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

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

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

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

[240]

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

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

The charity of her work, with its gentle benevolence, was reflected in all her life. She gained happiness by self-sacrifice, and peace by warring against social evils. Their characters and temperaments conflicted whenever they met, and yet, after each meeting, it seemed to Humphrey that their friendship was arising on a firmer basis. Sometimes the shock of their opposing personalities would leave behind it quarrelsome echoes—not the echoes of an open quarrel, but the unmistakable suggestion of disagreement and dissatisfaction. He blundered about, trying to fathom her wishes, but[241] her individuality remained always to him a problem, inscrutably complex.

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

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

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

[242]

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

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

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

There were the photographers, too. A new race of men had come into Fleet Street, claiming kinship with[243] the reporters, yet divided by difference of thought and outlook upon news. They were remarkable in their way, the product of the picture daily paper. And their coming marked the doom of the artist ill............