It was books found
in the shop and studied in the shop that first opened his eyes to the
glory of the world, as he sat on the step-ladder, reading his
Shakespeare or puzzling out his first Greek by the light of a single
gas-flare; and for the sake of these things he had a tender
recollection of Paternoster Row. It was to Rickman's that he owed his
education. Doggedly at first and afterwards mechanically,
abstractedly, he got through the work he had to do. At times he even
appreciated with a certain enjoyment the exquisite irony of his fate.
Perhaps, when it came to the Gin Palace of Art, he had felt that the
thing was getting almost beyond a joke. He had not been prepared for
that lurid departure. He did not realize that he was in it, that his
father had staked, not only his hopes, but his capital on him. He
simply knew that "the guv'nor" was wrapt up in the horrid thing, that
he had spent enormous sums on it, and he wasn't going to throw him
over at the start.
But he had not the smallest intention of spending his whole life so.
As always, long ago, in the darkness of the City shop, he had seen a
brilliance of his own spreading around Rickman's and beyond it,
shining away into the distance, so he saw it now, flinging out a
broad, flaming, unmistakable path that could by no possibility lead
back there. He only suffered a certain limited and unimportant part of
him to be made into a machine.
Meanwhile it was perhaps in the divine mercy that the workings of
this machine were hidden from Isaac.
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