“You don’t think everybody’s saved, eh? That, you know, would be a serious heresy, Tewler. I forget which—Perfectionism or something—but it would be.”
“I don’t fink at all, Sir. I don’t know enough. Only I feel if Chrise died to save us sinners, ’E wouldn’t make a mess of it and leave most of us out. Like that, Sir. Would ’E, Sir? If you repent truly and believe.”
“And you believe?”
“Like anything, Sir. Don’t make no mistake about that, Sir. I says my prayers and ’ope to be forgiven. I do my best to be good. I’ve never scoffed in my life. I’ve never used bad language. Never. I’ve listened to it but I’ve never used it No, Sir.”
“And the less said about it all the better?”
“Yessir.” He replied so eagerly and with such manifest relief that Jim Whittaker realised the religious Inquisition was at an end.
“And so, to come to business. We had a sort of discussion with the worthy man here. He’s still “—he got the only word for it—” he’s Wraath with you. Wraath.”
Edward Albert featured blameless distress.
“He says he wants you to leave his—his high-class establishment and live elsewhere.”
“But where am I to live?”
“I think we can arrange something. You see, you will have a small income.”
“What, my own? To spend?”
“We think you can be trusted to do that. You’ll have to be careful, you know,”
“One can’t be too careful.”
“That’s exactly the principle. You see your mother left a little property in the savings bank and in various investments—not very much but quite enough to keep you—and Mr Myame has invested practically all of it in his school—on your behalf. We’ve arranged with him that this shall take the form of a first mortgage on his property, with reasonable arrangements to pay it off—”
“I don’t rightly know what a mortgage is,” said Edward Albert.
“You needn’t. They’ll see to all that in Hooper’s office. You’re the mortgagee and Myame is the mortgagor. It’s perfectly simple. He mortgages his school to you. See? Mortgage. And what it comes to is that you will get something like two guineas and a half a week, of which about five bob will be capital repayment which you’ll have to put by—or Hooper’s office might do that for you—and you’ll have to live on that, and I should think you can rub along quite well until you begin to earn a living. That’s the outlook, and the next question is, what do you want to get up to? Then we can decide where you ought to live and all that. What’s your idea about all that, Tewler?”
“Well, Sir, it’s like this. I’ve been making ’nquiries as you might say! There’s a very nice gentleman who’s Librarian in the Public Library and he’s been a great ’elp. It’s no good me trying to ’ide it from you, Sir. I’m not ’ighly educated. Yet,”
“Oh, come, Edward. Don’t be down-hearted.”
“I got on a bit with Elementary French and Scripture, but all the same, Sir, Mr Myame didn’t take me very far.”
Mr Whittaker intimated a general agreement.
“Frinstance it would be nice to be a Bang Clark. That’s reely respectable. You ’ave your Bang Collar Days. You ’ave promotion. You ’ave a pension. You know where you are. But I’m not educated enough to be a Bang Clark. Even if I went to a good college and worked very ’ard, I doubt if I could qualify in time....
“Then there’s Lower Division Civil Service. That’s safe. You go on to a pension. If I worked ’ard. I’m only thirteen. If I was to work ’ard for that....
“Then there’s London Matriculation. That’s ’ard. But the gentleman in the lib’ry said it was a good thing to work for. It opens all sorts of avenues, ’e said....”
Jim Whittaker allowed Edward Albert to unfold his discreet but ignoble conception of life. It appeared to him that before Edward Albert died he was likely to be despised and detested by quite a number of people. So there was no reason to detest the poor sniffy little beast here and now. All in good time. The Firm had always rather underpaid old Tewler and it had to do its duty by his son, whether it liked him or not.
And it did its duty. It acceded to his strong desire to embark upon a life of miscellaneous mental improvement in that Imperial College of Commercial Science in Kentish Town, and it made an attempt to get him housed and fed according to his condition.
XI. Introducing Doobers
Young Matterlock, a counting-house clerk of thirty-two, was charged to deal with this responsibility. A boarding-house which offered opportunities for conversation and companionship seemed to be indicated. He found such establishments rare in Kentish Town. There it was mostly lodging-houses. But when one went south and east, he found boarding-houses in an enormous abundance with the utmost variety of -charges, customs, habits and clients. London was a great centre for students of every sort and colour, and for every sort and colour boarding-houses had adapted themselves. It was a museum of nationalities, a kaleidoscope of broken-off social fragments. The difficulty was to find a boarding-house that was just simply a boarding-house.
It did not occur to young Matterlock as anything extraordinary that in all this vast wilderness of lodgings and boarding-houses, not one had ever been planned and built as a lodging-house or boarding-house. Every one had been built to accommodate an imaginary and quite impossible family of considerable means and insanitary habits, with cheap abject servants packed away in the attics and basement, a dining-room, a drawing-room, a parlour and the like. The ground landlords, the architects and builders of the period seem to have been incapable of any other idea. Not ten per cent of these hopeful family residences were ever occupied by that vanishing English family; the rest were sub-divided into “floors” from the first, and nearly all of them, even the family houses, were furnished with faded and misfitting second-hand furniture. With a plentiful lack of imagination, nineteenth-century England had shaped its conduct and future to the forms of an obsolete social dream.
Thackeray has embalmed for ever this particular phase in our decadent and commercialised feudalism for the student of social history. Our concern is wholly and solely with Edward Albert, and it is not for us to speculate here, now that London and most of our other big cities such as they were, have been knocked to pieces, how far England may presently reveal a quickened and creative mind, how far it will still continue to be an unchangeable, unimaginative mother or how far it may lapse into an unpicturesque decay of muddle and misfits.... Doober’s, to which young Matterlock finally entrusted Edward Albert, had a fairly handsome facade in Bendle Street, just south of the Euston Road. Its official name of Scartmore House was painted in resolute lettering across its brow. Young Matterlock had inspected it and made the necessary arrangements beforehand. Then he had collected Edward Albert, with a tin box, a cricket bat, an outgrown overcoat and a new portmanteau, from the school, and brought him in a slow, sure four-wheeler to his new habitation.
“I think you’ll find it a very nice homely place,” he said on the way. “Mrs Doober who runs it seems a thoroughly good sort. She’ll introduce you to people and make you feel at home. You’ll soon get used to it. If you fall upon any difficulties you know my address. Your money will come every Saturday from Hooper’s office and you’ll pay the bill that day. The balance over you ought to find enough for clothes, college fees and running-expenses. If you’re careful you can manage. You can’t be too careful.”
Edward Albert made a responsive noise to that familiar phrase. .
“I think you ought to get your clothes made to measure. Those cheap ready-mades of Myame’s make you look even worse than you need do. I think Mrs Doober or some one will find you some sort of tailor round the corner. Bespoke tailors I think they call them. You see this doesn’t sit on your shoulders, and your sleeve’s so short it shows too much of your wrists. Wrists aren’t exactly your strong point, Tewler.... Well, here we are!”