"Nothing right!" was the reply. "Hain't there been a battle and great slaughter? Look at this Daily Telegraph bill. There's a real bill for ye; that'll sell paipers! Ours won't!"
Of course I saw the difference at once, so I took the boy critic and a friend of his into my office and with the paper before us sat down to get out a new and sensational bill. Then I sent for the chief sub-editor, Abbott, and showed him the difference. To my amazement he defended his quiet bill. "It's a Conservative paper," he said, "and doesn't shout at you."
The boy critic giggled. "You come out to sell paipers," he cried, "and you'll soon hev' to shout!"
The end of it was that I gave the boy ten shillings and five to his friend and made them promise to come to me each week with the bills, good and bad.
Those kids taught me what the London hapenny public wanted and I went home laughing at my own high-brow notions.
The ordinary English public did not want thoughts but sensations. I had begun to edit the paper with the best in me at twenty-eight; I went back in my life, and when I edited it as a boy of fourteen I began to succeed. My obsessions then were kissing and fighting: when I got one or other or both of these interests into every column, the circulation of the paper increased steadily.
I was awakened every morning at seven with breakfast and the papers: I could hardly get up earlier, as the milk did not come till seven. One morning my Telegraph told me that there had really been a battle in Egypt and of course the English had won. While driving to the office I cut out and arranged the account in The Telegraph and bettered it here and there with reports taken from the Daily Chronicle and The Times. I was at the office before eight, but no sub-editors came till nearly nine. That didn't matter so much, but the compositors only began to drift in at eight-fifteen. At once I set them to work and by nine I had put the whole paper together, with one short leading article instead of two long ones, and a good bill.
The first edition sold over ten thousand; I told the sub-editors not to be caught napping again and informed the printers that they had all to be present at eight sharp. They promised willingly. My boy critic was on the job and congratulated me and gave me, incidentally, a new idea. "Some days," he said, "the news of a victory comes into the Telegraph between four in the morning, when they go to press, and ten, and then they bring out a speshul edition. My brother works on the Telegraph; he's a compositor and he'd give me the first pull of any speshul stuff and I could bring it to you. If your paiper is ready, you could taike the news and be out almost as soon as the Telegraph.
Then you'd sell; oh my! 'twould be a holy lark!"
I fell in with the idea, told him he should have a sovereign to share with his brother every time he succeeded, and gave him my address: he was to come for me in a cab whenever he got such news. By extra pay I induced three "comps" to come in at six in the morning, and downstairs Maltby and his assistant and Tibbett and his brother were always on hand at the same hour.
One morning the little imp came for me. In half an hour I was in the office and had given the report of a big battle from the Telegraph word for word to the comps. They worked like fiends; indeed, the spirit was such that the comp who ought to have gone downstairs with the news called to his two chums to tail on to the rope and jumped into the letter-lift, which would have practically fallen five stories had not the chums clung on to the pulleys at the cost of bleeding fingers. In ten minutes, the Evening News was selling on the street, and, as it happened, selling before the Telegraph's special edition. We could have sold hundreds of thousands, had the old machines been able to turn them out. As it was, we sold forty or fifty thousand and Fleet Street learned that a new evening paper was on the job.
About noon that day I had a visitor, Mr. Levi Lawson, owner of the Telegraph, a little, fat, rubicund Jew of fifty or sixty, fuming with anger that his thunder had been stolen. I soon saw that he only suspected that we were out before him, for he informed me that I must never reproduce more than 30 per cent of a Telegraph article, even when I published the fact that the account was taken from their columns and gave them full credit. I showed him that I had stated in my preliminary story that the Telegraph correspondent was usually the best. That seemed to appease him, and as I knew my zeal had led me too far, I told him that I always meant to give the original purveyor of the news twenty minutes' start.
Just as Lawson was going out, conciliated, in came Lord Folkestone. I introduced Lawson to him and Lawson told him the story, adding, "You've a smart editor in this American; he'll do something." When Folkestone heard the whole story and how the "comp" had risked his life in his eagerness to save half a minute, he had the men up and thanked them and took me off to lunch, saying I must tell the whole story to Lady Folkestone. He confided to me on the way that Lady Folkestone couldn't stand Ken-nard: "He's not very kindly, you know!"
Lady Folkestone at that time was a large lady of forty-odd, who was as kind and wise as she was big. Henry Chaplin, her brother, the Squire of Lincolnshire, as he was called, was one of those extraordinary characters that only England can produce. Had he been educated, he would have been a great man; he was spoiled by having inherited a great position and fifty or sixty thousand pounds a year. He was handsome, too, tall and largely built, with a leonine aspect. Everyone in the eighties told you how he had fallen desperately in love with a pretty girl, who on the eve of marriage ran away with the Marquis of Hastings. Chaplin at once went on the turf in opposition to the Marquis; a few years later he got a great horse in Hermit, who burst a blood vessel ten days before the Derby. The Marquis plunged against Hermit: for the first time the Derby was run in a snow storm (God's providence coming in to help righteous indignation) and Hermit won. On settling day the Marquis blew his brains out, or what stood for them, and Chaplin was vindicated. I don't know what became of the lady, but Chaplin went into the House of Commons and soon developed an ore rotunda style of rhetoric that sometimes deformed a really keen understanding of life. I knew him as a most lavish spender; he used to order special trains to take his guests to his country house, and his claret was as wonderful as his Comet port. He had read a good deal, too, but he had never forced himself to read anything that did not appeal to him, and so he was far too self-centred in opinion, with curious lacunae of astounding ignorance.
An Englishman through and through, with all the open-handed instincts of a conquering and successful race, and with a deep-rooted love of fair play and surface sentimentalities of all sorts that no one could explain, such as the English taste in men's dress and a genuine indifference to every other art. I have said a lot about Henry Chaplin because his sister was curiously like him in essentials, as generous-kindly and sweet-minded as possible, with at bottom an immense satisfaction in her privileged position. She loved music genuinely, yet when I talked of Wagner's astonishing genius, she seemed to have absolutely no comprehension of it.
Her daughter was tall and pretty, the son, too, a fine specimen so far as looks went, but with no conception of what I had begun to call to myself the first duty, which consists in developing the mind as harmoniously as the body.
Such self-development increases one's power enormously, but is as easy and dangerous to overdo as it is easy and dangerous to overdevelop a muscle.
English society I learned to know through the unvarying kindness of the Folkestones: it struck me as superficial always and of the Middle Ages in its continual reference to a Christian, or rather a Pauline, standard of morals, which sat oddly on a vigorous, manly race.
When my month was up I was able to show that I had increased the efficiency of the Evening News staff and had saved to boot some five thousand pounds yearly of expenses, while adding nearly as much to the revenue.