Dombey and Son
clock in the hall. He was intimate with all the paperhanging in the
house; saw things that no one else saw in the patterns; found out
miniature tigers and lions running up the bedroom walls, and squinting
faces leering in the squares and diamonds of the floor-cloth.
The solitary child lived on, surrounded by this arabesque work of his
musing fancy, and no one understood him. Mrs Blimber thought him “odd,”
and sometimes the servants said among themselves that little Dombey
“moped;” but that was all.
Unless young Toots had some idea on the subject, to the expression of
which he was wholly unequal. Ideas, like ghosts (according to the
common notion of ghosts), must be spoken to a little before they will
explain themselves; and Toots had long left off asking any questions of
his own mind. Some mist there may have been, issuing from that leaden
casket, his cranium, which, if it could have taken shape and form,
would have become a genie; but it could not; and it only so far
followed the example of the smoke in the Arabian story, as to roll out
in a thick cloud, and there hang and hover. But it left a little figure
visible upon a lonely shore, and Toots was always staring at it.
“How are you?” he would say to Paul, fifty times a day. “Quite well,
Sir, thank you,” Paul would answer. “Shake hands,” would be Toots’s
next advance.
Which Paul, of course, would immediately do. Mr Toots generally said
again, after a long interval of staring and hard breathing, “How are
you?” To which Paul again replied, “Quite well, Sir, thank you.”
One evening Mr Toots was sitting at his desk, oppressed by
correspondence, when a great purpose seemed to flash upon him. He laid
down his pen, and went off to seek Paul, whom he found at last, after a
long search, looking through the window of his little bedroom.
“I say!” cried Toots, speaking the moment he entered the room, lest he
should forget it; “what do you think about?”
“Oh! I think about a great many things,” replied Paul.
“Do you, though?” said Toots, appearing to consider that fact in itself
surprising. “If you had to die,” said Paul, looking up into his face—Mr
Toots started, and seemed much disturbed.
“Don’t you think you would rather die on a moonlight night, when the
sky was quite clear, and the wind blowing, as it did last night?”
Mr Toots said, looking doubtfully at Paul, and shaking his head, that
he didn’t know about that.
“Not blowing, at least,” said Paul, “but sounding in the air like the
sea sounds in the shells. It was a beautiful night. When I had listened
to the water for a long time, I got up and looked out. There was a boat
over there, in the full light of the moon; a boat with a sail.”
The child looked at him so steadfastly, and spoke so earnestly, that Mr
Toots, feeling himself called upon to say something about this boat,
said, “Smugglers.” But with an impartial remembrance of there being two
sides to every question, he added, “or Preventive.”
“A boat with a sail,” repeated Paul, “in the full light of the moon.
The sail like an arm, all silver. It went away into the distance, and
what do you think it seemed to do as it moved with the waves?”
“Pitch,” said Mr Toots.
“It seemed to beckon,” said the child, “to beckon me to come!—There she
is! There she is!”
Toots was almost beside himself with dismay at this sudden exclamation,
after what had gone before, and cried “Who?”
“My sister Florence!” cried Paul, “looking up here, and waving her
hand. She sees me—she sees me! Good-night, dear, good-night,
good-night.”
His quick transition to a state of unbounded pleasure, as he stood at
his window, kissing and clapping his hands: and the way in which the
light retreated from his features as she passed out of his view, and
left a patient melancholy on the little face: were too remarkable
wholly to escape even Toots’s notice. Their interview being interrupted
at this moment by a visit from Mrs Pipchin, who usually brought her
black skirts to bear upon Paul just before dusk, once or twice a week,
Toots had no opportunity of improving the occasion: but it left so
marked an impression on his mind that he twice returned, after having
exchanged the usual salutations, to ask Mrs Pipchin how she did. This
the irascible old lady conceived to be a deeply devised and
long-meditated insult, originating in the diabolical invention of the
weak-eyed young man downstairs, against whom she accordingly lodged a
formal complaint with Doctor Blimber that very night; who mentioned to
the young man that if he ever did it again, he should be obliged to
part with him.
The evenings being longer now, Paul stole up to his window every
evening to look out for Florence. She always passed and repassed at a
certain time, until she saw him; and their mutual recognition was a
gleam of sunshine in Paul’s daily life. Often after dark, one other
figure walked alone before the Doctor’s house. He rarely joined them on
the Saturdays now. He could not bear it. He would rather come
unrecognised, and look up at the windows where his son was qualifying
for a man; and wait, and watch, and plan, and hope.
Oh! could he but have seen, or seen as others did, the slight spare boy
above, watching the waves and clouds at twilight, with his earnest
eyes, and breasting the window of his solitary cage when birds flew by,
as if he would have emulated them, and soared away!
CHAPTER XIII.
Shipping Intelligence and Office Business
Mr Dombey’s offices were in a court where there was an old-established
stall of choice fruit at the corner: where perambulating merchants, of
both sexes, offered for sale at any time between the hours of ten and
five, slippers, pocket-books, sponges, dogs’ collars, and Windsor soap;
and sometimes a pointer or an oil-painting.
The pointer always came that way, with a view to the Stock Exchange,
where a sporting taste (originating generally in bets of new hats) is
much in vogue. The other commodities were addressed to the general
public; but they were never offered by the vendors to Mr Dombey. When
he appeared, the dealers in those wares fell off respectfully. The
principal slipper and dogs’ collar man—who considered himself a public
character, and whose portrait was screwed on to an artist’s door in
Cheapside—threw up his forefinger to the brim of his hat as Mr Dombey
went by. The ticket-porter, if he were not absent on a job, always ran
officiously before, to open Mr Dombey’s office door as wide as
possible, and hold it open, with his hat off, while he entered.
The clerks within were not a whit behind-hand in their demonstrations
of respect. A solemn hush prevailed, as Mr Dombey passed through the
outer office. The wit of the Counting-House became in a moment as mute
as the row of leathern fire-buckets hanging up behind him. Such vapid
and flat daylight as filtered through the ground-glass windows and
skylights, leaving a black sediment upon the panes, showed the books
and papers, and the figures bending over them, enveloped in a studious
gloom, and as much abstracted in appearance, from the world without, as
if they were assembled at the bottom of the sea; while a mouldy little
strong room in the obscure perspective, where a shaded lamp was always
burning, might have represented the cavern of some ocean monster,
looking on with a red eye at these mysteries of the deep.
When Perch the messenger, whose place was on a little bracket, like a
timepiece, saw Mr Dombey come in—or rather when he felt that he was
coming, for he had usually an instinctive sense of his approach—he
hurried into Mr Dombey’s room, stirred the fire, carried fresh coals
from the bowels of the coal-box, hung the newspaper to air upon the
fender, put the chair ready, and the screen in its place, and was round
upon his heel on the instant of Mr Dombey’s entrance, to take his
great-coat and hat, and hang them up. Then Perch took the newspaper,
and gave it a turn or two in his hands before the fire, and laid it,
deferentially, at Mr Dombey’s elbow. And so little objection had Perch
to being deferential in the last degree, that if he might have laid
himself at Mr Dombey’s feet, or might have called him by some such
title as used to be bestowed upon the Caliph Haroun Alraschid, he would
have been all the better pleased.
As this honour would have been an innovation and an experiment, Perch
was fain to content himself by expressing as well as he could, in his
manner, You are the light of my Eyes. You are the Breath of my Soul.
You are the commander of the Faithful Perch! With this imperfect
happiness to cheer him, he would shut the door softly, walk away on
tiptoe, and leave his great chief to be stared at, through a
dome-shaped window in the leads, by ugly chimney-pots and backs of
houses, and especially by the bold window of a hair-cutting saloon on a
first floor, where a waxen effigy, bald as a Mussulman in the morning,
and covered, after eleven o’clock in the day, with luxuriant hair and
whiskers in the latest Christian fashion, showed him the wrong side of
its head for ever.
Between Mr Dombey and the common world, as it was accessible through
the medium of the outer office—to which Mr Dombey’s presence in his own
room may be said to have struck like damp, or cold air—there were two
degrees of descent. Mr Carker in his own office was the first step; Mr
Morfin, in his own office, was the second. Each of these gentlemen
occupied a little chamber like a bath-room, opening from the passage
outside Mr Dombey’s door. Mr Carker, as Grand Vizier, inhabited the
room that was nearest to the Sultan. Mr Morfin, as an officer of
inferior state, inhabited the room that was nearest to the clerks.
The gentleman last mentioned was a cheerful-looking, hazel-eyed elderly
bachelor: gravely attired, as to his upper man, in black; and as to his
legs, in pepper-and-salt colour. His dark hair was just touched here
and there with specks of gray, as though the tread of Time had splashed
it; and his whiskers were already white. He had a mighty respect for Mr
Dombey, and rendered him due homage; but as he was of a genial temper
himself, and never wholly at his ease in that stately presence, he was
disquieted by no jealousy of the many conferences enjoyed by Mr Carker,
and felt a secret satisfaction in having duties to discharge, which
rarely exposed him to be singled out for such distinction. He was a
great musical amateur in his way—after business; and had a paternal
affection for his violoncello, which was once in every week transported
from Islington, his place of abode, to a certain club-room hard by the
Bank, where quartettes of the most tormenting and excruciating nature
were executed every Wednesday evening by a private party.
Mr Carker was a gentleman thirty-eight or forty years old, of a florid
complexion, and with two unbroken rows of glistening teeth, whose
regularity and whiteness were quite distressing. It was impossible to
escape the observation of them, for he showed them whenever he spoke;
and bore so wide a smile upon his countenance (a smile, however, very
rarely, indeed, extending beyond his mouth), that there was something
in it like the snarl of a cat. He affected a stiff white cravat, after
the example of his principal, and was always closely buttoned up and
tightly dressed. His manner towards Mr Dombey was deeply conceived and
perfectly expressed. He was familiar with him, in the very extremity of
his sense of the distance between them. “Mr Dombey, to a man in your
position from a man in mine, there is no show of subservience
compatible with the transaction of business between us, that I should
think sufficient. I frankly tell you, Sir, I give it up altogether. I
feel that I could not satisfy my own mind; and Heaven knows, Mr Dombey,