Samuel Hopkins Adams - The Clarion

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A call from the business office took Hal away. At once Ellis turned to
the older man.

"Are you going to run the paper, Doc?"

"No: no, my boy. Hal owns it, on his own money."

"Because if you are, I quit."

"That's no way to talk," said the magnate, aggrieved. "There isn't a man
in Worthington treats his employees better or gets along with 'em
smoother than me."

"That's right, too, I guess. Only I don't happen to want to be your
employee."

"You're frank, at least, Mr. Ellis."

"Why not? I've laid my cards on the table. You know me for what I am, a
disgruntled dreamer. I know you for what you are, a hard-headed business
man. We don't have to quarrel about it. Tell you what I'll do: I'll
match you, horse-and-horse, for the soul of your boy."

"You're a queer Dick, Ellis."

"Don't want to match? Then I suppose I've got to fight you for him,"
sighed the editor.

The big man laughed whole-heartedly. "Not a chance, my friend! Not a
chance on earth. I don't believe even a woman could come between Hal
and me, let alone a man."

"_Or_ a principle?"

"Ah--ah! Dealing in abstractions again. Look out for this fellow,
Boyee," he called jovially as Hal came back to his desk. "He'll make
your paper the official organ of the Muckrakers' Union."

"I'll watch him," promised Hal. "Meantime I'll take your advice about my
speech, Mac, and blue-pencil the how-to-be-good stuff."

"Now you're talking! I'll tell you, Boss: why not get some of the
fellows to speak up. You might learn a few things about your own paper
that would interest you."

"Good idea! But, Mac, I wish you wouldn't call me 'Boss.' It makes me
feel absurdly young."

"All right, Hal," returned Ellis, with a grin. "But you've still got
some youngness to overcome, you know."

An hour later, looking down the long luncheon table, the editor-owner
felt his own inexperience more poignantly. With a very few exceptions,
these men, his employees, were his seniors in years. More than that, he
thought to see in the faces an air of capability, of assurance, of
preparedness, a sort of work-worthiness like the seaworthiness of a
vessel which has passed the high test of wind and wave. And to him,
untried, unformed, ignorant, the light amateur, all this human mechanism
must look for guidance. Humility clouded him at the recollection of the
spirit in which he had taken on the responsibility so vividly
personified before him, a spirit of headlong wrath and revenge, and he
came fervently to a realization and a resolve. He saw himself as part of
a close-knit whole; he visioned, sharply, the Institution, complex,
delicate, almost infinitely powerful for good or evil, not alone to
those who composed it, but to the community to which it bore so subtle a
relationship. And he resolved, with a determination that partook of the
nature of prayer and yet was more than prayer, to give himself loyally,
unsparingly, devotedly to the common task. In this spirit he rose, at
the close of the luncheon, to speak.

No newspaper reported the maiden speech of Mr. Harrington Surtaine to
the staff of the Worthington "Clarion." Newspapers are reticent about
their own affairs. In this case it is rather a pity, for the effort is
said to have been an eminently successful one. Estimated by its effect,
it certainly was, for it materialized with quite spiritistic suddenness,
from out the murk of uncertainty and suspicion, the form and substance
of a new _esprit de corps_, among the "Clarion" men, and established the
system of Talk-it-Over Breakfasts which made a close-knit, jealously
guarded corporation and club out of the staff. Free of all ostentation
or self-assertiveness was Hal's talk; simple, and, above all virtues,
brief. He didn't tell his employees what he expected of them. He told
them what they might expect of him. The frankness of his manner, the
self-respecting modesty of his attitude toward an audience of more
experienced subordinates, his shining faith and belief in the profession
which he had adopted; all this eked out by his ease of address and his
dominant physical charm, won them from the first. Only at the close did
he venture upon an assertion of his own ideas or theories.

"It is the Sydney 'Bulletin,' I think, which preserves as its motto the
proposition that every man has at least one good story in him. I have
been studying newspaper files since I took this job,--all the files of
all the papers I could get,--and I'm almost ready to believe that much
news which the papers publish has got realer facts up its sleeve: that
the news is only the shadow of the facts. I'd like to get at the Why of
the day's news. Do you remember Sherlock Holmes's 'commonplace' divorce
suit, where the real cause was that the husband used to remove his front
teeth and hurl 'em at the wife whenever her breakfast-table conversation
wasn't sprightly enough to suit him? Once out of a hundred times, I
suppose, the everyday processes of our courts hide something picturesque
or perhaps important in the background. Any paper that could get and
present that sort of news would liven up its columns a good deal. And it
would strike a new note in Worthington. I'll give you a motto for the
'Clarion,' gentlemen: 'The Facts Behind the News.' And now I've said my
say, and I want to hear from you."

Here for the first time Hal struck a false note. Newspaper men, as a
class, abhor public speaking. So much are they compelled to hear from
"those bores who prate intolerably over dinner tables," that they regard
the man who speaks when he isn't manifestly obliged to, as an enemy to
the public weal, and are themselves most loath thus to add to the sum of
human suffering. Merely by way of saving the situation, Wayne, the city
editor, arose and said a few words complimentary to the new owner. He
was followed by the head copy-reader in the same strain. Two of the
older sub-editors perpetrated some meaningless but well-meant remarks,
and the current of events bade fair to end in complete stagnation, when
from out of the ruck, midway of the table, there rose the fringed and
candid head of one William S. Marchmont, the railroad and markets
reporter.

Marchmont was an elderly man, of a journalistic type fast disappearing.
There is little room in the latter-day pressure of newspaper life for
the man who works on "booze." But though a steady drinker, and
occasionally an unsteady one, Marchmont had his value. He was an expert
in his specialty. He had a wide acquaintance, and he seldom became
unprofessionally drunk in working hours. To offset the unwonted strain
of rising before noon, however, he had fortified himself for this
occasion by several cocktails which were manifest in his beaming smile
and his expansive flourish in welcoming Mr. Surtaine to the goodly
fellowship of the pen.

"Very good, all that about the facts behind the news," he said
genially. "Very instructive and--and illuminating. But what I wanta ask
you is this: We fellows who have to _write_ the facts behind the news;
where do we get off?"

"I don't understand you," said Hal.

"Lemme explain. Last week we had an accident on the Mid-and-Mud.
Engineer ran by his signals. Rear end collision. Seven people killed.
Coroner's inquest put all the blame on the engineer. Engineer wasn't
tending to his duty. That's news, isn't it, Mr. Surtaine?"

"Undoubtedly."

"Yes: but here's the facts. That engineer had been kept on duty
forty-eight hours with only five hours off. He was asleep when he ran
past the block and killed those people."

"Is he telling the truth, Mac?" asked Hal in a swift aside to Ellis.

"If he says so, it's right," replied Ellis.

"What do you call that?" pursued the speaker.

"Murder. I call it murder." Max Veltman, who sat just beyond the
speaker, half rose from his chair. "The men who run the road ought to be
tried for murder."

"Oh, _you_ can call it that, all right, in one of your Socialist
meetings," returned the reporter genially. "But I can't."

"Why can't you?" demanded Hal.

"The railroad people would shut down on news to the 'Clarion.' I
couldn't get a word out of them on anything. What good's a reporter who
can't get news? You'd fire me in a week."

"Can you prove the facts?"

"I can."

"Write it for to-morrow's paper. I'll see that you don't lose your
place."

Marchmont sat down, blinking. Again there was silence around the table,
but this time it was electric, with the sense of flashes to come. The
slow drawl of Lindsay, the theater reporter, seemed anti-climatic as he
spoke up, slouched deep in his seat.

"How much do you know of dramatic criticism in this town, Mr. Surtaine?"

"Nothing."

"Maybe, then, you'll be pained to learn that we're a set of liars--I
might even go further--myself among the number. There hasn't been honest
dramatic criticism written in Worthington for years."

"That is hard to believe, Mr. Lindsay."

"Not if you understand the situation. Suppose I roast a show like 'The
Nymph in the Nightie' that played here last week. It's vapid and silly,
and rotten with suggestiveness. I wouldn't let my kid sister go within
gunshot of it. But I've got to tell everybody else's kid sister, through
our columns, that it's a delightful and enlivening _melange_ of high
class fun and frolic. To be sure, I can praise a fine performance like
'Kindling' or 'The Servant in the House,' but I've got to give just as
clean a bill of health to a gutter-and-brothel farce. Otherwise, the
high-minded gentlemen that run our theaters will cut off my tickets."

"Buy them at the box-office," said Hal.

"No use. They wouldn't let me in. The courts have killed honest
criticism by deciding that a manager can keep a critic out on any
pretext or without any. Besides, there's the advertising. We'd lose
that."

"Speaking of advertising,"--now it was Lynch, a young reporter who had
risen from being an office boy,--"I guess it spoils some pretty good
stories from the down-town district. Look at that accident at Scheffer
and Mintz's; worth three columns of anybody's space. Tank on the roof
broke, and drowned out a couple of hundred customers. Panic, and broken
bones, and all kinds of things. How much did we give it? One stick! And
we didn't name the place: just called it 'a Washington Street store.'
There were facts behind _that_ news, all right. But I guess Mr.
Shearson wouldn't have been pleased if we'd printed 'em."

In fact, Shearson, the advertising manager, looked far from pleased at
the mention.

"If you think a one-day story would pay for the loss of five thousand a
year in advertising, you've got another guess, young man," he growled.

"He's right, there," said Dr. Surtaine, on one side of Hal; and from the
other, McGuire Ellis chirped:--

"Things are beginning to open up, all right, Mr. Editor."

Two aspirants were now vying for the floor, the winner being the
political reporter for the paper.

"Would you like to hear some facts about the news we don't print?" he
asked.

"Go ahead," replied Hal. "You have the floor."

"You recall a big suffrage meeting here recently, at which Mrs. Barkerly
from London spoke. Well, the chairman of that meeting didn't get a line
of his speech in the papers: didn't even get his name mentioned. Do you
know why?"

"I can't even imagine," said Hal.

"Because he's the Socialist candidate for Governor of this State. He's
blackballed from publication in every newspaper here."

"By whom?" inquired Hal.

"By the hinted wish of the Chamber of Commerce. They're so afraid of the
Socialist movement that they daren't even admit it's alive."

"Not at all!" Dr. Surtaine's rotund bass boomed out the denial. "There
are some movements that it's wisest to disregard. They'll die of
themselves. Socialism is a destructive force. Why should the papers help
spread it by noticing it in their columns?"

"Well, I'm no Socialist," said the political reporter, "but I'm a
newspaper man, and I say it's news when a Socialist does a thing just as
much as when any one else does it. Yet if I tried to print it, they'd
give me the laugh on the copy-desk."

"It's a fact that we're all tied down on the news in this town,"
corroborated Wayne; "what between the Chamber of Commerce and the Dry
Goods Union and the theaters and the other steady advertisers. You must
have noticed, Mr. Surtaine, that if there's a shoplifting case or
anything of that kind you never see the name of the store in print. It's
always 'A State Street Department Store' or 'A Warburton Avenue Shop.'
Ask Ellis if that isn't so."

"Correct," said Ellis.

"Why shouldn't it be so?" cried Shearson. "You fellows make me tired.
You're always thinking of the news and never of the advertising. Who is
it pays your salaries, do you think? The men who advertise in the
'Clarion.'"

"Hear! Hear!" from Dr. Surtaine.

"And what earthly good does it do to print stuff like those shoplifting
cases? Where's the harm in protecting the store?"

"I'll tell you where," said Ellis. "That McBurney girl case. They got
the wrong girl, and, to cover themselves, they tried to railroad her. It
was a clear case. Every paper in town had the facts. Yet they gave that
girl the reputation of a thief and never printed a correction for fear
of letting in the store for a damage suit."

"Did the 'Clarion' do that?" asked Hal.

"Yes."

"Get me a full report of the facts."

"What are you going to do?" asked Shearson.

"Print them."

"Oh, my Lord!" groaned Shearson.

The circle was now drawing in and the talk became brisker, more
detailed, more intimate. To his overwhelming amazement Hal learned some
of the major facts of that subterranean journalistic history which never
gets into print; the ugly story of the blackmail of a President of the
United States by a patent medicine concern (Dr. Surtaine verified this
with a nod); the inside facts of the failure of an important senatorial
investigation which came to nothing because of the drunken debauchery of
the chief senatorial investigator; the dreadful details of the death of
a leading merchant in a great Eastern city, which were so glossed over
by the local press that few of his fellow citizens ever had an inkling
of the truth; the obtainable and morally provable facts of the
conspiracy on the part of a mighty financier which had plunged a nation
into panic; these and many other strange narratives of the news, known
to every old newspaper man, which made the neophyte's head whirl. Then,
in a pause, a young voice said:

"Well, to bring the subject up to date, what about the deaths in the
Rookeries?"

"Shut up," said Wayne sharply.

There followed a general murmur of question and answer. "What about the
Rookeries?"--"Don't know."--"They say the death-rate is a terror."--"Are
they concealing it at the City Hall?"--"No; Merritt can't find
out."--"Bet Tip O'Farrell can."--"Oh, he's in on the game."--"Just
another fake, I guess."

In vain Hal strove to catch a clue from the confused voices. He had made
a note of it for future inquiry, when some one called out: "Mac Ellis
hasn't said anything yet." The others caught it up. "Speech from
Mac!"--"Don't let him out."--"If you can't speak, sing a song."--"Play a
tune on the _bazoo_."--"Hike him up there, somebody."--"Silence for the
MacGuire!!"

"I've never made a speech in my life," said Ellis, glowering about him,
"and you fellows know it. But last night I read this in Plutarch:
'Themistocles said that he certainly could not make use of any stringed
instrument; could only, were a small and obscure city put into his
hands, make it great and glorious.'"

Ellis paused, lifting one hand. "Fellows," he said, and he turned
sharply to face Hal Surtaine, "I don't know how the devil old
Themistocles ever could do it--unless he owned a newspaper!"

Silence followed, and then a quick acclaiming shout, as they grasped the
implicit challenge of the corollary. Then again silence, tense with
curiosity. No doubt of what they awaited. Their expectancy drew Hal to
his feet.

"I had intended to speak but once," he said, in a constrained voice,
"but I've learned more here this afternoon--more than--than I could have
thought--" He broke off and threw up his hand. "I'm no newspaper man,"
he cried. "I'm only an amateur, a freshman at this business. But one
thing I believe; it's the business of a newspaper to give the news
without fear or favor, and that's what the 'Clarion' is going to do from
this day. On that platform I'll stand by any man who'll stand by me.
Will you help?"

The answer rose and rang like a cheer. The gathering broke into little,
excited, chattering groups, sure symptom of the success of a meeting.
Much conjecture was expressed and not a little cynicism. "Compared to us
Ishmael would be a society favorite if Surtaine carries this through,"
said one. "It means suspension in six months," prophesied Shearson. But
most of the men were excitedly enthusiastic. Your newspaper man is by
nature a romantic; otherwise he would not choose the most adventurous of
callings. And the fighting tone of the new boss stimulated in them the
spirit of chance and change.

Slowly and reluctantly they drifted away to the day's task. At the close
Hal sat, thoughtful and spent, in a far corner when Ellis walked heavily
over to him. The associate editor gazed down at his bemused principal
for a time. From his pocket he drew the thick blue pencil of his craft,
and with it tapped Hal thrice on the shoulder.

"Rise up, Sir Newspaper Man," he pronounced solemnly. "I hereby dub thee
Knight-Editor."

CHAPTER XII

THE THIN EDGE

Across the fresh and dainty breakfast table, Dr. Miles Elliot surveyed
his even more fresh and dainty niece and ward with an expression of
sternest disapproval. Not that it affected in any perceptible degree
that attractive young person's healthy appetite. It was the habit of the
two to breakfast together early, while their elderly widowed cousin, who
played the part of Feminine Propriety in the household in a highly
self-effacing and satisfactory manner, took her tea and toast in her own
rooms. It was further Dr. Elliot's custom to begin the day by
reprehending everything (so far as he could find it out) which Miss Esme
had done, said, or thought in the previous twenty-four hours. This, as
he frequently observed to her, was designed to give her a suitably
humble attitude toward the scheme of creation, but didn't.

"Out all night again?" he growled.

"Pretty nearly," said Esme cheerfully, setting a very even row of very
white teeth into an apple.

"Humph! What was it this time?"

"A dinner-dance at the Norris's."

"Have a good time?"

"Beautiful! My frock was pretty. And I was pretty. And everybody was
nice to me. And I wish it were going to happen right over again
to-night."

"Whom did you dance with mostly?"

"Anybody that asked me."

"Dare say. How many new victims?" he demanded.

"Don't be a silly Guardy. I'm not a man-eating tiger or tigress, or the
Great American Puma--or pumess. Don't you think 'pumess' is a nice
lady-word, Guardy?"

"Did you dance with Will Douglas?" catechised the grizzled doctor,
declining to be shunted off on a philological discussion. Next to acting
as legal major domo to E.M. Pierce, Douglas's most important function in
life was apparently to fetch and carry for the reigning belle of
Worthington. His devotion to Esme Elliot had become stock gossip of the
town, since three seasons previous.

"Almost half as often as he asked me," said the girl. "That was eight
times, I think."

"Nice boy, Will."

"Boy!" There was a world of expressiveness in the monosyllable.

"Not a day over forty," observed the uncle. "And you are twenty-two. Not
that you look it"--judicially--"like thirty-five, after all this
dissipation."

Esme rose from her seat, walked with great dignity past her guardian,
and suddenly whirling, pounced upon his ear.

"Do I? Do I?" she cried. "Do I look thirty-five? Quick! Take it back."

"Ouch! Oh! No. Not more'n thirty. Oo! All right; twenty-five, then.
Fifteen! Three!!!"

She kissed the assaulted ear, and pirouetted over to the broad
window-seat, looking in her simple morning gown like a school-girl.

"Wonder how you do it," grumbled Dr. Elliot. "Up all night roistering
like a sophomore--"

"I was in bed at three."

"Down next morning, fresh as a--a--"

"Rose," she supplied tritely.

"--cake o' soap," concluded her uncle. "Now, as for you and Will
Douglas, as between Will's forty--"

"Marked down from forty-five," she interjected.

"And your twenty-two--"

"Looking like thirty-something."

"Never mind," said Dr. Elliot in martyred tones. "_I_ don't want to
finish _any_ sentence. Why should I? Got a niece to do it for me."

"Nobody wants you to finish that one. You're a matchmaking old maid,"
declared Esme, wrinkling her delicate nose at him, "and if you're ever
put up for our sewing-circle I shall blackball you. Gossip!"

"Oh, if I wanted to gossip, I'd begin to hint about the name of
Surtaine."

The girl's color did not change. "As other people have evidently been
doing to you."

"A little. Did you dance with him last night?"

"He wasn't there. He's working very hard on his newspaper."

"You seem to know a good deal about it."

"Naturally, since I've bought into the paper myself. I believe that's
the proper business phrase, isn't it?"

"Bought in? What do you mean? You haven't been making investments
without my advice?"

"Don't worry, Guardy, dear. It isn't strictly a business transaction.
I've been--ahem--establishing a sphere of influence."

"Over Harrington Surtaine?"

"Over his newspaper."

"Look here, Esme! How serious is this Surtaine matter?" Dr. Elliot's
tone had a distinct suggestion of concern.

"For me? Not serious at all."

"But for him?"

"How can I tell? Isn't it likely to be serious for any of the
unprotected young of your species when a Great American Pumess gets
after him?" she queried demurely.

"But you can't know him very well. He's been here only a few weeks,
hasn't he?"

"More than a month. And from the first he's gone everywhere."

"That's quite unusual for your set, isn't it? I thought you rather
prided yourselves on being careful about outsiders."

"No one's an outsider whom Jinny Willard vouches for. Besides every one
likes Hal Surtaine for himself."

"You among the number?"

"Yes, indeed," she responded frankly. "He's attractive. And he seems
older and more--well--interesting than most of the boys of my set."

"And that appeals to you?"

"Yes: it does. I get awfully bored with the just-out-of-college chatter
of the boys. I want to see the wheels go round, Guardy. Real wheels,
that make up real machinery and get real things done. I'm not quite an
_ingenue_, you know."

"Thirty-five, thirty, twenty-five, fifteen, three," murmured her uncle,
rubbing his ear. "And does young Surtaine give you inside glimpses of
the machinery of his business?"

"Sometimes. He doesn't know very much about it himself, yet."

"It's a pretty dirty business, Honey. And, I'm afraid, he's a pretty bad
breed."

"The father _is_ rather impossible, isn't he?" she said, laughing. "But
they say he's very kindly, and well-meaning, and public-spirited, and
that kind of thing."

"He's a scoundrelly old quack. It's a bad inheritance for the boy. Where
are you off to this morning?"

"To the 'Clarion' office."

"What! Well, but, see here, dear, does Cousin Clarice approve of that
sort of thing?"

"Wholly," Esme assured him, dimpling. "It's on behalf of the Recreation
Club. That's the Reverend Norman Hale's club for working-girls, you
know. We're going to give a play. And, as I'm on the Press Committee,
it's quite proper for me to go to the newspapers and get things
printed."

"Humph!" grunted Dr. Elliot. "Well: good hunting--Pumess."

After the girl had gone, he sat thinking. He knew well the swift
intimacies, frank and clean and fine, which spring up in the small,
close-knit social circles of a city like Worthington. And he knew, too,
and trusted and respected the judgment of Mrs. Festus Willard, whose
friendship was tantamount to a certificate of character and eligibility.
As against that, he set the unforgotten picture of the itinerant quack,
vending his poison across the countryside, playing on desperate fears
and tragic hopes, coining his dollars from the grimmest of false dies;
and now that same quack,--powerful, rich, generous, popular, master of
the good things of life,--still draining out his millions from the
populace, through just such deadly swindling as that which had been
lighted up by the flaring exploitation of the oil torches fifteen years
before. Could any good come from such a stock? He decided to talk it out
with Esme, sure that her fastidiousness would turn away from the ugly
truth.

Meantime, the girl was making a toilet of vast and artful simplicity
wherewith to enrapture the eye of the beholder. The first profound
effect thereof was wrought upon Reginald Currier, alias "Bim," some
fifteen minutes later, at the outer portals of the "Clarion" office.

"Hoojer wanter--" he began, and then glanced up. Almost as swiftly as he
had aforetime risen under Hal's irate and athletic impulsion, the
redoubtable Bim was lifted from his seat by the power of Miss Elliot's
glance. "Gee!" he murmured.

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