And I had a sinking feeling that, somehow, old J. H. had found out about the applications I had planted with a half dozen other papers and that this was his gentle way of letting me know he knew—and that I had better watch my step.
Just before noon, Steve Johnson—who handles the medical run along with whatever else the Barnacle can find for him to do—came over to my desk. He had a bunch of clippings in his hand and he was looking worried.
«I hate to ask you this, Mark,» he said, «but would you help me out?»
«Sure thing, Steve.»
«It’s an operation. I have to check on it, but I won’t have the time. I got to run out to the airport and catch an interview.»
He laid the clips down on my desk. «It’s all in there.»
Then he was off for his interview.
I picked up the clippings and read them through; it was a story that would break your heart.
There was this little fellow, about three years old, who had to have an operation on his heart. It was a piece of surgery that had been done only a time or two before, and then only in big Eastern hospitals by famous medical names—and never on one as young as three.
I hated to pick up the phone and call; I was almost sure the kind of answer I would get.
But I did, and naturally I ran into the kind of trouble you always run into when you try to get some information out of a hospital staff—as if they were shining pure and you were a dirty little mongrel trying to sneak in. But I finally got hold of someone who told me the boy seemed to be okay and that the operation appeared to be successful.
So I called the surgeon who had done the job. I must have caught him in one of his better moments, for he filled me in on some information that fit into the story.
«You are to be congratulated, Doctor,» I told him and he got a little testy.
«Young man,» he told me, «in an operation such as this the surgeon is no more than a single factor. There are so many other factors that no one can take credit.»
Then suddenly he sounded tired and scared. «It was a miracle,» he said.
«But don’t you quote me on that,» he fairly shouted at me.
«I wouldn’t think of it,» I told him.
Then I called the hospital again, and talked to the mother of the boy.
It was a good story. We caught the home edition with it, a four-column head on the left side of page one, and the Barnacle slipped a cog or two and gave me a byline on it.
After lunch I went back to Jo Ann’s desk; she was in a tizzy. The Barnacle had thrown a church convention program at her and she was in the midst of writing an advance story, listing all the speakers and committee members and special panels and events. It’s the deadliest kind of a story you can be told to write; it’s worse, even, than the Community Chest.
I listened to her being bitter for quite a while; then I asked her if she figured she’d have any strength left when the day was over.
«I’m all pooped out,» she said.
«Reason I asked,» I told her, «is that I want to take the boat out of the water and I need someone to help me.»
«Mark,» she said, «if you expect me to go out there and horse a boat around …»
«You wouldn’t have to lift,» I told her. «Maybe just tug a little. We’ll use a block and tackle to lift it on the blocks so that I can paint it later. All I need is someone to steady it while I haul it up.»
She still wasn’t sold on it, so I laid out some bait.
«We could stop downtown and pick up a couple of lobsters,» I told her. «You are good at lobsters. I could make some of my Roquefort dressing, and we could have a …»
«But without the garlic,» she said. So I promised to forego the garlic and she agreed to come.
Somehow or other, we never did get that boat out of the water; there were so many other things to do.
After dinner we built a fire in the fireplace and sat in front of it. She put her head on my shoulder and we were comfortable and cozy. «Let’s play pretend,» she said. «Let’s pretend you have that job you want. Let’s say it is in London, and this is a lodge in the English fens …»
«A fen,» I said, «is a hell of a place to have a lodge.»
«You always spoil things,» she complained. «Let’s start over again. Let’s pretend you have that job you want …»
And she stuck to her fens.
Driving back to the lake after taking her home, I wondered if I’d ever get that job. Right at the moment it didn’t look so rosy. Not that I couldn’t have handled it, for I knew I could. I had racks of books on world affairs, and I kept close track of what was going on. I had a good command of French, a working knowledge of German, and off and on I was struggling with Spanish. It was something I’d wanted all my life—to feel that I was part of that fabulous newspaper fraternity which kept check around the world.
I overslept, and was late to work in the morning. The Barnacle took a sour view of it. «Why did you bother to come in at all?» he growled at me. «Why do you ever bother to come in? Last two days I sent you out on two assignments, and where are the stories?»
«There weren’t any stories,» I told him, trying to keep my temper. «They were just some more pipe dreams you dug up.»
«Some day,» he said, «when you get to be a real reporter, you’ll dig up stories for yourself. That’s what’s the matter with this staff,» he said in a sudden burst of anger. «That’s what’s wrong with you. No initiative; sit around and wait; wait until I dig up something I can send you out on. No one ever surprises me and brings in a story I haven’t sent them out on.»
He pegged me with his eyes. «Why don’t you just once surprise me?»
«I’ll surprise you, buster,» I said and walked over to my desk.
I sat there thinking. I thought about old Mrs. Clayborne, who had been dying hard—and then suddenly had died easy. I remembered what the gardener had told me, and the footprint I had found underneath the window.
I thought of that other old lady who had been a hundred years old, and how all her old, dead friends had come visiting. And about the physicist who had brownies in his lab. And about the boy and his successful operation.
And I got an idea.
I went to the files and went through them three weeks back, page by page.
I took a lot of notes and got a little scared, but told myself it was nothing but coincidence.
Then I sat down at my typewriter and made half a dozen false starts, but finally I had it.
The brownies have come back again, I wrote.
You know, those little people who do all sorts of good deeds for you, and expect nothing in return except that you set out a bowl of milk for them.
At the time I didn’t realize that I was using almost the exact words the physicist had said.
I didn’t write about Mrs. Clayborne, or the old lady with her visitors, or the physicist, or the little boy who had the operation; those weren’t things you could write about with your tongue in cheek, and that’s the way I wrote it.
But I did write about the little two and three paragraph items I had found tucked away in the issues I had gone through—the good luck stories; the little happy stories of no consequence, except for the ones they had happened to—about people finding things they’d lost months or years ago, about stray dogs coming home, and kids winning essay contests, and neighbor helping neighbor. All the kindly little news stories that we’d thrown in just to fill up awkward holes.
There were a lot of them—a lot more, it seemed to me, than you could normally expect to find. All these things happened in our town in the last three weeks, I wrote at the end of it.
And I added one last line: Have you put out that bowl of milk?