A MAN OF LETTERS
The Macochee gossips, after they were assured he was engaged in
clerical, and not manual work, might have promoted Marley much more
rapidly than his railroad would have done, had it not been for the news
that he had changed his employment. They had gone far enough to noise it
about that Marley was chief clerk in the office, where he was only a
bill clerk, when the _Republican_, with the impartial good nature with
which it treated all of Macochee's folk, so long as they kept out of
politics, mentioned him for the first time since his departure, and
then, to tell of the advancement he was rapidly making in the metropolis
that loomed so large and important in their provincial eyes. Lavinia had
the facts in a letter from Marley a day or so before the _Republican_
had them, though she never could imagine, as she told everybody, where
the _Republican_ got its information.
"I have a big piece of news to tell you," he wrote. "Last night I dined
with Weston. It was the first really enjoyable evening I have had since
I struck the town. Luckily, the strikers had everything tied up so tight
that we could do little work, and I had no trouble in getting off in
time. I met him about six o'clock, and we went to the swellest
restaurant in town. Weston is the finest fellow you ever saw; as it was
pay night, he said he would blow me off to a good dinner. And he did,
the best dinner I have ever eaten; there were half a dozen courses, and
as we ate we talked, talked about everything, college days, the hard
days that come after college, and you, and everything. Weston's
experience has been about the same as mine--one long, hopeless search
for a job. He, however, did not wait so long as I did; he said that he
realized there was no place for him in a small town, and so he set out
for the city almost at once. His father wanted him to study medicine,
but he said he hadn't the money or the patience to wait, and he hated
medicine anyway, and, as newspaper work offered the quickest channel to
making a living he chose that. His secret ambition, he confessed, is
literature, and I believe he is writing a book, but he would not, or did
not, tell me as much. He says he thinks newspaper work a bad business
for any one to get into, but then I have discovered that that is the way
every man talks about his own calling.
"After we had finished our dinner, we sat there for a long, long time
over our coffee and cigarettes, and we finally got to talking about the
strike. Weston, you know, has been working on it, and I was glad to be
able to tell him a good many things he said he could use. Finally, I
don't know just how it came about, but I told him how the strike started
with us, about the man appearing in the street alongside the freight
house, whistling, and then holding up two fingers--I think I described
it to you in a letter the other night. Weston was greatly interested; I
can see him still, sitting across the table from me, knocking the ashes
from his cigarette into his empty coffee-cup and looking so intently at
me out of his brown eyes that he almost embarrassed me. And what was my
surprise when I finished to have him say:
"'By Jove, Marley, I'll have to use that. I've been wondering how to
lead my story to-night.'
"Now you know the strike at our place occurred several days ago, but
since then it has been spreading, and to-day the men on another road
walked out. This morning when I picked up the _Courier_ and turned to
the strike news, here is what I read, under big head-lines:
"'A short man with a brown derby hat cocked over his eye walked
leisurely down Canal Street at ten o'clock yesterday morning. The short
man walked a block and then turned and walked back. At the open door of
the C. and A.'s big freight house he stopped. Suddenly he whistled,
once, twice, thrice, in low notes. Then he raised his hand with a
gesture that was graceful and yet commanding, and held up two fingers.
Inside the freight house the men who were heaving away at the big bales
and boxes, attracted by the whistle, paused in their labor and looked
up; they saw the man raise his two fingers; and, with the discipline of
well-trained troops, they dropped their trucks, put on their coats and
marched out of the freight house. And the Alton had been added to the
list of railroads whose men were on strike.'
"Of course, I was surprised and puzzled, and a little pleased too, that
I had had a hand in the article. As I read it, though, I thought of a
hundred details I might have told Weston, and I began to wish I had
written the account myself. This afternoon he came around to the office
again, and the first thing he said was:
"'Did you see your story this morning?'
"I told him I had, of course. 'But,' I added, 'that was the way it
happened on our road; not on the Alton.'
"But he only laughed, and said something about the tricks of the trade.
"And now for the news I was going to tell you. I told Weston, as we
talked the story over, of my little wish that I had written the article
myself, and he looked at me intently for a moment. Then he said:
"'How'd you like to break into newspaper business?'
"My heart leaped; it came to me suddenly that it wasn't the law, nor
railroad work, but journalism that I wanted to enter. I told him so
frankly and he said:
"'Well, it's a dog's life and I don't know whether I'm doing you a good
turn or not, but I'll speak to the city editor tonight. He's a little
short of men just now.
"My heart is in my mouth. I can hardly wait till to-morrow, when I'm to
see him again. Think of it, dear, and all it means! It means more money,
association with men of my own kind, men like Weston, and a fine,
interesting life; and it means you; oh, it means you!"
Marley was able in this letter to communicate to Lavinia some of his
enthusiasm and some of his suspense, and she found it difficult to await
the result of his next interview with Weston. She began to count the
hours until Marley and Weston should meet again, and then in a flash it
came over her that they had doubtless already met, that the decision was
already known, the fate determined, and she was still in ignorance. She
had a sense of mystery in it, and she grew impatient, wondering why he
did not telegraph. The next day came, and a letter with it; but the
letter did not decide anything. Marley wrote that Weston had spoken to
the city editor, and that he had told him to bring Marley around that
evening. And so, other hours of waiting, and then, at last, another
letter. Marley announced the result with what self-repression he could
command.
"It's settled," he wrote. "I'm to go to work Monday--as a reporter on
the staff of the _Courier_. The salary to begin with is to be fifteen
dollars a week. I'm glad to quit railroad work; I'm not built to be a
railroad man; I can't adhere to rules as they want me to, and I can't
bow down as it seems I should. I didn't tell you that my boss and I had
not been getting along very well lately; I thought I wouldn't worry you.
I was glad to be able to tell him to-day that I'd quit Saturday. I did
it in a proud and haughty manner; he seemed surprised and shocked--even
pained. And when I broke the news gently to the young Canuck he
expressed great sorrow and regret, but in his secret heart I knew he was
glad, for now as a prophet he can vindicate himself, at least partly, in
his diary."
Lavinia was glad that Marley had gone into newspaper work; much as she
had tried she had not been able to conceive of him in exactly the ideal
light as a clerk in a railroad office; that position, while it may have
had its own promise, nevertheless did not envelope him in the atmosphere
she considered native to him. In his new relation to literature, which,
in her ignorance, she confounded with journalism, she felt a deep
satisfaction, and a new pride, and she was glad when the _Republican_
announced the fact of Marley's new position; she felt that it was a
fitting vindication of her lover in the eyes of the people of Macochee
and a rebuke for the distrust they had shown in him.
Thereafter her mail was increased, for in addition to his letter Marley
sent her the _Courier_ with his work marked; often he marked Weston's as
well, and early in June he wrote: "I want you to read Weston's story in
Sunday's paper about the Derby; it's a peach; it's the best piece of
frill writing that the town has seen in many a day."
The tone of Marley's letters now became more cheerful; it was evident to
Lavinia that he was finding an interest in life, and in his descriptions
of his daily work and the places all over Chicago it took him to and the
people of all sorts it brought him in contact with, she found a new
interest for her own life. When he wrote that his salary had been
increased because of his story about a Sunday evening service in a
church of the colored people in Dearborn Street, it seemed to her that
happiness at last had come to them, and if, with the passing of June,
she felt a pang at Marley's grieving in one of his letters that this was
the month in which they had intended to be married, she was consoled by
the rapid progress he was making in his work. His salary had been raised
a second time; he was receiving now twenty-five dollars a week; it
seemed large to her, and she could not understand why it did not seem
large to Marley, even when he wrote that Weston was paid forty dollars a
week.
Her chief joy, perhaps, lay in the fact that he seemed to be living more
comfortably than he had before. Now that he had left his dismal
boarding-house she found a relief from its subtly communicated influence
of the stranded wrecks of life, as Marley surely found it in the
apartments he was sharing with Weston. She parted as gladly from the
knowledge of his landlady as Marley did himself, assuring her that the
landlady had "not decreased any in value as a zoo exhibit since first I
rhapsodized about her." Lavinia felt that she could dispense with much
of the worry her womanly concern for his comfort had given her, and she
turned with a new joy to the books he was constantly recommending.
"Did you ever read," he wrote, "Turgenieff's _Fathers and Sons_? I know
that you didn't and therefore I know what a treat you have coming. I'll
send you the book if you can't get it in Macochee, and I presume you
can't. Snider's sign 'Drugs and Books' is a lure to deceive an unwary
public that doesn't care as much for books as it does for soda-water;
and the stock there, as I recall it, consists largely of forty-cent
editions of books on which the copyright has expired, and which, printed
on cheap, pulp paper, are to be introduced for the first time to the
natives of Macochee. I wish you could see Weston's little book-case,
with its rows of his favorites. Besides Turgenieff and Tolstoi--he says
the Russians are the greatest novel writers the world has yet
produced--he has all of George Eliot; I have just read over again
_Middlemarch_ and _Daniel Deronda_. He likes Jane Austen, too, and he
says you would like her; I haven't read any but _Emma_ as yet. I'm going
to read them all. And if you like, you can read the set of little
volumes I am sending you to-day; we can read them thus together. And
Henry James--do read him--_Daisy Miller_ especially; you will like that.
Besides these, Weston has most of Ibsen's plays, and sometimes he reads
parts of them aloud to me; he reads them well. Some day, he says, he's
going to write a play himself; he is fond of the theater, and we often
go. One of the fine things about being on a newspaper is that we get
theater tickets, though we can't always get tickets to the theater we
want. Now and then the dramatic editor--a fine old fellow with a
magnificent shock of white hair, who may be seen about the office late
at night looking very _distingué_ in his evening clothes--gets Weston to
write a criticism on some play; and often the literary editor lets him
review books. Weston said to-day he'd get the literary editor to let me
review some books, and when I told him I didn't know how, he laughed in
a strange way and said that wouldn't make the slightest difference.
There's another book you _must_ read, and that is _A Modern Instance_.
The chief character is Bartley Hubbard, a newspaper man. Weston and I
had a big argument about the character to-day. I said I thought it was a
libel on the newspaper profession and Weston laughed and said it was
only the truth, and that I'd agree with him after I'd been in the work
longer. 'Newspaper work isn't a profession anyway,' he said, 'but a
business.' He speaks of journalism--though he won't call it journalism,
nor let me--just as lawyers speak of the law. He is urging me, by the
way, to keep up my law studies, and I'm thinking of going to the law
school here, if I find I can carry it on with my other work. Weston
declares I can; he says a man has to carry water on both shoulders if he
wants to amount to anything in the world--Wade Powell said something
like that to me once. Weston says I'll want to get out of newspaper work
after a while. He disturbed me a little to-day, and he hurt me, too, by
saying that a newspaper man has no business to be married; and he knows
all about you, too. Of course, he didn't mean to hurt me, it's merely
his way of looking at things."
Happy as she was, Lavinia still had to have her woman's worries, and
they began to express themselves in constant adjuration to Marley to
guard his health; she feared the effect of night work, and she feared,
too, that he could not carry on his law studies and do his duty as a
reporter at the same time. She sympathized with the spirit of pride and
determination which made him wish to finish his law studies and be
admitted to the bar, but she found a greater satisfaction in thinking of
him as a journalist than as a lawyer; the figure he thus presented to
her mind was so much more romantic than the prosaic one of a lawyer to
which she had been all her life accustomed; on a large metropolitan
daily he was almost as romantic to her as an army officer or a naval
officer would have been. And while she did not like the night work, and
had her fears of it for Marley, she nevertheless felt strongly its
picturesque quality.
The picture Marley drew in one of his letters of the strange shifting of
the scene that is to be observed in the streets of a great city as
darkness falls, when those that work in the prosaic day disappear and in
their places appears the vast and mysterious army of the toilers by
night, many of them in callings demanding the cover of the night,
thrilled her strangely. But she did not know how from all the
temptations of the irregular life he was leading he was saved, partly by
the gentle friend he had found in James Weston, but more by the constant
thought of the girl whom he had left behind at home.