Bleak House, Charles Dickens [the beginning after the end novel read .txt] 📗

CHAPTER XXXVIII

A Struggle

 

When our time came for returning to Bleak House again, we were

punctual to the day and were received with an overpowering welcome.

I was perfectly restored to health and strength, and finding my

housekeeping keys laid ready for me in my room, rang myself in as

if I had been a new year, with a merry little peal. “Once more,

duty, duty, Esther,” said I; “and if you are not overjoyed to do

it, more than cheerfully and contentedly, through anything and

everything, you ought to be. That’s all I have to say to you, my

dear!”

 

The first few mornings were mornings of so much bustle and

business, devoted to such settlements of accounts, such repeated

journeys to and fro between the growlery and all other parts of the

house, so many rearrangements of drawers and presses, and such a

general new beginning altogether, that I had not a moment’s

leisure. But when these arrangements were completed and everything

was in order, I paid a visit of a few hours to London, which

something in the letter I had destroyed at Chesney Wold had induced

me to decide upon in my own mind.

 

I made Caddy Jellyby—her maiden name was so natural to me that I

always called her by it—the pretext for this visit and wrote her a

note previously asking the favour of her company on a little

business expedition. Leaving home very early in the morning, I got

to London by stagecoach in such good time that I got to Newman

Street with the day before me.

 

Caddy, who had not seen me since her wedding-day, was so glad and

so affectionate that I was half inclined to fear I should make her

husband jealous. But he was, in his way, just as bad—I mean as

good; and in short it was the old story, and nobody would leave me

any possibility of doing anything meritorious.

 

The elder Mr. Turveydrop was in bed, I found, and Caddy was milling

his chocolate, which a melancholy little boy who was an apprentice

—it seemed such a curious thing to be apprenticed to the trade of

dancing—was waiting to carry upstairs. Her father-in-law was

extremely kind and considerate, Caddy told me, and they lived most

happily together. (When she spoke of their living together, she

meant that the old gentleman had all the good things and all the

good lodging, while she and her husband had what they could get,

and were poked into two corner rooms over the Mews.)

 

“And how is your mama, Caddy?” said I.

 

“Why, I hear of her, Esther,” replied Caddy, “through Pa, but I see

very little of her. We are good friends, I am glad to say, but Ma

thinks there is something absurd in my having married a dancing-master, and she is rather afraid of its extending to her.”

 

It struck me that if Mrs. Jellyby had discharged her own natural

duties and obligations before she swept the horizon with a

telescope in search of others, she would have taken the best

precautions against becoming absurd, but I need scarcely observe

that I kept this to myself.

 

“And your papa, Caddy?”

 

“He comes here every evening,” returned Caddy, “and is so fond of

sitting in the corner there that it’s a treat to see him.”

 

Looking at the corner, I plainly perceived the mark of Mr.

Jellyby’s head against the wall. It was consolatory to know that

he had found such a resting-place for it.

 

“And you, Caddy,” said I, “you are always busy, I’ll be bound?”

 

“Well, my dear,” returned Caddy, “I am indeed, for to tell you a

grand secret, I am qualifying myself to give lessons. Prince’s

health is not strong, and I want to be able to assist him. What

with schools, and classes here, and private pupils, AND the

apprentices, he really has too much to do, poor fellow!”

 

The notion of the apprentices was still so odd to me that I asked

Caddy if there were many of them.

 

“Four,” said Caddy. “One in-door, and three out. They are very

good children; only when they get together they WILL play—

children-like—instead of attending to their work. So the little

boy you saw just now waltzes by himself in the empty kitchen, and

we distribute the others over the house as well as we can.”

 

“That is only for their steps, of course?” said I.

 

“Only for their steps,” said Caddy. “In that way they practise, so

many hours at a time, whatever steps they happen to be upon. They

dance in the academy, and at this time of year we do figures at

five every morning.”

 

“Why, what a laborious life!” I exclaimed.

 

“I assure you, my dear,” returned Caddy, smiling, “when the out-door apprentices ring us up in the morning (the bell rings into our

room, not to disturb old Mr. Turveydrop), and when I put up the

window and see them standing on the door-step with their little

pumps under their arms, I am actually reminded of the Sweeps.”

 

All this presented the art to me in a singular light, to be sure.

Caddy enjoyed the effect of her communication and cheerfully

recounted the particulars of her own studies.

 

“You see, my dear, to save expense I ought to know something of the

piano, and I ought to know something of the kit too, and

consequently I have to practise those two instruments as well as

the details of our profession. If Ma had been like anybody else, I

might have had some little musical knowledge to begin upon.

However, I hadn’t any; and that part of the work is, at first, a

little discouraging, I must allow. But I have a very good ear, and

I am used to drudgery—I have to thank Ma for that, at all events—

and where there’s a will there’s a way, you know, Esther, the world

over.” Saying these words, Caddy laughingly sat down at a little

jingling square piano and really rattled off a quadrille with great

spirit. Then she good-humouredly and blushingly got up again, and

while she still laughed herself, said, “Don’t laugh at me, please;

that’s a dear girl!”

 

I would sooner have cried, but I did neither. I encouraged her and

praised her with all my heart. For I conscientiously believed,

dancing-master’s wife though she was, and dancing-mistress though

in her limited ambition she aspired to be, she had struck out a

natural, wholesome, loving course of industry and perseverance that

was quite as good as a mission.

 

“My dear,” said Caddy, delighted, “you can’t think how you cheer

me. I shall owe you, you don’t know how much. What changes,

Esther, even in my small world! You recollect that first night,

when I was so unpolite and inky? Who would have thought, then, of

my ever teaching people to dance, of all other possibilities and

impossibilities!”

 

Her husband, who had left us while we had this chat, now coming

back, preparatory to exercising the apprentices in the ball-room,

Caddy informed me she was quite at my disposal. But it was not my

time yet, I was glad to tell her, for I should have been vexed to

take her away then. Therefore we three adjourned to the

apprentices together, and I made one in the dance.

 

The apprentices were the queerest little people. Besides the

melancholy boy, who, I hoped, had not been made so by waltzing

alone in the empty kitchen, there were two other boys and one dirty

little limp girl in a gauzy dress. Such a precocious little girl,

with such a dowdy bonnet on (that, too, of a gauzy texture), who

brought her sandalled shoes in an old threadbare velvet reticule.

Such mean little boys, when they were not dancing, with string, and

marbles, and cramp-bones in their pockets, and the most untidy legs

and feet—and heels particularly.

 

I asked Caddy what had made their parents choose this profession

for them. Caddy said she didn’t know; perhaps they were designed

for teachers, perhaps for the stage. They were all people in

humble circumstances, and the melancholy boy’s mother kept a

ginger-beer shop.

 

We danced for an hour with great gravity, the melancholy child

doing wonders with his lower extremities, in which there appeared

to be some sense of enjoyment though it never rose above his waist.

Caddy, while she was observant of her husband and was evidently

founded upon him, had acquired a grace and self-possession of her

own, which, united to her pretty face and figure, was uncommonly

agreeable. She already relieved him of much of the instruction of

these young people, and he seldom interfered except to walk his

part in the figure if he had anything to do in it. He always

played the tune. The affectation of the gauzy child, and her

condescension to the boys, was a sight. And thus we danced an hour

by the clock.

 

When the practice was concluded, Caddy’s husband made himself ready

to go out of town to a school, and Caddy ran away to get ready to

go out with me. I sat in the ball-room in the interval,

contemplating the apprentices. The two out-door boys went upon the

staircase to put on their half-boots and pull the in-door boy’s

hair, as I judged from the nature of his objections. Returning

with their jackets buttoned and their pumps stuck in them, they

then produced packets of cold bread and meat and bivouacked under a

painted lyre on the wall. The little gauzy child, having whisked

her sandals into the reticule and put on a trodden-down pair of

shoes, shook her head into the dowdy bonnet at one shake, and

answering my inquiry whether she liked dancing by replying, “Not

with boys,” tied it across her chin, and went home contemptuous.

 

“Old Mr. Turveydrop is so sorry,” said Caddy, “that he has not

finished dressing yet and cannot have the pleasure of seeing you

before you go. You are such a favourite of his, Esther.”

 

I expressed myself much obliged to him, but did not think it

necessary to add that I readily dispensed with this attention.

 

“It takes him a long time to dress,” said Caddy, “because he is

very much looked up to in such things, you know, and has a

reputation to support. You can’t think how kind he is to Pa. He

talks to Pa of an evening about the Prince Regent, and I never saw

Pa so interested.”

 

There was something in the picture of Mr. Turveydrop bestowing his

deportment on Mr. Jellyby that quite took my fancy. I asked Caddy

if he brought her papa out much.

 

“No,” said Caddy, “I don’t know that he does that, but he talks to

Pa, and Pa greatly admires him, and listens, and likes it. Of

course I am aware that Pa has hardly any claims to deportment, but

they get on together delightfully. You can’t think what good

companions they make. I never saw Pa take snuff before in my life,

but he takes one pinch out of Mr. Turveydrop’s box regularly and

keeps putting it to his nose and taking it away again all the

evening.”

 

That old Mr. Turveydrop should ever, in the chances and changes of

life, have come to the rescue of Mr. Jellyby from Borrioboola-Gha

appeared to me to be one of the pleasantest of oddities.

 

“As to Peepy,” said Caddy with a little