The Great God Success Part 1

The Great G.o.d Success.

by John Graham (David Graham Phillips).

I.

THE CANDIDATE FROM YALE.

"O your college paper, I suppose?"

"No, I never wrote even a letter to the editor."

"Took prizes for essays?"

"No, I never wrote if I could help it."

"But you like to write?"

"I'd like to learn to write."

"You say you are two months out of college--what college?"

"Yale."

"Hum--I thought Yale men went into something commercial; law or banking or railroads. 'Leave hope of fortune behind, ye who enter here' is over the door of this profession."

"I haven't the money-making instinct."

"We pay fifteen dollars a week at the start."

"Couldn't you make it twenty?"

The Managing Editor of the _News-Record_ turned slowly in his chair until his broad chest was full-front toward the young candidate for the staff. He lowered his florid face slowly until his double chin swelled out over his low "stick-up" collar. Then he gradually raised his eyelids until his amused blue eyes were looking over the tops of his gla.s.ses, straight into Howard's eyes.

"Why?" he asked. "Why should we?"

Howard's grey eyes showed embarra.s.sment and he flushed to the line of his black hair which was so smoothly parted in the middle. "Well--you see--the fact is--I need twenty a week. My expenses are arranged on that scale. I'm not clever at money matters. I'm afraid I'd get in a mess with only fifteen."

"My dear young man," said Mr. King, "I started here at fifteen dollars a week. And I had a wife; and the first baby was coming."

"Yes, but your wife was an energetic woman. She stood right beside you and worked too. Now I have only myself."

Mr. King raised his eyebrows and became a rosier red. He was evidently preparing to rebuke this audacious intrusion into his private affairs by a stranger whose card had been handed to him not ten minutes before. But Howard's tone and manner were simple and sincere. And they happened to bring into Mr. King's mind a rush of memories of his youth and his wife.

She had married him on faith. They had come to New York fifteen years before, he to get a place as reporter on the _News-Record_, she to start a boarding-house; he doubting and trembling, she with courage and confidence for two. He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and opened the book of memory at the place where the leaves most easily fell apart:

He is coming home at one in the morning, worn out, sick at heart from the day's buffetings. As he puts his key into the latch, the door opens.

There stands a handsome girl; her face is flushed; her eyes are bright; her lips are held up for him to kiss; she shows no trace of a day that began hours before his and has been a succession of exasperations and humiliations against which her sensitive nature, trained in the home of her father, a distinguished up-the-state Judge, gives her no protection, "Victory," she whispers, her arms about his neck and her head upon his coat collar. "Victory! We are seventy-two cents ahead on the week, and everything paid up!"

Mr. King opened his eyes--they had been closed less than five seconds.

"Well, let it be twenty--though just why I'm sure I don't know. And we'll give you a four weeks' trial. When will you begin?"

"Now," answered the young man, glancing about the room. "And I shall try to show that I appreciate your consideration, whether I deserve it or not."

It was a large bare room, low of ceiling. Across one end were five windows overlooking from a great height the tempest that rages about the City Hall day and night with few lulls and no pauses. Mr. King's roll-top desk was at the first window. Under each of the other windows was a broad flat table desk--for copy-readers. At the farthest of these sat the City Editor--thin, precise-looking, with yellow skin, hollow cheeks, ragged grey-brown moustache, ragged scant grey-brown hair and dark brown eyes. He looked nervously tired and, because brown was his prevailing shade, dusty. He rose as Mr. King came with young Howard.

"Here, Mr. Bowring, is a young man from Yale. He wishes you to teach him how to write. Mr. Howard, Mr. Bowring. I hope you gentlemen will get on comfortably together."

Mr. King went back to his desk. Mr. Bowring and Howard looked each at the other. Mr. Bowring smiled, with good-humour, without cordiality.

"Let me see, where shall we put you?" And his glance wandered along the rows of sloping table-desks--those nearer the windows lighted by daylight; those farther away, by electric lamps. Even on that cool, breezy August afternoon the sunlight and fresh air did not penetrate far into the room.

"Do you see the young man with the beautiful fair moustache," said Mr.

Bowring, "toiling away in his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves--there?"

"Near the railing at the entrance?"

"Precisely. I think I will put you next him." Mr. Bowring touched a b.u.t.ton on his desk and presently an office boy--a mop of auburn curls, a pert face and gangling legs in knickerbockers--hurried up with a "Yes, Sir?"

"Please tell Mr. Kittredge that I would like to speak to him and--please sc.r.a.pe your feet along the floor as little as possible."

The boy smiled, walking away less as if he were trying to terrorize park pedestrians by a rush on roller skates. Kittredge and Howard were made acquainted and went toward their desks together. "A few moments--if you will excuse me--and I'm done," said Kittredge motioning Howard into the adjoining chair as he sat and at once bent over his work.

Howard watched him with interest, admiration and envy. The reporter was perhaps twenty-five years old--fair of hair, fair of skin, goodlooking in a pretty way. His expression was keen and experienced yet too self-complacent to be highly intelligent. He was rapidly covering sheet after sheet of soft white paper with bold, loose hand-writing. Howard noticed that at the end of each sentence he made a little cross with a circle about it, and that he began each paragraph with a paragraph sign.

Presently he scrawled a big double cross in the centre of the sheet under the last line of writing and gathered up his sheets in the numbered order. "Done, thank G.o.d," he said. "And I hope they won't butcher it."

"Do you send it to be put in type?" asked Howard.

"No," Kittredge answered with a faint smile. "I hand it in to Mr.

Bowring--the City Editor, you know. And when the copyreaders come at six, it will be turned over to one of them. He reads it, cuts it down if necessary, and writes headlines for it. Then it goes upstairs to the composing room--see the box, the little dumb-waiter, over there in the wall?--well, it goes up by that to the floor above where they set the type and make up the forms."

"I'm a complete ignoramus," said Howard, "I hope you'll not mind my trying to find out things. I hope I shall not bore you."

"Glad to help you, I'm sure. I had to go through this two years ago when I came here from Princeton."

Kittredge "turned in" his copy and returned to his seat beside Howard.

"What were you writing about, if I may ask?" inquired Howard.

"About some snakes that came this morning in a 'tramp' from South America. One of them, a boa constrictor, got loose and coiled around a windla.s.s. The cook was pa.s.sing and it caught him. He fainted with fright and the beast squeezed him to death. It's a fine story--lots of amusing and dramatic details. I wrote it for a column and I think they won't cut it. I hope not, anyhow. I need the money."

"You are paid by the column?"

"Yes. I'm on s.p.a.ce--what they call a s.p.a.ce writer. If a man is of any account here they gradually raise him to twenty-five dollars a week and then put him on s.p.a.ce. That means that he will make anywhere from forty to a hundred a week, or perhaps more at times. The average for the best is about eighty."

"Eighty dollars a week," thought Howard. "Fifty-two times eighty is forty-one hundred and sixty. Four thousand a year, counting out two weeks for vacation." To Howard it seemed wealth at the limit of imagination. If he could make so much as that!--he who had grave doubts whether, no matter how hard he worked, he would ever wrench a living from the world.

Just then a seedy young man with red hair and a red beard came through the gate in the railing, nodded to Kittredge and went to a desk well up toward the daylight end of the room.

"That's the best of 'em all," said Kittredge in a low tone. "His name is Sewell. He's a Harvard man--Harvard and Heidelberg. But drink! Ye G.o.ds, how he does drink! His wife died last Christmas--practically starvation.