I
Little old Bob Dungan, his coat off, his sleeves rolled to the elbow so
that they revealed the red-woolen underwear which he habitually wore,
sat at his typewriter in the furthest corner of the noisy City Room and
rattled off a cryptic sentence. He wrote:
“_The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog._”
Now this is not a piece of information calculated to interest more than
a baker’s dozen of the half million readers of a metropolitan daily such
as that which Bob served. The sentence as a sentence has but one virtue;
it contains all of the letters of the alphabet. That is all you can say
for it. Nevertheless, having written the words, Bob studied them
profoundly, ticking off with his pencil each letter, from A to Izzard,
and when he was done, counted those that still remained.
“Nine,” he said, half aloud. And he scratched his head. “Ought to get it
under that.” He put a fresh sheet in the typewriter and prepared to try
again. To the casual eye of any one who might be watching from across
the room, he looked like a very busy man.
As a matter of fact, this was exactly the impression Bob wished to
convey. He was anxious to appear busy and indispensable. For little old
Bob Dungan was desperately afraid of being fired.
A newspaper staff is built to meet emergencies. That means that, left to
itself, it inevitably becomes top-heavy, and on days when news is slack,
the City Room is half full of men waiting for an assignment that never
comes. When such a condition develops, the veterans in the office know
what will follow. Some fine morning, the publisher drifts down stairs
and sees the idle men--idle because there is nothing for them to do. And
that afternoon, the order comes to cut the staff, cut to the bone.
So faces once familiar begin to disappear. The latest comers are the
first to go, and only unusual ability will save them. Then the less
efficient among the regulars are dropped, and finally, in drastic cases,
those oldtimers who have begun to slow down. There was once a Saturday
afternoon when from a single City Room twenty-two men were discharged,
and the work went on, Monday morning, just the same. Men who have seemed
indispensable disappear--and leave no more of a hole than your finger
leaves in a bucket of water. The young reporters take these episodes
gaily, as a part of the game; those more experienced accept misfortune
with what resignation they can muster. But in the case of a man who has
served the paper for ten or fifteen or twenty years, the moment has its
black and tragic side.
Old Bob Dungan was wise enough to know the signs. Three weeks before two
young reporters had disappeared. A week after, five men were “let go.”
Last Saturday seven old friends had stopped at his desk to say goodby.
And this morning, his half-admitted apprehensions had been brought to
focus. Fear had set its grip on him....
Dade, the City Editor, a driver of a man who was himself driven by a
fierce affection for the paper which he served, was standing at Bob’s
desk, and they were talking together when Boswell, the publisher, came
in from the elevator. And Dade--the man had a kindly, human streak in
him which some people never discovered--whispered out of the side of his
mouth to Bob:
“Look out, old man. For God’s sake, look busy as hell!”
Then he went across to meet Boswell; and Bob began to write on his
machine, at top speed, over and over again:
“_Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party. Now
is the time for all good men to come...._”
He shifted, after a while, to the other: “_The quick brown fox jumps
over the lazy dog._” Meaningless enough; but Bob hoped, with all his
trembling soul, that he was succeeding in looking busy. He was, as has
been said, afraid of being fired.