Beyond the cityroom was a battery of private offices. I will certainly not conceal the existence of my extreme nervousness as we neared the proximity of the famous editor. I hung back from the groundglass door inscribed in shabby, peeling letters—in distinction to its neighbors, newly and brightly painted—W.R. Le ffaçasé. Gootes, noting my trepidation, put on the brogue of a burlesque Irishman.
"Is it afraid of Himself you are, me boy? Sure, think no more of it. Faith, and wasnt he born Billy Casey; no better than the rest of us for all his mother was a Clancy and related to the Finnegans? He's written so often about coming from noble Huguenot stock he almost believes it himself, but the Huguenots were dirty Protestants and when his time comes W R'll send for the priest and take the last sacraments like the true son of the Church he is in his heart. So buck up, me boy, and come in and view the biggest faker in journalism."
But Gootes' flippancy reassured me no more than did the bare sunlit office behind the door. I had somehow, perhaps from the movies, expected to see an editor's desk piled with copypaper while he himself used halfadozen telephones at once, simultaneously making incomprehensible gestures at countless underlings. But Mr Le ffaçasé's desk was nude except for an enameled snuffbox and a signed photograph of a president whose administration had been subjected daily to the editor's bitterest jabs. On the walls hung framed originals of the more famous political cartoons of the last quartercentury, but neither telephone nor scrap of manuscript was in evidence.
But who could examine that office with detached scrutiny while William Rufus Le ffaçasé occupied it? Somnolent in a leather armchair, he opened tiny, sunken eyes to regard us with less than interest as we entered. Under a shiny alpaca coat he wore an oldfashioned collarless shirt whose neckband was fastened with a diamond stud. Neither collar nor tie competed with the brilliance of this flashing gem resting in a shaven stubblefold of his draped neck. His face was remarkably long, his upperlip stretching interminably from a mouth looking to have been freshly smeared with vaseline to a nose not unlike a golfclub in shape. From the snuffbox on his desk, which I'd imagined a pretty ornament or receptacle for small objects, he scooped with a flat thumb a conical mound of graybrown dust and this, with a sweeping upward motion, he pushed into a gaping nostril.
"Chief, this is Albert Weener."
"How do, Mr Weener. Gootes, who the bloody hell is Weener?"
"Why, Chief, he's the guy who put the stuff on the grass."
"Oh." He surveyed me with the attention due a worthy but not particularly valuable specimen. "You bit the dog, ay, Weener?"
Gootes burst into a high, appreciative cackle. Le ffaçasé turned the deathray of his left eye on him. "Youre a syncophant, Gootes," he stated flatly, "a miserable groveling lowlivered cringing fawning mealymouthed chickenhearted toadeating arselicking, slobbering syncophant."
I couldnt see how we were ever to reach the point this way, so I ventured, "I understand in view of the fact that I inoculated Mrs Dinkman's lawn you want me to contribute—"