Part 31 (1/2)
”From the business point of view.”
”Oh, you theorists! You theorists!” Dr. Surtaine threw out his hands in a gesture of pleasant despair. ”You want to run the world like a Sunday-school cla.s.s.”
”Instead of like a three-card-monte game.”
”With your lofty notions, Ellis, how did you ever come to work on a sheet like the 'Clarion'?”
”A man's got to eat. When I walked out of that directors' meeting I walked out of my job and into a saloon; and from that saloon I walked into a good many other saloons. Luckily for me, booze knocked me out early. I broke down, went West, got my health and some sense back again, drifted to this town, found an opening on the 'Clarion,' and took it, to make a living.”
”You won't continue to do that,” advised Dr. Surtaine bluntly, ”if you keep on trying to reform your bosses.”
”But what makes me sick,” continued Ellis, disregarding this hint, ”is to have people a.s.sume that newspaper men are a lot of semi-crooks and shysters. What does the petty grafting that a few reporters do--and, mind you, there's mighty little of it done--amount to, compared with the rottenness of a paper run by my church-going reformer with the business standards?”
A call from the business office took Hal away. At once Ellis turned to the older man.
”Are you going to run the paper, Doc?”
”No: no, my boy. Hal owns it, on his own money.”
”Because if you are, I quit.”
”That's no way to talk,” said the magnate, aggrieved. ”There isn't a man in Worthington treats his employees better or gets along with 'em smoother than me.”
”That's right, too, I guess. Only I don't happen to want to be your employee.”
”You're frank, at least, Mr. Ellis.”
”Why not? I've laid my cards on the table. You know me for what I am, a disgruntled dreamer. I know you for what you are, a hard-headed business man. We don't have to quarrel about it. Tell you what I'll do: I'll match you, horse-and-horse, for the soul of your boy.”
”You're a queer d.i.c.k, Ellis.”
”Don't want to match? Then I suppose I've got to fight you for him,”
sighed the editor.
The big man laughed whole-heartedly. ”Not a chance, my friend! Not a chance on earth. I don't believe even a woman could come between Hal and me, let alone a man.”
”_Or_ a principle?”
”Ah--ah! Dealing in abstractions again. Look out for this fellow, Boyee,” he called jovially as Hal came back to his desk. ”He'll make your paper the official organ of the Muckrakers' Union.”
”I'll watch him,” promised Hal. ”Meantime I'll take your advice about my speech, Mac, and blue-pencil the how-to-be-good stuff.”
”Now you're talking! I'll tell you, Boss: why not get some of the fellows to speak up. You might learn a few things about your own paper that would interest you.”
”Good idea! But, Mac, I wish you wouldn't call me 'Boss.' It makes me feel absurdly young.”
”All right, Hal,” returned Ellis, with a grin. ”But you've still got some youngness to overcome, you know.”
An hour later, looking down the long luncheon table, the editor-owner felt his own inexperience more poignantly. With a very few exceptions, these men, his employees, were his seniors in years. More than that, he thought to see in the faces an air of capability, of a.s.surance, of preparedness, a sort of work-worthiness like the seaworthiness of a vessel which has pa.s.sed the high test of wind and wave. And to him, untried, unformed, ignorant, the light amateur, all this human mechanism must look for guidance. Humility clouded him at the recollection of the spirit in which he had taken on the responsibility so vividly personified before him, a spirit of headlong wrath and revenge, and he came fervently to a realization and a resolve. He saw himself as part of a close-knit whole; he visioned, sharply, the Inst.i.tution, complex, delicate, almost infinitely powerful for good or evil, not alone to those who composed it, but to the community to which it bore so subtle a relations.h.i.+p. And he resolved, with a determination that partook of the nature of prayer and yet was more than prayer, to give himself loyally, unsparingly, devotedly to the common task. In this spirit he rose, at the close of the luncheon, to speak.
No newspaper reported the maiden speech of Mr. Harrington Surtaine to the staff of the Worthington ”Clarion.” Newspapers are reticent about their own affairs. In this case it is rather a pity, for the effort is said to have been an eminently successful one. Estimated by its effect, it certainly was, for it materialized with quite spiritistic suddenness, from out the murk of uncertainty and suspicion, the form and substance of a new _esprit de corps_, among the ”Clarion” men, and established the system of Talk-it-Over Breakfasts which made a close-knit, jealously guarded corporation and club out of the staff. Free of all ostentation or self-a.s.sertiveness was Hal's talk; simple, and, above all virtues, brief. He didn't tell his employees what he expected of them. He told them what they might expect of him. The frankness of his manner, the self-respecting modesty of his att.i.tude toward an audience of more experienced subordinates, his s.h.i.+ning faith and belief in the profession which he had adopted; all this eked out by his ease of address and his dominant physical charm, won them from the first. Only at the close did he venture upon an a.s.sertion of his own ideas or theories.