The Great God Success. David Graham Phillips

meant a revolution in fortune for him. It was the transition from close calculation on twenty-five dollars a week to wealth beyond his most fanciful dreams of six months ago. Not having the money-getting instinct and being one of those who compare their work with the best instead of with the inferior, Howard never felt that he was “entitled to a living.” He had a lively sense of gratitude for the money return for his services which prudence presently taught him to conceal.

      “Space” meant to him eighty dollars a week at least—circumstances of ease. So vast a sum did it seem that he began to consider the problem of investment. “I have been not badly off on twenty-five dollars a week,” he thought. “With, well, say forty dollars a week I shall be able to satisfy all my wants. I can save at least forty a week and that will mean an independence with a small income by the time I am thirty-four.”

      But—a year after he was put “on space” he was still just about even with his debts. He seemed to himself to be living no better and it was only by careful counting-up that he could see how that dream of independence had eluded him. A more extensive wardrobe, a little better food, a more comfortable suite of rooms, an occasional dinner to some friends, loans to broken-down reporters, and the mysteriously vanished two thousand dollars was accounted for.

      Howard tried to retrench, devised small ingenious schemes for saving money, lectured himself severely and frequently for thus trifling away his chance to be a free man. But all in vain. He remained poor; and, whenever he gave the matter thought, which was not often, gloomy forebodings as to the future oppressed him. “I shall find myself old,” he thought, “with nothing accomplished, with nothing laid by. I shall be an old drudge.” He understood the pessimistic tone of his profession. All about him were men like himself—leading this gambler’s life of feverish excitement and evanescent achievement, earning comfortable incomes and saving nothing, looking forward to the inevitable time of failing freshness and shattered nerves and declining income.

      He spasmodically tried to write stories for the magazines, contrived plots for novels and plays, wrote first chapters, first scenes of first acts. But the exactions of newspaper life, the impossibility of continuous effort at any one piece of work and his natural inertia—he was inert but neither idle nor lazy—combined to make futile his efforts to emancipate himself from hand-to-mouth journalism.

      He had been four years a reporter and was almost twenty-six years old. He was known throughout his profession in New York, although he had never signed an article. One remarkable “human interest” story after another had forced the knowledge of his abilities upon the reporters and editors of other newspapers. And he was spoken of as one of the best and in some respects the best “all round reporter” in the city. This meant that he was capable to any emergency—that, whatever the subject, he could write an accurate, graphic, consecutive and sustained story and could get it into the editor’s hands quickly.

      Indeed he possessed facility to the perilous degree. What others achieved only after long toil, he achieved without effort. This was due chiefly to the fact that he never relaxed but was at all times the journalist, reading voraciously newspapers, magazines and the best books, and using what he read; observing constantly and ever trying to see something that would make “good copy”; turning over phrases in his mind to test the value of words both as to sound and as to meaning. He was an incessantly active man. His great weakness was the common weakness—failure to concentrate. In Park Row they regarded him as a brilliant success. Brilliant he was. But a success he was not. He knew that he was a brilliant failure—and not very brilliant.

      “Why is it?” he asked himself again and again in periods of reaction from the nervous strain of some exciting experience. “Shall I never seize any of these chances that are always thrusting themselves at me? Shall I always act like a Neapolitan beggar? Will the stimulus to ambition never come?”