Adventure stories; Islands -- Fiction; Journalists -- Fiction; Love stories; Science fiction; South Pacific Ocean -- Fiction
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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