Part 4 (1/2)
Henry had come to the office straight from school, at the age of sixteen; and, though cla.s.srooms breathe an air sufficiently frigid and suggestive of inhuman interests and unmeaning discipline, the icy air of that office had at first almost taken his breath. The place was so ridiculously serious! There might conceivedly be interests in the world worthy of so abject an absorption, so bleaching an obeisance of the individual; but Henry, with the dews of certain cla.s.sics still upon him, remembered that anything really Olympian in its importance is always strong enough to smile. It is a lesser strength that must make the muscular effort of severity. True dignities, as often as possible, stand at ease. But here indeed were no true strengths and dignities,--only prison-strengths and prison-dignities. Here the majesties, the occupations, the offences, were alike frivolities, fantastically changed about into solemnities.
That first impression of abject bowed heads and chains rattled beneath desks, was roughly correct. For all that was human in a man, this was a prison. These men who bent over foolish papers were evidently convicts of the most desperate character; so, at all events, you would judge when occasionally one or other of the prison-governors, known as ”partners,”
pa.s.sed among them with the lash of his eye. Such faint human twittering as may have grown up amongst even these poor exiles would suddenly die into a silence white with fear, as when the shadow of a hawk falls across the song of smaller birds.
No human relations are acknowledged here. Outside, you may be a husband wonderfully beloved and tragically important; you may be a man whose courage has be-medalled your brave breast; you may be a pa.s.sionate and subtle musician in your private hours; you may even on Sundays be a much appreciated vessel of the divine: but all such distinctions are not current here; here they are foreign coin, diplomas unacknowledged in this barbarous realm of ink and steel. The more ignorant, the more narrow, the more mean, the more unnatural, you can contrive to be, the better will be your lot in this sad monastery of Mammon. When the door hissed behind you, with that little patent pneumatic device, you ceased to be a human being, and began to be--the human machine. All the vitality you have stored within that pale body you are expected to exhaust here,--you have sold it, don't you remember, for sixty or three hundred pounds a year; you are not expected to have any left over for pleasures. That will be robbery. Masters suffer much from peculation indeed in this way; but a machine is in course of invention which shall put an end to this, by the application of which to your heart the task-master will know whether or not you have spent every available heart-beat in his slavery during the day, or whether you are endeavouring, you miserable thief, to steal home with a little remnant of it for your children at night.
This was the theory of the office, as Henry once heard it expressed, with a cynicism more brief and direct from the lips of one of his task-masters; but it must be admitted that in certain respects his experience was extreme. There are offices which are the ears and eyes of activities absorbingly and even romantically human. To be in a s.h.i.+pping-office is not perhaps to be the rose, but it is to live near it,--the great rose of the sea. You are, so to say, a land-sailor, a supercargo left on sh.o.r.e. Your office-windows are lashed with hurricanes; your talk is frequently of cyclones. The names of far romantic isles are constantly on your lips, and your bills of lading are threepenny romances in themselves. Strange produce of distant lands are your daily concern, and the four winds meet at your counter with a savour of tar. For all you know, a pirate may claim your attention any minute of the day.
Or, again, to be, say, in a corn-merchant's, a clearing-house of the fruitful earth. There at your telephone you may hear the corn-fields whispering to you, hear the wheat waving in the wind, and the thin chatter of oats. Or you may sell b.u.t.ter and cheese in an office that smells of farms. However removed, you are an indirect agent of the earth, a humble go-between of the seasons and the eternal needs of man.
Or, once more, you may be one of the thousand clerks of a great manufacturer, and be humbly related to one of the arts or crafts that gladden the eye or add to the comforts of man. Or even, though you may be denied so close an a.s.sociation with the elements, or the arts, you may be the pen to some subtle legal confidante of human nature. Your office may be stored with records of human perversity and whimsicality.
You may be the witness to fantastic wills, or a.s.sist in the administration of the estates of lunatics. At all events, you will come within hearing of the human pa.s.sions. Misers will visit you at times, and beautiful ladies in mourning deep as their distress; and from your desk you will catch a glimpse of the sombre pageantry of litigious man.
Though it is true that a certain far-off flavour of these legal excitements occasionally enlivened the business to which Henry had been sacrificially indentured, for the most part it was an abstract parasitical thing which had succeeded in persuading other businesses, more directly fed from the human spring, of its obliging usefulness in relieving them of detachable burdens. In fact, it had no activity or interest of its own to account for, so it proposed, in default of any such original reason for existence, to look after the accounts of others, as a self-const.i.tuted body of financial police. For those engaged in it, except those who had been born mentally deformed, or those who had become unnaturally perverted by long usage, it was a sort of penitentiary of the mathematics.
CHAPTER X
THE GRa.s.s BETWEEN THE FLAG-STONES
Yes, it was a curiously unreal world; and, for the first day or two, as Henry, bent, lonely and bewildered, over his desk, studied it furtively with questioning eyes, it seemed to him as though he had strayed into some asylum for the insane, where fantastic interests and mock honours take the place of the real interests and honours of sane human beings.
Part of the business of the firm consisted in the collection of house-rents, frequently entailing visits from tenants and questions of repairs. A certain Mr. Smith, a wiry little grey-headed man, with a keen face and a decisive manner, looked after this branch; and the gusto with which he did it was one of Henry's earliest and most instructive amazements. House-repairs were quite evidently his poetry, and he never seemed so happy as when pa.s.sionately wrangling with a tenant on some question of drains. The words ”cesspool” and ”wet-trap”--words to which I don't pretend to attach any meaning--seemed to be particular favourites of his. In fact, an hour seldom pa.s.sed without their falling from his lips. But Mr. Smith's great opportunity was a gale. For that always meant an exciting harvest of dislodged chimney-pots, flying slates, and smashed skylights, which would impart an energetic interest to his life for days.
Again, in Henry's department--for the office was cut into two halves, with about ten clerks in each, the partners having, of course, their own private offices, from which they might dart out at any moment--there was a certain little fussy chief clerk who was obviously a person of very mysterious importance. He was frequently away, evidently on missions of great moment, for always on his return he would be closeted immediately with one or other of the partners, who in turn seemed to consider him important too, and would sometimes treat him almost like one of themselves, actually condescending to laugh with him now and again over some joke, evidently as mysterious as all the rest. This Mr. Perkins seldom noticed the juniors in his department, though occasionally he would select one of them to accompany him on one of his missions to clients of the firm; and they would start off together, as you may see a plumber and his apprentice sometimes in the streets,--the proud master-plumber in front, and the little apprentice plumber behind, carrying the lead pipe and the iron smelting-pot.
Now, did Mr. Smith really take such a heart-interest in cesspools and wet-traps as he appeared to do? and did Mr. Perkins really think he mattered all that?
These were two of the earliest questions which Henry asked himself, and as time brought the answers to them, and kindred questions, there were unexpected elements of comfort for the heart of the boy, longing so desperately in that barren place for any hint of the human touch. One day Mr. Smith startled him by mentioning d.i.c.kens, and even Charles Lamb.
It was a kindly recognition of Mesurier's rumoured interest in literature. Henry looked at him in amazement. ”Oh, you read then!” he exclaimed. Of anything so human as reading he had suspected no one in that office.
Then as to the great Mr. Perkins, the time came when he was to prove very human indeed. For, dying suddenly one day, his various work had to pa.s.s into other hands; and, bit by bit, it began to leak out that those missions had not been so industriously devoted to the interests of the firm, nor been so carefully executed, as had been imagined. For Mr.
Perkins, it transpired, had been fond of his pleasures, could appreciate wine, and liked an occasional informal holiday. So, posthumously, he began to wear for Henry a faint halo of humanity.
Indeed, it did not take Henry many days to realise that, as gra.s.s will force its way even between the flag-stones in a prison-yard, no little humanity contrived to support its existence even in this dead place. By degrees, he realised that these apparently colourless and frigid figures about him had each their separate individuality, engaging or otherwise; that their interests were by no means centred on the dull pages before them; and that, for the most part, they were very much in a like case with himself. Although thus immured from the world of realities, they still maintained, in vigorous activity, many healthy outdoor interests, and were quite keen in their enthusiasm for, and remarkably instructed in, the latest developments of horse-racing, football, and prize-fighting. Likewise, they had retained an astonis.h.i.+ngly fresh and unimpaired interest in women, and still enjoyed the simple earth-born pleasures of the gla.s.s and the pipe.
As he understood this, Henry began to feel more at home; and, as the characters of his a.s.sociates revealed themselves, he began to see that there were amongst them several pleasant and indeed merry fellows, and that, after all, fortune might have thrown him into much worse company.
They, on their side, making like discoveries in him, he presently found himself admitted to their freemasonry, and initiated into their many secret ways of mitigating their lot, and shortening their long days.
Thus, this chill, stern world of automata, which, on first sight, looked as if no human word or smile or jest could escape the detection of its iron laws, revealed, when you were once inside it, an under-world of pleasant escapes and exciting truancies, of which, as you grew accustomed to the risks and general conditions of the life, you were able skilfully to avail yourself.
The main principle of these was to seem to spend twice as much time on each task as it needed, that you might have the other half for such private uses as were within your reach,--to elongate dinner-hours at both ends so adroitly, and on such carefully selected propitious occasions, that the elongation, or at least the whole extent of it, would pa.s.s un.o.bserved; and, in general, to gain time, any waste ends of five minutes or quarter hours, on all possible occasions. If the reader calls this s.h.i.+rking and robbery, he must. Technically, no doubt, it was; but these clerks, without so formulating it, merely exercised the right of all oppressed beings liberally to interpret to their own advantage, where possible, the terms of an unjust contract which grinding economic conditions had compelled them to make. They had been forced to promise too much in exchange for too little, and they equalised the disparity where they could.
Whether they spent the time thus h.o.a.rded in a profitable fas.h.i.+on, is a question of personal definition. It was usually expended in companies of twos or threes, with a pipe and a pot of beer and much spirited talk, in the warm corners of adjacent taverns; and, so long as you don't drink too much, there has perhaps been invented none pleasanter than that old-fas.h.i.+oned way of spending an hour. Certainly, it was the way for ale to taste good, and a pipe to seem the most satisfying of all earthly consolations. It was almost worth the bondage to enjoy the keen relish of the escape.