Mr. Carker was a gentleman thirty-eight or forty years old, of a florid complexion, and with two unbroken rows of glistening teeth, whose regularity and whiteness were quite distressing. It was impossible to escape the observation of them, for he showed them whenever he spoke; and bore so wide a smile upon his countenance (a smile, however, very rarely, indeed, extending beyond his mouth), that there was something in it like the snarl of a cat. He affected a stiff white cravat, after the example of his principal, and was always closely buttoned up and tightly dressed. His manner towards Mr. Dombey was deeply conceived and perfectly expressed. He was familiar with him, in the very extremity of his sense of the distance between them. “Mr. Dombey, to a man in your position from a man in mine, there is no show of subservience compatible with the transaction of business between us, that I should think sufficient. I frankly tell you, Sir, I give it up altogether. I feel that I could not satisfy my own mind; and Heaven knows, Mr. Dombey, you can afford to dispense with the endeavour.” If he had carried these words about with him printed on a placard, and had constantly offered it to Mr. Dombey’s perusal on the breast of his coat, he could not have been more explicit than he was.
This was Carker the Manager. Mr. Carker the Junior, Walter’s friend, was his brother; two or three years older than he, but widely removed in station. The younger brother’s post was on the top of the official ladder; the elder brother’s at the bottom. The elder brother never gained a stave, or raised his foot to mount one. Young men passed above his head, and rose and rose; but he was always at the bottom. He was quite resigned to occupy that low condition: never complained of it: and certainly never hoped to escape from it.
“How do you do this morning?” said Mr. Carker the Manager, entering Mr. Dombey’s room soon after his arrival one day: with a bundle of papers in his hand.
“How do you do, Carker?” said Mr. Dombey, rising from his chair, and standing with his back to the fire. “Have you anything there for me?”
“I don’t know that I need trouble you,” returned Carker, turning over the papers in his hand. “You have a committee today at three, you know.”
“And one at three, three-quarters,” added Mr. Dombey.
“Catch you forgetting anything!” exclaimed Carker, still turning over his papers. “If Mr. Paul inherits your memory, he’ll be a troublesome customer in the House. One of you is enough.”
“You have an accurate memory of your own,” said Mr. Dombey.
“Oh! I!” returned the manager. “It’s the only capital of a man like me.”
Mr. Dombey did not look less pompous or at all displeased, as he stood leaning against the chimneypiece, surveying his (of course unconscious) clerk, from head to foot. The stiffness and nicety of Mr. Carker’s dress, and a certain arrogance of manner, either natural to him or imitated from a pattern not far off, gave great additional effect to his humility. He seemed a man who would contend against the power that vanquished him, if he could, but who was utterly borne down by the greatness and superiority of Mr. Dombey.
“Is Morfin here?” asked Mr. Dombey after a short pause, during which Mr. Carker had been fluttering his papers, and muttering little abstracts of their contents to himself.
“Morfin’s here,” he answered, looking up with his widest and almost sudden smile; “humming musical recollections—of his last night’s quartette party, I suppose—through the walls between us, and driving me half mad. I wish he’d make a bonfire of his violoncello, and burn his music-books in it.”
“You respect nobody, Carker, I think,” said Mr. Dombey.
“No?” inquired Carker, with another wide and most feline show of his teeth. “Well! Not many people, I believe. I wouldn’t answer perhaps,” he murmured, as if he were only thinking it, “for more than one.”
A dangerous quality, if real; and a not less dangerous one, if feigned. But Mr. Dombey hardly seemed to think so, as he still stood with his back to the fire, drawn up to his full height, and looking at his head-clerk with a dignified composure, in which there seemed to lurk a stronger latent sense of power than usual.
“Talking of Morfin,” resumed Mr. Carker, taking out one paper from the rest, “he reports a junior dead in the agency at Barbados, and proposes to reserve a passage in the Son and Heir—she’ll sail in a month or so—for the successor. You don’t care who goes, I suppose? We have nobody of that sort here.”
Mr. Dombey shook his head with supreme indifference.
“It’s no very precious appointment,” observed Mr. Carker, taking up a pen, with which to endorse a memorandum on the back of the paper. “I hope he may bestow it on some orphan nephew of a musical friend. It may perhaps stop his fiddle-playing, if he has a gift that way. Who’s that? Come in!”
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Carker. I didn’t know you were here, Sir,” answered Walter; appearing with some letters in his hand, unopened, and newly arrived. “Mr. Carker the Junior, Sir—”
At the mention of this name, Mr. Carker the Manager was or affected to be, touched to the quick with shame and humiliation. He cast his eyes full on Mr. Dombey with an altered and apologetic look, abased them on the ground, and remained for a moment without speaking.
“I thought, Sir,” he said suddenly and angrily, turning on Walter, “that you had been before requested not to drag Mr. Carker the Junior into your conversation.”
“I beg your pardon,” returned Walter. “I was only going to say that Mr. Carker the Junior had told me he believed you were gone out, or I should not have knocked at the door when you were engaged
