Part 26 (1/2)
”A little,” confessed the reporter. ”Now that it's over, I do feel a bit let down.”
”I'll bet you do,” said Mr. Foxman. ”Well, you'd better run along to your hotel and get a good night's rest. Take to-morrow off too--don't report here until day after to-morrow; that'll be Friday, won't it? All right then, I'll see you Friday afternoon here; I may have something of interest to say to you then. Meanwhile, as I told you before, keep your mouth shut to everybody. I don't know yet whether I'll want to run your story to-morrow morning or the morning after. My information is that Blake, through his lawyers, will announce the completion of the merger, probably on Friday, or possibly on Sat.u.r.day. I may decide to hold off the explosion until they come out with their announcement. Really, that would be the suitable moment to open fire on 'em and smash up their little stock-market game for them.”
Dog-tired and happier than any poor dog of a newspaper man has a right to be, Singlebury went to his room and to bed. And when finally he fell asleep he dreamed the second chapter of that orange-blossomy dream of his.
Being left to himself, Mr. Foxman read Singlebury's copy through page by page, changing words here and there, but on the whole enormously pleased with it. Then he touched a buzzer b.u.t.ton under his desk, being minded to call into conference the chief editorial writer and the news editor before he put the narrative into type. Now it happened that at this precise moment Mr. Foxman's own special boy had left his post just outside Mr. Foxman's door to skylark with a couple of ordinary copy boys in the corridor between the city room and the Sunday room, and so he didn't answer the summons immediately. The fact was, he didn't hear the bell until Mr. Foxman impatiently rang a second and a third time. Then he came running, making up a suitable excuse to explain his tardiness as he came. And during that half minute of delay there leaped out of nowhere into Mr. Foxman's brain an idea--an idea, horned, hoofed and hairy--which was to alter the current of his own life and, directly or indirectly, the lives of scores of others.
It would seem I was a trifle premature, back yonder near the beginning of this chapter, when I used the line: Six-thirty-four--enter the villain.
Because, as I now realise, the villain didn't enter then. The villain did not enter until this moment, more than forty-eight hours later, entering not in the guise of a human being but in the shape of this tufted, woolly demon of a notion which took such sudden lodgment in Mr.
Foxman's mind. Really, I suppose we should blame the office boy. His being late may have been responsible for the whole thing.
He poked a tow head in at the door, ready to take a scolding.
”D'yer ring, sir?” he inquired meekly.
”Yes, three times,” said Mr. Foxman. ”Where have you been?”
”Right here, sir. Somethin' you wanted, sir?”
”No; I've changed my mind. Get out!”
Pleased and surprised to have escaped, the towhead withdrew. Very deliberately Mr. Foxman lit a cigar, leaned back in his chair, and for a period took mental accounting of his past, his present and his future; and all the while he did this a decision was being forged for him, by that busy devilish little tempter, into shape and point and permanency.
In his fingers he held the means of making himself independent--yes, even rich. Why--he began asking himself the plaguing question and kept on asking it--why should he go on working his life out for twelve thousand dollars a year when, by one safe, secret stroke, he could make twelve times twelve thousand, or very possibly more? He knew what happened to newspaper executives who wore out in the harness. Offhand, he could think of half a dozen who had been as capable as he was, as active and as zealous, and as single-purposed in their loyalty to the sheets they served as he was to this sheet which he served.
All of these men had held high editorial posts and, in their prime, had drawn down big salaries, as newspaper salaries go. Where were they now, since they had grown old? He knew where they were--mighty good and well he knew. One trying to run a chicken farm on Staten Island and daily demonstrating that a man who could manage a newspaper does not necessarily know how to manage a flock of temperamental White Leghorn hens; one an exchange editor, a neglected and unconsidered figure of obscurity, a nonent.i.ty almost, and a pensioner, practically, in the same shop whose affairs his slackened old hands had once controlled; one or two more of them actually needy--out of work and out at elbows; and so on, and so forth, through the list.
Well, it rested with Mr. Foxman to avert such a finish to his own career; the instrument fitted to combat the prospect was here in his grasp. Temptation, whispering to him, bade him use it--told him he would be a sorry fool not to use it. What was that line about Opportunity's knocking once at every man's door? And what was that other line about there being a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune?
After all, it meant only that he break faith with five men:--with his employer, General Lignum, who trusted him; with his underling, Singlebury, who had done a good job of work for him; and with three others whom, for the sake of convenience, he mentally grouped together--Bogardus and Pratt and Murtha, the lawyer. These three he eliminated from the equation in one puff of blue cigar smoke. For they were all three of them crooks and plotters and double dealers, masters of the dirty trick and the dirty device, who conspired together to serve not the general good, but their own squalid and contemptible ends.
For General Lignum he had more heed. Perhaps I should say here that until this hour this man, Hobart Foxman, had been an honest man--not just reasonably honest but absolutely honest, a man foursquare as a smokehouse. Never before had it occurred to him to figure up to see whether honesty really paid. He did some brisk figuring now.
After all, did it pay? As a reporter, back yonder in the old days when he, a raw cub, first broke into this wearing, grinding newspaper game, he had despised fakers and faking and the petty grafting, the cheap sponging to which he saw some reporters--not many, perhaps, but some--descending. As an a.s.sistant sporting editor, after his first promotion from the ranks, he had been content to live upon his somewhat meagre salary, refusing to fatten his income by taking secret pay from prize-fight promoters wishful of getting advertis.e.m.e.nts dressed up as news stories into the columns of the sporting page. As a staff correspondent, first at Albany and then at Was.h.i.+ngton, he had walked wide of the lobbyists who sought to corrupt and succeeded in corrupting certain correspondents, and by corrupting them were able sometimes to colour the news, sometimes to suppress it. Always the dispatches he signed had been unbiased, fair, above the board.
To be sure, Foxman had played office politics the while he went up, peg by peg. To men above him he had been the a.s.siduous courtier, crooking the pregnant knee before those who might help him onward. But, then, that was a part of the game--office politics was. Even so, playing it to the top of his bent, he had been on the level. And what had being on the level brought him? It had brought him a place of executive authority and a salary of twelve thousand a year. And these two things--the place and the twelve thousand--he would continue to have and to hold and to enjoy for just so long as he was strong enough to fight off ambitious younger men, climbing up from below as he had climbed; or, worse luck, for just so long as he continued to please the mercurial millionaire who two years earlier, at public outcry, had bought _The Clarion_, lock, stock and barrel, with its good will and fixtures--just as a man might buy a cow with its calf in the drover's pen.
That brought him round again to a consideration of General Lignum.
Metaphysically he undressed the general and considered him naked. He turned him about and looked at him on every side. The result was not flattering to that impressive and dignified gentleman. Was General Lignum so deserving of consideration? What had General Lignum ever done in all his luxurious days to justify him to a place in the sun? Lignum never worked for his millions; he inherited them. When Lignum bought _The Clarion_, then as now a losing property, he had been actuated by the same whim which makes a spoiled child crave the costliest toy in the toy shop and, like that spoiled child, he would cast it aside, unmindful of its future, in the same hour that he tired of his newest possession and of the cost of its upkeep.
Wasn't Lignum lavis.h.i.+ng wads of his easy-come, easy-go money on it now, because of his ambition to be a United States senator? Most certainly he was--for that and nothing else. Barring his wealth, which was a gift to him, and his newspaper, which was a plaything, what qualified this dilettante to sit in the seats of the mighty? What did Lignum know of the toil and the sweat and the gifts spent by men, whose names to him were merely items in a pay roll, to make _The Clarion_ a power in the community and in the country? What did he care? In the last a.n.a.lysis what anyhow was this General Robert Bruce Lignum except a bundle of pampered selfishness, wrapped up in a membrane, inclosed in a frock coat and lidded under a high hat? When he got that far Mr. Foxman decided he owed Lignum nothing, as compared with what Lignum owed him. Well, here was a chance to collect the debt, with back dividends and interest accrued. He would collect. He would make himself independent of the whims of Lignum, of the necessity of daily labour, of the uncertainties of his position, of the certainty of the oncoming of age when his hand must tire and his wits grow blunted.
This left to be disposed of--only Singlebury. And Singlebury, in Mr.
Foxman's mind, was now become the least of the factors concerned. In this, his new scheme of things that had sprung full-grown from the loins of a great and a sudden desire, a Singlebury more or less mattered not a whit. In the same moment that he decided to discard Singlebury the means of discarding Singlebury came to him.
That inspiration clarified the situation tremendously, interlocking one part of his plan with the others. In any event the lips of Pratt, Bogardus and Murtha were closed, and their hands tied. By now Lignum was at least a thousand miles out at sea. In the working out of his scheme Foxman would be safe from the meddlings and muddlings of Old Lignum.
Already he had begun to think of that gentleman as Old Lignum instead of as General Lignum, so fast were his mental aspects and att.i.tudes altering. Finally, with Singlebury out of the way, the plot would stand up, a completed and almost a perfect edifice.