This eBook is dedicated to the memory of Joe Cooper
[Illustration: CHARLES E. CHAPIN]
Charles Chapin’s Story
Written in Sing Sing Prison
“The mighty gates of circumstance
Turn on the smallest hinge,
And oft some seeming pettiest chance
Gives our life its after tinge.”
With an Introduction by
Basil King
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
[Illustration: Colophon]
To Her Who Ever Beckons
To Me from Afar
“Oh, how dark and lone and drear
Will seem that brighter world of bliss,
If, while wandering through each radiant zone,
We fail to find the loved of this.”
PUBLISHERS’ NOTE
“The defendant was indicted on September 18, 1918, for murder in the
first degree, in that he had killed his wife Nellie, with a pistol, by
shooting her in the head. At the time of the killing defendant was, and
for several years prior thereto had been, the city editor of the New
York _Evening World_. He is sixty years of age. He and his wife whom he
killed had been married for thirty-nine years, and the uncontradicted
testimony is to the effect that their relations had been singularly
devoted.”
The tragic and unusual case of Charles E. Chapin, now serving a term of
life imprisonment in Sing Sing, will be well remembered by newspaper
readers. The paragraph quoted above is from the report of a Commission
which passed upon the sanity of the defendant.
At the time of the tragedy Mr. Chapin wrote a letter to a newspaper
associate in part as follows:
“For some time I have been conscious that I am on the verge of a
nervous breakdown. I have fought against it continually, but the pains
in my head grow more acute, and I realize now that the time is fast
approaching when I will collapse entirely. I dread to think of passing
the remainder of my life in a sanitarium so I am doing the only thing I
can think of to escape such a calamity. I know how wrong it is, but I
cannot go on suffering as I have for months. It takes greater courage
than I possess. I have tried to think out what is best to do, and
cannot bear the thought of leaving my wife to face the world alone, so
I have resolved to take her with me.”
The defendant then went to Prospect Park, a revolver in his pocket,
intending to end his life. In a newspaper he saw the headline, “Charles
Chapin Wanted For Murder.” Going to the nearest police station, he gave
himself up.
That, in brief, is the story of the tragedy which terminated the career
of the author of this book.
INTRODUCTION
In calling the reader’s attention to the following pages it may be
well to strike at once the personal note and explain my acquaintance
with the writer. I am not an official visitor at Sing Sing Prison.
I am not a philanthropist. In philanthropy as now practiced I have
only a limited confidence. Had I not had a personal reason for going
to the House of Sorrow I should have felt it an intrusion, almost an
impertinence, to have forced myself where men have at least the right
not to be stared at while undergoing their agony.
I met Charles Chapin at the request of another prisoner at Sing
Sing--a young man doing a life-term for a similar transgression of
the law--whom I had come to know by correspondence. A story of mine
having attracted his attention he was kind enough to write me. After an
exchange of letters I went “up the river” to see him, finding a tall,
stalwart, manly, bright-faced lad of twenty-six who had gone there at
twenty-two. This meeting was the starting point of an affection which
has become one of the precious things in my life.
The writer of this book had been at Sing Sing but a very short time
when my younger friend asked me if I would see the new arrival. Here
again my own books had prepared the way for me, and, as far as the
conditions permitted, our coming together was not different from what
it would have been had we met at a club. My recollection is that we
talked of the public interests of the day, of literature, and of the
scene around us. As to the last there was not a murmur of complaint. In
subsequent meetings we have kept to the same tone, though we could not
have become as friendly as we are without an element of what I may call
mutual solicitude stealing into our intercourse.
My object in bringing up this point is to underscore the fact that when
it comes to human dealing there is no difference between the man whom
we somewhat hideously call a convict and anybody else. We arrest him,
we try him, we sentence him, we lock him behind bars--and having in our
own thought thrust him outside the human race we fancy that it must
seem to him a matter of course to be in the limbo of outcast souls.
But not at all! Arrested, tried, sentenced, buried in a cell, he is to
himself as much a man, and the very same man, as ever he was. As truly
as men at liberty he finds the prisoner’s life abnormal. Normality,
after all, is only what we are accustomed to. Short of perfection it is
not a standard in itself. For the individual normal life is the life
to which he has trained himself, and no two lives have been trained
alike. Normality is an inner principle more than it is an outer one.
Outwardly, through a sort of moral cowardice, we conform as best we
can to accepted patterns which inwardly we reject; but it is the inner
ideal by which we truly live. There are honored men by the million all
over the world whose methods would render them abnormal to most of
their fellow-citizens were the bluff to be called. We do not call the
bluff, and we dare not, for the reason that the vast majority of us
fear that in any such unmasking we ourselves should be exposed.
At the same time hidden wrong, however concealed by our social
false-fronts, demands an expiation. We are so constituted--uprightness
is so much the native principle of the human being--that our universal
departure from the only norm there is cannot go unrecognized.
Unconsciously, subconsciously, and even to some extent consciously,
we call for sacrifice and propitiation. The more dogged our refusal
to repent and reform the more persistent our demand for something or
someone to suffer in our stead.
Modern American slang has coined a word for this, doubtless because
the need cried out for expression. Like all slang it is the voice of
the man in the street, finding the right outlet for his pent-up soul
where the scholar and lexicographer have walked round it. In this case,
however, modern and ancient instinct have been one, and in our slang
word of to-day we link up with a mighty tradition and go back to our
first recognition of the soul’s necessities.
We speak of the man on whom the hard consequences fall as--the goat. So
did the people who first read the results of wrong in terms of tragedy.
The burden of their sin was intolerable. Unwilling to see that they
could throw off that burden by giving up the sin they sought means
whereby they might go on committing the sin and escape the penalty. So
once a year they took a goat and laid their sin upon his head, sending
him off into the wilderness to get rid of him. He became the scape-goat
who bore their punishment so that they could begin with a clean slate
again. It was naïve, childish, but significant.
And in the convict, I am driven to believe, modern civilization is not
looking for the brother to be treated wisely because his weakness is
so obvious and his suffering so great. If that were all the way would
be found as soon as there was a will. The difficulties of dealing with
the prison and prisoner are, to my mind, largely inventions. When we
consider what gigantic obstacles we have overcome when it was to our
interest to overcome them anything here is child’s play. We shake our
heads and pull long faces chiefly to get dust into our own eyes, so
that we may better carry out the purpose we really have at heart.
That purpose is to find a goat. Is not that the underlying motive
of the world-wide cruelty that has made the prison of the Christian
the nearest thing to Calvary? Is not that the reason why the most
philanthropic and tender-hearted among us can mentally look on at
barbarities such as have rarely been surpassed on earth and never
turn a hair? In the prisoner we have found our goat. He is suffering
not for his own sins alone, but for ours. Naïvely, childishly, but
significantly, we outrage every human instinct within him, so that our
own secret self-reproach may be appeased. The world as it is, society
as we have formed it, must have a goat; and we seize the weakest and
most defenseless thing on which we can lay our hands.
I should say right here that I am not speaking from personal knowledge.
I know only what every other member of the public knows--what has
been written of in newspapers and books, exposed in plays and moving
pictures, and never contradicted. I am aware too that efforts at
humanizing the prison system have been made here and there, and the
Sing Sing of to-day is a proof of them. But they have been made
by individuals and have never had the public back of them. When
the public, through its elected representatives, have been able to
intervene it has been largely to nullify or put a stop to anything
meant to mitigate the poor goat’s suffering. Our women, our clergymen,
our reformers will cry out against atrocities four thousand miles away,
and not lift a finger to stop the operation of the third degree--to
cite nothing else--against their own countrymen at their own gates.
Here perhaps one should say in the words of One more tolerant than I,
“These things ought ye to have done and not leave the other undone.”
It is the more amazing then to see the human sacrifice coming through
his crucifixion with exaltation in his face and a new life in his
heart. That happens. It happens rarely enough, God knows, but the
miracle comes to pass. It has happened in the case of the boy friend
I have already mentioned. It has happened in other instances, some of
which I myself have known. I have watched it happening in the case of
him whose book I am now commending to the public.
To reconstruct a sane and helpful life when all that is left of the
self is what one has in common with the animal is an indication of a
mighty principle of growth. The writer of these pages is not the man
who went “up the river” two years ago. The book reads as though its
author had climbed through smiling hills only to fall over a frightful
precipice. Possibly; and yet one might fall over a precipice to find
oneself in a valley of fruits and flowers, even if among them there
are bitter herbs. That is the new life which out of anguish the man is
creating for himself and helping to shed about him. The reader will
not have finished this book when he has read to the last line, not
any more than we have done with a life when we scan its record on a
tombstone. The best part of it will lie in the invisible pages through
which the tale goes on.
[Illustration: Basil King’s signature]
WHY THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN
A friend came to visit me. We were seated in the visitors’ room at Sing
Sing. It was the first time we had met since that fateful day when the
structure I had spent a lifetime in rearing, crashed down upon me and
buried me beneath the ruins. I told him something of my life in prison;
the dreary monotony of it, the loneliness, the hours of bitter regret,
the long nights of solitude, the heartache, the desolation.
In the new life in which I found myself there were duties to be
performed during the day, or I must have gone mad with the morbid
thoughts that were always surging through my brain. But there were the
long evenings and longer nights, sleepless nights in a cell that is no
bigger than a dead man’s grave.
I told my friend that I had sought distraction in books. I had plenty
of time for reading and more than twelve thousand volumes to choose
from. Books were almost my only companions. But sometimes I would read
for an hour without retaining a word and frequently I would have to
turn back and read the pages again, for I had read only with my eyes;
my mind was focused elsewhere. Thoughts of that dreadful tragedy were
ever running between the lines of the printed pages. Ofttimes something
I read would bring memories and a flood of tears. For even a felon can
weep. Oscar Wilde, in the most sorrowful story I have ever read, _De
Profundis_, into which the imprisoned poet poured the tears of his
tortured soul, wrote these lines:
“When a day comes that a man in prison does not weep, it is not when
he is happy but when his heart is hard.” And yet there are men who
argue that imprisonment is not an adequate punishment. They have
never tried it.
“Why don’t you turn to writing during some of your leisure hours,”
suggested my friend. “Why don’t you write a book?”
“About what?”
“Write an autobiography.”
“I haven’t that much egotism left.”
“Tell the story of your forty years as a newspaper man.”
That night in my cell my thoughts kept me awake. Forty years a
newspaper man! Memories began to crowd in upon me. It seemed as if even
the smallest events of my life were flashing through a kinetoscope.
Whatever else had happened to me, my memory was unimpaired. Events and
persons and names through all my forty years of newspaper activity came
back to me as vividly as if they had been crowded into the past few
months. Thoughts come quickly in the solitude of a prison cell.
Forty years! Looking forward, with the inexperienced eyes of youth,
forty years seems a long stretch of time, the span of a life of
fullness. Looking backward, when one is sixty and is at the end of his
journey, forty years is but a succession of yesterdays that multiplied
so rapidly they were come and gone almost without realization. How
much action was crowded into those forty years. How much happiness,
how much sorrow; what ambitious hopes, what bitter disappointments.
Sometimes achieving success, often humiliated by failure. Striving
always for fame and riches, acquiring a fleeting glimpse of both,
and in the end cast upon the scrap heap of humanity, abandoned and
forgotten, dead yet alive.
There is no self-pity in what I write. My heart may be torn with
anguish, my mind tormented with regret, but there has never been one
moment since I came to prison that I have pitied myself or permitted
the pity of others to depress me. I know why I am here and what brought
it about. I know that if I were not here I should not be living. I know
that if I had died and the dear one I loved had survived she would be
suffering greater privation than I ever can. Nothing else matters.
The day after my friend suggested that I write a book, I chanced to
read a bit of philosophy that was written by Samuel Smiles. “It is good
for men to be roused into action by difficulty, rather than to slumber
away their lives in useless apathy and indolence,” wrote this fine
philosopher. In the same essay he expressed this thought: “There are
natures which blossom and ripen amidst trials that would only wither
and decay in an atmosphere of ease and comfort.”
Solitude drives some men mad; it sharpens the wits of others. There are
many instances of courageous men who have turned confinement in prison
into a great personal achievement. More faint-hearted ones, crushed and
defeated by self-pity, drifted quickly into a condition of impotent
inertia. Hopeless and without ambition, they withered and died.
Some of the greatest books in all literature were written in the
solitude of confinement, written by men who suffered greater hardships
than I shall perhaps ever know, for they were in prison in the days
when men were treated with inhuman cruelty, before the searchlight of
publicity had penetrated into the loathsome dungeons where they were
chained and tortured. They are long since dead. What they wrote still
lives and will endure as long as books are read. Thoughts expressed in
words are imperishable.
When I realized what had been achieved by such illustrious men as
Cervantes and Dante and John Bunyan and Defoe and Lovelace and Cooper
and Campanella and countless others, I was lifted out of despondent
lethargy and fired with ambition to try and do something besides cry.
It is so easy to cry in prison.
I began to write. In memory I lived my life over again. My manuscript
grew into many pages and the occupation of mind it gave often lifted
me out of myself and my gloomy surroundings. I think it may have saved
me from the worst possible fate that could have befallen me. I wrote
on from day to day without fixed purpose. I had no thought of ever
publishing my story. I was content that it gave me something to do
and that in doing it the iron within was rising to crush out morbid
thoughts.
About the time my story was nearing completion, Major Lewis E. Lawes
came to Sing Sing as Warden, a man of heart and understanding, the
right man in a big job. Because I had previously had experience in
newspaper making, he asked me to become editor of the institutional
paper, the _Sing Sing Bulletin_. A request from the Warden is
equivalent to an order and it was my duty to comply as obediently as
if I had been ordered to duty on the coal dump. Major Lawes did not
make his order compulsory. He simply pointed out that it might be an
opportunity for me to do something useful, something that might be of
lasting benefit to others. It is fine to make believe that one is still
of some use in the world, even though he fails.
I published the first chapter of my autobiography in our prison paper
and some of my associates here urged me to continue it. My good
friend Basil King, who wrote that wonderful story, _The City of
Comrades_, read my manuscript. His advice prompted me to send it to
a publisher. That is how my story now comes to you.
C. E. C.
SING SING, May, 1920.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I.--FROM THE BOTTOM 1
II.--BARNSTORMING 20
III.--CHICAGO “TRIBUNE” DAYS 40
IV.--MY FIRST BIG “SCOOP” 59
V.--A MURDER MYSTERY 82
VI.--“STAR” REPORTING 98
VII.--A CITY EDITOR AT TWENTY-FIVE 126
VIII.--BREAKING INTO PARK ROW 155
IX.--ON THE “WORLD’S” CITY DESK 172
X.--NEWSPAPERING TO-DAY 193
XI.--THE PULITZERS 216
XII.--NEWSPAPER ETHICS 231
XIII.--GATHERING CLOUDS 265
XIV.--TRAGEDY 287
XV.--A “LIFER” IN SING SING 313
Charles Chapin’s Story
CHAPTER I
FROM THE BOTTOM
I began life, and I ended life--the real living of the everyday
world--as a newspaper man.
Newspapering, of a kind, commenced for me in a thriving little Western
town when I was just fourteen years old, and had started out to climb
from the bottom the long ladder that leads up through education and
experience to fame and fortune. In this little town I was attracted by
a sign in the window of a newspaper office. A boy was wanted to deliver
papers.
I applied at the front counter for the job and was directed to the
circulation manager, who critically sized me up and declared that
I wouldn’t do. He needed strong boys, he said, boys who were husky
enough to pack a heavy bundle of newspapers over a route several miles
in length and deliver them to subscribers before they sat down to
breakfast.
I was a little chap, even for my age, but I had grit and persuaded the
man to give me a trial. It was my duty to be in the pressroom at 3.30
o’clock every morning, take papers from the press as fast as they were
printed, fold to regulation form, and start off with several hundred
strapped to my shoulder, delivering to the homes of subscribers as I
went along. It was a five-mile tramp before breakfast and in almost the
hilliest town I ever saw. Many of the streets on my route were so steep
that one took almost as many steps upward as forward and in the winter
months I would often flounder through snow that was waist deep.
My wages were four dollars a week. I realized that I could not pay
expenses and save up for my education on this slender income, so I set
to work to find ways of increasing it. Opportunity came knocking at
my door within a week. In the same building with the newspaper was a
telegraph office and one morning when I returned from delivering papers
the operator called me in and asked if I would carry an important
message to the home of a United States Senator. It was from President
Grant, he said, and could not be delayed. His regular messenger boy
hadn’t shown up.
I readily consented and I recall how chesty I felt as bearer of a
Presidential message on which the fate of the nation might hang. My
importance grew on me as I trudged along and finally I broke into a
run. When the maid came to the door and said the Senator wasn’t up I
insisted that she show me to his bedchamber.
I was led upstairs to where the Senator was sleeping his wits away,
perhaps dreaming of that big land swindle with which his name was
afterward so scandalously linked. I rapped several times without a
response. The door was ajar and I could get a glimpse of him in his
bed, the blankets pulled over his head as if to deaden the sound of his
noisy snoring.
Getting no reply to my repeated knocking I pushed the door open, went
boldly into the room, and yanked the bedclothing from the sleeper. He
awoke with a start and glared at me as if he were going to bite.
“Wake up, Senator,” I exclaimed, not a bit abashed, “I have an
important telegraph message for you from President Grant.” I know that
I must have swelled up as I thrust it into his outstretched hand.
He read it and began to laugh.
“How did you know that it is important?” he asked.
“Any message from President Grant to a United States Senator must be
important,” I replied. The Senator patted my head as he reached for his
trousers, drew out a silver dollar, and handed it to me.
“Nothing to collect on the message,” I hastened to assure him.
“The dollar is yours for being my little alarm clock and waking me up,”
he good-naturedly replied.
He asked me to pull the bellcord and when a servant responded he
ordered that breakfast be brought up for both of us. And when it came
he made me sit down and help him eat it.
During the breakfast he asked me a lot of questions about myself and
my ambitions and he gave me some wholesome advice and loaned me two
books from his library. He told me stories about famous statesmen and
how some of them had begun life as I was beginning and had fought their
way to the top. It was a wonderful hour I spent with him and there were
other hours and more silver dollars and the loan of many volumes from
his well-stocked bookcases in the weeks that followed before he was
called back to Washington by the opening of Congress.
When I reported back to the telegraph office I was offered a steady
job, the operator having discovered that his red-headed messenger had
run off with a patent medicine vendor. The messenger work wouldn’t
interfere with my delivering papers. I was to get thirteen dollars
a month and “perquisites.” The big sounding word meant that I was
permitted to charge an extra quarter for every telegram I delivered
more than a mile from the office. Visions of affluence and the means
of obtaining the much coveted education flashed through the dreams of a
tired small boy that night.
Before falling asleep I figured up how much my earnings might amount
to in a year and was elated with the total I set down. Delivering
papers at four dollars a week and telegraph messages at thirteen
dollars a month footed up three hundred and sixty-four dollars a year,
not counting “perquisites.” The “perquisites” was the only uncertain
element in my calculations. I knew that a large percentage of the
population lived more than a mile from the office and I tried to make
mental estimates of how many might be important enough to receive
telegrams. I grew as optimistic over my prospect as the visionary
Colonel Sellers did in his calculations of how many bottles of lotion
would be needed to cure all the sore eyed persons in the world.
The next day opportunity came knocking again. Across the way from “our
office” was an unpretentious restaurant, run by a jolly, red faced
man with an enormous nose, and his adorable wife. It was cheap as to
price, but everything was of good quality. It was the cleanest and
neatest eating place I can recall. At least that is the impression
that lingers in my memory after the elapse of almost half a century. I
wasn’t so fastidious as regards restaurants and food then as I grew to
be in later years. How I did love that dear motherly woman who hurried
steaming hot coffee and a “stack of wheats” to me every morning when I
returned from delivering papers.
One morning she began chatting with me in a friendly way and when she
had coaxed me to tell about myself she proposed that I help them out
by acting as cashier during the mid-day rush hour. In return I was to
get my meals. It took me less than a minute to accept. It meant that
I could save my earnings, for I also had free lodgings, the foreman
of the pressroom having granted me permission to sleep on a stack of
print paper. I acquired a bedquilt and at night I would roll up in it
and sleep more soundly and untroubled than ever I did in the luxurious
Plaza Hotel in New York, where, later in life, I made my home for many
years. There are tender memories of my nest a-top the reserve supply of
print paper, covered only with my quilt of many colors and fantastic
design. It was there I learned the lesson of self-education; a lesson
that was worth while.
Looking backward now from the last milestone of my life’s journey,
I am wondering what I might have achieved if I could have had the
opportunities so many young men neglect.
There was an editor who took a liking to me and who helped me in a
lot of ways. I have often wondered how so busy a man could have the
time or patience to give so much attention to so small a human atom
as me. He selected books for me to read and he would talk to me about
them and explain many of the perplexities that lodged in my mind. I
had a duplicate key to his bookcases and was permitted to take a book
whenever I wished. In return for this privilege I kept the bookcases
in order. It was a fine opportunity for a chap who was hungry for
knowledge and had no other way of acquiring it. And how I did read!
There was nothing in the wide range of literature that I wouldn’t
tackle and try to comprehend. I read all of the essays of Emerson
and Carlyle, the philosophies of Aristotle, Epictetus, Montaigne,
and Johnson and volume after volume of history, ancient, modern, and
medieval. In the line of fiction I read all of Balzac, Dumas, Hugo,
Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, and a score of others of the great authors.
I read the lives of the great men of all times.
And, best of all, I read the Bible. Of all authors, of all times, there
were none who expressed themselves so clearly and so beautifully as did
the men who wrote this greatest Book of all literature.
I studied the sciences, especially astronomy, chemistry, geology, and
ethnology. The works of Voltaire and Darwin interested but mystified
me. I read and studied and analyzed so far as my undeveloped brain
would reach, but in all my reading of such books my belief in God and
in the teachings of Christ was never shaken. To-day, in spite of my
present condition and what brought me to it, that belief is as firmly
rooted as ever.
I learned other things in the newspaper office and in the telegraph
office that were useful later on. The easiest accomplishment that
came to me was when I mastered the Morse code and learned to send and
receive telegraph messages. The operator who employed me as messenger
boy was my instructor and I repaid him by often taking messages from
the wires while he lingered with convivial companions in a nearby
saloon. One night the newspaper editor was worried because it was
nearly time for the night report of the Associated Press to begin and
the telegraph operator couldn’t be found. Scouts were sent scurrying in
every direction, to search for him. When they found him and brought him
to the office he could scarcely stand on his feet.
The signal for clearing the wire had already been given and the
operator lurched over to the table and responded to the call of his
office. The press report began coming. I knew the operator was in
no condition for duty and I watched him with nervous apprehension.
Automatically he grabbed a pencil and began to write but he got down
only a few illegible sentences when he collapsed and plunged from his
seat to the floor.
I let him lie there in drunken stupor while I took every word of the
report without once breaking in on the wire to ask that a sentence be
repeated. The report was several thousand words in length. The editor,
tense and anxious, sat by my side, editing the copy as fast as I wrote
it, sending it direct to the composing room. When it was done I almost
went to pieces from the nervous strain.
The editor told everyone in the office how I had saved the paper from
being sent to press without a line of telegraph news and before I went
to bed I got him to promise not to report the operator. I met the
operator many years later. He had become chief operator in one of the
most important telegraph offices in the West and gave me every facility
at his disposal when I called to arrange for filing my report of a
great political convention. He told me then that he never drank another
drop of liquor after that night I saved him from disgrace.
At the time I mastered telegraphy I also learned to set type. And I
learned something of what is called job work, such as setting display
type for letter heads, business cards, circulars, and other commercial
necessities of the printer’s art. I learned to lock a form and put it
on a press, and to run and feed the press. I got no pay for what I did
other than what I earned by delivering papers and telegraph messages. I
did it because I loved it and cared for no other form of enjoyment. I
had no boy friends and made no attempt to cultivate them. My associates
were men, chiefly men from whom I could learn something useful and
there wasn’t a man in the entire organization of the newspaper office
who didn’t cheerfully explain to me anything I asked of him. Even the
busy editors and printers would stop important work to help me with
something I couldn’t comprehend. Perhaps that is why I have always
tried to be helpful to boys who were beginning at the bottom of the
ladder as I did.
At the time I was trying to educate myself from books borrowed from
the editor’s library, I chanced to get a copy of a weekly story paper
that was exclusively for boys and girls. With that issue there had
been started a department for instruction in shorthand, conducted by
one of the ablest stenographers in New York. Shorthand was then almost
unknown in the West and even in the big cities the comparatively few
who had mastered it were employed in court and legislative work. It was
but little known even in big business, which hadn’t yet heard of the
telephone, or of electric lights, or typewriting and adding machines. I
became interested, sent on my subscription to the magazine and studied
the lessons. Soon I purchased a set of textbooks and applied myself
with such industry that I quickly mastered it. I got so that I could
take down in shorthand messages that came over the telegraph wires.
Evenings I would attend lectures and public meetings and constant
practice soon made it possible for me to make verbatim reports of even
the most rapid speakers.
One day a lawyer came to me and asked if I could report an important
trial in which he was to appear as counsel. I was timid about
undertaking it, but urged on by the telegraph operator and my friend
the editor, I consented. The day of the trial came and I walked
importantly into the courtroom with my notebooks and pencils. The
lawyer who had employed me greeted me effusively and escorted me to a
table inside the railing and immediately under the judge’s bench. There
had never been a stenographic report of a trial in that court.
Before the trial began the lawyer made a pretty speech about me,
telling how I had mastered the mysteries of a wonderful sign language
that enabled me to take down every word as fast as it was uttered, no
matter how rapidly the speaker might talk. There were few stenographers
who were my equals for speed and accuracy, the lawyer lyingly
proclaimed. The courtroom was crowded and I felt as if a spotlight had
been suddenly turned on me. The whitehaired judge beamed benignantly as
he consented to my official appointment to report the trial.
There was one in the courtroom who was hostile. I knew it the instant
I spotted him, scowling crossly at me from the opposite side of the
table. He was a weazened old chap, as bald as an egg, hooked nose and
catlike eyes. He had been official court reporter for many years and
wrote longhand with considerable speed. He evidently looked upon me as
menacing his job. Ignoring my appointment, he got out a ream of legal
cap and proceeded to take testimony in accustomed longhand.
As many of the witnesses were foreigners and spoke brokenly I
experienced some difficulty in understanding them, but I felt that I
was getting along smoothly until the judge directed me to read the
reply a witness had made to the preceding question. I read aloud from
my notes and suddenly came to a halt. I stammered and stuttered. My
notes had become undecipherable. The shorthand characters were dancing
a jib. I could make nothing of them. The lawyer who employed me glared
angrily and the old fiend with the hook nose sneered contemptuously.
The judge alone was sympathetic. He evidently understood that my
confusion was due to nervousness rather than to incompetence. The
judge tried to encourage me by telling me not to get flustered and to
take as much time as necessary for the translation. The more I tried
the more hopelessly confused I grew. At last the judge motioned to old
hooknose to read from his report. How my heart throbbed the humiliation
I felt when that hateful old court reporter gave me a withering look
of contempt as he rose and read from his notes in a loud, firm voice.
I have always hated him and his mean, supercilious sneer with which he
sank contentedly back in his chair and gloated over my defeat. What
stung the hardest was that almost the instant the judge signaled to
old hooknose, the tantalizing hieroglyphics over which I had stumbled
suddenly came to life and became as translatable as ordinary print. But
it was too late. I felt crushed and beaten.
In the telegraph office one evening, I scribbled a fanciful story
which I called _An Autobiography of a Hotel Office Chair._ I left it
on a desk when I went across the street to eat and couldn’t find it
when I returned. The operator had begun taking the press report and
I couldn’t bother him. I thought he might have chucked it into the
wastebasket, so went to bed, but when I returned from delivering papers
the next morning I found a note from the editor, complimenting me on
what he graciously described as an “exceedingly well-written little
sketch.” He added: “Stick to it and you’ll get there.” Two silver
dollars were enclosed.
I was transported to the seventh heaven with delight when I found
that he had put my _Autobiography of a Hotel Office Chair_ in a
conspicuous position on the editorial page. Within an hour I read it
not less than a dozen times. Never were telegraph messages delivered
with greater celerity than I delivered them that day. I felt as if I
had wings.
When the operator got to the office he explained the mystery of how my
story got into print. He had noticed it lying on the desk when I went
to supper and had picked it up and read it. He took it to the editor.
“I’ll print it,” the editor said. “That lad has got stuff in him. He’ll
make a newspaper man some day.”
He double leaded my story and put it on the same page with his own
brilliant editorials, for he was a brilliant writer, as I recall him,
much too big a man for the job he occupied or the narrow sphere in
which some unexplainable freak of fate had cast him. I was an editor in
Chicago when I read of his tragic death. He was dropped to make room
for a younger man and he went into the woods and blew out his wonderful
brains.
A few more words of conceit about my story of the hotel office
chair. A few days after it was printed the editor showed me the
Chicago _Tribune_ and the St. Louis _Globe Democrat_. Each
had reprinted my story, with credit to the paper in which it first
appeared. Nothing I ever did afterwards in the field of journalism
brought me so much happiness.
I began studying the papers of the big cities. Often I would read
descriptions of events, get the facts in my mind, and rewrite them
in my own way, critically comparing what I had written with what had
been printed. I think this helped as much as anything in laying the
foundation for what I ultimately came to. Whenever I could I talked
to my friend, the editor, about my ambition and he was my ever-willing
tutor and guide. One day he called me to him and said that before the
year was up he would give me a regular job as reporter. I was elated
over the promise and during the ensuing months I studied harder than
ever.
Then came a calamity in my young life. Whether it was because I worked
too much and slept too little, or because I was sleeping in the foul
atmosphere of a basement pressroom, I was stricken with a fever and
when next I was able to sit up I was a miserable little skeleton of
skin and bones.
All ambition was gone. Even that bright and happy dream of a newspaper
career vanished with the delirium I had suffered. There was but one
thing in all the world I wanted. I wanted to see my mother. And home to
her I went, as fast as a train could take me.