"It don't get you any place. Now if I was in business I'd be just getting ready to be a president of the company or something. And as it is I'm just an old man around the shop. Forty-two my last birthday. In a couple of years more I'll be on the copy desk."
"That's mostly bunk, Charlie. But even if it was so, haven't you had a lot of fun?"
"What do you mean, fun?"
"Going out where things are happening and writing pieces and seeing them in the paper the next day. Just writing a baseball story seems sort of exciting to me."
"Hell," said Charlie, "they're all faked, those baseball games. I wouldn't go across the street to see one."
He paused, but went on again before Peter could protest.
"It's a funny thing, but the longer you stay in newspaper work the more it gets to seem as if everything's faked. After a while you find out that all the murders are just alike. Somebody sleeps with somebody and somebody else don't like it and then you have what we call a 'mystery' and we get all steamed up about it. Railroad accidents—the engineer disregarded the signal—fires—somebody dropped a cigarette in a pile of waste. My God, Pete, there's only about ten things can happen any place in the world and then they must go on repeating themselves over and over."
Peter rushed in pellmell. "But don't you see, Charlie. It's the writing about them makes them different. A piano player might as well say, 'I haven't got anything but the same notes.'"
"Well," said Charlie, "I'd drown all five of them if they wanted to be piano players. Maybe there is some fun in writing. I don't know anything about that. But if a man wants to write why put it down some place where it's going to be swept up by the street cleaner the next day. At eleven o'clock tomorrow morning all that stuff you were writing before I came in will be dead and rotten. It'll have to make room for the home edition and on top of that'll come another. And so on all day long. Writing for a newspaper's like spitting in Niagara Falls. Anybody that can write ought to get on a magazine and do something that'll last anyway from breakfast to dinner time."
"It's no good for me," said Peter. "I've written for magazines a little—just sport stuff, you know. You do something and maybe you like it, but that's the last you hear about it for a month. By the time it comes out you've forgotten all about it and maybe by that time it isn't true anyway. It's like writing for posterity."