Samuel Hopkins Adams - The Clarion

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"Pages!" almost squalled the little man. "D'you think I'm made of
money?"

"Elpy," said Dr. Surtaine, abruptly, "do you remember my platform
patter?"

"Like the multiplication table."

"Was it good?"

"Best ever!"

"Well, I'm a slicker proposition with a pen than I ever was with a
spiel. And you're securing my services for nothing. Come around to the
office, man, and let me show you."

Still suspicious, Mr. McQuiggan permitted himself to be led away,
expatiating as he went, upon the unrivaled location and glorious future
of his mining property. From time to time, Dr. Surtaine jotted down an
unostentatious note.

The first view of the Certina building dashed Mr. McQuiggan's
suspicions; his inspection of his old friend's superb office slew them
painlessly.

"Is this all yours, Andy? On the level? Did you do it all on your own?"

"Every bit of it! With my little pen-and-ink. Take a look around the
walls and you'll see how."

He seated himself at his desk and proceeded to jot down, with apparent
carelessness, but in broad, sweeping lines, a type lay-out, while his
guest passed from advertisement to advertisement, in increasing
admiration. Before Old Lame-Boy he paused, absolutely fascinated.

"I thought that'd get you," exulted the host, who, between strokes of
the creative pen had been watching him.

"I've seen it in the newspaper, but never connected it with you. Being
out of the medical line I lost interest. Say, it's a wonder! Did it
fetch 'em?"

"Fetch 'em? It knocked 'em flat. That picture's the foundation of this
business. Talk about suggestion in advertising! He's a regular
hypnotist, Old Lame-Boy is. Plants the suggestion right in the small of
your back, where we want it. Why, Elpy, I've seen a man walk up to that
picture on a bill-board as straight as you or me, take one good, long
look, and go away hanging onto his kidneys, and squirming like a lizard.
Fact! What do you think of that? Genius, I call it: just flat genius, to
produce an effect like that with a few lines and a daub or two of
color."

"Some pull!" agreed Mr. McQuiggan, with professional approval. "And
then--'Try Certina,' eh?"

"For a starter and, for a finisher 'Certina _Cures_.' Shoves the bottle
right into their hands. The first bottle braces 'em. They take another.
By the time they've had half a dozen, they love it."

"Booze?"

"Sure! Flavored and spiced up, nice and tasty. Great for the temperance
trade. _And_ the best little repeater on the market. Now take a look,
Elpy."

He tapped the end of his pen upon the rough sketch of the mining
advertisement, which he had drafted. Mr. McQuiggan bent over it in
study, and fell a swift victim to the magic of the art.

"Why, that would make a wad of bills squirm out of the toe of a
stockin'! It's new game to me. I've always worked the personal touch.
But I'll sure give it a try-out, Andy."

"I guess it's bad!" exulted the other. "I guess I've lost the trick of
tolling the good old dollars in! Take this home and try it on your cash
register! Now, come around and meet the boy."

Thus it was that Editor-in-Chief Harrington Surtaine, in the third week
of his incumbency received a professional call from his father, and a
companion from whose pockets bulged several sheets of paper.

"Shake hands with Mr. McQuiggan, Hal," said the Doctor. "Make a bow when
you meet him, too. He's your first new business for the reformed
'Clarion.'"

"In what way?" asked Hal, meeting a grip like iron from the stranger.
"News?"

"News! I guess not. Business, I said. Real money. Advertising."

"It's like this, Mr. Surtaine," said L.P. McQuiggan, turning his spare,
hard visage toward Hal. "I've got some copper stock to sell--an A1
under-developed proposition; and your father, who's an old pal, tells me
the 'Clarion' can do the business for me. Now, if I can get a good rate
from you, it's a go."

"Mr. Shearson, the advertising manager, is your man. I don't know
anything about advertising rates."

"Then you'd best get busy and learn," cried Dr. Surtaine.

"I'm learning other things."

"For instance?"

"What news is and isn't."

"Look here, Boyee." Dr. Surtaine's voice was surcharged with a
disappointed earnestness. "Put yourself right on this. News is news; any
paper can get it. But advertising is _Money_. Let your editors run the
news part, till you can work into it. _You get next to the door where
the cash comes in._"

In the fervor of his advice he thumped Hal's desk. The thump woke
McGuire Ellis, who had been devoting a spare five minutes to his
favorite pastime. For his behoof, the exponent of policy repeated his
peroration. "Isn't that right, Ellis?" he cried. "You're a practical
newspaper man."

"It's true to type, anyway," grunted Ellis.

"Sure it is!" cried the other, too bent on his own notions to interpret
this comment correctly. "And now, what about a little reading notice for
McQuiggan's proposition?"

"Yes: an interview with me on the copper situation and prospects might
help," put in McQuiggan.

Hal hesitated, looking to Ellis for counsel.

"You've got to do something for an advertiser on a big order like this,
Boyee," urged his father.

"Let's see the copy," put in Ellis. The trained journalistic eye ran
over the sheets. "Lot of gaudy slush about copper mines in general," he
observed, "and not much information on Streaky Mountain."

"It's an undeveloped property," said McQuiggan.

"Strong on geography," continued Ellis. "'In the immediate vicinity,'"
he read from one sheet, "'lie the Copper Monarch Mine paying 40 per cent
dividends, the Deep Gulch Mine, paying 35 per cent, the Three Sisters,
Last Chance, Alkali Spring Mines, all returning upwards of 25 per cent
per annum: and immediately adjacent is the famous Strike-for-the-West
property which enriches its fortunate stockholders to the tune of 75 per
cent a year!' Are you on the same range as the Strike-for-the-West, Mr.
McQuiggan?"

"It's an adjacent property," growled the mining man. "What d'you know
about copper?"

"Oh, I've seen a little mining, myself. And a bit of mining advertising.
That's quite an ad. of yours, McQuiggan."

"I wrote that ad.," said Dr. Surtaine blandly: "and I challenge anybody
to find a single misstatement in it."

"You're safe. There isn't any. And scarcely a single statement. But if
you wrote it, I suppose it goes."

"And the interview, too," rasped McQuiggan.

"It's usual," said Ellis to Hal. "The tail with the hide: the soul with
the body, when you're selling."

"But we're not selling interviews," said Hal uneasily.

"You're getting nearly a thousand dollars' worth of copy, and giving a
bonus that don't cost you anything," said his father. "The papers have
done it for me ever since I've been in business."

"I guess that's right, too," agreed Ellis.

"Why don't you take McQuiggan down to meet your Mr. Shearson, Hal?"
suggested the Doctor. "I'll stay here and round out a couple of other
ideas for his campaign."

Hal had risen from his desk when there was a light knock at the door and
Milly Neal's bright head appeared.

"Hullo!" said Dr. Surtaine. "What's up? Anything wrong at the shop,
Milly?"

The girl walked into the room and stood trimly at ease before the four
men.

"No, Chief," said she. "I understood Mr. Surtaine wanted to see me."

"I?" said Hal blankly, pushing a chair toward her.

"Yes. Didn't you? They told me you left word for me in the city room, to
see you when I came in again. Sometimes I send my copy, so I only just
got the message."

"Miss Neal is 'Kitty the Cutie,'" explained McGuire Ellis.

"Looks it, too," observed L.P. McQuiggan jauntily, addressing the upper
far corner of the room.

Miss Neal looked at him, met a knowing and conscious smile, looked right
through the smile, and looked away again, all with the air of one who
gazes out into nothingness.

"Guess I'll go look up this Shearson person," said Mr. McQuiggan, a
trifle less jauntily. "See you all later."

"I'd no notion you were the writer of the Cutie paragraphs, Milly," said
Dr. Surtaine. "They're lively stuff."

"Nobody has. I'm keeping it dark. It's only a try-out. You _did_ send
for me, didn't you?" she added, turning to Hal.

"Yes. What I had in mind to say to you--that is, to the author--the
writer of the paragraphs," stumbled Hal, "is that they're a little
too--too--"

"Too flip?" queried his father. "That's what makes 'em go."

"If they could be done in a manner not quite so undignified," suggested
the editor-in-chief.

Color rose in the girl's smooth cheek. "You think they're vulgar," she
charged.

"That's rather too harsh a word," he protested.

"You do! I can see it." She flushed an angry red. "I'd rather stop
altogether than have you think that."

"Don't be young," put in McGuire Ellis, with vigor. "Kitty has caught
on. It's a good feature. The paper can't afford to drop it."

"That's right," supplemented Dr. Surtaine. "People are beginning to talk
about those items. They read 'em. I read 'em myself. They've got the go,
the pep. They're different. But, Milly, I didn't even know you could
write."

"Neither did I," said the girl staidly, "till I got to putting down some
of the things I heard the girls say, and stringing them together with
nonsense of my own. One evening I showed some of it to Mr. Veltman, and
he took it here and had it printed."

"I was going to suggest, Mr. Surtaine," said McGuire Ellis formally,
"that we put Miss Kitty on the five-dollar-a-column basis and make her
an every-other-day editorial page feature. I think the stuff's worth
it."

"We can give it a trial," said his principal, a little dubiously, "since
you think so well of it."

"Then, Milly, I suppose you'll be quitting the shop to become a
full-fledged writer," remarked Dr. Surtaine.

"No, indeed, Chief." The girl smiled at him with that frank
friendliness which Hal had noted as informing every relationship between
Dr. Surtaine and the employees of the Certina plant. "I'll stick. The
regular pay envelope looks good to me. And I can do this work after
hours."

"How would it be if I was to put you on half-time, Milly?" suggested her
employer. "You can keep your department going by being there in the
mornings and have your afternoons for the writing."

The girl thanked him demurely but with genuine gratitude.

"Then we'll look for your copy here on alternate days," said Hal. "And I
think I'll give you a desk. As this develops into an editorial feature I
shall want to keep an eye on it and to be in touch with you. Perhaps I
could make suggestions sometimes."

She rose, thanking him, and Hal held open the door for her. Once again
he felt, with a strange sensation, her eyes take hold on his as she
passed him.

"Pretty kid," observed Ellis. "Veltman is crazy about her, they say."

"_Good_ kid, too," added Dr. Surtaine, emphasizing the adjective. "You
might tell Veltman that, whoever he is."

"Tell him, yourself," retorted Ellis with entire good nature. "He isn't
the sort to offer gratuitous information to."

Upon this advice, L.P. McQuiggan reentered. "All fixed," said he, with
evident satisfaction. "We went to the mat on rates, but Shearson agreed
to give me some good reading notices. Now, I'll beat it. See you
to-night, Andy?"

Dr. Surtaine nodded. "You owe me a commission, Boyee," said he, smiling
at Hal as McQuiggan made his exit. "But I'll let you off this time. I
guess it won't be the last business I bring in to you. Only, don't you
and Ellis go looking every gift horse too hard in the teeth. You might
get bit."

"Shut your eyes and swallow it and ask no questions, if it's good, eh,
Doctor?" said McGuire Ellis. "That's the motto for your practice."

"Right you are, my boy. And it's the motto of sound business. What is
business?" he continued, soaring aloft upon the wings of a Paean of
Policy. "Why, business is a deal between you and me in which I give you
my goods and a pleasant word, and you give me your dollar and a polite
reply. Some folks always want to know where the dollar came from. Not
me! I'm satisfied to know that its coming to me. Money has wings, and if
you throw stones at it, it'll fly away fast. And you want to remember,"
he concluded with the fervor of honest conviction, "that a newspaper
can't be quite right, any more than a man can, unless it makes its own
living. Well. I'm not going to preach any more. So long, boys."

"What do you think of it, Mr. Surtaine?" inquired McGuire Ellis, after
the lecturer had gone his way. "Pretty sound sense, eh?"

"I wonder just what you mean by that, Ellis. Not what you say,
certainly."

But Ellis only laughed and turned to his "flimsy."

Meantime the editor of the "Clarion" was being quietly but persistently
beset by another sermonizer, less cocksure of text than the Sweet Singer
of Policy, but more subtle in influence. This was Miss Esme Elliot.
Already, the half-jocular partnership undertaken at the outset of their
acquaintance had developed into a real, if somewhat indeterminate
connection. Esme found her new acquaintance interesting both for himself
and for his career. Her set in general considered the ripening
friendship merely "another of Esme's flirtations," and variously
prophesied the denouement. To the girl's own mind it was not a
flirtation at all. She was (she assured herself) genuinely absorbed in
the development of a new mission in which she aspired to be influential.
That she already exercised a strong sway of personality over Hal
Surtaine, she realized. Indeed, in the superb confidence of her charm,
she would have been astonished had it been otherwise. Just where her
interest in the newly adventured professional field ended, and in
Harrington Surtaine, the man, began, she would have been puzzled to say.
Kathleen Pierce had bluntly questioned her on the subject.

"Yes, of course I like him," said Esme frankly. "He's interesting and
he's a gentleman, and he has a certain force about him, and he's"--she
paused, groping for a characterization--"he's unexpected."

"What gets me," said Kathleen, in her easy slang, "is that he never
pulls any knighthood-in-flower stuff, yet you somehow feel it's there.
Know what I mean? There's a scrapper behind that nice-boy smile."

"He hasn't scrapped with me, yet, Kathie," smiled the beauty.

"Don't let him," advised the other. "It mightn't be safe. Still, I
suppose you understand him by now, down to the ground."

"Indeed I do not. Didn't I tell you he was unexpected? He has an
uncomfortable trick," complained Miss Elliot, "just when everything is
smooth and lovely, of suddenly leveling those gray-blue eyes of his at
you, like two pistols. 'Throw up your hands and tell me what you really
mean!' One doesn't always want to tell what one really means."

"Bet you have to with him, sooner or later," returned her friend.

This conversation took place at the Vanes' _al fresco_ tea, to which Hal
came for a few minutes, late in the afternoon of his father's visit with
McQuiggan, mainly in the hope of seeing Esme Elliot. Within five minutes
after his arrival, Worthington society was frowning, or smiling,
according as it was masculine or feminine, at their backs, as they
strolled away toward the garden. Miss Esme was feeling a bit petulant,
perhaps because of Kathie Pierce's final taunt.

"I think you aren't living up to our partnership," she accused.

"Is it a partnership, where one party is absolute slave to the other's
slightest wish?" he smiled.

"There! That is exactly it. You treat me like a child."

"I don't think of you as a child, I assure you."

"You listen to all I say with pretended deference, and smile and--and go
your own way with inevitable motion."

"Wherein have I failed in my allegiance?" asked Hal, courteously
concerned. "Haven't we published everything about all the charities that
you're interested in?"

"Oh, yes. So far as that goes. But the paper itself doesn't seem to
change any. It's got the same tone it always had."

"What's wrong with its tone?" The eyes were leveled at her now.

"Speaking frankly, it's tawdry. It's lurid. It's--well, yellow."

"A matter of method. You're really more interested, then, in the way we
present news than in the news we present."

"I don't know anything about news, itself. But I don't see why a
newspaper run by a gentleman shouldn't be in good taste."

"Nor do I. Except that those things take time. I suppose I've got to get
in touch with my staff before I can reform their way of writing the
paper."

"Haven't you done that yet?"

"I simply haven't had time."

"Then I'll make you a nice present of a very valuable suggestion. Give a
luncheon to your employees, and invite all the editors and reporters.
Make a little speech to them and tell them what you intend to do, and
get them to talk it over and express opinions. That's the way to get
things done. I do it with my mission class. And, by the way, don't make
it a grand banquet at one of the big hotels. Have it in some place where
the men are used to eating. They'll feel more at home and you'll get
more out of them."

"Will you come?"

"No. But you shall come up to the house and report fully on it."

Had Miss Esme Elliot, experimentalist in human motives, foreseen to what
purpose her ingenious suggestion was to work out, she might well have
retracted her complaint of lack of real influence; for this casual
conversation was the genesis of the Talk-it-Over Breakfast, an
institution which potently affected the future of the "Clarion" and its
young owner.

CHAPTER XI

THE INITIATE

Within a month after Hal's acquisition of the "Clarion," Dr. Surtaine
had become a daily caller at the office. "Just to talk things over," was
his explanation of these incursions, which Hal always welcomed, no
matter how busy he might be. Advice was generally the form which the
visitor's talk took; sometimes warning; not infrequently suggestions of
greater or less value. Always his counsel was for peace and policy.

"Keep in with the business element, Boyee. Remember all the time that
Worthington is a business city, the liveliest little business city
between New York and Chicago. Business made it. Business runs it.
Business is going to keep on running it. Anybody who works on a
different principle, I don't care whether it's in politics or journalism
or the pulpit, is going to get hurt. I don't deny you've braced up the
'Clarion.' People are beginning to talk about it already. But the best
men, the moneyed men, are holding off. They aren't sure of you yet.
Sometimes I'm not sure myself. Every now and then the paper takes a
stand I don't like. It goes too far. You've put ginger into it. I have
to admit that. And ginger's a good thing, but sugar catches more flies."

The notion of a breakfast to the staff met with the Doctor's instant
approval.

"That's the idea!" said he "I'll come to it, myself. Lay down your
general scheme and policy to 'em. Get 'em in sympathy with it. If any of
'em aren't in sympathy with it, get rid of those. Kickers never did any
business any good. You'll get plenty of kicks from outside. Then, when
the office gets used to your way of doing things, you can quit wasting
so much time on the news and editorial end."

"But that's what makes the paper, Dad."

"Get over that idea. You hire men to get out the paper. Let 'em earn
their pay while you watch the door where the dollars come in.
Advertising, my son: that's the point to work at. In a way I'm sorry you
let Sterne out."

The ex-editor had left, a fortnight before, on a basis agreeable to
himself and Hal, and McGuire Ellis had taken over his duties.

"Certainly you had no reason to like Sterne, Dad."

"For all that, he knew his job. Everything Sterne did had a dollar
somewhere in the background. Even his blackmailing game. He worked with
the business office, and he took his orders on that basis. Now if you
had some man whom you could turn over this news end to while you're
building up a sound advertising policy--"

"How about McGuire Ellis?"

Dr. Surtaine glanced over to the window corner where the associate
editor was somnambulantly fighting a fly for the privilege of continuing
a nap.

"Too much of a theorist: too much of a knocker."

"He's taught me what little I know about this business," said Hal. "Hi!
Wake up, Ellis. Do you know you've got to make a speech in an hour? This
is the day of the Formal Feed."

"Hoong!" grunted Ellis, arousing himself. "Speech? I can't make a
speech. Make it yourself."

"I'm going to."

"What are you going to talk about?"

"Well, I might borrow your text and preach them a sermon on honesty in
journalism. Seriously, I think the whole paper has degenerated to low
ideals, and if I put it to them straight, that every man of them,
reporter, copy-reader, or editor, has got to measure up to an absolutely
straight standard of honesty--"

"They'll throw the tableware at you," said McGuire Ellis quietly: "at
least they ought to, if they don't."

The two Surtaines stared at him in surprise.

"Who are you," continued the journalist, "to talk standards of honesty
in journalism to those boys?"

"He's their boss: that's all he is," said Dr. Surtaine weightily.

"Let him set the example, then, jack the paper up where it belongs, and
there'll be no difficulty with the men who write it."

"But, Mac, you've been hammering at me about the crookedness of
journalism in Worthington from the first."

"All right. Crookedness there is. Where does it come from? From the men
in control, mostly. Let me tell you something, you two: there's hardly a
reporter in this city who isn't more honest than the paper he works
for."

"Hifalutin nonsense," said Dr. Surtaine.

"From your point of view. You're an outsider. It's outsiders that make
the newspaper game as bad as it is. Look at 'em in this town. Who owns
the 'Banner'? A political boss. Who owns the 'News'? A brewer. The
'Star'? A promoter, and a pretty scaly one at that. The 'Observer'
belongs body and soul to an advertising agency, and the 'Telegraph' is
controlled by the banks. And one and all of 'em take their orders from
the Dry Goods Union, which means Elias M. Pierce, because they live on
its advertising."

"Why not? That's business," said Dr. Surtaine.

"Are we talking about business? I thought it was standards. What do
those men know about the ethics of journalism? If you put the thing up
to him, like as not E.M. Pierce would tell you that an ethic is
something a doctor gives you to make you sleep."

"How about the 'Clarion,' Mac?" said Hal, smiling. "It's run by an
outsider, too, isn't it?"

"That's what I want to know." There was no answering smile on Ellis's
somber and earnest face. "I've thought there was hope for you. You've
had no sound business training, thank God, so your sense of decency may
not have been spoiled."

"You don't seem to think much of business standards," said the Doctor
tolerantly.

"Not a great deal. I've bumped into 'em too hard. Not so long ago I was
publisher of a paying daily in an Eastern city. The directors were all
high-class business men, and the chairman of the board was one of those
philanthropist-charity-donator-pillar-of-the-church chaps with a
permanent crease of high respectability down his front. Well, one day
there turned up a double murder in the den of one of these venereal
quacks that infest every city. It set me on the trail, and I had my best
reporter get up a series about that gang of vampires. Naturally that
necessitated throwing out their ads. The advertising manager put up a
howl, and we took the thing to the board of directors. In those days I
had all my enthusiasm on tap. I had an array of facts, too, and I went
at that board like a revivalist, telling 'em just the kind of devil-work
the 'men's specialists' did. At the finish I sat down feeling pretty
good. Nobody said anything for quite a while. Then the chairman dropped
the pencil he'd been puttering with, and said, in a kind of purry voice:
'Gentlemen: I thought Mr. Ellis's job on this paper was to make it pay
dividends, and not to censor the morals of the community.'"

"And, by crikey, he was right!" cried Dr. Surtaine.

"From the business point of view."

"Oh, you theorists! You theorists!" Dr. Surtaine threw out his hands in
a gesture of pleasant despair. "You want to run the world like a
Sunday-school class."

"Instead of like a three-card-monte game."

"With your lofty notions, Ellis, how did you ever come to work on a
sheet like the 'Clarion'?"

"A man's got to eat. When I walked out of that directors' meeting I
walked out of my job and into a saloon; and from that saloon I walked
into a good many other saloons. Luckily for me, booze knocked me out
early. I broke down, went West, got my health and some sense back again,
drifted to this town, found an opening on the 'Clarion,' and took it, to
make a living."

"You won't continue to do that," advised Dr. Surtaine bluntly, "if you
keep on trying to reform your bosses."

"But what makes me sick," continued Ellis, disregarding this hint, "is
to have people assume that newspaper men are a lot of semi-crooks and
shysters. What does the petty grafting that a few reporters do--and,
mind you, there's mighty little of it done--amount to, compared with the
rottenness of a paper run by my church-going reformer with the business
standards?"

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