Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  XXIV.

  Bartley walked about the streets for a long time, without purpose or direction, brooding fiercely on his wrongs, and reminding himself how Marcia had determined to have him, and had indeed flung herself upon his mercy, with all sorts of good promises; and had then at once taken the whip-hand, and goaded and tormented him ever since. All the kindness of their common life counted for nothing in this furious reverie, or rather it was never once thought of; he cursed himself for a fool that he had ever asked her to marry him, and for doubly a fool that he had married her when she had as good as asked him. He was glad, now, that he had taunted her with that; he only regretted that he had told her he was sorry. He was presently aware of being so tired that he could scarcely pull one leg after another; and yet he felt hopelessly wide awake. It was in simple despair of anything else to do that he climbed the stairs to Ricker’s lofty perch in the Chronicle-Abstract office. Ricker turned about as he entered, and stared up at him from beneath the green pasteboard visor with which he was shielding his eyes from the gas; his hair, which was of the harshness and color of hay, was stiffly poked up and strewn about on his skull, as if it were some foreign product.

  “Hello!” he said. “Going to issue a morning edition of the Events?”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Oh, I supposed you evening-paper gents went to bed with the hens. What has kept you up, esteemed contemporary?” He went on working over some despatches which lay upon his table.

  “Don’t you want to come out and have some oysters?” asked Bartley.

  “Why this princely hospitality? I’ll come with you in half a minute,” Ricker said, going to the slide that carried up the copy to the composing-room and thrusting his manuscript into the box.

  “Where are you going?” he asked, when they found themselves out in the soft starlit autumnal air; and Bartley answered with the name of an oyster-house, obscure, but of singular excellence.

  “Yes, that’s the best place,” Ricker commented. “What I always wonder at in you is the rapidity with which you Ve taken on the city. You were quite in the green wood when you came here, and now you know your Boston like a little man. I suppose it’s your newspaper work that’s familiarized you with the place. Well, how do you like your friend Witherby, as far as you’ve gone?”

  “Oh, we shall get along, I guess,” said Bartley. “He still keeps me in the background, and plays at being editor, but he pays me pretty well.”

  “Not too well, I hope.”

  “I should like to see him try it.”

  “I shouldn’t,” said Ricker. “He’d expect certain things of you, if he did. You’ll have to look out for Witherby.”

  “You mean that he’s a scamp?”

  “No; there isn’t a better conscience than Witherby carries in the whole city. He’s perfectly honest. He not only believes that he has a right to run the Events in his way; but he sincerely believes that he is right in doing it. There’s where he has the advantage of you, if you doubt him. I don’t suppose he ever did a wrong thing in his life; he’d persuade himself that the thing was right before he did it.”

  “That’s a common phenomenon, isn’t it?” sneered Bartley. “Nobody sins.”

  “You’re right, partly. But some of us sinners have our misgivings, and Witherby never has. You know he offered me your place?”

  “No, I didn’t,” said Bartley, astonished and not pleased.

  “I thought he might have told you. He made me inducements; but I was afraid of him: Witherby is the counting-room incarnate. I talked you into him for some place or other; but he didn’t seem to wake up to the value of my advice at once. Then I couldn’t tell what he was going to offer you.”

  “Thank you for letting me in for a thing you were afraid of!”

  “I didn’t believe he would get you under his thumb, as he would me. You’ve got more back-bone than I have. I have to keep out of temptation; you have noticed that I never drink, and I would rather not look upon Witherby when he is red and giveth his color in the cup. I’m sorry if I’ve let you in for anything that you regret. But Witherby’s sincerity makes him dangerous, — I own that.”

  “I think he has some very good ideas about newspapers,” said Bartley, rather sulkily.

  “Oh, very,” assented Ricker. “Some of the very best going. He believes that the press is a great moral engine, and that it ought to be run in the interest of the engineer.”

  “And I suppose you believe that it ought to be run in the interest of the public?”

  “Exactly — after the public has paid.”

  “Well, I don’t; and I never did. A newspaper is a private enterprise.”

  “It’s private property, but it isn’t a private enterprise, and in its very nature it can’t be. You know I never talk ‘journalism’ and stuff; it amuses me to hear the young fellows at it, though I think they might be doing something worse than magnifying their office; they might be decrying it. But I’ve got a few ideas and principles of my own in my back pantaloons pocket.”

  “Haul them out,” said Bartley.

  “I don’t know that they’re very well formulated,” returned Ricker, “and I don’t contend that they’re very new. But I consider a newspaper a public enterprise, with certain distinct duties to the public. It’s sacredly bound not to do anything to deprave or debauch its readers; and it’s sacredly bound not to mislead or betray them, not merely as to questions of morals and politics, but as to questions of what we may lump as ‘advertising.’ Has friend Witherby developed his great ideas of advertisers’ rights to you?” Bartley did not answer, and Ricker went on: “Well, then, you can understand my position, when I say it’s exactly the contrary.”

  “You ought to be on a religious newspaper, Ricker,” said Bartley with a scornful laugh.

  “Thank you, a secular paper is bad enough for me.”

  “Well, I don’t pretend that I make the Events just what I want,” said Bartley. “At present, the most I can do is to indulge in a few cheap dreams of what I should do, if I had a paper of my own.”

  “What are your dreams? Haul out, as you say.”

  “I should make it pay, to begin with; and I should make it pay by making it such a thorough newspaper that every class of people must have it. I should cater to the lowest class first, and as long as I was poor I would have the fullest and best reports of every local accident and crime; that would take all the rabble. Then, as I could afford it, I’d rise a little, and give first-class non-partisan reports of local political affairs; that would fetch the next largest class, the ward politicians of all parties. I’d lay for the local religious world, after that; — religion comes right after politics in the popular mind, and it interests the women like murder: I’d give the minutest religious intelligence, and not only that, but the religious gossip, and the religious scandal. Then I’d go in for fashion and society, — that comes next. I’d have the most reliable and thorough-going financial reports that money could buy. When I’d got my local ground perfectly covered, I’d begin to ramify. Every fellow that could spell, in any part of the country, should understand that, if he sent me an account of a suicide, or an elopement, or a murder, or an accident, he should be well paid for it; and I’d rise on the same scale through all the departments. I’d add art criticisms, dramatic and sporting news, and book reviews, more for the looks of the thing than for anything else; they don’t any of ’em appeal to a large class. I’d get my paper into such a shape that people of every kind and degree would have to say, no matter what particular objection was made to it, ‘Yes, that’s so; but it’s the best newspaper in the world, and we can’t get along without it.’”

  “And then,” said Ricker, “you’d begin to clean up, little by little, — let up on your murders and scandals, and purge and live cleanly like a gentleman? The trick’s been tried before.”

  They had arrived at the oyster-house, and were sitting at their table, waiting for the oysters to be brought to them. Bartley tilted his
chair back. “I don’t know about the cleaning up. I should want to keep all my audience. If I cleaned up, the dirty fellows would go off to some one else; and the fellows that pretended to be clean would be disappointed.”

  “Why don’t you get Witherby to put your ideas in force?” asked Ricker, dryly.

  Bartley dropped his chair to all fours, and said with a smile, “He belongs to church.”

  “Ah! he has his limitations. What a pity! He has the money to establish this great moral engine of yours, and you haven’t. It’s a loss to civilization.”

  “One thing, I know,” said Bartley, with a certain effect of virtue, “nobody should buy or sell me; and the advertising element shouldn’t spread beyond the advertising page.”

  “Isn’t that rather high ground?” inquired Ricker.

  Bartley did not think it worth while to answer. “I don’t believe that a newspaper is obliged to be superior in tone to the community,” he said.

  “I quite agree with you.”

  “And if the community is full of vice and crime, the newspaper can’t do better than reflect its condition.”

  “Ah! there I should distinguish, esteemed contemporary. There are several tones in every community, and it will keep any newspaper scratching to rise above the highest. But if it keeps out of the mud at all, it can’t help rising above the lowest. And no community is full of vice and crime any more than it is full of virtue and good works. Why not let your model newspaper mirror these?”

  “They’re not snappy.”

  “No, that’s true.”

  “You must give the people what they want.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Well, it’s a beautiful dream,” said Ricker, “nourished on a youth sublime. Why do not these lofty imaginings visit us later in life? You make me quite ashamed of my own ideal newspaper. Before you began to talk, I had been fancying that the vice of our journalism was its intense localism. I have doubted a good while whether a drunken Irishman who breaks his wife’s head, or a child who falls into a tub of hot water, has really established a claim on the public interest. Why should I be told by telegraph how three negroes died on the gallows in North Carolina? Why should an accurate correspondent inform me of the elopement of a married man with his maid-servant in East Machias? Why should I sup on all the horrors of a railroad accident, and have the bleeding fragments hashed up for me at breakfast? Why should my newspaper give a succession of shocks to my nervous system, as I pass from column to column, and poultice me between shocks with the nastiness of a distant or local scandal? You reply, because I like spice. But I don’t. I am sick of spice; and I believe that most of our readers are.”

  “Cater to them with milk-toast, then,” said Bartley.

  Ricker laughed with him, and they fell to upon their oysters.

  When they parted, Bartley still found himself wakeful. He knew that he should not sleep if he went home, and he said to himself that he could not walk about all night. He turned into a gayly-lighted basement, and asked for something in the way of a nightcap.

  The bar-keeper said there was nothing like a hot-scotch to make you sleep; and a small man with his hat on, who had been talking with the bar-keeper, and coming up to the counter occasionally to eat a bit of cracker or a bit of cheese out of the two bowls full of such fragments that stood at the end of the counter, said that this was so.

  It was very cheerful in the bar-room, with the light glittering on the rows of decanters behind the bar-keeper, a large, stout, clean, pale man in his shirt-sleeves, after the manner of his kind; and Bartley made up his mind to stay there till he was drowsy, and to drink as many hot-scotches as were necessary to the result. He had his drink put on a little table and sat down to it easily, stirring it to cool it a little, and feeling its flattery in his brain from the first sip.

  The man who was munching cheese and crackers wore a hat rather large for him, pulled down over his eyes. He now said that he did not care if he took a gin-sling, and the bar-keeper promptly set it before him on the counter, and saluted with “Good evening, Colonel,” a large man who came in, carrying a small dog in his arms. Bartley recognized him as the manager of a variety combination playing at one of the theatres, and the manager recognized the little man with the gin-sling as Tommy. He did not return the bar-keeper’s salutation, but he asked, as he sat down at a table, “What do I want for supper, Charley?”

  The bar-keeper said, oracularly, as he leaned forward to wipe his counter with a napkin, “Fricassee chicken.”

  “Fricassee devil,” returned the manager. “Get me a Welsh rabbit.”

  The bar-keeper, unperturbed by this rejection, called into the tube behind him, “One Welsh rabbit.”

  “I want some cold chicken for my dog,” said the manager.

  “One cold chicken,” repeated the bar-keeper, in his tube.

  “White meat,” said the manager.

  “White meat,” repeated the bar-keeper.

  “I went into the Parker House one night about midnight, and I saw four doctors there eating lobster salad, and devilled crab, and washing it down with champagne; and I made up my mind that the doctors needn’t talk to me any more about what was wholesome. I was going in for what was good. And there aint anything better for supper than Welsh rabbit in this world.”

  As the manager addressed this philosophy to the company at large, no one commented upon it, which seemed quite the same to the manager, who hitched one elbow over the back of his chair, and caressed with the other hand the dog lying in his lap.

  The little man in the large hat continued to walk up and down, leaving his gin-sling on the counter, and drinking it between his visits to the cracker and cheese.

  “What’s that new piece of yours, Colonel?” he asked, after a while. “I aint seen it yet.”

  “Legs, principally,” sighed the manager. “That’s what the public wants. I give the public what it wants. I don’t pretend to be any better than the public. Nor any worse,” he added, stroking his dog.

  These ideas struck Bartley in their accordance with his own ideas of journalism, as he had propounded them to Ricker. He had drunk half of his hot-scotch.

  “That’s what I say,” assented the little man. “All that a theatre has got to do is to keep even with the public.”

  “That’s so, Tommy,” said the manager of a school of morals, with wisdom that impressed more and more the manager of a great moral engine.

  “The same principle runs through everything,” observed Bartley, speaking for the first time.

  The drink had stiffened his tongue somewhat, but it did not incommode his utterance; it rather gave dignity to it, and his head was singularly clear. He lifted his empty glass from the table, and, catching the bar-keeper’s eye, said, “Do it again.” The man brought it back full.

  “It runs through the churches as well as the theatres. As long as the public wanted hell-fire, the ministers gave them hell-fire. But you couldn’t get hell-fire — not the pure, old-fashioned brimstone article — out of a popular preacher now, for love or money.”

  The little man said, “I guess you’ve got about the size of it there”; and the manager laughed.

  “It’s just so with the newspapers, too,” said Bartley. “Some newspapers used to stand out against publishing murders, and personal gossip, and divorce trials. There ain’t a newspaper that pretends to keep anyways up with the times, now, that don’t do it! The public want spice, and they will have it!”

  “Well, sir,” said the manager, “that’s my way of looking at it. I say, if the public don’t want Shakespeare, give ’em burlesque till they’re sick of it. I believe in what Grant said: ‘The quickest way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it.’”

  “That’s so,” said the little man, “every time.” He added, to the bar-keeper, that he guessed he would have some brandy and soda, and Bartley found himself at the bottom of his second tumbler. He ordered it replenished.

  The
little man seemed to be getting further away. He said, from the distance to which he had withdrawn, “You want to go to bed with three nightcaps on, like an old-clothes man.”

  Bartley felt like resenting the freedom, but he was anxious to pour his ideas of journalism into the manager’s sympathetic ear, and he began to talk, with an impression that it behooved him to talk fast. His brain was still very clear, but his tongue was getting stiffer. The manager now had his Welsh rabbit before him; but Bartley could not make out how it had got there, nor when. He was talking fast, and he knew, by the way everybody was listening, that he was talking well. Sometimes he left his table, glass in hand, and went and laid down the law to the manager, who smilingly assented to all he said. Once he heard a low growling at his feet, and, looking down, he saw the dog with his plate of cold chicken, that had also been conjured into the room somehow.

  “Look out,” said the manager, “he’ll nip you in the leg.”

  “Curse the dog! he seems to be on all sides of you,” said Bartley. “I can’t stand anywhere.”