_A perturbed spirit--The loss of a fortune--A broken bank--A study
in bimetallism--Auri sacra fames--A rough diamond--A friend of the
peerage--And of Dublin stout--His weaknesses--The Quarterly Review--The
dilemma--An amateur hospital nurse--A terrible night--Benvenuto
Cellini--A subtle jest--The disappearance of the jester--An appropriated
leaderette--An appropriated anecdote--An appropriated quatrain._
ONCE I saw a sub-editor actually within easy reach of suicide. It was
not the duplicating of a five-column speech in flimsy, nor was it that
the foreman printer had broken his heart. It was that he had been the
victim of a heartless theft. His savings of years had been carried off
in the course of a single night. So he explained to me with “tears in
his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,” when I came down to the office one
evening. He was walking up and down his room, with three hours’ arrears
of unopened telegrams on his desk and a _p.p.c._ note from the foreman
beneath a leaden “rule,” used as a paper weight; for the foreman, being,
as usual, a conscientious man, invariably promised to hand in his notice
at sundown if kept waiting for copy.
“What on earth is the matter?” I inquired.
“Is it neuralgia or----”
“It’s worse--worse!” he moaned. “I’ve lost all my money--all--all!
there’s the tin I kept it in--see for yourself if there’s a penny left
in it.” He threw himself into his chair and bowed down his head upon his
hands.
Far off a solitary (speaking) trumpet blew.
“If the hands are to go home you’ve only got to say so and I release
them,” was the message that was delivered into my ear when I went to the
end of the tube communicating with the foreman.
“Three columns will be out inside half an hour,” I replied. Then I
turned to the sobbing sub-editor. “Come,” said I, “bear it like a man.
It’s a terrible thing, of course, but still it must be faced. Tell me
how many pounds you’ve lost, and I’ll put the matter into the hands of
the police.”
He looked up with a vacant white face.
“How many--there were a hundred and forty pence in the tin when I went
home last night. See if there’s a penny left.”
A cursory glance at the chocolate tin that lay on the table was quite
sufficient to convince me that it was empty.
“Cheer up,” I said. “A hundred and forty pence. It sounds large in
pence, to be sure, but when you think of it from the standard of the
silver currency it doesn’t seem so formidable. Eleven and eightpence. Of
course it’s a shocking thing. Was it all in pence?”
“All--all--every penny of it.”
“Keep up your heart. We may be able to trace the money. I suppose you
are prepared to identify the coins?”
He ran his fingers through his hair, and I could see that he was
striving manfully to collect his thoughts.
“Identify? I could swear to them if I saw them in the lump--one hundred
and forty--one--hundred--and--forty--pence! Yes, I’ll swear that I could
swear to them in the lump. But singly--oh, I’ll never see them again!”
“Tell me how it came about that you had so much money in this room,”
said I, beginning to open the telegrams. “Man, did you not think of the
terrible temptation that you were placing in the way of the less opulent
members of the staff? Eleven and eight in a disused chocolate tin! It’s
a temptation like this that turns honest men into thieves.”
Then it was that he informed me on the point upon which I confess I was
curious--namely, how he came to have this fortune in copper.
His wife, he said, was in the habit of giving him a penny every rainy
night, this being his tramcar fare from his house to his office. But--he
emphasised this detail--she was usually weak enough not to watch to see
whether he got into the tramcar or not, and the consequence was that,
unless the night was very wet indeed, he was accustomed to walk the
whole way and thus save the penny, which he nightly deposited in the
chocolate tin: he could not carry it home with him, he said, for his
wife would be certain to find it when she searched his waistcoat pockets
before he arose in the morning.
“For a hundred and forty times you persevered in this course of
duplicity for the sake of the temporary gain!” said I. “It is this
craving to become quickly rich that is the curse of the nineteenth
century. I thought that journalists were free from it; I find that they
are as bad as Stock Exchange gamblers or magazine proprietors. Oh,
gold! gold! Go on with your work or there’ll be a blue-pencilled row
to-morrow. Don’t fancy you’ll obtain the sympathy of any human being in
your well-earned misfortune. You don’t deserve to have so good a wife.
A penny every rainy night--a penny! Oh, I lose all patience when I think
of your complaining. Go on with your work.”
He went on with his work.
Some months after this incident he thought it necessary to tell me that
he was a Scotchman.
It was not necessary; but I asked him if his wife was one too.
“Not exactly,” said he argumentatively. “But she’s a native of
Scotland--I’ll say that much for her.”
I afterwards heard that he had become the proprietor of that very
journal upon which he had been sub-editor.
I was not surprised.
*****
My memories of the sub-editor’s room include a three months’ experience
of a remarkable man. He imposed upon me for nearly a week, telling me
anecdotes of the distinguished persons whom he had met in the course of
his career. It seemed to me--for a week--that he was the darling of the
most exclusive society in Europe. He talked about noble lords by their
Christian names, and of noble ladies with equal breezy freedom. Many
of his anecdotes necessitated a verbatim report of the replies made by
marquises and countesses to his playful sallies; and I noticed that,
so far as his recollection served him, they had always addressed him as
George; sometimes--but only in the case of over-familiar daughters of
peers--Georgie. I felt--for a week--that journalism had made a sensible
advance socially when such things were possible. Perhaps, I thought,
some day the daughter of a peer may distort my name, so that I may not
die undistinguished.
I have seen a good many padded peeresses and dowdy duchesses since those
days, and my ambition has somehow drifted into other channels; but while
the man talked of his intimacies with peers, and his friendship--he
assured me on his sacred word of honour (whatever that meant) that it
was perfectly Platonic--with peeresses.
I was carried away--for a week.
He was an undersized man, with a rooted prejudice against soap and the
comb. He spoke like a common man, and wore clothes that were clearly
second-hand. He posed as the rough diamond, the untamed literary lion,
the genius who refuses to be trammelled by the usages--most of them
purely artificial--of society, and on whom society consequently dotes.
What he doted on was Dublin stout. If he had acquired during his
intercourse with the aristocracy their effete taste in the way of
drinking, he certainly managed to chasten it. He drank six bottles of
stout in the course of a single night, and regretted that there was not
a seventh handy.
For a month he did his work moderately well, but at the end of that time
he began to put it upon other people. He made excuse after excuse to
shirk his legitimate duties. One night he came down with a swollen face.
He was suffering inexpressible agony from toothache, he said, and if
he were to sit down to his desk he really would not guarantee that some
shocking mistake would not occur. He would, he declared, be serving the
best interests of the paper if he were to go home to his bed. He only
waited to drink a bottle of stout before going.
A few days after his return to work he entered the office enveloped in
an odoriferous muffler, and speaking hoarsely. He had, he said, caught
so severe a cold that the doctor was not going to allow him to leave his
house; but so soon as he got his back turned, he had run down to tell
us that it was impossible for him to do anything for a night or two. He
wanted to bind us down in the most solemn way not to let the doctor know
that he came out, and we promised to let no one know except the manager.
This assurance somehow did not seem to satisfy him. But he drank a
bottle of porter and went away.
The very next week he came to me in confidence, telling me that he had
just received the proofs of his usual political article in the
_Quarterly_, and that the editor had taken the trouble to telegraph to
him to return the proofs for press without fail the next day. Now, the
only question with him was, should he chuck up the _Quarterly_, for
which he had written for many years, or the humble daily paper in the
office of which he was standing.
I did not venture to suggest a solution of the problem.
He did.
“Maybe you wouldn’t mind taking a squint”--his phraseology was that
of the rough genius--“through the telegrams for to-night,” said he. “I
don’t like to impose on a good-natured sonny like you, but you see how
I’m situated. Confound that _Quarterly!_”
“Do you do the political article for the _Quarterly?_” I asked.
“Man, I’ve done it for the past eleven years,” said he. “I thought every
one knew that. It’s editor of the _Quarterly_ that I should be to-day
if William Smith hadn’t cut me out of the job. But I bear him no
malice--bless your soul, not I. You’ll go over the flimsies?”
I said I would, and he wiped a bath sponge of porter-froth off his beard
in order to thank me.
I knew that he was telling me a lie about the _Quarterly_, but I did his
work.
Less than a week after, he entered my room to express the hope that I
would be able to make arrangements to have his work done for him once
again, the fact being that he had just received a message from Mrs.
Thompson--the wife of young Thompson, the manager for Messrs. Gibson,
the shippers--to ask him for heaven’s sake to help her to look after her
husband that night. Young Thompson had been behaving rather wildly of
late, it appeared, and was suffering from an attack of that form of
heredity known as _delirium tremens_. He had been held down in the bed
by three men and Mrs. Thompson the previous night, my informant said,
and added that he himself would probably be one of a fresh batch on whom
a similar duty would devolve inside an hour or so.
He had scarcely left the office--after refreshing himself by the
artificial aid of Guinness--before a knock came to my door, and the next
moment Mr. Thompson himself quietly entered. I saw that the poker was
within easy reach, and then asked him how he was.
“I’m all right,” he replied. “I merely dropped in to borrow the _Glasgow
Herald_ for a few minutes. I heard to-day that a ship of ours was
reported as spoken, but I can’t find it in any paper that has come to
us.”
“You can have the _Herald_ with pleasure,” said I. “You didn’t go to the
concert last night?”
“No,” said he. “You see it was the night of our choir practice, and I
had to attend it to keep the others up to their work.”
The next night I asked the sub-editor how his friend Mr. Thompson was,
and if he had experienced much difficulty in keeping him from making an
onslaught upon the snakes.
He shook his head solemnly, as if his experiences of the previous night
were too terrible to be expressed in ordinary colloquialisms.
“Sonny,” said he, “pray that you may never see all that I saw last
night.”
“Or all that Thompson saw,” said I. “Was he very bad?”
“As bad as they make them,” he replied. “I sat on his head for hours at
a stretch.”
“When he was off his head you were on it?”
“Ay; but every now and again he would, by an almost superhuman effort,
toss me half way up to the ceiling. Man, it was an awful night! It’s
heartless of me not being with the poor woman now; but I said I’d do a
couple of hours’ work before going.”
“All right,” said I. “Maybe Thompson will call here and you can walk up
with him.”
“Thompson call? What the blue pencil do you mean?”
“Just what I say. If you had waited for five minutes last night you
might have had his company up to that pleasant little _séance_ in which
you turned his head into a chair. He called to see the _Glasgow Herald_
before you could have reached the end of the street.”
He gave a little gasp.
“I didn’t say Thompson, did I?” he asked, after a pause.
“You certainly did,” said I.
“I’ll be forgetting my own name next,” said he. “The man’s name is
Johnston--he lives in the corner house of the row I lodge in.”
“Anyhow, you’ll not see him to-night,” said I.
*****
The fellow failed to exasperate me even then. But he succeeded early the
next month. He came to me one night with a magazine in his hand.
“I wonder if the boss”--I think I mentioned that he was a rough
diamond--“would mind my inserting a column or so of extracts from this
paper of mine in the _Drawing Room_ on Benvenuto Cellini?” He pronounced
the name “Selliny.”
“On whom is the paper?” I inquired.
“Selliny--Benvenuto Selliny. I’ve made Selliny my own--no man living can
touch me there. I knocked off the thing in a hurry, but it reads very
well, though I say it who shouldn’t.”
“Why shouldn’t you say it?” I inquired.
“Well when you’ve written as much as me,”--he was a rough
diamond--“maybe you’ll be as modest,” he cried, gaily. “When you can
knock off a paper----”
“There’s one paper that you’ll not knock off, but that you’ll be pretty
soon knocked off,” said I; “and that paper is the one that you are
connected with just now. If lies were landed property you’d be one of
the largest holders of real estate in the world. I never met such a liar
as you are. You never wrote that article on Benvenuto Cellini--you don’t
even know how to pronounce the man’s name.”
“The boy’s mad--mad!” he cried, with a laugh that was not a laugh. “Mr.
Barton,”--the managing editor had entered the room,--“this fair-haired
young gentleman is a bit off his head, I’m thinking.”
“I’m not off my head in the least,” said I. “Do you mean to say, in the
presence of Mr. Barton, that you wrote that paper in the _Drawing Room_
on Benvenuto Cellini?”
“Do you want me to take my oath that I wrote it?” said he. “What makes
you think that I didn’t write it?”
“Nothing beyond the fact that I wrote it myself, and that this slip
of paper which I hold in my hand is the cheque that was sent to me
in payment for it, and that this other slip is the usual form of
acknowledgment--you see the title of the article on the side--which I
have to post to-morrow.”
There was a silence in the room. The managing editor had seated himself
in my chair and was scribbling something at the desk.
“My fair-haired friend,” said the sub-editor, “I thought that you would
have seen from the first the joke I was playing on you. Why, man, the
instant I read the paper I knew it was by you. Don’t you fancy that I
know your fluent style by this time?”
“I fancy that there’s no greater liar on earth than yourself,” said I.
“Look here,” he cried, assuming a menacing attitude. “I can stand a lot,
but----”
“And so can I,” said the managing editor, “but at last the breaking
strain is reached. That paper will allow of your drawing a
month’s salary to-morrow,”--he handed him the paper which he had
scribbled,--“and I think that as this office has done without you for
eleven nights during the past month, it will do without you for the
twelfth. Don’t let me find you below when I am going away.”
He didn’t.
*****
I cannot say that I ever met another man connected with a newspaper
quite so unscrupulous as the man with whom I have just dealt. I can
certainly safely say that I never again knew of a journalist laying
claim to the authorship of anything that I wrote, either in a daily
paper, where everything is anonymous, or in a magazine, where I employed
a pseudonym. No one thought it worth his while doing so. A man who
was not a journalist, however, took to himself the honour and glory
associated with the writing of a leaderette of mine on the excellent
management of a local library. The man who was idiot enough to do so was
a theological student in the Presbyterian interest. He began to frequent
the library without previously having paid his fare, and on being
remonstrated with mildly by the young librarian, said that surely it was
not a great concession on the part of the committee to allow him the
run of the building after the article he had written in the leading
newspaper on the manner in which the institution was conducted. It so
happened, however, that the librarian had, at my request, furnished me
with the statistics that formed the basis of the leaderette, and he
had no hesitation in saying of the divinity student at his leisure what
David said of all men in his haste. But after being thrust out of the
library and called an impostor, the divinity student went home and wrote
a letter signed “Theologia,” in which he made a furious onslaught upon
the management of the library, and had the effrontery to demand its
insertion in the newspaper the next day.
He is now a popular and deservedly respected clergyman, and I hear that
his sermon on Acts v., 1-11 is about to be issued in pamphlet form.
*****
Curiously enough quite recently a man in whose chambers I was
breakfasting, pointed out to me what he called a good story that had
appeared in a paper on the previous evening.
The paragraph in which it was included was as follows:--
“A rather amusing story is told by the _Avilion Gazettes_ Special
Commissioner in his latest article on ‘Ireland as it is and as it would
be.’ It is to the effect that some of the Irish members recently wished
to cross the Channel for half-a-crown each, and to that end called on a
boat agent, a Tory, who knew them, when the following conversation took
place:--
“‘Can we go across for half-a-crown each?’
“‘No, ye can’t, thin.’
“‘An’ why not?’
“‘Because’tis a cattle boat.’
“‘Nevermind that, sure we’re not particular.’
“‘No, but the cattle are.’”
That was the entire paragraph..
“It’s a bit rough on your compatriots,” said my host. “You look as if
you feel it.”
“I do,” said I; “I feel it to be rather sad that a story that a fellow
takes the trouble to invent and to print in a pamphlet, should be picked
up by an English correspondent in Dublin, printed in one of his letters
from Ireland, and afterwards published in a London evening paper without
any acknowledgment being made of the source whence it was derived.”
And that is my opinion still. The story was a pure invention of my own,
and it was printed in an anonymous skit, only without the brogue. It
was left for the English Special Commissioner to make a feature of the
brogue, of which, of course, he had become a master, having been close
upon two days in Dublin.
But the most amusing thing to me was to find that the sub-editor of the
newspaper with which I was connected had actually cut the paragraph out
of the London paper and inserted it in our columns. He pointed it out to
me on my return, and asked me if I didn’t think it a good story.
I said it was first rate, and inquired if he had ever heard the story
before. He replied that he never had.
That was, I repeat, the point of the whole incident which amused me
most; for I had made the sub-editor a present of the original pamphlet,
and he said he had enjoyed it immensely.
He also hopes to be one day an ordained clergyman.
*****
When in Ireland during the General Election of 1892, I got a telegram
one night informing me that Mr. Justin M’Carthy had been defeated in
Derry that day by Mr. Ross, Q.C.
It occurred to me that if a quatrain could be made upon the incident it
might be read the next day. The following was the result of the great
mental effort necessary to bring to bear upon the task:--
“That the Unionists Derry can win
Is a matter to-day beyond doubt;
For Ross the Q.C. is just in,
And the one that’s Justin is just out.”
I put my initials to this masterpiece, and I need scarcely say that I
was dizzy with pride when it appeared at the head of a column the
next morning. Now, that thing kept staring me in the face out of every
newspaper, English as well as Irish, that I picked up during the next
fortnight, only it appeared without my initials, but in compensation
bore as preface, lest the reader might be amazed at coming too suddenly
upon such subtle humour, these words:--
“The following epigram by a Dublin wit is being widely circulated in the
Irish metropolis.” Some months afterwards, when I chanced to pay a visit
to Dublin, the author of the epigram was pointed out to me.
“So it was he who wrote that thing about just in and just out?” I
remarked.
“It was,” said my friend. “I’d introduce you to him only, between
ourselves, though a nice enough fellow before he wrote that, _he hasn’t
been very approachable since_.”
I felt extremely obliged to the gentleman. I thought of Mary Barton,
the heroic lady represented by Miss Bateman long ago, who had accused
herself of the crime committed by another.