Chapter 9

The assignment that fell to my lot when the book was made out, the first against which my name was written in a New York editor's book, was a lunch of some sort at the Astor House. I have forgotten what was the special occasion. I remember the bearskin hats of the Old Guard in it, but little else. In a kind of haze I beheld half the savory viands of earth spread under the eyes and nostrils of a man who had not tasted food for the third day. I did not ask for any. I had reached that stage of starvation that is like the still centre of a cyclone, when no hunger is left. But it may be that a touch of it all crept into my report; for when the editor had read it, he said briefly:

"You will do. Take that desk, and report at ten every morning, sharp."

That night, when I was dismissed from the office, I went up the Bowery to No. 185, where a Danish family kept a boarding-house up under the roof. I had work and wages now, and could pay. On the stairs I fell in a swoon and lay there till some one stumbled over me in the dark and carried me in. My strength had at last given out.

So began my life as a newspaper man.

WILLIAM H. RIDEING

(1853-____)

REJECTED MANUSCRIPTS

Nowadays, it seems, every one reads, also writes. There are few streets where the callous postman does not occasionally render some doorstep desolate by the delivery of a rejected manuscript. Fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind, and the first steps in the career of a successful man of letters are always interesting. You remember how Franklin slyly dropped his first contribution through the slit in his brother's printing-house door; and how the young Charles Dickens crept softly to the letter-box up a dark court, off a dark alley, near Fleet Street.

In the case of Mr. Rideing, all must admire and be thankful for the indomitable spirit which disappointments were unable to discourage.

From "Many Celebrities and a Few Others," by William H. Rideing. Doubleday, Page & Co., 1913.

I do not know to a certainty just how or when the new ambition found its cranny and sprouted, and I wonder that it did not perish at once, like others of its kind which never blossoming were torn from the bed that nourished them and borne afar like balls of thistledown. How and why it survived the rest, which seemed more feasible, I am not able to answer fully or satisfactorily to myself, and other people have yet to show any curiosity about it.

How at this period I watched for the postman! Envelopes of portentous bulk were put into my hands so often that I became inured to disappointment, unsurprised and unhurt, like a patient father who has more faith in the abilities of his children than the stupid and purblind world which will not employ them.

These rejected essays and tales were my children, and the embarrassing number of them did not curb my philoprogenitiveness.

Dawn broke unheeded and without reproach to the novice as he sat by candle-light at his table giving shape and utterance to dreams which did not foretell penalties, nor allow any intimation to reach him of the disillusionings sure to come, sharp-edged and poignant, with the awakening day. The rocky coast of realities, with its shoals and whirlpools, which encircles the sphere of dreams, is never visible till the sun is high. You are not awake till you strike it.

Up and dressed, careless of breakfast, he hears the postman's knock.

There is Something for the boy, which at a glance instantly dispels the clouds of his drowsiness and makes his heart jump: an envelope not bulky, an envelope whose contents tremble in his hand and grow dim in his eyes, and have to be read and read again before they can be believed. One of his stories has at last found a place and will be printed next month! Life may bestow on us its highest honours, and wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, the guerdon of a glorious lot, but it can never transcend or repeat the thrill and ecstasy of the triumphant apotheosis of such a moment as that.

It was a fairy story, and though nobody could have suspected it, the fairy queen was Miss Goodall, much diminished in stature, of course, with all her indubitable excellencies, her nobility of character, and her beauty of person sublimated to an essence that only a Lilliputian vessel could hold. Her instincts were domestic, and her domain was the hearthstone, and there she and her attendants, miniatures of the charming damsels in Miss McGinty's peachy and strawberry-legged _corps de ballet_, rewarded virtue and trampled meanness under their dainty, twinkling feet. Moreover, the story was to be paid for, a condition of the greater glory, an irrefragable proof of merit. Only as evidence of worth was money thought of, and though much needed, it alone was lightly regarded. The amount turned out to be very small. The editor handed it out of his trousers pocket--not the golden guinea looked for, but a few shillings. He must have detected a little disappointment in the drooping corners of the boy's mouth, for without any remark from him he said--he was a dingy and inscrutable person--"That is all we ever pay--four shillings per _colyume_," pronouncing the second syllable of that word like the second syllable of "volume."

What did the amount matter to the boy? A paper moist and warm from the press was in his hands, and as he walked home through sleet and snow and wind--the weather of the old sea-port was in one of its tantrums--he stopped time and again to look at his name, his very own name, shining there in letters as lustrous as the stars of heaven.

When that little story of mine appeared in all the glory of print, Fame stood at my door, a daughter of the stars in such array that it blinded one to look at her. She has never come near me since, and I have changed my opinion of her: a beguiling minx, with little taste or judgment, and more than her share of feminine lightness and caprice; an unconscionable flirt, that is all she is.

I came to New York, and peeped into the doors of the _Tribune_, the _World_, the _Times_, and the _Sun_ with all the reverence that a Moslem may feel when he beholds Mecca. ...

It was in the August of a bounteous year of fruit. The smell of peaches and grapes piled in barrows and barrels scented the air, as it scents the memory still. The odour of a peach brings back to me all the magic-lantern impressions of a stranger--memories of dazzling, dancing, tropical light, bustle, babble, and gayety; they made me feel that I had never been alive before, and the people of the old seaport, active as I had thought them, became in a bewildered retrospect as slow and quiet as snails. But far sweeter to me than the fragrance of peaches were the humid whiffs I breathed from the noisy press rooms in the Park Row basements, the smell of the printers' ink as it was received by the warm, moist rolls of paper in the whirring, clattering presses. There was history in the making, destiny at her loom. Nothing ever expels it: if once a taste for it is acquired, it ties itself up with ineffaceable memories and longings, and even in retirement and changed scenes restores the eagerness and aspirations of the long-passed hour when it first came over us with a sort of intoxication.

I had no introduction and no experience and was prudent enough to foresee the rebuff that would surely follow a climb up the dusky but alluring editorial stairs and an application for employment in so exalted a profession by a boy of seventeen. I decided that I could use more persuasion and gain a point in hiding my youth, which was a menace to me, by writing letters, and so I plunged through the post on Horace Greeley, on L. J. Jennings, the brilliant, forgotten Englishman who then edited the _Times_, on Mr. Dana, and on the rest. The astonishing thing of that time, as I look back on it, was my invulnerability to disappointments; I expected them and was prepared for them, and when they came they were as spurs and not as arrows nor as any deadly weapon. They hardly caused a sigh except a sigh of relief from the chafing uncertainties of waiting, and instead of depressing they compelled advances in fresh directions which soon became exhilarating, advances upon which one started with stronger determination and fuller, not lessened, confidence. O heart of Youth! How unfluttered thy beat! How invincible thou art in thine own conceit! What gift of heaven or earth can compare with thy supernal faith! "No matter how small the cage the bird will sing if it has a voice."

Had my letters been thrown into the wastepaper basket, after an impatient glance by the recipients, I should not have been surprised or more than a little nettled; but I received answers not encouraging from both Horace Greeley and Mr. Dana.

Mr. Greeley was brief and final, but Mr. Dana, writing in his own hand (how friendly it was of him!), qualified an impulse to encourage with a tag for self-protection. "Your letter does you credit," he wrote. Those five words put me on the threshold of my goal. "Your letter does you credit, and I shall be glad to hear from you again----" A door opened, and a flood of light and warmth from behind it enveloped me as in a gown of eiderdown. "I shall be glad to hear from you again three or four years from now!" The door slammed in my face, the gown slipped off, and left me with a chill. But I did not accuse Mr. Dana of deliberately hurting me or think that he surmised how a polite evasion of that sort may without forethought be more cruel than the coldest and most abrupt negative.

I went farther afield, despatching my letters to Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and Springfield. In Philadelphia there was a little paper called the _Day_, and this is what its editor wrote to me:

"There are several vacancies in the editorial department, but there is one vacancy still worse on the ground floor, and the cashier is its much-harried victim. You might come here, but you would starve to death, and saddle your friends with the expenses of a funeral."

A man with humour enough for that ought to have prospered, and I rejoiced to learn soon afterward that he (I think his name was Cobb) had been saved from his straits by an appointment to the United States Mint!

His jocularity did not shake my faith in the seriousness of journalism. I had not done laughing when I opened another letter written in a fine, crabbed hand like the scratching of a diamond on a window-pane, and as I slowly deciphered its contents I could hardly believe what I read. It was from Samuel Bowles the elder, editor of the Springfield _Republican_, then as now one of the sanest, most respected, and influential papers in the country. He wanted a young man to relieve him of some of his drudgery, and I might come on at once to serve as his private secretary. He did not doubt that I could be useful to him, and he was no less sure that he could be useful to me. Moreover, my idea of salary, he said--it was modest, but forty dollars a month--"just fitted his." He was one of the great men of his time when papers were strong or weak, potent in authority or negligible, in proportion to the personality of the individual controlling them. He himself was the _Republican_, as Mr. Greeley was the _Tribune_, Mr. Bennett the _Herald_, Mr. Dana the _Sun_, Mr. Watterson the _Courier-Journal_, and Mr. Murat Halstead the Cincinnati _Commercial_, though, of course, like them, he tacitly hid himself behind the sacred and inviolable screen of anonymity, and none of them exercised greater power over the affairs of the nation than he, out of the centre, did from that charming New England town to which he invited me. The opportunity was worth a premium, such as is paid by apprentices in England for training in ships and in merchants' and lawyers' offices; the salary seemed like the gratuity of a too liberal and chivalric employer, for no fees could procure from any vocational institution so many advantages as were to be freely had in association with him. He instructed and inspired, and if he perceived ability and readiness in his pupil (this was my experience of him), he was as eager to encourage and improve him as any father could be with a son, looking not for the most he could take out of him in return for pay, but for the most he could put into him for his own benefit.

Journalism to him was not the medium of haste, passion, prejudice, and faction. He fully recognized all its responsibilities, and the need of meeting them and respecting them by other than casual, haphazard, and slipshod methods. He was an economist of words, with an abhorrence of redundance and irrelevance; not only an economist of words, but also an economist of syllables, choosing always the fewer, and losing nothing of force or precision by that choice. He had what was not less than a passion for brevity. "What," he was asked, "makes a journalist?" and he replied: "A nose for news." But with him the news had to be sifted, verified, and reduced to an essence, not inflated, distorted and garnished with all the verbal spoils of the reporter's last scamper through the dictionary.

How sedate and prosperous Springfield looked to me when I arrived there on an early spring day! How clean, orderly, leisurely, and respectable after the untidiness and explosive anarchy of New York! I made for the river, as I always do wherever a river is, and watched it flowing down in the silver-gray light and catching bits of the rain-washed blue sky. The trees had lost the brittleness and sharpness of winter's drawing and their outlines were softening into greenish velvet. In the coverts, arbutus crept out with a hawthorn-like fragrance from patches of lingering snow. The main street leading into the town from the Massasoit House and the station also had an air of repose and dignity as if those who had business in it were not preoccupied by the frenzy for bargains, but had time and the inclination for loitering, politeness, and sociability. That was in 1870, and I fear that Springfield must have lost some of its old-world simplicity and leisureliness since then. I regret that I have never been in it since, though I have passed through it hundreds of times.

The office of the Republican was in keeping with its environment, an edifice of stone or brick not more than three or four stories high, neat, uncrowded, and quiet; very different from the newspaper offices of Park Row, with their hustle, litter, dust, and noise. I met no one on my way upstairs to the editorial rooms, and quaked at the oppressive solemnity and detachment of it. I wondered if people were observing me from the street and thought how much impressed they would be if they divined the importance of the person they were looking at, possibly another Tom Tower. The vanity of youth is in the same measure as its valour; withdraw one, and the other droops.

"Now," said Mr. Bowles sharply, after a brusque greeting, "we'll see what you can do."

I was dubious of him in that first encounter. He was crisp and quick in manner, clear-skinned, very spruce, and clear-eyed; his eyes appraised you in a glance.

"Take that and see how short you can make it."

He handed me a column from one of the "exchanges," as the copies of other papers are called. I spent half an hour at it, striking out repetitions and superfluous adjectives and knitting long sentences into brief ones. Condensation is a fine thing, as Charles Reade once said, and to know how to condense judiciously, to get all the juice, without any of the rind or pulp, is as important to the journalist as a knowledge of anatomy to the figure painter.

I went over it a second time before I handed it back to him as the best I could do. I had plucked the fatted column to a lean quarter of that length, yet I trembled and sweated.

"Bah!" he cried, scoring it with a pencil, which sped as dexterously as a surgeon's knife. "Read it now. Have I omitted anything essential?"

He had not; only the verbiage had gone. All that was worthy of preservation remained in what the printer calls a "stickful." That was my first lesson in journalism.

HELEN ADAMS KELLER

(1880-____)

HOW SHE LEARNED TO SPEAK

When nineteen months old Helen Keller was stricken with an illness which robbed her of both sight and hearing. The infant that is blind and deaf is of course dumb also, for being unable to see or hear the speech of others, the child cannot learn to imitate it.

Despite her enormous handicaps, Miss Keller to-day is a college graduate, a public speaker, and the author of several charming books. It need scarcely be explained that this miracle was not wrought by self-help alone. But if she had not striven with all her might to respond to the efforts of her devoted teacher, Miss Keller would not to-day be mistress of the unusual talent for literary expression which makes her contributions sure of a welcome in the columns of the leading magazines.

From "The Story of My Life," by Helen Keller. Published by Doubleday, Page & Co.

The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me. I am filled with wonder when I consider the immeasurable contrast between the two lives which it connects. It was the third of March; 1887, three months before I was seven years old.

On the afternoon of that eventful day I stood on the porch, dumb, expectant. I guessed vaguely from my mother's signs and from the hurrying to and fro in the house that something unusual was about to happen, so I went to the door and waited on the steps. The afternoon sun penetrated the mass of honeysuckle that covered the porch, and fell on my upturned face. My fingers lingered almost unconsciously on the familiar leaves and blossoms which had just come forth to greet the sweet southern spring. I did not know what the future held of marvel or surprise for me. Anger and bitterness had preyed upon me continually for weeks, and a deep languor had succeeded this passionate struggle.

Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding-line, and had no way of knowing how near the harbour was. "Light! give me light!" was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.

I felt approaching footsteps. I stretched out my hand as I supposed to my mother. Some one took it, and I was caught up and held close in the arms of her who had come to reveal all things to me, and, more than all things else, to love me.

The morning after my teacher came she led me into her room and gave me a doll. The little blind children at the Perkins Institution had sent it and Laura Bridgman had dressed it; but I did not know this until afterward. When I had played with it a little while, Miss Sullivan slowly spelled into my hand the word "d-o-l-l." I was at once interested in this finger play and tried to imitate it. When I finally succeeded in making the letters correctly I was flushed with childish pleasure and pride. Running downstairs to my mother I held up my hand and made the letters for doll. I did not know that I was spelling a word or even that words existed; I was simply making my fingers go in monkey-like imitation. In the days that followed I learned to spell in this uncomprehending way a great many words, among them _pin_, _hat_, _cup_, and a few verbs like _sit_, _stand_, and _walk_. But my teacher had been with me several weeks before I understood that everything has a name.

One day, while I was playing with my new doll, Miss Sullivan put my big rag doll into my lap also, spelled "d-o-l-l" and tried to make me understand that "d-o-l-l" applied to both. Earlier in the day we had had a tussle over the words "m-u-g" and "w-a-t-e-r." Miss Sullivan had tried to impress it upon me that "m-u-g" is mug and that "w-a-t-e-r" is _water_, but I persisted in confounding the two. In despair she had dropped the subject for the time, only to renew it at the first opportunity. I became impatient at her repeated attempts and, seizing the new doll, I dashed it upon the floor. I was keenly delighted when I felt the fragments of the broken doll at my feet. Neither sorrow nor regret followed my passionate outburst. I had not loved the doll. In the still, dark world in which I lived there was no strong sentiment or tenderness. I felt my teacher sweep the fragments to one side of the hearth, and I had a sense of satisfaction that the cause of my discomfort was removed. She brought me my hat, and I knew I was going out into the warm sunshine. This thought, if a wordless sensation may be called a thought, made me hop and skip with pleasure.

We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Some one was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten--a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.

I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. I felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow.

I learned a great many new words that day. I do not remember what they all were; but I do know that _mother_, _father_, _sister_, _teacher_ were among them--words that were to make the world blossom for me, "like Aaron's rod, with flowers." It would have been difficult to find a happier child than I was as I lay in my crib at the close of that eventful day and lived over the joys it had brought me, and for the first time longed for a new day to come.

I had now the key to all language, and I was eager to learn to use it. Children who hear acquire language without any particular effort; the words that fall from others' lips they catch on the wing, as it were, delightedly, while the little deaf child must trap them by a slow and often painful process. But whatever the process, the result is wonderful. Gradually from naming an object we advance step by step until we have traversed the vast distance between our first stammered syllable and the sweep of thought in a line of Shakespeare.

At first, when my teacher told me about a new thing I asked very few questions. My ideas were vague, and my vocabulary was inadequate; but as my knowledge of things grew, and I learned more and more words, my field of inquiry broadened, and I would return again and again to the same subject, eager for further information. Sometimes a new word revived an image that some earlier experience had engraved on my brain.