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

low tricksters who delight in putting that

illustrious art at a disadvantage in the world. By all that is base

and despicable,” cried Mr. Boythorn, “the treatment of surgeons

aboard ship is such that I would submit the legs—both legs—of

every member of the Admiralty Board to a compound fracture and

render it a transportable offence in any qualified practitioner to

set them if the system were not wholly changed in eight and forty

hours!”

 

“Wouldn’t you give them a week?” asked Mr. Jarndyce.

 

“No!” cried Mr. Boythorn firmly. “Not on any consideration! Eight

and forty hours! As to corporations, parishes, vestry-boards, and

similar gatherings of jolter-headed clods who assemble to exchange

such speeches that, by heaven, they ought to be worked in

quicksilver mines for the short remainder of their miserable

existence, if it were only to prevent their detestable English from

contaminating a language spoken in the presence of the sun—as to

those fellows, who meanly take advantage of the ardour of gentlemen

in the pursuit of knowledge to recompense the inestimable services

of the best years of their lives, their long study, and their

expensive education with pittances too small for the acceptance of

clerks, I would have the necks of every one of them wrung and their

skulls arranged in Surgeons’ Hall for the contemplation of the whole

profession in order that its younger members might understand from

actual measurement, in early life, HOW thick skulls may become!”

 

He wound up this vehement declaration by looking round upon us with

a most agreeable smile and suddenly thundering, “Ha, ha, ha!” over

and over again, until anybody else might have been expected to be

quite subdued by the exertion.

 

As Richard still continued to say that he was fixed in his choice

after repeated periods for consideration had been recommended by Mr.

Jarndyce and had expired, and he still continued to assure Ada and

me in the same final manner that it was “all right,” it became

advisable to take Mr. Kenge into council. Mr. Kenge, therefore,

came down to dinner one day, and leaned back in his chair, and

turned his eye-glasses over and over, and spoke in a sonorous voice,

and did exactly what I remembered to have seen him do when I was a

little girl.

 

“Ah!” said Mr. Kenge. “Yes. Well! A very good profession, Mr.

Jarndyce, a very good profession.”

 

“The course of study and preparation requires to be diligently

pursued,” observed my guardian with a glance at Richard.

 

“Oh, no doubt,” said Mr. Kenge. “Diligently.”

 

“But that being the case, more or less, with all pursuits that are

worth much,” said Mr. Jarndyce, “it is not a special consideration

which another choice would be likely to escape.”

 

“Truly,” said Mr. Kenge. “And Mr. Richard Carstone, who has so

meritoriously acquitted himself in the—shall I say the classic

shades?—in which his youth had been passed, will, no doubt, apply

the habits, if not the principles and practice, of versification in

that tongue in which a poet was said (unless I mistake) to be born,

not made, to the more eminently practical field of action on which

he enters.”

 

“You may rely upon it,” said Richard in his off-hand manner, “that I

shall go at it and do my best.”

 

“Very well, Mr. Jarndyce!” said Mr. Kenge, gently nodding his head.

“Really, when we are assured by Mr. Richard that he means to go at

it and to do his best,” nodding feelingly and smoothly over those

expressions, “I would submit to you that we have only to inquire

into the best mode of carrying out the object of his ambition. Now,

with reference to placing Mr. Richard with some sufficiently eminent

practitioner. Is there any one in view at present?”

 

“No one, Rick, I think?” said my guardian.

 

“No one, sir,” said Richard.

 

“Quite so!” observed Mr. Kenge. “As to situation, now. Is there

any particular feeling on that head?”

 

“N—no,” said Richard.

 

“Quite so!” observed Mr. Kenge again.

 

“I should like a little variety,” said Richard; “I mean a good range

of experience.”

 

“Very requisite, no doubt,” returned Mr. Kenge. “I think this may

be easily arranged, Mr. Jarndyce? We have only, in the first place,

to discover a sufficiently eligible practitioner; and as soon as we

make our want—and shall I add, our ability to pay a premium?—

known, our only difficulty will be in the selection of one from a

large number. We have only, in the second place, to observe those

little formalities which are rendered necessary by our time of life

and our being under the guardianship of the court. We shall soon

be—shall I say, in Mr. Richard’s own light-hearted manner, ‘going

at it’—to our heart’s content. It is a coincidence,” said Mr.

Kenge with a tinge of melancholy in his smile, “one of those

coincidences which may or may not require an explanation beyond our

present limited faculties, that I have a cousin in the medical

profession. He might be deemed eligible by you and might be

disposed to respond to this proposal. I can answer for him as

little as for you, but he MIGHT!”

 

As this was an opening in the prospect, it was arranged that Mr.

Kenge should see his cousin. And as Mr. Jarndyce had before

proposed to take us to London for a few weeks, it was settled next

day that we should make our visit at once and combine Richard’s

business with it.

 

Mr. Boythorn leaving us within a week, we took up our abode at a

cheerful lodging near Oxford Street over an upholsterer’s shop.

London was a great wonder to us, and we were out for hours and hours

at a time, seeing the sights, which appeared to be less capable of

exhaustion than we were. We made the round of the principal

theatres, too, with great delight, and saw all the plays that were

worth seeing. I mention this because it was at the theatre that I

began to be made uncomfortable again by Mr. Guppy.

 

I was sitting in front of the box one night with Ada, and Richard

was in the place he liked best, behind Ada’s chair, when, happening

to look down into the pit, I saw Mr. Guppy, with his hair flattened

down upon his head and woe depicted in his face, looking up at me.

I felt all through the performance that he never looked at the

actors but constantly looked at me, and always with a carefully

prepared expression of the deepest misery and the profoundest

dejection.

 

It quite spoiled my pleasure for that night because it was so very

embarrassing and so very ridiculous. But from that time forth, we

never went to the play without my seeing Mr. Guppy in the pit,

always with his hair straight and flat, his shirt-collar turned

down, and a general feebleness about him. If he were not there when

we went in, and I began to hope he would not come and yielded myself

for a little while to the interest of the scene, I was certain to

encounter his languishing eyes when I least expected it and, from

that time, to be quite sure that they were fixed upon me all the

evening.

 

I really cannot express how uneasy this made me. If he would only

have brushed up his hair or turned up his collar, it would have been

bad enough; but to know that that absurd figure was always gazing at

me, and always in that demonstrative state of despondency, put such

a constraint upon me that I did not like to laugh at the play, or to

cry at it, or to move, or to speak. I seemed able to do nothing

naturally. As to escaping Mr. Guppy by going to the back of the

box, I could not bear to do that because I knew Richard and Ada

relied on having me next them and that they could never have talked

together so happily if anybody else had been in my place. So there

I sat, not knowing where to look—for wherever I looked, I knew Mr.

Guppy’s eyes were following me—and thinking of the dreadful expense

to which this young man was putting himself on my account.

 

Sometimes I thought of telling Mr. Jarndyce. Then I feared that the

young man would lose his situation and that I might ruin him.

Sometimes I thought of confiding in Richard, but was deterred by the

possibility of his fighting Mr. Guppy and giving him black eyes.

Sometimes I thought, should I frown at him or shake my head. Then I

felt I could not do it. Sometimes I considered whether I should

write to his mother, but that ended in my being convinced that to

open a correspondence would be to make the matter worse. I always

came to the conclusion, finally, that I could do nothing. Mr.

Guppy’s perseverance, all this time, not only produced him regularly

at any theatre to which we went, but caused him to appear in the

crowd as we were coming out, and even to get up behind our fly—

where I am sure I saw him, two or three times, struggling among the

most dreadful spikes. After we got home, he haunted a post opposite

our house. The upholsterer’s where we lodged being at the corner of

two streets, and my bedroom window being opposite the post, I was

afraid to go near the window when I went upstairs, lest I should see

him (as I did one moonlight night) leaning against the post and

evidently catching cold. If Mr. Guppy had not been, fortunately for

me, engaged in the daytime, I really should have had no rest from

him.

 

While we were making this round of gaieties, in which Mr. Guppy so

extraordinarily participated, the business which had helped to bring

us to town was not neglected. Mr. Kenge’s cousin was a Mr. Bayham

Badger, who had a good practice at Chelsea and attended a large

public institution besides. He was quite willing to receive Richard

into his house and to superintend his studies, and as it seemed that

those could be pursued advantageously under Mr. Badger’s roof, and

Mr. Badger liked Richard, and as Richard said he liked Mr. Badger

“well enough,” an agreement was made, the Lord Chancellor’s consent

was obtained, and it was all settled.

 

On the day when matters were concluded between Richard and Mr.

Badger, we were all under engagement to dine at Mr. Badger’s house.

We were to be “merely a family party,” Mrs. Badger’s note said; and

we found no lady there but Mrs. Badger herself. She was surrounded

in the drawing-room by various objects, indicative of her painting a

little, playing the piano a little, playing the guitar a little,

playing the harp a little, singing a little, working a little,

reading a little, writing poetry a little, and botanizing a little.

She was a lady of about fifty, I should think, youthfully dressed,

and of a very fine complexion. If I add to the little list of her

accomplishments that she rouged a little, I do not mean that there

was any harm in it.

 

Mr. Bayham Badger himself was a pink, fresh-faced, crisp-looking

gentleman with a weak voice, white teeth, light hair, and surprised

eyes, some years younger, I should say, than Mrs. Bayham Badger. He

admired her exceedingly, but principally, and to begin with, on the

curious ground (as it seemed to us) of her having had three

husbands. We had barely taken our seats when he said to Mr.

Jarndyce quite triumphantly, “You would hardly suppose that I am

Mrs. Bayham Badger’s third!”

 

“Indeed?” said Mr. Jarndyce.

 

“Her third!” said Mr. Badger. “Mrs. Bayham Badger has not the

appearance,