Dombey and Son
parade, his whole life being a struggle against all kinds of apoplectic
symptoms, “we knew each other through your boy.”
Mr Dombey seemed touched, as it is not improbable the Major designed he
should be, by this allusion. He looked down and sighed: and the Major,
rousing himself fiercely, again said, in reference to the state of mind
into which he felt himself in danger of falling, that this was
weakness, and nothing should induce him to submit to it.
“Our friend had a remote connexion with that event,” said the Major,
“and all the credit that belongs to her, J. B. is willing to give her,
Sir. Notwithstanding which, Ma’am,” he added, raising his eyes from his
plate, and casting them across Princess’s Place, to where Miss Tox was
at that moment visible at her window watering her flowers, “you’re a
scheming jade, Ma’am, and your ambition is a piece of monstrous
impudence. If it only made yourself ridiculous, Ma’am,” said the Major,
rolling his head at the unconscious Miss Tox, while his starting eyes
appeared to make a leap towards her, “you might do that to your heart’s
content, Ma’am, without any objection, I assure you, on the part of
Bagstock.” Here the Major laughed frightfully up in the tips of his
ears and in the veins of his head. “But when, Ma’am,” said the Major,
“you compromise other people, and generous, unsuspicious people too, as
a repayment for their condescension, you stir the blood of old Joe in
his body.”
“Major,” said Mr Dombey, reddening, “I hope you do not hint at anything
so absurd on the part of Miss Tox as—”
“Dombey,” returned the Major, “I hint at nothing. But Joey B. has lived
in the world, Sir: lived in the world with his eyes open, Sir, and his
ears cocked: and Joe tells you, Dombey, that there’s a devilish artful
and ambitious woman over the way.”
Mr Dombey involuntarily glanced over the way; and an angry glance he
sent in that direction, too.
“That’s all on such a subject that shall pass the lips of Joseph
Bagstock,” said the Major firmly. “Joe is not a tale-bearer, but there
are times when he must speak, when he will speak!—confound your arts,
Ma’am,” cried the Major, again apostrophising his fair neighbour, with
great ire,—“when the provocation is too strong to admit of his
remaining silent.”
The emotion of this outbreak threw the Major into a paroxysm of horse’s
coughs, which held him for a long time. On recovering he added:
“And now, Dombey, as you have invited Joe—old Joe, who has no other
merit, Sir, but that he is tough and hearty—to be your guest and guide
at Leamington, command him in any way you please, and he is wholly
yours. I don’t know, Sir,” said the Major, wagging his double chin with
a jocose air, “what it is you people see in Joe to make you hold him in
such great request, all of you; but this I know, Sir, that if he wasn’t
pretty tough, and obstinate in his refusals, you’d kill him among you
with your invitations and so forth, in double-quick time.”
Mr Dombey, in a few words, expressed his sense of the preference he
received over those other distinguished members of society who were
clamouring for the possession of Major Bagstock. But the Major cut him
short by giving him to understand that he followed his own
inclinations, and that they had risen up in a body and said with one
accord, “J. B., Dombey is the man for you to choose as a friend.”
The Major being by this time in a state of repletion, with essence of
savoury pie oozing out at the corners of his eyes, and devilled grill
and kidneys tightening his cravat: and the time moreover approaching
for the departure of the railway train to Birmingham, by which they
were to leave town: the Native got him into his great-coat with immense
difficulty, and buttoned him up until his face looked staring and
gasping, over the top of that garment, as if he were in a barrel. The
Native then handed him separately, and with a decent interval between
each supply, his washleather gloves, his thick stick, and his hat;
which latter article the Major wore with a rakish air on one side of
his head, by way of toning down his remarkable visage. The Native had
previously packed, in all possible and impossible parts of Mr Dombey’s
chariot, which was in waiting, an unusual quantity of carpet-bags and
small portmanteaus, no less apoplectic in appearance than the Major
himself: and having filled his own pockets with Seltzer water, East
India sherry, sandwiches, shawls, telescopes, maps, and newspapers, any
or all of which light baggage the Major might require at any instant of
the journey, he announced that everything was ready. To complete the
equipment of this unfortunate foreigner (currently believed to be a
prince in his own country), when he took his seat in the rumble by the
side of Mr Towlinson, a pile of the Major’s cloaks and great-coats was
hurled upon him by the landlord, who aimed at him from the pavement
with those great missiles like a Titan, and so covered him up, that he
proceeded, in a living tomb, to the railroad station.
But before the carriage moved away, and while the Native was in the act
of sepulture, Miss Tox appearing at her window, waved a lilywhite
handkerchief. Mr Dombey received this parting salutation very
coldly—very coldly even for him—and honouring her with the slightest
possible inclination of his head, leaned back in the carriage with a
very discontented look. His marked behaviour seemed to afford the Major
(who was all politeness in his recognition of Miss Tox) unbounded
satisfaction; and he sat for a long time afterwards, leering, and
choking, like an over-fed Mephistopheles.
During the bustle of preparation at the railway, Mr Dombey and the
Major walked up and down the platform side by side; the former taciturn
and gloomy, and the latter entertaining him, or entertaining himself,
with a variety of anecdotes and reminiscences, in most of which Joe
Bagstock was the principal performer. Neither of the two observed that
in the course of these walks, they attracted the attention of a working
man who was standing near the engine, and who touched his hat every
time they passed; for Mr Dombey habitually looked over the vulgar herd,
not at them; and the Major was looking, at the time, into the core of
one of his stories. At length, however, this man stepped before them as
they turned round, and pulling his hat off, and keeping it off, ducked
his head to Mr Dombey.
“Beg your pardon, Sir,” said the man, “but I hope you’re a doin’ pretty
well, Sir.”
He was dressed in a canvas suit abundantly besmeared with coal-dust and
oil, and had cinders in his whiskers, and a smell of half-slaked ashes
all over him. He was not a bad-looking fellow, nor even what could be
fairly called a dirty-looking fellow, in spite of this; and, in short,
he was Mr Toodle, professionally clothed.
“I shall have the honour of stokin’ of you down, Sir,” said Mr Toodle.
“Beg your pardon, Sir.—I hope you find yourself a coming round?”
Mr Dombey looked at him, in return for his tone of interest, as if a
man like that would make his very eyesight dirty.
“’Scuse the liberty, Sir,” said Toodle, seeing he was not clearly
remembered, “but my wife Polly, as was called Richards in your family—”
A change in Mr Dombey’s face, which seemed to express recollection of
him, and so it did, but it expressed in a much stronger degree an angry
sense of humiliation, stopped Mr Toodle short.
“Your wife wants money, I suppose,” said Mr Dombey, putting his hand in
his pocket, and speaking (but that he always did) haughtily.
“No thank’ee, Sir,” returned Toodle, “I can’t say she does. I don’t.”
Mr Dombey was stopped short now in his turn: and awkwardly: with his
hand in his pocket.
“No, Sir,” said Toodle, turning his oilskin cap round and round; “we’re
a doin’ pretty well, Sir; we haven’t no cause to complain in the
worldly way, Sir. We’ve had four more since then, Sir, but we rubs on.”
Mr Dombey would have rubbed on to his own carriage, though in so doing
he had rubbed the stoker underneath the wheels; but his attention was
arrested by something in connexion with the cap still going slowly
round and round in the man’s hand.
“We lost one babby,” observed Toodle, “there’s no denyin’.”
“Lately,” added Mr Dombey, looking at the cap.
“No, Sir, up’ard of three years ago, but all the rest is hearty. And in
the matter o readin’, Sir,” said Toodle, ducking again, as if to remind
Mr Dombey of what had passed between them on that subject long ago,
“them boys o’ mine, they learned me, among ’em, arter all. They’ve made
a wery tolerable scholar of me, Sir, them boys.”
“Come, Major!” said Mr Dombey.
“Beg your pardon, Sir,” resumed Toodle, taking a step before them and
deferentially stopping them again, still cap in hand: “I wouldn’t have
troubled you with such a pint except as a way of gettin’ in the name of
my son Biler—christened Robin—him as you was so good as to make a
Charitable Grinder on.”
“Well, man,” said Mr Dombey in his severest manner. “What about him?”
“Why, Sir,” returned Toodle, shaking his head with a face of great
anxiety and distress, “I’m forced to say, Sir, that he’s gone wrong.”
“He has gone wrong, has he?” said Mr Dombey, with a hard kind of
satisfaction.
“He has fell into bad company, you see, genelmen,” pursued the father,
looking wistfully at both, and evidently taking the Major into the
conversation with the hope of having his sympathy. “He has got into bad
ways. God send he may come to again, genelmen, but he’s on the wrong
track now! You could hardly be off hearing of it somehow, Sir,” said
Toodle, again addressing Mr Dombey individually; “and it’s better I
should out and say my boy’s gone rather wrong. Polly’s dreadful down
about it, genelmen,” said Toodle with the same dejected look, and
another appeal to the Major.
“A son of this man’s whom I caused to be educated, Major,” said Mr
Dombey, giving him his arm. “The usual return!”
“Take advice from plain old Joe, and never educate that sort of people,
Sir,” returned the Major. “Damme, Sir, it never does! It always fails!”
The simple father was beginning to submit that he hoped his son, the
quondam Grinder, huffed and cuffed, and flogged and badged, and taught,
as parrots are, by a brute jobbed into his place of schoolmaster with
as much fitness for it as a hound, might not have been educated on
quite a right plan in some undiscovered respect, when Mr Dombey angrily
repeating “The usual return!” led the Major away. And the Major being
heavy to hoist into Mr Dombey’s carriage, elevated in mid-air, and
having to stop and swear that he would flay the Native alive, and break
every bone in his skin, and visit other physical torments upon him,
every time he couldn’t get his foot on the step, and fell back on that
dark exile, had barely time before they started to repeat hoarsely that
it would never do: that it always failed: and that if he were to
educate “his own vagabond,” he would certainly be hanged.
Mr Dombey assented bitterly; but there was something more in his
bitterness, and in his moody way of falling back in the carriage, and
looking with knitted brows at the changing objects without, than the
failure of that noble educational system administered by the Grinders’
Company. He had seen upon the man’s rough cap a piece of new crape, and
he had assured himself, from his manner and his answers, that he wore
it for _his_ son.
So! from high to low, at home or abroad, from Florence in his great
house to the coarse churl who was feeding the fire then smoking before
them, everyone set up some claim or other to a share in his dead boy,
and was a bidder against him! Could he ever forget how that woman had
wept over his pillow, and called him her own child! or how he, waking