It was, I think, The Day that finally discovered the Young Man. Ferrol had known the bitter opposition which he had fought in his own twenties and thirties, and he shone as the apostle of youth. The Young Man, from a neglected embryo, became a national asset; all hands were uplifted to him in the dawn of the new century. He was enthroned in the seats from which his elders were deposed.
People seeking for a symbol of the new life that was beginning, looked westwards and found a whole nation that typified the Young Man who was to be their salvation. They found America, eager, with strident voice, forceful and straining its muscles to the game of life—a whole nation of young men. It became the fashion to take America as a model. There was an invasion of boots and bicycles and cameras. "Look," every one cried, "see how they do things better than we do. Look at their magazines—how wonderful they are." Phonographs, kinetoscopes, the first jumpy cinematographs, photo-buttons, chewing-gum, they came to the country, and were hailed gladly as from the land of Young Men.
Presently the young men themselves came. They came with their hair parted in the middle, and keen, clean-shaven faces with very predominant chins. They were mere boys, and they had a bounce and a boisterous assurance that took one's breath away. With them came loudly-striped shirts, multi-coloured socks, felt hats and lounge suits in city offices, and, later, soft-fronted shirts and black silk bows for evening wear. They opened London offices for New York firms, and showed us card-indexing systems, roll-top desks, dictaphones and loose-leaf ledgers. All letters were typewritten, and the firm who sent out a letter in the crabbed handwriting of its senior clerk was accounted disgracefully behind the times.
The Young Man set the pace with a vengeance, and it was a panting business to keep abreast of him.
Cock-tails and quick-lunch restaurants appeared next; griddle-cakes, clam-chowder and club sandwiches were shown to us; and finally, as though having absorbed their nutriment, we had assimilated their habits, a fierce desire to speak with a nasal accent took hold of us.
The man who wanted to get a job spoke with as much American accent as he could muster up; he looked American, and he affected American ways; his affirmative was "sure," and he wore his hair long and sleek, divided evenly in the middle. He was the Young Man, cocksure, enthusiastic and determined—the most remarkable product of his time.
Ferrol found him, a year or so before he arrived, with that instinct of his, almost second-sight, which never failed. He boomed him as a Type; he glorified him, and gave him high posts in the office of The Day. With the exception of Neckinger, the editor, who came straight from New York, he was the native product, and Ferrol was always on the look-out for more of him.
And so, in the midst of all this, when the cry for the Young Man was at its hungriest, when "hustle" and "strenuous" were added to the vocabulary, we see Humphrey Quain, waiting on the outskirts, watching his opportunity, and meanwhile bending over the counter of the Easterham Gazette office, coat off and shirt sleeves turned back to the elbow, folding up copies of the Easterham Gazette as they came damp, with the ink wet on them, from the printing-press in the basement.
The Easterham Gazette was, unhesitatingly, the worst paper in Easterham. It was an eight-page weekly journal, with a staff of one editor, one reporter and Humphrey Quain. When things were slack in the reporting line, the reporter (an extraordinarily shaggy person called Beaver, whose thumbs were always covered with ink) was expected to "fill up time at case"—which means that he was to assist in setting up the paper in type. The editor, whose name was Worthing, walked about in a knickerbocker suit and a soft grey hat, and it was part of his business to obtain advertisements for the Gazette. The leading articles he wrote were always composed with one eye on the advertiser. In praising the laudable action of Councillor Bilson in opposing the introduction of trams into the town, there was a pleasant parenthesis, something in this manner: "It needs no words of ours to echo the praise bestowed on that gallant champion of our town, our much-respected Councillor Bilson (in whose windows, by the way, there is a remarkable exhibit of Oriental coffee-making) ..." and so on.