"Not until July. You must come to see us at Newport."
"Nothing could please me better--if I can get away."
"I"ll send you an invitation, although you have treated me very badly of late. But I suppose you are busy."
"Busy? Isn"t a galley slave always busy?"
"Are you still writing editorials?"
"Yes--and on the fallen _News-Record_. In fact----"
"Well--what?"
Howard laughed. "Don"t faint," he said. "I"ll leave you at once if you wish me to, and I"ll never give it away that you once knew me. I"m the editor--the responsible devil for the depravity."
"How interesting!" Mrs. Carnarvon was evidently not disturbed. Then the American adoration of success came out. "I"m so glad you"re getting on.
I always knew you would. Really, you must come to dinner. I"ll invite some of the people you"ve been attacking. They"ll like to look at you, and you will be amused by them. And I don"t in the least mind your giving it to them if they bait you, as I did this morning. Will you come?"
"If I may leave by ten o"clock. I go down town every night."
"Why, when do you sleep?"
"Not much, these days. Life"s too interesting to permit of much sleep.
I"ll make up when it slackens a bit."
As he was turning his horse, she said: "Marian"s address is Claridge"s, Brooke Street, Mayfair. If she isn"t there, they forward her mail."
Howard was puzzled. "What made her give me that address?" he thought.
"I know she didn"t like my seeing so much of Marian. And here she is practically inviting me to write to her." He could not understand it.
"If I were not a "yellow" editor and if Marian were not engaged to one of the richest men in New York, I"d say that this lady was encouraging me." He smiled. "Not yet--not just yet." And he cheerfully urged his horse into a canter.
Mrs. Carnarvon"s opinion of the _News-Record_ and its recent performances fairly represented that of the fashionable and the very rich. They read it, as they never did before, because it interested them. They could not deny that what it said was true; that is, they could not deny it to their own minds, although they did vigorously deny it publicly. Those who were attacked directly or indirectly, or expected to be attacked, denounced the paper as an "outrage," a "disgrace to the city," a "specimen of the journalism of the gutter." Many who were not in sympathy with the men or the methods a.s.sailed thought that its course was "inexpedient," "tended to increase discontent among the lower cla.s.ses," "weakened the influence of the better cla.s.ses." Only a few of the "triumphant cla.s.ses" saw the real value and benefit of the _News-Record"s_ frank attacks upon greed and hypocrisy, saw that these attacks were not dangerous or demagogical because they were just and were combined with a careful avoidance of encouragement to the lazy, the envious, the incompetent and the ignorant.
Fortunately for Howard"s peace, that eminent New York "multi," Samuel Jocelyn, for whom Coulter had the highest respect, was of this last cla.s.s. When Howard began, Coulter was at Aiken where Jocelyn had a cottage. He had never been able to make headway with Jocelyn, and Mrs.
Jocelyn deigned to give him and Mrs. Coulter only the coldest of cold nods. Just as Coulter had become so agitated by Howard"s radical course that he was preparing to go to New York to remonstrate with him, Jocelyn called.
"I came to thank you for what you are doing with your paper," he said cordially. "It seems to me that all intelligent men who are not blind to their own ultimate interests ought to stand by you. I can"t tell you how much I admire your frankness and honesty. And you draw the line just right. You attack plunder, you defend property. Will your wife and you dine with us this evening?"
Coulter postponed his trip to New York.
On the last day of the first three months the circulation of the _News-Record_ was 147,253--an increase of 42,150 over what it was on the day Howard took charge; its advertising had increased twelve per cent; its net profits for the quarter were seventy-five thousand dollars as against fifty-seven thousand for the preceding quarter.
"Very good indeed," was Stokely"s comment.
"Another quarter like this," said Howard, "and I"m going to ask you to let me increase expenses a thousand dollars a week to ill.u.s.trate the paper."
"We"ll talk that over with Coulter. Personally I like this "yellow-journalism"--when it"s done intelligently. I always told Coulter we"d have to come to it. It"s only common sense to make a paper easy reading. Then, too, we can have a great deal more influence--in fact, we have already. I"m getting what I want up at Albany this winter much cheaper."
Howard winced. "He made me feel like a blackmailer," he said to himself when Stokely had gone. "And I suppose these fellows do look on me as a new Malcolm with up-to-date tricks. Well, they will see, they will see."
He tried to go on with his work, but Stokely"s cynical words persistently interrupted him. Why had he not squarely challenged Stokely then and there? Why had he only winced where a year ago he would have demanded an explanation?
He hated to confess it to himself, he made every effort to smother it, but the thought still stared him in the face--"I am not so strong in my ideals of personal character as I was a year ago."
The fact that his present course was profitable gave him, he felt, more pleasure than the fact that it was right. If the alternative of wealth and power with self-abas.e.m.e.nt or poverty, obscurity with self-respect were put to him now, what would he decide? Would he give up his prospects, his hopes of Marian and of an easy career? He was afraid to answer. He contented himself with one of his habitual evasions--"I will settle that when the time comes. No, Stokely"s remark did not make a crisis. If the crisis ever does come, surely I will act like a man. I"ll be securer then, more necessary to this pair of plunderers, able to make better terms for myself. In practical life, it is necessary to sacrifice something in order to succeed."
But Stokely"s words and his own silence and the real reasons for his changing ideals and for his cowardice continued to annoy him.
Every day he came down town planning for a better newspaper the next morning than they had ever made before. And his vigour, his enthusiasm permeated the entire office. He went from one news department to another, suggesting, asking for suggestions, praising, criticising judiciously and with the greatest consideration for vanity. He talked with the reporters, urging them on by showing keen interest in them and their work, and intimate knowledge of what they were doing. And he dictated every day telegrams to correspondents, thanking them for any conspicuously good stories they had telegraphed in, adding something to the compensation of those who were paid by s.p.a.ce and made little.
If his work had not been his amus.e.m.e.nt the long hours, the constant application, would have broken him down. But he had no interests outside the office and he got his mental recreation by shifting his mind from one department to another.
In June his salary was increased to twenty-five thousand a year and his last lingering feeling of financial insecurity disappeared. For the first time in his life he felt strong enough to undertake a serious responsibility, to give hostages to fortune without fear of being unable to keep faith. He learned from Mrs. Carnarvon that Marian was returning on the _Oceanic_ on the ninth of July, and he accepted a Sat.u.r.day-to-Monday invitation to Newport for the twelfth of July. It was from Segur that he got the news that Danvers was in j.a.pan and was not returning until the autumn.
On the ninth of July, from the window of his office, he saw the _Oceanic_ steam up the bay and up the river to her pier. He sent down a request that the ship-news reporter be sent up as soon as he returned.
"Is it a good story?" he asked when the reporter, Blackwell, entered.
"Was there anybody on board?"
"A lot of swell people," the young man answered; "all the women got up in the latest Paris gowns."
"Did you notice whether Mrs. Provost came?"
"Came? Well, rather, with two French maids chattering and chasing after her. And there was a tall girl with her, a stunner, a girl she called "Marian, my dear.""
Howard stopped him with "Thank you. Don"t write anything about them."
"It was the best thing I saw--the funniest."
"Well--don"t use the names."
Young Blackwell turned to go. "Oh, I see--friends of yours," he smiled.
"Very well. I"ll keep "em out."
Howard flushed and called him back. "Go ahead," he said. "Write just what you were going to. Of course you wouldn"t write anything that was not fair and truthful. We don"t "play favourites" here. Forget what I said."
And so it came to pa.s.s that Mrs. Provost, half pleased, half indignant, said to Miss Trevor as they sat in the drawing room of the Pullman on the way to Newport the next day: "Just look at this, Marian dear, in the horrid _News-Record_. And it used to be such a nice paper with that slimy Coulter bowing and sc.r.a.ping to everybody."
"This" was Mrs. Provost and her dogs and her maids and her asides to "Marian dear," described with accuracy and a keen sense of the ludicrous.
"It"s too dreadful," she continued. "There is no such thing as privacy in this country. The newspapers are making us," with a slight accent on the p.r.o.noun, "as common and public as tenement-house people."
"Yes," Miss Trevor answered absently. "But why read the newspapers? I never could get interested in them, though I"ve tried."
XVII.