David Graham Phillips

“ What he had said to Alice about marriage was true—as to his intentions, at least. A poor woman, he felt, he could not marry; a rich woman, he felt, he would not marry. And he cared nothing about marriage because he was never lonely, never leaned or wished to lean upon another, abhorred the idea of any one leaning upon him; because he regarded freedom as the very corner-stone of his scheme of life. ”

“ Then, with a flimsy mask of pretended calmness only the more clearly revealing self-contempt and cowardice, he faced her amazed eyes, her pale cheeks, her parted lips—and dropped his gaze to the floor.
“You?” she whispered. “You?”
“Yes, I.”
She sat so still that he reached over and touched her hand. It was cold. She shivered and drew it away. They were silent for a long time—several minutes. She was looking at his face. It was old and sad and feeble—pitiful, contemptible. She had never seen those lines of weakness about his mouth before. ”

“ In such a city as New York, to be deliberately careful about money is the only way to keep within one’s income, whether it be vast or small. There are temptations to buy at the end of every glance of the eye. The merchants are crafty in producing new and insidious allurements, in creating new and expensive tastes. But these might be resisted were it not that the habits of all one’s associates are constantly and all but irresistibly stimulating the faculty of imitation.
Neither Howard nor Marian had been brought up to be watchful about money. ”

“ But that bad habits will not help a man to a career in journalism any more than in any other profession.”
“Career?” smiled Kittredge, resenting Howard’s good-humoured irony and putting on a supercilious look that brought out more strongly the insignificance of his face. “Journalism is not a career. It is either a school or a cemetery. A man may use it as a stepping-stone to something else. But if he sticks to it, he finds himself an old man, dead and done for to all intents and purposes years before he’s buried.” ”

“ You have fixed your ambition high—very high. You wish to make an honest and a useful and a distinguished career. You know you have weaknesses. I needn’t remind you—need I—that you have had to fight those weaknesses? How could you have won thus far if you had been responsible for others instead of being alone, and certain that the consequences would fall upon yourself only? I want to see you continue to win. I don’t want to see you dragged down by extravagance, by love for this woman, by ambition of the kind her friends approve. ”

“ One morning when he had been living in Washington Square, South, about—three years, Howard was dressing hurriedly, the door of his sitting-room accidentally ajar. Through the crack he saw some one stooping over the serving tray which he had himself put outside his door when he had finished breakfast. He looked more closely. It was “the clergyman” from up under the eaves—an unfrocked priest, thin to emaciation, misery written upon his face even more deeply than weakness. ”

“ To print the things the people wish to read in the quantities the people like and in the form the most people can most easily understand—that is success as an editor.”
“No doubt,” said Marian, thinking of the low view all her friends took of Howard’s newspaper, “if you were making a newspaper to please yourself, you would make a very different one.”
“Oh, no,” laughed Howard, “I print what I myself like; that is, what I like to find in a newspaper. We print human news made by human beings and interesting to human beings. And we don’t pretend to be anything more than human. ”

“ Danvers was acutely suspicious, saved from cynicism and misanthropy by his vanity only. He was the familiar combination of credulity and incredulity, now trusting not at all and again trusting with an utter incapacity to judge. Had he been far more attractive personally, he might still have failed to find genuine affection. To be liked for one’s self alone or even chiefly is rarely the lot of any human being who has a possession that is all but universally coveted—wealth or position or power or beauty.
Danvers and Marian had known each the other from childhood. ”

“ The nearest he had come to companionship was with Alice. With the other women whom he had known in various degrees from warmth to white-heat, there had been interruptions, no such constant freedom of access, no such intermingling of daily life. Her he had seen at all hours and in all circumstances. She never disturbed him but was ready to talk when he wished to listen, listened eagerly when he talked, and was silent and beautiful and restful to look at when he wished to indulge in the dissipation of mental laziness. ”

“ As it is, I am ever more and more a slave. To be free I ought to be poor or rich. And I cannot endure the thought of poverty again. I must be rich.”
The idea allured him to a degree that made him ashamed of himself. Sometimes, when he was talking to Marian or writing editorials, all in the strain of high principle and contempt for sordidness, he would flush at the thought that he was in reality a good deal of a hypocrite. “I’m expressing the ideals I ought to have, the ideals I used to have, not the ideals I have.” ”

“ It may not be if I am free—free to meet every situation as it arises, with no responsibility for others resting upon me in the decision. If I had a wife, how could I be free? I might be forced to sell myself—not for fame but for a bare living. Suppose choice between freedom with poverty and comfort with self-contempt were put squarely at me, and I a married man. ”

“ It was the centre of the most varied life in New York. To the north lay fashion and wealth, to the east and west, respectability and moderate means; to the south, poverty and squalor, vice and crime. All could be seen and heard from the windows of his sitting room. In the evenings toward spring he looked out upon a panorama of the human race such as is presented by no other city in the world and by no other part of that city. ”

“ Howard smiled. “I didn’t know that Coulter ever indulged in dreams.”
“Yes, he had the rich man’s mania—the craze for founding a family. So everything is to be put into real estate and long-term bonds. And for years New York is to be reminded of Samuel Coulter by some incapable who’ll use his name and his money to advertise nature’s contempt for family pride in her distributions of brains. I think even a fine tomb is a wiser memorial.” ”

“ At the Twenty-third Street ferry-house he got into a hansom and gave the address of “the flat.” He did not note where he was until the hansom drew up at the curb. He leaned forward and looked at the house—at their windows with the curtains which she had draped so gracefully, which she and he had selected at Vantine’s one morning. How often he had seen her standing between those curtains, looking out for him, her blue-black hair waving back from her forehead so beautifully and her face ready to smile so soon as ever she should catch sight of him. ”

“ Howard said, as they were about to go to their rooms for the day’s work. “There’s no danger in attacking any hypocrisy. Don’t attack beliefs that are universal or nearly universal—at least not openly. But don’t be afraid of a hypocrisy because it is universal. People know that they are hypocrites in respect of it. They may not have the courage publicly to applaud you. ”

“ A few of her pencil marks on the margin of a leaf in one of his books; a gesture, a little mannerism of some woman passing him in the street—and he would be ready to sink down with weariness and loneliness, like a tired traveller in a vast desert.
He completely lost self-control only once. It was a cold, wet May night and everything had gone against him that day. He looked drearily round his rooms as he came in. How stiff, how forbidding, how desert they seemed! He threw himself into a big chair.
“No friends,” he thought, “no one that cares a rap whether I live or die, suffer or am happy. ”

“ Kittredge flushed slightly and answered in a more serious tone:
“We must work while others amuse themselves or sleep. We must sleep while others are at work. That throws us out of touch with the whole world of respectability and regularity. When we get done at night, wrought up by the afternoon and evening of this gambling with our brains and nerves as the stake, what is open to us?”
“That is true,” said Howard. ”

“ Howard shrugged his shoulders and tossed the paper from him.
“There it lies,” he said, “a corpse. Already a corpse, its life ended before it was fairly born. There it is, dead and done for—writ in water, and by anonymous hands. Who knows who did it? Who cares?”
He caught Marian’s eyes, looking wonder and reproach.
“I don’t like to hear you say that,” she said, forgetting Mrs. Carnarvon. “Other men—yes, the little men who work for the cheap rewards. But not you, who work for the sake of work. This night’s experience has thrilled me. I understand your profession now. ”

“ Or perhaps the only sound to disturb the city’s sleep would be that soft tread, timid as a mouse’s, stealthy as a jackal’s—the tread of a lonely woman with draggled silk skirt and painted cheeks and eyes burning into the darkness, and a heart as bitter and as sad as no money, no home, no friends, no hope can make it. ”

“ But don’t forget that you and she are not starting out to make a career. Don’t forget that she is already fixed—her tastes, habits, friendships, associations, ideals already formed. Don’t forget that your love is the only bond between you—and that it may drag you toward her mode of life instead of drawing her towards yours. Don’t forget that your own associations and temptations are becoming more and more difficult. I repeat, you cringed—yes, cringed—when Stokely insulted you. Why?”
Howard was silent. ”

“ If you were the sort of woman a man could doubt, you wouldn’t be the sort of woman I could love. And you know it isn’t vanity that makes me sure. I often wonder how you happened to care for such a—but I must not attack any one whom you like so well. No, I knew you cared by the same instinct that makes you know that I care for you. ”

“ Howard was now thirty years old. Park Row had long ceased talking of him as a “coming man.” While his style of writing was steadily improving, he wrote with no fixed aim, wrote simply for the day, for the newspaper which dies with the day of its date. Some of his acquaintances wondered why a man of such ability should thus stand still. The less observant spoke of him as an impressive example of the “journalistic blight.” Those who looked deeper saw the truth—a dangerous facility, a perilous inertia, a fatal entanglement. ”

“ Because I have seen women, brought up as you have been, crawling miserably about in the sloughs of poverty. Because I have seen the weaknesses of human nature and know that they exist in me—yes, and in you, for all your standing there so strong and arrogant and self-reliant. ”

“ At a glance it seemed a dream of life with evil and sorrow and pain banished.
“No place for a working man,” thought he, “at least not for my kind of a working man. It appeals too sharply to the instincts for laziness and luxury.”
He was late and stood in the entrance to the palm-garden, looking about for Segur. Soon he saw him waving from a table near the wall under the music-alcove.
“The oysters are just coming,” said Segur. “Sit over there between Mrs. Carnarvon and Miss Trevor. They are cousins, Howard, so be cautious what you say to one about the other. Oh, here is Mr. Berersford.” ”

“ They were in the Avenue again—“the awakening,” Howard said as the flood of carriages rolled about them.
“You will win,” she repeated, when they were almost at Forty-seventh Street. “You will be famous.”
“Probably not. The price for fame may be too big.”
“The price? But you are willing to work?”
“Work—yes. But not to lie, not to cheat, not to exchange self-respect for self-contempt—at least, I think, I hope not.” ”

“ Once in this class, once having tasted the joy of power, Howard was lost to her. She was unable to restrain or direct, or even clearly to understand. She became an incident in his life. As riches came with power, they pushed him to one side in her life. Living in separate parts of a large house, leading separate lives, rarely meeting except when others were present—following the typical life of New Yorkers of fortune and fashion—they gradually grew to know little and see little and think little each of the other. ”

“ Must I be alone and friendless and loveless always? That is not life; that is not just. I will not; I will not. I love her—love her—love her. With the best that there is in me, I love her. Am I such a coward that I cannot face even my own weaknesses? ”

“ Howard went about his plans quietly. He avoided every appearance of exerting authority, disturbed not a wheel in the great machine. He made his changes so subtly that those who received the suggestions often came to him a few days afterward, proposing as their own the very plans he had hinted. He was thus cautious partly because of his experience of the vanity of men, their sensitiveness to criticism, their instinctive opposition to improvement from without; partly from his knowledge of the hysteria which raged in the offices of the “yellow journals.” ”

“ A discontent, a feeling that her life was incomplete, perpetually teased her. He was distinctly unhappy, often gloomy, at times morose. In her rare analytic moods she attributed their failure to prolong the happiness of their courtship to the hard work which kept him from her, kept them from enjoying the great love which she assumed they felt each for the other. She would not and could not see that that love had long disappeared, leaving a mask of forms, of phrases and of impulses of passion to conceal its departure. And to this view he outwardly assented, when she suggested it ”

“ Carnarvon.
“The ‘worst ever,’” laughed Segur. “He is very positive and likes only a certain style and won’t have anything that doesn’t exactly fit his ideas. He’s easy to get along with but difficult to work for.”
“I imagine his positiveness is the secret of his success.” Marian knew that Segur was half in jest and was fond of Howard. But she couldn’t endure hearing him criticised.
“No. I think he succeeds because he works, pushes straight on, never stops to repair blunders but never makes the same kind of a blunder the second time.” ”

“ After four years of “expansion” there, they had begun to feel cramped; and a year after Marian inherited the house Howard had progressed to the mental, the moral, the financial state where it seemed natural, logical, practically necessary that they should set up a real New York “establishment.”
“Isn’t this just the house for us?” she said. “I hate huge, big houses. Like you, I think the taste of the occupants should be everywhere. Now this house is just big enough. You don’t know how wonderful it would be.” ”

“ We try never to think of our own idea of what the people ought to read, but always to get at what the people themselves think they ought to read. We are journalists, not news-censors.”
“I must say newspapers do not interest me.” Marian confessed it a little diffidently.
“You are probably not interested,” Howard answered, “because you don’t care for news. It is a queer passion—the passion for news. The public has it in a way. ”