Little Dorrit
a burst of sorrow and compassion, ‘No, no, I have never seen him in my
life!’
CHAPTER 20. Moving in Society
If Young John Chivery had had the inclination and the power to write a
satire on family pride, he would have had no need to go for an avenging
illustration out of the family of his beloved. He would have found it
amply in that gallant brother and that dainty sister, so steeped in mean
experiences, and so loftily conscious of the family name; so ready
to beg or borrow from the poorest, to eat of anybody’s bread, spend
anybody’s money, drink from anybody’s cup and break it afterwards.
To have painted the sordid facts of their lives, and they throughout
invoking the death’s head apparition of the family gentility to come and
scare their benefactors, would have made Young John a satirist of the
first water.
Tip had turned his liberty to hopeful account by becoming a
billiard-marker. He had troubled himself so little as to the means of
his release, that Clennam scarcely needed to have been at the pains of
impressing the mind of Mr Plornish on that subject. Whoever had paid
him the compliment, he very readily accepted the compliment with _his_
compliments, and there was an end of it. Issuing forth from the gate
on these easy terms, he became a billiard-marker; and now occasionally
looked in at the little skittle-ground in a green Newmarket coat
(second-hand), with a shining collar and bright buttons (new), and drank
the beer of the Collegians.
One solid stationary point in the looseness of this gentleman’s
character was, that he respected and admired his sister Amy. The feeling
had never induced him to spare her a moment’s uneasiness, or to put
himself to any restraint or inconvenience on her account; but with that
Marshalsea taint upon his love, he loved her. The same rank Marshalsea
flavour was to be recognised in his distinctly perceiving that she
sacrificed her life to her father, and in his having no idea that she
had done anything for himself.
When this spirited young man and his sister had begun systematically
to produce the family skeleton for the overawing of the College, this
narrative cannot precisely state. Probably at about the period when
they began to dine on the College charity. It is certain that the more
reduced and necessitous they were, the more pompously the skeleton
emerged from its tomb; and that when there was anything particularly
shabby in the wind, the skeleton always came out with the ghastliest
flourish.
Little Dorrit was late on the Monday morning, for her father slept
late, and afterwards there was his breakfast to prepare and his room to
arrange. She had no engagement to go out to work, however, and therefore
stayed with him until, with Maggy’s help, she had put everything right
about him, and had seen him off upon his morning walk (of twenty yards
or so) to the coffee-house to read the paper. She then got on her bonnet
and went out, having been anxious to get out much sooner. There was, as
usual, a cessation of the small-talk in the Lodge as she passed through
it; and a Collegian who had come in on Saturday night, received the
intimation from the elbow of a more seasoned Collegian, ‘Look out. Here
she is!’
She wanted to see her sister, but when she got round to Mr Cripples’s,
she found that both her sister and her uncle had gone to the theatre
where they were engaged. Having taken thought of this probability by
the way, and having settled that in such case she would follow them, she
set off afresh for the theatre, which was on that side of the river, and
not very far away.
Little Dorrit was almost as ignorant of the ways of theatres as of the
ways of gold mines, and when she was directed to a furtive sort of door,
with a curious up-all-night air about it, that appeared to be ashamed of
itself and to be hiding in an alley, she hesitated to approach it; being
further deterred by the sight of some half-dozen close-shaved gentlemen
with their hats very strangely on, who were lounging about the door,
looking not at all unlike Collegians. On her applying to them, reassured
by this resemblance, for a direction to Miss Dorrit, they made way for
her to enter a dark hall--it was more like a great grim lamp gone out
than anything else--where she could hear the distant playing of music
and the sound of dancing feet. A man so much in want of airing that he
had a blue mould upon him, sat watching this dark place from a hole in
a corner, like a spider; and he told her that he would send a message
up to Miss Dorrit by the first lady or gentleman who went through. The
first lady who went through had a roll of music, half in her muff and
half out of it, and was in such a tumbled condition altogether, that it
seemed as if it would be an act of kindness to iron her. But as she was
very good-natured, and said, ‘Come with me; I’ll soon find Miss Dorrit
for you,’ Miss Dorrit’s sister went with her, drawing nearer and nearer
at every step she took in the darkness to the sound of music and the
sound of dancing feet.
At last they came into a maze of dust, where a quantity of people were
tumbling over one another, and where there was such a confusion of
unaccountable shapes of beams, bulkheads, brick walls, ropes, and
rollers, and such a mixing of gaslight and daylight, that they seemed
to have got on the wrong side of the pattern of the universe. Little
Dorrit, left to herself, and knocked against by somebody every moment,
was quite bewildered, when she heard her sister’s voice.
‘Why, good gracious, Amy, what ever brought you here?’
‘I wanted to see you, Fanny dear; and as I am going out all day
to-morrow, and knew you might be engaged all day to-day, I thought--’
‘But the idea, Amy, of _you_ coming behind! I never did!’ As her sister
said this in no very cordial tone of welcome, she conducted her to a
more open part of the maze, where various golden chairs and tables were
heaped together, and where a number of young ladies were sitting on
anything they could find, chattering. All these young ladies wanted
ironing, and all had a curious way of looking everywhere while they
chattered.
Just as the sisters arrived here, a monotonous boy in a Scotch cap put
his head round a beam on the left, and said, ‘Less noise there, ladies!’
and disappeared. Immediately after which, a sprightly gentleman with a
quantity of long black hair looked round a beam on the right, and said,
‘Less noise there, darlings!’ and also disappeared.
‘The notion of you among professionals, Amy, is really the last thing
I could have conceived!’ said her sister. ‘Why, how did you ever get
here?’
‘I don’t know. The lady who told you I was here, was so good as to bring
me in.’
‘Like you quiet little things! You can make your way anywhere, I
believe. _I_ couldn’t have managed it, Amy, though I know so much more of
the world.’
It was the family custom to lay it down as family law, that she was a
plain domestic little creature, without the great and sage experience of
the rest. This family fiction was the family assertion of itself against
her services. Not to make too much of them.
‘Well! And what have you got on your mind, Amy? Of course you have
got something on your mind about me?’ said Fanny. She spoke as if her
sister, between two and three years her junior, were her prejudiced
grandmother.
‘It is not much; but since you told me of the lady who gave you the
bracelet, Fanny--’
The monotonous boy put his head round the beam on the left, and said,
‘Look out there, ladies!’ and disappeared. The sprightly gentleman with
the black hair as suddenly put his head round the beam on the right, and
said, ‘Look out there, darlings!’ and also disappeared. Thereupon all
the young ladies rose and began shaking their skirts out behind.
‘Well, Amy?’ said Fanny, doing as the rest did; ‘what were you going to
say?’
‘Since you told me a lady had given you the bracelet you showed me,
Fanny, I have not been quite easy on your account, and indeed want to
know a little more if you will confide more to me.’
‘Now, ladies!’ said the boy in the Scotch cap. ‘Now, darlings!’ said the
gentleman with the black hair. They were every one gone in a moment, and
the music and the dancing feet were heard again.
Little Dorrit sat down in a golden chair, made quite giddy by these
rapid interruptions. Her sister and the rest were a long time gone; and
during their absence a voice (it appeared to be that of the gentleman
with the black hair) was continually calling out through the music,
‘One, two, three, four, five, six--go! One, two, three, four, five,
six--go! Steady, darlings! One, two, three, four, five, six--go!’
Ultimately the voice stopped, and they all came back again, more or less
out of breath, folding themselves in their shawls, and making ready
for the streets. ‘Stop a moment, Amy, and let them get away before
us,’ whispered Fanny. They were soon left alone; nothing more important
happening, in the meantime, than the boy looking round his old beam, and
saying, ‘Everybody at eleven to-morrow, ladies!’ and the gentleman with
the black hair looking round his old beam, and saying, ‘Everybody at
eleven to-morrow, darlings!’ each in his own accustomed manner.
When they were alone, something was rolled up or by other means got out
of the way, and there was a great empty well before them, looking down
into the depths of which Fanny said, ‘Now, uncle!’ Little Dorrit, as her
eyes became used to the darkness, faintly made him out at the bottom of
the well, in an obscure corner by himself, with his instrument in its
ragged case under his arm.
The old man looked as if the remote high gallery windows, with their
little strip of sky, might have been the point of his better fortunes,
from which he had descended, until he had gradually sunk down below
there to the bottom. He had been in that place six nights a week for
many years, but had never been observed to raise his eyes above his
music-book, and was confidently believed to have never seen a play.
There were legends in the place that he did not so much as know the
popular heroes and heroines by sight, and that the low comedian had
‘mugged’ at him in his richest manner fifty nights for a wager, and he
had shown no trace of consciousness. The carpenters had a joke to the
effect that he was dead without being aware of it; and the frequenters
of the pit supposed him to pass his whole life, night and day, and
Sunday and all, in the orchestra. They had tried him a few times with
pinches of snuff offered over the rails, and he had always responded to
this attention with a momentary waking up of manner that had the pale
phantom of a gentleman in it: beyond this he never, on any occasion, had
any other part in what was going on than the part written out for the
clarionet; in private life, where there was no part for the clarionet,
he had no part at all. Some said he was poor, some said he was a wealthy
miser; but he said nothing, never lifted up his bowed head, never varied
his shuffling gait by getting his springless foot from the ground.
Though expecting now to be summoned by his niece, he did not hear her
until she had spoken to him three or four times; nor was he at all
surprised by the presence of two nieces instead of one, but merely said
in his tremulous voice, ‘I am coming, I am coming!’ and crept forth by
some underground way which emitted a cellarous smell.
‘And so, Amy,’ said her sister, when the three together passed out at
the door that had such a shame-faced consciousness of being different
from other doors: the uncle instinctively taking Amy’s arm as the arm to
be relied on: ‘so, Amy, you are curious about me?’
She was pretty, and conscious, and rather flaunting; and the
condescension with which she put aside the superiority of her charms,