Bleak House - Charles Dickens (read this if txt) 📗

I thought it best

to be as useful as I could, and to render what kind services I

could to those immediately about me, and to try to let that circle

of duty gradually and naturally expand itself. All this I said

with anything but confidence, because Mrs. Pardiggle was much older

than I, and had great experience, and was so very military in her

manners.

 

“You are wrong, Miss Summerson,” said she, “but perhaps you are not

equal to hard work or the excitement of it, and that makes a vast

difference. If you would like to see how I go through my work, I

am now about—with my young family—to visit a brickmaker in the

neighbourhood (a very bad character) and shall be glad to take you

with me. Miss Clare also, if she will do me the favour.”

 

Ada and I interchanged looks, and as we were going out in any case,

accepted the offer. When we hastily returned from putting on our

bonnets, we found the young family languishing in a corner and Mrs.

Pardiggle sweeping about the room, knocking down nearly all the

light objects it contained. Mrs. Pardiggle took possession of Ada,

and I followed with the family.

 

Ada told me afterwards that Mrs. Pardiggle talked in the same loud

tone (that, indeed, I overheard) all the way to the brickmaker’s

about an exciting contest which she had for two or three years

waged against another lady relative to the bringing in of their

rival candidates for a pension somewhere. There had been a

quantity of printing, and promising, and proxying, and polling, and

it appeared to have imparted great liveliness to all concerned,

except the pensioners—who were not elected yet.

 

I am very fond of being confided in by children and am happy in

being usually favoured in that respect, but on this occasion it

gave me great uneasiness. As soon as we were out of doors, Egbert,

with the manner of a little footpad, demanded a shilling of me on

the ground that his pocket-money was “boned” from him. On my

pointing out the great impropriety of the word, especially in

connexion with his parent (for he added sulkily “By her!”), he

pinched me and said, “Oh, then! Now! Who are you! YOU wouldn’t

like it, I think? What does she make a sham for, and pretend to

give me money, and take it away again? Why do you call it my

allowance, and never let me spend it?” These exasperating

questions so inflamed his mind and the minds of Oswald and Francis

that they all pinched me at once, and in a dreadfully expert way—

screwing up such little pieces of my arms that I could hardly

forbear crying out. Felix, at the same time, stamped upon my toes.

And the Bond of Joy, who on account of always having the whole of

his little income anticipated stood in fact pledged to abstain from

cakes as well as tobacco, so swelled with grief and rage when we

passed a pastry-cook’s shop that he terrified me by becoming

purple. I never underwent so much, both in body and mind, in the

course of a walk with young people as from these unnaturally

constrained children when they paid me the compliment of being

natural.

 

I was glad when we came to the brickmaker’s house, though it was

one of a cluster of wretched hovels in a brick-field, with pigsties

close to the broken windows and miserable little gardens before the

doors growing nothing but stagnant pools. Here and there an old

tub was put to catch the droppings of rain-water from a roof, or

they were banked up with mud into a little pond like a large dirt-pie. At the doors and windows some men and women lounged or

prowled about, and took little notice of us except to laugh to one

another or to say something as we passed about gentlefolks minding

their own business and not troubling their heads and muddying their

shoes with coming to look after other people’s.

 

Mrs. Pardiggle, leading the way with a great show of moral

determination and talking with much volubility about the untidy

habits of the people (though I doubted if the best of us could have

been tidy in such a place), conducted us into a cottage at the

farthest corner, the ground-floor room of which we nearly filled.

Besides ourselves, there were in this damp, offensive room a woman

with a black eye, nursing a poor little gasping baby by the fire; a

man, all stained with clay and mud and looking very dissipated,

lying at full length on the ground, smoking a pipe; a powerful

young man fastening a collar on a dog; and a bold girl doing some

kind of washing in very dirty water. They all looked up at us as

we came in, and the woman seemed to turn her face towards the fire

as if to hide her bruised eye; nobody gave us any welcome.

 

“Well, my friends,” said Mrs. Pardiggle, but her voice had not a

friendly sound, I thought; it was much too business-like and

systematic. “How do you do, all of you? I am here again. I told

you, you couldn’t tire me, you know. I am fond of hard work, and

am true to my word.”

 

“There an’t,” growled the man on the floor, whose head rested on

his hand as he stared at us, “any more on you to come in, is

there?”

 

“No, my friend,” said Mrs. Pardiggle, seating herself on one stool

and knocking down another. “We are all here.”

 

“Because I thought there warn’t enough of you, perhaps?” said the

man, with his pipe between his lips as he looked round upon us.

 

The young man and the girl both laughed. Two friends of the young

man, whom we had attracted to the doorway and who stood there with

their hands in their pockets, echoed the laugh noisily.

 

“You can’t tire me, good people,” said Mrs. Pardiggle to these

latter. “I enjoy hard work, and the harder you make mine, the

better I like it.”

 

“Then make it easy for her!” growled the man upon the floor. “I

wants it done, and over. I wants a end of these liberties took

with my place. I wants an end of being drawed like a badger. Now

you’re a-going to poll-pry and question according to custom—I know

what you’re a-going to be up to. Well! You haven’t got no

occasion to be up to it. I’ll save you the trouble. Is my

daughter a-washin? Yes, she IS a-washin. Look at the water.

Smell it! That’s wot we drinks. How do you like it, and what do

you think of gin instead! An’t my place dirty? Yes, it is dirty—

it’s nat’rally dirty, and it’s nat’rally onwholesome; and we’ve had

five dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so

much the better for them, and for us besides. Have I read the

little book wot you left? No, I an’t read the little book wot you

left. There an’t nobody here as knows how to read it; and if there

wos, it wouldn’t be suitable to me. It’s a book fit for a babby,

and I’m not a babby. If you was to leave me a doll, I shouldn’t

nuss it. How have I been conducting of myself? Why, I’ve been

drunk for three days; and I’da been drunk four if I’da had the

money. Don’t I never mean for to go to church? No, I don’t never

mean for to go to church. I shouldn’t be expected there, if I did;

the beadle’s too genteel for me. And how did my wife get that

black eye? Why, I give it her; and if she says I didn’t, she’s a

lie!”

 

He had pulled his pipe out of his mouth to say all this, and he now

turned over on his other side and smoked again. Mrs. Pardiggle,

who had been regarding him through her spectacles with a forcible

composure, calculated, I could not help thinking, to increase his

antagonism, pulled out a good book as if it were a constable’s

staff and took the whole family into custody. I mean into

religious custody, of course; but she really did it as if she were

an inexorable moral policeman carrying them all off to a station-house.

 

Ada and I were very uncomfortable. We both felt intrusive and out

of place, and we both thought that Mrs. Pardiggle would have got on

infinitely better if she had not had such a mechanical way of

taking possession of people. The children sulked and stared; the

family took no notice of us whatever, except when the young man

made the dog bark, which he usually did when Mrs. Pardiggle was

most emphatic. We both felt painfully sensible that between us and

these people there was an iron barrier which could not be removed

by our new friend. By whom or how it could be removed, we did not

know, but we knew that. Even what she read and said seemed to us

to be ill-chosen for such auditors, if it had been imparted ever so

modestly and with ever so much tact. As to the little book to

which the man on the floor had referred, we acquired a knowledge of

it afterwards, and Mr. Jarndyce said he doubted if Robinson Crusoe

could have read it, though he had had no other on his desolate

island.

 

We were much relieved, under these circumstances, when Mrs.

Pardiggle left off.

 

The man on the floor, then turning his head round again, said

morosely, “Well! You’ve done, have you?”

 

“For to-day, I have, my friend. But I am never fatigued. I shall

come to you again in your regular order,” returned Mrs. Pardiggle

with demonstrative cheerfulness.

 

“So long as you goes now,” said he, folding his arms and shutting

his eyes with an oath, “you may do wot you like!”

 

Mrs. Pardiggle accordingly rose and made a little vortex in the

confined room from which the pipe itself very narrowly escaped.

Taking one of her young family in each hand, and telling the others

to follow closely, and expressing her hope that the brickmaker and

all his house would be improved when she saw them next, she then

proceeded to another cottage. I hope it is not unkind in me to say

that she certainly did make, in this as in everything else, a show

that was not conciliatory of doing charity by wholesale and of

dealing in it to a large extent.

 

She supposed that we were following her, but as soon as the space

was left clear, we approached the woman sitting by the fire to ask

if the baby were ill.

 

She only looked at it as it lay on her lap. We had observed before

that when she looked at it she covered her discoloured eye with her

hand, as though she wished to separate any association with noise

and violence and ill treatment from the poor little child.

 

Ada, whose gentle heart was moved by its appearance, bent down to

touch its little face. As she did so, I saw what happened and drew

her back. The child died.

 

“Oh, Esther!” cried Ada, sinking on her knees beside it. “Look

here! Oh, Esther, my love, the little thing! The suffering,

quiet, pretty little thing! I am so sorry for it. I am so sorry

for the mother. I never saw a sight so pitiful as this before!

Oh, baby, baby!”

 

Such compassion, such gentleness, as that with which she bent down

weeping and put her hand upon the mother’s might have softened any

mother’s heart that ever beat. The woman at first gazed at her