Читать книгу Jericho's Daughters - Paul Iselin Wellman - Страница 19

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❧ To the stranger within its gates Jericho offered a convenient introduction to itself in the form of a handsome booklet, issued by the Chamber of Commerce, printed in four colors, and entitled Richest in Peace, Safest in War. It contained a map showing the situation of the young city almost in the center of the continent, far from the perilous seacoasts and borders of the nation, from which enemies, identified by Jericho people as “the Rooshians,” might attack.

The booklet contained also a summary of the city’s advantages as a place to live, including a rather hasty reference to the weather: “An outstanding feature of Jericho’s weather is its variability. As everybody knows, the people of the world who amount to anything live in regions of swift and sudden changes in temperature and weather, with scurrying winds.”

The “swift and sudden changes in temperature” was a neat touch of understatement. Occasionally Jericho enjoyed beautiful, calm, balmy days; but more often the conditions were either sweltering or freezing, so that if, indeed, the erratic behavior of the thermometer is an index to what is required to “amount to anything,” the people of Jericho should have been blessed above all mortals.

The “scurrying winds” was good, too. Sometimes they scurried at ninety miles an hour, and they had been known to scurry with gale force for days and even weeks at a time, in summer with a searing edge of heat, in winter with ice fangs of cold.

On that particular early January morning Debs Dorn hardly considered himself blessed by the sub-zero wind which rasped like a file on his cheek. He tucked his head deeper into the upturned collar of his overcoat, pulled his hat low on his forehead, rammed his fists into his pockets and half ran, half skated down the snowy sidewalk toward Jolly Herron’s Drugstore.

It was before sunrise and the streets were dark. Save for a solitary bus grinding along up the block and a few furtive automobiles appearing to be frozen at the slippery curbs, no sign of life was visible. But the windows of the drugstore were alight, although the frost which frescoed them prevented one from seeing who might be giving patronage at this early hour of a winter’s morning.

Herron’s Drugstore was ancient, foul, dilapidated, and frowsy, with a row of sticky booths for patrons of the soda fountain, spindle-legged stools at the counter, a faded mirror at the back, a display of much-thumbed magazines and comic books, a cigar counter, and the usual shelves of proprietary medicines. Nevertheless, it remained open twenty-four hours a day, and for an excellent reason. Uninviting as it appeared, Jolly Herron’s place possessed a certain significance, for it stood about halfway between the newspaper offices of the Daily Clarion and the Morning Sentinel, and hence provided a curious neutral ground where members of the staffs of those two eternally feuding journals could meet with taunts and gibes, and unprintable stories, and occasional exchanges of information, more or less friendly.

Debs opened the door, stepped from raw cold into fetid warmth, carefully closed the door, brushed a few flecks of snow from his sleeves, and turned down his coat collar. He was thus revealed as a compact, dark young man, bony-faced, with an oddly sensitive mouth and eyes oddly alert and oddly secret. Habitually he wore a look of weary cynicism—a pose with him, perhaps, for he was no more than thirty—and he was a person of some consequence, being the city editor of the Jericho Daily Clarion.

Debs Dorn’s name was part of his background. His father, a bookish visionary who operated a small, eternally dusty and eternally littered secondhand bookshop, was too busy upholding his militant theories as a philosophical atheist, a vegetarian, a prohibitionist, and a socialist ever to make much of a living. There were days when the table in the Dorn household had scarcely enough even of the cheapest vegetables to satisfy hunger. The elder Dorn was dead now, being predeceased by his wife, but he had named his only son for his chief hero of socialism, Eugene V. Debs. This name the son bore with a sort of ironic truculence. But except for his name Debs Dorn espoused none of his father’s lost causes. He liked beefsteak and bourbon for dinner, when he could afford them; never took the slightest interest in any kind of religious discussion; and though his leanings were liberal, he did not permit his own political views to influence in any manner his handling of the news strictly according to the rock-bound Republican policies of the Clarion, which paid him his salary.

“Hi, Smoky,” he said to a cadaverous youth with pimples, who stood behind the counter waiting for the drugstore’s day shift to arrive.

“Hi, Debs,” said the youth.

The drugstore was empty, but Debs jerked his head toward the rear.

“Brummitt and Yates,” said Smoky. “And Jeff.”

Debs walked to a rear door, opened it, and entered a room even dirtier and less appealing than the drugstore itself. There was a long table, seared and scarred with cigarette burns, standing on an uncarpeted floor littered with half-smoked stubs, burnt matches, and dried mud. Two unshaded electric bulbs hanging from the ceiling gave a bilious light, and scattered about were half a dozen battered chairs.

Jutting out in one corner was a jerry-built box of cheap siding, concealing a filthy lavatory and stool. An old-fashioned steam radiator bore rather rakishly a rusted tin coffee can containing water to “humidify” the air: and some treatment of this or another kind was indicated, for though the day was hardly beginning the room was stale and blue with tobacco smoke. The walls were of rough plaster, painted a faded gray and decorated with three or four torn theatrical posters, a “mural” of pornographic nature drawn by a drunken newspaper artist with a copyreader’s grease pencil, and sundry stains where tobacco chewers had spat.

Women were never admitted to this back room, which was facetiously referred to as the Press Club, and was the reason for the popularity of Jolly Herron’s place. It was for newspapermen only, a haven where they could drink or gamble or gossip or even sleep, unobserved by the lay public.

A balding, young-old man in a baggy suit, Ed Brummitt, of the Sentinel, was shaking dice with Harry Yates, a fellow staff member, for nickels on the scarred table. Another man sat behind a newspaper, his chair tilted back against the wall, both hat and overcoat on.

“Hi, gents,” said Debs nodding.

“Mr. Dorn, of the evening bladder, I believe,” said Brummitt.

Yates, plumpish and smelling of whiskey, did not look up. Brummitt returned to the game and the small cubes rattled.

“My point,” said Yates. “That’s forty-five cents I’m into you.”

“I gotta quit and go home,” said Brummitt. “Payday tomorrow.”

Yates nodded. It was a peculiarity of the Jericho newspapers that though printers and advertising solicitors were paid by the week, members of the editorial staffs were paid semi-monthly. It also was a peculiarity of the two papers that their reporters were paid so little that at the end of each half month they rarely had enough money to satisfy even a forty-five-cent crap-shooting debt.

Brummitt and Yates put on their overcoats and prepared to depart. They had just finished their night’s work on the morning paper and would sleep through the day. As they left, Brummitt halted beside Debs.

“Hear Madame Wedge is back from Honolulu,” he said.

Debs nodded.

“Hear the Big Deal is on again,” Brummitt added.

Again Debs nodded. He, too, had heard the rumor.

Curious how information, no matter how secret, managed to seep through both newspaper offices. The “Big Deal” to which Brummitt referred was a hardy perennial—a rumor often revived, but always denied, of a merger of the two newspapers. It was dreaded by both staffs, for a consolidation meant that some reporters would find themselves in the surplus category, and therefore without jobs.

Brummitt and the other Sentinel man went on out.

Throughout this exchange, to which he paid not the slightest attention, the young man beside the wall remained tilted back in his chair, reading the final edition of the Morning Sentinel. He was Jeff Linderman, assistant city editor of the Daily Clarion, lanky and serious-faced, perhaps five years Debs’ junior. Hat pushed back on his head and overcoat unbuttoned, he read carefully, with deep concentration, the opposition newspaper, page by page, column by column, until he had digested every item in it.

Debs said nothing until he finished and looked up. He himself had read the rival paper with equal thoroughness before he left home that morning.

“About time to get over there, Jeff,” he now said.

Jeff straightened his long thin legs, rose, buttoned his overcoat, pulled his hat down on his forehead, folded the paper, thrust it into his pocket, and belched.

“Reckon so,” he said.

“Find anything startling in the opposition?”

“Nope. Blurbs. Routine. That yarn about the vice ring is a phony. The old Draggett story dug up again and worked over. Any truth to the scuttlebutt about the Big Deal?”

“Don’t know. May only be talk, because Mary Agnes came home.”

Debs should perhaps have been more respectful of the wife of the publisher of the Clarion, but newspapermen speak thus irreverently of their betters.

Jeff belched again. “I dread the day.”

“Seas rough last night?” asked Debs without solicitude.

“It’s the hooch they sell in this damned state. Didn’t drink so much, but it turns my guts upside down.”

This was a rather usual complaint of Jeff’s, who had no stomach for liquor and really did not drink heavily, but had an innocent vanity in being considered an abandoned sot. He was intelligent, a loyal lieutenant, and one of the two men with some writing ability on the Clarion, the other being Debs Dorn himself. These two, who might have added a little brightness to the paper’s drab columns, were assigned to “desk jobs,” leaving the writing to the less able. It is a disease that affects most newspapers.

Together they left the drugstore and stepped into the bitter wind which whirled scattered snowflakes down the bleak dark street.