Chapter 5

“With this little candle? No, no, dear--_my_ dear. You will be a great man. You will not forget; but you will go on and do the things that I’m afraid I didn’t help, maybe hindered, you in trying to do. And you will keep a little room in your heart, a very little room. And I shall be in there. And you’ll open the door every once in a while and come in and take me in your arms and kiss me. And I think--yes, I feel that--that I shall know and thrill.”

Her voice sank lower and lower and then her eyes closed, and presently he called the nurse.

The next day he rose from his bed, just at the connecting door between his room and hers, and looked in at her. The shades were drawn and only a faint light crept into the room. He thought he saw her stir and went nearer.

“Why, they’ve made you very gay this morning,” he laughed, “with the red ribbons at your neck.”

There was no answer. He came still nearer. The red ribbons were long streamers of blood. She was dead.

VIII.

A STRUGGLE FOR SELF-CONTROL.

He left her at Asheville as she wished--“where I have been happiest and where I wish you to think of me.” On the train coming north he reviewed his past and made his plans for the future.

As to the past he had only one regret--that he had not learned to appreciate Alice until too late. He felt that his failure to advance had been due entirely to himself--to his inertia, his willingness to seize any pretext for refraining from action. As to the future--work, work with a purpose. His mind must be fully and actively occupied. There must be no leisure, for leisure meant paralysis.

At the Twenty-third Street ferry-house he got into a hansom and gave the address of “the flat.” He did not note where he was until the hansom drew up at the curb. He leaned forward and looked at the house--at their windows with the curtains which she had draped so gracefully, which she and he had selected at Vantine’s one morning. How often he had seen her standing between those curtains, looking out for him, her blue-black hair waving back from her forehead so beautifully and her face ready to smile so soon as ever she should catch sight of him.

He leaned back and closed his eyes. The blood was pounding through his temples and his eyeballs seemed to be scalding under the lids.

“Never again,” he moaned. “How lonely it is.”

The cabman lifted the trap. “Here we are, sir.”

“Yes--in a moment.” Where should he go? But what did it matter? “To a hotel,” he said. “The nearest.”

“The Imperial?”

“That will do--yes--go there.”

He resolved never to return to “the flat.” On the following day he sent for the maid and arranged the breaking up. He gave her everything except his personal belongings and a few of Alice’s few possessions--those he could keep, and those which he must destroy because he could not endure the thought of any one having them.

At the office all understood his mourning; but no one, not even Kittredge, knew him well enough to intrude beyond gentler looks and tones. Kittredge had written a successful novel and was going abroad for two years of travel and writing. Howard took his rooms in the Royalton. They dined together a few nights before he sailed.

“And now,” said Kittredge, “I’m my own master. Why, I can’t begin to fill the request for ‘stuff.’ I can go where I please, do as I please. At last I shall work. For I don’t call the drudgery done under compulsion work.”

“Work!” Howard repeated the word several times absently. Then he leaned forward and said with what was for him an approach to the confidential: “What a mess I have been making of my life! What waste! What folly! I’ve behaved like a child, an impulsive, irresponsible child. And now I must get to work, really to work.”

“With your talents a year or so of work would free you.”

“Oh, I’m free.” Howard hesitated and flushed. “Yes, I’m free,” he repeated bitterly. “We are all free except for the shackles we fasten upon ourselves and can unlock for ourselves. I don’t agree with you that earning one’s daily bread is drudgery.”

“Well, let’s see you work--work for something definite. Why don’t you try for some higher place on the paper--correspondent at Washington or London--no, not London, for that is a lounging job which would ruin even an energetic man. Why not try for the editorial staff? They ought to have somebody upstairs who takes an interest in something besides politics.”

“But doesn’t a man have to write what he doesn’t believe? You know how Segur is always laughing at the protection editorials he writes, although he is a free-trader.”

“Oh, there must be many directions in which the paper is free to express honest opinions.”

Howard began that very night. As soon as he reached his club where he was living for a few days he sat down to the file of the _News-Record_ and began to study its editorial style and method. He had learned a great deal before three o’clock in the morning and had written a short editorial on a subject he took from the news. In the morning he read his article again and decided that with a few changes--adjectives cut out, long sentences cut up, short sentences made shorter and the introduction and the conclusion omitted--it would be worth handing in. With the corrected article in his hand he knocked at the door of the editor’s room.

It was a small, plainly furnished office--no carpet, three severe chairs, a revolving book case with a battered and dusty bust of Lincoln on it, a table strewn with newspaper cuttings. Newspapers from all parts of the world were scattered about the floor. At the table sat the editor, Mr. Malcolm, whom Howard had never before seen.

He was short and slender, with thin white hair and a smooth, satirical face, deeply wrinkled and unhealthily pale. He was dressed in black but wore a string tie of a peculiarly lively shade of red. His most conspicuous feature was his nose--long, narrow, pointed, sarcastic.

“My name is Howard,” began the candidate, all but stammering before Mr. Malcolm’s politely uninterested glance, “and I come from downstairs.”

“Oh--so you are Mr. Howard. I’ve heard of you often. Will you be seated?”

“Thank you--no. I’ve only brought in a little article I thought I’d submit for your page. I’d like to write for it and, if you don’t mind, I’ll bring in an article occasionally.”

“Glad to have it. We like new ideas; and a new pen, a new mind, ought to produce them. If you don’t see your articles in the paper, you’ll know what has happened to them. If you do, paste them on space slips and send them up by the boy on Thursdays.” Mr. Malcolm nodded and smiled and dipped his pen in the ink-well.

The editorial appeared just as Howard wrote it. He read and reread it, admiring the large, handsome editorial type in which it was printed, and deciding that it was worthy of the excellent place in the column which Mr. Malcolm had given it. He wrote another that very day and sent it up by the boy. He found it in his desk the next noon with “Too abstract--never forget that you are writing for a newspaper” scrawled across the last page in blue pencil.

In the two following months Howard submitted thirty-five articles. Three were published in the main as he wrote them, six were “cut” to paragraphs, one appeared as a letter to the editor with “H” signed to it. The others disappeared. It was not encouraging, but Howard kept on. He knew that if he stopped marching steadily, even though hopelessly, toward a definite goal, a heavy hand would be laid upon his shoulder to drag him away and fling him down upon a grave.

As it was, desperately though he fought to refrain from backward glances, he was now and again taken off his guard. A few of her pencil marks on the margin of a leaf in one of his books; a gesture, a little mannerism of some woman passing him in the street--and he would be ready to sink down with weariness and loneliness, like a tired traveller in a vast desert.

He completely lost self-control only once. It was a cold, wet May night and everything had gone against him that day. He looked drearily round his rooms as he came in. How stiff, how forbidding, how desert they seemed! He threw himself into a big chair.

“No friends,” he thought, “no one that cares a rap whether I live or die, suffer or am happy. Nothing to care for. Why do I go on? What’s the use if one has not an object--a human object?”

And their life together came flooding back--her eyes, her kisses, her attentions, her passionate love for him, so pervasive yet so unobtrusive; the feeling of her smooth, round arm about his neck; her way of pressing close up to him and locking her fingers in his; the music of her voice, singing her heartsong to him yet never putting it into words----

He stumbled over to the divan and stretched himself out and buried his face in the cushions. “Come back!” he sobbed. “Come back to me, dear.” And then he cried, as a man cries--without tears, with sobs choking up into his throat and issuing in moans.

“Curious,” he said aloud when the storm was over and he was sitting up, ashamed before himself for his weakness, “who would have suspected me of this?”

IX.

AMBITION AWAKENS.

Howard was now thirty-two. He was still trying for the editorial staff; but in the last month only five of his articles had been printed to twenty-three thrown away. A national campaign was coming on and the _News-Record_ was taking a political stand that seemed to him sound and right. For the first time he tried political editorials.

The cause aroused his passion for justice, for democratic equality and the abolition of privilege. He had something to say and he succeeded in saying it vigorously, effectively, with clearness and moderation of statement. How to avoid hysteria; how to set others on fire instead of only making of himself a fiery spectacle; how to be earnest, yet calm; how to be satirical yet sincere; how to be interesting, yet direct--these were his objects, pursued with incessant toiling, rewriting again and again, recasting of sentences, careful balancing of words for exact shades of meaning.

“I shall never learn to write,” had been his complaint of himself to himself for years. And in these days it seemed to him that he was farther from a good style than ever. His standards had risen, were rising; he feared that his power of accomplishment was failing. Therefore his heart sank and his face paled when an office boy told him that Mr. Malcolm wished to see him.

“I suppose it’s to tell me not to annoy him with any more of my attempts,” he thought. “Well, anyway, I’ve had the benefit of the work. I’ll try a novel next.”

“Take a seat,” said Mr. Malcolm with an absent nod. “Just a moment, if you please.”

On a chair beside him was the remnant of what had been a huge up-piling of newspapers--the exchanges that had come in during the past twenty-four hours. The Exchange Editor had been through them and Mr. Malcolm was reading “to feel the pulse of the country” and also to make sure that nothing of importance had been overlooked.

On the floor were newspapers by the score, thrown about tumultuously. Mr. Malcolm would seize a paper from the unread heap, whirl it open and send his glance and his long pointed nose tearing down one column and up another, and so from page to page. It took less than a minute for him to finish and filing away great sixteen page dailies. A few seconds sufficed for the smaller papers. Occasionally he took his long shears and with a skilful twist cut out a piece from the middle of a page and laid it and the shears upon the table with a single motion.

“Now, Mr. Howard.” Malcolm sent the last paper to increase the chaos on the floor and faced about in his revolving chair. “How would you like to come up here?”

Howard looked at him in amazement. “You mean----”

“We want you to join the editorial staff. Mr. Walker has married him a rich wife and is going abroad to do literary work, which means that he is going to do nothing. Will you come?”

“It is what I have been working for.”

“And very hard you have worked.” Mr. Malcolm’s cold face relaxed into a half-friendly, half-satirical smile. “After you’d been sending up articles for a fortnight, I knew you’d make it. You went about it systematically. An intelligent plan, persisted in, is hard to beat in this world of laggards and hap-hazard strugglers.”

“And I was on the point of giving up--that is, giving up this particular ambition,” Howard confessed.

“Yes, I saw it in your articles--a certain pessimism and despondency. You show your feelings plainly, young man. It is an excellent quality--but dangerous. A man ought to make his mind a machine working evenly without regard to his feelings or physical condition. The night my oldest child died--I was editor of a country newspaper--I wrote my leaders as usual. I never had written better. You can be absolute master inside, if you will. You can learn to use your feelings when they’re helpful and to shut them off when they hinder.”

“But don’t you think that temperament----”

“Temperament--that’s one of the subtlest forms of self-excuse. However, the place is yours. The salary is a hundred and twenty-five a week--an advance of about twelve hundred a year, I believe, on your average downstairs. Can you begin soon?”

“Immediately,” said Howard, “if the City Editor is satisfied.”

An office boy showed him to his room--a mere hole-in-the-wall with just space for a table-desk, a small table, a case of shelves for books of reference, and two chairs. The one window overlooked the lower end of Manhattan Island--the forest of business buildings peaked with the Titan-tenements of financial New York. Their big, white plumes of smoke and steam were waving in the wind and reflecting in pale pink the crimson of the setting sun.

Howard had his first taste of the intoxication of triumph, his first deep inspiration of ambition. He recalled his arrival in New York, his timidity, his dread lest he should be unable to make a living--“Poor boy,” they used to say at home, “he will have to be supported. He is too much of a dreamer.” He remembered his explorations of those now familiar streets--how acutely conscious he had been that they were paved with stone, walled with stone, roofed with a stony sky, peopled with faces and hearts of stone. How miserably insignificant he had felt!

And all these years he had been almost content to be one of the crowd, like them exerting himself barely enough to provide himself with the essentials of existence. Like them, he had given no real thought to the morrow. And now, with comparatively little labour, he had put himself in the way to become a master, a director of the enormous concentrated energies summed up in the magic word New York.

The key to the situation was--work, incessant, self-improving, self-developing. “And it is the key to happiness also,” he thought. “Work and sleep--the two periods of unconsciousness of self--are the two periods of happiness.”

His aloofness freed him from the temptations of distraction. He knew no women. He did not put himself in the way of meeting them. He kept away from theatres. He sunk himself in a routine of labour which, viewed from the outside, seemed dull and monotonous. Viewed from his stand-point of acquisition, of achievement, it was just the reverse.

The mind soon adapts itself to and enjoys any mental routine which exercises it. The only difficulty is in forming the habit of the routine.

Howard was greatly helped by his natural bent toward editorial writing. The idea of discussing important questions each day with a vast multitude as an audience stirred his imagination and aroused his instincts for helping on the great world-task of elevating the race. This enthusiasm pleased and also amused his cynical chief.

“You believe in things?” Malcolm said to him after they had become well acquainted. “Well, it is an admirable quality--but dangerous. You will need careful editing. Your best plan is to give yourself up to your belief while you are writing--then to edit yourself in cold blood. That is the secret of success, of great success in any line, business, politics, a profession--enthusiasm, carefully revised and edited.”

“It is difficult to be cold blooded when one is in earnest.”

“True,” Malcolm answered, “and there is the danger. My own enthusiasms are confined to the important things--food, clothing and shelter. It seems to me that the rest is largely a matter of taste, training and time of life. But don’t let me discourage you. I only suggest that you may have to guard against believing so intensely that you produce the impression of being an impracticable, a fanatic. Be cautious always; be especially cautious when you are cocksure you’re right. Unadulterated truth always arouses suspicion in the unaccustomed public. It has the alarming tastelessness of distilled water.”

Howard was acute enough to separate the wisdom from the cynicism of his chief. He saw the lesson of moderation. “You have failed, my very able chief,” he said to himself, “because you have never believed intensely enough to move you to act. You have attached too much importance to the adulteration--the folly and the humbug. And here you are, still only a critic, destructive but never constructive.”

At first his associates were much amused by his intensity. But as he learned to temper and train his enthusiasm they grew to respect both his ability and his character. Before a year had passed they were feeling the influence of his force--his trained, informed mind, made vigorous by principles and ideals.

Malcolm had the keen appreciation of a broad mind for this honest, intelligent energy. He used the editorial “blue-pencil” for alteration and condensation with the hand of a master. He cut away Howard’s crudities, toned down and so increased his intensity, and pointed it with the irony and satire necessary to make it carry far and penetrate easily.

Malcolm was at once giving Howard a reputation greater than he deserved and training him to deserve it.

* * * * *

In the office next to Howard’s sat Segur, a bachelor of forty-five who took life as a good-humoured jest and amused his leisure with the New Yorkers who devote a life of idleness to a nervous flight from boredom. Howard interested Segur who resolved to try to draw him out of his seclusion.

“I’m having some people to dinner at the Waldorf on Thursday,” he said, looking in at the door. “Won’t you join us?”

“I’d be glad to,” replied Howard, casting about for an excuse for declining. “But I’m afraid I’d ruin your dinner. I haven’t been out for years. I’ve been too busy to make friends or, rather, acquaintances.”

“A great mistake. You ought to see more of people.”

“Why? Can they tell me anything that I can’t learn from newspapers or books more accurately and without wasting so much time? I’d like to know the interesting people and to see them in their interesting moments. But I can’t afford to hunt for them through the wilderness of nonentities and wait for them to become interesting.”

“But you get amusement, relaxation. Then too, it’s first-hand study of life.”

“I’m not sure of that. Yawning is not a very attractive kind of relaxation, is it? And as for study of life, eight years of reporting gave me more of that than I could assimilate. And it was study of realities, not of pretenses. As I remember them, ‘respectable’ people are all about the same, whether in their vices or in their virtues. They are cut from a few familiar, ‘old reliable’ patterns. No, I don’t think there is much to be learned from respectability on dress parade.”

“You’ll be amused on Thursday. You must come. I’m counting on you.”

Howard accepted--cordially as he could not refuse decently. Yet he had a presentiment or a shyness or an impatience at the interruption of his routine which reproached him for accepting with insistence and persistence.

X.

THE ETERNAL MASCULINE.

It was the first week in November, and in those days “everybody” did not stay in the country so late as now. There were many New Yorkers in the crowd of out-of-town people at the Waldorf. Howard was attracted, fascinated by the scene--carefully-groomed men and women, the air of gaiety and ease, the flowers, the music, the lights, the perfumes. At a glance it seemed a dream of life with evil and sorrow and pain banished.

“No place for a working man,” thought he, “at least not for my kind of a working man. It appeals too sharply to the instincts for laziness and luxury.”

He was late and stood in the entrance to the palm-garden, looking about for Segur. Soon he saw him waving from a table near the wall under the music-alcove.

“The oysters are just coming,” said Segur. “Sit over there between Mrs. Carnarvon and Miss Trevor. They are cousins, Howard, so be cautious what you say to one about the other. Oh, here is Mr. Berersford.”

The others knew each other well; Howard knew them only as he had seen their names in the “fashionable intelligence” columns of the newspapers. Mrs. Carnarvon was a small thin woman in a black velvet gown which made her thinness obtrusive and attractive or the reverse according as one’s taste is toward or away from attenuation. Her eyes were a dull, greenish grey, her skin brown and smooth and tough from much exposure in the hunting field. Her cheeks were beginning to hang slightly, so that one said: “She is pretty, but she will soon not be.” Her mouth proclaimed strong appetites--not unpleasantly since she was good-looking.

Miss Trevor was perhaps ten years younger than her cousin, not far from twenty-four. She had a critical, almost amused yet not unpleasant way of looking out of unusually clear blue-green eyes. Her hair was of an ordinary shade of dark brown, but fine and thick and admirably arranged to set off her long, sensitive, high bred features. Her chin and mouth expressed decision and strong emotions.

There was a vacant chair between Segur and Berersford and it was presently filled by a fat, middle-aged woman, neither blonde nor brunette, with a large, serene face. Upon it was written a frank confession that she had never in her life had an original thought capable of creating a ripple of interest. She was Mrs. Sidney, rich, of an “old” family--in the New York meaning of the word “old”--both by marriage and by birth, much courted because of her position and because she entertained a great deal both in town and at a large and hospitable country house.

The conversation was lively and amused, or seemed to amuse, all. It was purely personal--about Kittie and Nellie and Jim and Peggie and Amy and Bob; about the sayings and doings of a few dozen people who constituted the intimates of these five persons.

Mrs. Carnarvon turned to the silent Howard at last and began about the weather.

“Horrible in the city, isn’t it?”

“Well, perhaps it is,” replied Howard. “But I fancied it delightful. You see I have not lived anywhere but New York for so long that I am hardly capable to judge.”

“Why everybody says we have the worst climate in the world.”

“Far be it from me to contradict everybody. But for me New York has the ideal climate. Isn’t it the best of any great city in the world? You see, we have the air of the sea in our streets. And when the sun shines, which it does more days in the year than in any other great city, the effect is like champagne--or rather, like the effect champagne looks as if it ought to have.”

“I hate champagne,” said Mrs. Carnarvon. “Marian, you must not drink it; you know you mustn’t.” This to Miss Trevor who was lifting the glass to her lips. She drank a little of the champagne, then set the glass down slowly.