Read Ebook: The Great God Success: A Novel by Phillips David Graham

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Ebook has 1475 lines and 64774 words, and 30 pages

"That's our business. You soon get used to it, just as a doctor does. You learn to look at life from the purely professional standpoint. Of course you must feel in order to write. But you must not feel so keenly that you can't write. You have to remember always that you're not there to cheer or sympathise or have emotions, but only to report, to record. You tell what your eyes see. You'll soon get so that you can and will make good stories out of your own calamaties."

"Is that a portrait of the editor?" asked Howard, pointing to a grimed oil-painting, the only relief to the stretch of cracked and streaked white wall except a few ragged maps.

"That--oh, that is old man Stone--the 'great condenser.' He's there for a double purpose, as an example of what a journalist should be and as a warning of what a journalist comes to. After twenty years of fine work at crowding more news in good English into one column than any other editor could get in bad English into four columns, he was discharged for drunkenness. Soon afterwards he walked off the end of a dock one night in a fog. At least it was said that there was a fog and that he was drunk. I have my doubts."

"Cheerful! I have not been in the profession an hour but I have already learned something very valuable."

"What's that?" asked Kittredge, "that it's a good profession to get out of?"

"No. But that bad habits will not help a man to a career in journalism any more than in any other profession."

"Career?" smiled Kittredge, resenting Howard's good-humoured irony and putting on a supercilious look that brought out more strongly the insignificance of his face. "Journalism is not a career. It is either a school or a cemetery. A man may use it as a stepping-stone to something else. But if he sticks to it, he finds himself an old man, dead and done for to all intents and purposes years before he's buried."

"I wonder if it doesn't attract a great many men who have a little talent and fancy that they have much. I wonder if it does not disappoint their vanity rather than their merit."

"That sounds well," replied Kittredge, "and there's some truth in it. But, believe me, journalism is the dragon that demands the annual sacrifice of youth. It will have only youth. Why am I here? Why are you here? Because we are young, have a fresh, a new point of view. As soon as we get a little older, we shall be stale and, though still young in years, we must step aside for young fellows with new ideas and a new point of view."

"But why should not one have always new ideas, always a new point of view? Why should one expect to escape the penalties of stagnation in journalism when one can't escape them in any other profession?"

"But who has new ideas all the time? The average successful man has at most one idea and makes a whole career out of it. Then there are the temptations."

"How do you mean?"

Kittredge flushed slightly and answered in a more serious tone:

"We must work while others amuse themselves or sleep. We must sleep while others are at work. That throws us out of touch with the whole world of respectability and regularity. When we get done at night, wrought up by the afternoon and evening of this gambling with our brains and nerves as the stake, what is open to us?"

"That is true," said Howard. "There are the all-night saloons and--the like."

"And if we wish society, what society is open to us? What sort of young women are waiting to entertain us at one, two, three o'clock in the morning? Why, I have not made a call in a year. And I have not seen a respectable girl of my acquaintance in at least that time, except once or twice when I happened to have assignments that took me near Fifth Avenue in the afternoon."

"Mr. Kittredge, Mr. Bowring wishes to speak to you," an office boy said and Kittredge rose. As he went, he put his hand on Howard's shoulder and said: "No, I am getting out of it as fast as ever I can. I'm writing books."

"Kittredge," thought Howard, "I wonder, is this Henry Jennings Kittredge, whose stories are on all the news stands?" He saw an envelope on the floor at his feet. The address was "Henry Jennings Kittredge, Esq."

When Kittredge came back for his coat, Howard said in a tone of frank admiration: "Why, I didn't know you were the Kittredge that everybody is talking about. You certainly have no cause for complaint."

Kittredge shrugged his shoulders. "At fifteen cents a copy, I have to sell ten thousand copies before I get enough to live on for four months. And you'd be surprised how much reputation and how little money a man can make out of a book. Don't be distressed because they keep you here with nothing to do but wonder how you'll have the courage to face the cashier on pay day. It's the system. Your chance will come."

It was three days before Howard had a chance. On a Sunday afternoon the Assistant City Editor who was in charge of the City Desk for the day sent him up to the Park to write a descriptive story of the crowds. "Try to get a new point of view," he said, "and let yourself loose. There's usually plenty of room in Monday's paper."

Howard wandered through the Central Park for two hours, struggling for the "new point of view" of the crowds he saw there--these monotonous millions, he thought, lazily drinking at a vast trough of country air in the heart of the city. He planned an article carefully as he dined alone at the Casino. He went down to the office early and wrote diligently--about two thousand words. When he had finished, the Night City Editor told him that he might go as there would be nothing more that night.

He was in the street at seven the next morning. As he walked along with a News-Record, bought at the first news-stand, he searched every page: first, the larger "heads"--such a long story would call for a "big head;" then the smaller "heads"--they may have been crowded and have had to cut it down; then the single-line "heads"--surely they found a "stickful" or so worth printing.

At last he found it. A dozen items in the smallest type, agate, were grouped under the general heading "City Jottings" at the end of an inside column of an inside page. The first of these City Jottings was two lines in length:

"The millions were in the Central Park yesterday, lazily drinking at that vast trough of country air in the heart of the city."

As he entered the office Howard looked appealingly and apologetically at the boy on guard at the railing and braced himself to receive the sneering frown of the City Editor and to bear the covert smiles of his fellow reporters. But he soon saw that no one had observed his mighty spring for a foothold and his ludicrous miss and fall.

"Had anything in yet?" Kittredge inquired casually, late in the afternoon.

"I wrote a column and a half yesterday and I found two lines among the City Jottings," replied Howard, reddening but laughing.

"The first story I wrote was cut to three lines but they got a libel suit on it."

THE CITY EDITOR RECONSIDERS.

At the end of six weeks, the City Editor called Howard up to the desk and asked him to seat himself. He talked in a low tone so that the Assistant City Editor, reading the newspapers at a nearby desk, could not hear.

"We like you, Mr. Howard." Mr. Bowring spoke slowly and with a carefulness in selecting words that indicated embarrassment. "And we have been impressed by your earnestness. But we greatly fear that you are not fitted for this profession. You write well enough, but you do not seem to get the newspaper--the news--idea. So we feel that in justice to you and to ourselves we ought to let you know where you stand. If you wish, we shall be glad to have you remain with us two weeks longer. Meanwhile you can be looking about you. I am certain that you will succeed somewhere, in some line, sooner or later. But I think that the newspaper profession is a waste of your time."

Howard had expected this. Failure after failure, his articles thrown away or rewritten by the copyreaders, had prepared him for the blow. Yet it crushed him for the moment. His voice was not steady as he replied:

"No doubt you are right. Thank you for taking the trouble to study my case and tell me so soon."

"Don't hesitate to stay on for the two weeks," Mr. Bowring continued. "We can make you useful to us. And you can look about to much better advantage than if you were out of a place."

"I'll stay the two weeks," Howard said, "unless I find something sooner."

"Don't be more discouraged than you can help," said Mr. Bowring. "You may be very grateful before long for finding out so early what many of us--I myself, I fear--find out after years and--when it is too late."

Always that note of despair; always that pointing to the motto over the door of the profession: "Abandon hope, ye who enter here." What was the explanation? Were these men right? Was he wrong in thinking that journalism offered the most splendid of careers--the development of the mind and the character; the sharpening of all the faculties; the service of truth and right and human betterment, in daily combat with injustice and error and falsehood; the arousing and stimulating of the drowsy minds of the masses of mankind?

Howard looked about at the men who held on where he was slipping. "Can it be," he thought, "that I cannot survive in a profession where the poorest are so poor in intellect and equipment? Why am I so dull that I cannot catch the trick?"

He set himself to study newspapers, reading them line by line, noting the modes of presenting facts, the arrangement of headlines, the order in which the editors put the several hundred items before the eyes of the reader--what they displayed on each page and why; how they apportioned the space. With the energy of unconquerable resolution he applied himself to solving for himself the puzzle of the press--the science and art of catching the eye and holding the attention of the hurrying, impatient public.

He learned much. He began to develop the news-instinct, that subtle instant realisation of what is interesting and what is not interesting to the public mind. But the time was short; a sense of impending calamity and the lack of self-confidence natural to inexperience made it impossible for him effectively to use his new knowledge in the few small opportunities which Mr. Bowring gave him. With only six days of his two weeks left, he had succeeded in getting into the paper not a single item of a length greater than two sticks. He slept little; he despaired not at all; but he was heart-sick and, as he lay in his bed in the little hall-room of the furnished-room house, he often envied women the relief of tears. What he endured will be appreciated only by those who have been bred in sheltered homes; who have abruptly and alone struck out for themselves in the ocean of a great city without a single lesson in swimming; who have felt themselves seized from below and dragged downward toward the deep-lying feeding-grounds of Poverty and Failure.

"I think I'll wait a few days," said Howard, his tone corresponding to the look in his eyes and the compression of his resolute mouth.

The next day but one Mr. Bowring called him up to the City Desk and gave him a newspaper-clipping which read:

"Bald Peak, September 29--Willie Dent, the three-year-old baby of John Dent, a farmer living two miles from here, strayed away into the mountains yesterday and has not been seen since. His dog, a cur, went with him. Several hundred men are out searching. It has been storming, and the mountains are full of bears and wild cats."

"Will you take the train that leaves at eleven tonight and get us the story--if it is not a 'fake,' as I strongly suspect. Telegraph your story if there is not time for you to get back here by nine to-morrow night."

"Of course it's a fake, or at least a wild exaggeration," thought Howard as he turned away. "If Bowring had not been all but sure there was nothing in it, he would never have given it to me."

He was not well, his sleepless nights having begun to tell even upon his powerful constitution. The rest of that afternoon and all of a night without sleep in the Pullman he was in a depth of despond. He had been in the habit of getting much comfort out of an observation his father had made to him just before he died: "Remember that ninety per cent of these fourteen hundred million human beings are uncertain where to-morrow's food is to come from. Be prudent but never be afraid." But just then he could get no consolation out of this maxim of grim cheer. He seemed to himself incompetent and useless, a predestined failure. "What is to become of me?" he kept repeating, his heart like lead and his mind fumbling about in a confused darkness.

At Bald Peak he was somewhat revived by the cold mountain air of the early morning. As he alighted upon the station platform he spoke to the baggage-master standing in front of the steps.

"Was the little boy of a man named Dent lost in the mountains near here?"

"Yes--three days ago," replied the baggage-man.

"Have they found him yet?"

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