"There hasn't been any accident worth speaking of. No one hurt, I mean."
"All right. Let it go," said Selsey, calmly. Hargreave went away to haggle with the foreman over something. Nobody was relieved to hear that the accident had not been serious.
Humphrey lingered a little longer: he saw rooms leading out of the composing-room, where there was a noise of hammering on metal, and the smell of molten lead, ... and men running to and fro in aprons, taking surreptitious pinches of snuff, banging with mallets, carrying squares of type, proofs, battered tins of tea, ... running to and fro, terribly serious and earnest, just as scene-shifters in the theatre rush and bustle and carry things that the audience never sees, when the curtain hides the stage.
"Better get home," said Selsey, noticing him again.
Humphrey went downstairs. The reporters' room was empty; the fire was low in the grate. He went downstairs, and as he reached the bottom step, the grey building shivered and trembled as if in agony, and there came up from the very roots of its being a deep roar, at first irregular, and menacing, but gradually settling down to a steady, rhythmical beat, like the throbbing of thousands of human hearts.
II
The man whom Humphrey feared most, in those early days, was Rivers, the news-editor. His personality was a riddle. You were never certain when you were summoned to his room in the morning, whether good or ill would result from it. In his hands lay the ordering of your day. You had no more control over your liberty from the time you came into Rivers' room than a prisoner serving his sentence,—no longer a man with a soul, but a reporter. You could be raised into the highest heaven or dropped down to the deepest hell by the wish of Rivers. He could bid you go forth—and you would have to tramp wretchedly the streets of the most unlovely spots in outer London in an interminable search for some elusive news: or perhaps you would be given five pounds for expenses and told to catch the next train for a far county, and spend the day among the hedgerows of the country-side. He had power absolute, like the taskmasters of old.
He sat in his room, with the map of England on the wall with its red flags marking the towns where The Day had correspondents, surrounded by telephones and cuttings from papers. He was in the office all day and night. At least that was how it appeared to Humphrey, who met him often and at all times on the stairs. When he was not, by any chance, there, his place was taken by O'Brien, an excitable Irishman, whose tie worked itself gradually up his collar, marking the time when his excitement was at fever-heat like a barometer.