I wanted to stay longer and talk to him, but I had to hurry on this my first assignment in New York. “Is this your desk?” I asked.
“No; they haven’t deigned to give me one yet,” and he chuckled again. “But I suppose I will get one eventually—if they don’t throw me out.”
“I hope I’ll see you when I get back.”
“Oh, I’ll be around here, if I’m not out in the snow. It’s tough, isn’t it?” and he turned to his work again. I bustled out through that same anteroom where I had been restrained, and observed to my pestiferous opponents: “Now just take notice, Eddie. I belong here, see? I work here. And I’ll be back in a little while.”
“Oh, dat’s all right,” he replied with a grin. “We gotta do dat. We gotta keep mosta dese hams outa here, dough. Dat’s de orders we got.”
“Hams?” I thought. “They let these little snips speak of strangers as hams! That’s New York for you!”
I made the short dreary commuters’ trip to Elizabeth. When I found my graveyard and the caretaker thereof, he said there was no truth in the story. No man by the name of the dead man mentioned had ever been buried there. No noises or appearances of any kind had been recorded. “They’re always publishing things like that about New Jersey,” he said. “I wish they’d quit it. Some newspaper fellow just wanted to earn a little money, that’s all.”
I tramped back, caught a train and reached the office at eight. Already most of the assignments had been given out. The office was comparatively empty. The city editor had gone to dinner. At a desk along a wall was a long, lean, dyspeptic-looking man, his eyes shaded by a green shield, whom I took to be the night editor, so large was the pile of “copy” beside him, but when I ventured to approach him he merely glared sourly. “The city desk’s not closed yet,” he growled. “Wait’ll they come back.”
I retired, rebuffed again.
Presently one of the assistants reappeared and I reported to him. “Nothing to it, eh?” he observed. “But there ought to be some kind of a josh to it.” I did not get him. He told me to wait around, and I sought out an empty desk and sat down. The thing that was interesting me was how much I should be paid per week. In the meanwhile I contented myself with counting the desks and wondering about the men who occupied them, who they were, and what they were doing. To my right, against the north wall, were two roll-top desks, at one of which was seated a dapper actor-like man writing and posting. He was arrayed in a close-fitting gray suit, with a bright vest and an exceedingly high collar. Because of some theatrical programs which I saw him examining, I concluded that he must be connected with the dramatic department, probably the dramatic critic. I was interested and a little envious. The dramatic department of a great daily in New York seemed a wonderful thing to me.
After a time also there entered another man who opened the desk next the dramatic critic. He was medium tall and stocky, with a mass of loose wavy hair hanging impressively over his collar, not unlike the advance agent of a cure-all or a quack Messiah. His body was encased in a huge cape-coat which reached to his knees after the best manner of a tragedian. He wore a large, soft-brimmed felt, which he now doffed rather grandiosely, and stood a big cane in the corner. He had, the look and attitude of a famous musician, the stage-type, and evidently took himself very seriously. I put him down as the musical critic at least, some great authority of whom I should hear later.
Time went by, and I waited. Through the windows from where I was sitting I could see the tops of one or two buildings, one holding a clock-face lighted with a green light. Being weary of sitting, I ventured to leave my seat and look out to the south. Then for the first time I saw that great night panorama of the East River and the bay with its ships and docks, and the dark mass of buildings in between, many of them still lighted. It was a great scene, and a sense of awe came over me. New York was so vast, so varied, so rich, so hard. How was one to make one’s way here? I had so little to offer, merely a gift of scribbling; and money, as I could see, was not to be made in that way.
The city editor returned and told me to attend a meeting of some committee which looked to the better lighting and cleaning of a certain district. It was all but too late, as I knew, and if reported would be given no more than an inch of space. I took it rather dejectedly. Then fell the worst blow of all. “Wait a minute,” he said, as I moved to depart. “I wanted to tell you. I can’t make you a reporter yet—there is no vacancy on our regular staff. But I’ll put you on space, and you can charge up whatever you get in at seven-and-a-half a column. We allow fifty cents an hour for time. Show up tomorrow at eleven, and I’ll see if anything turns up.”
My heart sank to my shoes. No reportorial staff with which I had ever been connected had been paid by space. I went to the meeting and found that it was of no importance, and made but one inch, as I discovered next morning by a careful examination of the paper. And a column of the paper measured exactly twenty-one inches! So my efforts this day, allowing for time charged for my first trip, had resulted in a total of one dollar and eighty-six cents, or a little less than street-sweepers and snow-shovelers were receiving.
But this was not all. Returning about eleven with this item, I ventured to say to the night editor now in charge: “When does a man leave here?”
“You’re a new space man, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You have the late watch tonight.”
“And how late is that?”
“Until after the first edition is on the press,” he growled.
Not knowing when that was I still did not venture to question him but returned to another reporter working near at hand, who told me I should have to stay until three. At that time my green-shaded mentor called, “You might as well go now,” and I made my way to the Sixth Avenue L and so home, having been here since one o’clock of the preceding day. The cheerful face of my sister sleepily admitting me was quite the best thing that this brisk day in the great city had provided.
CHAPTER LXXIII
The next morning, coming down at eleven I encountered my friend of the day before, whom I found looking through the paper and checking up such results as he had been able to achieve. “Tst! Tst!” he clicked to himself as he went over the pages, looking high and low for a minute squib which he had managed to get in. Looking around and seeing me near at hand, he said: “Positively, this is the worst paper in New York. I’ve always heard it was, and now I know it. This damned crowd plays favorites. They have an inside ring, a few pets, who get all the cream, and fellows like you and me get the short ends. Take me yesterday: I was sent out on four lousy little stories, and not one amounted to anything. I tramped and rode all over town in the snow, listened to a lot of fools spout, and this morning I have just three little items. Look at that—and that—and that!” and he pointed to checkmarks on different pages. They made a total of, say, seven or eight inches, the equivalent in cash of less than three dollars. “And I’m supposed to live on that,” he went on, “and I have a boy and a girl in school! How do they figure that a man is to get along?”
I had no consolation to offer him. After a time he resumed: “What they do is to get strangers like us, or any of these down-and-out newspaper men always walking up and down Park Row looking for a job, and get us to work on space because it sounds bigger to a greenhorn. Sure they have space-men here who amount to something, fellows who get big money, but they’re not like us. They make as much as seventy-five and a hundred dollars a week. But they’re rewrite men, old reporters who have too big a pull and who are too sure of themselves to stand for the low salaries they pay here. But they’re at the top. We little fellows are told that stuff about space, but all we get is leg-work. If you or I should get hold of a good story don’t you ever think they’d let us write it. I know that much. They’d take it away and give it to one of these rewrite fellows. There’s one now,” and he pointed to a large comfortable man in a light brown overcoat and brown hat who was but now ambling in. “He rewrote one of my stories just the other day. If they wanted you for regular work they’d make you take a regular salary for fear you’d get too much of space. They just keep us little fellows as extras to follow up such things as they wouldn’t waste a good man on. And they’re always firing a crowd of men every three or four months to keep up the zip of the staff, to keep ’em worried and working hard. I hate the damned business. I told myself in Pittsburgh that I never would get back in it again, but here I am!”
This revelation made me a little sick. So this was my grand job! A long period of drudgery for little or nothing, my hard-earned money exhausted—and then what?
“Just now,” he went on, “there’s nothing doing around the town or I wouldn’t be here. I’m only staying on until I can get something better. It’s a dog’s life. There’s nothing in it. I worked here all last week, and what do you think I made? Twelve dollars and seventy-five cents for the whole week, time included. Twelve dollars and seventy-five cents! It’s an outrage!”
I agreed with him. “What is this time they allow?” I asked. “How do they figure—expenses and all?”
“Sure, they allow expenses, and I’m going to figure mine more liberally from now on. It’s a little bonus they allow you for the time you work, but you don’t get anything anyhow. I’ll double any railroad fare I pay. If they don’t like it they can get somebody else. But they won’t let you do too much of it, and if you can’t make a little salary on small stuff they won’t keep you even then.” He grinned. “Anything big goes to the boys on a salary, and if it’s real big the space-men, who are on salary and space also, get the cream. I went out on a story the other afternoon and tramped around in the rain and got all the facts, and just as I was going to sit down and write it—well, I hadn’t really got started—one of the managing editors—there are about twenty around here—came up and took it away from me and gave it to somebody else to write. All I got was ‘time.’ Gee, I was sore! But I don’t care,” he added with a chuckle. “I’ll be getting out of here one of these days.”
Being handed this dose of inspiring information, I was in no mood for what followed; although I decided that this series of ills that were now befalling him was due to the fact that he was older than myself and maybe not very efficient, whereas in my case, being young, efficient, etc., etc—the usual mental bonus youth hands itself—I should do better. But when it came to my assignments this day and the next and the next, and in addition I was “handed” the late watch, my cock sureness began to evaporate. Each day I was given unimportant rumors or verification tales, which came to nothing. So keen was the competition between the papers, especially between the World and the Sun, or the World and the Herald, that almost everything suggested by one was looked into and criticized by the others. The items assigned to me this second day were: to visit the city morgue and there look up the body of a young and beautiful girl who was supposed to have drowned herself or been drowned and see if this was true, as another paper had said (and of course she was not beautiful at all); to visit a certain hotel to find out what I could about a hotel beat who had been arrested (this item, although written, was never used); to visit a Unitarian conference called to debate some supposed changes in faith or method of church development, the date for which however had been changed without notice to the papers, for which I was allowed time and carfare. My time, setting aside the long and wearisome hours in which I sat in the office awaiting my turn for an assignment, netted me the handsome sum of two dollars and fifty cents. And all the time in this very paper, I could read the noblest and most elevating discourses about duty, character, the need of a higher sense of citizenship, and what not. I used to frown at the shabby pecksniffery of it, the cheap buncombe that would allow a great publisher to bleed and drive his employees at one end of his house and deliver exordiums as to virtue, duty, industry, thrift, honesty at the other.
However, despite these little setbacks and insights, I was not to be discouraged. The fact that I had succeeded elsewhere made me feel that somehow I should succeed here. Nevertheless, in spite of this sense of efficiency, I was strangely overawed and made more than ordinarily incompetent by the hugeness and force and heartlessness of the great city, its startling contrasts of wealth and poverty, the air of ruthlessness and indifference and disillusion that everywhere prevailed. Only recently there had been a disgusting exposure of the putrescence and heartlessness and brutality which underlay the social structure of the city. There had been the Lexow Investigation with its sickening revelations of graft and corruption, and the protection and encouragement of vice and crime in every walk of political and police life. The most horrible types of brothels had been proved to be not only winked at but preyed upon by the police and the politicians by a fixed and graded monthly tax in which the patrolman, the “roundsman,” the captain and the inspector, to say nothing of the district leader, shared. There was undeniable proof that the police and the politicians, even the officials, of the city were closely connected with all sorts of gambling and wire-tapping and bunco-steering, and even the subornation of murder. To the door of every house of prostitution and transient rooming-house the station police captain’s man, the roundsman, came as regularly as the rent or the gas man, and took more away. “Squealers” had been murdered in cold blood for their squealing. A famous chief of police, Byrnes by name, reputed at that time, far and wide, for his supposed skill in unraveling mysteries, being faced by a saturnalia of crime which he could not solve, had finally in self-defense caused to be arrested, tried, convicted and electrocuted, all upon suborned testimony, an old, helpless, half-witted bum known as Old Shakespeare, whose only crime was that he was worthless and defenseless. But the chief had thereby saved his “reputation.” Not far from the region in which my sister lived, although it was respectable enough in its way, tramped countless girls by night and by day looking for men, the great business of New York, and all preyed upon by the police. On several occasions, coming home from work after midnight, I found men lying hatless, coatless, trousers pockets pulled out, possibly their skulls fractured, so inadequate or indifferent or conniving was the so-called police protection.
Nowhere before had I seen such a lavish show of wealth, or, such bitter poverty. In my reporting rounds I soon came upon the East Side; the Bowery, with its endless line of degraded and impossible lodging-houses, a perfect whorl of bums and failures; the Brooklyn waterfront, parts of it terrible in its degradation; and then by way of contrast again the great hotels, the mansions along Fifth Avenue, the smart shops and clubs and churches. When I went into Wall Street, the Tenderloin, the Fifth Avenue district, the East and West sides, I seemed everywhere to sense either a terrifying desire for lust or pleasure or wealth, accompanied by a heartlessness which was freezing to the soul, or a dogged resignation to deprivation and misery. Never had I seen so many down-and-out men—in the parks, along the Bowery and in the lodging-houses which lined that pathetic street. They slept over gratings anywhere from which came a little warm air, or in doorways or cellar-ways. At a half dozen points in different parts of the city I came upon those strange charities which supply a free meal to a man or lodging for the night, providing that he came at a given hour and waited long enough.
