he smiled into the transmitter upon learning that his caller was Mrs.
A. Lincoln Wilbram.
By the audience in front of the counter the following social
intelligence was presently inferred:
That Mr. and Mrs. Wilbram had just returned from Florida; that they
had enjoyed themselves ever so much; that they hoped Mr. Myers's
little girl was better; that they were taking their meals at the
Clarendon pending the mobilization of their house-servants; that they
expected to dine with the Mortimer Trevelyans this evening; that food
for the dog may with propriety be brought home from a hotel, but not
from the Mortimer Trevelyans; that there was utterly nothing in the
icebox for poor Mudge's supper; that Mudge was a chow dog purchased by
a friend of Mr. Wilbram's in Hongkong at so much a pound, just as Mr.
Myers purchased live fowls; that Mudge now existed not to become chow,
but to consume chow, and would feel grateful in his dog heart if Mr.
Myers would, at this admittedly late hour, send him two pounds of
bologna and a good bone; and that Mrs. Wilbram would consider herself
under deep and lasting obligation to Mr. Myers for this act of
kindness.
Mr. Myers assured Mrs. Wilbram that it would mean no trouble at all;
he would send up the order as soon as his boy came back from
delivering a beefsteak to the Mortimer Trevelyans.
He filled out a slip and stuck it on the hook.
"Now, Mr. Downey," he said briskly.
But Jacob Downey gave him one tremendous look and limped out of the
shop.
II
It was evening in the home of Miss Angelina Lance. Twenty-seven hours
had passed since Jacob Downey's exasperated exit from Myers's Meat
Shop. The eyes of Miss Angelina were bright behind her not-unbecoming
spectacles as she watched the face of the solemn young man in the
Morris chair near the reading lamp.
In his hand the solemn young man held three sheets of school
composition paper. As he read the pencil writing on page one he lost
his gravity. Over page two he smiled broadly. At the end of the last
page he said:
"D.K.T. couldn't have done better. May I show it to him?"
In the office of the Ashland (N.J.) _Bee_ the solemn young man was
known as Mr. Sloan. At Miss Lance's he was Sam. The mentioned D.K.T.
conducted the celebrated "Bee-Stings" column on the editorial page of
Mr. Sloan's journal, his levity being offset by the sobriety of Mr.
Sloan, who was assistant city-editor.
On two evenings a week Mr. Sloan fled the cares of the Fourth Estate
and became Sam in the soul-refreshing presence of Miss Angelina. He
was by no means her only male admirer. In the Sixth Grade at the
Hilldale Public School she had thirty others; among these Willie
Downey, whose name appeared on every page of the composition Mr. Sloan
had read.
With a host of other sixth-graders throughout the city Willie had
striven that day for a prize of ten dollars in gold offered by the
public-spirited A. Lincoln Wilbram, of Wilbram, Prescott & Co., for
the best schoolboy essay on Moral Principles.
"Moral principles, gentlemen; that is what we need in Ashland. How
many men do you know who stand up for their convictions--or have any
to stand up for?"
If the head of a department store is a bit thunderous at times, think
what a Jovian position he occupies. In his cloud-girt,
mahogany-panelled throne-room on the eighth floor he rules over a
thousand mortals, down to the little Jacob Downeys in the basement,
who, if they do not quite weep with delight when he gives them a
smile, tremble, at least, at his frown. When a large body of popular
opinion accords him greatness, were he not undemocratic to affect
humility and speak small?
"I speak of common men," said Mr. Wilbram (this was at a Chamber of
Commerce banquet); "of men whose living depends upon the pleasure of
their superiors. How few there are with fearless eye!"
He scarcely heard the laughter from a group of building contractors at
a side table, who had not seen a servile eye among their workmen in
many moons; for a worthy project had popped into his mind at that
instant. How was the moral backbone of our yeomanry to be stiffened
save through education? Why not a prize contest to stimulate the
interest of the rising generation in this obsolete subject?
In many an Ashland home where bicycles, roller-skates, wireless
outfits, and other such extravagances were strongly desired, the
question had since been asked: "Pa, what are Moral Principles?" While
some of the resulting essays indicated a haziness in paternal minds,
not so the production that Mr. Sloan read in Miss Lance's parlour.
"But I couldn't let you print it," said Miss Angelina. "I wouldn't
have Willie shamed for anything. He may be weak in grammar, but he is
captain of every athletic team in the school. He has told me in
confidence that he means to spend the prize money for a genuine
horse-hide catching-mitt."
"If I cross out his name, or give him a _nom de plume_?"
On that condition Miss Lance consented.
III
At the office next morning Sloan found the essay in his pocket and
looked around the city-room for D.K.T. The staff poet-clown was no
daylight saver; professing to burn the midnight oil in the interest of
his employer, he seldom drifted in before half-past nine.
"See me. S.S." wrote Sloan, and dropped Willie's manuscript on
D.K.T.'s desk.
Then he jumped and gasped, and copy-readers and office-boys jumped and
gasped, and the religious editor dashed frantically for the stairs,
outrunning the entire staff down the hall, though he had farther to go
than any other man or woman there. A huge, heart-stopping shock had
rocked the building, set the windows to clattering and the lights to
swinging, and brought down in a cloud the accumulated dust of a
quarter-century.
Within two minutes by the clock Sloan and five reporters had started
for the scene of the Rutland disaster, fifteen miles away, where
enough giant powder had gone up in one terrific blast to raze
Gibraltar. A thriving town lay in ruins; hundreds of families were
homeless; a steamship was sunk at her dock; a passenger train blown
from the rails.
At eleven o'clock on the night following that pitiful day Sloan
journeyed homeward to Ashland in an inter-urban trolley-car in company
with a crowd of refugees. A copy of the last edition of the _Bee_
comforted his weary soul.
The first page was a triumph. Count on the office to back up its men
in the field! There was the whole story, the whole horror and
heartbreak, finely displayed. There were his photographs of the
wreckage; there, in a "box" was his interview with the superintendent
of the Rutland Company; there was a map of the devastated area.
Perhaps someone had found time even to do an editorial; in that case
the clean-up would be complete.
Opening the paper to the sixth page, he groaned; for the first thing
that caught his eye was Willie Downey's essay, at the top of D.K.T.'s
column, with Willie's name below the headline.
MOREL PRINSAPLES
BY WILLIE DOWNEY
AGE 12
Morel Prinsaples is when you have a nerve to stick up for some thing.
Like last night my Father went in Mires meet shop & stood in line 15
or twenty min. wateing his tirn & when his tirn come he says to mr.
Mires Ile have 6 porc chops.
at that inst. the telaphone wrang & mr. Mires slidd for it like it was
2nd base.
Hold on Mires says Pa, who got here 1st, me or that bell wringer.
Igscuse me just 1 min. says Mr. mires.
No I be ding if Ile igscuse you says Pa, 1st come 1st served is the
rool of bizness all over.
But Mr. mires wyped his hands on his apern & ansered the wring & it
was mrs. Will Brum, she was going to eat out at a frends so she wanted
2 lbs, bolony & a dog bone.
So then Pa give him hale columbus.
Here I bin wateing ½ an our he said, yet when some lazy lofer of a
woman who has been reading a novvle or a sleep all after noon pfhones
you to rush her up some dog meet in youre Autto with gass 36 cts. &
charge it to her acct. & may be you wont get youre munny for three 4
munths, wy you run to wate on her while I stand & shovle my feet in
youre saw dust like a ding mexican pea own or some thing.
What says Pa is there about a cusstamer who takes the trubble to come
for his meet & pay cash for it & deliwers it him self that maiks him
so Meen & Lo that he hass to be pushed one side for some body that has
not got Gumpshun enoughf to order her dog bones before the rush our?
Do you think that people with a telapfhone's munny is any better than
mine, do you think because I walk in here on my hine leggs that I am a
piker & a cheep skait, becuase if so I will bring along my telapfhone
contract nex time & show you & then may be you will reckonnize me as a
free born amerrican who dont haff to traid where I haff to play 2d
fiddle to a chow pupp. Its agenst my morel prinsaples says Pa.
With theas wirds he walks out in the rane althogh his feet hurt him
clear down to Washington St. to the nex meet store, but by that time
they were all cloased up so we had prinsaples for supper insted of
porc chops.
Pa says if he run a store & had a pfhone & no body to anser it & do
nothing else he would ring it's neck, becuase while the telaphone is
the gratest blesing of the aige, but a pfhone with out an opperater is
like a ham ommalet with the ham let out. He says the reazon the Chane
Stores have such a pull with the public is becuase the man behine the
counter is not all the time jilting you in the middle of your order &
chacing off to be sweet to some sosciety dame with a dog 4 miles away.
Ma says she dont kno why we have a pfhone any how becuase every time
she is youseing it a woman buts in & jiggles the hook & says will you
pleas hang up so I can call a Dr. & when Ma hangs up & then lissens in
to see who is sick, wy this woman calls up a lady f rend & they nock
Ma back & 4th over the wyre for ours & some times they say I bet she
is lisening in on us dont you.
So as I say let us all stick up for our Morel Prinsaples like my
Father come what may.
IV
Bright were Miss Angelina's eyes but not with mirth. It was
unspeakable, this thing that Mr. Sloan had done. Thrice before bedtime
she called his lodgings. Mr. Sloan was not in.
Before the last call, she donned her wraps and went out to Plume
Street. Courageously she pulled the bell at Number Nine. Willie's
mother opened the door and cried, surprised, "Why! Miss Lance."
"Is Willie here? Have you seen the paper? Will you let me tell him how
it happened, and how sorry I am?"
Willie was not receiving callers this evening. He had been sent to bed
without supper. The explosion at Rutland had been as nothing, it
seemed, to the outburst in the Downey home.
Slowly the extent of the harm dawned upon Miss Angelina.
"It was Mrs. A. Lincoln Wilbram wanted the dog bone," said Mrs. Downey
tearfully. "Everybody will recognize her; and what Mr. Wilbram will do
to us we don't need to be told. Poor Jake is so upset he has gone out
to roam in the dark. He couldn't stay in the house."
New jobs were scarce for men at his time of life, and with his feet.
Dora and Jennie might have to leave high school.
"I'm sure you meant us no wrong, Miss Lance; I'm sure there was a
mistake. But think how dreadful it is, after twenty-two years of
having Mr. Wilbram's pay, then to turn around and backbite his wife
like that, right out in print!"
Doubly troubled now, Miss Lance departed. Attracted by a quick
gathering of loiterers in the avenue, she witnessed a controversy that
might easily have become a police matter.
"You're a liar if you say you said all that to me!" shouted the burly
Butcher Myers. "You never opened your head, you shrimp! Bawling me out
in the papers and losing me my best customers! Whaddye mean?"
Back came the retort from Jacob Downey with the snarl of a little
creature at bay.
"If I didn't say it to you then, you big lobster, I say it to you now.
All that the paper says I said I say. What'll you do about it?"
"Hah! You!" Myers snapped his fingers in Downey's fiery face and
turned away.
Miss Lance's path to the Hilldale School next morning took her past
three post-boxes. Into the third she dropped a note that she had
carried from home. Mr. Sloan would find her message exceedingly brief,
although (or, perhaps, because) she had spent hours in composing it.
DEAR SIR:
I regret to discover that you lack moral principles.
ANGELINA LANCE.
Just before the last bell the janitor brought in a prisoner for her
custody. Willie Downey's head was bloody but unbowed; three
seventh-graders he had vanquished in one round. "They guyed me," said
he. "They called me a Nawthour."
Morning prayer and song waited while teacher and pupil spoke earnestly
of many things; while the teacher's eyes filled with tears, and the
pupil's heart filled with high resolve to bring home the baseball
championship of the Ashland Public School League and lay it at Miss
Angelina's feet, or perish in the attempt.
V
The A. Lincoln Wilbram prize went to a small boy named Aaron Levinsky
whose English was 99 per cent. pure. Little Aaron's essay was printed
as the centre-piece in Wilbram, Prescott & Co.'s page in the _Bee_;
little Aaron invested his gold in thrift-stamps, and the tumult and
the shouting died.
Miss Angelina Lance sat alone every evening of the week. True, Mr.
Sloan had tried to right the wrong; he had called Miss Angelina on the
telephone, which he should have known was an inadequate thing to do;
he had also sent a ten-dollar bank-note to Willie, in care of Miss
Lance at the Hilldale School, together with his warm felicitations
upon Willie's success as a _littérateur_. Did Willie know that his
fine first effort had been reprinted, with proper credit, in the great
New York _Planet_?
True, too, the illustrious D.K.T. had written Miss Angelina an abject
apology, most witty and poetic, taking all the blame to himself and
more than exonerating his high-principled friend Mr. Sloan.
But the bank-note went back to its donor without even a rejection
slip; and D.K.T.'s humour was fatal to his client's cause. Ghastly are
they who jest in the shadow of tragedy. Mr. Sloan and D.K.T. did not
know, of course--Miss Angelina had not thought it of any use to tell
them--of the sword which they had hung up by a thread above the heads
of the Downeys.
As for Jacob Downey, he limped about amid his hardware in the basement
at Wilbram, Prescott & Co.s, careworn, haunted of eye, expecting the
house to crash about his ears at any moment. One does not with
impunity publish the wife of one's employer as a lazy loafer.
The A. Lincoln Wilbrams had servants again, and dined at home. To Mr.
Wilbram said Mrs. Wilbram one evening:
"It is the strangest thing. In the last month I've met scarcely a soul
who hasn't asked me silly questions about Mudge and his diet. Mrs.
Trevelyan and everybody. And they always look so queer."
Mr. Wilbram was reminded that while coming home that evening with a
package in his hand he had met Trevelyan, and Trevelyan had inquired:
"What's that? A bone for the dog?"
"To-morrow," said A. Lincoln, "I'll ask him what he was driving at."
"What was the package?" queried his wife.
He fetched it from the hall. It had come to him at the store that day
by registered mail.
"From Hildegarde," said Mrs. Wilbram, noting the Los Angeles postmark.
Hildegarde was honeymooning among the orange groves. Wrote the happy
bride:
Dear Aunt and Uncle:
Charles and I see by the paper that Mudge is hungry, so we are sending
him a little present.
"What can the child mean, Abe?"
"Don't ask me," he answered. "Undo the present and see."
They loosened blue ribbons and wrappings of soft paper, and disclosed
a link of bologna sausage.
Maddening? It might have been, if Hildegarde had not thought to
inclose a page from the _Daily Southern Californian_, upon which,
ringed with pencil marks, was a bit of miscellany headed, "Morel
Prinsaples."
They read it through to the conclusion:
So as I say let us all stick up for our Morel Prinsaples like my
Father come what may.--Willie Downey in Ashland (N.J.) _Bee_.
"Why!--why!--it's--it's me!" cried Mrs. Wilbram. "I did telephone to
Mr. Myers for two pounds of bologna and a dog bone--on the night we
dined at the Trevelyans'!"
"It comes mighty close to libel," fumed Wilbram.
"How do they dare! You must see Worthington Oakes about this, Abe."
"I certainly will," he vowed.
VI
He certainly did, as Mr. Worthington Oakes, the publisher of the
_Bee_, will testify. In the front office on the editorial floor he saw
Mr. Oakes for a bad half-hour, and demanded a public retraction of the
insult.
At about the same time a dapper stranger who had come up in the
elevator with Mr. Wilbram held speech with Assistant City-Editor Sloan
in the local room at the other end of the hall.
"Yonder's your bird," said Mr. Sloan, pointing to a poetic-looking
young man at a desk in a corner.
Crossing to the poet, who was absorbed in his day' poesy and talking
to himself as he versified, the stranger smiled and spoke.
"Am I addressing the celebrated D.K.T.?"
"Am, cam, dam, damn, ham, jam, lamb----"
The far-away look of genius faded out of the poet's eyes.
"Not buying," said he. "My pay-envelope is mortgaged to you
book-agents for ten years to come. Ma'am, ram, Sam, cram, clam, gram,
slam----"
"Books are not my line," said the dapper one briskly. "I represent the
Jones-Nonpareil Newspaper Syndicate. In fact, I am Jones. I have a
proposition to make to you, Mr. D.K.T., that may enable you to buy
more books than you can ever read. You know, of course, what the
Jones-Nonpareil service is. We reach the leading dailies of the United
States and Canada----"
"Have a chair, Mr. Jones."
"Thank you. We handle some very successful writers. Malcomb Hardy, you
may have heard, takes his little five hundred a week out of us; and
poor Larry Bonner pulled down eleven hundred as long as he had health.
His Chinese-laundryman sketches might be selling yet."
"Suspense is cruel," spoke D.K.T. eagerly. "Let the glad news come."
"Some time ago," said the syndicate man, "you printed in your column
an essay in imitation of a schoolboy's. You called it 'Moral
Principles'."
D.K.T. sank back with a low moan.
"If you can write six of those a week for a year," continued the
visitor, "you won't ever need to slave any more. You can burn your pen
and devote the rest of your life to golf and good works."
The poet closed his eyes. "Sham, swam, diagram," he murmured.
"Does a minimum guarantee of fifteen thousand a year look like
anything to you? There will, of course, be the book rights and the
movie rights in addition."
"Anagram, epigram, telegram, flimflam--aha!" cried D.K.T. "Siam!" He
wrote it down.
"That little skit of yours," pursued the caller, "has swept the
country. You have created a nation-wide demand. My ringer is on the
journalistic pulse, and I know. Can you repeat?"
He drew a paper from his pocketbook.
"Here is a list of subjects your imaginary Willie Downey might start
with: The Monetary System; the Cost of Living; the League of Nations;
Capital and Labour----"
Over the stranger's head an office-boy whispered significantly: "Front
office."
"Excuse me," said the poet, and hurried away.
With the publisher, in the front office, sat A. Lincoln Wilbram, quite
purple in the cheeks. They had a file of the _Bee_ before them.
"Diedrick," said Mr. Oakes, "on March eighteenth you printed this
thing"--his finger on Willie's essay--"why did you do it?"
"What's the matter with it?" replied D.K.T.
"The matter with it," spoke Mr. Wilbram terribly, "is that it slanders
my wife. It makes her out to eat dog bones. Friends of ours as far
away as California have seen it and recognized her portrait, drawn by
your scurrilous pen. The worst of it is, the slander is founded on
fact. By what right do you air my domestic affairs before the public
in this outrageous fashion?"
With agonized eyes the funny-man read the essay as far as the fateful
line, "It was Mrs. Will Brum."
"My gosh!" he cried.
"How did you come to write such a thing?" Mr. Oakes demanded.
"Me write that thing? If I only had!"
The facts were recalled; the sending of Mr. Sloan and many reporters
to Rutland; the need of extra hands at the copy-table that day.
"I found this contribution on my desk. It looked safe. In the rush of
the morning I sent it up and never gave it another thought."
"So it is really a boy's essay, and not some of your own fooling?"
asked Oakes.
"A boy's essay, yes; entered in Mr. Wilbram's prize contest,
eliminated by the boy's teacher and shown by her to Mr. Sloan, who
brought it to the shop. I know now that Sloan meant me to change the
author's name to save the kid from ridicule. If there were actual
persons in it, I'm as amazed as Mrs. Wilbram."
"I wonder, Oakes," said Wilbram, "that a dignified newspaper like
yours would print such trash, in the first place."
Worthington Oakes looked down his nose. D.K.T. took up the challenge.
"Trash, sir? If it's trash, why has the Ashland Telephone asked
permission to reprint it on the front cover of their next directory?"
"Have they asked that?"
"They have; they say they will put a little moral principle into the
telephone hogs in this town. And didn't a Fifth Avenue minister preach
a sermon on it last Sunday? Doesn't the _Literary Review_ give it half
a page this week? Hasn't it been scissored by almost every exchange
editor in the land? Isn't there a man in the city-room now offering me
fifteen thousand a year to write a daily screed like it?"
"You can see, Wilbram," said Mr. Oakes, "that there was no intention
to injure or annoy. We are very sorry; but how can we print an apology
to Mrs. Wilbram without making the matter worse?"
"Who is this Willie Downey?" demanded Wilbram. "And who is the school
teacher?"
"I don't believe my moral principles will let me tell you," replied
D.K.T. "I'm positive Mr. Sloan's won't let him. We received the essay
in confidence."
"Enough said," Mr. Wilbram exclaimed, rising. "Good day to you. I
don't need your help, anyway. I'll find out from the butcher."
VII
It seemed necessary that Mr. Sloan should call at the Lance home that
evening. Whatever Miss Angelina might think of him, it was his duty to
take counsel with her for the welfare of Willie.
He began with the least important of the grave matters upon his mind.
"Do you suppose your _protégé_ could write some essays like the one we
printed?"
"Why, Mr. Sloan?"
If Miss Angelina had responded, "Why, you hyena?" she would not have
cut him more deeply than with her simple, "Why, Mr. Sloan?"
"A newspaper syndicate," he explained, "has offered D.K.T. a fortune
for a series of them."
"Poor Willie!" she sighed. "He flunked his English exam, to-day. I'm
afraid I shall have him another year."
"He is a lucky boy," said Sloan.
"Do you think so?"
Clearly her meaning was, "Do you think he is lucky when a powerful
newspaper goes out of its way to crush him?"
"There is no use approaching him with a literary contract?"
"Not with the baseball season just opening. His team beat the
Watersides yesterday, sixteen nothing. He has more important business
on hand than writing for newspapers."
Since Sloan wrote for a newspaper, this was rather a dig.
Nevertheless, he persevered.
"A. Lincoln Wilbram is on his trail. Do you know that Willie libelled
Mrs. Wilbram?"
"Oh! Sam. Surely I know about the libel. But is--is Mr. Wilbram
really----Has he discovered?"
"He came to the office to-day. We gave him no information; but he has
other sources. He is bound to identify his enemy before he quits."
"I didn't know about the so-called slander at first," said she, "when
I--when you----"
"When I promised to change Willie's name?"
"I found out when I went to them, on the night it came out in the
paper. They were woefully frightened. They are frightened still. Mr.
Downey has worked for Mr. Wilbram since he was a boy. They think of
Mr. Wilbram almost as a god. It's--it's a tragedy, Sam, to them."
"Would it do any good to warn them?"
"They need no warning," said Miss Angelina. "Don't add to their
terrors."
"I am more sorry than I can say. May I hope to be forgiven some day?"
"There's nothing to forgive, Sam. It was an accident. But don't you
see what a dangerous weapon a newspaper is?'
"Worse than a car or a gun," he agreed.