Читать книгу Гордость и предубеждение / Pride and Prejudice. Great Expectations / Большие надежды - Чарльз Диккенс, Джейн Остин - Страница 25

After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself.

He advised my attending certain places in London. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an admirable manner.

I thought if I could retain my bedroom in Barnard’s Inn, my life would be agreeably varied. So I went off to Little Britain and expressed my wish to Mr. Jaggers.

“If I could buy the furniture now hired for me,” said I, “and one or two other little things, I should be quite at home there.”

“Go it![119]” said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. “Well! How much do you want?”

I said I didn’t know how much.

“Come!” retorted Mr. Jaggers. “How much? Fifty pounds?”

“O, not nearly so much.”

“Five pounds?” said Mr. Jaggers.

This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, “O, more than that.”

“More than that, eh!” retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind me; “how much more?”

“It is so difficult to fix a sum,” said I, hesitating.

“Come!” said Mr. Jaggers. “Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?”

“Twenty pounds, of course,” said I, smiling.

“Wemmick!” said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. “Take Mr. Pip’s written order, and pay him twenty pounds.”

Mr. Jaggers never laughed. 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. “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 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!”

I said I supposed he was very skilful?

“Deep,” said Wemmick, “as Australia. If there was anything deeper,” added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, “he’d be it.”

Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied —

“We don’t run much into clerks,[120] because there’s only one Jaggers. There are only four of us. Would you like to see them? You are one of us, as I may say.”

I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back, we went up stairs. The house was dark and shabby. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher[121] – a large pale, puffed, swollen man – was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby appearance. In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes. In a back room, a high-shouldered man,[122] who was dressed in old black clothes, 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 down stairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian’s room, and said, “This you’ve seen already.”

Then 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,[123] I could offer you a bed, and I should consider it an honor. 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[124] a bit of garden and a summer-house.”

I said I should be delighted to accept his invitation.

“Thank you,” said he. “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.”

I told him I would do so, with all the interest and curiosity that his preparation awakened.