PART I

MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

Crown 8vo, Cloth, 6/-

THE SACRIFICE. (Also a SIXPENNY EDITION.)

EVE'S APPLE.

HENRY IN SEARCH OF A WIFE.

UNCLE POLPERRO.

LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN

MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD

BY

ALPHONSE COURLANDER

[Illustration]

LONDON

T. FISHER UNWIN

ADELPHI TERRACE

1913

_First Edition_ _May 1912_

_Second Impression_ _July 1912_

_Third Impression_ _October 1913_

[_All Rights Reserved_]

CONTENTS

PART I

EASTERHAM 9

PART II

LILIAN 71

PART III

ELIZABETH 199

PART IV

PARIS 281

PART I

EASTERHAM

MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD

I

If you had been standing on a certain cold night in January opposite

the great building where _The Day_ is jewelled in electric lights

across the dark sky, you would have seen a little, stout man run down

the steps of the entrance at the side, three at a time, land on the

pavement as if he were preparing to leap the roadway, with the sheer

impetus of the flight of steps behind him, and had suddenly thought

better of it, glance hurriedly at the big, lighted clock whose hands,

formed of the letters _T-H-E D-A-Y_, in red and green electric lights,

showed that it was nearly half-past twelve, and suddenly start off in a

terrible hurry towards Chancery Lane, as though pursued by some awful

thing.

Considering the bulkiness of the little man, he ran remarkably well. He

dodged a light newspaper van that was coming recklessly round Fetter

Lane, for there was none of the crowded traffic of daylight to be

negotiated, and then, he turned the corner of Chancery Lane--and there

you would have seen the last of him. He would have vanished from your

life, a stumpy little man, with an umbrella popped under one arm, a

bundle of papers grasped in his hand, a hat jammed down on his head,

and the ends of a striped muffler floating in the breeze of his own

making.

The sight of a man running, even in these days when life itself goes

with a rush, is sufficient to awaken comment in the mind of the

onlooker. It suggests pursuit, the recklessness of other days; it

impels, instinctively, the cry of "Stop, thief," for no man runs unless

he is hunted by a powerful motive. Therefore it may be assumed that

since I have sent a man bolting hard out of your sight up the lamp-lit

avenue of Chancery Lane, you are wondering why the devil he's in such a

hurry.

Well, he was hurrying because the last train to Shepherd's Bush goes

at 12.35, and, as he had been away from home since ten o'clock that

morning, he was rather anxious to get back. He could not afford a cab

fare, though only a few hours ago he had been eating oysters, bisque

soup, turbot, pheasant, asparagus out of season and pêche Melba at the

Savoy Hotel with eighteenpence in his pocket--and the odd pence had

gone to the waiter and the cloakroom man. So that by the time he had

reached the top of Chancery Lane, dashed across the road and through

the door of the station, where a porter would have slammed the grille

in another second, and bought his ticket with an explosive, panting

"Bush," he had just tenpence left.

The lift-man knew him, nodded affably and said: "Just in time, Mr

Pride."

"A hard run," said Mr Pride; and then with a cheery smile, "never mind;

good for the liver." There were only a few people in the lift--four men

and a woman to be precise. He knew the men as casual acquaintances of

the last tube train. There was Denning, a sporting sub-editor on _The

Lantern_; another was a proof-reader on one of the afternoon papers,

who finished work in the evening but never went home before the last

tube; then there was Harlem, the librarian of _The Day_, an amazing

man who spoke all the European languages, and some of the Asiatic ones

after his fifth glass of beer; the fourth was a friend of Harlem, a

moody young man who wore his hair long, smoked an evil-looking pipe,

and seemed to be a little unsteady on his feet. As for the woman, Pride

knew her well by sight. She had hair that was of an unreal yellow, and

a latch-key dangled from her little finger as though it were a new kind

of ring. She always got out at Tottenham Court Road.

As the lift went down, its high complaining noise falling to a low

buzzing sound seemed like the tired murmur of a weary human being glad

that rest had come at last. The sound of the approaching train came

rolling through the tunnel. They all rushed desperately down the short

flight of steps that led to the platform, as the train came in with a

rattle of doors opening and slamming, and scrambled for seats, while

the uniformed men, who appeared to be the only thoroughly wide-awake

people in the neighbourhood, said in the most contradictory fashion:

"Stand clear of the gates," "Hurry on, please," and "Passengers off

first."

Pride found himself in the smoking carriage, opposite Harlem, with

his young friend at his side. It never occurred to him that there was

anything exceptional in his dash for the last train. He did it four

nights out of the week, as a matter of course. He was fifty years old,

though he pretended he was ten years younger, and shaved his face clean

to keep up the illusion. He used to explain to his friends that he came

of a family famous for baldness in early years.

"Been busy?" asked Harlem, filling his pipe.

"Nothing to speak of," said Pride. "Turned up at the office at eleven,

but there was nothing doing until after lunch. Then I had to go and see

Sir William Darton--they're going to start the Thames Steamboats again.

He wasn't at home, and he wasn't in his office, but I found him at six

o'clock in the Constitutional. Got back and found they'd sent home for

my dress clothes, and left a nice little envelope with the ticket of

the Canadian Dinner.... That's why I'm so late to-night...."

Pride filled his own pipe, and sighed. "The old days are over!" he

said. "They used to post our assignments overnight--'Dear Mr Pride,

kindly do a quarter of a column of the enclosed meeting.' Why, _The

Sentinel_ used to allow us five shillings every time we put on evening

dress."

"Well, _The Sentinel_ was a pretty dull paper before the Kelmscotts

bought it and turned it into a halfpenny," said Harlem. "Look at it

now, a nice, bright paper--oh, by the way, do you know Cannock," he

jerked his head to the man at his side. "He's _The Sentinel's_ latest

acquisition. This is Tommy Pride, one of the ancient bulwarks of _The

Sentinel_, until they fired him. Now he's learning to be a halfpenny

journalist."

Pride looked at the young man.

"I don't know about being the latest acquisition," Cannock said. "As a

matter of fact, they've fired _me_ to-day."

"It's a hobby of theirs now," Harlem remarked. "You'll get a job on

_The Day_ if you ask for one. There's always room with us, ain't there,

Tommy?"

Pride looked wistfully at the clouds of blue smoke that rose from his

lips.... Yes, he thought, there was always room on _The Day_--at any

moment they might decide to make alterations in the staff. The fact

of Cannock's being sacked mattered nothing; he was a young man, and

for young men, knocking at the door of Fleet Street, there was always

an open pathway. Think of the papers there were left to work for--the

evenings and the dailies, and even when they were exhausted, perhaps a

job on a weekly paper, or the editorship of one of the scores of penny

and sixpenny magazines. And, after that, the provinces and the suburbs

had their papers. Pride knew: in his long experience he had wandered

from one paper to another, two years here, three years here, until the

halfpenny papers had brought a new type of journalist into the street.

"Married?" asked Pride.

"Not me!" replied Cannock, with a slight hiccough.

"Well, you're all right. You can free-lance if you want to."

"Oh, it's no good to me," Cannock said. "It's a dog's life anyhow,

and I've only had two months of it. I'm going back to my guv'nor's

business."

"Ah," said Pride, "there's no use wasting sympathy on you. Why did you

ever leave it? What's his business?"

"That," Cannock laughed gaily and pointed to a poster as the train

stopped at Tottenham Court Road Station. It was a great picture of

barrels and barrels of beer, piled one above the other, reaching away

into the far distance. Thousands of barrels under a vaulted roof. And

in the foreground were little figures of men in white aprons with red

jersey caps on their heads, rolling in more barrels, with their arms

bared to the elbows. Across the picture in large letters Pride could

read: "Cannock Brothers, Holloway. Cannock's Entire."

"Why, your people are worth millions!" Pride said. "What on earth are

you doing in journalism."

"I know they are. That's what I was thinking of yesterday. I wondered

how on earth they got anybody to do the work."

"Well, you won't mind me, I'm sure," Pride said, leaning over to

Cannock. "I'm older than you, and I belong to what they call the old

school of journalism. This isn't the lovely life some people think it

must be, and it's going to get worse each year. We've got to fight for

our jobs every day of our life. 'Making good,' they call it. I'm used

to it," he said defiantly, looking at Harlem, "I like it.... I couldn't

do anything else. I'm not fit for anything else. It has its lazy

moments, too, and its moments of excitement and thrills. No, my son,

you go back to the brewery, there's more money in it for you and all

the glory you want with your name plastered over every bottle and on

all the walls. Ask five hundred men in the street if they've ever heard

of Tommy Pride. They've been reading things I've written every day, but

they don't know who's written them. Ask 'em who's Cannock? Why, they'll

turn mechanically into the nearest public-house and call for a bottle

of you."

"I used to think it would be jolly to be on a newspaper," Cannock said.

"My guv'nor got me the job. He's something to do with the Kelmscotts."

"So it is if you're meant to be on a newspaper. That's the trouble

of fellows like you. You come out of nowhere, or from the 'Varsity,

and get plunked right down in the heart of a London newspaper

office--probably someone's fired to make room for you. You're

friends of the editor and you think you're great men, until you find

you're expected to take your turn with the rest. Then you grouse,

because you're not meant for it. You've got appointments to keep at

dinner-time, and you must get your meals regularly. Or you want to

write fine stuff and be great star descriptive men at once, or go to

Persia and Timbuctoo, and live on flam and signed articles. But, if you

were meant to be a reporter, you'd hang round the news editor's room

for any job that came along, you'd take any old thing that was given

you, and do it without a murmur, and when you've done that for thirty

years you might meet success, and stay on until they shoved you out of

the office."

He saw that Cannock was smiling, and seemed to read his thoughts.

"Me?" he said. "Oh, you mustn't judge by me. I belong to the old

school, you know. I'm the son of my father--he was a Gallery man, and

died worth three hundred pounds, and that's more than I am. I'm one of

the products of the last generation, and all I want is £2 a week and

a cottage in the country." The little man relit his pipe, and puffed

contentedly. "Lord! I should like that!" he said.

"You're always frightened of being fired, Tommy," said Harlem. "You

know well enough you're what we call a thoroughly reliable and

experienced man, and Ferrol wouldn't have you sacked."

"There's always that bogy," Pride answered with a laugh. "You never

know what may happen. The only thing is to join the Newspaper Press

Fund and trust in the Lord. None of the youngsters do either of these

things to-day."

Cannock and Harlem prepared to leave as the train slowed down before

Marble Arch. "It's a rotten game," said Cannock. "I'm glad I'm out of

it. Good-bye."

Pride took his hand. "Good-bye." He saw them pass the window, and

wave to him as they went under the lighted "Way Out" sign, and then

he turned to his papers with a sigh. But somehow or other he did not

read. He always carried papers about with him, through sheer force of

habit, much as the under side of a tailor's coat lapel is bristling

with pins. He had been with news all day; he had written some of it; he

had read the same things in the different editions of the newspapers;

he had left the street when they were printing more news; and the first

thing he would do on waking up in the morning would be to reach out for

a copy of _The Day_ which was brought with the morning tea. He did not

read news as the average man does--he regarded it objectively, reading

it without emotion. The march of the world, the daily happenings moved

him as much as a packet of loose diamonds moves the jeweller who

handles them daily, and weighs them to see their worth.

He was thinking of Cannock, with his future all clear before him:

Cannock, with beer woven into the fibre of his being, as news was in

his. It must be rather fine to be independent like that.... Idly, he

wondered what Cannock's guv'nor was like: did he admire these pictures

of the vast hall crowded with beer barrels, enough to last London

for a whole Saturday night, and ready to be filled up again for all

the nights in the week.... He looked round the carriage at the faces

of those who were travelling with him. Five boisterous young people

were making themselves a noisy nuisance at one end of the carriage.

Opposite him, in the seat lately occupied by Harlem, a working man was

staring ahead of him with an empty wide stare as if, in a moment of

absent-mindedness, his actual self had slipped away, and left a hulk

of shabbily-clothed body, without a spark of intelligence. Others were

nodding, half asleep, and there was one man, with closed eyes, and

parted lips, breathing stertorously, whose head bobbled from side to

side with the rocking of the train.... He woke up, suddenly, as the

train stopped with a jerk, and the conductor called out "'Perd's Bush."

Tommy Pride always gave his papers to the lift-man. They waited for

the last passenger, who came lurching round the corner with his head

still bobbling and his eyes half lost below the drooping eyelids. He

steadied himself against the wall--and his hand spread over another of

those glorious posters. What a picture for Cannock!... Somehow, Pride

rejoiced to think that he was not Cannock.

He went past the Green to one of the small houses in a turning off the

Uxbridge Road. The moon shone out of the wintry sky, white and placid,

above his home. He let himself in, and turned out the flicker of gas

in the hall. He walked on tiptoe into the sitting-room, and having

taken off his boots went to the fireplace. Here on a trivet he found

a cup of cocoa, and his slippers warming before the fire. There were

three slices of thin bread and butter on the table. He never went to

bed without his bread and butter. During his meal he saw a copy of

_The Day_ on a chair, and he read bits of it mechanically, for he had

read it all before. The clock struck one, and he bolted the front door

and went softly upstairs. As he turned on the light his wife stirred

uneasily, and he came to the bedside. She opened her eyes at his kiss,

and smiled tenderly at him.

"Is it very late, dear?" she asked.

"One o'clock."

"Poor sweetheart!" she murmured. "Did you have your cocoa?"

"Yes," he said.

"Tired?"

He laughed. "Not very. I'm a bit cheerful, to tell you the truth. Tell

you about it in the morning. Ferrol spoke to me to-day. He's a fine

chap."

II

That was the magic of it! Ferrol had spoken to him. The conversation

had been quite ordinary. "Well, Pride, I hope things are going all

right?" And Ferrol had nodded cheerfully and smiled as he passed into

his room. Perhaps, he had asked Pride to come and see him.... It was

not what Ferrol said that mattered: it was the Idea behind it--that

Ferrol knew and remembered his men individually.

Out of the insensate tangle of machines and lives, high above the

thunderous clamour of the printing-presses, the rolling of heavy vans

stacked high with cylinders of paper, the ringing of telephone bells,

the ticking and clicking and buzzing, floor above floor, of the great

grey building in which they all lived, Ferrol rises with his masterful

personality and calm voice, carving the chaos of it all into discipline

and order. He looms, in the imagination, powerful and omnipresent,

making his desires felt in the far corners of the continents.

Ferrol whispered, and Berlin, Vienna or San Francisco gave him his

needs. He was the brain and the heart of the body he had created, and

his nerves and his arteries were spread over the earth. He placed his

fingers on the pulse of mankind, and knew what was ailing--knew what it

wanted, and found the specialist to attend to it.

His influence lay over the narrow street of tall buildings, urging men

onwards and upwards with the gospel of great endeavour. Some men, as

their pagan ancestors worshipped the Sun as the God of Light, placed

him on a pedestal in their hearts, and bowed down to him as the God of

Success, for the energy of his spirit was everywhere. If you searched

behind the ponderous double octuple machines, rattling and thudding,

and driving the work of their world forward, you would have found it

there--the motive power of the whole. It lurked in the tap-tap of the

telegraph transmitter, in the quick click of the type in the slots of

the linotype machines as the aproned operators touched the keyboard; it

was in the heart of the reporter groping through the day for facts, and

writing them with the shadow of Ferrol falling across the paper. The

clerks in the counting-house, the advertising men, the grimy printers'

boys in the basement, the type-setters and the block-makers on the top

floors near the skylights, messengers, typists--they were all bricks

in the edifice which was built up for the men who wrote the paper--the

edifice of which Ferrol was the keystone.

His enemies distorted the vision of him; they saw him, an inhuman,

incredible monster, with neither soul nor heart, grimly eager for

one end--the making of money. They wrote of him as an evil thing,

brooding over sensationalism.... One must see him as Tommy Pride and

all those who worked for him on _The Day_ saw him, eager, keen, and

large-hearted, a wonderful blend of sentiment and business, torn,

sometimes, between expediency and the hidden desires of his heart. One

must see him reckless and, since he was only human, making mistakes,

creating, destroying, living only for what the day brought forth....

The spirit of Fleet Street, itself.

* * * * *

Like a silver thread woven into the texture of his character, in which

good and evil were patterned as they are in most men, a streak of the

sentimental was there, shining untarnished, a survival of his days of

young romance. Very few people knew of this trait; Ferrol hugged it to

himself secretly, as though it were a weakness of which he was ashamed.

It came upon him at odd, unexpected moments when he was hemmed in by

the gross materialism of every day, this passionate, sudden yearning

for poetry and ideals. He would try to lift the latch of the door

that had locked the world of beauty and art from him. Swift desires

would seize him to be carried away in his motor-car, as if it were a

magic carpet, to some Arcadia of dreaming shadows, with the sunlight

splashing through the green roofs of the forests.

The sentimental in him would, at such times, find expression in many

ways. He made extravagant gifts to people; he would take a sudden

interest in the career of one man, and bring all that man's longings

to realization by lifting him up and making his name. How glorious

that power was to Ferrol! The power of singling men out, finding the

spark of genius that he could raise to a steady flame, fanning it with

opportunity; he could make a man suddenly rich with a stroke of his

pen; pack him off to Arabia or South America and bid him write his

best. Sometimes they failed, because it was not in them to succeed, and

Ferrol was as merciless to failures as he was generous to those who won

through.

The men he made!...

Sometimes, when the waves of sentiment swept over him, he would try and

materialize his ideals for a time. He would commission a great poet to

contribute to _The Day_; he would open his columns to the cult of the

beautiful, and then a grisly murder or a railway disaster would happen,

crushing Ferrol's sentiment. Away with the ideal, for, after all, the

world does not want it! Three columns of the murder or the railway

disaster, with photographs, leaders, special articles, all turning

round the news itself. That was how it was done.

And now the fit was on Ferrol as he sat in his room with the crimson

carpet and the dark red walls, hung with contents bills of _The

Day_. He had been going over the morning letters with his secretary,

listening to the applications for employment. He made a point of

hearing them, now and again. There was one letter there that suddenly

awoke his interest; the name touched a chord in his memory, a chord

that responded with a low, tender note.... And, his mind marched back

through the corridors of the past, until he came out upon the old,

quiet, cathedral town of the days of his youth.

He saw himself, a slight, eager young man, long, long before his dreams

of greatness came to pass, yet feeling in his heart that the plans he

was making would be followed. A young Ferrol plotting within himself

to wrest spoils from the world, longing intolerably for power and the

wealth that could give it. Well did he know, even in those far-off

days, that destiny was holding out her hands, laden with roses and

prizes for him.... Those were the days of the young heart; the days

of nineteen and twenty, and the first love, scarce understood, that

comes to us, mysterious and beautiful. He saw a very different Ferrol

then. The lip unshaven, that was now hidden with a bushy moustache

turning grey; the hair, now also grey under the touch of Time, silky

and black. He saw this boy walking the lanes that led out of Easterham

town, in the spring-time, with a girl at his side.

Over the abyss of the years the boy beckoned to him, and Ferrol looked

back on a yesterday of thirty years. Her name was Margaret, and she

was for him the beginning of things. From her he learned much of the

tenderness of life, and the love of Nature that had remained with him.

He was a clerk in an auctioneer's office then, with most of his dreams

still undreamt. He and Margaret had been children together. They were

children now, laughing, and walking over the fields with the spire of

the cathedral, pointing like a finger to the skies, in the distant haze

of the afternoon.

There was more purity in that first romance of his than in anything he

had found in after years. Oh! wonderful days of young unsullied hearts,

and the white innocence of life. The memory of evenings came to him, of

kisses in the starlight, when incomprehensible emotions surged through

him, vague imaginings of what life must really be, and the torture of

unrest, of something that he did not understand. Her eyes were tearful,

and yet she smiled, and at her smile they both laughed. And so the

spell was broken, and they trudged, side by side, homeward in the

silent night.

She inspired him, and in that, perhaps, she fulfilled her destiny. She

sowed the seeds of ambition in his soul: he would dare anything for

her, yea, reach his hand upwards, and pluck the very stars from Heaven

to lay at her feet. And, very gradually, a dreadful nausea of Easterham

came over him. His desk was by the window that looked upon the High

Street: he almost remembered, now, the day when it first dawned on him

that the place was no longer tolerable. It was mid-day and the heat

quivered above the cobble-stones: two dogs were fighting with jarring

yelps that could be heard all down the street; the baker's cart went by

with an empty rattle, and Miss Martin of Willow Hall drove in as usual

to the bank next door. An old man was herding a flock of sheep towards

the market-place, and the sheep-dog ran this way and that way, barking

as he ran. Three sandwich-men, grotesquely hidden in boards, slouched

past in frayed clothes and battered hats, with pipes in their mouths.

He read their boards mechanically.... "Sale at Wilcox's.... Ladies'

Undergarments.... Ribbons." He had read the same thing every day in the

week; he had looked out upon the same scene, every day, it seemed; the

dogs had been quarrelling eternally, the shepherd passed and repassed

like a never-ending silent dream; grocer, and baker, and banker, and

Hargrave, the farmer ... there he was again touching his hat to Miss

Martin as she stepped from her trap.... O God! the heavy monotony of it

all fell like a weight on his heart.

The nostalgia grew. The chimes of the cathedral lost their music, the

stillness of the town became more unbearable than the turmoil and

clatter of cities. There was something to be wrought for and fought for

in the world outside. This was not life; this was a mausoleum!

The arguments with his father--his mother was dead--and the long

time it took to persuade him.... The parting with Margaret, and the

whispered vows and promises, spoken breathlessly from their earnest

young hearts. It seemed they could never be broken.

He came to London. It was in the late seventies, at the beginning of

the spread of education that has resulted in the amazing flood of

periodicals: it was a flood that led Ferrol on to fortune. His scope

widened; he grew in his outlook, and saw that here was a way to power

indeed. He shone like a new star over London, gathering lesser lights

around him, developing that marvellous power of organization, that

astonishing personality that drew men to him, until he seized his

opportunity and bought the moribund _Day_ when it was a penny paper on

its last legs. In ten years' time he had become wealthy and powerful,

and since then he had gone on and on until no triumph was denied him.

And Margaret...? The years passed, and with the passing of time, they

both developed. That young love, once so irrefrangible, grew warped

and misshapen, until it finally snapped. There was no quarrel; neither

could reproach the other; they simply grew out of their love, as so

many young people do. There was a correspondence for a time, but it

slackened and presently ceased altogether. She must have felt her hold

loosening on Ferrol, as with a thousand new interests he came upon the

wide horizon of life. She must have noticed this in his letters, and

instead of seeking to bind him to her against his will, she just let

him go. And Ferrol must have weighed the impossibility of asking her

to marry him at this point of his career, when he was striving and

struggling upwards; not all men travel the fastest when they travel

alone, but Ferrol was one of those who could run no risk of being

delayed. They had none of the pang of parting ... but years afterwards,

when Ferrol was a childless widower (for he married when he was

thirty-five, and walked behind his wife's coffin two years afterwards),

he wondered what had become of Margaret, and always he cherished that

memory of his one romance that had tapered away out of his life. He

could never forget the sweet simplicity of Margaret's face, the tears

on her eyelashes, and the yielding softness of her youth when he

pressed her to his heart and lips with wonderful thoughts quivering

through his soul.

He remembered one day in his life, a few years after the death of his

wife, when a wild desire had seized him to handle his past again, as

an antiquarian turns over his treasures and rejoices in some ancient

relic. It was a day in summer, when the heat was heavy over London, and

the city smelt of hot asphalt and tar: without a word to anybody he had

left his work and taken the train, back to Easterham and his youth.

The old familiar landmarks rose up before him, bringing a strange

feeling of age to him. So much had happened in the interval that it

seemed that year upon year had piled up a wall before him, separating

him for evermore from this old world that had been. The ivy still clung

to the castellated walls of the Cathedral close; the clock chimed as he

went by, just as he had heard it chime in the long days that were gone.

The very rooks seemed unchanged as they clamoured huskily in the old

beeches.

And yet, with it all, there was something different, and he knew that

the difference lay not so much with the place as with himself. His

entire perception had altered. He saw things through eyes that had

grown older. The High Street, with its brooding air of stillness, that

had once seemed so stale and intolerable to him, now appealed to him

with its wondrous peace, a magical spot far away from the turmoil of

things. There were the same names over the grocers' and the drapers'

and the ironmongers' shops, but old Matthew Bethell's quaint bookshop

had gone, and in its place there stood a large green, flat-fronted

establishment, with an open window stacked high with magazines and

newspapers, and a great poster above it, thus:

The Day.

ONE HALFPENNY

HOWARD

SLANDER

CASE.

FULL REPORT.

The sentimental in him winced, but the material business man glowed

with pride as he saw the great poster, proclaiming _The Day_ paramount

over its rivals. There was always a conflict between the two men that

made up that complex personality known as Ferrol. He went to the house

where he had once lived; his father was dead now, and as he looked up

at the open window and saw a strange woman doing some needle-work,

it seemed to him as if the people that were living there had laid

sacrilegious hands upon the holy fragrance of the past; as if their

prying eyes had peered into all the hidden secrets that belonged to

him. He turned away resentfully towards the old inn, the Red Lion,

whose proprietor, old Hamblin, remembered him from other days when he

revealed himself, and was inclined to be overcome with the importance

of the visit, until Ferrol put him at his ease. They chatted together,

the old man, with his back to the fireplace, coat-tails lifted from

habit, for the grate was empty on this hot day, Ferrol sitting astride

a chair, watching the blue stream of smoke that came from Hamblin's

lips as he puffed at his long white churchwarden.... Hamblin must have

stood like that during all the years that Ferrol had been in London.

The only change that came to the people of Easterham was death.

They talked of people they had known, and so the talk came naturally to

Margaret. He listened unmoved to the news of her marriage, and found

that nothing more than conventional phrases came from his lips when

Hamblin told him of her death. Somehow, it seemed to him so natural. He

had been away seventeen years, and Easterham had lost its hold upon him

now. The death of his father ... the new face at the window of their

house.... The death of Margaret seemed to come as a natural sequence to

things.

Hamblin went on talking about people. "She married Mr Quain, one of the

College schoolmasters.... I expect he was after your time ... a good

deal older than you, Mr Ferrol.... They had one child, a boy ... living

with his aunt now. All her people left Easterham years ago...." And so

on.

It was in the afternoon that Ferrol came back to London, feeling that

he had been prodding at wet moss-grown stones in some old decayed ruin,

turning them over to see what he could find, and having them crumble

apart in his hands. He never went back again.

* * * * *

That was thirteen years ago. Ferrol's memories ended abruptly. He

touched a button, and a young man, with a shiny, pink face and fair

hair parted in the middle, came in with a notebook and pencil in his

hand. He looked as if he spent every moment of his spare time in

washing his face. There was a quiet, nervous air about him--the air

of one who is never certain of what is going to happen next. Ferrol's

abrupt sentences always unnerved him.

"Trinder," he said, "there was a letter among the lot to-day. Quain.

Written on _Easterham Gazette_ notepaper. Asking for editorial

employment."

"Yes, sir." Trinder had long ceased to marvel at Ferrol's memory for

details.

"Write to him the usual letter asking him to call. Wednesday at twelve."

Trinder made a note and withdrew.

Ferrol wondered what Margaret's boy was like.

III

At the age of twenty Humphrey Quain found himself on the threshold of

a world of promise. It seemed to him that if, out of all the years of

time, he could have chosen the period in which he would live, he would

have picked out the dawn of this twentieth century of grace. England

was just then in the throes of casting from herself the burden of

old traditions. The closing years of the nineties had been years of

preparation and development--years of broadening minds and new ideas,

until quite suddenly, it seemed, the century turned the corner, and

yesterday became old-fashioned in a day, and all eyes were fixed on the

glorious sunrise of the twentieth century--the wonderful century.

People, you remember, played with the fantasy of beginning a brand-new

century as if it were a new toy. Nobody who was living could remember

the birth of the last century. It was a new emotion for everyone.

There was the oddity of writing dates, discarding for ever the 189--

and beginning with 19--; old phrases, such as _fin-de-siècle_, became

suddenly obsolete; new phrases were coined, among which "Twencent"

(an abbreviation for twentieth century, and a tribute to the snap

and hustle with which the world was now expected to go) survived

the longest; songs were sung at music-halls; there was a burst of

cartoons on the subject; people referred jokingly to the last century,

parodying the recollections of boresome centenarians; while the

unhappy _Nineteenth Century_, as though the calendar had taken a mean

advantage of its mid-Victorian dignity, determined never again to risk

being so hopelessly out of date, and added to its title the words

"and After," thereby enabling future centuries to go for ever without

ruffling its title.

In the midst of this change, when the death of Queen Victoria seemed

to snap the present from the past irrevocably, and the novelty of

a king came to England again; when the first of the tubes that now

honeycomb London was a twopenny wonder, and people were talking of

Shepherd's Bush, and Notting Hill Gate, and marvelling curiously why

they had never talked of them before; when Socialism was burrowing

and gnawing like a rat at the old, worn fabric of Society, urging the

working-man to stand equal in Parliament with the noblest lords in

the land. In the midst of all this there arose suddenly, born with

the twentieth century, the Young Man. He had already come, answering

the call of the country in the dark disillusioning days of the Boer

War. People had seen the young clerks and workmen of England marching

shoulder to shoulder down the streets of London, like the train-bands

of Elizabethan days. When the country was in peril the flower and the

youth of England came to its aid, and the older men could do nothing

but stay at home and look on.

The young man, scorned by his elders in all the periods of the

nineteenth century except those last years of development, found

himself suddenly caught up on the high wave that was sweeping away

the rubbish and the sentiment and the lumber of the old customs, and

borne above them all. He was set on a pinnacle, as the new type; the

future of the world was said to be in the hands of the young men; the

old men--even forty was too old, you remember--had had their day.

They were now like so much old furniture, shabby and undesirable,

second-hand goods, better replaced by strong, well-made, up-to-date

things.

It really was a wonderful time for the Young Man. In the old days it

had been customary for him to show respect to his elders, to call them

"sir," to stand up when they came into a room, or raise his hat if they

met in the streets, to offer his seat to them if there was none vacant,

and generally to treat them as old ladies, with polite reverence

mingled with awe.

The worship of age had become a fetish; it was improper to criticize

the opinions of a man older than yourself; it was heresy to think that

you were as capable as the old men; youth had to wait and grow old for

its chances in life; youth was ridiculed, snubbed and held in the leash.

And then, quite suddenly it seemed, though Ibsen had heard it knocking

at the door long before, the younger generation burst upon us with an

astonishing vigour, taking possession of the new century, trampling

down the false gods of age and bringing in its train, like boys

trooping from a nursery, hosts of new toys and new ideas in everything.

It was, I think, _The Day_ that finally discovered the Young Man.

Ferrol had known the bitter opposition which he had fought in his own

twenties and thirties, and he shone as the apostle of youth. The Young

Man, from a neglected embryo, became a national asset; all hands were

uplifted to him in the dawn of the new century. He was enthroned in the

seats from which his elders were deposed.

People seeking for a symbol of the new life that was beginning, looked

westwards and found a whole nation that typified the Young Man who

was to be their salvation. They found America, eager, with strident

voice, forceful and straining its muscles to the game of life--a whole

nation of young men. It became the fashion to take America as a model.

There was an invasion of boots and bicycles and cameras. "Look," every

one cried, "see how they do things better than we do. Look at their

magazines--how wonderful they are." Phonographs, kinetoscopes, the

first jumpy cinematographs, photo-buttons, chewing-gum, they came to

the country, and were hailed gladly as from the land of Young Men.

Presently the young men themselves came. They came with their

hair parted in the middle, and keen, clean-shaven faces with very

predominant chins. They were mere boys, and they had a bounce and

a boisterous assurance that took one's breath away. With them came

loudly-striped shirts, multi-coloured socks, felt hats and lounge

suits in city offices, and, later, soft-fronted shirts and black silk

bows for evening wear. They opened London offices for New York firms,

and showed us card-indexing systems, roll-top desks, dictaphones and

loose-leaf ledgers. All letters were typewritten, and the firm who

sent out a letter in the crabbed handwriting of its senior clerk was

accounted disgracefully behind the times.

The Young Man set the pace with a vengeance, and it was a panting

business to keep abreast of him.

Cock-tails and quick-lunch restaurants appeared next; griddle-cakes,

clam-chowder and club sandwiches were shown to us; and finally, as

though having absorbed their nutriment, we had assimilated their

habits, a fierce desire to speak with a nasal accent took hold of us.

The man who wanted to get a job spoke with as much American accent

as he could muster up; he looked American, and he affected American

ways; his affirmative was "sure," and he wore his hair long and

sleek, divided evenly in the middle. He was the Young Man, cocksure,

enthusiastic and determined--the most remarkable product of his time.

Ferrol found him, a year or so before he arrived, with that instinct of

his, almost second-sight, which never failed. He boomed him as a Type;

he glorified him, and gave him high posts in the office of _The Day_.

With the exception of Neckinger, the editor, who came straight from New

York, he was the native product, and Ferrol was always on the look-out

for more of him.

And so, in the midst of all this, when the cry for the Young Man was

at its hungriest, when "hustle" and "strenuous" were added to the

vocabulary, we see Humphrey Quain, waiting on the outskirts, watching

his opportunity, and meanwhile bending over the counter of the

_Easterham Gazette_ office, coat off and shirt sleeves turned back to

the elbow, folding up copies of the _Easterham Gazette_ as they came

damp, with the ink wet on them, from the printing-press in the basement.

* * * * *

The _Easterham Gazette_ was, unhesitatingly, the worst paper in

Easterham. It was an eight-page weekly journal, with a staff of one

editor, one reporter and Humphrey Quain. When things were slack in the

reporting line, the reporter (an extraordinarily shaggy person called

Beaver, whose thumbs were always covered with ink) was expected to

"fill up time at case"--which means that he was to assist in setting

up the paper in type. The editor, whose name was Worthing, walked

about in a knickerbocker suit and a soft grey hat, and it was part of

his business to obtain advertisements for the _Gazette_. The leading

articles he wrote were always composed with one eye on the advertiser.

In praising the laudable action of Councillor Bilson in opposing the

introduction of trams into the town, there was a pleasant parenthesis,

something in this manner: "It needs no words of ours to echo the praise

bestowed on that gallant champion of our town, our much-respected

Councillor Bilson (in whose windows, by the way, there is a remarkable

exhibit of Oriental coffee-making) ..." and so on.

It was Beaver's duty to make the "calls" during the week. How he

managed them all, I don't know; but in the intervals of attending

the police-court, the council meetings, and all the meetings of

local organizations, he would call at the hospital, at the mayor's

parlour, on the town clerk, on the churches and cathedrals, snapping

up unconsidered trifles in the shape of accidents, civic news, church

services, and all the other activities of Easterham life. Sometimes

during the week Beaver would swing himself astride a bicycle, as

frayed and as shabby as himself, and pedal to Wimberly, or Pooleham,

or further afield to Great Huxton for local meetings, all of which

were of vast interest to the _Easterham Gazette_, since its copies

went weekly--or were supposed to go--over the whole of the county,

and it had annexed to its title the names of all the best villages.

Its full title, by the way, was: _Easterham Gazette, and Wimberly,

Pooleham, Great Huxton, Middle Huxton and Little Huxton Chronicle;

Coomber, Melsdom and Upper Thornton Journal_, largest circulation in

any district, weekly one penny. It was nigh upon sixty years of age,

and therefore its tottering infirmity may be excused.

Humphrey Quain came into the office ostensibly as a clerk. In the

beginning he thought it was a fascinating game seeing the things that

one wrote in print. Therefore, all unconsciously, he started to write.

He began with "Cycle Notes" and "Theatre Notes," and presently he found

himself with sufficient interest to fill a whole column, which dealt

mainly with local gossip, and was called "The Easterham Letter." It was

addressed always to the editor and was signed "P and Q." When he was

not writing, he was addressing wrappers or making out the weekly bills

for the newsagents; and every Friday evening he stood by the counter,

folding up the papers as they came to him, and handing them to grubby

little children who were sent by the newsagents, or sold the papers for

themselves in the streets.

It really was a remarkable paper for the twentieth century. Its

advertisement space was one shilling an inch, or less if you promised

not to tell any one; three men, of course, could not fill the whole of

these eight great sheets, and therefore the carrier's wagon delivered

every Thursday to the _Easterham Gazette_ office, mysterious thin brown

parcels the size of a column, and rather heavy. Simultaneously, all

over the country, like parcels were being delivered, and, if by chance

you compared an issue of the _Easterham Gazette_ with any thirty local

papers in the North, South, or East of England, you would have been

amazed at the remarkable similarity of their contents. They had the

same serial story of thrilling adventure, the same "Cookery Notes and

Kitchen Recipes," the same "Home Hints to Household Happiness," word

for word, and the same column of jokes.

For these long parcels that arrived every Thursday at the _Easterham

Gazette_ office were columns of type cast from moulds, sent down from

a London Agency which has made a mighty business of supplying general

matter, from foreign intelligence to fashion notes, ready for the

printing-press, at so much a column. They call it "stereo."

Humphrey Quain had been in the office for three years. His aunt was

a friend of Mr Worthing, the editor, and his father thought it would

be a good thing for the boy to have some association with the world of

letters, however distant. Shortly afterwards, Quain senior had taken

a master's appointment in a private boarding-school at Southsea, and

Humphrey remained with his aunt. A year later his father died.

He parted with his father with a straining heart, for Daniel Quain was

a tremendous success as a father, though he was a failure as a man. Of

course this was only Humphrey's point of view: what more could a boy

want than a father who could fashion any kind of toy, from whistles

to steamboats, out of a block of wood; who knew enough of elementary

science to make a pin sail on water, by letting it rest on a cigarette

paper which soaked and sank away, leaving the pin afloat; who could

blow a halfpenny from one wine-glass to another, and produce whooing

sounds from a hollow tube by placing it over a gas flame. Wonderful

father!

It was Daniel who fostered in Humphrey's heart the love of reading:

those early books were adventure stories by Fenimore Cooper, Kingston

and Ballantyne. He read Harrison Ainsworth, too, and Henty, and took

in the _Boy's Own Paper_, and, in short, did everything in the way of

reading that a normal, happy, healthy-minded boy should do. "Keep clear

of philosophy until you are thirty," Daniel said one day, as he was

showing him how three matches can be made to stand upright; "then you

won't understand enough of life to be miserable."

Later, he came to the Dickens and Thackeray stage, but he was pained to

find he could not enjoy Scott. He confided his distaste to his father,

as though it were a guilty failing of which to be ashamed.

"Form your own likes and dislikes in reading as in everything else,"

said Daniel. "Don't be a literary snob, and pretend you enjoy the

acquaintance of books merely because they belong so to speak to the

'upper ten' of the book-world."

When his father died, Humphrey was first brought face to face with the

stern things of life. It was a chance remark of his aunt that gave

him the first glimpse. "You'll have to do something for yourself,

Humphrey," she said one day. "That father of yours did nothing for

you." She always spoke bitterly of his father.

Humphrey had never thought of it before. It had seemed to him that

things came naturally to people from father to son: that, in some

mysterious, unthought-of way, when he was about twenty or so, he would

find himself with an income of sorts, or some settled employment.

"You must Get On," said his aunt, looking at him through her

spectacles. "Young men Get On quickly to-day. You must grasp your

opportunities."

So here came a new and delightful interest into Humphrey's existence.

He perceived something fine in it all. From that day he had one creed

in life: the creed of Getting On. This determination swamped every

other interest in life. It was as if his aunt had suddenly touched upon

some internal button that had started off a driving-wheel within him,

and set all the machinery of energy into movement. How did one "Get On"

in the world? He began to take an enormous interest in everything, to

follow the doings of men and cities outside Easterham; his knowledge

widened slowly, for he had no brothers and was singularly innocent in

the everyday sense of the word.

And all the time, during those Easterham days, he was beginning to

understand things. He saw that Beaver and Worthing, with their small

salaries and narrow capacities, had not "Got On"--would never "Get On."

He realized too, that his father, well through life, had been little

better than a man in the beginning of it. On the other hand, Bilson,

with his large, shining shop, might be said to have "Got On," and just

when he was half deciding that Bilson held the secret, Bilson suddenly

went bankrupt, owing to the failure of some coffee plantations in

Ceylon. It seemed a perplexing business, this getting on. Easier to

talk about than to do. And, after all, the getting on-ness of Bilson

had been circumscribed by the narrow area of Easterham. The real

success meant power, and the ability to use it: wide power over the

affairs of other people.

These were not the thoughts of a moment: they were lingering thoughts

that spread over three years, from seventeen to twenty, those three

years when he was at the _Easterham Gazette_ office, with only Beaver

and Worthing for his models in life.

They were thoughts in the intervals of writing "notes" on local

subjects--indeed, the notes were the outcome of the thoughts--of

reading, and of cycling, and going to the theatre. And then one day a

most amazing thing happened.

Beaver Got On!

Yes, it was really incredible, but the fact was there indisputable and

glaring. Beaver, shaggy and unkempt, who seemed to have settled down

for ever to the meetings and the calls and the police-courts ("Harriet

Higgins, 30, no fixed abode, charged with being drunk and disorderly,

etc."), broke through the cobwebs that had settled on him, in an

unexpected and definite manner.

He came to Humphrey one day and remarked quite casually, "I've given

old Worthing the push."

Humphrey looked at him: he wore a Norfolk jacket, with old trousers,

and a tweed hat of no shape at all. Beaver took his pipe out of his

mouth, and Humphrey noticed the short nails on his stumpy, fat fingers.

Beaver always bit his nails.

"I've given old Worthing the push," said Beaver. "Look at this." He

showed a letter to Humphrey, who saw that it was from the "Special News

Agency" of London, employing Beaver in their service at £2, 10s. a week.

"How did you get it?" Humphrey asked.

"Wrote in," said Beaver, gnawing a finger-tip. "Been writing in on the

quiet for the last year. Fed up with old Worthing and filling up time

at case."

"I thought you had to know how to write well if you wanted to work in

London," Humphrey said. There were no illusions about Beaver's style.

"Oh! the Agency doesn't want writing--it wants a man who can take down

shorthand verbatim.... I'm off next week," said Beaver.

Humphrey looked longingly at him and his letter, and then round at

the whitewashed walls of the office, with its Calendars and local

Directories for years past on the shelf, and the pile of _Gazettes_

on the corner of the counter. Mr Worthing passed through the office,

stopped, and scowled at Beaver.

"Kindly remove your head-gear in the front office," he said, and

Beaver, with the unmurmuring discipline of years which nothing could

break, took off the crumpled tweed thing he called a hat.

"Nice pig, isn't he?" Beaver said to Humphrey, as Worthing went out.

"We had an awful row. Said I ought to have given him a month's notice.

A week would have been good enough for me if he was doing the sacking.

Pig in knickers, that's what he is," said Beaver, defiantly. "This is a

Hole."

"Oh, Beaver!" cried Humphrey, hopelessly. "It is a Hole. He _is_ a

Pig.... But what's going to happen to me?"

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

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

Beaver?"

"Just turned thirty. Why?"

"Thirty!" thought Humphrey; fancy Beaver having wasted all these years

in doing nothing but local reporting. Would he have to work ten years

more and still achieve nothing further than Beaver. There must be some

way out of it. Beaver had found it, and surely he could.

"It's fine for you," Humphrey said, admiringly now, for, in the

blankness of Beaver leaving the office where they had worked, he had

forgotten to congratulate him. "The Special News Agency is the biggest

in London, isn't it."

"Rather," said Beaver, comfortably. "It's a life job." That was

his ambition. "Look here, young Quain, I think you're too good for

Easterham, too. Those notes of yours, you know.... I used to read

'em every week. Not at all bad.... You take my tip, and do a turn at

reporting for a while, and then when you've got the hang of things

write in. Write in to all the London papers. Say you've had good

provincial experience--'provincial' sounds better than local. You'll

see. You're bound to get replies. Say you're a good all-round man.

Enclose a stamped envelope." Beaver sauntered to and fro, nibbling at a

nail between excited sentences. "Oh, and don't you forget it. Write on

_Easterham Gazette_ notepaper."

And when, a week later, Beaver left, Worthing asked Humphrey to try his

hand at the police-court, Humphrey accepted the inevitable, and tried

to improve on the style of the police reports. Worthing swore at him

and rewrote them all, and told him to model his style on that of the

late Mr Beaver.

Whereupon Humphrey, seeing that he would never Get On if he were to

live in the shadow of Beaver, sat down, and "wrote in."

He wrote to _The Day_, because he bought the paper every morning, and

thought it was wonderful.

The day that Ferrol's reply arrived was a day of triumph for Humphrey.

The letter came to him with unbelievable promptness, asking him to call

at the office.... Never again did Humphrey recapture the fine emotion

that thrilled him as he read and re-read the letter. Looking back on

it, he saw that those moments were among the most glorious in his

life; he stood on the threshold of a world of promise and enchantment,

suddenly revealed to him by this scrap of paper with _The Day_ in

embossed blue letters, surrounded by telephone numbers and telegraphic

addresses of the great newspaper.

When he showed the letter to his aunt, she sighed in a tired way, and

said unexpectedly: "I'm afraid you will never get on, Humphrey. You are

too restless. I'm sure you would do better to remain with Mr Worthing.

However...." She very rarely finished her sentences.

Humphrey smiled. He saw himself marching to fortune; he was twenty, and

it never occurred to him that he could fail.

IV

You may call Fleet Street what you like, but the secret of it eludes

you always. It has as many moods as a woman: it is the street of

laughter and of tears, of adventure and dullness, of romance and

reality, of promise and lost hopes, of conquest and broken men. Into

its narrow neck are crammed all the hurrying life, the passions, the

eager, beating hearts, the happiness and the sorrow of the broad

streets East and West that lead to it. There is something in this

thin, crooked street, holding in its body the essence of the world,

that clutches at the imagination, something in the very atmosphere

surrounding it which makes it different from all the other streets that

are walked by men.

The stones and the old timber of some of its buildings are like the

yellow parchment of some ancient manuscript, scribbled with faded

history. There are chop-houses, and taverns, where the wigged and

knee-breeched Puffs sat writing their tit-bits of scandal for the

fashionable intelligence of the day; where Addison and Steele tapped

their snuff-boxes and planned their letters to Mr Spectator; or,

further back in the years, Shakespeare himself went Strandwards from

Blackfriars up the narrow street where the gabled houses leaned to one

another. Look, you can almost see the ghosts of Fleet Street pacing

out of the little courts and alleys that lie athwart the street: you

know that massive bulk of a man, walking ponderously, in drab-coloured

coat and knee-breeches, and rather untidy stockings above his heavy,

buckled shoes. He is in the street of a million words; other ghosts

jostle him, and in the gallant company one sees Charles Dickens,

dropping his manuscript stealthily into a dark letter-box, in a dark

office, up a dark court; and all the dead men who have given their

lives to the street, some of them foolishly wanton in wine--dead men

shot in the wars, or burnt with fever, or wrecked with the struggle,

come back ... come back to Fleet Street, to look wistfully at the lit

windows, and listen to the throbbing music of the presses.

It lures you like a siren, coaxing with soft promises of prizes to be

wrested from it: you shall be the favoured of the gods, and you become

Sisyphus, rolling his stone eternally, day after day. Here are the

things of life that you covet, they shall be yours, says the Street:

and you are Tantalus, reaching out everlastingly, and grasping nothing,

until your heart is parched within you. You shall be strong and mighty,

it says, sapping your strength like Delilah, until you pull down the

pillars of hope, and fall buried beneath the reckless ruins of your

career.

Once you have answered the voice of the siren, you are taken in the

magic spell. Beat your breast, and exclaim in agony, but nothing will

avail, for if you leave the Street, the quiet world will seem void for

ever, and, as the ghosts burn backwards through space, so shall you

return to the old agitations and longings.

* * * * *

This was the Street to which young Humphrey Quain came on a January

morning, riding triumphantly on the top of an omnibus. As he passed the

fantastic Griffin, with its open jaws and monstrous scaly wings, like a

warder guarding those who would escape, Fleet Street seemed to be the

Street of Conquest.

It was a rare, crisp day, with a touch of frost in the air, and the sun

clear and high in the heavens, above the tangle of wires and cables

that almost roofed the Street. The traffic was beating up and down,

with frequent blocks, here and there, as a heavy hooded van staggered

up from Whitefriars or Bouverie Street. It was nearly mid-day, and

the light two-wheeled carts were pouring out of Shoe Lane, or coming

from Salisbury Square with the early editions of the afternoon papers.

Newsboys on bicycles, with sacks of papers swung over their backs,

seemed to be risking their lives every moment as they flashed into the

thick of the traffic, clinging to hansoms, and sliding between drays

and omnibuses, out of the press, until they could get through the

narrow neck of Fleet Street towards the West.

Humphrey breathed deeply as he looked about him: the names of the

newspapers were blazoned everywhere. Heavens! what a world of paper and

ink this was, to be sure. The doors, the windows and the letter-boxes

bore the titles of newspapers--all the newspapers that were. Every

room, on every floor, was inhabited by the representatives of some

paper or other: on the musty top windows he could read the titles of

journals in Canada and Australia; great golden letters bulged across

the buildings telling of familiar newspapers. The houses were an odd

mixture of modernity and antiquity, they jostled each other in their

cramped space; narrow buildings squeezed between high, red offices with

plate-glass windows, and over and above the irregular roofs the wires

spread thin threads against the sky, wires that gave and received news

from the uttermost ends of the earth.

The letters in white enamel or gold on the windows told of Paris

and Berlin, of Rotterdam and Vienna; here they marked the home of a

religious paper, there the office of a trade paper, and hard by it

_The Sportsman_, with its windows full of prize-fighters' photographs

and a massive silver belt in a plush case, for the possession of which

Porky Smith and Jewey Brown were coming to blows. Every branch of human

activity, all the intricate complexities of modern life seemed to be

represented either by a room or the fifth part of a room in Fleet

Street.

And, rising out of the riot of narrow buildings, huddled closely to

each other, the great homes of the daily papers stood up as landmarks.

Here were the London offices of the important provincial papers,

which spoke nightly with Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield and

Liverpool--plate-glass windows and large letters gave them a handsome

enough appearance, but they looked comparatively insignificant beside

the tall red building of _The Sentinel_, and the new green-glazed

establishment of _The Wire_, while the grey, enormous offices of _The

Day_ dwarfed them all. There was something solid about _The Day_ as it

stood four-square firmly in the Street, with its great letters sprawled

across the front, golden by day, and golden with electric light in the

night-time.

It seemed almost as if _The Day_ had nudged the other great papers

out of Fleet Street, for in the side streets, in Bouverie Street, and

Whitefriars Street, and in Shoe Lane, the remainder of the London

papers found their homes, with the exception of the high-toned _Morning

Courier_, which found itself at the western end of the Street past the

Law Courts.

But _The Day_, with its arrogant dome-tower (lit up at nights), its

swinging glass doors and braided commissionaires, was the most typical

of the modern newspaper world. It was just such a place as Humphrey

Quain had dreamed. The swing doors were always on the move; the people

were coming and going quickly--here was action, and all the movement

and the business of life.

For a few moments Humphrey hesitated a little nervously. He was a

minute or two in advance of the time appointed for the interview, and

he stood there, irresolute, filled with a wondrous sense of expectancy,

among the crowd that hurried to and fro. He noticed on the other side

of the road a bearded man, in a silk hat and a frayed overcoat, sitting

on a doorstep at the top of Whitefriars Street. The man had a keen,

intelligent face with blue eyes. It was the shiny silk hat that leapt

to Humphrey's notice, it seemed so out of keeping with the rest of

the man's clothes. Besides, why should a man in a silk hat sit on a

doorstep.... Years later the man was still there, every day, sitting

sphinx-like, surveying those who passed him ... he must have marked

their faces grow older.

The commissionaire regarded Humphrey critically. It was the business of

the commissionaire in _The Day_ office, especially, to be a judge of

character. He divided callers into two main classes--those who wanted

to see the editor, and those whom the editor wanted to see. The two

classes were quite distinct, and there were few who, like Humphrey

Quain, belonged to both.

"Yes, by appointment," said Humphrey, a little proudly, to the

commissionaire's cold question that rose like a wall to so many callers.

He was shown into a little room, and made to fill up a form--name,

address and business. The next minute a boy in a green uniform led him

up a flight of stairs, through the ante-room where the pink-cheeked

Trinder sat typewriting diligently, and so to Ferrol's room.

Humphrey had a confused impression of a broad, high room, of a man

sitting at a desk miles away at the farther end of the room by the

half-curtained window; of red walls hung with files of newspapers, and

the contents bills of that day; of a Louis XVI. clock, all scrolls and

cupids, bringing a queer touch of drawing-room leisure with it; and of

telephones and buttons that surrounded the man at the desk. The buttons

fascinated him: he saw that thin slips of ivory labelled them with the

names of the different departments--Editor, News-Editor, Reporters,

Sub-Editors, Advertisement Manager, Business Manager, Literary

Editor, Sporting Editor, City Editor, Foreign Editor--the whole of

the building, with all its workers, seemed to be within the reach of

Ferrol's fingers. He was like the captain of a great ship, navigating

the paper from this room, steering daily through the perilous journey.

Humphrey remembered afterwards how he was possessed with an odd

longing; he wanted to see Ferrol press all the buttons at once, to hear

the bones of the paper, the framework on which it was built up each

day, come clattering and rattling into the room.

Ferrol looked up from his papers, pushed back his round, upholstered

chair that tipped slightly on its axis, and the room with its red walls

and carpet suddenly faded from Humphrey, and he became aware only of

a face that looked at him ... a masterful, powerful face, strong in

every feature, from the thick, closely-knit eyebrows below the broad

forehead, to the round, large chin. There was something insistent in

this face of Ferrol, with its steel-coloured eyes, that hardened or

softened with his moods, and its black moustache, that bulged heavily

over his upper lip and gave him an appearance of rugged ferocity.

Humphrey felt as if he were a squirming thing under the microscope....

That was the way of Ferrol--everything depended on the first

impression that he received; all his being was tautened to receive that

first impression. It was a narrow system of judging character, but he

made few mistakes.... They were quickly corrected. He never forgave

those who deceived him by wearing a mask over their true selves.

There is not the slightest doubt that Humphrey felt a little

nervous--who would not, with Ferrol's eyes boring through one?--but he

knew that great issues were at stake. He carried his head high, and his

eyes met Ferrol's without a quiver. Thus he stood by the table for five

seconds, though it seemed as many minutes to him, until Ferrol told him

to sit down.

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

eye to eye all the while.

"Yes, sir," said Humphrey, briskly. Somehow or other, with the sound of

Ferrol's voice all his nervousness departed. It was the silence that

had made him feel awkward.

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

"Three years," Humphrey replied.

"That all the experience you've had?"

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

"What do you want to do?"

Here was an amazing question for which he was totally unprepared. It

had never occurred to him that he would be asked to make his choice.

His eyes wandered to the buttons.... What _did_ he want to do? He made

an answer that sounded futile and foolish to him.

"I want to get on," he stammered, hesitatingly, with a picture of his

aunt rising mentally before him.

Ferrol's eyes twinkled. It was a magic answer if Humphrey had but

known. Most of the others he saw wanted to do descriptive writing,

they had literary kinks in them, or wanted to have roving commissions

abroad.... None of them wanted to start at the bottom.

"Well, this is the place for young men who want to get on, you know,"

said Ferrol. "It's hard work...." He turned away and consulted some

papers. "I think I'll give you a chance," he said.

The clock struck twelve, and it sounded to Humphrey that a chime of

joy-bells had flooded the room with triumphant music.

"When can you start?" Ferrol asked.

"Next week," Humphrey said.

"You can start at three pounds a week." Ferrol pressed a button.

Trinder appeared. "Ask Mr Rivers if he can come," said Ferrol.

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

"I'll put you on the reporting staff," Ferrol remarked. Then he smiled.

"We'll see how you get on...." There was a pause. (Three pounds a week!

Three pounds a week!)

He looked up as the door opened and saw an extraordinarily

virile-looking person come into the room--a man with the face of a

refined pugilist, with large square-shaped hands and an expression of

impish perkiness in his eyes.

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

Mr Rivers shook his hand with an air of polite restraint. "Mr Rivers is

our News Editor," explained Ferrol, and then to Rivers, "I have engaged

Mr Quain for a trial month, Rivers."

Rivers smiled whimsically. "You're not a genius, I hope," he said to

Humphrey. The spirit of humour that flashed across Rivers's face,

twinkling his eyes and the corners of his mouth and dimpling his

cheeks, made Humphrey laugh a negative reply.

"That's all right," said Rivers, his face so creased in smiles until

his beady eyes threatened to disappear altogether. "The last genius

we had," he said, with a nod to Ferrol, "let us down horribly on the

Bermondsey murder story."

The telephone bell rang. "I'll see him now," said Ferrol through the

telephone, and Humphrey took that as a signal that the interview was

ended. Ferrol shook hands with him, and once more he felt himself

the target of those steel-grey eyes that held in them the stern

remorselessness of strength.

* * * * *

"Good-looking young man," said Rivers, as the door closed behind

Humphrey. "Hope he'll shape all right."

"I hope so," Ferrol echoed.... And he was glad that Rivers had praised

Humphrey, for he was pleased with the upright, manly bearing of the

lad, the quick intelligence of the face, and he had noticed the frank

eyes, the smooth skin and the dark hair that had belonged in the lost

years to Margaret.

V

Humphrey came downstairs and out into the street again walking like one

in a dream. His interview with Ferrol had lasted barely five minutes,

and in those few minutes the whole course of his future life had been

determined. His mind was whirling with the suddenness of it all;

whirling and whirling round one thought, the thought of three pounds

a week. Round this pivot, as a catharine-wheel spins round its pin,

the thing of the greatest import revolved brilliantly, shedding its

luminous light far into the dark recesses of the future ... he was on

_The Day_. Fleet Street was at his feet.

In that moment a new Humphrey Quain was born, different from the

youth who had walked a little timorously into Ferrol's room; he was

no longer a lost cipher in the world, he was a unit in the army that

marched forwards, with Progress and To-morrow for their watchwords. He

felt, suddenly, a great man--Humphrey Quain of _The Day_, cocksure,

self-confident, with ambitions that appalled him when he thought of

them in after years.

What would Beaver say? What would old Worthing say...? And there was

his aunt, too.

That man in the silk hat, with the shabby overcoat, was still sitting

on the doorstep. As Humphrey passed him, his lips twisted in a haunting

ironical smile. Perhaps he knew of Humphrey's thoughts.

He went back to Easterham. After all, Worthing took it very well, and

his aunt agreed that three pounds a week certainly showed that he was

Getting On, and Beaver, to whom he wrote the glad news, recommended him

rooms in Guilford Street, in the house where he was living.

And there followed days of tremendous dreams.

VI

A week later a four-wheeler brought up outside No. 5A Guilford Street,

and there, on the doorstep, was Beaver, with his thumbs inkier than

ever, waiting to welcome Humphrey to London. The cabman, one of those

red-faced, truculent individuals whom a petrol-driven Nemesis has now

overtaken and rendered humble, demanded two shillings more than his

fare, firstly, because it was obvious that Humphrey came from the

country, and secondly, because he had gone by mistake to 550A, which

was at the far end of the street.

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

They compromised with an extra sixpence, on the condition that the

cabman should assist in carrying Humphrey's two trunks into the house,

as far as the second-floor landing.

"There are your rooms," Beaver said, throwing open the door; "you've

got a sitting-room, with a little bed-room at the side. Twelve

shillings a week," he said, anxiously. "Not too much, I hope.

Breakfasts, one shilling a day." He lowered his voice mysteriously.

"Take my tip, Quain, and open the eggs and the window at the same time."

Humphrey laughed. It was jolly to have Beaver in the loneliness of

London. This was quite another Beaver, a better-groomed Beaver, with a

clean collar, and only one day's stubble on his chin. He made swift

calculations--twelve and seven--nineteen, and coals--what of coals?

Coals were a shilling a scuttle. Beaver confided to him that he had

a regular system for checking the coal supply. It seems he made an

inventory of every lump of coal in every fresh scuttleful. He kept a

kind of day-book and ledger system of coal, debiting against the credit

supply the lumps that he put on the fire, and balancing his books at

night. In this way Mrs Wayzgoose, the landlady, found no opportunity

for making extra capital out of the coal business.

"You're better off than I am," Beaver said. "I've only got the top room

at eight shillings a week--a bed-sitting room. But then, I send ten

shillings a week to my sister. It doesn't leave@ very much by the time

I've had my meals and paid the rent."

Humphrey begged him to consider the sitting-room as his own, so long

as he lived in the house. They began to unpack together, Beaver making

exclamations of surprise at the turn of things.

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

hand.

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

wonderful chap."

"Oh! I daresay Ferrol's all right ... but _The Day's_ got an awful

reputation. They're always sacking somebody.... I'd rather be where I

am. They've got to keep firing, you know. New blood, and new ideas.

That's what they want."

Humphrey laughed. "I'm not afraid," he said. "Once I get my teeth into

the place, they won't shake me off." All the same, it must be confessed

that Beaver's words awoke a slight feeling of alarm in his heart. A

king might arise who knew not Humphrey, and he might go down with the

rest.

"We'll put the books on the mantelpiece; I'll have to get a book-shelf

to-morrow." Humphrey had brought up a few of his favourites--an odd

collection: _The Fifth Form at St Dominic's_; _The Time Machine_;

_An Easy Outline of Evolution_; _Gulliver's Travels_, and _Captain

Singleton_; the poems of Browning and Robert Buchanan, and Carlyle's

_French Revolution_. The pictures they agreed to hang to-morrow. They

were only heliogravure prints of the kind that were sold in shilling

parts. Watts' "Hope" and "Life and Death," and other popular pictures,

together with photographic reproductions of authors, ancient and

modern, from _The Bookman_.

When they had finished, Humphrey surveyed his new home. It looked

comfortable enough in the fire-light, with the green curtains

drawn over the windows. The furniture was of the heavy mahogany,

mid-Victorian fashion, blended with a horsehair sofa and bent-wood

arm-chair, that struck a jarring note of ultra-modernity. There was a

flat-topped desk in one corner by the fireplace. The mantelpiece was

hideous with pink and blue vases that held dried grass and clipped

bulrushes. Looking round more carefully, he saw that Moses himself

could not have had more bulrushes to screen him than Mrs Wayzgoose had

put for the delight of her lodgers. There were bulrushes in the mirror

over the sideboard, bulrushes in a gaily-decorated stand whose paint

hid its drain-pipe pedigree, bulrushes in another bloated vase on a

fretted ebony stand by the window. Who shall explain this extraordinary

passion for bulrushes that still holds in its thrall the respectable

landladies of England?

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

Beaver smiled. "You just try!" he said meaningly. "Anyhow, you're

better off than I am, mine's paper fans."

He rang the bell, and a stout, placid-faced woman appeared at the

door. She wore at her neck a large topaz-coloured stone, as large as a

saucer, set in a circle of filigree gold, and heavy-looking lumps of

gold dangled from her ears. Her hands, with their fingers interlocked,

rested on the ends of the shawl that made her appear even more ample

than she was.

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

Mrs Wayzgoose's face fell apart in her welcoming smile--the smile that

her lodgers saw only once. It was a wonderful, carefully-studied smile,

beginning with the gradual creasing of the mouth, extending earwards,

joyfully, and finally spreading until the nose and the eyes were

brought into the scheme.

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

"Everything's very comfortable," Humphrey answered.

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

Humphrey was about to reply coffee, when the guardian Beaver

winked enormously at him, and shook his head in a manner that was

quite perplexing. He had not a notion of what Beaver was trying to

convey--there was evidently something to beware of in the question.

Then, he had an inspiration.

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

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

"Very good." Mrs Wayzgoose turned to go.

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

bulrushes...."

"_Bulrushes!_" echoed Mrs Wayzgoose, losing her placidity all of a

sudden. There was an icy silence. Beaver seemed to be enjoying it.

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

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

them?"

"Without them?" The way she echoed his words, her voice rising in its

scale, reminded him of the wolf's replies to Red Riding Hood before

making a meal of her. "Are you aware, Mr Quain, that those bulrushes

have been there for the last thirty years."

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

answered politely.

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

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

"The last gentleman who had these rooms," continued Mrs Wayzgoose,

"he _was_ a gentleman, in spite of being coffee-coloured, was a law

student. Mr Hilfi Abbas. He took the rooms _because_ of the bulrushes.

Said they reminded him of the Nile. I could let these rooms over and

over again to Egyptian gentlemen while these bulrushes are there...."

And with that she flounced out of the room in a whirl of skirts, with

her ear-rings rocking to the headshakes which punctuated her remarks.

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

I tell you?"

Humphrey laughed, and shook his fist at the offending bulrushes.

"They'll go somehow, you see."

When all the unpacking was finished, the pipes put in the pipe-rack,

the tobacco-jar on the table, and the photographs of his mother, his

father and his aunt placed on the mantelpiece, the question of food

came uppermost in his mind. Beaver told him that he had accepted an

invitation to supper.

"I met a chap on a job whom I knew years ago. We were both reporters

together in Hull, on a weekly there. I didn't know you'd be coming up

this evening or I wouldn't have arranged to go there."

"Well, it doesn't matter," said Humphrey. "I can manage for myself.

Don't let me upset your arrangements."

"Look here," Beaver said suddenly. "Why shouldn't you come with me.

It's only cold supper and they won't mind a bit. I'll explain things.

Besides," he added, as he noticed Humphrey was hesitating, "Tommy Pride

will be one of your new colleagues. He's on _The Day_. You might be

able to pick up a few tips from him."

So Humphrey agreed, and they went up into Holborn. It was Sunday

evening and every shop was shut, except an isolated restaurant and a

tobacconist here and there. The public-houses alone were wholly open,

and their windows radiated brilliance into the night. The East had

invaded the West for its Sunday parade, and the streets were a restless

procession of young people; sex called to sex without anything more

evil in intention than a walk through the streets, a hand-clasp and,

perhaps, a kiss in some by-way, and then to part with the memory of a

gay adventure that would linger during the dull routine of the week to

come, to be forgotten and replaced by another.

Beaver was for taking the "tube" to Shepherd's Bush--it was a new

luxury for London then, making people wonder how they could have borne

so long with the sulphurous smoke and gloom of the old underground

railway--but the movement of the streets fascinated Humphrey, and,

though the journey took much longer, they went out by omnibus.

Ah! that ride.... The first ride through London, when Humphrey felt

the great buildings all around him, and above him, rising enormously

in a long chain that seemed to stretch for miles and miles, below the

sky that was copper-tinted with the glare of thousands of lamps. What

did London mean to him, then? He found his mind groping forwards and

backwards, and this way and that way, puzzling for the secret of the

real London that was hidden in the stones of it. He was a little afraid

of it all, it seemed so vast and complicated. In Easterham, one knew

every one, and to walk the streets was like walking the rooms of one's

house--but here no man noticed another, one felt strange and outcast at

first, intensely lonely, and minutely insignificant. Idly, as he looked

down from this omnibus, at the people as they strolled up and down,

he wondered of what they were thinking. Did they ever think at all,

these people of the streets--did they ever have moments of meditation

when they pondered the why and the wherefore of anything? It seemed so

odd to Humphrey, as he thought of it--here was the centre of a great

civilization, here were men and women, well and decently dressed, here

was London broad and mighty, and yet the minds of those who walked

below him were, he felt, narrow and pinched. They might have been

living in Easterham for all their lives.

And, now, he felt afraid for the first time, knowing that he could

never conquer these people by the path he had chosen. What mattered

anything to them, except that it touched the root of their lives?

They cared nothing, he knew, for the greatness of things. They talked

vaguely of the greatness of Empire, but they never thought about it,

nor understood it. They lived in a world of names--the world itself

was nothing but a string of names which they had been taught. The

very stars above them were just "Stars," and the word meant no more

to them: if you had talked to them of infinite worlds beyond worlds,

of other planets with suns and moons and stars of their own, they

would have winked an eye ... and how, when they could not be conquered

with the mightiness of everything about them, could Humphrey Quain

hope to conquer them. For he had nothing beyond the desire to conquer

them--a desire so strong, smouldering somewhere within him, that it

had burnt up almost every other interest; he could think perhaps more

deeply than they could, but for the rest, he was limited by lack of

great knowledge, lack of everything, except an innate gift of shrewd

observation and a power of intuitive reasoning.

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

"There's the Marble Arch," said Beaver. "What have you been dreaming

about? You haven't said a word all the time."

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

like looking at people."

They went past Hyde Park, with its naked trees showing like skeletons

in the moonlight. The night seemed to deepen the spaciousness of the

Park, with its shadows and silence; it held all the mystery and beauty

of a forest. And later they passed the blue, far-reaching depths of

Kensington Gardens, with the scent of trees and the smell of earth

after rain coming to them.

It was all new to Humphrey, new and delightful. He promised himself

glorious days and nights probing this city to its heart, and listening

to the beat of its pulses. Already, for so was he fashioned, he began

to note his emotions, and to watch his inner self, and the impressions

he was receiving, so that he could write about them. This was the

journalist's sense--a sixth sense--which urges its possessor to set

down everything he observes, and adds an infinite zest to life, since

every experience, every thought, every new feeling, means something

to write about. Nor did he think of the things he saw, in the way of

the average man. He thought in phrases. It did not content him to feel

that a street lamp was merely a lamp. He would ask himself, almost

unconsciously, "What does it look like?" and search for a simile. His

thoughts ran in metaphors and symbols. They swung into Notting Hill

High Street, and here the streets were almost as crowded as those

at Holborn, and the lights of the public-houses flared, oases of

brilliance in the desert of dark, shuttered shops. And so down the hill

to Shepherd's Bush, with its lamps twinkling round the green, and its

throng of people--more men and women thinking of nothing at all, and

going up and down in herds, like cattle.

VII

The memory of that evening at the Prides remained with Humphrey. It

was his first glimpse into the social life, and he saw a home that

was wholly delightful. Beaver had not under-estimated the hospitality

of the Prides. They gave him a hearty welcome that made him feel at

home at once. Tommy Pride met them in the passage, and after the first

introductions he led the way to the sitting-room, where Mrs Pride was

waiting. She was a woman of forty, buxom and charming. He saw, within

a very few minutes, that her admiration of Tommy Pride knew no bounds,

that she thought him splendid and flawless--that much he read from the

way her brown eyes lit up when she gazed upon him, and the fond smile

that marked her lips when she spoke to him.

The sitting-room was not a very large apartment, but it was furnished

with unusual taste. There were books set in white enamelled

bookcases--books that are permanent on the shelf, and not novels of

a moment. There was chintz on the arm-chairs and green curtains hung

over the window, and a few original black-and-white drawings and

water-colours on the walls, papered in dark blue. The impression that

the room gave to the visitor was one of peace and rest.

Humphrey was frankly disappointed in Tommy Pride. He had had a vague

notion that everybody connected with a London newspaper was, of

necessity, a person of fame. He knew the names of those who signed the

articles in _The Day_, and he imagined he would find himself in the

company of the great immortals. Somehow or other it had never crossed

his mind that there were patient, toiling men--hundreds of them--who

put out their best work day after day, year after year, without any

hope of glory or fame, but simply for the necessities of life, as a

bricklayer lays bricks--hundreds of men quite unknown outside the

bounds of Fleet Street and the inner newspaper world.

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

London, Mr Quain?"

Humphrey nodded, and the conversation went into the channels of small

talk. Beaver and he amused the Prides with recollections of Easterham

and Mr Worthing, and Tommy Pride capped their recollections with some

of his own.

"When I was on a little local paper once, we had a fellow named

Smee, who thought he could write," said Tommy. "The editor was a

hard, cruel sort of chap, without any sympathy for the finer side of

literature--at least that was what Smee said. He used to sob all round

the place, because he wanted to write great throbbing prose instead of

borough-council meetings. One day Smee got his chance. The editor was

ill, and there was a prisoner to be hanged in the county jail. Smee

wrote the effort of his life. It went something in this way:--

"'Last Tuesday, under the blue vault of heaven, when the larks were

singing their rhapsodies to the roseate dawn, at 8 A.M., like a sudden

harbinger of horror, the black flag fluttered above the prison walls,

showing that Alfred Trollop, aged forty-two, labourer, had suffered the

last penalty of the law--viz., death.'"

"How's that for descriptive?" asked Tommy, smacking his lips. "'Viz.,

death.' A glorious touch, eh?" He leaned towards Humphrey. "Don't you

bother about fine writing, Quain, or you'll break your heart. We keep

a stableful of fine writers, and turn 'em loose when we want any high

falutin' done."

"Don't be so depressing, Tommy," Mrs Pride said. "Never mind what he

says, Mr Quain--there's a chance for every one to do his best in Fleet

Street."

"Dear optimistress," remarked Tommy, linking an arm in hers, "let's see

what we have for supper."

They all went into the dining-room, and Humphrey was given the place

of honour next to Mrs Pride. Beaver sat opposite, and Tommy was at the

head of the table carving the joint of cold roast beef. "I'm a little

out of form," he said, whimsically. "This is the first meal I've had at

home for a week."

"I sometimes wish Tommy were a sub-editor," Mrs Pride confided to

Humphrey; "then we should at least have the day to ourselves. But he

says he could never sit down at a desk for eight hours a night."

"Not me," Tommy interposed, with his mouth full of beef. "If they want

to make you a sub-editor, Quain, take several grains of cyanide of

potassium rather than yield. You've got some freedom of thought and

life as a reporter, but if you're a sub you're chained down with a

string of rules. They make you wear a mental uniform."

"I thought a sub-editor held a more important position than a

reporter," Humphrey said.

"So he does, only the reporters don't think so. The paper couldn't get

on without the sub-editors. I should love to see _The Day_ printed for

just one issue with everything that the reporters wrote untouched. It

would have to be a forty-two page paper. Because every reporter thinks

his story is the best, and writes as much of it as he can.... I like

the subs, they've saved my life over and over again. Next to the Agency

men they're the most useful people in the world, eh, Beaver?... Have

some beer, Beaver. Pass him the jug, Quain."

Beaver laughed. "It strikes me you people on the regular staff of the

papers take yourselves much too seriously. You've all got swelled

heads. For the sake of fine phrases you'll lose half the facts. Why

don't you all understand that it's simply in the day's work to do your

job and forget all about it."

"Lord knows," Tommy replied, "but we don't. We get obsessed with our

jobs, and dream them, and spend hours taking trouble over them, and we

know all the time that when they come cold and chilly at night through

the sub's hands, they're lopped about and cut up to fit a space. We may

pretend we don't care what happens to our writing, so long as we draw

our money, but I think we all do in our secret hearts. We're born that

way. The moment a man really doesn't care whether his story is printed

or cut to shreds, he's no good in a newspaper office. It means he's

lost his enthusiasm."

Tommy's voice fell. He knew well enough that that was the state of

affairs to which he had come. All the long, long years of work had

left him emotionless. He had exhausted his enthusiasm, and the whole

business seemed stale to him. He felt out of place in this new world

of newspaperdom, peopled with energetic, hopeful young men who came

out of nowhere, and captured at once the prizes which were so hardly

won in his day. He felt himself being nudged out of it all, by the

pushful enthusiastic army of young men who had marched down on Fleet

Street. All round him he saw signs of the coming change--the old penny

papers were talking of changing their price to a halfpenny; the older

men in journalism were being pensioned off, or dismissed, or "put on

space"--which means that they were not paid a regular salary but at so

much a column for what they wrote. The spirit of change was working

everywhere: some of the solid writers who found that they could not

comply with the modern demands of journalism, migrated back to the

provinces and became editors or leader-writers on papers in Manchester,

Birmingham or Sheffield. And, at the back of all this change, the

figure of Ferrol hovered.... Ferrol sweeping irresistibly over the old

traditions of Fleet Street.... Ferrol threatening to acquire this paper

and that paper, to start weeklies and monthlies, to extend his power

even to the provinces, so that everywhere the shadow brooded.

And they would want young men, keen, shrewd young men, and so the day

would come when he would fade away from the life of Fleet Street. And

then--"Tommy and I are going to retire soon," Mrs Pride said, with a

fond glance at her husband, "aren't we, Tommy?"

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

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

write his book."

"No," said Beaver, incredulously.

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

"I? Lord, no! Not now. I once had an idea of writing books. I was just

about your age. I believe I've even got the first chapter somewhere.

But I've never written it. Whenever the missis and I get very

depressed, we cheer ourselves up by talking of that book, and writing

it in the country. By the way, do you know that deep down in the heart

of every newspaper man there's a longing to write one book, and to live

on two pounds a week in the country?"

"That'll do, Tommy," Mrs Pride interposed. "I won't have you spoil Mr

Quain's evening any more. You're making him quite depressed. Don't pay

any attention to him, Mr Quain, and have some cheese."

After supper they went back to the sitting-room, and Mrs Pride played

to them, and Beaver sang in a shaky bass voice. Humphrey had never

heard Beaver sing before. There was something grotesque about the

singing. It took Humphrey by surprise. Beaver was the sort of man who,

somehow or other, one imagined would sing in a high treble. He sang on

and on, right through the portfolio of the "World's Favourite Songs,"

including "The Anchor's Weighed," "John Peel," "The Heart Bowed Down,"

and the rest of them. Pride sat in the arm-chair by the fireside,

smoking a pipe, and nodding to the old melodies, while Humphrey

gravitated to the book-shelves, and looked at some of the books.

He seemed to have left Easterham and his aunt far behind him in dim

ages. A new feeling of responsibility came over him, as he sat there

thinking of the morrow when his battle with Fleet Street was to begin.

The future rested with him alone, and it gave him a delicious thrill of

individuality to think of it.

It was as if he had suddenly become merged with some one else within

him, who was constantly saying to him: "You are Humphrey Quain.... You

are Humphrey Quain. Take charge of yourself now.... I have finished

with you." He had an odd sense of not fully knowing this strange new

Self with which he was faced. He wondered, too, whether Beaver or Pride

had ever passed through the same sensation that was passing through him

now. This was the beginning of that introspection when the presence

of his Self became dominant in his mind, shaping as something to

be looked at and examined and questioned, that was to lead to much

bitterness and unhappiness in the years to come.

The evening came to an end, but before they left Pride took Humphrey

aside. "Beaver said you might like a few hints," he said. "I don't

think I can help you much. I think you know your way about. But there

are two important things to remember: Don't be a genius, and don't be a

fool. I'll tell you more in the morning."

On the way back to Guilford Street Beaver eulogized Pride. He was one

of the best reporters in Fleet Street--one of the safest, Beaver meant.

Never let his paper down. Worth his salary on any paper.

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

"Who? Pride--no! I don't think he gets very much. He's not a show man,

you see. Of course, dear old Tommy hasn't got a cent to spare. He's got

a girl of thirteen at boarding-school, and that takes a good bit of

keeping up."

"Why was he so discouraging?"

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

Humphrey went to bed that night full of thoughts of the morning. And

in the tumult of his thoughts he wondered how he should avoid becoming

as Tommy Pride, with all his thirty years of work as nothing, and all

the high ambitions sacrificed to Fleet Street. Was that to be his end

too--a reporter for ever, and at the finish of it, nothing but the

husks of enthusiasm. He thought of Pride's wistful desire for a cottage

in the country and two pounds a week. And he fell asleep while thinking

how he was going to find a better end to his work than that.