Mugby Junction | Page 6

ray of hope and prospering ambition in my life. When
I attended your course, I believed that I should come to be a great healer, and I felt almost
happy--even though I was still the one boarder in the house with that horrible mask, and
ate and drank in silence and constraint with the mask before me, every day. As I had done
every, every, every day, through my school-time and from my earliest recollection."
"What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?"
"You are like a Superior Being to me. You are like Nature beginning to reveal herself to
me. I hear you again, as one of the hushed crowd of young men kindling under the power
of your presence and knowledge, and you bring into my eyes the only exultant tears that
ever stood in them."
"You remember Me, Mr. Young Jackson?" In a grating voice from quite another quarter.
"Too well. You made your ghostly appearance in my life one day, and announced that its
course was to be suddenly and wholly changed. You showed me which was my
wearisome seat in the Galley of Barbox Brothers. (When THEY were, if they ever were,
is unknown to me; there was nothing of them but the name when I bent to the oar.) You
told me what I was to do, and what to be paid; you told me afterwards, at intervals of
years, when I was to sign for the Firm, when I became a partner, when I became the Firm.
I know no more of it, or of myself."
"What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?"
"You are like my father, I sometimes think. You are hard enough and cold enough so to
have brought up an acknowledged son. I see your scanty figure, your close brown suit,
and your tight brown wig; but you, too, wear a wax mask to your death. You never by a
chance remove it--it never by a chance falls off--and I know no more of you."
Throughout this dialogue, the traveller spoke to himself at his window in the morning, as
he had spoken to himself at the Junction overnight. And as he had then looked in the
darkness, a man who had turned grey too soon, like a neglected fire: so he now looked in
the sun-light, an ashier grey, like a fire which the brightness of the sun put out.
The firm of Barbox Brothers had been some offshoot or irregular branch of the Public
Notary and bill-broking tree. It had gained for itself a griping reputation before the days
of Young Jackson, and the reputation had stuck to it and to him. As he had imperceptibly
come into possession of the dim den up in the corner of a court off Lombard Street, on
whose grimy windows the inscription Barbox Brothers had for many long years daily
interposed itself between him and the sky, so he had insensibly found himself a
personage held in chronic distrust, whom it was essential to screw tight to every
transaction in which he engaged, whose word was never to be taken without his attested
bond, whom all dealers with openly set up guards and wards against. This character had
come upon him through no act of his own. It was as if the original Barbox had stretched
himself down upon the office floor, and had thither caused to be conveyed Young
Jackson in his sleep, and had there effected a metempsychosis and exchange of persons

with him. The discovery-- aided in its turn by the deceit of the only woman he had ever
loved, and the deceit of the only friend he had ever made: who eloped from him to be
married together--the discovery, so followed up, completed what his earliest rearing had
begun. He shrank, abashed, within the form of Barbox, and lifted up his head and heart
no more.
But he did at last effect one great release in his condition. He broke the oar he had plied
so long, and he scuttled and sank the galley. He prevented the gradual retirement of an
old conventional business from him, by taking the initiative and retiring from it. With
enough to live on (though, after all, with not too much), he obliterated the firm of Barbox
Brothers from the pages of the Post- Office Directory and the face of the earth, leaving
nothing of it but its name on two portmanteaus.
"For one must have some name in going about, for people to pick up," he explained to
Mugby High Street, through the Inn window, "and that name at least was real once.
Whereas, Young Jackson!--Not to mention its being a sadly satirical misnomer for Old
Jackson."
He took up his hat and walked out, just in time to see, passing along