Like most things or people really worth knowing, the printing-office is of a retiring disposition. It is an old building, once a dwelling-house, which stands somewhat back from the street, with a quaint old garden around it. An ancient picket fence, nicked and whittled by a generation or so of boys who should have known better, guards its privacy. At the tip of the low cornice is a weatherbeaten bird house, a miniature Greek Parthenon, where the wrens built their nests. Larger and more progressive business buildings had crowded up to the street lines on both sides of it, and yet it managed to preserve somehow an air of ancient gentility. The gate sagged on its hinges, the chimney had lost a brick or two, but it sat there in its garden and watched with mild interest the hasty world go by.
I wondered, that morning, why the peculiar air of the place had never before touched me. I paused a moment, looking in at it with such a feeling of expectancy as I cannot well describe. I did not know what adventure might there befall me. At any moment I half expected to see my imagined old fellow appear on the doorstep and cry out, half ironically, half explosively:
"Fudge!" Upon which, undoubtedly, I should have disappeared into thin air.
There being no sign of life, for it was still very early in the morning, I opened the gate and went in. Over the front door stretched a weatherbeaten sign bearing these words in large letters:
Under this name there was a line of smaller lettering, so faded that one could not easily read it from the street. But as I stood now at the doorway and looked up I could make it out – and it came to me, I cannot tell with what charm, like the far-off echo of ancient laughter:
Below this legend in fresher paint, bearing indeed the evidence of repainting, for many are the vicissitudes of a country newspaper, was the name of the firm:
I went up the steps to the little porch and looked in at the doorway. I shall never forget the odour of printer's ink which came warmly to my nostrils, the never-to-be-forgotten odour of printer's ink, sweeter than the spices of Araby, more alluring than attar of roses!.. It was a long, low room, with pasted pictures on the walls, a row of dingy cases at one side, the press at the farther end, the stones near it, and a cutting machine with its arm raised aloft as though to command attention. The editor's desk in the corner was heaped so high with books and papers and magazines and pamphlets that another single one added to the pile would certainly have produced an avalanche – and ended ignominiously in the capacious wastebasket.
For all its dinginess and its picturesque disorder there was something infinitely beguiling about the room. In the front window stood a row of potted geraniums, very thrifty, and there was a yellow canary in a cage, and the editor's ancient chair (one lame leg bandaged with string) was occupied by an old fat gray cat, curled up on a cushion and comfortably asleep. A light breeze came in at one of the windows, fingered a leaf of the calendar to make sure that it was really spring again, and went out blithely at the other window.
I liked it: I liked it all.
"There is a fine woman around this shop somewhere," I said to myself, "or else a very fine man."
My vision of the daring paragrapher who could say "Fudge" with such virgin enthusiasm instantly shifted. I saw him now as something of a poet – still old, but with a pleasing beard (none of your common chin whiskers) and rarely fine eyes, a man who could care for flowers in the window and keep the cat from the canary.
At that instant my eyes were smitten with stark reality, my imagination wrecked upon the reef of fact. I saw Fergus MacGregor.
Fergus is one of those men who should always be seen for the first time: after you begin to know him, you can't rightly appreciate him.
He was sitting away back in the corner of the room, by his favourite window, tipped back in his chair, with one heel hooked over a rung, the other leg playing loose in space, sadly reading the "Adventures of Tom Sawyer" which he considers the greatest book in the world – next to Robert Burns's poems.
Fergus has always been good for me. He is all facts, like roast beef, or asparagus, or a wheel in a rut. It is almost impossible to idealize Fergus: he has freckles and red hair on his hands. When Fergus first came to Hempfield, one of our good old Yankee citizens, who had never seen much of foreigners and therefore considered them all immoral, said he never had liked Frenchmen.
Whenever I am soaring aloft, as I think I am too likely to do, I have to be very firm in the wings, else the sight of Fergus MacGregor, with his red hair, his scorched face, and his angular wiry frame, will bring me straight down to earth. He brought me down the first morning I laid eyes on him. As I stood there in the printing-office, looking about me, Fergus glanced up from the "Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and said:
"Wull?"
I can't tell you what worlds of solid reality were packed into that single word. At once all my imaginings came tumbling about me. What, after all, had I come for? Why was I in this absurd printing-office? What wild-goose chase was I on? I should really be at home planting potatoes. Potatoes, cows, corn, cash – surely there were no other realities in life! For an instant the visions of the fields died within me, and I felt sick and weak. You will understand – if you understand.
I thought, as I stood there stupidly, that this was indeed the man who would say "Fudge!" to all the world.
I groped in a wandering mind for some adequate way of escape, and it occurred to me presently that I could order a thousand envelopes, with my name printed in the corner, and bring him to terms. No, I'd order five thousand – and utterly obliterate him!
"Wull?" said Fergus.
If it had not been for this second "Wull?" I might have gone back to my immemorial existence and never have brought my new vision to the hard test of life, never have known Anthy, never have felt the glory of a new earth.
But with that second "Wull?" which was even more devastating than the first, I felt something electric, warm, strong, stinging through me. I had a curious sense of high happiness, and before I knew it I was saying:
"After all, men do fly!"
I laugh still when I remember how Fergus MacGregor looked at me. For a long moment he said nothing as eloquently as ever I heard it said. I began to feel the humour of the situation (humour is the fellow that always waits just around the corner until the danger is past), but I said in all seriousness:
"I'm looking for the man who wrote an editorial last week headed 'Fudge.' He doesn't appear to approve of flying machines."
Fergus had not stirred by so much as the fraction of an inch. He looked at me for another instant and then paid me, if I had known it, a most surprising compliment. He smiled. His face slowly cracked open – I can express it no other way – and remained cracked for the space of two seconds, and returned to its usual condition. Fergus's smile is one of the wonders of nature.
"What ye going to do?" asked Fergus. "Thrash the editor?"
"No," said I, "convert him."
Fergus slowly shook his head.
"Ye can't," said he.
"I've already begun," said I.
Fergus looked me over for a moment, and smiled again, this time winding up with a snort or a cough, which started to be a laugh, but stopped away down somewhere inside of him.
"Ye think I wrote it?"
"Well," said I, "you look perfectly capable of it."
I was just beginning to enjoy thoroughly this give and take of conversation, which of all sports in the world is certainly the most fascinating, when I heard steps behind me and, turning half around, saw Anthy for the first time.
"There's the editor," said Fergus. "Ask her yourself."
She came down the room toward me with a quick, businesslike step. She wore a little round straw hat with a plain band. She had a sprig of lilac on her