An evening spent under the calming influence of Winifred Dartie’s common-sense, and Turkish coffee, which, though ‘liverish stuff,’ he always drank with relish, restored in him something of the feeling that it was a storm in a teacup.
“But that paper paragraph,” he said, “sticks in my gizzard.”
“Very tiresome, Soames, the whole thing; but I shouldn’t bother. People skim those ‘chiff-chaff’ little notes and forget them the next moment. They’re just put in for fun.”
“Pretty sort of fun! That paper says it has a million readers.”
“There’s no name mentioned.”
“These political people and whipper-snappers in Society all know each other,” said Soames.
“Yes, my dear boy,” said Winifred in her comfortable voice, so cosey, and above disturbance, “but nobody takes anything seriously nowadays.”
She was sensible. He went up to bed in more cheerful mood.
But retirement from affairs had effected in Soames a deeper change than he was at all aware of. Lacking professional issues to anchor the faculty for worrying he had inherited from James Forsyte, he was inclined to pet any trouble that came along. The more he thought of that paragraph, the more he felt inclined for a friendly talk with the editor. If he could go to Fleur and say: “I’ve made it all right with those fellows, anyway. There’ll be no more of that sort of thing,” he would wipe out her vexation. If you couldn’t make people in private think well of your daughter, you could surely check public expression of the opposite opinion.
Except that he did not like to get into them, Soames took on the whole a favourable view of ‘the papers.’ He read The Times; his father had read it before him, and he had been brought up on its crackle. It had news—more news for his money than he could get through. He respected its leading articles; and if its great supplements had at times appeared to him too much of a good thing, still it was a gentleman’s paper. Annette and Winifred took The Morning Post. That also was a gentleman’s paper, but it had bees in its bonnet. Bees in bonnets were respectable things, but personally Soames did not care for them. He knew little of the other papers except that those he saw about had bigger headlines and seemed cut up into little bits. Of the Press as a whole he took the English view: It was an institution. It had its virtues and its vices—anyway you had to put up with it.
About eleven o’clock he was walking towards Fleet Street.
At the office of The Evening Sun he handed in his card and asked to see the Editor. After a moment’s inspection of his top-hat, he was taken down a corridor and deposited in a small room. It seemed a ‘wandering great place.’ Some one would see him!
“Some one?” said Soames: “I want the Editor.”
The Editor was very busy; could he come again when the rush was over?
“No,” said Soames.
Would he state his business? Soames wouldn’t.
The attendant again looked at his top-hat and went away.
Soames waited a quarter of an hour, and was then taken to an even smaller room, where a cheery-looking man in eye-glasses was turning over a book of filed cuttings. He glanced up as Soames entered, took his card from the table, and read from it:
“Mr. Soames Forsyte? Yes?”
“Are you the Editor?” asked Soames.
“One of them. Take a seat. What can I do for you?”
Impressed by a certain speed in the air, and desirous of making a good impression, Soames did not sit down, but took from his pocket-book the paragraph.
“I’ve come about this in your issue of last Thursday.”
The cheery man put it up to his eyes, seemed to chew the sense of it a little with his mouth, and said: “Yes?”
“Would you kindly tell me who wrote it?”
“We never disclose the names of correspondents, sir.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, I know.”
The cheery man’s mouth opened, as if to emit the words: “Then why did you ask?” but closed in a smile instead.
“You’ll forgive me,” said Soames; “it quite clearly refers to my daughter, Mrs. Michael Mont, and her husband.”
“Indeed! You have the advantage of me; but what’s the matter with it? Seems rather a harmless piece of gossip.”
Soames looked at him. He was too cheery;
“You think so?” he said, drily. “May I ask if you would like to have your daughter alluded to as an enterprising little lady?”
“Why not? It’s quite a pleasant word. Besides, there’s no name mentioned.”
“Do you put things in,” asked Soames, shrewdly, “in order that they may be Greek to all your readers?”
The cheery man laughed: “Well,” he said, “hardly. But really, sir, aren’t you rather thin-skinned?”
This was an aspect of the affair that Soames had not foreseen. Before he could ask this Editor chap not to repeat his offence, he had apparently to convince him that it WAS an offence; but to do that he must expose the real meaning of the paragraph.
“Well,” he said, “if you can’t see that the tone of the thing’s unpleasant, I can’t make you. But I beg you won’t let any more such paragraphs appear. I happen to know that your correspondent is actuated by malevolence.”
The cheery man again ran his eye over the cutting.
“I shouldn’t have judged that. People in politics are taking and giving knocks all the time—they’re not mealy-mouthed. This seems perfectly innocuous as gossip goes.”
Thus backhanded by the words ‘thin-skinned’ and ‘mealy-mouthed,’ Soames said testily:
“The whole thing’s extremely petty.”
“Well, sir, you know, I rather agree. Good morning!” and the cheery man blandly returned to his file.
The fellow was like an india-rubber ball! Soames clenched his top-hat. Now or never he must make him bound.
“If your correspondent thinks she can vent her spleen in print with impunity, she will find herself very much mistaken.” He waited for the effect. There was absolutely none. “Good morning!” he said, and turned on his heel.
Somehow it had not been so friendly as he had expected. Michael’s words “The Press is a sensitive plant” came into his mind. He shouldn’t mention his visit.
Two days later, picking up The Evening Sun at The Connoisseurs, he saw the word “Foggartism.” H’m! A leader!
“Of the panaceas rife among the young hopefuls in politics, perhaps the most absurd is one which goes by the name of Foggartism. We are in a position to explain the nature of this patent remedy for what is supposed to be the national ill-health before it has been put on the market. Based on Sir James Foggart’s book, “The Parlous State of England,” the main article of faith in this crazy creed would appear to be the depletion of British man-power. According to its prophets, we are to despatch to the ends of the Empire hundreds of thousands of our boys and girls as soon as they leave school. Quite apart from the rank impossibility of absorbing them into the life of the slowly developing Dominions, we are to lose this vital stream of labour and defensive material, in order that twenty years hence the demand from our Dominions may equal the supplying power of Great Britain. A crazier proposition was never conceived in woolly brains. Well does the word Foggartism characterise such a proposition. Alongside this emigration ‘stunt’—for there is no other term which suits its sensational character—rises a feeble back-to-the-land propaganda. The keystone of the whole professes to be the doctrine that the standard of British wages and living now preclude us from any attempt to rival German production, or to recover our trade with Europe. Such a turning of the tail on our industrial supremacy has probably never before been mooted in this country. The sooner these cheap-jack gerrymanders of British policy realise that the British voter will have nothing to do with so crack-brained a scheme, the sooner it will come to the still birth which is its inevitable fate.”