The Silver Poppy - Arthur Stringer

John Hartley, "Pale Souls."

What are more desolate than life's moral Great Divides.—"The Silver Poppy."

The grimy offices of the United News Bureau were on William Street, almost under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. In four years this bureau had known three failures and had existed, as well, under three different names. Uneasy on his desk ever rested the heels of its managing editor. There was a tradition, in fact, that this official had, perforce, to take his chair out to lunch with him—otherwise a new man occupied it on his return.

In dusty little pens about the august editorial chair toiled some ten or twelve sadly dilapidated literary hacks, waifs of the sea of journalism that had been washed up on the inhospitable shores of the syndicate bureau. They were, as a rule, old men eking out a simple existence on their few dollars a week, and, after frugal repasts at the noonday hour, when the wheels of creative imagination suspended for luncheon, dilating pensively on the old days, the good old palmy days of Greeley and Dana and Godkin, when to wield the pen was a labor of love and honor, when a newspaper man was not a walking sweat-shop of letters, whereby literature was turned out in job lots and articles were manufactured at so much the dozen.

It had not taken Hartley long to find that the United News Bureau was looked on with considerable contempt, with even hatred, by the ordinary New York newspaper writer. These upholders of sometimes dubiously conventional journalism made it a rule always to refer to the bureau as "the Boiler-Plate Factory," and night and day they watched it with suspicious eyes for evidences of violated copyright. But the bureau knew its business, and the different members of its staff had long since been schooled in the deft execution of what was not inappropriately termed a "plate sneak." This form of literary gymnastics consisted in the bodily appropriation of any desired article, sermon, story, or essay, the copy purloined being neatly disguised by a false face, as it were, in the substitution of a freshly written introduction. An original paragraph or two was attached to the end, with, perhaps, the interpolation of an occasional new sentence throughout the body of the thing purloined. As the bureau dealt in everything from anniversary poetry to syndicated political addresses, the field for its predatory activities was practically unlimited. A short story could be made by transplanting a De Maupassant peasant to a New England farm, or the interjection of a Kipling recruit into an Arizona mining-camp. The old-time action was jealously preserved in the transformation, the only alterations being those essential to a change of climate and conditions—and, presto, one had a new tale as bright and glittering as a freshly minted penny.

The bureau had a Menu Page, too, made up by a very lean and hungry-looking old gentleman who lunched sparingly on a sandwich each noon, and a Religious Thought Page, edited by a very stout individual who kept a brandy-flask standing beside his ink-bottle. A profitable branch of its business was the preparation of obituaries of eminent men still living, and it is on record that one editor had made it his cheerful practise to submit these touching studies to the different gentlemen whom they most intimately concerned, naively asking if anything further remained to be said. What the bureau fattened on, however, was the uncopyrighted in general, and for all such morsels it watched with hawk-like intensity. An English novel or any less substantial publication which came to it unprotected by the arm of the law was pounced on at once, rapaciously and gleefully. It was renamed, abridged or expanded as the case might require, and in less time than it took the original author to indite his first chapter, it was on the market as a new and thrilling serial, "secured by special arrangement."

The bureau, among other things, paid particular attention to the wants of the farmer, and issued a Dairy Page, edited by an elderly maiden lady who made Brooklyn her home and beheld a cow not more than once a year. The expert who edited the Agricultural Page, it might be added, had prepared himself for such tasks by many years' labor as an insurance agent. The bureau also boasted of a professional poet, who ran strongly to patriotism, but as his rhymes were manufactured for the convenience of the rather undiscriminating bucolic editor and later on for the delectation of the bucolic reader, his Gems in Verse usually went unchallenged.

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