I could only silently pray that he would “give me an easy one,” and that I should not disgrace myself in the doing of it. By Jove, Will, what an old martinet Baldwin was, for all his good heart! Do you remember that sharp, crackling voice of his, and the awful “Be brief! be brief!” that always drove all capacity for condensation out of a mans head, and set him to stammering out his story with wordy incoherence? Baldwin is on the Record still. I wonder what poor devil is trembling at this hour under that disconcerting adjuration.
A wretched day that was! The hours went slow as grief. Smeary little barearmed fiends trotted in from the composing-room and out again, bearing fluttering galley-proofs. Bedraggled, hollow-eyed men came in from the streets and set their soaked umbrellas to steam against the heater, and passed into the lions den to feed him with news, and were sent out again to take up their half cooked umbrellas and so forth to forage for more. Everyone, I thought, gave me one brief glance of contempt and curiosity, and put me out of his thoughts. Everyone had some business everyone but me. The men who had been waiting with me were called up one by one and detailed to work. I was left alone.
Torture my nervously active
Then a new horror came to torture my nervously active imagination. Had my superior officer forgotten his new recruit? Or could he find no task mean enough for my powers? This filled me at first with a sinking shame, and then with a hot rage and sense of wrong. Why should he thus slight me? Had I not a right to be tried, at least? Was there any duty he could find that I would not perform or die? I would go to him and tell him that I had come there to work; and would make him give me the work. No, I should simply be snubbed, and sent to my seat like a schoolboy, or perhaps discharged on the spot. I must bear my humiliation in silence.
I looked up and saw you entering, with your bright, ruddy boys face shining with wet, beaming a greeting to all the room. In my soul I cursed you, at a venture, for your lightheartedness and your look of cheery self-confidence. What a vast stretch of struggle and success set you above me you, the reporter, above me, the novice! And just then awful summons “Barclay! Barclay!”
I shall hear that strident note at the judgment day. I went in and got my orders, and came out with them, all in a sort of daze that must have made Baldwin think me an idiot. And then you came up to me and scraped acquaintance in a desultory way, to hide your kind intent; and gave me a hint or two as to how to obtain a full account of the biennial meeting of the Post-Pliocene Mineralogical Society, or whatever it was, without diving too deeply into the Post-Pliocene period. I would have fought for you to the death, at that moment.
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