"Don't be so depressing, Tommy," Mrs Pride said. "Never mind what he says, Mr Quain—there's a chance for every one to do his best in Fleet Street."
"Dear optimistress," remarked Tommy, linking an arm in hers, "let's see what we have for supper."
They all went into the dining-room, and Humphrey was given the place of honour next to Mrs Pride. Beaver sat opposite, and Tommy was at the head of the table carving the joint of cold roast beef. "I'm a little out of form," he said, whimsically. "This is the first meal I've had at home for a week."
"I sometimes wish Tommy were a sub-editor," Mrs Pride confided to Humphrey; "then we should at least have the day to ourselves. But he says he could never sit down at a desk for eight hours a night."
"Not me," Tommy interposed, with his mouth full of beef. "If they want to make you a sub-editor, Quain, take several grains of cyanide of potassium rather than yield. You've got some freedom of thought and life as a reporter, but if you're a sub you're chained down with a string of rules. They make you wear a mental uniform."
"I thought a sub-editor held a more important position than a reporter," Humphrey said.
"So he does, only the reporters don't think so. The paper couldn't get on without the sub-editors. I should love to see The Day printed for just one issue with everything that the reporters wrote untouched. It would have to be a forty-two page paper. Because every reporter thinks his story is the best, and writes as much of it as he can.... I like the subs, they've saved my life over and over again. Next to the Agency men they're the most useful people in the world, eh, Beaver?... Have some beer, Beaver. Pass him the jug, Quain."
Beaver laughed. "It strikes me you people on the regular staff of the papers take yourselves much too seriously. You've all got swelled heads. For the sake of fine phrases you'll lose half the facts. Why don't you all understand that it's simply in the day's work to do your job and forget all about it."
"Lord knows," Tommy replied, "but we don't. We get obsessed with our jobs, and dream them, and spend hours taking trouble over them, and we know all the time that when they come cold and chilly at night through the sub's hands, they're lopped about and cut up to fit a space. We may pretend we don't care what happens to our writing, so long as we draw our money, but I think we all do in our secret hearts. We're born that way. The moment a man really doesn't care whether his story is printed or cut to shreds, he's no good in a newspaper office. It means he's lost his enthusiasm."
Tommy's voice fell. He knew well enough that that was the state of affairs to which he had come. All the long, long years of work had left him emotionless. He had exhausted his enthusiasm, and the whole business seemed stale to him. He felt out of place in this new world of newspaperdom, peopled with energetic, hopeful young men who came out of nowhere, and captured at once the prizes which were so hardly won in his day. He felt himself being nudged out of it all, by the pushful enthusiastic army of young men who had marched down on Fleet Street. All round him he saw signs of the coming change—the old penny papers were talking of changing their price to a halfpenny; the older men in journalism were being pensioned off, or dismissed, or "put on space"—which means that they were not paid a regular salary but at so much a column for what they wrote. The spirit of change was working everywhere: some of the solid writers who found that they could not comply with the modern demands of journalism, migrated back to the provinces and became editors or leader-writers on papers in Manchester, Birmingham or Sheffield. And, at the back of all this change, the figure of Ferrol hovered.... Ferrol sweeping irresistibly over the old traditions of Fleet Street.... Ferrol threatening to acquire this paper and that paper, to start weeklies and monthlies, to extend his power even to the provinces, so that everywhere the shadow brooded.