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 r............