Stories of Achievement Volume IV Part 12

(1853-____)

REJECTED Ma.n.u.sCRIPTS

Nowadays, it seems, every one reads, also writes. There are few streets where the callous postman does not occasionally render some doorstep desolate by the delivery of a rejected ma.n.u.script. Fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind, and the first steps in the career of a successful man of letters are always interesting. You remember how Franklin slyly dropped his first contribution through the slit in his brother's printing-house door; and how the young Charles d.i.c.kens crept softly to the letter-box up a dark court, off a dark alley, near Fleet Street.

In the case of Mr. Rideing, all must admire and be thankful for the indomitable spirit which disappointments were unable to discourage.

From "Many Celebrities and a Few Others," by William H. Rideing.

Doubleday, Page & Co., 1913.

I do not know to a certainty just how or when the new ambition found its cranny and sprouted, and I wonder that it did not perish at once, like others of its kind which never blossoming were torn from the bed that nourished them and borne afar like b.a.l.l.s of thistledown. How and why it survived the rest, which seemed more feasible, I am not able to answer fully or satisfactorily to myself, and other people have yet to show any curiosity about it.

How at this period I watched for the postman! Envelopes of portentous bulk were put into my hands so often that I became inured to disappointment, unsurprised and unhurt, like a patient father who has more faith in the abilities of his children than the stupid and purblind world which will not employ them.

These rejected essays and tales were my children, and the embarra.s.sing number of them did not curb my philoprogenitiveness.

Dawn broke unheeded and without reproach to the novice as he sat by candle-light at his table giving shape and utterance to dreams which did not foretell penalties, nor allow any intimation to reach him of the disillusionings sure to come, sharp-edged and poignant, with the awakening day. The rocky coast of realities, with its shoals and whirlpools, which encircles the sphere of dreams, is never visible till the sun is high. You are not awake till you strike it.

Up and dressed, careless of breakfast, he hears the postman's knock.

There is Something for the boy, which at a glance instantly dispels the clouds of his drowsiness and makes his heart jump: an envelope not bulky, an envelope whose contents tremble in his hand and grow dim in his eyes, and have to be read and read again before they can be believed. One of his stories has at last found a place and will be printed next month! Life may bestow on us its highest honours, and wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, the guerdon of a glorious lot, but it can never transcend or repeat the thrill and ecstasy of the triumphant apotheosis of such a moment as that.

It was a fairy story, and though n.o.body could have suspected it, the fairy queen was Miss Goodall, much diminished in stature, of course, with all her indubitable excellencies, her n.o.bility of character, and her beauty of person sublimated to an essence that only a Lilliputian vessel could hold. Her instincts were domestic, and her domain was the hearthstone, and there she and her attendants, miniatures of the charming damsels in Miss McGinty's peachy and strawberry-legged _corps de ballet_, rewarded virtue and trampled meanness under their dainty, twinkling feet. Moreover, the story was to be paid for, a condition of the greater glory, an irrefragable proof of merit. Only as evidence of worth was money thought of, and though much needed, it alone was lightly regarded. The amount turned out to be very small. The editor handed it out of his trousers pocket--not the golden guinea looked for, but a few shillings. He must have detected a little disappointment in the drooping corners of the boy's mouth, for without any remark from him he said--he was a dingy and inscrutable person--"That is all we ever pay--four shillings per _colyume_," p.r.o.nouncing the second syllable of that word like the second syllable of "volume."

What did the amount matter to the boy? A paper moist and warm from the press was in his hands, and as he walked home through sleet and snow and wind--the weather of the old sea-port was in one of its tantrums--he stopped time and again to look at his name, his very own name, shining there in letters as l.u.s.trous as the stars of heaven.

When that little story of mine appeared in all the glory of print, Fame stood at my door, a daughter of the stars in such array that it blinded one to look at her. She has never come near me since, and I have changed my opinion of her: a beguiling minx, with little taste or judgment, and more than her share of feminine lightness and caprice; an unconscionable flirt, that is all she is.

I came to New York, and peeped into the doors of the _Tribune_, the _World_, the _Times_, and the _Sun_ with all the reverence that a Moslem may feel when he beholds Mecca. ...

It was in the August of a bounteous year of fruit. The smell of peaches and grapes piled in barrows and barrels scented the air, as it scents the memory still. The odour of a peach brings back to me all the magic-lantern impressions of a stranger--memories of dazzling, dancing, tropical light, bustle, babble, and gayety; they made me feel that I had never been alive before, and the people of the old seaport, active as I had thought them, became in a bewildered retrospect as slow and quiet as snails. But far sweeter to me than the fragrance of peaches were the humid whiffs I breathed from the noisy press rooms in the Park Row bas.e.m.e.nts, the smell of the printers' ink as it was received by the warm, moist rolls of paper in the whirring, clattering presses. There was history in the making, destiny at her loom.

Nothing ever expels it: if once a taste for it is acquired, it ties itself up with ineffaceable memories and longings, and even in retirement and changed scenes restores the eagerness and aspirations of the long-pa.s.sed hour when it first came over us with a sort of intoxication.

I had no introduction and no experience and was prudent enough to foresee the rebuff that would surely follow a climb up the dusky but alluring editorial stairs and an application for employment in so exalted a profession by a boy of seventeen. I decided that I could use more persuasion and gain a point in hiding my youth, which was a menace to me, by writing letters, and so I plunged through the post on Horace Greeley, on L. J. Jennings, the brilliant, forgotten Englishman who then edited the _Times_, on Mr. Dana, and on the rest. The astonishing thing of that time, as I look back on it, was my invulnerability to disappointments; I expected them and was prepared for them, and when they came they were as spurs and not as arrows nor as any deadly weapon. They hardly caused a sigh except a sigh of relief from the chafing uncertainties of waiting, and instead of depressing they compelled advances in fresh directions which soon became exhilarating, advances upon which one started with stronger determination and fuller, not lessened, confidence. O heart of Youth! How unfluttered thy beat!

How invincible thou art in thine own conceit! What gift of heaven or earth can compare with thy supernal faith! "No matter how small the cage the bird will sing if it has a voice."

Had my letters been thrown into the wastepaper basket, after an impatient glance by the recipients, I should not have been surprised or more than a little nettled; but I received answers not encouraging from both Horace Greeley and Mr. Dana.

Mr. Greeley was brief and final, but Mr. Dana, writing in his own hand (how friendly it was of him!), qualified an impulse to encourage with a tag for self-protection. "Your letter does you credit," he wrote.

Those five words put me on the threshold of my goal. "Your letter does you credit, and I shall be glad to hear from you again----" A door opened, and a flood of light and warmth from behind it enveloped me as in a gown of eiderdown. "I shall be glad to hear from you again three or four years from now!" The door slammed in my face, the gown slipped off, and left me with a chill. But I did not accuse Mr. Dana of deliberately hurting me or think that he surmised how a polite evasion of that sort may without forethought be more cruel than the coldest and most abrupt negative.

I went farther afield, despatching my letters to Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and Springfield. In Philadelphia there was a little paper called the _Day_, and this is what its editor wrote to me:

"There are several vacancies in the editorial department, but there is one vacancy still worse on the ground floor, and the cashier is its much-harried victim. You might come here, but you would starve to death, and saddle your friends with the expenses of a funeral."

A man with humour enough for that ought to have prospered, and I rejoiced to learn soon afterward that he (I think his name was Cobb) had been saved from his straits by an appointment to the United States Mint!

His jocularity did not shake my faith in the seriousness of journalism.

I had not done laughing when I opened another letter written in a fine, crabbed hand like the scratching of a diamond on a window-pane, and as I slowly deciphered its contents I could hardly believe what I read.

It was from Samuel Bowles the elder, editor of the Springfield _Republican_, then as now one of the sanest, most respected, and influential papers in the country. He wanted a young man to relieve him of some of his drudgery, and I might come on at once to serve as his private secretary. He did not doubt that I could be useful to him, and he was no less sure that he could be useful to me. Moreover, my idea of salary, he said--it was modest, but forty dollars a month--"just fitted his." He was one of the great men of his time when papers were strong or weak, potent in authority or negligible, in proportion to the personality of the individual controlling them. He himself was the _Republican_, as Mr. Greeley was the _Tribune_, Mr.

Bennett the _Herald_, Mr. Dana the _Sun_, Mr. Watterson the _Courier-Journal_, and Mr. Murat Halstead the Cincinnati _Commercial_, though, of course, like them, he tacitly hid himself behind the sacred and inviolable screen of anonymity, and none of them exercised greater power over the affairs of the nation than he, out of the centre, did from that charming New England town to which he invited me. The opportunity was worth a premium, such as is paid by apprentices in England for training in ships and in merchants' and lawyers' offices; the salary seemed like the gratuity of a too liberal and chivalric employer, for no fees could procure from any vocational inst.i.tution so many advantages as were to be freely had in a.s.sociation with him. He instructed and inspired, and if he perceived ability and readiness in his pupil (this was my experience of him), he was as eager to encourage and improve him as any father could be with a son, looking not for the most he could take out of him in return for pay, but for the most he could put into him for his own benefit.

Journalism to him was not the medium of haste, pa.s.sion, prejudice, and faction. He fully recognized all its responsibilities, and the need of meeting them and respecting them by other than casual, haphazard, and slipshod methods. He was an economist of words, with an abhorrence of redundance and irrelevance; not only an economist of words, but also an economist of syllables, choosing always the fewer, and losing nothing of force or precision by that choice. He had what was not less than a pa.s.sion for brevity. "What," he was asked, "makes a journalist?" and he replied: "A nose for news." But with him the news had to be sifted, verified, and reduced to an essence, not inflated, distorted and garnished with all the verbal spoils of the reporter's last scamper through the dictionary.

How sedate and prosperous Springfield looked to me when I arrived there on an early spring day! How clean, orderly, leisurely, and respectable after the untidiness and explosive anarchy of New York! I made for the river, as I always do wherever a river is, and watched it flowing down in the silver-gray light and catching bits of the rain-washed blue sky.

The trees had lost the brittleness and sharpness of winter's drawing and their outlines were softening into greenish velvet. In the coverts, arbutus crept out with a hawthorn-like fragrance from patches of lingering snow. The main street leading into the town from the Ma.s.sasoit House and the station also had an air of repose and dignity as if those who had business in it were not preoccupied by the frenzy for bargains, but had time and the inclination for loitering, politeness, and sociability. That was in 1870, and I fear that Springfield must have lost some of its old-world simplicity and leisureliness since then. I regret that I have never been in it since, though I have pa.s.sed through it hundreds of times.

The office of the Republican was in keeping with its environment, an edifice of stone or brick not more than three or four stories high, neat, uncrowded, and quiet; very different from the newspaper offices of Park Row, with their hustle, litter, dust, and noise. I met no one on my way upstairs to the editorial rooms, and quaked at the oppressive solemnity and detachment of it. I wondered if people were observing me from the street and thought how much impressed they would be if they divined the importance of the person they were looking at, possibly another Tom Tower. The vanity of youth is in the same measure as its valour; withdraw one, and the other droops.

"Now," said Mr. Bowles sharply, after a brusque greeting, "we'll see what you can do."

I was dubious of him in that first encounter. He was crisp and quick in manner, clear-skinned, very spruce, and clear-eyed; his eyes appraised you in a glance.

"Take that and see how short you can make it."

He handed me a column from one of the "exchanges," as the copies of other papers are called. I spent half an hour at it, striking out repet.i.tions and superfluous adjectives and knitting long sentences into brief ones. Condensation is a fine thing, as Charles Reade once said, and to know how to condense judiciously, to get all the juice, without any of the rind or pulp, is as important to the journalist as a knowledge of anatomy to the figure painter.

I went over it a second time before I handed it back to him as the best I could do. I had plucked the fatted column to a lean quarter of that length, yet I trembled and sweated.

"Bah!" he cried, scoring it with a pencil, which sped as dexterously as a surgeon's knife. "Read it now. Have I omitted anything essential?"

He had not; only the verbiage had gone. All that was worthy of preservation remained in what the printer calls a "stickful." That was my first lesson in journalism.

HELEN ADAMS KELLER

(1880-____)

HOW SHE LEARNED TO SPEAK

When nineteen months old Helen Keller was stricken with an illness which robbed her of both sight and hearing. The infant that is blind and deaf is of course dumb also, for being unable to see or hear the speech of others, the child cannot learn to imitate it.

Despite her enormous handicaps, Miss Keller to-day is a college graduate, a public speaker, and the author of several charming books.

It need scarcely be explained that this miracle was not wrought by self-help alone. But if she had not striven with all her might to respond to the efforts of her devoted teacher, Miss Keller would not to-day be mistress of the unusual talent for literary expression which makes her contributions sure of a welcome in the columns of the leading magazines.

From "The Story of My Life," by Helen Keller. Published by Doubleday, Page & Co.

The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me. I am filled with wonder when I consider the immeasurable contrast between the two lives which it connects. It was the third of March; 1887, three months before I was seven years old.

On the afternoon of that eventful day I stood on the porch, dumb, expectant. I guessed vaguely from my mother's signs and from the hurrying to and fro in the house that something unusual was about to happen, so I went to the door and waited on the steps. The afternoon sun penetrated the ma.s.s of honeysuckle that covered the porch, and fell on my upturned face. My fingers lingered almost unconsciously on the familiar leaves and blossoms which had just come forth to greet the sweet southern spring. I did not know what the future held of marvel or surprise for me. Anger and bitterness had preyed upon me continually for weeks, and a deep languor had succeeded this pa.s.sionate struggle.

Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the sh.o.r.e with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compa.s.s or sounding-line, and had no way of knowing how near the harbour was. "Light! give me light!" was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.

I felt approaching footsteps. I stretched out my hand as I supposed to my mother. Some one took it, and I was caught up and held close in the arms of her who had come to reveal all things to me, and, more than all things else, to love me.