Chapter 18 The Price of Keeping Faith

He took the editorship, and the cost of it arrived before the ink on the announcement was dry. The first sign was the assembly. Cormac went back to the hall on Rookery Row the week after he accepted, only to hear the men's business as any member might, and Scanlon had the floor, and Scanlon did not pretend not to see him at the back of the room. He said, to the whole room, that the assembly now had among its members a man who drew a salary from the company it bargained with, and that a man in that position could not vote in the assembly's counsels without the assembly's business being known at the company's Wednesday table, and that any man who thought otherwise had never sat in a room where money changed hands. It was a fair point, and Cormac had expected it, and he stood up and said so. "He is right," he said. "If I keep my membership and my vote, the assembly will never be sure that what it says in this room stays in this room. That is a doubt the men cannot afford, and I will not put it on them. I resign my membership as of tonight. I will come when I am asked, and I will not come when I am not, and if the day ever comes when you want me to argue the company's side against you, you may be sure I will argue yours against the company." There was no applause. Brogan shook his hand at the door, and Mulvaney's brother shook it, and most of the room looked at the floor, and Cormac walked home alone in the rain and did not sleep, and in the morning he went to the Clarion and began, for the first time in his career, to do the work of a man who had chosen a desk. The second sign was Selwyn's echo. A month after the settlement, a letter appeared in the Bugle over a labor man's name — not Scanlon's, though Scanlon's friends had helped to write it — and it said that the Clarion's editor had sold the strike for a salary, and that the men of the Pressmen's Assembly had been bought with a handful of shares and a piece of a rich woman's paper. Cormac had expected this too, and he answered it in the Clarion, in the plainest prose he had, and half the city believed him and half did not, and that was the whole measure of a public man's life. The work, which he had dreaded, turned out to be the one thing that held. There was a city to be read every day, and he read it the way he had once read a page he meant to edit, hunting for the sentence that was true and the rest that was decoration. Brogan brought him the trade's business in person, every Monday, and made him listen. Scanlon came to see him in June, which surprised him. The young man stood in the doorway of the editor's office with his cap in his hands and would not sit down, and he said, without preamble, that he had been wrong in the assembly room in February, that the heiress had printed the truth and kept her word and he had been the last man in the trade to see it. "I did not come to apologize," Scanlon said. "You would not believe me if I did, and I would not mean it. I came to tell you that the men who walked out with me in February have started a second assembly, and that we are going to organize the feeders at the Brooklyn shops, where the wage is seven dollars and no one has ever gone out, and that I wanted you to know it from me and not from the Bugle." "Why?" "Because you were right about one thing," Scanlon said. "You told me the wagon was bait and I wanted to break a head, and if I had, there would be no trust and no rule and no wage, and I would be in the Tombs. I hate that you were right. But you were." He put on his cap. "I am going to be the organizer you used to be. And one day I am going to be the man across the table that somebody hates. That is how it goes, I think." Cormac stood up and offered him his hand, and Scanlon shook it and went out, and Cormac sat back down and looked at the wall for a long time. But the letter that kept him awake was the one he wrote to her, in March, and never sent. He wrote it late at night, in his rooms over the stable on Vandam Street, which he had not yet left because leaving them felt like admitting something he was not ready to admit. He wrote: *I have been three months in your building and I have not yet learned how to be in a room with you and think only of the work. I am told by every sensible person I know that there is no future in this, that a man who was an organizer and a woman who owns the paper cannot be anything to one another that does not end in one of them losing what they are. I am told it by my own better judgment, which has never once been as good a counselor as my temper. So I am writing it down instead of saying it, because I have not decided whether I believe it.* He read it twice, and then he folded it into the back of a book and left it there, and went to bed, and did not sleep, and in the morning went to the office as though the book did not exist. --- And then, in April, three things happened in a week. The first was that the Clarion's circulation, which had fallen by a third in December, came back in the spring, and stayed. It was not the exposé that brought it back; it was the strike. Every paper in the city had reported the strike, and only one of them had reported it from the inside, and by spring the city had decided that the Clarion was the paper that printed the truth whether it hurt the owners or not, and there was no advertising slogan in the world as good as that. The second was that old Mr. Thorndike died, at his house on the Hudson, in the middle of a paragraph, and the city went to his funeral and forgot him, and the papers were kind, and Cormac wrote a short and careful notice that said only what was true and let the readers decide the rest, and it was, Cornelia thought, the best thing he had written since the settlement. The third was that a man came to the Clarion's office on the last Thursday of April, and asked to see Miss Hollingsworth, and his card said *Hosmer & Son, Publishers, Chicago,* and he had a proposition, and he gave them a week to consider it. The proposition was this: that the Clarion and the Bugle together be bought by a syndicate from the West and merged, and that Miss Hollingsworth and her editor be retained, at generous salaries, to run the morning edition of a chain that already owned eleven newspapers and intended to own fifty. It was, on its face, the most flattering offer either of them had ever received. It was also, as they both understood at once, the end of the thing they had spent a winter building. ---