Success, A Novel

Others than Banneker’s friends and frequenters now evinced symptoms of interest in his influence upon his environment.  Approve him you might, or disapprove him; the palpable fact remained that he wielded a growing power.  Several promising enterprises directed at the City Treasury had aborted under destructive pressure from his pen.  A once impregnably cohesive ring of Albany legislators had disintegrated with such violence of mutual recrimination that prosecution loomed imminent, because of a two weeks’ “vacation” of Banneker’s at the State Capitol.  He had hunted some of the lawlessness out of the Police Department and bludgeoned some decent housing measures through the city councils.  Politically he was deemed faithless and unreliable which meant that, as an independent, he had ruined some hopefully profitable combinations in both parties.  Certain men, high up in politics and finance at the point where they overlap, took thoughtful heed of him.  How could they make him useful?  Or, at least, prevent him from being harmful?

No less a potentate than Poultney Masters had sought illumination from Willis Enderby upon the subject in the days when people in street-cars first began to rustle through the sheets of The Patriot, curious to see what the editorial had to say to them that day.

“What do you think of him?” began the magnate.

“Able,” grunted the other.

“If he weren’t, I wouldn’t be troubling my head about him.  What else?  Dangerous?”

“As dangerous as he is upright.  Exactly.”

“Now, I wonder what the devil you mean by that, Enderby,” said the financier testily.  “Dangerous as long as he’s upright?  Eh?  And dangerous to what?”

“To anything he goes after.  He’s got a following.  I might almost say a blind following.”

“Got a boss, too, hasn’t he?”

“Marrineal?  Ah, I don’t know how far Marrineal interferes.  And I don’t know Marrineal.”

“Upright, too; that one?” The sneer in Masters’s heavy voice was palpable.

“You consider that no newspaper can be upright,” the lawyer interpreted.

“I’ve bought ’em and bluffed ’em and stood ’em in a corner to be good,” returned the other simply.  “What would you expect my opinion to be?”

“The Sphere, among them?” queried the lawyer.

“Damn The Sphere!” exploded the other.  “A dirty, muck-grubbing, lying, crooked rag.”

“Your actual grudge against it is not for those latter qualities, though,” pointed out Enderby.  “On questions where it conflicts with your enterprises, it’s straight enough.  That’s it’s defect.  Upright equals dangerous.  You perceive?”

Masters shrugged the problem away with a thick and ponderous jerk of his shoulders.  “What’s young Banneker after?” he demanded.

“You ought to know him as well as I. He’s a sort of protege of yours, isn’t he?”

“At The Retreat, you mean?  I put him in because he looked to be polo stuff.  Now the young squirt won’t practice enough to be certain team material.”

“Found a bigger game.”

“Umph!  But what’s in back of it?”

“It’s the game for the game’s sake with him, I suspect.  I can only tell you that, wherever I’ve had contact with him, he has been perfectly straightforward.”

“Maybe.  But what about this anarchistic stuff of his?”

“Oh, anarchistic!  You mean his attacks on Wall Street?  The Stock Exchange isn’t synonymous with the Constitution of the United States, you know, Masters.  Do moderate your language.”

“Now you’re laughing at me, damn you, Enderby.”

“It’s good for you.  You ought to laugh at yourself more.  Ask Banneker what he’s at.  Very probably he’ll laugh at you inside.  But he’ll answer you.”

“That reminds me.  He had an editorial last week that stuck to me.  ’It is the bitter laughter of the people that shakes thrones.  Have a care, you money kings, not to become too ridiculous!’ Isn’t that socialist-anarchist stuff?”

“It’s very young stuff.  But it’s got a quality, hasn’t it?”

“Oh, hell, yes; quality!” rumbled the profane old man.  “Well, I will tackle your young prodigy one of these days.”

Which, accordingly, he did, encountering, some days later, Banneker in the reading-room at The Retreat.

“What are you up to; making trouble with that editorial screed of yours?” he growled at the younger man.

Banneker smiled.  He accepted that growl from Poultney Masters, not because Masters was a great and formidable figure in the big world, but because beneath the snarl there was a quality of—­no, not of friendliness, but of man-to-man approach.

“No.  I’m trying to cure trouble, not make it.”

“Umph!  Queer idea of curing.  Here we are in the midst of good times, everywhere, and you talk about—­what was the stuff?—­oh, yes:  ’The grinning mask of prosperity, beneath which Want searches with haggard and threatening eyes for the crust denied.’  Fine stuff!”

“Not mine.  I don’t write as beautifully as all that.  It’s quoted from a letter.  But I’ll take the responsibility, since I quoted it.  There’s some truth in it, you know.”

“Not a hair’s-weight.  If you fill the minds of the ignorant with that sort of thing, where shall we end?”

“If you fill the minds of the ignorant, they will no longer be ignorant.”

“Then they’ll be above their class and their work.  Our whole trouble is in that; people thinking they’re too good for the sort of work they’re fitted for.”

“Aren’t they too good if they can think themselves into something better?”

Poultney Masters delivered himself of a historical profundity.  “The man who first had the notion of teaching the mass of people to read will have something to answer for.”

“Destructive, isn’t it?” said Banneker, looking up quickly.

“Now, you want to go farther.  You want to teach ’em to think.”

“Exactly.  Why not?”

“Why not?  Why, because, you young idiot, they’ll think wrong.”

“Very likely.  At first.  We all had to spell wrong before we spelled right.  What if people do think wrong?  It’s the thinking that’s important.  Eventually they’ll think right.”

“With the newspapers to guide them?” There was a world of scorn in the magnate’s voice.

“Some will guide wrong.  Some will guide right.  The most I hope to do is to teach ’em a little to use their minds.  Education and a fair field.  To find out and to make clear what is found; that’s the business of a newspaper as I see it.”

“Tittle-tattle.  Tale-mongering,” was Masters’s contemptuous qualification.

“A royal mission,” laughed Banneker.  “I call the Sage to witness.  ’But the glory of kings is to search out a matter.’”

“But they’ve got to be kings,” retorted the other quickly.  “It’s a tricky business, Banneker.  Better go in for polo.  We need you.”  He lumbered away, morose and growling, but turned back to call over his shoulder:  “Read your own stuff when you get up to-morrow and see if polo isn’t a better game and a cleaner.”

What the Great of the city might think of his journalistic achievement troubled Banneker but little, so long as they thought of it at all, thereby proving its influence; the general public was his sole arbiter, except for the opinions of the very few whose approval he really desired, Io Eyre, Camilla Van Arsdale, and more remotely the men for whose own standards he maintained a real respect, such as Willis Enderby and Gaines.  Determined to make Miss Van Arsdale see his point of view, as well as to assure himself of hers, he had extracted from her a promise that she would visit The Patriot office before she returned to the West.  Accordingly, on a set morning she arrived on her trip of inspection, tall, serene, and, in her aloof genre, beautiful, an alien figure in the midst of that fevered and delirious energy.  He took her through the plant, elucidating the mechanical processes of the daily miracle of publication, more far-reaching than was ever any other voice of man, more ephemeral than the day of the briefest butterfly.  Throughout, the visitor’s pensive eyes kept turning from the creature to the creator, until, back in the trim quietude of his office, famed as the only orderly working-room of journalism, she delivered her wondering question: 

“And you have made all this, Ban?”

“At least I’ve remade it.”

She shook her head.  “No; as I told you before, I can’t see you in it.”

“You mean, it doesn’t express me.  It isn’t meant to.’

“Whom does it express, then?  Mr. Marrineal?”

“No.  It isn’t an expression at all in that sense.  It’s a—­a response.  A response to the demand of hundreds of thousands of people who have never had a newspaper made for them before.”

“An echo of vox populi?  Does that excuse its sins?”

“I’m not putting it forth as an excuse.  Is it really sins or only bad taste that offends you?”

“Clever, Ban.  And true in a measure.  But insincerity is more than bad taste.  It’s one of the primal sins.”

“You find The Patriot insincere?”

“Can I find it anything else, knowing you?”

“Ah, there you go wrong again, Miss Camilla.  As an expression of my ideals, the news part of the paper would be insincere.  I don’t like it much better than you do.  But I endure it; yes, I’ll be frank and admit that I even encourage it, because it gives me wider scope for the things I want to say.  Sincere things.  I’ve never yet written in my editorial column anything that I don’t believe from the bottom of my soul.  Take that as a basis on which to judge me.”

“My dear Ban!  I don’t want to judge you.”

“I want you to,” he cried eagerly.  “I want your judgment and your criticism.  But you must see what I’m aiming for.  Miss Camilla, I’m making people stir their minds and think who never before had a thought beyond the everyday processes of life.”

“For your own purposes?  Thought, as you manipulate it, might be a high-explosive.  Have you thought of using it in that way?”

“If I found a part of the social edifice that had to be blown to pieces, I might.”

“Take care that you don’t involve us all in the crash.  Meantime, what is the rest of your editorial page; a species of sedative to lull their minds?  Who is Evadne Ellington?”

“One of our most prominent young murderesses.”

“And you let her sign a column on your page?”

“Oh, she’s a highly moral murderess.  Killed her lover in defense of her honor, you know.  Which means that she shot him when he got tired of her.  A sobbing jury promptly acquitted her, and now she’s writing ’Warnings to Young Girls.’  They’re most improving and affecting, I assure you.  We look after that.”

“Ban!  I hate to have you so cynical.”

“Not at all,” he protested.  “Ask the Prevention of Vice people and the criminologists.  They’ll tell you that Evadne’s column is a real influence for good among the people who read and believe it.”

“What class is Reformed Rennigan’s sermon aimed at?” she inquired, with wrinkling nostrils. “‘Soaking it to Satan’; is that another regular feature?”

“Twice a week.  It gives us a Y.M.C.A. circulation that is worth a good deal to us.  Outside of my double column, the page is a sort of forum.  I’ll take anything that is interesting or authoritative.  For example, if Royce Melvin had something of value to say to the public about music, where else could she find so wide a hearing as through The Patriot?”

“No, I thank you,” returned his visitor dryly.

“No?  Are you sure?  What is your opinion of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ as a national song?”

“It’s dreadful.”

“Why?”

“For every reason.  The music misfits the words.  It’s beyond the range of most voices.  The harmonies are thin.  No crowd in the world can sing it.  What is the value or inspiration of a national song that the people can’t sing?”

“Ask it of The Patriot’s public.  I’ll follow it up editorially; ’Wanted; A Song for America.’”

“I will,” she answered impulsively.  Then she laughed.  “Is that the way you get your contributors?”

“Often, as the spider said to the fly,” grinned Banneker the shameless.  “Take a thousand words or more and let us have your picture.”

“No.  Not that.  I’ve seen my friends’ pictures too often in your society columns.  By the way, how comes it that a paper devoted to the interests of the common people maintains that aristocratic feature?”

“Oh, the common people eat it alive.  Russell Edmonds is largely responsible for keeping it up.  You should hear his theory.  It’s ingenious.  I’ll send for him.”

Edmonds, who chanced to be at his desk, entered the editorial den with his tiny pipe between his teeth, and, much disconcerted at finding a lady there, hastily removed it until Miss Van Arsdale suggested its restitution.

“What?  The society page?” said he.  “Yes; I was against dropping it.  You see, Miss Van Arsdale, I’m a Socialist in belief.”

“Is there a pun concealed in that or are you serious, Mr. Edmonds?”

“Serious.  I’m always that on the subjects of Socialism and The Patriot.”

“Then you must explain if I’m to understand.”

“By whom is society news read?  By two classes,” expounded the veteran; “those whose names appear, and those who are envious of those whose names appear.  Well, we’re after the envious.”

“Still I don’t see.  With what purpose?’

“Jim Simpson, who has just got his grocery bill for more than he can pay, reads a high-colored account of Mrs. Stumpley-Triggs’s aquatic dinner served in the hundred-thousand-dollar swimming-pool on her Westchester estate.  That makes Jim think.”

“You mean that it makes him discontented.”

“Well, discontent is a mighty leaven.”

Miss Van Arsdale directed her fine and serious eyes upon Banneker.  “So it comes back to the cult of discontent.  Is that Mr. Marrineal’s formula, too, Mr. Edmonds?”

“Underneath all his appearance of candor, Marrineal’s a secret animal,” said Edmonds.

“Does he leave you a free hand with your editorials, Ban?” inquired the outsider.

“Absolutely.”

“Watches the circulation only,” said Edmonds.  “Thus far,” he added.

“You’re looking for an ulterior motive, then,” interpreted Miss Van Arsdale.

“I’m looking for whatever I can find in Marrineal, Miss Van Arsdale,” confessed the patriarch of the office.  “As yet I haven’t found much.”

“I have,” said Banneker.  “I’ve discovered his theory of journalism.  We three, Edmonds, Marrineal, and I, regard this business from three diverse viewpoints.  To Edmonds it’s a vocation and a rostrum.  He wants really, under his guise as the most far-seeing news man of his time, to call sinners against society to repentance, or to force repentance down their throats.  There’s a good deal of the stern evangelist about you, you know, Pop.”

“And you?” The other’s smile seemed enmeshed in the dainty spiral of smoke brooding above his pursed lips.

“Oh, I’m more the pedagogue.  With me, too, the game is a vocation.  But it’s a different one.  I’d like to marshal men’s minds as a generalissimo marshals armies.”

“In the bonds of your own discipline?” asked Miss Van Arsdale.

“If I could chain a mind I’d be the most splendid tyrant of history.  No.  Free leadership of the free is good enough.”

“If Marrineal will leave you free,” commented the veteran.  “What’s your diagnosis of Marrineal, then?”

“A priest of Baal.”

“With The Patriot in the part of Baal?”

“Not precisely The Patriot.  Publicity, rather, of which The Patriot is merely the instrument.  Marrineal’s theory of publicity is interesting.  It may even be true.  Substantially it is this:  All civilized Americans fear and love print; that is to say, Publicity, for which read Baal.  They fear it for what it may do to them.  They love and fawn on it for what it may do for them.  It confers the boon of glory and launches the bolts of shame.  Its favorites, made and anointed from day to day, are the blessed of their time.  Those doomed by it are the outcasts.  It sits in momentary judgment, and appeal from its decisions is too late to avail anything to its victims.  A species of auto-juggernaut, with Marrineal at the wheel.”

“What rubbish!” said Miss Van Arsdale with amused scorn.

“Oh, because you’ve nothing to ask or fear from Baal.  Yet even you would use it, for your musical preachment.”

As he spoke, he became aware of Edmonds staring moodily and with pinched lips at Miss Van Arsdale.  To the mind’s eye of the old stager had flashed a sudden and astounding vision of all that pride of womanhood and purity underlying the beauty of the face, overlaid and fouled by the inky vomit of Baal of the printing-press, as would have come to pass had not he, Edmonds, obstructed the vengeance.

“I can imagine nothing printed,” said the woman who had loved Willis Enderby, “that could in any manner influence my life.”

“Fortunate you!” Edmonds wreathed his little congratulation in festoons of light vapor.  “But you live in a world of your own making.  Marrineal is reckoning on the world which lives and thinks largely in terms of what its neighbor thinks of it.”

“He once said to me,” remarked Banneker, “that the desire to get into or keep out of print could be made the master-key to new and undreamed-of powers of journalism if one had the ability to find a formula for it.”

“I’m not sure that I understand what he means,” said Miss Van Arsdale, “but it has a sinister sound.”

“Are Baal’s other names Bribery and Blackmail?” glowered Edmonds.

“There has never been a hint of any illegitimate use of the paper, so far as I can discover.  Yet it’s pretty plain to me that he intends to use it as an instrument.”

“As soon as we’ve made it strong enough,” supplied Edmonds.

“An instrument of what?” inquired Miss Van Arsdale.

“Power for himself.  Political, I suppose.”

“Does he want office?” she asked.

“Perhaps.  Perhaps he prefers the deeper-lying power to make and unmake politicians.  We’ve done it already in a few cases.  That’s Edmonds’s specialty.  I’ll know within a few days what Marrineal wants, if I can get a showdown.  He and I are coming to a new basis of finance.”

“Yes; he thinks he can’t afford to keep on paying you by circulation.  You’re putting on too much.”  This from Edmonds.

“That’s what he got me here for.  However, I don’t really believe he can.  I’m eating up what should be the paper’s legitimate profits.  And yet”—­he smiled radiantly—­“there are times when I don’t see how I’m going to get along with what I have.  It’s pretty absurd, isn’t it, to feel pinched on fifty thousand a year, when I did so well at Manzanita on sixty a month?”

“It’s a fairy-tale,” declared Miss Van Arsdale.  “I knew that you were going to arrive sooner or later, Ban.  But this isn’t an arrival.  It’s a triumph.”

“Say rather it’s a feat of balancing,” he propounded.  “A tight-rope stunt on a gilded rope.  Failure on one side; debt on the other.  Keep going like the devil to save yourself from falling.”

“What is it making of him, Mr. Edmonds?” Banneker’s oldest friend turned her limpid and anxious regard upon his closest friend.

“A power.  Oh, it’s real enough, all this empire of words that crumbles daily.  It leaves something behind, a little residue of thought, ideals, convictions.  What do you fear for him?”

“Cynicism,” she breathed uneasily.

“It’s the curse of the game.  But it doesn’t get the worker who feels his work striking home.”

“Do you see any trace of cynicism in the paper?” asked Banneker curiously.

“All this blaring and glaring and froth and distortion,” she replied, sweeping her hand across the issue which lay on the desk before her.  “Can you do that sort of thing and not become that sort of thing?”

“Ask Edmonds,” said Banneker.

“Thirty years I’ve been in this business,” said the veteran slowly.  “I suppose there are few of its problems and perplexities that I haven’t been up against.  And I tell you, Miss Van Arsdale, all this froth and noise and sensationalism doesn’t matter.  It’s an offense to taste, I know.  But back of it is the big thing that we’re trying to do; to enlist the ignorant and helpless and teach them to be less ignorant and helpless.  If fostering the political ambitions of a Marrineal is part of the price, why, I’m willing to pay it, so long as the paper keeps straight and doesn’t sell itself for bribe money.  After all, Marrineal can ride to his goal only on our chariot.  The Patriot is an institution now.  You can’t alter an institution, not essentially.  You get committed to it, to the thing you’ve made yourself.  Ban and I have made the new Patriot, not Marrineal.  Even if he got rid of us, he couldn’t change the paper; not for a long time and only very gradually.  The following that we’ve built up would be too strong for him.”

“Isn’t it too strong for you two?” asked the doubting woman-soul.

“No.  We understand it because we made it.”

“Frankenstein once said something like that,” she murmured.

“It isn’t a monster,” rumbled Edmonds.  “Sometimes I think it’s a toy dog, with Ban’s ribbon around its cute little neck.  I’ll answer for Ban, Miss Van Arsdale.”

The smoke of his minute pipe went up, tenuous and graceful, incense devoted to the unseen God behind the strangely patterned curtain of print; to Baal who was perhaps even then grinning down upon his unsuspecting worshipers.

But Banneker, moving purposefully amidst that vast phantasmagoria of pulsing print, wherein all was magnified, distorted, perverted to the claims of a gross and rabid public appetite, dreamed his pure, untainted dream; the conception of his newspaper as a voice potent enough to reach and move all; dominant enough to impose its underlying ideal; confident enough of righteousness to be free of all silencing and control.  That voice should supply the long unsatisfied hunger of the many for truth uncorrupted.  It should enunciate straightly, simply, without reservation, the daily verities destined to build up the eternal structure.  It should be a religion of seven days a week, set forth by a thousand devoted preachers for a million faithful hearers.

Camilla Van Arsdale had partly read his dream, and could have wept for it and him.

Io Eyre had begun to read it, and her heart went out to him anew.  For this was the test of success.