_March 3._ Fate seemed determined that our lives should be closely
connected. In December Mr. Blodgett wrote asking me to call at his
office, and he was already smiling when his boy passed me through the
door at which so many had to tarry.
“There are a good many kinds of fools,” was his welcoming remark, “but
one of the commonest is the brand who think because they can do one
thing well, they ought to be able to do the exact opposite. I’ve known
men who could grow rich out of brewing beer, who kept themselves poor
through thinking they knew all about horses; I’ve known women who
queened it in parlors, who went to smash because they believed
themselves inspired actresses; I’ve sat here in this office thirty
years, and grown rich through the belief of clergymen, doctors,
merchants, farmers,—the whole box and dice,—that they were heaven-born
financiers, and could play us Wall Street men even at our own game.
Whatever else you do in this world, doctor, don’t think that because
you can talk a dozen languages, they fit you to be a successful mute.”
“When you are in this mood, Mr. Blodgett, I can be nothing else,” I
interpolated, as he paused a moment for breath.
“Alexander Whitely,” he went on, smiling, “probably knows more about
petroleum and kerosene than any other man in the world, and he’s made
himself rich by his knowledge. But it doesn’t satisfy him to be on the
top of his own heap; he wants to get on the top of some other fellow’s.
In short, he has an itch to be something he isn’t, and the darned
fool’s gone and bought a daily newspaper with the idea that he is going
to be a great editor!”
“His lamp of genius will not go out for want of oil,” I remarked.
“For a moment he showed one glimmer of sense: he came to me for
advice,” said Mr. Blodgett in evident enjoyment. “I told him to get an
A 1 business manager, to make you chief editor, let you pick your
staff, and then blow in all the money you and the business end asked
for, and never go inside the building himself. It was too good sense
for him, for he’s daft with the idea of showing the world how to edit a
paper. But my advice simmered down to this: if you want to be his
private secretary, at four thousand a year, and pretend to revise his
editorials, but really write them for him, I guess you can have the
position. Of course he is to think he writes the rubbish.”
“A Voltaire in miniature,” I laughed.
“A what?”
“The great Frederic thought himself a poet, and induced Voltaire to
come and be his literary counselor. The latter showed a bundle of
manuscripts to some one and sneered, ‘See all this dirty linen of the
king’s he has sent me to wash.’”
“That was one for his nibs,” chuckled Mr. Blodgett appreciatively. “But
you mustn’t make such speeches as that of Whitely.”
“In spite of my many tongues, I can be mute.”
“Do you think I haven’t seen that? And I’ve seen something more, which
is that you always give a dollar’s worth of work for seventy-five cents
of wages. Now, Whitely’s a hard man, and if you made the terms with him
he’d be sure to get the better of you. So I’ve arranged to have him
meet you here, and I’m going to see fair play. I’ve told him you won’t
do it for less than four thousand, and he’ll not get you a cent
cheaper. The work will be very light.”
“The work is easy,” I assented, “but is it honest?”
“Seems to me we had better leave that to Whitely to settle.”
“And is Mr. Whitely an honest man?”
Mr. Blodgett smiled as he looked at me, and observed, “Whitely wouldn’t
steal a red-hot stove unless it had handles! But he probably thinks
this all right. Few people know how much successful men use other men’s
brains. Here’s a report on a Southern railroad by an expert in my
employ. I’ve never even been over the road, yet I’ll sign my name to
the report as if it was my work. Now, in oil Whitely hires all kinds of
men to do different things for him, and he gets whatever credit
follows; and I suppose he thinks that if he pays you to write
editorials, they are as much his as any other thing he buys.”
“He must be conscious of a distinction.”
“That’s his lookout, if he is. Don’t start in to keep other people’s
consciences in order, doctor, for it’s the hardest-worked and
poorest-paid trade in the world.”
When Mr. Whitely arrived, Mr. Blodgett was as good as his word, taking
the matter practically out of my hands, and letting me sit a passive
and amused spectator of the contest between the two shrewd men, who
dropped all thought of personal friendship while they discussed the
matter. Mr. Blodgett won, and made the further stipulation that since
Mr. Whitely intended to be at the office only in the afternoon, I might
be equally privileged as to my hours of attendance. His forethought and
kindness did more, for his last speech to Mr. Whitely was, “Then it’s
understood that the doctor writes your letters and revises your
editorials, but nothing else.” And as soon as we were alone he
intimated, “Remember that, or before you know it he’ll be screwing you
to death. Don’t you write anything extra for him unless there’s extra
pay. Now, don’t waste my time by thanks in business hours, but come in
to-night to dinner, so as to let the boss and Agnes congratulate you.”
My employment began the first of the year, at which time the paper came
into the hands of its new proprietor; and it amuses me to recall him as
he sat at his desk that first day, thrumming it nervously, and trying
to dictate an editorial on The Outlook for the New Year. A more
hopeless bit of composition I have seldom read, and four times it was
rewritten as I built it into shape.
The man has no more sense of form than he has of English. Even worse,
he is almost without ideas. It has become his invariable custom to
remark to me suavely, as he takes his seat at his desk about two
o’clock, “Dr. Hartzmann, possibly you can suggest a good subject for me
to write about to-day?” And when I propose one, he continues: “That is
satisfactory. Jot down what you think I had better say, while I run
over my mail.” An hour later I lay the typewritten sheets before him,
and, after reading them with the most evident pleasure, he puts his
initials at the top and sends the editorial out to the managing editor;
to have a second pleasure when, after two hours, the galley slips of
proof come back to him.
Fortunately for me, he cares no more for politics than I do, and thus
saves me from the necessity of studying and mastering that shifting
quicksand against which beat the tides of men, ebbing as private greed
obtains the mastery, and flowing in those curious revulsions of
selfishly altruistic public spirit called patriotism. Except for this
subject his taste is catholic, and his foible is to pose as omniscient.
“I wish new subjects,—something, if possible, that intellectual people
do not know about,”—is his constant command; and nothing delights him
more than an editorial on a subject of which he has never heard.
Speaking only his mother tongue, he has an inordinate desire for
foreign words, and will observe, “A quotation in another language gives
an editorial page an air of culture which I desire my paper to have.”
Our composing-room, I imagine, is the only one in New York which has
Greek type, and if I gave him the smallest encouragement he would buy
fonts of Sanskrit and Hebrew characters. He always makes me teach him
how to pronounce the sentences, catching them with a wonderful
parrot-like facility. Usually he carries clippings of the last half
dozen editorials with him, and his delight is to make an opportunity to
read one aloud, prefaced by the announcement that he is the writer.
Sometimes, indeed, he cannot contain his pleasure over the articles
till their appearance in type, and I repeatedly hear him request a
visitor, “If you have ten minutes to spare, let me read you this
editorial I have just written for to-morrow’s issue.”
At first, in spite of Mr. Blodgett’s explanation, I thought this real
dishonesty, and despised not merely him, but myself as well for aiding
in such trickery. As I grow to know him better, however, I find he is
not cozening the public so much as imposing on himself. The man has a
fervent and untrained imagination, which has never, in the
practicalities of oil, had a safety-valve. As a result, it has rioted
in dreams of which he is the hero, until it has brought him to the
point of thinking his wildest fancies quite possible realities. His
self-faith is so great that his imagination sets no limit to his
powers, and thus he can believe everything of himself. I have heard him
tell what he would do under given circumstances, and, with my knowledge
of him, I know he is conceiving himself to be actually doing what he
describes. Thus, in a smaller sense, he really imagines that he writes
the editorials, and he even reads them to Mr. Blodgett, apparently
unconscious that there can be the slightest question of authorship in
the latter’s mind.
With this singular weakness the man is yet a strong one. His capacity
to judge and manage men or facts is truly marvelous. He rules his paper
as he rules everything, with the firmest hand, and not a man in his
employ but knows who is master. Within a year he turned the journal
into a great earner of money, and in the business office they have to
confess that it is all his work, ignorant though he is to this day of
the details. He knows by instinct where money should be spent, and
where it should be scrimped. Yet with all this business shrewdness he
cares not half so much that his investment is paying him twenty per
cent as that people are talking about his ability as an editor, and my
only influence over him even now is the praise my editorials have won
him.
Perhaps the most singular quality of his nature is his heedlessness of
individual opinion, and his dread of it in mass. He is so absolutely
self-centred—every thought directed inward—that he never tries to make
the individual like him, yet he craves intensely the world’s esteem. He
longs for notoriety, and even stoops to an almost daily mention of
himself in his paper, taking endless pains to get his name into other
journals as well. Even his philanthropy, for which the world admires
him, is used for this purpose. Ridiculous as it may seem, the most
grating task I have to do is the writing of the fulsome press
dispatches which he invariably sends out whenever he makes one of his
gifts. He writes, too, to his fellow editors, asking them to comment on
the largess; and since he makes it a point to cultivate the pleasantest
relations with his confrères, they give him good measure, though with
many a smile and wink among themselves when they get together. “Mr.
White-Lie” is his sobriquet in the fraternity.
How curiously diverse the same man is to different people! To the world
Mr. Whitely is a man of great business ability, of wide knowledge, of
great benevolence, and of fine manners. I do not wonder, Maizie, that
he imposes on you; for though you have discernment, yet you are not of
a suspicious nature, and his acting is so wonderful and his manner so
frank, through his own unconsciousness of his self-deceit, that not a
dozen people dream the man is other than he seems. You might, perhaps,
in spite of his taciturnity, have discovered his charlatan pretense of
learning if you had been born inquisitive, but you take his writings
for the measure of his intellect, and have no more reason to suspect
that his skillful reservations are the refuge of a sciolist than that
my silence covers such little erudition as I have.
Why I can do naught else but sit here and write of the past I do not
understand. Until a month ago I was working every evening till far into
the night, but now, try as I may, I can no longer force myself to my
task. I should think it was physical exhaustion, were it not that I can
chronicle this stale record of what I know so well. I suppose it is
mental discouragement at my slight progress in reducing that crushing
debt, and, even more, my sadness at the thought of you as his wife.
Good-night, my darling. May happiness be yours.