The paper goes to press at 2.30, but I have to stay till six to answer the ’phone, sign for wires, and read extra proofs.
On Saturdays the Echo has a lot of extra stuff, a page of ‘society letters’ among the rest. It usually falls to my lot to edit these. Can’t say I fancy the job much, but the only thing I positively abhor is ‘faking’ a society letter. This is one of the tricks of newspaperdom. When a society letter fails to turn up from a certain place—say from Windsor—in due time, the news editor slaps a Windsor Weekly down before me and says blandly, ‘fake up a society letter from that, Miss Montgomery.’
So poor Miss Montgomery goes meekly to work, and concocts an introductory paragraph or so about ‘autumn leaves’ and ‘mellow days’ and ‘October frosts,’ or any old stuff like that to suit the season. Then I go carefully over the columns of the weekly, clip out all the available personals and news items, about weddings, and engagements, and teas, etc., hash them up in epistolary style, forge the Windsor correspondent’s nom de plume—and there’s your society letter! I used to include funerals, too, but I found the news editor blue-pencilled them. Evidently funerals have no place in society.
Then I write a column or so of giddy paragraphs for Monday’s Echo. I call it “Around the Tea-Table,” and sign it “Cynthia.”
My office is a back room looking out on a back yard in the middle of the block. I don’t know that all the Haligonian washerwomen live around it, but certainly a good percentage of them must, for the yard is a network of lines from which sundry and divers garments are always streaming gaily to the breezes. On the ground and over the roof cats are prowling continually, and when they fight, the walls resound with their howls. Most of them are lank, starved-looking beasties enough, but there is one lovely gray fellow who basks on a window sill opposite me and looks so much like ‘Daffy’ that, when I look at him, I could squeeze out a homesick tear if I were not afraid that would wash a clean spot on my grimy face. This office is really the worst place for getting dirty I ever was in.
November 18, 1901
Have had a difficult time trying to arrange for enough spare minutes to do some writing. I could not write in the evenings, I was always too tired. Besides, I had to keep my buttons sewed on and my stockings darned. Then I reverted to my old practice, and tried getting up at six in the morning. But it did not work, as of yore. I could never get to bed as early as I could when I was a country ‘schoolma’am’ and I found it impossible to do without a certain amount of sleep.
There was only one alternative.
Hitherto, I had thought that undisturbed solitude was necessary that the fire of genius might burn and even the fire for pot-boiling. I must be alone, and the room must be quiet. I could never have even imagined that I could possibly write anything in a newspaper office, with rolls of proof shooting down every ten minutes, people coming and conversing, telephones ringing, and machines being thumped and dragged overhead. I would have laughed at the idea, yea, I would have laughed it to scorn. But the impossible has happened. I am of one mind with the Irishman who said you could get used to anything, even to being hanged!
All my spare time here I write, and not such bad stuff either, since the Delineator, the Smart Set and Ainslies’ have taken some of it. I have grown accustomed to stopping in the middle of a paragraph to interview a prowling caller, and to pausing in full career after an elusive rhyme, to read a lot of proof, and snarled-up copy.
Saturday, December 8, 1901
Of late I’ve been Busy with a capital B. ’Tending to office work, writing pot-boilers, making Christmas presents, etc., mostly etc.
One of the “etcs.” is a job I heartily detest. It makes my soul cringe. It is bad enough to have your flesh cringe, but when it strikes into your soul it gets on your spiritual nerves terribly. We are giving all the firms who advertise with us a free “write-up” of their holiday goods, and I have to visit all the stores, interview the proprietors, and crystallize my information into two “sticks” of copy. From three to five every afternoon I potter around the business blocks until my nose is purple with the cold and my fingers numb from much scribbling of notes.
Wednesday, December 12, 1901
It is an ill wind that blows no good and my disagreeable assignment has blown me some. The other evening I went in to write up the Bon Marche, which sets up to be the millinery establishment of Halifax, and I found the proprietor very genial. He said he was delighted that the Echo had sent a lady, and by way of encouraging it not to weary in well doing he would send me up one of the new walking hats if I gave the Bon Marche a good write-up. I rather thought he was only joking, but sure enough, when the write-up came out yesterday, up came the hat, and a very pretty one it is too.
Thursday, December 20, 1901
All the odd jobs that go a-begging in this office are handed over to the present scribe. The very queerest one up to date came yesterday.
The compositors were setting up, for the weekly edition, a story called ‘A Royal Betrothal,’ taken from an English paper, and when about half through they lost the copy. Whereupon the news-editor requested me to go and write an ‘end’ for the story. At first I did not think I could. What was set up of the story was not enough to give me any insight into the solution of the plot. Moreover, my knowledge of royal love affairs is limited, and I have not been accustomed to write with flippant levity of kings and queens.
However, I fell to work and somehow got it done. Today it came out, and as yet nobody has guessed where the ‘seam’ comes in. If the original author ever beholds it, I wonder what he will think.
I may remark, in passing, that more than ten years afterward I came across a copy of the original story in an old scrapbook, and was much amused to discover that the author’s development of the plot was about as different from mine as anything could possibly be.
Thursday, December 27th, 1901
Christmas is over. I had been rather dreading it, for I had been expecting to feel very much the stranger in a strange land. But, as usual, anticipation was discounted by realization. I had a very pleasant time although not, of course, so wildly exhilarating as to endanger life, limb or nerves, which was, no doubt, just as well.
I had a holiday, the first since coming here, and so was haunted all day by the impression that it was Sunday. I had dinner at the Halifax with B. and spent the afternoon with her. In the evening we went to the opera to see The Little Minister. It was good but not nearly so good as the book. I don’t care for dramatized novels. They always jar on my preconceptions of the characters. Also, I had to write a criticism of the play and cast for the Chronicle and I dislike that very much.
Saturday, March 29, 1902
This week has been a miserable one of rain and fog and neuralgia. But I’ve lived through it. I’ve read proofs and dissected headlines and fought with compositors and bandied jokes with the marine editor. I have ground out various blameless rhymes for a consideration of filthy lucre, and I’ve written one real poem out of my heart.
I hate my “pot-boiling” stuff. But it gives me the keenest pleasure to write something that is good, a fit and proper incarnation of the art I worship. The news-editor has just been in to give me an assignment for to-morrow, bad ’cess to him. It is Easter Sunday, and I have to write up the ‘parade’ down Pleasant Street after church, for Monday’s Echo.
Palmday, May 3, 1902
I spent the afternoon “expurgating” a novel for the news-editor’s use and behoof. When he was away on his vacation his substitute began to run a serial in the Echo called “Under the Shadow.” Instead of getting some A.P.A. stuff as he should have done, he simply bought a sensational novel and used it. It was very long and was only about half done when the news-editor returned. So, as it would run all summer, in its present form, I was bidden to take it and cut mercilessly out all unnecessary stuff. I have followed instructions, cutting out most of the kisses