The Great God Success | Page 3

hope not, anyhow. I need the money."
"You are paid by the column?"
"Yes. I'm on space--what they call a space writer. If a man is of any account here they gradually raise him to twenty-five dollars a week and then put him on space. 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 gods, how he does drink! His wife died last Christmas--practically starvation. Sewell disappeared--frightful bust. A month afterward they found him under an assumed name over on Blackwell's Island, doing three months for disorderly conduct. He wrote a Christmas carol while his wife was dying. It began "Merrily over the Snow" and went on about light hearts and youth and joy and all that--you know, the usual thing. When he got the money, she didn't need it or anything else in her nice quiet grave over in Long Island City. So he 'blew in' the money on a wake."
Sewell was coming toward them. Kittredge called out: "Was it a good story, Sam?"
"Simply great! You ought to have seen the room. Only the bed and the cook-stove and a few dishes on a shelf--everything else gone to the pawnshop. The man must have killed the children first. They lay side by side on the bed, each with its hands folded on its chest--suppose the mother did that; and each little throat was cut from ear to ear--suppose the father did that. Then he dipped his paint brush in the blood and daubed on the wall in big scrawling letters: 'There is no God!' Then he took his wife in his arms, stabbed her to the heart and cut his own throat. And there they lay, his arms about her, his cheek against hers, dead. It was murder as a fine art. Gad, I wish I could write."
Kittredge introduced Howard--"a Yale man--just came on the paper."
"Entering the profession? Well, they say of the other professions that there is always room at the top. Journalism is just the reverse. The room is all at the bottom--easy to enter, hard to achieve, impossible to leave. It is all bottom, no top." Sewell nodded, smiled attractively in spite of his swollen face and his unsightly teeth, and went back to his work.
"He's sober," said Kittredge when he was out of hearing, "so his story is pretty sure to be the talk of Park Row tomorrow."
Howard was astonished at the cheerful, businesslike point of view of these two educated and apparently civilised young men as to the tragedies of life. He had shuddered at Kittredge's story of the man squeezed to death by the snake. Sewell's story, so graphically outlined, filled him with horror, made it a struggle for him to conceal his feelings.
"I suppose you must see a lot of frightful things," he suggested.
"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