Another time it was the residence of the Catholic archbishop of St. Louis, a very old but shrewd man whom, so it was rumored in newspaper circles, the local priests were plotting to make appear infirm and weakminded in order that a favorite of theirs might be made coadjutor. I was sent to inquire about his health, to see him if possible. At the door I was met by a sleek dark priest who inquired what I wished, whereupon he assured me that the archbishop was too feeble to be seen.
“That is exactly why I am here,” I insisted. “The Globe wishes to inform the public of his exact condition. There seems to be a belief on the part of some that he is not as ill as is given out.”
“What! You accuse us of concealing something in connection with the archbishop! This is outrageous!” and he firmly shut me out.
It seemed to me that the straightforward thing would have been to let me meet the archbishop. He was a public official, the state of whose health was of interest to thousands. But no; official control regulated that. Shortly afterward he was declared too feeble to perform his duties and a coadjutor was appointed.
Again I was sent to a fashionable west end hotel to interview a visiting governor who was attending a reception of some kind and who, as we understood, was leaving the next day.
“My dear young fellow,” said a functionary connected with the entertainment committee, “you cannot do anything of the sort. This is no time to be coming around for anything of this kind.”
“But he is leaving tomorrow....”
“I cannot help that. You cannot see him now.”
“How about taking him my card and asking him about tomorrow?”
“No, no, no! I cannot do anything of the sort. You cannot see him,” and once again I was shunted briskly forth.
I recall being sent one evening to attend a great public ball of some kind—The Veiled Prophets—which was held in the general selling-room of the stock exchange at Third and Walnut, and which followed as a rule some huge autumnal parade. The city editor sent me for a general view or introduction or pen picture to be used as a lead to the full story, which was to be done by others piecemeal. For this occasion I was ordered to hire a dress-suit (the first I had ever worn), which cost the paper three dollars. I remember being greatly disturbed by my appearance once I got in it and feeling very queer and conspicuous. I was greatly troubled as to what sort of impression my garb would make on the various members of the staff. As to the latter I was not long in doubt.
“Say, look at our friend in the claw-hammer, will you?” this from Hazard. “He looks like a real society man to me!”
“Usher, you mean,” called Bellairs. “Who is he? I don’t seem to remember him.”
“Those pants come darned near being a fit, don’t they?” this from some one who had laid hold of the side lines of the trousers.
I could not make up my mind whether I wanted to fight or laugh or whether I was startlingly handsome or a howling freak.
But the thing that weighed on me most was the luxury, tawdry enough perhaps to those intimately connected with it, which this ball presented, contrasted with my own ignoble state. After spending three hours there bustling about examining flowers, decorations, getting names, details of costumes, and drinking various drinks with officiating floormasters whose sole duty appeared to be to look after the press and see that they got all details straight, I returned to the office and began to pour forth a glowing account of how beautiful it all was, how gorgeous, how perfect the women, how marvelous their costumes, how gracious and graceful the men, how oriental or occidental or Arabic, I forget which, were the decorations, outdoing the Arabian Nights or the fabled splendors of the Caliphate. Who does not recognize this indiscriminate newspaper tosh, poured forth from one end of America to another for everything from a farmers’ reunion or an I. O. O. F. Ladies’ Day to an Astor or a Vanderbilt wedding?
As I was writing, my head whirring with the imaginary and impossible splendors of the occasion, I was informed by my city editor that when I was done I should go to a number in South St. Louis where only an hour before a triple or quadruple murder had been committed. I was to go out on a street-car and if I could not get back in time by street-car I was to get a carriage and drive back at breakneck speed in order to get the story into the last edition. The great fear was that the rival paper, the Republic, would get it or might already have it and we would not. And so, my head full of pearls, diamonds, silks, satins, laces, a world of flowers and lights, I was now hustled out along the dark, shabby, lonely streets of South St. Louis to the humblest of cottages, in the humblest of streets where, among unpainted shacks with lean-tos at the back for kitchens, was one which contained this story.
An Irish policeman, silent and indifferent, was already at the small dark gate in the dark and silent street, guarding it against intruders; another was inside the door, which stood partially open, and beyond in the roadway in the darkness, their faces all but indistinguishable, a few horrified people. A word of explanation and I was admitted. A faint glow from a small smoky glass lamp illuminated the front room darkly. It turned out that a very honest, simple, religious and good-natured Irish-American of about fifty, who had been working by the day in this neighborhood, had recently been taken ill with brain fever and had on this night arisen from his feverish sickbed, seized a flatiron, crept into the front room where his wife and two little children slept and brained all three. He had then returned to the rear room, where a grown daughter slept on a couch beside him, and had first felled her with the iron and then cut her throat with a butcher knife. Murderous as the deed seemed, and apparently premeditated, it was the result of fever. The policeman at the gate informed me that the father had already been taken to the Four Courts and that a hospital ambulance was due any moment.
“But he’s out av his mind,” he insisted blandly. “He’s crazy, sure, or sick av the fever. No man in his right sinses would do that. I tried to taalk to him but he couldn’t say naathin’, just mumble like.”
After my grand ball this wretched front room presented a sad and ghastly contrast. The house and furniture were very poor, the dead wife and children homely and seemingly work-worn. I noticed the dim, smoky flame cast by the lamp, the cheap bed awry and stained red, the mother and two children lying in limp and painful disorder, the bedding dragged half off. It was evident that a struggle had taken place, for a chair and table were upset, the ironing-board thrown down, a bureau and the bed pushed sidewise.
Shocked beyond measure, yet with an eye to color and to the zest of the public for picturesque details, I examined the three rooms with care, the officer in the house following me. Together we looked at the utensils in the kitchen, what was in the cupboard to eat, what in the closet to wear. I made notes of the contents of the rooms, their cheapness, then went to the neighbors on either hand to learn if they had heard anything. Then in a stray owl-car, no carriages being available, I hurried to the Four Courts, several miles cityward, to see the criminal. I found him, old, pale, sick, thin, walking up and down in his small iron cell, plainly out of his mind, a picture of hopeless, unconscious misery. His hands trembled idly about his mouth; his shabby trousers bagged about his shoes; he was unshaven and weak-looking, and all the while he mumbled to himself some unintelligible sounds. I tried to talk with him but could get nothing. He seemed not even to know that I was there, so brain-sick was he. Then I questioned the jail attendants, those dull wiseacres of the law. Had he talked? Did they think he was sane? With the usual acumen and delicacy of this tribe, they were inclined to think he was shamming.
I hurried through dark streets to the office. It was an almost empty reportorial room in which I scribbled my dolorous picture. With the impetuosity of youth and curiosity and sorrow and wonder I told it all, the terror, the pity, the inexplicability. As I wrote, each page was taken up by Hartung, edited and sent up. Then, having done perhaps a column and a half (Bellairs having arrived with various police theories), I was allowed finally to amble out into a dark street and seek my miserable little room with its creaky bed, its dirty coverlets, its ragged carpets and stained walls. Nevertheless, I lay down with a kind of high pride and satisfaction in my story of the murder and my description of the ball, and with my life in consequence! I was not so bad. I was getting along. I must be thought an exceptional man to be picked for two such difficult tasks in the same evening. Life itself was not so bad; it was just higgledy-piggledy, catch-as-catch-can, that was all. If one were clever, like myself, it was all right. Next morning, when I reached the office, McCord and Hazard and some others pronounced my stuff “pretty good,” and I was beside myself with glee. I strolled about as though I owned the earth, pretending simplicity and humility but actually believing that I was the finest ever, that no one could outdo me at this game of reporting.
CHAPTER XXV
Things relatively interesting, contrasts nearly as sharp and as well calculated to cause one to meditate on the wonder, the beauty, the uncertainty, the indifference, the cruelty and the rank favoritism of life, were daily if not hourly put before me. Now it would be some such murder as this or a social scandal of some kind, often of a gross and revolting character, in some ultra-respectable neighborhood, or a suicide of peculiarly sad or grim character. Or, again, it would be a fine piece of chicane, as when a certain “board-and-feed” stable owner of the west end, about to lose his property because of poor business and anxious to save himself by securing the insurance, set fire to the stable and destroyed seventeen healthy horses as well as one stable attendant and “got away with it,” legally anyhow. His plan had probably been to save the horses and the man, but the plan miscarried. I gathered as much from him when I interviewed him. I put some pertinent questions at him but could get no admissions on which to base a charge. He was a shrewd, calculating, commercial type, vigorous and semi-savage. He evaded me blandly and I had to write the fire up as a sad accident, thereby aiding him to get his insurance, the while I was convinced that he was guilty, a hard-hearted scoundrel.
Another thing that I sensed very clearly at this time was the fact that the average newspaper reporter was a far better detective in his way than the legitimate official detective, and not nearly so well paid. The average so-called “headquarters man,” was a loathsome thing, as low in his ideas and methods as the lowest criminal he was set to trap. The criminal was at least shrewd and dynamic enough to plot and execute a crime, whereas the detective had no brains at all, merely a low kind of cunning. Often red-headed, freckled, with big hands and feet, store clothes, squeaky shoes—why does such a picture of the detective come back to me? Pop-eyed, with a ridiculous air of mystery and profundity in matters requiring neither, dirty, offensive, fish-eyed and merciless, the detectives floundered about in different cases without a grain of humor; whereas the average reporter was, by contrast anyhow, intelligent or shrewd, cleanly nearly always, if at times a little slouchy, inclined to drink and sport perhaps but genial, often gentlemanly, a fascinating story-teller, a keen psychologist (nearly always one of the best), frequently well read, humorous, sympathetic, amusing or gloomy as the case might be, but generally to be relied upon in such emergencies for truly skillful work. Naturally there was some enmity between the two, a contempt on the part of the newspaper man for the detective, a fear and dislike and secret opposition on the part of the detective. The reporter would go forth on a mystifying case and as a rule, given time enough, would solve it, whereas the police detectives would be tramping about often trailing the reporters, reading the newspapers to discover what had been discovered, and then, when the work had been done and the true clew furnished, would step forward at the grand moment to do the arresting and get their pictures and names in the papers. The detectives were constantly playing into the hands of the police reporters in unimportant matters during periods between great cases, doing them little favors, helping them in small cases, in order that when a big case came along they might have favors done unto them. The most important of all these favors, of course, was that of seeing that their names were mentioned in the papers as being engaged in solving a mystery or having done thus and so, when in all likelihood some newspaper man had done it.
Sometimes the tip as to where the criminal was likely to be found would be furnished by the papers and later credited to the police. Sometimes the newspaper men would lash the police, sometimes flatter them, but always they were seeking to make the police aid them to get various necessary things done, and not always succeeding. Sometimes the police were hand-in-glove with certain crooks or evil-doers, and you could all but prove it, but until you did so, and sometimes afterward, they were stubborn and would defy you and the papers. But not for long. They loved publicity too much; offer them sufficient publicity, and they would act. It was nearly always my experience that the newspapers, which meant the reporters of course plus an efficient city editor and possibly a managing editor, would be the first to worm out the psychology of any given case and then point an almost unerring finger at the criminal; then the police or detectives would come in and do the arresting and get the credit.
Another thing that impressed me greatly at this time was the kaleidoscopic character of newspaper work, which, in its personal significance to me, cannot be too much emphasized. As I have said, one day it would be a crime of a lurid or sensational character that would arrest and compel me to think, and the same day, within the hour perhaps, it would be a lecturer or religionist with some finespun theory of life, some theosophist like Annie Besant, who in passing through St. Louis on a lecture tour would be at one of the best hotels, usually the Southern, talking transmigration and Nirvana. Again, it would be some mountebank or quack of a low order—a spiritualist, let us say, of the Eva Fay stripe, or a mindreader like Bishop, or a third-rate religionist like the Reverend Sam Jones, who was then in his heyday preaching unadulterated hell, or the arrival of a prize-fighter-actor like John L. Sullivan, then only recently defeated by Corbett, or a novelist of the quack order, such as Hall Caine.
And there were distinguished individuals, including such excellent lecturers as Henry Watterson and Henry M. Stanley, or a musician like Paderewski, or a scientist of the standing of Nikola Tesla. I was sent to interview my share of these, to get their views on something—anything or nothing really, for my city editor, Mr. Mitchell, seemed at times a little cloudy as to their significance, and certainly I had no clear insight into What most of them stood for. I wondered, guessed, made vague stabs at what I thought they represented, and in the main took them seriously enough. My favorite question was What did they think of life, its meaning, since this was uppermost in my mind at the time, and I think I asked it of every one of them, from John L. Sullivan to Annie Besant. And what a jangle of doctrines! What a noble burst of ideas! Annie Besant, in a room at the Southern delicately scented with flowers, arrayed in a cool silken gray dress, informed me that the age was material, that wealth and show were an illusion based on nothing at all (I wrote that down without understanding what she meant), that the Hindu Swamis had long since solved all this seeming mystery of living, Madame Blavatsky being the most recent and the greatest apostle of wisdom in this matter, and that the great thing to do in this world or the next was to improve oneself spiritually and so eventually attain to Nirvana, nothingness—a word I had to look up afterward. (When I told Dick Wood about her he seemed greatly impressed and said: “Oh, there’s more to that stuff than you think, Dreiser. You’re just not up on all that yet. These mystics see more than we think they do,” and he looked very wise.)
