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 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.