Part 10

When he reached the little room his father was still occupied in the shop. With a remarkable suppression of his all-mastering desire, he determined to wait until eight o’clock until the shop was closed for the night before he laid out his treasure before his father. It must be a solemn ceremonial. There must be no disturbing influence; his father must be his alone when he confided to his keeping the first pieces of silver he had won by the sweat of his brow and the travail of his spirit.

Just as it had seemed that seven o’clock would never come, it now seemed that eight o’clock would never come either. The pieces of silver appeared to be playing strange tricks in his pocket. But with a concentration of the will, which he felt to be stupendous, he set about preparing the frugal supper for them both. If the repression of his feeling of triumph were to kill him he must not let it gain expression until his father had closed the shop.

Perversely enough his father, all unconscious, did not come into the little room until a quarter-past eight. They sat down together at their evening meal. The man looked with a curious wistfulness into the face of the boy. The eyes were almost weird in their brightness; the pale cheeks were strangely flushed. He rose and took from the hearth a pot of warm broth, which he placed before the boy. Involuntarily the boy drew away from it with a little gesture of repugnance.

His father besought him to eat the broth.

“Oh no, no, my father,” said the boy, with a shudder, “there is flesh in it!”

By a supreme effort of the will the boy swallowed his milk and ate his bread, and cleared the table, and trimmed the hearth before he disclosed his pieces of silver. He even contrived to clothe his unseemly and vainglorious eagerness with a kind of humility as he laid each piece side by side upon the tablecloth.

“Behold, my father!” he said in a choking whisper, “I have won my first pieces of silver!”

His father enfolded him in tender arms. The slight frame was quivering like that of an imprisoned bird.

“Kiss me, my father,” he said, with that simplicity which his father could only obey.

The man pressed a caress upon the gaunt cheek.

“Let us kneel, my father, together before these pieces of silver,” said the boy.

They knelt together.

“Thou dost not rejoice as do I, O my father!” said the boy, searching the eyes of the white-haired man. “These pieces of silver do not seem to bring you gladness. And yet I have shouted my joy. To-night I know the pangs of happiness that Hannibal and Cæsar and Alexander felt. To-night I am fit to woo the priestess of Delphi.”

“We lose the Promethean fire as age falls about us,” said his father. “We do not dance nor pipe, neither do we sing. But I salute thee, Achilles. Ave, ave, my brave one!”

“I never thought to see this hour,” said the boy, gathering up the pieces of silver and placing them in his father’s hand. “I know not what they have cost me, my father, but now I would that the cost were a hundred times more.”

“Is it not a pious thought, beloved one,” said his father, “that that which we render is given to us again?”

“I have wrought greatly in the practical sciences during the week past, my father,” said the boy. “My power increases hour by hour; the persons in the streets are nothing like so mysterious to me as they were; and yet still there are great waste places. There is, indeed, much to learn, my father, much to learn.”

To-night his mood was one of rare expansion. He spoke unceasingly of what the future bore. The ten pieces of silver acted like a wine of great potency upon the too-delicate strings of the mind.

“Every day, every hour, every minute I am growing in stature,” he said. “Every time my heart beats, my father, I am more than I was. To-night I feel a royal courage stirring in my flesh. There is much to learn, my father, much to learn, but one day I feel sure I shall learn it all.”

“And when thou hast learnt it all, Achilles?” his father asked.

“Why--why of course, my father, when I have learnt it all I shall commence author,” said the boy.

That evening, for the first time in his life, he showed his contempt for the darkness by going up-stairs to bed without a candle. His father continued to sit at the table in the little room all the night through, consulting one page after another of the aged tome, which was bound so massively, until the chill morning light crept over the top of the shutters. He then walked out bare-headed, slow of gait, into the vapours of the dawn.

XVII

During the week which followed, the behaviour of William Jordan, Junior, was very closely scrutinized by his fellow-labourers in the vineyard of No. 24 Trafalgar Square. One and all were freely inoculated with the “traditions of the house.” Each member of the counting-house staff, from Mr. Dodson, who might be of any age and standing, to Mr. Walter Pater Walkinshaw, Mr. Aristophanes Luff, Mr. Leslie Stephen Sandars, and Mr. T. B. Macaulay Jenkins, who unmistakably were of one particular period and degree, were infected by a generous jealousy for the name and fame “of the first publishing house in London, and therefore of the civilized world.”

“It ain’t, you know,” Mr. James Dodson communicated to William Jordan, Junior, in his second or unofficial manner, “but Octavius thinks so, and what Octavius thinks the staff has got d---- well to believe.”

Mr. William Jordan, Junior, was honoured with this confidence while proceeding to a luncheon to be partaken of in Mr. Dodson’s company, and by his express invitation, at the refreshment buffet annexed to the Brontë Hotel, which was situated in a by-street off Trafalgar Square. Mr. Dodson, who needless to say selected this house of refreshment and led the way thereto, ordered of a gorgeous lady in a scarlet blouse and large yellow earrings, whom he addressed as “Chrissie” with that inimitable _flair_ that never forsook him on public occasions, “two lean ham-sandwiches and two tankards of half-and-half with plenty of top.”

The reception accorded by Mr. William Jordan, Junior, to these viands, for which the buffet of the Brontë Hotel was justly famous, filled Mr. Dodson with astonishment and Chrissie with consternation not unmingled with protest.

“Your fat friend needn’t look as though he’s tasted vitriol,” said the lady in the scarlet blouse, as the boy recoiled with horror at the moment he was saluted by the fumes from the tankard. “That’s the best half-and-half in London, young man, and he who says it is not is a perverter of the truth.”

“Is--is it h-hemlock?” gasped the boy, as tragically he replaced the tankard upon the marble slab.

With that presence of mind for which he was notorious, Mr. Dodson bent across the counter and whispered something in the ear of the lady in the scarlet blouse, which was not audible to Mr. William Jordan, Junior. To lend colour to his statement, in whatever it might consist, Mr. Dodson tapped his forehead in an impersonal and mystical manner.

“Get him a small milk, Chrissie,” said Mr. Dodson with a most engaging air, which had long been the despair and the envy of his wide circle of acquaintance.

When this beverage had been produced and the lady in the scarlet blouse had been thanked profusely, but not altogether mollified by the recipient of this signal act of condescension, both she and Mr. Dodson gazed at him curiously while he looked nervously at the plate containing the ham-sandwich which had been set before him.

“If you’d like a bit of bread-and-butter, you can have it you know,” said the lady in the scarlet blouse.

“Oh, t-thank you, t-thank you, if you will have the g-g-great kindness,” said the boy. He was relieved beyond expression; yet his embarrassment at being addressed publicly by a mysterious kind of creature of whom his friends, the ancient authors, had invariably formed such remarkable opinions, caused a deep tawny blush to overspread his pale and hollow cheeks.

“You may well look so fat,” said the lady in the scarlet blouse, with her indignation melting. She felt that his agitation was a frank testimonial to the impact of her own overpowering personality.

During these transactions, Mr. Dodson, having dispatched his own ham-sandwich and “tankard of half-and-half with plenty of top” with great success, proceeded to deal in like manner with those of his strange companion. And further, at the conclusion of these operations he disclosed, mainly for the information of the lady in the scarlet blouse, the true basis upon which two such diverse elements as Mr. James Dodson and Mr. William Jordan, Junior, were wont to co-operate.

“Luney,” he said to the boy, while he fixed the lady in the scarlet blouse with a steady and unsmiling gaze, “you can lend me two and a kick _pro tem._ Matchbox has gone down in the big race, and he carried my shirt.”

“I--I b-beg your p-pardon, sir,” stammered the boy. The limit to his knowledge in the practical sciences had presented itself rather abruptly.

“Lend me half-a-dollar, you cuckoo,” said Mr. Dodson sternly, “and don’t be so darnation polite.”

“I--I b-beg your p-pardon, sir,” stammered the boy, “I--I d-don’t t-think I k-know what you mean.”

The lady in the scarlet blouse regarded him with eyes of wonder. Mr. Dodson, however, still retained his self-possession in the presence of an unknowingness that transcended all that had previously come within his purview.

“He comes of a rather good family,” said Mr. Dodson in an eloquent aside to the lady in the scarlet blouse.

“Oh, does he?” said the lady in the scarlet blouse, opening her lazy eyes a little wider--“a gilt mug.”

“What silver have you got about you, Luney?” said Mr. Dodson.

This request was sufficiently intelligible to the boy to cause him to produce a collection of silver pieces which his father insisted on his carrying about with him. Mr. Dodson selected five shillings in a leisurely and impartial manner.

“I’ll make it a dollar,” he said, “and mind, my son, that you don’t forget to ask me for it. I’ve got such a weak memory for small things that one of these days I shall forget to attend my own funeral.”

Upon this utterance, which the boy was fain to consider as very remarkable, Mr. Dodson disbursed the sum of one shilling and sixpence to the lady in the scarlet blouse, and at the same time took the opportunity of transferring a dahlia, which approximated to the size of a small cauliflower, from his own person to the ample bosom of this already sufficiently gorgeous creature.

“So long, Chrissie,” he said. “See you at the Tivoli at a quarter to nine.”

With a great air, which the lesser luminaries of his circle were apt to interpret as swagger, Mr. Dodson made for the door.

“Come on, Luney,” said he, “let me take you back to your governess.”

This speech, delivered in a very audible manner, was not altogether for the guidance of Mr. William Jordan, Junior, but rather for that of two young gentlemen of a similar type to Mr. Dodson himself, who at that moment were entering the buffet.

“’Ow are yer, Jimmy?” said one of these with a nod of easy familiarity.

Mr. Dodson gave a curt nod to embrace them both, and looked them down with a cold, straight glance.

“Cheek,” said Mr. Dodson, in a half-audible aside to Mr. William Jordan, Junior. “Infernal cheek!”

“Who’s Jimmy touting around with this morning?” said the first of these gentlemen to the lady in the scarlet blouse.

“A gilt mug,” said that superb creature coldly from behind her dahlia.

“Thought as much,” said the first gentleman with a quizzical look at his companion. “Between you and me and the mustard pot, Chrissie, it’s my opinion Jimmy Dodson gets a bigger snob every day.”

“Jimmy’s all right,” said the lady. “If either of _you_ had got half _his_ style, you’d do.”

“Yes, I suppose we should.”

Each of the young men gave a sigh that was so imperfectly repressed, that it lent poignant expression to the unattainable.

XVIII

In the process of taking Mr. William Jordan, Junior, back to his governess, Mr. James Dodson, in his capacity of an accomplished man of the world of many years’ standing, delivered himself at large upon certain first principles, which he considered to be indispensable to all who sought to graduate in the severe school of worldly experience.

“I’ll tell you what it is, my son,” he said, taking the bewildered boy by the arm, for an additional tankard of “half-and-half with plenty of top” had provoked in Mr. Dodson an unwonted expansion, “I’ll tell you what it is, my son, there is something wrong with you.”

The boy did not reply to this indictment. He felt that there was.

“There’s something missing,” said Mr. Dodson impressively.

The silence of William Jordan, Junior, continued to corroborate Mr. Dodson.

“As I have already said, my son,” said Mr. Dodson, “you are just about fivepence halfpenny to the shilling, not more, not a farthing more. I cast no aspersions, mind, upon the maiden aunt who undertook your up-bringing. I don’t doubt that she is a good and worthy, and nice-minded old woman, but I blame her for one thing, my son, for one thing I am forced to blame her.”

Who the old woman was that Mr. Dodson was forced to blame and what he blamed her for, William Jordan, Junior, had not the courage to inquire.

“She might at least,” Mr. Dodson’s tone was one of judicial sadness, “have seen that you had all your buttons on when she turned you out into the world.”

“M-my b-buttons, s-sir!” stammered William Jordan, Junior, fingering his jacket nervously.

“Yes, my son, your buttons.” Mr. Dodson’s amiability verged upon the formidable. “When a cove starts out in life now-a-days, he’s got to have all his buttons on, and _he’s got to have ’em stitched on with wire_. Understand?”

William Jordan, Junior, did not understand at all, but the courage was not his to say so.

“Stitched on with wire,” said Mr. Dodson, “but every sucking Cabinet Minister as-sim-i-lates that at his Board School now-a-days. And there are a lot of other little things you have got to have in these days, my son, if you want to see your name in _The Times_ when they are handing around the Birthday Honours. And there is one little thing you have not got, which to my mind is fun-da-ment-ally necessary.” Mr. Dodson’s voice sank into mystery. “Fun-da-mentally necessary. Octavius will tell you the same. You want a manner.”

“A--a m-manner, sir?” said the boy.

“Yes, my son, a manner,” said Mr. Dodson. “And for heaven’s sake drop the sir. I’m not a King or a Commissioner of Police or a Colonel in the volunteers, not yet at any rate. As I say, you want a manner.”

“A m-manner!” said the boy anxiously.

“Never heard of a manner, I suppose,” said Mr. Dodson in as withering a tone as two tankards of “half-and-half with plenty of top” would permit. “Bright boy! As Pa says, you are about as fit to sit on a stool in the counting-house of Crumpett and Hawker as Pontius Pilate was to sit on the Board of Governors of Eternal Bliss. I suppose you’ll be saying next you have never heard of Eton and Oxford.”

“E-Eton and O-Oxford,” said the boy. His desperate ignorance caused him to take a leap in the dark. “Oh, y-y-yes,” he said anxiously, “I--I--s-suppose, sir, they would be eminent p-publishers the same as Messrs. Crumpett and Hawker.”

“Stars above!” Mr. Dodson so far forgot the exigencies of polite life as to dance several steps in public. “If you go on at this rate, my son, we shall have to have you bled for the simples. I must get Pa to tell that to Octavius. Why, can’t you see, lunatic, that Octavius has got Eton and Oxford written all over him, and therefore that every cove in the counting-house of Crumpett and Hawker, from Pa himself who sits at a table and snubs his betters to underpaid menials like you and me, have got to have Eton and Oxford written all over them too?”

“I--I d-don’t understand,” the boy stammered feebly.

“What is there to understand, fathead?” said Mr. Dodson. “It simply means that, like everybody else, you have got to take Octavius for your model. Of course you needn’t keep it up out of office hours unless you like. Only chaps with a strong constitution can keep it up all the time.”

“I--I d-don’t understand,” said the boy.

“You Juggins!” said Mr. Dodson, whose scorn sought in vain to express itself adequately. “The whole thing is so simple. If you are going to keep your stool in the counting-house of Crumpett and Hawker, you have got to show yourself up to the traditions of the house. I can’t talk plainer. You have got to copy Octavius. Of course he means nothing, but he is very impressive. Some of the staff say it’s Eton and some say it’s Oxford, but Pa says it’s a blend. And you can lay to it Pa knows. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, my son; if you are a good boy, and can only learn to use the right-coloured wax and to paste those labels the right side up, one of these days I will take you round into Pall Mall, and you shall watch Octavius go up the steps of his club.”

By the time this munificent offer had been made by Mr. Dodson, with an air of quiet patronage which became him extremely well, he and the bewildered neophyte, whose education he had undertaken, had come to the brass plate of No. 24 Trafalgar Square. As soon as they had entered these halcyon portals they encountered one of the fortunate ones of a world in which the favours are by no means impartially dispensed, in the person of a young gentleman, who thus early in life had been called to the high office of administering to the personal good-will and pleasure of the head of the firm, and of whom in consequence all the other junior members of the staff were inordinately jealous. Mr. Dodson’s manner of addressing this luminary was in such memorable contrast to the one he had lately been using, that even such a one as William Jordan, Junior, who in the phrase of Mr. Dodson “was no more than fivepence ha’penny to the shilling,” was fain to observe it.

“Davis,” said Mr. Dodson, “has Mr. Octavius gone out yet to luncheon?”

“Yes, Dodson,” said Mr. Davis. “Mr. Octavius _has_ gone out to luncheon. He went out at twenty minutes to two, to lunch with Sir Topman Murtle at the Marlborough.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Dodson, with aristocratic self-possession bordering on indifference. “Is Murtle selling?”

“Yes, Dodson,” said Mr. Davis blandly, “Sir Topman _is_ selling. The tenth enormous impression completing two hundred thousand copies, has been called for by the Trade within twenty-four days of publication.”

“H’m,” said Mr. Dodson, concealing a yawn in a very well-bred manner. “If he goes on he will beat Lavinia.”

“No, Dodson,” said Mr. Davis, dissenting delicately, “Miss Lavinia Longborn Gentle once had two hundred thousand copies called for by the Trade in twenty-four hours.”

“Going out now to luncheon, Davis?”

“Yes, Dodson, I am.”

As Mr. Davis sauntered out in a manner entirely worthy of Mr. Dodson himself, William Jordan, Junior, with his odd and unaccountable natural courtesy, which had already baffled many who had come in contact with it, opened the door that he might pass through.

“Why did you open the door for that young swine?” said Mr. Dodson, with an extremely rapid reversion to his out-of-doors manner. “If you do it again you and I will quarrel. He is as full of side as he can stick. He would even like _me_ to dip my ensign; he would like me to call him ‘Mr.’--_me_, if you please, call _him_. I ought to have had his berth; everybody in the office said I was better qualified. He got it by a trick. I will tell you what he did. He signed his name in the time-book, _George Eliot Davis_, and he had no more right to do so than I have. Next day I signed myself _Matthew Arnold Dodson_, but it was too late. Octavius had already seen his name in the book and had promoted him up-stairs.”

With this tragical fragment of autobiography, Mr. Dodson and William Jordan, Junior, ascended their stools in the left-hand corner of the counting-house.

The second week of the boy’s sojourn in the high latitudes to which an inscrutable providence had called him was as chequered as his first. His fate was postponed; the sword, ever ready to descend, hung in mid-air, suspended by a thread. The theory of the previous week that the boy was deficient mentally, had received such ample confirmation that it had come to rank as established fact. Many anecdotes were already in circulation concerning an intellectual weakness that was now common knowledge. Mr. Dodson was the author of the majority of these; and owing to the fact that his superintendence of the boy’s education permitted him to obtain first-hand evidence, he had acquired among the staff a kind of vogue as a _raconteur_, which formerly it had not been his good fortune to enjoy.

To the well-furnished mind of that philosopher every cloud was lined with silver. Luney’s education cost him infinite pains and expenditure of temper in the course of a day, but the halo cast by the mere recital of his latest vagaries was ample compensation. Their fame had even evoked the august notice of the occupant of the low table, Mr. Walter Pater Walkinshaw. In his capacity of a vigilant student of the human heart, and part author with Robert Brigstock, M.A. (Cantab.), who sat up-stairs, of _The Fluctuations of a Discerning Spirit_, published anonymously and now in its fourth edition, this august but benign personage inclined a tolerant and sympathetic ear to the anecdotes so racily narrated by Mr. Dodson.

“I don’t think you know the latest, sir, about young Jordan,” said that eminent worldling about half-past three, as he sauntered up to the low table with the simper of a dean at a dinner party. “I took him out to luncheon this morning, sir, and I ask you, sir, what do you think he ate?”

“Tell me, Dodson,” said Mr. W. P. Walkinshaw indulgently, as he dipped thoughtfully, as he invariably did, and began a letter, “Very Reverend and Dear Sir.”

“He ate, sir,” said Mr. Dodson impressively, “one slice of thin bread-and-butter, and he sipped a small glass of milk.”

“Ha, ha, very good, very good!” said Mr. W. P. Walkinshaw, as he began writing, “Messrs. Crumpett and Hawker have had the extreme gratification of reading the MS. of your very able and deeply thoughtful work, _The Genuflexions of a Natural Christian_.” Having committed this sentence to paper he paused ere he shaped the next, and said in that manner which expert criticism allowed to be almost as “authentic” as that of Mr. Octavius himself, “Tell me, Dodson, do you candidly consider that young Jordan is fit to occupy a stool in the counting-house of Crumpett and Hawker?”

Mr. Dodson, whose technique was far too fine to reply off-hand to a direct canvass of his judgment by one of the calibre of Mr. Walter Pater Walkinshaw, notwithstanding that he was in a position to do so, appeared to parry the question delicately.

“Well, sir,” he said, with such an approximation to the manner of Mr. Octavius, that for a moment the luminary at the low table had the illusion that he had presumed to catechize the head of the firm, “well, sir,” said Mr. Dodson, “since you--ah, put the question point-blank, as one might say, perhaps it is incumbent upon one to observe that whatever opinion one may form, one may not always feel justified in--ah, giving it expression.”

“One respects your scruples immensely, Mr. Dodson, they do you credit,” said Mr. W. P. Walkinshaw, who also respected that eminent worldling’s diction and mode of utterance immensely, although he did not say so; “but I invite you, Mr. Dodson, to be perfectly frank. I need not say your frankness will go no farther.”

“Well, sir, if you really _press_ the question,” said Mr. Dodson, with a simplicity he did not feel, “I have--ah, come to the con-clusion, reluctantly to the con-clusion that William Jordan, Junior, idiomatically speaking, is not more than fivepence ha’penny to the shilling.”