Trial and Error Read online

  He turned back to his guest.

  “Don’t you know a single person who ought to be murdered?” asked Mr Todhunter with disapproval.

  “Well—er—no,” Mr Chitterwick had to apologise. “I’m afraid I don’t.” He wondered why his host should appear to set so much store by his acquaintance with potential murderees but hardly liked to ask.

  Mr Todhunter frowned at him. He felt that Mr Chitterwick had accepted his invitation on false pretences.

  He felt, too, that he might just as well give the whole idea up, now as later. Mr Todhunter was not prepared to advertise his services in the daily press as a benevolent murderer to those in need, and short of some such drastic step it seemed that those services would never be required. He found himself both relieved and, at the same time, curiously disappointed.

  5

  One goes forth to seek something and finds it not; one returns home and finds the object of one’s search being handed to one by some kind friend on a platter.

  It was on a Tuesday evening that Mr Todhunter decided, on the failure of Mr Chitterwick, that he must abandon his great plan. It was on the very next afternoon that Ferrers, the literary editor of the London Review handed him, in the most casual way, exactly what he wanted. While Mr Todhunter had been searching the highways and byways for a suitable victim, it seemed that one had been lurking complacently all the time right in his path.

  It was a chance question of Mr Todhunter’s which brought the matter to light. Before going to Ferrers’s room to select his book for review he had strolled down another passage to pass the time of day with an old friend of his on the staff, one of the leader writers, to whom in point of fact Mr Todhunter’s own slight connection with the London Review was due. The man was not in his room, and there was another name on the door.

  “By the way,” said Mr Todhunter when he had deposited his ancient brown trilby hat on a file of newspapers in Ferrers’ big room overlooking Fleet Street, “by the way, is Ogilvie away ill? He’s not in his room.”

  Ferrers looked up from the copy he was cutting, blue pencil in hand. “Ill? Not he. He’s the latest to go, that’s all.”

  “To go?” repeated Mr Todhunter, mildly puzzled.

  “Sacked! Poor old Ogilvie’s been sacked, to put it frankly. They handed him a cheque for six months salary yesterday and told him to clear out.”

  “Ogilvie sacked?” Mr Todhunter was shocked. Ogilvie, with his big head, bulging with solid brain, and his calm, penetrating pen, had always seemed an integral part of the London Review. “Dear me, I thought he was a fixture here.”

  “It’s a damned shame.” Ferrers, usually discretion in trousers, spoke with unwonted heat. “Just shot him out, like that.”

  One of the fiction reviewers was turning over a huge pile of new novels on a table by the window. “Why?” he asked.

  “Oh, these blasted internal politics. Too complicated for you to understand, young fellow.”

  The fiction reviewer, who happened to be three months older than his literary editor, grinned amiably. “Sorry, boss.” He was under the delusion that Ferrers disliked being called “boss.”

  “Look here,” asked Mr Todhunter. “About Ogilvie. Why did you say he had to go?”

  “Internal reorganisation, my boy,” Ferrers told him bitterly. “And do you know what that means?”

  “No,” said Mr Todhunter.

  “Well, so far as I can make out it means sack all the men with any guts and retain the spittle-lickers. That’s a fine thing for a paper like this, isn’t it?” Ferrers was genuinely proud of the London Review and its reputation for solid, old-fashioned dignity, honesty and decorum, which he had fought hard to maintain even after the weekly had passed into the control of Consolidated and Periodicals Ltd., who were now its unworthy owners.

  “But what will Ogilvie do?”

  “God knows. He’s got a wife and family to look after somehow.”

  “I suppose,” said Mr Todhunter, now much worried, “that he’ll get a job somewhere else without much difficulty?”

  “Will he? I doubt it. He’s no chicken, old Ogilvie. Besides, it doesn’t do a man any good to be sacked from Consolidated Periodicals. Remember that, by the way, young fellow,” added Ferrers to the fiction reviewer.

  “You pay me a little more and I wouldn’t give you so many chances,” retorted the fiction reviewer.

  “What’s the good of paying you any more? You’d never write the kind of review I want.”

  “If you mean, write a column of unctuous praise every week on behalf of your biggest advertisers, all full of nice, fat quotable sentences, no, I wouldn’t,” said the other nastily. “I’ve told you before, I’m not that kind of reviewer.”

  “And I’ve told you before, young fellow, that you’ll come to a bad end. You have to take things as you find them in this world.”

  The reviewer made a rude noise and turned back to his novels.

  Mr Todhunter opened the doors of the big bookcase in which the nonfiction books were kept, but for once his eye did not light up. He was one of those unfortunate people who, against all reason, feel a kind of responsibility for those in distress or trouble; and the present plight and future predicament of Ogilvie were worrying him already. Mr Todhunter felt that he ought to do something about it.

  “It was Armstrong who dismissed Ogilvie?” he asked, turning back to Ferrers. Armstrong was the new managing editor of Consolidated Periodicals Ltd.

  Ferrers, who had got busy with his blue pencil again, looked up patiently. “Armstrong? Oh no. He’s got no say in that kind of thing at present.”

  “Lord Felixbourne, then?” Lord Felixbourne was the owner.

  “No. It was . . . Oh well, I suppose I ought not to talk about it. But it’s a dirty business.”

  “Any chance of you being next, Ferrers?” asked the fiction reviewer. “I mean, it would be rather jolly if we could have a literary editor who’d let me say, just once a month or so, that a novel is bad when it is.”

  “You say what you like, don’t you? I don’t interfere with you.”

  “No, you merely cut out all my best bits.” The fiction reviewer strolled across the room and stood behind his editor’s shoulder. He uttered a wail of despair and stabbed at the copy on the desk. “Oh, my lord, you haven’t cut that paragraph, have you? But, good heavens, man, why? It isn’t even rude. It only amounts to saying that——”

  “Listen, Todhunter. This is what Byle’s written: ‘If this were Mr Firkin’s first novel there might be some excuse for this turgid spate of words, curdled with cliches like cream with clots, for it might only mean that he had not thought it necessary to find out how to handle his tools before using them; but by his sixth attempt Mr Firkin should at least have learned his English grammar. For the rest, if there is any meaning hidden away under the deluge of his verbosity, I could not find it. Perhaps those of my colleagues who, impressed no doubt by Mr Firkin’s powers of drooling on to any given length without saying anything at all, have bestowed such generous praise on his earlier books will oblige with an explanation of why this one should ever have been written. Or is that a secret known only to Mr Firkin’s publishers?’ And he says it isn’t even rude. What would you do in my place?”

  Mr Todhunter gave his deprecating, almost guilty little smile. “Perhaps it is a little outspoken.”

  “I’ll say it is,” agreed Ferrers and drew two more large blue crosses over the offending paragraph.

  The reviewer, a man of violent passion, stamped with rage. “I can’t understand you. Damn it, Todhunter, you ought to back me up. Of course it’s outspoken. And why the hell shouldn’t it be? It’s time something like that was said about Firkin. The man’s reputation is absurdly inflated. He’s not good at all; damn it, he’s bad! And he gets all this sickening praise because half the reviewers can’t be bothered to plough through his stuff at all and so find it easier to praise than criticise, and the other half really do think that inordinate length is a sign of genius
, instead of being impressed as they should be by a man who can say just twice as much in a quarter of the space. Or else they know that the public likes value for its money and confuse value with verbiage. Damn it, it’s time someone pricked the bubble, isn’t it?”

  “That’s all very well, young fellow,” replied Ferrers, unperturbed by this outburst. “But there are ways of pricking it without using an axe. After all, you don’t need a butcher’s cleaver to burst a bubble. If I printed that, I should get a dozen letters from dear old ladies the next morning saying how unfair it is to attack poor Mr Firkin’s book that he’d worked so hard to write, when he’d never done anything to you, and can’t I get a reviewer with no axe of his own to grind.”

  “But I haven’t any axe to grind!” foamed the reviewer.

  “I know that,” soothed Ferrers. “But they don’t.”

  Mr Todhunter picked a book almost at random from the shelves and crept out of the room. As he went, he heard Mr Byle’s excited voice behind him:

  “Very well, I resign. Curse your old ladies. I don’t care a hoot about them. If you won’t let me review honestly, I resign.”

  Mr Todhunter was not impressed. Mr Byle resigned with fair regularity every Wednesday afternoon, if he happened to see his copy in process of being cut. If not, he forgot what he had written and remained happy. In any case the difficulty pleaded so feelingly by Ferrers of finding another reviewer worthy of the London Review at such short notice invariable caused Mr Byle to soften his heart and agree to remain for just one more week, and the process was then repeated all over again.

  The first requisite for a literary editor is tact. The second and third are tact too.

  6

  Mr Todhunter was acting with unusual cunning.

  He wanted to find out more about Ogilvie’s dismissal; and though Ferrers would not tell him, Mr Todhunter thought he knew where he might pick up a little gossip. He therefore made his way to the assistant editor’s room.

  Leslie Wilson was a sociable young man with literary intentions of his own. He shared a room with the musical editor, but the latter was rarely in it. To Mr Todhunter’s invitation that he should come and drink a cup of tea in the restaurant at the top of the building he agreed with pleased promptitude. Young Wilson had respect for few people outside Ferrers and the editor in chief, but Mr Todhunter, with his slightly spinsterish manners and donnish mind, had always impressed him; though Mr Todhunter, who was by way of being alarmed himself before Wilson’s competence and youth, would have been much astonished to hear it.

  They took the lift, and Mr Todhunter disposed his lightly covered bones on a hard chair. To the waitress he was firm upon the matter of China tea, with so many spoonfuls to the pot and no more. Wilson professed his eagerness to eat and drink exactly what Mr Todhunter thought of eating and drinking.

  They then discussed the book pages for eight minutes.

  At the end of that time Mr Todhunter introduced the name of Ogilvie and was gratified to notice a distinct reaction on the part of his companion.

  “It’s a damned shame,” said young Wilson hotly.

  “Yes, but what is the cause of his being dismissed so unexpectedly?” Mr Todhunter poured out the tea with care and pushed the sugar basin across to his guest. It was early, and the two had the room to themselves. “I should have thought he was such a competent man.”

  “He is competent. One of the best leader writers we’ve ever had. That hasn’t anything to do with his going.”

  “Dear me, then what had?”

  “Oh, it’s all part and parcel of the same game. Ogilvie got the boot because he wouldn’t knuckle under to Fisher.”

  “Fisher? I don’t think I’ve heard of him before. Who is he?”

  “He’s a nasty piece of work,” replied the assistant literary editor without discretion. “As nasty as they make ’em. His real name’s Fischmann. American German Jew, with a dash of anything else unpleasant thrown in. And he’s just making merry hell of this place.”

  In response to Mr Todhunter’s enquiries Wilson told the whole story. It was not a nice one.

  The London Review had recently passed out of the hands of kindly, tolerant old Sir John Verney into those of Lord Felixbourne, the chairman of Consolidated Periodicals Ltd. Lord Felixbourne believed in pep and vim, but he had the sense to realise that one of the London Review’s greatest assets was its freedom from the prevalent vulgarity of the English press, and he approved its old policy, which had been to keep a course between the pompous tediousness of the Spectator and that tone of common pertness which is the popular press’s version of the American tabloids. Indeed Lord Felixbourne quite understood that it was just this policy which gave the London Review the surprisingly large circulation it had, for it attracted as its readers most of those whose minds still remain decent and who are yet bored by too solemn a tone at their Saturday breakfast tables.

  But this was not enough for Lord Felixbourne. The policy was to continue, but the men who had made it were to go—or reform. There was a saying in Fleet Street that an appointment on the London Review meant a job for life. No one was ever sacked; few reprimands were ever administered; the staff was trusted. It was this condition of affairs that the new proprietor wished to change. Lord Felixbourne had found that the threat of instant dismissal at the first, smallest error kept a journalist on his toes. He was a kind man, but he believed sincerely that his toes were the members on which a journalist should be, not on any other more comfortable part of his anatomy. He had made a speech to this effect to the staff of the London Review when he first took over control. That a serious weekly is not the same as a daily newspaper did not seem to have occurred to him.

  The staff of the London Review had not been seriously perturbed. They knew their jobs, and they knew, too, that they did them as well as the staff of any other weekly journal—and, in the general opinion, a good deal better. Proprietors like to let off a little hot air occasionally; but the circulation was going up steadily, the paper had as good a reputation as any in Europe, earthquakes might happen in Patagonia but not in the serene offices of the London Review.

  The staff were wrong. Lord Felixbourne was a kindly man and it would have distressed him very much to carry out the purging himself. He therefore imported Mr Isidore Fischmann, at considerable expense, from the United States and gave him full powers to do it instead. The whole of Consolidated Periodicals Ltd. was placed at his mercy. Mr Fischmann showed his mettle before he had been in the place a week by sacking the editor of the London Review himself.

  Young Wilson was quite fair. He admitted handsomely that it had been quite time old Vincent retired. He was a relic from Victorian journalism; he was hopelessly out of date; he was a bit of a joke. But the decent thing would have been for Lord Felixbourne to persuade him into resigning and then settle a nice fat pension on the old man, not have him more or less kicked out of the place by this Fischmann fellow, with a cheque for a year’s salary in his pocket and not a penny more. When asked why he had not recommended even a pension, Fischmann had replied that the old man had been grossly overpaid for years and ought to have saved enough three times over to last him for the short remainder of his life. As a matter of fact, the old man had; but that was neither here nor there. A nice fat pension to editors retiring for reasons of old age (and no editor had ever retired from the London Review for anything else) was a part of the journal’s tradition.

  The staff was upset. But their disapproval was as nothing compared with the perturbation which overtook the whole building during the next three months; a perturbation verging in some cases on panic. For dismissals became as common as primroses in Devon. A storm had struck Fleet Street and the staff of Consolidated Periodicals Ltd. were scattered before it as cigarette ash before an electric fan.

  The whole trouble, opined young Wilson, still trying to be fair but becoming more and more red every minute, the whole trouble was due to the fact that Fischmann was the wrong sort of man for the job. Young Wilson q
uite admitted that a slight gingering up of the London Review’s staff would have been a perfectly sound thing; while a change to a rather more definite policy need not have incurred any real risk of stunting, which had been the Old Gang’s bogey. But Fischmann had lost his head completely.

  Crazy with power, he was sacking people now throughout the whole building, not on any question of efficiency or lack of value, but on nothing more nor less now than an attitude of independence to himself. Things had reached such a pitch that the most useless fellow could obtain the editorship of one of the minor periodicals in the firm’s control so long as he was prepared to join the band of Fischmann’s toadies; sooner or later the best man must go if he kept up his attitude of independence. Even hostility was not required; a mere reluctance to touch his hat to Fischmann in the corridor was almost enough now to earn the dismissal, at twelve hours notice, of the best man in Fleet Street.

  “But I can’t believe that anything like that can be happening here,” protested Mr Todhunter. “One hears of these absurd affairs in the popular newspapers, but surely not in the London Review.”

  “Ask Ferrers, ask Ogilvie himself, ask anyone,” countered Wilson.

  “I did ask Ferrers,” admitted Mr Todhunter, “and he refused to tell me.”

  “Oh well.” Wilson smiled rather engagingly. “Ferrers thinks it’s best to keep these things to ourselves. Besides, Byle was there, wasn’t he? He’s a bit inclined to go up in the air over any question of what he calls ‘abstract justice,’” said Wilson with tolerance, having just been very much up in the air himself over this question of thoroughly practical injustice.

  Some such thought occurred to Mr Todhunter as he wondered vaguely what justice might be when not abstract; but of course justice can be perfectly practical, and injustice usually is.

  Mr Todhunter liked Wilson. It was one of his chief joys on Wednesday afternoons to stand and laugh guiltily in a corner when Wilson, lacking his chief’s gift of suave authority, was cornered by an irate Byle wanting to know why his choicest denuciations had been blue-pencilled or accusing the staff of walking off with the books in their pockets that he particularly wanted to review. Wilson’s wriggling, “Oh, come now, I say—draw it mild!” gave him much malicious pleasure; for the young man had so obviously not yet learned the necessary art of prevaricating convincingly.