Part 11 (1/2)

”Yes, I saw it in your articles--a certain pessimism and despondency.

You show your feelings plainly, young man. It is an excellent quality--but dangerous. A man ought to make his mind a machine working evenly without regard to his feelings or physical condition. The night my oldest child died--I was editor of a country newspaper--I wrote my leaders as usual. I never had written better. You can be absolute master inside, if you will. You can learn to use your feelings when they're helpful and to shut them off when they hinder.”

”But don't you think that temperament----”

”Temperament--that's one of the subtlest forms of self-excuse. However, the place is yours. The salary is a hundred and twenty-five a week--an advance of about twelve hundred a year, I believe, on your average downstairs. Can you begin soon?”

”Immediately,” said Howard, ”if the City Editor is satisfied.”

An office boy showed him to his room--a mere hole-in-the-wall with just s.p.a.ce for a table-desk, a small table, a case of shelves for books of reference, and two chairs. The one window overlooked the lower end of Manhattan Island--the forest of business buildings peaked with the t.i.tan-tenements of financial New York. Their big, white plumes of smoke and steam were waving in the wind and reflecting in pale pink the crimson of the setting sun.

Howard had his first taste of the intoxication of triumph, his first deep inspiration of ambition. He recalled his arrival in New York, his timidity, his dread lest he should be unable to make a living--”Poor boy,” they used to say at home, ”he will have to be supported. He is too much of a dreamer.” He remembered his explorations of those now familiar streets--how acutely conscious he had been that they were paved with stone, walled with stone, roofed with a stony sky, peopled with faces and hearts of stone. How miserably insignificant he had felt!

And all these years he had been almost content to be one of the crowd, like them exerting himself barely enough to provide himself with the essentials of existence. Like them, he had given no real thought to the morrow. And now, with comparatively little labour, he had put himself in the way to become a master, a director of the enormous concentrated energies summed up in the magic word New York.

The key to the situation was--work, incessant, self-improving, self-developing. ”And it is the key to happiness also,” he thought.

”Work and sleep--the two periods of unconsciousness of self--are the two periods of happiness.”

His aloofness freed him from the temptations of distraction. He knew no women. He did not put himself in the way of meeting them. He kept away from theatres. He sunk himself in a routine of labour which, viewed from the outside, seemed dull and monotonous. Viewed from his stand-point of acquisition, of achievement, it was just the reverse.

The mind soon adapts itself to and enjoys any mental routine which exercises it. The only difficulty is in forming the habit of the routine.

Howard was greatly helped by his natural bent toward editorial writing.

The idea of discussing important questions each day with a vast mult.i.tude as an audience stirred his imagination and aroused his instincts for helping on the great world-task of elevating the race.

This enthusiasm pleased and also amused his cynical chief.

”You believe in things?” Malcolm said to him after they had become well acquainted. ”Well, it is an admirable quality--but dangerous. You will need careful editing. Your best plan is to give yourself up to your belief while you are writing--then to edit yourself in cold blood.

That is the secret of success, of great success in any line, business, politics, a profession--enthusiasm, carefully revised and edited.”

”It is difficult to be cold blooded when one is in earnest.”

”True,” Malcolm answered, ”and there is the danger. My own enthusiasms are confined to the important things--food, clothing and shelter. It seems to me that the rest is largely a matter of taste, training and time of life. But don't let me discourage you. I only suggest that you may have to guard against believing so intensely that you produce the impression of being an impracticable, a fanatic. Be cautious always; be especially cautious when you are c.o.c.ksure you're right. Unadulterated truth always arouses suspicion in the unaccustomed public. It has the alarming tastelessness of distilled water.”

Howard was acute enough to separate the wisdom from the cynicism of his chief. He saw the lesson of moderation. ”You have failed, my very able chief,” he said to himself, ”because you have never believed intensely enough to move you to act. You have attached too much importance to the adulteration--the folly and the humbug. And here you are, still only a critic, destructive but never constructive.”

At first his a.s.sociates were much amused by his intensity. But as he learned to temper and train his enthusiasm they grew to respect both his ability and his character. Before a year had pa.s.sed they were feeling the influence of his force--his trained, informed mind, made vigorous by principles and ideals.

Malcolm had the keen appreciation of a broad mind for this honest, intelligent energy. He used the editorial ”blue-pencil” for alteration and condensation with the hand of a master. He cut away Howard's crudities, toned down and so increased his intensity, and pointed it with the irony and satire necessary to make it carry far and penetrate easily.

Malcolm was at once giving Howard a reputation greater than he deserved and training him to deserve it.

In the office next to Howard's sat Segur, a bachelor of forty-five who took life as a good-humoured jest and amused his leisure with the New Yorkers who devote a life of idleness to a nervous flight from boredom.

Howard interested Segur who resolved to try to draw him out of his seclusion.

”I'm having some people to dinner at the Waldorf on Thursday,” he said, looking in at the door. ”Won't you join us?”