A PENITENTIARY OF THE MATHEMATICS
Yes, Mike was some day to be another Kean, and Henry was to prove a
serious rival to Shakespeare; but, meanwhile, they were clerks in the
offices of Tyre.
Of the rigours, and therefore too the truancies and humours of the lot
official, Mike was comparatively so comfortably circumstanced as to have
little knowledge. His father was the king of a little flourishing prison
of desks, and Mike was one of the heirs-apparent. Consequently, his lot,
though dull, was seldom bitter; and many mitigations of it were within
his privilege. With Henry it was different. He was a humble unit among
twenty other slaves, chained to that modern substitute for the galleys,
the desk; and, in a wicked bargain, he had contracted to give his
life-blood from nine in the morning till six in the evening, for sixty
pounds a year, with an occasional "rise," which, after thirty years'
service, might end in your having reached a proud annual three hundred
for the rest of your maimed and narrowed days.
Henry had come to the office straight from school, at the age of
sixteen; and, though classrooms breathe an air sufficiently frigid and
suggestive of inhuman interests and unmeaning discipline, the icy air of
that office had at first almost taken his breath. The place was so
ridiculously serious! There might conceivedly be interests in the world
worthy of so abject an absorption, so bleaching an obeisance of the
individual; but Henry, with the dews of certain classics still upon him,
remembered that anything really Olympian in its importance is always
strong enough to smile. It is a lesser strength that must make the
muscular effort of severity. True dignities, as often as possible, stand
at ease. But here indeed were no true strengths and dignities,--only
prison-strengths and prison-dignities. Here the majesties, the
occupations, the offences, were alike frivolities, fantastically changed
about into solemnities.
That first impression of abject bowed heads and chains rattled beneath
desks, was roughly correct. For all that was human in a man, this was a
prison. These men who bent over foolish papers were evidently convicts
of the most desperate character; so, at all events, you would judge when
occasionally one or other of the prison-governors, known as "partners,"
passed among them with the lash of his eye. Such faint human twittering
as may have grown up amongst even these poor exiles would suddenly die
into a silence white with fear, as when the shadow of a hawk falls
across the song of smaller birds.
No human relations are acknowledged here. Outside, you may be a husband
wonderfully beloved and tragically important; you may be a man whose
courage has be-medalled your brave breast; you may be a passionate and
subtle musician in your private hours; you may even on Sundays be a much
appreciated vessel of the divine: but all such distinctions are not
current here; here they are foreign coin, diplomas unacknowledged in
this barbarous realm of ink and steel. The more ignorant, the more
narrow, the more mean, the more unnatural, you can contrive to be, the
better will be your lot in this sad monastery of Mammon. When the door
hissed behind you, with that little patent pneumatic device, you ceased
to be a human being, and began to be--the human machine. All the
vitality you have stored within that pale body you are expected to
exhaust here,--you have sold it, don't you remember, for sixty or three
hundred pounds a year; you are not expected to have any left over for
pleasures. That will be robbery. Masters suffer much from peculation
indeed in this way; but a machine is in course of invention which shall
put an end to this, by the application of which to your heart the
task-master will know whether or not you have spent every available
heart-beat in his slavery during the day, or whether you are
endeavouring, you miserable thief, to steal home with a little remnant
of it for your children at night.
This was the theory of the office, as Henry once heard it expressed,
with a cynicism more brief and direct from the lips of one of his
task-masters; but it must be admitted that in certain respects his
experience was extreme. There are offices which are the ears and eyes of
activities absorbingly and even romantically human. To be in a
shipping-office is not perhaps to be the rose, but it is to live near
it,--the great rose of the sea. You are, so to say, a land-sailor, a
supercargo left on shore. Your office-windows are lashed with
hurricanes; your talk is frequently of cyclones. The names of far
romantic isles are constantly on your lips, and your bills of lading are
threepenny romances in themselves. Strange produce of distant lands are
your daily concern, and the four winds meet at your counter with a
savour of tar. For all you know, a pirate may claim your attention any
minute of the day.
Or, again, to be, say, in a corn-merchant's, a clearing-house of the
fruitful earth. There at your telephone you may hear the corn-fields
whispering to you, hear the wheat waving in the wind, and the thin
chatter of oats. Or you may sell butter and cheese in an office that
smells of farms. However removed, you are an indirect agent of the
earth, a humble go-between of the seasons and the eternal needs of man.
Or, once more, you may be one of the thousand clerks of a great
manufacturer, and be humbly related to one of the arts or crafts that
gladden the eye or add to the comforts of man. Or even, though you may
be denied so close an association with the elements, or the arts, you
may be the pen to some subtle legal confidante of human nature. Your
office may be stored with records of human perversity and whimsicality.
You may be the witness to fantastic wills, or assist in the
administration of the estates of lunatics. At all events, you will come
within hearing of the human passions. Misers will visit you at times,
and beautiful ladies in mourning deep as their distress; and from your
desk you will catch a glimpse of the sombre pageantry of litigious man.
Though it is true that a certain far-off flavour of these legal
excitements occasionally enlivened the business to which Henry had been
sacrificially indentured, for the most part it was an abstract
parasitical thing which had succeeded in persuading other businesses,
more directly fed from the human spring, of its obliging usefulness in
relieving them of detachable burdens. In fact, it had no activity or
interest of its own to account for, so it proposed, in default of any
such original reason for existence, to look after the accounts of
others, as a self-constituted body of financial police. For those
engaged in it, except those who had been born mentally deformed, or
those who had become unnaturally perverted by long usage, it was a sort
of penitentiary of the mathematics.