"Then give him one of your men, two of your men, for carriers. Tell him to keep sending his copy down in relays, as he writes it. But don't let him get away."
"Oh, I'll hold him here if I have to nail him to the floor. I tell you, a thing like this would shake public confidence. It'd be worse than a fireproof hotel going up in flames. It would mean an alarming and immediate depreciation in our credit, a deplorable——"
"Of course it would. Come down as soon as you can and tell me all that. I'll have more time then."
Pyott hung up the receiver. He poised for one brief and immobile moment, deep in thought, before he swung about to the three exigent figures making signs for his attention. Then the thin-featured, many-wrinkled, weary-eyed face relaxed in an almost honest and unequivocal smile.
VIII
Trotter, shut in the Vice-President's private office, paid little attention to his surroundings. He did not even know that the desk on which he wrote was of mahogany. He did not notice the imported Daghestan under his feet. He was unconscious of the orchids in the low desk-vase of French silver. He was oblivious of the onyx and marble elegance that surrounded him.
All he knew was that he had paper and ink in plenty and the Greatest Story of the Age to write. All he knew was that time was precious, that two trusted messengers stood before him to deliver his copy, that presses in the lower part of the city waited like hungry animals to gulp down his story, and that before nightfall a million eyes would widen and half a million hearts would beat a little faster at the words that he was about to write.
He pushed back the silver and cut-glass desk ornaments, the heavy gold-framed portrait of a young girl standing beside an opulent-bosomed woman in an opera cloak, the foolish vase of orchids. He made space for himself and his work. And then he wrote.
He wrote with all the rhapsodic passion of a god creating a new world. He began with a preamble that would have broken a copy-reader's heart. He followed it up with atmospheric discursiveness that would have worn away an editor's blue pencil. He told how Steam and Steel were supposed to have crushed the Spirit of Romance out of the age. He pointed out how the modern city of stone and concrete seemed no longer to house that wayward and retrospective spirit in which the heart of the poet has forever reveled.
Then he sought to demonstrate how true Romance can never die, how Wonder is all about even the Wall Street clerk and the five-o'clock commuter. He put forward the claim that modern New York was as potentially picturesque, as alluringly labyrinthine, as olden Bagdad itself. He argued that the Thousand and One Tales were nightly recurring in our very midst, only we had neither the eyes nor the leisure to observe them. He told of the strange underworlds hidden from the casual eye, of subterranean rivers of life which Respectability never sees. He showed how it was only the face of life that had changed. He intimated that Stevenson had unearthed romance enough in an up-to-date London, that Hugo and Balzac had found it in Paris, and he eloquently proclaimed that even to-day it was to be stumbled across in our city of homes on the Hudson.