BLEAK HOUSE

Inapoi la Sumar

CHAPTER XVI  

Tom-all-Alone's

My Lady Dedlock is restless, very restless.  The astonished  fashionable intelligence hardly knows where to have her.  To-day  she is at Chesney Wold; yesterday she was at her house in town; to- morrow she may be abroad, for anything the fashionable intelligence  can with confidence predict.  Even Sir Leicester's gallantry has  some trouble to keep pace with her.  It would have more but that  his other faithful ally, for better and for worse--the gout--darts  into the old oak bedchamber at Chesney Wold and grips him by both  legs.  Sir Leicester receives the gout as a troublesome demon, but still a  demon of the patrician order.  All the Dedlocks, in the direct male  line, through a course of time during and beyond which the memory  of man goeth not to the contrary, have had the gout. 

It can be  proved, sir.  Other men's fathers may have died of the rheumatism  or may have taken base contagion from the tainted blood of the sick  vulgar, but the Dedlock family have communicated something  exclusive even to the levelling process of dying by dying of their  own family gout.  It has come down through the illustrious line  like the plate, or the pictures, or the place in Lincolnshire.  It  is among their dignities.  Sir Leicester is perhaps not wholly  without an impression, though he has never resolved it into words,  that the angel of death in the discharge of his necessary duties  may observe to the shades of the aristocracy, "My lords and  gentlemen, I have the honour to present to you another Dedlock  certified to have arrived per the family gout." 

Hence Sir Leicester yields up his family legs to the family  disorder as if he held his name and fortune on that feudal tenure.   He feels that for a Dedlock to be laid upon his back and  spasmodically twitched and stabbed in his extremities is a liberty  taken somewhere, but he thinks, "We have all yielded to this; it  belongs to us; it has for some hundreds of years been understood  that we are not to make the vaults in the park interesting on more  ignoble terms; and I submit myself to the compromise.  And a goodly show he makes, lying in a flush of crimson and gold in  the midst of the great drawing-room before his favourite picture of  my Lady, with broad strips of sunlight shining in, down the long  perspective, through the long line of windows, and alternating with  soft reliefs of shadow. 

Outside, the stately oaks, rooted for ages  in the green ground which has never known ploughshare, but was  still a chase when kings rode to battle with sword and shield and  rode a-hunting with bow and arrow, bear witness to his greatness.   Inside, his forefathers, looking on him from the walls, say, "Each  of us was a passing reality here and left this coloured shadow of  himself and melted into remembrance as dreamy as the distant voices  of the rooks now lulling you to rest," and hear their testimony to  his greatness too.  And he is very great this day.  And woe to  Boythorn or other daring wight who shall presumptuously contest an  inch with him!  My Lady is at present represented, near Sir Leicester, by her  portrait.  She has flitted away to town, with no intention of  remaining there, and will soon flit hither again, to the confusion  of the fashionable intelligence.  The house in town is not prepared  for her reception.  It is muffled and dreary. 

Only one Mercury in  powder gapes disconsolate at the hall-window; and he mentioned last  night to another Mercury of his acquaintance, also accustomed to  good society, that if that sort of thing was to last--which it  couldn't, for a man of his spirits couldn't bear it, and a man of  his figure couldn't be expected to bear it--there would be no  resource for him, upon his honour, but to cut his throat!  What connexion can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the  house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the  outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him  when he swept the churchyard-step?  What connexion can there have  been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world  who from opposite sides of great gulfs have, nevertheless, been  very curiously brought together!  Jo sweeps his crossing all day long, unconscious of the link, if  any link there be.  He sums up his mental condition when asked a  question by replying that he "don't know nothink." 

He knows that  it's hard to keep the mud off the crossing in dirty weather, and  harder still to live by doing it.  Nobody taught him even that  much; he found it out.  Jo lives--that is to say, Jo has not yet died--in a ruinous place  known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone's.  It is a  black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people, where the  crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced,  by some bold vagrants who after establishing their own possession  took to letting them out in lodgings.  Now, these tumbling  tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery.  As on the ruined  human wretch vermin parasites appear, so these ruined shelters have  bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in  walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers,  where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying  fever and sowing more evil in its every footprint than Lord Coodle,  and Sir Thomas Doodle, and the Duke of Foodle, and all the fine  gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set right in five  hundred years--though born expressly to do it.  Twice lately there has been a crash and a cloud of dust, like the  springing of a mine, in Tom-all-Alone's; and each time a house has  fallen.  These accidents have made a paragraph in the newspapers  and have filled a bed or two in the nearest hospital.  The gaps  remain, and there are not unpopular lodgings among the rubbish.  As  several more houses are nearly ready to go, the next crash in Tom- all-Alone's may be expected to be a good one.  This desirable property is in Chancery, of course.  It would be an  insult to the discernment of any man with half an eye to tell him  so.  Whether "Tom" is the popular representative of the original  plaintiff or defendant in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, or whether Tom  lived here when the suit had laid the street waste, all alone,  until other settlers came to join him, or whether the traditional  title is a comprehensive name for a retreat cut off from honest  company and put out of the pale of hope, perhaps nobody knows.   Certainly Jo don't know. 

"For I don't," says Jo, "I don't know nothink."  It must be a strange state to be like Jo!  To shuffle through the  streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to  the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the  shops, and at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the  windows!  To see people read, and to see people write, and to see  the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all  that language--to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb!   It must be very puzzling to see the good company going to the  churches on Sundays, with their books in their hands, and to think  (for perhaps Jo DOES think at odd times) what does it all mean, and  if it means anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing  to me?  To be hustled, and jostled, and moved on; and really to  feel that it would appear to be perfectly true that I have no  business here, or there, or anywhere; and yet to be perplexed by  the consideration that I AM here somehow, too, and everybody  overlooked me until I became the creature that I am!  It must be a  strange state, not merely to be told that I am scarcely human (as  in the case of my offering myself for a witness), but to feel it of  my own knowledge all my life! 

To see the horses, dogs, and cattle  go by me and to know that in ignorance I belong to them and not to  the superior beings in my shape, whose delicacy I offend!  Jo's  ideas of a criminal trial, or a judge, or a bishop, or a govemment,  or that inestimable jewel to him (if he only knew it) the  Constitution, should be strange!  His whole material and immaterial  life is wonderfully strange; his death, the strangest thing of all.  Jo comes out of Tom-all-Alone's, meeting the tardy morning which is  always late in getting down there, and munches his dirty bit of  bread as he comes along.  His way lying through many streets, and  the houses not yet being open, he sits down to breakfast on the  door-step of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in  Foreign Parts and gives it a brush when he has finished as an  acknowledgment of the accommodation.  He admires the size of the  edifice and wonders what it's all about.  He has no idea, poor  wretch, of the spiritual destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific  or what it costs to look up the precious souls among the coco-nuts  and bread-fruit.  He goes to his crossing and begins to lay it out for the day.  The  town awakes; the great tee-totum is set up for its daily spin and  whirl; all that unaccountable reading and writing, which has been  suspended for a few hours, recommences. 

Jo and the other lower  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 to-morrow morning for a warrant.  Gridley, a  disappointed suitor, has been here to-day 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 his ragged head. 

"I'm fly," says Jo. 

"But fen larks, you know.  Stow hooking it!" 

"What does the horrible creature mean?" exclaims the servant,  recoiling from him. 

"Stow cutting away, you know!" says Jo. 

"I don't understand you.  Go on before!  I will give you more money  than you ever had in your life." 

Jo screws up his mouth into a whistle, gives his ragged head a rub,  takes his broom under his arm, and leads the way, passing deftly  with his bare feet over the hard stones and through the mud and  mire.  Cook's Court.  Jo stops.  A pause. 

"Who lives here?" 

"Him wot give him his writing and give me half a bull," says Jo in  a whisper without looking over his shoulder. 

"Go on to the next." 

Krook's house.  Jo stops again.  A longer pause. 

"Who lives here?" 

"HE lived here," Jo answers as before.  After a silence he is asked, "In which room?" 

"In the back room up there.  You can see the winder from this  corner.  Up there!  That's where I see him stritched out.  This is  the public-ouse where I was took to." 

"Go on to the next!" 

It is a longer walk to the next, but Jo, relieved of his first  suspicions, sticks to the forms imposed upon him and does not look  round.  By many devious ways, reeking with offence of many kinds,  they come to the little tunnel of a court, and to the gas-lamp  (lighted now), and to the iron gate. 

"He was put there," says Jo, holding to the bars and looking in.  "Where?  Oh, what a scene of horror!" 

"There!" says Jo, pointing. 

"Over yinder.  Arnong them piles of  bones, and close to that there kitchin winder!  They put him wery  nigh the top.  They was obliged to stamp upon it to git it in.  I  could unkiver it for you with my broom if the gate was open.   That's why they locks it, I s'pose," giving it a shake. 

"It's  always locked.  Look at the rat!" cries Jo, excited. 

"Hi!  Look!   There he goes!  Ho!  Into the ground!" 

The servant shrinks into a corner, into a corner of that hideous  archway, with its deadly stains contaminating her dress; and  putting out her two hands and passionately telling him to keep away  from her, for he is loathsome to her, so remains for some moments.   Jo stands staring and is still staring when she recovers herself. 

"Is this place of abomination consecrated ground?" 

"I don't know nothink of consequential ground," says Jo, still  staring. 

"Is it blessed?" 

"Which?" says Jo, in the last degree amazed. 

"Is it blessed?" 

"I'm blest if I know," says Jo, staring more than ever; "but I  shouldn't think it warn't.  Blest?" repeats Jo, something troubled  in his mind. 

"It an't done it much good if it is.  Blest?  I  should think it was t'othered myself.  But I don't know nothink!" 

The servant takes as little heed of what he says as she seems to  take of what she has said herself.  She draws off her glove to get  some money from her purse.  Jo silently notices how white and small  her hand is and what a jolly servant she must be to wear such  sparkling rings.  She drops a piece of money in his hand without touching it, and  shuddering as their hands approach. 

"Now," she adds, "show me the  spot again!" 

Jo thrusts the handle of his broom between the bars of the gate,  and with his utmost power of elaboration, points it out.  At  length, looking aside to see if he has made himself intelligible,  he finds that he is alone.  His first proceeding is to hold the piece of money to the gas-light  and to be overpowered at finding that it is yellow--gold.  His next  is to give it a one-sided bite at the edge as a test of its  quality.  His next, to put it in his mouth for safety and to sweep  the step and passage with great care.  His job done, he sets off  for Tom-all-Alone's, stopping in the light of innumerable gas-lamps  to produce the piece of gold and give it another one-sided bite as  a reassurance of its being genuine. 

The Mercury in powder is in no want of society to-night, for my  Lady goes to a grand dinner and three or four balls.  Sir Leicester  is fidgety down at Chesney Wold, with no better company than the  goat; he complains to Mrs. Rouncewell that the rain makes such a  monotonous pattering on the terrace that he can't read the paper  even by the fireside in his own snug dressing-room.  "Sir Leicester would have done better to try the other side of the  house, my dear," says Mrs. Rouncewell to Rosa.  "His dressing-room  is on my Lady's side.  And in all these years I never heard the  step upon the Ghost's Walk more distinct than it is to-night!"  

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