"To let us handle it our own way," subst.i.tuted the Doctor. "We"ve got our campaign all figured out and ready to start. Do you know what the great danger is now?"
"Letting the infection go on without taking open measures to stop it."
"You"re way wrong! Starting a panic that will scatter it all over the place is the real danger. Have you heard of a single case outside of the Rookeries district, so far?"
Hal strove to recall the death-list on the proof. "No," he admitted.
"You see! It"s confined to one locality. Now, what happens if you turn loose a newspaper scare? Why, those poor, ignorant people will swarm out of the Rookeries and go anywhere to escape the quarantine that they know will come. You"ll have an epidemic not localized, but general. The situation will be ten times as difficult and dangerous as it is now."
Struck with the plausibility of this reasoning, Hal hesitated. "That"s up to the authorities," he said.
"The authorities!" cried the charlatan, in disdain. "What could they do?
The damage would be done before they got ready to move. You see, we"ve got to handle this situation diplomatically. Look here, Boyee; what"s the worst feature of an epidemic? Panic. You know the Bible parable. The seven plagues came to Egypt and ten thousand people died. The Grand Vizier said to the plagues, "How many of my people have you slain?" The plagues said, "A thousand." "What about the other nine thousand?" said the Grand Vizier. "Not guilty!" said the plagues. "They were slain by Fear." Maybe it was in "Paradise Lost" and not the Bible. But the lesson"s the same. Panic is the killer."
"But the disease is increasing all the time," objected Hal. "Are we to sit still and--"
"Is it?" broke in the wily controversialist. "How do you account for this, then?" He drew from his pocket a printed leaflet. "Take a peek at those figures. Fewer deaths in the Rookeries this last week than in any week since March."
This was true. Not infrequently there comes an inexplicable subsidence of mortality in mid-epidemic. No competent hygienist is deceived into mistaking this phenomenon for an indication of the end. Not being a hygienist Hal was again impressed.
"The Health Bureau"s own statistics," continued the argumentator, pushing his advantage. "With Dr. Merritt"s signature at the bottom."
"Dr. Merritt says that the epidemic is being fostered by secrecy, suppression, and lying."
"All sentimentalism. Merritt would turn the city upside down if he had his way. Was it him that told you it was typhus?"
"No. We"ve got a two-page story in proof now, giving the whole facts of the epidemic."
"You can"t publish it, Boy-ee," said his father firmly.
"Can"t? That sounds like an order."
Adroitly Dr. Surtaine caught at the word. "An order drawn on your word of honor."
"If there"s any question of honor to the "Clarion," it"s to tell the truth plainly and take the consequences."
"Who said anything about the "Clarion"s" honor? This is between you and me."
"You"ll have to speak more plainly," said Hal with a dawning dread.
"Boyee, I hate to do this, but I"ve got to, to save the city. You gave me your word that the day you had to suppress news for your own sake, you"d quit this Don Quixotic business and treat others as decently and considerately as you treated yourself."
"Go on," said Hal, in a half whisper.
"Well--Milly Neal." Dr. Surtaine wet his lips nervously. "You saved yourself there by keeping the story out of the papers. Of course you were right. You were dead right. You"d have been a fool to do anything else. But there you are. And there"s your promise."
A nausea of the soul sickened Hal. That his father, whom he had so loved and honored, should make of the loyalty which had, at the cost of principle, protected the name of Surtaine against open disgrace, a tool wherewith to tear down his professional standards--it was like some incredible and malign jocosity of a devilish logic. Of what was going on in the quack"s mind he had no inkling. He could not know that his father saw in the suppression of the suicide news, only a natural and successful effort on the part of Hal to conceal his own guilt in Milly"s death. No more could Dr. Surtaine comprehend that it was the dreadful responsibility of the Surtaine quackery for which Hal had unhesitantly sacrificed the declared principle of the "Clarion." So they gazed darkly at each other across the chasm, each seeing his opponent in the blackest colors.
"You hold me to that?" demanded Hal, half choked.
"I have to, Boy-ee."
To Dr. Surtaine the issue which he had raised was but the distasteful means to a necessary end. To Hal it meant the final capitulation to the forces against which he had been fighting since his first enlightenment.
"I might as well sell the "Clarion" now, and be done with it," he declared bitterly.
"Nonsense! If you stuck to this foolishness you"d have to sell it or lose it. You"d be ruined, both in influence and in money. How would you feel when Mac Ellis, and Wayne, and all the fellows that stuck by you found themselves out of a job because of your pig-headedness? And what harm are you doing by dropping the story, anyway? We"ve got this thing beaten, right now. It isn"t spreading. It"s dropping off. What"ll the "Clarion" look like when its great sensation peters out into thin air?
But by that time the harm"ll be done and the whole country will think we"re a plague-stricken city. Don"t do all that damage and spoil everything just for a false delusion, Boyee."
But Hal"s mind was brooding on the fatal promise which he had so confidently made his father. One way out there was.
"Since it"s a question of my word to you," he said, "I could still publish the truth about Milly Neal."
"No. You couldn"t do that, Boyee," said his father in a tone, half sorrowful, half shamed.
"No. You"re right. I couldn"t--G.o.d help me!"
To proclaim his own father a moral criminal in his own paper was the one test which Hal lacked the power to meet. It was the world-old conflict between loyalty and principle--in which loyalty so often and so tragically wins the first combat.
After all, Hal forced himself to consider, he was not serving his public ill by this particular sacrifice of principle. The official mortality figures helped him to persuade himself that the typhus was indeed ebbing. For himself, as the price of silence, there was easy sailing under the flag of local patriotism, and with every success in prospect.
Yet it was with sunken eyes that he turned to the tempter.
"All right," he said, with a half groan, "I give in. We won"t print it."
Dr. Surtaine heaved a great sigh of relief. "That"s horse sense!" he cried jovially. "Now, you go ahead on those lines and you"ll make the "Clarion" the best-paying proposition in Worthington. I"ll drop a few hints where they"ll do the most good, and you"ll see the advertisers breaking their necks to come in. Journalism is no different from any other business, Boy-ee. Live and let live. Bear and forbear. There"s the rule for you. The trouble with you, Boy-ee, has been that you"ve been trying to run a business on pink-tea principles."
"The trouble with me," said his son bitterly, "is that I"ve been trying to reform a city when I ought to have been reforming myself."
"Oh, you"re all right, Boy-ee," his affectionate and admiring father rea.s.sured him. "You"re just finding yourself. As for this reform--" And he was launched upon the second measure of the Paean of Policy when Hal cut him short by ringing a bell and ordering the boy to send McGuire Ellis to him. Ellis came up from the city room.
"Kill the epidemic story, Mr. Ellis," he ordered.
Red pa.s.sion surged up into Ellis"s face.
"Kill--" he began, in a strangled voice.
"Kill it. You understand?" The a.s.sociate editor"s color receded. He looked with slow contempt from father to son.
"Oh, yes, I understand," he said. "Any other orders to-day?"
Hal made no reply. His father, divining that this was no time for further speech, took his departure. McGuire Ellis went out with black despair at his heart, a soldier betrayed by his captain. And the proprietor of the "Clarion," his feet now set in the path of success and profit, turned back to his work in sodden disenchantment, sighing as youth alone sighs, and as youth sighs only when it foregoes the dream of ideals which is its immortal birthright.
CHAPTER XXVIII
"WHOSE BREAD I EAT"