"Is it true?" gasped Humphrey.
"It is true that the President is dead—but it is the President of Montemujo or something like that in South America, and not M. Loubet."
Dagneau laughed merrily and slapped the papers on the table. He took Humphrey by the shoulders and shook him playfully.
"I—would I let my old and faithful Englishman down?" he asked. The newspaper phrase spoken as Dagneau spoke it sounded delightful.
"By George, you gave me a shock," Humphrey laughed. "I thought I'd been dozing for an hour with the President dead. Dagneau, you are an espèce de—anything you like."
"Any telegrams from London?"
"One to interview Jeanne Granier. I've done it Will you go through the evening papers? Look out for the Temps comments on the Persian railway ... they're running that in London. And the latest stuff about the Hanon case. I'll run round to Le Parisien and see what they've got."
He went down the winding staircase, past the red-faced concierge and his enormous wife, who knitted perpetually by the door ("Pas des lettres, m'sieu," she said, in answer to his inquiring look), and so into the street. A passing cabman held up his whip in appeal, and, as moments were precious now, Humphrey engaged him. They bowled along through the side-streets, and at the end of each he saw, repeated, the glorious opal and orange sunset over Paris: those magnificent sunsets that left the sky in a smother of golden and purple and dark clouds edged with livid light behind the steeple of St Augustine. They came to the building of Le Parisien, with whom The Day had an arrangement by which Humphrey could see their proofs evening and night, in exchange for extending the same privilege to the London Correspondent of Le Parisien at the offices of The Day.
He crossed the threshold into the familiar atmosphere of Fleet Street. Hurry and activity: young Frenchmen writing rapidly in room after room. Some of them knew him, looked up from their work and nodded to him. From below the printing-machines sent tremors through the building, as they rolled off the first edition for the distant provinces of France, and for the night trains to every capital of Europe. The same old work was going on here: the same incessant quest and record of news.
He went to the room of Barboux, the foreign editor.