The City in the Sea
Henry De Vere Stacpoole
9781465540393
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
One dry bright morning in early September, Robert Lestrange left his rooms in Cadogan Street, and, boarding a bus bound for Charing Cross climbed on to the roof. Robert was good to look at, though as a matter of fact he was not particularly good-looking, but he was young, well dressed, well groomed and clean, innocent-seeming and light-hearted; a person one might fancy most engaging to the eyes of girls and confidence trick men. At Charing Cross he dropped off the bus and took his way along the south side of the Strand, walking in a leisurely manner and absorbing the details around him. The Strand is much more than a street. It is the life of many nations, the activities of many men; the past and present all made visible and audible. In the Strand walk Henry Irving and Toole, no less surely than Berry and Godfrey Tearle; Disraeli no less living than Baldwin. It is an extension of the Bund of Nagasaki, and an earthquake in San Francisco tells of itself here an hour after the event. It has also some of the most delightful shops in the world. The shop, for instance, where the sporting guns and rifles are arranged for view and where the big game and the trees of the jungle show shadowlike behind the express rifles. Bobby hung before this window, absorbing its atmosphere of sport and adventure; then he went on, crossing the mystic boundary line that divides the West End from Newspaperland, on down Fleet Street and up White Lion Court to the doorway of No. 1, Mortimer Buildings. This is a bit of old London, and here, as in most bits of old London, Romance sits in gloom and, frankly, dirt: the leases have not fallen in, but the railings seem on the point of doing so, and the hall doorsteps up which Bobby went, and the steps of the stairs leading to the first floor, are hollowed out by the feet of generations. The offices of Beaman & Hare are situated on the first floor facing the court. The principal had not arrived, but Miss Hare was in and would see Mr. Lestrange if he would wait. He agreed to this reasonable proposition, took his seat in the tiny outer office, which was furnished with the Times, two chairs, a table, and a portrait of Thomas Hardy. Bobby was a writing man. You never would have guessed it following him down the Strand or now, as he sat nursing his knee, regardless of the literature on the table and waiting to interview Miss Hare. When old Nicholas Lestrange had gone broke over post-war industrials and died, and when the Government had done taxing the estate, his one and only child had found himself an orphan, possessed of the furniture of his room at Bibliol College, Oxford, expensive tastes, and two hundred a year to indulge them on. He did not grumble. He dropped Oxford, came to London with some good introductions, and plunged into the world of newspaperland. When you start to learn how to be a chef you have to start to learn how to wash up dishes. In Fleet Street it is the same. The great editor is great partly because he has been through the mill and knows every detail of his business; this Robert Lestrange found out after he had been a month in the Street of Adventure, also the fact that he was never likely to become a great editor. He had not the flair for news or the instinct for news values, and the morning paper that is furiously alive at breakfast time and dead at lunch seemed to him of all forms of the printed word the most ephemeral. Then he found, all at once and by accident, that he could write stories, that he could invent news much more interesting than the news in the papers, and doings much more intriguing (anyhow, more lasting in interest) than the doings of the people of Shoreditch and Belgravia as chronicled in the Press.
