Banneker's induction into journalism was unimpressive. They gave him a desk, an outfit of writing materials, a mail-box with his name on it, and eventually an assignment. Mr. Mallory presented him to several of the other "cubs" and two or three of the older and more important reporters. They were all quite amiable, obviously willing to be helpful, and they impressed the observant neophyte with that quiet and solid _esprit de corps_ which is based upon respect for work well performed in a common cause. He apprehended that The Ledger office was in some sort an institution.
None of his new acquaintances volunteered information as to the mechanism of his new job. Apparently he was expected to figure that out for himself. By nature reticent, and trained in an environment which still retained enough of frontier etiquette to make a scrupulous incuriosity the touchstone of good manners and perhaps the essence of self-preservation, Banneker asked no questions. He sat and waited.
One by one the other reporters were summoned by name to the city desk, and dispatched with a few brief words upon the various items of the news. Presently Banneker found himself alone, in the long files of desks. For an hour he sat there and for a second hour. It seemed a curious way in which to be earning fifteen dollars a week. He wondered whether he was expected to sit tight at his desk. Or had he the freedom of the office? Characteristically choosing the more active assumption, he found his way to the current newspaper files. They were like old friends.
"Mr. Banneker." An office boy was at his elbow. "Mr. Greenough wants you."
Conscious of a quickened pulse, and annoyed at himself because of it, the tyro advanced to receive his maiden assignment. The epochal event was embodied in the form of a small clipping from an evening paper, stating that a six-year-old boy had been fatally burned at a bonfire near the North River. Banneker, Mr. Greenough instructed him mildly, was to make inquiries of the police, of the boy's family, of the hospital, and of such witnesses as he could find.
Quick with interest he caught up his hat and hurried out. Death, in the sparsely populated country wherefrom he hailed, was a matter of inclusive local importance; he assumed the same of New York. Three intense hours he devoted to an item which any police reporter of six months' standing would have rounded up in a brace of formal inquiries, and hastened back, brimful of details for Mr. Greenough.
"Good! Good!" interpolated that blandly approving gentleman from time to time in the course of the narrative. "Write it, Mr. Banneker! write it."
"How much shall I write?"
"Just what is necessary to tell the news."
Behind the amiable smile which broadened without lighting up the sub-Mongol physiognomy of the city editor, Banneker suspected something. As he sat writing page after page, conscientiously setting forth every germane fact, the recollection of that speculative, estimating smile began to play over the sentences with a dire and blighting beam. Three fourths of the way through, the writer rose, went to the file-board and ran through a dozen newspapers. He was seeking a ratio, a perspective. He wished to determine how much, in a news sense, the death of the son of an obscure East-Side plasterer was worth. On his return he tore up all that he had written, and substituted a curt paragraph, without character or color, which he turned in. He had gauged the value of the tragedy accurately, in the light of his study of news files.
Greenough showed the paragraph (which failed to appear at all in the overcrowded paper of next morning) to Mr. Gordon.
"The new man doesn't start well," he remarked. "Too little imaginative interest."
"Isn't it knowledge rather than lack of interest?" suggested the managing editor.
"It may come to the same thing. If he knows too much to get really interested, he'll be a dull reporter."
"I doubt whether you'll find him dull," smiled Mr. Gordon. "But he may find his job dull. In that case, of course he'd better find another."
Indeed, that was the danger which, for weeks to follow, Banneker skirted. Police news, petty and formal, made up his day's work. Had he sought beneath the surface of it the underlying elements, and striven to express these, his matter as it came to the desk, however slight the technical news value might have been, would have afforded the watchful copy-readers, trained to that special selectiveness as only The Ledger could train its men, opportunity of judging what potentialities might lurk beneath the crudities of the "cub." But Banneker was not crude. He was careful. His sense of the relative importance of news, acquired by those weeks of intensive analysis before applying for his job, was too just to let him give free play to his pen. What was the use? The "story" wasn't worth the space.
Nevertheless, 3 T 9901, which Banneker was already too cognoscent to employ in his formal newsgathering (the notebook is anathema to the metropolitan reporter), was filling up with odd bits, which were being transferred, in the weary hours when the new man sat at his desk with nothing to do, to paper in the form of sketches for Miss Westlake's trustful and waiting typewriter. Nobody could say that Banneker was not industrious. Among his fellow reporters he soon acquired the melancholy reputation of one who was forever writing "special stuff," none of which ever "landed." It was chiefly because of his industry and reliability, rather than any fulfillment of the earlier promise of brilliant worth as shown in the Sunday Sphere articles, that he got his first raise to twenty dollars. It surprised rather than gratified him.
He went to Mr. Gordon about it. The managing editor was the kind of man with whom it is easy to talk straight talk.
"What's the matter with me?" asked Banneker.
Mr. Gordon played a thoughtful tattoo upon his fleshy knuckles with the letter-opener. "Nothing. Aren't you satisfied?"
"No. Are you?"
"You've had your raise, and fairly early. Unless you had been worth it, you wouldn't have had it."
"Am I doing what you expected of me?"
"Not exactly. But you're developing into a sure, reliable reporter."
"A routine man," commented Banneker.
"After all, the routine man is the backbone of the office." Mr. Gordon executed a fantasia on his thumb. "Would you care to try a desk job?" he asked, peering at Banneker over his glasses.
"I'd rather run a trolley car. There's more life in it."
"Do you _see_ life, in your work, Mr. Banneker?"
"See it? I feel it. Sometimes I think it's going to flatten me out like a steam-roller."
"Then why not write it?"
"It isn't news: not what I see."
"Perhaps not. Perhaps it's something else. But if it's there and we can get a gleam of it into the paper, we'll crowd news out to make a place for it. You haven't been reading The Ledger I'm afraid."
"Like a Bible."
"Not to good purpose, then. What do you think of Tommy Burt's stuff?"
"It's funny; some of it. But I couldn't do it to save my job."
"Nobody can do it but Burt, himself. Possibly you could learn something from it, though."
"Burt doesn't like it, himself. He told me it was all formula; that you could always get a laugh out of people about something they'd been taught to consider funny, like a red nose or a smashed hat. He's got a list of Sign Posts on the Road to Humor."
"The cynicism of twenty-eight," smiled the tolerant Mr. Gordon. "Don't let yourself be inoculated."
"Mr. Gordon," said Banneker doggedly; "I'm not doing the kind of work I expected to do here."
"You can hardly expect the star jobs until you've made yourself a star man."
Banneker flushed. "I'm not complaining of the way I've been treated. I've had a square enough deal. The trouble is with me. I want to know whether I ought to stick or quit."
"If you quit, what would you do?"
"I haven't a notion," replied the other with an indifference which testified to a superb, instinctive self-confidence. "Something."
"Do it here. I think you'll come along all right."
"But what's wrong with me?" persisted Banneker.
"Too much restraint. A rare fault. You haven't let yourself out." For a space he drummed and mused. Suddenly a knuckle cracked loudly. Mr. Gordon flinched and glared at it, startled as if it had offended him by interrupting a train of thought. "Here!" said he brusquely. "There's a Sewer-Cleaners' Association picnic to-morrow. They're going to put in half their day inspecting the Stimson Tunnel under the North River. Pretty idea; isn't it? Suppose I ask Mr. Greenough to send you out on the story. And I'd like a look at it when you turn it in."
Banneker worked hard on his report of the picnic; hard and self-consciously. Tommy Burt would, he knew, have made a "scream" of it, for tired business men to chuckle over on their way downtown. Pursuant to what he believed Mr. Gordon wanted, Banneker strove conscientiously to be funny with these human moles, who, having twelve hours of freedom for sunshine and air, elected to spend half of it in a hole bigger, deeper, and more oppressive than any to which their noisome job called them. The result was five painfully mangled sheets which presently went to the floor, torn in strips. After that Banneker reported the picnic as he saw, felt, and smelt it. It was a somber bit of writing, not without its subtleties and shrewd perceptions; quite unsuitable to the columns of The Ledger, in which it failed to appear. But Mr. Gordon read it twice. He advised Banneker not to be discouraged.
Banneker was deeply discouraged. He wanted to resign.
Perhaps he would nave resigned, if old Mynderse Verschoyle had not died at eight o'clock on the morning of the day when Banneker was the earliest man to report at the office. A picturesque character, old Mynderse, who had lived for forty-five years with his childless wife in the ancient house on West 10th Street, and for the final fifteen years had not addressed so much as a word to her. She had died three months before; and now he had followed, apparently, from what Banneker learned in an interview with the upset and therefore voluble secretary of the dead man, because, having no hat............