Our Mutual Friend
that could be detected, but, aware of his employer’s suspicions, stood
with his eyes on the ground.
Mr Fledgeby was thus amiably engaged when a step was heard at the outer
door, and the door was heard to open hastily. ‘Hark! That’s your doing,
you Pump of Israel,’ said Fledgeby; ‘you can’t have shut it.’ Then the
step was heard within, and the voice of Mr Alfred Lammle called aloud,
‘Are you anywhere here, Fledgeby?’ To which Fledgeby, after cautioning
Riah in a low voice to take his cue as it should be given him, replied,
‘Here I am!’ and opened his bedroom door.
‘Come in!’ said Fledgeby. ‘This gentleman is only Pubsey and Co. of
Saint Mary Axe, that I am trying to make terms for an unfortunate friend
with in a matter of some dishonoured bills. But really Pubsey and Co.
are so strict with their debtors, and so hard to move, that I seem to be
wasting my time. Can’t I make ANY terms with you on my friend’s part, Mr
Riah?’
‘I am but the representative of another, sir,’ returned the Jew in a low
voice. ‘I do as I am bidden by my principal. It is not my capital that
is invested in the business. It is not my profit that arises therefrom.’
‘Ha ha!’ laughed Fledgeby. ‘Lammle?’
‘Ha ha!’ laughed Lammle. ‘Yes. Of course. We know.’
‘Devilish good, ain’t it, Lammle?’ said Fledgeby, unspeakably amused by
his hidden joke.
‘Always the same, always the same!’ said Lammle. ‘Mr—’
‘Riah, Pubsey and Co. Saint Mary Axe,’ Fledgeby put in, as he wiped away
the tears that trickled from his eyes, so rare was his enjoyment of his
secret joke.
‘Mr Riah is bound to observe the invariable forms for such cases made
and provided,’ said Lammle.
‘He is only the representative of another!’ cried Fledgeby. ‘Does as
he is told by his principal! Not his capital that’s invested in the
business. Oh, that’s good! Ha ha ha ha!’ Mr Lammle joined in the laugh
and looked knowing; and the more he did both, the more exquisite the
secret joke became for Mr Fledgeby.
‘However,’ said that fascinating gentleman, wiping his eyes again, ‘if
we go on in this way, we shall seem to be almost making game of Mr Riah,
or of Pubsey and Co. Saint Mary Axe, or of somebody: which is far from
our intention. Mr Riah, if you would have the kindness to step into the
next room for a few moments while I speak with Mr Lammle here, I should
like to try to make terms with you once again before you go.’
The old man, who had never raised his eyes during the whole transaction
of Mr Fledgeby’s joke, silently bowed and passed out by the door which
Fledgeby opened for him. Having closed it on him, Fledgeby returned to
Lammle, standing with his back to the bedroom fire, with one hand under
his coat-skirts, and all his whiskers in the other.
‘Halloa!’ said Fledgeby. ‘There’s something wrong!’
‘How do you know it?’ demanded Lammle.
‘Because you show it,’ replied Fledgeby in unintentional rhyme.
‘Well then; there is,’ said Lammle; ‘there IS something wrong; the whole
thing’s wrong.’
‘I say!’ remonstrated Fascination very slowly, and sitting down with his
hands on his knees to stare at his glowering friend with his back to the
fire.
‘I tell you, Fledgeby,’ repeated Lammle, with a sweep of his right arm,
‘the whole thing’s wrong. The game’s up.’
‘What game’s up?’ demanded Fledgeby, as slowly as before, and more
sternly.
‘THE game. OUR game. Read that.’
Fledgeby took a note from his extended hand and read it aloud. ‘Alfred
Lammle, Esquire. Sir: Allow Mrs Podsnap and myself to express our united
sense of the polite attentions of Mrs Alfred Lammle and yourself towards
our daughter, Georgiana. Allow us also, wholly to reject them for the
future, and to communicate our final desire that the two families
may become entire strangers. I have the honour to be, Sir, your most
obedient and very humble servant, JOHN PODSNAP.’ Fledgeby looked at the
three blank sides of this note, quite as long and earnestly as at the
first expressive side, and then looked at Lammle, who responded with
another extensive sweep of his right arm.
‘Whose doing is this?’ said Fledgeby.
‘Impossible to imagine,’ said Lammle.
‘Perhaps,’ suggested Fledgeby, after reflecting with a very discontented
brow, ‘somebody has been giving you a bad character.’
‘Or you,’ said Lammle, with a deeper frown.
Mr Fledgeby appeared to be on the verge of some mutinous expressions,
when his hand happened to touch his nose. A certain remembrance
connected with that feature operating as a timely warning, he took it
thoughtfully between his thumb and forefinger, and pondered; Lammle
meanwhile eyeing him with furtive eyes.
‘Well!’ said Fledgeby. ‘This won’t improve with talking about. If we
ever find out who did it, we’ll mark that person. There’s nothing more
to be said, except that you undertook to do what circumstances prevent
your doing.’
‘And that you undertook to do what you might have done by this time, if
you had made a prompter use of circumstances,’ snarled Lammle.
‘Hah! That,’ remarked Fledgeby, with his hands in the Turkish trousers,
‘is matter of opinion.’
‘Mr Fledgeby,’ said Lammle, in a bullying tone, ‘am I to understand that
you in any way reflect upon me, or hint dissatisfaction with me, in this
affair?’
‘No,’ said Fledgeby; ‘provided you have brought my promissory note in
your pocket, and now hand it over.’
Lammle produced it, not without reluctance. Fledgeby looked at it,
identified it, twisted it up, and threw it into the fire. They both
looked at it as it blazed, went out, and flew in feathery ash up the
chimney.
‘NOW, Mr Fledgeby,’ said Lammle, as before; ‘am I to understand that
you in any way reflect upon me, or hint dissatisfaction with me, in this
affair?’
‘No,’ said Fledgeby.
‘Finally and unreservedly no?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fledgeby, my hand.’
Mr Fledgeby took it, saying, ‘And if we ever find out who did this,
we’ll mark that person. And in the most friendly manner, let me mention
one thing more. I don’t know what your circumstances are, and I don’t
ask. You have sustained a loss here. Many men are liable to be involved
at times, and you may be, or you may not be. But whatever you do,
Lammle, don’t—don’t—don’t, I beg of you—ever fall into the hands of
Pubsey and Co. in the next room, for they are grinders. Regular flayers
and grinders, my dear Lammle,’ repeated Fledgeby with a peculiar relish,
‘and they’ll skin you by the inch, from the nape of your neck to the
sole of your foot, and grind every inch of your skin to tooth-powder.
You have seen what Mr Riah is. Never fall into his hands, Lammle, I beg
of you as a friend!’
Mr Lammle, disclosing some alarm at the solemnity of this affectionate
adjuration, demanded why the devil he ever should fall into the hands of
Pubsey and Co.?
‘To confess the fact, I was made a little uneasy,’ said the candid
Fledgeby, ‘by the manner in which that Jew looked at you when he heard
your name. I didn’t like his eye. But it may have been the heated
fancy of a friend. Of course if you are sure that you have no personal
security out, which you may not be quite equal to meeting, and which can
have got into his hands, it must have been fancy. Still, I didn’t like
his eye.’
The brooding Lammle, with certain white dints coming and going in his
palpitating nose, looked as if some tormenting imp were pinching it.
Fledgeby, watching him with a twitch in his mean face which did duty
there for a smile, looked very like the tormentor who was pinching.
‘But I mustn’t keep him waiting too long,’ said Fledgeby, ‘or he’ll
revenge it on my unfortunate friend. How’s your very clever and
agreeable wife? She knows we have broken down?’
‘I showed her the letter.’
‘Very much surprised?’ asked Fledgeby.
‘I think she would have been more so,’ answered Lammle, ‘if there had
been more go in YOU?’
‘Oh!—She lays it upon me, then?’
‘Mr Fledgeby, I will not have my words misconstrued.’
‘Don’t break out, Lammle,’ urged Fledgeby, in a submissive tone,
‘because there’s no occasion. I only asked a question. Then she don’t
lay it upon me? To ask another question.’
‘No, sir.’
‘Very good,’ said Fledgeby, plainly seeing that she did. ‘My compliments
to her. Good-bye!’
They shook hands, and Lammle strode out pondering. Fledgeby saw him
into the fog, and, returning to the fire and musing with his face to it,
stretched the legs of the rose-coloured Turkish trousers wide apart, and
meditatively bent his knees, as if he were going down upon them.
‘You have a pair of whiskers, Lammle, which I never liked,’ murmured
Fledgeby, ‘and which money can’t produce; you are boastful of your
manners and your conversation; you wanted to pull my nose, and you have
let me in for a failure, and your wife says I am the cause of it. I’ll
bowl you down. I will, though I have no whiskers,’ here he rubbed the
places where they were due, ‘and no manners, and no conversation!’
Having thus relieved his noble mind, he collected the legs of the
Turkish trousers, straightened himself on his knees, and called out
to Riah in the next room, ‘Halloa, you sir!’ At sight of the old man
re-entering with a gentleness monstrously in contrast with the character
he had given him, Mr Fledgeby was so tickled again, that he exclaimed,
laughing, ‘Good! Good! Upon my soul it is uncommon good!’
‘Now, old ’un,’ proceeded Fledgeby, when he had had his laugh out,
‘you’ll buy up these lots that I mark with my pencil—there’s a tick
there, and a tick there, and a tick there—and I wager two-pence you’ll
afterwards go on squeezing those Christians like the Jew you are. Now,
next you’ll want a cheque—or you’ll say you want it, though you’ve
capital enough somewhere, if one only knew where, but you’d be peppered
and salted and grilled on a gridiron before you’d own to it—and that
cheque I’ll write.’
When he had unlocked a drawer and taken a key from it to open another
drawer, in which was another key that opened another drawer, in which
was another key that opened another drawer, in which was the cheque
book; and when he had written the cheque; and when, reversing the key
and drawer process, he had placed his cheque book in safety again; he
beckoned the old man, with the folded cheque, to come and take it.
‘Old ’un,’ said Fledgeby, when the Jew had put it in his pocketbook, and
was putting that in the breast of his outer garment; ‘so much at present
for my affairs. Now a word about affairs that are not exactly mine.
Where is she?’
With his hand not yet withdrawn from the breast of his garment, Riah
started and paused.
‘Oho!’ said Fledgeby. ‘Didn’t expect it! Where have you hidden her?’
Showing that he was taken by surprise, the old man looked at his master
with some passing confusion, which the master highly enjoyed.
‘Is she in the house I pay rent and taxes for in Saint Mary Axe?’
demanded Fledgeby.
‘No, sir.’
‘Is she in your garden up atop of that house—gone up to be dead, or
whatever the game is?’ asked Fledgeby.
‘No, sir.’
‘Where is she then?’
Riah bent his eyes upon the ground, as if considering whether he could
answer the question without breach of faith, and then silently raised
them to Fledgeby’s face, as if he could not.
‘Come!’ said Fledgeby. ‘I won’t press that just now. But I want to know
this, and I will know this, mind you. What are you up to?’
The old man, with an apologetic action of his head and hands, as not
comprehending the master’s meaning, addressed to him a look of mute
inquiry.
‘You can’t be a gallivanting dodger,’ said Fledgeby. ‘For you’re a
“regular pity the sorrows”, you know—if you DO know any Christian
rhyme—“whose trembling limbs have borne him to”—et cetrer. You’re one
of the Patriarchs; you’re a shaky old card; and you can’t be in love
with this Lizzie?’