If you had been standing on a certain cold night in January opposite the great building where The Day is jewelled in electric lights across the dark sky, you would have seen a little, stout man run down the steps of the entrance at the side, three at a time, land on the pavement as if he were preparing to leap the roadway, with the sheer impetus of the flight of steps behind him, and had suddenly thought better of it, glance hurriedly at the big, lighted clock whose hands, formed of the letters T-H-E D-A-Y, in red and green electric lights, showed that it was nearly half-past twelve, and suddenly start off in a terrible hurry towards Chancery Lane, as though pursued by some awful thing.
Considering the bulkiness of the little man, he ran remarkably well. He dodged a light newspaper van that was coming recklessly round Fetter Lane, for there was none of the crowded traffic of daylight to be negotiated, and then, he turned the corner of Chancery Lane—and there you would have seen the last of him. He would have vanished from your life, a stumpy little man, with an umbrella popped under one arm, a bundle of papers grasped in his hand, a hat jammed down on his head, and the ends of a striped muffler floating in the breeze of his own making.
The sight of a man running, even in these days when life itself goes with a rush, is sufficient to awaken comment in the mind of the onlooker. It suggests pursuit, the recklessness of other days; it impels, instinctively, the cry of "Stop, thief," for no man runs unless he is hunted by a powerful motive. Therefore it may be assumed that since I have sent a man bolting hard out of your sight up the lamp-lit avenue of Chancery Lane, you are wondering why the devil he's in such a hurry.
Well, he was hurrying because the last train to Shepherd's Bush goes at 12.35, and, as he had been away from home since ten o'clock that morning, he was rather anxious to get back. He could not afford a cab fare, though only a few hours ago he had been eating oysters, bisque soup, turbot, pheasant, asparagus out of season and pêche Melba at the Savoy Hotel with eighteenpence in his pocket—and the odd pence had gone to the waiter and the cloakroom man. So that by the time he had reached the top of Chancery Lane, dashed across the road and through the door of the station, where a porter would have slammed the grille in another second, and bought his ticket with an explosive, panting "Bush," he had just tenpence left.
The lift-man knew him, nodded affably and said: "Just in time, Mr Pride."
A hard run, said Mr Pride; and then with a cheery smile, "never mind; good for the liver." There were only a few people in the lift—four men and a woman to be precise. He knew the men as casual acquaintances of the last tube train. There was Denning, a sporting sub-editor on The Lantern; another was a proof-reader on one of the afternoon papers, who finished work in the evening but never went home before the last tube; then there was Harlem, the librarian of The Day, an amazing man who spoke all the European languages, and some of the Asiatic ones after his fifth glass of beer; the fourth was a friend of Harlem, a moody young man who wore his hair long, smoked an evil-looking pipe, and seemed to be a little unsteady on his feet. As for the woman, Pride knew her well by sight. She had hair that was of an unreal yellow, and a latch-key dangled from her little finger as though it were a new kind of ring. She always got out at Tottenham Court Road.
As the lift went down, its high complaining noise falling to a low buzzing sound seemed like the tired murmur of a weary human being glad that rest had come at last. The sound of the approaching train came rolling through the tunnel. They all rushed desperately down the short flight of steps that led to the platform, as the train came in with a rattle of doors opening and slamming, and scrambled for seats, while the uniformed men, who appeared to be the only thoroughly wide-awake people in the neighbourhood, said in the most contradictory fashion: "Stand clear of the gates," "Hurry on, please," and "Passengers off first."
Pride found himself in the smoking carriage, opposite Harlem, with his young friend at his side. It never occurred to him that there was anything exceptional in his dash for the last train. He did it four nights out of the week, as a matter of course. He was fifty years old, though he pretended he was ten years younger, and shaved his face clean to keep up the illusion. He used to explain to his friends that he came of a family famous for baldness in early years.
Been busy? asked Harlem, filling his pipe.
Nothing to speak of, said Pride. "Turned up at the office at eleven, but there was nothing doing until after lunch. Then I had to go and see Sir William Darton—they're going to start the Thames Steamboats again. He wasn't at home, and he wasn't in his office, but I found him at six o'clock in the Constitutional. Got back and found they'd sent home for my dress clothes, and left a nice little envelope with the ticket of the Canadian Dinner.... That's why I'm so late to-night...."
Pride filled his own pipe, and sighed. "The old days are over!" he said. "They used to post our assignments overnight—'Dear Mr Pride, kindly do a quarter of a column of the enclosed meeting.' Why, The Sentinel used to allow us five shillings every time we put on evening dress."
Well, The Sentinel was a pretty dull paper before the Kelmscotts bought it and turned it into a halfpenny, said Harlem. "Look at it now, a nice, bright paper—oh, by the way, do you know Cannock," he jerked his head to the man at his side. "He's The Sentinel's latest acquisition. This is Tommy Pride, one of the ancient bulwarks of The Sentinel, until they fired him. Now he's learning to be a halfpenny journalist."
Pride looked at the young man.
I don't know about being the latest acquisition, Cannock said. "As a matter of fact, they've fired me to-day."
It's a hobby of theirs now, Harlem remarked. "You'll get a job on The Day if you ask for one. There's always room with us, ain't there, Tommy?"
Pride looked wistfully at the clouds of blue smoke that rose from his lips.... Yes, he thought, there was always room on The Day—at any moment they might decide to make alterations in the staff. The fact of Cannock's being sacked mattered nothing; he was a young man, and for young men, knocking at the door of Fleet Street, there was always an open pathway. Think of the papers there were left to work for—the evenings and the dailies, and even when they were exhausted, perhaps a job on a weekly paper, or the editorship of one of the scores of penny and sixpenny magazines. And, after that, the provinces and the suburbs had their papers. Pride knew: in his long experience he had wandered from one paper to another, two years here, three years here, until the halfpenny papers had brought a new type of journalist into the street.
Married? asked Pride.
Not me! replied Cannock, with a slight hiccough.
Well, you're all right. You can free-lance if you want to.
Oh, it's no good to me, Cannock said. "It's a dog's life anyhow, and I've only had two months of it. I'm going back to my guv'nor's business."
Ah, said Pride, "there's no use wasting sympathy on you. Why did you ever leave it? What's his business?"
That, Cannock laughed gaily and pointed to a poster as the train stopped at Tottenham Court Road Station. It was a great picture of barrels and barrels of beer, piled one above the other, reaching away into the far distance. Thousands of barrels under a vaulted roof. And in the foreground were little figures of men in white aprons with red jersey caps on their heads, rolling in more barrels, with their arms bared to the elbows. Across the picture in large letters Pride could read: "Cannock Brothers, Holloway. Cannock's Entire."
Why, your people are worth millions! Pride said. "What on earth are you doing in journalism."
I know they are. That's what I was thinking of yesterday. I wondered how on earth they got anybody to do the work.
Well, you won't mind me, I'm sure, Pride said, leaning over to Cannock. "I'm older than you, and I belong to what they call the old school of journalism. This isn't the lovely life some people think it must be, and it's going to get worse each year. We've got to fight for our jobs every day of our life. 'Making good,' they call it. I'm used to it," he said defiantly, looking at Harlem, "I like it.... I couldn't do anything else. I'm not fit for anything else. It has its lazy moments, too, and its moments of excitement and thrills. No, my son, you go back to the brewery, there's more money in it for you and all the glory you want with your name plastered over every bottle and on all the walls. Ask five hundred men in the street if they've ever heard of Tommy Pride. They've been reading things I've written every day, but they don't know who's written them. Ask 'em who's Cannock? Why, they'll turn mechanically into the nearest public-house and call for a bottle of you."
I used to think it would be jolly to be on a newspaper, Cannock said. "My guv'nor got me the job. He's something to do with the Kelmscotts."
So it is if you're meant to be on a newspaper. That's the trouble of fellows like you. You come out of nowhere, or from the 'Varsity, and get plunked right down in the heart of a London newspaper office—probably someone's fired to make room for you. You're friends of the editor and you think you're great men, until you find you're expected to take your turn with the rest. Then you grouse, because you're not meant for it. You've got appointments to keep at dinner-time, and you must get your meals regularly. Or you want to write fine stuff and be great star descriptive men at once, or go to Persia and Timbuctoo, and live on flam and signed articles. But, if you were meant to be a reporter, you'd hang round the news editor's room for any job that came along, you'd take any old thing that was given you, and do it without a murmur, and when you've done that for thirty years you might meet success, and stay on until they shoved you out of the office.
He saw that Cannock was smiling, and seemed to read his thoughts.
Me? he said. "Oh, you mustn't judge by me. I belong to the old school, you know. I'm the son of my father—he was a Gallery man, and died worth three hundred pounds, and that's more than I am. I'm one of the products of the last generation, and all I want is ￡2 a week and a cottage in the country." The little man relit his pipe, and puffed contentedly. "Lord! I should like that!" he said.
You're always frightened of being fired, Tommy, said Harlem. "You know well enough you're what we call a thoroughly reliable and experienced man, and Ferrol wouldn't have you sacked."
There's always that bogy, Pride answered with a laugh. "You never know what may happen. The only thing is to join the Newspaper Press Fund and trust in the Lord. None of the youngsters do either of these things to-day."
Cannock and Harlem prepared to leave as the train slowed down before Marble Arch. "It's a rotten game," said Cannock. "I'm glad I'm out of it. Good-bye."
Pride took his hand. "Good-bye." He saw them pass the window, and wave to him as they went under the lighted "Way Out" sign, and then he turned to his papers with a sigh. But somehow or other he did not read. He always carried papers about with him, through sheer force of habit, much as the under side of a tailor's coat lapel is bristling with pins. He had been with news all day; he had written some of it; he had read the same things in the different editions of the newspapers; he had left the street when they were printing more news; and the first thing he would do on waking up in the morning would be to reach out for a copy of The Day which was brought with the morning tea. He did not read news as the average man does—he regarded it objectively, reading it without emotion. The march of the world, the daily happenings moved him as much as a packet of loose diamonds moves the jeweller who handles them daily, and weighs them to see their worth.
He was thinking of Cannock, with his future all clear before him: Cannock, with beer woven into the fibre of his being, as news was in his. It must be rather fine to be independent like that.... Idly, he wondered what Cannock's guv'nor was like: did he admire these pictures of the vast hall crowded with beer barrels, enough to last London for a whole Saturday night, and ready to be filled up again for all the nights in the week.... He looked round the carriage at the faces of those who were travelling with him. Five boisterous young people were making themselves a noisy nuisance at one end of the carriage. Opposite him, in the seat lately occupied by Harlem, a working man was staring ahead of him with an empty wide stare as if, in a moment of absent-mindedness, his actual self had slipped away, and left a hulk of shabbily-clothed body, without a spark of intelligence. Others were nodding, half asleep, and there was one man, with closed eyes, and parted lips, breathing stertorously, whose head bobbled from side to side with the rocking of the train.... He woke up, suddenly, as the train stopped with a jerk, and the conductor called out "'Perd's Bush."
Tommy Pride always gave his papers to the lift-man. They waited for the last passenger, who came lurching round the corner with his head still bobbling and his eyes half lost below the drooping eyelids. He steadied himself against the wall—and his hand spread over another of those glorious posters. What a picture for Cannock!... Somehow, Pride rejoiced to think that he was not Cannock.
He went past the Green to one of the small houses in a turning off the Uxbridge Road. The moon shone out of the wintry sky, white and placid, above his home. He let himself in, and turned out the flicker of gas in the hall. He walked on tiptoe into the sitting-room, and having taken off his boots went to the fireplace. Here on a trivet he found a cup of cocoa, and his slippers warming before the fire. There were three slices of thin bread and butter on the table. He never went to bed without his bread and butter. During his meal he saw a copy of The Day on a chair, and he read bits of it mechanically, for he had read it all before. The clock struck one, and he bolted the front door and went softly upstairs. As he turned on the light his wife stirred uneasily, and he came to the bedside. She opened her eyes at his kiss, and smiled tenderly at him.
Is it very late, dear? she asked.
One o'clock.
Poor sweetheart! she murmured. "Did you have your cocoa?"
Yes, he said.
Tired?
He laughed. "Not very. I'm a bit cheerful, to tell you the truth. Tell you about it in the morning. Ferrol spoke to me to-day. He's a fine chap."
That was the magic of it! Ferrol had spoken to him. The conversation had been quite ordinary. "Well, Pride, I hope things are going all right?" And Ferrol had nodded cheerfully and smiled as he passed into his room. Perhaps, he had asked Pride to come and see him.... It was not what Ferrol said that mattered: it was the Idea behind it—that Ferrol knew and remembered his men individually.
Out of the insensate tangle of machines and lives, high above the thunderous clamour of the printing-presses, the rolling of heavy vans stacked high with cylinders of paper, the ringing of telephone bells, the ticking and clicking and buzzing, floor above floor, of the great grey building in which they all lived, Ferrol rises with his masterful personality and calm voice, carving the chaos of it all into discipline and order. He looms, in the imagination, powerful and omnipresent, making his desires felt in the far corners of the continents.
Ferrol whispered, and Berlin, Vienna or San Francisco gave him his needs. He was the brain and the heart of the body he had created, and his nerves and his arteries were spread over the earth. He placed his fingers on the pulse of mankind, and knew what was ailing—knew what it wanted, and found the specialist to attend to it.
His influence lay over the narrow street of tall buildings, urging men onwards and upwards with the gospel of great endeavour. Some men, as their pagan ancestors worshipped the Sun as the God of Light, placed him on a pedestal in their hearts, and bowed down to him as the God of Success, for the energy of his spirit was everywhere. If you searched behind the ponderous double octuple machines, rattling and thudding, and driving the work of their world forward, you would have found it there—the motive power of the whole. It lurked in the tap-tap of the telegraph transmitter, in the quick click of the type in the slots of the linotype machines as the aproned operators touched the keyboard; it was in the heart of the reporter groping through the day for facts, and writing them with the shadow of Ferrol falling across the paper. The clerks in the counting-house, the advertising men, the grimy printers' boys in the basement, the type-setters and the block-makers on the top floors near the skylights, messengers, typists—they were all bricks in the edifice which was built up for the men who wrote the paper—the edifice of which Ferrol was the keystone.
His enemies distorted the vision of him; they saw him, an inhuman, incredible monster, with neither soul nor heart, grimly eager for one end—the making of money. They wrote of him as an evil thing, brooding over sensationalism.... One must see him as Tommy Pride and all those who worked for him on The Day saw him, eager, keen, and large-hearted, a wonderful blend of sentiment and business, torn, sometimes, between expediency and the hidden desires of his heart. One must see him reckless and, since he was only human, making mistakes, creating, destroying, living only for what the day brought forth....
The spirit of Fleet Street, itself.
Like a silver thread woven into the texture of his character, in which good and evil were patterned as they are in most men, a streak of the sentimental was there, shining untarnished, a survival of his days of young romance. Very few people knew of this trait; Ferrol hugged it to himself secretly, as though it were a weakness of which he was ashamed. It came upon him at odd, unexpected moments when he was hemmed in by the gross materialism of every day, this passionate, sudden yearning for poetry and ideals. He would try to lift the latch of the door that had locked the world of beauty and art from him. Swift desires would seize him to be carried away in his motor-car, as if it were a magic carpet, to some Arcadia of dreaming shadows, with the sunlight splashing through the green roofs of the forests.
The sentimental in him would, at such times, find expression in many ways. He made extravagant gifts to people; he would take a sudden interest in the career of one man, and bring all that man's longings to realization by lifting him up and making his name. How glorious that power was to Ferrol! The power of singling men out, finding the spark of genius that he could raise to a steady flame, fanning it with opportunity; he could make a man suddenly rich with a stroke of his pen; pack him off to Arabia or South America and bid him write his best. Sometimes they failed, because it was not in them to succeed, and Ferrol was as merciless to failures as he was generous to those who won through.
The men he made!...
Sometimes, when the waves of sentiment swept over him, he would try and materialize his ideals for a time. He would commission a great poet to contribute to The Day; he would open his columns to the cult of the beautiful, and then a grisly murder or a railway disaster would happen, crushing Ferrol's sentiment. Away with the ideal, for, after all, the world does not want it! Three columns of the murder or the railway disaster, with photographs, leaders, special articles, all turning round the news itself. That was how it was done.
And now the fit was on Ferrol as he sat in his room with the crimson carpet and the dark red walls, hung with contents bills of The Day. He had been going over the morning letters with his secretary, listening to the applications for employment. He made a point of hearing them, now and again. There was one letter there that suddenly awoke his interest; the name touched a chord in his memory, a chord that responded with a low, tender note.... And, his mind marched back through the corridors of the past, until he came out upon the old, quiet, cathedral town of the days of his youth.
He saw himself, a slight, eager young man, long, long before his dreams of greatness came to pass, yet feeling in his heart that the plans he was making would be followed. A young Ferrol plotting within himself to wrest spoils from the world, longing intolerably for power and the wealth that could give it. Well did he know, even in those far-off days, that destiny was holding out her hands, laden with roses and prizes for him.... Those were the days of the young heart; the days of nineteen and twenty, and the first love, scarce understood, that comes to us, mysterious and beautiful. He saw a very different Ferrol then. The lip unshaven, that was now hidden with a bushy moustache turning grey; the hair, now also grey under the touch of Time, silky and black. He saw this boy walking the lanes that led out of Easterham town, in the spring-time, with a girl at his side.
Over the abyss of the years the boy beckoned to him, and Ferrol looked back on a yesterday of thirty years. Her name was Margaret, and she was for him the beginning of things. From her he learned much of the tenderness of life, and the love of Nature that had remained with him. He was a clerk in an auctioneer's office then, with most of his dreams still undreamt. He and Margaret had been children together. They were children now, laughing, and walking over the fields with the spire of the cathedral, pointing like a finger to the skies, in the distant haze of the afternoon.
There was more purity in that first romance of his than in anything he had found in after years. Oh! wonderful days of young unsullied hearts, and the white innocence of life. The memory of evenings came to him, of kisses in the starlight, when incomprehensible emotions surged through him, vague imaginings of what life must really be, and the torture of unrest, of something that he did not understand. Her eyes were tearful, and yet she smiled, and at her smile they both laughed. And so the spell was broken, and they trudged, side by side, homeward in the silent night.
She inspired him, and in that, perhaps, she fulfilled her destiny. She sowed the seeds of ambition in his soul: he would dare anything for her, yea, reach his hand upwards, and pluck the very stars from Heaven to lay at her feet. And, very gradually, a dreadful nausea of Easterham came over him. His desk was by the window that looked upon the High Street: he almost remembered, now, the day when it first dawned on him that the place was no longer tolerable. It was mid-day and the heat quivered above the cobble-stones: two dogs were fighting with jarring yelps that could be heard all down the street; the baker's cart went by with an empty rattle, and Miss Martin of Willow Hall drove in as usual to the bank next door. An old man was herding a flock of sheep towards the market-place, and the sheep-dog ran this way and that way, barking as he ran. Three sandwich-men, grotesquely hidden in boards, slouched past in frayed clothes and battered hats, with pipes in their mouths. He read their boards mechanically.... "Sale at Wilcox's.... Ladies' Undergarments.... Ribbons." He had read the same thing every day in the week; he had looked out upon the same scene, every day, it seemed; the dogs had been quarrelling eternally, the shepherd passed and repassed like a never-ending silent dream; grocer, and baker, and banker, and Hargrave, the farmer ... there he was again touching his hat to Miss Martin as she stepped from her trap.... O God! the heavy monotony of it all fell like a weight on his heart.
The nostalgia grew. The chimes of the cathedral lost their music, the stillness of the town became more unbearable than the turmoil and clatter of cities. There was something to be wrought for and fought for in the world outside. This was not life; this was a mausoleum!
The arguments with his father—his mother was dead—and the long time it took to persuade him.... The parting with Margaret, and the whispered vows and promises, spoken breathlessly from their earnest young hearts. It seemed they could never be broken.
He came to London. It was in the late seventies, at the beginning of the spread of education that has resulted in the amazing flood of periodicals: it was a flood that led Ferrol on to fortune. His scope widened; he grew in his outlook, and saw that here was a way to power indeed. He shone like a new star over London, gathering lesser lights around him, developing that marvellous power of organization, that astonishing personality that drew men to him, until he seized his opportunity and bought the moribund Day when it was a penny paper on its last legs. In ten years' time he had become wealthy and powerful, and since then he had gone on and on until no triumph was denied him.
And Margaret...? The years passed, and with the passing of time, they both developed. That young love, once so irrefrangible, grew warped and misshapen, until it finally snapped. There was no quarrel; neither could reproach the other; they simply grew out of their love, as so many young people do. There was a correspondence for a time, but it slackened and presently ceased altogether. She must have felt her hold loosening on Ferrol, as with a thousand new interests he came upon the wide horizon of life. She must have noticed this in his letters, and instead of seeking to bind him to her against his will, she just let him go. And Ferrol must have weighed the impossibility of asking her to marry him at this point of his career, when he was striving and struggling upwards; not all men travel the fastest when they travel alone, but Ferrol was one of those who could run no risk of being delayed. They had none of the pang of parting ... but years afterwards, when Ferrol was a childless widower (for he married when he was thirty-five, and walked behind his wife's coffin two years afterwards), he wondered what had become of Margaret, and always he cherished that memory of his one romance that had tapered away out of his life. He could never forget the sweet simplicity of Margaret's face, the tears on her eyelashes, and the yielding softness of her youth when he pressed her to his heart and lips with wonderful thoughts quivering through his soul.
He remembered one day in his life, a few years after the death of his wife, when a wild desire had seized him to handle his past again, as an antiquarian turns over his treasures and rejoices in some ancient relic. It was a day in summer, when the heat was heavy over London, and the city smelt of hot asphalt and tar: without a word to anybody he had left his work and taken the train, back to Easterham and his youth.
The old familiar landmarks rose up before him, bringing a strange feeling of age to him. So much had happened in the interval that it seemed that year upon year had piled up a wall before him, separating him for evermore from this old world that had been. The ivy still clung to the castellated walls of the Cathedral close; the clock chimed as he went by, just as he had heard it chime in the long days that were gone. The very rooks seemed unchanged as they clamoured huskily in the old beeches.
And yet, with it all, there was something different, and he knew that the difference lay not so much with the place as with himself. His entire perception had altered. He saw things through eyes that had grown older. The High Street, with its brooding air of stillness, that had once seemed so stale and intolerable to him, now appealed to him with its wondrous peace, a magical spot far away from the turmoil of things. There were the same names over the grocers' and the drapers' and the ironmongers' shops, but old Matthew Bethell's quaint bookshop had gone, and in its place there stood a large green, flat-fronted establishment, with an open window stacked high with magazines and newspapers, and a great poster above it, thus:
The Day.
ONE HALFPENNY
HOWARD
SLANDER
CASE.
FULL REPORT.
The sentimental in him winced, but the material business man glowed with pride as he saw the great poster, proclaiming The Day paramount over its rivals. There was always a conflict between the two men that made up that complex personality known as Ferrol. He went to the house where he had once lived; his father was dead now, and as he looked up at the open window and saw a strange woman doing some needle-work, it seemed to him as if the people that were living there had laid sacrilegious hands upon the holy fragrance of the past; as if their prying eyes had peered into all the hidden secrets that belonged to him. He turned away resentfully towards the old inn, the Red Lion, whose proprietor, old Hamblin, remembered him from other days when he revealed himself, and was inclined to be overcome with the importance of the visit, until Ferrol put him at his ease. They chatted together, the old man, with his back to the fireplace, coat-tails lifted from habit, for the grate was empty on this hot day, Ferrol sitting astride a chair, watching the blue stream of smoke that came from Hamblin's lips as he puffed at his long white churchwarden.... Hamblin must have stood like that during all the years that Ferrol had been in London. The only change that came to the people of Easterham was death.
They talked of people they had known, and so the talk came naturally to Margaret. He listened unmoved to the news of her marriage, and found that nothing more than conventional phrases came from his lips when Hamblin told him of her death. Somehow, it seemed to him so natural. He had been away seventeen years, and Easterham had lost its hold upon him now. The death of his father ... the new face at the window of their house.... The death of Margaret seemed to come as a natural sequence to things.
Hamblin went on talking about people. "She married Mr Quain, one of the College schoolmasters.... I expect he was after your time ... a good deal older than you, Mr Ferrol.... They had one child, a boy ... living with his aunt now. All her people left Easterham years ago...." And so on.
It was in the afternoon that Ferrol came back to London, feeling that he had been prodding at wet moss-grown stones in some old decayed ruin, turning them over to see what he could find, and having them crumble apart in his hands. He never went back again.
That was thirteen years ago. Ferrol's memories ended abruptly. He touched a button, and a young man, with a shiny, pink face and fair hair parted in the middle, came in with a notebook and pencil in his hand. He looked as if he spent every moment of his spare time in washing his face. There was a quiet, nervous air about him—the air of one who is never certain of what is going to happen next. Ferrol's abrupt sentences always unnerved him.
Trinder, he said, "there was a letter among the lot to-day. Quain. Written on Easterham Gazette notepaper. Asking for editorial employment."
Yes, sir. Trinder had long ceased to marvel at Ferrol's memory for details.
Write to him the usual letter asking him to call. Wednesday at twelve.
Trinder made a note and withdrew.
Ferrol wondered what Margaret's boy was like.
At the age of twenty Humphrey Quain found himself on the threshold of a world of promise. It seemed to him that if, out of all the years of time, he could have chosen the period in which he would live, he would have picked out the dawn of this twentieth century of grace. England was just then in the throes of casting from herself the burden of old traditions. The closing years of the nineties had been years of preparation and development—years of broadening minds and new ideas, until quite suddenly, it seemed, the century turned the corner, and yesterday became old-fashioned in a day, and all eyes were fixed on the glorious sunrise of the twentieth century—the wonderful century.
People, you remember, played with the fantasy of beginning a brand-new century as if it were a new toy. Nobody who was living could remember the birth of the last century. It was a new emotion for everyone. There was the oddity of writing dates, discarding for ever the 189— and beginning with 19—; old phrases, such as fin-de-siècle, became suddenly obsolete; new phrases were coined, among which "Twencent" (an abbreviation for twentieth century, and a tribute to the snap and hustle with which the world was now expected to go) survived the longest; songs were sung at music-halls; there was a burst of cartoons on the subject; people referred jokingly to the last century, parodying the recollections of boresome centenarians; while the unhappy Nineteenth Century, as though the calendar had taken a mean advantage of its mid-Victorian dignity, determined never again to risk being so hopelessly out of date, and added to its title the words "and After," thereby enabling future centuries to go for ever without ruffling its title.
In the midst of this change, when the death of Queen Victoria seemed to snap the present from the past irrevocably, and the novelty of a king came to England again; when the first of the tubes that now honeycomb London was a twopenny wonder, and people were talking of Shepherd's Bush, and Notting Hill Gate, and marvelling curiously why they had never talked of them before; when Socialism was burrowing and gnawing like a rat at the old, worn fabric of Society, urging the working-man to stand equal in Parliament with the noblest lords in the land. In the midst of all this there arose suddenly, born with the twentieth century, the Young Man. He had already come, answering the call of the country in the dark disillusioning days of the Boer War. People had seen the young clerks and workmen of England marching shoulder to shoulder down the streets of London, like the train-bands of Elizabethan days. When the country was in peril the flower and the youth of England came to its aid, and the older men could do nothing but stay at home and look on.
The young man, scorned by his elders in all the periods of the nineteenth century except those last years of development, found himself suddenly caught up on the high wave that was sweeping away the rubbish and the sentiment and the lumber of the old customs, and borne above them all. He was set on a pinnacle, as the new type; the future of the world was said to be in the hands of the young men; the old men—even forty was too old, you remember—had had their day. They were now like so much old furniture, shabby and undesirable, second-hand goods, better replaced by strong, well-made, up-to-date things.
It really was a wonderful time for the Young Man. In the old days it had been customary for him to show respect to his elders, to call them "sir," to stand up when they came into a room, or raise his hat if they met in the streets, to offer his seat to them if there was none vacant, and generally to treat them as old ladies, with polite reverence mingled with awe.
The worship of age had become a fetish; it was improper to criticize the opinions of a man older than yourself; it was heresy to think that you were as capable as the old men; youth had to wait and grow old for its chances in life; youth was ridiculed, snubbed and held in the leash.
And then, quite suddenly it seemed, though Ibsen had heard it knocking at the door long before, the younger generation burst upon us with an astonishing vigour, taking possession of the new century, trampling down the false gods of age and bringing in its train, like boys trooping from a nursery, hosts of new toys and new ideas in everything.
It was, I think, The Day that finally discovered the Young Man. Ferrol had known the bitter opposition which he had fought in his own twenties and thirties, and he shone as the apostle of youth. The Young Man, from a neglected embryo, became a national asset; all hands were uplifted to him in the dawn of the new century. He was enthroned in the seats from which his elders were deposed.
People seeking for a symbol of the new life that was beginning, looked westwards and found a whole nation that typified the Young Man who was to be their salvation. They found America, eager, with strident voice, forceful and straining its muscles to the game of life—a whole nation of young men. It became the fashion to take America as a model. There was an invasion of boots and bicycles and cameras. "Look," every one cried, "see how they do things better than we do. Look at their magazines—how wonderful they are." Phonographs, kinetoscopes, the first jumpy cinematographs, photo-buttons, chewing-gum, they came to the country, and were hailed gladly as from the land of Young Men.
Presently the young men themselves came. They came with their hair parted in the middle, and keen, clean-shaven faces with very predominant chins. They were mere boys, and they had a bounce and a boisterous assurance that took one's breath away. With them came loudly-striped shirts, multi-coloured socks, felt hats and lounge suits in city offices, and, later, soft-fronted shirts and black silk bows for evening wear. They opened London offices for New York firms, and showed us card-indexing systems, roll-top desks, dictaphones and loose-leaf ledgers. All letters were typewritten, and the firm who sent out a letter in the crabbed handwriting of its senior clerk was accounted disgracefully behind the times.
The Young Man set the pace with a vengeance, and it was a panting business to keep abreast of him.
Cock-tails and quick-lunch restaurants appeared next; griddle-cakes, clam-chowder and club sandwiches were shown to us; and finally, as though having absorbed their nutriment, we had assimilated their habits, a fierce desire to speak with a nasal accent took hold of us.
The man who wanted to get a job spoke with as much American accent as he could muster up; he looked American, and he affected American ways; his affirmative was "sure," and he wore his hair long and sleek, divided evenly in the middle. He was the Young Man, cocksure, enthusiastic and determined—the most remarkable product of his time.
Ferrol found him, a year or so before he arrived, with that instinct of his, almost second-sight, which never failed. He boomed him as a Type; he glorified him, and gave him high posts in the office of The Day. With the exception of Neckinger, the editor, who came straight from New York, he was the native product, and Ferrol was always on the look-out for more of him.
And so, in the midst of all this, when the cry for the Young Man was at its hungriest, when "hustle" and "strenuous" were added to the vocabulary, we see Humphrey Quain, waiting on the outskirts, watching his opportunity, and meanwhile bending over the counter of the Easterham Gazette office, coat off and shirt sleeves turned back to the elbow, folding up copies of the Easterham Gazette as they came damp, with the ink wet on them, from the printing-press in the basement.
The Easterham Gazette was, unhesitatingly, the worst paper in Easterham. It was an eight-page weekly journal, with a staff of one editor, one reporter and Humphrey Quain. When things were slack in the reporting line, the reporter (an extraordinarily shaggy person called Beaver, whose thumbs were always covered with ink) was expected to "fill up time at case"—which means that he was to assist in setting up the paper in type. The editor, whose name was Worthing, walked about in a knickerbocker suit and a soft grey hat, and it was part of his business to obtain advertisements for the Gazette. The leading articles he wrote were always composed with one eye on the advertiser. In praising the laudable action of Councillor Bilson in opposing the introduction of trams into the town, there was a pleasant parenthesis, something in this manner: "It needs no words of ours to echo the praise bestowed on that gallant champion of our town, our much-respected Councillor Bilson (in whose windows, by the way, there is a remarkable exhibit of Oriental coffee-making) ..." and so on.
It was Beaver's duty to make the "calls" during the week. How he managed them all, I don't know; but in the intervals of attending the police-court, the council meetings, and all the meetings of local organizations, he would call at the hospital, at the mayor's parlour, on the town clerk, on the churches and cathedrals, snapping up unconsidered trifles in the shape of accidents, civic news, church services, and all the other activities of Easterham life. Sometimes during the week Beaver would swing himself astride a bicycle, as frayed and as shabby as himself, and pedal to Wimberly, or Pooleham, or further afield to Great Huxton for local meetings, all of which were of vast interest to the Easterham Gazette, since its copies went weekly—or were supposed to go—over the whole of the county, and it had annexed to its title the names of all the best villages. Its full title, by the way, was: Easterham Gazette, and Wimberly, Pooleham, Great Huxton, Middle Huxton and Little Huxton Chronicle; Coomber, Melsdom and Upper Thornton Journal, largest circulation in any district, weekly one penny. It was nigh upon sixty years of age, and therefore its tottering infirmity may be excused.
Humphrey Quain came into the office ostensibly as a clerk. In the beginning he thought it was a fascinating game seeing the things that one wrote in print. Therefore, all unconsciously, he started to write. He began with "Cycle Notes" and "Theatre Notes," and presently he found himself with sufficient interest to fill a whole column, which dealt mainly with local gossip, and was called "The Easterham Letter." It was addressed always to the editor and was signed "P and Q." When he was not writing, he was addressing wrappers or making out the weekly bills for the newsagents; and every Friday evening he stood by the counter, folding up the papers as they came to him, and handing them to grubby little children who were sent by the newsagents, or sold the papers for themselves in the streets.
It really was a remarkable paper for the twentieth century. Its advertisement space was one shilling an inch, or less if you promised not to tell any one; three men, of course, could not fill the whole of these eight great sheets, and therefore the carrier's wagon delivered every Thursday to the Easterham Gazette office, mysterious thin brown parcels the size of a column, and rather heavy. Simultaneously, all over the country, like parcels were being delivered, and, if by chance you compared an issue of the Easterham Gazette with any thirty local papers in the North, South, or East of England, you would have been amazed at the remarkable similarity of their contents. They had the same serial story of thrilling adventure, the same "Cookery Notes and Kitchen Recipes," the same "Home Hints to Household Happiness," word for word, and the same column of jokes.
For these long parcels that arrived every Thursday at the Easterham Gazette office were columns of type cast from moulds, sent down from a London Agency which has made a mighty business of supplying general matter, from foreign intelligence to fashion notes, ready for the printing-press, at so much a column. They call it "stereo."
Humphrey Quain had been in the office for three years. His aunt was a friend of Mr Worthing, the editor, and his father thought it would be a good thing for the boy to have some association with the world of letters, however distant. Shortly afterwards, Quain senior had taken a master's appointment in a private boarding-school at Southsea, and Humphrey remained with his aunt. A year later his father died.
He parted with his father with a straining heart, for Daniel Quain was a tremendous success as a father, though he was a failure as a man. Of course this was only Humphrey's point of view: what more could a boy want than a father who could fashion any kind of toy, from whistles to steamboats, out of a block of wood; who knew enough of elementary science to make a pin sail on water, by letting it rest on a cigarette paper which soaked and sank away, leaving the pin afloat; who could blow a halfpenny from one wine-glass to another, and produce whooing sounds from a hollow tube by placing it over a gas flame. Wonderful father!
It was Daniel who fostered in Humphrey's heart the love of reading: those early books were adventure stories by Fenimore Cooper, Kingston and Ballantyne. He read Harrison Ainsworth, too, and Henty, and took in the Boy's Own Paper, and, in short, did everything in the way of reading that a normal, happy, healthy-minded boy should do. "Keep clear of philosophy until you are thirty," Daniel said one day, as he was showing him how three matches can be made to stand upright; "then you won't understand enough of life to be miserable."
Later, he came to the Dickens and Thackeray stage, but he was pained to find he could not enjoy Scott. He confided his distaste to his father, as though it were a guilty failing of which to be ashamed.
Form your own likes and dislikes in reading as in everything else, said Daniel. "Don't be a literary snob, and pretend you enjoy the acquaintance of books merely because they belong so to speak to the 'upper ten' of the book-world."
When his father died, Humphrey was first brought face to face with the stern things of life. It was a chance remark of his aunt that gave him the first glimpse. "You'll have to do something for yourself, Humphrey," she said one day. "That father of yours did nothing for you." She always spoke bitterly of his father.
Humphrey had never thought of it before. It had seemed to him that things came naturally to people from father to son: that, in some mysterious, unthought-of way, when he was about twenty or so, he would find himself with an income of sorts, or some settled employment.
You must Get On, said his aunt, looking at him through her spectacles. "Young men Get On quickly to-day. You must grasp your opportunities."
So here came a new and delightful interest into Humphrey's existence. He perceived something fine in it all. From that day he had one creed in life: the creed of Getting On. This determination swamped every other interest in life. It was as if his aunt had suddenly touched upon some internal button that had started off a driving-wheel within him, and set all the machinery of energy into movement. How did one "Get On" in the world? He began to take an enormous interest in everything, to follow the doings of men and cities outside Easterham; his knowledge widened slowly, for he had no brothers and was singularly innocent in the everyday sense of the word.
And all the time, during those Easterham days, he was beginning to understand things. He saw that Beaver and Worthing, with their small salaries and narrow capacities, had not "Got On"—would never "Get On." He realized too, that his father, well through life, had been little better than a man in the beginning of it. On the other hand, Bilson, with his large, shining shop, might be said to have "Got On," and just when he was half deciding that Bilson held the secret, Bilson suddenly went bankrupt, owing to the failure of some coffee plantations in Ceylon. It seemed a perplexing business, this getting on. Easier to talk about than to do. And, after all, the getting on-ness of Bilson had been circumscribed by the narrow area of Easterham. The real success meant power, and the ability to use it: wide power over the affairs of other people.
These were not the thoughts of a moment: they were lingering thoughts that spread over three years, from seventeen to twenty, those three years when he was at the Easterham Gazette office, with only Beaver and Worthing for his models in life.
They were thoughts in the intervals of writing "notes" on local subjects—indeed, the notes were the outcome of the thoughts—of reading, and of cycling, and going to the theatre. And then one day a most amazing thing happened.
Beaver Got On!
Yes, it was really incredible, but the fact was there indisputable and glaring. Beaver, shaggy and unkempt, who seemed to have settled down for ever to the meetings and the calls and the police-courts ("Harriet Higgins, 30, no fixed abode, charged with being drunk and disorderly, etc."), broke through the cobwebs that had settled on him, in an unexpected and definite manner.
He came to Humphrey one day and remarked quite casually, "I've given old Worthing the push."
Humphrey looked at him: he wore a Norfolk jacket, with old trousers, and a tweed hat of no shape at all. Beaver took his pipe out of his mouth, and Humphrey noticed the short nails on his stumpy, fat fingers. Beaver always bit his nails.
I've given old Worthing the push, said Beaver. "Look at this." He showed a letter to Humphrey, who saw that it was from the "Special News Agency" of London, employing Beaver in their service at ￡2, 10s. a week.
How did you get it? Humphrey asked.
Wrote in, said Beaver, gnawing a finger-tip. "Been writing in on the quiet for the last year. Fed up with old Worthing and filling up time at case."
I thought you had to know how to write well if you wanted to work in London, Humphrey said. There were no illusions about Beaver's style.
Oh! the Agency doesn't want writing—it wants a man who can take down shorthand verbatim.... I'm off next week, said Beaver.
Humphrey looked longingly at him and his letter, and then round at the whitewashed walls of the office, with its Calendars and local Directories for years past on the shelf, and the pile of Gazettes on the corner of the counter. Mr Worthing passed through the office, stopped, and scowled at Beaver.
Kindly remove your head-gear in the front office, he said, and Beaver, with the unmurmuring discipline of years which nothing could break, took off the crumpled tweed thing he called a hat.
Nice pig, isn't he? Beaver said to Humphrey, as Worthing went out. "We had an awful row. Said I ought to have given him a month's notice. A week would have been good enough for me if he was doing the sacking. Pig in knickers, that's what he is," said Beaver, defiantly. "This is a Hole."
Oh, Beaver! cried Humphrey, hopelessly. "It is a Hole. He is a Pig.... But what's going to happen to me?"
You'll do my work, Beaver remarked.
I can't write shorthand. Besides, I don't want to. How old are you, Beaver?
Just turned thirty. Why?
Thirty! thought Humphrey; fancy Beaver having wasted all these years in doing nothing but local reporting. Would he have to work ten years more and still achieve nothing further than Beaver. There must be some way out of it. Beaver had found it, and surely he could.
It's fine for you, Humphrey said, admiringly now, for, in the blankness of Beaver leaving the office where they had worked, he had forgotten to congratulate him. "The Special News Agency is the biggest in London, isn't it."
Rather, said Beaver, comfortably. "It's a life job." That was his ambition. "Look here, young Quain, I think you're too good for Easterham, too. Those notes of yours, you know.... I used to read 'em every week. Not at all bad.... You take my tip, and do a turn at reporting for a while, and then when you've got the hang of things write in. Write in to all the London papers. Say you've had good provincial experience—'provincial' sounds better than local. You'll see. You're bound to get replies. Say you're a good all-round man. Enclose a stamped envelope." Beaver sauntered to and fro, nibbling at a nail between excited sentences. "Oh, and don't you forget it. Write on Easterham Gazette notepaper."
And when, a week later, Beaver left, Worthing asked Humphrey to try his hand at the police-court, Humphrey accepted the inevitable, and tried to improve on the style of the police reports. Worthing swore at him and rewrote them all, and told him to model his style on that of the late Mr Beaver.
Whereupon Humphrey, seeing that he would never Get On if he were to live in the shadow of Beaver, sat down, and "wrote in."
He wrote to The Day, because he bought the paper every morning, and thought it was wonderful.
The day that Ferrol's reply arrived was a day of triumph for Humphrey. The letter came to him with unbelievable promptness, asking him to call at the office.... Never again did Humphrey recapture the fine emotion that thrilled him as he read and re-read the letter. Looking back on it, he saw that those moments were among the most glorious in his life; he stood on the threshold of a world of promise and enchantment, suddenly revealed to him by this scrap of paper with The Day in embossed blue letters, surrounded by telephone numbers and telegraphic addresses of the great newspaper.
When he showed the letter to his aunt, she sighed in a tired way, and said unexpectedly: "I'm afraid you will never get on, Humphrey. You are too restless. I'm sure you would do better to remain with Mr Worthing. However...." She very rarely finished her sentences.
Humphrey smiled. He saw himself marching to fortune; he was twenty, and it never occurred to him that he could fail.
You may call Fleet Street what you like, but the secret of it eludes you always. It has as many moods as a woman: it is the street of laughter and of tears, of adventure and dullness, of romance and reality, of promise and lost hopes, of conquest and broken men. Into its narrow neck are crammed all the hurrying life, the passions, the eager, beating hearts, the happiness and the sorrow of the broad streets East and West that lead to it. There is something in this thin, crooked street, holding in its body the essence of the world, that clutches at the imagination, something in the very atmosphere surrounding it which makes it different from all the other streets that are walked by men.
The stones and the old timber of some of its buildings are like the yellow parchment of some ancient manuscript, scribbled with faded history. There are chop-houses, and taverns, where the wigged and knee-breeched Puffs sat writing their tit-bits of scandal for the fashionable intelligence of the day; where Addison and Steele tapped their snuff-boxes and planned their letters to Mr Spectator; or, further back in the years, Shakespeare himself went Strandwards from Blackfriars up the narrow street where the gabled houses leaned to one another. Look, you can almost see the ghosts of Fleet Street pacing out of the little courts and alleys that lie athwart the street: you know that massive bulk of a man, walking ponderously, in drab-coloured coat and knee-breeches, and rather untidy stockings above his heavy, buckled shoes. He is in the street of a million words; other ghosts jostle him, and in the gallant company one sees Charles Dickens, dropping his manuscript stealthily into a dark letter-box, in a dark office, up a dark court; and all the dead men who have given their lives to the street, some of them foolishly wanton in wine—dead men shot in the wars, or burnt with fever, or wrecked with the struggle, come back ... come back to Fleet Street, to look wistfully at the lit windows, and listen to the throbbing music of the presses.
It lures you like a siren, coaxing with soft promises of prizes to be wrested from it: you shall be the favoured of the gods, and you become Sisyphus, rolling his stone eternally, day after day. Here are the things of life that you covet, they shall be yours, says the Street: and you are Tantalus, reaching out everlastingly, and grasping nothing, until your heart is parched within you. You shall be strong and mighty, it says, sapping your strength like Delilah, until you pull down the pillars of hope, and fall buried beneath the reckless ruins of your career.
Once you have answered the voice of the siren, you are taken in the magic spell. Beat your breast, and exclaim in agony, but nothing will avail, for if you leave the Street, the quiet world will seem void for ever, and, as the ghosts burn backwards through space, so shall you return to the old agitations and longings.
This was the Street to which young Humphrey Quain came on a January morning, riding triumphantly on the top of an omnibus. As he passed the fantastic Griffin, with its open jaws and monstrous scaly wings, like a warder guarding those who would escape, Fleet Street seemed to be the Street of Conquest.
It was a rare, crisp day, with a touch of frost in the air, and the sun clear and high in the heavens, above the tangle of wires and cables that almost roofed the Street. The traffic was beating up and down, with frequent blocks, here and there, as a heavy hooded van staggered up from Whitefriars or Bouverie Street. It was nearly mid-day, and the light two-wheeled carts were pouring out of Shoe Lane, or coming from Salisbury Square with the early editions of the afternoon papers. Newsboys on bicycles, with sacks of papers swung over their backs, seemed to be risking their lives every moment as they flashed into the thick of the traffic, clinging to hansoms, and sliding between drays and omnibuses, out of the press, until they could get through the narrow neck of Fleet Street towards the West.
Humphrey breathed deeply as he looked about him: the names of the newspapers were blazoned everywhere. Heavens! what a world of paper and ink this was, to be sure. The doors, the windows and the letter-boxes bore the titles of newspapers—all the newspapers that were. Every room, on every floor, was inhabited by the representatives of some paper or other: on the musty top windows he could read the titles of journals in Canada and Australia; great golden letters bulged across the buildings telling of familiar newspapers. The houses were an odd mixture of modernity and antiquity, they jostled each other in their cramped space; narrow buildings squeezed between high, red offices with plate-glass windows, and over and above the irregular roofs the wires spread thin threads against the sky, wires that gave and received news from the uttermost ends of the earth.
The letters in white enamel or gold on the windows told of Paris and Berlin, of Rotterdam and Vienna; here they marked the home of a religious paper, there the office of a trade paper, and hard by it The Sportsman, with its windows full of prize-fighters' photographs and a massive silver belt in a plush case, for the possession of which Porky Smith and Jewey Brown were coming to blows. Every branch of human activity, all the intricate complexities of modern life seemed to be represented either by a room or the fifth part of a room in Fleet Street.
And, rising out of the riot of narrow buildings, huddled closely to each other, the great homes of the daily papers stood up as landmarks. Here were the London offices of the important provincial papers, which spoke nightly with Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield and Liverpool—plate-glass windows and large letters gave them a handsome enough appearance, but they looked comparatively insignificant beside the tall red building of The Sentinel, and the new green-glazed establishment of The Wire, while the grey, enormous offices of The Day dwarfed them all. There was something solid about The Day as it stood four-square firmly in the Street, with its great letters sprawled across the front, golden by day, and golden with electric light in the night-time.
It seemed almost as if The Day had nudged the other great papers out of Fleet Street, for in the side streets, in Bouverie Street, and Whitefriars Street, and in Shoe Lane, the remainder of the London papers found their homes, with the exception of the high-toned Morning Courier, which found itself at the western end of the Street past the Law Courts.
But The Day, with its arrogant dome-tower (lit up at nights), its swinging glass doors and braided commissionaires, was the most typical of the modern newspaper world. It was just such a place as Humphrey Quain had dreamed. The swing doors were always on the move; the people were coming and going quickly—here was action, and all the movement and the business of life.
For a few moments Humphrey hesitated a little nervously. He was a minute or two in advance of the time appointed for the interview, and he stood there, irresolute, filled with a wondrous sense of expectancy, among the crowd that hurried to and fro. He noticed on the other side of the road a bearded man, in a silk hat and a frayed overcoat, sitting on a doorstep at the top of Whitefriars Street. The man had a keen, intelligent face with blue eyes. It was the shiny silk hat that leapt to Humphrey's notice, it seemed so out of keeping with the rest of the man's clothes. Besides, why should a man in a silk hat sit on a doorstep.... Years later the man was still there, every day, sitting sphinx-like, surveying those who passed him ... he must have marked their faces grow older.
The commissionaire regarded Humphrey critically. It was the business of the commissionaire in The Day office, especially, to be a judge of character. He divided callers into two main classes—those who wanted to see the editor, and those whom the editor wanted to see. The two classes were quite distinct, and there were few who, like Humphrey Quain, belonged to both.
Yes, by appointment, said Humphrey, a little proudly, to the commissionaire's cold question that rose like a wall to so many callers.
He was shown into a little room, and made to fill up a form—name, address and business. The next minute a boy in a green uniform led him up a flight of stairs, through the ante-room where the pink-cheeked Trinder sat typewriting diligently, and so to Ferrol's room.
Humphrey had a confused impression of a broad, high room, of a man sitting at a desk miles away at the farther end of the room by the half-curtained window; of red walls hung with files of newspapers, and the contents bills of that day; of a Louis XVI. clock, all scrolls and cupids, bringing a queer touch of drawing-room leisure with it; and of telephones and buttons that surrounded the man at the desk. The buttons fascinated him: he saw that thin slips of ivory labelled them with the names of the different departments—Editor, News-Editor, Reporters, Sub-Editors, Advertisement Manager, Business Manager, Literary Editor, Sporting Editor, City Editor, Foreign Editor—the whole of the building, with all its workers, seemed to be within the reach of Ferrol's fingers. He was like the captain of a great ship, navigating the paper from this room, steering daily through the perilous journey. Humphrey remembered afterwards how he was possessed with an odd longing; he wanted to see Ferrol press all the buttons at once, to hear the bones of the paper, the framework on which it was built up each day, come clattering and rattling into the room.
Ferrol looked up from his papers, pushed back his round, upholstered chair that tipped slightly on its axis, and the room with its red walls and carpet suddenly faded from Humphrey, and he became aware only of a face that looked at him ... a masterful, powerful face, strong in every feature, from the thick, closely-knit eyebrows below the broad forehead, to the round, large chin. There was something insistent in this face of Ferrol, with its steel-coloured eyes, that hardened or softened with his moods, and its black moustache, that bulged heavily over his upper lip and gave him an appearance of rugged ferocity.
Humphrey felt as if he were a squirming thing under the microscope.... That was the way of Ferrol—everything depended on the first impression that he received; all his being was tautened to receive that first impression. It was a narrow system of judging character, but he made few mistakes.... They were quickly corrected. He never forgave those who deceived him by wearing a mask over their true selves.
There is not the slightest doubt that Humphrey felt a little nervous—who would not, with Ferrol's eyes boring through one?—but he knew that great issues were at stake. He carried his head high, and his eyes met Ferrol's without a quiver. Thus he stood by the table for five seconds, though it seemed as many minutes to him, until Ferrol told him to sit down.
So you want to come on The Day, was the way Ferrol began. They were eye to eye all the while.
Yes, sir, said Humphrey, briskly. Somehow or other, with the sound of Ferrol's voice all his nervousness departed. It was the silence that had made him feel awkward.
Let's see.... Ah! yes; you've been on an Easterham paper, haven't you?
Three years, Humphrey replied.
That all the experience you've had?
Humphrey smiled faintly. "That's all," he said.
What do you want to do?
Here was an amazing question for which he was totally unprepared. It had never occurred to him that he would be asked to make his choice. His eyes wandered to the buttons.... What did he want to do? He made an answer that sounded futile and foolish to him.
I want to get on, he stammered, hesitatingly, with a picture of his aunt rising mentally before him.
Ferrol's eyes twinkled. It was a magic answer if Humphrey had but known. Most of the others he saw wanted to do descriptive writing, they had literary kinks in them, or wanted to have roving commissions abroad.... None of them wanted to start at the bottom.
Well, this is the place for young men who want to get on, you know, said Ferrol. "It's hard work...." He turned away and consulted some papers. "I think I'll give you a chance," he said.
The clock struck twelve, and it sounded to Humphrey that a chime of joy-bells had flooded the room with triumphant music.
When can you start? Ferrol asked.
Next week, Humphrey said.
You can start at three pounds a week. Ferrol pressed a button. Trinder appeared. "Ask Mr Rivers if he can come," said Ferrol.
Humphrey thought only of three pounds a week ... three pounds!
I'll put you on the reporting staff, Ferrol remarked. Then he smiled. "We'll see how you get on...." There was a pause. (Three pounds a week! Three pounds a week!)
He looked up as the door opened and saw an extraordinarily virile-looking person come into the room—a man with the face of a refined pugilist, with large square-shaped hands and an expression of impish perkiness in his eyes.
Come in, Rivers, said Ferrol. "This is Mr Quain."
Mr Rivers shook his hand with an air of polite restraint. "Mr Rivers is our News Editor," explained Ferrol, and then to Rivers, "I have engaged Mr Quain for a trial month, Rivers."
Rivers smiled whimsically. "You're not a genius, I hope," he said to Humphrey. The spirit of humour that flashed across Rivers's face, twinkling his eyes and the corners of his mouth and dimpling his cheeks, made Humphrey laugh a negative reply.
That's all right, said Rivers, his face so creased in smiles until his beady eyes threatened to disappear altogether. "The last genius we had," he said, with a nod to Ferrol, "let us down horribly on the Bermondsey murder story."
The telephone bell rang. "I'll see him now," said Ferrol through the telephone, and Humphrey took that as a signal that the interview was ended. Ferrol shook hands with him, and once more he felt himself the target of those steel-grey eyes that held in them the stern remorselessness of strength.
Good-looking young man, said Rivers, as the door closed behind Humphrey. "Hope he'll shape all right."
I hope so, Ferrol echoed.... And he was glad that Rivers had praised Humphrey, for he was pleased with the upright, manly bearing of the lad, the quick intelligence of the face, and he had noticed the frank eyes, the smooth skin and the dark hair that had belonged in the lost years to Margaret.
Humphrey came downstairs and out into the street again walking like one in a dream. His interview with Ferrol had lasted barely five minutes, and in those few minutes the whole course of his future life had been determined. His mind was whirling with the suddenness of it all; whirling and whirling round one thought, the thought of three pounds a week. Round this pivot, as a catharine-wheel spins round its pin, the thing of the greatest import revolved brilliantly, shedding its luminous light far into the dark recesses of the future ... he was on The Day. Fleet Street was at his feet.
In that moment a new Humphrey Quain was born, different from the youth who had walked a little timorously into Ferrol's room; he was no longer a lost cipher in the world, he was a unit in the army that marched forwards, with Progress and To-morrow for their watchwords. He felt, suddenly, a great man—Humphrey Quain of The Day, cocksure, self-confident, with ambitions that appalled him when he thought of them in after years.
What would Beaver say? What would old Worthing say...? And there was his aunt, too.
That man in the silk hat, with the shabby overcoat, was still sitting on the doorstep. As Humphrey passed him, his lips twisted in a haunting ironical smile. Perhaps he knew of Humphrey's thoughts.
He went back to Easterham. After all, Worthing took it very well, and his aunt agreed that three pounds a week certainly showed that he was Getting On, and Beaver, to whom he wrote the glad news, recommended him rooms in Guilford Street, in the house where he was living.
And there followed days of tremendous dreams.
A week later a four-wheeler brought up outside No. 5A Guilford Street, and there, on the doorstep, was Beaver, with his thumbs inkier than ever, waiting to welcome Humphrey to London. The cabman, one of those red-faced, truculent individuals whom a petrol-driven Nemesis has now overtaken and rendered humble, demanded two shillings more than his fare, firstly, because it was obvious that Humphrey came from the country, and secondly, because he had gone by mistake to 550A, which was at the far end of the street.
Why didn't you speak the number plainly, he growled.
They compromised with an extra sixpence, on the condition that the cabman should assist in carrying Humphrey's two trunks into the house, as far as the second-floor landing.
There are your rooms, Beaver said, throwing open the door; "you've got a sitting-room, with a little bed-room at the side. Twelve shillings a week," he said, anxiously. "Not too much, I hope. Breakfasts, one shilling a day." He lowered his voice mysteriously. "Take my tip, Quain, and open the eggs and the window at the same time."
Humphrey laughed. It was jolly to have Beaver in the loneliness of London. This was quite another Beaver, a better-groomed Beaver, with a clean collar, and only one day's stubble on his chin. He made swift calculations—twelve and seven—nineteen, and coals—what of coals?
Coals were a shilling a scuttle. Beaver confided to him that he had a regular system for checking the coal supply. It seems he made an inventory of every lump of coal in every fresh scuttleful. He kept a kind of day-book and ledger system of coal, debiting against the credit supply the lumps that he put on the fire, and balancing his books at night. In this way Mrs Wayzgoose, the landlady, found no opportunity for making extra capital out of the coal business.
You're better off than I am, Beaver said. "I've only got the top room at eight shillings a week—a bed-sitting room. But then, I send ten shillings a week to my sister. It doesn't leave@ very much by the time I've had my meals and paid the rent."
Humphrey begged him to consider the sitting-room as his own, so long as he lived in the house. They began to unpack together, Beaver making exclamations of surprise at the turn of things.
Fancy you being on The Day! he said, pausing with a volume in each hand.
It all happened so quickly. I took your advice. Ferrol seems a wonderful chap.
Oh! I daresay Ferrol's all right ... but The Day's got an awful reputation. They're always sacking somebody.... I'd rather be where I am. They've got to keep firing, you know. New blood, and new ideas. That's what they want.
Humphrey laughed. "I'm not afraid," he said. "Once I get my teeth into the place, they won't shake me off." All the same, it must be confessed that Beaver's words awoke a slight feeling of alarm in his heart. A king might arise who knew not Humphrey, and he might go down with the rest.
We'll put the books on the mantelpiece; I'll have to get a book-shelf to-morrow. Humphrey had brought up a few of his favourites—an odd collection: The Fifth Form at St Dominic's; The Time Machine; An Easy Outline of Evolution; Gulliver's Travels, and Captain Singleton; the poems of Browning and Robert Buchanan, and Carlyle's French Revolution. The pictures they agreed to hang to-morrow. They were only heliogravure prints of the kind that were sold in shilling parts. Watts' "Hope" and "Life and Death," and other popular pictures, together with photographic reproductions of authors, ancient and modern, from The Bookman.
When they had finished, Humphrey surveyed his new home. It looked comfortable enough in the fire-light, with the green curtains drawn over the windows. The furniture was of the heavy mahogany, mid-Victorian fashion, blended with a horsehair sofa and bent-wood arm-chair, that struck a jarring note of ultra-modernity. There was a flat-topped desk in one corner by the fireplace. The mantelpiece was hideous with pink and blue vases that held dried grass and clipped bulrushes. Looking round more carefully, he saw that Moses himself could not have had more bulrushes to screen him than Mrs Wayzgoose had put for the delight of her lodgers. There were bulrushes in the mirror over the sideboard, bulrushes in a gaily-decorated stand whose paint hid its drain-pipe pedigree, bulrushes in another bloated vase on a fretted ebony stand by the window. Who shall explain this extraordinary passion for bulrushes that still holds in its thrall the respectable landladies of England?
I must have them cleared away, said Humphrey.
Beaver smiled. "You just try!" he said meaningly. "Anyhow, you're better off than I am, mine's paper fans."
He rang the bell, and a stout, placid-faced woman appeared at the door. She wore at her neck a large topaz-coloured stone, as large as a saucer, set in a circle of filigree gold, and heavy-looking lumps of gold dangled from her ears. Her hands, with their fingers interlocked, rested on the ends of the shawl that made her appear even more ample than she was.
This is Mr Quain, Mrs Wayzgoose, said Beaver.
Mrs Wayzgoose's face fell apart in her welcoming smile—the smile that her lodgers saw only once. It was a wonderful, carefully-studied smile, beginning with the gradual creasing of the mouth, extending earwards, joyfully, and finally spreading until the nose and the eyes were brought into the scheme.
I hope you find everything you want, Mr Quain, she said.
Everything's very comfortable, Humphrey answered.
Do you take tea or coffee with your breakfasts, Mr Quain?
Humphrey was about to reply coffee, when the guardian Beaver winked enormously at him, and shook his head in a manner that was quite perplexing. He had not a notion of what Beaver was trying to convey—there was evidently something to beware of in the question. Then, he had an inspiration.
What do I take, Beaver? he asked.
Oh, tea—undoubtedly tea, Beaver answered hastily.
Very good. Mrs Wayzgoose turned to go.
Oh! by the way, Mrs Wayzgoose, Humphrey said. "These ... these bulrushes...."
Bulrushes! echoed Mrs Wayzgoose, losing her placidity all of a sudden. There was an icy silence. Beaver seemed to be enjoying it.
Pray, what of my bulrushes? demanded the masterful Mrs Wayzgoose.
Don't you think ... I mean ... wouldn't the room be lighter without them?
Without them? The way she echoed his words, her voice rising in its scale, reminded him of the wolf's replies to Red Riding Hood before making a meal of her. "Are you aware, Mr Quain, that those bulrushes have been there for the last thirty years."
I was not aware of it, but I am not surprised to hear it, Humphrey answered politely.
And that never a complaint has been made about them.
I am surprised to hear that, he murmured.
The last gentleman who had these rooms, continued Mrs Wayzgoose, "he was a gentleman, in spite of being coffee-coloured, was a law student. Mr Hilfi Abbas. He took the rooms because of the bulrushes. Said they reminded him of the Nile. I could let these rooms over and over again to Egyptian gentlemen while these bulrushes are there...." And with that she flounced out of the room in a whirl of skirts, with her ear-rings rocking to the headshakes which punctuated her remarks.
There you are, said Beaver, as the door closed behind her. "What did I tell you?"
Humphrey laughed, and shook his fist at the offending bulrushes. "They'll go somehow, you see."
When all the unpacking was finished, the pipes put in the pipe-rack, the tobacco-jar on the table, and the photographs of his mother, his father and his aunt placed on the mantelpiece, the question of food came uppermost in his mind. Beaver told him that he had accepted an invitation to supper.
I met a chap on a job whom I knew years ago. We were both reporters together in Hull, on a weekly there. I didn't know you'd be coming up this evening or I wouldn't have arranged to go there.
Well, it doesn't matter, said Humphrey. "I can manage for myself. Don't let me upset your arrangements."
Look here, Beaver said suddenly. "Why shouldn't you come with me. It's only cold supper and they won't mind a bit. I'll explain things. Besides," he added, as he noticed Humphrey was hesitating, "Tommy Pride will be one of your new colleagues. He's on The Day. You might be able to pick up a few tips from him."
So Humphrey agreed, and they went up into Holborn. It was Sunday evening and every shop was shut, except an isolated restaurant and a tobacconist here and there. The public-houses alone were wholly open, and their windows radiated brilliance into the night. The East had invaded the West for its Sunday parade, and the streets were a restless procession of young people; sex called to sex without anything more evil in intention than a walk through the streets, a hand-clasp and, perhaps, a kiss in some by-way, and then to part with the memory of a gay adventure that would linger during the dull routine of the week to come, to be forgotten and replaced by another.
Beaver was for taking the "tube" to Shepherd's Bush—it was a new luxury for London then, making people wonder how they could have borne so long with the sulphurous smoke and gloom of the old underground railway—but the movement of the streets fascinated Humphrey, and, though the journey took much longer, they went out by omnibus.
Ah! that ride.... The first ride through London, when Humphrey felt the great buildings all around him, and above him, rising enormously in a long chain that seemed to stretch for miles and miles, below the sky that was copper-tinted with the glare of thousands of lamps. What did London mean to him, then? He found his mind groping forwards and backwards, and this way and that way, puzzling for the secret of the real London that was hidden in the stones of it. He was a little afraid of it all, it seemed so vast and complicated. In Easterham, one knew every one, and to walk the streets was like walking the rooms of one's house—but here no man noticed another, one felt strange and outcast at first, intensely lonely, and minutely insignificant. Idly, as he looked down from this omnibus, at the people as they strolled up and down, he wondered of what they were thinking. Did they ever think at all, these people of the streets—did they ever have moments of meditation when they pondered the why and the wherefore of anything? It seemed so odd to Humphrey, as he thought of it—here was the centre of a great civilization, here were men and women, well and decently dressed, here was London broad and mighty, and yet the minds of those who walked below him were, he felt, narrow and pinched. They might have been living in Easterham for all their lives.
And, now, he felt afraid for the first time, knowing that he could never conquer these people by the path he had chosen. What mattered anything to them, except that it touched the root of their lives? They cared nothing, he knew, for the greatness of things. They talked vaguely of the greatness of Empire, but they never thought about it, nor understood it. They lived in a world of names—the world itself was nothing but a string of names which they had been taught. The very stars above them were just "Stars," and the word meant no more to them: if you had talked to them of infinite worlds beyond worlds, of other planets with suns and moons and stars of their own, they would have winked an eye ... and how, when they could not be conquered with the mightiness of everything about them, could Humphrey Quain hope to conquer them. For he had nothing beyond the desire to conquer them—a desire so strong, smouldering somewhere within him, that it had burnt up almost every other interest; he could think perhaps more deeply than they could, but for the rest, he was limited by lack of great knowledge, lack of everything, except an innate gift of shrewd observation and a power of intuitive reasoning.
Out of the mists of his thoughts, Beaver's voice came to him.
There's the Marble Arch, said Beaver. "What have you been dreaming about? You haven't said a word all the time."
Humphrey laughed. "I was looking at the people," he said. "I always like looking at people."
They went past Hyde Park, with its naked trees showing like skeletons in the moonlight. The night seemed to deepen the spaciousness of the Park, with its shadows and silence; it held all the mystery and beauty of a forest. And later they passed the blue, far-reaching depths of Kensington Gardens, with the scent of trees and the smell of earth after rain coming to them.
It was all new to Humphrey, new and delightful. He promised himself glorious days and nights probing this city to its heart, and listening to the beat of its pulses. Already, for so was he fashioned, he began to note his emotions, and to watch his inner self, and the impressions he was receiving, so that he could write about them. This was the journalist's sense—a sixth sense—which urges its possessor to set down everything he observes, and adds an infinite zest to life, since every experience, every thought, every new feeling, means something to write about. Nor did he think of the things he saw, in the way of the average man. He thought in phrases. It did not content him to feel that a street lamp was merely a lamp. He would ask himself, almost unconsciously, "What does it look like?" and search for a simile. His thoughts ran in metaphors and symbols. They swung into Notting Hill High Street, and here the streets were almost as crowded as those at Holborn, and the lights of the public-houses flared, oases of brilliance in the desert of dark, shuttered shops. And so down the hill to Shepherd's Bush, with its lamps twinkling round the green, and its throng of people—more men and women thinking of nothing at all, and going up and down in herds, like cattle.
The memory of that evening at the Prides remained with Humphrey. It was his first glimpse into the social life, and he saw a home that was wholly delightful. Beaver had not under-estimated the hospitality of the Prides. They gave him a hearty welcome that made him feel at home at once. Tommy Pride met them in the passage, and after the first introductions he led the way to the sitting-room, where Mrs Pride was waiting. She was a woman of forty, buxom and charming. He saw, within a very few minutes, that her admiration of Tommy Pride knew no bounds, that she thought him splendid and flawless—that much he read from the way her brown eyes lit up when she gazed upon him, and the fond smile that marked her lips when she spoke to him.
The sitting-room was not a very large apartment, but it was furnished with unusual taste. There were books set in white enamelled bookcases—books that are permanent on the shelf, and not novels of a moment. There was chintz on the arm-chairs and green curtains hung over the window, and a few original black-and-white drawings and water-colours on the walls, papered in dark blue. The impression that the room gave to the visitor was one of peace and rest.
Humphrey was frankly disappointed in Tommy Pride. He had had a vague notion that everybody connected with a London newspaper was, of necessity, a person of fame. He knew the names of those who signed the articles in The Day, and he imagined he would find himself in the company of the great immortals. Somehow or other it had never crossed his mind that there were patient, toiling men—hundreds of them—who put out their best work day after day, year after year, without any hope of glory or fame, but simply for the necessities of life, as a bricklayer lays bricks—hundreds of men quite unknown outside the bounds of Fleet Street and the inner newspaper world.
Well, Mrs Pride said to him; "so you're going to try your luck in London, Mr Quain?"
Humphrey nodded, and the conversation went into the channels of small talk. Beaver and he amused the Prides with recollections of Easterham and Mr Worthing, and Tommy Pride capped their recollections with some of his own.
When I was on a little local paper once, we had a fellow named Smee, who thought he could write, said Tommy. "The editor was a hard, cruel sort of chap, without any sympathy for the finer side of literature—at least that was what Smee said. He used to sob all round the place, because he wanted to write great throbbing prose instead of borough-council meetings. One day Smee got his chance. The editor was ill, and there was a prisoner to be hanged in the county jail. Smee wrote the effort of his life. It went something in this way:—
'Last Tuesday, under the blue vault of heaven, when the larks were singing their rhapsodies to the roseate dawn, at 8 A.M., like a sudden harbinger of horror, the black flag fluttered above the prison walls, showing that Alfred Trollop, aged forty-two, labourer, had suffered the last penalty of the law—viz., death.'
How's that for descriptive? asked Tommy, smacking his lips. "'Viz., death.' A glorious touch, eh?" He leaned towards Humphrey. "Don't you bother about fine writing, Quain, or you'll break your heart. We keep a stableful of fine writers, and turn 'em loose when we want any high falutin' done."
Don't be so depressing, Tommy, Mrs Pride said. "Never mind what he says, Mr Quain—there's a chance for every one to do his best in Fleet Street."
Dear optimistress, remarked Tommy, linking an arm in hers, "let's see what we have for supper."
They all went into the dining-room, and Humphrey was given the place of honour next to Mrs Pride. Beaver sat opposite, and Tommy was at the head of the table carving the joint of cold roast beef. "I'm a little out of form," he said, whimsically. "This is the first meal I've had at home for a week."
I sometimes wish Tommy were a sub-editor, Mrs Pride confided to Humphrey; "then we should at least have the day to ourselves. But he says he could never sit down at a desk for eight hours a night."
Not me, Tommy interposed, with his mouth full of beef. "If they want to make you a sub-editor, Quain, take several grains of cyanide of potassium rather than yield. You've got some freedom of thought and life as a reporter, but if you're a sub you're chained down with a string of rules. They make you wear a mental uniform."
I thought a sub-editor held a more important position than a reporter, Humphrey said.
So he does, only the reporters don't think so. The paper couldn't get on without the sub-editors. I should love to see The Day printed for just one issue with everything that the reporters wrote untouched. It would have to be a forty-two page paper. Because every reporter thinks his story is the best, and writes as much of it as he can.... I like the subs, they've saved my life over and over again. Next to the Agency men they're the most useful people in the world, eh, Beaver?... Have some beer, Beaver. Pass him the jug, Quain.
Beaver laughed. "It strikes me you people on the regular staff of the papers take yourselves much too seriously. You've all got swelled heads. For the sake of fine phrases you'll lose half the facts. Why don't you all understand that it's simply in the day's work to do your job and forget all about it."
Lord knows, Tommy replied, "but we don't. We get obsessed with our jobs, and dream them, and spend hours taking trouble over them, and we know all the time that when they come cold and chilly at night through the sub's hands, they're lopped about and cut up to fit a space. We may pretend we don't care what happens to our writing, so long as we draw our money, but I think we all do in our secret hearts. We're born that way. The moment a man really doesn't care whether his story is printed or cut to shreds, he's no good in a newspaper office. It means he's lost his enthusiasm."
Tommy's voice fell. He knew well enough that that was the state of affairs to which he had come. All the long, long years of work had left him emotionless. He had exhausted his enthusiasm, and the whole business seemed stale to him. He felt out of place in this new world of newspaperdom, peopled with energetic, hopeful young men who came out of nowhere, and captured at once the prizes which were so hardly won in his day. He felt himself being nudged out of it all, by the pushful enthusiastic army of young men who had marched down on Fleet Street. All round him he saw signs of the coming change—the old penny papers were talking of changing their price to a halfpenny; the older men in journalism were being pensioned off, or dismissed, or "put on space"—which means that they were not paid a regular salary but at so much a column for what they wrote. The spirit of change was working everywhere: some of the solid writers who found that they could not comply with the modern demands of journalism, migrated back to the provinces and became editors or leader-writers on papers in Manchester, Birmingham or Sheffield. And, at the back of all this change, the figure of Ferrol hovered.... Ferrol sweeping irresistibly over the old traditions of Fleet Street.... Ferrol threatening to acquire this paper and that paper, to start weeklies and monthlies, to extend his power even to the provinces, so that everywhere the shadow brooded.
And they would want young men, keen, shrewd young men, and so the day would come when he would fade away from the life of Fleet Street. And then—"Tommy and I are going to retire soon," Mrs Pride said, with a fond glance at her husband, "aren't we, Tommy?"
She means to the workhouse, Beaver, Tommy remarked, with a grin.
We're going to have a cottage in the country, and Tommy's going to write his book.
No, said Beaver, incredulously.
Do you write books, Mr Pride? Humphrey asked.
I? Lord, no! Not now. I once had an idea of writing books. I was just about your age. I believe I've even got the first chapter somewhere. But I've never written it. Whenever the missis and I get very depressed, we cheer ourselves up by talking of that book, and writing it in the country. By the way, do you know that deep down in the heart of every newspaper man there's a longing to write one book, and to live on two pounds a week in the country?
That'll do, Tommy, Mrs Pride interposed. "I won't have you spoil Mr Quain's evening any more. You're making him quite depressed. Don't pay any attention to him, Mr Quain, and have some cheese."
After supper they went back to the sitting-room, and Mrs Pride played to them, and Beaver sang in a shaky bass voice. Humphrey had never heard Beaver sing before. There was something grotesque about the singing. It took Humphrey by surprise. Beaver was the sort of man who, somehow or other, one imagined would sing in a high treble. He sang on and on, right through the portfolio of the "World's Favourite Songs," including "The Anchor's Weighed," "John Peel," "The Heart Bowed Down," and the rest of them. Pride sat in the arm-chair by the fireside, smoking a pipe, and nodding to the old melodies, while Humphrey gravitated to the book-shelves, and looked at some of the books.
He seemed to have left Easterham and his aunt far behind him in dim ages. A new feeling of responsibility came over him, as he sat there thinking of the morrow when his battle with Fleet Street was to begin. The future rested with him alone, and it gave him a delicious thrill of individuality to think of it.
It was as if he had suddenly become merged with some one else within him, who was constantly saying to him: "You are Humphrey Quain.... You are Humphrey Quain. Take charge of yourself now.... I have finished with you." He had an odd sense of not fully knowing this strange new Self with which he was faced. He wondered, too, whether Beaver or Pride had ever passed through the same sensation that was passing through him now. This was the beginning of that introspection when the presence of his Self became dominant in his mind, shaping as something to be looked at and examined and questioned, that was to lead to much bitterness and unhappiness in the years to come.
The evening came to an end, but before they left Pride took Humphrey aside. "Beaver said you might like a few hints," he said. "I don't think I can help you much. I think you know your way about. But there are two important things to remember: Don't be a genius, and don't be a fool. I'll tell you more in the morning."
On the way back to Guilford Street Beaver eulogized Pride. He was one of the best reporters in Fleet Street—one of the safest, Beaver meant. Never let his paper down. Worth his salary on any paper.
I suppose he gets a pretty big salary? Humphrey asked.
Who? Pride—no! I don't think he gets very much. He's not a show man, you see. Of course, dear old Tommy hasn't got a cent to spare. He's got a girl of thirteen at boarding-school, and that takes a good bit of keeping up.
Why was he so discouraging?
Oh! that's his way. He pretends he's a pessimist.
Humphrey went to bed that night full of thoughts of the morning. And in the tumult of his thoughts he wondered how he should avoid becoming as Tommy Pride, with all his thirty years of work as nothing, and all the high ambitions sacrificed to Fleet Street. Was that to be his end too—a reporter for ever, and at the finish of it, nothing but the husks of enthusiasm. He thought of Pride's wistful desire for a cottage in the country and two pounds a week. And he fell asleep while thinking how he was going to find a better end to his work than that.
Humphrey Quain came into the office of The Day with the greatest asset a journalist can possess—enthusiasm. There is no other profession in the world that calls so continually, day after day, for enthusiasm. The bank-clerk may have his slack moment in adding up his figures—indeed the work has become so mechanical to him that he can even think of other things while making his additions; the actor, even, has his lines by heart, and can sometimes go automatically through his part, without the audience noticing he is listless; the barrister may lose his case; the artist may paint one bad picture—it is forgotten in the gallery of good ones; but the reporter must be always alert, always eager, always ready to adapt himself to circumstances and persons, and fail at the peril of his career. In large things and small things it is all alike: the man who goes to report a meeting must do it as eagerly and with as much enthusiasm as the man who journeys to Egypt to interview the Khedive.
And, as Humphrey soon found, every day and every hour there are forces conspiring to kill this eagerness and enthusiasm at the root. Before he had been a week on The Day he began to realize the forces that were up against him. It seemed that there was a deliberate league on the part of the world to stifle his ambitions, and to make things go awry with him. Before he had been a week on The Day he felt that he was being checked and thwarted by people. He was turned from the doorsteps by the footmen and servants of those whom he went to see on some quite trivial matters; or he could never find the man he went forth to seek. He went from private house to office, from office to club, in search of a city magnate one day, and failed in his quest, and, after hours of searching, he came back to The Day empty-handed, and Rivers said brusquely: "You'll have to try again at dinner-time. He's sure to be home at seven. We've got to have him to-night." And so he went again at seven to the man's house, only to find that he was dining out and would not be back until eleven. Whereupon he waited about patiently, and, finally, when he did return home, the city magnate declined to venture any opinion on the subject in question to Humphrey (it was about the Russian loan), and, after all, he came back, late and tired, to the office, to find that, as far as Selsey, the chief sub-editor, was concerned, nobody cared very much about his failure or not.
And, in the morning, his struggles and troubles and the difficulty of yesterday was quite forgotten, and Rivers never even mentioned the matter to him. But if The Sentinel, or any other paper, had chanced to find the city magnate in a more relenting mood, and had squeezed an interview out of him...!
He was given cuttings from other papers, pasted on slips of paper, and told to inquire into them. They led him nowhere. There would be, perhaps, an interview with some well-known person of European interest visiting London, but the printed interview never said where the well-known person was to be found. And so this meant a weary round of hotels, and endless telephone calls, until the hours passed, and Humphrey discovered that the man had left London the night before. Even though that was no fault of his own, he could not eliminate the sense of failure from his mind.
And once, Rivers had told him to go and see Cartwright's, the coal-merchants, in Mark Lane, and get from them some facts about the rise in the price of coal. And he had been shown into the office, and Cartwright had talked swiftly, hurling technical facts and figures at him, as though he had been in the coal business all his life. So that when the interview was ended, Humphrey reeled out of the office, his mind and memory a tangle of half-understood facts, and wholly incapable of writing anything on the matter. Fortunately, when he got back, he found that other reporters had been seeing coal-merchants, and all that was wanted was just three lines from each—an expression of opinion as to whether the high price would last—and Humphrey rescued from the tangle of talk Cartwright's firm belief that the rise was only temporary.
Another day he had been sent to interview a Bishop—an authority on dogma, whose views were to be asked on a startling proposition (from America) of bringing the Bible up-to-date. The Bishop received Humphrey coldly in the hall of his house, and Humphrey noticed that the halls were hung with many texts reflecting Christian sentiments of love and hope and brotherhood. And the Bishop, unmoved by Humphrey's rather forlorn appearance, for somehow he quailed before the austere gaitered personage, curtly told him that he could not discuss the matter.
When Humphrey came back it so happened that he met Neckinger. "Well, what are you doing to-day, Quain?" asked Neckinger with an indulgent smile. He was a short, thick-set man, with a pear-shaped face, and brown eyes that held a quizzical look in them. It was the second time Humphrey had come into touch with Neckinger, who was the editor of The Day, and rarely ventured from his room when he came to the office. Humphrey told him where he had been, and with what results.
Wouldn't he talk? asked Neckinger.
No, Humphrey answered.
Neckinger paused with his hand on the door knob. His eyes twinkled, and his fingers caressed his moustache. "Why didn't you make him talk?" asked Neckinger with a hint of disapproval in his voice. Then, without waiting for a reply, he went into his room.
Humphrey felt that he was faced with a new problem in life. How did one make people talk? It was not enough to hunt your quarry to his lair—that was the easiest part of the business—you had to compel him to disgorge words—any words—so be they made coherent sentences. You had to come back and say that he had spoken, and write down what he said at your discretion. And if he would not speak, you had, in some mysterious manner, to force the words from his mouth. That was what puzzled Humphrey in the beginning. What was the magic key that the other reporters had to unlock the conversation of those whom they went to see? They very seldom failed. Humphrey went home, perplexed, disturbed with this added burden on his shoulders. He saw his life as one long effort at making unwilling people talk for publication.
And yet, on the whole, this first week of his in Fleet Street was one of glorious happiness. The romance of the place gripped him at once, and held him a willing captive. He loved the thrill of pride that came to him, whenever he passed through the swing doors in the morning, and the commissionaire, superior person of impregnable dignity, condescended to nod to him. He loved the reporters' room, with its fire and the grate, and the half circle of chairs drawn round it, where there were always two or three of the other men sitting, and talking wonderful things about the secrets of their work.
In reality, the reporters' room was the most prosaic room in the whole building. It was a broad, bare room, excessively utilitarian in appearance. There was nothing superfluous or ornamental in it. Everything within its four walls was set there for a distinct purpose. The large high windows were uncurtained so as to admit the full light of day. And when the full light of day shone, it showed an incredibly untidy room, with every desk littered with writing-paper, and newspapers, and even the floor thick with a slipshod carpet of printed matter. The desks were placed against the walls and round the room. Humphrey had no desk of his own. He usually came in and sat at whichever desk was empty, and more often than not the rightful owner of the desk would arrive, and Humphrey would mumble apologies, gather up his papers, and depart to the next desk. In this way he sometimes made a whole tour of the room, shifting from desk to desk.
There were pegs near the door, and from one of them a disreputable umbrella dangled by its crook handle. It was pale-brown with dust, and its ribs were bent and broken, and rents showed in the covering—as an umbrella its use had long since gone, yet it still hung there. Nobody knew to whom it belonged. Nobody threw it away—it was a respected survival of some ancient day. It remained for ever, an umbrella that had once done good and faithful work, now useless and dusty, with its gaping holes and twisted framework—perhaps, as a symbol.
A telephone, a bell that rang in the commissionaire's box and told him the reporter needed a messenger-boy, and a pot of paste completed the furniture of the reporters' room. They had all they needed, and if they wished for anything they could ring for it—that was the attitude of the managerial side who were responsible for office luxuries. The manager, by the way, had a room that was, by comparison, a temple of luxury, from its soft-shaded electric lights and green wall-paper (the reporters' walls were distempered) to its wondrous carpet, and mahogany desk. Nobody seemed to care very much for the reporters, Humphrey found, except when one of them—or all of them—saved the paper from being beaten by its rivals, or caused the paper to beat its rivals. But in the ordinary course of events, the manager ignored the reporters; the sub-editors, in their hearts, regarded them as loafers and pitied their grammar and inaccuracy for official titles and initials of leading men; Neckinger never bothered much about them unless there was trouble in the air, while those distant people, the leader-writers, sometimes looked at them curiously, as one regards strange types. And yet, the reporters were the friendliest and most human of all those in the office. They came daily into contact with life in all its forms, and it knocked the rough edges off them. They were generous, large-hearted men, whose loyalty to their paper had no limits. They lived together, herded in their big bare room, chafing always against their slavery, and yet loving their bondage, unmoved at the strange phases of life that passed through their hands; surveying, as spectators regard a stage-play, the murders, the humours, the achievements, the tragedies, and the sorrow and laughter of nations.
In those days the interior of the grey building was an unexplored mystery for Humphrey. He passed along the corridors by half-opened doors which gave a tantalizing glimpse into the rooms beyond where men sat writing. There were the sporting rooms, where the sporting editor and his staff worked at things quite apart from the reporters. Nothing seemed to matter to them: the greatest upheavals left their room undisturbed; football, cricket, racing, coursing and the giving of tips were their main interests, and though a king died or war was declared, they still held their own page, the full seven columns of it, so that they could chronicle the sport and the pleasure. The sporting men and the reporters seldom mingled in the office; sometimes Lake, the sporting editor, nodded to those he knew coming up the stairs. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with a heavy face, and the appearance of a clubman and a man of the world.
Close to the sporting room was a strange room lit with an extraordinarily luminous pale blue glare. Humphrey satisfying his curiosity prowled about the building one evening, and ventured to the door. The men who were there did not question his presence. They just looked at him and went on with their work. One of them, in his shirt-sleeves and a black apron, was holding a black square of glass to the light, from which something shining was dripping. A pungent smell of iodoform filled Humphrey's nostrils. He knew the smell; it was intimately associated with the recollections of his youth, when he had dabbled in photography with a low-priced camera, using the cistern-room at the top of the house as a dark-room. And he saw that another man was manipulating an enormous camera, that moved along a grooved base. This, he knew, was an enlarging apparatus, and he realized that here they were making the blocks for The Day—transferring a drawing or a photograph to copper or zinc plates.
There was something real and vital about this office where each day was active with a different activity from the day before; where each room was a mirror of life itself.
Next door to the room where the blue light vibrated and flared intensely, he found a smaller room, where two men sat, also in their shirt-sleeves, tap-tapping at telegraph transmitters. A cigarette dangled loosely from the lip of each man, and neither of them glanced at the work of his fingers. They looked always at the printed proof, or the written copy held in a clip before them. This was the provincial wire room. They were tapping a selection of the news, letter by letter, to Birmingham, where The Day had an office of its own. Humphrey noticed with a queer thrill that one of the men was sending through something that he himself had written.
Downstairs, in a long room, longer than the reporters' room, and just as utilitarian, the sub-editors sat at two broad tables forming the letter T. Mr Selsey, the chief sub-editor, sat in the very centre of the top of the T, surrounded by baskets, and proofs, and telephones, and, at about seven o'clock every evening, his dinner. He was a gentle-mannered man, whose face told the time as clearly as a clock. From six to eight it was cheerful; when he began to frown it was nine o'clock; when he grew restless and spoke brusquely it was eleven; and when his hair was dishevelled and his eyes became anxious it was eleven-thirty, and the struggle of pruning down and rejecting the masses of copy that passed through his hands was at its climax. At one o'clock he was normal again, and became gentle over a cup of cocoa.
Humphrey was never certain whether Mr Selsey approved of him or not. He had to go through the ordeal every evening of bringing that which he had written to him, and to stand by while it was read. It reminded him of his school-days, when he used to bring his exercise-book up to the schoolmaster. Selsey seldom made any comment—he read it, marked it with a capital letter indicating whether its fate would be three lines, a paragraph, or its full length, and tossed it into a basket, whence it would be rescued by one of the sub-editors, who saw that the paragraphs, the punctuation and the sense of it were right, cut out whole sentences if it were necessary to compress it, and added a heading to it. Then, it was taken back to Selsey, who glanced at it quickly, and threw it into another basket, whence it was removed by a boy and shot through a pneumatic tube to the composing-room.
The sub-editors' room was the heart of the organism of The Day between the hours of six in the evening and one the next morning. It throbbed with persistent business. The tape machines clicked out the news of the world in long strips, and boys stood by them, cutting up the slips into convenient sizes, and pasting them on paper.
The telephone bells rang, and every night at nine-thirty, Westgate, the leather-lunged sub-editor, disappeared into a telephone-box with a glass door. Humphrey saw him one night when he happened to be in the room. He looked like a man about to be electrocuted, with a band over the top of his skull, ending in two receivers that fitted closely over his ears. His hands were free so that he could write, and through the glass Humphrey watched his mouth working violently until his face was wet with perspiration. He was shouting through a mouthpiece, and his words were carried under the sea to Paris, though no one in the sub-editors' room could hear them, since the telephone-box was padded and noise-proof.
And Humphrey could see his pencil moving swiftly over the paper, with an occasional pause, as his mouth opened widely to articulate a question, and again he felt that delightful and mighty sensation of being in touch with the bones of life, as he realized that somewhere, far away in Paris, the correspondent of The Day, invisible but audible, was hailing the sub-editors' room across space and time.
He saw no longer the strained, taut face of Westgate, his unkempt moustache bobbing up and down with the movement of his upper lip, the big vein down his forehead bulging like a thick piece of string with his perspiring exertions. He saw a miracle, and it filled his heart with a strange exultation. He wanted to say to Selsey, "Isn't that splendid!"
Six other men sat at the long table that ran at right angles to the top table, and Selsey was flanked by Westgate, who dealt with Paris, and Tothill, who did the police-court news,—the stub of a cigarette stuck on his lower lip as though it were some strange growth. These men, in the first few days of Humphrey's life in the office of The Day, were incomprehensible people to him. He could not understand why they should elect, out of all the work in the world, to sit down at a table from six until one; to leave their homes—he assumed that they were comfortable—their firesides and their wives. They did not meet life as the reporters did; they had none of the glamour and the adventure of it, the work seemed to him to be unutterably stale and destructive. One or two of them wore green shades over their eyes to protect them from the glare of white paper under electric light. And the green shades gave their faces an appearance of pallor. They looked at him curiously whenever he came into the room: he divined at once, rightly or wrongly, that their interests clashed with his. They were one of their forces which he knew he would have to fight.
The remembrance of Tommy Pride's words echoed in his ears as he stood by Selsey's table.
Yet this room held him spell-bound as none other did. It was the main artery through which the life-blood of The Day flowed. He saw the boys ripping open the russet-coloured envelopes that disgorged telegrams from islands and continents afar off; he saw them sorting out stacks of tissue paper covered with writing, "flimsy"—manifolded copy—from all the people who lived by recording the happenings of the moment—men like Beaver, who were lost if people did not do things—the stories of people who brought law-suits, who were born, married, divorced; who went bankrupt; who died; who left wills; stories of actors who played parts; of books that were written; of men who made speeches; of banquets; of funerals—the little, grubby boys were handling the epitome of existence, and this great volume of throbbing life was merely paper with words scrawled over it to them.... It was only in after years that Humphrey himself perceived the significance and the meaning of the emotions which swelled within him during those early days. At the time, as he glanced left and right, down the long table, where the sub-editors bent their heads to their work, and he saw this man dealing with the city news, making out lists of the prices of stocks and shares, and that man handling the doings of Parliament, something moved him inwardly to smile with a great, unbounded pride. He was like a recruit who has been blooded. "I, too, am part of this," he thought. "And this is part of me."
Yet another glimpse he had into the mysteries of the grey building, and then he marvelled, not that the small things he wrote were cut down, but that they ever got into print at all.
It was one night when he had been sent out on a late inquiry. A "runner"—one of those tattered men, who run panting into newspaper offices at night with news of accidents or fires—had brought in some story of an omnibus wreck in Whitehall. Humphrey was given a crumpled piece of paper, with wretchedly scrawled details on it, and told to go forth and investigate. Had he not been so new to the game, he would have known that it was wise to telephone to Charing Cross or Westminster hospitals, for the deductive mind of a reporter used to such things would have told him that where there is an omnibus wreck, there must be injury to life and limb, and the nearest hospitals would be able to verify the bald fact of an accident. But there was nobody who had sufficient leisure or inclination to teach Humphrey his business, and, perhaps it was all the better for him that he should buy his lessons with experience. For he found that "runners'" tales, though they must be investigated, seldom pay for the investigation. The "runner" exaggerates manfully for the sake of his half-crown. Thus, when he arrived at Whitehall, he found, by the simple expedient of asking the policeman on point duty, that there had been an accident—most decidedly there had been an accident; one wheel had come off an omnibus. When? "Oh, about three hours ago, but nobody was hurt as I know on. You can go back and tell 'em there's nothing in it for the noosepaper."
Humphrey had never said that he was a reporter: how did the policeman know? He was a good-natured, red-faced man, and his attitude towards Humphrey was one of easy-going familiarity and gentle tolerance. He spoke kindly as equal to equal; it might almost be said that, from his great height, he bent down, as it were, to meet Humphrey, with the air of a patron conferring benefits. He was not like the Easterham policemen who touched their hats to Humphrey, and called him "sir," because they knew whenever anything happened, the Gazette would refer to the plucky action of P.C. Coles, who was on point duty at the time.
Nobody hurt at all! Humphrey repeated, looking vaguely round in the darkness, as though he expected to see the wooden streets of Whitehall littered with bleeding corpses to give the constable the lie.
You go 'ome, said the policeman, kindly. "I should be the first to know of anything like that if it was serious. I'd have to put in my report. I ain't got no mention of no one injured seriously."
He said it with an air of finality, as though he were taking upon himself the credit of having saved life and limb by not using his notebook. And with that, he eased the chin-strap of his helmet with his forefinger, nodded smilingly, repeated, "You go 'ome," and padded riverwards in his rubber-soled boots.
When Humphrey got back to the office and into the sub-editors' room to tell his news, he found that their work was slackening. Two or three of them were hard at it, but the rest were having their supper. A tall, spidery-looking man, with neatly parted fair hair and a singularly high forehead, was tossing for pennies with Westgate—and winning. It was midnight. One of the sub-editors said to Humphrey:
You'd better tell Selsey; he's in the composing-room. Humphrey hesitated.
It's across the corridor, his informant added.
He went across the corridor, and into a new world. The room was alive with noise; row upon row the aproned linotype operators sat before the key-boards translating the written words of the "copy" before them into leaden letters. Their machines were almost human. They touched the keys, as if they were typewriting, and little brass letters slipped down into a line, and then mechanically an iron hand gripped the line, plunged it into a box of molten lead, and lifted it out again with a solid line of lead cast from the mould, while the little brass letters were hoisted upwards and distributed automatically into their places, and all the time the same business was being repeated again and again. The lines of type were set up in columns, seven of them to a page, and locked in an iron frame, and then they were taken to an inner room, where men pressed papier maché over the pages of type, so that every letter was moulded clearly on this substance. Then this "flong" was placed in a curved receptacle, and boiling lead was poured upon it, as on a mould, so that one had the page curved to fit the cylinder of the printing machine. The curved sheet went through various phases of trimming and making ready, until it was finally taken to the basement.... Very many brains were working together that the words written by Humphrey should be repeated hundreds and thousands of times. All these men were part of the mighty scheme. They had their homes and their separate lives outside the big building, but here they were all merged into one disciplined body, for so many hours at night, carrying on the work which the men on the other side did during the day.
In one corner of the room Selsey was busy with Hargreave, the assistant night editor, and as Humphrey went up he saw that they were still cutting out things from printed proofs, and altering headings. And on an iron-topped table great squares of type rested—the forms just as he had seen them in the Easterham Gazette office—only they were bigger, and the "furniture"—the odd wedge-shaped pieces of wood which they used in Easterham to lock the type firmly in between the frames, was abandoned for a simpler contrivance in iron. And there were Selsey and Hargreave peering at the first pages of The Day in solid type, reading it from right to left, as one reads Hebrew, and suddenly Hargreave would say: "Well we'd better take out the last ten lines of that, and shift this half-way down the column, and put this Reuter message at the top with a splash heading," or else, putting a finger on a square of type, "take that out altogether, that'll give us room." And he would glance up at the clock, with the anxiety of a man who knows there are trains to catch.
No question of writing here.... No time for sentiment.... No time to think, "Poor devil, those ten lines cost, perhaps, hours of work," or, "Those ten lines were thought by their writer to be literature." Literature be hanged! It was only cold type, leaden letters squeezed into square frames—leaden letters that will be melted down on the morrow—type, and the whole paper to be printed, and trains for the delivery carts to catch, if people would have papers before breakfast. And the aproned men brought other squares of type, and printed rough impressions of them, so that Humphrey caught a glimpse of one of the pages at shortly after midnight of a paper that would be new to people at eight o'clock the next morning. He felt the pride of a privileged person.
Selsey caught sight of him. "Hullo, Quain ... what are you doing here?"
Bus accident— began Humphrey.
Hargreave pounced upon him. "Any good? Is it worth a contents bill?" he asked, excitedly.
There hasn't been any accident worth speaking of. No one hurt, I mean.
All right. Let it go, said Selsey, calmly. Hargreave went away to haggle with the foreman over something. Nobody was relieved to hear that the accident had not been serious.
Humphrey lingered a little longer: he saw rooms leading out of the composing-room, where there was a noise of hammering on metal, and the smell of molten lead, ... and men running to and fro in aprons, taking surreptitious pinches of snuff, banging with mallets, carrying squares of type, proofs, battered tins of tea, ... running to and fro, terribly serious and earnest, just as scene-shifters in the theatre rush and bustle and carry things that the audience never sees, when the curtain hides the stage.
Better get home, said Selsey, noticing him again.
Humphrey went downstairs. The reporters' room was empty; the fire was low in the grate. He went downstairs, and as he reached the bottom step, the grey building shivered and trembled as if in agony, and there came up from the very roots of its being a deep roar, at first irregular, and menacing, but gradually settling down to a steady, rhythmical beat, like the throbbing of thousands of human hearts.
The man whom Humphrey feared most, in those early days, was Rivers, the news-editor. His personality was a riddle. You were never certain when you were summoned to his room in the morning, whether good or ill would result from it. In his hands lay the ordering of your day. You had no more control over your liberty from the time you came into Rivers' room than a prisoner serving his sentence,—no longer a man with a soul, but a reporter. You could be raised into the highest heaven or dropped down to the deepest hell by the wish of Rivers. He could bid you go forth—and you would have to tramp wretchedly the streets of the most unlovely spots in outer London in an interminable search for some elusive news: or perhaps you would be given five pounds for expenses and told to catch the next train for a far county, and spend the day among the hedgerows of the country-side. He had power absolute, like the taskmasters of old.
He sat in his room, with the map of England on the wall with its red flags marking the towns where The Day had correspondents, surrounded by telephones and cuttings from papers. He was in the office all day and night. At least that was how it appeared to Humphrey, who met him often and at all times on the stairs. When he was not, by any chance, there, his place was taken by O'Brien, an excitable Irishman, whose tie worked itself gradually up his collar, marking the time when his excitement was at fever-heat like a barometer.
Rivers had a home, of course, and a wife and a family. He was domesticated somewhere out in Herne Hill, from the hours of eight until ten-thirty in the morning; and except once a week no more was seen of him at home. O'Brien generally took the desk on Sundays. But for the rest of his life Rivers lived and breathed with The Day more than any one else. From the time the door closed on him after breakfast, to the time when it closed on him late at night, when he went home, worn-out and tired, he worked for The Day. He was bought as surely as any slave was bought in the days of bondage. And his price was a magnificent one of four figures.
He expected his men to do as he did, in the service of the paper. For his goodwill, nothing sufficed but the complete subservience of all other interests to the work of The Day. Not until you did that, were you worthy to be on the paper and serve him.... And many hearts were broken in that room, with its hopeless gospel of materialism, where ideals were withered and nothing spiritual could survive.
Rivers was one of the young men who had won himself to power by the brute force of his intellect. He knew his own business to the tips of his fingers, and, beyond that, nothing mattered. Art and literature and the finer qualities of life could not enter into the practical range of his vision. They were not news. The great halfpenny public cared for nothing but news—a murder mystery, for choice; and the only chance art or literature had of awaking his interest was for the artist to commit suicide in extraordinary circumstances, or for the novelist to murder his publisher. ("By George!" I can hear Rivers saying, "here's a ripping story.... Here's an author murdered his publisher ... 'm ... 'm ... I suppose it's justifiable homicide.")
But on news—red-hot news—he was splendid. He might be sitting in his chair, joking idly with anybody who happened to be in the room, and suddenly the boy would bring in a slip from the tape machine: a submarine wreck! Immediately, the listless, joking man would become swiftly serious and grim. He would decide instantly on the choice of reporters—two should be sent to the scene. "Boy, bring the A.B.C. No train. Damn it, why didn't that kid bring the news in at once. He dawdled five minutes. We could have caught the 3.42. Well, look up the trains to Southampton. Four o'clock. O'Brien, telephone up Southampton and tell them to have a car to take The Day reporters on. Boy, ask Mr Wratten and Mr Pride to come up. O'Brien, send a wire to the local chaps—tell 'em to weigh in all they can. Notify the post-office five thousand words from Portsmouth. Too late for photographs to-night—ring through to the artists, we'll have a diagram and a map. Off Southsea, eh? Shove in a picture of Southsea...." And in an hour it would all be over, and Rivers, a new man with news stirring in the world, would playfully punch O'Brien in the chest, and gather about him a reporter or two for company, and bestow wonderful largesse in the shape of steaks and champagne. That was the human thing about Rivers. He was master absolute, and yet there was no sharp dividing line between him and the men under him. The discipline was there, but it was never obtruded. They drank, and joked, and scored off each other, and Rivers, when things were slack, would tell them some of his early adventures, but whenever it came to the test, his authority in his sphere was supreme. He knew how to get the best work out of his men; and, I think, sometimes, he was sorry for the men who had not, and never would get, a salary of four figures.
Humphrey could not understand him. At times he would be brutally cruel, and morose, scarcely speaking a word to anybody except Wratten, who was generally in his good books; at other times he would come to the office as light-hearted as a child, and urge them all into good-humour, and make them feel that there was no life in the world equal to theirs. Since that day when Humphrey had first met him in Ferrol's room, and he had laughed and said, "You're not a genius, are you?" Rivers had not taken any particular notice of him. When he came into Rivers' room, halting and nervous, he envied the easy freedom of the other reporters who chanced to be there. Wratten sitting on a table, dangling his legs, and Tommy Pride, with his hat on the back of his head, and a pipe in his mouth, while a third man might be looking over the diary of the day's events.
Hullo, Quain....
Good-morning, Mr Rivers.
O'Brien, what have you got for Quain. Eh? Nothing yet. Go downstairs and wait.
Or else: "Nothing doing this morning. You'd better do this lecture at seven o'clock. Give him the ticket, O'Brien."
And, as Humphrey left the room, he heard Wratten say casually, "I'll do that Guildhall luncheon to-day, Rivers, eh?" And Rivers replied, "Right-O. We shall want a column."
Splendid Wratten, he thought! How long would it be before he acquired such ease, such sure familiarity—how long before he should prove himself worthy to dangle his legs freely in the presence of Rivers.
Within a few days something happened that made Humphrey the celebrity of a day in the reporters' room. It was a fluke, a happy chance, as most of the good things in life are. A man had killed himself in a London street under most peculiar circumstances. He had dressed himself in woman's clothes, and only, after death, when they took him to the hospital, did they find that the dead body was that of a man. He was employed in a solicitor's office near Charing Cross Road. His name was Bellowes, and he was married, and lived at Surbiton. These facts were published briefly in the afternoon papers. Rivers, scenting a mystery, threw his interest into the story. There is nothing like a mystery for selling the paper. He sent for Willoughby.
Humphrey had found Willoughby one of the most astonishing individuals of the reporters' room. He was a tall, slim man, with a hollow-cheeked face and a forehead that was always frowning. His hair fell in disorder almost over his eyebrows, and whenever he wrote he pulled his hair about with his left hand, and mumbled the sentences as he wrote them. His speciality was crime: he knew more of the dark underside of human nature than any one Humphrey had met. He knew the intimate byways of crime, and its motives; every detective in the Criminal Investigation Department was his friend, and though by the rigid law of Scotland Yard they were forbidden to give information, he could chat with them, make his own deductions as well as any detective, and sometimes accompany them when an arrest was expected. He drew his information from unknown sources, and he was always bringing the exclusive news of some crime or other to The Day.
He was a bundle of nerves, for he lived always in a world of expectancy. At any moment, any hour, day and night, something would be brought to light. Murder and sudden death and mystery formed the horizon of his thoughts.
Humphrey had found a friend in Willoughby. In very contrast to the work in which he was engaged, he kept the room alive with merriment. He could relate stories as well as he could write them, and he spoke always with the set phrases of old-time journalism that had a ludicrous effect on his listeners. His character was a strange mixture of shrewdness, worldly-wisdom, and ingenuousness, and this was reflected in the books he carried always with him. In one pocket there would be an untranslatable French novel, and, in the other, by way of counterblast, a Meredith or a Stevenson. He and Humphrey had often talked about books, and Willoughby showed the temperament of a cultured scholar and a philosopher when he discussed literature.
Willoughby went up to Rivers' room.
Here you are, my son, said Rivers, tossing him over the cuttings on the affair of the strange suicide. "Get down to Surbiton and see if you can nose out anything. I'll get some one else to look after the London end."
The some one else chanced to be Humphrey, for there was nobody but him left in the reporters' room. Thus it came about that, a few minutes after Willoughby had set out for Surbiton, Humphrey came out on Fleet Street with instructions to look after the "London end" of the tragedy.
Rivers' parting words were ringing in his ears. They had a sinister meaning in them. "... And don't you fall down, young man," he had said, using the vivid journalistic metaphor for failure.
The busy people of the street surged about him, as he stood still for a moment trying to think where he should begin on the London end. He felt extraordinarily inexperienced and helpless.... He thought how Wratten would have known at once where to go, or how easily Tommy Pride, with his years of training, could do the job. He did not dare ask Rivers to teach him his business—he had enough common sense to know that, at any cost, his ignorance must be hidden under a mask of wisdom.
The reporter thrust suddenly face to face with a mystery that must be unravelled in a few hours is a fit subject for tragedy. He is a social outlaw. He has not the authority of the detective, and none of the secret information of a department at his hand. He is a trespasser in private places, a Peeping Tom, with his eye to a chink in the shuttered lives of others. His inner self wrenches both ways; he loathes and loves his duty. The human man in him says, "This is a shocking tragedy!" The journalist subconsciously murmurs, "This will be a column at least." Tears, and broken hearts, and the dismal tragedy of it all pass like a picture before him, and leave him unmoved.
The public stones him for obeying their desires. He would gladly give up all this sorry business ... and perhaps his salvation lies in his own hand if he becomes sufficiently strong and bold to cry "Enough!"
And this is the tragedy of it—he is neither strong nor bold; and so we may appreciate the picture of Humphrey Quain faced for the first time with the crisis that comes into every journalist's life, when his work revolts his finer senses.
He went blindly up the street, and newsboys ran towards him with raucous shouts, offering the latest news of the suicide. He bought a copy, and read through the story. It occurred to him that the best thing he could do was to go to the offices near Charing Cross Road, where the dead man had worked.
He took an omnibus. It was five o'clock in the evening, and most of the passengers were City men going home. Lucky people—their work was finished, and his was not yet begun.
When he came to the building he wanted, he paused outside. It was a ghastly business. What on earth should he say? What right had he to go and ask questions—there would be an inquest. Surely the public could wait till then for the sordid story. It was ghoulish.
He went into the office and asked the young man at the counter whether Mr Parfitt (the name of the partner) was in. The young man must have guessed his business in a moment. Humphrey felt as if he had a placard hanging round his neck, "I am a newspaper man." "No," snapped the young man, curtly, "he's out."
When will he be back? asked Humphrey.
I don't know, the young man answered, obstinately. "Who are you from?" That was a form of insult reserved for special occasions: it implied, you see, that the caller was obviously not of such appearance as to suggest that he was anything but a paid servant.
Humphrey said: "I wanted to talk about this sad tragedy of—"
The young man looked him up and down, and said, "We've nothing to say."
But— began Humphrey.
We've nothing to say. The young man's lips closed tightly together with a grimace of absolute finality. Humphrey hesitated: he knew that the whole mystery lay within the knowledge of this spiteful person, if only he could be overcome.
Look here, said the young man, threateningly. "Why don't you damn reporters mind your own business. You're the seventh we've 'ad up 'ere. We've nothing to say. See?" His voice rose to a shriller key. He was a very unpleasant young man, but fortunately he dropped his "h's," which modified, in some strange way, in Humphrey's mind the effect of his onslaught. The young man who had at first seemed somebody of importance, faded away now merely to an underbred nonentity. Humphrey laughed at him.
You might keep your h's if you can't keep your temper, he said.
Then he left the office, feeling sorry for himself. It was nearly six o'clock, and he was no further. A hall-porter sat reading a paper in front of the fireplace. Humphrey tried diplomacy. He remarked on the tragedy: the hall-porter agreed it was very tragic. There had been seven other reporters before him (marvellous how policemen and hall-porters seemed to know him at once). Humphrey felt in his pocket for half-a-crown and slipped it into the porter's hand. The porter thanked him with genuine gratitude.
Well, said Humphrey, "what sort of a chap was this Mr Bellowes?"
Can't say as how I ever saw him, said the porter; "this is my first day here."
O lord! groaned Humphrey.
He was in the street again, pondering what he should do. And suddenly that intuitive reasoning power of his began to work. A man who worked in the neighbourhood would conceivably be known to the shopkeepers round about. He visited the shops adjoining the building where the dead man worked, but none of them yielded any information, not even the pawnbrokers. The men whom he asked seemed quite willing to help, but they knew nothing. Finally, he went into the Green Lion public-house which stands at the corner by a court.
Hitherto public-houses had not interested him very much: he went into them rarely, because in Easterham, where every one's doings were noted, it was considered the first step downwards to be seen going into a public-house. Thus, he had grown up without acquiring the habit of promiscuous drinking.
There were a good many people in the bar, and the briskness of business was marked by the frequent pinging noise of the bell in the patent cash till, as a particularly plain-looking young woman pulled the drawer open to drop money in. Humphrey asked for bottled beer. "Cannock's?" the barmaid asked. "Please." She gave him the drink. He said "Thank you." She said "Thank you." She gave him the change, and said "Thank you" again. Whereupon, in accordance with our polite custom, he murmured a final "'Kyou." Then she went away with an airy greeting to some fresh customer.
Presently she came back to where Humphrey was standing. He plunged boldly.
Sad business this of Mr Bellowes? he ventured, taking a gulp at his beer. She raised her eyebrows in inquiry.
Haven't you read about— he held a crumpled evening paper in his hand. "The tragedy, I mean."
Oh yes, she said. "Very sad, isn't it?"
A man came between them. "'Ullo, Polly, lovely weather, don't it?" he said, cheerfully, counting out six coppers, and making them into a neat pile on the table. "Same as usual."
Now then, Mister Smart! said Polly, facetiously, bringing him a glass of whisky. "All the soda."
Up to the pretty, please, he said, adding "Whoa-er" as the soda-water bubbled to the level of the fluted decorations round the glass. Small talk followed, frequently interrupted by fresh arrivals. A quarter of an hour passed. The cheerful man had one more drink, and finally departed, with Polly admonishing him to "Be good," to which he replied, "I always am." Humphrey ordered another Cannock.
Did he often come here?
Who? asked Polly. "Mr Jobling—the man who's gone out?"
No. I mean Mr Bellowes.
I'm sure I don't know, she said a little distantly. "Those gentlemen over there"—nodding to a corner of the bar where two men stood in the shadows—"can tell you all about him. They were telling me something about him just before you came in. Fourpence, please."
Humphrey took with him his glass of beer, and went to the two men. They were both drinking whisky, and they seemed to be in a good humour. They turned at Humphrey's wavering "Excuse me...."
Eh? said one of the men.
Excuse me... Humphrey repeated. "I'm told you knew Mr Bellowes."
Well, said the other man, a little truculently. "What if we did?"
It seemed to Humphrey that the most absolute frankness was desirable here.
Look here, he said, "I wish you'd help me by telling me something about him. Here's my card.... I'm on The Day."
The younger of the two men smiled, and winked. "You've got a nerve," he said. "Why, you couldn't print it if we told you."
Couldn't I? Well, never mind. Let's have a drink on it anyway.
Humphrey began his third Cannock, and the others drank whisky. One of them, in drinking, spilt a good deal of the liquor over his coat lapel, and did not bother to wipe it off: he was slightly drunk.
It's bringing a bad reputation on the firm, said the elder man. "Name in all the papers."
Humphrey was seized with an idea. He knew now that the whole secret of the mystery was within his grasp. One of the men, at least, was from the solicitor's office. The instinct of the journalist made him courageous: he would never leave the bar until he got the story.
I'll tell you what, he said, "I'll promise to keep the name of the firm out of The Day; I'll just refer to it as a firm of solicitors!"
That's not a bad notion, said the younger man. He drew the elder man aside and they talked quietly for a few minutes. Then more drinks were ordered. Humphrey tackled his fourth Cannock. His head was just beginning to ache.
A tantalizing half-hour passed. The younger man seemed more friendly to Humphrey—he had some friends in Fleet Street; did Humphrey know them, and so on. The elder man was growing more drunk. He swayed a little now. Humphrey's ears buzzed, and his vision was not so acute. The outlines of people were blurred and indistinct. "Good lord," he murmured to himself, "I'm getting drunk too." He was pleasantly happy, and smiled into his sixth glass of beer. He confided to the elder man that he admired him for his constancy to the dead man, and they began to talk over the bad business as friends. The elder man even called him "Ol' chap." They really were very affectionate.
But WHY did he do it? said Humphrey; "that's what beats me."
Oh, well, you see he was in love with this girl ...
Which girl?
Why, Miss Sycamore ... you know the little girl that sings, 'Come Round and See Me in the Evening,' in the Pompadour Girl.
No. Was he?
Was he not, said the elder man, with a hiccough. "Why, he used to be talking to me all day about her.... And the letters. My word, you should see the letters ... he used to show them to me before he sent them off. Full of high thinking and all that."
And gradually the whole story came out, in scattered pieces, that Humphrey saw he could put together into a real-life drama. Never once did he think of the dead man, or the dead man's wife in Surbiton (Willoughby was probably doing his best there). He only saw the secret drama unfolding itself like a novelist's plot. The meetings, the letters, the double life of Bellowes, a respectable churchwarden in Surbiton; a libertine in London—and then she threw him over; declined to see him when he called at the stage door; he had dressed himself as a woman, hoping to pass the stage-door keeper. Perhaps if he had got as far as the dressing-room, maddened by the breakage of his love, and the waste of his intrigue, there might have been a double tragedy. And so to the final grotesque death in the street.
It was eight o'clock when Humphrey had the whole story in his mind, and by that time, though he knew he had drunk far too much, he was not so drunk as the other two men.
There you are, old boy, said the elder man, affectionately. "You can print it all, and keep my name and the name of the firm out of the papers."
So long, said the younger man, as they parted at the door of the bar. "You won't have another."
I'd better get back now, Humphrey replied. "Thanks awfully. You've done me a good turn."
He walked back to the office; the late evening papers still bore on their posters the word "Mystery"—but he alone of all the people hurrying to and fro knew the key of the mystery. He had set forth a few hours ago—it seemed years—ignorant of everything, and, behold, he had put a finger into the tragedy of three lives. All that feeling of revolt and hatred of his business passed away from him, and left in its place nothing but a great joy that he had succeeded, where he never dreamt success was possible. After this he knew he must be a journalist for ever, a licensed meddler in the affairs of other people.
And so, with his head throbbing, and his legs a little unsteady, he came back to the office of The Day. It was nine o'clock; Rivers had left the office for the night, and O'Brien was out at dinner. He went to Mr Selsey, and told him briefly all he knew.
Where did you get it from? Selsey asked.
From some friends of his; I promised I wouldn't mention the name of the firm of solicitors he worked in.
What about Miss Sycamore?
Miss Sycamore? echoed Humphrey, blankly.
Yes. Haven't you got her? We must know what she says. It mayn't be true.
Humphrey's head swam. He was appalled at the idea of having to go out again, and face the woman in the sordid case. Selsey looked at the clock. "I'll send somebody else up to see her—she's at the Hilarity Theatre, isn't she? You'd better get on with the main story. Write all you can."
He went to the reporters' room; nobody was there except Wratten, just finishing his work. Humphrey sat down at a desk, and began to write. His brain was whirling with the facts he had learnt; they tumbled over one another, until he did not know how to tell them all. He started to write, and he found that he could not even begin the story. He tore up sheet after sheet in despair. The clock went past the quarter and Humphrey was still staring helplessly at the blank paper. Wratten finished his work and dashed out with his copy to the sub-editor's room.
I'm drunk, he said to himself. "That's what's the matter."
And later: "What a fool I was to drink so much."
And then, as if in excuse: "But I shouldn't have got the story if I hadn't drunk with them."
A boy came to him. "Mr Selsey says have you got the first sheets of your story."
Tell him he'll have them in a few minutes, Humphrey said.
And when Wratten came into the room he found Humphrey with his head on his outstretched arms, and his shoulders shaken with his sobbing.
Hullo! What's up, old man? asked Wratten, bending over him. "Not well?"
Humphrey lifted a red-eyed face to Wratten. "I'm drunk," he said. "My head's awful."
Bosh! Wratten said cheerfully, "you're sober enough. Selsey's delighted you've got your story. I suppose it was a hard story to get."
Humphrey groaned. "I can't write it.... I can't get even the beginning of it."
That happens to all of us. I have to begin my story half a dozen times before I get the right one. Look here, let me help you. Tell me as much as you can. He touched the bell, and a boy appeared. "Go and get a cup of black coffee—a large cup, Napoleon," he said jovially to the boy, giving him a sixpenny piece.
By the time the coffee had arrived, Humphrey had told Wratten the story. "By George!" said Wratten, "that's fine! Now, let's do it between ourselves. Don't bother about plans. Start right in with the main facts and put them at the top. Always begin with the fact, and tell the story in the first two paragraphs—then you've got the rest of the column to play about in."
The coffee woke Humphrey up. In a quarter of an hour, with Wratten's help, the story was well advanced, and Selsey's boy had gone away with the first slips. Whenever he came to a dead stop, Wratten told him how to continue. "Wrap it up carefully," Wratten said. "Talk about the dead man's pure love for anything that was artistic: say that he was a slave to art, and that Miss Sycamore typified art for him. That'll please her. Say that she never encouraged his attentions, and that realizing life was empty without her, he killed himself. Make it the psychological tragedy of a man in love with an Ideal that he could never attain. And don't gloat."
The story was finished. "That's all right," Wratten said.
Look here— Humphrey began, but something choked his throat. He felt as if Wratten had rescued him from the terror of failure: his glimpse of brotherhood overwhelmed him.
Stow it! said Wratten, unconcernedly. "It's the paper I was thinking of. Well, I'm off. Don't say a word about it in the morning."
And there it was, in the morning, the whole story with glaring headlines, an exclusive story for The Day. Humphrey, riding down Gray's Inn Road, saw the bills in the shop-windows, and two men in the omnibus were discussing it: his head was dull with the drink of last night, but he felt exhilarated when he thought of it all. He wanted to tell the two men in the omnibus that he had written the story in The Day. He came to the office and the fellows in the reporters' room seemed as glad as he was. Willoughby told him of his Surbiton adventure, and how Mrs Bellowes declined to see anybody. And when he went into Rivers' room, the great man smiled and said facetiously, "Well, young man, I suppose you're pleased with yourself." He winked at Wratten. "You'll be editor one day, eh?"
It's a jolly good story, said Wratten, "the best The Day's had for a long time."
Humphrey smiled weakly. He would have told Rivers just how it came to be such a jolly good story, if Wratten had not frowned meaningly at him. And not until Rivers said: "Come off that desk, young man, and see what you can do with this—" handing him a job, did Humphrey realize that he was at ease, dangling his legs with the great ones.
Not everything that Humphrey did was difficult, nor undesirable. There were times when his card with The Day on it opened the doors of high places, magically: there were many people who welcomed him, actors and playwrights and people to whom publicity such as the reporter can give is necessary. He was received by countesses who were engaged in propaganda work, and by lordlings who were interested in schemes for the alleged welfare of the people: these people wanted to be interviewed, many of them even prepared their statements beforehand. But, in spite of the advantage they gained, they always treated him with that polite restraint which the English aristocracy adopt towards the inferior classes. He obtained wonderful peeps into grand houses, with huge staircases, and enormous rooms with panelled walls and candelabra and rare pictures; into Government offices, too, when an inquiry was necessary, where permanent officials worked, heedless of the change of Ministers that went on with each new Government; and once he went into the dressing-room of Sir Wimborne Johns, that very famous actor, who shook him by the hand, and treated Humphrey as one of his best friends, and told him two funny stories while the dresser was adjusting his make-up for Act II.
Then there were the meetings—amazingly futile gatherings of people who met in the rooms of hotels, the Caxton Hall at Westminster or the Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street. These meetings gave young Humphrey an insight into the petty little vanities of life. They were hot-beds of mutual admiration. What was their business and what did they achieve? Heaven only knows! They had been in existence for years; this was perhaps the seventh or eighth or twenty-sixth annual meeting of the Anti-Noise Society, and the world was not yet silent. Yet here were the old ladies and the old gentlemen and the secretary (in a frock coat) congratulating themselves on an excellent year's work, and passing votes of thanks to each other, as though they were giving lollipops to children. These meetings were all built on one scheme. They always began half an hour late, because there were so few people in the room. The reporters (and here Humphrey sometimes met Beaver) sat at a green baize-covered table near the speakers, and were given all sorts of printed matter—enough to fill the papers they represented, and, occasionally, men and women would sidle up to them, and give their visiting-cards, and say, "Be sure and get the initials right," or, "Would you like to interview me on Slavery in Cochin-China?" Then the chairman (Sir Simon Sloper) arrived, whiskered and florid-faced, and every one clapped their hands; and the secretary read letters and telegrams of regret which he passed to the reporters' table; and then they read the balance-sheet and the annual report, and Miss Heggie Petty, with the clipped accent of Forfarshire, gave her district report, and W. Black-Smith, Esq. ("Please don't forget the hyphen in The Day"), delivered his district report, and then the secretary spoke again, and the treasurer reminded them with a sternly humorous manner, that the annual subscriptions were overdue, and, finally, came the great event of the afternoon: Sir Simon Sloper rose to address the meeting. Everybody was hugely interested, except the reporters, to whom it was platitudinous and tediously stale: they had heard it all before, times without number, at all the silly little meetings of foolish people the Sir Simon Slopers had their moments of adulation and their reward of a paragraph in the papers. Nothing vital, nothing of great and lasting importance, was ever done at these meetings, yet every day six or seven of them were held.
There were societies and counter societies: there was a society for the suppression of this, and a society for the encouragement of that; there was the Society for Sunday Entertainment, and the Society for Sunday Rest; every one seemed to be pulling in opposite directions, and every one imagined that his or her views were best for the people. Humphrey found the reflection of all this in the advertisement columns of The Day, where there were advertisements of lotions that grew hair on bald heads, or ointment that took away superfluous hair; medicines that made fat people thin, or pills that made thin people fat; tonics that toned down nervous, high-strung people, and phosphates that exhilarated those who were depressed. Life was a terribly ailing thing viewed through the advertisement columns; one seemed to be living in an invalid world, suffering from lumbago and nervous debility. It was a nightmare of a world, where people were either too florid or too pale, too fat or too thin, too bald or too hairy, too tall or too short ... and yet the world went on unchangingly, just as it did after the meetings of all the little societies of men or women who met together to give moral medicine to the world.
It is necessary that you should see these things from the same point of view as Humphrey, to realize the effect of it all on the development of his character. For after a dose of such meetings, when the careful reports of speeches that seemed important enough at the time, were either cut down by the sub-editors to three lines, or left out of the paper altogether, he asked himself the question: Why?
Why do all these people hold meetings?
And the answer came to him with a shock: "They are doing it all for me. Everything that is going on is being done for me."
And as he realized that he was only an onlooker, a creature apart, something almost inhuman without a soul for pity or gladness, a dweller on the outskirts of life, a great longing came over him to join in it all himself. It seemed that this gigantic game of love and passion and sudden death and great achievement, was worth learning, and those who did not learn it, and only looked on while the tumult was whirling about them, were but shadows that faded away with the sunset of years.
He wanted to join in. He saw, now, that he was drifting nowhere. He, too, wanted to share in the great game, playing a part that was not to be ignored, that was needful to the success of the game. Alone he brooded on it. Beaver chaffed him and asked him what was up. Impossible to explain the perplexities of his inmost mind to Beaver.
I don't know, he said, "I've got the hump."
They were having breakfast in the common sitting-room.
Haven't they printed your stuff?
It isn't that, Humphrey said.
Well, what's up? demanded the insistent Beaver.
Everything! said Humphrey, gloomily, looking round the room. The bulrushes were still there. "Everything. This ... I feel as we used to feel at Easterham!"
I know what's the matter with you, said Beaver, folding his napkin, and pushing back his chair from the table. He regarded Humphrey with tremendous wisdom, and bit his nails. "You've got the hump," he said smiling at his inspiration. "Too many late hours."
I suppose so.
Well, look here, don't you get brooding. You want company. I vote we have lunch together to-day. You come and call for me at the office, at one.
Right you are, I will if I can, Humphrey replied.
All the morning he remained in the same mood, grappling with the new aspect of things that had come to him. Alone he brooded on it: he heard Rivers running through the programme of the day's events—the King going to Windsor, a new battleship being launched, a murderer to be tried at the Old Bailey, a society scandal in the Law Courts—the usual panorama of every day, at which Rivers told his men to look. And it was a great thing for the people of Windsor that the King was coming; there would be flags and guards of honour, and the National Anthem; and the reputation of a ship-building firm, and the anxiety of thousands rested on the successful launch of the battleship, and a weary woman in a squalid slum was waiting tremblingly for the issue of the murder trial; but all these things, of such great import to those who played in the game, were not shared by those who looked on. And as Humphrey listened to Rivers, he realized that though they all moved with life, they were not of it.
He remembered a story that Willoughby told of a Salvation Army meeting in the Albert Hall, when General Booth had walked up and down the platform speaking of the glories of salvation, and, suddenly, he pointed a finger at the table below. "Are you saved?" he asked, with his finger shaking at a man who was looking up at him. "Me?" said the man, looking about him confusedly, and then, with a touch of indignation at being suddenly dragged into the game, "Me? I'm a reporter!"
He remembered that story now, and all that it expressed. At the time Willoughby told it, he thought it was a good joke, but now he saw the cruel irony of it.
And, in this frame of mind, as he was at grips with himself, he went to call for Beaver. A light glimmered in the darkness of his mind, and the Joy and Spirit of Life itself, playing, instead of the Pipes of Pan, the keys of a typewriter, smiled upon him, and gave him the vision of a girlish face in a halo of fair hair that seemed threaded with gold as the sunlight touched it.