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In the second week of that month I commenced my new duties at Glasgow and bade farewell for ever to the tall stool and "the dry drudgery of the desk's dead wood." Before me opened a pleasing prospect of attractive and interesting work, brightened by the beams of youthful hope and awakened ambition. I was now chief clerk to a general manager.
Nevertheless, at ten dollars per column for this kind of writing, he continued to make a decent space bill, and clear himself of the doldrums where the waning of the city desk's favor had left him. All that he could now make he needed, for his change of domicile had brought about a corresponding change of habit and expenditure into which he slipped imperceptibly.
The "desk's dead wood" and all its hateful slavery, the dull darkened rooms where his mother prosed through endless evenings, the bookless, joyless, hopeless existence that had cramped him all his days rose up before him, as a stretch of unbroken plain may rise before a lost man till it maddens him.
He is chained daily to the desk's dull wood, and makes entry after entry in the same columns of the same book. This is his duty. He may be unsteady, irregular, inapt, or incorrect, and his being so may occasion his brethren some trouble, and draw down upon himself a rebuke from a higher quarter; but the machinery goes on steadily notwithstanding.
So beautifully was the thing running that I had had the idle fancy of some actual urge from Andriaovsky himself; and each night, before sitting down to work, I set his portrait at my desk's end, as if it had been some kind of an observance. The most beautiful result of all was, that I felt what I had not felt for five years that I too was not "doing" my work, but actually living and being it.
"Useful!" breathed Merle, scathingly. "Useful to brutalize a lot of brave souls who merely sought " he broke off with a new sense of outrage. "And not a policeman there to do his duty!" he finished resentfully. Wilbur Cowan sat in a carven chair near a corner of the beautiful desk, hitching it forward to rest his arms on the desk's top. He was newly appraising this white-faced brother.
Stocks were lower than ever and still going down. His five hundred a year was safe, but the rest seemed doomed for his lifetime, at least. He would drop in at George's office. At one corner of each desk stood a polished metal placard on a little standard, and bearing the name of the desk's occupant. Mr. Owens. Mr. Satterlee. Mr. James. Miss Rauch. Mr. Minick. "Hello, Father," Mr.
The raised lid shut off the light from the window, and the desk's interior was rather dark. They had to grope in the corners, and occasionally their hands touched. Every time this happened Ralph thought of the decision that he must make so soon.
"I bought this yesterday for my wife; took it out of a little deal in Trolley," he told Hopkins, taking a small jewel-box from one of the desk's drawers. It contained a diamond ring, somewhat showy, but obviously quite expensive. Hopkins's semi-envious admiration made Gilmartin add, genially: "What do you say to lunch?
Greenough's distribution of the day's news continued to be distinctly unfavorable to the new space-man. The better men on the staff began to comment on the city desk's discrimination. Banneker had, for a time, shone in heroic light: his feat had been honorable, not only to The Ledger office, but to the entire craft of reporting.
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