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VI

The next morning she arose and went forth, and in about half-an-hour returned. Denry was still in bed, but his health seemed to have resumed its normal excellence. Mrs. Machin burst upon him in such a state of complicated excitement as he had never before seen her in.

"Denry," she cried. "What do you think?"

"What?" said he.

"I 've just been down home, and they 're – they 're pulling the house down. All the furniture 's out, and they 've got all the tiles off the roof, and the windows out. And there's a regular crowd watching."

Denry sat up.

"And I can tell you another piece of news," said he. "Mr. Cecil Wilbraham is dead."

"Dead!" she breathed.

"Yes," said Denry. "I think he 's served his purpose. As we 're here, we 'll stop here. Don't forget it's the most sensible kind of a house you 've ever seen. Don't forget that Mrs. Cotterill could run it without a servant and have herself tidy by ten o'clock in a morning."

Mrs. Machin perceived then, in a flash of terrible illumination, that there never had been any Cecil Wilbraham; that Denry had merely invented him and his long moustaches and his wall eye for the purpose of getting the better of his mother. The whole affair was an immense swindle upon her. Not a Mr. Cecil Wilbraham, but her own son had bought her cottage over her head and jockeyed her out of it beyond any chance of getting into it again. And to defeat his mother the rascal had not simply perverted the innocent Nellie Cotterill to some co-operation in his scheme, but he had actually bought four other cottages because the landlord would not sell one alone, and he was actually demolishing property to the sole end of stopping her from re-entering it!

Of course, the entire town soon knew of the upshot of the battle, of the year-long battle, between Denry and his mother, and the means adopted by Denry to win. The town also had been hoodwinked, but it did not mind that. It loved its Denry the more, and, seeing that he was now properly established in the most remarkable house in the district, it soon afterwards made him a town councillor as some reward for his talent in amusing it.

And Denry would say to himself:

"Everything went like clockwork, except the mustard and water. I did n't bargain for the mustard and water. And yet, if I was clever enough to think of putting a label on the bottle and to have the beds prepared, I ought to have been clever enough to keep mustard out of the house." It would be wrong to mince the unpleasant fact that the sham poisoning which he had arranged to the end that he and his mother should pass the night in the house had finished in a manner much too realistic for Denry's pleasure. Mustard and water, particularly when mixed by Mrs. Machin, is mustard and water.

She had that consolation.

CHAPTER IX. THE GREAT NEWSPAPER WAR

I

When Denry and his mother had been established a year and a month in the new house at Bleakridge, Denry received a visit one evening which perhaps flattered him more than anything had ever flattered him. The visitor was Mr. Myson. Now Mr. Myson was the founder, proprietor, and editor of the Five Towns Weekly, a new organ of public opinion which had been in existence about a year; and Denry thought that Mr. Myson had popped in to see him in pursuit of an advertisement of the Thrift Club, and at first he was not at all flattered.

But Mr. Myson was not hunting for advertisements, and Denry soon saw him to be the kind of man who would be likely to depute that work to others. Of middle height, well and quietly dressed, with a sober, assured deportment, he spoke in a voice and accent that were not of the Five Towns; they were superior to the Five Towns. And in fact Mr. Myson originated in Manchester and had seen London. He was not provincial, and he beheld the Five Towns as part of the provinces, which no native of the Five Towns ever succeeds in doing. Nevertheless, his manner to Denry was the summit of easy and yet deferential politeness.

He asked permission "to put something before" Denry. And when, rather taken aback by such smooth phrases, Denry had graciously accorded the permission, he gave a brief history of the Five Towns Weekly, showing how its circulation had grown, and definitely stating that at that moment it was yielding a profit. Then he said:

"Now my scheme is to turn it into a daily."

"Very good notion!" said Denry instinctively.

"I 'm glad you think so," said Mr. Myson. "Because I 've come here in the hope of getting your assistance. I 'm a stranger to the district, and I want the co-operation of some one who is n't. So I 've come to you. I need money, of course, though I have myself what most people would consider sufficient capital. But what I need more than money is – well – moral support."

"And who put you on to me?" asked Denry.

Mr. Myson smiled. "I put myself on to you," said he. "I think I may say I 've got my bearings in the Five Towns, after over a year's journalism in it, and it appeared to me that you were the best man I could approach. I always believe in flying high."

Therein was Denry flattered. The visit seemed to him to seal his position in the district in a way in which his election to the Bursley Town Council had failed to do. He had been somehow disappointed with that election. He had desired to display his interest in the serious welfare of the town, and to answer his opponent's arguments with better ones. But the burgesses of his ward appeared to have no passionate love of logic. They just cried "Good old Denry!" and elected him – with a majority of only forty-one votes. He had expected to feel a different Denry when he could put "Councillor" before his name. It was not so. He had been solemnly in the mayoral procession to church, he had attended meetings of the council, he had been nominated to the Watch Committee. But he was still precisely the same Denry, though the youngest member of the council. But now he was being recognised from the outside. Mr. Myson's keen Manchester eye, ranging over the quarter of a million inhabitants of the Five Towns in search of a representative individual force, had settled on Denry Machin. Yes, he was flattered. Mr. Myson's choice threw a rose light on all Denry's career; his wealth and its origin; his house and stable, which were the astonishment and the admiration of the town; his Universal Thrift Club; yea, and his councillorship. After all, these were marvels. (And possibly the greatest marvel was the signed presence of his mother in that wondrous house, and the fact that she consented to employ Rose Chudd, the incomparable Sappho of charwomen, for three hours every day.)

In fine, he perceived from Mr. Myson's eyes that his position was unique.

And after they had chatted a little, and the conversation had deviated momentarily from journalism to house property, he offered to display Machin House (as he had christened it) to Mr. Myson, and Mr. Myson was really impressed beyond the ordinary. Mr. Myson's homage to Mrs. Machin, whom they chanced on in the paradise of the bathroom, was the polished mirror of courtesy. How Denry wished that he could behave like that when he happened to meet countesses!

Then, once more in the drawing-room, they resumed the subject of newspapers.

"You know," said Mr. Myson. "It 's really a very bad thing indeed for a district to have only one daily newspaper. I 've nothing myself to say against The Staffordshire Signal, but you 'd perhaps be astonished" – this in a confidential tone – "at the feeling there is against the Signal in many quarters."

"Really!" said Denry.

"Of course its fault is that it is n't sufficiently interested in the great public questions of the district. And it can't be. Because it can't take a definite side. It must try to please all parties. At any rate it must offend none. That is the great evil of a journalistic monopoly… Two hundred and fifty thousand people – why! there is an ample public for two first-class papers! Look at Nottingham! Look at Bristol! Look at Leeds! Look at Sheffield! … And theirnewspapers."

And Denry endeavoured to look at these great cities! Truly the Five Towns was just about as big.

The dizzy journalistic intoxication seized him. He did not give Mr. Myson an answer at once, but he gave himself an answer at once. He would go into the immense adventure. He was very friendly with the Signal people – certainly; but business was business, and the highest welfare of the Five Towns was the highest welfare of the Five Towns.

Soon afterwards all the hoardings of the district spoke with one blue voice, and said that the Five Towns Weekly was to be transformed into the Five Towns Daily, with four editions beginning each day at noon, and that the new organ would be conducted on the lines of a first-class evening paper.

The inner ring of knowing ones knew that a company entitled "The Five Towns Newspapers, Limited," had been formed, with a capital of ten thousand pounds, and that Mr. Myson held three thousand pounds' worth of shares, and the great Denry Machin one thousand five hundred, and that the remainder were to be sold and allotted as occasion demanded. The inner ring said that nothing would ever be able to stand up against the Signal. On the other hand, it admitted that Denry, the most prodigious card ever born into the Five Towns, had never been floored by anything or anybody. The inner ring anticipated the future with glee. Denry and Mr. Myson anticipated the future with righteous confidence. As for the Signal, it went on its august way, calmly blind to sensational hoardings.

II

On the day of the appearance of the first issue of the Five Towns Daily, the offices of the new paper at Hanbridge gave proof of their excellent organisation, working in all details with an admirable smoothness. In the basement a Marinoni machine thundered like a sucking dove to produce fifteen thousand copies an hour. On the ground floor ingenious arrangements had been made for publishing the paper; in particular, the iron railings to keep the boys in order in front of the publishing counter had been imitated from the Signal. On the first floor was the editor and founder, with his staff, and above that the composing department. The number of stairs that separated the composing department from the machine room was not a positive advantage, but bricks and mortar are inelastic, and one does what one can. The offices looked very well from the outside, and they compared passably with the offices of the Signalclose by. The posters were duly in the ground-floor windows, and gold signs, one above another to the roof, produced an air of lucrative success.

Denry happened to be in the Daily offices that afternoon. He had had nothing to do with the details of organisation, for details of organisation were not his speciality. His speciality was large, leading ideas. He knew almost nothing of the agreements with correspondents and Press Association and Central News and the racing services and the fiction syndicates, nor of the difficulties with the Compositors' Union, nor of the struggle to lower the price of paper by the twentieth of a penny per pound, nor of the awful discounts allowed to certain advertisers, nor of the friction with the railway company, nor of the sickening adulation that had been lavished on quite unimportant news agents, nor – worst of all – of the dearth of newsboys. These matters did not attract him. He could not stoop to them. But when Mr. Myson, calm and proud, escorted him down to the machine room, and the Marinoni threw a folded pink Daily almost into his hands, and it looked exactly like a real newspaper, and he saw one of his own descriptive articles in it, and he reflected that he was an owner of it – then Denry was attracted and delighted, and his heart beat. For this pink thing was the symbol and result of the whole affair, and had the effect of a miracle on him.

And he said to himself, never guessing how many thousands of men had said it before him, that a newspaper was the finest toy in the world.

About four o'clock the publisher, in shirt sleeves and an apron, came up to Mr. Myson and respectfully asked him to step into the publishing office. Mr. Myson stepped into the publishing office, and Denry with him, and they there beheld a small, ragged boy with a bleeding nose and a bundle of Dailys in his wounded hand.

"Yes," the boy sobbed; "and they said they 'd cut my eyes out and plee [play] marbles wi' 'em, if they cotched me in Crown Square agen." And he threw down the papers with a final yell.

The two directors learnt that the delicate threat had been uttered by four Signal boys who had objected to any fellow-boys offering any paper other than the Signal for sale in Crown Square or anywhere else.

Of course, it was absurd.

Still, absurd as it was, it continued. The central publishing offices of the Daily at Hanbridge, and its branch offices in the neighbouring towns, were like military hospitals, and the truth appeared to the directors that while the public was panting to buy copies of the Daily, the sale of the Daily was being prevented by means of a scandalous conspiracy on the part of Signal boys. For it must be understood that in the Five Towns people prefer to catch their newspaper in the street as it flies and cries. The Signal had a vast army of boys, to whom every year it gave a great fête. Indeed, the Signalpossessed nearly all the available boys, and assuredly all the most pugilistic and strongest boys. Mr. Myson had obtained boys only after persistent inquiry and demand, and such as he had found were not the fittest, and therefore were unlikely to survive. You would have supposed that in a district that never ceases to grumble about bad trade and unemployment, thousands of boys would have been delighted to buy the Daily at fourpence a dozen and sell it at sixpence. But it was not so.

On the second day the dearth of boys at the offices of the Daily was painful. There was that magnificent, enterprising newspaper waiting to be sold, and there was the great enlightened public waiting to buy; and scarcely any business could be done because the Signal boys had established a reign of terror over their puny and upstart rivals!

The situation was unthinkable.

Still, unthinkable as it was, it continued. Mr. Myson had thought of everything except this. Naturally it had not occurred to him that an immense and serious effort for the general weal was going to be blocked by a gang of tatterdemalions.

He complained, with dignity, to the Signal, and was informed, with dignity, by the Signalthat the Signal could not be responsible for the playful antics of its boys in the streets; that, in short, the Five Towns was a free country. In the latter proposition Mr. Myson did not concur.

After trouble in the persuasion of parents – astonishing how indifferent the Five Towns' parent was to the loss of blood by his offspring! – a case reached the police-court. At the hearing the Signal gave a solicitor a watching brief, and that solicitor expressed the Signal's horror of carnage. The evidence was excessively contradictory, and the Stipendiary dismissed the summons with a good joke. The sole definite result was that the boy whose father had ostensibly brought the summons got his ear torn within a quarter of an hour of leaving the court. Boys will be boys.

Still, the Daily had so little faith in human nature that it could not believe that the Signalwas not secretly encouraging its boys to be boys. It could not believe that the Signal, out of a sincere desire for fair play and for the highest welfare of the district, would willingly sacrifice nearly half its circulation and a portion of its advertisement revenue. And the hurt tone of Mr. Myson's leading articles seemed to indicate that in Mr. Myson's opinion his older rival ought to do everything in its power to ruin itself. The Signal never spoke of the fight. The Daily gave shocking details of it every day.

The struggle trailed on through the weeks.

Then Denry had one of his ideas. An advertisement was printed in the Daily for two hundred able-bodied men to earn two shillings for working six hours a day. An address different from the address of the Daily was given. By a ruse Denry procured the insertion of the advertisement in the Signal also.

"We must expend our capital on getting the paper on to the streets," said Denry. "That's evident. We 'll have it sold by men. We 'll soon see if the Signal ragamuffins will attack them. And we won't pay 'em by results; we'll pay 'em a fixed wage; that 'll fetch 'em. And a commission, on sales into the bargain. Why! I would n't mind engaging five hundred men. Swamp the streets! That's it! Hang expense. And when we 've done the trick, then we can go back to the boys; they'll have learnt their lesson."

And Mr. Myson agreed, and was pleased that Denry was living up to his reputation.

The state of the earthenware trade was supposed that summer to be worse than it had been since 1869, and the grumblings of the unemployed were prodigious, even seditious. Mr. Myson, therefore, as a measure of precaution engaged a couple of policemen to ensure order at the address, and during the hours, named in the advertisement as a rendezvous for respectable men in search of a well-paid job. Having regard to the thousands of perishing families in the Five Towns, he foresaw a rush and a crush of eager breadwinners. Indeed, the arrangements were elaborate.

Forty minutes after the advertised time for the opening of the reception of respectable men in search of money four men had arrived. Mr. Myson, mystified, thought that there had been a mistake in the advertisement. But there was no mistake in the advertisement. A little later two more men came. Of the six, three were tipsy, and the other three absolutely declined to be seen selling papers in the streets. Two were abusive, one facetious. Mr. Myson did not know his Five Towns; nor did Denry. A man in the Five Towns, when he can get neither bread nor beer, will keep himself and his family on pride and water.

The policemen went off to more serious duties.

III

Then came the announcement of the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Signal, and of the processional fête by which the Signal was at once to give itself a splendid spectacular advertisement and to reward and enhearten its boys. The Signal meant to liven up the streets of the Five Towns on that great day by means of a display of all the gilt chariots of Snape's Circus in the main thoroughfares. Many of the boys would be in the gilt chariots. Copies of the anniversary number of the Signal would be sold from the gilt chariots. The idea was excellent, and it showed that after all the Signal was getting just a little more afraid of its young rival than it had pretended to be.

For, strange to say, after a trying period of hesitation, the Five Towns Daily was slightly on the upward curve – thanks to Denry. Denry did not mean to be beaten by the puzzle which the Daily offered to his intelligence. There the Daily was, full of news, and with quite an encouraging show of advertisements, printed on real paper with real ink – and yet it would not "go." Notoriously the Signal earned a net profit of at the very least five thousand a year, whereas the Daily earned a net loss of at the very least sixty pounds a week – and of that sixty quite a third was Denry's money. He could not explain it. Mr. Myson tried to rouse the public by passionately stirring up extremely urgent matters – such as the smoke-nuisance, the increase of the rates, the park question, German competition, technical education for apprentices; but the public obstinately would not be roused concerning its highest welfare to the point of insisting on a regular supply of the Daily. If a mere five thousand souls had positively demanded daily a copy of the Daily and not slept till boys or agents had responded to their wish, the troubles of the Daily would soon have vanished. But this ridiculous public did not seem to care which paper was put into its hand in exchange for its halfpenny so long as the sporting news was put there. It simply was indifferent. It failed to see the importance to such an immense district of having two flourishing and mutually opposing daily organs. The fundamental boy difficulty remained ever-present.

And it was the boy difficulty that Denry perseveringly and ingeniously attacked, until at length the Daily did indeed possess some sort of a brigade of its own, and the bullying and slaughter in the streets (so amusing to the inhabitants) grew a little less one-sided.

A week or more before the Signal'sanniversary day Denry heard that the Signal was secretly afraid lest the Daily's brigade might accomplish the marring of its gorgeous procession, and that the Signal was ready to do anything to smash the Daily's brigade. He laughed; he said he did not mind. About that time hostilities were rather acute; blood was warming, and both papers, in the excitation of rivalry, had partially lost the sense of what was due to the dignity of great organs. By chance a tremendous local football match – Knype v. Bursley – fell on the very Saturday of the procession. The rival arrangements for the reporting of the match were as tremendous as the match itself, and somehow the match seemed to add keenness to the journalistic struggle, especially as the Daily favoured Bursley and the Signal was therefore forced to favour Knype.

By all the laws of hazard there ought to have been a hitch on that historic Saturday. Telephone or telegraph ought to have broken down, or rain ought to have made play impossible. But no hitch occurred. And at five-thirty o'clock of a glorious afternoon in earliest November the Daily went to press with a truly brilliant account of the manner in which Bursley (for the first and last time in its history) had defeated Knype by one goal to none. Mr. Myson was proud. Mr. Myson defied the Signal to beat his descriptive report. As for the Signal'sprocession – well, Mr. Myson and the chief sub-editor of the Daily glanced at each other and smiled.

And a few minutes later the Daily boys were rushing out of the publishing-room with bundles of papers – assuredly in advance of the Signal.

It was at this juncture that the unexpected began to occur to the Daily boys. The publishing door of the Daily opened into Stanway Rents, a narrow alley in a maze of mean streets behind Crown Square. In Stanway Rents was a small warehouse in which, according to rumours of the afternoon, a free soup kitchen was to be opened. And just before the football edition of the Daily came off the Marinoni, it emphatically was opened, and there issued from its inviting gate an odour – not, to be sure, of soup, but of toasted cheese and hot jam – such an odour as had never before tempted the nostrils of a Dailyboy; a unique and omnipotent odour. Several boys (who, I may state frankly, were traitors to the Daily cause, spies and mischief-makers from elsewhere) raced unhesitatingly in, crying that toasted cheese sandwiches and jam tarts were to be distributed like lightning to all authentic newspaper lads.

The entire gang followed – scores, over a hundred – inwardly expecting to emerge instantly with teeth fully employed, followed like sheep unto a fold.

And the gate was shut.

Toasted cheese and hot jammy pastry were faithfully served to the ragged host – but with no breathless haste. And when, loaded, the boys struggled to depart, they were instructed by the kind philanthropist who had fed them to depart by another exit and they discovered themselves in an enclosed yard of which the double doors were apparently unyielding. And the warehouse door was shut also. And, as the cheese and jam disappeared, shouts of fury arose on the air. The yard was so close to the offices of the Dailythat the chimney-pots of those offices could actually be seen. And yet the shouting brought no answer from the lords of the Daily, congratulating themselves up there on their fine account of the football match, and on their celerity in going to press, and on the loyalty of their brigade.

The Signal, it need not be said, disavowed complicity in this extraordinary entrapping of the Daily brigade by means of an odour. Could it be held responsible for the excesses of its disinterested sympathisers? … Still, the appalling trick showed the high temperature to which blood had risen in the genial battle between great rival organs. Persons in the very inmost ring whispered that Denry Machin had at length been bested on this critically important day.