Читать книгу Variety Show: Twenty Years of Watching the News Parade - Frederick Griffin - Страница 9

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In my mind the heading took shape. But my mind was a ferment. Flavelle was still up, and the hour of the last edition was drawing on. The deadline!—I had to watch that. But how was I to get out, if he kept on long? If I started to leave after such a speech, would I not be pounced on? Suppose there was another speaker! Would the story be printed? If it were printed, what would the censor say? What would the people say? Was I hearing it right or was I getting it wrong? Could I remember it? Could I swear to it?

By an effort I held to my seat while Mr. Flavelle went on to talk of the responsibility of the munitions makers.

“Profits!” he exclaimed scornfully. “I have come from the heart of a nation where they are sweating blood to win this war. Profits! I stand before you to say this: in the past we have all had our ideas about profits, but—with men sacrificing their lives for us, to hell with profits!”

Such was the origin of a Flavelle phrase which became famous in Canada. Of course, I have only given the emotional highlights of his speech which discussed the many angles of the munitions problem learned on his British visit.

At last he ended and sat down. Another man got up to speak technically of inspection. The tension eased. Men began to emerge from the dugouts of their own souls. It was my chance for a getaway.

Scarcely daring to breathe, I began to tiptoe towards the door like a burglar in the dark. At any moment I expected someone to yell “Stop!” but I got safely outside. There panic gripped me and I started running down the zigzag stairs. Down and down I ran for six or seven storeys, panting, my heart seeming to choke me, until I began to grow dizzy. There was no pursuit. Calming somewhat, I took an elevator.

A very excited reporter rushed the half-block to his office and burst in on the News Editor busy on the last edition, with three-quarters of an hour to go. To him it was just another story. “Write it,” he said, “be quick.”

Quickly indeed I ripped out two-thirds of a column for I was experiencing for the first time the ecstasy of a hot news story when the blood is quickened, the brain keys fast and phrases come tumbling. I hurried with it to the Editor. He glanced down my noble words and frowned.

“We can’t print that!” he said.

“But,” I cried, “it’s true! I heard him.”

“Why, the censor would shut us up to-morrow.”

“But—c-can’t you use anything—any of this?”

What did I care about a censor? I felt like going to jail, facing a firing squad, for the sake of my story—because I was feeling for the first time the sublime ferment of NEWS. It was my awakening to love. In my ears birds were singing, there was a smell of violets, little lambs were gambolling—and I was slightly mad. Love!

“All you can do,” said the News Editor coldly, “is show it to Flavelle and find what we may print, if anything. This is wartime, you know.”

Back to the bank building and the top floor, to find the meeting over and my hero chatting. At the first favourable moment I broke in: “I’m from The Star. I heard your speech. I want to know how much we may use.”

“Write it,” said Mr. Flavelle, “and let me see it,” and I pulled forth the masterpiece.

“You have it written already!”

“Yes, sir, and will you read it now?”

He glanced at it, whistled and looked up. “Young man,” he said, “no doubt you are a good journalist—but, you know, you have misunderstood me completely. Why, look here, you make me seem to have been abusing these good men. I wasn’t doing that. I was just giving them a little friendly talk.”

He smiled and I grinned, learning fast. He might have been vehement; instead he was gentle and clever. “Yes, sir,” I said, gratefully almost, “will you please go through it and strike out what we may not use.”

He did, handling the copy like a newspaper desk man, and, without comment, pencilled out sentences and paragraphs. He left in the bit about profits. Otherwise it was a sadly cut report.

“Now,” he said, “use that.”

And that was what got into print in the last edition. It scarcely caused a ripple whereas in its first undoctored warmth it might have caused a revolution, but the “To hell with profits!” phrase was quoted widely.

Since that day I have not spoken to Sir Joseph Flavelle though a few months later I heard him speak again, this time giving evidence in the famous “bacon probe” into the war profits of his packing business, the William Davies Company, which I helped cover. His bearing then was not evangelical, but coldly business-like. Often of recent years I have seen him walking with sturdy benevolence along the street with his small black handbag in which cynics say he carries his coupons. He was just the incident of an early journalistic hour from which I learned much. Within a month I was to learn more on my first out-of-town assignment. This was to Kitchener, Ontario, where a war-inflamed riot had broken out on municipal election night, January 1, 1917.

The very name Kitchener was a symptom of the passions of the time. It had been Berlin, a substantial industrial city which was the centre of a fine settlement of German and Pennsylvania-Dutch people. Some months previously an agitation had succeeded in having the old name wiped out and that of the British War Secretary substituted as 100-per-cent. loyal. But a majority of City Council elected on New Year’s Day was obviously of German descent. This did not please the Patriots. Windows of a newspaper office were smashed, a mess made inside the plant and a couple of aldermen-elect beaten. A company of soldiers was sent to restore order.

Into the ticklish situation I landed next morning with no thought in the world but to write high, wide and handsome. I was a war correspondent, no less, and I wrote despatches that Philip Gibbs might have envied had he been describing the occupation of Liège—about Kitchener being a cauldron filled with ugly elements, soldiers sitting on the lid, and so forth, winning Page One flare headlines for the first time.

Elated, I burdened the telegraph wires with words for two whole days. One of the despatches made a minor sensation by relating that the water commission had started the New Year wrong by issuing bills bearing the line, Berlin, Jan. 1, 1917, instead of Kitchener. The implication was that the Germans were flouting the Loyalists. I was unaware, having made no effort to check, that the bills had been printed before the change of name and had been put in the mails inadvertently. Officials, discovering the mistake, had made a last-minute effort to have Kitchener stamped on and had, except in a few cases, succeeded.

Thus I ran along, reporter at last of big events, unconscious of the enmity stirring in worthy Kitchener breasts. Nemesis lay in wait. It came in most friendly guise. Less than an hour before I was to return to Toronto, the war having ended, an editor of the paper which had been attacked stopped two other Toronto reporters and myself on the street.

“Sorry you’re leaving us,” he said untruthfully. “Won’t you have a drink before train time?”

Prohibition was now in effect and he led us along as if seeking one of the bootleggers who had already sprung up. He did not find one. “Let’s go to my house,” he said at last, which was his aim, I think, all the time.

There he produced, all ready, a jug of wine. For each of us he poured, not a wine glass, but a tumbler full. It was by way of being my first drink and I eyed it dubiously. “If this is intoxicating,” I said in all innocence, “it’s a little too much.”

“You have my word,” said our host, “there’s not a drop of alcohol in it.”

We drank. He, chatting merrily the while, poured us each another bumper. Once more I asked, but less conscientiously, its alcoholic content. Once more he declared it mild as honey.

It was not. Within a few minutes I was drunk. Maybe it was simply Ontario native wine which is potent enough—I do not know. I do know that we three reporters talked and talked—and when I stumbled forth to the street a boy, who must have been lying in wait, came forward and said, “You from The Star? Well, the Water Commission wants to see you.”

The Wa-water Commish—Water Commishun! I tried to recall what I knew about it. My head whirled. My legs did not seem to belong. I wanted to lie down and rest—to blazes with the Water Commission!

“Better go,” said one of my Toronto comrades soothingly. “See what they want anyway.”

Stumbling after the boy, I lurched before two gentlemen who sat behind a desk, my voice thick, my face flushed, my clothes disordered.

“So you,” said one of them icily, “are the reporter who’s been writing all those lies! Listen, Mister, this city is going to take action against you and your paper for $10,000 damages.”

“D-damages! For w-what!”

“For libel. For saying we had changed the name on the water bills back to Berlin.”

Libel!—that monster! And I stood in front of them, thus. They could say I had been drunk on the job and prove it. I staggered to the train, found a seat, fell asleep, sobered up and got off at Toronto, a ruined man.

That was not the end of my suffering. Two or three days later, when the sabotaged newspaper resumed publication, it celebrated the occasion by carrying on its front page under a seven-column heading the views of Toronto newspapermen on the recent disturbance. We scarcely recognized them but they were ours, given to the editor while imbibing his wine! He had interviewed us, no doubt of that, when we were all friends together and got from us statements at variance with what we had been writing, expressing sympathy with the German element and pooh-poohing the Loyalists.

We had been put on the spot and had not an alibi—caught cold! Each of us was quoted by name.

Sequel? None so far as I was concerned, but Joe Armstrong of The Toronto World nearly lost his job. His editor and publisher, W. F. Maclean, was facing an election for the Federal Parliament in South York, a suburban constituency, on war issues. His reporter’s views on the Kitchener situation, as expressed in the interview, enraged him. He feared they would cost him a patriotic seat. Joe had a hard time explaining.

As for myself, afraid to speak to anyone in my office about the affair, I hugged my unhappy secret of threatened libel, dreading the moment when my guilt would be blazoned forth.

That moment never came. Either the Kitchener officials had been simply making a gesture or they cooled. Nothing happened, except that I learned a lot.