MR. CURPET, of the firm of Curpet and Smythe, whose name was painted in black and white on the dark green door, had told him that the office hours were from nine-thirty to six. The clock of the Law Courts was striking a quarter to ten. He hesitated a moment, and then seized the handle; but the door was fast, and he descended the two double flights of iron stairs into the quadrangle.
New Serjeant’s Court was a large modern building of very red brick with terra-cotta facings, eight storeys high; but in spite of its faults of colour and its excessive height, ample wall spaces and temperate ornamentation gave it a dignity and comeliness sufficient to distinguish it from other buildings in the locality. In the centre of the court was an oval patch of brown earth, with a few trees whose paleleaved tops, struggling towards sunlight, reached to the middle of the third storey. Round this plantation ran an immaculate roadway of wooden blocks, flanked by an equally immaculate asphalt footpath.
The court possessed its own private lamp-posts, and these were wrought of iron in an antique design.
Men and boys, grave and unconsciously oppressed by the burden of the coming day, were continually appearing out of the gloom of the long tunnelled entrance and vanishing into one or other of the twelve doorways. Presently a carriage and pair drove in, and stopped opposite Richard. A big man of about fifty, with a sagacious red and blue face, jumped alertly out, followed by an attentive clerk carrying a blue sack. It seemed to Richard that he knew the features of the big man from portraits, and, following the pair up the staircase of No. 2, he discovered from the legend on the door through which they disappeared that he had been in the presence of Her Majesty’s Attorney-General. Simultaneously with a misgiving as to his ability to reach the standard of clerical ability doubtless required by Messrs. Curpet and Smythe, who did business cheek by jowl with an attorney-general and probably employed him, came an elevation of spirit as he darkly guessed what none can realise completely, that a man’s future lies on his own knees, and on the knees of no gods whatsoever.
He continued his way upstairs, but Messrs. Curpet and Smythe’s portal was still locked. Looking down the well, he espied a boy crawling reluctantly and laboriously upward, with a key in his hand which he dragged across the banisters. In course of time the boy reached Messrs. Curpet and Smythe’s door, and opening it stepped neatly over a pile of letters which lay immediately within. Richard followed him.
“Oh! My name’s Larch,” said Richard, as if it had just occurred to him that the boy might be interested in the fact. “Do you know which is my room?”
The boy conducted him along a dark passage with green doors on either side, to a room at the end. It was furnished mainly with two writing-tables and two armchairs; in one corner was a disused copying-press, in another an immense pile of reporters’ notebooks; on the mantelpiece, a tumbler, a duster, and a broken desk lamp.
“That’s your seat,” said the boy, pointing to the larger table, and disappeared. Richard disposed of his coat and hat and sat down, trying to feel at ease and not succeeding.
At five minutes past ten a youth entered with the “Times” under his arm. Richard waited for him to speak, but he merely stared and took off his overcoat. Then he said, —
“You’ve got my hook. If you don’t mind I’ll put your things on this other one.”
“Certainly,” assented Richard.
The youth spread his back luxuriously to the empty fireplace and opened the “Times,” when another and smaller boy put his head in at the door.
“Jenkins, Mr. Alder wants the ‘Times.’”
The youth silently handed over the advertisement pages which were lying on the table. In a minute the boy returned.
“Mr. Alder says he wants the inside of the ‘Times.’”
“Tell Mr. Alder to go to hell, with my compliments.” The boy hesitated.
“Go on, now,” Jenkins insisted. The boy hung on the door-handle, smiling dubiously, and then went out.
“Here, wait a minute!” Jenkins called him back. “Perhaps you’d better give it him. Take the damn thing away.”
A sound of hurried footsteps in the next room was succeeded by an imperious call for Jenkins, at which Jenkins slipped nimbly into his chair and untied a bundle of papers.
“Jenkins!” the call came again, with a touch of irritation in it, but Jenkins did not move. The door was thrust open.
“Oh! You are there, Jenkins. Just come in and take a letter down.” The tones were quite placid.
“Yes, Mr. Smythe.”
“I never take any notice of Smythe’s calls,” said Jenkins, when he returned. “If he wants me, he must either ring or fetch me. If I once began it, I should be running in and out of his room all day, and I’ve quite enough to do without that.”
“Fidgety, eh?” Richard suggested.
“Fidgety’s no word for it, I tell you. Alder — that’s the manager, you know — said only yesterday that he has less trouble with forty Chancery actions of Curpet’s than with one county-court case of Smythe’s. I know I’d a jolly sight sooner write forty of Curpet’s letters than ten of Smythe’s. I wish I’d got your place, and you’d got mine. I suppose you can write shorthand rather fast.”
“Middling,” said Richard. “About 120.”
“Oh! We had a man once who could do 150, but he’d been a newspaper reporter. I do a bit over a hundred, if I’ve not had much to drink overnight. Let’s see, they’re giving you twenty-five bob, aren’t they?”
Richard nodded.
“The man before you had thirty-five, and he couldn’t spell worth a brass button. I only get fifteen, although I’ve been here seven years. A damn shame I call it! But Curpet’s beastly near. If he’d give some other people less, and me a bit more…”
“Who are ‘some other people’?” asked Richard, smiling.
“Well, there’s old Aked. He sits in the outer office — you won’t have seen him because he doesn’t generally come till eleven. They give him a pound a week, just for doing a bit of engrossing when he feels inclined to engross, and for being idle when he feels inclined to be idle. He’s a broken-down something or other, — used to be clerk to Curpet’s father. He has some dibs of his own, and this just finds him amusement. I bet he doesn’t do fifty folios a week. And he’s got the devil’s own temper.”
Jenkins was proceeding to describe other members of the staff when the entry of Mr. Curpet himself put an end to the recital. Mr. Curpet was a small man, with a round face and a neatly trimmed beard.
“Good morning, Larch. If you’ll kindly come into my room, I’ll dictate my letters. Good morning, Jenkins.” He smiled and withdrew, leaving Richard excessively surprised at his suave courtesy.
In his own room Mr. Curpet sat before a pile of letters, and motioned Richard to a side table.
“You will tell me if I go too fast,” he said, and began to dictate regularly, with scarcely a pause. The pile of letters gradually disappeared into a basket. Before half a dozen letters were done Richard comprehended that he had become part of a business machine of far greater magnitude than anything to which he had been accustomed in Bursley. This little man with the round face dealt impassively with tens of thousands of pounds; he mortgaged whole streets, bullied railway companies, and wrote familiarly to lords. In the middle of one long letter, a man came panting in, whom Richard at once took for Mr. Alder, the Chancery manager. His rather battered silk hat was at the back of his head, and he looked distressed.
“I’m sorry to say we’ve lost that summons in Rice v. The L. R. Railway.”
“Really!” said Mr. Curpet. “Better appeal, and brief a leader, eh?”
“Can’t appeal, Mr. Curpet.”
“Well, we must make the best of it. Telegraph to the country. I’ll write and keep them calm. It’s a pity they were so sure. Rice will have to economise for a year or two. What was my last word, Larch?” The dictation proceeded.
One hour was allowed for lunch, and Richard spent the first moiety of it in viewing the ambrosial exteriors of Strand restaurants. With the exception of the coffee-house at Bursley, he had never been in a restaurant in his life, and he was timid of entering any of those sumptuous establishments whose swinging doors gave glimpses of richly decorated ceilings, gleaming tablecloths, and men in silk hats greedily consuming dishes placed before them by obsequious waiters.
At last, without quite knowing how he got there, he sat in a long, low apartment, papered like an attic bedroom, and odorous of tea and cake. The place was crowded with young men and women indifferently well-dressed, who bent over uncomfortably small oblong marble-topped tables. An increasing clatter of crockery filled the air. Waitresses, with pale, vacant faces, dressed in dingy black with white aprons, moved about with difficulty at varying rates of speed, but none of them seemed to betray an interest in Richard. Behind the counter, on which stood great polished urns emitting clouds of steam, were several women whose superior rank in the restaurant was denoted by a black apron, and after five minutes had elapsed Richard observed one of these damsels pointing out himself to a waitress, who approached and listened condescendingly to his order.
A thin man, rather more than middle-aged, with a grey beard and slightly red nose, entered and sat down opposite to Richard. Without preface he began, speaking rather fast and with an expressive vivacity rarely met with in the ageing, —
“Well, my young friend, how do you like your new place?”
Richard stared at him.
“Are you Mr. Aked?”
“The same. I suppose Master Jenkins has made you acquainted with all my peculiarities of temper and temperament. — Glass of milk, roll, and two pats of butter — and, I say, my girl, try not to keep me waiting as long as you did yesterday.” There was a bright smile on his face, which the waitress unwillingly returned.
“Don’t you know,” he went on, looking at Richard’s plate,—”don’t you know that tea and ham together are frightfully indigestible?”
“I never have indigestion.”
“No matter. You soon will have if you eat tea and ham together. A young man should guard his digestion like his honour. Sounds funny, doesn’t it? But it’s right. An impaired digestive apparatus has ruined many a career. It ruined mine. You see before you, sir, what might have been an author of repute, but for a wayward stomach.”
“You write?” Richard asked, interested at once, but afraid lest Mr. Aked might be cumbrously joking.
“I used to.” The old man spoke with proud self-consciousness.
“Have you written a book?”
“Not a book. But I’ve contributed to all manner of magazines and newspapers.”
“What magazines?”
“Well, let me see — it’s so long ago. I’ve written for ‘Cornhill.’ I wrote for ‘Cornhill’ when Thackeray edited it. I spoke to Carlyle once.”
“You did?”
“Yes. Carlyle said to me — Carlyle said to me —— Carlyle said—”Mr. Aked’s voice dwindled to an inarticulate murmur, and, suddenly ignoring Richard’s presence, he pulled a book from his pocket and began to finger the leaves. It was a French novel, “La Vie de Bohème.” His face had lost all its mobile expressiveness.
A little alarmed by such eccentricity, and not quite sure that this associate of Carlyle was perfectly sane, Richard sat silent, waiting for events. Mr. Aked was clearly accustomed to reading while he ate; he could even drink with his eyes on the book. At length he pushed his plates away from him, and closed the novel with a snap.
“I see you’re from the country, Larch,” he said, as if there had been no lapse in the conversation. “Now, why in God’s name did you leave the country? Aren’t there enough people in London?”
“Because I wanted to be an author,” answered Richard, with more assurance than veracity, though he spoke in good faith. The fact was that his aspirations, hitherto so vague as to elude analysis, seemed within the last few minutes mysteriously to have assumed definite form.
“You’re a young fool, then.”
“But I’ve an excellent digestion.”
“You won’t have it if you begin to write. Take my word, you’re a young fool. You don’t know what you’re going in for, my little friend.”
“Was Murger a fool?” Richard said clumsily, determined to exhibit an acquaintance with “La Vie de Bohème.”
“Ha! We read French, do we?”
Richard blushed. The old man got up.
“Come along,” he said peevishly. “Let’s get out of this hole.”
At the pay-desk, waiting for change, he spoke to the cashier, a thin girl with reddish-brown hair, who coughed, —
“Did you try those lozenges?”
“Oh! yes, thanks. They taste nice.”
“Beautiful day.”
“Yes; my word, isn’t it!”
They walked back to the office in absolute silence; but just as they were going in, Mr. Aked stopped, and took Richard by the coat.
“Have you anything special to do next Thursday night?”
“No,” said Richard.
“Well, I’ll take you to a little French restaurant in Soho, and we’ll have dinner. Half a crown. Can you afford?”
Richard nodded.
“And, I say, bring along some of your manuscripts, and I’ll flay them alive for you.”