May Iverson's Career Part 2

The man muttered something that seemed to mean that she was right. The real reporter interrupted, looking busy and worried again. "Miss Watts," he said, quickly, "can't we go right into your house and send this story to the _Searchlight_ over your telephone? It's a quarter to one, and there isn't a minute to lose. The _Searchlight_ goes to press in an hour. I've got all the facts," he added, in a peaceful tone.

Miss Watts said we could, and led the way into the house, while the counterfeiters and the police tramped off through the mud and rain.

When we got inside, Miss Watts took us to the library and lit the electric lights, while the real reporter bustled about, looking busier than any one I ever saw before. I watched him for a minute. Then I told Miss Watts I wanted to go into a quiet room and write my story.

She and the real reporter looked at each other again. I was getting tired of their looks. The real reporter spoke to me very kindly, like a Sunday-school superintendent addressing his cla.s.s.

"Now, see here, Miss Iverson," he said; "you've had a big, new experience and lots of excitement. You discovered the counterfeiters.

You'll get full credit for it. Let it go at that, and I'll write the story. It's got to be a real story, not a kindergarten special."

If he hadn't said that about the kindergarten special I might have let him write the story, for I was cold and tired and scared. But at those fatal words I felt myself stiffen all over.

"It's my story," I said, with icy determination. "And I'm going to write it."

The real reporter looked annoyed. "But _can_ you?" he protested. "We haven't time for experiments."

"Of course I can," I said. And I'm afraid I spoke crossly, for I was getting annoyed. "I'll write it exactly the way Sister Irmingarde told me to."

I sat down at the table as I spoke. I heard a b.u.mp and something that sounded like a groan. The real reporter had fallen into a chair. "Good Lord!" he said; and then for a long time he didn't say anything.

Finally he began to fuss with his paper, as if he meant to write the story anyway. I wrote three pages and forgot about him. At last he muttered, "Here, let me see those," and his voice sounded like a dove's when it mourns under the eaves. I pushed the sheets toward him with my left hand and went on writing. Suddenly I heard a gasp and a chuckle. In another second the real reporter was standing beside me, grinning his widest grin.

"Why, say, you little May Iverson kid," he almost shouted, "this story is going to be good!"

I could hear Miss Watts straighten up in the chair from which she was watching us. She s.n.a.t.c.hed at my pages, and he let her have them. I wanted to draw myself up to my full height and look at him coldly, but I didn't--there wasn't time. Besides, far down inside of me I was delighted by his praise.

"Of course it's going to be good," was all I said. "Sister Irmingarde told me to write about things as they are, and very simply."

He had my pages back in his hands now and was running over them quickly, putting in a few words here and there with a pencil. I could see he was not changing much. Then he started on a jump for the next room, where the telephone was, but stopped at the door. There was a queer look in his eyes.

"Sister Irmingarde's a daisy!" he muttered.

Then I heard him calling New York. "Gimme the _Searchlight_," he called. "Gimme the city desk. Hurry up! Say, Jack, this is Gibson, at Sound View. We've got a crackerjack of a story out here. No--the Iverson kid is doing it. It's all right, too. Get Hammond busy there and let him take it on the typewriter as fast as I read it. Ready?

Here goes."

He began to read my first page.

Miss Watts got up and shut the door, and I bowed my thanks to her. The storm was worse than ever, but I hardly heard it. For a second his words had made me think of Sister Irmingarde. I felt sorry for her.

She would never have a chance like this--to write a real news story for a great newspaper. The convent seemed like a place I had heard of, long ago.

Then I settled down to work, and for the next hour there was no sound in the room but the whisper of my busy pen and the respectful footsteps of Miss Watts as she reverently carried my story, page by page, to the chastened "real reporter."

II

THE CRY OF THE PACK

Mr. Nestor Hurd, our "feature" editor, was in a bad humor. We all knew he was, and everybody knew why, except Mr. Nestor Hurd himself. He thought it was because he had not a competent writer on his whole dash-blinged staff, and he was explaining this to s.p.a.ce in words that stung like active gnats. Really it was because his wife had just called at his office and drawn his month's salary in advance to go to Atlantic City.

Over the little part.i.tion that separated his private office from the square pen where his reporters had their desks Mr. Hurd's words flew and lit upon us. Occasionally we heard the murmur of Mr. Morris's voice, patting the air like a soothing hand; and at last our chief got tired and stopped, and an office boy came into the outer room and said he wanted to see me.

I went in with steady knees. I was no longer afraid of Mr. Hurd. I had been on the _Searchlight_ a whole week, and I had written one big "story" and three small ones, and they had all been printed. I knew my style was improving every day--growing more mature. I had dropped a great many amateur expressions, and I had learned to stop when I reached the end of my story instead of going right on. Besides, I was no longer the newest of the "cub reporters." The latest one had been taken on that morning--a scared-looking girl who told me in a trembling voice that she had to write a special column every day for women. It was plain that she had not studied life as we girls had in the convent. She made me feel a thousand years old instead of only eighteen. I had received so much advice during the week that some of it was spilling over, and I freely and gladly gave the surplus to her.

I had a desk, too, by this time, in a corner near a window where I could look out on City Hall Park and see the newsboys stealing baths in the fountain. And I was going to be a nun in three years, so who cared, anyway? I went to Mr. Hurd with my head high and the light of confidence in my eyes.

"'S that?" remarked Mr. Hurd, when he heard my soft footfalls approaching his desk. He was too busy to look up and see. He was bending over a great heap of newspaper clippings, and the veins bulged out on his brow from the violence of his mental efforts. Mr. Morris, the thin young editor who had a desk near his, told him it was Miss Iverson. Mr. Morris had a muscular bulge on each jaw-bone, which Mr.

Gibson had told me was caused by the strain of keeping back the things he wanted to say to Mr. Hurd. Mr. Hurd twisted the right corner of his mouth at me, which was his way of showing that he knew that the person he was talking to stood at his right side.

"'S Iverson," he began (he hadn't time to say Miss Iverson), "got 'ny money?"

I thought he wanted to borrow some. I had seen a great deal of borrowing going on during the week; everybody's money seemed to belong to everybody else. I was glad to let him have it, of course, but a little surprised. I told him that I had some money, for when I left home papa had given me--

He interrupted me rudely. "Don't want to know how much papa gave you,"

he snapped. "Want to know where 'tis."

I told him coldly that it was in a savings-bank, for papa thought--

He interrupted again. I had never been interrupted when I was in the convent. There the girls hung on my words with suspended breath.

"'S all right, then," Mr. Hurd said. "Here's your story. Go and see half a dozen of our biggest millionaires in Wall Street--Drake, Carter, Hayden--you know the list. Tell 'em you're a stranger in town, come to study music or painting. Got a little money to see you through--'nough for a year. Ask 'em what to do with it--how to invest it--and write what happens. Good story, eh?" He turned to Morris for approval, and all his dimples showed, making him look like a six-months-old baby. He immediately regretted this moment of weakness and frowned at me.

"'S all," he said; and I went away.

I will now pause for a moment to describe an interesting phenomenon that ran through my whole journalistic career. I always went into an editor's room to take an a.s.signment with perfect confidence, and I usually came out of it in black despair. The confidence was caused by the memory that I had got my past stories; the despair was caused by the conviction that I could not possibly get the present one. Each a.s.signment Mr. Hurd had given me during the week seemed not only harder than the last, but less worthy the dignity of a general's daughter. Besides, a new and terrible thing was happening to me. I was becoming afraid--not of work, but of men. I never had been afraid of anything before. From the time we were laid in our cradles my father taught my brother Jack and me not to be afraid. The worst of my fear now was that I didn't know exactly why I felt it, and there was no one I could go to and ask about it. All the men I met seemed to be divided into two cla.s.ses. In the first cla.s.s were those who were not kind at all--men like Mr. Hurd, who treated me as if I were a machine, and ignored me altogether or looked over my head or past the side of my face when they spoke to me. They seemed rude at first, and I did not like them; but I liked them better and better as time went on. In the second cla.s.s were the men who were too kind--who sprawled over my desk and wasted my time and grinned at me and said things I didn't understand and wanted to take me to Coney Island. Most of them were merely silly, but two or three of them were horrible. When they came near me they made me feel queer and sick. After they had left I wanted to throw open all the doors and windows and air the room. There was one I used to dream of when I was overworked, which was usually. He was always a snake in the dream--a fat, disgusting, lazy snake, slowly squirming over the ground near me, with his bulging green eyes on my face. There were times when I was afraid to go to sleep for fear of dreaming of that snake; and when during the day he came into the room and over to my desk I would hardly have been surprised to see him crawl instead of walk. Indeed, his walk was a kind of crawl.

Mr. Gibson, Hurd's star reporter, whose desk was next to mine, spoke to me about him one day, and his grin was not as wide as usual.

"Is Yawkins annoying you?" he asked. "I've seen you actually shudder when he came to your desk. If the cad had any sense he'd see it, too.

Has he said anything? Done anything?"

I said he hadn't, exactly, but that I felt a strange feeling of horror every time he came near me; and Gibson raised his eyebrows and said he guessed he knew why, and that he would attend to it. He must have attended to it, for Yawkins stopped coming to my desk, and after a few months he was discharged for letting himself be "thrown down" on a big story, and I never saw him again. But at the time Mr. Hurd gave me his Wall Street a.s.signment I was beginning to be horribly afraid to approach strangers, which is no way for a reporter to feel; and when I had to meet strange men I always found myself wondering whether they would be the Hurd type or the Yawkins type. I hardly dared to hope they would be like Mr. Gibson, who was like the men at home--kind and casual and friendly; but of course some of them were.

Once Mrs. Hoppen, a woman reporter on the _Searchlight_, came and spoke to me about them. She was forty and slender and black-eyed, and her work was as clever as any man's, but it seemed to have made her very hard. She seemed to believe in no one. She made me feel as if she had dived so deep in life that she had come out into a place where there wasn't anything. She came to me one day when Yawkins was coiled over my desk. He crawled away as soon as he saw her, for he hated her.

After he went she stood looking down at me and hesitating. It was not like her to hesitate about anything.

"Look here," she said at last; "I earn a good income by attending to my own business, and I usually let other people's business alone.

Besides, I'm not cut out for a Star of Bethlehem. But I just want to tell you not to worry about that kind of thing." She looked after Yawkins, who had crawled through the door.

I tried to say that I wasn't worrying, but I couldn't, for it wasn't true. And someway, though I didn't know why, I couldn't talk to her about it. She didn't wait for me, however, but went right on.

"You're very young," she said, "and a long way from home. You haven't been in New York long enough to make influential friends or create a background for yourself; so you seem fair game, and the wolves are on the trail. But you can be sure of one thing--they'll never get you; so don't worry."

I thanked her, and she patted my shoulder and went away. I wasn't sure just what she meant, but I knew she had tried to be kind.

The day I started down to Wall Street to see the multimillionaires I was very thoughtful. I didn't know then, as I did later, how guarded they were in their offices, and how hard it was for a stranger to get near them. What I simply hated was having them look at me and grin at me, and seeing them under false pretenses and having to tell them lies. I knew Sister Irmingarde would not have approved of it--but there were so many things in newspaper work that Sister Irmingarde wouldn't approve of. I was beginning to wonder if there was anything at all she would approve; and later, of course, I found there was. But I discovered many, many other things long before that.

I went to Mr. Drake's office first. He was the one Mr. Hurd had mentioned first, and while I was at school I had heard about him and read that he was very old and very kind and very pious. I thought perhaps he would be kind enough to see a strange girl for a few minutes and give her some advice, even if his time was worth a thousand dollars a minute, as they said it was. So I went straight to his office and asked for him, and gave my card to a b.u.t.toned boy who seemed strangely loath to take it. He was perfectly sure Mr. Drake hadn't time to see me, and he wanted the whole story of my life before he gave the card to any one; but I was not yet afraid of office boys, and he finally took the card and went away with dragging steps.

Then my card began to circulate like a love story among the girls at St. Catharine's. Men in little cages and at mahogany desks read it, and stared at me and pa.s.sed it on to other men. Finally it disappeared in an inner room, and a young man came out holding it in his hand and spoke to me in a very cold and direct manner. The card had my real name on it, but no address or newspaper, and it didn't mean anything at all to the direct young man. He wanted to know who I was and what I wanted of Mr. Drake, and I told him what Mr. Hurd had told me to say.