第4章 What the Morning Bugle Printed

The Morning Bugle went to press at dawn, and by noon its headline was being shouted on every corner between City Hall and the ferry landing, and the newsboys did not have to shout very hard, because the words sold themselves. **THE CLARION'S DIRTY MONEY: New Owner Inherits Rails Deal That Ruined Widows.** Cornelia read it in the carriage, twice, while the driver waited, and then a third time because the third reading was the one where the blood stopped roaring in her ears and the words became only words again. It was clever, as Selwyn's work was always clever. It did not accuse her of anything. It merely laid two true things side by side and let the reader do the joining. The first true thing: that in the spring, before his death, Percival Hollingsworth had signed a contract with a group of men who were laying a railway west of the city, and had accepted, in exchange for printing their prospectus and their shares, a parcel of their bonds. The second true thing: that the railway had since failed, and that a great many small investors — including, the piece named with a delicate show of pity, several widows — had lost their savings in it. Between the two true things the piece placed a single sentence, and the sentence was the dagger: *The Clarion's presses did not print a word of the failure while the Hollingsworths still held the bonds.* It was not libel. That was the worst of it. Every word was defensible, and any lawyer would say so, and the city would read it exactly as Selwyn had intended: that the Clarion was bought and paid for, that its owner's money came out of widows' pockets, and that the woman who had just inherited it was of the same kind. She read the last paragraph, where Selwyn had been kind enough to report that the new owner was a young lady lately returned from Europe, and that it remained to be seen whether she would show herself as careful of the truth as she was of her wardrobe. Cornelia folded the paper, and folded it again, and set it on the seat beside her, and sat looking straight ahead through the carriage window while the city went by and did not care at all. Then she thought: *the men in the press-room will read this too.* And after that, though she would not have said so aloud, she thought: *and so will he.* --- She went to the Clarion building at two o'clock and found the outer office in an uproar. Advertisers had been telephoning since ten. Two had already sent messengers to withdraw their space for the week. The city editor, a pale worried man named Trafton who had worked under her father for nineteen years, met her at the door of the newsroom with his hands opening and closing as though he were trying to knead the air into something he could hold. "Miss Hollingsworth. We should not answer it. Any answer gives the thing a life it does not deserve. That was always your father's rule. Print the news, ignore the slander, and the city forgets in a week." "The city has not forgotten a single thing Selwyn has printed in three months," Cornelia said. "And I have read my father's rule, Mr. Trafton. It was the rule of a man who owned a paper everyone already believed." Trafton's mouth tightened. "Then what do you propose? Suing them? You cannot sue a man for telling the truth out of order." "No," Cornelia said. "You cannot. But you can tell a bigger truth beside it." She looked past him into the newsroom, at the rows of desks and the typewriter girls and the reporters hunched over their copy, and she thought of a cold assembly room on Rookery Row, and of a man who had offered her a weapon and then waited to see what she would do with it. "Send for Mr. Thorndike," she said. "And send for Mr. Wyndham. I would like to know precisely how my father came to own those railway bonds, and I would like to be told in front of witnesses, because I will not be lied to about this and then told it was for my own good." --- The afternoon was the hardest she had spent since the funeral. Thorndike came, a heavy assured man of sixty who had been her father's banker and his friend and had, she now understood, been quietly measuring the Clarion for purchase for some time. He did not deny the bonds. He explained them, with the patience of a man explaining arithmetic to a child, as a perfectly ordinary investment that had gone wrong, a thing that happened in business every day. "Your father believed in the road," Thorndike said. "So did I. So did a great many sensible men. We lost. That is all. There is nothing to answer, because there is nothing disgraceful in being wrong." "There is something disgraceful in holding the bonds while the paper stayed silent about the failure," Cornelia said. "The piece says so, and it is a fact, and I want to know why my father did it." "Because a man does not print a story that will ruin his own investment the week before he means to realize it." Thorndike's tone turned cool. "Would you have had him beggar himself and a hundred families besides to satisfy a principle? That is a schoolgirl's question, Miss Hollingsworth. Business has its own weather, and a man who will not sail in it never leaves the harbor." "And when the harbor is widows' money?" Thorndike stood up. "I said what I came to say. You have my view. You also have a paper that is losing advertisers by the hour, a press-room that will not work much longer without a settlement, and a mortgage that comes due in March. I will make you the offer I made your father, and I will make it once, and then I will not make it again. Sell me your shares. I will pay the assessed value, the men will be settled by men who know how to settle them, and you may go back to Europe and look at your pictures." It was, she recognized, not entirely an offer made in cruelty. It was an offer made by a man who had spent forty years in a world where every problem had a price, and where the price of this one was one young woman's name on a deed of sale. "I will not sell," Cornelia said. Thorndike put on his hat. "Then I will see you in March," he said, "when the note comes due," and he left, and the door closed softly behind him, which was somehow worse than a slam. Wyndham stayed a moment longer. "You have just refused the only man in the city who can lend you money, Miss Hollingsworth." "I know." "There is one thing I did not tell you, because it is new, and because it is the kind of thing a solicitor likes to verify before he says it aloud." Wyndham lowered his voice. "The railway bonds were not the only paper your father signed with that group. There is a second contract, held in a lockbox in a bank on Nassau Street, and the box is in your name. I have seen it in the register. I have not seen what is inside." Cornelia felt the day tilt. "Who else knows about the box?" "Your father set it up before his illness. He told no one, so far as I can determine." Wyndham paused. "But the bank keeps a register, Miss Hollingsworth. In this city, every register has been read by someone." He took up his gloves. "When would you like to go to Nassau Street?" Cornelia looked at the window, where the afternoon had gone gray and the gas lamps were coming on along the street, and at the Clarion building opposite, where the windows of the press-room glowed with the yellow light of work that did not stop for her. "Tomorrow," she said. "But first I have a walk to take." ---