VI
Trotter sat peering mildly about him as that Gargantuan organism known as a newspaper office labored and shrieked in the birth of an afternoon edition. Subterranean Hoe presses roared and hummed, telegraph keys clicked and cluttered, typewriters tapped and clattered like a dozen highholders on a hollow elm, telephone bells shrilled, shouting pressmen came and went, unkempt copy boys trailed back and forth with their festoons of limp galley proof, and Hubbart, with close-set eyes and a forehead like a bisected ostrich egg, sat at the City Desk, calmly presiding over an otherwise frenzied accouchement.
It interested Trotter. It interested him very much. But it no longer filled him with mingled fear and revolt. He was, indeed, no longer envious, just as he was no longer nervous. He was as calm as a Nihilist with a bomb in his pocket.
Looking up, he saw that the office boy was holding the rail gate open for him to enter. But he was conscious of no spirit of elation as he stepped through the gate and passed on into that glass-fronted cage where Pyott, the managing editor, sat like a switchman in his many-levered tower.
Trotter saw, seated at a desk before him, a thin-featured, thin-haired man of forty, with the crumpled-up eye-corners peculiar to the face that masks a circuitous and secretive mind. It was a face full of that weary concern, that alert indifferency, which is companion to the spirit of repeated compromise. It was far from an open face: it seemed to betray only two things, tiredness and satiric intelligence.
The man at the desk did not even look up. He merely flung a barbed "Well?" over his shoulder. It reminded Trotter of the preoccupied tail swish of a horse worried by a black-fly. The side flick of one casual monosyllable was plainly all he was worth. Trotter calmly sat down.
"I've been waiting for six months for a job on this paper," he began, quite seriously, quite deliberately. The man at the desk went on writing. The pen did not even stop.
"Yes?" This second monosyllable was neither an answer nor a question. It was merely an intimation that nothing of arresting moment had as yet been uttered.
"So I've come straight to you!"
"Yes!" This third exclamation was plainly a challenge to come to the issue in hand.