Bleak House

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"I don't need to be told," returns the trooper, taking his pipe
from his lips for a moment and carrying his eyes back from
following the progress of the cushion to the pipe-bowl which is
burning low, "that he carried on heavily and went to ruin. I have
been at his right hand many a day when he was charging upon ruin
full-gallop. I was with him when he was sick and well, rich and
poor. I laid this hand upon him after he had run through
everything and broken down everything beneath him--when he held a
pistol to his head."

"I wish he had let it off," says the benevolent old man, "and blown
his head into as many pieces as he owed pounds!"

"That would have been a smash indeed," returns the trooper coolly;
"any way, he had been young, hopeful, and handsome in the days gone
by, and I am glad I never found him, when he was neither, to lead
to a result so much to his advantage. That's reason number one."

"I hope number two's as good?" snarls the old man.

"Why, no. It's more of a selfish reason. If I had found him, I
must have gone to the other world to look. He was there."

"How do you know he was there?"

"He wasn't here."

"How do you know he wasn't here?"

"Don't lose your temper as well as your money," says Mr. George,
calmly knocking the ashes out of his pipe. "He was drowned long
before. I am convinced of it. He went over a ship's side.
Whether intentionally or accidentally, I don't know. Perhaps your
friend in the city does. Do you know what that tune is, Mr.
Smallweed?" he adds after breaking off to whistle one, accompanied
on the table with the empty pipe.

"Tune!" replied the old man. "No. We never have tunes here."

"That's the Dead March in Saul. They bury soldiers to it, so it's
the natural end of the subject. Now, if your pretty granddaughter
--excuse me, miss--will condescend to take care of this pipe for two
months, we shall save the cost of one next time. Good evening, Mr.
Smallweed!"

"My dear friend!" the old man gives him both his hands.

"So you think your friend in the city will be hard upon me if I
fall in a payment?" says the trooper, looking down upon him like a
giant.

"My dear friend, I am afraid he will," returns the old man, looking
up at him like a pygmy.

Mr. George laughs, and with a glance at Mr. Smallweed and a parting
salutation to the scornful Judy, strides out of the parlour,
clashing imaginary sabres and other metallic appurtenances as he
goes.

"You're a damned rogue," says the old gentleman, making a hideous
grimace at the door as he shuts it. "But I'll lime you, you dog,
I'll lime you!"

After this amiable remark, his spirit soars into those enchanting
regions of reflection which its education and pursuits have opened
to it, and again he and Mrs. Smallweed while away the rosy hours,
two unrelieved sentinels forgotten as aforesaid by the Black
Serjeant.

While the twain are faithful to their post, Mr. George strides
through the streets with a massive kind of swagger and a grave-
enough face. It is eight o'clock now, and the day is fast drawing
in. He stops hard by Waterloo Bridge and reads a playbill, decides
to go to Astley's Theatre. Being there, is much delighted with the
horses and the feats of strength; looks at the weapons with a
critical eye; disapproves of the combats as giving evidences of
unskilful swordsmanship; but is touched home by the sentiments. In
the last scene, when the Emperor of Tartary gets up into a cart and
condescends to bless the united lovers by hovering over them with
the Union Jack, his eyelashes are moistened with emotion.

The theatre over, Mr. George comes across the water again and makes
his way to that curious region lying about the Haymarket and
Leicester Square which is a centre of attraction to indifferent
foreign hotels and indifferent foreigners, racket-courts, fighting-
men, swordsmen, footguards, old china, gaming-houses, exhibitions,
and a large medley of shabbiness and shrinking out of sight.
Penetrating to the heart of this region, he arrives by a court and
a long whitewashed passage at a great brick building composed of
bare walls, floors, roof-rafters, and skylights, on the front of
which, if it can be said to have any front, is painted GEORGE'S
SHOOTING GALLERY, &c.

Into George's Shooting Gallery, &c., he goes; and in it there are
gaslights (partly turned off now), and two whitened targets for
rifle-shooting, and archery accommodation, and fencing appliances,
and all necessaries for the British art of boxing. None of these
sports or exercises being pursued in George's Shooting Gallery to-
night, which is so devoid of company that a little grotesque man
with a large head has it all to himself and lies asleep upon the
floor.

The little man is dressed something like a gunsmith, in a green-
baize apron and cap; and his face and hands are dirty with
gunpowder and begrimed with the loading of guns. As he lies in the
light before a glaring white target, the black upon him shines
again. Not far off is the strong, rough, primitive table with a
vice upon it at which he has been working. He is a little man with
a face all crushed together, who appears, from a certain blue and
speckled appearance that one of his cheeks presents, to have been
blown up, in the way of business, at some odd time or times.

"Phil!" says the trooper in a quiet voice.

"All right!" cries Phil, scrambling to his feet.

"Anything been doing?"

"Flat as ever so much swipes," says Phil. "Five dozen rifle and a
dozen pistol. As to aim!" Phil gives a howl at the recollection.

"Shut up shop, Phil!"

As Phil moves about to execute this order, it appears that he is
lame, though able to move very quickly. On the speckled side of
his face he has no eyebrow, and on the other side he has a bushy
black one, which want of uniformity gives him a very singular and
rather sinister appearance. Everything seems to have happened to
his hands that could possibly take place consistently with the
retention of all the fingers, for they are notched, and seamed, and
crumpled all over. He appears to be very strong and lifts heavy
benches about as if he had no idea what weight was. He has a
curious way of limping round the gallery with his shoulder against
the wall and tacking off at objects he wants to lay hold of instead
of going straight to them, which has left a smear all round the
four walls, conventionally called "Phil's mark."

This custodian of George's Gallery in George's absence concludes
his proceedings, when he has locked the great doors and turned out
all the lights but one, which he leaves to glimmer, by dragging out
from a wooden cabin in a corner two mattresses and bedding. These
being drawn to opposite ends of the gallery, the trooper makes his
own bed and Phil makes his.

"Phil!" says the master, walking towards him without his coat and
waistcoat, and looking more soldierly than ever in his braces.
"You were found in a doorway, weren't you?"

"Gutter," says Phil. "Watchman tumbled over me."

"Then vagabondizing came natural to YOU from the beginning."

"As nat'ral as possible," says Phil.

"Good night!"

"Good night, guv'ner."

Phil cannot even go straight to bed, but finds it necessary to
shoulder round two sides of the gallery and then tack off at his
mattress. The trooper, after taking a turn or two in the rifle-
distance and looking up at the moon now shining through the
skylights, strides to his own mattress by a shorter route and goes
to bed too.

CHAPTER XXII

Mr. Bucket

Allegory looks pretty cool in Lincoln's Inn Fields, though the
evening is hot, for both Mr. Tulkinghorn's windows are wide open,
and the room is lofty, gusty, and gloomy. These may not be
desirable characteristics when November comes with fog and sleet or
January with ice and snow, but they have their merits in the sultry
long vacation weather. They enable Allegory, though it has cheeks
like peaches, and knees like bunches of blossoms, and rosy
swellings for calves to its legs and muscles to its arms, to look
tolerably cool to-night.

Plenty of dust comes in at Mr. Tulkinghorn's windows, and plenty
more has generated among his furniture and papers. It lies thick
everywhere. When a breeze from the country that has lost its way
takes fright and makes a blind hurry to rush out again, it flings
as much dust in the eyes of Allegory as the law-or Mr. Tulkinghorn,
one of its trustiest representatives--may scatter, on occasion, in
the eyes of the laity.

In his lowering magazine of dust, the universal article into which
his papers and himself, and all his clients, and all things of
earth, animate and inanimate, are resolving, Mr. Tulkinghorn sits
at one of the open windows enjoying a bottle of old port. Though a
hard-grained man, close, dry, and silent, he can enjoy old wine
with the best. He has a priceless bin of port in some artful
cellar under the Fields, which is one of his many secrets. When he
dines alone in chambers, as he has dined to-day, and has his bit of
fish and his steak or chicken brought in from the coffee-house, he
descends with a candle to the echoing regions below the deserted
mansion, and heralded by a remote reverberation of thundering
doors, comes gravely back encircled by an earthy atmosphere and
carrying a bottle from which he pours a radiant nectar, two score
and ten years old, that blushes in the glass to find itself so
famous and fills the whole room with the fragrance of southern
grapes.

Mr. Tulkinghorn, sitting in the twilight by the open window, enjoys
his wine. As if it whispered to him of its fifty years of silence
and seclusion, it shuts him up the closer. More impenetrable than
ever, he sits, and drinks, and mellows as it were in secrecy,
pondering at that twilight hour on all the mysteries he knows,
associated with darkening woods in the country, and vast blank
shut-up houses in town, and perhaps sparing a thought or two for
himself, and his family history, and his money, and his will--all a
mystery to every one--and that one bachelor friend of his, a man of
the same mould and a lawyer too, who lived the same kind of life
until he was seventy-five years old, and then suddenly conceiving
(as it is supposed) an impression that it was too monotonous, gave
his gold watch to his hair-dresser one summer evening and walked
leisurely home to the Temple and hanged himself.

But Mr. Tulkinghorn is not alone to-night to ponder at his usual
length. Seated at the same table, though with his chair modestly
and uncomfortably drawn a little way from it, sits a bald, mild,
shining man who coughs respectfully behind his hand when the lawyer
bids him fill his glass.

"Now, Snagsby," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "to go over this odd story
again."

"If you please, sir."

"You told me when you were so good as to step round here last
night--"

"For which I must ask you to excuse me if it was a liberty, sir;
but I remember that you had taken a sort of an interest in that
person, and I thought it possible that you might--just--wish--to--"

Mr. Tulkinghorn is not the man to help him to any conclusion or to
admit anything as to any possibility concerning himself. So Mr.
Snagsby trails off into saying, with an awkward cough, "I must ask
you to excuse the liberty, sir, I am sure."

"Not at all," says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "You told me, Snagsby, that
you put on your hat and came round without mentioning your
intention to your wife. That was prudent I think, because it's not
a matter of such importance that it requires to be mentioned."

"Well, sir," returns Mr. Snagsby, "you see, my little woman is--not
to put too fine a point upon it--inquisitive. She's inquisitive.
Poor little thing, she's liable to spasms, and it's good for her to
have her mind employed. In consequence of which she employs it--I
should say upon every individual thing she can lay hold of, whether
it concerns her or not--especially not. My little woman has a very
active mind, sir."

Mr. Snagsby drinks and murmurs with an admiring cough behind his
hand, "Dear me, very fine wine indeed!"

"Therefore you kept your visit to yourself last night?" says Mr.
Tulkinghorn. "And to-night too?"

"Yes, sir, and to-night, too. My little woman is at present in--
not to put too fine a point on it--in a pious state, or in what she
considers such, and attends the Evening Exertions (which is the
name they go by) of a reverend party of the name of Chadband. He
has a great deal of eloquence at his command, undoubtedly, but I am
not quite favourable to his style myself. That's neither here nor
there. My little woman being engaged in that way made it easier
for me to step round in a quiet manner."

Mr. Tulkinghorn assents. "Fill your glass, Snagsby."

"Thank you, sir, I am sure," returns the stationer with his cough
of deference. "This is wonderfully fine wine, sir!"

"It is a rare wine now," says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "It is fifty years
old."

"Is it indeed, sir? But I am not surprised to hear it, I am sure.
It might be--any age almost." After rendering this general tribute
to the port, Mr. Snagsby in his modesty coughs an apology behind
his hand for drinking anything so precious.

"Will you run over, once again, what the boy said?" asks Mr.
Tulkinghorn, putting his hands into the pockets of his rusty
smallclothes and leaning quietly back in his chair.

"With pleasure, sir."

Then, with fidelity, though with some prolixity, the law-stationer
repeats Jo's statement made to the assembled guests at his house.
On coming to the end of his narrative, he gives a great start and
breaks off with, "Dear me, sir, I wasn't aware there was any other
gentleman present!"

Mr. Snagsby is dismayed to see, standing with an attentive face
between himself and the lawyer at a little distance from the table,
a person with a hat and stick in his hand who was not there when he
himself came in and has not since entered by the door or by either
of the windows. There is a press in the room, but its hinges have
not creaked, nor has a step been audible upon the floor. Yet this
third person stands there with his attentive face, and his hat and
stick in his hands, and his hands behind him, a composed and quiet
listener. He is a stoutly built, steady-looking, sharp-eyed man in
black, of about the middle-age. Except that he looks at Mr.
Snagsby as if he were going to take his portrait, there is nothing
remarkable about him at first sight but his ghostly manner of
appearing.

"Don't mind this gentleman," says Mr. Tulkinghorn in his quiet way.
"This is only Mr. Bucket."

"Oh, indeed, sir?" returns the stationer, expressing by a cough
that he is quite in the dark as to who Mr. Bucket may be.

"I wanted him to hear this story," says the lawyer, "because I have
half a mind (for a reason) to know more of it, and he is very
intelligent in such things. What do you say to this, Bucket?"

"It's very plain, sir. Since our people have moved this boy on,
and he's not to be found on his old lay, if Mr. Snagsby don't
object to go down with me to Tom-all-Alone's and point him out, we
can have him here in less than a couple of hours' time. I can do
it without Mr. Snagsby, of course, but this is the shortest way."

"Mr. Bucket is a detective officer, Snagsby," says the lawyer in
explanation.

"Is he indeed, sir?" says Mr. Snagsby with a strong tendency in his
clump of hair to stand on end.

"And if you have no real objection to accompany Mr. Bucket to the
place in question," pursues the lawyer, "I shall feel obliged to
you if you will do so."

In a moment's hesitation on the part of Mr. Snagsby, Bucket dips
down to the bottom of his mind.

"Don't you be afraid of hurting the boy," he says. "You won't do
that. It's all right as far as the boy's concerned. We shall only
bring him here to ask him a question or so I want to put to him,
and he'll be paid for his trouble and sent away again. It'll be a
good job for him. I promise you, as a man, that you shall see the
boy sent away all right. Don't you be afraid of hurting him; you
an't going to do that."

"Very well, Mr. Tulkinghorn!" cries Mr. Snagsby cheerfully. And
reassured, "Since that's the case--"

"Yes! And lookee here, Mr. Snagsby," resumes Bucket, taking him
aside by the arm, tapping him familiarly on the breast, and
speaking in a confidential tone. "You're a man of the world, you
know, and a man of business, and a man of sense. That's what YOU
are."

"I am sure I am much obliged to you for your good opinion," returns
the stationer with his cough of modesty, "but--"

"That's what YOU are, you know," says Bucket. "Now, it an't
necessary to say to a man like you, engaged in your business, which
is a business of trust and requires a person to be wide awake and
have his senses about him and his head screwed on tight (I had an
uncle in your business once)--it an't necessary to say to a man
like you that it's the best and wisest way to keep little matters
like this quiet. Don't you see? Quiet!"

"Certainly, certainly," returns the other.

"I don't mind telling YOU," says Bucket with an engaging appearance
of frankness, "that as far as I can understand it, there seems to
be a doubt whether this dead person wasn't entitled to a little
property, and whether this female hasn't been up to some games
respecting that property, don't you see?"

"Oh!" says Mr. Snagsby, but not appearing to see quite distinctly.

"Now, what YOU want," pursues Bucket, again tapping Mr. Snagsby on
the breast in a comfortable and soothing manner, "is that every
person should have their rights according to justice. That's what
YOU want."

"To be sure," returns Mr. Snagsby with a nod.

"On account of which, and at the same time to oblige a--do you call
it, in your business, customer or client? I forget how my uncle
used to call it."

"Why, I generally say customer myself," replies Mr. Snagsby.

"You're right!" returns Mr. Bucket, shaking hands with him quite
affectionately. "--On account of which, and at the same time to
oblige a real good customer, you mean to go down with me, in
confidence, to Tom-all-Alone's and to keep the whole thing quiet
ever afterwards and never mention it to any one. That's about your
intentions, if I understand you?"

"You are right, sir. You are right," says Mr. Snagsby.

"Then here's your hat," returns his new friend, quite as intimate
with it as if he had made it; "and if you're ready, I am."

They leave Mr. Tulkinghorn, without a ruffle on the surface of his
unfathomable depths, drinking his old wine, and go down into the
streets.

"You don't happen to know a very good sort of person of the name of
Gridley, do you?" says Bucket in friendly converse as they descend
the stairs.

"No," says Mr. Snagsby, considering, "I don't know anybody of that
name. Why?"

"Nothing particular," says Bucket; "only having allowed his temper
to get a little the better of him and having been threatening some
respectable people, he is keeping out of the way of a warrant I
have got against him--which it's a pity that a man of sense should
do."

As they walk along, Mr. Snagsby observes, as a novelty, that
however quick their pace may be, his companion still seems in some
undefinable manner to lurk and lounge; also, that whenever he is
going to turn to the right or left, he pretends to have a fixed
purpose in his mind of going straight ahead, and wheels off,
sharply, at the very last moment. Now and then, when they pass a
police-constable on his beat, Mr. Snagsby notices that both the
constable and his guide fall into a deep abstraction as they come
towards each other, and appear entirely to overlook each other, and
to gaze into space. In a few instances, Mr. Bucket, coming behind
some under-sized young man with a shining hat on, and his sleek
hair twisted into one flat curl on each side of his head, almost
without glancing at him touches him with his stick, upon which the
young man, looking round, instantly evaporates. For the most part
Mr. Bucket notices things in general, with a face as unchanging as
the great mourning ring on his little finger or the brooch,
composed of not much diamond and a good deal of setting, which he
wears in his shirt.

When they come at last to Tom-all-Alone's, Mr. Bucket stops for a
moment at the corner and takes a lighted bull's-eye from the
constable on duty there, who then accompanies him with his own
particular bull's-eye at his waist. Between his two conductors,
Mr. Snagsby passes along the middle of a villainous street,
undrained, unventilated, deep in black mud and corrupt water--
though the roads are dry elsewhere--and reeking with such smells
and sights that he, who has lived in London all his life, can
scarce believe his senses. Branching from this street and its
heaps of ruins are other streets and courts so infamous that Mr.
Snagsby sickens in body and mind and feels as if he were going
every moment deeper down into the infernal gulf.

"Draw off a bit here, Mr. Snagsby," says Bucket as a kind of shabby
palanquin is borne towards them, surrounded by a noisy crowd.
"Here's the fever coming up the street!"

As the unseen wretch goes by, the crowd, leaving that object of
attraction, hovers round the three visitors like a dream of
horrible faces and fades away up alleys and into ruins and behind
walls, and with occasional cries and shrill whistles of warning,
thenceforth flits about them until they leave the place.

"Are those the fever-houses, Darby?" Mr. Bucket coolly asks as he
turns his bull's-eye on a line of stinking ruins.

Darby replies that "all them are," and further that in all, for
months and months, the people "have been down by dozens" and have
been carried out dead and dying "like sheep with the rot." Bucket
observing to Mr. Snagsby as they go on again that he looks a little
poorly, Mr. Snagsby answers that he feels as if he couldn't breathe
the dreadful air.

There is inquiry made at various houses for a boy named Jo. As few
people are known in Tom-all-Alone's by any Christian sign, there is
much reference to Mr. Snagsby whether he means Carrots, or the
Colonel, or Gallows, or Young Chisel, or Terrier Tip, or Lanky, or
the Brick. Mr. Snagsby describes over and over again. There are
conflicting opinions respecting the original of his picture. Some
think it must be Carrots, some say the Brick. The Colonel is
produced, but is not at all near the thing. Whenever Mr. Snagsby
and his conductors are stationary, the crowd flows round, and from
its squalid depths obsequious advice heaves up to Mr. Bucket.
Whenever they move, and the angry bull's-eyes glare, it fades away
and flits about them up the alleys, and in the ruins, and behind
the walls, as before.

At last there is a lair found out where Toughy, or the Tough
Subject, lays him down at night; and it is thought that the Tough
Subject may be Jo. Comparison of notes between Mr. Snagsby and the
proprietress of the house--a drunken face tied up in a black
bundle, and flaring out of a heap of rags on the floor of a dog-
hutch which is her private apartment--leads to the establishment of
this conclusion. Toughy has gone to the doctor's to get a bottle
of stuff for a sick woman but will be here anon.

"And who have we got here to-night?" says Mr. Bucket, opening
another door and glaring in with his bull's-eye. "Two drunken men,
eh? And two women? The men are sound enough," turning back each
sleeper's arm from his face to look at him. "Are these your good
men, my dears?"

"Yes, sir," returns one of the women. "They are our husbands."

"Brickmakers, eh?"

"Yes, sir."

"What are you doing here? You don't belong to London."

"No, sir. We belong to Hertfordshire."

"Whereabouts in Hertfordshire?"

"Saint Albans."

"Come up on the tramp?"

"We walked up yesterday. There's no work down with us at present,
but we have done no good by coming here, and shall do none, I
expect."

"That's not the way to do much good," says Mr. Bucket, turning his
head in the direction of the unconscious figures on the ground.

"It an't indeed," replies the woman with a sigh. "Jenny and me
knows it full well."

The room, though two or three feet higher than the door, is so low
that the head of the tallest of the visitors would touch the
blackened ceiling if he stood upright. It is offensive to every
sense; even the gross candle burns pale and sickly in the polluted
air. There are a couple of benches and a higher bench by way of
table. The men lie asleep where they stumbled down, but the women
sit by the candle. Lying in the arms of the woman who has spoken
is a very young child.

"Why, what age do you call that little creature?" says Bucket. "It
looks as if it was born yesterday." He is not at all rough about
it; and as he turns his light gently on the infant, Mr. Snagsby is
strangely reminded of another infant, encircled with light, that he
has seen in pictures.