第6章 The Press-room After Midnight

The press-room took up the whole ground floor of the Clarion building, and at midnight it was the loudest place Cornelia had ever stood in. The great presses rolled in their iron frames, and the paper ran through them in white rivers, and the floor shook underfoot with the patient violence of machines that did not know or care that it was late. The gas jets hissed overhead. The smell was ink and oil and the hot metal of the type, and under all of it, faintly, the smell of the men themselves, sweat and tobacco and the onions they had eaten at supper. They had taken the injured man to the dispensary at the end of the room, and there he lay on a bench with his hand wrapped in a torn shirt, gray-faced and biting down on a leather strap. He was young; nineteen, maybe twenty. The machines had caught his sleeve and pulled him against the feeder, and the hand that had caught the worst of it would not be setting type again. "His name is Mulvaney," Cormac said quietly at her shoulder. "He has a wife and no children. If he keeps the hand he will be lucky, and if he keeps it he will not be able to feel the sorts, and if he cannot feel the sorts he is finished." Cornelia had never fainted in her life and did not intend to begin in a press-room at midnight with two hundred men watching her. She knelt by the bench, took the boy's other hand, and held it, and said, "You are going to be all right, Mr. Mulvaney. I have sent for a doctor and I will pay for the best one in the city, and when you are mended there will be work for you here, whatever the machines do, and if I say that in front of these men I will not take it back." Mulvaney looked at her through the pain and did not quite believe her, and that was all right; he did not have to believe her. The men standing around did, or would, or would not, and she had learned in the assembly room that words said in front of witnesses were the only kind that counted in this district. "Miss Hollingsworth," Cormac said. "Step back. The doctor is here." She stepped back. The doctor was a small hurried man with a bag, and he cleared the bench and bent to his work, and Cormac drew her away toward the wall, where an old compositor was watching her with the flat attention of a man who had sized up his share of owners. "You are Percival's daughter," the old man said. "I am." "I set type for your father for nineteen years. Nineteen years, and he never once came down here and stood where you are standing now." The old man's name, she learned, was Lazarus Brogan, and his hands were curved like claws from the trade, and his eyes were not kind, though they were not cruel either; they were simply old and very tired. "Understand something, Miss. We are not your friends because you held that boy's hand. A hand held is a hand held. It does not pay a wage. What we will remember is what you print." "I mean to print the truth," Cornelia said. "Everybody means to print the truth. The question is whose truth, and who pays for it when it is printed." Brogan turned away to his case of type, and after a moment he said, without looking at her, "I knew his father." Cormac had gone very still. "Kavanagh," Brogan said. "Your father. He was a pressman on the old rotary at the World, and when the new presses came he was let go, and he took to drink, and he died in the charity ward at fifty years of age. You were a boy in school. Do not think I have forgotten it." "I have not forgotten it either," Cormac said. "I know you have not." Brogan set a piece of type in its place. "That is why I vote with you, and will still vote with you when they offer me a pension to vote otherwise. Because you have not forgotten, and because you do not pretend you have not. There is no man in this room who trusts you because you are clever. We trust you because you are angry with the right people, and we wait, every day, to see if the heiress will change which people those are." There was nothing to say to that, and Cornelia did not try to say it. Cormac took her along the far wall, past the case racks where the men had set the type for every edition in her father's memory, and showed her the machine in the corner: the new one, the linotype, with its brass keyboard and its pot of molten metal and the little flying matrices that dropped into place faster than the eye could follow. "Watch," he said, and one of the operators ran it, and the letters dropped, and the line came up whole in the time it would have taken a fast compositor to set three words. "It is beautiful," Cornelia said, and hated herself for saying it, because it was true. "It is beautiful," Cormac agreed, "and it is the most dangerous thing that has ever come into this trade, and both of those are true at once, and any man who tells you only one of them is lying to you." --- The doctor saved the boy's thumb and lost him two fingers. They carried him to a cab at half past two, and Cormac paid the fare out of his own pocket and would not let her pay it back, and they stood on the step of the Clarion in the cold and watched the cab go down the empty avenue. "You should go home, Miss Hollingsworth. Nothing good happens in this district after two." "You said the men would be watching." "They have been watching all day. You held the boy's hand in front of all of them. They will talk about that for a week, and then they will forget it, and it will matter again only if you keep your word about the work." She pulled her coat tighter. "Mr. Kavanagh. Your father. I am sorry." "Everybody is sorry." He said it without bitterness; he said it the way a man states a fact about the weather. "He was a good pressman and a worse father, and when his trade went he had nothing else to be. If you want to know why I stand on a crate in a room over a saloon and tell two hundred men to put their hands out of a company's presses, that is your answer. I am not noble. I am just a man who has been to the funeral." Cornelia looked at the empty street and the gas lamp on the corner and the presses still rumbling somewhere inside the building, and she felt, for the first time since the dock, that she was standing in a real place. Europe had been beautiful and had meant nothing. This meant something, and it was ugly, and it was hers. "Tomorrow," she said, "I go to the bank on Nassau Street. I want you to come with me." He looked at her sharply. "Why?" "Because when I open that box I do not know what I am going to find, and I would rather find it in front of one man who will tell me the truth about it than in front of Mr. Thorndike, who will tell me only what suits him." She held his gaze. "And because if it is as bad as we think, I would like you to know it at the same moment I do." For a moment he said nothing. Then he took off his hat and looked at it as though it had something written on the brim. "Eleven o'clock," he said. "Do not be late, and do not bring a lawyer." ---