AFTER two or three days, when I had established myself in my
room and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had
ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr Pocket and I had a long talk together.
He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for the referred to his
having been told by Mr Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and
that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could `hold my own'
with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of
course, knowing nothing to the contrary.
He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such
mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of explainer
and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent assistance I
should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense
with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar
purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner;
and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honourable in
fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honourable in
fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no
doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such
excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor, did I ever regard him as
having anything ludicrous about him - or anything but what was serious, honest,
and good - in his tutor communication with me.
When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to
work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in
Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be none
the worse for Herbert's society. Mr Pocket did not object to this arrangement,
but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be
submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of the
consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to
Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr Jaggers.
`If I could buy the furniture now hired for me,' said I, `and one or two
other little things, I should be quite at home there.'
`Go it!' said Mr Jaggers, with a short laugh. `I told you you'd get on. Well!
How much do you want?'
I said I didn't know how much.
`Come!' retorted Mr Jaggers. `How much? Fifty pounds?'
`Oh, not nearly so much.'
`Five pounds?' said Mr Jaggers.
This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, `Oh! more than
that.'
`More than that, eh!' retorted Mr Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his
hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me;
`how much more?'
`It is so difficult to fix a sum,' said I, hesitating.
`Come!' said Mr Jaggers. `Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three
times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?'
I said I thought that would do handsomely.
`Four times five will do handsomely, will it?' said Mr Jaggers, knitting his
brows. `Now, what do you make of four times five?'
`What do I make of it?'
`Ah!' said Mr Jaggers; `how much?'
`I suppose you make it twenty pounds,' said I, smiling.
`Never mind what I make it, my friend,' observed Mr Jaggers, with a knowing
and contradictory toss of his head. `I want to know what you make it.'
`Twenty pounds, of course.'
`Wemmick!' said Mr Jaggers, opening his office door. `Take Mr Pip's written
order, and pay him twenty pounds.'
This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression
on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr Jaggers never laughed; but he wore
great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his
large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he
sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious
way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I
said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr Jaggers's manner.
`Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment,' answered Wemmick; `he
don't mean that you should know what to make of it. - Oh!' for I looked
surprised, `it's not personal; it's professional: only professional.'
Wemmick was at his desk, lunching - and crunching - on a dry hard biscuit;
pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he
were posting them.
`Always seems to me,' said Wemmick, `as if he had set a mantrap and was
watching it. Suddenly - click - you're caught!'
Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said
I supposed he was very skilful?
`Deep,' said Wemmick, `as Australia.' Pointing with his pen at the office
floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the figure,
to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. `If there was anything
deeper,' added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, `he'd be it.'
Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said,
`Ca-pi-tal!' Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied:
`We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and people
won't have him at second-hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to see
'em? You are one of us, as I may say.'
I accepted the offer. When Mr Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post,
and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he
kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron
pigtail, we went up-stairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy
shoulders that had left their mark in Mr Jaggers's room, seemed to have been
shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk
who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher - a large pale puffed
swollen man - was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby
appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated
who contributed to Mr Jaggers's coffers. `Getting evidence together,' said Mr
Wemmick, as we came out, `for the Bailey.' In the room over that, a little
flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been
forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes,
whom Mr Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling,
and who would melt me anything I pleased - and who was in an excessive
white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room,
a high-shouldered man with a faceache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed
in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping
over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for
Mr Jaggers's own use.
This was all the establishment. When we went down-stairs again, Wemmick led
me into my guardian's room, and said, `This you've seen already.'
`Pray,' said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them
caught my sight again, `whose likenesses are those?'
`These?' said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the
horrible heads before bringing them down. `These are two celebrated ones. Famous
clients of ours that got us a world of credit. This chap (why you must have come
down in the night and been peeping into the inkstand, to get this blot upon your
eyebrow, you old rascal!) murdered his master, and, considering that he wasn't
brought up to evidence, didn't plan it badly.'
`Is it like him?' I asked, recoiling from the brute, as Wemmick spat upon his
eyebrow and gave it a rub with his sleeve.
`Like him? It's himself, you know. The cast was made in Newgate, directly
after he was taken down. You had a particular fancy for me, hadn't you, Old
Artful?' said Wemmick. He then explained this affectionate apostrophe, by
touching his brooch representing the lady and the weeping willow at the tomb
with the urn upon it, and saying, `Had it made for me, express!'
`Is the lady anybody?' said I.
`No,' returned Wemmick. `Only his game. (You liked your bit of game, didn't
you?) No; deuce a bit of a lady in the case, Mr Pip, except one - and she wasn't
of this slender ladylike sort, and you wouldn't have caught her looking after
this urn - unless there was something to drink in it.' Wemmick's attention being
thus directed to his brooch, he put down the cast, and polished the brooch with
his pocket-handkerchief.
`Did that other creature come to the same end?' I asked. `He has the same
look.'
`You're right,' said Wemmick; `it's the genuine look. Much as if one nostril
was caught up with a horsehair and a little fish-hook. Yes, he came to the same
end; quite the natural end here, I assure you. He forged wills, this blade did,
if he didn't also put the supposed testators to sleep too. You were a
gentlemanly Cove, though' (Mr Wemmick was again apostrophizing), `and you said
you could write Greek. Yah, Bounceable! What a liar you were!I never met such a
liar as you!' Before putting his late friend on his shelf again, Wemmick touched
the largest of his mourning rings and said, `Sent out to buy it for me, only the
day before.'
While he was putting up the other cast and coming down from the chair, the
thought crossed my mind that all his personal jewellery was derived from like
sources. As he had shown no diffidence on the subject, I ventured on the liberty
of asking him the question, when he stood before me, dusting his hands.
`Oh yes,' he returned, `these are all gifts of that kind. One brings another,
you see; that's the way of it. I always take 'em. They're curiosities. And
they're property. They may not be worth much, but, after all, they're property
and portable. It don't signify to you with your brilliant look-out, but as to
myself, my guidingstar always is, "Get hold of portable property".'
When I had rendered homage to this light, he went on to say, in a friendly
manner:
`If at any odd time when you have nothing better to do, you wouldn't mind
coming over to see me at Walworth, I could offer you a bed, and I should
consider it an honour. I have not much to show you; but such two or three
curiosities as I have got, you might like to look over; and I am fond of a bit
of garden and a summer-house.'
I said I should be delighted to accept his hospitality.
`Thankee,' said he; `then we'll consider that it's to come off, when
convenient to you. Have you dined with Mr Jaggers yet?'
`Not yet.'
`Well,' said Wemmick, `he'll give you wine, and good wine. I'll give you
punch, and not bad punch. and now I'll tell you something. When you go to dine
with Mr Jaggers, look at his housekeeper.'
`Shall I see something very uncommon?'
`Well,' said Wemmick, `you'll see a wild beast tamed. Not so very uncommon,
you'll tell me. I reply, that depends on the original wildness of the beast, and
the amount of taming. It won't lower your opinion of Mr Jaggers's powers. Keep
your eye on it.'
I told him I would do so, with all the interest and curiosity that his
preparation awakened. As I was taking my departure, he asked me if I would like
to devote five minutes to seeing Mr Jaggers `at it?'
For several reasons, and not least because I didn't clearly know what Mr
Jaggers would be found to be `at,' I replied in the affirmative. We dived into
the City, and came up in a crowded policecourt, where a blood-relation (in the
murderous sense) of the deceased with the fanciful taste in brooches, was
standing at the bar, uncomfortably chewing something; while my guardian had a
woman under examination or cross-examination - I don't know which - and was
striking her, and the bench, and everybody present, with awe. If anybody, of
whatsoever degree, said a word that he didn't approve of, he instantly required
to have it `taken down.' If anybody wouldn't make an admission, he said, `I'll
have it out of you!' and if anybody made an admission, he said, `Now I have got
you!' the magistrates shivered under a single bite of his finger. Thieves and
thieftakers hung in dread rapture on his words, and shrank when a hair of his
eyebrows turned in their direction. Which side he was on, I couldn't make out,
for he seemed to me to be grinding the whole place in a mill; I only know that
when I stole out on tiptoe, he was not on the side of the bench; for, he was
making the legs of the old gentleman who presided, quite convulsive under the
table, by his denunciations of his conduct as the representative of British law
and justice in that chair that day.
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