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.
IV
You may call Fleet Street what you like, but the secret of it eludes you always. It has as many moods as a woman: it is the street of laughter and of tears, of adventure and dullness, of romance and reality, of promise and lost hopes, of conquest and broken men. Into its narrow neck are crammed all the hurrying life, the passions, the eager, beating hearts, the happiness and the sorrow of the broad streets East and West that lead to it. There is something in this thin, crooked street, holding in its body the essence of the world, that clutches at the imagination, something in the very atmosphere surrounding it which makes it different from all the other streets that are walked by men.
The stones and the old timber of some of its buildings are like the yellow parchment of some ancient manuscript, scribbled with faded history. There are chop-houses, and taverns, where the wigged and knee-breeched Puffs sat writing their tit-bits of scandal for the fashionable intelligence of the day; where Addison and Steele tapped their snuff-boxes and planned their letters to Mr Spectator; or, further back in the years, Shakespeare himself went Strandwards from Blackfriars up the narrow street where the gabled houses leaned to one another. Look, you can almost see the ghosts of Fleet Street pacing out of the little courts and alleys that lie athwart the street: you know that massive bulk of a man, walking ponderously, in drab-coloured coat and knee-breeches, and rather untidy stockings above his heavy, buckled shoes. He is in the street of a million words; other ghosts jostle him, and in the gallant company one sees Charles Dickens, dropping his manuscript stealthily into a dark letter-box, in a dark office, up a dark court; and all the dead men who have given their lives to the street, some of them foolishly wanton in wine—dead men shot in the wars, or burnt with fever, or wrecked with the struggle, come back ... come back to Fleet Street, to look wistfully at the lit windows, and listen to the throbbing music of the presses.
It lures you like a siren, coaxing with soft promises of prizes to be wrested from it: you shall be the favoured of the gods, and you become Sisyphus, rolling his stone eternally, day after day. Here are the things of life that you covet, they shall be yours, says the Street: and you are Tantalus, reaching out everlastingly, and grasping nothing, until your heart is parched within you. You shall be strong and mighty, it says, sapping your strength like Delilah, until you pull down the pillars of hope, and fall buried beneath the reckless ruins of your career.