Little Dorrit

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And where did Plornish live? Plornish lived in Bleeding Heart
Yard. He was 'only a plasterer,' Little Dorrit said, as a caution
to him not to form high social expectations of Plornish. He lived
at the last house in Bleeding Heart Yard, and his name was over a
little gateway.
Arthur took down the address and gave her his. He had now done all
he sought to do for the present, except that he wished to leave her
with a reliance upon him, and to have something like a promise from
her that she would cherish it.

'There is one friend!' he said, putting up his pocketbook. 'As I
take you back--you are going back?'

'Oh yes! going straight home.'

'As I take you back,' the word home jarred upon him, 'let me ask
you to persuade yourself that you have another friend. I make no
professions, and say no more.'

'You are truly kind to me, sir. I am sure I need no more.'

They walked back through the miserable muddy streets, and among the
poor, mean shops, and were jostled by the crowds of dirty hucksters
usual to a poor neighbourhood. There was nothing, by the short
way, that was pleasant to any of the five senses. Yet it was not
a common passage through common rain, and mire, and noise, to
Clennam, having this little, slender, careful creature on his arm.
How young she seemed to him, or how old he to her; or what a secret
either to the other, in that beginning of the destined interweaving
of their stories, matters not here. He thought of her having been
born and bred among these scenes, and shrinking through them now,
familiar yet misplaced; he thought of her long acquaintance with
the squalid needs of life, and of her innocence; of her solicitude
for others, and her few years, and her childish aspect.

They were come into the High Street, where the prison stood, when
a voice cried, 'Little mother, little mother!' Little Dorrit
stopping and looking back, an excited figure of a strange kind
bounced against them (still crying 'little mother'), fell down, and
scattered the contents of a large basket, filled with potatoes, in
the mud.

'Oh, Maggy,' said Little Dorrit, 'what a clumsy child you are!'

Maggy was not hurt, but picked herself up immediately, and then
began to pick up the potatoes, in which both Little Dorrit and
Arthur Clennam helped. Maggy picked up very few potatoes and a
great quantity of mud; but they were all recovered, and deposited
in the basket. Maggy then smeared her muddy face with her shawl,
and presenting it to Mr Clennam as a type of purity, enabled him to
see what she was like.

She was about eight-and-twenty, with large bones , large features,
large feet and hands, large eyes and no hair. Her large eyes were
limpid and almost colourless; they seemed to be very little
affected by light, and to stand unnaturally still. There was also
that attentive listening expression in her face, which is seen in
the faces of the blind; but she was not blind, having one tolerably
serviceable eye. Her face was not exceedingly ugly, though it was
only redeemed from being so by a smile; a good-humoured smile, and
pleasant in itself, but rendered pitiable by being constantly
there. A great white cap, with a quantity of opaque frilling that
was always flapping about, apologised for Maggy's baldness, and
made it so very difficult for her old black bonnet to retain its
place upon her head, that it held on round her neck like a gipsy's
baby. A commission of haberdashers could alone have reported what
the rest of her poor dress was made of, but it had a strong general
resemblance to seaweed, with here and there a gigantic tea-leaf.
Her shawl looked particularly like a tea-leaf after long infusion.

Arthur Clennam looked at Little Dorrit with the expression of one
saying, 'May I ask who this is?' Little Dorrit, whose hand this
Maggy, still calling her little mother, had begun to fondle,
answered in words (they were under a gateway into which the
majority of the potatoes had rolled).

'This is Maggy, sir.'

'Maggy, sir,' echoed the personage presented. 'Little mother!'

'She is the grand-daughter--' said Little Dorrit.

'Grand-daughter,' echoed Maggy.

'Of my old nurse, who has been dead a long time. Maggy, how old
are you?'

'Ten, mother,' said Maggy.

'You can't think how good she is, sir,' said Little Dorrit, with
infinite tenderness.

'Good SHE is,' echoed Maggy, transferring the pronoun in a most
expressive way from herself to her little mother.

'Or how clever,' said Little Dorrit. 'She goes on errands as well
as any one.' Maggy laughed. 'And is as trustworthy as the Bank of
England.' Maggy laughed. 'She earns her own living entirely.
Entirely, sir!' said Little Dorrit, in a lower and triumphant tone.

'Really does!'

'What is her history?' asked Clennam.

'Think of that, Maggy?' said Little Dorrit, taking her two large
hands and clapping them together. 'A gentleman from thousands of
miles away, wanting to know your history!'

'My history?' cried Maggy. 'Little mother.'

'She means me,' said Little Dorrit, rather confused; 'she is very
much attached to me. Her old grandmother was not so kind to her as
she should have been; was she, Maggy?'
Maggy shook her head, made a drinking vessel of her clenched left
hand, drank out of it, and said, 'Gin.' Then beat an imaginary
child, and said, 'Broom-handles and pokers.'

'When Maggy was ten years old,' said Little Dorrit, watching her
face while she spoke, 'she had a bad fever, sir, and she has never
grown any older ever since.'

'Ten years old,' said Maggy, nodding her head. 'But what a nice
hospital! So comfortable, wasn't it? Oh so nice it was. Such a
Ev'nly place!'

'She had never been at peace before, sir,' said Little Dorrit,
turning towards Arthur for an instant and speaking low, 'and she
always runs off upon that.'

'Such beds there is there!' cried Maggy. 'Such lemonades! Such
oranges! Such d'licious broth and wine! Such Chicking! Oh, AIN'T
it a delightful place to go and stop at!'

'So Maggy stopped there as long as she could,' said Little Dorrit,
in her former tone of telling a child's story; the tone designed
for Maggy's ear, 'and at last, when she could stop there no longer,
she came out. Then, because she was never to be more than ten
years old, however long she lived--'

'However long she lived,' echoed Maggy.

'And because she was very weak; indeed was so weak that when she
began to laugh she couldn't stop herself--which was a great pity--'

(Maggy mighty grave of a sudden.)

'Her grandmother did not know what to do with her, and for some
years was very unkind to her indeed. At length, in course of time,
Maggy began to take pains to improve herself, and to be very
attentive and very industrious; and by degrees was allowed to come
in and out as often as she liked, and got enough to do to support
herself, and does support herself. And that,' said Little Dorrit,
clapping the two great hands together again, 'is Maggy's history,
as Maggy knows!'

Ah! But Arthur would have known what was wanting to its
completeness, though he had never heard of the words Little mother;
though he had never seen the fondling of the small spare hand;
though he had had no sight for the tears now standing in the
colourless eyes; though he had had no hearing for the sob that
checked the clumsy laugh. The dirty gateway with the wind and rain
whistling through it, and the basket of muddy potatoes waiting to
be spilt again or taken up, never seemed the common hole it really
was, when he looked back to it by these lights. Never, never!

They were very near the end of their walk, and they now came out of
the gateway to finish it. Nothing would serve Maggy but that they
must stop at a grocer's window, short of their destination, for her
to show her learning. She could read after a sort; and picked out
the fat figures in the tickets of prices, for the most part
correctly. She also stumbled, with a large balance of success
against her failures, through various philanthropic recommendations
to Try our Mixture, Try our Family Black, Try our Orange-flavoured
Pekoe, challenging competition at the head of Flowery Teas; and
various cautions to the public against spurious establishments and
adulterated articles. When he saw how pleasure brought a rosy tint
into Little Dorrit's face when Maggy made a hit, he felt that he
could have stood there making a library of the grocer's window
until the rain and wind were tired.

The court-yard received them at last, and there he said goodbye to
Little Dorrit. Little as she had always looked, she looked less
than ever when he saw her going into the Marshalsea lodge passage,
the little mother attended by her big child.
The cage door opened, and when the small bird, reared in captivity,
had tamely fluttered in, he saw it shut again; and then he came
away.

CHAPTER 10

Containing the whole Science of Government

The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being
told) the most important Department under Government. No public
business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the
acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the
largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was
equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the
plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution
Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour
before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified
in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of
boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official
memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence,
on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the
one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a
country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been
foremost to study that bright revelation and to carry its shining
influence through the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever
was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand
with all the public departments in the art of perceiving--HOW NOT
TO DO IT.

Through this delicate perception, through the tact with which it
invariably seized it, and through the genius with which it always
acted on it, the Circumlocution Office had risen to overtop all the
public departments; and the public condition had risen to be--what
it was.

It is true that How not to do it was the great study and object of
all public departments and professional politicians all round the
Circumlocution Office. It is true that every new premier and every
new government, coming in because they had upheld a certain thing
as necessary to be done, were no sooner come in than they applied
their utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it. It is true
that from the moment when a general election was over, every
returned man who had been raving on hustings because it hadn't been
done, and who had been asking the friends of the honourable
gentleman in the opposite interest on pain of impeachment to tell
him why it hadn't been done, and who had been asserting that it
must be done, and who had been pledging himself that it should be
done, began to devise, How it was not to be done. It is true that
the debates of both Houses of Parliament the whole session through,
uniformly tended to the protracted deliberation, How not to do it.
It is true that the royal speech at the opening of such session
virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have a considerable
stroke of work to do, and you will please to retire to your
respective chambers, and discuss, How not to do it. It is true
that the royal speech, at the close of such session, virtually
said, My lords and gentlemen, you have through several laborious
months been considering with great loyalty and patriotism, How not
to do it, and you have found out; and with the blessing of
Providence upon the harvest (natural, not political), I now dismiss
you. All this
is true, but the Circumlocution Office went beyond it.

Because the Circumlocution Office went on mechanically, every day,
keeping this wonderful, all-sufficient wheel of statesmanship, How
not to do it, in motion. Because the Circumlocution Office was
down upon any ill-advised public servant who was going to do it, or
who appeared to be by any surprising accident in remote danger of
doing it, with a minute, and a memorandum, and a letter of
instructions that extinguished him. It was this spirit of national
efficiency in the Circumlocution Office that had gradually led to
its having something to do with everything. Mechanicians, natural
philosophers, soldiers, sailors, petitioners, memorialists, people
with grievances, people who wanted to prevent grievances, people
who wanted to redress grievances, jobbing people, jobbed people,
people who couldn't get rewarded for merit, and people who couldn't
get punished for demerit, were all indiscriminately tucked up under
the foolscap paper of the Circumlocution Office.

Numbers of people were lost in the Circumlocution Office.
Unfortunates with wrongs, or with projects for the general welfare
(and they had better have had wrongs at first, than have taken that
bitter English recipe for certainly getting them), who in slow
lapse of time and agony had passed safely through other public
departments; who, according to rule, had been bullied in this,
over-reached by that, and evaded by the other; got referred at last
to the Circumlocution Office, and never reappeared in the light of
day. Boards sat upon them, secretaries minuted upon them,
commissioners gabbled about them, clerks registered, entered,
checked, and ticked them off, and they melted away. In short, all
the business of the country went through the Circumlocution Office,
except the business that never came out of it; and its name was
Legion.

Sometimes, angry spirits attacked the Circumlocution Office.
Sometimes, parliamentary questions were asked about it, and even
parliamentary motions made or threatened about it by demagogues so
low and ignorant as to hold that the real recipe of government was,
How to do it. Then would the noble lord, or right honourable
gentleman, in whose department it was to defend the Circumlocution
Office, put an orange in his pocket, and make a regular field-day
of the occasion. Then would he come down to that house with a slap
upon the table, and meet the honourable gentleman foot to foot.
Then would he be there to tell that honourable gentleman that the
Circumlocution Office not only was blameless in this matter, but
was commendable in this matter, was extollable to the skies in this
matter. Then would he be there to tell that honourable gentleman
that, although the Circumlocution Office was invariably right and
wholly right, it never was so right as in this matter. Then would
he be there to tell that honourable gentleman that it would have
been more to his honour, more to his credit, more to his good
taste, more to his good sense, more to half the dictionary of
commonplaces, if he had left the Circumlocution Office alone, and
never approached this matter. Then would he keep one eye upon a
coach or crammer from the Circumlocution Office sitting below the
bar, and smash the honourable gentleman with the Circumlocution
Office account of this matter. And although one of two things
always happened; namely, either that the Circumlocution Office had
nothing to say and said it, or that it had something to say of
which the noble lord, or right honourable gentleman, blundered one
half and forgot the other; the Circumlocution Office was always
voted immaculate by an accommodating majority.

Such a nursery of statesmen had the Department become in virtue of
a long career of this nature, that several solemn lords had
attained the reputation of being quite unearthly prodigies of
business, solely from having practised, How not to do it, as the
head of the Circumlocution Office. As to the minor priests and
acolytes of that temple, the result of all this was that they stood
divided into two classes, and, down to the junior messenger, either
believed in the Circumlocution Office as a heaven-born institution
that had an absolute right to do whatever it liked; or took refuge
in total infidelity, and considered it a flagrant nuisance.

The Barnacle family had for some time helped to administer the
Circumlocution Office. The Tite Barnacle Branch, indeed,
considered themselves in a general way as having vested rights in
that direction, and took it ill if any other family had much to say
to it. The Barnacles were a very high family, and a very large
family. They were dispersed all over the public offices, and held
all sorts of public places. Either the nation was under a load of
obligation to the Barnacles, or the Barnacles were under a load of
obligation to the nation. It was not quite unanimously settled
which; the Barnacles having their opinion, the nation theirs.

The Mr Tite Barnacle who at the period now in question usually
coached or crammed the statesman at the head of the Circumlocution
Office, when that noble or right honourable individual sat a little
uneasily in his saddle by reason of some vagabond making a tilt at
him in a newspaper, was more flush of blood than money. As a
Barnacle he had his place, which was a snug thing enough; and as a
Barnacle he had of course put in his son Barnacle Junior in the
office. But he had intermarried with a branch of the
Stiltstalkings, who were also better endowed in a sanguineous point
of view than with real or personal property, and of this marriage
there had been issue, Barnacle junior and three young ladies. What
with the patrician requirements of Barnacle junior, the three young
ladies, Mrs Tite Barnacle nee Stiltstalking, and himself, Mr Tite
Barnacle found the intervals between quarter day and quarter day
rather longer than he could have desired; a circumstance which he
always attributed to the country's parsimony.
For Mr Tite Barnacle, Mr Arthur Clennam made his fifth inquiry one
day at the Circumlocution Office; having on previous occasions
awaited that gentleman successively in a hall, a glass case, a
waiting room, and a fire-proof passage where the Department seemed
to keep its wind. On this occasion Mr Barnacle was not engaged, as
he had been before, with the noble prodigy at the head of the
Department; but was absent. Barnacle Junior, however, was
announced as a lesser star, yet visible above the office horizon.

With Barnacle junior, he signified his desire to confer; and found
that young gentleman singeing the calves of his legs at the
parental fire, and supporting his spine against the mantel-shelf.
It was a comfortable room, handsomely furnished in the higher
official manner; an presenting stately suggestions of the absent
Barnacle, in the thick carpet, the leather-covered desk to sit at,
the leather-covered desk to stand at, the formidable easy-chair and
hearth-rug, the interposed screen, the torn-up papers, the
dispatch-boxes with little labels sticking out of them, like
medicine bottles or dead game, the pervading smell of leather and
mahogany, and a general bamboozling air of How not to do it.

The present Barnacle, holding Mr Clennam's card in his hand, had a
youthful aspect, and the fluffiest little whisker, perhaps, that
ever was seen. Such a downy tip was on his callow chin, that he
seemed half fledged like a young bird; and a compassionate observer
might have urged that, if he had not singed the calves of his legs,
he would have died of cold. He had a superior eye-glass dangling
round his neck, but unfortunately had such flat orbits to his eyes
and such limp little eyelids that it wouldn't stick in when he put
it up, but kept tumbling out against his waistcoat buttons with a
click that discomposed him very much.

'Oh, I say. Look here! My father's not in the way, and won't be
in the way to-day,' said Barnacle Junior. 'Is this anything that
I can do?'

(Click! Eye-glass down. Barnacle Junior quite frightened and
feeling all round himself, but not able to find it.)

'You are very good,' said Arthur Clennam. 'I wish however to see
Mr Barnacle.'

'But I say. Look here! You haven't got any appointment, you
know,' said Barnacle Junior.

(By this time he had found the eye-glass, and put it up again.)

'No,' said Arthur Clennam. 'That is what I wish to have.'

'But I say. Look here! Is this public business?' asked Barnacle
junior.

(Click! Eye-glass down again. Barnacle Junior in that state of
search after it that Mr Clennam felt it useless to reply at
present.)

'Is it,' said Barnacle junior, taking heed of his visitor's brown
face, 'anything about--Tonnage--or that sort of thing?'

(Pausing for a reply, he opened his right eye with his hand, and
stuck his glass in it, in that inflammatory manner that his eye
began watering dreadfully.)

'No,' said Arthur, 'it is nothing about tonnage.'

'Then look here. Is it private business?'

'I really am not sure. It relates to a Mr Dorrit.'

'Look here, I tell you what! You had better call at our house, if
you are going that way. Twenty-four, Mews Street, Grosvenor
Square. My father's got a slight touch of the gout, and is kept at
home by it.'

(The misguided young Barnacle evidently going blind on his eye-
glass side, but ashamed to make any further alteration in his
painful arrangements.)

'Thank you. I will call there now. Good morning.' Young Barnacle
seemed discomfited at this, as not having at all expected him to
go.

'You are quite sure,' said Barnacle junior, calling after him when
he got to the door, unwilling wholly to relinquish the bright
business idea he had conceived; 'that it's nothing about Tonnage?'

'Quite sure.'

With such assurance, and rather wondering what might have taken
place if it HAD been anything about tonnage, Mr Clennam withdrew to
pursue his inquiries.

Mews Street, Grosvenor Square, was not absolutely Grosvenor Square
itself, but it was very near it. It was a hideous little street of
dead wall, stables, and dunghills, with lofts over coach-houses
inhabited by coachmen's families, who had a passion for drying
clothes and decorating their window-sills with miniature turnpike-
gates. The principal chimney-sweep of that fashionable quarter
lived at the blind end of Mews Street; and the same corner
contained an establishment much frequented about early morning and
twilight for the purchase of wine-bottles and kitchen-stuff.
Punch's shows used to lean against the dead wall in Mews Street,
while their proprietors were dining elsewhere; and the dogs of the
neighbourhood made appointments to meet in the same locality. Yet
there were two or three small airless houses at the entrance end of
Mews Street, which went at enormous rents on account of their being
abject hangers-on to a fashionable situation; and whenever one of
these fearful little coops was to be let (which seldom happened,
for they were in great request), the house agent advertised it as
a gentlemanly residence in the most aristocratic part of town,
inhabited solely by the elite of the beau monde.

If a gentlemanly residence coming strictly within this narrow
margin had not been essential to the blood of the Barnacles, this
particular branch would have had a pretty wide selection among, let
us say, ten thousand houses, offering fifty times the accommodation
for a third of the money. As it was, Mr Barnacle, finding his
gentlemanly residence extremely inconvenient and extremely dear,
always laid it, as a public servant, at the door of the country,
and adduced it as another instance of the country's parsimony.

Arthur Clennam came to a squeezed house, with a ramshackle bowed
front, little dingy windows, and a little dark area like a damp
waistcoat-pocket, which he found to be number twenty-four, Mews
Street, Grosvenor Square. To the sense of smell the house was like
a sort of bottle filled with a strong distillation of Mews; and
when the footman opened the door, he seemed to take the stopper
out.

The footman was to the Grosvenor Square footmen, what the house was
to the Grosvenor Square houses. Admirable in his way, his way was
a back and a bye way. His gorgeousness was not unmixed with dirt;
and both in complexion and consistency he had suffered from the
closeness of his pantry. A sallow flabbiness was upon him when he
took the stopper out, and presented the bottle to Mr Clennam's
nose.

'Be so good as to give that card to Mr Tite Barnacle, and to say
that I have just now seen the younger Mr Barnacle, who recommended
me to call here.'

The footman (who had as many large buttons with the Barnacle crest
upon them on the flaps of his pockets, as if he were the family
strong box, and carried the plate and jewels about with him
buttoned up) pondered over the card a little; then said, 'Walk in.'

It required some judgment to do it without butting the inner hall-
door open, and in the consequent mental confusion and physical
darkness slipping down the kitchen stairs. The visitor, however,
brought himself up safely on the door-mat.