That night, in a little box of a flat in Hampstead, a man was fighting his last battle, with the fingers of Death at his throat and the arm of Love for his support. It was a sharp, short battle, ended when the night itself finished, and the dawn came through the chinks in the shutters, as pale and as cold as a ghost.
This was the end of Leonard Wratten, whom so few people understood, who had always kept his own counsel, so that only he himself knew of his own struggles and ambitions—they were just like Humphrey's, just like those of every other man in the Street. He had not asked much of life, and all that he asked for was given him, and then snatched away.
They talked about it in the Pen Club, and in the offices. "Overwork," they whispered. "He was just married." Ferrol rose to the occasion: wrote handsome cheques for Mrs Wratten, straightened out affairs, sent her flowers, arranged for her to take a sea-cruise ... did all that he possibly could, except bring Leonard Wratten striding back to life again.
But there was one in Fleet Street who followed the coffin to the cemetery, who seemed to feel that he alone had understood Wratten. ("It's always the best fellows that are taken," they said, when he was gone, as they say of every one.) And, as he came away from the cemetery in the sunshine when the coffin had been lowered into the grave, and scattered with lilies, he knew that he had lost friendship inestimable, for it had not had time fully to develop and ripen.
Wratten's death, and the break with Lilian, came hard upon each other: he felt that the roots of his life were stirred, two influences of such potent possibilities had gone from him. He knew that a phase of his life was closed.
The Pen Club stands far away from Clubland up a narrow court that leads from Fleet Street, into the maze of the little streets and courts that finally emerge on Holborn.
It is the hidden core of newspaper land. It lurks behind the newspaper offices with discreet ground-glass windows, unpretentious, and obscurely peaceful. No porter in brass-buttoned uniform guards its doors—indeed, it has but one, and that a door with a lustrous, black-glass panel, with a golden message of "Members Only" lettered upon it. Strangers and messengers are requested to tap gently on the window of a little pigeon-hole at the side.
Oliver Goldsmith once lived in the house that is now the Pen Club; Dr Johnson lived a few courts away, and strode down Fleet Street to the "Cheshire Cheese," little dreaming that Americans would follow in his footsteps as pilgrims to a shrine. Its courts have had their place in the history of our letters, but all that is past, for journalism affects a contempt for literature, and literature walks by with a high head. If you want literature, and art, and high-thinking, you must go further west, along the Strand, where you may find a club that still clings to the traditions of Bohemia: but if you want to meet good fellows, jolly, generous, foolish men, wise as patriarchs in some things, and like children in others, then you must join the Pen Club.
All around it are the flourishing signs of the journalists' trade. Here a process-block maker; there a lesser News Agency; round the corner a large printing works, and almost opposite it the vibrating basements of The Day. You can see the props of the scenery—take a stroll through the courts, and you see the back-doors of all those proud newspaper offices, great rolls of paper being hoisted up for to-morrow's issue, dismal wagons piled high with yesterday's papers, tied up in bundles, "returns"; unsold papers that will be taken back to the paper-mills and pulped: food for the philosopher here!
Humphrey Quain joined the Pen Club when he had been three years in Fleet Street. It was Willoughby, the crime enthusiast of The Day, who put his name down; Jamieson, the dramatic critic, seconded him.
Two years had made very little outward difference in Humphrey. He had perhaps grown an inch, and his shoulders broadened in proportion, but his face was the same frank, boyish face that had gazed open-mouthed in Fleet Street on that January day. Yet there was some slight change in the expression of the eyes; they had become charged with an eager, expectant look; observation had trained them to an alertness and a strained directness of gaze. Inwardly, too, the change in him was imperceptible. He had lost a little of that cocksure way of his, and acquired, by constant mingling with men older than himself, a point of view and an understanding above his years. In worldly knowledge he had advanced with large and sudden strides: some call it vice and some call it experience. A young man, thrust into the whirlpool of London, finds it difficult to avoid such experience, and so Humphrey had allowed himself to be tossed hither and thither with the underswirl of it all, learning deeper lessons than any man can teach.
He had come out of this period with a sense of something lost, yet never regretting its loss. Sometimes a bitter spasm of shame would overtake him when he thought of the sordid memories he was accumulating. He could have wished it all undone, and he looked back on the Humphrey Quain of Easterham, and saw himself singularly unsmirched, and innocent—knowing nothing, absolutely nothing. After all, he thought, was this knowledge? Does all this go towards the making of a man, as the steel is tempered by the fire? Humphrey did not know ... he took all that life offered him: the good and the bad, the folly with the wisdom.
That affair of his with Lilian Filmer was now nothing more than a memory. They had never spoken since their wretched meeting in the Strand restaurant. It was strange, too, how rarely they had met, when in the old days scarcely a day seemed to pass without the sight of her in Fleet Street. She still worked in the Special News Agency Office, and yet, during the two years that had passed since their parting, he had not seen her more than four or five times, and then only in the distance. Once he found himself marching straight towards her in the crowd of the luncheon-hour walkers: panic seized him; he did not know what to do. She was walking proudly with the erect carriage of her body that he knew so well—and then, almost mysteriously, she had disappeared. Perhaps she had seen him, and avoided a direct meeting by turning down a side street or by passing into a shop. For a year he always walked on the other side of the street during the luncheon hour. At the back of his mind she lived as vividly as she had lived in the days when she had been the most important factor in his existence. There were times when the thought of her rendered him uneasy; he felt he had not been true to himself, there was a reproachful blot on his escutcheon.... Strange! how lasting his love had seemed that night when he had kissed her in the cab after the theatre. He could look back on it all now dispassionately. There had been progress in the office. His salary was now eight pounds a week. He remembered the day when he had gone to Ferrol, and said, a little miserably, for the strain of the breaking with Lilian pressed hardly on his heart in those days: "I've broken off my engagement." In these words he had dedicated himself to Ferrol and The Day. Nothing more was said. Ferrol nodded in a non-committal sort of way. A few weeks later Humphrey was sent to the East Coast on special work. He did well, and the increase in salary came to him at last.
With this he lifted himself out of the old ruck of his life. The money opened up unbounded vistas of wealth and new possibilities to him. He decided to leave Beaver and Guilford Street. Beaver, as an influence, had served his turn in shaping Humphrey's career. It was Beaver who first showed him the way to London, and now, at odd intervals, Beaver occurred and recurred across his vision, still biting his nails, and still with ink-splashed thumbs. No stress of ambition seemed to disturb Beaver's placidity. He was content to plod on and on, day after day, a journalistic cart-horse, until he dropped dead in his collar. That was how it seemed to Humphrey, who never credited Beaver with any great aspirations, yet that shaggy man had a separate life of his own, with his own dreams, and his own aims, which one day were destined to touch the fringe of Humphrey's life.
Humphrey took a small flat in Clifford's Inn, a place of sleep and peace and quiet then, as it is now, out of the noise of Fleet Street. It was a "flat" only by courtesy, for in reality it was made up of two rooms and a box-room. The larger was his sitting-room, and the smaller—a narrow, oblong room—he used as a sleeping apartment. Very little light, and scarcely any air, came through the small latticed windows, but the rooms held a medi?val charm about them, and he was free for ever from the landladies and grubbiness of lodgings. He paid a pound a week for his rooms in Clifford's Inn.
Every evening when he was free in London, Humphrey went to the Pen Club. The place had a fascination for him, which he could not shake off. One could not define this fascination, this influence which the Club wielded over him.
It grew on him gradually, until an evening spent without a visit to the Club seemed empty and insufficient. There was nothing vicious about the Club—it was just a meeting-place, where one could eat and drink. Within its four walls there was peace unutterable; and the world stood still for you when you passed the threshold. Other clubs have tape machines spitting out lengths of news: telegrams pasted on the walls; chairs full of old gentlemen reading newspapers with dutiful eagerness—the Pen Club was a place where you escaped from news, where nobody was interested in news as news, but merely in news as it stood in the relation to the doings of their friends. There was no excitement over a by-election, nobody cared who would get in on polling day; nobody thrilled over a revolution in a foreign state; mention of these things only served as a peg on which to hang discussions of personalities. "I expect Williamson's having a nobby time in St Petersburg," or "Who's down at Bodmin for The Herald—Carter?—I thought so. Jolly good stuff in to-day."
And when news did touch them, it touched them personally, and altered the tenor of their lives perhaps for many days. At any minute something would happen, and a half-dozen of them would be wanted at their different offices. They would just disappear from the Club for a few days, and return to find that a fresh set of events had dwarfed their own experiences completely. They were never missed. A man might be absent in Morocco for half-a-year, living through wild happenings, with his life hanging on a slender thread—a hero in the eyes of newspaper readers—but nobody in particular in the eyes of the Pen Club, where every one found his level in the fellowship of the Pen. They came and went like shadows.
Humphrey found all types of journalists in the Pen Club—odd types off the beaten track of journalism, guarding their own cabbage-patch of news, and taking their wares to market daily. There was Larkin, for instance, who took the railway platforms as his special province. He was a tall, thin man, with friendly eyes smiling behind gold-rimmed pince-nez. No Duke or Duchess could leave London by way of the railway termini without Larkin knowing it. Those paragraphs that appeared scattered about all the newspapers of London, telling of the departure of Somebody and his wife to Cairo or Nice marked the trail of Larkin's day across the London railway stations. Then there was Foyle, a chubby, red-faced man, with a jolly smile, who, by the unwritten law of Fleet Street, chronicled the fires that happened in the Metropolis. A fire without Foyle was an impossible thing to imagine. There was Touche, who dealt only in marriages and engagements; and Ford, who had made a corner for himself in the Divorce Courts; Chate, who sat in the Bankruptcy Court; Modgers, who specialized in recording the wills and last testaments of those who died; and Vernham, lean, long-haired, and cadaverous, who was the Fleet Street authority on the weather. These men and others were the servants of all newspapers, and attached to none. In some cases their work had been handed down from father to son; they made snug incomes, and though they were servants of all, they were masters of themselves.
And all these men were just like children out of school, when they met in the Pen Club: there was no grim seriousness about them—they kept all that for their work. They had insatiable appetites for stories, for reminiscences of their craft. They knew how to laugh. It was well that they did, for, if they had taken themselves seriously, they would never have been able to face the caricatures of themselves which hung on the walls. These caricatures, drawn by a cartoonist on one of the dailies, were things of shuddering satire: they were cruelly true, grotesque parodies of faces and mouths, legs and arms. If you wanted to know the truth of a member, all you had to do was to consult the wall, and there you saw the man's character grimacing at you in colours.
Humphrey had been away from London for a week, and he came back to find the Club seething with excitement. The moment he crossed the threshold he was aware of something abnormal in the life of the Club.
It was the last night of the Club elections for the Committee—a riotous affair as a rule. All round the room there was the chatter and buzz of members discussing the new spirit in the Club.
As member after member dropped in, the excitement grew. It was a historic election. For the first time the youngest members of the Club had been nominated to stand on the Committee. The older members, the men who had watched the Pen Club grow from one room in the second floor of a house to two whole houses knocked into one, looked on a little sorrowfully. They had not become accustomed to the new spirit in the Club. Among themselves, they said the Club was going to the dogs. These young men were making a travesty of the whole business. They had no reverence for traditions. After all, the election of a Chairman and a Committee was a grave affair. It was amazing how seriously they took themselves.
Presently Chander appeared selling copies of The Club Mosquito, a journal produced specially for the occasion, which stung members in the weakest spots of their personalities. There were caricatures and portraits of all the "Young Members" who were going to save the Club, as they put it, from the moss and cobwebs of old age. Really, these young men were very ruthless. They invented Election songs, and they sang boisterously:—
"We're going to vote all night, We're going to vote all day.
"Privileged sub-editors, dropping in for a half-hour from their offices, found themselves caught up on the tempest of exhilaration. "Hallo, here's Leman—have you voted yet, Leman?" and a paper would be fetched and Leman would be made to put a cross against thirteen names, with thirteen people urging him to have a drink. Bribery and corruption!
Humphrey abandoned himself to the merriment of the evening. He constituted himself Willoughby's election-agent, and canvassed for votes with shameless disregard for the Corrupt Practices Act. Sharp, the sporting journalist, was busy making a book on the result. That eminent war-correspondent, Bertram Wace, issued a manifesto, demanding to know why he should not be Chairman. The price of The Club Mosquito rose to a shilling a copy when it was known that all the proceeds were to go to the Newspaper Press Fund.
Humphrey found himself left alone with the excitement eddying all round him. He was able to survey the scene with an air of detached interest. It reminded him of his school-days: all these men were young of heart, with the generous impulses of boys; they had the spirit of eternal youth—the one reward which men of their temperament are able to wrest from life.
He saw Willoughby, with his black hair in a disordered tangle over his eyes, joining in the war-song of the Young Members.
As he looked at all these men, chattering, laughing, grouped together here and there where some one was telling an entertaining story, he saw the smiling aspect of Fleet Street, the siren, luring the adventurous stranger to her, with laughter and opulent promise. To-morrow they would all begin their nervous work again, struggling to secure a firm foothold in the niches of the Street, when a false move, a mistake, would bring disaster with it; but they thought nothing of to-morrow; they lived in a life of to-days....
He saw Tommy Pride come into the Club. Two years had left their mark on Tommy's face. New reporters had appeared in the Street, and somehow Tommy found himself marking time, while the army of younger men pressed forward and passed him. He could not complain; he felt that if he asserted himself, Rivers or Neckinger would tell him bluntly that they were cutting down the staff—the dreadful, unanswerable excuse for dismissal. He knew that his mind was less supple than it was years ago; the stress and the bitterness of competition was sterner now than in those days when they posted assignments overnight. So, too, his pen went more slowly, finding each day increasing the difficulty of grappling with new methods. Tommy Pride had lived in To-day, and now To-morrow was upon him.
Stopping for the declaration of the poll, Pride? asked Humphrey.
Not me, said Tommy, picking a bundle of letters from his pigeon-hole. "I've had a late turn to-night and the missis will be sitting up."
Well, what about a drink?
Tommy shrugged his shoulders wearily. "Oh—a whisky and soda," he said. "What a row these fellows are making." Willoughby attacked him with a voting paper, and Humphrey noticed how Pride's hand—the hand that had written millions of words—trembled as he made crosses against the names. It was as if each finger were attached to thin wires; it reminded Humphrey of those toy tortoises from Japan, that danced and shook in a little glass case. And he thought: "Will my hand be like that one day?"
The torrent of talk flowed all round him; gusts of boisterous laughter marked the close of a funny story. In all the stories there was a note of egotism. He saw, suddenly, why these men were not as other men. They were profound egotists, they lived each day by the assertion of their own individuality. The stronger the individuality of the man, the greater his chance of success. And these men, he saw, though they all worked in a common school, were absolutely different from one another. They were different, even, in breeding: there were men whose voice and pose could only have been acquired at one of the 'Varsities; there were men who lacked the refinements of speech; keen, eager men, and men whose eyes had lost their lustre, who seemed weary with work; mere boys, self-assertive and confident with the wisdom of men of the world, and older men with grey heads and bald heads.
They surged about him, and came and went, in twos and threes, some of them departing to their homes in the suburbs, north and south, whither trains ran into the early hours of the morning.
Humphrey had been long enough in Fleet Street to know them all: if you could have taken the personalities of these men and blended them together, the composite result would have closely resembled the personality of Tommy Pride—who was now drinking his second glass of whisky. They were men of tremendously active brains—not one of them but had an idea for a new paper that was worth a fortune if only the capital could be procured—and all of them longed intensely for that cottage in the country after the storm and stress of Fleet Street; they could not talk seriously without being cynical, for though they saw the real side of life, the pompous make-believe of the rest left them without any illusions.
Better wait for the result now, Humphrey said to Tommy. "It'll be out in a few minutes."
All right, said Tommy, glancing at the clock. "Green's offered me a lift in his cab. Have a drink, Quain. I had the hump when I came in—feel better now."
They all trooped upstairs, where the Young Members were making discordant noises. They sang new and improvised quatrains. You would have thought that not a care in the world could exist within those cheerful walls.
There was a shout of "Here they are." The vote-counters came into the room. One of them they hailed affectionately as "Grandpa." Humphrey had seen him before, walking about Fleet Street, with his silver beard and black slouch hat set on his white hair, but to-night he felt strangely moved, as the old man came into the room, smiling to the cheers. What was it? Some association of ideas passed through his mind, some linking up of Ferrol, young, powerful, master of so many destinies, with the picture before his eyes....
These thoughts were overwhelmed with a tumult of shouting. The old man was reading out the names of the members of the new Committee.
The Young Members had won.
Come on, said Tommy Pride, "let's get off before the rush."
As they passed out of the Club into the cool air of the night, Tommy suddenly recollected Green and his offer of a cab. "Oh, never mind," he said; "can you lend me four bob for the cab; I'm rather short." Humphrey passed the money to him, and, drawn by the jingle of the coin, as a moth is to candle, a man lurched out of the shadows of the court.
The gas-light fell on the unshaven face of the man, and made his eyes blink feebly: it showed the pitiful, shabby clothes that garbed the swaying figure.
Hullo, Tommy, said the man. He smiled weakly not sure of his ground.
Good God! said Tommy.
Eagerness now came into the man's face; a terrible eagerness, as if everything depended on his being able to compress his story into as few words as possible, before Tommy went. There was no beating about the bush.
I say, old man, lend me a bob, will you?... Didn't you know?... Oh, I left two years ago.... Nothing doing.... Yes, I know I'm a fool.... Honest, this is for food.... Remember that time we had up in Chatsworth, when the Duke...? Seen anything more of that fellow we met in Portsmouth on the Royal visit?... What was his name?... Can't remember it ... never mind, I say, old man, can you spare a bob?
Tommy passed him one of the shillings he had just borrowed from Humphrey. "Why don't you pull up," he said; "you can do good stuff if you want to."
Pull up! said the man. "Course I can do good stuff. I can do the best stuff in Fleet Street.... Remember that story I wrote about...."
There was something intensely tragic in this sudden kindling of the old, egotistical flame in the burnt-out ruin of a man. The cringing attitude left him when he spoke of his work.
Well, you'd better get home... Tommy said. "What's the missis doing?"
She's trying to make a little by typewriting now.... Thanks for the bob.... He shambled down the court towards Gough Square. "So long." His footsteps grew fainter, until the last echoes of them died away.
Tommy Pride came out with Humphrey into Fleet Street.
There came to them, as it comes only to those who work in the Street, the fascination of its night. The coloured omnibuses, and the cabs, and the busy crowds of people had left it long ago, and the lamps were like a yellow necklace strung into the darkness. Eastwards, doubly steep in its vacancy, Ludgate Hill rose under the silent railway bridge to St Paul's; westwards, the Griffin, the dark towers of the Law Courts, and the island churches loomed uncertainly against the starless sky. The lights shone in the high windows of offices about them, and they caught glimpses of men smoking pipes, working in their shirt-sleeves—Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, were waiting for their news. The carts darted up and down the street with loads of newspapers for the trains. There was a noise of moving machinery. A ragged, homeless man slouched wretchedly along the street, his eyes downcast, mumbling his misery to himself. Two men in grimy clothes were delving down into the bowels of the roadway, and dragging up gross loads of black slime. They worked silently, seeing nothing of the loathsomeness of their work. Over all, above even the noise of the machinery, there came the cleansing sound of swiftly running water, as the street-cleaners, with streaming hoses, swept the dust and the muck and the rubble of the day into the torrents of the gutter.
Humphrey took rooms in Clifford's Inn, because that was where Kenneth Carr lived. The two came together, though their natures were opposite, and their friendship had ripened.
Carr was an ascetic, denying himself most of the ordinary pleasures of life, sacrificing himself to the work of his heart; his mind was calm, with a spiritual beauty; he was a man of singularly high ideals. This contrast with Humphrey's frank materialism, his love of pleasure and lack of any deep, spiritual feeling, seemed only to draw their friendship closer. Then there was the memory of Wratten. They often talked together of him, and, as for Humphrey, he never found himself face to face with a difficult piece of reporting without imagining what Wratten would have done. Most people in Fleet Street had forgotten him long ago, but on Humphrey's mind he had left an indelible impression.
I wonder what it was about Wratten that makes us remember him still, Humphrey said one day. "I had only known him a few months."
I don't know, Kenneth said. "It's like that, I've noticed. Sometimes a man, out of all the others you meet, comes forward, and you feel instantly, 'This man is worth having as a friend.' The charm of Wratten was that there were two Wrattens: one, the glum, churlish man, with whom nobody could get on, and the other, the self-revealing Wratten we knew."
They smoked in silence. Presently Kenneth threw his cigarette into the fireplace.
I suppose I'll have to get on with my book.
Why don't you come out ... come to the Club?
Not me, my son. I'm happier here. I want to get a chapter done.
What's the good of writing novels ... they don't pay, do they?
Pay! They pay you for every hour you spend over them, said Kenneth. "I should go brooding mad if I couldn't sit down for an hour or so every night and do what I like with my people. The unhappiest moments of my life were when, to oblige Elizabeth, I gave up novel-writing for a time, and took to poverty statistics."
Humphrey glanced up at the mantelpiece. A portrait of Elizabeth Carr was there, in a silver frame, set haphazard among the litter of masculine knick-knacks—ash-trays, a cigarette-box and a few old pipes. It was a portrait that had always attracted Humphrey; the sun had caught the depth of her eyes and the shadows about her throat. He was never in the room without being conscious of that portrait, and often, when he was not thinking of her at all, he would find himself looking upwards at the silver frame to see, confronting him, the eyes of Elizabeth Carr. She, herself, never seemed to be quite like the photograph. She came, sometimes, to see Kenneth, and, at rare intervals, Humphrey's visits coincided with hers.
She did not live with her brother. She was more fortunate than he, because she had been left an income which was large enough for all her wants. She had always wished to help Kenneth with a small allowance, but he declared he would not touch a penny of her money. "I'll fight my own battles," he said.
There was something in her attitude towards Humphrey—a vague, impalpable something—that left him always uneasy; perhaps it was a subtle display of deference—he could not define it, but he felt that she was comparing him, in her mind, with Kenneth, and that he was worsted in the comparison. She would move about in the little room, preparing tea for them, her presence bringing an oddly domestic air into the rooms, and Humphrey would help her, and she would be jolly and laugh when he was clumsy, but all the time it was as if she were holding him away from her with invisible hands.
And, when he looked at her photograph, he saw behind the clear beauty of the face, with its smile of tenderness and large eyes that never left him, an Elizabeth Carr divinely meek ... utterly unlike the Elizabeth Carr he knew, who carried herself with such graceful pride and seemed so far above him.
He took up the portrait for a moment. "She hasn't been here lately?" he said.
Who? asked Kenneth, at his writing-table.
Your sister ... you were speaking about the statistics you did for her.
Oh? Elizabeth. No. She's been pretty busy with her work.
Slumming, eh?
That's about it. I don't know half her schemes. Wonderful girl, Elizabeth. Now I come to think of it, I've got to go down to Epping Forest to-morrow. Some bean-feast she's giving to a thousand slum kids. There's sure to be a ticket in your office, why don't you ask to do it?
I will, said Humphrey. "A day's fresh air in the forest would do me good."
And he did. Things happened to be slack that day in Fleet Street, and Rivers thought there would be plenty of human interest in the story, "though, of course, it's a chestnut," so that was how Humphrey found himself on the platform at Loughton Station an hour later.
The morning was rich with the warmth and colour of June. The clear fresh smell of the country was all about him. The scent of the flowers, the sight of the green fields dappled with the yellow and white of kingcup and daisy, the pale sky above him with the sun beating down from the cloudless blue, called him back to Easterham, and the life that now seemed centuries away. Throughout all the comings and goings of years, throughout the change, and the unrest of men and women, the old Cathedral close would be unaltered. The rooks would still clamour and circle about the beeches, and the ivy would grow more thickly. Looking back on Easterham, now on the odd market-place, and on the streets that wandered out to the hedgerows and meadow-lands towards the New Forest, he looked back on a picture of infinite peace.
A bird's song and the croon of bees as they swung in their flower-cradles; a horse galloping freely in a field, and cattle browsing in the sunshine—were not all these of more worth than anything else in life?
Unnoticed, he had relinquished everything to Fleet Street. The poison of its promise had drugged him. He could appreciate nothing outside its narrow area ... news! news! and the talking of news; fifty steps round to the Pen Club, and fifty steps back to the office; all the day spent in that world of bricks and mortar, which had once seemed so vast, and was now to him nothing more than a very much magnified Easterham.
He had not even sought out London. He remembered regretfully the evening of his first ride with Beaver, through the crowded streets to Shepherd's Bush, when he had promised himself nights and days of enchantment in the new wonder of London. And the wonder was still unexplored. As it was with London, so it was with everything. His acquaintance and knowledge was superficial. There was no time for deep study, and the Past could not live with the Present hammering at its doors urgently day after day. Just so, too, with the cities in every part of England. He had travelled much, but he came away from every place taking with him only the knowledge of the whereabouts of the hotel, the post-office and the railway station.
A sense of waste filled him; he saw behind him the years, crowded with events, so crowded with movement that he could retain nothing of their activity. And he saw before him a repetition of this, year after year, and again year after year, a long avenue of waiting years, through which he passed, looking ever forward, seeing nothing, remembering nothing, and coming through them all empty-handed, unless....
Unless what? He saw the impasse waiting for him. What was there to be done to avoid it? He might rise to the highest point in reporting—climb up laboriously, only to find at the top of the ladder that others were climbing up after him to force him down the steps on the other side.
Kenneth Carr was rescuing the flotsam of the years. These books of his, though they brought little money, were something permanent; they were the witnesses of endeavour; they remained as things achieved out of the reckless squandering of the hours.
And Humphrey knew that for him there would be nothing left except the dead files of The Day, nothing more profitable than that, a brain worked out, weak eyes and a trembling hand. Yes, and as he looked about him on the glory of the country, and heard the breeze making a sea-noise among the trees, he felt that there was something everlasting here, if he could only grasp it. He could not explain it. He only knew that looking upwards into the lucent depths of the green leaves of a tree, and catching now and again the glimpse of the blue sky beyond, seemed to remove the oppression that weighed his soul, and release his mind from perplexity.
He smiled. The old phrase came echoing back to him. "Two pounds a week and a cottage in the country," he thought. Eternal, pitiful, unfulfilled desire.
The whistle of the approaching train woke him from his thoughts. "I'm an ass," he said to himself. "I couldn't live a day without being in the thick of it."
He walked back to the station, just in time to see the train coming round the bend of the platform, giving a glimpse of fluttering handkerchiefs and eager faces at the windows. The stillness of the station was suddenly shattered into a thousand noisy pieces. The children tumbled over one another in their haste to be the first to see all that there was to see.
There was a mighty sound of shrill voices, chattering, laughing, and calling to one another: a confused picture of pallid-faced children, darting from group to group, seeking their child-friends, and arranging themselves in marching order. The teachers herded them together like hens marshalling their elusive brood. Humphrey surveyed the scene with an eye trained to the observation of detail.
He saw the painful cleanliness of the children, as though they had been scrubbed and washed for days before their outing. He saw behind the neatness of the pink ribbon and the mended boots, a vision of faded mothers, fumbling with hands shrivelled by laundry work, or fingers ragged with sewing, at these parting touches of pathetic finery. And, behind the vision of the mothers, he saw that whole sordid underworld hung round the neck of civilization.... These children, pinched and haggard, were left to live in the breathless slums, with only charity to help them. The State made laws for them: but there was no law to make them grow up otherwise than the generation of neglect which produced them.
They were too young to know the difference between happiness and misery. They could only sing and march away, an army of rags and patched neatness, because for one whole day their young limbs were to have the freedom of the country. They thought of that one day, and not of the other three hundred and sixty-four days of squalor and want.
Hullo—here you are, then, Kenneth Carr appeared out of the crowd of children. "Seen Elizabeth—I've lost her."
Humphrey looked along the platform, and he saw Elizabeth Carr bending down and talking to a little girl. She looked tall and beautiful, among all the harsh ugliness for which these children stood. Her figure, as she stooped to the little ones, seemed to shine with grace and merciful pity. She saw Humphrey, and nodded to him, as he raised his hat. Then she came up leading the child.
Look, she said, and though her eyes were lit with anger, her voice was gentle. "Look at this child's dress—and the father's earning thirty shillings a week."
Humphrey looked. The child was dressed grotesquely, so grotesquely that it appealed more to the sense of the ludicrous than to the sense of pity. Her main garment was an absurd black cape sparkling with sequins, that undoubtedly belonged to her mother's cloak; it reached to below the child's knees. Beneath this was a tattered muslin blouse of an uncertain, faded colour, and beneath that—nothing. Elizabeth lifted the cape a little and showed undergarments made of string sacking. The child had neither shoes nor stockings.
Isn't it a shame! she cried, sending the child to join the rest. "Doesn't it revolt you?"
Poverty! said Humphrey. "What can one do?"
Do! retorted Elizabeth. "What's the good of having compulsory education, if you don't have compulsory clothing. I know the parents of that child. They could dress that child if they wanted to. Oh," and she clenched her fists, "it makes me feel so helpless."
They talked about it on the way to the forest, as they followed in the wake of the children.
The wicked folly and the shame of it, she said. "Does nobody realize the ruin and wreckage that belongs to big cities? Thousands on thousands of lives ended before they began. The parents don't know, and won't know.
And what becomes of those who live? These children here will go through their school-days, and then—what? A small percentage of them may get on, the rest will become casual labourers, dock-hands, and loafers.
They passed a long, ill-clad youth lounging along the road. His face was brutally coarse, and he walked with a slouch.
There's one of them, Elizabeth went on. "Now, I know that boy: he used to come to these outings three years ago. He's left school now, and he has tramped down from London for the sake of a meat-pie or a mug of tea. Lots of them do that, you know," she said to Humphrey. "He's never learnt a trade. Of course, he learnt history and geography, and all that, and he got a place, I think, as an errand-boy. There's no interest in running errands—so he just loafs now; and he'll loaf on through life, until he's an old man, sleeping on the Embankment, or on the benches on the Bayswater side of the Park. Perhaps he'll have a few spells in prison—anyhow, he's doomed. Lost. And so are nearly all these children here to-day."
The strength of her convictions amazed Humphrey. He had never heard Elizabeth talk like this before. He wondered why she, so beautiful and frail, should mingle with the ugliness of life. When they came to the forest, and Kenneth wandered off alone, she told him.
"It's because behind all this sordidness there is something that is more than beauty—there are magnificent tragedies here, that make my throat dry. There are struggles to live of which nobody ever knows. And, sometimes, you know, when I come from one of my slums and stand by the theatres as they are emptying, and see the lighted motor-cars, and all these other women with jewels round their necks and in their ears, I want to laugh at the folly of it all. They don't know ... they never can know, unless they go down to the depths, and look.""
"Humphrey was silent.
And nobody can do anything, you know, except this sort of thing. It's a poor enough thing to do, but it's something to know you're helping.
I think this work is noble, Humphrey said.
Oh no—not noble. It would be noble if we could do something lasting—something permanent.
They were sitting now on the soft grass, and he looked sidewise at Elizabeth Carr, and saw the fine outline of her profile. There was great beauty in her face, in the delicate oval of her chin, in the shadows that played about her throat, showing soft and white above the low collar of lace. That low lace collar and unornamented dress gave to her a touch of demure simplicity. She had the fragrance of lavender: he could imagine her—(seeing her now, with her eyes and lips tender, and her hands meekly clasped in her lap)—standing in a room of chintz and Chippendale, tending her bowl of pink roses by the latticed window opened to the sunshine.
He sat by her absorbing her serenity; there was repose and rest in the unconscious pose of her body. He had suddenly found the Elizabeth Carr of the photograph on Kenneth's mantelpiece: her presence seemed to bring him peace.
The noise of the children rioting in their happiness made her smile.
Come, she said, "let us go and join them."
They walked across the open space in the forest, the soft grass yielding to their feet, and came upon the whole exulting landscape. On all sides of them the ragged little ones, released for a day from the barren prison-house of alley and by-way, ran and romped in the freedom of unfettered limbs, uttering shouts of triumph and gladness. This picture of merriment unchecked, cheered the heart with its bright movement. Here was life, overflowing, bubbling, swirling in little eddies among the trees and undergrowth, running free over the green meadow-lands with all the chattering animation of childhood.
Out of the main stream they found strange types of children, odd-minded little things, full of cunning and mother-wit that they had learnt already, knowing the world's hand was against them. Some of them clutched pennies in grimy fists: money saved in farthings for weeks in anticipation of this treat. Others secreted about their person portions of the meat-pie which was given them for lunch. They would take this home as an earnest of altruism.
Impossible to forget the shadow of misery that overhung all their lives; impossible to see these ragged children, who had hopeless years before them, without realizing the mad folly and the waste of citizenship.
Splendid Empire on which the sun never sets! Will the historian of the future, discovering in the ruins of the British Museum Humphrey's account of that day in Epping Forest, place his finger on the yellow paper with its faded ink, and cry: "This is where the story of the Decline and Fall of Britain begins."
They went to see the children take their tea. They sat at long plank tables under the corrugated iron roof of the shed-like pavilion. The girls were in one vast room, the boys in another. Their school-teachers rapped on the table, and the jabber and chatter faded away into a silence. Then the voice of one of the school-masters started singing—
Praise God, from whom——
and the hymn was taken up by the voices, singing vociferously—
"Praise God, from whom all blessings flow; Praise Him, all creatures here below; Praise Him above, ye heavenly host; Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
"There was nothing half-hearted about it; they made a great clamour of their thanks, and their shrill treble made echoes within echoes against the iron roof and wooden walls of the room in which they sat. And Humphrey, always the looker-on, saw the imperishable pathos of this and all that lay behind it, and for a moment he felt pity tug at his heart. Then, as if ashamed of his weakness, he turned to Elizabeth and saw that she was watching him. She laid a gloved hand on his sleeve for the fraction of a second; it was an impulsive, unconscious movement, the merest shadow of a caress.
I did not know you could feel like that, she said softly.
In those days Humphrey, trained in the school of experience, took his place in the ranks of Fleet Street, that very narrow community, where each man knows the value of his brother's work.
He was being shaped in the mould. The characteristics of the journalist were more strongly marked in him than they had ever been. He was self-reliant and resourceful, he had acquired the magic faculty of making instant friendships; he had developed his personality, and there was about him a certain charm, a youthful ingenuousness of expression that stood him in good stead when he was at work. People liked Humphrey; among his colleagues in the Street, he was not great enough for jealousy, nor small enough to be ignored. He steered the middle course of popularity.
He had been long enough now on The Day for Ferrol to perceive his limitations. Humphrey did not know—nobody knew—that Ferrol from his red room was watching his work, noting each failure and each success, watching and weighing his value. And it was with something of regret that Ferrol realized that in Humphrey he had found not a genius, but merely a plodding conscientious worker, perhaps a little above the average. For, in spite of Rivers, who found that genius and reporting do not go hand in hand, Ferrol was always searching alertly for the miraculous writer whose style was individual; whose writing would be discussed in those broad circles where The Day was read.
One sees Ferrol hoping for that spark of genius to glow in Humphrey, dreaming, whenever his thoughts took him back, of days now so dim that they seem never to have existed, and faced only with disappointment. Up to a certain point he could make Humphrey—but no further. Perhaps, after all, the boy might show his worth in work of broader scope.... Ferrol plans, and plans, rearranging the men in his employ, moving a man here, and a man there, a god with life for a chessboard and human lives as the men.... One sees Humphrey, young and vigorous, doing his daily work....
It was an extraordinary life, full of uncertainties and sudden surprises ... a life of never-ending energy, with little rest even in sleep, for into his dreams there crept all the tangle of the day's happenings. Disaster swept all round him, but he seemed to be lifted above all evil by the magic of his calling. The king can do no wrong: no journalist ever seemed to be hit by the hazards of life. Murders, the collapse of houses, railway smashes, roofs falling in and burying people in the rubble, shipwrecks and terrible fires.... Humphrey was always on the spot, sooner or later, with a dozen others of the craft....
He was outside the range of the things that really mattered. Politics and the problems that touched deeply the lives of the people did not come his way. They fell into the hands of the lobby correspondent, the man in the Press Gallery of the House, or the sociological writers who stood somewhat aloof from the routine of the Street.
But, on the whole, the life was glorious, in spite of its bitter moments.
I shall have to chuck it, you know, Kenneth Carr said, one day. "This life is too awful: it's the system that's wrong, there is no system."
That was Kenneth's point of view. Of course there was no system. Is there any system in life?
We're all sick men, in Fleet Street, sighed Kenneth. "We're sick and we're growing old. Our nerves are broken with the continual movement and unrest. There's no time allowance made for our stomachs: I tell you, we're all sick men in Fleet Street, brain, nerve and stomach."
At such times, Humphrey would laugh and defend the Street and its work, just to cheer Kenneth up.
Don't you go and drop out, he urged. "I shall be left without a friend."
The next day they met each other on the platform at Paddington. There was to be a Royal week in Windsor. A foreign monarch had come to England.
Well, what do you think of the life to-day? Humphrey asked.
Oh, it's all right, Kenneth laughed. "I suppose I wanted a little fresh air and sunshine.... I shall get it in the forest."
He was reading a letter in the bold, firm handwriting of Elizabeth Carr.
"Dear Mr Quain," she wrote, "I don't think I ever thanked you for the article you wrote of our day in the forest with the children. I asked Kenneth to tell you how glad I was, but I expect he forgot all about it. I think your article was most sympathetic, though I wish you hadn't made quite so much of that unfortunate child who was dressed so grotesquely. I will tell you what I mean when I see you, for I am writing to know if you can come to dinner here. I'm sorry Kenneth won't be able to come—he's away in Lancashire on that dreadful strike. Thank Heaven—he'll be leaving it all soon."
There was a postscript.
"Of course, I know the nature of your work will not let you say 'yes' definitely, but I've made the day Saturday, on purpose to give you a chance. And if I don't have a wire from you, I shall expect you."
It was quite a month since he had spent that day in Loughton with Elizabeth Carr, and though he could not name offhand the things he had done since then, day by day, that day and its incidents remained sharply defined in his memory.
Had he really taken more than usual care to write his account of their doings? Or, was it that the vision of her, and the recollection of her earnest eyes, inspired him to better work? Or, had there been nothing very special about the story after all, and was her letter merely a courtesy?
The fact remained that he was flattered to receive the letter with its invitation. Kenneth had certainly forgotten to deliver her message. He looked upon it as something of a triumph for him: very patiently he had waited for a word from Elizabeth Carr.
There was that extraordinary remark of hers when he had watched the children sing their grace. He had asked her what she meant by it, and she had declined to say. He had felt humiliated by her words: did she imagine that he had no heart at all? She seemed to think that because he was a reporter on a halfpenny paper, he must be absolutely callous.
He re-read the letter. She was curiously captious. She seemed ready to take offence now because he had made a "story" out of that wretched child clad in its mother's cape and bedraggled blouse. Well, of course, she wasn't a journalist. She couldn't be expected to see human interest from the same point of view as The Day. He wrote, accepting her invitation provisionally.
In the days that followed, thoughts of Elizabeth Carr recurred with disturbing persistency. He recalled the odd way in which she had come into his life: first at that evening at the Wrattens, when Lilian Filmer had been his foremost thought, then, intermittently, at Kenneth Carr's, something unusually antagonistic in her attitude to him; and now she had come into the heart of his work, bringing with her a touch of intimacy. She, who had always averted herself from him, was now asking him to be her guest.
She, who had always seemed to ignore him, was, of a sudden, extending towards him tentacles of influence, vague and shadowy; he was uneasily aware of their presence.
He read her letter several times before the Saturday came—the gentle perfume of it reminded him of her own fragrance. He was sensitive to praise and appreciation, and he dwelt often on those words which spoke of his work. It was pleasant to know that he had at last shown Elizabeth Carr what he could do. She was, he knew, judging him always by Kenneth's standard, in life as well as writing, and of course every one knew that Kenneth's ideals were high, that his writing was brilliant.... So Kenneth was going to leave Fleet Street. It was the first that Humphrey had heard of it. "I shall have to chuck it," Kenneth had said, and he was going to keep his word. He contemplated the prospect with melancholy. Kenneth was a good friend; his departure would leave an intolerable gap in London life. The chats and the evening meetings would be gone.... They would pass out of each other's daily life....
Thus Saturday came, and Humphrey found himself free to carry out his acceptance of Elizabeth's invitation.
Humphrey had always imagined that Elizabeth lived in a flat with some woman-friend: he was surprised when he found the address led to a little white house, one of a row of such houses, in a broad, peaceful road at the back of Kensington High Street. It was one of those houses that must have been built when Kensington was a village; it was like a cottage in the heart of London. The Virginian creeper made its drapery of green over the trellis-work that framed the window, and the walls were green with ivy. An elderly woman opened the door to his knock, and he found himself in a low-ceilinged hall, with a few black-and-white drawings on the walls, and a reproduction of Whistler's Nocturne.
He was ushered into the sitting-room. Even if he had not known that it was her house, he could have chosen this room, out of all the rooms in London, as the room of Elizabeth Carr. Wherever he looked, he found a reflex of her peace and gentle calm.
In the few moments of waiting he took in all the details of the room: the soft-toned wall-paper, with a woodland frieze of blue and delicate shades of green, the old Japanese prints on the walls, and the little leather-bound books on the tables here and there. He had sat so many times in the rooms of different people whom he went to interview, that his observation had trained itself mechanically to notice such details. He heard a rustle on the stairs, the door opened gently, and Elizabeth Carr came into the room.
She looked as beautiful as a picture in the frame of her own room. So had he imagined her, her hair looped back from its centre parting piled in gleaming coils just above the nape of her neck, leaving its delicate outline unbroken; a long necklet of amethysts made a mauve rivulet against the whiteness of her bosom till it fell in a festoon over her bodice, and blended with the colour of her dress, amethystine itself. And in her hair there gleamed a comb beaten by a Norwegian goldsmith, and set with moonstone and chrysoprase.
She came forward to greet him, moving with the subtle grace of womanhood. Her charm, her frank beauty, filled him with a peculiar sense of unworthiness and embarrassment. Before the wonder of her, before the purity of her, everything else in life seemed incomprehensibly sordid.
I am so glad you were able to come, she said. She looked him in the eyes as she spoke, and there was this, he noticed, about Elizabeth Carr: she meant every word she said—even the most trivial of greetings took on significance when she uttered them. Her words gave him confidence.
It was good of you to ask me.... There was a slight pause. "I nearly missed the house," he said with an inconsequential smile. "I always thought you lived in a flat."
Did you? she replied. "Oh no!—(Do sit down—I'm expecting some more visitors shortly.) I've had this house for a long time." She sighed. "It's an inheritance, you know, and I thought I'd live in it myself, instead of letting it. Kenneth and I have dreadful squabbles—he says it's too far out for him, and wants me to keep a flat with him in town—and I loathe flats. I've got a small garden at the back, and it's blessed in the summer. There's a walnut tree and a pear tree just wide enough apart to hold a hammock."
A hammock in London! cried Humphrey; "I envy you! Think of our Clifford's Inn."
I really don't know how you people can live on the doorsteps of your offices. I'm sure it's not good for you. Anyway, Kenneth's giving it up.
I hadn't heard of it before your letter.
It was only settled a few days ago. Grahams, the publishers, liked his last book well enough to offer him a good advance; and the book's sold in America—he's got enough to get a year's start in the country, and so he's going down there to write only the things he wants to.
Humphrey smiled in his cocksure way. "Aha! he'll soon get sick of it, Miss Carr."
Elizabeth Carr's fingers strayed into the loops of her amethyst necklace; the light shone on the violet and blue gems as she gathered them into a little heap, and let them fall again. Her brows hinted at a frown for a moment, and then they became level again.
Nothing would make you give up Fleet Street, I suppose? she asked.
No ... the fever's in me, he said. "I couldn't live without it."
Are you so wrapped up in it?
Well, said Humphrey, "I suppose I am. It's rather fine, you know, the way things are done. You ought to go through a newspaper office and see it at work ... all sorts of people, each of them working daily with only one aim—to-morrow's paper...."
And you never think of the day when Ferrol doesn't want you any more?
Well, you know, Humphrey said, with a smile, "it's difficult to explain. We just trust to luck. After all, lots of men have drifted into journalism; when they're done, they drift back again."
I see, Elizabeth Carr said, nodding her head gently. "And there are always fresh men to drift."
I suppose so.
And, you're quite content.
Humphrey shrugged his shoulders. "What else can I do?"
The bell rang. "Ah! what else!" she exclaimed, rising to meet her visitors.
The new-comers were introduced to Humphrey. One was a tall, thin man, with remarkable eyes, black and deep-sunken, and the thin mobile lips of an artist. His name was Dyotkin; he spoke English fluently, with a faint Russian accent. The other was a woman whose youthful complexion and features of middle age were in conflict, but whose hair tinged with grey left no doubt of her years. Although her dress was in excellent taste, it suggested an unduly overbearing wealth. Humphrey recognized her name when he heard it: Mrs Hayman. She was one of the philanthropists who helped Elizabeth in her work.
They went into dinner, to sit at a little oval Chippendale table just big enough for the four of them; Dyotkin and he faced one another, sitting between Elizabeth and Mrs Hayman.
Your work must be very interesting, Mrs Hayman said.
Humphrey smiled. That was the commonest remark he heard. Those who did not know what the work was, perceived dimly its interest, but not one of them could ever be made to understand the intense, eager passion of the life.
It is interesting, Humphrey said. "Miss Carr knows a good deal of it."
I suppose you go everywhere—it must be splendid.
When you talk like that, I, too, think it must be splendid. Sometimes, it's very funny.
Still, it's nice to see everything, isn't it? And I suppose you go to theatres and concerts.
Oh no! I'm not a critic. That's another man's work. I'm just a reporter.
I don't know how you get your news. What do you do? Go out in the morning and ask people? And isn't it dreadfully difficult to fill the paper?
It was always the same; nobody could understand the routine of the business. Everybody had the same idea that newspaper offices lived in a day of tremulous anticipation lest there should not be enough news. Nobody understood that the happenings in the world were so vast and complex, that their sole anxiety was to compress into four pages the manifold events that had happened while the earth had turned on its axis for one day.
Now, yesterday, for instance? Mrs Hayman said, with an inviting smile. "What did you do yesterday?"
Oh, yesterday was an unpleasant day. I had to go to Camberwell late at night. A man had given himself up somewhere in Wales. He said he'd murdered Miss Cott—you remember the train murder, three years ago.... He kept a chemist's shop in Camberwell, we found out. So I had to go there. I got there dreadfully late. The door was opened by a girl. Her eyes were swollen and red. She was his daughter, I guessed.... I can tell you, I felt awkward.
I should think so, Elizabeth said. He looked at her, and saw that she was annoyed.
What did you do—go away? Mrs Hayman asked.
Go away? Good gracious, no. I interviewed her.
Interviewed her!
Well, I talked with her, if you like. They were very pleased at the office.
I think it's repulsive, Elizabeth remarked.
Oh, come! Humphrey remonstrated.
The dinner was finished. It occurred to Humphrey that he had fallen from grace.
We will go into the next room, Elizabeth said, "and Mr Dyotkin shall play to us." As she passed by him, Humphrey went forward and opened the door for her. Dyotkin and Mrs Hayman lingered behind. He passed into the adjoining room with Elizabeth. He wanted to defend himself.
You're a little hard on me, you know, he said.
I don't understand how you can do it, she said.
Do what?
Forget all your finer feelings, and make a trade of it.
I don't make a trade of it, he said, hotly. "You cannot separate the good from the bad. You must take us just as we are—or leave us."
The words came from him quietly, almost unconsciously, as though in an unguarded moment his tongue had taken advantage of his thoughts. She turned her face sideways to his, and he was conscious of a queer look in her eyes—an expression which was absolutely foreign to them. He saw doubt, uncertainty and surprise in the swift glance of a moment. "I ought not to have said that," he thought to himself. And, then, hard upon that, defiantly, "I don't care what she thinks; it's what I thought."
The expression in her eyes softened. Though he had said nothing more, it was as if he had subtly communicated to her that which was passing in his mind.
Yes, she said, with softness in her voice, "we must take the good with the bad, but we must separate the sincere from the insincere. I saw you that day in the forest when your eyes showed how you felt the pity of it all—and yet, you see, you did not put that in The Day. You did not write as you felt."
So that was her explanation. How could he make her comprehend the conflict that was for ever in his mind, and even his explanation could not redeem him in her eyes.
John Davidson's verse ran through his mind like a dirge:—
"Ambition and passion and power, Came out of the North and the West, Every year, every day, every hour, Into Fleet Street to fashion their best. They would write what is noble and wise, They must live by a traffic in lies!
"Ah, but it was wrong of her to take that view. As if one could ever tell the truth in a world where the very fabric of society is woven from lies and false conceptions. How could he tell her and make her believe that he was thrilled, and that his throat tightened at things that he saw—and yet he never dared give way to his emotions, and write them. Why, the most vital things in his life were not the things he wrote, but the things he did not write.
Though his mind was rioting with indignation, he laughed. "We mustn't take our work too seriously," he said. "It's too ephemeral for that. Things only last a day."
She did not answer. She turned from him without a word. He had meant to anger her, and he had succeeded. There was a chatter of voices in the passage and Mrs Hayman came into the room with Dyotkin. Elizabeth went towards him.
Won't you play something? she begged.
Dyotkin sat down by the piano. The seat was too low; he wanted a cushion, or some books, and Elizabeth went to fetch them.
The sight of her waiting on Dyotkin filled Humphrey with an increasing annoyance. It jarred on him somehow. He attempted to help in an ungainly way, but Elizabeth, without conveying it directly, held aloof from his assistance. He settled himself in the arm-chair by Mrs Hayman ... and Dyotkin played.
Humphrey had no knowledge of music. He did not even know the name of the piece that was being played, but as the fingers of Dyotkin struck three grand chords, something stirred within his soul, and, gradually, a vague understanding came to him, and he followed and traced the theme through its embroidery. And the following of the theme was just like the following of an ideal. At times he was lost in waves of seductive sounds, that charmed him and led his thoughts away, and then, suddenly, the chords would emerge again, out of the bewildering maze of melody clear and triumphant, again, and yet again; he could follow them, though they were cunningly concealed beneath intricate patterns.
And then, for a moment, he would lose them, but he knew that they were still there, if he sought for them, and so he stumbled on; and, behold, once more as the dawn bursts out of the darkness, the familiar sounds struck on his ears. And now they were with him always: he hearkened to them, and they were fraught with a strange, delicious meaning. "I have thought this," he said, in his mind.
Here was something far, far removed from anything of daily life. He was uplifted, exalted from earthly things. The wonder of the music enchanted him. Ah! what achievements were not possible in such moments! He felt grandiose, noble and apart from life altogether.... The music ceased. He sighed as one awaking from the glory of a dream. He looked up, and his eyes, once again, met the eyes of Elizabeth, deep and tender and unspeakably divine.
It is impossible to point a finger at any date in this period of the career of Humphrey Quain and say, "This is the day on which he fell in love with Elizabeth Carr." For the days merged gradually into weeks and months, and they met at irregular intervals, and out of their meetings something new and definite came to Humphrey.
There was no sudden transition from acquaintance to friendship, from friendship to love. He could not mark the stages of the development of their knowledge of one another. But before he was aware of its true meaning, once again the spirit of yearning and unrest took hold of him.
This time, his love was different from that abrupt love-affair with Lilian Filmer. Then untutored youth had broken its bounds, and love had swept him from his foothold. He had been ardent, passionate in those days, the fervour of love had intoxicated him; but now, with this slow attachment, his love was a different quality. Lilian, coming fresh upon the horizon of his hopes, bringing with her the promise of all that he needed in those days, had made a physical appeal to him. Always there was working, subconsciously, in his mind, the thought of her desirability. She offered him material rewards; they were attracted to each other by the mutual disadvantages of their surroundings.
Their meeting, their abortive love-affair was the expression of the everlasting desire of the companionship of sex: they were, both of them, groping after things half-understood, towards a goal that looked glamorous in the incomplete vision they had of it.
But Elizabeth Carr appealed to the intellectual in him. No doubt the old primeval forces compelled him towards her, but they were far below the surface of his thoughts whenever the vision of Elizabeth rose before him. He could not describe the hold she had on his imagination. Her influence had been so subtly and gently exercised, that he had not noticed the power of it, until now he was dominated by the thought of her. The finer spirit that lies dormant in every man, except in the very basest, put forth its wings and awoke. In little questions of everyday honour he began to see things from Elizabeth's point of view: little, trivial questions of his dealings with mankind which jarred on Elizabeth's own code of morality. Unquestionably, he was better for her influence, better from the spiritual standpoint, but weaker altogether when judged by the standard of everyday life. Elizabeth preached the gospel of altruism not directly, but insidiously, and he found himself adopting her views.
Hitherto his had been the grim doctrine of worldly success: those who would be strong must be ruthless and remorseless; there must be no halting consideration of the feelings of others. Though he did not realize it, his absorption of Elizabeth's ideals was weakening him, inevitably.
The charity of her work, with its gentle benevolence, was reflected in all her life. She gained happiness by self-sacrifice, and peace by warring against social evils. Their characters and temperaments conflicted whenever they met, and yet, after each meeting, it seemed to Humphrey that their friendship was arising on a firmer basis. Sometimes the shock of their opposing personalities would leave behind it quarrelsome echoes—not the echoes of an open quarrel, but the unmistakable suggestion of disagreement and dissatisfaction. He blundered about, trying to fathom her wishes, but her individuality remained always to him a problem, inscrutably complex.
There were times, it seemed, when their spirits were in perfect agreement, when he was raised high in the wonder of the esteem in which she, obviously, held him. Those were the times when he came first to realize that he loved her: and the audacity of his discovery filled him with dismay. He knew that she was altogether superior; she lived exalted in thought and deed in a plane far above him. They met, it is true, over tea, or at a theatre, just as if they both inhabited the same sphere, but, in spite of that, they were as separate planets, whirling in their own orbits, rushing together for an instant, meeting for a fraction of time, and soaring away once more until again they drew together.
And, even when understanding of her seemed nearest to him, she suddenly receded from his grasp. A change of voice, a change of expression, a movement of her body—what was it? He did not know. He only knew that something he had said had separated them: she could become, in a moment, distant and unattainable, another woman altogether, coldly antagonistic.
Yet, by the old symptoms, he knew that he loved her. She persisted in his thoughts with an alarming result. He found himself pausing, pen in hand, at his desk in the reporters' room, thinking, "Would Elizabeth be pleased with this?..." And an impulse that needed all his strength to combat seized him to abandon the set form into which The Day had cast his thoughts, to criticize and to express his own individual impression, whether they accorded or not with the views held by The Day. This was altogether new and disturbing. He was a mouthpiece whose mere duty was to record the words of others by interviews, or a painter to present pictures and not opinions. Conscience and convictions were luxuries that belonged to the critics of art, and the leader-writers.
There came to him days of unqualified unhappiness, when he was possessed by doubts. For the first time he mistrusted the value of his work: he began to see that the fundamental truths of life were outside his scope. Cities might be festering with immorality and slums; vice might parade openly, but these things could never be touched on in a daily newspaper. Nobody was to blame, least of all those who controlled the newspaper, for it is not the business of a daily to deal with the morals of existence.... It is not easy to analyse his feelings ... but, as a result of all this vague tormenting and apprehension, the old thrill at the power and wonder of the office which throbbed with daily activities forsook him, leaving in its place nothing but the desolating knowledge of the littleness and futility of it all.
The phase passed: the variety of the work enthralled him again. He travelled to distant towns and remote villages, and whenever he was in the grip of his work, all thoughts of Elizabeth Carr departed from him. He obtained extraordinary glimpses into the lives of other people; he acquired a knowledge into the working of things that was denied to those who only gleaned their knowledge second-hand from the things that he and others wrote. He saw things all day long: the plottings, the achievements and the failures of mankind.
The other men of the Street flitted into his life and out again at the decree of circumstance. For a week, perhaps, half-a-dozen of them would be thrown together in some part of England. They met at the hotels; they formed friendships, and they parted again, knowing, with the fatalism of their craft, that they would forgather perhaps next week, perhaps next year. There was no sentiment in these friendships.
There were the photographers, too. A new race of men had come into Fleet Street, claiming kinship with the reporters, yet divided by difference of thought and outlook upon news. They were remarkable in their way, the product of the picture daily paper. And their coming marked the doom of the artist illustrators in the newspapers. They were the newest of the new generation, shattering every conception even of the younger men of the manner in which a journalist should perform his duty. The photographers were drawn, as a class, from the studios and operating-rooms of the professional photographer. They forsook the posing of babies and young men in frock coats for the photographic quest of news.
Their finger-tips and nails were brown with the stain of iodoform, and for them there was no concealment of their profession, for they went through life with the burden of their cameras slung over their shoulders. Their audacity was astounding, even to Humphrey and his friends, who knew the necessity of audacity themselves.
They ranged themselves outside the Law Courts, or the Houses of Parliament, or wherever one of the many interests of the day centred, and when a litigant or a Cabinet Minister appeared, a dozen men closed towards him, their cameras at the level of their eyes, and a dozen intermittent "clicking" noises marked the achievement of their quest. They saw life in pictures; a speech was nothing to them but the open mouth and the raised arm of the speaker; the poignancy of death left them unmoved before the need of focus and exposure.
The difficulties of their work seemed so immense to Humphrey that reporting seemed child's play beside it. For not only had they actually to be on the spot, to overcome prejudices and barriers, but, once there, they had to select and group their picture, and to reckon with the light and time. And though the photographers and the reporters were far removed from one another by the external nature of their work, though neither class saw life from the identical standpoint, yet they were interdependent, and linked by the same ceaseless forces working towards one common end....
Sometimes, also, in out-of-the-way places, Humphrey met men who reminded him of his days on the Easterham Gazette, men with attenuated minds who were even more absorbed in their work than the London reporter. They had a shameless way of never concealing their identity: they were always the "reporter"; some of them never saw the dignity of their calling, they were careless of speech and appearance, seeming to place themselves on the level of inferior people, and submitting to the undisguised contempt of the little local authorities, who spoke to them scornfully as "You reporters."
Yet, among these, Humphrey found scholars and men of strange experience. Their salaries were absurdly low for the work they did—thirty shillings to two pounds a week was the average; their lives were a thousand times more dismal and humdrum than the lives of the London men. And, in spite of these, many London men sighed for the pleasant country work. Whenever Humphrey heard a man speak of the leisure and peace of country journalism, he told them of Easterham and its dreadful monotony.
He had interior glimpses, too, of other newspaper offices; not a town in the kingdom without its sheet of printed paper, and its reporter recording the day or the week. These offices held his imagination by their sameness. Whether it was Belfast or Birmingham, Edinburgh or Exeter, their plan was uniform. There was always the narrow room, with its paper-strewn desks or tables at which the reporters sat; always the same air of hazy smoke hovered level with the electric-light bulbs; the same type of alert-eyed men, with the taut lips and frown of those who think swiftly, came into the room, smoking a cigarette or a pipe (but rarely a cigar), and brought with them a familiar suggestion of careless good-fellowship as they sat down to the work of transcribing their notes. And, always, wherever he went, the pungent smell of printer's ink was in his nostrils, the metallic rustle of shifting types from the linotype room, and the deep, rumbling sound of machinery in his ears.
Ah, when he got down to the machines that moved it all, he probed to the depths of the simple greatness. Those big, strong men who worked below it all, and lived by the labour of it, made a parable of the whole social system. Of what avail would all their writing be, if it were not for the men and the machines below?
Once he went down the stone steps to the high-roofed basement of The Day. He went at midnight, just when the printing was about to begin. It was as if he had penetrated into the utmost secrecy of the office. Here were the things of which nobody seemed to think; here, again, were men in their aprons stained with grease and oily ink; men with bare, strong arms lifting the curved plates of metal, and fixing them to the cylinders; each man doing his allotted work, oiling a bearing here, tightening a nut there, moving busily about the mighty growth of machinery that filled the brightly lit room. The sight of that tangle of iron and steel confused his thoughts. He understood nothing of it all. Those great machines rose before him, towering massively to the roof, tier upon tier of black and glittering metal, with rods and cranks, and weird gaps here and there showing their bowels of polished steel. The enormous rolls of paper which he had seen carried on carts and hoisted many a time into the paper-department of the office, were waiting by each machine, threaded on to a rod of steel. Their blank whiteness reflected the light of the electric lamps.
And then, suddenly, a red light glowed, and somebody shouted, and a man turned a small wheel in the wall—just as a motor-car driver turns the wheel of the steering gear—and the great machines broke into thunderous noises. The din was appalling. It was loud and continuous, and the clamour of it deadened the ears.
Humphrey looked and saw the white reels of paper spinning, and, through the forest of iron and steel, he could trace a cascade of running whiteness, as the paper was spun between the rollers, up and down and across, until it met the curved plates of type, and ran beneath them, to reappear black with the printed words. And the columns looked like blurred, thin lines in the incredible rapidity of the passing paper. The moments were magical; he tried to follow the course of this everlasting ribbon of paper, but he could not. He saw it disappear and come into his vision again. He saw it speed and vanish along a triangular slab of steel, downwards into the invisible intricacies that took it and folded it into two and four and eight pages, cut it and patted it into shape, and tossed it out, quire after quire, a living, printed thing—The Day.
And everywhere, wherever he glanced at the turbulent, roaring machines, little screws were working, silent wheels were spinning, small, thin rods were moving almost imperceptibly to and fro, to and fro. He saw great rollers touching the gutters of ink, transmitting their inky touch to other rollers, spinning round and round and round; and the paper, speeding through it all, from the great white web to the folded sheets that were snatched up by waiting men and bundled into a lift, upwards into the night where the carts were waiting.
And the force of the noise was dreadful, and the power of the machines perpetual and relentless as they flung from them, with such terrible ease, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of square, folded papers.
They looked as if they could crush the lives of men in the swift snare of their machinery.
Whom should he meet one day, but Beaver!
Beaver of the inky thumbs and the bitten nails, who had, somehow, eluded him, though they both worked in the narrow Street. Nothing astonishing in this, for the work of Beaver lay in circles different from his own. He never came outside the radius of meetings, inquests, the opening of bazaars and the hundred and one minor happenings that are to be found in "To-day's Diary." But here he was, utterly unchanged from the Beaver with whom Humphrey had lived in Guilford Street, with Mrs Wayzgoose, her wasteful coal-scuttles and her bulrushes.
They met in a chop-house by Temple Bar, a strange place, where the lower floor was packed with keen-faced men from the Courts of Justice over the way and the Temple at the back. They sat crowded together, abandoning all comfort in the haste to enjoy the luxury of the chops and steaks for which the house was famed.
There were no table-cloths on the round tables, where coffee-cups and plates of poached eggs and rounds of toast jostled each other. Only in England would people sit with joy and eat cheek by jowl in this fashion, with the smell of coffee and hot food in their nostrils, and the clatter of plates and knives and forks in their ears.
Upstairs men played chess and dominoes over coffee and rolls, cracking their boiled eggs with difficulty in the cramped space.
Humphrey heard a voice hail him as he threaded his way between the tables. He looked back and saw Beaver waving a friendly fork at him.
Hullo! cried Beaver, shifting his chair away a few inches, and seriously incommoding a grey-haired man so absorbed in his game of chess that his coffee was cold and untouched. "Come and sit here," cried Beaver.
They shook hands. "Well, how goes it?" Humphrey asked. "Still with the nose to the grindstone?"
That's it, Beaver said. Their positions had been changed since the days of Easterham, when Beaver seemed miles above him in worldly success. He remembered the day Beaver left for London, to embark on a career which shone clear and brilliant in Humphrey's imagination. "Write in!" Those had been Beaver's last words. "Write in. That's what I did." The vision of it all rose before him now, as he sat by Beaver: the dingy office, with the scent of the fishmonger next door, the auctioneer's bills on the walls, with samples of mourning and wedding cards, and tradesmen's invoice headings, to show the excellence of the Gazette's jobbing department. And now—? He was conscious of a change in Beaver's attitude towards him.
Humphrey had taken his place in Fleet Street among the personalities, among the young men of promise and achievement. He had even seen his name signed to occasional articles in The Day—glorious thrill, splendid emotion, that repaid all the long anonymous hours of patient work!
You're getting on! Beaver said. There was admiration unconcealed in his eyes and voice. "Great Scott! It seems impossible that you and I ever worked together on that rotten Easterham paper. That was a fine story you did of the Hextable Railway Smash."
I've got nothing to complain of, Humphrey replied, hacking at a roll of bread. "It hasn't been easy work. Yours isn't, for the matter of that."
Beaver laughed. "Oh, mine—it isn't difficult, you know. I get so used to it, that I can report a speech mechanically without even thinking of the speaker."
It's a safe job, you know, he said, after a pause. "A life job."
Humphrey knew what Beaver's exultation in the safety of his job meant.
There were men in Fleet Street, husbands of wives, and fathers of families, who lived and worked tremblingly from day to day, never certain when a fatal envelope would not contain the irrevocable "regret" of the editor that he could no longer continue the engagement.
Why, it might happen to Humphrey himself, for aught he knew. Truly, Beaver was to be envied after all.
But don't you think you'd do better on a daily paper? Humphrey said. "I could tell Rivers about you, you know. There might be room on The Day."
I'm taking no risks. I'm going to stop where I am. You see—er— Beaver became suddenly hesitant, and smiled foolishly. "What I mean to say is—I'm engaged to be married."
He leant back in his seat and contemplated the astonishment in Humphrey's face.
No—are you really!
Fact, retorted Beaver. "Been engaged for the last year."
Beaver going to be married! The news touched Humphrey oddly: Beaver could be earning very little more than Humphrey had earned at the time when he had almost plunged into married life, and there was no desire on Beaver's part to reach out and grasp greater things; he was in a life job, untouched by the wrack and torment of ambition, and the craving for success. Oh, assuredly, Beaver was not to be pitied in the equable calmness of his life and temperament.
Well, I congratulate you, old man—though I never thought you were the marrying sort.
Beaver took the congratulations blushingly. "Nor did I, until I met Her."
He spoke of "Her" in an awed, impressive manner, as though She were some abnormal person far removed from all other people in the world. Humphrey tried to figure the girl whom Beaver had chosen. He thought of her as a rather plain, nice homely sort of person, with no great burden of intellect or imagination.
Beaver's hand dived into an inside pocket, and out came a leather case. This he opened, and displayed a photograph, reverently.
That's her! he said, showing the portrait.
Humphrey kept his self-possession well. Neither by a look nor a word did he betray the past: there was nothing in his manner to show Beaver that the girl whose portrait he held in his hand was she whose lips had clung to his in the young, passionate kisses of yester-year.
But, as Humphrey looked on the face of Lilian Filmer, the same Lilian, even though the photograph was new, and the hair was done in a different fashion, an acute feeling of sorrow came over him, bringing with it the remembrance of aching days, of the early beginnings, of those meetings and partings, and hearts that strained, and he saw the reflection of himself, foolish and cruel, mistaking the shadow for the substance, struggling and struggling, all for nothing ... for not even as much as Beaver had gained.
She looked at him out of the eyes of her photograph, and about her lips there still hovered that smile which had always been a riddle to him; a smile of indulgent love, or contempt? Who knows—a woman's smile is the secret of her sex. Yet now, it seemed, her lips were curved in triumph. This was her revenge on him, that he should go for ever loveless through the world, while she should steal into a haven of welcome peace.
Beaver's voice brought him back to physical things. She would kiss Beaver's shaggy-moustached lips, and his arms would catch her in an embrace.... How soon she had forgotten ... he thought, unreasonably.... She might have waited.... She might have understood....
Well? said Beaver, awaiting praise. "You've had a good old look."
She's awfully nice and charming, Humphrey answered, returning the photograph. "She's like somebody I know."
Oh, you've probably seen the original, old man, when you used to come and call for me. She used to be one of the girls in our office.
He had forgotten that lunch in the Fleet Street public-house, when Humphrey had asked for the name of the girl.
Used to be one of the girls in the office! Then Lilian had left. He wondered what she was doing, and an impulse that could not be withstood, compelled him to find out whether she had ever mentioned him to Beaver.
By George! he said. "I remember, now. Miss Filmer, her name was, wasn't it?"
That's it, Miss Filmer. Did you ever speak to her, then?
He was treading on uncertain ground. It was clear that she had never spoken of him. He felt that she had forgotten him, absolutely and completely.
Oh, I think so—just casually, now and again.
Well, I never! said the innocent Beaver. "That's interesting. I'll tell her I met you."
Oh, she wouldn't remember me or my name, Humphrey answered, hastily. "It was only just 'How-d'ye-do' and 'Good-day' with us.... So she's left the office now."
Yes. It's rather a sad story. Her father died, you know. He was a chronic invalid—paralysis, I think. Anyhow, we don't speak of it much, and I've never pressed her. But the father who was so useless in life, has been the salvation of the mother by his death. Odd, isn't it? He was insured for a good round sum, and Lilian's mother—did I tell you her name was Lilian?—has bought a little annuity, so that Lilian's free. She used to slave for her mother and the rest of the family until they grew up. That's why she worked overtime at the office. 'Pon me soul, I'd rather be the lowest jackal in Fleet Street than some of these poor little typist girls at eighteen bob a week.... Well, time's up. I've got to be at the Mansion House at three: the Lord Mayor's taking the chair at some blooming meeting to raise a fund for something, somewhere. What are you doing to-day?
Oh, I'm on the Klipp case at the Old Bailey.
Humphrey came away profoundly disturbed. Something entirely unexpected had happened. Lilian had lived as the vaguest shadow at the back of his mind, just as he had last seen her, when she bent down to kiss him, and now this picture would have to be erased. He shuddered at the thought. She was Beaver's "girl": she would be Beaver's "missis."
After all, what did it matter? He and Lilian had long since parted; there had been little in common between them. He might have married her, and been as Beaver; she might have married him, but never, never, could she have held the magic and the inspiration of Elizabeth Carr.
His mind, always susceptible to outside influences, brooded on the new fact that had come into his life. Unconsciously, as a natural sequel to his thoughts, he began to dream of his new love, and to see himself happier than he had ever been, with Elizabeth for ever at his side. The same motives that impelled him to Lilian after that scene in the registry office, when Wratten was married, now urged him towards Kenneth Carr's sister....
And, of course, one day, Beaver would have to mention his name to Lilian. She would probably smile and say nothing. "He's engaged now," Beaver would say. "There won't be any bachelors left, soon." And that would be his message to Lilian.
On a Saturday evening some weeks later, Humphrey sat in the dismantled room in Clifford's Inn, in which he and Kenneth Carr had shared so many hours of grateful friendship.
The room looked forlorn enough. Square gaping patches on the wall marked the places where pictures had once hung; the windows were bared of curtains and the floor was dismal without the carpet, littered with scraps of paper and little pieces of destroyed letters. Trunks and boxes ready for the leaving were in the small entrance hall, now robbed of its curtains and its comfort. A pair of old boots, a broken pipe, a row of empty bottles and siphons, a chipped cup or two—these alone formed the salvage which the room would rescue from Kenneth's presence.
This, said Kenneth, taking the pipe-rack from the mantelpiece, "this, my son, I give and bequeath to you." He laughed, and tossed it over to Humphrey, who caught it neatly.
Kenneth waved his arm comprehensively round the room. "Now if there's any other little thing you fancy," he said, "take your choice. I'm afraid there's nothing but old boots and broken glass left. You might fancy a bottle or two for candlesticks."
The only thing of yours I coveted was your green edition of Thackeray, and you took jolly good care to pack that before I came, Humphrey remarked.
I'll send you one for your next birthday. I shall be rolling in money when I get to work. Meanwhile, just hold this lid up, while I put these photographs in.
The light glinted on the silver of the frames. Humphrey knew nothing of two of them, but the third was a photograph that he had always observed. He could see it now as it lay, face upwards, in Kenneth's hand—the photograph of Elizabeth, very sweet and beautiful, with soft eyes that seemed to be full of infinite regret.
Do you know, old man, he said, "I wish you'd let me have that photograph."
Which one?
The one of Elizabeth. Closer acquaintance had led to the dropping of the formal "Miss" and "Mister."
What will Elizabeth say: it was a special and exclusive birthday present to me, frame and all.
You can easily get another one. Keep the frame if you want to. Honest, I'd like to have the photograph. It would remind me of you and all the jolly talks we've had.
Best Beloved, laughed Kenneth, jovially, "I can refuse you nothing. It is yours, with half my kingdom." He slipped the photograph from the frame. "You know, I feel exhilarated at the thought of leaving it all. I walk on air. I am free." He slammed the lid on the last box and pirouetted across the room.
Thanks, said Humphrey, placing the photograph in his letter-case.
Think of it, Kenneth cried, "from to-morrow I'm a free man—free to write as I will: free to say at such and such a time, 'Now I shall have luncheon,' 'Now I shall have dinner,' or, 'Now I will go to bed.' Free to say, 'To-morrow week at three-thirty I shall do such and such a thing,' in the sure and certain knowledge that I shall be able to do it. Henceforth, I am the captain of my soul."
Oh yes, you feel pretty chirpy now, but just you wait. You wait till there's a big story on, and you read all the other fellows' stories—you'll start guessing who did this one, or who got that scoop—and you'll wish you were back again.
Not I! I shall sit in the seclusion of my arm-chair, and gloat over it all the next morning. And I shall think, 'Poor devils, they're still at it—and all that they think so splendid to-day will be forgotten by to-morrow.' I've had my fill of Fleet Street.... Besides, I don't quite break with it.
Why?
Didn't I tell you? Old Macalister of The Herald is a brick. He's the literary editor, you know, a regular spider in a web of books. He's put me on the reviewers' list, so you'll see my work in the literary page of The Herald. And it's another guinea or so.
Good old Macalister, Humphrey said. "The literary editors are the only people who give us a little sympathy sometimes. I believe that whenever they see a reporter they say: 'There, but for the grace of God, go I.'"
Kenneth surveyed the room. "There," he said, brushing the dust of packing from him. "It's finished. In an hour I shall be gone."
What train are you catching?
The eight-twenty. I shall be in the West Country two hours later, and a trap will be waiting to take me to my cottage. You should see it, old man—just three rooms, low ceilings and oaken beams, and a door that is sunk two steps below the roadway. Five bob a week, and all mine for a year. There's a room for you when you come.
Sounds jolly enough!... Humphrey sighed. "By George, I shall miss you when you've gone, Kenneth," he said. "There'll only be Willoughby left. It's funny how few real, social friendships there are in the Street, isn't it? Fellows know each other and all that, and feed together, but they always keep their private family lives apart...."
I'll tell you a secret if you promise not to crow. I am sorry to leave. I'm pretending to be light-hearted and gay, as a sort of rehearsal for Elizabeth—she'll be here soon—but, really and truly, I feel as if I were leaving part of myself behind in Fleet Street. Say something ludicrous, Humphrey; be ridiculous and save me from becoming mawkish over the parting.
I can't, Humphrey admitted miserably. "It gives me the hump to sit in this bare room, and to think of all the talks we've had—"
You've got to come here on Monday again, and see that Carter Paterson takes away the big box.
I shall send a boy from the office: I won't set foot in the room again.... Wonder who'll live here next? he added inconsequently.
Donno, Kenneth replied, absently looking at his watch. "They're not bad rooms for the price. I say, it's time Elizabeth were here."
Their talk drifted aimlessly to and fro for the next quarter of an hour. They had already said everything they had to say on the subject of the journey. A feeling of depression and loneliness stole over Humphrey: his mind travelled to the days of his friendship with Wratten, and he was experiencing once more the sharp sense of loss that he had experienced when Wratten died.
There came a knock at the door, and Elizabeth appeared, bringing with her, as she always did, an atmosphere of gladness and peace. Her beautiful face, in the shadows of her large brimmed hat, her brilliant eyes, and the supple grace of her figure elated him: he came forward to greet her gaily. Sorrow could not live in her presence.
I'm sorry I'm late, she said. "But I've kept the cab waiting.... Well, have you two said your sobbing farewells?"
Kenneth kissed her. "Don't make a joke of the sacred moments ... we were on the verge of a tearful breakdown. My tears spring from the fact that he has given me no parting gift."
Good Lord! I forgot all about it. Humphrey produced from his pocket a small brown-paper parcel. "It's a pipe—smoke it, and see in the smoke visions of Fleet Street."
Well, I'm hanged! said Kenneth, conjuring up a similar parcel; "that's just what I bought for you. A five-and-sixpenny one, too."
Then I've lost, Humphrey said, with mock gloom. "Mine cost six-and-six. He'll have to pay the cab, Elizabeth, won't he?"
If you two are going to stand there talking nonsense Kenneth will miss the train. Come along! I'll carry the little bag. Can you both manage the big one?
Both of them cunningly kept up their artificially high spirits. Even when Kenneth switched off the electric light, and the room was in darkness, except for a pallid moonbeam that accentuated the bareness of the floor and walls, they parodied their own feelings. They were both a little ashamed of the sentimental that was in them.
But as the cab drove out of Fleet Street, they were silent. The lights were flaming in the upper rooms, but the offices of The Herald and The Day and the rest of the large dailies were unlit and silent, for Sunday gave peace to them on Saturday night. But Fleet Street itself was still alive, and the offices of the Sunday papers were active, and the noise of the presses, without which no day passes in the Street, would soon be heard....
Half an hour later, under the great glass roof of Paddington Station, the last farewells had been said.
Nothing but a "So long, old man," and a "Good-bye" and a tight handshake marked the breaking of another thread of friendship. Humphrey watched the train curve outwards and away into the darkness with that queer emotion that always comes when one is left standing on a railway platform, and a lighted train has moved out, full of life behind its lit windows, leaving in its place a glistening, empty stretch of rails.
Elizabeth was fluttering a valedictory handkerchief to the shadows. Humphrey touched her arm gently.
Shall we go now? he said.
I suppose we'd better. These were awkward, uneasy moments. He would have liked to have told her how much he felt the passing of Kenneth, but he was afraid of hurting her, for he knew that she, too, was saddened at his departure.
You'll let me see you home, won't you? he asked.
Would you? Thanks, so much.
They passed out of the station, and he called a hansom. His hand held her arm firmly as he helped her into the cab. She thanked him with her eyes. The moment was precious. It seemed that he had taken Kenneth's place; that, henceforth, she would look to him for protection.
They rode in silence through the lamp-lit terraces, where the white houses stood tall and ghostly, flinging their shadows across the road. There was nothing for him to say. He knew that their thoughts were running in the same groove. The sudden clear ray of a lamp flashed intermittently as the cab came into the range of its light, and he could see her face, serene, thoughtful, and very beautiful. It made him think of the photograph that lay in his pocket, against his heart.... She was very close to him, closer than she had ever been before, so close that he had but to put out his arms and draw her lips to his. Never again, he thought, would she be as close to him as she was at this moment. And the memory of Lilian intruded ... and with the memory came a vision of just such a ride homewards in a hansom.... Ah, but Elizabeth was of a finer fibre,—a higher being altogether. His body tingled at his thoughts. His imagination ran riot in the long silence, and he did not seek to check it.
He was seized by an indefinite impulse to hazard all his future in the rashness of a moment, to take her and kiss her, and tell her that he loved her.
Here we are, she said, with a sudden movement as the cab jolted to a standstill.
He sighed. How calm and remote she seemed from love.
You must come in for a moment and have something.
He hesitated from conventional politeness.
The drive has been cold, she said. "I will ask Ellen to mix you a whisky and soda; and I daresay she's left some sandwiches for us."
For us! There was an inestimable touch of intimacy about those words.
Thanks, he said (was his voice really as strange and as husky as it sounded to his ears?) "Thanks—if I won't be keeping you up."
Again, that suggestion of close acquaintance and absolute familiarity, as she let herself and him into the house with her latchkey, and closed the door softly on the world outside. It was all nothing to her. She moved about with perfect self-possession, unaware of the agitation within him.
Let me turn up the light, she said, leading the way into the sitting-room.
He stumbled against something in the feeble light.
Mind, she cried, laughingly. "Don't knock my treasures over."
And then, suddenly, the room was in utter darkness.
He heard her make an impatient murmur of annoyance. "There! I've turned it the wrong way.... Don't move ... I know where the matches are."
He heard the rustle of her dress, and her breathing, and the faint fragrance of her pervaded the darkness. He stood there in the black room with the blood surging in his veins, and pulses that seemed to be hammering against the silence. He could feel the throbbing of his temples. She moved about the room, and once she came near to him, so near that her hair seemed to float across his face with a caress that was soft and silken ... clearly in his brain he pictured her, smiling, pure and beautiful ... this darkness was becoming intolerable. He made a step towards her....
And the room was lit with a brightness that blurred his sight with the sudden transition from darkness. He saw her standing by the gas-bracket, with a look of concern on her face.
Humphrey! she cried, "is anything the matter with you?"
He was standing in a direct line with the oval mirror on the wall, and he caught the glimpse of a white face, with straining eyes and blanched lips, that he scarcely recognized as his own. She came to his side, tenderly solicitous.
He could bear it no longer. The words came from him in faltering sentences.
Elizabeth, he cried. "Don't you know ... I love you, I love you."
Her face flushed with perfect beauty.
Oh—Humphrey ... she said.
And by the intimation of her voice, half-reproachful, and yet charged with infinite pity and love, he knew that, if he were bold enough, he could take her and hold her for evermore.
I love you.... I love you ... he said, drawing her unresistingly towards him. And there was nothing in life comparable to the exquisite happiness of that miraculous moment when her lips met his.
He seemed to have reached out and touched the very summit of life in that swift moment of supreme excellence. His whole being vibrated with the splendour of living. He felt as he had felt that night when those three grand chords struck by Dyotkin had stirred the depths of his soul....
And then his moment faded away into the irrevocable past, as she disengaged herself with a gentle, graceful movement, and they stood facing each other in silence. He saw her eyes, inexpressibly mild and soft, droop downwards, as she bent her head; he marked the colour mounting up her cheeks, flushing faintly the whiteness of her neck, and her fingers straying nervously in the thin, golden loop of the chain that fell across her bosom.
The wonder of his emotions dazed him. All that he could realize was that, in the space of a second, their relations had been absolutely changed. Henceforth, she appeared to him in another aspect. Quite suddenly and swiftly they had become isolated from all the countless millions in the world by the sorcery of a kiss. It seemed unreal and absurd to him. He wanted to laugh.
You had better sit down, she said in a low voice, that had a note of appeal in it. "I hear Ellen coming.... It will not do to let her notice anything...."
Astonishing, he thought, how tranquil and undisturbed she could remain. She could talk to Ellen as if nothing at all had happened; she could hand him sandwiches and prattle about little things as long as Ellen was in the room, and even when the door closed on Ellen she seemed loath to let him speak.
But he stopped her, emboldened by the privilege of his love. He went over to her and, placing his hands on each side of her face, drew her forehead towards his kiss, and looked at her with sparkling, victorious eyes.
You have made me happier than I have ever been, he said. "I will be very grateful and good to you."
Her eyes met his searchingly. "You will, really?" she asked.
Really, he said, and he kissed her again.
Now they could talk—he had so much to say. With her acceptance of his pledge, her smiling "Really," and his reply, he became normal again. His thoughts descended from their eminence and came back to their matter-of-fact, everyday plane.
Tell me, he said, with a lover's vanity, "when did you first know that I loved you?"
I don't know ... she said. "Perhaps to-night."
Only to-night! he echoed, disappointed. "Oh, I have loved you long before this. I think it began when we went to the forest together that day with the children.... I shall be able to help you with your work," he cried, buoyantly, "or will you drop it now?"
She laughed merrily. "How you hurry things on!" she said. "Give me time to think, like a good boy. We're not going to be married to-morrow, are we?"
No ... no, he protested, "I didn't mean that. Let's have a really long, lovely engagement. Give me months in which I can do all sorts of things for you; we'll see things together that I've never seen before—museums and picture-galleries. Do you know, there's hundreds of things in London I've never seen."
Why not?
I put off the seeing until I go there with my love.
The consummate joy of the hour infected him. He walked up and down the room promising great things ... vanity and egotism tinged his talk.
I shall get on, you know. I shall do something great in Fleet Street, one day. There's no knowing where I shall stop. And then there are the books I mean to write. Oh yes! Kenneth's sown the seeds of book-writing in me. And plays ... plays are the things to make money with....
You won't need money, she said, kindly. "I have enough for both of us."
Dearest, he answered. (It seemed the most natural thing in the world, now, that he should call her "dearest.") "You must not say that.... You won't mind waiting, just a little, will you? Until I feel I can come to you and say that I do not need your money.... I can't explain it ... I should never be happy if I took a penny from you."
She took his hand and caressed it. "I like you all the better for that, Humphrey." (He noticed that she did not use the word "love.")
He saw the future splendid, and roseate. He thought, with a smile, of Ferrol. Ferrol could not check him now. He had made his own identity, he was conscious of his own will to achieve that which he set out to do. Besides, there was such a difference between Lilian and Elizabeth.
He emerged from the house, a new being in a new world, living in the amazement of the last hour.
It seemed strange to him that, with such a change in his life, the old work should proceed unaltered: he stood in Rivers' room, listening to Rivers' talk and banter as the news-editor gave him his work to do; he came before Selsey at night, copy in hand; he mingled with the reporters in their big, bare room, talking of the day's paper, and discussing their jobs and their troubles with them; he came into that close, personal contact with men whom he knew, and men who knew him, and yet there was always an abyss that divided his two lives.
So it was with all of them: in their friendship they seemed to say, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no further"; their homes, their private sorrows and eager hopes, the real lives that they lived, in fact, were left behind them with the closing of their house-door, and they came to the office different beings.
Those matters that touched their innermost lives were never discussed. Occasionally, the birth of a baby in the home of a reporter or a sub-editor would bring a queer suggestion of humanity and ordinary life into their affairs: sometimes, the news would filter through of a wife seriously ill in some home at Herne Hill or Wimbledon, and there were solicitous inquiries (Ferrol would send down the greatest specialist in one of those deep, generous moods of his), for the rest they displayed no interest in each other's private affairs.
As a matter of fact, it was assumed, by the law of the Street, that they had no private lives of their own. It is impossible to imagine Humphrey saying: "If you please, I am engaged to be married, may I have the evening off," if at seven in the evening anything from a fire at the docks to the kidnapping of a baby occurred.
Therefore he told no one of the new wonder that had come into his life, not even Tommy Pride, who, by the way, had of late taken to sending out for a glass of whisky and soda, and doing his work with the glass before him on the table. They looked at each other in the reporters' room, and sighed, "Poor old Tommy."
Least of all would he tell Ferrol. He would have liked to have gone to Ferrol, and told him, but he remembered Ferrol's outburst. He was older now, and he could not trust himself to listen calmly to the old arguments. And he felt that it would be a slur on Elizabeth if he were forced to plead the cause of his marriage....
So the days followed each other, and he was happy with that mixed happiness which is, perhaps, the most perfect. After the first great moment when he had declared his love, their relations had fallen back to their original groove. It was safer thus: one could not live always on the exalted plane of that moment.
His love-affair with Elizabeth Carr was of a different calibre from that with Lilian. It was truer, and rested on a firmer basis of friendship, but it lacked the ardour, and the passionate moments and kisses of the days when love held the ascendancy over his work....
Once, when he was moved with most eager desire during one of their lonely meetings, he caught her to him, and kissed her, and he was conscious of an unspoken reproach in her lips and eyes, that took from him, for the moment, all the savour of his love.
It seemed to him that he was most successful when he was not playing the lover, when they met just as if they were rather exceptional friends instead of betrothed, and this irked him from time to time. He wanted to love, and be loved, he wanted to give all and take all. But when, in those rare moods, she answered his kisses recklessly, she was splendidly beautiful and magnificent, atoning lavishly for all that she had withheld from him.
In one thing this wooing ran parallel with the wooing of Lilian: there were the same interruptions and postponement of plans; Fleet Street for ever intruded, and always there was the remorseless, inexorable conflict between his love and his career.
After an unfortunate week of shattered plans for spending an evening together, she sighed impatiently. "I wish you would give up Fleet Street," she said. "You could do better work."
Oh! he said, light-heartedly, "one day I will. I'll sit down and write my book. But it's too soon yet."
She looked at him with doubt in her eyes. She seemed to be feeling her way through the dark corridors of his mind.
But surely you don't like the work, she said.
He laughed. "Some days I don't, and some days I do. Some days I think it loathsome, and some days I think it glorious.... We're all like that."
A day came when he thought it glorious, when Fleet Street gave him of its best, a swift reward for his allegiance.
He was in the reporters' room one evening, talking the latest office gossip with Jamieson and Willoughby, which concerned the marriage of The Day's Miss Minger, with young Hartopp of The Gazette. It was an event in Fleet Street, marking, in its way, the end of the epoch of the woman reporter.
I don't think a reporters' room is a fit place for a woman, Willoughby said. "They're all right for their special work—cooking and dress and weddings, and all that—but hard, right-down chasing after stories is man's work."
I didn't mind Miss Minger, remarked Humphrey. "She was a jolly good sport, but women have us at a disadvantage. Remember that time when we all fell down on the gun-running story at Harwich, and Miss Minger sailed in, smiled her prettiest, and squeezed a scoop out of them."
Ah, well, Jamieson said. "They're all the same ... marriage, you know, and a happy home, with jolly children. They soon find out that it's better to let hubby do the reporting.... Hullo, young man Trinder, what do you want?" he said, breaking off as the pink-faced secretary stood in the doorway.
You're wanted, Trinder said, nodding to Humphrey.
Me! said Humphrey. "What's up?"
Ferrol wants you.
My word! said Willoughby. "Are you going to be sacked, or is your salary to be raised?"
Our blessings on you, cried Jamieson, as he followed Trinder out of the room, upstairs, and along the corridor to Ferrol's door.
Ferrol stood with his hat and coat on waiting for him.
Oh, Quain, he said, shortly. "Get your things and come along. I want to talk to you."
Humphrey paused, bewildered. "Hurry up," said Ferrol. He took his watch from his pocket, glanced at it, and clicked its case hurriedly. "I've got to be back here at ten."
Very well, sir, said Humphrey. He ran back to the reporters' room, and gathered together his hat and his coat and his stick.
What's up? chorused Jamieson and Willoughby.
Lord knows! he gasped. "He wants me to go somewhere or the other with him."
Most certainly you are either going to be sacked or have your salary raised, remarked Willoughby. "But if you are going to be made editor, be kind to us when you are all-powerful."
Ass! laughed Humphrey, in reply.
He went back. Ferrol made a noise of satisfaction, and led the way out of his room, carefully switching off the lights. Down the stairs they went, side by side, Humphrey walking beside the mighty Ferrol, just as he did in his dreams. Down the stairs they went, and the men coming up—his colleagues—raised their hats to Ferrol, for they always gave him respect, and the heart of him throbbed with the strangeness of it all.
The commissionaire saluted stiffly, and gazed at Humphrey with a new esteem. A small boy in uniform darted with haste before them, and opened the door of a limousine car, reflecting the lights of the night in its lacquered brilliance. The chauffeur touched the polished peak of his hat. It seemed that everybody paid homage to Ferrol, greatest of all men in the eyes of Humphrey Quain.
For this man was the symbol, the personification of the Street and the paper for which he had worked with all his heart, with all his might, and with all his soul.
He stood aside to let Ferrol step into the car first, but Ferrol, with a smile, urged him into the lighted interior. He received an impression of superlative comfort and riches in that small, blue-lined room with its little electric lamp overhead. There were rugs of deliciously soft camel-hair, and, as he settled in the yielding cushions, his outstretched feet struck something hard, that gave warmth instantly, even through the leather of his boots. A silver cone-shaped holder, filled with red roses, confronted him; their very scent suggested ease and luxury. There were touches of silver everywhere: an ash-tray at his right hand, a whistle attached to a speaking tube, and a row of books in a silver case—an A B C Railway Guide, a diary, an address book, and a postal guide. They gave the Ferrol touch of concentrated energy, even in these surroundings of comfortable, upholstered rest.
The car sped along with a soft movement, almost noiseless, except for the low purring of its engines. Through the windows, past the strong face of Ferrol, he caught glimpses of a wet world with people walking upon their own reflections in the glistening pavements, of ragged beggars slouching along with hunched-up shoulders, of streaming crowds passing and repassing, ignoring entirely the passage of this splendid, immaculate room on wheels, never questioning the right of those people within it to the shelter which was denied to them.
And he felt extraordinarily remote from all these people: an odd thrill of contempt for them moved him to think: "What fools they are not to get cars for themselves." It was as if he had been suddenly translated to another world: a world inhabited by a superior race of men and women, almost god-like in the power of their possessions, who looked down on other struggling mortals from their exalted plane, with a vision blurred by warmth and security.
The silence enchanted him. If Ferrol had spoken, the spell of that journey would have been snapped. The silence enabled him to enjoy to the full the extraordinary sensation of being whirled along in the darkness by the side of Ferrol towards some unknown destiny. The discipline had made him always regard Ferrol with awe; but now, as he sat wrapped in the warm rugs of the motor-car, the social barriers dropped. He wondered why Ferrol was doing this.
The speed of the car slackened gradually. He caught a glimpse of railings and the lights shining among the trees, bringing back to him the old memories of his first impression of the park. But they were on the Kensington side, and the breadth of the park from Bayswater to Kensington made all the difference. Here there seemed to be a culture and dignity in the very houses themselves: they did not suggest the overbearing, self-made prosperity of that broad road that ran parallel with it on the other side of the trees and meadows.
A servant stood by the open door of the car. His face was implacably dignified. His white shirt-front and tie were splendidly correct for his station, in that he wore three obvious bone studs and a black tie. He held the door of the house open, and Humphrey followed Ferrol inside.
He had been to many houses such as this as a reporter, when he had waited with a sense of social inferiority in halls hung with old masters, and furnished with rare old oak ... at those times the servants had treated him with a mixture of deference and contempt. But this was different: respectful, eager hands relieved him of his coat and hat; vaguely he knew he had to follow one of the owners of these hands up a broad staircase, along a soft carpeted passage, to a room which, suddenly flooded with light, showed its possession of a basin fitted with shining silver taps. He washed luxuriously; the towels were warm to the touch. He felt at peace with the world.
Down the stairs again, with a portrait on the white panelled wall for each step, to the inner hall lined with tapestries and brocade, where a bronze statue held an electric torch aloft to light the way to the dining-room.
Ferrol was standing by the fire. "Chilly to-night," he said, as Humphrey came into the room. His voice echoed in the spacious loneliness of the room.
Yes, said Humphrey, "it is." He hesitated a moment, and then added "sir." It seemed the correct thing to do, though Ferrol and he might have been, for all that had happened in the last half-hour, excellent personal friends, of equal status in the world.
Come and warm yourself, said Ferrol, motioning him to a high-backed chair by the fire. Humphrey sat down, and put his hands to the fire. This room with its bright lights and its high ceiling filled him with a realization of his own comparative poverty. The walls, again, reflected the artistic in Ferrol.
His glance wandered to the table. Dishes of delicacies in aspic and mayonnaise gave colour to the white glitter of glass and silver. A bowl of great chrysanthemums rose out of the centre-piece of crystal, whose lower tiers were crowded with peaches, apricots, green figs, grapes, and other exotic fruits....
A whimsical vision came to him of a sausage-shop in Fleet Street where, often, kept late on a job, without opportunity for dinner, he had sat on a high stool at the counter eating sausages and onions and potatoes as they came hot from the sizzling trays of fat in the window. The thought made him smile.
What's the joke? asked Ferrol, smiling too.
Humphrey went a diffident pink. After all, why shouldn't he tell Ferrol? He was quite right: the great man bubbled with laughter. He saw the ingenuousness of the thought. It endeared Humphrey to him.
Ah, young man, he said, "I know that shop."
Humphrey's eyebrows raised.
I've passed it many a time and seen the inviting sausages. By God! he continued, bringing his fist down on the mantelpiece, "I'd give you everything on the table, every night of your life, if I could go in and sit at the counter and eat them." He laughed. "So don't you be in too much of a hurry to give up sausages."
A servant appeared, bearing a silver soup-tureen. Ferrol sat at the top of the table, and Humphrey took the seat at his right hand. The soup was clear and delicious, possessing a faint, elusive flavour of sherry. While he was eating, he became aware of the butler pouring light-coloured wine into a high stemmed glass. He looked up and saw Ferrol regarding his wine glass.
It's all I drink, said Ferrol. "A little hock with dinner. In my day, many a fellow was ruined with too much drink. Are they as bad now?" he asked.
It was a strange experience to have Ferrol question him on the doings of the Street.
Oh no! he said, hastily, "there's not much of that now. Perhaps a half dozen or so here and there, but nothing serious." (But he thought of the shaking hand of Tommy Pride as he spoke.)
None of my men drink, eh? Ferrol said. It was more of an assertion than a query. "Do you know we've got the finest staff in London—in England."
During the whole of that delightful dinner Humphrey listened to Ferrol talking about the men with whom he worked. He knew them all: knew all that they had done, and all that they were capable of doing. He asked Humphrey's opinion on this man and that man, and listened attentively to the reply. Sometimes Humphrey made a joke, and Ferrol laughed.
And, as the dinner progressed, and the clear, cold wine invigorated his mind and warmed his perceptions, he conceived a greater liking for this man, who was so human at the core of him. In the office one saw him with the distorted, disciplined view, as an unapproachable demi-god, surrounded by people who sacrificed his name to their own advancement. Ah! if one could always be on these terms of privileged intimacy with him, what a difference it would make in the work. If one dared tell Ferrol of the obstacles and the petty humiliations that obscured the path to good work for the sake of the paper....
Tell me, said Ferrol, suddenly, pushing bunches of black grapes towards him—"tell me about Easterham, and your life there."
Now, what could there be in Easterham and its monotonous life to interest Ferrol, thought Humphrey.
Nevertheless, he told him of Easterham, and the Easterham Gazette on which he had worked. That amused Ferrol vastly. And he had to answer oddly insistent questions—to describe the Market Square, and the Cathedral close, with its rooks and ivy. It astonished him to find how interested Ferrol was in these little things, and almost before he was aware of it, he found himself speaking of personal matters, of things that touched his own inner, private life, of his aunt (with her stern gospel of "Getting On"), of the mother whom he did not remember, and of Daniel Quain, his father.
And as he talked on, he saw suddenly that Ferrol was listening in a detached manner, and it occurred to him that he had rather overstepped the limits of a reply to a polite inquiry. He became confused and shy. His reminiscences withered within him. Ferrol tried to urge him along the old track.
He's only doing it out of politeness, thought Humphrey. "I shan't tell him any more. He's making fun of me."
He cracked walnuts in silence and sipped at the port. (Ferrol touched neither nuts nor wine.) He did not interpret that air of detached interest with which Ferrol had listened to him as meaning anything else but boredom.
He did not know that, as he was speaking, the old years came back again to Ferrol, bringing with them once again the vision of Margaret and those secret walks outwards from Easterham, under the white moon of romance and love and supple youth that could be his never more.
Ferrol sighed.
You ought to be very happy, he said. "I think the happiest time of my life was when I was reporting."
Were you ever a reporter? asked Humphrey.
Oh yes! I didn't buy The Day at once.
He rose and went to a cabinet to fetch silver and enamelled boxes of cigars and cigarettes. The cigarettes were oval and fat.
I don't think you've had enough scope, said Ferrol, handing him a lighted match. "You've done well ... not as well as I hoped ... but perhaps you'd do better elsewhere."
A peculiar sensation attacked Humphrey in the regions of his throat and heart. ("Most certainly you are to have your salary raised or be sacked.") He waited tensely.
The butler came into the room, apologetically.
Half-past nine, sir, he said; "the car's waiting, sir."
"Oh—yes. I forgot. I've got to be back at the office.... All right, Wilson. Let me see—what was I saying.... Oh yes, broader scope. Can you speak French?"" he asked abruptly.
"Just what I learnt at school.... I can read the papers.
You'll easily pick it up.... Look here, I'll give you a lift back to Fleet Street. Do you want to go there?
Yes, said Humphrey, and then, suddenly, for some odd reason, he thought of Elizabeth. He was not very sure of his geography, but the street in which she lived could not be far from here. "I think I'd rather walk, if you don't mind.... I've got a call to make." He wanted to tell Elizabeth how splendid Ferrol had been to him.
Oh well! It doesn't matter. Come and see me at twelve to-morrow. I'm going to send you to Paris.
Paris! echoed Humphrey, as if Ferrol had promised him Paradise.
Paris, repeated Ferrol. "We're changing our correspondent."