Our Mutual Friend
So, the pie was brought down, and the worthy Mr Boffin exercised his
patience until Wegg, in the exercise of his knife and fork, had finished
the dish: only profiting by the opportunity to inform Wegg that although
it was not strictly Fashionable to keep the contents of a larder thus
exposed to view, he (Mr Boffin) considered it hospitable; for the
reason, that instead of saying, in a comparatively unmeaning manner, to
a visitor, ‘There are such and such edibles down stairs; will you have
anything up?’ you took the bold practical course of saying, ‘Cast your
eye along the shelves, and, if you see anything you like there, have it
down.’
And now, Mr Wegg at length pushed away his plate and put on his
spectacles, and Mr Boffin lighted his pipe and looked with beaming
eyes into the opening world before him, and Mrs Boffin reclined in a
fashionable manner on her sofa: as one who would be part of the audience
if she found she could, and would go to sleep if she found she couldn’t.
‘Hem!’ began Wegg, ‘This, Mr Boffin and Lady, is the first chapter of
the first wollume of the Decline and Fall off—’ here he looked hard at
the book, and stopped.
‘What’s the matter, Wegg?’
‘Why, it comes into my mind, do you know, sir,’ said Wegg with an air
of insinuating frankness (having first again looked hard at the book),
‘that you made a little mistake this morning, which I had meant to set
you right in, only something put it out of my head. I think you said
Rooshan Empire, sir?’
‘It is Rooshan; ain’t it, Wegg?’
‘No, sir. Roman. Roman.’
‘What’s the difference, Wegg?’
‘The difference, sir?’ Mr Wegg was faltering and in danger of breaking
down, when a bright thought flashed upon him. ‘The difference, sir?
There you place me in a difficulty, Mr Boffin. Suffice it to observe,
that the difference is best postponed to some other occasion when Mrs
Boffin does not honour us with her company. In Mrs Boffin’s presence,
sir, we had better drop it.’
Mr Wegg thus came out of his disadvantage with quite a chivalrous air,
and not only that, but by dint of repeating with a manly delicacy,
‘In Mrs Boffin’s presence, sir, we had better drop it!’ turned the
disadvantage on Boffin, who felt that he had committed himself in a very
painful manner.
Then, Mr Wegg, in a dry unflinching way, entered on his task; going
straight across country at everything that came before him; taking all
the hard words, biographical and geographical; getting rather shaken by
Hadrian, Trajan, and the Antonines; stumbling at Polybius (pronounced
Polly Beeious, and supposed by Mr Boffin to be a Roman virgin, and by
Mrs Boffin to be responsible for that necessity of dropping it); heavily
unseated by Titus Antoninus Pius; up again and galloping smoothly with
Augustus; finally, getting over the ground well with Commodus: who,
under the appellation of Commodious, was held by Mr Boffin to have been
quite unworthy of his English origin, and ‘not to have acted up to his
name’ in his government of the Roman people. With the death of this
personage, Mr Wegg terminated his first reading; long before which
consummation several total eclipses of Mrs Boffin’s candle behind
her black velvet disc, would have been very alarming, but for being
regularly accompanied by a potent smell of burnt pens when her feathers
took fire, which acted as a restorative and woke her. Mr Wegg, having
read on by rote and attached as few ideas as possible to the text, came
out of the encounter fresh; but, Mr Boffin, who had soon laid down his
unfinished pipe, and had ever since sat intently staring with his eyes
and mind at the confounding enormities of the Romans, was so severely
punished that he could hardly wish his literary friend Good-night, and
articulate ‘Tomorrow.’
‘Commodious,’ gasped Mr Boffin, staring at the moon, after letting
Wegg out at the gate and fastening it: ‘Commodious fights in that
wild-beast-show, seven hundred and thirty-five times, in one character
only! As if that wasn’t stunning enough, a hundred lions is turned into
the same wild-beast-show all at once! As if that wasn’t stunning enough,
Commodious, in another character, kills ’em all off in a hundred goes!
As if that wasn’t stunning enough, Vittle-us (and well named too) eats
six millions’ worth, English money, in seven months! Wegg takes it easy,
but upon-my-soul to a old bird like myself these are scarers. And even
now that Commodious is strangled, I don’t see a way to our bettering
ourselves.’ Mr Boffin added as he turned his pensive steps towards the
Bower and shook his head, ‘I didn’t think this morning there was half so
many Scarers in Print. But I’m in for it now!’
Chapter 6
CUT ADRIFT
The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, already mentioned as a tavern of
a dropsical appearance, had long settled down into a state of hale
infirmity. In its whole constitution it had not a straight floor, and
hardly a straight line; but it had outlasted, and clearly would yet
outlast, many a better-trimmed building, many a sprucer public-house.
Externally, it was a narrow lopsided wooden jumble of corpulent windows
heaped one upon another as you might heap as many toppling oranges,
with a crazy wooden verandah impending over the water; indeed the whole
house, inclusive of the complaining flag-staff on the roof, impended
over the water, but seemed to have got into the condition of a
faint-hearted diver who has paused so long on the brink that he will
never go in at all.
This description applies to the river-frontage of the Six Jolly
Fellowship Porters. The back of the establishment, though the chief
entrance was there, so contracted that it merely represented in its
connexion with the front, the handle of a flat iron set upright on its
broadest end. This handle stood at the bottom of a wilderness of court
and alley: which wilderness pressed so hard and close upon the Six Jolly
Fellowship Porters as to leave the hostelry not an inch of ground beyond
its door. For this reason, in combination with the fact that the house
was all but afloat at high water, when the Porters had a family wash the
linen subjected to that operation might usually be seen drying on lines
stretched across the reception-rooms and bed-chambers.
The wood forming the chimney-pieces, beams, partitions, floors and
doors, of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, seemed in its old age
fraught with confused memories of its youth. In many places it had
become gnarled and riven, according to the manner of old trees; knots
started out of it; and here and there it seemed to twist itself into
some likeness of boughs. In this state of second childhood, it had an
air of being in its own way garrulous about its early life. Not without
reason was it often asserted by the regular frequenters of the Porters,
that when the light shone full upon the grain of certain panels, and
particularly upon an old corner cupboard of walnut-wood in the bar, you
might trace little forests there, and tiny trees like the parent tree,
in full umbrageous leaf.
The bar of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters was a bar to soften the
human breast. The available space in it was not much larger than a
hackney-coach; but no one could have wished the bar bigger, that space
was so girt in by corpulent little casks, and by cordial-bottles
radiant with fictitious grapes in bunches, and by lemons in nets, and
by biscuits in baskets, and by the polite beer-pulls that made low
bows when customers were served with beer, and by the cheese in a snug
corner, and by the landlady’s own small table in a snugger corner near
the fire, with the cloth everlastingly laid. This haven was divided from
the rough world by a glass partition and a half-door, with a leaden
sill upon it for the convenience of resting your liquor; but, over this
half-door the bar’s snugness so gushed forth that, albeit customers
drank there standing, in a dark and draughty passage where they were
shouldered by other customers passing in and out, they always appeared
to drink under an enchanting delusion that they were in the bar itself.
For the rest, both the tap and parlour of the Six Jolly Fellowship
Porters gave upon the river, and had red curtains matching the noses of
the regular customers, and were provided with comfortable fireside tin
utensils, like models of sugar-loaf hats, made in that shape that they
might, with their pointed ends, seek out for themselves glowing nooks
in the depths of the red coals, when they mulled your ale, or heated for
you those delectable drinks, Purl, Flip, and Dog’s Nose. The first of
these humming compounds was a speciality of the Porters, which, through
an inscription on its door-posts, gently appealed to your feelings as,
‘The Early Purl House’. For, it would seem that Purl must always be
taken early; though whether for any more distinctly stomachic reason
than that, as the early bird catches the worm, so the early purl catches
the customer, cannot here be resolved. It only remains to add that in
the handle of the flat iron, and opposite the bar, was a very little
room like a three-cornered hat, into which no direct ray of sun, moon,
or star, ever penetrated, but which was superstitiously regarded as a
sanctuary replete with comfort and retirement by gaslight, and on the
door of which was therefore painted its alluring name: Cosy.
Miss Potterson, sole proprietor and manager of the Fellowship Porters,
reigned supreme on her throne, the Bar, and a man must have drunk
himself mad drunk indeed if he thought he could contest a point with
her. Being known on her own authority as Miss Abbey Potterson, some
water-side heads, which (like the water) were none of the clearest,
harboured muddled notions that, because of her dignity and firmness, she
was named after, or in some sort related to, the Abbey at Westminster.
But, Abbey was only short for Abigail, by which name Miss Potterson had
been christened at Limehouse Church, some sixty and odd years before.
‘Now, you mind, you Riderhood,’ said Miss Abbey Potterson, with emphatic
forefinger over the half-door, ‘the Fellowship don’t want you at all,
and would rather by far have your room than your company; but if you
were as welcome here as you are not, you shouldn’t even then have
another drop of drink here this night, after this present pint of beer.
So make the most of it.’
‘But you know, Miss Potterson,’ this was suggested very meekly though,
‘if I behave myself, you can’t help serving me, miss.’
‘CAN’T I!’ said Abbey, with infinite expression.
‘No, Miss Potterson; because, you see, the law—’
‘I am the law here, my man,’ returned Miss Abbey, ‘and I’ll soon
convince you of that, if you doubt it at all.’
‘I never said I did doubt it at all, Miss Abbey.’
‘So much the better for you.’
Abbey the supreme threw the customer’s halfpence into the till, and,
seating herself in her fireside-chair, resumed the newspaper she had
been reading. She was a tall, upright, well-favoured woman, though
severe of countenance, and had more of the air of a schoolmistress than
mistress of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters. The man on the other side
of the half-door, was a waterside-man with a squinting leer, and he eyed
her as if he were one of her pupils in disgrace.
‘You’re cruel hard upon me, Miss Potterson.’
Miss Potterson read her newspaper with contracted brows, and took no
notice until he whispered:
‘Miss Potterson! Ma’am! Might I have half a word with you?’
Deigning then to turn her eyes sideways towards the suppliant, Miss
Potterson beheld him knuckling his low forehead, and ducking at her with
his head, as if he were asking leave to fling himself head foremost over
the half-door and alight on his feet in the bar.
‘Well?’ said Miss Potterson, with a manner as short as she herself was