Chapter 2

Humphrey took rooms in Clifford's Inn, because that was where Kenneth Carr lived. The two came together, though their natures were opposite, and their friendship had ripened.

Carr was an ascetic, denying himself most of the ordinary pleasures of life, sacrificing himself to the work of his heart; his mind was calm, with a spiritual beauty; he was a man of singularly high ideals. This contrast with Humphrey's frank materialism, his love of pleasure and lack of any deep, spiritual feeling, seemed only to draw their friendship closer. Then there was the memory of Wratten. They often talked together of him, and, as for Humphrey, he never found himself face to face with a difficult piece of reporting without imagining what Wratten would have done. Most people in Fleet Street had forgotten him long ago, but on Humphrey's mind he had left an indelible impression.

"I wonder what it was about Wratten that makes us remember him still," Humphrey said one day. "I had only known him a few months."

"I don't know," Kenneth said. "It's like that, I've noticed. Sometimes a man, out of all the others you meet, comes forward, and you feel instantly, 'This man is worth having as a friend.' The charm of Wratten was that there were two Wrattens: one, the glum, churlish man, with whom nobody could get on, and the other, the self-revealing Wratten we knew."

They smoked in silence. Presently Kenneth threw his cigarette into the fireplace.

"I suppose I'll have to get on with my book."

[215]

"Why don't you come out ... come to the Club?"

"Not me, my son. I'm happier here. I want to get a chapter done."

"What's the good of writing novels ... they don't pay, do they?"

"Pay! They pay you for every hour you spend over them," said Kenneth. "I should go brooding mad if I couldn't sit down for an hour or so every night and do what I like with my people. The unhappiest moments of my life were when, to oblige Elizabeth, I gave up novel-writing for a time, and took to poverty statistics."

Humphrey glanced up at the mantelpiece. A portrait of Elizabeth Carr was there, in a silver frame, set haphazard among the litter of masculine knick-knacks—ash-trays, a cigarette-box and a few old pipes. It was a portrait that had always attracted Humphrey; the sun had caught the depth of her eyes and the shadows about her throat. He was never in the room without being conscious of that portrait, and often, when he was not thinking of her at all, he would find himself looking upwards at the silver frame to see, confronting him, the eyes of Elizabeth Carr. She, herself, never seemed to be quite like the photograph. She came, sometimes, to see Kenneth, and, at rare intervals, Humphrey's visits coincided with hers.

She did not live with her brother. She was more fortunate than he, because she had been left an income which was large enough for all her wants. She had always wished to help Kenneth with a small allowance, but he declared he would not touch a penny of her money. "I'll fight my own battles," he said.

There was something in her attitude towards Humphrey—a vague, impalpable something—that left him always uneasy; perhaps it was a subtle display of deference—he could not define it, but he felt that she was[216] comparing him, in her mind, with Kenneth, and that he was worsted in the comparison. She would move about in the little room, preparing tea for them, her presence bringing an oddly domestic air into the rooms, and Humphrey would help her, and she would be jolly and laugh when he was clumsy, but all the time it was as if she were holding him away from her with invisible hands.

And, when he looked at her photograph, he saw behind the clear beauty of the face, with its smile of tenderness and large eyes that never left him, an Elizabeth Carr divinely meek ... utterly unlike the Elizabeth Carr he knew, who carried herself with such graceful pride and seemed so far above him.

He took up the portrait for a moment. "She hasn't been here lately?" he said.

"Who?" asked Kenneth, at his writing-table.

"Your sister ... you were speaking about the statistics you did for her."

"Oh? Elizabeth. No. She's been pretty busy with her work."

"Slumming, eh?"

"That's about it. I don't know half her schemes. Wonderful girl, Elizabeth. Now I come to think of it, I've got to go down to Epping Forest to-morrow. Some bean-feast she's giving to a thousand slum kids. There's sure to be a ticket in your office, why don't you ask to do it?"

"I will," said Humphrey. "A day's fresh air in the forest would do me good."

And he did. Things happened to be slack that day in Fleet Street, and Rivers thought there would be plenty of human interest in the story, "though, of course, it's a chestnut," so that was how Humphrey found himself on the platform at Loughton Station an hour later.

The morning was rich with the warmth and colour of June. The clear fresh smell of the country was all[217] about him. The scent of the flowers, the sight of the green fields dappled with the yellow and white of kingcup and daisy, the pale sky above him with the sun beating down from the cloudless blue, called him back to Easterham, and the life that now seemed centuries away. Throughout all the comings and goings of years, throughout the change, and the unrest of men and women, the old Cathedral close would be unaltered. The rooks would still clamour and circle about the beeches, and the ivy would grow more thickly. Looking back on Easterham, now on the odd market-place, and on the streets that wandered out to the hedgerows and meadow-lands towards the New Forest, he looked back on a picture of infinite peace.

A bird's song and the croon of bees as they swung in their flower-cradles; a horse galloping freely in a field, and cattle browsing in the sunshine—were not all these of more worth than anything else in life?

Unnoticed, he had relinquished everything to Fleet Street. The poison of its promise had drugged him. He could appreciate nothing outside its narrow area ... news! news! and the talking of news; fifty steps round to the Pen Club, and fifty steps back to the office; all the day spent in that world of bricks and mortar, which had once seemed so vast, and was now to him nothing more than a very much magnified Easterham.

He had not even sought out London. He remembered regretfully the evening of his first ride with Beaver, through the crowded streets to Shepherd's Bush, when he had promised himself nights and days of enchantment in the new wonder of London. And the wonder was still unexplored. As it was with London, so it was with everything. His acquaintance and knowledge was superficial. There was no time for deep study, and the Past could not live with the Present hammering at its doors urgently day after day. Just so, too, with the[218] cities in every part of England. He had travelled much, but he came away from every place taking with him only the knowledge of the whereabouts of the hotel, the post-office and the railway station.

A sense of waste filled him; he saw behind him the years, crowded with events, so crowded with movement that he could retain nothing of their activity. And he saw before him a repetition of this, year after year, and again year after year, a long avenue of waiting years, through which he passed, looking ever forward, seeing nothing, remembering nothing, and coming through them all empty-handed, unless....

Unless what? He saw the impasse waiting for him. What was there to be done to avoid it? He might rise to the highest point in reporting—climb up laboriously, only to find at the top of the ladder that others were climbing up after him to force him down the steps on the other side.

Kenneth Carr was rescuing the flotsam of the years. These books of his, though they brought little money, were something permanent; they were the witnesses of endeavour; they remained as things achieved out of the reckless squandering of the hours.

And Humphrey knew that for him there would be nothing left except the dead files of The Day, nothing more profitable than that, a brain worked out, weak eyes and a trembling hand. Yes, and as he looked about him on the glory of the country, and heard the breeze making a sea-noise among the trees, he felt that there was something everlasting here, if he could only grasp it. He could not explain it. He only knew that looking upwards into the lucent depths of the green leaves of a tree, and catching now and again the glimpse of the blue sky beyond, seemed to remove the oppression that weighed his soul, and release his mind from perplexity.

He smiled. The old phrase came echoing back to[219] him. "Two pounds a week and a cottage in the country," he thought. Eternal, pitiful, unfulfilled desire.

The whistle of the approaching train woke him from his thoughts. "I'm an ass," he said to himself. "I couldn't live a day without being in the thick of it."

He walked back to the station, just in time to see the train coming round the bend of the platform, giving a glimpse of fluttering handkerchiefs and eager faces at the windows. The stillness of the station was suddenly shattered into a thousand noisy pieces. The children tumbled over one another in their haste to be the first to see all that there was to see.

There was a mighty sound of shrill voices, chattering, laughing, and calling to one another: a confused picture of pallid-faced children, darting from group to group, seeking their child-friends, and arranging themselves in marching order. The teachers herded them together like hens marshalling their elusive brood. Humphrey surveyed the scene with an eye trained to the observation of detail.

He saw the painful cleanliness of the children, as though they had been scrubbed and washed for days before their outing. He saw behind the neatness of the pink ribbon and the mended boots, a vision of faded mothers, fumbling with hands shrivelled by laundry work, or fingers ragged with sewing, at these parting touches of pathetic finery. And, behind the vision of the mothers, he saw that whole sordid underworld hung round the neck of civilization.... These children, pinched and haggard, were left to live in the breathless slums, with only charity to help them. The State made laws for them: but there was no law to make them grow up otherwise than the generation of neglect which produced them.

They were too young to know the difference between[220] happiness and misery. They could only sing and march away, an army of rags and patched neatness, because for one whole day their young limbs were to have the freedom of the country. They thought of that one day, and not of the other three hundred and sixty-four days of squalor and want.

"Hullo—here you are, then," Kenneth Carr appeared out of the crowd of children. "Seen Elizabeth—I've lost her."

Humphrey looked along the platform, and he saw Elizabeth Carr bending down and talking to a little girl. She looked tall and beautiful, among all the harsh ugliness for which these children stood. Her figure, as she stooped to the little ones, seemed to shine with grace and merciful pity. She saw Humphrey, and nodded to him, as he raised his hat. Then she came up leading the child.

"Look," she said, and though her eyes were lit with anger, her voice was gentle. "Look at this child's dress—and the father's earning thirty shillings a week."

Humphrey looked. The child was dressed grotesquely, so grotesquely that it appealed more to the sense of the ludicrous than to the sense of pity. Her main garment was an absurd black cape sparkling with sequins, that undoubtedly belonged to her mother's cloak; it reached to below the child's knees. Beneath this was a tattered muslin blouse of an uncertain, faded colour, and beneath that—nothing. Elizabeth lifted the cape a little and showed undergarments made of string sacking. The child had neither shoes nor stockings.

"Isn't it a shame!" she cried, sending the child to join the rest. "Doesn't it revolt you?"

"Poverty!" said Humphrey. "What can one do?"

"Do!" retorted Elizabeth. "What's the good of having compulsory education, if you don't have compulsory clothing. I know the parents of that child.[221] They could dress that child if they wanted to. Oh," and she clenched her fists, "it makes me feel so helpless."

They talked about it on the way to the forest, as they followed in the wake of the children.

"The wicked folly and the shame of it," she said. "Does nobody realize the ruin and wreckage that belongs to big cities? Thousands on thousands of lives ended before they began. The parents don't know, and won't know.

"And what becomes of those who live? These children here will go through their school-days, and then—what? A small percentage of them may get on, the rest will become casual labourers, dock-hands, and loafers."

They passed a long, ill-clad youth lounging along the road. His face was brutally coarse, and he walked with a slouch.

"There's one of them," Elizabeth went on. "Now, I know that boy: he used to come to these outings three years ago. He's left school now, and he has tramped down from London for the sake of a meat-pie or a mug of tea. Lots of them do that, you know," she said to Humphrey. "He's never learnt a trade. Of course, he learnt history and geography, and all that, and he got a place, I think, as an errand-boy. There's no interest in running errands—so he just loafs now; and he'll loaf on through life, until he's an old man, sleeping on the Embankment, or on the benches on the Bayswater side of the Park. Perhaps he'll have a few spells in prison—anyhow, he's doomed. Lost. And so are nearly all these children here to-day."

The strength of her convictions amazed Humphrey. He had never heard Elizabeth talk like this before. He wondered why she, so beautiful and frail, should mingle with the ugliness of life. When they came to the[222] forest, and Kenneth wandered off alone, she told him.

"It's because behind all this sordidness there is something that is more than beauty—there are magnificent tragedies here, that make my throat dry. There are struggles to live of which nobody ever knows. And, sometimes, you know, when I come from one of my slums and stand by the theatres as they are emptying, and see the lighted motor-cars, and all these other women with jewels round their necks and in their ears, I want to laugh at the folly of it all.

"They don't know ... they never can know, unless they go down to the depths, and look."

Humphrey was silent.

"And nobody can do anything, you know, except this sort of thing. It's a poor enough thing to do, but it's something to know you're helping."

"I think this work is noble," Humphrey said.

"Oh no—not noble. It would be noble if we could do something lasting—something permanent."

They were sitting now on the soft grass, and he looked sidewise at Elizabeth Carr, and saw the fine outline of her profile. There was great beauty in her face, in the delicate oval of her chin, in the shadows that played about her throat, showing soft and white above the low collar of lace. That low lace collar and unornamented dress gave to her a touch of demure simplicity. She had the fragrance of lavender: he could imagine her—(seeing her now, with her eyes and lips tender, and her hands meekly clasped in her lap)—standing in a room of chintz and Chippendale, tending her bowl of pink roses by the latticed window opened to the sunshine.

He sat by her absorbing her serenity; there was repose and rest in the unconscious pose of her body. He had suddenly found the Elizabeth Carr of the[223] photograph on Kenneth's mantelpiece: her presence seemed to bring him peace.

The noise of the children rioting in their happiness made her smile.

"Come," she said, "let us go and join them."

They walked across the open space in the forest, the soft grass yielding to their feet, and came upon the whole exulting landscape. On all sides of them the ragged little ones, released for a day from the barren prison-house of alley and by-way, ran and romped in the freedom of unfettered limbs, uttering shouts of triumph and gladness. This picture of merriment unchecked, cheered the heart with its bright movement. Here was life, overflowing, bubbling, swirling in little eddies among the trees and undergrowth, running free over the green meadow-lands with all the chattering animation of childhood.

Out of the main stream they found strange types of children, odd-minded little things, full of cunning and mother-wit that they had learnt already, knowing the world's hand was against them. Some of them clutched pennies in grimy fists: money saved in farthings for weeks in anticipation of this treat. Others secreted about their person portions of the meat-pie which was given them for lunch. They would take this home as an earnest of altruism.

Impossible to forget the shadow of misery that overhung all their lives; impossible to see these ragged children, who had hopeless years before them, without realizing the mad folly and the waste of citizenship.

Splendid Empire on which the sun never sets! Will the historian of the future, discovering in the ruins of the British Museum Humphrey's account of that day in Epping Forest, place his finger on the yellow paper with its faded ink, and cry: "This is where the story of the Decline and Fall of Britain begins."

[224]

They went to see the children take their tea. They sat at long plank tables under the corrugated iron roof of the shed-like pavilion. The girls were in one vast room, the boys in another. Their school-teachers rapped on the table, and the jabber and chatter faded away into a silence. Then the voice of one of the school-masters started singing—
"Praise God, from whom——"

and the hymn was taken up by the voices, singing vociferously—
"Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost."

There was nothing half-hearted about it; they made a great clamour of their thanks, and their shrill treble made echoes within echoes against the iron roof and wooden walls of the room in which they sat. And Humphrey, always the looker-on, saw the imperishable pathos of this and all that lay behind it, and for a moment he felt pity tug at his heart. Then, as if ashamed of his weakness, he turned to Elizabeth and saw that she was watching him. She laid a gloved hand on his sleeve for the fraction of a second; it was an impulsive, unconscious movement, the merest shadow of a caress.

"I did not know you could feel like that," she said softly.