Common Cause

by Samuel Hopkins Adams

  “It’s good advice.”

  Buddy marched along beside his employer, obviously wriggling upon the hook of some pointed thought. Presently further reticence became impossible.

  “Mr. Robson!”

  “Well?”

  “Them stamps—”

  “What would the blue pencil do to a sentence beginning that way, Buddy?”

  “Those stamps—it’s like I told the fresh guy at the window.”

  “They’re for the circulation department?”

  “No, sir. But they’re for circulation all right. I been sendin’ the paper every day to Hamburg.”

  Jeremy’s pulses quickened. “Your own idea, Buddy?”

  “Nope. I’m sendin’ it to Her. It’s Her idear. She reads it reg’lar. She’s deeply int’rusted in my cay-reer.”

  “Where did you get that? It doesn’t sound like Her.”

  “It ain’t. Got it out of a book,” confessed the boy. “I write to Her, too,” he added happily. “She ast me to.”

  “What does she think of your work?” inquired the Boss gravely.

  “I ain’t heard from Her since I began gettin’ my stuff in the paper. But I guess She likes the paper all right. She tells me in most every letter what a big thing it is to help make a noospaper.”

  “Does She? What else does She say?”

  “I dunno.” The boy lost himself in thought. “It’s just a little here an’ a little there. She never says much; not any one time. But you can see She thinks a lot of the Business.”

  “Now, you wouldn’t suppose that, would you?” said the artful Jeremy, feeding his hunger for the mere, dear memory of her brought back and made real by speech. “It must be because you told her you were going to be a newspaper man.”

  “That’s it. She thinks it’s like being a preacher, only more so. She says you mustn’t ever be mean or give away a friend or take advantage of having a noospaper to write for. An’ She says you got to always write what you honest-to-God think, because it’s yella to do the other thing. I guess She wouldn’t stand for a fake, not for a second! I bet She’d take the hid off’n some o’ them—o’ those Record guys. An’ She says the hardest thing’ll be some time when there’s somethin’ a fella oughta write an’ that’ll get him in the wrong if he does write it, for him not to lay down an’ quit on it. An’ She says never, never to be afraid o’ your job, because that makes the job your boss an’ not you the job’s boss. An’ She says unless a guy can’t trust himself nobuddy can trust him an’ be safe, no matter how much they want to. I guess that’s about all right! Ain’t it, Boss?”

  “It’s about all right, Buddy,” said Jeremy with an effort. That final bit of philosophy had stabbed.

  After the presses had stopped and the offices had emptied, that evening, the editor of The Guardian sat at his desk with the little photograph of Marcia Ames before him. He looked into the frank and radiant face; into the eyes that met the world and its perplexities so steadily, with so pure and single-minded a challenge.

  “You didn’t ask much, did you, my dear!” he said softly to the picture. “You only asked that I should be straight and honest; not a shifter and a coward. Well, it was too much. Buddy may do better. I’ll help him as far as I can. That’s a promise, my dear.”

  He heard the departing Buddy whistling outside. His footsteps approached the door. Jeremy slipped a hand over the picture.

  “Anythin’ more you want me for, Boss?” asked the boy, appearing in the doorway.

  “No, Buddy. Good-night.”

  “’Night.” He paused. “I dunno’s She would have wanted me to tell you about the paper,” he said. “She never told me not to, though. I kinda thought you’d wanta know. I guess we got a man-size job makin’ a paper good enough for Her to read, ain’t we, Boss!”

  “I guess we have,” said Jeremy steadily.

  The door shut and he returned to his contemplation of the picture. “You read me, my dear,” he said. “You were reading me all the time. You read me in the Eli Wade story. And in the golf story. And perhaps in others I didn’t realize. You knew I’d come eventually to do such a wretched crawl as I did on the German school bill. You knew that you never could trust yourself to me. You’d seen me go back on myself. You knew that a man who would go back on himself would go back on you when the test came.” He mused bitterly. “As I would have done,” said Jeremy Robson.

  No man ever pronounced upon himself a harsher judgement.

  21

  “Boss,” said Andrew Galpin.

  He had come in and perched himself upon a corner of Jeremy’s desk, swinging his long legs. A folded copy of that day’s Guardian served him for a fan, which he plied languidly, for it was the early hot spell of June, 1914. The regard with which he favored his chief was both affectionate and quizzical.

  “Well?” queried Jeremy.

  “D’ you know we’re pretty near two years old?”

  “That’s right, Andy. We are.”

  “D’ you feel it?”

  “Yes, and a couple of hundred years on top of it.”

  “So bad as that! We’re some old for our age, I’ll admit. But I don’t see any signs of senile decay, yet.”

  “Oh, we can still stir our bones enough to get off the press on time.”

  “What do you think of this feller’s paper, anyway, Boss?”

  “What do you?”

  “Pretty well satisfied, thank you. We’ve got fourteen thousand circulation that you couldn’t pry loose with a crow-bar.”

  “Couldn’t we? I’m not going to try.”

  “Not going to? You have tried. You’ve stepped on every cussed one of their cussed toes, one time or another. Dam’ fi don’t think you’ve got ’em so they like it.”

  “Queer way they’ve got of showing it, then. Do you ever read the editorial correspondence?”

  “Oh, that’s all right!” The general manager waved such matters loftily away. “They quit the paper, sore. Then they get over it and come back. If they don’t, there’s plenty of others to take their places. Even the Dutchers”—this being, at the time, Mr. Galpin’s term indicative of that powerful and flourishing organization, the Deutscher club—“have come around.”

  “Not all of them. Stockmuller is out still.”

  “He’s a stiff-neck. He’s the only one.”

  “Not the only advertiser. The Laundry Association have never got over Wong Kee, the yellow peril. The Emporium takes as little space as possible. And I don’t notice the P.-U. crowding any contracts on us, Andy.”

  “Verall tells me they’re coming back. At least, they’re showing flirtatious signs.”

  “No! I wonder what kind of bargain they’ll offer now.”

  “You ought to curb that mean, suspicious nature of yours, Boss,” reproved Galpin solemnly. “Now, I set it down to force of habit on the P.-U.’s part. Something’s in the air. Therefore they begin to advertise. It’s the cuttle-fish principle. Only they use printer’s ink.”

  “What’s their little game?”

  “Self-defense, I guess. The Governor is sharpening up his Corporation Control Bill.”

  “We’ll be for it. The P.-U. advertising won’t make any difference. Montrose Clark ought to know that by this time. If he knows anything,” qualified Jeremy.

  “Don’t worry about President Puff. He knows a lot of things he didn’t know before The Guardian tackled the job of his education. One of ’em is that the P.-U. is going to need just as much friendship and just as little enmity as it can get when this bill comes up.”

  “And Clark is going to smooth us down with his advertising, eh?”

  Andy lifted up his voice in pertinent song:

  “There was a young man who said, ‘Why

  Can’t I look in my Ear with my Eye?

  If I set my mind to it

  I’m sure I can do it.

  You can never tell till you try.’

  There’s the P.-U. motto,” he added; “and a noble one it is. ‘You neve
r can tell till you try.’”

  “Let ’em try somewhere else than in The Guardian.”

  “Not so, Boss,” argued Galpin. “This bill is rough stuff. It’ll pretty near wipe out the P.-U. They’re entitled to a yell, at least. Even Verrall admits that. And what Verrall won’t swallow whole, when it comes from Mart Embree, must be tough swallowing.”

  “Verrall wants to make his advertising total as big as possible.”

  “Being human—although an advertising manager—he does. Well, he’s got no kick coming. Look at the clippings of your young friend and disciple, Mr. Buddy Higman. The Record is nowhere. Respected Sir and Editor, as your correspondents from the cheese district write; we are making money this year. Real, guaranteed money.”

  “Enough to take up our note?”

  “Why worry? The bank doesn’t. Old Warrington purrs like a cat every time he meets me. You can read in any witch-book that a banker purring like a cat is a sure sign of prosperity.”

  “What’s it in your scheme-hatching mind to do with all this prosperity, Andy?”

  “New press,” returned the general manager, who had been leading up to this point.

  Pro and con they argued it, the owner finally agreeing.

  “We really owe it to the advertisers as well as the readers” had been Andy’s best argument. “Look how they’ve stuck.”

  “They’ve had to,” returned Jeremy grimly. “Half of ’em would have got out at every bump if they hadn’t been afraid.”

  “Well, we’re solid with ’em now. Look what we did to ’em in April. Hiked the rates a clean ten per cent all around. And did they peep?”

  “They did not. They howled.”

  “Force of habit again. They all came through, didn’t they? We’re making it pay ’em.”

  “We’re giving them all the return they’re entitled to,” agreed the editor. “I wish I were as sure that we’re giving the reading public as good.”

  “Don’t hear many kicks, do you?”

  “Lots. If I didn’t I’d know we were rotten.”

  “Ay-ah. That was a fool question of mine. But I mean, you feel the paper taking hold all the time, can’t you? We’re certainly putting it over. We’ve made a Governor already. What do you expect? Want to elect a President and Congress?”

  “The Governor is one of my troubles, Andy.”

  “Butting in?”

  “You can’t call it that.”

  “What can you call it?” demanded the downright Galpin.

  “Well, boosting. Without him we wouldn’t be where we are.”

  “Nor anywhere else,” added the other with emphasis.

  “Probably not. I appreciate that. I’d give him the paper, if he needed it, as far as that goes. But as long as my name is on it, I want it to be my paper.”

  “Well, ‘Smiling Mart’ isn’t trying to pry it away from you, is he?”

  “Of course not. It’s hard to put into words. But I feel as if I—we—The Guardian were being surrounded by a sort of political web.”

  “The Governor being the spider?”

  “No. It’s his web, in a way; but he isn’t spinning it. It’s being spun for him and for us. All our readers identify us completely with his policies. If I say anything editorially, it commits the Governor. People take it for granted that we’re his mouthpiece. It’s isn’t fair to him or to us.”

  “Does he take advantage of it?”

  “We—ell; I don’t know. He doesn’t mean to. Every now and then, though, something will come up where he wants us to do this or not to do that—always some unimportant thing—because of its influence on more important things that we’re both interested in.”

  “As for instance?”

  “Take all this boosting, press-agent stuff that comes along and that Embree wants in,” replied Jeremy. “Sometimes it’s political. Sometimes it’s personal. Sometimes it’s the German stuff that Wymett used to talk about. I’ve got to admit that Embree’s view is always for the practical good of the paper. By following his advice, we’ve held sulky advertisers more than once. But I know this, I’m doing for him—and for the politics of it—and for the paper itself, in a way, I guess—what I wouldn’t do for any advertiser. And sometimes it’s been a matter of principles. Not very important, maybe, but principles just the same. Compromise, Andy.”

  “Life’s mostly compromise, I guess. There’s a little more of it in the newspaper game than in other lines because the newspaper touches life at more points than any other business.”

  “I’ve always thought,” pursued Jeremy, “that when I came to own a newspaper it would be independent if it wasn’t anything else. Well, look at The Guardian!”

  “Ay-ah. I’m looking at it. What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s ducking a little here, and dodging a little there, and trying to be cautious about this issue and polite about that man, and so on. That isn’t my notion of being independent.”

  “What is? I guess we’re as cocky as any paper in the country. You can’t tell all the people to go to hell all the time,” pointed out the general manager, reasonably.

  “I don’t want to. But I want to be able to if I do want to. Am I talking like a fool, Andy?”

  “I don’t know,” answered the other, troubled.

  A silence fell between them. Galpin whittled a pencil to so careful and delicate a point that it immediately broke. He repeated the experiment with like result before he spoke.

  “Say, Jem.”

  The other looked up, attentive. Seldom, since their new relationship had the older man employed any formula of address other than the half-jocular, half-official, “Boss.”

  “Say it, Andy.”

  “Who are you making this paper for?”

  Across the editor’s face passed a swift shock, as of thought surprised and betrayed.

  “Making it for?” he said slowly.

  “Ay-ah. For yourself, I guess. Huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it don’t suit?”

  “Not altogether.”

  “Not good enough?”

  “No.”

  “Ay-ah. I see.” One of those extraordinary flashes of intuitive insight which sometimes pass electrically between surcharged and kindred minds, culminated in the general manager’s next question. “What does she think of it?”

  “Who?” The startled counter-question represented less than Jeremy’s normal frankness.

  Andy rose and stood above the other. “How should I know who? If I did I’d know more about the paper.”

  “You’re right.” For the moment Jeremy was as intuitive as his friend. “You think it would have been more honest of me, as I’m making a paper for someone else, to let you in on it.”

  “What does she think of The Guardian?” persisted Andy.

  Jeremy stared out into the gray and bleak spaces. “God knows,” he said. “I’ve no way of finding out.”

  Andy turned and went to the door. “Forget it,” he said. The tone was his sufficient apology.

  That night of June, 1914,1 two years after Marcia Ames’s lips had pressed themselves to his cheek, and he had felt her sobbing breath on his face, Jeremy went again to the bridge where they had stood. A barge filled with young people passed the turn of the lake. A canoe bearing a boy and a girl—how young they seemed to lonely Jeremy, and how enviable!—floated beneath him, and their speech came up to him, dim, tender, and murmurous. Then, sped by a poignant magic, the blended voices of Marcia’s song were wafted to him across the waters.

  “Who wins his love shall lose her,

  Who loses her shall gain,

  For still the spirit wooes her,

  A soul without a stain,

  And memory still pursues her

  With longings not in vain!”

  He could hear in the distance the faint plash of the oars that drove the boat of song. The fairy voices, fainter, sang:

  “He loses her who gains her,

  Who watches, day by day,
/>   The dust of time . . .”

  The words were blurred as the unseen boat passed behind some unseen cape; then the music died on the breeze. Jeremy bent over the railing, where Marcia’s hand had rested.

  Half a world away an obscured fanatic, unknown to the world and today almost forgotten by it, was gloomily, lonelily, dreamily blending those common, inexpensive, terrific chemicals whereby he was to plunge civilization in carnage. The happy boats passed on. The happy voices blended again and were silenced. The busy presses chronicled the events of unsuspecting nations to little folk of souls yet untouched who, sleeping, “rose up to buy and sell again.” Then the bomb of the dreamy fanatic was flung, and in the force of that explosion, the wave of war, which had hung crested and suspended, broke and whelmed the world in such flood that the quicksands upon its edges spread even to far-away Fenchester.

  Part 3

  22

  Stricken, at first, by the unimaginable vastness of the tragedy which had befallen Europe, the State of Centralia quickly recovered, and lifted up a thousand voices of acclaim. Germany was being splendidly victorious.1 Nothing could stop the Kaiser’s perfected war machine; nothing could stand against the valor and discipline of the field-gray legions. Triumph was a matter of only a few months; perhaps only a few weeks. France would be crushed; Russia humbled; England, the faithless and foolhardy, penned in her island and slowly starved to submission. Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles! The loyalest Imperial colony could hardly have rejoiced more openly or fervently than did Centralia, a sovereign State of the United States of America. Slow, still, systematic, scientific propagation of Deutschtum throughout the years now reaped its due reward.

  Those there were in the State, and many, who revolted from the brutality of Germany’s war-making. But what voice they could find in Centralia, where politicians and press and pulpit were dominated either by the influence or the fear of organized German sentiment? Let a man but speak a word against Germany’s cause, and the anathema of Deutschtum descended upon him. A highly practical anathema, too; directed to his business affairs and even his social relations. The accusation of prejudice, of Wall Street influence, of British sympathies lay against any who dared question or criticize the “necessary rigor” of German methods. The rape of Belgium2 was hardly more triumphant than the seduction of Centralia.