In the evening Josephus held a reception. All his contemporaries in the brewery—the men who entered with himself—all those who had passed over his head, all those with whom he had been a junior in the brewery, called to congratulate him. At the moment he felt as if this universal sympathy fully made up for all his sufferings of the past. Nor was it until the morning that he partly perceived the truth—that no amount of sympathy would restore his vanished youth, and give him what he had lost.
But he will never quite understand this; and he looked upon himself as having begun again from the point where he stopped. When the reception was over and the last man gone, he began to talk about his future.
"I shall go on again with the evening course," he said, "just where I left off. I remember we were having Monday for book-keeping by single and double entry; Tuesday for French; Thursday for arithmetic—we were in mixed fractions; and Friday for Euclid. Then I shall take up my class at the Sunday-school again, and shall become a full church-member of the Wesleyan connection—for though my father was once churchwarden at Stepney church, I always favored the Wesleyans myself."
He talked as if he was a boy again, with all his life before him, and, indeed, at the moment he thought he was.
CHAPTER XLIII. O MY PROPHETIC SOUL!
Harry thought nothing about the papers which were found among the notes that evening, because he was wholly engaged in the contemplation of a man who had suddenly gone back thirty-five years in his life. The gray hairs, thin at the top and gone at the temples, were not, it is true, replaced by the curly brown locks of youth, though one thinks that Josephus must always have been a straight-haired young man. But it was remarkable to hear that man of fifty-five talking as if the years had rolled backward, and he could take up the thread of life where he had dropped it so long ago. He spoke of his evening lectures and his Sunday-school with the enthusiasm of a boy. He would study—work of that sort always paid: he would prepare his lessons for the school beforehand, and stand well with the superintendent: it was good for men in business offices, he said, to have a good character with the superintendent. Above all, he would learn French and bookkeeping, with mensuration, gauging, and astronomy, at the Beaumont Institute. All these things would come in useful, some time or the other, at the brewery; besides, it helps a man to be considered studious in his habits. He became, in fact, in imagination a young man once more. And because in the old days, when he had a character to earn, he did not smoke tobacco, so now he forgot that former solace of the day, his evening pipe.
"The brewery," he said, "is a splendid thing to get into. You can rise: you may become—ah! even chief accountant: you may look forward to draw over a thousand a year at the brewery, if you are steady and well conducted, and get a good name. It is not every one, mind you, gets the chance of such a service. And once in, always in. That's the pride of the brewery. No turning out: there you stay, with your salary always rising, till you die."
In the morning, the exultation of spirits was exchanged for a corresponding depression. Josephus went to the brewery, knowing that he should sit on that old seat of his no longer.
He went to look at it: the wooden stool was worn black; the desk was worn black; he knew every cut and scratch in the lid at which he had written so many years. There were all the books at which he had worked so long: not hard work, nor work requiring thought, but simple entering and ticking off of names, which a man can do mechanically—on summer afternoons, with the window open and an occasional bee buzzing in from Hainault Forest, and the sweet smell of the vats and the drowsy rolling of the machinery—one can do the work half asleep and never make a mistake. Now he would have to undertake some different kind of work, more responsible work: he would have to order and direct; he would have a chair instead of a stool, and a table instead of a desk. So that he began to wish that he had in the old days gone further in his studies—but he was always slow at learning—before the accident happened; and to wonder if anything at all remained of the knowledge he had then painfully acquired after all these years.