Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (speed reading book TXT) 📕

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?”

“O, not nearly so much.”

“Five pounds?” said Mr. Jaggers.

This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, “O, 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 man-trap 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 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.

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 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.

“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 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.

“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”.”

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 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.”

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

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.