The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White)

by Lynn Shepherd

  And there he sits munching, and gnawing, and looking up at the great Cross on the summit of St. Paul’s Cathedral, glittering above a red and violet-tinted cloud of smoke. From the boy’s face one might suppose that sacred emblem to be, in his eyes, the crowning confusion of the great, confused city;—so golden, so high up, so far out of his reach. There he sits, the sun going down, the river running fast, the crowd flowing by him in two streams—everything moving on to some purpose and to one end—until he is stirred up, and told to “move on” too.

  *

  CHAPTER 20

  A NEW LODGER

  The long vacation saunters on towards term-time, like an idle river very leisurely strolling down a flat country to the sea. Mr. Guppy saunters along with it congenially. He has blunted the blade of his pen-knife, and broken the point off, by sticking that instrument into his desk in every direction. Not that he bears the desk any ill will, but he must do something, and it must be something of an unexciting nature, which will lay neither his physical nor his intellectual energies under too heavy contribution. He finds that nothing agrees with him so well, as to make little gyrations on one leg of his stool, and stab his desk, and gape.

  Kenge and Carboy are out of town, and the articled clerk has taken out a shooting license, and gone down to his father’s, and Mr. Guppy’s two fellow-stipendiaries are away on leave. Mr. Guppy, and Mr. Richard Carstone, divide the dignity of the office. But Mr. Carstone is for the time being established in Kenge’s room, whereat Mr. Guppy chafes. So exceedingly, that he with biting sarcasm informs his mother, in the confidential moments when he sups with her off a lobster and lettuce, in the Old Street Road, that he is afraid the office is hardly good enough for swells, and that if he had known there was a swell coming, he would have got it painted.

  Mr. Guppy suspects everybody who enters on the occupation of a stool in Kenge and Carboy’s office, of entertaining, as a matter of course, sinister designs upon him. He is clear that every such person wants to depose him. If he be ever asked how, why, when, or wherefore, he shuts up one eye and shakes his head. On the strength of these profound views, he in the most ingenious manner takes infinite pains to counter-plot, when there is no plot; and plays the deepest games of chess without any adversary.

  It is a source of much gratification to Mr. Guppy, therefore, to find the new-comer constantly poring over the papers in Jarndyce and Jarndyce; for he well knows that nothing but confusion and failure can come of that. His satisfaction communicates itself to a third saunterer through the long vacation in Kenge and Carboy’s office; to wit, Young Smallweed.

  Whether Young Smallweed (metaphorically called Small and eke Chick Weed, as it were jocularly to express a fledgling) was ever a boy, is much doubted in Lincoln’s Inn. He is now something under fifteen, and an old limb of the law. He is facetiously understood to entertain a passion for a lady at a cigar-shop, in the neighbourhood of Chancery Lane, and for her sake to have broken off a contract with another lady, to whom he had been engaged some years. He is a town-made article, of small stature and weazen features; but may be perceived from a considerable distance by means of his very tall hat. To become a Guppy is the object of his ambition. He dresses at that gentleman (by whom he is patronized), talks at him, walks at him, founds himself entirely on him. He is honoured with Mr. Guppy’s particular confidence, and occasionally advises him, from the deep wells of his experience, on difficult points in private life.

  Mr. Guppy has been lolling out of window all the morning, after trying all the stools in succession and finding none of them easy, and after several times putting his head into the iron safe with a notion of cooling it. Mr. Smallweed has been twice dispatched for effervescent drinks, and has twice mixed them in the two official tumblers and stirred them up with the ruler. Mr. Guppy propounds, for Mr. Smallweed’s consideration, the paradox that the more you drink the thirstier you are; and reclines his head upon the window-sill in a state of hopeless languor.

  While thus looking out into the shade of Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn, surveying the intolerable bricks and mortar, Mr. Guppy becomes conscious of a manly whisker emerging from the cloistered walk below, and turning itself up in the direction of his face. At the same time, a low whistle is wafted through the Inn, and a suppressed voice cries, “Hip! Gup-py!”

  “Why, you don’t mean it?” says Mr. Guppy, aroused. “Small! Here’s Jobling!” Small’s head looks out of window too, and nods to Jobling.

  “Where have you sprung up from?” inquires Mr. Guppy.

  “From the market-gardens down by Deptford. I can’t stand it any longer. I must enlist. I say! I wish you’d lend me half-a-crown. Upon my soul, I’m hungry.”

  Jobling looks hungry, and also has the appearance of having run to seed in the market-gardens down by Deptford.

  “I say! Just throw out half-a-crown, if you have got one to spare. I want to get some dinner.”

  “Will you come and dine with me?” says Mr. Guppy, throwing out the coin, which Mr. Jobling catches neatly.

  “How long should I have to hold out?” says Jobling.

  “Not half an hour. I am only waiting here till the enemy goes,” returns Mr. Guppy, butting inward with his head.

  “What enemy—?”

  “A new one. Going to be articled. Will you wait?”

  “Can you give a fellow anything to read in the meantime?” says Mr. Jobling.

  Smallweed suggests the Law List. But Mr. Jobling declares, with much earnestness, that he “can’t stand it.”

  “You shall have the paper,” says Mr. Guppy. “He shall bring it down. But you had better not be seen about here. Sit on our staircase and read, it’s a quiet place.”

  Jobling nods intelligence and acquiescence. The sagacious Smallweed supplies him with the newspaper, and occasionally drops his eye upon him from the landing as a precaution against his becoming disgusted with waiting, and making an untimely departure. At last the enemy retreats, and then Smallweed fetches Mr. Jobling up.

  “Well, and how are you?” says Mr. Guppy, shaking hands with him.

  “So, so. How are you?”

  Mr. Guppy replying that he is not much to boast of, Mr. Jobling ventures on the question, “How is she?” This Mr. Guppy resents as a liberty; retorting, “Jobling, there are chords in the human mind—” Jobling begs pardon.

  “Any subject but that!” says Mr. Guppy, with a gloomy enjoyment of his injury. “For there are chords, Jobling—”

  Mr. Jobling begs pardon again.

  During this short colloquy, the active Smallweed, who is of the dinner party, has written in legal characters on a slip of paper, “Return immediately.” This notification to all whom it may concern, he inserts in the letter-box; and then putting on the tall hat at the angle of inclination at which Mr. Guppy wears his, informs his patron that they may now make themselves scarce.

  Accordingly they betake themselves to a neighbouring dining-house, of the class known among its frequenters by the denomination Slap-Bang, where the waitress, a bouncing young female of forty, is supposed to have made some impression on the susceptible Smallweed; of whom it may be remarked that he is a weird changeling, to whom years are nothing. He stands precociously possessed of centuries of owlish wisdom. If he ever lay in a cradle, it seems as if he must have lain there in a tail-coat. He has an old, old eye, has Smallweed: and he drinks and smokes, in a monkeyish way; and his neck is stiff in his collar; and he is never to be taken in; and he knows all about it, whatever it is. In short, in his bringing up, he has been so nursed by Law and Equity that he has become a kind of fossil Imp, to account for whose terrestrial existence it is reported at the public offices that his father was John Doe, and his mother the only female member of the Roe family: also that his first long-clothes were made from a blue bag.

  Into the dining-house, unaffected by the seductive show in the window, of artificially whitened cauliflowers and poultry, verdant baskets of peas, coolly blooming cucumbers, and joints ready for the spit, Mr. Smallwe
ed leads the way. They know him there, and defer to him. He has his favourite box, he bespeaks all the papers, he is down upon bald patriarchs, who keep them more than ten minutes afterwards. It is of no use trying him with anything less than a full-sized “bread,” or proposing to him any joint in cut, unless it is in the very best cut. In the matter of gravy he is adamant.

  Conscious of his elfin power, and submitting to his dread experience, Mr. Guppy consults him in the choice of that day’s banquet; turning an appealing look towards him as the waitress repeats the catalogue of viands, and saying “What do you take, Chick?” Chick, out of the profundity of his artfulness, preferring “veal and ham and French beans—and don’t you forget the stuffing, Polly” (with an unearthly cock of his vulnerable eye); Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling give the like order. Three pint pots of half-and-half are superadded. Quickly the waitress returns, bearing what is apparently a model of the tower of Babel, but what is really a pile of plates and flat tin dish-covers. Mr. Smallweed, approving of what is set before him, conveys intelligent benignity into his ancient eye, and winks upon her. Then, amid a constant coming in, and going out, and running about, and a clatter of crockery, and a rumbling up and down of the machine which brings the nice cuts from the kitchen, and a shrill crying for more nice cuts down the speaking-pipe, and a shrill reckoning of the cost of nice cuts that have been disposed of, and a general flush and steam of hot joints, cut and uncut, and a considerably heated atmosphere in which the soiled knives and tablecloths seem to break out spontaneously into eruptions of grease and blotches of beer, the legal triumvirate appease their appetites.

  Mr. Jobling is buttoned up closer than mere adornment might require. His hat presents at the rims a peculiar appearance of a glistening nature, as if it had been a favourite snail-promenade. The same phenomenon is visible on some parts of his coat, and particularly at the seams. He has the faded appearance of a gentleman in embarrassed circumstances: even his light whiskers droop with something of a shabby air.

  His appetite is so vigorous, that it suggests spare living for some little time back. He makes such a speedy end of his plate of veal and ham, bringing it to a close while his companions are yet midway in theirs, that Mr. Guppy proposes another. “Thank you, Guppy,” says Mr. Jobling, “I really don’t know but what I will take another.”

  Another being brought, he falls to with great goodwill.

  Mr. Guppy takes silent notice of him at intervals, until he is half-way through his second plate and stops to take an enjoying pull at his pint pot of half-and-half (also renewed), and stretches out his legs and rubs his hands. Beholding him in which glow of contentment, Mr. Guppy says:

  “You are a man again, Tony!”

  “Well, not quite, yet,” says Mr. Jobling. “Say, just born.”

  “Will you take any other vegetables? Grass? Peas? Summer cabbage?”

  “Thank you, Guppy,” says Mr. Jobling. “I really don’t know but what I will take summer cabbage.”

  Order given: with the sarcastic addition (from Mr. Smallweed) of “Without slugs, Polly!” And cabbage produced.

  “I am growing up, Guppy,” says Mr. Jobling, plying his knife and fork with a relishing steadiness.

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “In fact, I have just turned into my teens,” says Mr. Jobling.

  He says no more until he has performed his task, which he achieves as Messrs. Guppy and Smallweed finish theirs; thus getting over the ground in excellent style, and beating those two gentlemen easily by a veal and ham and a cabbage.

  “Now, Small,” says Mr. Guppy, “what would you recommend about pastry?”

  “Marrow puddings,” says Mr. Smallweed, instantly.

  “Aye, aye!” cries Mr. Jobling, with an arch look. “You’re there, are you? Thank you, Mr. Guppy, I don’t know but what I will take a marrow pudding.”

  Three marrow puddings being produced, Mr. Jobling adds, in a pleasant humour, that he is coming of age fast. To these succeed, by command of Mr. Smallweed, “three Cheshires”; and to those, “three small rums.” This apex of the entertainment happily reached, Mr. Jobling puts up his legs on the carpeted seat (having his own side of the box to himself), leans against the wall, and says, “I am grown up now, Guppy. I have arrived at maturity.”

  “What do you think, now,” says Mr. Guppy, “about—you don’t mind Smallweed?”

  “Not the least in the world. I have the pleasure of drinking his good health.”

  “Sir, to you!” says Mr. Smallweed.

  “I was saying, what do you think now,” pursues Mr. Guppy, “of enlisting?”

  “Why, what I may think after dinner,” returns Mr. Jobling, “is one thing, my dear Guppy, and what I may think before dinner is another thing. Still, even after dinner, I ask myself the question, What am I to do? How am I to live? Ill fo manger, you know,” says Mr. Jobling, pronouncing that word as if he meant a necessary fixture in an English stable. “Ill fo manger. That’s the French saying, and mangering is as necessary to me as it is to a Frenchman. Or more so.”

  Mr. Smallweed is decidedly of opinion “much more so.”

  “If any man had told me,” pursues Jobling, “even so lately as when you and I had the frisk down in Lincolnshire, Guppy, and drove over to see that house at Castle Wold—”

  Mr. Smallweed corrects him—Chesney Wold.

  “Chesney Wold. (I thank my honourable friend for that cheer.) If any man had told me, then, that I should be as hard up at the present time as I literally find myself, I should have—well, I should have pitched into him,” says Mr. Jobling, taking a little rum-and-water with an air of desperate resignation; “I should have let fly at his head.”

  “Still, Tony, you were on the wrong side of the post then,” remonstrates Mr. Guppy. “You were talking about nothing else in the gig.”

  “Guppy,” says Mr. Jobling, “I will not deny it. I was on the wrong side of the post. But I trusted to things coming round.”

  That very popular trust in flat things coming round! Not in their being beaten round, or worked round, but in their “coming” round! As though a lunatic should trust in the world’s “coming” triangular!

  “I had confident expectations that things would come round and be all square,” says Mr. Jobling, with some vagueness of expression, and perhaps of meaning, too. “But I was disappointed. They never did. And when it came to creditors making rows at the office, and to people that the office dealt with making complaints about dirty trifles of borrowed money, why there was an end of that connexion. And of any new professional connexion, too; for if I was to give a reference tomorrow, it would be mentioned, and would sew me up. Then, what’s a fellow to do? I have been keeping out of the way, and living cheap, down about the market-gardens; but what’s the use of living cheap when you have got no money! You might as well live dear.”

  “Better,” Mr. Smallweed thinks.

  “Certainly. It’s the fashionable way; and fashion and whiskers have been my weaknesses, and I don’t care who knows it,” says Mr. Jobling. “They are great weaknesses—Damme, sir, they are great. Well!” proceeds Mr. Jobling, after a defiant visit to his rum-and-water, “what can a fellow do, I ask you, but enlist?”

  Mr. Guppy comes more fully into the conversation, to state what, in his opinion, a fellow can do. His manner is the gravely impressive manner of a man who has not committed himself in life, otherwise than as he has become the victim of a tender sorrow of the heart.

  “Jobling,” says Mr. Guppy, “myself and our mutual friend Smallweed—”

  (Mr. Smallweed modestly observes “Gentlemen both!” and drinks.)

  “Have had a little conversation on this matter more than once since you—”

  “Say, got the sack!” cries Mr. Jobling, bitterly. “Say it, Guppy. You mean it.”

  “N-o-o! Left the Inn,” Mr. Smallweed delicately suggests.

  “Since you left the Inn, Jobling,” says Mr. Guppy; “and I have mentioned, to our mutual friend Smallweed, a plan I have lat
ely thought of proposing. You know Snagsby the stationer?”

  “I know there is such a stationer,” returns Mr. Jobling. “He was not ours, and I am not acquainted with him.”

  “He is ours, Jobling, and I am acquainted with him,” Mr. Guppy retorts. “Well, sir! I have lately become better acquainted with him, through some accidental circumstances that have made me a visitor of his in private life. Those circumstances it is not necessary to offer in argument. They may—or they may not—have some reference to a subject, which may—or may not—have cast its shadow on my existence.”

  As it is Mr. Guppy’s perplexing way, with boastful misery to tempt his particular friends into this subject, and the moment they touch it, to turn on them with that trenchant severity about the chords in the human mind; both Mr. Jobling and Mr. Smallweed decline the pitfall, by remaining silent.

  “Such things may be,” repeats Mr. Guppy, “or they may not be. They are no part of the case. It is enough to mention that both Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby are very willing to oblige me; and that Snagsby has, in busy times, a good deal of copying work to give out. He has all Tulkinghorn’s, and an excellent business besides. I believe, if our mutual friend Smallweed were put into the box, he could prove this?”

  Mr. Smallweed nods, and appears greedy to be sworn.

  “Now, gentlemen of the jury,” says Mr. Guppy, “—I mean, now Jobling—you may say this is a poor prospect of a living. Granted. But it’s better than nothing, and better than enlistment. You want time. There must be time for these late affairs to blow over. You might live through it on much worse terms than by writing for Snagsby.”

  Mr. Jobling is about to interrupt, when the sagacious Smallweed checks him with a dry cough, and the words, “Hem! Shakspeare!”

  “There are two branches to this subject, Jobling,” says Mr. Guppy. “That is the first. I come to the second. You know Krook, the Chancellor, across the lane. Come, Jobling,” says Mr. Guppy, in his encouraging cross-examination-tone, “I think you know Krook, the Chancellor, across the lane?”