How I worked that week! I refused invitation after invitation, and stayed late after every one else had gone to get ahead with my work. During office hours I steadily abstracted myself from what was going on all round, and determined that nothing should draw me from my tasks. I even volunteered for and undertook work not strictly my own, greatly to the amazement of everybody, especially Wallop, who began to think there really must be something in the rumour that I was not well. And all the while I most assiduously doctored my face, which gradually came to resume its normal complexion.
I could see that this burst of industry was having its due effect in high quarters. Mr Barnacle, who after his lecture had treated me gruffly and abruptly for some days, began again to treat me civilly, and Mr Merrett bestowed once or twice a special commendation on my industry.
In due time, so far from feeling myself a repentant idler, I had grown to consider myself one of the most virtuous, industrious, and well-principled clerks in London, and in proportion as this conviction got hold of me my application to work relaxed. One event especially completed my self-satisfaction. About three weeks after my interview with Mr Barnacle I was summoned into the partners’ room, and there informed that, having now been eight months in their service, and proving myself useful in my situation, my salary would henceforth be twelve shillings a week!
I could hardly believe my ears! Why, it was just half as much again as what I had been receiving. On eight shillings a week I had lived economically, but not so badly. And now, what might I not do with twelve shillings a week?
Doubleday insisted on my coming up to his lodgings that evening to celebrate the joyful event with a quiet supper. This invitation I accepted, the first for nearly a month, and in view of the occasion spent my first extra four shillings in anticipation on a coloured Oxford-shirt, which I grandly requested, with the air of a moneyed man, to be put down to my account. I found myself quite the hero of the party that evening. Every one was there. I had an affecting reconciliation with Whipcord, and forgot all about Flanagan’s desertion and Daly’s indifference in my hour of tribulation; I discoursed condescendingly with the Field-Marshal about his hopeless attachment, and promised to go for a row up the river one Saturday with the twins. And all the time of supper I was mentally calculating the cost of Doubleday’s entertainment, and wondering whether I could venture to give a party myself!
In fact, I was so much taken up with my own good fortune and my new rise in life, that I could think of nothing else. I forgot my former warnings and humiliations. I forgot that even with twelve shillings a week I had barely enough to clothe me respectably; I forgot that every one of these fellows was in the habit of laughing at me behind my back, and I forgot all my good resolutions to live steadily till Jack came back.
And I forgot all about poor Jack—(now, so the letters had told me), convalescent and slowly recovering health, but still lying lonely and weary in the Packworth Hospital. Indeed, that evening his name only twice crossed my mind—once when Doubleday and Crow were laughing over the prospect of “Bull’s-eye” turning up with a face deeply marked with his late disease; and once when, walking back to Beadle Square, full of my new plans of extravagance, I chanced to pass a small boy, curled up on a doorstep, with his head resting on a shoeblack box, and the light of a neighbouring lamp shining full on his sleeping face. Then I remembered how, not very long ago, I had seen that same head lying side by side with Jack’s head on the pillow at Mrs Nash’s. And as I stood for a moment to look, I could almost have believed that the sleeping figure there, with all his vulgarity and dishonesty, had as good a title to call himself Jack Smith’s friend as I had.