'instead of just jumping out on me out of the dark.'
"There was no one in the hall when she showed me out and not even a
hat or coat visible. 'Give me a kiss, Harry,' she said and I kissed
her very readily. 'Quite sure you don't mind?' she said at her door.
"'Not a bit,' I said. 'I ought to have written.'
"'Sunday at three,' she said, as I went down the carpeted staircase.
"'Sunday at three,' I replied at the bend of the stairs.
"Downstairs there was a sort of entrance hall to all the flats with a
fire burning in a fire-place and a man ready to call a cab or taxi
for anyone who wanted one. The prosperity and comfort of it all
impressed me greatly, and I was quite proud to be walking out of such
a fine place. It was only when I had gone some way along the street
that I began to realise how widely my plans for the evening had
miscarried.
"I had not asked her whether she was living a bad life or not and I
had reasoned with her not at all. The scenes I had rehearsed in my
mind beforehand, of a strong and simple and resolute younger brother
saving his frail but lovable sister from terrible degradations, had
indeed vanished altogether from my mind when her door had opened and
she had appeared. And here I was with the evening all before me and
nothing to report to my family but the profound difference that lies
between romance and reality. I decided not to report to my family at
all yet, but to go for a very long walk and think this Fanny business
over thoroughly, returning home when it would be too late for my
mother to cross-examine me and 'draw me out' at any length.
"I made for the Thames Embankment, for that afforded uncrowded
pavements and the solemnity and incidental beauty appropriate to a
meditative promenade.
"It is curious to recall now the phases of my mind that night. At
first the bright realities I came from dominated me: Fanny pretty and
prosperous, kindly and self-assured, in her well-lit, well-furnished
flat, and the friendly and confident voice I had heard speaking in
the hall, asserted themselves as facts to be accepted and respected.
It was delightful after more than two years of ugly imaginations to
have the glimpse of my dear sister again so undefeated and loved and
cared for and to look forward to a long time with her on Sunday and a
long confabulation upon all I had done in the meantime and all I
meant to do. Very probably these two people were married after all,
but unable for some obscure reason to reveal the fact to the world.
Perhaps Fanny would tell me as much in the strictest confidence on
Sunday and I could go home and astonish and quell my mother with the
whispered secret. And even as I developed and cuddled this idea it
grew clear and cold and important in my mind that they were not
married at all, and the shades of a long-accumulated disapproval
dimmed that first bright impression of Fanny's little nest. I felt a
growing dissatisfaction with the part I had played in our encounter.
I had let myself be handled and thrust out as though I had been a
mere boy instead of a brother full of help and moral superiority.
Surely I ought to have said something, however brief, to indicate our
relative moral positions! I ought to have faced that man too, the
Bad Man, lurking no doubt in the room with the mirror and the
chintz-covered chair. He had avoided seeing me--because he could not
face me! And from these new aspects of the case I began to develop a
whole new dream of reproach and rescue. What should I have said to
the Bad Man? 'And so, Sir, at last we meet----'
"Something like that.
"My imagination began to leap and bound and soar with me. I pictured
the Bad Man, dressed in that 'immaculate evening dress' which my
novels told me marked the deeper and colder depths of male depravity,
cowering under my stream of simple eloquence. 'You took her,' I
would say, 'from our homely but pure and simple home. You broke her
father's heart'--yes, I imagined myself saying that!--'And what have
you made of her?' I asked. 'Your doll, your plaything! to be
pampered while the whim lasts and then to be cast aside!'
Or--'tossed aside'?
"I decided 'tossed aside' was better.
"I found myself walking along the Embankment, gesticulating and
uttering such things as that."
"But you knew better?" said Firefly. "Even then."
"I knew better. But that was the way our minds worked in the ancient
days."
§ 7
"But," said Sarnac, "my second visit to Fanny, like my first, was
full of unexpected experiences and unrehearsed effects. The carpet
on the pleasant staircase seemed to deaden down my moral tramplings,
and when the door opened and I saw my dear Fanny again, friendly and
glad, I forgot altogether the stern interrogations with which that
second interview was to have opened. She pulled my hair and kissed
me, took my hat and coat, said I had grown tremendously and measured
herself against me, pushed me into her bright little sitting-room,
where she had prepared such a tea as I had never seen before, little
ham sandwiches, sandwiches of a delightful stuff called Gentleman's
Relish, strawberry jam, two sorts of cake, and little biscuits to
fill in any odd corners. 'You are a dear to come and see me, Harry.
But I had a sort of feeling that whatever happened you would come
along.'
"'We two always sort of hung together,' I said.
"'Always,' she agreed. 'I think mother and Ernie might have written
me a line. Perhaps they will later. Ever seen an electric kettle,
Harry? This is one. And you put that plug in there.'
"'I know,' I said, and did as I was told. 'There's resistances
embedded in the coating. I've been doing some electricity and
chemistry. Council classes. Six'r seven subjects altogether. And
there's a shop-window in Tothill Street full of such things.'
"'I expect you know all about them,' she said. 'I expect you've
learnt all sorts of sciences,' and so we came to the great topic of
what I was learning and what I was going to do.
"It was delightful to talk to someone who really understood the
thirst for knowledge that possessed me. I talked of myself and my
dreams and ambitions, and meanwhile, being a growing youth, my arm
swept like a swarm of locusts over Fanny's wonderful tea. Fanny
watched me with a smile on her face and steered me with questions
towards the things she most wanted to know. And when we had talked
enough for a time she showed me how to play her pianola and I got a
roll of Schumann that Mr. Plaice had long ago made familiar to me and
had the exquisite delight of playing it over for myself. These
pianolas were quite easy things to manage, I found; in a little while
I was already playing with conscious expression.
"Fanny praised me for my quickness, cleared her tea-things away while
I played, and then came and sat beside me and listened and talked and
we found we had learnt quite a lot about music since our parting. We
both thought great things of Bach,--whom I found I was calling quite
incorrectly Batch--and Mozart, who also had to be pronounced a little
differently. And then Fanny began to question me about the work I
wanted to do in the world. 'You mustn't stay with that old chemist
much longer,' she declared. How would I like to do some sort of work
that had to do with books, bookselling or helping in a library or
printing and publishing books and magazines? 'You've never thought
of writing things?' asked Fanny. 'People do.'
"'I made some verses once or twice,' I confessed, 'and wrote a letter
to the _Daily News_ about temperance. But they didn't put it in.'
"'Have you ever wanted to write?'
"'What, books? Like Arnold Bennett? Rather!'
"'But you didn't quite know how to set about it.'
"'It's difficult to begin,' I said, as though that was the only
barrier.
"'You ought to leave that old chemist's shop,' she repeated. 'If I
were to ask people I know and found out some better sort of job for
you, Harry, would you take it?'
"'_Rather!_' said I."
"Why not altogether?" interrupted Firefly.
"Oh! we used to say _Rather_," said Sarnac. "It was artistic
understatement. But you realise how dreadfully I lapsed from all my
preconceived notions about Fanny and myself. We talked the whole
evening away. We had a delightful cold picnic supper in a pretty
little dining-room with a dresser, and Fanny showed me how to make a
wonderful salad with onions very finely chopped and white wine and
sugar in the dressing. And afterwards came some more of that marvel,
the pianola, and then very reluctantly I took my leave. And when I
found myself in the streets again I had once more my former sense of
having dropped abruptly from one world into another, colder, bleaker,
harder, and with entirely different moral values. Again I felt the
same reluctance to go straight home and have my evening dimmed and
destroyed by a score of pitiless questions. And when at last I did
go home I told a lie. 'Fanny's got a pretty place and she's as happy
as can be,' I said. 'I'm not quite sure, but from what she said, I
believe that man's going to marry her before very long.'
"My cheeks and ears grew hot under my mother's hostile stare.
"'Did she tell you that?'
"'Practically,' I lied. 'I kind of got it out of her.'
"'But 'e's married already!' said my mother.
"'I believe there is something,' I said.
"'_Something!_' said my mother scornfully. 'She's stolen another
woman's man. 'E belongs to 'er--for ever. No matter what there is
against 'er. "Whomsoever God Hath Joined, Let No Man Put
Asunder!"--that's what I was taught and what I believe. 'E may be
older; 'e may have led her astray, but while she and 'e harbour
together the sin is 'ers smutch as 'is. Did you see 'im?'
"'He wasn't there.'
"''Adn't the face. That's so much to their credit. And are you
going there again?'
"'I've kind of promised----'
"'It's against my wishes, 'Arry. Every time you go near Fanny,
'Arry, you disobey me. Mark that. Let's be plain about that, once
and for all.'
"I felt mulish. 'She's my sister,' I said.
"'And I'm your mother. Though nowadays mothers are no more than dirt
under their children's feet. Marry 'er indeed! Why should 'e?
Likely. 'E'll marry the next one. Come, Prue, take that bit of coal
off the fire and we'll go up to bed."
§ 8
"And now," said Sarnac, "I must tell you of the queer business
organisation of Thunderstone House and the great firm of Crane &
Newberry, for whom, at Fanny's instance, I abandoned Mr. Humberg and
his gold-labelled bottles of nothingness. Crane & Newberry were
publishers of newspapers, magazines and books, and Thunderstone House
was a sort of fountain of printed paper, spouting an unending wash of
reading matter into the lives of the English people.
"I am talking of the world two thousand years ago," said Sarnac. "No
doubt you have all been good children and have read your histories
duly, but at this distance in time things appear very much
foreshortened, and changes that occupied lifetimes and went on amidst
dense clouds of doubt, misunderstanding and opposition seem to be the
easiest and most natural of transitions. We were all taught that the
scientific method came into human affairs first of all in the world
of material things, and later on in the matters of psychology and
human relationship, so that the large-scale handling of steel, and
railways, automobiles, telegraphs, flying machines and all the broad
material foundations of the new age were in existence two or three
generations before social, political and educational ideas and
methods were modified in correspondence with the new necessities
these things had created. There was a great unanticipated increase
in the trade and population of the world and much confusion and
conflict, violent social stresses and revolutions and great wars,
before even the need of a scientific adjustment of human
relationships was recognised. It is easy enough to learn of such
things in general terms but hard to explain just what these processes
of blind readjustment meant in anxiety, suffering and distress to the
countless millions who found themselves born into the swirl of this
phase of change. As I look back to that time in which I lived my
other life I am reminded of a crowd of people in one of my old
Pimlico fogs. No one had any vision of things as a whole; everybody
was feeling his way slowly and clumsily from one just perceptible
thing to another. And nearly everybody was uneasy and disposed to be
angry.
"It is clear beyond question to us now, that the days of illiterate
drudges were already past in the distant nineteenth century, for
power-machinery had superseded them. The new world, so much more
complicated and dangerous, so much richer and ampler, was a world
insisting upon an educated population, educated intellectually and
morally. But in those days these things were not at all clear, and
it was grudgingly and insufficiently that access to knowledge and
enlightenment was given by the learned and prosperous classes to the
rapidly accumulating masses of the population. They insisted that it
should be done by special channels and in a new and different class
of school. I have told you of what passed for my education, reading
and writing, rudimentary computations, 'jogfry' and so forth. That
sort of process, truncated by employment at thirteen or fourteen,
when curiosity and interest were just beginning to awaken, was as far
as education had gone for the bulk of the common men and women in the
opening years of the twentieth century. It had produced a vast
multitude of people, just able to read, credulous and uncritical and
pitifully curious to learn about life and things, pitifully wanting
to see and know. As a whole the community did nothing to satisfy the
vague aspirations of those half-awakened swarms; it was left to
'private enterprise' to find what profits it could in their dim
desires. A number of great publishing businesses arose to trade upon
the new reading public that this 'elementary' education, as we called
it, had accumulated.
"In all ages people have wanted stories about life. The young have
always wanted to be told about the stage on which they are beginning
to play their parts, to be shown the chances and possibilities of
existence, vividly and dramatically, so that they may imagine and
anticipate their own reactions. And even those who are no longer
youthful have always been eager to supplement their experiences and
widen their judgment by tales and histories and discussions. There
has been literature since there has been writing, since indeed there
was enough language for story-telling and reciting. And always
literature has told people what their minds were prepared to receive,
searching for what it should tell rather in the mind and expectation
of the hearer or reader--who was the person who paid--than in the
unendowed wildernesses of reality. So that the greater part of the
literature of every age has been a vulgar and ephemeral thing
interesting only to the historian and psychologist of later times
because of the light it threw upon the desires and imaginative
limitations of its generation. But the popular literature of the age
in which Harry Mortimer Smith was living was more abundant, more
cynically insincere, lazy, cheap and empty than anything that the
world had ever seen before.
"You would accuse me of burlesque if I were to tell you the stories
of the various people who built up immense fortunes by catering for
the vague needs of the new reading crowds that filled the
hypertrophied cities of the Atlantic world. There was a certain
Newnes of whom legend related that one day after reading aloud some
item of interest to his family he remarked, 'I call that a regular
tit-bit.' From that feat of nomenclature he went on to the idea of a
weekly periodical full of scraps of interest, cuttings from books and
newspapers and the like. A hungry multitude, eager and curious, was
ready to feed greedily on such _hors d'oeuvre_. So _Tit-Bits_ came
into existence, whittled from a thousand sources by an industrious
and not too expensive staff, and Newnes became a man of wealth and a
baronet. His first experiment upon the new public encouraged him to
make a number of others. He gave it a monthly magazine full of short
stories drawn from foreign sources. At first its success was
uncertain, and then a certain Dr. Conan Doyle rose to fame in it and
carried it to success with stories about crime and the detection of
crime. Every intelligent person in those days, everyone indeed
intelligent or not, was curious about the murders and such-like
crimes which still abounded. Indeed, there could have been no more
fascinating and desirable subject for us; properly treated such cases
illuminated the problems of law, training and control in our social
welter as nothing else could have done. The poorest people bought at
least a weekly paper in order to quicken their wits over murder
mysteries and divorces, driven by an almost instinctive need to probe
motives and judge restraints. But Conan Doyle's stories had little
of psychology in them; he tangled a skein of clues in order to
disentangle it again, and his readers forgot the interest of the
problem in the interest of the puzzle.
"Hard upon the heels of Newnes came a host of other competitors,
among others a certain Arthur Pearson and a group of brothers
Harmsworth who rose to great power and wealth from the beginning of a
small weekly paper called _Answers_, inspired originally by the
notion that people liked to read other people's letters. You will
find in the histories how two of these Harmsworths, men of great
thrust and energy, became Lords of England and prominent figures in
politics, but I have to tell of them now simply to tell you of the
multitude of papers and magazines they created to win the
errand-boy's guffaw, the heart of the factory girl, the respect of
the aristocracy and the confidence of the _nouveau riche_. It was a
roaring factory of hasty printing. Our own firm at Thunderstone
House was of an older standing than these Newnes, Pearson, Harmsworth
concerns. As early as the eighteenth century the hunger for
knowledge had been apparent, and a certain footman turned publisher,
named Dodsley, had produced a book of wisdom called the _Young Man's
Companion._ Our founder, Crane, had done the same sort of thing in
Early Victorian times. He had won his way to considerable success
with a _Home Teacher_ in monthly parts and with Crane's _Circle of
the Sciences_ and a weekly magazine and so forth. His chief rivals
had been two firms called Cassell's and Routledge's, and for years,
though he worked upon a smaller capital, he kept well abreast of
them. For a time the onrush of the newer popular publishers had
thrust Crane and his contemporaries into the background and then,
reconstructed and reinvigorated by a certain Sir Peter Newberry, the
old business had won its way back to prosperity, publishing a shoal
of novelette magazines and cheap domestic newspapers for women, young
girls and children, reviving the _Home Teacher_ on modern lines with
a memory training system and a _Guide to Success_ by Sir Peter
Newberry thrown in, and even launching out into scientific handbooks
of a not too onerous sort.
"It is difficult for you to realise," said Sarnac, "what a frightful
lot of printed stuff there was in that old world. It was choked with
printed rubbish just as it was choked with human rubbish and a
rubbish of furniture and clothing and every sort of rubbish; there
was too much of the inferior grades of everything. And good things
incredibly rare! You cannot imagine how delightful it is for me to
sit here again, naked and simple, talking plainly and nakedly in a
clear and beautiful room. The sense of escape, of being cleansed of
unnecessary adhesions of any sort, is exquisite. We read a book now
and then and talk and make love naturally and honestly and do our
work and thought and research with well-aired, well-fed brains, and
we live with all our senses and abilities taking a firm and easy grip
upon life. But stress was in the air of the twentieth century.
Those who had enough courage fought hard for knowledge and existence,
and to them we sold our not very lucid or helpful _Home Teacher_ and
our entirely base _Guide to Success_; but great multitudes relaxed
their hold upon life in a way that is known now only to our morbid
psychologists. They averted their attention from reality and gave
themselves up to reverie. They went about the world distraught in a
day-dream, a day-dream that they were not really themselves, but
beings far nobler and more romantic, or that presently things would
change about them into a dramatic scene centring about themselves.
These novelette magazines and popular novels that supplied the chief
part of the income of Crane & Newberry, were really helps to
reverie--mental drugs. Sunray, have you ever read any
twentieth-century novelettes?"
"One or two," said Sunray. "It's as you say. I suppose I have a
dozen or so. Some day you shall see my little collection."
"Very likely _ours_--half of them,--Crane & Newberry's I mean. It
will be amusing to see them again. The great bulk of this reverie
material was written for Crane & Newberry by girls and women and by a
type of slack imaginative men. These 'authors,' as we called them,
lived scattered about London or in houses on the country-side, and
they sent their writings by post to Thunderstone House, where we
edited them in various ways and put the stuff into our magazines and
books. Thunderstone House was a great rambling warren of a place
opening out of Tottenham Court Road, with a yard into which huge
lorries brought rolls of paper and from which vans departed with our
finished products. It was all a-quiver with the roar and thudding of
the printing machinery. I remember very vividly to this day how I
went there first, down a narrow roadway out of the main thoroughfare,
past a dingy public-house and the stage door of a theatre."
"What were you going to do--pack up books? Or run errands?" asked
Radiant.
"I was to do what I could. Very soon I was on the general editorial
staff."
"Editing popular knowledge?"
"Yes."
"But why did they want an illiterate youngster like yourself at
Thunderstone House?" asked Radiant. "I can understand that this work
of instructing and answering the first crude questions of the new
reading classes was necessarily a wholesale improvised affair, but
surely there were enough learned men at the ancient universities to
do all the editing and instructing that was needed!"
Sarnac shook his head. "The amazing thing is that there weren't," he
said. "They produced men enough of a sort but they weren't the right
sort."
His auditors looked puzzled.
"The rank-and-file of the men they sent out labelled M.A. and so
forth from Oxford and Cambridge were exactly like those gilt-lettered
jars in Mr. Humberg's shop, that had nothing in them but stale water.
The pseudo-educated man of the older order couldn't teach, couldn't
write, couldn't explain. He was pompous and patronising and prosy;
timid and indistinct in statement, with no sense of the common need
or the common quality. The promoted office-boy, these new magazine
and newspaper people discovered, was brighter and better at the job,
comparatively modest and industrious, eager to know things and impart
things. The editors of our periodicals, the managers of our part
publications and so forth were nearly all of the office-boy class,
hardly any of them, in the academic sense, educated. But many of
them had a sort of educational enthusiasm and all of them a boldness
that the men of the old learning lacked...."