Chapter 14

“Listen, dear.” He took her hand and drew her arms more closely about his neck. “Suppose that the lines were drawn--as they may be any day. Suppose that we had to choose, with all these friends of yours, with our position, yes, even the place I have won in my profession, my place as editor--all that we now have on the one side; and on the other side a thankless, unprofitable, apparently useless standing up for the right. Wouldn’t you miss your friends?”

“_All_ our friends? And who will be on the other side?”

“Almost no one that we know--that you would care to call upon or go about with or have here at the house. Nobody with any great amount of wealth or social position. Those other people who are in town when it is said ‘Nobody is in town now!’”

She did not answer.

“Where would you be?” he repeated.

“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of that.” She came around and sat on his knee. “Where? Why, there’s only one ‘where’ in all this world for me--‘wheresoever thou goest.’”

And so the half-formed impulse to begin to straighten himself out with her was smothered by her.

Both were silent through dinner. She was thinking how honest, how fearless he was, how he loved her, how eagerly she would follow him, how blessed she was in the love of such a man. And he--he was regretting that his “pose” had carried him so far; he was wishing that he had not been so bitter in his attacks upon his and his wife’s friends, the coal conspirators. When he had definitely cast in his lot with “the shearers” why persist in making his hypocrisy more abominable by protesting more loudly than ever in behalf of “the sheep?” Above all, why had he let his habit of voluble denunciation lead him into this hypocrisy with the woman he loved?

He admitted to himself that “causes” had ceased to interest him except as they might contribute to the advancement of his power. Power!--that was his ambition now. First he had wished to have an independent income in order to be free. When he had achieved that, it was at the sacrifice of his mental freedom. And now, with the clearness of self-knowledge which only men of great ability have, he knew that the one cause for which he would make sacrifices was--himself.

“Of what are you thinking so gloomily?” she interrupted.

“Oh--I--let me see--well, I was thinking what a fraud I am; and that I wished I could dupe myself as completely as I can dupe--”

“Me?” she laughed. “Oh, we’re all frauds--shocking frauds. I wouldn’t have you see me as I really am for anything.”

Although her remark was a commonplace, of small meaning, as he knew, he got comfort out of it, so desperately was he casting about for some consolation.

“That’s true, my dear,” he said. “And I wish that you liked the kind of a fraud I am as well as I like the kind of a fraud you are.”

XXIV.

“MR. VALIANT-FOR-TRUTH.”

Stokely came rushing into his office the next morning. “Good God, old man,” he exclaimed, “What’s the meaning of this attack on the coal roads?”

Howard flushed with resentment, not at what Stokely said, but at his tone.

“Now, don’t get on your high horse. I don’t think you understand.” Stokely’s tone had moderated. “Don’t you know that the Delaware Valley road is in this?”

Howard started. He had just invested two hundred thousand dollars in that stock on Stokely’s advice “No, I didn’t know it.” He recovered himself. “And furthermore I don’t give a damn.” He struck his desk angrily. His simulation of incorruptible indignation for the moment half deceived himself.

“Why, man, if this infernal roast is kept up, you’ll lose a hundred thousand. Then there are my interests. I’m up to my neck in this deal.”

“My advice to you is to get out of it. I’m sorry, but you know as well as I do that the thing is infamous.”

“Infamous--nonsense! It will double our dividends and the consumers won’t feel it.”

“Let us not discuss it, Stokely. There--don’t say anything you’ll regret.”

“But--”

“Now, Stokely--don’t argue it with me.”

Stokely put on his hat, stood up and looked at Howard with sullen admiration. “You will drive away the last friend you’ve got on earth, if you keep this up. Good morning.”

Howard sent a smile of cynical amusement after him, then stared thoughtfully into the mass of papers on his desk for five, ten, fifteen minutes. When his plan was formed he touched the electric button.

“Please tell Mr. King I’d like to see him,” he said to the answering boy.

Mr. King entered with a bundle of legal documents. “I suppose it’s the injunction you want to discuss,” he said. “We’ve got the papers all ready. It’s simply great. Those fellows will be in a corner and will have to give up. They can’t get away from us. The price of coal will drop half a dollar within a week, I’ll bet.”

“I’m afraid you are over sanguine,” Howard said. “I’ve just been going over the matter with my lawyer. But leave the papers with me. And--about the news--be careful what you say. We’ve been going a little strong. I think a little less personal matter would be advisable.”

Mr. King was amazed and looked it. He slowly pulled himself together to say, “All right, Mr. Howard. I think I understand.” He laid the papers down and departed. Outside the door he laughed softly to himself. “Somebody’s been cutting his comb, I guess,” he murmured. “Well, I didn’t think he’d last. New York always gets ‘em when they’re worth while.”

As the door closed behind King, Howard drew out the lowest and deepest drawer of his desk. It was half-filled with long-undisturbed pamphlets and newspaper cuttings. He tossed in the injunction papers. A cloud of dust flew up and settled thickly upon them. He shut the drawer.

He went to the window and looked out over the city--that seductive, that overwhelming expression of wealth and power. “What was it my father wrote me when I told him I was going to New York?” and he recalled almost the exact words--“New York that lures young men from the towns and the farms, and prostitutes them, teaches them to sell themselves with unblushing cheeks for a fee, for an office, for riches, for power.” He shrugged his shoulders, smiled, drew himself up, returned to his desk and was soon absorbed in his work.

The next morning the _News-Record’s_ double-leaded “leader” on the Coal Trust was a discharge of heavy artillery. But it was artillery in retreat. And in the succeeding days, the retreat continued--not precipitate but orderly, masterly.

* * * * *

Ten days after their talk on the “coal conspiracy” Marian greeted him late in the afternoon with “Oh, such a row with Mrs. Mercer!”

“Mrs. Mercer! Why, what was she angry about?”

“She wasn’t--at least, not at first. It was I. I went to see her and she asked me to thank you for stopping that fight on the coal conspiracy.”

“That was tactful of her,” Howard said, turning away to hide his nervousness.

“And I told her that you had not stopped, that you wouldn’t stop until you had broken it up. And she smiled in a superior way and said I was quite mistaken, that I didn’t read the paper, I haven’t read it for several days, but I knew _you_, dear, and I remembered what you had said. And so we just had it. We were polite but furious when I went. I shall never go near her again.”

“But, unfortunately, we have stopped. We had to do it. We could accomplish nothing.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter. What angered me was her insinuation.”

“That was irritating. But, tell me, what if it had been true?” Howard’s voice was strained and he was looking at her eagerly, with fever in his eyes.

“But it couldn’t be. It isn’t worth while imagining. You could not be a coward and a traitor.” So complete was her confidence in him that suspicion of him was impossible.

“Would you sit in judgment on me?”

“Not if I could help it.”

“But you can--you could help it.” His manner was agitated, and he spoke almost fiercely. “I am free,” he went on, and as she watched his eyes she understood why men feared him. “I do what I will. I am not accountable to you, not even to you. I have never asked you to approve of me, to approve what I do, to love me. You are free also, free to love, free to withdraw your love. I follow the law of my own being. You must take me as you find me or not at all.”

She tried to stop him but could not. His words poured on. He leaned forward and took her hand and his eyes were brilliant and piercing. “I love you,” he said. “Ah, how I love you--not because you love me, not because you are an angel, not because you are a superior being. No, not for any reason in all this wide world but because you are you. Do what you will and I shall love you. Whether I had to look up among the stars or down in the mire to find you, I would look just as steadily, just as proudly.”

He drew along breath and his hand trembled. “If I were a traitor, then, if you loved me, you would say, ‘What! Is he to be found among traitors? How I love treason!’ If I were a coward, liar, thief, a sum of all the vices, then, if you ever had loved me you would love me still. I want no love with mental reservations, no love with ifs and buts and provided-thats. I want love, free and fearless, that adapts itself to changing human nature as the colour of the sea adapts itself to the colour of the sky; love that does not have to be cajoled and persuaded lest it be not there when I most need it. I want the love that loves.”

“You know you have it.” She had been compelled by his mood and was herself in a fever. She looked at him with the expression which used to make his nerves vibrate. “You know that no human being ever was more to another than I to you. But you can’t expect me to be just the same as you are. I love _you_--not the false, base creature you picture. I admire the way you love, but I could not love in that way. Thank God, my love, my dear--I shall never be put to that test. For my love for you is my--my all.”

“We are very serious about a mere supposition.”

Howard was laughing, but not naturally. “We take each the other far too seriously. I’m sorry you idealise me so. Who knows--you might find me out some day--and then--well, don’t blame me.”

Marian said no more, but late that evening she put her hands on his shoulders and said: “You’re not hiding something from me--something we ought to bear together?”

“Not I.” Howard smiled down into her eyes and kissed her.

His mood of reaction, of hysteria had passed. He was thinking how little in reality she had had to do with his outburst. He had not been addressing her at all, except as she seemed to him for the moment the embodiment of his self-respect--or rather, of an “absurd,” “extremely youthful” ideal of self-respect which he had “outgrown.”

XXV.

THE PROMISED LAND.

A woman with a powerful personality may absorb in herself a man of strong and resolute ambition, may compel him to make her his career, to feel that to get and to keep her is all that he asks from destiny. But Marian was not such a woman.

She had come into Howard’s life at just the time and in just the way to arouse his latent passion for power and to give it a sufficient initial impetus. It was love for her that set him to lifting himself from among those who work through themselves alone to the potent few who work chiefly by directing the labour of others.

Once in this class, once having tasted the joy of power, Howard was lost to her. She was unable to restrain or direct, or even clearly to understand. She became an incident in his life. As riches came with power, they pushed him to one side in her life. Living in separate parts of a large house, leading separate lives, rarely meeting except when others were present--following the typical life of New Yorkers of fortune and fashion--they gradually grew to know little and see little and think little each of the other.

There was no abruptness in the transition. Every day had contributed its little toward widening the gap. There was no coolness, no consciousness of separation; simply the slow formation of the habit of complete independence each of the other.

His ambitions absorbed his thought and his time. To them he found her very useful. The social side--forming and keeping up friendly relations with the families whose heads were men of influence--was a vital part of his plan. But he used her just as he used every and any one else whom he found capable of contributing to his advancement; and, as she never insisted upon herself, never sought to influence or even to inquire into his course of action, she did not find him out.

She was in a vague way an unhappy woman. A discontent, a feeling that her life was incomplete, perpetually teased her. He was distinctly unhappy, often gloomy, at times morose. In her rare analytic moods she attributed their failure to prolong the happiness of their courtship to the hard work which kept him from her, kept them from enjoying the great love which she assumed they felt each for the other. She would not and could not see that that love had long disappeared, leaving a mask of forms, of phrases and of impulses of passion to conceal its departure. And to this view he outwardly assented, when she suggested it; but he knew that she was deceiving herself as to him, and wondered if she were not deceiving herself as to her own feelings.

Up to the time of the “Coal Conspiracy” and his attempt to put himself straight with her, the idea of his love for her and of her oneness with him had at least a hold upon his imagination. He then saw how far apart they had drifted; and he dismissed from his mind even the pretense that love played any part in his life. After that definite break with principle and self-respect for the sake of his coal holdings, his Wall Street friends and his newspaper career, the development of his character continued along strictly logical lines with accelerating speed. And it was accompanied by an ever franker, more cynical acceptance of the change.

He could not deceive himself, nor can any man with the clearness of judgment necessary to great achievement--although many “successful” men, for obvious reasons of self-interest, diligently encourage the popular theory of warped conscience. He was well aware that he had shifted from the ideal of use _to_ his fellow-beings to the ideal of use _of_ his fellow-beings, from the ideal of character to the ideal of reputation. And he knew that the two ideals can not be combined and that he not only was not attempting to combine them but had no desire so to do. He despised his former ideals; but also he despised himself for despising them.

His quarrel with himself was that he seemed to himself a rather vulgar sort of hypocrite. This was highly disagreeable to him, as his whole nature tended to make him wish to be himself, to make him shrink from the part of the truckler and the sycophant which he was playing so haughtily and so artistically. At times it exasperated him that he could not regard his change of front as a deliberate sale for value received, and not as the weak and cowardly surrender which he saw that it really was.

* * * * *

On the day after Howard’s forty-fourth birthday Coulter fell dead at the entrance to the Union Club. When Stokely heard of it he went direct to the _News-Record_ office.

“I happen to know something about Coulter’s will,” he said to Howard. “The _News-Record_ stock is to be sold and you and I are to have the first chance to take it at three hundred and fifty--which is certainly cheap enough.”

“Why did he arrange to dispose of the most valuable part of his estate?”

“Well, we had an agreement about it. Then, too, Coulter had no faith in newspapers as a permanent investment. You know there are only the widow, the girl and that worthless boy. Heavens, what an ass that boy is! Coulter has tied up his estate until the youngest grandchild comes of age. He hopes that there will be a son among the grandchildren who will realise his dream.”

“Dream?” Howard smiled. “I didn’t know that Coulter ever indulged in dreams.”

“Yes, he had the rich man’s mania--the craze for founding a family. So everything is to be put into real estate and long-term bonds. And for years New York is to be reminded of Samuel Coulter by some incapable who’ll use his name and his money to advertise nature’s contempt for family pride in her distributions of brains. I think even a fine tomb is a wiser memorial.”

“Well, how much of the stock shall you take?” Howard asked.

“Not a share,” Stokely replied dejectedly. “Coulter couldn’t have died at a worse time for me. I’m tied in every direction and shall be for a year at least. So you’ve got a chance to become controlling owner.”

“I?” Howard laughed. “Where could I get a million and a half?”

“How much could you take in cash?”

“Well--let me see--perhaps--five hundred thousand.”

“You can borrow the million with the stock as collateral.”

“But how could I pay?”

“Why, your dividends at our present rate would be more than two hundred thousand a year. Your interest charge would be under seventy-five thousand. Perhaps I can arrange it so that it won’t be more than fifty thousand. You can let the balance go on reducing the loan. Then I may be able to put you onto a few good things. At any rate you can’t lose anything. Your stock would bring five hundred even at forced sale. It’s your chance, old man. I want to see you take it.”

“I’ll think it over. I have no head for figures.”

“Let me manage it for you.” Stokely rose to go. Howard began thanking him, but he cut him off with:

“You owe me no thanks. You’ve made money for me--big money. I owe you my help. Besides, I don’t want any outsider in here. Let me know when you’re ready.” He nodded and was gone.

“What a chance!” Howard repeated again and again.

He was looking out over New York.

Twenty years before he had faced it, asking of it nothing but a living and his freedom. For twenty years he had fought. Year by year, even when he seemed to be standing still or going backward, he had steadily gained, making each step won a vantage-ground for forward attack. And now--victory. Power, wealth, fame, all his!

Yet a deep melancholy came over him. And he fell to despising himself for the kind of exultation that filled him, its selfishness, its sordidness, the absence of all high enthusiasm. Why was he denied the happiness of self-deception? Why could he not forget the means, blot it out, now that the end was attained?

His mind went out, not to Marian, but to that other--the one sleeping under the many, many layers of autumn leaves at Asheville. And he heard a voice saying so faintly, so timidly: “I lay awake night after night listening to your breathing, and whispering under my breath, ‘I love you, I love you. Why can’t you love me?’” And then--he flung down the cover of his desk and rushed away home.

“Why did I think of Alice?” he asked himself. And the answer came--because in those days, in the days of his youth, he had had beliefs, high principles; he had been incapable of this slavery to appearances, to vain show, incapable of this passion for reputation regardless of character. His weaknesses were then weaknesses only, and not, as now, the laws of his being controlling his every act.

He smiled cynically at the self of such a few years ago--yet he could not meet those honest, fearless eyes that looked out at him from the mirror of memory.

He was triumphant, but self-respect had gone and not all the thick swathings of vanity covered him from the stabs of self-contempt.

“When I am really free, when the paper is paid for and I can do as I please, why not try to be a man again? Why not? It would cost me nothing.”

But a man is the sum of _all_ his past.

XXVI.

IN POSSESSION.

Stokely arranged the loan, and within six months Howard was controlling owner of the _News-Record._ There was a debt of a million and a quarter attached to his ownership, but he saw how that would be wiped out. Once more he threw himself into his work with the energy of a boy. He had to give much of his time to the business department--to the details of circulation and advertising. He felt that the profits of the paper could be greatly increased by improving its facilities for reaching the advertiser and the public. He had never been satisfied with the circulation methods; but theretofore his ignorance of business and his position as mere salaried editor had acted in restraint upon his interference with the “ground floor.”

As he had suspected, the business office was afflicted with the twin diseases--routine and imitativeness. It followed an old system, devised in days of small circulation and grudgingly improved, not by thought on the part of those who circulated the paper, but by compulsion on the part of the public. No attempts were made to originate schemes for advertising the paper. The only methods were wooden variations upon placards in the street cars and the elevated stations, and cards hung up at the news-stands. As forgetting advertising business, they thought they showed enterprise by a little canvassing among the conspicuous merchants in Greater New York.

Howard had charts made showing the circulation by districts. With these as a basis he ordered an elaborate campaign to “push” the paper in the districts where it was circulated least and to increase its hold where it was strong. “We do not reach one-third of the people who would like to take our paper,” he told Jowett, the business manager. “Let us have an army of agents and let us take up our territory by districts.”

The Sunday edition was the largest source of revenue, both because it carried a great deal more advertising at much higher rates than did the week-day editions, and because it sold at a price which yielded a profit on the paper itself, while the price of the weekday editions did not. News constituted less than one-fourth of its contents. The rest was “feature articles,” as interesting a week late to a man in Seattle as on the day of publication within a mile of the office.

“We get out the very best magazine in the market,” said Howard to Jowett. “Are we pushing it in the east, in the west, in the south? Look at the charts.

“We have a Sunday circulation of five hundred in Oregon, of one thousand in Texas, of six hundred in Georgia, of two thousand in Maine. Why not ten times as much in each of those states? Why not ten times as much as we now have near New York?”

There was no reason except failure to “push” the paper. That reason Howard proceeded to remove. But these enterprises involved large expenditures, perhaps might mean postponement of the payment of the debt. Receipts must be increased and the most promising way was an increase in the advertising business.

Howard noted on the chart nineteen cities and large towns near New York in each of which the daily circulation of the _News-Record_ was equal to that of any paper published there and far exceeded the combined circulations of all the home dailies on Sunday. This suggested a system of local advertising pages, and for its working out he engaged one of the most capable newspaper advertising men in the city. Within three months the idea had “caught on” and, instead of sending useless columns of New York “want-ads” and the like to places where they could not be useful, the _News-Record_ was presenting to its readers in twelve cities and towns the advertisements of their local merchants.

A year of this work, with Howard giving many hours of each day personally to tiresome details, brought the natural results. The profits of the _News-Record_ had risen to five hundred and forty thousand, of which Howard’s share was nearly three hundred thousand. The next year the profits were seven hundred and fifty thousand, and Howard had reduced his debt to eight hundred thousand.

“We shall be free and clear in less than three years,” he said to Marian.

“If we have luck,” she added.

“No--if we work--and we shall. Luck is a stone which envy flings at success.”