Читать книгу The Lash - Olin L. Lyman - Страница 4

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AMBITION is an itch for something you haven't got and never expect to get," remarked Peters, rapping his pipe bowl against the edge of the desk and reaching for Mead's tobacco box. He owned none of his own and the rest of the force formed a convenient and interminable tobacco trust for him.

"You might add to that observation the clause 'but others have,' Pete," put in Charlie Kirk, while Mead resignedly watched Peters jamming an unwieldy wad of the weed into the bowl with his thumb, to brazenly reach for more the next instant. "Besides, that remark isn't original. It's gone the rounds of the papers. I don't know where they pinched it, but I'll bet it wasn't from you."

"Your observation does you credit, Sherlock," retorted Peters, undisturbed. "If you would exercise a little of that faculty on the job, maybe the old man would raise your attenuated wage."

The quiet voice of the city editor broke in upon the amiable colloquy. "Here, Kirk," said he, "and you, Peters, I want you. Go and relieve Smallwood and Lynn at that visiting convention and tell them to hurry here with their stuff. They've been there since seven. I thought the thing would be over by now."

Kirk and Peters left Mead's desk, where they had been loafing for a few spare moments, and, slipping on their coats, walked to the elevator and sank streetward. The city editor delved again into the debris on his groaning desk. It was a rush night. The few men in the great room, for most of the reporters were still out, were bent over portly pads or pecked busily at typewriters.

Mead scrawled away at the lecture story to which he had been assigned that evening. Warming to his work he rounded out many of the professor's periods for him and added some good things of his own. Now and then he read a paragraph with complacency and sifted in a few more adjectives. He had heard the old fairy tale of speakers giving reporters credit for improving their efforts. Moreover, he was but lately hatched from the high school and was nearing the end of his probationary period upon the Courier. As with the _debut_ of most of the boys, coherence was smothered in verbiage. Mead's written words flowed on like rivers to the sea. You who speak by the card will well remember the turbid freshets you handed in, long ago, with a sort of awe to think you had penned them. You looked for a little corresponding awe on the part of the city editor. He merely grunted, and the next morning it was a wise father that knew his brain-child. The anxious parent looked twice through the pages, finally finding the changeling, dwarfed and subdued, in a modest corner next the patent medicine "ads." Stripped of the gauzy gewgaws of fancy with which you had complacently adorned it, it lay in its stark cerements of staring simplicity, a hard, terse, graphic, uncompromising fact. That salient bar, the editorial pencil, had dammed the winding, sunlit stream at its very source, forcing it home by a short cut that skipped much romantic scenery but saved time for the navigator. You read the mangled remnant of that early flight and cursed the city editor's lack of literary appreciation. Afterward, when the years had brought you wisdom, you wondered why he had kept you at all. Yet you knew, after all,—for the veterans were tyros once.

Mead toiled on, the mirage of an achieved literary gem on his mental horizon. It was the same mirage, old yet ever young, that flashes in transient glory and fades as often and as miserably before the wistful eyes of the veteran in letters as with the tyro: the dream of an unattainable ideal, which mocks and melts away, a phantom of the sands.

His task completed, Mead brought his masterpiece to the city editor's desk. "The lecture, Mr. Harkins," said he, with a thrill of secret pride. A sense of polished erudition welled strong within him. Harkins might now see what the real thing in literary skill could do with the most prosaic of assignments.

Harkins had cleared his desk pretty well in the past few minutes and his assistants were busy in consequence. He slapped the masterpiece irreverently on the desk. Like a withering blast his trained eyes swept the first page, which was heavily laden with elaborate introduction. There were a few fierce swoops of a blue pencil. Words fell in the ranks like scattered skirmishers, then platoons of phrases were swept away. The enfiladed page fell face down on the desk. Another, similarly mangled, followed. Only a few gallant remnants of that imposing array remained. It was the survival of the fittest, the obliteration of the superfluous; but it was hard. Mead watched the sacrifice in slow, gathering horror.

Harkins looked up. "Busy night!" said he abruptly but not unkindly. "Anyway, this won't do. Cultivate the newspaper style. Get brevity, terseness. Cut out excess baggage. Get the right word and fit it in right. You're voluminous. Make it luminous."

Harkins resumed the massacre and Mead, poor innocent, walked disconsolately to his desk to digest the bitter pill that must invariably be administered to the newspaper novice. At Mead's age the simultaneous discovery that there are things to learn and things to unlearn is disconcerting. He sat discouraged, his pinions drooping, and stared gloomily at some gyrating millers about the electric bulb over his desk. Presently he tried to catch them, with a half-acknowledged desire to pluck off their wings in a little game of "pass it on." But they were elusive and evaded him.

Several men came in from assignments, and removing their coats, for a hot wave was grilling the late days of June, set to work. Smallwood and Lynn, back from the convention, left thick wads of copy on the city editor's desk and went out for a late lunch. More reporters entered hurriedly and fell to. The dramatic editor entered with deliberation, as became the great, and leisurely set about the roasting of a "first night." Copy boys scurried like scampering ants. The editors bent to their tasks, the reporters' fingers rushed over the pads or jingled the typewriter keys. Everybody hit up the pace but the dramatic critic. He sat, pencil poised like a poniard, deliberating whether he should slay the piece and principals by slow torture, like an Indian, or perform the deed with one murderous lunge. The proprietors of this particular theatre had fallen out with the business office of the Courier. They did not advertise in the Courier now, so when the dramatic critic attended their house he paid for his seat and charged it to expense account. Naturally, what the Courier said about the attractions at that house, during the season in question, was not what it would have said had the brethren been dwelling together in amity.

This was a particularly auspicious occasion. The other houses had been closed for several weeks, owing to the advent of warm weather. This theatre had opened to accommodate a troupe which, in stage parlance, was trying it on the dog before venturing to launch a new summer attraction in the metropolis. After due reflection the Courier's dramatic critic savagely gripped his pencil and proceeded to use it as a bowie in the interest of the suffering dog.

There had been nothing more for Mead to do and he sat at his desk, sucking disconsolately at a short pipe. It being a new accomplishment, he found difficulty in keeping it lighted. He viewed the moths with malice, their fluttering wings fanning his resentment. He was again reaching cautiously for them when a voice sounded at his elbow; an odd voice, unlike other voices.

"Say, kid," it inquired, "where's the head push?"

Mead turned, somewhat confused by the unexpected interruption. "Huh?" he asked.

"Why, the main squeeze, the first fiddle!" was the impatient rejoinder. Then, as an afterthought, "the city editor."

Mead indicated. "Over there," he said. "His name's Harkins." He turned in his chair to watch the stranger, who shuffled over to Harkins' desk.

"Say, Mr. Harkins, I need a job. And that's no lie," was how he put it.

Harkins whirled in his chair. His keen glance swept the visitor from head to foot. "No, I guess it isn't," was his quiet verdict. "You need a lot of things, don't you?"

"You've hit it, sir," grinned the guest, "right behind the ear. But a job will bring 'em and my face won't. It's been overworked lately, that face, and I'm restin' it. I'd hock it, but it's all I've got, and besides I guess I've got all it'll bring already."

"Shouldn't wonder," grinned Harkins in reply, surveying with growing interest the traveller, for such his appearance bespoke him. "Did it bring you here?"

"No, they didn't see it," laughed the stranger. "I came by freight from Cleveland. It was a pork train—and I'm on it yet," with a sweeping gesture that indicated the ensemble of his frayed and dusty habiliments. "No low bridge for me that trip," he continued. "The brakemen rode on top, but the bumpers were good enough for me. Ain't so risky."

Harkins quizzically looked him over. He was uniquely worth the trouble. A battered cap, tipped rakishly over one ear, topped a mat of curly red hair of the peculiar bricky hue that hisses a sibilant Celtic brogue in whilom wind-stirrings. Beneath a broad forehead there danced and rioted two Irish eyes, pale blue pools in an environing forest of freckles. Nature had been generous with mouths when he transpired and had given him enough for two. He had further distended it with much smiling. His cheeks and chin were rough with a sandy stubble; not over-coarse, for he was young. He was slender and of medium height. His garments, in an advanced state of senility, exuded cinders at every pore. As for his shoes, the poor devil was literally on his uppers.

"I guess," said Harkins, not unkindly, "I guess, my boy, we're full."

"You're lucky," murmured the stranger, gray discouragement in his face. "Wish I was. I'm a hollow tube just now."

He turned suddenly toward Harkins, despair in the eyes grown dark with trouble, the light and the laughter fled.

"My God!" he gulped, "I haven't eaten a morsel for hours! I want to earn my livin'! I know I look like a hobo,—I am one, I suppose,—but I'm a workin' one. I'm a bum tramp reporter, it's true enough, you only have to look at me. But try me, Mr. Harkins, just give me a chance to make good, for I tell you I can get the news!"

Harkins involuntarily thrust his hand into his trousers pocket. A gesture restrained him.

"Mr. Harkins," said the visitor, with an odd dignity, grotesque enough in his shabby garb, "no hand-outs. When I can't earn what I eat, I'll cut the game."

Harkins reflectively looked him over, now with a little concern. Pride in such tatters, that would not accept alms, merited consideration. Then, too, Dodds had just been dismissed and someone must replace him. But the stranger! He was hardly an acceptable candidate. Still, there was a frankness in the mottled face and twinkling eyes, an odd note in the voice just tinged with an Anglicized brogue, that appealed to Harkins. In the ensuing moment of hesitancy the question was decided for him.

A telephone bell sounded at the city editor's elbow. He turned in his chair, clapped the receiver to his ear, listened a moment, replied briefly, hung up the receiver and turned to the stranger. Mead, the only one of the force at liberty, had leaned forward in his chair as the city editor answered the 'phone. Now he settled back again in deep disgust as Harkins addressed the disreputable visitor.

"I'll try you," he said briefly. "Know the town at all?"

"No, but I can find it," was the reply.

"There's a big row on at the corner of Elm and Market streets," said Harkins. "Beer and brickbats, tough locality. Rival nests of low foreigners. You'll have to step lively, forms close early tonight. By the way, take Mead with you and you take charge. It's a job if you win out. If not, you can travel."

The stranger grabbed his hat and vanished, the resentful cub at his heels. The city editor glanced at the big clock in the corner and returned to his task. More men came in, including Kirk and Peters, the convention having finally adjourned. The manuscripts multiplied on the readers' desks. On all sides men were laboring furiously.

Three-quarters of an hour had elapsed when there was an upward whisk of the elevator and into the big room hurried the seedy stranger. Mead, no longer resentful, followed him. Indeed, there was something of homage in Mead's tribute toward the other, the involuntary tribute that any honest tyro must pay, in any trade, to the experienced hand who knows his business. Mead was perspiring. So was the stranger, who had evidently kept himself and his force moving. Straight to Mead's desk strode the new arrival, tearing off his shabby coat as he went, Mead heeling. The leader flung himself into Mead's chair, waving his hand toward the vacant desk next to it, where the cub meekly seated himself and fell to writing. He had been assigned to his part of the tale by the vagrant journalist as the two were rushed back to the office in a cab from the scene of the trouble.

The stranger drew from his vest pocket the stub of a soft-leaded pencil about three inches long. The point was inserted for a thoughtful instant in his mouth, then was slapped swiftly upon a pad. Sprawled forward, with elbows on the desk, he wrapped his calves securely around the legs of his chair. Thus he began the strewing of words upon the paper, in the execrable handwriting and at the phenomenal speed which have become traditions of that office, where each has remained unrivaled in the paper's annals. Oblivious of his surroundings, he bent over his desk like a jockey in the saddle, eyes glued on the pad whose leaves he was covering at lightning speed. As he proceeded he tossed the finished sheets carelessly aside without pausing. Mead, too, under the benign influence of time-pressure, took a long stride forward in newspaper requirements by forgetting to "pad" uselessly. Meanwhile the city editor's assistants gathered up the finished sheets and carried them away to be hastily edited and shot upward to the compositors.

It was, in reportorial parlance, "hot stuff." A man had been killed in this battle of the slums and the criminal was somewhere in hiding. Many men were injured, some seriously. Extra policemen had been summoned. The detail had charged the mob with sanguinary results, both to the mob and the bluecoats. As usual some non-combatants had suffered. There had been a number of arrests. The patrol wagons had been busy, the gongs of the hospital ambulances had sounded their warning as they dashed to the relief of the injured. It was the big story of that issue, grim and formidable, dwarfing even the stormy convention in its dramatic features, which partook of the sombre dignity of the tragic under the masterly treatment of the tattered scribe. It was, too, a chaotic story, with a certain swirl, a swift rush of events that had piled one upon the other with a cyclonic swiftness that must have staggered a neophyte and taxed to the utmost the highest resources of brain and nerve, together with the most feverish energy of the veteran.

In a full, rounded entirety, dwarfing the efforts of the rival morning dailies,—though some of them had several experienced men on the story,—the parish of the Courier read of the memorable riot in that issue. It was actually impressive to watch the story pouring from the point of that flying, disreputable pencil, flowing down the sheets in a mad torrent, the scenes brought before the reader's eyes with an irresistible force that made them visible in graphic word pictures, as if actually photographed. The stub rushed on, weaving the main web of the tale, while Mead's pencil picked up the loose ends in the form of minor details. Harkins marveled as he watched the story's development. Its size surpassed his expectations. Had he fully understood its scope, several of his best men would have been taken summarily from their tasks and sent post-haste to the scene. Not till this tattered knight of the road returned, with the cub in tow, had Harkins known of the snowball's growth. Yet here it was at last, the final sheet of what Harkins' trained journalistic sense told him was a superb handling of an unusually difficult assignment. He sent the last sheets upstairs and turned to the stranger and his faithful cub, who were mopping fevered faces.

"Great!" quoth Harkins, including the cub, who felt his oats in consequence and began filling his pipe with due seriousness. "You will do," added the editor, turning to the new man. "Come on tomorrow afternoon."

The new man rose to leave but hesitated, crimsoning a little. Harkins eyed him inquiringly. The stranger grinned rather ruefully.

"Object to my sleeping on this table?" he asked. "The rate is cheaper. Besides, I'm hollower even than I was."

Harkins laughed, but it was a sympathetic laugh. "I had forgotten," said he. "You'll find a bed softer than the table, I imagine, and there is a filling restaurant in the next block." He proceeded to make an advance on the new man's salary. The latter thanked him and was off.

The boys crowded around, curious and interested. "He's no Albert Edward on wardrobe," commented the dramatic critic, "but he's a pippin just the same. Who is he, Harkins?"

"Hang it!" replied Harkins dubiously, "I forgot to ask him. What's his name, Mead?"

"Gee, I don't know," replied the cub, sucking contentedly at his pipe. "He didn't give me any time to ask."