“By my inferiors in this office,” he replied.
“I’d like to know where your inferiors are,” said I. “They’re not in this office—so much I can swear. I doubt if they are in any other.”
He asked me if I meant to insult him, and I assured him that I invariably made my meaning so plain when I had occasion to say anything, there was no excuse for asking what I meant.
He never talked to me again about being insulted.
Another curious specimen of an extinct animal was subject to remarkable fits of depression and moroseness. He offered to make me a bet one night that he would not be alive on that day week. I took him up promptly, and offered to stake a five-pound note on the issue, provided that he did the same. He said he hadn’t a five-pound note in the world, though he had been toiling like a galley slave for twenty years. I pitied the poor fellow, though it was not until I saw his wife—a mass of black beads and pomatum—that I recognised his right to the consolation of pessimism. I believe that he was only deterred from suicide by an irresistible belief in a future state. He had heard a well-meant but injudicious sermon in which the statement was made that husband and wife, though parted by death, would one day be reunited. Believing this he lived on. What was the use of doing anything else?
I met with another sub-editor on whom for a period I looked with some measure of awe, being in statu pupillari at the time.
Every night he used to take a razor out of his press and lay it beside his desk, having opened it with great deliberation and a hard look upon his haggard face. I believed that he was possessed of strong suicidal impulses, and that he was placing the razor where it would be handy in case he should find it necessary to make away with himself some night or in the early hours of the morning.
I held him in respect for just one month. At the end of that time I saw him sharpening his pencil with the razor, and I ventured to inquire if he usually employed the instrument for that purpose.