This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if _they_ laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers’s manner.
“Tell him that, and he’ll take it as a compliment,” answered Wemmick; “he don’t mean that you _should_ know what to make of it.—Oh!” for I looked surprised, “it’s not personal;it’s professional: only professional.”
Wemmick was at his desk,lunching—and crunching—on a dry hard biscuit;pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth,as if he were posting them.
“Always seems to me,” said Wemmick,“as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it.Suddenly—click—you’re caught!”
Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life,I said I supposed he was very skilful?
“Deep,” said Wemmick, “as Australia.” Pointing with his pen at the office floor,to express that Australia was understood,for the purposes of the figure,to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe.“If there was anything deeper,” added Wemmick,bringing his pen to paper, “he’d be it.”
Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business,and Wemmick said, “Ca-pi-tal!” Then I asked if there were many clerks?to which he replied,—
“We don’t run much into clerks,because there’s only one Jaggers,and people won’t have him at second hand.There are only four of us. Would you like to see ’em?You are one of us, as I may say.”
I accepted the offer. When Mr.Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the post,and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe,the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers’s room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher—a large pale, puffed, swollen man—was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers’s coffers. “Getting evidence together,” said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, “for the Bailey.” In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased,—and who was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers’s own use.
This was all the establishment.When we went downstairs again,Wemmick led me into my guardian’s room, and said,“This you’ve seen already.”
“Pray,” said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, “whose likenesses are those?”
“These?” said Wemmick, getting upon a chair,and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down.“These are two celebrated ones.Famous clients of ours that got us a world of credit.This chap (why you must have come down in the night and been peeping into the inkstand, to get this blot upon your eyebrow, you old rascal!) murdered his master, and,considering that he wasn’t brought up to evidence,didn’t plan it badly.”
“Is it like him?” I asked, recoiling from the brute,as Wemmick spat upon his eyebrow and gave it a rub with his sleeve.
“Like him?It’s himself, you know. The cast was made in Newgate,directly after he was taken down.You had a particular fancy for me, hadn’t you, Old Artful?” said Wemmick. He then explained this affectionate apostrophe,by touching his brooch representing the lady and the weeping willow at the tomb with the urn upon it, and saying, “Had it made for me, express!”
“Is the lady anybody?” said I.
“No,” returned Wemmick. “Only his game.(You liked your bit of game, didn’t you?) No; deuce a bit of a lady in the case, Mr. Pip,except one,—and she wasn’t of this slender lady-like sort,and you wouldn’t have caught _her_ looking after this urn,unless there was something to drink in it.” Wemmick’s attention being thus directed to his brooch,he put down the cast,and polished the brooch with his pocket-handkerchief.
“Did that other creature come to the same end?” I asked. “He has the same look.”
“You’re right,” said Wemmick; “it’s the genuine look.Much as if one nostril was caught up with a horse-hair and a little fish-hook.Yes, he came to the same end;quite the natural end here, I assure you.He forged wills, this blade did,if he didn’t also put the supposed testators to sleep too.You were a gentlemanly Cove, though” (Mr.Wemmick was again apostrophising),“and you said you could write Greek. Yah, Bounceable!What a liar you were!I never met such a liar as you!” Before putting his late friend on his shelf again,Wemmick touched the largest of his mourning rings and said,“Sent out to buy it for me, only the day before.”
While he was putting up the other cast and coming down from the chair,the thought crossed my mind that all his personal jewelry was derived from like sources. As he had shown no diffidence on the subject, I ventured on the liberty of asking him the question, when he stood before me, dusting his hands.
“O yes,” he returned, “these are all gifts of that kind.One brings another, you see; that’s the way of it.I always take ’em. They’re curiosities.And they’re property. They may not be worth much, but,after all, they’re property and portable.It don’t signify to you with your brilliant lookout,but as to myself, my guiding-star always is,‘Get hold of portable property’.”
When I had rendered homage to this light,he went on to say, in a friendly manner:—
“If at any odd time when you have nothing better to do,you wouldn’t mind coming over to see me at Walworth,I could offer you a bed,and I should consider it an honour.I have not much to show you;but such two or three curiosities as I have got you might like to look over;and I am fond of a bit of garden and a summer-house.”
I said I should be delighted to accept his hospitality.
“Thankee,” said he; “then we’ll consider that it’s to come off,when convenient to you. Have you dined with Mr. Jaggers yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Well,” said Wemmick, “he’ll give you wine,and good wine. I’ll give you punch, and not bad punch.And now I’ll tell you something.When you go to dine with Mr. Jaggers,look at his housekeeper.”
“Shall I see something very uncommon?”
“Well,” said Wemmick, “you’ll see a wild beast tamed.Not so very uncommon, you’ll tell me. I reply,that depends on the original wildness of the beast,and the amount of taming.It won’t lower your opinion of Mr. Jaggers’s powers.Keep your eye on it.”
I told him I would do so,with all the interest and curiosity that his preparation awakened.As I was taking my departure,he asked me if I would like to devote five minutes to seeing Mr. Jaggers “at it?”