pg2084 [161]
This, and many another yarn of kindred substance which he heard from other people determined Ernest more than ever to stake on tailoring as the one trade about which he knew anything at all, nevertheless, here were three or four days gone by and employment seemed as far off as ever.
I now did what I ought to have done before, that is to say, I called on my own tailor whom I had dealt with for over a quarter of a century and asked his advice. He declared Ernest’s plan to be hopeless. “If,” said Mr Larkins, for this was my tailor’s name, “he had begun at fourteen, it might have done, but no man of twenty-four could stand being turned to work into a workshop full of tailors; he would not get on with the men, nor the men with him; you could not expect him to be ‘hail fellow, well met’ with them, and you could not expect his fellow-workmen to like him if he was not. A man must have sunk low through drink or natural taste for low company, before he could get on with those who have had such a different training from his own.”
Mr Larkins said a great deal more and wound up by taking me to see the place where his own men worked. “This is a paradise,” he said, “compared to most workshops. What gentleman could stand this air, think you, for a fortnight?”
I was glad enough to get out of the hot, fetid atmosphere in five minutes, and saw that there was no brick of Ernest’s prison to be loosened by going and working among tailors in a workshop.
Mr Larkins wound up by saying that even if my protégé were a much better workman than he probably was, no master would give him employment, for fear of creating a bother among the men.
I left, feeling that I ought to have thought of all this myself, and was more than ever perplexed as to whether I had not better let my young friend have a few thousand pounds and send him out to the colonies, when, on my return home at about five o’clock, I found him waiting for me, radiant, and declaring that he had found all he wanted.
CHAPTER LXXI
It seems he had been patrolling the streets for the last three or four nights—I suppose in search of something to do—at any rate knowing better what he wanted to get than how to get it. Nevertheless, what he wanted was in reality so easily to be found that it took a highly educated scholar like himself to be unable to find it. But, however this may be, he had been scared, and now saw lions where there were none, and was shocked and frightened, and night after night his courage had failed him and he had returned to his lodgings in Laystall Street without accomplishing his errand. He had not taken me into his confidence upon this matter, and I had not enquired what he did with himself in the evenings. At last he had concluded that, however painful it might be to him, he would call on Mrs Jupp, who he thought would be able to help him if anyone could. He had been walking moodily from seven till about nine, and now resolved to go straight to Ashpit Place and make a mother confessor of Mrs Jupp without more delay.
Of all tasks that could be performed by mortal woman there was none which Mrs Jupp would have liked better than the one Ernest was thinking of imposing upon her; nor do I know that in his scared and broken-down state he could have done much better than he now proposed. Miss Jupp would have made it very easy for him to open his grief to her; indeed, she would have coaxed it all out of him before he knew where he was; but the fates