THE EGO OF THE METROPOLIS
By Thomas T. Hoyne
“You couldn’t get her picture?” sneered the city editor contemptuously. “Come, Johnson, get into the game. You’re not in Chicago or St. Louis now. This is New York.”
Johnson was eating his bread in the sweat of his brow, but he wanted to continue eating. Therefore he said nothing, but lounged off into the local room, empty during the dead afternoon hours.
He was lucky to be working at all. During the couple of weeks he had been wearing out shoe leather chasing pictures for the greatest of all metropolitan morning newspapers he had been told his good fortune a hundred times. He, a perfect stranger in New York, had walked right into a job.
The job should have been tempting only to the rawest cub, but Johnson, a crackerjack reporter, snapped at it. He knew that some of the best newspaper men in New York, crackerjack reporters, were carrying the banner along Park Row.
The afternoon newspapers were boiling over with editions, black type and red crying out that one hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars had disappeared from a vault of the soundest bank in Wall Street and that the cashier was missing. To be assigned to this bank story, to get the chance to show what he really could do, Johnson would have given a finger from his right hand.
He sat on a corner of a typewriter desk, swinging one leg, while he raged inwardly at the insolent city editor. Bread or no bread, he could not work himself into spasms of enthusiasm over a near society woman’s photograph for a cheap story. He was too old in the game for such child’s play.
The noisy opening of the door between the managing editor’s room and the office of the city editor roused him. He heard the managing editor’s voice.
“Got any line on that bank cashier?”
“Not yet, sir,” replied the city editor, “but every live man on the staff is out on the story.”
Johnson flushed as if he had been insulted publicly. How would the old guard in Chicago or Cincinnati retort to such an insinuation against a man who had campaigned up and down the country and had learned the newspaper game as a soldier learns war—in action? He recalled winning out in California, notwithstanding “Native Sons.” But to win against the esoteric self-sufficiency of New Yorkers demanded higher fortitude.
“Where can I find the owner of this newspaper?”
Johnson came out of his dream abruptly to answer the insignificant little man who had rambled into the local room.
“He isn’t in the building just now,” said he patiently.
Owners of newspapers do not receive callers casually. When cranks get through the outer doors now and again it is the duty of some employee to act as buffer.
The visitor lifted a trembling hand to his forehead, shook his head uncertainly, and began to mumble a meandering, inconsequent tale. Amid the aimless words one sentence unexpectedly shaped itself that set the reporter’s nerves atingle.
Johnson glanced fearfully toward the city editor’s office.
“You want to see the owner of the paper?” he asked softly, the sudden thumping of his heart sounding in his voice. “Come with me.”
He grasped the visitor’s arm and hurried him out of the local room into the hall, and thence into an elevator.
“This way,” he coaxed, when they reached the street level. He led the man out into the crowded thoroughfare, cleverly sheering away from points of danger, as a battleship might convoy a treasure bark.
In the empty local room time dragged. The city editor busied himself in his little office, glaring at his assignment book, studying clippings from afternoon newspapers, and answering calls on his telephone. Once he was interrupted by a woman who laid two tickets for a church fair on his desk and asked to have a paragraph about the entertainment published.
“Johnson!” shouted the city editor arrogantly. His voice merely lost itself in the hollow local room. He rose from his chair irritably and peered through the door of his office, but there was no Johnson on whom to break his wrath.
As evening came on reporters and copy readers straggled in. No one brought startling news in the bank story. The cashier was still missing and there was no trace of him.
The local room burst into nervous life, emphasized by erratic volleys from pounding typewriters and hoarse yells for copy-boys. More than once as the night wore away the city editor stepped from his office to look toward the corner where Johnson usually sat. Each time a vacant chair aggravated his anger.
It was nearly eleven o’clock when the ringing telephone bell called his attention from the proof before him. He jerked the receiver from its hook.
“Johnson, eh? I wanted you half a dozen times this afternoon and evening, but now you needn’t come in at all. You’re through.”
He jammed the receiver back with a glow of satisfaction in having good reason to discharge an incompetent.
The telephone bell rang again. This time the city editor listened.
“You’ve got the cashier locked up in your room!” he fairly yelled. “All right! All right!”
Shaking with excitement he wheeled from the telephone.
“Brail! Jack! Fredericks!”
He roared the names into the local room in sharp succession.
Like soldiers at a bugle call men sprang from desks where they were working or idling.
“You, Jack, get on the ’phone and take a story from Johnson! He’s got the biggest beat that ever was pulled off in the city of New York.”
The rewrite man settled himself at the wire.
At the other end of it Johnson, in his room at the cheap hotel where he lived, struggled to be calm in this moment of triumph. He began to dictate.
Near him, well within range of vision, sat his willing prisoner. Not once since they left the newspaper office together had the cashier been out of Johnson’s sight. Helpless, hopeless, but with a conscience no longer heavily burdened, the unfortunate man listened now just as he had listened while the reporter, without betraying his source of information, craftily verified by telephone the wandering confession.
Clear and without interruption the stream of dictation poured over the wire. The story was written as a newspaper story should be written, and when it was told it ended.
“That’s all,” sighed Johnson proudly. “I’ll hold him here till two o’clock to make the beat an absolute cinch. Then I’ll ’phone the police.”
In the newspaper office the rewrite man had hardly drummed out the last line of copy before the sheet of paper was snatched from his typewriter and rushed in the wake of former scudding sheets to the composing room, just in time for the first edition.
“There never was a beat like it,” cried the exultant city editor. “I don’t see how he landed it.”
“It’s a great piece of newspaper work,” agreed the managing editor. “No man in the country could have done better. Who is Johnson?”
“A new man, but I’ve taught him the game already. He didn’t wait for any assignment—just went right out and dug that cashier up.” The city editor’s voice cracked with enthusiasm. “That’s the kind of newspaper men we turn out in little old New York.”