These things, naturally, I did not tell my judge, for they would only have hurt him and led to Mason. Therefore, I merely regarded my handiwork with honest scorn and an expression of contempt, and said the writing was not worthy of the Apollo Fire Office.
“I had come to the same conclusion,” said Mr. Septimus Trott. “We are of one mind, Mr. Corkey. Now, I appeal to your honour as a gentleman, and as one who is drawing a good salary here—I appeal to you, Mr. Corkey, to do your work in future so that we may respect you and value your services, and not deplore them. Remember henceforth, Mr. Corkey, that from ten until four, or later, as the occasion demands, we have a right to your whole time and energy and attention and intelligence. To deny us that right, and to offer us less than your best, is quite unworthy of you, and neither just nor honest to your masters. Good morning, Mr. Corkey; I feel sure that I shall not have to speak again.”
I did not know what to answer, for this exceedingly fine man had made me feel both uncomfortable and mean. I had, however, to say something, so thanked him and promised that he should never be bothered by me any more. But he had already dismissed the subject and was buried in a pile of complicated documents, which were no doubt destined to melt under his hands like the dew upon the fleece.
I returned calmly to my department and wrapped myself in silence as with a garment. But I concealed a bruised heart, as the saying is, and determined to rectify this unpleasant event as swiftly as possible. I decided to stop after hours for six consecutive nights and write till eight, or even nine o’clock, and so produce an amount of work during the current account that should delight Mr. Westonshaugh and gratify Mr. Trott, if he ever heard about it. I wanted, before everything, to show them I bore no malice, but quite the contrary.
Mr. Blades thought my idea good, and that very night I stopped on and on, long after the staff had gone. It was a weird and interesting thing to be alone with my solitary gaslight in that huge and empty office. All was profound silence, save where my industrious pen steadily registered policy after policy. Here and there out of the darkness glimmered a knob of brass or some such thing, like the watchful eye of a beast of prey, and far below one heard the occasional, eerie rattle of a hansom, or cry of a human voice in the empty City. In all that huge hive of industry only I appeared to be humming! It was a great thought in its way. And yet I felt the presence of my colleagues in a ghostly sort of fashion, and knew where the warlike Bassett sat, and the musical Wardle, and the sporting Tomlinson, and so on. But, of course, they were all far away in the bosoms of their families, or elsewhere, as the case might be.
And then came a strange experience—the event of a lifetime, or, at any rate, the event of mine so far, for suddenly and without anything much in the way of premonitory symptoms, I got an urgent craving to write a poem! It is impossible to say how it came, or why; but there it was. My fatal experiences of that day, and being so sorry for myself, and one thing and another, depressed me to a most unusual flatness; and then nature, apparently rebelling against this flatness, urged me to write a poem upon a dire and fearful subject.
You might have thought that I should have taken refuge from the troubles of the morning by writing something gladsome and joyous, or even a regular, right-down hymn, with hopeful allusions to higher things; but far from it, owing to the gloom of the silent office, or the gloom of my mind, or perhaps both together, I produced stanza after stanza of the most deathly and grim poetry you could find in the language. It was called “The Witches’ Sabbath,” and I amazed myself by the ease with which I handled corpse-candles, gouts of blood, the gallows tree, ravens, owls, bats, lightning, the mutter of thunder, the stroke of Doom, spectres, demons, hags, black cats, broomsticks, and, in fact, every dreadful image you can possibly imagine from the classics at large. These things simply rolled off my pen; I could hardly write fast enough to catch up with the dance of horrors which seemed to get worse and worse in every stanza; and I remember wondering, while my nib flew, that if this ghastly thing was the result of a mild and temperate rebuke from Mr. Septimus Trott, what sort of poem I should have made if he had dealt bitterly and sarcastically and cruelly with me. I stopped to examine the question, and finally decided that it was the great patience and tenderness of Mr. Trott that had reduced me to this black depth of despair; and I believed that if he had slated me with all the force of barbed invective undoubtedly at his command, I should have gone to the other extreme and not stopped overtime, and been reckless and ferocious and mad, and very likely have produced a wild drinking-song, or some profane limerick of a far lower quality than this stately poem with all its horrors.
One verse especially pleased me, and I set it down here without hesitation, because the time was actually coming when my poem would see the glory of print—not, of course, that I should see the glory of anything else in the way of reward. But merely to be in print glorifies one for a long time.
“Through a dim gloaming with the hurtling crash
And thunder of their batlike wings they came.