men who wrote for the papers, who sub-edited papers, who designed
posters, who were always just the same. One forgot them for a year or
two, one came across them again and found them just the same--still
writing for the same papers, still sub-editing the same papers,
designing the same posters. I was in the mood to rediscover them in the
privacies of their hearths, with the same excellent wives making fair
copies of the same manuscripts, with the same gaiety of the same
indifferent whiskey, brown or pale or suspicious-looking, in heavy,
square, cut-glass stoppered decanters, and with the same indifferent
Virginian tobacco at the same level in the same jars.

I was in the mood for this stability, for the excellent household
article that was their view of life and literature. I wanted to see it
again, to hear again how it was filling the unvarying, allotted columns
of the daily, the weekly, or the monthly journals. I wanted to breathe
again this mild atmosphere where there are no longer hopes or fears.
But, alas!...

I rang bell after bell of that gloomy central London district. You know
what happens. One pulls the knob under the name of the person one
seeks--pulls it three, or, it may be, four times in vain. One rings the
housekeeper's bell; it reverberates, growing fainter and fainter,
gradually stifled by a cavernous subterranean atmosphere. After an age a
head peeps round the opening door, the head of a hopeless anachronism,
the head of a widow of early Victorian merit, or of an orphan of
incredible age. One asks for So-and-so--he's out; for Williams--he's
expecting an increase of family, and has gone into the country with
madame. And Waring? Oh, he's gone no one knows where, and Johnson who
used to live at Number 44 only comes up to town on Tuesdays now. I
exhausted the possibilities of that part of Bloomsbury, the
possibilities of variety in the types of housekeepers. The rest of
London divided itself into bands--into zones. Between here and
Kensington the people that I knew could not be called on after dinner,
those who lived at Chiswick and beyond were hyperborean--one was bound
by the exigencies of time. It was ten o'clock as I stood reflecting on a
doorstep--on Johnson's doorstep. I must see somebody, must talk to
somebody, before I went to bed in the cheerless room at the club. It was
true I might find a political stalwart in the smoking-room--but that was
a last resort, a desperate and ignominious _pis aller_