Chapter VIII: Part III: Elizabeth (1)

I

The Pen Club stands far away from Clubland up a narrow court that leads from Fleet Street, into the maze of the little streets and courts that finally emerge on Holborn.

It is the hidden core of newspaper land. It lurks behind the newspaper offices with discreet ground-glass windows, unpretentious, and obscurely peaceful. No porter in brass-buttoned uniform guards its doors--indeed, it has but one, and that a door with a lustrous, black-glass panel, with a golden message of "Members Only" lettered upon it. Strangers and messengers are requested to tap gently on the window of a little pigeon-hole at the side.

Oliver Goldsmith once lived in the house that is now the Pen Club; Dr Johnson lived a few courts away, and strode down Fleet Street to the "Cheshire Cheese," little dreaming that Americans would follow in his footsteps as pilgrims to a shrine. Its courts have had their place in the history of our letters, but all that is past, for journalism affects a contempt for literature, and literature walks by with a high head. If you want literature, and art, and high-thinking, you must go further west, along the Strand, where you may find a club that still clings to the traditions of Bohemia: but if you want to meet good fellows, jolly, generous, foolish men, wise as patriarchs in some things, and like children in others, then you must join the Pen Club.

All around it are the flourishing signs of the journalists' trade. Here a process-block maker; there a lesser News Agency; round the corner a large printing works, and almost opposite it the vibrating basements of _The Day_. You can see the props of the scenery--take a stroll through the courts, and you see the back-doors of all those proud newspaper offices, great rolls of paper being hoisted up for to-morrow's issue, dismal wagons piled high with yesterday's papers, tied up in bundles, "returns"; unsold papers that will be taken back to the paper-mills and pulped: food for the philosopher here!

Humphrey Quain joined the Pen Club when he had been three years in Fleet Street. It was Willoughby, the crime enthusiast of _The Day_, who put his name down; Jamieson, the dramatic critic, seconded him.

Two years had made very little outward difference in Humphrey. He had perhaps grown an inch, and his shoulders broadened in proportion, but his face was the same frank, boyish face that had gazed open-mouthed in Fleet Street on that January day. Yet there was some slight change in the expression of the eyes; they had become charged with an eager, expectant look; observation had trained them to an alertness and a strained directness of gaze. Inwardly, too, the change in him was imperceptible. He had lost a little of that cocksure way of his, and acquired, by constant mingling with men older than himself, a point of view and an understanding above his years. In worldly knowledge he had advanced with large and sudden strides: some call it vice and some call it experience. A young man, thrust into the whirlpool of London, finds it difficult to avoid such experience, and so Humphrey had allowed himself to be tossed hither and thither with the underswirl of it all, learning deeper lessons than any man can teach.

He had come out of this period with a sense of something lost, yet never regretting its loss. Sometimes a bitter spasm of shame would overtake him when he thought of the sordid memories he was accumulating. He could have wished it all undone, and he looked back on the Humphrey Quain of Easterham, and saw himself singularly unsmirched, and innocent--knowing nothing, absolutely nothing. After all, he thought, was this knowledge? Does all this go towards the making of a man, as the steel is tempered by the fire? Humphrey did not know ... he took all that life offered him: the good and the bad, the folly with the wisdom.

That affair of his with Lilian Filmer was now nothing more than a memory. They had never spoken since their wretched meeting in the Strand restaurant. It was strange, too, how rarely they had met, when in the old days scarcely a day seemed to pass without the sight of her in Fleet Street. She still worked in the Special News Agency Office, and yet, during the two years that had passed since their parting, he had not seen her more than four or five times, and then only in the distance. Once he found himself marching straight towards her in the crowd of the luncheon-hour walkers: panic seized him; he did not know what to do. She was walking proudly with the erect carriage of her body that he knew so well--and then, almost mysteriously, she had disappeared. Perhaps she had seen him, and avoided a direct meeting by turning down a side street or by passing into a shop. For a year he always walked on the other side of the street during the luncheon hour. At the back of his mind she lived as vividly as she had lived in the days when she had been the most important factor in his existence. There were times when the thought of her rendered him uneasy; he felt he had not been true to himself, there was a reproachful blot on his escutcheon.... Strange! how lasting his love had seemed that night when he had kissed her in the cab after the theatre. He could look back on it all now dispassionately. There had been progress in the office. His salary was now eight pounds a week. He remembered the day when he had gone to Ferrol, and said, a little miserably, for the strain of the breaking with Lilian pressed hardly on his heart in those days: "I've broken off my engagement." In these words he had dedicated himself to Ferrol and _The Day_. Nothing more was said. Ferrol nodded in a non-committal sort of way. A few weeks later Humphrey was sent to the East Coast on special work. He did well, and the increase in salary came to him at last.

With this he lifted himself out of the old ruck of his life. The money opened up unbounded vistas of wealth and new possibilities to him. He decided to leave Beaver and Guilford Street. Beaver, as an influence, had served his turn in shaping Humphrey's career. It was Beaver who first showed him the way to London, and now, at odd intervals, Beaver occurred and recurred across his vision, still biting his nails, and still with ink-splashed thumbs. No stress of ambition seemed to disturb Beaver's placidity. He was content to plod on and on, day after day, a journalistic cart-horse, until he dropped dead in his collar. That was how it seemed to Humphrey, who never credited Beaver with any great aspirations, yet that shaggy man had a separate life of his own, with his own dreams, and his own aims, which one day were destined to touch the fringe of Humphrey's life.

Humphrey took a small flat in Clifford's Inn, a place of sleep and peace and quiet then, as it is now, out of the noise of Fleet Street. It was a "flat" only by courtesy, for in reality it was made up of two rooms and a box-room. The larger was his sitting-room, and the smaller--a narrow, oblong room--he used as a sleeping apartment. Very little light, and scarcely any air, came through the small latticed windows, but the rooms held a mediæval charm about them, and he was free for ever from the landladies and grubbiness of lodgings. He paid a pound a week for his rooms in Clifford's Inn.

Every evening when he was free in London, Humphrey went to the Pen Club. The place had a fascination for him, which he could not shake off. One could not define this fascination, this influence which the Club wielded over him.

It grew on him gradually, until an evening spent without a visit to the Club seemed empty and insufficient. There was nothing vicious about the Club--it was just a meeting-place, where one could eat and drink. Within its four walls there was peace unutterable; and the world stood still for you when you passed the threshold. Other clubs have tape machines spitting out lengths of news: telegrams pasted on the walls; chairs full of old gentlemen reading newspapers with dutiful eagerness--the Pen Club was a place where you escaped from news, where nobody was interested in news as news, but merely in news as it stood in the relation to the doings of their friends. There was no excitement over a by-election, nobody cared who would get in on polling day; nobody thrilled over a revolution in a foreign state; mention of these things only served as a peg on which to hang discussions of personalities. "I expect Williamson's having a nobby time in St Petersburg," or "Who's down at Bodmin for _The Herald_--Carter?--I thought so. Jolly good stuff in to-day."

And when news did touch them, it touched them personally, and altered the tenor of their lives perhaps for many days. At any minute something would happen, and a half-dozen of them would be wanted at their different offices. They would just disappear from the Club for a few days, and return to find that a fresh set of events had dwarfed their own experiences completely. They were never missed. A man might be absent in Morocco for half-a-year, living through wild happenings, with his life hanging on a slender thread--a hero in the eyes of newspaper readers--but nobody in particular in the eyes of the Pen Club, where every one found his level in the fellowship of the Pen. They came and went like shadows.

Humphrey found all types of journalists in the Pen Club--odd types off the beaten track of journalism, guarding their own cabbage-patch of news, and taking their wares to market daily. There was Larkin, for instance, who took the railway platforms as his special province. He was a tall, thin man, with friendly eyes smiling behind gold-rimmed pince-nez. No Duke or Duchess could leave London by way of the railway termini without Larkin knowing it. Those paragraphs that appeared scattered about all the newspapers of London, telling of the departure of Somebody and his wife to Cairo or Nice marked the trail of Larkin's day across the London railway stations. Then there was Foyle, a chubby, red-faced man, with a jolly smile, who, by the unwritten law of Fleet Street, chronicled the fires that happened in the Metropolis. A fire without Foyle was an impossible thing to imagine. There was Touche, who dealt only in marriages and engagements; and Ford, who had made a corner for himself in the Divorce Courts; Chate, who sat in the Bankruptcy Court; Modgers, who specialized in recording the wills and last testaments of those who died; and Vernham, lean, long-haired, and cadaverous, who was the Fleet Street authority on the weather. These men and others were the servants of all newspapers, and attached to none. In some cases their work had been handed down from father to son; they made snug incomes, and though they were servants of all, they were masters of themselves.

And all these men were just like children out of school, when they met in the Pen Club: there was no grim seriousness about them--they kept all that for their work. They had insatiable appetites for stories, for reminiscences of their craft. They knew how to laugh. It was well that they did, for, if they had taken themselves seriously, they would never have been able to face the caricatures of themselves which hung on the walls. These caricatures, drawn by a cartoonist on one of the dailies, were things of shuddering satire: they were cruelly true, grotesque parodies of faces and mouths, legs and arms. If you wanted to know the truth of a member, all you had to do was to consult the wall, and there you saw the man's character grimacing at you in colours.

* * * * *

Humphrey had been away from London for a week, and he came back to find the Club seething with excitement. The moment he crossed the threshold he was aware of something abnormal in the life of the Club.

It was the last night of the Club elections for the Committee--a riotous affair as a rule. All round the room there was the chatter and buzz of members discussing the new spirit in the Club.

As member after member dropped in, the excitement grew. It was a historic election. For the first time the youngest members of the Club had been nominated to stand on the Committee. The older members, the men who had watched the Pen Club grow from one room in the second floor of a house to two whole houses knocked into one, looked on a little sorrowfully. They had not become accustomed to the new spirit in the Club. Among themselves, they said the Club was going to the dogs. These young men were making a travesty of the whole business. They had no reverence for traditions. After all, the election of a Chairman and a Committee was a grave affair. It was amazing how seriously they took themselves.

Presently Chander appeared selling copies of _The Club Mosquito_, a journal produced specially for the occasion, which stung members in the weakest spots of their personalities. There were caricatures and portraits of all the "Young Members" who were going to save the Club, as they put it, from the moss and cobwebs of old age. Really, these young men were very ruthless. They invented Election songs, and they sang boisterously:--

"We're going to vote all night,
We're going to vote all day."

Privileged sub-editors, dropping in for a half-hour from their offices, found themselves caught up on the tempest of exhilaration. "Hallo, here's Leman--have you voted yet, Leman?" and a paper would be fetched and Leman would be made to put a cross against thirteen names, with thirteen people urging him to have a drink. Bribery and corruption!

Humphrey abandoned himself to the merriment of the evening. He constituted himself Willoughby's election-agent, and canvassed for votes with shameless disregard for the Corrupt Practices Act. Sharp, the sporting journalist, was busy making a book on the result. That eminent war-correspondent, Bertram Wace, issued a manifesto, demanding to know why he should not be Chairman. The price of _The Club Mosquito_ rose to a shilling a copy when it was known that all the proceeds were to go to the Newspaper Press Fund.

Humphrey found himself left alone with the excitement eddying all round him. He was able to survey the scene with an air of detached interest. It reminded him of his school-days: all these men were young of heart, with the generous impulses of boys; they had the spirit of eternal youth--the one reward which men of their temperament are able to wrest from life.

He saw Willoughby, with his black hair in a disordered tangle over his eyes, joining in the war-song of the Young Members.

As he looked at all these men, chattering, laughing, grouped together here and there where some one was telling an entertaining story, he saw the smiling aspect of Fleet Street, the siren, luring the adventurous stranger to her, with laughter and opulent promise. To-morrow they would all begin their nervous work again, struggling to secure a firm foothold in the niches of the Street, when a false move, a mistake, would bring disaster with it; but they thought nothing of to-morrow; they lived in a life of to-days....

He saw Tommy Pride come into the Club. Two years had left their mark on Tommy's face. New reporters had appeared in the Street, and somehow Tommy found himself marking time, while the army of younger men pressed forward and passed him. He could not complain; he felt that if he asserted himself, Rivers or Neckinger would tell him bluntly that they were cutting down the staff--the dreadful, unanswerable excuse for dismissal. He knew that his mind was less supple than it was years ago; the stress and the bitterness of competition was sterner now than in those days when they posted assignments overnight. So, too, his pen went more slowly, finding each day increasing the difficulty of grappling with new methods. Tommy Pride had lived in To-day, and now To-morrow was upon him.

"Stopping for the declaration of the poll, Pride?" asked Humphrey.

"Not me," said Tommy, picking a bundle of letters from his pigeon-hole. "I've had a late turn to-night and the missis will be sitting up."

"Well, what about a drink?"

Tommy shrugged his shoulders wearily. "Oh--a whisky and soda," he said. "What a row these fellows are making." Willoughby attacked him with a voting paper, and Humphrey noticed how Pride's hand--the hand that had written millions of words--trembled as he made crosses against the names. It was as if each finger were attached to thin wires; it reminded Humphrey of those toy tortoises from Japan, that danced and shook in a little glass case. And he thought: "Will my hand be like that one day?"

The torrent of talk flowed all round him; gusts of boisterous laughter marked the close of a funny story. In all the stories there was a note of egotism. He saw, suddenly, why these men were not as other men. They were profound egotists, they lived each day by the assertion of their own individuality. The stronger the individuality of the man, the greater his chance of success. And these men, he saw, though they all worked in a common school, were absolutely different from one another. They were different, even, in breeding: there were men whose voice and pose could only have been acquired at one of the 'Varsities; there were men who lacked the refinements of speech; keen, eager men, and men whose eyes had lost their lustre, who seemed weary with work; mere boys, self-assertive and confident with the wisdom of men of the world, and older men with grey heads and bald heads.

They surged about him, and came and went, in twos and threes, some of them departing to their homes in the suburbs, north and south, whither trains ran into the early hours of the morning.

Humphrey had been long enough in Fleet Street to know them all: if you could have taken the personalities of these men and blended them together, the composite result would have closely resembled the personality of Tommy Pride--who was now drinking his second glass of whisky. They were men of tremendously active brains--not one of them but had an idea for a new paper that was worth a fortune if only the capital could be procured--and all of them longed intensely for that cottage in the country after the storm and stress of Fleet Street; they could not talk seriously without being cynical, for though they saw the real side of life, the pompous make-believe of the rest left them without any illusions.

"Better wait for the result now," Humphrey said to Tommy. "It'll be out in a few minutes."

"All right," said Tommy, glancing at the clock. "Green's offered me a lift in his cab. Have a drink, Quain. I had the hump when I came in--feel better now."

They all trooped upstairs, where the Young Members were making discordant noises. They sang new and improvised quatrains. You would have thought that not a care in the world could exist within those cheerful walls.

There was a shout of "Here they are." The vote-counters came into the room. One of them they hailed affectionately as "Grandpa." Humphrey had seen him before, walking about Fleet Street, with his silver beard and black slouch hat set on his white hair, but to-night he felt strangely moved, as the old man came into the room, smiling to the cheers. What was it? Some association of ideas passed through his mind, some linking up of Ferrol, young, powerful, master of so many destinies, with the picture before his eyes....

These thoughts were overwhelmed with a tumult of shouting. The old man was reading out the names of the members of the new Committee.

The Young Members had won.

"Come on," said Tommy Pride, "let's get off before the rush."

As they passed out of the Club into the cool air of the night, Tommy suddenly recollected Green and his offer of a cab. "Oh, never mind," he said; "can you lend me four bob for the cab; I'm rather short." Humphrey passed the money to him, and, drawn by the jingle of the coin, as a moth is to candle, a man lurched out of the shadows of the court.

The gas-light fell on the unshaven face of the man, and made his eyes blink feebly: it showed the pitiful, shabby clothes that garbed the swaying figure.

"Hullo, Tommy," said the man. He smiled weakly not sure of his ground.

"Good God!" said Tommy.

Eagerness now came into the man's face; a terrible eagerness, as if everything depended on his being able to compress his story into as few words as possible, before Tommy went. There was no beating about the bush.

"I say, old man, lend me a bob, will you?... Didn't you know?... Oh, I left two years ago.... Nothing doing.... Yes, I know I'm a fool.... Honest, this is for food.... Remember that time we had up in Chatsworth, when the Duke...? Seen anything more of that fellow we met in Portsmouth on the Royal visit?... What was his name?... Can't remember it ... never mind, I say, old man, _can_ you spare a bob?"

Tommy passed him one of the shillings he had just borrowed from Humphrey. "Why don't you pull up," he said; "you can do good stuff if you want to."

"Pull up!" said the man. "Course I can do good stuff. I can do the best stuff in Fleet Street.... Remember that story I wrote about...."

There was something intensely tragic in this sudden kindling of the old, egotistical flame in the burnt-out ruin of a man. The cringing attitude left him when he spoke of his work.

"Well, you'd better get home..." Tommy said. "What's the missis doing?"

"She's trying to make a little by typewriting now.... Thanks for the bob...." He shambled down the court towards Gough Square. "So long." His footsteps grew fainter, until the last echoes of them died away.

Tommy Pride came out with Humphrey into Fleet Street.

There came to them, as it comes only to those who work in the Street, the fascination of its night. The coloured omnibuses, and the cabs, and the busy crowds of people had left it long ago, and the lamps were like a yellow necklace strung into the darkness. Eastwards, doubly steep in its vacancy, Ludgate Hill rose under the silent railway bridge to St Paul's; westwards, the Griffin, the dark towers of the Law Courts, and the island churches loomed uncertainly against the starless sky. The lights shone in the high windows of offices about them, and they caught glimpses of men smoking pipes, working in their shirt-sleeves--Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, were waiting for their news. The carts darted up and down the street with loads of newspapers for the trains. There was a noise of moving machinery. A ragged, homeless man slouched wretchedly along the street, his eyes downcast, mumbling his misery to himself. Two men in grimy clothes were delving down into the bowels of the roadway, and dragging up gross loads of black slime. They worked silently, seeing nothing of the loathsomeness of their work. Over all, above even the noise of the machinery, there came the cleansing sound of swiftly running water, as the street-cleaners, with streaming hoses, swept the dust and the muck and the rubble of the day into the torrents of the gutter.

II

Humphrey took rooms in Clifford's Inn, because that was where Kenneth Carr lived. The two came together, though their natures were opposite, and their friendship had ripened.

Carr was an ascetic, denying himself most of the ordinary pleasures of life, sacrificing himself to the work of his heart; his mind was calm, with a spiritual beauty; he was a man of singularly high ideals. This contrast with Humphrey's frank materialism, his love of pleasure and lack of any deep, spiritual feeling, seemed only to draw their friendship closer. Then there was the memory of Wratten. They often talked together of him, and, as for Humphrey, he never found himself face to face with a difficult piece of reporting without imagining what Wratten would have done. Most people in Fleet Street had forgotten him long ago, but on Humphrey's mind he had left an indelible impression.

"I wonder what it was about Wratten that makes us remember him still," Humphrey said one day. "I had only known him a few months."

"I don't know," Kenneth said. "It's like that, I've noticed. Sometimes a man, out of all the others you meet, comes forward, and you feel instantly, 'This man is worth having as a friend.' The charm of Wratten was that there were two Wrattens: one, the glum, churlish man, with whom nobody could get on, and the other, the self-revealing Wratten we knew."

They smoked in silence. Presently Kenneth threw his cigarette into the fireplace.

"I suppose I'll have to get on with my book."

"Why don't you come out ... come to the Club?"

"Not me, my son. I'm happier here. I want to get a chapter done."

"What's the good of writing novels ... they don't pay, do they?"

"Pay! They pay you for every hour you spend over them," said Kenneth. "I should go brooding mad if I couldn't sit down for an hour or so every night and do what I like with my people. The unhappiest moments of my life were when, to oblige Elizabeth, I gave up novel-writing for a time, and took to poverty statistics."

Humphrey glanced up at the mantelpiece. A portrait of Elizabeth Carr was there, in a silver frame, set haphazard among the litter of masculine knick-knacks--ash-trays, a cigarette-box and a few old pipes. It was a portrait that had always attracted Humphrey; the sun had caught the depth of her eyes and the shadows about her throat. He was never in the room without being conscious of that portrait, and often, when he was not thinking of her at all, he would find himself looking upwards at the silver frame to see, confronting him, the eyes of Elizabeth Carr. She, herself, never seemed to be quite like the photograph. She came, sometimes, to see Kenneth, and, at rare intervals, Humphrey's visits coincided with hers.

She did not live with her brother. She was more fortunate than he, because she had been left an income which was large enough for all her wants. She had always wished to help Kenneth with a small allowance, but he declared he would not touch a penny of her money. "I'll fight my own battles," he said.

There was something in her attitude towards Humphrey--a vague, impalpable something--that left him always uneasy; perhaps it was a subtle display of deference--he could not define it, but he felt that she was comparing him, in her mind, with Kenneth, and that he was worsted in the comparison. She would move about in the little room, preparing tea for them, her presence bringing an oddly domestic air into the rooms, and Humphrey would help her, and she would be jolly and laugh when he was clumsy, but all the time it was as if she were holding him away from her with invisible hands.

And, when he looked at her photograph, he saw behind the clear beauty of the face, with its smile of tenderness and large eyes that never left him, an Elizabeth Carr divinely meek ... utterly unlike the Elizabeth Carr he knew, who carried herself with such graceful pride and seemed so far above him.

He took up the portrait for a moment. "She hasn't been here lately?" he said.

"Who?" asked Kenneth, at his writing-table.

"Your sister ... you were speaking about the statistics you did for her."

"Oh? Elizabeth. No. She's been pretty busy with her work."

"Slumming, eh?"

"That's about it. I don't know half her schemes. Wonderful girl, Elizabeth. Now I come to think of it, I've got to go down to Epping Forest to-morrow. Some bean-feast she's giving to a thousand slum kids. There's sure to be a ticket in your office, why don't you ask to do it?"

"I will," said Humphrey. "A day's fresh air in the forest would do me good."

And he did. Things happened to be slack that day in Fleet Street, and Rivers thought there would be plenty of human interest in the story, "though, of course, it's a chestnut," so that was how Humphrey found himself on the platform at Loughton Station an hour later.

The morning was rich with the warmth and colour of June. The clear fresh smell of the country was all about him. The scent of the flowers, the sight of the green fields dappled with the yellow and white of kingcup and daisy, the pale sky above him with the sun beating down from the cloudless blue, called him back to Easterham, and the life that now seemed centuries away. Throughout all the comings and goings of years, throughout the change, and the unrest of men and women, the old Cathedral close would be unaltered. The rooks would still clamour and circle about the beeches, and the ivy would grow more thickly. Looking back on Easterham, now on the odd market-place, and on the streets that wandered out to the hedgerows and meadow-lands towards the New Forest, he looked back on a picture of infinite peace.

A bird's song and the croon of bees as they swung in their flower-cradles; a horse galloping freely in a field, and cattle browsing in the sunshine--were not all these of more worth than anything else in life?

Unnoticed, he had relinquished everything to Fleet Street. The poison of its promise had drugged him. He could appreciate nothing outside its narrow area ... news! news! and the talking of news; fifty steps round to the Pen Club, and fifty steps back to the office; all the day spent in that world of bricks and mortar, which had once seemed so vast, and was now to him nothing more than a very much magnified Easterham.

He had not even sought out London. He remembered regretfully the evening of his first ride with Beaver, through the crowded streets to Shepherd's Bush, when he had promised himself nights and days of enchantment in the new wonder of London. And the wonder was still unexplored. As it was with London, so it was with everything. His acquaintance and knowledge was superficial. There was no time for deep study, and the Past could not live with the Present hammering at its doors urgently day after day. Just so, too, with the cities in every part of England. He had travelled much, but he came away from every place taking with him only the knowledge of the whereabouts of the hotel, the post-office and the railway station.

A sense of waste filled him; he saw behind him the years, crowded with events, so crowded with movement that he could retain nothing of their activity. And he saw before him a repetition of this, year after year, and again year after year, a long avenue of waiting years, through which he passed, looking ever forward, seeing nothing, remembering nothing, and coming through them all empty-handed, unless....

Unless what? He saw the impasse waiting for him. What was there to be done to avoid it? He might rise to the highest point in reporting--climb up laboriously, only to find at the top of the ladder that others were climbing up after him to force him down the steps on the other side.

Kenneth Carr was rescuing the flotsam of the years. These books of his, though they brought little money, were something permanent; they were the witnesses of endeavour; they remained as things achieved out of the reckless squandering of the hours.

And Humphrey knew that for him there would be nothing left except the dead files of _The Day_, nothing more profitable than that, a brain worked out, weak eyes and a trembling hand. Yes, and as he looked about him on the glory of the country, and heard the breeze making a sea-noise among the trees, he felt that there was something everlasting here, if he could only grasp it. He could not explain it. He only knew that looking upwards into the lucent depths of the green leaves of a tree, and catching now and again the glimpse of the blue sky beyond, seemed to remove the oppression that weighed his soul, and release his mind from perplexity.

He smiled. The old phrase came echoing back to him. "Two pounds a week and a cottage in the country," he thought. Eternal, pitiful, unfulfilled desire.

The whistle of the approaching train woke him from his thoughts. "I'm an ass," he said to himself. "I couldn't live a day without being in the thick of it."

He walked back to the station, just in time to see the train coming round the bend of the platform, giving a glimpse of fluttering handkerchiefs and eager faces at the windows. The stillness of the station was suddenly shattered into a thousand noisy pieces. The children tumbled over one another in their haste to be the first to see all that there was to see.

There was a mighty sound of shrill voices, chattering, laughing, and calling to one another: a confused picture of pallid-faced children, darting from group to group, seeking their child-friends, and arranging themselves in marching order. The teachers herded them together like hens marshalling their elusive brood. Humphrey surveyed the scene with an eye trained to the observation of detail.

He saw the painful cleanliness of the children, as though they had been scrubbed and washed for days before their outing. He saw behind the neatness of the pink ribbon and the mended boots, a vision of faded mothers, fumbling with hands shrivelled by laundry work, or fingers ragged with sewing, at these parting touches of pathetic finery. And, behind the vision of the mothers, he saw that whole sordid underworld hung round the neck of civilization.... These children, pinched and haggard, were left to live in the breathless slums, with only charity to help them. The State made laws for them: but there was no law to make them grow up otherwise than the generation of neglect which produced them.

They were too young to know the difference between happiness and misery. They could only sing and march away, an army of rags and patched neatness, because for one whole day their young limbs were to have the freedom of the country. They thought of that one day, and not of the other three hundred and sixty-four days of squalor and want.

"Hullo--here you are, then," Kenneth Carr appeared out of the crowd of children. "Seen Elizabeth--I've lost her."

Humphrey looked along the platform, and he saw Elizabeth Carr bending down and talking to a little girl. She looked tall and beautiful, among all the harsh ugliness for which these children stood. Her figure, as she stooped to the little ones, seemed to shine with grace and merciful pity. She saw Humphrey, and nodded to him, as he raised his hat. Then she came up leading the child.

"Look," she said, and though her eyes were lit with anger, her voice was gentle. "Look at this child's dress--and the father's earning thirty shillings a week."

Humphrey looked. The child was dressed grotesquely, so grotesquely that it appealed more to the sense of the ludicrous than to the sense of pity. Her main garment was an absurd black cape sparkling with sequins, that undoubtedly belonged to her mother's cloak; it reached to below the child's knees. Beneath this was a tattered muslin blouse of an uncertain, faded colour, and beneath that--nothing. Elizabeth lifted the cape a little and showed undergarments made of string sacking. The child had neither shoes nor stockings.

"Isn't it a shame!" she cried, sending the child to join the rest. "Doesn't it revolt you?"

"Poverty!" said Humphrey. "What can one do?"

"Do!" retorted Elizabeth. "What's the good of having compulsory education, if you don't have compulsory clothing. I know the parents of that child. They could dress that child if they wanted to. Oh," and she clenched her fists, "it makes me feel so helpless."

They talked about it on the way to the forest, as they followed in the wake of the children.

"The wicked folly and the shame of it," she said. "Does nobody realize the ruin and wreckage that belongs to big cities? Thousands on thousands of lives ended before they began. The parents don't know, and won't know.

"And what becomes of those who live? These children here will go through their school-days, and then--what? A small percentage of them may get on, the rest will become casual labourers, dock-hands, and loafers."

They passed a long, ill-clad youth lounging along the road. His face was brutally coarse, and he walked with a slouch.

"There's one of them," Elizabeth went on. "Now, I know that boy: he used to come to these outings three years ago. He's left school now, and he has tramped down from London for the sake of a meat-pie or a mug of tea. Lots of them do that, you know," she said to Humphrey. "He's never learnt a trade. Of course, he learnt history and geography, and all that, and he got a place, I think, as an errand-boy. There's no interest in running errands--so he just loafs now; and he'll loaf on through life, until he's an old man, sleeping on the Embankment, or on the benches on the Bayswater side of the Park. Perhaps he'll have a few spells in prison--anyhow, he's doomed. Lost. And so are nearly all these children here to-day."

The strength of her convictions amazed Humphrey. He had never heard Elizabeth talk like this before. He wondered why she, so beautiful and frail, should mingle with the ugliness of life. When they came to the forest, and Kenneth wandered off alone, she told him.

"It's because behind all this sordidness there is something that is more than beauty--there are magnificent tragedies here, that make my throat dry. There are struggles to live of which nobody ever knows. And, sometimes, you know, when I come from one of my slums and stand by the theatres as they are emptying, and see the lighted motor-cars, and all these other women with jewels round their necks and in their ears, I want to laugh at the folly of it all.

"They don't know ... they never can know, unless they go down to the depths, and look."

Humphrey was silent.

"And nobody can do anything, you know, except this sort of thing. It's a poor enough thing to do, but it's something to know you're helping."

"I think this work is noble," Humphrey said.

"Oh no--not noble. It would be noble if we could do something lasting--something permanent."

They were sitting now on the soft grass, and he looked sidewise at Elizabeth Carr, and saw the fine outline of her profile. There was great beauty in her face, in the delicate oval of her chin, in the shadows that played about her throat, showing soft and white above the low collar of lace. That low lace collar and unornamented dress gave to her a touch of demure simplicity. She had the fragrance of lavender: he could imagine her--(seeing her now, with her eyes and lips tender, and her hands meekly clasped in her lap)--standing in a room of chintz and Chippendale, tending her bowl of pink roses by the latticed window opened to the sunshine.

He sat by her absorbing her serenity; there was repose and rest in the unconscious pose of her body. He had suddenly found the Elizabeth Carr of the photograph on Kenneth's mantelpiece: her presence seemed to bring him peace.

The noise of the children rioting in their happiness made her smile.

"Come," she said, "let us go and join them."

They walked across the open space in the forest, the soft grass yielding to their feet, and came upon the whole exulting landscape. On all sides of them the ragged little ones, released for a day from the barren prison-house of alley and by-way, ran and romped in the freedom of unfettered limbs, uttering shouts of triumph and gladness. This picture of merriment unchecked, cheered the heart with its bright movement. Here was life, overflowing, bubbling, swirling in little eddies among the trees and undergrowth, running free over the green meadow-lands with all the chattering animation of childhood.

Out of the main stream they found strange types of children, odd-minded little things, full of cunning and mother-wit that they had learnt already, knowing the world's hand was against them. Some of them clutched pennies in grimy fists: money saved in farthings for weeks in anticipation of this treat. Others secreted about their person portions of the meat-pie which was given them for lunch. They would take this home as an earnest of altruism.

Impossible to forget the shadow of misery that overhung all their lives; impossible to see these ragged children, who had hopeless years before them, without realizing the mad folly and the waste of citizenship.

Splendid Empire on which the sun never sets! Will the historian of the future, discovering in the ruins of the British Museum Humphrey's account of that day in Epping Forest, place his finger on the yellow paper with its faded ink, and cry: "This is where the story of the Decline and Fall of Britain begins."

They went to see the children take their tea. They sat at long plank tables under the corrugated iron roof of the shed-like pavilion. The girls were in one vast room, the boys in another. Their school-teachers rapped on the table, and the jabber and chatter faded away into a silence. Then the voice of one of the school-masters started singing--

"Praise God, from whom----"

and the hymn was taken up by the voices, singing vociferously--

"Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost."

There was nothing half-hearted about it; they made a great clamour of their thanks, and their shrill treble made echoes within echoes against the iron roof and wooden walls of the room in which they sat. And Humphrey, always the looker-on, saw the imperishable pathos of this and all that lay behind it, and for a moment he felt pity tug at his heart. Then, as if ashamed of his weakness, he turned to Elizabeth and saw that she was watching him. She laid a gloved hand on his sleeve for the fraction of a second; it was an impulsive, unconscious movement, the merest shadow of a caress.

"I did not know you could feel like that," she said softly.

III

In those days Humphrey, trained in the school of experience, took his place in the ranks of Fleet Street, that very narrow community, where each man knows the value of his brother's work.

He was being shaped in the mould. The characteristics of the journalist were more strongly marked in him than they had ever been. He was self-reliant and resourceful, he had acquired the magic faculty of making instant friendships; he had developed his personality, and there was about him a certain charm, a youthful ingenuousness of expression that stood him in good stead when he was at work. People liked Humphrey; among his colleagues in the Street, he was not great enough for jealousy, nor small enough to be ignored. He steered the middle course of popularity.

He had been long enough now on _The Day_ for Ferrol to perceive his limitations. Humphrey did not know--nobody knew--that Ferrol from his red room was watching his work, noting each failure and each success, watching and weighing his value. And it was with something of regret that Ferrol realized that in Humphrey he had found not a genius, but merely a plodding conscientious worker, perhaps a little above the average. For, in spite of Rivers, who found that genius and reporting do not go hand in hand, Ferrol was always searching alertly for the miraculous writer whose style was individual; whose writing would be discussed in those broad circles where _The Day_ was read.

One sees Ferrol hoping for that spark of genius to glow in Humphrey, dreaming, whenever his thoughts took him back, of days now so dim that they seem never to have existed, and faced only with disappointment. Up to a certain point he could make Humphrey--but no further. Perhaps, after all, the boy might show his worth in work of broader scope.... Ferrol plans, and plans, rearranging the men in his employ, moving a man here, and a man there, a god with life for a chessboard and human lives as the men.... One sees Humphrey, young and vigorous, doing his daily work....

It was an extraordinary life, full of uncertainties and sudden surprises ... a life of never-ending energy, with little rest even in sleep, for into his dreams there crept all the tangle of the day's happenings. Disaster swept all round him, but he seemed to be lifted above all evil by the magic of his calling. The king can do no wrong: no journalist ever seemed to be hit by the hazards of life. Murders, the collapse of houses, railway smashes, roofs falling in and burying people in the rubble, shipwrecks and terrible fires.... Humphrey was always on the spot, sooner or later, with a dozen others of the craft....

He was outside the range of the things that really mattered. Politics and the problems that touched deeply the lives of the people did not come his way. They fell into the hands of the lobby correspondent, the man in the Press Gallery of the House, or the sociological writers who stood somewhat aloof from the routine of the Street.

But, on the whole, the life was glorious, in spite of its bitter moments.

"I shall have to chuck it, you know," Kenneth Carr said, one day. "This life is too awful: it's the system that's wrong, there is no system."

That was Kenneth's point of view. Of course there was no system. Is there any system in life?

"We're all sick men, in Fleet Street," sighed Kenneth. "We're sick and we're growing old. Our nerves are broken with the continual movement and unrest. There's no time allowance made for our stomachs: I tell you, we're all sick men in Fleet Street, brain, nerve and stomach."

At such times, Humphrey would laugh and defend the Street and its work, just to cheer Kenneth up.

"Don't you go and drop out," he urged. "I shall be left without a friend."

The next day they met each other on the platform at Paddington. There was to be a Royal week in Windsor. A foreign monarch had come to England.

"Well, what do you think of the life to-day?" Humphrey asked.

"Oh, it's all right," Kenneth laughed. "I suppose I wanted a little fresh air and sunshine.... I shall get it in the forest."

IV

He was reading a letter in the bold, firm handwriting of Elizabeth Carr.

"DEAR MR QUAIN," she wrote, "I don't think I ever thanked you for the article you wrote of our day in the forest with the children. I asked Kenneth to tell you how glad I was, but I expect he forgot all about it. I think your article was most _sympathetic_, though I wish you hadn't made quite so much of that unfortunate child who was dressed so grotesquely. I will tell you what I mean when I see you, for I am writing to know if you can come to dinner here. I'm sorry Kenneth won't be able to come--he's away in Lancashire on that dreadful strike. Thank Heaven--he'll be leaving it all soon."

There was a postscript.

"Of course, I know the nature of your work will not let you say 'yes' definitely, but I've made the day Saturday, on purpose to give you a chance. And if I don't have a wire from you, I shall expect you."

It was quite a month since he had spent that day in Loughton with Elizabeth Carr, and though he could not name offhand the things he had done since then, day by day, that day and its incidents remained sharply defined in his memory.

Had he really taken more than usual care to write his account of their doings? Or, was it that the vision of her, and the recollection of her earnest eyes, inspired him to better work? Or, had there been nothing very special about the story after all, and was her letter merely a courtesy?

The fact remained that he was flattered to receive the letter with its invitation. Kenneth had certainly forgotten to deliver her message. He looked upon it as something of a triumph for him: very patiently he had waited for a word from Elizabeth Carr.

There was that extraordinary remark of hers when he had watched the children sing their grace. He had asked her what she meant by it, and she had declined to say. He had felt humiliated by her words: did she imagine that he had no heart at all? She seemed to think that because he was a reporter on a halfpenny paper, he must be absolutely callous.

He re-read the letter. She was curiously captious. She seemed ready to take offence now because he had made a "story" out of that wretched child clad in its mother's cape and bedraggled blouse. Well, of course, she wasn't a journalist. She couldn't be expected to see human interest from the same point of view as _The Day_. He wrote, accepting her invitation provisionally.

In the days that followed, thoughts of Elizabeth Carr recurred with disturbing persistency. He recalled the odd way in which she had come into his life: first at that evening at the Wrattens, when Lilian Filmer had been his foremost thought, then, intermittently, at Kenneth Carr's, something unusually antagonistic in her attitude to him; and now she had come into the heart of his work, bringing with her a touch of intimacy. She, who had always averted herself from him, was now asking him to be her guest.

She, who had always seemed to ignore him, was, of a sudden, extending towards him tentacles of influence, vague and shadowy; he was uneasily aware of their presence.

He read her letter several times before the Saturday came--the gentle perfume of it reminded him of her own fragrance. He was sensitive to praise and appreciation, and he dwelt often on those words which spoke of his work. It was pleasant to know that he had at last shown Elizabeth Carr what he could do. She was, he knew, judging him always by Kenneth's standard, in life as well as writing, and of course every one knew that Kenneth's ideals were high, that his writing was brilliant.... So Kenneth was going to leave Fleet Street. It was the first that Humphrey had heard of it. "I shall have to chuck it," Kenneth had said, and he was going to keep his word. He contemplated the prospect with melancholy. Kenneth was a good friend; his departure would leave an intolerable gap in London life. The chats and the evening meetings would be gone.... They would pass out of each other's daily life....

Thus Saturday came, and Humphrey found himself free to carry out his acceptance of Elizabeth's invitation.

Humphrey had always imagined that Elizabeth lived in a flat with some woman-friend: he was surprised when he found the address led to a little white house, one of a row of such houses, in a broad, peaceful road at the back of Kensington High Street. It was one of those houses that must have been built when Kensington was a village; it was like a cottage in the heart of London. The Virginian creeper made its drapery of green over the trellis-work that framed the window, and the walls were green with ivy. An elderly woman opened the door to his knock, and he found himself in a low-ceilinged hall, with a few black-and-white drawings on the walls, and a reproduction of Whistler's Nocturne.

He was ushered into the sitting-room. Even if he had not known that it was her house, he could have chosen this room, out of all the rooms in London, as the room of Elizabeth Carr. Wherever he looked, he found a reflex of her peace and gentle calm.