Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 95.djvu/217

Rh men, and that I could not provide against the proverbial rainy day from any salaries I might earn. I started my paper, worked like a slave for seven years on it. I wrote articles, editorials, read manuscripts and books, kept up an enormous correspondence, solicited most of my advertisements, and went to the printing office every issue to attend personally to the details of “make-up” and proofreading. No day laborer ever worked as I did, for there is an end to his hours. I worked from the time I crawled out of bed in the morning until I crept in again in the wee, sma’ hours next morning. Then I had an opportunity to sell out, and did so, at half the figures any man in my place would have got. But at least I am better off than if I had stuck to newspaper work for somebody else.

Better off? How? Financially, only. Otherwise, I had been far better off today had I stayed in my little country town and worked faithfully and carefully at writing things less ephemeral. I am worn out. My brain is fagged. When I walk along a country road to-day, I see no visions. The babbling brooks, the singing birds, the soft west wind, the blue skies above, have no great messages for me. My head aches. I cannot exert my mental faculties to evolve a second set of rhymes, even when the first comes involuntarily. There is no more poetry left in me. I dropped it somewhere in those dusty, musty newspaper offices when I went home after midnight. I did not miss it then, I was too dead tired; but to-day I know where I left all my capabilities for beautiful, poetic fancies. I try to write stories, remembering the great novel which was the early dream of my life. But the blue pencil habit has killed all ability to do fine writing. Condensation is valuable in a newspaper; in a novel it does not help to adorn the page nor point a moral. Human nature is no longer interesting to me; how can I make it so to others? I have seen too much of it. I used to know a man journalist who said, “The newspaper will use you as long as there is any freshness in you; then it will throw you aside like a squeezed lemon.” I am a squeezed lemon.

“But you have had your day,” says the younger woman. “Why grumble now?” Because it was not the day I wanted, and I only meant to make it the stepping-stone to something better. I did not want to be a newspaper woman and nothing more; and now that I have leisure for something more, I find my mental faculties, instead of being sharpened for further use, dulled. I have done desultory work so long I cannot take up anything more thorough. I have been a “hack” too many years. I cannot be a race horse now.

There is a moral to my tale of woe. Let the young woman who has ambitions of a literary nature shun the newspaper office as she would any other hurtful thing. I know women who are content to be reporters to the end of the chapter. But they never cared to write poems. They never glowed with imaginary triumphs. They are content with whatever work falls to their hands, so long as their daily bread and butter is assured. But there is an ever increasing army of young women coming on from colleges and schools, who have in them the ambition to do more than make a living. Let them not waste time and talent on the newspaper. The first thing they will learn is that the newspaper office is not a drawing-room. Men will treat them as they would another man,—or the office boy. They will not take the trouble to remove their pipes because a woman happens to sit in the same room with them; they will not wear coats, nor remove their feet from the table. They may even throw “spit-balls” at her. But if she would be popular with the “boys” she must take all this as a matter of course. She will be met everywhere by the argument that if she goes into men’s offices to do men’s work, she must take men as they are in actual life, not as they appear in drawing-rooms. The sensible woman who can take this philosophically, without becoming herself “one of the boys,” will find that VOL. 95— NO. 2