Chapter 2: Fellow Travellers

Little Dorrit

by Charles Dickens

'No more of yesterday's howling over yonder to-day, Sir; is
there?'

'I have heard none.'

'Then you may be sure there is none. When these people howl,
they howl to be heard.'

'Most people do, I suppose.'

'Ah! but these people are always howling. Never happy
otherwise.'

'Do you mean the Marseilles people?'

'I mean the French people. They're always at it. As to
Marseilles, we know what Marseilles is. It sent the most
insurrectionary tune into the world that was ever composed. It
couldn't exist without allonging and marshonging to something or
other--victory or death, or blazes, or something.'

The speaker, with a whimsical good humour upon him all the time,
looked over the parapet-wall with the greatest disparagement of
Marseilles; and taking up a determined position by putting his hands
in his pockets and rattling his money at it, apostrophised it with a
short laugh.

'Allong and marshong, indeed. It would be more creditable to
you, I think, to let other people allong and marshong about their
lawful business, instead of shutting 'em up in quarantine!'

'Tiresome enough,' said the other. 'But we shall be out
to-day.'

'Out to-day!' repeated the first. 'It's almost an aggravation
of the enormity, that we shall be out to-day. Out! What have we
ever been in for?'

'For no very strong reason, I must say. But as we come from the
East, and as the East is the country of the plague--'

'The plague!' repeated the other. 'That's my grievance. I have
had the plague continually, ever since I have been here. I am like a
sane man shut up in a madhouse; I can't stand the suspicion of the
thing. I came here as well as ever I was in my life; but to suspect
me of the plague is to give me the plague. And I have had it--and I
have got it.'

'You bear it very well, Mr Meagles,' said the second speaker,
smiling.

'No. If you knew the real state of the case, that's the last
observation you would think of making. I have been waking up night
after night, and saying, now I have got it, now it has developed
itself, now I am in for it, now these fellows are making out their
case for their precautions. Why, I'd as soon have a spit put through
me, and be stuck upon a card in a collection of beetles, as lead the
life I have been leading here.'

'Well, Mr Meagles, say no more about it now it's over,' urged a
cheerful feminine voice.

'Over!' repeated Mr Meagles, who appeared (though without any
ill- nature) to be in that peculiar state of mind in which the last
word spoken by anybody else is a new injury. 'Over! and why should
I say no more about it because it's over?'

It was Mrs Meagles who had spoken to Mr Meagles; and Mrs Meagles
was, like Mr Meagles, comely and healthy, with a pleasant English
face which had been looking at homely things for five-and-fifty years
or more, and shone with a bright reflection of them.

'There! Never mind, Father, never mind!' said Mrs Meagles.
'For goodness sake content yourself with Pet.'

'With Pet?' repeated Mr Meagles in his injured vein. Pet,
however, being close behind him, touched him on the shoulder, and Mr
Meagles immediately forgave Marseilles from the bottom of his
heart.

Pet was about twenty. A fair girl with rich brown hair hanging
free in natural ringlets. A lovely girl, with a frank face, and
wonderful eyes; so large, so soft, so bright, set to such perfection
in her kind good head. She was round and fresh and dimpled and
spoilt, and there was in Pet an air of timidity and dependence which
was the best weakness in the world, and gave her the only crowning
charm a girl so pretty and pleasant could have been without.

'Now, I ask you,' said Mr Meagles in the blandest confidence,
falling back a step himself, and handing his daughter a step forward
to illustrate his question: 'I ask you simply, as between man and
man, you know, did you ever hear of such damned nonsense as putting
Pet in quarantine?'

'It has had the result of making even quarantine enjoyable.'
'Come!' said Mr Meagles, 'that's something to be sure. I am obliged
to you for that remark. Now, Pet, my darling, you had better go
along with Mother and get ready for the boat. The officer of health,
and a variety of humbugs in cocked hats, are coming off to let us out
of this at last: and all we jail-birds are to breakfast together in
something approaching to a Christian style again, before we take wing
for our different destinations. Tattycoram, stick you close to your
young mistress.'

He spoke to a handsome girl with lustrous dark hair and eyes,
and very neatly dressed, who replied with a half curtsey as she
passed off in the train of Mrs Meagles and Pet. They crossed the
bare scorched terrace all three together, and disappeared through a
staring white archway. Mr Meagles's companion, a grave dark man of
forty, still stood looking towards this archway after they were gone;
until Mr Meagles tapped him on the arm.

'I beg your pardon,' said he, starting.

'Not at all,' said Mr Meagles.

They took one silent turn backward and forward in the shade of
the wall, getting, at the height on which the quarantine barracks are
placed, what cool refreshment of sea breeze there was at seven in the
morning. Mr Meagles's companion resumed the conversation.

'May I ask you,' he said, 'what is the name of--'

'Tattycoram?' Mr Meagles struck in. 'I have not the least
idea.'

'I thought,' said the other, 'that--'

'Tattycoram?' suggested Mr Meagles again.

'Thank you--that Tattycoram was a name; and I have several times
wondered at the oddity of it.'

'Why, the fact is,' said Mr Meagles, 'Mrs Meagles and myself
are, you see, practical people.'

'That you have frequently mentioned in the course of the
agreeable and interesting conversations we have had together, walking
up and down on these stones,' said the other, with a half smile
breaking through the gravity of his dark face.

'Practical people. So one day, five or six years ago now, when
we took Pet to church at the Foundling--you have heard of the
Foundling Hospital in London? Similar to the Institution for the
Found Children in Paris?'

'I have seen it.'

'Well! One day when we took Pet to church there to hear the
music--because, as practical people, it is the business of our lives
to show her everything that we think can please her--Mother (my usual
name for Mrs Meagles) began to cry so, that it was necessary to take
her out. "What's the matter, Mother?" said I, when we had brought
her a little round: "you are frightening Pet, my dear." "Yes, I know
that, Father," says Mother, "but I think it's through my loving her
so much, that it ever came into my head." "That ever what came into
your head, Mother?" "O dear, dear!" cried Mother, breaking out
again, "when I saw all those children ranged tier above tier, and
appealing from the father none of them has ever known on earth, to
the great Father of us all in Heaven, I thought, does any wretched
mother ever come here, and look among those young faces, wondering
which is the poor child she brought into this forlorn world, never
through all its life to know her love, her kiss, her face, her voice,
even her name!" Now that was practical in Mother, and I told her so.
I said, "Mother, that's what I call practical in you, my dear."'

The other, not unmoved, assented.

'So I said next day: Now, Mother, I have a proposition to make
that I think you'll approve of. Let us take one of those same little
children to be a little maid to Pet. We are practical people. So if
we should find her temper a little defective, or any of her ways a
little wide of ours, we shall know what we have to take into account.
We shall know what an immense deduction must be made from all the
influences and experiences that have formed us--no parents, no
child-brother or sister, no individuality of home, no Glass Slipper,
or Fairy Godmother. And that's the way we came by Tattycoram.'

'And the name itself--'

'By George!' said Mr Meagles, 'I was forgetting the name itself.
Why, she was called in the Institution, Harriet Beadle--an arbitrary
name, of course. Now, Harriet we changed into Hattey, and then into
Tatty, because, as practical people, we thought even a playful name
might be a new thing to her, and might have a softening and
affectionate kind of effect, don't you see? As to Beadle, that I
needn't say was wholly out of the question. If there is anything
that is not to be tolerated on any terms, anything that is a type of
Jack-in-office insolence and absurdity, anything that represents in
coats, waistcoats, and big sticks our English holding on by nonsense
after every one has found it out, it is a beadle. You haven't seen a
beadle lately?'

'As an Englishman who has been more than twenty years in China,
no.'

'Then,' said Mr Meagles, laying his forefinger on his
companion's breast with great animation, 'don't you see a beadle,
now, if you can help it. Whenever I see a beadle in full fig, coming
down a street on a Sunday at the head of a charity school, I am
obliged to turn and run away, or I should hit him. The name of
Beadle being out of the question, and the originator of the
Institution for these poor foundlings having been a blessed creature
of the name of Coram, we gave that name to Pet's little maid. At one
time she was Tatty, and at one time she was Coram, until we got into
a way of mixing the two names together, and now she is always
Tattycoram.'

'Your daughter,' said the other, when they had taken another
silent turn to and fro, and, after standing for a moment at the wall
glancing down at the sea, had resumed their walk, 'is your only
child, I know, Mr Meagles. May I ask you--in no impertinent
curiosity, but because I have had so much pleasure in your society,
may never in this labyrinth of a world exchange a quiet word with you
again, and wish to preserve an accurate remembrance of you and
yours--may I ask you, if I have not gathered from your good wife that
you have had other children?'

'No. No,' said Mr Meagles. 'Not exactly other children. One
other child.'

'I am afraid I have inadvertently touched upon a tender
theme.'

'Never mind,' said Mr Meagles. 'If I am grave about it, I am
not at all sorrowful. It quiets me for a moment, but does not make
me unhappy. Pet had a twin sister who died when we could just see
her eyes--exactly like Pet's--above the table, as she stood on tiptoe
holding by it.'

'Ah! indeed, indeed!'

'Yes, and being practical people, a result has gradually sprung
up in the minds of Mrs Meagles and myself which perhaps you may--or
perhaps you may not--understand. Pet and her baby sister were so
exactly alike, and so completely one, that in our thoughts we have
never been able to separate them since. It would be of no use to
tell us that our dead child was a mere infant. We have changed that
child according to the changes in the child spared to us and always
with us. As Pet has grown, that child has grown; as Pet has become
more sensible and womanly, her sister has become more sensible and
womanly by just the same degrees. It would be as hard to convince me
that if I was to pass into the other world to- morrow, I should not,
through the mercy of God, be received there by a daughter, just like
Pet, as to persuade me that Pet herself is not a reality at my side.'
'I understand you,' said the other, gently.

'As to her,' pursued her father, 'the sudden loss of her little
picture and playfellow, and her early association with that mystery
in which we all have our equal share, but which is not often so
forcibly presented to a child, has necessarily had some influence on
her character. Then, her mother and I were not young when we
married, and Pet has always had a sort of grown-up life with us,
though we have tried to adapt ourselves to her. We have been advised
more than once when she has been a little ailing, to change climate
and air for her as often as we could--especially at about this time
of her life--and to keep her amused. So, as I have no need to stick
at a bank-desk now (though I have been poor enough in my time I
assure you, or I should have married Mrs Meagles long before), we go
trotting about the world. This is how you found us staring at the
Nile, and the Pyramids, and the Sphinxes, and the Desert, and all the
rest of it; and this is how Tattycoram will be a greater traveller in
course of time than Captain Cook.'

'I thank you,' said the other, 'very heartily for your
confidence.'

'Don't mention it,' returned Mr Meagles, 'I am sure you are
quite welcome. And now, Mr Clennam, perhaps I may ask you whether
you have yet come to a decision where to go next?'

'Indeed, no. I am such a waif and stray everywhere, that I am
liable to be drifted where any current may set.'

'It's extraordinary to me--if you'll excuse my freedom in saying
so--that you don't go straight to London,' said Mr Meagles, in the
tone of a confidential adviser.

'Perhaps I shall.'

'Ay! But I mean with a will.'

'I have no will. That is to say,'--he coloured a little,--'next
to none that I can put in action now. Trained by main force; broken,
not bent; heavily ironed with an object on which I was never
consulted and which was never mine; shipped away to the other end of
the world before I was of age, and exiled there until my father's
death there, a year ago; always grinding in a mill I always hated;
what is to be expected from me in middle life? Will, purpose, hope?
All those lights were extinguished before I could sound the
words.'

'Light 'em up again!' said Mr Meagles.

'Ah! Easily said. I am the son, Mr Meagles, of a hard father
and mother. I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured,
and priced everything; for whom what could not be weighed, measured,
and priced, had no existence. Strict people as the phrase is,
professors of a stern religion, their very religion was a gloomy
sacrifice of tastes and sympathies that were never their own, offered
up as a part of a bargain for the security of their possessions.
Austere faces, inexorable discipline, penance in this world and
terror in the next--nothing graceful or gentle anywhere, and the void
in my cowed heart everywhere--this was my childhood, if I may so
misuse the word as to apply it to such a beginning of life.'

'Really though?' said Mr Meagles, made very uncomfortable by the
picture offered to his imagination. 'That was a tough commencement.
But come! You must now study, and profit by, all that lies beyond
it, like a practical man.'

'If the people who are usually called practical, were practical
in your direction--'

'Why, so they are!' said Mr Meagles.

'Are they indeed?'

'Well, I suppose so,' returned Mr Meagles, thinking about it.
'Eh?

One can but be practical, and Mrs Meagles and myself are nothing
else.'

'My unknown course is easier and more helpful than I had
expected to find it, then,' said Clennam, shaking his head with his
grave smile. 'Enough of me. Here is the boat.'

The boat was filled with the cocked hats to which Mr Meagles
entertained a national objection; and the wearers of those cocked
hats landed and came up the steps, and all the impounded travellers
congregated together. There was then a mighty production of papers
on the part of the cocked hats, and a calling over of names, and
great work of signing, sealing, stamping, inking, and sanding, with
exceedingly blurred, gritty, and undecipherable results. Finally,
everything was done according to rule, and the travellers were at
liberty to depart whithersoever they would.

They made little account of stare and glare, in the new pleasure
of recovering their freedom, but flitted across the harbour in gay
boats, and reassembled at a great hotel, whence the sun was excluded
by closed lattices, and where bare paved floors, lofty ceilings, and
resounding corridors tempered the intense heat. There, a great table
in a great room was soon profusely covered with a superb repast; and
the quarantine quarters became bare indeed, remembered among dainty
dishes, southern fruits, cooled wines, flowers from Genoa, snow from
the mountain tops, and all the colours of the rainbow flashing in the
mirrors.

'But I bear those monotonous walls no ill-will now,' said Mr
Meagles. 'One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left
behind; I dare say a prisoner begins to relent towards his prison,
after he is let out.'

They were about thirty in company, and all talking; but
necessarily in groups. Father and Mother Meagles sat with their
daughter between them, the last three on one side of the table: on
the opposite side sat Mr Clennam; a tall French gentleman with raven
hair and beard, of a swart and terrible, not to say genteelly
diabolical aspect, but who had shown himself the mildest of men; and
a handsome young Englishwoman, travelling quite alone, who had a
proud observant face, and had either withdrawn herself from the rest
or been avoided by the rest--nobody, herself excepted perhaps, could
have quite decided which. The rest of the party were of the usual
materials: travellers on business, and travellers for pleasure;
officers from India on leave; merchants in the Greek and Turkey
trades; a clerical English husband in a meek strait- waistcoat, on a
wedding trip with his young wife; a majestic English mama and papa,
of the patrician order, with a family of three growing-up daughters,
who were keeping a journal for the confusion of their
fellow-creatures; and a deaf old English mother, tough in travel,
with a very decidedly grown-up daughter indeed, which daughter went
sketching about the universe in the expectation of ultimately toning
herself off into the married state.

The reserved Englishwoman took up Mr Meagles in his last remark.
'Do you mean that a prisoner forgives his prison?' said she, slowly
and with emphasis.

'That was my speculation, Miss Wade. I don't pretend to know
positively how a prisoner might feel. I never was one before.'

'Mademoiselle doubts,' said the French gentleman in his own
language, 'it's being so easy to forgive?'

'I do.'

Pet had to translate this passage to Mr Meagles, who never by
any accident acquired any knowledge whatever of the language of any
country into which he travelled. 'Oh!' said he. 'Dear me! But
that's a pity, isn't it?'

'That I am not credulous?' said Miss Wade.

'Not exactly that. Put it another way. That you can't believe
it easy to forgive.'

'My experience,' she quietly returned, 'has been correcting my
belief in many respects, for some years. It is our natural progress,
I have heard.'

'Well, well! But it's not natural to bear malice, I hope?' said
Mr Meagles, cheerily.

'If I had been shut up in any place to pine and suffer, I should
always hate that place and wish to burn it down, or raze it to the
ground. I know no more.' 'Strong, sir?' said Mr Meagles to the
Frenchman; it being another of his habits to address individuals of
all nations in idiomatic English, with a perfect conviction that they
were bound to understand it somehow. 'Rather forcible in our fair
friend, you'll agree with me, I think?'

The French gentleman courteously replied, 'Plait-il?' To which
Mr Meagles returned with much satisfaction, 'You are right. My
opinion.'

The breakfast beginning by-and-by to languish, Mr Meagles made
the company a speech. It was short enough and sensible enough,
considering that it was a speech at all, and hearty. It merely went
to the effect that as they had all been thrown together by chance,
and had all preserved a good understanding together, and were now
about to disperse, and were not likely ever to find themselves all
together again, what could they do better than bid farewell to one
another, and give one another good-speed in a simultaneous glass of
cool champagne all round the table? It was done, and with a general
shaking of hands the assembly broke up for ever.

The solitary young lady all this time had said no more. She
rose with the rest, and silently withdrew to a remote corner of the
great room, where she sat herself on a couch in a window, seeming to
watch the reflection of the water as it made a silver quivering on
the bars of the lattice. She sat, turned away from the whole length
of the apartment, as if she were lonely of her own haughty choice.
And yet it would have been as difficult as ever to say, positively,
whether she avoided the rest, or was avoided.

The shadow in which she sat, falling like a gloomy veil across
her forehead, accorded very well with the character of her beauty.
One could hardly see the face, so still and scornful, set off by the
arched dark eyebrows, and the folds of dark hair, without wondering
what its expression would be if a change came over it. That it could
soften or relent, appeared next to impossible. That it could deepen
into anger or any extreme of defiance, and that it must change in
that direction when it changed at all, would have been its peculiar
impression upon most observers. It was dressed and trimmed into no
ceremony of expression. Although not an open face, there was no
pretence in it. 'I am self-contained and self- reliant; your opinion
is nothing to me; I have no interest in you, care nothing for you,
and see and hear you with indifference'--this it said plainly. It
said so in the proud eyes, in the lifted nostril, in the handsome but
compressed and even cruel mouth. Cover either two of those channels
of expression, and the third would have said so still. Mask them
all, and the mere turn of the head would have shown an unsubduable
nature.

Pet had moved up to her (she had been the subject of remark
among her family and Mr Clennam, who were now the only other
occupants of the room), and was standing at her side.

'Are you'--she turned her eyes, and Pet faltered--'expecting any
one to meet you here, Miss Wade?'

'I? No.'

'Father is sending to the Poste Restante. Shall he have the
pleasure of directing the messenger to ask if there are any letters
for you?'

'I thank him, but I know there can be none.'

'We are afraid,' said Pet, sitting down beside her, shyly and
half tenderly, 'that you will feel quite deserted when we are all
gone.'

'Indeed!'

'Not,' said Pet, apologetically and embarrassed by her eyes,
'not, of course, that we are any company to you, or that we have been
able to be so, or that we thought you wished it.'

'I have not intended to make it understood that I did wish
it.'

'No. Of course. But--in short,' said Pet, timidly touching her
hand as it lay impassive on the sofa between them, 'will you not
allow Father to tender you any slight assistance or service? He will
be very glad.'

'Very glad,' said Mr Meagles, coming forward with his wife and
Clennam. 'Anything short of speaking the language, I shall be
delighted to undertake, I am sure.'

'I am obliged to you,' she returned, 'but my arrangements are
made, and I prefer to go my own way in my own manner.'

'Do you?' said Mr Meagles to himself, as he surveyed her with a
puzzled look. 'Well! There's character in that, too.'

'I am not much used to the society of young ladies, and I am
afraid I may not show my appreciation of it as others might. A
pleasant journey to you. Good-bye!'

She would not have put out her hand, it seemed, but that Mr
Meagles put out his so straight before her that she could not pass
it. She put hers in it, and it lay there just as it had lain upon
the couch.

'Good-bye!' said Mr Meagles. 'This is the last good-bye upon
the list, for Mother and I have just said it to Mr Clennam here, and
he only waits to say it to Pet. Good-bye! We may never meet
again.'

'In our course through life we shall meet the people who are
coming to meet us, from many strange places and by many strange
roads,' was the composed reply; 'and what it is set to us to do to
them, and what it is set to them to do to us, will all be done.'
There was something in the manner of these words that jarred upon
Pet's ear. It implied that what was to be done was necessarily evil,
and it caused her to say in a whisper, 'O Father!' and to shrink
childishly, in her spoilt way, a little closer to him. This was not
lost on the speaker.

'Your pretty daughter,' she said, 'starts to think of such
things. Yet,' looking full upon her, 'you may be sure that there are
men and women already on their road, who have their business to do
with you, and who will do it. Of a certainty they will do it. They
may be coming hundreds, thousands, of miles over the sea there; they
may be close at hand now; they may be coming, for anything you know
or anything you can do to prevent it, from the vilest sweepings of
this very town.'

With the coldest of farewells, and with a certain worn
expression on her beauty that gave it, though scarcely yet in its
prime, a wasted look, she left the room.

Now, there were many stairs and passages that she had to
traverse in passing from that part of the spacious house to the
chamber she had secured for her own occupation. When she had almost
completed the journey, and was passing along the gallery in which her
room was, she heard an angry sound of muttering and sobbing. A door
stood open, and within she saw the attendant upon the girl she had
just left; the maid with the curious name.

She stood still, to look at this maid. A sullen, passionate
girl! Her rich black hair was all about her face, her face was
flushed and hot, and as she sobbed and raged, she plucked at her lips
with an unsparing hand.

'Selfish brutes!' said the girl, sobbing and heaving between
whiles. 'Not caring what becomes of me! Leaving me here hungry and
thirsty and tired, to starve, for anything they care! Beasts!
Devils! Wretches!'

'My poor girl, what is the matter?'

She looked up suddenly, with reddened eyes, and with her hands
suspended, in the act of pinching her neck, freshly disfigured with
great scarlet blots. 'It's nothing to you what's the matter. It
don't signify to any one.'

'O yes it does; I am sorry to see you so.'

'You are not sorry,' said the girl. 'You are glad. You know
you are glad. I never was like this but twice over in the quarantine
yonder; and both times you found me. I am afraid of you.'

'Afraid of me?'

'Yes. You seem to come like my own anger, my own malice, my
own-- whatever it is--I don't know what it is. But I am ill-used, I
am ill-used, I am ill-used!' Here the sobs and the tears, and the
tearing hand, which had all been suspended together since the first
surprise, went on together anew.

The visitor stood looking at her with a strange attentive smile.
It was wonderful to see the fury of the contest in the girl, and the
bodily struggle she made as if she were rent by the Demons of old.

'I am younger than she is by two or three years, and yet it's me
that looks after her, as if I was old, and it's she that's always
petted and called Baby! I detest the name. I hate her! They make a
fool of her, they spoil her. She thinks of nothing but herself, she
thinks no more of me than if I was a stock and a stone!' So the girl
went on.

'You must have patience.'

'I won't have patience!'

'If they take much care of themselves, and little or none of
you, you must not mind it.'

I will mind it.'

'Hush! Be more prudent. You forget your dependent
position.'

'I don't care for that. I'll run away. I'll do some mischief.
I won't bear it; I can't bear it; I shall die if I try to bear
it!'

The observer stood with her hand upon her own bosom, looking at
the girl, as one afflicted with a diseased part might curiously watch
the dissection and exposition of an analogous case.

The girl raged and battled with all the force of her youth and
fulness of life, until by little and little her passionate
exclamations trailed off into broken murmurs as if she were in pain.
By corresponding degrees she sank into a chair, then upon her knees,
then upon the ground beside the bed, drawing the coverlet with her,
half to hide her shamed head and wet hair in it, and half, as it
seemed, to embrace it, rather than have nothing to take to her
repentant breast.

'Go away from me, go away from me! When my temper comes upon
me, I am mad. I know I might keep it off if I only tried hard
enough, and sometimes I do try hard enough, and at other times I
don't and won't. What have I said! I knew when I said it, it was
all lies. They think I am being taken care of somewhere, and have
all I want.

They are nothing but good to me. I love them dearly; no people
could ever be kinder to a thankless creature than they always are to
me. Do, do go away, for I am afraid of you. I am afraid of myself
when I feel my temper coming, and I am as much afraid of you. Go
away from me, and let me pray and cry myself better!' The day passed
on; and again the wide stare stared itself out; and the hot night was
on Marseilles; and through it the caravan of the morning, all
dispersed, went their appointed ways. And thus ever by day and
night, under the sun and under the stars, climbing the dusty hills
and toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land and journeying
by sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react
on one another, move all we restless travellers through the
pilgrimage of life.