“A libel action, Mr Snelgrove,” said Fitzalan. “I’ve been telling Wally how tricky they can be. Never like to advise anyone to start a libel case—unless it’s something really rough, and when you have a chance of winning.”
“Now what do you think of that?” said Mr Snelgrove, smiling at the Professor with an urbanity which Dean Knapp might have envied. “Imagine a lawyer advising a client not to go to law! Still, Fitzalan has a very level head about these things. Libel is very strange; very strange indeed. But if you think two heads are better than one, I’d be happy to hear the facts—at no extra charge, of course.” And again he laughed in a manner which was supposed to convey his knowledge that Fitzalan would not charge a relative for advice, and that he concurred in such generosity. And in another minute Mr Snelgrove was sitting down, the door was closed and the Professor was rehearsing his grievance against The Bellman once more, just as Mr Snelgrove intended.
Matthew Snelgrove presented, in himself, one of those interesting and not infrequent cases in which Nature imitates Art. In the nineteenth century it appears that many lawyers were dry and fusty men, of formal manner and formal dress, who carried much of the deportment of the courtroom into private life. Novelists and playwrights, observing this fact, put many such lawyers into their books and upon the stage. Actors deficient in observation and resource adopted this stock character of the Lawyer, and he was to be seen in hundreds of plays. And Matthew Snelgrove, whose professional and personal character was being formed about the turn of the century, seized upon this lawyer-like shell eagerly, and made it his own. Through the years he perfected his impersonation until, as he confronted Professor Vambrace, he was not only a lawyer in reality, but also a lawyer in a score of stagey mannerisms; a lawyer who joined the tips of his fingers while listening to a client; a lawyer who closed his eyes and smacked his lips disconcertingly while others talked; a lawyer who tugged and polished at his long nose with a very large handkerchief; a lawyer who coughed dryly before speaking; a lawyer who used his eyeglasses not so much as aids to vision as for peeping over, snatching from the nose, rubbing on the lapel, and wagging in his listener’s face. He was a master of legal grimace—the smile of disbelief, the smile of I-pity-your-ignorance, the smile of that-may-safely-be-left-in-my-hands, as well as a number of effective frowns, signifying disapproval, impatience and disgust. Like many another professional man, Mr Snelgrove had become the prisoner of a professional manner, and as his legal skill was by no means extraordinary it was often impossible to tell whether he was really a lawyer or an indifferent character actor playing the part of a lawyer. Whatever the truth of the matter, his life-long performance had brought him great respect and no small measure of wealth.
For the practice of the law he had no particular intellectual endowment except an enthusiasm for the status quo and a regret that most of the democratic legislation of the last century could not be removed from the statute books. If Dean Knapp’s ideal was the urbane cleric of the nineteenth century, Mr Snelgrove’s was the lawyer-squire of the eighteenth; he was a snob, ready to play the dignified toady to anyone whom he considered his superior, and heavily patronizing to those beneath him; it was with people who might be considered his equals that he was uneasy and contentious. But as no client can be considered the full equal of his lawyer during a professional consultation, he was quite at ease with Professor Vambrace.
As he listened to Vambrace’s story he realized that this was a case peculiarly fitted to his own talents and temperament. Fitzalan could not be expected to understand it. The law firm of Snelgrove, Martin and Fitzalan was composed on a familiar principle; Mr Martin was particularly adept at corporation law and did all the firm’s business in that line; Fitzalan was a Catholic and a Liberal in politics, and brought a good deal of business into the office from those quarters; Mr Snelgrove was a Conservative who liked to be called a Tory, and he attracted Tory business in wills and estates. But he also considered himself the firm’s expert on what he called “the niceties”—meaning matters of offended honour, as opposed to vulgar rape and breach of promise. Obviously the matter of the false engagement notice was a “nicety”, and he would pronounce upon it himself. When the Professor had finished, Mr Snelgrove fitted the tips of his fingers together, smacked his lips, raised his eyebrows and peeped over his pince-nez, and feeling that this was enough of what actors call “business” for the moment, gave utterance.
“I see what Fitzalan means, of course. It would not be easy to determine whether the publication of this distasteful notice constitutes libel. Libel, as you are probably not aware, is that which brings a man into hatred, contempt or ridicule, or which lowers a man in the estimation of his fellows; where there is a defamatory imputation which can be plainly shown to the court, it is not necessary to prove special damage—loss of money, or some actual loss of that sort. If this is a case at all, it is a border-line case. Judges as a rule do not like border-line cases, and if you were to go to court on this matter you might be badly disappointed.”
“Just what I mean,” said Mr Fitzalan, who had not been with Mr Snelgrove long enough to know when to keep his mouth shut. When Mr Snelgrove was rolling the sweet morsels of the law under his tongue, he did not care to be interrupted, and he put on the face of one who thinks he detects an escape of sewer gas, but is not quite sure. But Fitzalan went on: “You see, Wally, you’ve got to decide who would be the plaintiff in a case you brought. How old is Pearlie?”
“My daughter Pearl is twenty-two,” said the Professor.
“Well, you see, she’s not a minor. Is she to be the plaintiff? Who has suffered the libel, you or her? Does she want to bring a case?”
“I have naturally not discussed such a painful and distasteful matter with her.”
“Well, you’d better do it before you go any farther. If Pearlie doesn’t put a good face on it in court, and act like a girl who is wronged the judge will think you’ve forced her into the action, and the defence lawyers will get it out of her, and you’ll look like a tyrant and a fool as well. You’d better watch your step, Wally.”
“My wife and daughter and I have all suffered more than you can suppose, Ronald, from this iniquitous thing,” said the Professor. “It is not inconceivable that we might appear as joint plaintiffs.”
“Oh, now, hold on, Wally,” said Fitzalan. “You know what a mess Liz would make of it in the box; anybody could make her swear that black was white. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. Anyhow, what have you to gain by an action?”
“I have this to gain; I should make those idiots on The Bellman feel something of the pain that I have felt. I should make them smart.”
“Oh, Wally, never go to law for simple vengeance; that’s not what law is for. Redress, yes; vengeance, no. You talk as if The Bellman did it to spite you. Of course it was damn silly of them to take an ad with a date like November 31st in it, but wrong dates are common enough. You’d be surprised how many law cases hang on a wrong date. But they were just as much the victims of this practical joker as you.”
“Precisely,” said Mr Snelgrove, snatching the conversation to himself. “Now my advice, Professor Vambrace, is this: to threaten an action for libel is not necessarily to go to court and fight it. You think The Bellman has been negligent, and I agree with you. A sharp lesson will do them no harm. I have no special affection for the Press; indeed, in a long career in the courts, I have despaired of teaching the Press manners. Rather than face an action, The Bellman would probably consider some reparation out of court. But it would not be good strategy to let them think that we would do so. If you care to leave the matter in our hands, I should like to think it over, and advise you.”
Thus Professor Vambrace experienced that sensation of bereavement which so often comes to a man who seeks professional assistance with a grievance, and shortly finds that his grievance is no longer his own personal property, and that much of the flavour has gone out of it.
When the Professor had left the office, Mr
Snelgrove sat silent, his finger-tips together, peering over his spectacles, until Fitzalan spoke.
“Do you want to see the people at The Bellman or shall I?” said he.
“Perhaps I had better attend to it,” said Mr Snelgrove. “You are a relative of Professor Vambrace, are you not?”
“I’m his wife’s cousin. I thought you knew that.”
“I wasn’t sure just where the kinship lay. I think there might be some indelicacy about your appearing too openly in such a matter. I’ll be glad to deal with it.”
“As a matter of fact, Mr Snelgrove, I’m not at all sure that anything should be done. I told Wally to forget about it, or take The Bellman’s apology.”
“I don’t agree with you. The Vambrace family has undoubtedly sustained some injury of reputation. They have a right to expect some reparation.”
“I always think it’s better to swallow a little hurt to a family reputation than to get tangled in a lawsuit, or a law wrangle in private. It always comes out, and sounds worse. Wally’s cracked on his family reputation. Doesn’t amount to a damn. Who cares, anyhow?”
“Isn’t Vambrace related to a noble family in Ireland?”
“Second cousin to the Marquis of Mourne and Derry. He brings it up fairly often, in order to say that such things mean nothing to him.”
“Aha; and isn’t his wife’s family, and yours, rather a distinguished one, among the Irish families in this part of Canada?”
“Well, we didn’t emigrate during either of the Potato Famines. I suppose that’s something. Liz’s father, old Wolfe Tone Fitzalan, drank a bottle of whisky a day for thirty years and was never drunk. That’s distinction, of course.”
“You make light of it, but these things have their significance. Fine old families should not suffer affront in silence.”
“Don’t you worry that Wally will be silent. He’ll bellyache about this till the day he dies. I just hope he doesn’t scare all the boys away from Pearlie because of it. Her chances aren’t first rate, anyhow, working in Waverley Library; there’s a graveyard of matrimonial hopes, let me tell you!”
“I’ll undertake it, and let you know what happens.”
“If you insist, sir, there’s nothing I can say. But I’m against it. You’re fighting The Bellman, but they’re as much a victim of this joke as Wally and his family, and they may dig in their heels and refuse to pay up.”
“Ah, yes, the anonymous practical joker should come in for his share of the punishment, of course, or the matter cannot be considered closed.”
“Exactly. And how do you think you’ll find him?”
“As a matter of fact,” said Mr Snelgrove, pausing at the door before making a well-timed exit, “I have a shrewd idea that I know who he is.”
And with this remark he went, leaving his junior impressed against his will.
Who reads a newspaper? In a very large city, where newspapers are many, the question is of real concern to publishers, to editors, to circulation managers. But in such a city as Salterton, though it is no mean city, there is little question as to who reads The Bellman; it is no great exaggeration to say that everybody reads it. But with what a range of individual differences they read it!
Even in our time, when there is supposed to be so much rush and bustle, there are people who read a newspaper solemnly through, taking all evening to do so, missing nothing; international news, district correspondence, local affairs, editorials, special articles and advertisements even down to the humblest adjuration to “End Pile Torture Quickly”, all are grist to their mill. What it means to them is never easy to discover; they are usually aged and uncommunicative people, and they rarely make themselves known to the staff of the paper which affords them so much entertainment, unless it is to confess to a reporter on a ninetieth birthday that they are still able to read The Bellman without glasses. How different are they from those others, usually women, who confess under questioning that they have “skimmed through” the paper, but who appear to have missed the chief news of the day. It was to this class of skimmers, perhaps, that the lady belonged who was discovered in London in 1944, and who admitted that she had never heard of Hitler. The vagaries of female readers, however, are beyond all reason; the simplest group for study is that which reads the paper from back to front, dropping its central portions to the floor early in the proceedings, and reassembling the whole on a principle which makes it intolerable to those who attempt to read it later.
Inevitably the literacy and comprehension of a newspaper’s readers ranges over the widest scope. The Bellman had readers who read the column headed “City and Vicinity” every night of their lives, and never failed to speak of it as “City and Vinicity”. At the opposite pole to these were some members of the Waverley faculty who affected a fine superiority to the paper, spoke of it as “the local rag” and were alternately amused by it or angry with it; indeed, they were almost ashamed to be seen ordering half a dozen extra copies when some references to themselves or their work appeared in it. But there were others at Waverley who thought differently, and who knew something of the part which the old paper had played in the history of its country. Of course there were readers who asserted that The Bellman was not nearly so good as it had been when they were younger; they found that this stricture applied to much else in life as well.
Gloster Ridley’s editorials were read by people who were interested to know what The Bellman thought about current affairs, as well as by people who wanted to know what the paper thought in order that they might, as a matter of principle, disagree with it. Of these readers, only a very few bore in mind that each editorial was simply an expression of opinion by one man, who had made up his mind after some consultation with perhaps two or three other men; the majority thought of newspaper editorials as the opinions of a group of remote beings, like the Cabinet, or the justices of the Supreme Court, but with this difference: it was a mark of grace to dissent from them, if only in some slight particular. Thus it was that many people who met Ridley for the first time said, “I always read your editorials; of course I don’t agree with all of them”—as though this revealed a special independence of spirit in them, and put the editor in his place. Many people feel it necessary to be especially belligerent when talking to an editor, to show that they are not afraid of him; for however foolish an editor may be in private life, when he puts on his editorial “We” he is like a judge who has put on his wig, and has added a cubit to his stature. And the readers who least resembled these editor-quellers were those who read the paper chiefly for its comic strips. Not that these were frivolous; the solemn devotion with which they followed the snail-like progress of those serial adventures was as great as that of the devout who read the syndicated Bible comment which was published every Saturday.
Devout also, but rarely edified, were the readers of the sports pages. It is a tested axiom of newspaper work that the sporting fraternity are never content. Although the proportion of most newspapers which is devoted to sport is far greater than the proportion of the population which is seriously interested in sport, sports lovers usually feel that a niggardly allowance of space has been given to their hobby. They tend to be zealots, and they believe their kind to be more numerous than is really the case; and because they are frequently superstitious, and possess a strong mythopoeic faculty, they attribute to newspaper sports reporters grudges and malign intentions toward their favourites of which those hard-working men are innocent. It sometimes seems to harassed sports editors that sports enthusiasts read the papers only to find food for their vast disgrundement.
The Bellman was closely perused by countless specialists, and by none more keenly than the specialists in morality; the reports from the police court were their special meat, and they acquired and retained a wide knowledge of who had been before the magistrate, and upon what charge; reckless driving, drunkenness, non-support of wives, all the common offences were docketed in their minds, enlivened now and again by a lively fist-fight or tasty bit of indecent
exposure. Everybody looks at a police court report now and then, but the specialists never missed one; wherever a report might be printed, separated by some mechanical necessity from others of its kind, they would sniff it out, make it part of their mental fabric, never forget it, and recall it when the offender died, or when his daughter married, or when some distinction or piece of good fortune brought him once again into the news. They were good people, these moralists, who rarely offended against the law themselves; but if by chance one of their kind were found, say, drunk and in charge of a car, they knew at once all the details—that his wife was pregnant, or his aged mother trembling upon the threshold of death (for these are the two commonest afflictions of wrongdoers, as every newspaperman knows) and bemoaned his fall with an intensity which might almost have been mistaken for relish.
To set down all the special interests to which a paper like The Bellman ministers every night would be a gigantic task and weary reading. For who, in his heart, really wants to give much of his time to another man’s concerns? Most people will sympathize with the schoolchildren who search the columns of the paper for items about “Current Events” to take to school to appease a teacher who approaches history by that path. But who except a physician searches the columns of accident news, to see what other physicians may be mentioned; and who but a lawyer gives special attention to the lawyers who are named in the reports of court cases? Professional etiquette forbids the gentlemen of the short and the long robes to advertise their skill, but they do not like to be overlooked in the news columns; as Mr Marryat sometimes bitterly remarked, they were fond enough of advertising when they did not have to pay for it. Even the clergy are not above this human weakness; they may personally choose to do good by stealth, but their congregations like themselves and their pastors to be frequently and favourably mentioned. The page of social news was read with eagerness by those who hoped to be included, or who admired or envied those who were named, for even in democratic Canada the fire of social ambition burns with a hard, gem-like flame in many bosoms. There were thousands among The Bellman’s readers who apparently never wearied of reading that “lovely flower arrangements and tapers in dainty silver holders graced the table”; they always wanted to know who had “poured”, at afternoon teas, for to “pour” is for many ladies the pinnacle of social achievement. And the wedding photographs were keenly scanned by all the photographers, of course, to see whose work had been printed and what could be found wrong with it.
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