I
Little old Bob Dungan, his coat off, his sleeves rolled to the elbow so that they revealed the red-woolen underwear which he habitually wore, sat at his typewriter in the furthest corner of the noisy City Room and rattled off a cryptic sentence. He wrote:
“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
Now this is not a piece of information calculated to interest more than a baker’s dozen of the half million readers of a metropolitan daily such as that which Bob served. The sentence as a sentence has but one virtue; it contains all of the letters of the alphabet. That is all you can say for it. Nevertheless, having written the words, Bob studied them profoundly, ticking off with his pencil each letter, from A to Izzard, and when he was done, counted those that still remained.
“Nine,” he said, half aloud. And he scratched his head. “Ought to get it under that.” He put a fresh sheet in the typewriter and prepared to try again. To the casual eye of any one who might be watching from across the room, he looked like a very busy man.
As a matter of fact, this was exactly the impression Bob wished to convey. He was anxious to appear busy and indispensable. For little old Bob Dungan was desperately afraid of being fired.
A newspaper staff is built to meet emergencies. That means that, left to itself, it inevitably becomes top-heavy, and on days when news is slack, the City Room is half full of men waiting for an assignment that never comes. When such a condition develops, the veterans in the office know what will follow. Some fine morning, the publisher drifts down stairs and sees the idle men—idle because there is nothing for them to do. And that afternoon, the order comes to cut the staff, cut to the bone.
So faces once familiar begin to disappear. The latest comers are the first to go, and only unusual ability will save them. Then the less efficient among the regulars are dropped, and finally, in drastic cases, those oldtimers who have begun to slow down. There was once a Saturday afternoon when from a single City Room twenty-two men were discharged, and the work went on, Monday morning, just the same. Men who have seemed indispensable disappear—and leave no more of a hole than your finger leaves in a bucket of water. The young reporters take these episodes gaily, as a part of the game; those more experienced accept misfortune with what resignation they can muster. But in the case of a man who has served the paper for ten or fifteen or twenty years, the moment has its black and tragic side.
Old Bob Dungan was wise enough to know the signs. Three weeks before two young reporters had disappeared. A week after, five men were “let go.” Last Saturday seven old friends had stopped at his desk to say goodby. And this morning, his half-admitted apprehensions had been brought to focus. Fear had set its grip on him....
Dade, the City Editor, a driver of a man who was himself driven by a fierce affection for the paper which he served, was standing at Bob’s desk, and they were talking together when Boswell, the publisher, came in from the elevator. And Dade—the man had a kindly, human streak in him which some people never discovered—whispered out of the side of his mouth to Bob:
“Look out, old man. For God’s sake, look busy as hell!”
Then he went across to meet Boswell; and Bob began to write on his machine, at top speed, over and over again:
“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party. Now is the time for all good men to come....”
He shifted, after a while, to the other: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Meaningless enough; but Bob hoped, with all his trembling soul, that he was succeeding in looking busy. He was, as has been said, afraid of being fired.