Alphonse Courlander

“ But out of the glamour of their love and kisses there emerged the grey talk of practical things. "We don't know anything about each other," she cried.
"I know you.... I feel that I have known you all my life!" he insisted. "Don't you feel like that towards me?" he asked, anxiously.
"Perhaps I do," she said, and Humphrey went into raptures over it. "Isn't it wonderful," he said, "to think that only a few weeks ago we were really strangers, and now you have been in my arms—how can we be strangers, Lilian, and kiss as we do?" ”

“ Love not only blinds us to the imperfections of others, but twists the vision we have always held of ourselves.
Wratten had taken a flat at Hampstead—a little box of a flat—at a ridiculously high rent, but to Humphrey, as he came into the sitting-room, it appeared as an ideal home. There was an air of repose and rest about it, the walls papered in a soft green, chintz curtains drawn over the windows, a carpet of a shade of green deeper than the walls, and old furniture about the room.
The artistic nature is always hidden below the practical journalist, and it comes to light in different ways. ”

“ Wratten himself was extremely nervous, and it was his nervousness that made his manner almost brusque; he must have been a gloomy lover, and yet, as Humphrey saw the dark-eyed bride he was wedding, and marked the pride in her eyes as she looked up to him, and the fluttering of her lips as she whispered things to him, he knew that somewhere in this rugged blunt nature of Wratten there was a vein of golden tenderness and beauty. ”

“ Humphrey smiled. He saw himself marching to fortune; he was twenty, and it never occurred to him that he could fail.
[44]
IV
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. ”

“ In the midst of this change, when the death of Queen Victoria seemed to snap the present from the past irrevocably, and the novelty of a king came to England again; when the first of the tubes that now honeycomb London was a twopenny wonder, and people were talking of Shepherd's Bush, and Notting Hill Gate, and marvelling curiously why they had never talked of them before; when Socialism was burrowing and gnawing like a rat at the old, worn fabric of Society, urging the working-man to stand equal in Parliament with the noblest lords in the land. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The strong men are never popular.
The train had now sped past Rugby, and the green valleys and chequered landscapes ran by in a never-ending panorama. The sunshine held with them as far as Crewe, and then, as they came into an unlovely stretch of land bristling with factory chimneys, the clouds gathered, and the greyness settled over the day. The three friends sat silently now: Wratten and Carr, seated opposite, were looking out of the window, and Humphrey over Carr's shoulder caught glimpses of the little world to which they were journeying. ”

“ When she spoke of Ferrol, Humphrey remembered all that had been done for him. What could she know of Ferrol's personality, of his splendid force, of the thousand generous acts that remained hidden, while only the things were remembered that blackened his reputation. His admiration for Ferrol was immeasurable. He saw in the indomitable energy of the man something tangible and positive among all the negative virtues of life. Ferrol stood for achievement that crowned the indefatigable years. ”

“ Out of the insensate tangle of machines and lives, high above the thunderous clamour of the printing-presses, the rolling of heavy vans stacked high with cylinders of paper, the ringing of telephone bells, the ticking and clicking and buzzing, floor above floor, of the great grey building in which they all lived, Ferrol rises with his masterful personality and calm voice, carving the chaos of it all into discipline and order. He looms, in the imagination, powerful and omnipresent, making his desires felt in the far corners of the continents. ”

“ She was enjoying the play, but Humphrey could pay no attention to it. He could only think of her. How real was all this: how every moment counted as a moment of pure, throbbing enjoyment. And he thought of Rivers, and the office, and Selsey and the sub-editors' room, messenger boys and the tape machines—what did it all matter beside the incomparable happiness of these moments. Knowledge came to him subconsciously: it was for this that one worked and suffered. ”

“ Humphrey lingered a little longer: he saw rooms leading out of the composing-room, where there was a noise of hammering on metal, and the smell of molten lead, ... and men running to and fro in aprons, taking surreptitious pinches of snuff, banging with mallets, carrying squares of type, proofs, battered tins of tea, ... running to and fro, terribly serious and earnest, just as scene-shifters in the theatre rush and bustle and carry things that the audience never sees, when the curtain hides the stage.
"Better get home," said Selsey, noticing him again. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He heard a rustle on the stairs, the door opened gently, and Elizabeth Carr came into the room.
She looked as beautiful as a picture in the frame of her own room. So had he imagined her, her hair looped back from its centre parting piled in gleaming coils just above the nape of her neck, leaving its delicate outline unbroken; a long necklet of amethysts made a mauve rivulet against the whiteness of her bosom till it fell in a festoon over her bodice, and blended with the colour of her dress, amethystine itself. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Here, in a new world and a new city, he was beginning to see things in a truer proportion. Fleet Street receded into the far perspective as something quite small and unimportant; the men themselves, even, seemed narrow-minded and petty, incapable of thinking more deeply than the news of the day demanded.
Humphrey, from the heights of his room in Paris, began to see how broad the world was, that it was finer [288] to deal with nations than individuals, and from his view Fleet Street appeared to him in the same relation as Easterham had appeared to him in London. ”

“ Humphrey thought of the girl he had passed that day in the street.... "I wish I were you," he said. "It must be rather fine to have some one pegging away at you always to do your best: it must be rather fine to have a smile waiting for you at the end of the long day's work."
"Fine!" said Wratten, "it's the only thing that's left to us. We're robbed of everything else that matters. We haven't a soul to call our own, and we can't even rule our lives. Time, that precious heritage of every one else, doesn't belong to us. ”

“ Sometimes, also, in out-of-the-way places, Humphrey met men who reminded him of his days on the Easterham Gazette, men with attenuated minds who were even more absorbed in their work than the London reporter. They had a shameless way of never concealing their identity: they were always the "reporter"; some of them never saw the dignity of their calling, they were careless of speech and appearance, seeming to place themselves on the level of inferior people, and submitting to the undisguised contempt of the little local authorities, who spoke to them scornfully as "You reporters." ”

“ There was something savage and primitive about these women: they lacked the frankness and gaiety of the coster-girl in London; they were beautiful, with an evil and cruel beauty. Vicious-looking men slouched from the shadows. Their looks could not conceal the knives in their pockets. They were as rats in the night, creeping from pavement to pavement, preying on humanity.
[300]
The door of a café chantant opened, as Humphrey came abreast with it, and the sound of a jingling chorus, played on a discordant piano, arrested his steps. ”

“ This was a hard world, spread around them, a world where men lived hard, worked hard, and died hard. A world without sunshine,—all grimy iron and coal and brute strength. And again Humphrey could not help feeling the pitiful artificiality of his own work, that mattered so little, compared with this real and vital business of dragging coal from the heart of the earth to warm her children.
They had to change at Wigan: the bookstalls were covered with placards of Manchester and Bolton newspapers telling of the horror of the disaster. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whom should he meet one day, but Beaver!
Beaver of the inky thumbs and the bitten nails, who had, somehow, eluded him, though they both worked in the narrow Street. Nothing astonishing in this, for the work of Beaver lay in circles different from his own. He never came outside the radius of meetings, inquests, the opening of bazaars and the hundred and one minor happenings that are to be found in "To-day's Diary." But here he was, utterly unchanged from the Beaver with whom Humphrey had lived in Guilford Street, with Mrs Wayzgoose, her wasteful coal-scuttles and her bulrushes. ”

“ It seemed to Humphrey that he had left London centuries ago ... that he had never met Lilian at all. It was as if that morning his life had been uprooted, and it would have to be planted again before it could absorb the old interests and influences.... He was hungry and cold. There was no chance of getting food. If he were a miner, or had any real part in this game, the Salvation Army would have given him tea and bread ... but he was a reporter, an onlooker, supposed to be watching everything, and, in a sense, physically invisible. ”

“ Ferrol knew well enough how to handle men: they must be made always to believe that they are firm and independent, and it does not do to let them see the props and supports that hold them up.
Humphrey was busily searching for the reason of this summons to Ferrol's room. It was only the third time that he had been in this broad red room, yet already his nervousness vanished, he no longer feared his greatness, or the comprehensive power of the man with the black moustache and the strong hands that held in their grip all the fortunes of The Day. ”

“ Half an hour later, under the great glass roof of Paddington Station, the last farewells had been said.
Nothing but a "So long, old man," and a "Good-bye" and a tight handshake marked the breaking of another thread of friendship. Humphrey watched the train curve outwards and away into the darkness with that queer [259] emotion that always comes when one is left standing on a railway platform, and a lighted train has moved out, full of life behind its lit windows, leaving in its place a glistening, empty stretch of rails.
Elizabeth was fluttering a valedictory handkerchief to the shadows. ”

“ But it used to rejoice Humphrey's heart to see, sometimes, how older men who were inclined to patronize him as a beginner and a junior the night before, treated him as one of themselves in the morning at the breakfast-table. And he nearly burst with pride when he first saw his messages headed: "From The Day Special Correspondent." Even though he were no further afield than Manchester or Birmingham, it seemed to place him in the gallant band of great ones just as if he were a Steevens, a Billy Russell, or an Archibald Forbes. ”

“ He saw the people sitting outside the cafés near braziers of glowing coal, calmly drinking coloured liquids, as though there were no such thing as work in the world.
And that was the thought that gave Humphrey his first impression of Paris. These people, it seemed, only played with life. There was something artificial and unreal about all these cafés: they played at being angry (that business at the Customs office was part of the game) , an agent held up a little white baton to stop the traffic—playing at being a London policeman, thought Humphrey. ”