The Call of the Town Part 19

"You know the _Watchman_, I suppose?" said Mr. P., who had closely observed the young editor's delighted expression while reading the letter.

"Know it? I should think I do," he answered, with his old buoyancy of spirit. "A perfect production, the best of all the sixpenny weeklies, although it is the youngest. How can I thank you?"

"Not so fast; you've still 'to pull it off,' as Swainton says. All that I have done has been to open the door for you."

"But isn't that everything?"

"Almost, but not quite. If Henry Charles is found 'as advertised,' all will be well. Something, you see, depends on yourself."

"Get it or not, I'm eternally your debtor. Anyhow, my varied experience should be of value, though they usually hanker after university chaps on these weekly reviews. But the _Watchman_ is a rare old Tory, and here I'm shrieking Radicalism at five pound a week."

"Don't let that disturb you. I fancy your politics are of no importance.

It's your journalistic knowledge that's wanted. To make up the paper, arrange the book reviews, write some of them--the paragraphs and so forth. Pilkington is a society fellow who takes life easily, and wants a competent sub. That's about the situation, I should say. I believe Lord Dingleton finances the paper as a hobby."

"In any case, it would mean a footing in London, and that is all I want."

"I am confident you'll suit, and although I advise you not to build too much on London, I believe it's worth having a try at--if only to knock on the head your romantic notions of life there. When will you go?"

"To-morrow; first train; back in the evening. n.o.body the wiser if it doesn't come off."

But it did; and for good or ill, with scarce a thought of Flo, Henry returned to Laysford engaged as a.s.sistant-editor of the _Watchman_, on the understanding that he would start as soon as he could possibly get away from the _Leader_. The gentleman then a.s.sisting Mr. Pilkington was a distinguished Oxford man, oozing learning at every pore, but as incompetent a journalist as one would meet within the radius of Newspaperland.

CHAPTER XVIII

IN LONDON TOWN

THE directors of the _Leader_ were more gracious about his resignation than Henry had expected. Evidently, although quite satisfied with his work, they did not apprehend any insurmountable difficulty in securing a successor. The manager hinted (after Henry's going was certain) that rather than have had the trouble of changing editors, they might even have arranged to advance his salary--supreme proof that he had not been without his merits in the eyes of his employers. Mr Jones, by virtue of his superior years, took leave to warn him of the gravity of the step he was taking, and a.s.sured him that at 350 a year in London he would be no better off than he was with 100 less in Laysford. For one brief moment Flo's desire that he should stay pa.s.sed through his mind, but in his heart he knew that it was not entirely a matter of money, and he set his teeth to "Now or never."

When it had been arranged that he was to leave the _Leader_, the manager exhibited almost indecent haste in appointing his successor, and was careful to remind him that although, as events turned out, he would be free to go in a month's time, the Company was ent.i.tled to at least three months' notice, and possibly six. Mr. Jones had a habit of making generosity fit in with business; he did not mention that he had secured a successor who was to receive 50 a year less than Henry had been getting. At one time an editor of the _Leader_ had been paid as much as 750 a year, but that was in the days of a showy start, when money went out more rapidly than it came in, and during the succeeding years the pay-books would show a steady decline in the rate of editorial salaries.

By strict limitation of payments, Mr. Jones was steadily increasing the dividends of the shareholders, and steadily depreciating the standard of the staff. The day that Henry left, the literary touch which Adrian Grant and a limited few had noticed in the _Leader_ under his editorship disappeared, and the market and police intelligence again gave the tone of the sheet.

The most serious feature of his removal was the conduct of Miss Winton, who gave him more than one bad quarter of an hour for his selfishness in actually accepting the engagement "without a single thought of her." Flo harped so steadily on this note, that Henry was half-persuaded he was indeed a shamefully selfish young man; and when he closely examined his conduct, he wondered whether the satisfaction with which he had reported his fortune to his father arose from filial affection or from downright vanity.

The upshot of Miss Winton's exposition of his selfishness and her tearful protestations against his deserting her was a formal engagement, where only an "understanding" had existed before. This seemed to still her anxious heart, but Henry had made the proposition with none of the fervour with which more than once in fancy he had seen himself begging for her hand. In truth, his heart misgave him, and he did not mention the matter in any of his letters home. He rightly judged that such news might dull the keen edge of pleasure his London appointment would afford to his own folk at Hampton. He did not even mention it to Mr.

Puddephatt. For the first time in his life he felt himself something of a dissembler. In this way his removal to London rather aggravated his state of mental unrest than modified it. His brightest dream had come true, but--

The first weeks in London, however, were so full of new sensations and agreeable distractions, that he had scarcely been a fortnight away from Laysford when it looked like a year. To walk down Fleet Street and the Strand each day, or to thread the old byways between the Embankment and Holborn, with the knowledge that no excursion train was to rush him off northward at the end of fourteen days, was a pleasure which only the provincial settling in London could enjoy. How he had longed for years to tread these pavements as a resident, and not merely as a gaping visitor. His feet gripped them while he walked, as though he thought at every stride, "Ye are firm beneath me at last, O Streets of London!"

Fleet Street, he knew in his heart, was outwardly as shabby a thoroughfare as ever served for the main artery of a great city, but he also knew that if the buildings were mean and the crowd that surged along its pavements as common to the eye as any in the frowsiest provincial city, there was more romance behind many of these shabby windows which bore the names of journals, famous and obscure, than in stately Whitehall or in Park Lane. The hum of printing-presses from dingy bas.e.m.e.nts, the smell of printer's ink from many open doors, had a charm for him which perversely recalled the scent of new-mown hay in a Hampton meadow long years before.

At first, he rarely pa.s.sed a street without noting its name, an odd building without finding something to engage his interest, a man of uncommon aspect without wondering who he might be--what paper did he edit? But soon his daily walk from his lodgings in Woburn Place to the office of the _Watchman_ opposite the Law Courts was performed with less attention to the common objects of the route.

A sausage shop hard by his office, sending forth at all hours of the day a strong odour of frying fat and onions, remained the freshest of his impressions; he never pa.s.sed it without thinking of its impertinence in such a quarter; but one day he discovered that it was not without claim to literary a.s.sociations.

A young man with a chin that had required a shave for at least three days, wearing a shabby black mackintosh suggestive of shabbier things below, and boots much down at heel, came out of the shop with the aroma of sausage and onion strong upon him, and the f.a.g-end of a savoury mouthful in the act of descending his throat. Something in the features of this dilapidated person struck Henry as oddly familiar, so that he glanced at him intently, and looked back, still puzzling as to who the fellow could be, when he found the shabby one looking at him, and evidently equally exercised concerning his ident.i.ty. After a moment's hesitation, Henry walked back to him, and the sausage-eater flushed as he said:

"Why, Hen--Mr. Charles--can it be you? I knew you were in London, and had half a mind to call on you, but you--well--"

The reason why was too obvious to call for explanation.

Henry himself was quite as much confused as the speaker. It was a shock to him to recognise in the person before him none other than one who had first pointed out to him the road to Journalism--"Trevor Smith, if you please."

What a change from those Stratford days, when he had talked so jauntily of fortunes made in Fleet Street, so hopefully of the coming of his own chance there. The greasy hat was worn with none of the old rakish air, but served only as a sorry covering for unkempt locks; and if London streets were paved with gold, the precious metal had worn away the heels of Trevor's boots as surely as any of the baser sorts.

It was difficult for one so transparently honest as Henry to pretend not to notice the pitiable condition of his old friend, and there was a forced cordiality in his tone when he greeted him.

"My dear fellow, I am delighted to meet you again. Odd, isn't it, that we should meet among London's millions? Come along with me to the Press Restaurant for a bit of lunch and a chat over old times."

"Thank you very much," said Trevor, "but the fact is I have just had something to eat--"

"Never mind that; so have I. Let it be coffee and a chat."

Together they crossed the street and sought out a remote corner of the restaurant, where, despite his protestations, Trevor submitted to adding two poached eggs on toast to the sumptous repast he had taken at the sausage-shop.

The story he had to tell was as threadbare as his clothes; with variations, it might stand for that of fifty per cent, of Fleet Street's wrecks; the other moiety being explained by the one word, Drink.

Some two years after Henry left Wheelton the Stratford edition of the _Guardian_ had been discontinued. Despite the brilliancy of the "Notes and Comments" from Trevor's pungent pen, the number of copies sold brought no profit to the proprietors, and the journalist who had demanded weekly "the liberty to know, to think, and to utter freely above all other liberties," was given the liberty to find another situation. Every effort to secure a reportership had failed, though he confessed to having answered upwards of eighty advertis.e.m.e.nts; and then, as a last resource, he had found his way to London, which calls for only those who have fought and won their fight in the provinces, but receives with every one such a waggon-load of wastrels.

"And now?" asked Henry.

"Writing introductions about different towns for the British Directories, Limited, at half-a-crown a thousand words. Some weeks it means as much as fifteen shillings, but the job will soon be finished, and I see nothing ahead of it."

Trevor was near to weeping point, but perhaps Henry was more affected than he by the recital of his woes. Gone was every vestige of his old journalistic chatter, and in the very highway of the profession he ranked as an alien compared with the position he had held when he and Henry lodged together at Stratford. Stranger still, in dropping the old jargon of the newspaper man, he seemed to have lost even the confidence to ask a loan now that he stood more in need of it, and Henry could better spare the money.

It was left to Henry to suggest that perhaps the loan of a pound, "as between two fellow-journalists," would not be amiss. "Most men of letters," he added kindly, "have at one time or other experienced reverses of fortune. There is no hurry for repayment."

"I am most grateful; you are indeed a good friend to me," said Trevor, not without a touch of real emotion; "and if only I can get _Jinks's Weekly_ to use a three-guinea article on 'A Week in a Dosshouse,' you shall have the money back soon. They took an article from me--nearly two years ago--on 'Fortunes made in Journalism.' I got four guineas for it; but it was the only thing of any length I have managed to place since coming to town."

The odd couple parted at the restaurant door, and Trevor Smith shuffled off Strandwards without any profuse thanks, for he was one of those who, lacking both the capacity and the opportunity to succeed, when overtaken by misfortune become so shrivelled in character that they display not even the melancholy pluck necessary to mendicancy. The chances were that he and Henry would never meet again. The stout ship under full sail had sighted the derelict for a moment--that was all. Like so many of his kind, Trevor Smith was fated to sink out of sight in the dark, mysterious...o...b..iette of London's failures.

The a.s.sistant editor of the _Watchman_ returned to his office almost as sad at heart, if not more so, than the man he had left, whose heart was numbed and pa.s.sionless.

The office of his paper was scarcely so elegant as he had once imagined all London editorial quarters to be. The entrance was a fairly wide slit between a barber's and a tobacconist's, the stairs as mean as those at the office of the _Wheelton Guardian_; but the first floor, occupied by the newspaper, was remarkably well furnished, Mr. G.o.dfrey Pilkington being a gentleman of some taste, and the proprietor of the _Watchman_ did not stint him in such items of expense. At first Henry had marvelled that a peer of the realm could have deigned to mount such miserable stairs or to trust his august person in elbowing between the barber's and the tobacconist's, but he soon learned that the most unpretentious accommodation on the highway of journalism may cost as much as marble halls in a provincial city.

The editor, as Adrian Grant had hinted, was no glutton for work, and an hour or two each day appeared to satisfy his taste. Thus all the details of the _Watchman_ were left to Henry, the chief articles being contributed by friends of Mr. Pilkington. A cashier, a clerk, and an advertising manager were the only members of the office staff; and as the paper was distributed by a large wholesale house, no business beyond the editorial and advertising affairs of the _Watchman_ was conducted at the office. A very humdrum place, in truth, except on the rare occasions when the lordly proprietor put in an appearance, or Mr. Pilkington received some political person with an axe to grind, and an eye on the _Watchman_, as a possible grinder.

For all that, the _Watchman_ made a brave show every Friday, and its articles were quoted widely in the provincial Press as representing the weighty opinion of Tory inner circles; and the more the _Watchman_ was quoted the higher rose the hopes of Mr. Pilkington that Lord Dingleton would continue to bridge the monthly chasm which yawned between the income of the _Watchman_ and the cost of its production, for--let us blab the horrid truth, as yet unknown to Henry--the paper was merely the expensive hobby of his lordship.

On returning to his office after his encounter with Trevor Smith, the young journalist was surprised and delighted to find Adrian Grant seated in his chair, and smoking the eternal cigarette.

"Thought I would just drop in to see how you were getting along," the visitor said, rising and shaking hands with his protege. "Very comfortable quarters here," glancing round Henry's well-furnished room.

"I had just been wondering this very day when I should have the pleasure of seeing you again." The sincerity of Henry's words was apparent on his face.