CHAPTER XVIII
IN THE "JOURNAL" OFFICE
The room was a long one, full of dazzling islands of light where shaded lamps above the isolated sub-editors' desks threw their white circles. This room, too, was smirched with black shadows; there were odd corners where light never came. It never shone upon the big bookcase over the mantelpiece, or in the corner behind the man who conned the foreign exchanges, or on the nest of pigeonholes over against the chief "sub."
When he would refer to these he must needs emerge blinking from the blinding light in which he worked and go groping in the darkness for the needed memorandum.
He was sitting at his desk now, intent upon his work.
At his elbow stood a pad, on which he wrote from time to time.
Seemingly his task was an aimless one. He wrote nothing save the neat jottings upon his pad. Bundles of manuscript came to him, blue books, cuttings from other newspapers; these he looked at rather than read, looked at them in a hard, strained fashion, put them in this basket or that, as the fancy seized him, chose another bundle, stared at it, fluttered the leaves rapidly, and so continued. He had the appearance of a man solving some puzzle, piecing together intricate parts to make one comprehensive whole. When he hesitated, as he sometimes did, and seemed momentarily doubtful as to which basket a manuscript should be consigned, you felt the suggestion of mystery with which his movements were enveloped, and held your breath. When he had decided upon the basket you hoped for the best, but wondered vaguely what would have happened if he had chosen the other.
The door that opened into the tape-room was swinging constantly now, for it wanted twenty minutes to eleven. Five tickers chattered incessantly, and there was a constant procession of agency boys and telegraph messengers passing in and out the vestibule of the silent building. And the pneumatic tubes that ran from the front hall to the subs' room hissed and exploded periodically, and little leathern carriers rattled into the wire basket at the chief sub's elbow.
News! news! news!
A timber fire at Rotherhithe; the sudden rise in Consols; the Sultan of Turkey grants an amnesty to political offenders; a man kills his wife at Wolverhampton; a woman cyclist run down by a motor-car; the Bishop of Elford denounces Non-conformists——