Chapter IX: Part III: Elizabeth (2)

In the few moments of waiting he took in all the details of the room: the soft-toned wall-paper, with a woodland frieze of blue and delicate shades of green, the old Japanese prints on the walls, and the little leather-bound books on the tables here and there. He had sat so many times in the rooms of different people whom he went to interview, that his observation had trained itself mechanically to notice such details. He heard a rustle on the stairs, the door opened gently, and Elizabeth Carr came into the room.

She looked as beautiful as a picture in the frame of her own room. So had he imagined her, her hair looped back from its centre parting piled in gleaming coils just above the nape of her neck, leaving its delicate outline unbroken; a long necklet of amethysts made a mauve rivulet against the whiteness of her bosom till it fell in a festoon over her bodice, and blended with the colour of her dress, amethystine itself. And in her hair there gleamed a comb beaten by a Norwegian goldsmith, and set with moonstone and chrysoprase.

She came forward to greet him, moving with the subtle grace of womanhood. Her charm, her frank beauty, filled him with a peculiar sense of unworthiness and embarrassment. Before the wonder of her, before the purity of her, everything else in life seemed incomprehensibly sordid.

"I am so glad you were able to come," she said. She looked him in the eyes as she spoke, and there was this, he noticed, about Elizabeth Carr: she meant every word she said--even the most trivial of greetings took on significance when she uttered them. Her words gave him confidence.

"It was good of you to ask me...." There was a slight pause. "I nearly missed the house," he said with an inconsequential smile. "I always thought you lived in a flat."

"Did you?" she replied. "Oh no!--(Do sit down--I'm expecting some more visitors shortly.) I've had this house for a long time." She sighed. "It's an inheritance, you know, and I thought I'd live in it myself, instead of letting it. Kenneth and I have dreadful squabbles--he says it's too far out for him, and wants me to keep a flat with him in town--and I loathe flats. I've got a small garden at the back, and it's blessed in the summer. There's a walnut tree and a pear tree just wide enough apart to hold a hammock."

"A hammock in London!" cried Humphrey; "I envy you! Think of our Clifford's Inn."

"I really don't know how you people can live on the doorsteps of your offices. I'm sure it's not good for you. Anyway, Kenneth's giving it up."

"I hadn't heard of it before your letter."

"It was only settled a few days ago. Grahams, the publishers, liked his last book well enough to offer him a good advance; and the book's sold in America--he's got enough to get a year's start in the country, and so he's going down there to write only the things he wants to."

Humphrey smiled in his cocksure way. "Aha! he'll soon get sick of it, Miss Carr."

Elizabeth Carr's fingers strayed into the loops of her amethyst necklace; the light shone on the violet and blue gems as she gathered them into a little heap, and let them fall again. Her brows hinted at a frown for a moment, and then they became level again.

"Nothing would make you give up Fleet Street, I suppose?" she asked.

"No ... the fever's in me," he said. "I couldn't live without it."

"Are you so wrapped up in it?"

"Well," said Humphrey, "I suppose I am. It's rather fine, you know, the way things are done. You ought to go through a newspaper office and see it at work ... all sorts of people, each of them working daily with only one aim--to-morrow's paper...."

"And you never think of the day when Ferrol doesn't want you any more?"

"Well, you know," Humphrey said, with a smile, "it's difficult to explain. We just trust to luck. After all, lots of men have drifted into journalism; when they're done, they drift back again."

"I see," Elizabeth Carr said, nodding her head gently. "And there are always fresh men to drift."

"I suppose so."

"And, you're quite content."

Humphrey shrugged his shoulders. "What else can I do?"

The bell rang. "Ah! what else!" she exclaimed, rising to meet her visitors.

The new-comers were introduced to Humphrey. One was a tall, thin man, with remarkable eyes, black and deep-sunken, and the thin mobile lips of an artist. His name was Dyotkin; he spoke English fluently, with a faint Russian accent. The other was a woman whose youthful complexion and features of middle age were in conflict, but whose hair tinged with grey left no doubt of her years. Although her dress was in excellent taste, it suggested an unduly overbearing wealth. Humphrey recognized her name when he heard it: Mrs Hayman. She was one of the philanthropists who helped Elizabeth in her work.

They went into dinner, to sit at a little oval Chippendale table just big enough for the four of them; Dyotkin and he faced one another, sitting between Elizabeth and Mrs Hayman.

"Your work must be very interesting," Mrs Hayman said.

Humphrey smiled. That was the commonest remark he heard. Those who did not know what the work was, perceived dimly its interest, but not one of them could ever be made to understand the intense, eager passion of the life.

"It is interesting," Humphrey said. "Miss Carr knows a good deal of it."

"I suppose you go everywhere--it must be splendid."

"When you talk like that, I, too, think it must be splendid. Sometimes, it's very funny."

"Still, it's nice to see everything, isn't it? And I suppose you go to theatres and concerts."

"Oh no! I'm not a critic. That's another man's work. I'm just a reporter."

"I don't know how you get your news. What do you do? Go out in the morning and ask people? And isn't it dreadfully difficult to fill the paper?"

It was always the same; nobody could understand the routine of the business. Everybody had the same idea that newspaper offices lived in a day of tremulous anticipation lest there should not be enough news. Nobody understood that the happenings in the world were so vast and complex, that their sole anxiety was to compress into four pages the manifold events that had happened while the earth had turned on its axis for one day.

"Now, yesterday, for instance?" Mrs Hayman said, with an inviting smile. "What did you do yesterday?"

"Oh, yesterday was an unpleasant day. I had to go to Camberwell late at night. A man had given himself up somewhere in Wales. He said he'd murdered Miss Cott--you remember the train murder, three years ago.... He kept a chemist's shop in Camberwell, we found out. So I had to go there. I got there dreadfully late. The door was opened by a girl. Her eyes were swollen and red. She was his daughter, I guessed.... I can tell you, I felt awkward."

"I should think so," Elizabeth said. He looked at her, and saw that she was annoyed.

"What did you do--go away?" Mrs Hayman asked.

"Go away? Good gracious, no. I interviewed her."

"Interviewed her!"

"Well, I talked with her, if you like. They were very pleased at the office."

"I think it's repulsive," Elizabeth remarked.

"Oh, come!" Humphrey remonstrated.

The dinner was finished. It occurred to Humphrey that he had fallen from grace.

"We will go into the next room," Elizabeth said, "and Mr Dyotkin shall play to us." As she passed by him, Humphrey went forward and opened the door for her. Dyotkin and Mrs Hayman lingered behind. He passed into the adjoining room with Elizabeth. He wanted to defend himself.

"You're a little hard on me, you know," he said.

"I don't understand how you can do it," she said.

"Do what?"

"Forget all your finer feelings, and make a trade of it."

"I don't make a trade of it," he said, hotly. "You cannot separate the good from the bad. You must take us just as we are--or leave us."

The words came from him quietly, almost unconsciously, as though in an unguarded moment his tongue had taken advantage of his thoughts. She turned her face sideways to his, and he was conscious of a queer look in her eyes--an expression which was absolutely foreign to them. He saw doubt, uncertainty and surprise in the swift glance of a moment. "I ought not to have said that," he thought to himself. And, then, hard upon that, defiantly, "I don't care what she thinks; it's what I thought."

The expression in her eyes softened. Though he had said nothing more, it was as if he had subtly communicated to her that which was passing in his mind.

"Yes," she said, with softness in her voice, "we must take the good with the bad, but we must separate the sincere from the insincere. I saw you that day in the forest when your eyes showed how you felt the pity of it all--and yet, you see, you did not put that in _The Day_. You did not write as you felt."

So that was her explanation. How could he make her comprehend the conflict that was for ever in his mind, and even his explanation could not redeem him in her eyes.

John Davidson's verse ran through his mind like a dirge:--

"Ambition and passion and power,
Came out of the North and the West,
Every year, every day, every hour,
Into Fleet Street to fashion their best.
They would write what is noble and wise,
They must live by a traffic in lies!"

Ah, but it was wrong of her to take that view. As if one could ever tell the truth in a world where the very fabric of society is woven from lies and false conceptions. How could he tell her and make her believe that he was thrilled, and that his throat tightened at things that he saw--and yet he never dared give way to his emotions, and write them. Why, the most vital things in his life were not the things he wrote, but the things he did not write.

Though his mind was rioting with indignation, he laughed. "We mustn't take our work too seriously," he said. "It's too ephemeral for that. Things only last a day."

She did not answer. She turned from him without a word. He had meant to anger her, and he had succeeded. There was a chatter of voices in the passage and Mrs Hayman came into the room with Dyotkin. Elizabeth went towards him.

"Won't you play something?" she begged.

Dyotkin sat down by the piano. The seat was too low; he wanted a cushion, or some books, and Elizabeth went to fetch them.

The sight of her waiting on Dyotkin filled Humphrey with an increasing annoyance. It jarred on him somehow. He attempted to help in an ungainly way, but Elizabeth, without conveying it directly, held aloof from his assistance. He settled himself in the arm-chair by Mrs Hayman ... and Dyotkin played.

Humphrey had no knowledge of music. He did not even know the name of the piece that was being played, but as the fingers of Dyotkin struck three grand chords, something stirred within his soul, and, gradually, a vague understanding came to him, and he followed and traced the theme through its embroidery. And the following of the theme was just like the following of an ideal. At times he was lost in waves of seductive sounds, that charmed him and led his thoughts away, and then, suddenly, the chords would emerge again, out of the bewildering maze of melody clear and triumphant, again, and yet again; he could follow them, though they were cunningly concealed beneath intricate patterns.

And then, for a moment, he would lose them, but he knew that they were still there, if he sought for them, and so he stumbled on; and, behold, once more as the dawn bursts out of the darkness, the familiar sounds struck on his ears. And now they were with him always: he hearkened to them, and they were fraught with a strange, delicious meaning. "I have thought this," he said, in his mind.

Here was something far, far removed from anything of daily life. He was uplifted, exalted from earthly things. The wonder of the music enchanted him. Ah! what achievements were not possible in such moments! He felt grandiose, noble and apart from life altogether.... The music ceased. He sighed as one awaking from the glory of a dream. He looked up, and his eyes, once again, met the eyes of Elizabeth, deep and tender and unspeakably divine.

V

It is impossible to point a finger at any date in this period of the career of Humphrey Quain and say, "This is the day on which he fell in love with Elizabeth Carr." For the days merged gradually into weeks and months, and they met at irregular intervals, and out of their meetings something new and definite came to Humphrey.

There was no sudden transition from acquaintance to friendship, from friendship to love. He could not mark the stages of the development of their knowledge of one another. But before he was aware of its true meaning, once again the spirit of yearning and unrest took hold of him.

This time, his love was different from that abrupt love-affair with Lilian Filmer. Then untutored youth had broken its bounds, and love had swept him from his foothold. He had been ardent, passionate in those days, the fervour of love had intoxicated him; but now, with this slow attachment, his love was a different quality. Lilian, coming fresh upon the horizon of his hopes, bringing with her the promise of all that he needed in those days, had made a physical appeal to him. Always there was working, subconsciously, in his mind, the thought of her desirability. She offered him material rewards; they were attracted to each other by the mutual disadvantages of their surroundings.

Their meeting, their abortive love-affair was the expression of the everlasting desire of the companionship of sex: they were, both of them, groping after things half-understood, towards a goal that looked glamorous in the incomplete vision they had of it.

But Elizabeth Carr appealed to the intellectual in him. No doubt the old primeval forces compelled him towards her, but they were far below the surface of his thoughts whenever the vision of Elizabeth rose before him. He could not describe the hold she had on his imagination. Her influence had been so subtly and gently exercised, that he had not noticed the power of it, until now he was dominated by the thought of her. The finer spirit that lies dormant in every man, except in the very basest, put forth its wings and awoke. In little questions of everyday honour he began to see things from Elizabeth's point of view: little, trivial questions of his dealings with mankind which jarred on Elizabeth's own code of morality. Unquestionably, he was better for her influence, better from the spiritual standpoint, but weaker altogether when judged by the standard of everyday life. Elizabeth preached the gospel of altruism not directly, but insidiously, and he found himself adopting her views.

Hitherto his had been the grim doctrine of worldly success: those who would be strong must be ruthless and remorseless; there must be no halting consideration of the feelings of others. Though he did not realize it, his absorption of Elizabeth's ideals was weakening him, inevitably.

The charity of her work, with its gentle benevolence, was reflected in all her life. She gained happiness by self-sacrifice, and peace by warring against social evils. Their characters and temperaments conflicted whenever they met, and yet, after each meeting, it seemed to Humphrey that their friendship was arising on a firmer basis. Sometimes the shock of their opposing personalities would leave behind it quarrelsome echoes--not the echoes of an open quarrel, but the unmistakable suggestion of disagreement and dissatisfaction. He blundered about, trying to fathom her wishes, but her individuality remained always to him a problem, inscrutably complex.

There were times, it seemed, when their spirits were in perfect agreement, when he was raised high in the wonder of the esteem in which she, obviously, held him. Those were the times when he came first to realize that he loved her: and the audacity of his discovery filled him with dismay. He knew that she was altogether superior; she lived exalted in thought and deed in a plane far above him. They met, it is true, over tea, or at a theatre, just as if they both inhabited the same sphere, but, in spite of that, they were as separate planets, whirling in their own orbits, rushing together for an instant, meeting for a fraction of time, and soaring away once more until again they drew together.

And, even when understanding of her seemed nearest to him, she suddenly receded from his grasp. A change of voice, a change of expression, a movement of her body--what was it? He did not know. He only knew that something he had said had separated them: she could become, in a moment, distant and unattainable, another woman altogether, coldly antagonistic.

Yet, by the old symptoms, he knew that he loved her. She persisted in his thoughts with an alarming result. He found himself pausing, pen in hand, at his desk in the reporters' room, thinking, "Would Elizabeth be pleased with this?..." And an impulse that needed all his strength to combat seized him to abandon the set form into which _The Day_ had cast his thoughts, to criticize and to express his own individual impression, whether they accorded or not with the views held by _The Day_. This was altogether new and disturbing. He was a mouthpiece whose mere duty was to record the words of others by interviews, or a painter to present pictures and not opinions. Conscience and convictions were luxuries that belonged to the critics of art, and the leader-writers.

There came to him days of unqualified unhappiness, when he was possessed by doubts. For the first time he mistrusted the value of his work: he began to see that the fundamental truths of life were outside his scope. Cities might be festering with immorality and slums; vice might parade openly, but these things could never be touched on in a daily newspaper. Nobody was to blame, least of all those who controlled the newspaper, for it is not the business of a daily to deal with the morals of existence.... It is not easy to analyse his feelings ... but, as a result of all this vague tormenting and apprehension, the old thrill at the power and wonder of the office which throbbed with daily activities forsook him, leaving in its place nothing but the desolating knowledge of the littleness and futility of it all.

* * * * *

The phase passed: the variety of the work enthralled him again. He travelled to distant towns and remote villages, and whenever he was in the grip of his work, all thoughts of Elizabeth Carr departed from him. He obtained extraordinary glimpses into the lives of other people; he acquired a knowledge into the working of things that was denied to those who only gleaned their knowledge second-hand from the things that he and others wrote. He saw things all day long: the plottings, the achievements and the failures of mankind.

The other men of the Street flitted into his life and out again at the decree of circumstance. For a week, perhaps, half-a-dozen of them would be thrown together in some part of England. They met at the hotels; they formed friendships, and they parted again, knowing, with the fatalism of their craft, that they would forgather perhaps next week, perhaps next year. There was no sentiment in these friendships.

There were the photographers, too. A new race of men had come into Fleet Street, claiming kinship with the reporters, yet divided by difference of thought and outlook upon news. They were remarkable in their way, the product of the picture daily paper. And their coming marked the doom of the artist illustrators in the newspapers. They were the newest of the new generation, shattering every conception even of the younger men of the manner in which a journalist should perform his duty. The photographers were drawn, as a class, from the studios and operating-rooms of the professional photographer. They forsook the posing of babies and young men in frock coats for the photographic quest of news.

Their finger-tips and nails were brown with the stain of iodoform, and for them there was no concealment of their profession, for they went through life with the burden of their cameras slung over their shoulders. Their audacity was astounding, even to Humphrey and his friends, who knew the necessity of audacity themselves.

They ranged themselves outside the Law Courts, or the Houses of Parliament, or wherever one of the many interests of the day centred, and when a litigant or a Cabinet Minister appeared, a dozen men closed towards him, their cameras at the level of their eyes, and a dozen intermittent "clicking" noises marked the achievement of their quest. They saw life in pictures; a speech was nothing to them but the open mouth and the raised arm of the speaker; the poignancy of death left them unmoved before the need of focus and exposure.

The difficulties of their work seemed so immense to Humphrey that reporting seemed child's play beside it. For not only had they actually to be on the spot, to overcome prejudices and barriers, but, once there, they had to select and group their picture, and to reckon with the light and time. And though the photographers and the reporters were far removed from one another by the external nature of their work, though neither class saw life from the identical standpoint, yet they were interdependent, and linked by the same ceaseless forces working towards one common end....

Sometimes, also, in out-of-the-way places, Humphrey met men who reminded him of his days on the _Easterham Gazette_, men with attenuated minds who were even more absorbed in their work than the London reporter. They had a shameless way of never concealing their identity: they were always the "reporter"; some of them never saw the dignity of their calling, they were careless of speech and appearance, seeming to place themselves on the level of inferior people, and submitting to the undisguised contempt of the little local authorities, who spoke to them scornfully as "You reporters."

Yet, among these, Humphrey found scholars and men of strange experience. Their salaries were absurdly low for the work they did--thirty shillings to two pounds a week was the average; their lives were a thousand times more dismal and humdrum than the lives of the London men. And, in spite of these, many London men sighed for the pleasant country work. Whenever Humphrey heard a man speak of the leisure and peace of country journalism, he told them of Easterham and its dreadful monotony.

He had interior glimpses, too, of other newspaper offices; not a town in the kingdom without its sheet of printed paper, and its reporter recording the day or the week. These offices held his imagination by their sameness. Whether it was Belfast or Birmingham, Edinburgh or Exeter, their plan was uniform. There was always the narrow room, with its paper-strewn desks or tables at which the reporters sat; always the same air of hazy smoke hovered level with the electric-light bulbs; the same type of alert-eyed men, with the taut lips and frown of those who think swiftly, came into the room, smoking a cigarette or a pipe (but rarely a cigar), and brought with them a familiar suggestion of careless good-fellowship as they sat down to the work of transcribing their notes. And, always, wherever he went, the pungent smell of printer's ink was in his nostrils, the metallic rustle of shifting types from the linotype room, and the deep, rumbling sound of machinery in his ears.

Ah, when he got down to the machines that moved it all, he probed to the depths of the simple greatness. Those big, strong men who worked below it all, and lived by the labour of it, made a parable of the whole social system. Of what avail would all their writing be, if it were not for the men and the machines below?

Once he went down the stone steps to the high-roofed basement of _The Day_. He went at midnight, just when the printing was about to begin. It was as if he had penetrated into the utmost secrecy of the office. Here were the things of which nobody seemed to think; here, again, were men in their aprons stained with grease and oily ink; men with bare, strong arms lifting the curved plates of metal, and fixing them to the cylinders; each man doing his allotted work, oiling a bearing here, tightening a nut there, moving busily about the mighty growth of machinery that filled the brightly lit room. The sight of that tangle of iron and steel confused his thoughts. He understood nothing of it all. Those great machines rose before him, towering massively to the roof, tier upon tier of black and glittering metal, with rods and cranks, and weird gaps here and there showing their bowels of polished steel. The enormous rolls of paper which he had seen carried on carts and hoisted many a time into the paper-department of the office, were waiting by each machine, threaded on to a rod of steel. Their blank whiteness reflected the light of the electric lamps.

And then, suddenly, a red light glowed, and somebody shouted, and a man turned a small wheel in the wall--just as a motor-car driver turns the wheel of the steering gear--and the great machines broke into thunderous noises. The din was appalling. It was loud and continuous, and the clamour of it deadened the ears.

Humphrey looked and saw the white reels of paper spinning, and, through the forest of iron and steel, he could trace a cascade of running whiteness, as the paper was spun between the rollers, up and down and across, until it met the curved plates of type, and ran beneath them, to reappear black with the printed words. And the columns looked like blurred, thin lines in the incredible rapidity of the passing paper. The moments were magical; he tried to follow the course of this everlasting ribbon of paper, but he could not. He saw it disappear and come into his vision again. He saw it speed and vanish along a triangular slab of steel, downwards into the invisible intricacies that took it and folded it into two and four and eight pages, cut it and patted it into shape, and tossed it out, quire after quire, a living, printed thing--_The Day_.

And everywhere, wherever he glanced at the turbulent, roaring machines, little screws were working, silent wheels were spinning, small, thin rods were moving almost imperceptibly to and fro, to and fro. He saw great rollers touching the gutters of ink, transmitting their inky touch to other rollers, spinning round and round and round; and the paper, speeding through it all, from the great white web to the folded sheets that were snatched up by waiting men and bundled into a lift, upwards into the night where the carts were waiting.

And the force of the noise was dreadful, and the power of the machines perpetual and relentless as they flung from them, with such terrible ease, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of square, folded papers.

They looked as if they could crush the lives of men in the swift snare of their machinery.

VI

Whom should he meet one day, but Beaver!

Beaver of the inky thumbs and the bitten nails, who had, somehow, eluded him, though they both worked in the narrow Street. Nothing astonishing in this, for the work of Beaver lay in circles different from his own. He never came outside the radius of meetings, inquests, the opening of bazaars and the hundred and one minor happenings that are to be found in "To-day's Diary." But here he was, utterly unchanged from the Beaver with whom Humphrey had lived in Guilford Street, with Mrs Wayzgoose, her wasteful coal-scuttles and her bulrushes.

They met in a chop-house by Temple Bar, a strange place, where the lower floor was packed with keen-faced men from the Courts of Justice over the way and the Temple at the back. They sat crowded together, abandoning all comfort in the haste to enjoy the luxury of the chops and steaks for which the house was famed.

There were no table-cloths on the round tables, where coffee-cups and plates of poached eggs and rounds of toast jostled each other. Only in England would people sit with joy and eat cheek by jowl in this fashion, with the smell of coffee and hot food in their nostrils, and the clatter of plates and knives and forks in their ears.

Upstairs men played chess and dominoes over coffee and rolls, cracking their boiled eggs with difficulty in the cramped space.

Humphrey heard a voice hail him as he threaded his way between the tables. He looked back and saw Beaver waving a friendly fork at him.

"Hullo!" cried Beaver, shifting his chair away a few inches, and seriously incommoding a grey-haired man so absorbed in his game of chess that his coffee was cold and untouched. "Come and sit here," cried Beaver.

They shook hands. "Well, how goes it?" Humphrey asked. "Still with the nose to the grindstone?"

"That's it," Beaver said. Their positions had been changed since the days of Easterham, when Beaver seemed miles above him in worldly success. He remembered the day Beaver left for London, to embark on a career which shone clear and brilliant in Humphrey's imagination. "Write in!" Those had been Beaver's last words. "Write in. That's what I did." The vision of it all rose before him now, as he sat by Beaver: the dingy office, with the scent of the fishmonger next door, the auctioneer's bills on the walls, with samples of mourning and wedding cards, and tradesmen's invoice headings, to show the excellence of the _Gazette's_ jobbing department. And now--? He was conscious of a change in Beaver's attitude towards him.

Humphrey had taken his place in Fleet Street among the personalities, among the young men of promise and achievement. He had even seen his name signed to occasional articles in _The Day_--glorious thrill, splendid emotion, that repaid all the long anonymous hours of patient work!

"You're getting on!" Beaver said. There was admiration unconcealed in his eyes and voice. "Great Scott! It seems impossible that you and I ever worked together on that rotten Easterham paper. That was a fine story you did of the Hextable Railway Smash."

"I've got nothing to complain of," Humphrey replied, hacking at a roll of bread. "It hasn't been easy work. Yours isn't, for the matter of that."

Beaver laughed. "Oh, mine--it isn't difficult, you know. I get so used to it, that I can report a speech mechanically without even thinking of the speaker."

"It's a safe job, you know," he said, after a pause. "A life job."

Humphrey knew what Beaver's exultation in the safety of his job meant.

There were men in Fleet Street, husbands of wives, and fathers of families, who lived and worked tremblingly from day to day, never certain when a fatal envelope would not contain the irrevocable "regret" of the editor that he could no longer continue the engagement.

Why, it might happen to Humphrey himself, for aught he knew. Truly, Beaver was to be envied after all.

"But don't you think you'd do better on a daily paper?" Humphrey said. "I could tell Rivers about you, you know. There might be room on _The Day_."

"I'm taking no risks. I'm going to stop where I am. You see--er--" Beaver became suddenly hesitant, and smiled foolishly. "What I mean to say is--I'm engaged to be married."

He leant back in his seat and contemplated the astonishment in Humphrey's face.

"No--are you really!"

"Fact," retorted Beaver. "Been engaged for the last year."

Beaver going to be married! The news touched Humphrey oddly: Beaver could be earning very little more than Humphrey had earned at the time when he had almost plunged into married life, and there was no desire on Beaver's part to reach out and grasp greater things; he was in a life job, untouched by the wrack and torment of ambition, and the craving for success. Oh, assuredly, Beaver was not to be pitied in the equable calmness of his life and temperament.

"Well, I congratulate you, old man--though I never thought you were the marrying sort."

Beaver took the congratulations blushingly. "Nor did I, until I met Her."

He spoke of "Her" in an awed, impressive manner, as though She were some abnormal person far removed from all other people in the world. Humphrey tried to figure the girl whom Beaver had chosen. He thought of her as a rather plain, nice homely sort of person, with no great burden of intellect or imagination.

Beaver's hand dived into an inside pocket, and out came a leather case. This he opened, and displayed a photograph, reverently.

"That's her!" he said, showing the portrait.

Humphrey kept his self-possession well. Neither by a look nor a word did he betray the past: there was nothing in his manner to show Beaver that the girl whose portrait he held in his hand was she whose lips had clung to his in the young, passionate kisses of yester-year.

But, as Humphrey looked on the face of Lilian Filmer, the same Lilian, even though the photograph was new, and the hair was done in a different fashion, an acute feeling of sorrow came over him, bringing with it the remembrance of aching days, of the early beginnings, of those meetings and partings, and hearts that strained, and he saw the reflection of himself, foolish and cruel, mistaking the shadow for the substance, struggling and struggling, all for nothing ... for not even as much as Beaver had gained.

She looked at him out of the eyes of her photograph, and about her lips there still hovered that smile which had always been a riddle to him; a smile of indulgent love, or contempt? Who knows--a woman's smile is the secret of her sex. Yet now, it seemed, her lips were curved in triumph. This was her revenge on him, that he should go for ever loveless through the world, while she should steal into a haven of welcome peace.

Beaver's voice brought him back to physical things. She would kiss Beaver's shaggy-moustached lips, and his arms would catch her in an embrace.... How soon she had forgotten ... he thought, unreasonably.... She might have waited.... She might have understood....

"Well?" said Beaver, awaiting praise. "You've had a good old look."

"She's awfully nice and charming," Humphrey answered, returning the photograph. "She's like somebody I know."

"Oh, you've probably seen the original, old man, when you used to come and call for me. She used to be one of the girls in our office."

He had forgotten that lunch in the Fleet Street public-house, when Humphrey had asked for the name of the girl.

Used to be one of the girls in the office! Then Lilian had left. He wondered what she was doing, and an impulse that could not be withstood, compelled him to find out whether she had ever mentioned him to Beaver.

"By George!" he said. "I remember, now. Miss Filmer, her name was, wasn't it?"

"That's it, Miss Filmer. Did you ever speak to her, then?"

He was treading on uncertain ground. It was clear that she had never spoken of him. He felt that she had forgotten him, absolutely and completely.

"Oh, I think so--just casually, now and again."

"Well, I never!" said the innocent Beaver. "That's interesting. I'll tell her I met you."

"Oh, she wouldn't remember me or my name," Humphrey answered, hastily. "It was only just 'How-d'ye-do' and 'Good-day' with us.... So she's left the office now."

"Yes. It's rather a sad story. Her father died, you know. He was a chronic invalid--paralysis, I think. Anyhow, we don't speak of it much, and I've never pressed her. But the father who was so useless in life, has been the salvation of the mother by his death. Odd, isn't it? He was insured for a good round sum, and Lilian's mother--did I tell you her name was Lilian?--has bought a little annuity, so that Lilian's free. She used to slave for her mother and the rest of the family until they grew up. That's why she worked overtime at the office. 'Pon me soul, I'd rather be the lowest jackal in Fleet Street than some of these poor little typist girls at eighteen bob a week.... Well, time's up. I've got to be at the Mansion House at three: the Lord Mayor's taking the chair at some blooming meeting to raise a fund for something, somewhere. What are you doing to-day?"

"Oh, I'm on the Klipp case at the Old Bailey."

Humphrey came away profoundly disturbed. Something entirely unexpected had happened. Lilian had lived as the vaguest shadow at the back of his mind, just as he had last seen her, when she bent down to kiss him, and now this picture would have to be erased. He shuddered at the thought. She was Beaver's "girl": she would be Beaver's "missis."

After all, what did it matter? He and Lilian had long since parted; there had been little in common between them. He might have married her, and been as Beaver; she might have married him, but never, never, could she have held the magic and the inspiration of Elizabeth Carr.

His mind, always susceptible to outside influences, brooded on the new fact that had come into his life. Unconsciously, as a natural sequel to his thoughts, he began to dream of his new love, and to see himself happier than he had ever been, with Elizabeth for ever at his side. The same motives that impelled him to Lilian after that scene in the registry office, when Wratten was married, now urged him towards Kenneth Carr's sister....

And, of course, one day, Beaver would have to mention his name to Lilian. She would probably smile and say nothing. "He's engaged now," Beaver would say. "There won't be any bachelors left, soon." And that would be his message to Lilian.

VII

On a Saturday evening some weeks later, Humphrey sat in the dismantled room in Clifford's Inn, in which he and Kenneth Carr had shared so many hours of grateful friendship.

The room looked forlorn enough. Square gaping patches on the wall marked the places where pictures had once hung; the windows were bared of curtains and the floor was dismal without the carpet, littered with scraps of paper and little pieces of destroyed letters. Trunks and boxes ready for the leaving were in the small entrance hall, now robbed of its curtains and its comfort. A pair of old boots, a broken pipe, a row of empty bottles and siphons, a chipped cup or two--these alone formed the salvage which the room would rescue from Kenneth's presence.

"This," said Kenneth, taking the pipe-rack from the mantelpiece, "this, my son, I give and bequeath to you." He laughed, and tossed it over to Humphrey, who caught it neatly.

Kenneth waved his arm comprehensively round the room. "Now if there's any other little thing you fancy," he said, "take your choice. I'm afraid there's nothing but old boots and broken glass left. You might fancy a bottle or two for candlesticks."

"The only thing of yours I coveted was your green edition of Thackeray, and you took jolly good care to pack that before I came," Humphrey remarked.

"I'll send you one for your next birthday. I shall be rolling in money when I get to work. Meanwhile, just hold this lid up, while I put these photographs in."

The light glinted on the silver of the frames. Humphrey knew nothing of two of them, but the third was a photograph that he had always observed. He could see it now as it lay, face upwards, in Kenneth's hand--the photograph of Elizabeth, very sweet and beautiful, with soft eyes that seemed to be full of infinite regret.

"Do you know, old man," he said, "I wish you'd let me have that photograph."

"Which one?"

"The one of Elizabeth." Closer acquaintance had led to the dropping of the formal "Miss" and "Mister."

"What will Elizabeth say: it was a special and exclusive birthday present to me, frame and all."

"You can easily get another one. Keep the frame if you want to. Honest, I'd like to have the photograph. It would remind me of you and all the jolly talks we've had."

"Best Beloved," laughed Kenneth, jovially, "I can refuse you nothing. It is yours, with half my kingdom." He slipped the photograph from the frame. "You know, I feel exhilarated at the thought of leaving it all. I walk on air. I am free." He slammed the lid on the last box and pirouetted across the room.

"Thanks," said Humphrey, placing the photograph in his letter-case.

"Think of it," Kenneth cried, "from to-morrow I'm a free man--free to write as I will: free to say at such and such a time, 'Now I shall have luncheon,' 'Now I shall have dinner,' or, 'Now I will go to bed.' Free to say, 'To-morrow week at three-thirty I shall do such and such a thing,' in the sure and certain knowledge that I shall be able to do it. Henceforth, I am the captain of my soul."

"Oh yes, you feel pretty chirpy now, but just you wait. You wait till there's a big story on, and you read all the other fellows' stories--you'll start guessing who did this one, or who got that scoop--and you'll wish you were back again."

"Not I! I shall sit in the seclusion of my arm-chair, and gloat over it all the next morning. And I shall think, 'Poor devils, they're still at it--and all that they think so splendid to-day will be forgotten by to-morrow.' I've had my fill of Fleet Street.... Besides, I don't quite break with it."

"Why?"

"Didn't I tell you? Old Macalister of _The Herald_ is a brick. He's the literary editor, you know, a regular spider in a web of books. He's put me on the reviewers' list, so you'll see my work in the literary page of _The Herald_. And it's another guinea or so."

"Good old Macalister," Humphrey said. "The literary editors are the only people who give us a little sympathy sometimes. I believe that whenever they see a reporter they say: 'There, but for the grace of God, go I.'"

Kenneth surveyed the room. "There," he said, brushing the dust of packing from him. "It's finished. In an hour I shall be gone."

"What train are you catching?"

"The eight-twenty. I shall be in the West Country two hours later, and a trap will be waiting to take me to my cottage. You should see it, old man--just three rooms, low ceilings and oaken beams, and a door that is sunk two steps below the roadway. Five bob a week, and all mine for a year. There's a room for you when you come."

"Sounds jolly enough!..." Humphrey sighed. "By George, I shall miss you when you've gone, Kenneth," he said. "There'll only be Willoughby left. It's funny how few real, social friendships there are in the Street, isn't it? Fellows know each other and all that, and feed together, but they always keep their private family lives apart...."

"I'll tell you a secret if you promise not to crow. I _am_ sorry to leave. I'm pretending to be light-hearted and gay, as a sort of rehearsal for Elizabeth--she'll be here soon--but, really and truly, I feel as if I were leaving part of myself behind in Fleet Street. Say something ludicrous, Humphrey; be ridiculous and save me from becoming mawkish over the parting."

"I can't," Humphrey admitted miserably. "It gives me the hump to sit in this bare room, and to think of all the talks we've had--"

"You've got to come here on Monday again, and see that Carter Paterson takes away the big box."

"I shall send a boy from the office: I won't set foot in the room again.... Wonder who'll live here next?" he added inconsequently.

"Donno," Kenneth replied, absently looking at his watch. "They're not bad rooms for the price. I say, it's time Elizabeth were here."

Their talk drifted aimlessly to and fro for the next quarter of an hour. They had already said everything they had to say on the subject of the journey. A feeling of depression and loneliness stole over Humphrey: his mind travelled to the days of his friendship with Wratten, and he was experiencing once more the sharp sense of loss that he had experienced when Wratten died.

There came a knock at the door, and Elizabeth appeared, bringing with her, as she always did, an atmosphere of gladness and peace. Her beautiful face, in the shadows of her large brimmed hat, her brilliant eyes, and the supple grace of her figure elated him: he came forward to greet her gaily. Sorrow could not live in her presence.

"I'm sorry I'm late," she said. "But I've kept the cab waiting.... Well, have you two said your sobbing farewells?"

Kenneth kissed her. "Don't make a joke of the sacred moments ... we were on the verge of a tearful breakdown. My tears spring from the fact that he has given me no parting gift."

"Good Lord! I forgot all about it." Humphrey produced from his pocket a small brown-paper parcel. "It's a pipe--smoke it, and see in the smoke visions of Fleet Street."

"Well, I'm hanged!" said Kenneth, conjuring up a similar parcel; "that's just what I bought for you. A five-and-sixpenny one, too."

"Then I've lost," Humphrey said, with mock gloom. "Mine cost six-and-six. He'll have to pay the cab, Elizabeth, won't he?"

"If you two are going to stand there talking nonsense Kenneth will miss the train. Come along! I'll carry the little bag. Can you both manage the big one?"

Both of them cunningly kept up their artificially high spirits. Even when Kenneth switched off the electric light, and the room was in darkness, except for a pallid moonbeam that accentuated the bareness of the floor and walls, they parodied their own feelings. They were both a little ashamed of the sentimental that was in them.

But as the cab drove out of Fleet Street, they were silent. The lights were flaming in the upper rooms, but the offices of _The Herald_ and _The Day_ and the rest of the large dailies were unlit and silent, for Sunday gave peace to them on Saturday night. But Fleet Street itself was still alive, and the offices of the Sunday papers were active, and the noise of the presses, without which no day passes in the Street, would soon be heard....

Half an hour later, under the great glass roof of Paddington Station, the last farewells had been said.

Nothing but a "So long, old man," and a "Good-bye" and a tight handshake marked the breaking of another thread of friendship. Humphrey watched the train curve outwards and away into the darkness with that queer emotion that always comes when one is left standing on a railway platform, and a lighted train has moved out, full of life behind its lit windows, leaving in its place a glistening, empty stretch of rails.

Elizabeth was fluttering a valedictory handkerchief to the shadows. Humphrey touched her arm gently.

"Shall we go now?" he said.

"I suppose we'd better." These were awkward, uneasy moments. He would have liked to have told her how much he felt the passing of Kenneth, but he was afraid of hurting her, for he knew that she, too, was saddened at his departure.

"You'll let me see you home, won't you?" he asked.

"Would you? Thanks, so much."

They passed out of the station, and he called a hansom. His hand held her arm firmly as he helped her into the cab. She thanked him with her eyes. The moment was precious. It seemed that he had taken Kenneth's place; that, henceforth, she would look to him for protection.

They rode in silence through the lamp-lit terraces, where the white houses stood tall and ghostly, flinging their shadows across the road. There was nothing for him to say. He knew that their thoughts were running in the same groove. The sudden clear ray of a lamp flashed intermittently as the cab came into the range of its light, and he could see her face, serene, thoughtful, and very beautiful. It made him think of the photograph that lay in his pocket, against his heart.... She was very close to him, closer than she had ever been before, so close that he had but to put out his arms and draw her lips to his. Never again, he thought, would she be as close to him as she was at this moment. And the memory of Lilian intruded ... and with the memory came a vision of just such a ride homewards in a hansom.... Ah, but Elizabeth was of a finer fibre,--a higher being altogether. His body tingled at his thoughts. His imagination ran riot in the long silence, and he did not seek to check it.

He was seized by an indefinite impulse to hazard all his future in the rashness of a moment, to take her and kiss her, and tell her that he loved her.

"Here we are," she said, with a sudden movement as the cab jolted to a standstill.

He sighed. How calm and remote she seemed from love.

"You must come in for a moment and have something."

He hesitated from conventional politeness.

"The drive has been cold," she said. "I will ask Ellen to mix you a whisky and soda; and I daresay she's left some sandwiches for us."

"For us!" There was an inestimable touch of intimacy about those words.

"Thanks," he said (was his voice really as strange and as husky as it sounded to his ears?) "Thanks--if I won't be keeping you up."

Again, that suggestion of close acquaintance and absolute familiarity, as she let herself and him into the house with her latchkey, and closed the door softly on the world outside. It was all nothing to her. She moved about with perfect self-possession, unaware of the agitation within him.

"Let me turn up the light," she said, leading the way into the sitting-room.

He stumbled against something in the feeble light.

"Mind," she cried, laughingly. "Don't knock my treasures over."

And then, suddenly, the room was in utter darkness.

He heard her make an impatient murmur of annoyance. "There! I've turned it the wrong way.... Don't move ... I know where the matches are."

He heard the rustle of her dress, and her breathing, and the faint fragrance of her pervaded the darkness. He stood there in the black room with the blood surging in his veins, and pulses that seemed to be hammering against the silence. He could feel the throbbing of his temples. She moved about the room, and once she came near to him, so near that her hair seemed to float across his face with a caress that was soft and silken ... clearly in his brain he pictured her, smiling, pure and beautiful ... this darkness was becoming intolerable. He made a step towards her....

And the room was lit with a brightness that blurred his sight with the sudden transition from darkness. He saw her standing by the gas-bracket, with a look of concern on her face.

"Humphrey!" she cried, "is anything the matter with you?"

He was standing in a direct line with the oval mirror on the wall, and he caught the glimpse of a white face, with straining eyes and blanched lips, that he scarcely recognized as his own. She came to his side, tenderly solicitous.

He could bear it no longer. The words came from him in faltering sentences.

"Elizabeth," he cried. "Don't you know ... I love you, I love you."

Her face flushed with perfect beauty.

"Oh--Humphrey ..." she said.

And by the intimation of her voice, half-reproachful, and yet charged with infinite pity and love, he knew that, if he were bold enough, he could take her and hold her for evermore.

"I love you.... I love you ..." he said, drawing her unresistingly towards him. And there was nothing in life comparable to the exquisite happiness of that miraculous moment when her lips met his.

VIII

He seemed to have reached out and touched the very summit of life in that swift moment of supreme excellence. His whole being vibrated with the splendour of living. He felt as he had felt that night when those three grand chords struck by Dyotkin had stirred the depths of his soul....