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Page 68
That is the old time journalist's idea of it. That is the way he was
trained, and that is why at the age of sixty he is still a reporter.
If you train up a youth in this way, he will go into reporting with
too full a knowledge of the newspaper business, with no illusions
concerning it, and with no ignorant enthusiasms, but with a keen and
justifiable impression that he is not paid enough for what he does.
And he will only do what he is paid to do.
Now, you cannot pay a good reporter for what he does, because he does
not work for pay. He works for his paper. He gives his time, his
health, his brains, his sleeping hours, and his eating hours, and
sometimes his life, to get news for it. He thinks the sun rises only
that men may have light by which to read it. But if he has been in a
newspaper office from his youth up, he finds out before he becomes a
reporter that this is not so, and loses his real value. He should come
right out of the University where he has been doing "campus notes" for
the college weekly, and be pitchforked out into city work without
knowing whether the Battery is at Harlem or Hunter's Point, and with
the idea that he is a Moulder of Public Opinion and that the Power of
the Press is greater than the Power of Money, and that the few lines
he writes are of more value in the Editor's eyes than is the column of
advertising on the last page, which they are not.
After three years--it is sometimes longer, sometimes not so long--he
finds out that he has given his nerves and his youth and his
enthusiasm in exchange for a general fund of miscellaneous knowledge,
the opportunity of personal encounter with all the greatest and most
remarkable men and events that have risen in those three years, and a
great fund of resource an patience. He will find that he has crowded
the experiences of the lifetime of the ordinary young business man,
doctor, or lawyer, or man about town, into three short years; that he
has learned to think and to act quickly, to be patient and unmoved
when every one else has lost his head, actually or figuratively
speaking; to write as fast as another man can talk, and to be able to
talk with authority on matters of which other men do not venture even
to think until they have read what he has written with a copy-boy at
his elbow on the night previous.
It is necessary for you to know this, that you may understand what
manner of man young Albert Gordon was.
Young Gordon had been a reporter just three years. He had left Yale
when his last living relative died, and had taken the morning train
for New York, where they had promised him reportorial work on one of
the innumerable Greatest New York Dailies. He arrived at the office at
noon, and was sent back over the same road on which he had just come,
to Spuyten Duyvil, where a train had been wrecked and everybody of
consequence to suburban New York killed. One of the old reporters
hurried him to the office again with his "copy," and after he had
delivered that, he was sent to the Tombs to talk French to a man in
Murderers' Row, who could not talk anything else, but who had shown
some international skill in the use of a jimmy. And at eight, he
covered a flower-show in Madison Square Garden; and at eleven was sent
over the Brooklyn Bridge in a cab to watch a fire and make guesses at
the losses to the insurance companies.
He went to bed at one, and dreamed of shattered locomotives, human
beings lying still with blankets over them, rows of cells, and banks
of beautiful flowers nodding their heads to the tunes of the brass
band in the gallery. He decided when he awoke the next morning that he
had entered upon a picturesque and exciting career, and as one day
followed another, he became more and more convinced of it, and more
and more devoted to it. He was twenty then, and he was now
twenty-three, and in that time had become a great reporter, and had
been to Presidential conventions in Chicago, revolutions in Hayti,
Indian outbreaks on the Plains, and midnight meetings of moonlighters
in Tennessee, and had seen what work earthquakes, floods, fire, and
fever could do in great cities, and had contradicted the President,
and borrowed matches from burglars. And now he thought he would like
to rest and breathe a bit, and not to work again unless as a war
correspondent. The only obstacle to his becoming a great war
correspondent lay in the fact that there was no war, and a war
correspondent without a war is about as absurd an individual as a
general without an army. He read the papers every morning on the
elevated trains for war clouds; but though there were many war clouds,
they always drifted apart, and peace smiled again. This was very
disappointing to young Gordon, and he became more and more keenly
discouraged.
And then as war work was out of the question, he decided to write his
novel. It was to be a novel of New York life, and he wanted a quiet
place in which to work on it. He was already making inquiries among
the suburban residents of his acquaintance for just such a quiet spot,
when he received an offer to go to the Island of Opeki in the North
Pacific Ocean, as secretary to the American consul at that place. The
gentleman who had been appointed by the President to act as consul at
Opeki was Captain Leonard T. Travis, a veteran of the Civil War, who
had contracted a severe attack of rheumatism while camping out at
night in the dew, and who on account of this souvenir of his efforts
to save the Union had allowed the Union he had saved to support him in
one office or another ever since. He had met young Gordon at a dinner,
and had had the presumption to ask him to serve as his secretary, and
Gordon, much to his surprise, had accepted his offer. The idea of a
quiet life in the tropics with new and beautiful surroundings, and
with nothing to do and plenty of time in which to do it, and to write
his novel besides, seemed to Albert to be just what he wanted; and
though he did not know nor care much for his superior officer, he
agreed to go with him promptly, and proceeded to say good-by to his
friends and to make his preparations. Captain Travis was so delighted
with getting such a clever young gentleman for his secretary, that he
referred to him to his friends as "my attach� of legation"; nor did he
lessen that gentleman's dignity by telling any one that the attach�'s
salary was to be five hundred dollars a year. His own salary was only
fifteen hundred dollars; and though his brother-in-law, Senator
Rainsford, tried his best to get the amount raised, he was
unsuccessful. The consulship to Opeki was instituted early in the
'50's, to get rid of and reward a third or fourth cousin of the
President's, whose services during the campaign were important, but
whose after-presence was embarrassing. He had been created consul to
Opeki as being more distant and unaccessible than any other known
spot, and had lived and died there; and so little was known of the
island, and so difficult was communication with it, that no one knew
he was dead, until Captain Travis, in his hungry haste for office, had
uprooted the sad fact. Captain Travis, as well as Albert, had a
secondary reason for wishing to visit Opeki. His physician had told
him to go to some warm climate for his rheumatism, and in accepting
the consulship his object was rather to follow out his doctor's orders
at his country's expense, than to serve his country at the expense of
his rheumatism.
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