1876 by Gore Vidal Read Free Book Online Page A

ground! Everything here burns up sooner or later. You know that.”
    I felt real anguish. “I used to review the plays there ...”
    “For me, yes. I know. What did we call you?”
    “Gallery Mouse.”
    “Well, Gallery Mouse has a wide range of new theatres to attend if he so chooses.” A sidelong glance at me. “But surely you don’t want to write about our theatre.”
    “No. No.”
    “Because I do admire your reports from Europe. You deeply understand that wicked old world.”
    I cannot think why I deeply resented Bryant’s smug puritan tone. After all, our wicked old Paris has never come up with a thief on the scale of Boss Tweed.
    “I had thought I might perhaps do some American pieces. You know: what it is like to come back after so many years.”
    “A latter-day Rip Van Winkle?”
    The phrase that I have myself been using for two days became on his lips indescribably boring and obvious. “Well, yes. I suppose that such a comparison is unavoidable.”
    “And our newspapers do not avoid much ...”
    “Except the truth of the matter.” To my horror, this savagery escaped my lips; but Bryant took it well enough.
    “Half-truths are the best we can manage, I fear. For a moment you sounded like our late friend Leggett.”
    “That is indeed a compliment.” The passionate Leggett burned out his mind and lungs for the truth—or at least for something not unlike that elusive absolute.
    Finally, we stood in front of the Evening Post’s new building.
    “Schuyler, you have endured nobly the three miles.”
    Although my face was stiff from the cold, my body was leaking sweat from every pore.
    “Now you must come in and meet the staff.”
    I entrusted myself to the compartment of the perpendicular railway whilst Bryant climbed the stairs.
    The Negro operator was admiring. “There’s no one like old Mr. Bryant in all New York. He’ll be up there before we are.”
    And so he was. As I stepped onto the landing, I saw Bryant hanging from the lintel to his office door. Very slowly he chinned himself, and dropped to the floor.
    “You will give me aheart attack.” I was firm. “Just watching you is bad for my system.”
    This flattered him, and in the best of humours he took me into his new office which was simply a larger version of the old one—the same desk, chairs, open bookcases crowded with his own works; my sharp author’s eye noted two books by me.
    The literary editor was summoned. George Gary Eggleton is pleasant, young: “Admire Paris and [sic!] the Commune more than I can say, Mr. Schuyler.”
    “Would that you had said it, Mr. Eggleton.” I seldom resist so obvious an opening. “I looked in vain for a notice of it in the Post .”
    “Is that true?” Enthroned at his desk, Bryant was Jehovah on the mountaintop.
    “I must say ... I don’t know ... perhaps ... I shall look ...”
    That disposed of the literary editor. I was then introduced to a Mr. Henderson, the business head of the paper. The two men spoke of business. I proposed that I go.
    “No, Mr. Schuyler. I’m the one who’s going.” And Mr. Henderson did go.
    “Would you like to write something for us on the Centennial Exhibition?” I had forgotten how swiftly Bryant comes to the point when he is at his desk, at work.
    “Why, yes. I would.”
    “It opens in Philadelphia. May or June, I’m not certain. Anyway, there will be time to prepare yourself, to think through all the changes you will have noted ...”
    “Not least, amongst them, let us hope, the rates of payment at the Post ?”How impossible it would have been for the young Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler to mention money to William Cullen Bryant. But I am old, needy, triplebound with brass, and would that it were gold. I managed to get him to agree to a flat payment of five hundred dollars for no less than ten thousand words, an excellent price for the Post , though hardly in the Ledger class.
    I rose to go. “I am to take tea with our old friend John