บทที่ บทที่ 21 · Casting my eyes on Mr. Wemmick as we went along, to see what he was

. Casting my eyes on Mr. Wemmick as we went along, to see what he was

like in the light of day, I found him to be a dry man, rather short in

stature, with a square wooden face, whose expression seemed to have

been imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel. There were some

marks in it that might have been dimples, if the material had been

softer and the instrument finer, but which, as it was, were only dints.

The chisel had made three or four of these attempts at embellishment

over his nose, but had given them up without an effort to smooth them

off. I judged him to be a bachelor from the frayed condition of his

linen, and he appeared to have sustained a good many bereavements; for

he wore at least four mourning rings, besides a brooch representing a

lady and a weeping willow at a tomb with an urn on it. I noticed, too,

that several rings and seals hung at his watch-chain, as if he were

quite laden with remembrances of departed friends. He had glittering

eyes,—small, keen, and black,—and thin wide mottled lips. He had had

them, to the best of my belief, from forty to fifty years.

“So you were never in London before?” said Mr. Wemmick to me.

“No,” said I.

“_I_ was new here once,” said Mr. Wemmick. “Rum to think of now!”

“You are well acquainted with it now?”

“Why, yes,” said Mr. Wemmick. “I know the moves of it.”

“Is it a very wicked place?” I asked, more for the sake of saying

something than for information.

“You may get cheated, robbed, and murdered in London. But there are

plenty of people anywhere, who’ll do that for you.”

“If there is bad blood between you and them,” said I, to soften it off

a little.

“O! I don’t know about bad blood,” returned Mr. Wemmick; “there’s not

much bad blood about. They’ll do it, if there’s anything to be got by

it.”

“That makes it worse.”

“You think so?” returned Mr. Wemmick. “Much about the same, I should

say.”

He wore his hat on the back of his head, and looked straight before

him: walking in a self-contained way as if there were nothing in the

streets to claim his attention. His mouth was such a post-office of a

mouth that he had a mechanical appearance of smiling. We had got to the

top of Holborn Hill before I knew that it was merely a mechanical

appearance, and that he was not smiling at all.

“Do you know where Mr. Matthew Pocket lives?” I asked Mr. Wemmick.

“Yes,” said he, nodding in the direction. “At Hammersmith, west of

London.”

“Is that far?”

“Well! Say five miles.”

“Do you know him?”

“Why, you’re a regular cross-examiner!” said Mr. Wemmick, looking at me

with an approving air. “Yes, I know him. _I_ know him!”

There was an air of toleration or depreciation about his utterance of

these words that rather depressed me; and I was still looking sideways

at his block of a face in search of any encouraging note to the text,

when he said here we were at Barnard’s Inn. My depression was not

alleviated by the announcement, for, I had supposed that establishment

to be an hotel kept by Mr. Barnard, to which the Blue Boar in our town

was a mere public-house. Whereas I now found Barnard to be a

disembodied spirit, or a fiction, and his inn the dingiest collection

of shabby buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner as a club

for Tom-cats.

We entered this haven through a wicket-gate, and were disgorged by an

introductory passage into a melancholy little square that looked to me

like a flat burying-ground. I thought it had the most dismal trees in

it, and the most dismal sparrows, and the most dismal cats, and the

most dismal houses (in number half a dozen or so), that I had ever

seen. I thought the windows of the sets of chambers into which those

houses were divided were in every stage of dilapidated blind and

curtain, crippled flower-pot, cracked glass, dusty decay, and miserable

makeshift; while To Let, To Let, To Let, glared at me from empty rooms,

as if no new wretches ever came there, and the vengeance of the soul of

Barnard were being slowly appeased by the gradual suicide of the

present occupants and their unholy interment under the gravel. A frowzy

mourning of soot and smoke attired this forlorn creation of Barnard,

and it had strewn ashes on its head, and was undergoing penance and

humiliation as a mere dust-hole. Thus far my sense of sight; while dry

rot and wet rot and all the silent rots that rot in neglected roof and

cellar,—rot of rat and mouse and bug and coaching-stables near at hand

besides—addressed themselves faintly to my sense of smell, and moaned,

“Try Barnard’s Mixture.”

So imperfect was this realisation of the first of my great

expectations, that I looked in dismay at Mr. Wemmick. “Ah!” said he,

mistaking me; “the retirement reminds you of the country. So it does

me.”

He led me into a corner and conducted me up a flight of stairs,—which

appeared to me to be slowly collapsing into sawdust, so that one of

those days the upper lodgers would look out at their doors and find

themselves without the means of coming down,—to a set of chambers on

the top floor. MR. POCKET, JUN., was painted on the door, and there was

a label on the letter-box, “Return shortly.”

“He hardly thought you’d come so soon,” Mr. Wemmick explained. “You

don’t want me any more?”

“No, thank you,” said I.

“As I keep the cash,” Mr. Wemmick observed, “we shall most likely meet

pretty often. Good day.”

“Good day.”

I put out my hand, and Mr. Wemmick at first looked at it as if he

thought I wanted something. Then he looked at me, and said, correcting

himself,—

“To be sure! Yes. You’re in the habit of shaking hands?”

I was rather confused, thinking it must be out of the London fashion,

but said yes.

“I have got so out of it!” said Mr. Wemmick,—“except at last. Very

glad, I’m sure, to make your acquaintance. Good day!”

When we had shaken hands and he was gone, I opened the staircase window

and had nearly beheaded myself, for, the lines had rotted away, and it

came down like the guillotine. Happily it was so quick that I had not

put my head out. After this escape, I was content to take a foggy view

of the Inn through the window’s encrusting dirt, and to stand dolefully

looking out, saying to myself that London was decidedly overrated.

Mr. Pocket, Junior’s, idea of Shortly was not mine, for I had nearly

maddened myself with looking out for half an hour, and had written my

name with my finger several times in the dirt of every pane in the

window, before I heard footsteps on the stairs. Gradually there arose

before me the hat, head, neckcloth, waistcoat, trousers, boots, of a

member of society of about my own standing. He had a paper-bag under

each arm and a pottle of strawberries in one hand, and was out of

breath.

“Mr. Pip?” said he.

“Mr. Pocket?” said I.

“Dear me!” he exclaimed. “I am extremely sorry; but I knew there was a

coach from your part of the country at midday, and I thought you would

come by that one. The fact is, I have been out on your account,—not

that that is any excuse,—for I thought, coming from the country, you

might like a little fruit after dinner, and I went to Covent Garden

Market to get it good.”

For a reason that I had, I felt as if my eyes would start out of my

head. I acknowledged his attention incoherently, and began to think

this was a dream.

“Dear me!” said Mr. Pocket, Junior. “This door sticks so!”

As he was fast making jam of his fruit by wrestling with the door while

the paper-bags were under his arms, I begged him to allow me to hold

them. He relinquished them with an agreeable smile, and combated with

the door as if it were a wild beast. It yielded so suddenly at last,

that he staggered back upon me, and I staggered back upon the opposite

door, and we both laughed. But still I felt as if my eyes must start

out of my head, and as if this must be a dream.

“Pray come in,” said Mr. Pocket, Junior. “Allow me to lead the way. I

am rather bare here, but I hope you’ll be able to make out tolerably

well till Monday. My father thought you would get on more agreeably

through to-morrow with me than with him, and might like to take a walk

about London. I am sure I shall be very happy to show London to you. As

to our table, you won’t find that bad, I hope, for it will be supplied

from our coffee-house here, and (it is only right I should add) at your

expense, such being Mr. Jaggers’s directions. As to our lodging, it’s

not by any means splendid, because I have my own bread to earn, and my

father hasn’t anything to give me, and I shouldn’t be willing to take

it, if he had. This is our sitting-room,—just such chairs and tables

and carpet and so forth, you see, as they could spare from home. You

mustn’t give me credit for the tablecloth and spoons and castors,

because they come for you from the coffee-house. This is my little

bedroom; rather musty, but Barnard’s _is_ musty. This is your bedroom;

the furniture’s hired for the occasion, but I trust it will answer the

purpose; if you should want anything, I’ll go and fetch it. The

chambers are retired, and we shall be alone together, but we shan’t

fight, I dare say. But dear me, I beg your pardon, you’re holding the

fruit all this time. Pray let me take these bags from you. I am quite

ashamed.”

As I stood opposite to Mr. Pocket, Junior, delivering him the bags,

One, Two, I saw the starting appearance come into his own eyes that I

knew to be in mine, and he said, falling back,—

“Lord bless me, you’re the prowling boy!”

“And you,” said I, “are the pale young gentleman!”