One morning Edwin was busy in the shop with his own private minion, the
paper boy, who went in awe of him. But this was not the same Edwin,
though people who could only judge by features, and by the length of
trousers and sleeves on legs and arms, might have thought that it was
the same Edwin enlarged and corrected. Half a year had passed. The
month was February, cold. Mr Enoch Peake had not merely married Mrs
Louisa Loggerheads, but had died of an apoplexy, leaving behind him
Cocknage Gardens, a widow, and his name painted in large letters over
the word `Loggerheads' on the lintel of the Dragon. The steam-printer
had done the funeral cards, and had gone to the burial of his hopes of
business in that quarter. Many funeral cards had come out of the same
printing office during the winter, including that of Mr Udall, the
great marble-player. It seemed uncanny to Edwin that a marble-player
whom he had actually seen playing marbles should do anything so solemn
as expire. However, Edwin had perfectly lost all interest in marbles;
only once in six months had he thought of them, and that once through a
funeral card. Also he was growing used to funeral cards. He would
enter an order for funeral cards as nonchalantly as an order for
butterscotch labels. But it was not deaths and the spectacle of life as
seen from the shop that had made another Edwin of him.
What had changed him was the slow daily influence of a large number of
trifling habitual duties none of which fully strained his faculties, and
the monotony of them, and the constant watchful conventionality of his
deportment with customers. He was still a youth, very youthful, but you
had to keep an eye open for his youthfulness if you wished to find it
beneath the little man that he had been transformed into. He now took
his watch out of his pocket with an absent gesture and look exactly like
his father's; and his tones would be a reflection of those of the last
important full-sized man with whom he had happened to have been in
contact. And though he had not developed into a dandy (finance
forbidding), he kept his hair unnaturally straight, and amiably grumbled
to Maggie about his collars every fortnight or so. Yes, another Edwin!
Yet it must not be assumed that he was growing in discontent, either
chronic or acute. On the contrary, the malady of discontent troubled
him less and less.
To the paper boy he was a real man. The paper boy accepted him with
unreserved fatalism, as Edwin accepted his father. Thus the boy stood
passive while Edwin brought business to a standstill by privately
perusing the "Manchester Examiner." It was Saturday morning, the
morning on which the "Examiner" published its renowned Literary
Supplement. All the children read eagerly the Literary Supplement; but
Edwin, in virtue of his office, got it first. On the first and second
pages was the serial story, by George MacDonald, W. Clark Russell, or
Mrs Lynn Linton; then followed readable extracts from new books, and on
the fourth page were selected jokes from "Punch." Edwin somehow always
began with the jokes, and in so doing was rather ashamed of his levity.
He would skim the jokes, glance at the titles of the new books, and look
at the dialogue parts of the serial, while business and the boy waited.
There was no hurry then, even though the year had reached 1873 and
people were saying that they would soon be at the middle of the
seventies; even though the Licensing Act had come into force and
publicans were predicting the end of the world. Morning papers were not
delivered till ten, eleven, or twelve o'clock in Bursley, and on
Saturdays, owing to Edwin's laudable interest in the best periodical
literature, they were apt to be delivered later than usual.
------------------------------------------------------------------------