Dawn O'Hara: The Girl Who Laughed Read online

  CHAPTER VII. BLACKIE'S PHILOSOPHY

  I did not write Norah about Von Gerhard. After all, I told myself, therewas nothing to write. And so I was the first to break the solemn pactthat we had made.

  "You will write everything, won't you, Dawn dear?" Norah had pleaded,with tears in her pretty eyes. "Promise me. We've been nearer to eachother in these last few months than we have been since we were girls.And I've loved it so. Please don't do as you did during those miserableyears in New York, when you were fighting your troubles alone and weknew nothing of it. You wrote only the happy things. Promise me you'llwrite the unhappy ones too--though the saints forbid that there shouldbe any to write! And Dawn, don't you dare to forget your heavy underwearin November. Those lake breezes!--Well, some one has to tell you, and Ican't leave those to Von Gerhard. He has promised to act as monitor overyour health."

  And so I promised. I crammed my letters with descriptions of the Knapfhousehold. I assured her that I was putting on so much weight that theskirts which formerly hung about me in limp, dejected folds now refusedto meet in the back, and all the hooks and eyes were making faces ateach other. My cheeks, I told her, looked as if I were wearing plumpers,and I was beginning to waddle and puff as I walked.

  Norah made frantic answer:

  "For mercy's sake child, be careful or you'll be FAT!"

  To which I replied: "Don't care if I am. Rather be hunky and healthythan skinny and sick. Have tried both."

  It is impossible to avoid becoming round-cheeked when one is working ona paper that allows one to shut one's desk and amble comfortably homefor dinner at least five days in the week. Everybody is at least plumpin this comfortable, gemutlich town, where everybody placidly locks hisshop or office and goes home at noon to dine heavily on soup and meatand vegetables and pudding, washed down by the inevitable beer andfollowed by forty winks on the dining room sofa with the German Zeitungspread comfortably over the head as protection against the flies.

  There is a fascination about the bright little city. There is about itsomething quaint and foreign, as though a cross-section of the old worldhad been dumped bodily into the lap of Wisconsin. It does not seem atall strange to hear German spoken everywhere--in the streets, in theshops, in the theaters, in the street cars. One day I chanced upon asign hung above the doorway of a little German bakery over on the northside. There were Hornchen and Kaffeekuchen in the windows, and a broodof flaxen-haired and sticky children in the back of the shop. I stopped,open-mouthed, to stare at the worn sign tacked over the door.

  "Hier wird Englisch gesprochen," it announced.

  I blinked. Then I read it again. I shut my eyes, and opened them againsuddenly. The fat German letters spoke their message as before--"Englishspoken here."

  On reaching the office I told Norberg, the city editor, about myfind. He was not impressed. Norberg never is impressed. He is the mostsoul-satisfying and theatrical city editor that I have ever met. Heis fat, and unbelievably nimble, and keen-eyed, and untiring. He says,"Hell!" when things go wrong; he smokes innumerable cigarettes, inhalingthe fumes and sending out the thin wraith of smoke with little explosivesounds between tongue and lips; he wears blue shirts, and no collar tospeak of, and his trousers are kept in place only by a miracle and aninefficient looking leather belt.

  When he refused to see the story in the little German bakery sign Ibegan to argue.

  "But man alive, this is America! I think I know a story when I see it.Suppose you were traveling in Germany, and should come across a signover a shop, saying: 'Hier wird Deutsch gesprochen.' Wouldn't you thinkyou were dreaming?"

  Norberg waved an explanatory hand. "This isn't America. This isMilwaukee. After you've lived here a year or so you'll understand whatI mean. If we should run a story of that sign, with a two-column cut,Milwaukee wouldn't even see the joke."

  But it was not necessary that I live in Milwaukee a year or so in orderto understand its peculiarities, for I had a personal conductor andefficient guide in the new friend that had come into my life with thefirst day of my work on the Post. Surely no woman ever had a strongerfriend than little "Blackie" Griffith, sporting editor of the MilwaukeePost. We became friends, not step by step, but in one gigantic leap suchas sometimes triumphs over the gap between acquaintance and liking.

  I never shall forget my first glimpse of him. He strolled into the cityroom from his little domicile across the hall. A shabby, disreputable,out-at-elbows office coat was worn over his ultra-smart street clothes,and he was puffing at a freakish little pipe in the shape of a miniatureautomobile. He eyed me a moment from the doorway, a fantastic, elfinlittle figure. I thought that I had never seen so strange and so ugly aface as that of this little brown Welshman with his lank, black hair andhis deep-set, uncanny black eyes. Suddenly he trotted over to me witha quick little step. In the doorway he had looked forty. Now a smileillumined the many lines of his dark countenance, and in some miraculousway he looked twenty.

  "Are you the New York importation?" he, asked, his great black eyessearching my face.

  "I'm what's left of it," I replied, meekly.

  "I understand you've been in for repairs. Must of met up with somethin'on the road. They say the goin' is full of bumps in N' York."

  "Bumps!" I laughed, "it's uphill every bit of the road, and yet you'vegot to go full speed to get anywhere. But I'm running easily again,thank you."

  He waved away a cloud of pipe-smoke, and knowingly squinted through thehaze. "We don't speed up much here. And they ain't no hill climbin' t'speak of. But say, if you ever should hit a nasty place on the route,toot your siren for me and I'll come. I'm a regular little human garagewhen it comes to patchin' up those aggravatin' screws that need oilin'.And, say, don't let Norberg bully you. My name's Blackie. I'm goin' t'like you. Come on over t' my sanctum once in a while and I'll show youmy scrapbook and let you play with the office revolver."

  And so it happened that I had not been in Milwaukee a month beforeBlackie and I were friends.

  Norah was horrified. My letters were full of him. I told her that shemight get a more complete mental picture of him if she knew that hewore the pinkest shirts, and the purplest neckties, and the blackest andwhitest of black-and-white checked vests that ever aroused the envyof an office boy, and beneath them all, the gentlest of hearts. Andtherefore one loves him. There is a sort of spell about the illiteratelittle slangy, brown Welshman. He is the presiding genius of the place.The office boys adore him. The Old Man takes his advice in selectinga new motor car; the managing editor arranges his lunch hour to suitBlackie's and they go off to the Press club together, arm in arm. It isBlackie who lends a sympathetic ear to the society editor's tale ofwoe. He hires and fires the office boys; boldly he criticizes thenews editor's makeup; he receives delegations of tan-coated, red-facedprizefighting-looking persons; he gently explains to the photographerwhy that last batch of cuts make their subjects look as if afflictedwith the German measles; he arbitrates any row that the newspaper mayhave with such dignitaries as the mayor or the chief of police; hemanages boxing shows; he skims about in a smart little roadster; heedits the best sporting page in the city; and at four o'clock of anafternoon he likes to send around the corner for a chunk of devil's foodcake with butter filling from the Woman's Exchange. Blackie never wentto school to speak of. He doesn't know was from were. But he can "see"a story quicker, and farther and clearer than any newspaper man I everknew--excepting Peter Orme.

  There is a legend about to the effect that one day the managing editor,who is Scotch and without a sense of humor, ordered that Blackie shouldhenceforth be addressed by his surname of Griffith, as being a moredignified appellation for the use of fellow reporters, hangers-on, copykids, office boys and others about the big building.

  The day after the order was issued the managing editor summoned afreckled youth and thrust a sheaf of galley proofs into his hand.

  "Take those to Mr. Griffith," he ordered without looking up.

  "T' who?"

  "To Mr. Griffith,
" said the managing editor, laboriously, and scowling abit.

  The boy took three unwilling steps toward the door. Then he turned apuzzled face toward the managing editor.

  "Say, honest, I ain't never heard of dat guy. He must be a new one.W'ere'll I find him?"

  "Oh, damn! Take those proofs to Blackie!" roared the managing editor.And thus ended Blackie's enforced flight into the realms of dignity.

  All these things, and more, I wrote to the scandalized Norah. I informedher that he wore more diamond rings and scarf pins and watch fobs than arailroad conductor, and that his checked top-coat shrieked to Heaven.

  There came back a letter in which every third word was underlined, andwhich ended by asking what the morals of such a man could be.

  Then I tried to make Blackie more real to Norah who, in all hersheltered life, had never come in contact with a man like this.

  "... As for his morals--or what you would consider his morals, Sis--theyprobably are a deep crimson; but I'll swear there is no yellow streak.I never have heard anything more pathetic than his story. Blackie soldpapers on a down-town corner when he was a baby six years old. Then hegot a job as office boy here, and he used to sharpen pencils, and runerrands, and carry copy. After office hours he took care of some horsesin an alley barn near by, and after that work was done he was employedabout the pressroom of one of the old German newspaper offices.Sometimes he would be too weary to crawl home after working half thenight, and so he would fall asleep, a worn, tragic little figure, on apile of old papers and sacks in a warm corner near the presses. He wasthe head of a household, and every penny counted. And all the time hewas watching things, and learning. Nothing escaped those keen blackeyes. He used to help the photographer when there was a pile of platesto develop, and presently he knew more about photography than the manhimself. So they made him staff photographer. In some marvelous wayhe knew more ball players, and fighters and horsemen than the sportingeditor. He had a nose for news that was nothing short of wonderful. Henever went out of the office without coming back with a story. They usedto use him in the sporting department when a rush was on. Then he becameone of the sporting staff; then assistant sporting editor; then sportingeditor. He knows this paper from the basement up. He could operate alinotype or act as managing editor with equal ease.

  "No, I'm afraid that Blackie hasn't had much time for morals. But, Norahdear, I wish that you could hear him when he talks about his mother. Hemay follow doubtful paths, and associate with questionable people, andwear restless clothes, but I wouldn't exchange his friendship for thatof a dozen of your ordinary so-called good men. All these years of workand suffering have made an old man of little Blackie, although he isyoung in years. But they haven't spoiled his heart any. He is able todistinguish between sham and truth because he has been obliged to doit ever since he was a child selling papers on the corner. But he stillclings to the office that gave him his start, although he makes moremoney in a single week outside the office than his salary would amountto in half a year. He says that this is a job that does not interferewith his work."

  Such is Blackie. Surely the oddest friend a woman ever had. He possessesa genius for friendship, and a wonderful understanding of suffering,born of those years of hardship and privation. Each learned the other'sstory, bit by bit, in a series of confidences exchanged during thatpeaceful, beatific period that follows just after the last edition hasgone down. Blackie's little cubby-hole of an office is always bluewith smoke, and cluttered with a thousand odds and ends--photographs,souvenirs, boxing-gloves, a litter of pipes and tobacco, a wardrobe ofdust-covered discarded coats and hats, and Blackie in the midst of itall, sunk in the depths of his swivel chair, and looking like an amiablebrown gnome, or a cheerful little joss-house god come to life. There isin him an uncanny wisdom which only the streets can teach. He is oneof those born newspaper men who could not live out of sight of theticker-tape, and the copy-hook and the proof-sheet.

  "Y' see, girl, it's like this here," Blackie explained one day. "W'reall workin' for some good reason. A few of us are workin' for the gloryof it, and most of us are workin' t' eat, and lots of us are pluggin'an' savin' in the hopes that some day we'll have money enough to getback at some people we know; but there is some few workin' for the purelove of the work--and I guess I'm one of them fools. Y' see, I startedin at this game when I was such a little runt that now it's a ingrowinghabit, though it is comfortin' t' know you got a place where you c'nalways come in out of the rain, and where you c'n have your mail sent."

  "This newspaper work is a curse," I remarked. "Show me a clevernewspaper man and I'll show you a failure. There is nothing in it butthe glory--and little of that. We contrive and scheme and run about allday getting a story. And then we write it at fever heat, searching oursouls for words that are cleancut and virile. And then we turn it in,and what is it? What have we to show for our day's work? An ephemeralthing, lacking the first breath of life; a thing that is dead beforeit is born. Why, any cub reporter, if he were to put into some otherprofession the same amount of nerve, and tact, and ingenuity andfinesse, and stick-to-it-iveness that he expends in prying a singlestory out of some unwilling victim, could retire with a fortune in notime."

  Blackie blew down the stem of his pipe, preparatory to re-filling thebowl. There was a quizzical light in his black eyes. The little heap ofburned matches at his elbow was growing to kindling wood proportions. Itwas common knowledge that Blackie's trick of lighting pipe or cigaretteand then forgetting to puff at it caused his bill for matches to exceedhis tobacco expense account.

  "You talk," chuckled Blackie, "like you meant it. But sa-a-ay, girl,it's a lonesome game, this retirin' with a fortune. I've noticed thatthem guys who retire with a barrel of money usually dies at the end ofthe first year, of a kind of a lingerin' homesickness. You c'n seetheir pictures in th' papers, with a pathetic story of how they wasjust beginnin' t' enjoy life when along comes the grim reaper an' claims'em."

  Blackie slid down in his chair and blew a column of smoke ceilingward.

  "I knew a guy once--newspaper man, too--who retired with a fortune.He used to do the city hall for us. Well, he got in soft with the newadministration before election, and made quite a pile in stocks that wastipped off to him by his political friends. His wife was crazy forhim to quit the newspaper game. He done it. An' say, that guy kept ongettin' richer and richer till even his wife was almost satisfied. Butsa-a-ay, girl, was that chap lonesome! One day he come up here lookinglike a dog that's run off with the steak. He was just dyin' for a kindword, an' he sniffed the smell of the ink and the hot metal like it wasJune roses. He kind of wanders over to his old desk and slumps down inthe chair, and tips it back, and puts his feet on the desk, with his hattipped back, and a bum stogie in his mouth. And along came a kid witha bunch of papers wet from the presses and sticks one in his hand,and--well, girl, that fellow, he just wriggled he was so happy. You knowas well as I do that every man on a morning paper spends his day offhanging around the office wishin' that a mob or a fire or somethin' bigwould tear lose so he could get back into the game. I guess I told youabout the time Von Gerhard sent me abroad, didn't I?"

  "Von Gerhard!" I repeated, startled. "Do you know him?"

  "Well, he ain't braggin' about it none," Blackie admitted. "Von Gerhard,he told me I had about five years or so t' live, about two, three yearsago. He don't approve of me. Pried into my private life, old Von Gerharddid, somethin' scand'lous. I had sort of went to pieces about that time,and I went t' him to be patched up. He thumps me fore 'an' aft, firinga volley of questions, lookin' up the roof of m' mouth, and squintin'at m' finger nails an' teeth like I was a prize horse for sale. Then hesits still, lookin' at me for about half a minute, till I begin t' feeluncomfortable. Then he says, slow: 'Young man, how old are you?'

  "'O, twenty-eight or so,' I says, airy.

  "'My Gawd!' said he. 'You've crammed twice those years into your life,and you'll have to pay for it. Now you listen t' me. You got t' quitworkin', an' smokin', and g
et away from this. Take a ocean voyage,' hesays, 'an' try to get four hours sleep a night, anyway.'

  "Well say, mother she was scared green. So I tucked her under m' arm,and we hit it up across the ocean. Went t' Germany, knowin' that itwould feel homelike there, an' we took in all the swell baden, andchased up the Jungfrau--sa-a-ay, that's a classy little mountain, thatJungfrau. Mother, she had some swell time I guess. She never set downexcept for meals, and she wrote picture postals like mad. But sa-a-ay,girl, was I lonesome! Maybe that trip done me good. Anyway, I'm livin'yet. I stuck it out for four months, an' that ain't so rotten for a guywho just grew up on printer's ink ever since he was old enough to holda bunch of papers under his arm. Well, one day mother an' me was sittin'out on one of them veranda cafes they run to over there, w'en somebodyhits me a crack on the shoulder, an' there stands old Ryan who usedt' do A. P. here. He was foreign correspondent for some big New Yorksyndicate papers over there.

  "'Well if it ain't Blackie!' he says. 'What in Sam Hill are you doingout of your own cell when Milwaukee's just got four more games t' winthe pennant?'

  "Sa-a-a-ay, girl, w'en I got through huggin' him around the neck an'buyin' him drinks I knew it was me for the big ship. 'Mother,' I says,'if you got anybody on your mind that you neglected t' send picturepostals to, now's' your last chance. 'F I got to die I'm going out withm' scissors in one mitt, and m' trusty paste-pot by m' side!' An' wehits it up for old Milwaukee. I ain't been away since, except w'en Iwas out with the ball team, sending in sportin' extry dope for the pinksheet. The last time I was in at Baumbach's in comes Von Gerhard an'--"

  "Who are Baumbach's?" I interrupted.

  Blackie regarded me pityingly. "You ain't never been to Baumbach's?Why girl, if you don't know Baumbach's, you ain't never been properlyintroduced to Milwaukee. No wonder you ain't hep to the ways of thislittle community. There ain't what the s'ciety editor would call theproper ontong cordyal between you and the natives if you haven't hadcoffee at Baumbach's. It ain't hardly legal t' live in Milwaukee allthis time without ever having been inside of B--"

  "Stop! If you do not tell me at once just where this wonderful placemay be found, and what one does when one finds it, and how I happened tomiss it, and why it is so necessary to the proper understanding of thecity--"

  "I'll tell you what I'll do," said Blackie, grinning, "I'll romp youover there to-morrow afternoon at four o'clock. Ach Himmel! What willthat for a grand time be, no?"

  "Blackie, you're a dear to be so polite to an old married cratur' likeme. Did you notice--that is, does Ernst von Gerhard drop in often atBaumbach's?"