I succeeded in holding up the sentence of doom for another fortnight, by the sportsmanship of a gallant old lady named the Countess of Carlisle. We had been conducting a temperance crusade which had earned her warm approval, and for the sake of that cause and her Liberal idealism, she offered to guarantee the men’s wages until the paper might be sold.
But it was never sold. The fatal night came when Franklin Thomasson, white and distressed, but resolute, faced his staff with the dreadful announcement that that was the last night. One man fainted. Several wept. Outside the printers waited in the hope that at this twelfth hour some stroke of luck would avert this great misfortune. To them it was a question of bread and butter for wives and babes.
That luck stroke did not happen.
With several colleagues I waited, smoking and talking, after the sentence had been pronounced. It seemed impossible to believe that The Tribune was dead. It was more than the death of an abstract thing, more than the collapse of a business enterprise. Something of ourselves had died with it, our hopes and endeavors, our work of brain and heart. A newspaper is a living organism, threaded through with the nerves of men and women, inspired by their spirit, animated by their ideals and thought, the living vehicle of their own adventure of life. So The Tribune seemed to us then, in that last hour, when we looked back on our labor and comradeship, our laughter, our good times together on “the rag,” as we had called it.
Long after midnight I left the office for the last time, with that friend of mine who had gone to Augustine Birrell, a tall, melancholy-mannered, Georgian-looking man, whose tall hat was a noble specimen of old-fashioned type.
The brilliant lights outside the office suddenly went out. It was like the sinking of the ship. My friend said, “Dead! Dead!” and lifted his hat as in the presence of death.
IX
After the downfall of The Tribune there was a period of suffering, anxiety, and in some cases despair, for many of the men who had held positions on that paper. One good fellow committed suicide. Others fell into grievous debt while waiting like Mr. Micawber for something to turn up. Fleet Street is a cruel highway for out-of-work journalists, and as so many were turned out into the street together it was impossible for all of them to be absorbed by other newspapers, already fully staffed.