Common Cause

by Samuel Hopkins Adams

  “We’re not printing anything,” pleasantly replied his visitor.

  “What do you want, then?”

  “Will you sell The Guardian?”

  “To whom?”

  “To me.”

  Mr. Wymett leaned back from his desk and studied his caller from beneath heavy eyelids. His posture lent to his face a furtively benevolent look as of one meditating the performance of a good deed on the sly. Such was not his precise intent, as regarded young Robson. He didn’t trust young Robson. He didn’t trust The Record. For that matter he was not in a mood to trust anybody or anything in a calumnious world. He opened a small cabinet at his elbow which he had hastily closed upon young Robson’s entrance.

  “May I offer you a drink?” he said.

  “No; thank you.”

  “Good! Nothing mixes so badly with printer’s ink,” approved the older man patronizingly. “I seldom touch it, otherwise than as a digestant.” He poured himself a liberal allowance and set the glass on his desk. “Whom do you represent?”

  “Myself.”

  Mr. Wymett smiled tolerantly.

  “Of course. But whose capital?”

  “My own.”

  “A secret deal, eh? What reason have you to suppose that the paper is for sale?”

  “I was in the Senate.”

  Thus unpleasantly recalled to his thorny situation, Mr. Wymett gulped down his whiskey and hastily poured another.

  “A bare-faced forgery,” he asserted with an effect of judicial severity; “as will be proved at the proper time.”

  “Let us assume it to be, for the sake of courtesy. It got a quick endorsement,” replied young Robson smoothly.

  Mr. Wymett hastily set down the re-filled glass which he was voluptuously raising, and rather wished that he hadn’t taken that other one. Young Robson was not, perhaps, as young as his years.

  “Endorsement?” he inquired.

  “Locker and Mayne have skipped out. The forgery impressed them to that extent.”

  “Yellow,” commented the severe Mr. Wymett. His hand crept toward the stimulant which possesses the mystic power of changing timorous yellow into fighting red—up to a point—and was retracted again before attaining the goal. The caller’s quick eye noted the movement. “They own no part of The Guardian,” added its proprietor, “and their action has nothing to do with the matter of its sale.”

  “No,” commented young Robson in a tone disturbingly indeterminate between confirmation and incredulity.

  “I’ve been offered a hundred thousand for the paper,” remarked Mr. Wymett casually.

  “Coal-oil Johnny must have been out this way.”

  “My dear young sir,” said Mr. Wymett in a tone intended to be crushing; “I am talking business. May I trouble you to do the same?”

  “Then The Guardian is for sale.”

  “Everything in this world is for sale, at its price,” returned the editor-owner, thereby unconsciously voicing his philosophy of life.

  “I assume that the price of The Guardian has not been increased by the events of today.”

  “Assume nothing of the sort.”

  Young Mr. Robson leaned forward over the desk. “Shall I talk plain talk?”

  “If you please.”

  “There’ll be an indictment if you stay here.”

  “There will. For forgery. Against the author of that faked letter.”

  “Against you. Nothing can stop it.”

  “Did Embree promise you that?”

  “There’s no question of promise. I don’t even get your idea.”

  “Indeed! Suppose you give me credit for a gleam of intelligence. Nothing more is required to see your game. Yours and Embree’s. He wants to get his hands on a paper here. He fakes up this attack on me and The Guardian to bulldoze me into selling the paper. You are his tool. The pair of you think you can run me off my own property with an unloaded gun. Not A. M. Wymett!”

  “Very ingenious. But Senator Embree doesn’t happen to enter into this in any way, shape, or manner.”

  “Then who is backing you? Is it Phipps and the brewery crowd? Or the banking trust? I don’t suppose you’ve saved the money out of your twenty-five a week from The Record.”

  “That’s beside the question. The money is there. Seventy thousand dollars flat.”

  Into Mr. Wymett’s parched-looking eyes shot a swift gleam, only to be as swiftly veiled. He lifted and slowly drank the liquor before him. He shook his head.

  “Not to be considered. Absurd.”

  “It is what I figure The Guardian to be worth; to have been worth up to two-fifteen this afternoon.”

  “It is worth just as much now as it was yesterday.”

  “Seventy thousand dollars,” pursued young Robson as if the other had not spoken. “I’d like your answer.”

  “Indeed! And when would you like it?”

  The visitor glanced at the clock.

  “Say, an hour.”

  “Come, now! You aren’t so innocent of business as to suppose that deals of this importance are put through on any such hair-trigger basis.”

  “Not ordinarily. This is rather special, isn’t it?” insinuated the other.

  “Frankly, I don’t like your attitude, Mr. Robson.”

  “Consider your own.” Jeremy’s eyes hardened. “You’re fiddling and faddling within a step of the penitentiary. They’ll get you if you try to hang to The Guardian. Public sentiment will demand it. Do you know that the Bellair papers are carrying the story?”

  “Damn ’em!” said Mr. Wymett and visited the decanter again.

  “So, you see how far it’s gone. Now, if it is known that you’re out of the paper, they’ll let up on you, won’t they? That looks to me like the politics of it.”

  “Probably,” agreed Mr. Wymett.

  “Well, what do you say?”

  “Let me talk to my lawyer.”

  The Honorable Selden Dana was summoned, and came after a short delay, in the course of which Mr. Wymett had two more whiskies to his own good luck, for the price offered was better than he could have reasonably hoped. On Judge Dana’s arrival he and Mr. Wymett retired for a conference. It was brief. Three words comprised the lawyer’s advice: “Sell and git!”

  “You’ve bought, Mr. Robson,” he said, returning with his client for a drink, and departed thoughtfully, leaving the old and the new owner of The Guardian with duly signed preliminary agreements in their pockets. Jeremy was to take over control the first of the succeeding month.

  “So you won’t say where the money comes from?” said the now relaxed and smiling Mr. Wymett.

  “For publication?”

  “Oh, no. To satisfy personal curiosity.”

  “For that I wouldn’t. Public curiosity, though; that’s different. I suppose people will be interested to know who’s back of the paper.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Then I’ll look to you to tell them. In tomorrow’s Guardian. These are the facts, which you can verify by wire if you wish.” And he related to the surprised Mr. Wymett the main circumstances of the Greer will. “When that is published,” he concluded, “people will understand that it’s my own money, that The Guardian is my own paper, and that there are no strings on it or me.”

  Mr. Wymett had another drink—“just one more”—to the success of The Guardian under its new management, and became expansive for once in his cautious life.

  “You’ve bought into a sporting proposition, young man.” The retiring editor rested his lined and puckered face on his hand, and regarded his vis-à-vis thoughtfully. “A sporting proposition. Oh, God; I’m glad to be out of it—and sorry! It’s a hell of a life, and I’ve loved it. But in the end it gets you. Like a drug.”

  He sat staring in a brief silence at the young, sanguine, keen face before him; a sad, humorous-eyed, ageing, slovenly, dishonest, tolerant philosopher.

  “You’re young,” he broke forth. “Young enough, probably, to believe that you can run a newspaper and
still be—and still keep your ideals. Oh, I had ’em, when I started in, just as you’ve got ’em. Of course you’ve got ’em! They go with youth. Perhaps they’d stay with youth if youth would stay with us. But you grow old so damnably fast in this game. Look at me! Or perhaps you’d better not look at me. You might see yourself as you’ll be at my age.”

  “Not me,” returned Jeremy Robson with unflattering conviction.

  “Not? Well, perhaps not. I’m an old babbler. So you want Fenchester to know that it’s your own money that’s behind the paper?”

  “Yes; so they’ll understand that it’s a strictly one-man proposition.”

  “And you think it’s going to be. Oh, well; for a little while, maybe. Then—” His voice was as that of one who regretfully deprives a child of a sweetmeat—“you’ll forego that happy and infantile dream. You’re not going to run your newspaper just because you’ve bought it. The politicians are going to run it for you. The banks are going to run it for you. The railroads and trolley lines and water-power companies and public-utility people are going to run it for you. And always the advertisers—the advertisers—the advertisers. You’re going to be just a little, careful, polite Recording Secretary for them all. You’ll print what they tell you to and you’ll kill what they forbid you to print. Otherwise you can’t live. Don’t I know! I’ve tried it—both ways.”

  He dreamed with somnolent eyes back over the happy, troubled, iniquitous, exciting years of The Guardian. “And so you think you’ll change all that! Not much to be left of the old Guardian, eh? Perhaps not even his figurehead, blowing his trumpet over the paper’s title. I hope you’ll leave that, though. It’s been there a long time. Fifty-odd years. Almost as long as I’ve lived. For old times’ sake I’d like to see him stay, the old Guardian. We newspaper men are all sentimentalists and conservatives at heart.”

  “Not me,” denied Jeremy. “Not the conservative part, anyway. But I’ll leave The Guardian his trumpet.”

  “That trumpet! I was going to rock the walls of Jericho with it! They still stand; you may have noticed that. There’s a lot of solidity about our modern Jericho. As for us poor Joshuas of the newspapers, our trumpet isn’t a trumpet any more. It’s the horn of a talking-machine. We’re just damned phonographs playing the records that bigger men thrust into our mechanical insides. Am I boring you?”

  “Go on,” said Jeremy Robson. “I took a course in journalism at college. There was nothing in it like this.”

  “There wouldn’t be. I’d like to lecture to ’em on the Voice of the Press. The Voice from the Horn! Nickel-in-the-slot and you get your tune. The politician drops his coin in and gets his favorite selection, in consideration of a job on a board. The city authorities drop their coin in—that’s the official printing—and you sing their little song. The railroads drop in a few favors, passes and the like, and the horn grinds out their pet record. And always the advertiser, big, small, and medium; he owns your paper, news and editorials, and you’ll do as he says or—where do you get off!

  “And then there’s the silencers,” continued the remorseless lecturer. “Don’t forget the silencers. The Dutch and the Swedes and the Norwegians and the Irish, all with tender toes. The Jews and the Methodists and the Catholics and the Lutherans, all touchy as wasps. You can’t afford to play any tune they don’t like. And always there’s Deutschtum. Know what ‘Deutschtum’ is? No, you wouldn’t. Well, it means that German-Americans are organized for German purposes all through the Middle West, and nowhere more strongly than in this State. When Germany declares war on Europe, which will be within ten years—yes, I’ve been grinned at before by people who considered this just a crazy hobby of mine—all our Bunds and Vereins and Gesellschafts are going to see to it that the United States either stays out or goes in on the ‘right’ side. Why, they’re making a Little Germany of us right here in this State and city by slow, methodical, Teuton education,1 managed by our school boards which are run by Germans, trained to it in the public schools—”

  “That’s a thing I’d like to tackle,” said Robson thoughtfully.

  “Hands off, young David! The Dutch Goliath is too big for your sling. No, sir! Stand in with them. You’ll find them reasonable and easy enough to deal with so long as you don’t interfere with their programme. Play the German tune and they’ll play yours. Study ’em, flatter ’em a little, and watch ’em. Theirs is the winning game.

  “To trail along with the successful element,” continued the cynical oracle: “That’s the great secret. It’s the only way for a newspaper. There lies your profit.”

  “In other words, selling out to the highest bidder,” translated his disenchanted listener.

  The volunteer professor of journalism took one more drink and gazed with surprise and reproach at the empty bottle.

  “Oh, I don’t say you’ll sell out, all at once. It’s a gradual process. Step by step, finding a nice soft excuse to plant your foot on each time, until you hit the bottom. Don’t I know! What you won’t do for fear, you’ll do for friendship—and then for favor—and then for preferment.” His voice dropped, and his eyes sought the empty liquor glass. “And then—for cash.”

  The younger man stirred, uneasy under that intimate and betraying confidence.

  “Oh, it’s a rotten game, and Lord! how I hate to be quitting it!” pursued the philosopher. “How I’d love to be you, just getting really into it! Perhaps I’d do different. Make a better job of it. Keep to my ideals. Perhaps not. Too heavy odds.” His eyes lifted again with a bleary, dreamy wistfulness. “So you’re going to run an honest newspaper in Fenchester, are you, son?”

  The visitor rose. “You bet I am!” he said jubilantly.

  [Often in the vivid years to follow, the young owner of The Guardian had cause to reflect that the shrewdest professional advice which he had ever disregarded came from one who had just “stuck” him with an all-but-ruinous bargain.]

  Late as was the interview, he couldn’t go to bed without telling Andrew Galpin. Much depended on that astute youth. Jeremy routed him out of bed, at his boarding-house.

  “Come out and get a rarebit and a stein of beer, Andy.”

  “Ay-a-a-ah!” yawned Galpin. “Watsamatter with you? What time is it?”

  “Quarter to one.”

  “You’re crazy, young fellow.”

  “I’m worse than that. I’ve just bought The Guardian.”

  “What!”

  “That’s what.”

  “Where’d you get the money?”

  “Left to me.”

  “How much did you pay?”

  “Seventy thousand.”

  “Seventy! You fat-wit!”

  “What’s the matter with that?” asked Jeremy, crestfallen.

  “Twenty thousand nice, fat, round, cool dollars is what’s the matter with it. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Didn’t have the time. I caught Wymett when he was scared.”

  “He caught you when you were easy,” retorted Galpin in disgust. “How did you happen to get stuck for seventy?”

  Jeremy looked sulky. “I figured it out on a basis of advertising and circulation.”

  “Oh, hell! You poor innocent!” These unpalatable observations he left his caller to digest while he retired to wash his face. In the act of lacing up his left boot he remarked: “You could have got it for fifty. Fifty-five at the outside.”

  “It ought to make eight thousand a year.”

  “On paper,” was Galpin’s laconic comment. He looked up from his right boot. “Its advertising rate card is all bunk. Rotten with rebates.”

  “Oh!” said Jeremy blankly. “Anyway, it can be made to make money,” he added, recovering.

  “Maybe. How much reserve have you got?”

  “Oh, about fifteen thousand.”

  “It’ll eat that in the first year,” observed Galpin, slipping into his suspenders.

  A dismayed silence fell between the friends. “Well, come on,” said Jeremy finally.

  “
I’m afraid I’ll spoil your appetite.”

  “You haven’t improved it,” admitted Jeremy. “So you think I’ve made a fool of myself.”

  “I think you’ve bought a dog, and an old dog.”

  “It can be taught new tricks.”

  “A yellow dog.”

  “It hasn’t always been yellow. It needn’t keep on being.”

  “I don’t think you’ll be comfortable in its hide.”

  “Andy, I’d counted on you.”

  Galpin stopped buttoning his waistcoat and looked up. “For what?”

  “To help me make a real newspaper.”

  “As how?”

  “General manager.”

  “Is that why you’re asking me out to beer up, young fellow?”

  “Yes.”

  Galpin removed his waistcoat and hung it neatly on a chair back. He then proceeded to unlace his right boot. “What are you doing?” demanded Jeremy.

  “Going back to bed.”

  “Not interested?”

  “Worse than that. I’m excited.”

  “Want time to—”

  “Want nothin’!”

  “Well, but—”

  “No beer for me. No midnight racketings. I go on the water wagon right here. Also the sleep wagon.” He folded his trousers lengthwise upon his trunk, and reached for his pajamas. “I advise you the same,” he added. “We’ve got a job, you and I, training a yellow dog to jump in and fight for its life.”

  “You’re on for the job, then, Andy?” cried Jeremy.

  “Boss,” said Andrew Galpin, rolling over into his dishevelled bed, “you’ve hired a hand.”

  Part 2

  12

  Motives not fully formulated had impelled Jeremy Robson to the purchase of The Fenchester Guardian. Now that he was face to face with the multiform problem of what he was to do with his new responsibility, he sought to determine why he had possessed himself of it, hoping to discover in that Why a clue to his future course.

  Several figures at once stepped to the front of his mind and imperiously claimed credit for inspiring his action. There was Montrose Clark who had capped his impersonal insolences by the shibboleth, “rippawtah.” Nobody was ever going to give Jeremy Robson curt orders as a “rippawtah” again. (But he had the saving sense to grin at himself for the triviality of it!) There was Andrew Galpin, who had said of the pleasant pursuit of editorial writing that the practitioner of it “was licked—a beaten man,” thus taking all the gloss from that phase. There was Milliken, crude, coarse, malicious, with his inept but biting epithets, and his blatant jibes at the necessities of hired-man (or worse-than-hired-woman) journalism. There was Eli Wade, whom he had written down to order—though herein Jeremy was still dallying with self-delusions, since it was the lure of his own facile pen that had betrayed him there—and to whom he owed a reparation which he could perhaps now make. There was his old purpose of someday owning a paper; quite a different paper, however, from the feeble and dubious Guardian. More potent was the influence, never wholly abated, of that talk with Senator Martin Embree wherein the shrewd judge of men and agencies had suggested the power to be exerted for good by a fair-minded, independent daily. But the real motivating power was Marcia Ames. Withdrawing herself from him, she had left him a legacy of influence which was, at the same time, a debt. He owed it to himself to prove to her that he could be as honorable as she had deemed him dishonorable; as trustworthy as she had deemed him unfit to be trusted; and he must do this through this same medium of print whereby he had offended. Something dogged in him prescribed that he should work out his salvation there on the spot. She might never return to see it. She might never even know of it. But it would be her work. By so much, at least, Jeremy would hold her. And in doing what she would have him do, he would fill that bleak and arid void, which, lacking hope, can be appeased only by activity.