Bleak House
the level of the street—a grim, hard, uncouth parlour, only
ornamented with the coarsest of baize table-covers, and the hardest
of sheet-iron tea-trays, and offering in its decorative character no
bad allegorical representation of Grandfather Smallweed’s
mind—seated in two black horsehair porter’s chairs, one on each side
of the fire-place, the superannuated Mr. and Mrs. Smallweed while
away the rosy hours. On the stove are a couple of trivets for the
pots and kettles which it is Grandfather Smallweed’s usual occupation
to watch, and projecting from the chimney-piece between them is a
sort of brass gallows for roasting, which he also superintends when
it is in action. Under the venerable Mr. Smallweed’s seat and guarded
by his spindle legs is a drawer in his chair, reported to contain
property to a fabulous amount. Beside him is a spare cushion with
which he is always provided in order that he may have something to
throw at the venerable partner of his respected age whenever she
makes an allusion to money—a subject on which he is particularly
sensitive.
“And where’s Bart?” Grandfather Smallweed inquires of Judy, Bart’s
twin sister.
“He an’t come in yet,” says Judy.
“It’s his tea-time, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“How much do you mean to say it wants then?”
“Ten minutes.”
“Hey?”
“Ten minutes.” (Loud on the part of Judy.)
“Ho!” says Grandfather Smallweed. “Ten minutes.”
Grandmother Smallweed, who has been mumbling and shaking her head at
the trivets, hearing figures mentioned, connects them with money and
screeches like a horrible old parrot without any plumage, “Ten
ten-pound notes!”
Grandfather Smallweed immediately throws the cushion at her.
“Drat you, be quiet!” says the good old man.
The effect of this act of jaculation is twofold. It not only doubles
up Mrs. Smallweed’s head against the side of her porter’s chair and
causes her to present, when extricated by her granddaughter, a highly
unbecoming state of cap, but the necessary exertion recoils on Mr.
Smallweed himself, whom it throws back into HIS porter’s chair like a
broken puppet. The excellent old gentleman being at these times a
mere clothes-bag with a black skull-cap on the top of it, does not
present a very animated appearance until he has undergone the two
operations at the hands of his granddaughter of being shaken up like
a great bottle and poked and punched like a great bolster. Some
indication of a neck being developed in him by these means, he and
the sharer of his life’s evening again sit fronting one another in
their two porter’s chairs, like a couple of sentinels long forgotten
on their post by the Black Serjeant, Death.
Judy the twin is worthy company for these associates. She is so
indubitably sister to Mr. Smallweed the younger that the two kneaded
into one would hardly make a young person of average proportions,
while she so happily exemplifies the before-mentioned family likeness
to the monkey tribe that attired in a spangled robe and cap she might
walk about the table-land on the top of a barrel-organ without
exciting much remark as an unusual specimen. Under existing
circumstances, however, she is dressed in a plain, spare gown of
brown stuff.
Judy never owned a doll, never heard of Cinderella, never played at
any game. She once or twice fell into children’s company when she was
about ten years old, but the children couldn’t get on with Judy, and
Judy couldn’t get on with them. She seemed like an animal of another
species, and there was instinctive repugnance on both sides. It is
very doubtful whether Judy knows how to laugh. She has so rarely seen
the thing done that the probabilities are strong the other way. Of
anything like a youthful laugh, she certainly can have no conception.
If she were to try one, she would find her teeth in her way,
modelling that action of her face, as she has unconsciously modelled
all its other expressions, on her pattern of sordid age. Such is
Judy.
And her twin brother couldn’t wind up a top for his life. He knows no
more of Jack the Giant Killer or of Sinbad the Sailor than he knows
of the people in the stars. He could as soon play at leap-frog or at
cricket as change into a cricket or a frog himself. But he is so much
the better off than his sister that on his narrow world of fact an
opening has dawned into such broader regions as lie within the ken of
Mr. Guppy. Hence his admiration and his emulation of that shining
enchanter.
Judy, with a gong-like clash and clatter, sets one of the sheet-iron
tea-trays on the table and arranges cups and saucers. The bread she
puts on in an iron basket, and the butter (and not much of it) in a
small pewter plate. Grandfather Smallweed looks hard after the tea as
it is served out and asks Judy where the girl is.
“Charley, do you mean?” says Judy.
“Hey?” from Grandfather Smallweed.
“Charley, do you mean?”
This touches a spring in Grandmother Smallweed, who, chuckling as
usual at the trivets, cries, “Over the water! Charley over the water,
Charley over the water, over the water to Charley, Charley over the
water, over the water to Charley!” and becomes quite energetic about
it. Grandfather looks at the cushion but has not sufficiently
recovered his late exertion.
“Ha!” he says when there is silence. “If that’s her name. She eats a
deal. It would be better to allow her for her keep.”
Judy, with her brother’s wink, shakes her head and purses up her
mouth into no without saying it.
“No?” returns the old man. “Why not?”
“She’d want sixpence a day, and we can do it for less,” says Judy.
“Sure?”
Judy answers with a nod of deepest meaning and calls, as she scrapes
the butter on the loaf with every precaution against waste and cuts
it into slices, “You, Charley, where are you?” Timidly obedient to
the summons, a little girl in a rough apron and a large bonnet, with
her hands covered with soap and water and a scrubbing brush in one of
them, appears, and curtsys.
“What work are you about now?” says Judy, making an ancient snap at
her like a very sharp old beldame.
“I’m a-cleaning the upstairs back room, miss,” replies Charley.
“Mind you do it thoroughly, and don’t loiter. Shirking won’t do for
me. Make haste! Go along!” cries Judy with a stamp upon the ground.
“You girls are more trouble than you’re worth, by half.”
On this severe matron, as she returns to her task of scraping the
butter and cutting the bread, falls the shadow of her brother,
looking in at the window. For whom, knife and loaf in hand, she opens
the street-door.
“Aye, aye, Bart!” says Grandfather Smallweed. “Here you are, hey?”
“Here I am,” says Bart.
“Been along with your friend again, Bart?”
Small nods.
“Dining at his expense, Bart?”
Small nods again.
“That’s right. Live at his expense as much as you can, and take
warning by his foolish example. That’s the use of such a friend. The
only use you can put him to,” says the venerable sage.
His grandson, without receiving this good counsel as dutifully as he
might, honours it with all such acceptance as may lie in a slight
wink and a nod and takes a chair at the tea-table. The four old faces
then hover over teacups like a company of ghastly cherubim, Mrs.
Smallweed perpetually twitching her head and chattering at the
trivets and Mr. Smallweed requiring to be repeatedly shaken up like a
large black draught.
“Yes, yes,” says the good old gentleman, reverting to his lesson of
wisdom. “That’s such advice as your father would have given you,
Bart. You never saw your father. More’s the pity. He was my true
son.” Whether it is intended to be conveyed that he was particularly
pleasant to look at, on that account, does not appear.
“He was my true son,” repeats the old gentleman, folding his bread
and butter on his knee, “a good accountant, and died fifteen years
ago.”
Mrs. Smallweed, following her usual instinct, breaks out with
“Fifteen hundred pound. Fifteen hundred pound in a black box, fifteen
hundred pound locked up, fifteen hundred pound put away and hid!” Her
worthy husband, setting aside his bread and butter, immediately
discharges the cushion at her, crushes her against the side of her
chair, and falls back in his own, overpowered. His appearance, after
visiting Mrs. Smallweed with one of these admonitions, is
particularly impressive and not wholly prepossessing, firstly because
the exertion generally twists his black skull-cap over one eye and
gives him an air of goblin rakishness, secondly because he mutters
violent imprecations against Mrs. Smallweed, and thirdly because the
contrast between those powerful expressions and his powerless figure
is suggestive of a baleful old malignant who would be very wicked if
he could. All this, however, is so common in the Smallweed family
circle that it produces no impression. The old gentleman is merely
shaken and has his internal feathers beaten up, the cushion is
restored to its usual place beside him, and the old lady, perhaps
with her cap adjusted and perhaps not, is planted in her chair again,
ready to be bowled down like a ninepin.
Some time elapses in the present instance before the old gentleman is
sufficiently cool to resume his discourse, and even then he mixes it
up with several edifying expletives addressed to the unconscious
partner of his bosom, who holds communication with nothing on earth
but the trivets. As thus: “If your father, Bart, had lived longer, he
might have been worth a deal of money—you brimstone chatterer!—but
just as he was beginning to build up the house that he had been
making the foundations for, through many a year—you jade of a
magpie, jackdaw, and poll-parrot, what do you mean!—he took ill and
died of a low fever, always being a sparing and a spare man, full of
business care—I should like to throw a cat at you instead of a
cushion, and I will too if you make such a confounded fool of
yourself!—and your mother, who was a prudent woman as dry as a chip,
just dwindled away like touchwood after you and Judy were born—you
are an old pig. You are a brimstone pig. You’re a head of swine!”
Judy, not interested in what she has often heard, begins to collect
in a basin various tributary streams of tea, from the bottoms of cups
and saucers and from the bottom of the tea-pot for the little
charwoman’s evening meal. In like manner she gets together, in the
iron bread-basket, as many outside fragments and worn-down heels of
loaves as the rigid economy of the house has left in existence.
“But your father and me were partners, Bart,” says the old gentleman,
“and when I am gone, you and Judy will have all there is. It’s rare
for you both that you went out early in life—Judy to the flower
business, and you to the law. You won’t want to spend it. You’ll get
your living without it, and put more to it. When I am gone, Judy will
go back to the flower business and you’ll still stick to the law.”
One might infer from Judy’s appearance that her business rather lay
with the thorns than the flowers, but she has in her time been
apprenticed to the art and mystery of artificial flower-making. A
close observer might perhaps detect both in her eye and her
brother’s, when their venerable grandsire anticipates his being gone,
some little impatience to know when he may be going, and some
resentful opinion that it is time he went.
“Now, if everybody has done,” says Judy, completing her preparations,
“I’ll have that girl in to her tea. She would never leave off if she
took it by herself in the kitchen.”
Charley is accordingly introduced, and under a heavy fire of eyes,
sits down to her basin and a Druidical ruin of bread and butter. In
the active superintendence of this young person, Judy Smallweed
appears to attain a perfectly geological age and to date from the