Mr. Hungerford invited me to sit down. Before I could say anything Hungerford’s lawyer asked whether I had proceeded with legal action—filed a complaint, or anything of that sort.
I said I had not.
“Better for you, then,” Lingley said. “You’re swimming in rough waters, Mr. Hazzard. Do you know anything about the legal system?”
“Very little,” I confessed.*
“Do you understand what it would cost you to bring a legal action against this business, or against Mr. Dornwood as an individual? And do you understand that it would cost double that once the case was thrown out of court, as I assure you it would be? It’s not a trifling thing to impugn the integrity of such men as these.”
“They impugn themselves, it seems to me. But I’m sure you’re right.”
Lawyer Lingley looked briefly puzzled. “You mean to say you’ll quit your claim?”
“I expect that phrase has some legalistic significance of which I’m not aware. What happened, happened—neither you nor I can change that, Mr. Lingley. And if the courts don’t judge in this matter, Heaven might not be so lax.”
“Heaven isn’t within my jurisdiction. If you’re willing to be reasonable, I’ve prepared a paper for you to sign.”
“A paper saying what?”
“That you have no fiscal claim on this company or Mr. Dornwood, no matter whether some small amount of material you wrote found its way into Dornwood’s published accounts.”
“It was not a ‘small amount,’ Mr. Lingley. We’re talking about an act of thievery bold enough to make a vulture blush.”
“Make up your mind,” Lingley said. “Do you want to settle the matter, or are you going to persist in these libels?”
I looked at the paper. It was, in so far as I could decipher the whereases, a renunciation of all my prior complaints. In exchange, it said, the company would not pursue me for “defamation.”
There was a space prepared for my signature.
“If I sign this,” I said slowly, “I suppose I’ll need a witness?”
“My secretary will witness it.”
“No need—I’ve brought a witness of my own,” and I gestured through the door for Julian to enter.
Hungerford and the lawyer blinked at this unexpected development. If they did not recognize Julian Comstock, Theodore Dornwood certainly did. He sat bolt upright, and an unprintable word escaped his lips.
“What’s this about?” Hungerford demanded. “Who is this man?”
“Julian Comstock,” I said. “Julian, this is Mr. Hungerford, the publisher of the Spark.”
Julian offered his hand. Hungerford took it, though every other part of him seemed frozen in shock.
“And this is Mr. Hungerford’s lawyer, Mr. Buck Lingley.”
“Hello, Mr. Lingley,” said Julian in an amiable tone.
Lingley’s complexion, which up to that moment had been florid, turned the color of an eggshell, and his tendentious manner went the way of the morning dew. He did not speak. Instead he reached across the desk and picked up the paper I was meant to sign. He folded it in thirds and tore it in two pieces. Then he pursed his lips in a sickly imitation of a smile. “I’m delighted—no—honored—to meet you, Captain Comstock. Unfortunately an urgent appointment calls me away—I cannot linger.” He turned to Hungerford. “I think our business is finished for today, John,” he said, and left the room in such a hurry that I was surprised the breeze didn’t pull the door shut after him.
Mr. Hungerford had yet to close his slackened jaw.
“And I recognize Theodore Dornwood,” Julian said, “our regiment’s civilian scribe. I’ve read some of your work, Mr. Dornwood. Or at least the work that was published under your name.”
“Yes!” Dornwood said in a strangled voice, which was not helpful. “No!”
“Shut up, Theo,” Mr. Hungerford said. “Captain Comstock, do you have a contribution to make to this discussion?”
“Not at all. It was only that my friend Adam seems to be having a hard time making himself understood.”
“I think we’ve overcome that difficulty,” Hungerford said. “As a responsible publisher I mean to correct any mistake that finds its way into print. Naturally I’m astonished to discover that Mr. Dornwood borrowed another man’s work without attribution. That error will be corrected.”
“Corrected in what way?” Julian inquired, before Dornwood could stammer out some version of the same question.
“We’ll print a notice in tomorrow’s Spark.”
“A notice! Excellent,” said Julian. “Still, there’s the matter of the thousands of pamphlets that have already been distributed under Mr. Dornwood’s name. If some profit or royalty has been paid to Mr. Dornwood by mistake—”
“Sir, there’s no problem in that department. I’ll have our accountants calculate the full amount and pay it to you directly.”
“To Mr. Hazzard, you mean.”
“I mean, of course, to Mr. Hazzard.”
“Well, that shows a Christian spirit,” said Julian. “Doesn’t it, Adam?”
“It’s almost contrite,” I said, not a little astonished myself.
“But it seems to me,” Julian went on, “though I’m no expert on the publishing business, you might be missing an opportunity, Mr. Hungerford, and a lucrative one, at that.”
“Please explain,” Hungerford said warily, while Dornwood cringed in his chair like a spanked child.
“We’ve established that Adam was the true author of The Adventures of Captain Commongold. Was it well-written, do you think?”
“The public has taken to it in a big way. We’ve gone into a third printing. That makes it well-written, by my definition. You say it was all your work, Mr. Hazzard?”
“All but the punctuation,” I said, glaring at Dornwood.
“Does that suggest anything to you, as a publisher?” Julian asked. “Adam is too modest to mention it, but he’s written more than just these matter-of-fact Adventures. He has a novel in progress. Your press prints novels as well as newspapers, doesn’t it, Mr. Hungerford?”
“We have a modest line of bound thrillers.”
Julian asked me if my novel could be considered “thrilling.”
“It has pirates in it,” I said.
“There you are, then! Adam is a proven best-seller, and he’s writing a book with pirates and other exciting persons in it—and here he is standing in your office!”
“I’ll have a contract drawn up,” Hungerford murmured.
“Mr. Hungerford is a canny businessman, Adam. He wants to publish your novel. Will the terms be generous, Mr. Hungerford?”
Hungerford quoted a colossal number, which he said was his standard rate for first-time novelists. I was quite taken aback, and probably turned as white in the face as Lawyer Lingley had when he recognized the President’s nephew. I could not speak. My toes and fingers were numb.
“Good,” Julian said. “But is Adam really a first-time novelist?—given the success of his previous work, I mean.”
Hungerford nodded woodenly and announced a number twice as cosmic. I might have fainted, if I had not had the desk to lean on.
“Is the number acceptable, Adam?”
I allowed that it was.
“As for Mr. Dornwood—” Julian began.
“He’ll be fired immediately,” Hungerford said.
“Please don’t do that! I’m sure Adam doesn’t want to punish Mr. Dornwood any further, now that the error had been corrected.”
“I guess that’s right,” I managed to say. “I won’t hold a grudge against any man. You can keep your job, Dornwood, for all of me. Although—”
Dornwood gave me a pleading look. He was no longer the smug Manhattanite. He might have been some condemned slave kneeling before a Pharaoh for clemency. It was an unusual sensation to hold another man’s fate in my hands. I could ask for his apology, I supposed. I supposed I could ask for his head, too, and Hungerford would have it delivered it to me on a ch
ina plate. But I’m not a vindictive person.
“I want your typewriter,” I said.
They say the typewriter was invented in 1870 or thereabouts. It has had many incarnations in the centuries since. It went out of production even before the End of Oil, and was re-introduced only recently. Modern typewriters are made by hand, by craftsmen who have studied innumerable rusty remains rescued from various Tips. They are expensive to buy, and costly to maintain. They’re also very heavy. Julian and I took turns carrying Dornwood’s typewriter down the street to a taxi stand.
“Say something,” Julian suggested, “or I’ll think you’ve lost your tongue.”
“I’m out of words entirely.”
“Unfortunate condition for a writer to be in.”
That brought me up short. Was I a writer, in the professional sense? I guessed I was. Hungerford and his lawyer had meant for me to sign a quit-claim this afternoon. Instead I had signed a contract to write a novel, and inked my name on a receipt for Theodore Dornwood’s writing machine. Probably those two items, the contract and the typewriter, were acceptable bona fides in the author’s trade.
I said to Julian, “I didn’t know you could do that.”
“Do what?”
“What you did at the Spark. Command obedience. Hungerford practically bowed to you.”
As long as I had known Julian I had known he was an Aristo. And I knew Aristos were meant to be respected and obeyed. But we had ignored that dictum as boys, and been forced to ignore it as soldiers, and agreed to ignore it as friends, and it was seldom topmost in my mind. I reminded myself that to a stranger, even a highly-placed businessman such as Mr. Hungerford, Julian was no more or less than a member of the family of the reigning President. No doubt Hungerford imagined that a word from Julian to his uncle would cause the Spark to be shut down and placed under a permanent Dominion sanction. That was the kind of power Deklan Conqueror was able to exercise.
By implication—at least in the mind of Hungerford and his lawyer—it was Julian’s power as well.
“It’s a handy thing,” Julian said as we maneuvered first the typewriter and then ourselves into an available cab, “to invoke the family name now and then.”
“It must be daunting to possess such power, and to wield it.”
“The power is all Deklan’s, I’m afraid.”
“Perhaps not all. You borrowed a little of it just now.”
“I don’t want it. The thought of it sickens me. The power to do good—that’s the power I’d like to wield,” said Julian.
“Anyone can do good in the world, Julian, to some degree.” Or so my mother had often told me, and the Dominion Reader for Young Persons concurred.
“The kind of good I want to do requires the kind of power few men possess.”
“What kind of good is it, that wants such muscle?”
But Julian wouldn’t answer.
Calyxa wasn’t impressed by the typewriter. She pointed out all its dents and scars—which were many, for the machine had been carried to Labrador and back at least once, and had seen hard service under Dornwood. It still smelled a little of liquor and burnt hemp. But it was serviceable and well-oiled, and did its job uncomplainingly.
Calyxa also reminded me that I didn’t know how to type. There was a skill associated with it. I could find letters and poke them, but this was a relatively laborious way to conduct business. She told me she had seen a booklet at Grogan’s called Typewriting Self-Taught, and I promised her I would buy myself a copy, even if it cost as much as a Charles Curtis Easton novel.
If she was cynical about the typewriter, she was genuinely pleased by the news that I had signed a contract for my novel, and that Dornwood’s royalties for Julian Commongold had been consigned to me. We would have money of our own, in other words, and there was the solid promise of more to come.
“So we won’t be running off to Buffalo,” she said.
“We can support ourselves in New York City. You can sing in cafés or not, as the mood suits you.”
“Assuming we survive the Independence Day festivities at the Executive Palace.”
I wished she hadn’t mentioned it. “Julian’s almost certain no harm will come to us there.”
“Almost certain,” she said. “That’s almost reassuring.”
There was a sound like gunfire in the street that night.
I rose and went to the bedroom window. The window had been left open in order to soften the heat in the upper stories of the house, though barely a breeze was blowing.
I put my head outside. Manhattan lay quiet in the midnight darkness. I could hear the rustling of draped flags and the creek of insects. The bones of Sky-Scrapers cut angular silhouettes out of the stars, and here and there the fulgent glow of distant foundries smoldered. Down below, in the stables attached to the house, a sleepless horse snuffled and tapped its shod hoof on the ground.
More explosions followed, and the sound of stifled laughter. A crew of five or six boys dashed out between two of the row houses, lit punks glowing in their hands. Offended voices hailed them from other windows.
What I had taken for gunshots was only the sound of exploding fire-crackers, tossed about by mischievous children in anticipation of the Fourth of July. Julian and I had played the same kind of tricks back in Williams Ford in our younger days. The dairymen had despised us for it, and claimed our concussions dried up the milk in the udders of their cows.
I couldn’t bring myself to be angry.
The smell of black powder came in with the night air. Calyxa stirred and asked sleepily whether something was burning. “Smells like the whole town’s on fire,” she murmured.
“Just mischief,” I told her.
I shivered, though the night was warm. Then I shuttered the window and went back to bed.
* The grounds of the Executive Palace had once been a great Park, according to Julian, and open to the public; but that had changed when the federal government moved north from Washington.
* Four, actually.
* Orphans were a common sight on Manhattan streets, where they begged for coins in ingenious and aggressive ways. There was also a generous supply of limbless veterans, their competition.
* The Automobiles were perhaps a less successful artistic effect, as they seemed unusually one-dimensional, and bobbed unconvincingly as they moved; but the dedicated crew of Sound-Makers compensated for this with engine noises created by a baritone growling into a speaking-tube. How these automobiles had survived so long into the End of Oil was a question the film-makers did not address.
* A pledge alone secures the deed / Your labor’s mine, while I fulfill your need, etc. If there was any haggling over this bargain, the film did not depict it.
† Though only an idiot could have misinterpreted his facial grimaces, which the screen actor portrayed in a broad manner.
* The ladies were not pleased with certain Broadway sophisticates also present, whose cries of “That’s right—keep single if you can help it!” were quickly suppressed.
† An error of history, since the northern states had not yet been acquired at the time of the Fall of the Cities; but forgivable in the name of Art and Patriotism.
* I felt I had nothing to lose by honesty—nor much to gain, come down to it.
4
In the days before the Fourth of July I wrote up a special Introduction to the revised edition of The Adventures of Captain Commongold (Now Revealed as Julian Comstock), the Youthful Hero of the Saguenay, and replaced all the commas Mr. Theodore Dornwood had deleted or misplaced. In the matter of the Introduction I accepted the tutelage of Sam Godwin, who said it was very important that I should not insult the reigning President, but rather say something to praise him.
I didn’t like to do this. After everything Julian had said about his uncle, it felt like hypocrisy. I told Sam so.
“It is hypocrisy. A lie, frankly. But it’s for Julian’s sake. It may save his life, or at least prolong it.”
I cou
ld hardly refuse, then, for this was the same document that had imperiled Julian in the first place, and I was not sorry if it could be made to serve the opposite purpose. So I wrote down that Julian had joined the Army of the Laurentians under an assumed name “so that he would not receive any special treatment that might otherwise accrue to a President’s nephew, but would be treated as an ordinary soldier of the line.” Not that Deklan Comstock would ever stoop to influencing the military to obtain a better position for Julian: “The President no doubt believes, as Julian does, that a man must distinguish himself on his own hook, and for his own behavior, and no one else’s. It was Julian’s fear that some commissioned officer might attempt to curry favor through favoritism; and his pride and patriotism would not allow him to accept any such unearned privilege.” Julian, I wrote, wanted to achieve the condition of heroism, if he achieved it at all, “as Deklan Conqueror had: on his own behalf, and without any softening help.”
Julian winced when he read this, and told me I ought to work for the Dominion, since I was so facile with a flattering lie; but Sam rebuked him and explained that I had included the passage at his insistence.
“I’ve been spending time with Army officers on leave from the Laurentians,” Sam said. “In the high ranks, particularly the men around General Galligasken, there is considerable discontent with Deklan Comstock. The President attempts to rule the Army like a tyrant, and orders peculiar attacks and strategies of his own contriving; and when these fail—as they almost inevitably do—he punishes some hapless Major General, or appoints a more servile one in his place. Unfortunately our success at Chicoutimi isn’t typical of the general progress of the War. The Army of the Laurentians can’t continue to sustain losses at the current rate—the President will have to recall veterans, or whip up a new draft, if he wants to prevent a complete collapse. I tell you this in utmost confidence: if we can placate Deklan Conqueror, even temporarily, we may also outlast him.”
That was unsettling news, even if it had a bright side, but there was nothing I could do about it. Julian accepted it with a nod and a frown.
Later that day I asked Sam whether he had been in contact with any of the Jews of New York City, for there were many of them—I had seen them walking black-suited to their Saturday services, in an enclave near the Egyptian part of town.*
Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America Page 30
