Sometimes, also, in out-of-the-way places, Humphrey met men who reminded him of his days on the _Easterham Gazette_, men with attenuated minds who were even more absorbed in their work than the London reporter. They had a shameless way of never concealing their identity: they were always the "reporter"; some of them never saw the dignity of their calling, they were careless of speech and appearance, seeming to place themselves on the level of inferior people, and submitting to the undisguised contempt of the little local authorities, who spoke to them scornfully as "You reporters."
Yet, among these, Humphrey found scholars and men of strange experience. Their salaries were absurdly low for the work they did--thirty shillings to two pounds a week was the average; their lives were a thousand times more dismal and humdrum than the lives of the London men. And, in spite of these, many London men sighed for the pleasant country work. Whenever Humphrey heard a man speak of the leisure and peace of country journalism, he told them of Easterham and its dreadful monotony.
He had interior glimpses, too, of other newspaper offices; not a town in the kingdom without its sheet of printed paper, and its reporter recording the day or the week. These offices held his imagination by their sameness. Whether it was Belfast or Birmingham, Edinburgh or Exeter, their plan was uniform. There was always the narrow room, with its paper-strewn desks or tables at which the reporters sat; always the same air of hazy smoke hovered level with the electric-light bulbs; the same type of alert-eyed men, with the taut lips and frown of those who think swiftly, came into the room, smoking a cigarette or a pipe (but rarely a cigar), and brought with them a familiar suggestion of careless good-fellowship as they sat down to the work of transcribing their notes. And, always, wherever he went, the pungent smell of printer's ink was in his nostrils, the metallic rustle of shifting types from the linotype room, and the deep, rumbling sound of machinery in his ears.
Ah, when he got down to the machines that moved it all, he probed to the depths of the simple greatness. Those big, strong men who worked below it all, and lived by the labour of it, made a parable of the whole social system. Of what avail would all their writing be, if it were not for the men and the machines below?