“He’s sober,” said Kittredge when he was out of hearing, “so his story is pretty sure to be the talk of Park Row tomorrow.”
Howard was astonished at the cheerful, businesslike point of view of these two educated and apparently civilised young men as to the tragedies of life. He had shuddered at Kittredge’s story of the man squeezed to death by the snake. Sewell’s story, so graphically outlined, filled him with horror, made it a struggle for him to conceal his feelings.
“I suppose you must see a lot of frightful things,” he suggested.
“That’s our business. You soon get used to it, just as a doctor does. You learn to look at life from the purely professional standpoint. Of course you must feel in order to write. But you must not feel so keenly that you can’t write. You have to remember always that you’re not there to cheer or sympathise or have emotions, but only to report, to record. You tell what your eyes see. You’ll soon get so that you can and will make good stories out of your own calamaties.”
“Is that a portrait of the editor?” asked Howard, pointing to a grimed oil-painting, the only relief to the stretch of cracked and streaked white wall except a few ragged maps.
“That--oh, that is old man Stone--the ‘great condenser.’ He’s there for a double purpose, as an example of what a journalist should be and as a warning of what a journalist comes to. After twenty years of fine work at crowding more news in good English into one column than any other editor could get in bad English into four columns, he was discharged for drunkenness. Soon afterwards he walked off the end of a dock one night in a fog. At least it was said that there was a fog and that he was drunk. I have my doubts.”
“Cheerful! I have not been in the profession an hour but I have already learned something very valuable.”
“What’s that?” asked Kittredge, “that it’s a good profession to get out of?”
“No. But that bad habits will not help a man to a career in journalism any more than in any other profession.”
“Career?” smiled Kittredge, resenting Howard’s good-humoured irony and putting on a supercilious look that brought out more strongly the insignificance of his face. “Journalism is not a career. It is either a school or a cemetery. A man may use it as a stepping-stone to something else. But if he sticks to it, he finds himself an old man, dead and done for to all intents and purposes years before he’s buried.”