The Great God Success Part 10

The cabman lifted the trap. "Here we are, sir."

"Yes--in a moment." Where should he go? But what did it matter? "To a hotel," he said. "The nearest."

"The Imperial?"

"That will do--yes--go there."

He resolved never to return to "the flat." On the following day he sent for the maid and arranged the breaking up. He gave her everything except his personal belongings and a few of Alice's few possessions--those he could keep, and those which he must destroy because he could not endure the thought of any one having them.

At the office all understood his mourning; but no one, not even Kittredge, knew him well enough to intrude beyond gentler looks and tones. Kittredge had written a successful novel and was going abroad for two years of travel and writing. Howard took his rooms in the Royalton.

They dined together a few nights before he sailed.

"And now," said Kittredge, "I'm my own master. Why, I can't begin to fill the request for 'stuff.' I can go where I please, do as I please. At last I shall work. For I don't call the drudgery done under compulsion work."

"Work!" Howard repeated the word several times absently. Then he leaned forward and said with what was for him an approach to the confidential: "What a mess I have been making of my life! What waste! What folly! I've behaved like a child, an impulsive, irresponsible child. And now I must get to work, really to work."

"With your talents a year or so of work would free you."

"Oh, I'm free." Howard hesitated and flushed. "Yes, I'm free," he repeated bitterly. "We are all free except for the shackles we fasten upon ourselves and can unlock for ourselves. I don't agree with you that earning one's daily bread is drudgery."

"Well, let's see you work--work for something definite. Why don't you try for some higher place on the paper--correspondent at Was.h.i.+ngton or London--no, not London, for that is a lounging job which would ruin even an energetic man. Why not try for the editorial staff? They ought to have somebody upstairs who takes an interest in something besides politics."

"But doesn't a man have to write what he doesn't believe? You know how Segur is always laughing at the protection editorials he writes, although he is a free-trader."

"Oh, there must be many directions in which the paper is free to express honest opinions."

Howard began that very night. As soon as he reached his club where he was living for a few days he sat down to the file of the _News-Record_ and began to study its editorial style and method. He had learned a great deal before three o'clock in the morning and had written a short editorial on a subject he took from the news. In the morning he read his article again and decided that with a few changes--adjectives cut out, long sentences cut up, short sentences made shorter and the introduction and the conclusion omitted--it would be worth handing in. With the corrected article in his hand he knocked at the door of the editor's room.

It was a small, plainly furnished office--no carpet, three severe chairs, a revolving book case with a battered and dusty bust of Lincoln on it, a table strewn with newspaper cuttings. Newspapers from all parts of the world were scattered about the floor. At the table sat the editor, Mr. Malcolm, whom Howard had never before seen.

He was short and slender, with thin white hair and a smooth, satirical face, deeply wrinkled and unhealthily pale. He was dressed in black but wore a string tie of a peculiarly lively shade of red. His most conspicuous feature was his nose--long, narrow, pointed, sarcastic.

"My name is Howard," began the candidate, all but stammering before Mr.

Malcolm's politely uninterested glance, "and I come from downstairs."

"Oh--so you are Mr. Howard. I've heard of you often. Will you be seated?"

"Thank you--no. I've only brought in a little article I thought I'd submit for your page. I'd like to write for it and, if you don't mind, I'll bring in an article occasionally."

"Glad to have it. We like new ideas; and a new pen, a new mind, ought to produce them. If you don't see your articles in the paper, you'll know what has happened to them. If you do, paste them on s.p.a.ce slips and send them up by the boy on Thursdays." Mr. Malcolm nodded and smiled and dipped his pen in the ink-well.

The editorial appeared just as Howard wrote it. He read and reread it, admiring the large, handsome editorial type in which it was printed, and deciding that it was worthy of the excellent place in the column which Mr. Malcolm had given it. He wrote another that very day and sent it up by the boy. He found it in his desk the next noon with "Too abstract--never forget that you are writing for a newspaper" scrawled across the last page in blue pencil.

In the two following months Howard submitted thirty-five articles.

Three were published in the main as he wrote them, six were "cut" to paragraphs, one appeared as a letter to the editor with "H" signed to it. The others disappeared. It was not encouraging, but Howard kept on.

He knew that if he stopped marching steadily, even though hopelessly, toward a definite goal, a heavy hand would be laid upon his shoulder to drag him away and fling him down upon a grave.

As it was, desperately though he fought to refrain from backward glances, he was now and again taken off his guard. A few of her pencil marks on the margin of a leaf in one of his books; a gesture, a little mannerism of some woman pa.s.sing him in the street--and he would be ready to sink down with weariness and loneliness, like a tired traveller in a vast desert.

He completely lost self-control only once. It was a cold, wet May night and everything had gone against him that day. He looked drearily round his rooms as he came in. How stiff, how forbidding, how desert they seemed! He threw himself into a big chair.

"No friends," he thought, "no one that cares a rap whether I live or die, suffer or am happy. Nothing to care for. Why do I go on? What's the use if one has not an object--a human object?"

And their life together came flooding back--her eyes, her kisses, her attentions, her pa.s.sionate love for him, so pervasive yet so un.o.btrusive; the feeling of her smooth, round arm about his neck; her way of pressing close up to him and locking her fingers in his; the music of her voice, singing her heartsong to him yet never putting it into words----

He stumbled over to the divan and stretched himself out and buried his face in the cus.h.i.+ons. "Come back!" he sobbed. "Come back to me, dear."

And then he cried, as a man cries--without tears, with sobs choking up into his throat and issuing in moans.

"Curious," he said aloud when the storm was over and he was sitting up, ashamed before himself for his weakness, "who would have suspected me of this?"

IX.

AMBITION AWAKENS.

Howard was now thirty-two. He was still trying for the editorial staff; but in the last month only five of his articles had been printed to twenty-three thrown away. A national campaign was coming on and the _News-Record_ was taking a political stand that seemed to him sound and right. For the first time he tried political editorials.

The cause aroused his pa.s.sion for justice, for democratic equality and the abolition of privilege. He had something to say and he succeeded in saying it vigorously, effectively, with clearness and moderation of statement. How to avoid hysteria; how to set others on fire instead of only making of himself a fiery spectacle; how to be earnest, yet calm; how to be satirical yet sincere; how to be interesting, yet direct--these were his objects, pursued with incessant toiling, rewriting again and again, recasting of sentences, careful balancing of words for exact shades of meaning.

"I shall never learn to write," had been his complaint of himself to himself for years. And in these days it seemed to him that he was farther from a good style than ever. His standards had risen, were rising; he feared that his power of accomplishment was failing.

Therefore his heart sank and his face paled when an office boy told him that Mr. Malcolm wished to see him.

"I suppose it's to tell me not to annoy him with any more of my attempts," he thought. "Well, anyway, I've had the benefit of the work.

I'll try a novel next."

"Take a seat," said Mr. Malcolm with an absent nod. "Just a moment, if you please."

On a chair beside him was the remnant of what had been a huge up-piling of newspapers--the exchanges that had come in during the past twenty-four hours. The Exchange Editor had been through them and Mr.

Malcolm was reading "to feel the pulse of the country" and also to make sure that nothing of importance had been overlooked.

On the floor were newspapers by the score, thrown about tumultuously.

Mr. Malcolm would seize a paper from the unread heap, whirl it open and send his glance and his long pointed nose tearing down one column and up another, and so from page to page. It took less than a minute for him to finish and filing away great sixteen page dailies. A few seconds sufficed for the smaller papers. Occasionally he took his long shears and with a skilful twist cut out a piece from the middle of a page and laid it and the shears upon the table with a single motion.

"Now, Mr. Howard." Malcolm sent the last paper to increase the chaos on the floor and faced about in his revolving chair. "How would you like to come up here?"

Howard looked at him in amazement. "You mean----"

"We want you to join the editorial staff. Mr. Walker has married him a rich wife and is going abroad to do literary work, which means that he is going to do nothing. Will you come?"

"It is what I have been working for."

"And very hard you have worked." Mr. Malcolm's cold face relaxed into a half-friendly, half-satirical smile. "After you'd been sending up articles for a fortnight, I knew you'd make it. You went about it systematically. An intelligent plan, persisted in, is hard to beat in this world of laggards and hap-hazard strugglers."

"And I was on the point of giving up--that is, giving up this particular ambition," Howard confessed.