[Literature] Charles Dickens: A Great Mystery Solved by Gillan Vase #10/131

An old young man, or a young old man? — Mr. Grewgious’ short-sighted eyes cannot make out which. A man of about middle height; thin and scared looking; with black beard and whiskers; and hair dark as night. A pale man, with something weird and mysterious about him like a spectre, and whose eyes, hidden behind a massive pair of blue spectacles, are all the more open to terrible suspicion on that account. A voiceless man, sitting still in the chair, into which he had sunk on Mr. Grewgious’ invitation, and in which he remains motionless, with his glazed eyes fixed upon that exhausted gentleman, freezing him.

“This is getting alarming,” thinks Mr. Grewgious, “and I’m on the wrong side for the bell. Besides, that boy is sure not to be at his post. But boys will be boys,” he adds, as his anger ebbs fast, “I was a boy once myself, and remember perfectly how it hurt me to have my ears boxed, and how they burned afterwards. I’ll lay it on gently, only as a matter of warning.” Then aloud, “Do you wish to confer with me on any subject, sir?”

“You are seeking a clerk?”

“Unfortunately,” says Mr. Grewgious, “I am.” He is greatly relieved to hear the mysterious stranger speak; for, exhausted as he is, his imagination has been conjuring up in him a ghostly visitor.

“I am come to offer myself as a candidate for the place.”

“Very good!” responds Mr. Grewgious, wishing that he hadn’t.

“I beg you to try me.” —

There is a curious roughness in the voice as if the speaker were struggling with tears, and as if the issue of the struggle were doubtful. But after a pause, he goes on again —

“I am poor, and without friends. I am exceedingly anxious to get work to do because, if I cannot, I must beg or starve, and to beg I am ashamed. But I will work — work night and day, if you wish it; and you shall pay me for that work not one penny more than you decide that it is worth.”

Although staggered by this address, so unusual, so wholly different from anything said by the fifty-odd applicants who have been besieging his rooms and altering the chronic aspect of Staple Inn all that day, and touched by the pathos and apparent sincerity of the speaker, and by something else — a something undefinable, but which makes the strange figure, and the broken voice seem not altogether unfamiliar — though why familiar, or where, he cannot tell — Mr. Grewgious is, nevertheless, far too versed in the ways of the world and its hypocrisies to show for the present anything more than his strict business side to the stranger. He inquires, therefore, more drily than ever —

“What is your name, sir?”

“Brandis. Robert Brandis, at your service.”

“Are you young,” continues Mr. Grewgious, screwing up his eyes in an earnest endeavour to penetrate the blue spectacles, and unscrewing them again, as wise as he was before, “or middle-aged, or old?”

“I am young, sir; young in years, though trouble has aged me.”

“Humph!” exclaims Mr. Grewgious, smoothing his head in some perturbation of spirit; for good sense and good feeling are pointing in opposite directions, and he cannot make up his mind which to follow. Then, abruptly—” Have you anything the matter with your eyes? I wear spectacles myself, sometimes, on account of my short sight; but not blue ones. I cannot say,” viewing these articles with strong disfavour, and speaking more sharply than he would have done but for the conflict within, “that I consider them an improvement. Not at all.”

“I wear them, sir, because I must. They do not interfere with my seeing all it is necessary for me to see.”

“Very likely,” thinks Mr. Grewgious, “but they interfere with your being seen, and that’s what I want to do. Can you write a good, clear, legible hand?” inquires Mr. Grewgious further, in a hard and severe tone. For common good sense is slowly yielding to the attack of uncommon kindly feeling, and Mr. Grewgious is half-angry with himself for his own weakness, as he knows the world will call it.

“Let me show you, sir.” He turns to a table, upon which writing materials are lying, and writes his name in full. There is no manner of objection to be made to the handwriting. It will do.

“Have you any notion of bookkeeping?”

“Not much, sir, as yet; but I will learn, in my spare hours, if I have any. In a very short time, I will learn.

I am a good arithmetician. Do not let that be an obstacle.”

“That shall be no obstacle,” says Mr.