by Unknown
CHAPTER XV
THE HONEYED WORD
The offices of Peaceful Moments were in a large building in a street off Madison Avenue. They consisted of a sort of outer lair, where Pugsy Maloney spent his time reading tales of life on the prairies and heading off undesirable visitors; a small room, into which desirable but premature visitors were loosed, to wait their turn for admission into the Presence; and a larger room beyond, which was the editorial sanctum.
Smith, returning from luncheon on the day following his announcement of the great change, found both Betty and Pugsy waiting in the outer lair, evidently with news of import.
“Mr. Smith,” began Betty.
“Dey’re in dere,” said Master Maloney with his customary terseness.
“Who, exactly?” asked Smith.
“De whole bunch of dem.”
Smith inspected Pugsy through his eyeglass. “Can you give me any particulars?” he asked patiently. “You are well-meaning, but vague, Comrade Maloney. Who are in there?”
“About ‘steen of dem!” said Pugsy.
“Mr. Asher,” said Betty, “and Mr. Philpotts, and all the rest of them.” She struggled for a moment, but, unable to resist the temptation, added, “I told you so.”
A faint smile appeared upon Smith’s face.
“Dey just butted in,” said Master Maloney, resuming his narrative. “I was sittin’ here, readin’ me book, when de foist of de guys blows in. ‘Boy,’ says he, ‘is de editor in?’ ‘Nope,’ I says. ‘I’ll go in and wait,’ says he. ‘Nuttin’ doin’,’ says I. ‘Nix on de goin’-in act.’ I might as well have saved me breat! In he butts. In about t’ree minutes along comes another gazebo. ‘Boy,’ says he, ‘is de editor in?’ ‘Nope,’ I says. ‘I’ll wait,’ says he, lightin’ out for de door, and in he butts. Wit’ dat I sees de proposition’s too fierce for muh. I can’t keep dese big husky guys out if dey bucks center like dat. So when de rest of de bunch comes along, I don’t try to give dem de trun down. I says, ‘Well, gent,’ I says, ‘it’s up to youse. De editor ain’t in, but, if you feels lonesome, push t’roo. Dere’s plenty dere to keep youse company. I can’t be boddered!’”
“And what more could you have said?” agreed Smith approvingly. “Tell me, did these gentlemen appear to be gay and light-hearted, or did they seem to be looking for someone with a hatchet?”
“Dey was hoppin’ mad, de whole bunch of dem.”
“Dreadfully,” attested Betty.
“As I suspected,” said Smith, “but we must not repine. These trifling contretemps are the penalties we pay for our high journalistic aims. I fancy that with the aid of the diplomatic smile and the honeyed word I may manage to win out. Will you come and give me your moral support, Comrade Brown?”
He opened the door of the inner room for Betty, and followed her in.
Master Maloney’s statement that “about ‘steen” visitors had arrived proved to be a little exaggerated. There were five men in the room.
As Smith entered, every eye was turned upon him. To an outside spectator he would have seemed rather like a very well-dressed Daniel introduced into a den of singularly irritable lions. Five pairs of eyes were smoldering with a long-nursed resentment. Five brows were corrugated with wrathful lines. Such, however, was the simple majesty of Smith’s demeanor that for a moment there was dead silence. Not a word was spoken as he paced, wrapped in thought, to the editorial chair. Stillness brooded over the room as he carefully dusted that piece of furniture, and, having done so to his satisfaction, hitched up the knees of his trousers and sank gracefully into a sitting position.
This accomplished, he looked up and started. He gazed round the room.
“Ha! I am observed!” he murmured.
The words broke the spell. Instantly the five visitors burst simultaneously into speech.
“Are you the acting editor of this paper?”
“I wish to have a word with you, sir.”
“Mr. Maloney, I presume?”
“Pardon me!”
“I should like a few moments’ conversation.”
The start was good and even, but the gentleman who said “Pardon me!” necessarily finished first, with the rest nowhere.
Smith turned to him, bowed, and fixed him with a benevolent gaze through his eyeglass.
“Are you Mr. Maloney, may I ask?” enquired the favored one.
The others paused for the reply. Smith shook his head. “My name is Smith.”
“Where is Mr. Maloney?”
Smith looked across at Betty, who had seated herself in her place by the typewriter.
“Where did you tell me Mr. Maloney had gone to, Miss Brown? Ah, well, never mind. Is there anything I can do for you, gentlemen? I am on the editorial staff of this paper.”
“Then, maybe,” said a small, round gentleman who, so far, had done only chorus work, “you can tell me what all this means? My name is Waterman, sir. I am here on behalf of my wife, whose name you doubtless know.”
“Correct me if I am wrong,” said Smith, “but I should say it, also, was Waterman.”
“Luella Granville Waterman, sir!” said the little man proudly. “My wife,” he went on, “has received this extraordinary communication from a man signing himself P. Maloney. We are both at a loss to make head or tail of it.”
“It seems reasonably clear to me,” said Smith, reading the letter.
“It’s an outrage. My wife has been a contributor to this journal since its foundation. We are both intimate friends of Mr. Renshaw, to whom my wife’s work has always given complete satisfaction. And now, without the slightest warning, comes this peremptory dismissal from P. Maloney. Who is P. Maloney? Where is Mr. Renshaw?”
The chorus burst forth. It seemed that that was what they all wanted to know. Who was P. Maloney? Where was Mr. Renshaw?
“I am the Reverend Edwin T. Philpott, sir,” said a cadaverous-looking man with light blue eyes and a melancholy face. “I have contributed ‘Moments of Meditation’ to this journal for some considerable time.”
Smith nodded.
“I know, yours has always seemed to me work which the world will not willingly let die.”
The Reverend Edwin’s frosty face thawed into a bleak smile.
“And yet,” continued Smith, “I gather that P. Maloney, on the other hand, actually wishes to hurry on its decease. Strange!”
A man in a serge suit, who had been lurking behind Betty, bobbed into the open.
“Where’s this fellow Maloney? P. Maloney. That’s the man we want to see. I’ve been working for this paper without a break, except when I had the grip, for four years, and now up comes this Maloney fellow, if you please, and tells me in so many words that the paper’s got no use for me.”
“These are life’s tragedies,” sighed Smith.
“What does he mean by it? That’s what I want to know. And that’s what these gentlemen want to know. See here—”
“I am addressing—” said Smith.
“Asher’s my name. B. Henderson Asher. I write ‘Moments of Mirth.’”
A look almost of excitement came into Smith’s face, such a look as a visitor to a foreign land might wear when confronted with some great national monument. He stood up and shook Mr. Asher reverently by the hand.
“Gentlemen,” he said, reseating himself, “this is a painful case. The circumstances, as you will admit when you have heard all, are peculiar. You have asked me where Mr. Renshaw is. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know!” exclaimed Mr. Asher.
“Nobody knows. With luck you may find a black cat in a coal cellar on a moonless night, but not Mr. Renshaw. Shortly after I joined this journal, he started out on a vacation, by his doctor’s orders, and left no address. No letters were to be forwarded. He was to enjoy complete rest. Who can say where he is now? Possibly racing down some rugged slope in the Rockies with two grizzlies and a wildcat in earnest pursuit. Possibly in the midst of Florida Everglades, making a noise like a piece of meat in orde
r to snare alligators. Who can tell?”
Silent consternation prevailed among his audience.
“Then, do you mean to say,” demanded Mr. Asher, “that this fellow Maloney’s the boss here, and that what he says goes?”
Smith bowed.
“Exactly. A man of intensely masterful character, he will brook no opposition. I am powerless to sway him. Suggestions from myself as to the conduct of the paper would infuriate him. He believes that radical changes are necessary in the policy of Peaceful Moments, and he will carry them through if it snows. Doubtless he would gladly consider your work if it fitted in with his ideas. A rapid-fire impression of a glove fight, a spine-shaking word picture of a railway smash, or something on those lines, would be welcomed. But—”
“I have never heard of such a thing,” said Mr. Waterman indignantly.
“In this life,” said Smith, shaking his head, “we must be prepared for every emergency. We must distinguish between the unusual and the impossible. It is unusual for the acting editor of a weekly paper to revolutionize its existing policy, and you have rashly ordered your life on the assumption that it is impossible. You are unprepared. The thing comes on you as a surprise. The cry goes round New York, ‘Comrades Asher, Waterman, Philpotts, and others have been taken unawares. They cannot cope with the situation.’”
“But what is to be done?” cried Mr. Asher.
“Nothing, I fear, except to wait. It may be that when Mr. Renshaw, having dodged the bears and eluded the wildcat, returns to his post, he will decide not to continue the paper on the lines at present mapped out. He should be back in about ten weeks.”
“Ten weeks!”
“Till then, the only thing to do is to wait. You may rely on me to keep a watchful eye on your interests. When your thoughts tend to take a gloomy turn say to yourselves, ‘All is well. Smith is keeping a watchful eye on our interests.’”
“All the same, I should like to see this P. Maloney,” said Mr. Asher.
“I shouldn’t,” said Smith. “I speak in your best interests. P. Maloney is a man of the fiercest passions. He cannot brook interference. If you should argue with him, there is no knowing what might not happen. He would be the first to regret any violent action, when once he had cooled off, but— Of course, if you wish it I could arrange a meeting. No? I think you are wise. And now, gentlemen, as I have a good deal of work to get through—
“All very disturbing to the man of culture and refinement,” said Smith, as the door closed behind the last of the malcontents. “But I think that we may now consider the line clear. I see no further obstacle in our path. I fear I have made Comrade Maloney perhaps a shade unpopular with our late contributors, but these things must be. We must clench our teeth and face them manfully. He suffers in an excellent cause.”
CHAPTER XVI
TWO VISITORS TO THE OFFICE
There was once an editor of a paper in the Far West who was sitting at his desk, musing pleasantly on life, when a bullet crashed through the window and imbedded itself in the wall at the back of his head. A happy smile lighted up the editor’s face. “Ah!” he said complacently, “I knew that personal column of ours would make a hit!”
What the bullet was to the Far West editor, the visit of Mr. Martin Parker to the offices of Peaceful Moments was to Smith.
It occurred shortly after the publication of the second number of the new series, and was directly due to Betty’s first and only suggestion for the welfare of the paper.
If the first number of the series had not staggered humanity, it had at least caused a certain amount of comment. The warm weather had begun, and there was nothing much going on in New York. The papers were consequently free to take notice of the change in the policy of Peaceful Moments. Through the agency of Smith’s newspaper friends, it received some very satisfactory free advertisement, and the sudden increase in the sales enabled Smith to bear up with fortitude against the numerous letters of complaint from old subscribers who did not know what was good for them. Visions of a large new public which should replace these Brooklyn and Flatbush ingrates filled his mind.
The sporting section of the paper pleased him most. The personality of Kid Brady bulked large in it. A photograph of the ambitious pugilist, looking moody and important in an attitude of self-defense, filled half a page, and under the photograph was the legend, “Jimmy Garvin must meet this boy.” Jimmy was the present holder of the light-weight title. He had won it a year before, and since then had confined himself to smoking cigars as long as walking sticks and appearing nightly in a vaudeville sketch entitled, “A Fight for Honor.” His reminiscences were being published in a Sunday paper. It was this that gave Smith the idea of publishing Kid Brady’s autobiography in Peaceful Moments, an idea which won the Kid’s whole-hearted gratitude. Like most pugilists he had a passion for bursting into print. Print is the fighter’s accolade. It signifies that he has arrived. He was grateful to Smith, too, for not editing his contributions. Jimmy Garvin groaned under the supervision of a member of the staff of his Sunday paper, who deleted his best passages and altered the rest into Addisonian English. The readers of Peaceful Moments got their Brady raw.
“Comrade Brady,” said Smith meditatively to Betty one morning, “has a singularly pure and pleasing style. It is bound to appeal powerfully to the many-headed. Listen to this. Our hero is fighting one Benson in the latter’s home town, San Francisco, and the audience is rooting hard for the native son. Here is Comrade Brady on the subject: ‘I looked around that house, and I seen I hadn’t a friend in it. And then the gong goes, and I says to myself how I has one friend, my old mother down in Illinois, and I goes in and mixes it, and then I seen Benson losing his goat, so I gives him a half-scissor hook, and in the next round I picks up a sleep-producer from the floor and hands it to him, and he takes the count.’ That is what the public wants. Crisp, lucid, and to the point. If that does not get him a fight with some eminent person, nothing will.”
He leaned back in his chair.
“What we really need now,” he said thoughtfully, “is a good, honest, muck-raking series. That’s the thing to put a paper on the map. The worst of it is that everything seems to have been done. Have you by any chance a second ‘Frenzied Finance’ at the back of your mind? Or proofs that nut sundaes are composed principally of ptomaine and outlying portions of the American workingman? It would be the making of us.”
Now it happened that in the course of her rambles through the city Betty had lost herself one morning in the slums. The experience had impressed itself on her mind with an extraordinary vividness. Her lot had always been cast in pleasant places, and she had never before been brought into close touch with this side of life. The sight of actual raw misery had come home to her with an added force from that circumstance. Wandering on, she had reached a street which eclipsed in cheerlessness even its squalid neighbors. All the smells and noises of the East Side seemed to be penned up here in a sort of canyon. The masses of dirty clothes hanging from the fire-escapes increased the atmosphere of depression. Groups of ragged children covered the roadway.
It was these that had stamped the scene so indelibly on her memory. She loved children, and these seemed so draggled and uncared-for.
Smith’s words gave her an idea.
“Do you know Broster Street, Mr. Smith?” she asked.
“Down on the East Side? Yes, I went there once to get a story, one red-hot night in August, when I was on the News. The Ice Company had been putting up their prices, and trouble was expected down there. I was sent to cover it.”
He did not add that he had spent a week’s salary that night, buying ice and distributing it among the denizens of Broster Street.
“It’s an awful place,” said Betty, her eyes filling with tears. “Those poor children!”
Smith nodded.
“Some of those tenement houses are fierce,” he said thoughtfully. Like Betty, he found himself with a singularly clear recollection of his one visit to Broster Street. “But
you can’t do anything.”
“Why not?” cried Betty. “Oh, why not? Surely you couldn’t have a better subject for your series? It’s wicked. People only want to be told about them to make them better. Why can’t we draw attention to them?”
“It’s been done already. Not about Broster Street, but about other tenements. Tenements as a subject are played out. The public isn’t interested in them. Besides, it wouldn’t be any use. You can’t tree the man who is really responsible, unless you can spend thousands scaring up evidence. The land belongs in the first place to some corporation or other. They lease it to a lessee. When there’s a fuss, they say they aren’t responsible, it’s up to the lessee. And he, bright boy, lies so low you can’t find out who it is.”
“But we could try,” urged Betty.
Smith looked at her curiously. The cause was plainly one that lay near to her heart. Her face was flushed and eager. He wavered, and, having wavered, he did what no practical man should do. He allowed sentiment to interfere with business. He knew that a series of articles on Broster Street would probably be so much dead weight on the paper, something to be skipped by the average reader, but he put the thought aside.
“Very well,” he said. “If you care to turn in a few crisp remarks on the subject, I’ll print them.”
Betty’s first instalment was ready on the following morning. It was a curious composition. A critic might have classed it with Kid Brady’s reminiscences, for there was a complete absence of literary style. It was just a wail of pity, and a cry of indignation, straight from the heart and split up into paragraphs.
Smith read it with interest, and sent it off to the printer unaltered.
“Have another ready for next week, Comrade Brown,” he said. “It’s a long shot, but this might turn out to be just what we need.”
And when, two days after the publication of the number containing the article, Mr. Martin Parker called at the office, he felt that the long shot had won out.