There came to him days of unqualified unhappiness, when he was possessed by doubts. For the first time he mistrusted the value of his work: he began to see that the fundamental truths of life were outside his scope. Cities might be festering with immorality and slums; vice might parade openly, but these things could never be touched on in a daily newspaper. Nobody was to blame, least of all those who controlled the newspaper, for it is not the business of a daily to deal with the morals of existence.... It is not easy to analyse his feelings ... but, as a result of all this vague tormenting and apprehension, the old thrill at the power and wonder of the office which throbbed with daily activities forsook him, leaving in its place nothing but the desolating knowledge of the littleness and futility of it all.
The phase passed: the variety of the work enthralled him again. He travelled to distant towns and remote villages, and whenever he was in the grip of his work, all thoughts of Elizabeth Carr departed from him. He obtained extraordinary glimpses into the lives of other people; he acquired a knowledge into the working of things that was denied to those who only gleaned their knowledge second-hand from the things that he and others wrote. He saw things all day long: the plottings, the achievements and the failures of mankind.
The other men of the Street flitted into his life and out again at the decree of circumstance. For a week, perhaps, half-a-dozen of them would be thrown together in some part of England. They met at the hotels; they formed friendships, and they parted again, knowing, with the fatalism of their craft, that they would forgather perhaps next week, perhaps next year. There was no sentiment in these friendships.
There were the photographers, too. A new race of men had come into Fleet Street, claiming kinship with the reporters, yet divided by difference of thought and outlook upon news. They were remarkable in their way, the product of the picture daily paper. And their coming marked the doom of the artist illustrators in the newspapers. They were the newest of the new generation, shattering every conception even of the younger men of the manner in which a journalist should perform his duty. The photographers were drawn, as a class, from the studios and operating-rooms of the professional photographer. They forsook the posing of babies and young men in frock coats for the photographic quest of news.
Their finger-tips and nails were brown with the stain of iodoform, and for them there was no concealment of their profession, for they went through life with the burden of their cameras slung over their shoulders. Their audacity was astounding, even to Humphrey and his friends, who knew the necessity of audacity themselves.
They ranged themselves outside the Law Courts, or the Houses of Parliament, or wherever one of the many interests of the day centred, and when a litigant or a Cabinet Minister appeared, a dozen men closed towards him, their cameras at the level of their eyes, and a dozen intermittent "clicking" noises marked the achievement of their quest. They saw life in pictures; a speech was nothing to them but the open mouth and the raised arm of the speaker; the poignancy of death left them unmoved before the need of focus and exposure.
The difficulties of their work seemed so immense to Humphrey that reporting seemed child's play beside it. For not only had they actually to be on the spot, to overcome prejudices and barriers, but, once there, they had to select and group their picture, and to reckon with the light and time. And though the photographers and the reporters were far removed from one another by the external nature of their work, though neither class saw life from the identical standpoint, yet they were interdependent, and linked by the same ceaseless forces working towards one common end....
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."
Yet, among these, Humphrey found scholars and men of strange experience. Their salaries were absurdly low for the work they did—thirty shillings to two pounds a week was the average; their lives were a thousand times more dismal and humdrum than the lives of the London men. And, in spite of these, many London men sighed for the pleasant country work. Whenever Humphrey heard a man speak of the leisure and peace of country journalism, he told them of Easterham and its dreadful monotony.