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

CHAPTER XX

A New Lodger

 

The long vacation saunters on towards term-time like an idle river

very leisurely strolling down a flat country to the sea. Mr. Guppy

saunters along with it congenially. He has blunted the blade of

his penknife and broken the point off by sticking that instrument

into his desk in every direction. Not that he bears the desk any

ill will, but he must do something, and it must be something of an

unexciting nature, which will lay neither his physical nor his

intellectual energies under too heavy contribution. He finds that

nothing agrees with him so well as to make little gyrations on one

leg of his stool, and stab his desk, and gape.

 

Kenge and Carboy are out of town, and the articled clerk has taken

out a shooting license and gone down to his father’s, and Mr.

Guppy’s two fellow-stipendiaries are away on leave. Mr. Guppy and

Mr. Richard Carstone divide the dignity of the office. But Mr.

Carstone is for the time being established in Kenge’s room, whereat

Mr. Guppy chafes. So exceedingly that he with biting sarcasm

informs his mother, in the confidential moments when he sups with

her off a lobster and lettuce in the Old Street Road, that he is

afraid the office is hardly good enough for swells, and that if he

had known there was a swell coming, he would have got it painted.

 

Mr. Guppy suspects everybody who enters on the occupation of a

stool in Kenge and Carboy’s office of entertaining, as a matter of

course, sinister designs upon him. He is clear that every such

person wants to depose him. If he be ever asked how, why, when, or

wherefore, he shuts up one eye and shakes his head. On the

strength of these profound views, he in the most ingenious manner

takes infinite pains to counterplot when there is no plot, and

plays the deepest games of chess without any adversary.

 

It is a source of much gratification to Mr. Guppy, therefore, to

find the new-comer constantly poring over the papers in Jarndyce

and Jarndyce, for he well knows that nothing but confusion and

failure can come of that. His satisfaction communicates itself to

a third saunterer through the long vacation in Kenge and Carboy’s

office, to wit, Young Smallweed.

 

Whether Young Smallweed (metaphorically called Small and eke Chick

Weed, as it were jocularly to express a fledgling) was ever a boy

is much doubted in Lincoln’s Inn. He is now something under

fifteen and an old limb of the law. He is facetiously understood

to entertain a passion for a lady at a cigar-shop in the

neighbourhood of Chancery Lane and for her sake to have broken off

a contract with another lady, to whom he had been engaged some

years. He is a town-made article, of small stature and weazen

features, but may be perceived from a considerable distance by

means of his very tall hat. To become a Guppy is the object of his

ambition. He dresses at that gentleman (by whom he is patronized),

talks at him, walks at him, founds himself entirely on him. He is

honoured with Mr. Guppy’s particular confidence and occasionally

advises him, from the deep wells of his experience, on difficult

points in private life.

 

Mr. Guppy has been lolling out of window all the morning after

trying all the stools in succession and finding none of them easy,

and after several times putting his head into the iron safe with a

notion of cooling it. Mr. Smallweed has been twice dispatched for

effervescent drinks, and has twice mixed them in the two official

tumblers and stirred them up with the ruler. Mr. Guppy propounds

for Mr. Smallweed’s consideration the paradox that the more you

drink the thirstier you are and reclines his head upon the window-sill in a state of hopeless languor.

 

While thus looking out into the shade of Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn,

surveying the intolerable bricks and mortar, Mr. Guppy becomes

conscious of a manly whisker emerging from the cloistered walk

below and turning itself up in the direction of his face. At the

same time, a low whistle is wafted through the Inn and a suppressed

voice cries, “Hip! Gup-py!”

 

“Why, you don’t mean it!” says Mr. Guppy, aroused. “Small! Here’s

Jobling!” Small’s head looks out of window too and nods to

Jobling.

 

“Where have you sprung up from?” inquires Mr. Guppy.

 

“From the market-gardens down by Deptford. I can’t stand it any

longer. I must enlist. I say! I wish you’d lend me half a crown.

Upon my soul, I’m hungry.”

 

Jobling looks hungry and also has the appearance of having run to

seed in the market-gardens down by Deptford.

 

“I say! Just throw out half a crown if you have got one to spare.

I want to get some dinner.”

 

“Will you come and dine with me?” says Mr. Guppy, throwing out the

coin, which Mr. Jobling catches neatly.

 

“How long should I have to hold out?” says Jobling.

 

“Not half an hour. I am only waiting here till the enemy goes,”

returns Mr. Guppy, butting inward with his head.

 

“What enemy?”

 

“A new one. Going to be articled. Will you wait?”

 

“Can you give a fellow anything to read in the meantime?” says Mr.

Jobling.

 

Smallweed suggests the law list. But Mr. Jobling declares with

much earnestness that he “can’t stand it.”

 

“You shall have the paper,” says Mr. Guppy. “He shall bring it

down. But you had better not be seen about here. Sit on our

staircase and read. It’s a quiet place.”

 

Jobling nods intelligence and acquiescence. The sagacious

Smallweed supplies him with the newspaper and occasionally drops

his eye upon him from the landing as a precaution against his

becoming disgusted with waiting and making an untimely departure.

At last the enemy retreats, and then Smallweed fetches Mr. Jobling

up.

 

“Well, and how are you?” says Mr. Guppy, shaking hands with him.

 

“So, so. How are you?”

 

Mr. Guppy replying that he is not much to boast of, Mr. Jobling

ventures on the question, “How is SHE?” This Mr. Guppy resents as

a liberty, retorting, “Jobling, there ARE chords in the human

mind—” Jobling begs pardon.

 

“Any subject but that!” says Mr. Guppy with a gloomy enjoyment of

his injury. “For there ARE chords, Jobling—”

 

Mr. Jobling begs pardon again.

 

During this short colloquy, the active Smallweed, who is of the

dinner party, has written in legal characters on a slip of paper,

“Return immediately.” This notification to all whom it may

concern, he inserts in the letter-box, and then putting on the tall

hat at the angle of inclination at which Mr. Guppy wears his,

informs his patron that they may now make themselves scarce.

 

Accordingly they betake themselves to a neighbouring dining-house,

of the class known among its frequenters by the denomination slap-bang, where the waitress, a bouncing young female of forty, is

supposed to have made some impression on the susceptible Smallweed,

of whom it may be remarked that he is a weird changeling to whom

years are nothing. He stands precociously possessed of centuries

of owlish wisdom. If he ever lay in a cradle, it seems as if he

must have lain there in a tail-coat. He has an old, old eye, has

Smallweed; and he drinks and smokes in a monkeyish way; and his

neck is stiff in his collar; and he is never to be taken in; and he

knows all about it, whatever it is. In short, in his bringing up

he has been so nursed by Law and Equity that he has become a kind

of fossil imp, to account for whose terrestrial existence it is

reported at the public offices that his father was John Doe and his

mother the only female member of the Roe family, also that his

first long-clothes were made from a blue bag.

 

Into the dining-house, unaffected by the seductive show in the

window of artificially whitened cauliflowers and poultry, verdant

baskets of peas, coolly blooming cucumbers, and joints ready for

the spit, Mr. Smallweed leads the way. They know him there and

defer to him. He has his favourite box, he bespeaks all the

papers, he is down upon bald patriarchs, who keep them more than

ten minutes afterwards. It is of no use trying him with anything

less than a full-sized “bread” or proposing to him any joint in cut

unless it is in the very best cut. In the matter of gravy he is

adamant.

 

Conscious of his elfin power and submitting to his dread

experience, Mr. Guppy consults him in the choice of that day’s

banquet, turning an appealing look towards him as the waitress

repeats the catalogue of viands and saying “What do YOU take,

Chick?” Chick, out of the profundity of his artfulness, preferring

“veal and ham and French beans—and don’t you forget the stuffing,

Polly” (with an unearthly cock of his venerable eye), Mr. Guppy and

Mr. Jobling give the like order. Three pint pots of half-and-half

are superadded. Quickly the waitress returns bearing what is

apparently a model of the Tower of Babel but what is really a pile

of plates and flat tin dish-covers. Mr.