There was no sudden transition from acquaintance to friendship, from friendship to love. He could not mark the stages of the development of their knowledge of one another. But before he was aware of its true meaning, once again the spirit of yearning3 and unrest took hold of him.
This time, his love was different from that abrupt4 love-affair with Lilian Filmer. Then untutored youth had broken its bounds, and love had swept him from his foothold. He had been ardent5, passionate6 in those days, the fervour of love had intoxicated7 him; but now, with this slow attachment8, his love was a different quality. Lilian, coming fresh upon the horizon of his hopes, bringing with her the promise of all that he needed in those days, had made a physical appeal to him. Always there was working, subconsciously9, in his mind, the thought of her desirability. She offered him material rewards; they were attracted to each other by the mutual10 disadvantages of their surroundings.
Their meeting, their abortive12 love-affair was the expression of the everlasting13 desire of the companionship of sex: they were, both of them, groping after things half-understood, towards a goal that looked glamorous14 in the incomplete vision they had of it.
[240]
But Elizabeth Carr appealed to the intellectual in him. No doubt the old primeval forces compelled him towards her, but they were far below the surface of his thoughts whenever the vision of Elizabeth rose before him. He could not describe the hold she had on his imagination. Her influence had been so subtly and gently exercised, that he had not noticed the power of it, until now he was dominated by the thought of her. The finer spirit that lies dormant15 in every man, except in the very basest, put forth16 its wings and awoke. In little questions of everyday honour he began to see things from Elizabeth's point of view: little, trivial questions of his dealings with mankind which jarred on Elizabeth's own code of morality. Unquestionably, he was better for her influence, better from the spiritual standpoint, but weaker altogether when judged by the standard of everyday life. Elizabeth preached the gospel of altruism17 not directly, but insidiously18, and he found himself adopting her views.
Hitherto his had been the grim doctrine19 of worldly success: those who would be strong must be ruthless and remorseless; there must be no halting consideration of the feelings of others. Though he did not realize it, his absorption of Elizabeth's ideals was weakening him, inevitably20.
The charity of her work, with its gentle benevolence21, was reflected in all her life. She gained happiness by self-sacrifice, and peace by warring against social evils. Their characters and temperaments22 conflicted whenever they met, and yet, after each meeting, it seemed to Humphrey that their friendship was arising on a firmer basis. Sometimes the shock of their opposing personalities23 would leave behind it quarrelsome echoes—not the echoes of an open quarrel, but the unmistakable suggestion of disagreement and dissatisfaction. He blundered about, trying to fathom24 her wishes, but[241] her individuality remained always to him a problem, inscrutably complex.
There were times, it seemed, when their spirits were in perfect agreement, when he was raised high in the wonder of the esteem25 in which she, obviously, held him. Those were the times when he came first to realize that he loved her: and the audacity26 of his discovery filled him with dismay. He knew that she was altogether superior; she lived exalted27 in thought and deed in a plane far above him. They met, it is true, over tea, or at a theatre, just as if they both inhabited the same sphere, but, in spite of that, they were as separate planets, whirling in their own orbits, rushing together for an instant, meeting for a fraction of time, and soaring away once more until again they drew together.
And, even when understanding of her seemed nearest to him, she suddenly receded28 from his grasp. A change of voice, a change of expression, a movement of her body—what was it? He did not know. He only knew that something he had said had separated them: she could become, in a moment, distant and unattainable, another woman altogether, coldly antagonistic29.
Yet, by the old symptoms, he knew that he loved her. She persisted in his thoughts with an alarming result. He found himself pausing, pen in hand, at his desk in the reporters' room, thinking, "Would Elizabeth be pleased with this?..." And an impulse that needed all his strength to combat seized him to abandon the set form into which The Day had cast his thoughts, to criticize and to express his own individual impression, whether they accorded or not with the views held by The Day. This was altogether new and disturbing. He was a mouthpiece whose mere30 duty was to record the words of others by interviews, or a painter to present pictures and not opinions. Conscience and convictions were luxuries that belonged to the critics of art, and the leader-writers.
[242]
There came to him days of unqualified unhappiness, when he was possessed31 by doubts. For the first time he mistrusted the value of his work: he began to see that the fundamental truths of life were outside his scope. Cities might be festering with immorality32 and slums; vice33 might parade openly, but these things could never be touched on in a daily newspaper. Nobody was to blame, least of all those who controlled the newspaper, for it is not the business of a daily to deal with the morals of existence.... It is not easy to analyse his feelings ... but, as a result of all this vague tormenting34 and apprehension35, the old thrill at the power and wonder of the office which throbbed36 with daily activities forsook37 him, leaving in its place nothing but the desolating38 knowledge of the littleness and futility39 of it all.
The phase passed: the variety of the work enthralled40 him again. He travelled to distant towns and remote villages, and whenever he was in the grip of his work, all thoughts of Elizabeth Carr departed from him. He obtained extraordinary glimpses into the lives of other people; he acquired a knowledge into the working of things that was denied to those who only gleaned41 their knowledge second-hand42 from the things that he and others wrote. He saw things all day long: the plottings, the achievements and the failures of mankind.
The other men of the Street flitted into his life and out again at the decree of circumstance. For a week, perhaps, half-a-dozen of them would be thrown together in some part of England. They met at the hotels; they formed friendships, and they parted again, knowing, with the fatalism of their craft, that they would forgather perhaps next week, perhaps next year. There was no sentiment in these friendships.
There were the photographers, too. A new race of men had come into Fleet Street, claiming kinship with[243] the reporters, yet divided by difference of thought and outlook upon news. They were remarkable43 in their way, the product of the picture daily paper. And their coming marked the doom44 of the artist illustrators in the newspapers. They were the newest of the new generation, shattering every conception even of the younger men of the manner in which a journalist should perform his duty. The photographers were drawn45, as a class, from the studios and operating-rooms of the professional photographer. They forsook the posing of babies and young men in frock coats for the photographic quest of news.
Their finger-tips and nails were brown with the stain of iodoform, and for them there was no concealment46 of their profession, for they went through life with the burden of their cameras slung47 over their shoulders. Their audacity was astounding48, even to Humphrey and his friends, who knew the necessity of audacity themselves.
They ranged themselves outside the Law Courts, or the Houses of Parliament, or wherever one of the many interests of the day centred, and when a litigant49 or a Cabinet Minister appeared, a dozen men closed towards him, their cameras at the level of their eyes, and a dozen intermittent50 "clicking" noises marked the achievement of their quest. They saw life in pictures; a speech was nothing to them but the open mouth and the raised arm of the speaker; the poignancy51 of death left them unmoved before the need of focus and exposure.
The difficulties of their work seemed so immense to Humphrey that reporting seemed child's play beside it. For not only had they actually to be on the spot, to overcome prejudices and barriers, but, once there, they had to select and group their picture, and to reckon with the light and time. And though the photographers and the reporters were far removed from one another by the external nature of their work, though neither class saw life from the identical standpoint, yet they were interdependent,[244] and linked by the same ceaseless forces working towards one common end....
Sometimes, also, in out-of-the-way places, Humphrey met men who reminded him of his days on the Easterham Gazette, men with attenuated52 minds who were even more absorbed in their work than the London reporter. They had a shameless way of never concealing53 their identity: they were always the "reporter"; some of them never saw the dignity of their calling, they were careless of speech and appearance, seeming to place themselves on the level of inferior people, and submitting to the undisguised contempt of the little local authorities, who spoke54 to them scornfully as "You reporters."
Yet, among these, Humphrey found scholars and men of strange experience. Their salaries were absurdly low for the work they did—thirty shillings to two pounds a week was the average; their lives were a thousand times more dismal55 and humdrum56 than the lives of the London men. And, in spite of these, many London men sighed for the pleasant country work. Whenever Humphrey heard a man speak of the leisure and peace of country journalism57, he told them of Easterham and its dreadful monotony.
He had interior glimpses, too, of other newspaper offices; not a town in the kingdom without its sheet of printed paper, and its reporter recording58 the day or the week. These offices held his imagination by their sameness. Whether it was Belfast or Birmingham, Edinburgh or Exeter, their plan was uniform. There was always the narrow room, with its paper-strewn desks or tables at which the reporters sat; always the same air of hazy59 smoke hovered60 level with the electric-light bulbs; the same type of alert-eyed men, with the taut61 lips and frown of those who think swiftly, came into the room, smoking a cigarette or a pipe (but rarely a cigar), and brought with them a familiar suggestion of careless[245] good-fellowship as they sat down to the work of transcribing62 their notes. And, always, wherever he went, the pungent63 smell of printer's ink was in his nostrils64, the metallic65 rustle66 of shifting types from the linotype room, and the deep, rumbling67 sound of machinery68 in his ears.
Ah, when he got down to the machines that moved it all, he probed to the depths of the simple greatness. Those big, strong men who worked below it all, and lived by the labour of it, made a parable69 of the whole social system. Of what avail would all their writing be, if it were not for the men and the machines below?
Once he went down the stone steps to the high-roofed basement of The Day. He went at midnight, just when the printing was about to begin. It was as if he had penetrated70 into the utmost secrecy71 of the office. Here were the things of which nobody seemed to think; here, again, were men in their aprons72 stained with grease and oily ink; men with bare, strong arms lifting the curved plates of metal, and fixing them to the cylinders73; each man doing his allotted74 work, oiling a bearing here, tightening75 a nut there, moving busily about the mighty76 growth of machinery that filled the brightly lit room. The sight of that tangle77 of iron and steel confused his thoughts. He understood nothing of it all. Those great machines rose before him, towering massively to the roof, tier upon tier of black and glittering metal, with rods and cranks, and weird78 gaps here and there showing their bowels79 of polished steel. The enormous rolls of paper which he had seen carried on carts and hoisted80 many a time into the paper-department of the office, were waiting by each machine, threaded on to a rod of steel. Their blank whiteness reflected the light of the electric lamps.
And then, suddenly, a red light glowed, and somebody shouted, and a man turned a small wheel in the wall—just[246] as a motor-car driver turns the wheel of the steering81 gear—and the great machines broke into thunderous noises. The din11 was appalling82. It was loud and continuous, and the clamour of it deadened the ears.
Humphrey looked and saw the white reels of paper spinning, and, through the forest of iron and steel, he could trace a cascade83 of running whiteness, as the paper was spun84 between the rollers, up and down and across, until it met the curved plates of type, and ran beneath them, to reappear black with the printed words. And the columns looked like blurred85, thin lines in the incredible rapidity of the passing paper. The moments were magical; he tried to follow the course of this everlasting ribbon of paper, but he could not. He saw it disappear and come into his vision again. He saw it speed and vanish along a triangular86 slab87 of steel, downwards88 into the invisible intricacies that took it and folded it into two and four and eight pages, cut it and patted it into shape, and tossed it out, quire after quire, a living, printed thing—The Day.
And everywhere, wherever he glanced at the turbulent, roaring machines, little screws were working, silent wheels were spinning, small, thin rods were moving almost imperceptibly to and fro, to and fro. He saw great rollers touching89 the gutters90 of ink, transmitting their inky touch to other rollers, spinning round and round and round; and the paper, speeding through it all, from the great white web to the folded sheets that were snatched up by waiting men and bundled into a lift, upwards91 into the night where the carts were waiting.
And the force of the noise was dreadful, and the power of the machines perpetual and relentless92 as they flung from them, with such terrible ease, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of square, folded papers.
They looked as if they could crush the lives of men in the swift snare93 of their machinery.
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1
merged
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| （使）混合( merge的过去式和过去分词 )； 相融； 融入； 渐渐消失在某物中 | |
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2
intervals
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| n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息 | |
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3
yearning
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| a.渴望的；向往的；怀念的 | |
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abrupt
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| adj.突然的，意外的；唐突的，鲁莽的 | |
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5
ardent
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，强烈的，烈性的 | |
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6
passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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intoxicated
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| 喝醉的，极其兴奋的 | |
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8
attachment
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| n.附属物，附件；依恋；依附 | |
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9
subconsciously
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| ad.下意识地，潜意识地 | |
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10
mutual
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| adj.相互的，彼此的；共同的，共有的 | |
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din
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| n.喧闹声，嘈杂声 | |
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12
abortive
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| adj.不成功的，发育不全的 | |
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13
everlasting
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| adj.永恒的，持久的，无止境的 | |
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14
glamorous
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| adj.富有魅力的；美丽动人的；令人向往的 | |
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15
dormant
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| adj.暂停活动的；休眠的；潜伏的 | |
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16
forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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altruism
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| n.利他主义，不自私 | |
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18
insidiously
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| 潜在地，隐伏地，阴险地 | |
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19
doctrine
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| n.教义；主义；学说 | |
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20
inevitably
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| adv.不可避免地；必然发生地 | |
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21
benevolence
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| n.慈悲，捐助 | |
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22
temperaments
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| 性格( temperament的名词复数 )； （人或动物的）气质； 易冲动； （性情）暴躁 | |
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23
personalities
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| n. 诽谤，（对某人容貌、性格等所进行的）人身攻击； 人身攻击；人格, 个性, 名人( personality的名词复数 ) | |
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24
fathom
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| v.领悟，彻底了解 | |
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25
esteem
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| n.尊敬，尊重；vt.尊重，敬重；把…看作 | |
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audacity
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| n.大胆，卤莽，无礼 | |
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27
exalted
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| adj.(地位等)高的，崇高的；尊贵的，高尚的 | |
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28
receded
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| v.逐渐远离( recede的过去式和过去分词 )；向后倾斜；自原处后退或避开别人的注视；尤指问题 | |
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29
antagonistic
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| adj.敌对的 | |
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30
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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31
possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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32
immorality
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| n. 不道德, 无道义 | |
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33
vice
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| n.坏事；恶习；[pl.]台钳，老虎钳；adj.副的 | |
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34
tormenting
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| 使痛苦的，使苦恼的 | |
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35
apprehension
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| n.理解，领悟；逮捕，拘捕；忧虑 | |
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36
throbbed
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| 抽痛( throb的过去式和过去分词 )； （心脏、脉搏等）跳动 | |
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37
forsook
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| forsake的过去式 | |
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38
desolating
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| 毁坏( desolate的现在分词 )； 极大地破坏； 使沮丧； 使痛苦 | |
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39
futility
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| n.无用 | |
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40
enthralled
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| 迷住，吸引住( enthrall的过去式和过去分词 )； 使感到非常愉快 | |
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41
gleaned
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| v.一点点地收集（资料、事实）( glean的过去式和过去分词 )；（收割后）拾穗 | |
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42
second-hand
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| adj.用过的，旧的，二手的 | |
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43
remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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44
doom
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| n.厄运，劫数；v.注定，命定 | |
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45
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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46
concealment
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| n.隐藏, 掩盖，隐瞒 | |
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47
slung
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| 抛( sling的过去式和过去分词 )； 吊挂； 遣送； 押往 | |
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48
astounding
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| adj.使人震惊的vt.使震惊，使大吃一惊astound的现在分词) | |
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49
litigant
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| n.诉讼当事人；adj.进行诉讼的 | |
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50
intermittent
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| adj.间歇的，断断续续的 | |
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51
poignancy
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| n.辛酸事，尖锐 | |
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52
attenuated
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| v.（使）变细( attenuate的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）变薄；（使）变小；减弱 | |
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53
concealing
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| v.隐藏，隐瞒，遮住( conceal的现在分词 ) | |
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54
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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55
dismal
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| adj.阴沉的，凄凉的，令人忧郁的，差劲的 | |
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56
humdrum
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| adj.单调的，乏味的 | |
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57
journalism
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| n.新闻工作，报业 | |
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58
recording
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| n.录音，记录 | |
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59
hazy
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| adj.有薄雾的，朦胧的；不肯定的，模糊的 | |
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60
hovered
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| 鸟( hover的过去式和过去分词 )； 靠近（某事物）； （人）徘徊； 犹豫 | |
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61
taut
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| adj.拉紧的，绷紧的，紧张的 | |
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62
transcribing
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| （用不同的录音手段）转录( transcribe的现在分词 )； 改编（乐曲）（以适应他种乐器或声部）； 抄写； 用音标标出（声音） | |
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63
pungent
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| adj.（气味、味道）刺激性的，辛辣的；尖锐的 | |
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64
nostrils
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| 鼻孔( nostril的名词复数 ) | |
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65
metallic
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| adj.金属的；金属制的；含金属的；产金属的；像金属的 | |
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66
rustle
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| v.沙沙作响；偷盗(牛、马等)；n.沙沙声声 | |
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67
rumbling
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| n. 隆隆声, 辘辘声 adj. 隆隆响的 动词rumble的现在分词 | |
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68
machinery
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| n.(总称)机械，机器；机构 | |
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69
parable
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| n.寓言，比喻 | |
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70
penetrated
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| adj. 击穿的，鞭辟入里的 动词penetrate的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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71
secrecy
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| n.秘密，保密，隐蔽 | |
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72
aprons
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| 围裙( apron的名词复数 )； 停机坪，台口（舞台幕前的部份） | |
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73
cylinders
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| n.圆筒( cylinder的名词复数 )；圆柱；汽缸；（尤指用作容器的）圆筒状物 | |
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74
allotted
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| 分配，拨给，摊派( allot的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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75
tightening
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| 上紧，固定，紧密 | |
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76
mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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77
tangle
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| n.纠缠；缠结；混乱；v.(使)缠绕；变乱 | |
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78
weird
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| adj.古怪的，离奇的；怪诞的，神秘而可怕的 | |
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bowels
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| n.肠，内脏，内部；肠( bowel的名词复数 )；内部，最深处 | |
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80
hoisted
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| 把…吊起，升起( hoist的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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81
steering
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| n.操舵装置 | |
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82
appalling
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| adj.骇人听闻的，令人震惊的，可怕的 | |
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83
cascade
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| n.小瀑布，喷流；层叠；vi.成瀑布落下 | |
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84
spun
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| v.纺，杜撰，急转身 | |
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85
blurred
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| v.（使）变模糊( blur的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）难以区分；模模糊糊；迷离 | |
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86
triangular
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| adj.三角（形）的，三者间的 | |
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87
slab
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| n.平板，厚的切片；v.切成厚板，以平板盖上 | |
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88
downwards
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| adj./adv.向下的（地），下行的（地） | |
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touching
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| adj.动人的，使人感伤的 | |
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90
gutters
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| （路边）排水沟( gutter的名词复数 )； 阴沟； （屋顶的）天沟； 贫贱的境地 | |
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91
upwards
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| adv.向上，在更高处...以上 | |
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92
relentless
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| adj.残酷的，不留情的，无怜悯心的 | |
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snare
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| n.陷阱，诱惑，圈套；（去除息肉或者肿瘤的）勒除器；响弦，小军鼓；vt.以陷阱捕获，诱惑 | |
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