The Innocent Moon by Henry Williamson Page B

star. We sold 15,000 more copies last week of the Northern Edition, due to your Parkin story.”
    Walking down Bond Street that afternoon, Phillip stopped at the Copenhagen pottery shop, and seeing a tawny owl on one of the rows of naturalistic glazed animals and birds, went in and bought it for £10/10/-. From there he went to a music shop in Oxford Street for records of Parsifal, heard from the Doves’ Nest where he had lain, stretched out, head on arms and eyes closed, in the azure spirit of the music—azure to him above the eternal tragedy and hopelessness of the world. Playing this music in the garden room until after midnight, he determined to go down to Folkestone on the following Saturday night, and in the morning ask permission from Mrs. Trevelian to present the porcelain owl to Spica in token of friendship and for help received in his literary career. Nothing more.
    Conceit in his powers as a reporter was soon reduced when he realised that what was done one week was forgotten the next and all was to do again.
    There were three men reporters and one woman writer on the paper. All were fed on clippings supplied by Harry Ownsworth. Two of the men—North and Singates—were on the staff at £8/8/-a week each, while Phillip and Miss Vivienne Lecomte were on space. For these two it was not what they wrote andturned in which counted for payment, but only what was finally printed in the paper.
    Four days a week all four reporters were sent out on stories, only to find that some were dead the next day because one or more of the dailies had got there first. So most of what they had ‘got’—perhaps a hundred or more miles away after train journeys taking from early morning to late at night and written in the early hours of the next morning—was impaled on The Spike, a tall steel poniard with a wooden base in the centre of the News editor’s desk, where sat Harry Ownsworth with his scissors searching through a pile of morning and evening London papers, provincial weeklies, parish magazines, trade journals, Society magazines, and wrinkling his sloping forehead for ideas.
    As the end of each week drew near, when The Weekly Courier became a live newspaper covering Saturday’s events, so the punk rose like so many paper butterflies impaled on the steel thorn by a mechanical shrike.
    And then, on Saturday morning—a change of scene, a quickening of tempo. The paper was now alive, covering the world served by the news agencies, Reuters and Associated Press. From these clicking machines on pedestals, topped by glass domes, writhed endless lengths of paper tape, reproducing electric impulses which had travelled along submarine cable and telephone wire. The Weekly Courier room was deserted; Bloom moved into the news-room of The Trident with its big subbing table, editorial desk, and barrister’s table—there was a barrister permanently employed to vet possible libel. Heightened tempo induced tension as afternoon slumped into evening, with damp proofs trodden upon the floor like Bank Holiday litter among furlongs of tape. Bloom, his invariable dark suit looking more shapeless than ever, became a waif-like wanderer in slow movement from upholstered editorial office to news-room, his face becoming more haggard from nerve-strain in the electric light as he glanced at the latest news at the head of the writhing worm of paper issuing from a tape-machine, while the building vibrated periodically with the basement roar of rotary machines printing succeeding country editions. He seemed lost in his own maze as he picked up a damp galley proof only to drop it again, adding it to the hundreds of other proofs trodden flatter and scattered farther from the feet of the sub-editors sitting in shirt-sleeves around the mahogany subbing table. As the dead-line for theLondon edition drew nearer Bloom seemed to be partly shattered; he approached, as though wishing to avoid, his reporters standing by, looking drabber and becoming more querulous