Part 9

Aubrey Andrews was the rival warrior. He was the kind of man who always has a lot of crisp greenbacks in a neat leather bill-fold. Harry's hard-earned frogskins were always crumpled in a trousers pocket This may seem trivial, but it distinguishes two totally different classes of men. Aubrey was tall, dark, well groomed; he played billiards and belonged to expensive clubs. It was supposed that his wife would be beyond the reach of financial worries. He kept a horse and easy office hours.

Harry--well, Harry was no aristocrat. He worked hard for what he got, and didn't get much. He was neither tall, nor dark, nor well groomed. But he was a fine, lovable, high-minded chap, and to everyone's surprise, including his own, he got Elaine.

Tennyson had a good deal to do with it, I think. Harry still read Tennyson, although that excellent poet is no longer fashionable, and kept on repeating what Tennyson said about Elaine. And finally Elaine could not help saying, “My Lancelot!” and melting into his arms.

Aubrey gave them a magnificent silver coffee-urn for a wedding present, and presently enlisted for service, first on the Mexican border and then in France, where he became a heroic and legendary figure, surrounded in Elaine's mind by the prismatic glamour of girlhood days.

That coffee-urn was a stunner! It was far the handsomest thing in the little suburban house, except, of course, Elaine herself. Beneath its shining caldron sat an alcohol lamp that rendered a blue flame and kept the coffee hot. Elaine's initials--her maiden initials--were engraved upon it, and those of the donor: E. A. A. A. The hand of the insidious silversmith had twined the A's together very gracefully.

Every time he looked at it, Harry felt subconsciously irritated, although he hardly realized why.

It stood on the little mission sideboard, outshining everything else in the pretty dining room. It was Elaine's particular pride, and was used only on special occasions. Often it was brought out for the little celebrations that young married couples have every now and then. And, curiously enough, these celebrations very often ended in tears. The polished dazzle of those silver curves was only too apt to suggest to Elaine's radiant little beauty-loving heart other handsome wares she would like to have, or unlucky comparison of the relative beauty of the wedding presents sent by _her_ friends and _his;_ or Harry would make some blunt remark about his not being able to give her all that some other husband might have.

Alas! Something of the sardonic spirit of the black-browed Aubrey seemed to radiate from his urn. Can a coffee-um hypnotize? Grotesque as it appears, little by little they realized that the innocent piece of silver was marring many an otherwise happy hour.

*****

All the way to town in the smoking car, Harry's mind rotated savagely about their absurd tiff.

Let's see, how was it? He had said: “I'm sorry, dearest; I shall have to be rather late tonight. The head of my department is away, and I've got an extra lot of work to do.” She said: “Oh, dear--oh, dear! Then we sha'n't be able to go to the theatre, shall we?” He said: “We can go next week, Brownie.” She said: “Something horrid always happens when we have this coffee-urn on the table.”

(N. B. Right here, when the danger topic was introduced, he should have put on an extra soft pedal. But did he? Not a bit. As soon as the urn was mentioned his eyes began to flash.)

“Well,” he said, “don't let's have it on so often!” She said: “Any one might think you were jealous of it. It's the only handsome piece of silver I've got.”

Here he did make one honest effort to steer away from danger:

“I'm awfully sorry about to-night, honey, but the work's just got to be done.” She said: “Why didn't you let me know sooner you were going to work late? I could have arranged to go and see Mother.” He said: “Oh, well, everything I do is always wrong, anyway! I suppose if I could buy you a roomful of silver like that old tureen, you wouldn't mind.”

And after that it was not far to the deluge. All conducted according to the recognized technique of quarrelling, passing through the seven stages of repartee outlined by Touchstone, which should never be forgotten by those happily married:

1 The retort courteous

2 The quip modest

3 The reply churlish

4 The reproof valiant

5 The counter-check quarrelsome

6 The lie with circumstance

7 The lie direct

All day both Mr. and Mrs. Bennett were unpleasantly conscious of their undigested altercation lying black and gloomy in the back of their minds. At lunch-time he tried to call her on the telephone; but the wire did not answer. Indeed, she had gone to spend the day in town with friends, and was to go to dinner and the theatre with them. She left no message for Harry, and gave the cook permission to go out overnight.

About nine o'clock he got home tired and eager to resume their usual blissful companionship. The house was dark and untenanted. In a rage, he threw away the box of candy he had brought, and got himself some bread and cheese from the ice-box.

In the dining room his eye fell upon the coffee-urn. He swore at it. Just then Elaine called him up, and in a cool, distant voice told him that she had decided to spend the night in town with her mother.

The next morning Elaine came home about ten o'clock, humming a merry little air as she walked down the quiet suburban street. She and Harry had patched things up over the telephone at breakfast-time.

The sun was shining brightly, and she was planning a specially nice dinner for poor Harry that evening. After all, it wasn't the dear boy's fault that he had to work so hard. It was horrible of her to run off and desert him that way. Tonight she would show him how much she loved him. They would have ice cream with hot chocolate sauce, and meringues and chicken salad; and she would buy him a cigar and hide it in his napkin. And the old coffee-um should go back in the glass cabinet.

*****

The cook, with a very grave face, opened the front door.

“Heavens, Emily, what's the matter?” cried Mrs. Bennett.

“Burgled!” said Emily, tragically. “Someone's been an' bruk in the dining-room winder. Footpads, I guess.”

Mrs. Bennett gave a little shriek of dismay She ran to the dining room.

One window stood an inch or two open, and one of the panes was broken. She glanced round the room. Nothing was disarranged, but her glance fell on the sideboard.

The coffee-urn was gone!

“Well,” she said, “that's very extraordinary. Mr. Bennett slept here last night, and he's a light sleeper. He always locks the windows before he goes to bed. Is anything else missing?”

“The apple pie's gone out o' the ice-box,” said Emily.

“Oh, well, that's Mr. Bennett, I'm sure,” said Elaine. “I'll call up the police right away, and see if they can do anything. My nice coffee-urn! Why, it's the finest thing we had in the whole house.”

Before the police arrived, Mrs. Bennett herself took a careful look round the outside of the house. She found nothing unusual except a cigar butt lying on the ground near the broken window. She picked it up gingerly. A section of the gilt band still adhered to the wrapper. She could read the name, _Florona._ She carried the fragment into the cellar and threw it into the ash-can.

Two policemen arrived shortly, examined everything, and asked innumerable questions. Mrs. Bennett gave them a careful description of the coffee-urn. They departed, promising to do everything possible to trace it. They said that a piece of silver so large and unusual would not be hard to locate with the aid of the pawnbrokers. Then Mrs. Bennett went upstairs to think.

It seemed very strange that the thieves should take the urn and nothing else, when there were other pieces of silver beside it on the sideboard. She called up Harry, who was horrified to learn of the loss. He had slept right through the night without hearing a sound. He offered to come home if he could do anything to help; but she would not hear of it.

That night Mrs. Bennett had a special little dinner waiting for her husband: his favourite soup, a tender steak, fried potatoes, ice cream with hot chocolate sauce. And after dinner they discussed the theft of the urn.

“I don't understand how it was that you didn't hear anything,” said Elaine. “You generally sleep so lightly. Did you sit up late?”

“No,” he said; “I sat in the dining room until about ten, eating cheese and apple pie, and smoking a cigar. Then I went to bed----”

“Oh, you just reminded me!” cried Elaine. “I bought you a nice cigar to smoke after your dinner, and I forgot to give it to you.”

From the mantelpiece she gave him a cigar with a _Florona_ band.

“Why, isn't that nice!” said he, “That's the kind I always smoke. I didn't think you knew one brand from the other.”

“I know more than you think, old man,” she said.

When Harry came home the next night, he brought a bulky parcel with him.

“I'm awfully sorry about the urn, Brownie,” he said. “I went to see the detectives to-day, and they think there's very little chance of getting it back; so I brought you this to take its place.” She opened the package. It was a big China coffee-jug of rose-and-white porcelain, flagrantly out of harmony with her silver and blue china.

“Honey,” she said, “I think it's just lovely. It's ever and ever so much nicer than that old urn.”

A week later, in the afternoon, the local chief of police called up Mrs. Bennett.

“Come down here to the police station,” he said. “We've found your coffee-pot. The most extraordinary thing you ever heard of. We found it buried in a haystack, back of Webster's barn. Why any one should leave it there is more than I know. The thief must have been frightened and hid it. Will you come down and identify it?”

Mrs. Bennett hastened down to the police station. There on the sergeant's table stood the famous urn, the pride of her heart. There was no doubt about it: the initials were there--it was hers. Tarnished and spotted by exposure, it was still the handsomest piece of silver she had ever seen. Involuntarily she gave a cry of delight. Then she hesitated. After all, compared to Harry's happiness and hers, what was a silver urn?

“Oh, captain,” she said, “I'm so disappointed. That's not mine! It's very much like it, but it isn't mine.”

THE BATTLE OF MANILA ENVELOPES

MR. BIRDLIP was a good old man, of unimpeachable simplicity. He had achieved enormous wealth in an honourable business, and then found (to his mild distress) that the great traffic he had built up conducted itself automatically. He had, in a way, been gently shouldered out of his own nest by the capable men whose fortunes he had made. But his zealous and frugal spirit required some sort of problem to feed upon, and he delighted his heart by owning a newspaper. _The Evening Lens_ was his toy and the child of his dotage.

So the Persian rugs and walnut panelling of his private suite in the huge Birdlip Building saw him rarely. He was supremely happy in the dingy sanctum at the back of the old _Lens_ office, where the hum of the presses and the racket of the city room (which he still, by an innocent misunderstanding, called the “sitting room”) delighted his guileless heart. He would sit turning over the pages of each edition as it came upstairs (putting his second finger up to his tongue before he turned each leaf) and poring industriously over the market reports, the comics, and the Woman's Page. With his pink cheeks, his dapper little figure in a brown suit and cream-coloured waistcoat, and his eager, shy, chirping manner, he was very like a robin. Although he was full of gigantic schemes, which he broached naively in the editorial council every now and then, he never wittingly interfered with his editor-in-chief, in whom he had full confidence. But his gentle and jejune mind had a disastrous effect on the paper no less. Almost unconsciously the Lens was written and edited down to his standard, as a roomful of adults will amiably prattle so as to carry along a child in the conversation.

Mr. Birdlip's amazing success in his original field had been due partly to his decent sagacity, honesty, and persistence, and partly to his sheer fortune in finding (at the very outset of his enterprise) several men of rugged ability, who became the pearls in his simple oyster-shell. As a result of this, it had become his fixed mental habit to believe that somewhere, some day, he would encounter the man or men who would make the _Lens_ the greatest newspaper in the country. This, indeed, was his candid ambition, and he never went anywhere without keeping his eyes open for the anticipated messiah.

He was greatly taken by broad primitive effects: when he noticed that a Chicago daily always called itself “The World's Greatest Newspaper” he was marvellously struck by the power of this slogan, and lamented that he had not thought of it first. The question as to whether the slogan were true or not never occurred to him. He liked to have the keynote sentences in the leading editorial emphasized in blackface type, so that there might be no danger of any one's missing the point. Desiring for his beloved sheet “this man's art and that man's scope,” as the sonnet puts it, every now and then he thought he had discovered the prodigy, and some new feature would be added to the paper at outrageous expense, only to be quietly shovelled out six months or a year later. In the meantime, the auditor was growing very gray, and even Mr. Birdlip's quick blue eye was sometimes hazed with faint perplexity when he studied the circulation charts. Perhaps it would have been kinder if someone could have told him that a boyhood spent in splitting infinitives is not sufficient training for one to become an Abraham Lincoln of the newspaper business.

As he trotted in and out of the _Lens_ office, with his rosy air of confidence and his disarming simplicity (which made his white hair seem a wanton cruelty on the part of Time, that would wither a man's cells while his mind was still on all fours), Mr. Birdlip was the object of furtive but very sharp study on the part of some cynical journalists whom he hired. It was a genuine amazement to Sanford, the dramatic critic, that the owner was so entirely unaware of his (Sanford's) abilities, which certainly (he thought) called for a salary of more than sixty dollars a week. Sanford often meditated about this, and not entirely in secret. In fact, it was generally admitted among the younger members of the staff, when they gathered at Ventriloquo's for lunch, that the Old Man was immaculately ignorant of all phases of the newspaper business. While the spaghetti and mushrooms cheered the embittered gossips, merry and quaint were the quips sped toward the unsuspecting target. Sanford's private grievance was that though for over a year he had been doing signed critiques of plays, which were really spirited and honest, not once had the Old Man condescended to mention them, or to show any sign of uttering an _Ecce Homo_ in his direction. As far as he was concerned, he felt that the weekly battle of Manila Envelopes was a conspicuous rout, and he frequently rehearsed the exact tone in which he would some day say to the managing editor: “You may fire when ready, Gridley.” Little did Sanford realize that the only time Mr. Birdlip had attempted to read the “Exits and Entrances” column he had met the name of Æschylus, had faltered, and retreated upon the syndicated sermon by the Rev. Frank Crane.

*****

“I saw 'Ruddigore' the other evening,” said Sanford to his cronies, as they called for a second round of coffee. “There's a line in it that describes old Birdie fore, aft, and amidships. Something like this: 'He is that particular variety of good old man to whom the truth is always a refreshing novelty'.”

They complauded. Rightly or wrongly, these high-spirited and sophisticated young men had decided that Mr. Birdlip's naïveté was so refreshingly complete that it gave them an aesthetic pleasure to contemplate it. It had the exquisite beauty of any absolute perfection. Their employer's latest venture, which had been to pay $200,000 for the exclusive right to publish and syndicate the mysterious formulae of a leading Memory Course, had shocked them very greatly.

It touched them in a tender spot to know that there had been all that money lying round the office, unused, which was now to be squandered (as they put it) on charlatanry, when they felt that they might just as well have had some of it.

“The Old Man is always looking for some special stunt, and trying to discover someone on the outside,” said one. “He can't see the material right under his nose.”

“It's really rather pathetic: he's crazy to get out a great newspaper, but he hasn't the faintest idea how to do it.”

“Yes, give him credit for sincerity. It isn't just circulation he wants.”

“Circulation's easy enough, if that's what you're after. The three builders of circulation are Sordid, Sensational, and Sex--”

“And the greatest of these is Sex.”

“Oh, he's decent enough. He won't pander.”

“He panders to stupidity. He's fallen for this Memory bunk. And when he finds that's a flivver, he'll try something else, equally fatuous. He's making the old _Lens_ ridiculous.”

They smoked awhile, meditatively.

“What I would like to figure out,” said Sanford, “is some way of making an impression on the Old Man. I've got to get more money. The trouble--some part of it is, I feel instinctively that he and I live in different worlds. We hardly even talk the same language. Well, there's no chance of his learning my way of thinking; so I suppose I'll have to learn his.”

“He's the man who puts the nil in the Manila envelope,” said one of the others.

“As far as we are concerned, yes. But there's plenty of the stuff going round on Fridays for the kind of people he understands.”

“He seems to be an absent-minded old bird. When I talk to him, it's as though I were trying to speak through a fog.”

“It looks to me as though his mind had overstayed its leave of absence.”

“He likes the kind of men who, as he says, 'have both feet on the ground'.”

“Yes, but you've got to have at least one foot in the air if you're going to get anywhere.”

“See here,” said the literary editor, who was more tolerant than the others. “What's the use of panning the Old Man? He's trying to put the paper over, just as hard as we are. Maybe harder. But he doesn't know. And I believe he knows he doesn't know. I think the chief trouble is, they all knuckle down to him so. They're scared of him. They think the only way they can hold their jobs is by agreeing with him. If someone could only put him wise----”

“But how _can_ you put him wise? He doesn't see anything unless it's laid out for him in a strip cartoon or a full-page ad. The kind of thing that interests him is the talk he hears in a Pullman smoker or club car.”

“That's a fact. You know he always says he likes to go travelling, because he picks up ideas from people on the train. 'Of course I place you! Mr. Mowbray Monk of Seattle. And is your Rotary Club still rotating?' That kind of talk.”

“I think you're right,” said Sanford. “He doesn't see us because we have too much protective colouring. We are only the patient drudges. We don't talk that Pullman palaver about Big Business. We've got to learn to talk his language. What is that phrase of Bacon's--we've got to bring ourselves home to his business and bosom----”

“Let's get back to the office,” said the disillusioned literary editor. “That's the way to bring home the bacon.”

*****

A few days later Sanford was at his desk, clipping and pasting press agents' flimsies for the Saturday Theatre Page. This was a task which he hated above all others, and he was meditating sourly on the scarcity of truth in human affairs. At this moment Mr. Birdlip happened to pass along the corridor outside the editorial rooms. Sanford heard him say:

“Miss Flaccus, will you get me a seat in the club car, ten o'clock train to-morrow? I've got to run over to New York to take lunch with Mr. Montaigne.”

Sanford put down his shears, relit his pipe, and began to pursue a fugitive idea round the suburbs of his mind. Presently he drew out his check book from a drawer and did some calculating on a sheet of paper. “A hundred dollars,” he said to himself. “I guess it's worth it.”

The following morning, dressed in a new suit and with shoes freshly burnished, Sanford was at the terminal twenty minutes before train time. With him was a young man carrying a leather portfolio. To observe the respectful demeanour of this young man, no one would have suspected that he was Sanford's young brother-in-law, rejoicing in cutting his classes at college for a day's masquerading. Sanford bought some cigars (a form of smoking which he detested) and carefully removed the bands from all but one of them.

Presently Mr. Birdlip appeared, cheerfully trotting up the stairs. Sanford and his companion followed discreetly. As Mr. Birdlip went through the gate, they were close behind. Entering the club car, Mr. Birdlip sat down and opened a morning paper. Sanford and his companion were prompt to take the two adjoining seats. Sanford began to look over _System_ and _Printers' Ink_, and perhaps his interest in these vigorous journals was not wholly unfeigned, for it was the first time he had studied them. The young man beside him drew out a mass of papers from his leather bag, and in a moment of stillness just before the train started said in a clear voice:

“Pardon, sir, but there is some important dictation here that ought to be attended to.”

Sanford assumed the air of a man wearied with tremendous affairs. .

“Very well, what comes first?”

“The New York _Budget_ has wired for an answer in regard to their proposition.”

Sanford blew a luxurious whiff of smoke. “Take this letter: My dear Mr. Ralston. Replying to your inquiries as to whether I would be willing to take charge of the editorial page of the _Budget_ for a few months, to put the paper on its feet, I am willing to consider the matter, and would be pleased to discuss it with you if you will run over to see me. I am very busy just now, and could not possibly undertake the work for some weeks. I have been retained in an advisory capacity by a big Western syndicate which was badly in need of some circulation building; and until I can put their paper up to a half-million figure I have not much spare time. Their paper has gone up a couple of hundred thousand since I mapped out a campaign for them, but I would not feel justified in discontinuing my services to them until these gains are properly consolidated. I will be in my office at ten o'clock next Tuesday morning if you care to see me. Very truly yours.”

Mr. Birdlip was hidden behind his paper, but something in the angle at which the sheets were held led Sanford to believe that the old gentleman was listening.

“Very well, Edwards,” he said. “What's next?”

“Here's this letter from Lord Southpeak of the London _Gazette_ asking if he can see you when he comes over next month.”

“Cable Southpeak I shall be very happy to see him if he gets here before the fifteenth. I am going on my vacation then.”

The attentive Edwards scribbled rapidly in his notebook.

“Just pick out the most urgent stuff,” said Sanford. “I don't care to bother with anything that isn't really pressing. I've got an important conference on in New York to-day, and I want to keep my mind clear. Blackwit of the Associated Press has asked me to say a few words to his directors on 'Journalism as a Function of Public Conscience'.”

Edwards ran rapidly through an imposing mass of documents.

“That long-distance call from the Chicago _Vox_,” he said. “You promised to give Mr. Groton some word this morning.”