The Old Reporter
What the reporter knew was true indeed, but there were other things equally true, and these he did not know—even when he saw them, which was so seldom that he called them "fakes." He was not quite twenty-one.
He never told anyone about all this. There was no one to tell. What if there had been? You might remind a Cornwall lad in the bottom of a mine that there was a good, warm sun shining on the hill-side overhead. That would not cure his paleness.
When he got through working it was time to go to bed. He did not go immediately to bed. He would not have gone to sleep if he had. … And now I have told the true story of how young Billy got into the way of drinking more than was good for him. It was not to help him get news out of men, because conviviality, he thought, was too personal a thing to use it in business, where he dealt with people, few of whom he considered his social equals. It was not to make him write better copy, because he was an artist and strained with
249
