Bleak House
but he must do something, and it must be something of an unexciting
nature, which will lay neither his physical nor his intellectual
energies under too heavy contribution. He finds that nothing agrees
with him so well as to make little gyrations on one leg of his stool,
and stab his desk, and gape.
Kenge and Carboy are out of town, and the articled clerk has taken
out a shooting license and gone down to his father’s, and Mr. Guppy’s
two fellow-stipendiaries are away on leave. Mr. Guppy and Mr. Richard
Carstone divide the dignity of the office. But Mr. Carstone is for
the time being established in Kenge’s room, whereat Mr. Guppy chafes.
So exceedingly that he with biting sarcasm informs his mother, in the
confidential moments when he sups with her off a lobster and lettuce
in the Old Street Road, that he is afraid the office is hardly good
enough for swells, and that if he had known there was a swell coming,
he would have got it painted.
Mr. Guppy suspects everybody who enters on the occupation of a stool
in Kenge and Carboy’s office of entertaining, as a matter of course,
sinister designs upon him. He is clear that every such person wants
to depose him. If he be ever asked how, why, when, or wherefore, he
shuts up one eye and shakes his head. On the strength of these
profound views, he in the most ingenious manner takes infinite pains
to counterplot when there is no plot, and plays the deepest games of
chess without any adversary.
It is a source of much gratification to Mr. Guppy, therefore, to find
the new-comer constantly poring over the papers in Jarndyce and
Jarndyce, for he well knows that nothing but confusion and failure
can come of that. His satisfaction communicates itself to a third
saunterer through the long vacation in Kenge and Carboy’s office, to
wit, Young Smallweed.
Whether Young Smallweed (metaphorically called Small and eke Chick
Weed, as it were jocularly to express a fledgling) was ever a boy is
much doubted in Lincoln’s Inn. He is now something under fifteen and
an old limb of the law. He is facetiously understood to entertain a
passion for a lady at a cigar-shop in the neighbourhood of Chancery
Lane and for her sake to have broken off a contract with another
lady, to whom he had been engaged some years. He is a town-made
article, of small stature and weazen features, but may be perceived
from a considerable distance by means of his very tall hat. To become
a Guppy is the object of his ambition. He dresses at that gentleman
(by whom he is patronized), talks at him, walks at him, founds
himself entirely on him. He is honoured with Mr. Guppy’s particular
confidence and occasionally advises him, from the deep wells of his
experience, on difficult points in private life.
Mr. Guppy has been lolling out of window all the morning after trying
all the stools in succession and finding none of them easy, and after
several times putting his head into the iron safe with a notion of
cooling it. Mr. Smallweed has been twice dispatched for effervescent
drinks, and has twice mixed them in the two official tumblers and
stirred them up with the ruler. Mr. Guppy propounds for Mr.
Smallweed’s consideration the paradox that the more you drink the
thirstier you are and reclines his head upon the window-sill in a
state of hopeless languor.
While thus looking out into the shade of Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn,
surveying the intolerable bricks and mortar, Mr. Guppy becomes
conscious of a manly whisker emerging from the cloistered walk below
and turning itself up in the direction of his face. At the same time,
a low whistle is wafted through the Inn and a suppressed voice cries,
“Hip! Gup-py!”
“Why, you don’t mean it!” says Mr. Guppy, aroused. “Small! Here’s
Jobling!” Small’s head looks out of window too and nods to Jobling.
“Where have you sprung up from?” inquires Mr. Guppy.
“From the market-gardens down by Deptford. I can’t stand it any
longer. I must enlist. I say! I wish you’d lend me half a crown. Upon
my soul, I’m hungry.”
Jobling looks hungry and also has the appearance of having run to
seed in the market-gardens down by Deptford.
“I say! Just throw out half a crown if you have got one to spare. I
want to get some dinner.”
“Will you come and dine with me?” says Mr. Guppy, throwing out the
coin, which Mr. Jobling catches neatly.
“How long should I have to hold out?” says Jobling.
“Not half an hour. I am only waiting here till the enemy goes,”
returns Mr. Guppy, butting inward with his head.
“What enemy?”
“A new one. Going to be articled. Will you wait?”
“Can you give a fellow anything to read in the meantime?” says Mr.
Jobling.
Smallweed suggests the law list. But Mr. Jobling declares with much
earnestness that he “can’t stand it.”
“You shall have the paper,” says Mr. Guppy. “He shall bring it down.
But you had better not be seen about here. Sit on our staircase and
read. It’s a quiet place.”
Jobling nods intelligence and acquiescence. The sagacious Smallweed
supplies him with the newspaper and occasionally drops his eye upon
him from the landing as a precaution against his becoming disgusted
with waiting and making an untimely departure. At last the enemy
retreats, and then Smallweed fetches Mr. Jobling up.
“Well, and how are you?” says Mr. Guppy, shaking hands with him.
“So, so. How are you?”
Mr. Guppy replying that he is not much to boast of, Mr. Jobling
ventures on the question, “How is SHE?” This Mr. Guppy resents as a
liberty, retorting, “Jobling, there ARE chords in the human mind—”
Jobling begs pardon.
“Any subject but that!” says Mr. Guppy with a gloomy enjoyment of his
injury. “For there ARE chords, Jobling—”
Mr. Jobling begs pardon again.
During this short colloquy, the active Smallweed, who is of the
dinner party, has written in legal characters on a slip of paper,
“Return immediately.” This notification to all whom it may concern,
he inserts in the letter-box, and then putting on the tall hat at the
angle of inclination at which Mr. Guppy wears his, informs his patron
that they may now make themselves scarce.
Accordingly they betake themselves to a neighbouring dining-house, of
the class known among its frequenters by the denomination slap-bang,
where the waitress, a bouncing young female of forty, is supposed to
have made some impression on the susceptible Smallweed, of whom it
may be remarked that he is a weird changeling to whom years are
nothing. He stands precociously possessed of centuries of owlish
wisdom. If he ever lay in a cradle, it seems as if he must have lain
there in a tail-coat. He has an old, old eye, has Smallweed; and he
drinks and smokes in a monkeyish way; and his neck is stiff in his
collar; and he is never to be taken in; and he knows all about it,
whatever it is. In short, in his bringing up he has been so nursed by
Law and Equity that he has become a kind of fossil imp, to account
for whose terrestrial existence it is reported at the public offices
that his father was John Doe and his mother the only female member of
the Roe family, also that his first long-clothes were made from a
blue bag.
Into the dining-house, unaffected by the seductive show in the window
of artificially whitened cauliflowers and poultry, verdant baskets of
peas, coolly blooming cucumbers, and joints ready for the spit, Mr.
Smallweed leads the way. They know him there and defer to him. He has
his favourite box, he bespeaks all the papers, he is down upon bald
patriarchs, who keep them more than ten minutes afterwards. It is of
no use trying him with anything less than a full-sized “bread” or
proposing to him any joint in cut unless it is in the very best cut.
In the matter of gravy he is adamant.
Conscious of his elfin power and submitting to his dread experience,
Mr. Guppy consults him in the choice of that day’s banquet, turning
an appealing look towards him as the waitress repeats the catalogue
of viands and saying “What do YOU take, Chick?” Chick, out of the
profundity of his artfulness, preferring “veal and ham and French
beans—and don’t you forget the stuffing, Polly” (with an unearthly
cock of his venerable eye), Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling give the like
order. Three pint pots of half-and-half are superadded. Quickly the
waitress returns bearing what is apparently a model of the Tower of
Babel but what is really a pile of plates and flat tin dish-covers.
Mr. Smallweed, approving of what is set before him, conveys
intelligent benignity into his ancient eye and winks upon her. Then,
amid a constant coming in, and going out, and running about, and a
clatter of crockery, and a rumbling up and down of the machine which
brings the nice cuts from the kitchen, and a shrill crying for more
nice cuts down the speaking-pipe, and a shrill reckoning of the cost
of nice cuts that have been disposed of, and a general flush and
steam of hot joints, cut and uncut, and a considerably heated
atmosphere in which the soiled knives and tablecloths seem to break
out spontaneously into eruptions of grease and blotches of beer, the
legal triumvirate appease their appetites.
Mr. Jobling is buttoned up closer than mere adornment might require.
His hat presents at the rims a peculiar appearance of a glistening
nature, as if it had been a favourite snail-promenade. The same
phenomenon is visible on some parts of his coat, and particularly at
the seams. He has the faded appearance of a gentleman in embarrassed
circumstances; even his light whiskers droop with something of a
shabby air.
His appetite is so vigorous that it suggests spare living for some
little time back. He makes such a speedy end of his plate of veal and
ham, bringing it to a close while his companions are yet midway in
theirs, that Mr. Guppy proposes another. “Thank you, Guppy,” says Mr.
Jobling, “I really don’t know but what I WILL take another.”
Another being brought, he falls to with great goodwill.
Mr. Guppy takes silent notice of him at intervals until he is half
way through this second plate and stops to take an enjoying pull at
his pint pot of half-and-half (also renewed) and stretches out his
legs and rubs his hands. Beholding him in which glow of contentment,
Mr. Guppy says, “You are a man again, Tony!”
“Well, not quite yet,” says Mr. Jobling. “Say, just born.”
“Will you take any other vegetables? Grass? Peas? Summer cabbage?”
“Thank you, Guppy,” says Mr. Jobling. “I really don’t know but what I
WILL take summer cabbage.”
Order given; with the sarcastic addition (from Mr. Smallweed) of
“Without slugs, Polly!” And cabbage produced.
“I am growing up, Guppy,” says Mr. Jobling, plying his knife and fork
with a relishing steadiness.
“Glad to hear it.”
“In fact, I have just turned into my teens,” says Mr. Jobling.
He says no more until he has performed his task, which he achieves as
Messrs. Guppy and Smallweed finish theirs, thus getting over the
ground in excellent style and beating those two gentlemen easily by a
veal and ham and a cabbage.
“Now, Small,” says Mr. Guppy, “what would you recommend about
pastry?”
“Marrow puddings,” says Mr. Smallweed instantly.
“Aye, aye!” cries Mr. Jobling with an arch look. “You’re there, are
you? Thank you, Mr. Guppy, I don’t know but what I WILL take a marrow
pudding.”
Three marrow puddings being produced, Mr. Jobling adds in a pleasant
humour that he is coming of age fast. To these succeed, by command of
Mr. Smallweed, “three Cheshires,” and to those “three small rums.”
This apex of the entertainment happily reached, Mr. Jobling puts up
his legs on the carpeted seat (having his own side of the box to
himself), leans against the wall, and says, “I am grown up now,
Guppy. I have arrived at maturity.”
“What do you think, now,” says Mr. Guppy, “about—you don’t mind
Smallweed?”