BROKEN LINKS
And vain and empty stole away
Their little seasons, one by one;
And wearied while it yet was day
They fell asleep beneath the sun,
Ere once the dream or magic word
Could swing the gates of life apart,
Ere once some greater passion stirred
The dust from each impassive heart.
JOHN HARTLEY, "Pale Souls."
What are more desolate than life's moral Great Divides.--"The
Silver Poppy."
The grimy offices of the United News Bureau were on William Street,
almost under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. In four years this
bureau had known three failures and had existed, as well, under three
different names. Uneasy on his desk ever rested the heels of its
managing editor. There was a tradition, in fact, that this official had,
perforce, to take his chair out to lunch with him--otherwise a new man
occupied it on his return.
In dusty little pens about the august editorial chair toiled some ten or
twelve sadly dilapidated literary hacks, waifs of the sea of journalism
that had been washed up on the inhospitable shores of the syndicate
bureau. They were, as a rule, old men eking out a simple existence on
their few dollars a week, and, after frugal repasts at the noonday hour,
when the wheels of creative imagination suspended for luncheon, dilating
pensively on the old days, the good old palmy days of Greeley and Dana
and Godkin, when to wield the pen was a labor of love and honor, when a
newspaper man was not a walking sweat-shop of letters, whereby
literature was turned out in job lots and articles were manufactured at
so much the dozen.
It had not taken Hartley long to find that the United News Bureau was
looked on with considerable contempt, with even hatred, by the ordinary
New York newspaper writer. These upholders of sometimes dubiously
conventional journalism made it a rule always to refer to the bureau as
"the Boiler-Plate Factory," and night and day they watched it with
suspicious eyes for evidences of violated copyright. But the bureau knew
its business, and the different members of its staff had long since been
schooled in the deft execution of what was not inappropriately termed a
"plate sneak." This form of literary gymnastics consisted in the bodily
appropriation of any desired article, sermon, story, or essay, the copy
purloined being neatly disguised by a false face, as it were, in the
substitution of a freshly written introduction. An original paragraph or
two was attached to the end, with, perhaps, the interpolation of an
occasional new sentence throughout the body of the thing purloined. As
the bureau dealt in everything from anniversary poetry to syndicated
political addresses, the field for its predatory activities was
practically unlimited. A short story could be made by transplanting a De
Maupassant peasant to a New England farm, or the interjection of a
Kipling recruit into an Arizona mining-camp. The old-time action was
jealously preserved in the transformation, the only alterations being
those essential to a change of climate and conditions--and, presto, one
had a new tale as bright and glittering as a freshly minted penny.
The bureau had a Menu Page, too, made up by a very lean and
hungry-looking old gentleman who lunched sparingly on a sandwich each
noon, and a Religious Thought Page, edited by a very stout individual
who kept a brandy-flask standing beside his ink-bottle. A profitable
branch of its business was the preparation of obituaries of eminent men
still living, and it is on record that one editor had made it his
cheerful practise to submit these touching studies to the different
gentlemen whom they most intimately concerned, naively asking if
anything further remained to be said. What the bureau fattened on,
however, was the uncopyrighted in general, and for all such morsels it
watched with hawk-like intensity. An English novel or any less
substantial publication which came to it unprotected by the arm of the
law was pounced on at once, rapaciously and gleefully. It was renamed,
abridged or expanded as the case might require, and in less time than it
took the original author to indite his first chapter, it was on the
market as a new and thrilling serial, "secured by special arrangement."
The bureau, among other things, paid particular attention to the wants
of the farmer, and issued a Dairy Page, edited by an elderly maiden lady
who made Brooklyn her home and beheld a cow not more than once a year.
The expert who edited the Agricultural Page, it might be added, had
prepared himself for such tasks by many years' labor as an insurance
agent. The bureau also boasted of a professional poet, who ran strongly
to patriotism, but as his rhymes were manufactured for the convenience
of the rather undiscriminating bucolic editor and later on for the
delectation of the bucolic reader, his Gems in Verse usually went
unchallenged.
Since it took several days for the dissemination of the bureau's
material, as everything went from its offices made up into plates and
boxed for express, all of its offerings had to be prepared with a
wholesome disregard as to dates. This somewhat handicapped the dramatic
editor, who found it necessary to write bright and ingenious criticisms
of plays without first witnessing their performance--although, it must
be confessed, any difficulty on this score was usually obviated by
making all notices unreservedly eulogistic--otherwise remote editors
later on wrote in complaining of the loss of passes for those same
performances when they ventured out on the road and joined hands with
the bureau in that common and most commendable pursuit of stimulating
the imagination of the masses.
Midsummer in the bureau always saw the staff in the midst of their
Christmas literature, which, like its other anniversary material, was
made up into pages, with a generous sprinkling of highly appropriate
pictures of snow scenes and swinging bells and smiling Santa Clauses.
Year after year these same pictures were taken down from their dusty
shelves, and then year after year were duly stored away again for
another season's use. Summer fiction, in the same way, was always
manufactured during the winter months, by writers crouching forlornly
over cheerless little gas-heaters. The bureau possessed a couple of
"hands" surprisingly expert at this novelette work, who labored with the
assistance of the back numbers of the less prominent magazines, and
seemed possessed of the pleasing thought that what the world most loved
was an old friend in new clothes.
One of Hartley's first lessons--and there were many of them to be
learned--had been that no article, editorial, or story must "slop over."
This phrase was interpreted to him as meaning that no article must be
one line longer than the strictly allotted space. If such proved the
case the editorial blue pencil performed the necessary amputation, and
the child of the expansive mind was crowded into its page sadly bereft
of limbs, and often enough of all genuine sense and coherence. Hartley
had acquired the art, too, of writing poetry to order, suitable for the
bureau's stock illustrations, while the compositor waited at his elbow,
with his make-up suspended until the necessary lines were duly indited.
The young scholar from Oxford had been not a little amused, in secret,
at the duties of the person who was known as the comic editor. The chief
task of this editor seemed to be a ruthless scalping of the foreign
humorous weeklies and a conscientious and often laborious adjustment of
the witticisms of Punch to the American understanding. He was equally
amused to find that the Republican editor and the Democratic editor were
one and the same person, a mild-mannered and kindly faced old gentleman
in a faded green suit, who on alternate days furiously wrote the most
scathing political leaders back at himself.
Hartley himself had been carefully warned never to touch on religion,
politics, or even locality in any of his contributions. It had also been
impressed on his bewildered brain that there existed in American public
life a mysterious factor known as the "Irish element," and that under no
circumstances must he express any opinion or make any allusion which
might be interpreted as offensive to this element. If in doubt, his
editor commanded, he must be as Anglophobic as possible. He was also to
make it a point to wax gently sarcastic, even playfully malicious, when
speaking of that effete and overluxurious city New York--the name of
which, it appeared, was bitter in the mouth of all outsiders. Hartley
could never fathom why this was, but it was. And that seemed enough. He
learned to feel less uncomfortable masquerading under his different
pen-names after discovering that the heavily bearded old German who
smoked bad tobacco at the desk next to his own flourished in the columns
of the Woman's and Fashion Page as Daisy Dineen, the unquestioned
authority on dumpling recipes in ten thousand unsuspecting homes.
These were the offices and this was the atmosphere into which Hartley
listlessly came the morning after his interview with Cordelia Vaughan,
when he had faltered in telling her his real verdict on The Unwise
Virgins. This was the bitter gateway through which he had once dreamed
he could enter some Eden of eminence.
As he passed to his desk and mopped the dust from it with an old
newspaper, the place and all it stood for filled him with a sudden
new-born disgust and weariness, a feeling more reckless than any which
had before taken possession of him. He was sick of the smell of
turpentine and printers' ink. He was sick of the unventilated rooms and
the bad light. Daisy Dineen's tobacco-smoke drifted smotheringly about
him. A plaintive minor note seemed to creep into the tinkling chorus of
the many busy typewriters behind many little wooden partitions. There
seemed something ghoulish and subterranean in the stooped, dimly lighted
crooked figures of the patient writers about him. If earth's voracious
readers beyond the pale only knew and understood!
Hartley was leaning disconsolately on his elbow, thinking this thought,
when the shrill and slightly nasal voice of the managing editor called
him. He got up and went listlessly to the editorial desk, still hearing
some note of latent pathos in the patient tinkling of the many
typewriters.
"Look here, Lord Haughtly"--from his first day with the bureau they had
dubbed him Lord Haughtly, the opprobriousness of which he had born with
good-natured and smiling resignation--"what stuff have you turned in
this last week?"
It seemed to the young disseminator of information that the question was
asked in an unusually peremptory tone of voice. He was ready to overlook
such things, however, for in days gone by this rough-and-ready man of
affairs had not been altogether unkind to him, in his unconscious,
careless way. He remembered, too, that he had come to the bureau an
unknown and penniless youth, and that he was still one of the
"probationers."
"Nothing much this week, I'm afraid," he answered.
"Nothing, eh?" said the controller of the destinies of journalistic
literature, as he viewed the end of his cigar, which had all the
appearance of a well-worn paint-brush. "You don't seem to be aching much
to get on the pay-roll this week?"
"No, I rather didn't expect to," said Hartley quietly. He was beginning
to scent danger ahead.
"Didn't, eh? Well, I guess I've been letting you off kind of easy
lately. I've struck a new scheme, and I need a good chesty talker like
you to push it through for me. Goin' to try you on a new line of work. I
want you to go 'round to the different fancy outfitters and get anything
flashy in fall styles for the Fashion Page. Then look up six or seven
club-men--well-known club-men--and get me up a breezy two columns on
expensive underwear for men of the Four Hundred. Find out what young Van
Asteroid pays for his silk things and how many he's got, and all that
kind of guff."
There was a moment's silence. The author of Nausicaa and Other Poems
when anger took hold of him always went white and said little. He looked
down at his enemy, outwardly calm. But an inner fire was burning away
the last link of his bondage.
"I don't think I should care to undertake an assignment of that nature."
The oppressor had not seen his face.
"Probably you wouldn't," retorted the unsuspecting editor. "But we ain't
all here doing the things we want to. Everybody in this push, I guess,
has his dirty work to do. We want that article by four to-morrow. That
clear?"
"Quite clear. But I don't think you understand me," said the other,
struggling in vain to rise above his rage.
"You--you mean to tell me you won't! Look here, young man, you were a
sandwich-eating, no-account immigrant, starving in the gutters when I
picked you up and tried to make a New York newspaper man out of you.
There's men from Maine to New Mexico hungering to get the chance I gave
you--men who'd pay good money to get into this office. And you can do
what I say or get out."
Hartley wondered what strange metamorphosis had taken place somewhere
deep within his soul to give rise to the sudden new reckless spirit of
independence which swept through him. Before it his anger melted away;
he reveled only in a new sense of freedom.
"Very well, then; I get out," he replied, turning on his heel, almost
smilingly.
The voice of the managing editor had risen high above the smaller noises
of the office, and as Hartley walked to his dusty old desk and took up
his hat and somewhat tattered gloves there was a moment of unbroken
silence. He stood at the door and looked back. Timidly and nervously the
busy typewriters behind the little partitions started to tinkle out
their doleful staccato again. The managing editor sat, half turned in
his pivot chair, looking through the door after Hartley in amazement.
Then he swore at him lustily, and declaring before all that was holy
that it would do him good to go out and starve, he snorted the burden of
his rage from his mind and savagely commanded Daisy Dineen to give him a
match.
And that was the manner in which John Hartley left the services of the
United News Bureau for all time.