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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
In "The Great God Success," David Graham Phillips delves into the intricacies of American society during the early 20th century, exploring themes of ambition, corruption, and the moral complexities of the pursuit of wealth. Through a blend of realism and critique, Phillips constructs a narrative that not only captures the zeitgeist of the Gilded Age but also serves as a cautionary tale about the perils of unbridled ambition. His prose is marked by incisive social commentary, vivid characterizations, and a narrative style that deftly intertwines irony and tragedy, shedding light on both the glittering allure of success and the darker undercurrents that accompany it. Phillips, a journalist turned novelist, was deeply influenced by the societal changes and rampant materialism characterizing his era. His experiences covering political scandals and social injustices fostered in him a keen awareness of the moral dilemmas faced by individuals amidst a rapidly changing economic landscape. This background informs the rich tapestry of characters and conflicts in "The Great God Success," rendering it not only a work of fiction but also a reflection of the author's profound concerns about the values of his time. This compelling narrative invites readers to ponder the true meaning of success and its impact on human relationships and societal structures. Recommended for those interested in early 20th-century American literature, as well as anyone seeking a critical perspective on the pursuit of success in relation to personal integrity, Phillips' work remains strikingly relevant today.
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The Great God Success
Table of Contents
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:
“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.
At Bald Peak he was somewhat revived by the cold mountain air of the early morning. As he alighted upon the station platform he spoke to the baggage-master standing in front of the steps.
“Was the little boy of a man named Dent lost in the mountains near here?”
“Yes—three days ago,” replied the baggage-man.
“Have they found him yet?”
“No—nor never will alive—that’s my opinion.”
Howard asked for the nearest livery-stable and within twenty minutes was on his way to Dent’s farm. His driver knew all about the lost child. Two hundred men were still searching. “And Mrs. Dent, she’s been sittin’ by the window, list’nin’ day and night. She won’t speak nor eat and she ain’t shed a tear. It was her only child. The men come in sayin’ it ain’t no use to hunt any more, an’ they look at her an’ out they goes ag’in.”
Soon the driver pointed to a cottage near the road. The gate was open; the grass and the flower-beds were trampled into a morass. The door was thrown wide and several women were standing about the threshold. At the window within view of the road and the mountains sat the mother—a young woman with large brown eyes, and clear-cut features, refined, beautified, exalted by suffering. Her look was that of one listening for a faint, far away sound upon which hangs the turn of the balances to joy or to despair.
That morning two of the searchers went to the northeast into the dense and tangled swamp woods between Bald Peak and Cloudy Peak—the wildest wilderness in the mountains. The light barely penetrates the foliage on the brightest days. The ground is rough, sometimes precipitous, closely covered with bushes and tangled creepers.
The two explorers, almost lost themselves, came at last to the edge of a swamp surrounded by cedars. They half-crawled, half-climbed through the low trees and festooning creepers to the edge of a clear bit of open, firm ground.
In the middle was a cedar tree. Under it, seated upon the ground, was the lost boy. His bare, brown legs, torn and bleeding, were stretched straight in front of him. His bare feet were bruised and cut. His gingham dress was torn and wet and stained. His small hands were smears of dirt and blood. He was playing with a tin can. He had put a stone into it and was making a great rattling. The dog was running to and fro, apparently enjoying the noise. The little boy’s face was tear-stained and his eyes were swollen. But he was not crying just then and laughter lurked in his thin, fever-flushed face.
As the men came into view, the dog began to bark angrily, but the boy looked a solemn welcome.
“Want mamma,” he said. “I’se hungry.”
One of the men picked him up—the gingham dress was saturated.
“You’re hungry?” asked the man, his voice choking.
“Yes. An’ I’se so wet. It wained and wained.” Then the child began to sob. “It was dark,” he whispered, “an’ cold. I want my mamma.”
It was an hour’s tedious journey back to Dent’s by the shortest route. At the top of the hill those near the cottage saw the boy in the arms of the man who had found him. They shouted and the mother sprang out of the house and came running, stumbling down the path to the gate. She caught at the gate-post and stood there, laughing, screaming, sobbing.
“Baby! Baby!” she called.
The little boy turned his head and stretched out his thin, blood-stained arms. She ran toward him and snatched him from the young farmer.
“Hungry, mamma,” he sobbed, hiding his face on her shoulder.
Howard wrote his story on the train, going down to New York. It was a straightforward chronicle of just what he had seen and heard. He began at the beginning—the little mountain home, the family of three, the disappearance of the child. He described the perils of the mountains, the storm, the search, the wait, the listening mother, scene by scene, ending with mother and child together again and the dog racing around them, with wagging tail and hanging tongue. He wrote swiftly, making no changes, without a trace of his usual self-consciousness in composition. When he had done he went into the restaurant car and dined almost gaily. He felt that he had failed again. How could he hope to tell such a story? But he was not despondent. He was still under the spell of that intense human drama with its climax of joy. His own concerns seemed secondary, of no consequence.
He reached the office at half-past nine, handed in his “copy” and went away. He was in bed at half-past ten and was at once asleep. At eleven the next morning a knocking awakened him from a sound sleep that had restored and refreshed him. “A messenger from the office,” was called through the door in answer to his inquiry. He took the note from the boy and tore it open:
“My dear Mr. Howard: Thank you for the splendid story you gave us last night. It is one of the best, if not the best, we have had the pleasure of publishing in years. Your salary has been raised to twenty-five dollars a week.
“Congratulations. You have ‘caught on’ at last. I’m glad to take back what I said the other day.
“HENRY C. BOWRING.”
III. — A PARK ROW CELEBRITY.
Kittredge was the first to congratulate him when he reached the office. “Everybody is talking about your story,” he said. “I must say I was surprised when I read it. I had begun to fear that you would never catch the trick—for, with most of us writing is only a trick. But now I see that you are a born writer. Your future is in your own hands.”
“You think I can learn to write?”
“That is the sane way to put it. Yes, I know that you can. If you’ll only not be satisfied with the results that come easy, you will make a reputation. Not a mere Park Row reputation, but the real thing.”
