'They're wot's left, Mr. Snagsby,' says Jo, 'out of a sov'ring as wos give me by a lady in a wale as sed she wos a servant and as come to my crossin one night and asked to be showd this 'ere ouse and the ouse wot him as you giv the writin to died at, and the berrin-ground wot he's berrid in. She ses to me, she ses, "are you the boy at the Inkwhich?" she ses. I ses, "yes," I ses. She ses to me, she ses, "can you show me all them places?" I ses, "yes, I can," I ses. And she ses to me "do it," and I dun it, and she giv me a sov'ring and hooked it. And I an't had much of the sov'ring neither,' says Jo, with dirty tears, 'fur I had to pay five bob, down in Tom-all-Alone's, afore they'd square it fur to give me change, and then a young man he thieved another five while I was asleep, and another boy he thieved ninepence, and the landlord he stood drains round with a lot more on it.'
'You don't expect anybody to believe this, about the lady and the sovereign, do you?' says the constable, eyeing him aside with ineffable disdain.
'I don't know as I do, sir,' replies Jo. 'I don't expect nothink at all, sir, much, but that's the true hist'ry on it.'
'You see what he is!' the constable observes to the audience. 'Well, Mr. Snagsby, if I don't lock him up this time, will you engage for his moving on?'
'No!' cries Mrs. Snagsby from the stairs.
'My little woman!' pleads her husband. 'Constable, I have no doubt he'll move on. You know you really must do it,' says Mr. Snagsby.
'I'm everyways agreeable, sir,' says the hapless Jo.
'Do it, then,' observes the constable. 'You know what you have got to do. Do it! And recollect you won't get off so easy next time. Catch hold of your money. Now, the sooner you're five mile off, the better for all parties.'
With this farewell hint, and pointing generally to the setting sun, as a likely place to move on to, the constable bids his auditors good afternoon; and makes the echoes of Cook's Court perform slow music for him as he walks away on the shady side, carrying his iron-bound hat in his hand for a little ventilation.
Now, Jo's improbable story concerning the lady and the sovereign has awakened more or less the curiosity of all the company. Mr. Guppy, who has an inquiring mind in matters of evidence, and who has been suffering severely from the lassitude of the long vacation, takes that interest in the case, that he enters on a regular cross-examination of the witness, which is found so interesting by the ladies that Mrs. Snagsby politely invites him to step up-stairs, and drink a cup of tea, if he will excuse the disarranged state of the tea-table, consequent on their previous exertions. Mr. Guppy yielding his assent to this proposal, Jo is requested to follow into the drawing-room doorway, where Mr. Guppy takes him in hand as a witness, patting him into this shape, that shape, and the other shape, like a butterman dealing with so much butter, and worrying him according to the best models. Nor is the examination unlike many such model displays, both in respect of its eliciting nothing, and of its being lengthy; for Mr. Guppy is sensible of his talent, and Mrs. Snagsby feels, not only that it gratifies her inquisitive disposition, but that it lifts her husband's establishment higher up in the law. During the progress of this keen encounter, the vessel Chadband, being merely engaged in the oil trade, gets aground, and waits to be floated off.
'Well!' says Mr. Guppy, 'either this boy sticks to it like cobbler's-wax, or there is something out of the common here that beats anything that ever came into my way at Kenge and Carboy's.'
Mrs. Chadband whispers Mrs. Snagsby, who exclaims, 'You don't say so!'
'For years!' replies Mrs. Chadband.
'Has known Kenge and Carboy's office for years,' Mrs. Snagsby triumphantly explains to Mr. Guppy. 'Mrs. Chad-band – this gentleman's wife – Reverend Mr. Chadband.'
'Oh, indeed!' says Mr. Guppy.
'Before I married my present husband,' says Mrs. Chadband.
'Was you a party in anything, ma'am?' says Mr. Guppy, transferring his cross-examination.
'No.'
'Not a party in anything, ma'am?' says Mr. Guppy.
Mrs. Chadband shakes her head.
'Perhaps you were acquainted with somebody who was a party in something, ma'am?' says Mr. Guppy, who likes nothing better than to model his conversation on forensic principles.
'Not exactly that, either,' replies Mrs. Chadband, humouring the joke with a hard-favoured smile.
'Not exactly that, either!' repeats Mr. Guppy. 'Very good. Pray, ma'am, was it a lady of your acquaintance who had some transactions (we will not at present say what transactions) with Kenge and Carboy's office, or was it a gentleman of your acquaintance? Take time, ma'am. We shall come to it presently. Man or woman, ma'am?'
'Neither,' says Mrs. Chadband, as before.
'Oh! A child!' says Mr. Guppy, throwing on the admiring Mrs. Snagsby the regular acute professional eye which is thrown on British jurymen. 'Now, ma'am, perhaps you'll have the kindness to tell us what child.'
'You have got it at last, sir,' says Mrs. Chadband, with another hard-favoured smile. 'Well, sir, it was before your time, most likely, judging from your appearance. I was left in charge of a child named Esther Summerson, who was put out in life by Messrs. Kenge and Carboy.'
'Miss Summerson, ma'am!' cries Mr. Guppy, excited.
'I call her Esther Summerson,' says Mrs. Chadband, with austerity. 'There was no Miss-ing of the girl in my time. It was Esther. ''Esther, do this! Esther, do that!" and she was made to do it.'
'My dear ma 'am,' returns Mr. Guppy, moving across the small apartment, 'the humble individual who now addresses you received that young lady in London, when she first came here from the establishment to which you have alluded. Allow me to have the pleasure of taking you by the hand.'
Mr. Chadband, at last seeing his opportunity, makes his accustomed signal, and rises with a smoking head, which he dabs with his pocket-handkerchief. Mrs. Snagsby whispers 'Hush!'
'My friends,' says Chadband, 'we have partaken in moderation' (which was certainly not the case so far as he was concerned), 'of the comforts which have been provided for us. May this house live upon the fatness of the land; may corn and wine be plentiful therein; may it grow, may it thrive, may it prosper, may it advance, may it proceed, may it press forward! But, my friends, have we partaken of anything else? We have. My friends, of what else have we partaken? Of spiritual profit? Yes. From whence have we derived that spiritual profit? My young friend, stand forth!'
Jo, thus apostrophised, gives a slouch backward, and another slouch forward, and another slouch to each side, and confronts the eloquent Chadband, with evident doubts of his intentions.
'My young friend,' says Chadband, 'you are to us a pearl, you are to us a diamond, you are to us a gem, you are to us a jewel. And why, my young friend?'
'I don't know,' replies Joe. 'I don't know nothink.'
'My young friend,' says Chadband, 'it is because you know nothing that you are to us a gem and jewel. For what are you, my young friend? Are you a beast of the field? No. A bird of the air? No. A fish of the sea or river? No. You are a human boy, my young friend. A human boy. O glorious to be a human boy! And why glorious, my young friend? Because you are capable of receiving the lessons of wisdom, because you are capable of profiting by this discourse which I now deliver for your good, because you are not a stick, or a staff, or a stock, or a stone, or a post, or a pillar.
O running stream of sparkling joy
To be a soaring human boy!
And do you cool yourself in that stream now, my young friend? No. Why do you not cool yourself in that stream now? Because you are in a state of darkness, because you are in a state of obscurity, because you are in a state of sinfulness, because you are in a state of bondage. My young friend, what is bondage? Let us, in a spirit of love, inquire.'
At this threatening stage of the discourse, Jo, who seems to have been gradually going out of his mind, smears his right arm over his face, and gives a terrible yawn. Mrs. Snagsby indignantly expresses her belief that he is a limb of the archfiend.
'My friends,' says Mr. Chadband, with his persecuted chin folding itself into its fat smile again as he looks round, 'it is right that I should be humbled, it is right that I should be tried, it is right that I should be mortified, it is right that I should be corrected. I stumbled, on Sabbath last, when I thought with pride of my three hours' improving. The account is now favourably balanced: my creditor has accepted a composition. O let us be joyful, joyful! O let us be joyful!'
Great sensation on the part of Mrs. Snagsby.
'My friends,' says Chadband, looking round him in conclusion, 'I will not proceed with my young friend now. Will you come to-morrow, my young friend, and inquire of this good lady where I am to be found to deliver a discourse untoe you, and will you come like the thirsty swallow upon the next day, and upon the day after that, and upon the day after that, and upon many pleasant days, to hear discourses?' (This, with a cow-like lightness.)
Jo, whose immediate object seems to be to get away on any terms, gives a shuffling nod. Mr. Guppy then throws him a penny, and Mrs. Snagsby calls to Guster to see him safely out of the house. But, before he goes down-stairs, Mr. Snagsby loads him with some broken meats from the table, which he carries away, hugging in his arms.
So Mr. Chadband – of whom the persecutors say that it is no wonder he should go on for any length of time uttering such abominable nonsense, but that the wonder rather is that he should ever leave off, having once the audacity to begin– retires into private life until he invests a little capital of supper in the oil-trade. Jo moves on, through the long vacation, down to Blackfriars Bridge, where he finds a baking stony corner, wherein to settle to his repast.
And there he sits, munching and gnawing, and looking up at the great Gross on the summit of St. Paul's Cathedral, glittering above a red and violet-tinted cloud of smoke. From the boy's face one might suppose that sacred emblem to be, in his eyes, the crowning confusion of the great, confused city; so golden, so high up, so far out of his reach. There he sits, the sun going down, the river running fast, the crowd flowing by him in two streams – everything moving on to some purpose and to one end – until he is stirred up, and told to 'move on' too.
Chapter XX
A new lodger
The long vacation saunters on towards term-time, like an idle river very leisurely strolling down a flat country to the sea. Mr. Guppy saunters along with it congenially. He has blunted the blade of his penknife, and broken the point off, by sticking that instrument into his desk in every direction. Not that he bears the desk any ill-will, but he must do something, and it must be something of an unexciting nature, which will lay neither his physical nor his intellectual energies under too heavy contribution. He finds that nothing agrees with him so well, as to make little gyrations on one leg of his stool, and stab his desk, and gape.
Kenge and Carboy are out of town, and the articled clerk has taken out a shooting licence, and gone down to his father's, and Mr. Guppy's two fellow-stipendiaries are away on leave. Mr. Guppy, and Mr. Richard Carstone, divide the dignity of the office. But Mr. Carstone is for the time being established in Kenge's room, whereat Mr. Guppy chafes. So exceedingly, that he with biting sarcasm informs his mother, in the confidential moments when he sups with her off a lobster and lettuce, in the Old Street Road, that he is afraid the office is hardly good enough for swells, and that if he had known there was a swell coming, he would have got it painted.
Mr. Guppy suspects everybody who enters on the occupation of a stool in Kenge and Carboy's office, of entertaining, as a matter of course, sinister designs upon him. He is clear that every such person wants to depose him. If he be ever asked how, why, when, or wherefore, he shuts up one eye and shakes his head. On the strength of these profound views, he in the most ingenious manner takes infinite pains to counterplot, when there is no plot; and plays the deepest games of chess without any adversary.
It is a source of much gratification to Mr. Guppy, therefore, to find the new-comer constantly poring over the papers in Jarndyce and Jarndyce; for he well knows that nothing but confusion and failure can come of that. His satisfaction communicates itself to a third saunterer through the long vacation in Kenge and Carboy's office; to wit, Young Smallweed.
Whether Young Smallweed (metaphorically called Small and eke Chick Weed, as it were jocularly to express a fledgling,) was ever a boy, is much doubted in Lincoln's Inn. He is now something under fifteen, and an old limb of the law. He is facetiously understood to entertain a passion for a lady at a cigar-shop, in the neighbourhood of Chancery Lane, and for her sake to have broken off a contract with another lady, to whom he had been engaged some years. He is a town-made article, of small stature and weazen features; but may be perceived from a considerable distance by means of his very tall hat. To become a Guppy is the object of his ambition. He dresses at that gentleman (by whom he is patronized), talks at him, walks at him, founds himself entirely on him. He is honoured with Mr. Guppy's particular confidence, and occasionally advises him, from the deep wells of his experience, on difficult points in private life.
Mr. Guppy has been lolling out of window all the morning, after trying all the stools in succession and finding none of them easy, and after several times putting his head into the iron safe with a notion of cooling it. Mr. Smallweed has been twice despatched for effervescent drinks, and has twice mixed them in the two official tumblers and stirred them up with the ruler. Mr. Guppy propounds, for Mr. Smallweed's consideration, the paradox that the more you drink the thirstier you are; and reclines his head upon the window-sill in a state of hopeless languor.
While thus looking out into the shade of Old Square, Lincoln's Inn, surveying the intolerable bricks and mortar, Mr. Guppy becomes conscious of a manly whisker emerging from the cloistered walk below, and turning itself up in the direction of his face. At the same time, a low whistle is wafted through the Inn, and a suppressed voice cries, 'Hip! Gup-py!'
'Why, you don't mean it?' says Mr, Guppy, aroused. 'Small! Here's Jobling!' Small's head looks out of window too, and nods to Jobling.
'Where have you sprung up from?' inquires Mr. Guppy.
'From the market-gardens down by Deptford. I can't stand it any longer. I must enlist. I say! I wish you'd lend me half-a-crown. Upon my soul I'm hungry.'
Jobling looks hungry, and also has the appearance of having run to seed in the market-gardens down by Deptford.
'I say! Just throw out half-a-crown, if you have got one to spare. I want to get some dinner.'
'Will you come and dine with me?' says Mr. Guppy, throwing out the coin, which Mr. Jobling catches neatly.
'How long should I have to hold out?' says Jobling.
'Not half an hour. I am only waiting here till the enemy goes,' returns Mr. Guppy, butting inward with his head.
'What enemy?'
'A new one. Going to be articled. Will you wait?'
'Can you give a fellow anything to read in the meantime?' says Mr. Jobling.
Smallweed suggests the Law List. But Mr. Jobling declares, with much earnestness, that he 'can't stand it.'
'You shall have the paper,' says Mr. Guppy. 'He shall bring it down. But you had better not be seen about here. Sit on our staircase and read. It's a quiet place.'
Jobling nods intelligence and acquiescence. The sagacious Smallweed supplies him with the newspaper, and occasionally drops his eye upon him from the landing as a precaution against his becoming disgusted with waiting, and making an untimely departure. At last the enemy retreats, and then Smallweed fetches Mr. Jobling up.
'Well, and how are you?' says Mr. Guppy, shaking hands with him.
'So, so. How are you?'
Mr. Guppy replying that ne is not much to boast of, Mr. Jobling ventures on the question, 'How is she?' This Mr. Guppy resents as a liberty; retorting, 'Jobling, there are chords in the human mind—' Jobling begs pardon.
'Any subject but that!' says Mr. Guppy, with a gloomy enjoyment of his injury. 'For there are chords, Jobling—
Mr. Jobling begs pardon again.
During this short colloquy, the active Smallweed, who is of the dinner party, has written in legal characters on a slip of paper, 'Return immediately.' This notification to all whom it may concern, he inserts in the letter-box; and then putting on the tall hat, at the angle of inclination at which Mr. Guppy wears his, informs his patron that they may now make themselves scarce.
Accordingly they betake themselves to a neighbouring dining-house, of the class known among its frequenters by the denomination Slap-Bang, where the waitress, a bouncing young female of forty, is supposed to have made some impression on the susceptible Smallweed; of whom it may be remarked that he is a weird changeling, to whom years are nothing. He stands precociously possessed of centuries of owlish wisdom. If he ever lay in a cradle, it seems as if he must have lain there in a tail-coat. He has an old, old eye, has Smallweed: and he drinks and smokes, in a monkeyish way; and his neck is stiff in his collar; and he is never to be taken in; and he knows all about it, whatever it is. In short, in his bringing up, he has been so nursed by Law and Equity that he has become a kind of fossil Imp, to account for whose terrestrial existence it is reported at the public offices that his father was John Doe, and his mother the only female member of the Roe family: also that his first long-clothes were made from a blue bag.
Into the dining-house, unaffected by the seductive show in the window, of artificially whitened cauliflowers and poultry, verdant baskets of peas, coolly blooming cucumbers, and joints ready for the spit, Mr. Smallweed leads the way. They know him there, and defer to him. He has his favourite box, he bespeaks all the papers, he is down upon bald patriarchs, who keep them more than ten minutes afterwards. It is of no use trying him with anything less than a full-sized 'bread,' or proposing to him any joint in cut, unless it is in the very best cut. In the matter of gravy he is adamant.
Conscious of his elfin power, and submitting to his dread experience, Mr. Guppy consults him in the choice of that day's banquet; turning an appealing look towards him as the waitress repeats the catalogue of viands, and saying 'What do you take, Chick?' Chick, out of the profundity of his artfulness, preferring Veal and ham and French beans – And don't you forget the stuffing, Polly,' (with an unearthly cock of his venerable eye); Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling give the like order. Three pint pots of half-and-half are superadded. Quickly the waitress returns, bearing what is apparently a model of the tower of Babel, but what is really a pile of plates and flat tin dish-covers. Mr. Smallweed, approving of what is set before him, conveys intelligent benignity into his ancient eye, and winks upon her. Then, amid a constant coming in, and going out, and running about, and a clatter of crockery, and a rumbling up and down of the machine which brings the nice cuts from the kitchen, and a shrill crying for more nice cuts down the speaking-pipe, and a shrill reckoning of the cost of nice cuts that have been disposed of, and a general flush and steam of hot joints, cut and uncut, and a considerably heated atmosphere in which the soiled knives and tablecloths seem to break out spontaneously into eruptions of grease and blotches of beer, the legal triumvirate appease their appetites.
Mr. Jobling is buttoned up closer than mere adornment might require. His hat presents at the rims a peculiar appearance of a glistening nature, as if it had been a favourite snail-promenade. The same phenomenon is visible on some parts of his coat, and particularly at the seams. He has the faded appearance of a gentleman in embarrassed circumstances; even his light whiskers droop with something of a shabby air.
His appetite is so vigorous, that it suggests spare living for some little time back. He makes such a speedy end of his plate of veal and ham, bringing it to a close while his companions are yet midway in theirs, that Mr. Guppy proposes another. 'Thank you, Guppy,' says Mr. Jobling, 'I really don't know but what I will take another.'
Another being brought, he falls to with great good will.
Mr. Guppy takes silent notice of him at intervals, until he is half way through this second plate and stops to take an enjoying pull at his pint pot of half-and-half (also renewed), and stretches out his legs and rubs his hands. Beholding him in which glow of contentment, Mr. Guppy says:
'You are a man again, Tony!'
'Well, not quite, yet,' says Mr. Jobling. 'Say, just born.'
'Will you take any other vegetables? Grass? Peas? Summer cabbage?'
'Thank you, Guppy,' says Mr. Jobling. 'I really don't know but what I will take summer cabbage.'
Order given; with the sarcastic addition (from Mr. Small-weed) of Without slugs, Polly!' And cabbage produced.
'I am growing up, Guppy,' says Mr. Jobling, plying his knife and fork with a relishing steadiness.
'Glad to hear it.'
'In fact, I have just turned into my teens,' says Mr. Jobling.
He says no more until he has performed his task, which he achieves as Messrs. Guppy and Smallweed finish theirs; thus getting over the ground in excellent style, and beating those two gentlemen easily by a veal and ham and a cabbage.
'Now, Small,' says Mr. Guppy, 'what would you recommend about pastry?'
'Marrow puddings,' says Mr. Smallweed, instantly.
'Aye, aye!' cries Mr. Jobling, with an arch look. 'You're there, are you? Thank you, Mr. Guppy, I don't know but what I will take a marrow pudding.'
Three marrow puddings being produced, Mr. Jobling adds, in a pleasant humour, that he is coming of age fast. To these succeed, by command of Mr. Smallweed, 'three Cheshires;' and to those, 'three small rums.' This apex of the entertainment happily reached, Mr. Jobling puts up his legs on the carpeted seat (having his own side of the box to himself), leans against the wall, and says, 'I am grown up, now, Guppy. I have arrived at maturity.'
'What do you think, now,' says Mr. Guppy, 'about – you don't mind Smallweed?'
'Not the least in the world. I have the pleasure of drinking his good health.'
'Sir, to you!' says Mr. Smallweed.
'I was saying, what do you think now,' pursues Mr. Guppy, 'of enlisting?'
'Why, what I may think after dinner,' returns Mr. Jobling, 'is one thing, my dear Guppy, and what I may think before dinner is another thing. Still, even after dinner, I ask myself the question, What am I to do? How am I to live? Ill fo manger, you know,' says Mr. Jobling, pronouncing that word as if he meant a necessary fixture in an English stable. 'Ill fo manger. That's the French saying, and mangering is as necessary to me as it is to a Frenchman. Or more so.'
Mr. Smallweed is decidedly of opinion 'much more so.'
'If any man had told me,' pursues Jobling, 'even so lately as when you and I had the frisk down in Lincolnshire, Guppy, and drove over to see that house at Castle Wold–'
Mr. Smallweed corrects him – Chesney Wold.
'Chesney Wold. (I thank my honourable friend for that cheer.) If any man had told me, then, that I should be as hard up at the present time as I literally find myself, I should have– well, I should have pitched into him,' says Mr. Jobling, taking a little rum-and-water with an air of desperate resignation; 'I should have let fly at his head.'
'Still, Tony, you were on the wrong side of the post then,' remonstrates Mr. Guppy. 'You were talking about nothing else in the gig.'
'Guppy,' says Mr. Jobling, 'I will not deny it. I was on the wrong side of the post. But I trusted to things coming round.'
That very popular trust in flat things coming round! Not in their being beaten round, or worked round, but in their 'coming' round! As though a lunatic should trust in the world's 'coming' triangular!
'I had confident expectations that things would come round and be all square,' says Mr. Jobling, with some vagueness of expression, and perhaps of meaning, too. 'But I was disappointed. They never did. And when it came to creditors making rows at the office, and to people that the office dealt with making complaints about dirty trifles of borrowed money, why there was an end of that connexion. And of any new professional connexion, too; for if I was to give a reference tomorrow, it would be mentioned, and would sew me up. Then, what's a fellow to do? I have been keeping out of the way, and living cheap, down about the market-gardens; but what's the use of living cheap when you have got no money? You might as well live dear.'
'Better,' Mr. Smallweed thinks.
'Certainly. It's the fashionable way; and fashion and whiskers have been my weaknesses, and I don't care who knows it,' says Mr. Jobling. 'They are great weaknesses– Damme, sir, they are great. Well!' proceeds Mr. Jobling, after a defiant visit to his rum-and-water, 'what can a fellow do, I ask you, but enlist?'
Mr. Guppy comes more fully into the conversation, to state what, in his opinion, a fellow can do. His manner is the gravely impressive manner of a man who has not committed himself in life, otherwise than as he has become the victim of a tender sorrow of the heart.
'Jobling,' says Mr. Guppy, 'myself and our mutual friend Smallweed–'
(Mr. Smallweed modestly observes 'Gentlemen both!' and drinks.)
'Have had a little conversation on this matter more than once, since you–'
'Say, got the sack!' cries Mr. Jobling, bitterly. 'Say it, Guppy. You mean it.'
'N-o-o! Left the Inn,' Mr. Smallweed delicately suggests.
'Since you left the Inn, Jobling,' says Mr. Guppy; 'and I have mentioned, to our mutual friend Smallweed, a plan I have lately thought of proposing. You know Snagsby the stationer?'
'I know there is such a stationer,' returns Mr. Jobling. 'He was not ours, and I am not acquainted with him.'
'He is ours, Jobling, and I am acquainted with him,' Mr. Guppy retorts. 'Well, sir! I have lately become better acquainted with him, through some accidental circumstances that have made me a visitor of his in private life. Those circumstances it is not necessary to offer in argument. They may – or they may not – have some reference to a subject, which may – or may not – have cast its shadow on my existence.'
As it is Mr. Guppy's perplexing way, with boastful misery to tempt his particular friends into this subject, and the moment they touch it, to turn on them with that trenchant severity about the chords in the human mind; both Mr. Jobling and Mr. Smallweed decline the pitfall, by remaining silent.
'Such things may be,' repeats Mr. Guppy, 'or they may not be. They are no part of the case. It is enough to mention, that both Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby are very willing to oblige me; and that Snagsby has, in busy times, a good deal of copying work to give out. He has all Tulkinghorn's and an excellent business besides. I believe, if our mutual friend Smallweed were put into the box, he could prove this?'
Mr. Smallweed nods, and appears greedy to be sworn.
'Now, gentlemen of the jury,' says Mr. Guppy, '—I mean, now, Jobling – you may say this is a poor prospect of a living. Granted. But it's better than nothing, and better than enlistment. You want time. There must be time for these late affairs to blow over. You might live through it on much worse terms than by writing for Snagsby.'
Mr. Jobling is about to interrupt, when the sagacious Smallweed checks him with a dry cough, and the words, 'Hem! Shakspeare!'
'There are two branches to this subject, Jobling,' says Mr. Guppy. 'That is the first. I come to the second. You know Krook, the Chancellor, across the lane. Come, Jobling,' says Mr. Guppy, in his encouraging cross-examination-tone, 'I think you know Krook, the Chancellor, across the lane?'
'I know him by sight,' says Mr. Jobling.
'You know him by sight. Very well. And you know little Flite?'
'Everybody knows her,' says Mr. Jobling.
'Everybody knows her. Very well. Now it has been one of my duties of late, to pay Flite a certain weekly allowance, deducting from it the amount of her weekly rent: which I have paid (in consequence of instructions I have received) to Krook himself, regularly in her presence. This has brought me into communication with Krook, and into a knowledge of his house and his habits. I know he has a room to let. You may live there at a very low charge, under any name you like; as quietly as if you were a hundred miles off. He'll ask no questions; and would accept you as a tenant, at a word from me – before the clock strikes, if you chose. And I tell you another thing, Jobling,' says Mr. Guppy, who has suddenly lowered his voice, and become familiar again, 'he's an extraordinary old chap – always rummaging among a litter of papers, and grubbing away at teaching himself to read and write; without getting on a bit, as it seems to me. He is a most extraordinary old chap, sir. I don't know but what it might be worth a fellow's while to look him up a bit.'
'You don't mean—?' Mr. Jobling begins.
'I mean,' returns Mr. Guppy, shrugging his shoulders with becoming modesty, 'that I can't make him out. I appeal to our mutual friend Smallweed whether he has or has not heard me remark, that I can't make him out.'
Mr. Smallweed bears the concise testimony, 'A few!'
'I have seen something of the profession, and something of life, Tony,' says Mr. Guppy, 'and it's seldom I can't make a man out, more or less. But such an old card as this; so deep, so sly, and secret (though I don't believe he is ever sober), I never came across. Now, he must be precious old, you know, and he has not a soul about him, and he is reported to be immensely rich; and whether he is a smuggler or a receiver, or an unlicensed pawnbroker, or a money-lender – all of which I have thought likely at different times – it might pay you to knock up a sort of knowledge of him. I don't see why you shouldn't go in for it, when everything else suits.'