XII
March 3. Fate seemed determined that our lives should be closely connected. In December Mr. Blodgett wrote asking me to call at his office, and he was already smiling when his boy passed me through the door at which so many had to tarry.
"There are a good many kinds of fools," was his welcoming remark, "but one of the commonest is the brand who think because they can do one thing well, they ought to be able to do the exact opposite. I've known men who could grow rich out of brewing beer, who kept themselves poor through thinking they knew all about horses; I've known women who queened it in parlors, who went to smash because they believed themselves inspired actresses; I've sat here in this office thirty years, and grown rich through the belief of clergymen, doctors, merchants, farmers, – the whole box and dice, – that they were heaven-born financiers, and could play us Wall Street men even at our own game. Whatever else you do in this world, doctor, don't think that because you can talk a dozen languages, they fit you to be a successful mute."
"When you are in this mood, Mr. Blodgett, I can be nothing else," I interpolated, as he paused a moment for breath.
"Alexander Whitely," he went on, smiling, "probably knows more about petroleum and kerosene than any other man in the world, and he's made himself rich by his knowledge. But it doesn't satisfy him to be on the top of his own heap; he wants to get on the top of some other fellow's. In short, he has an itch to be something he isn't, and the darned fool's gone and bought a daily newspaper with the idea that he is going to be a great editor!"
"His lamp of genius will not go out for want of oil," I remarked.
"For a moment he showed one glimmer of sense: he came to me for advice," said Mr. Blodgett in evident enjoyment. "I told him to get an A 1 business manager, to make you chief editor, let you pick your staff, and then blow in all the money you and the business end asked for, and never go inside the building himself. It was too good sense for him, for he's daft with the idea of showing the world how to edit a paper. But my advice simmered down to this: if you want to be his private secretary, at four thousand a year, and pretend to revise his editorials, but really write them for him, I guess you can have the position. Of course he is to think he writes the rubbish."
"A Voltaire in miniature," I laughed.
"A what?"
"The great Frederic thought himself a poet, and induced Voltaire to come and be his literary counselor. The latter showed a bundle of manuscripts to some one and sneered, 'See all this dirty linen of the king's he has sent me to wash.'"
"That was one for his nibs," chuckled Mr. Blodgett appreciatively. "But you mustn't make such speeches as that of Whitely."
"In spite of my many tongues, I can be mute."
"Do you think I haven't seen that? And I've seen something more, which is that you always give a dollar's worth of work for seventy-five cents of wages. Now, Whitely's a hard man, and if you made the terms with him he'd be sure to get the better of you. So I've arranged to have him meet you here, and I'm going to see fair play. I've told him you won't do it for less than four thousand, and he'll not get you a cent cheaper. The work will be very light."
"The work is easy," I assented, "but is it honest?"
"Seems to me we had better leave that to Whitely to settle."
"And is Mr. Whitely an honest man?"
Mr. Blodgett smiled as he looked at me, and observed, "Whitely wouldn't steal a red-hot stove unless it had handles! But he probably thinks this all right. Few people know how much successful men use other men's brains. Here's a report on a Southern railroad by an expert in my employ. I've never even been over the road, yet I'll sign my name to the report as if it was my work. Now, in oil Whitely hires all kinds of men to do different things for him, and he gets whatever credit follows; and I suppose he thinks that if he pays you to write editorials, they are as much his as any other thing he buys."
"He must be conscious of a distinction."
"That's his lookout, if he is. Don't start in to keep other people's consciences in order, doctor, for it's the hardest-worked and poorest-paid trade in the world."
When Mr. Whitely arrived, Mr. Blodgett was as good as his word, taking the matter practically out of my hands, and letting me sit a passive and amused spectator of the contest between the two shrewd men, who dropped all thought of personal friendship while they discussed the matter. Mr. Blodgett won, and made the further stipulation that since Mr. Whitely intended to be at the office only in the afternoon, I might be equally privileged as to my hours of attendance. His forethought and kindness did more, for his last speech to Mr. Whitely was, "Then it's understood that the doctor writes your letters and revises your editorials, but nothing else." And as soon as we were alone he intimated, "Remember that, or before you know it he'll be screwing you to death. Don't you write anything extra for him unless there's extra pay. Now, don't waste my time by thanks in business hours, but come in to-night to dinner, so as to let the boss and Agnes congratulate you."
My employment began the first of the year, at which time the paper came into the hands of its new proprietor; and it amuses me to recall him as he sat at his desk that first day, thrumming it nervously, and trying to dictate an editorial on The Outlook for the New Year. A more hopeless bit of composition I have seldom read, and four times it was rewritten as I built it into shape.
The man has no more sense of form than he has of English. Even worse, he is almost without ideas. It has become his invariable custom to remark to me suavely, as he takes his seat at his desk about two o'clock, "Dr. Hartzmann, possibly you can suggest a good subject for me to write about to-day?" And when I propose one, he continues: "That is satisfactory. Jot down what you think I had better say, while I run over my mail." An hour later I lay the typewritten sheets before him, and, after reading them with the most evident pleasure, he puts his initials at the top and sends the editorial out to the managing editor; to have a second pleasure when, after two hours, the galley slips of proof come back to him.
Fortunately for me, he cares no more for politics than I do, and thus saves me from the necessity of studying and mastering that shifting quicksand against which beat the tides of men, ebbing as private greed obtains the mastery, and flowing in those curious revulsions of selfishly altruistic public spirit called patriotism. Except for this subject his taste is catholic, and his foible is to pose as omniscient. "I wish new subjects, – something, if possible, that intellectual people do not know about," – is his constant command; and nothing delights him more than an editorial on a subject of which he has never heard. Speaking only his mother tongue, he has an inordinate desire for foreign words, and will observe, "A quotation in another language gives an editorial page an air of culture which I desire my paper to have." Our composing-room, I imagine, is the only one in New York which has Greek type, and if I gave him the smallest encouragement he would buy fonts of Sanskrit and Hebrew characters. He always makes me teach him how to pronounce the sentences, catching them with a wonderful parrot-like facility. Usually he carries clippings of the last half dozen editorials with him, and his delight is to make an opportunity to read one aloud, prefaced by the announcement that he is the writer. Sometimes, indeed, he cannot contain his pleasure over the articles till their appearance in type, and I repeatedly hear him request a visitor, "If you have ten minutes to spare, let me read you this editorial I have just written for to-morrow's issue."
At first, in spite of Mr. Blodgett's explanation, I thought this real dishonesty, and despised not merely him, but myself as well for aiding in such trickery. As I grow to know him better, however, I find he is not cozening the public so much as imposing on himself. The man has a fervent and untrained imagination, which has never, in the practicalities of oil, had a safety-valve. As a result, it has rioted in dreams of which he is the hero, until it has brought him to the point of thinking his wildest fancies quite possible realities. His self-faith is so great that his imagination sets no limit to his powers, and thus he can believe everything of himself. I have heard him tell what he would do under given circumstances, and, with my knowledge of him, I know he is conceiving himself to be actually doing what he describes. Thus, in a smaller sense, he really imagines that he writes the editorials, and he even reads them to Mr. Blodgett, apparently unconscious that there can be the slightest question of authorship in the latter's mind.
With this singular weakness the man is yet a strong one. His capacity to judge and manage men or facts is truly marvelous. He rules his paper as he rules everything, with the firmest hand, and not a man in his employ but knows who is master. Within a year he turned the journal into a great earner of money, and in the business office they have to confess that it is all his work, ignorant though he is to this day of the details. He knows by instinct where money should be spent, and where it should be scrimped. Yet with all this business shrewdness he cares not half so much that his investment is paying him twenty per cent as that people are talking about his ability as an editor, and my only influence over him even now is the praise my editorials have won him.
Perhaps the most singular quality of his nature is his heedlessness of individual opinion, and his dread of it in mass. He is so absolutely self-centred – every thought directed inward – that he never tries to make the individual like him, yet he craves intensely the world's esteem. He longs for notoriety, and even stoops to an almost daily mention of himself in his paper, taking endless pains to get his name into other journals as well. Even his philanthropy, for which the world admires him, is used for this purpose. Ridiculous as it may seem, the most grating task I have to do is the writing of the fulsome press dispatches which he invariably sends out whenever he makes one of his gifts. He writes, too, to his fellow editors, asking them to comment on the largess; and since he makes it a point to cultivate the pleasantest relations with his confrères, they give him good measure, though with many a smile and wink among themselves when they get together. "Mr. White-Lie" is his sobriquet in the fraternity.
How curiously diverse the same man is to different people! To the world Mr. Whitely is a man of great business ability, of wide knowledge, of great benevolence, and of fine manners. I do not wonder, Maizie, that he imposes on you; for though you have discernment, yet you are not of a suspicious nature, and his acting is so wonderful and his manner so frank, through his own unconsciousness of his self-deceit, that not a dozen people dream the man is other than he seems. You might, perhaps, in spite of his taciturnity, have discovered his charlatan pretense of learning if you had been born inquisitive, but you take his writings for the measure of his intellect, and have no more reason to suspect that his skillful reservations are the refuge of a sciolist than that my silence covers such little erudition as I have.
Why I can do naught else but sit here and write of the past I do not understand. Until a month ago I was working every evening till far into the night, but now, try as I may, I can no longer force myself to my task. I should think it was physical exhaustion, were it not that I can chronicle this stale record of what I know so well. I suppose it is mental discouragement at my slight progress in reducing that crushing debt, and, even more, my sadness at the thought of you as his wife.
Good-night, my darling. May happiness be yours.
XIII
March 4. My impressions of that first winter in New York are curiously dim except for the extreme loneliness of my life, which, after the close companionship with my father for so many years, seemed at times almost unbearable. Indeed, I doubt if I could have borne the long hours of solitude and toil but for my occasional glimpses of you. I should think myself fatuous in claiming that you influence me physically, – that I am conscious of a material glow, ecstasy, thrill, call it what you please, when with you, – if I had not once heard Agnes declare that she always felt, when you were in the room, as if she had been drinking champagne; showing that I am not the only one you can thus affect.
My pleasantest recollection is of our long talk in my employer's study; and strangely enough, it was my books which gained it for me. Mr. Whitely, when I first came into his service, had just endowed a free library in one of the Western cities where some of his oil interests centred, and I hinted to him the purchase of my books as a further gift to his hobby. The suggestion did not meet with his approval, – I fear because there was not the self-advertising in it that there is in a money gift, – but after a week he told me that he might buy the collection to furnish his editorial study. "I plan," he said, "to make my office attractive, and then have informal literary receptions once a week. I shall therefore require some books, and as your library should be marked by breadth and depth of learning, I presume it will serve my purpose."
"There are quite a number of Eastern manuscripts of value," I told him, "and few of the books are in languages that can be read by the average New Yorker."
"That gives the suggestion of scholarship which I wish," he acknowledged.
We easily came to terms under these circumstances, and I cannot tell you how happy I was to find myself once more surrounded by my books. As soon as they were in place and the study was handsomely furnished, my employer issued cards; and though he had nothing in common with the literary and artistic set, the mere fact that he controlled the columns of a great paper brought them all flocking to his afternoons. It is a case of mutual cultivation, and I am sick of being told to write puffs of books and pictures. Even foreigners do not seem above this log-rolling, and toady to the editor of the influential journal. And yet we think Johnson mean-spirited for standing at Chesterfield's door! It humiliates me to see writers and artists stooping so low merely to get notices that are worthless in a critical sense, and doubly am I degraded that mine is the pen that aids in this contemptible chicane.
You, Mrs. Blodgett, and Agnes came to one of these afternoons, and made me happy, not alone by your presence, but by an insinuated reproof, which meant, I thought, that you had become enough interested in me to care what I did. You expressed surprise at my being there, and so I explained to you that I had become Mr. Whitely's secretary.
"And is your work congenial?" you asked.
I shrugged my shoulders, and quoted, "Civilized man cannot live without dining."
"But you told me you were making a living. Is not a crust with independence and a chance to make a name better than such work?"
"If one is free, yes. But if one must earn money?"
"I had somehow fixed it in my mind that you were en garçon. One's fancies are sometimes very ridiculous. Who invented the mot that a woman's intuitions were what she had when she was wrong?"
"Some man, of course," I laughed. "And you were right in supposing me a bachelor."
"How little people really know about one another," you observed, "and yet we talk of the realism of life! I believe it is only in fiction that we get it."
"Napoleon said, 'Take away history and give me a novel: I wish the truth!' Certainly, our present romance writers attempt it."
"Only to prove that truth is not art."
"How so?"
"To photograph life in literature is no more art than a reproduction of our street sounds would be music."
"Painting and sculpture are copying."
"And the closer the copy, the less the art."
"Then you would define art as" —
"The vivifying of work with the personality of the workman."
"That is not very far from Saadi's thought that art is never produced without love."
"I have to confess that you mention an author of whom I had never even heard till I read The Debatable Lands. The extracts printed there made me think he must be one of the great philosopher poets of the world. Yet there is no copy of his works at the Lenox."
"There are copies of all his writings here."
"I think I shall disobey Polonius by trying to be a borrower," you announced, and turning to Mr. Whitely, you asked, "Do you ever loan your books?"
"To lend to you would be a pleasure, and give added value to the volume," assented Mr. Whitely, joining us. "Take anything you wish."
"Thank you so much. Will you let me see what you have of Saadi, so that I may take my choice?"
"You were speaking of" – hemmed Mr. Whitely.
"Saadi."
"Ah, yes. Dr. Hartzmann knows where it is."
When I had led the way to the proper shelf, you selected the Gulistan, opened it, and then laughed. "You have the best protection against borrowers. I envy both of you the ability to read him in the original, but it is beyond me."
"As you read Latin, you can read Gentius' translation of the Bostan," I suggested, taking the book down.
"How do you know that I can read Latin?" you asked.
I faltered for a moment, too much taken aback to think what to reply, and fortunately Mr. Whitely interposed quickly, "Miss Walton's reputation for learning is so well recognized that knowledge of Latin is taken for granted."
Taking advantage of the compliment, I surmised, "Perhaps you will care less to read the poet if I quote a stanza of his: —
'Seek truth from life, and not from books, O fool!
Look at the sky to find the stars, not in the pool.'"
"You only make me the more eager," you said, running over the pages.
"The book is worth reading," vouched Mr. Whitely.
"How good that is!" you appealed to him, laying your finger on lines to the effect that a dozen poor men will sleep in peace on a straw heap, while the greatest empire is too narrow for two kings.
"Very," answered my employer, after looking at the text with a critical air. If you could only have enjoyed the joke with me!
Suddenly, as I watched you, you became pale, and glancing down to learn the cause, I saw a manuscript note in my father's handwriting on the margin of the page. "Mr. Whitely," you asked huskily, "how did you get this book?"
Had you looked at me you would have seen one paler than yourself, as I stood there expecting the axe to fall. Oh! the relief when Mr. Whitely replied, "I bought it in Germany."
You closed the volume, remarking, "I do not think I will ask the loan, after all. He seems an author one ought to own."
"I hoped you would add an association to the book," urged Mr. Whitely.
"Thank you," you parried gravely, "but so old a volume can hardly be lacking in association. I think we must be going."
I took you down to the carriage, and Mrs. Blodgett kindly offered me the fourth seat. You were absolutely silent in the drive up-town, and I was scarcely less so as I tried to read your thoughts. What feelings had that scrap of writing stirred in you?
I have often since then recalled our parting words that afternoon, and wondered if I allowed a mere scruple – a cobweb that a stronger man would have brushed aside without a second thought – to wreck my life. If I had taken what you offered? Perhaps the time might have come when I could have told you of my trick, and you would have forgiven it. Perhaps —
You said to me graciously, when we separated at your door, "I shall be very happy, Dr. Hartzmann, if you will come to see me."
I flushed with pleasure, for I felt it was not a privilege you gave to many. But even as I hesitated for words with which to express my gratitude, I realized that I had no moral right to gain your hospitality by means of my false name; and when I spoke it was to respond, "I thank you for the favor most deeply, Miss Walton, but I am too busy a man for social calls."
Oh, my darling, if you had known what those few words cost me, and the struggle it was to keep my voice steady as I spoke them! For I knew you could only take them to mean that I declined your friendship. Hide my shame as I might try to do, I could not escape its pains. God keep you from such suffering, Maizie, and good-night.