It lures you like a siren, coaxing with soft promises of prizes to be wrested from it: you shall be the favoured of the gods, and you become Sisyphus, rolling his stone eternally, day after day. Here are the things of life that you covet, they shall be yours, says the Street: and you are Tantalus, reaching out everlastingly, and grasping nothing, until your heart is parched within you. You shall be strong and mighty, it says, sapping your strength like Delilah, until you pull down the pillars of hope, and fall buried beneath the reckless ruins of your career.
Once you have answered the voice of the siren, you are taken in the magic spell. Beat your breast, and exclaim in agony, but nothing will avail, for if you leave the Street, the quiet world will seem void for ever, and, as the ghosts burn backwards through space, so shall you return to the old agitations and longings.
This was the Street to which young Humphrey Quain came on a January morning, riding triumphantly on the top of an omnibus. As he passed the fantastic Griffin, with its open jaws and monstrous scaly wings, like a warder guarding those who would escape, Fleet Street seemed to be the Street of Conquest.
It was a rare, crisp day, with a touch of frost in the air, and the sun clear and high in the heavens, above the tangle of wires and cables that almost roofed the Street. The traffic was beating up and down, with frequent blocks, here and there, as a heavy hooded van staggered up from Whitefriars or Bouverie Street. It was nearly mid-day, and the light two-wheeled carts were pouring out of Shoe Lane, or coming from Salisbury Square with the early editions of the afternoon papers. Newsboys on bicycles, with sacks of papers swung over their backs, seemed to be risking their lives every moment as they flashed into the thick of the traffic, clinging to hansoms, and sliding between drays and omnibuses, out of the press, until they could get through the narrow neck of Fleet Street towards the West.
Humphrey breathed deeply as he looked about him: the names of the newspapers were blazoned everywhere. Heavens! what a world of paper and ink this was, to be sure. The doors, the windows and the letter-boxes bore the titles of newspapers--all the newspapers that were. Every room, on every floor, was inhabited by the representatives of some paper or other: on the musty top windows he could read the titles of journals in Canada and Australia; great golden letters bulged across the buildings telling of familiar newspapers. The houses were an odd mixture of modernity and antiquity, they jostled each other in their cramped space; narrow buildings squeezed between high, red offices with plate-glass windows, and over and above the irregular roofs the wires spread thin threads against the sky, wires that gave and received news from the uttermost ends of the earth.