Roll-Call — Part 1, Chapter 2, part 1

I

More than two months later George came into the office in Russell Square an hour or so after his usual time.

He had been to South Kensington Museum to look up, for professional purposes, some scale drawings of architectural detail which were required for a restaurant then rising in Piccadilly under the direction of Lucas & Enwright.

In his room Mr. Everard Lucas was already seated.

Mr. Lucas was another articled pupil of the firm; being a remote cousin of the late senior partner, he had entered on special terms.

Although a year older than George he was less advanced, for whereas George had passed the Intermediate, Mr. Lucas had not.

But in manly beauty, in stylishness, in mature tact, and especially in persuasive charm, he could beat George.

"Hallo!"

Lucas greeted.

"How do you feel?

Fit?"

"Fit?"

said George enthusiastically "I feel so fit I could push in the side of a house."

"What did I tell you?"

said Lucas.

George rubbed his hand all over Lucas's hair, and Lucas thereupon seized George's other hand and twisted his arm, and a struggle followed.

In this way they would often lovingly salute each other of a morning.

Lucas had infected George with the craze for physical exercises as a remedy for all ills and indiscretions, including even late nights and excessive smoking.

The competition between them to excel in the quality of fitness was acute, and sometimes led to strange challenges.

After a little discussion about springing from the toes, Lucas now accused George's toes of a lack of muscularity, and upon George denying the charge, he asserted that George could not hang from the mantelpiece by his toes.

They were both men of the world, capable of great heights of dignity, figures in an important business, aspirants to a supreme art and profession.

They were at that moment in a beautiful late-eighteenth-century house of a stately and renowned square, and in a room whose proportions and ornament admittedly might serve as an exemplar to the student; and not the least lovely feature of the room was the high carved mantelpiece.

The morning itself was historic, for it was the very morning upon which, President McKinley having expired, Theodore Roosevelt ascended the throne and inaugurated a new era.

Nevertheless, such was their peculiar time of life that George, a minute later, was as a fact hanging by his toes from the mantelpiece, while Lucas urged him to keep the blood out of his head.

George had stood on his hands on a box and lodged his toes on the mantelpiece, and then raised his hands--and Lucas had softly pushed the box away.

George's watch was dangling against his flushed cheek.

"Put that box back, you cuckoo!"

George exploded chokingly.

Then the door opened and Mr. Enwright appeared.

Simultaneously some shillings slipped out of George's pocket and rolled about the floor.

The hour was Mr. Enwright's customary hour of arrival, but he had no fair excuse for passing through that room instead of proceeding along the corridor direct to the principals' room.

His aspect, as he gazed at George's hair and at the revealed sateen back of George's waistcoat, was unusual.

Mr. Enwright commonly entered the office full of an intense and aggrieved consciousness of his own existence--of his insomnia, of the reaction upon himself of some client's stupidity, of the necessity of going out again in order to have his chin lacerated by his favourite and hated Albanian barber.

But now he had actually forgotten himself.

"What _is_ this?"

he demanded.

Lucas having quickly restored the box, George subsided dangerously thereon, and arose in a condition much disarrayed and confused, and beheld Mr. Enwright with shame.

"I--I was just looking to see if the trap of the chimney was shut," said George.

It was foolish in the extreme, but it was the best he could do, and after all it was a rather marvellous invention.

Lucas sat down and made no remark.

"You might respect the mantelpiece," said Mr. Enwright bitterly, and went into the principals' room, where John Orgreave could be heard dictating letters.

George straightened his clothes and picked up his money, and the two men of the world giggled nervously at each other.

Mr. Haim next disturbed them.

The shabby, respectable old man smiled vaguely, with averted glance.

"I think he's heard the result," said he.

Both men knew that 'he' was Mr. Enwright, and that the 'result' was the result of the open competition for the £150,000 Law Courts which a proud provincial city proposed to erect for itself.

The whole office had worked very hard on the drawings for that competition throughout the summer, while cursing the corporation which had chosen so unusual a date for sending-in day.

Even Lucas had worked.

George's ideas for certain details, upon which he had been engaged on the evening of his introduction to Mr. Haim's household, had been accepted by Mr. Enwright.

As for Mr. Enwright, though the exigencies of his beard, and his regular morning habit of inveighing against the profession at great length, and his inability to decide where he should lunch, generally prevented him from beginning the day until three o'clock in the afternoon, Mr. Enwright had given many highly concentrated hours of creative energy to the design.

And Mr. Haim had adorned the sheets with the finest lettering.

The design was held to be very good.

The principals knew the identity of all the other chief competitors and their powers, and they knew also the idiosyncrasies of the Assessor; and their expert and impartial opinion was that the Lucas & Enwright design ought to win and would win.

This view, indeed, was widespread in the arcana of the architectural world.

George had gradually grown certain of victory.

And yet, at Mr. Haim's words, his hopes sank horribly away.

"Have we won?"

he asked sharply.

"That I can't say, Mr. Cannon," answered Haim.

"Well, then, how do you know he's heard?

Has he told you?"

"No," said the factotum mysteriously.

"But I think he's heard."

And upon this Mr. Haim slouched off quite calmly.

Often he had assisted at the advent of such vital news in the office--news obtained in advance by the principals through secret channels--and often the news had been bad.

But the firm's calamities seemed never to affect the smoothness of Mr. Haim's earthly passage.

The door into the principals' room opened, and Mr. Enwright's head showed.

The gloomy, resenting eyes fixed George for an instant.

"Well, you've lost that competition," said Mr. Enwright, and he stepped into full view.

His unseen partner had ceased to dictate, and the shorthand-clerk could be heard going out by the other door.

"No!"

said George, in a long, outraged murmur.

The news seemed incredible and quite disastrous; and yet at the same time had he not, in one unvisited corner of his mind, always foreknown it?

Suddenly he was distressed, discouraged, disillusioned about the whole of life.

He thought that Everard Lucas, screwing up a compass, was strangely unmoved.

But Mr. Enwright ignored Lucas.

"Who's got it?"

George asked.

"Whinburn."

"That chap!...

Where are _we_?"

"Nowhere."

"Not placed?"

"Not in it.

Skelting's second.

And Grant third.

I shouldn't have minded so much if Grant had got it.

There was something to be said for his scheme.

I knew _we_ shouldn't get it.

I knew that perfectly well--not with Corver assessing."

George wondered that his admired principal should thus state the exact opposite of what he had so often affirmed during the last few weeks.

People were certainly very queer, even the best of them.

The perception of this fact added to his puzzled woe.

"But Whinburn's design is grotesque!"

he protested borrowing one of Mr. Enwright's adjectives.

"Of course it is."

"Then why does Sir Hugh Corver go and give him the award?

Surely he must know----" "Know!"

Mr. Enwright growled, destroying Sir Hugh and his reputation and his pretensions with one single monosyllable.

"Then why did they make him Assessor--that's what I can't understand."

"It's quite simple," rasped Mr. Enwright.

"They made him assessor because he's got so much work to do it takes him all his time to trot about from one job to another on his blooming pony.

They made him assessor because his pony's a piebald pony.

Couldn't you think of that for yourself?

Or have you been stone deaf in this office for two years?

It stands to reason that a man who's responsible for all the largest new eyesores in London would impress any corporation.

Clever chap, Corver!

Instead of wasting his time in travel and study, he made a speciality of learning how to talk to committees.

And he was always full of ideas like the piebald pony, ever since I knew him."

"It's that façade that did for us," broke in another voice.

John Orgreave stood behind Mr. Enwright.

He spoke easily; he was not ruffled by the immense disappointment, though the mournful greatness of the topic had drawn him irresistibly into the discussion.

John Orgreave had grown rather fat and coarse.

At one period, in the Five Towns, he had been George's hero.

He was so no longer.

George was still fond of him, but he had torn him down from the pedestal and established Mr. Enwright in his place.

George in his heart now somewhat patronized the placid Orgreave, regarding him as an excellent person who comprehended naught that was worth comprehending, and as a husband who was the dupe of his wife.

"You couldn't have any other façade," Mr. Enwright turned on him, "unless you're absolutely going to ignore the market on the other side of the Square.

Whinburn's façade is an outrage--an outrage.

Give me a cigarette.

I must run out and get shaved."

While Mr. Enwright was lighting the cigarette, George reflected in desolation upon the slow evolving of the firm's design for the Law Courts.

Again and again in the course of the work had he been struck into a worshipping enthusiasm by the brilliance of Mr. Enwright's invention and the happy beauty of his ideas.

For George there was only one architect in the world; he was convinced that nobody could possibly rival Mr. Enwright, and that no Law Courts ever had been conceived equal to those Law Courts.

And he himself had contributed something to the creation.

He had dreamed of the building erected and of being able to stand in front of some detail of it and say to himself: "That was my notion, that was."

And now the building was destroyed before its birth.

It would never come into existence.

It was wasted.

And the prospect for the firm of several years' remunerative and satisfying labour had vanished.

But the ridiculous, canny Whinburn would be profitably occupied, and his grotesque building would actually arise, and people would praise it, and it would survive for centuries--at any rate for a century.

Mr. Enwright did not move.

"It's no use regretting the façade, Orgreave," he said suddenly.

"There's such a thing as self-respect."

"I don't see that self-respect's got much to do with it," Orgreave replied lightly.

("Of course you don't," George thought.

"You're a decent sort, but you don't see, and you never will see.

Even Lucas doesn't see.

I alone see."

And he felt savage and defiant.

) "Better shove my self-respect away into this cupboard, I suppose!"

said Mr. Enwright, with the most acrid cynicism, and he pulled open one door of a long, low cupboard whose top formed a table for portfolios, dusty illustrated books, and other accumulations.

The gesture was dramatic, and none knew it better than Mr. Enwright.

The cupboard was the cupboard which contained the skeleton.

It was full of designs rejected in public competitions.

There they lay, piles and piles of them, the earliest dating from the late seventies.

The cupboard was crammed with the futility of Enwright's genius.

It held monuments enough to make illustrious a score of cities.

Lucas & Enwright was a successful firm.

But, confining itself chiefly to large public works, it could not escape from the competition system; and it had lost in far more competitions than it had won.

It was always, and always would be, at the mercy of an Assessor.

The chances had always been, and always would be, against the acceptance of its designs, because they had the fatal quality of originality combined with modest adherence to the classical tradition.

When they conquered, it was by sheer force.

George glanced at the skeleton, and he was afraid.

Something was very wrong with architecture.

He agreed with Mr. Enwright's tiresomely reiterated axiom that it was the Cinderella of professions and the chosen field of ghastly injustice.

He had embraced architecture; he had determined to follow exactly in the footsteps of Mr. Enwright; he had sworn to succeed.

But could he succeed?

Suppose he failed!

Yes, his faith faltered.

He was intensely, miserably afraid.

He was the most serious man in Russell Square.

Astounding that only a few minutes ago he had hung triumphantly by his feet from the mantelpiece!

Mr. Enwright kicked-to the door of the cupboard.

"Look here," he said to his partner, "I shan't be back just yet.

I have to go and see Bentley.

I'd forgotten it."

Nobody was surprised at this remark.

Whenever Mr. Enwright was inconveniently set back he always went off to visit Bentley, the architect of the new Roman Catholic Cathedral at Westminster, on the plea of an urgent appointment.

"_You_ had a look at the cathedral lately?"

he demanded of George as he left.

"No, I haven't," said George, who, by reason of a series of unaccountable omissions, and of the fullness of his life as an architect and a man of the world, had never seen the celebrated cathedral at all.

"Well," said Mr. Enwright sarcastically, "better take just a glance at it--some time--before they've spoilt the thing with decorations.

There's a whole lot of 'em only waiting till Bentley's out of the way to begin and ruin it."

II

Before the regular closing hour of the office the two articled pupils had left and were walking side by side through Bloomsbury.

They skirted the oval garden of Bedford Square, which, lying off the main track to the northern termini, and with nothing baser in it than a consulate or so, took precedence in austerity and selectness over Russell Square, which had consented to receive a grand hotel or 'modern caravanserai' and a shorthand school.

Indeed the aspect of Bedford Square, where the great institution of the basement and area still flourished in perfection, and wealthy menials with traditional manners lived sensually in caves beneath the spacious, calm salons of their employers and dupes,--the aspect of Bedford Square gave the illusion that evolution was not, and that Bloomsbury and the whole impressive structure of British society could never change.

Still, from a more dubious Bloomsbury, demure creatures with inviting, indiscreet eyes were already traversing the prim flags of Bedford Square on their way to the evening's hard diplomacy.

Mr. Lucas made quiet remarks about their qualities, but George did not respond.

"Look here, old man," said Lucas, "there's no use in all this gloom.

You might think Lucas & Enwright had never put up a building in their lives.

Just as well to dwell now and then on what they have done instead of on what they haven't done.

We're fairly busy, you know.

Besides----" He spoke seriously, tactfully, with charm, and he had a beautiful voice.

"Quite right!

Quite right!"

George willingly agreed, swinging his stick and gazing straight ahead.

And he thought: "This chap has got his head screwed on.

He's miles wiser than I am, and he's really nice.

I could never be nice like that."

In a moment they were at the turbulent junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, where crowds of Londoners, deeply unconscious of their own vulgarity, and of the marvellous distinction of Bedford Square, and of the moral obligation to harmonize socks with neckties, were preoccupying themselves with omnibuses and routes, and constituting the spectacle of London.

The high-heeled, demure creatures were lost in this crowd, and Lucas and George were lost in it.

"Well," said Lucas, halting on the pavement.

"You're going down to the cathedral."

"It'll please the old cock," answered George, anxious to disavow any higher motive.

"You aren't coming?"

Lucas shook his head.

"I shall just go and snatch a hasty"....

'Cup of tea' was the unuttered end of the sentence.

"Puffin's?"

Lucas nodded.

Puffin's was a cosy house of sustenance in a half-new street on the site of the razed slums of St. Giles's. He would not frequent the orthodox tea-houses, which were all alike and which had other serious disadvantages.

He adventured into the unusual, and could always demonstrate that what he found was subtly superior to anything else.

"That affair still on?"

George questioned.

"It's not off."

"She's a nice little thing--that I will say."

"It all depends," Lucas replied sternly.

"I don't mind telling you she wasn't so jolly nice on Tuesday."

"Wasn't she?"

George raised his eyebrows.

Lucas silently scowled, and his handsomeness vanished for an instant.

"However----" he said.

As George walked alone down Charing Cross Road, he thought: "That girl will have to look out,"--meaning that in his opinion Lucas was not a man to be trifled with.

Lucas was a wise and an experienced man, and knew the world.

And what he did could not be other than right.

This notion comforted George, who had a small affair of his own, which he had not yet even mentioned to Lucas.

Delicacy as well as diffidence had prevented him from doing so.

It was a very different affair from any of Lucas's, and he did not want Lucas to misesteem it; neither did he want Lucas to be under the temptation to regard him as a ninny.

Not the cathedral alone had induced George to leave the office early.

The dissembler had reflected that if he called in a certain conventional tea-shop near Cambridge Circus at a certain hour he would probably meet Marguerite Haim.

He knew that she had an appointment with one of her customers, a firm of bookbinders, that afternoon, and that on similar occasions she had been to the tea-shop.

In fact he had already once deliciously taken tea with her therein.

To-day he was disappointed, to the extent of the tea, for he met her as she was coming out of the shop.

Their greetings were rather punctilious, but beneath superficial formalities shone the proofs of intimacy.

They had had large opportunities to become intimate, and they had become intimate.

The immediate origin of and excuse for the intimacy was a lampshade.

George had needed a lampshade for his room, and she had offered to paint one.

She submitted sketches.

But George also could paint a bit.

Hence discussions, conferences, rival designs, and, lastly, an agreement upon a composite design.

Before long, the lampshade craze increasing in virulence, they had between them re-lampshaded the entire house.

Then the charming mania expired; but it had done its work.

During the summer holiday George had written twice to Marguerite, and he had thought pleasurably about her the whole time.

He had hoped that she would open the door for him upon his return, and that when he saw her again he would at length penetrate the baffling secret of her individuality.

She had opened the door for him, exquisitely, but the secret had not yielded itself.

It was astonishing to George, how that girl could combine the candours of honest intimacy with a profound reserve.

"Were you going in there for tea?"

she asked, looking up at him gravely.

"No," he said.

"I don't want any tea.

I have to wend my way to the Roman Catholic Cathedral--you know, the new one, near Victoria.

I suppose you wouldn't care to see it?"

"I should love to," she answered, with ingenuous eagerness.

"I think it might do me good."

A strange phrase, he thought!

What did she mean?

"Would you mind walking?"

she suggested.

"Let me take that portfolio, then."

So they walked.

She had her usual serious expression, as it were full of the consciousness of duty.

It made him think how reliable she would always be.

She held herself straight and independently, and her appearance was very simple and very trim.

He considered it wrong that a girl with such beautiful lips should have to consult callous bookbinders and accept whatever they chose to say.

To him she was like a lovely and valiant martyr.

The spectacle of her was touching.

However, he could not have dared to hint at these sentiments.

He had to pretend that her exposure to the stresses of the labour-market was quite natural and right.

Always he was careful in his speech with her.

When he got to know people he was apt to be impatient and ruthless; for example, to John Orgreave and his wife, and to his mother and stepfather, and sometimes even to Everard Lucas.

He would bear them down.

But he was restrained from such freedoms with Enwright, and equally with Marguerite Haim.

She did not intimidate him, but she put him under a spell.

Crossing Piccadilly Circus he had a glimpse of the rising walls and the scaffolding of the new restaurant.

He pointed to the building without a word.

She nodded and smiled.

In the Mall, where the red campanile of the cathedral was first descried, George began to get excited.

And he perceived that Marguerite sympathetically responded to his excitement.

She had never even noticed the campanile before, and the reason was that the cathedral happened not to be on the route between Alexandra Grove and her principal customers.

Suddenly, out of Victoria Street, they came up against the vast form of the Byzantine cathedral.

It was hemmed in by puny six-story blocks of flats, as ancient cathedrals also are hemmed in by the dwellings of townsfolk.

But here, instead of the houses having gathered about the cathedral, the cathedral had excavated a place for itself amid the houses.

Tier above tier the expensively curtained windows of dark drawing-rooms and bedrooms inhabited by thousands of the well-to-do blinked up at the colossal symbol that dwarfed them all.

George knew that he was late.

If the watchman's gate was shut for the night he would look a fool.

But his confidence in his magic power successfully to run risks sustained him in a gallant and assured demeanour.

The gate in the hoarding that screened the west front was open.

With a large gesture he tipped the watchman a shilling, and they passed in like princes.

The transition to the calm and dusty interior was instantaneous and almost overwhelming.

Immense without, the cathedral seemed still more immense within.

On one side of the nave was a steam-engine; on the other some sort of a mill; and everywhere lay in heaps the wild litter of construction, among which moved here and there little parties of aproned pygmies engaged silently and industriously on sub-contracts; the main army of labourers had gone.

The walls rose massively clear out of the white-powdered confusion into arches and high domes; and the floor of the choir, and a loftier floor beyond that, also rose clear.

Perspectives ended in shadow and were illimitable, while the afternoon light through the stone grille of the western windows made luminous spaces in the gloom.

The sensation of having the mysterious girl at his elbow in that wonder-striking interior was magnificent.

He murmured, with pride: "Do you know this place has the widest nave of any cathedral in the world?

It's a much bigger cathedral than St. Paul's. In fact I'm not sure if it isn't the biggest in England."

"You know," he said again, "in the whole of the nineteenth century only one cathedral was built in England."

"Which was that?"

"Truro....

And you could put Truro inside this and leave a margin all round.

Mr. Enwright says this is the last cathedral that ever will be built, outside America."

They gazed, more and more aware of a solemn miracle.

"It's marvellous--marvellous!"

he breathed.

After a few moments, glancing at her, a strong impulse to be confidential mastered him.

He was obliged to tell that girl.

"I say, we've lost that competition--for the Law Courts."

He smiled, but the smile had no effect.