CHAPTER IV.—THE UNATTACHED EDITOR.
The “casual” word—The mighty hunter—The retort discourteous—How the editor’s chair was broken—An explanation on a clove—The master of a system—A hitch in the system—The two Alhambras—A parallel—The unattached parson—Another system—A father’s legacy—The sermon—The imagination and its claims—The evening service—Saying a few words—Antique carved oak—How the chaplain’s doubts were dispersed—A literary tinker—A tinker’s triumph—The two Joneses.
THE “scratch” editor also may now and again be found to possess some eccentricities. He is the man who is taken on a newspaper in an emergency to fill the place of an editor who may perhaps be suffering from a serious illness, or who may, in an unguarded moment, have died. There is a class of journalists with whom being out of employment amounts almost to a profession in itself. But the “unattached” editor is usually no more brilliant a man than the unattached gentleman “in holy orders”—the clergyman who appears suddenly at the vestry door carrying a black bag, and probably with his nose a little red (the result of a cold railway journey), and who introduces himself to the sexton as ready to do duty for the legitimate, but temporarily incapacitated, incumbent, whose telegram he had received only the previous day.
As the congregation are glad to get any one who can read the prayers with an air of authority in the absence of their pastor, so the proprietors of a newspaper are sometimes pleased to welcome the “scratch,” or casual, editor.
I have met with a few of the class, but never with one whose chronic unattached condition I could not easily account for, before we had been together long. Most of them hated journalism—-and everything else (with one important exception). All of them boasted of their feats as journalists. A fine crusted specimen was accustomed to declare nightly that he had once kept hunters; another that he had not always been connected with such a miserable rag as the journal on which he was temporarily employed.
“I’ve been on the best papers in the three kingdoms,” he shouted one night.
“That’s only another way of saying that you’ve been kicked off the most influential organs in the country,” remarked a bystander.
“If you don’t look out you’ll soon be kicked off another.”
No verbal retort is possible to such brutality of language. None was attempted.