The partnership in Pump Court lasted for more than four years. After nicely judging the minimum of work which would carry him through his bar examinations, Jack surprised his friends by closing the former life of indolence with a snap. When assizes were on, he made an undiscriminating round of the North Eastern circuit, conducting a dock defence as though it were a state trial; in London he attended suburban county courts with as much zeal as if he had been sent special. During the Long Vacation he remained at the end of a wire; the Bar Point-to-Point was sacrificed without a murmur, and invitations during his working day seldom penetrated farther than the telephone in his clerk's room.
Once a year, indeed, he consented to meet his friends at dinner with Loring, but they were contracting new ties and professing enthusiasms which he did not share. Framlingham and Knightrider had been drilled into the professional rigidity and limited outlook of junior subalterns in crack regiments: Oakleigh was a politician, Pentyre a man of leisure; Summertown had abandoned diplomacy for the army—the life of a public danger for that of a private nuisance, as Valentine Arden, the novelist, complained in a moment of exasperation. Deganway, on the same authority, rested in the Foreign Office by day and spent tireless nights adding to the number of those who addressed him by his Christian name. O'Rane and Mayhew were abroad.
Had he ever felt the inclination, Jack professed to be without the time or energy to take part in a social life of dinners and dances. Exchanging one pose for another, he had ceased to be the arbiter of "good form," as that is understood at Eton and New College, and was aping the manners of an older generation; the new aloofness, like the old, dispensed him from doing anything that he did not like and gratified his faint but ineradicable sense of superiority. At night he now chose the society of his own profession at the County Club and steeped himself in forensic retorts discourteous and the aroma of judicial wit; by day he chopped leading cases at luncheon in Hall and smoked one cigarette in the Gardens, striding up and down with his chin deep on his white slips and his hands locked beneath the tails of his coat. He was too busy for week-end parties, too old to take his sister to dances.
"It doesn't do to be seen lunching at your club too much," he explained to Eric, when at the end of four years he had decided that the inconvenience of moving was less than that of continuing to live in the Temple. "People think you've no work. Trouble is, I'm getting no exercise. I think I shall have to move away so that I can get a walk in the morning."
Eric received the news with little surprise and hardly more regret. Jack was in chambers before he himself got up in the morning and in bed before the London News began to print off. The dissolution would only cost them an occasional half-hour's talk in the early evening and a rare Sunday walk when Jack was not staying at Red Roofs.
"Nineteen nine, nineteen five," Eric calculated. "We're twenty-six and we've had four years here. By the way, are you dining with Jim to-night? Give him my love and say I wish I could come too. It's no good, if I have to run away after the fish. I remember your father telling me that journalism was a dog's life. He never spoke a truer word."
"But you've done extraordinarily well," Jack insisted, rousing reluctantly from the contemplation of his own career. "What are you? Dramatic critic and assistant literary editor? And you're making a dam' sight more than I am. I've decided to give up this twopenny ha'penny criminal work. Otherwise I shall get left in a rut."
Eric was thinking less of his routine work than of four dog's-eared plays which he had sent the round of the London managers; a critic was ever one who could not create.
"The right people have died at the right time," he explained. "It's not quite what I hoped, though."
Jack knocked out his pipe and left Eric to finish his early dinner by himself. It was the anniversary of their last Phoenix Club gathering at Oxford; and for the last four years a dozen or more of them had contrived to meet at the end of every June. So far, O'Rane's pessimistic forecast had halted short of fulfilment; none was dead, none was bankrupt, though Draycott was living at Boulogne with a warrant in readiness for him, if he ever returned to England. Sinclair was married, but the others had not yet found time for triumph or disaster. If Eric enjoyed a good salary and a responsible position, they had been bought with hard work, unsleeping contrivance and two severe illnesses; the instant spectacular effect of Lord Byron's descent upon London remained a day dream.