CHAPTER XXXV
The LaClede, as I have indicated, was the center of all gossiping newspaper life at this time, at least that part of it of which I knew anything. Here, in idling groups, during the course of a morning, afternoon or evening, might appear Dick or Peter, Body, Clark, Hazard, Johnson, Root, Johns Daws, a long company of excellent newspaper men who worked on the different papers of the city from time to time and who, because of a desire for companionship in this helter-skelter world and the certainty of finding it here, hung about this corner. Here one could get in on a highly intellectual or diverting conversation of one kind or another at almost any time. So many of these men had come from distant cities and knew them much better than they did St. Louis. As a rule, being total strangers and here only for a short while, they were inclined to sniff at conditions as they found them here and to boast of those elsewhere, especially the men who came from New York, Boston, San Francisco and Chicago. I was one of those who, knowing Chicago and St. Louis only and wishing to appear wise in these matters, boasted vigorously of the superlative importance of Chicago as a city, whereas such men as Root of New York, Johnson of Boston, Ware of New Orleans, and a few others, merely looked at me and smiled.
“All I have to say to you, young fellow,” young Root once observed to me genially if roughly after one of these heated and senseless arguments, “is wait till you go to New York and see for yourself. I’ve been to Chicago, and it’s a way-station in comparison. It’s the only other city you’ve seen, and that’s why you think it’s so great.” There was a certain amount of kindly toleration in his voice which infuriated me.
“Ah, you’re crazy,” I replied. “You’re like all New Yorkers: you think you know it all. You won’t admit you’re beaten when you are.”
The argument proceeded through all the different aspects of the two cities until finally we called each other damned fools and left in a huff. Years later, however, having seen New York, I wanted to apologize if ever I met him again. The two cities, as I then learned, each individual and wonderful in its way, were not to be contrasted. But how sure I was of my point of view then!
Nearly all of these young men, as I now saw, presented a sharp contrast to those I had known in Chicago, or perhaps the character of the work in this city and my own changing viewpoint made them seem different. Chicago at that time had seemed to be full of exceptional young men in the reportorial world, men who in one way or another had already achieved considerable local repute as writers and coming men: Finley Peter Dunne, George Ade, Brand Whitlock, Ben King, Charles Stewart, and many others, some of whom even in that day were already signing their names to some of their contributions; whereas here in St. Louis, few if any of us had achieved any local distinction of any kind. No one of us had as yet created a personal or literary following. We could not, here, apparently; the avenues were not the same. And none of us was hailed as certain to attract attention in the larger world outside. We formed little more than a weak scholastic brotherhood or union, recognizing each other genially enough as worthy fellow-craftsmen but not offering each other much consolation in our rough state beyond a mere class or professional recognition as working newspaper men. Yet at times this LaClede was a kind of tonic bear garden, or mental wrestling-place, where unless one were very guarded and sure of oneself one might come by a quick and hard fall, as when once in some argument in regard to a current political question, and without knowing really what I was talking about, I made the statement that palaeontology indicated so-and-so, whereupon one of my sharp confrères suddenly took me up with: “Say, what is palaeontology, anyhow? Do you know?”
I was completely stumped, for I didn’t. It was a comparatively new word, outside the colleges, being used here and there in arguments and editorials, and I had glibly taken it over. I floundered about and finally had to confess that I did not know what it was, whereupon I endured a laugh for my pains. I was thereafter wiser and more cautious.
But this, in my raw, ignorant state, was a very great help to me. Many of these men were intelligent and informed to the cutting point in regard to many facts of life of which I was extremely ignorant. Many of them had not only read more but seen more, and took my budding local pretensions to being somebody with a very large grain of salt. At many of the casual meetings, where at odd moments reporters and sometimes editors were standing or sitting about and discussing one phase of life and another, I received a back-handed slap which sometimes jarred my pride but invariably widened my horizon.
One of the most interesting things in my life at this time was that same North Seventh Street police station previously mentioned, to which I went daily and which was a center for a certain kind of news at least—rapes, riots, murders, fantastic family complications of all kinds, so common to very poor and highly congested neighborhoods. This particular station was the very center of a mixed ghetto, slum and negro life, which even at this time was still appalling to me in some of its aspects. It was all so dirty, so poor, so stuffy, so starveling. There were in it all sorts of streets—Jewish, negro, and run-down American, or plain slum, the first crowded with long-bearded Jews and their fat wives, so greasy, smelly and generally offensive that they sickened me: rag-pickers, chicken-dealers and feather-sorters all. In their streets the smell of these things, picked or crated chickens, many of them partially decayed, decayed meats and vegetables, half-sorted dirty feathers and rags and I know not what else, was sickening in hot weather. In the negro streets—or rather alleys, for they never seemed to occupy any general thoroughfare—were rows or one-, two-, three-and four-story shacks or barns of frame or brick crowded into back yards and with thousands of blacks of the most shuffling and idle character hanging about. In these hot days of June, July and August they seemed to do little save sit or lie in the shade of buildings in this vicinity and swap yarns or contemplate the world with laughter or in silence. Occasionally there was a fight, a murder or a low love affair among them which justified my time here. In addition, there were those other streets of soggy, decayed Americans—your true slum—filled with as low and cantankerous a population of whites as one would find anywhere, a type of animal dangerous to the police themselves, for they could riot and kill horribly and were sullen at best. Invariably the police traveled here in pairs, and whenever an alarm from some policeman on his beat was turned in from this region a sergeant and all the officers in the station at the time would set forth to the rescue, sometimes as many as eight or ten in a police wagon, with orders, as I myself have heard them given, “to club the —— heads off them” or “break their —— bones, but bring them in here. I’ll fix ’em”; in response to which all the stolid Irish huskies would go forth to battle, returning frequently with a whole vanload of combatants or alleged combatants, all much the worse for the contest.
There was an old fat Irish sergeant of about fifty or fifty-five, James King by name, who used to amuse me greatly. He ruled here like a potentate under the captain, whom I rarely saw. The latter had an office to himself in the front of the station and rarely came out, seeming always to be busy with bigwigs of one type and another. With the sergeant, however, I became great friends. His place was behind the central desk, in the front of which were two light standards and on the surface of which were his blotter and reports of different kinds. Behind the desk was his big tilted swivel chair, with himself in it, stout, perspiring, coatless, vestless, collarless, his round head and fat neck beady with sweat, his fat arms and hands moist and laid heavily over his protuberant stomach. According to him, he had been at this work exactly eight years, and before that he had “beat the sidewalk,” as he said, or traveled a beat.