Chapter 20: Introduces the next

Little Dorrit

by Charles Dickens

The passengers were landing from the packet on the pier at Calais.
A low-lying place and a low-spirited place Calais was, with the tide
ebbing out towards low water-mark. There had been no more water on
the bar than had sufficed to float the packet in; and now the bar
itself, with a shallow break of sea over it, looked like a lazy
marine monster just risen to the surface, whose form was indistinctly
shown as it lay asleep. The meagre lighthouse all in white, haunting
the seaboard as if it were the ghost of an edifice that had once had
colour and rotundity, dropped melancholy tears after its late
buffeting by the waves. The long rows of gaunt black piles, slimy
and wet and weather-worn, with funeral garlands of seaweed twisted
about them by the late tide, might have represented an unsightly
marine cemetery. Every wave-dashed, storm-beaten object, was so low
and so little, under the broad grey sky, in the noise of the wind and
sea, and before the curling lines of surf, making at it ferociously,
that the wonder was there was any Calais left, and that its low gates
and low wall and low roofs and low ditches and low sand-hills and low
ramparts and flat streets, had not yielded long ago to the
undermining and besieging sea, like the fortifications children make
on the sea-shore.

After slipping among oozy piles and planks, stumbling up wet
steps and encountering many salt difficulties, the passengers entered
on their comfortless peregrination along the pier; where all the
French vagabonds and English outlaws in the town (half the
population) attended to prevent their recovery from bewilderment.
After being minutely inspected by all the English, and claimed and
reclaimed and counter-claimed as prizes by all the French in a
hand-to-hand scuffle three quarters of a mile long, they were at last
free to enter the streets, and to make off in their various
directions, hotly pursued.

Clennam, harassed by more anxieties than one, was among this
devoted band. Having rescued the most defenceless of his compatriots
from situations of great extremity, he now went his way alone, or as
nearly alone as he could be, with a native gentleman in a suit of
grease and a cap of the same material, giving chase at a distance of
some fifty yards, and continually calling after him, 'Hi! Ice-say!
You! Seer! Ice-say! Nice Oatel!'

Even this hospitable person, however, was left behind at last,
and Clennam pursued his way, unmolested. There was a tranquil air in
the town after the turbulence of the Channel and the beach, and its
dulness in that comparison was agreeable. He met new groups of his
countrymen, who had all a straggling air of having at one time
overblown themselves, like certain uncomfortable kinds of flowers,
and of being now mere weeds. They had all an air, too, of lounging
out a limited round, day after day, which strongly reminded him of
the Marshalsea. But, taking no further note of them than was
sufficient to give birth to the reflection, he sought out a certain
street and number which he kept in his mind.

'So Pancks said,' he murmured to himself, as he stopped before a
dull house answering to the address. 'I suppose his information to
be correct and his discovery, among Mr Casby's loose papers,
indisputable; but, without it, I should hardly have supposed this to
be a likely place.'

A dead sort of house, with a dead wall over the way and a dead
gateway at the side, where a pendant bell-handle produced two dead
tinkles, and a knocker produced a dead, flat, surface-tapping, that
seemed not to have depth enough in it to penetrate even the cracked
door. However, the door jarred open on a dead sort of spring; and he
closed it behind him as he entered a dull yard, soon brought to a
close by another dead wall, where an attempt had been made to train
some creeping shrubs, which were dead; and to make a little fountain
in a grotto, which was dry; and to decorate that with a little
statue, which was gone.

The entry to the house was on the left, and it was garnished as
the outer gateway was, with two printed bills in French and English,
announcing Furnished Apartments to let, with immediate possession. A
strong cheerful peasant woman, all stocking, petticoat, white cap,
and ear-ring, stood here in a dark doorway, and said with a pleasant
show of teeth, 'Ice-say! Seer! Who?'

Clennam, replying in French, said the English lady; he wished to
see the English lady. 'Enter then and ascend, if you please,'
returned the peasant woman, in French likewise. He did both, and
followed her up a dark bare staircase to a back room on the first-
floor. Hence, there was a gloomy view of the yard that was dull, and
of the shrubs that were dead, and of the fountain that was dry, and
of the pedestal of the statue that was gone.

'Monsieur Blandois,' said Clennam.

'With pleasure, Monsieur.'

Thereupon the woman withdrew and left him to look at the room.
It was the pattern of room always to be found in such a house. Cool,
dull, and dark. Waxed floor very slippery. A room not large enough
to skate in; nor adapted to the easy pursuit of any other occupation.
Red and white curtained windows, little straw mat, little round
table with a tumultuous assemblage of legs underneath, clumsy
rush-bottomed chairs, two great red velvet arm-chairs affording
plenty of space to be uncomfortable in, bureau, chimney- glass in
several pieces pretending to be in one piece, pair of gaudy vases of
very artificial flowers; between them a Greek warrior with his helmet
off, sacrificing a clock to the Genius of France.

After some pause, a door of communication with another room was
opened, and a lady entered. She manifested great surprise on seeing
Clennam, and her glance went round the room in search of some one
else.

'Pardon me, Miss Wade. I am alone.'

'It was not your name that was brought to me.'

'No; I know that. Excuse me. I have already had experience
that my name does not predispose you to an interview; and I ventured
to mention the name of one I am in search of.'

'Pray,' she returned, motioning him to a chair so coldly that he
remained standing, 'what name was it that you gave?'

'I mentioned the name of Blandois.'

'Blandois?'

'A name you are acquainted with.'

'It is strange,' she said, frowning, 'that you should still
press an undesired interest in me and my acquaintances, in me and my
affairs, Mr Clennam. I don't know what you mean.'

'Pardon me. You know the name?'

'What can you have to do with the name? What can I have to do
with the name? What can you have to do with my knowing or not
knowing any name? I know many names and I have forgotten many more.
This may be in the one class, or it may be in the other, or I may
never have heard it. I am acquainted with no reason for examining
myself, or for being examined, about it.'

'If you will allow me,' said Clennam, 'I will tell you my reason
for pressing the subject. I admit that I do press it, and I must beg
you to forgive me if I do so, very earnestly. The reason is all
mine, I do not insinuate that it is in any way yours.'

'Well, sir,' she returned, repeating a little less haughtily
than before her former invitation to him to be seated: to which he
now deferred, as she seated herself. 'I am at least glad to know
that this is not another bondswoman of some friend of yours, who is
bereft of free choice, and whom I have spirited away. I will hear
your reason, if you please.'

'First, to identify the person of whom we speak,' said Clennam,
'let me observe that it is the person you met in London some time
back. You will remember meeting him near the river--in the
Adelphi!'

'You mix yourself most unaccountably with my business,' she
replied, looking full at him with stern displeasure. 'How do you
know that?'

'I entreat you not to take it ill. By mere accident.' 'What
accident?'

'Solely the accident of coming upon you in the street and seeing
the meeting.'

'Do you speak of yourself, or of some one else?'

'Of myself. I saw it.'

'To be sure it was in the open street,' she observed, after a
few moments of less and less angry reflection. 'Fifty people might
have seen it. It would have signified nothing if they had.'

'Nor do I make my having seen it of any moment, nor (otherwise
than as an explanation of my coming here) do I connect my visit with
it or the favour that I have to ask.'

'Oh! You have to ask a favour! It occurred to me,' and the
handsome face looked bitterly at him, 'that your manner was softened,
Mr Clennam.'

He was content to protest against this by a slight action
without contesting it in words. He then referred to Blandois'
disappearance, of which it was probable she had heard? However
probable it was to him, she had heard of no such thing. Let him look
round him (she said) and judge for himself what general intelligence
was likely to reach the ears of a woman who had been shut up there
while it was rife, devouring her own heart. When she had uttered
this denial, which he believed to be true, she asked him what he
meant by disappearance? That led to his narrating the circumstances
in detail, and expressing something of his anxiety to discover what
had really become of the man, and to repel the dark suspicions that
clouded about his mother's house. She heard him with evident
surprise, and with more marks of suppressed interest than he had seen
in her; still they did not overcome her distant, proud, and
self-secluded manner. When he had finished, she said nothing but
these words:

'You have not yet told me, sir, what I have to do with it, or
what the favour is? Will you be so good as come to that?'

'I assume,' said Arthur, persevering, in his endeavour to soften
her scornful demeanour, 'that being in communication--may I say,
confidential communication?--with this person--'

'You may say, of course, whatever you like,' she remarked; 'but
I do not subscribe to your assumptions, Mr Clennam, or to any
one's.'

'--that being, at least in personal communication with him,'
said Clennam, changing the form of his position in the hope of making
it unobjectionable, 'you can tell me something of his antecedents,
pursuits, habits, usual place of residence. Can give me some little
clue by which to seek him out in the likeliest manner, and either
produce him, or establish what has become of him. This is the favour
I ask, and I ask it in a distress of mind for which I hope you will
feel some consideration. If you should have any reason for imposing
conditions upon me, I will respect it without asking what it is.'

'You chanced to see me in the street with the man,' she
observed, after being, to his mortification, evidently more occupied
with her own reflections on the matter than with his appeal. 'Then
you knew the man before?'

'Not before; afterwards. I never saw him before, but I saw him
again on this very night of his disappearance. In my mother's room,
in fact. I left him there. You will read in this paper all that is
known of him.'

He handed her one of the printed bills, which she read with a
steady and attentive face.

'This is more than I knew of him,' she said, giving it back.

Clennam's looks expressed his heavy disappointment, perhaps his
incredulity; for she added in the same unsympathetic tone: 'You don't
believe it. Still, it is so. As to personal communication: it seems
that there was personal communication between him and your mother.
And yet you say you believe her declaration that she knows no more of
him!'

A sufficiently expressive hint of suspicion was conveyed in
these words, and in the smile by which they were accompanied, to
bring the blood into Clennam's cheeks.

'Come, sir,' she said, with a cruel pleasure in repeating the
stab, 'I will be as open with you as you can desire. I will confess
that if I cared for my credit (which I do not), or had a good name to
preserve (which I have not, for I am utterly indifferent to its being
considered good or bad), I should regard myself as heavily
compromised by having had anything to do with this fellow. Yet he
never passed in at my door--never sat in colloquy with me until
midnight.'

She took her revenge for her old grudge in thus turning his
subject against him. Hers was not the nature to spare him, and she
had no compunction.

'That he is a low, mercenary wretch; that I first saw him
prowling about Italy (where I was, not long ago), and that I hired
him there, as the suitable instrument of a purpose I happened to
have; I have no objection to tell you. In short, it was worth my
while, for my own pleasure--the gratification of a strong feeling--to
pay a spy who would fetch and carry for money. I paid this creature.
And I dare say that if I had wanted to make such a bargain, and if I
could have paid him enough, and if he could have done it in the dark,
free from all risk, he would have taken any life with as little
scruple as he took my money. That, at least, is my opinion of him;
and I see it is not very far removed from yours. Your mother's
opinion of him, I am to assume (following your example of assuming
this and that), was vastly different.'

'My mother, let me remind you,' said Clennam, 'was first brought
into communication with him in the unlucky course of business.'

'It appears to have been an unlucky course of business that last
brought her into communication with him,' returned Miss Wade; 'and
business hours on that occasion were late.'

'You imply,' said Arthur, smarting under these cool-handed
thrusts, of which he had deeply felt the force already, 'that there
was something--'

'Mr Clennam,' she composedly interrupted, 'recollect that I do
not speak by implication about the man. He is, I say again without
disguise, a low mercenary wretch. I suppose such a creature goes
where there is occasion for him. If I had not had occasion for him,
you would not have seen him and me together.'

Wrung by her persistence in keeping that dark side of the case
before him, of which there was a half-hidden shadow in his own
breast, Clennam was silent.

'I have spoken of him as still living,' she added, 'but he may
have been put out of the way for anything I know. For anything I
care, also. I have no further occasion for him.'

With a heavy sigh and a despondent air, Arthur Clennam slowly
rose.

She did not rise also, but said, having looked at him in the
meanwhile with a fixed look of suspicion, and lips angrily
compressed:

'He was the chosen associate of your dear friend, Mr Gowan, was
he not? Why don't you ask your dear friend to help you?'

The denial that he was a dear friend rose to Arthur's lips; but
he repressed it, remembering his old struggles and resolutions, and
said:

'Further than that he has never seen Blandois since Blandois set
out for England, Mr Gowan knows nothing additional about him. He was
a chance acquaintance, made abroad.'

'A chance acquaintance made abroad!' she repeated. 'Yes. Your
dear friend has need to divert himself with all the acquaintances he
can make, seeing what a wife he has. I hate his wife, sir.'

The anger with which she said it, the more remarkable for being
so much under her restraint, fixed Clennam's attention, and kept him
on the spot. It flashed out of her dark eyes as they regarded him,
quivered in her nostrils, and fired the very breath she exhaled; but
her face was otherwise composed into a disdainful serenity; and her
attitude was as calmly and haughtily graceful as if she had been in a
mood of complete indifference.

'All I will say is, Miss Wade,' he remarked, 'that you can have
received no provocation to a feeling in which I believe you have no
sharer.'

'You may ask your dear friend, if you choose,' she returned,
'for his opinion upon that subject.'

'I am scarcely on those intimate terms with my dear friend,'
said Arthur, in spite of his resolutions, 'that would render my
approaching the subject very probable, Miss Wade.'

'I hate him,' she returned. 'Worse than his wife, because I was
once dupe enough, and false enough to myself, almost to love him.
You have seen me, sir, only on common-place occasions, when I dare
say you have thought me a common-place woman, a little more self-
willed than the generality. You don't know what I mean by hating, if
you know me no better than that; you can't know, without knowing with
what care I have studied myself and people about me. For this reason
I have for some time inclined to tell you what my life has been--not
to propitiate your opinion, for I set no value on it; but that you
may comprehend, when you think of your dear friend and his dear wife,
what I mean by hating. Shall I give you something I have written and
put by for your perusal, or shall I hold my hand?'

Arthur begged her to give it to him. She went to the bureau,
unlocked it, and took from an inner drawer a few folded sheets of
paper. Without any conciliation of him, scarcely addressing him,
rather speaking as if she were speaking to her own looking-glass for
the justification of her own stubbornness, she said, as she gave them
to him:

'Now you may know what I mean by hating! No more of that. Sir,
whether you find me temporarily and cheaply lodging in an empty
London house, or in a Calais apartment, you find Harriet with me.
You may like to see her before you leave. Harriet, come in!' She
called Harriet again. The second call produced Harriet, once
Tattycoram.

'Here is Mr Clennam,' said Miss Wade; 'not come for you; he has
given you up,--I suppose you have, by this time?'

'Having no authority, or influence--yes,' assented Clennam.

'Not come in search of you, you see; but still seeking some one.
He wants that Blandois man.'

'With whom I saw you in the Strand in London,' hinted Arthur.
'If you know anything of him, Harriet, except that he came from
Venice--which we all know--tell it to Mr Clennam freely.' 'I know
nothing more about him,' said the girl.

'Are you satisfied?' Miss Wade inquired of Arthur.

He had no reason to disbelieve them; the girl's manner being so
natural as to be almost convincing, if he had had any previous
doubts. He replied, 'I must seek for intelligence elsewhere.'

He was not going in the same breath; but he had risen before the
girl entered, and she evidently thought he was. She looked quickly
at him, and said:

'Are they well, sir?'

'Who?'

She stopped herself in saying what would have been 'all of
them;' glanced at Miss Wade; and said 'Mr and Mrs Meagles.'

'They were, when I last heard of them. They are not at home.
By the way, let me ask you. Is it true that you were seen there?'

'Where? Where does any one say I was seen?' returned the girl,
sullenly casting down her eyes.

'Looking in at the garden gate of the cottage.'

'No,' said Miss Wade. 'She has never been near it.'

'You are wrong, then,' said the girl. 'I went down there the
last time we were in London. I went one afternoon when you left me
alone. And I did look in.'

'You poor-spirited girl,' returned Miss Wade with infinite
contempt; 'does all our companionship, do all our conversations, do
all your old complainings, tell for so little as that?'

'There was no harm in looking in at the gate for an instant,'
said the girl. 'I saw by the windows that the family were not
there.'

'Why should you go near the place?'

'Because I wanted to see it. Because I felt that I should like
to look at it again.'

As each of the two handsome faces looked at the other, Clennam
felt how each of the two natures must be constantly tearing the other
to pieces.

'Oh!' said Miss Wade, coldly subduing and removing her glance;
'if you had any desire to see the place where you led the life from
which I rescued you because you had found out what it was, that is
another thing. But is that your truth to me? Is that your fidelity
to me? Is that the common cause I make with you? You are not worth
the confidence I have placed in you. You are not worth the favour I
have shown you. You are no higher than a spaniel, and had better go
back to the people who did worse than whip you.'

'If you speak so of them with any one else by to hear, you'll
provoke me to take their part,' said the girl.

'Go back to them,' Miss Wade retorted. 'Go back to them.'

'You know very well,' retorted Harriet in her turn, 'that I
won't go back to them. You know very well that I have thrown them
off, and never can, never shall, never will, go back to them. Let
them alone, then, Miss Wade.'

'You prefer their plenty to your less fat living here,' she
rejoined. 'You exalt them, and slight me. What else should I have
expected? I ought to have known it.'

'It's not so,' said the girl, flushing high, 'and you don't say
what you mean. I know what you mean. You are reproaching me,
underhanded, with having nobody but you to look to. And because I
have nobody but you to look to, you think you are to make me do, or
not do, everything you please, and are to put any affront upon me.
You are as bad as they were, every bit. But I will not be quite
tamed, and made submissive. I will say again that I went to look at
the house, because I had often thought that I should like to see it
once more. I will ask again how they are, because I once liked them
and at times thought they were kind to me.'

Hereupon Clennam said that he was sure they would still receive
her kindly, if she should ever desire to return.

'Never!' said the girl passionately. 'I shall never do that.
Nobody knows that better than Miss Wade, though she taunts me because
she has made me her dependent. And I know I am so; and I know she is
overjoyed when she can bring it to my mind.'

'A good pretence!' said Miss Wade, with no less anger,
haughtiness, and bitterness; 'but too threadbare to cover what I
plainly see in this. My poverty will not bear competition with their
money. Better go back at once, better go back at once, and have done
with it!'

Arthur Clennam looked at them, standing a little distance
asunder in the dull confined room, each proudly cherishing her own
anger; each, with a fixed determination, torturing her own breast,
and torturing the other's. He said a word or two of leave-taking;
but Miss Wade barely inclined her head, and Harriet, with the assumed
humiliation of an abject dependent and serf (but not without defiance
for all that), made as if she were too low to notice or to be
noticed.

He came down the dark winding stairs into the yard with an
increased sense upon him of the gloom of the wall that was dead, and
of the shrubs that were dead, and of the fountain that was dry, and
of the statue that was gone. Pondering much on what he had seen and
heard in that house, as well as on the failure of all his efforts to
trace the suspicious character who was lost, he returned to London
and to England by the packet that had taken him over. On the way he
unfolded the sheets of paper, and read in them what is reproduced in
the next chapter.