However, the glamour of achievement passed all too soon. Disillusionment began on the morning of the following day. It was then that the full measure of nervous bewilderment at all the strange things about him descended upon him; it was then that the sense of his natural impotence was communicated to him first.
It called for all his fortitude to sustain that long term between eight o’clock in the morning and seven o’clock at night. The minutes passed so tardily that it seemed they would never admit of his release. Long before the end of the day it was as much as he could do to refrain from running away from it all in the horror of sheer nausea. He longed to flee anywhere—anywhere so long as he could escape from this strange servitude to which he had committed himself.
The clerks staring at him from their tall stools; his curious surroundings; their publicity; the curt and uncompromising manner in which he was addressed; and above all the many and remarkable duties he was called upon to perform—duties which somehow did not seem to coincide with the peculiar form of “handiness” upon which he had been wont to plume himself—all these circumstances made calls upon his courage as he scarcely knew how to meet. Yet not once during the day did he allow to escape his thoughts the paramount necessity of proving himself worthy of his good fortune. The need of obtaining pieces of silver had grown to be as great as that of drawing the breath of life.
Only too soon was it apparent to those trained minds in whose midst he was now placed that he was woefully deficient in natural ability. But his intense anxiety to do all that was required of him; his innate courtesy, which was curiously disarming to old and young alike, although sometimes it did not save him from sharp words, and even from tricks and hardships being put upon him; his almost ridiculous docility; his unceasing endeavours to be of service to others, misguided though they were; his unprecedented blindness to his own personal interests; and above all his painfully, ridiculously obvious mental deficiencies, which by general consensus “he could not help,” saved him from being complained of openly to the highest quarters as “hopelessly incompetent,” which all about him during the early days of his servitude considered him to be.
“He is about as capable of sitting a stool in the counting-house of Crumpett and Hawker,” said Mr. Walter Pater Walkinshaw, that august gentleman to whose charge he had been committed in the first instance by the head of the firm, and who occupied a low chair at a small table in the middle of the room, and who also exuded “the traditions of the firm” at every pore, “as he is of editing an edition of Thackeray. I shall be compelled to make a complaint if he does not bring a little common intelligence to bear on the most elementary duties. Here he has actually sealed the Lady Rowena Montmorency’s prose poem—accepted prose poem—in yellow, in spite of the fact that prose poems stand in a class by themselves and must be sealed in pink; and further he has omitted to stamp the parcel with the monogram of the firm, although it expressly lays down on page four of the printed rules of procedure, that the MSS. of the daughters of peers must in all cases be so treated. Mr. Dodson, please have the goodness to inform him that if this occurs again I shall be compelled to bring it to the notice of Mr. Octavius. And if such a thing should come to the ear of Mr. Octavius I cannot answer for the consequences.”
“I will, sir,” said Mr. Dodson respectfully.
Thereupon Mr. Dodson returned to the high stool in the left-hand corner, which had been allotted to Mr. William Jordan, Junior. He was engaged in trying to wrap up a novel of portentous length, which had received a somewhat uncompromising quietus at the hands of Messrs. Crumpett and Hawker. Mr. Dodson watched his protégé somewhat grimly as he wrestled not very effectually with the leaves of this production and endeavoured to encase them in brown paper and string.
“Look here, lunatic, you want it tighter,” said Mr. Dodson, having rendered him who sought to tie the parcel excessively unhappy by his presence. “Slew it round a bit, and turn over the corners like I showed you yesterday. Pa’s been talking about you. He says if you don’t do better you will get the boot.”
“I—I b-beg your p-pardon, sir,” stammered the boy.
“Don’t be so d——d polite, you lunatic!”