Little Dorrit

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'Indeed, no. I am such a waif and stray everywhere, that I am
liable to be drifted where any current may set.'

'It's extraordinary to me--if you'll excuse my freedom in saying
so--that you don't go straight to London,' said Mr Meagles, in the
tone of a confidential adviser.

'Perhaps I shall.'

'Ay! But I mean with a will.'

'I have no will. That is to say,'--he coloured a little,--'next to
none that I can put in action now. Trained by main force; broken,
not bent; heavily ironed with an object on which I was never
consulted and which was never mine; shipped away to the other end
of the world before I was of age, and exiled there until my
father's death there, a year ago; always grinding in a mill I
always hated; what is to be expected from me in middle life? Will,
purpose, hope? All those lights were extinguished before I could
sound the words.'

'Light 'em up again!' said Mr Meagles.

'Ah! Easily said. I am the son, Mr Meagles, of a hard father and
mother. I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and
priced everything; for whom what could not be weighed, measured,
and priced, had no existence. Strict people as the phrase is,
professors of a stern religion, their very religion was a gloomy
sacrifice of tastes and sympathies that were never their own,
offered up as a part of a bargain for the security of their
possessions. Austere faces, inexorable discipline, penance in this
world and terror in the next--nothing graceful or gentle anywhere,
and the void in my cowed heart everywhere--this was my childhood,
if I may so misuse the word as to apply it to such a beginning of
life.'

'Really though?' said Mr Meagles, made very uncomfortable by the
picture offered to his imagination. 'That was a tough
commencement. But come! You must now study, and profit by, all
that lies beyond it, like a practical man.'

'If the people who are usually called practical, were practical in
your direction--'

'Why, so they are!' said Mr Meagles.

'Are they indeed?'

'Well, I suppose so,' returned Mr Meagles, thinking about it. 'Eh?

One can but be practical, and Mrs Meagles and myself are nothing
else.'

'My unknown course is easier and more helpful than I had expected
to find it, then,' said Clennam, shaking his head with his grave
smile. 'Enough of me. Here is the boat.'

The boat was filled with the cocked hats to which Mr Meagles
entertained a national objection; and the wearers of those cocked
hats landed and came up the steps, and all the impounded travellers
congregated together. There was then a mighty production of papers
on the part of the cocked hats, and a calling over of names, and
great work of signing, sealing, stamping, inking, and sanding, with
exceedingly blurred, gritty, and undecipherable results. Finally,
everything was done according to rule, and the travellers were at
liberty to depart whithersoever they would.

They made little account of stare and glare, in the new pleasure of
recovering their freedom, but flitted across the harbour in gay
boats, and reassembled at a great hotel, whence the sun was
excluded by closed lattices, and where bare paved floors, lofty
ceilings, and resounding corridors tempered the intense heat.
There, a great table in a great room was soon profusely covered
with a superb repast; and the quarantine quarters became bare
indeed, remembered among dainty dishes, southern fruits, cooled
wines, flowers from Genoa, snow from the mountain tops, and all the
colours of the rainbow flashing in the mirrors.

'But I bear those monotonous walls no ill-will now,' said Mr
Meagles. 'One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's
left behind; I dare say a prisoner begins to relent towards his
prison, after he is let out.'

They were about thirty in company, and all talking; but necessarily
in groups. Father and Mother Meagles sat with their daughter
between them, the last three on one side of the table: on the
opposite side sat Mr Clennam; a tall French gentleman with raven
hair and beard, of a swart and terrible, not to say genteelly
diabolical aspect, but who had shown himself the mildest of men;
and a handsome young Englishwoman, travelling quite alone, who had
a proud observant face, and had either withdrawn herself from the
rest or been avoided by the rest--nobody, herself excepted perhaps,
could have quite decided which. The rest of the party were of the
usual materials: travellers on business, and travellers for
pleasure; officers from India on leave; merchants in the Greek and
Turkey trades; a clerical English husband in a meek strait-
waistcoat, on a wedding trip with his young wife; a majestic
English mama and papa, of the patrician order, with a family of
three growing-up daughters, who were keeping a journal for the
confusion of their fellow-creatures; and a deaf old English mother,
tough in travel, with a very decidedly grown-up daughter indeed,
which daughter went sketching about the universe in the expectation
of ultimately toning herself off into the married state.

The reserved Englishwoman took up Mr Meagles in his last remark.
'Do you mean that a prisoner forgives his prison?' said she, slowly
and with emphasis.

'That was my speculation, Miss Wade. I don't pretend to know
positively how a prisoner might feel. I never was one before.'

'Mademoiselle doubts,' said the French gentleman in his own
language, 'it's being so easy to forgive?'

'I do.'

Pet had to translate this passage to Mr Meagles, who never by any
accident acquired any knowledge whatever of the language of any
country into which he travelled. 'Oh!' said he. 'Dear me! But
that's a pity, isn't it?'

'That I am not credulous?' said Miss Wade.

'Not exactly that. Put it another way. That you can't believe it
easy to forgive.'

'My experience,' she quietly returned, 'has been correcting my
belief in many respects, for some years. It is our natural
progress, I have heard.'

'Well, well! But it's not natural to bear malice, I hope?' said Mr
Meagles, cheerily.

'If I had been shut up in any place to pine and suffer, I should
always hate that place and wish to burn it down, or raze it to the
ground. I know no more.'
'Strong, sir?' said Mr Meagles to the Frenchman; it being another
of his habits to address individuals of all nations in idiomatic
English, with a perfect conviction that they were bound to
understand it somehow. 'Rather forcible in our fair friend, you'll
agree with me, I think?'

The French gentleman courteously replied, 'Plait-il?' To which Mr
Meagles returned with much satisfaction, 'You are right. My
opinion.'

The breakfast beginning by-and-by to languish, Mr Meagles made the
company a speech. It was short enough and sensible enough,
considering that it was a speech at all, and hearty. It merely
went to the effect that as they had all been thrown together by
chance, and had all preserved a good understanding together, and
were now about to disperse, and were not likely ever to find
themselves all together again, what could they do better than bid
farewell to one another, and give one another good-speed in a
simultaneous glass of cool champagne all round the table? It was
done, and with a general shaking of hands the assembly broke up for
ever.

The solitary young lady all this time had said no more. She rose
with the rest, and silently withdrew to a remote corner of the
great room, where she sat herself on a couch in a window, seeming
to watch the reflection of the water as it made a silver quivering
on the bars of the lattice. She sat, turned away from the whole
length of the apartment, as if she were lonely of her own haughty
choice. And yet it would have been as difficult as ever to say,
positively, whether she avoided the rest, or was avoided.

The shadow in which she sat, falling like a gloomy veil across her
forehead, accorded very well with the character of her beauty. One
could hardly see the face, so still and scornful, set off by the
arched dark eyebrows, and the folds of dark hair, without wondering
what its expression would be if a change came over it. That it
could soften or relent, appeared next to impossible. That it could
deepen into anger or any extreme of defiance, and that it must
change in that direction when it changed at all, would have been
its peculiar impression upon most observers. It was dressed and
trimmed into no ceremony of expression. Although not an open face,
there was no pretence in it. 'I am self-contained and self-
reliant; your opinion is nothing to me; I have no interest in you,
care nothing for you, and see and hear you with indifference'--this
it said plainly. It said so in the proud eyes, in the lifted
nostril, in the handsome but compressed and even cruel mouth.
Cover either two of those channels of expression, and the third
would have said so still. Mask them all, and the mere turn of the
head would have shown an unsubduable nature.

Pet had moved up to her (she had been the subject of remark among
her family and Mr Clennam, who were now the only other occupants of
the room), and was standing at her side.

'Are you'--she turned her eyes, and Pet faltered--'expecting any
one to meet you here, Miss Wade?'

'I? No.'

'Father is sending to the Poste Restante. Shall he have the
pleasure of directing the messenger to ask if there are any letters
for you?'

'I thank him, but I know there can be none.'

'We are afraid,' said Pet, sitting down beside her, shyly and half
tenderly, 'that you will feel quite deserted when we are all gone.'

'Indeed!'

'Not,' said Pet, apologetically and embarrassed by her eyes, 'not,
of course, that we are any company to you, or that we have been
able to be so, or that we thought you wished it.'

'I have not intended to make it understood that I did wish it.'

'No. Of course. But--in short,' said Pet, timidly touching her
hand as it lay impassive on the sofa between them, 'will you not
allow Father to tender you any slight assistance or service? He
will be very glad.'

'Very glad,' said Mr Meagles, coming forward with his wife and
Clennam. 'Anything short of speaking the language, I shall be
delighted to undertake, I am sure.'

'I am obliged to you,' she returned, 'but my arrangements are made,
and I prefer to go my own way in my own manner.'

'Do you?' said Mr Meagles to himself, as he surveyed her with a
puzzled look. 'Well! There's character in that, too.'

'I am not much used to the society of young ladies, and I am afraid
I may not show my appreciation of it as others might. A pleasant
journey to you. Good-bye!'

She would not have put out her hand, it seemed, but that Mr Meagles
put out his so straight before her that she could not pass it. She
put hers in it, and it lay there just as it had lain upon the
couch.

'Good-bye!' said Mr Meagles. 'This is the last good-bye upon the
list, for Mother and I have just said it to Mr Clennam here, and he
only waits to say it to Pet. Good-bye! We may never meet again.'

'In our course through life we shall meet the people who are coming
to meet us, from many strange places and by many strange roads,'
was the composed reply; 'and what it is set to us to do to them,
and what it is set to them to do to us, will all be done.'
There was something in the manner of these words that jarred upon
Pet's ear. It implied that what was to be done was necessarily
evil, and it caused her to say in a whisper, 'O Father!' and to
shrink childishly, in her spoilt way, a little closer to him. This
was not lost on the speaker.

'Your pretty daughter,' she said, 'starts to think of such things.
Yet,' looking full upon her, 'you may be sure that there are men
and women already on their road, who have their business to do with
YOU, and who will do it. Of a certainty they will do it. They may
be coming hundreds, thousands, of miles over the sea there; they
may be close at hand now; they may be coming, for anything you know
or anything you can do to prevent it, from the vilest sweepings of
this very town.'

With the coldest of farewells, and with a certain worn expression
on her beauty that gave it, though scarcely yet in its prime, a
wasted look, she left the room.

Now, there were many stairs and passages that she had to traverse
in passing from that part of the spacious house to the chamber she
had secured for her own occupation. When she had almost completed
the journey, and was passing along the gallery in which her room
was, she heard an angry sound of muttering and sobbing. A door
stood open, and within she saw the attendant upon the girl she had
just left; the maid with the curious name.

She stood still, to look at this maid. A sullen, passionate girl!
Her rich black hair was all about her face, her face was flushed
and hot, and as she sobbed and raged, she plucked at her lips with
an unsparing hand.

'Selfish brutes!' said the girl, sobbing and heaving between
whiles. 'Not caring what becomes of me! Leaving me here hungry
and thirsty and tired, to starve, for anything they care! Beasts!
Devils! Wretches!'

'My poor girl, what is the matter?'

She looked up suddenly, with reddened eyes, and with her hands
suspended, in the act of pinching her neck, freshly disfigured with
great scarlet blots. 'It's nothing to you what's the matter. It
don't signify to any one.'

'O yes it does; I am sorry to see you so.'

'You are not sorry,' said the girl. 'You are glad. You know you
are glad. I never was like this but twice over in the quarantine
yonder; and both times you found me. I am afraid of you.'

'Afraid of me?'

'Yes. You seem to come like my own anger, my own malice, my own--
whatever it is--I don't know what it is. But I am ill-used, I am
ill-used, I am ill-used!' Here the sobs and the tears, and the
tearing hand, which had all been suspended together since the first
surprise, went on together anew.

The visitor stood looking at her with a strange attentive smile.
It was wonderful to see the fury of the contest in the girl, and
the bodily struggle she made as if she were rent by the Demons of
old.

'I am younger than she is by two or three years, and yet it's me
that looks after her, as if I was old, and it's she that's always
petted and called Baby! I detest the name. I hate her! They make
a fool of her, they spoil her. She thinks of nothing but herself,
she thinks no more of me than if I was a stock and a stone!' So
the girl went on.

'You must have patience.'

'I WON'T have patience!'

'If they take much care of themselves, and little or none of you,
you must not mind it.'

I WILL mind it.'

'Hush! Be more prudent. You forget your dependent position.'

'I don't care for that. I'll run away. I'll do some mischief. I
won't bear it; I can't bear it; I shall die if I try to bear it!'

The observer stood with her hand upon her own bosom, looking at the
girl, as one afflicted with a diseased part might curiously watch
the dissection and exposition of an analogous case.

The girl raged and battled with all the force of her youth and
fulness of life, until by little and little her passionate
exclamations trailed off into broken murmurs as if she were in
pain. By corresponding degrees she sank into a chair, then upon
her knees, then upon the ground beside the bed, drawing the
coverlet with her, half to hide her shamed head and wet hair in it,
and half, as it seemed, to embrace it, rather than have nothing to
take to her repentant breast.

'Go away from me, go away from me! When my temper comes upon me,
I am mad. I know I might keep it off if I only tried hard enough,
and sometimes I do try hard enough, and at other times I don't and
won't. What have I said! I knew when I said it, it was all lies.
They think I am being taken care of somewhere, and have all I want.

They are nothing but good to me. I love them dearly; no people
could ever be kinder to a thankless creature than they always are
to me. Do, do go away, for I am afraid of you. I am afraid of
myself when I feel my temper coming, and I am as much afraid of
you. Go away from me, and let me pray and cry myself better!'
The day passed on; and again the wide stare stared itself out; and
the hot night was on Marseilles; and through it the caravan of the
morning, all dispersed, went their appointed ways. And thus ever
by day and night, under the sun and under the stars, climbing the
dusty hills and toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land
and journeying by sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and
to act and react on one another, move all we restless travellers
through the pilgrimage of life.

CHAPTER 3

Home

It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close, and stale.
Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and
flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick-and-mortar
echoes hideous. Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot,
steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look at them
out of windows, in dire despondency. In every thoroughfare, up
almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful
bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the Plague were in the
city and the dead-carts were going round. Everything was bolted
and barred that could by possibility furnish relief to an
overworked people. No pictures, no unfamiliar animals, no rare
plants or flowers, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient
world--all TABOO with that enlightened strictness, that the ugly
South Sea gods in the British Museum might have supposed themselves
at home again. Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets.
Nothing to breathe but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to
change the brooding mind, or raise it up. Nothing for the spent
toiler to do, but to compare the monotony of his seventh day with
the monotony of his six days, think what a weary life he led, and
make the best of it--or the worst, according to the probabilities.

At such a happy time, so propitious to the interests of religion
and morality, Mr Arthur Clennam, newly arrived from Marseilles by
way of Dover, and by Dover coach the Blue-eyed Maid, sat in the
window of a coffee-house on Ludgate Hill. Ten thousand responsible
houses surrounded him, frowning as heavily on the streets they
composed, as if they were every one inhabited by the ten young men
of the Calender's story, who blackened their faces and bemoaned
their miseries every night. Fifty thousand lairs surrounded him
where people lived so unwholesomely that fair water put into their
crowded rooms on Saturday night, would be corrupt on Sunday
morning; albeit my lord, their county member, was amazed that they
failed to sleep in company with their butcher's meat. Miles of
close wells and pits of houses, where the inhabitants gasped for
air, stretched far away towards every point of the compass.
Through the heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed, in
the place of a fine fresh river. What secular want could the
million or so of human beings whose daily labour, six days in the
week, lay among these Arcadian objects, from the sweet sameness of
which they had no escape between the cradle and the grave--what
secular want could they possibly have upon their seventh day?
Clearly they could want nothing but a stringent policeman.

Mr Arthur Clennam sat in the window of the coffee-house on Ludgate
Hill, counting one of the neighbouring bells, making sentences and
burdens of songs out of it in spite of himself, and wondering how
many sick people it might be the death of in the course of the
year. As the hour approached, its changes of measure made it more
and more exasperating. At the quarter, it went off into a
condition of deadly-lively importunity, urging the populace in a
voluble manner to Come to church, Come to church, Come to church!
At the ten minutes, it became aware that the congregation would be
scanty, and slowly hammered out in low spirits, They WON'T come,
they WON'T come, they WON'T come! At the five minutes, it
abandoned hope, and shook every house in the neighbourhood for
three hundred seconds, with one dismal swing per second, as a groan
of despair.

'Thank Heaven!' said Clennam, when the hour struck, and the bell
stopped.

But its sound had revived a long train of miserable Sundays, and
the procession would not stop with the bell, but continued to march
on. 'Heaven forgive me,' said he, 'and those who trained me. How
I have hated this day!'

There was the dreary Sunday of his childhood, when he sat with his
hands before him, scared out of his senses by a horrible tract
which commenced business with the poor child by asking him in its
title, why he was going to Perdition?--a piece of curiosity that he
really, in a frock and drawers, was not in a condition to satisfy--
and which, for the further attraction of his infant mind, had a
parenthesis in every other line with some such hiccupping reference
as 2 Ep. Thess. c. iii, v. 6 & 7. There was the sleepy Sunday of
his boyhood, when, like a military deserter, he was marched to
chapel by a picquet of teachers three times a day, morally
handcuffed to another boy; and when he would willingly have
bartered two meals of indigestible sermon for another ounce or two
of inferior mutton at his scanty dinner in the flesh. There was
the interminable Sunday of his nonage; when his mother, stern of
face and unrelenting of heart, would sit all day behind a Bible--
bound, like her own construction of it, in the hardest, barest, and
straitest boards, with one dinted ornament on the cover like the
drag of a chain, and a wrathful sprinkling of red upon the edges of
the leaves--as if it, of all books! were a fortification against
sweetness of temper, natural affection, and gentle intercourse.
There was the resentful Sunday of a little later, when he sat down
glowering and glooming through the tardy length of the day, with a
sullen sense of injury in his heart, and no more real knowledge of
the beneficent history of the New Testament than if he had been
bred among idolaters. There was a legion of Sundays, all days of
unserviceable bitterness and mortification, slowly passing before
him.
'Beg pardon, sir,' said a brisk waiter, rubbing the table. 'Wish
see bed-room?'

'Yes. I have just made up my mind to do it.'

'Chaymaid!' cried the waiter. 'Gelen box num seven wish see room!'

'Stay!' said Clennam, rousing himself. 'I was not thinking of what
I said; I answered mechanically. I am not going to sleep here. I
am going home.'

'Deed, sir? Chaymaid! Gelen box num seven, not go sleep here,
gome.'

He sat in the same place as the day died, looking at the dull
houses opposite, and thinking, if the disembodied spirits of former
inhabitants were ever conscious of them, how they must pity
themselves for their old places of imprisonment. Sometimes a face
would appear behind the dingy glass of a window, and would fade
away into the gloom as if it had seen enough of life and had
vanished out of it. Presently the rain began to fall in slanting
lines between him and those houses, and people began to collect
under cover of the public passage opposite, and to look out
hopelessly at the sky as the rain dropped thicker and faster. Then
wet umbrellas began to appear, draggled skirts, and mud. What the
mud had been doing with itself, or where it came from, who could
say? But it seemed to collect in a moment, as a crowd will, and in
five minutes to have splashed all the sons and daughters of Adam.
The lamplighter was going his rounds now; and as the fiery jets
sprang up under his touch, one might have fancied them astonished
at being suffered to introduce any show of brightness into such a
dismal scene.

Mr Arthur Clennam took up his hat and buttoned his coat, and walked
out. In the country, the rain would have developed a thousand
fresh scents, and every drop would have had its bright association
with some beautiful form of growth or life. In the city, it
developed only foul stale smells, and was a sickly, lukewarm, dirt-
stained, wretched addition to the gutters.

He crossed by St Paul's and went down, at a long angle, almost to
the water's edge, through some of the crooked and descending
streets which lie (and lay more crookedly and closely then) between
the river and Cheapside. Passing, now the mouldy hall of some
obsolete Worshipful Company, now the illuminated windows of a
Congregationless Church that seemed to be waiting for some
adventurous Belzoni to dig it out and discover its history; passing
silent warehouses and wharves, and here and there a narrow alley
leading to the river, where a wretched little bill,
FOUND DROWNED, was weeping on the wet wall; he came at last to the
house he sought. An old brick house, so dingy as to be all but
black, standing by itself within a gateway. Before it, a square
court-yard where a shrub or two and a patch of grass were as rank
(which is saying much) as the iron railings enclosing them were
rusty; behind it, a jumble of roots. It was a double house, with
long, narrow, heavily-framed windows. Many years ago, it had had
it in its mind to slide down sideways; it had been propped up,
however, and was leaning on some half-dozen gigantic crutches:
which gymnasium for the neighbouring cats, weather-stained, smoke-
blackened, and overgrown with weeds, appeared in these latter days
to be no very sure reliance.