XVIII.

For forty-eight hours longer the fact of the defalcation was kept back;

but then, in view of the legal action urged by those who did not accept

the theory of Northwick's death, it had to come out, and it broke all

bounds in overwhelming floods of publicity.

Day after day the papers were full of the facts, and it was weeks before

the editorial homilies ceased. From time to time, fresh details and

unexpected revelations, wise guesses and shameless fakes, renewed the

interest of the original fact. There were days when there was nothing

about it in the papers, and then days when it broke out in vivid

paragraphs and whole lurid columns again. It was not that the fraud was

singular in its features; these were common to most of the defalcations,

great and small, which were of daily fame in the newspapers. But the

doubt as to the man's fate, and the enduring mystery of his whereabouts,

if he were still alive, were qualities that gave peculiar poignancy to

Northwick's case. Its results in the failure of people not directly

involved, were greater than could have been expected; and the sum of his

peculations mounted under investigation. It was all much worse than had

been imagined, and in most of the editorial sermons upon it the moral

gravity of the offence was measured by the amounts stolen and indirectly

lost by it. There was a great deal of mere astonishment, as usual, that

the crime should have been that of a man whom no one would have dreamed

of suspecting, and there was some sufficiently ridiculous consternation

at the presence of such moral decay in the very heart of the commercial

life of Boston.

In the _Events_, Pinney made his report of the affair the work of art

which he boasted should come from his hand. It was really a space-man's

masterpiece; and it appealed to every nerve in the reader's body, with

its sensations repeated through many columns, and continued from page to

page with a recurrent efflorescence of scare-heads and catch-lines. In

the ardor of production, all scruples and reluctances became fused in a

devotion to the interests of the _Events_ and its readers. With every

hour the painful impressions of his interview with Miss Northwick grew

fainter, and the desire to use it stronger, and he ended by sparing no

color of it. But he compromised with his sympathy for her, by deepening

the shadows in the behavior of the man who could bring all this sorrow

upon those dearest to him. He dwelt upon the unconsciousness of the

family, the ignorance of the whole household, in which life ran smoothly

on, while the head of both was a fugitive from justice, if not the

victim of a swift retribution. He worked in all the pathos which the

facts were capable of holding, and at certain points he enlarged the

capacity of the facts. He described with a good deal of graphic force

the Northwick interior. Under his touch the hall expanded, the staircase

widened and curved, the carpets thickened, the servants multiplied, the

library into which "the _Events_' representative was politely ushered,"

was furnished with "all the appliances of a cultured taste." The works

of the standard authors in costly bindings graced its shelves;

magnificent paintings and groups of statuary adorned its walls and

alcoves. The dress of the lady who courteously received the _Events_'

reporter, was suitably enriched; her years were discounted, and her

beauty approached to the patrician cast. There was nothing mean about

Pinney, and while he was at it he lavished a manorial grandeur upon the

Northwick place, outside as well as inside. He imparted a romantic

consequence to Hatboro' itself: "A thriving New England town, proud of

its historic past, and rejoicing in its modern prosperity, with a

population of some five or six thousand souls, among whose working men

and women modern ideas of the most advanced character had been realized

in the well-known Peck Social Union, with its co-operative kitchen and

its clientèle of intelligent members and patrons."

People of all occupations became leading residents in virtue of taking

Pinney into their confidence, and "A Prominent Proletarian" achieved the

distinction of a catch-line by freely imparting the impressions of J. M.

Northwick's character among the working-classes. "The Consensus of

Public Feeling," in portraying which Pinney did not fail to exploit the

proprietary word he had seized, formed the subject of some dramatic

paragraphs; and the whole formed a rich and fit setting for the main

facts of Northwick's undoubted fraud and flight, and for the conjectures

which Pinney indulged in concerning his fate.

Pinney's masterpiece was, in fine, such as he could write only at that

moment of his evolution as a man, and such as the _Events_ could publish

only at that period of its development as a newspaper. The report was

flashy and vulgar and unscrupulous, but it was not brutal, except by

accident, and not unkind except through the necessities of the case. But

it was helplessly and thoroughly personal, and it was no more

philosophized than a monkish chronicle of the Middle Ages.

The _Abstract_ addressed a different class of readers, and aimed at a

different effect in its treatment of public affairs. We look upon

newspapers as having a sort of composite temperament, formed from the

temperaments of all the different men employed on them; but, as a matter

of fact, they each express the disposition and reflect the temperament

of one controlling spirit, which all the other dispositions and

temperaments yield to. This is so much the case that it is hard to

efface the influence of a strong mind from the journal it has shaped,

even when it is no longer actively present in it. A good many years

before the time of the Northwick defalcation, the _Events_ had been in

the management of a journalist, once well-known in Boston, a certain

Bartley Hubbard, who had risen from the ranks of the reporters, and who

had thoroughly reporterized it in the worst sense. After he left it, the

owner tried several devices for elevating and reforming it, but failed,

partly because he was himself a man of no ideals but those of the

counting-room, and largely because the paper could not recover from the

strong slant given it without self-destruction. So the _Events_

continued what Bartley Hubbard had made it, and what the readers he had

called about it liked it to be: a journal without principles and without

convictions, but with interests only; a map of busy life, indeed, but

glaringly colored, with crude endeavors at picturesqueness, and with no

more truth to life than those railroad maps where the important centres

converge upon the broad black level of the line advertised, and leave

rival roads wriggling faintly about in uninhabited solitudes. In

Hubbard's time the _Abstract_, then the _Chronicle-Abstract_, was in

charge of the editor who had been his first friend on the Boston press,

and whom he finally quarreled with on a point which this friend

considered dishonorable to Hubbard. Ricker had not since left the paper,

and though he was called a crank by some of the more progressive and

reckless of the young men, he clung to his ideal of a conscience in

journalism; he gave the Abstract a fixed character and it could no more

have changed than the _Events_, without self-destruction. The men under

him were not so many as Cæsar's soldiers, and that, perhaps, was the

reason why he knew not only their names but their qualities. When

Maxwell came with the fact of the defalcation which the detectives had

entrusted to him for provisional use, and asked to be assigned to the

business of working it up, Kicker consented, but he consented

reluctantly. He thought Maxwell was better for better things; he knew he

was a ravenous reader of philosophy and sociology, and he had been early

in the secret of his being a poet; it had since become an open secret

among his fellow-reporters, for which he suffered both honor and

dishonor.

"I shouldn't think you'd like to do it, Maxwell," said Ricker, kindly.

"It isn't in your line, is it? Better give it to some of the other

fellows."

"It's more in my line than you suppose, Mr. Ricker," said the young

fellow. "It's a subject I've looked up a great deal lately. I once

thought"--he looked down bashfully--"of trying to write a play about a

defaulter, and I got together a good many facts about defalcation.

You've no idea how common it is; it's about the commonest fact of our

civilization."

"Ah! Is that so?" asked Ricker with ironical deference to the bold

generalizer. "Who else is 'onto' this thing?"

"Pinney, of the _Events_."

"Well, he's a dangerous rival, in some ways," said Ricker. "When it

comes to slush and a whitewash brush, I don't think you're a match for

him. But perhaps you don't intend to choose the same weapons." Ricker

pulled down the green-lined pasteboard peak that he wore over his

forehead by gaslight, and hitched his chair round to his desk again, and

Maxwell knew that he was authorized to do the work.

He got no word from the detective, who had given him a hint of the

affair, to go ahead the night after his return from Hatboro', as he had

expected, but he knew that the fact could not be kept back, and he

worked as hard at his report as Pinney and Pinney's wife had worked at

theirs. He waited till the next morning to begin, however, for he was

too fagged after he came home from the Hilarys'; he rose early and got

himself a cup of tea over the gas-burner; before the house was awake he

was well on in his report. By nightfall he had finished it, and then he

carried it to Ricker. The editor had not gone to dinner yet, and he gave

Maxwell's work the critical censure of a hungry man. It was in two

separate parts: one, a careful and lucid statement of all the facts

which had come to Maxwell's knowledge, in his quality of reporter, set

down without sensation, and in that self-respectful decency of tone

which the _Abstract_ affected; the other, an editorial comment upon the

facts. Ricker read the first through without saying anything; when he

saw what the second was, he pushed up his green-lined peak, and said,

"Hello, young man! Who invited you to take the floor?"

"Nobody. I found I couldn't embody my general knowledge of defalcation

in the report without impertinence, and as I had to get my wisdom off my

mind somehow, I put it in editorial shape. I don't expect you to take

it. Perhaps I can sell it somewhere."

Ricker seemed to pay no attention to his explanation. He went on reading

the manuscript, and when he ended, he took up the report again, and

compared it with the editorial in length. "If we printed these things as

they stand it would look like a case of the tail wagging the dog."