Bartley stood for a moment, and then went out and wandered aimlessly about
till nightfall. He went out shocked and frightened at what he had done,
and ready for any reparation. But this mood wore away, and he came back
sullenly determined to let her make the advances toward reconciliation, if
there was to be one. Her love had already made his peace, and she met
him in the dimly lighted little hall with a kiss of silent penitence and
forgiveness. She had on her hat and shawl, as if she had been waiting for
him to come and take her out to tea; and on their way to the restaurant she
asked him of his adventure among the newspapers. He told her briefly, and
when they sat down at their table he took out the precious order and showed
it to her. But its magic was gone; it was only an order for twenty-five
dollars, now; and two hours ago it had been success, rapture, a common
hope and a common joy. They scarcely spoke of it, but talked soberly of
indifferent things.
She could not recur to her father's visit at once, and he would not be
the first to mention it. He did nothing to betray his knowledge of her
intention, as she approached the subject through those feints that women
use, and when they stood again in their little attic room she was obliged
to be explicit.
“What hurt me, Bartley,” she said, “was that you should think for an
instant that I would let father ask me to leave you, or that he would ask
such a thing. He only came to tell me to be good to you, and help you, and
trust you; and not worry you with my silliness and--and--jealousy. And I
don't ever mean to. And I know he will be good friends with you yet. He
praised you for working so hard;”--she pushed it a little beyond the bare
fact;--“he always did that; and I know he's only waiting for a good chance
to make it up with you.”
She lifted her eyes, glistening with tears, and it touched his peculiar
sense of humor to find her offering him reparation, when he had felt
himself so outrageously to blame; but he would not be outdone in
magnanimity, if it came to that.
“It's all right, Marsh. I was a furious idiot, or I should have let you
explain at once. But you see I had only one thought in my mind, and that
was my luck, which I wanted to share with you; and when your father seemed
to have come in between us again--”
“Oh, yes, yes!” she answered. “I understand.” And she clung to him in
the joy of this perfect intelligence, which she was sure could never be
obscured again.
When Bartley's article came out, she read it with a fond admiration which
all her praises seemed to leave unsaid. She bought a scrap-book, and pasted
the article into it, and said that she was going to keep everything he
wrote. “What are you going to write the next thing?” she asked.
“Well, that's what I don't know,” he answered. “I can't find another
subject like that, so easily.”
“Why, if people care to read about a logging-camp, I should think they
would read about almost anything. Nothing could be too common for them.
You might even write about the trouble of getting cheap enough rooms in
Boston.”
“Marcia,” cried Bartley, “you're a treasure! I'll write about that very
thing! I know the Chronicle-Abstract will be glad to get it.”
She thought he was joking, till he came to her after a while for some
figures which he did not remember. He had the true newspaper instinct,
and went to work with a motive that was as different as possible from the
literary motive. He wrote for the effect which he was to make, and not
from any artistic pleasure in the treatment. He did not attempt to give it
form,--to imagine a young couple like himself and Marcia coming down from
the country to place themselves in the city; he made no effort to throw
about it the poetry of their ignorance and their poverty, or the pathetic
humor of their dismay at the disproportion of the prices to their means.
He set about getting all the facts he could, and he priced a great many
lodgings in different parts of the city; then he went to a number
of real-estate agents, and, giving himself out as a reporter of the
Chronicle-Abstract, he interviewed them as to house-rents, past and
present. Upon these bottom facts, as he called them, he based a “spicy”
sketch, which had also largely the character of an _exposé_. There is
nothing the public enjoys so much as an _exposé_: it seems to be made in
the reader's own interest; it somehow constitutes him a party to the attack
upon the abuse, and its effectiveness redounds to the credit of all the
newspaper's subscribers. After a week's stay in Boston, Bartley was able
to assume the feelings of a native who sees his city falling into decay
through the rapacity of its landladies. In the heading of ten or fifteen
lines which he gave his sketch, the greater number were devoted to this
feature of it; though the space actually allotted to it in the text was
comparatively small. He called his report “Boston's Boarding-Houses,” and
he spent a paragraph upon the relation of boarding-houses to civilization,
before detailing his own experience and observation. This part had many of
those strokes of crude picturesqueness and humor which he knew how to give,
and was really entertaining; but it was when he came to contrast the rates
of house-rent and the cost of provisions with the landladies'
“PERPENDICULAR PRICES,”
that Bartley showed all the virtue of a born reporter. The sentences were
vivid and telling; the _ensemble_ was very alarming; and the conclusion was
inevitable, that, unless this abuse could somehow be reached, we should
lose a large and valuable portion of our population,--especially those
young married people of small means with whom the city's future prosperity
so largely rested, and who must drift away to find homes in rival
communities if the present exorbitant demands were maintained.
As Bartley had foretold, he had not the least trouble in selling this
sketch to the Chronicle-Abstract. The editor probably understood its
essential cheapness perfectly well; but he also saw how thoroughly readable
it was. He did not grumble at the increased price which Bartley put
upon his work; it was still very far from dear; and he liked the young
Downeaster's enterprise. He gave him as cordial a welcome as an overworked
man may venture to offer when Bartley came in with his copy, and he felt
like doing him a pleasure. Some things out of the logging-camp sketch had
been copied, and people had spoken to the editor about it, which was a
still better sign that it was a hit.
“Don't you want to come round to our club to-night?” asked the editor, as
he handed Bartley the order for his money across the table. “We have a bad
dinner, and we try to have a good time. We're all newspaper men together.”
“Why, thank you,” said Bartley, “I guess I should like to go.”
“Well, come round at half-past five, and go with me.”
Bartley walked homeward rather soberly. He had meant, if he sold this
article, to make amends for the disappointment they had both suffered
before, and to have a commemorative supper with Marcia at Parker's: he had
ignored a little hint of hers about his never having taken her there yet,
because he was waiting for this chance to do it in style. He resolved that,
if she did not seem to like his going to the club, he would go back and
withdraw his acceptance. But when he told her he had been invited,--he
thought he would put the fact in this tentative way,--she said, “I hope you
accepted!”
“Would you have liked me to?” he asked with relief.
“Why, of course! It's a great honor. You'll get acquainted with all those
editors, and perhaps some of them will want to give you a regular place.” A
salaried employment was their common ideal of a provision for their future.
“Well, that's what I was thinking myself,” said Bartley.
“Go and accept at once,” she pursued.
“Oh, that isn't necessary. If I get round there by half-past five, I can
go,” he answered.
His lurking regret ceased when he came into the reception-room, where the
members of the club were constantly arriving, and putting off their hats
and overcoats, and then falling into groups for talk. His friend of the
Chronicle-Abstract introduced him lavishly, as our American custom is.
Bartley had a little strangeness, but no bashfulness, and, with his
essentially slight opinion of people, he was promptly at his ease. These
men liked his handsome face, his winning voice, the good-fellowship of his
instant readiness to joke; he could see that they liked him, and that his
friend Ricker was proud of the impression he made; before the evening was
over he kept himself with difficulty from patronizing Ricker a little.
The club has grown into something much more splendid and expensive; but it
was then content with a dinner certainly as bad as Ricker promised, but
fabulously modest in price, at an old-fashioned hotel, whose site was long
ago devoured by a dry-goods palace. The drink was commonly water or beer;
occasionally, if a great actor or other distinguished guest honored the
board, some spendthrift ordered champagne. But no one thought fit to go to
this ruinous extreme for Bartley. Ricker offered him his choice of beer or
claret, and Bartley temperately preferred water to either; he could see
that this raised him in Ricker's esteem.
No company of men can fail to have a good time at a public dinner, and the
good time began at once with these journalists, whose overworked week ended
in this Saturday evening jollity. They were mostly young men, who found
sufficient compensation in the excitement and adventure of their underpaid
labors, and in the vague hope of advancement; there were grizzled beards
among them, for whom neither the novelty nor the expectation continued, but
who loved the life for its own sake, and would hardly have exchanged it for
prosperity. Here and there was an old fellow, for whom probably all the
illusion was gone; but he was proud of his vocation, proud even of the
changes that left him somewhat superannuated in his tastes and methods.
None, indeed, who have ever known it, can wholly forget the generous rage
with which journalism inspires its followers. To each of those young men,
beginning the strangely fascinating life as reporters and correspondents,
his paper was as dear as his king once was to a French noble; to serve it
night and day, to wear himself out for its sake, to merge himself in its
glory, and to live in its triumphs without personal recognition from the
public, was the loyal devotion which each expected his sovereign newspaper
to accept as its simple right. They went and came, with the prompt and
passive obedience of soldiers, wherever they were sent, and they struggled
each to “get in ahead” of all the others with the individual zeal of
heroes. They expanded to the utmost limits of occasion, and they submitted
with an anguish that was silent to the editorial excision, compression, and
mutilation of reports that were vitally dear to them. What becomes of these
ardent young spirits, the inner history of journalism in any great city
might pathetically show; but the outside world knows them only in the fine
frenzy of interviewing, or of recording the midnight ravages of what they
call the devouring element, or of working up horrible murders or tragical
accidents, or of tracking criminals who have baffled all the detectives.
Hearing their talk Bartley began to realize that journalism might be a very
different thing from what he had imagined it in a country printing-office,
and that it might not be altogether wise to consider it merely as a
stepping-stone to the law.
With the American eagerness to recognize talent, numbers of good fellows
spoke to him about his logging sketch; even those who had not read it
seemed to know about it as a hit. They were all delighted to be able to
say, “Ricker tells me that you offered it to old Witherby, and he wouldn't
look at it!” He found that this fact, which he had doubtfully confided to
Ricker, was not offensive to some of the Events people who were there; one
of them got him aside, and darkly owned to him that Witherby was doing
everything that any one man could to kill the Events, and that in fact the
counting-room was running the paper.
All the club united in abusing the dinner, which in his rustic ignorance
Bartley had not found so infamous; but they ate it with perfect appetite
and with mounting good spirits. The president brewed punch in a great bowl
before him, and, rising with a glass of it in his hand, opened a free
parliament of speaking, story-telling, and singing. Whoever recollected a
song or a story that he liked, called upon the owner of it to sing it or
tell it; and it appeared not to matter how old the fun or the music was:
the company was resolved to be happy; it roared and clapped till the
glasses rang. “You will like this song,” Bartley's neighbors to right and
left of him prophesied; or, “Just listen to this story of Mason's,--it's
capital,”--as one or another rose in response to a general clamor. When
they went back to the reception-room they carried the punch-bowl with them,
and there, amid a thick cloud of smoke, two clever amateurs took their
places at the piano, and sang and played to their heart's content, while
the rest, glass in hand, talked and laughed, or listened as they chose.
Bartley had not been called upon, but he was burning to try that song in
which he had failed so dismally in the logging-camp. When the pianist rose
at last, he slipped down into the chair, and, striking the chords of the
accompaniment, he gave his piece with brilliant audacity. The room silenced
itself and then burst into a roar of applause, and cries of “Encore!” There
could be no doubt of the success. “Look here, Ricker,” said a leading
man at the end of the repetition, “your friend must be one of us!”--and,
rapping on the table, he proposed Bartley's name. In that simple time the
club voted _viva voce_ on proposed members, and Bartley found himself
elected by acclamation, and in the act of paying over his initiation fee to
the treasurer, before he had well realized the honor done him. Everybody
near him shook his hand, and offered to be of service to him. Much of this
cordiality was merely collective good feeling; something of it might be
justly attributed to the punch; but the greater part was honest. In this
civilization of ours, grotesque and unequal and imperfect as it is in many
things, we are bound together in a brotherly sympathy unknown to any other.
We new men have all had our hard rubs, but we do not so much remember them
in soreness or resentment as in the wish to help forward any other who is
presently feeling them. If he will but help himself too, a hundred hands
are stretched out to him.
Bartley had kept his head clear of the punch, but he left the club drunk
with joy and pride, and so impatient to be with Marcia and tell her of his
triumphs that he could hardly wait to read the proof of his boarding-house
article which Ricker had put in hand at once for the Sunday edition. He
found Marcia sitting up for him, and she listened with a shining face while
he hastily ran over the most flattering facts of the evening. She was not
so much surprised at the honors done him as he had expected but she was
happier, and she made him repeat it all and give her the last details. He
was afraid she would ask him what his initiation had cost; but she seemed
to have no idea that it had cost anything, and though it had swept away a
third of the money he had received for his sketch, he still resolved that
she should have that supper at Parker's.
“I consider my future made,” he said aloud, at the end of his swift
cogitation on this point.
“Oh, yes!” she responded rapturously. “We needn't have a moment's anxiety.
But we must be very saving still till you get a place.”
“Oh, certainly,” said Bartley.