"'S Iverson," barked Nestor Hurd, over the low partition which divided
his office from that of his staff, "c'm' here!"
I responded to his call with sympathetic haste. It had been a hard day
for Mr. Hurd. Everything had gone wrong. Every reporter he had sent
out seemed to be "falling down" on his assignment and telephoning in
to explain why. Next to failures, our chief disliked explanations. "A
dead man doesn't care a hang what killed him," was his terse summing
up of their futility.
He was shouting an impassioned monologue into the telephone when I
reached his side, and as a final exclamation-point he hurled the
receiver down on his desk, upsetting a bottle of ink. I waited in
silence while he exhausted the richest treasures of his vocabulary and
soaked up the ink with blotters. It was a moment for feminine tact,
and I exercised it, though I was no longer in awe of Mr. Hurd. I had
been on the _Searchlight_ a year, and the temperamental storms of my
editors now disturbed me no more than the whirling and buzzing of
mechanical tops. Even Mollie Merk had ceased to call me the "convent
kid." I had made many friends, learned many lessons, suffered many
disappointments, lost many illusions, and taken on some new ones. I
had slowly developed a sense of humor--to my own abysmal surprise. The
memory of my convent had become as the sound of a vesper-bell, heard
occasionally above the bugle-calls of a strenuous life. Also, I had
learned to avoid "fine writing," which is why my pen faltered just now
over the "bugle-calls." I knew my men associates very well, and
admired most of them, though they often filled me with a maternal
desire to stand them in a corner with their faces to the wall. I
frequently explained to them what their wives or sweethearts really
meant by certain things they had said. I was the recognized office
authority on good form, Catholicism, and feminine psychology.
Therefore I presented to Mr. Hurd's embittered glance the serene brow
of an equal--even on occasions such as this, when the peace of the
office lay in fragments around us.
At last he ceased to address space, threw the blotters into his
waste-paper basket, and turned resentful eyes on me.
"Gibson's fallen down on the Brandow case," he snapped.