And how that reportorial room seemed to thrill or sing between the hours of five and seven in the evening, when the stories of the afternoon were coming in, or between ten-thirty and midnight, when the full grist of the day was finally being ground out. How it throbbed with human life and thought, quite like a mill room full of looms or a counting house in which endless records and exchanges are being made. Those reporters, eighteen or twenty of them, bright, cheerful, interesting, forceful youths, each bent upon making a name for himself, each working hard, each here bending over his desk scratching his head or ear and thinking, his mind lost in the mazes of arrangement and composition.
Wandell had no tolerance for any but the best of newspaper reporters and would discharge a man promptly for falling down on a story, especially if he could connect it with the feeling that he was not as good a newspaper man as he should be. He hated commonplace men, and once I had become familiar with the office and with him, he would often ask me in a spirit of unrest if I knew of an especially good one anywhere with whom he could replace some one else whom he did not like; a thought which jarred me but which did not prevent me from telling him. Somehow I had an eye and a taste for exceptional men myself, and I wanted his staff to be as good as any. So it was not long before he began to rely on me to supply him with suitable men, so much so that I soon had the reputation of being a local arbiter of jobs, one who could get men in or keep them out—a thing which made me some enemies later. And it really was not true for I could not have kept any good man out.
In the meantime, while he was trying me out to suit himself, he had been giving me only routine work: the North Seventh Street police station afternoons and evenings, where one or two interesting stories might be expected every day, crimes or sordid romances of one kind or another. Or if there was nothing much doing there I might be sent out on an occasional crime story elsewhere. Once I had handled a few of these for him, and to his satisfaction, I was pushed into the topnotch class and given only the most difficult stories, those which might be called feature crimes and sensations, which I was expected to unravel, sometimes single-handed, and to which always I was expected to write the lead. This realistic method of his plus a keen desire to unload all the heavy assignments on me was in no wise bad for me. He liked me, and this was his friendly way of showing it.
Indeed, with a ruthless inconsiderateness, as I then thought, he piled on story after story, until I was a little infuriated at first, seeing how little I was being paid. When nothing of immediate importance was to be had, he proceeded to create news, studying out interesting phases of past romances or crimes which he thought might be worth while to work up and publish on Sunday, and handing them to me to do over. He even created stories when the general news was dull, throwing me into the most delicate and dangerous fields of arson, murder, theft, marital unhappiness, and tragedies of all kinds, things not public but which by clever detective work could be made so, and where libel and other suits and damages lurked on either hand. Without cessation, Sunday and every other day, he called upon me to display sentiment, humor or cold, hard, descriptive force, as the case might be, quoting now Hugo, now Balzac, now Dickens, and now Zola to me to show me just what was to be done. In a little while, despite my reduced salary and the fact that I had lost my previous place in disgrace and was not likely to get a raise here soon, I was as much your swaggering newspaper youth as ever, strolling about the city with the feeling that I was somebody and looking up all my old friends, with the idea of letting them know that I was by no means such a failure as they might imagine. Dick and Peter of course, seeing me ambling in on them late one hot night, received me with open arms.
“Well, you’re a good one!” yelped Dick in his high, almost falsetto voice when I came in. I could see that he had been sitting before his open window, which commanded Broadway, where he had been no doubt meditating—your true romancer. “Where the hell have you been keeping yourself? You’re a dandy? We’ve been looking for you for weeks. We’ve been down to your place a dozen times, but you wouldn’t let us in. You’re a dandy, you are! McCord has some more of those opera cartoons done. Why didn’t you ever come around, anyhow?”
“I’m working down on the Republic now,” I replied, blushing, “and I’ve been busy.”
“Oho!” laughed Dick, slapping his knees. “That’s a good one on you! I heard about it. Those shows written up, and not one in town! Oho! That’s good!” He coughed a consumptive cough or two and relaxed.
I laughed with him. “It wasn’t really all my fault,” I said apologetically.
“I know it wasn’t. Don’t I know the Globe? Didn’t Carmichael get me to work the same racket for him? Ask Hazard. It wasn’t your fault. Sit down. Peter’ll be here in a little while; then we’ll go out and get something.”
We fell to discussing the attitude of the people on the Globe after I had left. Wood insisted that he had not heard much. He knew instinctively that Mitchell was glad I was gone, as he might well have been. Hartung had reported to him that McCullagh had raised Cain with Mitchell and that two or three of the boys on the staff had manifested relief.