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"Do you think," he said, "that you could report on the dresses for us to-morrow night at the Artists' Ball?" "I report?" Joan looked at him in astonishment; women reporters were disapproved of on the Evening Herald. "I know it is unusual," Mr. Strangman admitted. "But Jones is ill, and our other men will all be busy on important turns.
The new office, to which she wended her way on the Monday morning, lay in a side alley opening off Fleet Street, a rickety old building, busy as a hive of bees in swarming time. Here worked Mr. Strangman and his satellites; spiders, in fact, in the centre of their cleverly-constructed web, throwing out feelers in search of news to all quarters of the globe. Anything less like a spider than Mr.
Her back ached, her eyes throbbed, she was conscious of a feeling of intense hatred against mild, inoffensive Mr. Strangman. That gentleman, having discovered the lateness of the hour by chance, kept her another quarter of an hour apologizing before he signed the letters. Then he looked up at her suddenly.
That's your fault, I am shouting and my mouth is near the tube. Look alive, miss. Listening? Well: to Davids. D for daddy, a for apples, v for varnish, i for I. I said I for i! Got it now? D for daddy again," and so on. "The truth of it is," said Mr. Chester, during a pause in one of these wordy tussles, "I, or that telephone, will have to go, Strangman. I cannot work with it going on."
It was a pet fallacy of his that he was the hardest-worked man in London. Rose smiled. "But her typing is quite good," she argued, "and you are such an easy dictator, I am sure she will get on all right." She had been exceptionally pleased when Mr. Strangman reluctantly gave way. Joan would, she hoped, take kindly to newspaper work, and it might open up new roads to her.
She extricated herself from behind the luggage. "I will come and look you up sometimes," she announced, "though it probably won't be often; I am a bad hand at stirring myself out to see anyone in the evenings. Good-night, and I hope you will get on all right with Strangman, he is a kind little man really." She went.
To Joan he was excessively polite, and so afraid that her capabilities might not come up to his expectations that for the first few days he left her practically with no work to do. She sat in a large, well-lit if draughty room, opposite Mr. Strangman at his table.
"My dear fellow" Strangman was all agitation at once "what is to be done? The messages must go and I must hear them sent or the boys would put in wrong words. I am sure it is not any pleasanter for me than it is for you; I have also got to work." "T for Tommy, I keep telling you Tommy, Tommy," the lad at the 'phone shrieked triumphantly. Mr.
Strangman it would have been difficult to imagine. He was an alert, nervous man, with bright, kind eyes, a flexible mouth and very restless hands. His whole nature hung on wires, as if which was indeed the case his mental capacity was too big and overpowering for his physical strength. His manners under the strain of work were jerky and abrupt, but otherwise he was a very kindly and genial man.
Strangman had not felt in the mood to dictate letters, with the result that at a quarter to six seven of them had to be altered and retyped. Joan was still sitting at her machine in a corner of the hot, noisy office, beating out: "Dear Sir, In answer to yours, etc.," when the clock struck six.
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