"And Myatt's the captain, I suppose?" said I.
"No. But he's the finest full-back in the League."
I then had a vision of Myatt as a great man. By an effort of the
imagination I perceived that the equivalent of the fate of nations
depended upon him. I recollected, now, large yellow posters on the
hoardings we had passed, with the names of Knype and of Manchester
Rovers in letters a foot high and the legend "League match at Knype"
over all. It seemed to me that the heroic name of Jos Myatt, if truly he
were the finest full-back in the League, if truly his presence or
absence affected the betting as far off as Birmingham, ought also to
have been on the posters, together with possibly his portrait. I saw Jos
Myatt as a matador, with a long ribbon of scarlet necktie down his
breast, and embroidered trousers.
"Why," said Buchanan, "if Knype drop into the Second Division they'll
never pay another dividend! It'll be all up with first-class football in
the Five Towns!"
The interests involved seemed to grow more complicated. And here I had
been in the district nearly four hours without having guessed that the
district was quivering in the tense excitement of gigantic issues! And
here was this Scotch doctor, at whose word the great Myatt would have
declined to play, never saying a syllable about the affair, until a
chance remark from Buchanan loosened his tongue. But all doctors are
strangely secretive. Secretiveness is one of their chief private
pleasures.
"Come and see the pigeons, eh?" said Buchanan.
"Pigeons?" I repeated.
"We give the results of over a hundred matches in our Football Edition,"
said Buchanan, and added: "not counting Rugby."
As we left the room two boys dodged round us into it, bearing telegrams.
In a moment we were, in the most astonishing manner, on a leaden roof of
the _Signal_ offices. High factory chimneys rose over the horizon of
slates on every side, blowing thick smoke into the general murk of the
afternoon sky, and crossing the western crimson with long pennons of
black. And out of the murk there came from afar a blue-and-white pigeon
which circled largely several times over the offices of the _Signal_. At
length it descended, and I could hear the whirr of its strong wings. The
wings ceased to beat and the pigeon slanted downwards in a curve, its
head lower than its wide tail. Then the little head gradually rose and
the tail fell; the curve had changed, the pace slackened; the pigeon was
calculating with all its brain; eyes, wings, tail and feet were being
co-ordinated to the resolution of an intricate mechanical problem. The
pinkish claws seemed to grope--and after an instant of hesitation the
thing was done, the problem solved; the pigeon, with delicious
gracefulness, had established equilibrium on the ridge of a pigeon-cote,
and folded its wings, and was peering about with strange motions of its
extremely movable head. Presently it flew down to the leads, waddled to
and fro with the ungainly gestures of a fat woman of sixty, and
disappeared into the cote. At the same moment the boy who had been
dismissed from the sub-editor's room ran forward and entered the cote by
a wire-screened door.
"Handy things, pigeons!" said the doctor as we approached to examine the
cote. Fifty or sixty pigeons were cooing and strutting in it. There was
a protest of wings as the boy seized the last arriving messenger.
"Give it here!" Buchanan ordered.
The boy handed over a thin tube of paper which he had unfastened from
the bird's leg. Buchanan unrolled it and showed it to me. I read:
"Midland Federation. Axe United, Macclesfield Town. Match abandoned
after half-hour's play owing to fog. Three forty-five."
"Three forty-five," said Buchanan, looking at his watch. "He's done the
ten miles in half an hour, roughly. Not bad. First time we tried pigeons
from as far off as Axe. Here, boy!" And he restored the paper to the
boy, who gave it to another boy, who departed with it.
"Man," said the doctor, eyeing Buchanan. "Ye'd no business out here.
Ye're not precisely a pigeon."
Down we went, one after another, by the ladder, and now we fell into the
composing-room, where Buchanan said he felt warmer. An immense, dirty,
white-washed apartment crowded with linotypes and other machines, in
front of which sat men in white aprons, tapping, tapping--gazing at
documents pinned at the level of their eyes--and tapping, tapping. A
kind of cavernous retreat in which monstrous iron growths rose out of
the floor and were met half-way by electric flowers that had their roots
in the ceiling! In this jungle there was scarcely room for us to walk.
Buchanan explained the linotypes to me. I watched, as though
romantically dreaming, the flashing descent of letter after letter, a
rain of letters into the belly of the machine; then, going round to the
back, I watched the same letters rising again in a close, slow
procession, and sorting themselves by themselves at the top in readiness
to answer again to the tapping, tapping of a man in a once-white apron.
And while I was watching all that I could somehow, by a faculty which we
have, at the same time see pigeons far overhead, arriving and arriving
out of the murk from beyond the verge of chimneys.
"Ingenious, isn't it?" said Stirling.
But I imagine that he had not the faculty by which to see the pigeons.
A reverend, bearded, spectacled man, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up
and an apron stretched over his hemispherical paunch, strolled slowly
along an alley, glancing at a galley-proof with an ingenuous air just as
if he had never seen a galley-proof before.
"It's a stick more than a column already," said he confidentially,
offering the long paper, and then gravely looking at Buchanan, with head
bent forward, not through his spectacles but over them.
The editor negligently accepted the proof, and I read a series of
titles: "Knype _v_. Manchester Rovers. Record Gate. Fifteen thousand
spectators. Two goals in twelve minutes. Myatt in form. Special Report."
Buchanan gave the slip back without a word.
"There you are!" said he to me, as another compositor near us attached a
piece of tissue paper to his machine. It was the very paper that I had
seen come out of the sky, but its contents had been enlarged and amended
by the sub-editorial pen. The man began tapping, tapping, and the
letters began to flash downwards on their way to tell a quarter of a
million people that Axe _v_. Macclesfield had been stopped by fog.
"I suppose that Knype match is over by now?" I said.
"Oh no!" said Buchanan. "The second half has scarcely begun."
"Like to go?" Stirling asked.
"Well," I said, feeling adventurous, "it's a notion, isn't it?"
"You can run Mr Loring down there in five or six minutes," said
Buchanan. "And he's probably never seen anything like it before. You
might call here as you come home and see the paper on the machines."