I remember as though it were yesterday my first interview with that genius of the new journalism. He kept me waiting for a while in an antechamber of Carmelite House. Young men, extremely well dressed, and obviously in a great hurry on business of enormous importance to themselves, kept coming and going. Messenger boys in neat little liveries bounced in and out of the “Chief’s” room, in answer to his bell. Presently one of them approached me and said, “Your turn.” I drew a deep breath, prayed for courage, and found myself face to face with a handsome, clean-shaven, well-dressed man, with a lock of brown hair falling over his broad forehead, and a friendly, quizzical look in his brown eyes.
Sitting back in a deep chair, smoking a cigar, he read some of the articles I had brought, and occasionally said “Not bad!” or “Rather amusing!” Once he looked up and said, “You look rather pale, young man. Better go to the South of France for a bit.”
But it was the air of Fleet Street I wanted.
Presently he gave me the chance of it.
“How would you like to edit Page Four, and write two articles a week?”
I went out of Carmelite House with that offer accepted, uplifted to the seventh heaven of hope, and yet a little scared by the dangerous and dazzling height which I had reached.
A month later, having uprooted my home in the North, brought a wife and babe to London, incurred heavy expenses with a mortgage on the future, I presented myself at The Daily Mail again, and awaited the leisure and pleasure of Alfred Harmsworth.
When I was shown into his room, he only dimly remembered my face.
“Let me see,” he said, groping back to the distant past, which was four weeks old.