boucher book oct28.pdf - Index of

484 Anthony Boucher
Mr. Manson was never able to find a teller who remembered receiving that
astonishingly large deposit made to the credit of the Sentinel ’s account; but there it
was, all duly entered.
And so the Grover Sentinel became a daily, printing the truth.
V
If it’s all right with you, we’ll skip pretty fast over the next part of the story. The days
of triumph never make interesting reading. The rise and fall—that’s your dramatic
formula. The build-up can be stirring and the letdown can be tragic, but there’s no
interest in the flat plateau at the top.
So there’s no need to tell in detail all that happened in Grover after the Sentinel
went daily. You can imagine the sort of thing: How the Hitchcock plant stepped
up its production and turned out a steady flow of war matériel that was the pride
of the county, the state, and even the country. How Doc Quillan tracked down,
identified, and averted the epidemic that threatened the workers’ housing project.
How Chief Hanby finally got the goods on the gamblers who were moving in on
the South Side and cleaned up the district. How the Grover Red Cross drive went a
hundred percent over its quota. How the expected meat shortage never materialized
… You get the picture.
All this is just the plateau, the level stretch between the rise and the fall. Not that
John MacVeagh expected the fall. Nothing like that seemed possible, even though
Molly worried.
“You know, boss,” she said one day, “I was reading over some of the books I used
to love when I was a kid. This wish—it’s magic, isn’t it?”
MacVeagh snapped the speaking box on his desk and gave a succinct order to
the assistant editor. He was the chief executive of a staff now. Then he turned back
and said, “Why, yes, Molly, I guess you might call it that. Magic, miracle—what do
we care so long as it enables us to accomplish all we’re doing?”
“I don’t know. But sometimes I get scared. Those books, especially the ones by
E. Nesbit—”
MacVeagh grinned. “Scared of kids’ books?”
“I know it sounds silly, boss, but kids’ books are the only place you can find out
about magic. And there seems to be only one sure thing about it: You can know
there’s a catch to it. There’s always a catch.”
MacVeagh didn’t think any further about that. What stuck in his mind were
phrases like those he heard down at Clem’s barber shop:
“Hanged if I know what’s come over this burg. Seems like for a couple of months
there just can’t nothing go wrong. Ever since that trouble out at the plant when they
got rid of Bricker, this burg is just about perfect, seems like.”
Those were fine words. They fed the soul. They made you forget that little, nagging,
undefined discontent that was rankling underneath and threatening to spoil
all this wonderful miracle—or magic, if you prefer. They even made you be polite
to H. A. Hitchcock when he came to pay his respects to you after the opening of
the new Sentinel Building.
He praised MacVeagh as an outstanding example of free enterprise. (A year or so