CHAPTER XIII.—THIRTEEN MONTHS OF IT.
GROWING familiarity with his work did not restore to Seth the lofty conceptions of journalism’s duties and delights which he had nourished on the hill-side farm, and which had been so ingloriously dimmed and defaced by his first day’s experience.
The tasks set before him, to which he gradually became accustomed, seemed almost as unintellectual and mechanical as the ploughing and planting he had forsaken. The rule of condensation, compression, continually dinned into his ears by his mentors, robbed his labors of all possible charm. To “boil down” columns of narrative into a few lines of bald, cold statement; to chronicle day after day in the curtest form, fires, failures, crimes, disasters, deaths, in a wearying chain of uninteresting news notes; to throw remorselessly into the journalistic crucible all the work of imagination, of genius, of deep fine thought which came into his hands, together with the wordy dross spun out by the swarm of superficial scribblers, and extract from good and bad alike only the meaningless, miserable fact—this was a task against which, in the first weeks of experience, his whole soul revolted.
By the time he had become reconciled to it, and had mastered its tricks, his dream of journalism as the most exalted of all departments of activity seemed to him like some far-away fantasy of childhood.
He not only had failed to draw inspiration from his work; it was already ceasing to interest him. Under pleasanter conditions, he felt that he would have at least liked the proof-reading portion of the daily routine; but the printers were so truculent and hostile, and seemed so pre-determined to treat him as their natural enemy, that this was irksome, too. There was no relief to the distasteful monotony in other branches of his work. Even the agricultural column, which he had promised himself to so vastly improve, yielded no satisfaction. The floating, valueless stuff from which his predecessors had selected their store came so easily and naturally to the scissors that after a week or two he abandoned the idea of preparing original matter: it saved time and labor, and nobody seemed to know the difference. These words, in fact, came to describe his mental attitude toward all his work. He had no pride in it. If he escaped curses for badly-read proofs, and criticism for missing obvious matters of news, it was enough.
Seth did not arrive at this condition of mind without much inner protest, or without sundry efforts to break through the crust of perfunctory drudgery which was encasing him. At the start he bestowed considerable thought and work upon an effort to brighten and improve, by careful re-working of materials, one of the departments entrusted to him, and, just when he expected praise, Tyler told him to stop it. Then he tried to make his religious column a feature by discarding most of the ancient matter which revolved so drolly in the Obago Evening Mercury, and picking out eloquent bits from the sermons of great contemporary preachers; but this elicited denominational protest from certain pious subscribers, and Mr. Workman commanded a return to the old rut.
But the cruel humiliation came when Seth took to Mr. Samboye an editorial paragraph he had written with great care. It was a political paragraph, and Seth felt confident that it was exactly in the Chronicle’s line, and good writing as well. The Editor took it, after regarding the young writer with a stony, half-surprised stare, and read it over slowly. He delivered judgment upon it, in his habitual pomposity of phrases: “This is markedly comprehensive in scope and clarified in expression, Mr. Fairchild.” Then, as Seth’s heart was warming with a sense of commendation and success, the Editor calmly tore the manuscript in strips, dropped them in his waste-basket, and turned reflectively to his newspaper.
Seth’s breath nearly left him: “Then you can’t use it;” he faltered. “I thought it might do for an editorial paragraph.”
There was the faintest suggestion of a patronising smile on Mr. Samboye’s broad, ruddy face.
“Oh, I am reminded, Mr. Fairchild,” he answered, with bland irrelevance; “pray do not allow Porte to pass again with a small p, as you did yesterday in the proof of my Turkish article. It should be capitalized invariably.”
The beginner went back to his stall both humiliated and angry. The cool insolence with which he had been reminded that he was a proof-reader, and warned away from thoughts of the editorial page, enraged and depressed him. He passed a bitter hour at his table, looking savagely through the window at the automatic motions of the printer directly opposite, but thinking evil thoughts of Samboye, and cursing the fate which had led him into newspaper work. So uncomfortable did he make himself by these reflections that it required a real effort to throw off their effects when Watts came upstairs, and the two left the office for the day. It was impossible not to relate his grievance.
Tom did not see its tragic side, and refused utterly to concede that Seth ought to be cast down by it.
“That’s only Samboye’s way,” he said, lightly. “He won’t let any of the fellows get on to the page, simply because he’s afraid they’ll outwrite him. He’d rather do it all himself—and he does grind out an immense load of stuff—than encourage any rivals. Besides, he never loses a chance to snub youngsters. Don’t let it worry you for a minute. If he sees that it does, he’ll only pile it on the thicker. In this business you’ve got to have a hide on you like the behemoth of Holy Writ, or you’ll keep raw all the while.”
Seth found some consolation in this view, and more still in Tom’s cheery tone. The two young men spent the evening together—at Bismarck’s.
This came gradually but naturally to be Seth’s habitual evening resort. It represented to him, indeed, all that was friendly and inviting in Tecumseh society. He was able to recall dimly some of the notions of coming social distinction he indulged in the farm days—dreams of a handsome young editor who was in great request in the most refined and luxurious home circles, who said the most charming things to beautiful young ladies at parties and balls, who wavered in his mind between wedding his employer’s daughter and taking a share in the paper, or choosing some lowlier but more intellectual maid to wife, and leading with her a halcyon and exaltedly literary career in a cottage—but they were as unreal, as indistinct now as the dreams of night before last. All the social bars seemed drawn against him as a matter of course.
This did not impress him as a hardship, because he was only vaguely conscious of it, at first, and then grew into the habit of regarding it as a thing to be grateful for. Tom Watts pointed out to him frequently the advantage of being a Bohemian, of being free from all the fearsome, undefined routine and responsibility of making calls, of dressing up in the evening, and of dangling supine attendance upon girls and their mammas. This “social racket,” the city editor said, might please some people; Dent, for instance, seemed to like it. But for his part it seemed quite the weakest thing a young man could go in for—entirely incompatible with the robust and masculine character demanded in a successful journalist.
This presented itself to Seth as an extremely sound position, and he made it his own so willingly that very soon he began to take credit to himself in his own eyes for having turned a deaf ear to the social siren, and having deliberately rejected the advances of fashionable Tecumseh. He grew, really, to believe that it was by preference, by a wise resolution to preserve his freedom and individuality, that he remained outside the mysterious, impalpable regions which were labelled in his mind as “Society.”
On the other hand, there was no nonsense at Bismarck’s, or at the other similar beer halls to which Tom introduced him. One dressed as one chose, and did as one liked; seven-up or penochle provided just the mental recreation a wearied literary brain demanded; and the fellows one met there were cheerful, companionable young men, who likewise had no nonsense about them, who put on no airs of superiority, and who glided swiftly and jovially through the grades of acquaintanceship to intimacy.
Seth was greatly strengthened in his liking for this refuge from loneliness in a strange city by what he saw of Arthur Dent, whom Watts had prepared him to regard as the embodiment of the other and strait-laced side.
This young man was not at all uncivil, but he was delicate, almost effeminate in frame, wore eye-glasses, dressed with fastidious neatness, never made any jokes or laughed heartily at those of others, and rarely joined the daily lounge and smoke around Tyler’s table after the paper had gone to press—and in all these things he grated upon Seth’s sensitiveness. He was the one member of the staff whom Mr. Workman seemed to like and whom Mr. Samboye never humiliated publicly by his ponderous ridicule, and these were added grievances. He worked very steadily and carefully, and was said to do a good deal of heavy reading at home, evenings, in addition to the slavish routine of high social duties in which Seth indefinitely understood him to be immersed. His chief tasks were the book reviews, the editing of correspondence, and the preparation of minor editorial paragraphs in a smaller type than Mr. Samboye’s. Seth thought that his style, though correct and neat, was thin and emasculated, and he came to associate this with his estimate of the writer, and account for it by his habits and associations—which the further confirmed him in his judgment as to the right way to live.
But there was something more than this. The first few days after his return from his vacation, Dent had tried to be courteous and helpful to the newcomer from the country, in his shy, undemonstrative way, and Seth, despite his preconceived prejudice, had gone a little way on the road to friendship. Then one night, as he and Watts were returning arm-in-arm to their joint lodgings from Bismarck’s, a trifle unsteadily perhaps, they had encountered Dent walking with a young lady, and Tom had pleasantly accosted them—at least it seemed pleasantly to Seth—but Dent had not taken it in the right spirit at the time, and had been decidedly cool to Seth ever since. This was so unreasonable that the country boy resented it deeply, and the two barely spoke to each other.
His relations with the others were less strained, but scarcely more valuable in the way of companionship. Mr. Tyler did not seem to care much for his company, and never asked him to go to the “Roast Beef”—a sort of combination of club and saloon where he spent most of his evenings, where poker was the chief amusement and whisky the principal drink. From all Seth could learn, it was as well for him that he was not invited there. As for Murtagh, all his associations outside the office seemed to be with young men of his own race, who formed a coterie by themselves, and frequented distinctively Irish resorts. Like most other American cities Tecumseh had its large Irish and German elements, and in nothing were ethnographic lines drawn so clearly as in the matter of amusements. There were enough young Americans holding aloof from both these foreign circles to constitute a small constituency for the “Roast Beef,” but a far greater number had developed a liking for the German places of resort, and drank beer and ate cheese and rye bread as if to the manner born. Seth found himself in this class on his first step over the threshold of city life; he enjoyed it, and he saw very little of the others.
The two most important men on the Chronicle, Mr. Workman and Mr. Samboye, were far removed from the plane upon which all these Bohemian divisions were traced. They belonged to the Club—the Tuscarora Club. Seth knew where the club house was—but he felt that this was all he was ever likely to know about it. The first few days in Tecumseh had taught him the hopelessness of his dream of associating with his employer. Socially they were leagues apart at the outset, and if the distance did not increase as weeks grew into months, at least Seth’s perception of it did, which amounted to the same thing.
He did not so readily abandon the idea of being made a companion by Samboye, but at last that vanished too. The Editor held himself very high, and if he occasionally came down off his mountain top, his return to those heights only served to emphasize their altitude. There were conflicting stories about his salary. Among the lesser lights of the editorial room it was commonly estimated at forty-five dollars a week, but some of the printers had information that it was at least fifty—which fatigued the imagination. Seth himself received nine dollars, which his brother supplemented by five, and he found that he was regarded as doing remarkably well for a beginner. But between this condition and the state of Samboye with his great income, his fine house on one of the best streets, his influential position in the city, and his luxurious amusements at the Club, an impassable gulf yawned.
There is no pleasure in following further the details of the country boy’s new life. He lost sight of his disappointment in the consolations of a phase of city existence which does not show to advantage in polite-pages. He did not become vicious or depraved.
The relentless treadmill of a daily paper forbade his becoming indolent. By sheer force of contact his mind expanded, too, more than even he suspected. But it was a formless, unprofitable expansion, which did not help him to get out of the rut. He performed his work acceptably—at least he rarely heard any criticisms upon it—lived a trifle ahead of his small income, and ceased to even speculate on the chance of promotion.
When, thirteen months after his advent in Tecumseh, the news came to him from the farm that his father was dying, he obtained leave to go home. Mr. Workman remarked to Mr. Samboye that afternoon:
“I shan’t mind much if Fairchild doesn’t come back.”
“Is that so? He seems to get through his work decently and inoffensively enough. He will never set the North River ablaze, of course, but he is civil and all that.”
“Yes, but I can’t see that there’s anything in him. Beside, I don’t like his influence on Watts. I’m told you can find them together at Bismarck’s every night in the week.”
“Of course, that makes it bad,” said Mr. Samboye.
Then the proprietor and the editor locked up their desks, went over to the Club, and played pyramid pool till midnight.