fill the request for ‘stuff.’ I can go where I please, do as I
please. At last I shall work. For I don’t call the drudgery done under
compulsion work.”
“Work!” Howard repeated the word several times absently. Then he leaned
forward and said with what was for him an approach to the confidential:
“What a mess I have been making of my life! What waste! What folly! I’ve
behaved like a child, an impulsive, irresponsible child. And now I must
get to work, really to work.”
“With your talents a year or so of work would free you.”
“Oh, I’m free.” Howard hesitated and flushed. “Yes, I’m free,” he
repeated bitterly. “We are all free except for the shackles we fasten
upon ourselves and can unlock for ourselves. I don’t agree with you that
earning one’s daily bread is drudgery.”
“Well, let’s see you work--work for something definite. Why don’t you
try for some higher place on the paper--correspondent at Washington or
London--no, not London, for that is a lounging job which would ruin even
an energetic man. Why not try for the editorial staff? They ought
to have somebody upstairs who takes an interest in something besides
politics.”
“But doesn’t a man have to write what he doesn’t believe? You know
how Segur is always laughing at the protection editorials he writes,
although he is a free-trader.”
“Oh, there must be many directions in which the paper is free to express
honest opinions.”
Howard began that very night. As soon as he reached his club where he
was living for a few days he sat down to the file of the _News-Record_
and began to study its editorial style and method. He had learned a
great deal before three o’clock in the morning and had written a short
editorial on a subject he took from the news. In the morning he read his
article again and decided that with a few changes--adjectives cut out,
long sentences cut up, short sentences made shorter and the introduction
and the conclusion omitted--it would be worth handing in. With the
corrected article in his hand he knocked at the door of the editor’s
room.
It was a small, plainly furnished office--no carpet, three severe
chairs, a revolving book case with a battered and dusty bust of Lincoln
on it, a table strewn with newspaper cuttings. Newspapers from all
parts of the world were scattered about the floor. At the table sat the
editor, Mr. Malcolm, whom Howard had never before seen.
He was short and slender, with thin white hair and a smooth, satirical
face, deeply wrinkled and unhealthily pale. He was dressed in black
but wore a string tie of a peculiarly lively shade of red. His most
conspicuous feature was his nose--long, narrow, pointed, sarcastic.
“My name is Howard,” began the candidate, all but stammering before Mr.
Malcolm’s politely uninterested glance, “and I come from downstairs.”
“Oh--so you are Mr. Howard. I’ve heard of you often. Will you be
seated?”
“Thank you--no. I’ve only brought in a little article I thought I’d
submit for your page. I’d like to write for it and, if you don’t mind,
I’ll bring in an article occasionally.”
“Glad to have it. We like new ideas; and a new pen, a new mind, ought to
produce them. If you don’t see your articles in the paper, you’ll know
what has happened to them. If you do, paste them on space slips and
send them up by the boy on Thursdays.” Mr. Malcolm nodded and smiled and
dipped his pen in the ink-well.
The editorial appeared just as Howard wrote it. He read and reread it,
admiring the large, handsome editorial type in which it was printed, and
deciding that it was worthy of the excellent place in the column which
Mr. Malcolm had given it. He wrote another that very day and sent it
up by the boy. He found it in his desk the next noon with “Too
abstract--never forget that you are writing for a newspaper” scrawled
across the last page in blue pencil.
In the two following months Howard submitted thirty-five articles.
Three were published in the main as he wrote them, six were “cut” to
paragraphs, one appeared as a letter to the editor with “H” signed to
it. The others disappeared. It was not encouraging, but Howard kept on.
He knew that if he stopped marching steadily, even though hopelessly,
toward a definite goal, a heavy hand would be laid upon his shoulder to
drag him away and fling him down upon a grave.
As it was, desperately though he fought to refrain from backward
glances, he was now and again taken off his guard. A few of her pencil
marks on the margin of a leaf in one of his books; a gesture, a little
mannerism of some woman passing him in the street--and he would be ready
to sink down with weariness and loneliness, like a tired traveller in a
vast desert.
He completely lost self-control only once. It was a cold, wet May night
and everything had gone against him that day. He looked drearily round
his rooms as he came in. How stiff, how forbidding, how desert they
seemed! He threw himself into a big chair.
“No friends,” he thought, “no one that cares a rap whether I live or
die, suffer or am happy. Nothing to care for. Why do I go on? What’s the
use if one has not an object--a human object?”
And their life together came flooding back--her eyes, her kisses,
her attentions, her passionate love for him, so pervasive yet so
unobtrusive; the feeling of her smooth, round arm about his neck; her
way of pressing close up to him and locking her fingers in his; the
music of her voice, singing her heartsong to him yet never putting it
into words----
He stumbled over to the divan and stretched himself out and buried his
face in the cushions. “Come back!” he sobbed. “Come back to me, dear.”
And then he cried, as a man cries--without tears, with sobs choking up
into his throat and issuing in moans.
“Curious,” he said aloud when the storm was over and he was sitting up,
ashamed before himself for his weakness, “who would have suspected me of
this?”
IX.
AMBITION AWAKENS.
Howard was now thirty-two. He was still trying for the editorial staff;
but in the last month only five of his articles had been printed to
twenty-three thrown away. A national campaign was coming on and the
_News-Record_ was taking a political stand that seemed to him sound and
right. For the first time he tried political editorials.
The cause aroused his passion for justice, for democratic equality and
the abolition of privilege. He had something to say and he succeeded
in saying it vigorously, effectively, with clearness and moderation of
statement. How to avoid hysteria; how to set others on fire instead of
only making of himself a fiery spectacle; how to be earnest, yet
calm; how to be satirical yet sincere; how to be interesting, yet
direct--these were his objects, pursued with incessant toiling,
rewriting again and again, recasting of sentences, careful balancing of
words for exact shades of meaning.
“I shall never learn to write,” had been his complaint of himself
to himself for years. And in these days it seemed to him that he was
farther from a good style than ever. His standards had risen, were
rising; he feared that his power of accomplishment was failing.
Therefore his heart sank and his face paled when an office boy told him
that Mr. Malcolm wished to see him.
“I suppose it’s to tell me not to annoy him with any more of my
attempts,” he thought. “Well, anyway, I’ve had the benefit of the work.
I’ll try a novel next.”
“Take a seat,” said Mr. Malcolm with an absent nod. “Just a moment, if
you please.”
On a chair beside him was the remnant of what had been a huge
up-piling of newspapers--the exchanges that had come in during the past
twenty-four hours. The Exchange Editor had been through them and Mr.
Malcolm was reading “to feel the pulse of the country” and also to make
sure that nothing of importance had been overlooked.
On the floor were newspapers by the score, thrown about tumultuously.
Mr. Malcolm would seize a paper from the unread heap, whirl it open and
send his glance and his long pointed nose tearing down one column and up
another, and so from page to page. It took less than a minute for him
to finish and filing away great sixteen page dailies. A few seconds
sufficed for the smaller papers. Occasionally he took his long shears
and with a skilful twist cut out a piece from the middle of a page and
laid it and the shears upon the table with a single motion.
“Now, Mr. Howard.” Malcolm sent the last paper to increase the chaos on
the floor and faced about in his revolving chair. “How would you like to
come up here?”
Howard looked at him in amazement. “You mean----”
“We want you to join the editorial staff. Mr. Walker has married him a
rich wife and is going abroad to do literary work, which means that he
is going to do nothing. Will you come?”
“It is what I have been working for.”
“And very hard you have worked.” Mr. Malcolm’s cold face relaxed into
a half-friendly, half-satirical smile. “After you’d been sending up
articles for a fortnight, I knew you’d make it. You went about it
systematically. An intelligent plan, persisted in, is hard to beat in
this world of laggards and hap-hazard strugglers.”
“And I was on the point of giving up--that is, giving up this particular
ambition,” Howard confessed.
“Yes, I saw it in your articles--a certain pessimism and despondency.
You show your feelings plainly, young man. It is an excellent
quality--but dangerous. A man ought to make his mind a machine working
evenly without regard to his feelings or physical condition. The night
my oldest child died--I was editor of a country newspaper--I wrote my
leaders as usual. I never had written better. You can be absolute master
inside, if you will. You can learn to use your feelings when they’re
helpful and to shut them off when they hinder.”
“But don’t you think that temperament----”
“Temperament--that’s one of the subtlest forms of self-excuse. However,
the place is yours. The salary is a hundred and twenty-five a week--an
advance of about twelve hundred a year, I believe, on your average
downstairs. Can you begin soon?”
“Immediately,” said Howard, “if the City Editor is satisfied.”
An office boy showed him to his room--a mere hole-in-the-wall with just
space for a table-desk, a small table, a case of shelves for books of
reference, and two chairs. The one window overlooked the lower end
of Manhattan Island--the forest of business buildings peaked with the
Titan-tenements of financial New York. Their big, white plumes of
smoke and steam were waving in the wind and reflecting in pale pink the
crimson of the setting sun.
Howard had his first taste of the intoxication of triumph, his first
deep inspiration of ambition. He recalled his arrival in New York, his
timidity, his dread lest he should be unable to make a living--“Poor
boy,” they used to say at home, “he will have to be supported. He is too
much of a dreamer.” He remembered his explorations of those now familiar
streets--how acutely conscious he had been that they were paved with
stone, walled with stone, roofed with a stony sky, peopled with faces
and hearts of stone. How miserably insignificant he had felt!
And all these years he had been almost content to be one of the crowd,
like them exerting himself barely enough to provide himself with the
essentials of existence. Like them, he had given no real thought to the
morrow. And now, with comparatively little labour, he had put himself
in the way to become a master, a director of the enormous concentrated
energies summed up in the magic word New York.
The key to the situation was--work, incessant, self-improving,
self-developing. “And it is the key to happiness also,” he thought.
“Work and sleep--the two periods of unconsciousness of self--are the two
periods of happiness.”
His aloofness freed him from the temptations of distraction. He knew no
women. He did not put himself in the way of meeting them. He kept away
from theatres. He sunk himself in a routine of labour which, viewed from
the outside, seemed dull and monotonous. Viewed from his stand-point of
acquisition, of achievement, it was just the reverse.
The mind soon adapts itself to and enjoys any mental routine which
exercises it. The only difficulty is in forming the habit of the
routine.
Howard was greatly helped by his natural bent toward editorial writing.
The idea of discussing important questions each day with a vast
multitude as an audience stirred his imagination and aroused his
instincts for helping on the great world-task of elevating the race.
This enthusiasm pleased and also amused his cynical chief.
“You believe in things?” Malcolm said to him after they had become well
acquainted. “Well, it is an admirable quality--but dangerous. You will
need careful editing. Your best plan is to give yourself up to your
belief while you are writing--then to edit yourself in cold blood.
That is the secret of success, of great success in any line, business,
politics, a profession--enthusiasm, carefully revised and edited.”
“It is difficult to be cold blooded when one is in earnest.”
“True,” Malcolm answered, “and there is the danger. My own enthusiasms
are confined to the important things--food, clothing and shelter. It
seems to me that the rest is largely a matter of taste, training and
time of life. But don’t let me discourage you. I only suggest that you
may have to guard against believing so intensely that you produce the
impression of being an impracticable, a fanatic. Be cautious always; be
especially cautious when you are cocksure you’re right. Unadulterated
truth always arouses suspicion in the unaccustomed public. It has the
alarming tastelessness of distilled water.”
Howard was acute enough to separate the wisdom from the cynicism of his
chief. He saw the lesson of moderation. “You have failed, my very able
chief,” he said to himself, “because you have never believed intensely
enough to move you to act. You have attached too much importance to the
adulteration--the folly and the humbug. And here you are, still only a
critic, destructive but never constructive.”
At first his associates were much amused by his intensity. But as he
learned to temper and train his enthusiasm they grew to respect both his
ability and his character. Before a year had passed they were feeling
the influence of his force--his trained, informed mind, made vigorous by
principles and ideals.
Malcolm had the keen appreciation of a broad mind for this honest,
intelligent energy. He used the editorial “blue-pencil” for alteration
and condensation with the hand of a master. He cut away Howard’s
crudities, toned down and so increased his intensity, and pointed it
with the irony and satire necessary to make it carry far and penetrate
easily.
Malcolm was at once giving Howard a reputation greater than he deserved
and training him to deserve it.
* * * * *
In the office next to Howard’s sat Segur, a bachelor of forty-five who
took life as a good-humoured jest and amused his leisure with the New
Yorkers who devote a life of idleness to a nervous flight from boredom.
Howard interested Segur who resolved to try to draw him out of his
seclusion.
“I’m having some people to dinner at the Waldorf on Thursday,” he said,
looking in at the door. “Won’t you join us?”
“I’d be glad to,” replied Howard, casting about for an excuse for
declining. “But I’m afraid I’d ruin your dinner. I haven’t been out for
years. I’ve been too busy to make friends or, rather, acquaintances.”
“A great mistake. You ought to see more of people.”
“Why? Can they tell me anything that I can’t learn from newspapers or
books more accurately and without wasting so much time? I’d like to know
the interesting people and to see them in their interesting moments. But
I can’t afford to hunt for them through the wilderness of nonentities
and wait for them to become interesting.”
“But you get amusement, relaxation. Then too, it’s first-hand study of
life.”
“I’m not sure of that. Yawning is not a very attractive kind of
relaxation, is it? And as for study of life, eight years of reporting
gave me more of that than I could assimilate. And it was study of
realities, not of pretenses. As I remember them, ‘respectable’ people
are all about the same, whether in their vices or in their virtues. They
are cut from a few familiar, ‘old reliable’ patterns. No, I don’t think
there is much to be learned from respectability on dress parade.”
“You’ll be amused on Thursday. You must come. I’m counting on you.”
Howard accepted--cordially as he could not refuse decently. Yet he had
a presentiment or a shyness or an impatience at the interruption of
his routine which reproached him for accepting with insistence and
persistence.
X.
THE ETERNAL MASCULINE.
It was the first week in November, and in those days “everybody” did not
stay in the country so late as now. There were many New Yorkers in
the crowd of out-of-town people at the Waldorf. Howard was attracted,
fascinated by the scene--carefully-groomed men and women, the air of
gaiety and ease, the flowers, the music, the lights, the perfumes. At a
glance it seemed a dream of life with evil and sorrow and pain banished.
“No place for a working man,” thought he, “at least not for my kind of
a working man. It appeals too sharply to the instincts for laziness and
luxury.”
He was late and stood in the entrance to the palm-garden, looking about
for Segur. Soon he saw him waving from a table near the wall under the
music-alcove.
“The oysters are just coming,” said Segur. “Sit over there between Mrs.
Carnarvon and Miss Trevor. They are cousins, Howard, so be cautious what
you say to one about the other. Oh, here is Mr. Berersford.”
The others knew each other well; Howard knew them only as he had seen
their names in the “fashionable intelligence” columns of the newspapers.
Mrs. Carnarvon was a small thin woman in a black velvet gown which made
her thinness obtrusive and attractive or the reverse according as one’s
taste is toward or away from attenuation. Her eyes were a dull, greenish
grey, her skin brown and smooth and tough from much exposure in the
hunting field. Her cheeks were beginning to hang slightly, so that one
said: “She is pretty, but she will soon not be.” Her mouth proclaimed
strong appetites--not unpleasantly since she was good-looking.
Miss Trevor was perhaps ten years younger than her cousin, not far from
twenty-four. She had a critical, almost amused yet not unpleasant way
of looking out of unusually clear blue-green eyes. Her hair was of an
ordinary shade of dark brown, but fine and thick and admirably arranged
to set off her long, sensitive, high bred features. Her chin and mouth
expressed decision and strong emotions.
There was a vacant chair between Segur and Berersford and it was
presently filled by a fat, middle-aged woman, neither blonde nor
brunette, with a large, serene face. Upon it was written a frank
confession that she had never in her life had an original thought
capable of creating a ripple of interest. She was Mrs. Sidney, rich,
of an “old” family--in the New York meaning of the word “old”--both by
marriage and by birth, much courted because of her position and because
she entertained a great deal both in town and at a large and hospitable
country house.
The conversation was lively and amused, or seemed to amuse, all. It was
purely personal--about Kittie and Nellie and Jim and Peggie and Amy and
Bob; about the sayings and doings of a few dozen people who constituted
the intimates of these five persons.
Mrs. Carnarvon turned to the silent Howard at last and began about the
weather.
“Horrible in the city, isn’t it?”
“Well, perhaps it is,” replied Howard. “But I fancied it delightful. You
see I have not lived anywhere but New York for so long that I am hardly
capable to judge.”
“Why everybody says we have the worst climate in the world.”
“Far be it from me to contradict everybody. But for me New York has the
ideal climate. Isn’t it the best of any great city in the world? You
see, we have the air of the sea in our streets. And when the sun shines,
which it does more days in the year than in any other great city, the
effect is like champagne--or rather, like the effect champagne looks as
if it ought to have.”
“I hate champagne,” said Mrs. Carnarvon. “Marian, you must not drink it;
you know you mustn’t.” This to Miss Trevor who was lifting the glass to
her lips. She drank a little of the champagne, then set the glass down
slowly.
“What you said made me want to drink it,” she said to Howard. “I was
glad to hear your lecture on the weather. I had never thought of it
before, but New York really has a fine climate. And only this afternoon
I let that stupid Englishman--Plymouth--you’ve met him? No?--Well, at
any rate, he was denouncing our climate and for the moment I forgot
about London.”
“Frightful there, isn’t it, after October and until May?”
“Yes, and the air is usually stale even in the late spring. When it’s
warm, it’s sticky. And when it’s cold, it’s raw.”
“You are a New Yorker?”
“Yes,” said Miss Trevor faintly, and for an instant showing surprise at
his ignorance. “That is, I spend part of the winter here--like all New
Yorkers.”
“All?”
“Oh, all except those who don’t count, or rather, who merely count.”
“How do you mean?” Howard was taking advantage of her looking into her
plate to smile with a suggestion of irony. She happened to glance up and
so caught him.
“Oh,” she said, smiling with frank irony at him, “I mean all those
people--the masses, I think they’re called--the people who have to be
fussed over and reformed and who keep shops and--and all that.”
“The people who work, you mean?”
“No, I mean the people you never meet about anywhere, the people who
read the newspapers and come to the basement door.”
“Oh, yes, I understand.” Howard was laughing. “Well, that’s one way of
looking at life. Of course it’s not my way.”
“What is your way?”
“Why, being one of those who count only in the census, I naturally take
a view rather different from yours. Now I should say that _your_ people
don’t count. You see, I am most deeply interested in people who read
newspapers.”
“Oh, you write for the papers, like Jim Segur? What do you write?”
“What they call editorials.”
“You are an editor?”
“Yes and no. I am one of the editors who does not edit but is edited.”
“It must be interesting,” said Miss Trevor, vaguely.
“More interesting than you imagine. But then all work is that. In
fact work is the only permanently interesting thing in life. The rest
produces dissatisfaction and regret.”
“Oh, I’m not so very dissatisfied. Yet I don’t work.”
“Are you quite sure? Think how hard you work at being fitted for gowns,
at going about to dinners and balls and the like, at chasing foxes and
anise seed bags and golf balls.”
“But that is not work. It is amusing myself.”
“Yes, you think so. But you forget that you are doing it in order that
all these people who don’t count may read about it in the papers and so
get a little harmless relaxation.”
“But we don’t do it to get into the papers.”
“Probably not. Neither did this--what is it here in my plate, a lamb
chop?--this lamb gambol about and keep itself in condition to form a
course at Segur’s dinner. But after all, wasn’t that what it was really
for? Then think how many people you support by your work.”
“You make me feel like a day-labourer.”
“Oh, you’re a much harder worker than any day labourer. And the saddest
part of it to me is that you work altogether for others. You give, give
and get in return nothing but a few flattering glances, a few careless
pats on the back of your vanity. I should hate to work so hard for so
little.”
“But what would you do?” Miss Trevor was looking at him, interested and
amused.
“Well, I’d work for myself. I’d insist on a return, on getting back
something equivalent or near it. I’d insist on having my mind improved,
or having my power or my reputation advanced.”
“I was only jesting when I said that about people not counting.”
“Altogether?”
“No, not altogether. I don’t care much about the masses. They seem to
me to be underbred, of a different sort. I hate doing things that are
useful and I hate people that do useful things--in a general way, I
mean.”
“That is doubtless due to defective education,” said Howard, with a
smile that carried off the thrust as a jest.
“Is that the way you’d describe a horror of contact with--well, with
unpleasant things?” Miss Trevor was serious.