And that was the manner in which John Hartley left the services of the United News Bureau for all time.
So avid of these earthly crumbs of praise, Behold, how in her need, From door to door of fame she crawls and prays One crust to glut her greed.
Upward through illusion and onward through error, that is life.--"The Silver Poppy."
Hartley was in a dilemma. He counted his money with some trepidation, and found that he possessed, all told, just four dollars and ninety cents, one dollar of which was to go for a month's rent of his typewriter. Seldom before had such things troubled him. If they were not, he felt that they ought to be, the mere accidents, the immaterial phases, of life.
Placing the little pile of money out before him on his worn old work-table, he realized, as he gazed down at it, that it made a very low wall between him and starvation.
Yet he did not altogether regret his breaking away from the United News Bureau. He had never nursed much love for that Grub Street of the New World. He had always realized, too, that journalism in any form could hold out no great hopes for him. He had not the news instinct, that great gift which to an editor, he had learned, only too amply covered the multitudinous sins of illiteracy. Nor had he that patience of spirit which would permit of his ever becoming a humble laborer with the pen of the "pot-boiler."
He recalled to his mind poor old Sissons, who so often had drifted into the bureau office--who for years had written his four books a season, under contract, for his paltry one hundred and forty dollars a volume. Sissons? Sissons? Who was Sissons? The name had not gone ringing down the avenues of fame, and yet few men in New York had written so much, none so laboriously.
In his dilemma Hartley remembered that he had once before earned three dollars a week as a super-numerary in one of the upper Broadway theaters. If the worst came to the worst, he could go back and be a "super"--it would be the refinement of cruelty, he thought, to be cast for a "thinking part" in one of the drawing-room scenes in Cordelia Vaughan's forth-coming comedy. He decided, in the end, though, that he would prefer unloading freight on the East River wharves. Many a day he had watched those ruddy wharf laborers, half enviously; and their lot, to him, had seemed incomparably happier than that of the pale shadows who shambled weakly about the broken old desks of the United News Bureau. And since the day Stevenson's old lodging-house had been pointed out to him he had felt a warmer feeling for both that ragged river front and for that vanished velvet-jacketed vagabond and dreamer of great dreams. Only--there was the inevitable "only"--only if he had never had that intoxicating first taste of another life.