On ten thousand Friday evenings, as it seemed to him, he had gone into
the gas-lit office with the wire-blinds, in the Cock Yard. And the
procedure never varied. Behind a large table sat two gentlemen, the
secretary and a subordinate, who was, however, older than the secretary.
They had enormous ledgers in front of them, and at the lower corners of
the immense pages was a transverse crease, like a mountain range on the
left and like a valley on the right, caused by secretarial thumbs in
turning over. On the table were also large metal inkstands and wooden
money-coffers. The two officials both wore spectacles, and they both
looked above their spectacles when they talked to members across the
table. They spoke in low tones; they smiled with the most scrupulous
politeness; they never wasted words. They counted money with prim and
efficient gestures, ringing gold with the mien of judges inaccessible to
human emotions. They wrote in the ledgers, and on the membership-cards,
in a hand astoundingly regular and discreetly flourished; the pages of
the ledgers had the mystic charm of ancient manuscripts, and the
finality of decrees of fate. Apparently the scribes never made
mistakes, but sometimes they would whisper in colloquy, and one, without
leaning his body, would run a finger across the ledger of the other;
their fingers knew intimately the geography of the ledgers, and moved as
though they could have found a desired name, date, or number, in the
dark. The whole ceremony was impressive. It really did impress Edwin,
as he would wait his turn among the three or four proud and respectable
members that the going and coming seemed always to leave in the room.
The modest blue-yellow gas, the vast table and ledgers, and the two
sober heads behind; the polite murmurings, the rustle of leaves, the
chink of money, the smooth sound of elegant pens: all this made
something not merely impressive, but beautiful; something that had a
true if narrow dignity; something that ministered to an ideal if a low
one.
But Edwin had regarded the operation as a complete loss of the money
whose payment it involved. Ten years! It was an eternity! And even
then his father would have some preposterous suggestion for rendering
useless the unimaginable fifty pounds! Meanwhile the weekly deduction
of eighteenpence from his miserable income was an exasperating strain.
And then one night the secretary had told him that he was entering on
his last month. If he had possessed any genuine interest in money, he
would have known for himself; but he did not. And then the payments had
ceased. He had said nothing to his father.
And now the share had matured, and there was the unimaginable sum
waiting for him! He got his hat and a stamp, and hurried to the Cock
Yard. The secretary, in his private room now, gave him five notes as
though the notes had been naught but tissue paper, and he accepted them
in the same inhuman manner. The secretary asked him if he meant to take
out another share, and from sheer moral cowardice he said that he did
mean to do so; and he did so, on the spot. And in less than ten minutes
he was back at the shop. Nothing had happened there. The other horses
had not come down from Bleakridge, and the men had not come out of the
Dragon. But he had fifty pounds in his pocket, and it was lawfully his.
A quarter of an hour earlier he positively could not have conceived the
miracle.
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