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 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 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."