I slunk out of the house later, and drove back fifteen miles to the station. On the way I passed an old horse cab conveying a young man in the opposite direction. I felt certain that he actually was the young gentleman who was going to sing at the concert that night.
On another occasion I had the unfortunate experience of being taken for Mr. Winston Churchill. It was his luck and not mine, because it was at a time when a great number of Irishmen were lusting for his blood. I am no more like Mr. Churchill than I am like Lloyd George, except that we are both clean shaven and both happened to be driving in a blue car. It was on a day when there was trouble in Belfast (that city of peace!) and the Orangemen had sworn to prevent Churchill from speaking to the Catholic community on the Celtic Football Ground. They lined up for him thousands strong outside the railway station where he was due to arrive, and their pockets were loaded with “kidney” stones, and iron nuts from the shipyards. Churchill is a brave man, and faced them with such pluck that they did not attempt to injure him at that moment of his arrival, though afterwards they attacked his car in Royal Avenue and would have overturned it but for a charge of mounted police. He made his speech to the Catholic Irish and slipped out of Belfast by a different station. The mobs of Orangemen were awaiting his return in a blue car to a hotel in Royal Avenue, and it was my car, and my clean-shaven face under a bowler hat which went back to that hotel and caused a slight mistake among them. I was suddenly aware of ten thousand men yelling at me fiercely and threatening to tear me limb from limb. The police made a rush, and I and my companion escaped with only torn collars and the loss of dignity after a wild scrimmage on the steps of the hotel. For hours the mob waited outside for Mr. Winston Churchill to depart, and I did not venture forth until the news of his going spread among them.
Such incidents are not enjoyable at the time. But a newspaper man with a sense of humor takes them as part of his day’s work, and however trivial they may be, bides his time for big events of history in which, after his apprenticeship, he may find his chance as a chronicler of things that matter.
II
It is one of the little ironies of a reporter’s life that he finds himself at times in the company of those who sit in the seats of the mighty and those who possess the power of worldly wealth, when he, poor lad, is wondering whether his next article will pay for his week’s rent, and jingles a few pieces of silver in a threadbare pocket.
It is true that most newspaper offices are liberal in the matter of expenses, so that while a “story” is in progress the newspaper man is able to put up at the best hotels, to hire motor cars with the ease of a millionaire, and to live so much like a lord that hall porters, Ministers of State, private detectives, and women of exalted rank are willing to treat him as such, if he plays the part well, and conceals his miserable identity. But there is always the feeling, to a sensitive fellow on the bottom rung of the journalistic ladder, that he is only a looker-on of life, a play actor watching from the wings, even a kind of Christopher Sly, belonging to the gutter but dressed up by some freak of fate, and invited to the banquet of the great.
The young newspaper man, if he is wise, and proud, with a sense of the dignity of his own profession, overcomes this foolish sense of inferiority by the noble thought that he may be (and probably is) of more importance to the world than people of luxury and exalted rank, and that, indeed, it is only by his words that many of them live at all. Unless he writes about them they do not exist. He is their critic, their judge, to some extent their creator. He it is who—as a man of letters—makes them famous or infamous, who gives the laurels of history to the man of action—for there is no Ulysses without Homer—and who moves through the pageant of life as a modern Froissart, painting the word pictures of courts and camps, revealing what happens behind the scenes, giving the immortality of his words to little people he meets upon the way, or to kings and heroes. That point of view, with its youthful egotism, has been comforting to many young gentlemen who have taken rude knocks to their sensibility because of their profession; and there is some truth in it.
As a descriptive writer on London newspapers, I had that advantage of being poor among the rich, and lowly among the exalted. Among other experiences which fell to my lot was that of being a chronicler of royal processions, ceremonies, marriages, coronations, funerals, and other events in the lives of kings and princes.