Upon the right-hand drawboard of his desk was his typewriter; he slipped a piece of paper under the roller and typed a heading: Notes and Comment. It was an ancient custom of the paper to end the editorial columns with a few paragraphs of brief observation, pithy and, if possible, amusing, and Ridley wrote most of them. It was not that he fancied himself as a wit, but the job must be done by somebody, and better his wit than Shillito’s; the Old Mess had a turn for puns and what he called “witty aperçus”. He picked up the first of the editorial pages, and ran his eye quickly over it: a leader complaining of high taxation, and two subsidiary editorials, one sharply rebuking a South American republic for some wickedness connected with coffee and another explaining that the great cause of traffic accidents was not drunkenness or mechanical defects in cars, but elementary bad manners on the part of drivers. There were no paragraphs which he might steal, or use as priming for the pump of his own wit, and only one joke. It read:
Office Boy: Man waiting to see you, sir.
Boss: I’m too busy for time-wasters. Does he look important?
Office Boy: Well, not too much so, sir. About like yourself.
Ridley sighed, and put the sheet in the waste basket. The next three yielded nothing that he could use. The fourth contained a note which looked promising. It was:
An American doctor says that hairs in the ears help hearing. Barber, hold those shears!
Surely a witty aperçu could be wrought from that? He pondered for a moment, and then typed:
A Montreal physician asserts that hairs in the ears are aids to hearing. In future, it appears, we must choose between hearing and shearing.
When it was on paper he eyed it glumly, changed “asserts” to “says” and picked up the next sheet. It was from a prairie paper, whose editor was of the opinion that the chief cause of motor accidents was faulty brakes. None of its notes were worth stealing, but tucked in a corner was:
Boss: You say there is a man at the door wishes to see me. Does he look like a gentleman?
Office Boy: Well, not exactly like a gentleman, sir. Just something like yourself!
The next three papers brought him no inspiration, but among the Notes in the fourth appeared the following:
A local merchant is still reeling from the answer he received when he asked his secretary to describe a visitor. “Nobody important,” replied the fair one, “pretty much like yourself.”
Ridley hurried on. The next page which came to hand carried a sharp warning to the Government that continued high taxation would beget a dreadful vengeance at the next general election, and a lesser piece which said that modern children would be less prone to delinquency if they read fewer comic books devoted to the doings of criminals and fixed their admiration upon some notable hero of the past, such as Robin Hood. This paper also carried an editorial which took issue with some opinions The Bellman had expressed a few days before, on prison reform; the editor of The Bellman, it was implied, lacked a kind and understanding heart. Ridley made a note to write a counterblast, pointing out that Robin Hood was a criminal and a practical communist, and that no one but a numbskull would hold him up as a hero to children.
Thus he worked through the pile of contemporary opinion. He paused to read what a medical columnist in one paper had to say about gallstones. They could, it appeared, “sleep” for years, causing little or no distress beyond an occasional sense of uneasiness. Ridley wondered if he had sleeping gallstones; he certainly had a sense of uneasiness, though it was nothing to what it had been a few years ago. To sit in an editor’s chair, even reading epidemic jokes and groping for witty aperçus, was a good life; better, certainly, than his days as a reporter and, later, as a news editor. He read on, plunging deep into the pool of Canadian editorial opinion: the wickedness of the Government, the wickedness of the nation in spending several times as much on liquor as it gave to charity, the wickedness of the USA in not sufficiently recognizing Canada’s greatness, the wickedness of Britain in not spending more money in Canada: he scanned these familiar topics without emotion, thinking only that the newspapers, like the churches, would be in a poor way if there were no wickedness in the world. Indeed, a good many editors seemed to think of themselves, primarily, as preachers, crying aloud to a godless world to repent of its manifold sins. Some, who did not regard themselves as preachers, appeared to think of themselves as simple, shrewd old farmers; they wrote nostalgically of a bygone, Arcadian era, when everybody was near enough to the farm to have a little manure on his boots, and they appeared to think that farmers were, as a class, more honest and less given to gaudy vice than city folk. Ridley, who had lived in a rural community for a few years when a child, had never been able to find out where this opinion had its root. Other editors, who were disguised neither as preachers nor farmers, donned newsprint togas and appeared as modern Catos, ready to shed the last drop of their ink in defence of those virtues which they believed to be the exclusive property of the party not in power; these were also exceedingly hard upon the rising generation, whom they lumped together under the name of “teen-agers”. To be an editor was to be a geyser of opinion; every day, without fail, Old Faithful must shoot up his jet of comment, neither so provocative as to drive subscribers from his paper, nor yet so inane as to be utterly contemptible. The editor must not affront the intelligence of the better sort among his readers, and yet he must try to say something acceptable to those who really took the paper for the comics and the daily astrology feature. Truly, a barber’s chair, that fits all buttocks.
While musing, Ridley had drawn moustaches and spectacles on pictures of four statesmen which appeared in a paper under his hand. He sketched a wig of curly hair on a bald man. With two deft dots of his pencil, he crossed the eyes of a huge-breasted girl under whose picture appeared the caption: “Miss Sweater Girl for this month is lovely Dinah Ball, acclaimed by outstanding artists for her outstanding physique”. If a new Sweater Girl every month, why not an Udders Day, for the suitable honouring of all mammals? Could a witty aperçu be made of that? Probably not for a family journal.
But this was idleness. He must work. The editor of an evening daily has no time for profitless musing until after three o’clock. He tore up the defaced pictures, so that Miss Green should not find them, and turned once again to his task.
When another twenty minutes had passed he had perused the editorial outpourings of his thirty-eight contemporaries and had produced four more paragraphs of Notes and Comment. It was possible, he knew, to buy syndicated material of this sort, but he rather liked writing his own; the technique had its special fascination. It was possible, when desperate for material, to make an editorial note about virtually anything, or out of nothing at all. Consider, for instance, his startling success of the previous June: a mosquito in his office had annoyed him, and when he mentioned it to Miss Green she borrowed an atomizer filled with some sort of spray from the janitor, sought out the monster, and stifled it. “There’s a spray for every kind of bug now, Mr Ridley,” she had said. “Except the humbug, Miss Green,” he had replied, thinking of Mr Shillito. And there had been a Note, ready to hand. He had typed it at once: