The old man held out his hand, and Henry took it, with a grateful sense of the friendly manner in which Mr. Lingard had performed a painful task, and a certain recognition that, after all, a poet must be something of a nuisance to business-men.
When he returned to his desk, he sat for a long time thoughtful, divided in mind between exultation that he was soon to be free to take the adventurous highway of literature, and anxiety as to where in a month's time his preliminary meals were to come from.
Yet, after all, the main thing was to be free of this servitude. Out of freedom all things might be hoped.
Still, as Henry looked round at the familiar faces of his fellow-clerks, and realised that in a month's time his comradeship with them would be at an end, he was surprised to feel a certain pang of separation. Mere custom has so great a part in our affections, that though a routine may have been dull and distasteful, if it has any extenuating circumstances at all, we change it with a certain irrational regret. After all, his office-life was associated with much contraband merriment; and, unconsciously, his associates had taken a valuable part in his training, humanised him in certain directions, as he had humanised them in others. They had saved him from dilettanteism, and whatever he wrote in future would owe something warm and kindly to the years he had spent with them.
His very desk took on a pathetic expression, as of a place that was so soon to know him no more for ever; and Mr. Smith, wrangling over wet-traps and cesspools at the counter, just as on the first day he had heard him, almost moved him to tears. Perhaps in ten years' time, were he to come back, he would find him still at his post, fervidly engaged in the same altercations, with only a little additional greyness at the temples to mark the lapse of time.
And Jenkins would still be sitting in the little screened-off cupboard, with "cashier" painted on the glass window. As three o'clock approached, he would still be heard loudly counting his cash and shovelling the gold into wash-leather bags, and the silver into little paper-bags marked £5 apiece, in a wild rush to reach the bank before it closed.
And would the same good fellows, a little more serious, because long since married, be cracking jokes and loafing near the fire-guard, in some rare safe hour, of the afternoon when all the partners were out, to make a spring for the desks, as the carefully learnt tread of one or another of those partners followed the opening of the front door.
The very work that he hated seemed to wear an unwonted look of tenderness. Who would keep the books he had kept--with something of his father's neatness; who would look after the accounts of "the Rev. Thomas Salthouse," or take charge of "Ex'ors James Shuttleworth, Esqre"?
Of course, it was absurd--absurd, perhaps, just because it was human. For was he not going to be free, free to fulfil his dreams, free to follow those voices that had so often called him from beyond the sunset? Soon he would be able to cry out to them, with literal truth, "I am yours, yours--all yours!" And in those ten years which were to pass so invariably for Mr. Smith, and for Jenkins and the rest, what various and dazzling changes might be, must be, in store for him. Long before the end of them he must have written masterpieces and become famous, and Angel and he be long settled together in their paradise of home.
Henry was pleased to find that his chums were to miss him no less than he was to miss them. As an unofficial master of their pale revels, his place would not be easy to fill; and he was much touched, when, a day or two before the end of the month, which was the time mutually agreed upon for Henry to look round, they intimated their desire to give a little dinner in his honour at "The Jovial Clerks" tavern.