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

says to me seven

and sixpence? I know nothing about seven and sixpence. It is

impossible for me to pursue the subject with any consideration for

the man. I don’t go about asking busy people what seven and

sixpence is in Moorish—which I don’t understand. Why should I go

about asking them what seven and sixpence is in Money—which I

don’t understand?”

 

“Well,” said my guardian, by no means displeased with this artless

reply, “if you come to any kind of journeying with Rick, you must

borrow the money of me (never breathing the least allusion to that

circumstance), and leave the calculation to him.”

 

“My dear Jarndyce,” returned Mr. Skimpole, “I will do anything to

give you pleasure, but it seems an idle form—a superstition.

Besides, I give you my word, Miss Clare and my dear Miss Summerson,

I thought Mr. Carstone was immensely rich. I thought he had only

to make over something, or to sign a bond, or a draft, or a cheque,

or a bill, or to put something on a file somewhere, to bring down a

shower of money.”

 

“Indeed it is not so, sir,” said Ada. “He is poor.”

 

“No, really?” returned Mr. Skimpole with his bright smile. “You

surprise me.”

 

“And not being the richer for trusting in a rotten reed,” said my

guardian, laying his hand emphatically on the sleeve of Mr.

Skimpole’s dressing-gown, “be you very careful not to encourage him

in that reliance, Harold.”

 

“My dear good friend,” returned Mr. Skimpole, “and my dear Miss

Simmerson, and my dear Miss Clare, how can I do that? It’s

business, and I don’t know business. It is he who encourages me.

He emerges from great feats of business, presents the brightest

prospects before me as their result, and calls upon me to admire

them. I do admire them—as bright prospects. But I know no more

about them, and I tell him so.”

 

The helpless kind of candour with which he presented this before

us, the light-hearted manner in which he was amused by his

innocence, the fantastic way in which he took himself under his own

protection and argued about that curious person, combined with the

delightful ease of everything he said exactly to make out my

guardian’s case. The more I saw of him, the more unlikely it

seemed to me, when he was present, that he could design, conceal,

or influence anything; and yet the less likely that appeared when

he was not present, and the less agreeable it was to think of his

having anything to do with any one for whom I cared.

 

Hearing that his examination (as he called it) was now over, Mr.

Skimpole left the room with a radiant face to fetch his daughters

(his sons had run away at various times), leaving my guardian quite

delighted by the manner in which he had vindicated his childish

character. He soon came back, bringing with him the three young

ladies and Mrs. Skimpole, who had once been a beauty but was now a

delicate high-nosed invalid suffering under a complication of

disorders.

 

“This,” said Mr. Skimpole, “is my Beauty daughter, Arethusa—plays

and sings odds and ends like her father. This is my Sentiment

daughter, Laura—plays a little but don’t sing. This is my Comedy

daughter, Kitty—sings a little but don’t play. We all draw a

little and compose a little, and none of us have any idea of time

or money.”

 

Mrs. Skimpole sighed, I thought, as if she would have been glad to

strike out this item in the family attainments. I also thought

that she rather impressed her sigh upon my guardian and that she

took every opportunity of throwing in another.

 

“It is pleasant,” said Mr. Skimpole, turning his sprightly eyes

from one to the other of us, “and it is whimsically interesting to

trace peculiarities in families. In this family we are all

children, and I am the youngest.”

 

The daughters, who appeared to be very fond of him, were amused by

this droll fact, particularly the Comedy daughter.

 

“My dears, it is true,” said Mr. Skimpole, “is it not? So it is,

and so it must be, because like the dogs in the hymn, ‘it is our

nature to.’ Now, here is Miss Summerson with a fine administrative

capacity and a knowledge of details perfectly surprising. It will

sound very strange in Miss Summerson’s ears, I dare say, that we

know nothing about chops in this house. But we don’t, not the

least. We can’t cook anything whatever. A needle and thread we

don’t know how to use. We admire the people who possess the

practical wisdom we want, but we don’t quarrel with them. Then why

should they quarrel with us? Live and let live, we say to them.

Live upon your practical wisdom, and let us live upon you!”

 

He laughed, but as usual seemed quite candid and really to mean

what he said.

 

“We have sympathy, my roses,” said Mr. Skimpole, “sympathy for

everything. Have we not?”

 

“Oh, yes, papa!” cried the three daughters.

 

“In fact, that is our family department,” said Mr. Skimpole, “in

this hurly-burly of life. We are capable of looking on and of

being interested, and we DO look on, and we ARE interested. What

more can we do? Here is my Beauty daughter, married these three

years. Now I dare say her marrying another child, and having two

more, was all wrong in point of political economy, but it was very

agreeable. We had our little festivities on those occasions and

exchanged social ideas. She brought her young husband home one

day, and they and their young fledglings have their nest upstairs.

I dare say at some time or other Sentiment and Comedy will bring

THEIR husbands home and have THEIR nests upstairs too. So we get

on, we don’t know how, but somehow.”

 

She looked very young indeed to be the mother of two children, and

I could not help pitying both her and them. It was evident that

the three daughters had grown up as they could and had had just as

little haphazard instruction as qualified them to be their father’s

playthings in his idlest hours. His pictorial tastes were

consulted, I observed, in their respective styles of wearing their

hair, the Beauty daughter being in the classic manner, the

Sentiment daughter luxuriant and flowing, and the Comedy daughter

in the arch style, with a good deal of sprightly forehead, and

vivacious little curls dotted about the corners of her eyes. They

were dressed to correspond, though in a most untidy and negligent

way.

 

Ada and I conversed with these young ladies and found them

wonderfully like their father. In the meanwhile Mr. Jarndyce (who

had been rubbing his head to a great extent, and hinted at a change

in the wind) talked with Mrs. Skimpole in a corner, where we could

not help hearing the chink of money. Mr. Skimpole had previously

volunteered to go home with us and had withdrawn to dress himself

for the purpose.

 

“My roses,” he said when he came back, “take care of mama. She is

poorly to-day. By going home with Mr. Jarndyce for a day or two, I

shall hear the larks sing and preserve my amiability. It has been

tried, you know, and would be tried again if I remained at home.”

 

“That bad man!” said the Comedy daughter.

 

“At the very time when he knew papa was lying ill by his

wallflowers, looking at the blue sky,” Laura complained.

 

“And when the smell of hay was in the air!” said Arethusa.

 

“It showed a want of poetry in the man,” Mr. Skimpole assented, but

with perfect good humour. “It was coarse. There was an absence of

the finer touches of humanity in it! My daughters have taken great

offence,” he explained to us, “at an honest man—”

 

“Not honest, papa. Impossible!” they all three protested.

 

“At a rough kind of fellow—a sort of human hedgehog rolled up,”

said Mr. Skimpole, “who is a baker in this neighbourhood and from

whom we borrowed a couple of arm-chairs. We wanted a couple of arm-chairs, and we hadn’t got them, and therefore of course we looked

to a man who HAD got them, to lend them. Well! This morose person

lent them, and we wore them out. When they were worn out, he

wanted them back. He had them back. He was contented, you will

say. Not at all. He objected to their being worn. I reasoned

with him, and pointed out his mistake. I said, ‘Can you, at your

time of life, be so headstrong, my friend, as to persist that an

arm-chair is a thing to put upon a shelf and look at? That it is

an object to contemplate, to survey from a distance, to consider

from a point of sight? Don’t you KNOW that these arm-chairs were

borrowed to be sat upon?’ He was unreasonable and unpersuadable

and used intemperate language. Being as patient as I am at this

minute, I addressed another appeal to him. I said, ‘Now, my good

man, however our business capacities may vary, we are all children

of one great mother, Nature. On this blooming summer morning here

you see me’ (I was on the sofa) ‘with flowers before me, fruit upon

the table, the cloudless sky above me, the air full of fragrance,

contemplating Nature. I entreat you, by our common brotherhood,

not to interpose between me and a subject so sublime, the absurd

figure of an angry baker!’ But he did,” said Mr. Skimpole, raising

his laughing eyes in playful astonishment; “he did interpose that

ridiculous figure, and he does, and he will again. And therefore I

am very glad to get out of his way and to go home with my friend

Jarndyce.”

 

It seemed to escape his consideration that Mrs. Skimpole and the

daughters remained behind to encounter the baker, but this was so

old a story to all of them that it had become a matter of course.

He took leave of his family with a tenderness as airy and graceful

as any other aspect in which he showed himself and rode away with

us in perfect harmony of mind. We had an opportunity of seeing

through some open doors, as we went downstairs, that his own

apartment was a palace to the rest of the house.

 

I could have no anticipation, and I had none, that something very

startling to me at the moment, and ever memorable to me in what

ensued from it, was to happen before this day was out. Our guest

was in such spirits on the way home that I could do nothing but

listen to him and wonder at him; nor was I alone in this, for Ada

yielded to the same fascination. As to my guardian, the wind,

which had threatened to become fixed in the east when we left

Somers Town, veered completely round before we were a couple of

miles from it.

 

Whether of questionable childishness or not in any other matters,

Mr. Skimpole had a child’s enjoyment of change and bright weather.

In no way wearied by his sallies on the road, he was in the

drawing-room before any of us; and I heard him at the piano while I

was yet looking after my housekeeping, singing refrains of

barcaroles and drinking songs, Italian and German, by the score.

 

We were all assembled shortly before dinner, and he was still at

the piano idly picking out in his luxurious way little strains of

music, and talking between whiles of finishing some sketches of the

ruined old Verulam wall to-morrow, which he had begun a year or two

ago and had got tired of, when a card was brought in