Bleak House
ourselves, but, we trust, improving to others.”
Suppose Mr. Pardiggle were to dine with Mr. Jellyby, and suppose Mr.
Jellyby were to relieve his mind after dinner to Mr. Pardiggle, would
Mr. Pardiggle, in return, make any confidential communication to Mr.
Jellyby? I was quite confused to find myself thinking this, but it
came into my head.
“You are very pleasantly situated here!” said Mrs. Pardiggle.
We were glad to change the subject, and going to the window, pointed
out the beauties of the prospect, on which the spectacles appeared to
me to rest with curious indifference.
“You know Mr. Gusher?” said our visitor.
We were obliged to say that we had not the pleasure of Mr. Gusher’s
acquaintance.
“The loss is yours, I assure you,” said Mrs. Pardiggle with her
commanding deportment. “He is a very fervid, impassioned
speaker—full of fire! Stationed in a waggon on this lawn, now,
which, from the shape of the land, is naturally adapted to a public
meeting, he would improve almost any occasion you could mention for
hours and hours! By this time, young ladies,” said Mrs. Pardiggle,
moving back to her chair and overturning, as if by invisible agency,
a little round table at a considerable distance with my work-basket
on it, “by this time you have found me out, I dare say?”
This was really such a confusing question that Ada looked at me in
perfect dismay. As to the guilty nature of my own consciousness after
what I had been thinking, it must have been expressed in the colour
of my cheeks.
“Found out, I mean,” said Mrs. Pardiggle, “the prominent point in my
character. I am aware that it is so prominent as to be discoverable
immediately. I lay myself open to detection, I know. Well! I freely
admit, I am a woman of business. I love hard work; I enjoy hard work.
The excitement does me good. I am so accustomed and inured to hard
work that I don’t know what fatigue is.”
We murmured that it was very astonishing and very gratifying, or
something to that effect. I don’t think we knew what it was either,
but this is what our politeness expressed.
“I do not understand what it is to be tired; you cannot tire me if
you try!” said Mrs. Pardiggle. “The quantity of exertion (which is no
exertion to me), the amount of business (which I regard as nothing),
that I go through sometimes astonishes myself. I have seen my young
family, and Mr. Pardiggle, quite worn out with witnessing it, when I
may truly say I have been as fresh as a lark!”
If that dark-visaged eldest boy could look more malicious than he had
already looked, this was the time when he did it. I observed that he
doubled his right fist and delivered a secret blow into the crown of
his cap, which was under his left arm.
“This gives me a great advantage when I am making my rounds,” said
Mrs. Pardiggle. “If I find a person unwilling to hear what I have to
say, I tell that person directly, ‘I am incapable of fatigue, my good
friend, I am never tired, and I mean to go on until I have done.’ It
answers admirably! Miss Summerson, I hope I shall have your
assistance in my visiting rounds immediately, and Miss Clare’s very
soon.”
At first I tried to excuse myself for the present on the general
ground of having occupations to attend to which I must not neglect.
But as this was an ineffectual protest, I then said, more
particularly, that I was not sure of my qualifications. That I was
inexperienced in the art of adapting my mind to minds very
differently situated, and addressing them from suitable points of
view. That I had not that delicate knowledge of the heart which must
be essential to such a work. That I had much to learn, myself, before
I could teach others, and that I could not confide in my good
intentions alone. For these reasons I thought it best to be as useful
as I could, and to render what kind services I could to those
immediately about me, and to try to let that circle of duty gradually
and naturally expand itself. All this I said with anything but
confidence, because Mrs. Pardiggle was much older than I, and had
great experience, and was so very military in her manners.
“You are wrong, Miss Summerson,” said she, “but perhaps you are not
equal to hard work or the excitement of it, and that makes a vast
difference. If you would like to see how I go through my work, I am
now about—with my young family—to visit a brickmaker in the
neighbourhood (a very bad character) and shall be glad to take you
with me. Miss Clare also, if she will do me the favour.”
Ada and I interchanged looks, and as we were going out in any case,
accepted the offer. When we hastily returned from putting on our
bonnets, we found the young family languishing in a corner and Mrs.
Pardiggle sweeping about the room, knocking down nearly all the light
objects it contained. Mrs. Pardiggle took possession of Ada, and I
followed with the family.
Ada told me afterwards that Mrs. Pardiggle talked in the same loud
tone (that, indeed, I overheard) all the way to the brickmaker’s
about an exciting contest which she had for two or three years waged
against another lady relative to the bringing in of their rival
candidates for a pension somewhere. There had been a quantity of
printing, and promising, and proxying, and polling, and it appeared
to have imparted great liveliness to all concerned, except the
pensioners—who were not elected yet.
I am very fond of being confided in by children and am happy in being
usually favoured in that respect, but on this occasion it gave me
great uneasiness. As soon as we were out of doors, Egbert, with the
manner of a little footpad, demanded a shilling of me on the ground
that his pocket-money was “boned” from him. On my pointing out the
great impropriety of the word, especially in connexion with his
parent (for he added sulkily “By her!”), he pinched me and said, “Oh,
then! Now! Who are you! YOU wouldn’t like it, I think? What does she
make a sham for, and pretend to give me money, and take it away
again? Why do you call it my allowance, and never let me spend it?”
These exasperating questions so inflamed his mind and the minds of
Oswald and Francis that they all pinched me at once, and in a
dreadfully expert way—screwing up such little pieces of my arms that
I could hardly forbear crying out. Felix, at the same time, stamped
upon my toes. And the Bond of Joy, who on account of always having
the whole of his little income anticipated stood in fact pledged to
abstain from cakes as well as tobacco, so swelled with grief and rage
when we passed a pastry-cook’s shop that he terrified me by becoming
purple. I never underwent so much, both in body and mind, in the
course of a walk with young people as from these unnaturally
constrained children when they paid me the compliment of being
natural.
I was glad when we came to the brickmaker’s house, though it was one
of a cluster of wretched hovels in a brick-field, with pigsties close
to the broken windows and miserable little gardens before the doors
growing nothing but stagnant pools. Here and there an old tub was put
to catch the droppings of rain-water from a roof, or they were banked
up with mud into a little pond like a large dirt-pie. At the doors
and windows some men and women lounged or prowled about, and took
little notice of us except to laugh to one another or to say
something as we passed about gentlefolks minding their own business
and not troubling their heads and muddying their shoes with coming to
look after other people’s.
Mrs. Pardiggle, leading the way with a great show of moral
determination and talking with much volubility about the untidy
habits of the people (though I doubted if the best of us could have
been tidy in such a place), conducted us into a cottage at the
farthest corner, the ground-floor room of which we nearly filled.
Besides ourselves, there were in this damp, offensive room a woman
with a black eye, nursing a poor little gasping baby by the fire; a
man, all stained with clay and mud and looking very dissipated, lying
at full length on the ground, smoking a pipe; a powerful young man
fastening a collar on a dog; and a bold girl doing some kind of
washing in very dirty water. They all looked up at us as we came in,
and the woman seemed to turn her face towards the fire as if to hide
her bruised eye; nobody gave us any welcome.
“Well, my friends,” said Mrs. Pardiggle, but her voice had not a
friendly sound, I thought; it was much too business-like and
systematic. “How do you do, all of you? I am here again. I told you,
you couldn’t tire me, you know. I am fond of hard work, and am true
to my word.”
“There an’t,” growled the man on the floor, whose head rested on his
hand as he stared at us, “any more on you to come in, is there?”
“No, my friend,” said Mrs. Pardiggle, seating herself on one stool
and knocking down another. “We are all here.”
“Because I thought there warn’t enough of you, perhaps?” said the
man, with his pipe between his lips as he looked round upon us.
The young man and the girl both laughed. Two friends of the young
man, whom we had attracted to the doorway and who stood there with
their hands in their pockets, echoed the laugh noisily.
“You can’t tire me, good people,” said Mrs. Pardiggle to these
latter. “I enjoy hard work, and the harder you make mine, the better
I like it.”
“Then make it easy for her!” growled the man upon the floor. “I wants
it done, and over. I wants a end of these liberties took with my
place. I wants an end of being drawed like a badger. Now you’re
a-going to poll-pry and question according to custom—I know what
you’re a-going to be up to. Well! You haven’t got no occasion to be
up to it. I’ll save you the trouble. Is my daughter a-washin? Yes,
she IS a-washin. Look at the water. Smell it! That’s wot we drinks.
How do you like it, and what do you think of gin instead! An’t my
place dirty? Yes, it is dirty—it’s nat’rally dirty, and it’s
nat’rally onwholesome; and we’ve had five dirty and onwholesome
children, as is all dead infants, and so much the better for them,
and for us besides. Have I read the little book wot you left? No, I
an’t read the little book wot you left. There an’t nobody here as
knows how to read it; and if there wos, it wouldn’t be suitable to
me. It’s a book fit for a babby, and I’m not a babby. If you was to
leave me a doll, I shouldn’t nuss it. How have I been conducting of
myself? Why, I’ve been drunk for three days; and I’da been drunk four
if I’da had the money. Don’t I never mean for to go to church? No, I
don’t never mean for to go to church. I shouldn’t be expected there,
if I did; the beadle’s too gen-teel for me. And how did my wife get
that black eye? Why, I give it her; and if she says I didn’t, she’s a
Lie!”
He had pulled his pipe out of his mouth to say all this, and he now
turned over on his other side and smoked again. Mrs. Pardiggle, who
had been regarding him through her spectacles with a forcible
composure, calculated, I could not help thinking, to increase his
antagonism, pulled out a good book as if it were a constable’s staff
and took the whole family into custody. I mean into religious
custody, of course; but she really did it as if she were an
inexorable moral policeman carrying them all off to a station-house.
Ada and I were very uncomfortable. We both felt intrusive and out of
place, and we both thought that Mrs. Pardiggle would have got on
infinitely better if she had not had such a mechanical way of taking
possession of people. The children sulked and stared; the family took
no notice of us whatever, except when the young man made the dog
bark, which he usually did when Mrs. Pardiggle was most emphatic. We
both felt painfully sensible that between us and these people there
was an iron barrier which could not be removed by our new friend. By