“Number One,” suggested Jeremy. “Mr. Montrose Clark.”
“Setting aside any personal prejudice in the matter, what have you got against the Public Utilities Corporation?”
“It doesn’t play fair. It is always begging for special privileges and then establishing them as rights after it has got them.”
The lawyer reflected that this theory, presented and amplified editorially in The Guardian, would be unpleasantly difficult to refute.
“After all, it performs a public service,” he pointed out, a bit lamely.
“The public could do it for itself better and cheaper.”
“That’s Embreeism. It’s Socialism.”
“Call it what you like. It’s common sense.”
“Let me advise you, in the friendliest spirit, not to take up any such scatter-brained theories in your paper. They’d wreck it.”
“That may come later. I’ll tell you this now, Judge. We won’t support the transfer plan.”
“I never thought you would,” said the lawyer calmly.
“What’s the idea of this call, then?”
“To suggest that you keep your hands off and let us fight it out in the Council.”
Jeremy laughed outright. “You don’t ask me to hold the easy mark while you go through his pockets. Only to stand by and not interfere.”
Judge Dana grinned. “I don’t care much for the style of your metaphor,” he confessed.
“Judge, I’m afraid it’s no go. You can easily bulldoze or bribe the Council, if we keep our hands off.”
“Fair words, my boy! Fair words! Hasn’t The Guardian ever done any bulldozing?”
“I expect it has—in a good cause.”
“This is a good cause. It’s going to be good for you as well as us—and the public.”
“How so?” queried Jeremy.
“Our plan is to present the new system to the public through a series of advertisements. Education, you understand. The modern way: through the press. Would you like to see the outline?”
“Come to the point. What’s the amount?”
Where the hand-perfected Garson would have seen hope in the question, the warier lawyer scented danger to his plans. Nevertheless he went ahead. “Five hundred, minimum. Perhaps as high as a thousand, if the public is slow to learn. Our total advertising appropriation this year,” stated Judge Dana with great deliberation, “will run to five thousand dollars. There is no reason why The Guardian should not get a half of it. At least a half.”
“Did Mr. Clark ever get the message that I sent him by Garson, as to bribes?”
“Bribes?” The lawyer looked properly startled. “I don’t know. I doubt it.”
“I sent word to Clark that when I got ready to take bribes, I’d take them direct, in the form of cash.”
“But I’m not offering to bribe you or The Guardian,” protested the other. “It’s a matter of simple business. We institute an advertising campaign in a newspaper. We don’t ask it to advocate our measures; to a finicking mind that might seem to be a form of bribery. No; we only ask that, having published our advertising and accepted us as customers, the paper refrain from rendering the service we’ve paid for useless or less than useless, by attacking our arguments editorially. Isn’t that fair and reasonable?” pleaded the lawyer, with a plausible gesture of laying the matter out for equitable judgement.
Jeremy passed the argument. “Do you think Garson ever delivered my message?”
“I should think it unlikely,” returned the other, taken slightly aback.
“Afraid?”
“Politic.”
“The same thing, usually. Are you afraid of Montrose Clark?”
The lawyer reddened. “I came here as one gentleman to another—”
“With an offer of hush-money,” broke in the editor. “Come, Judge; you and I are down to hard-pan. We can dispense with bluff. However, if you don’t like the word ‘afraid’—I don’t like it much, myself, but that’s because there’s so many things that I’m trying not to be afraid of—I’ll take it back. Now; will you take my message to Clark, as Garson wouldn’t?”
“No; I will not.”
“Then I’ll have to write it to him. Or, I might print it in The Guardian, in the form of an open letter following this interview.”
“This is a confidential visit,” cried the lawyer, shocked clean out of his professional calm.
“You’ve got me there,” admitted the other. “I’ve got to play square if I put up the bluff, haven’t I, Judge? Even with you.”
“I’m damned if I understand you, young man.”
“Cheer up. We’ve got many long years to learn all about each other in.”
“You think The Guardian will last?” Dana could not resist the temptation to impart the dig.
“It’ll be remembered, if it doesn’t,” promised its editor. “Won’t you reconsider the matter of that message, Judge? You can tone it down, you know, and temper it to the dignity of the great little man, whereas if I write to him—”
“I’ll do it,” declared Dana suddenly. “And I won’t tone it down.”
“And you’ll enjoy it,” added Jeremy with a grin, which met an unexpected response. The two men understood each other. In a certain complimentary sense they were even sympathetic to each other.
Devastating was the wrath of Montrose Clark upon receipt of Judge Dana’s report, wholly unexpurgated. He fumed, first redly, then purply, as if some strange chemical reaction were taking place inside him; and from the exhalations of that turmoil, there crystallized a most unwise decision. Montrose Clark decided upon reprisals with his enemy’s own weapon. He had Garson write several personal attacks upon Jeremy Robson, and intimidated Farley into publishing them in The Record, at special advertising rates, a procedure decidedly painful to Farley’s views of professional ethics and journalistic fellowship. Jeremy retorted with a series of hasty but rather brilliant imaginary interviews with one “President Puff,” which all but drove the subject of them into an apoplexy, and were a source of joy to the ungodly, albeit discreetly subdued as to expression, for the P.-U. head was a man of power in many directions. At this point the Church rushed into the breach in the person of the Reverend Mr. Merserole, Montrose Clark’s rector, and the beneficiary of a five thousand dollar gift to the fund of the Nicklin Avenue Church only a week previous. Both the high-minded Mr. Clark and the high-church rector would have been profoundly and quite honestly shocked at the suggestion that there was the faintest element of financial influence (in impious circles called “graft”) in what followed. But the reverend gentlemen preached an able and severe sermon upon the topic “Poisoned Pens,” in which a certain type of reckless, demagogic, passion-inciting, self-seeking, conscienceless journalism was lifted up to public reprobation in a pillar of fiery invective. The Guardian violated all precedent by publishing the livelier portions of the sermon under the caption, “Whom can the Reverend Gentleman Mean?” and followed this up with a report on the Clark contribution, paralleled with further excerpts from the more spiritual and lofty portions of the sermon, headed with the text “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” The reverend Mr. Merserole was pained and annoyed for the remainder of the week by a steady influx of marked copies of The Guardian. He was stimulated to a holy but helpless wrath by the subsequent discovery that he, the impeccable pastor of the fashionable Nicklin Avenue Church, had been impiously dubbed “the Nickle-in-the-Slot rector.” This ribaldry he ascribed to Jeremy Robson’s unprofessional wit, wherein he was wrong. As a matter of fact, it was a flash from the quaint mind of Eli Wade, the Boot & Shoe Surgeon. But Jeremy had earned another implacable enemy.
The Guardian did not get its share of the $500-or-more educational advertising from the P.-U. Indeed, there was no educational advertising. The transfer issue was passed, for the time, rather than venture into the open where, as Judge Dana observed, “The Guardian was waiting for it with a fish-horn and a brick”; and the P.-U.’s legal l
ights set about drafting a blanket franchise for the consideration of some future legislature, which should enable the corporation to do about what it pleased without reference to dubious councils or pestilent journalistic demagogues.
18
Crystallizing policies left but two figures in the field for the campaign of 1913. That Martin Embree would carry the radical banner was a foregone conclusion. Magnus Laurens was logically the man to oppose him. To the Clark-Wanser-Dana wing of the party, who owned the then Governor, a weak-kneed, feeble-spirited, oratorical creature, Laurens was distasteful. He was far more prone to give orders than to take them. But on fundamental issues he was “right”; a sound conservative, reliably hostile to all the quasi-socialistic theories threatening the control of the State. Moreover his personal and political rectitude was beyond suspicion. Like or dislike him, he was the only man in sight with a chance of beating Embree.
Meantime “Deutschtum,” that world-wide, subterranean propaganda of German influence, German culture, German hopes and ambitions and future dominations which had for a quarter of a century established itself reproductively as the ichneumon parasite affixes its eggs to the body of the helpless host which, later, their brood will prey upon and destroy—Deutschtum was scheming out the peaceable and subtle conquest of Centralia through capture of the minds of the coming generations of citizens. The Cultural Language Bill was quite harmless in appearance, so astutely had it been drawn. Under pretense of giving parents of public school pupils the right to secure for their children, by petition, instruction in foreign languages, it actually established German as a “preferred study” with the heaviest ratio of credits, and, in the advanced schools, as practically a compulsory subject. This meant the addition of some four to five hundred teachers of German throughout the State, every one of whom would be a propagandist of Deutschtum. As a side issue, the determination of the textbooks on European history was left to the German staff. The school boards of the State being already pretty well Teutonized, it was evident that, should the bill pass, history as taught in the Centralia school system would be censored agreeably to the purposes of His Imperial Majesty Wilhelm of Germany.
Originally it was intended to present the measure, backed by a formidable list of names from the academic world, with a sprinkling of “prominent citizens,” and push it quietly through as a purely educational and technical matter into which, the professionals and professors having said their say in advocacy, the public need not trouble itself to examine. Leave these esoteric matters to the specialists! The list of endorsers was prepared. It was comprehensive, as regards the colleges and schools, the pedagogic element being influenced by the natural academic sympathy for the German educational system which honors scholarship so highly. Prominent citizens lent their names as prominent citizens always will when a petition not affecting their own pockets (though it may affect the national integrity of their own country) is presented. A committee, graced by the presence of Emil Bausch, Professor Brender, head of the German Department of the local university, Professor Rappelje, of the Economics Department, Judge Dana, the Reverend Mr. Merserole, Farley of The Record, and others, with Robert Wanser as chairman, made a formal appearance as sponsors. It was a solemn, dull, and impressive occasion, and The Guardian representative sent to report it almost yawned his head off. He sadly envied his boss whom he had met coming out of the office juggling two white and gleaming golf-balls. He wished he owned a paper and could devote a morning to pure sport whenever so minded!
The golf-balls did not indicate unmingled recreation for the boss of The Guardian. He was responding to a telephone challenge for a match with Magnus Laurens. Since the agreement in the editor’s den, the water-power magnate had made rather a habit of dropping in upon Jeremy when he came to Fenchester. He would stretch his powerful figure in Jeremy’s easy-chair, open the friendly hostilities by proposing to him that, since he believed in other people’s property being taken over for the public good, he should deliver The Guardian to Nick Milliken and real Socialists; shrewdly discuss politics and the practitioners thereof; and invariably wind up on the main interest which the two men held in common, the Americanization of their hybrid State.
Even at its best, Lauren’s golf-game was not redoubtable to a player of Jeremy’s caliber. On this particular morning it was far from its best. Turning to his opponent after a flagrant flub on the ninth green, the older man said:
“My mind isn’t on the game today. Let’s get an early lunch, and talk.” As soon as they were seated at the table, he opened up the subject.
“You’re against me, of course, in the campaign.”
“Certainly. We’re for Embree.”
“That’s all right. What I’m going to say doesn’t contemplate any possibility of your changing. Have you read the Cultural Language Bill?”
“No. I’ve sent a man up to cover the hearing.”
“Why didn’t you read it?”
“I understood it wasn’t of any special importance.”
“From whom? Embree? Never mind,” added Laurens, smiling. “You needn’t answer. Remember our conversation about Deutschtum in the schools?”
“Yes.”
“This is it.”
“As this bill was explained to me, it isn’t at all the measure you described in outline.”
“Not on the surface. They’ve changed it. But it’s even worse in intent.”
“You made a study of it?”
“They asked me to sign it. I refused.”
“Who asked you?”
“In confidence, Robert Wanser.”
“Why, he was one of the leaders in the movement for your nomination.”
“As he took pains to remind me.”
“Is this likely to be made a political issue?”
“I don’t think so. Not in the party sense. The German crowd want to push the bill through as quietly as possible.”
“That’s natural. Once they get their system fastened on the schools—”
“It’s there to stay.”
“I guess I’ll get back to the office, Mr. Laurens. I want to get in touch with our reporter at the hearing.”
Olin, the reporter in question, abruptly ceased yawning his head off upon receipt of instructions to follow closely the representations made for the bill. His story, edited by Jeremy himself with illuminating side touches, turned that innocent-seeming measure inside out and revealed some interesting phenomena on the inner side. One remark of Magnus Laurens—“I got my first schooling in the Corner School-House and I want to see it stay as American as it was in my day”—stuck in Jeremy’s mind. Out of it he constructed an editorial on the Corner School-House as the keystone of Americanism, never for an instant foreboding that the phrase would become the catchword of a bitter campaign. The first effect of the editorial was to bring Embree around to the Club at dinnertime to find Jeremy.
“What on earth did you make that break for?” cried the harassed statesman.
“Break? It wasn’t a break. That bill means more than you think.”
“It means nothing serious. Or it wouldn’t have, if you hadn’t made an issue of it. Now, the Lord knows what we’re in for!”
“An open discussion is my guess. That was the object of the editorial.”
“Oh, you’ll get that! If that were all—or half!”
“We haven’t killed the bill, have we?” asked the editor hopefully.
“No. But it will have to be cut and pruned a good deal, to meet arguments.”
“Will that hurt your feelings?”
“I care nothing about the bill. It’s only a sop to the harmless vanity of the Germans. But you’ve got them down on you again. And they blame me for it.”
“Do they! Why?”
The Senator laughed in a half-embarrassed way. “Well, you know, Jem, I’m credited with having some influence with The Guardian. I wish I had half I’m credited with.”
“You mean you’re supposed to control the paper’s policies.”
> “Don’t get disturbed over it. I can’t help it.”
“Nor can I, apparently,” returned the editor, frowning. “People absolutely refuse to believe that a man is responsible for his own paper—except when there’s something to kick on.”
“What are you going to do now about the bill?”
“Let it simmer. Take another shot at it when it comes up again.”
“Do you want me to lose the election?”
“Come out on the other side if you want to, Martin.”
“I am for the bill.”
“Make a speech and say so, then. We’ll report you in full, and give you a leading editorial courteously regretting that so brilliant and far-seeing and sturdily American a statesman should be in error on this one point.”
An answering smile game into Martin Embree’s expressive face. “Go a little light on the sturdy American feature.”
“But you are that, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am. Just on this bill, though, I don’t care to ram it down the Germans’ throats.”
“You’ll never teach me politics, Mart,” sighed the other. “I’m too single-barreled and one-ideaed.”
“One-eyed, my boy, one-eyed. Try to see the thing from another fellow’s point of view.”
“Your point of view at present is that I’ve gone astray from your good influence. Is that it?”
“There are other influences, Jem.” The Senator’s smile was broad and golden as a bar of sunlight. “I hear you were out at the swell Country Club this morning with Magnus Laurens.”
“Your information is O.K.”
“Did he talk to you about this bill?”
“He did.”
“Is he against it?”
“He is. Refused to sign the memorial.”
Embree’s face grew heavy and thoughtful. “Did he so! I wonder if we could get him on record?”
“Magnus Laurens isn’t likely to dodge an issue.”
“He’s a queer associate for the editor of The Guardian.”
“I pick my own associates,” retorted Jeremy shortly.
“Or let them pick you. Until they get ready to drop you again. That’s the way with those fellows that have too much money.”
Common Cause Page 20
