Читать книгу Dr. Wainwright's Patient. A Novel онлайн

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However, no matter what work was or was not done there, the Stannaries Office was a fact, and a fact for which the nation paid, and according to the entries in the Civil Service estimates, paid pretty handsomely. For there was a Lord Commissioner of Stannaries, at two thousand a-year, and a secretary at one thousand, and a private secretary at three hundred, and four-and-twenty clerks at salaries ranging from one to eight hundred, besides messengers and office-keepers. It was a well-thought-of office to; the men engaged in it went into good society, and were recognised as brother officials by the lofty bureaucrats of the Treasury and the Foreign Office--great creatures, who looked upon Somerset House and the Post Office as tenanted by the sons of peers' butlers, and who regarded the Custom House as a damp place somewhere on the Thames, where amphibious persons known as "tide-waiters" searched passengers' baggage. But it was by no means infra dig. to know men in the Stannaries; and that department of the public service annually contributed a by no means small share of the best dancers and amateur performers of the day. "Only give us gentlemen," Mr. Branwhite, the secretary, would say in his first official interview with a newly-appointed Lord Commissioner--for the patronage of his office was vested in the Lord Commissioner of the Stannaries, who was a political functionary, and came in and went out with the Government--"only give us gentlemen; that's all I ask. We don't require much brains in this place, and that's the truth; but we do want birth and breeding." And on these points Mr. Branwhite, who was the son of an auctioneer at Penrith, and who combined the grace of Dr. Johnson with the geniality of Dr. Abernethy, was inexorable. The cry was echoed everywhere throughout the office. "Let's have gentlemen, for God's sake!" little Fitzbinkie, the private secretary, would say, adding, with a look of as much horror as he could throw into his eyeglass--you never saw his eyes--"there was a fellow here the other day, came to see my lord. Worthington--you've heard about him--wonderful fellow at the Admiralty, great gun at figures, and organisation, and that kind of thing; reformed the navy almost, and so on; and--give you my honour--he had on a brown shooting-jacket, and a black-silk waistcoat, give you my word! Frightful, eh? Let's have gentlemen, at any price."