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.”