“It hasn’t always been yellow. It needn’t keep on being.”
“I don’t think you’ll be comfortable in its hide.”
Galpin stopped buttoning his waistcoat and looked up. “For what?”
“Is that why you’re asking me out to beer up, young fellow?”
Galpin removed his waistcoat and hung it neatly on a chair back. He then proceeded to unlace his right boot. “What are you doing?” demanded Jeremy.
“No beer for me. No midnight racketings. I go on the water wagon right here. Also the sleep wagon.” He folded his trousers lengthwise upon his trunk, and reached for his pajamas. “I advise you the same,” he added. “We’ve got a job, you and I, training a yellow dog to jump in and fight for its life.”
“You’re on for the job, then, Andy?” cried Jeremy.
“Boss,” said Andrew Galpin, rolling over into his dishevelled bed, “you’ve hired a hand.”
MOTIVES not fully formulated had impelled Jeremy Robson to the purchase of The Fenchester Guardian. Now that he was face to face with the multiform problem of what he was to do with his new responsibility, he sought to determine why he had possessed himself of it, hoping to discover in that Why a clue to his future course.
Several figures at once stepped to the front of his mind and imperiously claimed credit for inspiring his action. There was Montrose Clark who had capped his impersonal insolences by the shibboleth, “rippawtah.” Nobody was ever going to give Jeremy Robson curt orders as a “rippawtah” again. (But he had the saving sense to grin at himself for the triviality of it!) There was Andrew Galpin, who had said of the pleasant pursuit of editorial writing that the practitioner of it “was licked--a beaten man,” thus taking all the gloss from that phase. There was Milliken, crude, coarse, malicious, with his inept but biting epithets, and his blatant jibes at the necessities of hired-man (or worse-than-hired-woman) journalism. There was Eli Wade, whom he had written down to order--though herein Jeremy was still dallying with self-delusions, since it was the lure of his own facile pen that had betrayed him there--and to whom he owed a reparation which he could perhaps now make. There was his old purpose of some day owning a paper; quite a different paper, however, from the feeble and dubious Guardian. More potent was the influence, never wholly abated, of that talk with Senator Martin Embree wherein the shrewd judge of men and agencies had suggested the power to be exerted for good by a fair-minded, independent daily. But the real motivating power was Marcia Ames. Withdrawing herself from him, she had left him a legacy of influence which was, at the same time, a debt. He owed it to himself to prove to her that he could be as honorable as she had deemed him dishonorable; as trustworthy as she had deemed him unfit to be trusted; and he must do this through this same medium of print whereby he had offended. Something dogged in him prescribed that he should work out his salvation there on the spot. She might never return to see it. She might never even know of it. But it would be her work. By so much, at least, Jeremy would hold her. And in doing what she would have him do, he would fill that bleak and arid void, which, lacking hope, can be appeased only by activity.