CHAPTER VIII

It made me happy to know that whether or not I was taken on I had at least achieved one friend at court. Maxwell advised me to stick.

“You’ll get on,” he said a day or two later. “I believe you’ve got the stuff in you. Maybe I can help you. You’ll probably be like every other damned newspaper man once you get a start: an ingrate; but I’ll help you just the same. Hang around. That convention will begin in three or four weeks now. I’ll speak a good word for you, unless you tie up with some other paper before then.”

And to my astonishment really, he was as good as his word. He must have spoken to the city editor soon after this, for the latter asked me what I had been doing and told me to hang around in case something should turn up.

But before a newspaper story appeared for me to do a new situation arose which tied me up closer with this prospect than I had hoped for. The lone editorial writer previously mentioned, a friend and intimate of the city editor, had just completed a small work of fiction which he and the city editor in combination had had privately printed, and which they were very eager to sell. It was, as I recall it, very badly done, an immature imitation of Tom Sawyer without any real charm or human interest. The author himself, Mr. Gissel, was a picayune yellow-haired person. He spent all his working hours, as I came to know, writing those biased, envenomed and bedeviling editorials which are required by purely partisan journals. I gathered as much from conversations that were openly carried on before me between himself and the city editor, the managing editor and an individual who I later learned was the political man. They were “out” as I heard the managing editor say, one day “to get” some one—on orders from some individual of whom at that time I knew nothing, and Mr. Gissel was your true henchman or editorial mercenary, a “peanut” or “squeak” writer, penning what he was ordered to pen. Once I understood I despised him but at first he amused me though I could not like him. Whenever he had concocted some particularly malicious or defaming line as I learned in time, he would get up and dance about, chortling and cackling in a disconcerting way. So for the first time I began to see how party councils and party tendencies were manufactured or twisted or belied, and it still further reduced my estimate of humanity. Men, as I was beginning to find—all of us—were small, irritable, nasty in their struggle for existence. This little editor, for instance, was not interested in the Democratic party (which this paper was supposed to represent), or indeed in party principles of any kind. He did not believe what he wrote, but, receiving forty dollars a week, he was anxious to make a workmanlike job of it. Just at this time he was engaged in throwing mud at the national Republican administration, the mayor and the governor, as well as various local politicians, whom the owner of the paper wished him to attack.

What a pitiful thing journalism or our alleged “free press” was, I then and there began to gather—dimly enough at first I must admit. What a shabby compound of tricky back-room councils, public professions, all looking to public favors and fames which should lead again to public contracts and financial emoluments! Journalism, like politics, as I was now soon to see, was a slough of muck in which men were raking busily and filthily for what their wretched rakes might uncover in the way of financial, social, political returns. I looked at this dingy office and then at this little yellow-haired rat of an editor one afternoon as he worked, and it came to me what a desperately subtle and shifty thing life was. Here he was, this little runt, scribbling busily, and above him were strong, dark, secretive men, never appearing publicly perhaps but paying him his little salary privately, dribbling it down to him through a publisher and an editor-in-chief and a managing editor, so that he might be kept busy misconstruing, lying, intellectually cheating.

But the plan he had in regard to his book: The graduating class of the Hyde Park High School, of which he had been a member a few years before, had numbered about three hundred students. Of these two hundred were girls, one hundred and fifty of whom he claimed to have known personally. One afternoon as I was preparing to leave after all the assignments had been given out, the city editor called me over and, with the help of this scheming little editorial writer, began to explain to me a plan by which, if I carried it out faithfully, I could connect myself with the Daily Globe as a reporter. I was to take a certain list of names and addresses and as many copies of The Adventures of Harry Munn, or some such name, as I could carry and visit each of these quondam schoolmates of Mr. Gissel at their homes, where I was to recall to their minds that he was an old schoolmate of theirs, that this his first book related to scenes with which they were all familiar, and then persuade them if possible to buy a copy for one dollar. My reward for this was to be ten cents a copy on all copies sold, and in addition (and this was the real bait) I was to have a tryout on the Globe as a reporter at fifteen dollars a week if I succeeded in selling one hundred and twenty copies within the next week or so.

I took the list and gathered up an armful of the thin cloth-covered volumes, fired by the desire thus to make certain my entrance into the newspaper world. I cannot say that I was very much pleased with my mission, but my necessity or aspiration was so great that I was glad to do it just the same. I was nervous and shamefaced as I approached the first home on my list, and I suffered aches and pains in my vanity and my sense of the fitness of things. The only salve I could find in the whole thing was that Mr. Gissel actually knew these people and that I could say I came personally from him as a friend and fellow-member of the Globe staff. It was a thin subterfuge, but apparently it went down with a few of those pretty unsophisticated girls. The majority of them lived in the best residences of the south side, some of them mansions of the truly rich whose democratic parents had insisted upon sending their children to the local high school. In each case, upon inquiring for a girl, with the remark that I came from Mr. Gissel of the Globe, I was received in the parlor or reception-room and told to wait. Presently the girl would come bustling in and listen to my tactful story, smiling contemptuously perhaps at my shabby mission or opening her eyes in surprise or curiosity.

“Mr. Gissel? Mr. Gissel?” said one girl inquiringly. “Why, I don’t recall any such person——” and she retired, leaving me to make my way out as best I might.

Another exclaimed: “Harry Gissel! Has that little snip written a book? The nerve—to send you around to sell his book! Why do you do it? I will take one, because I am curious to see the kind of thing he has done, but I’ll wager right now it’s as silly as he is. He’s invented some scheme to get you to do this because he knows he couldn’t sell the book in any other way.”

Others remembered him and seemed to like him; others bought the book only because he was a member of their class. Some struck up a genial conversation with me.

In spite of my distress at having to do this work there were compensations. It gave me a last fleeting picture of that new, sunny prosperity which was the most marked characteristic of Chicagoans of that day, and contrasted so sharply with the scenes of poverty which I had recently seen. In this region, for it was June, newly fledged collegians, freshly returned from the colleges of the East and Europe, were disporting themselves about the lawns and within the open-windowed chambers of the houses. Traps and go-carts of many of the financially and socially elect filled the south side streets. The lawn tennis suit, the tennis game, the lawn party and the family croquet game were everywhere in evidence. The new-rich and those most ambitious financially at that time were peculiarly susceptible I think to the airs and manners of the older and more pretentious regions of the world. They were bent upon interpreting their new wealth in terms of luxury as they had observed it elsewhere. Hence these strutting youths in English suits with turned-up trousers, swagger sticks and flori-colored ties and socks intended to suggest the spirit of London, as they imagined it to be; hence the high-headed girls in flouncy, lacy dresses, their cheeks and eyes bright with color, who no doubt imagined themselves to be great ladies, and who carried themselves with an air of remote disdain. The whole thing had the quality of a play well staged: really the houses, the lawns, the movements of the people, their games and interests all harmonizing after the fashion of a play. They saw this as a great end in itself, which, perhaps, it is. To me in my life-hungry, love-hungry state, this new-rich prosperity with its ease, its pretty women and its effort at refinement was quite too much. It set me to riotous dreaming and longing made me ache to lounge and pose after this same fashion.