Bleak House

I felt curious to know more concerning this person. I asked, “Does he give lessons in deportment now?”

“Now!” returned the old lady shortly. “Never did.”

After a moment's consideration, I suggested that perhaps fencing had been his accomplishment.

“I don't believe he can fence at all, ma'am,” said the old lady.

I looked surprised and inquisitive. The old lady, becoming more and more incensed against the master of deportment as she dwelt upon the subject, gave me some particulars of his career, with strong assurances that they were mildly stated.

He had married a meek little dancing-mistress, with a tolerable connexion (having never in his life before done anything but deport himself), and had worked her to death, or had, at the best, suffered her to work herself to death, to maintain him in those expenses which were indispensable to his position. At once to exhibit his deportment to the best models and to keep the best models constantly before himself, he had found it necessary to frequent all public places of fashionable and lounging resort, to be seen at Brighton and elsewhere at fashionable times, and to lead an idle life in the very best clothes. To enable him to do this, the affectionate little dancing-mistress had toiled and laboured and would have toiled and laboured to that hour if her strength had lasted so long. For the mainspring of the story was that in spite of the man's absorbing selfishness, his wife (overpowered by his deportment) had, to the last, believed in him and had, on her death-bed, in the most moving terms, confided him to their son as one who had an inextinguishable claim upon him and whom he could never regard with too much pride and deference. The son, inheriting his mother's belief, and having the deportment always before him, had lived and grown in the same faith, and now, at thirty years of age, worked for his father twelve hours a day and looked up to him with veneration on the old imaginary pinnacle.

“The airs the fellow gives himself!” said my informant, shaking her head at old Mr. Turveydrop with speechless indignation as he drew on his tight gloves, of course unconscious of the homage she was rendering. “He fully believes he is one of the aristocracy! And he is so condescending to the son he so egregiously deludes that you might suppose him the most virtuous of parents. Oh!” said the old lady, apostrophizing him with infinite vehemence. “I could bite you!”

I could not help being amused, though I heard the old lady out with feelings of real concern. It was difficult to doubt her with the father and son before me. What I might have thought of them without the old lady's account, or what I might have thought of the old lady's account without them, I cannot say. There was a fitness of things in the whole that carried conviction with it.

My eyes were yet wandering, from young Mr. Turveydrop working so hard, to old Mr. Turveydrop deporting himself so beautifully, when the latter came ambling up to me and entered into conversation.

He asked me, first of all, whether I conferred a charm and a distinction on London by residing in it? I did not think it necessary to reply that I was perfectly aware I should not do that, in any case, but merely told him where I did reside.

“A lady so graceful and accomplished,” he said, kissing his right glove and afterwards extending it towards the pupils, “will look leniently on the deficiencies here. We do our best to polish – polish – polish!”

He sat down beside me, taking some pains to sit on the form, I thought, in imitation of the print of his illustrious model on the sofa. And really he did look very like it.

“To polish – polish – polish!” he repeated, taking a pinch of snuff and gently fluttering his fingers. “But we are not, if I may say so to one formed to be graceful both by Nature and Art – ” with the high-shouldered bow, which it seemed impossible for him to make without lifting up his eyebrows and shutting his eyes “ – we are not what we used to be in point of deportment.”

“Are we not, sir?” said I.

“We have degenerated,” he returned, shaking his head, which he could do to a very limited extent in his cravat. “A levelling age is not favourable to deportment. It develops vulgarity. Perhaps I speak with some little partiality. It may not be for me to say that I have been called, for some years now, Gentleman Turveydrop, or that his Royal Highness the Prince Regent did me the honour to inquire, on my removing my hat as he drove out of the Pavilion at Brighton (that fine building), 'Who is he? Who the devil is he? Why don't I know him? Why hasn't he thirty thousand a year?' But these are little matters of anecdote – the general property, ma'am – still repeated occasionally among the upper classes.”

“Indeed?” said I.

He replied with the high-shouldered bow. “Where what is left among us of deportment,” he added, “still lingers. England – alas, my country! – has degenerated very much, and is degenerating every day. She has not many gentlemen left. We are few. I see nothing to succeed us but a race of weavers.”

“One might hope that the race of gentlemen would be perpetuated here,” said I.

“You are very good.” He smiled with a high-shouldered bow again. “You flatter me. But, no – no! I have never been able to imbue my poor boy with that part of his art. Heaven forbid that I should disparage my dear child, but he has – no deportment.”

“He appears to be an excellent master,” I observed.

“Understand me, my dear madam, he IS an excellent master. All that can be acquired, he has acquired. All that can be imparted, he can impart. But there ARE things – ” He took another pinch of snuff and made the bow again, as if to add, “This kind of thing, for instance.”

I glanced towards the centre of the room, where Miss Jellyby's lover, now engaged with single pupils, was undergoing greater drudgery than ever.

“My amiable child,” murmured Mr. Turveydrop, adjusting his cravat.

“Your son is indefatigable,” said I.

“It is my reward,” said Mr. Turveydrop, “to hear you say so. In some respects, he treads in the footsteps of his sainted mother. She was a devoted creature. But wooman, lovely wooman,” said Mr. Turveydrop with very disagreeable gallantry, “what a sex you are!”

I rose and joined Miss Jellyby, who was by this time putting on her bonnet. The time allotted to a lesson having fully elapsed, there was a general putting on of bonnets. When Miss Jellyby and the unfortunate Prince found an opportunity to become betrothed I don't know, but they certainly found none on this occasion to exchange a dozen words.

“My dear,” said Mr. Turveydrop benignly to his son, “do you know the hour?”

“No, father.” The son had no watch. The father had a handsome gold one, which he pulled out with an air that was an example to mankind.

“My son,” said he, “it's two o'clock. Recollect your school at Kensington at three.”

“That's time enough for me, father,” said Prince. “I can take a morsel of dinner standing and be off.”

“My dear boy,” returned his father, “you must be very quick. You will find the cold mutton on the table.”

“Thank you, father. Are YOU off now, father?”

“Yes, my dear. I suppose,” said Mr. Turveydrop, shutting his eyes and lifting up his shoulders with modest consciousness, “that I must show myself, as usual, about town.”

“You had better dine out comfortably somewhere,” said his son.

“My dear child, I intend to. I shall take my little meal, I think, at the French house, in the Opera Colonnade.”

“That's right. Good-bye, father!” said Prince, shaking hands.

“Good-bye, my son. Bless you!”

Mr. Turveydrop said this in quite a pious manner, and it seemed to do his son good, who, in parting from him, was so pleased with him, so dutiful to him, and so proud of him that I almost felt as if it were an unkindness to the younger man not to be able to believe implicitly in the elder. The few moments that were occupied by Prince in taking leave of us (and particularly of one of us, as I saw, being in the secret), enhanced my favourable impression of his almost childish character. I felt a liking for him and a compassion for him as he put his little kit in his pocket – and with it his desire to stay a little while with Caddy – and went away good-humouredly to his cold mutton and his school at Kensington, that made me scarcely less irate with his father than the censorious old lady.

The father opened the room door for us and bowed us out in a manner, I must acknowledge, worthy of his shining original. In the same style he presently passed us on the other side of the street, on his way to the aristocratic part of the town, where he was going to show himself among the few other gentlemen left. For some moments, I was so lost in reconsidering what I had heard and seen in Newman Street that I was quite unable to talk to Caddy or even to fix my attention on what she said to me, especially when I began to inquire in my mind whether there were, or ever had been, any other gentlemen, not in the dancing profession, who lived and founded a reputation entirely on their deportment. This became so bewildering and suggested the possibility of so many Mr. Turveydrops that I said, “Esther, you must make up your mind to abandon this subject altogether and attend to Caddy.” I accordingly did so, and we chatted all the rest of the way to Lincoln's Inn.

Caddy told me that her lover's education had been so neglected that it was not always easy to read his notes. She said if he were not so anxious about his spelling and took less pains to make it clear, he would do better; but he put so many unnecessary letters into short words that they sometimes quite lost their English appearance. “He does it with the best intention,” observed Caddy, “but it hasn't the effect he means, poor fellow!” Caddy then went on to reason, how could he be expected to be a scholar when he had passed his whole life in the dancing-school and had done nothing but teach and fag, fag and teach, morning, noon, and night! And what did it matter? She could write letters enough for both, as she knew to her cost, and it was far better for him to be amiable than learned. “Besides, it's not as if I was an accomplished girl who had any right to give herself airs,” said Caddy. “I know little enough, I am sure, thanks to Ma!”

“There's another thing I want to tell you, now we are alone,” continued Caddy, “which I should not have liked to mention unless you had seen Prince, Miss Summerson. You know what a house ours is. It's of no use my trying to learn anything that it would be useful for Prince's wife to know in OUR house. We live in such a state of muddle that it's impossible, and I have only been more disheartened whenever I have tried. So I get a little practice with – who do you think? Poor Miss Flite! Early in the morning I help her to tidy her room and clean her birds, and I make her cup of coffee for her (of course she taught me), and I have learnt to make it so well that Prince says it's the very best coffee he ever tasted, and would quite delight old Mr. Turveydrop, who is very particular indeed about his coffee. I can make little puddings too; and I know how to buy neck of mutton, and tea, and sugar, and butter, and a good many housekeeping things. I am not clever at my needle, yet,” said Caddy, glancing at the repairs on Peepy's frock, “but perhaps I shall improve, and since I have been engaged to Prince and have been doing all this, I have felt better-tempered, I hope, and more forgiving to Ma. It rather put me out at first this morning to see you and Miss Clare looking so neat and pretty and to feel ashamed of Peepy and myself too, but on the whole I hope I am better-tempered than I was and more forgiving to Ma.”

The poor girl, trying so hard, said it from her heart, and touched mine. “Caddy, my love,” I replied, “I begin to have a great affection for you, and I hope we shall become friends.”

“Oh, do you?” cried Caddy. “How happy that would make me!”

“My dear Caddy,” said I, “let us be friends from this time, and let us often have a chat about these matters and try to find the right way through them.” Caddy was overjoyed. I said everything I could in my old-fashioned way to comfort and encourage her, and I would not have objected to old Mr. Turveydrop that day for any smaller consideration than a settlement on his daughter-in-law.

By this time we were come to Mr. Krook's, whose private door stood open. There was a bill, pasted on the door-post, announcing a room to let on the second floor. It reminded Caddy to tell me as we proceeded upstairs that there had been a sudden death there and an inquest and that our little friend had been ill of the fright. The door and window of the vacant room being open, we looked in. It was the room with the dark door to which Miss Flite had secretly directed my attention when I was last in the house. A sad and desolate place it was, a gloomy, sorrowful place that gave me a strange sensation of mournfulness and even dread. “You look pale,” said Caddy when we came out, “and cold!” I felt as if the room had chilled me.

We had walked slowly while we were talking, and my guardian and Ada were here before us. We found them in Miss Flite's garret. They were looking at the birds, while a medical gentleman who was so good as to attend Miss Flite with much solicitude and compassion spoke with her cheerfully by the fire.

“I have finished my professional visit,” he said, coming forward. “Miss Flite is much better and may appear in court (as her mind is set upon it) to-morrow. She has been greatly missed there, I understand.”

Miss Flite received the compliment with complacency and dropped a general curtsy to us.

“Honoured, indeed,” said she, “by another visit from the wards in Jarndyce! Ve-ry happy to receive Jarndyce of Bleak House beneath my humble roof!” with a special curtsy. “Fitz-Jarndyce, my dear” – she had bestowed that name on Caddy, it appeared, and always called her by it – “a double welcome!”

“Has she been very ill?” asked Mr. Jarndyce of the gentleman whom we had found in attendance on her. She answered for herself directly, though he had put the question in a whisper.