Chapter III: Part II: Lilian (1)

I

Humphrey Quain came into the office of _The Day_ with the greatest asset a journalist can possess--enthusiasm. There is no other profession in the world that calls so continually, day after day, for enthusiasm. The bank-clerk may have his slack moment in adding up his figures--indeed the work has become so mechanical to him that he can even think of other things while making his additions; the actor, even, has his lines by heart, and can sometimes go automatically through his part, without the audience noticing he is listless; the barrister may lose his case; the artist may paint one bad picture--it is forgotten in the gallery of good ones; but the reporter must be always alert, always eager, always ready to adapt himself to circumstances and persons, and fail at the peril of his career. In large things and small things it is all alike: the man who goes to report a meeting must do it as eagerly and with as much enthusiasm as the man who journeys to Egypt to interview the Khedive.

And, as Humphrey soon found, every day and every hour there are forces conspiring to kill this eagerness and enthusiasm at the root. Before he had been a week on _The Day_ he began to realize the forces that were up against him. It seemed that there was a deliberate league on the part of the world to stifle his ambitions, and to make things go awry with him. Before he had been a week on _The Day_ he felt that he was being checked and thwarted by people. He was turned from the doorsteps by the footmen and servants of those whom he went to see on some quite trivial matters; or he could never find the man he went forth to seek. He went from private house to office, from office to club, in search of a city magnate one day, and failed in his quest, and, after hours of searching, he came back to _The Day_ empty-handed, and Rivers said brusquely: "You'll have to try again at dinner-time. He's sure to be home at seven. We've got to have him to-night." And so he went again at seven to the man's house, only to find that he was dining out and would not be back until eleven. Whereupon he waited about patiently, and, finally, when he did return home, the city magnate declined to venture any opinion on the subject in question to Humphrey (it was about the Russian loan), and, after all, he came back, late and tired, to the office, to find that, as far as Selsey, the chief sub-editor, was concerned, nobody cared very much about his failure or not.

And, in the morning, his struggles and troubles and the difficulty of yesterday was quite forgotten, and Rivers never even mentioned the matter to him. But if _The Sentinel_, or any other paper, had chanced to find the city magnate in a more relenting mood, and had squeezed an interview out of him...!

He was given cuttings from other papers, pasted on slips of paper, and told to inquire into them. They led him nowhere. There would be, perhaps, an interview with some well-known person of European interest visiting London, but the printed interview never said where the well-known person was to be found. And so this meant a weary round of hotels, and endless telephone calls, until the hours passed, and Humphrey discovered that the man had left London the night before. Even though that was no fault of his own, he could not eliminate the sense of failure from his mind.

And once, Rivers had told him to go and see Cartwright's, the coal-merchants, in Mark Lane, and get from them some facts about the rise in the price of coal. And he had been shown into the office, and Cartwright had talked swiftly, hurling technical facts and figures at him, as though he had been in the coal business all his life. So that when the interview was ended, Humphrey reeled out of the office, his mind and memory a tangle of half-understood facts, and wholly incapable of writing anything on the matter. Fortunately, when he got back, he found that other reporters had been seeing coal-merchants, and all that was wanted was just three lines from each--an expression of opinion as to whether the high price would last--and Humphrey rescued from the tangle of talk Cartwright's firm belief that the rise was only temporary.

Another day he had been sent to interview a Bishop--an authority on dogma, whose views were to be asked on a startling proposition (from America) of bringing the Bible up-to-date. The Bishop received Humphrey coldly in the hall of his house, and Humphrey noticed that the halls were hung with many texts reflecting Christian sentiments of love and hope and brotherhood. And the Bishop, unmoved by Humphrey's rather forlorn appearance, for somehow he quailed before the austere gaitered personage, curtly told him that he could not discuss the matter.

When Humphrey came back it so happened that he met Neckinger. "Well, what are you doing to-day, Quain?" asked Neckinger with an indulgent smile. He was a short, thick-set man, with a pear-shaped face, and brown eyes that held a quizzical look in them. It was the second time Humphrey had come into touch with Neckinger, who was the editor of _The Day_, and rarely ventured from his room when he came to the office. Humphrey told him where he had been, and with what results.

"Wouldn't he talk?" asked Neckinger.

"No," Humphrey answered.

Neckinger paused with his hand on the door knob. His eyes twinkled, and his fingers caressed his moustache. "Why didn't you make him talk?" asked Neckinger with a hint of disapproval in his voice. Then, without waiting for a reply, he went into his room.

Humphrey felt that he was faced with a new problem in life. How did one _make_ people talk? It was not enough to hunt your quarry to his lair--that was the easiest part of the business--you had to compel him to disgorge words--any words--so be they made coherent sentences. You had to come back and say that he had spoken, and write down what he said at your discretion. And if he would not speak, you had, in some mysterious manner, to force the words from his mouth. That was what puzzled Humphrey in the beginning. What was the magic key that the other reporters had to unlock the conversation of those whom they went to see? They very seldom failed. Humphrey went home, perplexed, disturbed with this added burden on his shoulders. He saw his life as one long effort at making unwilling people talk for publication.

And yet, on the whole, this first week of his in Fleet Street was one of glorious happiness. The romance of the place gripped him at once, and held him a willing captive. He loved the thrill of pride that came to him, whenever he passed through the swing doors in the morning, and the commissionaire, superior person of impregnable dignity, condescended to nod to him. He loved the reporters' room, with its fire and the grate, and the half circle of chairs drawn round it, where there were always two or three of the other men sitting, and talking wonderful things about the secrets of their work.

In reality, the reporters' room was the most prosaic room in the whole building. It was a broad, bare room, excessively utilitarian in appearance. There was nothing superfluous or ornamental in it. Everything within its four walls was set there for a distinct purpose. The large high windows were uncurtained so as to admit the full light of day. And when the full light of day shone, it showed an incredibly untidy room, with every desk littered with writing-paper, and newspapers, and even the floor thick with a slipshod carpet of printed matter. The desks were placed against the walls and round the room. Humphrey had no desk of his own. He usually came in and sat at whichever desk was empty, and more often than not the rightful owner of the desk would arrive, and Humphrey would mumble apologies, gather up his papers, and depart to the next desk. In this way he sometimes made a whole tour of the room, shifting from desk to desk.

There were pegs near the door, and from one of them a disreputable umbrella dangled by its crook handle. It was pale-brown with dust, and its ribs were bent and broken, and rents showed in the covering--as an umbrella its use had long since gone, yet it still hung there. Nobody knew to whom it belonged. Nobody threw it away--it was a respected survival of some ancient day. It remained for ever, an umbrella that had once done good and faithful work, now useless and dusty, with its gaping holes and twisted framework--perhaps, as a symbol.

A telephone, a bell that rang in the commissionaire's box and told him the reporter needed a messenger-boy, and a pot of paste completed the furniture of the reporters' room. They had all they needed, and if they wished for anything they could ring for it--that was the attitude of the managerial side who were responsible for office luxuries. The manager, by the way, had a room that was, by comparison, a temple of luxury, from its soft-shaded electric lights and green wall-paper (the reporters' walls were distempered) to its wondrous carpet, and mahogany desk. Nobody seemed to care very much for the reporters, Humphrey found, except when one of them--or all of them--saved the paper from being beaten by its rivals, or caused the paper to beat its rivals. But in the ordinary course of events, the manager ignored the reporters; the sub-editors, in their hearts, regarded them as loafers and pitied their grammar and inaccuracy for official titles and initials of leading men; Neckinger never bothered much about them unless there was trouble in the air, while those distant people, the leader-writers, sometimes looked at them curiously, as one regards strange types. And yet, the reporters were the friendliest and most human of all those in the office. They came daily into contact with life in all its forms, and it knocked the rough edges off them. They were generous, large-hearted men, whose loyalty to their paper had no limits. They lived together, herded in their big bare room, chafing always against their slavery, and yet loving their bondage, unmoved at the strange phases of life that passed through their hands; surveying, as spectators regard a stage-play, the murders, the humours, the achievements, the tragedies, and the sorrow and laughter of nations.

In those days the interior of the grey building was an unexplored mystery for Humphrey. He passed along the corridors by half-opened doors which gave a tantalizing glimpse into the rooms beyond where men sat writing. There were the sporting rooms, where the sporting editor and his staff worked at things quite apart from the reporters. Nothing seemed to matter to them: the greatest upheavals left their room undisturbed; football, cricket, racing, coursing and the giving of tips were their main interests, and though a king died or war was declared, they still held their own page, the full seven columns of it, so that they could chronicle the sport and the pleasure. The sporting men and the reporters seldom mingled in the office; sometimes Lake, the sporting editor, nodded to those he knew coming up the stairs. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with a heavy face, and the appearance of a clubman and a man of the world.

Close to the sporting room was a strange room lit with an extraordinarily luminous pale blue glare. Humphrey satisfying his curiosity prowled about the building one evening, and ventured to the door. The men who were there did not question his presence. They just looked at him and went on with their work. One of them, in his shirt-sleeves and a black apron, was holding a black square of glass to the light, from which something shining was dripping. A pungent smell of iodoform filled Humphrey's nostrils. He knew the smell; it was intimately associated with the recollections of his youth, when he had dabbled in photography with a low-priced camera, using the cistern-room at the top of the house as a dark-room. And he saw that another man was manipulating an enormous camera, that moved along a grooved base. This, he knew, was an enlarging apparatus, and he realized that here they were making the blocks for _The Day_--transferring a drawing or a photograph to copper or zinc plates.

There was something real and vital about this office where each day was active with a different activity from the day before; where each room was a mirror of life itself.

Next door to the room where the blue light vibrated and flared intensely, he found a smaller room, where two men sat, also in their shirt-sleeves, tap-tapping at telegraph transmitters. A cigarette dangled loosely from the lip of each man, and neither of them glanced at the work of his fingers. They looked always at the printed proof, or the written copy held in a clip before them. This was the provincial wire room. They were tapping a selection of the news, letter by letter, to Birmingham, where _The Day_ had an office of its own. Humphrey noticed with a queer thrill that one of the men was sending through something that he himself had written.

Downstairs, in a long room, longer than the reporters' room, and just as utilitarian, the sub-editors sat at two broad tables forming the letter T. Mr Selsey, the chief sub-editor, sat in the very centre of the top of the T, surrounded by baskets, and proofs, and telephones, and, at about seven o'clock every evening, his dinner. He was a gentle-mannered man, whose face told the time as clearly as a clock. From six to eight it was cheerful; when he began to frown it was nine o'clock; when he grew restless and spoke brusquely it was eleven; and when his hair was dishevelled and his eyes became anxious it was eleven-thirty, and the struggle of pruning down and rejecting the masses of copy that passed through his hands was at its climax. At one o'clock he was normal again, and became gentle over a cup of cocoa.

Humphrey was never certain whether Mr Selsey approved of him or not. He had to go through the ordeal every evening of bringing that which he had written to him, and to stand by while it was read. It reminded him of his school-days, when he used to bring his exercise-book up to the schoolmaster. Selsey seldom made any comment--he read it, marked it with a capital letter indicating whether its fate would be three lines, a paragraph, or its full length, and tossed it into a basket, whence it would be rescued by one of the sub-editors, who saw that the paragraphs, the punctuation and the sense of it were right, cut out whole sentences if it were necessary to compress it, and added a heading to it. Then, it was taken back to Selsey, who glanced at it quickly, and threw it into another basket, whence it was removed by a boy and shot through a pneumatic tube to the composing-room.

The sub-editors' room was the heart of the organism of _The Day_ between the hours of six in the evening and one the next morning. It throbbed with persistent business. The tape machines clicked out the news of the world in long strips, and boys stood by them, cutting up the slips into convenient sizes, and pasting them on paper.

The telephone bells rang, and every night at nine-thirty, Westgate, the leather-lunged sub-editor, disappeared into a telephone-box with a glass door. Humphrey saw him one night when he happened to be in the room. He looked like a man about to be electrocuted, with a band over the top of his skull, ending in two receivers that fitted closely over his ears. His hands were free so that he could write, and through the glass Humphrey watched his mouth working violently until his face was wet with perspiration. He was shouting through a mouthpiece, and his words were carried under the sea to Paris, though no one in the sub-editors' room could hear them, since the telephone-box was padded and noise-proof.

And Humphrey could see his pencil moving swiftly over the paper, with an occasional pause, as his mouth opened widely to articulate a question, and again he felt that delightful and mighty sensation of being in touch with the bones of life, as he realized that somewhere, far away in Paris, the correspondent of _The Day_, invisible but audible, was hailing the sub-editors' room across space and time.

He saw no longer the strained, taut face of Westgate, his unkempt moustache bobbing up and down with the movement of his upper lip, the big vein down his forehead bulging like a thick piece of string with his perspiring exertions. He saw a miracle, and it filled his heart with a strange exultation. He wanted to say to Selsey, "Isn't that splendid!"

Six other men sat at the long table that ran at right angles to the top table, and Selsey was flanked by Westgate, who dealt with Paris, and Tothill, who did the police-court news,--the stub of a cigarette stuck on his lower lip as though it were some strange growth. These men, in the first few days of Humphrey's life in the office of _The Day_, were incomprehensible people to him. He could not understand why they should elect, out of all the work in the world, to sit down at a table from six until one; to leave their homes--he assumed that they were comfortable--their firesides and their wives. They did not meet life as the reporters did; they had none of the glamour and the adventure of it, the work seemed to him to be unutterably stale and destructive. One or two of them wore green shades over their eyes to protect them from the glare of white paper under electric light. And the green shades gave their faces an appearance of pallor. They looked at him curiously whenever he came into the room: he divined at once, rightly or wrongly, that their interests clashed with his. They were one of their forces which he knew he would have to fight.

The remembrance of Tommy Pride's words echoed in his ears as he stood by Selsey's table.

Yet this room held him spell-bound as none other did. It was the main artery through which the life-blood of _The Day_ flowed. He saw the boys ripping open the russet-coloured envelopes that disgorged telegrams from islands and continents afar off; he saw them sorting out stacks of tissue paper covered with writing, "flimsy"--manifolded copy--from all the people who lived by recording the happenings of the moment--men like Beaver, who were lost if people did not do things--the stories of people who brought law-suits, who were born, married, divorced; who went bankrupt; who died; who left wills; stories of actors who played parts; of books that were written; of men who made speeches; of banquets; of funerals--the little, grubby boys were handling the epitome of existence, and this great volume of throbbing life was merely paper with words scrawled over it to them.... It was only in after years that Humphrey himself perceived the significance and the meaning of the emotions which swelled within him during those early days. At the time, as he glanced left and right, down the long table, where the sub-editors bent their heads to their work, and he saw this man dealing with the city news, making out lists of the prices of stocks and shares, and that man handling the doings of Parliament, something moved him inwardly to smile with a great, unbounded pride. He was like a recruit who has been blooded. "I, too, am part of this," he thought. "And this is part of me."

* * * * *

Yet another glimpse he had into the mysteries of the grey building, and then he marvelled, not that the small things he wrote were cut down, but that they ever got into print at all.

It was one night when he had been sent out on a late inquiry. A "runner"--one of those tattered men, who run panting into newspaper offices at night with news of accidents or fires--had brought in some story of an omnibus wreck in Whitehall. Humphrey was given a crumpled piece of paper, with wretchedly scrawled details on it, and told to go forth and investigate. Had he not been so new to the game, he would have known that it was wise to telephone to Charing Cross or Westminster hospitals, for the deductive mind of a reporter used to such things would have told him that where there is an omnibus wreck, there must be injury to life and limb, and the nearest hospitals would be able to verify the bald fact of an accident. But there was nobody who had sufficient leisure or inclination to teach Humphrey his business, and, perhaps it was all the better for him that he should buy his lessons with experience. For he found that "runners'" tales, though they must be investigated, seldom pay for the investigation. The "runner" exaggerates manfully for the sake of his half-crown. Thus, when he arrived at Whitehall, he found, by the simple expedient of asking the policeman on point duty, that there had been an accident--most decidedly there had been an accident; one wheel had come off an omnibus. When? "Oh, about three hours ago, but nobody was hurt as I know on. You can go back and tell 'em there's nothing in it for the noosepaper."

Humphrey had never said that he was a reporter: how did the policeman know? He was a good-natured, red-faced man, and his attitude towards Humphrey was one of easy-going familiarity and gentle tolerance. He spoke kindly as equal to equal; it might almost be said that, from his great height, he bent down, as it were, to meet Humphrey, with the air of a patron conferring benefits. He was not like the Easterham policemen who touched their hats to Humphrey, and called him "sir," because they knew whenever anything happened, the _Gazette_ would refer to the plucky action of P.C. Coles, who was on point duty at the time.

"Nobody hurt at all!" Humphrey repeated, looking vaguely round in the darkness, as though he expected to see the wooden streets of Whitehall littered with bleeding corpses to give the constable the lie.

"You go 'ome," said the policeman, kindly. "I should be the first to know of anything like that if it was serious. I'd have to put in my report. I ain't got no mention of no one injured seriously."

He said it with an air of finality, as though he were taking upon himself the credit of having saved life and limb by not using his notebook. And with that, he eased the chin-strap of his helmet with his forefinger, nodded smilingly, repeated, "You go 'ome," and padded riverwards in his rubber-soled boots.

When Humphrey got back to the office and into the sub-editors' room to tell his news, he found that their work was slackening. Two or three of them were hard at it, but the rest were having their supper. A tall, spidery-looking man, with neatly parted fair hair and a singularly high forehead, was tossing for pennies with Westgate--and winning. It was midnight. One of the sub-editors said to Humphrey:

"You'd better tell Selsey; he's in the composing-room." Humphrey hesitated.

"It's across the corridor," his informant added.

He went across the corridor, and into a new world. The room was alive with noise; row upon row the aproned linotype operators sat before the key-boards translating the written words of the "copy" before them into leaden letters. Their machines were almost human. They touched the keys, as if they were typewriting, and little brass letters slipped down into a line, and then mechanically an iron hand gripped the line, plunged it into a box of molten lead, and lifted it out again with a solid line of lead cast from the mould, while the little brass letters were hoisted upwards and distributed automatically into their places, and all the time the same business was being repeated again and again. The lines of type were set up in columns, seven of them to a page, and locked in an iron frame, and then they were taken to an inner room, where men pressed papier mâché over the pages of type, so that every letter was moulded clearly on this substance. Then this "flong" was placed in a curved receptacle, and boiling lead was poured upon it, as on a mould, so that one had the page curved to fit the cylinder of the printing machine. The curved sheet went through various phases of trimming and making ready, until it was finally taken to the basement.... Very many brains were working together that the words written by Humphrey should be repeated hundreds and thousands of times. All these men were part of the mighty scheme. They had their homes and their separate lives outside the big building, but here they were all merged into one disciplined body, for so many hours at night, carrying on the work which the men on the other side did during the day.

In one corner of the room Selsey was busy with Hargreave, the assistant night editor, and as Humphrey went up he saw that they were still cutting out things from printed proofs, and altering headings. And on an iron-topped table great squares of type rested--the forms just as he had seen them in the _Easterham Gazette_ office--only they were bigger, and the "furniture"--the odd wedge-shaped pieces of wood which they used in Easterham to lock the type firmly in between the frames, was abandoned for a simpler contrivance in iron. And there were Selsey and Hargreave peering at the first pages of _The Day_ in solid type, reading it from right to left, as one reads Hebrew, and suddenly Hargreave would say: "Well we'd better take out the last ten lines of that, and shift this half-way down the column, and put this Reuter message at the top with a splash heading," or else, putting a finger on a square of type, "take that out altogether, that'll give us room." And he would glance up at the clock, with the anxiety of a man who knows there are trains to catch.

No question of writing here.... No time for sentiment.... No time to think, "Poor devil, those ten lines cost, perhaps, hours of work," or, "Those ten lines were thought by their writer to be literature." Literature be hanged! It was only cold type, leaden letters squeezed into square frames--leaden letters that will be melted down on the morrow--type, and the whole paper to be printed, and trains for the delivery carts to catch, if people would have papers before breakfast. And the aproned men brought other squares of type, and printed rough impressions of them, so that Humphrey caught a glimpse of one of the pages at shortly after midnight of a paper that would be new to people at eight o'clock the next morning. He felt the pride of a privileged person.

Selsey caught sight of him. "Hullo, Quain ... what are you doing here?"

"Bus accident--" began Humphrey.

Hargreave pounced upon him. "Any good? Is it worth a contents bill?" he asked, excitedly.

"There hasn't been any accident worth speaking of. No one hurt, I mean."

"All right. Let it go," said Selsey, calmly. Hargreave went away to haggle with the foreman over something. Nobody was relieved to hear that the accident had not been serious.

Humphrey lingered a little longer: he saw rooms leading out of the composing-room, where there was a noise of hammering on metal, and the smell of molten lead, ... and men running to and fro in aprons, taking surreptitious pinches of snuff, banging with mallets, carrying squares of type, proofs, battered tins of tea, ... running to and fro, terribly serious and earnest, just as scene-shifters in the theatre rush and bustle and carry things that the audience never sees, when the curtain hides the stage.

"Better get home," said Selsey, noticing him again.

Humphrey went downstairs. The reporters' room was empty; the fire was low in the grate. He went downstairs, and as he reached the bottom step, the grey building shivered and trembled as if in agony, and there came up from the very roots of its being a deep roar, at first irregular, and menacing, but gradually settling down to a steady, rhythmical beat, like the throbbing of thousands of human hearts.

II

The man whom Humphrey feared most, in those early days, was Rivers, the news-editor. His personality was a riddle. You were never certain when you were summoned to his room in the morning, whether good or ill would result from it. In his hands lay the ordering of your day. You had no more control over your liberty from the time you came into Rivers' room than a prisoner serving his sentence,--no longer a man with a soul, but a reporter. You could be raised into the highest heaven or dropped down to the deepest hell by the wish of Rivers. He could bid you go forth--and you would have to tramp wretchedly the streets of the most unlovely spots in outer London in an interminable search for some elusive news: or perhaps you would be given five pounds for expenses and told to catch the next train for a far county, and spend the day among the hedgerows of the country-side. He had power absolute, like the taskmasters of old.

He sat in his room, with the map of England on the wall with its red flags marking the towns where _The Day_ had correspondents, surrounded by telephones and cuttings from papers. He was in the office all day and night. At least that was how it appeared to Humphrey, who met him often and at all times on the stairs. When he was not, by any chance, there, his place was taken by O'Brien, an excitable Irishman, whose tie worked itself gradually up his collar, marking the time when his excitement was at fever-heat like a barometer.

Rivers had a home, of course, and a wife and a family. He was domesticated somewhere out in Herne Hill, from the hours of eight until ten-thirty in the morning; and except once a week no more was seen of him at home. O'Brien generally took the desk on Sundays. But for the rest of his life Rivers lived and breathed with _The Day_ more than any one else. From the time the door closed on him after breakfast, to the time when it closed on him late at night, when he went home, worn-out and tired, he worked for _The Day_. He was bought as surely as any slave was bought in the days of bondage. And his price was a magnificent one of four figures.

He expected his men to do as he did, in the service of the paper. For his goodwill, nothing sufficed but the complete subservience of all other interests to the work of _The Day_. Not until you did that, were you worthy to be on the paper and serve him.... And many hearts were broken in that room, with its hopeless gospel of materialism, where ideals were withered and nothing spiritual could survive.

Rivers was one of the young men who had won himself to power by the brute force of his intellect. He knew his own business to the tips of his fingers, and, beyond that, nothing mattered. Art and literature and the finer qualities of life could not enter into the practical range of his vision. They were not news. The great halfpenny public cared for nothing but news--a murder mystery, for choice; and the only chance art or literature had of awaking his interest was for the artist to commit suicide in extraordinary circumstances, or for the novelist to murder his publisher. ("By George!" I can hear Rivers saying, "here's a ripping story.... Here's an author murdered his publisher ... 'm ... 'm ... I suppose it's justifiable homicide.")

But on news--red-hot news--he was splendid. He might be sitting in his chair, joking idly with anybody who happened to be in the room, and suddenly the boy would bring in a slip from the tape machine: a submarine wreck! Immediately, the listless, joking man would become swiftly serious and grim. He would decide instantly on the choice of reporters--two should be sent to the scene. "Boy, bring the A.B.C. No train. Damn it, why didn't that kid bring the news in at once. He dawdled five minutes. We could have caught the 3.42. Well, look up the trains to Southampton. Four o'clock. O'Brien, telephone up Southampton and tell them to have a car to take _The Day_ reporters on. Boy, ask Mr Wratten and Mr Pride to come up. O'Brien, send a wire to the local chaps--tell 'em to weigh in all they can. Notify the post-office five thousand words from Portsmouth. Too late for photographs to-night--ring through to the artists, we'll have a diagram and a map. Off Southsea, eh? Shove in a picture of Southsea...." And in an hour it would all be over, and Rivers, a new man with news stirring in the world, would playfully punch O'Brien in the chest, and gather about him a reporter or two for company, and bestow wonderful largesse in the shape of steaks and champagne. That was the human thing about Rivers. He was master absolute, and yet there was no sharp dividing line between him and the men under him. The discipline was there, but it was never obtruded. They drank, and joked, and scored off each other, and Rivers, when things were slack, would tell them some of his early adventures, but whenever it came to the test, his authority in his sphere was supreme. He knew how to get the best work out of his men; and, I think, sometimes, he was sorry for the men who had not, and never would get, a salary of four figures.

Humphrey could not understand him. At times he would be brutally cruel, and morose, scarcely speaking a word to anybody except Wratten, who was generally in his good books; at other times he would come to the office as light-hearted as a child, and urge them all into good-humour, and make them feel that there was no life in the world equal to theirs. Since that day when Humphrey had first met him in Ferrol's room, and he had laughed and said, "You're not a genius, are you?" Rivers had not taken any particular notice of him. When he came into Rivers' room, halting and nervous, he envied the easy freedom of the other reporters who chanced to be there. Wratten sitting on a table, dangling his legs, and Tommy Pride, with his hat on the back of his head, and a pipe in his mouth, while a third man might be looking over the diary of the day's events.

"Hullo, Quain...."

"Good-morning, Mr Rivers."

"O'Brien, what have you got for Quain. Eh? Nothing yet. Go downstairs and wait."

Or else: "Nothing doing this morning. You'd better do this lecture at seven o'clock. Give him the ticket, O'Brien."

And, as Humphrey left the room, he heard Wratten say casually, "I'll do that Guildhall luncheon to-day, Rivers, eh?" And Rivers replied, "Right-O. We shall want a column."

Splendid Wratten, he thought! How long would it be before he acquired such ease, such sure familiarity--how long before he should prove himself worthy to dangle his legs freely in the presence of Rivers.

Within a few days something happened that made Humphrey the celebrity of a day in the reporters' room. It was a fluke, a happy chance, as most of the good things in life are. A man had killed himself in a London street under most peculiar circumstances. He had dressed himself in woman's clothes, and only, after death, when they took him to the hospital, did they find that the dead body was that of a man. He was employed in a solicitor's office near Charing Cross Road. His name was Bellowes, and he was married, and lived at Surbiton. These facts were published briefly in the afternoon papers. Rivers, scenting a mystery, threw his interest into the story. There is nothing like a mystery for selling the paper. He sent for Willoughby.

Humphrey had found Willoughby one of the most astonishing individuals of the reporters' room. He was a tall, slim man, with a hollow-cheeked face and a forehead that was always frowning. His hair fell in disorder almost over his eyebrows, and whenever he wrote he pulled his hair about with his left hand, and mumbled the sentences as he wrote them. His speciality was crime: he knew more of the dark underside of human nature than any one Humphrey had met. He knew the intimate byways of crime, and its motives; every detective in the Criminal Investigation Department was his friend, and though by the rigid law of Scotland Yard they were forbidden to give information, he could chat with them, make his own deductions as well as any detective, and sometimes accompany them when an arrest was expected. He drew his information from unknown sources, and he was always bringing the exclusive news of some crime or other to _The Day_.

He was a bundle of nerves, for he lived always in a world of expectancy. At any moment, any hour, day and night, something would be brought to light. Murder and sudden death and mystery formed the horizon of his thoughts.

Humphrey had found a friend in Willoughby. In very contrast to the work in which he was engaged, he kept the room alive with merriment. He could relate stories as well as he could write them, and he spoke always with the set phrases of old-time journalism that had a ludicrous effect on his listeners. His character was a strange mixture of shrewdness, worldly-wisdom, and ingenuousness, and this was reflected in the books he carried always with him. In one pocket there would be an untranslatable French novel, and, in the other, by way of counterblast, a Meredith or a Stevenson. He and Humphrey had often talked about books, and Willoughby showed the temperament of a cultured scholar and a philosopher when he discussed literature.

Willoughby went up to Rivers' room.

"Here you are, my son," said Rivers, tossing him over the cuttings on the affair of the strange suicide. "Get down to Surbiton and see if you can nose out anything. I'll get some one else to look after the London end."

The some one else chanced to be Humphrey, for there was nobody but him left in the reporters' room. Thus it came about that, a few minutes after Willoughby had set out for Surbiton, Humphrey came out on Fleet Street with instructions to look after the "London end" of the tragedy.

Rivers' parting words were ringing in his ears. They had a sinister meaning in them. "... And don't you fall down, young man," he had said, using the vivid journalistic metaphor for failure.

The busy people of the street surged about him, as he stood still for a moment trying to think where he should begin on the London end. He felt extraordinarily inexperienced and helpless.... He thought how Wratten would have known at once where to go, or how easily Tommy Pride, with his years of training, could do the job. He did not dare ask Rivers to teach him his business--he had enough common sense to know that, at any cost, his ignorance must be hidden under a mask of wisdom.

The reporter thrust suddenly face to face with a mystery that must be unravelled in a few hours is a fit subject for tragedy. He is a social outlaw. He has not the authority of the detective, and none of the secret information of a department at his hand. He is a trespasser in private places, a Peeping Tom, with his eye to a chink in the shuttered lives of others. His inner self wrenches both ways; he loathes and loves his duty. The human man in him says, "This is a shocking tragedy!" The journalist subconsciously murmurs, "This will be a column at least." Tears, and broken hearts, and the dismal tragedy of it all pass like a picture before him, and leave him unmoved.

The public stones him for obeying their desires. He would gladly give up all this sorry business ... and perhaps his salvation lies in his own hand if he becomes sufficiently strong and bold to cry "Enough!"

And this is the tragedy of it--he is neither strong nor bold; and so we may appreciate the picture of Humphrey Quain faced for the first time with the crisis that comes into every journalist's life, when his work revolts his finer senses.

He went blindly up the street, and newsboys ran towards him with raucous shouts, offering the latest news of the suicide. He bought a copy, and read through the story. It occurred to him that the best thing he could do was to go to the offices near Charing Cross Road, where the dead man had worked.

He took an omnibus. It was five o'clock in the evening, and most of the passengers were City men going home. Lucky people--their work was finished, and his was not yet begun.

When he came to the building he wanted, he paused outside. It was a ghastly business. What on earth should he say? What right had he to go and ask questions--there would be an inquest. Surely the public could wait till then for the sordid story. It was ghoulish.

He went into the office and asked the young man at the counter whether Mr Parfitt (the name of the partner) was in. The young man must have guessed his business in a moment. Humphrey felt as if he had a placard hanging round his neck, "I am a newspaper man." "No," snapped the young man, curtly, "he's out."

"When will he be back?" asked Humphrey.

"I don't know," the young man answered, obstinately. "Who are you from?" That was a form of insult reserved for special occasions: it implied, you see, that the caller was obviously not of such appearance as to suggest that he was anything but a paid servant.

Humphrey said: "I wanted to talk about this sad tragedy of--"

The young man looked him up and down, and said, "We've nothing to say."

"But--" began Humphrey.

"We've nothing to say." The young man's lips closed tightly together with a grimace of absolute finality. Humphrey hesitated: he knew that the whole mystery lay within the knowledge of this spiteful person, if only he could be overcome.

"Look here," said the young man, threateningly. "Why don't you damn reporters mind your own business. You're the seventh we've 'ad up 'ere. We've nothing to say. See?" His voice rose to a shriller key. He was a very unpleasant young man, but fortunately he dropped his "h's," which modified, in some strange way, in Humphrey's mind the effect of his onslaught. The young man who had at first seemed somebody of importance, faded away now merely to an underbred nonentity. Humphrey laughed at him.

"You might keep your h's if you can't keep your temper," he said.

Then he left the office, feeling sorry for himself. It was nearly six o'clock, and he was no further. A hall-porter sat reading a paper in front of the fireplace. Humphrey tried diplomacy. He remarked on the tragedy: the hall-porter agreed it was very tragic. There had been seven other reporters before him (marvellous how policemen and hall-porters seemed to know him at once). Humphrey felt in his pocket for half-a-crown and slipped it into the porter's hand. The porter thanked him with genuine gratitude.

"Well," said Humphrey, "what sort of a chap was this Mr Bellowes?"

"Can't say as how I ever saw him," said the porter; "this is my first day here."

"O lord!" groaned Humphrey.

He was in the street again, pondering what he should do. And suddenly that intuitive reasoning power of his began to work. A man who worked in the neighbourhood would conceivably be known to the shopkeepers round about. He visited the shops adjoining the building where the dead man worked, but none of them yielded any information, not even the pawnbrokers. The men whom he asked seemed quite willing to help, but they knew nothing. Finally, he went into the Green Lion public-house which stands at the corner by a court.

Hitherto public-houses had not interested him very much: he went into them rarely, because in Easterham, where every one's doings were noted, it was considered the first step downwards to be seen going into a public-house. Thus, he had grown up without acquiring the habit of promiscuous drinking.

There were a good many people in the bar, and the briskness of business was marked by the frequent pinging noise of the bell in the patent cash till, as a particularly plain-looking young woman pulled the drawer open to drop money in. Humphrey asked for bottled beer. "Cannock's?" the barmaid asked. "Please." She gave him the drink. He said "Thank you." She said "Thank you." She gave him the change, and said "Thank you" again. Whereupon, in accordance with our polite custom, he murmured a final "'Kyou." Then she went away with an airy greeting to some fresh customer.

Presently she came back to where Humphrey was standing. He plunged boldly.

"Sad business this of Mr Bellowes?" he ventured, taking a gulp at his beer. She raised her eyebrows in inquiry.

"Haven't you read about--" he held a crumpled evening paper in his hand. "The tragedy, I mean."

"Oh yes," she said. "Very sad, isn't it?"

A man came between them. "'Ullo, Polly, lovely weather, don't it?" he said, cheerfully, counting out six coppers, and making them into a neat pile on the table. "Same as usual."

"Now then, Mister Smart!" said Polly, facetiously, bringing him a glass of whisky. "All the soda."

"Up to the pretty, please," he said, adding "Whoa-er" as the soda-water bubbled to the level of the fluted decorations round the glass. Small talk followed, frequently interrupted by fresh arrivals. A quarter of an hour passed. The cheerful man had one more drink, and finally departed, with Polly admonishing him to "Be good," to which he replied, "I always am." Humphrey ordered another Cannock.

"Did he often come here?"

"Who?" asked Polly. "Mr Jobling--the man who's gone out?"

"No. I mean Mr Bellowes."

"I'm sure I don't know," she said a little distantly. "Those gentlemen over there"--nodding to a corner of the bar where two men stood in the shadows--"can tell you all about him. They were telling me something about him just before you came in. Fourpence, please."

Humphrey took with him his glass of beer, and went to the two men. They were both drinking whisky, and they seemed to be in a good humour. They turned at Humphrey's wavering "Excuse me...."

"Eh?" said one of the men.

"Excuse me..." Humphrey repeated. "I'm told you knew Mr Bellowes."

"Well," said the other man, a little truculently. "What if we did?"

It seemed to Humphrey that the most absolute frankness was desirable here.

"Look here," he said, "I wish you'd help me by telling me something about him. Here's my card.... I'm on _The Day_."

The younger of the two men smiled, and winked. "You've got a nerve," he said. "Why, you couldn't print it if we told you."

"Couldn't I? Well, never mind. Let's have a drink on it anyway."

Humphrey began his third Cannock, and the others drank whisky. One of them, in drinking, spilt a good deal of the liquor over his coat lapel, and did not bother to wipe it off: he was slightly drunk.

"It's bringing a bad reputation on the firm," said the elder man. "Name in all the papers."

Humphrey was seized with an idea. He knew now that the whole secret of the mystery was within his grasp. One of the men, at least, was from the solicitor's office. The instinct of the journalist made him courageous: he would never leave the bar until he got the story.

"I'll tell you what," he said, "I'll promise to keep the name of the firm out of _The Day_; I'll just refer to it as a firm of solicitors!"

"That's not a bad notion," said the younger man. He drew the elder man aside and they talked quietly for a few minutes. Then more drinks were ordered. Humphrey tackled his fourth Cannock. His head was just beginning to ache.

A tantalizing half-hour passed. The younger man seemed more friendly to Humphrey--he had some friends in Fleet Street; did Humphrey know them, and so on. The elder man was growing more drunk. He swayed a little now. Humphrey's ears buzzed, and his vision was not so acute. The outlines of people were blurred and indistinct. "Good lord," he murmured to himself, "I'm getting drunk too." He was pleasantly happy, and smiled into his sixth glass of beer. He confided to the elder man that he admired him for his constancy to the dead man, and they began to talk over the bad business as friends. The elder man even called him "Ol' chap." They really were very affectionate.

"But WHY did he do it?" said Humphrey; "that's what beats me."

"Oh, well, you see he was in love with this girl ..."

"Which girl?"

"Why, Miss Sycamore ... you know the little girl that sings, 'Come Round and See Me in the Evening,' in the _Pompadour Girl_."

"No. Was he?"

"Was he not," said the elder man, with a hiccough. "Why, he used to be talking to me all day about her.... And the letters. My word, you should see the letters ... he used to show them to me before he sent them off. Full of high thinking and all that."

And gradually the whole story came out, in scattered pieces, that Humphrey saw he could put together into a real-life drama. Never once did he think of the dead man, or the dead man's wife in Surbiton (Willoughby was probably doing his best there). He only saw the secret drama unfolding itself like a novelist's plot. The meetings, the letters, the double life of Bellowes, a respectable churchwarden in Surbiton; a libertine in London--and then she threw him over; declined to see him when he called at the stage door; he had dressed himself as a woman, hoping to pass the stage-door keeper. Perhaps if he had got as far as the dressing-room, maddened by the breakage of his love, and the waste of his intrigue, there might have been a double tragedy. And so to the final grotesque death in the street.

It was eight o'clock when Humphrey had the whole story in his mind, and by that time, though he knew he had drunk far too much, he was not so drunk as the other two men.

"There you are, old boy," said the elder man, affectionately. "You can print it all, and keep my name and the name of the firm out of the papers."

"So long," said the younger man, as they parted at the door of the bar. "You won't have another."

"I'd better get back now," Humphrey replied. "Thanks awfully. You've done me a good turn."

He walked back to the office; the late evening papers still bore on their posters the word "Mystery"--but he alone of all the people hurrying to and fro knew the key of the mystery. He had set forth a few hours ago--it seemed years--ignorant of everything, and, behold, he had put a finger into the tragedy of three lives. All that feeling of revolt and hatred of his business passed away from him, and left in its place nothing but a great joy that he had succeeded, where he never dreamt success was possible. After this he knew he must be a journalist for ever, a licensed meddler in the affairs of other people.

And so, with his head throbbing, and his legs a little unsteady, he came back to the office of _The Day_. It was nine o'clock; Rivers had left the office for the night, and O'Brien was out at dinner. He went to Mr Selsey, and told him briefly all he knew.

"Where did you get it from?" Selsey asked.

"From some friends of his; I promised I wouldn't mention the name of the firm of solicitors he worked in."

"What about Miss Sycamore?"

"Miss Sycamore?" echoed Humphrey, blankly.

"Yes. Haven't you got her? We must know what she says. It mayn't be true."

Humphrey's head swam. He was appalled at the idea of having to go out again, and face the woman in the sordid case. Selsey looked at the clock. "I'll send somebody else up to see her--she's at the Hilarity Theatre, isn't she? You'd better get on with the main story. Write all you can."