“Say,
my girl’s got back on me,” said the new reporter with the sad moustache and the
Oscar Wilde hair, coming into the editorial rooms and interrupting the managing
editor in an editorial on the grand display of dudology – which, by the way, is
currently supposed to be the missing link so long sought after by Charles
Darwin – at the band concert the other evening, “ gone clean back on me and
gone off with another fellow. “My heart is broke.”
“That’s all right,”
responded the managing editor, “but that does not explain your absence from
this office for the last few weeks. Where have you been ? I want you to
understand that this thing must cease, cease right now, or we shall be
compelled to substitute some other mighty intellect for yours. You’re kind of
smart, you know; you have a pretty wit, you’re brilliant in epigram, your
humour is immense, your satire keen, and your sarcasm as withering as an autumn
leaf; but you don’t attend to your work right, and unless you brace up we shall
be compelled in the classic language of the Evening Times to give you the grand
bounce.
“This will not occur again,”
said the aspirant for journalistic honours, “ but I’ve been feeling so bad over
my girl’s cruel desertion of me that it’s made me quite sick. Have you ever
known what it is to love, and to love unrequitably; to waste all the tender
attractions of a young and yearning heart upon an object that cared naught for
its joy or its sorrow?”
“Yes, I’ve been there,”
said the managing editor feelingly, as thoughts of a recent breach of promise
case in which he had played one of the principal parts, flashed across his
mind, “ I have been there and I can sympathise with you. Excuse this tear. But
how did it happen? Give me a pointer on the row.”
“Don’t you give me away and
I’ll tell you all about it. You see I’ve been going with that girl for a long
while and I’m pretty badly mashed upon her – stuck for all I’m worth, as you
might say. Soon after we first commenced, keeping steady company, I taught her
how to smoke cigarettes. And I you it was fine. We’d stroll up and down some of
the fine avenues smoking and she’d call me ‘old man’ and ‘old fellow’ and say I
was a ‘fine old card’, just like one fellow ‘ud say to another.
“Well, just before we had
this row, she sent me a note saying: “ My dear Jim – she always calls me Jim
because it ain’t my name – “when night begins to throw her sable mantle over
the earth and pin it with a star, meet me sure. Something very, very important.
Mind ten o’clock. Till then farewell.” I went to see her of course, and as I
had no cigarettes I gave her a cigar that some fellow had brought me down town
through the day. Well, sir, the darn thing had powder in it and it went off
with a bang, an’ you’d a gone right off and died if you’d a gone right off and
died if you’d seen the circus that girl went through. She turned a summersault
and fell over the sidewalk an’ I helped her up and she blamed me for it, and
said I’d put up the job on her an’ now she wont speak to me. She’s going with a
blooming red-headed dude now with little sprouts of red hair on his face that
look like the electric light – a horseshoe over the mouth and half a one on
each cheek. Say, I’m agoin’ to get square on that fellow if it takes me a year.
Have you got room for a conundrum?”
“Yes, spit it out.
Conundrums are awfully discouraging, and I noticed since you commenced giving them
to me that the number of deaths in Hamilton has increased wonderfully. But I
guess we can stand another.”
“What is the remarkable
dead-head pass on record.
“ I give up. Better ask
Spackman, he’s a –“
“ Oh never mind him.
Thermopylae.”
“ That’s not so bad. Keep
‘em up to that standard and you’ll have a brilliant future before you yet,” and
the managing editor settled down to his editorial while the new reporter with
the sad moustache and the Oscar Wilde hair went gaily out to hunt for news.”
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