The Professor (4 page)

"Humph! there's some sense in that face."

I turned; at my elbow stood a tall man, young, though probably
five or six years older than I—in other respects of an
appearance the opposite to common place; though just now, as I am
not disposed to paint his portrait in detail, the reader must be
content with the silhouette I have just thrown off; it was all I
myself saw of him for the moment: I did not investigate the
colour of his eyebrows, nor of his eyes either; I saw his
stature, and the outline of his shape; I saw, too, his
fastidious-looking RETROUSSE nose; these observations, few in
number, and general in character (the last excepted), sufficed,
for they enabled me to recognize him.

"Good evening, Mr. Hunsden," muttered I with a bow, and then,
like a shy noodle as I was, I began moving away—and why?
Simply because Mr. Hunsden was a manufacturer and a millowner,
and I was only a clerk, and my instinct propelled me from my
superior. I had frequently seen Hunsden in Bigben Close, where
he came almost weekly to transact business with Mr. Crimsworth,
but I had never spoken to him, nor he to me, and I owed him a
sort of involuntary grudge, because he had more than once been
the tacit witness of insults offered by Edward to me. I had the
conviction that he could only regard me as a poor-spirited slave,
wherefore I now went about to shun his presence and eschew his
conversation.

"Where are you going?" asked he, as I edged off sideways. I had
already noticed that Mr. Hunsden indulged in abrupt forms of
speech, and I perversely said to myself—

"He thinks he may speak as he likes to a poor clerk; but my mood
is not, perhaps, so supple as he deems it, and his rough freedom
pleases me not at all."

I made some slight reply, rather indifferent than courteous, and
continued to move away. He coolly planted himself in my path.

"Stay here awhile," said he: "it is so hot in the dancing-room;
besides, you don't dance; you have not had a partner to-night."

He was right, and as he spoke neither his look, tone, nor manner
displeased me; my AMOUR-PROPRE was propitiated; he had not
addressed me out of condescension, but because, having repaired
to the cool dining-room for refreshment, he now wanted some one
to talk to, by way of temporary amusement. I hate to be
condescended to, but I like well enough to oblige; I stayed.

"That is a good picture," he continued, recurring to the
portrait.

"Do you consider the face pretty?" I asked.

"Pretty! no—how can it be pretty, with sunk eyes and hollow
cheeks? but it is peculiar; it seems to think. You could have a
talk with that woman, if she were alive, on other subjects than
dress, visiting, and compliments."

I agreed with him, but did not say so. He went on.

"Not that I admire a head of that sort; it wants character and
force; there's too much of the sen-si-tive (so he articulated it,
curling his lip at the same time) in that mouth; besides, there
is Aristocrat written on the brow and defined in the figure; I
hate your aristocrats."

"You think, then, Mr. Hunsden, that patrician descent may be read
in a distinctive cast of form and features?"

"Patrician descent be hanged! Who doubts that your lordlings may
have their 'distinctive cast of form and features' as much as we
—shire tradesmen have ours? But which is the best? Not theirs
assuredly. As to their women, it is a little different: they
cultivate beauty from childhood upwards, and may by care and
training attain to a certain degree of excellence in that point,
just like the oriental odalisques. Yet even this superiority is
doubtful. Compare the figure in that frame with Mrs. Edward
Crimsworth—which is the finer animal?"

I replied quietly: "Compare yourself and Mr. Edward Crimsworth,
Mr Hunsden."

"Oh, Crimsworth is better filled up than I am, I know besides he
has a straight nose, arched eyebrows, and all that; but these
advantages—if they are advantages—he did not inherit from his
mother, the patrician, but from his father, old Crimsworth, who,
MY father says, was as veritable a —shire blue-dyer as ever
put indigo in a vat yet withal the handsomest man in the three
Ridings. It is you, William, who are the aristocrat of your
family, and you are not as fine a fellow as your plebeian brother
by long chalk."

There was something in Mr. Hunsden's point-blank mode of speech
which rather pleased me than otherwise because it set me at my
ease. I continued the conversation with a degree of interest.

"How do you happen to know that I am Mr. Crimsworth's brother? I
thought you and everybody else looked upon me only in the light
of a poor clerk."

"Well, and so we do; and what are you but a poor clerk? You do
Crimsworth's work, and he gives you wages—shabby wages they are,
too."

I was silent. Hunsden's language now bordered on the
impertinent, still his manner did not offend me in the least—it
only piqued my curiosity; I wanted him to go on, which he did in
a little while.

"This world is an absurd one," said he.

"Why so, Mr. Hunsden?"

I wonder you should ask: you are yourself a strong proof of the
absurdity I allude to."

I was determined he should explain himself of his own accord,
without my pressing him so to do—so I resumed my silence.

"Is it your intention to become a tradesman?" he inquired
presently.

"It was my serious intention three months ago."

"Humph! the more fool you—you look like a tradesman! What a
practical business-like face you have!"

"My face is as the Lord made it, Mr. Hunsden."

"The Lord never made either year face or head for X— What good
can your bumps of ideality, comparison, self-esteem,
conscientiousness, do you here? But if you like Bigben Close,
stay there; it's your own affair, not mine."

"Perhaps I have no choice."

"Well, I care nought about it—it will make little difference to
me what you do or where you go; but I'm cool now—I want to dance
again; and I see such a fine girl sitting in the corner of the
sofa there by her mamma; see if I don't get her for a partner in
a jiffy! There's Waddy—Sam Waddy making up to her; won't I cut
him out?"

And Mr. Hunsden strode away. I watched him through the open
folding-doors; he outstripped Waddy, applied for the hand of the
fine girl, and led her off triumphant. She was a tall,
well-made, full-formed, dashingly-dressed young woman, much in
the style of Mrs. E. Crimsworth; Hunsden whirled her through the
waltz with spirit; he kept at her side during the remainder of
the evening, and I read in her animated and gratified countenance
that he succeeded in making himself perfectly agreeable. The
mamma too (a stout person in a turban—Mrs. Lupton by name)
looked well pleased; prophetic visions probably flattered her
inward eye. The Hunsdens were of an old stem; and scornful as
Yorke (such was my late interlocutor's name) professed to be of
the advantages of birth, in his secret heart he well knew and
fully appreciated the distinction his ancient, if not high
lineage conferred on him in a mushroom-place like X—,
concerning whose inhabitants it was proverbially said, that not
one in a thousand knew his own grandfather. Moreover the
Hunsdens, once rich, were still independent; and report affirmed
that Yorke bade fair, by his success in business, to restore to
pristine prosperity the partially decayed fortunes of his house.
These circumstances considered, Mrs. Lupton's broad face might
well wear a smile of complacency as she contemplated the heir of
Hunsden Wood occupied in paying assiduous court to her darling
Sarah Martha. I, however, whose observations being less anxious,
were likely to be more accurate, soon saw that the grounds for
maternal self-congratulation were slight indeed; the gentleman
appeared to me much more desirous of making, than susceptible of
receiving an impression. I know not what it was in Mr. Hunsden
that, as I watched him (I had nothing better to do), suggested to
me, every now and then, the idea of a foreigner. In form and
features he might be pronounced English, though even there one
caught a dash of something Gallic; but he had no English shyness:
he had learnt somewhere, somehow, the art of setting himself
quite at his ease, and of allowing no insular timidity to
intervene as a barrier between him and his convenience or
pleasure. Refinement he did not affect, yet vulgar he could not
be called; he was not odd—no quiz—yet he resembled no one else
I had ever seen before; his general bearing intimated complete,
sovereign satisfaction with himself; yet, at times, an
indescribable shade passed like an eclipse over his countenance,
and seemed to me like the sign of a sudden and strong inward
doubt of himself, his words and actions-an energetic discontent
at his life or his social position, his future prospects or his
mental attainments—I know not which; perhaps after all it might
only be a bilious caprice.

No man likes to acknowledge that he has made a mistake in the
choice of his profession, and every man, worthy of the name, will
row long against wind and tide before he allows himself to cry
out, "I am baffled!" and submits to be floated passively back to
land. From the first week of my residence in X— I felt my
occupation irksome. The thing itself—the work of copying and
translating business-letters—was a dry and tedious task enough,
but had that been all, I should long have borne with the
nuisance; I am not of an impatient nature, and influenced by the
double desire of getting my living and justifying to myself and
others the resolution I had taken to become a tradesman, I should
have endured in silence the rust and cramp of my best faculties;
I should not have whispered, even inwardly, that I longed for
liberty; I should have pent in every sigh by which my heart might
have ventured to intimate its distress under the closeness,
smoke, monotony and joyless tumult of Bigben Close, and its
panting desire for freer and fresher scenes; I should have set up
the image of Duty, the fetish of Perseverance, in my small
bedroom at Mrs. King's lodgings, and they two should have been my
household gods, from which my darling, my cherished-in-secret,
Imagination, the tender and the mighty, should never, either by
softness or strength, have severed me. But this was not all; the
antipathy which had sprung up between myself and my employer
striking deeper root and spreading denser shade daily, excluded
me from every glimpse of the sunshine of life; and I began to
feel like a plant growing in humid darkness out of the slimy
walls of a well.

Antipathy is the only word which can express the feeling Edward
Crimsworth had for me—a feeling, in a great measure,
involuntary, and which was liable to be excited by every, the
most trifling movement, look, or word of mine. My southern
accent annoyed him; the degree of education evinced in my
language irritated him; my punctuality, industry, and accuracy,
fixed his dislike, and gave it the high flavour and poignant
relish of envy; he feared that I too should one day make a
successful tradesman. Had I been in anything inferior to him, he
would not have hated me so thoroughly, but I knew all that he
knew, and, what was worse, he suspected that I kept the padlock
of silence on mental wealth in which he was no sharer. If he
could have once placed me in a ridiculous or mortifying position,
he would have forgiven me much, but I was guarded by three
faculties—Caution, Tact, Observation; and prowling and prying as
was Edward's malignity, it could never baffle the lynx-eyes of
these, my natural sentinels. Day by day did his malice watch my
tact, hoping it would sleep, and prepared to steal snake-like on
its slumber; but tact, if it be genuine, never sleeps.

I had received my first quarter's wages, and was returning to my
lodgings, possessed heart and soul with the pleasant feeling that
the master who had paid me grudged every penny of that
hard-earned pittance—(I had long ceased to regard Mr. Crimsworth
as my brother—he was a hard, grinding master; he wished to be an
inexorable tyrant: that was all). Thoughts, not varied but
strong, occupied my mind; two voices spoke within me; again and
again they uttered the same monotonous phrases. One said:
"William, your life is intolerable." The other: "What can you
do to alter it?" I walked fast, for it was a cold, frosty night
in January; as I approached my lodgings, I turned from a general
view of my affairs to the particular speculation as to whether my
fire would be out; looking towards the window of my sitting-room,
I saw no cheering red gleam.

"That slut of a servant has neglected it as usual," said I, "and
I shall see nothing but pale ashes if I go in; it is a fine
starlight night—I will walk a little farther."

It WAS a fine night, and the streets were dry and even clean for
X—; there was a crescent curve of moonlight to be seen by the
parish church tower, and hundreds of stars shone keenly bright in
all quarters of the sky.

Unconsciously I steered my course towards the country; I had got
into Grove-street, and began to feel the pleasure of seeing dim
trees at the extremity, round a suburban house, when a person
leaning over the iron gate of one of the small gardens which
front the neat dwelling-houses in this street, addressed me as I
was hurrying with quick stride past.

"What the deuce is the hurry? Just so must Lot have left Sodom,
when he expected fire to pour down upon it, out of burning brass
clouds."

I stopped short, and looked towards the speaker. I smelt the
fragrance, and saw the red spark of a cigar; the dusk outline of
a man, too, bent towards me over the wicket.

"You see I am meditating in the field at eventide," continued
this shade. "God knows it's cool work! especially as instead of
Rebecca on a camel's hump, with bracelets on her arms and a ring
in her nose, Fate sends me only a counting-house clerk, in a grey
tweed wrapper." The voice was familiar to me—its second
utterance enabled me to seize the speaker's identity.