Our Mutual Friend
solicit the immediate advance of two hundred pounds from unexpected
riches exercising their noblest privilege in the trust of a common
humanity?
In such a Dismal Swamp does the new house stand, and through it does
the Secretary daily struggle breast-high. Not to mention all the people
alive who have made inventions that won’t act, and all the jobbers who
job in all the jobberies jobbed; though these may be regarded as the
Alligators of the Dismal Swamp, and are always lying by to drag the
Golden Dustman under.
But the old house. There are no designs against the Golden Dustman
there? There are no fish of the shark tribe in the Bower waters? Perhaps
not. Still, Wegg is established there, and would seem, judged by his
secret proceedings, to cherish a notion of making a discovery. For,
when a man with a wooden leg lies prone on his stomach to peep under
bedsteads; and hops up ladders, like some extinct bird, to survey the
tops of presses and cupboards; and provides himself an iron rod which he
is always poking and prodding into dust-mounds; the probability is that
he expects to find something.
BOOK THE SECOND — BIRDS OF A FEATHER
Chapter 1
OF AN EDUCATIONAL CHARACTER
The school at which young Charley Hexam had first learned from a
book—the streets being, for pupils of his degree, the great Preparatory
Establishment in which very much that is never unlearned is learned
without and before book—was a miserable loft in an unsavoury yard. Its
atmosphere was oppressive and disagreeable; it was crowded, noisy,
and confusing; half the pupils dropped asleep, or fell into a state of
waking stupefaction; the other half kept them in either condition by
maintaining a monotonous droning noise, as if they were performing, out
of time and tune, on a ruder sort of bagpipe. The teachers, animated
solely by good intentions, had no idea of execution, and a lamentable
jumble was the upshot of their kind endeavours.
It was a school for all ages, and for both sexes. The latter were kept
apart, and the former were partitioned off into square assortments. But,
all the place was pervaded by a grimly ludicrous pretence that every
pupil was childish and innocent. This pretence, much favoured by the
lady-visitors, led to the ghastliest absurdities. Young women old in
the vices of the commonest and worst life, were expected to profess
themselves enthralled by the good child’s book, the Adventures of
Little Margery, who resided in the village cottage by the mill; severely
reproved and morally squashed the miller, when she was five and he was
fifty; divided her porridge with singing birds; denied herself a new
nankeen bonnet, on the ground that the turnips did not wear nankeen
bonnets, neither did the sheep who ate them; who plaited straw and
delivered the dreariest orations to all comers, at all sorts of
unseasonable times. So, unwieldy young dredgers and hulking mudlarks
were referred to the experiences of Thomas Twopence, who, having
resolved not to rob (under circumstances of uncommon atrocity) his
particular friend and benefactor, of eighteenpence, presently came into
supernatural possession of three and sixpence, and lived a shining light
ever afterwards. (Note, that the benefactor came to no good.) Several
swaggering sinners had written their own biographies in the same strain;
it always appearing from the lessons of those very boastful persons,
that you were to do good, not because it WAS good, but because you were
to make a good thing of it. Contrariwise, the adult pupils were taught
to read (if they could learn) out of the New Testament; and by dint of
stumbling over the syllables and keeping their bewildered eyes on the
particular syllables coming round to their turn, were as absolutely
ignorant of the sublime history, as if they had never seen or heard of
it. An exceedingly and confoundingly perplexing jumble of a school,
in fact, where black spirits and grey, red spirits and white, jumbled
jumbled jumbled jumbled, jumbled every night. And particularly every
Sunday night. For then, an inclined plane of unfortunate infants would
be handed over to the prosiest and worst of all the teachers with good
intentions, whom nobody older would endure. Who, taking his stand on
the floor before them as chief executioner, would be attended by a
conventional volunteer boy as executioner’s assistant. When and where it
first became the conventional system that a weary or inattentive infant
in a class must have its face smoothed downward with a hot hand, or when
and where the conventional volunteer boy first beheld such system in
operation, and became inflamed with a sacred zeal to administer it,
matters not. It was the function of the chief executioner to hold forth,
and it was the function of the acolyte to dart at sleeping infants,
yawning infants, restless infants, whimpering infants, and smooth their
wretched faces; sometimes with one hand, as if he were anointing them
for a whisker; sometimes with both hands, applied after the fashion of
blinkers. And so the jumble would be in action in this department for a
mortal hour; the exponent drawling on to My Dearert Childerrenerr, let
us say, for example, about the beautiful coming to the Sepulchre; and
repeating the word Sepulchre (commonly used among infants) five hundred
times, and never once hinting what it meant; the conventional boy
smoothing away right and left, as an infallible commentary; the whole
hot-bed of flushed and exhausted infants exchanging measles, rashes,
whooping-cough, fever, and stomach disorders, as if they were assembled
in High Market for the purpose.
Even in this temple of good intentions, an exceptionally sharp boy
exceptionally determined to learn, could learn something, and, having
learned it, could impart it much better than the teachers; as being
more knowing than they, and not at the disadvantage in which they stood
towards the shrewder pupils. In this way it had come about that Charley
Hexam had risen in the jumble, taught in the jumble, and been received
from the jumble into a better school.
‘So you want to go and see your sister, Hexam?’
‘If you please, Mr Headstone.’
‘I have half a mind to go with you. Where does your sister live?’
‘Why, she is not settled yet, Mr Headstone. I’d rather you didn’t see
her till she is settled, if it was all the same to you.’
‘Look here, Hexam.’ Mr Bradley Headstone, highly certificated
stipendiary schoolmaster, drew his right forefinger through one of the
buttonholes of the boy’s coat, and looked at it attentively. ‘I hope
your sister may be good company for you?’
‘Why do you doubt it, Mr Headstone?’
‘I did not say I doubted it.’
‘No, sir; you didn’t say so.’
Bradley Headstone looked at his finger again, took it out of the
buttonhole and looked at it closer, bit the side of it and looked at it
again.
‘You see, Hexam, you will be one of us. In good time you are sure to
pass a creditable examination and become one of us. Then the question
is—’
The boy waited so long for the question, while the schoolmaster looked
at a new side of his finger, and bit it, and looked at it again, that at
length the boy repeated:
‘The question is, sir—?’
‘Whether you had not better leave well alone.’
‘Is it well to leave my sister alone, Mr Headstone?’
‘I do not say so, because I do not know. I put it to you. I ask you to
think of it. I want you to consider. You know how well you are doing
here.’
‘After all, she got me here,’ said the boy, with a struggle.
‘Perceiving the necessity of it,’ acquiesced the schoolmaster, ‘and
making up her mind fully to the separation. Yes.’
The boy, with a return of that former reluctance or struggle or whatever
it was, seemed to debate with himself. At length he said, raising his
eyes to the master’s face:
‘I wish you’d come with me and see her, Mr Headstone, though she is not
settled. I wish you’d come with me, and take her in the rough, and judge
her for yourself.’
‘You are sure you would not like,’ asked the schoolmaster, ‘to prepare
her?’
‘My sister Lizzie,’ said the boy, proudly, ‘wants no preparing, Mr
Headstone. What she is, she is, and shows herself to be. There’s no
pretending about my sister.’
His confidence in her, sat more easily upon him than the indecision with
which he had twice contended. It was his better nature to be true to
her, if it were his worse nature to be wholly selfish. And as yet the
better nature had the stronger hold.
‘Well, I can spare the evening,’ said the schoolmaster. ‘I am ready to
walk with you.’
‘Thank you, Mr Headstone. And I am ready to go.’
Bradley Headstone, in his decent black coat and waistcoat, and decent
white shirt, and decent formal black tie, and decent pantaloons of
pepper and salt, with his decent silver watch in his pocket and its
decent hair-guard round his neck, looked a thoroughly decent young man
of six-and-twenty. He was never seen in any other dress, and yet there
was a certain stiffness in his manner of wearing this, as if there were
a want of adaptation between him and it, recalling some mechanics in
their holiday clothes. He had acquired mechanically a great store of
teacher’s knowledge. He could do mental arithmetic mechanically, sing
at sight mechanically, blow various wind instruments mechanically, even
play the great church organ mechanically. From his early childhood up,
his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage. The arrangement of
his wholesale warehouse, so that it might be always ready to meet the
demands of retail dealers—history here, geography there, astronomy to
the right, political economy to the left—natural history, the physical
sciences, figures, music, the lower mathematics, and what not, all in
their several places—this care had imparted to his countenance a look
of care; while the habit of questioning and being questioned had given
him a suspicious manner, or a manner that would be better described as
one of lying in wait. There was a kind of settled trouble in the face.
It was the face belonging to a naturally slow or inattentive intellect
that had toiled hard to get what it had won, and that had to hold it now
that it was gotten. He always seemed to be uneasy lest anything should
be missing from his mental warehouse, and taking stock to assure
himself.
Suppression of so much to make room for so much, had given him a
constrained manner, over and above. Yet there was enough of what was
animal, and of what was fiery (though smouldering), still visible in
him, to suggest that if young Bradley Headstone, when a pauper lad, had
chanced to be told off for the sea, he would not have been the last man
in a ship’s crew. Regarding that origin of his, he was proud, moody, and
sullen, desiring it to be forgotten. And few people knew of it.
In some visits to the Jumble his attention had been attracted to this
boy Hexam. An undeniable boy for a pupil-teacher; an undeniable boy
to do credit to the master who should bring him on. Combined with this
consideration, there may have been some thought of the pauper lad now
never to be mentioned. Be that how it might, he had with pains gradually
worked the boy into his own school, and procured him some offices to
discharge there, which were repaid with food and lodging. Such were the
circumstances that had brought together, Bradley Headstone and young
Charley Hexam that autumn evening. Autumn, because full half a year had
come and gone since the bird of prey lay dead upon the river-shore.
The schools—for they were twofold, as the sexes—were down in that
district of the flat country tending to the Thames, where Kent and
Surrey meet, and where the railways still bestride the market-gardens
that will soon die under them. The schools were newly built, and there