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The Great God Success

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The Great God Success

A NOVEL

By JOHN GRAHAM (DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS)



THE GREGG PRESS / RIDGEWOOD, N.J.


CONTENTS.

CHAPTER

I. THE CANDIDATE FROM YALE

II. THE CITY EDITOR RECONSIDERS

III. A PARK ROW CELEBRITY

IV. IN THE EDGE OF BOHEMIA

V. ALICE

VI. IN A BOHEMIAN QUICKSAND

VII. A LITTLE CANDLE GOES OUT

VIII. A STRUGGLE FOR SELF-CONTROL

IX. AMBITION AWAKENS

X. THE ETERNAL MASCULINE

XI. TRESPASSING

XII. MAKING THE MOST OF A MONTH

XIII. RECKONING WITH DANVERS

XIV. THE NEWS-RECORD GETS A NEW EDITOR

XV. YELLOW JOURNALISM

XVI. MR. STOKELY IS TACTLESS

XVII. A WOMAN AND A WARNING

XVIII. HOWARD EXPLAINS HIS MACHINE

XIX. "I MUST BE RICH."

XX. ILLUSION

XXI. WAVERING

XXII. THE SHENSTONE EPISODE

XXIII. EXPANDING AND CONTRACTING

XXIV. "MR. VALIANT-FOR-TRUTH."

XXV. THE PROMISED LAND

XXVI. IN POSSESSION

XXVII. THE HARVEST

XXVIII. SUCCESS



THE GREAT GOD SUCCESS




I.

THE CANDIDATE FROM YALE.


"O your college paper, I suppose?"

"No, I never wrote even a letter to the editor."

"Took prizes for essays?"

"No, I never wrote if I could help it."

"But you like to write?"

"I'd like to learn to write."

"You say you are two months out of college--what college?"

"Yale."

"Hum--I thought Yale men went into something commercial; law or banking or
railroads. 'Leave hope of fortune behind, ye who enter here' is over the
door of this profession."

"I haven't the money-making instinct."

"We pay fifteen dollars a week at the start."

"Couldn't you make it twenty?"

The Managing Editor of the _News-Record_ turned slowly in his chair
until his broad chest was full-front toward the young candidate for the
staff. He lowered his florid face slowly until his double chin swelled out
over his low "stick-up" collar. Then he gradually raised his eyelids until
his amused blue eyes were looking over the tops of his glasses, straight
into Howard's eyes.

"Why?" he asked. "Why should we?"

Howard's grey eyes showed embarrassment and he flushed to the line of his
black hair which was so smoothly parted in the middle. "Well--you see--the
fact is--I need twenty a week. My expenses are arranged on that scale. I'm
not clever at money matters. I'm afraid I'd get in a mess with only
fifteen."

"My dear young man," said Mr. King, "I started here at fifteen dollars a
week. And I had a wife; and the first baby was coming."

"Yes, but your wife was an energetic woman. She stood right beside you and
worked too. Now I have only myself."

Mr. King raised his eyebrows and became a rosier red. He was evidently
preparing to rebuke this audacious intrusion into his private affairs by a
stranger whose card had been handed to him not ten minutes before. But
Howard's tone and manner were simple and sincere. And they happened to
bring into Mr. King's mind a rush of memories of his youth and his wife.
She had married him on faith. They had come to New York fifteen years
before, he to get a place as reporter on the _News-Record_, she to
start a boarding-house; he doubting and trembling, she with courage and
confidence for two. He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and opened
the book of memory at the place where the leaves most easily fell apart:

He is coming home at one in the morning, worn out, sick at heart from the
day's buffetings. As he puts his key into the latch, the door opens. There
stands a handsome girl; her face is flushed; her eyes are bright; her lips
are held up for him to kiss; she shows no trace of a day that began hours
before his and has been a succession of exasperations and humiliations
against which her sensitive nature, trained in the home of her father, a
distinguished up-the-state Judge, gives her no protection, "Victory," she
whispers, her arms about his neck and her head upon his coat collar.
"Victory! We are seventy-two cents ahead on the week, and everything paid
up!"

Mr. King opened his eyes--they had been closed less than five seconds.
"Well, let it be twenty--though just why I'm sure I don't know. And we'll
give you a four weeks' trial. When will you begin?"

"Now," answered the young man, glancing about the room. "And I shall try to
show that I appreciate your consideration, whether I deserve it or not."

It was a large bare room, low of ceiling. Across one end were five windows
overlooking from a great height the tempest that rages about the City Hall
day and night with few lulls and no pauses. Mr. King's roll-top desk was at
the first window. Under each of the other windows was a broad flat table
desk--for copy-readers. At the farthest of these sat the City Editor--thin,
precise-looking, with yellow skin, hollow cheeks, ragged grey-brown
moustache, ragged scant grey-brown hair and dark brown eyes. He looked
nervously tired and, because brown was his prevailing shade, dusty. He rose
as Mr. King came with young Howard.

"Here, Mr. Bowring, is a young man from Yale. He wishes you to teach him
how to write. Mr. Howard, Mr. Bowring. I hope you gentlemen will get on
comfortably together."

Mr. King went back to his desk. Mr. Bowring and Howard looked each at the
other. Mr. Bowring smiled, with good-humour, without cordiality. "Let me
see, where shall we put you?" And his glance wandered along the rows of
sloping table-desks--those nearer the windows lighted by daylight; those
farther away, by electric lamps. Even on that cool, breezy August afternoon
the sunlight and fresh air did not penetrate far into the room.

"Do you see the young man with the beautiful fair moustache," said Mr.
Bowring, "toiling away in his shirt-sleeves--there?"

"Near the railing at the entrance?"

"Precisely. I think I will put you next him." Mr. Bowring touched a button
on his desk and presently an office boy--a mop of auburn curls, a pert face
and gangling legs in knickerbockers--hurried up with a "Yes, Sir?"

"Please tell Mr. Kittredge that I would like to speak to him and--please
scrape your feet along the floor as little as possible."

The boy smiled, walking away less as if he were trying to terrorize park
pedestrians by a rush on roller skates. Kittredge and Howard were made
acquainted and went toward their desks together. "A few moments--if you
will excuse me--and I'm done," said Kittredge motioning Howard into the
adjoining chair as he sat and at once bent over his work.

Howard watched him with interest, admiration and envy. The reporter was
perhaps twenty-five years old--fair of hair, fair of skin, goodlooking in a
pretty way. His expression was keen and experienced yet too self-complacent
to be highly intelligent. He was rapidly covering sheet after sheet of soft
white paper with bold, loose hand-writing. Howard noticed that at the end
of each sentence he made a little cross with a circle about it, and that he
began each paragraph with a paragraph sign. Presently he scrawled a big
double cross in the centre of the sheet under the last line of writing and
gathered up his sheets in the numbered order. "Done, thank God," he said.
"And I hope they won't butcher it."

"Do you send it to be put in type?" asked Howard.

"No," Kittredge answered with a faint smile. "I hand it in to Mr.
Bowring--the City Editor, you know. And when the copyreaders come at six,
it will be turned over to one of them. He reads it, cuts it down if
necessary, and writes headlines for it. Then it goes upstairs to the
composing room--see the box, the little dumb-waiter, over there in the
wall?--well, it goes up by that to the floor above where they set the type
and make up the forms."

"I'm a complete ignoramus," said Howard, "I hope you'll not mind my trying
to find out things. I hope I shall not bore you."

"Glad to help you, I'm sure. I had to go through this two years ago when I
came here from Princeton."

Kittredge "turned in" his copy and returned to his seat beside Howard.

"What were you writing about, if I may ask?" inquired Howard.

"About some snakes that came this morning in a 'tramp' from South America.
One of them, a boa constrictor, got loose and coiled around a windlass. The
cook was passing and it caught him. He fainted with fright and the beast
squeezed him to death. It's a fine story--lots of amusing and dramatic
details. I wrote it for a column and I think they won't cut it. I hope not,
anyhow. I need the money."

"You are paid by the column?"

"Yes. I'm on space--what they call a space writer. If a man is of any
account here they gradually raise him to twenty-five dollars a week and
then put him on space. That means that he will make anywhere from forty to
a hundred a week, or perhaps more at times. The average for the best is
about eighty."

"Eighty dollars a week," thought Howard. "Fifty-two times eighty is
forty-one hundred and sixty. Four thousand a year, counting out two weeks
for vacation." To Howard it seemed wealth at the limit of imagination. If
he could make so much as that!--he who had grave doubts whether, no matter
how hard he worked, he would ever wrench a living from the world.

Just then a seedy young man with red hair and a red beard came through the
gate in the railing, nodded to Kittredge and went to a desk well up toward
the daylight end of the room.

"That's the best of 'em all," said Kittredge in a low tone. "His name is
Sewell. He's a Harvard man--Harvard and Heidelberg. But drink! Ye gods, how
he does drink! His wife died last Christmas--practically starvation. Sewell
disappeared--frightful bust. A month afterward they found him under an
assumed name over on Blackwell's Island, doing three months for disorderly
conduct. He wrote a Christmas carol while his wife was dying. It began
"Merrily over the Snow" and went on about light hearts and youth and joy
and all that--you know, the usual thing. When he got the money, she didn't
need it or anything else in her nice quiet grave over in Long Island City.
So he 'blew in' the money on a wake."

Sewell was coming toward them. Kittredge called out: "Was it a good story,
Sam?"

"Simply great! You ought to have seen the room. Only the bed and the
cook-stove and a few dishes on a shelf--everything else gone to the
pawnshop. The man must have killed the children first. They lay side by
side on the bed, each with its hands folded on its chest--suppose the
mother did that; and each little throat was cut from ear to ear--suppose
the father did that. Then he dipped his paint brush in the blood and daubed
on the wall in big scrawling letters: 'There is no God!' Then he took his
wife in his arms, stabbed her to the heart and cut his own throat. And
there they lay, his arms about her, his cheek against hers, dead. It was
murder as a fine art. Gad, I wish I could write."

Kittredge introduced Howard--"a Yale man--just came on the paper."

"Entering the profession? Well, they say of the other professions that
there is always room at the top. Journalism is just the reverse. The room
is all at the bottom--easy to enter, hard to achieve, impossible to leave.
It is all bottom, no top." Sewell nodded, smiled attractively in spite of
his swollen face and his unsightly teeth, and went back to his work.

"He's sober," said Kittredge when he was out of hearing, "so his story is
pretty sure to be the talk of Park Row tomorrow."

Howard was astonished at the cheerful, businesslike point of view of these
two educated and apparently civilised young men as to the tragedies of
life. He had shuddered at Kittredge's story of the man squeezed to death by
the snake. Sewell's story, so graphically outlined, filled him with horror,
made it a struggle for him to conceal his feelings.

"I suppose you must see a lot of frightful things," he suggested.

"That's our business. You soon get used to it, just as a doctor does. You
learn to look at life from the purely professional standpoint. Of course
you must feel in order to write. But you must not feel so keenly that you
can't write. You have to remember always that you're not there to cheer or
sympathise or have emotions, but only to report, to record. You tell what
your eyes see. You'll soon get so that you can and will make good stories
out of your own calamaties."

"Is that a portrait of the editor?" asked Howard, pointing to a grimed
oil-painting, the only relief to the stretch of cracked and streaked white
wall except a few ragged maps.

"That--oh, that is old man Stone--the 'great condenser.' He's there for a
double purpose, as an example of what a journalist should be and as a
warning of what a journalist comes to. After twenty years of fine work at
crowding more news in good English into one column than any other editor
could get in bad English into four columns, he was discharged for
drunkenness. Soon afterwards he walked off the end of a dock one night in a
fog. At least it was said that there was a fog and that he was drunk. I
have my doubts."

"Cheerful! I have not been in the profession an hour but I have already
learned something very valuable."

"What's that?" asked Kittredge, "that it's a good profession to get out
of?"

"No. But that bad habits will not help a man to a career in journalism any
more than in any other profession."

"Career?" smiled Kittredge, resenting Howard's good-humoured irony and
putting on a supercilious look that brought out more strongly the
insignificance of his face. "Journalism is not a career. It is either a
school or a cemetery. A man may use it as a stepping-stone to something
else. But if he sticks to it, he finds himself an old man, dead and done
for to all intents and purposes years before he's buried."

"I wonder if it doesn't attract a great many men who have a little talent
and fancy that they have much. I wonder if it does not disappoint their
vanity rather than their merit."

"That sounds well," replied Kittredge, "and there's some truth in it. But,
believe me, journalism is the dragon that demands the annual sacrifice of
youth. It will have only youth. Why am I here? Why are you here? Because we
are young, have a fresh, a new point of view. As soon as we get a little
older, we shall be stale and, though still young in years, we must step
aside for young fellows with new ideas and a new point of view."

"But why should not one have always new ideas, always a new point of view?
Why should one expect to escape the penalties of stagnation in journalism
when one can't escape them in any other profession?"

"But who has new ideas all the time? The average successful man has at most
one idea and makes a whole career out of it. Then there are the
temptations."

"How do you mean?"

Kittredge flushed slightly and answered in a more serious tone:

"We must work while others amuse themselves or sleep. We must sleep while
others are at work. That throws us out of touch with the whole world of
respectability and regularity. When we get done at night, wrought up by the
afternoon and evening of this gambling with our brains and nerves as the
stake, what is open to us?"

"That is true," said Howard. "There are the all-night saloons and--the
like."

"And if we wish society, what society is open to us? What sort of young
women are waiting to entertain us at one, two, three o'clock in the
morning? Why, I have not made a call in a year. And I have not seen a
respectable girl of my acquaintance in at least that time, except once or
twice when I happened to have assignments that took me near Fifth Avenue in
the afternoon."

"Mr. Kittredge, Mr. Bowring wishes to speak to you," an office boy said and
Kittredge rose. As he went, he put his hand on Howard's shoulder and said:
"No, I am getting out of it as fast as ever I can. I'm writing books."

"Kittredge," thought Howard, "I wonder, is this Henry Jennings Kittredge,
whose stories are on all the news stands?" He saw an envelope on the floor
at his feet. The address was "Henry Jennings Kittredge, Esq."

When Kittredge came back for his coat, Howard said in a tone of frank
admiration: "Why, I didn't know you were the Kittredge that everybody is
talking about. You certainly have no cause for complaint."

Kittredge shrugged his shoulders. "At fifteen cents a copy, I have to sell
ten thousand copies before I get enough to live on for four months. And
you'd be surprised how much reputation and how little money a man can make
out of a book. Don't be distressed because they keep you here with nothing
to do but wonder how you'll have the courage to face the cashier on pay
day. It's the system. Your chance will come."

It was three days before Howard had a chance. On a Sunday afternoon the
Assistant City Editor who was in charge of the City Desk for the day sent
him up to the Park to write a descriptive story of the crowds. "Try to get
a new point of view," he said, "and let yourself loose. There's usually
plenty of room in Monday's paper."

Howard wandered through the Central Park for two hours, struggling for the
"new point of view" of the crowds he saw there--these monotonous millions,
he thought, lazily drinking at a vast trough of country air in the heart of
the city. He planned an article carefully as he dined alone at the Casino.
He went down to the office early and wrote diligently--about two thousand
words. When he had finished, the Night City Editor told him that he might
go as there would be nothing more that night.

He was in the street at seven the next morning. As he walked along with a
News-Record, bought at the first news-stand, he searched every page: first,
the larger "heads"--such a long story would call for a "big head;" then the
smaller "heads"--they may have been crowded and have had to cut it down;
then the single-line "heads"--surely they found a "stickful" or so worth
printing.

At last he found it. A dozen items in the smallest type, agate, were
grouped under the general heading "City Jottings" at the end of an inside
column of an inside page. The first of these City Jottings was two lines in
length:

"The millions were in the Central Park yesterday, lazily drinking at that
vast trough of country air in the heart of the city."

As he entered the office Howard looked appealingly and apologetically at
the boy on guard at the railing and braced himself to receive the sneering
frown of the City Editor and to bear the covert smiles of his fellow
reporters. But he soon saw that no one had observed his mighty spring for a
foothold and his ludicrous miss and fall.

"Had anything in yet?" Kittredge inquired casually, late in the afternoon.

"I wrote a column and a half yesterday and I found two lines among the
City Jottings," replied Howard, reddening but laughing.

"The first story I wrote was cut to three lines but they got a libel suit
on it."




II.

THE CITY EDITOR RECONSIDERS.


At the end of six weeks, the City Editor called Howard up to the desk and
asked him to seat himself. He talked in a low tone so that the Assistant
City Editor, reading the newspapers at a nearby desk, could not hear.

"We like you, Mr. Howard." Mr. Bowring spoke slowly and with a carefulness
in selecting words that indicated embarrassment. "And we have been
impressed by your earnestness. But we greatly fear that you are not fitted
for this profession. You write well enough, but you do not seem to get the
newspaper--the news--idea. So we feel that in justice to you and to
ourselves we ought to let you know where you stand. If you wish, we shall
be glad to have you remain with us two weeks longer. Meanwhile you can be
looking about you. I am certain that you will succeed somewhere, in some
line, sooner or later. But I think that the newspaper profession is a waste
of your time."

Howard had expected this. Failure after failure, his articles thrown away
or rewritten by the copyreaders, had prepared him for the blow. Yet it
crushed him for the moment. His voice was not steady as he replied:

"No doubt you are right. Thank you for taking the trouble to study my case
and tell me so soon."

"Don't hesitate to stay on for the two weeks," Mr. Bowring continued. "We
can make you useful to us. And you can look about to much better advantage
than if you were out of a place."

"I'll stay the two weeks," Howard said, "unless I find something sooner."

"Don't be more discouraged than you can help," said Mr. Bowring. "You may
be very grateful before long for finding out so early what many of us--I
myself, I fear--find out after years and--when it is too late."

Always that note of despair; always that pointing to the motto over the
door of the profession: "Abandon hope, ye who enter here." What was the
explanation? Were these men right? Was he wrong in thinking that journalism
offered the most splendid of careers--the development of the mind and the
character; the sharpening of all the faculties; the service of truth and
right and human betterment, in daily combat with injustice and error and
falsehood; the arousing and stimulating of the drowsy minds of the masses
of mankind?

Howard looked about at the men who held on where he was slipping. "Can it
be," he thought, "that I cannot survive in a profession where the poorest
are so poor in intellect and equipment? Why am I so dull that I cannot
catch the trick?"

He set himself to study newspapers, reading them line by line, noting the
modes of presenting facts, the arrangement of headlines, the order in which
the editors put the several hundred items before the eyes of the
reader--what they displayed on each page and why; how they apportioned the
space. With the energy of unconquerable resolution he applied himself to
solving for himself the puzzle of the press--the science and art of
catching the eye and holding the attention of the hurrying, impatient
public.

He learned much. He began to develop the news-instinct, that subtle instant
realisation of what is interesting and what is not interesting to the
public mind. But the time was short; a sense of impending calamity and the
lack of self-confidence natural to inexperience made it impossible for him
effectively to use his new knowledge in the few small opportunities which
Mr. Bowring gave him. With only six days of his two weeks left, he had
succeeded in getting into the paper not a single item of a length greater
than two sticks. He slept little; he despaired not at all; but he was
heart-sick and, as he lay in his bed in the little hall-room of the
furnished-room house, he often envied women the relief of tears. What he
endured will be appreciated only by those who have been bred in sheltered
homes; who have abruptly and alone struck out for themselves in the ocean
of a great city without a single lesson in swimming; who have felt
themselves seized from below and dragged downward toward the deep-lying
feeding-grounds of Poverty and Failure.

"Buck up, old man," said Kittredge to whom he told his bad news after
several days of hesitation and after Kittredge had shown him that he
strongly suspected it. "Don't mind old Bowring. You're sure to get on, and,
if you insist upon the folly, in this profession. I'll give you a note to
Montgomery--he's City Editor over at the _World_-shop--and he'll take
you on. In some ways you will do better there. You'll rise faster, get a
wider experience, make more money. In fact, this shop has only one
advantage. It does give a man peace of mind. It's more like a club than an
office. But in a sense that is a drawback. I'll give you a note to-night.
You will be at work over there to-morrow."

"I think I'll wait a few days," said Howard, his tone corresponding to the
look in his eyes and the compression of his resolute mouth.

The next day but one Mr. Bowring called him up to the City Desk and gave
him a newspaper-clipping which read:

"Bald Peak, September 29--Willie Dent, the three-year-old baby
of John Dent, a farmer living two miles from here, strayed away
into the mountains yesterday and has not been seen since. His
dog, a cur, went with him. Several hundred men are out searching.
It has been storming, and the mountains are full of bears
and wild cats."

"Yes, I saw this in the _Herald_," said Howard.

"Will you take the train that leaves at eleven tonight and get us the
story--if it is not a 'fake,' as I strongly suspect. Telegraph your story
if there is not time for you to get back here by nine to-morrow night."

"Of course it's a fake, or at least a wild exaggeration," thought Howard as
he turned away. "If Bowring had not been all but sure there was nothing in
it, he would never have given it to me."

He was not well, his sleepless nights having begun to tell even upon his
powerful constitution. The rest of that afternoon and all of a night
without sleep in the Pullman he was in a depth of despond. He had been in
the habit of getting much comfort out of an observation his father had made
to him just before he died: "Remember that ninety per cent of these
fourteen hundred million human beings are uncertain where to-morrow's food
is to come from. Be prudent but never be afraid." But just then he could
get no consolation out of this maxim of grim cheer. He seemed to himself
incompetent and useless, a predestined failure. "What is to become of me?"
he kept repeating, his heart like lead and his mind fumbling about in a
confused darkness.

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