"If Bernholz's makes 'em that way, you can bet it's up to the split-second of date, and maybe they beat the pistol by a jump. I bluffed for a raise of five dollars, on the strength of this outfit, and got it off the bat. There's the suit paid for in two months and a pair of shoes over." He thrust out a leg, from below the sharp-pressed trouser-line of which protruded a boot trimmed in a sort of bizarre fretwork. "Like me to take you around to Bernholz's?"

Banneker shook his head. The name for which he sought had come to him. "Did you ever hear of Mertoun, somewhere on Fifth Avenue?"

"Yes. And I've seen Central Park and the Statue of Liberty," railed the other. "Thinkin' of patternizing Mertoun, was you?"

"Yes, I'd like to."

"Like to! There's a party at the Astorbilt's to-morrow night; you'd like to go to that, wouldn't you? Fat chance!" said the disdainful and seasoned cit. "D'you know what Mertoun would do to you? Set you back a hundred simoleons soon as look at you. And at that you got to have a letter of introduction like gettin' in to see the President of the United States or John D. Rockefeller. Come off, my boy! Bernholz's 'll fix you just as good, all but the label. Better come around to-morrow."

"Much obliged, but I'm not buying yet. Where would you say a fellow would have a chance to see the best-dressed men?"

Young Mr. Wickert looked at once self-conscious and a trifle miffed, for in his own set he was regarded as quite the mould of fashion. "Oh, well, if you want to pipe off the guys that think they're the whole thing, walk up the Avenue and watch the doors of the clubs and the swell restaurants. At that, they haven't got anything on some fellows that don't spend a quarter of the money, but know what's what and don't let grafters like Mertoun pull their legs," said he. "Say, you seem to know what you want, all right, all right," he added enviously. "You ain't goin' to let this little old town bluff you; ay?"

"No. Not for lack of a few clothes. Good-night," replied Banneker, leaving in young Wickert's mind the impression that he was "a queer gink," but also, on the whole, "a good guy." For the worldling was only small, not mean of spirit.

Banneker might have added that one who had once known cities and the hearts of men from the viewpoint of that modern incarnation of Ulysses, the hobo, contemptuous and predatory, was little likely to be overawed by the most teeming and headlong of human ant-heaps. Having joined the ant-heap, Banneker was shrewdly concerned with the problem of conforming to the best type of termite discoverable. The gibes of the doorstep chatterers had not aroused any new ambition; they had merely given point to a purpose deferred because of other and more immediate pressure. Already he had received from Camilla Van Arsdale a letter rich in suggestion, hint, and subtly indicated advice, with this one passage of frank counsel:

If I were writing, spinster-aunt-wise, to any one else in your position, I should be tempted to moralize and issue warnings about—well, about the things of the spirit. But you are equipped, there. Like the "Master," you will "go your own way with inevitable motion." With the outer man—that is different. You have never given much thought to that phase. And you have an asset in your personal appearance. I should not be telling you this if I thought there were danger of your becoming vain. But I really think it would be a good investment for you to put yourself into the hands of a first-class tailor, and follow his advice, in moderation, of course. Get the sense of being fittingly turned out by going where there are well-dressed people; to the opera, perhaps, and the theater occasionally, and, when you can afford it, to a good restaurant. Unless the world has changed, people will look at you. But you must not know it. Important, this is!... I could, of course, give you letters of introduction. "Les morts vont vite," it is true, and I am dead to that world, not wholly without the longings of a would-be revenant; but a ghost may still claim some privileges of memory, and my friends would be hospitable to you. Only, I strongly suspect that you would not use the letters if I gave them. You prefer to make your own start; isn't it so? Well; I have written to a few. Sooner or later you will meet with them. Those things always happen even in New York.... Be sure to write me all about the job when you get it—

Prudence dictated that he should be earning something before he invested in expensive apparel, be it never so desirable and important. However, he would outfit himself just as soon as a regular earning capacity justified his going into his carefully husbanded but dwindling savings. He pictured himself clad as a lily of the field, unconscious of perfection as Herbert Cressey himself, in the public haunts of fashion and ease; through which vision there rose the searing prospect of thus encountering Io Welland. What was her married name? He had not even asked when the news was broken to him; had not wanted to ask; was done with all that for all time.

He was still pathetically young and inexperienced. And he had been badly hurt.



CHAPTER II

Dust was the conspicuous attribute of the place. It lay, flat and toneless, upon the desk, the chairs, the floor; it streaked the walls. The semi-consumptive office "boy's" middle-aged shoulders collected it. It stirred in the wake of quiet-moving men, mostly under thirty-five, who entered the outer door, passed through the waiting-room, and disappeared behind a partition. Banneker felt like shaking himself lest he should be eventually buried under its impalpable sifting. Two hours and a half had passed since he had sent in his name on a slip of paper, to Mr. Gordon, managing editor of the paper. On the way across Park Row he had all but been persuaded by a lightning printer on the curb to have a dozen tasty and elegant visiting-cards struck off, for a quarter; but some vague inhibition of good taste checked him. Now he wondered if a card would have served better.

While he waited, he checked up the actuality of a metropolitan newspaper entrance-room, as contrasted with his notion of it, derived from motion pictures. Here was none of the bustle and hurry of the screen. No brisk and earnest young figures with tense eyes and protruding notebooks darted feverishly in and out; nor, in the course of his long wait, had he seen so much as one specimen of that invariable concomitant of all screen journalism, the long-haired poet with his flowing tie and neatly ribboned manuscript. Even the office "boy," lethargic, neutrally polite, busy writing on half-sheets of paper, was profoundly untrue to the pictured type. Banneker wondered what the managing editor would be like; would almost, in the wreckage of his preconceived notions, have accepted a woman or a priest in that manifestation, when Mr. Gordon appeared and was addressed by name by the hollow-chested Cerberus. Banneker at once echoed the name, rising.

The managing editor, a tall, heavy man, whose smoothly fitting cutaway coat seemed miraculously to have escaped the plague of dust, stared at him above heavy glasses.

"You want to see me?"

"Yes. I sent in my name."

"Did you? When?"

"At two-forty-seven, thirty," replied the visitor with railroad accuracy.

The look above the lowered glasses became slightly quizzical. "You're exact, at least. Patient, too. Good qualities for a newspaper man. That's what you are?"

"What I'm going to be," amended Banneker.

"There is no opening here at present."

"That's formula, isn't it?" asked the young man, smiling.

The other stared. "It is. But how do you know?"

"It's the tone, I suppose. I've had to use it a good deal myself, in railroading."

"Observant, as well as exact and patient. Come in. I'm sorry I misplaced your card. The name is—?"

"Banneker, E. Banneker."

Following the editor, he passed through a large, low-ceilinged room, filled with desk-tables, each bearing a heavy crystal ink-well full of a fluid of particularly virulent purple. A short figure, impassive as a Mongol, sat at a corner desk, gazing out over City Hall Park with a rapt gaze. Across from him a curiously trim and graceful man, with a strong touch of the Hibernian in his elongated jaw and humorous gray eyes, clipped the early evening editions with an effect of highly judicious selection. Only one person sat in all the long files of the work-tables, littered with copy-paper and disarranged newspapers; a dark young giant with the discouraged and hurt look of a boy kept in after school. All this Banneker took in while the managing editor was disposing, usually with a single penciled word or number, of a sheaf of telegraphic "queries" left upon his desk. Having finished, he swiveled in his chair, to face Banneker, and, as he spoke, kept bouncing the thin point of a letter-opener from the knuckles of his left hand. His hands were fat and nervous.

"So you want to do newspaper work?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I think I can make a go of it."

"Any experience?"

"None to speak of. I've written a few things. I thought you might remember my name."

"Your name? Banneker? No. Why should I?"

"You published some of my things in the Sunday edition, lately. From Manzanita, California."

"No. I don't think so. Mr. Homans." A graying man with the gait of a marionnette and the precise expression of a rocking-horse, who had just entered, crossed over. "Have we sent out any checks to a Mr. Banneker recently, in California?"

The new arrival, who was copy-reader and editorial selecter for the Sunday edition, repeated the name in just such a wooden voice as was to be expected. "No," he said positively.

"But I've cashed the checks," returned Banneker, annoyed and bewildered. "And I've seen the clipping of the article in the Sunday Sphere of—"

"Just a moment. You're not in The Sphere office. Did you think you were? Some one has directed you wrong. This is The Ledger."

"Oh!" said Banneker. "It was a policeman that pointed it out. I suppose I saw wrong." He paused; then looked up ingenuously. "But, anyway, I'd rather be on The Ledger."

Mr. Gordon smiled broadly, the thin blade poised over a plump, reddened knuckle.

"Would you! Now, why?"

"I've been reading it. I like the way it does things."

The editor laughed outright. "If you didn't look so honest, I would think that somebody of experience had been tutoring you. How many other places have you tried?"

"None."

"You were going to The Sphere first? On the promise of a job?"

"No. Because they printed what I wrote."

"The Sphere's ways are not our ways," pronounced Mr. Gordon primly. "It's a fundamental difference in standards."

"I can see that."

"Oh, you can, can you?" chuckled the other. "But it's true that we have no opening here."

(The Ledger never did have an "opening"; but it managed to wedge in a goodly number of neophytes, from year to year, ninety per cent of whom were automatically and courteously ejected after due trial. Mr. Gordon performed a surpassing rataplan upon his long-suffering thumb-joint and wondered if this queer and direct being might qualify among the redeemable ten per cent.)

"I can wait." (They often said that.) "For a while," added the youth thoughtfully.

"How long have you been in New York?"

"Thirty-three days."

"And what have you been doing?"

"Reading newspapers."

"No! Reading—That's rather surprising. All of them?"

"All that I could manage."

"Some were so bad that you couldn't worry through them, eh?" asked the other with appreciation.

"Not that. But I didn't know the foreign languages except French, and Spanish, and a little Italian."

"The foreign-language press, too. Remarkable!" murmured the other. "Do you mind telling me what your idea was?"

"It was simple enough. As I wanted to get on a newspaper, I thought I ought to find out what newspapers were made of."

"Simple, as you say. Beautifully simple! So you've devised for yourself the little job of perfecting yourself in every department of journalism; politics, finances, criminal, sports, society; all of them, eh?"

"No; not all," replied Banneker.

"Not? What have you left out?"

"Society news" was the answer, delivered less promptly than the other replies.

Bestowing a twinkle of mingled amusement and conjecture upon the applicant's clothing, Mr. Gordon said:

"You don't approve of our social records? Or you're not interested? Or why is it that you neglect this popular branch?"

"Personal reasons."

This reply, which took the managing editor somewhat aback, was accurate if not explanatory. Miss Van Arsdale's commentaries upon Gardner and his quest had inspired Banneker with a contemptuous distaste for this type of journalism. But chiefly he had shunned the society columns from dread of finding there some mention of her who had been Io Welland. He was resolved to conquer and evict that memory; he would not consciously put himself in the way of anything that recalled it.

"Hum! And this notion of making an intensive study of the papers; was that original with you?"

"Well, no, not entirely. I got it from a man who made himself a bank president in seven years."

"Yes? How did he do that?"

"He started by reading everything he could find about money and coinage and stocks and bonds and other financial paper. He told me that it was incredible the things that financial experts didn't know about their own business—the deep-down things—and that he guessed it was so with any business. He got on top by really knowing the things that everybody was supposed to know."

"A sound theory, I dare say. Most financiers aren't so revealing."

"He and I were padding the hoof together. We were both hoboes then."

The managing editor looked up, alert, from his knuckle-tapping. "From bank president to hobo. Was his bank an important one?"

"The biggest in a medium-sized city."

"And does that suggest nothing to you, as a prospective newspaper man?"

"What? Write him up?"

"It would make a fairly sensational story."

"I couldn't do that. He was my friend. He wouldn't like it."

Mr. Gordon addressed his wedding-ring finger which was looking a bit scarified. "Such an article as that, properly done, would go a long way toward getting you a chance on this paper—Sit down, Mr. Banneker."

"You and I," said Banneker slowly and in the manner of the West, "can't deal."

"Yes, we can." The managing editor threw his steel blade on the desk. "Sit down, I tell you. And understand this. If you come on this paper—I'm going to turn you over to Mr. Greenough, the city editor, with a request that he give you a trial—you'll be expected to subordinate every personal interest and advantage to the interests and advantages of the paper, except your sense of honor and fair-play. We don't ask you to give that up; and if you do give it up, we don't want you at all. What have you done besides be a hobo?"

"Railroading. Station-agent."

"Where were you educated?"

"Nowhere. Wherever I could pick it up."

"Which means everywhere. Ever read George Borrow?"

"Yes."

The heavy face of Mr. Gordon lighted up. "Ree-markable! Keep on. He's a good offset to—to the daily papers. Writing still counts, on The Ledger. Come over and meet Mr. Greenough."

The city editor unobtrusively studied Banneker out of placid, inscrutable eyes, soft as a dove's, while he chatted at large about theaters, politics, the news of the day. Afterward the applicant met the Celtic assistant, Mr. Mallory, who broadly outlined for him the technique of the office. With no further preliminaries Banneker found himself employed at fifteen dollars a week, with Monday for his day off and directions to report on the first of the month.

As the day-desk staff was about departing at six o'clock, Mr. Gordon sauntered over to the city desk looking mildly apologetic.

"I practically had to take that young desert antelope on," said he.

"Too ingenuous to turn down," surmised the city editor.

"Ingenuous! He's heir to the wisdom of the ages. And now I'm afraid I've made a ghastly mistake."

"Something wrong with him?"

"I've had his stuff in the Sunday Sphere looked up."

"Pretty weird?" put in Mallory, gliding into his beautifully fitting overcoat.

"So damned good that I don't see how The Sphere ever came to take it. Greenough, you'll have to find some pretext for firing that young phenomenon as soon as possible."

Perfectly comprehending his superior's mode of indirect expression the city editor replied:

"You think so highly of him as that?"

"Not one of our jobs will be safe from him if he once gets his foot planted," prophesied the other with mock ruefulness. "Do you know," he added, "I never even asked him for a reference."

"You don't need to," pronounced Mallory, shaking the last wrinkle out of himself and lighting the cigarette of departure. "He's got it in his face, if I'm any judge."

Highly elate, Banneker walked on springy pavements all the way to Grove Street. Fifteen a week! He could live on that. His other income and savings could be devoted to carrying out Miss Camilla's advice. For he need not save any more. He would go ahead, fast, now that he had got his start. How easy it had been.

Entering the Brashear door, he met plain, middle-aged little Miss Westlake. A muffler was pressed to her jaw. He recalled having heard her moving about her room, the cheapest and least desirable in the house, and groaning softly late in the night; also having heard some lodgers say that she was a typist with very little work. Obviously she needed a dentist, and presumably she had not the money to pay his fee. In the exultation of his good luck, Banneker felt a stir of helpfulness toward this helpless person.

"Oh!" said he. "How do you do! Could you find time to do some typing for me quite soon?"

It was said impulsively and was followed by a surge of dismay. Typing? Type what? He had absolutely nothing on hand!

Well, he must get up something. At once. It would never do to disappoint that pathetic and eager hope, as of a last-moment rescue, expressed in the little spinster's quick flush and breathless, thankful affirmative.



CHAPTER III

Ten days' leeway before entering upon the new work. To which of scores of crowding purposes could Banneker best put the time? In his offhand way the instructive Mallory had suggested that he familiarize himself with the topography and travel-routes of the Island of Manhattan. Indefatigably he set about doing this; wandering from water-front to water-front, invading tenements, eating at queer, Englishless restaurants, picking up chance acquaintance with chauffeurs, peddlers, street-fakers, park-bench loiterers; all that drifting and iridescent scum of life which variegates the surface above the depths. Everywhere he was accepted without question, for his old experience on the hoof had given him the uncoded password which loosens the speech of furtive men and wise. A receptivity, sensitized to a high degree by the inspiration of new adventure, absorbed these impressions. The faithful pocket-ledger was filling rapidly with notes and phrases, brisk and trenchant, set down with no specific purpose; almost mechanically, in fact, but destined to future uses. Mallory, himself no mean connoisseur of the tumultuous and flagrant city, would perhaps have found matter foreign to his expert apprehension could he have seen and translated the pages of 3 T 9901.

Banneker would go forward in the fascinating paths of exploration; but there were other considerations.

The outer man, for example. The inner man, too; the conscious inner man strengthened upon the strong milk of the philosophers, the priests, and the prophets so strangely mingled in that library now stored with Camilla Van Arsdale; exhilarated by the honey-dew of "The Undying Voices," of Keats and Shelley, and of Swinburne's supernal rhythms, which he had brought with him. One visit to the Public Library had quite appalled him; the vast, chill orderliness of it. He had gone there, hungry to chat about books! To the Public Library! Surely a Homeric joke for grim, tomish officialdom. But tomish officialdom had not even laughed at him; it was too official to appreciate the quality of such side-splitting innocence.... Was he likely to meet a like irresponsiveness when he should seek clothing for the body?

Watch the clubs, young Wickert had advised. Banneker strolled up Fifth Avenue, branching off here and there, into the more promising side streets.

It was the hour of the First Thirst; the institutions which cater to this and subsequent thirsts drew steadily from the main stream of human activity flowing past. Many gloriously clad specimens passed in and out of the portals, socially sacred as in the quiet Fifth Avenue clubs, profane as in the roaring, taxi-bordered "athletic" foundations; but there seemed to the anxious observer no keynote, no homogeneous character wherefrom to build as on a sure foundation. Lacking knowledge, his instinct could find no starting-point; he was bewildered in vision and in mind. Just off the corner of the quietest of the Forties, he met a group of four young men, walking compactly by twos. The one nearest him in the second line was Herbert Cressey. His heavy and rather dull eye seemed to meet Banneker's as they came abreast. Banneker nodded, half checking himself in his slow walk.

"How are you?" he said with an accent of surprise and pleasure.

Cressey's expressionless face turned a little. There was no response in kind to Banneker's smile.

"Oh! H'ware you!" said he vaguely, and passed on.

Banneker advanced mechanically until he reached the corner. There he stopped. His color had heightened. The smile was still on his lips; it had altered, taken on a quality of gameness. He did not shake his fist at the embodied spirit of metropolitanism before him, as had a famous Gallic precursor of his, also a determined seeker for Success in a lesser sphere; but he paraphrased Rastignac's threat in his own terms.

"I reckon I'll have to lick this town and lick it good before it learns to be friendly."

A hand fell on his arm. He turned to face Cressey.

"You're the feller that bossed the wreck out there in the desert, aren't you? You're—lessee—Banneker."

"I am." The tone was curt.

"Awfully sorry I didn't spot you at once." Cressey's genuineness was a sufficient apology. "I'm a little stuffy to-day. Bachelor dinner last night. What are you doing here? Looking around?"

"No. I'm living here."

"That so? So am I. Come into my club and let's talk. I'm glad to see you, Mr. Banneker."

Even had Banneker been prone to self-consciousness, which he was not, the extreme, almost monastic plainness of the small, neutral-fronted building to which the other led him would have set him at ease. It gave no inkling of its unique exclusiveness, and equally unique expensiveness. As for Cressey, that simple, direct, and confident soul took not the smallest account of Banneker's standardized clothing, which made him almost as conspicuous in that environment as if he had entered clad in a wooden packing-case. Cressey's creed in such matters was complete; any friend of his was good enough for any environment to which he might introduce him, and any other friend who took exceptions might go farther!

"Banzai!" said the cheerful host over his cocktail. "Welcome to our city. Hope you like it."

"I do," said Banneker, lifting his glass in response.

"Where are you living?"

"Grove Street."

Cressey knit his brows. "Where's that? Harlem?"

"No. Over west of Sixth Avenue."

"Queer kind of place to live, ain't it? There's a corkin' little suite vacant over at the Regalton. Cheap at the money. Oh!-er-I-er-maybe—"

"Yes; that's it," smiled Banneker. "The treasury isn't up to bachelor suites, yet awhile. I've only just got a job."

"What is it?"

"Newspaper work. The Morning Ledger."

"Reporting?" A dubious expression clouded the candid cheerfulness of the other's face.

"Yes. What's the matter with that?"

"Oh; I dunno. It's a piffling sort of job, ain't it?"

"Piffling? How do you mean?"

"Well, I supposed you had to ask a lot of questions and pry into other people's business and—and all that sorta thing."

"If nobody asked questions," pointed out Banneker, remembering Gardner's resolute devotion to his professional ideals, "there wouldn't be any news, would there?"

"Sure! That's right," agreed the gilded youth. "The Ledger's the decentest paper in town, too. It's a gentleman's paper. I know a feller on it; Guy Mallory; was in my class at college. Give you a letter to him if you like."

Informed that Banneker already knew Mr. Mallory, his host expressed the hope of being useful to him in any other possible manner—"any tips I can give you or anything of that sort, old chap?"—so heartily that the newcomer broached the subject of clothes.

"Nothin' easier," was the ready response. "I'll take you right down to Mertoun. Just one more and we're off."

The one more having been disposed of: "What is it you want?" inquired Cressey, when they were settled in the taxi which was waiting at the club door for them.

"Well, what do I want? You tell me."

"How far do you want to go? Will five hundred be too much?"

"No."

Cressey lost himself in mental calculations out of which he presently delivered himself to this effect:

"Evening clothes, of course. And a dinner-jacket suit. Two business suits, a light and a dark. You won't need a morning coat, I expect, for a while. Anyway, we've got to save somethin' out for shirts and boots, haven't we?"

"I haven't the money with me" remarked Banneker, his innocent mind on the cash-with-order policy of Sears-Roebuck.

"Now, see here," said Cressey, good-humoredly, yet with an effect of authority. "This is a game that's got to be played according to the rules. Why, if you put down spot cash before Mertoun's eyes he'd faint from surprise, and when he came to, he'd have no respect for you. And a tailor's respect for you," continued Cressey, the sage, "shows in your togs."

"When do I pay, then?"

"Oh, in three or four months he sends around a bill. That's more of a reminder to come in and order your fall outfit than it is anything else. But you can send him a check on account, if you feel like it."

"A check?" repeated the neophyte blankly. "Must I have a bank account?"

"Safer than a sock, my boy. And just as simple. To-morrow will do for that, when we call on the shirt-makers and the shoe sharps. I'll put you in my bank; they'll take you on for five hundred."

Arrived at Mertoun's, Banneker unobtrusively but positively developed a taste of his own in the matter of hue and pattern; one, too, which commanded Cressey's respect. The gilded youth's judgment tended toward the more pronounced herringbones and homespuns.

"All right for you, who can change seven days in the week; but I've got to live with these clothes, day in and day out," argued Banneker.

To which Cressey deferred, though with a sigh. "You could carry off those sporty things as if they were woven to order for you," he declared. "You've got the figure, the carriage, the—the whatever-the-devil it is, for it."

Prospectively poorer by something more than four hundred dollars, Banneker emerged from Mertoun's with his mentor.

"Gotta get home and dress for a rotten dinner," announced that gentleman cheerfully. "Duck in here with me," he invited, indicating a sumptuous bar, near the tailor's, "and get another little kick in the stomach. No? Oh, verrawell. Where are you for?"

"The Public Library."

"Gawd!" said his companion, honestly shocked. "That's a gloomy hole, ain't it?"

"Not so bad, when you get used to it. I've been putting in three hours a day there lately."

"Whatever for?"

"Oh, browsing. Book-hungry, I suppose. Carnegie hasn't discovered Manzanita yet, you know; so I haven't had many library opportunities."

"Speaking of Manzanita," remarked Cressey, and spoke of it, reminiscently and at length, as they walked along together. "Did the lovely and mysterious I.O.W. ever turn up and report herself?"

Banneker's breath caught painfully in his throat.

"D'you know who she was?" pursued the other, without pause for reply to his previous question; and still without intermission continued: "Io Welland. That's who she was. Oh, but she's a hummer! I've met her since. Married, you know. Quick work, that marriage. There was a dam' queer story whispered around about her starting to elope with some other chap, and his going nearly batty because she didn't turn up, and all the time she was wandering around in the desert until somebody picked her up and took care of her. You ought to know something of that. It was supposed to be right in your back-yard."

"I?" said Banneker, commanding himself with an effort; "Miss Welland reported in with a slight injury. That's all."

One glance at him told Cressey that Banneker did indeed "know something" of the mysterious disappearance which had so exercised a legion of busy tongues in New York; how much that something might be, he preserved for future and private speculation, based on the astounding perception that Banneker was in real pain of soul. Tact inspired Cressey to say at once: "Of course, that's all you had to consider. By the way, you haven't seen my revered uncle since you got here, have you?"

"Mr. Vanney? No."

"Better drop in on him."

"He might try to give me another yellow-back," smiled the ex-agent.

"Don't take Uncle Van for a fool. Once is plenty for him to be hit on the nose."

"Has he still got a green whisker?"

"Go and see. He's asked about you two or three times in the last coupla months."

"But I've no errand with him."

"How can you tell? He might start something for you. It isn't often that he keeps a man in mind like he has you. Anyway, he's a wise old bird and may hand you a pointer or two about what's what in New York. Shall I 'phone him you're in town?"

"Yes. I'll get in to see him some time to-morrow."

Having made an appointment, in the vital matter of shirts and shoes, for the morning, they parted. Banneker set to his browsing in the library until hunger drove him forth. After dinner he returned to his room, cumbered with the accumulation of evening papers, for study.

Beyond the thin partition he could hear Miss Westlake moving about and humming happily to herself. The sound struck dismay to his soul. The prospect of work from him was doubtless the insecure foundation of that cheerfulness. "Soon" he had said; the implication was that the matter was pressing. Probably she was counting on it for the morrow. Well, he must furnish something, anything, to feed the maw of her hungry typewriter; to fulfill that wistful hope which had sprung in her eyes when he spoke to her.

Sweeping his table bare of the lore and lure of journalism as typified in the bulky, black-faced editions, he set out clean paper, cleansed his fountain pen, and stared at the ceiling. What should he write about? His mental retina teemed with impressions. But they were confused, unresolved, distorted for all that he knew, since he lacked experience and knowledge of the environment, and therefore perspective. Groping, he recalled a saying of Gardner's as that wearied enthusiast descanted upon the glories of past great names in metropolitan journalism.

"They used to say of Julian Ralph that he was always discovering City Hall Park and getting excited over it; and when he got excited enough, he wrote about it so that the public just ate it up."

Well, he, Banneker, hadn't discovered City Hall Park; not consciously. But he had gleaned wonder and delight from other and more remote spots, and now one of them began to stand forth upon the blank ceiling at which he stared, seeking guidance. A crowded corner of Essex Street, stewing in the hard sunshine. The teeming, shrill crowd. The stench and gleam of a fish-stall offering bargains. The eager games of the children, snatched between onsets of imminent peril as cart or truck came whirling through and scattering the players. Finally the episode of the trade fracas over the remains of a small and dubious weakfish, terminating when the dissatisfied customer cast the delicacy at the head of the stall-man and missed him, the corpus delicti falling into the gutter where it was at once appropriated and rapt away by an incredulous, delighted, and mangy cat. A crude, commonplace, malodorous little street row, the sort of thing that happens, in varying phases, on a dozen East-Side corners seven days in the week.

Banneker approached and treated the matter from the viewpoint of the cat, predatory, philosophic, ecstatic. One o'clock in the morning saw the final revision, for he had become enthralled with the handling of his subject. It was only a scant five pages; less than a thousand words. But as he wrote and rewrote, other schemata rose to the surface of his consciousness, and he made brief notes of them on random ends of paper; half a dozen of them, one crowding upon another. Some day, perhaps, when there were enough of them, when he had become known, had achieved the distinction of a signature like Gardner, there might be a real series.... His vague expectancies were dimmed in weariness.

Such was the genesis of the "Local Vagrancies" which later were to set Park Row speculating upon the signature "Eban."



CHAPTER IV

Accessibility was one of Mr. Horace Vanney's fads. He aspired to be a publicist, while sharing fallible humanity's ignorance of just what the vague and imposing term signifies; and, as a publicist, he conceived it in character to be readily available to the public. Almost anybody could get to see Mr. Vanney in his tasteful and dignified lower Broadway offices, upon almost any reasonable or plausible errand. Especially was he hospitable to the newspaper world, the agents of publicity; and, such is the ingratitude of the fallen soul of man, every newspaper office in the city fully comprehended his attitude, made use of him as convenient, and professionally regarded him as a bit of a joke, albeit a useful and amiable joke. Of this he had no inkling. Enough for him that he was frequently, even habitually quoted, upon a wide range of windy topics, often with his picture appended.

With far less difficulty than he had found in winning the notice of Mr. Gordon, Banneker attained the sanctum of the capitalist.

"Well, well!" was the important man's greeting as he shook hands. "Our young friend from the desert! How do we find New York?"

From Banneker's reply, there grew out a pleasantly purposeless conversation, which afforded the newcomer opportunity to decide that he did not like this Mr. Vanney, sleek, smiling, gentle, and courteous, as well as he had the brusque old tyrant of the wreck. That green-whiskered autocrat had been at least natural, direct, and unselfish in his grim emergency work. This manifestation seemed wary, cautious, on its guard to defend itself against some probable tax upon its good nature. All this unconscious, instinctive reckoning of the other man's characteristics gave to the young fellow an effect of poise, of judicious balance and quiet confidence. It was one of Banneker's elements of strength, which subsequently won for him his unique place, that he was always too much interested in estimating the man to whom he was talking, to consider even what the other might think of him. It was at once a form of egoism, and the total negation of egotism. It made him the least self-conscious of human beings. And old Horace Vanney, pompous, vain, the most self-conscious of his genus, felt, though he could not analyze, the charm of it.

A chance word indicated that Banneker was already "placed." At once, though almost insensibly, the attitude of Mr. Vanney eased; obviously there was no fear of his being "boned" for a job. At the same time he experienced a mild misgiving lest he might be forfeiting the services of one who could be really useful to him. Banneker's energy and decisiveness at the wreck had made a definite impression upon him. But there was the matter of the rejected hundred-dollar tip. Unpliant, evidently, this young fellow. Probably it was just as well that he should be broken in to life and new standards elsewhere than in the Vanney interests. Later, if he developed, watchfulness might show it to be worth while to....

"What is it that you have in mind, my boy?" inquired the benign Mr. Vanney.

"I start in on The Ledger next month."

"The Ledger! Indeed! I did not know that you had any journalistic experience."

"I haven't."

"Well. Er—hum! Journalism, eh? A—er—brilliant profession!"

"You think well of it?"

"I have many friends among the journalists. Fine fellows! Very fine fellows."

The instinctive tone of patronage was not lost upon Banneker. He felt annoyed at Mr. Vanney. Unreasonably annoyed. "What's the matter with journalism?" he asked bluntly.

"The matter?" Mr. Vanney was blandly surprised. "Haven't I just said—"

"Yes; you have. Would you let your son go into a newspaper office?"

"My son? My son chose the profession of law."

"But if he had wanted to be a journalist?"

"Journalism does not perhaps offer the same opportunities for personal advancement as some other lines," said the financier cautiously.

"Why shouldn't it?"

"It is largely anonymous." Mr. Vanney gave the impression of feeling carefully for his words. "One may go far in journalism and yet be comparatively unknown to the public. Still, he might be of great usefulness," added the sage, brightening, "very great usefulness. A sound, conservative, self-respecting newspaper such as The Ledger, is a public benefactor."

"And the editor of it?"

"That's right, my boy," approved the other. "Aim high! Aim high! The great prizes in journalism are few. They are, in any line of endeavor. And the apprenticeship is hard."

Herbert Cressey's clumsy but involuntary protest reasserted itself in Banneker's mind. "I wish you would tell me frankly, Mr. Vanney, whether reporting is considered undignified and that sort of thing?"

"Reporters can be a nuisance," replied Mr. Vanney fervently. "But they can also be very useful."

"But on the whole—"

"On the whole it is a necessary apprenticeship. Very suitable for a young man. Not a final career, in my judgment."

"A reporter on The Ledger, then, is nothing but a reporter on The Ledger."

"Isn't that enough, for a start?" smiled the other. "The station-agent at—what was the name of your station? Yes, Manzanita. The station-agent at Manzanita—"

"Was E. Banneker," interposed the owner of that name positively. "A small puddle, but the inhabitant was an individual toad, at least. To keep one's individuality in New York isn't so easy, of course."

"There are quite a number of people in New York," pointed out the philosopher, Vanney. "Mostly crowd."

"Yes," said Banneker. "You've told me something about the newspaper business that I wanted to know." He rose.

The other put out an arresting hand. "Wouldn't you like to do a little reporting for me, before you take up your regular work?"

"What kind of reporting?"

"Quite simple. A manufacturing concern in which I own a considerable interest has a strike on its hands. Suppose you go down to Sippiac, New Jersey, where our factories are, spend three or four days, and report back to me your impressions and any ideas you may gather as to improving our organization for furthering our interests."

"What makes you think that I could be useful in that line?" asked Banneker curiously.

"My observations at the Manzanita wreck. You have, I believe, a knack for handling a situation."

"I can always try," accepted Banneker.

Supplied with letters to the officials of the International Cloth Company, and a liberal sum for expenses, the neophyte went to Sippiac. There he visited the strongly guarded mills, still making a feeble pretense of operating, talked with the harassed officials, the gang-boss of the strike-breakers, the "private guards," who had, in fact, practically assumed dominant police authority in the place; all of which was faithful to the programme arranged by Mr. Vanney. Having done so much, he undertook to obtain a view of the strike from the other side; visited the wretched tenements of the laborers, sought out the sullen and distrustful strike-leaders, heard much fiery oratory and some veiled threats from impassioned agitators, mostly foreign and all tragically earnest; chatted with corner grocerymen, saloon-keepers, ward politicians, composing his mental picture of a strike in a minor city, absolutely controlled, industrially, politically, and socially by the industry which had made it. The town, as he came to conceive it, was a fevered and struggling gnome, bound to a wheel which ground for others; a gnome who, if he broke his bonds, would be perhaps only the worse for his freedom. At the beginning of the sixth day, for his stay had outgrown its original plan, the pocket-ledger, 3 T 9901, was but little the richer, but the mind of its owner teemed with impressions.

It was his purpose to take those impressions in person to Mr. Horace Vanney, by the 10 A.M. train. Arriving at the station early, he was surprised at being held up momentarily by a line of guards engaged in blocking off a mob of wailing, jabbering women, many of whom had children in their arms, or at their skirts. He asked the ticket-agent, a big, pasty young man about them.

"Mill workers," said the agent, making change.

"What are they after?"

"Wanta get to the 10.10 train."

"And the guards are stopping them?"

"You can use your eyes, cantcha?"

Using his eyes, Banneker considered the position. "Are those fellows on railroad property?"

"What is it to you whether they are or ain't?"

Banneker explained his former occupation. "That's different," said the agent. "Come inside. That's a hell of a mess, ain't it!" he added plaintively as Banneker complied. "Some of those poor Hunkies have got their tickets and can't use 'em."

"I'd see that they got their train, if this was my station," asserted Banneker.

"Yes, you would! With that gang of strong-arms against you."

"Chase 'em," advised Banneker simply. "They've got no right keeping your passengers off your trains."

"Chase 'em, ay? You'd do it, I suppose."

"I would."

"How?"

"You've got a gun, haven't you?"

"Maybe you think those guys haven't got guns, too."

"Well, all I can say is, that if there had been passengers held up from their trains at my station and I didn't get them through, I'd have been through so far as the Atkinson and St. Philip goes."

"This railroad's different. I'd be through if I butted in on this mill row."

"How's that?"

"Well, for one thing, old Vanney, who's the real boss here, is a director of the road."

"So that's it!" Banneker digested this information. "Why are the women so anxious to get away?"

"They say"—the local agent lowered his voice—"their children are starving here, and they can get better jobs in other places. Naturally the mills don't want to lose a lot of their hands, particularly the women, because they're the cheapest. I don't know as I blame 'em for that. But this business of hiring a bunch of ex-cons and—Hey! Where are you goin'?"

Banneker was beyond the door before the query was completed. Looking out of the window, the agent saw a fat and fussy young mother, who had contrived to get through the line, waddling at her best speed across the open toward the station, and dragging a small boy by the hand. A lank giant from the guards' ranks was after her. Screaming, she turned the corner out of his vision. There were sounds which suggested a row at the station-door, but the agent, called at that moment to the wire, could not investigate. The train came and went, and he saw nothing more of the ex-railroader from the West.

Although Mr. Horace Vanney smiled pleasantly enough when Banneker presented himself at the office to make his report, the nature of the smile suggested a background more uncertain.

"Well, what have you found, my boy?" the financier began.

"A good many things that ought to be changed," answered Banneker bluntly.

"Quite probably. No institution is perfect."

"The mills are pretty rotten. You pay your people too little—"

"Where do you get that idea?"

"From the way they live."

"My dear boy; if we paid them twice as much, they'd live the same way. The surplus would go to the saloons."

"Then why not wipe out the saloons?"

"I am not the Common Council of Sippiac," returned Mr. Vanney dryly.

"Aren't you?" retorted Banneker even more dryly.

The other frowned. "What else?"

"Well; the housing. You own a good many of the tenements, don't you?"

"The company owns some."

"They're filthy holes."

"They are what the tenants make them."

"The tenants didn't build them with lightless hallways, did they?"

"They needn't live there if they don't like them. Have you spent all your time, for which I am paying, nosing about like a cheap magazine muckraker?" It was clear that Mr. Vanney was annoyed.

"I've been trying to find out what is wrong with Sippiac. I thought you wanted facts."

"Precisely. Facts. Not sentimental gushings."

"Well, there are your guards. There isn't much sentiment about them. I saw one of them smash a woman in the face, and knock her down, while she was trying to catch a train and get out of town."

"And what did you do?"

"I don't know exactly how much. But I hope enough to land him in the hospital. They pulled me off too soon."

"Do you know that you would have been killed if it hadn't been for some of the factory staff who saved you from the other guards—as you deserved, for your foolhardiness?"

The young man's eyebrows went up a bit. "Don't bank too much on my foolhardiness. I had a wall back of me. And there would have been material for several funerals before they got me." He touched his hip-pocket. "By the way, you seem to be well informed."

"I've been in 'phone communication with Sippiac since the regrettable occurrence. It perhaps didn't occur to you to find out that the woman, who is now under arrest, bit the guard very severely."

"Of course! Just like the rabbit bit the bulldog. You've got a lot of thugs and strong-arm men doing your dirty work, that ought to be in jail. If the newspapers here ever get onto the situation, it would make pretty rough reading for you, Mr. Vanney."

The magnate looked at him with contemptuous amusement. "No newspaper of decent standing prints that kind of socialistic stuff, my young friend."

"Why not?"

"Why not! Because of my position. Because the International Cloth Company is a powerful institution of the most reputable standing, with many lines of influence."

"And that is enough to keep the newspapers from printing an article about conditions in Sippiac?" asked Banneker, deeply interested in this phase of the question. "Is that the fact?"

It was not the fact; The Sphere, for one, would have handled the strike on the basis of news interest, as Mr. Vanney well knew; wherefore he hated and pretended to despise The Sphere. But for his own purposes he answered:

"Not a paper in New York would touch it. Except," he added negligently, "perhaps some lying, Socialist sheet. And let me warn you, Mr. Banneker," he pursued in his suavest tone, "that you will find no place for your peculiar ideas on The Ledger. In fact, I doubt whether you will be doing well either by them or by yourself in going on their staff, holding such views as you do."

"Do you? Then I'll tell them beforehand."

Mr. Vanney privately reflected that there was no need of this: he intended to call up the editor-in-chief and suggest the unsuitability of the candidate for a place, however humble, on the staff of a highly respectable and suitably respectful daily.

Which he did. The message was passed on to Mr. Gordon, and, in his large and tolerant soul, decently interred. One thing of which the managing editor of The Ledger was not tolerant was interference from without in his department.

Before allowing his man to leave, Mr. Vanney read him a long and well-meant homily, full of warning and wisdom, and was both annoyed and disheartened when, at the end of it, Banneker remarked:

"I'll dare you to take a car and spend twenty-four hours going about Sippiac with me. If you stand for your system after that, I'll pay for the car."

To which the other replied sadly that Banneker had in some manner acquired a false and distorted view of industrial relations.

Therein, for once in an existence guided almost exclusively by prejudice, Horace Vanney was right. At the outset of a new career to which he was attuning his mind, Banneker had been injected into a situation typical of all that is worst in American industrial life, a local manufacturing enterprise grown rich upon the labor of underpaid foreigners, through the practice of all the vicious, lawless, and insidious methods of an ingrown autocracy, and had believed it to be fairly representative. Had not Horace Vanney, doubtless genuine in his belief, told him as much?

"We're as fair and careful with our employees as any of our competitors."

As a matter of fact there were, even then, scores of manufacturing plants within easy distance of New York, representing broad and generous policies and conducted on a progressive and humanistic labor system. Had Banneker had his first insight into local industrial conditions through one of these, he might readily have been prejudiced in favor of capital. As it was, swallowing Vanney's statement as true, he mistook an evil example as a fair indication of the general status. Then and there he became a zealous protagonist of labor.

It had been Mr. Horace Vanney's shrewd design to show a budding journalist of promise on which side his self-interest lay. The weak spot in the plan was that Banneker did not seem to care!



CHAPTER V

Banneker's induction into journalism was unimpressive. They gave him a desk, an outfit of writing materials, a mail-box with his name on it, and eventually an assignment. Mr. Mallory presented him to several of the other "cubs" and two or three of the older and more important reporters. They were all quite amiable, obviously willing to be helpful, and they impressed the observant neophyte with that quiet and solid esprit de corps which is based upon respect for work well performed in a common cause. He apprehended that The Ledger office was in some sort an institution.

None of his new acquaintances volunteered information as to the mechanism of his new job. Apparently he was expected to figure that out for himself. By nature reticent, and trained in an environment which still retained enough of frontier etiquette to make a scrupulous incuriosity the touchstone of good manners and perhaps the essence of self-preservation, Banneker asked no questions. He sat and waited.

One by one the other reporters were summoned by name to the city desk, and dispatched with a few brief words upon the various items of the news. Presently Banneker found himself alone, in the long files of desks. For an hour he sat there and for a second hour. It seemed a curious way in which to be earning fifteen dollars a week. He wondered whether he was expected to sit tight at his desk. Or had he the freedom of the office? Characteristically choosing the more active assumption, he found his way to the current newspaper files. They were like old friends.

"Mr. Banneker." An office boy was at his elbow. "Mr. Greenough wants you."

Conscious of a quickened pulse, and annoyed at himself because of it, the tyro advanced to receive his maiden assignment. The epochal event was embodied in the form of a small clipping from an evening paper, stating that a six-year-old boy had been fatally burned at a bonfire near the North River. Banneker, Mr. Greenough instructed him mildly, was to make inquiries of the police, of the boy's family, of the hospital, and of such witnesses as he could find.

Quick with interest he caught up his hat and hurried out. Death, in the sparsely populated country wherefrom he hailed, was a matter of inclusive local importance; he assumed the same of New York. Three intense hours he devoted to an item which any police reporter of six months' standing would have rounded up in a brace of formal inquiries, and hastened back, brimful of details for Mr. Greenough.

"Good! Good!" interpolated that blandly approving gentleman from time to time in the course of the narrative. "Write it, Mr. Banneker! write it."

"How much shall I write?"

"Just what is necessary to tell the news."

Behind the amiable smile which broadened without lighting up the sub-Mongol physiognomy of the city editor, Banneker suspected something. As he sat writing page after page, conscientiously setting forth every germane fact, the recollection of that speculative, estimating smile began to play over the sentences with a dire and blighting beam. Three fourths of the way through, the writer rose, went to the file-board and ran through a dozen newspapers. He was seeking a ratio, a perspective. He wished to determine how much, in a news sense, the death of the son of an obscure East-Side plasterer was worth. On his return he tore up all that he had written, and substituted a curt paragraph, without character or color, which he turned in. He had gauged the value of the tragedy accurately, in the light of his study of news files.

Greenough showed the paragraph (which failed to appear at all in the overcrowded paper of next morning) to Mr. Gordon.

"The new man doesn't start well," he remarked. "Too little imaginative interest."

"Isn't it knowledge rather than lack of interest?" suggested the managing editor.

"It may come to the same thing. If he knows too much to get really interested, he'll be a dull reporter."

"I doubt whether you'll find him dull," smiled Mr. Gordon. "But he may find his job dull. In that case, of course he'd better find another."

Indeed, that was the danger which, for weeks to follow, Banneker skirted. Police news, petty and formal, made up his day's work. Had he sought beneath the surface of it the underlying elements, and striven to express these, his matter as it came to the desk, however slight the technical news value might have been, would have afforded the watchful copy-readers, trained to that special selectiveness as only The Ledger could train its men, opportunity of judging what potentialities might lurk beneath the crudities of the "cub." But Banneker was not crude. He was careful. His sense of the relative importance of news, acquired by those weeks of intensive analysis before applying for his job, was too just to let him give free play to his pen. What was the use? The "story" wasn't worth the space.

Nevertheless, 3 T 9901, which Banneker was already too cognoscent to employ in his formal newsgathering (the notebook is anathema to the metropolitan reporter), was filling up with odd bits, which were being transferred, in the weary hours when the new man sat at his desk with nothing to do, to paper in the form of sketches for Miss Westlake's trustful and waiting typewriter. Nobody could say that Banneker was not industrious. Among his fellow reporters he soon acquired the melancholy reputation of one who was forever writing "special stuff," none of which ever "landed." It was chiefly because of his industry and reliability, rather than any fulfillment of the earlier promise of brilliant worth as shown in the Sunday Sphere articles, that he got his first raise to twenty dollars. It surprised rather than gratified him.

He went to Mr. Gordon about it. The managing editor was the kind of man with whom it is easy to talk straight talk.

"What's the matter with me?" asked Banneker.

Mr. Gordon played a thoughtful tattoo upon his fleshy knuckles with the letter-opener. "Nothing. Aren't you satisfied?"

"No. Are you?"

"You've had your raise, and fairly early. Unless you had been worth it, you wouldn't have had it."

"Am I doing what you expected of me?"

"Not exactly. But you're developing into a sure, reliable reporter."

"A routine man," commented Banneker.

"After all, the routine man is the backbone of the office." Mr. Gordon executed a fantasia on his thumb. "Would you care to try a desk job?" he asked, peering at Banneker over his glasses.

"I'd rather run a trolley car. There's more life in it."

"Do you see life, in your work, Mr. Banneker?"

"See it? I feel it. Sometimes I think it's going to flatten me out like a steam-roller."

"Then why not write it?"

"It isn't news: not what I see."

"Perhaps not. Perhaps it's something else. But if it's there and we can get a gleam of it into the paper, we'll crowd news out to make a place for it. You haven't been reading The Ledger I'm afraid."

"Like a Bible."

"Not to good purpose, then. What do you think of Tommy Burt's stuff?"

"It's funny; some of it. But I couldn't do it to save my job."

"Nobody can do it but Burt, himself. Possibly you could learn something from it, though."

"Burt doesn't like it, himself. He told me it was all formula; that you could always get a laugh out of people about something they'd been taught to consider funny, like a red nose or a smashed hat. He's got a list of Sign Posts on the Road to Humor."

"The cynicism of twenty-eight," smiled the tolerant Mr. Gordon. "Don't let yourself be inoculated."

"Mr. Gordon," said Banneker doggedly; "I'm not doing the kind of work I expected to do here."

"You can hardly expect the star jobs until you've made yourself a star man."

Banneker flushed. "I'm not complaining of the way I've been treated. I've had a square enough deal. The trouble is with me. I want to know whether I ought to stick or quit."

"If you quit, what would you do?"

"I haven't a notion," replied the other with an indifference which testified to a superb, instinctive self-confidence. "Something."

"Do it here. I think you'll come along all right."

"But what's wrong with me?" persisted Banneker.

"Too much restraint. A rare fault. You haven't let yourself out." For a space he drummed and mused. Suddenly a knuckle cracked loudly. Mr. Gordon flinched and glared at it, startled as if it had offended him by interrupting a train of thought. "Here!" said he brusquely. "There's a Sewer-Cleaners' Association picnic to-morrow. They're going to put in half their day inspecting the Stimson Tunnel under the North River. Pretty idea; isn't it? Suppose I ask Mr. Greenough to send you out on the story. And I'd like a look at it when you turn it in."

Banneker worked hard on his report of the picnic; hard and self-consciously. Tommy Burt would, he knew, have made a "scream" of it, for tired business men to chuckle over on their way downtown. Pursuant to what he believed Mr. Gordon wanted, Banneker strove conscientiously to be funny with these human moles, who, having twelve hours of freedom for sunshine and air, elected to spend half of it in a hole bigger, deeper, and more oppressive than any to which their noisome job called them. The result was five painfully mangled sheets which presently went to the floor, torn in strips. After that Banneker reported the picnic as he saw, felt, and smelt it. It was a somber bit of writing, not without its subtleties and shrewd perceptions; quite unsuitable to the columns of The Ledger, in which it failed to appear. But Mr. Gordon read it twice. He advised Banneker not to be discouraged.

Banneker was deeply discouraged. He wanted to resign.

Perhaps he would nave resigned, if old Mynderse Verschoyle had not died at eight o'clock on the morning of the day when Banneker was the earliest man to report at the office. A picturesque character, old Mynderse, who had lived for forty-five years with his childless wife in the ancient house on West 10th Street, and for the final fifteen years had not addressed so much as a word to her. She had died three months before; and now he had followed, apparently, from what Banneker learned in an interview with the upset and therefore voluble secretary of the dead man, because, having no hatred left on which to center his life, he had nothing else to live for. Banneker wrote the story of that hatred, rigid, ceremonious, cherished like a rare virtue until it filled two lives; and he threw about it the atmosphere of the drear and divided old house. At the end, the sound of the laughter of children at play in the street.

The article appeared word for word as he had written it. That noon Tommy Burt, the funny man, drawing down his hundred-plus a week on space, came over and sat on Banneker's desk, and swung his legs and looked at him mournfully and said:

"You've broken through your shell at last."

"Did you like it?" asked Banneker.

"Like it! My God, if I could write like that! But what's the use! Never in the world."

"Oh, that's nonsense," returned Banneker, pleased. "Of course you can. But what's the rest of your 'if'?"

"I wouldn't be wasting my time here. The magazines for me."

"Is that better?"

"Depends on what you're after. For a man who wants to write, it's better, of course."

"Why?"

"Gives him a larger audience. No newspaper story is remembered overnight except by newspaper men. And they don't matter."

"Why don't they matter?" Banneker was surprised again, this time rather disagreeably.

"It's a little world. There isn't much substance to it. Take that Verschoyle stuff of yours; that's literature, that is! But you'll never hear of it again after next week. A few people here will remember it, and it'll help you to your next raise. But after you've got that, and, after that, your lift onto space, where are you?"

The abruptly confidential approach of Tommy Burt flattered Banneker with the sense that by that one achievement of the Verschoyle story he had attained a new status in the office. Later there came out from the inner sanctum where sat the Big Chief, distilling venom and wit in equal parts for the editorial page, a special word of approval. But this pleased the recipient less than the praise of his peers in the city room.

After that first talk, Burt came back to Banneker's desk from time to time, and once took him to dinner at "Katie's," the little German restaurant around the corner. Burt was given over to a restless and inoffensively egoistic pessimism.

"Look at me. I'm twenty-eight and making a good income. When I was twenty-three, I was making nearly as much. When I'm thirty-eight, where shall I be?"

"Can't you keep on making it?" asked Banneker.

"Doubtful. A fellow goes stale on the kind of stuff I do. And if I do keep on? Five to six thousand is fine now. It won't be so much ten years from now. That's the hell of this game; there's no real chance in it."

"What about the editing jobs?"

"Desk-work? Chain yourself by the leg, with a blue pencil in your hand to butcher better men's stuff? A managing editor, now, I'll grant you. He gets his twenty or twenty-five thousand if he doesn't die of overstrain, first. But there's only a few managing editors."

"There are more editorial writers."

"Hired pens. Dishing up other fellows' policies, whether you believe in 'em or not. No; I'm not of that profession, anyway." He specified the profession, a highly ancient and dishonorable one. Mr. Burt, in his gray moods, was neither discriminating nor quite just.

Banneker voiced the question which, at some point in his progress, every thoughtful follower of journalism must meet and solve as best he can. "When a man goes on a newspaper I suppose he more or less accepts that paper's standards, doesn't he?"

"More or less? To what extent?" countered the expert.

"I haven't figured that out, yet."

"Don't be in a hurry about it," advised the other with a gleam of malice. "The fellows that do figure it out to the end, and are honest enough about it, usually quit."

"You haven't quit."

"Perhaps I'm not honest enough or perhaps I'm too cowardly," retorted the gloomy Burt.

Banneker smiled. Though the other was nearly two years his senior, he felt immeasurably the elder. There is about the true reporter type an infinitely youthful quality; attractive and touching; the eternal juvenile, which, being once outgrown with its facile and evanescent enthusiasms, leaves the expert declining into the hack. Beside this prematurely weary example of a swift and precarious success, Banneker was mature of character and standard. Nevertheless, the seasoned journalist was steeped in knowledge which the tyro craved.

"What would you do," Banneker asked, "if you were sent out to write a story absolutely opposed to something you believed right; political, for instance?"

"I don't write politics. That's a specialty."

"Who does?"

"'Parson' Gale."

"Does he believe in everything The Ledger stands for?"

"Certainly. In office hours. For and in consideration of one hundred and twenty-five dollars weekly, duly and regularly paid."

"Outside of office hours, then."

"Ah; that's different. In Harlem where he lives, the Parson is quite a figure among the reform Democrats. The Ledger, as you know, is Republican; and anything in the way of reform is its favorite butt. So Gale spends his working day poking fun at his political friends and associates."

"Out West we'd call that kind of fellow a yellow pup."

"Well, don't call the Parson that; not to me," warned the other indignantly. "He's as square a man as you'll find on Park Row. Why, you were just saying, yourself, that a reporter is bound to accept his paper's standards when he takes the job."

"Then I suppose the answer is that a man ought to work only on a newspaper in whose policies he believes."

"Which policies? A newspaper has a hundred different ones about a hundred different things. Here in this office we're dead against the split infinitive and the Honest Laboring Man. We don't believe he's honest and we've got our grave doubts as to his laboring. Yet one of our editorial writers is an out-and-out Socialist and makes fiery speeches advising the proletariat to rise and grab the reins of government. But he'd rather split his own head than an infinitive."

"Does he write anti-labor editorials?" asked the bewildered Banneker.

"Not as bad as that. He confines himself to European politics and popular scientific matters. But, of course, wherever there is necessity for an expression of opinion, he's anti-socialist in his writing, as he's bound to be."

"Just a moment ago you were talking of hired pens. Now you seem to be defending that sort of thing. I don't understand your point of view."

"Don't you? Neither do I, I guess," admitted the expositor with great candor. "I can argue it either way and convince myself, so far as the other fellow's work is concerned. But not for my own."

"How do you figure it out for yourself, then?"

"I don't. I dodge. It's a kind of tacit arrangement between the desk and me. In minor matters I go with the paper. That's easy, because I agree with it in most questions of taste and the way of doing things. After all The Ledger has got certain standards of professional conduct and of decent manners; it's a gentleman's paper. The other things, the things where my beliefs conflict with the paper's standards, political or ethical, don't come my way. You see, I'm a specialist; I do mostly the fluffy stuff."

"If that's the way to keep out of embarrassing decisions, I'd like to become a specialist myself."

"You can do it, all right," the other assured him earnestly. "That story of yours shows it. You've got The Ledger touch—no, it's more individual than that. But you've got something that's going to stick out even here. Just the same, there'll come a time when you'll have to face the other issue of your job or your—well, your conscience."

What Tommy Burt did not say in continuation, and had no need to say, since his expressive and ingenuous face said it for him, was, "And I wonder what you'll do with that!"

A far more influential friend than Tommy Burt had been wondering, too, and had, not without difficulty, expressed her doubts in writing. Camilla Van Arsdale had written to Banneker:

... I know so little of journalism, but there are things about it that I distrust instinctively. Do you remember what that wrangler from the Jon Cal told Old Bill Speed when Bill wanted to hire him: "I wouldn't take any job that I couldn't look in the eye and tell it to go to hell on five minutes' notice." I have a notion that you've got to take that attitude toward a reporting job. There must be so much that a man cannot do without loss of self-respect. Yet, I can't imagine why I should worry about you as to that. Unless it is that, in a strange environment one gets one's values confused.... Have you had to do any "Society" reporting yet? I hope not. The society reporters of my day were either obsequious little flunkeys and parasites, or women of good connections but no money who capitalized their acquaintanceship to make a poor living, and whom one was sorry for, but would rather not see. Going to places where one is not asked, scavenging for bits of news from butlers and housekeepers, sniffing after scandals—perhaps that is part of the necessary apprenticeship of newspaper work. But it's not a proper work for a gentleman. And, in any case, Ban, you are that, by the grace of your ancestral gods.

Little enough did Banneker care for his ancestral gods: but he did greatly care for the maintenance of those standards which seemed to have grown, indigenously within him, since he had never consciously formulated them. As for reporting, of whatever kind, he deemed Miss Van Arsdale prejudiced. Furthermore, he had met the society reporter of The Ledger, an elderly, mild, inoffensive man, neat and industrious, and discerned in him no stigma of the lickspittle. Nevertheless, he hoped that he would not be assigned to such "society news" as Remington did not cover in his routine. It might, he conceived, lead him into false situations where he could be painfully snubbed. And he had never yet been in a position where any one could snub him without instant reprisals. In such circumstances he did not know exactly what he would do. However, that bridge could be crossed or refused when he came to it.



CHAPTER VI

Such members of the Brashear household as chose to accommodate themselves strictly to the hour could have eight o'clock breakfast in the basement dining-room for the modest consideration of thirty cents; thirty-five with special cream-jug. At these gatherings, usually attended by half a dozen of the lodgers, matters of local interest were weightily discussed; such as the progress of the subway excavations, the establishment of a new Italian restaurant in 11th Street, or the calling away of the fourth-floor-rear by the death of an uncle who would perhaps leave him money. To this sedate assemblage descended one crisp December morning young Wickert, clad in the natty outline of a new Bernholz suit, and obviously swollen with tidings.

"Whaddya know about the latest?" he flung forth upon the coffee-scented air.

"The latest" in young Wickert's compendium of speech might be the garments adorning his trim person, the current song-hit of a vaudeville to which he had recently contributed his critical attention, or some tidbit of purely local gossip. Hainer, the plump and elderly accountant, opined that Wickert had received an augmentation of salary, and got an austere frown for his sally. Evidently Wickert deemed his news to be of special import; he was quite bloated, conversationally. He now dallied with it.

"Since when have you been taking in disguised millionaires, Mrs. Brashear?"

The presiding genius of the house, divided between professional resentment at even so remotely slurring an implication (for was not the Grove Street house good enough for any millionaire, undisguised!) and human curiosity, requested an explanation.

"I was in Sherry's restaurant last night," said the offhand Wickert.

"I didn't read about any fire there," said the jocose Hainer, pointing his sally with a wink at Lambert, the art-student.

Wickert ignored the gibe. Such was the greatness of his tidings that he could afford to.

"Our firm was giving a banquet to some buyers and big folks in the trade. Private room upstairs; music, flowers, champagne by the case. We do things in style when we do 'em. They sent me up after hours with an important message to our Mr. Webler; he was in charge of arrangements."

"Been promoted to be messenger, ay?" put in Mr. Hainer, chuckling.

"When I came downstairs," continued the other with only a venomous glance toward the seat of the scorner, "I thought to myself what's the matter with taking a look at the swells feeding in the big restaurant. You may not know it, people, but Sherry's is the ree-churchiest place in Nuh Yawk to eat dinner. It's got 'em all beat. So I stopped at the door and took 'em in. Swell? Oh, you dolls! I stood there trying to work up the nerve to go in and siddown and order a plate of stew or something that wouldn't stick me more'n a dollar, just to say I'd been dining at Sherry's, when I looked across the room, and whadda you think?" He paused, leaned forward, and shot out the climactic word, "Banneker!"

"Having his dinner there?" asked the incredulous but fascinated Mrs. Brashear.

"Like he owned the place. Table to himself, against the wall. Waiter fussin' over him like he loved him. And dressed! Oh, Gee!"

"Did you speak to him?" asked Lambert.

"He spoke to me," answered Wickert, dealing in subtle distinctions. "He was just finishing his coffee when I sighted him. Gave the waiter haffa dollar. I could see it on the plate. There I was at the door, and he said, 'Why, hello, Wickert. Come and have a liquor.' He pronounced it a queer, Frenchy way. So I said thanks, I'd have a highball."

"Didn't he seem surprised to see you there?" asked Hainer.

Wickert paid an unconscious tribute to good-breeding. "Banneker's the kind of feller that wouldn't show it if he was surprised. He couldn't have been as surprised as I was, at that. We went to the bar and had a drink, and then I ast him what'd he, have on me, and all the time I was sizing him up. I'm telling you, he looked like he'd grown up in Sherry's."

The rest of the conversation, it appeared from Mr. Wickert's spirited sketch, had consisted mainly in eager queries from himself, and good-humored replies by the other.

Did Banneker eat there every night?

Oh, no! He wasn't up to that much of a strain on his finances.

But the waiters seemed to know him, as if he was one of the regulars.

In a sense he was. Every Monday he dined there. Monday was his day off.

Well, Mr. Wickert (awed and groping) would be damned! All alone?

Banneker, smiling, admitted the solitude. He rather liked dining alone.

Oh, Wickert couldn't see that at all! Give him a pal and a coupla lively girls, say from the Ladies' Tailor-Made Department, good-lookers and real dressers; that was his idea of a dinner, though he'd never tried it at Sherry's. Not that he couldn't if he felt like it. How much did they stick you for a good feed-out with a cocktail and maybe a bottle of Italian Red?

Well, of course, that depended on which way was Wickert going? Could Banneker set him on his way? He was taking a taxi to the Avon Theater, where there was an opening.

Did Mr. Banneker (Wickert had by this time attained the "Mr." stage) always follow up his dinner at Sherry's with a theater?

Usually, if there were an opening. If not he went to the opera or a concert.

For his part, Wickert liked a little more spice in life. Still, every feller to his tastes. And Mr. Banneker was sure dressed for the part. Say—if he didn't mind—who made that full-dress suit?

No; of course he didn't mind. Mertoun made it.

After which Mr. Banneker had been deftly enshrouded in a fur-lined coat, worthy of a bank president, had crowned these glories with an impeccable silk hat, and had set forth. Wickert had only to add that he wore in his coat lapel one of those fancy tuberoses, which he, Wickert, had gone to the pains of pricing at the nearest flower shop immediately after leaving Banneker. A dollar apiece! No, he had not accepted the offer of a lift, being doubtful upon the point of honor as to whether he would be expected to pay a pro rata of the taxi charge. They, the assembled breakfast company, had his permission to call him, Mr. Wickert, a goat if Mr. Banneker wasn't the swellest-looking guy he had anywhere seen on that memorable evening.

Nobody called Mr. Wickert a goat. But Mr. Hainer sniffed and said:

"And him a twenty-five-dollar-a-week reporter!"

"Perhaps he has private means," suggested little Miss Westlake, who had her own reasons for suspecting this: reasons bolstered by many and frequent manuscripts, turned over to her for typing, recast, returned for retyping, and again, in many instances, re-recast and re-retyped, the result of the sweating process being advantageous to their literary quality. Simultaneous advantage had accrued to the typist, also, in a practical way. Though the total of her bills was modest, it constituted an important extra; and Miss Westlake no longer sought to find solace for her woes through the prescription of the ambulant school of philosophic thought, and to solve her dental difficulties by walking the floor of nights. Philosophy never yet cured a toothache. Happily the sufferer was now able to pay a dentist. Hence Banneker could work, untroubled of her painful footsteps in the adjoining room, and considered the outcome cheap at the price. He deemed himself an exponent of enlightened selfishness. Perhaps he was. But the dim and worn spinster would have given half a dozen of her best and painless teeth to be of service to him. Now she came to his defense with a pretty dignity:

"I am sure that Mr. Banneker would not be out of place in any company."

"Maybe not," answered the cynical Lambert. "But where does he get it? I ask you!"

"Wherever he gets it, no gentleman could be more forehanded in his obligations," declared Mrs. Brashear.

"But what's he want to blow it for in a shirty place like Sherry's?" marveled young Wickert.

"Wyncha ask him?" brutally demanded Hainer.

Wickert examined his mind hastily, and was fain to admit inwardly that he had wanted to ask him, but somehow felt "skittish" about it. Outwardly he retorted, being displeased at his own weakness, "Ask him yourself."

Had any one questioned the subject of the discussion at Mrs. Brashear's on this point, even if he were willing to reply to impertinent interrogations (a high improbability of which even the hardy Wickert seems to have had some timely premonition), he would perhaps have explained the glorified routine of his day-off, by saying that he went to Sherry's and the opening nights for the same reason that he prowled about the water-front and ate in polyglot restaurants on obscure street-corners east of Tompkins Square; to observe men and women and the manner of their lives. It would not have been a sufficient answer; Banneker must have admitted that to himself. Too much a man of the world in many strata not to be adjustable to any of them, nevertheless he felt more attuned to and at one with his environment amidst the suave formalism of Sherry's than in the more uneasy and precarious elegancies of an East-Side Tammany Association promenade and ball.

Some of the youngsters of The Ledger said that he was climbing.

He was not climbing. To climb one must be conscious of an ascent to be surmounted. Banneker was serenely unaware of anything above him, in that sense. Eminent psychiatrists were, about that time, working upon the beginning of a theory of the soul, later to be imposed upon an impressionable and faddish world, which dealt with a profound psychical deficit known as a "complex of inferiority." In Banneker they would have found sterile soil. He had no complex of inferiority, nor, for that matter, of superiority; mental attitudes which, applied to social status, breed respectively the toady and the snob. He had no complex at all. He had, or would have had, if the soul-analysts had invented such a thing, a simplex. Relative status was a matter to which he gave little thought. He maintained personal standards not because of what others might think of him, but because he chose to think well of himself.

Sherry's and a fifth-row-center seat at opening nights meant to him something more than refreshment and amusement; they were an assertion of his right to certain things, a right of which, whether others recognized or ignored it, he felt absolutely assured. These were the readily attainable places where successful people resorted. Serenely determined upon success, he felt himself in place amidst the outward and visible symbols of it. Let the price be high for his modest means; this was an investment which he could not afford to defer. He was but anticipating his position a little, and in such wise that nobody could take exception to it, because his self-promotion demanded no aid or favor from any other living person. His interest was in the environment, not in the people, as such, who were hardly more than, "walking ladies and gentlemen" in a mise-en-scene. Indeed, where minor opportunities offered by chance of making acquaintances, he coolly rejected them. Banneker did not desire to know people—yet. When he should arrive at the point of knowing them, it must be upon his terms, not theirs.

It was on one of his Monday evenings of splendor that a misadventure of the sort which he had long foreboded, befell him. Sherry's was crowded, and a few tables away Banneker caught sight of Herbert Cressey, dining with a mixed party of a dozen. Presently Cressey came over.

"What have you been doing with yourself?" he asked, shaking hands. "Haven't seen you for months."

"Working," replied Banneker. "Sit down and have a cocktail. Two, Jules," he added to the attentive waiter.

"I guess they can spare me for five minutes," agreed Cressey, glancing back at his forsaken place. "This isn't what you call work, though, is it?"

"Hardly. This is my day off."

"Oh! And how goes the job?"

"Well enough."

"I'd think so," commented the other, taking in the general effect of Banneker's easy habituation to the standards of the restaurant. "You don't own this place, do you?" he added.

From another member of the world which had inherited or captured Sherry's as part of the spoils of life, the question might have been offensive. But Banneker genuinely liked Cressey.

"Not exactly," he returned lightly. "Do I give that unfortunate impression?"

"You give very much the impression of owning old Jules—or he does—and having a proprietary share in the new head waiter. Are you here much?"

"Monday evenings, only."

"This is a good cocktail," observed Cressey, savoring it expertly. "Better than they serve to me. And, say, Banneker, did Mertoun make you that outfit?"