The Great God Success | Page 3

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,