PART II LILIAN Chapter 1

Humphrey Quain came into the office of The Day with the greatest asset a journalist can possess—enthusiasm. There is no other profession in the world that calls so continually, day after day, for enthusiasm. The bank-clerk may have his slack moment in adding up his figures—indeed the work has become so mechanical to him that he can even think of other things while making his additions; the actor, even, has his lines by heart, and can sometimes go automatically through his part, without the audience noticing he is listless; the barrister may lose his case; the artist may paint one bad picture—it is forgotten in the gallery of good ones; but the reporter must be always alert, always eager, always ready to adapt himself to circumstances and persons, and fail at the peril of his career. In large things and small things it is all alike: the man who goes to report a meeting must do it as eagerly and with as much enthusiasm as the man who journeys to Egypt to interview the Khedive.

And, as Humphrey soon found, every day and every hour there are forces conspiring to kill this eagerness and enthusiasm at the root. Before he had been a week on The Day he began to realize the forces that were up against him. It seemed that there was a deliberate league on the part of the world to stifle his ambitions, and to make things go awry with him. Before he had been a week on The Day he felt that he was being checked and thwarted by people. He was turned from the doorsteps by the footmen and servants of those whom he went to see on some quite trivial matters; or[74] he could never find the man he went forth to seek. He went from private house to office, from office to club, in search of a city magnate one day, and failed in his quest, and, after hours of searching, he came back to The Day empty-handed, and Rivers said brusquely: "You'll have to try again at dinner-time. He's sure to be home at seven. We've got to have him to-night." And so he went again at seven to the man's house, only to find that he was dining out and would not be back until eleven. Whereupon he waited about patiently, and, finally, when he did return home, the city magnate declined to venture any opinion on the subject in question to Humphrey (it was about the Russian loan), and, after all, he came back, late and tired, to the office, to find that, as far as Selsey, the chief sub-editor, was concerned, nobody cared very much about his failure or not.

And, in the morning, his struggles and troubles and the difficulty of yesterday was quite forgotten, and Rivers never even mentioned the matter to him. But if The Sentinel, or any other paper, had chanced to find the city magnate in a more relenting mood, and had squeezed an interview out of him...!

He was given cuttings from other papers, pasted on slips of paper, and told to inquire into them. They led him nowhere. There would be, perhaps, an interview with some well-known person of European interest visiting London, but the printed interview never said where the well-known person was to be found. And so this meant a weary round of hotels, and endless telephone calls, until the hours passed, and Humphrey discovered that the man had left London the night before. Even though that was no fault of his own, he could not eliminate the sense of failure from his mind.

And once, Rivers had told him to go and see Cartwright's, the coal-merchants, in Mark Lane, and get from them some facts about the rise in the price of coal.[75] And he had been shown into the office, and Cartwright had talked swiftly, hurling technical facts and figures at him, as though he had been in the coal business all his life. So that when the interview was ended, Humphrey reeled out of the office, his mind and memory a tangle of half-understood facts, and wholly incapable of writing anything on the matter. Fortunately, when he got back, he found that other reporters had been seeing coal-merchants, and all that was wanted was just three lines from each—an expression of opinion as to whether the high price would last—and Humphrey rescued from the tangle of talk Cartwright's firm belief that the rise was only temporary.

Another day he had been sent to interview a Bishop—an authority on dogma, whose views were to be asked on a startling proposition (from America) of bringing the Bible up-to-date. The Bishop received Humphrey coldly in the hall of his house, and Humphrey noticed that the halls were hung with many texts reflecting Christian sentiments of love and hope and brotherhood. And the Bishop, unmoved by Humphrey's rather forlorn appearance, for somehow he quailed before the austere gaitered personage, curtly told him that he could not discuss the matter.

When Humphrey came back it so happened that he met Neckinger. "Well, what are you doing to-day, Quain?" asked Neckinger with an indulgent smile. He was a short, thick-set man, with a pear-shaped face, and brown eyes that held a quizzical look in them. It was the second time Humphrey had come into touch with Neckinger, who was the editor of The Day, and rarely ventured from his room when he came to the office. Humphrey told him where he had been, and with what results.

"Wouldn't he talk?" asked Neckinger.

"No," Humphrey answered.

[76]

Neckinger paused with his hand on the door knob. His eyes twinkled, and his fingers caressed his moustache. "Why didn't you make him talk?" asked Neckinger with a hint of disapproval in his voice. Then, without waiting for a reply, he went into his room.

Humphrey felt that he was faced with a new problem in life. How did one make people talk? It was not enough to hunt your quarry to his lair—that was the easiest part of the business—you had to compel him to disgorge words—any words—so be they made coherent sentences. You had to come back and say that he had spoken, and write down what he said at your discretion. And if he would not speak, you had, in some mysterious manner, to force the words from his mouth. That was what puzzled Humphrey in the beginning. What was the magic key that the other reporters had to unlock the conversation of those whom they went to see? They very seldom failed. Humphrey went home, perplexed, disturbed with this added burden on his shoulders. He saw his life as one long effort at making unwilling people talk for publication.

And yet, on the whole, this first week of his in Fleet Street was one of glorious happiness. The romance of the place gripped him at once, and held him a willing captive. He loved the thrill of pride that came to him, whenever he passed through the swing doors in the morning, and the commissionaire, superior person of impregnable dignity, condescended to nod to him. He loved the reporters' room, with its fire and the grate, and the half circle of chairs drawn round it, where there were always two or three of the other men sitting, and talking wonderful things about the secrets of their work.

In reality, the reporters' room was the most prosaic room in the whole building. It was a broad, bare room, excessively utilitarian in appearance. There was nothing superfluous or ornamental in it. Everything within its[77] four walls was set there for a distinct purpose. The large high windows were uncurtained so as to admit the full light of day. And when the full light of day shone, it showed an incredibly untidy room, with every desk littered with writing-paper, and newspapers, and even the floor thick with a slipshod carpet of printed matter. The desks were placed against the walls and round the room. Humphrey had no desk of his own. He usually came in and sat at whichever desk was empty, and more often than not the rightful owner of the desk would arrive, and Humphrey would mumble apologies, gather up his papers, and depart to the next desk. In this way he sometimes made a whole tour of the room, shifting from desk to desk.

There were pegs near the door, and from one of them a disreputable umbrella dangled by its crook handle. It was pale-brown with dust, and its ribs were bent and broken, and rents showed in the covering—as an umbrella its use had long since gone, yet it still hung there. Nobody knew to whom it belonged. Nobody threw it away—it was a respected survival of some ancient day. It remained for ever, an umbrella that had once done good and faithful work, now useless and dusty, with its gaping holes and twisted framework—perhaps, as a symbol.

A telephone, a bell that rang in the commissionaire's box and told him the reporter needed a messenger-boy, and a pot of paste completed the furniture of the reporters' room. They had all they needed, and if they wished for anything they could ring for it—that was the attitude of the managerial side who were responsible for office luxuries. The manager, by the way, had a room that was, by comparison, a temple of luxury, from its soft-shaded electric lights and green wall-paper (the reporters' walls were distempered) to its wondrous carpet, and mahogany desk. Nobody seemed to care very much for the reporters, Humphrey found, except when one of them—or[78] all of them—saved the paper from being beaten by its rivals, or caused the paper to beat its rivals. But in the ordinary course of events, the manager ignored the reporters; the sub-editors, in their hearts, regarded them as loafers and pitied their grammar and inaccuracy for official titles and initials of leading men; Neckinger never bothered much about them unless there was trouble in the air, while those distant people, the leader-writers, sometimes looked at them curiously, as one regards strange types. And yet, the reporters were the friendliest and most human of all those in the office. They came daily into contact with life in all its forms, and it knocked the rough edges off them. They were generous, large-hearted men, whose loyalty to their paper had no limits. They lived together, herded in their big bare room, chafing always against their slavery, and yet loving their bondage, unmoved at the strange phases of life that passed through their hands; surveying, as spectators regard a stage-play, the murders, the humours, the achievements, the tragedies, and the sorrow and laughter of nations.

In those days the interior of the grey building was an unexplored mystery for Humphrey. He passed along the corridors by half-opened doors which gave a tantalizing glimpse into the rooms beyond where men sat writing. There were the sporting rooms, where the sporting editor and his staff worked at things quite apart from the reporters. Nothing seemed to matter to them: the greatest upheavals left their room undisturbed; football, cricket, racing, coursing and the giving of tips were their main interests, and though a king died or war was declared, they still held their own page, the full seven columns of it, so that they could chronicle the sport and the pleasure. The sporting men and the reporters seldom mingled in the office; sometimes Lake, the sporting editor, nodded to those he knew coming up the[79] stairs. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with a heavy face, and the appearance of a clubman and a man of the world.

Close to the sporting room was a strange room lit with an extraordinarily luminous pale blue glare. Humphrey satisfying his curiosity prowled about the building one evening, and ventured to the door. The men who were there did not question his presence. They just looked at him and went on with their work. One of them, in his shirt-sleeves and a black apron, was holding a black square of glass to the light, from which something shining was dripping. A pungent smell of iodoform filled Humphrey's nostrils. He knew the smell; it was intimately associated with the recollections of his youth, when he had dabbled in photography with a low-priced camera, using the cistern-room at the top of the house as a dark-room. And he saw that another man was manipulating an enormous camera, that moved along a grooved base. This, he knew, was an enlarging apparatus, and he realized that here they were making the blocks for The Day—transferring a drawing or a photograph to copper or zinc plates.

There was something real and vital about this office where each day was active with a different activity from the day before; where each room was a mirror of life itself.

Next door to the room where the blue light vibrated and flared intensely, he found a smaller room, where two men sat, also in their shirt-sleeves, tap-tapping at telegraph transmitters. A cigarette dangled loosely from the lip of each man, and neither of them glanced at the work of his fingers. They looked always at the printed proof, or the written copy held in a clip before them. This was the provincial wire room. They were tapping a selection of the news, letter by letter, to Birmingham, where The Day had an office of its own. Humphrey[80] noticed with a queer thrill that one of the men was sending through something that he himself had written.

Downstairs, in a long room, longer than the reporters' room, and just as utilitarian, the sub-editors sat at two broad tables forming the letter T. Mr Selsey, the chief sub-editor, sat in the very centre of the top of the T, surrounded by baskets, and proofs, and telephones, and, at about seven o'clock every evening, his dinner. He was a gentle-mannered man, whose face told the time as clearly as a clock. From six to eight it was cheerful; when he began to frown it was nine o'clock; when he grew restless and spoke brusquely it was eleven; and when his hair was dishevelled and his eyes became anxious it was eleven-thirty, and the struggle of pruning down and rejecting the masses of copy that passed through his hands was at its climax. At one o'clock he was normal again, and became gentle over a cup of cocoa.

Humphrey was never certain whether Mr Selsey approved of him or not. He had to go through the ordeal every evening of bringing that which he had written to him, and to stand by while it was read. It reminded him of his school-days, when he used to bring his exercise-book up to the schoolmaster. Selsey seldom made any comment—he read it, marked it with a capital letter indicating whether its fate would be three lines, a paragraph, or its full length, and tossed it into a basket, whence it would be rescued by one of the sub-editors, who saw that the paragraphs, the punctuation and the sense of it were right, cut out whole sentences if it were necessary to compress it, and added a heading to it. Then, it was taken back to Selsey, who glanced at it quickly, and threw it into another basket, whence it was removed by a boy and shot through a pneumatic tube to the composing-room.

The sub-editors' room was the heart of the organism[81] of The Day between the hours of six in the evening and one the next morning. It throbbed with persistent business. The tape machines clicked out the news of the world in long strips, and boys stood by them, cutting up the slips into convenient sizes, and pasting them on paper.

The telephone bells rang, and every night at nine-thirty, Westgate, the leather-lunged sub-editor, disappeared into a telephone-box with a glass door. Humphrey saw him one night when he happened to be in the room. He looked like a man about to be electrocuted, with a band over the top of his skull, ending in two receivers that fitted closely over his ears. His hands were free so that he could write, and through the glass Humphrey watched his mouth working violently until his face was wet with perspiration. He was shouting through a mouthpiece, and his words were carried under the sea to Paris, though no one in the sub-editors' room could hear them, since the telephone-box was padded and noise-proof.

And Humphrey could see his pencil moving swiftly over the paper, with an occasional pause, as his mouth opened widely to articulate a question, and again he felt that delightful and mighty sensation of being in touch with the bones of life, as he realized that somewhere, far away in Paris, the correspondent of The Day, invisible but audible, was hailing the sub-editors' room across space and time.

He saw no longer the strained, taut face of Westgate, his unkempt moustache bobbing up and down with the movement of his upper lip, the big vein down his forehead bulging like a thick piece of string with his perspiring exertions. He saw a miracle, and it filled his heart with a strange exultation. He wanted to say to Selsey, "Isn't that splendid!"

Six other men sat at the long table that ran at right[82] angles to the top table, and Selsey was flanked by Westgate, who dealt with Paris, and Tothill, who did the police-court news,—the stub of a cigarette stuck on his lower lip as though it were some strange growth. These men, in the first few days of Humphrey's life in the office of The Day, were incomprehensible people to him. He could not understand why they should elect, out of all the work in the world, to sit down at a table from six until one; to leave their homes—he assumed that they were comfortable—their firesides and their wives. They did not meet life as the reporters did; they had none of the glamour and the adventure of it, the work seemed to him to be unutterably stale and destructive. One or two of them wore green shades over their eyes to protect them from the glare of white paper under electric light. And the green shades gave their faces an appearance of pallor. They looked at him curiously whenever he came into the room: he divined at once, rightly or wrongly, that their interests clashed with his. They were one of their forces which he knew he would have to fight.

The remembrance of Tommy Pride's words echoed in his ears as he stood by Selsey's table.

Yet this room held him spell-bound as none other did. It was the main artery through which the life-blood of The Day flowed. He saw the boys ripping open the russet-coloured envelopes that disgorged telegrams from islands and continents afar off; he saw them sorting out stacks of tissue paper covered with writing, "flimsy"—manifolded copy—from all the people who lived by recording the happenings of the moment—men like Beaver, who were lost if people did not do things—the stories of people who brought law-suits, who were born, married, divorced; who went bankrupt; who died; who left wills; stories of actors who played parts; of books that were written; of men who made speeches; of[83] banquets; of funerals—the little, grubby boys were handling the epitome of existence, and this great volume of throbbing life was merely paper with words scrawled over it to them.... It was only in after years that Humphrey himself perceived the significance and the meaning of the emotions which swelled within him during those early days. At the time, as he glanced left and right, down the long table, where the sub-editors bent their heads to their work, and he saw this man dealing with the city news, making out lists of the prices of stocks and shares, and that man handling the doings of Parliament, something moved him inwardly to smile with a great, unbounded pride. He was like a recruit who has been blooded. "I, too, am part of this," he thought. "And this is part of me."

Yet another glimpse he had into the mysteries of the grey building, and then he marvelled, not that the small things he wrote were cut down, but that they ever got into print at all.

It was one night when he had been sent out on a late inquiry. A "runner"—one of those tattered men, who run panting into newspaper offices at night with news of accidents or fires—had brought in some story of an omnibus wreck in Whitehall. Humphrey was given a crumpled piece of paper, with wretchedly scrawled details on it, and told to go forth and investigate. Had he not been so new to the game, he would have known that it was wise to telephone to Charing Cross or Westminster hospitals, for the deductive mind of a reporter used to such things would have told him that where there is an omnibus wreck, there must be injury to life and limb, and the nearest hospitals would be able to verify the bald fact of an accident. But there was nobody who had sufficient leisure or inclination to teach Humphrey his business, and, perhaps it was all the better for him[84] that he should buy his lessons with experience. For he found that "runners'" tales, though they must be investigated, seldom pay for the investigation. The "runner" exaggerates manfully for the sake of his half-crown. Thus, when he arrived at Whitehall, he found, by the simple expedient of asking the policeman on point duty, that there had been an accident—most decidedly there had been an accident; one wheel had come off an omnibus. When? "Oh, about three hours ago, but nobody was hurt as I know on. You can go back and tell 'em there's nothing in it for the noosepaper."

Humphrey had never said that he was a reporter: how did the policeman know? He was a good-natured, red-faced man, and his attitude towards Humphrey was one of easy-going familiarity and gentle tolerance. He spoke kindly as equal to equal; it might almost be said that, from his great height, he bent down, as it were, to meet Humphrey, with the air of a patron conferring benefits. He was not like the Easterham policemen who touched their hats to Humphrey, and called him "sir," because they knew whenever anything happened, the Gazette would refer to the plucky action of P.C. Coles, who was on point duty at the time.

"Nobody hurt at all!" Humphrey repeated, looking vaguely round in the darkness, as though he expected to see the wooden streets of Whitehall littered with bleeding corpses to give the constable the lie.

"You go 'ome," said the policeman, kindly. "I should be the first to know of anything like that if it was serious. I'd have to put in my report. I ain't got no mention of no one injured seriously."

He said it with an air of finality, as though he were taking upon himself the credit of having saved life and limb by not using his notebook. And with that, he eased the chin-strap of his helmet with his forefinger,[85] nodded smilingly, repeated, "You go 'ome," and padded riverwards in his rubber-soled boots.

When Humphrey got back to the office and into the sub-editors' room to tell his news, he found that their work was slackening. Two or three of them were hard at it, but the rest were having their supper. A tall, spidery-looking man, with neatly parted fair hair and a singularly high forehead, was tossing for pennies with Westgate—and winning. It was midnight. One of the sub-editors said to Humphrey:

"You'd better tell Selsey; he's in the composing-room." Humphrey hesitated.

"It's across the corridor," his informant added.

He went across the corridor, and into a new world. The room was alive with noise; row upon row the aproned linotype operators sat before the key-boards translating the written words of the "copy" before them into leaden letters. Their machines were almost human. They touched the keys, as if they were typewriting, and little brass letters slipped down into a line, and then mechanically an iron hand gripped the line, plunged it into a box of molten lead, and lifted it out again with a solid line of lead cast from the mould, while the little brass letters were hoisted upwards and distributed automatically into their places, and all the time the same business was being repeated again and again. The lines of type were set up in columns, seven of them to a page, and locked in an iron frame, and then they were taken to an inner room, where men pressed papier maché over the pages of type, so that every letter was moulded clearly on this substance. Then this "flong" was placed in a curved receptacle, and boiling lead was poured upon it, as on a mould, so that one had the page curved to fit the cylinder of the printing machine. The curved sheet went through various phases of trimming and making ready, until it was finally taken to the basement....[86] Very many brains were working together that the words written by Humphrey should be repeated hundreds and thousands of times. All these men were part of the mighty scheme. They had their homes and their separate lives outside the big building, but here they were all merged into one disciplined body, for so many hours at night, carrying on the work which the men on the other side did during the day.

In one corner of the room Selsey was busy with Hargreave, the assistant night editor, and as Humphrey went up he saw that they were still cutting out things from printed proofs, and altering headings. And on an iron-topped table great squares of type rested—the forms just as he had seen them in the Easterham Gazette office—only they were bigger, and the "furniture"—the odd wedge-shaped pieces of wood which they used in Easterham to lock the type firmly in between the frames, was abandoned for a simpler contrivance in iron. And there were Selsey and Hargreave peering at the first pages of The Day in solid type, reading it from right to left, as one reads Hebrew, and suddenly Hargreave would say: "Well we'd better take out the last ten lines of that, and shift this half-way down the column, and put this Reuter message at the top with a splash heading," or else, putting a finger on a square of type, "take that out altogether, that'll give us room." And he would glance up at the clock, with the anxiety of a man who knows there are trains to catch.

No question of writing here.... No time for sentiment.... No time to think, "Poor devil, those ten lines cost, perhaps, hours of work," or, "Those ten lines were thought by their writer to be literature." Literature be hanged! It was only cold type, leaden letters squeezed into square frames—leaden letters that will be melted down on the morrow—type, and the whole paper to be printed, and trains for the delivery carts to catch, if[87] people would have papers before breakfast. And the aproned men brought other squares of type, and printed rough impressions of them, so that Humphrey caught a glimpse of one of the pages at shortly after midnight of a paper that would be new to people at eight o'clock the next morning. He felt the pride of a privileged person.

Selsey caught sight of him. "Hullo, Quain ... what are you doing here?"

"Bus accident—" began Humphrey.

Hargreave pounced upon him. "Any good? Is it worth a contents bill?" he asked, excitedly.

"There hasn't been any accident worth speaking of. No one hurt, I mean."

"All right. Let it go," said Selsey, calmly. Hargreave went away to haggle with the foreman over something. Nobody was relieved to hear that the accident had not been serious.

Humphrey lingered a little longer: he saw rooms leading out of the composing-room, where there was a noise of hammering on metal, and the smell of molten lead, ... and men running to and fro in aprons, taking surreptitious pinches of snuff, banging with mallets, carrying squares of type, proofs, battered tins of tea, ... running to and fro, terribly serious and earnest, just as scene-shifters in the theatre rush and bustle and carry things that the audience never sees, when the curtain hides the stage.

"Better get home," said Selsey, noticing him again.

Humphrey went downstairs. The reporters' room was empty; the fire was low in the grate. He went downstairs, and as he reached the bottom step, the grey building shivered and trembled as if in agony, and there came up from the very roots of its being a deep roar, at first irregular, and menacing, but gradually settling down to a steady, rhythmical beat, like the throbbing of thousands of human hearts.