Chapter 6

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[56] 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.

[57]

"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."

[58]

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.

[59]

"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.[60] 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[61] 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[62] 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[63] 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.