Trial and Error by Anthony Berkeley Read Free Book Online Page A

replied the assistant literary editor without discretion. “As nasty as they make ’em. His real name’s Fischmann. American German Jew, with a dash of anything else unpleasant thrown in. And he’s just making merry hell of this place.”
    In response to Mr Todhunter’s enquiries Wilson told the whole story. It was not a nice one.
    The London Review had recently passed out of the hands of kindly, tolerant old Sir John Verney into those of Lord Felixbourne, the chairman of Consolidated Periodicals Ltd. Lord Felixbourne believed in pep and vim, but he had the sense to realise that one of the London Review’ s greatest assets was its freedom from the prevalent vulgarity of the English press, and he approved its old policy, which had been to keep a course between the pompous tediousness of the Spectator and that tone of common pertness which is the popular press’s version of the American tabloids. Indeed Lord Felixbourne quite understood that it was just this policy which gave the London Review the surprisingly large circulation it had, for it attracted as its readers most of those whose minds still remain decent and who are yet bored by too solemn a tone at their Saturday breakfast tables.
    But this was not enough for Lord Felixbourne. The policy was to continue, but the men who had made it were to go—or reform. There was a saying in Fleet Street that an appointment on the London Review meant a job for life. No one was ever sacked; few reprimands were ever administered; the staff was trusted. It was this condition of affairs that the new proprietor wished to change. Lord Felixbourne had found that the threat of instant dismissal at the first, smallest error kept a journalist on his toes. He was a kind man, but he believed sincerely that his toes were the members on which a journalist should be, not on any other more comfortable part of his anatomy. He had made a speech to this effect to the staff of the London Review when he first took over control. That a serious weekly is not the same as a daily newspaper did not seem to have occurred to him.
    The staff of the London Review had not been seriously perturbed. They knew their jobs, and they knew, too, that they did them as well as the staff of any other weekly journal—and, in the general opinion, a good deal better. Proprietors like to let off a little hot air occasionally; but the circulation was going up steadily, the paper had as good a reputation as any in Europe, earthquakes might happen in Patagonia but not in the serene offices of the London Review.
    The staff were wrong. Lord Felixbourne was a kindly man and it would have distressed him very much to carry out the purging himself. He therefore imported Mr Isidore Fischmann, at considerable expense, from the United States and gave him full powers to do it instead. The whole of Consolidated Periodicals Ltd. was placed at his mercy. Mr Fischmann showed his mettle before he had been in the place a week by sacking the editor of the London Review himself.
    Young Wilson was quite fair. He admitted handsomely that it had been quite time old Vincent retired. He was a relic from Victorian journalism; he was hopelessly out of date; he was a bit of a joke. But the decent thing would have been for Lord Felixbourne to persuade him into resigning and then settle a nice fat pension on the old man, not have him more or less kicked out of the place by this Fischmann fellow, with a cheque for a year’s salary in his pocket and not a penny more. When asked why he had not recommended even a pension, Fischmann had replied that the old man had been grossly overpaid for years and ought to have saved enough three times over to last him for the short remainder of his life. As a matter of fact, the old man had; but that was neither here nor there. A nice fat pension to editors retiring for reasons of old age (and no editor had ever retired from the London Review for anything else) was a part of the