Chapter 4

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[45] 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.

[46]

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[47] 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[48] 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,[49] 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[50] 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[51] 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[52] 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.