Chapter 19 The Admission

The offer had been on the desk for three days, and Cornelia had read it every day, and on the third evening she sent for Cormac and asked him to come to her father's study, at the house on the square, at nine o'clock, and to come alone. He came at nine, and she met him in the hall and led him up the stairs, past the portraits of Hollingsworth men who had looked down on four generations of this city, and stopped, as she always did, at the portrait of her father. Cormac stopped beside her and looked at it with her. "He does not look like a man who would refuse to sign," Cormac said. "He looks like a man who was certain of everything," Cornelia said. "He refused to sign, and he died without telling anyone, and I have spent four months learning that the two facts belong together." They went into the study. Cormac sat in the visitors' chair and Cornelia did not sit in her father's chair; she sat in the chair across from him, the two of them face to face across a desk the size of a small country, as they had a hundred times, and this time neither of them had a paper in their hands. "Tell me what you think of the offer," she said. "I think you have already decided," Cormac said. "You would not have sent for me alone otherwise." "I have decided nothing. I want your reading." "Then here is my reading." He leaned forward. "If you sell, you and I keep our salaries and our desks, and the Clarion survives as the New York morning edition of a chain that is owned in Chicago. The men keep their trust, because the syndicate will buy the shares at a premium to avoid a fight. In five years the paper will be bigger and richer and worse, and no man who works there will ever again decide anything that matters, and we will both be well paid to do as we are told. And I will have given up the only thing I have ever been, for a salary and a desk, and I will have done it to keep you." "And if I refuse?" "If you refuse, the syndicate goes to the Bugle, and the Bugle gets the money, and the city has one morning paper with money behind it and one without, and we spend the next ten years working twice as hard for half as much." He sat back. "You asked for the truth. That is the truth. Neither answer is clean." Cornelia looked at him for a long moment. The gas light was low, and the house was quiet, and outside the square was empty, and they were, for the first time since December, entirely alone. "There is a third answer," she said. "Which is?" "You tell me what you would want, if you were not afraid of what it would mean for me." He did not answer at once. He looked at the desk, and then at the portrait of her father on the wall, and then at last, with an effort she could see him make, he looked at her. "I would want to keep the paper," he said. "Not because it is mine. Because it is the only thing either of us has ever built that was worth building, and because you keep it partly for the men, and I keep it partly for the men, and if we sell it, the men will keep their shares and lose their newspaper, and I have spent my whole life telling them that a thing you own and cannot use is not worth owning." "And what else would you want?" "I would want," he said slowly, "to stop pretending that I do not look for you in the room before I look for anyone else. I would want to stop writing letters in March that I do not send. I would want, very much, to kiss you, and I have wanted that since the corridor in January, and I have not done it because I did not know whether you wanted a partner or a cause, and because a man in my position does not take a great risk lightly." Cornelia stood up and came around the desk, and stood in front of him, and looked down at him, and her voice, when she spoke, was quite steady. "You are not a cause," she said. "You have never once been a cause. You are the only person in this city who has told me the truth and expected me to be able to bear it, and if you cannot tell the difference between that and a cause, then you are a worse reporter than I have been led to believe." He stood up. For a moment he did not move, and then he took her face in his hands, and kissed her, and the study of Percival Hollingsworth, which had held every secret and every shame of the family for twenty years, held this instead, for a little while. When they separated, neither of them stepped back. "I am still an owner," she said, "and you are still a man who has been fired for telling the truth, and there is a desk between us in every room we enter, and there will be until one of us is dead. I will not pretend otherwise, and neither may you." "I will not pretend otherwise," he said. "Then we will keep the paper," Cornelia said, "and we will do the hard thing, and it will cost us, and we will do it anyway, because we have been in this together since the second of December and there is no getting out of it now." Later, when the fire had burned low, they talked about the things neither had said aloud in a year. She told him about her mother, who had died when Cornelia was nine, and about the years afterward in which her father had filled the house with business because he did not know how to fill it with anything else, and about the morning in Naples when the letter had come and she had realized that she was the last Hollingsworth and that the name carried a debt she had not chosen. He told her about the charity ward where his father had died, and about the week after the funeral when he had gone to ask for his father's last wages and had been shown the door, and about the day he had first stood on a crate in the assembly room and heard his own voice come out steady and known, without any doubt at all, what he was for. They did not agree about much. She thought a paper could be both prosperous and honest, and he did not. He thought an assembly could hold a company to account without owning a share of it, and she did not. But they had stopped, somewhere in the winter, trying to convert each other, which is a thing that people mistake for love and that is in fact something better: it is the decision to hold two different opinions in one house and call the house a home. They went back to the desk and sat down across from each other, and worked, until two in the morning, on the refusal they would send to Chicago, and the plan for the twelve months to come, and it was the first completely honest conversation she had ever had with anyone in that house. At the door, at two in the morning, he stopped and turned. "There is one thing I will not do," he said. "I will not let you make me the reason you keep the paper. If you keep it, you keep it because it is right, and if one day it is right to sell it, you will sell it, and you will not ask me to stand in the way. I have spent my life being the thing that other people stood in front of, and I will not be that for you." "You will not be," Cornelia said. "But you will tell me when you think I am wrong." "Every day," Cormac said. "That is what I am for." And he went down the stairs, and the house on the square was not, for the first time in twenty years, entirely a cold one. ---