Marginalia

Chapter 24

Paul Schacht

October 27, 2019

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 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 he 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.

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 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 honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable 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.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 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.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 “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.”

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 “Go it!” said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. “I told you you’d get on. Well! How much do you want?”

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 I said I didn’t know how much.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 “Come!” retorted Mr. Jaggers. “How much? Fifty pounds?”

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 “O, not nearly so much.”

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 “Five pounds?” said Mr. Jaggers.

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, “O, more than that.”

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 “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?”

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 “It is so difficult to fix a sum,” said I, hesitating.

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 “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?”

¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 I said I thought that would do handsomely.

¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 “Four times five will do handsomely, will it?” said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his brows. “Now, what do you make of four times five?”

¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 “What do I make of it?”

¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 “Ah!” said Mr. Jaggers; “how much?”

¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 “I suppose you make it twenty pounds,” said I, smiling.

¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 “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.”

¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 “Twenty pounds, of course.”

¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 “Wemmick!” said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. “Take Mr. Pip’s written order, and pay him twenty pounds.”

¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 0 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.

¶ 23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 0 “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.”

¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0 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.

¶ 25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0 “Always seems to me,” said Wemmick, “as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click—you’re caught!”

¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful?

¶ 27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 0 “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.”

¶ 28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 0 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,—

¶ 29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 0 “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.”

¶ 30 Leave a comment on paragraph 30 0 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 upstairs. 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 face-ache 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.

¶ 31 Leave a comment on paragraph 31 0 This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian’s room, and said, “This you’ve seen already.”

¶ 32 Leave a comment on paragraph 32 0 “Pray,” said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, “whose likenesses are those?”

¶ 33 Leave a comment on paragraph 33 0 “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.”

¶ 34 Leave a comment on paragraph 34 0 “Is it like him?” I asked, recoiling from the brute, as Wemmick spat upon his eyebrow and gave it a rub with his sleeve.

¶ 35 Leave a comment on paragraph 35 0 “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!”

¶ 36 Leave a comment on paragraph 36 0 “Is the lady anybody?” said I.

¶ 37 Leave a comment on paragraph 37 0 “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 lady-like 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.

¶ 38 Leave a comment on paragraph 38 0 “Did that other creature come to the same end?” I asked. “He has the same look.”

¶ 39 Leave a comment on paragraph 39 0 “You’re right,” said Wemmick; “it’s the genuine look. Much as if one nostril was caught up with a horse-hair 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.”

¶ 40 Leave a comment on paragraph 40 0 While he was putting up the other cast and coming down from the chair, the thought crossed my mind that all his personal jewelry 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.

¶ 41 Leave a comment on paragraph 41 0 “O 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 lookout, but as to myself, my guiding-star always is, ‘Get hold of portable property’.”

¶ 42 Leave a comment on paragraph 42 0 When I had rendered homage to this light, he went on to say, in a friendly manner:—

¶ 43 Leave a comment on paragraph 43 0 “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 honor. 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.”

¶ 44 Leave a comment on paragraph 44 0 I said I should be delighted to accept his hospitality.

¶ 45 Leave a comment on paragraph 45 0 “Thankee,” said he; “then we’ll consider that it’s to come off, when convenient to you. Have you dined with Mr. Jaggers yet?”

¶ 46 Leave a comment on paragraph 46 0 “Not yet.”

¶ 47 Leave a comment on paragraph 47 0 “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.”

¶ 48 Leave a comment on paragraph 48 0 “Shall I see something very uncommon?”

¶ 49 Leave a comment on paragraph 49 0 “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.”

¶ 50 Leave a comment on paragraph 50 0 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?”

¶ 51 Leave a comment on paragraph 51 0 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 police-court, 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 thief-takers 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.