Joan of the Journal

“I’ll be back in a minute,” Joan called over her shoulder to Mother, as she scurried around past the lilac bushes by the kitchen windows.

Oh, suppose she were too late!

Tim had gone into the Journal office, just as she had started doing the dishes. Joan rarely minded doing dishes, because the windows above the kitchen sink looked across at the Journal office and she could watch everything that went on over there. Usually, she lingered over the dishes, just as she hustled over the bed making because the bedrooms were on the other side of the house. But to-day, she had done the dishes in less than no time, because she wanted to be nearer the scene of action than the kitchen windows.

She hurried now, though it was rather undignified for a person fourteen years old to run in a public place like this. That was the trouble with living right down town. No privacy. Joan thought of the rows and rows of new homes out at the end of Market Street, and then looked back at her own little home—also on Market Street. It was a tiny, red brick house, tucked in between the Journal office and the county court house, set back behind a space of smooth green lawn. It was like living in a public square. But Joan had lived there all her life and really loved the excitement of it.

Uncle John, who was general manager of the paper, would probably be busy and tell Tim to wait, as though he were just anybody applying for a summer-time job and not his own nephew, Joan’s seventeen-year-old brother.

Joan crossed the green plot to the nearest window of the _Journal_—she had climbed in and out of those windows as a little girl. She could see Chub, the red-haired office boy, wandering around. He was never very busy this time of the afternoon after the paper was on the press. Joan was as much at home in the Journal office as in her own brick house next door. As a baby, she had often curled up on a heap of newspapers and taken her nap, regardless of the roar and throb of the presses. That was when Daddy had been alive and had been city editor. He had been so proud of his baby girl that he had often taken her to work with him in an afternoon when Mother was busy and things at the office were slack.

She had grown up with the roar and clatter of the machines, and the smell of hot ink, and she loved it all, just as other girls might love a battered old piano in the parlor—just because it spelled home.

Uncle John’s office was at the end of the editorial rooms, just by the swinging door into the composing room. “Sanctum sanctorum” she and Tim called Uncle John’s office. Joan stationed herself out of sight, under the buckeye tree, and peered through the dirty, streaked window. She could see Uncle John’s desk, with its crowded cubby-holes, frayed blotter, and books about to fall off.

She craned her neck and saw Tim standing before the desk, twisting his cap in his hands. Of course, talking to Uncle John wasn’t anything, but asking for a job as a cub reporter was. They were talking together, and Tim looked so serious, Joan would hardly have recognized him.

Oh, he had to get that job! It was during graduation week, when Tim had had to have a new outfit for the commencement exercises, that Mother had done some figuring and suddenly discovered that perhaps there would not be enough money for college for Tim, after all. Tim had had his heart set on going to the State University at Columbus that fall. Joan herself had even dreamed of attending the big football games while he was there, and when they cheered, “Martin! Atta boy, Martin!” she would say, as modestly as she could, “That’s my brother!” Tim was good in all sports—had been a leader in them all through high school. It was the only thing he really liked, but, in a town like Plainfield, excelling in sports offered no method of earning money during the summer months.

Tim had stalked about for days, gloomy as could be, after Mother’s announcement. Then one evening, when Uncle John had dropped in for supper, he had said, “Want a job, do you? Well, come over, and talk to me some time. Maybe I can fix you up. We’re adding new names to the pay roll every week, and you might as well get yours on, too.”

If he’d said anything like that to Joan, she would have been in seventh heaven, she thought. But Tim seemed only mildly thrilled. Of course, he wanted the job, but it was only a job to Tim, while a job on the Journal had been Joan’s lifelong dream.

Finally, as she watched now, she saw Uncle John get up and walk around his desk. He shook hands with Tim and patted him on the shoulder. Tim grinned all over his face, then turned and went out the door, while Uncle John went back to his cluttered desk. Joan could have watched Tim as he went through the editorial rooms and the business office and the front door of the Journal, for there were rows of windows all facing her own green yard, but instead, she turned and raced to their kitchen door.

“Mother!” her voice vibrated through the old house. “Tim got the job!”

Mrs. Martin looked up from the oven where she had slipped in a cake, and smiled. “That’s nice.”

Joan sank down on a kitchen chair that was peeling its paint. “Mother, it’s wonderful!”

“Joan, don’t get so excited.” The oven door banged. “It’s not you that’s got the job.”

“I really feel as though it was, honest,” declared the girl. “You know, I’ve always dreamed of having a job on the Journal and now I have it—or rather Tim has, but it’s all in the family.”

“You should have been a boy, Jo,” Mrs. Martin made her oft-repeated remark. As it was, Joan’s dark, straight hair was always given a boyish bob, and there were some boyish freckles on her short nose, too. “Tim may be the image of his father, but you’re just the way he was, crazy about the newspaper. I don’t see what you see in it. Though I guess it has been better since John’s been managing it. But as soon as we can sell this house without a loss, we’ll move.”

“Mother!” Joan wouldn’t feel she were living without the Journal next door. But she didn’t take her mother’s words seriously. Mother was always talking vaguely of selling the house and had suggested it in earnest recently. The interest on the mortgage was high and being in a business block, it was hard to find a buyer. If she could retain it, until some one wanted it for business purposes, they might make a nice profit. But Plainfield was a slow-growing town. Uncle John advised holding it until some one wanted it for a business.

“Your poor father just slaved for that paper, and it never got him anywhere,” went on her mother. “I hope you get over the notion of being a reporter by the time you’re Tim’s age, and take up stenography.”

“Ugh.” Joan made a little face. “Office work—not me!”

No, she was going to be a reporter, no matter what. Hadn’t Daddy taught her to typewrite when she was only eleven, and didn’t even Tim think she was a “pretty good typist”? Daddy had always said she had a “nose for news,” too. She remembered feeling her pug nose speculatively the first time he said that, wondering what it meant. Her nose did turn up inquisitively. Now she knew, “nose for news” meant she had the natural curiosity that it took to make a good reporter.

Then the door opened and Tim came in, still wearing the broad grin with which he had left the Journal office.

“I’m glad you got it, son.” Mrs. Martin spoke before Tim could say a word.

“Just like that kid, to tell everything before any one else gets a chance.”

He was really cross. That’s the way he was most of the time, these days. They had been good chums until his senior year in High School, when he had assumed such superior airs. He had acted especially high and mighty since his graduation last week. As far as Joan could find out, he had nothing against her except her age. Could she help it that she was nearly four years the younger? She was almost as tall as Amy Powell, her best friend, and Amy was fifteen years old. He was usually nice to Amy, too, but then Amy had a grown-up way around the boys.

Only at times did he seem the same old brother. To think that only a year ago they had been such chums, even to having a secret code between them. When she was small, it had amused her to learn that Tim’s real name, Timothy, was also the name of a grain. “Oats and beans and barley,” she used to sing the old song at him, and somehow or other in their play that phrase came to mean, “Danger. Look out.” It had been convenient lots of times in their games, Hie Spy and Run Sheep Run. But they hadn’t used it for a long time now.

“Tim, I just couldn’t help telling. I was so excited.” She tried to make her dark eyes sober and her voice sorry sounding, now.

“She’s the limit.” Tim turned to his mother. “Reads what I’m writing over my shoulder and breathes down my neck till I’m nearly crazy.”

He, like Mother, refused to believe she was in earnest about being a reporter.

“You ought to be glad I do snoop around,” Joan told him, as she wiped off the table for Mother. “You know Edna Ferber’s Dawn O’Hara was rescued from the wastebasket by her sister, so you see! When do you start in?”

“To-morrow.” Tim drew up his shoulders, proudly. “Uncle John says they really need a cub reporter since they put Mack on Sports. That’s the place I’d really like! But—they need a cub, and I’m it. Decent enough salary, too, Mother; I’ll be able to pay you some board, besides saving for the University.”

Mother smiled. “That’s fine!”

“I stopped at Nixon’s desk and he gave me my beat.” Tim pulled a scrap of yellow paper from his pocket.

“What is your beat?” Joan squirmed to see.

He let her read: Railway Station Flower Shops Library Post Office

“I have to go round there every day and scare up news,” he said. “The rest of the time, I’ll be busy doing obits and rewrites.” (That meant obituary notices and articles rewritten from other newspapers.)

Joan gazed at him over the plates and things she was carrying into the china closet. She always just drained them, and they were dry now. “And can I go with you?”

“On my beat?” came the scandalized echo. “I should say not!”