The Launching of Roger Brook (33 page)

Again Roger’s face fell. It was less than five shillings a week. He had always known that clerks were a downtrodden and ill-paid class, but had not imagined the remuneration of their most junior grade to be quite as miserable as this.

‘’Tis very kind of you,’ he murmured unhappily, ‘but I fear I could barely live on that.’

‘You would not have to,’ the lawyer replied. ‘But perhaps I did not make my whole thought plain. We had been speaking of my apprentices and, while circumstances do not permit
of your being articled to me, in view of your youth I was thinking of you in those terms. That is to say, you would bed and board with them here at my cost, and the
louis
a month would be yours to spend as you willed on small enjoyments or keeping some young woman in ribbons.’

This put a very different complexion on the matter. A
louis
a month was no fortune and, Roger felt, a sad decline in his earnings after the near half a
louis
a
day
that he had been making as his share in his recent partnership. It seemed all wrong that the rewards of honest work should be so infinitely less than those of merry charlatanism, but that was to be expected; and the present offer at least meant security from want throughout the winter with a prospect of having saved enough to return to England by the spring if no better approach to fortune had occurred in the meantime. In fact, as the lawyer was usually paid to take his apprentices and in this case was offering a wage, it seemed he was behaving very generously; and Roger, with his usual honesty when not forced by circumstances to conceal his motives, said so when accepting the proposition.

Maître Léger smiled again. ‘’Tis true that I was in part prompted by the thought that no man works well and happily unless he has a few
francs
for his private necessities in his pocket, yet I believe that I have the reputation in Rennes of a shrewd man at a bargain. You will learn soon enough that my apprentices are an idle, slovenly lot, with scarce a peck of brains or learning between them; whereas you, Monsieur Breuc, are clearly a young man of superior education and if you choose to apply yourself with even moderate endeavour to the tasks which are set you will, I have no doubt, earn your twelve
louis
a year and show me a good profit in addition.’

‘I shall certainly do my best to repay your kindness,’ Roger replied with genuine sincerity. ‘When do you wish me to start?’

‘Why, the sooner the better, since you have only to fetch your things from the
Du Guesclin
. Come with me now and I will present you to your future colleagues; then you can collect your belongings and settle in this evening.’

As he stood up the lawyer paused a moment, staring down at his papers thoughtfully; then he said: ‘My senior apprentices are older than yourself and are still working
without a wage after three years here. You will be sharing their accommodation and be one of them in all but name. I am anxious to avoid any jealousy arising from the fact that you are being paid, so I think it would be wise to resort to a small deception. My wife is a native of Artois and has many relatives in the northern provinces. I propose to give out that you are a distant cousin of hers, as the relationship will appear an adequate reason for the special arrangement I have made in your case.’

‘It is good of you to provide against my being subject to unpleasantness,’ said Roger. ‘But to carry the matter through would it not be advisable for you to present me to Madame Léger before I meet any of your employees, in order that we may arrange some details of this cousinship against anybody questioning me concerning it?’

‘I would do so, but Madame Léger accompanied me on my recent visit to Paris, and is not yet returned. I will inform her by letter of the arrangement, so that when she gets back she may greet you at once as her relative; but for the moment all you need tell anyone who questions you, is that your mother was a Colombat, since that was my wife’s maiden name.’ As he finished speaking, Maître Léger led the way downstairs and proceeded to introduce Roger to his new colleagues.

The chief clerk was a bent old man named Fusier, but Brochàrd, his number two, a broad-shouldered, thick-set man of about forty, struck Roger as having much more personality. Three other clerks were employed, Guigner, Taillepied and Ruttot, the latter being the senior Latin copyist under whom Roger was to work. He thought all of them dreary, depressed-looking men, and was thoroughly glad that he had no intention of making the law his permanent profession.

The apprentices were introduced as Hutot, Quatrevaux, Douie, Monestot and Colas; that being the order of their seniority. Roger judged that the age he had given himself, of seventeen, made him younger than the two senior, about the same age as Douie and older than the two who had most recently joined the firm; but that in actual fact he was probably about of an age with the youngest.

Hutot was a big, fair-haired, stupid-looking lout; Quatrevaux a dark thin fellow of better dress and appearance than the others; Douie the youth with the violent red hair who
had shown him up to Maître Léger, Monestot a pimply-faced youngster who looked as if he had outgrown his strength; and Colas a bright-eyed, impish-looking lad.

Roger found that the whole of the ground floor appeared to be offices. The apprentices all worked in a room at the back, under the supervision of the thick-set second head, Brochard. The clerks occupied the front room, with the exception of the old chief clerk Fusier, who had an office to himself on the opposite side of the stairs, next to the waiting-room. It was decided that as Roger was to be employed copying documents it would be best for him to work in the clerks’ room at a desk next to that of his senior, Ruttot.

When the introductions had been completed Roger was handed over to the junior apprentice, Colas, to be shown his living quarters. The mischievous-looking youngster took him upstairs to the top of the house where, beneath the roof, two attics had been converted into one room for the apprentices. Even so, the space seemed extraordinarily small; the six truckle beds were no more than a few inches apart and the low ceiling made the crowded chamber appallingly stuffy.

‘That’s yours,’ said Colas, pointing to a bed in the far corner. ‘And, by all the saints, I’m pleased to see you.’

‘Thank you,’ replied Roger, giving him a slightly suspicious look at this somewhat curious welcome.

Colas grinned. ‘You don’t know what you are in for yet. ’Tis you who are the junior apprentice now, and a dog’s life you’ll find it, till some other poor greenhorn is articled and takes your place.’

‘But I have not been articled,’ said Roger firmly, ‘so I am not an apprentice.’

‘To the devil with that!’ Colas declared truculently. ‘As you are to share our room you’ll count as one. ’Twill be for you in future to get up an hour before the rest of us and fetch up the pails of water for our washing. You’ll have to run errands for us, too; get us our tucker from Julien, the pastrycook, and carry
billet-doux
from Hutot and Monestot to their mistresses. You’ll empty the slops and make our beds in the midday recess. You won’t have time for that in the mornings since ‘twill be for you now to sweep out the office, clear the wastepaper baskets and fill the inkpots, unless you choose to do that overnight; but I’ve always been
too tired by evening after eight hours of that old brute Brochard’s driving.’

Roger’s mouth hardened. When he had accepted Maître Léger’s offer he had expected to be faced with long hours of dreary and uninteresting work, but not to be sent back to school again; and young Colas had painted a picture of a more exacting life than that led by the most junior fags at Sherborne.

‘I’ll do all there is to do in the office, if ’tis required of me,’ he said, ‘but you can all get your water for yourselves and run your own errands.’

‘We’ll see about that,’ scoffed Colas. ‘Hutot is as strong as a bull, and as easily angered. Cross him if you like but ‘twill be the worse for you. And don’t think ‘twill do you any good to go tale-bearing to Maître Léger. If you do we’ll make your life hell for you.’

He paused for a moment, then went on more kindly. ‘Take my advice and do as Hutot tells you without complaining. You’ll soon get used to it, and I will lend you a hand now and then. I’ll give you a good tip, too. Keep on the right side of Brigitte, the cook, and she’ll give you a decent portion at meals.’

Roger accepted this belated olive branch but reserved his decision as to how far he would make himself a slave to the other apprentices; then, as the day was now well advanced, he said he would go and fetch his belongings from the
Du Guesclin
.

He had already settled up there that morning, so he had only to collect his bag, and, on the way, he decided to take a walk through the town in order to think over the new situation in which he found himself.

Apart from the personal loss he felt over the death of old Aristotle Fénelon he was just beginning to realise how much he would miss the free life of the road, as the constant change of scene and interest had suited his temperament. By comparison the lawyer’s office offered not only a narrow life but one of drudgery. Yet to settle down there for a time at least offered security and seemed his only way of escape from the perils which beset a life of homeless vagabondage.

There was, too, the question of Athénaïs. Even with his other preoccupations during the day she had never been far from his thoughts and, although Monsieur Aldegonde had said that she would be absent from Rennes for some
weeks, she was certain to return there in due course. He felt that, come what might, he could not possibly bring himself to leave Rennes without seeing her again; so the obvious course was to make the best of things for the time being at Maître Léger’s.

One point about his new position worried him considerably. His master had naturally assumed that he knew German, and, although it seemed unlikely that much German correspondence passed through the office, he did not want to be caught out; not only for his own sake but because of the awkward position in which it would place his benefactor, now that he was presumed to be one of Maître Léger’s relatives by marriage.

It was clear that he could not hope to master the language in a few weeks without proper tuition, but he felt that with the aid of a German grammar, for such secret study as he could get in during his spare time, he might be able to learn sufficient of it to make out the contents of a letter; so he walked the streets until he found a bookshop on the
Quai de Lamennais
, where he managed to buy a ‘First Steps in German’ and a French-German dictionary.

Darkness was now falling, so, quickening his pace, he collected his things at the
Du Guesclin
and made his way back to the lawyer’s house in the
Rue d’Antrain
.

Up in the attic he found his new room-mates tidying themselves up before going down to supper. They immediately all crowded round him with a spate of questions. He did his best to answer civilly but without committing himself too far on the score of his past circumstances.

The dark, well-dressed Quatrevaux proved his most persistent questioner, but it was the surly-looking Hutot who said:

‘So, you’re a relative of Madame Léger’s, are you? Well, don’t imagine that we shall treat you any differently on that account. You are now the junior here and will consider yourself as our servant.’

‘Nay, nay,’ Quatrevaux protested in a mocking voice, ‘how crudely you put things, Hutot. Monsieur Breuc is not our servant, but a friend who will be delighted to render us certain services; and, as an earnest of his friendship, he was just about to suggest procuring half a dozen bottles of good wine in which we could drink his health tonight.’

Roger knew that the custom of paying one’s footing was
a common one on entering many walks of life, so he replied at once: ‘I will do so with pleasure, Messieurs, if you will be good enough to tell me where best to buy them.’

‘After supper I will take you to a good place round the corner,’ volunteered Quatrevaux. ‘But there is supper, so let us go down.’

A handbell had begun to clang as he was speaking and, on hearing it, all the others made a dash for the door, leaving Roger and Quatrevaux to bring up the rear.

‘Ill-mannered brutes,’ murmured the dark young man. ‘By the way they rush for their food anyone could tell that they come from peasant families; but I saw at the first glance, Monsieur Breuc, that you are a person of some breeding.’

’Tis true, Monsieur, and I am happy to be able to return the compliment.’

‘I trust we shall be friends, then. In these times persons who have any pretensions to quality should stand together. But I warn you to have a care how you cross Hutot. He is cunning as well as strong and in a position to make your life a misery if you refuse to obey his slightest whim.’

‘Thanks for the warning,’ said Roger gratefully. ‘As for your offer of friendship, Monsieur, I am most happy to accept it. If my lot is to be a hard one here ‘twill be a great consolation to have someone to whom I can talk freely.’

On their reaching the ground floor Quatrevaux led Roger through a short passage at the back of the hall to a one-storeyed wing of the house that jutted out along the side of a small courtyard. It contained Maître Léger’s dining-room and the kitchen quarters.

Roger had supposed that the apprentices would eat with the master of the house, but Quatrevaux told him that only Brochard enjoyed that privilege, and that of being waited on by Aimée, the little fifteen-year-old maid. The rest of the staff lived out, and to fend for themselves in the kitchen was considered good enough for the apprentices.

The others were already seated at a big deal table and Brigitte, the ample-bosomed young cook, was ladling stew from a saucepan on to their plates. Roger wished her good-evening and, as soon as she had helped him, set to; but before he was a third of the way through, the others had guzzled their portions and were calling for a second helping. By the time his turn came Hutot had demanded a third
and the saucepan was empty, which provoked a general laugh at Roger’s expense. There was only bread and cheese to follow, but ample of that, so he made up on it and did not leave the table hungry.