He rang the bell and asked Miss Green to find Mr. Rumball and send him in. Meanwhile he made a bet with himself that the first sex scene in Plonk would be found between page 15 and 30. He won his bet. It was by no means a certainty. Sometimes this important scene came between pages 1 and 15.
Henry Rumball was a tall, untidy young man on the reportorial staff; his daily round included visits to the docks, the university and the undertakers. He presented himself wordlessly before the editor’s desk.
“I thought you might like to review Plonk,” said Ridley. “I know you take an interest in the modern novel. This is rather special, I believe. Stark stuff. Say what you think, but don’t frighten any old ladies.”
“Thanks, Mr. Ridley. Gosh, Plonk,” said Rumball, seizing the volume and seeming to caress it.
“You know something about it?”
“I’ve seen the American reviews. They say it moves the novel on to an entirely different plateau of achievement. The Saturday Review man said when he’d finished it he felt exactly as if he had been drinking plonk all night himself. It’s kind of tactile, I guess.”
“Well, say so in your piece. Tactile is a handy word; tends to make a sentence quotable.”
Rumball rocked his weight from foot to foot, breathed heavily, and then said, “I don’t know that I really ought to do it.”
“Why not? I thought you liked that kind of thing?”
“Yes, Mr. Ridley, but I’m trying to keep my head clear, you see. I’m avoiding outside influences, to keep my stream unpolluted, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t know in the least what you mean. What stream are you talking about?”
“My stream of inspiration. For The Plain. My book, you know.”
“Are you writing a book?”
“Yes. Don’t you remember? I told you all about it nearly a year ago.”
“I can’t recall anything about it. When did you tell me?”
“Well, I came in to ask you about a raise—.”
“Oh yes, I remember that. I told you to talk to Mr. Weir. I never interfere with his staff.”
“Yes, well, I told you then I was writing a novel. And now I’m working on my first draft. And I’m not reading anything, for fear it may influence me. That’s the big danger, you know. Influences. Above all, you have to be yourself.”
“Aha, well if you don’t want Plonk I’ll find someone else. Will you ask Mr. Weir to see me when he has a free moment?”
“Could I just talk to you for a minute, about the novel? I’d appreciate your help, Mr. Ridley.”
“This is rather a busy time.”
But Rumball had already seated himself, and his shyness had fallen from him. His eyes gleamed.
“It’s going to be a big thing. I know that. It’s not conceit; I feel it just as if the book was somebody else’s. It’s something nobody has ever tried to do in Canada before. It’s about the West—”
“I recall quite a few novels about the West.”
“Yes, but they were all about man’s conquest of the prairie. This is just the opposite. It’s the prairie’s conquest of man. See? A big concept. A huge panorama. I only hope I can handle it. You remember that film The Plough that Broke the Plain? I’m calling my book The Plain that Broke the Plough. I open with a tremendous description of the Prairie; vast, elemental, brooding, slumbrous; I reckon on at least fifteen thousand words of that. Then Man comes. Not the Red Man; he understands the prairie; he croons to it. No, this is the White Man; he doesn’t understand the prairie; he rips up its belly with a blade; he ravishes it. ‘Take it easy,’ says the Red Man. ‘Aw, drop dead,’ says the White Man. You see? There’s your conflict. But the real conflict is between the White Man and the prairie. The struggle goes on for three generations, and at last the prairie breaks the White Man. Just throws him off.”
“Very interesting,” said Ridley, picking up some papers from his desk. “We must have a talk about it some time. Perhaps when you have finished it.”
“Oh, but that may not be for another five years,” said Rumball. “I’m giving myself to this, utterly.”
“Not to the neglect of your daily work, I hope?”
“I do that almost mechanically, Mr. Ridley. But my creative depths are busy all the time with my book.”
“Aha; will you ask Mr. Weir if I may see him?”
“Certainly, sir. But there’s just one thing I’d like your advice about. Names. Names are so important in a book. Now the big force in my book is the prairie itself, and I just call it the Prairie. But my people who are struggling against it are two families; one is English, from the North, and I thought of calling them the Chimneyholes, only they pronounce it Chumnel. The other is Scandinavian and I want to call them the Ruokatavarakauppas. I’m worried that the vowel sounds in the two names may not be sufficiently differentiated. Because, you see, I want to get a big poetic sweep into the writing, and if the main words in the novel aren’t right, the whole thing may bog down, do you see?”
“I want to see Mr. Weir at once,” said Ridley, in a loud, compelling voice.
“I’ll tell him right away,” said Rumball, moving toward the door, “but if you should happen to think of a name that has the same rhythm as Ruokatavarakauppas but has a slightly darker vowel shading I’d be grateful if you would tell me. It’s really going to be a kind of big saga, and I want people to read it aloud as much as possible, and the names are terribly important.”
Reluctantly, he left the office, and shortly afterward Edward Weir, the managing editor, came in and sat in the chair from which Rumball had been driven with such difficulty.
“Anything out of the ordinary last night?” asked Ridley.
“Just the usual Hallowe’en stuff, except for one story we can’t track down. Some sort of trouble at the Cathedral. The Dean won’t say anything, but he didn’t deny that something had happened. Archie was going home a little after midnight and he met Miss Pottinger coming from the West Door of the Cathedral. He asked her if anything was wrong and she said, ‘You’ll get nothing out of me,’ and hurried off across the street. But she had no stockings on, and bedroom slippers; he spotted them under her coat. Now what was she doing in the Cathedral at midnight on Hallowe’en with no stockings on?”
“At her age lack of stockings suggests great perturbation of mind, but nothing really interesting. Did Archie try to get into the church?”
“Yes, but the door was locked. He could see light through the keyhole, but there was nothing to be heard.”
“Probably nothing at all happening, really.”
“I don’t know. When I called Knapp this morning he was very short, and when I asked him if it was true that someone had tried to rob the Cathedral last night he said, ‘Where did you hear about that?’ and then tried to tell me he meant nothing by it.”
“Why don’t you try the organist? You know, that fellow—what’s his name?—Cobbler. He never stops talking.”
“Called him. He said, ‘My lips are sealed.’ You know what a jackass he is.”
“We’d better keep after it. Tell me, is that fellow Rumball any good?”
“Fair. He was better when he first came on the staff. He moons a good deal now. Maybe he’s in love.”
“Perhaps Mr. Shillito could give him one of his talks on the virtue of digging in the Newspaper Game.”
“God forbid. Are you going to do anything about that matter?”
“I’m moving as fast as I can. It’s very difficult. You have no heart, Ned. How would you like to be thrown out of your job at seventy-eight?”
“If I had a pension, and a house all paid for, and a nice little private income, and probably a good chunk of savings, like old Shillito, I would like nothing better.”
“Has he all that?”
“You know it as well as I do. He just likes to prowl around this office and waste everybody’s time.”
“He says he prays to whatever gods there be that he may drop in harness. He’s not a conventionally rel
igious man, but that is his prayer.”
“The old faker! When he caught on to this Cathedral story this morning he was in my office like a shot out of a gun. ‘Ned, my boy,’ he said, ‘take an old newspaperman’s advice and let this thing drop; I’ve been a staunch churchman all my life, and there’s nothing I would not do to shield the church against a breath of slander.’ Of course I tried to find out if he knew anything, but he shut up like a clam. Gloster, why don’t you give him the axe? He’s just a pest.”
“I inherited him. And he was editor himself for a few months before I was appointed. I don’t want anybody to be able to say that I was unfair to him.”
“It’s your funeral. But he’s a devil of a nuisance. Always in the news room, keeping somebody from work. The boys are sick of him. They aren’t even civil to him any more, but he doesn’t notice.”
“I’m going to do something very soon. I just want to be able to do it the right way. If we could ease him out gloriously, somehow it would be best. I had a notion involving an illuminated address which might work. But leave it with me for a few days more. Nothing else out of the way?”
But the day’s news was barren of anything else which the managing editor thought Mr. Ridley should know, and he went back to his own office leaving the editor once more with the task of writing his leader. To postpone the dread moment a little longer he picked up the few typewritten sheets which Mr. Shillito called “his stint”, and read that which was uppermost.
A VANISHING AMENITY
That the walking-stick is disappearing from our streets—nay even from our hall-stands—is a fact not to be gainsaid by the boldest. Where once:
Sir Plume, of amber snuffbox justly vain
And the nice conduct of a clouded cane,
took pride in possessing half-a-score different sticks for every occasion—for dress, for church, for the town stroll and the rural ramble—your modern man, hastening from business to home and from home to club in his comfortable car, needs none and, be it said, desires none. Macaulay’s schoolboy, young model of erudition, might be excused today for failing to distinguish between rattan and ebony, between cherished blackthorn and familiar ashplant. Beyond question the walking-stick has—hinc illae lacrimae—gone where the woodbine twineth.
Ridley sighed and then, slowly and painfully, was possessed by rage. His weakness in failing to get rid of the Old Mess condemned him to publish this sort of hogwash in the paper of which he was known to be the editor. The mantle of the eighteenth century essayist—old, frowsy, tattered, greasy and patched with Addison’s gout-rags and the seat of the gentle Elia’s pants—had fallen upon Swithin Shillito, and he strutted and postured in it, every day, in the columns of The Bellman. And why? Because he, Gloster Ridley, lacked the guts to tell the Old Mess that he was fired. He hated himself. He despised his weakness. And yet—a pious regard for old age and a sincere desire to be just and to use his power wisely restrained him from acting as he would have done if the offender had been, for instance, Henry Rumball. And, who could say, might not many readers of The Bellman—even a majority of them—share the opinion of Eldon Bumford, who reveled in Mr. Shillito’s essay on the fate of the toothpick and exulted in his discussions of the importation of snuff and birdseed? To what extent was he, Gloster Ridley, justified in imposing his taste upon the newspaper’s subscribers? Still, was it not for doing so that he drew his excellent salary and his annual bonus reckoned upon the profits? What about the barber’s chair; might there not be a few buttocks for Shillito? But he could go on in this Hamlet-like strain all day. There was only one thing for it. He rang for Miss Green.
“Please call Mr. Warboys and ask if I may see him for half an hour this afternoon,” said he.
“Yes, Mr. Ridley. And Professor Vambrace called again and said he couldn’t come at eleven and insists on seeing you at two.”
“Very well, Miss Green. But what is all this about Professor Vambrace? What does he want to see me about?”
“I don’t know sir, because he wouldn’t give me any hint on the phone. But he was very crusty. He kept repeating ‘Two, sharp,’ in a way I didn’t like.”
“He did, did he? Well, whenever he comes, keep him waiting five minutes. And I don’t want to be disturbed until lunch.”
“Yes, sir. Here are a few letters which came with the second mail.”
These were quickly dealt with. A temperance league called for “renewed efforts”, and Moral Re-Armament asserted in three paragraphs that if everybody would try to be decent to everybody else, all problems between management and labour would disappear. A young Nigerian wrote, “I am African boy but always wear American shoes”, and wanted a Canadian pen-friend, preferably a girl between 14 and 16. Another, deeply critical of The Bellman, was so eccentric in grammar and spelling that it took five minutes of Ridley’s time to prepare it for the printer; there is nothing that makes an editor feel more like St. Francis—a loving brother to the ass—than this sort of remedial work on a letter which accuses him of unfairness or stupidity. At last Ridley was ready to write his leader.
After all his fussing it came out quite smoothly, and by mid-day he had everything prepared for the printers and was ready to think about his luncheon.
CONSIDERING THAT he prepared and ate it in strict privacy, Gloster Ridley’s lunch was a matter of extraordinary interest to a great many people in Salterton. There are some ways in which a man may be eccentric, and nobody will think anything of it; there are others in which eccentricity becomes almost a moral issue. Having no wife to return to at the middle of the day, the obvious thing was for him to eat at an hotel or a restaurant. But instead he preferred to prepare his own luncheon and eat it in his office. This oddity might have been overlooked if he had uncomfortably devoured a sandwich at his desk, and washed it down with milk; such a course might have won him a reputation as a keen newspaperman, unwilling to relax for an instant in his contemplation of the day’s horrors; it might have brought him those stigmata of the conscientious and ambitious executive, a couple of ulcers. But he was known to prepare and eat a hot dish, and follow it with some cheese or a bit of fruit, and make himself black coffee in a special percolator. It was even suspected that he sometimes took a glass of sherry with his meal.
These enormities might have been forgiven if he had made a joke of them, or had asked other men of business to come and share his repast. But he obstinately considered his lunch to be nobody’s business but his own. Consequently spiteful things were said of him, and it was hinted that he wore a blue apron with white frills while preparing his meal, and more than one Letter to the Editor had suggested that if he knew as much about politics, or economics, or world affairs or whatever it might be, as he did about cooking, The Bellman would be a better paper.
Cooking, however, was his hobby, and he saw no reason why he should not do as he pleased. He would probably have admitted—indeed, often did admit to his particular friend Mrs. Fielding—that he was a bit of an old woman, and fussed about his food. He hated to eat in public, and he hated the kind of food which the restaurants of Salterton offered. In a modest way he was a gourmet. He cooked his own dinners in his apartment, and often asked his friends to dine with him. They agreed that his cooking was excellent. He permitted his housekeeper (whom he always thought of as Constant Reader because she devoured The Bellman nightly and gave him unsought advice about it daily) to cook his breakfast, but otherwise he took care of himself in this respect. He did not realize that his daily luncheon was taken almost as a personal affront by several ladies in Salterton who regarded all unattached men with suspicion, and if he knew that other men laughed at him he did not care.
Perhaps the most irritating part of the whole business to those who disapproved of his custom was his extreme thinness. A man who makes so much fuss about his food ought, by all laws of morality and justice, to be fat. He should bear about with him burdensome evidence of his shameful and unmanly preoccupation. But Ridley was tall and thin and bald, and was referred to by
the staff of The Bellman, when he was out of earshot, as Bony.
He liked his lunch-time, because it gave him an opportunity to think. On this first of November he moved the little hot-plate out of his cupboard as usual, took two eggs and other necessaries from his briefcase, and made himself an excellent omelette. He sat down at a small table near his window and ate it, looking down at the Salterton market, which was one of the last of the open-air markets in that part of Canada, and a very pretty sight.
He was thinking, of course, about Mr. Shillito. When he saw his publisher that afternoon, he would explain that Mr. Shillito must go, and he would ask Mr. Warboys to help him to ease the blow. Execrable as Mr. Shillito might be as a writer, and detestable as he might be about the office, he was an old man with somewhat more than his fair share of self-esteem, and Ridley could not bring himself to wound him. But there must be no half-measures. Shillito must have an illuminated address, presented if possible by Mr. Warboys himself. The whole staff must be assembled, and Mr. Shillito must be allowed to make a speech. Perhaps the Mayor could be bamboozled into coming. And a picture of the affair must appear in The Bellman, with a caption which would make it clear that Mr. Shillito was retiring of his own volition. It would all be done in the finest style. Why, if Mr. Warboys were in a good mood, he might even suggest a little dinner for Mr. Shillito, instead of a staff meeting. Ridley found that his eyes had moistened as he contemplated the golden light in which Mr. Shillito would depart from The Bellman.
But why do I worry about him? he asked himself. Does he ever give a thought to my convenience? Doesn’t he use me shamelessly whenever he can? What was that incident only a week ago? Shillito had burst into his office with some dreadful freak in tow, a grinning little fellow called Bevill Higgin—how tiresome he had been about the lack of a final “s” on his name—who wanted Ridley to publish half-a-dozen articles by himself on some method of singing that he taught. Print them and pay for them, if you please! Ridley had been furious, but when really angry he did not show it. Instead he gave them both what he thought of as the Silent Treatment. He had allowed little Higgin to chatter on and on, making silly jokes and paying him monstrous compliments, while he sat in his chair, saying nothing and only now and then gnashing the scissors which he held in his hand. The Silent Treatment never failed, and at last Shillito had said, “But we mustn’t detain you, Chief; shall I make arrangements with Mr. Higgin for the articles?” And he had replied, “No, Mr. Shillito, I don’t think we need trouble you to do that.” Higgin had blushed and grinned, and even the Old Mess knew that he had been snubbed. But if people invaded his office unasked and tried to force upon him things which he did not want, did they deserve any better treatment? One of Shillito’s worst characteristics was that he looked upon The Bellman as a sort of relief centre and soup kitchen for all the lame ducks he picked up in a social life which yielded an unusual number of lame ducks. A lunatic, lean-witted fool, presuming on an ague’s privilege, he quoted to himself, and at once felt sorry for the Old Mess. But he really must stop thinking of him as the Old Mess. It was one of his worst mental faults, that trick of having private and usually inadmissible names for people. Some day a few of them were sure to pop out. When he was on the operating-table, under anaesthetic, for instance.