Our Mutual Friend
little voice, and laying into me with your little bonnet, which you
had snatched off for the purpose,’ returned her father, as if the
remembrance gave a relish to the rum; ‘you were doing this one Sunday
morning when I took you out, because I didn’t go the exact way you
wanted, when the old gentleman, sitting on a seat near, said, “That’s a
nice girl; that’s a VERY nice girl; a promising girl!” And so you were,
my dear.’
‘And then he asked my name, did he, pa?’
‘Then he asked your name, my dear, and mine; and on other Sunday
mornings, when we walked his way, we saw him again, and—and really
that’s all.’
As that was all the rum and water too, or, in other words, as R. W.
delicately signified that his glass was empty, by throwing back his head
and standing the glass upside down on his nose and upper lip, it might
have been charitable in Mrs Wilfer to suggest replenishment. But that
heroine briefly suggesting ‘Bedtime’ instead, the bottles were put away,
and the family retired; she cherubically escorted, like some severe
saint in a painting, or merely human matron allegorically treated.
‘And by this time to-morrow,’ said Lavinia when the two girls were alone
in their room, ‘we shall have Mr Rokesmith here, and shall be expecting
to have our throats cut.’
‘You needn’t stand between me and the candle for all that,’ retorted
Bella. ‘This is another of the consequences of being poor! The idea of a
girl with a really fine head of hair, having to do it by one flat candle
and a few inches of looking-glass!’
‘You caught George Sampson with it, Bella, bad as your means of dressing
it are.’
‘You low little thing. Caught George Sampson with it! Don’t talk about
catching people, miss, till your own time for catching—as you call
it—comes.’
‘Perhaps it has come,’ muttered Lavvy, with a toss of her head.
‘What did you say?’ asked Bella, very sharply. ‘What did you say, miss?’
Lavvy declining equally to repeat or to explain, Bella gradually lapsed
over her hair-dressing into a soliloquy on the miseries of being poor,
as exemplified in having nothing to put on, nothing to go out in,
nothing to dress by, only a nasty box to dress at instead of a
commodious dressing-table, and being obliged to take in suspicious
lodgers. On the last grievance as her climax, she laid great stress—and
might have laid greater, had she known that if Mr Julius Handford had a
twin brother upon earth, Mr John Rokesmith was the man.
Chapter 5
BOFFIN’S BOWER
Over against a London house, a corner house not far from Cavendish
Square, a man with a wooden leg had sat for some years, with his
remaining foot in a basket in cold weather, picking up a living on
this wise:—Every morning at eight o’clock, he stumped to the corner,
carrying a chair, a clothes-horse, a pair of trestles, a board, a
basket, and an umbrella, all strapped together. Separating these, the
board and trestles became a counter, the basket supplied the few small
lots of fruit and sweets that he offered for sale upon it and became a
foot-warmer, the unfolded clothes-horse displayed a choice collection of
halfpenny ballads and became a screen, and the stool planted within it
became his post for the rest of the day. All weathers saw the man at the
post. This is to be accepted in a double sense, for he contrived a
back to his wooden stool, by placing it against the lamp-post. When the
weather was wet, he put up his umbrella over his stock in trade, not
over himself; when the weather was dry, he furled that faded article,
tied it round with a piece of yarn, and laid it cross-wise under the
trestles: where it looked like an unwholesomely-forced lettuce that had
lost in colour and crispness what it had gained in size.
He had established his right to the corner, by imperceptible
prescription. He had never varied his ground an inch, but had in the
beginning diffidently taken the corner upon which the side of the house
gave. A howling corner in the winter time, a dusty corner in the summer
time, an undesirable corner at the best of times. Shelterless fragments
of straw and paper got up revolving storms there, when the main street
was at peace; and the water-cart, as if it were drunk or short-sighted,
came blundering and jolting round it, making it muddy when all else was
clean.
On the front of his sale-board hung a little placard, like a
kettle-holder, bearing the inscription in his own small text:
Errands gone
On with fi
Delity By
Ladies and Gentlemen
I remain
Your humble Servt.
Silas Wegg.
He had not only settled it with himself in course of time, that he
was errand-goer by appointment to the house at the corner (though he
received such commissions not half a dozen times in a year, and then
only as some servant’s deputy), but also that he was one of the house’s
retainers and owed vassalage to it and was bound to leal and loyal
interest in it. For this reason, he always spoke of it as ‘Our House,’
and, though his knowledge of its affairs was mostly speculative and
all wrong, claimed to be in its confidence. On similar grounds he never
beheld an inmate at any one of its windows but he touched his hat. Yet,
he knew so little about the inmates that he gave them names of his own
invention: as ‘Miss Elizabeth’, ‘Master George’, ‘Aunt Jane’, ‘Uncle
Parker’—having no authority whatever for any such designations, but
particularly the last—to which, as a natural consequence, he stuck with
great obstinacy.
Over the house itself, he exercised the same imaginary power as over its
inhabitants and their affairs. He had never been in it, the length of
a piece of fat black water-pipe which trailed itself over the area-door
into a damp stone passage, and had rather the air of a leech on the
house that had ‘taken’ wonderfully; but this was no impediment to his
arranging it according to a plan of his own. It was a great dingy house
with a quantity of dim side window and blank back premises, and it
cost his mind a world of trouble so to lay it out as to account for
everything in its external appearance. But, this once done, was quite
satisfactory, and he rested persuaded, that he knew his way about the
house blindfold: from the barred garrets in the high roof, to the two
iron extinguishers before the main door—which seemed to request all
lively visitors to have the kindness to put themselves out, before
entering.
Assuredly, this stall of Silas Wegg’s was the hardest little stall of
all the sterile little stalls in London. It gave you the face-ache
to look at his apples, the stomach-ache to look at his oranges, the
tooth-ache to look at his nuts. Of the latter commodity he had always
a grim little heap, on which lay a little wooden measure which had
no discernible inside, and was considered to represent the penn’orth
appointed by Magna Charta. Whether from too much east wind or no—it was
an easterly corner—the stall, the stock, and the keeper, were all as
dry as the Desert. Wegg was a knotty man, and a close-grained, with a
face carved out of very hard material, that had just as much play
of expression as a watchman’s rattle. When he laughed, certain jerks
occurred in it, and the rattle sprung. Sooth to say, he was so wooden
a man that he seemed to have taken his wooden leg naturally, and rather
suggested to the fanciful observer, that he might be expected—if his
development received no untimely check—to be completely set up with a
pair of wooden legs in about six months.
Mr Wegg was an observant person, or, as he himself said, ‘took a
powerful sight of notice’. He saluted all his regular passers-by every
day, as he sat on his stool backed up by the lamp-post; and on the
adaptable character of these salutes he greatly plumed himself. Thus,
to the rector, he addressed a bow, compounded of lay deference, and
a slight touch of the shady preliminary meditation at church; to the
doctor, a confidential bow, as to a gentleman whose acquaintance with
his inside he begged respectfully to acknowledge; before the Quality he
delighted to abase himself; and for Uncle Parker, who was in the army
(at least, so he had settled it), he put his open hand to the side
of his hat, in a military manner which that angry-eyed buttoned-up
inflammatory-faced old gentleman appeared but imperfectly to appreciate.
The only article in which Silas dealt, that was not hard, was
gingerbread. On a certain day, some wretched infant having purchased the
damp gingerbread-horse (fearfully out of condition), and the adhesive
bird-cage, which had been exposed for the day’s sale, he had taken a tin
box from under his stool to produce a relay of those dreadful specimens,
and was going to look in at the lid, when he said to himself, pausing:
‘Oh! Here you are again!’
The words referred to a broad, round-shouldered, one-sided old fellow in
mourning, coming comically ambling towards the corner, dressed in a pea
over-coat, and carrying a large stick. He wore thick shoes, and thick
leather gaiters, and thick gloves like a hedger’s. Both as to his dress
and to himself, he was of an overlapping rhinoceros build, with folds
in his cheeks, and his forehead, and his eyelids, and his lips, and his
ears; but with bright, eager, childishly-inquiring, grey eyes, under his
ragged eyebrows, and broad-brimmed hat. A very odd-looking old fellow
altogether.
‘Here you are again,’ repeated Mr Wegg, musing. ‘And what are you now?
Are you in the Funns, or where are you? Have you lately come to settle
in this neighbourhood, or do you own to another neighbourhood? Are you
in independent circumstances, or is it wasting the motions of a bow on
you? Come! I’ll speculate! I’ll invest a bow in you.’
Which Mr Wegg, having replaced his tin box, accordingly did, as he rose
to bait his gingerbread-trap for some other devoted infant. The salute
was acknowledged with:
‘Morning, sir! Morning! Morning!’
(‘Calls me Sir!’ said Mr Wegg, to himself; ‘HE won’t answer. A bow
gone!’)
‘Morning, morning, morning!’
‘Appears to be rather a ’arty old cock, too,’ said Mr Wegg, as before;
‘Good morning to YOU, sir.’
‘Do you remember me, then?’ asked his new acquaintance, stopping in
his amble, one-sided, before the stall, and speaking in a pounding way,
though with great good-humour.
‘I have noticed you go past our house, sir, several times in the course
of the last week or so.’
‘Our house,’ repeated the other. ‘Meaning—?’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Wegg, nodding, as the other pointed the clumsy forefinger
of his right glove at the corner house.
‘Oh! Now, what,’ pursued the old fellow, in an inquisitive manner,
carrying his knotted stick in his left arm as if it were a baby, ‘what
do they allow you now?’
‘It’s job work that I do for our house,’ returned Silas, drily, and with
reticence; ‘it’s not yet brought to an exact allowance.’
‘Oh! It’s not yet brought to an exact allowance? No! It’s not yet
brought to an exact allowance. Oh!—Morning, morning, morning!’
‘Appears to be rather a cracked old cock,’ thought Silas, qualifying his
former good opinion, as the other ambled off. But, in a moment he was
back again with the question:
‘How did you get your wooden leg?’
Mr Wegg replied, (tartly to this personal inquiry), ‘In an accident.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘Well! I haven’t got to keep it warm,’ Mr Wegg made answer, in a sort of
desperation occasioned by the singularity of the question.
‘He hasn’t,’ repeated the other to his knotted stick, as he gave it a
hug; ‘he hasn’t got—ha!—ha!—to keep it warm! Did you ever hear of the
name of Boffin?’
‘No,’ said Mr Wegg, who was growing restive under this examination. ‘I
never did hear of the name of Boffin.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘Why, no,’ retorted Mr Wegg, again approaching desperation; ‘I can’t say
I do.’
‘Why don’t you like it?’