HUMANITY IN HIGH PLACES
One day, however, Henry was to make the still more surprising discovery,
that not only were the clerks human beings, but that one of the
partners--only one of them--was also human. He made this discovery about
the senior partner, whose old-world figure and quaint name, Septimus
Searle Lingard, had, in spite of his severity, attracted him by a
certain musty distinction.
A stranger figure than Septimus Searle Lingard has seldom walked the
streets of any town. Though not actually much over sixty, you would have
said he must be a thousand; his abnormally long, narrow, shaven face was
so thin and gaunt and hollowed, and his tall, upright figure was so
painfully fragile, that his black broadcloth seemed almost too heavy for
the worn frame inside it. And nothing in the world else was ever so
piercingly solemn as his keen weary old eyes. With his tall silk hat,
his thin white hair, his long white face, long black frock-coat, and
black trousers, he looked for all the world like a distinguished
skeleton. Henry could never be quite sure whether he was to be classed
as a "character," or as a genuine personality. One thing was certain,
that, sometime or other, or many times, in his life he had done
something, or many things, which had won for him a respect as deep as
his solemnity of aspect; and certainly, if gravity of demeanour goes for
anything, all the owls of all the ages in collaboration could not have
produced an expression of time-honoured wisdom so convincing. Sometimes
his old lantern-jaws would emit an uncanny cackle of a laugh, and a
ghastly flicker of humour play across his parchment features; but these
only deepened the general sense of solemnity, as the hoot of a
night-bird deepens the loneliness of some desolate hollow among
the hills.
It was this strange old ghost of a man that was to be the next to turn
human, and it came about like this. Right away at the top of the
building was a lonely room where the sun never shone, in which were
stored away the old account-books, diaries, and various
dead-and-done-with documents of the firm; and here too was deposited,
from time to time, various wreckage of the same kind from other
businesses whose last offices had been done by the firm, and whose
records were still preserved, in the unlikely event of any chance
resurrection of claim upon, or interest in, their long forgotten names.
Here crumbled the last relics of many an ambitious enterprise,--great
ledgers, with their covers still fresh, lay like slabs, from which, if
you wiped away the dust, the gilded names of foundered companies would
flash as from gaudy tombstones; letter-books bursting with letters that
no eye would read again so long as the world lasted; yellow title-deeds
from which all the virtue had long since exhaled, and to which no
dangling of enormous seals could any longer lend a convincing air of
importance. Here everything was dead and dusty as an old shoe. The dry
bones in the valley of Askelon were as children skipping in the morning
sun compared with the dusty death that mouldered and mouldered in this
lonely locked-up room,--this catacomb of dead businesses.
It was seldom necessary to visit this room; but occasionally Henry
would find an excuse to loiter an hour there, for there was a certain
dreary romance about the place, and the almost choking smell of old
leather seemed to promise all sorts of buried secrets. It cannot be said
that the place ever adequately gratified the sense of mystery it
excited; but, after all, to excite the sense of mystery is perhaps
better than to gratify it, and, considering its poor material, this room
was quite a clever old mysteriarch.
One day, however, Henry came upon some writing that did greatly interest
him, though it was almost contemporary. It was old Mr. Septimus
Lingard's diary for the year preceding, which he had got hold of,--not
his private diary, but the entirely public official diary in which he
kept account of the division of his days among his various clients--for
the most part an unexciting record. But at the end of the book, on one
of the general memoranda pages, Henry noticed a square block of writing
which, to his surprise, proved to be a long quotation from a book which
the old man had been reading,--on the Immortality of the soul!
Had old Mr. Septimus Lingard a soul too, a soul that troubled him
maybe, a soul that had its moving memories, and its immortal
aspirations? Yes, somewhere hidden in that strange legal document of a
body, there was evidently a soul. Mr. Lingard had a soul!
But wait a moment, here was an addition of the old man's own! The
passage quoted had been of death and its possible significance, and it
was just a sigh, a fear, the old man had breathed after it: _How high
has the winding-sheet encompassed my own bosom_!
Solemn as were the words in themselves, they seemed doubly so in that
lonely room; and Henry was glad to lock the door and return to the
comparatively living world downstairs. But from that moment old Mr.
Lingard was transfigured in his eyes. Beneath all the sternness of his
exterior, the grimness of the business interests which seemed to absorb
him, Henry had discovered the blessed human spring. And he came too to
wear a certain pathos and sanctity in Henry's eyes, as he remembered how
old a man he was, and that secretly all this time, while he seemed so
busy with this public company and another, he was quietly preparing to
die. From this moment tasks done for him came to have a certain joy in
them. For his sake, as it were, he began to understand how you might
take a pride in doing well something that, in your opinion, was not
worth doing; and one day when the old man, well satisfied with some work
he had done, patted him kindly on the back and said, "We'll make a
business man of you after all!" the tears started to his eyes, and for a
moment he almost hoped that they would.