第9章 The Edition That Cost Her Everything

They printed it on a Tuesday in the second week of December, in the edition that went to press at four in the morning and was on the street before the sun, and Cormac Kavanagh's name was at the top of the page and hers was at the foot, where the publisher's signature stood, as her father's had stood for twenty years. **THE MACHINE AND THE MONEY: How the Clarion Was Bought With a Widow's Savings — And What Its Owner Means to Do About It.** It was the longest piece the Clarion had printed in a decade. It did not accuse anyone of anything. It laid out the loan, the interest, the memorandum, the machines, and the wage the men would lose, and it let the city read the arithmetic for itself. It printed Percival Hollingsworth's notes exactly as he had left them, and it printed, in Cormac's plainest prose, the single sentence that would be quoted in every other paper by the week's end: *The men who set this paper's type have not been paid since October, and the money that should have paid them is in the pockets of the men who paid for the machines.* Cornelia stood at the window of her father's study and watched the newsboys run down the avenue with the Clarion in their arms, and she knew, before the sun was fully up, that she had done the thing that could not be undone. The first telegram came at eight. It was from Thorndike, and it was one line: *You have made a serious mistake.* The second came at nine, from an advertiser worth nine thousand dollars a year: *Regret cannot continue our space under the present management.* By noon there were four more like it. By three o'clock the city editor Trafton had come to her office with a face like ash and a list of the advertisers who had already given notice, and had stood in her doorway and said, with the desperate respect of a man who has served two generations of Hollingsworths, "Miss, we have lost a third of the space for next week. If this goes on a month, we cannot pay the men, and then we cannot print, and then the Bugle has what it wants without lifting a finger." "I know," Cornelia said. "Keep the news going. The news is the only thing we have that they cannot take." --- The men of the Clarion read it at the noonday shift, and the men of the Row read it in the saloons, and what happened in the press-room that afternoon Cornelia did not see and only heard about afterward, and what she heard surprised her more than the advertiser's telegrams had. They had not thanked her. Lazarus Brogan had read the piece twice through, standing at his case, and had then folded it carefully and put it in his coat and gone back to setting type, and said only, "She kept her word. That is all." And one of the younger men had asked Brogan whether it changed anything, and Brogan had said, "It changes what we will say about her in March. It does not change the wage. Do not confuse the two." That was the fair answer and the true one, and Cormac brought it to her himself, late in the afternoon, standing in her office with his hat in his hand and the ink still on his fingers. "The men will not cheer you," he said. "You should know that. They do not cheer owners. If you expected a parade, you have been reading too many of your own editorials." "I did not expect a parade." "Good. But they will remember it, and when the settlement comes, they will remember that the person across the table was the one who printed the truth about her own father. That is worth more than a parade. It is worth about two dollars a week in the negotiations, and two dollars a week is what we came for." Cornelia looked at him across the desk. In the three weeks since the assembly room she had grown used to finding him there, in the doorway or across from her, always with a fact and never with a compliment, and she had begun to notice that she looked for him in the room before she looked for anyone else. "There is something I have not told you," she said. "That sounds ominous." "Mr. Thorndike sent for me. He will call the note on the first of March unless I sell him the shares at his own price, and he has let it be known that the price is now half what he offered in November. He is punishing me for the piece." "Can he call it?" "He is the bank. He can do whatever the papers he wrote allow him to do, and my father, who should have read them more carefully, allowed him a great deal." She folded her hands. "I have a plan, and I want you to hear it before I say it to anyone else, because it will sound mad." "Almost everything that has happened in the last three weeks has sounded mad." "I mean to offer the men a share," Cornelia said. "Not charity, not a pension. A share of the company, held in trust for the assembly, on the condition that the wage is settled and the fund for the displaced is paid. If the men own a part of the paper, Thorndike cannot take it without buying it from them, and the city will not let him buy it from them without a fight. And if the paper fails, the men lose their share and I lose everything, and at least we shall all fail together." Cormac looked at her for a long, careful moment, and she saw in his face the exact thing she had seen in the assembly room — the calculation, and then the wariness, and then, this time, slowly, something else. "That is not a mad plan," he said. "That is a dangerous plan, which is a different thing. I will put it to the men. I make you no promises." "That is all I ask." "In that case," he said, and stopped, and started again. "In that case, I will tell you one thing, and then I will go and put it to the men, and you will not hold it against me. You have done what you said you would do, and I have not met many people of your name who have, and I am finding it hard to remember that I am not supposed to like you." He put on his hat and went out before she could answer, which was, she suspected, exactly why he had gone. --- That evening, at the house on the square, Hortense kept her promise. She had her trunks in the hall before dinner, and she stood among them in her traveling coat with her mouth set and her eyes wet. "I am going to my sister in Philadelphia," she said. "I cannot watch you do this. You have thrown away your father's name and your own future for a piece of typewritten scandal, and you have done it beside a man who would be happy to see every house on this square torn down. When it is finished, and you have lost everything, do not write to me for money, because I will not have any to give you. The men have taken it." Aunt Hortense, Cornelia thought, had never once in her life spoken to a man with ink on his hands, and believed completely that the men who did were stealing from her. "I am sorry," she said. "I will not write to you for money." Hortense's face crumpled for just a moment, and then it was set again, and she went out to the carriage, and a footman carried her trunks behind her, and the door of the house closed and the house was quieter than it had been since Cornelia came home. She stood alone in the hall for a while. Then she went up to her father's study, and turned up the gas, and sat down in his chair — his chair, for the first time — and opened the account book to a fresh page and began to write, in careful columns, everything she meant to do. ---