Scoop-Evelyn-Waugh [25]
Shumble, Whelper and Pigge knew Corker; they had loitered together of old on many a doorstep and forced an entry into many a stricken home. "Thought you'd be on this train," said Shumble. "Your name's posted for collect facilities in the radio station. What sort of trip?" "Lousy. How are things here?" "Lousy. Who's with you?" Corker told him, adding: "Who's here already?" Shumble told him. "All the old bunch." "Yes, and there's a highbrow yid from the Twopence � but we don't count him." "No, no competition there." "The Twopence isn't what you would call a newspaper is it?... Still there's enough to make things busy and there's more coming. They seem to have gone crazy about this story at home. Jakes is urging eight hundred words a day." "Jakes here? Well there must be something in it." "Who's the important little chap with the beard?" They looked towards the customs shed through which the Swiss was being obsequiously conducted. "You'd think he was an ambassador," said Corker bitterly. The black porter of the Hotel Liberty interrupted them. Corker began to describe in detail his lost elephant. Shumble disappeared in the. crowd. "Too bad, too bad," said the porter. "Very bad men on railway." "But it was registered through." "Maybe he'll turn up." "Do things often get lost on your damned awful line?" "Most always." All round them the journalists were complaining about their losses. "... Five miles of film," said the leader of the Excelsior Movie-Sound News. "How am I going to get that through the expenses department?" "Very bad men on railway. They like film plenty � him make good fire." William alone was reconciled to the disaster; his cleft sticks were behind him; it was as though, on a warm day, he had suddenly shed an enormous, fur-lined motoring-coat.
So far as their profession allowed them time for such soft feelings, Corker and Pigge were friends. "... It was large and very artistic," said Corker, describing his elephant, "just the kind of thing Madge likes." Pigge listened sympathetically. The bustle was over. William and Corker had secured a room together at the Liberty; their sparse hand-luggage was unpacked and Pigge had dropped in for a drink. "What's the situation?" asked William, when Corker had exhausted his information � though not his resentment � about the shawls and cigarette boxes. "Lousy," said Pigge. "I've been told to go to the front." "That's what we all want to do. But in the first place there isn't any front and in the second place we couldn't get to it if there was. You can't move outside the town without a permit and you can't get a permit." "Then what are you sending?" asked Corker. "Colour stuff," said Pigge, with great disgust. "Preparations in the threatened capital, soldiers of fortune, mystery men, foreign influences, volunteers...there isn't any hard news. The Fascist headquarters are up country somewhere in the mountains. No one knows where. They're going to attack when the rain stops in about ten days. You can't get a word out of the Government. They won't admit there is a crisis." "What, not with Jakes and Hitchcock here?" said Corker in wonder. "What's this President like anyway?" "Lousy." "Where is Hitchcock, by the way?" "That's what we all want to know."
"Where's Hitchcock?" asked Jakes. Paleologue shook his head sadly. He was finding Jakes a hard master. For over a week he had been on his payroll. It seemed a lifetime. But the pay was fabulous and Paleologue was a good family man: he had two wives to support and countless queer-coloured children on whom he lavished his love. Until the arrival of the newspapermen � that decisive epoch in Ishmaelite social history � he had been dragoman and interpreter at the British Legation, on wages which � though supplemented from time to time by the sale to his masters' colleagues of any waste paper he could find lying around the Chancery � barely sufficed for the necessaries of his household; occasionally he had been able to provide amusement for bachelor attaches; occasionally he sold objects of native art to the ladies of the compound. But it had been an exiguous living. Now he was getting fifty American dollars a week. It was a wage beyond the bounds of his wildest ambition...but Mr. Jakes was very exacting and very peremptory. "Who was on the train?" "No one except the newspaper gentlemen and M. Giraud." "Who's he?" "He is in the Railway. He went down to the coast with his wife last week, to see her off to Europe." "Yes, yes, I remember. That was the 'panic-stricken refugees' story. No one else?" "No, Mr. Jakes." "Well go find Hitchcock." "Yes, sir." Jakes turned his attention to his treatise. The dominant member of the new cabinet, he typed, was colourful Kingsley-Wood...