Produced by Eric Eldred, William Craig, Charles Franks and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
THE GREAT GOD SUCCESS
A NOVEL
By John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
The Gregg Press / Ridgewood, N.J.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER
I. THE CANDIDATE FROM YALE
II. THE CITY EDITOR RECONSIDERS
III. A PARK ROW CELEBRITY
IV. IN THE EDGE OF BOHEMIA
V. ALICE
VI. IN A BOHEMIAN QUICKSAND
VII. A LITTLE CANDLE GOES OUT
VIII. A STRUGGLE FOR SELF-CONTROL
IX. AMBITION AWAKENS
X. THE ETERNAL MASCULINE
XI. TRESPASSING
XII. MAKING THE MOST OF A MONTH
XIII. RECKONING WITH DANVERS
XIV. THE NEWS-RECORD GETS A NEW EDITOR
XV. YELLOW JOURNALISM
XVI. MR. STOKELY IS TACTLESS
XVII. A WOMAN AND A WARNING
XVIII. HOWARD EXPLAINS HIS MACHINE
XIX. “I MUST BE RICH.”
XX. ILLUSION
XXI. WAVERING
XXII. THE SHENSTONE EPISODE
XXIII. EXPANDING AND CONTRACTING
XXIV. “MR. VALIANT-FOR-TRUTH.”
XXV. THE PROMISED LAND
XXVI. IN POSSESSION
XXVII. THE HARVEST
XXVIII. SUCCESS
THE GREAT GOD SUCCESS
I.
THE CANDIDATE FROM YALE.
“O your college paper, I suppose?”
“No, I never wrote even a letter to the editor.”
“Took prizes for essays?”
“No, I never wrote if I could help it.”
“But you like to write?”
“I’d like to learn to write.”
“You say you are two months out of college--what college?”
“Yale.”
“Hum--I thought Yale men went into something commercial; law or banking
or railroads. ‘Leave hope of fortune behind, ye who enter here’ is over
the door of this profession.”
“I haven’t the money-making instinct.”
“We pay fifteen dollars a week at the start.”
“Couldn’t you make it twenty?”
The Managing Editor of the _News-Record_ turned slowly in his chair
until his broad chest was full-front toward the young candidate for the
staff. He lowered his florid face slowly until his double chin swelled
out over his low “stick-up” collar. Then he gradually raised his eyelids
until his amused blue eyes were looking over the tops of his glasses,
straight into Howard’s eyes.
“Why?” he asked. “Why should we?”
Howard’s grey eyes showed embarrassment and he flushed to the line of
his black hair which was so smoothly parted in the middle. “Well--you
see--the fact is--I need twenty a week. My expenses are arranged on that
scale. I’m not clever at money matters. I’m afraid I’d get in a mess
with only fifteen.”
“My dear young man,” said Mr. King, “I started here at fifteen dollars a
week. And I had a wife; and the first baby was coming.”
“Yes, but your wife was an energetic woman. She stood right beside you
and worked too. Now I have only myself.”
Mr. King raised his eyebrows and became a rosier red. He was evidently
preparing to rebuke this audacious intrusion into his private affairs by
a stranger whose card had been handed to him not ten minutes before. But
Howard’s tone and manner were simple and sincere. And they happened to
bring into Mr. King’s mind a rush of memories of his youth and his wife.
She had married him on faith. They had come to New York fifteen years
before, he to get a place as reporter on the _News-Record_, she to
start a boarding-house; he doubting and trembling, she with courage and
confidence for two. He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and
opened the book of memory at the place where the leaves most easily fell
apart:
He is coming home at one in the morning, worn out, sick at heart from
the day’s buffetings. As he puts his key into the latch, the door opens.
There stands a handsome girl; her face is flushed; her eyes are bright;
her lips are held up for him to kiss; she shows no trace of a day that
began hours before his and has been a succession of exasperations and
humiliations against which her sensitive nature, trained in the home of
her father, a distinguished up-the-state Judge, gives her no protection,
“Victory,” she whispers, her arms about his neck and her head upon his
coat collar. “Victory! We are seventy-two cents ahead on the week, and
everything paid up!”
Mr. King opened his eyes--they had been closed less than five seconds.
“Well, let it be twenty--though just why I’m sure I don’t know. And
we’ll give you a four weeks’ trial. When will you begin?”
“Now,” answered the young man, glancing about the room. “And I shall try
to show that I appreciate your consideration, whether I deserve it or
not.”
It was a large bare room, low of ceiling. Across one end were five
windows overlooking from a great height the tempest that rages about
the City Hall day and night with few lulls and no pauses. Mr. King’s
roll-top desk was at the first window. Under each of the other windows
was a broad flat table desk--for copy-readers. At the farthest of these
sat the City Editor--thin, precise-looking, with yellow skin, hollow
cheeks, ragged grey-brown moustache, ragged scant grey-brown hair and
dark brown eyes. He looked nervously tired and, because brown was his
prevailing shade, dusty. He rose as Mr. King came with young Howard.
“Here, Mr. Bowring, is a young man from Yale. He wishes you to teach him
how to write. Mr. Howard, Mr. Bowring. I hope you gentlemen will get on
comfortably together.”
Mr. King went back to his desk. Mr. Bowring and Howard looked each at
the other. Mr. Bowring smiled, with good-humour, without cordiality.
“Let me see, where shall we put you?” And his glance wandered along
the rows of sloping table-desks--those nearer the windows lighted by
daylight; those farther away, by electric lamps. Even on that cool,
breezy August afternoon the sunlight and fresh air did not penetrate far
into the room.
“Do you see the young man with the beautiful fair moustache,” said Mr.
Bowring, “toiling away in his shirt-sleeves--there?”
“Near the railing at the entrance?”
“Precisely. I think I will put you next him.” Mr. Bowring touched a
button on his desk and presently an office boy--a mop of auburn curls,
a pert face and gangling legs in knickerbockers--hurried up with a “Yes,
Sir?”
“Please tell Mr. Kittredge that I would like to speak to him and--please
scrape your feet along the floor as little as possible.”
The boy smiled, walking away less as if he were trying to terrorize park
pedestrians by a rush on roller skates. Kittredge and Howard were made
acquainted and went toward their desks together. “A few moments--if you
will excuse me--and I’m done,” said Kittredge motioning Howard into the
adjoining chair as he sat and at once bent over his work.
Howard watched him with interest, admiration and envy. The reporter was
perhaps twenty-five years old--fair of hair, fair of skin, goodlooking
in a pretty way. His expression was keen and experienced yet too
self-complacent to be highly intelligent. He was rapidly covering sheet
after sheet of soft white paper with bold, loose hand-writing. Howard
noticed that at the end of each sentence he made a little cross with a
circle about it, and that he began each paragraph with a paragraph sign.
Presently he scrawled a big double cross in the centre of the sheet
under the last line of writing and gathered up his sheets in the
numbered order. “Done, thank God,” he said. “And I hope they won’t
butcher it.”
“Do you send it to be put in type?” asked Howard.
“No,” Kittredge answered with a faint smile. “I hand it in to Mr.
Bowring--the City Editor, you know. And when the copyreaders come at
six, it will be turned over to one of them. He reads it, cuts it down
if necessary, and writes headlines for it. Then it goes upstairs to the
composing room--see the box, the little dumb-waiter, over there in the
wall?--well, it goes up by that to the floor above where they set the
type and make up the forms.”
“I’m a complete ignoramus,” said Howard, “I hope you’ll not mind my
trying to find out things. I hope I shall not bore you.”
“Glad to help you, I’m sure. I had to go through this two years ago when
I came here from Princeton.”
Kittredge “turned in” his copy and returned to his seat beside Howard.
“What were you writing about, if I may ask?” inquired Howard.
“About some snakes that came this morning in a ‘tramp’ from South
America. One of them, a boa constrictor, got loose and coiled around a
windlass. The cook was passing and it caught him. He fainted with fright
and the beast squeezed him to death. It’s a fine story--lots of amusing
and dramatic details. I wrote it for a column and I think they won’t cut
it. I hope not, anyhow. I need the money.”
“You are paid by the column?”
“Yes. I’m on space--what they call a space writer. If a man is of any
account here they gradually raise him to twenty-five dollars a week and
then put him on space. That means that he will make anywhere from forty
to a hundred a week, or perhaps more at times. The average for the best
is about eighty.”
“Eighty dollars a week,” thought Howard. “Fifty-two times eighty is
forty-one hundred and sixty. Four thousand a year, counting out
two weeks for vacation.” To Howard it seemed wealth at the limit of
imagination. If he could make so much as that!--he who had grave doubts
whether, no matter how hard he worked, he would ever wrench a living
from the world.
Just then a seedy young man with red hair and a red beard came through
the gate in the railing, nodded to Kittredge and went to a desk well up
toward the daylight end of the room.
“That’s the best of ‘em all,” said Kittredge in a low tone. “His name is
Sewell. He’s a Harvard man--Harvard and Heidelberg. But drink! Ye gods,
how he does drink! His wife died last Christmas--practically starvation.
Sewell disappeared--frightful bust. A month afterward they found him
under an assumed name over on Blackwell’s Island, doing three months for
disorderly conduct. He wrote a Christmas carol while his wife was dying.
It began “Merrily over the Snow” and went on about light hearts and
youth and joy and all that--you know, the usual thing. When he got the
money, she didn’t need it or anything else in her nice quiet grave over
in Long Island City. So he ‘blew in’ the money on a wake.”
Sewell was coming toward them. Kittredge called out: “Was it a good
story, Sam?”
“Simply great! You ought to have seen the room. Only the bed and the
cook-stove and a few dishes on a shelf--everything else gone to the
pawnshop. The man must have killed the children first. They lay side by
side on the bed, each with its hands folded on its chest--suppose the
mother did that; and each little throat was cut from ear to ear--suppose
the father did that. Then he dipped his paint brush in the blood and
daubed on the wall in big scrawling letters: ‘There is no God!’ Then
he took his wife in his arms, stabbed her to the heart and cut his own
throat. And there they lay, his arms about her, his cheek against hers,
dead. It was murder as a fine art. Gad, I wish I could write.”
Kittredge introduced Howard--“a Yale man--just came on the paper.”
“Entering the profession? Well, they say of the other professions that
there is always room at the top. Journalism is just the reverse. The
room is all at the bottom--easy to enter, hard to achieve, impossible to
leave. It is all bottom, no top.” Sewell nodded, smiled attractively in
spite of his swollen face and his unsightly teeth, and went back to his
work.
“He’s sober,” said Kittredge when he was out of hearing, “so his story
is pretty sure to be the talk of Park Row tomorrow.”
Howard was astonished at the cheerful, businesslike point of view
of these two educated and apparently civilised young men as to the
tragedies of life. He had shuddered at Kittredge’s story of the man
squeezed to death by the snake. Sewell’s story, so graphically outlined,
filled him with horror, made it a struggle for him to conceal his
feelings.
“I suppose you must see a lot of frightful things,” he suggested.
“That’s our business. You soon get used to it, just as a doctor does.
You learn to look at life from the purely professional standpoint. Of
course you must feel in order to write. But you must not feel so keenly
that you can’t write. You have to remember always that you’re not there
to cheer or sympathise or have emotions, but only to report, to record.
You tell what your eyes see. You’ll soon get so that you can and will
make good stories out of your own calamaties.”
“Is that a portrait of the editor?” asked Howard, pointing to a grimed
oil-painting, the only relief to the stretch of cracked and streaked
white wall except a few ragged maps.
“That--oh, that is old man Stone--the ‘great condenser.’ He’s there for
a double purpose, as an example of what a journalist should be and as a
warning of what a journalist comes to. After twenty years of fine work
at crowding more news in good English into one column than any other
editor could get in bad English into four columns, he was discharged for
drunkenness. Soon afterwards he walked off the end of a dock one night
in a fog. At least it was said that there was a fog and that he was
drunk. I have my doubts.”
“Cheerful! I have not been in the profession an hour but I have already
learned something very valuable.”
“What’s that?” asked Kittredge, “that it’s a good profession to get out
of?”
“No. But that bad habits will not help a man to a career in journalism
any more than in any other profession.”
“Career?” smiled Kittredge, resenting Howard’s good-humoured irony
and putting on a supercilious look that brought out more strongly the
insignificance of his face. “Journalism is not a career. It is either a
school or a cemetery. A man may use it as a stepping-stone to something
else. But if he sticks to it, he finds himself an old man, dead and done
for to all intents and purposes years before he’s buried.”
“I wonder if it doesn’t attract a great many men who have a little
talent and fancy that they have much. I wonder if it does not disappoint
their vanity rather than their merit.”
“That sounds well,” replied Kittredge, “and there’s some truth in
it. But, believe me, journalism is the dragon that demands the annual
sacrifice of youth. It will have only youth. Why am I here? Why are you
here? Because we are young, have a fresh, a new point of view. As soon
as we get a little older, we shall be stale and, though still young in
years, we must step aside for young fellows with new ideas and a new
point of view.”
“But why should not one have always new ideas, always a new point of
view? Why should one expect to escape the penalties of stagnation in
journalism when one can’t escape them in any other profession?”
“But who has new ideas all the time? The average successful man has at
most one idea and makes a whole career out of it. Then there are the
temptations.”
“How do you mean?”
Kittredge flushed slightly and answered in a more serious tone:
“We must work while others amuse themselves or sleep. We must sleep
while others are at work. That throws us out of touch with the whole
world of respectability and regularity. When we get done at night,
wrought up by the afternoon and evening of this gambling with our brains
and nerves as the stake, what is open to us?”
“That is true,” said Howard. “There are the all-night saloons and--the
like.”
“And if we wish society, what society is open to us? What sort of young
women are waiting to entertain us at one, two, three o’clock in the
morning? Why, I have not made a call in a year. And I have not seen a
respectable girl of my acquaintance in at least that time, except once
or twice when I happened to have assignments that took me near Fifth
Avenue in the afternoon.”
“Mr. Kittredge, Mr. Bowring wishes to speak to you,” an office boy said
and Kittredge rose. As he went, he put his hand on Howard’s shoulder
and said: “No, I am getting out of it as fast as ever I can. I’m writing
books.”
“Kittredge,” thought Howard, “I wonder, is this Henry Jennings
Kittredge, whose stories are on all the news stands?” He saw an envelope
on the floor at his feet. The address was “Henry Jennings Kittredge,
Esq.”
When Kittredge came back for his coat, Howard said in a tone of frank
admiration: “Why, I didn’t know you were the Kittredge that everybody is
talking about. You certainly have no cause for complaint.”
Kittredge shrugged his shoulders. “At fifteen cents a copy, I have to
sell ten thousand copies before I get enough to live on for four months.
And you’d be surprised how much reputation and how little money a man
can make out of a book. Don’t be distressed because they keep you here
with nothing to do but wonder how you’ll have the courage to face the
cashier on pay day. It’s the system. Your chance will come.”
It was three days before Howard had a chance. On a Sunday afternoon the
Assistant City Editor who was in charge of the City Desk for the day
sent him up to the Park to write a descriptive story of the crowds. “Try
to get a new point of view,” he said, “and let yourself loose. There’s
usually plenty of room in Monday’s paper.”
Howard wandered through the Central Park for two hours, struggling for
the “new point of view” of the crowds he saw there--these monotonous
millions, he thought, lazily drinking at a vast trough of country air in
the heart of the city. He planned an article carefully as he dined
alone at the Casino. He went down to the office early and wrote
diligently--about two thousand words. When he had finished, the Night
City Editor told him that he might go as there would be nothing more
that night.
He was in the street at seven the next morning. As he walked along with
a News-Record, bought at the first news-stand, he searched every page:
first, the larger “heads”--such a long story would call for a “big
head;” then the smaller “heads”--they may have been crowded and have
had to cut it down; then the single-line “heads”--surely they found a
“stickful” or so worth printing.
At last he found it. A dozen items in the smallest type, agate, were
grouped under the general heading “City Jottings” at the end of an
inside column of an inside page. The first of these City Jottings was
two lines in length:
“The millions were in the Central Park yesterday, lazily drinking at
that vast trough of country air in the heart of the city.”
As he entered the office Howard looked appealingly and apologetically
at the boy on guard at the railing and braced himself to receive the
sneering frown of the City Editor and to bear the covert smiles of his
fellow reporters. But he soon saw that no one had observed his mighty
spring for a foothold and his ludicrous miss and fall.
“Had anything in yet?” Kittredge inquired casually, late in the
afternoon.
“I wrote a column and a half yesterday and I found two lines among the
City Jottings,” replied Howard, reddening but laughing.
“The first story I wrote was cut to three lines but they got a libel
suit on it.”
II.
THE CITY EDITOR RECONSIDERS.
At the end of six weeks, the City Editor called Howard up to the desk
and asked him to seat himself. He talked in a low tone so that the
Assistant City Editor, reading the newspapers at a nearby desk, could
not hear.
“We like you, Mr. Howard.” Mr. Bowring spoke slowly and with a
carefulness in selecting words that indicated embarrassment. “And we
have been impressed by your earnestness. But we greatly fear that you
are not fitted for this profession. You write well enough, but you
do not seem to get the newspaper--the news--idea. So we feel that in
justice to you and to ourselves we ought to let you know where you
stand. If you wish, we shall be glad to have you remain with us two
weeks longer. Meanwhile you can be looking about you. I am certain that
you will succeed somewhere, in some line, sooner or later. But I think
that the newspaper profession is a waste of your time.”
Howard had expected this. Failure after failure, his articles thrown
away or rewritten by the copyreaders, had prepared him for the blow. Yet
it crushed him for the moment. His voice was not steady as he replied:
“No doubt you are right. Thank you for taking the trouble to study my
case and tell me so soon.”
“Don’t hesitate to stay on for the two weeks,” Mr. Bowring continued.
“We can make you useful to us. And you can look about to much better
advantage than if you were out of a place.”
“I’ll stay the two weeks,” Howard said, “unless I find something
sooner.”
“Don’t be more discouraged than you can help,” said Mr. Bowring. “You
may be very grateful before long for finding out so early what many of
us--I myself, I fear--find out after years and--when it is too late.”
Always that note of despair; always that pointing to the motto over the
door of the profession: “Abandon hope, ye who enter here.” What was
the explanation? Were these men right? Was he wrong in thinking that
journalism offered the most splendid of careers--the development of the
mind and the character; the sharpening of all the faculties; the service
of truth and right and human betterment, in daily combat with injustice
and error and falsehood; the arousing and stimulating of the drowsy
minds of the masses of mankind?
Howard looked about at the men who held on where he was slipping. “Can
it be,” he thought, “that I cannot survive in a profession where the
poorest are so poor in intellect and equipment? Why am I so dull that I
cannot catch the trick?”
He set himself to study newspapers, reading them line by line, noting
the modes of presenting facts, the arrangement of headlines, the order
in which the editors put the several hundred items before the eyes
of the reader--what they displayed on each page and why; how they
apportioned the space. With the energy of unconquerable resolution he
applied himself to solving for himself the puzzle of the press--the
science and art of catching the eye and holding the attention of the
hurrying, impatient public.
He learned much. He began to develop the news-instinct, that subtle
instant realisation of what is interesting and what is not interesting
to the public mind. But the time was short; a sense of impending
calamity and the lack of self-confidence natural to inexperience made it
impossible for him effectively to use his new knowledge in the few small
opportunities which Mr. Bowring gave him. With only six days of his two
weeks left, he had succeeded in getting into the paper not a single item
of a length greater than two sticks. He slept little; he despaired not
at all; but he was heart-sick and, as he lay in his bed in the little
hall-room of the furnished-room house, he often envied women the relief
of tears. What he endured will be appreciated only by those who have
been bred in sheltered homes; who have abruptly and alone struck out
for themselves in the ocean of a great city without a single lesson
in swimming; who have felt themselves seized from below and dragged
downward toward the deep-lying feeding-grounds of Poverty and Failure.
“Buck up, old man,” said Kittredge to whom he told his bad news after
several days of hesitation and after Kittredge had shown him that he
strongly suspected it. “Don’t mind old Bowring. You’re sure to get on,
and, if you insist upon the folly, in this profession. I’ll give you a
note to Montgomery--he’s City Editor over at the _World_-shop--and he’ll
take you on. In some ways you will do better there. You’ll rise faster,
get a wider experience, make more money. In fact, this shop has only one
advantage. It does give a man peace of mind. It’s more like a club
than an office. But in a sense that is a drawback. I’ll give you a note
to-night. You will be at work over there to-morrow.”
“I think I’ll wait a few days,” said Howard, his tone corresponding to
the look in his eyes and the compression of his resolute mouth.
The next day but one Mr. Bowring called him up to the City Desk and gave
him a newspaper-clipping which read:
“Bald Peak, September 29--Willie Dent, the three-year-old baby
of John Dent, a farmer living two miles from here, strayed away
into the mountains yesterday and has not been seen since. His
dog, a cur, went with him. Several hundred men are out searching.
It has been storming, and the mountains are full of bears
and wild cats.”
“Yes, I saw this in the _Herald_,” said Howard.
“Will you take the train that leaves at eleven tonight and get us the
story--if it is not a ‘fake,’ as I strongly suspect. Telegraph your
story if there is not time for you to get back here by nine to-morrow
night.”
“Of course it’s a fake, or at least a wild exaggeration,” thought Howard
as he turned away. “If Bowring had not been all but sure there was
nothing in it, he would never have given it to me.”
He was not well, his sleepless nights having begun to tell even upon
his powerful constitution. The rest of that afternoon and all of a night
without sleep in the Pullman he was in a depth of despond. He had been
in the habit of getting much comfort out of an observation his father
had made to him just before he died: “Remember that ninety per cent
of these fourteen hundred million human beings are uncertain where
to-morrow’s food is to come from. Be prudent but never be afraid.” But
just then he could get no consolation out of this maxim of grim cheer.
He seemed to himself incompetent and useless, a predestined failure.
“What is to become of me?” he kept repeating, his heart like lead and
his mind fumbling about in a confused darkness.
At Bald Peak he was somewhat revived by the cold mountain air of the
early morning. As he alighted upon the station platform he spoke to the
baggage-master standing in front of the steps.
“Was the little boy of a man named Dent lost in the mountains near
here?”
“Yes--three days ago,” replied the baggage-man.
“Have they found him yet?”
“No--nor never will alive--that’s my opinion.”
Howard asked for the nearest livery-stable and within twenty minutes was
on his way to Dent’s farm. His driver knew all about the lost child. Two
hundred men were still searching. “And Mrs. Dent, she’s been sittin’
by the window, list’nin’ day and night. She won’t speak nor eat and
she ain’t shed a tear. It was her only child. The men come in sayin’ it
ain’t no use to hunt any more, an’ they look at her an’ out they goes
ag’in.”
Soon the driver pointed to a cottage near the road. The gate was open;
the grass and the flower-beds were trampled into a morass. The door was
thrown wide and several women were standing about the threshold. At the
window within view of the road and the mountains sat the mother--a
young woman with large brown eyes, and clear-cut features, refined,
beautified, exalted by suffering. Her look was that of one listening for
a faint, far away sound upon which hangs the turn of the balances to joy
or to despair.
* * * * *
That morning two of the searchers went to the northeast into the dense
and tangled swamp woods between Bald Peak and Cloudy Peak--the wildest
wilderness in the mountains. The light barely penetrates the foliage on
the brightest days. The ground is rough, sometimes precipitous, closely
covered with bushes and tangled creepers.
The two explorers, almost lost themselves, came at last to the edge of a
swamp surrounded by cedars. They half-crawled, half-climbed through the
low trees and festooning creepers to the edge of a clear bit of open,
firm ground.
In the middle was a cedar tree. Under it, seated upon the ground, was
the lost boy. His bare, brown legs, torn and bleeding, were stretched
straight in front of him. His bare feet were bruised and cut. His
gingham dress was torn and wet and stained. His small hands were smears
of dirt and blood. He was playing with a tin can. He had put a stone
into it and was making a great rattling. The dog was running to and fro,
apparently enjoying the noise. The little boy’s face was tear-stained
and his eyes were swollen. But he was not crying just then and laughter
lurked in his thin, fever-flushed face.
As the men came into view, the dog began to bark angrily, but the boy
looked a solemn welcome.
“Want mamma,” he said. “I’se hungry.”
One of the men picked him up--the gingham dress was saturated.
“You’re hungry?” asked the man, his voice choking.
“Yes. An’ I’se so wet. It wained and wained.” Then the child began to
sob. “It was dark,” he whispered, “an’ cold. I want my mamma.”
It was an hour’s tedious journey back to Dent’s by the shortest route.
At the top of the hill those near the cottage saw the boy in the arms of
the man who had found him. They shouted and the mother sprang out of the
house and came running, stumbling down the path to the gate. She caught
at the gate-post and stood there, laughing, screaming, sobbing.
“Baby! Baby!” she called.
The little boy turned his head and stretched out his thin, blood-stained
arms. She ran toward him and snatched him from the young farmer.
“Hungry, mamma,” he sobbed, hiding his face on her shoulder.
* * * * *
Howard wrote his story on the train, going down to New York. It was a
straightforward chronicle of just what he had seen and heard. He began
at the beginning--the little mountain home, the family of three, the
disappearance of the child. He described the perils of the mountains,
the storm, the search, the wait, the listening mother, scene by scene,
ending with mother and child together again and the dog racing around
them, with wagging tail and hanging tongue. He wrote swiftly, making no
changes, without a trace of his usual self-consciousness in composition.
When he had done he went into the restaurant car and dined almost gaily.
He felt that he had failed again. How could he hope to tell such a
story? But he was not despondent. He was still under the spell of that
intense human drama with its climax of joy. His own concerns seemed
secondary, of no consequence.
He reached the office at half-past nine, handed in his “copy” and went
away. He was in bed at half-past ten and was at once asleep. At eleven
the next morning a knocking awakened him from a sound sleep that had
restored and refreshed him. “A messenger from the office,” was called
through the door in answer to his inquiry. He took the note from the boy
and tore it open:
“My dear Mr. Howard: Thank you for the splendid story you gave us last
night. It is one of the best, if not the best, we have had the pleasure
of publishing in years. Your salary has been raised to twenty-five
dollars a week.
“Congratulations. You have ‘caught on’ at last. I’m glad to take back
what I said the other day.
“HENRY C. BOWRING.”
III.
A PARK ROW CELEBRITY.
Kittredge was the first to congratulate him when he reached the office.
“Everybody is talking about your story,” he said. “I must say I was
surprised when I read it. I had begun to fear that you would never catch
the trick--for, with most of us writing is only a trick. But now I see
that you are a born writer. Your future is in your own hands.”
“You think I can learn to write?”
“That is the sane way to put it. Yes, I know that you can. If you’ll
only not be satisfied with the results that come easy, you will make a
reputation. Not a mere Park Row reputation, but the real thing.”
Howard got flattery enough in the next few days to turn a stronger
head than was his at twenty-two. But a few partial failures within a
fortnight sobered him and steadied him. His natural good sense made him
take himself in hand. He saw that his success had been to a great extent
a happy accident; that to repeat it, to improve upon it he must study
life, study the art of expression. He must keep his senses open to
impression. He must work at style, enlarge his vocabulary, learn the use
of words, the effect of varying combinations of words both as to sound
and as to meaning. “I must learn to write for the people,” he thought,
“and that means to write the most difficult of all styles.”
He was, then and always, one of those who like others and are liked by
them, yet never seek company and so are left to themselves. As he had
no money to spare and a deep aversion to debt, he was not tempted into
joining in the time-wasting dissipations that were now open to him. He
worked hard at his profession and, when he left the office, usually went
direct to his rooms to read until far into the morning. He was often
busy sixteen hours out of the twenty-four. His day at reporting was
long--from noon until midnight, and frequently until three in the
morning. But the work was far different from the grind which is the lot
of the young men striving in other professions or in business. It
was the most fascinating work imaginable for an intelligent, thirsty
mind--the study of human nature under stress of the great emotions.
His mode of thought and his style made Mr. Bowring and Mr. King give him
much of this particular kind of reporting. So he was always observing
love, hate, jealousy, revenge, greed. He saw these passions in action in
the lives of people of all kinds and conditions. And he saw little else.
The reporter is a historian. And history is, as Gibbon says, for the
most part “a record of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”
For many a man this has been a ruinous, one-sided development. Howard
was saved by his extremely intelligent, sympathetic point of view.
He saw the whole of each character, each conflict that he was sent to
study. If the point of the story was the good side of human nature--some
act of generosity or self-sacrifice--he did not exaggerate it into
godlike heroism but adjusted it in its proper prospective by bringing
out its human quality and its human surroundings. If the main point was
violence or sordidness or baseness, he saw the characteristics which
relieved and partially redeemed it. His news-reports were accounts of
the doings not of angels or devils but of human beings, accounts written
from a thoroughly human standpoint.
Here lay the cause of his success. In all his better stories--for
he often wrote poor ones--there was the atmosphere of sincerity, of
realism, the marks of an acute observer, without prejudice and with
a justifiable leaning toward a belief in the fundamental worth of
humanity. Where others were cynical he was just. Where others were
sentimental, he had sincere, healthful sentiment. Where others were
hysterical, he calmly and accurately described, permitting the tragedy
to reveal itself instead of burying it beneath high-heaped adjectives.
Simplicity of style was his aim and he was never more delighted by any
compliment than by one from the chief political reporter.
“That story of yours this morning,” said this reporter whose lack as
a writer was more than compensated by his ability to get intimately
acquainted with public men, “reads as if a child might have written it.
I don’t see how you get such effects without any style at all. You just
let your story tell itself.”
“Well, you see,” replied Howard, “I am writing for the masses, and fine
writing would be wasted upon them.”
“You’re right,” said Jackman, “we don’t need literature on this
paper--long words, high-sounding phrases and all that sort of thing.
What we want is just plain, simple English that goes straight to the
point.”
“Like Shakespeare’s and Bunyan’s,” suggested Kittredge with a grin.
“Shakespeare? Fudge!” scoffed Jackman. “Why he couldn’t have made a
living as a space-writer on a New York newspaper.”
“No, I don’t think he would have staid long in Park Row,” replied
Kittredge with a subtlety of meaning that escaped Jackman.
A few days before New Year’s the Managing Editor looked up and smiled as
Howard was passing his desk.
“How goes it?” he asked.
“Oh, not so badly,” Howard answered, “but I am a good deal depressed at
times.”
“Depressed? Nonsense! You’ve got everything--youth, health and freedom.
And by the way, you are going on space the first of the year. Our rule
is a year on salary before space. But we felt that it was about time to
strengthen the rule by making an exception.”
Howard stammered thanks and went away. This piece of news, dropped
apparently so carelessly by Mr. King, meant a revolution in fortune for
him. It was the transition from close calculation on twenty-five dollars
a week to wealth beyond his most fanciful dreams of six months ago. Not
having the money-getting instinct and being one of those who compare
their work with the best instead of with the inferior, Howard never felt
that he was “entitled to a living.” He had a lively sense of gratitude
for the money return for his services which prudence presently taught
him to conceal.
“Space” meant to him eighty dollars a week at least--circumstances of
ease. So vast a sum did it seem that he began to consider the problem of
investment. “I have been not badly off on twenty-five dollars a week,”
he thought. “With, well, say forty dollars a week I shall be able to
satisfy all my wants. I can save at least forty a week and that will
mean an independence with a small income by the time I am thirty-four.”
But--a year after he was put “on space” he was still just about even
with his debts. He seemed to himself to be living no better and it
was only by careful counting-up that he could see how that dream of
independence had eluded him. A more extensive wardrobe, a little better
food, a more comfortable suite of rooms, an occasional dinner to some
friends, loans to broken-down reporters, and the mysteriously vanished
two thousand dollars was accounted for.
Howard tried to retrench, devised small ingenious schemes for saving
money, lectured himself severely and frequently for thus trifling away
his chance to be a free man. But all in vain. He remained poor; and,
whenever he gave the matter thought, which was not often, gloomy
forebodings as to the future oppressed him. “I shall find myself old,”
he thought, “with nothing accomplished, with nothing laid by. I shall
be an old drudge.” He understood the pessimistic tone of his profession.
All about him were men like himself--leading this gambler’s life of
feverish excitement and evanescent achievement, earning comfortable
incomes and saving nothing, looking forward to the inevitable time of
failing freshness and shattered nerves and declining income.
He spasmodically tried to write stories for the magazines, contrived
plots for novels and plays, wrote first chapters, first scenes of
first acts. But the exactions of newspaper life, the impossibility of
continuous effort at any one piece of work and his natural inertia--he
was inert but neither idle nor lazy--combined to make futile his efforts
to emancipate himself from hand-to-mouth journalism.
He had been four years a reporter and was almost twenty-six years old.
He was known throughout his profession in New York, although he had
never signed an article. One remarkable “human interest” story after
another had forced the knowledge of his abilities upon the reporters and
editors of other newspapers. And he was spoken of as one of the best and
in some respects the best “all round reporter” in the city. This meant
that he was capable to any emergency--that, whatever the subject, he
could write an accurate, graphic, consecutive and sustained story and
could get it into the editor’s hands quickly.
Indeed he possessed facility to the perilous degree. What others
achieved only after long toil, he achieved without effort. This was
due chiefly to the fact that he never relaxed but was at all times
the journalist, reading voraciously newspapers, magazines and the best
books, and using what he read; observing constantly and ever trying to
see something that would make “good copy”; turning over phrases in his
mind to test the value of words both as to sound and as to meaning.
He was an incessantly active man. His great weakness was the common
weakness--failure to concentrate. In Park Row they regarded him as a
brilliant success. Brilliant he was. But a success he was not. He knew
that he was a brilliant failure--and not very brilliant.
“Why is it?” he asked himself again and again in periods of reaction
from the nervous strain of some exciting experience. “Shall I never
seize any of these chances that are always thrusting themselves at
me? Shall I always act like a Neapolitan beggar? Will the stimulus to
ambition never come?”
IV.
IN THE EDGE OF BOHEMIA.
Howard lived in Washington Square, South. He had gone to a
“furnished-room house” there because it was cheap. He staid because he
was comfortable and was without a motive for moving.
It was the centre of the most varied life in New York. To the north lay
fashion and wealth, to the east and west, respectability and moderate
means; to the south, poverty and squalor, vice and crime. All could be
seen and heard from the windows of his sitting room. In the evenings
toward spring he looked out upon a panorama of the human race such as
is presented by no other city in the world and by no other part of
that city. Within view were Americans of all kinds, French and Germans,
Italians and Austrians, Spaniards and Moors, Scandinavians and
negroes, born New Yorkers and born citizens of most of the capitals of
civilisation and semi-barbarism. There were actresses, dancers, shop
girls, cocottes; touts, thieves, confidence-men, mission workers;
artists and students from the musty University building, tramps and
drunkards from the “barrel-houses” and “stale-beer shops;” and, across
the square to the north, representatives of New York’s oldest and most
noted families. To the west were apartment houses whence stiff, prim
bookkeepers, floor-walkers, clerks and small shop-keepers issued with
their families on Sundays, bound for church. There were other apartment
houses--the most of them to the south--whence in the midnight hours
came slattern servants and reckless looking girls in loose wrappers and
high-heeled slippers, pitcher in hand, bound for the nearest saloon.
After dusk from early spring until late fall a multitude of interesting
sounds mingled with the roar of the elevated trains to the west and
south and the rumble of carriages in “the Avenue” to the north. Howard,
reading or writing at his window on his leisure days, heard the young
men and young women laughing and shouting and making love under the
trees where the Washington Arch glistened in the twilight. Later came
the songs--“I want you, my honey, yes I do,” or “Lu, Lu, how I love my
Lu!”, or some other of the current concert-hall jingles. Many figures
could be seen flitting about in the shadows. Usually these figures were
in pairs; usually one was in white; usually at her waist-line there was
a black belt that continued on until it was lost in the other and darker
figure.
Scraps of a score of languages--curses, jests, terms of
endearment--would float up to him. Then came the hours of comparative
silence, with the city breathing softly and regularly, with the moon
hanging low and the pale arch rising above the dark trees like a giant
ghost. There would be an occasional drunken shout or shriek; a riotous
roar of song from some staggering reveller making company for himself on
the journey home; the heavy step of the policeman. Or perhaps the only
sound to disturb the city’s sleep would be that soft tread, timid as
a mouse’s, stealthy as a jackal’s--the tread of a lonely woman with
draggled silk skirt and painted cheeks and eyes burning into the
darkness, and a heart as bitter and as sad as no money, no home, no
friends, no hope can make it.
Once he threw a silver dollar from his window to the sidewalk well in
front of her. She did not see it flash downward but she heard it ring
upon the walk. She rushed forward and twice kicked it away from her in
her frenzy to get it. When her bare hand--or was it a claw?--at last
closed upon it, she gave a low scream, looked slyly and fearfully about,
then ran as if death were at her heels.
Soon after Howard was put “on space” he took the best suite of rooms in
the house. It was a strange company which Mrs. Sands had gathered under
her roof. Except Howard there was no one, not even Mrs. Sands herself,
who did not have so much past that there was little left for future.
Indeed, perhaps none of these storm-tossed or wrecked human craft
had had more of a past than Mrs. Sands. There was no mistaking the
significance of those deep furrows filled with powder and plastered with
paint, those few hairs tinted and frizzed. But like all persons with
real pasts Mrs. Sands and her lodgers kept the veil tightly drawn. They
confessed to no yesterdays and they did not dare think of to-morrow.
They were incuriously awaiting the impulse which was sure to come, sure
to thrust them on downward.
A new lodger at Mrs. Sand’s usually took the best rooms that were to be
had. Then, sometimes slowly, sometimes swiftly, came the retreat upward
until a cubby-hole under the eaves was reached. Finally came precipitate
and baggageless departure, often with a week or two of lodging unpaid.
The next pause, if pause there was, would be still nearer the river-bed
or the Morgue.
One morning when he had been living in Washington Square, South,
about--three years, Howard was dressing hurriedly, the door of his
sitting-room accidentally ajar. Through the crack he saw some one
stooping over the serving tray which he had himself put outside his
door when he had finished breakfast. He looked more closely. It was
“the clergyman” from up under the eaves--an unfrocked priest, thin to
emaciation, misery written upon his face even more deeply than weakness.
He hastily bundled the bones of two chops and a bit of bread into a
stained and torn handkerchief, and sprang away up the stairs toward his
little hole at the roof.
Howard was in a hurry and so put off for the time action upon the
natural impulse. When he came back at midnight, there was soon a knock
at his door. He opened it and invited in the man at the threshold--a
tall, strongly built, erect German, with a dissipated handsome face,
heavily scarred from university duels.
“Pardon me for disturbing you,” said the German. His speech, his tone,
his manner, left no doubt as to his breeding though they raised the
gravest doubts as to his being willing to give a true account of why he
had become a tenant in that lodging house.
“Will you have a cigarette and some whiskey?” inquired Howard.
The German’s glance lit and lingered upon the bottle of Scotch on the
table. “Concentrated, double-distilled friendship,” said he as he poured
out his drink.
“But a friend that drives all others away,” smiled Howard.
“I have found it of a very jealous disposition,” replied the German with
a careless shrug of the shoulders and a lifting of the eyebrows. “But at
least this friend has the grace to stay after it has driven the others
away.”
“To stay until the last piece of silver is gone.”
“But what more does one expect of a friend? Besides, we are overlooking
one friend--the one who helped our clerical fellow-lodger of the attic
out of his troubles to-day.”
“His luck has turned?”
“Permanently. He shot himself this afternoon.”
“And only this morning I made up my mind to try to help him,” said
Howard regretfully.
“You could not have hoped to succeed so well. His case needed something
more than temporary expedient. But, to come to the point, I had a slight
acquaintance with him. He left a note for me--mailed it just before he
shot himself. In it he asked that I insert a personal in the Herald.
Unfortunately I have not the money. I thought that you as a journalist
might be able to suggest something.”
The German held out a slip of cheap writing paper on which was written:
“Helen--when you see this it will be over--L.”
“A good story,” was Howard’s first thought, his news-instinct alert. And
then he remembered that it was not for him to tell. “I will attend to
this for you to-morrow.”
“Thank you,” said the German, helping himself to the whiskey. “Have you
seen the new lodgers?”
“Those in the room behind me? Yes. I saw them at the front door as I
came in.”
“They’re a queer pair--the youngest I’ve seen in this house. I’ve been
wondering what tempest wrecked them on this forlorn coast so early in
the voyage.”
“Why wrecked?”
“My dear sir, we are all--except you--wrecks here, all unseaworthy at
least.”
“One of them was quite pretty, I thought,” said Howard, “the slender one
with the black hair.”
“They are not mates. The other girl is of a different sort. She’s more
used to this kind of life, at least to poverty. I fancy Miss Black-Hair
looks on it as a lark. But she’ll find out the truth by the time she has
mounted another story.”
“Here, to go up means to go down,” Howard said, weary of the
conversation and wishing that the German would leave.
“They say that they’re sisters,” the German went on, again helping
himself to the whiskey; “They say they have run away from home because
of a stepmother and that they are going to earn their own living. But
they won’t. They spend the nights racing about with a gang of the young
wretches of this neighbourhood. They won’t be able to stand getting up
early for work. And then----”
The German blew out a huge cloud of cigarette smoke, shrugged his
shoulders and added: “Miss Black-Hair may get on up town presently. But
I doubt it. The Tenderloin rarely recruits from down here.”