VI
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.
They met in a chop-house by Temple Bar, a strange place, where the lower floor was packed with keen-faced men from the Courts of Justice over the way and the Temple at the back. They sat crowded together, abandoning all comfort in the haste to enjoy the luxury of the chops and steaks for which the house was famed.
There were no table-cloths on the round tables, where coffee-cups and plates of poached eggs and rounds of toast jostled each other. Only in England would people sit with joy and eat cheek by jowl in this fashion, with the smell of coffee and hot food in their nostrils, and the clatter of plates and knives and forks in their ears.
Upstairs men played chess and dominoes over coffee and rolls, cracking their boiled eggs with difficulty in the cramped space.
Humphrey heard a voice hail him as he threaded his way between the tables. He looked back and saw Beaver waving a friendly fork at him.
"Hullo!" cried Beaver, shifting his chair away a few inches, and seriously incommoding a grey-haired man so absorbed in his game of chess that his coffee was cold and untouched. "Come and sit here," cried Beaver.
They shook hands. "Well, how goes it?" Humphrey asked. "Still with the nose to the grindstone?"
"That's it," Beaver said. Their positions had been changed since the days of Easterham, when Beaver seemed miles above him in worldly success. He remembered the day Beaver left for London, to embark on a career which shone clear and brilliant in Humphrey's imagination. "Write in!" Those had been Beaver's last words. "Write in. That's what I did." The vision of it all rose before him now, as he sat by Beaver: the dingy office, with the scent of the fishmonger next door, the auctioneer's bills on the walls, with samples of mourning and wedding cards, and tradesmen's invoice headings, to show the excellence of the Gazette's jobbing department. And now—? He was conscious of a change in Beaver's attitude towards him.