STEP by step The Guardian followed the war through its pregnant early days. In presentation of the news, both Jeremy and Galpin strove to be conscientiously neutral. For Galpin, this was simple enough. It accorded with his creed, that the news should stand of itself and for itself and let the people judge. Jeremy took it harder. There were times when, in the security of his den, he fingered his pencil with a fierce and mounting resentment which cried for expression toward Germany’s savagery and terrorism. On the other hand, he knew that to incite prejudices, wrath, and hatred within America, and particularly within so divided a State as his own, was to thrust the nation nearer to that hell’s caldron wherein Europe agonized. The President had prescribed neutrality. That, Jeremy recognized, was the part of statesmanship. He appeased his own soul with the argument that it was equally the part of honorable journalism.

If he had thought by editorial silence to satisfy or even conciliate the propagandists of Deutschtum in the State, he was soon undeceived. The process of the absorption of Centralia by the German-Americans was swiftly progressing, and as a newspaper of influence, The Guardian came within the purview of their programme. Daily the mail deposited upon his desk a swelling flood of proselytizing literature; pamphlets, reprints, letters to the editor from writers whom he had never heard of (and who in many cases had no existence) as well as from his own clientÈle, excerpts from the German press, editorials from that great and malign force in American journalism who, already secretly plotting with Germany, was playing the game of Teutonic diplomacy by inciting fear and distrust of Japan and shouting for war upon and annexation of Mexico. He could not have published one twentieth of them. He did not publish one one-hundredth of them. Hardly a day passed without his being stopped on the street by some sorrowful or accusing or indignant subscriber who wished to know why The Guardian had not reproduced Pastor Klink’s powerful editorial on “The Crusader Spirit of Germany,” or how it happened that The Record printed Mr. Woeker’s letter on Belgian provocations while The Guardian had n’t a word of it. Suspicion established itself in the editor’s mind that some person or persons were making daily and scientific analysis of his newspaper for the purpose of forcing propaganda upon it by the power of protest. He suspected, and with reason, the Deutscher Club.

The matter of news soon became an irritant to the apostles of Deutschtum. To the layman, news is simple fact, the product of the world’s activities, finished and ready for the press. To the expert journalist news is a theme and the printed page his instrument whereon he may render that theme by an infinite variety of inflections and with infinitely varying effect upon his public. Headlines and sub-heads alone may vitally alter the whole purport of an article not otherwise garbled. So long as Germany’s record was one of consistent victories, the course of the Centralia newspapers was clearly marked. They had but to print the cables with captions appropriate to the facts, in order to please their self-appointed masters, the German-American public. But Russia now made her sensational advance. Victory in the West was threatened by disaster in the East. Much ingenious and painful juggling of cable news was imposed upon the harassed journalistic fraternity of Centralia by this unfortunate development. Relegating the Russian campaign to nooks and corners of the inner pages and qualifying it by indeterminate or sometimes satiric headlines, was the most generally approved method. The Guardian, however, printed the news. It printed it straight, for what it was worth, and under appropriate captions. Somewhat to Jeremy’s surprise and more to his relief, the Governor had no criticism to make of this course.

“So long as you stick to facts, we’ve got a good defense,” was his view. “They’ll kick. Of course they’ll kick. Let ’em. In time they’ll come to see that they’re really kicking against the facts, not against The Guardian. Just now our German friends are pretty excited and touchy and nervous. If you could give ’em a little more show on the editorial page, while this Russian business is on, it’d help.”

Kick the German-Americans certainly did, by pen and Voice. No less a person than Robert Wanser, who had maintained a mere bowing acquaintance with Jeremy since the Cultural Language Bill episode, took it upon himself to voice a protest to General Manager Galpin.

“Why print this Russian claptrap at all?” he asked.

“All the papers are carrying it,” answered Galpin.

“Not so much of it, and not so prominently as The Guardian.”

“We’re giving it what it’s worth as news, just as we give the German advances in the West.”

“Everybody knows that it isn’t news. It is British fabrications, put on the tables to fool—er—influenceable newspapers.”

“Influenceable, eh?” said Galpin, annoyed. “Everybody knows, do they? You prove it to us, and we’ll print it, all right.”

“You are making a mistake,” pronounced the banker severely. “For a newspaper to take up the British side is very suspicious.”

“Bunk! The Guardian’s been square, and you know it. But we’re not going to stand for being censored by a lot of organized letter-writers.”

“A(c)h, censored!” The banker’s guttural almost emerged upon the troubled surface of speech. “The censoring is inside your editorial office, if anywhere. You refuse to publish our letters—”

“‘Our’? Have you been writing us letters?”

“I have sent you letters.” Mr. Wanser’s face became red.

“Funny! I don’t recall any. Sign ’em?”

“They were signed,” returned the other, with an effort at loftiness.

“With what name?” demanded Galpin bluntly.

“I am not here to be cross-examined by you.”

“You started this. And now you want to duck it. Nothing doing! You let out what we’ve suspected; that a lot of those letters are machine-made, and sent in signed with fake names or with real names stuck on as a blind for some committee. That don’t go, in The Guardian. We’ve had too much stuff put over on us.”

The banker’s dignity dissolved in wrath. “Don’t you get fresh with me, young man. I guess you and your boss, too, are going to learn something one of these days! Going out of your way to insult the best citizens in the State every time your dirty, pro-English paper—”

“Oh, you make me sick!” said Galpin, and marched away, leaving Wanser brandishing a denunciatory fist at nothing.

The split between the Germans and The Guardian imperceptibly widened, as time went on, through minor incidents, arguments, and abortive attempts at influence. Seizing upon its opportunity, The Record accepted the whole programme of local German censorship, published nothing that could possibly offend, trimmed its news to the prejudices of the dominant element, and by these methods cut in upon its rival’s local circulation. Verrall, however, reported that as yet there was nothing to worry about, while at the same time earnestly advocating an inoffensive foreign news policy for The Guardian. So 1914 passed into 1915, and the paper held its own.

On a mid-April day of 1915 there appeared upon an inner page of The Guardian, an item of such overwhelming importance, that when the editor and owner read it, all other news of the day receded and blurred into a dull, colorless mist of insignificance. The article stated briefly that Miss Marcia Ames, cousin of Miss Letitia Pritchard, of 11 Montgomery Street, who was well known to Fenchester society, not only for her charm and beauty, but also as being the only lady intercollegiate golf-player in the country, had left Berne, whither she had gone after the breaking-out of the war, and was visiting friends in Copenhagen. Her many and admiring friends would be glad to learn, etc., etc., in the best society-reportorial formula. After thoroughly absorbing that paragraph into his inmost being, Jeremy sent for Buddy Higman, who had now taken on the additional duty of marking each day’s paper, from the assignment book, article by article, with the name of the writer of each.

“Buddy,” said the editor, “whose is the Ames story?”

This being an official query, Buddy made pretense of consulting his marked file. “Higman, sir.”

“Oh! You wrote it? Did you have a letter?”

“Yes, sir. But I did n’t write it from that. I would n’t make a story out of a letter from Her. That’s personal,” said Buddy, proud in his rigid sense of ethics.

“Then where did you get it?”

“I figured that like as not Miss Pritchard would get one by the same mail. So I went an’ ast her.”

“And she had?”

“Yes, sir. I told her I was there for The Guardian an’ was there anything she could give out. An’ she gimme the story.”

“Buddy, if you don’t look out you’re going to be a real newspaper man one of these days!”

“I wisht I was one now,” returned the boy wistfully. “Do you? What would you do?”

“I dunno, exactly. Somethin’.”

“You’d need a more definite policy than that, son, if you were in the bad fix of owning a newspaper.”

“I’d do somethin’,” persisted the boy. “I’d soak the Germans. Say, Boss, how old do you have to be to get into the National Guard?”

“A good deal older than you are. Why all this martial ardor, Buddy?”

“That’s what She’d do, if She was a man.”

“Did the letter say so?”

“Yes. Can a feller—is it ever all right for a feller to show a lady’s letter?”

Wondering again as he had wondered before whence this freckled scrub of a boy had derived his instincts of the gentleman born and bred, Jeremy answered gravely: “It might be. That’s for you to decide, Buddy.”

“I kinda guess She’d like for you to see this.” He dug out of his pocket a crumpled sheet, covered with the strong, straight, beautiful script of Marcia. “Read there, Boss.” He indicated an inner page.

“...or later it must come,” the letter ran. “As soon as you are old enough you must learn to be a soldier. Every one in the world who can, must learn to be a soldier. I cannot tell you, Buddy, of the terrible thing that German national ambition is; how it reaches out into every nation to make that nation its tool; how it aims to overrun the world and make it one vast Germany. You will be old enough soon to see what it is doing in your own little city, so far away. Perhaps you do not comprehend. Perhaps you will not understand even what I am writing; but you may find some one on your paper who will know and will explain.”

“I think, perhaps, I was meant to see this, Buddy,” interjected Jeremy.

“But I guess I know what She was drivin’ at all right,” replied the boy.

“How can America be so blind!” Jeremy read on. “How can its newspapers be so blind! The last numbers of The Guardian that I saw, no word of arousing the people to a sense of what all this means. Oh, Buddy, Buddy! If you were only a man and had a newspaper of your own! I have written your aunt about the books and...”

The bottom of the page terminated the reading. Jeremy, with his lips set straight and hard, handed back the sheet. The boy faced him with a candid eye.

“Boss, you’re a man,” he said.

“Am I?” said Jeremy, more to himself than in reply. “And you got a noospaper of your own.”

“Not of my own, wholly.”

“Ain’t it?” cried Buddy, amazed. “Who’s in on it?”

“The people who read it, and believe in it. It’s partly theirs. The men I work with to help keep politics straight and fair. I have to think of them.”

Buddy sighed. “It ain’t as big a cinch as it looks, ownin’ a paper, is it!”

“Not these days, son.”

“Anyway, I guess She knows,” asseverated the stout little loyalist. “She’s lived there an’ she oughta know. What She says goes, with me.”

The clear single-mindedness of a boy! How the editor of The Guardian, feeling a thousand years old, envied his lowliest assistant! How the unstilled ache for Marcia woke and throbbed again at her words! She had begged him not wholly to forget her. Had it been a spell laid upon him it could have been no more compelling. He wondered whether, twenty years hence, her influence would have become less vital, less intimate upon him, and, wondering, knew that it would not.

He went home deviously by way of Montgomery Street. The early shoots had lanced their way into the sunshine of the Pritchard garden, and Miss Letitia was making her rounds, inspecting for the winter-killed amongst the tenderer of her shrubbery. Jeremy leaned upon the fence saying nothing. There were reasons why he felt hesitant about approaching Miss Pritchard. In his campaign against the tax-dodgers he had fallen foul of old Madam Taylor, one of her particular friends.

Shortly after the publication, Miss Pritchard, meeting Jeremy at her own front gate as he was about to enter, had presented the danger signal of two high-colored spots upon the cheek-curves, and a pair of specially bright eyes; also the theorem, for his acceptance, that a newspaper ought to be in better business than attacking and abusing lone and defenseless women. Declining to accept this theorem without debate, Jeremy was informed that Miss Pritchard would disdain thenceforth to harbor The Guardian upon her premises. Interpreting this to mean that the editor of that fallen sheet would be equally unwelcome, the caller had departed, divided between wrath and melancholy. Up to that time the Pritchard house had been one of the few ports of call in his busy but rather lonely life. Now, another of those gossamer links with Marcia Ames was severed. Miss Pritchard soon came to regret her severity, too; for the steadfast, unspoken, hopeless devotion of the boy—he was still only that to her—to the memory of her golden girl, had bloomed for her like one of the flowers in her old maid’s garden.

Now, seeing the lover, forlorn and mute, outside what was once his paradise, she gave way to compunction. But not wholly. There was a sting in her first words.

“Are you reckoning up taxes on my place, Mr. Jeremy?”

“That’s been done long ago,” he said uncompromisingly.

“When are you going to print it?”

“As soon as you try to dodge ’em.”

He looked very tired, and his voice had lost something of the buoyant quality of youth which she had always associated with him. A different note crept into her own when she spoke again.

“I had a long letter from Marcia to-day.”

“Is she well?” The tone was politely formal, but she saw the color rise in his face and marked the pathetic eagerness in his eyes.

“She’s the same Marcia Ames. Even to the name.”

He caught at the opportunity. “She’s not married yet?”

“No. Her fiancÉ is fighting. Somewhere in the remote colonies, I believe.”

“FiancÉ?”

“Surely you knew that she was engaged; a young cousin of her stepfather’s. It was an affair of years.”

“Not when she was here,” Jeremy blurted.

Her surprised regard challenged him. “You seem very certain,” she observed.

Jeremy recovered himself. “I had heard rumors, but nothing formal,” he said. “I thought perhaps you would have told me when it was announced.”

“I assumed that you knew.”

What Miss Pritchard meant was, “I assumed that she would have told you.” She perceived that there were depths in this affair of which she knew little or nothing.

“German betrothals are curious and formal things in her class,” continued the old maid. “When she came here, to ‘see America first,’ I believe it was understood that nothing was to be settled until her return. She went back, and the formalities were arranged. At the outbreak of war her fiancÉ was somewhere in Africa and, I believe, is still there.”

“I see,” said Jeremy dully.

“Marcia still sees The Guardian.” The spirit of romance in the spinster heart would force the words.

“I know. And that helps. Good-bye and thank you.”

“Come to see me and let’s be friends again,” said the warm-hearted lady.

Most of that night Jeremy spent on the tramp, thinking of The Guardian in terms of Marcia’s letter; haggardly struggling to harmonize cross-interests, cross-purposes, cross-loyalties. Out of the struggle emerged one clear resolve. What next the progress of the war should produce that intimately touched his conscience, should be the signal, the release. Upon that The Guardian should speak its owner’s mind though damnation follow.

Three weeks later the Lusitania was sunk.