CHAPTER XVII
ROB PULLS HIMSELF TOGETHER
In a London fog the street-lamps are up and about, running maliciously at pedestrians. He is in love or writing a book who is struck by one without remonstrating. One night that autumn a fog crept through London a month before it was due, and Rob met a lamp-post the following afternoon on his way home from the Wire office. He passed on without a word, though he was not writing a book. Something had happened that day, and, but for Mary Abinger, Rob would have been wishing that his mother could see him now.
The editor of the Wire had called him into a private room, in which many a young gentleman, who only wanted a chance to put the world to rights, has quaked, hat in hand, before now. It is the dusty sanctum from which Mr. Rowbotham wearily distributes glory or consternation, sometimes with niggardly hand, and occasionally like an African explorer scattering largess among the natives. Mr. Rowbotham might be even a greater editor than he is if he was sure that it is quite the proper thing for so distinguished a man as himself to believe in anything, and some people think that his politics are to explain away to-day the position he took up yesterday. He seldom writes himself, and, while directing the line to be adopted by his staff, he smokes a cigar which he likes to probe with their pens. He is pale and thin, and has roving eyes, got from always being on the alert against aspirants.
All the chairs in the editorial room, except Mr. Rowbotham's own, had been converted, like the mantelpiece, into temporary bookcases. Rob tumbled the books off one (your Inquiry into the State of Ireland was among them, gentle reader) much as a coal-heaver topples his load into a cellar, or like a housewife emptying her apron.
'You suit me very well, Angus,' the editor said. 'You have no lurking desire to write a book, have you?'
'No,' Rob answered; 'since I joined the Press that ambition seems to have gone from me.'
'Quite so,' said Mr. Rowbotham, his tone implying that Rob now left the court without a stain upon his character. The editor's cigar went out, and he made a spill of a page from Sonnets of the Woods, which had just come in for review.
'As you know,' the editor continued, 'I have been looking about me for a leader-writer for the last year. You have a way of keeping your head that I like, and your style is not so villainously bad. Are you prepared to join us?'