CHAPTER XVII.—AN UPWARD LEAP.
WHAT man of achievement cannot recall some one short period of his life which seems to transcend in significance and value all the rest of his career—when great things for which he had only unconsciously waited came to him without the asking; when the high court of events rendered its sudden, unexpected verdict of success, without costs to him who had never made a plea; when the very stars in their courses seemed to have privily conspired to fight for him? How swift, inexplicable, even amazing it all was! And yet how simple too! And when the first flush of astonishment—half delight, half diffidence—had passed, how natural it all seemed; how mind and manners and methods all expanded to meet the new requirements; how calmly and as a matter of course the dignity was worn, the increment appropriated, the mental retina adapted to the widened focus! How easily, too, he sloughed off his own conviction that it was all pure luck, and accepted the world’s kind judgment of deserved success! Who is it that accuses the world, and rails at its hardness of heart? What man among us all, in the hour of honest introspection, does not know that he is rated too high, that he is in debt to the credulity, the generosity, the dear old human tendency to hero-worship, of his fellows?
This is an extract from a letter which the successful Seth Fairchild wrote a few months ago. Chronologically, it is dated only a couple of years after the occurrences with which we are now concerned—but to him an interval of decades doubtless seemed to separate the periods. Perhaps the modesty of it is a trifle self-conscious, and the rhetoric is of a flamboyant kind which he will never, apparently, outgrow, but at all events it shows a disposition to be fair as between himself and history. The period of great fortune, to which he alludes, is to be glanced at in this present chapter—to be limned, though only in outline, more clearly no doubt than he himself could be trusted to do it. For, though a man have never so fine a talent for self-analysis, you are safe to be swamped if you follow him a step beyond your own depth. In cold fact, Seth could no more tell how it was that, within one short year, he rose from the very humblest post to become Editor of the Chronicle, than Master Tom here can explain why he has outgrown his last summer’s knickerbockers while his twin brother hasn’t.
He had been back at his work in Tecumseh only a month when word came to the office one morning that Mr. Tyler could not come—that he had been seriously injured in the havoc wrought by a runaway horse. It was too early for either editor or proprietor to be on the scene, and Arthur Dent at that hour was the visible head of the staff. He and Seth had scarcely spoken to each other for months—in fact since that disagreeable evening encounter—but he walked over now to our young man’s desk and said:
“Mr. Fairchild, you would better take the News to-day. Tyler has been badly hurt.”
Marvelling much at the favoritism of the selection, for Dent had not only passed Murtagh over but had waived his own claims of precedence, Seth, changed desks. He got through the work well enough, it appeared, but he mistrusted deeply his ability to hold the place. Mr. Samboye did not seem to approve his promotion, though he said nothing, and the manner in which Mr. Workman looked at him in his new chair seemed distinctly critical.
After the paper had gone to press, and some little routine work against the next morning’s start was out of the way, he wavered between idling the remaining two hours away among the exchanges, or attempting an editorial article for the morrow, such as Mr. Tyler occasionally contributed. His former experience with Mr. Samboye dismayed him a bit, but he concluded to try the editorial experiment again. Some things which Ansdell had said one day on the Silver question remained in his mind, and he made them the basis of a half-column article. He was finishing this when the office-boy told him Mr. Workman wished to see him below. He took his Silver article with him, vaguely hoping, hardly expecting, to be congratulated on his day’s work, and told to keep the desk.
Seth’s impressions of his employer were that he was a hard, peremptory man, and he searched his face now for some sign of softness in vain. Mr. Workman motioned him to a seat, and said abruptly:
“You were on the News desk to-day. Did you take it yourself, or were you sent there?”
“Mr. Dent told me to take it, sir.”
“Why didn’t he take it himself, or put Murtagh on?”
Seth had it in mind to explain that Murtagh did not come down early enough, but he remembered how strenuous the rules were in the matter of matutinal punctuality, and concluded to say simply that he didn’t know. Mr. Workman looked at him for a moment, made some arabesque figures with his pencil on the edge of the blotter, looked at him again, and then said, in a milder tone than Seth had supposed his voice capable of:
“I may as well be candid with you. I have been very much disappointed in you so far. You haven’t panned out at all as your brother led me to expect you would.”
This was a knock-down blow. Poor Seth could only turn his copy about in his hands and stammer: “I am very sorry. In what way have I failed?”
“It would be hard to tell exactly in what way. I should say it was in a general failure to be the sort of young man I thought you were going to be. You have shown no inclination, for example, to write anything—and yet your brother praised you up to the skies as a writer.”
“But what was the good? I did write a long paragraph when I first came here, and handed it in to Mr. Samboye, and he tore it up before my eyes! That would be enough to discourage anybody!”
“Oh, he did that with you too, did he?” Mr. Workman made more arabesques on his blotter, shading them with great neatness.
Seth thought this was a favorable opportunity to get in his Silver article, and handed it to the proprietor with a word of explanation. Mr. Workman read it over carefully and laid it aside without a syllable of comment. There was nothing in his face to show whether he liked it or not. He surrounded all his penciled figures with a wavy border, and said again:
“Then there are your associations. Before ever you came I was discouraged at the amount of money and time and health my young men were squandering in saloons. It had become a scandal to the town. I get a young man in from the country, whose habits are vouched for as perfect, with an idea that he will influence the rest, and lo and behold! he becomes the boss guzzler of the lot!”
“There is a good deal of justice in that, Mr. Workman—or there was. But since I’ve been back this time it has been changed. I have moved into another boarding house where I have a room to myself, and I have read at home almost every evening when I was not with Mr. Ansdell. I think I see the folly of that old way, as clearly as any one can.”
“Ansdell and I had a long talk about you the other day. It was he who gave me my first idea that there was anything in you. He is something of a crank on certain subjects, but he knows men like a book. I have been saying to myself that if he liked you there must be more in you than I had discovered. If I am right in this, now is your time to show it. It is a toss up, the doctors say this afternoon, whether poor Tyler lives or dies. In any case he won’t be about in months. You can keep on at the desk for a while. We’ll see how you make it go.”
The next afternoon, when the inky boy brought up the damp first copies from the clanging, roaring region of the press, Seth was transfixed with bewilderment at seeing his article in the position of honor on the editorial page. While he still stared at it, amazed and troubled, Mr. Samboye with an angry snort swung around in his chair to face him:
“Is this Silver thing yours?”
“Yes.”
“And it is your conception of the ethics of journalism, is it, to sneak leaders into the composing, room without authority?”
“I sneaked nothing in! I gave the copy to Mr. Workman last night. I am as much surprised to see it the leader as you are.”
Mr. Samboye rose abruptly, and strode through the room to the stairs. They were ricketty at best and they trembled, the whole floor trembled, under his wrathful and ponderous tread.
The fat-armed foreman, who was in on his eternal quest for copy, had heard this dialogue. He grinned as the Editor slammed the door below, and chuckled out “He’ll get his comb cut now. The boss ordered your thing to be the leader himself.”
Mr. Samboye presently returned with his broad face glowing crimson, and seated himself at his work again in gloomy silence. He made more erasures than usual, and soon gave it up altogether, taking his hat and stick with an impatient gesture, and stamping his way out.
Time went on. The luckless Mr. Tyler died, and Seth became confirmed in his place. He had developed more strongly, perhaps, than any other one trait, the capacity for system, and he was able to so remodel and expedite the routine work of the News desk that he had a good deal of time for editorial writing. His matter was never again given the place of honor, but it came to be and important and regular feature of the page.
He worked hard on the paper—and almost equally hard, by spells, at home evenings. He did drop in at Bismarck’s or some like place, for a few moments now and then, but he was careful to avoid games, or any further intimacy with habitués. Had it not been for Ansdell and Dent, this part of his new regimen would have been well nigh impossible, for the gregarious instinct was strong in him—as it is in any young man worth his salt—and associations of some sort were as necessary as food to him. He had discovered, long before this, that Dent was an old acquaintance of Ansdell’s, and that he, in fact, had told the latter about Seth and his profitless courses, and interested the lawyer in his case.
He had learned, too, that this pale “Young Man Christian” as Watts had called him derisively, had from the first been well-disposed toward him, and, when the emergency of Tyler’s absence came up, had waived alike his own claims to preferment and his justifiable personal pique, and thrust Seth forward into the place because he felt that he needed some such incentive to make a man of himself. This was very high conduct, and Seth tried hard to like Dent a great deal in return. He never quite succeeded. They were too dissimilar in temperament to ever become close friends. Seth explained it to himself by saying that Dent was too cold and non-emotional. But Dent himself never seemed conscious of anything lacking in their relations, and they were certainly cordial and companionable enough when they met, generally two evenings a week, at Mr. Ansdell’s chambers.
Nothing less like the bachelor’s den dear to tradition can be imagined. There were no pipes, for the lawyer smoked cigars and nothing else; there was no litter of papers, opened books, pamphlets, scraps and the like, for he was the soul of order; no tumbled clothes, odd boots, overflowing trunks, etc., for he was the pink of neatness. He used to like to describe himself in the words with which Evelyn paints his father, as “of a thriving, neat, silent, methodical genius,” but it was always with a twinkling eye, for surely no man was ever less silent. He was a born talker—nervous, eager, fluent, with a delicate sense of the sound and shading of words, a keen appreciation of all picturesque and salient points, a rare delight in real humor, and, above all, with tremendous capabilities of earnestness. Conceive such a man, if you can—for there will never be another like him—and then endow him in your mind with a marvelous accumulation of knowledge, with convictions upon every conceivable subject, and with nothing short of a passion for enforcing these upon those of whom he was fond—and some idea of the perfect ascendancy he gained over Seth will have been obtained.
Mr. Ansdell was neither impeccable nor omniscient. There was much in both his theories and his practice which would not commend itself to the moral statutes of the age; he attempted no defense, being incredulous as to the right of criticism upon personal predilections. But he had a flaming wrath, a consuming, intolerant contempt, for men who were unable to distinguish between private tastes and public duty. On this subject of public duty he was so strenuous, so deeply earnest, that often there seemed but a microscopic line between his attitude and fanaticism. But this zeal had its magnificent uses. Often it swayed despite themselves the politicians of his party who had least in common with him, and who disliked him and vaunted their conventional superiority to him even while they were being swept along toward nobler purposes than their own small souls could ever have conceived, in the current of feeling which his devotion had created.
He took complete possession of Seth’s mind, and he worked wonders upon it. There is neither room here, nor power, to analyze these achievements. The young man, heretofore through circumstances slow and mechanical, revealed under the inspiration of this contact his true temperament. He became as receptive as a sensitized plate in the camera. He seemed to take in facts, theories, emotions, prejudices, beliefs, through the very pores of his skin. He found himself hating one line of public action, and all its votaries, vividly; he found himself thrilling with violent enthusiasm for another line, and its exponents—such an enthusiasm as exiled men tremble under when they hear the national air of their native land.
He was not always right. Very often indeed he did injustice, in his mind, and in the types as well, to really well-meaning men who after their lights were just as patriotic as he was. He condemned with undue ferocity where he could not unreservedly praise, and, like most men of three-and-twenty who sit on the tripod of judgment upon their fellow mortals, he made many mistakes. But his mental and moral advance, despite these limitations, was tremendously swift, and, in the main, substantial. No man ever made the world budge an inch ahead who had not well developed the capacity for indignation at weak and wrong things. This indignant faculty grew and swelled in Seth’s nature like a strong vine, spreading upon the tree of his admiration for his ideals.
He had a fair income now—twenty dollars a week—and he lived very well, having a room in a good house, and taking his meals down town. This was a condition of life which had always commended itself to his imagination, and he revelled now in realising it. Of course he saved no money. Through Ansdell and others he had made the acquaintance of a number of Tecumseh men of position, and he had been asked a little to their houses, but he had not gone more than once. This single experience did not dismay or humiliate him; he flattered himself that he came out of it with credit. But it did not interest him; it was wofully difficult to talk to the women he met—to know what to say to them. It was the easier to come back from this one excursion to his old Bohemian bachelor notions, and justify them to himself.
The correspondence with Isabel had not been altogether so attractive as he had anticipated. It had its extremely pleasant side, of course, but there were drawbacks. She wrote well, but then most of her writing was about herself, which grew wearisome after a time. It was difficult too, to find time to answer her letters always when the philandering mood was upon him, and in this matter he found himself curiously the creature of his moods. The routine of daily newspaper toil had rendered him largely independent of them in his ordinary work. He wrote about as well one day as another. But there were seasons when he could not write to Isabel at all. Then he would say to himself that the need of doing so was a nuisance, and in this frame of mind he would generally end by reproaching himself for even entertaining the idea of a mild flirtation with his brother’s wife. Not that there was anything wrong in it, of course; he was quite clear on this point; but it was so useless, such a gratuitous outlay of time and talent!
But then next day, perhaps, a good dinner, or a chance glimpse of fresh romance in the exchanges, or some affecting play at the theatre of an evening, would bring back all the glamour of her pretty, tender face, the magic of her eyes, the perfume of her tawny hair. And then he could write, and did write, often with a force of sweet rhetoric, a moving quality of caressing ardor, which it is difficult to distinguish from love making.
To him these letters did not mean that at all; they were really abstract reflections of the sentimental side of his nature, which might have been evoked by almost any likable, intelligent woman.
But to the wife on the farm they seemed deeply, deliciously, personal.