Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 95.djvu/215

Rh land town. I persuaded myself that life in a great city, where I might come into close contact with the great, pulsating mass of humanity, would be of more use tome. It is always easy to decide in favor of what we prefer to do. And so I came to the city. Once here, I must live. The occasional check for two, ten, twenty-five dollars is not half as punctual as the landlady’s rent bill or the insistence of a healthy appetite. I was no Keats. I was not minded to emulate Chatterton. I met a comfortable, optimistic, well-fed woman who did regular work on a newspaper. I determined to try for a position, not as a permanency, but as a stepping-stone.

Now a stepping-stone is right enough in its place, if one does not linger on it until the desire to go farther has died. I applied for a position on four metropolitan papers, and by each managing editor was well received (one of them going so far as to put on his coat when he saw me). Each one wrote my name and address in a small book, saying he would send for me when he needed me. Fortunately I sat where I could see into the first of these books. There were three pages of similar names and addresses; or, to be exact, of addresses of women with similar ambitions, all of whom had, doubtless, been told the same thing,—that they would be sent for when they were needed. “Doubtless some of them are waiting still, although that was twenty years ago. But the glimpse into that book proved that I had the sort of sense that is necessary to success. I did not wait to be sent for. I went forth and applied to all the managing editors I could reach, and not being set at regular work with the alacrity which I had hoped to see displayed, I set myself at work. I hunted up lectures and concerts that were not scheduled on the city editor’s lists. I reported Shakespeare lectures by noted professors before their regular classes. I began to depend on my “nose for news,” and brought in short, readable accounts of happenings in places where the regular reporters were not sent. They were used, and I was paid “space rates,”—and little enough they amounted to. After a time I was sent for and a new managing editor engaged me at the munificent salary of fifteen dollars a week to edit the “woman’s page,” which meant contributing five columns to every Sunday edition of the paper. I took the place in delight, filled it three weeks, and then was told that the new editor had left, and that another woman had my position. I saw the successor of my editor, and he was exceedingly polite; but he regretted that he could not employ two of us, and as the other woman was poor he felt obliged to let her keep the position she needed more than I seemed to. I could not tell him that I had nothing but the clothes I wore, and that beyond the paltry fifteen dollars I knew not how I should live. I have always believed in the gospel of clothes. If a woman goes to seek employment in well-fitting, tasteful, “lady-like”’ attire, she will usually get what she wants far more quickly and surely than if she is shabby; but in this case my respectable clothes were my undoing. The other woman wore cheap satins, frayed around the bindings; I wore plain, well-made cloth. And she got the work because she was in apparent need. I went home, wept a few tears in private, and went at my writing again. I got a position as eastern correspondent for a western daily. The pay was good (this was years ago when western papers paid for eastern letters), and I was happy again, but the wild and woolly editor wanted to marry me, without the preliminaries of meeting, and that cut short my usefulness on his paper.

But I was a good reporter, and soon found work enough on the daily papers at space rates to take care of myself. Some weeks I earned from fifty to eighty dollars; oftener I did not earn ten. I have attended an all-day convention, and worked far into the night, writing reports for messenger boys to take in sections “red hot”? to the presses, so that the first part of the article would be in type before the