The Clarion Part 31

"From the business point of view."

"Oh, you theorists! You theorists!" Dr. Surtaine threw out his hands in a gesture of pleasant despair. "You want to run the world like a Sunday-school cla.s.s."

"Instead of like a three-card-monte game."

"With your lofty notions, Ellis, how did you ever come to work on a sheet like the 'Clarion'?"

"A man's got to eat. When I walked out of that directors' meeting I walked out of my job and into a saloon; and from that saloon I walked into a good many other saloons. Luckily for me, booze knocked me out early. I broke down, went West, got my health and some sense back again, drifted to this town, found an opening on the 'Clarion,' and took it, to make a living."

"You won't continue to do that," advised Dr. Surtaine bluntly, "if you keep on trying to reform your bosses."

"But what makes me sick," continued Ellis, disregarding this hint, "is to have people a.s.sume that newspaper men are a lot of semi-crooks and shysters. What does the petty grafting that a few reporters do--and, mind you, there's mighty little of it done--amount to, compared with the rottenness of a paper run by my church-going reformer with the business standards?"

A call from the business office took Hal away. At once Ellis turned to the older man.

"Are you going to run the paper, Doc?"

"No: no, my boy. Hal owns it, on his own money."

"Because if you are, I quit."

"That's no way to talk," said the magnate, aggrieved. "There isn't a man in Worthington treats his employees better or gets along with 'em smoother than me."

"That's right, too, I guess. Only I don't happen to want to be your employee."

"You're frank, at least, Mr. Ellis."

"Why not? I've laid my cards on the table. You know me for what I am, a disgruntled dreamer. I know you for what you are, a hard-headed business man. We don't have to quarrel about it. Tell you what I'll do: I'll match you, horse-and-horse, for the soul of your boy."

"You're a queer d.i.c.k, Ellis."

"Don't want to match? Then I suppose I've got to fight you for him,"

sighed the editor.

The big man laughed whole-heartedly. "Not a chance, my friend! Not a chance on earth. I don't believe even a woman could come between Hal and me, let alone a man."

"_Or_ a principle?"

"Ah--ah! Dealing in abstractions again. Look out for this fellow, Boyee," he called jovially as Hal came back to his desk. "He'll make your paper the official organ of the Muckrakers' Union."

"I'll watch him," promised Hal. "Meantime I'll take your advice about my speech, Mac, and blue-pencil the how-to-be-good stuff."

"Now you're talking! I'll tell you, Boss: why not get some of the fellows to speak up. You might learn a few things about your own paper that would interest you."

"Good idea! But, Mac, I wish you wouldn't call me 'Boss.' It makes me feel absurdly young."

"All right, Hal," returned Ellis, with a grin. "But you've still got some youngness to overcome, you know."

An hour later, looking down the long luncheon table, the editor-owner felt his own inexperience more poignantly. With a very few exceptions, these men, his employees, were his seniors in years. More than that, he thought to see in the faces an air of capability, of a.s.surance, of preparedness, a sort of work-worthiness like the seaworthiness of a vessel which has pa.s.sed the high test of wind and wave. And to him, untried, unformed, ignorant, the light amateur, all this human mechanism must look for guidance. Humility clouded him at the recollection of the spirit in which he had taken on the responsibility so vividly personified before him, a spirit of headlong wrath and revenge, and he came fervently to a realization and a resolve. He saw himself as part of a close-knit whole; he visioned, sharply, the Inst.i.tution, complex, delicate, almost infinitely powerful for good or evil, not alone to those who composed it, but to the community to which it bore so subtle a relationship. And he resolved, with a determination that partook of the nature of prayer and yet was more than prayer, to give himself loyally, unsparingly, devotedly to the common task. In this spirit he rose, at the close of the luncheon, to speak.

No newspaper reported the maiden speech of Mr. Harrington Surtaine to the staff of the Worthington "Clarion." Newspapers are reticent about their own affairs. In this case it is rather a pity, for the effort is said to have been an eminently successful one. Estimated by its effect, it certainly was, for it materialized with quite spiritistic suddenness, from out the murk of uncertainty and suspicion, the form and substance of a new _esprit de corps_, among the "Clarion" men, and established the system of Talk-it-Over Breakfasts which made a close-knit, jealously guarded corporation and club out of the staff. Free of all ostentation or self-a.s.sertiveness was Hal's talk; simple, and, above all virtues, brief. He didn't tell his employees what he expected of them. He told them what they might expect of him. The frankness of his manner, the self-respecting modesty of his att.i.tude toward an audience of more experienced subordinates, his shining faith and belief in the profession which he had adopted; all this eked out by his ease of address and his dominant physical charm, won them from the first. Only at the close did he venture upon an a.s.sertion of his own ideas or theories.

"It is the Sydney 'Bulletin,' I think, which preserves as its motto the proposition that every man has at least one good story in him. I have been studying newspaper files since I took this job,--all the files of all the papers I could get,--and I'm almost ready to believe that much news which the papers publish has got realer facts up its sleeve: that the news is only the shadow of the facts. I'd like to get at the Why of the day's news. Do you remember Sherlock Holmes's 'commonplace' divorce suit, where the real cause was that the husband used to remove his front teeth and hurl 'em at the wife whenever her breakfast-table conversation wasn't sprightly enough to suit him? Once out of a hundred times, I suppose, the everyday processes of our courts hide something picturesque or perhaps important in the background. Any paper that could get and present that sort of news would liven up its columns a good deal. And it would strike a new note in Worthington. I'll give you a motto for the 'Clarion,' gentlemen: 'The Facts Behind the News.' And now I've said my say, and I want to hear from you."

Here for the first time Hal struck a false note. Newspaper men, as a cla.s.s, abhor public speaking. So much are they compelled to hear from "those bores who prate intolerably over dinner tables," that they regard the man who speaks when he isn't manifestly obliged to, as an enemy to the public weal, and are themselves most loath thus to add to the sum of human suffering. Merely by way of saving the situation, Wayne, the city editor, arose and said a few words complimentary to the new owner. He was followed by the head copy-reader in the same strain. Two of the older sub-editors perpetrated some meaningless but well-meant remarks, and the current of events bade fair to end in complete stagnation, when from out of the ruck, midway of the table, there rose the fringed and candid head of one William S. Marchmont, the railroad and markets reporter.

Marchmont was an elderly man, of a journalistic type fast disappearing.

There is little room in the latter-day pressure of newspaper life for the man who works on "booze." But though a steady drinker, and occasionally an unsteady one, Marchmont had his value. He was an expert in his specialty. He had a wide acquaintance, and he seldom became unprofessionally drunk in working hours. To offset the unwonted strain of rising before noon, however, he had fortified himself for this occasion by several c.o.c.ktails which were manifest in his beaming smile and his expansive flourish in welcoming Mr. Surtaine to the goodly fellowship of the pen.

"Very good, all that about the facts behind the news," he said genially. "Very instructive and--and illuminating. But what I wanta ask you is this: We fellows who have to _write_ the facts behind the news; where do we get off?"

"I don't understand you," said Hal.

"Lemme explain. Last week we had an accident on the Mid-and-Mud.

Engineer ran by his signals. Rear end collision. Seven people killed.

Coroner's inquest put all the blame on the engineer. Engineer wasn't tending to his duty. That's news, isn't it, Mr. Surtaine?"

"Undoubtedly."

"Yes: but here's the facts. That engineer had been kept on duty forty-eight hours with only five hours off. He was asleep when he ran past the block and killed those people."

"Is he telling the truth, Mac?" asked Hal in a swift aside to Ellis.

"If he says so, it's right," replied Ellis.

"What do you call that?" pursued the speaker.

"Murder. I call it murder." Max Veltman, who sat just beyond the speaker, half rose from his chair. "The men who run the road ought to be tried for murder."

"Oh, _you_ can call it that, all right, in one of your Socialist meetings," returned the reporter genially. "But I can't."

"Why can't you?" demanded Hal.

"The railroad people would shut down on news to the 'Clarion.' I couldn't get a word out of them on anything. What good's a reporter who can't get news? You'd fire me in a week."

"Can you prove the facts?"

"I can."

"Write it for to-morrow's paper. I'll see that you don't lose your place."

Marchmont sat down, blinking. Again there was silence around the table, but this time it was electric, with the sense of flashes to come. The slow drawl of Lindsay, the theater reporter, seemed anti-climatic as he spoke up, slouched deep in his seat.

"How much do you know of dramatic criticism in this town, Mr. Surtaine?"

"Nothing."

"Maybe, then, you'll be pained to learn that we're a set of liars--I might even go further--myself among the number. There hasn't been honest dramatic criticism written in Worthington for years."