Chapter 5: Family Affairs

Little Dorrit

by Charles Dickens

As the city clocks struck nine on Monday morning, Mrs Clennam was
wheeled by Jeremiah Flintwinch of the cut-down aspect to her tall
cabinet. When she had unlocked and opened it, and had settled
herself at its desk, Jeremiah withdrew--as it might be, to hang
himself more effectually--and her son appeared.

'Are you any better this morning, mother?'

She shook her head, with the same austere air of luxuriousness
that she had shown over-night when speaking of the weather.

'I shall never be better any more. It is well for me, Arthur,
that I know it and can bear it.'

Sitting with her hands laid separately upon the desk, and the
tall cabinet towering before her, she looked as if she were
performing on a dumb church organ. Her son thought so (it was an old
thought with him), while he took his seat beside it.

She opened a drawer or two, looked over some business papers,
and put them back again. Her severe face had no thread of relaxation
in it, by which any explorer could have been guided to the gloomy
labyrinth of her thoughts.

'Shall I speak of our affairs, mother? Are you inclined to
enter upon business?'

'Am I inclined, Arthur? Rather, are you? Your father has been
dead a year and more. I have been at your disposal, and waiting your
pleasure, ever since.'

'There was much to arrange before I could leave; and when I did
leave, I travelled a little for rest and relief.'

She turned her face towards him, as not having heard or
understood his last words. 'For rest and relief.'

She glanced round the sombre room, and appeared from the motion
of her lips to repeat the words to herself, as calling it to witness
how little of either it afforded her.

'Besides, mother, you being sole executrix, and having the
direction and management of the estate, there remained little
business, or I might say none, that I could transact, until you had
had time to arrange matters to your satisfaction.'

'The accounts are made out,' she returned. 'I have them here.
The vouchers have all been examined and passed. You can inspect them
when you like, Arthur; now, if you please.'

'It is quite enough, mother, to know that the business is
completed. Shall I proceed then?'

'Why not?' she said, in her frozen way.

'Mother, our House has done less and less for some years past,
and our dealings have been progressively on the decline. We have
never shown much confidence, or invited much; we have attached no
people to us; the track we have kept is not the track of the time;
and we have been left far behind. I need not dwell on this to you,
mother. You know it necessarily.'

'I know what you mean,' she answered, in a qualified tone. 'Even
this old house in which we speak,' pursued her son, 'is an instance
of what I say. In my father's earlier time, and in his uncle's time
before him, it was a place of business--really a place of business,
and business resort. Now, it is a mere anomaly and incongruity here,
out of date and out of purpose. All our consignments have long been
made to Rovinghams' the commission- merchants; and although, as a
check upon them, and in the stewardship of my father's resources,
your judgment and watchfulness have been actively exerted, still
those qualities would have influenced my father's fortunes equally,
if you had lived in any private dwelling: would they not?'

'Do you consider,' she returned, without answering his question,
'that a house serves no purpose, Arthur, in sheltering your infirm
and afflicted--justly infirm and righteously afflicted--mother?'

'I was speaking only of business purposes.'

'With what object?'

'I am coming to it.'

'I foresee,' she returned, fixing her eyes upon him, 'what it
is. But the Lord forbid that I should repine under any visitation.
In my sinfulness I merit bitter disappointment, and I accept it.'

'Mother, I grieve to hear you speak like this, though I have had
my apprehensions that you would--'

'You knew I would. You knew me,' she interrupted.

Her son paused for a moment. He had struck fire out of her, and
was surprised.

'Well!' she said, relapsing into stone. 'Go on. Let me
hear.'

'You have anticipated, mother, that I decide for my part, to
abandon the business. I have done with it. I will not take upon
myself to advise you; you will continue it, I see. If I had any
influence with you, I would simply use it to soften your judgment of
me in causing you this disappointment: to represent to you that I
have lived the half of a long term of life, and have never before set
my own will against yours. I cannot say that I have been able to
conform myself, in heart and spirit, to your rules; I cannot say that
I believe my forty years have been profitable or pleasant to myself,
or any one; but I have habitually submitted, and I only ask you to
remember it.'

Woe to the suppliant, if such a one there were or ever had been,
who had any concession to look for in the inexorable face at the
cabinet. Woe to the defaulter whose appeal lay to the tribunal where
those severe eyes presided. Great need had the rigid woman of her
mystical religion, veiled in gloom and darkness, with lightnings of
cursing, vengeance, and destruction, flashing through the sable
clouds. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, was a prayer
too poor in spirit for her. Smite Thou my debtors, Lord, wither
them, crush them; do Thou as I would do, and Thou shalt have my
worship: this was the impious tower of stone she built up to scale
Heaven.

'Have you finished, Arthur, or have you anything more to say to
me?

I think there can be nothing else. You have been short, but
full of matter!'

'Mother, I have yet something more to say. It has been upon my
mind, night and day, this long time. It is far more difficult to say
than what I have said. That concerned myself; this concerns us
all.'

'Us all! Who are us all?'

'Yourself, myself, my dead father.'

She took her hands from the desk; folded them in her lap; and
sat looking towards the fire, with the impenetrability of an old
Egyptian sculpture.

'You knew my father infinitely better than I ever knew him; and
his reserve with me yielded to you. You were much the stronger,
mother, and directed him. As a child, I knew it as well as I know it
now. I knew that your ascendancy over him was the cause of his going
to China to take care of the business there, while you took care of
it here (though I do not even now know whether these were really
terms of separation that you agreed upon); and that it was your will
that I should remain with you until I was twenty, and then go to him
as I did. You will not be offended by my recalling this, after
twenty years?'

'I am waiting to hear why you recall it.'

He lowered his voice, and said, with manifest reluctance, and
against his will:

'I want to ask you, mother, whether it ever occurred to you to
suspect--'

At the word Suspect, she turned her eyes momentarily upon her
son, with a dark frown. She then suffered them to seek the fire, as
before; but with the frown fixed above them, as if the sculptor of
old Egypt had indented it in the hard granite face, to frown for
ages.

'--that he had any secret remembrance which caused him trouble
of mind--remorse? Whether you ever observed anything in his conduct
suggesting that; or ever spoke to him upon it, or ever heard him hint
at such a thing?'

'I do not understand what kind of secret remembrance you mean to
infer that your father was a prey to,' she returned, after a silence.
'You speak so mysteriously.'

'Is it possible, mother,' her son leaned forward to be the
nearer to her while he whispered it, and laid his hand nervously upon
her desk, 'is it possible, mother, that he had unhappily wronged any
one, and made no reparation?'

Looking at him wrathfully, she bent herself back in her chair to
keep him further off, but gave him no reply.

'I am deeply sensible, mother, that if this thought has never at
any time flashed upon you, it must seem cruel and unnatural in me,
even in this confidence, to breathe it. But I cannot shake it
off.

Time and change (I have tried both before breaking silence) do
nothing to wear it out. Remember, I was with my father. Remember, I
saw his face when he gave the watch into my keeping, and struggled to
express that he sent it as a token you would understand, to you.
Remember, I saw him at the last with the pencil in his failing hand,
trying to write some word for you to read, but to which he could give
no shape. The more remote and cruel this vague suspicion that I
have, the stronger the circumstances that could give it any semblance
of probability to me. For Heaven's sake, let us examine sacredly
whether there is any wrong entrusted to us to set right. No one can
help towards it, mother, but you. '

Still so recoiling in her chair that her overpoised weight moved
it, from time to time, a little on its wheels, and gave her the
appearance of a phantom of fierce aspect gliding away from him, she
interposed her left arm, bent at the elbow with the back of her hand
towards her face, between herself and him, and looked at him in a
fixed silence.

'In grasping at money and in driving hard bargains--I have
begun, and I must speak of such things now, mother--some one may have
been grievously deceived, injured, ruined. You were the moving power
of all this machinery before my birth; your stronger spirit has been
infused into all my father's dealings for more than two score years.
You can set these doubts at rest, I think, if you will really help me
to discover the truth. Will you, mother?'

He stopped in the hope that she would speak. But her grey hair
was not more immovable in its two folds, than were her firm lips.

'If reparation can be made to any one, if restitution can be
made to any one, let us know it and make it. Nay, mother, if within
my means, let me make it. I have seen so little happiness come of
money; it has brought within my knowledge so little peace to this
house, or to any one belonging to it, that it is worth less to me
than to another. It can buy me nothing that will not be a reproach
and misery to me, if I am haunted by a suspicion that it darkened my
father's last hours with remorse, and that it is not honestly and
justly mine.' There was a bell-rope hanging on the panelled wall,
some two or three yards from the cabinet. By a swift and sudden
action of her foot, she drove her wheeled chair rapidly back to it
and pulled it violently--still holding her arm up in its shield-like
posture, as if he were striking at her, and she warding off the
blow.

A girl came hurrying in, frightened.

'Send Flintwinch here!'

In a moment the girl had withdrawn, and the old man stood within
the door. 'What! You're hammer and tongs, already, you two?' he
said, coolly stroking his face. 'I thought you would be. I was
pretty sure of it.'

'Flintwinch!' said the mother, 'look at my son. Look at
him!'

'Well, I am looking at him,' said Flintwinch.

She stretched out the arm with which she had shielded herself,
and as she went on, pointed at the object of her anger.

'In the very hour of his return almost--before the shoe upon his
foot is dry--he asperses his father's memory to his mother! Asks his
mother to become, with him, a spy upon his father's transactions
through a lifetime! Has misgivings that the goods of this world
which we have painfully got together early and late, with wear and
tear and toil and self-denial, are so much plunder; and asks to whom
they shall be given up, as reparation and restitution!'

Although she said this raging, she said it in a voice so far
from being beyond her control that it was even lower than her usual
tone. She also spoke with great distinctness.

'Reparation!' said she. 'Yes, truly! It is easy for him to
talk of reparation, fresh from journeying and junketing in foreign
lands, and living a life of vanity and pleasure. But let him look at
me, in prison, and in bonds here. I endure without murmuring,
because it is appointed that I shall so make reparation for my sins.
Reparation! Is there none in this room? Has there been none here
this fifteen years?'

Thus was she always balancing her bargains with the Majesty of
heaven, posting up the entries to her credit, strictly keeping her
set-off, and claiming her due. She was only remarkable in this, for
the force and emphasis with which she did it. Thousands upon
thousands do it, according to their varying manner, every day.

'Flintwinch, give me that book!'

The old man handed it to her from the table. She put two
fingers between the leaves, closed the book upon them, and held it up
to her son in a threatening way. ' In the days of old, Arthur,
treated of in this commentary, there were pious men, beloved of the
Lord, who would have cursed their sons for less than this: who would
have sent them forth, and sent whole nations forth, if such had
supported them, to be avoided of God and man, and perish, down to the
baby at the breast. But I only tell you that if you ever renew that
theme with me, I will renounce you; I will so dismiss you through
that doorway, that you had better have been motherless from your
cradle. I will never see or know you more. And if, after all, you
were to come into this darkened room to look upon me lying dead, my
body should bleed, if I could make it, when you came near me.'

In part relieved by the intensity of this threat, and in part
(monstrous as the fact is) by a general impression that it was in
some sort a religious proceeding, she handed back the book to the old
man, and was silent.

'Now,' said Jeremiah; 'premising that I'm not going to stand
between you two, will you let me ask (as I have been called in, and
made a third) what is all this about?'

'Take your version of it,' returned Arthur, finding it left to
him to speak, 'from my mother. Let it rest there. What I have said,
was said to my mother only.' 'Oh!' returned the old man. 'From your
mother? Take it from your mother? Well! But your mother mentioned
that you had been suspecting your father. That's not dutiful, Mr
Arthur. Who will you be suspecting next?'

'Enough,' said Mrs Clennam, turning her face so that it was
addressed for the moment to the old man only. 'Let no more be said
about this.'

'Yes, but stop a bit, stop a bit,' the old man persisted. 'Let
us see how we stand. Have you told Mr Arthur that he mustn't lay
offences at his father's door? That he has no right to do it? That
he has no ground to go upon?'

'I tell him so now.'

'Ah! Exactly,' said the old man. 'You tell him so now. You
hadn't told him so before, and you tell him so now. Ay, ay! That's
right! You know I stood between you and his father so long, that it
seems as if death had made no difference, and I was still standing
between you. So I will, and so in fairness I require to have that
plainly put forward. Arthur, you please to hear that you have no
right to mistrust your father, and have no ground to go upon.'

He put his hands to the back of the wheeled chair, and muttering
to himself, slowly wheeled his mistress back to her cabinet. 'Now,'
he resumed, standing behind her: 'in case I should go away leaving
things half done, and so should be wanted again when you come to the
other half and get into one of your flights, has Arthur told you what
he means to do about the business?'

'He has relinquished it.'

'In favour of nobody, I suppose?'

Mrs Clennam glanced at her son, leaning against one of the
windows.

He observed the look and said, 'To my mother, of course. She
does what she pleases.'

'And if any pleasure,' she said after a short pause, 'could
arise for me out of the disappointment of my expectations that my
son, in the prime of his life, would infuse new youth and strength
into it, and make it of great profit and power, it would be in
advancing an old and faithful servant. Jeremiah, the captain deserts
the ship, but you and I will sink or float with it.'

Jeremiah, whose eyes glistened as if they saw money, darted a
sudden look at the son, which seemed to say, 'I owe you no thanks for
this; you have done nothing towards it!' and then told the mother
that he thanked her, and that Affery thanked her, and that he would
never desert her, and that Affery would never desert her. Finally,
he hauled up his watch from its depths, and said, 'Eleven. Time for
your oysters!' and with that change of subject, which involved no
change of expression or manner, rang the bell.

But Mrs Clennam, resolved to treat herself with the greater
rigour for having been supposed to be unacquainted with reparation,
refused to eat her oysters when they were brought. They looked
tempting; eight in number, circularly set out on a white plate on a
tray covered with a white napkin, flanked by a slice of buttered
French roll, and a little compact glass of cool wine and water; but
she resisted all persuasions, and sent them down again--placing the
act to her credit, no doubt, in her Eternal Day-Book.

This refection of oysters was not presided over by Affery, but
by the girl who had appeared when the bell was rung; the same who had
been in the dimly-lighted room last night. Now that he had an
opportunity of observing her, Arthur found that her diminutive
figure, small features, and slight spare dress, gave her the
appearance of being much younger than she was. A woman, probably of
not less than two-and-twenty, she might have been passed in the
street for little more than half that age. Not that her face was
very youthful, for in truth there was more consideration and care in
it than naturally belonged to her utmost years; but she was so little
and light, so noiseless and shy, and appeared so conscious of being
out of place among the three hard elders, that she had all the manner
and much of the appearance of a subdued child.

In a hard way, and in an uncertain way that fluctuated between
patronage and putting down, the sprinkling from a watering-pot and
hydraulic pressure, Mrs Clennam showed an interest in this dependent.
Even in the moment of her entrance, upon the violent ringing of the
bell, when the mother shielded herself with that singular action from
the son, Mrs Clennam's eyes had had some individual recognition in
them, which seemed reserved for her. As there are degrees of
hardness in the hardest metal, and shades of colour in black itself,
so, even in the asperity of Mrs Clennam's demeanour towards all the
rest of humanity and towards Little Dorrit, there was a fine
gradation.

Little Dorrit let herself out to do needlework. At so much a
day-- or at so little--from eight to eight, Little Dorrit was to be
hired. Punctual to the moment, Little Dorrit appeared; punctual to
the moment, Little Dorrit vanished. What became of Little Dorrit
between the two eights was a mystery.

Another of the moral phenomena of Little Dorrit. Besides her
consideration money, her daily contract included meals. She had an
extraordinary repugnance to dining in company; would never do so, if
it were possible to escape. Would always plead that she had this bit
of work to begin first, or that bit of work to finish first; and
would, of a certainty, scheme and plan--not very cunningly, it would
seem, for she deceived no one--to dine alone. Successful in this,
happy in carrying off her plate anywhere, to make a table of her lap,
or a box, or the ground, or even as was supposed, to stand on
tip-toe, dining moderately at a mantel-shelf; the great anxiety of
Little Dorrit's day was set at rest.

It was not easy to make out Little Dorrit's face; she was so
retiring, plied her needle in such removed corners, and started away
so scared if encountered on the stairs. But it seemed to be a pale
transparent face, quick in expression, though not beautiful in
feature, its soft hazel eyes excepted. A delicately bent head, a
tiny form, a quick little pair of busy hands, and a shabby dress--it
must needs have been very shabby to look at all so, being so
neat--were Little Dorrit as she sat at work.

For these particulars or generalities concerning Little Dorrit,
Mr Arthur was indebted in the course of the day to his own eyes and
to Mrs Affery's tongue. If Mrs Affery had had any will or way of her
own, it would probably have been unfavourable to Little Dorrit. But
as 'them two clever ones'--Mrs Affery's perpetual reference, in whom
her personality was swallowed up--were agreed to accept Little Dorrit
as a matter of course, she had nothing for it but to follow suit.
Similarly, if the two clever ones had agreed to murder Little Dorrit
by candlelight, Mrs Affery, being required to hold the candle, would
no doubt have done it.

In the intervals of roasting the partridge for the invalid
chamber, and preparing a baking-dish of beef and pudding for the
dining- room, Mrs Affery made the communications above set forth;
invariably putting her head in at the door again after she had taken
it out, to enforce resistance to the two clever ones. It appeared to
have become a perfect passion with Mrs Flintwinch, that the only son
should be pitted against them.

In the course of the day, too, Arthur looked through the whole
house. Dull and dark he found it. The gaunt rooms, deserted for
years upon years, seemed to have settled down into a gloomy lethargy
from which nothing could rouse them again. The furniture, at once
spare and lumbering, hid in the rooms rather than furnished them, and
there was no colour in all the house; such colour as had ever been
there, had long ago started away on lost sunbeams--got itself
absorbed, perhaps, into flowers, butterflies, plumage of birds,
precious stones, what not. There was not one straight floor from the
foundation to the roof; the ceilings were so fantastically clouded by
smoke and dust, that old women might have told fortunes in them
better than in grouts of tea; the dead-cold hearths showed no traces
of having ever been warmed but in heaps of soot that had tumbled down
the chimneys, and eddied about in little dusky whirlwinds when the
doors were opened. In what had once been a drawing-room, there were
a pair of meagre mirrors, with dismal processions of black figures
carrying black garlands, walking round the frames; but even these
were short of heads and legs, and one undertaker-like Cupid had swung
round on its own axis and got upside down, and another had fallen off
altogether. The room Arthur Clennam's deceased father had occupied
for business purposes, when he first remembered him, was so unaltered
that he might have been imagined still to keep it invisibly, as his
visible relict kept her room up-stairs; Jeremiah Flintwinch still
going between them negotiating. His picture, dark and gloomy,
earnestly speechless on the wall, with the eyes intently looking at
his son as they had looked when life departed from them, seemed to
urge him awfully to the task he had attempted; but as to any yielding
on the part of his mother, he had now no hope, and as to any other
means of setting his distrust at rest, he had abandoned hope a long
time.

Down in the cellars, as up in the bed-chambers, old objects that
he well remembered were changed by age and decay, but were still in
their old places; even to empty beer-casks hoary with cobwebs, and
empty wine-bottles with fur and fungus choking up their throats.
There, too, among unusual bottle-racks and pale slants of light from
the yard above, was the strong room stored with old ledgers, which
had as musty and corrupt a smell as if they were regularly balanced,
in the dead small hours, by a nightly resurrection of old
book-keepers.

The baking-dish was served up in a penitential manner on a
shrunken cloth at an end of the dining-table, at two o'clock, when he
dined with Mr Flintwinch, the new partner. Mr Flintwinch informed
him that his mother had recovered her equanimity now, and that he
need not fear her again alluding to what had passed in the morning.
'And don't you lay offences at your father's door, Mr Arthur,' added
Jeremiah, 'once for all, don't do it! Now, we have done with the
subject.'

Mr Flintwinch had been already rearranging and dusting his own
particular little office, as if to do honour to his accession to new
dignity. He resumed this occupation when he was replete with beef,
had sucked up all the gravy in the baking-dish with the flat of his
knife, and had drawn liberally on a barrel of small beer in the
scullery. Thus refreshed, he tucked up his shirt-sleeves and went to
work again; and Mr Arthur, watching him as he set about it, plainly
saw that his father's picture, or his father's grave, would be as
communicative with him as this old man.

'Now, Affery, woman,' said Mr Flintwinch, as she crossed the
hall. 'You hadn't made Mr Arthur's bed when I was up there last.
Stir yourself. Bustle.'

But Mr Arthur found the house so blank and dreary, and was so
unwilling to assist at another implacable consignment of his mother's
enemies (perhaps himself among them) to mortal disfigurement and
immortal ruin, that he announced his intention of lodging at the
coffee-house where he had left his luggage. Mr Flintwinch taking
kindly to the idea of getting rid of him, and his mother being
indifferent, beyond considerations of saving, to most domestic
arrangements that were not bounded by the walls of her own chamber,
he easily carried this point without new offence. Daily business
hours were agreed upon, which his mother, Mr Flintwinch, and he, were
to devote together to a necessary checking of books and papers; and
he left the home he had so lately found, with depressed heart.

But Little Dorrit?

The business hours, allowing for intervals of invalid regimen of
oysters and partridges, during which Clennam refreshed himself with a
walk, were from ten to six for about a fortnight. Sometimes Little
Dorrit was employed at her needle, sometimes not, sometimes appeared
as a humble visitor: which must have been her character on the
occasion of his arrival. His original curiosity augmented every day,
as he watched for her, saw or did not see her, and speculated about
her. Influenced by his predominant idea, he even fell into a habit
of discussing with himself the possibility of her being in some way
associated with it. At last he resolved to watch Little Dorrit and
know more of her story.