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

crossing and begins to lay it out for the day. The

town awakes; the great tee-totum is set up for its daily spin and

whirl; all that unaccountable reading and writing, which has been

suspended for a few hours, recommences. Jo and the other lower

animals get on in the unintelligible mess as they can. It is

market-day. The blinded oxen, over-goaded, over-driven, never

guided, run into wrong places and are beaten out, and plunge red-eyed and foaming at stone walls, and often sorely hurt the

innocent, and often sorely hurt themselves. Very like Jo and his

order; very, very like!

 

A band of music comes and plays. Jo listens to it. So does a dog

—a drover’s dog, waiting for his master outside a butcher’s shop,

and evidently thinking about those sheep he has had upon his mind

for some hours and is happily rid of. He seems perplexed

respecting three or four, can’t remember where he left them, looks

up and down the street as half expecting to see them astray,

suddenly pricks up his ears and remembers all about it. A

thoroughly vagabond dog, accustomed to low company and public-houses; a terrific dog to sheep, ready at a whistle to scamper over

their backs and tear out mouthfuls of their wool; but an educated,

improved, developed dog who has been taught his duties and knows

how to discharge them. He and Jo listen to the music, probably

with much the same amount of animal satisfaction; likewise as to

awakened association, aspiration, or regret, melancholy or joyful

reference to things beyond the senses, they are probably upon a

par. But, otherwise, how far above the human listener is the

brute!

 

Turn that dog’s descendants wild, like Jo, and in a very few years

they will so degenerate that they will lose even their bark—but

not their bite.

 

The day changes as it wears itself away and becomes dark and

drizzly. Jo fights it out at his crossing among the mud and

wheels, the horses, whips, and umbrellas, and gets but a scanty sum

to pay for the unsavoury shelter of Tom-all-Alone’s. Twilight

comes on; gas begins to start up in the shops; the lamplighter,

with his ladder, runs along the margin of the pavement. A wretched

evening is beginning to close in.

 

In his chambers Mr. Tulkinghorn sits meditating an application to

the nearest magistrate to-morrow morning for a warrant. Gridley,

a disappointed suitor, has been here to-day and has been alarming.

We are not to be put in bodily fear, and that ill-conditioned fellow

shall be held to bail again. From the ceiling, foreshortened

Allegory, in the person of one impossible Roman upside down, points

with the arm of Samson (out of joint, and an odd one) obtrusively

toward the window. Why should Mr. Tulkinghorn, for such no reason,

look out of window? Is the hand not always pointing there? So he

does not look out of window.

 

And if he did, what would it be to see a woman going by? There are

women enough in the world, Mr. Tulkinghorn thinks—too many; they

are at the bottom of all that goes wrong in it, though, for the

matter of that, they create business for lawyers. What would it be

to see a woman going by, even though she were going secretly? They

are all secret. Mr. Tulkinghorn knows that very well.

 

But they are not all like the woman who now leaves him and his

house behind, between whose plain dress and her refined manner

there is something exceedingly inconsistent. She should be an

upper servant by her attire, yet in her air and step, though both

are hurried and assumed—as far as she can assume in the muddy

streets, which she treads with an unaccustomed foot—she is a lady.

Her face is veiled, and still she sufficiently betrays herself to

make more than one of those who pass her look round sharply.

 

She never turns her head. Lady or servant, she has a purpose in

her and can follow it. She never turns her head until she comes to

the crossing where Jo plies with his broom. He crosses with her

and begs. Still, she does not turn her head until she has landed

on the other side. Then she slightly beckons to him and says,

“Come here!”

 

Jo follows her a pace or two into a quiet court.

 

“Are you the boy I’ve read of in the papers?” she asked behind her

veil.

 

“I don’t know,” says Jo, staring moodily at the veil, “nothink

about no papers. I don’t know nothink about nothink at all.”

 

“Were you examined at an inquest?”

 

“I don’t know nothink about no—where I was took by the beadle, do

you mean?” says Jo. “Was the boy’s name at the inkwhich Jo?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“That’s me!” says Jo.

 

“Come farther up.”

 

“You mean about the man?” says Jo, following. “Him as wos dead?”

 

“Hush! Speak in a whisper! Yes. Did he look, when he was living,

so very ill and poor?”

 

“Oh, jist!” says Jo.

 

“Did he look like—not like YOU?” says the woman with abhorrence.

 

“Oh, not so bad as me,” says Jo. “I’m a reg’lar one I am! You

didn’t know him, did you?”

 

“How dare you ask me if I knew him?”

 

“No offence, my lady,” says Jo with much humility, for even he has

got at the suspicion of her being a lady.

 

“I am not a lady. I am a servant.”

 

“You are a jolly servant!” says Jo without the least idea of saying

anything offensive, merely as a tribute of admiration.

 

“Listen and be silent. Don’t talk to me, and stand farther from

me! Can you show me all those places that were spoken of in the

account I read? The place he wrote for, the place he died at, the

place where you were taken to, and the place where he was buried?

Do you know the place where he was buried?”

 

Jo answers with a nod, having also nodded as each other place was

mentioned.

 

“Go before me and show me all those dreadful places. Stop opposite

to each, and don’t speak to me unless I speak to you. Don’t look

back. Do what I want, and I will pay you well.”

 

Jo attends closely while the words are being spoken; tells them off

on his broom-handle, finding them rather hard; pauses to consider

their meaning; considers it satisfactory; and nods his ragged head.

 

“I’m fly,” says Jo. “But fen larks, you know. Stow hooking it!”

 

“What does the horrible creature mean?” exclaims the servant,

recoiling from him.

 

“Stow cutting away, you know!” says Jo.

 

“I don’t understand you. Go on before! I will give you more money

than you ever had in your life.”

 

Jo screws up his mouth into a whistle, gives his ragged head a rub,

takes his broom under his arm, and leads the way, passing deftly

with his bare feet over the hard stones and through the mud and

mire.

 

Cook’s Court. Jo stops. A pause.

 

“Who lives here?”

 

“Him wot give him his writing and give me half a bull,” says Jo in

a whisper without looking over his shoulder.

 

“Go on to the next.”

 

Krook’s house. Jo stops again. A longer pause.

 

“Who lives here?”

 

“HE lived here,” Jo answers as before.

 

After a silence he is asked, “In which room?”

 

“In the back room up there. You can see the winder from this

corner. Up there! That’s where I see him stritched out. This is

the public-ouse where I was took to.”

 

“Go on to the next!”

 

It is a longer walk to the next, but Jo, relieved of his first

suspicions, sticks to the forms imposed upon him and does not look

round. By many devious ways, reeking with offence of many kinds,

they come to the little tunnel of a court, and to the gas-lamp

(lighted now), and to the iron gate.

 

“He was put there,” says Jo, holding to the bars and looking in.

 

“Where? Oh, what a scene of horror!”

 

“There!” says Jo, pointing. “Over yinder. Among them piles of

bones, and close to that there kitchin winder! They put him wery

nigh the top. They was obliged to stamp upon it to git it in. I

could unkiver it for you with my broom if the gate was open.

That’s why they locks it, I s’pose,” giving it a shake. “It’s

always locked. Look at the rat!” cries Jo, excited. “Hi! Look!

There he goes! Ho! Into the ground!”

 

The servant shrinks into a corner, into a corner of that hideous

archway, with its deadly stains contaminating her dress; and

putting out her two hands and passionately telling him to keep away

from her, for he is loathsome to her, so remains for some moments.

Jo stands staring and is still staring when she recovers herself.

 

“Is this place of abomination consecrated ground?”

 

“I don’t know nothink of consequential ground,” says Jo, still

staring.

 

“Is it blessed?”

 

“Which?” says Jo, in the last degree amazed.

 

“Is it blessed?”

 

“I’m blest if I know,” says Jo, staring more than ever; “but I

shouldn’t think it warn’t. Blest?” repeats Jo, something troubled

in his mind. “It an’t done it much good if it is. Blest? I

should think it was t’othered myself. But I don’t know nothink!”

 

The servant takes as little heed of what he says as she seems to

take of what she has said herself. She draws off her glove to get

some money from her purse. Jo silently notices how white and small

her hand is and what a jolly servant she must be to wear such

sparkling rings.

 

She drops a piece of money in his hand without touching it, and

shuddering as their hands approach. “Now,” she adds, “show me the

spot again!”

 

Jo thrusts the handle of his broom between the bars of the gate,

and with his utmost power of elaboration, points it out. At

length, looking aside to see if he has made himself intelligible,

he finds that he is alone.

 

His first proceeding is to hold the piece of money to the gaslight

and to be overpowered at finding that it is yellow—gold. His next

is to give it a one-sided bite at the edge as a test of its

quality. His next, to put it in his mouth for safety and to sweep

the step and passage with great care. His job done, he sets off

for Tom-all-Alone’s, stopping in the light of innumerable gas-lamps

to produce the piece of gold and give it another one-sided bite as

a reassurance of its being genuine.

 

The Mercury in powder is in no want of society to-night, for my

Lady goes to a grand dinner and three or four balls. Sir Leicester

is fidgety down at Chesney Wold, with no better company than the

goat; he complains to Mrs. Rouncewell that the rain makes such a

monotonous pattering on the terrace that he can’t read the paper

even by the fireside in his own snug dressing-room.

 

“Sir Leicester would have done better to try the other side of the

house, my dear,” says Mrs. Rouncewell to Rosa. “His dressing-room

is on my Lady’s side. And in all these years I never heard the

step upon the Ghost’s Walk more distinct than it is to-night!”