The great mirage

Front matter

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CHAPTER I N a certain clear, bracing afternoon in early

October a young girl stood at the front door of a pretty, old-fashioned white cottage and, shading her eyes with her hand, looked anxiously down the dusty road that led to the bustling town a quarter of a mile away. A single great elm spread its limbs over the lowly roof of the cottage and threw a pattern of flickering shadows across the well-kept beds of cosmos, salvia, marigolds, and other flowers of an elder day. In its air of neatness, self-respect, and thrift the house suggested a New England village rather than the outskirts of a Mohawk Valley manufacturing-town; and a glimpse of its prim, old-fashioned parlor furnished in black walnut and horsehair, with here and there a bit of shining old mahogany, and its exquisitely clean kitchen, with its glistening rows of tinware, its well-worn rag carpet and comfortable, deep -cushioned arm-chair by the sunny window, would have sustained that illusion in the mind of any experienced traveler.

The young girl standing in the doorway was about twenty-two, and, although not beautiful according to the standard that measures the exact proportions of nose, chin, and eyebrows, was nevertheless distinctly attractive. Her mouth was firm, small, and obviously designed for something better than mere conversation; her face, grave and thoughtful in repose, broke into dimples when she smiled; her eyes were of deep gray, suggestive of honesty, loyalty, and clear vision — the sort of eyes that command men’s respect and oftentimes awaken love. Evidently a girl not easily won, but well worth the wooing.

Her figure was of medium height and of an alluring mold that was somehow not quite in keeping with the clear, gray eyes and rather serious face. A tight-fitting jacket revealed the contour of her full, rounded bust, and she seemed to taper from her hips to the tips of her slim russet shoes. Her hands were small but, it was plain to see, not unaccustomed to work. There was a marked resemblance between her and the elderly woman who sat knitting in the little parlor, with the cat purring contentedly at her feet, the clock on the mantelpiece ticking off the seconds, and the afternoon sun throwing long beams of light across the floor.

The Cravens had come to Graytown many years before from New Hampshire, lured by the liberal salary offered the father and husband as superintendent of one of the local factories; and his death, when Kate, his daughter, was well into her teens, had left them anchored there with the home and an income of a very few hundreds a year. On this they had contrived to live, doing their own housework, making their own dresses, caring for their own garden, and even managing to carry a few eggs to the 2 grocer each week as a partial offset to their modest account. They had brought with them from their old home among the hills, along with their furniture and china, an old-fashioned Yankee pride and reticence that baffled all inquisitiveness, and at the same time served to keep them somewhat aloof from their neighbors.

‘‘Well, at least they’ve never found out just how poor we are !” was the comforting reflection in which the mother was wont to indulge herself.

Mrs. Craven and her daughter had never exactly fitted into the life of the town. Quite conscious of the fact that they were superior in birth and upbringing to those who ranked as their social equals, and too proud to seek the society of those who, chiefly by virtue of their holdings in mill stocks, deemed themselves the local aristocrats, the mother and the daughter had kept to themselves, forming no intimacies and seldom making or receiving visits. That their spare hours had not been altogether wasted was indicated by the diamond-paned mahogany bookcase where Emerson, Bancroft, Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, Miss Yonge, and Jane Austen rubbed shoulders with such literary extremes as an old copy of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which neither mother nor daughter ever opened, and a score of good modern novels which both had hungrily devoured from cover to cover. For although there are many women of the better class who can get along without much food for the body, there are very few who will willingly starve the imagination; and these children of New England preferred to feed theirs with fiction, philosophy, and even a little poetry, rather than with the daily fare of petty gos-

2 3 sip, spiced with an occasional cheap melodrama or variety show, that sufficed for their neighbors.

From Kate Craven’s earliest childhood her intimacy with her mother had been close and unusual, but a few months before the beginning of my story a cloud, bred of reticence on the part of the younger woman' and suspicion on that of the elder, had come between them; and now, as the girl stood anxiously gazing down the long road, the mother sat eying her furtively and keenly while a look on her face told of a certain mild perturbation of spirit. In the eager gaze of the daughter and the anxiety of the mother even the dullest observer could scent an incipient love affair; and, in truth, Mrs. Craven realized that for the very first time in all her life Kate was interested in a man.

It had all come about so gradually and simply and naturally that it was not until Ned Penfield and Kate Craven, although not formally engaged, had entered into the state known as ‘‘an understanding” that the mother awoke to a bitter realization of what had happened. She had cherished high ambitions for her daughter. Secretly she had set aside, year after year, a sum of money which was now sufficient to enable her to send Kate to Boston for a whole year of study, after which she should choose whatever calling — nursing, teaching, or typewriting — she desired to follow. These occupations Mrs. Craven regarded as “fitting” for a self-respecting woman of decent American parentage. It is doubtful if even in her wildest dreams it had occurred to her that commercial pursuits of all kinds, besides such professions as journalism, literature, the stage, illustrating, medicine, and music, were now 4 open to just such girls as her own daughter. The world had moved on during the long years of her quiet life in the little elm-shaded cottage, and she had taken but scant heed of its progress. In admitting to herself that her daughter might, without sacrifice of family dignity or her own self-respect, take her place among the toilers of the other sex and earn her own living, it seemed to this simple, conscience-ridden daughter of the Pilgrims that she had almost compromised with the most sacred beliefs and prejudices of her caste. She little knew that the yeast of revolt was fermenting in Kate’s breast; that her mind, stirred by a course of reading that had been wider and more radical and indiscriminate than her mother suspected, was now filled with inchoate dreams of a ‘‘career,” as she called it; that her whole soul had come to loathe the narrow life of Graytown and to yearn after something worth working for. It would have been a terrible shock to Susan Craven could she have known at this time — as she did later — that Boston, to whose memory she had remained faithful during her long exile from New England, had long since been displaced in her daughter’s fond imaginings by New York.

The mother had never spoken of the little fund that she had accumulated by Heaven alone knows what acts of parsimony and sacrifice; but now, as she watched her daughter entering from the front porch, her face beaming with happiness, she felt that the time had come to put the money to the use for which it had been intended. It might be that a change to other scenes and a broader life, with the inevitable contact with new ideas and new friends, would have its effect.

Mothers are said to have a quick eye where their daughters are concerned, but it sometimes happens that through lack of proper perspective they have livelier perceptions as to daughters not their own. Thus Susan Craven was so completely wrapped up in her own child that she had not yet learned that the latter’s intimacy with Ned Penfield, taking, as it had, the conspicuous form of many long walks and drives about the country-side, had long been a subject of keen interest and a great deal of comment, for the most part enviously unflattering, among the young women of the town. For Penfield, with his regular features, bold black eyes, and “dashing appearance,” as it was commonly termed, had made rapid headway in the good graces of the gentler and, so far as Graytown goes, the sharper sex during the two years in which he had lived and worked there. He had come from a larger town, and to the glamour of Syracuse was added that of his calling in the eyes of some of the more romantic and impressionable young women who fancied that they saw a future Dickens in this jaunty country reporter.

Kate Craven, more than all the others, had been impressed with his accomplishments as a budding man of letters. Brought up to read and to hold literature and authorship in profound respect, it is not strange that she should have been strongly attracted by the first writer it had been her fortune to know, and she devoured with eagerness every local item, editorial, and “news story” that came from his pen. It was this frank tribute to his talents and profession that first kindled in Penfield’s breast that sense of gratified vanity which so closely re- 6 sembles the greatest of all human passions that the victim can seldom distinguish between the two. He began to talk to her about his work, to invite her criticism of the editorials on which he labored so zealously — he had high ambitions and dreams of his own — and finally to consult her on such matters as literary style and the proper use of words. It was generally believed in Graytown that Ned Penfield thought pretty w’ell of himself and of his ability to turn a neat paragraph or wake the echoes of the country-side with an able editorial on state politics; but he was shrewd enough to recognize Kate Craven’s superior literary knowledge and not above taking advantage of it.

In course of time he encouraged her to try her hand at writing editorial paragraphs and news items, and was amazed at the ease with which she put thought and fact into words, culled from what seemed to him a boundless vocabulary. Kate had been a reader of good literature all her life and had unconsciously acquired the habit of expressing herself tersely and in fitting terms, while Penfield, whose reading had been confined to newspapers and cheap novels, was merely a fluent writer of the language that has been aptly called “journalese.”

Meanwhile, on this bright October day the Weekly EagUy owned and conducted by Hiram Pardee, had gone to press, and Penfield, its local editor, was free for the afternoon. The proprietor himself would, according to his invariable custom, take charge of the sales and make out the bills for the advertising and job printing.

Penfield, though still diligent in his work, had become fascinated by the mirage of metropolitan 7 life that the sensational New York dailies set before his eyes each day in such alluring colors, and had shrewdly decided that the Eagle offered no opportunity worthy of his talents. New York was the field for him, and for Kate Craven, too, just so soon as a place could be made for her.

But the New York that Kate saw in her dreams was not the city of hard work, fierce rivalry, bitter envy, heartbreaking failure, and incredible possibilities toward which the youth of the whole country ever turns its eager, yearning eyes; but the New York created by the Sunday supplements of the sensational press, a town of easily gotten wealth and luxurious living; of picturesque slums in which ‘‘settlement workers,’’ recruited from the ranks of fashion, toil ceaselessly and unselfishly for the poor; of a Wall Street inhabited by kings of finance who reward the faithful with wealth-producing “tips” on the stock-market; of a bright bohemian society in which actresses of radiant beauty chat brilliantly and unconventionally with artists, musicians, and authors of stupendous genius; of an exalted social caste composed of four hundred of the noblest and wealthiest, given over to elegant revels which the hoi polloi are privileged to gaze upon from afar in speechless wonder and delight.

This was the mirage that Kate Craven beheld in her dreams, this city of the yellow Sunday supplement, which she hoped to enter and capture.

Before leaving the office Penfield selected from the heap of exchanges beside his desk the Sunday supplement of the New York Megaphone and thrust it into his coat pocket. An houi later he was driving briskly down Main Street behind one of the 8 showiest livery horses in the town, while the citizens to whom he nodded jauntily said to one another, as they returned his greetings, ‘‘There’s Ned Penfield going to take his girl out buggy-riding.”

The young editor’s salary was not more than a thousand a year, but his position on the press enabled him to get the best that the village afforded, and at the very smallest outlay of money. In return for these commercial favors he was always ready to serve those with whom he dealt by alluding in the columns of the Eagle to the high quality of their wares or their own personal charm. Thus in the issue of the day on which we see young Penfield starting gaily for the eastern end of the town fully a dozen paragraphs bore testimony to his transactions with his fellow-townsmen.

“Those oysters at Pat Cuddy’s Exchange are just the cheese these cool evenings.”

“The Mohawk Brewery has been running overtime ever since the first of last month, and no wonder, when we think of the sort of beer they brew. By the way, Jakey Schneider is the boy who knows how to keep and serve it.”

“You’d better call on Charlie Hames early in the week if you want to take your lady friend out driving Sunday. As a general thing there isn’t a rig of any description left in his stable by noon.”

Chapter II

P ENFIELD found Kate waiting for him at the gate of the little cottage, and they drove off gaily while Susan Craven watched them through the drawn blinds with troubled eyes until a bend in the road hid them from view. At the foot of a long hill the horse fell into a leisurely walk, and Kate unfolded the supplement and buried herself in its contents. Suddenly she exclaimed:

‘‘That’s a great article about Carolyn Smithers’s salon. You know who she is — that rich young lady who moves in the Four Hundred and is always getting up clubs and leading movements of one sort or another. Now she’s tired of society and is going to establish a salon like Madame de StaH’s in her house on Madison Avenue, and make it a meeting-place for actors, musicians, painters, and the fashionable intellectual set. And it says that mere wealth will not be the passport to Miss Smithers’s salon. Only cultivation and artistic reputation. I’m a different sort of girl since I began reading these New York papers. I never realized before how much is going on in the world and what chances there are for women to do big things. There’s that big Woman’s Betterment Society! I’ll never be really contented until I can have a hand in it myself.”

“And what’s the Woman’s Betterment Society?” inquired Penfield.

‘‘Why, it’s the great organization for improving the condition of women, raising their intellectual status, giving them opportunities for social advancement. It’s the biggest thing ever done for our sex, and every time I read anything about it I wish I were able to help the work along. And that Mrs. Chilton-Smythe is a wonder. She’s born right in the Four Hundred and is worth millions and millions, so she needn’t do anything at all; yet she gives most of her time to the Betterment Society, and now it’s the most important thing in the whole country. By the way, what did you have in the Eagle to-day about Sadie Hazelrigg’s elopement?”

At the mention of this, the great local sensation of the week, Penfield’s brow darkened, and he replied, sullenly: “The old man wouldn’t let me print more than a stickful. If it had been my paper I’d have spread it all over the front page.”

“Ned,” exclaimed Kate, suddenly, “you’re just wasting your time in this place! You and I between us could get up a wonderful story about Sadie Hazelrigg and her Dutch coachman. Ever since I’ve been going with you I’ve developed what you call a nose for news, and I fairly hate to see such an opportunity wasted. Oh, if we were only in New York now, both of us! Well, we’re not! Which way shall we drive?”

“Let’s go over to Glendale for supper; we’ll have moonlight coming back,” said Penfield.

It was five o’clock when they drew up in front of the little old-fashioned tavern whose fame as a place of refreshment had served to make the pretty village of Glendale the Mecca of pleasure parties from every part of the county. The landlord, who

II had seen a reference to himself in the Eagle as ^‘the very prince of bonifaces,” came hurrying out to greet them.

“Well, I declare, Mr. Penfieldl” he exclaimed, in professionally hearty and hospitable tones. “ I was just saying to my wife this very morning that we hadn’t seen you in a month of Sundays, and we was wondering whether you was mad or anything, that you didn’t show up here no more. Needn’t ask how you be, Miss Craven. Your good looks is the best answer. Step right in through the back entry, and you’ll find my wife up to her elbows in preserves. You come along o’ me, Mr. Penfield, and have a little nip o’ rye to get the dust out of your throat.”

“Well, I be glad to see you to-day,” the landlady cried, with genuine delight, as Kate entered the kitchen. “Sit right down there and don’t stir till you’ve told me every mite o’ news you know; and what you don’t know, Kitty Craven, ain’t wuth knowin’, I guess. But you’d oughter come to me long ago to find out about what that Hazelrigg gal was up to. Why, they’ve been a-comin’ here together this three months or more. I knew what was goin’ on ever since last August.”

To which Kate made answer with an air of intense eagerness that went straight to the older woman’s heart. “Well, if you know all about it you had better tell me, because all I know is what everybody knows. Begin right at the beginning, for I’m just dying to hear the whole story.”

Thus conjured, Mrs. Perkins lowered her voice to the pitch demanded by revelations of such import and mystery as those with which her tongue was burdened, and, going back to the moment when she iz herself had first said to her husband that she never see Sadie Hazelrigg out driving or walking or riding but what that slick-looking coachman was snoopin’ round somewheres,” told the whole story of the love affair between mistress and servant as she had learned it by observation and hearsay.

‘‘Where do you suppose they’ve gone to?” asked Kitty, as Mrs. Perkins paused for breath.

“They left here for New York; but it’s my opinion they’re stopping with his uncle who keeps a road-house at a place called Flatbush. I’ve got the address, for once I forwarded some mail to him.”

At this moment Penfield called to her from the parlor, and Kate hastened to join him.

“I’ve got a scheme for you, Neddy!” she exclaimed. “Take the midnight express to New York, and in the morning go to the Megaphone and offer to write the whole story of the Hazelrigg case for them. I’ve just got it all from Mrs. Perkins, and, what’s more, she knows where they’re probably stopping. You ought to be able to write something that will make New York sit up and stare. You would, too, if I were there to help you. I’ll do your work while you’re away. With what I can pick up myself and you can turn in after you get back we’ll have as good a newspaper as you’ve printed in a long time.”

So it was settled that he should start for New York that night, leaving his sweetheart to fill his place to the best of her ability.

It was nearly eleven when the buggy stopped before the little white cottage. Susan Craven was awake and peering through the white-curtained window of her bedroom on the ground floor, after the fashion of prudent mothers the world over, as Kate walked swiftly up the flagged walk to the side-door. And long after her daughter was asleep the elder woman remained wide awake, staring into the darkness.

Penfield reached New York at nine in the morning, and while ordering his breakfast sent for a copy of the Megaphone and was amazed to see nearly half a page devoted to the Hazelrigg elopement under the caption, “Gone with the Coachman.” Bitterly disappointed by this bit of journalistic enterprise, his first thought was to return home at once and tell Kitty that the metropolitan pace was entirely too swift for a country reporter. Then he read the account carefully and found that it was a mere rehash of his own story in the Eagle telegraphed from Utica, to which had been added an exuberant description of the exalted status of the bride as a “leading member of the Four Hundred.” The page was further embellished with authentic portraits of Miss Hazelrigg and her mother and another of the coachman which did not resemble him in any way — ^which is not surprising, as it was merely an old likeness of the French Prince Imperial with a livery, short side-whiskers, and hair brushed in front of his ears. There were also pictures of three young men of fashion, and a paragraph explaining that they were suitors for the young lady’s hand. These had been added at the last moment, because it was seen that the page did not “balance” and needed more portraits to be thoroughly effective.

As nothing was printed about the present whereabouts of the couple, Penfield took new heart. As soon as he had finished his leisurely breakfast he started for Park Row, and, following the directions of the hotel clerk, soon found himself walking briskly down Fifth Avenue, swinging his cane and gazing about him with keen interest and pleasure. He was surprised to find the thoroughfare which he had always pictured as the abode of exclusive fashion merely a street of shops. But the long vista to the north and south gave him a sense of the immensity of the city, while the animation of the scene, the throngs of well-dressed women — many of them, perhaps, members of the Four Hundred — the endless processions of carriages, automobiles, and delivery wagons, all evidences of money recklessly spent and therefore easily earned, appealed powerfully to his eager, receptive mind.

Broadway, into which he turned at Twenty-third Street, seemed to him a splendid seat of commerce, a distributing-point for merchandise of all kinds. Trucks laden with boxes and bales were coming and going, and as he glanced down the side-streets he could catch glimpses of porters loading and unloading them. Through the plate-glass windows of the huge wholesale stores he could see shelves and counters covered with rolls of cloth and cases of hats, bonnets, feathers, artificial flowers — everything, in short, that could be worn by man, woman, or child. The very signs over the doors seemed so bright, new, and rich in gold-leaf that they inspired him with hope, and it was a positive stimulus to his thoughts to note the sharp, eager faces of the salesmen who stood just inside the glass doors and even prowled up and down the sidewalk on the keen lookout for their natural prey, the out-of-town customer.

All unknowing, Edward Penfield absorbed during his long walk down-town something of the spirit and flavor of the city in which he was destined to live and work. Knowing nothing of the history of the town, the sight of the gilt signs bearing names for the most part unknown in American commerce a dozen years before gave him none of that sense of gloom that they inspire in the hearts of those whose memories carry them back to the times when the old merchants, whose lives had been bound up in the growth of the city, dominated this very street — the days when rusty old signs bearing honored Anglo- Saxon names hung above these doors. Penfield liked new gilt signs because they glittered in the sunlight; nor was he hampered by memories of the past or respect for tradition. Essentially a man of the present, he was well qualified for a place in Park Row, where the cry is always for fresh young brains free from memories and traditions.

Chapter III

CAR down-town as we reckon nowadays in New A York, yet within gun-shot of the building which within the memory of those now living contained the most important retail dry -goods shop of the town, is the wind-swept, crowded, hideously noisy and clanging street where wires come together from all parts of the world, and the work never ceases throughout the twenty-four hours of the day and the seven days of the week; a street that knows no seventh day or Sabbath in which it is unlawful to do any manner of work.

It is a street that is not without its influence, for it is here that the news of the world is brought in in innumerable streams along countless wires, treated by skilled mechanics called editors, and then disseminated in printed form throughout the land. Here also the dreams and ambitions of thousands of the youth of the country center, for they see in it the opportunity for careers of importance.

Behind the buildings and at their flanks are narrow streets choked with wagons and shaken by the constant jar of mighty machinery at work in cavernous depths below, whence clouds of steam come forth in fitful gusts through sidewalk gratings, where ragged urchins huddle together on cold nights for warmth and companionship.

It did not take Penfield long to find the building for which he was looking. It breaks the sky-line of Park Row many stories above its immediate neighbors, an imposing monument to the zeal, ambition, and abilities of three generations of proprietors. For the New York Daily Megaphone is owned by Gaston Barshfield, son of Simon of the same surname and grandson of the world-famous Abraham, first of the line and founder of the extraordinary newspaper that still bears the imprint of his peculiar genius, though its character has been altered to suit the present feverish times. On the Megaphone premises Barshfield rules with the firm hand of an absolute but well-meaning monarch. His employees speak of him as the ‘‘great white Czar,’’ and of his own private office as the throne-room. Like all sovereigns who rule by divine right, he is obliged to delegate much of his authority to his privy councilors.

The first Barshfield had been a firm believer in humanity, and had reposed implicit confidence in every subordinate whom he regarded with favor. His son and successor had believed in himself absolutely, to a moderate extent in the people, and in his employees not at all. Gaston, the present wearer of the crown, believes in neither the public nor his employees, and does not even regard himself seriously. It was he who called the newspaper offices of Park Row cook-shops, and likened the news to the contents of a kitchen pot, a simile apt enough to become immortal.

The first of the dynasty of Barshfield led public opinion; the second — a far more successful ruler than his father — kept abreast of it; the third and greatest of them all follows it slavishly as a dog follows his master. But he does it in such a way as

i8 to convince his readers that he is actually influencing them, and, as he generally succeeds in agreeing with 'the majority of them, they are ready enough to concede his power and sagacity.

The young reporter could not have chosen a more auspicious time for his arrival in Park Row. It was not only the turning-point in his own career, but the psychological moment in the history of the Megaphone.

The Daily Megaphone and its present proprietor are so closely associated in the public mind that in speaking of either one always thinks of both. To arrive at any real understanding of Gaston Barshfield, and the newspaper which is generally regarded as the concrete expression of his complex personality, we must consider the methods of his European upbringing.

None knew better than Simon Barshfield, second in the royal line, the importance of the position which would be his son’s by inheritance; none knew better than he the arts that would be employed to influence him in the conduct of his journal. From his own earliest childhood he had been accustomed to the idea of journalistic power by seeing the throngs of politicians, financiers, philanthropists, actors, singers, and women of society who were for ever dogging his father’s footsteps. And these had paid their court to the son as well as to the father, for all the world as if the lad had been a young prince whose reign might begin at any moment. It was from influences of this sort that the second Barshfield desired to save his son, and it was mainly on this account that he determined to keep him abroad until his education was completed. The persons