“I don’t. I dodge. It’s a kind of tacit arrangement between the desk and me. In minor matters I go with the paper. That’s easy, because I agree with it in most questions of taste and the way of doing things. After all The Ledger has got certain standards of professional conduct and of decent manners; it’s a gentleman’s paper. The other things, the things where my beliefs conflict with the paper’s standards, political or ethical, don’t come my way. You see, I’m a specialist; I do mostly the fluffy stuff.”
“If that’s the way to keep out of embarrassing decisions, I’d like to become a specialist myself.”
“You can do it, all right,” the other assured him earnestly. “That story of yours shows it. You’ve got The Ledger touch—no, it’s more individual than that. But you’ve got something that’s going to stick out even here. Just the same, there’ll come a time when you’ll have to face the other issue of your job or your—well, your conscience.”
What Tommy Burt did not say in continuation, and had no need to say, since his expressive and ingenuous face said it for him, was, “And I wonder what you’ll do with that!”
A far more influential friend than Tommy Burt had been wondering, too, and had, not without difficulty, expressed her doubts in writing. Camilla Van Arsdale had written to Banneker:
... I know so little of journalism, but there are things about it that I distrust instinctively. Do you remember what that wrangler from the Jon Cal told Old Bill Speed when Bill wanted to hire him: “I wouldn’t take any job that I couldn’t look in the eye and tell it to go to hell on five minutes’ notice.” I have a notion that you’ve got to take that attitude toward a reporting job. There must be so much that a man cannot do without loss of self-respect. Yet, I can’t imagine why I should worry about you as to that. Unless it is that, in a strange environment one gets one’s values confused.... Have you had to do any “Society” reporting yet? I hope not. The society reporters of my day were either obsequious little flunkeys and parasites, or women of good connections but no money who capitalized their acquaintanceship to make a poor living, and whom one was sorry for, but would rather not see. Going to places where one is not asked, scavenging for bits of news from butlers and housekeepers, sniffing after scandals—perhaps that is part of the necessary apprenticeship of newspaper work. But it’s not a proper work for a gentleman. And, in any case, Ban, you are that, by the grace of your ancestral gods.
Little enough did Banneker care for his ancestral gods: but he did greatly care for the maintenance of those standards which seemed to have grown, indigenously within him, since he had never consciously formulated them. As for reporting, of whatever kind, he deemed Miss Van Arsdale prejudiced. Furthermore, he had met the society reporter of The Ledger, an elderly, mild, inoffensive man, neat and industrious, and discerned in him no stigma of the lickspittle. Nevertheless, he hoped that he would not be assigned to such “society news” as Remington did not cover in his routine. It might, he conceived, lead him into false situations where he could be painfully snubbed. And he had never yet been in a position where any one could snub him without instant reprisals. In such circumstances he did not know exactly what he would do. However, that bridge could be crossed or refused when he came to it.