15a The Prince and Betty

town, San Francisco, and the audience is rooting hard for the native son. Here is Comrade Brady on the subject: ‘I looked around that house, and I seen I hadn’t a friend in it. And then the gong goes, and I says to myself how I has one friend, my old mother down in Illinois, and I goes in and mixes it, and then I seen Benson losing his goat, so I gives him a half-scissor hook, and in the next round I picks up a sleep-producer from the floor and hands it to him, and he takes the count.’ That is what the public wants. Crisp, lucid, and to the point. If that does not get him a fight with some eminent person, nothing will.”

He leaned back in his chair.

“What we really need now,” he said thoughtfully, “is a good, honest, muck-raking series. That’s the thing to put a paper on the map. The worst of it is that everything seems to have been done. Have you by any chance a second ‘Frenzied Finance’ at the back of your mind? Or proofs that nut sundaes are composed principally of ptomaine and outlying portions of the American workingman? It would be the making of us.”

Now it happened that in the course of her rambles through the city Betty had lost herself one morning in the slums. The experience had impressed itself on her mind with an extraordinary vividness. Her lot had always been cast in pleasant places, and she had never before been brought into close touch with this side of life. The sight of actual raw misery had come home to her with an added force from that circumstance. Wandering on, she had reached a street which eclipsed in cheerlessness even its squalid neighbors. All the smells and noises of the East Side seemed to be penned up here in a sort of canyon. The masses of dirty clothes hanging from the fire-escapes increased the atmosphere of depression. Groups of ragged children covered the roadway.

It was these that had stamped the scene so indelibly on her memory. She loved children, and these seemed so draggled and uncared-for.

Smith’s words gave her an idea.

“Do you know Broster Street, Mr. Smith?” she asked.

“Down on the East Side? Yes, I went there once to get a story, one red-hot night in August, when I was on the News. The Ice Company had been putting up their prices, and trouble was expected down there. I was sent to cover it.”

He did not add that he had spent a week’s salary that night, buying ice and distributing it among the denizens of Broster Street.

“It’s an awful place,” said Betty, her eyes filling with tears. “Those poor children!”

Smith nodded.

“Some of those tenement houses are fierce,” he said thoughtfully. Like Betty, he found himself with a singularly clear recollection of his one visit to Broster Street. “But you can’t do anything.”

“Why not?” cried Betty. “Oh, why not? Surely you couldn’t have a better subject for your series? It’s wicked. People only want to be told about them to make them better. Why can’t we draw attention to them?”

“It’s been done already. Not about Broster Street, but about other tenements. Tenements as a subject are played out. The public isn’t interested in them. Besides, it wouldn’t be any use. You can’t tree the man who is really responsible, unless you can spend thousands scaring up evidence. The land belongs in the first place to some corporation or other. They lease it to a lessee. When there’s a fuss, they say they aren’t responsible, it’s up to the lessee. And he, bright boy, lies so low you can’t find out who it is.”

“But we could try,” urged Betty.

Smith looked at her curiously. The cause was plainly one that lay near to her heart. Her face was flushed and eager. He wavered, and, having wavered, he did what no practical man should do. He allowed sentiment to interfere with business. He knew that a series of articles on Broster Street would probably be so much dead weight on the paper, something to be skipped by the average reader, but he put the thought aside.

“Very well,” he said. “If you care to turn in a few crisp remarks on the subject, I’ll print them.”

Betty’s first instalment was ready on the following morning. It was a curious composition. A critic might have classed it with Kid Brady’s reminiscences, for there was a complete absence of literary style. It was just a wail of pity, and a cry of indignation, straight from the heart and split up into paragraphs.

Smith read it with interest, and sent it off to the printer unaltered.

“Have another ready for next week, Comrade Brown,” he said. “It’s a long shot, but this might turn out to be just what we need.”

And when, two days after the publication of the number containing the article, Mr. Martin Parker called at the office, he felt that the long shot had won out.

He was holding forth on life in general to Betty shortly before the luncheon hour when Pugsy Maloney entered bearing a card.

“Martin Parker?” said Smith, taking it. “I don’t know him. We make new friends daily.”

“He’s a guy wit’ a tall-shaped hat,” volunteered Master Maloney, “an’ he’s wearing a dude suit an’ shiny shoes.”

“Comrade Parker,” said Smith approvingly, “has evidently not been blind to the importance of a visit to Peaceful Moments. He has dressed himself in his best. He has felt, rightly, that this is no occasion for the flannel suit and the old straw hat. I would not have it otherwise. It is the right spirit. Show the guy in. We will give him audience.”

Pugsy withdrew.

Mr. Martin Parker proved to be a man who might have been any age between thirty-five and forty-five. He had a dark face and a black mustache. As Pugsy had stated, in effect, he wore a morning coat, trousers with a crease which brought a smile of kindly approval to Smith’s face, and patent-leather shoes of pronounced shininess.

“I want to see the editor,” he said.

“Will you take a seat?” said Smith.

He pushed a chair toward the visitor, who seated himself with the care inspired by a perfect trouser crease. There was a momentary silence while he selected a spot on the table on which to place his hat.