Bleak House by Charles Dickens (ebook reader that looks like a book TXT) 📕

they can’t speak out at once? More impracticable men and boys

persist in walking into Mr. Snagsby’s sleep and terrifying him with

unaccountable questions, so that often when the cock at the little

dairy in Cursitor Street breaks out in his usual absurd way about

the morning, Mr. Snagsby finds himself in a crisis of nightmare,

with his little woman shaking him and saying “What’s the matter

with the man!”

The little woman herself is not the least item in his difficulty.

To know that he is always keeping a secret from her, that he has

under all circumstances to conceal and hold fast a tender double

tooth, which her sharpness is ever ready to twist out of his head,

gives Mr. Snagsby, in her dentistical presence, much of the air of

a dog who has a reservation from his master and will look anywhere

rather than meet his eye.

These various signs and tokens, marked by the little woman, are not

lost upon her. They impel her to say, “Snagsby has something on

his mind!” And thus suspicion gets into Cook’s Court, Cursitor

Street. From suspicion to jealousy, Mrs. Snagsby finds the road as

natural and short as from Cook’s Court to Chancery Lane. And thus

jealousy gets into Cook’s Court, Cursitor Street. Once there (and

it was always lurking thereabout), it is very active and nimble in

Mrs. Snagsby’s breast, prompting her to nocturnal examinations of

Mr. Snagsby’s pockets; to secret perusals of Mr. Snagsby’s letters;

to private researches in the day book and ledger, till, cash-box,

and iron safe; to watchings at windows, listenings behind doors,

and a general putting of this and that together by the wrong end.

Mrs. Snagsby is so perpetually on the alert that the house becomes

ghostly with creaking boards and rustling garments. The ‘prentices

think somebody may have been murdered there in bygone times.

Guster holds certain loose atoms of an idea (picked up at Tooting,

where they were found floating among the orphans) that there is

buried money underneath the cellar, guarded by an old man with a

white beard, who cannot get out for seven thousand years because he

said the Lord’s Prayer backwards.

“Who was Nimrod?” Mrs. Snagsby repeatedly inquires of herself.

“Who was that lady—that creature? And who is that boy?” Now,

Nimrod being as dead as the mighty hunter whose name Mrs. Snagsby

has appropriated, and the lady being unproducible, she directs her

mental eye, for the present, with redoubled vigilance to the boy.

“And who,” quoth Mrs. Snagsby for the thousand and first time, “is

that boy? Who is that—!” And there Mrs. Snagsby is seized with

an inspiration.

He has no respect for Mr. Chadband. No, to be sure, and he

wouldn’t have, of course. Naturally he wouldn’t, under those

contagious circumstances. He was invited and appointed by Mr.

Chadband—why, Mrs. Snagsby heard it herself with her own ears!—to

come back, and be told where he was to go, to be addressed by Mr.

Chadband; and he never came! Why did he never come? Because he

was told not to come. Who told him not to come? Who? Ha, ha!

Mrs. Snagsby sees it all.

But happily (and Mrs. Snagsby tightly shakes her head and tightly

smiles) that boy was met by Mr. Chadband yesterday in the streets;

and that boy, as affording a subject which Mr. Chadband desires to

improve for the spiritual delight of a select congregation, was

seized by Mr. Chadband and threatened with being delivered over to

the police unless he showed the reverend gentleman where he lived

and unless he entered into, and fulfilled, an undertaking to appear

in Cook’s Court to-morrow night, “to—mor—row—night,” Mrs.

Snagsby repeats for mere emphasis with another tight smile and

another tight shake of her head; and to-morrow night that boy will

be here, and to-morrow night Mrs. Snagsby will have her eye upon

him and upon some one else; and oh, you may walk a long while in

your secret ways (says Mrs. Snagsby with haughtiness and scorn),

but you can’t blind ME!

Mrs. Snagsby sounds no timbrel in anybody’s ears, but holds her

purpose quietly, and keeps her counsel. To-morrow comes, the

savoury preparations for the Oil Trade come, the evening comes.

Comes Mr. Snagsby in his black coat; come the Chadbands; come (when

the gorging vessel is replete) the ‘prentices and Guster, to be

edified; comes at last, with his slouching head, and his shuffle

backward, and his shuffle forward, and his shuffle to the right,

and his shuffle to the left, and his bit of fur cap in his muddy

hand, which he picks as if it were some mangy bird he had caught

and was plucking before eating raw, Jo, the very, very tough

subject Mr. Chadband is to improve.

Mrs. Snagsby screws a watchful glance on Jo as he is brought into

the little drawing-room by Guster. He looks at Mr. Snagsby the

moment he comes in. Aha! Why does he look at Mr. Snagsby? Mr.

Snagsby looks at him. Why should he do that, but that Mrs. Snagsby

sees it all? Why else should that look pass between them, why else

should Mr. Snagsby be confused and cough a signal cough behind his

hand? It is as clear as crystal that Mr. Snagsby is that boy’s

father.

“Peace, my friends,” says Chadband, rising and wiping the oily

exudations from his reverend visage. “Peace be with us! My

friends, why with us? Because,” with his fat smile, “it cannot be

against us, because it must be for us; because it is not hardening,

because it is softening; because it does not make war like the

hawk, but comes home unto us like the dove. Therefore, my friends,

peace be with us! My human boy, come forward!”

Stretching forth his flabby paw, Mr. Chadband lays the same on Jo’s

arm and considers where to station him. Jo, very doubtful of his

reverend friend’s intentions and not at all clear but that

something practical and painful is going to be done to him,

mutters, “You let me alone. I never said nothink to you. You let

me alone.”

“No, my young friend,” says Chadband smoothly, “I will not let you

alone. And why? Because I am a harvest-labourer, because I am a

toiler and a moiler, because you are delivered over unto me and are

become as a precious instrument in my hands. My friends, may I so

employ this instrument as to use it to your advantage, to your

profit, to your gain, to your welfare, to your enrichment! My

young friend, sit upon this stool.”

Jo, apparently possessed by an impression that the reverend

gentleman wants to cut his hair, shields his head with both arms

and is got into the required position with great difficulty and

every possible manifestation of reluctance.

When he is at last adjusted like a lay-figure, Mr. Chadband,

retiring behind the table, holds up his bear’s-paw and says, “My

friends!” This is the signal for a general settlement of the

audience. The ‘prentices giggle internally and nudge each other.

Guster falls into a staring and vacant state, compounded of a

stunned admiration of Mr. Chadband and pity for the friendless

outcast whose condition touches her nearly. Mrs. Snagsby silently

lays trains of gunpowder. Mrs. Chadband composes herself grimly by

the fire and warms her knees, finding that sensation favourable to

the reception of eloquence.

It happens that Mr. Chadband has a pulpit habit of fixing some

member of his congregation with his eye and fatly arguing his

points with that particular person, who is understood to be

expected to be moved to an occasional grunt, groan, gasp, or other

audible expression of inward working, which expression of inward

working, being echoed by some elderly lady in the next pew and so

communicated like a game of forfeits through a circle of the more

fermentable sinners present, serves the purpose of parliamentary

cheering and gets Mr. Chadband’s steam up. From mere force of

habit, Mr. Chadband in saying “My friends!” has rested his eye on

Mr. Snagsby and proceeds to make that ill-starred stationer,

already sufficiently confused, the immediate recipient of his

discourse.

“We have here among us, my friends,” says Chadband, “a Gentile and

a heathen, a dweller in the tents of Tom-all-Alone’s and a mover-on

upon the surface of the earth. We have here among us, my friends,”

and Mr. Chadband, untwisting the point with his dirty thumb-nail,

bestows an oily smile on Mr. Snagsby, signifying that he will throw

him an argumentative back-fall presently if he be not already down,

“a brother and a boy. Devoid of parents, devoid of relations,

devoid of flocks and herds, devoid of gold and silver and of

precious stones. Now, my friends, why do I say he is devoid of

these possessions? Why? Why is he?” Mr. Chadband states the

question as if he were propounding an entirely new riddle of much

ingenuity and merit to Mr. Snagsby and entreating him not to give

it up.

Mr. Snagsby, greatly perplexed by the mysterious look he received

just now from his little woman—at about the period when Mr.

Chadband mentioned the word parents—is tempted into modestly

remarking, “I don’t know, I’m sure, sir.” On which interruption

Mrs. Chadband glares and Mrs. Snagsby says, “For shame!”

“I hear a voice,” says Chadband; “is it a still small voice, my

friends? I fear not, though I fain would hope so—”

“Ah—h!” from Mrs. Snagsby.

“Which says, ‘I don’t know.’ Then I will tell you why. I say this

brother present here among us is devoid of parents, devoid of

relations, devoid of flocks and herds, devoid of gold, of silver,

and of precious stones because he is devoid of the light that

shines in upon some of us. What is that light? What is it? I ask

you, what is that light?”

Mr. Chadband draws back his head and pauses, but Mr. Snagsby is not

to be lured on to his destruction again. Mr. Chadband, leaning

forward over the table, pierces what he has got to follow directly

into Mr. Snagsby with the thumb-nail already mentioned.

“It is,” says Chadband, “the ray of rays, the sun of suns, the moon

of moons, the star of stars. It is the light of Terewth.”

Mr. Chadband draws himself up again and looks triumphantly at Mr.

Snagsby as if he would be glad to know how he feels after that.

“Of Terewth,” says Mr. Chadband, hitting him again. “Say not to me

that it is NOT the lamp of lamps. I say to you it is. I say to

you, a million of times over, it is. It is! I say to you that I

will proclaim it to you, whether you like it or not; nay, that the

less you like it, the more I will proclaim it to you. With a

speaking-trumpet! I say to you that if you rear yourself against

it, you shall fall, you shall be bruised, you shall be battered,

you shall be flawed, you shall be smashed.”

The present effect of this flight of oratory—much admired for its

general power by Mr. Chadband’s followers—being not only to make

Mr. Chadband unpleasantly warm, but to represent the innocent Mr.

Snagsby in the light of a determined enemy to virtue, with a

forehead of brass and a heart of adamant, that unfortunate

tradesman becomes yet more disconcerted and is in a very advanced

state of low spirits and false position when Mr. Chadband

accidentally finishes him.

“My friends,” he resumes after dabbing his fat head for some time—

and it smokes to such an extent that he seems to light his pocket-handkerchief at it, which smokes, too, after every dab—“to pursue

the subject we