One hot day in August, when Bartley had been doing nothing for a week, and
Marcia was gloomily forecasting the future when they would have to begin
living upon the money they had put into the savings bank, she reverted to
the question of his taking up the law again. She was apt to recur to this
in any moment of discouragement, and she urged him now to give up his
newspaper work with that wearisome persistence with which women torment the
men they love.
“My newspaper work seems to have given me up, my dear,” said Bartley. “It's
like asking a fellow not to marry a girl that won't have him.” He laughed
and then whistled; and Marcia burst into fretful, futile tears, which he
did not attempt to assuage.
They had been all summer in town; the country would have been no change
to them; and they knew nothing of the seaside except the crowded, noisy,
expensive resorts near the city. Bartley wished her to go to one of these
for a week or two, at any rate, but she would not; and in fact neither of
them had the born citizen's conception of the value of a summer vacation.
But they had found their attic intolerable; and, the single gentlemen
having all given up their rooms by this time, Mrs. Nash let Marcia have one
lower down, where they sat looking out on the hot street.
“Well,” cried Marcia at last, “you don't care for my feelings, or you would
take up the law again.”
Her husband rose with a sigh that was half a curse, and went out. After
what she had said, he would not give her the satisfaction of knowing what
he meant to do; but he had it in his head to go to that Mr. Atherton to
whom Miss Kingsbury had introduced him, and ask his advice; he had found
out that Mr. Atherton was a lawyer, and he believed that he would tell him
what to do. He could at least give him some authoritative discouragement
which he might use in these discussions with Marcia.
Mr. Atherton had his office in the Events building, and Bartley was on his
way thither when he met Ricker.
“Seen Witherby?” asked his friend. “He was round looking for you.”
“What does Witherby want with me?” asked Bartley, with a certain
resentment.
“Wants to give you the managing-editorship of the Events,” said Ricker,
jocosely.
“Pshaw! Well, he knows where to find me, if he wants me very badly.”
“Perhaps he doesn't,” suggested Ricker. “In that case, you'd better look
him up.”
“Why, you don't advise--”
“Oh, _I_ don't advise anything! But if _he_ can let bygones be bygones, I
guess _you_ can afford to! I don't know just what he wants with you, but if
he offers you anything like a basis, you'd better take it.”
Bartley's basis had come to be a sort of by-word between them; Ricker
usually met him with some such demand as, “Well, what about the basis?” or,
“How's your poor basis?” Bartley's ardor for a salaried position amused
him, and he often tried to argue him out of it. “You're much better off as
a free lance. You make as much money as most of the fellows in places, and
you lead a pleasanter life. If you were on any one paper, you'd have to
be on duty about fifteen hours out of the twenty-four; you'd be out every
night till three or four o'clock; you'd have to do fires, and murders,
and all sorts of police business; and now you work mostly on fancy
jobs,--something you suggest yourself, or something you're specially asked
to do. That's a kind of a compliment, and it gives you scope.”
Nevertheless, if Bartley had his heart set upon a basis, Ricker wanted him
to have it. “Of course,” he said, “I was only joking about the basis. But
if Witherby should have something permanent to offer, don't quarrel with
your bread and butter, and don't hold yourself _too_ cheap. Witherby's
going to get all he can, for as little as he can, every time.”
Ricker was a newspaper man in every breath. His great interest in life was
the Chronicle-Abstract, which paid him poorly and worked him hard. To
get in ahead of the other papers was the object for which he toiled with
unremitting zeal; but after that he liked to see a good fellow prosper,
and he had for Bartley that feeling of comradery which comes out among
journalists when their rivalries are off. He would hate to lose Bartley
from the Chronicle-Abstract; if Witherby meant business, Bartley and
he might be excoriating each other before a week passed in sarcastic
references to “our esteemed contemporary of the Events,” and “our esteemed
contemporary of the Chronicle-Abstract”; but he heartily wished him luck,
and hoped it might be some sort of inside work.
When Ricker left him Bartley hesitated. He was half minded to go home and
wait for Witherby to look him up, as the most dignified and perhaps the
most prudent course. But he was curious and impatient, and he was afraid
of letting the chance, whatever it might be, slip through his fingers. He
suddenly resolved upon a little ruse, which would still oblige Witherby
to make the advance, and yet would risk nothing by delay. He mounted to
Witherby's room in the Events building, and pushed open the door. Then he
drew back, embarrassed, as if he had made a mistake. “Excuse me,” he said,
“isn't Mr. Atherton's office on this floor?”
Witherby looked up from the papers on his desk, and cleared his throat.
When he overreached himself he was apt to hold any party to the transaction
accountable for his error. Ever since he refused Bartley's paper on the
logging-camp, he had accused him in his heart of fraud because he had sold
the rejected sketch to another paper, and anticipated Witherby's tardy
enterprise in the same direction. Each little success that Bartley made
added to Witherby's dislike; and whilst Bartley had written for all the
other papers, he had never got any work from the Events. Witherby had the
guilty sense of having hated him as he looked up, and Bartley on his part
was uneasily sensible of some mocking paragraphs of a more or less personal
cast, which he had written in the Chronicle-Abstract, about the enterprise
of the Events.
“Mr. Atherton is on the floor above,” said Witherby. “But I'm very glad
you happened to look in, Mr. Hubbard. I--I was just thinking about you.
Ah--wont you take a chair?”
“Thanks,” said Bartley, non-committally; but he sat down in the chair which
the other rose to offer him.
Witherby fumbled about among the things on his desk before he resumed his
own seat. “I hope you have been well since I saw you?”
“Oh, yes, I'm always well. How have you been?” Bartley wondered whither
this exchange of civilities tended; but he believed he could keep it up as
long as old Witherby could.
“Why, I have not been very well,” said Witherby, getting into his chair,
and taking up a paper-weight to help him in talk. “The fact is, I find that
I have been working too hard. I have undertaken to manage the editorial
department of the Events in addition to looking after its business, and the
care has been too great. It has told upon me. I flatter myself that I have
not allowed either department to suffer--”
He referred this point so directly to him, that Bartley made a murmur of
assent, and Witherby resumed.
“But the care has told upon me. I am not so well as I could wish. I need
rest, and I need help,” he added.
Bartley had by this time made up his mind that, if Witherby had anything to
say to him, he should say it unaided.
Witherby put down the paper-weight, and gave his attention for a moment to
a paper-cutter. “I don't know whether you have heard that Mr. Clayton is
going to leave us?”
“No,” Bartley said, “I hadn't heard that.”
“Yes, he is going to leave us. Mr. Clayton and I have not agreed upon some
points, and we have both judged it best that we should part.”
Witherby paused again, and changed the positions of his inkstand and
mucilage-bottle. “Mr. Clayton has failed me, as I may say, at the
last moment, and we have been compelled to part. I found Mr.
Clayton--unpractical.”
He looked again at Bartley, who said, “Yes?”
“Yes. I found Mr. Clayton so much at variance in his views with--with my
own views--that I could do nothing with him. He has used language to me
which I am sure he will regret. But that is neither here nor there; he
is going. I have had my eye on you, Mr. Hubbard, ever since you came to
Boston, and have watched your career with interest. But I thought of Mr.
Clayton, in the first instance, because he was already attached to the
Events, and I wished to promote him. Office during good behavior, and
promotion in the direct line: I'm _that_ much of a civil-service reformer,”
said Witherby.
“Certainly,” said Bartley.
“But of course my idea in starting the Events was to make money.”
“Of course.”
“I hold that the first duty of a public journal is to make money for the
owner; all the rest follows naturally.”
“You're quite right, Mr. Witherby,” said Bartley. “Unless it makes money,
there can be no enterprise about it, no independence,--nothing. That was
the way I did with my little paper down in Maine. The first thing--I told
the committee when I took hold of the paper--is to keep it from losing
money; the next is to make money with it. First peaceable, then pure:
that's what I told them.”
“Precisely so!” Witherby was now so much at his ease with Bartley that
he left off tormenting the things on his desk, and used his hands in
gesticulating. “Look at the churches themselves! No church can do any good
till it's on a paying basis. As long as a church is in debt, it can't
secure the best talent for the pulpit or the choir, and the members go
about feeling discouraged and out of heart. It's just so with a newspaper.
I say that a paper does no good till it pays; it has no influence, its
motives are always suspected, and you've got to make it pay by hook or by
crook, before you can hope to--to--forward any good cause by it. That's
what _I_ say. Of course,” he added, in a large, smooth way, “I'm not going
to contend that a newspaper should be run _solely_ in the interest of the
counting-room. Not at all! But I do contend that, when the counting-room
protests against a certain course the editorial room is taking, it ought to
be respectfully listened to. There are always two sides to every question.
Suppose all the newspapers pitch in--as they sometimes do--and denounce a
certain public enterprise: a projected scheme of railroad legislation, or
a peculiar system of banking, or a co-operative mining interest, and the
counting-room sends up word that the company advertises heavily with us;
shall _we_ go and join indiscriminately in that hue and cry, or shall we
give our friends the benefit of the doubt?”
“Give them the benefit of the doubt,” answered Bartley. “That's what I
say.”
“And so would any other practical man!” said Witherby. “And that's just
where Mr. Clayton and I differed. Well, I needn't allude to him any
more,” he added leniently. “What I wish to say is this, Mr. Hubbard. I am
overworked, and I feel the need of some sort of relief. I know that I have
started the Events in the right line at last,--the only line in which it
can be made a great, useful, and respectable journal, efficient in
every good cause,--and what I want now is some sort of assistant in the
management who shall be in full sympathy with my own ideas. I don't want a
mere slave,--a tool; but I do want an independent, right-minded man, who
shall be with me for the success of the paper the whole time and every
time, and shall not be continually setting up his will against mine on all
sorts of _doctrinaire_ points. That was the trouble with Mr. Clayton. I
have nothing against Mr. Clayton personally; he is an excellent young man
in very many respects; but he was all wrong about journalism, all wrong,
Mr. Hubbard. I talked with him a great deal, and tried to make him see
where his interest lay. He had been on the paper as a reporter from the
start, and I wished very much to promote him to this position; which he
could have made the best position in the country. The Events is an evening
paper; there is no night-work; and the whole thing is already thoroughly
systematized. Mr. Clayton had plenty of talent, and all he had to do was to
step in under my direction and put his hand on the helm. But, no! I should
have been glad to keep him in a subordinate capacity; but I had to let him
go. He said that he would not report the conflagration of a peanut-stand
for a paper conducted on the principles I had developed to him. Now, that
is no way to talk. It's absurd.”
“Perfectly.” Bartley laughed his rich, caressing laugh, in which there
was the insinuation of all worldly-wise contempt for Clayton and all
worldly-wise sympathy with Witherby. It made Witherby feel good,--better
perhaps than he had felt at any time since his talk with Clayton.
“Well, now, what do you say, Mr. Hubbard? Can't we make some arrangement
with you?” he asked, with a burst of frankness.
“I guess you can,” said Bartley. The fact that Witherby needed him was so
plain that he did not care to practise any finesse about the matter.
“What are your present engagements?”
“I haven't any.”
“Then you can take hold at once?”
“Yes.”
“That's good!” Witherby now entered at large into the nature of the
position which he offered Bartley. They talked a long time, and in becoming
better acquainted with each other's views, as they called them, they became
better friends. Bartley began to respect Witherby's business ideas, and
Witherby in recognizing all the admirable qualities of this clear-sighted
and level-headed young man began to feel that he had secretly liked him
from the first, and had only waited a suitable occasion to unmask his
affection. It was arranged that Bartley should come on as Witherby's
assistant, and should do whatever he was asked to do in the management of
the paper; he was to write on topics as they occurred to him, or as they
were suggested to him. “I don't say whether this will lead to anything
more, Mr. Hubbard, or not; but I do say that you will be in the direct line
of promotion.”
“Yes, I understand that,” said Bartley.
“And now as to terms,” continued Witherby, a little tremulously.
“And now as to terms,” repeated Bartley to himself; but he said nothing
aloud. He felt that Witherby had cut out a great deal of work for him, and
work of a kind that he could not easily find another man both willing and
able to do. He resolved that he would have all that his service was worth.
“What should you think of twenty dollars a week?” asked Witherby.
“I shouldn't think it was enough,” said Bartley, amazed at his own
audacity, but enjoying it, and thinking how he had left Marcia with the
intention of offering himself to Mr. Atherton as a clerk for ten dollars a
week. “There is a great deal of labor in what you propose, and you command
my whole time. You would not like to have me do any work outside of the
Events.”
“No,” Witherby assented. “Would twenty-five be nearer the mark?” he
inquired soberly.
“It would be nearer, certainly,” said Bartley. “But I guess you had better
make it thirty.” He kept a quiet face, but his heart throbbed.
“Well, say thirty, then,” replied Witherby so promptly that Bartley
perceived with a pang that he might as easily have got forty from him. But
it was now too late, and a salary of fifteen hundred a year passed the
wildest hopes he had cherished half an hour before.
“All right,” he said quietly. “I suppose you want me to take hold at once?”
“Yes, on Monday. Oh, by the way,” said Witherby, “there is one little piece
of outside work which I should like you to finish up for us; and we'll
agree upon something extra for it, if you wish. I mean our Solid Men
series. I don't know whether you've noticed the series in the Events?”
“Yes,” said Bartley, “I have.”
“Well, then, you know what they are. They consist of interviews--guarded
and inoffensive as respects the sanctity of private life--with our leading
manufacturers and merchant princes at their places of business and their
residences, and include a description of these, and some account of the
lives of the different subjects.”
“Yes, I have seen them,” said Bartley. “I've noticed the general plan.”
“You know that Mr. Clayton has been doing them. He made them a popular
feature. The parties themselves were very much pleased with them.”
“Oh, people are always tickled to be interviewed,” said Bartley. “I know
they put on airs about it, and go round complaining to each other about
the violation of confidence, and so on; but they all like it. You know
I reported that Indigent Surf-Bathing entertainment in June for the
Chronicle-Abstract. I knew the lady who got it up, and I interviewed her
after the entertainment.”
“Miss Kingsbury?”
“Yes.” Witherby made an inarticulate murmur of respect for Bartley in
his throat, and involuntarily changed toward him, but not so subtly that
Bartley's finer instinct did not take note of the change. “She was a fresh
subject, and she told me everything. Of course I printed it all. She
was awfully shocked,--or pretended to be,--and wrote me a very
O-dear-how-could-you note about it. But I went round to the office the next
day, and I found that nearly every lady mentioned in the interview had
ordered half a dozen copies of that issue sent to her seaside address, and
the office had been full of Beacon Street swells all the morning buying
Chronicle-Abstracts,--'the one with the report of the Concert in it.'”
These low views of high society, coupled with an apparent familiarity with
it, modified Witherby more and more. He began to see that he had got a
prize. “The way to do with such fellows as your Solid Men,” continued
Bartley, “is to submit a proof to 'em. They never know exactly what to do
about it, and so you print the interview with their approval, and make 'em
_particeps criminis_. I'll finish up the series for you, and I won't make
any very heavy extra charge.”
“I should wish to pay you whatever the work was worth,” said Witherby, not
to be outdone in nobleness.
“All right; we sha'n't quarrel about that, at any rate.”
Bartley was getting toward the door, for he was eager to be gone now to
Marcia, but Witherby followed him up as if willing to detain him. “My
wife,” he said, “knows Miss Kingsbury. They have been on the same charities
together.”
“I met her a good while ago, when I was visiting a chum of mine at his
father's house here. I didn't suppose she'd know me; but she did at once,
and began to ask me if I was at the Hallecks'--as if I had never gone
away.”
“Mr. Ezra B. Halleck?” inquired Witherby reverently. “Leather trade?”
“Yes,” said Bartley. “I believe his first name was Ezra. Ben Halleck was my
friend. Do you know the family?” asked Bartley.
“Yes, we have met them--in society. I hope you're pleasantly situated where
you are, Mr. Hubbard? Should be glad to have you call at the house.”
“Thank you,” said Bartley, “my wife will be glad to have Mrs. Witherby
call.”
“Oh!” cried Witherby. “I didn't know you were married! That's good! There's
nothing like marriage, Mr. Hubbard, to keep a man going in the right
direction. But you've begun pretty young.”
“Nothing like taking a thing in time,” answered Bartley. “But I haven't
been married a great while; and I'm not so young as I look. Well, good
afternoon, Mr. Witherby.”
“_What_ did you say was your address?” asked Witherby, taking out his
note-book. “My wife will certainly call. She's down at Nantasket now, but
she'll be up the first part of September, and then she'll call. _Good_
afternoon.”
They shook hands at last, and Bartley ran home to Marcia. He burst into the
room with a glowing face. “Well, Marcia,” he shouted, “I've got my basis!”
“Hush! No! Don't be so loud! You haven't!” she answered, springing to her
feet. “I don't believe it! How hot you are!”
“I've been running--almost all the way from the Events office. I've got a
place on the Events,--assistant managing-editor,--thirty dollars a week,”
he panted.
“I knew you would succeed yet,--I knew you would, if I could only have a
little patience. I've been scolding myself ever since you went. I thought
you were going to do something desperate, and I had driven you to it. But
Bartley, Bartley! It can't be true, is it? Here, here! Do take this fan. Or
no, I'll fan you, if you'll let me sit on your knee! O poor thing, how hot
you are! But I thought you wouldn't white for the Events; I thought you
hated that old Witherby, who acted so ugly to you when you first came.”
“Oh, Witherby is a pretty good old fellow,” said Bartley, who had begun to
get his breath again. He gave her a full history of the affair, and they
rejoiced together over it, and were as happy as if Bartley had been
celebrating a high and honorable good fortune. She was too ignorant to feel
the disgrace, if there were any, in the compact which Bartley had closed,
and he had no principles, no traditions, by which to perceive it. To them
it meant unlimited prosperity; it meant provision for the future, which was
to bring a new responsibility and a new care.
“We will take the parlor with the alcove, now,” said Bartley. “Don't excite
yourself,” he added, with tender warning.
“No, no,” she said, pillowing her head on his shoulder, and shedding
peaceful tears.
“It doesn't seem as if we should ever quarrel again, does it?”
“No, no! We never shall,” she murmured. “It has always come from my
worrying you about the law, and I shall never do that any more. If you like
journalism better, I shall not urge you any more to leave it, now you've
got your basis.”
“But I'm going on with the law, now, for that very reason. I shall read law
all my leisure time. I feel independent, and I shall not be anxious about
the time I give, because I shall know that I can afford it.”
“Well, only you mustn't overdo.” She put her lips against his cheek.
“You're more to me than anything you can do for me.”
“Oh, Marcia!”