"Oh yes," he agreed, "I guess we'll have to give you a successor there, in any event. However this experiment turns out, it's time you had something better than that."
Harrington's first paper was signed "A Visitor from Mars," and Maxwell marvelled as he read it. It was not a great production, and it was full of small faults; but there was an indescribable naivete and charm about it to which its quaint, old-time style added the final touch. Harrington's studies of what he called "the olden masters" had not been in vain. Late the next evening, in the peace of his small Harlem flat, Maxwell submitted the manuscript to his wife for criticism. He passed it over without comment, desiring the unprejudiced opinion of the intelligent general reader, and Mrs. Maxwell read it twice, very carefully, before she handed it back. When she did there was a mist over her bright brown eyes.
"The darling thing!" she cried. "Who wrote it, Bob? It's as clever as it can be, and yet there's something about it that makes me feel queer and choky. It's—it's"—her face brightened—"it's something like the feeling I had when little Bobbie wrote me his first letter, that time I went home to take care of mother. One almost expects to see the words staggering down one side of the page in dear little, crooked, printed letters. It's the manuscript of a grown-up, sophisticated baby."
Maxwell took the copy from her, well pleased at this conjugal confirmation of his own impression.
"It's Harrington's," he explained, "and he's not sophisticated enough to hurt anybody yet. But he's going to make a success of this job—there's no doubt of that. I'll ask him to come up to dinner to-morrow night and go over the stuff with me a bit. I don't want to do it in the office."
The Western editor was equally enthusiastic the following day. He was also glowing pleasantly in the confirmation of his own keenness of intuition.
"You wouldn't have seen what you had here," he explained to Maxwell, unnecessarily. "This is pretty much like genius. This fellow will be writing his autobiography some day, and perhaps he'll remember his humble discoverers. Meantime, don't you spoil his work by trying to edit it. Let it alone. It's all right."
The column of "The Visitor from Mars" grew to two columns, and became a strong feature of the Sunday Searchlight. Harrington, now in possession of a fair weekly income and unlimited leisure, bought new clothes, rented a sitting-room, bedroom, and bath in a comfortable bachelor apartment-house, and spent his days browsing in libraries, where he read omnivorously. Incidentally, he discovered not only the telephone, telegraph, and other inventions predicted by the Sunday editor, but a locomotive fire-box which had received some favor among railroad officials for ten years, and a superb weapon of destruction which had been used in the Japanese army for six.
"He's getting on!" cried Wilson, delightedly, when Maxwell recounted these small disappointments in an otherwise inspiring onward career. "He's learned to dress like a gentleman, speak like a gentleman, and look like a gentleman, and he has also learned that there have been a few active minds in the world before his came. Give him time. He'll do something big yet."
Harrington promptly verified this prediction by falling in love, which he did on a scale and with an abandon unprecedented in the history of Park Row. It was a tempestuous upheaval for the emotional Southerner, and every other interest in his life retired to the remotest background and remained there, unseen and unsuspected. His choice fell on a woman reporter of the Searchlight, a quiet, refined young girl, whose journalistic activities were confined to reports of meetings of women's clubs and the descriptions of other social events. For her Bart Harrington commanded the morning stars to sing together, and dared the dazzled sun to look upon her like. To him she was Laura, Beatrice, Juliet, Francesca—the essence of all the loves of all the ages in one perfect form. During their brief engagement he called for her in a cab each morning, and drove her to her home each night. He would have laid a carpet of flowers for her from the office to the curb had it been practicable. Also, he discovered Keats and Shelley and Byron and Swinburne, and quoted them until the office boys, who alone remained to listen to him, demanded that increase of salary justly attached to increased nervous strain. Swinburne, Harrington promptly decided, he did not like. There was an earthiness in his verse, he explained to Maxwell, a material side, wholly lacking in the love of the right man for the right woman—in other words, in his own love for Miss Evans. He wrote a column about this kind of love in his Mars department, and a hundred thousand men read it with gurgles of warm appreciation and quoted it at dinner the next night. Then he married Miss Evans and became interested in the price of coal and other household supplies. His absorption in these topics was almost feverish. He talked about them morning, noon, and night. His interest in literature flickered and died out. To Maxwell, his first and still his best friend, he finally confided his dilemma.