Bleak House, Charles Dickens [the beginning after the end novel read .txt] 📗
- Author: Charles Dickens
- Performer: 0141439726
Book online «Bleak House, Charles Dickens [the beginning after the end novel read .txt] 📗». Author Charles Dickens
let us in a spirit of love inquire what is that Terewth to which I
have alluded. For, my young friends,” suddenly addressing the
‘prentices and Guster, to their consternation, “if I am told by the
doctor that calomel or castor-oil is good for me, I may naturally
ask what is calomel, and what is castor-oil. I may wish to be
informed of that before I dose myself with either or with both.
Now, my young friends, what is this Terewth then? Firstly (in a
spirit of love), what is the common sort of Terewth—the working
clothes—the every-day wear, my young friends? Is it deception?”
“Ah—h!” from Mrs. Snagsby.
“Is it suppression?”
A shiver in the negative from Mrs. Snagsby.
“Is it reservation?”
A shake of the head from Mrs. Snagsby—very long and very tight.
“No, my friends, it is neither of these. Neither of these names
belongs to it. When this young heathen now among us—who is now,
my friends, asleep, the seal of indifference and perdition being
set upon his eyelids; but do not wake him, for it is right that I
should have to wrestle, and to combat and to struggle, and to
conquer, for his sake—when this young hardened heathen told us a
story of a cock, and of a bull, and of a lady, and of a sovereign,
was THAT the Terewth? No. Or if it was partly, was it wholly and
entirely? No, my friends, no!”
If Mr. Snagsby could withstand his little woman’s look as it enters
at his eyes, the windows of his soul, and searches the whole
tenement, he were other than the man he is. He cowers and droops.
“Or, my juvenile friends,” says Chadband, descending to the level
of their comprehension with a very obtrusive demonstration in his
greasily meek smile of coming a long way downstairs for the
purpose, “if the master of this house was to go forth into the city
and there see an eel, and was to come back, and was to call unto
him the mistress of this house, and was to say, ‘Sarah, rejoice
with me, for I have seen an elephant!’ would THAT be Terewth?”
Mrs. Snagsby in tears.
“Or put it, my juvenile friends, that he saw an elephant, and
returning said ‘Lo, the city is barren, I have seen but an eel,’
would THAT be Terewth?”
Mrs. Snagsby sobbing loudly.
“Or put it, my juvenile friends,” said Chadband, stimulated by the
sound, “that the unnatural parents of this slumbering heathen—for
parents he had, my juvenile friends, beyond a doubt—after casting
him forth to the wolves and the vultures, and the wild dogs and the
young gazelles, and the serpents, went back to their dwellings and
had their pipes, and their pots, and their flutings and their
dancings, and their malt liquors, and their butcher’s meat and
poultry, would THAT be Terewth?”
Mrs. Snagsby replies by delivering herself a prey to spasms, not an
unresisting prey, but a crying and a tearing one, so that Cook’s
Court re-echoes with her shrieks. Finally, becoming cataleptic,
she has to be carried up the narrow staircase like a grand piano.
After unspeakable suffering, productive of the utmost consternation,
she is pronounced, by expresses from the bedroom, free from pain,
though much exhausted, in which state of affairs Mr. Snagsby,
trampled and crushed in the pianoforte removal, and extremely
timid and feeble, ventures to come out from behind the door in
the drawing-room.
All this time Jo has been standing on the spot where he woke up,
ever picking his cap and putting bits of fur in his mouth. He
spits them out with a remorseful air, for he feels that it is in
his nature to be an unimprovable reprobate and that it’s no good
HIS trying to keep awake, for HE won’t never know nothink. Though
it may be, Jo, that there is a history so interesting and affecting
even to minds as near the brutes as thine, recording deeds done on
this earth for common men, that if the Chadbands, removing their
own persons from the light, would but show it thee in simple
reverence, would but leave it unimproved, would but regard it as
being eloquent enough without their modest aid—it might hold thee
awake, and thou might learn from it yet!
Jo never heard of any such book. Its compilers and the Reverend
Chadband are all one to him, except that he knows the Reverend
Chadband and would rather run away from him for an hour than hear
him talk for five minutes. “It an’t no good my waiting here no
longer,” thinks Jo. “Mr. Snagsby an’t a-going to say nothink to me
to-night.” And downstairs he shuffles.
But downstairs is the charitable Guster, holding by the handrail of
the kitchen stairs and warding off a fit, as yet doubtfully, the
same having been induced by Mrs. Snagsby’s screaming. She has her
own supper of bread and cheese to hand to Jo, with whom she
ventures to interchange a word or so for the first time.
“Here’s something to eat, poor boy,” says Guster.
“Thank’ee, mum,” says Jo.
“Are you hungry?”
“Jist!” says Jo.
“What’s gone of your father and your mother, eh?”
Jo stops in the middle of a bite and looks petrified. For this
orphan charge of the Christian saint whose shrine was at Tooting
has patted him on the shoulder, and it is the first time in his
life that any decent hand has been so laid upon him.
“I never know’d nothink about ‘em,” says Jo.
“No more didn’t I of mine,” cries Guster. She is repressing
symptoms favourable to the fit when she seems to take alarm at
something and vanishes down the stairs.
“Jo,” whispers the lawstationer softly as the boy lingers on the
step.
“Here I am, Mr. Snagsby!”
“I didn’t know you were gone—there’s another half-crown, Jo. It
was quite right of you to say nothing about the lady the other
night when we were out together. It would breed trouble. You
can’t be too quiet, Jo.”
“I am fly, master!”
And so, good night.
A ghostly shade, frilled and night-capped, follows the lawstationer to the room he came from and glides higher up. And
henceforth he begins, go where he will, to be attended by another
shadow than his own, hardly less constant than his own, hardly less
quiet than his own. And into whatsoever atmosphere of secrecy his
own shadow may pass, let all concerned in the secrecy beware! For
the watchful Mrs. Snagsby is there too—bone of his bone, flesh of
his flesh, shadow of his shadow.
Sharpshooters
Wintry morning, looking with dull eyes and sallow face upon the
neighbourhood of Leicester Square, finds its inhabitants unwilling
to get out of bed. Many of them are not early risers at the
brightest of times, being birds of night who roost when the sun is
high and are wide awake and keen for prey when the stars shine out.
Behind dingy blind and curtain, in upper story and garret, skulking
more or less under false names, false hair, false titles, false
jewellery, and false histories, a colony of brigands lie in their
first sleep. Gentlemen of the green-baize road who could discourse
from personal experience of foreign galleys and home treadmills;
spies of strong governments that eternally quake with weakness and
miserable fear, broken traitors, cowards, bullies, gamesters,
shufflers, swindlers, and false witnesses; some not unmarked by the
branding-iron beneath their dirty braid; all with more cruelty in
them than was in Nero, and more crime than is in Newgate. For
howsoever bad the devil can be in fustian or smock-frock (and he
can be very bad in both), he is a more designing, callous, and
intolerable devil when he sticks a pin in his shirt-front, calls
himself a gentleman, backs a card or colour, plays a game or so of
billiards, and knows a little about bills and promissory notes than
in any other form he wears. And in such form Mr. Bucket shall find
him, when he will, still pervading the tributary channels of
Leicester Square.
But the wintry morning wants him not and wakes him not. It wakes
Mr. George of the shooting gallery and his familiar. They arise,
roll up and stow away their mattresses. Mr. George, having shaved
himself before a looking-glass of minute proportions, then marches
out, bare-headed and bare-chested, to the pump in the little yard
and anon comes back shining with yellow soap, friction, drifting
rain, and exceedingly cold water. As he rubs himself upon a large
jack-towel, blowing like a military sort of diver just come up, his
hair curling tighter and tighter on his sunburnt temples the more
he rubs it so that it looks as if it never could be loosened by any
less coercive instrument than an iron rake or a curry-comb—as he
rubs, and puffs, and polishes, and blows, turning his head from
side to side the more conveniently to excoriate his throat, and
standing with his body well bent forward to keep the wet from his
martial legs, Phil, on his knees lighting a fire, looks round as if
it were enough washing for him to see all that done, and sufficient
renovation for one day to take in the superfluous health his master
throws off.
When Mr. George is dry, he goes to work to brush his head with two
hard brushes at once, to that unmerciful degree that Phil,
shouldering his way round the gallery in the act of sweeping it,
winks with sympathy. This chafing over, the ornamental part of Mr.
George’s toilet is soon performed. He fills his pipe, lights it,
and marches up and down smoking, as his custom is, while Phil,
raising a powerful odour of hot rolls and coffee, prepares
breakfast. He smokes gravely and marches in slow time. Perhaps
this morning’s pipe is devoted to the memory of Gridley in his
grave.
“And so, Phil,” says George of the shooting gallery after several
turns in silence, “you were dreaming of the country last night?”
Phil, by the by, said as much in a tone of surprise as he scrambled
out of bed.
“Yes, guv’ner.”
“What was it like?”
“I hardly know what it was like, guv’ner,” said Phil, considering.
“How did you know it was the country?”
“On account of the grass, I think. And the swans upon it,” says
Phil after further consideration.
“What were the swans doing on the grass?”
“They was a-eating of it, I expect,” says Phil.
The master resumes his march, and the man resumes his preparation
of breakfast. It is not necessarily a lengthened preparation,
being limited to the setting forth of very simple breakfast
requisites for two and the broiling of a rasher of bacon at the
fire in the rusty grate; but as Phil has to sidle round a
considerable part of the gallery for every object he wants, and
never brings two objects at once, it takes time under the
circumstances. At length the breakfast is ready. Phil announcing
it, Mr. George knocks the ashes out of his pipe on the hob, stands
his pipe itself in the chimney corner, and sits down to the meal.
When he has helped himself, Phil follows suit, sitting at the
extreme end of the little oblong table and taking his plate on his
knees. Either in humility, or to hide his blackened hands, or
because it is his natural manner of eating.
“The country,” says Mr. George, plying his knife and fork; “why, I
suppose you never clapped your eyes on the country, Phil?”
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