490
PARTISAN REVIEW
request, a small request.
If
you would only be willing to help me
with it
I"
Without sitting down again the editor urged him, with a rather
impatient glance, to speak.
"It's about," Johannes said, "once more it's about 'tragic,' Herr
Doktor. You know about it, of course; we have discussed it several
times before. You are familiar with the reporters' wretched habit of
calling every accident tragic, whereas the proper use-well, I must
be brief, enough of that. And so every bicyclist who has tumbled
off his machine, every child with a burned finger, every cherry picker
who has fallen from his ladder is qualified with the desecrated word
'tragic.' I had almost broken our former reporter of that habit, I
gave him no peace, at least once a week I went to see him, and he
was a kind man, he laughed and often gave in, possibly he even
understood, at least in part, what it meant to me. But now the
new editor in charge of local items-I'll say nothing about him in
other respects, but I am hardly exaggerating when I state: every
chicken that is run over provides him with a welcome
opportunity
to misuse that holy word.
If
you could arrange an opportunity for me
to talk seriously to him, if you would ask him for once at least really
to listen to me-" The editor stepped to the switchboard, depressed
a key and spoke a few words into the mouthpiece.
"Herr Stettiner will be in his office at two o'clock and will spare
you a few minutes. I'll speak to him about it. But be brief when
you're talking to him 1"
With expressions of thanks the old typesetter took his leave.
The editor watched him move gently through the door, saw his
thin, white hair straggling down over his funny old linen coat, saw
the bent back of the faithful servant and was no longer sorry he
had failed to entice the old man into retirement. Let him stay 1 Let
him go on repeating these audiences once or twice a year. He was
not angry. He could quite easily put himself in his place.
That, however, was precisely what Herr Stettiner could not do
when Johannes turned up in his office at two o'clock (in the press of
business the editor-in-chief had, to be sure, forgotten to inform him).
Herr Stettiner, an extremely useful junior member of the staff
who had rapidly swung himself up from district reporter to editorial
rank, was by no means a monster; moreover as a reporter he had
