The Waterworks Read Online Free PDF Page A

wounded expression which seemed at the same time hopeful that the world could in the very next moment fulfill his expectations of it. It seemed to me that if I was really concerned about him I should grant him his integrity and give renewed thought to what he had said about his father. I would act privately on what I knew, on what he had told me, with due regard for the standardsof the profession we shared. To tell you the truth, apart from everything else, I smelled a story. If that is the case you do not, first thing, go to someone in whose interest it might be to see that you don’t get it. So I chose not to speak to Harry at this point but to test the original hypothesis. And when you want to know if someone is still alive, what do you do? You go to the morgue, of course.

Five

    O UR high-speed rotaries had come along around 1845, and from that moment the amount of news a paper could print, and the numbers of papers competing, suggested the need for a self-history of sorts, a memory file of our work. So that we would have at our disposal a library of our past inventions, and needn’t always spin our words out of nothing. At the Telegram this enterprise was first put in charge of an old man down in the basement, whose genius it was to lay one day’s edition on top of another, flat, in wide oak cabinet drawers, which he kept immaculately polished. Only when the war came, and it became apparent to the publisher that salable books could be made of collections of war pieces from the paper, did cross-reference filing begin in earnest. Now we had three or four young men sitting down there with scissors and paste pots who were never more than a month or two behind—fifteen New York dailies a day were dropped on their tables, after all—and I could go to a file drawer fully confident of finding a folder marked Pemberton, Augustus .
    He’d first come to our attention as one of the witnesses called before the Subcommittee on War Profiteering of the SenateCommittee for the Army and the Navy. The item was dated from Washington in April of 1864. There was nothing on the story subsequent to this—what Augustus had in fact testified to, or what the outcome of his testimony was, or indeed if the subcommittee had ever again met for any purpose whatsoever, I would not learn from my dear Telegram .
    A local item the same year afforded another glimpse of Pemberton’s business affairs: One Eustace Simmons, former deputy chief clerk in the Office of the Port Wardens on South Street, had been arrested in the Southern District of New York, along with two Portuguese nationals, on a charge of violation of the slave laws. His bond was made by his employer, the well-known merchant Mr. Augustus Pemberton.
    In this instance there was a following story, dated six months later: The case against Mr. Eustace Simmons and his two Portuguese partners for violation of the slave laws had been dismissed for insufficient evidence.
    Our reporter was clearly irritated by the ruling. He described the proceedings as extraordinarily casual, given the seriousness of the charges. The defendant Simmons had not looked terribly concerned before the judge’s decision, and not terribly elated afterward, and though the Portuguese gentlemen had embraced each other, Mr. Simmons had stood up with only the slightest smile to indicate his emotion … an angular man with a face marked by the pox … and barely nodded to the lawyers before he followed indolently after his employer, Augustus Pemberton, who was striding out of the courtroom, presumably to the next item of business on this ordinary business day.
    Well, perhaps I embellish things a bit. But my impression of the reporter’s feelings is accurate. We did not feel it so necessary to assume an objective tone in our reporting then. We were more honest and straightforward and did not make sucha sanctimonious thing of objectivity, which is finally a way of constructing an opinion for the reader without letting him