Bleak House
inward working, which expression of inward working, being echoed by
some elderly lady in the next pew and so communicated like a game of
forfeits through a circle of the more fermentable sinners present,
serves the purpose of parliamentary cheering and gets Mr. Chadband’s
steam up. From mere force of habit, Mr. Chadband in saying “My
friends!” has rested his eye on Mr. Snagsby and proceeds to make that
ill-starred stationer, already sufficiently confused, the immediate
recipient of his discourse.
“We have here among us, my friends,” says Chadband, “a Gentile and a
heathen, a dweller in the tents of Tom-all-Alone’s and a mover-on
upon the surface of the earth. We have here among us, my friends,”
and Mr. Chadband, untwisting the point with his dirty thumb-nail,
bestows an oily smile on Mr. Snagsby, signifying that he will throw
him an argumentative back-fall presently if he be not already down,
“a brother and a boy. Devoid of parents, devoid of relations, devoid
of flocks and herds, devoid of gold and silver and of precious
stones. Now, my friends, why do I say he is devoid of these
possessions? Why? Why is he?” Mr. Chadband states the question as if
he were propounding an entirely new riddle of much ingenuity and
merit to Mr. Snagsby and entreating him not to give it up.
Mr. Snagsby, greatly perplexed by the mysterious look he received
just now from his little woman—at about the period when Mr. Chadband
mentioned the word parents—is tempted into modestly remarking, “I
don’t know, I’m sure, sir.” On which interruption Mrs. Chadband
glares and Mrs. Snagsby says, “For shame!”
“I hear a voice,” says Chadband; “is it a still small voice, my
friends? I fear not, though I fain would hope so—”
“Ah—h!” from Mrs. Snagsby.
“Which says, ‘I don’t know.’ Then I will tell you why. I say this
brother present here among us is devoid of parents, devoid of
relations, devoid of flocks and herds, devoid of gold, of silver, and
of precious stones because he is devoid of the light that shines in
upon some of us. What is that light? What is it? I ask you, what is
that light?”
Mr. Chadband draws back his head and pauses, but Mr. Snagsby is not
to be lured on to his destruction again. Mr. Chadband, leaning
forward over the table, pierces what he has got to follow directly
into Mr. Snagsby with the thumb-nail already mentioned.
“It is,” says Chadband, “the ray of rays, the sun of suns, the moon
of moons, the star of stars. It is the light of Terewth.”
Mr. Chadband draws himself up again and looks triumphantly at Mr.
Snagsby as if he would be glad to know how he feels after that.
“Of Terewth,” says Mr. Chadband, hitting him again. “Say not to me
that it is NOT the lamp of lamps. I say to you it is. I say to you, a
million of times over, it is. It is! I say to you that I will
proclaim it to you, whether you like it or not; nay, that the less
you like it, the more I will proclaim it to you. With a
speaking-trumpet! I say to you that if you rear yourself against it,
you shall fall, you shall be bruised, you shall be battered, you
shall be flawed, you shall be smashed.”
The present effect of this flight of oratory—much admired for its
general power by Mr. Chadband’s followers—being not only to make Mr.
Chadband unpleasantly warm, but to represent the innocent Mr. Snagsby
in the light of a determined enemy to virtue, with a forehead of
brass and a heart of adamant, that unfortunate tradesman becomes yet
more disconcerted and is in a very advanced state of low spirits and
false position when Mr. Chadband accidentally finishes him.
“My friends,” he resumes after dabbing his fat head for some
time—and it smokes to such an extent that he seems to light his
pocket-handkerchief at it, which smokes, too, after every dab—“to
pursue the subject we are endeavouring with our lowly gifts to
improve, let us in a spirit of love inquire what is that Terewth to
which I have alluded. For, my young friends,” suddenly addressing the
’prentices and Guster, to their consternation, “if I am told by the
doctor that calomel or castor-oil is good for me, I may naturally ask
what is calomel, and what is castor-oil. I may wish to be informed of
that before I dose myself with either or with both. Now, my young
friends, what is this Terewth then? Firstly (in a spirit of love),
what is the common sort of Terewth—the working clothes—the
every-day wear, my young friends? Is it deception?”
“Ah—h!” from Mrs. Snagsby.
“Is it suppression?”
A shiver in the negative from Mrs. Snagsby.
“Is it reservation?”
A shake of the head from Mrs. Snagsby—very long and very tight.
“No, my friends, it is neither of these. Neither of these names
belongs to it. When this young heathen now among us—who is now, my
friends, asleep, the seal of indifference and perdition being set
upon his eyelids; but do not wake him, for it is right that I should
have to wrestle, and to combat and to struggle, and to conquer, for
his sake—when this young hardened heathen told us a story of a cock,
and of a bull, and of a lady, and of a sovereign, was THAT the
Terewth? No. Or if it was partly, was it wholly and entirely? No, my
friends, no!”
If Mr. Snagsby could withstand his little woman’s look as it enters
at his eyes, the windows of his soul, and searches the whole
tenement, he were other than the man he is. He cowers and droops.
“Or, my juvenile friends,” says Chadband, descending to the level of
their comprehension with a very obtrusive demonstration in his
greasily meek smile of coming a long way downstairs for the purpose,
“if the master of this house was to go forth into the city and there
see an eel, and was to come back, and was to call unto him the
mistress of this house, and was to say, ‘Sarah, rejoice with me, for
I have seen an elephant!’ would THAT be Terewth?”
Mrs. Snagsby in tears.
“Or put it, my juvenile friends, that he saw an elephant, and
returning said ‘Lo, the city is barren, I have seen but an eel,’
would THAT be Terewth?”
Mrs. Snagsby sobbing loudly.
“Or put it, my juvenile friends,” said Chadband, stimulated by the
sound, “that the unnatural parents of this slumbering heathen—for
parents he had, my juvenile friends, beyond a doubt—after casting
him forth to the wolves and the vultures, and the wild dogs and the
young gazelles, and the serpents, went back to their dwellings and
had their pipes, and their pots, and their flutings and their
dancings, and their malt liquors, and their butcher’s meat and
poultry, would THAT be Terewth?”
Mrs. Snagsby replies by delivering herself a prey to spasms, not an
unresisting prey, but a crying and a tearing one, so that Cook’s
Court re-echoes with her shrieks. Finally, becoming cataleptic, she
has to be carried up the narrow staircase like a grand piano. After
unspeakable suffering, productive of the utmost consternation, she is
pronounced, by expresses from the bedroom, free from pain, though
much exhausted, in which state of affairs Mr. Snagsby, trampled and
crushed in the piano-forte removal, and extremely timid and feeble,
ventures to come out from behind the door in the drawing-room.
All this time Jo has been standing on the spot where he woke up, ever
picking his cap and putting bits of fur in his mouth. He spits them
out with a remorseful air, for he feels that it is in his nature to
be an unimprovable reprobate and that it’s no good HIS trying to keep
awake, for HE won’t never know nothink. Though it may be, Jo, that
there is a history so interesting and affecting even to minds as near
the brutes as thine, recording deeds done on this earth for common
men, that if the Chadbands, removing their own persons from the
light, would but show it thee in simple reverence, would but leave it
unimproved, would but regard it as being eloquent enough without
their modest aid—it might hold thee awake, and thou might learn from
it yet!
Jo never heard of any such book. Its compilers and the Reverend
Chadband are all one to him, except that he knows the Reverend
Chadband and would rather run away from him for an hour than hear him
talk for five minutes. “It an’t no good my waiting here no longer,”
thinks Jo. “Mr. Snagsby an’t a-going to say nothink to me to-night.”
And downstairs he shuffles.
But downstairs is the charitable Guster, holding by the handrail of
the kitchen stairs and warding off a fit, as yet doubtfully, the same
having been induced by Mrs. Snagsby’s screaming. She has her own
supper of bread and cheese to hand to Jo, with whom she ventures to
interchange a word or so for the first time.
“Here’s something to eat, poor boy,” says Guster.
“Thank’ee, mum,” says Jo.
“Are you hungry?”
“Jist!” says Jo.
“What’s gone of your father and your mother, eh?”
Jo stops in the middle of a bite and looks petrified. For this orphan
charge of the Christian saint whose shrine was at Tooting has patted
him on the shoulder, and it is the first time in his life that any
decent hand has been so laid upon him.
“I never know’d nothink about ’em,” says Jo.
“No more didn’t I of mine,” cries Guster. She is repressing symptoms
favourable to the fit when she seems to take alarm at something and
vanishes down the stairs.
“Jo,” whispers the law-stationer softly as the boy lingers on the
step.
“Here I am, Mr. Snagsby!”
“I didn’t know you were gone—there’s another half-crown, Jo. It was
quite right of you to say nothing about the lady the other night when
we were out together. It would breed trouble. You can’t be too quiet,
Jo.”
“I am fly, master!”
And so, good night.
A ghostly shade, frilled and night-capped, follows the law-stationer
to the room he came from and glides higher up. And henceforth he
begins, go where he will, to be attended by another shadow than his
own, hardly less constant than his own, hardly less quiet than his
own. And into whatsoever atmosphere of secrecy his own shadow may
pass, let all concerned in the secrecy beware! For the watchful Mrs.
Snagsby is there too—bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, shadow of
his shadow.
CHAPTER XXVI
Sharpshooters
Wintry morning, looking with dull eyes and sallow face upon the
neighbourhood of Leicester Square, finds its inhabitants unwilling to
get out of bed. Many of them are not early risers at the brightest of
times, being birds of night who roost when the sun is high and are
wide awake and keen for prey when the stars shine out. Behind dingy
blind and curtain, in upper story and garret, skulking more or less
under false names, false hair, false titles, false jewellery, and
false histories, a colony of brigands lie in their first sleep.
Gentlemen of the green-baize road who could discourse from personal
experience of foreign galleys and home treadmills; spies of strong
governments that eternally quake with weakness and miserable fear,
broken traitors, cowards, bullies, gamesters, shufflers, swindlers,
and false witnesses; some not unmarked by the branding-iron beneath
their dirty braid; all with more cruelty in them than was in Nero,
and more crime than is in Newgate. For howsoever bad the devil can be
in fustian or smock-frock (and he can be very bad in both), he is a
more designing, callous, and intolerable devil when he sticks a pin
in his shirt-front, calls himself a gentleman, backs a card or
colour, plays a game or so of billiards, and knows a little about
bills and promissory notes, than in any other form he wears. And in
such form Mr. Bucket shall find him, when he will, still pervading
the tributary channels of Leicester Square.
But the wintry morning wants him not and wakes him not. It wakes Mr.
George of the shooting gallery and his familiar. They arise, roll up
and stow away their mattresses. Mr. George, having shaved himself