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A Modern Instance

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No company of men can fail to have a good time at a public dinner, and the
good time began at once with these journalists, whose overworked week ended
in this Saturday evening jollity. They were mostly young men, who found
sufficient compensation in the excitement and adventure of their underpaid
labors, and in the vague hope of advancement; there were grizzled beards
among them, for whom neither the novelty nor the expectation continued, but
who loved the life for its own sake, and would hardly have exchanged it for
prosperity. Here and there was an old fellow, for whom probably all the
illusion was gone; but he was proud of his vocation, proud even of the
changes that left him somewhat superannuated in his tastes and methods.
None, indeed, who have ever known it, can wholly forget the generous rage
with which journalism inspires its followers. To each of those young men,
beginning the strangely fascinating life as reporters and correspondents,
his paper was as dear as his king once was to a French noble; to serve it
night and day, to wear himself out for its sake, to merge himself in its
glory, and to live in its triumphs without personal recognition from the
public, was the loyal devotion which each expected his sovereign newspaper
to accept as its simple right. They went and came, with the prompt and
passive obedience of soldiers, wherever they were sent, and they struggled
each to "get in ahead" of all the others with the individual zeal of
heroes. They expanded to the utmost limits of occasion, and they submitted
with an anguish that was silent to the editorial excision, compression, and
mutilation of reports that were vitally dear to them. What becomes of these
ardent young spirits, the inner history of journalism in any great city
might pathetically show; but the outside world knows them only in the fine
frenzy of interviewing, or of recording the midnight ravages of what they
call the devouring element, or of working up horrible murders or tragical
accidents, or of tracking criminals who have baffled all the detectives.
Hearing their talk Bartley began to realize that journalism might be a very
different thing from what he had imagined it in a country printing-office,
and that it might not be altogether wise to consider it merely as a
stepping-stone to the law.

With the American eagerness to recognize talent, numbers of good fellows
spoke to him about his logging sketch; even those who had not read it
seemed to know about it as a hit. They were all delighted to be able to
say, "Ricker tells me that you offered it to old Witherby, and he wouldn't
look at it!" He found that this fact, which he had doubtfully confided to
Ricker, was not offensive to some of the Events people who were there; one
of them got him aside, and darkly owned to him that Witherby was doing
everything that any one man could to kill the Events, and that in fact the
counting-room was running the paper.

All the club united in abusing the dinner, which in his rustic ignorance
Bartley had not found so infamous; but they ate it with perfect appetite
and with mounting good spirits. The president brewed punch in a great bowl
before him, and, rising with a glass of it in his hand, opened a free
parliament of speaking, story-telling, and singing. Whoever recollected a
song or a story that he liked, called upon the owner of it to sing it or
tell it; and it appeared not to matter how old the fun or the music was:
the company was resolved to be happy; it roared and clapped till the
glasses rang. "You will like this song," Bartley's neighbors to right and
left of him prophesied; or, "Just listen to this story of Mason's,--it's
capital,"--as one or another rose in response to a general clamor. When
they went back to the reception-room they carried the punch-bowl with them,
and there, amid a thick cloud of smoke, two clever amateurs took their
places at the piano, and sang and played to their heart's content, while
the rest, glass in hand, talked and laughed, or listened as they chose.
Bartley had not been called upon, but he was burning to try that song in
which he had failed so dismally in the logging-camp. When the pianist rose
at last, he slipped down into the chair, and, striking the chords of the
accompaniment, he gave his piece with brilliant audacity. The room silenced
itself and then burst into a roar of applause, and cries of "Encore!" There
could be no doubt of the success. "Look here, Ricker," said a leading
man at the end of the repetition, "your friend must be one of us!"--and,
rapping on the table, he proposed Bartley's name. In that simple time the
club voted _viva voce_ on proposed members, and Bartley found himself
elected by acclamation, and in the act of paying over his initiation fee to
the treasurer, before he had well realized the honor done him. Everybody
near him shook his hand, and offered to be of service to him. Much of this
cordiality was merely collective good feeling; something of it might be
justly attributed to the punch; but the greater part was honest. In this
civilization of ours, grotesque and unequal and imperfect as it is in many
things, we are bound together in a brotherly sympathy unknown to any other.
We new men have all had our hard rubs, but we do not so much remember them
in soreness or resentment as in the wish to help forward any other who is
presently feeling them. If he will but help himself too, a hundred hands
are stretched out to him.

Bartley had kept his head clear of the punch, but he left the club drunk
with joy and pride, and so impatient to be with Marcia and tell her of his
triumphs that he could hardly wait to read the proof of his boarding-house
article which Ricker had put in hand at once for the Sunday edition. He
found Marcia sitting up for him, and she listened with a shining face while
he hastily ran over the most flattering facts of the evening. She was not
so much surprised at the honors done him as he had expected but she was
happier, and she made him repeat it all and give her the last details. He
was afraid she would ask him what his initiation had cost; but she seemed
to have no idea that it had cost anything, and though it had swept away a
third of the money he had received for his sketch, he still resolved that
she should have that supper at Parker's.

"I consider my future made," he said aloud, at the end of his swift
cogitation on this point.

"Oh, yes!" she responded rapturously. "We needn't have a moment's anxiety.
But we must be very saving still till you get a place."

"Oh, certainly," said Bartley.




XVII.


During several months that followed, Bartley's work consisted of
interviewing, of special reporting in all its branches, of correspondence
by mail and telegraph from points to which he was sent; his leisure
he spent in studying subjects which could be treated like that of
the boarding-houses. Marcia entered into his affairs with the keen
half-intelligence which characterizes a woman's participation in business;
whatever could be divined, she was quickly mistress of; she vividly
sympathized with his difficulties and his triumphs; she failed to follow
him in matters of political detail, or of general effect; she could not be
dispassionate or impartial; his relation to any enterprise was always more
important than anything else about it. On some of his missions he took her
with him, and then they made it a pleasure excursion; and if they came home
late with the material still unwritten, she helped him with his notes,
wrote from his dictation, and enabled him to give a fuller report than
his rivals. She caught up with amusing aptness the technical terms of the
profession, and was voluble about getting in ahead of the Events and the
other papers; and she was indignant if any part of his report was cut out
or garbled, or any feature was spoiled.

He made a "card" of grouping and treating with picturesque freshness the
spring openings of the milliners and dry-goods people; and when he brought
his article to Ricker, the editor ran it over, and said, "Guess you took
your wife with you, Hubbard."

"Yes, I did," Bartley owned. He was always proud of her looks, and it
flattered him that Ricker should see the evidences of her feminine taste
and knowledge in his account of the bonnets and dress goods. "You don't
suppose I could get at all these things by inspiration, do you?"

Marcia was already known to some of his friends whom he had introduced to
her in casual encounters. They were mostly unmarried, or if married they
lived at a distance, and they did not visit the Hubbards at their lodgings.
Marcia was a little shy, and did not quite know whether they ought to call
without being asked, or whether she ought to ask them; besides, Mrs. Nash's
reception-room was not always at her disposal, and she would not have liked
to take them all the way up to her own room. Her social life was therefore
confined to the public places where she met these friends of her husband's.
They sometimes happened together at a restaurant, or saw one another
between the acts at the theatre, or on coming out of a concert. Marcia was
not so much admired for her conversation by her acquaintance, as for her
beauty and her style; a rustic reluctance still lingered in her; she was
thin and dry in her talk with any one but Bartley, and she could not help
letting even men perceive that she was uneasy when they interested him in
matters foreign to her.

Bartley did not see why they could not have some of these fellows up
in their room for tea; but Marcia told him it was impossible. In fact,
although she willingly lived this irregular life with him, she was at heart
not at all a Bohemian. She did not like being in lodgings or dining at
restaurants; on their horse-car excursions into the suburbs, when the
spring opened, she was always choosing this or that little house as the
place where she would like to live, and wondering if it were within their
means. She said she would gladly do all the work herself; she hated to be
idle so much as she now must. The city's novelty wore off for her sooner
than for him: the concerts, the lectures, the theatres, had already lost
their zest for her, and she went because he wished her to go, or in order
to be able to help him with what he was always writing about such things.

As the spring advanced, Bartley conceived the plan of a local study,
something in the manner of the boarding-house article, but on a much vaster
scale: he proposed to Ricker a timely series on the easily accessible
hot-weather resorts, to be called "Boston's Breathing-Places," and to
relate mainly to the seaside hotels and their surroundings. His idea was
encouraged, and he took Marcia with him on most of his expeditions for its
realization. These were largely made before the regular season had well
begun; but the boats were already running, and the hotels were open, and
they were treated with the hospitality which a knowledge of Bartley's
mission must invoke. As he said, it was a matter of business, give and
take on both sides, and the landlords took more than they gave in any such
trade.

On her part Marcia regarded dead-heading as a just and legitimate privilege
of the press, if not one of its chief attributes; and these passes on boats
and trains, this system of paying hotel-bills by the presentation of a
card, constituted distinguished and honorable recognition from the public.
To her simple experience, when Bartley told how magnificently the reporters
had been accommodated, at some civic or commercial or professional banquet,
with a table of their own, where they were served with all the wines and
courses, he seemed to have been one of the principal guests, and her fear
was that his head should be turned by his honors. But at the bottom of her
heart, though she enjoyed the brilliancy of Bartley's present life, she did
not think his occupation comparable to the law in dignity. Bartley called
himself a journalist now, but his newspaper connection still identified him
in her mind with those country editors of whom she had always heard her
father speak with such contempt: men dedicated to poverty and the despite
of all the local notables who used them. She could not shake off the
old feeling of degradation, even when she heard Bartley and some of his
fellow-journalists talking in their boastfulest vein of the sovereign
character of journalism; and she secretly resolved never to relinquish her
purpose of having him a lawyer. Till he was fairly this, in regular and
prosperous practice, she knew that she should not have shown her father
that she was right in marrying Bartley.

In the mean time their life went ignorantly on in the obscure channels
where their isolation from society kept it longer than was natural. Three
or four months after they came to Boston, they were still country people,
with scarcely any knowledge of the distinctions and differences so
important to the various worlds of any city. So far from knowing that they
must not walk in the Common, they used to sit down on a bench there, in the
pleasant weather, and watch the opening of the spring, among the lovers
whose passion had a publicity that neither surprised nor shocked them.
After they were a little more enlightened, they resorted to the Public
Garden, where they admired the bridge, and the rock-work, and the statues.
Bartley, who was already beginning to get up a taste for art, boldly
stopped and praised the Venus, in the presence of the gardeners planting
tulip-bulbs.

They went sometimes to the Museum of Fine Arts, where they found a pleasure
in the worst things which the best never afterwards gave them; and where
she became as hungry and tired as if it were the Vatican. They had a pride
in taking books out of the Public Library, where they walked about on
tiptoe with bated breath; and they thought it a divine treat to hear the
Great Organ play at noon. As they sat there in the Music Hall, and let the
mighty instrument bellow over their strong young nerves, Bartley whispered
Marcia the jokes he had heard about the organ; and then, upon the wave of
aristocratic sensation from this experience, they went out and dined at
Copeland's, or Weber's, or Fera's, or even at Parker's: they had long since
forsaken the humble restaurant with its doilies and its ponderous crockery,
and they had so mastered the art of ordering that they could manage a
dinner as cheaply at these finer places as anywhere, especially if Marcia
pretended not to care much for her half of the portion, and connived at its
transfer to Bartley's plate.

In his hours of leisure, they were so perpetually together that it became a
joke with the men who knew them to say, when asked if Bartley were married,
"Very _much_ married." It was not wholly their inseparableness that gave
the impression of this extreme conjugality; as I said, Marcia's uneasiness
when others interested Bartley in things alien to her made itself felt even
by these men. She struggled against it because she did not wish to put him
to shame before them, and often with an aching sense of desolation she sent
him off with them to talk apart, or left him with them if they met on the
street, and walked home alone, rather than let any one say that she kept
her husband tied to her apron-strings. His club, after the first sense of
its splendor and usefulness wore away, was an ordeal; she had failed to
conceal that she thought the initiation and annual fees extravagant. She
knew no other bliss like having Bartley sit down in their own room with
her; it did not matter whether they talked; if he were busy, she would as
lief sit and sew, or sit and silently look at him as he wrote. In these
moments she liked to feign that she had lost him, that they had never been
married, and then come back with a rush of joy to the reality. But on his
club nights she heroically sent him off, and spent the evening with Mrs.
Nash. Sometimes she went out by day with the landlady, who had a passion
for auctions and cemeteries, and who led Marcia to an intimate acquaintance
with such pleasures. At Mount Auburn, Marcia liked the marble lambs, and
the emblematic hands pointing upward with the dexter finger, and the
infants carved in stone, and the angels with folded wings and lifted eyes,
better than the casts which Bartley said were from the antique, in the
Museum; on this side her mind was as wholly dormant as that of Mrs. Nash
herself. She always came home feeling as if she had not seen Bartley for a
year, and fearful that something had happened to him.

The hardest thing about their irregular life was that he must sometimes be
gone two or three days at a time, when he could not take her with him. Then
it seemed to her that she could not draw a full breath in his absence; and
once he found her almost wild on his return: she had begun to fancy that
he was never coming back again. He laughed at her when she betrayed her
secret, but she was not ashamed; and when he asked her, "Well, what if I
hadn't come back?" she answered passionately, "It wouldn't have made much
difference to me: I should not have lived."

The uncertainty of his income was another cause of anguish to her. At times
he earned forty or fifty dollars a week; oftener he earned ten; there was
now and then a week when everything that he put his hand to failed, and he
earned nothing at all. Then Marcia despaired; her frugality became a
mania, and they had quarrels about what she called his extravagance. She
embittered his daily bread by blaming him for what he spent on it; she wore
her oldest dresses, and would have had him go shabby in token of their
adversity. Her economies were frantic child's play,--methodless,
inexperienced, fitful; and they were apt to be followed by remorse in which
she abetted him in some wanton excess.

The future of any heroic action is difficult to manage; and the sublime
sacrifice of her pride and all the conventional proprieties which Marcia
had made in giving herself to Bartley was inevitably tried by the same
sordid tests that every married life is put to.

That salaried place which he was always seeking on the staff of some
newspaper, proved not so easy to get as he had imagined in the flush of
his first successes. Ricker willingly included him among the
Chronicle-Abstract's own correspondents and special reporters; and he held
the same off-and-on relation to several other papers; but he remained
without a more definite position. He earned perhaps more money than a
salary would have given him, and in their way of living he and Marcia laid
up something out of what he earned. But it did not seem to her that he
exerted himself to get a salaried place; she was sure that, if so many
others who could not write half so well had places, he might get one if he
only kept trying. Bartley laughed at these business-turns of Marcia's as
he called them; but sometimes they enraged him, and he had days of sullen
resentment when he resisted all her advances towards reconciliation. But he
kept hard at work, and he always owned at last how disinterested her most
ridiculous alarm had been.

Once, when they had been talking as usual about that permanent place on
some newspaper, she said, "But I should only want that to be temporary,
if you got it. I want you should go on with the law, Bartley. I've been
thinking about that. I don't want you should always be a journalist."

Bartley smiled. "What could I do for a living, I should like to know, while
I was studying law?"

"You could do some newspaper work,--enough to support us,--while you were
studying. You said when we first came to Boston that you should settle down
to the law."

"I hadn't got my eyes open, then. I've got a good deal longer row to hoe
than I supposed, before I can settle down to the law."

"Father said you didn't need to study but a little more."

"Not if I were going into the practice at Equity. But it's a very different
thing, I can tell you, in Boston: I should have to go in for a course in
the Harvard Law School, just for a little start-off."

Marcia was silenced, but she asked, after a moment, "Then you're going to
give up the law, altogether?"

"I don't know what I'm going to do; I'm going to do the best I can for the
present, and trust to luck. I don't like special reporting, for a finality;
but I shouldn't like shystering, either."

"What's shystering?" asked Marcia.

"It's pettifogging in the city courts. Wait till I can get my basis,--till
I have a fixed amount of money for a fixed amount of work,--and then I'll
talk to you about taking up the law again. I'm willing to do it whenever
it seems the right thing. I guess I should like it, though I don't see
why it's any better than journalism, and I don't believe it has any more
prizes."

"But you've been a long time trying to get your basis on a newspaper," she
reasoned. "Why don't you try to get it in some other way? Why don't you try
to get a clerk's place with some lawyer?"

"Well, suppose I was willing to starve along in that way, how should I go
about to get such a place?" demanded Bartley, with impatience.

"Why don't you go to that Mr. Halleck you visited here? You used to tell me
he was going to be a lawyer."

"Well, if you remember so distinctly what I said about going into the law
when I first came to Boston," said her husband angrily, "perhaps you'll
remember that I said I shouldn't go to Halleck until I didn't need his
help. I shall not go to him _for_ his help."

Marcia gave way to spiteful tears. "It seems as if you were ashamed to
let them know that you were in town. Are you afraid I shall want to get
acquainted with them? Do you suppose I shall want to go to their parties,
and disgrace you?"

Bartley took his cigar out of his mouth, and looked blackly at her. "So,
that's what you've been thinking, is it?"

She threw herself upon his neck. "No! no, it isn't!" she cried,
hysterically. "You know that I never thought it till this instant; you know
I didn't think it at all; I just _said_ it. My nerves are all gone; I don't
know _what_ I'm saying half the time, and you're as strict with me as if
I were as well as ever! I may as well take off my things,--I'm not well
enough to go with you, to-day, Bartley."

She had been dressing while they talked for an entertainment which Bartley
was going to report for the Chronicle-Abstract; and now she made a feint of
wishing to remove her hat. He would not let her. He said that if she did
not go, he should not; he reproached her with not wishing to go with him
any more; he coaxed her laughingly and fondly.

"It's only because I'm not so strong, now," she said in a whisper that
ended in a kiss on his cheek. "You must walk very slowly, and not hurry
me."

The entertainment was to be given in aid of the Indigent Children's
Surf-Bathing Society, and it was at the end of June, rather late in the
season. But the society itself was an afterthought, not conceived till a
great many people had left town on whose assistance such a charity
must largely depend. Strenuous appeals had been made, however: it was
represented that ten thousand poor children could be transported to
Nantasket Beach, and there, as one of the ladies on the committee said,
bathed, clam-baked, and lemonaded three times during the summer at a cost
so small that it was a saving to spend the money. Class Day falling about
the same time, many exiles at Newport and on the North Shore came up and
down; and the affair promised to be one of social distinction, if not
pecuniary success. The entertainment was to be varied: a distinguished poet
was to read an old poem of his, and a distinguished poetess was to read
a new poem of hers; some professional people were to follow with comic
singing; an elocutionist was to give impressions of noted public speakers;
and a number of vocal and instrumental amateurs were to contribute their
talent.

Bartley had instructions from Ricker to see that his report was very
full socially. "We want something lively, and at the same time nice and
tasteful, about the whole thing, and I guess you're the man to do it. Get
Mrs. Hubbard to go with you, and keep you from making a fool of yourself
about the costumes." He gave Bartley two tickets. "Mighty hard to get, I
can tell you, for _love_ or money,--especially love," he said; and Bartley
made much of this difficulty in impressing Marcia's imagination with the
uncommon character of the occasion. She had put on a new dress which
she had just finished for herself, and which was a marvel not only of
cheapness, but of elegance; she had plagiarized the idea from the costume
of a lady with whom she stopped to look in at a milliner's window where she
formed the notion of her bonnet. But Marcia had imagined the things anew in
relation to herself, and made them her own; when Bartley first saw her in
them, though he had witnessed their growth from the germ, he said that he
was afraid of her, she was so splendid, and he did not quite know whether
he felt acquainted. When they were seated at the concert, and had time to
look about them, he whispered, "Well, Marsh, I don't see anything here that
comes near you in style," and she flung a little corner of her drapery out
over his hand so that she could squeeze it: she was quite happy again.

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