David Malcolm Part 13

He dropped the paper, looked at my card, and read Boller's letter.

Evidently it amused him, for the half-burned cigarette in his mouth moved convulsively, and as he came toward me there sprang up in my mind doubts as to Boller's estimate of him. But he proved a good-natured young man and certainly very modest. Sitting on the ancient office-boy's desk, he addressed me in low tones, as though he feared to be overheard. He was glad to know any friend of Boller's, but evidently Boller was laboring under a misapprehension as to his importance. He disavowed having any influence. Had he the power, nothing would delight him more than to give a friend of Boller a job.

I had never thought of myself hunting anything so commonplace as a job, but as I listened to him and looked past him into the editorial room my ideas of my chosen profession were rapidly readjusting themselves and I was casting about for a way in which to continue my quest without the influence on which I had counted so heavily. I protested that I had never dreamed of him giving me a job; I had come to him simply for advice, and perhaps an introduction to the real powers.

Mr. Carmody gave an uneasy glance over his shoulders to a large desk in the corner, where sat a tall, thin man who seemed absorbed in a game of checkers played with newspaper clippings. Mr. Hanks, the city editor, he explained; nothing that he could say would have any influence on Mr.

Hanks. On my insisting, however, he at last consented to sound Mr.

Hanks on my behalf; he approached him with something of the caution he would have used in confronting a tiger; he waved his hand to me to a.s.sure me that all was well, and when I stood by the big desk he disappeared, and it was many days before I saw him again.

There was nothing repelling in Mr. Hanks. Indeed, he seemed rather a mild man, but when he turned on me a pair of large spectacles I felt suddenly as though I were a curious insect being examined under magnifying-gla.s.ses. Mr. Hanks, with his thin, pale face and dishevelled hair, appeared more an entomologist than a militant editor.

In a moment, however, I saw him in action. He shot his bare arm across the littered desk, he seemed to try to destroy his bra.s.s bell, and with every ring he shouted, "Copy--copy!" Office-boys sprang from the floor and dropped from the ceiling; they tumbled over one another in their hurry to answer the summons. He reprimanded them for being asleep. I thought that they would be ordered to bring Mr. Malcolm a chair, but instead one received from a waving hand a bunch of paper, and they retired as they had come, into the floor and the ceiling. I was under the magnifying-gla.s.ses again.

"Well, Mr. Malcolm," said Mr. Hanks, leaning back in his chair and clasping his hands behind his head, "ever done any newspaper work?"

"No, sir," I answered boldly. "I have just graduated from McGraw."

"And where in the devil is McGraw?" he asked in a slow, wondering voice.

How I wished for Doctor Todd! In five minutes this self-confident journalist would blush for his own ignorance. But Doctor Todd not being here to confound him with facts, there was nothing better for me to do than to hand him the letter. His face lighted with a smile as he read it. The effect was so good that I followed it with Mr. Pound's.

The effect of Mr. Pound's was so good that I was confident that I should soon be a journalist in fact, for Mr. Hanks read it over twice.

"My boy," he began, regarding me through his spectacles benignly. At that familiar address my heart leaped. "Let me give you some advice."

My heart fell. "Take those letters and lock them up to read when you are ten years older. Then start out and go from office to office until you get a place. Don't be discouraged. Some day you'll break in somewhere."

"But I want to work on _The Record_," I cried. "It's politics agree with mine--it is Republican. It is a respectable paper. It----"

Mr. Hanks was leaning over his desk. "Pile," he said, addressing the fat man who sat across from him, "that was a good beat we had on the Worthing divorce--I see all the evenings are after it hard. We must have a second-day story."

"I am ready," I said a little louder, "to begin with any kind of work."

Mr. Hanks looked up as though surprised that I was still there.

"You've come at a bad time," he said brusquely. "Summer--we are letting men go every day. But don't get discouraged. I worked four months for my first job, and I didn't come from McGraw either. Keep going the rounds."

Then he seemed to forget my existence and resumed his game of checkers.

His dismissal was a terrible blow, but I had read enough of great men to know that they had to fight for their opportunities, and I was determined not to be a weakling and go down in the first skirmish. For a moment I stood bewildered at the entrance of _The Record_ building, stunned by the unexpected outcome of my visit there. I was indignant at Boller for having raised my hopes so high. I was indignant at Mr.

Carmody for not measuring up to Boller's estimate. I was indignant at Mr. Hanks for not making a searching inquiry into my attainments, for his ignorance of McGraw and his amus.e.m.e.nt over my precious letters. I vowed that some day Mr. Hanks should be put under my magnifying-gla.s.s, to shrivel beneath my burning gaze.

To break in somewhere proved a long task. From Miss Minion's boarding-house on Seventeenth Street, where I established myself, I went forth daily to the siege of Park Row. I was shot up to heaven to editorial rooms beneath gilded domes, and as quickly shot down again.

I climbed to editorial rooms less exaltedly placed, up dark, bewildering stairways which seemed devised to make approach by them a peril. I soon knew the faces of all the city editors in town, and all the head office-boys were as familiar with mine. At the end of the first round I began to look more kindly on Mr. Hanks and to realize the wisdom of his advice that I lock away my letters. I recalled the varied receptions they had met, and when I started on my second round they were hidden in my trunk. Repeated rebuffs had a salutary effect.

My egotism was reduced to a vanis.h.i.+ng-point, my pride was quickened, and with my pride my determination to accomplish my purpose. Even had I lacked pride, I must have been nerved to my dogged persistence by the memory of Gladys Todd with Doctor Todd and the three Miss Minnicks speeding me to my triumphs. Every evening when I came home, tired and discouraged, to Miss Minion's, I found a letter addressed to me in a tall, angular hand--a very fat letter which seemed to promise a wealth of news and encouragement. But Gladys Todd could say less on more paper than I had believed possible. Encouragement she gave me, but never news. News would have spoiled the graceful flow of her sentences. Yet she was wonderfully good in the way she received my accounts of my disappointments. She was prouder than ever of "her knight"; her faith in him was firmer than ever; as she sat in the evening, in the soft light of the lamp, she was thinking of me with lance couched charging again and again against the embattled world.

At first in my replies I found a certain satisfaction in recounting my defeats; for in fighting on I seemed to be proving my superior worth and strength, and I became almost boastful of my repeated failures.

But the glamour of defeat wears off as the cause for which one fights becomes more hopeless, and after a month I seemed farther than ever from attaining my desire. I became depressed in the tone of my letters, but as my spirits sank Gladys Todd's seemed to soar.

One particularly fat epistle I found on my bureau on an evening when I was so discouraged that I was beginning to consider heeding my father's appeal that I return home and study for the Middle County bar. I opened it with dread. I wanted no comfort, but here in my hands were twenty pages of Gladys Todd's faith in me and her pride in me. She was sure that I should have the opportunity which I sought, and, having it, would mount to the dizziest heights. She likened me to a crusader who wore her colors and was charging single-handed against the gates of the Holy City and shouting his defiance of the infidels who held it. It was an exalted idea, but I remembered my tilt that afternoon with the ancient office-boy of _The Record_, and his refusal to take my seventh card to Mr. Hanks. The comparison was so absurd that I laughed as I had not laughed in many days, and with the sudden up-welling of my mirth, lonely mirth though it was, the blood which had grown sluggish quickened, the drooping courage rose, I saw the world through clearer eyes. The next afternoon when I faced the ancient office-boy the remembrance of Gladys Todd's metaphor made me smile, and so overcome was he by this unusual geniality that he did take in my card to Mr.

Hanks.

"Again," said Mr. Hanks, leaning back in his chair and surveying me through his magnifying-gla.s.ses. "Young man, are you never going to give me a rest?"

"Never," said I, smiling. "You advised me to go the rounds and not to be discouraged."

"Have you got your letters with you?" he asked mildly.

"They are locked away in my trunk," said I.

"You certainly have taken my advice with a vengeance," said he. "I suppose I shall have to do something to protect myself."

He leaned over his desk and became absorbed in his everlasting game of checkers. The smile left my face, for I thought that he had forgotten my presence, as he had forgotten it so many times before. But after a moment he slanted his head, focussed one microscope on me, and said: "Do you think you could cover Abraham Weinberg's funeral this afternoon?"

So it was that Gladys Todd's crusader at last broke down the gates of the Holy City. But I fear that it was to become one of the defending infidels. Doctor Todd, in his letter to whom it might concern, announced that David Malcolm was about to launch himself into journalism. And now, after long waiting, David Malcolm was launched.

Just when he was despairing of ever leaving the ways he had shot down them suddenly into the Temple Emanu-El and the funeral of Abraham Weinberg.

CHAPTER XIII

You can well understand the elation with which I announced my success to Gladys Todd. It was magnified by the month of disappointment, and to her I felt that I owed a debt. Though I had come to look with irony on her high-flown expressions of faith in me, I realized that the fear of her equally high-flown scorn had more than once kept me from abandoning my project. With pride I enclosed in my letter my account of the funeral of Mr. Weinberg, though I refrained from marring the trophy with an explanation that this first public production of my pen had been allowed to attain the length of a column because his store covered half a block and his advertis.e.m.e.nts many pages of _The Record_.

As a trophy Gladys Todd received it. Declaring that she lacked words in which to express her pride in her knight, she flew to greater heights than ever before. She had placed my first journalistic effort in a sc.r.a.p-book, and all that I wrote was to be preserved in like manner. I must send her every published line that came from my pen.

Her knight had triumphed in his first real pa.s.sage at arms, and she sent to me a chaplet of victory. It came--not a wreath, but a cus.h.i.+on worked with her own hands, mauve and white, the colors of McGraw, with '91 in black on one side and on the other the word "Excelsior."

The sc.r.a.p-book grew rapidly to alarming proportions, for having now my opportunity I worked hard, and Mr. Hanks was fond of telling me that I was rapidly outgrowing the reputation Doctor Todd and Mr. Pound had made for me on Park Row. Accounts of murders, suicides, yacht-races, robberies, public meetings, railroad accidents--all the varied events which make up a day's news--followed the funeral into Gladys Todd's archives. You can readily imagine that my views of life soon underwent a change. They became rather distorted, as I see them now; and was it a wonder when my day began at noon and ended in the small hours of the morning, carried me through hospitals, police-stations, and courts, from the darkest slums to the stateliest houses on the Avenue, from the sweatshop to the offices of the greatest financiers. To me all men were simply makers of news, and by their news value I judged them. A man's greatness I measured by the probable length of his obituary notice. Indeed, greatness itself was but the costume of a puppet, so often did I see the sawdust stuffing oozing from the gashes in the cloth. When I met one bank cas.h.i.+er simply because he had stolen, I forgot the thousands of others who were plodding away through lives of dull honesty. Because one Sunday-school superintendent sinned, I cla.s.sed all his kind as sinners. Becoming versed in the devious ways of statesmen, I began to doubt the virtues of my old heroes whose speeches I had often declaimed with so much unction. I became a cynic.

At twenty-two my thoughts matched the epigrams of Rochefoucauld and my philosophy that of Schopenhauer. All my old ideas as to the importance of the work I had chosen and of my own value to the world were quickly dissipated. Often I had cause to remember the Professor and his argument that even of our good actions selfishness was the main-spring, and accepting it as true, and laying bare the roots of my own motives and of those around me, I should have moved confusedly in the darkness had I not come to see more clearly what he meant by marching under sealed orders and to realize that I had a duty and that it was to live by the light I had. I did try to do this. I had a conscience, and though I might believe that it was but a group of conceptions as to the nature of right and wrong poured into my mind by my early instruction, it protested as strongly against abuse as did my digestive organs.

Sometimes I had to effect strange compromises with it. Sometimes, in my never ceasing search for facts, I found myself causing pain and trouble to those who were innocently brought under the shadow of crime and scandal, but I justified myself by the theory that they suffered for the good of the many. To me the old dictum that the end justifies the means became a useful balm.

You might think that, with so radical a change in my ideas, I should see Gladys Todd in another light than that of my college days. Indeed, looking back, those college days did seem of another age and another world, but in them Gladys Todd had become linked to me by ties as indissoluble as those which bound me to my father and mother. To what I deemed my broader view of life, their ways of living and their ways of thinking were certainly exceedingly narrow, but none the less I thought of them only with reverence and affection. So it was with Gladys Todd. That mirthful outburst over her effusion about the crusader was followed by many of its kind as her daily letters came to me, but this meant simply that I was growing older than she, and she to my mind became a child, but was none the less lovely for her unsophistication. In the turmoil of my daily work, in the unlovely clatter of Miss Minion's boarding-house, I often recalled the vine-clad veranda and our walks in the gra.s.s-grown lane, looked back to them regretfully, looked forward yearningly to the renewal of such hours.

Sometimes when my evening was free from my routine duty, and I was working harder than ever I had worked in my college days, I would forget my task to dream of the time when Miss Tucker's piano would no longer be clattering beneath me, and I should be no more disturbed by Mrs. Kittle, who had a habit of jumping her chair around the room next to mine, when somewhere in the city's outskirts I should have a house of my own, a little house in a bit of green, where I could find quiet and peace and Gladys Todd. For the realization of that dream all that I needed was money. By the lack of it I was condemned to Miss Minion's. Even when I had attained to the munificent salary of Mr.

Carmody, a figure which Boller had announced to me with so much awe, I was still far from having an income to keep two in the simplest comfort. It was difficult to make this clear to Gladys Todd. Her father and mother had married on eight hundred dollars a year, and even now my salary equalled the doctor's as president of the college. To her my salary read affluence, and in my letters I began to have difficulty to convince her that I had not grown exceedingly worldly and was not putting material comfort in the balance against unselfish and uncomplaining love. On my third biannual visit to Harlansburg I went armed with facts and figures as to house rents and flat rents, the prices of meats per pound, the cost of fuel, light, and clothing.

Having in my pocket such a tabulated statement which showed for incidentals a balance of but fifty dollars, I could not but smile ironically at the manner in which Doctor Todd presented me to his friends. Boller was forgotten. Boller's achievements were outshone by those of David Malcolm. Malcolm's success demonstrated the high character of McGraw's system of training. Malcolm was already being heard from!

Malcolm, with the problem which confronted him, was inwardly gauging his success by his bank account, and even the pride of Gladys Todd was a little clouded when she was called upon to use the same measure.

Sitting in the very chair in the shaded lamplight from which she had looked so admiringly on Boller two years before, she now studied the prospectus of our contemplated venture. She was very lovely, but I remember noticing what I had never before noticed, the wisps of hair which floated a little untidily about her ears. And I did what I had never done before--I compared her with another woman, with Miss Tucker, whose piano had so often disturbed my evening labors. Miss Tucker taught mathematics in an uptown girls' school. She was not as pretty as Gladys Todd, but I remembered how wonderfully neat she was, with never a hair blowing loose, and I remembered too that, though she had disturbed me with her music, I never complained of it, for the sake of the picture which she made every morning when she descended the stoop beneath my window, going to her work as cheerfully and daintily as many of her sisters would to a dinner or a dance.

"We shall only have a hundred dollars left for doctor's bills and car-fare then, David," said Gladys Todd, looking up from the paper.

There were tears in her eyes, but they did not affect me as much as her way of doing her hair. How I longed for the courage to tell her that it was decidedly bad form!

"But we shall only have to wait a little longer, Gladys," said I, and I moved my chair beside her chair.

"I know," she returned more bravely, putting her hand in mine. "But you don't realize how lonely I am without you. I want to be with you, helping you--to be at your side comforting you when you are tired, cheering you when you are discouraged."

For that moment I forgot the stray wisps and the Langtry knot.

"But it is only a little while longer," I pleaded. "Let us say in June. I shall come for you in June. You will wait for me till June?"

Her hand was on my shoulder, and I forgot all about Miss Tucker. For that moment I was the happiest of men.

"Wait for you till June?" she cried. "Why, David, I'd wait for you to eternity."