I don’t remember how I ever pushed myself past the telephone girl and secretary, but I found myself talking face to face with a clean, cold, high-thinking head, Mr. Alfred Nott, editor-boss of Free Mankind. My burning enthusiasm turned into ice through all my bones as I looked into the terrible, clean face and cold eyes of this clean cold higher-up. But I heard my words rushing right to him like the words of a soap-box speaker who is so on fire with his thoughts that even the cold ones from up-town are forced to listen to him.
“I can put a lot of new life into your magazine,” I said. “I have in me great new ideas about life, and I’m crazy to give them out to you. Your magazine is too much up in the head and not enough down on earth. It’s all words, words, long-winded empty words in emptiness. Your articles are something like those long sermons about nothing, that put people to sleep. I can wake up your readers like lightning. I can make your magazine mean living things to living people.”
The man fell back in his chair as if frightened. His mouth opened to speak, but no words came from his lips.
“What you tell us about not paying rent is good enough,” I went on. “But you should tell us how to put an end to all that. I know enough about not having a place to sleep in to write you something that will wake up the dead. You’re not excited enough with feelings when you write, because you live in a soft steam-heated place with plenty of money to pay for it. But the poor like me, with little rent, and drying out their heads worrying for that little, they feel what it is to be under the foot of those Cossacks, the landlords. In my stories I’d write for you, I’d get the readers so mad, they’d rush out and do something.”
Even while I was yet talking, Mr. Nott slipped out of the chair and disappeared like a frightened rabbit. I could see him vanishing through the door before I could stop my flow of words. I looked about me in the empty room. I felt as if I’d been slapped in the face.
I ran out of the office with tears in my eyes. And I couldn’t stop my crying in the street. So this is his Free Mankind! When a person comes to him with something real he runs away as from a madman. Here was a paper that would reform the world, and its boss wouldn’t even listen to one of the people he was setting out to save.
But there were other magazines in America, I told myself. The Reformer flashed before my eyes, because I remember it said on the back page, “It speaks for the average man.”
I found myself again face to face with an editor—John Blair, the great liberal, the friend of an American President, the starter of a new school that was to gather all the minds of the new world. With this man I thought I’d begin by asking him a question instead of rushing myself out to him in all my hungry eagerness.
“Mr. Blair,” I demanded in a voice of choked-in quietness, “do you think that the educated people know it all?”
He looked at me for a long minute. His lips closed together, his eyes cool like a judge. I felt he looked me over to decide in what shelf I belonged in the filing bureau of his college head.