Yet it would have been a cheerful enough place if our mail had not been so depressing. Everything we sent out came right back with a bounce, sometimes on the same day that we posted it. With indefatigable zeal we wrote feature "stories" about big topics in America's biggest city and furnished illustrations for the text. But the manuscripts did not sell. For two bitter months we kept at it before we discovered what was wrong. You may wonder how we could have been so blind. But there was no one to tell us what to do. We had to find out by experience.
In November our income was $60.90, all of it echoes from the past for material written in the west.
"How that crowd in the old office would laugh at us when we trailed back home, defeated!"
That was the thought which was at once a nightmare and a goad to further desperate effort. Day after day the Art Department and the kodak and I explored New York's highways and centers of interest. The place was ripe with barrels and barrels of good "feature stories," and I knew it; and the markets were not unfriendly, for by mail I had sold to them before. But now we could not "land."
On Christmas Day there was a dismal storm. Our purses were almost flat, and my box from home failed to arrive. To get up an appetite for dinner that night we went for a walk in a joy killing blizzard. I wanted to die and planned to do so. The only reason I did not jump off of a pier was the providential intervention of several stiff cocktails. (I am theoretically a prohibitionist, but grateful to the enemy for having saved my life.) The black cloud that shut out all sunlight was our measly total for December—$18.07.
One glimmer of hope remained in a growing suspicion that perhaps some of the "stories" we had submitted had seen print shortly before we arrived. Possibly some other free lances—I would now estimate the number as somewhere between nine hundred and a thousand—had gone over the island of Manhattan with a fine tooth comb? I began haunting the side streets to seek out the most hidden possibilities, and ended in triumph one afternoon in a little uptown bird store.
For two hours the young woman who was the proprietor of the store submitted to a searching interview, and I emerged with enough material for a full page spread. Then, taking no chances of being turned down because the contribution was too long, I condensed the "story" into a column. The manuscript went to the Sunday Editor of the New York Sun, with a letter pleading that "just this once" he grant me the special favor of a note to explain why he would not be able to use what I had to offer.
"Well enough written," he scribbled on the rejection slip, "but Miss Virginia has been done too many times before."
With that a great light dawned. Further investigation discovered that we had run into the same difficulty on numerous other occasions. We newcomers had no notion of how thoroughly and often the city had been pillaged for news. We could not tell old stuff from new. Manhattan Island is, indeed, the most perilous place in all America for the green and friendless free lance to attempt to earn a living. There is a wonderful abundance of "stories," but nearly all of them that the eye of the beginner can detect have been marketed before. Any other island but Manhattan! When dog days came around, I took a vacation on Bois Blanc in the Straits of Mackinac, and found more salable "stories" along its thinly populated shores than Manhattan had been able to furnish in three months. Everything I touched on Bois Blanc was new, and all my own. Anything on Manhattan is everybody's.
But to return to our troubles in New York. The only hope I could see was to create a line of writing all our own. This determination resulted in a highly specialized type of "feature" for which we found a market in the morning New York World. It combined novelty with the utmost essence of timeliness. For example, precluding any possibility of being anticipated on the opening of Coney Island's summer season, we wrote early in February: