Success, A Novel

Impenetrability of expression is doubtless a valuable attribute to a joss.  Otherwise so many josses would not display it.  Upon the stony and placid visage of Mr. Greenough, never more joss-like than when, on the morning after Banneker went to The Retreat, he received the resultant note, the perusal thereof produced no effect.  Nor was there anything which might justly be called an expression, discernible between Mr. Greenough’s cloven chin-tip and Mr. Greenough’s pale fringe of hair, when, as Banneker entered the office at noon, he called the reporter to him.  Banneker’s face, on the contrary, displayed a quite different impression; that of amiability.

“Nothing in the Eyre story, Mr. Banneker!”

“Not a thing.”

“You saw Mr. Densmore?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would he talk?”

“Yes; he made a statement.”

“It didn’t appear in the paper.”

“There was nothing to it but unqualified denial.”

“I see; I see.  That’s all, Mr. Banneker….  Oh, by the way.”

Banneker, who had set out for his desk, turned back.

“I had a note from you this morning.”

As this statement required no confirmation, Banneker gave it none.

“Containing your resignation.”

“Conditional upon my being assigned to pry into society or private scandals or rumors of them.”

“The Ledger does not recognize conditional resignation.”

“Very well.”  Banneker’s smile was as sunny and untroubled as a baby’s.

“I suppose you appreciate that some one must cover this kind of news.”

“Yes.  It will have to be some one else.”

The faintest, fleeting suspicion of a frown troubled the Brahminical calm of Mr. Greenough’s brow, only to pass into unwrinkled blandness.

“Further, you will recognize that, for the protection of the paper, I must have at call reporters ready to perform any emergency duty.”

“Perfectly,” agreed Banneker.

“Mr. Banneker,” queried Mr. Greenough in a semi-purr, “are you too good for your job?”

“Certainly.”

For once the personification of city-deskness, secure though he was in the justice of his position, was discomfited.  “Too good for The Ledger?” he demanded in protest and rebuke.

“Let me put it this way; I’m too good for any job that won’t let me look a man square between the eyes when I meet him on it.”

“A dull lot of newspapers we’d have if all reporters took that view,” muttered Mr. Greenough.

“It strikes me that what you’ve just said is the severest kind of an indictment of the whole business, then,” retorted Banneker.

“A business that is good enough for a good many first-class men, even though you may not consider it so for you.  Possibly being for the time—­for a brief time—­a sort of public figure, yourself, has—­”

“Nothing at all to do with it,” interrupted the urbane reporter.  “I’ve always been this way.  It was born in me.”

“I shall consult with Mr. Gordon about this,” said Mr. Greenough, becoming joss-like again.  “I hardly think—­” But what it was that he hardly thought, the subject of his animadversions did not then or subsequently ascertain, for he was dismissed in the middle of the sentence with a slow, complacent nod.

Loss of his place, had it promptly followed, would not have dismayed the rebel.  It did not follow.  Nothing followed.  Nothing, that is, out of the ordinary run.  Mr. Gordon said no word.  Mr. Greenough made no reference to the resignation.  Tommy Burt, to whom Banneker had confided his action, was of opinion that the city desk was merely waiting “to hand you something so raw that you’ll have to buck it; something that not even Joe Bullen would take.”  Joe Bullen, an undertaker’s assistant who had drifted into journalism through being a tipster, was The Ledger’s “keyhole reporter” (unofficial).

“The joss is just tricky enough for that,” said Tommy.  “He’ll want to put you in the wrong with Gordon.  You’re a pet of the boss’s.”

“Don’t blame Greenough,” said Banneker.  “If you were on the desk you wouldn’t want reporters that wouldn’t take orders.”

Van Cleve, oldest in standing of any of the staff, approached Banneker with a grave face and solemn warnings.  To leave The Ledger was to depart forever from the odor of journalistic sanctity.  No other office in town was endurable for a gentleman.  Other editors treated their men like muckers.  The worst assignment given out from The Ledger desk was a perfumed cinch in comparison with what the average city room dealt out.  And he gave a formidable sketch of the careers (invariably downhill) of reckless souls who had forsaken the true light of The Ledger for the false lures which led into outer and unfathomable darkness.  By this system of subtly threatened excommunication had The Ledger saved to itself many a good man who might otherwise have gone farther and not necessarily fared worse.  Banneker was not frightened.  But he did give more than a thought to the considerate standards and generous comradeship of the office.  Only—­was it worth the price in occasional humiliation?

Sitting, idle at his desk in one of the subsequent periods of penance, he bethought him of the note on the stationery of The New Era Magazine, signed, “Yours very truly, Richard W. Gaines.”  Perhaps this was opportunity beckoning.  He would go to see the Great Gaines.

The Great Gaines received him with quiet courtesy.  He was a stubby, thick, bearded man who produced an instant effect of entire candor.  So peculiar and exotic was this quality that it seemed to set him apart from the genus of humankind in an aura of alien and daunting honesty.  Banneker recalled hearing of outrageous franknesses from his lips, directed upon small and great, and, most amazingly, accepted without offense, because of the translucent purity of the medium through which, as it were, the inner prophet had spoken.  Besides, he was usually right.

His first words to Banneker, after his greeting, were:  “You are exceedingly well tailored.”

“Does it matter?” asked Banneker, smiling.

“I’m disappointed.  I had read into your writing midnight toil and respectable, if seedy, self-support.”

“After the best Grub Street tradition?  Park Row has outlived that.”

“I know your tailor, but what’s your college?” inquired this surprising man.

Banneker shook his head.

“At least I was right in that.  I surmised individual education.  Who taught you to think for yourself?”

“My father.”

“It’s an uncommon name.  You’re not a son of Christian Banneker, perhaps?”

“Yes.  Did you know him?”

“A mistaken man.  Whoring after strange gods.  Strange, sterile, and disappointing.  But a brave soul, nevertheless.  Yes; I knew him well.  What did he teach you?”

“He tried to teach me to stand on my own feet and see with my own eyes and think for myself.”

“Ah, yes!  With one’s own eyes.  So much depends upon whither one turns them.  What have you seen in daily journalism?”

“A chance.  Possibly a great chance.”

“To think for yourself?”

Banneker started, at this ready application of his words to the problem which was already outlining itself by small, daily limnings in his mind.

“To write for others what you think for yourself?” pursued the editor, giving sharpness and definition to the outline.

“Or,” concluded Mr. Gaines, as his hearer preserved silence, “eventually to write for others what they think for themselves?” He smiled luminously.  “It’s a problem in stress:  x = the breaking-point of honesty.  Your father was an absurdly honest man.  Those of us who knew him best honored him.”

“Are you doubting my honesty?” inquired Banneker, without resentment or challenge.

“Why, yes.  Anybody’s.  But hopefully, you understand.”

“Or the honesty of the newspaper business?”

A sigh ruffled the closer tendrils of Mr. Gaines’s beard.  “I have never been a journalist in the Park Row sense,” he said regretfully.  “Therefore I am conscious of solutions of continuity in my views.  Park Row amazes me.  It also appalls me.  The daily stench that arises from the printing-presses.  Two clouds; morning and evening….  Perhaps it is only the odor of the fertilizing agent, stimulating the growth of ideas.  Or is it sheer corruption?”

“Two stages of the same process, aren’t they?” suggested Banneker.

“Encouraging to think so.  Yet labor in a fertilizing plant, though perhaps essential, is hardly conducive to higher thinking.  You like it?”

“I don’t accept your definition at all,” replied Banneker.  “The newspapers are only a medium.  If there is a stench, they do not originate it.  They simply report the events of the day.”

“Exactly.  They simply disseminate it.”

Banneker was annoyed at himself for flushing.  “They disseminate news.  We’ve got to have news, to carry on the world.  Only a small fraction of it is—­well, malodorous.  Would you destroy the whole system because of one flaw?  You’re not fair.”

“Fair?  Of course I’m not.  How should I be?  No; I would not destroy the system.  Merely deodorize it a bit.  But I suppose the public likes the odors.  It sniffs ’em up like—­like Cyrano in the bake-shop.  A marvelous institution, the public which you and I serve.  Have you ever thought of magazine work, Mr. Banneker?”

“A little.”

“There might be a considerable future there for you.  I say ‘might.’  Nothing is more uncertain.  But you have certain—­er—­stigmata of the writer—­That article, now, about the funereal eulogies over the old builder; did you report that talk as it was?”

“Approximately.”

“How approximately?”

“Well; the basic idea was there.  The old fellows gave me that, and I fitted it up with talk.  Surely there’s nothing dishonest in that,” protested Banneker.

“Surely not,” agreed the other.  “You gave the essence of the thing.  That is a higher veracity than any literal reporting which would be dull and unreadable.  I thought I recognized the fictional quality in the dialogue.”

“But it wasn’t fiction,” denied Banneker eagerly.

The Great Gaines gave forth one of his oracles.  “But it was.  Good dialogue is talk as it should be talked, just as good fiction is life as it should be lived—­logically and consecutively.  Why don’t you try something for The New Era?”

“I have.”

“When?”

“Before I got your note.”

“It never reached me.”

“It never reached anybody.  It’s in my desk, ripening.”

“Send it along, green, won’t you?  It may give more indications that way.  And first work is likely to be valuable chiefly as indication.”

“I’ll mail it to you.  Before I go, would you mind telling me more definitely why you advise me against the newspaper business?”

“I advise?  I never advise as to questions of morals or ethics.  I have too much concern with keeping my own straight.”

“Then it is a question of morals?”

“Or ethics.  I think so.  For example, have you tried your hand at editorials?”

“Yes.”

“Successfully?”

“As far as I’ve gone.”

“Then you are in accord with the editorial policy of The Ledger?”

“Not in everything.”

“In its underlying, unexpressed, and immanent theory that this country can best be managed by an aristocracy, a chosen few, working under the guise of democracy?”

“No; I don’t believe that, of course.”

“I do, as it happens.  But I fail to see how Christian Banneker’s son and eleve could.  Yet you write editorials for The Ledger.”

“Not on those topics.”

“Have you never had your editorials altered or cut or amended, in such manner as to give a side-slant toward the paper’s editorial fetiches?”

Again and most uncomfortably Banneker felt his color change.  “Yes; I have,” he admitted.

“What did you do?”

“What could I do?  The Chief controls the editorial page.”

“You might have stopped writing for it.”

“I needed the money.  No; that isn’t true.  More than the money, I wanted the practice and the knowledge that I could write editorials if I wished to.”

“Are you thinking of going on the editorial side?”

“God forbid!” cried Banneker.

“Unwilling to deal in other men’s ideas, eh?  Well, Mr. Banneker, you have plenty of troubles before you.  Interesting ones, however.”

“How much could I make by magazine writing?” asked Banneker abruptly.

“Heaven alone knows.  Less than you need, I should say, at first.  How much do you need?”

“My space bill last week was one hundred and twenty-one dollars.  I filled ’em up on Sunday specials.”

“And you need that?”

“It’s all gone,” grinned Banneker boyishly.

“As between a safe one hundred dollars-plus, and a highly speculative nothing-and-upwards, how could any prudent person waver?” queried Mr. Gaines as he shook hands in farewell.

For the first time in the whole unusual interview, Banneker found himself misliking the other’s tone, particularly in the light emphasis placed upon the word prudent.  Banneker did not conceive kindly of himself as a prudent person.

Back at the office, Banneker got out the story of which he had spoken to Mr. Gaines, and read it over.  It seemed to him good, and quite in the tradition of The New Era.  It was polite, polished, discreet, and, if not precisely subtle, it dealt with interests and motives lying below the obvious surfaces of life.  It had amused Banneker to write it; which is not to say that he spared laborious and conscientious effort.  The New Era itself amused him, with its air of well-bred aloofness from the flatulent romanticism which filled the more popular magazines of the day with duke-like drummers or drummer-like dukes, amiable criminals and brisk young business geniuses, possessed of rather less moral sense than the criminals, for its heroes, and for its heroines a welter of adjectives exhaling an essence of sex.  Banneker could imagine one of these females straying into Mr. Gaines’s editorial ken, and that gentleman’s bland greeting as to his own sprightly second maid arrayed and perfumed, unexpectedly encountered at a charity bazar.  Too rarefied for Banneker’s healthy and virile young tastes, the atmosphere in which The New Era lived and moved and had its consistently successful editorial being!  He preferred a freer air to the mild scents of lavender and rose-ash, even though it might blow roughly at times.  Nevertheless, that which was fine and fastidious in his mind recognized and admired the restraint, the dignity, the high and honorably maintained standards of the monthly.  It had distinction.  It stood apart from and consciously above the reading mob.  In some respects it was the antithesis of that success for which Park Row strove and sweated.

Banneker felt that he, too, could claim a place on those heights.  Yes; he liked his story.  He thought that Mr. Gaines would like it.  Having mailed it, he went to Katie’s to dinner.  There he found Russell Edmonds discussing his absurdly insufficient pipe with his customary air of careworn watchfulness lest it go out and leave him forlorn and unsolaced in a harsh world.  The veteran turned upon the newcomer a grim twinkle.

“Don’t you do it,” he advised positively.

“Do what?”

“Quit.”

“Who told you I was considering it?”

“Nobody.  I knew it was about time for you to reach that point.  We all do—­at certain times.”

“Why?”

“Disenchantment.  Disillusionment.  Besides, I hear the city desk has been horsing you.”

“Then some one has been blabbing.”

“Oh, those things ooze out.  Can’t keep ’em in.  Besides, all city desks do that to cubs who come up too fast.  It’s part of the discipline.  Like hazing.”

“There are some things a man can’t do,” said Banneker with a sort of appeal in his voice.

“Nothing,” returned Edmonds positively.  “Nothing he can’t do to get the news.”

“Did you ever peep through a keyhole?”

“Figuratively speaking?”

“If you like.  Either way.”

“Yes.”

“Would you do it to-day?”

“No.”

“Then it’s a phase a reporter has to go through?”

“Or quit.”

“You haven’t quit?”

“I did.  For a time.  In a way.  I went to jail.”

“Jail?  You?” Banneker had a flash of intuition.  “I’ll bet it was for something you were proud of.”

“I wasn’t ashamed of the jail sentence, at any rate.  Youngster, I’m going to tell you about this.”  Edmonds’s fine eyes seemed to have receded into their hollows as he sat thinking with his pipe neglected on the table.  “D’you know who Marna Corcoran was?”

“An actress, wasn’t she?”

“Leading lady at the old Coliseum Theater.  A good actress and a good woman.  I was a cub then on The Sphere under Red McGraw, the worst gutter-pup that ever sat at a city desk, and a damned good newspaper man.  In those days The Sphere specialized on scandals; the rottener, the better; stuff that it wouldn’t touch to-day.  Well, a hell-cat of a society woman sued her husband for divorce and named Miss Corcoran.  Pure viciousness, it was.  There wasn’t a shadow of proof, or even suspicion.”

“I remember something about that case.  The woman withdrew the charge, didn’t she?”

“When it was too late.  Red McGraw had an early tip and sent me to interview Marna Corcoran.  He let me know pretty plainly that my job depended on my landing the story.  That was his style; a bully.  Well, I got the interview; never mind how.  When I left her home Miss Corcoran was in a nervous collapse.  I reported to McGraw.  ‘Keno!’ says he.  ’Give us a column and a half of it.  Spice it.’  I spiced it—­I guess.  They tell me it was a good job.  I got lost in the excitement of writing and forgot what I was dealing with, a woman.  We had a beat on that interview.  They raised my salary, I remember.  A week later Red called me to the desk.  ’Got another story for you, Edmonds.  A hummer.  Marna Corcoran is in a private sanitarium up in Connecticut; hopelessly insane.  I wouldn’t wonder if our story did it.’  He grinned like an ape.  ’Go up there and get it.  Buy your way in, if necessary.  You can always get to some of the attendants with a ten-spot.  Find out what she raves about; whether it’s about Allison.  Perhaps she’s given herself away.  Give us another red-hot one on it.  Here’s the address.’

“I wadded up the paper and stuffed it in his mouth.  His lips felt pulpy.  He hit me with a lead paper-weight and cut my head open.  I don’t know that I even hit him; I didn’t specially want to hit him.  I wanted to mark him.  There was an extra-size open ink-well on his desk.  I poured that over him and rubbed it into his face.  Some of it got into his eyes.  How he yelled!  Of course he had me arrested.  I didn’t make any defense; I couldn’t without bringing in Marna Corcoran’s name.  The Judge thought I was crazy.  I was, pretty near.  Three months, he gave me.  When I came out Marna Corcoran was dead.  I went to find Red McGraw and kill him.  He was gone.  I think he suspected what I would do.  I’ve never set eyes on him since.  Two local newspapers sent for me as soon as my term was up and offered me jobs.  I thought it was because of what I had done to McGraw.  It wasn’t.  It was on the strength of the Marna Corcoran interview.”

“Good God!”

“I needed a job, too.  But I didn’t take either of those.  Later I got a better one with a decent newspaper.  The managing editor said when he took me on:  ’Mr. Edmonds, we don’t approve of assaults on the city desk.  But if you ever receive in this office an assignment of the kind that caused your outbreak, you may take it out on me.’  There are pretty fine people in the newspaper business, too.”

Edmonds retrieved his pipe, discovering with a look of reproach and dismay that it was out.  He wiped away some tiny drops of sweat which had come out upon the grayish skin beneath his eyes, while he was recounting his tragedy.

“That makes my troubles seem petty,” said Banneker, under his breath.  “I wonder—­”

“You wonder why I told you all this,” supplemented the veteran.  “Since I have, I’ll tell you the rest; how I made atonement in a way.  Ten years ago I was on a city desk myself.  Not very long; but long enough to find I didn’t like it.  A story came to me through peculiar channels.  It was a scandal story; one of those things that New York society whispers about all over the place, yet it’s almost impossible to get anything to go on.  When I tell you that even The Searchlight, which lives on scandal, kept off it, you can judge how dangerous it was.  Well; I had it pat.  It was really big stuff of its kind.  The woman was brilliant, a daughter of one of the oldest and most noted New York families; and noted in her own right.  She had never married:  preferred to follow her career.  The man was eminent in his line:  not a society figure, except by marriage—­his wife was active in the Four Hundred—­because he had no tastes in that direction.  He was nearly twenty years senior to the girl.  The affair was desperate from the first.  How far it went is doubtful; my informant gave it the worst complexion.  Certainly there must have been compromising circumstances, for the wife left him, holding over him the threat of exposure.  He cared nothing for himself; and the girl would have given up everything for him.  But he was then engaged on a public work of importance; exposure meant the ruin of that.  The wife made conditions; that the man should neither speak to, see, nor communicate with the girl.  He refused.  The girl went into exile and forced him to make the agreement.  My informant had a copy of the letter of agreement; you can see how close she was to the family.  She said that, if we printed it, the man would instantly break barriers, seek out the girl, and they would go away together.  A front-page story, and exclusive.”

“So it was a woman who held the key!” exclaimed Banneker.

Edmonds turned on him.  “What does that mean?  Do you know anything of the story?”

“Not all that you’ve told me.  I know the people.”

“Then why did you let me go on?”

“Because they—­one of them—­is my friend.  There is no harm to her in my knowing.  It might even be helpful.”

“Nevertheless, I think you should have told me at once,” grumbled the veteran.  “Well, I didn’t take the story.  The informer said that she would place it elsewhere.  I told her that if she did I would publish the whole circumstances of her visit and offer, and make New York too hot to hold her.  She retired, bulging with venom like a mad snake.  But she dares not tell.”

“The man’s wife, was it not?”

“Some one representing her, I suspect.  A bad woman, that wife.  But I saved the girl in memory of Marna Corcoran.  Think what the story would be worth, now that the man is coming forward politically!” Edmonds smiled wanly.  “It was worth a lot even then, and I threw my paper down on it.  Of course I resigned from the city desk at once.”

“It’s a fascinating game, being on the inside of the big things,” ruminated Banneker.  “But when it comes to a man’s enslaving himself to his paper, I—­don’t—­know.”

“No:  you won’t quit,” prophesied the other.

“I have.  That is, I’ve resigned.”

“Of course.  They all do, of your type.  It was the peck of dirt, wasn’t it?”

Banneker nodded.

“Gordon won’t let you go.  And you won’t have any more dirt thrown at you—­probably.  If you do, it’ll be time enough then.”

“There’s more than that.”

“Is there?  What?”

“We’re a pariah caste, Edmonds, we reporters.  People look down on us.”

“Oh, that be damned!  You can’t afford to be swayed by the ignorance or snobbery of outsiders.  Play the game straight, and let the rest go.”

“But we are, aren’t we?” persisted Banneker.

“What!  Pariahs?” The look which the old-timer bent upon the rising star of the business had in it a quality of brooding and affection.  “Son, you’re too young to have come properly to that frame of mind.  That comes later.  With the dregs of disillusion after the sparkle has died out.”

“But it’s true.  You admit it.”

“If an outsider said that we were pariahs I’d call him a liar.  But, what’s the use, with you?  It isn’t reporting alone.  It’s the whole business of news-getting and news-presenting; of journalism.  We’re under suspicion.  They’re afraid of us.  And at the same time they’re contemptuous of us.”

“Why?”

“Because people are mostly fools and fools are afraid or contemptuous of what they don’t understand.”

Banneker thought it over.  “No.  That won’t do,” he decided.  “Men that aren’t fools and aren’t afraid distrust us and despise the business.  Edmonds, there’s nothing wrong, essentially, in furnishing news for the public.  It’s part of the spread of truth.  It’s the handing on of the light.  It’s—­it’s as big a thing as religion, isn’t it?”

“Bigger.  Religion, seven days a week.”

“Well, then—­”

“I know, son,” said Edmonds gently.  “You’re thirsting for the clear and restoring doctrine of journalism.  And I’m going to give you hell’s own heresy.  You’ll come to it anyway, in time.”  His fierce little pipe glowed upward upon his knotted brows.  “You talk about truth, news:  news and truth as one and the same thing.  So they are.  But newspapers aren’t after news:  not primarily.  Can’t you see that?”

“No.  What are they after?”

“Sensation.”

Banneker turned the word over in his mind, evoking confirmation in the remembered headlines even of the reputable Ledger.

“Sensation,” repeated the other.  “We’ve got the speed-up motto in industry.  Our newspaper version of it is ‘spice-up.’  A conference that may change the map of Europe will be crowded off any front page any day by young Mrs. Poultney Masters making a speech in favor of giving girls night-keys, or of some empty-headed society dame being caught in a roadhouse with another lady’s hubby.  Spice:  that’s what we’re looking for.  Something to tickle their jaded palates.  And they despise us when we break our necks or our hearts to get it for ’em.”

“But if it’s what they want, the fault lies with the public, not with us,” argued Banneker.

“I used to know a white-stuff man—­a cocaine-seller—­who had the same argument down pat,” retorted Edmonds quietly.

Banneker digested that for a time before continuing.

“Besides, you imply that because news is sensational, it must be unworthy.  That isn’t fair.  Big news is always sensational.  And of course the public wants sensation.  After all, sensation of one sort or another is the proof of life.”

“Hence the noble profession of the pander,” observed Edmonds through a coil of minute and ascending smoke-rings.  “He also serves the public.”

“You’re not drawing a parallel—­”

“Oh, no!  It isn’t the same thing, quite.  But it’s the same public.  Let me tell you something to remember, youngster.  The men who go to the top in journalism, the big men of power and success and grasp, come through with a contempt for the public which they serve, compared to which the contempt of the public for the newspaper is as skim milk to corrosive sublimate.”

“Perhaps that’s what is wrong with the business, then.”

“Have you any idea,” inquired Edmonds softly, “what the philosophy of the Most Ancient Profession is?”

Banneker shook his head.

“I once heard a street-walker on the verge of D.T.’s—­she was intelligent; most of ’em are fools—­express her analytical opinion of the men who patronized her.  The men who make our news system have much the same notion of their public.  How much poison they scatter abroad we won’t know until a later diagnosis.”

“Yet you advise me to stick in the business.”

“You’ve got to.  You are marked for it.”

“And help scatter the poison!”

“God forbid!  I’ve been pointing out the disease of the business.  There’s a lot of health in it yet.  But it’s got to have new blood.  I’m too old to do more than help a little.  Son, you’ve got the stuff in you to do the trick.  Some one is going to make a newspaper here in this rotten, stink-breathing, sensation-sniffing town that’ll be based on news.  Truth!  There’s your religion for you.  Go to it.”

“And serve a public that I’ll despise as soon as I get strong enough to disregard it’s contempt for me,” smiled Banneker.

“You’ll find a public that you can’t afford to despise,” retorted the veteran.  “There is such a public.  It’s waiting.”

“Well; I’ll know in a couple of weeks,” said Banneker.  “But I think I’m about through.”

For Edmonds’s bitter wisdom had gone far toward confirming his resolution to follow up his first incursion into the magazine field if it met with the success which he confidently expected of it.

As if to hold him to his first allegiance, the ruling spirits of The Ledger now began to make things easy for him.  Fat assignments came his way again.  Events which seemed almost made to order for his pen were turned over to him by the city desk.  Even though he found little time for Sunday “specials,” his space ran from fifteen to twenty-five dollars a day, and the “Eban” skits on the editorial page, now paid at double rates because of their popularity, added a pleasant surplus.  To put a point to his mysteriously restored favor, Mr. Greenough called up one hot morning and asked Banneker to make what speed he could to Sippiac, New Jersey.  Rioting had broken out between mill-guards and the strikers of the International Cloth Company factories, with a number of resulting fatalities.  It was a “big story.”  That Banneker was specially fitted, through his familiarity with the ground, to handle it, the city editor was not, of course, aware.

At Sippiac, Banneker found the typical industrial tragedy of that time and condition, worked out to its logical conclusion.  On the one side a small army of hired gun-men, assured of full protection and endorsement in whatever they might do:  on the other a mob of assorted foreigners, ignorant, resentful of the law, which seemed only a huge mechanism of injustice manipulated by their oppressors, inflamed by the heavy potations of a festal night carried over into the next day, and, because of the criminally lax enforcement of the law, tacitly permitted to go armed.  Who had started the clash was uncertain and, perhaps in essentials, immaterial; so perfectly and fatefully had the stage been set for mutual murder.  At the close of the fray there were ten dead.  One was a guard:  the rest, strikers or their dependents, including a woman and a six-year-old child, both shot down while running away.

By five o’clock that afternoon Banneker was in the train returning to the city with a board across his knees, writing.  Five hours later his account was finished.  At the end of his work, he had one of those ideas for “pointing” a story, mere commonplaces of journalism nowadays, which later were to give him his editorial reputation.  In the pride of his publicity-loving soul, Mr. Horace Vanney, chief owner of the International Cloth Mills, had given to Banneker a reprint of an address by himself, before some philosophical and inquiring society, wherein he had set forth some of his simpler economic theories.  A quotation, admirably apropos to Banneker’s present purposes, flashed forth clear and pregnant, to his journalistic memory.  From the Ledger “morgue” he selected one of several cuts of Mr. Vanney, and turned it in to the night desk for publication, with this descriptive note: 

Horace Vanney, Chairman of the Board of the International Cloth Company, Who declares that if working-women are paid more than a bare living wage, The surplus goes into finery and vanities which tempt them to ruin, Mr. Vanney’s mills pay girls four dollars a week.

Ravenously hungry, Banneker went out to order a long-delayed dinner at Katie’s.  Hardly had he swallowed his first mouthful of soup, when an office boy appeared.

“Mr. Gordon wants to know if you can come back to the office at once.”

On the theory that two minutes, while important to his stomach, would not greatly matter to the managing editor, Banneker consumed the rest of his soup and returned.  He found Mr. Gordon visibly disturbed.

“Sit down, Mr. Banneker,” he said.

Banneker compiled.

“We can’t use that Sippiac story.”

Banneker sat silent and attentive.

“Why did you write it that way?”

“I wrote it as I got it.”

“It is not a fair story.”

“Every fact—­”

“It is a most unfair story.”

“Do you know Sippiac, Mr. Gordon?” inquired Banneker equably.

“I do not.  Nor can I believe it possible that you could acquire the knowledge of it implied in your article, in a few hours.”

“I spent some time investigating conditions there before I came on the paper.”

Mr. Gordon was taken aback.  Shifting his stylus to his left hand, he assailed severally the knuckles of his right therewith before he spoke.  “You know the principles of The Ledger, Mr. Banneker.”

“To get the facts and print them, so I have understood.”

“These are not facts.”  The managing editor rapped sharply upon the proof.  “This is editorial matter, hardly disguised.”

“Descriptive, I should call it,” returned the writer amiably.

“Editorial.  You have pictured Sippiac as a hell on earth.”

“It is.”

“Sentimentalism!” snapped the other.  His heavy visage wore a disturbed and peevish expression that rendered it quite plaintive.  “You have been with us long enough, Mr. Banneker, to know that we do not cater to the uplift-social trade, nor are we after the labor vote.”

“Yes, sir.  I understand that.”

“Yet you present here, what is, in effect, a damning indictment of the Sippiac Mills.”

“The facts do that; not I.”

“But you have selected your facts, cleverly—­oh, very cleverly—­to produce that effect, while ignoring facts on the other side.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the presence and influence of agitators.  The evening editions have the names, and some of the speeches.”

“That is merely clouding the main issue.  Conditions are such there that no outside agitation is necessary to make trouble.”

“But the agitators are there.  They’re an element and you have ignored it.  Mr. Banneker, do you consider that you are dealing fairly with this paper, in attempting to commit it to an inflammatory, pro-strike course?”

“Certainly, if the facts constitute that kind of an argument.”

“What of that picture of Horace Vanney?  Is that news?”

“Why not?  It goes to the root of the whole trouble.”

“To print that kind of stuff,” said Mr. Gordon forcibly, “would make The Ledger a betrayer of its own cause.  What you personally believe is not the point.”

“I believe in facts.”

“It is what The Ledger believes that is important here.  You must appreciate that, as long as you remain on the staff, your only honorable course is to conform to the standards of the paper.  When you write an article, it appears to our public, not as what Mr. Banneker says, but as what The Ledger says.”

“In other words,” said Banneker thoughtfully, “where the facts conflict with The Ledger’s theories, I’m expected to adjust the facts.  Is that it?”

“Certainly not!  You are expected to present the news fairly and without editorial emphasis.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Gordon, but I don’t believe I could rewrite that story so as to give a favorable slant to the International’s side.  Shooting down women and kids, you know—­”

Mr. Gordon’s voice was crisp as he cut in.  “There is no question of your rewriting it.  That has been turned over to a man we can trust.”

“To handle facts tactfully,” put in Banneker in his mildest voice.

Considerably to his surprise, he saw a smile spread over Mr. Gordon’s face.  “You’re an obstinate young animal, Banneker,” he said.  “Take this proof home, put it under your pillow and dream over it.  Tell me a week from now what you think of it.”

Banneker rose.  “Then, I’m not fired?” he said.

“Not by me.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m trusting in your essential honesty to bring you around.”

“To be quite frank,” returned Banneker after a moment’s thought, “I’m afraid I’ve got to be convinced of The Ledger’s essential honesty to come around.”

“Go home and think it over,” suggested the managing editor.

To his associate, Andreas, he said, looking at Banneker’s retreating back:  “We’re going to lose that young man, Andy.  And we can’t afford to lose him.”

“What’s the matter?” inquired Andreas, the fanatical devotee of the creed of news for news’ sake.

“Quixotism.  Did you read his story?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Gordon looked up from his inflamed knuckles for an opinion.

“A great job,” pronounced Andreas, almost reverently.

“But not for us.”

“No; no.  Not for us.”

“It wasn’t a fair story,” alleged the managing editor with a hint of the defensive in his voice.

“Too hot for that,” the assistant supported his chief.  “And yet perhaps—­”

“Perhaps what?” inquired Mr. Gordon with roving and anxious eye.

“Nothing,” said Andreas.

As well as if he had finished, Mr. Gordon supplied the conclusion.  “Perhaps it is quite as fair as our recast article will be.”

It was, on the whole, fairer.