PART III ELIZABETH Chapter 1

The Pen Club stands far away from Clubland up a narrow court that leads from Fleet Street, into the maze of the little streets and courts that finally emerge on Holborn.

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.

It was the last night of the Club elections for the Committee—a riotous affair as a rule. All round the room there was the chatter and buzz of members discussing the new spirit in the Club.

As member after member dropped in, the excitement grew. It was a historic election. For the first time the youngest members of the Club had been nominated to stand on the Committee. The older members, the men who had watched the Pen Club grow from one room in the second floor of a house to two whole houses knocked into one, looked on a little sorrowfully. They had not become accustomed to the new spirit in the Club. Among themselves, they said the Club was going to the dogs. These young men were making a travesty of the whole business. They had no reverence for traditions. After all, the election of a Chairman and a Committee was a grave affair. It was amazing how seriously they took themselves.

Presently Chander appeared selling copies of The Club Mosquito, a journal produced specially for the occasion, which stung members in the weakest spots of[208] their personalities. There were caricatures and portraits of all the "Young Members" who were going to save the Club, as they put it, from the moss and cobwebs of old age. Really, these young men were very ruthless. They invented Election songs, and they sang boisterously:—
"We're going to vote all night,
We're going to vote all day."

Privileged sub-editors, dropping in for a half-hour from their offices, found themselves caught up on the tempest of exhilaration. "Hallo, here's Leman—have you voted yet, Leman?" and a paper would be fetched and Leman would be made to put a cross against thirteen names, with thirteen people urging him to have a drink. Bribery and corruption!

Humphrey abandoned himself to the merriment of the evening. He constituted himself Willoughby's election-agent, and canvassed for votes with shameless disregard for the Corrupt Practices Act. Sharp, the sporting journalist, was busy making a book on the result. That eminent war-correspondent, Bertram Wace, issued a manifesto, demanding to know why he should not be Chairman. The price of The Club Mosquito rose to a shilling a copy when it was known that all the proceeds were to go to the Newspaper Press Fund.

Humphrey found himself left alone with the excitement eddying all round him. He was able to survey the scene with an air of detached interest. It reminded him of his school-days: all these men were young of heart, with the generous impulses of boys; they had the spirit of eternal youth—the one reward which men of their temperament are able to wrest from life.

He saw Willoughby, with his black hair in a disordered tangle over his eyes, joining in the war-song of the Young Members.

[209]

As he looked at all these men, chattering, laughing, grouped together here and there where some one was telling an entertaining story, he saw the smiling aspect of Fleet Street, the siren, luring the adventurous stranger to her, with laughter and opulent promise. To-morrow they would all begin their nervous work again, struggling to secure a firm foothold in the niches of the Street, when a false move, a mistake, would bring disaster with it; but they thought nothing of to-morrow; they lived in a life of to-days....

He saw Tommy Pride come into the Club. Two years had left their mark on Tommy's face. New reporters had appeared in the Street, and somehow Tommy found himself marking time, while the army of younger men pressed forward and passed him. He could not complain; he felt that if he asserted himself, Rivers or Neckinger would tell him bluntly that they were cutting down the staff—the dreadful, unanswerable excuse for dismissal. He knew that his mind was less supple than it was years ago; the stress and the bitterness of competition was sterner now than in those days when they posted assignments overnight. So, too, his pen went more slowly, finding each day increasing the difficulty of grappling with new methods. Tommy Pride had lived in To-day, and now To-morrow was upon him.

"Stopping for the declaration of the poll, Pride?" asked Humphrey.

"Not me," said Tommy, picking a bundle of letters from his pigeon-hole. "I've had a late turn to-night and the missis will be sitting up."

"Well, what about a drink?"

Tommy shrugged his shoulders wearily. "Oh—a whisky and soda," he said. "What a row these fellows are making." Willoughby attacked him with a voting paper, and Humphrey noticed how Pride's hand—the[210] hand that had written millions of words—trembled as he made crosses against the names. It was as if each finger were attached to thin wires; it reminded Humphrey of those toy tortoises from Japan, that danced and shook in a little glass case. And he thought: "Will my hand be like that one day?"

The torrent of talk flowed all round him; gusts of boisterous laughter marked the close of a funny story. In all the stories there was a note of egotism. He saw, suddenly, why these men were not as other men. They were profound egotists, they lived each day by the assertion of their own individuality. The stronger the individuality of the man, the greater his chance of success. And these men, he saw, though they all worked in a common school, were absolutely different from one another. They were different, even, in breeding: there were men whose voice and pose could only have been acquired at one of the 'Varsities; there were men who lacked the refinements of speech; keen, eager men, and men whose eyes had lost their lustre, who seemed weary with work; mere boys, self-assertive and confident with the wisdom of men of the world, and older men with grey heads and bald heads.

They surged about him, and came and went, in twos and threes, some of them departing to their homes in the suburbs, north and south, whither trains ran into the early hours of the morning.

Humphrey had been long enough in Fleet Street to know them all: if you could have taken the personalities of these men and blended them together, the composite result would have closely resembled the personality of Tommy Pride—who was now drinking his second glass of whisky. They were men of tremendously active brains—not one of them but had an idea for a new paper that was worth a fortune if only the capital could be procured—and all of them longed intensely for that[211] cottage in the country after the storm and stress of Fleet Street; they could not talk seriously without being cynical, for though they saw the real side of life, the pompous make-believe of the rest left them without any illusions.

"Better wait for the result now," Humphrey said to Tommy. "It'll be out in a few minutes."

"All right," said Tommy, glancing at the clock. "Green's offered me a lift in his cab. Have a drink, Quain. I had the hump when I came in—feel better now."

They all trooped upstairs, where the Young Members were making discordant noises. They sang new and improvised quatrains. You would have thought that not a care in the world could exist within those cheerful walls.

There was a shout of "Here they are." The vote-counters came into the room. One of them they hailed affectionately as "Grandpa." Humphrey had seen him before, walking about Fleet Street, with his silver beard and black slouch hat set on his white hair, but to-night he felt strangely moved, as the old man came into the room, smiling to the cheers. What was it? Some association of ideas passed through his mind, some linking up of Ferrol, young, powerful, master of so many destinies, with the picture before his eyes....

These thoughts were overwhelmed with a tumult of shouting. The old man was reading out the names of the members of the new Committee.

The Young Members had won.

"Come on," said Tommy Pride, "let's get off before the rush."

As they passed out of the Club into the cool air of the night, Tommy suddenly recollected Green and his offer of a cab. "Oh, never mind," he said; "can you lend me four bob for the cab; I'm rather short." Humphrey[212] passed the money to him, and, drawn by the jingle of the coin, as a moth is to candle, a man lurched out of the shadows of the court.

The gas-light fell on the unshaven face of the man, and made his eyes blink feebly: it showed the pitiful, shabby clothes that garbed the swaying figure.

"Hullo, Tommy," said the man. He smiled weakly not sure of his ground.

"Good God!" said Tommy.

Eagerness now came into the man's face; a terrible eagerness, as if everything depended on his being able to compress his story into as few words as possible, before Tommy went. There was no beating about the bush.

"I say, old man, lend me a bob, will you?... Didn't you know?... Oh, I left two years ago.... Nothing doing.... Yes, I know I'm a fool.... Honest, this is for food.... Remember that time we had up in Chatsworth, when the Duke...? Seen anything more of that fellow we met in Portsmouth on the Royal visit?... What was his name?... Can't remember it ... never mind, I say, old man, can you spare a bob?"

Tommy passed him one of the shillings he had just borrowed from Humphrey. "Why don't you pull up," he said; "you can do good stuff if you want to."

"Pull up!" said the man. "Course I can do good stuff. I can do the best stuff in Fleet Street.... Remember that story I wrote about...."

There was something intensely tragic in this sudden kindling of the old, egotistical flame in the burnt-out ruin of a man. The cringing attitude left him when he spoke of his work.

"Well, you'd better get home..." Tommy said. "What's the missis doing?"

"She's trying to make a little by typewriting now.... Thanks for the bob...." He shambled down the[213] court towards Gough Square. "So long." His footsteps grew fainter, until the last echoes of them died away.

Tommy Pride came out with Humphrey into Fleet Street.

There came to them, as it comes only to those who work in the Street, the fascination of its night. The coloured omnibuses, and the cabs, and the busy crowds of people had left it long ago, and the lamps were like a yellow necklace strung into the darkness. Eastwards, doubly steep in its vacancy, Ludgate Hill rose under the silent railway bridge to St Paul's; westwards, the Griffin, the dark towers of the Law Courts, and the island churches loomed uncertainly against the starless sky. The lights shone in the high windows of offices about them, and they caught glimpses of men smoking pipes, working in their shirt-sleeves—Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, were waiting for their news. The carts darted up and down the street with loads of newspapers for the trains. There was a noise of moving machinery. A ragged, homeless man slouched wretchedly along the street, his eyes downcast, mumbling his misery to himself. Two men in grimy clothes were delving down into the bowels of the roadway, and dragging up gross loads of black slime. They worked silently, seeing nothing of the loathsomeness of their work. Over all, above even the noise of the machinery, there came the cleansing sound of swiftly running water, as the street-cleaners, with streaming hoses, swept the dust and the muck and the rubble of the day into the torrents of the gutter.