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Mugby Junction By Charles Dickens
PAGE: 2

"Some people, sir," remarked Lamps in a tone of apology, "are sometimes
what they don't like."

"Nobody knows that better than I do," sighed the other.  "I have been
what I don't like, all my life."

"When I first took, sir," resumed Lamps, "to composing little
Comic-Songs--like--"

Barbox Brothers eyed him with great disfavour.

"--To composing little Comic-Songs-like--and what was more hard--to
singing 'em afterwards," said Lamps, "it went against the grain at that
time, it did indeed."

Something that was not all oil here shining in Lamps's eye, Barbox
Brothers withdrew his own a little disconcerted, looked at the fire, and
put a foot on the top bar.  "Why did you do it, then?" he asked after a
short pause; abruptly enough, but in a softer tone.  "If you didn't want
to do it, why did you do it?  Where did you sing them?  Public-house?"

To which Mr. Lamps returned the curious reply: "Bedside."

At this moment, while the traveller looked at him for elucidation, Mugby
Junction started suddenly, trembled violently, and opened its gas eyes.
"She's got up!" Lamps announced, excited.  "What lays in her power is
sometimes more, and sometimes less; but it's laid in her power to get up
to-night, by George!"

The legend "Barbox Brothers," in large white letters on two black
surfaces, was very soon afterwards trundling on a truck through a silent
street, and, when the owner of the legend had shivered on the pavement
half an hour, what time the porter's knocks at the Inn Door knocked up
the whole town first, and the Inn last, he groped his way into the close
air of a shut-up house, and so groped between the sheets of a shut-up bed
that seemed to have been expressly refrigerated for him when last made.



II.


"You remember me, Young Jackson?"

"What do I remember if not you?  You are my first remembrance.  It was
you who told me that was my name.  It was you who told me that on every
twentieth of December my life had a penitential anniversary in it called
a birthday.  I suppose the last communication was truer than the first!"

"What am I like, Young Jackson?"

"You are like a blight all through the year to me.  You hard-lined, thin-
lipped, repressive, changeless woman with a wax mask on.  You are like
the Devil to me; most of all when you teach me religious things, for you
make me abhor them."

"You remember me, Mr. Young Jackson?"  In another voice from another
quarter.

"Most gratefully, sir.  You were the 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 on
the opposite side of the way, a velveteen man, carrying his day's dinner
in a small bundle that might have been larger without suspicion of
gluttony, and pelting away towards the Junction at a great pace.

"There's Lamps!" said Barbox Brothers.  "And by the bye--"

Ridiculous, surely, that a man so serious, so self-contained, and not yet
three days emancipated from a routine of drudgery, should stand rubbing
his chin in the street, in a brown study about Comic Songs.

"Bedside?" said Barbox Brothers testily.  "Sings them at the bedside?  Why
at the bedside, unless he goes to bed drunk?  Does, I shouldn't wonder.
But it's no business of mine.  Let me see.  Mugby Junction, Mugby
Junction.  Where shall I go next?  As it came into my head last night
when I woke from an uneasy sleep in the carriage and found myself here, I
can go anywhere from here.  Where shall I go?  I'll go and look at the
Junction by daylight.  There's no hurry, and I may like the look of one
Line better than another."

But there were so many Lines.  Gazing down upon them from a bridge at the
Junction, it was as if the concentrating Companies formed a great
Industrial Exhibition of the works of extraordinary ground spiders that
spun iron.  And then so many of the Lines went such wonderful ways, so
crossing and curving among one another, that the eye lost them.  And then
some of them appeared to start with the fixed intention of going five
hundred miles, and all of a sudden gave it up at an insignificant
barrier, or turned off into a workshop.  And then others, like
intoxicated men, went a little way very straight, and surprisingly slued
round and came back again.  And then others were so chock-full of trucks
of coal, others were so blocked with trucks of casks, others were so
gorged with trucks of ballast, others were so set apart for wheeled
objects like immense iron cotton-reels: while others were so bright and
clear, and others were so delivered over to rust and ashes and idle
wheelbarrows out of work, with their legs in the air (looking much like
their masters on strike), that there was no beginning, middle, or end to
the bewilderment.

Barbox Brothers stood puzzled on the bridge, passing his right hand
across the lines on his forehead, which multiplied while he looked down,
as if the railway Lines were getting themselves photographed on that
sensitive plate.  Then was heard a distant ringing of bells and blowing
of whistles.  Then, puppet-looking heads of men popped out of boxes in
perspective, and popped in again.  Then, prodigious wooden razors, set up
on end, began shaving the atmosphere.  Then, several locomotive engines
in several directions began to scream and be agitated.  Then, along one
avenue a train came in.  Then, along another two trains appeared that
didn't come in, but stopped without.  Then, bits of trains broke off.
Then, a struggling horse became involved with them.  Then, the
locomotives shared the bits of trains, and ran away with the whole.

"I have not made my next move much clearer by this.  No hurry.  No need
to make up my mind to-day, or to-morrow, nor yet the day after.  I'll
take a walk."

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