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

size of the building would have been its affording a great deal of

room to be dirty in. I believe that nothing belonging to the

family which it had been possible to break was unbroken at the time

of those preparations for Caddy’s marriage, that nothing which it

had been possible to spoil in any way was unspoilt, and that no

domestic object which was capable of collecting dirt, from a dear

child’s knee to the door-plate, was without as much dirt as could

well accumulate upon it.

Poor Mr. Jellyby, who very seldom spoke and almost always sat when

he was at home with his head against the wall, became interested

when he saw that Caddy and I were attempting to establish some

order among all this waste and ruin and took off his coat to help.

But such wonderful things came tumbling out of the closets when

they were opened—bits of mouldy pie, sour bottles, Mrs. Jellyby’s

caps, letters, tea, forks, odd boots and shoes of children,

firewood, wafers, saucepan-lids, damp sugar in odds and ends of

paper bags, footstools, blacklead brushes, bread, Mrs. Jellyby’s

bonnets, books with butter sticking to the binding, guttered candle

ends put out by being turned upside down in broken candlesticks,

nutshells, heads and tails of shrimps, dinner-mats, gloves, coffee-grounds, umbrellas—that he looked frightened, and left off again.

But he came regularly every evening and sat without his coat, with

his head against the wall, as though he would have helped us if he

had known how.

“Poor Pa!” said Caddy to me on the night before the great day, when

we really had got things a little to rights. “It seems unkind to

leave him, Esther. But what could I do if I stayed! Since I first

knew you, I have tidied and tidied over and over again, but it’s

useless. Ma and Africa, together, upset the whole house directly.

We never have a servant who don’t drink. Ma’s ruinous to

everything.”

Mr. Jellyby could not hear what she said, but he seemed very low

indeed and shed tears, I thought.

“My heart aches for him; that it does!” sobbed Caddy. “I can’t

help thinking to-night, Esther, how dearly I hope to be happy with

Prince, and how dearly Pa hoped, I dare say, to be happy with Ma.

What a disappointed life!”

“My dear Caddy!” said Mr. Jellyby, looking slowly round from the

wail. It was the first time, I think, I ever heard him say three

words together.

“Yes, Pa!” cried Caddy, going to him and embracing him

affectionately.

“My dear Caddy,” said Mr. Jellyby. “Never have—”

“Not Prince, Pa?” faltered Caddy. “Not have Prince?”

“Yes, my dear,” said Mr. Jellyby. “Have him, certainly. But,

never have—”

I mentioned in my account of our first visit in Thavies Inn that

Richard described Mr. Jellyby as frequently opening his mouth after

dinner without saying anything. It was a habit of his. He opened

his mouth now a great many times and shook his head in a melancholy

manner.

“What do you wish me not to have? Don’t have what, dear Pa?” asked

Caddy, coaxing him, with her arms round his neck.

“Never have a mission, my dear child.”

Mr. Jellyby groaned and laid his head against the wall again, and

this was the only time I ever heard him make any approach to

expressing his sentiments on the Borrioboolan question. I suppose

he had been more talkative and lively once, but he seemed to have

been completely exhausted long before I knew him.

I thought Mrs. Jellyby never would have left off serenely looking

over her papers and drinking coffee that night. It was twelve

o’clock before we could obtain possession of the room, and the

clearance it required then was so discouraging that Caddy, who was

almost tired out, sat down in the middle of the dust and cried.

But she soon cheered up, and we did wonders with it before we went

to bed.

In the morning it looked, by the aid of a few flowers and a

quantity of soap and water and a little arrangement, quite gay.

The plain breakfast made a cheerful show, and Caddy was perfectly

charming. But when my darling came, I thought—and I think now—

that I never had seen such a dear face as my beautiful pet’s.

We made a little feast for the children upstairs, and we put Peepy

at the head of the table, and we showed them Caddy in her bridal

dress, and they clapped their hands and hurrahed, and Caddy cried

to think that she was going away from them and hugged them over and

over again until we brought Prince up to fetch her away—when, I am

sorry to say, Peepy bit him. Then there was old Mr. Turveydrop

downstairs, in a state of deportment not to be expressed, benignly

blessing Caddy and giving my guardian to understand that his son’s

happiness was his own parental work and that he sacrificed personal

considerations to ensure it. “My dear sir,” said Mr. Turveydrop,

“these young people will live with me; my house is large enough for

their accommodation, and they shall not want the shelter of my

roof. I could have wished—you will understand the allusion, Mr.

Jarndyce, for you remember my illustrious patron the Prince Regent

—I could have wished that my son had married into a family where

there was more deportment, but the will of heaven be done!”

Mr. and Mrs. Pardiggle were of the party—Mr. Pardiggle, an

obstinate-looking man with a large waistcoat and stubbly hair, who

was always talking in a loud bass voice about his mite, or Mrs.

Pardiggle’s mite, or their five boys’ mites. Mr. Quale, with his

hair brushed back as usual and his knobs of temples shining very

much, was also there, not in the character of a disappointed lover,

but as the accepted of a young—at least, an unmarried—lady, a

Miss Wisk, who was also there. Miss Wisk’s mission, my guardian

said, was to show the world that woman’s mission was man’s mission

and that the only genuine mission of both man and woman was to be

always moving declaratory resolutions about things in general at

public meetings. The guests were few, but were, as one might

expect at Mrs. Jellyby’s, all devoted to public objects only.

Besides those I have mentioned, there was an extremely dirty lady

with her bonnet all awry and the ticketed price of her dress still

sticking on it, whose neglected home, Caddy told me, was like a

filthy wilderness, but whose church was like a fancy fair. A very

contentious gentleman, who said it was his mission to be

everybody’s brother but who appeared to be on terms of coolness

with the whole of his large family, completed the party.

A party, having less in common with such an occasion, could hardly

have been got together by any ingenuity. Such a mean mission as

the domestic mission was the very last thing to be endured among

them; indeed, Miss Wisk informed us, with great indignation, before

we sat down to breakfast, that the idea of woman’s mission lying

chiefly in the narrow sphere of home was an outrageous slander on

the part of her tyrant, man. One other singularity was that nobody

with a mission—except Mr. Quale, whose mission, as I think I have

formerly said, was to be in ecstasies with everybody’s mission—

cared at all for anybody’s mission. Mrs. Pardiggle being as clear

that the only one infallible course was her course of pouncing upon

the poor and applying benevolence to them like a strait-waistcoat;

as Miss Wisk was that the only practical thing for the world was

the emancipation of woman from the thraldom of her tyrant, man.

Mrs. Jellyby, all the while, sat smiling at the limited vision that

could see anything but Borrioboola-Gha.

But I am anticipating now the purport of our conversation on the

ride home instead of first marrying Caddy. We all went to church,

and Mr. Jellyby gave her away. Of the air with which old Mr.

Turveydrop, with his hat under his left arm (the inside presented

at the clergyman like a cannon) and his eyes creasing themselves up

into his wig, stood stiff and high-shouldered behind us bridesmaids

during the ceremony, and afterwards saluted us, I could never say

enough to do it justice. Miss Wisk, whom I cannot report as

prepossessing in appearance, and whose manner was grim, listened to

the proceedings, as part of woman’s wrongs, with a disdainful face.

Mrs. Jellyby, with her calm smile and her bright eyes, looked the

least concerned of all the company.

We duly came back to breakfast, and Mrs. Jellyby sat at the head of

the table and Mr. Jellyby at the foot. Caddy had previously stolen

upstairs to hug the children again and tell them that her name was

Turveydrop. But this piece of information, instead of being an

agreeable surprise to Peepy, threw him on his back in such

transports of kicking grief that I could do nothing on being sent

for but accede to the proposal that he should be admitted to the

breakfast table. So he came down and sat in my lap; and Mrs.

Jellyby, after saying, in reference to the state of his pinafore,

“Oh, you naughty Peepy, what a shocking little pig you are!” was

not at all discomposed. He was very good except that he brought

down Noah with him (out of an ark I had given him before we went to

church) and WOULD dip him head first into the wine-glasses and then

put him in his mouth.

My guardian, with his sweet temper and his quick perception and his

amiable face, made something agreeable even out of the ungenial

company. None of them seemed able to talk about anything but his,

or her, own one subject, and none of them seemed able to talk about

even that as part of a world in which there was anything else; but

my guardian turned it all to the merry encouragement of Caddy and

the honour of the occasion, and brought us through the breakfast

nobly. What we should have done without him, I am afraid to think,

for all the company despising the bride and bridegroom and old Mr.

Turveydrop—and old Mr. Thurveydrop, in virtue of his deportment,

considering himself vastly superior to all the company—it was a

very unpromising case.

At last the time came when poor Caddy was to go and when all her

property was packed on the hired coach and pair that was to take

her and her husband to Gravesend. It affected us to see Caddy

clinging, then, to her deplorable home and hanging on her mother’s

neck with the greatest tenderness.

“I am very sorry I couldn’t go on writing from dictation, Ma,”

sobbed Caddy. “I hope you forgive me now.”

“Oh, Caddy, Caddy!” said Mrs. Jellyby. “I have told you over and

over again that I have engaged a boy, and there’s an end of it.”

“You are sure you are not the least angry with me, Ma? Say you are

sure before I go away, Ma?”

“You foolish Caddy,” returned Mrs. Jellyby, “do I look angry, or

have I inclination to be angry, or time to be angry? How CAN you?”

“Take a little care of Pa while I am gone, Mama!”

Mrs. Jellyby positively laughed at the fancy. “You romantic

child,” said she, lightly patting Caddy’s back. “Go along. I am

excellent friends with you. Now, good-bye, Caddy, and be very

happy!”

Then Caddy hung upon her father and nursed his cheek against hers

as if he were some poor dull child in pain. All this took place in

the hall. Her father released her, took