第17章 A Settlement at Dawn

The settlement became real, one clause at a time, over the six weeks that followed. The trustees were named and the charter was drawn in the form Wyndham had drafted, and by the middle of February the Clarion Printing and Publishing Company had twenty workmen on its register of shareholders, and Brogan sat on its board in a coat he had bought for the purpose and said almost nothing, and listened to everything. The wage was restored to nine dollars for every man the machines did not displace. The fund for the displaced was funded, and the first three men drew from it in April. And the rule — the small rule, the one everyone had said was impossible — was printed in the shop rules and hung on the wall of the composing room where every man could read it: *No man may be turned out for belonging to his assembly.* It was a small revolution, and Cornelia knew better than anyone how small. Twenty shares of sixty was not control; it was a voice. She had given the men a voice in a company that would still, in the end, be run by the woman who held forty-one shares. But she had also given them standing, and standing was the thing that could not be taken back, and she understood now why Cormac had said it mattered more than the wage. The note came due on the first of March and did not ruin her. Wyndham, whose loyalty to her father had been the quiet kind, found her a new loan, from a savings bank uptown whose directors had read the Clarion's exposé and, being honest men, had disliked Thorndike for years. The terms were not generous. The paper would be smaller; the office would lose two rooms; Trafton's salary would be cut and he would grumble and stay. But it would live. And Selwyn fell, slowly, the way a man of his kind falls, which is by other men deciding he is no longer useful. The district attorney took up the memorandum, and the Bugle's owners, seeing which way the wind blew, dismissed him in March and settled the city's case out of court for a sum they did not disclose and a paragraph they did not print. Selwyn went to his house in the country and was not heard from again for a year — which was, Cornelia had learned, the length of time a certain kind of man needs to recover from being printed. The cost came too, and it came from every side. Her aunt's rooms at the Philadelphia house were closed to her, and Hortense wrote one letter, in October, that said only that she was well and that she hoped Cornelia was also. The Aldermere Club sent a note, in April, informing Miss Hollingsworth that her father's membership would not be transferred; the club had no rule against women, it explained, and therefore no rule it needed to change. Rowena Ballard married Sterling in June, in a ceremony that Cornelia read about in the Bugle's remnant, and she sent a gift and did not go. The spring brought other costs she had not foreseen. Two advertisers who had come back in February went away again in April, not because of the strike but because her editor had written a piece about the price of coal that annoyed them, and she let them go, and cut the paper's size by a column to balance the loss, and did not tell Cormac, because a man who is told every week which of his sentences cost money begins to write for the advertisers and stops writing for the city. Her aunt's house in Philadelphia stayed closed, and the society she had been raised in closed with it, quietly and completely, the way a door closes on a room that is being repapered. Rowena wrote twice and then stopped, and Cornelia did not write back, because she had learned that friendship offered at a distance to a woman who has refused the terms of her class is a kindness that costs the giver something, and she would not make Rowena pay it. What she had instead was the press-room. The men had not learned to love her; she had never expected them to. But they had learned to tell her the truth, which was rarer and more valuable, and by April Brogan would come up to her office on the first of every month with a list of what the trade needed and would sit in the visitors' chair and read it to her without any of the ceremony her father had required, and she would take the list and answer every item in writing, and that was the whole of their friendship. The assembly chose a new organizer in May, a sober man named Sheehan who had wept in the hospital corridor and had never once in his life wanted a fight. He was not Cormac, and he knew it, and he said so on the night he was chosen, and the men respected him for it. The Row had learned something that winter that no shop learns easily: that a fight can be won by a man who does not enjoy it, and that the winning is not the same as the peace. And on the day the shop rule went up on the composing-room wall, Cormac Kavanagh resigned as organizer of the Pressmen's Assembly, and stood in the assembly room and said goodbye to two hundred men, and half of them shook his hand and the other half did not, and the ones who did not were not wrong. --- He came to her office that evening, and he did not have a hat to turn in his hands, which she noticed, because he had never before entered a room without one. "I have been asked to stay on as editor of the Clarion," he said. "By the new board. By Brogan's trustees and by you. I have been offered a salary of four thousand dollars a year, and a seat at the Wednesday meeting, and a rule that no one may cut my copy without telling me." "Will you take it?" "That is what I came to ask you." He sat down across from her, in the chair where he had sat a hundred times, and for once he did not look like a man about to leave. "If I take it, I am not the organizer any longer. I am the editor of a newspaper, which pays me well and belongs partly to my friends. I will be a man with a salary and a desk, and in ten years I will be a man with a salary and a desk who used to be something else. And every man in the Row will look at me and think that the paper took me, the way it took the others, and they will be half right." "And if you do not take it?" "Then I will go back to organizing in another city, and the paper will be edited by someone who does not know the trade, and the trust will slowly lose its voice, and in five years the men will have their shares and no one in the office who cares what they mean." He looked at her directly. "I want to know which you would choose. Not for the paper. For yourself." Cornelia looked at him for a long moment. It was the first question he had ever asked her that had no arithmetic in it. "I would choose to have you here," she said. "And I would not ask you to stay for me, and I would not let you stay for me either. That is the honest answer." "It is the honest answer," he agreed. "And it is not the whole of it, and we both know it, and I think it is time we said the rest." ---