Читать книгу The Masterfolk - Haldane MacFall - Страница 4

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Which shows Some of the Gods in their Machinery, with but a Shadowy Hint of the Printer’s Devil

Amidst the untidy litter of torn paper that strewed the bare plank floor there stood a large double writing-table, spread with proofs and manuscript and pamphlets; and, with his feet in the litter of the floor and his elbows in the litter of the table, sat a gaunt yellow-haired youth, solemnly writing.

Netherby Gomme peered at his work in the waning light of the departing November afternoon; and the deepening dusk that took possession of the shabby room, turning all things to the colour of shadows, strained his attention, drawing long lines about his mouth and pronouncing the pallor of his serious face—the grim mask of the humorist. The slips of paper that were set into the sleeve-ends of his well-brushed threadbare coat to save the soiling of his shirt-cuffs, and the long reach of yellow sock that showed his feet thrust a wrinkled span beyond the original intention of his much-knee’d trousers, marked the ordered untidiness of the literary habit.

Everything in the room—the overflowed waste-paper basket at his feet; the severe academic comfort of the polished wooden armchair that stood yawning augustly vacant opposite to him; the shut door at his right hand, with its curt announcement of “Editor” in stiff, forbidding letters; the low bookshelves about the room with their rows of books of reference, stacks of journals and literary scraps piled a-top of them; the walls with their irregular array of calendars, advertisements, notices, and printed and pictured odds and ends; the atmosphere of the scrap-gathering paste-pot and of clippings from the knowledge of the world; the sepulchral, monotonous clock that ticked its aggressive statement of the passage of time as though with a cough of admonition that, whatever journalism might be, life was short and art was long; the naked mantel beneath it, which held the shabby soul of the jerrybuilder turned to stone—for it is the hearth that is haunted by the spirit of the architect, and this one had been a vulgar fellow—the bare fireplace that did not even go through the feeble pretence of giving comfort, for it had no fender, no hearthrug, but gaped, bored and empty and black, upon the making of literature—everything marked the room to be one of those scanty workshops where opinions are made, the dingy editorial office of a struggling weekly review; and the extent of the dinginess showed it to be a very struggling affair indeed.

The young man blotted his writing, and flipped through some pages of manuscript:

“Oliver,” said he, without looking up, “a light, I think!... We have here lying before us a most caustic literary criticism; but the light is so far gone that we can scarce see the dogmatic gentleman’s own literary infelicities—nay, can scarce see even his most split infinitives.”

He spoke like a leading article, with a slight cockney accent.

In the gloom of a dark corner by the window, at a high desk that stood against the wall, where he sat perched on a tall office stool with his feet curled round its long legs, a small boy ceased reading, and, fumbling about in the breast-pocket of his short Eton jacket, lugged out a tin box, struck a match, and, leaning forward, set a flame to the gas-jet. The place leaped into light. The youngster flung the matchbox across the room, and went on with his reading. It fell at the feet of the yellow-haired youth.

“Ah, Noll,” said he, stooping over and searching for it amongst the torn fragments of paper, “like those of even greater genius, our aims are only too often lost in the sea of wasted endeavour.”

He found the box; lit the gas at his right hand; coughed:

“Are you putting that down?” he asked drily of the grim unanswering silence.

The boy took no notice. The yellow-haired youth chuckled, and the deep-furrowed lines about his mouth broadened into a quizzical smile.

The boy Oliver could scarcely have been fourteen years of age, and had he not been son of the editor, and that editor the thriftless owner of but a very broken-winged Muse, and of a steadily diminishing literary property, the boy must still have been at school. He sighed heavily, rousing from his reading:

“I say, Netherby,” said he, “here’s a poem by that fellow with the hair.”

He held out the manuscript.

Netherby Gomme looked up:

“A lyric?” he asked.

“No. Drivel.”

Netherby Gomme sighed, and sat back in his chair:

“With what candid brutality the sub-editorial mind treats the most ecstatic flights of the imagination!” said he.

The boy Oliver shifted impatiently on his high stool:

“Shall I reject the ponderous rot?” he asked.

Netherby Gomme coughed:

“We—if you please, Oliver—we. It is always better to adopt the editorial we in matters of weight; and it throws the responsibility upon the irresponsible gods of journalism.”

Noll sighed, stretched himself, and yawned.

“All right. We’ll reject it, eh?... No good troubling the governor”—he jerked his thumb towards the editor’s room—“he’s so beastly short this afternoon. But I had better write the rejection, I suppose—the father doesn’t like poets to be rejected on the printed form—they’re so sensitive.”

He settled himself to write a letter, tongue in cheek, head down, and quoting for the other’s approval as he wrote:

“The—editor—regrets—that—whilst—he—appreciates—the—beauty of—the—lines—herewith—returned—he—is—unable—to—make—use of—them—owing—to——”

He came to a halt and invited the prompt. None coming, he glanced over his shoulder:

“What is it owing to, Netherby? I’m such a beastly poor liar. You’ve been on the press so much longer. Hustle your vivid imagination and chuck us an excuse.”

Netherby Gomme shook his head:

“I am only a humorist, Oliver—humour must walk knee-deep in truth. I do not travel on Romance——”

“Oh, shut up!... No good chucking the idiot roughly.... It’s beastly long.... We’ll chuck it for length, eh?”

Netherby Gomme smiled at him:

“Noll,” said he, “you are possessed of the magnificent carelessness of the gods—and I never interfere with religious bodies.”

Noll turned to his writing again, and there was a steady scratching of pen on paper.

Netherby Gomme sat for awhile, his face seamed with comic lines of grim amusement:

“I suppose,” he said at last—“I suppose we have read the poem, Oliver?”

“No, I haven’t. But you can.”

Netherby Gomme moved uneasily in his seat:

“N-no. No thanks, Oliver. We’ll take it as read.”

He coughed:

“By the way, Oliver, have you got the dummy for next week’s issue over there?”

Noll licked, sealed, and thumped the letter on the desk:

“Oh, ah, yes—I’m sitting on it and a bunch of keys to remind me.” He took a bunch of keys from under him, and put them in his trousers pocket, then lugged out from beneath him the dummy form of the review in its brown-paper cover. He opened it, and wetting his finger on his lip, he flipped through the leaves with their proofs pasted in position for guidance to the printer.

“Look here, Netherby.” He held up the booklet, pointing to a blank space. “The governor said I was to tell you we had better complete this column with a poem—says verse gives a pleasant appearance to the page.” He dropped the dummy on the desk in front of him. “It’s an awful bore, Netherby,” said he, “but that bundle of poems he gave me the other day took up such a lot of space on my desk that I flung them into the waste-paper basket. Can’t you knock up about twenty lines of amorous matter? I promise not to whistle.”

Netherby Gomme smiled grimly, sighed, took up a pen, and, drawing a sheet of paper to him, prepared to write....

The yellow-haired youth had been with this literary venture from the start. He had begun as office-boy; and as each member of the original staff had fallen out, at the stern prunings of necessity, he had been promoted to their places, until he sat alone, as leader-writer, humorist, topical poet, sentimentalist, sub-editor, office lad, and general usefulness. Scrupulous to the smallest detail, reliable in the performance of the minutest fraction of his bond, he got through his work with the facility of a man of affairs; and, like all busy men, finding time for everything, he had spent his hours of leisure outside the office in the humane atmosphere of the theatre, in the tragic fellowship of the street, in the eternal fresh comedy of the city’s by-ways, and in the company of the mighty masters of his tongue; in this, the best school of education in all the round world, he had acquired such a knowledge of letters, such a taste for the niceties of the written word, and such a mastery in its use, as would have astounded, as indeed it was destined to astound, even them that thought they knew him to his fullest powers.

The other, the editor’s son, Oliver Baddlesmere, had come to the office to complete establishment straight out of the schoolroom some months back. He had been brought in to reduce the pressure of clerking work, and, owing to extreme youth and inexperience, had been given the simpler duties to perform, so that he came naturally and as a matter of course to preside over the destinies of the poet’s corner and to impart information to a hungry world from the battered volumes of an encyclopædia, and suchlike heavy books of reference, the weight of which, in the intervals of airily relieving the world’s thirst for knowledge, the boy used for the purpose of pressing prints—of which he was gathering a collection from the illustrated papers of the day, pasting them into brown paper scrap-books of his own making.

Netherby Gomme had scarcely got under fair way with the writing of his amorous matter when the boy whipped round on his office-stool.

“I say, Netherby,” said he; “your book is making a splash all along the Thames. The bookstalls are covered with it—the whole blessed town is saffron with it.”

The yellow-haired youth smiled complacently; sitting back in his chair, he nodded:

“Indeed?” he said.

Noll slipped down off the stool, took it up, and carried it over to the fireplace:

“You were a chunk-head not to put your name to it!” he said. “But all the same, you know, it’s been roaring funny to hear the father and mother talk about it.”

He vaulted to the top of the high stool, scrambled on to his feet, and, reaching up, opened the glass face of the clock:

“It almost bursts me sometimes that I can’t tell ’em you wrote it,” he said. He got on tip-toe and put forward the large hand twenty minutes, shut the face with a click, turned where he stood, and, thrusting his hands into his trouser-pockets, he added confidentially:

“D’you know, Netherby, between you and me and the office ink-pot, I never thought myself that you could be so uncommon funny.”

The yellow-haired youth blushed.

Clambering down off the stool, Noll carried it back to his desk, took down a tall silk hat, ran his coat-sleeve round it, and put it on his head.

Netherby Gomme coughed:

“Oliver,” said he—hesitated—made a pause—then added nervously: “Oliver, I am going to confide in you. In fact, if I don’t I shall get some sort of low malarial fever. Now, don’t treat the confidence with the giggle of childishness.”

Noll sighed. He turned, leaped on to his office-stool, swung round, set his feet on the bar, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his palms, and, peering at the other out of the shadow from under the brim of his hat, said gloomily:

“O lor! the little typewriter girl!... Why the dickens you don’t kiss Julia and have done with it, Netherby, I can’t make out. Hang it, I have!... It was very nice whilst it lasted, and all that, but there was nothing in it to write poetry about!”

Netherby Gomme flushed.

“Oliver,” said he, with biting distinctness, “we have not yet shown the resentment that your vulgarity courts; but we would remind you that we may be goaded into flinging the office ink-pot——” He stretched out his long arm towards the large zinc well of ink before him.

Noll slid off the stool, putting it between them with the swift and calculated strategy of experience, guarding his head with his raised elbow:

“Chuck it, Netherby!” he bawled, dodging under cover of his desk warily; and he added in a hoarse aside, jerking his thumb towards the editor’s door: “Chuck it! I withdraw.”

The yellow-haired youth put down the heavy ink-pot.

Noll saw out of the corner of his alert eye that honour was satisfied, and as he ran his finger pensively down a large splash of ink that had dried on the wall beside his desk, he asked:

“Well?... About that confidence!”

Netherby Gomme cleared his throat:

“Now, Oliver, don’t say anything about this to anyone. It might make me so ridiculous, and—professional humorists are keenly sensitive to ridicule——”

“Lor!” said Noll, leaving the patch on the wall. “Get on.”

“This is in strict confidence, Noll.”

“Oh, it’s Julia all right enough,” growled Noll.

Gomme went on, ignoring the comment:

“Noll, it is one of the penalties of fame that its victims must appear in the brilliant world of fashion.” He coughed. “Come here, Noll.” He unlocked and pulled open the drawer before him, and Noll, aroused to sudden interest, sidled over to him as he brought out from the drawer a very carefully folded dress-coat. “Oliver, I’ve got a dress-coat. You see, I may have to go into society at any moment, now that my book has caught the public eye.”

Noll put out his hand:

“Let’s look at the thing,” said he eagerly.

Gomme caught his arm and kept him off it:

“Careful, Noll!” he gasped anxiously—“gently! or we shan’t get it back into its folds.”

He put it away carefully, locked it up, and, sitting back in his chair, he added gravely:

“Now, Noll, as one who has knowledge of the usages of polite society——”

“Eh?” said Noll.

Gomme touched him on the shoulder nervously.

“No, no, Noll—I’m not accusing you of practising them. But as one born within the pale of good society—from no fault of your own, I admit—ought one to put scent on the coat?”

Noll whistled:

“Je—hoshaphat!” said he, “I never noticed.” He pushed his hat back on his head, thrust his hands deep into his breeches pockets, and fixed a searching eye on experience: “I’m not sure. N-no—I don’t think so. The governor doesn’t.”

The yellow-haired youth shook his head solemnly:

“It’s a most awkward point, Oliver—a most awkward point—and somewhat momentous.... One’s first step at the threshold of a career should not be a stumble.”

Noll’s face lighted up with a suggestion:

“Tell you what I should do, Netherby. Just scent your handkerchief; and if it kicks up a beastly lot of notice and makes you uncomfortable, you can always get rid of it——”

“Indeed, Oliver!”

“Rather. Hand it to a lady and ask her if it is hers. Gives you a sort of introduction, too.”

Netherby Gomme stared aghast:

“B-but, Oliver, surely one is introduced in society!”

“Rather not—it ain’t form.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know; it’s the new hospitality. But about that scent, Netherby—let us try some on me, and I’ll see if it worries the mother. The father’ll soon be nasty about it if it’s bad form.”

Gomme shook his head, and sighed heavily:

“Ah, Oliver, one has to be very careful in one’s pose on entering a new world.”

Noll nodded:

“Rather!... Do you know, Netherby, it’s a rummy thing how one begins to wash one’s self and think about ornaments and things when one becomes a man, eh?”

“A most rummy thing indeed, Noll.”

Netherby Gomme sighed.

Noll looked at him with interest:

“It must be wonderful to feel famous,” he said.

“It is,” said Gomme gloomily. “Wonderful.”

“But I don’t see why you should be so beastly miserable about it, Netherby. It don’t hurt, does it?”

“Not exactly, Noll.” The yellow-haired youth sighed. “I am only suffering from the mood of the time.... Pessimism is on the town.... A clerk with any claim to culture must affect Decadence this season—and it gives me the hump.” He coughed. “Causes me acute mental discomfort.”

Noll snorted:

“Then I should chuck it,” he said. “When I was a kid I used to worry if I were not the same as the other kids; but—hullo!” He looked up at the clock. “It seems to me it’s about time to go and get tea.”

He winked an eye solemnly at Gomme, and whistled his way airily out of the office. The door swung open, revealing a dingy stair-landing, shut with a bang, and swallowed him.

The sound of Noll’s retreating footsteps on the stair had scarce faded away into the distant echoes of the street, when the door that led to the editor’s room opened, and a well-groomed man of about thirty-five entered the office. Anthony Baddlesmere was a handsome, well-set-up fellow—indeed, it was as much from his father as from his mother that Noll inherited his good looks. He was handsome to the degree of beauty; and this it was, perhaps, which, in spite of the easy carriage of the body and the subtle air of good-breeding, gave the impression of some indecision of character in the man. Or it may have been that this indecision was increased by a certain embarrassment as he endeavoured to get a firm note into his voice:

“Oh, Gomme—have you completed the dummy yet—for this week’s issue?”

Gomme got up from his chair and searched for the dummy amongst the papers on Noll’s desk. But Anthony Baddlesmere had seated himself on the corner of the desk, and, fingering a paper-knife, he said:

“Oh—er—never mind. There’s another matter, Netherby.... It’s some years since I started this sorry venture in this office.” He sighed, and passed his hand over his forehead wearily—“more years than I care to remember. You, the office-boy, were a lank lad of thirteen—I a young man, full of literary enthusiasms.... I tried to sell the public artistic wares”—he shrugged his shoulders—“tried to show them vital things—real things, instead of sham—tried to encourage promising youth”—he laughed sadly—“and a nice waste-paper basket we’ve made of it!”

He swung his foot and kicked the waste-paper basket into the middle of the room, sending its contents flying over the floor.

Netherby Gomme coughed:

“Yes, sir,” said he, “a great deal of the promise of youth goes into the waste-paper basket.”

Anthony Baddlesmere laughed uncomfortably; the laugh died out of his eyes, obliterated by a frown:

“Downstairs,” he went on, as though repeating an unpleasant task he had set himself—“downstairs they have given the public trash—cheap. And I have lost.... In me the literary enthusiasm, a little chilled, perhaps, remains; but the youth has gone. As for you—you are office-boy still, to all purposes, and lank still—but, lord! how you have grown!”

Netherby Gomme looked down at his scanty trousers and sighed:

“Yes, sir, I have grown.”

“H’m! like a scandal,” said Baddlesmere; and a gleam of merriment shot into his eyes, ran round the corners of his mouth, and vanished. “Gomme,” said he, “we are at the end of our resources. This is our last week in these rooms.... The office is bare—my home is bare. All my money—all my wife’s literary success—all have gone to feed the printing machine. It’s great inky maw has swallowed everything.... However, there is no debt—except to you. But that is a heavy one. My conscience tells me that you ought not to have been allowed to remain here and share in the collapse; you ought to have been promoted—to have been sent to—to——”

He hesitated—stopped.

“Where, sir?” asked the yellow-haired youth.

The bald fact was that Baddlesmere had never given the matter a thought until this disaster was upon him. He smiled sadly, and added vaguely:

“No place would have been good enough for you, Gomme.... You should have been promoted long ago....” He roused and faced the position boldly: “But you have been such a good friend to me and to the boy—so useful a part of this office, that I am afraid I have treated you like a part of myself, and have come by habit to think the hat that covered my head covered yours.... Dame Fortune has knocked the hat off—and I find there were two heads inside it.”

“Well, sir, we can look her in the face without the hat.”

“Yes, yes, Gomme—but I have looked over your head.”

“It has saved your eyes from the commonplace, sir, and my heart from a bad chill. I wouldn’t have missed the past years in this office for a fortune.”

“No, no, Gomme; nor I—nor I.”

“They have made a man of me,” the youth added hoarsely.

Baddlesmere put his hand on the other’s shoulder:

“But you should have been promoted—you should have been promoted.... And I could so easily have sent you to a better billet.” He sat down, and, fidgeting with the paper-knife again, he added, after a pause: “By the way, Gomme, I wish you did not write such a shocking bad hand.” He smiled, half jesting, half serious. “Why don’t you practise writing?”

Gomme’s face became a dull, expressionless mask:

“I have, sir,” he said grimly.

“How? You have!”

“I’ve written a book,” he said.

Baddlesmere whistled:

“The devil you have!... Ah, Gomme, everybody writes books nowadays.”

“But they read mine, sir,” said Netherby Gomme. He dived his hand into the breast-pocket of his coat, and, taking out a bundle of press-cuttings, drew a much-thumbed one from the others. “Listen to the mighty Thrumsby Burrage in The Discriminator, sir.” He read out the paragraph:

“We have here a refined humorist, whose work is stamped with the hall-mark of genius.”

Baddlesmere nodded; he was only half listening.

“Oh yes,” said he—“hall-mark of genius is Thrumsby Burrage.”

Gomme went on with a yawning travesty of the pulpit manner:

“In the present day it is indeed a veritable intellectual treat to come upon the subtle workmanship of a man of large experience of life—workmanship marked by that delicate wit which grows only to perfection in the cloistered atmosphere of scholarship.”

“Yes—cloistered atmosphere is Thrumsby Burrage.”

Gomme’s eyes twinkled:

“We rejoice that a new man of genius has risen amongst us, and we do not hesitate to say that the anonymous writer of ‘The Tragedy of the Ridiculous’ is that man.”

Anthony Baddlesmere shook off boredom, stood up slowly, stared at the gaunt yellow-haired youth before him in frank tribute of bewilderment, and said at last with hoarse surprise:

“You wrote this book, Gomme?”

“Yes, sir,” said Netherby Gomme simply; “but when I write my tragedy——”

Baddlesmere clapped a hand on his shoulder, and pleasure danced in his eyes.

“But, good God! you are famous, man—famous!... And you must be making a fortune.”

“No, sir—I sold the thing for a few pounds.”

Anthony Baddlesmere strode up and down the room.

“But, man,” said he—“I have been trying all my life, and with every advantage, to create a work of art such as this; and here are you, a mere stripling—damn it, scarcely out of knickerbockers—though, on my soul, you are nearly as old as your trousers—here are you, a mere stripling, famous!” He came to him, gripped him affectionately by the shoulder. “Of all men that I know, I would rather this thing had come to you than to any.” He turned and got to striding up and down the room again. “Famous!—at least you will be as soon as you give out your own name.”

Gomme’s face had flushed a little with the praise:

“But,” said he, “when I write my tragedy——”

Baddlesmere turned on him sharply:

“Tragedy be hanged!” said he. “My dear Gomme, you’ve got to recognise that the world never takes its humorists seriously. It’s always looking for the joke in their tragedies.... Which reminds me, Gomme, I’m afraid to-morrow must see us out of this.”

Gomme’s face lost its mask:

“But, sir!” he faltered—fidgeting nervously with the papers by his hand—“what are you going to do? and Noll?—and Mrs. Baddlesmere—when the blinds are pulled down?”

Baddlesmere strode over to the window, and, gazing down into the dusk of the chilly street below, made no answer. He stood so for a long while, and wondered.

He wondered if he had given the public vital things!

His mind ran rapidly over the failure of his scheme—a scheme that, as he now saw, had been inherent with failure at its very inception. He saw now, as he stood there ruined by it, that it was folly to expect a public to buy literature built up on the mere brilliant literary exercises in technical skill of a smart group of young fellows who had really had no claim upon the consideration of the world, nothing to say, no gift but a capacity to use the machinery of letters prettily; who had had positively nothing to offer to the world but old idioms freshly arrayed in pretty clothes—make-believe kings at a calico-ball. These had been but smart mediocrities—not an ounce of wisdom amongst them all. It came to him now with grim irony, as he stood there in confession to the clear-eyed judge of Self, that for all their cackle of literary style and their contempt for everyone else, these men had uttered no single thought worth preserving—that they had left their youth behind and were growing bald a-top, and full-blown and ordinary—except——

Yes, the work of this Netherby Gomme. He knew now as he ran over the years, that all the best work had come from this youth’s pen—about the only one of them all who had not given himself airs, who had put down the absolute truth as he whimsically saw it, who had worked and wrought amid bare walls and in hours snatched from toil-won leisure, whilst they all sat and prated of what they intended to do, and of how it should be done.

He turned from the window into the lighted office, and his glance fell on his son Noll’s desk. It was the only artistic corner in the room—the prints, mounted on brown paper, which the boy had tacked to the wall, had a decorative effect that showed rare artistic taste in one so young.

A touch of pride came into the man’s eyes, and went out in a frown. Netherby Gomme, watching him in alert silence, with delicate tact uttered no word.

As Baddlesmere moved towards the editor’s room he asked abruptly:

“Where’s Noll?”

“Heaven knows, sir,” said Netherby Gomme airily.

The door closed on the editor, and Gomme heard the slam of the outer door, which told that Baddlesmere had begun to descend the stair.

“Heaven knows!” Gomme shook his head. “Playing with a sewer, most like.... But God is very good to boys.”