"Seemingly we're too soon, Mr Edwin. What do you say to a turn round
the town--playground way? I doubted we should be too soon."
Edwin showed alacrity. As a schoolboy it had been definitely forbidden
to him to go out at night; and unless sent on a special and hurried
errand, he had scarcely seen the physiognomy of the streets after eight
o'clock. He had never seen the playground in the evening. And this
evening the town did not seem like the same town; it had become a new
and mysterious town of adventure. And yet Edwin was not fifty yards
away from his own bedroom.
They ascended Duck Bank together, Edwin proud to be with a celebrity of
the calibre of Big James, and Big James calmly satisfied to show himself
thus formally with his master's son. It appeared almost incredible that
those two immortals, so diverse, had issued from the womb practically
alike; that a few brief years on the earth had given Big James such a
tremendous physical advantage. Several hours' daily submission to the
exact regularities of lines of type and to the unvarying demands of
minutely adjusted machines in motion had stamped Big James's body and
mind with the delicate and quasi-finicking preciseness which
characterises all compositors and printers; and the continual monotonous
performance of similar tasks that employed his faculties while never
absorbing or straining them, had soothed and dulled the fever of life in
him to a beneficent calm, a calm refined and beautified by the
pleasurable exercise of song. Big James had seldom known a violent
emotion. He had craved nothing, sought for nothing, and lost nothing.
Edwin, like Big James in progress from everlasting to everlasting, was
all inchoate, unformed, undisciplined, and burning with capricious
fires; all expectant, eager, reluctant, tingling, timid, innocently and
wistfully audacious. By taking the boy's hand, Big James might have
poetically symbolised their relation.
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