MR. BIRDLIP was a good old man, of unimpeachable simplicity. He had achieved enormous wealth in an honourable business, and then found (to his mild distress) that the great traffic he had built up conducted itself automatically. He had, in a way, been gently shouldered out of his own nest by the capable men whose fortunes he had made. But his zealous and frugal spirit required some sort of problem to feed upon, and he delighted his heart by owning a newspaper. The Evening Lens was his toy and the child of his dotage. So the Persian rugs and walnut panelling of his private suite in the huge Birdlip Building saw him rarely. He was supremely happy in the dingy sanctum at the back of the old Lens office, where the hum of the presses and the racket of the city room (which he still, by an innocent misunderstanding, called the “sitting room”) delighted his guileless heart. He would sit turning over the pages of each edition as it came upstairs (putting his second finger up to his tongue before he turned each leaf) and poring industriously over the market reports, the comics, and the Woman's Page. With his pink cheeks, his dapper little figure in a brown suit and cream-coloured waistcoat, and his eager, shy, chirping manner, he was very like a robin. Although he was full of gigantic schemes, which he broached naively in the editorial council every now and then, he never wittingly interfered with his editor-in-chief, in whom he had full confidence. But his gentle and jejune mind had a disastrous effect on the paper no less. Almost unconsciously the Lens was written and edited down to his standard, as a roomful of adults will amiably prattle so as to carry along a child in the conversation.
Mr. Birdlip's amazing success in his original field had been due partly to his decent sagacity, honesty, and persistence, and partly to his sheer fortune in finding (at the very outset of his enterprise) several men of rugged ability, who became the pearls in his simple oyster-shell. As a result of this, it had become his fixed mental habit to believe that somewhere, some day, he would encounter the man or men who would make the Lens the greatest newspaper in the country. This, indeed, was his candid ambition, and he never went anywhere without keeping his eyes open for the anticipated messiah.
He was greatly taken by broad primitive effects: when he noticed that a Chicago daily always called itself “The World's Greatest Newspaper” he was marvellously struck by the power of this slogan, and lamented that he had not thought of it first. The question as to whether the slogan were true or not never occurred to him. He liked to have the keynote sentences in the leading editorial emphasized in blackface type, so that there might be no danger of any one's missing the point. Desiring for his beloved sheet “this man's art and that man's scope,” as the sonnet puts it, every now and then he thought he had discovered the prodigy, and some new feature would be added to the paper at outrageous expense, only to be quietly shovelled out six months or a year later. In the meantime, the auditor was growing very gray, and even Mr. Birdlip's quick blue eye was sometimes hazed with faint perplexity when he studied the circulation charts. Perhaps it would have been kinder if someone could have told him that a boyhood spent in splitting infinitives is not sufficient training for one to become an Abraham Lincoln of the newspaper business.
As he trotted in and out of the Lens office, with his rosy air of confidence and his disarming simplicity (which made his white hair seem a wanton cruelty on the part of Time, that would wither a man's cells while his mind was still on all fours), Mr. Birdlip was the object of furtive but very sharp study on the part of some cynical journalists whom he hired. It was a genuine amazement to Sanford, the dramatic critic, that the owner was so entirely unaware of his (Sanford's) abilities, which certainly (he thought) called for a salary of more than sixty dollars a week. Sanford often meditated about this, and not entirely in secret. In fact, it was generally admitted among the younger members of the staff, when they gathered at Ventriloquo's for lunch, that the Old Man was immaculately ignorant of all phases of the newspaper business. While the spaghetti and mushrooms cheered the embittered gossips, merry and quaint were the quips sped toward the unsuspecting target. Sanford's private grievance was that though for over a year he had been doing signed critiques of plays, which were really spirited and honest, not once had the Old Man condescended to mention them, or to show any sign of uttering an Ecce Homo in his direction. As far as he was concerned, he felt that the weekly battle of Manila Envelopes was a conspicuous rout, and he frequently rehearsed the exact tone in which he would some day say to the managing editor: “You may fire when ready, Gridley.” Little did Sanford realize that the only time Mr. Birdlip had attempted to read the “Exits and Entrances” column he had met the name of ?schylus, had faltered, and retreated upon the syndicated sermon by the Rev. Frank Crane.
 
 
 
 
“I saw 'Ruddigore' the other evening,” said Sanford to his cronies, as they called for a second round of coffee. “There's a line in it that describes old Birdie fore, aft, and amidships. Something like this: 'He is that particular variety of good old man to whom the truth is always a refreshing novelty'.”
They complauded. Rightly or wrongly, these high-spirited and sophisticated young men had decided that Mr. Birdlip's na?veté was so refreshingly complete that it gave them an aesthetic pleasure to contemplate it. It had the exquisite beauty of any absolute perfection. Their employer's latest venture, which had been to pay $200,000 for the exclusive right to publish and syndicate the mysterious formulae of a leading Memory Course, had shocked them very greatly.
It touched them in a tender spot to know that there had been all that money lying round the office, unused, which was now to be squandered (as they put it) on charlatanry, when they felt that they might just as well have had some of it.
“The Old Man is always looking for some special stunt, and trying to discover someone on the outside,” said one. “He can't see the material right under his nose.”
“It's really rather pathetic: he's crazy to get out a great newspaper, but he hasn't the faintest idea how to do it.”
“Yes, give him credit for sincerity. It isn't just circulation he wants.”
“Circulation's easy enough, if that's what you're after. The three builders of circulation are Sordid, Sensational, and Sex—”
“And the greatest of these is Sex.”
“Oh, he's decent enough. He won't pander.”
“He panders to stupidity. He's fallen for this Memory bunk. And when he finds that's a flivver, he'll try something else, equally fatuous. He's making the old Lens ridiculous.”
They smoked awhile, meditatively.
“What I would like to figure out,” said Sanford, “is some way of making an impression on the Old Man. I've got to get more money. The trouble—some part of it is, I feel instinctively that he and I live in different worlds. We hardly even talk the same language. Well, there's no chance of his learning my way of thinking; so I suppose I'll have to learn his.”
“He's the man who puts the nil in the Manila envelope,” said one of the others.
“As far as we are concerned, yes. But there's plenty of the stuff going round on Fridays for the kind of people he understands.”
“He seems to be an absent-minded old bird. When I talk to him, it's as though I were trying to speak through a fog.”
“It looks to me as though his mind had overstayed its leave of absence.”
“He likes the kind of men who, as he says, 'have both feet on the ground'.”
“Yes, but you've got to have at least one foot in the air if you're going to get anywhere.”
“See here,” said the literary editor, who was more tolerant than the others. “What's the use of panning the Old Man? He's trying to put the paper over, just as hard as we are. Maybe harder. But he doesn't know. And I believe he knows he doesn't know. I think the chief trouble is, they all knuckle down to him so. They're scared of him. They think the only way they can hold their jobs is by agreeing with him. If someone could only put him wise——”
“But how can you put him wise? He doesn't see anything unless it's laid out for him in a strip cartoon or a full-page ad. The kind of thing that interests him is the talk he hears in a Pullman smoker or club car.”
“That's a fact. You know he always says he likes to go travelling, because he picks up ideas from people on the train. 'Of course I place you! Mr. Mowbray Monk of Seattle. And is your Rotary Club still rotating?' That kind of talk.”
“I think you're right,” said Sanford. “He doesn't see us because we have too much protective colouring. We are only the patient drudges. We don't talk that Pullman palaver about Big Business. We've got to learn to talk his language. What is that phrase of Bacon's—we've got to bring ourselves home to his business and bosom——”
“Let's get back to the office,” said the disillusioned literary editor. “That's the way to bring home the bacon.”
 
 
 
 
A few days later Sanford was at his desk, clipping and pasting press agents' flimsies for the Saturday Theatre Page. This was a task which he hated above all others, and he was meditating sourly on the scarcity of truth in human affairs. At this moment Mr. Birdlip happened to pass along the corridor outside the editorial rooms. Sanford heard him say:
“Miss Flaccus, will you get me a seat in the club car, ten o'clock train to-morrow? I've got to run over to New York to take lunch with Mr. Montaigne.”
Sanford put down his shears, relit his pipe, and began to pursue a fugitive idea round the suburbs of his mind. Presently he drew out his check book from a drawer and did some calculating on a sheet of paper. “A hundred dollars,” he said to himself. “I guess it's worth it.”
The following morning, dressed in a new suit and with shoes freshly burnished, Sanford was at the terminal twenty minutes before train time. With him was a young man carrying a leather portfolio. To observe the respectful demeanour of this young man, no one would have suspected that he was Sanford's young brother-in-law, rejoicing in cutting his classes at college for a day's masquerading. Sanford bought some cigars (a form of smoking which he detested) and carefully removed the bands from all but one of them.
Presently Mr. Birdlip appeared, cheerfully trotting up the stairs. Sanford and his companion followed discreetly. As Mr. Birdlip went through the gat............