第15章 The Truth of the Black Ink

The board of the Clarion Printing and Publishing Company met at ten in the morning in the long room above the press-room, and every man in it had come expecting to take the paper away from her. Thorndike was there, and Wyndham, and two old friends of her father's who had inherited small parcels of shares and voted as Thorndike told them. The room smelled of the machines below and of the cigars of men who had been powerful for a long time. Cornelia sat at the head of the table in her plainest dress, with the account book before her and the folder hidden under the account book, and she let them talk. They talked for an hour. They talked about the note that came due in March. They talked about the advertisers who had gone. They talked about the scandal that the Clarion had brought on itself by printing its own shame, and about the regrettable necessity of a sale to a man who could settle the men and restore the paper's name. They talked about the good of the family and the good of the city and the good of the workers, whom they had never once consulted, and they did it all in the tone of men who had been assured, by long habit, that the woman at the head of the table would eventually agree. When they had finished, Thorndike put the sale agreement on the table and slid it toward her, and said, "Sign it, and we will all go home." Cornelia did not look at the paper. She looked at Thorndike. "Mr. Thorndike," she said, "on the day before my father died, did you ask him to sign this?" Something went across Thorndike's face, very fast, and was gone. "I asked him a hundred times to do what was good for the company. He was ill. He did not always know what was good for anyone." "No," Cornelia said. "He was not ill on the eighth of September. He was ill in October, and he died in October, and on the eighth of September he was well enough to write, in his own hand, that he would not sign this, and that you might do what you liked." She took the folder from beneath the account book and opened it on the table, and she turned it so that every man in the room could see the last page. "Here is the agreement you drew for him, in three drafts. Here is the date. And here, in his own hand, is his refusal." The room went silent. The two old friends of her father looked at the page and then at Thorndike and then, uneasily, at each other. Wyndham read it through his spectacles and set his lips. And Thorndike sat very still and did not touch it. "This proves nothing," Thorndike said. "It proves that my father refused the sale, and that you knew he refused it, and that you have spent four weeks telling this board that the sale was his wish." Cornelia closed the folder. "It proves also that the note you threaten to call in March was secured against the paper, by an agreement between your bank and my father, in which you also undertook — in writing — to sell the Clarion's presses to the Morning Bugle if the Clarion should fail. You arranged a position in which my father could not help but fail, so that you could buy his paper for the price of its debt. And you did it, Mr. Thorndike, not because you wanted a newspaper, but because Selwyn wanted one, and because a bank that can make a newspaper fail is a bank that can make anything fail, and you enjoy that very much." Thorndike stood up. He was white with anger and, behind the anger, she saw for the first time something like fear. "You are a girl," he said, "with a dead man's papers and no money and no friends left on this street, and you are telling the banker who has held your family's account for forty years that you will destroy him with a letter." "I am not going to destroy you," Cornelia said. "I am going to do something worse. I am going to print you." --- She printed him the next morning, in an edition that went to press before the board had finished its coffee, under a headline that ran the whole width of the page. **THE SECOND AGREEMENT: How the Clarion Was to Be Sold, and by Whom, and Why Its Owner Refused.** She printed the agreement, and the memorandum, and Gresham's confession, and her father's letter, and the entry of the money paid to Gormley's detectives. She printed her father's refusal in his own hand, at the top of the page, so that every reader would see it before they saw anything else. And at the foot of the page, where the publisher's signature stood, she printed two names instead of one: her own, and below it, in the plain type of the working page, *as reported by Cormac Kavanagh.* The Edition sold out before nine in the morning. The newsboys had to come back for more. By noon Thorndike had resigned from the board of the bank. By one o'clock the district attorney had sent for the memorandum and the confession, and by three the Bugle's afternoon edition carried a short and chastened paragraph, on an inside page, announcing that its editor had taken a leave of absence for his health. It was the smallest retreat Selwyn had ever made, and every man in the city who could read knew what it meant. That evening Cornelia stood in the press-room and watched the machines run, and Brogan came and stood beside her, and neither of them said anything for a while. "You printed your father's shame and his courage on the same page," Brogan said at last. "That is a hard thing to do, and it is the only honest thing to do, and I will tell the men so." "Thank you." "Do not thank me yet." He watched the paper run through the press, white to gray to printed. "The settlement is not signed. The note is still due in March. And Selwyn is not finished; a man like that does not finish, he only waits. But the strike will be called off if the men vote for the trust, and I will vote for it, and I will tell the ones who listen to me to vote for it too. That is what you have earned." She stayed until the last edition came off and the men began to bank the fires, and she went among them and asked each one what the settlement would mean for him, and wrote the answers in a small notebook, because she had learned that the only way to keep such promises is to write them down and count them every quarter. Three of the men would not speak to her. She did not blame them, and she wrote their names down too, because a woman who runs a paper must know exactly who will not forgive her and for what. Trafton found her at midnight and stood in the doorway of the press-room with his hat in his hands. "Miss Hollingsworth," he said. "I have worked for this paper for nineteen years, and I have never once seen an owner come down here after an edition. Your father would not have." "My father's paper almost went to the Bugle," Cornelia said. "I would rather be in the press-room than in the boardroom, and I would rather print the truth than the advertisers' version of it, and if that is not what the Clarion is for, then I have been wrong about this paper since the day I came home." Trafton looked at her for a long moment, and then he did something she had not seen him do before, which was to smile. "It is what the paper is for," he said. "It took you a month to find out. It took your father twenty years, and he never quite said it out loud." Down the room, Cormac was talking to Mulvaney's brother, who had come back to the shop with a hand that could not set type and had been given work at the counting desk. Cornelia watched them a moment. Patrick was laughing at something. Cormac was not; he was listening, his head tilted, the way he listened to everyone, and then he looked up across the length of the press-room and found her watching him, and neither of them looked away. ---