A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Oprah's Book Club) (85 page)

I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit in the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron pigtail, we went up-stairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers’s room, seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher—a large pale puffed swollen man—was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers’s coffers. “Getting evidence together,” said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, “for the Bailey.” In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased—and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers’s own use.

This was all the establishment. When we went down stairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian’s room, and said, “This you’ve seen already.”

“Pray,” said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, “whose likenesses are those?”

“These?” said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. “These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a world of credit. This chap (why you must have come down in the night and been peeping into the inkstand, to get this blot upon your eyebrow, you old rascal!) murdered his master, and, considering that he wasn’t brought up to evidence, didn’t plan it badly.”

“Is it like him?” I asked, recoiling from the brute, as Wemmick spat upon his eyebrow and gave it a rub with his sleeve.

“Like him? It’s himself, you know. The cast was made in Newgate, directly after he was taken down. You had a particular fancy for me, hadn’t you, Old Artful?” said Wemmick. He then explained this affectionate apostrophe, by touching his brooch representing the lady and the weeping willow at the tomb with an urn upon it, and saying, “Had it made for me express!”

“Is the lady anybody?” said I.

“No,” returned Wemmick. “Only his game. (You liked your bit of game, didn’t you?) No; deuce a bit of a lady in the case, Mr. Pip, except one—and she wasn’t of this slender lady-like sort, and you wouldn’t have caught
her
looking after this urn—unless there was something to drink in it.” Wemmick’s attention being thus directed to his brooch, he put down the cast, and polished the brooch with his pocket-handkerchief.

“Did that other creature come to the same end?” I asked. “He has the same look.”

“You’re right,” said Wemmick; “it’s the genuine look. Much as if one nostril was caught up with a horsehair and a little fishhook. Yes, he came to the same end; quite the natural end here, I assure you. He forged wills, this blade did, if he didn’t also put the supposed testators to sleep too. You were a gentlemanly Cove, though” (Mr. Wemmick was again apostrophising), “and you said you could write Greek. Yah, Bounceable! What a liar you were. I never met such a liar as you!” Before putting his late friend on his shelf again, Wemmick touched the largest of his mourning rings, and said, “Sent out to buy it for me, only the day before.”

While he was putting up the other cast and coming down from the chair, the thought crossed my mind that all his personal jewellery was derived from like sources. As he had shown no diffidence on the subject, I ventured on the liberty of asking him the question, when he stood before me, dusting his hands.

“Oh yes,” he returned, “these are all gifts of that kind. One brings another, you see; that’s the way of it. I always take ’em. They’re curiosities. And they’re property. They may not be worth much, but, after all, they’re property and portable. It don’t signify to you with your brilliant lookout, but as to myself, my guiding-star always is, ‘Get hold of portable property.’”

When I had rendered homage to this light, he went on to say, in a friendly manner:

“If at any odd time when you have nothing better to do, you wouldn’t mind coming over to see me at Walworth, I could offer you a bed, and I should consider it an honour. I have not much to show you; but such two or three curiosities as I have got, you might like to look over; and I am fond of a bit of garden and a summer-house.”

I said I should be delighted to accept his hospitality.

“Thankee,” said he; “then we’ll consider that it’s to come off, when convenient to you. Have you dined with Mr. Jaggers yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Well,” said Wemmick, “he’ll give you wine, and good wine. I’ll give you punch, and not bad punch. And now I’ll tell you something. When you go to dine with Mr. Jaggers, look at his housekeeper.”

“Shall I see something very uncommon?”

“Well,” said Wemmick, “you’ll see a wild beast tamed. Not so very uncommon, you’ll tell me. I reply, that depends on the original wildness of the beast, and the amount of taming. It won’t lower your opinion of Mr. Jaggers’s powers. Keep your eye on it.”

I told him I would do so, with all the interest and curiosity that his preparation awakened. As I was taking my departure, he asked me if I would like to devote five minutes to seeing Mr. Jaggers “at it?”

For several reasons, and not least because I didn’t clearly know what Mr. Jaggers would be found to be “at,” I replied in the affirmative. We dived into the City, and came up in a crowded police-court, where a blood-relation (in the murderous sense) of the deceased with the fanciful taste in brooches, was standing at the bar, uncomfortably chewing something; while my guardian had a woman under examination or cross-examination—I don’t know which—and was striking her, and the bench, and everybody present, with awe. If anybody, of whatsoever degree, said a word that he didn’t approve of, he instantly required to have it “taken down.” If anybody wouldn’t make an admission, he said, “I’ll have it out of you!” and if anybody made an admission, he said, “Now I have got you!” The magistrates shivered under a single bite of his finger. Thieves and thief-takers hung in dread rapture on his words, and shrank when a hair of his eyebrows turned in their direction. Which side he was on, I couldn’t make out, for he seemed to me to be grinding the whole place in a mill; I only know that when I stole out on tiptoe, he was not on the side of the bench; for, he was making the legs of the old gentleman who presided, quite convulsive under the table, by his denunciations of his conduct as the representative of British law and justice in that chair that day.

Bentley Drummle, who was so sulky a fellow that he even took up a book as if its writer had done him an injury, did not take up an acquaintance in a more agreeable spirit. Heavy in figure, movement, and comprehension—in the sluggish complexion of his face, and in the large awkward tongue that seemed to loll about in his mouth as he himself lolled about in a room—he was idle, proud, niggardly, reserved, and suspicious. He came of rich people down in Somersetshire, who had nursed this combination of qualities until they made the discovery that it was just of age and a blockhead. Thus, Bentley Drummle had come to Mr. Pocket when he was a head taller than that gentleman, and half a dozen heads thicker than most gentlemen.

Startop had been spoilt by a weak mother and kept at home when he ought to have been at school, but he was devotedly attached to her, and admired her beyond measure. He had a woman’s delicacy of feature, and was—“as you may see, though you never saw her,” said Herbert to me—exactly like his mother. It was but natural that I should take to him much more kindly than to Drummle, and that, even in the earliest evenings of our boating, he and I should pull homeward abreast of one another, conversing from boat to boat, while Bentley Drummle came up in our wake alone, under the overhanging banks and among the rushes. He would always creep inshore like some uncomfortable amphibious creature, even when the tide would have sent him fast upon his way; and I always think of him as coming after us in the dark or by the back-water, when our own two boats were breaking the sunset or the moonlight in midstream.

Herbert was my intimate companion and friend. I presented him with a half-share in my boat, which was the occasion of his often coming down to Hammersmith; and my possession of a half-share in his chambers often took me up to London. We used to walk between the two places at all hours. I have an affection for the road yet (though it is not so pleasant a road as it was then), formed in the impressibility of untried youth and hope.

When I had been in Mr. Pocket’s family a month or two, Mr. and Mrs. Camilla turned up. Camilla was Mr. Pocket’s sister. Georgiana, whom I had seen at Miss Havisham’s on the same occasion, also turned up. She was a cousin—an indigestive single woman, who called her rigidity religion, and her liver love. These people hated me with the hatred of cupidity and disappointment. As a matter of course, they fawned upon me in my prosperity with the basest meanness. Towards Mr. Pocket, as a grown-up infant with no notion of his own interests, they showed the complacent forbearance I had heard them express. Mrs. Pocket they held in contempt; but they allowed the poor soul to have been heavily disappointed in life, because that shed a feeble reflected light upon themselves.

These were the surroundings among which I settled down, and applied myself to my education. I soon contracted expensive habits, and began to spend an amount of money that within a few short months I should have thought almost fabulous; but through good and evil I stuck to my books. There was no other merit in this, than my having sense enough to feel my deficiences. Between Mr. Pocket and Herbert I got on fast; and, with one or the other always at my elbow to give me the start I wanted, and clear obstructions out of my road, I must have been as great a dolt as Drummle if I had done less.

I had not seen Mr. Wemmick for some weeks, when I thought I would write him a note and propose to go home with him on a certain evening. He replied that it would give him much pleasure, and that he would expect me at the office at six o’clock. Thither I went, and there I found him, putting the key of the safe down his back as the clock struck.

“Did you think of walking down to Walworth?” said he.

“Certainly,” said I, “if you approve.”

“Very much,” was Wemmick’s reply, “for I have had my legs under the desk all day, and shall be glad to stretch them. Now, I’ll tell you what I have got for supper, Mr. Pip. I have got a stewed steak—which is of home preparation—and a cold roast fowl—which is from the cook’s-shop. I think it’s tender, because the master of the shop was a Juryman in some cases of ours the other day, and we let him down easy. I reminded him of it when I bought the fowl, and I said, ‘Pick us out a good one, old Briton, because if we had chosen to keep you in the box another day or two, we could easily have done it.’ He said to that, ‘Let me make you a present of the best fowl in the shop.’ I let him, of course. As far as it goes, it’s property and portable. You don’t object to an aged parent, I hope?”

I really thought he was still speaking of the fowl, until he added, “Because I have got an aged parent at my place.” I then said what politeness required.

“So you haven’t dined with Mr. Jaggers yet?” he pursued, as we walked along.

“Not yet.”

“He told me so this afternoon when he heard you were coming. I expect you’ll have an invitation to-morrow. He’s going to ask your pals, too. Three of ’em; ain’t there?”

Although I was not in the habit of counting Drummle as one of my intimate associates, I answered, “Yes.”

“Well, he’s going to ask the whole gang;” I hardly felt complimented by the word; “and whatever he gives you, he’ll give you good. Don’t look forward to variety, but you’ll have excellence. And there’s another rum thing in his house,” proceeded Wemmick, after a moment’s pause, as if the remark followed on the housekeeper understood; “he never lets a door or window be fastened at night.”

“Is he never robbed?”

“That’s it!” returned Wemmick. “He says, and gives it out publicly, ‘I want to see the man who’ll rob
me.
’ Lord bless you, I have heard him, a hundred times if I have heard him once, say to regular cracksmen in our front office, ‘You know where I live; now, no bolt is ever drawn there; why don’t you do a stroke of business with me? Come; can’t I tempt you?’ Not a man of them, sir, would be bold enough to try it on, for love or money.”

“They dread him so much?” said I.

“Dread him,” said Wemmick. “I believe you they dread him. Not but what he’s artful, even in his defiance of them. No silver, sir. Britannia metal, every spoon.”

“So they wouldn’t have much,” I observed, “even if they—”

“Ah! But
he
would have much,” said Wemmick, cutting me short, “and they know it. He’d have their lives, and the lives of scores of ’em. He’d have all he could get. And it’s impossible to say what he couldn’t get, if he gave his mind to it.”

I was falling into meditation on my guardian’s greatness, when Wemmick remarked:

“As to the absence of plate, that’s only his natural depth, you know. A river’s its natural depth, and he’s his natural depth. Look at his watch-chain. That’s real enough.”

“It’s very massive,” said I.

“Massive?” repeated Wemmick. “I think so. And his watch is a gold repeater, and worth a hundred pound if it’s worth a penny. Mr. Pip, there are about seven hundred thieves in this town who know all about that watch; there’s not a man, a woman, or a child, among them, who wouldn’t identify the smallest link in that chain, and drop it as if it was red-hot, if inveigled into touching it.”