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BRUCE, as City Editor of The Tribune, was in charge of both the evening and morning editions. Of the latter he had only general supervision, but to the former he gave his entire day. Brokaw, small, red-headed and capable, was the news editor, the hopper through which all the grist passed before it appeared in print. Charles Hamblin, managing editor, was a careful, methodical Englishman of sound judgment. “The only safe place around a newspaper office is the wastepaper basket,” was his axiom.

There was a staff of ten or twelve reporters, besides those engaged on the society columns, the sports page, the drama with Dr. Storrs at its head, the humorous column on the editorial page, written by Miss Thomas, the Tommy to whom Cora had referred. There was a city of three hundred thousand to cover and, in addition, the state capitol at St. Paul. That is to say, Bruce, with little experience and less aptitude, had a man’s-size job. An accident, tragic in its denouement, had brought him the place.

When Bruce joined the staff, John Buttman was City Editor, a man of genius for the work, but ill-suited to Hamblin’s temperament. Hamblin was fond of saying, “I don’t want any brilliant men on this staff. I want a dependable plodder, who won’t change the name of the paper after I go home at night.” In time Buttman was sent to Chicago as special correspondent, and Billy Dowell was put in his place. Bruce at that time was night city editor, that is, Buttman’s assistant.

Dowell was cleverness taking a man’s shape. His memory was prodigious and unimpaired by his long periods of drunkenness. He knew everybody in town and thus possessed unrivaled sources of information. He was a clear, capable news writer, lending to his briefest stories a touch of the charm that characterized his personality. Bruce was delighted at the opportunity of working with him, of learning his trade from a master.

Dowell was mysterious. His home address did not appear in the list of employees. When asked for it, he flatly refused and spent half a day storming around the office, calling upon all the gods to witness that he was a free American citizen and he’d be double damned if he’d surrender any of his rights. He gave his time to the job, more than was required, and his work was satisfactory, wasn’t it? What difference did it make where he lived?? He lived where he damned well pleased. He’d give his address or not give it as suited him, and it suited him not to give it. They could like it or lump it. The fact that no one else had refused to give his address, only sharpened his rage. If the others wanted to be a pack of cringing curs, let ’em; he was a free American citizen, by all the saints in hell, and he’d stand on that prerogative.

Neither his address nor telephone number appeared in the office book. He would be seen occasionally at the theatre accompanied by a pretty, blue-eyed little creature, who, because of her infrequent appearances on the stage, was recognized as Bessie Quirk. It was understood that there was a Mrs. Dowell somewhere, over in Wisconsin or back in the state—the information was vague and she remained an unreality. No one had the temerity to question Billy, and the mystery behind which he shielded himself lasted his life out.

Bessie was a step-daughter, and to old man Quirk a rare and delicate creature to be protected, at all cost, from life’s black realities. One of the black realities was Billy Dowell. He had, perhaps, heard of the mythical Mrs. Dowell and resented his step-daughter’s interest in a married man. He resented it one Sunday evening to the extent of shooting a hole in Dowell’s head, while Bessie stood at the side of the murdered man. Later he told a jury that Billy had threatened him and he had shot in self-defence, believing himself in danger of great bodily harm. The jury accepted his plea, and he was sent to Stillwater for fifteen years.

Mrs. Dowell manifested reality and appeared, with a daughter, to claim the body of her husband. She was a quiet, serious, hard-working woman to whom Billy’s “flare” must have been dazzling—until it became bitter.

Thus a revolver in the hands of a paranoiac advanced Bruce. It was not a place he coveted. He had little experience of running a desk, directing a staff, and in his heart he hated newspaper work. It was not the goal upon which his eyes had been set. As he went fiercely through his work, cursing it, maltreating it, he remembered other ambitions. ...

He was eighteen, blatantly eighteen, and the dust of the small southern Minnesota town in which Clarence had learned his trade blew into his eyes. He was on his way to meet Ellen. She came to him, slight, blue-eyed, yellow-haired, straight-nosed, full lipped, seventeen and bewilderingly beautiful. They went on across the flat prairies, hand in hand, full of innocent talk—the essence of romance.

“Bruce, what will we do—sometime?”

“Have a home of our own and never be parted, Ellen.”

“Prosy: what will we do,—what will you do? You won’t always teach a country school, will you?”

He threw back his head and sent his laugh flying into the spring air.

“Ridiculous! Of course not. I’m ’bout through with that life now. It’s no work for a man. Don’t you know what I’m goin’ to do? I supposed you did. I’ve spoken so often about it.... I’m going to write books—that’s what.”

“Oh, Bruce. Can you?”

“Certainly I can. But look here, Ellen, you don’t doubt it, do you?”

“Not if you say so, Bruce.”

“That’s good. I just about couldn’t stand your doubtin’ it. Why, you of all people ought to be sure of it.”

“Me?—I don’t see why.”

“ ’Cause I’ve talked so much to you. I tell you everything.”

“Oh.” Then the eternal housewife became provident. “But can you make any money at that, Bruce?”

“It’ll be slow, probably. May take me six months or a year to get started, but we’ll manage somehow until they start buyin’.”

So that was his ambition. Ellen turned it over in her mind. This flaming, clear-eyed youth at her side seemed capable of anything, even of starving. But she was dubious. Her father was a retired farmer who provided his family with comforts and rustic luxuries, and she had no desire to face poverty, even with this strange creature who allured and confused.

“I don’t see how it will work out, Bruce.”

“Ellen, you aren’t to doubt,” he cried sharply. “Not ever.” He was trembling with passion.

She laid her hand, in a frightened gesture, on his arm. “I don’t, Bruce, I don’t. But we have to plan, don’t we?”

So slight and so beautiful, with the quick tears shining in her blue eyes, the bluest of things blue; so intensely alive and so soon to pass silently through the dark door into the vast Beyond Life. Had he but known, how much more quickly and how much more completely would he have forgiven her! Strange how sensitive grows the mind in the vicinity of one’s vanity! He could not instantly wholly forgive. Still it was a passing cloud and, enlightened by a sharp experience, Ellen paid tribute to his future greatness.

Only a few brief months remained to her.... A crude, bald letter reached him in the remote district where he taught his last term in a country school. At the words he read, he was emptied of emotion. Within, he was stone-cold. He had had no word of her sickness. Now she was dead. That meant her hand would never again lie in his. He would never again see her, hear her, sense her in all his being. She was dead. Dead people were cold, creepy....

As a child he had gone with his mother to a cabin in which a little old Irish woman lay dead. “Put your hand on her forehead, Bruce,” his mother directed. He had done so. For days the sensation lingered in his hot fingers. “Why did you have him do that?” a woman asked his mother. “It will show him the difference between life and death.”

Between life and death: He was alive, and Ellen—It was impossible to continue the day’s work. He dismissed the pupils, and they went out hushed, looking back over their shoulders at his white face, slinking away from something dreadful, incomprehensible.

The fire died down, the room grew cold. He shivered in the midst of his arid immensity. What did he think? Nothing. He hardly felt. He was emptied of sensation. He put on his cap and coat and went outdoors. A January sun shone upon him, reflected blindingly from the wide expanse of white snow. He stumbled home, got out his pony and rode away. Anywhere, nowhere. Mile after mile the tireless horse, wet with sweat, plunged ahead.

Slowly thought returned to him. His first sensation was of rage. He raised his head and shook his whip at the universe, cursing all things—a midge hurling anathema at creation. Then he lashed his pony and went forward swiftly. Beneath the blows of Destiny, rage cannot persist. Passion left him. He checked his horse to a walk and slumped in the saddle, beaten, destroyed. Now his agony was supreme—he was hopeless. He passed from blackness to blackness, a gloom impenetrable, in the midst of which he could no longer see Ellen, slight, bewitching.

His fine dream had fallen to bits. Life, like a great cracked bell, clanged harshly in his ears, a meaningless tumult, an insane uproar. Crash upon crash, hammering out his soul.... From somewhere, through the deafening clamor, there came a faint, true note. Slowly it caught his attention. It was as someone standing at his side, whispering comfort. He raised his head to listen. There was no voice, but there was the prompting of an instinct, and he heeded it. In the midst of the lonely, snow-covered plain, he threw himself upon God. It was, perhaps, inevitable that he should do so. His early training reasserted itself. His religious feeling had been casual but it had survived. It came now full-grown, panoplied, powerful. It sustained, quieted, restored reason. He had drunk the dregs and—found a jewel in the bottom of the cup....

To say that henceforth, for a time, he was religious would be to underestimate his power of devotion. His faith suffused him, colored every thought—was part of him, night and day. He abandoned the idea of writing great books. He would don the cowl and the cassock; he could minister to a world indifferent to the tenderness of Christ, the glory of an all-wise Creator. He would be the word in the midst of Babel. Obviously, his religion had not banished his conceit.

It passed, as such youthful frenzies always pass, but it served its purpose: It dragged him through the quagmire of his first grief. But that first grief had a long-enduring effect. It drew him closer to his mother and revealed to him her necessities. Hence it drove him into new channels. Though his ambition to write books did not die, it abrogated the throne and set salary to reign in its place. It might be seen, indeed, that it had directed his steps into his present distasteful, much worse than distasteful, employment....

Why should his imagination slumber in the presence of a great newspaper? He was a creator, and a paper, in its ephemeral character, was born to be destroyed. It was built on quicksands. The lathe that produced it might be interesting; the product was rubbish. Yet he was chained there with scarcely more freedom than the slave at the bar. Resenting his captivity, he strove for expression in new and unexpected ways. The machine bore him down. “We want sensation, not hysterics,” Hamblin told him dryly, laying his finger bluntly upon the weakness of his City Editor, who balked at nothing for effect, who even in his sanest moments, was careless of his public with the crude carelessness of the intensely individual man. Perhaps it became a game with Hamblin—this contest with his Editor. Though often thwarted, he was never discouraged. He would say:

“If you didn’t know better, I’d let you go at once. But you do. You know as well as I how a paper should be run. My job is to see that you run it that way.”

These conflicts lent zest to a job that rapidly tended to become routine, to sink into a groove, submerging personality. If Bruce had remained single in his concentration, this friendly strife might have gone on for years, the paper and the public reaping the benefit. His wife’s condition and his mother’s fatal illness destroyed his application. He gave to the office his time—his mind was elsewhere. He followed Hamblin’s directions—he sank to a nonentity.