CHAPTER I
THE WEIGHTS AND
MEASURES
All the English world knows, or knows of, that
branch of the Civil Service which is popularly called the Weights
and Measures. Every inhabitant of London, and every casual visitor
there, has admired the handsome edifice which generally goes by
that name, and which stands so conspicuously confronting the
Treasury Chambers. It must be owned that we have but a slip-slop
way of christening our public buildings. When a man tells us that
he called on a friend at the Horse Guards, or looked in at the Navy
Pay, or dropped a ticket at the Woods and Forests, we put up with
the accustomed sounds, though they are in themselves, perhaps,
indefensible. The 'Board of Commissioners for Regulating Weights
and Measures', and the 'Office of the Board of Commissioners for
Regulating Weights and Measures', are very long phrases; and as, in
the course of this tale, frequent mention will be made of the
public establishment in question, the reader's comfort will be best
consulted by maintaining its popular though improper
denomination.
It is generally admitted that the Weights and
Measures is a well- conducted public office; indeed, to such a
degree of efficiency has it been brought by its present very
excellent secretary, the two very worthy assistant-secretaries, and
especially by its late most respectable chief clerk, that it may be
said to stand quite alone as a high model for all other public
offices whatever. It is exactly antipodistic of the Circumlocution
Office, and as such is always referred to in the House of Commons
by the gentleman representing the Government when any attack on the
Civil Service, generally, is being made.
And when it is remembered how great are the
interests entrusted to the care of this board, and of these
secretaries and of that chief clerk, it must be admitted that
nothing short of superlative excellence ought to suffice the
nation. All material intercourse between man and man must be
regulated, either justly or unjustly, by weights and measures; and
as we of all people depend most on such material intercourse, our
weights and measures should to us be a source of never-ending
concern. And then that question of the decimal coinage! is it not
in these days of paramount importance? Are we not disgraced by the
twelve pennies in our shilling, by the four farthings in our penny?
One of the worthy assistant-secretaries, the worthier probably of
the two, has already grown pale beneath the weight of this
question. But he has sworn within himself, with all the heroism of
a Nelson, that he will either do or die. He will destroy the
shilling or the shilling shall destroy him. In his more ardent
moods he thinks that he hears the noise of battle booming round
him, and talks to his wife of Westminster Abbey or a peerage. Then
what statistical work of the present age has shown half the
erudition contained in that essay lately published by the secretary
on The Market Price of Coined Metals? What other living man
could have compiled that chronological table which is appended to
it, showing the comparative value of the metallic currency for the
last three hundred years? Compile it indeed! What other secretary
or assistant-secretary belonging to any public office of the
present day, could even read it and live? It completely silenced
Mr. Muntz for a session, and even The Times was afraid to
review it.
Such a state of official excellence has not,
however, been obtained without its drawbacks, at any rate in the
eyes of the unambitious tyros and unfledged novitiates of the
establishment. It is a very fine thing to be pointed out by envying
fathers as a promising clerk in the Weights and Measures, and to
receive civil speeches from mammas with marriageable daughters. But
a clerk in the Weights and Measures is soon made to understand that
it is not for him to – Sport with Amaryllis in the shade.
It behoves him that his life should be grave and his
pursuits laborious, if he intends to live up to the tone of those
around him. And as, sitting there at his early desk, his eyes
already dim with figures, he sees a jaunty dandy saunter round the
opposite corner to the Council Office at eleven o'clock, he cannot
but yearn after the pleasures of idleness. Were it not better done,
as others use? he says or sighs. But then comes Phoebus in the
guise of the chief clerk, and touches his trembling ears – As he
pronounces lastly on each deed, Of so much fame, in Downing Street
– expect the meed.
And so the high tone of the office is
maintained.
Such is the character of the Weights and Measures at
this present period of which we are now treating. The exoteric
crowd of the Civil Service, that is, the great body of clerks
attached to other offices, regard their brethren of the Weights as
prigs and pedants, and look on them much as a master's favourite is
apt to be regarded by other boys at school. But this judgement is
an unfair one. Prigs and pedants, and hypocrites too, there are
among them, no doubt – but there are also among them many stirred
by an honourable ambition to do well for their country and
themselves, and to two such men the reader is now requested to
permit himself to be introduced.
Henry Norman, the senior of the two, is the second
son of a gentleman of small property in the north of England. He
was educated at a public school, and thence sent to Oxford; but
before he had finished his first year at Brasenose his father was
obliged to withdraw him from it, finding himself unable to bear the
expense of a university education for his two sons. His elder son
at Cambridge was extravagant; and as, at the critical moment when
decision became necessary, a nomination in the Weights and Measures
was placed at his disposal, old Mr. Norman committed the not
uncommon injustice of preferring the interests of his elder but
faulty son to those of the younger with whom no fault had been
found, and deprived his child of the chance of combining the
glories and happiness of a double first, a fellow, a college tutor,
and a don.
Whether Harry Norman gained or lost most by the
change we need not now consider, but at the age of nineteen he left
Oxford and entered on his new duties. It must not, however, be
supposed that this was a step which he took without difficulty and
without pause. It is true that the grand modern scheme for
competitive examinations had not as yet been composed. Had this
been done, and had it been carried out, how awful must have been
the cramming necessary to get a lad into the Weights and Measures!
But, even as things were then, it was no easy matter for a young
man to convince the chief clerk that he had all the acquirements
necessary for the high position to which he aspired.
Indeed, that chief clerk was insatiable, and
generally succeeded in making every candidate conceive the very
lowest opinion of himself and his own capacities before the
examination was over. Some, of course, were sent away at once with
ignominy, as evidently incapable. Many retired in the middle of it
with a conviction that they must seek their fortunes at the bar, or
in medical pursuits, or some other comparatively easy walk of life.
Others were rejected on the fifth or sixth day as being deficient
in conic sections, or ignorant of the exact principles of hydraulic
pressure. And even those who were retained were so retained, as it
were, by an act of grace. The Weights and Measures was, and indeed
is, like heaven – no man can deserve it. No candidate can claim as
his right to be admitted to the fruition of the appointment which
has been given to him. Henry Norman, however, was found, at the
close of his examination, to be the least undeserving of the young
men then under notice, and was duly installed in his clerkship.
It need hardly be explained, that to secure so high
a level of information as that required at the Weights and
Measures, a scale of salaries equally exalted has been found
necessary. Young men consequently enter at £100 a year. We are
speaking, of course, of that more respectable branch of the
establishment called the Secretary's Department. At none other of
our public offices do men commence with more than £90 – except, of
course, at those in which political confidence is required.
Political confidence is indeed as expensive as hydraulic pressure,
though generally found to be less difficult of attainment.
Henry Norman, therefore, entered on his labours
under good auspices, having £10 per annum more for the business and
pleasures of life in London than most of his young brethren of the
Civil Service. Whether this would have sufficed of itself to enable
him to live up to that tone of society to which he had been
accustomed cannot now be surmised, as very shortly after his
appointment an aunt died, from whom he inherited some £150 or £200
a year. He was, therefore, placed above all want, and soon became a
shining light even in that bright gallery of spiritualized stars
which formed the corps of clerks in the Secretary's Office at the
Weights and Measures.
Young Norman was a good-looking lad when he entered
the public service, and in a few years he grew up to be a handsome
man. He was tall and thin and dark, muscular in his proportions,
and athletic in his habits. From the date of his first enjoyment of
his aunt's legacy he had a wherry on the Thames, and was soon known
as a man whom it was hard for an amateur to beat. He had a racket
in a racket-court at St. John's Wood Road, and as soon as fortune
and merit increased his salary by another £100 a year, he usually
had a nag for the season. This, however, was not attained till he
was able to count five years' service in the Weights and Measures.
He was, as a boy, somewhat shy and reserved in his manners, and as
he became older he did not shake off the fault. He showed it,
however, rather among men than with women, and, indeed, in spite of
his love of exercise, he preferred the society of ladies to any of
the bachelor gaieties of his unmarried acquaintance. He was,
nevertheless, frank and confident in those he trusted, and true in
his friendships, though, considering his age, too slow in making a
friend. Such was Henry Norman at the time at which our tale begins.
What were the faults in his character it must be the business of
the tale to show.
The other young clerk in this office to whom we
alluded is Alaric Tudor. He is a year older than Henry Norman,
though he began his official career a year later, and therefore at
the age of twenty- one. How it happened that he contrived to pass
the scrutinizing instinct and deep powers of examination possessed
by the chief clerk, was a great wonder to his friends, though
apparently none at all to himself. He took the whole proceeding
very easily; while another youth alongside of him, who for a year
had been reading up for his promised nomination, was so awe-struck
by the severity of the proceedings as to lose his powers of memory
and forget the very essence of the differential calculus.
Of hydraulic pressure and the differential calculus
young Tudor knew nothing, and pretended to know nothing. He told
the chief clerk that he was utterly ignorant of all such matters,
that his only acquirements were a tolerably correct knowledge of
English, French, and German, with a smattering of Latin and Greek,
and such an intimacy with the ordinary rules of arithmetic and with
the first books of Euclid, as he had been able to pick up while
acting as a tutor, rather than a scholar, in a small German
university.
The chief clerk raised his eyebrows and said he
feared it would not do. A clerk, however, was wanting. It was very
clear that the young gentleman who had only showed that he had
forgotten his conic sections could not be supposed to have passed.
The austerity of the last few years had deterred more young men
from coming forward than the extra £10 had induced to do so. One
unfortunate, on the failure of all his hopes, had thrown himself
into the Thames from the neighbouring boat-stairs; and though he
had been hooked out uninjured by the man who always attends there
with two wooden legs, the effect on his parents' minds had been
distressing. Shortly after this occurrence the chief clerk had been
invited to attend the Board, and the Chairman of the Commissioners,
who, on the occasion, was of course prompted by the Secretary,
recommended Mr. Hardlines to be a leetle more lenient. In
doing so the quantity of butter which he poured over Mr. Hardlines'
head and shoulders with the view of alleviating the misery which
such a communication would be sure to inflict, was very great. But,
nevertheless, Mr. Hardlines came out from the Board a crestfallen
and unhappy man. 'The service,' he said, 'would go to the dogs, and
might do for anything he cared, and he did not mind how soon. If
the Board chose to make the Weights and Measures a hospital for
idiots, it might do so. He had done what little lay in his power to
make the office respectable; and now, because mammas complained
when their cubs of sons were not allowed to come in there and rob
the public and destroy the office books, he was to be thwarted and
reprimanded! He had been,' he said, 'eight-and-twenty years in
office, and was still in his prime – but he should,' he thought,
'take advantage of the advice of his medical friends, and retire.
He would never remain there to see the Weights and Measures become
a hospital for incurables!'
It was thus that Mr. Hardlines, the chief clerk,
expressed himself. He did not, however, send in a medical
certificate, nor apply for a pension; and the first apparent effect
of the little lecture which he had received from the Chairman, was
the admission into the service of Alaric Tudor. Mr. Hardlines was
soon forced to admit that the appointment was not a bad one, as
before his second year was over, young Tudor had produced a very
smart paper on the merits – or demerits – of the strike bushel.
Alaric Tudor when he entered the office was by no
means so handsome a youth as Harry Norman; but yet there was that
in his face which was more expressive, and perhaps more attractive.
He was a much slighter man, though equally tall. He could boast no
adventitious capillary graces, whereas young Norman had a pair of
black curling whiskers, which almost surrounded his face, and had
been the delight and wonder of the maidservants in his mother's
house, when he returned home for his first official holiday. Tudor
wore no whiskers, and his light-brown hair was usually cut so short
as to give him something of the appearance of a clean Puritan. But
in manners he was no Puritan; nor yet in his mode of life. He was
fond of society, and at an early period of his age strove hard to
shine in it. He was ambitious; and lived with the steady aim of
making the most of such advantages as fate and fortune had put in
his way. Tudor was perhaps not superior to Norman in point of
intellect; but he was infinitely his superior in having early
acquired a knowledge how best to use such intellect as he had.
His education had been very miscellaneous, and
disturbed by many causes, but yet not ineffective or deficient. His
father had been an officer in a cavalry regiment, with a fair
fortune, which he had nearly squandered in early life. He had taken
Alaric when little more than an infant, and a daughter, his only
other child, to reside in Brussels. Mrs. Tudor was then dead, and
the remainder of the household had consisted of a French governess,
a bonne, and a man-cook. Here Alaric remained till he had
perfectly acquired the French pronunciation, and very nearly as
perfectly forgotten the English. He was then sent to a private
school in England, where he remained till he was sixteen, returning
home to Brussels but once during those years, when he was invited
to be present at his sister's marriage with a Belgian banker. At
the age of sixteen he lost his father, who, on dying, did not leave
behind him enough of the world's wealth to pay for his own burial.
His half-pay of course died with him, and young Tudor was literally
destitute.
His brother-in-law, the banker, paid for his
half-year's schooling in England, and then removed him to a German
academy, at which it was bargained that he should teach English
without remuneration, and learn German without expense. Whether he
taught much English may be doubtful, but he did learn German
thoroughly; and in that, as in most other transactions of his early
life, certainly got the best of the bargain which had been made for
him.
At the age of twenty he was taken to the Brussels
bank as a clerk; but here he soon gave visible signs of disliking
the drudgery which was exacted from him. Not that he disliked
banking. He would gladly have been a partner with ever so small a
share, and would have trusted to himself to increase his stake. But
there is a limit to the good nature of brothers-in-law, even in
Belgium; and Alaric was quite aware that no such good luck as this
could befall him, at any rate until he had gone through many years
of servile labour. His sister also, though sisterly enough in her
disposition to him, did not quite like having a brother employed as
a clerk in her husband's office. They therefore put their heads
together, and, as the Tudors had good family connexions in England,
a nomination in the Weights and Measures was procured.
The nomination was procured; but when it was
ascertained how very short a way this went towards the attainment
of the desired object, and how much more difficult it was to obtain
Mr. Hardlines' approval than the Board's favour, young Tudor's
friends despaired, and recommended him to abandon the idea, as,
should he throw himself into the Thames, he might perhaps fall
beyond the reach of the waterman's hook. Alaric himself, however,
had no such fears. He could not bring himself to conceive that he
could fail in being fit for a clerkship in a public office, and the
result of his examination proved at any rate that he had been right
to try.
The close of his first year's life in London found
him living in lodgings with Henry Norman. At that time Norman's
income was nearly three times as good as his own. To say that Tudor
selected his companion because of his income would be to ascribe
unjustly to him vile motives and a mean instinct. He had not done
so. The two young men had been thrown, together by circumstances.
They worked at the same desk, liked each other's society, and each
being alone in the world, thereby not unnaturally came together.
But it may probably be said that had Norman been as poor as Tudor,
Tudor might probably have shrunk from rowing in the same boat with
him.
As it was they lived together and were fast allies;
not the less so that they did not agree as to many of their
avocations. Tudor, at his friend's solicitation, had occasionally
attempted to pull an oar from Searle's slip to Battersea bridge.
But his failure in this line was so complete, and he had to
encounter so much of Norman's raillery, which was endurable, and of
his instruction, which was unendurable, that he very soon gave up
the pursuit. He was not more successful with a racket; and keeping
a horse was of course out of the question.
They had a bond of union in certain common friends
whom they much loved, and with whom they much associated. At least
these friends soon became common to them. The acquaintance
originally belonged to Norman, and he had first cemented his
friendship with Tudor by introducing him at the house of Mrs.
Woodward. Since he had done so, the one young man was there nearly
as much as the other.
Who and what the Woodwards were shall be told in a
subsequent chapter. As they have to play as important a part in the
tale about to be told as our two friends of the Weights and
Measures, it would not be becoming to introduce them at the end of
this.
As regards Alaric Tudor it need only be further
said, by way of preface, of him as of Harry Norman, that the faults
of his character must be made to declare themselves in the course
of our narrative.
CHAPTER II
THE INTERNAL NAVIGATION
The London world, visitors as well as residents, are well acquainted also with Somerset House; and it is moreover tolerably well known that Somerset House is a nest of public offices, which are held to be of less fashionable repute than those situated in the neighbourhood of Downing Street, but are not so decidedly plebeian as the Custom House, Excise, and Post Office.
But there is one branch of the Civil Service located in Somerset House, which has little else to redeem it from the lowest depths of official vulgarity than the ambiguous respectability of its material position. This is the office of the Commissioners of Internal Navigation. The duties to be performed have reference to the preservation of canal banks, the tolls to be levied at locks, and disputes with the Admiralty as to points connected with tidal rivers. The rooms are dull and dark, and saturated with the fog which rises from the river, and their only ornament is here and there some dusty model of an improved barge. Bargees not unfrequently scuffle with hobnailed shoes through the passages, and go in and out, leaving behind them a smell of tobacco, to which the denizens of the place are not unaccustomed.
Indeed, the whole office is apparently infected with a leaven of bargedom. Not a few of the men are employed from time to time in the somewhat lethargic work of inspecting the banks and towing- paths of the canals which intersect the country. This they generally do seated on a load of hay, or perhaps of b...