________________________________________________
_ I did not write Norah about Von Gerhard. After all, I
told myself, there was nothing to write. And so I was
the first to break the solemn pact that 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 each other 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 miserable years in New York, when you were fighting
your troubles alone and we knew nothing of it. You wrote
only the happy things. Promise me you'll write the
unhappy ones too--though the saints forbid that there
should be any to write! And Dawn, don't you dare to
forget your heavy underwear in November. Those lake
breezes!--Well, some one has to tell you, and I can't
leave those to Von Gerhard. He has promised to act as
monitor over your health."
And so I promised. I crammed my letters with
descriptions of the Knapf household. I assured her that
I was putting on so much weight that the skirts which
formerly hung about me in limp, dejected folds now
refused to meet in the back, and all the hooks and eyes
were making faces at each 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 healthy than skinny and sick. Have tried
both."
It is impossible to avoid becoming round-cheeked when
one is working on a paper that allows one to shut one's
desk and amble comfortably home for dinner at least five
days in the week. Everybody is at least plump in this
comfortable, gemutlich town, where everybody placidly
locks his shop or office and goes home at noon to dine
heavily on soup and meat and vegetables and pudding,
washed down by the inevitable beer and followed by forty
winks on the dining room sofa with the German Zeitung
spread comfortably over the head as protection against
the flies.
There is a fascination about the bright little city.
There is about it something quaint and foreign, as though
a cross-section of the old world had been dumped bodily
into the lap of Wisconsin. It does not seem at all
strange to hear German spoken everywhere--in the streets,
in the shops, in the theaters, in the street cars. One
day I chanced upon a sign hung above the doorway of a
little German bakery over on the north side. There were
Hornchen and Kaffeekuchen in the windows, and a brood of
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 again suddenly. The fat German letters
spoke their message as before--"English spoken here."
On reaching the office I told Norberg, the city
editor, about my find. He was not impressed. Norberg
never is impressed. He is the most soul-satisfying and
theatrical city editor that I have ever met. He is fat,
and unbelievably nimble, and keen-eyed, and untiring. He
says, "Hell!" when things go wrong; he smokes innumerable
cigarettes, inhaling the fumes and sending out the thin
wraith of smoke with little explosive sounds between
tongue and lips; he wears blue shirts, and no collar to
speak of, and his trousers are kept in place only by a
miracle and an inefficient looking leather belt.
When he refused to see the story in the little German
bakery sign I began 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 sign over a shop,
saying: `Hier wird Deutsch gesprochen.' Wouldn't you
think you were dreaming?"
Norberg waved an explanatory hand. "This isn't
America. This is Milwaukee. After you've lived here a
year or so you'll understand what I 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 order to understand its peculiarities, for
I had a personal conductor and efficient guide in the new
friend that had come into my life with the first day of
my work on the Post. Surely no woman ever had a stronger
friend than little "Blackie" Griffith, sporting editor of
the Milwaukee Post. We became friends, not step by
step, but in one gigantic leap such as sometimes triumphs
over the gap between acquaintance and liking.
I never shall forget my first glimpse of him. He
strolled into the city room 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 miniature automobile. He eyed me a moment from the
doorway, a fantastic, elfin little figure. I thought
that I had never seen so strange and so ugly a face as
that of this little brown Welshman with his lank, black
hair and his deep-set, uncanny black eyes. Suddenly he
trotted over to me with a quick little step. In the
doorway he had looked forty. Now a smile illumined the
many lines of his dark countenance, and in some
miraculous way he looked twenty.
"Are you the New York importation?" he, asked, his
great black eyes searching 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've got 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 the haze. "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
garage when 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
you my scrapbook and let you play with the office
revolver."
And so it happened that I had not been in Milwaukee
a month before Blackie and I were friends.
Norah was horrified. My letters were full of him.
I told her that she might get a more complete mental
picture of him if she knew that he wore the pinkest
shirts, and the purplest neckties, and the blackest and
whitest of black-and-white checked vests that ever
aroused the envy of an office boy, and beneath them all,
the gentlest of hearts. And therefore one loves him.
There is a sort of spell about the illiterate little
slangy, brown Welshman. He is the presiding genius of
the place. The office boys adore him. The Old Man
takes his advice in selecting a new motor car; the
managing editor arranges his lunch hour to suit Blackie's
and they go off to the Press club together, arm in arm.
It is Blackie who lends a sympathetic ear to the society
editor's tale of woe. He hires and fires the office boys;
boldly he criticizes the news editor's makeup; he receives
delegations of tan-coated, red-faced prizefighting-looking
persons; he gently explains to the photographer why that
last batch of cuts make their subjects look as if afflicted
with the German measles; he arbitrates any row that the
newspaper may have with such dignitaries as the mayor or the
chief of police; he manages boxing shows; he skims about in a
smart little roadster; he edits the best sporting page in
the city; and at four o'clock of an afternoon he likes to
send around the corner for a chunk of devil's food cake
with butter filling from the Woman's Exchange. Blackie
never went to 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 ever knew--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 should henceforth be
addressed by his surname of Griffith, as being a more
dignified appellation for the use of fellow reporters,
hangers-on, copy kids, office boys and others about the
big building.
The day after the order was issued the managing
editor summoned a freckled 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 a bit.
The boy took three unwilling steps toward the door.
Then he turned a puzzled 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 informed her that he wore more
diamond rings and scarf pins and watch fobs than a
railroad conductor, and that his checked top-coat
shrieked to Heaven.
There came back a letter in which every third word
was underlined, and which 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 her sheltered life, had never come in contact with
a man like this.
" . . . As for his morals--or what you would consider
his morals, Sis--they probably are a deep crimson; but
I'll swear there is no yellow streak. I never have heard
anything more pathetic than his story. Blackie sold
papers on a down-town corner when he was a baby six years
old. Then he got a job as office boy here, and he used
to sharpen pencils, and run errands, and carry copy.
After office hours he took care of some horses in an
alley barn near by, and after that work was done he was
employed about the pressroom of one of the old German
newspaper offices. Sometimes he would be too weary to
crawl home after working half the night, and so he would
fall asleep, a worn, tragic little figure, on a pile of
old papers and sacks in a warm corner near the presses.
He was the head of a household, and every penny counted.
And all the time he was watching things, and learning.
Nothing escaped those keen black eyes. He used to help
the photographer when there was a pile of plates to
develop, and presently he knew more about photography
than the man himself. So they made him staff
photographer. In some marvelous way he knew more ball
players, and fighters and horsemen than the sporting
editor. He had a nose for news that was nothing short of
wonderful. He never went out of the office without
coming back with a story. They used to use him in the
sporting department when a rush was on. Then he became
one of the sporting staff; then assistant sporting
editor; then sporting editor. He knows this paper from
the basement up. He could operate a linotype or act as
managing editor with equal ease.
"No, I'm afraid that Blackie hasn't had much time for
morals. But, Norah dear, I wish that you could hear him
when he talks about his mother. He may follow doubtful
paths, and associate with questionable people, and wear
restless clothes, but I wouldn't exchange his friendship
for that of a dozen of your ordinary so-called good men.
All these years of work and suffering have made an old
man of little Blackie, although he is young in years. But
they haven't spoiled his heart any. He is able to
distinguish between sham and truth because he has been
obliged to do it ever since he was a child selling papers
on the corner. But he still clings to the office that gave
him his start, although he makes more money in a single week
outside the office than his salary would amount to in half a
year. He says that this is a job that does not interfere
with his work."
Such is Blackie. Surely the oddest friend a woman
ever had. He possesses a genius for friendship, and a
wonderful understanding of suffering, born of those years
of hardship and privation. Each learned the other's
story, bit by bit, in a series of confidences exchanged
during that peaceful, beatific period that follows just
after the last edition has gone down. Blackie's little
cubby-hole of an office is always blue with smoke, and
cluttered with a thousand odds and ends--photographs,
souvenirs, boxing-gloves, a litter of pipes and tobacco,
a wardrobe of dust-covered discarded coats and hats, and
Blackie in the midst of it all, sunk in the depths of his
swivel chair, and looking like an amiable brown gnome, or
a cheerful little joss-house god come to life. There is
in him an uncanny wisdom which only the streets can
teach. He is one of those born newspaper men who could
not live out of sight of the ticker-tape, and the
copy-hook and the proof-sheet.
"Y' see, girl, it's like this here," Blackie
explained one day. "W're all workin' for some good
reason. A few of us are workin' for the glory of 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 get back at some people we know; but
there is some few workin' for the pure love of the
work--and I guess I'm one of them fools. Y' see, I
started in at this game when I was such a little runt
that now it's a ingrowing habit, though it is comfortin'
t' know you got a place where you c'n always 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 clever newspaper man and I'll show you a failure.
There is nothing in it but the glory--and little of that.
We contrive and scheme and run about all day getting a
story. And then we write it at fever heat, searching our
souls 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 ephemeral thing, lacking the first
breath of life; a thing that is dead before
it is born. Why, any cub reporter, if he were to put
into some other profession the same amount of nerve, and
tact, and ingenuity and finesse, and stick-to-it-iveness
that he expends in prying a single story out of some
unwilling victim, could retire with a fortune in no
time."
Blackie blew down the stem of his pipe, preparatory
to re-filling the bowl. There was a quizzical light in
his black eyes. The little heap of burned matches at his
elbow was growing to kindling wood proportions. It was
common knowledge that Blackie's trick of lighting pipe or
cigarette and then forgetting to puff at it caused his
bill for matches to exceed his 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 that them guys who retire
with a barrel of money usually dies at the end of the
first year, of a kind of a lingerin' homesickness. You
c'n see their pictures in th' papers, with a pathetic
story of how they was just 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 new administration before
election, and made quite a pile in stocks that was tipped
off to him by his political friends. His wife was crazy
for him to quit the newspaper game. He done it. An'
say, that guy kept on gettin' richer and richer till even
his wife was almost satisfied. But sa-a-ay, girl, was
that chap lonesome! One day he come up here looking like
a dog that's run off with the steak. He was just dyin'
for a kind word, an' he sniffed the smell of the ink and
the hot metal like it was June roses. He kind of wanders
over to his old desk and slumps down in the chair, and
tips it back, and puts his feet on the desk, with his hat
tipped back, and a bum stogie in his mouth. And along
came a kid with a 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 know as well as I
do that every man on a morning paper spends his day off
hanging around the office wishin' that a mob or a fire or
somethin' big would tear lose so he could get back into
the game. I guess I told you about 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 years ago. He
don't approve of me. Pried into my private life, old Von
Gerhard did, 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, firing a 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 he sits still, lookin' at me for about half
a minute, till I begin t' feel uncomfortable. 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' quit workin', an' smokin',
and get away from this. Take a ocean voyage,' he says,
`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 it would feel homelike
there, an' we took in all the swell baden, and chased up
the Jungfrau -- sa-a-ay, that's a classy little mountain,
that Jungfrau. Mother, she had some swell time I guess.
She never set down except 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 guy who
just grew up on printer's ink ever since he was old
enough to hold a 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 somebody hits
me a crack on the shoulder, an' there stands old Ryan who
used t' do A. P. here. He was foreign correspondent for
some big New York syndicate papers over there.
"`Well if it ain't Blackie!' he says. `What in Sam
Hill are you doing out of your own cell when Milwaukee's
just got four more games t' win the 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 picture postals
to, now's' your last chance. 'F I got to die I'm going
out with m' scissors in one mitt, and m' trusty paste-pot
by m' side!' An' we hits it up for old Milwaukee. I
ain't been away since, except w'en I was out with the
ball team, sending in sportin' extry dope for the pink
sheet. 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 properly introduced to Milwaukee.
No wonder you ain't hep to the ways of this little
community. There ain't what the s'ciety editor would
call the proper ontong cordyal between you and the
natives if you haven't had coffee at Baumbach's. It
ain't hardly legal t' live in Milwaukee all this time
without ever having been inside of B--"
"Stop! If you do not tell me at once just where this
wonderful place may be found, and what one does when one
finds it, and how I happened to miss it, and why it is so
necessary to the proper understanding of the city--"
"I'll tell you what I'll do," said Blackie, grinning,
"I'll romp you over there to-morrow afternoon at four
o'clock. Ach Himmel! What will that for a grand time
be, no?"
"Blackie, you're a dear to be so polite to an old
married cratur' like me. Did you notice--that is, does
Ernst von Gerhard drop in often at Baumbach's? " _
Read next: CHAPTER VIII - KAFFEE AND KAFFEEKUCHEN
Read previous: CHAPTER VI - STEEPED IN GERMAN
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