“Oh, captain,” she said, “I'm so disappointed. That's not mine! It's very much like it, but it isn't mine.”
THE BATTLE OF MANILA ENVELOPES
MR. BIRDLIP was a good old man, of unimpeachable simplicity. He had achieved enormous wealth in an honourable business, and then found (to his mild distress) that the great traffic he had built up conducted itself automatically. He had, in a way, been gently shouldered out of his own nest by the capable men whose fortunes he had made. But his zealous and frugal spirit required some sort of problem to feed upon, and he delighted his heart by owning a newspaper. The Evening Lens was his toy and the child of his dotage.
So the Persian rugs and walnut panelling of his private suite in the huge Birdlip Building saw him rarely. He was supremely happy in the dingy sanctum at the back of the old Lens office, where the hum of the presses and the racket of the city room (which he still, by an innocent misunderstanding, called the “sitting room”) delighted his guileless heart. He would sit turning over the pages of each edition as it came upstairs (putting his second finger up to his tongue before he turned each leaf) and poring industriously over the market reports, the comics, and the Woman's Page. With his pink cheeks, his dapper little figure in a brown suit and cream-coloured waistcoat, and his eager, shy, chirping manner, he was very like a robin. Although he was full of gigantic schemes, which he broached naively in the editorial council every now and then, he never wittingly interfered with his editor-in-chief, in whom he had full confidence. But his gentle and jejune mind had a disastrous effect on the paper no less. Almost unconsciously the Lens was written and edited down to his standard, as a roomful of adults will amiably prattle so as to carry along a child in the conversation.
Mr. Birdlip's amazing success in his original field had been due partly to his decent sagacity, honesty, and persistence, and partly to his sheer fortune in finding (at the very outset of his enterprise) several men of rugged ability, who became the pearls in his simple oyster-shell. As a result of this, it had become his fixed mental habit to believe that somewhere, some day, he would encounter the man or men who would make the Lens the greatest newspaper in the country. This, indeed, was his candid ambition, and he never went anywhere without keeping his eyes open for the anticipated messiah.
He was greatly taken by broad primitive effects: when he noticed that a Chicago daily always called itself “The World's Greatest Newspaper” he was marvellously struck by the power of this slogan, and lamented that he had not thought of it first. The question as to whether the slogan were true or not never occurred to him. He liked to have the keynote sentences in the leading editorial emphasized in blackface type, so that there might be no danger of any one's missing the point. Desiring for his beloved sheet “this man's art and that man's scope,” as the sonnet puts it, every now and then he thought he had discovered the prodigy, and some new feature would be added to the paper at outrageous expense, only to be quietly shovelled out six months or a year later. In the meantime, the auditor was growing very gray, and even Mr. Birdlip's quick blue eye was sometimes hazed with faint perplexity when he studied the circulation charts. Perhaps it would have been kinder if someone could have told him that a boyhood spent in splitting infinitives is not sufficient training for one to become an Abraham Lincoln of the newspaper business.
As he trotted in and out of the Lens office, with his rosy air of confidence and his disarming simplicity (which made his white hair seem a wanton cruelty on the part of Time, that would wither a man's cells while his mind was still on all fours), Mr. Birdlip was the object of furtive but very sharp study on the part of some cynical journalists whom he hired. It was a genuine amazement to Sanford, the dramatic critic, that the owner was so entirely unaware of his (Sanford's) abilities, which certainly (he thought) called for a salary of more than sixty dollars a week. Sanford often meditated about this, and not entirely in secret. In fact, it was generally admitted among the younger members of the staff, when they gathered at Ventriloquo's for lunch, that the Old Man was immaculately ignorant of all phases of the newspaper business. While the spaghetti and mushrooms cheered the embittered gossips, merry and quaint were the quips sped toward the unsuspecting target. Sanford's private grievance was that though for over a year he had been doing signed critiques of plays, which were really spirited and honest, not once had the Old Man condescended to mention them, or to show any sign of uttering an Ecce Homo in his direction. As far as he was concerned, he felt that the weekly battle of Manila Envelopes was a conspicuous rout, and he frequently rehearsed the exact tone in which he would some day say to the managing editor: “You may fire when ready, Gridley.” Little did Sanford realize that the only time Mr. Birdlip had attempted to read the “Exits and Entrances” column he had met the name of Æschylus, had faltered, and retreated upon the syndicated sermon by the Rev. Frank Crane.