and gutted his way through the major's introduction, and between
slashing strokes made a war map of the Balkans in his scalp with his
blue pencil. Then he lost patience altogether.
"Here," he said to me, "you're not doing anything, are you? Well, take
this awful bunch of mushy slush and read it through, and then try to
make a decent half-column story out of it. And rush it over a page at a
time, will you? We've got to hustle to catch the three o'clock edition
with it."
Long before three o'clock the major was back in the shop, waiting for
the first run of papers to come off the press. Furtively I watched him
as he hunted through the sticky pages to find his first story. I guess
he had the budding pride of authorship in him, just as all the rest of
us have it in us. But he didn't find his story, he found mine. He didn't
say anything, but he looked crushed and forlorn as he got up and went
away. It was like him not to ask for any explanations, and it was like
Devore not to offer him any.
So it went. Even if he had grown up in the business I doubt whether
Major Putnam Stone would ever have made a newspaper man; and now he was
too far along in life to pick up even the rudiments of the trade. He
didn't have any more idea of news values than a rabbit. He had the most
amazing faculty for overlooking what was vital in the news, but he could
always be depended upon to pick out some trivial and inconsequential
detail and dress it up with about half a yard of old-point lace
adjectives. He never by any chance used a short word if he could dig up
a long, hard one, and he never seemed to be able to start a story
without a quotation from one of the poets. It never was a modern poet
either. Excepting for Sidney Lanier and Father Ryan, apparently he
hadn't heard of any poet worth while since Edgar Allan Poe died. And
everything that happened seemed to remind him--at great length--of
something else that had happened between 1861 and 1865. When it came to
lugging the Civil War into a tale, he was as bad as that character in
one of Dickens' novels who couldn't keep the head of King Charles the
First out of his literary productions. With that reared-back,
flat-heeled, stiff-spined gait of his, he would go rummaging round the
hotels and the Shawnee Club, meeting all sorts of people and hearing all
sorts of things that a real reporter would have snatched at like a
hungry dog snatching at a T-bone, and then he would remember that it
was the fortieth anniversary of the Battle of Kenesaw Mountain, or
something, and, forgetting everything else, would come bulging and
bustling back to the office, all worked up over the prospect of writing
two or three columns about that. He just simply couldn't get the
viewpoint; yet I think he tried hard enough. I guess the man who said
you couldn't teach an old dog new tricks had particular reference to an
old war dog.
I remember mighty well one incident that illustrates the point I am
trying to make. We had a Sunday edition. We were rather vain of our
Sunday edition. It carried a colored comic supplement and a section full
of special features, and we all took a more or less righteous pride in
it and tried hard to make it alive and attractive. We didn't always
succeed, but we tried all right. One Saturday night we put the Sunday to
bed, and about one o'clock, when the last form was locked, three or four
of us dropped into Tony's place at the corner for a bite to eat and a
drink. We hadn't been there very long when in came the old major, and at
my invitation he joined us at one of Tony's little round tables at the
back of the place. As a general thing the major didn't patronize Tony's.
I had never heard him say so--probably he wouldn't have said it for fear
of hurting our feelings--but I somehow had gathered the impression that
the major believed a gentleman, if he drank at all, should drink at his
club. But it was long after midnight now and the Shawnee Club would be
closed. Ike Webb spoke up presently.
"It's a pity we couldn't dig up the governor tonight," he said.
The governor had come down from the state capital about noon, and all
the afternoon and during most of the evening Webb had been trying to
find him. There was a possibility of a big story in the governor if Webb
could have found him. The major, who had been sitting there stirring his
toddy in an absent-minded sort of way, spoke up casually: "I spent an
hour with the governor tonight--at my club. In fact, I supped with him
in one of the private dining rooms." We looked up, startled, but the
major went right along. "Young gentlemen, it may interest you to know
that every time I see our worthy governor I am struck more and more by
his resemblance to General Leonidas Polk, as that gallant soldier and
gentleman looked when I last saw him----"
Devore, who had been sitting next to the major, with his shoulder half
turned from the old man, swung round sharply and interrupted him.
"Major," he said, with a thin icy stream of sarcasm trickling through
his words, "did you and the governor by any remote chance discuss
anything so brutally new and fresh as the present political
complications in this state?"
"Oh, yes," said the major blandly. "We discussed them quite at some
length--or at least the governor did. Personally I do not take a great
interest in these matters, not so great an interest as I should,
perhaps, take. However, I did feel impelled to take issue with him on
one point. Our governor is an honest gentleman--more than that, he was a
brave soldier--but I fear he is mistaken in some of his attitudes. I
regard him as being badly advised. For example, he told me that no
longer ago than this afternoon he affixed his official signature to a
veto of Senator Stickney's measure in regard to the warehouses of our
state----"
As Devore jumped up he overturned the major's toddy right in the major's
lap. He didn't stop to beg pardon, though; in fact, none of us stopped.
But at the door I threw one glance backward over my shoulder. The major
was still sitting reared back in his chair, with his wasted toddy
seeping all down the front of his billowy shirt, viewing our vanishing
figures with amazement and a mild reproof in his eyes. In the one quick
glance that I took I translated his expression to mean something like
this:
"Good Heavens, is this any way for a party of gentlemen to break up!
This could never happen at a gentlemen's club."
It was a foot-race back to the office, and Devore, who had the start,
won by a short length. Luckily the distance was short, not quite half a
block, and the presses hadn't started yet. Working like the crew of a
sinking ship, we snatched the first page form back off the steam table
and pried it open and gouged a double handful of hot slugs out of the
last column--Devore blistered his fingers doing it. A couple of linotype
operators who were on the late trick threw together the stick or two of
copy that Webb and I scribbled off a line at a time. And while we were
doing this Devore framed a triple-deck, black-face head. So we missed
only one mail.
The first page had a ragged, sloppy look, but anyway we were saved from
being scooped to death on the most important story of the year. The
vetoing of the Stickney Bill vitally affected the tobacco interests, and
they were the biggest interests in the state, and half the people of the
state had been thinking about nothing else and talking about nothing
else for two months--ever since the extra session of the legislature
started. It was well for us too that we did save our faces, because the
opposition sheet had managed to find the governor--he was stopping for
the night at the house of a friend out in the suburbs--and over the
telephone at a late hour he had announced his decision to them. But by
Monday morning the major seemed to have forgotten the whole thing. I
think he had even forgiven Devore for spilling his toddy and not
stopping to apologize.
As for Devore, he didn't say a word to the major--what would have been
the use? To Devore's credit also I will say that he didn't run to the
chief, bearing complaints of the major's hopeless incompetency. He kept
his tongue between his teeth and his teeth locked; and that must have
been hard on Devore, for he was a flickery, high-tempered man, and
nervous as a cat besides. To my knowledge, the only time he ever broke
out was when we teetotally missed the Castleton divorce story. So far as
the major's part in it was concerned, it was the Stickney veto story all
over again, with variations. The Castletons were almost the richest
people in town, and socially they stood way up. That made the scandal
that had been brewing and steeping and simmering for months all the
bigger when finally it came to a boil. When young Buford Castleton got
his eyes open and became aware of what everybody else had known for a
year or more, and when the rival evening paper came out in its last
edition with the full particulars, we, over in the Evening Press shop,
were plastered with shame, for we didn't have a line of it.
A stranger dropping in just about that time would have been justified in
thinking there was a corpse laid out in the plant somewhere, and that
all the members of the city staff were sitting up with the remains. As
luck would have it, it wasn't a stranger that dropped in on our grand
lodge of sorrow. It was Major Putnam Stone, and as he entered the door
he caught the tag end of what one of us was saying.
"I gather," he said in that large round voice of his, "that you young
gentlemen are discussing the unhappy affair which, I note, is mentioned
with such signally poor taste in the columns of our sensational
contemporary. I may state that I knew of this contemplated divorce
action yesterday. Mr. Buford Castleton, Senior, was my informant."
"What!" Devore almost yelled it. He had the love of a true city editor
for his paper, and the love of a mother for her child or a miser for his
gold is no greater love than that, let me tell you. "You knew about this
thing here?" He beat with two fingers that danced like the prongs of a
tuning fork on the paper spread out in front of him. "You knew it
yesterday?"
"Certainly," said the major. "The elder Mr. Castleton bared the truly
distressing details to me at the Shawnee Club."
"In confidence though--he told you about it in confidence, didn't he,
major?" said Ike Webb, trying to save the old fellow.
But the major besottedly wouldn't be saved.
"Absolutely not," he said. "There were several of us present, at least
three other gentlemen whose names I cannot now recall. Mr. Castleton
made the disclosure as though he wished it to be known among his
friends and his son's friends. It was quite evident to all of us that he
was entirely out of sympathy with the lady who is his daughter-in-law."
Devore forced himself to be calm. It was almost as though he sat on
himself to hold himself down in his chair; but when he spoke his voice
ran up and down the scales quiveringly.
"Major," he said, "don't you think it would be a good idea if you would
admit that the Southern Confederacy was defeated, and turned your
attention to a few things that have occurred subsequently? Why didn't
you write this story? Why didn't you tell me, so that I could write it?
Why didn't----Oh, what's the use!"
The major straightened himself up.
"Sir," he said, "allow me to correct you in regard to a plain
misstatement of fact. Sir, the Southern Confederacy was never defeated.
It ceased to exist as a nation because we were exhausted--because our
devastated country was exhausted. Another thing, sir, I am employed upon
this paper, I gainsay you, as a reporter, not as a scandal monger. I
would be the last to give circulation in the public prints to another
gentleman's domestic unhappiness. I regard it as highly improper that a
gentleman's private affairs should be aired in a newspaper under any
circumstances."
And with that he bowed and turned on his heel and went out, leaving
Devore shaking all over with the superhuman task of trying to hold
himself in. About ten minutes later, when I came out bound for my
boarding house, the major was standing at the front door. He looped one
of his absurdly small fingers into one of my buttonholes.
"Our city editor means well, no doubt," he said, "but he doesn't
understand, he doesn't appreciate our conceptions of these matters. He
was born on the other side of the river, you know," he said as though
that explained everything. Then his tone changed and anxiety crept into
it. "Do you think that I went too far? Do you think I ought to return to
him and apologize to him for the somewhat hasty and abrupt manner of
speech I used just now?"
I told him no--I didn't know what might happen if he went back in there
then--and I persuaded him that Devore didn't expect any apology; and
with that he seemed better satisfied and walked off. As I stood there
watching him, his stiff old back growing smaller as he went away from
me, I didn't know which I blamed the more, Devore for his malignant,
cold disdain of the major, or the major for his blatant stupidity. And
right then and there, all of a sudden, there came to me an understanding
of a thing that had been puzzling me all these weeks. Often I had
wondered how the major had endured Devore's contempt. I had decided in
my own mind that he must be blind to it, else he would have shown
resentment. But now I knew the answer. The major wasn't blind, he was
afraid; as the saying goes, he was afraid of his job. He needed it; he
needed the little scrap of money it brought him every Saturday night.
That was it, I knew now.
Knowing it made me sorrier than ever for the old man. Dimly I began to
realize, I think, what his own mental attitude toward his position must
be. Here he was, a mere cub reporter--and a remarkably bad one, a proven
failure--skirmishing round for small, inconsequential items, running
errands really, at an age when most of the men he knew were getting
ready to retire from business. Yet he didn't dare quit. He didn't dare
even to rebel against the slights of the man over him, because he needed
that twelve dollars a week. It was all, no doubt, that stood between him
and actual want. His pride was bleeding to death internally. On top of
all that he was being forced into a readjustment of his whole scheme of
things, at a time of life when its ordered routine was almost as much a
part of him as his hands and feet. As I figured it, he had long before
adjusted his life to his income, cunningly fitting in certain small
luxuries and all the small comforts; and now this income was cut to a
third or a quarter perhaps of its former dimensions. It seemed a pretty
hard thing for the major. It was fierce.
Perhaps my vision was clouded by my sympathy, but I thought Major Stone
aged visibly that summer. Maybe you have noticed how it is with men who
have gone along, hale and stanch, until they reach a certain age. When
they do start to break they break fast. He lost some of his flesh and
most of his rosiness. The skin on his face loosened a little and became
a tallowy yellowish-red, somewhat like a winter-killed apple.
His wardrobe suffered. One day one of his short little shoes was split
across the top just back of the toe cap, and the next morning it was
patched. Pretty soon the other shoe followed suit--first a crack in the
leather, then a clumsy patch over the crack. He wore his black slouch
hat until it was as green in spots as a gage plum; and late in August he
supplanted it with one of those cheap, varnished brown-straw hats that
cost about thirty-five cents apiece and look it.
His linen must have been one of his small extravagances. Those
majestically collared garments with the tremendous plaited bosoms and
the hand worked eyelets, where the three big flat gold studs went in,
never came ready made from any shop. They must have been built to his
measure and his order. Now he wore them until there were gaped places
between the plaits where the fine, fragile linen had ripped lengthwise,
and the collars were frayed down and broken across and caved in limply.
Finally he gave them up too, and one morning came to work wearing a
flimsy, sleazy, negligee shirt. I reckon you know the kind of shirt I
mean--always it fits badly, and the sleeves are always short and the
bosom is skimpy, and the color design is like bad wall-paper. After his
old full-bosomed grandeur this shirt, with a ten-cent collar buttoned on
to it and overriding the neckband, and gaping away in the front so that
the major's throat showed, seemed to typify more than anything else the
days upon which he had fallen. About this time I thought his voice took
on a changed tone permanently. It was still hollow, but it no longer
rang.
A good many men similarly placed would have taken to drink, but Major
Putnam Stone plainly was never born to be a drunkard and hard times
couldn't make one of him. With a sort of gentle, stupid persistence he
hung fast to his poor job, blundering through some way, struggling
constantly to learn the first easy tricks of the trade--the a, b, c's of
it--and never succeeding. He still lugged the classical poets and the
war into every story he tried to write, and day after day Devore
maintained his policy of eloquent brutal silence, refusing dumbly to
accept the major's clumsy placating attempts to get upon a better
footing with him. After that once he had never attempted to scold the
old man, but he would watch the major pottering round the city room,
and he would chew on his under lip and viciously lance his scalp with
his pencil point.
Well, aside from the major, Devore had his troubles that summer. That
was the summer of the biggest, bitterest campaign that the state had
seen, so old-timers said, since Breckinridge ran against Douglas and
both of them against Lincoln. If you have ever lived in the South,
probably you know something of political fights that will divide a state
into two armed camps, getting hotter and hotter until old slumbering
animosities come crawling out into the open, like poison snakes from
under a rock, and new lively ones hatch from the shell every hour or so
in a multiplying adder brood.
This was like that, only worse. Stripped of a lot of embroidery in the
shape of side issues and local complications, it resolved itself in a
last-ditch, last-stand, back-to-the-wall fight of the old regime of the
party against the new. On one side were the oldsters, bearers of famous
names some of them, who had learned politics as a trade and followed it
as a profession. Almost to a man they were professional office holders,
professional handshakers, professional silver tongues. And against them
were pitted a greedy, hungry group of younger men, less showy perhaps in
their persons, less picturesque in their manner of speech, but filled
each one with a great yearning for office and power; and they brought to
the aid of their vaulting ambitions a new and a faultlessly running
machine. From the outset the Evening Press had championed the cause of
the old crowd--the state-house ring as the enemy called it, when they
didn't call it something worse. We championed it not as a Northern or an
Eastern paper might, in a sedate, half-hearted way, but fiercely and
wholly and blindly--so blindly that we could see nothing in our own
faction but what was good and high and pure, nothing in the other but
what was smutted with evil intent. In daily double-leaded editorial
columns the chief preached a Holy War, and in the local pages we fought
the foe tooth and nail, biting and gouging and clawing, and they gouged
and clawed back at us like catamounts. That was where the hard work fell
upon Devore. He had to keep half his scanty staff working on politics
while the other half tried to cover the run of the news.
If I live to be a thousand years old I am not going to forget the state
convention that began at two o'clock that muggy September afternoon at
Lyric Hall up on Washington Street in the old part of the town. Once
upon a time, twenty or thirty years before, Lyric Hall had been the
biggest theater in town. The stage was still there and the boxes, and at
the back there were miles--they seemed miles anyway--of ancient,
crumbling, dauby scenery stacked up and smelling of age and decay. Booth
and Barrett had played there, and Fanny Davenport and Billy Florence.
Now, having fallen from its high estate, it served altered
purposes--conventions were held at Lyric Hall and cheap masquerade balls
and the like.
The press tables that had been provided were not, strictly speaking,
press tables at all. They were ordinary unpainted kitchen tables, ranged
two on one side and two on the other side at the front of the stage,
close up to the old gas-tipped footlights; and when we came in by the
back way that afternoon and found our appointed places I was struck by
certain sinister facts. Usually women flocked to a state convention. By
rights there should have been ladies in the boxes and in the balcony.
Now there wasn't a woman in sight anywhere, only men, row after row of
them. And there wasn't any cheering, or mighty little of it. When I tell
you the band played Dixie all the way through with only a stray whoop
now and then, you will understand better the temper of that crowd.
The situation, you see, was like this: One side had carried the mountain
end of the state; the other had carried the lowlands. One side had swept
the city; that meant a solid block of more than a hundred delegates. The
other side had won the small towns and the inland counties. So it stood
lowlander against highlander, city man against country man, and the
bitter waters of those ancient feuds have their wellsprings back a
thousand years in history, they tell me. One side led slenderly on
instructed vote. The other side had enough contesting delegations on
hand to upset the result if these contestants or any considerable
proportion of them should be recognized in the preliminary organization.
One side held a majority of the delegates who sat upon the floor; the
other side had packed the balcony and the aisles and the corners with
its armed partizans. One side was in the saddle and determined; the
other afoot and grimly desperate. And it was our side, as I shall call
it, meaning by that the state-house ring, that for the moment had the
whiphand; and it was the other side, led in person by State Senator
Stickney, god of the new machine, that stood ready to wade hip deep
through trouble to unhorse us.
Just below me, stretching across the hall from side to side in favored
front places, sat the city delegates--Stickney men all of them. And as
my eye swept the curved double row of faces it seemed to me I saw there
every man in town with a reputation as a gun-fighter or a knife-fighter
or a fist-fighter; and every one of them wore, pinning his delegate's
badge to his breast, a Stickney button that was round and bright red,
like a clot of blood on his shirt front.
They made a contrast, these half-moon lines of blocky men, to the lank,
slouch-hatted, low-collared country delegates--farmers, school
teachers, country doctors and country lawyers--who filled the seats
behind them and on beyond them. To the one group politics was a business
in which there was money to be made and excitement to be had; to the
other group it was a passion, veritably a sacredly high and serious
thing, which they took as they did their religion, with a solemn,
intolerant, Calvinistic sincerity. There was one thing, though, they all
shared in common. Whether a man's coat was of black alpaca or striped
flannel, the right-hand pocket sagged under the weight of unseen
ironmongery; or if the coat pocket didn't sag there was a bulging clump
back under the skirts on the right hip. For all the heat, hardly a man
there was in his shirtsleeves; and it would have been funny to watch how
carefully this man or that eased himself down into his seat, favoring
his flanks against the pressure of his hardware--that is to say, it
would have been funny if it all hadn't been so deadly earnest.
You could fairly smell trouble cooking in that hall. In any corner
almost there were the potential makings of half a dozen prominent
funerals. There was scarce a man, I judged, but nursed a private grudge
against some other man; and then besides these there was the big issue
itself, which had split the state apart lengthwise as a butcher's
cleaver splits a joint. Looking out over that convention, you could
read danger spelled out everywhere, in everything, as plain as print.