Chapter II: Part I: Easterham (2)

"Kindly remove your head-gear in the front office," he said, and Beaver, with the unmurmuring discipline of years which nothing could break, took off the crumpled tweed thing he called a hat.

"Nice pig, isn't he?" Beaver said to Humphrey, as Worthing went out. "We had an awful row. Said I ought to have given him a month's notice. A week would have been good enough for me if he was doing the sacking. Pig in knickers, that's what he is," said Beaver, defiantly. "This is a Hole."

"Oh, Beaver!" cried Humphrey, hopelessly. "It is a Hole. He _is_ a Pig.... But what's going to happen to me?"

"You'll do my work," Beaver remarked.

"I can't write shorthand. Besides, I don't want to. How old are you, Beaver?"

"Just turned thirty. Why?"

"Thirty!" thought Humphrey; fancy Beaver having wasted all these years in doing nothing but local reporting. Would he have to work ten years more and still achieve nothing further than Beaver. There must be some way out of it. Beaver had found it, and surely he could.

"It's fine for you," Humphrey said, admiringly now, for, in the blankness of Beaver leaving the office where they had worked, he had forgotten to congratulate him. "The Special News Agency is the biggest in London, isn't it."

"Rather," said Beaver, comfortably. "It's a life job." That was his ambition. "Look here, young Quain, I think you're too good for Easterham, too. Those notes of yours, you know.... I used to read 'em every week. Not at all bad.... You take my tip, and do a turn at reporting for a while, and then when you've got the hang of things write in. Write in to all the London papers. Say you've had good provincial experience--'provincial' sounds better than local. You'll see. You're bound to get replies. Say you're a good all-round man. Enclose a stamped envelope." Beaver sauntered to and fro, nibbling at a nail between excited sentences. "Oh, and don't you forget it. Write on _Easterham Gazette_ notepaper."

And when, a week later, Beaver left, Worthing asked Humphrey to try his hand at the police-court, Humphrey accepted the inevitable, and tried to improve on the style of the police reports. Worthing swore at him and rewrote them all, and told him to model his style on that of the late Mr Beaver.

Whereupon Humphrey, seeing that he would never Get On if he were to live in the shadow of Beaver, sat down, and "wrote in."

He wrote to _The Day_, because he bought the paper every morning, and thought it was wonderful.

The day that Ferrol's reply arrived was a day of triumph for Humphrey. The letter came to him with unbelievable promptness, asking him to call at the office.... Never again did Humphrey recapture the fine emotion that thrilled him as he read and re-read the letter. Looking back on it, he saw that those moments were among the most glorious in his life; he stood on the threshold of a world of promise and enchantment, suddenly revealed to him by this scrap of paper with _The Day_ in embossed blue letters, surrounded by telephone numbers and telegraphic addresses of the great newspaper.

When he showed the letter to his aunt, she sighed in a tired way, and said unexpectedly: "I'm afraid you will never get on, Humphrey. You are too restless. I'm sure you would do better to remain with Mr Worthing. However...." She very rarely finished her sentences.

Humphrey smiled. He saw himself marching to fortune; he was twenty, and it never occurred to him that he could fail.

IV

You may call Fleet Street what you like, but the secret of it eludes you always. It has as many moods as a woman: it is the street of laughter and of tears, of adventure and dullness, of romance and reality, of promise and lost hopes, of conquest and broken men. Into its narrow neck are crammed all the hurrying life, the passions, the eager, beating hearts, the happiness and the sorrow of the broad streets East and West that lead to it. There is something in this thin, crooked street, holding in its body the essence of the world, that clutches at the imagination, something in the very atmosphere surrounding it which makes it different from all the other streets that are walked by men.

The stones and the old timber of some of its buildings are like the yellow parchment of some ancient manuscript, scribbled with faded history. There are chop-houses, and taverns, where the wigged and knee-breeched Puffs sat writing their tit-bits of scandal for the fashionable intelligence of the day; where Addison and Steele tapped their snuff-boxes and planned their letters to Mr Spectator; or, further back in the years, Shakespeare himself went Strandwards from Blackfriars up the narrow street where the gabled houses leaned to one another. Look, you can almost see the ghosts of Fleet Street pacing out of the little courts and alleys that lie athwart the street: you know that massive bulk of a man, walking ponderously, in drab-coloured coat and knee-breeches, and rather untidy stockings above his heavy, buckled shoes. He is in the street of a million words; other ghosts jostle him, and in the gallant company one sees Charles Dickens, dropping his manuscript stealthily into a dark letter-box, in a dark office, up a dark court; and all the dead men who have given their lives to the street, some of them foolishly wanton in wine--dead men shot in the wars, or burnt with fever, or wrecked with the struggle, come back ... come back to Fleet Street, to look wistfully at the lit windows, and listen to the throbbing music of the presses.

It lures you like a siren, coaxing with soft promises of prizes to be wrested from it: you shall be the favoured of the gods, and you become Sisyphus, rolling his stone eternally, day after day. Here are the things of life that you covet, they shall be yours, says the Street: and you are Tantalus, reaching out everlastingly, and grasping nothing, until your heart is parched within you. You shall be strong and mighty, it says, sapping your strength like Delilah, until you pull down the pillars of hope, and fall buried beneath the reckless ruins of your career.

Once you have answered the voice of the siren, you are taken in the magic spell. Beat your breast, and exclaim in agony, but nothing will avail, for if you leave the Street, the quiet world will seem void for ever, and, as the ghosts burn backwards through space, so shall you return to the old agitations and longings.

* * * * *

This was the Street to which young Humphrey Quain came on a January morning, riding triumphantly on the top of an omnibus. As he passed the fantastic Griffin, with its open jaws and monstrous scaly wings, like a warder guarding those who would escape, Fleet Street seemed to be the Street of Conquest.

It was a rare, crisp day, with a touch of frost in the air, and the sun clear and high in the heavens, above the tangle of wires and cables that almost roofed the Street. The traffic was beating up and down, with frequent blocks, here and there, as a heavy hooded van staggered up from Whitefriars or Bouverie Street. It was nearly mid-day, and the light two-wheeled carts were pouring out of Shoe Lane, or coming from Salisbury Square with the early editions of the afternoon papers. Newsboys on bicycles, with sacks of papers swung over their backs, seemed to be risking their lives every moment as they flashed into the thick of the traffic, clinging to hansoms, and sliding between drays and omnibuses, out of the press, until they could get through the narrow neck of Fleet Street towards the West.

Humphrey breathed deeply as he looked about him: the names of the newspapers were blazoned everywhere. Heavens! what a world of paper and ink this was, to be sure. The doors, the windows and the letter-boxes bore the titles of newspapers--all the newspapers that were. Every room, on every floor, was inhabited by the representatives of some paper or other: on the musty top windows he could read the titles of journals in Canada and Australia; great golden letters bulged across the buildings telling of familiar newspapers. The houses were an odd mixture of modernity and antiquity, they jostled each other in their cramped space; narrow buildings squeezed between high, red offices with plate-glass windows, and over and above the irregular roofs the wires spread thin threads against the sky, wires that gave and received news from the uttermost ends of the earth.

The letters in white enamel or gold on the windows told of Paris and Berlin, of Rotterdam and Vienna; here they marked the home of a religious paper, there the office of a trade paper, and hard by it _The Sportsman_, with its windows full of prize-fighters' photographs and a massive silver belt in a plush case, for the possession of which Porky Smith and Jewey Brown were coming to blows. Every branch of human activity, all the intricate complexities of modern life seemed to be represented either by a room or the fifth part of a room in Fleet Street.

And, rising out of the riot of narrow buildings, huddled closely to each other, the great homes of the daily papers stood up as landmarks. Here were the London offices of the important provincial papers, which spoke nightly with Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield and Liverpool--plate-glass windows and large letters gave them a handsome enough appearance, but they looked comparatively insignificant beside the tall red building of _The Sentinel_, and the new green-glazed establishment of _The Wire_, while the grey, enormous offices of _The Day_ dwarfed them all. There was something solid about _The Day_ as it stood four-square firmly in the Street, with its great letters sprawled across the front, golden by day, and golden with electric light in the night-time.

It seemed almost as if _The Day_ had nudged the other great papers out of Fleet Street, for in the side streets, in Bouverie Street, and Whitefriars Street, and in Shoe Lane, the remainder of the London papers found their homes, with the exception of the high-toned _Morning Courier_, which found itself at the western end of the Street past the Law Courts.

But _The Day_, with its arrogant dome-tower (lit up at nights), its swinging glass doors and braided commissionaires, was the most typical of the modern newspaper world. It was just such a place as Humphrey Quain had dreamed. The swing doors were always on the move; the people were coming and going quickly--here was action, and all the movement and the business of life.

For a few moments Humphrey hesitated a little nervously. He was a minute or two in advance of the time appointed for the interview, and he stood there, irresolute, filled with a wondrous sense of expectancy, among the crowd that hurried to and fro. He noticed on the other side of the road a bearded man, in a silk hat and a frayed overcoat, sitting on a doorstep at the top of Whitefriars Street. The man had a keen, intelligent face with blue eyes. It was the shiny silk hat that leapt to Humphrey's notice, it seemed so out of keeping with the rest of the man's clothes. Besides, why should a man in a silk hat sit on a doorstep.... Years later the man was still there, every day, sitting sphinx-like, surveying those who passed him ... he must have marked their faces grow older.

The commissionaire regarded Humphrey critically. It was the business of the commissionaire in _The Day_ office, especially, to be a judge of character. He divided callers into two main classes--those who wanted to see the editor, and those whom the editor wanted to see. The two classes were quite distinct, and there were few who, like Humphrey Quain, belonged to both.

"Yes, by appointment," said Humphrey, a little proudly, to the commissionaire's cold question that rose like a wall to so many callers.

He was shown into a little room, and made to fill up a form--name, address and business. The next minute a boy in a green uniform led him up a flight of stairs, through the ante-room where the pink-cheeked Trinder sat typewriting diligently, and so to Ferrol's room.

Humphrey had a confused impression of a broad, high room, of a man sitting at a desk miles away at the farther end of the room by the half-curtained window; of red walls hung with files of newspapers, and the contents bills of that day; of a Louis XVI. clock, all scrolls and cupids, bringing a queer touch of drawing-room leisure with it; and of telephones and buttons that surrounded the man at the desk. The buttons fascinated him: he saw that thin slips of ivory labelled them with the names of the different departments--Editor, News-Editor, Reporters, Sub-Editors, Advertisement Manager, Business Manager, Literary Editor, Sporting Editor, City Editor, Foreign Editor--the whole of the building, with all its workers, seemed to be within the reach of Ferrol's fingers. He was like the captain of a great ship, navigating the paper from this room, steering daily through the perilous journey. Humphrey remembered afterwards how he was possessed with an odd longing; he wanted to see Ferrol press all the buttons at once, to hear the bones of the paper, the framework on which it was built up each day, come clattering and rattling into the room.

Ferrol looked up from his papers, pushed back his round, upholstered chair that tipped slightly on its axis, and the room with its red walls and carpet suddenly faded from Humphrey, and he became aware only of a face that looked at him ... a masterful, powerful face, strong in every feature, from the thick, closely-knit eyebrows below the broad forehead, to the round, large chin. There was something insistent in this face of Ferrol, with its steel-coloured eyes, that hardened or softened with his moods, and its black moustache, that bulged heavily over his upper lip and gave him an appearance of rugged ferocity.

Humphrey felt as if he were a squirming thing under the microscope.... That was the way of Ferrol--everything depended on the first impression that he received; all his being was tautened to receive that first impression. It was a narrow system of judging character, but he made few mistakes.... They were quickly corrected. He never forgave those who deceived him by wearing a mask over their true selves.

There is not the slightest doubt that Humphrey felt a little nervous--who would not, with Ferrol's eyes boring through one?--but he knew that great issues were at stake. He carried his head high, and his eyes met Ferrol's without a quiver. Thus he stood by the table for five seconds, though it seemed as many minutes to him, until Ferrol told him to sit down.

"So you want to come on _The Day_," was the way Ferrol began. They were eye to eye all the while.

"Yes, sir," said Humphrey, briskly. Somehow or other, with the sound of Ferrol's voice all his nervousness departed. It was the silence that had made him feel awkward.

"Let's see.... Ah! yes; you've been on an Easterham paper, haven't you?"

"Three years," Humphrey replied.

"That all the experience you've had?"

Humphrey smiled faintly. "That's all," he said.

"What do you want to do?"

Here was an amazing question for which he was totally unprepared. It had never occurred to him that he would be asked to make his choice. His eyes wandered to the buttons.... What _did_ he want to do? He made an answer that sounded futile and foolish to him.

"I want to get on," he stammered, hesitatingly, with a picture of his aunt rising mentally before him.

Ferrol's eyes twinkled. It was a magic answer if Humphrey had but known. Most of the others he saw wanted to do descriptive writing, they had literary kinks in them, or wanted to have roving commissions abroad.... None of them wanted to start at the bottom.

"Well, this is the place for young men who want to get on, you know," said Ferrol. "It's hard work...." He turned away and consulted some papers. "I think I'll give you a chance," he said.

The clock struck twelve, and it sounded to Humphrey that a chime of joy-bells had flooded the room with triumphant music.

"When can you start?" Ferrol asked.

"Next week," Humphrey said.

"You can start at three pounds a week." Ferrol pressed a button. Trinder appeared. "Ask Mr Rivers if he can come," said Ferrol.

Humphrey thought only of three pounds a week ... three pounds!

"I'll put you on the reporting staff," Ferrol remarked. Then he smiled. "We'll see how you get on...." There was a pause. (Three pounds a week! Three pounds a week!)

He looked up as the door opened and saw an extraordinarily virile-looking person come into the room--a man with the face of a refined pugilist, with large square-shaped hands and an expression of impish perkiness in his eyes.

"Come in, Rivers," said Ferrol. "This is Mr Quain."

Mr Rivers shook his hand with an air of polite restraint. "Mr Rivers is our News Editor," explained Ferrol, and then to Rivers, "I have engaged Mr Quain for a trial month, Rivers."

Rivers smiled whimsically. "You're not a genius, I hope," he said to Humphrey. The spirit of humour that flashed across Rivers's face, twinkling his eyes and the corners of his mouth and dimpling his cheeks, made Humphrey laugh a negative reply.

"That's all right," said Rivers, his face so creased in smiles until his beady eyes threatened to disappear altogether. "The last genius we had," he said, with a nod to Ferrol, "let us down horribly on the Bermondsey murder story."

The telephone bell rang. "I'll see him now," said Ferrol through the telephone, and Humphrey took that as a signal that the interview was ended. Ferrol shook hands with him, and once more he felt himself the target of those steel-grey eyes that held in them the stern remorselessness of strength.

* * * * *

"Good-looking young man," said Rivers, as the door closed behind Humphrey. "Hope he'll shape all right."

"I hope so," Ferrol echoed.... And he was glad that Rivers had praised Humphrey, for he was pleased with the upright, manly bearing of the lad, the quick intelligence of the face, and he had noticed the frank eyes, the smooth skin and the dark hair that had belonged in the lost years to Margaret.

V

Humphrey came downstairs and out into the street again walking like one in a dream. His interview with Ferrol had lasted barely five minutes, and in those few minutes the whole course of his future life had been determined. His mind was whirling with the suddenness of it all; whirling and whirling round one thought, the thought of three pounds a week. Round this pivot, as a catharine-wheel spins round its pin, the thing of the greatest import revolved brilliantly, shedding its luminous light far into the dark recesses of the future ... he was on _The Day_. Fleet Street was at his feet.

In that moment a new Humphrey Quain was born, different from the youth who had walked a little timorously into Ferrol's room; he was no longer a lost cipher in the world, he was a unit in the army that marched forwards, with Progress and To-morrow for their watchwords. He felt, suddenly, a great man--Humphrey Quain of _The Day_, cocksure, self-confident, with ambitions that appalled him when he thought of them in after years.

What would Beaver say? What would old Worthing say...? And there was his aunt, too.

That man in the silk hat, with the shabby overcoat, was still sitting on the doorstep. As Humphrey passed him, his lips twisted in a haunting ironical smile. Perhaps he knew of Humphrey's thoughts.

He went back to Easterham. After all, Worthing took it very well, and his aunt agreed that three pounds a week certainly showed that he was Getting On, and Beaver, to whom he wrote the glad news, recommended him rooms in Guilford Street, in the house where he was living.

And there followed days of tremendous dreams.

VI

A week later a four-wheeler brought up outside No. 5A Guilford Street, and there, on the doorstep, was Beaver, with his thumbs inkier than ever, waiting to welcome Humphrey to London. The cabman, one of those red-faced, truculent individuals whom a petrol-driven Nemesis has now overtaken and rendered humble, demanded two shillings more than his fare, firstly, because it was obvious that Humphrey came from the country, and secondly, because he had gone by mistake to 550A, which was at the far end of the street.

"Why didn't you speak the number plainly," he growled.

They compromised with an extra sixpence, on the condition that the cabman should assist in carrying Humphrey's two trunks into the house, as far as the second-floor landing.

"There are your rooms," Beaver said, throwing open the door; "you've got a sitting-room, with a little bed-room at the side. Twelve shillings a week," he said, anxiously. "Not too much, I hope. Breakfasts, one shilling a day." He lowered his voice mysteriously. "Take my tip, Quain, and open the eggs and the window at the same time."

Humphrey laughed. It was jolly to have Beaver in the loneliness of London. This was quite another Beaver, a better-groomed Beaver, with a clean collar, and only one day's stubble on his chin. He made swift calculations--twelve and seven--nineteen, and coals--what of coals?

Coals were a shilling a scuttle. Beaver confided to him that he had a regular system for checking the coal supply. It seems he made an inventory of every lump of coal in every fresh scuttleful. He kept a kind of day-book and ledger system of coal, debiting against the credit supply the lumps that he put on the fire, and balancing his books at night. In this way Mrs Wayzgoose, the landlady, found no opportunity for making extra capital out of the coal business.

"You're better off than I am," Beaver said. "I've only got the top room at eight shillings a week--a bed-sitting room. But then, I send ten shillings a week to my sister. It doesn't leave@ very much by the time I've had my meals and paid the rent."

Humphrey begged him to consider the sitting-room as his own, so long as he lived in the house. They began to unpack together, Beaver making exclamations of surprise at the turn of things.

"Fancy you being on _The Day_!" he said, pausing with a volume in each hand.

"It all happened so quickly. I took your advice. Ferrol seems a wonderful chap."

"Oh! I daresay Ferrol's all right ... but _The Day's_ got an awful reputation. They're always sacking somebody.... I'd rather be where I am. They've got to keep firing, you know. New blood, and new ideas. That's what they want."

Humphrey laughed. "I'm not afraid," he said. "Once I get my teeth into the place, they won't shake me off." All the same, it must be confessed that Beaver's words awoke a slight feeling of alarm in his heart. A king might arise who knew not Humphrey, and he might go down with the rest.

"We'll put the books on the mantelpiece; I'll have to get a book-shelf to-morrow." Humphrey had brought up a few of his favourites--an odd collection: _The Fifth Form at St Dominic's_; _The Time Machine_; _An Easy Outline of Evolution_; _Gulliver's Travels_, and _Captain Singleton_; the poems of Browning and Robert Buchanan, and Carlyle's _French Revolution_. The pictures they agreed to hang to-morrow. They were only heliogravure prints of the kind that were sold in shilling parts. Watts' "Hope" and "Life and Death," and other popular pictures, together with photographic reproductions of authors, ancient and modern, from _The Bookman_.

When they had finished, Humphrey surveyed his new home. It looked comfortable enough in the fire-light, with the green curtains drawn over the windows. The furniture was of the heavy mahogany, mid-Victorian fashion, blended with a horsehair sofa and bent-wood arm-chair, that struck a jarring note of ultra-modernity. There was a flat-topped desk in one corner by the fireplace. The mantelpiece was hideous with pink and blue vases that held dried grass and clipped bulrushes. Looking round more carefully, he saw that Moses himself could not have had more bulrushes to screen him than Mrs Wayzgoose had put for the delight of her lodgers. There were bulrushes in the mirror over the sideboard, bulrushes in a gaily-decorated stand whose paint hid its drain-pipe pedigree, bulrushes in another bloated vase on a fretted ebony stand by the window. Who shall explain this extraordinary passion for bulrushes that still holds in its thrall the respectable landladies of England?

"I must have them cleared away," said Humphrey.

Beaver smiled. "You just try!" he said meaningly. "Anyhow, you're better off than I am, mine's paper fans."

He rang the bell, and a stout, placid-faced woman appeared at the door. She wore at her neck a large topaz-coloured stone, as large as a saucer, set in a circle of filigree gold, and heavy-looking lumps of gold dangled from her ears. Her hands, with their fingers interlocked, rested on the ends of the shawl that made her appear even more ample than she was.

"This is Mr Quain, Mrs Wayzgoose," said Beaver.

Mrs Wayzgoose's face fell apart in her welcoming smile--the smile that her lodgers saw only once. It was a wonderful, carefully-studied smile, beginning with the gradual creasing of the mouth, extending earwards, joyfully, and finally spreading until the nose and the eyes were brought into the scheme.

"I hope you find everything you want, Mr Quain," she said.

"Everything's very comfortable," Humphrey answered.

"Do you take tea or coffee with your breakfasts, Mr Quain?"

Humphrey was about to reply coffee, when the guardian Beaver winked enormously at him, and shook his head in a manner that was quite perplexing. He had not a notion of what Beaver was trying to convey--there was evidently something to beware of in the question. Then, he had an inspiration.

"What do I take, Beaver?" he asked.

"Oh, tea--undoubtedly tea," Beaver answered hastily.

"Very good." Mrs Wayzgoose turned to go.

"Oh! by the way, Mrs Wayzgoose," Humphrey said. "These ... these bulrushes...."

"_Bulrushes!_" echoed Mrs Wayzgoose, losing her placidity all of a sudden. There was an icy silence. Beaver seemed to be enjoying it.

"Pray, what of my bulrushes?" demanded the masterful Mrs Wayzgoose.

"Don't you think ... I mean ... wouldn't the room be lighter without them?"

"Without them?" The way she echoed his words, her voice rising in its scale, reminded him of the wolf's replies to Red Riding Hood before making a meal of her. "Are you aware, Mr Quain, that those bulrushes have been there for the last thirty years."

"I was not aware of it, but I am not surprised to hear it," Humphrey answered politely.

"And that never a complaint has been made about them."

"I _am_ surprised to hear that," he murmured.

"The last gentleman who had these rooms," continued Mrs Wayzgoose, "he _was_ a gentleman, in spite of being coffee-coloured, was a law student. Mr Hilfi Abbas. He took the rooms _because_ of the bulrushes. Said they reminded him of the Nile. I could let these rooms over and over again to Egyptian gentlemen while these bulrushes are there...." And with that she flounced out of the room in a whirl of skirts, with her ear-rings rocking to the headshakes which punctuated her remarks.

"There you are," said Beaver, as the door closed behind her. "What did I tell you?"

Humphrey laughed, and shook his fist at the offending bulrushes. "They'll go somehow, you see."

When all the unpacking was finished, the pipes put in the pipe-rack, the tobacco-jar on the table, and the photographs of his mother, his father and his aunt placed on the mantelpiece, the question of food came uppermost in his mind. Beaver told him that he had accepted an invitation to supper.

"I met a chap on a job whom I knew years ago. We were both reporters together in Hull, on a weekly there. I didn't know you'd be coming up this evening or I wouldn't have arranged to go there."

"Well, it doesn't matter," said Humphrey. "I can manage for myself. Don't let me upset your arrangements."

"Look here," Beaver said suddenly. "Why shouldn't you come with me. It's only cold supper and they won't mind a bit. I'll explain things. Besides," he added, as he noticed Humphrey was hesitating, "Tommy Pride will be one of your new colleagues. He's on _The Day_. You might be able to pick up a few tips from him."

So Humphrey agreed, and they went up into Holborn. It was Sunday evening and every shop was shut, except an isolated restaurant and a tobacconist here and there. The public-houses alone were wholly open, and their windows radiated brilliance into the night. The East had invaded the West for its Sunday parade, and the streets were a restless procession of young people; sex called to sex without anything more evil in intention than a walk through the streets, a hand-clasp and, perhaps, a kiss in some by-way, and then to part with the memory of a gay adventure that would linger during the dull routine of the week to come, to be forgotten and replaced by another.

Beaver was for taking the "tube" to Shepherd's Bush--it was a new luxury for London then, making people wonder how they could have borne so long with the sulphurous smoke and gloom of the old underground railway--but the movement of the streets fascinated Humphrey, and, though the journey took much longer, they went out by omnibus.

Ah! that ride.... The first ride through London, when Humphrey felt the great buildings all around him, and above him, rising enormously in a long chain that seemed to stretch for miles and miles, below the sky that was copper-tinted with the glare of thousands of lamps. What did London mean to him, then? He found his mind groping forwards and backwards, and this way and that way, puzzling for the secret of the real London that was hidden in the stones of it. He was a little afraid of it all, it seemed so vast and complicated. In Easterham, one knew every one, and to walk the streets was like walking the rooms of one's house--but here no man noticed another, one felt strange and outcast at first, intensely lonely, and minutely insignificant. Idly, as he looked down from this omnibus, at the people as they strolled up and down, he wondered of what they were thinking. Did they ever think at all, these people of the streets--did they ever have moments of meditation when they pondered the why and the wherefore of anything? It seemed so odd to Humphrey, as he thought of it--here was the centre of a great civilization, here were men and women, well and decently dressed, here was London broad and mighty, and yet the minds of those who walked below him were, he felt, narrow and pinched. They might have been living in Easterham for all their lives.

And, now, he felt afraid for the first time, knowing that he could never conquer these people by the path he had chosen. What mattered anything to them, except that it touched the root of their lives? They cared nothing, he knew, for the greatness of things. They talked vaguely of the greatness of Empire, but they never thought about it, nor understood it. They lived in a world of names--the world itself was nothing but a string of names which they had been taught. The very stars above them were just "Stars," and the word meant no more to them: if you had talked to them of infinite worlds beyond worlds, of other planets with suns and moons and stars of their own, they would have winked an eye ... and how, when they could not be conquered with the mightiness of everything about them, could Humphrey Quain hope to conquer them. For he had nothing beyond the desire to conquer them--a desire so strong, smouldering somewhere within him, that it had burnt up almost every other interest; he could think perhaps more deeply than they could, but for the rest, he was limited by lack of great knowledge, lack of everything, except an innate gift of shrewd observation and a power of intuitive reasoning.

Out of the mists of his thoughts, Beaver's voice came to him.

"There's the Marble Arch," said Beaver. "What have you been dreaming about? You haven't said a word all the time."

Humphrey laughed. "I was looking at the people," he said. "I always like looking at people."

They went past Hyde Park, with its naked trees showing like skeletons in the moonlight. The night seemed to deepen the spaciousness of the Park, with its shadows and silence; it held all the mystery and beauty of a forest. And later they passed the blue, far-reaching depths of Kensington Gardens, with the scent of trees and the smell of earth after rain coming to them.

It was all new to Humphrey, new and delightful. He promised himself glorious days and nights probing this city to its heart, and listening to the beat of its pulses. Already, for so was he fashioned, he began to note his emotions, and to watch his inner self, and the impressions he was receiving, so that he could write about them. This was the journalist's sense--a sixth sense--which urges its possessor to set down everything he observes, and adds an infinite zest to life, since every experience, every thought, every new feeling, means something to write about. Nor did he think of the things he saw, in the way of the average man. He thought in phrases. It did not content him to feel that a street lamp was merely a lamp. He would ask himself, almost unconsciously, "What does it look like?" and search for a simile. His thoughts ran in metaphors and symbols. They swung into Notting Hill High Street, and here the streets were almost as crowded as those at Holborn, and the lights of the public-houses flared, oases of brilliance in the desert of dark, shuttered shops. And so down the hill to Shepherd's Bush, with its lamps twinkling round the green, and its throng of people--more men and women thinking of nothing at all, and going up and down in herds, like cattle.

VII

The memory of that evening at the Prides remained with Humphrey. It was his first glimpse into the social life, and he saw a home that was wholly delightful. Beaver had not under-estimated the hospitality of the Prides. They gave him a hearty welcome that made him feel at home at once. Tommy Pride met them in the passage, and after the first introductions he led the way to the sitting-room, where Mrs Pride was waiting. She was a woman of forty, buxom and charming. He saw, within a very few minutes, that her admiration of Tommy Pride knew no bounds, that she thought him splendid and flawless--that much he read from the way her brown eyes lit up when she gazed upon him, and the fond smile that marked her lips when she spoke to him.

The sitting-room was not a very large apartment, but it was furnished with unusual taste. There were books set in white enamelled bookcases--books that are permanent on the shelf, and not novels of a moment. There was chintz on the arm-chairs and green curtains hung over the window, and a few original black-and-white drawings and water-colours on the walls, papered in dark blue. The impression that the room gave to the visitor was one of peace and rest.

Humphrey was frankly disappointed in Tommy Pride. He had had a vague notion that everybody connected with a London newspaper was, of necessity, a person of fame. He knew the names of those who signed the articles in _The Day_, and he imagined he would find himself in the company of the great immortals. Somehow or other it had never crossed his mind that there were patient, toiling men--hundreds of them--who put out their best work day after day, year after year, without any hope of glory or fame, but simply for the necessities of life, as a bricklayer lays bricks--hundreds of men quite unknown outside the bounds of Fleet Street and the inner newspaper world.

"Well," Mrs Pride said to him; "so you're going to try your luck in London, Mr Quain?"

Humphrey nodded, and the conversation went into the channels of small talk. Beaver and he amused the Prides with recollections of Easterham and Mr Worthing, and Tommy Pride capped their recollections with some of his own.

"When I was on a little local paper once, we had a fellow named Smee, who thought he could write," said Tommy. "The editor was a hard, cruel sort of chap, without any sympathy for the finer side of literature--at least that was what Smee said. He used to sob all round the place, because he wanted to write great throbbing prose instead of borough-council meetings. One day Smee got his chance. The editor was ill, and there was a prisoner to be hanged in the county jail. Smee wrote the effort of his life. It went something in this way:--

"'Last Tuesday, under the blue vault of heaven, when the larks were singing their rhapsodies to the roseate dawn, at 8 A.M., like a sudden harbinger of horror, the black flag fluttered above the prison walls, showing that Alfred Trollop, aged forty-two, labourer, had suffered the last penalty of the law--viz., death.'"

"How's that for descriptive?" asked Tommy, smacking his lips. "'Viz., death.' A glorious touch, eh?" He leaned towards Humphrey. "Don't you bother about fine writing, Quain, or you'll break your heart. We keep a stableful of fine writers, and turn 'em loose when we want any high falutin' done."

"Don't be so depressing, Tommy," Mrs Pride said. "Never mind what he says, Mr Quain--there's a chance for every one to do his best in Fleet Street."

"Dear optimistress," remarked Tommy, linking an arm in hers, "let's see what we have for supper."

They all went into the dining-room, and Humphrey was given the place of honour next to Mrs Pride. Beaver sat opposite, and Tommy was at the head of the table carving the joint of cold roast beef. "I'm a little out of form," he said, whimsically. "This is the first meal I've had at home for a week."

"I sometimes wish Tommy were a sub-editor," Mrs Pride confided to Humphrey; "then we should at least have the day to ourselves. But he says he could never sit down at a desk for eight hours a night."

"Not me," Tommy interposed, with his mouth full of beef. "If they want to make you a sub-editor, Quain, take several grains of cyanide of potassium rather than yield. You've got some freedom of thought and life as a reporter, but if you're a sub you're chained down with a string of rules. They make you wear a mental uniform."

"I thought a sub-editor held a more important position than a reporter," Humphrey said.

"So he does, only the reporters don't think so. The paper couldn't get on without the sub-editors. I should love to see _The Day_ printed for just one issue with everything that the reporters wrote untouched. It would have to be a forty-two page paper. Because every reporter thinks his story is the best, and writes as much of it as he can.... I like the subs, they've saved my life over and over again. Next to the Agency men they're the most useful people in the world, eh, Beaver?... Have some beer, Beaver. Pass him the jug, Quain."

Beaver laughed. "It strikes me you people on the regular staff of the papers take yourselves much too seriously. You've all got swelled heads. For the sake of fine phrases you'll lose half the facts. Why don't you all understand that it's simply in the day's work to do your job and forget all about it."

"Lord knows," Tommy replied, "but we don't. We get obsessed with our jobs, and dream them, and spend hours taking trouble over them, and we know all the time that when they come cold and chilly at night through the sub's hands, they're lopped about and cut up to fit a space. We may pretend we don't care what happens to our writing, so long as we draw our money, but I think we all do in our secret hearts. We're born that way. The moment a man really doesn't care whether his story is printed or cut to shreds, he's no good in a newspaper office. It means he's lost his enthusiasm."

Tommy's voice fell. He knew well enough that that was the state of affairs to which he had come. All the long, long years of work had left him emotionless. He had exhausted his enthusiasm, and the whole business seemed stale to him. He felt out of place in this new world of newspaperdom, peopled with energetic, hopeful young men who came out of nowhere, and captured at once the prizes which were so hardly won in his day. He felt himself being nudged out of it all, by the pushful enthusiastic army of young men who had marched down on Fleet Street. All round him he saw signs of the coming change--the old penny papers were talking of changing their price to a halfpenny; the older men in journalism were being pensioned off, or dismissed, or "put on space"--which means that they were not paid a regular salary but at so much a column for what they wrote. The spirit of change was working everywhere: some of the solid writers who found that they could not comply with the modern demands of journalism, migrated back to the provinces and became editors or leader-writers on papers in Manchester, Birmingham or Sheffield. And, at the back of all this change, the figure of Ferrol hovered.... Ferrol sweeping irresistibly over the old traditions of Fleet Street.... Ferrol threatening to acquire this paper and that paper, to start weeklies and monthlies, to extend his power even to the provinces, so that everywhere the shadow brooded.

And they would want young men, keen, shrewd young men, and so the day would come when he would fade away from the life of Fleet Street. And then--"Tommy and I are going to retire soon," Mrs Pride said, with a fond glance at her husband, "aren't we, Tommy?"

"She means to the workhouse, Beaver," Tommy remarked, with a grin.

"We're going to have a cottage in the country, and Tommy's going to write his book."

"No," said Beaver, incredulously.

"Do you write books, Mr Pride?" Humphrey asked.

"I? Lord, no! Not now. I once had an idea of writing books. I was just about your age. I believe I've even got the first chapter somewhere. But I've never written it. Whenever the missis and I get very depressed, we cheer ourselves up by talking of that book, and writing it in the country. By the way, do you know that deep down in the heart of every newspaper man there's a longing to write one book, and to live on two pounds a week in the country?"

"That'll do, Tommy," Mrs Pride interposed. "I won't have you spoil Mr Quain's evening any more. You're making him quite depressed. Don't pay any attention to him, Mr Quain, and have some cheese."

After supper they went back to the sitting-room, and Mrs Pride played to them, and Beaver sang in a shaky bass voice. Humphrey had never heard Beaver sing before. There was something grotesque about the singing. It took Humphrey by surprise. Beaver was the sort of man who, somehow or other, one imagined would sing in a high treble. He sang on and on, right through the portfolio of the "World's Favourite Songs," including "The Anchor's Weighed," "John Peel," "The Heart Bowed Down," and the rest of them. Pride sat in the arm-chair by the fireside, smoking a pipe, and nodding to the old melodies, while Humphrey gravitated to the book-shelves, and looked at some of the books.

He seemed to have left Easterham and his aunt far behind him in dim ages. A new feeling of responsibility came over him, as he sat there thinking of the morrow when his battle with Fleet Street was to begin. The future rested with him alone, and it gave him a delicious thrill of individuality to think of it.

It was as if he had suddenly become merged with some one else within him, who was constantly saying to him: "You are Humphrey Quain.... You are Humphrey Quain. Take charge of yourself now.... I have finished with you." He had an odd sense of not fully knowing this strange new Self with which he was faced. He wondered, too, whether Beaver or Pride had ever passed through the same sensation that was passing through him now. This was the beginning of that introspection when the presence of his Self became dominant in his mind, shaping as something to be looked at and examined and questioned, that was to lead to much bitterness and unhappiness in the years to come.

The evening came to an end, but before they left Pride took Humphrey aside. "Beaver said you might like a few hints," he said. "I don't think I can help you much. I think you know your way about. But there are two important things to remember: Don't be a genius, and don't be a fool. I'll tell you more in the morning."

On the way back to Guilford Street Beaver eulogized Pride. He was one of the best reporters in Fleet Street--one of the safest, Beaver meant. Never let his paper down. Worth his salary on any paper.

"I suppose he gets a pretty big salary?" Humphrey asked.

"Who? Pride--no! I don't think he gets very much. He's not a show man, you see. Of course, dear old Tommy hasn't got a cent to spare. He's got a girl of thirteen at boarding-school, and that takes a good bit of keeping up."

"Why was he so discouraging?"

"Oh! that's his way. He pretends he's a pessimist."

Humphrey went to bed that night full of thoughts of the morning. And in the tumult of his thoughts he wondered how he should avoid becoming as Tommy Pride, with all his thirty years of work as nothing, and all the high ambitions sacrificed to Fleet Street. Was that to be his end too--a reporter for ever, and at the finish of it, nothing but the husks of enthusiasm. He thought of Pride's wistful desire for a cottage in the country and two pounds a week. And he fell asleep while thinking how he was going to find a better end to his work than that.