Little Dorrit
period might have been a little meritorious. In the constant effort not
to be betrayed into a new phase of the besetting sin of his experience,
the pursuit of selfish objects by low and small means, and to hold
instead to some high principle of honour and generosity, there might
have been a little merit. In the resolution not even to avoid Mr
Meagles’s house, lest, in the selfish sparing of himself, he should
bring any slight distress upon the daughter through making her the cause
of an estrangement which he believed the father would regret, there
might have been a little merit. In the modest truthfulness of always
keeping in view the greater equality of Mr Gowan’s years and the greater
attractions of his person and manner, there might have been a little
merit. In doing all this and much more, in a perfectly unaffected way
and with a manful and composed constancy, while the pain within him
(peculiar as his life and history) was very sharp, there might have been
some quiet strength of character. But, after the resolution he had made,
of course he could have no such merits as these; and such a state of
mind was nobody’s--nobody’s.
Mr Gowan made it no concern of his whether it was nobody’s or
somebody’s. He preserved his perfect serenity of manner on all
occasions, as if the possibility of Clennam’s presuming to have debated
the great question were too distant and ridiculous to be imagined. He
had always an affability to bestow on Clennam and an ease to treat
him with, which might of itself (in the supposititious case of his
not having taken that sagacious course) have been a very uncomfortable
element in his state of mind.
‘I quite regret you were not with us yesterday,’ said Mr Henry Gowan,
calling on Clennam the next morning. ‘We had an agreeable day up the
river there.’
So he had heard, Arthur said.
‘From your partner?’ returned Henry Gowan. ‘What a dear old fellow he
is!’
‘I have a great regard for him.’
‘By Jove, he is the finest creature!’ said Gowan. ‘So fresh, so green,
trusts in such wonderful things!’
Here was one of the many little rough points that had a tendency to
grate on Clennam’s hearing. He put it aside by merely repeating that he
had a high regard for Mr Doyce.
‘He is charming! To see him mooning along to that time of life,
laying down nothing by the way and picking up nothing by the way, is
delightful. It warms a man. So unspoilt, so simple, such a good soul!
Upon my life Mr Clennam, one feels desperately worldly and wicked in
comparison with such an innocent creature. I speak for myself, let me
add, without including you. You are genuine also.’
‘Thank you for the compliment,’ said Clennam, ill at ease; ‘you are too,
I hope?’
‘So so,’ rejoined the other. ‘To be candid with you, tolerably. I am
not a great impostor. Buy one of my pictures, and I assure you,
in confidence, it will not be worth the money. Buy one of another
man’s--any great professor who beats me hollow--and the chances are that
the more you give him, the more he’ll impose upon you. They all do it.’
‘All painters?’
‘Painters, writers, patriots, all the rest who have stands in the
market. Give almost any man I know ten pounds, and he will impose upon
you to a corresponding extent; a thousand pounds--to a corresponding
extent; ten thousand pounds--to a corresponding extent. So great the
success, so great the imposition. But what a capital world it is!’ cried
Gowan with warm enthusiasm. ‘What a jolly, excellent, lovable world it
is!’
‘I had rather thought,’ said Clennam, ‘that the principle you mention
was chiefly acted on by--’
‘By the Barnacles?’ interrupted Gowan, laughing.
‘By the political gentlemen who condescend to keep the Circumlocution
Office.’
‘Ah! Don’t be hard upon the Barnacles,’ said Gowan, laughing afresh,
‘they are darling fellows! Even poor little Clarence, the born idiot of
the family, is the most agreeable and most endearing blockhead! And by
Jupiter, with a kind of cleverness in him too that would astonish you!’
‘It would. Very much,’ said Clennam, drily.
‘And after all,’ cried Gowan, with that characteristic balancing of his
which reduced everything in the wide world to the same light weight,
‘though I can’t deny that the Circumlocution Office may ultimately
shipwreck everybody and everything, still, that will probably not be in
our time--and it’s a school for gentlemen.’
‘It’s a very dangerous, unsatisfactory, and expensive school to the
people who pay to keep the pupils there, I am afraid,’ said Clennam,
shaking his head.
‘Ah! You are a terrible fellow,’ returned Gowan, airily. ‘I can
understand how you have frightened that little donkey, Clarence, the
most estimable of moon-calves (I really love him) nearly out of his
wits. But enough of him, and of all the rest of them. I want to present
you to my mother, Mr Clennam. Pray do me the favour to give me the
opportunity.’
In nobody’s state of mind, there was nothing Clennam would have desired
less, or would have been more at a loss how to avoid.
‘My mother lives in a most primitive manner down in that dreary
red-brick dungeon at Hampton Court,’ said Gowan. ‘If you would make
your own appointment, suggest your own day for permitting me to take
you there to dinner, you would be bored and she would be charmed. Really
that’s the state of the case.’
What could Clennam say after this? His retiring character included a
great deal that was simple in the best sense, because unpractised and
unused; and in his simplicity and modesty, he could only say that he was
happy to place himself at Mr Gowan’s disposal. Accordingly he said it,
and the day was fixed. And a dreaded day it was on his part, and a very
unwelcome day when it came and they went down to Hampton Court together.
The venerable inhabitants of that venerable pile seemed, in those times,
to be encamped there like a sort of civilised gipsies. There was a
temporary air about their establishments, as if they were going away the
moment they could get anything better; there was also a dissatisfied air
about themselves, as if they took it very ill that they had not already
got something much better. Genteel blinds and makeshifts were more or
less observable as soon as their doors were opened; screens not half
high enough, which made dining-rooms out of arched passages, and warded
off obscure corners where footboys slept at nights with their heads
among the knives and forks; curtains which called upon you to believe
that they didn’t hide anything; panes of glass which requested you
not to see them; many objects of various forms, feigning to have no
connection with their guilty secret, a bed; disguised traps in walls,
which were clearly coal-cellars; affectations of no thoroughfares, which
were evidently doors to little kitchens. Mental reservations and artful
mysteries grew out of these things. Callers looking steadily into the
eyes of their receivers, pretended not to smell cooking three feet off;
people, confronting closets accidentally left open, pretended not to see
bottles; visitors with their heads against a partition of thin canvas,
and a page and a young female at high words on the other side, made
believe to be sitting in a primeval silence. There was no end to the
small social accommodation-bills of this nature which the gipsies of
gentility were constantly drawing upon, and accepting for, one another.
Some of these Bohemians were of an irritable temperament, as constantly
soured and vexed by two mental trials: the first, the consciousness
that they had never got enough out of the public; the second, the
consciousness that the public were admitted into the building. Under the
latter great wrong, a few suffered dreadfully--particularly on Sundays,
when they had for some time expected the earth to open and swallow
the public up; but which desirable event had not yet occurred, in
consequence of some reprehensible laxity in the arrangements of the
Universe.
Mrs Gowan’s door was attended by a family servant of several years’
standing, who had his own crow to pluck with the public concerning a
situation in the Post-Office which he had been for some time expecting,
and to which he was not yet appointed. He perfectly knew that the public
could never have got him in, but he grimly gratified himself with the
idea that the public kept him out. Under the influence of this injury
(and perhaps of some little straitness and irregularity in the matter
of wages), he had grown neglectful of his person and morose in mind;
and now beholding in Clennam one of the degraded body of his oppressors,
received him with ignominy.
Mrs Gowan, however, received him with condescension. He found her a
courtly old lady, formerly a Beauty, and still sufficiently
well-favoured to have dispensed with the powder on her nose and a
certain impossible bloom under each eye. She was a little lofty with
him; so was another old lady, dark-browed and high-nosed, and who must
have had something real about her or she could not have existed, but it
was certainly not her hair or her teeth or her figure or her complexion;
so was a grey old gentleman of dignified and sullen appearance; both of
whom had come to dinner. But, as they had all been in the British
Embassy way in sundry parts of the earth, and as a British Embassy
cannot better establish a character with the Circumlocution Office than
by treating its compatriots with illimitable contempt (else it would
become like the Embassies of other countries), Clennam felt that on the
whole they let him off lightly.
The dignified old gentleman turned out to be Lord Lancaster
Stiltstalking, who had been maintained by the Circumlocution Office for
many years as a representative of the Britannic Majesty abroad.
This noble Refrigerator had iced several European courts in his time,
and had done it with such complete success that the very name of
Englishman yet struck cold to the stomachs of foreigners who had the
distinguished honour of remembering him at a distance of a quarter of a
century.
He was now in retirement, and hence (in a ponderous white cravat, like
a stiff snow-drift) was so obliging as to shade the dinner. There was a
whisper of the pervading Bohemian character in the nomadic nature of
the service and its curious races of plates and dishes; but the noble
Refrigerator, infinitely better than plate or porcelain, made it superb.
He shaded the dinner, cooled the wines, chilled the gravy, and blighted
the vegetables.
There was only one other person in the room: a microscopically small
footboy, who waited on the malevolent man who hadn’t got into the
Post-Office. Even this youth, if his jacket could have been unbuttoned
and his heart laid bare, would have been seen, as a distant adherent of
the Barnacle family, already to aspire to a situation under Government.
Mrs Gowan with a gentle melancholy upon her, occasioned by her son’s
being reduced to court the swinish public as a follower of the low Arts,
instead of asserting his birthright and putting a ring through its nose
as an acknowledged Barnacle, headed the conversation at dinner on the
evil days. It was then that Clennam learned for the first time what
little pivots this great world goes round upon.
‘If John Barnacle,’ said Mrs Gowan, after the degeneracy of the times
had been fully ascertained, ‘if John Barnacle had but abandoned his most
unfortunate idea of conciliating the mob, all would have been well, and
I think the country would have been preserved.’
The old lady with the high nose assented; but added that if Augustus
Stiltstalking had in a general way ordered the cavalry out with
instructions to charge, she thought the country would have been
preserved.
The noble Refrigerator assented; but added that if William Barnacle and