GROWING familiarity with his work did not restore to Seth the lofty conceptions of journalism’s duties and delights which he had nourished on the hill-side farm, and which had been so ingloriously dimmed and defaced by his first day’s experience.
The tasks set before him, to which he gradually became accustomed, seemed almost as unintellectual and mechanical as the ploughing and planting he had forsaken. The rule of condensation, compression, continually dinned into his ears by his mentors, robbed his labors of all possible charm. To “boil down” columns of narrative into a few lines of bald, cold statement; to chronicle day after day in the curtest form, fires, failures, crimes, disasters, deaths, in a wearying chain of uninteresting news notes; to throw remorselessly into the journalistic crucible all the work of imagination, of genius, of deep fine thought which came into his hands, together with the wordy dross spun out by the swarm of superficial scribblers, and extract from good and bad alike only the meaningless, miserable fact—this was a task against which, in the first weeks of experience, his whole soul revolted.
By the time he had become reconciled to it, and had mastered its tricks, his dream of journalism as the most exalted of all departments of activity seemed to him like some far-away fantasy of childhood.
He not only had failed to draw inspiration from his work; it was already ceasing to interest him. Under pleasanter conditions, he felt that he would have at least liked the proof-reading portion of the daily routine; but the printers were so truculent and hostile, and seemed so pre-determined to treat him as their natural enemy, that this was irksome, too. There was no relief to the distasteful monotony in other branches of his work. Even the agricultural column, which he had promised himself to so vastly improve, yielded no satisfaction. The floating, valueless stuff from which his predecessors had selected their store came so easily and naturally to the scissors that after a week or two he abandoned the idea of preparing original matter: it saved time and labor, and nobody seemed to know the difference. These words, in fact, came to describe his mental attitude toward all his work. He had no pride in it. If he escaped curses for badly-read proofs, and criticism for missing obvious matters of news, it was enough.
Seth did not arrive at this condition of mind without much inner protest, or without sundry efforts to break through the crust of perfunctory drudgery which was encasing him. At the start he bestowed considerable thought and work upon an effort to brighten and improve, by careful re-working of materials, one of the departments entrusted to him, and, just when he expected praise, Tyler told him to stop it. Then he tried to make his religious column a feature by discarding most of the ancient matter which revolved so drolly in the Obago Evening Mercury, and picking out eloquent bits from the sermons of great contemporary preachers; but this elicited denominational protest from certain pious subscribers, and Mr. Workman commanded a return to the old rut.
But the cruel humiliation came when Seth took to Mr. Samboye an editorial paragraph he had written with great care. It was a political paragraph, and Seth felt confident that it was exactly in the Chronicle’s line, and good writing as well. The Editor took it, after regarding the young writer with a stony, half-surprised stare, and read it over slowly. He delivered judgment upon it, in his habitual pomposity of phrases: “This is markedly comprehensive in scope and clarified in expression, Mr. Fairchild.” Then, as Seth’s heart was warming with a sense of commendation and success, the Editor calmly tore the manuscript in strips, dropped them in his waste-basket, and turned reflectively to his newspaper.
Seth’s breath nearly left him: “Then you can’t use it;” he faltered. “I thought it might do for an editorial paragraph.”
There was the faintest suggestion of a patronising smile on Mr. Samboye’s broad, ruddy face.
“Oh, I am reminded, Mr. Fairchild,” he answered, with bland irrelevance; “pray do not allow Porte to pass again with a small p, as you did yesterday in the proof of my Turkish article. It should be capitalized invariably.”
The beginner went back to his stall both humiliated and angry. The cool insolence with which he had been reminded that he was a proof-reader, and warned away from thoughts of the editorial page, enraged and depressed him. He passed a bitter hour at his table, looking savagely through the window at the automatic motions of the printer directly opposite, but thinking evil thoughts of Samboye, and cursing the fate which had led him into newspaper work. So uncomfortable did he make himself by these reflections that it required a real effort to throw off their effects when Watts came upstairs, and the two left the office for the day. It was impossible not to relate his grievance.
Tom did not see its tragic side, and refused utterly to concede that Seth ought to be cast down by it.
“That’s only Samboye’s way,” he said, lightly. “He won’t let any of the fellows get on to the page, simply because he’s afraid they’ll outwrite him. He’d rather do it all himself—and he does grind out an immense load of stuff—than encourage any rivals. Besides, he never loses a chance to snub youngsters. Don’t let it worry you for a minute. If he sees that it does, he’ll only pile it on the thicker. In this business you’ve got to have a hide on you like the behemoth of Holy Writ, or you’ll keep raw all the while.”
Seth found some consolation in this view, and more still in Tom’s cheery tone. The two young men spent the evening together—at Bismarck’s.
This came gradually but naturally to be Seth’s habitual evening resort. It represented to him, indeed, all that was friendly and inviting in Tecumseh society. He was able to recall dimly some of the notions of coming social distinction he indulged in the farm days—dreams of a handsome young editor who was in great request in the most refined and luxurious home circles, who said the most charming things to beautiful young ladies at parties and balls, who wavered in his mind between wedding his employer’s daughter and taking a share in the paper, or choosing some lowlier but more intellectual maid to wife, and leading with her a halcyon and exaltedly literary career in a cottage—but they were as unreal, as indistinct now as the dreams of night before last. All the social bars seemed drawn against him as a matter of course.
This did not impress him as a hardship, because he was only vaguely conscious of it, at first, and then grew into the habit of regarding it as a thing to be grateful for. Tom Watts pointed out to him frequently the advantage of being a Bohemian, of being free from all the fearsome, undefined routine and responsibility of making calls, of dressing up in the evening, and of dangling supine attendance upon girls and their mammas. This “social racket,” the city editor said, might please some people; Dent, for instance, seemed to like it. But for his part it seemed quite the weakest thing a young man could go in for—entirely incompatible with the robust and masculine character demanded in a successful journalist.
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