It is still early, but dinner is over not the club dinner with its buzzing conversation, nor yet the restaurant dinner, hurried into the ten minutes between someone’s momentous speech and the leader that has to be written on it. The suburban dinner is over, and there was no need to hurry. They tell me I shall be healthier now. What do I care about being healthier?

Shall I sit with a novel over the fire? Shall I take life at second-hand and work up an interest in imaginary loves and the exigencies of shadows? What are all the firesides and fictions of the world to me that I should loiter here and doze, doze, as good as die?

They tell me it is a fine thing to take a little walk before bed-time. I go out into the suburban street. A thin, wet mist hangs over the silent and monotonous houses, and blurs the electric lamps along our road. There will be a fog in Fleet Street to-night, but everyone is too busy to notice it. How friendly a fog made us all! How jolly it was that night when I ran straight into a Chronicle man, and got a lead of him by a short head over the same curse! There’s no chance of running into anyone here, let alone cursing! A few figures slouch past and disappear; the last postman goes his round, knocking at one house in ten; up and down the asphalt path leading into the obscurity of the Common a wretched woman wanders in vain; the long, pointed windows of a chapel glimmer with yellowish light through the dingy air, and I hear the faint groans of a harmonium cheering the people dismally home. The groaning ceases, the lights go out, service is over; it will soon be time for decent people to be in bed.

In Fleet Street the telegrams will now be falling thick as No, I won’t say it! No Vallombrosa for me, nor any other journalistic tag! I remember once a young sub-editor had got as far as, “The cry is still ” when I took him by the throat. I have done the State some service.

Our sub-editors’ room is humming now: a low murmur of questions, rapid orders, the rustle of paper, the quick alarum of telephones. Boys keep bringing telegrams in orange envelopes. Each sub-editor is bent over his little lot of news. One sorts out the speeches from bundles of flimsy. The middle of Lloyd George’s speech has got mixed up with Balfour’s peroration. If he left them mixed, would anyone be the less wise? Perhaps the speakers might notice it, and that man from Wiltshire would be sure to write saying he had always supported Mr. Balfour, and heartily welcomed this fresh evidence of his consistency.

“Six columns speeches in already; how much?” asks the sub-editor. “Column and quarter,” comes answer from the head of the table, and the cutting begins. Another sub-editor pieces together an interview about the approaching comet. “Keep comet to three sticks,” comes the order, and the comet’s perihelion is abbreviated. Another guts a blue-book on prison statistics as savagely as though he were disembowelling the whole criminal population.

There’s the telephone ringing. “Hullo, hullo!” calls a sub-editor quietly. “Who are you? Margate mystery? Go ahead. They’ve found the corpse? All right. Keep it to a column, but send good story. Horrible mutilations? Good. Glimpse the corpse yourself if you can. Yes. Send full mutilations. Will call for them at eleven. Good-bye.” “You doing the Archbishop, Mr. Jones?” asks the head of the table. “Cup-tie at Sunderland,” answers Mr. Jones, and all the time the boys go in and out with those orange-coloured bulletins of the world’s health.

What’s a man to do at night out here? Let’s have a look at all these posters displayed in front of the Free Library, where a few poor creatures are still reading last night’s news for the warmth. Next week there’s a concert of chamber-music in the Town Hall I suppose I might go to that, just to “kill time” as they say. Think of a journalist wanting to kill time! Or to kill anything but another fellow’s “stuff,” and sometimes an editor! Then there’s a boxing competition at the St. John’s Arms, and a subscription dance in the Nelson Rooms, and a lecture on Dante, with illustrations from contemporary art, for working men and women, at the Institute. Also there’s something called the Why-Be-Lonesome Club for promoting friendly social intercourse among the young and old of all classes. I suppose I might go to that too. It sounds comprehensive.

There seems no need to be dull in the suburbs. A man in a cart is still crying coke down the street. Another desires to sell clothes-props. A brace of lovers come stealing out of the Common through the mist, careless of mud and soaking grass. I suppose people would say I’m too old to make love on a County Council bench. In love’s cash-books the balance-sheet of years is kept with remorseless accuracy.

The foreign editors are waiting now in their silent room, and the telegrams come to them from the ends of the world. They fold them in packets together by countries or continents the Indian stuff, the Russian stuff, the Egyptian, Balkan, Austrian, South African, Persian, Japanese, American, Spanish, and all the rest. They’ll have pretty nearly seven columns by this time, and the order will come “Two-and-a-half foreign,” Then the piecing and cutting will begin. One of them sits in a telephone box with bands across his head, and repeats a message from our Paris correspondent. Through our Paris man we can talk with Berlin and Rome.

From this rising ground I can see the light of the city reflected on the misty air, and somewhere mingled in that light are the big lamps down in Fleet Street. The City’s voice comes to me like a confused murmur through a telephone when the words are unintelligible. The only distinct sounds are the dripping of the moisture from the trees in suburban gardens, and the voice of an old lady imploring her pet dog to return from his evening walk.

The voice of all the world is now heard in that silent room. From moment to moment news is coming of treaties and revolutions, of sultans deposed and kings enthroned, of commerce and failures, of shipwrecks, earthquakes, and explorations, of wars and flooded camps and sieges, of intrigue, diplomacy, and assassination, of love, murder, revenge, and all the public joy and sorrow and business of mankind. All the voices of fear, hope, and lamentation echo in that silent little room; and maps hang on the walls, and guide-books are always ready, for who knows where the next event may come to pass upon this energetic little earth, already twisting for a hundred million years around the sun?

The editor must be back by now. Calm and decisive, he takes his seat in his own room, like the conductor of an orchestra preparing to raise his baton now that the tuning-up is finished. The leader-writers are coming in for their instructions. No need for much consultation to-night not for the first leader anyhow. For the second well, there are a good many things one could suggest: Turkey or Persia or the eternal German Dreadnought for a foreign subject; the stage censorship or the price of cotton; and the cup-ties, or the extinction of hats for both sexes as a light note to finish with. He’s always labouring to invent “something light,” is the editor. He says we must sometimes consider the public; just as though we wrote the rest of the paper for our own private fun.

But there’s no doubt about the first leader to-night. There’s only one subject on which it would be a shock to every reader in the morning not to find it written. And, my word! what a subject it is! What seriousness and indignation and conviction one could get into it! I should begin by restating the situation. You must always assume that the reader’s ignorance is new every morning, as love should be; and anyone who happens to know something about it likes to see he was right. I should work in adroit references to this evening’s speeches, and that would fill the first paragraph say, three sides of my copy, or something over. In the second paragraph I’d show the immense issues involved in the present contest, and expose the fallacies of our opponents who attempt to belittle the matter as temporary and unlikely to recur say, three sides of my copy again, but not a word more. And, then, in the third paragraph, I’d adjure the Government, in the name of all their party hold sacred, to stand firm, and I’d appeal to the people of this great Empire never to allow their ancient liberties to be encroached upon or overridden by a set of irresponsible well, in short, I should be like General Sherman when at the crisis of a battle he used to say, “Now, let everything go in” four sides of my copy, or even five if the stuff is running well.

Somebody must be writing that leader now. Possibly he is doing it better than I should, but I hope not. When Hannibal wandered all those years in Asia at the Court of silly Antiochus this or stupid Prusias the other, and knew that Carthage was falling to ruin while he alone might have saved her if only she had allowed him, would he have rejoiced to hear that someone else was succeeding better than himself had traversed the Alps with a bigger army, had won a second Cannae, and even at Zama snatched a decisive victory? Hannibal might have rejoiced. He was a very exceptional man.

But here’s a poor creature still playing the clarionet down the street, on the pretence of giving pleasure worth a penny. Yes, my boy, I know you’re out of work, and that is why you play the “Last Rose of Summer” and “When other Lips.” I am out of work, too, and I can’t play anything. You say you learnt when a boy, and once played in the orchestra at Drury Lane; but now you’ve come to wandering about suburban streets, and having finished “When other Lips,” you will quite naturally play “My Lodging’s on the Cold Ground.” Only last night I was playing in an orchestra myself, not a hundred miles (obsolete journalistic tag!) not a hundred miles from Drury Lane. It was a grand orchestra, that of ours. Night by night it played the symphony of the world, and each night a new symphony was performed, without rehearsal. The drums of our orchestra were the echoes of thundering wars; the flutes and soft recorders were the eloquence of an Empire’s statesmen; and our ’cellos and violins wailed with the pity of all mankind. In that vast orchestra I played the horn that sounds the charge, or with its sharp reveille vexes the ear of night before the sun is up. Here is your penny, my brother in affliction. I, too, have once joined in the music of a star, and now wander the suburban streets.

That leader-writer has not finished yet, but the proofs of the beginning of his article will be coming down. In an hour or so his work will be over, and he will pass out into the street exhausted, but happy with the sense of function fulfilled. Fleet Street is quieter now. The lamps gleam through the fog, a motor-’bus thunders by, a few late messengers flit along with the latest telegrams, and some stragglers from the restaurants come singing past the Temple. For a few moments there is silence but for the leader-writer’s quick footsteps on the pavement. He is some hours in front of the morning’s news, and in a few hours more half a million people will be reading what he has just written, and will quote it to each other as their own. How often I have had whole sentences of my stuff thrown at me as conclusive arguments almost before the printing ink was dry!

Here I stand, beside a solitary lamp-post upon a suburban acclivity. The light of the city’s existence I think my successor would say, of her pulsating and palpitating or ebullient existence is pale upon the sky, and the murmur of her voice sounds like large but distant waves. I stand alone, and near me there is no sound but the complaint of a homeless tramp swearing at the cold as he settles down upon a bench for the night.

How I used to swear at that boy for not coming quick enough to fetch my copy! I knew the young scoundrel’s step I knew the step of every man and boy in that office. I knew the way each of them went up and down the stairs, and coughed or whistled or spat. What knowledge dies with me now that I am gone! Qualis artifex pereo! But that boy how I should love to be swearing at him now! I wonder whether he misses me? I hope he does. “It would be an assurance most dear,” as an old song of exile used to say.