The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White)

by Lynn Shepherd

  It seemed that Caddy’s unfortunate papa had got over his bankruptcy—“gone through the Gazette,” was the expression Caddy used, as if it were a tunnel,—with the general clemency and commiseration of his creditors; and had got rid of his affairs in some blessed manner, without succeeding in understanding them; and had given up everything he possessed (which was not worth much, I should think, to judge from the state of the furniture), and had satisfied every one concerned that he could do no more, poor man. So, he had been honourably dismissed to “the office,” to begin the world again. What he did at the office, I never knew: Caddy said he was a “Custom-House and General Agent,” and the only thing I ever understood about that business was, that when he wanted money more than usual he went to the docks to look for it, and hardly ever found it.

  As soon as her papa had tranquillized his mind by becoming this shorn lamb, and they had removed to a furnished lodging in Hatton Garden (where I found the children, when I afterwards went there, cutting the horsehair out of the seats of the chairs, and choking themselves with it), Caddy had brought about a meeting between him and Old Mr. Turveydrop; and poor Mr. Jellyby, being very humble and meek, had deferred to Mr. Turveydrop’s Deportment so submissively, that they had become excellent friends. By degrees, old Mr. Turveydrop, thus familiarized with the idea of his son’s marriage, had worked up his parental feelings to the height of contemplating that event as being near at hand; and had given his gracious consent to the young couple commencing housekeeping at the Academy in Newman Street, when they would.

  “And your papa, Caddy. What did he say?”

  “O! Poor Pa,” said Caddy, “only cried, and said he hoped we might get on better than he and Ma had got on. He didn’t say so before Prince, he only said so to me. And he said, ‘My poor girl, you have not been very well taught how to make a home for your husband; but unless you mean with all your heart to strive to do it, you had better murder him than marry him—if you really love him.’ ”

  “And how did you reassure him, Caddy?”

  “Why, it was very distressing, you know, to see poor Pa so low, and hear him say such terrible things, and I couldn’t help crying myself. But I told him that I did mean it with all my heart; and that I hoped our house would be a place for him to come and find some comfort in, of an evening; and that I hoped and thought I could be a better daughter to him there, than at home. Then I mentioned Peepy’s coming to stay with me; and then Pa began to cry again, and said the children were Indians.”

  “Indians, Caddy?”

  “Yes,” said Caddy, “Wild Indians. And Pa said,” (here she began to sob, poor girl, not at all like the happiest girl in the world) “that he was sensible the best thing that could happen to them was, their being all Tomahawked together.”

  Ada suggested that it was comfortable to know that Mr. Jellyby did not mean these destructive sentiments.

  “No, of course I know Pa wouldn’t like his family to be weltering in their blood,” said Caddy, “but he means that they are very unfortunate in being Ma’s children, and that he is very unfortunate in being Ma’s husband; and I am sure that’s true, though it seems unnatural to say so.”

  I asked Caddy if Mrs. Jellyby knew that her wedding-day was fixed.

  “O! You know what Ma is, Esther,” she returned. “It’s impossible to say whether she knows it or not. She has been told it, often enough; and when she is told it, she only gives me a placid look, as if I was I don’t know what—a steeple in the distance,” said Caddy, with a sudden idea: “and then she shakes her head, and says ‘O Caddy, Caddy, what a tease you are!’ and goes on with the Borrioboola letters.”

  “And about your wardrobe, Caddy?” said I. For she was under no restraint with us.

  “Well, my dear Esther,” she returned, drying her eyes, “I must do the best I can, and trust to my dear Prince never to have an unkind remembrance of my coming so shabbily to him. If the question concerned an outfit for Borrioboola, Ma would know all about it, and would be quite excited. Being what it is, she neither knows nor cares.”

  Caddy was not at all deficient in natural affection for her mother, but mentioned this with tears, as an undeniable fact: which I am afraid it was. We were sorry for the poor dear girl and found so much to admire in the good disposition which had survived under such discouragement, that we both at once (I mean Ada and I) proposed a little scheme, that made her perfectly joyful. This was, her staying with us for three weeks; my staying with her for one; and our all three contriving and cutting out, and repairing, and sewing, and saving, and doing the very best we could think of, to make the most of her stock. My guardian being as pleased with the idea as Caddy was, we took her home next day to arrange the matter; and brought her out again in triumph, with her boxes and all the purchases that could be squeezed out of a ten-pound note, which Mr. Jellyby had found in the Docks I suppose, but which he at all events gave her. What my guardian would not have given her, if we had encouraged him, it would be difficult to say; but we thought it right to compound for no more than her weddingdress and bonnet. He agreed to this compromise; and if Caddy had ever been happy in her life, she was happy when we sat down to work.

  She was clumsy enough with her needle, poor girl, and pricked her fingers as much as she had been used to ink them. She could not help reddening a little, now and then: partly with the smart, and partly with vexation at being able to do no better: but she soon got over that, and began to improve rapidly. So, day after day, she, and my darling, and my little maid Charley, and a milliner out of the town, and I, sat hard at work, as pleasantly as possible.

  Over and above this, Caddy was very anxious “to learn housekeeping,” as she said. Now, Mercy upon us! The idea of her learning housekeeping of a person of my vast experience was such a joke, that I laughed, and coloured up, and fell into a comical confusion when she proposed it. However, I said, “Caddy, I am sure you are very welcome to learn anything that you can learn of me, my dear”; and I showed her all my books and methods, and all my fidgety ways. You would have supposed that I was showing her some wonderful inventions, by her study of them; and if you had seen her, whenever I jingled my housekeeping keys, get up and attend me, certainly you might have thought that there never was a greater impostor than I, with a blinder follower than Caddy Jellyby.

  So, what with working and housekeeping, and lessons to Charley, and backgammon in the evening with my guardian, and duets with Ada, the three weeks slipped fast away. Then I went home with Caddy, to see what could be done there; and Ada and Charley remained behind, to take care of my guardian.

  When I say I went home with Caddy, I mean to the furnished lodging in Hatton Garden. We went to Newman Street two or three times, where preparations were in progress too; a good many, I observed, for enhancing the comforts of old Mr. Turveydrop, and a few for putting the newly married couple away cheaply at the top of the house; but our great point was to make the furnished lodging decent for the wedding-breakfast, and to imbue Mrs. Jellyby beforehand with some faint sense of the occasion.

  The latter was the more difficult thing of the two, because Mrs. Jellyby and an unwholesome boy occupied the front sitting-room (the back one was a mere closet), and it was littered down with waste-paper and Borrioboolan interviews by appointment. The unwholesome boy, who seemed to me to be going into a decline, took his meals out of the house. When Mr. Jellyby came home, he usually groaned and went down into the kitchen. There he got something to eat, if the servant would give him anything; and then, feeling that he was in the way, went out and walked about Hatton Garden in the wet. The poor children scrambled up and tumbled down the house, as they had always been accustomed to do.

  The production of these devoted little sacrifices, in any presentable condition, being quite out of the question at a week’s notice, I proposed to Caddy that we should make them as happy as we could, on her marriage morning, in the attic where they all slept; and should confine our greatest efforts on her mama and her mama’s room, and a clean breakfa
st. In truth Mrs. Jellyby required a good deal of attention, the lattice-work up her back having widened considerably since I first knew her, and her hair looking like the mane of a dustman’s horse.

  Thinking that the display of Caddy’s wardrobe would be the best means of approaching the subject, I invited Mrs. Jellyby to come and look at it spread out on Caddy’s bed, in the evening after the unwholesome boy was gone.

  “My dear Miss Summerson,” said she, rising from her desk with her usual sweetness of temper, “these are really ridiculous preparations, though your assisting them is a proof of your kindness. There is something so inexpressibly absurd to me, in the idea of Caddy being married! O Caddy, you silly, silly, silly puss!”

  She came upstairs with us notwithstanding, and looked at the clothes in her customary far-off manner. They suggested one distinct idea to her; for she said, with her placid smile, and shaking her head, “My good Miss Summerson, at half the cost, this weak child might have been equipped for Africa!”

  On our going downstairs again, Mrs. Jellyby asked me whether this troublesome business was really to take place next Wednesday? And on my replying yes, she said, “Will my room be required, my dear Miss Summerson? For it’s quite impossible that I can put my papers away.”

  I took the liberty of saying that the room would certainly be wanted, and that I thought we must put the papers away somewhere. “Well, my dear Miss Summerson,” said Mrs. Jellyby, “you know best, I dare say. But by obliging me to employ a boy, Caddy has embarrassed me to that extent, overwhelmed as I am with public business, that I don’t know which way to turn. We have a Ramification meeting too, on Wednesday afternoon, and the inconvenience is very serious.”

  “It is not likely to occur again,” said I, smiling. “Caddy will be married but once, probably.”

  “That’s true,” Mrs. Jellyby replied, “that’s true, my dear. I suppose we must make the best of it!”

  The next question was, how Mrs. Jellyby should be dressed on the occasion. I thought it very curious to see her looking on serenely from her writing-table, while Caddy and I discussed it; occasionally shaking her head at us with a half-reproachful smile, like a superior spirit who could just bear with our trifling.

  The state in which her dresses were, and the extraordinary confusion in which she kept them, added not a little to our difficulty; but at length we devised something not very unlike what a commonplace mother might wear on such an occasion. The abstract manner in which Mrs. Jellyby would deliver herself up to having this attire tried on by the dressmaker, and the sweetness with which she would then observe to me how sorry she was that I had not turned my thoughts to Africa, were consistent with the rest of her behaviour.

  The lodging was rather confined as to space, but I fancied that if Mrs. Jellyby’s household had been the only lodgers in Saint Paul’s or Saint Peter’s, the sole advantage they would have found in the size of the building would have been its affording a great deal of room to be dirty in. I believe that nothing belonging to the family, which it had been possible to break, was unbroken at the time of those preparations for Caddy’s marriage; that nothing which it had been possible to spoil in any way, was unspoilt; and that no domestic object which was capable of collecting dirt, from a dear child’s knee to the door-plate, was without as much dirt as could well accumulate upon it.

  Poor Mr. Jellyby, who very seldom spoke, and almost always sat when he was at home with his head against the wall, became interested when he saw that Caddy and I were attempting to establish some order among all this waste and ruin, and took off his coat to help. But such wonderful things came tumbling out of the closets when they were opened—bits of mouldy pie, sour bottles, Mrs. Jellyby’s caps, letters, tea, forks, odd boots and shoes of children, firewood, wafers, saucepan-lids, damp sugar in odds and ends of paper bags, footstools, blacklead brushes, bread, Mrs. Jellyby’s bonnets, books with butter sticking to the binding, guttered candle-ends put out by being turned upside down in broken candlesticks, nutshells, heads and tails of shrimps, dinner-mats, gloves, coffee-grounds, umbrellas—that he looked frightened, and left off again. But he came regularly every evening, and sat without his coat, with his head against the wall; as though he would have helped us, if he had known how.

  “Poor Pa!” said Caddy to me, on the night before the great day, when we really had got things a little to rights. “It seems unkind to leave him, Esther. But what could I do, if I stayed! Since I first knew you, I have tidied and tidied over and over again; but it’s useless. Ma and Africa, together, upset the whole house directly. We never have a servant who don’t drink. Ma’s ruinous to everything.”

  Mr. Jellyby could not hear what she said, but he seemed very low indeed, and shed tears, I thought.

  “My heart aches for him; that it does!” sobbed Caddy. “I can’t help thinking tonight, Esther, how dearly I hope to be happy with Prince, and how dearly Pa hoped, I dare say, to be happy with Ma. What a disappointed life!”

  “My dear Caddy!” said Mr. Jellyby, looking slowly round from the wall. It was the first time, I think, I ever heard him say three words together.

  “Yes, Pa!” cried Caddy, going to him and embracing him affectionately.

  “My dear Caddy,” said Mr. Jellyby. “Never have—”

  “Not Prince, Pa?” faltered Caddy. “Not have Prince?”

  “Yes, my dear,” said Mr. Jellyby. “Have him, certainly. But, never have—”

  I mentioned in my account of our first visit in Thavies Inn, that Richard described Mr. Jellyby as frequently opening his mouth after dinner without saying anything. It was a habit of his. He opened his mouth now, a great many times, and shook his head in a melancholy manner.

  “What do you wish me not to have? Don’t have what, dear Pa?” asked Caddy, coaxing him with her arms round his neck.

  “Never have a Mission, my dear child.”

  Mr. Jellyby groaned, and laid his head against the wall again; and this was the only time I ever heard him make any approach to expressing his sentiments on the Borrioboolan question. I suppose he had been more talkative and lively, once; but he seemed to have been completely exhausted long before I knew him.

  I thought Mrs. Jellyby never would have left off serenely looking over her papers, and drinking coffee, that night. It was twelve o’clock before we could obtain possession of the room; and the clearance it required then, was so discouraging, that Caddy, who was almost tired out, sat down in the middle of the dust, and cried. But she soon cheered up, and we did wonders with it before we went to bed.

  In the morning it looked, by the aid of a few flowers and a quantity of soap and water, and a little arrangement, quite gay. The plain breakfast made a cheerful show, and Caddy was perfectly charming. But when my darling came, I thought—and I think now—that I never had seen such a dear face as my beautiful pet’s.

  We made a little feast for the children upstairs, and we put Peepy at the head of the table, and we showed them Caddy in her bridal dress, and they clapped their hands and hurrahed, and Caddy cried to think that she was going away from them, and hugged them over and over again, until we brought Prince up to fetch her away—when, I am sorry to say, Peepy bit him. Then there was old Mr. Turveydrop downstairs, in a state of Deportment not to be expressed, benignly blessing Caddy, and giving my guardian to understand, that his son’s happiness was his own parental work, and that he sacrificed personal considerations to ensure it. “My dear sir,” said Mr. Turveydrop, “these young people will live with me; my house is large enough for their accommodation, and they shall not want the shelter of my roof. I could have wished—you will understand the allusion, Mr. Jarndyce, for you remember my illustrious patron the Prince Regent—I could have wished that my son had married into a family where there was more Deportment; but the will of Heaven be done!”

  Mr. and Mrs. Pardiggle were of the party—Mr. Pardiggle, an obstinate-looking man with a large waistcoat and stubbly hair, who was always talking in a loud bass voice about his mite, or Mrs. P
ardiggle’s mite, or their five boys’ mites. Mr. Quale, with his hair brushed back as usual, and his knobs of temples shining very much, was also there; not in the character of a disappointed lover, but as the Accepted of a young—at least, an unmarried—lady, a Miss Wisk, who was also there. Miss Wisk’s mission, my guardian said, was to show the world that woman’s mission was man’s mission; and that the only genuine mission, of both man and woman, was to be always moving declaratory resolutions about things in general at public meetings. The guests were few; but were, as one might expect at Mrs. Jellyby’s, all devoted to public objects only. Besides those I have mentioned, there was an extremely dirty lady, with her bonnet all awry, and the ticketed price of her dress still sticking on it, whose neglected home, Caddy told me, was like a filthy wilderness, but whose church was like a fancy fair. A very contentious gentleman, who said it was his mission to be everybody’s brother, but who appeared to be on terms of coolness with the whole of his large family, completed the party.

  A party, having less in common with such an occasion, could hardly have been got together by any ingenuity. Such a mean mission as the domestic mission, was the very last thing to be endured among them; indeed, Miss Wisk informed us, with great indignation, before we sat down to breakfast, that the idea of woman’s mission lying chiefly in the narrow sphere of Home was an outrageous slander on the part of her Tyrant, Man. One other singularity was, that nobody with a mission—except Mr. Quale, whose mission, as I think I have formerly said, was to be in ecstasies with everybody’s mission—cared at all for anybody’s mission. Mrs. Pardiggle being as clear that the only one infallible course was her course of pouncing upon the poor, and applying benevolence to them like a strait-waistcoat; as Miss Wisk was that the only practical thing for the world was the emancipation of Woman from the thraldom of her Tyrant, Man. Mrs. Jellyby, all the while, sat smiling at the limited vision that could see anything but Borrioboola-Gha.