Dombey and Son
you can afford to dispense with the endeavour.” If he had carried these
words about with him printed on a placard, and had constantly offered
it to Mr Dombey’s perusal on the breast of his coat, he could not have
been more explicit than he was.
This was Carker the Manager. Mr Carker the Junior, Walter’s friend, was
his brother; two or three years older than he, but widely removed in
station. The younger brother’s post was on the top of the official
ladder; the elder brother’s at the bottom. The elder brother never
gained a stave, or raised his foot to mount one. Young men passed above
his head, and rose and rose; but he was always at the bottom. He was
quite resigned to occupy that low condition: never complained of it:
and certainly never hoped to escape from it.
“How do you do this morning?” said Mr Carker the Manager, entering Mr
Dombey’s room soon after his arrival one day: with a bundle of papers
in his hand.
“How do you do, Carker?” said Mr Dombey.
“Coolish!” observed Carker, stirring the fire.
“Rather,” said Mr Dombey.
“Any news of the young gentleman who is so important to us all?” asked
Carker, with his whole regiment of teeth on parade.
“Yes—not direct news—I hear he’s very well,” said Mr Dombey. Who had
come from Brighton over-night. But no one knew It.
“Very well, and becoming a great scholar, no doubt?” observed the
Manager.
“I hope so,” returned Mr Dombey.
“Egad!” said Mr Carker, shaking his head, “Time flies!”
“I think so, sometimes,” returned Mr Dombey, glancing at his newspaper.
“Oh! You! You have no reason to think so,” observed Carker. “One who
sits on such an elevation as yours, and can sit there, unmoved, in all
seasons—hasn’t much reason to know anything about the flight of time.
It’s men like myself, who are low down and are not superior in
circumstances, and who inherit new masters in the course of Time, that
have cause to look about us. I shall have a rising sun to worship,
soon.”
“Time enough, time enough, Carker!” said Mr Dombey, rising from his
chair, and standing with his back to the fire. “Have you anything there
for me?”
“I don’t know that I need trouble you,” returned Carker, turning over
the papers in his hand. “You have a committee today at three, you
know.”
“And one at three, three-quarters,” added Mr Dombey.
“Catch you forgetting anything!” exclaimed Carker, still turning over
his papers. “If Mr Paul inherits your memory, he’ll be a troublesome
customer in the House. One of you is enough.”
“You have an accurate memory of your own,” said Mr Dombey.
“Oh! I!” returned the manager. “It’s the only capital of a man like
me.”
Mr Dombey did not look less pompous or at all displeased, as he stood
leaning against the chimney-piece, surveying his (of course
unconscious) clerk, from head to foot. The stiffness and nicety of Mr
Carker’s dress, and a certain arrogance of manner, either natural to
him or imitated from a pattern not far off, gave great additional
effect to his humility. He seemed a man who would contend against the
power that vanquished him, if he could, but who was utterly borne down
by the greatness and superiority of Mr Dombey.
“Is Morfin here?” asked Mr Dombey after a short pause, during which Mr
Carker had been fluttering his papers, and muttering little abstracts
of their contents to himself.
“Morfin’s here,” he answered, looking up with his widest and almost
sudden smile; “humming musical recollections—of his last night’s
quartette party, I suppose—through the walls between us, and driving me
half mad. I wish he’d make a bonfire of his violoncello, and burn his
music-books in it.”
“You respect nobody, Carker, I think,” said Mr Dombey.
“No?” inquired Carker, with another wide and most feline show of his
teeth. “Well! Not many people, I believe. I wouldn’t answer perhaps,”
he murmured, as if he were only thinking it, “for more than one.”
A dangerous quality, if real; and a not less dangerous one, if feigned.
But Mr Dombey hardly seemed to think so, as he still stood with his
back to the fire, drawn up to his full height, and looking at his
head-clerk with a dignified composure, in which there seemed to lurk a
stronger latent sense of power than usual.
“Talking of Morfin,” resumed Mr Carker, taking out one paper from the
rest, “he reports a junior dead in the agency at Barbados, and proposes
to reserve a passage in the Son and Heir—she’ll sail in a month or
so—for the successor. You don’t care who goes, I suppose? We have
nobody of that sort here.”
Mr Dombey shook his head with supreme indifference.
“It’s no very precious appointment,” observed Mr Carker, taking up a
pen, with which to endorse a memorandum on the back of the paper. “I
hope he may bestow it on some orphan nephew of a musical friend. It may
perhaps stop his fiddle-playing, if he has a gift that way. Who’s that?
Come in!”
“I beg your pardon, Mr Carker. I didn’t know you were here, Sir,”
answered Walter; appearing with some letters in his hand, unopened, and
newly arrived. “Mr Carker the junior, Sir—”
At the mention of this name, Mr Carker the Manager was or affected to
be, touched to the quick with shame and humiliation. He cast his eyes
full on Mr Dombey with an altered and apologetic look, abased them on
the ground, and remained for a moment without speaking.
“I thought, Sir,” he said suddenly and angrily, turning on Walter,
“that you had been before requested not to drag Mr Carker the Junior
into your conversation.”
“I beg your pardon,” returned Walter. “I was only going to say that Mr
Carker the Junior had told me he believed you were gone out, or I
should not have knocked at the door when you were engaged with Mr
Dombey. These are letters for Mr Dombey, Sir.”
“Very well, Sir,” returned Mr Carker the Manager, plucking them sharply
from his hand. “Go about your business.”
But in taking them with so little ceremony, Mr Carker dropped one on
the floor, and did not see what he had done; neither did Mr Dombey
observe the letter lying near his feet. Walter hesitated for a moment,
thinking that one or other of them would notice it; but finding that
neither did, he stopped, came back, picked it up, and laid it himself
on Mr Dombey’s desk. The letters were post-letters; and it happened
that the one in question was Mrs Pipchin’s regular report, directed as
usual—for Mrs Pipchin was but an indifferent penwoman—by Florence. Mr
Dombey, having his attention silently called to this letter by Walter,
started, and looked fiercely at him, as if he believed that he had
purposely selected it from all the rest.
“You can leave the room, Sir!” said Mr Dombey, haughtily.
He crushed the letter in his hand; and having watched Walter out at the
door, put it in his pocket without breaking the seal.
“These continual references to Mr Carker the Junior,” Mr Carker the
Manager began, as soon as they were alone, “are, to a man in my
position, uttered before one in yours, so unspeakably distressing—”
“Nonsense, Carker,” Mr Dombey interrupted. “You are too sensitive.”
“I am sensitive,” he returned. “If one in your position could by any
possibility imagine yourself in my place: which you cannot: you would
be so too.”
As Mr Dombey’s thoughts were evidently pursuing some other subject, his
discreet ally broke off here, and stood with his teeth ready to present
to him, when he should look up.
“You want somebody to send to the West Indies, you were saying,”
observed Mr Dombey, hurriedly.
“Yes,” replied Carker.
“Send young Gay.”
“Good, very good indeed. Nothing easier,” said Mr Carker, without any
show of surprise, and taking up the pen to re-endorse the letter, as
coolly as he had done before. “‘Send young Gay.’”
“Call him back,” said Mr Dombey.
Mr Carker was quick to do so, and Walter was quick to return.
“Gay,” said Mr Dombey, turning a little to look at him over his
shoulder. “Here is a—”
“An opening,” said Mr Carker, with his mouth stretched to the utmost.
“In the West Indies. At Barbados. I am going to send you,” said Mr
Dombey, scorning to embellish the bare truth, “to fill a junior
situation in the counting-house at Barbados. Let your Uncle know from
me, that I have chosen you to go to the West Indies.”
Walter’s breath was so completely taken away by his astonishment, that
he could hardly find enough for the repetition of the words “West
Indies.”
“Somebody must go,” said Mr Dombey, “and you are young and healthy, and
your Uncle’s circumstances are not good. Tell your Uncle that you are
appointed. You will not go yet. There will be an interval of a month—or
two perhaps.”
“Shall I remain there, Sir?” inquired Walter.
“Will you remain there, Sir!” repeated Mr Dombey, turning a little more
round towards him. “What do you mean? What does he mean, Carker?”
“Live there, Sir,” faltered Walter.
“Certainly,” returned Mr Dombey.
Walter bowed.
“That’s all,” said Mr Dombey, resuming his letters. “You will explain
to him in good time about the usual outfit and so forth, Carker, of
course. He needn’t wait, Carker.”
“You needn’t wait, Gay,” observed Mr Carker: bare to the gums.
“Unless,” said Mr Dombey, stopping in his reading without looking off
the letter, and seeming to listen. “Unless he has anything to say.”
“No, Sir,” returned Walter, agitated and confused, and almost stunned,
as an infinite variety of pictures presented themselves to his mind;
among which Captain Cuttle, in his glazed hat, transfixed with
astonishment at Mrs MacStinger’s, and his uncle bemoaning his loss in
the little back parlour, held prominent places. “I hardly know—I—I am
much obliged, Sir.”
“He needn’t wait, Carker,” said Mr Dombey.
And as Mr Carker again echoed the words, and also collected his papers
as if he were going away too, Walter felt that his lingering any longer
would be an unpardonable intrusion—especially as he had nothing to
say—and therefore walked out quite confounded.
Going along the passage, with the mingled consciousness and
helplessness of a dream, he heard Mr Dombey’s door shut again, as Mr
Carker came out: and immediately afterwards that gentleman called to
him.
“Bring your friend Mr Carker the Junior to my room, Sir, if you
please.”
Walter went to the outer office and apprised Mr Carker the Junior of
his errand, who accordingly came out from behind a partition where he
sat alone in one corner, and returned with him to the room of Mr Carker
the Manager.
That gentleman was standing with his back to the fire, and his hands
under his coat-tails, looking over his white cravat, as unpromisingly
as Mr Dombey himself could have looked. He received them without any
change in his attitude or softening of his harsh and black expression:
merely signing to Walter to close the door.
“John Carker,” said the Manager, when this was done, turning suddenly
upon his brother, with his two rows of teeth bristling as if he would
have bitten him, “what is the league between you and this young man, in
virtue of which I am haunted and hunted by the mention of your name? Is
it not enough for you, John Carker, that I am your near relation, and
can’t detach myself from that—”
“Say disgrace, James,” interposed the other in a low voice, finding
that he stammered for a word. “You mean it, and have reason, say
disgrace.”
“From that disgrace,” assented his brother with keen emphasis, “but is
the fact to be blurted out and trumpeted, and proclaimed continually in
the presence of the very House! In moments of confidence too? Do you
think your name is calculated to harmonise in this place with trust and
confidence, John Carker?”
“No,” returned the other. “No, James. God knows I have no such
thought.”
“What is your thought, then?” said his brother, “and why do you thrust