On one of those ugly gray afternoons of early February, Benton Day of the Review received a cablegram from his chief in London, Dartmore. There are few men who would express themselves ironically by cable at the London-Tokyo rate of toll. Dartmore did it, and the message follows, with flesh and organs added to the cipher-skeleton:
The Review thought you would be interested to know that Japan has declared war and smashed part of the Russian fleet. This news from New York. Kindly inform Tokyo war-office, which I understand is just a step from your hotel.
Benton Day had come up from common things by strong, hard, well-planned work. He had known few defeats, and these cut deeply. The cable from Dartmore was the worst whipping of his career. Gray with shame, he sought the billiard-room of the hotel, where he found an animated group of British and American correspondents who had just heard the news—ten hours after it had been printed in London and New York. He found that Dartmore alone had taken pains to be ironical in the matter. The truth was exactly as ungetatable in Tokyo as in Mombassa—until the war-office chose to give it up. Benton Day was only to blame in so far as he was not a telepathist. This knowledge eased him greatly, but did not detract from his anger at Dartmore—an emotion which is bad for a young man to take out on his first big campaign. The little sentence in the cablegram regarding the fact that London had received the news from New York, held big interest for Feeney, the saturnine.
“Japan was busy last night,” he communed. “Her Mr. Togo smashed the Russians off Port Arthur, and her little Mr. Uriu, off Chemulpo. It’s about time,” he added with a trace of Indiana humor, “Japan was declaring war. But the thing that gets me is, how did New York know?... Finacune, my young friend, was it you who suggested something about the great frieze coat catching on with New York papers?”
Harrowing weeks at the Imperial followed, while armies augmented, navies fought in the dark, and the bearers of the light of the world made newspaper copy out of heathen temples and Japanese street scenes. Free lances fled to outer ports, there to hearken unto the tales of refugees and weary the world. And the names of these, the Japanese carefully ticketed to Failure, and severed from Opportunity forever.
The Blue Boar, Trollope, wore best of all. He bathed in many springs throughout the empire, peeked into strange quarters of both capitals, and ate and drank after the fashion of those who are formed of arcs and not of angles. From time to time he cabled his paper three words of hope, and eight words of expense account. Trollope strolled down the menus in all parts of Niphon—native and European menus—with fine relish, and waited serenely for the time when he should lean and harden in the field, his sleeves rolled up—one hand covering the strategy of armies, the other at a cable-end, and his sweating face reflecting the pink and pearly flush of fame.
It was not so with the others. Finacune was ragged and restless. The pale Talliaferro looked twice for his own shadow. Feeney’s dark fighting-face wasted and hardened, until it seemed hewn from a block of brown bone; and Trollope’s serene and changeless calm wrought upon Bingley’s nerves like an active poison.
These two did not pretend to speak at the last. The Horse-killer took on the look (his gray eyes were cold and immutable as corner stones, anyway) as if he would spur over a sea of dead men’s faces to get a big tale and a free cable. It would not have been so bad except that the London papers, coming in now with the first cables of the correspondents, showed a consistent garbling and distortion of their reports. Home writers occupied miles of space, placed Togo along with Lord Nelson, and Mutsuhito with Gladstone—a deep planned, conscienceless campaign of fact-mutilation for the extolling of Japanese character and mettle. New York, young in war-handling, was inclined to follow London’s diplomatic lead, against the reports of her own men. February and March ended before the first batch of the British correspondents were informed that they could take the field with Kuroki’s first army.
Feeney and Finacune remained in the billiard-room that last night at the Imperial, long after the rest had gone. These two men had pulled apart from the others in pulling together—the most florid with the dullest of writers; the showiest with the deepest. It had been an evening of rousing festivity. Possibly because these two had drunk less than the others; or possibly because their hopes for the field had been prolonged and mangled for such a length of time that they could not sleep now until they were actually booming down the Tokaido, Feeney and Finacune were billiarding idly after one o’clock in the morning and cooling the fever of the night’s stronger spirits with long, chilled glasses of soda, lightly flavored with Rhenish wine.