It is the hidden core of newspaper land. It lurks behind the newspaper offices with discreet ground-glass windows, unpretentious, and obscurely peaceful. No porter in brass-buttoned uniform guards its doors—indeed, it has but one, and that a door with a lustrous, black-glass panel, with a golden message of "Members Only" lettered upon it. Strangers and messengers are requested to tap gently on the window of a little pigeon-hole at the side.
Oliver Goldsmith once lived in the house that is now the Pen Club; Dr Johnson lived a few courts away, and strode down Fleet Street to the "Cheshire Cheese," little dreaming that Americans would follow in his footsteps as pilgrims to a shrine. Its courts have had their place in the history of our letters, but all that is past, for journalism affects a contempt for literature, and literature walks by with a high head. If you want literature, and art, and high-thinking, you must go further west, along the Strand, where you may find a club that still clings to the traditions of Bohemia: but if you want to meet good fellows, jolly, generous, foolish men, wise as patriarchs in some things, and like children in others, then you must join the Pen Club.
All around it are the flourishing signs of the journalists' trade. Here a process-block maker; there a lesser News Agency; round the corner a large printing[202] works, and almost opposite it the vibrating basements of The Day. You can see the props of the scenery—take a stroll through the courts, and you see the back-doors of all those proud newspaper offices, great rolls of paper being hoisted up for to-morrow's issue, dismal wagons piled high with yesterday's papers, tied up in bundles, "returns"; unsold papers that will be taken back to the paper-mills and pulped: food for the philosopher here!
Humphrey Quain joined the Pen Club when he had been three years in Fleet Street. It was Willoughby, the crime enthusiast of The Day, who put his name down; Jamieson, the dramatic critic, seconded him.
Two years had made very little outward difference in Humphrey. He had perhaps grown an inch, and his shoulders broadened in proportion, but his face was the same frank, boyish face that had gazed open-mouthed in Fleet Street on that January day. Yet there was some slight change in the expression of the eyes; they had become charged with an eager, expectant look; observation had trained them to an alertness and a strained directness of gaze. Inwardly, too, the change in him was imperceptible. He had lost a little of that cocksure way of his, and acquired, by constant mingling with men older than himself, a point of view and an understanding above his years. In worldly knowledge he had advanced with large and sudden strides: some call it vice and some call it experience. A young man, thrust into the whirlpool of London, finds it difficult to avoid such experience, and so Humphrey had allowed himself to be tossed hither and thither with the underswirl of it all, learning deeper lessons than any man can teach.
He had come out of this period with a sense of something lost, yet never regretting its loss. Sometimes a bitter spasm of shame would overtake him when he thought of the sordid memories he was accumulating.[203] He could have wished it all undone, and he looked back on the Humphrey Quain of Easterham, and saw himself singularly unsmirched, and innocent—knowing nothing, absolutely nothing. After all, he thought, was this knowledge? Does all this go towards the making of a man, as the steel is tempered by the fire? Humphrey did not know ... he took all that life offered him: the good and the bad, the folly with the wisdom.
That affair of his with Lilian Filmer was now nothing more than a memory. They had never spoken since their wretched meeting in the Strand restaurant. It was strange, too, how rarely they had met, when in the old days scarcely a day seemed to pass without the sight of her in Fleet Street. She still worked in the Special News Agency Office, and yet, during the two years that had passed since their parting, he had not seen her more than four or five times, and then only in the distance. Once he found himself marching straight towards her in the crowd of the luncheon-hour walkers: panic seized him; he did not know what to do. She was walking proudly with the erect carriage of her body that he knew so well—and then, almost mysteriously, she had disappeared. Perhaps she had seen him, and avoided a direct meeting by turning down a side street or by passing into a shop. For a year he always walked on the other side of the street during the luncheon hour. At the back of his mind she lived as vividly as she had lived in the days when she had been the most important factor in his existence. There were times when the thought of her rendered him uneasy; he felt he had not been true to himself, there was a reproachful blot on his escutcheon.... Strange! how lasting his love had seemed that night when he had kissed her in the cab after the theatre. He could look back on it all now dispassionately. There had been progress in the office. His salary was now eight pounds a week. He remembered[204] the day when he had gone to Ferrol, and said, a little miserably, for the strain of the breaking with Lilian pressed hardly on his heart in those days: "I've broken off my engagement." In these words he had dedicated himself to Ferrol and The Day. Nothing more was said. Ferrol nodded in a non-committal sort of way. A few weeks later Humphrey was sent to the East Coast on special work. He did well, and the increase in salary came to him at last.
With this he lifted himself out of the old ruck of his life. The money opened up unbounded vistas of wealth and new possibilities to him. He decided to leave Beaver and Guilford Street. Beaver, as an influence, had served his turn in shaping Humphrey's career. It was Beaver who first showed him the way to London, and now, at odd intervals, Beaver occurred and recurred across his vision, still biting his nails, and still with ink-splashed thumbs. No stress of ambition seemed to disturb Beaver's placidity. He was content to plod on and on, day after day, a journalistic cart-horse, until he dropped dead in his collar. That was how it seemed to Humphrey, who never credited Beaver with any great aspirations, yet that shaggy man had a separate life of his own, with his own dreams, and his own aims, which one day were destined to touch the fringe of Humphrey's life.
Humphrey took a small flat in Clifford's Inn, a place of sleep and peace and quiet then, as it is now, out of the noise of Fleet Street. It was a "flat" only by courtesy, for in reality it was made up of two rooms and a box-room. The larger was his sitting-room, and the smaller—a narrow, oblong room—he used as a sleeping apartment. Very little light, and scarcely any air, came through the small latticed windows, but the rooms held a medi?val charm about them, and he was free for ever from the landladies and grubbiness of lodgings. He paid a pound a week for his rooms in Clifford's Inn.
[205]
Every evening when he was free in London, Humphrey went to the Pen Club. The place had a fascination for him, which he could not shake off. One could not define this fascination, this influence which the Club wielded over him.
It grew on him gradually, until an evening spent without a visit to the Club seemed empty and insufficient. There was nothing vicious about the Club—it was just a meeting-place, where one could eat and drink. Within its four walls there was peace unutterable; and the world stood still for you when you passed the threshold. Other clubs have tape machines spitting out lengths of news: telegrams pasted on the walls; chairs full of old gentlemen reading newspapers with dutiful eagerness—the Pen Club was a place where you escaped from news, where nobody was interested in news as news, but merely in news as it stood in the relation to the doings of their friends. There was no excitement over a by-election, nobody cared who would get in on polling day; nobody thrilled over a revolution in a foreign state; mention of these things only served as a peg on which to hang discussions of personalities. "I expect Williamson's having a nobby time in St Petersburg," or "Who's down at Bodmin for The Herald—Carter?—I thought so. Jolly good stuff in to-day."
And when news did touch them, it touched them personally, and altered the tenor of their lives perhaps for many days. At any minute something would happen, and a half-dozen of them would be wanted at their different offices. They would just disappear from the Club for a few days, and return to find that a fresh set of events had dwarfed their own experiences completely. They were never missed. A man might be absent in Morocco for half-a-year, living through wild happenings, with his life hanging on a slender thread—a hero in the eyes of newspaper readers—but nobody in particular in[206] the eyes of the Pen Club, where every one found his level in the fellowship of the Pen. They came and went like shadows.
Humphrey found all types of journalists in the Pen Club—odd types off the beaten track of journalism, guarding their own cabbage-patch of news, and taking their wares to market daily. There was Larkin, for instance, who took the railway platforms as his special province. He was a tall, thin man, with friendly eyes smiling behind gold-rimmed pince-nez. No Duke or Duchess could leave London by way of the railway termini without Larkin knowing it. Those paragraphs that appeared scattered about all the newspapers of London, telling of the departure of Somebody and his wife to Cairo or Nice marked the trail of Larkin's day across the London railway stations. Then there was Foyle, a chubby, red-faced man, with a jolly smile, who, by the unwritten law of Fleet Street, chronicled the fires that happened in the Metropolis. A fire without Foyle was an impossible thing to imagine. There was Touche, who dealt only in marriages and engagements; and Ford, who had made a corner for himself in the Divorce Courts; Chate, who sat in the Bankruptcy Court; Modgers, who specialized in recording the wills and last testaments of those who died; and Vernham, lean, long-haired, and cadaverous, who was the Fleet Street authority on the weather. These men and others were the servants of all newspapers, and attached to none. In some cases their work had been handed down from father to son; they made snug incomes, and though they were servants of all, they were masters of themselves.
And all these men were just like children out of school, when they met in the Pen Club: there was no grim seriousness about them—they kept all that for their work. They had insatiable appetites for stories, for reminiscences of their craft. They knew how to[207] laugh. It was well that they did, for, if they had taken themselves seriously, they would never have been able to face the caricatures of themselves which hung on the walls. These caricatures, drawn by a cartoonist on one of the dailies, were things of shuddering satire: they were cruelly true, grotesque parodies of faces and mouths, legs and arms. If you wanted to know the truth of a member, all you had to do was to consult the wall, and there you saw the man's character grimacing at you in colours.
Humphrey had been away from London for a week, and he came back to find the Club seething with excitement. The moment he crossed the threshold he was aware of something abnormal in the life of the Club.
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