Page:Bleak House.djvu/279

 “Sir, to you!” says Mr. Smallweed.

“I was saying, what do you think now,” pursues Mr. Guppy, “of enlisting?”

“Why, what I may think after dinner,” returns Mr. Jobling, “is one thing, my dear Guppy, and what I may think before dinner is another thing. Still, even after dinner, I ask myself the question, What am I to do? How am I to live? Ill fo manger, you know,” says Mr. Jobling, pronouncing that word as if he meant a necessary fixture in an English stable, “lll fo manger. That's the French saying, and mangering is as necessary to me as it is to a Frenchman. Or more so.”

Mr. Smallweed is decidedly of opinion “much more so.”

“If any man had told me,” pursues Jobling, “even, so lately as when, you and I had the frisk down in Lincolnshire, Guppy, and drove over to see that house at Castle Wold—”

Mr. Smallweed corrects him—Chesney Wold.

“Chesney Wold. (I thank my honorable friend for that cheer.) If any man had told me, then, that I should be as hard up at the present time as I literally find myself, I should have—well, I should have pitched into him,” says Mr. Jobling, taking a little rum-and-water with an air of desperate resignation; “I should have let fly at his head.”

“Still, Tony, you were on the wrong side of the post then,” remonstrates Mr. Guppy. “You were talking about nothing else in the gig.”

“Guppy,” says Mr. Jobling, “I will not deny it, I was on the wrong side of the post. But I trusted to things coming round.”

That very popular trust in flat things coming round! Not in their being beaten round, or worked round, but in their "coming” round! As though a lunatic should trust in the world's "coming” triangular!

“I had confident expectations that things would come round and be all square,” says Mr. Jobling, with some vagueness of expression, and perhaps of meaning, too. “But I was disappointed. They never did. And when it came to creditors making rows at the office, and to people that the office dealt with making complaints about dirty trifles of borrowed money, why there was an end of that connexion. And of any new professional connexion, too; for if I was to give a reference to-morrow, it would be mentioned, and would sew me up. Then, what's a fellow to do? I have been keeping out of the way, and living cheap, down about the market-gardens; but what's the use of living cheap when you have got no money? You might as well live dear.”

“Better,” Mr. Swallweed thinks.

“Certainly. It's the fashionable way; and fashion and whiskers have been my weaknesses, and I don't care who knows it,” says Mr. Jobling. “They are great weaknesses—Damme, sir, they are great. Well!” proceeds Mr. Jobling, after a defiant visit to his rum-and-water, “what can a fellow do, I ask you, but enlist?”

Mr. Guppy comes more fully into the conversation, to state what, in his opinion, a fellow can do. His manner is the gravely impressive manner of a man who has not committed himself in life, otherwise than as he has become the victim of a tender sorrow of the heart.

“Jobling,” says Mr. Guppy, “myself and our mutual friend Smallweed”