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Page 2
Happy Jack was of no particular profession: he was a bit of a
_litt�rateur_, a bit of a journalist, a bit of a man of business, a
bit of an agent, a bit of a projector, a bit of a City man, and a bit
of a West-end man. His business, he said, was of a general nature. He
was usually to be heard of in connection with apocryphal companies and
misty speculations. He was always great as an agitator. As soon as a
League was formed, Happy Jack flew to its head-quarters as a vulture
to a battle-field. Was it a league for the promotion of
vegetarianism?--or a league for the lowering of the price of meat?--a
league for reforming the national costume?--or a league for repealing
the laws still existing upon the Statute-book against witches?--Happy
Jack was ever in the thickest of the fray, lecturing, expounding,
arguing, getting up extempore meetings of the frequenters of
public-houses, of which he sent reports to the morning papers,
announcing the 'numerous, highly respectable, and influential' nature
of the assembly, and modestly hinting, that Mr Happy Jack, 'who was
received with enthusiastic applause, moved, in a long and
argumentative address, a series of resolutions pledging the meeting
to,' &c. Jack, in fact, fully believed that he had done rather more
for free-trade than Cobden. Not, he said, that he was jealous of the
Manchester champion; circumstances had made the latter better
known--that he admitted; still he could not but know--and knowing,
feel--in his own heart of hearts, his own merits, and his own
exertions.
The railway mania was, as may be judged, a grand time for Happy Jack.
The number of lines of which he was a provisional director, the number
of schemes which came out--and often at good premiums too--under his
auspices; the number of railway journals which he founded, and the
number of academies which he established for the instruction of
youthful engineers--are they not written in the annals of the period?
Jack himself started as an engineer without any previous educational
ceremony whatever. His manner of laying out a 'direct line' was happy
and expeditious. He took a map and a ruler, and drew upon the one, by
the help of the other, a straight stroke in red ink--which looked
professional--from terminus to terminus. Afterwards, he stated
distinctly in writing, so that there could be no mistake about the
matter, that there were no engineering difficulties--that the landed
proprietors along the line were quite enthusiastic in their promotion
of the scheme--and that the probable profits, as deduced from
carefully drawn-up traffic-tables, would be about 35 per cent. At this
time, Happy Jack was quite a minor Hudson. He lived in an atmosphere
of shares, scrip, and prospectuses. Money poured in from every
quarter. A scrap of paper with an application for shares was worth the
bright tissue of the Bank--and Jack lost no time in changing the one
for the other. Amid the mass of railway newspapers, he started _The
Railway Sleeper Awakened_, _The Railway Whistle_, _The Railway
Turntable_, and _The Railway Timetable_; and it was in the first
number of the last famous organ--it lived for three weeks--in which
appeared a letter signed 'A Constant Reader.' After the bursting of
the bubble, Happy Jack appeared to have burst too; for his whereabouts
for a long time was unknown, and there were no traditions of his being
seen. Then he began to be heard of from distant and constantly varying
quarters of the town. Now you had a note from Shepherd's Bush, and
next day from Bermondsey. On Tuesday, Jack dated Little King Street,
Clapham Road; on Thursday, the communication reached you from Little
Queen Street, Victoria Villas, Hackney; and next week perhaps you were
favoured with a note from some of the minor little Inns of Court,
where the writer would be found getting up a company on the fourth
floor in a grimy room, furnished with a high deal-desk, two
three-legged stools, and illimitable foolscap, pens, and ink.
Where Mrs Happy Jack and the young-lady Happy Jacks went to at these
times, the boldest speculator has failed to discover: they vanished,
as it were, into thin air, and were seen no more till the sunshine
came, when they returned with the swallows. The lady herself was a
meek, mild creature, skilful in the art of living on nothing, and
making up dresses without material. She adored her husband, and
believed him the greatest man in the world. On the occurrence of such
little household incidents as an execution, or Jack making a rapid act
of cabmanship from his own hearth to the cheerful residence of Mr Levi
in Cursitor Street, the poor little woman, after having indulged
herself in the small luxury of a 'good cry,' would go to work to pack
up shirts and socks manfully, and with great foresight, would always
bring Jack's daily food in a basket, seeing that Mr Levi's bills are
constructed upon a scale of uncommon dimensions; after which, she
would eat the dinner with him in the coffee-room, drink to better
days, play cribbage, and at last get very nearly as joyous in that
greasy, grimy, sorrow-laden room, with bars on the outside of the
windows, as if it were the happy home she possessed a few weeks ago,
and which she always hoped to possess again. As for the girls, they
were trained by too good a master and mistress not to become apt
scholars. They knew what a bill of sale was from their tenderest
years; the broker's was no unfamiliar face; and they quite understood
how to treat a man in possession. Their management of duns was
consummate. Happy Jack used to listen to the comedy of excuses and
coaxings; and when the importunate had departed, grumblingly and
unpaid, he used solemnly to kiss his daughters on the forehead, and
invoke all sorts of blessings upon his preservers, his good angels,
his little girls, who were so clever, and so faithful, and so true.
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