Once you have answered the voice of the siren, you are taken in the magic spell. Beat your breast, and exclaim in agony, but nothing will avail, for if you leave the Street, the quiet world will seem void for ever, and, as the ghosts burn backwards through space, so shall you return to the old agitations and longings.
This was the Street to which young Humphrey Quain came on a January morning, riding triumphantly on the top of an omnibus. As he passed the fantastic Griffin, with its open jaws and monstrous scaly wings, like a warder guarding those who would escape, Fleet Street seemed to be the Street of Conquest.
It was a rare, crisp day, with a touch of frost in the air, and the sun clear and high in the heavens, above the tangle of wires and cables that almost roofed the Street. The traffic was beating up and down, with frequent blocks, here and there, as a heavy hooded van staggered up from Whitefriars or Bouverie Street. It was nearly mid-day, and the light two-wheeled carts were pouring out of Shoe Lane, or coming from Salisbury Square with the early editions of the afternoon papers. Newsboys on bicycles, with sacks of papers swung over their backs, seemed to be risking their lives every moment as they flashed into the thick of the traffic, clinging to hansoms, and sliding between drays and omnibuses, out of the press, until they could get through the narrow neck of Fleet Street towards the West.
Humphrey breathed deeply as he looked about him: the names of the newspapers were blazoned everywhere. Heavens! what a world of paper and ink this was, to be sure. The doors, the windows and the letter-boxes bore the titles of newspapers—all the newspapers that were. Every room, on every floor, was inhabited by the representatives of some paper or other: on the musty top windows he could read the titles of journals in Canada and Australia; great golden letters bulged across the buildings telling of familiar newspapers. The houses were an odd mixture of modernity and antiquity, they jostled each other in their cramped space; narrow buildings squeezed between high, red offices with plate-glass windows, and over and above the irregular roofs the wires spread thin threads against the sky, wires that gave and received news from the uttermost ends of the earth.
The letters in white enamel or gold on the windows told of Paris and Berlin, of Rotterdam and Vienna; here they marked the home of a religious paper, there the office of a trade paper, and hard by it The Sportsman, with its windows full of prize-fighters' photographs and a massive silver belt in a plush case, for the possession of which Porky Smith and Jewey Brown were coming to blows. Every branch of human activity, all the intricate complexities of modern life seemed to be represented either by a room or the fifth part of a room in Fleet Street.
And, rising out of the riot of narrow buildings, huddled closely to each other, the great homes of the daily papers stood up as landmarks. Here were the London offices of the important provincial papers, which spoke nightly with Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield and Liverpool—plate-glass windows and large letters gave them a handsome enough appearance, but they looked comparatively insignificant beside the tall red building of The Sentinel, and the new green-glazed establishment of The Wire, while the grey, enormous offices of The Day dwarfed them all. There was something solid about The Day as it stood four-square firmly in the Street, with its great letters sprawled across the front, golden by day, and golden with electric light in the night-time.
It seemed almost as if The Day had nudged the other great papers out of Fleet Street, for in the side streets, in Bouverie Street, and Whitefriars Street, and in Shoe Lane, the remainder of the London papers found their homes, with the exception of the high-toned Morning Courier, which found itself at the western end of the Street past the Law Courts.
But The Day, with its arrogant dome-tower (lit up at nights), its swinging glass doors and braided commissionaires, was the most typical of the modern newspaper world. It was just such a place as Humphrey Quain had dreamed. The swing doors were always on the move; the people were coming and going quickly—here was action, and all the movement and the business of life.