The young men dressed next morning in almost complete silence. Tom was
still sleepy, and seemed much less jovial and attractive than he had
been the previous evening; Seth, accustomed to far earlier rising,
was acutely awake, but his head ached wearily and there was a dreadful
dryness in his mouth and throat. They went through the forms of
breakfast in the basement, too, without much conversation. Seth was
ashamed of the number of cups of coffee he drank, and carried away only
confused recollections of having been introduced to a middle-aged woman
in black who sat at the head of the table, and of having perfunctorily
answered sundry questions about business in Dearborn County, put by a
man who sat next to him.
They were well on their way to the office before Tom’s silent mood wore
away.
“You must brace up!” he said. “Don’t let Workman know that we were out
together last night. He’s a regular crank about beer--that is, when
anybody but himself drinks it. What’s the matter? You look as melancholy
as a man going to be hanged.”
“I suppose I’m nervous about the thing. It’s all going to be so new and
strange at the start.”
“Oh, that’ll be all right. You’ll get the hang of it fast enough. They
are rather decent fellows to work with upstairs, all but Samboye. He’ll
try to sit on you from the start, but if you hold your own with him
you’ll get along with the rest.”
“Samboye--he’s the editor, isn’t he?”
“Yes. You don’t know any of them, I suppose?”
“Not even by name.”
“Well, after Workman, who’s very rightly named, and who runs the thing,
there’s Samboye, who koo-toos to Workman and bullies all the rest. He
puts on more airs than a mowing machine agent at a state fair. He makes
_everybody_ tired. Next to him comes Tyler--Tony Tyler, you’ll like
him--that is, if he takes a fancy to you. He knows about eighteen
hundred times as much as Samboye does, only somehow he hasn’t the
faculty of putting it on paper. Too much whisky. Then there’s Dent--he’s
a Young Man Christian; plays duets on the piano with his sister, you
know, and all that sort of thing--but he’s away now on his vacation. And
then Billy Murtagh--he’s a rattling good fellow, if you don’t let him
borrow money of you. He does part of the telegraph and news. Those are
the only fellows upstairs.”
“But where do you come in?”
“Me? Oh, I’m the City Editor. I and my gang are downstairs. I made
a strike to have you down with me, and put you on police court, but
Workman wouldn’t have it. It’s all poppycock, for they’ve got more men
upstairs now than they know what to do with. However, if Workman thinks
the people want to read editorials on the condition of Macedonia more
than they do local news, he can go ahead. It’s none of my funeral.”
“Do you know what special work I am to do?”
“From all I hear, it would be easier to tell what you’re not to do.
Everyone of them has got a scheme for unloading something on you. First
you’re to do a lot of Dent’s work, like the proofs and Agricultural and
Religious; then Murtagh wants to put State News on you, and Tyler tells
me you’ve got to do the weekly as soon as you get your hand in, and
Art, Music and the Drama is a thing that must go up stairs, now that the
baseball season has begun, for I can’t attend to it. But if they play it
too low down on you, just you make a stout kick to Workman about it.”
While Seth pondered this outlook and advice, they reached the
_Chronicle_ office, and presently, by a succession of dark and devious
stair-ways, he found himself in an ancient cockloft, curiously cut up by
low partitions into compartments like horse-stalls, each with a window
at the end, and was introduced as “the new man” to Mr. Anthony Tyler,
otherwise Tony.
This gentleman bore no outward signs of the excess of spirituous liquor
to which Tom had alluded, and was very cordial and pleasant. He was
extremely dark in hair, beard and eyes, seemed to be not more than
thirty, and sat at a table piled high with books, clippings and the
like, and surrounded by great heaps of papers. Tom glanced over two
or three of these latter, and then went off humming a tune lightly and
calling out to Seth in imitation of a popular air, as he rattled down
stairs “I’ll meet you when the form goes down.”
Among other polite questions Tyler asked Seth where he was stopping.
“Nowhere permanently. I must find some place. I stopped last night with
Mr. Votts.”
“With whom?”
“With Mr. Votts, the gentleman who just left us.”
“Oh, you mean Tom Watts. You’ve got his name wrong.”
“Come to think of it, it was a German who called him that last evening,
and I was misled by his pronunciation.”
Mr. Tyler’s face grew more serious.
“You are a stranger here. Let me give you some advice. Don’t cultivate
Mr. Watts’ German friends. He’s not a bad chap of his sort, but he
drinks altogether too much beer. Who drinks beer, thinks beer, as
Johnson says. Perhaps I can be of use to you in the matter of a boarding
house. Oh, here’s Mur-tagh,” he continued introducing Seth to another
tall, slender young man who had come up the stairs with an arm-full
of papers; “he will take you now, and give you an idea of your work.”
Whereupon Mr. Tyler turned again to his papers and shears, and Seth
followed the new comer to the farthest stall in the row, which was
henceforth to be his own.
*****
There came a brief quarter of an hour in the afternoon when what seemed
to the novice a state of the wildest excitement reigned in the editorial
room. An inky boy in a huge leather apron dashed from stall to stall
shouting an interrogative “Thirty for you?” His master and patron, the
foreman, also aproned from chin to knees, with shirt-sleeves rolled
to the biceps, followed with the same mysterious question, put in
an injured and indignant tone. A loud, sharp discussion between this
magnate and Tyler, profanely dictatorial on the one side, profanely
satirical on the other, rose suddenly and filled the room with its
clamor. An elderly man, bald as a billiard ball, and dressed like a
clergyman, came bounding up the stairs, pulling out his watch as he
advanced, and demanding fiercely the reason for this delay. There was an
outburst of explanation, in which four or five voices joined, mingling
personal abuse freely with their analysis of the situation. Tom Watts
leaped up the stairs four steps at a time and hurled himself into the
controversy. Seth could distinguish in this babel of exclamations such
phrases as--
“You better get some india-rubber chases!”
“If that fire’s cut down, you might as well not go to press at all!”
“If somebody would get down here in the morning, we could get our matter
up in time.”
“I’m sick and tired of getting out telegraph for these chuckle-headed
printers to throw on the floor!” “That Mayhew matter’s been standing on
the galleys so long already that it’s got grey-headed!”
“By the Lord Harry, I’ll make a rule that the next time we miss the
Wyoming mail it shall be taken out of your wages!”
Here the inky boy galloped through to Seth with a proof-sheet, shouting,
“You’ve got a minute and a half to read this in!” The bald, elderly
gentleman, who seemed to be Mr. Workman, came and stood over Seth, watch
in hand, scowling impatiently. Under this embarrassment the wet letters
danced before his eyes, and he could find no errors, though it turned
out later that he had passed “elephant” for “elopement” and ruined
Watts’ chief sensation. A few minutes later, the clang of the presses
in the basement shook the old building, and the inky boy bustled through
the room again, pitching a paper into each of the stalls. There was a
moment of silence, broken only by the soft rustling of the damp sheets.
Then simultaneously from the several tables rose a chorus of violent
objurgation.
Seth heard the voice which he had learned was Samboye’s roar out,
“What dash-dashed idiot has made me say ‘our martyr President Abraham
Sinclair? ’ Stop the press!” There were other voices: “Here’s two
lines of markets upside down!” “Oh, I say, this is _too_ bad. _Moyen
age_ is ‘mayonaise ’ in my Shylock notice, and it’s Mrs. McCullough
instead of Mr. --------.”
“I’m dashed if the paper looks as if it had been read at all. We can’t
have such proof-reading as this!”
While these comments were still proceeding the noise of the
press suddenly ceased. The silence was terrible to Seth’s guilty
consciousness, for he had heard enough to know that it was his fault.
Mr. Workman entered the room again, and again Sam-boye’s deep voice was
heard, repeating the awful Sinclair-Lincoln error. Seth had looked at
his fresh copy of the _Chronicle_, with some vague hope that the Editor
was mistaken, but alas! it was too true. Mr. Workman came over to his
stall; he had put his watch back in his pocket, but his countenance was
stern and unbending.
“You are Mr. Fairchild, I presume,” he said.
Seth rose to his feet, blushing, and murmured, “Yes, sir.”
“I understood from your brother that you were used to newspaper work.”
“Well, I thought I was. I have been around the _Banner of Liberty_
office a great deal, but it seems so different on a daily.”
“H’m,--yes. Well, I dare say you’ll learn.”
Luckily the press started up again here, and Mr. Workman, looking at his
watch once more, went down stairs.
Seth felt most grievously depressed. Looking back, his first day had
been full of mortification and failure. The use of scissors and mucilage
brush was painfully unfamiliar to his clumsy fingers. The scope and
intention of the various news departments he had been told to take
charge of were unknown to him, and he had watched Murtagh go over the
matter he submitted, striking out page after page, saying curtly, “We’ve
had this,” “This is only worth a line or two,” or “this belongs in
county notes,” with a sinking heart. His duties were so mechanical and
commonplace, after what he had conceived an editor’s functions to be,
that his ineptitude was doubly humiliating.
Then there was this dreadful proof-reading failure. Murtagh had given
him the sample proof-sheet in the back of the dictionary to copy his
marks from--and he had copied them with such scrupulous efforts after
exactness that the printers couldn’t understand them. These printers--he
could see them through the windows opposite, standing pensively over
their tall cases, and moving their right arms between the frames
and their sticks with the monotonous regularity of an engine’s
piston-rod--seemed a very sarcastic and disagreeable body of men, to
judge by the messages of criticism on his system of marking which the
inky boy had delivered for them with such fidelity and enjoyment during
the day. He had eaten nothing since the early breakfast, and felt faint
and tired. The rain outside, beating dismally on the window and the
tin roof beyond, added to his gloom, and the ceaseless drumming of the
presses below increased his headache.
The other men seemed to have nothing to do now save to talk, but he
turned wearily to the great mound of exchanges from which Murtagh had
directed him to extract “Society Jottings” and “Art, Music and the
Drama” after the paper went to press.
He spent a few despairing minutes on the threshold of the task--enough
to see clearly that it was beyond his strength. Society was Syriac
to him, and he had never seen a play acted, beyond an occasional
presentation of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” or “The Octoroon” by strolling
tenth-rate mummers in the tiny hall at Thessaly. How could he
select matter for such departments? He wavered for a time, from a
disinclination to confront men who had just condemned his work so
unsparingly, but at last he got up from the table where he had been
pinned all day, and went over to the further end of the room.
There was a sort of conclave about Tyler’s table. Both he and Samboye
reclined in tipped-back chairs, with their feet upon it; Watts sat on
the table swinging his legs, his straw hat still on the back of his
head, and Murtagh was perched in the window seat. Their conversation,
which had been flowing freely, stopped as Seth approached. He had
expected to be introduced to his Editor, Mr. Samboye, but no one
seemed to think of it, and that gentleman himself relieved him of the
embarrassment by nodding not uncourteously but with formality.
“Mr. Fairchild,” he said, with impressive slowness, “in the pursuit of a
high career you will be powerfully aided by keeping in recollection the
fact that the sixteenth President of the United States was named Lincoln
and not Sinclair. We have a prejudice too, weak as it may seem, in favor
of spelling ‘interval’ with a ‘v’ rather than an ‘n’.”
Seth did not find it so difficult to address this great man as he had
anticipated. He said simply that he was very sorry, but the work was
utterly new to him, it was his first day, he hoped to learn soon, etc.
Emboldened by the sound of his own voice, he added his doubts about
being able to satisfactorily preside over such exacting columns as
“Society Jottings” and “Art, Music and the Drama”--and gave reasons.
“By George!” cried Watts, “I envy you! Just fancy a man who has never
seen anything but ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’--and not even that with real
Siberian bloodhounds. You shall begin going tonight. I’ll take you to
‘Muldoon’s Picnic.’”
“Well, at any rate,” remarked Mr. Tyler, “you can do ‘Agricultural.’ You
must know that right down to the ground.”
“Yes,” assented Seth, “I think I ought to manage that. The truth
is, most of the stuff the papers print for farmers is nonsense--pure
rubbish.”
“I suppose it is. I know that Dent--he is a New York city boy, who
doesn’t know clover from cabbage--once put in a paragraph about the
importance of feeding chickens on rock salt, and an old farmer from
Boltus came in early one morning and whaled the bookkeeper out of his
boots because he had followed the advice and killed all his hens.
There must be some funny man out West somewhere who makes up these bad
agricultural paragraphs, and of course they get copied. How can fellows
like Dent, for instance, tell which are good and which are not? But they
can’t fool you, and that’ll be an advantage. Then there’s Religious. You
can do that easily enough. I should think.”
“Yes,” interposed Murtagh, “all you have to do is to lay for the Obago
_Evening Mercury_. Every Saturday that has a column of religious.
Alec Watson, a fellow in that office, has fifty-two of these columns,
extracts from Thomas à Kempis, and Wesley and Spurgeon and that sort of
thing, which have been running in the _Mercury_ since before the war.
When New Year’s comes he starts ’em going again, round and round.
Nobody knows the difference. Well, their columns are longer than ours,
so each week you can run about half their paragraphs--the shortest
ones--and then fill in with some news notes, statistics, you know, about
how many churches the Moravians have now, and that sort of thing. You
can pick those up during the week, anywhere.”
“Then there ought to be some originality about it too,” said Tom Watts.
“It is just as well to sling in some items of your own, I think, such
as ‘There is a growing desire among the Baptists to have Bishops, like
other people,’ or, ‘It is understood that at the coming Consistory
the Pope will create seven new American Cardinals.’ That last is a
particularly good point. Every once in a while, predict more Cardinals.
It doesn’t hurt anybody, and it makes you solid when the thing does
happen. There’s nothing like original news to show the influence of
journalism. One morning, after the cakes had been bad for a week, heavy,
sour or something else, I said to my landlady that I believed the fault
must be in the buckwheat. She said no, she didn’t think so, for the
flour looked very nice indeed. I put a line in ‘Local Glimpses’ that
day, saying that unfortunately the buckwheat this year was of inferior
quality, and the very next morning she apologised to me: said I was
right; the buckwheat _was_ bad; she had read so in the _Chronicle_. Can
you imagine a nobler illustration of the power of the press?”
Seth looked attentively at the speaker, to see if he was joking, but
there was no more evidence of mirth in his thin face than in the serious
tone of his voice. None of the others laughed.
Mr. Samboye said some of the most remarkable things, at once humorous
and highly original, and put in an elaborate frame of big unusual words.
He was a huge man in frame, with an enormous head, bushy eyebrows, heavy
whiskers, a ponderous manner, a tremendous voice--in fact seemed to Seth
precisely the kind of man from whom delicate wit, and soft shading of
phrases were not to be expected. He happened for the nonce to be in a
complaisant mood, and was relaxing himself in the company of “his
young men,” as he liked to call his colleagues. But ordinarily he was
overbearing and arbitrary, and this had rankled so deeply in their minds
that they listened with apathy, unresponsive, to his choicest sallies,
and Watts even combated him, with scant courtesy it seemed to Seth.
To him this monologue of the Editor’s was a revelation. He had never
heard such brilliant talk, such a wonderful mastery of words, such
delicious humor. He drank it all in eagerly, and laughed aloud at its
broader points--the more heartily, perhaps, because no one else smiled.
This display of appreciation bore fruit after its kind. Before Mr.
Samboye went he spoke some decidedly gracious words to Seth, saying
among other things:
“However harshly we may be tempted by momentary stress of emotion to
speak, always remember that we unitedly feel your fresh bucolic interest
in things, your virginal capacity for admiration, and your pristine
flush of enthusiasm for your work to be distinct acquisitions to the
paper,” which Seth felt to be somewhat nonsensical, but still was
grateful for.
After Mr. Samboye had gone, Tom Watts took occasion to warn him in an
aside:
“Be careful how you appear to curry favor with Samboye before the other
fellows. Oh, I know you didn’t think of it--but don’t laugh at his
jokes. They’ll think you’re trying to climb over them, and they’ll be
unpleasant to you, perhaps.”