It seemed strange to him that, with such a change in his life, the old work should proceed unaltered: he stood in Rivers' room, listening to Rivers' talk and banter as the news-editor gave him his work to do; he came before Selsey at night, copy in hand; he mingled with the reporters in their big, bare room, talking of the day's paper, and discussing their jobs and their troubles with them; he came into that close, personal contact with men whom he knew, and men who knew him, and yet there was always an abyss that divided his two lives.
So it was with all of them: in their friendship they seemed to say, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no further"; their homes, their private sorrows and eager hopes, the real lives that they lived, in fact, were left behind them with the closing of their house-door, and they came to the office different beings.
Those matters that touched their innermost lives were never discussed. Occasionally, the birth of a baby in the home of a reporter or a sub-editor would bring a queer suggestion of humanity and ordinary life into their affairs: sometimes, the news would filter through of a wife seriously ill in some home at Herne Hill or Wimbledon, and there were solicitous inquiries (Ferrol would send down the greatest specialist in one of those deep, generous moods of his), for the rest they displayed no interest in each other's private affairs.
As a matter of fact, it was assumed, by the law of the Street, that they had no private lives of their own. It is impossible to imagine Humphrey saying: "If you[266] please, I am engaged to be married, may I have the evening off," if at seven in the evening anything from a fire at the docks to the kidnapping of a baby occurred.
Therefore he told no one of the new wonder that had come into his life, not even Tommy Pride, who, by the way, had of late taken to sending out for a glass of whisky and soda, and doing his work with the glass before him on the table. They looked at each other in the reporters' room, and sighed, "Poor old Tommy."
Least of all would he tell Ferrol. He would have liked to have gone to Ferrol, and told him, but he remembered Ferrol's outburst. He was older now, and he could not trust himself to listen calmly to the old arguments. And he felt that it would be a slur on Elizabeth if he were forced to plead the cause of his marriage....
So the days followed each other, and he was happy with that mixed happiness which is, perhaps, the most perfect. After the first great moment when he had declared his love, their relations had fallen back to their original groove. It was safer thus: one could not live always on the exalted plane of that moment.
His love-affair with Elizabeth Carr was of a different calibre from that with Lilian. It was truer, and rested on a firmer basis of friendship, but it lacked the ardour, and the passionate moments and kisses of the days when love held the ascendancy over his work....
Once, when he was moved with most eager desire during one of their lonely meetings, he caught her to him, and kissed her, and he was conscious of an unspoken reproach in her lips and eyes, that took from him, for the moment, all the savour of his love.
It seemed to him that he was most successful when he was not playing the lover, when they met just as if they were rather exceptional friends instead of betrothed, and this irked him from time to time. He wanted to[267] love, and be loved, he wanted to give all and take all. But when, in those rare moods, she answered his kisses recklessly, she was splendidly beautiful and magnificent, atoning lavishly for all that she had withheld from him.
In one thing this wooing ran parallel with the wooing of Lilian: there were the same interruptions and postponement of plans; Fleet Street for ever intruded, and always there was the remorseless, inexorable conflict between his love and his career.
After an unfortunate week of shattered plans for spending an evening together, she sighed impatiently. "I wish you would give up Fleet Street," she said. "You could do better work."
"Oh!" he said, light-heartedly, "one day I will. I'll sit down and write my book. But it's too soon yet."
She looked at him with doubt in her eyes. She seemed to be feeling her way through the dark corridors of his mind.
"But surely you don't like the work," she said.
He laughed. "Some days I don't, and some days I do. Some days I think it loathsome, and some days I think it glorious.... We're all like that."
A day came when he thought it glorious, when Fleet Street gave him of its best, a swift reward for his allegiance.
He was in the reporters' room one evening, talking the latest office gossip with Jamieson and Willoughby, which concerned the marriage of The Day's Miss Minger, with young Hartopp of The Gazette. It was an event in Fleet Street, marking, in its way, the end of the epoch of the woman reporter.
"I don't think a reporters' room is a fit place for a woman," Willoughby said. "They're all right for their special work—cooking and dress and weddings, and all[268] that—but hard, right-down chasing after stories is man's work."
"I didn't mind Miss Minger," remarked Humphrey. "She was a jolly good sport, but women have us at a disadvantage. Remember that time when we all fell down on the gun-running story at Harwich, and Miss Minger sailed in, smiled her prettiest, and squeezed a scoop out of them."
"Ah, well," Jamieson said. "They're all the same ... marriage, you know, and a happy home, with jolly children. They soon find out that it's better to let hubby do the reporting.... Hullo, young man Trinder, what do you want?" he said, breaking off as the pink-faced secretary stood in the doorway.
"You're wanted," Trinder said, nodding to Humphrey.
"Me!" said Humphrey. "What's up?"
"Ferrol wants you."
"My word!" said Willoughby. "Are you going to be sacked, or is your salary to be raised?"
"Our blessings on you," cried Jamieson, as he followed Trinder out of the room, upstairs, and along the corridor to Ferrol's door.
Ferrol stood with his hat and coat on waiting for him.
"Oh, Quain," he said, shortly. "Get your things and come along. I want to talk to you."
Humphrey paused, bewildered. "Hurry up," said Ferrol. He took his watch from his pocket, glanced at it, and clicked its case hurriedly. "I've got to be back here at ten."
"Very well, sir," said Humphrey. He ran back to the reporters' room, and gathered together his hat and his coat and his stick.
"What's up?" chorused Jamieson and Willoughby.
"Lord knows!" he gasped. "He wants me to go somewhere or the other with him."
"Most certainly you are either going to be sacked[269] or have your salary raised," remarked Willoughby. "But if you are going to be made editor, be kind to us when you are all-powerful."
"Ass!" laughed Humphrey, in reply.
He went back. Ferrol made a noise of satisfaction, and led the way out of his room, carefully switching off the lights. Down the stairs they went, side by side, Humphrey walking beside the mighty Ferrol, just as he did in his dreams. Down the stairs they went, and the men coming up—his colleagues—raised their hats to Ferrol, for they always gave him respect, and the heart of him throbbed with the strangeness of it all.
The commissionaire saluted stiffly, and gazed at Humphrey with a new esteem. A small boy in uniform darted with haste before them, and opened the door of a limousine car, reflecting the lights of the night in its lacquered brilliance. The chauffeur touched the polished peak of his hat. It seemed that everybody paid homage to Ferrol, greatest of all men in the eyes of Humphrey Quain.
For this man was the symbol, the personification of the Street and the paper for which he had worked with all his heart, with all his might, and with all his soul.
He stood aside to let Ferrol step into the car first, but Ferrol, with a smile, urged him into the lighted interior. He received an impression of superlative comfort and riches in that small, blue-lined room with its little electric lamp overhead. There were rugs of deliciously soft camel-hair, and, as he settled in the yielding cushions, his outstretched feet struck something hard, that gave warmth instantly, even through the leather of his boots. A silver cone-shaped holder, filled with red roses, confronted him; their very scent suggested ease and luxury. There were touches of silver everywhere: an ash-tray at his right hand, a whistle attached to a speaking tube, and a row of books in a[270] silver case—an A B C Railway Guide, a diary, an address book, and a postal guide. They gave the Ferrol touch of concentrated energy, even in these surroundings of comfortable, upholstered rest.
The car sped along with a soft movement, almost noiseless, except for the low purring of its engines. Through the windows, past the strong face of Ferrol, he caught glimpses of a wet world with people walking upon their own reflections in the glistening pavements, of ragged beggars slouching along with hunched-up shoulders, of streaming crowds passing and repassing, ignoring entirely the passage of this splendid, immaculate room on wheels, never questioning the right of those people within it to the shelter which was denied to them.
And he felt extraordinarily remote from all these people: an odd thrill of contempt for them moved him to think: "What fools they are not to get cars for themselves." It was as if he had been suddenly translated to another world: a world inhabited by a superior race of men and women, almost god-like in the power of their possessions, who looked down on other struggling mortals from their exalted plane, with a vision blurred by warmth ............