A vast scheme, he told himself, and a noble one, and he wanted to tell Henrietta. He clarified his own mind for many weeks afterward, writing to her every week of his developing ideas.
“Keep my letters, Henrietta,” he told her. “I haven’t time to make copies. Sometime I may want to check with myself and see how well my notions have worked.”
Henrietta kept his letters with reverence. She bought a tin box and painted it red and kept it locked and in the back of her closet. The key she wore around her neck, and when she wrote this to Clem he sent her a strange dirty-looking little amulet on a string and told her how he had come by it from an old woman in China. “Put it in the box along with my letters,” he told her. “It might bring us luck.”
William’s wedding was in September after his graduation from college. He had not wanted so early a marriage, and he had suggested to Candace that they wait for a year, or even two, until he knew where he was going to find the two hundred thousand dollars he felt was the least possible capital upon which he could hope to start his newspaper. Candace, who could be a laggard when she must decide, had pouted at the idea of delay.
“If it is only money—”
“It is not just money,” William said. “I must make my plans very carefully. You don’t just start a newspaper. You have to have a prospectus and a dummy and you have to get advertising together.”
“You could do all those things as well after we were married as before,” she insisted. “I’m going to talk to Papa.”
When she said this William was about to forbid her and then he did not. All summer he had worked hard and late in the city and he had worked alone. Through months so hot that one by one Martin Rosevaine and Blayne Parker and Seth James had stolen away to luxurious homes by sea and mountain and lake, William had lived steadily alone in a cheap two-room flat in lower New York, working day and night upon one dummy after another to get exactly the newspaper he wanted. Once a month he allowed himself to visit Candace. Upon such a visit they were now talking.
“I don’t want to depend upon your father,” he said at last.
“Don’t be silly,” Candace replied with easy rudeness. “Papa would do anything for me.”
“So would I,” he said, smiling.
“Then let me talk to Papa,” she said.
“But don’t ask him for money, please,” he replied. “I can find it somewhere.”
He was sorely tempted by the old possibility behind her words, for he had felt compelled to delay his marriage while he searched for money. Grimly handsome and determinedly suave, he had made friends wherever he could among the rich. He was not one of them but he knew how to be. Though through this summer he had stripped himself bare as a coolie, a towel about his loins while he sweated at his desk night after night, there had been other nights when his garments were such that he feared no valet as he sallied forth to dine or dance among the wealthy. He did not talk easily but his high-held head and his correct courtesy served him well enough instead. Silence had this value, he found, that when he did talk people listened.
On this next visit, the last before his marriage, Roger Cameron asked him to come into his private library one night after dinner. William knew the room well for he had made free of it during college vacations. The books were curious and heterogeneous, and they provided a fair pattern of Mr. Cameron’s self-education. There was a whole shelf on Christian Science and now, in later years, another on the religions of India.
“Sit down,” Mr. Cameron said. “Candace has been talking to me.”
“I asked her not to, sir,” William said somewhat sternly. But he sat down.
“Yes, well, Candy never obeys anybody,” Mr. Cameron replied mildly. “Now, William, she wants to get married and she tells me you feel you can’t for a year or two.”
“I feel only that I should see my way fairly clear before I take on the support of a wife and a house and so on,” William said.
“That’s reasonable,” Mr. Cameron said. “Very right and reasonable. I did no more in my young days. Fact is, I had to wait. Mrs. Cameron’s father wouldn’t hear to anything else, no matter how she cried or how I got mad. We waited. Well, thinking about that makes me feel I don’t want my girl to go through the same thing her mother did. How much money do you need, William?”
William looked reluctant. “I don’t know exactly.”
“No, I know you don’t,” Mr. Cameron said with mild impatience. “I’m just asking.”
“I think I should see two hundred thousand dollars ahead,” William said.
Mr. Cameron pulled his underlip. “You don’t need that all at once.”
“No, but I have to be able to lay my hands on it.”
They were silent for a while. The big room was dark with oak paneling and the lights were lost in the beamed ceiling.
“Suppose you tell me a little more about this paper,” Roger Cameron said at last. “What makes you want a paper, anyway? Why don’t you come into the Stores with me?”
“I appreciate that, Mr. Cameron,” William said very properly. “I do, indeed. But I have set my heart on building up an entirely original sort of newspaper. If it is successful, I shall begin a chain. It will sell for two cents, and it will have more news that two cents ever bought before.”
“You’ll have to get a lot of advertising,” Mr. Cameron said.
“That’s where the money will be,” William replied. “But it’s not entirely a matter of money.”
“If it’s not a matter of money, what is it?” Mr. Cameron asked with some astonishment.
“I want to accomplish more than making money,” William said. He was not afraid to tell Mr. Cameron the truth. His thin erect body, his high head, his small tense hands clasped together were taut with earnestness. “I look at it this way, Mr. Cameron. Most of the world is made up of common people. They are stupid and ignorant. What they learn in school doesn’t help them to think. They cannot think. They have to be told what to think. They don’t know what is right and wrong. They have to be told.”
“People don’t like to think,” Mr. Cameron said shrewdly.
“I know that,” William said. “Therefore they act without thought or they listen to Socialists and agitators and they act foolishly and endanger decent people. I propose to do the thinking, Mr. Cameron. That is why I want a newspaper.”
“How do you know people are going to take to your thoughts?” Mr. Cameron asked. He was very much astonished. He did not know himself what to think of this young man with his lichen-gray eyes.
“I won’t say they are my thoughts, Mr. Cameron,” William said. “I shall do exactly what you do in the Stores. You have men whose job it is to find out what sells best and you buy in quantity what you think people want. Actually, you show people what they ought to buy. That is what I shall do. My paper will be full of what people like. There’ll be plenty of stories with pictures about oddities, about murders, about accidents. But there’ll be events that happen in the world, too, that people ought to know about.”
“Where are your ideas coming in?” Mr. Cameron demanded.
“In the way everything is told,” William said. “And not told,” he added.
Mr. Cameron shot him a sharp look. “Smart,” he murmured. “Very smart. I hope you’re always right.”
“I won’t be always right,” William replied. “But I shall try to be.”
It was more than he had told anybody, even his friends. They knew that he was to be the editor for he had always assumed that he would be, but they did not know that he planned to shape every item, every line, decide the news he would not tell as well as what he did. The paper would be a reflection of his mind and the direction that of his own soul. When he had put out his first issue he would take it to big business firms and show it to top men. He’d say, “Here is your safeguard. Advertise here and help me influence the people toward Us and away from Them.”