第20章 The New Edition

They refused the syndicate in the first week of May, and the city noticed, because refusing a Chicago syndicate is not the kind of thing the city often gets to watch a young woman do. The letter went out over her signature and Cormac's, and it said, in the plainest prose they could manage, that the Clarion had been made by the men who set its type, and that it would not be sold out from under them to a chain that had never set a line of it, and that the Clarion would go on printing the truth whatever it cost, which it had learned to do once and did not intend to forget. The Bugle took the syndicate's money within the month, and its masthead changed, and its editor's name changed, and by autumn it was a morning paper with money behind it and nothing in it that a man could trust. Cornelia watched it go and did not gloat, because she had learned by then that a paper that loses its nerve does not die; it merely becomes useful to men who have none. The Clarion did not get rich. It got smaller and harder and more honest, and it held, and holding was enough. The men kept the trust and did not sell it, which surprised everyone but Brogan, who had said from the first that a working man who has been given a share in a company will guard it more jealously than any millionaire, because a millionaire has others and the working man has only the one. The fund for the displaced paid out three pensions in September, and the pensioners came to the office to say thank you, and Cormac made them sit down and drink tea, and would not let them stand, because he had spent ten years telling men never to stand in front of the people who paid them, and he was not going to begin standing in front of the people who were paid. The Clarion's circulation, which had been eighteen thousand in the autumn of the strike, was twenty-six thousand by November, and the paper had taken on four reporters and a woman who wrote the society column and did it honestly, which in that city was a novelty. The office had given up the third floor in the spring and taken it back again in the fall. Trafton had grumbled about the size of the paper for six months and had then written, in October, a piece so good that half the city quoted it at dinner, and had never once mentioned that he had written it. --- On the last Thursday of November, one year to the day from the morning she had come home to a cold house on the square, Cornelia stood in the press-room at four in the morning and watched the first edition of the anniversary week run through the machines. The composing room had been rebuilt and the new machines stood along the wall, four of them, humming, and the men who ran them had been trained and pensioned and taught to read the balance sheet, and beside every one of them there was, by a rule that Brogan had insisted on, a hand compositor kept on at full wage, doing the work that the machine could not do, because Brogan had said that a trade is not a trade if it can be lost to a machine, and no one had been able to argue with him. Cormac was at the far end of the room, talking to a boy who was learning to feed the press, and Cornelia watched him in the machine light and thought, as she thought every day, that she had made exactly the right decision in December and that she would make it again, and that she was now going to have to pay for it every day for the rest of her life. The presses rumbled. The paper ran. She thought about what it had cost: the club, her aunt, Rowena, the two rooms of the office, the winter she would never get back, and the certainty she had carried home from Europe that the world was a place where things were either given to her or taken from her and she had no say in either. That certainty was gone, and she did not miss it. She had learned the difference between being safe and being useful, and she would not have traded the second for the first if all the money in the city had been laid out upon the desk. Cormac came down the room to her and stood at her shoulder and looked out over the machines with her and said nothing, which was the way he had learned to be with her in the press-room at four in the morning. And then the copy boy came up from the newsroom at a run, with a telegram in his hand and a face that Cornelia had learned, in a year of running a newspaper, to read at a glance, and this face said that whatever was on the wire was not an accident in the harbor or a fire in a tenement. This face said that the thing on the wire was going to change the week. She took the telegram and read it, standing in the light of the first edition. It was from Chicago. It was from a man named Hosmer, whom she had refused in May, and it was only four lines long, and when she had finished reading it she read it again, and then she looked up and found Cormac watching her from the far end of the press-room, waiting, the way he had waited for her once before, in an assembly room over a saloon, to find out whether she understood what she had just been handed. Cornelia folded the telegram and walked the length of the press-room to him through the noise of the machines, and put it into his hand, and stood beside him while he read it, and watched his face go still. *Miss Hollingsworth,* it said. *The syndicate has been dissolved and its papers are for sale. Eleven mastheads, one wire service, and a controlling interest in the Baltimore, Chicago, and Manhattan morning trade. The men who dissolved it have asked me who in America could run it. I told them there is one woman in New York who prints the truth and keeps her men, and one editor who writes it. They wish to know, by March, whether you will come to Chicago and see the whole of it with your own eyes.* Cormac looked up. "March," he said. "March," Cornelia said. "Eleven papers. A wire service." She looked at the machines, and at the men, and at the boy learning to feed the press, and at the composing room where Brogan's rule hung on the wall in a frame, and she felt the whole weight of the year she had survived settle on her shoulders and then, slowly, lift again, the way the presses lifted when they found their rhythm. "Tell them we will see it," she said. "And then let us print the morning." "Eleven papers," Cormac said, still looking at the telegram. "You refused their money in May, and they want you to run the whole of it in March. That is not a reward. That is a test, and they will be watching every edition to see whether you are the woman they read about or the woman they invented." "Then we had better print the morning as though they were watching," Cornelia said. "We have done it before." The machines found their rhythm, and the paper ran white to gray to printed, and somewhere above them the city was waking to an edition that had not yet been written, and neither of them knew what was going to be on the wire in March.