at the age of twenty humphrey quain found himself on the threshold of a world of promise. it seemed to him that if, out of all the years of time, he could have chosen the period in which he would live, he would have picked out the dawn of this twentieth century of grace. england was just then in the throes of casting from herself the burden of old traditions. the closing years of the nineties had been years of preparation and development—years of broadening minds and new ideas, until quite suddenly, it seemed, the century turned the corner, and yesterday became old-fashioned in a day, and all eyes were fixed on the glorious sunrise of the twentieth century—the wonderful century.
people, you remember, played with the fantasy of beginning a brand-new century as if it were a new toy. nobody who was living could remember the birth of the last century. it was a new emotion for everyone. there was the oddity of writing dates, discarding for ever the 189— and beginning with 19—; old phrases, such as fin-de-siècle, became suddenly obsolete; new phrases were coined, among which "twencent" (an abbreviation for twentieth century, and a tribute to the snap and hustle with which the world was now expected to go) survived the longest; songs were sung at music-halls; there was a burst of cartoons on the subject; people referred jokingly to the last century, parodying the recollections of boresome centenarians; while the unhappy nineteenth century, as though the calendar[32] had taken a mean advantage of its mid-victorian dignity, determined never again to risk being so hopelessly out of date, and added to its title the words "and after," thereby enabling future centuries to go for ever without ruffling its title.
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. in the midst of all this there arose suddenly, born with the twentieth century, the young man. he had already come, answering the call of the country in the dark disillusioning days of the boer war. people had seen the young clerks and workmen of england marching shoulder to shoulder down the streets of london, like the train-bands of elizabethan days. when the country was in peril the flower and the youth of england came to its aid, and the older men could do nothing but stay at home and look on.
the young man, scorned by his elders in all the periods of the nineteenth century except those last years of development, found himself suddenly caught up on the high wave that was sweeping away the rubbish and the sentiment and the lumber of the old customs, and borne above them all. he was set on a pinnacle, as the new type; the future of the world was said to be in the hands of the young men; the old men—even forty was too old, you remember—had[33] had their day. they were now like so much old furniture, shabby and undesirable, second-hand goods, better replaced by strong, well-made, up-to-date things.
it really was a wonderful time for the young man. in the old days it had been customary for him to show respect to his elders, to call them "sir," to stand up when they came into a room, or raise his hat if they met in the streets, to offer his seat to them if there was none vacant, and generally to treat them as old ladies, with polite reverence mingled with awe.
the worship of age had become a fetish; it was improper to criticize the opinions of a man older than yourself; it was heresy to think that you were as capable as the old men; youth had to wait and grow old for its chances in life; youth was ridiculed, snubbed and held in the leash.
and then, quite suddenly it seemed, though ibsen had heard it knocking at the door long before, the younger generation burst upon us with an astonishing vigour, taking possession of the new century, trampling down the false gods of age and bringing in its train, like boys trooping from a nursery, hosts of new toys and new ideas in everything.
it was, i think, the day that finally discovered the young man. ferrol had known the bitter opposition which he had fought in his own twenties and thirties, and he shone as the apostle of youth. the young man, from a neglected embryo, became a national asset; all hands were uplifted to him in the dawn of the new century. he was enthroned in the seats from which his elders were deposed.
people seeking for a symbol of the new life that was beginning, looked westwards and found a whole nation that typified the young man who was to be their[34] salvation. they found america, eager, with strident voice, forceful and straining its muscles to the game of life—a whole nation of young men. it became the fashion to take america as a model. there was an invasion of boots and bicycles and cameras. "look," every one cried, "see how they do things better than we do. look at their magazines—how wonderful they are." phonographs, kinetoscopes, the first jumpy cinematographs, photo-buttons, chewing-gum, they came to the country, and were hailed gladly as from the land of young men.
presently the young men themselves came. they came with their hair parted in the middle, and keen, clean-shaven faces with very predominant chins. they were mere boys, and they had a bounce and a boisterous assurance that took one's breath away. with them came loudly-striped shirts, multi-coloured socks, felt hats and lounge suits in city offices, and, later, soft-fronted shirts and black silk bows for evening wear. they opened london offices for new york firms, and showed us card-indexing systems, roll-top desks, dictaphones and loose-leaf ledgers. all letters were typewritten, and the firm who sent out a letter in the crabbed handwriting of its senior clerk was accounted disgracefully behind the times.
the young man set the pace with a vengeance, and it was a panting business to keep abreast of him.
cock-tails and quick-lunch restaurants appeared next; griddle-cakes, clam-chowder and club sandwiches were shown to us; and finally, as though having absorbed their nutriment, we had assimilated their habits, a fierce desire to speak with a nasal accent took hold of us.
the man who wanted to get a job spoke with as much american accent as he could muster up; he looked american, and he affected american ways; his[35] affirmative was "sure," and he wore his hair long and sleek, divided evenly in the middle. he was the young man, cocksure, enthusiastic and determined—the most remarkable product of his time.
ferrol found him, a year or so before he arrived, with that instinct of his, almost second-sight, which never failed. he boomed him as a type; he glorified him, and gave him high posts in the office of the day. with the exception of neckinger, the editor, who came straight from new york, he was the native product, and ferrol was always on the look-out for more of him.
and so, in the midst of all this, when the cry for the young man was at its hungriest, when "hustle" and "strenuous" were added to the vocabulary, we see humphrey quain, waiting on the outskirts, watching his opportunity, and meanwhile bending over the counter of the easterham gazette office, coat off and shirt sleeves turned back to the elbow, folding up copies of the easterham gazette as they came damp, with the ink wet on them, from the printing-press in the basement.
the easterham gazette was, unhesitatingly, the worst paper in easterham. it was an eight-page weekly journal, with a staff of one editor, one reporter and humphrey quain. when things were slack in the reporting line, the reporter (an extraordinarily shaggy person called beaver, whose thumbs were always covered with ink) was expected to "fill up time at case"—which means that he was to assist in setting up the paper in type. the editor, whose name was worthing, walked about in a knickerbocker suit and a soft grey hat, and it was part of his business to obtain advertisements for the gazette. the leading articles he wrote were always composed with one eye on the advertiser. in praising the laudable action of councillor[36] bilson in opposing the introduction of trams into the town, there was a pleasant parenthesis, something in this manner: "it needs no words of ours to echo the praise bestowed on that gallant champion of our town, our much-respected councillor bilson (in whose windows, by the way, there is a remarkable exhibit of oriental coffee-making) ..." and so on.
it was beaver's duty to make the "calls" during the week. how he managed them all, i don't know; but in the intervals of attending the police-court, the council meetings, and all the meetings of local organizations, he would call at the hospital, at the mayor's parlour, on the town clerk, on the churches and cathedrals, snapping up unconsidered trifles in the shape of accidents, civic news, church services, and all the other activities of easterham life. sometimes during the week beaver would swing himself astride a bicycle, as frayed and as shabby as himself, and pedal to wimberly, or pooleham, or further afield to great huxton for local meetings, all of which were of vast interest to the easterham gazette, since its copies went weekly—or were supposed to go—over the whole of the county, and it had annexed to its title the names of all the best villages. its full title, by the way, was: easterham gazette, and wimberly, pooleham, great huxton, middle huxton and little huxton chronicle; coomber, melsdom and upper thornton journal, largest circulation in any district, weekly one penny. it was nigh upon sixty years of age, and therefore its tottering infirmity may be excused.
humphrey quain came into the office ostensibly as a clerk. in the beginning he thought it was a fascinating game seeing the things that one wrote in print. therefore, all unconsciously, he started to write. he began with "cycle notes" and "theatre notes," and presently he found himself with sufficient interest to fill[37] a whole column, which dealt mainly with local gossip, and was called "the easterham letter." it was addressed always to the editor and was signed "p and q." when he was not writing, he was addressing wrappers or making out the weekly bills for the newsagents; and every friday evening he stood by the counter, folding up the papers as they came to him, and handing them to grubby little children who were sent by the newsagents, or sold the papers for themselves in the streets.
it really was a remarkable paper for the twentieth century. its advertisement space was one shilling an inch, or less if you promised not to tell any one; three men, of course, could not fill the whole of these eight great sheets, and therefore the carrier's wagon delivered every thursday to the easterham gazette office, mysterious thin brown parcels the size of a column, and rather heavy. simultaneously, all over the country, like parcels were being delivered, and, if by chance you compared an issue of the easterham gazette with any thirty local papers in the north, south, or east of england, you would have been amazed at the remarkable similarity of their contents. they had the same serial story of thrilling adventure, the same "cookery notes and kitchen recipes," the same "home hints to household happiness," word for word, and the same column of jokes.
for these long parcels that arrived every thursday at the easterham gazette office were columns of type cast from moulds, sent down from a london agency which has made a mighty business of supplying general matter, from foreign intelligence to fashion notes, ready for the printing-press, at so much a column. they call it "stereo."
humphrey quain had been in the office for three[38] years. his aunt was a friend of mr worthing, the editor, and his father thought it would be a good thing for the boy to have some association with the world of letters, however distant. shortly afterwards, quain senior had taken a master's appointment in a private boarding-school at southsea, and humphrey remained with his aunt. a year later his father died.
he parted with his father with a straining heart, for daniel quain was a tremendous success as a father, though he was a failure as a man. of course this was only humphrey's point of view: what more could a boy want than a father who could fashion any kind of toy, from whistles to steamboats, out of a block of wood; who knew enough of elementary science to make a pin sail on water, by letting it rest on a cigarette paper which soaked and sank away, leaving the pin afloat; who could blow a halfpenny from one wine-glass to another, and produce whooing sounds from a hollow tube by placing it over a gas flame. wonderful father!
it was daniel who fostered in humphrey's heart the love of reading: those early books were adventure stories by fenimore cooper, kingston and ballantyne. he read harrison ainsworth, too, and henty, and took in the boy's own paper, and, in short, did everything in the way of reading that a normal, happy, healthy-minded boy should do. "keep clear of philosophy until you are thirty," daniel said one day, as he was showing him how three matches can be made to stand upright; "then you won't understand enough of life to be miserable."
later, he came to the dickens and thackeray stage, but he was pained to find he could not enjoy scott. he confided his distaste to his father, as though it were a guilty failing of which to be ashamed.
[39]
"form your own likes and dislikes in reading as in everything else," said daniel. "don't be a literary snob, and pretend you enjoy the acquaintance of books merely because they belong so to speak to the 'upper ten' of the book-world."
when his father died, humphrey was first brought face to face with the stern things of life. it was a chance remark of his aunt that gave him the first glimpse. "you'll have to do something for yourself, humphrey," she said one day. "that father of yours did nothing for you." she always spoke bitterly of his father.
humphrey had never thought of it before. it had seemed to him that things came naturally to people from father to son: that, in some mysterious, unthought-of way, when he was about twenty or so, he would find himself with an income of sorts, or some settled employment.
"you must get on," said his aunt, looking at him through her spectacles. "young men get on quickly to-day. you must grasp your opportunities."
so here came a new and delightful interest into humphrey's existence. he perceived something fine in it all. from that day he had one creed in life: the creed of getting on. this determination swamped every other interest in life. it was as if his aunt had suddenly touched upon some internal button that had started off a driving-wheel within him, and set all the machinery of energy into movement. how did one "get on" in the world? he began to take an enormous interest in everything, to follow the doings of men and cities outside easterham; his knowledge widened slowly, for he had no brothers and was singularly innocent in the everyday sense of the word.
and all the time, during those easterham days,[40] he was beginning to understand things. he saw that beaver and worthing, with their small salaries and narrow capacities, had not "got on"—would never "get on." he realized too, that his father, well through life, had been little better than a man in the beginning of it. on the other hand, bilson, with his large, shining shop, might be said to have "got on," and just when he was half deciding that bilson held the secret, bilson suddenly went bankrupt, owing to the failure of some coffee plantations in ceylon. it seemed a perplexing business, this getting on. easier to talk about than to do. and, after all, the getting on-ness of bilson had been circumscribed by the narrow area of easterham. the real success meant power, and the ability to use it: wide power over the affairs of other people.
these were not the thoughts of a moment: they were lingering thoughts that spread over three years, from seventeen to twenty, those three years when he was at the easterham gazette office, with only beaver and worthing for his models in life.
they were thoughts in the intervals of writing "notes" on local subjects—indeed, the notes were the outcome of the thoughts—of reading, and of cycling, and going to the theatre. and then one day a most amazing thing happened.
beaver got on!
yes, it was really incredible, but the fact was there indisputable and glaring. beaver, shaggy and unkempt, who seemed to have settled down for ever to the meetings and the calls and the police-courts ("harriet higgins, 30, no fixed abode, charged with being drunk and disorderly, etc."), broke through the cobwebs that had settled on him, in an unexpected and definite manner.
[41]
he came to humphrey one day and remarked quite casually, "i've given old worthing the push."
humphrey looked at him: he wore a norfolk jacket, with old trousers, and a tweed hat of no shape at all. beaver took his pipe out of his mouth, and humphrey noticed the short nails on his stumpy, fat fingers. beaver always bit his nails.
"i've given old worthing the push," said beaver. "look at this." he showed a letter to humphrey, who saw that it was from the "special news agency" of london, employing beaver in their service at ￡2, 10s. a week.
"how did you get it?" humphrey asked.
"wrote in," said beaver, gnawing a finger-tip. "been writing in on the quiet for the last year. fed up with old worthing and filling up time at case."
"i thought you had to know how to write well if you wanted to work in london," humphrey said. there were no illusions about beaver's style.
"oh! the agency doesn't want writing—it wants a man who can take down shorthand verbatim.... i'm off next week," said beaver.
humphrey looked longingly at him and his letter, and then round at the whitewashed walls of the office, with its calendars and local directories for years past on the shelf, and the pile of gazettes on the corner of the counter. mr worthing passed through the office, stopped, and scowled at beaver.
"kindly remove your head-gear in the front office," he said, and beaver, with the unmurmuring discipline of years which nothing could break, took off the crumpled tweed thing he called a hat.
"nice pig, isn't he?" beaver said to humphrey, as worthing went out. "we had an awful row. said i ought to have given him a month's notice. a week[42] would have been good enough for me if he was doing the sacking. pig in knickers, that's what he is," said beaver, defiantly. "this is a hole."
"oh, beaver!" cried humphrey, hopelessly. "it is a hole. he is a pig.... but what's going to happen to me?"
"you'll do my work," beaver remarked.
"i can't write shorthand. besides, i don't want to. how old are you, beaver?"
"just turned thirty. why?"
"thirty!" thought humphrey; fancy beaver having wasted all these years in doing nothing but local reporting. would he have to work ten years more and still achieve nothing further than beaver. there must be some way out of it. beaver had found it, and surely he could.
"it's fine for you," humphrey said, admiringly now, for, in the blankness of beaver leaving the office where they had worked, he had forgotten to congratulate him. "the special news agency is the biggest in london, isn't it."
"rather," said beaver, comfortably. "it's a life job." that was his ambition. "look here, young quain, i think you're too good for easterham, too. those notes of yours, you know.... i used to read 'em every week. not at all bad.... you take my tip, and do a turn at reporting for a while, and then when you've got the hang of things write in. write in to all the london papers. say you've had good provincial experience—'provincial' sounds better than local. you'll see. you're bound to get replies. say you're a good all-round man. enclose a stamped envelope." beaver sauntered to and fro, nibbling at a nail between excited sentences. "oh, and don't you forget it. write on easterham gazette notepaper."
[43]
and when, a week later, beaver left, worthing asked humphrey to try his hand at the police-court, humphrey accepted the inevitable, and tried to improve on the style of the police reports. worthing swore at him and rewrote them all, and told him to model his style on that of the late mr beaver.
whereupon humphrey, seeing that he would never get on if he were to live in the shadow of beaver, sat down, and "wrote in."
he wrote to the day, because he bought the paper every morning, and thought it was wonderful.
the day that ferrol's reply arrived was a day of triumph for humphrey. the letter came to him with unbelievable promptness, asking him to call at the office.... never again did humphrey recapture the fine emotion that thrilled him as he read and re-read the letter. looking back on it, he saw that those moments were among the most glorious in his life; he stood on the threshold of a world of promise and enchantment, suddenly revealed to him by this scrap of paper with the day in embossed blue letters, surrounded by telephone numbers and telegraphic addresses of the great newspaper.
when he showed the letter to his aunt, she sighed in a tired way, and said unexpectedly: "i'm afraid you will never get on, humphrey. you are too restless. i'm sure you would do better to remain with mr worthing. however...." she very rarely finished her sentences.
humphrey smiled. he saw himself marching to fortune; he was twenty, and it never occurred to him that he could fail.
