The young men dressed next morning in almost complete silence. Tom was still sleepy, and seemed much less jovial and attractive than he had been the previous evening; Seth, accustomed to far earlier rising, was acutely awake, but his head ached wearily and there was a dreadful dryness in his mouth and throat. They went through the forms of breakfast in the basement, too, without much conversation. Seth was ashamed of the number of cups of coffee he drank, and carried away only confused recollections of having been introduced to a middle-aged woman in black who sat at the head of the table, and of having perfunctorily answered sundry questions about business in Dearborn County, put by a man who sat next to him.
They were well on their way to the office before Tom’s silent mood wore away.
“You must brace up!” he said. “Don’t let Workman know that we were out together last night. He’s a regular crank about beer—that is, when anybody but himself drinks it. What’s the matter? You look as melancholy as a man going to be hanged.”
“I suppose I’m nervous about the thing. It’s all going to be so new and strange at the start.”
“Oh, that’ll be all right. You’ll get the hang of it fast enough. They are rather decent fellows to work with upstairs, all but Samboye. He’ll try to sit on you from the start, but if you hold your own with him you’ll get along with the rest.”
“Samboye—he’s the editor, isn’t he?”
“Yes. You don’t know any of them, I suppose?”
“Not even by name.”
“Well, after Workman, who’s very rightly named, and who runs the thing, there’s Samboye, who koo-toos to Workman and bullies all the rest. He puts on more airs than a mowing machine agent at a state fair. He makes everybody tired. Next to him comes Tyler—Tony Tyler, you’ll like him—that is, if he takes a fancy to you. He knows about eighteen hundred times as much as Samboye does, only somehow he hasn’t the faculty of putting it on paper. Too much whisky. Then there’s Dent—he’s a Young Man Christian; plays duets on the piano with his sister, you know, and all that sort of thing—but he’s away now on his vacation. And then Billy Murtagh—he’s a rattling good fellow, if you don’t let him borrow money of you. He does part of the telegraph and news. Those are the only fellows upstairs.”
“But where do you come in?”
“Me? Oh, I’m the City Editor. I and my gang are downstairs. I made a strike to have you down with me, and put you on police court, but Workman wouldn’t have it. It’s all poppycock, for they’ve got more men upstairs now than they know what to do with. However, if Workman thinks the people want to read editorials on the condition of Macedonia more than they do local news, he can go ahead. It’s none of my funeral.”
“Do you know what special work I am to do?”
“From all I hear, it would be easier to tell what you’re not to do. Everyone of them has got a scheme for unloading something on you. First you’re to do a lot of Dent’s work, like the proofs and Agricultural and Religious; then Murtagh wants to put State News on you, and Tyler tells me you’ve got to do the weekly as soon as you get your hand in, and Art, Music and the Drama is a thing that must go up stairs, now that the baseball season has begun, for I can’t attend to it. But if they play it too low down on you, just you make a stout kick to Workman about it.”
While Seth pondered this outlook and advice, they reached the Chronicle office, and presently, by a succession of dark and devious stair-ways, he found himself in an ancient cockloft, curiously cut up by low partitions into compartments like horse-stalls, each with a window at the end, and was introduced as “the new man” to Mr. Anthony Tyler, otherwise Tony.
This gentleman bore no outward signs of the excess of spirituous liquor to which Tom had alluded, and was very cordial and pleasant. He was extremely dark in hair, beard and eyes, seemed to be not more than thirty, and sat at a table piled high with books, clippings and the like, and surrounded by great heaps of papers. Tom glanced over two or three of these latter, and then went off humming a tune lightly and calling out to Seth in imitation of a popular air, as he rattled down stairs “I’ll meet you when the form goes down.”
Among other polite questions Tyler asked Seth where he was stopping.
“Nowhere permanently. I must find some place. I stopped last night with Mr. Votts.”
“With whom?”
“With Mr. Votts, the gentleman who just left us.”
“Oh, you mean Tom Watts. You’ve got his name wrong.”
“Come to think of it, it was a German who called him that last evening, and I was misled by his pronunciation.”
Mr. Tyler’s face grew more serious.
“You are a stranger here. Let me give you some advice. Don’t cultivate Mr. Watts’ German friends. He’s not a bad chap of his sort, but he drinks altogether too much beer. Who drinks beer, thinks beer, as Johnson says. Perhaps I can be of use to you in the matter of a boarding house. Oh, here’s Mur-tagh,” he continued introducing Seth to another tall, slender young man who had come up the stairs with an arm-full of papers; “he will take you now, and give you an idea of your work.” Whereupon Mr. Tyler turned again to his papers and shears, and Seth followed the new comer to the farthest stall in the row, which was henceforth to be his own.
There came a brief quarter of an hour in the afternoon when what seemed to the novice a state of the wildest excitement reigned in the editorial room. An inky boy in a huge leather apron dashed from stall to stall shouting an interrogative “Thirty for you?” His master and patron, the foreman, also aproned from chin to knees, with shirt-sleeves rolled to the biceps, followed with the same mysterious question, put in an injured and indignant tone. A loud, sharp discussion between this magnate and Tyler, profanely dictatorial on the one side, profanely satirical on the other, rose suddenly and filled the room with its clamor. An elderly man, bald as a billiard ball, and dressed like a clergyman, came bounding up the stairs, pulling out his watch as he advanced, and demanding fiercely the reason for this delay. There was an outburst of explanation, in which four or five voices joined, mingling personal abuse freely with their analysis of the situation. Tom Watts leaped up the stairs four steps at a time and hurled himself into the controversy. Seth could distinguish in this babel of exclamations such phrases as—
“You better get some india-rubber chases!”
“If that fire’s cut down, you might as well not go to press at all!”
“If somebody would get down here in the morning, we could get our matter up in time.”
“I’m sick and tired of getting out telegraph for these chuckle-headed printers to throw on the floor!” “That Mayhew matter’s been standing on the galleys so long already that it’s got grey-headed!”
“By the Lord Harry, I’ll make a rule that the next time we miss the Wyoming mail it shall be taken out of your wages!”
Here the inky boy galloped through to Seth with a proof-sheet, shouting, “You’ve got a minute and a half to read this in!” The bald, elderly gentleman, who seemed to be Mr. Workman, came and stood over Seth, watch in hand, scowling impatiently. Under this embarrassment the wet letters danced before his eyes, and he could find no errors, though it turned out later that he had passed “elephant” for “elopement” and ruined Watts’ chief sensation. A few minutes later, the clang of the presses in the basement shook the old building, and the inky boy bustled through the room again, pitching a paper into each of the stalls. There was a moment of silence, broken only by the soft rustling of the damp sheets. Then simultaneously from the several tables rose a chorus of violent objurgation.
Seth heard the voice which he had learned was Samboye’s roar out, “What dash-dashed idiot has made me say ‘our martyr President Abraham Sinclair? ’ Stop the press!” There were other voices: “Here’s two lines of markets upside down!” “Oh, I say, this is too bad. Moyen age is ‘mayonaise ’ in my Shylock notice, and it’s Mrs. McCullough instead of Mr. ————.”
“I’m dashed if the paper looks as if it had been read at all. We can’t have such proof-reading as this!”
While these comments were still proceeding the noise of the press suddenly ceased. The silence was terrible to Seth’s guilty consciousness, for he had heard enough to know that it was his fault. Mr. Workman entered the room again, and again Sam-boye’s deep voice was heard, repeating the awful Sinclair-Lincoln error. Seth had looked at his fresh copy of the Chronicle, with some vague hope that the Editor was mistaken, but alas! it was too true. Mr. Workman came over to his stall; he had put his watch back in his pocket, but his countenance was stern and unbending.
“You are Mr. Fairchild, I presume,” he said.
Seth rose to his feet, blushing, and murmured, “Yes,............