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

CHAPTER XXI

The Smallweed Family

 

In a rather ill-favoured and ill-savoured neighbourhood, though one

of its rising grounds bears the name of Mount Pleasant, the Elfin

Smallweed, christened Bartholomew and known on the domestic hearth

as Bart, passes that limited portion of his time on which the

office and its contingencies have no claim. He dwells in a little

narrow street, always solitary, shady, and sad, closely bricked in

on all sides like a tomb, but where there yet lingers the stump of

an old forest tree whose flavour is about as fresh and natural as

the Smallweed smack of youth.

 

There has been only one child in the Smallweed family for several

generations. Little old men and women there have been, but no

child, until Mr. Smallweed’s grandmother, now living, became weak

in her intellect and fell (for the first time) into a childish

state. With such infantine graces as a total want of observation,

memory, understanding, and interest, and an eternal disposition to

fall asleep over the fire and into it, Mr. Smallweed’s grandmother

has undoubtedly brightened the family.

 

Mr. Smallweed’s grandfather is likewise of the party. He is in a

helpless condition as to his lower, and nearly so as to his upper,

limbs, but his mind is unimpaired. It holds, as well as it ever

held, the first four rules of arithmetic and a certain small

collection of the hardest facts. In respect of ideality,

reverence, wonder, and other such phrenological attributes, it is

no worse off than it used to be. Everything that Mr. Smallweed’s

grandfather ever put away in his mind was a grub at first, and is a

grub at last. In all his life he has never bred a single

butterfly.

 

The father of this pleasant grandfather, of the neighbourhood of

Mount Pleasant, was a horny-skinned, two-legged, money-getting

species of spider who spun webs to catch unwary flies and retired

into holes until they were entrapped. The name of this old pagan’s

god was Compound Interest. He lived for it, married it, died of

it. Meeting with a heavy loss in an honest little enterprise in

which all the loss was intended to have been on the other side, he

broke something—something necessary to his existence, therefore it

couldn’t have been his heart—and made an end of his career. As

his character was not good, and he had been bred at a charity

school in a complete course, according to question and answer, of

those ancient people the Amorites and Hittites, he was frequently

quoted as an example of the failure of education.

 

His spirit shone through his son, to whom he had always preached of

“going out” early in life and whom he made a clerk in a sharp

scrivener’s office at twelve years old. There the young gentleman

improved his mind, which was of a lean and anxious character, and

developing the family gifts, gradually elevated himself into the

discounting profession. Going out early in life and marrying late,

as his father had done before him, he too begat a lean and anxious-minded son, who in his turn, going out early in life and marrying

late, became the father of Bartholomew and Judith Smallweed, twins.

During the whole time consumed in the slow growth of this family

tree, the house of Smallweed, always early to go out and late to

marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has

discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books, fairy-tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever.

Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born to it and

that the complete little men and women whom it has produced have

been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something

depressing on their minds.

 

At the present time, in the dark little parlour certain feet below

the level of the street—a grim, hard, uncouth parlour, only

ornamented with the coarsest of baize table-covers, and the hardest

of sheet-iron tea-trays, and offering in its decorative character

no bad allegorical representation of Grandfather Smallweed’s mind—

seated in two black horsehair porter’s chairs, one on each side of

the fire-place, the superannuated Mr. and Mrs. Smallweed while away

the rosy hours. On the stove are a couple of trivets for the pots

and kettles which it is Grandfather Smallweed’s usual occupation to

watch, and projecting from the chimney-piece between them is a sort

of brass gallows for roasting, which he also superintends when it

is in action. Under the venerable Mr. Smallweed’s seat and guarded

by his spindle legs is a drawer in his chair, reported to contain

property to a fabulous amount. Beside him is a spare cushion with

which he is always provided in order that he may have something to

throw at the venerable partner of his respected age whenever she

makes an allusion to money—a subject on which he is particularly

sensitive.

 

“And where’s Bart?” Grandfather Smallweed inquires of Judy, Bart’s

twin sister.

 

“He an’t come in yet,” says Judy.

 

“It’s his tea-time, isn’t it?”

 

“No.”

 

“How much do you mean to say it wants then?”

 

“Ten minutes.”

 

“Hey?”

 

“Ten minutes.” (Loud on the part of Judy.)

 

“Ho!” says Grandfather Smallweed. “Ten minutes.”

 

Grandmother Smallweed, who has been mumbling and shaking her head

at the trivets, hearing figures mentioned, connects them with money

and screeches like a horrible old parrot without any plumage, “Ten

ten-pound notes!”

 

Grandfather Smallweed immediately throws the cushion at her.

 

“Drat you, be quiet!” says the good old man.

 

The effect of this act of jaculation is twofold. It not only

doubles up Mrs. Smallweed’s head against the side of her porter’s

chair and causes her to present, when extricated by her

granddaughter, a highly unbecoming state of cap, but the necessary

exertion recoils on Mr. Smallweed himself, whom it throws back into

HIS porter’s chair like a broken puppet. The excellent old

gentleman being at these times a mere clothes-bag with a black

skull-cap on the top of it, does not present a very animated

appearance until he has undergone the two operations at the hands

of his granddaughter of being shaken up like a great bottle and

poked and punched like a great bolster. Some indication of a neck

being developed in him by these means, he and the sharer of his

life’s evening again fronting one another in their two porter’s

chairs, like a couple of sentinels long forgotten on their post by

the Black Serjeant, Death.

 

Judy the twin is worthy company for these associates. She is so

indubitably sister to Mr. Smallweed the younger that the two

kneaded into one would hardly make a young person of average

proportions, while she so happily exemplifies the before-mentioned

family likeness to the monkey tribe that attired in a spangled robe

and cap she might walk about the table-land on the top of a barrel-organ without exciting much remark as an unusual specimen. Under

existing circumstances, however, she is dressed in a plain, spare

gown of brown stuff.

 

Judy never owned a doll, never heard of Cinderella, never played at

any game. She once or twice fell into children’s company when she

was about ten years old, but the children couldn’t get on with

Judy, and Judy couldn’t get on with them. She seemed like an

animal of another species, and there was instinctive repugnance on

both sides. It is very doubtful whether Judy knows how to laugh.

She has so rarely seen the thing done that the probabilities are

strong the other way. Of anything like a youthful laugh, she

certainly can have no conception. If she were to try one, she

would find her teeth in her way, modelling that action of her face,

as she has unconsciously modelled all its other expressions, on her

pattern of sordid age. Such is Judy.

 

And her twin brother couldn’t wind up a top for his life. He knows

no more of Jack the Giant Killer or of Sinbad the Sailor than he

knows of the people in the stars. He could as soon play at leap-frog or at cricket as change into a cricket or a frog himself. But

he is so much the better off than his sister that on his narrow

world of fact an opening has dawned into such broader regions as

lie within the ken of Mr. Guppy. Hence his admiration and his

emulation of that shining enchanter.

 

Judy, with a gong-like clash and clatter, sets one of the sheet-iron tea-trays on the table and arranges cups and saucers. The

bread she puts on in an iron basket, and the butter (and not much

of it) in a small pewter plate. Grandfather Smallweed looks hard

after the tea as it is served out and asks Judy where the girl is.

 

“Charley, do you mean?” says Judy.

 

“Hey?” from Grandfather Smallweed.

 

“Charley, do you mean?”

 

This touches a spring in Grandmother Smallweed, who, chuckling as

usual at the trivets, cries, “Over the water! Charley over the

water, Charley over the water, over the water to Charley, Charley

over the water, over the water to Charley!” and becomes quite

energetic about it. Grandfather looks at the cushion but has not

sufficiently recovered his late exertion.

 

“Ha!” he says when there is silence. “If that’s her name. She

eats a deal. It would be better to allow her for her keep.”

 

Judy, with her brother’s wink, shakes her head and purses up her

mouth into no without saying it.

 

“No?” returns the old man. “Why not?”

 

“She’d want sixpence a day, and we can do it for less,” says Judy.

 

“Sure?”

 

Judy answers with a nod of deepest meaning and calls, as she

scrapes the butter on the loaf with every precaution against waste

and cuts it into slices, “You, Charley, where are you?” Timidly

obedient to the summons, a little girl in a rough apron and a large

bonnet, with her hands covered with soap and water and a scrubbing

brush in one of them, appears, and curtsys.

 

“What work are you about now?” says Judy, making an ancient snap at

her like a very sharp old beldame.

 

“I’m a-cleaning the upstairs back room, miss,” replies Charley.

 

“Mind you do it thoroughly, and don’t loiter. Shirking won’t do

for me. Make haste! Go along!” cries Judy with a stamp upon the

ground. “You girls are more trouble than you’re worth, by half.”

 

On this severe matron, as she returns to her task of scraping the

butter and cutting the bread, falls the shadow of her brother,

looking in at the window. For whom, knife and loaf in hand, she

opens the street-door.

 

“Aye, aye, Bart!” says