CHAPTER I

A MODERN BUSINESS GIRL

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.

He sent his first short story to a friend who was a magazine editor, and it was accepted. He sent a second, and it was refused. Challoner, the editor, explained that the first one was a story and the second was not, showed him the subtle difference between a tale and a record of events; the fact that his first effort was instinctive and right, and that in the second he had failed in a difficult theme for want of craftsmanship; gave him a little book on the art, and dismissed him.

It was a defeat, and suffering under it he did something quite distinctive. He burned his boats, dismissed his employers in Fleet Street, and sat down to this new business, sending his productions to no editor, but to Beaman & Hare, a literary agency recommended by a friend.

This was his first visit to the office, with which he had been corresponding for some months and with which he had already done fairly satisfactory business.

The place did not impress him; it seemed small and cramped, and he was still recovering from the stairs and the fact that Hare was a Miss. He had always fancied the "M. Hare" who signed the typewritten letters and also the cheques, a man; the text of the letters and the handwriting had never suggested anything else. He wondered vaguely, as he sat nursing his knee and waiting for his interview, whether the man who had recommended him to this firm had been altogether happy in his advice. He was not left long in doubt.

The office-boy returned, and he was shown down a passage into a room where a girl seated before a desk littered with papers rose to receive him. She was pleasingly dressed, her auburn hair was shingled, she wore tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles, she was nice-looking--not pretty, nice-looking, in a new way.

And now, as she took off her reading glasses and they talked together, she seemed to lose her sex; it was like talking to a man, only much pleasanter.

"I am sorry to have kept you waiting," said the businesslike Miss Hare, "but I am glad you have come. These are your papers and our correspondence on the desk, and I kept you waiting whilst I got them in order. That last story you sent us has been turned down by three magazines because of the deficiency of feminine interest in it. There's no woman at all in it, as a matter of fact, and that's not a fault--it's a crime--in the eyes of the ordinary magazine editor. Yet it is the best story you have written."

"I'm glad you think that," said Bobby.

"Yes, but I'm not an ordinary magazine editor," said Miss Hare. "It was not the fault of the story that it was turned down, it was the fault of our office. I have been away, and Miss Beaman has been busy and Miss Strudwick, whom I am training, sent it to those magazines, quite unsuitable for it. However, when I came back I sent it to the editor of _Hoof and Horn_ with a strong personal note, and this morning I have a letter from him. He likes it, and will pay ten pounds--a wretched price. You see, the people who are interested in hoofs and horns are not nearly so numerous as the people who are interested in girls."

Bobby assented. This frank confession and open way of doing business came to him as a revelation pleasantly new.

"I'm afraid girls are not my strong point," said he.

"When a woman is reading a story," said Miss Hare, "she is the girl. If there are six girls in the story, she is each one of them; if she is eighty, she is still the heroine. If you make your girls pretty, and not impossible, and make them go through adventures, your women readers will supply all the rest. But there must be adventures, that is to say love interest, for love is the only adventure that counts with women readers. I know it's absurd, but there you are. I am not talking of literature, but of story-writing for profit."

The gunshop in the Strand came before Bobby's eyes, and the visionary jungle beasts that had called to him as a storyteller.

"Only half an hour ago," said he, "a shop-window in the Strand gave me a lot of ideas--open air--half-formed ideas, but I felt as if I had tumbled into a nest of stories--it wasn't a bonnet shop."

"What sort of shop?"

"A gunshop."

"I know it," said Miss Hare. "I've often looked in. At least, I think I know the one you mean."

"Do you mean to say you are interested in guns?"

"Anything that takes one's mind away from London is interesting. I was born in the country and could shoot before I was twelve, but that was in the days before the war swept everything away."

A distant look came into her eyes, passed, and putting on the tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles, she turned to the table littered with papers.

"Now here," said she, "is something that I want you to do. I would have written about it had you not called. Do you know anything about Tanagra statuettes?"

"I know the things you mean," said Bobby, "but I don't know much about them."

"Well, the editor of the _Paternoster Magazine_ has a cover design for the January number, and he wants a story written around it. Editors sometimes want this sort of thing done. It's not high-class work, but the _Paternoster_ is important and the story will be 'featured,' of course, as representing the cover design. This is it."

She handed him a picture.

It represented a man's hand, open, and, standing on the palm, a Tanagra figurine about nine inches high, a statuette of a Greek girl carrying a jar on her shoulder.

Lestrange, holding the drawing a little distance away from him, contemplated it with his head slightly on one side, and Miss Hare, in her turn, contemplated him.

He pleased her.

Already, and before she had seen him, she had taken a liking to him. She liked the stories he had sent in and she liked, even better, his business letters addressed to the firm; modest, straightforward, unassuming letters, always to the point: his handwriting had pleased her, and she was a judge of handwriting.

"Of course," said she, "many writers would consider it perhaps _infra dig_ to be asked for a story in this way written round a cover design, but the _Paternoster_ is worth pleasing, and, after all, nobody will know but the editor."

"Oh, I'm not bothering about that," said he. "It's the difficulty. How on earth am I to make a story of this thing--that's the question."

"Johnson said he could write a story about a broomstick if called upon," said Miss Hare.

"Yes, but this isn't a broomstick. I know something about broomsticks, but this----Well, I'll try. I must hunt round and find out things about Tanagra statuettes. The British Museum might help me, or the South Kensington."

"Try Behrens, in Museum Street," said she. "He's sure to know, and he's a dear old man, and you'll get atmosphere there, if you get nothing else. Number Six A Museum Street is his address, and you can mention my name. He's one of my best friends."

She paused, and into her eyes came that far-away look again, as though she were gazing over the past.

"Shall I take the drawing with me?" asked he, rising to go.

"No," said the girl, "I'll send it to your address by registered post. It's the only copy, and you might leave it in a cab or something. I'm sure you are forgetful."

"Now, how on earth did she know that?" said Bobby as he came down the stairs.