The stars in their courses fought for Mr. Queed in those days. Somebody had to fight for him, it seemed, since he was so little equipped to fight for himself, and the stars kindly undertook the a.s.signment. Not merely had he attracted the militant services of the bright little celestial body whose earthly agent was Miss Charlotte Lee Weyland; but this little body chanced to be one of a system or galaxy, a.s.sociated with and exercising a certain power, akin to gravitation, over that strong and steady planet known among men as Charles Gardiner West. And the very next day, the back of the morning"s mail being broken, the little star used some of its power to draw the great planet to the telephone, while feeling, in a most unstellar way, that it was a decidedly cheeky thing to do. However, nothing could have exceeded the charming radiance of Planet West, and it was he himself who introduced the topic of Mr. Queed, by inquiring, in mundane language, whether or not he had been fired.
"No!" laughed the star. "Instead of firing him, I"m now bent on _hiring_ him. Oh, you"d better not laugh! It"s to you I want to hire him!"
But at that the shining Planet laughed the more.
"What have I done to be worthy of this distinction? Also, what can I do with him? To paraphrase his own inimitable remark about your dog, what is the object of a man like that? What is he for?"
Sharlee dilated on the renown of Mr. Queed as a writer upon abstruse themes. Mr. West was not merely agreeable; he was interested. It seemed that at the very last meeting of the _Post_ directors--to which body Mr.
West had been elected at the stockholders" meeting last June--it had been decided that Colonel Cowles should have a little help in the editorial department. The work was growing; the Colonel was ageing. The point had been to find the help. Who knew but what this little highbrow was the very man they were looking for?
"I"ll call on him--at your aunt"s, shall I?--to-day if I can. Why, not a bit of it! The thanks are quite the other way. He may turn out another Charles A. Dana, cleverly disguised. When are you going to have another half-holiday up there?"
Sharlee left the telephone thinking that Mr. West was quite the nicest man she knew. Ninety-nine men out of a hundred, in his position, would have said, "Send him to see me." Mr. West had said, "I"ll call on him at your aunt"s," and had absolutely refused to pose as the gracious dispenser of patronage. However, a great many people shared Sharlee"s opinion of Charles Gardiner West. One of them walked into his office at that very moment, also pet.i.tioning for something, and West received him with just that same unaffected pleasantness of manner which everybody found so agreeable. But this one"s business, as it happened, completely knocked from Mr. West"s head the matter of Mr. Queed. In fact, he never gave it another thought. The following night he went to New York with a little party of friends, chiefly on pleasure bent; and, having no particularly frugal mind, permitted himself a very happy day or so in the metropolis. Hence it happened that Sharlee, learning from her aunt that no Post directors had called forcing remunerative work on Mr.
Queed, made it convenient, about five days after the telephone conversation, to meet Mr. West upon the street, quite by accident. Any girl can tell you how it is done.
"Oh, by the way," she said in the most casual way, "shall I send my little Doctor Queed to call upon you some day?"
West was agreeably contrite; abused himself for a shiftless lackwit who was slated for an unwept grave; promised to call that very day; and, making a memorandum the instant he got back to the office, this time did not fail to keep his word.
Not that Mr. Queed had been inconvenienced by the little delay. The minute after his landlady"s agent left him, he had become immersed in that great work of his, and there by day and night, he had remained.
Having turned over to the agent the full responsibility for finding work for him, he no longer had to bother his head about it. The whole matter dropped gloriously from his mind; he read, wrote, and avoided practicing sociology with tremendous industry; and thus he might have gone on for no one knows how long had there not, at five o"clock on the fifth day, come a knock upon his door.
"Well?" he called, annoyed.
Emma came in with a card. The name, at which the young man barely glanced, conveyed nothing to him.
"Well? What does he want?"
Emma did not know.
"Oh!" said Mr. Queed, irritably--"tell him to come up, if he must."
The _Post_ director came up--two flights; he knocked; was curtly bidden to enter; did so.
He stepped into one of the smallest rooms he had ever seen in his life; about nine by five-and-a-half, he thought. A tiny single bed ran along one side of it; jammed against the foot of the bed was a tiny table. A tiny chair stood at the table; behind the chair stood a tiny bureau; beside the bureau, the tiniest little iron wash-stand in the world. In the chair sat a man, not tiny, indeed, but certainly n.o.body"s prize giant. He sat in a kind of whirling tempest of books and papers, and he rode absorbedly in the whirlwind and majestically directed the storm.
West was intensely interested. "Mr. Queed?" he asked, from just inside the door.
"Yes," said the other, not looking up. "What can I do for you?"
West burst out laughing; he couldn"t help it.
"Maybe you can do a great deal, Mr. Queed. On the other hand maybe I can do some little trifle for you. Which leg the boot is on n.o.body on earth can say at this juncture. I have ventured to call," said he, "as an amba.s.sador from the morning _Post_ of this city."
"The _Post_?"
The name instantly started Queed"s memory to working; he recalled something about the _Post_--as yet, so it happened, only the copy of it he had read; and he turned and looked around with slow professorial amus.e.m.e.nt kindling in his eyes.
"Ah!" said he. "Possibly you are Colonel Cowles, the military political economist?"
West was more amused than ever. "No," said he, "on the contrary, West is the name, C.G. West--to correspond, you know, with the one on that card you have in your hand. I"ll sit down here on the bed--shall I?--so that we can talk more comfortably. Sitting does help the flow of ideas so remarkably, don"t you find? I am trespa.s.sing on your time," said he, "at the suggestion of--an acquaintance of yours, who has been telling me great things about your work."
Queed looked completely puzzled.
"The _Post_, Mr. Queed," went on West agreeably, "is always looking for men who can do exceptional work. Therefore, I have come to consider with you whether we might not make an arrangement to our mutual advantage."
At that the whole thing came back to the young man. He had agreed to take light remunerative work to pay his board, and now the day of reckoning was at hand. His heart grew heavy within him.
"Well," said he, exactly as he had said to the agent, "what have you to propose?"
"I thought of proposing, first, that you give me some idea of what you have done and can do on lines useful for a daily newspaper. How does that method of procedure strike you?"
Queed produced his celebrated envelope of clippings. Also he hunted up one or two stray cuttings which proved to be editorials he had written on a.s.signment, for a New York newspaper. West ran through them with intelligent quickness.
"I say! These are rather fine, you know. This article on the income tax now--just right!--just the sort of thing!"
Queed sat with his hand clamped on his head, which was aching rather badly, as indeed it did about three fourths of the time.
"Oh, yes," he said wearily.
"I take off my hat to you!" added West presently. "You"re rather out of my depth here, but at least I know enough political economy to know what is good."
He looked at Queed, smiling, very good-humored and gay, and Queed looked back at him, not very good-humored and anything but gay. Doubtless it would have surprised the young Doctor very much to know that West was feeling sorry for him just then, for at that moment he was feeling sorry for West.
"Now look here," said West.
He explained how the _Post_ desired a man to write sleep-inducing fillers--"occasional articles of weight and authority" was the way he put it--and wanted to know if such an opening would interest Mr. Queed.
Queed said he supposed so, provided the _Post_ took little of his time and paid his board in return for it. West had no doubt that everything could be satisfactorily arranged.
"Colonel Cowles is the man who hires and fires," he explained. "Go to see him in a day or two, will you? Meantime, I"ll tell him all about you."
Presently West smiled himself out, leaving Queed decidedly relieved at the brief reprieve. He had been harried by the fear that his visitor would insist on his stopping to produce an article or so while he waited. However, the time had come when the inevitable had to be faced.
His golden privacy must be ravished for the grim G.o.d of bread and meat.
The next afternoon he put on his hat with a bad grace, and went forth to seek Colonel Cowles, editor-in-chief of the leading paper in the State.
The morning _Post_ was an old paper, which had been in the hands of a single family from A.D. 1846 till only the other day. It had been a power during the war, a favorite mouthpiece of President Davis. It had stood like a wall during the cruelties of Reconstruction; had fought the good fight for white man"s rule; had crucified carpet-baggism and scalawaggery upon a cross of burning adjective. Later it had labored gallantly for Tilden; denounced Hayes as a robber; idolized Cleveland; preached free trade with pure pa.s.sion; swallowed free silver; stood "regular," though not without grimaces, through Bryanism. The _Post_ was, in short, a paper with an honorable history, and everybody felt a kind of affection for it. The plain fact remained, however, that within recent years a great many worthy persons had acquired the habit of reading the more hustling _State_.
The _Post_, not to put too fine a point upon it, had for a time run fast to seed. The third generation of its owners had lost their money, mostly in land speculations in the suburbs of New York City, and in the State of Oregon. You could have thrown a brick from their office windows and hit far better land speculations, but they had the common fault of believing that things far away from home are necessarily and always the best. The demand rose for bigger, fatter newspapers, with comic sections and plenty of purple ink, and the _Post"s_ owners found themselves unable to supply it. In fact they had to retort by mortgaging their property to the hilt and cutting expenses to rock-bottom. These were dark days for the _Post_. That it managed to survive them at all was due chiefly to the personality of Colonel Cowles, who, though doubtless laughable as a political economist, was yet considered to have his good points. But the Hercules-labor grew too heavy even for him, and the paper was headed straight for the auctioneer"s block when new interests suddenly stepped in and bought it. These interests, consisting largely of progressive men of the younger generation, thoroughly overhauled and reorganized the property, laid in the needed purple ink, and were now gradually driving the old paper back to the dividend-paying point again.
Colonel Cowles, whose services had, of course, been retained, was of the old school of journalism, editor and manager, too. Very little went into the _Post_ that he had not personally vised in the proof: forty galleys a night were child"s play to him. Managing editor there was none but himself; the city editor was his mere office-boy and mouthpiece; even the august business manager, who mingled with great advertisers on equal terms, was known to take orders from him. In addition the Colonel wrote three columns of editorials every day. Of these editorials it is enough to say at this point that there were people who liked them.
Toward this dominant personality, the reluctant applicant for work now made his way. He cut an absent-minded figure upon the street, did Mr.
Queed, but this time he made his crossings without mishap. Undisturbed by dogs, he landed at the _Post_ building, and in time blundered into a room described as "Editorial" on the gla.s.s-door. A friendly young girl sitting there, pounding away on a typewriter, referred him to the next office, and the young man, opening the connecting door without knocking, pa.s.sed inside.
A full-bodied, gray-headed, gray-mustached man sat in his shirt-sleeves behind a great table, writing with a very black pencil in a large sprawling hand. He glanced up as the door opened.
"Colonel Cowles?"