low-ceilinged space, where the whirring printing presses were not even partitioned off from the tables of editorial departments or reporters. It was like a factory going at full speed. Hours were 8.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m., or later if an extra--a 6th or 7th--edition was called for. I arrived at 8.15.
In a dark corner of this machinery shop I introduced myself with trepidation to McCloy, mentioning Mr. Laffan's name, and saw the blank look come and go, as he stared at me with "Blackwood, Blackwood?... Oh, yes, I remember! You're fifteen dollars a week. A Britisher from Canada.... Well, you'll have to look lively here!" He seemed so intensely busy and preoccupied, his mind so charged with a sort of electric activity, that I wondered he had time to open and shut his mouth. A small, thin man, with the slightest of frail bodies, nervous, delicately shaped hands, gimlet eyes that pierced, a big head with protruding forehead, a high-pitched, twanging voice that penetrated easily above the roar of the machinery, and a general air of such lightning speed and such popping, spitting energy that I felt he might any moment flash into flame or burst with a cracking report into a thousand pieces--this was the man on whom my living depended for many months to come. The phrase "New York hustler," darted across my mind; it stood in the flesh before me; he lived on wires. Buried among this mechanic perfection, however, I caught, odd to relate, an incongruous touch--of kindness, even of tenderness. There were gentle lines in that electric face. He had a smile I liked.
"What are you out here for? Where have you come from? What have you been doing? What d'you know?" he asked with the rapidity of a machine-gun. The shorthand rate must have been 400 words per minute.
I never talked so quickly in my life as in my brief reply. I watched the smile come and go. While he listened, he was shouting instructions to reporters then streaming in, to office boys, to printers, to sub-editors;
but his eyes never left my face, and when I had finished
