And all the time he was learning,—learning more swiftly than any one else can learn, in the school of journalism, where every hour brings its short cut to knowledge and worldly wisdom.
The occasional separations from Lilian, however, modified a little the charm of going away. These orders to go out of town had a habit of coming at the most undesirable moments, generally upsetting any plans they had made together for spending an enjoyable evening somewhere.
"When we are married," said Humphrey, on the eve of a departure for Canterbury to describe the visit of a party of priests from France and Italy who were making a pilgrimage to the Cathedral, "when we are married, you shall come away with me. It's not bad fun, if the job isn't hard."
"I wish you didn't have to go away so often," she pouted.
There was a hint of conflict, but Humphrey was too blind to see it. He only wished he had to go away more often, for the measure of his success on The Day was in proportion to the frequency of special work they gave to him. "All will be well when we are married," he said, comforting her.
His love-story wove in and out of his daily work. The date of their marriage had not yet been fixed, because Ferrol was away somewhere in the south of France, and that business of the extra pound a week on his salary could not, of course, be settled until Ferrol came back. It seemed, too, that Lilian was in no hurry to be married; she loved these days of his wooing to linger, with their idyllic moments, and rapturous embraces, and the wistfulness of all too insufficient kisses.
For the period of engagement was to them a period of licensed kissing. Nor was it always possible to meet beneath the moon. Humphrey grew cunningly expert in finding places where they could kiss in broad daylight. There was an Italian restaurant in the Strand (now pulled down for improvement), which had an upstairs dining-room where nobody but themselves ever seemed to go, and then there was the National Gallery, surprisingly empty, where the screens holding the etchings gave them their desired privacy, and on Saturday afternoon they went in the upper circles of theatres, sometimes, on purpose not to see the play, but to sit in the deserted lounges during the acting, and enjoy each other's company. Their love-affair was tangled by circumstance; scamped and impeded—they made the best of it, and lived many hours of happiness.
And then, one day, when he least expected it, she said: "I suppose you ought to come down and see mother."
Humphrey went out to Battersea to the home of his betrothed. The circumstances of his visit were not happy. It was raining, and there is no city in the world so miserable as London when it rains. The house was in a rather dreary side-street, a long distance from Battersea Park, a mere unit in the army of similar houses, that were joined to one another in a straight row, fronted by railings that had once been newly painted, but were now grimed and blackened. These houses appalled one: they were absolutely devoid of any kind of beauty, never could they have been deemed beautiful by their architect. They were as flat-fronted and as hideously symmetrical as a doll's-house; nor, apparently, did the people who dwelt in them take any pains to lessen the hideousness of their exteriors: ghastly curtains were at every window, curtains of mid-Victorian ugliness, leaving a cone-shaped vacancy bounded by lace. In the windows of the lower floors one caught a glimpse of a table, with a vase on it, and dried grass in the vase, and behind the glass panes above the front doors there was, in house after house, as Humphrey walked down the street, a trumpery piece of crockery or some worthless china statuette, or the blue vase of the front window, with more grass in it, or a worse abomination in the shape of a circular fan of coloured paper.
Number twenty-three, to be sure, where Lilian lived, was, as far as the outside view was concerned, different from the other houses, in that there were real flowers in the window, instead of dried grass. Humphrey felt wet and miserable when he reached it; the rain had dripped through a hole in his umbrella, and had soaked the shoulder of his coat. He went up the steps and pulled the bell. He waited a little while, and happening to glance over the railings into the area, he saw a girl of rather untidy appearance look up at him, and quickly vanish, as if she had been detected in something that she had been forbidden to do. The girl, he noticed, had the same features, on a smaller scale, as Lilian: he supposed she was Florence. Then he heard footsteps in the passage, and through the ground-glass panels of the door he could see a vague form approaching. The next moment all memory of ugliness and squalor and the dismal day departed from him, as Lilian, the embodiment of all the beautiful in his life, stood before him, smiling a welcome. How she seemed to change her personality with every fresh environment in which they met! She was the same Lilian, yet vaguely a different one here, with her brown hair done just as charmingly yet not in the same way as she did it when they went to theatres in the evening. She wore a white muslin blouse, without a collar, and round her neck was a thin gold chain necklace which he had given her. Though he did not realize it at the time, his joy in her was purely physical; the mere sight of her bared neck and throat and the warm softness of her body was sufficient to make him believe that he loved her as he could never love anybody else; he sought no further than the surface; she was pretty, and she was agreeable to be his wife. He did not stop to think of anything else.