He went into the office of the Special News Agency and found himself in a room where half-a-dozen girls were typewriting. They were making manifold copies of the hundred and one events that the Special News Agency "covered" with its Beavers, and supplied at a fixed annual rate to the newspapers. The Special News Agency were, so to speak, wholesale dealers in news. You bought the reports of Ministers' speeches or out-of-the-way lawsuits by the column. It was the same principle that governed the Easterham Gazette and its columns of stereo. No newspaper could afford a sufficiently large staff of reporters to cover everything. So the Special News Agency had its corps of verbatim shorthand writers, its representatives in every small village, and in every police-court. There was, of course, no room for the play of imagination or fantasy or style in these Special News Agency reports, and it was because of their rather stilted writing that the reporters on papers like The Day and The Sentinel and The Herald were sent sometimes over the same ground that the News Agency men had covered, to see if they could infuse some fresh interest into the story, or at all events to rewrite it, so that instead of each paper being uniform, it would strike its individual note in the presentation of news. The Special News Agency did for London and England what Reuter does for the world.
There was among the cluster of girls working at their typewriters one who looked up at Humphrey and smiled, as he waited for Beaver. She was not a particularly pretty girl, but there was a quality in her hair and eyes and in the expression of her face that lifted it out of the commonplace. The mere fact that out of all the girls who were at work in the office, she alone left the memory of her face to Humphrey, is sufficient tribute to her personality.
She smiled—and Humphrey remembered that smile, and the hair, that was dull brown in shadow and gleaming with golden threads in the sunlight, and the eyes, that were either grey or blue, and very large. And then, Beaver came and took him to lunch.
They went to a Fleet Street public-house, and lunched off steak and bubble-and-squeak for a shilling, and all through the lunch Humphrey was thinking of other things—especially a smile.
Well, said Beaver, "got over your hump?"
I suppose so, Humphrey answered. ("I wonder what her name is?")
Life's not so bad when you get used to it? Beaver remarked, contemplating his inky thumbs. "The trouble is that just as you're getting used to it, it's time to die. Eh?"
Humphrey's thoughts were wandering again. ("I believe those eyes were saying something to me?") Beaver continued in his chatter, and occasionally Humphrey, catching the sense of his last few words, agreed with a mechanical "Yes," or a nod ("Why did she smile at me?"), and at last he blurted out, "I say, Beaver, what's the name of the girl that sits nearest the door in your office?"
O lord! I don't know their names, said Beaver; "I've got other things to think about. What d'you want to know for?"
She's like some one I knew in Easterham, Humphrey replied, glibly.
I'll find out for you, if you like.
No—don't bother. It doesn't matter at all.
The next day he was walking down Fleet Street when he perceived her looming through the crowd. He was conscious of a queer emotion that attacked him, a sudden dryness of the throat, and a quickening of all the pulses of his body. His whole being became swiftly taut: he almost stood still. And, as she bore down upon him, he saw that she was not so tall as he had imagined, but her face looked divinely attractive under the shadow of the spreading hat, and because the sun was shining her hair glittered like a halo. Now, she was close to him, and he found himself praying to God that she would look at him, and smile again; and the next moment he felt that the ground would sink beneath him if she did so, and he longed to look the other way, but could not. The people passing to and fro knew nothing of the terrific disturbance that was going on in the mind of the young man walking down Fleet Street. Now they were level—he raised his hat—it was over, and the memory of her smile had sunk yet deeper within him. Yes, she had remembered him, and nodded to him, and that smile—what did it mean? It was not an enticing smile, it was an almost imperceptible movement of the closed lips, yet it held some magic in it. It seemed to him that though they had never spoken, she knew all about him; she came across his life, smiling in silence, and he was aware that something triumphant and fresh had come into his life, with her passing, just as he knew for a certainty that, before long, he would learn the secret of her smile, when he spoke to her.
He went back to work, curiously elated and happy for no reason at all that he could understand. Things were unaltered, and yet, somehow or other, they were different. He felt, suddenly, as if years had been added to his age; he felt that he had met something real in life at last, and, when he came to analyse it, it was nothing but an intangible smile, and the glance of two grey eyes.
That night, as he was on his way home, he chanced to meet Wratten. This tall man with the high forehead and curly hair was one of the puzzles of the office. He was a man who held aloof from his fellows, and because of that, they thought he was morose. Humphrey had a tremendous admiration for him, since the night when Wratten had helped him. He seemed so very splendid: he did daring things, and he never failed. The secret of his success was a brutality that stultified all his better feelings when he was on business. And he was a man who never left his quarry, though it meant waiting hours and hours for him.
Hullo, said Wratten, "where are you off to?"
Home, said Humphrey; "where are you?"
I'm going home too. I live at the Hampden Club at King's Cross.
They were near Guilford Street "Won't you come up, Wratten, and have a drink in my rooms—I live here, you know."
I don't take anything stronger than lemonade, said Wratten.
Humphrey laughed, and unlocked the door. He felt it an honour to have Wratten as a guest, if only for a few minutes. They went upstairs, and Humphrey apologized for the bulrushes. Wratten laughed: "Why don't you suggest to Rivers that you should write a story about the dangers of bulrushes in sitting-rooms: interview a doctor or two, and make 'em say that bulrushes accumulate dust. Invent a new disease, 'Bulrush Throat.' That'll make your landlady nervous."
By George, Humphrey said, "I will; that's a fine idea." Doubtless, you remember the scare that was raised a few years ago when The Day discovered the terror that lurked in the sitting-room bulrush; you remember, perhaps, the correspondence, and the symposium of doctors' views that followed, and The Day's leading article on the mighty matter. Humphrey Quain set the ball rolling, and was careful to leave marked copies of The Day in places where Mrs Wayzgoose was certain to see them, and the bulrushes disappeared very soon afterwards. Thus is history made.
I owe you a lot of thanks, Humphrey said, "for the way you helped me the other night."
It was the first time they had referred to the matter of the street suicide.
I didn't want you to be let down, said Wratten. "The life's rough enough as it is, a little help goes a long way. But you steer clear of too much drink, Quain. That's the ruin of so many good men...."
I couldn't help it.
Of course you couldn't—most men are drunkards from habit and not from choice. But you can take it from me, there's no room in Fleet Street for a man who drinks too much. They used to think it was fine Bohemianism in the old days, when a man wasn't a genius unless he was drunk half the time. Don't you believe it. It's the sober men who do the work and win through.
It depends on what you mean by winning through.
Well, there are many ways.... I suppose we've all got different ideas and ideals. I want to rear a family and keep a wife.
You aren't married then?
Not yet. I'm going to be married ... soon, said Wratten, simply. "I think marriage is the best thing for us. We want something to humanize our lives. It is the only chance of happiness for most of us ... the knowledge that whatever happens, however hard the work may be, we come home ... and there's a wife waiting. I know plenty of journalists who would have gone under if it were not for the wives. Splendid wives! They sit at home patiently, knowing all our troubles, comforting us, and keeping us cheerful. By God! Quain, the journalists' wives are the most beautiful and loyal women in the world...."
Humphrey smiled—and this was the man they thought was morose!
I get maudlin and sentimental when I think of 'em. They know our weaknesses, and our mistakes, and they bear with us. They smooth our hair and touch our faces, and all the misery of the day goes away with the magic of their fingers. They make little dinners for us, that we never eat, and they never let us see how unhappy they are, too ... I know, I know ... I've seen so many journalists' homes, and they're all the same ... they're simply overgrown children who let themselves be mothered by their wives.
Humphrey thought of the girl he had passed that day in the street.... "I wish I were you," he said. "It must be rather fine to have some one pegging away at you always to do your best: it must be rather fine to have a smile waiting for you at the end of the long day's work."
Fine! said Wratten, "it's the only thing that's left to us. We're robbed of everything else that matters. We haven't a soul to call our own, and we can't even rule our lives. Time, that precious heritage of every one else, doesn't belong to us. We're supposed to have no hearts, we're just machines that have always to be working at top speed ... but, thank God, there's one woman who believes in us, and who is waiting for us always."
It's funny you should talk like this, Humphrey said, "to-night, of all nights...." He was thinking again of himself and the girl who had crossed the path of his life.
Wratten knocked out the ashes of his pipe, and coughed with that little dry cough that was characteristic of him. "Oh! I don't know," he said. "Nothing funny when you come to think about it. I thought you might have heard it in the office. I'm being married to-morrow. By the way, I wish you'd come along and be best man: I haven't had time to fix up for one."
It was just an incident of almost less importance than the daily work, this business of getting married. But it was an incident that left a singular impression on Humphrey. Wratten's marriage was a prosaic affair, in a registry office, horribly formal, without the idealizing surroundings of a church and the grand solemnity of the marriage service. It took place at ten o'clock on a rather cold morning in June. Wratten himself was extremely nervous, and it was his nervousness that made his manner almost brusque; he must have been a gloomy lover, and yet, as Humphrey saw the dark-eyed bride he was wedding, and marked the pride in her eyes as she looked up to him, and the fluttering of her lips as she whispered things to him, he knew that somewhere in this rugged blunt nature of Wratten there was a vein of golden tenderness and beauty.
The marriage was oddly depressing: perhaps it was that the shadow of coming disaster hovered over them; perhaps Humphrey heard Wratten's words echoing in his ears, "They sit at home patiently ... knowing all our troubles, and they never let us see that they, too, are unhappy."
Humphrey did his duty as best man: there was a girl friend of the bride there, and he looked after them all, and cracked jokes, and made them sign their names in the right places, and Wratten had half a dozen little commissions for him to carry out. He had been so busy yesterday, that there had not been time to clear up everything.
When it was all over, and Wratten stood on the threshold of a new life, with his wife at his side, and a glad, proud smile on his handsome face, they came out of the registry office, and the girl friend emptied a bag of confetti over them, as they stepped into the cab that was to take them to Waterloo—they were going to Weymouth for a honeymoon. Some of the coloured pieces of paper fell on Humphrey's coat collar.
Good-bye, good luck, Humphrey said.
Wratten clasped his hand very tightly. Once again he smiled, and gave his little dry, nervous cough. "Good-bye, old man," he said affectionately. "Thanks awfully for coming. I think I'm going to be happy at last," and the cab drove away.
Humphrey saw the girl friend into an omnibus. "Didn't Maisie look splendid." He noticed that the girl friend wore an engagement-ring on her finger, and thenceforth he lost all interest in her.
He went to the office as usual, but he did not tell any one that he had been to Wratten's wedding. Now, he could feel quite at home in the reporters' room, and he even had a desk which, by custom, had become his own. He was more sure of himself than he had been a few months ago, though, in his inmost heart, he was still a little afraid of Rivers.
It was Ferrol who gave Humphrey confidence in himself. He called him into his room, and asked him bluntly how he liked the work.
Very much, Humphrey replied, his eyes glistening brightly, and again Ferrol was reminded of the long years that had passed, when romantic days were his. The boy was shaping well. That was fine, thought Ferrol. He meant Humphrey to have every chance; he wanted to see what stuff was in him.
That's good, said Ferrol, stroking his moustache. "Mr Rivers gives a satisfactory account of you."
The passion that ruled him, the passion for making men and reputations, was strong upon him just then. He saw Humphrey as raw material, and he meant to mould him into a finished article after his own heart. He would make no mistakes, it should be done slowly, step by step; he would leave Humphrey to fight his own battles, and only if he fell bloody and wounded, would he come forward and succour the boy.
I hope you'll keep it up, he said. "Don't get into trouble, but come to me if you do." He smiled and still caressed that fierce moustache. "I suppose you've heard I'm an ogre—don't believe any tale you hear. Just come straight to me when you are in any difficulty."
Humphrey came out of the room, exhilarated, and almost drunk with pride and happiness. It was Ferrol's magic again: a few words from him were like drops of oil to creaking machinery—they instilled fresh energy and desire into men, and made their hearts ardent for conquest. It was worth working night and day to have smooth words of praise from Ferrol himself, to know that he was watching you, powerful in his invisibility.
That afternoon, as he was returning from some engagement, he saw the girl with the smile coming towards him again. Afar off, it seemed, he was aware of her coming. It was as if her presence sent silent messages to him, vibrating through the air. Long before she appeared he had looked expectantly before him, knowing that she would approach him. Something in his mind linked up this neat blue-clad figure with the episode of the morning, and the little registry office, and Wratten saying, with that radiant smile of his, "I think I am going to be happy at last."
And, quite on the impulse of the moment, he made up his mind. She passed him, and left him all a-quiver with excitement, and then he turned and overtook her. His heart was beating quickly in the rhapsody of it all. She stopped, noticing him at her side, hesitating, nervous.
I say....
Oh! She smiled, and he saw her cheeks flush with colour, and at once he noted her wonderfully slender throat and the mysterious beauty of her breathing.
He was tongue-tied for a moment. She had stopped and he was speaking to her, and he was lost in the miracle of those few seconds, when he realized that in all the loneliness of this vast London, they had met and spoken at last. They stood in a little island of their own making, while people coming and going broke in a hurried surge all about them. The newsboys ran up Fleet Street calling the hour of the latest race, and, above all, came the noise and restlessness of the traffic beating up and down the street.
I say ... Humphrey began, "it's awfully rude of me to stop you like this...."
She smiled again. "Not at all," she said, in a gentle voice.
Could you tell me if Mr Beaver happens to be in the office now? he asked.
I don't think he is, she said. "Why not come up and see?"
N—no—it doesn't really matter. Humphrey laughed nervously. "I shall see him this evening. We dig together, you know."
Then it doesn't matter...? she said.
It doesn't matter, Humphrey agreed.
He waited forlornly: now she would pass away again, always elusive, just flitting in and out of his life like this, a disturbing factor.
But still she waited, and Humphrey was emboldened.
I say ... he stammered. "Won't you come and have a cup of tea?"
She glanced upwards at the clock.
Do come, he said, half turning to lead the way. "There's a Lyons just near here."
Oh, well ... she laughed and followed him.
My name's Quain, he said, as they were drinking their cups of tea. "Humphrey Quain." He waited longingly, hoping that she would understand why he had told her his name.
She drooped her eyes; everything she did was exaggerated in Humphrey's imagination. She gave him her name as if she were yielding up part of herself to him.
Mine is Filmer.
It was terribly unsatisfactory just to know that.
I suppose you'll think me rude... he began.
Oh! you must guess....
I never could. I should guess wrong.
Try, she coaxed. "It begins with L."
He guessed Lily the second time, and she corrected him. "You're nearly right," she said, "it's Lilian."
Lilian, he echoed, admiringly.
It's a hateful name, she pouted.
It's a lovely name, he said.
Do you really think so?
Rather!
Why? she smiled again.
What an absurd question to ask. Why, because—but how could Humphrey tell her, when they had hardly known each other for a quarter of an hour.
I hope you didn't think it rude of me stopping you like that, he ventured, after a pause.
Oh no ... though I suppose you think it's dreadful of me to be sitting with you like this.
To tell the truth, Humphrey considered the whole thing was extraordinarily dashing—that he should be sitting facing her over a cup of tea; to have learnt her name—Lilian Filmer—Lilian, beautiful name!—and to be carrying it off so calmly.
Not at all, he said.
Her next words fell like a shower of cold water over him.
You're such a boy, she said, with her eyes smiling indulgently at him.
He resented that, of course. "I'm twenty-one," he said loudly. "You're not more than twenty-one, I'm sure."
Perhaps I'm not, she answered, taking a tiny watch from her bosom. She sighed. "I must go."
Look here, said Humphrey, "are we going to meet again?"
What do you want to see me again for?
I just want to, Humphrey said. "I'm all alone."
Alone in London, she laughed. "Tragic boy ... oh, how miserable you look. Don't you like being called a boy?"
I don't mind what you call me, so long as you'll let me see you again. To-morrow's Saturday....
Oh! I can't manage to-morrow.
Well, on Sunday, then.
I never go out on Sundays.
On Monday, said Humphrey, desperately.
She considered the matter. "I know I'm engaged on Monday evening."
We'll have lunch together.
Very well, she said.
And, after that, they shook hands quite formally, and parted in Fleet Street. He had been in heaven for twenty minutes.
There were three days to Monday.
Lilian!
Out of this period of his career, Humphrey rescued memories of moments of ineffable happiness. They came intermittently, between long blanks of doubt and painful uncertainty, when his mind was troubled with unsatisfied yearnings and half-understood desires. He was able one day to look back upon it all, with an air of detached interest, like a man looking at a cinematograph picture, and he saw meetings, and partings, and all the ferment of his wooing of Lilian.
There was something intimate and secret about their meetings that pleased his palate, hungry for adventure, and this was a part of life that belonged wholly to them; he was indeed taking a part in the great game.
They met on the Monday at the hour appointed, and it seemed extraordinarily unreal, like a dream within a dream, that she should be wonderfully alive and smiling by his side. Fleet Street, the office, Rivers, and the long toil of the day were forgotten in a moment, such was the miracle of her being. It seemed impossible to him, on that day, that unhappiness and failure could darken his world. There was something eternal about her that moved him with strong, unquenchable desires for triumph and conquest. Her voice vibrated through him like the throb of a war-march, urging him to great endeavour.
So commonplace their greeting; so utterly inadequate to express the prodigious flutterings of his heart! They should have met alone in some solitary forest, when all the colours of the world were rushing to the clouds, in the hours of the sunset. He could have led her to a resting-place of moss and fern, and whispered to her all the thoughts that were in his mind....
But here in the world of everyday, what romance could survive the prosy clamour of it all. There was nothing to say but "Good-morning," and halting, nervous things about the weather, and the theatre, and each other's work. Anything of deeper import must be told by sighs and silences.
And thus, they parted again, after their lunch in a dingy Italian restaurant in the Strand, he with all his longings unfulfilled, and with a deeper sense of something that had been lacking in his life. Why could he not have told her all that he had felt? Why was it necessary for him to mask and screen his emotions with absurd talk that only seemed to waste precious opportunities? She rose before him in his imagination, amazingly distinct and real, no longer a shadow, but a real person. He conjured her presence at will before him, and she appeared as he liked to see her best, with her eyes grey and thoughtful, and the sunlight gilding her hair where it swept up from her white brow. Thus, when she was not there, he lived with her, and told her all the things he dared not say to her.
And nobody knew of these exquisite moments but himself. To mention her to Beaver, now, would be sacrilege. There was but one man who, he thought, would understand what was passing through him, and that was Wratten, who was away on his honeymoon.
They met several times during the next few weeks; it seemed to him that she would not consent to meet him if her heart did not echo his own. And yet, she gave no sign. There was always an air of chastened constraint about them both. He helped her adjust her fluffy feather boa once, and his hand brushed her cheek, and he remembered the feel of it, smooth and soft, like the touch of the downy skin of a peach.
All the time, of course, in the intervals of these meetings, there was the same breathless round of work to be done. Sometimes he would have to cancel their arrangements because he was given an assignment just at the very hour they had set apart for themselves—it was done by a hurried scrawl on office paper—"Dear Miss Filmer, I'm so sorry," and so forth. Once he had written "Dearest," but he tore it up, fearing he might lose her for ever. He could not risk offending her. He knew that she was rigorously strict in certain conventions.
I say ... may I call you Lilian? he had asked one day, and she had glanced at him with a stricken look, and said, "Oh—please, please don't, Mr Quain." She had even laid her hand upon his, with a persuasive gesture. It was a distinct pat—the sort of pat one bestows when a child is to be coaxed into goodness.
She was very perplexing.
Her manner could alter in the most unexpected and unaccountable manner. One day she might be quite gay, and he would feel that now it was merely a question of moments before he could storm her heart and carry it: and the next time he saw her she would be strangely distant, as though she regretted the progress they had made. Or else, she would be provokingly casual, and wound him deliberately in his weakest spot. She would call him a boy, with a little smile and play of the eyebrows. Ah! that rankled more than anything she said or did, for the whole happiness of his life depended on his being taken seriously, and at his own valuation—and he valued himself as a man of the world, with the experience of double his years.
It was, perhaps, this attitude of hers towards him that made him tell her of his work, which, in these days, became so magnified in importance to him. When by virtue of The Day he got behind the scenes of any phase of London life, he used to make a point of telling her just how it was done, in a rather cock-a-whoop manner.
Do you know, she said, "we have in our office thirty men who are doing the same thing, and, in all London, there are hundreds more?"
That crushed him entirely. She thought him vain. They very nearly quarrelled seriously.
One day Jamieson, the dramatic critic of The Day, met him in the office. Jamieson was a tubby little man with a high Shakespearean forehead, who exuded cheeriness. He was a professional optimist. He used to depress the reporters' room with his boisterous happiness: he was so glad that the flowers were blooming, and the grass was green, and that there were children, and the joy of life, and so forth.
He accosted Humphrey with twinkling eyes. "Glorious day, Quain," he said; "makes you feel glad that you're alive, doesn't it? Ah! my boy, it's fine to see the streets on a day like this—full of pretty girls in their spring dresses."
I don't get time to think about the weather, unless I'm writing about it, said Humphrey, with a laugh.
Buck up, my boy, said Jamieson, patting him on the back. "You want to look on the bright side of things on a day like this.... By the way, would you like to have two stalls for the Garrick to-morrow. It's the same old play they've had for two hundred nights—they only want a paragraph for The Day. I've got a first night on at His Majesty's."
Humphrey accepted the tickets gladly, for he had a vision of an evening at the theatre with Lilian, and Jamieson went on his way, leaving in his wake a trail of chuckling optimism. It happened to be a Saturday night, when he was quite free, and so he arranged with Lilian to meet her at Victoria—she lived at Battersea Park—and then they would have some dinner before they went to the theatre.
In those days Humphrey had not risen to the luxury of an opera hat; he wore a bowler hat, and his coat-collar buttoned up over the white tie of his evening-dress. He thrust his hands into his pockets and waited at Victoria Station for her. She was to meet him at a quarter to seven, and it was now five minutes to the hour and she had not come. He stood there, absolutely white with the tension of the passing moments. It seemed that he had been waiting an eternity, and he had lived through a thousand moments of disappointed expectation. Others who had been waiting there when he came had long since claimed those whom they had come to meet, and walked them off with smiles and laughter. He was still waiting.
Seven o'clock!
What on earth could have happened?
Visions of possible disasters crossed his mind: a train wreck and a cab accident; or perhaps she was ill and was not coming. There would be no way of communicating with him, and he would have to go on waiting. Or, perhaps, she had repented of her consent to make the evening glorious for him. The suspense was really terrible. There was nothing to do except to watch the newsboys cheerily gathering the magazines and papers together into piles, and shuttering the bookstall. He saw people running for trains, and whenever the hiss of steam announced the arrival of another train, he hurried to the wicket-gate to peer into the recesses of the crowd that struggled through it, in the hope of seeing her face a second before she actually appeared in person.
At five past seven he was still moodily waiting.
It was cruel of her to keep him dallying with patience like this. She must have known that he would be waiting for her on the moment. How little she cared if she could not even be punctual to the time they had arranged. He began to feel stale and dusty, as if he had been in his evening-dress for years.
He made up his mind to be very angry with her when she came.
And lo! she was at his side: more wonderful than ever, so wonderful that he scarcely recognized her. She had come through the crowd at the wicket-gate, floating towards him, it seemed, like a cloud of filmy, fluffy white. Her face was radiantly flushed and smiling, and he sprang towards her with a cry of relief and gladness.
Here I am, she announced. "I wondered if you'd be here." (As if he had not been waiting heart in mouth, for all that time.)
She wore no hat, but her hair was done in a way that he had never seen before. It seemed to change her strangely. If anything, it made her look more beautiful, as it rose in little waves from her forehead and fell about her ears in wayward threads of sparkling brown. And there was a black velvet ribbon that went in and out among the glory of her hair.
He slipped his hand beneath her white cloak that was fastened tightly to her chin, to guide her through the clumsy throng of station people. Her arm was warm and bare, as soft as satin, and there was something sacred in the very touch of it.
It was an occasion for a cab. They chattered on the way of everyday things, though all the time, with her by his side, so close, so beautiful, he could only think of Paradise.
I thought you were never coming, he said, with a dry throat.
Was I so late? she asked, with a laugh. "I couldn't help it. I ran like mad, and just saw the train going out of the station."
He wanted to tell her how beautiful she looked, but just then they arrived at the little restaurant in Soho where they were going to have dinner. He went in with her, supremely conscious that every one was staring at them. There was a stuffy smell of hot food, and the tables were crowded with diners—very few of them in evening-dress. He was passed on from waiter to waiter until a table was found, and then Lilian unfastened her white cloak, and he helped her to take it off, with a queer sensation of awe and wonder. She stood before him transformed, another Lilian from the one he had known in the street where they worked. He was amazed that she did not realize how this white display of her neck and arms and gently breathing throat was dazzling him with its splendour. He was amazed that she could sit there, revealing her richest beauty for the first time, and be totally unembarrassed—as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world....
The dinner was no doubt excellent, but Humphrey could not eat. He made a pretence of it, but he felt it was violating the ecstasy of these moments to eat before her. He only wanted to sit and look at her. He drank quite a lot of wine, almost a whole bottle in fact, for she took just half a glassful with water. It was cheap stuff, masquerading under the vague label of "Margaux," and it sent his imagination rioting. He was conscious of being deliciously extravagant when he ordered coffees and liqueurs, though the whole bill came to little more than twelve and six. Then they went to the theatre, and he bought her chocolates, and they sat in the stalls, side by side, for nearly three hours. He tried to appear normal—impossible! He knew what was coming: he fought against it for quite a long time, but some primeval instinct in him was stronger than his will—his hand sought hers, when the lights were low, and closed upon it. If she had withdrawn her hand, the whole castle of his dream would have come crashing about his ears. But she did not: she let it rest there. Once or twice he glanced at her sidewise, but she seemed oblivious of him. Her gaze was fixed on the players, her lips parted with pleasure; the pendant that hung from her neck stirring gently with the movement of her bosom. She was enjoying the play, but Humphrey could pay no attention to it. He could only think of her. How real was all this: how every moment counted as a moment of pure, throbbing enjoyment. And he thought of Rivers, and the office, and Selsey and the sub-editors' room, messenger boys and the tape machines—what did it all matter beside the incomparable happiness of these moments. Knowledge came to him subconsciously: it was for this that one worked and suffered.
As they were going in the cab together to Victoria through St. James's Park, where the lamps make a necklet of yellow round the dark shadows of the trees, and the moon was white in her face, he leaned towards her and kissed her on the lips. She gave a little dry sob, and her head drooped on his shoulder, so that he could bend over her and kiss her with all the impetuous longing of youth. And suddenly she shook herself free with an extraordinary melting look of tenderness and pity in her eyes. He thought she was angry, but she only smiled and patted his cheek.
And he felt as if he had passed through the portals of a new world, whose music beat gloriously on his ears, and whose colours leapt before his eyes in flashes of brilliance.
Lilian.... Lilian, he whispered, calling her by her name for the first time.
It's only for to-night, she said.... "Why did you kiss me?"
Lilian, he said again.
They came out into the glare of the streets near Victoria: romance dropped away from her as the Park was left behind. She sat upright and fumbled with her hair.
You oughtn't to have kissed me.... I oughtn't to have....
The discussion of it was horrible to him. It jarred. He, too, came suddenly back to reality.
It was only for to-night, of course, she said, with a nervous laugh.
It's not! he said, positively. "It's for to-morrow and for all time."
They drew up at the station. It was all over. The idyll ended in a clatter of horses' hoofs and hissing of steam, and engines whistling, and the hurrying to catch the last train.
Look here ... said Humphrey, as he stood by the carriage door.
I'm not angry, she whispered. "It was my fault."
The guard blew his whistle and waved his flag. Humphrey's heart was bursting with the hideous intrusion of modernity.
Good-night, she said. "Good-night and thank you. It's been beautiful."
There was just a second left to him, and he made use of it. She was leaning out of the window, and he swung himself on to the footboard and whispered—
Lilian—I love you. I'll write to you to-night.
Before she could reply, there were cries of "Stand away there," and the train swung out of the station.
That night Humphrey wrote his first love-letter, and told her all the things he had been wanting to say for weeks.
They became engaged.
It was a secret, furtive affair, for Lilian desired it. He gave her his signet ring—a present from his father—and she wore it, though not on her engagement finger, in case people should ask questions. She gave Humphrey a photograph of herself—in evening-dress—which he carried about in his pocket-book, to take out and look at frequently. He wrote to her every night—even when they had met during the day—long, long letters full of very high-sounding sentiments and praise of her. Heavens! the pages he covered with great promises. Her letters were not of the same quality: they were rather snappy and business-like, and held in them no romance or sentiment. Now and again she called him "dear" in her letters, and sometimes "dearest," but they were for the most part inadequate letters, that made him feel as if he were being cheated out of the full measure of his love-affair.
She told him that she was five years older than he was, and it only puffed him with greater pride, to think that he had conquered her in spite of his youth.
In very truth, it was a conquest! For days and days she had withstood the eager battery of his assault on her heart. "No," she had said gently, "you're a dear boy and I like you ... but let's be friends."
He went through all the phases of anger, sulkiness, despair and gloom, pleading with her daily, until the final exultation came. He used to see her home as far as Battersea, whenever his work allowed him freedom. There was a narrow, dark lane through which they walked, so that he could talk in the darkness of his love for her. Always, before they parted, she allowed him to kiss her. She kissed him too, and often they stood, with beating hearts, and lips met in one long kiss. He drew her to him, yielding and supple, and told her that she must marry him. She could resist no more, she let her head sink on his shoulder, and his finger caressed her chin and neck, and they stayed thus fettered with the exquisite moments of love.
I will be so good to you, Humphrey murmured.
Yes ... yes ... she whispered, her last resistance gone. And that was how they became engaged.
But out of the glamour of their love and kisses there emerged the grey talk of practical things. "We don't know anything about each other," she cried.
I know you.... I feel that I have known you all my life! he insisted. "Don't you feel like that towards me?" he asked, anxiously.
Perhaps I do, she said, and Humphrey went into raptures over it. "Isn't it wonderful," he said, "to think that only a few weeks ago we were really strangers, and now you have been in my arms—how can we be strangers, Lilian, and kiss as we do?"
Have you told your mother yet? he asked, one day.
No—not yet, she said.
Oughtn't I to meet her?
I suppose so—wait a little longer, she pleaded. "Have you told your aunt?"
You asked me not to. I'd love to take you down to her—she'd like you, I'm certain. It wouldn't matter if she didn't.
They made plans, of course: nothing was settled about the day of their marriage. It was a question whether life was possible for them both on three pounds a week. "I'm sure to get a rise, soon," said Humphrey. "I'll go and ask for one, and tell Ferrol I'm going to be married. We can live splendidly on four pounds a week. Heaps of people live on less."
I don't know.... It's mother I'm thinking of, she confessed.
What about mother? he asked.
I'm wondering what she'll do without me.
There are your sisters, he said. "How many are there, let me see"—he ticked them off—"Mabel, Florence and Edith. That's enough for her to go on with."
Her face grew wistful. "Yes—that's enough," she echoed, her eyes not looking at him. "I ought to have told you, Humphrey, long before this, but mother's rather dependent on me and Edith. There's Harry, of course, but he's still at the Technical Institute—he'll be able to help some day. Florence is still at school—and Mabel—Mabel's got something the matter with her hip."
Well, what about your father?
She winced. "Father—father doesn't help much. He's—he's an invalid."
Humphrey was young, and this was his first love, and the more obstacles there were to overcome, the greater seemed the prize to him. "We could send your mother a little money each week ..." he said. "It won't cost so much when you're not there."
Yes, we could do that. And I could still go on with my work.
What, he cried, horrified, "you go to the Special News Agency after we're married?"
Yes, why not?
Oh, Lilian dear, I don't want you to do that. I want you to have a home of your own, just to sit there and arrange it as you like, and do nothing but loll in an arm-chair all day until I come home in the evening, and then we'll loll together.
She laughed. "You are a funny boy," she said. "I suppose you think a house doesn't want looking after. It's much harder work than typewriting."
But don't you want a home, he persisted, mournful disappointment in his voice.
Of course I do, dear; I know what you mean—I was only teasing you. But, I do think, for the beginning, I ought to go on with my work. It's so much safer. Supposing you get out of work, then I could keep things going for a time.
I'm hanged if I'm going to live on you, he said indignantly.
They compromised by agreeing to the purchase of a typewriter—Lilian was to found a little business of her own that could be done at home. Plenty of people wanted typewriting, and she could earn almost a pound a week, she said, that would be enough for mother....
These practical discussions were very bitter to Humphrey: they robbed the whole thing of the last vestige of beauty; they depressed him, he knew not why. She did not mean it, but everything she said, that had nothing to do with endearment and love, made him feel hopeless. He was only really happy when they rested as children in one another's arms, talking delightful nonsense between their kisses, and not thinking at all of the plans of their lives that puzzled them so much when they came to talk about them.
It was about this period that Wratten came back from his honeymoon, and asked Humphrey to come and dine with him at home, always assuming that neither of them would be kept by work. "Tommy Pride is coming if he can, and I've asked Willoughby." It happened that Humphrey was the only one of the invited guests from the office who was able to come. The news of a Regent Street burglary published in the afternoon papers, made Willoughby champ his false teeth—a habit of his when he was excited—run his hand through his tangled hair, and depart in mysterious ways. Tommy Pride was sent to a lecture that began at eight. "Just my luck," he said to Humphrey, with a wry smile. "The missis will be disappointed."
So Wratten and Humphrey went out together. "I say," said Humphrey, on the way, "don't tell any one, but I'm engaged to be married."
No—are you? Wratten said. "Congratulations. When did that happen?"
Quite recently. Out came the photograph.
You're a lucky fellow. When are you going to get married?
I don't know yet—we haven't decided. Do you think we can live on three pounds a week?
Is that all you get, old man—you're worth more: it's a bit of a tight fit. Humphrey wondered what Wratten's salary was. Perhaps Wratten guessed his thoughts, for he said: "I don't like telling people what I get—there's a sort of secrecy about it—but, if you don't let it go any further, I'll tell you—I get ten pounds a week."
Humphrey felt himself shrink into insignificance before that mighty sum. Ten pounds seemed a tremendous salary to earn—no wonder Wratten had married. It was too much for one man's needs.
I say, that's pretty good, he said, admiringly.
Oh! you'll be worth more than that, some day, Wratten said. "You're the kind of chap that gets on, I can see.... That's why I shouldn't be in a hurry to marry if I were you," he added; "I've seen lots of fellows stick in the mud by marrying too early. It doesn't give them a chance. Marriage helps in some ways, and holds back in others ... a man is not so independent when he marries. He has to think of others besides himself. Unless, of course, his wife has a little means of her own."
He has to think of others besides himself!
That point of view had never come to Humphrey before. Why, he was marrying solely to please himself. Marriage seemed to him, then, necessary to the fulfilment of his dreams. Lilian was a mere excuse. He told her that he wanted to make her happy, blinding himself to the fact that he wanted to make himself happy. He was going to use her as a motive for his life, that was all. She would urge him on to success, encourage him, look after him, comfort him when he was in need of it—he had never thought of her at all, except as an accessory to his life. Of course, if anybody had told Humphrey this, at the time, he would have denied it, vehemently; protested his eternal love; sworn that she was always uppermost in his mind; and that it was his most ardent desire to work for her happiness. Love not only blinds us to the imperfections of others, but twists the vision we have always held of ourselves.
Wratten had taken a flat at Hampstead—a little box of a flat—at a ridiculously high rent, but to Humphrey, as he came into the sitting-room, it appeared as an ideal home. There was an air of repose and rest about it, the walls papered in a soft green, chintz curtains drawn over the windows, a carpet of a shade of green deeper than the walls, and old furniture about the room.
The artistic nature is always hidden below the practical journalist, and it comes to light in different ways. With some men it shows itself in a love of old books; with others, it bursts out in the form of writing other things than ephemeral newspaper "copy"; and with nearly all, the artist in them shakes itself free from its hiding-place and shines clear and strong in the home. There is no time for art during the day; no need for it, indeed. The standard of what is good is not made by the reporter, but by the paper for which he writes.
And here, in Wratten's home, Humphrey found the vein of the artist in him, in his perception and appreciation of old furniture. He fondled his pieces. "Here's a nice little rocking-chair," he said. "Don't see many of these now."
I like this, said Humphrey, touching another old chair.
Ah! yes, that's a beauty, Wratten replied. "I picked that up in Ipswich frightfully cheap. It's an old Dutch back chair of the seventeenth century." He tilted it up and ran his palm over the perfect curve of the cabriole legs, entirely absorbed in the pleasure of touching the chair.
I didn't know you went in for this sort of thing, Humphrey said.
I've been getting things like this together for years ... they're so restful, these old things. Can you imagine anything more peaceful than that book-case? and he pointed to a beautiful Empire book-case, with rows of books showing through the latticed glass and brass rosettes for handles to the drawers that rested on claw feet.
The change in Wratten was really remarkable. Although he was still serious, and his face in repose was gloomy, he seemed to have lost his brusque manner. Marriage had undoubtedly softened him.
Mrs Wratten came into the room and welcomed Humphrey. Wratten slipped his arm through his wife's, and she looked up at him and smiled at him.... Humphrey saw himself standing thus, in his own home, with Lilian close to him, his companion for ever. It all seemed so very desirable. This little home was very compact and peaceful, thousands of miles removed from the restlessness of Fleet Street....
While they were talking, a young man and a woman were ushered into the room by the little maid-servant. The likeness between the two was unmistakable—they were obviously brother and sister. The young man was the taller of the two, very slender, with the thin and delicate hands of a woman. Humphrey noticed the long fingers tapering to the well-kept nails. The face was the face of an ascetic, thin-lipped and refined. The eyes were peculiarly glowing, and set deeply beneath the overhanging eyebrows; the nose was finely chiselled; the nostrils sensitive and curling, with a faint suspicion of superciliousness. He was introduced to Humphrey as Kenneth Carr, and Humphrey knew the name at once. Kenneth Carr had the reputation of being a brilliant descriptive writer; he was on the staff of The Herald, but, besides that, he had written several historical biographies, many novels, and was at work on a play. He belonged to a type which is a little apart from Fleet Street, with its wear and tear—a shy, scholarly man, who found that historical biographies and novels did not yield sufficient income, and, therefore, the grinding work of everyday journalism was preferable to pot boiling. Fleet Street was, to him, a stepping-stone. He would have been happier in the editorial chair of a weekly paper, or writing essays for The Spectator and the Saturday Review, but, as it was, he threw in his lot with Fleet Street, and did his work so well that he stood at the top of the ladder. But Fleet Street had left its mark on his face—it was pale and thin, and the eyes had a strained, nervous look in them.
Awfully good of you to ask us, he said to Mrs Wratten. "Elizabeth and I don't go out much, she gets so tired from her slumming."
His sister smiled—Humphrey saw that the handsome features of Kenneth Carr became beautiful in his sister's face. The sharp lines about the nose and mouth were softened, her eyes were bluer and larger, her face rounded more fully, and devoid of the hollows which made the face of Kenneth so intellectual. The likeness between brother and sister finished with the lips—hers were very red, and were faintly parted, so that one had a glimpse of her teeth, like a string of white pearls. She wore her hair in two loops from a parting in the centre, and she had a habit of carrying her head a little forward, so that the outward curve of her neck was emphasized in its perfect grace.
What does your brother mean by slumming, Miss Carr? Humphrey asked as they sat at dinner.
He calls it slumming, Elizabeth Carr laughed, "but it isn't exactly that. I'm rather fond of the people who have no chance in life. I want to make a chance for them." She spoke banteringly, but her eyes had a curious way of growing large and earnest as if they were anxious to counteract the lack of seriousness in her voice. "I'm trying to make a thoroughfare through the Blind Alley," she said. "Isn't it dramatic? Can't you imagine me with pick and shovel, Mr Quain."
What do you mean by the Blind Alley? he asked.
She suddenly became grave. "Of course, you've never thought of that—have you? It's just a phrase.... Some day I'll explain to you fully. It's where the people who have no chance live."
How do you help them?
We don't help them much, at present—we're only beginning. It's a life's work, she said, earnestly, "and it's a work for which a life would be gladly given. You've asked me the question I'm always asking myself—How is it to be done?"
Does your brother help?
Kenneth—oh, as best he can. It's the apathy that we want to overcome. That's what makes the Blind Alley. She laughed. "We'll do it some day—I don't know how—but we'll do it."
Kenneth Carr's voice drawled across the table. "Look out, Mr Quain, or Elizabeth will have you in her toils. I'll bet she's talking slumming to you. You can't be a social reformer and a reporter, you know, nowadays. The two don't hang together."
Kenneth! his sister said, with pretended indignation.
Look at me! She's making me compile a book about poverty that'll be nothing but statistics—who wants them outside blue books. She's got me in her toils.
The phrase amused Humphrey: he thought of Lilian, and began comparing her with the woman next to him. Of course, they were not alike; the comparison irritated him, why compare people so entirely different. One might know Elizabeth Carr for years, and yet never know her; Lilian was different. She seemed simpler, and yet.... He wondered if Lilian had ever heard of the Blind Alley, or bothered about the people who have no chance.
When the dinner was finished, and they were all settling down to chatter, the telephone bell rang. Wratten went to answer it. "It's the office," Mrs Wratten said, with disappointment in her voice.
Wratten came back. "I'm frightfully sorry," he said. "The office wants me ... Collard's arrested." He went over to his wife. "I shall be late, dear, don't sit up," he said.
Who's Collard? she asked.
Oh! the Company promoter—reg'lar crook—but he might have waited until the morning to be arrested.
Filthy luck! he grumbled, as he reappeared, shouldering himself into his overcoat. "Having to leave all you people like this.... Can't be helped."
The maid came in with coffee. Wratten gulped a thimbleful, kissed his wife, and went out. The evening seemed to have lost something of its pleasure with his sudden departure. They fell to talking over the ways of work and the calls of the office. It was as if Fleet Street had suddenly asserted itself, and shown the futility of trying to escape from it even for a few hours.
Poor Mr Wratten, Elizabeth Carr sighed, "I do think they're heartless."
Why don't you help us, Miss Carr? Humphrey said, with a laugh. "We're in the Blind Alley too."
The weeks passed into August, and Humphrey took eagerly all the work that was given to him by Rivers. He became a mental ostrich, assimilating all sorts of knowledge. One day, perhaps, he would have to describe a cat show at the Crystal Palace, the next he might be attending a technical exhibition at the Agricultural Hall and Olympia, and have his head stuffed with facts and figures of this and that industry. He was acquiring knowledge all day long, but it was only superficial; there was no time to go deeply into any subject, and indeed, his one object was to unburden his mind of all the superfluous things he learnt during the day. If reporters were to keep a book of cuttings of everything they wrote—and they know the value of their work sufficiently not to do that—they would be amazed, looking back over ten years (those cuttings would fill several mighty volumes), at the vast range of subjects they touched upon, at the inside knowledge they had of the little—and even big—things of life; of the great men with whom they had come into contact, perhaps for a few minutes, perhaps for a day; of the men they had even helped to make great by the magic of publicity—they would be astounded at the broadness of their lives, at the things they had forgotten long ago, and perhaps they would pity themselves, looking over their cuttings, for the splendid futility of it all.
You remember Kipling's poem of "The Files," bound volumes of past years; which are repositories of all lost endeavours and dead enthusiasm. Heaven help us when we can write and achieve no more, and the only work of our youth and manhood lies buried, forgotten, in the faded yellow sheets of the files.
But Humphrey Quain at this period, just like every other young man, whether he be a haberdasher or a reporter, did not contemplate the remote future. He was young, and his brain was clear and fresh, and he wrote everything with a pulsing eagerness, as though it were his final appeal to posterity. He found his style improving, as he read, and his understanding broadened. He wrote in the crisp style that suited The Day; he had what they call the "human touch"—that was a phrase which Ferrol was very fond of using. Rivers began to entrust him with better things to do: now and again he was sent out of London on country assignments. That was a delightful business, to escape for a day or so from the office routine, and be more or less independent in some far-away town or village. You were given money for expenses, and told to go to Cornwall, where something extraordinary was about to happen, or some one had a grievance, or else there was some one to interview, and you packed a handbag, and went in a cab to Paddington, and had lunch on the train, and stopped at the best hotel, and generally tried to pretend that you were holiday making. But, more often than not, the idea of a holiday fell away when you got to the place, and you had to bustle and bother and worry to get what you wanted. Then you had to write your message, and that meant generally being late for dinner, or perhaps it was the kind of story that kept you hanging about and made it necessary to telephone news late at night.
But going out of town held a wonderful charm for Humphrey—it gave him a sense of responsibility. It made him feel that the office trusted him; somehow or other he felt more important on these country jobs, as if he bore the burden of The Day on his own shoulders.
There was the charm, too, of writing the story in the first person, instead of adopting the impersonal attitude that was the rule with London work; and the charm of fixing the little telegraph pass to the message, which franked it at press rates to The Day without pre-payment. Sometimes there were other men on the same story, and they forgathered after work, and as all journalists do, talked shop, because they cannot talk of anything without it touches the fringe of their work. The men he met were, for the most part, thoroughly experienced and capable, they were tremendously enthusiastic, though they tried to appear blasé, because it was considered the correct thing among themselves. They never discussed each other's work, nor told of what they had written. Even when they met in the morning, though they had all read their colleagues' messages in the papers, and compared them with their own, they kept aloof from all reference to the merits or demerits of these messages. But it used to rejoice Humphrey's heart to see, sometimes, how older men who were inclined to patronize him as a beginner and a junior the night before, treated him as one of themselves in the morning at the breakfast-table. And he nearly burst with pride when he first saw his messages headed: "From The Day Special Correspondent." Even though he were no further afield than Manchester or Birmingham, it seemed to place him in the gallant band of great ones just as if he were a Steevens, a Billy Russell, or an Archibald Forbes.
And all the time he was learning,—learning more swiftly than any one else can learn, in the school of journalism, where every hour brings its short cut to knowledge and worldly wisdom.
The occasional separations from Lilian, however, modified a little the charm of going away. These orders to go out of town had a habit of coming at the most undesirable moments, generally upsetting any plans they had made together for spending an enjoyable evening somewhere.
When we are married, said Humphrey, on the eve of a departure for Canterbury to describe the visit of a party of priests from France and Italy who were making a pilgrimage to the Cathedral, "when we are married, you shall come away with me. It's not bad fun, if the job isn't hard."
I wish you didn't have to go away so often, she pouted.
There was a hint of conflict, but Humphrey was too blind to see it. He only wished he had to go away more often, for the measure of his success on The Day was in proportion to the frequency of special work they gave to him. "All will be well when we are married," he said, comforting her.
His love-story wove in and out of his daily work. The date of their marriage had not yet been fixed, because Ferrol was away somewhere in the south of France, and that business of the extra pound a week on his salary could not, of course, be settled until Ferrol came back. It seemed, too, that Lilian was in no hurry to be married; she loved these days of his wooing to linger, with their idyllic moments, and rapturous embraces, and the wistfulness of all too insufficient kisses.
For the period of engagement was to them a period of licensed kissing. Nor was it always possible to meet beneath the moon. Humphrey grew cunningly expert in finding places where they could kiss in broad daylight. There was an Italian restaurant in the Strand (now pulled down for improvement), which had an upstairs dining-room where nobody but themselves ever seemed to go, and then there was the National Gallery, surprisingly empty, where the screens holding the etchings gave them their desired privacy, and on Saturday afternoon they went in the upper circles of theatres, sometimes, on purpose not to see the play, but to sit in the deserted lounges during the acting, and enjoy each other's company. Their love-affair was tangled by circumstance; scamped and impeded—they made the best of it, and lived many hours of happiness.
And then, one day, when he least expected it, she said: "I suppose you ought to come down and see mother."
Humphrey went out to Battersea to the home of his betrothed. The circumstances of his visit were not happy. It was raining, and there is no city in the world so miserable as London when it rains. The house was in a rather dreary side-street, a long distance from Battersea Park, a mere unit in the army of similar houses, that were joined to one another in a straight row, fronted by railings that had once been newly painted, but were now grimed and blackened. These houses appalled one: they were absolutely devoid of any kind of beauty, never could they have been deemed beautiful by their architect. They were as flat-fronted and as hideously symmetrical as a doll's-house; nor, apparently, did the people who dwelt in them take any pains to lessen the hideousness of their exteriors: ghastly curtains were at every window, curtains of mid-Victorian ugliness, leaving a cone-shaped vacancy bounded by lace. In the windows of the lower floors one caught a glimpse of a table, with a vase on it, and dried grass in the vase, and behind the glass panes above the front doors there was, in house after house, as Humphrey walked down the street, a trumpery piece of crockery or some worthless china statuette, or the blue vase of the front window, with more grass in it, or a worse abomination in the shape of a circular fan of coloured paper.
Number twenty-three, to be sure, where Lilian lived, was, as far as the outside view was concerned, different from the other houses, in that there were real flowers in the window, instead of dried grass. Humphrey felt wet and miserable when he reached it; the rain had dripped through a hole in his umbrella, and had soaked the shoulder of his coat. He went up the steps and pulled the bell. He waited a little while, and happening to glance over the railings into the area, he saw a girl of rather untidy appearance look up at him, and quickly vanish, as if she had been detected in something that she had been forbidden to do. The girl, he noticed, had the same features, on a smaller scale, as Lilian: he supposed she was Florence. Then he heard footsteps in the passage, and through the ground-glass panels of the door he could see a vague form approaching. The next moment all memory of ugliness and squalor and the dismal day departed from him, as Lilian, the embodiment of all the beautiful in his life, stood before him, smiling a welcome. How she seemed to change her personality with every fresh environment in which they met! She was the same Lilian, yet vaguely a different one here, with her brown hair done just as charmingly yet not in the same way as she did it when they went to theatres in the evening. She wore a white muslin blouse, without a collar, and round her neck was a thin gold chain necklace which he had given her. Though he did not realize it at the time, his joy in her was purely physical; the mere sight of her bared neck and throat and the warm softness of her body was sufficient to make him believe that he loved her as he could never love anybody else; he sought no further than the surface; she was pretty, and she was agreeable to be his wife. He did not stop to think of anything else.
So it's really you! she said, with a laugh.
As though she had not been expecting him!
He murmured something about the weather as he shook his dripping umbrella. She could invest commonplaces, courtesy phrases, with reality. Her eyes were tender as she said, "You poor thing." It was really fine to have some one so interested in your welfare that her eyes could show pity over a few rain-spots.
You must come in and dry yourself over the fire. We had a fire because it is so wet.
She closed the door. He took off his coat and hat, and suddenly he caught her silently to him (her eyes spoke of caution, and looked towards the door, leading from the passage), and they kissed hurriedly and passionately. She disengaged herself, and began to talk about trivialities in a high tone. "I have not told any one yet," she whispered. "It is still a secret—so you needn't be afraid of mother." She led the way into the room. Somebody was sitting on the sofa, against the light.
Mother, said Lilian, "this is Mr Quain."
Oh, said Mrs Filmer, rising and coming forward to shake hands with him, "how do you do?"
Humphrey sat down in a gloomy, black horsehair chair by Mrs Filmer, who returned to a sofa that belonged to the same family. They began to talk. It was plain that Lilian's mother had been coached by her. She seemed to pay him a deference altogether disproportionate to the occasion, if he were to be considered as a mere casual visitor, a friend of Lilian. She was a faded woman of fifty years or so, the personification of the room itself, for everything within those four walls was irrevocably lost and faded—the photographs in their ugly frames were yellow and old-fashioned; the pictures on the walls, chiefly engravings of thirty years ago, in bevelled frames of walnut wood, were spotted with damp; the furniture was absolutely without taste, a mixture of horsehair and mahogany, and the piano had one of those frilled red satin fronts behind a fretted framework. There was a blue plush portière, with a fringe of pom-poms down one side of it, hanging from a brass rod over the door.
It was difficult for him to believe that she was Lilian's mother: that she had actually brought into the world that beautiful, supple being whom he loved. Had she ever been like Lilian? He could trace no resemblance to her in this little thin woman who sat before him, her hands, with the skin of them warped and crinkled, crossed in her lap, her hair sparse and faded, with threads of brown showing among the grey, and the fringe of another tint altogether. She did not even talk as Lilian did: she was too careful of aspirates. He saw that she was altogether inferior to Lilian. She talked of nothing—nothing at all. And all the time she was talking, and he was answering her, he was aware, dimly, of Lilian's presence, somewhere in the background; he was conscious of her watching him, studying him.
The weather was terrible for the time of the year.
They wanted to move out of this house; it was too large for them.
It was so nice for Lilian to have such a comfortable office to work in.
But it was a long way to come home, when the weather was bad.
The weather was very bad to-day.
The summer, one supposed, was breaking up.
After all, it was not so very out of season.
Mr Quain must find his work very interesting.
And so on.
Tea was brought in by a girl who was Lilian on a smaller scale. "Edith, this is Mr Quain," said Lilian; and to Humphrey, "This is my sister Edith." She put the tray down, and shook hands limply. He noticed that she had precisely the same coloured eyes as Lilian's, but they were weaker, and she did not carry herself well. She seemed but a pale shadow of the splendid reality of Lilian. Then Florence, the other sister, came into the room; she was the young girl whom Humphrey had seen over the railings as he stood on the doorstep. She was undeveloped, but her face and figure bore great promise of a beautiful womanhood. Her hair was of a reddish colour, and hung in a long plait down her back. Her face was quite unlike Lilian's: he judged that she resembled her father.
You look dreadful, child, said Lilian, with a laugh. "Go and wash your face, little pig."
Florence made a grimace, and tossed her pigtail. "It's freckles," she said, hopelessly. "I've been scrubbing away for ten minutes." She looked at Humphrey appealingly, with a smile in her eyes—they all had that smile he knew so well.
I think you're too hard on your sister, Miss Filmer, he said to Lilian, with mock gravity. (How odd the Miss Filmer sounded.) "She looks radiant. I noticed it was freckles at once." Florence went to Lilian and put her arm round her waist. They were evidently very sisterly. Edith was busy pouring out tea ("One lump or two, Mr Quain"); Mrs Filmer sat with her hands crossed in her lap looking out of the window into the garden beyond. Humphrey took a cup of tea across to her; she was too effusive in her thanks; begged him to sit down, and urged Florence to look after Mr Quain. Just then the front door clicked. "There's Harry," said Edith, putting down the teapot, and running to the door. A short, well-built young man appeared. His hair was the reddish colour of Florence's hair, and his face was frank and boyish. He was about nineteen years old, just the age of discrimination in ties and socks, and the flaunting of well-filled cigarette cases. He and Edith were apparently the greatest friends, doubtless because there was only two years' interval in their ages. Nevertheless, he pulled Florence's pigtail affectionately and gave her a brotherly kiss; pecked Lilian on the cheek ("What a horrid collar you're wearing, Harry," she said, "and you simply reek of tobacco"), and kissed his mother on her forehead. Then Lilian introduced him to Humphrey Quain, and they shook hands and regarded each other furtively, with a constrained silence.
Humphrey felt that the whole family must know of the relations between Lilian and himself, though not one of them spoke about it. But they all treated him with a certain deference, and gave him a status in the house, which invested him with a superiority that seemed to match Lilian's. For there was no doubt of her superiority in this household, now that they were all gathered together. She seemed so stalwart and broad beside them; a creature apart from them all. She did not appear to belong to them, and yet she was, indisputably, of them. They were so commonplace, and she was so rare—at least, that was what Humphrey thought. He watched her as she moved about the room bearing plates and cups, noiselessly, gracefully; she gave him a new impression of domesticity as she wandered about in her own home without the hat that he was accustomed to see her wearing. And she gave him, furthermore, an appearance of strength and character, as though she had acquired the right to rule in this household by the might of her own toil which chiefly supported it. While she was in the room, it lost some of its faded quality, and when she left it to take a cup of tea and a piece of cake to Mabel, the third sister, who was an invalid lying, he understood, on a couch upstairs, the room became desolate, and the most insistent person was the faded mother with her querulous voice.
They made him look at picture-postcard albums and photographs, and some of Florence's drawings, while Lilian was absent. Florence wanted to be a fashion artist, and though her drawings were incredibly bad and scratchy, he felt it was necessary for him to say that they showed promise.... How had Lilian grown to be Lilian in these surroundings, he wondered—surroundings of such frank ugliness and shabby gentility?
He glanced out of the window which gave a view of a narrow oblong garden at the back, where a few stunted wallflowers struggled to live. A patch of unkempt grass ran between the high walls, and there a broken wicker-work chair faced the windows. As he looked out he saw a man stumbling over the grass towards the side door: he caught a glimpse of the soiled and frayed clothes, and feet clothed in down-at-the-heel slippers, of a grey face with shrunken cheeks, and pale blue eyes that peered weakly from beneath grey wiry eyebrows. The man came across his vision like a spectre, trailing his slippered feet one after another, and swaying a little as he walked. He was fascinated by the sight, and suddenly his attention was distracted by Lilian. She had come back to the room, and was standing at his side. Her eyes had followed his, and she knew what he had seen. "Will you have some more tea?" she said, abruptly, touching him on the shoulder. He turned away hastily: his eyes met hers; they held a challenge in them, as though she were daring him to speak of the man in the garden. It was as if he had probed into a carefully hidden secret.
He knew, without being told, that this aimless, shambling man with the slippered feet was the father. He was given in a moment the explanation of this room; the mother; the invalid child; and the air of subdued failure that brooded over the house. He saw Lilian as a regenerating, purifying influence, trying to lift them out of the slough. Their eyes met, and though no word was passed between them, he understood everything.
He wished that he had not come to this house. This family depressed him, and made him feel afraid of Life. It was an odd thought that haunted him: they would be his relations when he married Lilian.
But when, after the leave-takings, she came to the door to help him on with his coat and let him out, he realized that she was unchanged, that she was still splendid for him, and as desirable as she had always been. He felt something of a hero, because he was going to rescue her from this dreadful home of hers....
The memory of the father dogged his thoughts as he came away. He wished he had not gone to the house.
At eight o'clock, on a chill morning, the women in the red-brick cottages of Hyde, which are built round the Hyde collieries, felt the earth quiver beneath their feet, and heard a low roar, reverberating about them. Their hands went up to their beating hearts; they rushed to their windows that overlooked the grey wastes where the shafts of the mines stood gaunt against the horizon; they saw a burst of flame leap from the upcast shaft of No. 3 mine; leap vividly for a swift moment, and leave behind it a vision of a twisted cable-rope, and twisted iron, and the flame that vanished swiftly bore with it the souls of two hundred men: their husbands, their sons—their men. They gathered their shawls about them, and ran, with their clogs clattering on the cobbled streets, to the pit-mouth, joining a stream of men, whose eyeballs shone whitely from the grime and black of their faces—they ran with terror clutching at their hearts and fear at their heels, and every lip was parched and dry with the horror and dread of the moment. There had been a disaster to No. 3 pit: an explosion; a fire—"What is it? Tell us?" They crowded round the mine offices, besieged the mine manager: "For the love of Heaven, for the mercy of Mary, for the sake of Christ—tell us! We must know ... we are the wives, the daughters, the mothers of those who went below to their work in the blackness of the coal.... No need to tell us: we know, now; we see the thin cloud of smoke, with its evil smell, floating above the shaft ... the engine-room is silent. The ventilation fan is not working. It has been shattered, with the lives of all those who matter, by this explosion.
Yes, yes, we will wait. Some of our men are sure to have escaped; they know the workings. They will find their way to the Arden mine shaft adjoining, and come up in the cages. Perhaps they all will, and no lives will be lost. We will wait....
At eleven o'clock the little tape machines in the newspaper offices printed out letter by letter the message that was sent by the Hyde reporter, who overslept himself that day, and did not hear the news until ten. "An explosion occurred in the No. 3 mine of the Hyde Collieries this morning. Two hundred men were working at the time, and it is feared that there has been a serious loss of life."
Off you pop, said Rivers to Wratten, who had just arrived at the office. "This looks big. I think you'd better have some one with you. Boy, tell Mr Quain to come up."
Half an hour later Wratten and Quain were on their way in a cab to Euston, Humphrey thrilling with the adventure of being chosen to accompany Wratten, looking forward to a new experience. "Horrible things, these mine disasters," said Wratten. "I hate 'em," as if any one in the world was so misguided as to like them.
Are they difficult to do? asked Humphrey.
Sometimes ... it depends. If there's a chance of rescue, you've got to hang about sometimes all night. They get on my nerves. This'll be your first, won't it?
Yes, Humphrey said. It seemed strange to him that they should be discussing such an appalling disaster so dispassionately; considering it only from their point of view. There was no sense of tragedy, of deep gloom, in their talk. It was all part of their business—a lecture, a murder, an interview, a catastrophe—it was all the same to them. They were merely lookers-on.
When they arrived at Euston, a tall man, whose chief characteristics were gold-rimmed spectacles and a black moustache, came towards them. He wore a red tie and carried a heavy ash stick in his hand. "What—ho! Wratten," he said, jovially, "coming up?"
Hullo, Grame, said Wratten, "anybody else here yet?"
Oh! the whole gang. We're for'rard in a reserved compartment.
Kenneth Carr, white-faced and breathless, arrived at the last moment. "Hullo!" he said, "isn't this awful.... Two hundred men! I'll join you as soon as possible."
Poor Kenneth! Wratten remarked to Quain, as they followed Grame to the carriage. "He really feels this quite keenly. He realizes the immensity of the tragedy to which we're going to travel. It's a mistake. It hampers one."
I should have thought it would make you do better work, Quain answered, "if you really felt the tremendous grief of it all."
Not a bit. It makes you maudlin. You lose your head and go slobbering sentimental stuff about. Remember, you're no one—you don't exist—you're just a reporter who's got to hustle round, find out what's happened, and tell people how it happened. Never mind how it strikes you—The Day ain't interested in you and your sensations—it wants the story of the mine disaster.
But— Humphrey began.
Wratten turned on him savagely. "Oh! Good God! don't you think I feel it too? Don't you think I hate the idea of never being able to write it as I see it? By God! I wouldn't dare tell the story of a mine disaster as I see it. The Day would never print it—it would be rank socialism."
There were five other reporters in the carriage. Two of them Humphrey had met before: Mainham, who wore pince-nez, looked like a medical student, and spent every Saturday at the Zoological Garden, where he discovered extraordinary stories of crocodiles, who suffered from measles; he was, in a way, the registrar of births, deaths and marriages among the animals; and Chander, a thin-faced, thin-lipped young man, who wore long hair, whose conversation was entirely made up of a long chain of funny stories.
Chander faced the little tragedies of his work daily, but he kept himself eternally young by pretending only to see the humorous side of things. For instance, he once spent a whole morning in the rain and slush of a January, trying to verify some story. He tramped the dismal pavements of a dirty street off Tottenham Court Road, in search of a certain man in a certain house, finally gave it up in disgust, and discovered that he should have gone to another street of the same name by King's Cross. That would have disheartened the average man: but Chander turned it into a funny story—it is good to have the Chander point of view.
The other reporters were Thomas, who worked for The Courier—a penny paper—a well-ordered, methodical, unimaginative man, who had a secret pity for the poor devils who had to work for halfpenny papers; and a big broad-shouldered man, whose name was Gully. His face at a glance seemed handsome enough, until you noticed the narrow eyes and the coarseness of the heavy under lip. He had brought a pack of cards with him and wanted to play nap.
Good heavens! said Kenneth Carr, irritably, "try and behave as if you had some decency left. We're going to a mine disaster. There's two hundred dead men at the other end of the journey."
Well, you do talk rot, Gully replied. "Are they relations of yours?" He sniggered at his joke, and asked Mainham to play. Mainham said he couldn't play in the train, but Thomas was willing. Chander, who knew that Kenneth Carr loathed Gully and all that he stood for, joined the party out of sheer good-nature. He hated quarrelling.
Why look on the black side of things, Carr? he said. "Perhaps they're not dead at all. We needn't go into mourning until we know everything, and we don't know anything except what the early editions of the evening papers had. And newspapers are so inaccurate."
Ass! said Kenneth, with a grin, for he and Chander were good friends, and he understood Chander's tact.
Gully shuffled the cards. "I hope they're dead," he said, "because then we shall be able to get back to-morrow."
Kenneth Carr, Grame and Wratten looked at each other. Wratten gave his head a little toss, and made a clicking noise that meant, "What can you expect, after all, from Gully."
Charitable soul, Chander said, admiringly. "What a sweet temperament you have. Won't it be sad if you find 'em all alive and ready to kick!"
Kenneth Carr, Wratten, Mainham and Humphrey went into the dining-car, as the express rocked northwards towards Luton. The journey was full of apprehension for Humphrey; he had never been on such a big story as this, and, though he knew he had to do nothing but obey Wratten, there was still a doubt of success in his mind. It interfered with his appetite. He marvelled that the other men could eat their food so calmly, as though they were going on a pleasure trip, and talk of ordinary things. Of course, they were thoroughly used to it. It was as common an incident in their lives as casting up columns of figures is to a bank clerk, or the measuring of dead bodies to an undertaker.
After luncheon, Mainham left them to go back to the carriage, and the three friends were alone over cigarettes and coffee.
I'm sorry I lost my temper with Gully, Carr said, after a pause.
Oh, we all know Gully. Wratten smiled and sipped his coffee.
Don't get like Gully, Kenneth said to Humphrey, "even if you feel like him. It's bad; it's the Gullys that have brought such a lot of disrespect on journalism. He's the type of journalist whom people think it necessary to give 'free' cigars to, and 'free' whiskies and sodas; 'free' dinners, even. They think it is the correct thing to give 'free' things to us, as one throws bones to a dog. It's the Gullys who take everything greedily and never disillusion them."
But don't you think you're too sensitive? Humphrey ventured. "It seems to me that the work we do demands a skin thick enough to take all insults. Look at the things we have to do sometimes!"
It's our business to take risks, Wratten interposed. "I don't mind what I do, so long as there's a good story in it. If it's discreditable, the fault isn't with me. I'm only a humble instrument. It's The Day who's to blame—The Day and the system. I do my duty, and any complaints can be made to Neckinger or Ferrol, with or without horsewhip. That's my position."
You see, Kenneth Carr said, musingly, "there are, roughly, three classes of reporters. There's the man who is keenly alive to the human side of his work and talks about it, as I'm afraid I do; there's the man who feels just as keenly and shuts up, as you and Wratten and Mainham and hosts of others do; and there's the chap, like Gully, who hasn't an ounce of imagination, and gloats over things like this mine disaster, because he's a ghoul. I envy people like you and Wratten. You do the best work because, although you feel pity and sorrow, you never allow these feelings to hamper your instincts of the reporter."
Humphrey smiled. "Wratten doesn't." The time passed in recounting some of Wratten's audacious doings. His bullying a half-suspected murderer into a confession; his brutal exposure of a woman swindler—he had answered an advertisement for a partner in some scheme or other, found the advertiser was a woman with a questionable commercial past, pretended he was bona fide, and, when he had obtained all his material, ruthlessly exposed her in The Day. There was the case of the feeble-minded millionaire, who was kept a prisoner in his house. There was the case of the Gaiety girl who married a lordling, and Wratten pried into their private lives, forced the lordling into an interview, and wrote a merciless story that made London snigger. He was absolutely callous in his work, yet so human and tender-hearted out of it. Humphrey, since that night when he had been helped by him, had looked up to Wratten as the type of the ideal reporter, with courage unlimited, who never flinched, even when the work was most unsavoury and humiliating.
He was not popular with the reporters of the papers: he kept himself away from them, and restricted his friendship to one or two men. The reason of his unpopularity was simply because others feared him as a rival, and Humphrey found, later, that there was merit in that sort of unpopularity. The strong men are never popular.
The train had now sped past Rugby, and the green valleys and chequered landscapes ran by in a never-ending panorama. The sunshine held with them as far as Crewe, and then, as they came into an unlovely stretch of land bristling with factory chimneys, the clouds gathered, and the greyness settled over the day. The three friends sat silently now: Wratten and Carr, seated opposite, were looking out of the window, and Humphrey over Carr's shoulder caught glimpses of the little world to which they were journeying. He saw the great brick chimneys everywhere now, breathing clouds of foul black smoke, and then, wherever he looked, the strange-looking gearing-wheels of the coal-mine shafts came into view. Some of them were quite near the railway line, and he could see the light twinkling between their spokes as the great shaft wheels moved round, hauling up invisible cages. There were tangles of iron-work, and buildings of grimy brick, and, as they rushed on, they passed gaunt sidings where coal-stained trucks waited in a long line.
They were in a world of brick and iron and coal: down below them, beneath the throbbing wheels of the express, the earth was a honeycomb of burrows, where half-naked men sweated and worked in the awful heat and close darkness. This was a hard world, spread around them, a world where men lived hard, worked hard, and died hard. A world without sunshine,—all grimy iron and coal and brute strength. And again Humphrey could not help feeling the pitiful artificiality of his own work, that mattered so little, compared with this real and vital business of dragging coal from the heart of the earth to warm her children.
They had to change at Wigan: the bookstalls were covered with placards of Manchester and Bolton newspapers telling of the horror of the disaster. They bought copies of every paper, and saw the whole terrible story, hastily put together, and capped with heart-rending headlines. They would have to wait thirty minutes for the train to Hyde: Wratten twitched Humphrey's sleeve and drew him aside. "Look here," he said, "I don't know what the other fellows are going to do. Trains are no good to me—I mayn't be able to get back to Wigan to wire, and the Hyde post-office will be a one-horse show. I'm going to get a motor-car. Come on." So they left the group. Social friendship was at an end: there were no "Good-byes," each man was concerned with himself and his own work.
Motor-cars were not used by newspapers at that time to the extent that they are used to-day; they were doubly expensive, and even a little uncertain, but The Day was always generous with expenses when it came to getting news.
They went outside, and Wratten hailed a dilapidated four-wheeler. "Drive to a motor garage—quick," he said.
Won't t' old hoss do, guv'nor? asked the cabby, with the broad Northern accent.
No, it won't, and look slippy, growled Wratten. The old cab rattled over the stones and down a steep hill.
This is a pretty dull hole, Humphrey said, looking out at the town, which seemed to be oozing coal from all its pores.
Yes, Wratten said shortly. "I'm trying to think out a plan. You'd better come with me to Hyde, and after we've got some stuff for the main story, you can hang on, and I'll bump back here in the car, and put it on the wire. Then I'll come back to the mine and relieve you. You'll probably have got some interviews by then, and we can run them on to the story."
They arranged for the motor-car, and during a ten-minutes' wait, Wratten dashed off to the post-office. "Always call at the post-office when you get on a job like this, and tell them what you're going to send. Besides, the office may have some instructions for you in the poste restante. And always wire your address to the office. We'd better stop at the Royal. I daresay every one else will be there, but it can't be helped."
They set out in the evening for the mine. The car took them through the mean streets of Wigan and the outlying villages, where the shadow of disaster hung like a black curtain over the houses. The streets were strangely silent: groups of men stood at the street corners, talking in constrained voices, and women with shawls over their heads flicked across the roads, grey and ghostlike, the slap of their clogs breaking harshly into the silence. Now and again they passed a beer-house, brilliantly lit, and from here came sounds of voices, and high nervous laughter. "They always get drunk on days like these," Wratten said. "They have to forget that death is always sitting at their shoulders."
And now there was a stretch of open country, yet even the fields had not the bright green of the Southern fields. The very grass was soiled with the coal, and the mines and the tall chimneys made a ring round their horizon. Humphrey moved uneasily in the car: the brooding spirit of tragedy that hovered over the place was beginning to seem intolerable. It was all so grey, so appallingly dismal and squalid. Here were the houses with the blinds drawn over their windows—whole streets of them—houses where there was no man to come home now. Here were women leaning over the railings of the patches of gardens, staring before them into the desolate future. Fatherless babes crawling about the dusty pavements and gutters, unheedingly, knowing nothing of the disaster that had scorched and withered the mankind of their world.
They turned down a side-street, and came out upon an open space filled with a mighty crowd of people. Behind them was the gate that led to the colliery, and far away, above their heads, Humphrey saw the winding wheel above the shaft, twisted and broken, the shaft itself jagged and castellated where the force of the explosion had torn the brickwork, and the cable-ropes shattered and tangled, as if some giant hands had wrenched it loose and made a plaything of it.
The crowds before the gate parted as they heard the noise of the motor-car. They made a narrow lane, just wide enough for the car to creep through. The gate was guarded by a police-sergeant, who, overcome by the sight of the motor-car, opened the way, and saluted: Wratten, bulky with rugs and wraps, touched the peak of his cap. The car drew up outside the offices, and they set out to walk up the black hill to the pit-mouth.
Desolation, utter and dismal; the lowering sky stained and splashed with the red of the dying sun; dark masses gathering below the purple pall of clouds; the ground barren and black with coal beneath the feet: these were Humphrey's first impressions as they walked up the hill, with thousands of envious, resentful eyes regarding them from the crowds that huddled beyond the railings. Nobody questioned them; nobody asked them what right they had to be there. They were part and parcel of the scheme—the literary undertakers, or, if you like, the descendants of the bards of old, the panegyrists, come to sing their elegies to the dead.
The full force of the tragedy came, as a blow between the eyes, when they reached the pit-mouth. Those women, waiting patiently throughout the day,—and they would wait, too, long into the night, keeping up their vigils of despair—who could forget them? Who could look at their faces without feeling an overwhelming gush of pity flooding the heart; those eyes, red-rimmed and staring intensely, eyes that could weep no more, for their tears were exhausted, and nothing but a stony impassive grief was left! The shawls made some of the faces beautiful, Madonna-like, framing them in oval, but others were the faces of dolorous old women, grey-haired, and mumbling of mouth. And some of them laid their forefingers to their lips, calling the world in silence to witness their stupendous sorrow. They stood there compact and pitiful: thinking of God knows what—perhaps of the last good-bye, of a quarrel before parting, of a plan for the morrow, of all the little last things that had been done by their men, before death had come.
And, permeating everything, into the very nostrils of all of them, there crept a ghastly smell of gas and coal-dust—a smell that brought to the vision of the imaginative the shambles in the twisting galleries of coal below their feet; great falls of black boulders, nameless tortured hulks that once were men—living, loving, laughing—lying haphazard as they fell to the same gigantic fist that smote the iron wheel above the shaft, and crumpled the brickwork as if it were cardboard.
They had to see it all: they met other reporters wandering in and out—dream-people in a world of terrible reality. Their companions of the train were all there: Kenneth Carr, surveying that wall of women silently; Mainham, talking to the mine-manager, whose black and sweating face told of many descents into the mine; Gully, buttonholing a woman with a baby in her arms, and making notes in his notebook; Grame, plodding to and fro in the coaly mire, for it had been raining that morning in the North: all working, all observing, all gathering facts. It was not their business to moralize, to link up dead men and disasters with the idea of these desolate women and humanity at large. That was the leader-writer's work. Their business was to get the news and say how it happened. They dared not even expose criminal negligence, or inhuman cruelty, or savage conditions of work—and libel laws were there to restrain them.
And they all felt—yes, I believe even the brutal Gully felt it for a moment—the unspeakable horror of the tragedy, the injustice not of men dying like this, but having to live like this; great waves of sympathy and pity came over them, and they pitied themselves for their impotence. Ah! if they could have told the millions that would read their writings in the morning, the thoughts that were in their minds....
Humphrey saw it all. He saw the gaunt, drear shed where the flickering lamp-light played over a dozen shapeless bundles sewed up in white. A man came to the shed—this business of identification was no woman's work—the policeman in charge whispered something: they went in together; the policeman turned back the sheet—O God! is it possible that a face once human could look like that! Turn down the sheet. We cannot recognize him. All we know is that the bundle of clothes seared from his body is his; that pocket-book is his too, and we recognize the bone crucifix that he bought one Easter-tide in Manchester.
Hold up.... Thanks, matey, the light's a bit dim....
An odour of carbolic mingled with the stench of the coal-dust; a blue-clad nurse with a scarlet cross on her arm moved among the white bundles, and she seemed to bring with her a promise of exquisite peace after pain, and rest and eternal sleep. Outside, a grim black wagon lumbered up the hill, and, as the wind flapped its canvas doors open, one saw its load of coffins....
Now the rescue party was going down again. They emerged from a brick shanty, through whose windows Humphrey could see the shelves which were meant to hold the miners' lamps—there was a pathos in those empty shelves. These men were going down to dare death: they looked inhuman fantastic creatures, with goggled helmets over their heads, and great knapsack arrangements of oxygen and nitrogen to breathe, for one breath of the air in the mine below meant stupor and sleep everlasting. There were five men, and as they passed the group of dolorous women, they must have felt the tremor of hope and deep gratitude that shot through the fibre of every despairing one. Here were the sexes in their elemental state, stripped of all the artificial trappings of civilization; men were doing the work of men; women giving them courage with the blessings of God that they murmured.
The leader of the rescue gang carried a little canary in a cage; the little yellow bird piped and sang, and hopped about his perch. The little yellow bird was the centre of all their faith in God's mercy: for if the bird could live in the air of the mine, there was still some hope for their men.
Slowly the cage descended the shaft that was unbroken. The sunset blinked between the spokes of the gearing-wheel, slower and slower—they were at the bottom of the mine. Now, they were in that inferno of vaporous blackness, with death stalking them, a gaunt, cloudy monster, who had but to puff out his cheeks and breathe destruction. There would be enormous falls of coal and timber to combat; they would have to crawl on their bellies, and stagger along, stooping to the broken roofs of the galleries, and always there was the startling danger of a jar knocking their knapsacks, or breaking the mouthpieces through which they breathed their precious elixir of life.
Up above, the night was coming, and a rain as soft as tears began to drift downwards. The women waited. Salvation Army officers moved among them, enticing some of them into the shelter of the silent machine-room. "Of what use is tea and coffee to us? Give us our men. No food or drink shall pass our lips until our men have kissed them, or we have kissed their still faces."
Up above, a preacher preached of the infinite mercy of God, and the gospel of pain and sorrow by which the Kingdom of Heaven is reached. He stood there with his arms outstretched, like a black cross silhouetted against the darkening sky, his low, mournful, dirge-like voice blending with the gloom.... Down below, in the reek and the stench, the rescuers' hands are bloody with tearing their way through obstacles, and their pulses are hammering in their heads ... and they have seen sickening things.
Now the wheel begins to move again. Doctors hurry to the door of the cage—lint, bandages, stretchers, evil and glittering instruments that kill pain with pain, all the ghastly paraphernalia of Death. They are coming up!... They are coming up!... A silence, so swift and sudden, that it is as if the great multitude had whispered "Hush," the tinkle of the bell marking the stages of the ascent is clearly heard by people waiting on the bank. The cage appears.... The men stagger out, one by one, helmets removed, their faces grimed and sweaty, their eyes white and staring out of the black grotesquery of their faces, their lips taut and silent.
And one of them carries a cage in his hand, a cage with an empty perch, and a smother of wet and draggled feathers huddled into one corner. A world without the song of a bird—no hope! ... no hope.
I shall have to dash back to Wigan now, and get my stuff on the wires, said Wratten. "Will you wait here and I'll come and relieve you. Pick up any stuff you can. Facts." Humphrey wandered about the dismal pit-mouth—sometimes he was challenged by the police, and ordered to keep within a certain area. He found a cluster of reporters by a lighted lamp. One of them had received an official communication from the mine-manager, and he was giving it to his colleagues. Humphrey took it down in his note-book. Then there was another flutter. A piece of flimsy paper was fixed to a board outside the lamp-house. A message from the King.
Now, the wires were humming with words, thousands upon thousands of words sent by the writers to all the cities of the kingdom. And in all the offices the large square sheets of the press telegraph-forms were being delivered. Humphrey saw the picture of The Day office: Selsey sitting at the top of the table, the boy handing him the pile of news from Wigan, a sub-editor cutting it down, here and there—always cutting down. Perhaps, you see, some great politician was making a speech at the Albert Hall, and space was needed for three columns, with a large introduction.
It was nine o'clock. Another rescue party had gone down. The women still waited, their faces yellow now in the flare of lamps. It seemed to Humphrey that he had left London centuries ago ... that he had never met Lilian at all. It was as if that morning his life had been uprooted, and it would have to be planted again before it could absorb the old interests and influences.... He was hungry and cold. There was no chance of getting food. If he were a miner, or had any real part in this game, the Salvation Army would have given him tea and bread ... but he was a reporter, an onlooker, supposed to be watching everything, and, in a sense, physically invisible.
A car panted up.... It was Wratten. "Here I am, Quain. Anything happened? Official communication. Oh yes, and the King's telegram. Better send them off. Hop into the car and then send it back for me. I'll wait."
Wait? Humphrey said. "What about food?"
I've got some sandwiches. I'll wait here until two. Never know what will happen. Rescuer might get killed. It's happened before. Fellow might be brought up alive.
But it's going to rain like blazes.
Is it?... Off you get. You can turn in. I'll keep the deck.
It was nearly eleven when Humphrey had sent his telegram to London. The post-office was open by a side door for the correspondents, and some of them were still writing. Cigarettes dangled from their lips. They had an opened note-book on one side and a pile of telegraph-forms on the other—not the forms that ordinary human beings use, but large square sheets, divided up into spaces for a hundred words on a page. Fifteen of them made a column in The Day—Wratten had covered thirty forms.
Humphrey went back to the hotel. His friends were in the coffee-room amazing the waitress with their appetites for cold meat and pickles and beer at half-past eleven. The tension was over, and the reaction was setting in. Their faces were strained, and they all seemed unnaturally good-humoured. They laughed at anything, clutching at any joke that would make them forget the dismal horrors of their day. Kenneth Carr looked more pallid than ever.
Where's Wratten? he asked, as Humphrey came into the room.
Still waiting up there, Humphrey said.
What's the good of waiting? Gully put in. "If anything happens, the Agency men will send it through, and, anyway, it's too late for the first edition."
I reckon I've done my day's work; me for the soft bed, Chander remarked. "By the way, I found five separate men who've got five separate shillings out of me. Each swore he was absolutely the first person to arrive on the scene and no one else there. It's a sad world. Good-night."
Kenneth Carr left shortly afterwards, and the others remained drinking and telling stories. Humphrey had been chary of drinking since his adventure that evening when he was on his first murder story, but to-night he drank with the rest. They were all urged by the same motives. They wanted to forget the black pit-mouth, and the women, and the smell of the coal-dust.
That night Humphrey woke up suddenly and heard the rain drumming against the window. He wondered if Wratten were back from the mine. He fell asleep again, and dreamed of a gaunt building, where a blue-clad nurse, with the face of Lilian, hovered about white, shapeless bundles.... And in London the dawn was coming westwards over Fleet Street, and the vans were rattling to the stations, so that all that had been written would be read over millions of breakfast-tables everywhere in the kingdom.
Since his visit to Lilian's home, he had come to a definite decision about his marriage. It would have to be privately done, and the news kept from his aunt until they were wedded. In spite of the increasing breadth of his life, he had not yet shaken off the narrow influence of Easterham; his aunt still remained as a factor to be considered in his scheme of things. If he told her, beforehand, she would ask all sorts of questions. Who were the Filmers? What did Mr Filmer do? (He winced at even this imagined question.) Were they really nice people? That was the greatest quality that anybody could have in his aunt's estimation—the quality of being really nice. It was a vague, impalpable quality that defied definition, though Humphrey knew that, somehow or other, his aunt would arrive at the conclusion that the Filmers had not that desirable attribute, if she could by any chance visit them.
Of Lilian, of course, there could be no doubt.... She was rare and exquisite, so different altogether from the rest of her family. Nobody could help loving her, and he knew that she would survive the Easterham inquisition. But he saw at once that Mrs Filmer and his aunt would never, never blend. She would find out at once that Mrs Filmer was not "really nice."...
He and Lilian talked it over, whenever they could meet. She did not share his hurry to be married. "It is sweet like this," she said once. There was an odd, wistful note in her voice. Then she looked at him fondly, and, "Oh! what a boy you are, Humphrey," she said. He did not object to that so much now. He smiled indulgently—he had not been many months in Fleet Street, but he seemed to have absorbed the experience of as many years.
He was changing, so gradually, that he could not note the phases of his development himself. He felt that he was leaving all his old associations far behind. It was as if some driving power were within him, rushing him forward daily, while most of the other people round him stood still. There was Beaver, for instance—he seemed to have left Beaver long ago, though they were still at their old Guilford Street lodgings. But, somehow, Beaver seemed now just a milestone, marking the passage of a brief stage in his life. Soon, he knew, Beaver would be out of sight altogether. There was Tommy Pride—another milestone; he had run on and caught up with Wratten and Kenneth Carr, and these were the people who were influencing him now....
And there was that great ambition, growing into a steady flame: ambition burning up every other desire within him; ambition leading him by ways that mattered not so long as they led at last to conquest.
Lilian was to help him: she was to be a handmaiden to ambition. The picture of the journalistic homes that he had seen made him long to found one of his own. This life of lodgings and drifting was profitless—he wanted a home; permanence and peace in this life of restless insecurity. Very often he dreamed of his home—where would it be?—they would have to be content with rooms at first, an upper part, perhaps, but the rooms would be their own, and they could shut the door on the world, and live monarchs of their own seclusion for a few hours, at least, every day. There were walls lined with books, too, in his picture of the home, and Lilian, in an arm-chair of her own, set by the fireplace, and the blinds down, and the light glittering on the golden threads in her brown hair.
He told Lilian of his dreams, and she shook her head and smiled.
It's a nice picture, isn't it? she said.
Don't you see it too? he asked.
Sometimes. I used to see it quite a lot at one time. Before I knew you.
He showed chagrin. "Oh! wasn't I in it?"
How could you have been when I hadn't met you? I forget who was the ideal for me at the moment. Lewis Waller, perhaps, or William Gillette. She laughed. "Silly Humphrey, it's the picture you're in love with, and you can put anybody in the arm-chair."
He protested against it, yet all the while he was wondering how she could have known that! He had not considered that point of view himself, nor would he now. It was Lilian he wanted; she was just as beautiful as ever, and nobody else was within his grasp.
He sighed. "I do wish we could settle about—about our marriage. Let's fix it up for next week."
She pretended to be horrified. "Only a week to prepare in! Look at the things I've got to buy. My bottom drawer isn't half full."
Well! he said, hopelessly, "when are we going to get married? Do let's try and fix a day."
He could not understand why, sometimes, she would seem so eager and delighted with the prospect of marriage, and at other times she would be in a mood for indefinite postponement, as though she wished to keep him for ever lingering after her with all his thirst for love unquenched.
He could not know that she was beginning to realize, with that intuition which no man can fathom, that her dreams had been but dreams, and the love that they thought everlasting but the passing shadow of a moment.
When he got back to the reporters' room that evening—he had been reporting the visit of a famous actress to a Home for Incurables—Willoughby met him with a grave face.
Heard about Wratten? he asked.
No—what is it? Humphrey said, feeling that evil news was coming.
Double pneumonia—they thought it was a chill at first ... he got it at that mine disaster last week. You were there, weren't you?
Yes. He would insist on staying out all night ... it was raining....
That was Wratten all over, Willoughby said.
Humphrey winced. "Don't say 'was,'" he said, almost fiercely. "Wratten's going to get better. It's impossible for him to die ... why, he is only just begun to live ... and there's his wife ... and, perhaps...."
He stopped short. Nobody could quite understand what Wratten meant to him. Not even Wratten himself.
I didn't know you and Wratten were very thick, Willoughby said. "He's a good chap, but so devilish glum."
None of you know Wratten—I don't suppose I do—but I know that he's the whitest man in the Street.
He went out to Hampstead that night, after work, but the nurse who came to the door said that he could not see Mrs Wratten, she was in the sick-room—Mr Wratten was dangerously ill; but he was going on as well as could be expected.
Ferrol was back in his room, among his buttons, after a long holiday abroad. There was always a subtle difference in the office when he returned after these occasional absences; and not only in the office, but in the whole Street, where men would say to each other, "Ferrol's back, I hear ... wonder what The Day will do next." For Ferrol always returned to his paper with some new scheme, some new idea that he had planned while he was away—he seemed to be able to see weeks ahead, to know what people would be talking about, or, if he could not be certain as to that, he would "boom" something in The Day, and its mighty circulation would make people talk about anything he wanted them to discuss. They were doing nearly a million a day—think of it! Ferrol, sitting in his office, could touch a button, give some instructions, and send his influence into nearly a million homes. He could move the thoughts of hundreds of thousands; throw the weight of The Day into a cause and carry it through into success. He could order the lives of his readers, in large matters or small matters. That famous Batter Pudding campaign, for instance, is not forgotten, when The Day found a crank of a doctor, who declared that our national ill-health was due to eating Batter Pudding with roast beef. Batter Pudding was on every one's lips, and in no one's mouth. People stopped cooking Batter Pudding. Ferrol touched a button and they obeyed. Nor must we forget the wonderful campaign on the "Bulrush Throat," by which Humphrey was able to oust the bulrushes from Mrs Wayzgoose's sitting-room.
Yet, sometimes, in The Day campaigns, there was a spark of greatness and a hint of nobler things, that seemed to reflect the complex personality of Ferrol himself; Ferrol groping through the web of commercial opportunism which was weaving round him, striving after something ideal and worthy. A man has been wrongly arrested and condemned—Ferrol stands for justice; the columns of The Day are opened to powerful pens; the nation is inflamed, there are questions in the House, the case is re-opened and the conviction quashed. Nameless injustices and cruel dishonesty would flourish if The Day were not there to expose such things. You must balance the good against the evil, and perhaps the good will outweigh the evil, for Ferrol, when he touched the buttons, did many good things, and the nearest approach to evil he made was in doing those few things that were transparently foolish....
Something in The Day had arrested his attention that morning. (He always read the paper through, page by page, from the city quotations to the last word on the sporting page.) The article in question was not an important one: it was a few hundred words about a party of American girls who were being hustled through London in one day—the quickest sight-seeing tour on record. The account of their doings was brightly written, with a flash of humour here and there; and, you know, it had the "human touch."
Who wrote it? The button moves; pink-faced Trinder starts nervously from his desk in the ante-room, and appears shiny, and halting in speech. He is sent on a mission of investigation, while Ferrol turns to other matters: the circulation department wants waking up. Ferrol actually travelled in his car all the way from his house in Kensington, and for every contents bill of The Day he saw three of The Sentinel. Gammon, the manager of the circulation department, appears, produced magically by touching a button. "This won't do, you know." There are explanations, though Ferrol doesn't want explanations—he wants results; which Gammon, retiring in a mood for perspiration, promises. There has been a slight drop in advertisement revenue—Ferrol has a finger in every pie. "Dull season be damned," says Ferrol to the advertisement manager—a very great person, drawing five thousand a year, commissions and salary, and with it all dependent on Ferrol. In two minutes Ferrol has produced a "scheme"—an idea that may be worth thousands of pounds to the paper. "Splendid," says the advertisement manager. "Get ahead with it," says Ferrol....
In ten minutes it is as if there had been an eruption in every department of the grey building. The fault-finding words in the red room with the buttons drop like stones in a pool, making widening rings, until they reach the humblest junior in every department—Ferrol is back, and the office knows it!...
Trinder reappears. Mr Quain wrote the article ... and Ferrol suddenly remembers.
So the boy has been doing well. Both Neckinger and Rivers approve of Humphrey. "Not a brilliant genius, thank God!" says Rivers, "but a good straightforward man. Very sound."
Thus is Ferrol justified once more in his perception for the right man. His thoughts travelled back once more to Easterham, to the days when he himself was Humphrey's age, to the days of Margaret, and the white memories of his only romance. Strange that the vision of her should always stand out against the thousand complexities of his life after all these years. He saw her just as he had last seen her, eyes of a deep darkness, and black hair that seemed by contrast to heighten the dusky pallor of her skin. A child that was too frail to live, and yet she had inspired him in these long distant days.
It was astonishing to think that she had had a separate life of her own; that she had married and passed out of the scheme of things. She was dead, and yet she came knocking like this at queer, irregular intervals, at the door of his life.
And Ferrol was drawn with a strange attraction towards this boy who was her son; he came as if he were a message from Margaret, holding out her hands to him, across the unfathomable abyss of Space and Time. "Now you can repay," she seemed to say.
Well, Quain, said Ferrol, as Humphrey came into the room.
Ferrol masked his sentiments behind the crisp, hard voice that he always cultivated in the office. Nobody could have guessed from his treatment of Humphrey that he regarded the boy with any particular favour. Ferrol knew well enough how to handle men: they must be made always to believe that they are firm and independent, and it does not do to let them see the props and supports that hold them up.
Humphrey was busily searching for the reason of this summons to Ferrol's room. It was only the third time that he had been in this broad red room, yet already his nervousness vanished, he no longer feared his greatness, or the comprehensive power of the man with the black moustache and the strong hands that held in their grip all the fortunes of The Day. He stood there, by Ferrol's desk, so changed, so different from the timid Humphrey who had felt the floor sinking beneath him when he faced, for the first time, this man whose potentiality he could not grasp. There was little outward difference, save, perhaps, the lips compressed a little tighter, and a frown that came and went, but inwardly the timid Humphrey had gone, and in its place there was a bolder Humphrey, whose mind was all the better for the bruises of battle.
Well, Quain, said Ferrol, moving papers about his desk, and regarding Humphrey all the time with those penetrating grey eyes.
You sent for me, sir? Humphrey asked.
Yes. Ferrol paused. "Getting on all right?" he blurted out.
Humphrey smiled—Getting on! The phrase had been on his lips on that day when he had first appeared in the red room. He thought of all the things that had been crowded into his life since then. Of all that he had seen; of all the people he had met; of the glimpses into the greatness and the pettiness; the worthiness and the unworthiness; the virtue and the vice and the vanity of it all. As he thought thus, he saw a blurred composite picture of the past months, figures flitting to and fro, men striving in the underworld of endeavour, work, work, and a little love, and, in the background, a whimsical picture of his aunt who preached the stern gospel of Getting On, without knowing what it really meant.
I'm going to have you put on better work, Ferrol said. How the boy's eyes sparkled and lit up his face! "Mr Rivers is quite satisfied. You shall do some of the descriptive work. Think you'll be able to do as well as John K. Garton one day?"
John K. Garton!—he was the great descriptive writer of The Day, the man who signed every article he wrote, who was never seen in the reporters' room, except when he looked in for letters; a being who seemed to Humphrey to belong to quite another sphere, above Wratten, above Kenneth Carr, above all the reporters in salary and reputation. He was one of Ferrol's products: all England knew of him, and read his work as special correspondent, yet Ferrol could put a finger on a button, you know....
Humphrey laughed. "Oh, I don't know, Mr Ferrol," he said, awkwardly. "My work would probably be quite different, I couldn't write in his style."
That's right, said Ferrol. "Try and find an individual style of your own. No room for imitators here. Still, there's plenty of time to talk about that. I just wanted to let you know I've had my eye on you." Ferrol nodded, Humphrey turned to go.
Then he remembered he was going to ask Ferrol for a rise in salary. He came back to the desk.
Oh, Mr Ferrol, he said, "I ought to tell you, I'm going to be married."
Ferrol pushed his pad aside. What a fool he had been to think he could constitute himself the only influence in this boy's career. How was it he had overlooked the one important factor—a woman. It came so suddenly, this revelation of Humphrey's intimate life, and all at once Ferrol found himself swayed with an unreasoning dislike of this unknown woman—it was an absurd feeling of jealousy.—Yes, he was jealous that anybody should exercise a greater influence than himself over Humphrey, now that he had decided to push him forward to success.
Married! he said, harshly, "you damned young fool!"
The words came as a blow in the face. Humphrey flushed, and found that he could not speak. He thought of Ferrol's soft words that had opened up such illimitable visions of the future, and then, quite unexpectedly—this.
Somebody in Easterham? asked Ferrol.
Oh no! Nobody in Easterham. She lives in London. She's in Fleet Street.
A woman journalist?
No—she's a typist.
You damned young fool! Ferrol repeated. "What do you want to get married for?"
In the silence that followed, Humphrey stood bewildered. The harsh note in Ferrol's voice surprised him; what on earth could it matter to Ferrol whether he married or not. And Ferrol must have read his thoughts, and seen his mistake at once.
Of course, he said, "it's no business of mine. Your life's your own. Only I think you're too young for that sort of thing. Why, you haven't seen the world yet. You haven't a father, have you?"
No, said Humphrey.
Well—Ferrol's voice softened—"you won't mind my advising you then."
No, said Humphrey again: already he seemed to feel Lilian slipping from his grasp.
I'm looking at it simply from the business point of view. No man has a right to marry until his position is made—least of all a reporter.
But she would help me, Humphrey pleaded. "She would be able to help me. She would ..." he broke off.
Ferrol completed the sentence for him. "Keep you straight. Yes, I know. I've heard it all before. The man who needs a woman to keep him straight is only half a man."
But, continued Humphrey—and he thought of Wratten and Tommy Pride—"we don't get much out of life—we're at work all day long, there's absolutely nobody ... I mean, there's nothing left in it all ..." he spread his hands wide. "At the end there's nothing ... emptiness." He stammered broken sentences that had a queer impressiveness in them. "I'm nothing ... it seems to me ... all this life, rushing about all day ... and everything forgotten to-morrow ... there's nothing that lasts ... nothing except...."
Oh, you think you'll get happiness, Ferrol said. "Perhaps you will. But every moment of happiness is going to cost you years of misery. As soon as you marry, what happens? You are no longer independent. You've got to lie down and take all the kicks. You've got to submit to be ground down; to be insulted by men whom you dare not strike back, as you would, if you had only yourself to think of.... And then, you know, in a year's time, you've got to work ... double as hard, and to watch every penny, and to save.... Why, you young fool, don't you see that if you're going to get on in this business, you mustn't have any other wish in life but to rise to the top. Everything must be put aside for that—you must even put aside yourself. You must have only one love—the love of the game; the love of the hunter for his quarry."
What made Ferrol talk like this.... What had happened to Humphrey that he should be there, standing up to Ferrol, fighting the question of his marriage? Something new and unexpected had thrust itself into their relations, and Humphrey could not understand it.
But that's what I want to do, he said; "we should do it together."
Yes. How? said Ferrol, a little brutally again. "Shall I tell you? I know you young men who marry the moment you see a marrying wage. It's all very well for you—you may progress—you may develop—you're bound to, for men knock about and gather world experience. But what of the woman at home?—cooped up in her home with babies? Eh? have you thought of that? Where would your home be? You haven't got as far as that, then. The woman stands still, and you march on. She can lift you up, but you can't lift her up. And then the day comes that you're a brilliant man—the most brilliant man in the Street, if you like...." Ferrol smiled. "Oh! you never know. Think of John K. Garton, and Mallaby, and Owers.... And you're different. You can link up the things of life. You can perceive and appreciate pictures and fine music and the meaning of everything that matters ... and for the woman who has not been able to progress, nothing but popular songs, chromographs, and ignorance of anything but the petty little things of to-day. Then you hear people saying, 'How on earth did he come to marry her?' There's always an answer to that. He didn't marry her. It was another man—the man he was twenty years ago—who did it. Do you see?"
Humphrey looked about him forlornly. His dreams were crumbling before the onslaught of Ferrol's remorseless less words. The powerful magnetism of this man held him: he felt sure that Ferrol was right.... Ferrol was only voicing the thoughts that he himself had feared to express. Above the inward turmoil of his mind, he heard again the voice of Ferrol, forceful and insistent:
You are not the man you will be in twenty years' time. There's no reason, he added hastily, "why I should take all this trouble over you ... no reason at all ... it's no concern of mine. Other people on my staff can do as they please—for some men marriage is the best thing ... I don't interfere. I'm not interfering now. I'm only giving my point of view."
Yes ... I know, Humphrey said, and somehow or other he seemed to feel an extraordinary sympathy for Ferrol; he seemed to understand this man. At that moment he would have stood forth for Ferrol and championed him against a world of hatred!
Only I thought ... Humphrey began. "You see, she supports her family...."
O Lord! Ferrol groaned. "It's worse than I imagined."
Besides, she's ... she's clever ... we have the same tastes.
Of course you have. But your tastes will alter. You're going to progress.... And she's going to progress, too, on different lines.... A woman's line of progress is different ... and in twenty years' time!
The telephone bell rang. Ferrol took up the receiver.
Well, that's all, he said to Humphrey. And then: "I don't take this trouble with every one."
Humphrey groped for words. "No ... I understand ... I see what you mean.... You don't think...."
Ferrol nodded. "You can do what you like, of course."
He put the receiver to his ear and began talking rapidly.
Lilian knew the letter by heart now, she had read it through and through so often. She had received it early that morning, when, as usual, she ran downstairs at the postman's knock, so as to take that precious letter, that came daily, from the floor where it lay as it had been dropped through the slit in the door. Of late, the sisters and brother had noticed the hurry to capture the first post, and there had been a little good-humoured chaffing over the breakfast-table, where they all sat together—the father and mother took their breakfast upstairs in bed, in keeping with their slatternly lives.
Going to be a blushing bride soon, Lily? said Harry, with a wink to Edith.
Don't be silly! Lilian said, crumbling her letter in her pocket.
What's he like? Is it that nobleman who came here a few weeks ago? If so, I don't think much of his taste in ties!
It's better than your taste in socks, retorted Lilian.
Aha!—a hit, a palpable hit. Guessed it at once. Pass the butter, Edie.
Do tell us all about it, Florence urged.
The family wants to know, pleaded Harry.
Lilian—are you really....
Her hands closed over the letter which she had just read. She turned her head away and pretended to be busy at the coffee-pot. They were all joking among themselves, and they did not notice the tears glisten in her eyes.
There's nothing to tell, she said, in a hard voice.
Oh, we don't believe that! Harry said. "Young ladies wot gets letters in masculiferous handwritings every morning...."
She rose abruptly and looked at the clock. Then—wonderful Lilian!—she laughed and threw them all off the scent. "You children are too talkative," she said, with pretended loftiness. "I mustn't stop chattering with you or I shall miss the eight-forty." She put on her gloves with precision, and took up her little handbag, and adjusted her hat, just as if nothing had happened to disturb the ordinary course of her life; and, then, with the usual kiss all round, she let herself out of the house.
Oh, she kept herself well in hand throughout the journey to town—nobody knew, and nobody must know. It was only a secret between herself and her heart. She looked out with dry eyes over the dismal plain of chimney-pots with which the train ran level, the cowls spinning in the wind ... the chimney-pots stretched row upon row, far away, until, with a hint of the open sea, adventure and wide freedom, the masts and rigging and brown sails arose from the ships lying in the docks. But when she came to the office she rushed upstairs, and in the little room where they hung their cloaks and hats, all her pent-up emotions broke loose with a torrent of tears. She wanted to empty her eyes of tears so that there should be none left, and she wept without control, silently, until she could weep no more. It was just like a short, sharp storm on a day that is oppressive and heavy; the air is all the cooler and sweeter for it, fresh breezes play gently over the streets, the world itself seems eased after its outburst.
She could smile again. She bathed her red eyes in the cold water of the basin, and performed some magic with a powder-puff. Nobody would have guessed, as she sat tap-tapping at her typewriter, with the sunshine touching her hair with its golden fingers, that a thunderstorm had shaken her nature a few minutes earlier. It was all over now; only the letter remained, and she knew the letter by heart, she had read it so often.
A difficult letter to write! Well, not really, for that which comes from the heart is easy to write. It is insincerity which presents difficulties, and in this business Humphrey had not been insincere. He had not made any cold calculations as to the future; he had not weighed the pros and cons of it all. After the letter was written and posted, the vision of her reproachful face haunted his dreams, and he felt that he had lost something irretrievable—something of himself that had gone from him, never to return.
He was only considering himself. He saw the sudden possibilities of the future which Ferrol had opened for him; the true proportions in which he had painted that picture of the days to come. The fear of these responsibilities attacked him and made him a coward.
He saw, at once, that he could not marry Lilian, and he told her so in a tempestuous, passionate letter, with ill-considered phrases jumbled all together, treading on one another's heels, as fast as the ideas tumbled about in his mind.
"I cannot do it, Lilian, dear," he began. "We should never be happy together. I can see that. I don't know what you will think of me; you cannot think any worse of me than I think of myself. I feel a blackguard; I feel as if some one had given me a beautiful, priceless vase, and I had hurled it to the floor and smashed it. It is not that I love you any the less, but I cannot ask you to share this life of mine. When I first knew you, I thought it would be beautiful if we could be married—everything seemed so easy to accomplish. But now I see that years must pass before I win my way, and that marriage for us would be an unhappy, uphill affair. Forgive me, forgive me, Lilian. I cannot tell you all my thoughts on paper. But meet me just once more in the old restaurant in the Strand, where I can explain to you all that I want to say, and plead for your forgiveness. Oh, my sweet Lilian, you will understand and help me, I know.
"Humphrey."
This was the letter, written on the impulse of the moment, which Humphrey sent to her. Incredible that it should be dropped in the ordinary way into a pillar-box, to lie for hours with hundreds of other letters, to pass through many hands until it finally came into the hands of the postman at Battersea Park, who delivered it, without any emotion, with a score of bills and receipts and circulars.
Well, it was done, and, while Humphrey was waiting for his work in the reporters' room of The Day, Lilian's mind was busy with the new development of affairs. Now, she could review everything calmly, she felt in her heart that Humphrey was right, but there was the sense of wounded pride with her. He had thrown her over! He did not even ask her to wait for him—yes! she would have waited—he was hasty to unburden himself and win his freedom again. Yet she knew that she could not wait—she was older than he—she would be too old in ten years' time. The flower of her life would be full for a few years, and then she knew he would see that her glory was waning.... All this was no surprise to her. Instinctively she seemed to have known that this would be the outcome of her love affair. Strange! how she accepted it without any more demur than the natural outburst of tears—and what were those tears, after all, but tears of self-pity, as she looked upon herself and saw that she was poor and patient and loveless?
They met in that same Italian restaurant in the Strand to which Humphrey had first taken her on that day, months ago, when the glamour was upon him. The proprietor knew them for more or less regular customers, and they always had the upstairs room, which was invariably empty.
This dreadful business of the waiter taking his hat and stick, setting the table in order, offering the menus, and recommending things, with a greasy smile, and knowing, dark eyes! They had to mask their feelings, and to play the old part, and pretend that they were going to have lunch.
She noticed that Humphrey's face was pale, the lines about his mouth less soft than usual. His eyes were strained, and he looked at her wistfully, not quite sure of his ground, wondering whether there would be a scene.
She could read him thoroughly. She knew that he really felt mean and uncomfortable, that she had but to use her woman-wit to recapture him at once—snare him so completely that never could he escape again. She knew that the very sight of her weakened him in his resolve, a kiss on the lips, and her fingers stroking his hair and face, he was hers, and the world well lost for him.
But that was not Lilian's way. A strange, deep feeling of pity was in her heart as she marked the pallor of his face. She would have mothered him, but never cajoled him. "He is only a boy," she thought sorrowfully, "with a boy's destructiveness. This, that he thinks is an overwhelming tragedy, will be only a mere incident in a few years' time." And she smiled at her thoughts.
Her smile awoke only the faintest echoes of dying memories within him: her smile that had once thrilled him, and sent his heart beating faster, and made his throat so curiously parched—incredible that such things had happened once!
You are not angry, he said, timidly, with a touch of tragedy in his voice.
Angry? she echoed. (He feared she was going to make light of the whole affair, and trembled at the idea of her mocking him: he might have known that that also was not Lilian's way.) "Angry," she repeated. "No, Humphrey. I'm not angry."
There's no excuse, he began, hopelessly, "I've got nothing to say for myself.... It seems to me ... it seems best that it should be ... for both of us, I mean."
I think it's better for me, she said, softly. "There's no good making a tragedy of it. Things always turn out for the best."
He fidgeted uneasily. "I was thinking it over last night.... Oh, my head aches with thinking.... You see, what can we do, if we married. Everything's up against us ... it's all fighting and risks, and uncertainty. I don't mind for myself" (and Humphrey really believed this, for the moment), "it's you that I'm thinking of ... it wouldn't be fair. I could ask you to wait..." he did not finish.
Now, really, Humphrey's arrogance must be taught a lesson. Behold, Lilian gathering her forces together to crush him—ask her to wait, indeed! as if he were her last chance. And then something in his eyes checked her, something wistful and intensely pathetic. Splendidly, Lilian spared him. He was so easy to crush ... perhaps she still liked him a little, in spite of everything.
No, she said. "There's no need to do that. We'll each go our own ways."
The waiter, after discreet knocking at the door, came between them with plates of food and clatter of knives and forks. They regarded him silently, and when he was gone, they made a feeble pretence of eating.
I ought to have known better, she said, returning to the business again with a wry smile. "I ought to have known it couldn't have lasted."
It isn't that I love you any the less, he said, unconsciously quoting a phrase in his letter. "I don't know how to explain my attitude.... I love you just the same ... but, somehow...."
Don't, don't explain, she interrupted. "I understand. Of course it's impossible if you think like that. And, of course, Humphrey, there's no need to talk of love...." She laughed a little, and then, really, she could not spare him any more. "Oh, what a boy you are!"
He flushed hotly. "I know you've always looked upon me as a boy," he said. "You think I'm a child ... but it takes a man to do what I'm doing ... it takes courage to face it out ... it hurts."
Oh, you are a boy, she said, with a little hysterical laugh. "Of course you're only a boy." She pushed her plate away from her. "Don't you see what you've done—you've broken up everything."
And she put her head on her arms outstretched on the table, and sobbed and sobbed again.
He watched her shoulders tremble with her sobs, and heard her accusing words repeat themselves in a pitiful refrain in his ears. At that moment he touched, it seemed, the lowest depths of meanness. He felt awkward and foolish.... She was crying, and he could do nothing. "Lilian ... Lilian," he pleaded, touching her hand that was flat on the table. "Don't—I didn't mean to." Heavens! if she did not stop, he would snatch her to him, and kiss her hotly, and let Ferrol and the world and all its success go by him for ever.
The waiter saved the situation. His knock came as a warning, and when he entered the room with more plates and a greasier smile, he found the lady at the window flinging it open widely and complaining of the heat, the gentleman looking moodily before him, and the food barely touched.
You no like the fricassee, sare? he said, turning the rejected food with his fork.
It's all right, Humphrey said, in a voice that the waiter knew to mean "Get out." "No appetite to-day."
Lilian turned from the window, as the door closed behind him. Her eyes and lips were struggling for mastery over her emotions, and the lips conquered with a wan, watery smile. She placed her hand on Humphrey's shoulder. "There," she said, wiping her eyes, destroying the tension with a prosy sniff. "It's all over—I didn't mean to be so silly."
The miserable meal went on in silence. There was nothing more to be said. He was thinking of all this pitiful love-affair of his, how it ran unevenly through the fabric of work and hopes, beginning at first with a brilliant pattern—a splash of the golden sunrise—and gradually becoming worn, until now all the threads were twisted and frayed. After this, they would part, never to meet again on the old terms, never to recapture the thrill of early love. Odd, how she who had lain so close to his heart, enfolded in his arms, would have to pass him in the street henceforth, perhaps with only a nod, perhaps without any recognition at all. And nobody would know, nobody would guess of their shipwrecked love.
I'm glad I never told mother, she said once, voicing her thoughts. She took a little package from her pocket: it held the few trinkets he had given her, wrapped up in tissue-paper—a brooch or two, a thin gold necklace with a heart dangling from it, and his own signet ring.
No ... no ... he said; "for God's sake, keep those. I should be happier if you kept them."
She shook her head gently. "I could not keep them," she said. "They were little tokens of your love ... they belong to you now."
There was a pause. The clock chimed two. The disillusion was complete, all the fine draperies of love had been wrenched away—they were so flimsy after all—and behind them reality stood, sordid and ashamed. She tried to strike a note of cheerful fatalism.
Well, what must be, must be, she said, reaching for her cloak. He sprang to his feet to help her, remembering how, in other days, his hand had touched her cheek, and he had urged her lips towards him, that he might kiss her. How calm and self-possessed she was now. How magnificently she mastered the situation—a false move from her and the moments would become chaotic. He was uneasy, awkward and embarrassed ... one moment, ready to snatch her to his arms and begin all over again; the next, alertly conscious that he was unencumbered, that henceforth there was no other interest in his life but work—free!
Now she was ready to go.
I won't come down with you, he said, "I'll say good-bye now." He could not face a parting in the street. He watched her gather her things together, her bag, her umbrella, her gloves ... she smiled at him, and now the smile was a riddle: he could not guess her thoughts: contempt or pity?
Suddenly she bent down towards him, stooped over him, with her face aglow with a divine expression, virginal and tender, the light of sacrifice in her eyes, the sweet pain of martyrdom on her lips; she bent towards him and kissed him lightly on the forehead.
Good-bye, Humphie dear.
She had never spoken with a voice like that before, she had never shown how much she loved him, and all the misunderstandings, the torment, the doubts and uncertainties were washed away as his thoughts gushed forth in a great appreciation of his loss.
The next moment she had gone.
He was alone in the room, with her good-bye ringing in his ears. Idly he fingered a little packet of tissue-paper, opening it and laying bare the little pieces of metal that were all that remained to him of his love.
He touched the presents that he had given to Lilian—each one held memories for him.... The gold signet ring had belonged to his father.... If only Daniel Quain had been there, with his world-wisdom and philosophy....
Tears, Humphrey? Surely, not tears! Think how splendidly free you are now; think of the moment of triumph when you can go to Ferrol and tell him that you are no longer hampered; see how straight the path that leads to conquest.