Seth’s first impressions of the World, gathered when he found himself and his valise alone on the sidewalk of one of Tecumseh’s chief streets, were distinctly gloomy.
Other passengers who had left the train here, and in whose throng he had been borne along thus far, started off briskly in various directions once they reached the busy thoroughfare, elbowing their way through the horde of clamorous hotel porters much as one might push through a clump of obstructing bushes. He had firmly fixed in his mind the cardinal rule of traveling countrymen, that these shouting runners were brigands intent upon robbing him, and he was clear in his resolution to give them no hold upon him, not even by so much as a civil expression of countenance. He said “No, thank you!” sternly to at least a dozen solicitations, so it seemed to him, and walked away steadily, fearful that their practised eyes had detected in him an utter stranger, and intent only upon proving to them that he knew where he was going. When at last it seemed likely that they were no longer watching him, he stopped, put his bag down in a door way, and looked about.
It was half-past six of a summer afternoon (for a failure to make connections had prolonged the sixty-mile journey over eight hours), and the sun, still high, beat down the whole length of the street with an oppressive glare and heat. The buildings on both sides, as far as eye could reach, were of brick, flat-topped, irregular in height, and covered with flaring signs. There was no tree, nor any green thing, in sight.
Past him in a ceaseless stream, and all in one direction, moved a swarm of humanity—laborers and artisans with dinner-pails, sprucely dressed narrow-chested clerks and book-keepers, and bold faced factory-girls in dowdy clothes and boots run down at the heels—a bewildering, chattering procession. No one of all this throng glanced at him, or paid the slightest attention to him, until one merry girl, spying his forlorn visage, grinned and called out with a humorous drawl “Hop-pick—ers!” and then danced off with her laughing companions, one of whom said, “Aw, come off! You’re rushin’ the season. Hop’s ain’t ripe yet.”
Seth felt deeply humiliated at this. He had been vaguely musing upon the general impudence of his coming to this strange city to teach its people daily on all subjects, from government down, while he did not even know how to gracefully get his bag off the street. This incident added the element of wounded self-pride to his discomfort—for even casual passers-by were evidently able to tell by his appearance that he was a farmer. Strange! neither Albert nor John had told him anything calculated to serve him in this dilemma. They had warned him plentifully as to what not to do. Indeed his head was full of negative information, of pit-falls to avoid, temptations to guard against. But on the affirmative side it was all a blank. John had, it was true, advised him to get board with some quiet family, but if there were any representatives of such quiet families in the crowd surging past, how was he to know them?
While he tormented himself with this perplexing problem, two clerks came out of the store next to which he stood, to pull up the awning and prepare for night. A tall young man, with his hands deep in his trouser’s pockets, and a flat straw hat much on one side of his head, sauntered across the street to them, and was greeted familiarly.
“Well, Tom,” shouted one of these clerks, “you just everlastingly gave it to that snide show to-night. Wasn’t it a scorcher, though?”
The young man with the straw hat put on a satisfied smile: “That’s the only way to do it,” he said lightly. “The sooner these fakirs understand that they can’t play Tecumseh people for chumps, the better. If the Chronicle keeps on pounding ’em, they’ll begin to give us a wide berth. Their advance agent thought he could fix me by opening a pint bottle of champagne. That may work in Hornellsville, but when he gets to-night’s Chronicle I fancy he’ll twig that it doesn’t go down here.”
“Oh, by the way, Tom,” said the other clerk, in a low tone of voice, “my sister’s engaged to Billy Peters. I don’t know that she wants to have it given away, that is, names, and everything, but you might kind o’ hint at it. It would please the old folks, I think—you know father’s taken the Chronicle for the last twenty years.”
“I know” said Tom, producing an old envelope from a side pocket and making some dashes on it with a pencil—“the regulation gag: ‘It is rumored that a rising young hat-dealer will shortly lead to the altar one of the bright, particular social stars of Brewery street ’ eh? Something like that?”
“Yes, that’s it. You know how to fix it so that everybody’ll know who is meant. Be around at Menzel’s to-night?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll look in. The beer’s been fearfully flat there, though, this last carload. So long, boys!”—and Tom moved down the street while the clerks re-entered the store.
Seth followed him eagerly, and touched him on the shoulder, saying:
“I beg your pardon, sir, but I heard you mention the Chronicle just now. I would be much obliged if you could tell me where the office is.”
The young man turned, looked Seth over and said, affably enough:
“Certainly. But you’ll find it shut up. The book-keeper’s gone home.” Then he added, as by a happy afterthought: “If you want to pay a weekly subscription, though, I can take it, just as well as not.”
“No,” answered Seth, “I’ve come to work on the Chronicle.”
“Oh—printer? I guess some of the fellows are there still, throwing in their cases. If you like, I’ll show you.”
Seth replied, with some embarrassment, “No, I’m not a printer. I’ve come to be—to be—an editor.”
Tom’s manner changed in a twinkling from civility to extreme cordiality.
“Oh—ho! you’re the new man from Thessaly, eh? Jack Fairchild’s brother! By Jove! How are you, anyway? When did you get in? Where are you stopping?”
“I’m not stopping anywhere—unless it be this stairway here,” Seth replied, pointing to his carpetbag with a smile, for his companion’s cheerfulness was infectious. “I came in half an hour ago, and I scarcely knew where to go, or what to do first. I gather that you are connected with the Chronicle.”
“Well, I should remark!” said Tom, taking the bag up as he spoke. “Come along. We’ll have some supper down at Bismarck’s, and leave your grip there for the evening. We can call for it on our way home. You’ll stop with me to-night, you know. It ain’t a particularly fly place, but we’ll manage all right, I guess. And how’s Jack?”
In the delight of finding so genial a colleague, one, too, who had known and worked with his brother, Seth’s heart rose, as they walked down the street again. He had been more than a little dismayed at the prospect of meeting these unknown writers whose genius radiated in the columns of the Chronicle, and in whose company he was henceforth to labor. Especially had he been nervous lest he should not speak with sufficient correctness, and should shock their fastidious ears with idioms insensibly acquired in the back-country. It was a great relief to find that this gentleman was so easy in his conversation, not to say colloquial.
They stopped presently at a broad open door, flanked by wide windows, in which were displayed a variety of bright-tinted play bills, and two huge pictures of a goat confidently butting a small barrel. There was a steep pile of these little, dark-colored barrels on the sidewalk at the curb, from which came a curious smell of resin. As they entered, Seth discovered that this odor belonged to the whole place.
The interior was dark and, to the country youth’s eyes, unexpectedly vast. The floor was sprinkled with gray sand. An infinitude of small, circular oak tables, each surrounded with chairs, stretched out in every direction into the distant gloom. Away at the farther end of the place, somebody was banging furiously on a piano. In the middle distance, three elderly men sat smoking long pipes and playing dominoes, silently, save for the sharp clatter of the pieces. Nearer, three other men, seated about a table, were all roaring in German at the top of their lungs, pounding with their glasses on the resounding wood, and making the most excited and menacing gestures. While Seth stared at them, expecting momentarily to see the altercation develop into blows, he felt himself clutched by the arm, and heard Tom say:
“Bismarck, this is Mr. Fairchild, a new Chronicle man. You must use him as well as you do me.”
Seth turned and found himself shaking hands with an old German monstrous in girth, and at once fierce and comical in aspect, with short, upright gray hair, a huge yellowish-white moustache, and little piggish blue eyes nearly hidden from view by the wave of fat which rendered his great purple face as featureless as the bottom of a platter.
“Who effer vas Misder Vott’s frent, den you bed he owens dis whole houwus,” this stout gentleman wheezed out, smiling warmly, and releasing Seth’s hand to indicate, with a sweeping gesture of his pudgy paw, the extent of Seth’s new and figurative possessions.
On the invitation of the host they all took seats, and a lean, wolfish-faced young man named “Ow-goost,” who shuffled along pushing his big slippers on the floor, brought three tall foaming glasses of dark-brown beer. Seth did not care for beer, and had always, in a general way, avoided saloons and drink, but of course, under these circumstances, it would be ridiculous not to do as the others did. The beverage was bitter, but not unpleasant, and with an effort he drank it half down at a time, as he saw his companions do. Then he looked about, while they discussed the merits of this new “bock,” Tom speaking with an air of great authority, and pronouncing it better than the last, but a bit too cold.
The piano was still jangling, and the dominoes were being rattled around for a new game. The three noisy old men had grown, if possible, more violent and boisterous than ever. One of them now sprang to his feet, lifted his right hand dramatically toward the dusky ceiling, and bellowed forth sonorously something which Seth thought must be at least a challenge to immediate combat, while the others hammered their glasses vehemently, and fairly shrieked dissent.
“I’m afraid those men are going to fight,” he said.
“Fight? Nonsense! They’re rather quieter than usual,” remarked Tom. “What are they chewing on to-night, Bismarck—the Sigel racket?”
“Yes,” said their host, listening indifferently. “Dot’s Sigel.” Then, addressing Seth, he explained: “Somedimes it’s Sigel, unt somedimes the reffolution uff forty-eighd, unt den somedimes der k-vestion of we haf a vood bafement by Main streed. It all makes no differunce to dem, vicheffer ding dey shdarts mit, dey git yust so much oxcited. Dot rooster you see standing up mit der spegtacles, dot Henery Beckstein, he’s a tailor; he sits mid his legs tvisted all day, den when night comes he neets some exercises. Efery night for tweluf years he comes here, unt has his liddle dalk, und de udders, dey alvays pitches into him. He likes dot better as his dinner. De vurst is, dey all don’t know vat dey talk aboud. I bleef, so help me Gott, no one of ’em ever laid eyes by Sigel, unt dey all svear he vas deir dearest frent. Now—hear dot! Dot Beckstein say uff he didn’t shleep mid him four years in his dent, in de same bet! How was dot for lies, huh?” The host, pained and mortified at this mendacity, left his seat and waddled over to the disputants, shouting as he went, and joined the conversation so earnestly that his little eyes seemed bursting from his beet-red face.
“Great old man, that,” said Tom, pounding with his glass for the waiter; “there’s no flies on him! I named him Bismarck three or four years ago—everybody calls him that now—and it tickled him so, there’s nothing here too good for me. You like cheese, don’t you?”
“Well, yes, I eat cheese sometimes.”
Seth never had eaten this kind of cheese which Owgoost presently slapped down before them, along with a mustard cup, a long bulging roll of black bread, and more beer. It was pale and hard and strong of scent, was cut in thick slabs, and was to be eaten, he judged from Tom’s procedure, under a heavy top-dressing of the brown mustard. He liked it though, and was interested to find how well beer went with it, or it went with beer. Then they had each a little pickled lambs-tongue, pink and toothsome, to be eaten with plenty of salt, and it was quite remarkable how ideally beer seemed to go with this, too. In all, three large glasses went.
Tom was a delightful companion. It was simply charming to hear him talk, as he did almost continuously, describing the round of life in Tecumseh, relating gay little anecdotes of personal experience, and commenting trenchantly on various men as they came in. To some of these he introduced Seth. They seemed extremely affable young people, and some of them who took seats near by invited Tom and him with much fervor and still greater frequency, to have their glasses filled up. The former accepted these proffers very freely, but the beer did not taste as good to Seth as it had during supper, and he kept to his one glass—the fourth—sipping at it from time to time. Tom was so urgent about it, though, that he did take a cigar, a dark, able-bodied cigar which annoyed him by burning up on one side.
The beer-hall presented a brilliant appearance now, with all the lights flaming, with most of the chairs filled by merry young men, with three or four white-jacketed waiters flitting about, bearing high in air both hands full of foaming glasses—a fine contrast to the dingy, bare interior of the twilight, with only the solitary Owgoost. Above the ceaseless hum of conversation and laughter, rose, at intervals, the strains of lively music from the far-off piano, reinforced now by a harp and a flute.
After a time cards were proposed, and Tom made one of a quartette who ranged themselves at the table. Seth could not play, and so moved his chair back, to watch the game. His cigar burned badly and he relighted it. Then it tasted bitter, and, after some hesitation, he threw it away. The game, called seven-up, was one he had never seen before; the ten-spots were invested with a fictitious value which puzzled him. Tom, over whose shoulder he watched had three of these tens, and silently indicated to Seth that they were of especial interest. Seth fixed his eyes upon them, to see how they were to be managed. They were very curious ten-spots, being made of beer-glasses running over with lambs-tongues, with lambs chasing them to rescue their lamented members, and burly “Bismarck” striving in vain to secure order. General Sigel came to help him, and Tom dealt him a terrific blow. Here was a fight at last, and John Fairchild stood by, rapidly taking notes. Then it came bed-time, and—Seth was being shaken into sensibility by Tom, who said between fits of chuckling:
“Wake up, old boy! Wake up!”
Another great change had taken place in the beer-hall—the lights were out, the music had ceased, the crowd was gone. A solitary gas-jet flickered from the chandelier over the table; the game was ended, and the players were standing ready to depart, and laughing. Fat Bismarck stood behind him, in the half-shadow, looking very sleepy, and he seemed to be grinning too.
Seth saw all this first. Then he discovered that he held his collar and necktie in his hand, and that his coat and waistcoat were on the table. He dimly began to understand that he had been asleep, and that, in the operation of his dream, he had commenced undressing. Everybody was laughing at him, his friend Tom, who now was helping him on with his coat, most heartily of all.
“I declare,” Seth said, “I must have fallen asleep. I had no idea—I suppose I was dreaming of getting ready for bed.”
“Oh, dots all right, dots all right,” said Bismarck heartily. “Ve don’d mind it a bit. You vas only dired owut.”
“Yes, that’s it,” said Tom, “he’d had a hard day of it, traveling all the way from Thessaly. Are you ready? We’ll get the bag, and trot along home. Good night, boys!”
Seth responded to the chorus of answering “good nights,” and the twain started out. Tom not only carried the bag, but took his companion’s arm—much to Seth’s satisfaction, for he felt very tired, and it seemed unusually difficult for him to shake off his sleepiness. Tom was more talkative than ever, and he seemed to be saying extremely clever things, but Seth somehow did not follow their meaning, and he could think of nothing to say in reply. They were in a dark side street now.
“Ah, I thought he’d be open!” said Tom, abruptly, stopping before a place, through the closed shutters of which long horizontal threads of light gleamed. “Let’s go in and have a night-cap. It’ll set you straight in a minute.”
The curious reluctance to speak, of which Seth had felt vaguely conscious all along, now prompted acquiescence as the easiest course, and he followed Tom into a small, low room, thick with cigar-smoke and the odor of kerosene, where four or five men, with their hats tilted over their eyes, were playing cards: there was a pile of money in the centre of the table, to which each in turn seemed to be adding from a smaller heap before him. They were so much engrossed in the game that they only nodded at Tom, and Seth felt relieved at escaping the ordeal of being introduced to them. At Tom’s suggestion he took a little glass of brandy—“to do their duty by the National debt,”—what ever that meant. It was burning, nauseous stuff, which brought the tears to his eyes, but it made him feel better.
It especially enabled him to talk, which he proceeded to do now with a fluency that surprised him. Tom was evidently much impressed by his remarks, saying little, it is true, but gripping his arm more closely. Thus they walked to Tom’s lodgings—a tall, dark brick house opposite a long line of coal sheds. The hall was so dark that Seth, in trying to follow his guide, stumbled over an umbrella-rack, and fell to the floor. Tom assisted him to rise, with a paternal “steady now, steady; that’s it, lean on me,” and so helped him up the two flights of steep, narrow stairs. In all the world, it seemed to Seth, he could not have met a more amiable or congenial friend than Tom, and he told him so, as they climbed the stairs, affectionately leaning upon his arm, and making his phrases as ornate in diction and warm in tone as he could.
“Here we are,” said Tom, opening a door, and lighting a lamp which revealed a small, scantily furnished room, in extreme disorder. “Make yourself at home, my boy. Smoke a pipe before you go to bed?”
“Oh, mercy, no. I thinks—do you know, I feel a little dizzy.”
“Oh, you’ll be all right in the morning. Just undress and pile into bed. I’ll smoke a pipe first.” Half an hour after Seth’s first day in the World had closed in heavy slumber, Tom looked at him before blowing out the light, and smiled to himself: “He is about as fresh as they make ’em.”
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.”
GROWING familiarity with his work did not restore to Seth the lofty conceptions of journalism’s duties and delights which he had nourished on the hill-side farm, and which had been so ingloriously dimmed and defaced by his first day’s experience.
The tasks set before him, to which he gradually became accustomed, seemed almost as unintellectual and mechanical as the ploughing and planting he had forsaken. The rule of condensation, compression, continually dinned into his ears by his mentors, robbed his labors of all possible charm. To “boil down” columns of narrative into a few lines of bald, cold statement; to chronicle day after day in the curtest form, fires, failures, crimes, disasters, deaths, in a wearying chain of uninteresting news notes; to throw remorselessly into the journalistic crucible all the work of imagination, of genius, of deep fine thought which came into his hands, together with the wordy dross spun out by the swarm of superficial scribblers, and extract from good and bad alike only the meaningless, miserable fact—this was a task against which, in the first weeks of experience, his whole soul revolted.
By the time he had become reconciled to it, and had mastered its tricks, his dream of journalism as the most exalted of all departments of activity seemed to him like some far-away fantasy of childhood.
He not only had failed to draw inspiration from his work; it was already ceasing to interest him. Under pleasanter conditions, he felt that he would have at least liked the proof-reading portion of the daily routine; but the printers were so truculent and hostile, and seemed so pre-determined to treat him as their natural enemy, that this was irksome, too. There was no relief to the distasteful monotony in other branches of his work. Even the agricultural column, which he had promised himself to so vastly improve, yielded no satisfaction. The floating, valueless stuff from which his predecessors had selected their store came so easily and naturally to the scissors that after a week or two he abandoned the idea of preparing original matter: it saved time and labor, and nobody seemed to know the difference. These words, in fact, came to describe his mental attitude toward all his work. He had no pride in it. If he escaped curses for badly-read proofs, and criticism for missing obvious matters of news, it was enough.
Seth did not arrive at this condition of mind without much inner protest, or without sundry efforts to break through the crust of perfunctory drudgery which was encasing him. At the start he bestowed considerable thought and work upon an effort to brighten and improve, by careful re-working of materials, one of the departments entrusted to him, and, just when he expected praise, Tyler told him to stop it. Then he tried to make his religious column a feature by discarding most of the ancient matter which revolved so drolly in the Obago Evening Mercury, and picking out eloquent bits from the sermons of great contemporary preachers; but this elicited denominational protest from certain pious subscribers, and Mr. Workman commanded a return to the old rut.
But the cruel humiliation came when Seth took to Mr. Samboye an editorial paragraph he had written with great care. It was a political paragraph, and Seth felt confident that it was exactly in the Chronicle’s line, and good writing as well. The Editor took it, after regarding the young writer with a stony, half-surprised stare, and read it over slowly. He delivered judgment upon it, in his habitual pomposity of phrases: “This is markedly comprehensive in scope and clarified in expression, Mr. Fairchild.” Then, as Seth’s heart was warming with a sense of commendation and success, the Editor calmly tore the manuscript in strips, dropped them in his waste-basket, and turned reflectively to his newspaper.
Seth’s breath nearly left him: “Then you can’t use it;” he faltered. “I thought it might do for an editorial paragraph.”
There was the faintest suggestion of a patronising smile on Mr. Samboye’s broad, ruddy face.
“Oh, I am reminded, Mr. Fairchild,” he answered, with bland irrelevance; “pray do not allow Porte to pass again with a small p, as you did yesterday in the proof of my Turkish article. It should be capitalized invariably.”
The beginner went back to his stall both humiliated and angry. The cool insolence with which he had been reminded that he was a proof-reader, and warned away from thoughts of the editorial page, enraged and depressed him. He passed a bitter hour at his table, looking savagely through the window at the automatic motions of the printer directly opposite, but thinking evil thoughts of Samboye, and cursing the fate which had led him into newspaper work. So uncomfortable did he make himself by these reflections that it required a real effort to throw off their effects when Watts came upstairs, and the two left the office for the day. It was impossible not to relate his grievance.
Tom did not see its tragic side, and refused utterly to concede that Seth ought to be cast down by it.
“That’s only Samboye’s way,” he said, lightly. “He won’t let any of the fellows get on to the page, simply because he’s afraid they’ll outwrite him. He’d rather do it all himself—and he does grind out an immense load of stuff—than encourage any rivals. Besides, he never loses a chance to snub youngsters. Don’t let it worry you for a minute. If he sees that it does, he’ll only pile it on the thicker. In this business you’ve got to have a hide on you like the behemoth of Holy Writ, or you’ll keep raw all the while.”
Seth found some consolation in this view, and more still in Tom’s cheery tone. The two young men spent the evening together—at Bismarck’s.
This came gradually but naturally to be Seth’s habitual evening resort. It represented to him, indeed, all that was friendly and inviting in Tecumseh society. He was able to recall dimly some of the notions of coming social distinction he indulged in the farm days—dreams of a handsome young editor who was in great request in the most refined and luxurious home circles, who said the most charming things to beautiful young ladies at parties and balls, who wavered in his mind between wedding his employer’s daughter and taking a share in the paper, or choosing some lowlier but more intellectual maid to wife, and leading with her a halcyon and exaltedly literary career in a cottage—but they were as unreal, as indistinct now as the dreams of night before last. All the social bars seemed drawn against him as a matter of course.
This did not impress him as a hardship, because he was only vaguely conscious of it, at first, and then grew into the habit of regarding it as a thing to be grateful for. Tom Watts pointed out to him frequently the advantage of being a Bohemian, of being free from all the fearsome, undefined routine and responsibility of making calls, of dressing up in the evening, and of dangling supine attendance upon girls and their mammas. This “social racket,” the city editor said, might please some people; Dent, for instance, seemed to like it. But for his part it seemed quite the weakest thing a young man could go in for—entirely incompatible with the robust and masculine character demanded in a successful journalist.
This presented itself to Seth as an extremely sound position, and he made it his own so willingly that very soon he began to take credit to himself in his own eyes for having turned a deaf ear to the social siren, and having deliberately rejected the advances of fashionable Tecumseh. He grew, really, to believe that it was by preference, by a wise resolution to preserve his freedom and individuality, that he remained outside the mysterious, impalpable regions which were labelled in his mind as “Society.”
On the other hand, there was no nonsense at Bismarck’s, or at the other similar beer halls to which Tom introduced him. One dressed as one chose, and did as one liked; seven-up or penochle provided just the mental recreation a wearied literary brain demanded; and the fellows one met there were cheerful, companionable young men, who likewise had no nonsense about them, who put on no airs of superiority, and who glided swiftly and jovially through the grades of acquaintanceship to intimacy.
Seth was greatly strengthened in his liking for this refuge from loneliness in a strange city by what he saw of Arthur Dent, whom Watts had prepared him to regard as the embodiment of the other and strait-laced side.
This young man was not at all uncivil, but he was delicate, almost effeminate in frame, wore eye-glasses, dressed with fastidious neatness, never made any jokes or laughed heartily at those of others, and rarely joined the daily lounge and smoke around Tyler’s table after the paper had gone to press—and in all these things he grated upon Seth’s sensitiveness. He was the one member of the staff whom Mr. Workman seemed to like and whom Mr. Samboye never humiliated publicly by his ponderous ridicule, and these were added grievances. He worked very steadily and carefully, and was said to do a good deal of heavy reading at home, evenings, in addition to the slavish routine of high social duties in which Seth indefinitely understood him to be immersed. His chief tasks were the book reviews, the editing of correspondence, and the preparation of minor editorial paragraphs in a smaller type than Mr. Samboye’s. Seth thought that his style, though correct and neat, was thin and emasculated, and he came to associate this with his estimate of the writer, and account for it by his habits and associations—which the further confirmed him in his judgment as to the right way to live.
But there was something more than this. The first few days after his return from his vacation, Dent had tried to be courteous and helpful to the newcomer from the country, in his shy, undemonstrative way, and Seth, despite his preconceived prejudice, had gone a little way on the road to friendship. Then one night, as he and Watts were returning arm-in-arm to their joint lodgings from Bismarck’s, a trifle unsteadily perhaps, they had encountered Dent walking with a young lady, and Tom had pleasantly accosted them—at least it seemed pleasantly to Seth—but Dent had not taken it in the right spirit at the time, and had been decidedly cool to Seth ever since. This was so unreasonable that the country boy resented it deeply, and the two barely spoke to each other.
His relations with the others were less strained, but scarcely more valuable in the way of companionship. Mr. Tyler did not seem to care much for his company, and never asked him to go to the “Roast Beef”—a sort of combination of club and saloon where he spent most of his evenings, where poker was the chief amusement and whisky the principal drink. From all Seth could learn, it was as well for him that he was not invited there. As for Murtagh, all his associations outside the office seemed to be with young men of his own race, who formed a coterie by themselves, and frequented distinctively Irish resorts. Like most other American cities Tecumseh had its large Irish and German elements, and in nothing were ethnographic lines drawn so clearly as in the matter of amusements. There were enough young Americans holding aloof from both these foreign circles to constitute a small constituency for the “Roast Beef,” but a far greater number had developed a liking for the German places of resort, and drank beer and ate cheese and rye bread as if to the manner born. Seth found himself in this class on his first step over the threshold of city life; he enjoyed it, and he saw very little of the others.
The two most important men on the Chronicle, Mr. Workman and Mr. Samboye, were far removed from the plane upon which all these Bohemian divisions were traced. They belonged to the Club—the Tuscarora Club. Seth knew where the club house was—but he felt that this was all he was ever likely to know about it. The first few days in Tecumseh had taught him the hopelessness of his dream of associating with his employer. Socially they were leagues apart at the outset, and if the distance did not increase as weeks grew into months, at least Seth’s perception of it did, which amounted to the same thing.
He did not so readily abandon the idea of being made a companion by Samboye, but at last that vanished too. The Editor held himself very high, and if he occasionally came down off his mountain top, his return to those heights only served to emphasize their altitude. There were conflicting stories about his salary. Among the lesser lights of the editorial room it was commonly estimated at forty-five dollars a week, but some of the printers had information that it was at least fifty—which fatigued the imagination. Seth himself received nine dollars, which his brother supplemented by five, and he found that he was regarded as doing remarkably well for a beginner. But between this condition and the state of Samboye with his great income, his fine house on one of the best streets, his influential position in the city, and his luxurious amusements at the Club, an impassable gulf yawned.
There is no pleasure in following further the details of the country boy’s new life. He lost sight of his disappointment in the consolations of a phase of city existence which does not show to advantage in polite-pages. He did not become vicious or depraved.
The relentless treadmill of a daily paper forbade his becoming indolent. By sheer force of contact his mind expanded, too, more than even he suspected. But it was a formless, unprofitable expansion, which did not help him to get out of the rut. He performed his work acceptably—at least he rarely heard any criticisms upon it—lived a trifle ahead of his small income, and ceased to even speculate on the chance of promotion.
When, thirteen months after his advent in Tecumseh, the news came to him from the farm that his father was dying, he obtained leave to go home. Mr. Workman remarked to Mr. Samboye that afternoon:
“I shan’t mind much if Fairchild doesn’t come back.”
“Is that so? He seems to get through his work decently and inoffensively enough. He will never set the North River ablaze, of course, but he is civil and all that.”
“Yes, but I can’t see that there’s anything in him. Beside, I don’t like his influence on Watts. I’m told you can find them together at Bismarck’s every night in the week.”
“Of course, that makes it bad,” said Mr. Samboye.
Then the proprietor and the editor locked up their desks, went over to the Club, and played pyramid pool till midnight.