AMBITION is an itch for something you haven't got and never expect to get," remarked Peters, rapping his pipe bowl against the edge of the desk and reaching for Mead's tobacco box. He owned none of his own and the rest of the force formed a convenient and interminable tobacco trust for him.
"You might add to that observation the clause 'but others have,' Pete," put in Charlie Kirk, while Mead resignedly watched Peters jamming an unwieldy wad of the weed into the bowl with his thumb, to brazenly reach for more the next instant. "Besides, that remark isn't original. It's gone the rounds of the papers. I don't know where they pinched it, but I'll bet it wasn't from you."
"Your observation does you credit, Sherlock," retorted Peters, undisturbed. "If you would exercise a little of that faculty on the job, maybe the old man would raise your attenuated wage."
The quiet voice of the city editor broke in upon the amiable colloquy. "Here, Kirk," said he, "and you, Peters, I want you. Go and relieve Smallwood and Lynn at that visiting convention and tell them to hurry here with their stuff. They've been there since seven. I thought the thing would be over by now."
Kirk and Peters left Mead's desk, where they had been loafing for a few spare moments, and, slipping on their coats, walked to the elevator and sank streetward. The city editor delved again into the debris on his groaning desk. It was a rush night. The few men in the great room, for most of the reporters were still out, were bent over portly pads or pecked busily at typewriters.
Mead scrawled away at the lecture story to which he had been assigned that evening. Warming to his work he rounded out many of the professor's periods for him and added some good things of his own. Now and then he read a paragraph with complacency and sifted in a few more adjectives. He had heard the old fairy tale of speakers giving reporters credit for improving their efforts. Moreover, he was but lately hatched from the high school and was nearing the end of his probationary period upon the Courier. As with the _debut_ of most of the boys, coherence was smothered in verbiage. Mead's written words flowed on like rivers to the sea. You who speak by the card will well remember the turbid freshets you handed in, long ago, with a sort of awe to think you had penned them. You looked for a little corresponding awe on the part of the city editor. He merely grunted, and the next morning it was a wise father that knew his brain-child. The anxious parent looked twice through the pages, finally finding the changeling, dwarfed and subdued, in a modest corner next the patent medicine "ads." Stripped of the gauzy gewgaws of fancy with which you had complacently adorned it, it lay in its stark cerements of staring simplicity, a hard, terse, graphic, uncompromising fact. That salient bar, the editorial pencil, had dammed the winding, sunlit stream at its very source, forcing it home by a short cut that skipped much romantic scenery but saved time for the navigator. You read the mangled remnant of that early flight and cursed the city editor's lack of literary appreciation. Afterward, when the years had brought you wisdom, you wondered why he had kept you at all. Yet you knew, after all,—for the veterans were tyros once.
Mead toiled on, the mirage of an achieved literary gem on his mental horizon. It was the same mirage, old yet ever young, that flashes in transient glory and fades as often and as miserably before the wistful eyes of the veteran in letters as with the tyro: the dream of an unattainable ideal, which mocks and melts away, a phantom of the sands.
His task completed, Mead brought his masterpiece to the city editor's desk. "The lecture, Mr. Harkins," said he, with a thrill of secret pride. A sense of polished erudition welled strong within him. Harkins might now see what the real thing in literary skill could do with the most prosaic of assignments.
Harkins had cleared his desk pretty well in the past few minutes and his assistants were busy in consequence. He slapped the masterpiece irreverently on the desk. Like a withering blast his trained eyes swept the first page, which was heavily laden with elaborate introduction. There were a few fierce swoops of a blue pencil. Words fell in the ranks like scattered skirmishers, then platoons of phrases were swept away. The enfiladed page fell face down on the desk. Another, similarly mangled, followed. Only a few gallant remnants of that imposing array remained. It was the survival of the fittest, the obliteration of the superfluous; but it was hard. Mead watched the sacrifice in slow, gathering horror.
Harkins looked up. "Busy night!" said he abruptly but not unkindly. "Anyway, this won't do. Cultivate the newspaper style. Get brevity, terseness. Cut out excess baggage. Get the right word and fit it in right. You're voluminous. Make it luminous."