Bleak House by Charles Dickens (best ebook reader for laptop .txt) 📕

animals get on in the unintelligible mess as they can. It is market-day. The blinded oxen, over-goaded, over-driven, never guided, run into wrong places and are beaten out, and plunge red-eyed and foaming at stone walls, and often sorely hurt the innocent, and often sorely hurt themselves. Very like Jo and his order; very, very like!

A band of music comes and plays. Jo listens to it. So does a dog⁠—a drover’s dog, waiting for his master outside a butcher’s shop, and evidently thinking about those sheep he has had upon his mind for some hours and is happily rid of. He seems perplexed respecting three or four, can’t remember where he left them, looks up and down the street as half expecting to see them astray, suddenly pricks up his ears and remembers all about it. A thoroughly vagabond dog, accustomed to low company and public-houses; a terrific dog to sheep, ready at a whistle to scamper over their backs and tear out mouthfuls of their wool; but an educated, improved, developed dog who has been taught his duties and knows how to discharge them. He and Jo listen to the music, probably with much the same amount of animal satisfaction; likewise as to awakened association, aspiration, or regret, melancholy or joyful reference to things beyond the senses, they are probably upon a par. But, otherwise, how far above the human listener is the brute!

Turn that dog’s descendants wild, like Jo, and in a very few years they will so degenerate that they will lose even their bark⁠—but not their bite.

The day changes as it wears itself away and becomes dark and drizzly. Jo fights it out at his crossing among the mud and wheels, the horses, whips, and umbrellas, and gets but a scanty sum to pay for the unsavoury shelter of Tom-all-Alone’s. Twilight comes on; gas begins to start up in the shops; the lamplighter, with his ladder, runs along the margin of the pavement. A wretched evening is beginning to close in.

In his chambers Mr. Tulkinghorn sits meditating an application to the nearest magistrate tomorrow morning for a warrant. Gridley, a disappointed suitor, has been here today and has been alarming. We are not to be put in bodily fear, and that ill-conditioned fellow shall be held to bail again. From the ceiling, foreshortened Allegory, in the person of one impossible Roman upside down, points with the arm of Samson (out of joint, and an odd one) obtrusively toward the window. Why should Mr. Tulkinghorn, for such no reason, look out of window? Is the hand not always pointing there? So he does not look out of window.

And if he did, what would it be to see a woman going by? There are women enough in the world, Mr. Tulkinghorn thinks⁠—too many; they are at the bottom of all that goes wrong in it, though, for the matter of that, they create business for lawyers. What would it be to see a woman going by, even though she were going secretly? They are all secret. Mr. Tulkinghorn knows that very well.

But they are not all like the woman who now leaves him and his house behind, between whose plain dress and her refined manner there is something exceedingly inconsistent. She should be an upper servant by her attire, yet in her air and step, though both are hurried and assumed⁠—as far as she can assume in the muddy streets, which she treads with an unaccustomed foot⁠—she is a lady. Her face is veiled, and still she sufficiently betrays herself to make more than one of those who pass her look round sharply.

She never turns her head. Lady or servant, she has a purpose in her and can follow it. She never turns her head until she comes to the crossing where Jo plies with his broom. He crosses with her and begs. Still, she does not turn her head until she has landed on the other side. Then she slightly beckons to him and says, “Come here!”

Jo follows her a pace or two into a quiet court.

“Are you the boy I’ve read of in the papers?” she asked behind her veil.

“I don’t know,” says Jo, staring moodily at the veil, “nothink about no papers. I don’t know nothink about nothink at all.”

“Were you examined at an inquest?”

“I don’t know nothink about no⁠—where I was took by the beadle, do you mean?” says Jo. “Was the boy’s name at the inkwhich Jo?”

“Yes.”

“That’s me!” says Jo.

“Come farther up.”

“You mean about the man?” says Jo, following. “Him as wos dead?”

“Hush! Speak in a whisper! Yes. Did he look, when he was living, so very ill and poor?”

“Oh, jist!” says Jo.

“Did he look like⁠—not like you?” says the woman with abhorrence.

“Oh, not so bad as me,” says Jo. “I’m a reg’lar one I am! You didn’t know him, did you?”

“How dare you ask me if I knew him?”

“No offence, my lady,” says Jo with much humility, for even he has got at the suspicion of her being a lady.

“I am not a lady. I am a servant.”

“You are a jolly servant!” says Jo without the least idea of saying anything offensive, merely as a tribute of admiration.

“Listen and be silent. Don’t talk to me, and stand farther from me! Can you show me all those places that were spoken of in the account I read? The place he wrote for, the place he died at, the place where you were taken to, and the place where he was buried? Do you know the place where he was buried?”

Jo answers with a nod, having also nodded as each other place was mentioned.

“Go before me and show me all those dreadful places. Stop opposite to each, and don’t speak to me unless I speak to you. Don’t look back. Do what I want, and I will pay you well.”

Jo attends closely while the words are being spoken; tells them off on his broom-handle, finding them rather hard; pauses to consider their meaning; considers it satisfactory; and nods