'I wonder,' said the sub-editor, with an insinuating glance at the foreman, 'if the new man is expected to-night.'
Mr. Licquorish had told him that this was so an hour before, but the cunning bred of fear advised him to give Penny the opportunity of divulging the news.
That worthy smiled to himself, as any man has a right to do who has been told something in confidence by his employer.
'He's a Yorkshireman, I believe,' continued the crafty Protheroe.
'That's all you know,' said the foreman, first glancing back to see if Mr. Licquorish's door was shut. 'Mr. George Frederick has told me all about him; he's a Scotsman called Angus, that's never been out of his native county.'
'He's one of those compositors taken to literature, is he?' asked Umbrage, who by literature meant reporting, pausing in the middle of a sentence he was transcribing from his note-book. 'Just as I expected,' he added contemptuously.
'No,' said the foreman, thawing in the rays of such ignorance; 'Mr. George Frederick says he's never been on a newspaper before.'
'An outsider!' cried Umbrage, in the voice with which outsiders themselves would speak of reptiles. 'They are the ruin of the profession, they are.'
'He'll make you all sit up, Mister,' said Penny, with a chuckle. 'Mr. George Frederick has had his eye on him for a twelvemonth.'
'I don't suppose you know how Mr. George Frederick fell in with him?' said the sub-editor, basking in Penny's geniality.
'Mr. George Frederick told me everythink about him—everythink,' said the foreman proudly. 'It was a parson that recommended him.'
'A parson!' ejaculated Umbrage, in such a tone that if you had not caught the word you might have thought he was saying 'An outsider!' again.
'Yes, a parson whose sermon this Angus took down in shorthand, I fancy.'
'What was he doing taking down a sermon?'
'I suppose he was there to hear it.'
'And this is the kind of man who is taking to literature nowadays!' Umbrage cried.
'Oh, Mr. George Frederick has heard a great deal about him,' continued Penny maliciously, 'and expects him to do wonders. He's a self-made man.'
'Oh,' said Umbrage, who could find nothing to object to in that, having risen from comparative obscurity himself.
'Mr. George Frederick,' Penny went on, 'offered him a berth here before Billy Tagg was engaged, but he couldn't come.'
'I suppose,' said Juvenal, with the sarcasm that made him terrible on Fridays, 'the Times offered him something better, or was it the Spectator that wanted an editor?'
'No, it was family matters. His mother or his sister, or—let me see, it was his sister's child—was dependent on him, and could not be left. Something happened to her, though. She's dead, I think, so he's a free man now.'
'Yes, it was his sister's child, and she was found dead,' said the sub-editor, 'on a mountain-side, curiously enough, with George Frederick's letter in her hand offering Angus the appointment.'
Protheroe was foolish to admit that he knew this, for it was news to the foreman, but it tries a man severely to have to listen to news that he could tell better himself. One immediate result of the sub-editor's rashness was that Rob Angus sank several stages in Penny's estimation.
'I dare say he'll turn out a muff,' he said, and flung out of the room, with another intimation that the copy must be cut down.
The evening wore on. Protheroe had half a dozen things to do at once, and did them.
Telegraph boys were dropping the beginning of Lord John Manners's speech through a grating on to the sub-editorial desk long before he had reached the end of it at Nottingham.
The sub-editor had to revise this as it arrived in flimsy, and write a summary of it at the same time. His summary was set before all the speech had reached the office, which may seem strange. But when Penny cried aloud for summary, so that he might get that column off his hands, Protheroe made guesses at many things, and, risking, 'the right hon. gentleman concluded his speech, which was attentively listened to, with some further references to current topics,' flung Lord John to the boy, who rushed with him to Penny, from whose hand he was snatched by a compositor. Fifteen minutes afterwards Lord John concluded his speech at Nottingham.
About half-past nine Protheroe seized his hat and rushed home for supper. In the passage he nearly knocked himself over by running against the young man in the heavy top-coat. Umbrage went out to see if he could gather any information about a prize-fight. John Milton came in with a notice of a concert, which he stuck conspicuously on the chief reporter's file. When the chief reporter came in, he glanced through it and made a few alterations, changing 'Mr. Joseph Grimes sang out of tune,' for instance, to 'Mr. Grimes, the favourite vocalist, was in excellent voice.' The concert was not quite over yet, either; they seldom waited for the end of anything on the Mirror.
When Umbrage returned, Billy Kirker, the chief reporter, was denouncing John Milton for not being able to tell him how to spell 'deceive.'
'What is the use of you?' he asked indignantly, 'if you can't do a simple thing like that?'
'Say "cheat,"' suggested Umbrage.
So Kirker wrote 'cheat.' Though he was the chief of the Mirror's reporting department, he had only Umbrage and John Milton at present under him.
As Kirker sat in the reporters' room looking over his diary, with a cigarette in his mouth, he was an advertisement for the Mirror, and if he paid for his velvet coat out of his salary, the paper was in a healthy financial condition. He was tall, twenty-two years of age, and extremely slight. His manner was languid, though his language was sometimes forcible, but those who knew him did not think him mild. This evening his fingers looked bare without the diamond ring that sometimes adorned them. This ring, it was noticed, generally disappeared about the middle of the month, and his scarf-pin followed it by the twenty-first. With the beginning of the month they reappeared together. The literary staff was paid monthly.
Mr. Licquorish looked in at the door of the reporters' room to ask pleasantly if they would not like a fire. Had Protheroe been there he would have said 'No'; but Billy Kirker said 'Yes.' Mr. Licquorish had thought that Protheroe was there.
This was the first fire in the reporters' room that season, and it smoked. Kirker, left alone, flung up the window, and gradually became aware that some one with a heavy tread was walking up and down the alley. He whistled gently in case it should be a friend of his own, but, getting no response, resumed his work. Mr. Licquorish also heard the footsteps, but though he was waiting for the new reporter, he did not connect him with the man outside.
Rob had stopped at the door a score of times, and then turned away. He had arrived at Silchester in the afternoon, and come straight to the Mirror office to look at it. Then he had set out in quest of lodgings, and, having got them, had returned to the passage. He was not naturally a man crushed by a sense of his own unworthiness, but, looking up at these windows and at the shadows that passed them every moment, he felt far away from his saw-mill. What a romance to him, too, was in the glare of the gas and in the Mirror bill that was being reduced to pulp on the wall at the mouth of the close! It had begun to rain heavily, but he did not feel the want of an umbrella, never having possessed one in Thrums.
Fighting down the emotions that had mastered him so often, he turned once more to the door, and as he knocked more loudly than formerly, a compositor came out, who told him what to do if he was there on business.
'Go upstairs,' he said, 'till you come to a door, and then kick.'
Rob did not have to kick, however, for he met Mr. Licquorish coming downstairs, and both half stopped.