Chapter 16

Bartley had instructions from Ricker to see that his report was very full socially. “We want something lively, and at the same time nice and tasteful, about the whole thing, and I guess you're the man to do it. Get Mrs. Hubbard to go with you, and keep you from making a fool of yourself about the costumes.” He gave Bartley two tickets. “Mighty hard to get, I can tell you, for _love_ or money,--especially love,” he said; and Bartley made much of this difficulty in impressing Marcia's imagination with the uncommon character of the occasion. She had put on a new dress which she had just finished for herself, and which was a marvel not only of cheapness, but of elegance; she had plagiarized the idea from the costume of a lady with whom she stopped to look in at a milliner's window where she formed the notion of her bonnet. But Marcia had imagined the things anew in relation to herself, and made them her own; when Bartley first saw her in them, though he had witnessed their growth from the germ, he said that he was afraid of her, she was so splendid, and he did not quite know whether he felt acquainted. When they were seated at the concert, and had time to look about them, he whispered, “Well, Marsh, I don't see anything here that comes near you in style,” and she flung a little corner of her drapery out over his hand so that she could squeeze it: she was quite happy again.

After the concert, Bartley left her for a moment, and went up to a group of the committee near the platform, to get some points for his report. He spoke to one of the gentlemen, note-book and pencil in hand, and the gentleman referred him to one of the ladies of the committee, who, after a moment of hesitation, demanded in a rich tone of injury and surprise, “Why! Isn't this Mr. Hubbard?” and, indignantly answering herself, “Of _course_ it is!” gave her hand with a sort of dramatic cordiality, and flooded him with questions: “When did you come to Boston? Are you at the Hallecks'? Did you come--Or no, you're _not_ Harvard. You're not _living_ in Boston? And what in the world are _you_ getting items for? Mr. Hubbard, Mr. Atherton.”

She introduced him in a breathless climax to the gentleman to whom he had first spoken, and who had listened to her attack on Bartley with a smile which he was at no trouble to hide from her. “Which question are you going to answer first, Mr. Hubbard?” he asked quietly, while his eyes searched Bartley's for an instant with inquiry which was at once kind and keen. His face had the distinction which comes of being clean-shaven in our bearded times.

“Oh, the last,” said Bartley. “I'm reporting the concert for the Chronicle-Abstract, and I want to interview some one in authority about it.”

“Then interview _me_, Mr. Hubbard,” cried the young lady. “_I'm_ in authority about this affair,--it's my own invention, as the White Knight says,--and then I'll interview you afterwards. And you've gone into journalism, like all the Harvard men! So glad it's you, for you can be a perfect godsend to the cause if you will. The entertainment hasn't given us all the money we shall want, by any means, and we shall need all the help the press can give us. Ask me any questions you please, Mr. Hubbard: there isn't a soul here that I wouldn't sacrifice to the last personal particular, if the press will only do its duty in return. You've no idea how we've been working during the last fortnight since this Old Man of the Sea-Bathing sprang upon us. I was sitting quietly at home, thinking of anything else in the world, I can assure you, when the atrocious idea occurred to me.” She ran on to give a full sketch of the inception and history of the scheme up to the present time. Suddenly she arrested herself and Bartley's flying pencil: “Why, you're not putting all that nonsense down?”

“Certainly I am,” said Bartley, while Mr. Atherton, with a laugh, turned and walked away to talk with some other ladies. “It's the very thing I want. I shall get in ahead of all the other papers on this; they haven't had anything like it, yet.”

She looked at him for a moment in horror. Then, “Well, go on; I would do anything for the cause!” she cried.

“Tell me who's been here, then,” said Bartley.

She recoiled a little. “I don't like giving names.”

“But I can't say who the people were, unless you do.”

“That's true,” said the young lady thoughtfully. She prided herself on her thoughtfulness, which sometimes came before and sometimes after the fact. “You're not obliged to say who told you?”

“Of course not.”

She ran over a list of historical and distinguished names, and he slyly asked if this and that lady were not dressed so, and so, and worked in the costumes from her unconsciously elaborate answers; she was afterwards astonished that he should have known what people had on. Lastly, he asked what the committee expected to do next, and was enabled to enrich his report with many authoritative expressions and intimations. The lady became all zeal in these confidences to the public, at last; she told everything she knew, and a great deal that she merely hoped.

“And now come into the committee-room and have a cup of coffee; I know you must be faint with all this talking,” she concluded. “I want to ask you something about yourself.” She was not older than Bartley, but she addressed him with the freedom we use in encouraging younger people.

“Thank you,” he said coolly; “I can't, very well. I must go back to my wife, and hurry up this report.”

“Oh! is Mrs. Hubbard here?” asked the young lady with well-controlled surprise. “Present me to her!” she cried, with that fearlessness of social consequences for which she was noted: she believed there were ways of getting rid of undesirable people without treating them rudely.

The audience had got out of the hall, and Marcia stood alone near one of the doors waiting for Bartley. He glanced proudly toward her, and said, “I shall be very glad.”

Miss Kingsbury drifted by his side across the intervening space, and was ready to take Marcia impressively by the hand when she reached her; she had promptly decided her to be very beautiful and elegantly simple in dress, but she found her smaller than she had looked at a distance. Miss Kingsbury was herself rather large,--sometimes, she thought, rather too large: certainly too large if she had not had such perfect command of every inch of herself. In complexion she was richly blonde, with beautiful fair hair roughed over her forehead, as if by a breeze, and apt to escape in sunny tendrils over the peachy tints of her temples. Her features were massive rather than fine; and though she thoroughly admired her chin and respected her mouth, she had doubts about her nose, which she frankly referred to friends for solution: had it not _too_ much of a knob at the end? She seemed to tower over Marcia as she took her hand at Bartley's introduction, and expressed her pleasure at meeting her.

“I don't know why it need be such a surprise to find one's gentlemen friends married, but it always is, somehow. I don't think Mr. Hubbard would have known me if I hadn't insisted upon his recognizing me; I can't blame him: it's three years since we met. Do you help him with his reports? I know you do! You _must_ make him lenient to our entertainment,--the cause is so good! How long have you been in Boston? Though I don't know why I should ask that,--you may have always been in Boston! One used to know everybody; but the place _is_ so large, now. I should like to come and see you; but I'm going out of town to-morrow, for the summer. I'm not really here, now, except _ex officio_; I ought to have been away weeks ago, but this Indigent Surf-Bathing has kept me. You've no idea what such an undertaking is. But you _must_ let me have your address, and as soon as I get back to town in the fall, I shall insist upon looking you up. _Good_ by! I must run away, now, and leave you; there are a thousand things for me to look after yet to-day.” She took Marcia again by the hand, and superadded some bows and nods and smiles of parting, after she released her, but she did not ask her to come into the committee-room and have some coffee; and Bartley took his wife's hand under his arm and went out of the hall.

“Well,” he said, with a man's simple pleasure in Miss Kingsbury's friendliness to his wife, “that's the girl I used to tell you about,--the rich one with the money in her own right, whom I met at the Hallecks'. She seemed to think you were about the thing, Marsh! I saw her eyes open as she came up, and I felt awfully proud of you; you never looked half so well. But why didn't you _say_ something?”

“She didn't give me any chance,” said Marcia, “and I had nothing to say, anyway. I thought she was very disagreeable.”

“Disagreeable!” repeated Bartley in amaze.

Miss Kingsbury went back to the committee-room, where one of the amateurs had been lecturing upon her: “Clara Kingsbury can say and do, from the best heart in the world, more offensive things in ten minutes than malice could invent in a week. Somebody ought to go out and drag her away from that reporter by main force. But I presume it's too late already; she's had time to destroy us all. You'll see that there won't be a shred left of us in _his_ paper at any rate. Really, I wonder that, in a city full of nervous and exasperated people like Boston, Clara Kingsbury has been suffered to live. She throws her whole soul into everything she undertakes, and she has gone so _en masse_ into this Indigent Bathing, and splashed about in it so, that _I_ can't understand how we got anybody to come to-day. Why, I haven't the least doubt that she's offered that poor man a ticket to go down to Nantasket and bathe with the other Indigents; she's treated _me_ as if I ought to be personally surf-bathed for the last fortnight; and if there's any chance for us left by her tactlessness, you may be sure she's gone at it with her conscience and simply swept it off the face of the earth.”

XVIII.

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.”