A SCRAP OF PAPER

To be awakened by Rollo, to be served in bed with an appetizing breakfast and to catch a hansom to the nearest elevated station were novel preparations for work in the Sentinel office.  The impossibility of it all delighted St. George rather more than the reality, for there is no pastime, as all the world knows, quite like that of practising the impossible.  The days when, “like a man unfree,” he had fared forth from his unlovely lodgings clandestinely to partake of an evil omelette, seemed enchantingly far away.  It was, St. George reflected, the experience of having been released from prison, minus the disgrace.

Yet when he opened the door of the city room the odour of the printers’ ink somehow fused his elation in his liberty with the elation of the return.  This was like wearing fetters for bracelets.  When he had been obliged to breathe this air he had scoffed at its fascination, but now he understood.  “A newspaper office,” so a revered American of letters who had begun his life there had once imparted to St. George, “is a place where a man with the temperament of a savant and a recluse may bring his American vice of commercialism and worship of the uncommon, and let them have it out.  Newspapers have no other use—­except the one I began on.”  When St. George entered the city room, Crass, of the goblin’s blood cravats, had vacated his old place, and Provin was just uncovering his typewriter and banging the tin cover upon everything within reach, and Bennietod was writhing over a rewrite, and Chillingworth was discharging an office boy in a fashion that warmed St. George’s heart.

But Chillingworth, the city editor, was an italicized form of Chillingworth, the guest.  He waved both arms at the foreman who ventured to tell him of a head that had one letter too many, and he frowned a greeting at St. George.

“Get right out on the Boris story,” he said.  “I depend on you.  The chief is interested in this too—­telephoned to know whom I had on it.”

St. George knew perfectly that “the chief” was playing golf at Lenox and no doubt had read no more than the head-lines of the Holland story, for he was a close friend of the bishop’s, and St. George knew his ways; but Chillingworth’s methods always told, and St. George turned away with all the old glow of his first assignment.

St. George, calling up the Bitley Reformatory, knew that the Chances and the Fates were all allied against his seeing the mulatto woman; but he had learned that it is the one unexpected Fate and the one apostate Chance who open great good luck of any sort.  So, though the journey to Westchester County was almost certain to result in refusal, he meant to be confronted by that certainty before he assumed it.  To the warden on the wire St. George put his inquiry.

“What are your visitors’ days up there, Mr. Jeffrey?”

“Thursdays,” came the reply, and the warden’s voice suggested handcuffs by way of hospitality.