CHAPTER XII.—THE SANCTUM.
The young men dressed next morning in almost complete silence. Tom was still sleepy, and seemed much less jovial and attractive than he had been the previous evening; Seth, accustomed to far earlier rising, was acutely awake, but his head ached wearily and there was a dreadful dryness in his mouth and throat. They went through the forms of breakfast in the basement, too, without much conversation. Seth was ashamed of the number of cups of coffee he drank, and carried away only confused recollections of having been introduced to a middle-aged woman in black who sat at the head of the table, and of having perfunctorily answered sundry questions about business in Dearborn County, put by a man who sat next to him.
They were well on their way to the office before Tom’s silent mood wore away.
“You must brace up!” he said. “Don’t let Workman know that we were out together last night. He’s a regular crank about beer—that is, when anybody but himself drinks it. What’s the matter? You look as melancholy as a man going to be hanged.”
“I suppose I’m nervous about the thing. It’s all going to be so new and strange at the start.”
“Oh, that’ll be all right. You’ll get the hang of it fast enough. They are rather decent fellows to work with upstairs, all but Samboye. He’ll try to sit on you from the start, but if you hold your own with him you’ll get along with the rest.”
“Samboye—he’s the editor, isn’t he?”
“Yes. You don’t know any of them, I suppose?”
“Not even by name.”
“Well, after Workman, who’s very rightly named, and who runs the thing, there’s Samboye, who koo-toos to Workman and bullies all the rest. He puts on more airs than a mowing machine agent at a state fair. He makes everybody tired. Next to him comes Tyler—Tony Tyler, you’ll like him—that is, if he takes a fancy to you. He knows about eighteen hundred times as much as Samboye does, only somehow he hasn’t the faculty of putting it on paper. Too much whisky. Then there’s Dent—he’s a Young Man Christian; plays duets on the piano with his sister, you know, and all that sort of thing—but he’s away now on his vacation. And then Billy Murtagh—he’s a rattling good fellow, if you don’t let him borrow money of you. He does part of the telegraph and news. Those are the only fellows upstairs.”
“But where do you come in?”
“Me? Oh, I’m the City Editor. I and my gang are downstairs. I made a strike to have you down with me, and put you on police court, but Workman wouldn’t have it. It’s all poppycock, for they’ve got more men upstairs now than they know what to do with. However, if Workman thinks the people want to read editorials on the condition of Macedonia more than they do local news, he can go ahead. It’s none of my funeral.”
“Do you know what special work I am to do?”
“From all I hear, it would be easier to tell what you’re not to do. Everyone of them has got a scheme for unloading something on you. First you’re to do a lot of Dent’s work, like the proofs and Agricultural and Religious; then Murtagh wants to put State News on you, and Tyler tells me you’ve got to do the weekly as soon as you get your hand in, and Art, Music and the Drama is a thing that must go up stairs, now that the baseball season has begun, for I can’t attend to it. But if they play it too low down on you, just you make a stout kick to Workman about it.”
While Seth pondered this outlook and advice, they reached the Chronicle office, and presently, by a succession of dark and devious stair-ways, he found himself in an ancient cockloft, curiously cut up by low partitions into compartments like horse-stalls, each with a window at the end, and was introduced as “the new man” to Mr. Anthony Tyler, otherwise Tony.
This gentleman bore no outward signs of the excess of spirituous liquor to which Tom had alluded, and was very cordial and pleasant. He was extremely dark in hair, beard and eyes, seemed to be not more than thirty, and sat at a table piled high with books, clippings and the like, and surrounded by great heaps of papers. Tom glanced over two or three of these latter, and then went off humming a tune lightly and calling out to Seth in imitation of a popular air, as he rattled down stairs “I’ll meet you when the form goes down.”
Among other polite questions Tyler asked Seth where he was stopping.
“Nowhere permanently. I must find some place. I stopped last night with Mr. Votts.”
“With whom?”
“With Mr. Votts, the gentleman who just left us.”
“Oh, you mean Tom Watts. You’ve got his name wrong.”
“Come to think of it, it was a German who called him that last evening, and I was misled by his pronunciation.”
Mr. Tyler’s face grew more serious.
“You are a stranger here. Let me give you some advice. Don’t cultivate Mr. Watts’ German friends. He’s not a bad chap of his sort, but he drinks altogether too much beer. Who drinks beer, thinks beer, as Johnson says. Perhaps I can be of use to you in the matter of a boarding house. Oh, here’s Mur-tagh,” he continued introducing Seth to another tall, slender young man who had come up the stairs with an arm-full of papers; “he will take you now, and give you an idea of your work.” Whereupon Mr. Tyler turned again to his papers and shears, and Seth followed the new comer to the farthest stall in the row, which was henceforth to be his own.
There came a brief quarter of an hour in the afternoon when what seemed to the novice a state of the wildest excitement reigned in the editorial room. An inky boy in a huge leather apron dashed from stall to stall shouting an interrogative “Thirty for you?” His master and patron, the foreman, also aproned from chin to knees, with shirt-sleeves rolled to the biceps, followed with the same mysterious question, put in an injured and indignant tone. A loud, sharp discussion between this magnate and Tyler, profanely dictatorial on the one side, profanely satirical on the other, rose suddenly and filled the room with its clamor. An elderly man, bald as a billiard ball, and dressed like a clergyman, came bounding up the stairs, pulling out his watch as he advanced, and demanding fiercely the reason for this delay. There was an outburst of explanation, in which four or five voices joined, mingling personal abuse freely with their analysis of the situation. Tom Watts leaped up the stairs four steps at a time and hurled himself into the controversy. Seth could distinguish in this babel of exclamations such phrases as—
“You better get some india-rubber chases!”
“If that fire’s cut down, you might as well not go to press at all!”
“If somebody would get down here in the morning, we could get our matter up in time.”
“I’m sick and tired of getting out telegraph for these chuckle-headed printers to throw on the floor!” “That Mayhew matter’s been standing on the galleys so long already that it’s got grey-headed!”
“By the Lord Harry, I’ll make a rule that the next time we miss the Wyoming mail it shall be taken out of your wages!”
Here the inky boy galloped through to Seth with a proof-sheet, shouting, “You’ve got a minute and a half to read this in!” The bald, elderly gentleman, who seemed to be Mr. Workman, came and stood over Seth, watch in hand, scowling impatiently. Under this embarrassment the wet letters danced before his eyes, and he could find no errors, though it turned out later that he had passed “elephant” for “elopement” and ruined Watts’ chief sensation. A few minutes later, the clang of the presses in the basement shook the old building, and the inky boy bustled through the room again, pitching a paper into each of the stalls. There was a moment of silence, broken only by the soft rustling of the damp sheets. Then simultaneously from the several tables rose a chorus of violent objurgation.
Seth heard the voice which he had learned was Samboye’s roar out, “What dash-dashed idiot has made me say ‘our martyr President Abraham Sinclair? ’ Stop the press!” There were other voices: “Here’s two lines of markets upside down!” “Oh, I say, this is too bad. Moyen age is ‘mayonaise ’ in my Shylock notice, and it’s Mrs. McCullough instead of Mr. ————.”
“I’m dashed if the paper looks as if it had been read at all. We can’t have such proof-reading as this!”
While these comments were still proceeding the noise of the press suddenly ceased. The silence was terrible to Seth’s guilty consciousness, for he had heard enough to know that it was his fault. Mr. Workman entered the room again, and again Sam-boye’s deep voice was heard, repeating the awful Sinclair-Lincoln error. Seth had looked at his fresh copy of the Chronicle, with some vague hope that the Editor was mistaken, but alas! it was too true. Mr. Workman came over to his stall; he had put his watch back in his pocket, but his countenance was stern and unbending.
“You are Mr. Fairchild, I presume,” he said.
Seth rose to his feet, blushing, and murmured, “Yes, sir.”
“I understood from your brother that you were used to newspaper work.”
“Well, I thought I was. I have been around the Banner of Liberty office a great deal, but it seems so different on a daily.”
“H’m,—yes. Well, I dare say you’ll learn.”
Luckily the press started up again here, and Mr. Workman, looking at his watch once more, went down stairs.
Seth felt most grievously depressed. Looking back, his first day had been full of mortification and failure. The use of scissors and mucilage brush was painfully unfamiliar to his clumsy fingers. The scope and intention of the various news departments he had been told to take charge of were unknown to him, and he had watched Murtagh go over the matter he submitted, striking out page after page, saying curtly, “We’ve had this,” “This is only worth a line or two,” or “this belongs in county notes,” with a sinking heart. His duties were so mechanical and commonplace, after what he had conceived an editor’s functions to be, that his ineptitude was doubly humiliating.
Then there was this dreadful proof-reading failure. Murtagh had given him the sample proof-sheet in the back of the dictionary to copy his marks from—and he had copied them with such scrupulous efforts after exactness that the printers couldn’t understand them. These printers—he could see them through the windows opposite, standing pensively over their tall cases, and moving their right arms between the frames and their sticks with the monotonous regularity of an engine’s piston-rod—seemed a very sarcastic and disagreeable body of men, to judge by the messages of criticism on his system of marking which the inky boy had delivered for them with such fidelity and enjoyment during the day. He had eaten nothing since the early breakfast, and felt faint and tired. The rain outside, beating dismally on the window and the tin roof beyond, added to his gloom, and the ceaseless drumming of the presses below increased his headache.
The other men seemed to have nothing to do now save to talk, but he turned wearily to the great mound of exchanges from which Murtagh had directed him to extract “Society Jottings” and “Art, Music and the Drama” after the paper went to press.
He spent a few despairing minutes on the threshold of the task—enough to see clearly that it was beyond his strength. Society was Syriac to him, and he had never seen a play acted, beyond an occasional presentation of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” or “The Octoroon” by strolling tenth-rate mummers in the tiny hall at Thessaly. How could he select matter for such departments? He wavered for a time, from a disinclination to confront men who had just condemned his work so unsparingly, but at last he got up from the table where he had been pinned all day, and went over to the further end of the room.
There was a sort of conclave about Tyler’s table. Both he and Samboye reclined in tipped-back chairs, with their feet upon it; Watts sat on the table swinging his legs, his straw hat still on the back of his head, and Murtagh was perched in the window seat. Their conversation, which had been flowing freely, stopped as Seth approached. He had expected to be introduced to his Editor, Mr. Samboye, but no one seemed to think of it, and that gentleman himself relieved him of the embarrassment by nodding not uncourteously but with formality.
“Mr. Fairchild,” he said, with impressive slowness, “in the pursuit of a high career you will be powerfully aided by keeping in recollection the fact that the sixteenth President of the United States was named Lincoln and not Sinclair. We have a prejudice too, weak as it may seem, in favor of spelling ‘interval’ with a ‘v’ rather than an ‘n’.”
Seth did not find it so difficult to address this great man as he had anticipated. He said simply that he was very sorry, but the work was utterly new to him, it was his first day, he hoped to learn soon, etc. Emboldened by the sound of his own voice, he added his doubts about being able to satisfactorily preside over such exacting columns as “Society Jottings” and “Art, Music and the Drama”—and gave reasons.
“By George!” cried Watts, “I envy you! Just fancy a man who has never seen anything but ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’—and not even that with real Siberian bloodhounds. You shall begin going tonight. I’ll take you to ‘Muldoon’s Picnic.’”
“Well, at any rate,” remarked Mr. Tyler, “you can do ‘Agricultural.’ You must know that right down to the ground.”
“Yes,” assented Seth, “I think I ought to manage that. The truth is, most of the stuff the papers print for farmers is nonsense—pure rubbish.”
“I suppose it is. I know that Dent—he is a New York city boy, who doesn’t know clover from cabbage—once put in a paragraph about the importance of feeding chickens on rock salt, and an old farmer from Boltus came in early one morning and whaled the bookkeeper out of his boots because he had followed the advice and killed all his hens. There must be some funny man out West somewhere who makes up these bad agricultural paragraphs, and of course they get copied. How can fellows like Dent, for instance, tell which are good and which are not? But they can’t fool you, and that’ll be an advantage. Then there’s Religious. You can do that easily enough. I should think.”
“Yes,” interposed Murtagh, “all you have to do is to lay for the Obago Evening Mercury. Every Saturday that has a column of religious. Alec Watson, a fellow in that office, has fifty-two of these columns, extracts from Thomas à Kempis, and Wesley and Spurgeon and that sort of thing, which have been running in the Mercury since before the war. When New Year’s comes he starts ’em going again, round and round. Nobody knows the difference. Well, their columns are longer than ours, so each week you can run about half their paragraphs—the shortest ones—and then fill in with some news notes, statistics, you know, about how many churches the Moravians have now, and that sort of thing. You can pick those up during the week, anywhere.”
“Then there ought to be some originality about it too,” said Tom Watts. “It is just as well to sling in some items of your own, I think, such as ‘There is a growing desire among the Baptists to have Bishops, like other people,’ or, ‘It is understood that at the coming Consistory the Pope will create seven new American Cardinals.’ That last is a particularly good point. Every once in a while, predict more Cardinals. It doesn’t hurt anybody, and it makes you solid when the thing does happen. There’s nothing like original news to show the influence of journalism. One morning, after the cakes had been bad for a week, heavy, sour or something else, I said to my landlady that I believed the fault must be in the buckwheat. She said no, she didn’t think so, for the flour looked very nice indeed. I put a line in ‘Local Glimpses’ that day, saying that unfortunately the buckwheat this year was of inferior quality, and the very next morning she apologised to me: said I was right; the buckwheat was bad; she had read so in the Chronicle. Can you imagine a nobler illustration of the power of the press?”
Seth looked attentively at the speaker, to see if he was joking, but there was no more evidence of mirth in his thin face than in the serious tone of his voice. None of the others laughed.
Mr. Samboye said some of the most remarkable things, at once humorous and highly original, and put in an elaborate frame of big unusual words. He was a huge man in frame, with an enormous head, bushy eyebrows, heavy whiskers, a ponderous manner, a tremendous voice—in fact seemed to Seth precisely the kind of man from whom delicate wit, and soft shading of phrases were not to be expected. He happened for the nonce to be in a complaisant mood, and was relaxing himself in the company of “his young men,” as he liked to call his colleagues. But ordinarily he was overbearing and arbitrary, and this had rankled so deeply in their minds that they listened with apathy, unresponsive, to his choicest sallies, and Watts even combated him, with scant courtesy it seemed to Seth.
To him this monologue of the Editor’s was a revelation. He had never heard such brilliant talk, such a wonderful mastery of words, such delicious humor. He drank it all in eagerly, and laughed aloud at its broader points—the more heartily, perhaps, because no one else smiled. This display of appreciation bore fruit after its kind. Before Mr. Samboye went he spoke some decidedly gracious words to Seth, saying among other things:
“However harshly we may be tempted by momentary stress of emotion to speak, always remember that we unitedly feel your fresh bucolic interest in things, your virginal capacity for admiration, and your pristine flush of enthusiasm for your work to be distinct acquisitions to the paper,” which Seth felt to be somewhat nonsensical, but still was grateful for.
After Mr. Samboye had gone, Tom Watts took occasion to warn him in an aside:
“Be careful how you appear to curry favor with Samboye before the other fellows. Oh, I know you didn’t think of it—but don’t laugh at his jokes. They’ll think you’re trying to climb over them, and they’ll be unpleasant to you, perhaps.”