I stared at him in my ignorance, but, fully under the impression that something unpleasant was meant, I resolutely determined to stay where I was, and I was saved from further persecution by Mr Hallett coming up, which was the signal for Jem Smith to sneak off. I asked Hallett what was meant, and he explained to me that it was a custom for working men on entering a new place to pay for some beer for their fellow-workmen.
“But don’t you pay a penny to the young wolves,” he said, and I determined that I would not.
I was well on in the second week, and during the intervening days I had been set to every dirty and objectionable task Mr Grimstone could invent for me, but I did them patiently and well. I had seen nothing of my employers, and but little of Mr Hallett, who seemed too busy to take much notice of me; but he somehow had a knack of turning up in emergencies, just when I required help and counsel, showing that he kept an eye upon me for my good.
I noticed as I sat beneath a frame eating my dinner in the composing-room that he always employed a good deal of his time in drawing or calculating, and I found, too, that he was no great favourite with his fellow-workmen, who nicknamed him the steam-engine, because he worked so rapidly and did so much. It was very plain, too, that the overseer hated him, giving him the most difficult and unpleasant tasks, but they were always willingly done by Mr Hallett, who was too good a workman to be spared.
I had just completed the washing of some very dirty type one day, and, according to orders, made my way up to Mr Grimstone’s glass case, very dirty and grubby-looking, no doubt, when I stared with surprise on seeing there before me a little cleanly-shaven man who, except in clothes, was the exact counterpart of Mr Rowle.
Somehow or other I had been so occupied, and my mind so intent upon the task given me, that I had thought no more about asking to see him; and now, here he was, Mr Rowle’s twin brother, in angry altercation with the overseer, while Jem Smith stood in the door. The latter had been let off a good many dirty, tasks of late, and I had succeeded to them, but the promotion he had received did not seem to have been attended with success.
“Now look hero, Grimstone,” the little man was saying, “you needn’t bark at me, for I don’t care a pinch of snuff for all your snarls. I asked you to send me up the best boy you had, to read, and you sent me your worst.”
“Mr Rowle, it is false, sir.”
“And I say it is true, and that you did it all out of your crass obstinacy and determination to be as disagreeable as you can to everybody in the place.”
“I sent you up one of my best boys, Mr Rowle.”