Chapter 5

Some weeks later there came a letter which brought the reality of things into his own life. It was a short and regretful letter from a firm of Easterham solicitors, announcing the death of his aunt.

They informed him of the fact in a few, brief, dignified words. There was an undercurrent of excuse, as if they felt themselves personally responsible for the sudden demise, and were anxious to apologise for any inconvenience that might be felt by Mr Quain. He gathered that his aunt had lived on an annuity, which expired with her; that a little financial trouble—loans to a brother of whom Humphrey had never heard—absorbed her furniture and all her possessions, with the exception of a watch and chain, which she had willed to Humphrey. The funeral was to take place two days hence—and that was all.

The letter moved him neither to tears nor sorrow. His aunt had been as remote from him in life as she was in death. An unbridgeable abyss had divided them. Never, during the years he had lived in Easterham, after his father's death, had they talked of the fundamental things that mattered to one another. He felt that he owed her nothing, least of all love, for she remained in his memory a masterful, powerful influence, trying to fetter him down to a narrow life, without comprehension of the broad, beautiful world that lay at her doors.

He could see her now in her dress of some mysterious black pattern, and always a shawl over her shoulder, her white hair plastered close to her heavy gold earrings, her lips thin and compressed, and her eyes hard-set, when[315] she said, "You must Get On." She did not know, when she urged him to go forward, how far he meant to go. Her vision of Getting On was bounded by Easterham—what could she know and understand of all the bewildering phases he had undergone; the bitter heartaches, the misery of failure, and the glory of conquest in a world wider than a million Easterhams.

But, as he thought of her dead, a strange feeling came to him that now she could understand everything, that she knew all, and was even ready to reach out in sympathy to him. Her last pathetic message—a watch and chain! The rude knowledge that he had gained of the secret things of her life—how she lived, her loan to the brother; it seemed that some hidden door which they had both kept carefully locked had been flung open widely—that his eyes were desecrating her profoundest secrets.

It was not the first time that Death had stirred his life, but this was a sudden and unexpected snapping of a chain that bound him with his boyhood. Always he had been subconsciously aware of his aunt's presence in the scheme of things; there had been ingrained in him a certain fear of her, that he had never quite shaken off. Behind the individuality of his own life she had lurked, a shadowy figure, yet ready to emerge from the shadows at a moment of provocation, and become real and distinct and forbidding.

And now he could scarcely realize that she was dead—that he was absolutely alone in the world, though there might be, somewhere, cousins and kinspeople whom he had never seen.

She had not been demonstratively kind to him in life. The watch and chain she left was the first present he could ever remember receiving from her. But he felt that he could not absent himself from her funeral; it would be a sad and desolate business in the Easterham[316] churchyard, with not many people there, yet he knew that he could not pass the day in Paris without thinking of her, lowered into the grave to the eternal loneliness of death.

He sent a telegram to London, and received a reply a few hours later, giving him permission to leave Paris, and the next day he travelled to England.

The collection of papers and magazines rested unread in his lap. He looked from the window on the succession of pictures that flashed and disappeared—a blue-bloused labourer at work in the fields, or a waggoner toiling along a country lane; children shouting by the hedgerows, and the signal-women who sat by their little huts on the railway as the train sped by. He could not read; sometimes, with a sigh, he sought a paper (France had just caught the popular magazine habit from England), turned the pages restlessly, and, finally, leaning on the arm-rest, stared out of the window....

The shuttle of his mind went to and fro, twining together the disconnected threads of his thoughts into a pattern of memories—memories of his youth and his work and his aunt interwoven with the strong, dominating thought of Elizabeth....

His thoughts turned continually to Elizabeth; sometimes they spun away to something else, but always they were led back through a series of memories to that night when he had kissed her for the first time.

It was odd how this absence from her seemed to have changed her in his mind. There had been an undercurrent of disappointment in their relations, of late. Her letters had been strangely sterile and unsatisfying. She had written an evasive reply, after a delay, an answer to his last letter begging her to come to him....

Yet he was eager to see her and to kiss her. He felt that she was all that he had left to him in[317] the world: that she and his work were all that mattered....

A garrulous Frenchman lured him into conversation during dinner; he was glad, for it gave him relief from the monotonous burden of his thoughts ... and on the boat he dozed in the sunshine of a smooth crossing.

Once in England again, the delight of an exile returning to his home provided new sensations. The porters were deferentially solicitous for his comfort; the Customs officers behaved with innate politeness, and the little squat train, with its separate compartments, brought a glow of happiness to him. He saw England as a stranger might see it for the first time: he observed the discipline and order of the railway station that came not from oppression but from high organization and planning. There were no mistakes made; the boy brought his tea-basket and did not overcharge him; the porter accepted sixpence and touched his hat, not obsequiously, but in acknowledgment, without a suggestion of haggling for more. It seemed incredible that he should find this perfection, where a year ago he could not see it....

There were Frenchmen in the carriage, and he sat with the conscious pride of an Englishman in his own country. The train moved out, giving a glimpse of the harbour and the sea breaking in white lines over the sloping beach; and then through a tunnel that emerged on fields. The first thing he noticed was the vivid green of the country, and the way it was cut up and divided into squares and oblongs: the small clumps of low-set trees, the fat cattle, and the peace brooding over the land. And then he noticed the little houses, low-storied and thatched, with a feather of blue smoke waving from their chimneys. The whole journey was a series of new impressions that elated him. Stations flashed and left behind a blurred memory of advertisements,[318] and names that breathed of yeoman England: Ashford—Paddock Wood—Sevenoaks—Knockholt; and then the advertisement-boards stood out of the green fields, blatantly insisting on lung tonics and pills, marking off mile after mile that brought him nearer to London. The houses closed in on the railway line; the train ran now through larger stations of red brick, passing the peopled platforms with an echoing roar; other crowded trains passed them, going slowly to the suburbs they had left behind. A new note seemed to come into the journey as the evening descended, and the world outside was populous with lights.

The memory of the clean, sweet country, with its toy houses, was wiped away by a swift blot of darkness as the train flashed through New Cross, and out into the broad network of rails with which London begins.

He saw the factories and the sidings and the busy traffic of trains overtaking one another, running parallel for a space, and then swaying apart as one branched off to the south-eastern suburbs. He saw the smoke hanging in thick clouds on the far horizon; masts and rigging made spidery silhouettes against the sky; and the tall, factory chimneys thrust out their monstrous tongues of livid fire.

The city was before him right and left, overgrown and tremendous. They ran level with crooked chimney-pots and the scarred roofs of endless rows of houses. The upper windows were yellow with light, and he caught glimpses of women before mirrors and men in their shirt-sleeves. Dark masses of clouds rolled before the moon. Something wet splashed on his cheek.

A silent Englishman sitting next to him, said moodily: "Raining as usual. I've never once come home without it raining." He laughed as though it were a bitter joke.

Fantastic reflections wriggled on the wet, shining[319] approach to London Bridge—a swift vision of bus-drivers, with oilcloth capes glinting in the rain, hurrying crowds, and something altogether new—a motor-omnibus.

Then the train, with a dignified, steady movement, swung slowly across Hungerford Bridge, and he saw the strong, resolute river, black and broad, flowing to the bridges, within the jewelled girdle of the Embankment.

The sense of England's greatness came to him, as the landmarks of London were set in a semicircle before him: the tall dome of St Paul's, the spires of churches, the turrets of great hotels, grey Government offices, culminating in the vague majesty of the Houses of Parliament.

How different the streets were from Paris! There was a force and an energy that seemed to be driving everything perpetually forward. This business of getting to dinner—it was about half-past seven—was a terribly earnest and crowded affair. The throng of motor-cars and omnibuses jammed and flocked together in the Strand, held in leash by a policeman's uplifted hand, and when it was released, it crawled sluggishly forward. Here and there, rare sight for Humphrey, one of the new motor-omnibuses lumbered forward heavily, threatening instant annihilation of everything. There was no chatter of voices in the crowd—no gesticulation—the people walked silently and hurriedly with a set concentration of purpose.

He went to a hotel in the Adelphi to leave his bag. Then he came out, pausing for a moment irresolutely in the crowd. It was too late, as he had foreseen, to go to Elizabeth. He had made up his mind to see her on his return from Easterham.

An omnibus halted by him: he boarded it, and as he passed the Griffin, he breathed deeply like a monarch entering his own domain, for the scent of the Street was in his nostrils and the old, well-known vision of the lit[320] windows passed before him, and a newsboy ran along shouting a late edition. This was the only Street in the world, he felt, that he loved; its people were his people, and its life was his life.

He turned into the Pen Club, to friendship, good-fellowship and welcome. And all the old friends were there—Larkin, retelling old stories, Chander spinning merry yarns, and Vernham making melancholy epigrams. Willoughby, he learnt, was away on a mystery in the north, and Jamieson was at a first night.

"By the way," said Larkin, "heard about Tommy Pride?"

"No. What's happened?"

"He's left The Day."

"Sacked?" asked Humphrey.

Larkin nodded. "Rather rough on poor old Tommy. Married, isn't he?"

A picture of his first visit to the home of the Prides leapt before Humphrey's eyes, and the comfort, the cheeriness, that hid all the hard work of the week. The news hurt him queerly.

"What's he doing?" he asked.

"Well, not much. Tommy's not a youngster, you know. I suppose the Newspaper Press Fund will tide him over a bit."

Larkin dropped the subject, to listen to a story from Vernham. After all, it was the most casual thing in the happenings of Fleet Street to them: it might happen to them any day; it was bound to happen to them one day. And there would always be young men ready to take their places. Nobody was to blame; it was just one of the chances of the inexorable system which made their work a gamble, where men hazarded their wits and their lives, and lost or won in the game.

Humphrey knew more than they did what it meant for Tommy Pride. He heard as a mocking echo now,[321] the old cry, "Two pounds a week and a cottage in the country."...

"Have a drink," Larkin said.

He became suddenly out of tune with the place. His perception of Fleet Street altered. He saw the relentless cruelty of it, the implacable demand for sacrifice that it always made. He visioned it as a giant striding discordantly through the lives of men, crushing them with a strength as mighty as its own machines that roared in the night ... a clumsy and senseless giant, that towered above them, against whom all struggles were pitiful ... futile.