Success, A Novel

The House With Three Eyes sent forth into the darkness a triple glow of hospitality.  Through the aloof Chelsea district street, beyond the westernmost L structure, came taxicabs, hansoms, private autos, to discharge at the central door men who were presently revealed, under the lucent globe above the lintel, to be for the most part silhouette studies in the black of festal tailoring and silk hat against the white of expansive shirt-front.  Occasionally, though less often, one of the doors at either flank of the house, also overwatched by shining orbs, opened to discharge an early departure.  A midnight wayfarer, pausing opposite to contemplate this inexplicable grandeur in a dingy neighborhood, sought enlightenment from the passing patrolman: 

“Wot’s doin’?  Swell gamblin’ joint?  Huh?” As he spoke a huge, silent car crept swiftly to the entry, which opened to swallow up two bareheaded, luxuriously befurred women, with their escorts.  The curious wayfarer promptly amended his query, though not for the better.

“Naw!” replied the policeman with scorn.  “That’s Mr. Banneker’s house.”

“Banneker?  Who’s Banneker?”

With augmented contempt the officer requested the latest quotations on clover seed.  “He’s the editor of The Patriot,” he vouchsafed.  “A millionaire, too, they say.  And a good sport.”

“Givin’ a party, huh?”

“Every Saturday night,” answered he of the uniform and night-stick, who, having participated below-stairs in the reflections of the entertainment, was condescending enough to be informative.  “Say, the swellest folks in New York fall over themselves to get invited here.”

“Why ain’t he on Fi’th Avenyah, then?” demanded the other.

“He makes the Fi’th Avenyah bunch come to him,” explained the policeman, with obvious pride.  “Took a couple of these old houses on long lease, knocked out the walls, built ’em into one, on his own plan, and, say!  It’s a pallus!  I been all through it.”

A lithely powerful figure took the tall steps of the house three at a time, and turned, under the light, to toss away a cigar.

“Cheest!” exclaimed the wayfarer in tones of awe:  “that’s K.O.  Doyle, the middleweight, ain’t it?”

“Sure!  That’s nothin’.  If you was to get inside there you’d bump into some of the biggest guys in town; a lot of high-ups from Wall Street, and maybe a couple of these professors from Columbyah College, and some swell actresses, and a bunch of high-brow writers and painters, and a dozen dames right off the head of the Four Hundred list.  He takes ’em, all kinds, Mr. Banneker does, just so they’re somethin’.  He’s a wonder.”

The wayfarer passed on to his oniony boarding-house, a few steps along, deeply marveling at the irruption of magnificence into the neighborhood in the brief year since he had been away.

Equipages continued to draw up, unload, and withdraw, until twelve thirty, when, without so much as a preliminary wink, the House shut its Three Eyes.  A scant five minutes earlier, an alert but tired-looking man, wearing the slouch hat of the West above his dinner coat, had briskly mounted the steps and, after colloquy with the cautious, black guardian of the door, had been admitted to a side room, where he was presently accosted by a graying, spare-set guest with ruminative eyes.

“I heard about this show by accident, and wanted in,” explained the newcomer in response to the other’s look of inquiry.  “If I could see Banneker—­”

“It will be some little time before you can see him.  He’s at work.”

“But this is his party, isn’t it?”

“Yes.  The party takes care of itself until he comes down.”

“Oh; does it?  Well, will it take care of me?”

“Are you a friend of Mr. Banneker’s?”

“In a way.  In fact, I might claim to have started him on his career of newspaper crime.  I’m Gardner of the Angelica City Herald.”

“Ban will be glad to see you.  Take off your things.  I am Russell Edmonds.”

He led the way into a spacious and beautiful room, filled with the composite hum of voices and the scent of half-hidden flowers.  The Westerner glanced avidly about him, noting here a spoken name familiar in print, there a face recognized from far-spread photographic reproduction.

“Some different from Ban’s shack on the desert,” he muttered.  “Hello!  Mr. Edmonds, who’s the splendid-looking woman in brown with the yellow orchids, over there in the seat back of the palms?”

Edmonds leaned forward to look.  “Royce Melvin, the composer, I believe.  I haven’t met her.”

“I have, then,” returned the other, as the guest changed her position, fully revealing her face.  “Tried to dig some information out of her once.  Like picking prickly pears blindfold.  That’s Camilla Van Arsdale.  What a coincidence to find her here!”

“No!  Camilla Van Arsdale?  You’ll excuse me, won’t you?  I want to speak to her.  Make yourself known to any one you like the looks of.  That’s the rule of the house; no introductions.”

He walked across the room, made his way through the crescent curving about Miss Van Arsdale, and, presenting himself, was warmly greeted.

“Let me take you to Ban,” he said.  “He’ll want to see you at once.”

“But won’t it disturb his work?”

“Nothing does.  He writes with an open door and a shut brain.”

He led her up the east flight of stairs and down a long hallway to an end room with door ajar, notwithstanding that even at that distance the hum of voices and the muffled throbbing of the concert grand piano from below were plainly audible.  Banneker’s voice, regular, mechanical, desensitized as the voices of those who dictate habitually are prone to become, floated out: 

“Quote where ignorance is bliss ’tis folly to be wise end quote comma said a poet who was also a cynic period.  Many poets are comma but not the greatest period.  Because of their—­turn back to the beginning of the paragraph, please, Miss Westlake.”

“I’ve brought up an old friend, Ban,” announced Edmonds, pushing wide the door.

Vaguely smiling, for he had trained himself to be impervious to interruptions, the editorializer turned in his chair.  Instantly he sprang to his feet, and caught Miss Van Arsdale by both hands.

“Miss Camilla!” he cried.  “I thought you said you couldn’t come.”

“I’m defying the doctors,” she replied.  “They’ve given me so good a report of myself that I can afford to.  I’ll go down now and wait for you.”

“No; don’t.  Sit up here with me till I finish.  I don’t want to lose any of you,” said he affectionately.

But she laughingly refused, declaring that he would be through all the sooner for his other guests, if she left him.

“See that she meets some people, Bop,” Banneker directed.  “Gaines of The New Era, if he’s here, and Betty Raleigh, and that new composer, and the Junior Masters.”

Edmonds nodded, and escorted her downstairs.  Nicely judging the time when Banneker would have finished, he was back in quarter of an hour.  The stenographer had just left.

“What a superb woman, Ban!” he said.  “It’s small wonder that Enderby lost himself.”

Banneker nodded.  “What would she have said if she could know that you, an absolute stranger, had been the means of saving her from a terrific scandal?  Gives one a rather shivery feeling about the power and responsibility of the press, doesn’t it?”

“It would have been worse than murder,” declared the veteran, with so much feeling that his friend gave him a grateful look.  “What’s she doing in New York?  Is it safe?”

“Came on to see a specialist.  Yes; it’s all right.  The Enderbys are abroad.”

“I see.  How long since you’d seen her?”

“Before this trip?  Last spring, when I took a fortnight off.”

“You went clear West, just to see her?”

“Mainly.  Partly, too, to get back to the restfulness of the place where I never had any troubles.  I’ve kept the little shack I used to own; pay a local chap named Mindle to keep it in shape.  So I just put in a week of quiet there.”

“You’re a queer chap, Ban.  And a loyal one.”

“If I weren’t loyal to Camilla Van Arsdale—­” said Banneker, and left the implication unconcluded.

“Another friend from your picturesque past is down below,” said Edmonds, and named Gardner.

“Lord!  That fellow nearly cost me my life, last time we met,” laughed Banneker.  Then his face altered.  Pain drew its sharp lines there, pain and the longing of old memories still unassuaged.  “Just the same, I’ll be glad to see him.”

He sought out the Californian, found him deep in talk with Guy Mallory of The Ledger, who had come in late, gave him hearty greeting, and looked about for Camilla Van Arsdale.  She was supping in the center of a curiously assorted group, part of whom remembered the old romance of her life, and part of whom had identified her, by some chance, as Royce Melvin, the composer.  All of them were paying court to her charm and intelligence.  She made a place beside herself for Banneker.

“We’ve been discussing The Patriot, Ban,” she said, “and Mr. Gaines has embalmed you, as an editorial writer, in the amber of one of his best epigrams.”

The Great Gaines made a deprecating gesture.  “My little efforts always sound better when I’m not present,” he protested.

“To be the subject of any Gaines epigram, however stinging, is fame in itself,” said Banneker.

“And no sting in this one.  ‘Attic salt and American pep,’” she quoted.  “Isn’t it truly spicy?”

Banneker bowed with half-mocking appreciation.  “I fancy, though, that Mr. Gaines prefers his journalistic egg more au naturel.”

“Sometimes,” admitted the most famous of magazine editors, “I could dispense with some of the pep.”

“I like the pep, too, Ban.”  Betty Raleigh, looking up from a seat where she sat talking to a squat and sensual-looking man, a dweller in the high places and cool serenities of advanced mathematics whom jocular-minded Nature had misdowered with the face of a satyr, interposed the suave candor of her voice.  “I actually lick my lips over your editorials even where I least agree with them.  But the rest of the paper—­Oh, dear!  It screeches.”

“Modern life is such a din that one has to screech to be heard above it,” said Banneker pleasantly.

“Isn’t it the newspapers which make most of the din, though?” suggested the mathematician.

“Shouting against each other,” said Gaines.

“Like Coney Island barkers for rival shows,” put in Junior Masters.

“Just for variety how would it do to try the other tack and practice a careful but significant restraint?” inquired Betty.

“Wouldn’t sell a ticket,” declared Banneker.

“Still, if we all keep on yelling in the biggest type and hottest words we can find,” pointed out Edmonds, “the effect will pall.”

“Perhaps the measure of success is in finding something constantly more strident and startling than the other fellow’s war whoop,” surmised Masters.

“I have never particularly admired the steam calliope as a form of expression,” observed Miss Van Arsdale.

“Ah!” said the actress, smiling, “but Royce Melvin doesn’t make music for circuses.”

“And a modern newspaper is a circus,” pronounced the satyr-like scholar.

“Three-ring variety; all the latest stunts; list to the voice of the ballyhoo,” said Masters.

“Panem et circenses” pursued the mathematician, pleased with his simile, “to appease the howling rabble.  But it is mostly circus, and very little bread that our emperors of the news give us.”

“We’ve got to feed what the animal eats,” defended Banneker lightly.

“After having stimulated an artificial appetite,” said Edmonds.

As the talk flowed on, Betty Raleigh adroitly drew Banneker out of the current of it.  “Your Patriot needn’t have screeched at me, Ban,” she murmured in an injured tone.

“Did it, Betty?  How, when, and where?”

“I thought you were horridly patronizing about the new piece, and quite unkind to me, for a friend.”

“It wasn’t my criticism, you know,” he reminded her patiently.  “I don’t write the whole paper, though most of my acquaintances seem to think that I do.  Any and all of it to which they take exception, at least.”

“Of course, I know you didn’t write it, or it wouldn’t have been so stupid.  I could stand anything except the charge that I’ve lost my naturalness and become conventional.”

“You’re like the man who could resist anything except temptation, my dear:  you can stand anything except criticism,” returned Banneker with a smile so friendly that there was no sting in the words.  “You’ve never had enough of that.  You’re the spoiled pet of the critics.”

“Not of this new one of yours.  He’s worse than Gurney.  Who is he and where does he come from?”

“An inconsiderable hamlet known as Chicago.  Name, Allan Haslett.  Dramatic criticism out there is still so unsophisticated as to be intelligent as well as honest—­at its best.”

“Which it isn’t here,” commented the special pet of the theatrical reviewers.

“Well, I thought a good new man would be better than the good old ones.  Less hampered by personal considerations.  So I sent and got this one.”

“But he isn’t good.  He’s a horrid beast.  We’ve been specially nice to him, on your account mostly—­Ban, if you grin that way I shall hate you!  I had Bezdek invite him to one of the rehearsal suppers and he wouldn’t come.  Sent word that theatrical suppers affected his eyesight when he came to see the play.”

Banneker chuckled.  “Just why I got him.  He doesn’t let the personal element prejudice him.”

“He is prejudiced.  And most unfair.  Ban,” said Betty in her most seductive tones, “do call him down.  Make him write something decent about us.  Bez is fearfully upset.”

Banneker sighed.  “The curse of this business,” he reflected aloud, “is that every one regards The Patriot as my personal toy for me or my friends to play with.”

“This isn’t play at all.  It’s very much earnest.  Do be nice about it, Ban.”

“Betty, do you remember a dinner party in the first days of our acquaintance, at which I told you that you represented one essential difference from all the other women there?”

“Yes.  I thought you were terribly presuming.”

“I told you that you were probably the only woman present who wasn’t purchasable.”

“Not understanding you as well as I do now, I was quite shocked.  Besides, it was so unfair.  Nearly all of them were most respectable married people.”

“Bought by their most respectable husbands.  Some of ’em bought away from other husbands.  But I gave you credit for not being on that market—­or any other.  And now you’re trying to corrupt my professional virtue.”

“Ban!  I’m not.”

“What else is it when you try to use your influence to have me fire our nice, new critic?”

“If that’s being corruptible, I wonder if any of us are incorruptible.”  She stretched upward an idle hand and fondled a spray of freesia that drooped against her cheek.  “Ban; there’s something I’ve been waiting to tell you.  Tertius Marrineal wants to marry me.”

“I’ve suspected as much.  That would settle the obnoxious critic, wouldn’t it!  Though it’s rather a roundabout way.”

“Ban!  You’re beastly.”

“Yes; I apologize,” he replied quickly.  “But—­have I got to revise my estimate of you, Betty?  I should hate to.”

“Your estimate?  Oh, as to purchasability.  That’s worse than what you’ve just said.  Yet, somehow, I don’t resent it.  Because it’s honest, I suppose,” she said pensively.  “No:  it wouldn’t be a—­a market deal.  I like Tertius.  I like him a lot.  I won’t pretend that I’m madly in love with him.  But—­”

“Yes; I know,” he said gently, as she paused, looking at him steadily, but with clouded eyes.  He read into that “but” a world of opportunities; a theater of her own—­the backing of a powerful newspaper—­wealth—­and all, if she so willed it, without interruption to her professional career.

“Would you think any the less of me?” she asked wistfully.

“Would you think any the less of yourself?” he countered.

The blossoming spray broke under her hand.  “Ah, yes; that’s the question after all, isn’t it?” she murmured.

Meantime, Gardner, the eternal journalist, fostering a plan of his own, was gathering material from Guy Mallory who had come in late.

“What gets me,” he said, looking over at the host, “is how he can do a day’s work with all this social powwow going on.”

“A day’s?  He does three days’ work in every one.  He’s the hardest trained mind in the business.  Why, he could sit down here this minute, in the middle of this room, and dictate an editorial while keeping up his end in the general talk.  I’ve seen him do it.”

“He must be a wonder at concentration.”

“Concentration?  If he didn’t invent it, he perfected it.  Tell you a story.  Ban doesn’t go in for any game except polo.  One day some of the fellows at The Retreat got talking golf to him—­”

“The Retreat?  Good Lord!  He doesn’t belong to The Retreat, does he?”

“Yes; been a member for years.  Well, they got him to agree to try it.  Jim Tamson, the pro—­he’s supposed to be the best instructor in America—­was there then.  Banneker went out to the first tee, a 215-yard hole, watched Jim perform his show-em-how swing, asked a couple of questions.  ‘Eye on the ball,’ says Jim.  ’That’s nine tenths of it.  The rest is hitting it easy and following through.  Simple and easy,’ says Jim, winking to himself.  Banneker tries two or three clubs to see which feels easiest to handle, picks out a driving-iron, and slams the ball almost to the edge of the green.  Chance?  Of course, there was some luck in it.  But it was mostly his everlasting ability to keep his attention focused.  Jim almost collapsed.  ’First time I ever saw a beginner that didn’t top,’ says he.  ‘You’ll make a golfer, Mr. Banneker.’

“‘Not me,’ says Ban.  ‘This game is too easy.  It doesn’t interest me.’  He hands Jim a twenty-dollar bill, thanks him, goes in and has his bath, and has never touched a golf-stick since.”

Gardner had been listening with a kindling eye.  He brought his fist down on his knee.  “You’ve told me something!” he exclaimed.

“Going to try it out on your own game?”

“Not about golf.  About Banneker.  I’ve been wondering how he managed to establish himself as an individual figure in this big town.  Now I begin to see it.  It’s publicity; that’s what it is.  He’s got the sense of how to make himself talked about.  He’s picturesque.  I’ll bet Banneker’s first and last golf shot is a legend in the clubs yet, isn’t it?”

“It certainly is,” confirmed Mallory.  “But do you really think that he reasoned it all out on the spur of the moment?”

“Oh, reasoned; probably not.  It’s instinctive, I tell you.  And the twenty to the professional was a touch of genius.  Tamson will never stop talking about it.  Can’t you hear him, telling it to his fellow pros?  ‘Golf’s too easy for me,’ he says, ’and hands me a double sawbuck!  Did ye ever hear the like!’ And so the legend is built up.  It’s a great thing to become a local legend.  I know, for I’ve built up a few of ’em myself….  I suppose the gun-play on the river-front gave him his start at it and the rest came easy.”

“Ask him.  He’ll probably tell you,” said Mallory.  “At least, he’ll be interested in your theory.”

Gardner strolled over to Banneker’s group, not for the purpose of adopting Mallory’s suggestion, for he was well satisfied with his own diagnosis, but to congratulate him upon the rising strength of The Patriot.  As he approached, Miss Van Arsdale, in response to a plea from Betty Raleigh, went to the piano, and the dwindled crowd settled down into silence.  For music, at The House With Three Eyes, was invariably the sort of music that people listen to; that is, the kind of people whom Banneker gathered around him.

After she had played, Miss Van Arsdale declared that she must go, whereupon Banneker insisted upon taking her to her hotel.  To her protests against dragging him away from his own party, he retorted that the party could very well run itself without him; his parties often did, when he was specially pressed in his work.  Accepting this, his friend elected to walk; she wanted to hear more about The Patriot.  What did she think of it, he asked.

“I don’t expect you to like it,” he added.

“That doesn’t matter.  I do tremendously admire your editorials.  They’re beautifully done; the perfection of clarity.  But the rest of the paper—­I can’t see you in it.”

“Because I’m not there, as an individual.”

He expounded to her his theory of journalism.  That was a just characterization of Junior Masters, he said:  the three-ringed circus.  He, Banneker, would run any kind of a circus they wanted, to catch and hold their eyes; the sensational acts, the clowns of the funny pages, the blare of the bands, the motion, the color, and the spangles; all to beguile them into reading and eventually to thinking.

“But we haven’t worked it out yet, as we should.  What I’m really aiming at is a saturated solution, as the chemists say:  Not a saturated solution of circulation, for that isn’t possible, but a saturated solution of influence.  If we can’t put The Patriot into every man’s house, we ought to be able to put it into every man’s mind.  All things to all men:  that’s the formula.  We’re far from it yet, but we’re on the road.  And in the editorials, I’m making people stir their minds about real things who never before developed a thought beyond the everyday, mechanical processes of living.”

“To what end?” she asked doubtfully.

“Does it matter?  Isn’t the thinking, in itself, end enough?”

“Brutish thinking if it’s represented in your screaming headlines.”

“Predigested news.  I want to preserve all their brain-power for my editorial page.  And, oh, how easy I make it for them!  Thoughts of one syllable.”

“And you use your power over their minds to incite them to discontent.”

“Certainly.”

“But that’s dreadful, Ban!  To stir up bitterness and rancor among people.”

“Don’t you be misled by cant, Miss Camilla,” adjured Banneker.  “The contented who have everything to make them content have put a stigma on discontent.  They’d have us think it a crime.  It isn’t.  It’s a virtue.”

“Ban!  A virtue?”

“Well; isn’t it?  Call it by the other name, ambition.  What then?”

Miss Van Arsdale pondered with troubled eyes.  “I see what you mean,” she confessed.  “But the discontent that arises within one’s self is one thing; the ‘divine discontent.’  It’s quite another to foment it for your own purposes in the souls of others.”

“That depends upon the purpose.  If the purpose is to help the others, through making their discontent effective to something better, isn’t it justified?”

“But isn’t there always the danger of making a profession of discontent?”

“That’s a shrewd hit,” confessed Banneker.  “I’ve suspected that Marrineal means to capitalize it eventually, though I don’t know just how.  He’s a secret sort of animal, Marrineal.”

“But he gives you a free hand?” she asked.

“He has to,” said Banneker simply.

Camilla Van Arsdale sighed.  “It’s success, Ban.  Isn’t it?”

“Yes.  It’s success.  In its kind.”

“Is it happiness?”

“Yes.  Also in its kind.”

“The real kind?  The best kind?”

“It’s satisfaction.  I’m doing what I want to do.”

She sighed.  “I’d hoped for something more.”

He shook his head.  “One can’t have everything.”

“Why not?” she demanded almost fiercely.  “You ought to have.  You’re made for it.”  After a pause she added:  “Then it isn’t Betty Raleigh.  I’d hoped it was.  I’ve been watching her.  There’s character there, Ban, as well as charm.”

“She has other interests.  No; it isn’t Betty.”

“Ban, there are times when I could hate her,” broke out Miss Van Arsdale.

“Who?  Betty?”

“You know whom well enough.”

“I stand corrected in grammar as well as fact,” he said lightly.

“Have you seen her?”

“Yes.  I see her occasionally.  Not often.”

“Does she come here?”

“She has been.”

“And her husband?”

“No.”

“Ban, aren’t you ever going to get over it?”

He looked at her silently.

“No; you won’t.  There are a few of us like that.  God help us!” said Camilla Van Arsdale.