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

by Lynn Shepherd

  “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!”

  “I see the marshes once,” says Phil, contentedly eating his breakfast.

  “What marshes?”

  “The marshes, commander,” returns Phil.

  “Where are they?”

  “I don’t know where they are,” says Phil; “but I see ’em, guv’ner. They was flat. And miste.”

  Governor and Commander are interchangeable terms with Phil, expressive of the same respect and deference, and applicable to nobody but Mr. George.

  “I was born in the country, Phil.”

  “Was you indeed, commander?”

  “Yes. And bred there.”

  Phil elevates his one eyebrow, and after respectfully staring at his master to express interest, swallows a great gulp of coffee, still staring at him.

  “There’s not a bird’s note that I don’t know,” says Mr. George. “Not many an English leaf or berry that I couldn’t name. Not many a tree that I couldn’t climb yet, if I was put to it. I was a real country boy, once. My good mother lived in the country.”

  “She must have been a fine old lady, guv’ner,” Phil observes.

  “Ay! And not so old either, five-and-thirty years ago,” says Mr. George. “But I’ll wager that at ninety she would be near as upright as me, and near as broad across the shoulders.”

  “Did she die at ninety, guv’ner?” inquires Phil.

  “No. Bosh! Let her rest in peace, God bless her!” says the trooper. “What set me on about country boys, and run-aways, and good-for-nothings? You, to be sure! So you never clapped your eyes upon the country—marshes and dreams excepted. Eh?”

  Phil shakes his head.

  “Do you want to see it?”

  “N’no, I don’t know as I do, particular,” says Phil.

  “The town’s enough for you, eh?”

  “Why, you see, commander,” says Phil, “I ain’t acquainted with anythink else, and I doubt if I ain’t a-getting too old to take to novelties.”

  “How old are you, Phil?” asks the trooper, pausing as he conveys his smoking saucer to his lips.

  “I’m something with a eight in it,” says Phil. “It can’t be eighty. Nor yet eighteen. It’s betwixt ’em, somewheres.”

  Mr. George, slowly putting down his saucer without tasting its contents, is laughingly beginning, “Why, what the deuce, Phil—” when he stops, seeing that Phil is counting on his dirty fingers.

  “I was just eight,” says Phil, “agreeable to the parish calculation, when I went with the tinker. I was sent on a errand, and I see him a-sittin under a old buildin with a fire all to himself wery comfortable, and he says, ‘Would you like to come along a me, my man?’ I says ‘Yes,’ and him and me and the fire goes home to Clerkenwell together. That was April Fool Day. I was able to count up to ten; and when April Fool Day come round again, I says to myself, ‘Now, old chap, you’re one and a eight in it.’ April Fool Day after that, I says, ‘Now, old chap, you’re two and a eight in it.’ In course of time, I come to ten and a eight in it; two tens and a eight in it. When it got so high, it got the upper hand of me; but this is how I always know there’s a eight in it.”

  “Ah!” says Mr. George, resuming his breakfast. “And where’s the tinker?”

  “Drink put him in the hospital, guv’ner, and the hospital put him—in a glass-case, I have heerd,” Phil replies mysteriously.

  “By that means you got promotion? Took the business, Phil?”

  “Yes, commander, I took the business. Such as it was. It wasn’t much of a beat—round Saffron Hill, Hatton Garden, Clerkenwell, Smiffeld, and there—poor neighbourhood, where they uses up the kettles till they’re past mending. Most of the tramping tinkers used to come and lodge at our place; that was the best part of my master’s earnings. But they didn’t come to me. I warn’t like him. He could sing ’em a good song. I couldn’t! He could play ’em a tune on any sort of pot you please, so as it was iron or block tin. I never could do nothing with a pot, but mend it or bile it—never had a note of music in me. Besides, I was too ill-looking, and their wives complained of me.”

  “They were mighty particular. You would pass muster in a crowd, Phil!” says the trooper with a pleasant smile.

  “No, guv’ner,” returns Phil, shaking his head. “No, I shouldn’t. I was passable enough when I went with the tinker, though nothing to boast of then: but what with blowing the fire with my mouth when I was young, and spileing my complexion, and singeing my hair off, and swallering the smoke; and what with being nat’rally unfort’nate in the way of running against hot metal, and marking myself by sich means; and what with having turn-ups with the tinker as I got older, almost whenever he was too far gone in drink—which was almost always—my beauty was queer, wery queer, even at that time. As to since; what with a dozen years in a dark forge, where the men was given to larking; and what with being scorched in a accident at a gas-works; and what with being blowed out of winder, case-filling at the firework business; I am ugly enough to be made a show on!”

  Resigning himself to which condition with a perfectly satisfied manner, Phil begs the favour of another cup of coffee. While drinking it, he says:

  “It was after the case-filling blow-up when I first see you, commander. You remember?”

  “I remember, Phil. You were walking along in the sun.”

  “Crawling, guv’ner, again a wall—”

  “True, Phil—shouldering your way on—”

  “In a night-cap!” exclaims Phil, excited.

  “In a night-cap—”

  “And hobbling with a couple of sticks!” cries Phil, still more excited.

  “With a couple of sticks. When—”

  “When you stops, you know,” cries Phil, putting down his cup and saucer, and hastily removing his plate from his knees, “and says to me, ‘What, comrade! You have been in the wars!’ I didn’t say much to you, commander, then, for I was took by surprise, that a person so strong and healthy and bold as you was, should stop to speak to such a limping bag of bones as I was. But you says to me, says you, delivering it out of your chest as hearty as possible, so that it was like a glass of something hot, ‘What accident have you met with? You have been badly hurt. What’s amiss, old boy? Cheer up, and tell us about it!’ Cheer up! I was cheered already! I says as much to you, you says more to me, I says more to you, you says more to me, and here I am, commander! Here I am, commander!” cries Phil, who has started from his chair
and unaccountably begun to sidle away. “If a mark’s wanted, or if it will improve the business, let the customers take aim at me. They can’t spoil my beauty. I’m all right. Come on! If they want a man to box at, let ’em box at me. Let ’em knock me well about the head. I don’t mind. If they want a light-weight, to be throwed for practice, Cornwall, Devonshire, or Lancashire, let ’em throw me. They won’t hurt me. I have been throwed, all sorts of styles, all my life!”

  With this unexpected speech, energetically delivered, and accompanied by action illustrative of the various exercises referred to, Phil Squod shoulders his way round three sides of the gallery, and abruptly tacking off at his commander, makes a butt at him with his head, intended to express devotion to his service. He then begins to clear away the breakfast.

  Mr. George, after laughing cheerfully, and clapping him on the shoulder, assists in these arrangements, and helps to get the gallery into business order. That done, he takes a turn at the dumb-bells; and afterwards weighing himself, and opining that he is getting “too fleshy,” engages with great gravity in solitary broadsword practice. Meanwhile, Phil has fallen to work at his usual table, where he screws and unscrews, and cleans, and files, and whistles into small apertures, and blackens himself more and more, and seems to do and undo everything that can be done and undone about a gun.

  Master and man are at length disturbed by footsteps in the passage, where they make an unusual sound, denoting the arrival of unusual company. These steps, advancing nearer and nearer to the gallery, bring into it a group, at first sight scarcely reconcilable with any day in the year but the fifth of November.

  It consists of a limp and ugly figure carried in a chair by two bearers, and attended by a lean female with a face like a pinched mask, who might be expected immediately to recite the popular verses, commemorative of the time when they did contrive to blow Old England up alive, but for her keeping her lips tightly and defiantly closed as the chair is put down. At which point, the figure in it gasping, “O Lord! O dear me! I am shaken!” adds, “How de do, my dear friend, how de do?” Mr. George then descries, in the procession, the venerable Mr. Smallweed out for an airing, attended by his granddaughter Judy as body-guard.

  “Mr. George, my dear friend,” says Grandfather Smallweed, removing his right arm from the neck of one of his bearers, whom he has nearly throttled coming along, “how de do? You’re surprised to see me, my dear friend.”

  “I should hardly have been more surprised to have seen your friend in the city,” returns Mr. George.

  “I am very seldom out,” pants Mr. Smallweed. “I haven’t been out for many months. It’s inconvenient—and it comes expensive. But I longed so much to see you, my dear Mr. George. How de do, sir?”

  “I am well enough,” says Mr. George. “I hope you are the same.”

  “You can’t be too well, my dear friend.” Mr. Smallweed takes him by both hands. “I have brought my granddaughter Judy. I couldn’t keep her away. She longed so much to see you.”

  “Hum! She bears it calmly!” mutters Mr. George.

  “So we got a hackney-cab, and put a chair in it, and just round the corner they lifted me out of the cab and into the chair, and carried me here, that I might see my dear friend in his own establishment! This,” says Grandfather Smallweed, alluding to the bearer, who has been in danger of strangulation, and who withdraws adjusting his windpipe, “is the driver of the cab. He has nothing extra. It is by agreement included in his fare. This person,” the other bearer, “we engaged in the street outside for a pint of beer. Which is twopence. Judy, give the person twopence. I was not sure you had a workman of your own here, my dear friend, or we needn’t have employed this person.”

  Grandfather Smallweed refers to Phil, with a glance of considerable terror and a half-subdued “O Lord! O dear me!” Nor is his apprehension, on the surface of things, without some reason; for Phil, who has never beheld the apparition in the black-velvet cap before, has stopped short with a gun in his hand, with much of the air of a dead shot, intent on picking Mr. Smallweed off as an ugly old bird of the crow species.

  “Judy, my child,” says Grandfather Smallweed, “give the person his twopence. It’s a great deal for what he has done.”

  The person, who is one of those extraordinary specimens of human fungus that spring up spontaneously in the western streets of London, ready dressed in an old red jacket, with a “Mission” for holding horses and calling coaches, receives his twopence with anything but transport, tosses the money into the air, catches it overhanded, and retires.

  “My dear Mr. George,” says Grandfather Smallweed, “would you be so kind as help to carry me to the fire? I am accustomed to a fire, and I am an old man, and I soon chill. O dear me!”

  His closing exclamation is jerked out of the venerable gentleman by the suddenness with which Mr. Squod, like a genie, catches him up, chair and all, and deposits him on the hearthstone.

  “O Lord!” says Mr. Smallweed, panting. “O dear me! O my stars! My dear friend, your workman is very strong—and very prompt. O Lord, he is very prompt! Judy, draw me back a little. I’m being scorched in the legs”; which indeed is testified to the noses of all present by the smell of his worsted stockings.

  The gentle Judy, having backed her grandfather a little way from the fire, and having shaken him up as usual, and having released his overshadowed eye from its black velvet extinguisher, Mr. Smallweed again says, “O dear me! O Lord!” and looking about, and meeting Mr. George’s glance, again stretches out both hands.

  “My dear friend! So happy in this meeting! And this is your establishment? It’s a delightful place. It’s a picture! You never find that anything goes off here, accidentally; do you, my dear friend?” adds Grandfather Smallweed, very ill at ease.

  “No, no. No fear of that.”

  “And your workman. He—O dear me!—he never lets anything off without meaning it; does he, my dear friend?”

  “He has never hurt anybody but himself,” says Mr. George, smiling.

  “But he might, you know. He seems to have hurt himself a good deal, and he might hurt somebody else,” the old gentleman returns. “He mightn’t mean it—or he even might. Mr. George, will you order him to leave his infernal fire-arms alone, and go away?”

  Obedient to a nod from the trooper, Phil retires, empty-handed, to the other end of the gallery. Mr. Smallweed, reassured, falls to rubbing his legs.

  “And you’re doing well, Mr. George?” he says to the trooper, squarely standing faced about towards him with his broadsword in his hand. “You are prospering, please the Powers?”

  Mr. George answers with a cool nod, adding, “Go on. You have not come to say that, I know.”

  “You are so sprightly, Mr. George,” returns the venerable grandfather. “You are such good company.”

  “Ha ha! Go on!” says Mr. George.

  “My dear friend!—But that sword looks awful gleaming and sharp. It might cut somebody by accident. It makes me shiver, Mr. George.—Curse him!” says the excellent old gentleman apart to Judy, as the trooper takes a step or two away to lay it aside. “He owes me money, and might think of paying off old scores in this murdering place. I wish your brimstone grandmother was here, and he’d shave her head off.”

  Mr. George, returning, folds his arms, and looking down at the old man, sliding every moment lower and lower in his chair, says quietly, “Now for it!”

  “Ho!” cries Mr. Smallweed, rubbing his hands with an artful chuckle. “Yes. Now for it. Now for what, my dear friend?”

  “For a pipe,” says Mr. George; who with great composure sets his chair in the chimney-corner, takes his pipe from the grate, fills it and lights it, and falls to smoking peacefully.

  This tends to the discomfiture of Mr. Smallweed, who finds it so difficult to resume his object, whatever it may be, that he becomes exasperated, and secretly claws the air with an impotent vindictiveness expressive of an intense desire to tear and rend the visage of Mr. George. As the excellent old gen
tleman’s nails are long and leaden, and his hands lean and veinous, and his eyes green and watery; and over and above this, as he continues, while he claws, to slide down in his chair and to collapse into a shapeless bundle; he becomes such a ghastly spectacle, even in the accustomed eyes of Judy, that that young virgin pounces at him with something more than the ardour of affection, and so shakes him up, and pats and pokes him in divers parts of his body, but particularly in that part which the science of self-defence would call his wind, that in his grievous distress he utters enforced sounds like a paviour’s rammer.

  When Judy has by these means set him up again in his chair, with a white face and a frosty nose (but still clawing), she stretches out her weazen forefinger, and gives Mr. George one poke in the back. The trooper raising his head, she makes another poke at her esteemed grandfather; and, having thus brought them together, stares rigidly at the fire.

  “Aye, aye! Ho, ho! U—u—u—ugh!” chatters Grandfather Smallweed, swallowing his rage. “My dear friend!” (still clawing).

  “I tell you what,” says Mr. George. “If you want to converse with me, you must speak out. I am one of the Roughs, and I can’t go about and about. I haven’t the art to do it. I am not clever enough. It don’t suit me. When you go winding round and round me,” says the trooper, putting his pipe between his lips again, “damme, if I don’t feel as if I was being smothered!”

  And he inflates his broad chest to its utmost extent, as if to assure himself that he is not smothered yet.

  “If you have come to give me a friendly call,” continues Mr. George, “I am obliged to you; how are you? If you have come to see whether there’s any property on the premises, look about you; you are welcome. If you want to out with something, out with it!”

  The blooming Judy, without removing her gaze from the fire, gives her grandfather one ghostly poke.

  “You see! It’s her opinion too. And why the devil that young woman won’t sit down like a Christian,” says Mr. George with his eyes musingly fixed on Judy, “I can’t comprehend.”