Bleak House
Mr. George looks distrustfully from the painted ceiling to the
ground, from the ground to Mr. Smallweed, from Mr. Smallweed to Mr.
Tulkinghorn, and from Mr. Tulkinghorn to the painted ceiling again,
often in his perplexity changing the leg on which he rests.
“I do assure you, sir,” says Mr. George, “not to say it offensively,
that between you and Mr. Smallweed here, I really am being smothered
fifty times over. I really am, sir. I am not a match for you
gentlemen. Will you allow me to ask why you want to see the captain’s
hand, in the case that I could find any specimen of it?”
Mr. Tulkinghorn quietly shakes his head. “No. If you were a man of
business, sergeant, you would not need to be informed that there are
confidential reasons, very harmless in themselves, for many such
wants in the profession to which I belong. But if you are afraid of
doing any injury to Captain Hawdon, you may set your mind at rest
about that.”
“Aye! He is dead, sir.”
“IS he?” Mr. Tulkinghorn quietly sits down to write.
“Well, sir,” says the trooper, looking into his hat after another
disconcerted pause, “I am sorry not to have given you more
satisfaction. If it would be any satisfaction to any one that I
should be confirmed in my judgment that I would rather have nothing
to do with this by a friend of mine who has a better head for
business than I have, and who is an old soldier, I am willing to
consult with him. I—I really am so completely smothered myself at
present,” says Mr. George, passing his hand hopelessly across his
brow, “that I don’t know but what it might be a satisfaction to me.”
Mr. Smallweed, hearing that this authority is an old soldier, so
strongly inculcates the expediency of the trooper’s taking counsel
with him, and particularly informing him of its being a question of
five guineas or more, that Mr. George engages to go and see him. Mr.
Tulkinghorn says nothing either way.
“I’ll consult my friend, then, by your leave, sir,” says the trooper,
“and I’ll take the liberty of looking in again with the final answer
in the course of the day. Mr. Smallweed, if you wish to be carried
downstairs—”
“In a moment, my dear friend, in a moment. Will you first let me
speak half a word with this gentleman in private?”
“Certainly, sir. Don’t hurry yourself on my account.” The trooper
retires to a distant part of the room and resumes his curious
inspection of the boxes, strong and otherwise.
“If I wasn’t as weak as a brimstone baby, sir,” whispers Grandfather
Smallweed, drawing the lawyer down to his level by the lapel of his
coat and flashing some half-quenched green fire out of his angry
eyes, “I’d tear the writing away from him. He’s got it buttoned in
his breast. I saw him put it there. Judy saw him put it there. Speak
up, you crabbed image for the sign of a walking-stick shop, and say
you saw him put it there!”
This vehement conjuration the old gentleman accompanies with such a
thrust at his granddaughter that it is too much for his strength, and
he slips away out of his chair, drawing Mr. Tulkinghorn with him,
until he is arrested by Judy, and well shaken.
“Violence will not do for me, my friend,” Mr. Tulkinghorn then
remarks coolly.
“No, no, I know, I know, sir. But it’s chafing and
galling—it’s—it’s worse than your smattering chattering magpie of a
grandmother,” to the imperturbable Judy, who only looks at the fire,
“to know he has got what’s wanted and won’t give it up. He, not to
give it up! HE! A vagabond! But never mind, sir, never mind. At the
most, he has only his own way for a little while. I have him
periodically in a vice. I’ll twist him, sir. I’ll screw him, sir. If
he won’t do it with a good grace, I’ll make him do it with a bad one,
sir! Now, my dear Mr. George,” says Grandfather Smallweed, winking at
the lawyer hideously as he releases him, “I am ready for your kind
assistance, my excellent friend!”
Mr. Tulkinghorn, with some shadowy sign of amusement manifesting
itself through his self-possession, stands on the hearth-rug with his
back to the fire, watching the disappearance of Mr. Smallweed and
acknowledging the trooper’s parting salute with one slight nod.
It is more difficult to get rid of the old gentleman, Mr. George
finds, than to bear a hand in carrying him downstairs, for when he is
replaced in his conveyance, he is so loquacious on the subject of the
guineas and retains such an affectionate hold of his button—having,
in truth, a secret longing to rip his coat open and rob him—that
some degree of force is necessary on the trooper’s part to effect a
separation. It is accomplished at last, and he proceeds alone in
quest of his adviser.
By the cloisterly Temple, and by Whitefriars (there, not without a
glance at Hanging-Sword Alley, which would seem to be something in
his way), and by Blackfriars Bridge, and Blackfriars Road, Mr. George
sedately marches to a street of little shops lying somewhere in that
ganglion of roads from Kent and Surrey, and of streets from the
bridges of London, centring in the far-famed elephant who has lost
his castle formed of a thousand four-horse coaches to a stronger iron
monster than he, ready to chop him into mince-meat any day he dares.
To one of the little shops in this street, which is a musician’s
shop, having a few fiddles in the window, and some Pan’s pipes and a
tambourine, and a triangle, and certain elongated scraps of music,
Mr. George directs his massive tread. And halting at a few paces from
it, as he sees a soldierly looking woman, with her outer skirts
tucked up, come forth with a small wooden tub, and in that tub
commence a-whisking and a-splashing on the margin of the pavement,
Mr. George says to himself, “She’s as usual, washing greens. I never
saw her, except upon a baggage-waggon, when she wasn’t washing
greens!”
The subject of this reflection is at all events so occupied in
washing greens at present that she remains unsuspicious of Mr.
George’s approach until, lifting up herself and her tub together when
she has poured the water off into the gutter, she finds him standing
near her. Her reception of him is not flattering.
“George, I never see you but I wish you was a hundred mile away!”
The trooper, without remarking on this welcome, follows into the
musical-instrument shop, where the lady places her tub of greens upon
the counter, and having shaken hands with him, rests her arms upon
it.
“I never,” she says, “George, consider Matthew Bagnet safe a minute
when you’re near him. You are that restless and that roving—”
“Yes! I know I am, Mrs. Bagnet. I know I am.”
“You know you are!” says Mrs. Bagnet. “What’s the use of that? WHY
are you?”
“The nature of the animal, I suppose,” returns the trooper
good-humouredly.
“Ah!” cries Mrs. Bagnet, something shrilly. “But what satisfaction
will the nature of the animal be to me when the animal shall have
tempted my Mat away from the musical business to New Zealand or
Australey?”
Mrs. Bagnet is not at all an ill-looking woman. Rather large-boned, a
little coarse in the grain, and freckled by the sun and wind which
have tanned her hair upon the forehead, but healthy, wholesome, and
bright-eyed. A strong, busy, active, honest-faced woman of from
forty-five to fifty. Clean, hardy, and so economically dressed
(though substantially) that the only article of ornament of which she
stands possessed appear’s to be her wedding-ring, around which her
finger has grown to be so large since it was put on that it will
never come off again until it shall mingle with Mrs. Bagnet’s dust.
“Mrs. Bagnet,” says the trooper, “I am on my parole with you. Mat
will get no harm from me. You may trust me so far.”
“Well, I think I may. But the very looks of you are unsettling,” Mrs.
Bagnet rejoins. “Ah, George, George! If you had only settled down and
married Joe Pouch’s widow when he died in North America, SHE’D have
combed your hair for you.”
“It was a chance for me, certainly,” returns the trooper half
laughingly, half seriously, “but I shall never settle down into a
respectable man now. Joe Pouch’s widow might have done me good—there
was something in her, and something of her—but I couldn’t make up my
mind to it. If I had had the luck to meet with such a wife as Mat
found!”
Mrs. Bagnet, who seems in a virtuous way to be under little reserve
with a good sort of fellow, but to be another good sort of fellow
herself for that matter, receives this compliment by flicking Mr.
George in the face with a head of greens and taking her tub into the
little room behind the shop.
“Why, Quebec, my poppet,” says George, following, on invitation, into
that department. “And little Malta, too! Come and kiss your Bluffy!”
These young ladies—not supposed to have been actually christened by
the names applied to them, though always so called in the family from
the places of their birth in barracks—are respectively employed on
three-legged stools, the younger (some five or six years old) in
learning her letters out of a penny primer, the elder (eight or nine
perhaps) in teaching her and sewing with great assiduity. Both hail
Mr. George with acclamations as an old friend and after some kissing
and romping plant their stools beside him.
“And how’s young Woolwich?” says Mr. George.
“Ah! There now!” cries Mrs. Bagnet, turning about from her saucepans
(for she is cooking dinner) with a bright flush on her face. “Would
you believe it? Got an engagement at the theayter, with his father,
to play the fife in a military piece.”
“Well done, my godson!” cries Mr. George, slapping his thigh.
“I believe you!” says Mrs. Bagnet. “He’s a Briton. That’s what
Woolwich is. A Briton!”
“And Mat blows away at his bassoon, and you’re respectable civilians
one and all,” says Mr. George. “Family people. Children growing up.
Mat’s old mother in Scotland, and your old father somewhere else,
corresponded with, and helped a little, and—well, well! To be sure,
I don’t know why I shouldn’t be wished a hundred mile away, for I
have not much to do with all this!”
Mr. George is becoming thoughtful, sitting before the fire in the
whitewashed room, which has a sanded floor and a barrack smell and
contains nothing superfluous and has not a visible speck of dirt or
dust in it, from the faces of Quebec and Malta to the bright tin pots
and pannikins upon the dresser shelves—Mr. George is becoming
thoughtful, sitting here while Mrs. Bagnet is busy, when Mr. Bagnet
and young Woolwich opportunely come home. Mr. Bagnet is an
ex-artilleryman, tall and upright, with shaggy eyebrows and whiskers
like the fibres of a coco-nut, not a hair upon his head, and a torrid
complexion. His voice, short, deep, and resonant, is not at all
unlike the tones of the instrument to which he is devoted. Indeed
there may be generally observed in him an unbending, unyielding,
brass-bound air, as if he were himself the bassoon of the human
orchestra. Young Woolwich is the type and model of a young drummer.
Both father and son salute the trooper heartily. He saying, in due
season, that he has come to advise with Mr. Bagnet, Mr. Bagnet
hospitably declares that he will hear of no business until after
dinner and that his friend shall not partake of his counsel without
first partaking of boiled pork and greens. The trooper yielding to
this invitation, he and Mr. Bagnet, not to embarrass the domestic
preparations, go forth to take a turn up and down the little street,
which they promenade with measured tread and folded arms, as if it
were a rampart.
“George,” says Mr. Bagnet. “You know me. It’s my old girl that
advises. She has the head. But I never own to it before her.
Discipline must be maintained. Wait till the greens is off her mind.
Then we’ll consult. Whatever the old girl says, do—do it!”