Bleak House
her wages), she immediately relented and allowed us to pass in. The
lock of the door being in a disabled condition, she then applied
herself to securing it with the chain, which was not in good action
either, and said would we go upstairs?
We went upstairs to the first floor, still seeing no other furniture
than the dirty footprints. Mr. Jarndyce without further ceremony
entered a room there, and we followed. It was dingy enough and not at
all clean, but furnished with an odd kind of shabby luxury, with a
large footstool, a sofa, and plenty of cushions, an easy-chair, and
plenty of pillows, a piano, books, drawing materials, music,
newspapers, and a few sketches and pictures. A broken pane of glass
in one of the dirty windows was papered and wafered over, but there
was a little plate of hothouse nectarines on the table, and there was
another of grapes, and another of sponge-cakes, and there was a
bottle of light wine. Mr. Skimpole himself reclined upon the sofa in
a dressing-gown, drinking some fragrant coffee from an old china
cup—it was then about mid-day—and looking at a collection of
wallflowers in the balcony.
He was not in the least disconcerted by our appearance, but rose and
received us in his usual airy manner.
“Here I am, you see!” he said when we were seated, not without some
little difficulty, the greater part of the chairs being broken. “Here
I am! This is my frugal breakfast. Some men want legs of beef and
mutton for breakfast; I don’t. Give me my peach, my cup of coffee,
and my claret; I am content. I don’t want them for themselves, but
they remind me of the sun. There’s nothing solar about legs of beef
and mutton. Mere animal satisfaction!”
“This is our friend’s consulting-room (or would be, if he ever
prescribed), his sanctum, his studio,” said my guardian to us.
“Yes,” said Mr. Skimpole, turning his bright face about, “this is the
bird’s cage. This is where the bird lives and sings. They pluck his
feathers now and then and clip his wings, but he sings, he sings!”
He handed us the grapes, repeating in his radiant way, “He sings! Not
an ambitious note, but still he sings.”
“These are very fine,” said my guardian. “A present?”
“No,” he answered. “No! Some amiable gardener sells them. His man
wanted to know, when he brought them last evening, whether he should
wait for the money. ‘Really, my friend,’ I said, ‘I think not—if
your time is of any value to you.’ I suppose it was, for he went
away.”
My guardian looked at us with a smile, as though he asked us, “Is it
possible to be worldly with this baby?”
“This is a day,” said Mr. Skimpole, gaily taking a little claret in a
tumbler, “that will ever be remembered here. We shall call it Saint
Clare and Saint Summerson day. You must see my daughters. I have a
blue-eyed daughter who is my Beauty daughter, I have a Sentiment
daughter, and I have a Comedy daughter. You must see them all.
They’ll be enchanted.”
He was going to summon them when my guardian interposed and asked him
to pause a moment, as he wished to say a word to him first. “My dear
Jarndyce,” he cheerfully replied, going back to his sofa, “as many
moments as you please. Time is no object here. We never know what
o’clock it is, and we never care. Not the way to get on in life,
you’ll tell me? Certainly. But we DON’T get on in life. We don’t
pretend to do it.”
My guardian looked at us again, plainly saying, “You hear him?”
“Now, Harold,” he began, “the word I have to say relates to Rick.”
“The dearest friend I have!” returned Mr. Skimpole cordially. “I
suppose he ought not to be my dearest friend, as he is not on terms
with you. But he is, I can’t help it; he is full of youthful poetry,
and I love him. If you don’t like it, I can’t help it. I love him.”
The engaging frankness with which he made this declaration really had
a disinterested appearance and captivated my guardian, if not, for
the moment, Ada too.
“You are welcome to love him as much as you like,” returned Mr.
Jarndyce, “but we must save his pocket, Harold.”
“Oh!” said Mr. Skimpole. “His pocket? Now you are coming to what I
don’t understand.” Taking a little more claret and dipping one of the
cakes in it, he shook his head and smiled at Ada and me with an
ingenuous foreboding that he never could be made to understand.
“If you go with him here or there,” said my guardian plainly, “you
must not let him pay for both.”
“My dear Jarndyce,” returned Mr. Skimpole, his genial face irradiated
by the comicality of this idea, “what am I to do? If he takes me
anywhere, I must go. And how can I pay? I never have any money. If I
had any money, I don’t know anything about it. Suppose I say to a
man, how much? Suppose the man says to me seven and sixpence? I know
nothing about seven and sixpence. It is impossible for me to pursue
the subject with any consideration for the man. I don’t go about
asking busy people what seven and sixpence is in Moorish—which I
don’t understand. Why should I go about asking them what seven and
sixpence is in Money—which I don’t understand?”
“Well,” said my guardian, by no means displeased with this artless
reply, “if you come to any kind of journeying with Rick, you must
borrow the money of me (never breathing the least allusion to that
circumstance), and leave the calculation to him.”
“My dear Jarndyce,” returned Mr. Skimpole, “I will do anything to
give you pleasure, but it seems an idle form—a superstition.
Besides, I give you my word, Miss Clare and my dear Miss Summerson, I
thought Mr. Carstone was immensely rich. I thought he had only to
make over something, or to sign a bond, or a draft, or a cheque, or a
bill, or to put something on a file somewhere, to bring down a shower
of money.”
“Indeed it is not so, sir,” said Ada. “He is poor.”
“No, really?” returned Mr. Skimpole with his bright smile. “You
surprise me.”
“And not being the richer for trusting in a rotten reed,” said my
guardian, laying his hand emphatically on the sleeve of Mr.
Skimpole’s dressing-gown, “be you very careful not to encourage him
in that reliance, Harold.”
“My dear good friend,” returned Mr. Skimpole, “and my dear Miss
Simmerson, and my dear Miss Clare, how can I do that? It’s business,
and I don’t know business. It is he who encourages me. He emerges
from great feats of business, presents the brightest prospects before
me as their result, and calls upon me to admire them. I do admire
them—as bright prospects. But I know no more about them, and I tell
him so.”
The helpless kind of candour with which he presented this before us,
the light-hearted manner in which he was amused by his innocence, the
fantastic way in which he took himself under his own protection and
argued about that curious person, combined with the delightful ease
of everything he said exactly to make out my guardian’s case. The
more I saw of him, the more unlikely it seemed to me, when he was
present, that he could design, conceal, or influence anything; and
yet the less likely that appeared when he was not present, and the
less agreeable it was to think of his having anything to do with any
one for whom I cared.
Hearing that his examination (as he called it) was now over, Mr.
Skimpole left the room with a radiant face to fetch his daughters
(his sons had run away at various times), leaving my guardian quite
delighted by the manner in which he had vindicated his childish
character. He soon came back, bringing with him the three young
ladies and Mrs. Skimpole, who had once been a beauty but was now a
delicate high-nosed invalid suffering under a complication of
disorders.
“This,” said Mr. Skimpole, “is my Beauty daughter, Arethusa—plays
and sings odds and ends like her father. This is my Sentiment
daughter, Laura—plays a little but don’t sing. This is my Comedy
daughter, Kitty—sings a little but don’t play. We all draw a little
and compose a little, and none of us have any idea of time or money.”
Mrs. Skimpole sighed, I thought, as if she would have been glad to
strike out this item in the family attainments. I also thought that
she rather impressed her sigh upon my guardian and that she took
every opportunity of throwing in another.
“It is pleasant,” said Mr. Skimpole, turning his sprightly eyes from
one to the other of us, “and it is whimsically interesting to trace
peculiarities in families. In this family we are all children, and I
am the youngest.”
The daughters, who appeared to be very fond of him, were amused by
this droll fact, particularly the Comedy daughter.
“My dears, it is true,” said Mr. Skimpole, “is it not? So it is, and
so it must be, because like the dogs in the hymn, ‘it is our nature
to.’ Now, here is Miss Summerson with a fine administrative capacity
and a knowledge of details perfectly surprising. It will sound very
strange in Miss Summerson’s ears, I dare say, that we know nothing
about chops in this house. But we don’t, not the least. We can’t cook
anything whatever. A needle and thread we don’t know how to use. We
admire the people who possess the practical wisdom we want, but we
don’t quarrel with them. Then why should they quarrel with us? Live
and let live, we say to them. Live upon your practical wisdom, and
let us live upon you!”
He laughed, but as usual seemed quite candid and really to mean what
he said.
“We have sympathy, my roses,” said Mr. Skimpole, “sympathy for
everything. Have we not?”
“Oh, yes, papa!” cried the three daughters.
“In fact, that is our family department,” said Mr. Skimpole, “in this
hurly-burly of life. We are capable of looking on and of being
interested, and we DO look on, and we ARE interested. What more can
we do? Here is my Beauty daughter, married these three years. Now I
dare say her marrying another child, and having two more, was all
wrong in point of political economy, but it was very agreeable. We
had our little festivities on those occasions and exchanged social
ideas. She brought her young husband home one day, and they and their
young fledglings have their nest upstairs. I dare say at some time or
other Sentiment and Comedy will bring THEIR husbands home and have
THEIR nests upstairs too. So we get on, we don’t know how, but
somehow.”
She looked very young indeed to be the mother of two children, and I
could not help pitying both her and them. It was evident that the
three daughters had grown up as they could and had had just as little
haphazard instruction as qualified them to be their father’s
playthings in his idlest hours. His pictorial tastes were consulted,
I observed, in their respective styles of wearing their hair, the
Beauty daughter being in the classic manner, the Sentiment daughter
luxuriant and flowing, and the Comedy daughter in the arch style,
with a good deal of sprightly forehead, and vivacious little curls
dotted about the corners of her eyes. They were dressed to
correspond, though in a most untidy and negligent way.
Ada and I conversed with these young ladies and found them
wonderfully like their father. In the meanwhile Mr. Jarndyce (who had
been rubbing his head to a great extent, and hinted at a change in
the wind) talked with Mrs. Skimpole in a corner, where we could not
help hearing the chink of money. Mr. Skimpole had previously
volunteered to go home with us and had withdrawn to dress himself for
the purpose.
“My roses,” he said when he came back, “take care of mama. She is
poorly to-day. By going home with Mr. Jarndyce for a day or two, I
shall hear the larks sing and preserve my amiability. It has been
tried, you know, and would be tried again if I remained at home.”
“That bad man!” said the Comedy daughter.
“At the very time when he knew papa was lying ill by his wallflowers,
looking at the blue sky,” Laura complained.