“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.
