Mrs. Blimber, her Mama, was not learned herself, but she pretended to be, and that did quite as well. She said at evening parties, that if she could have known Cicero, she thought she could have died contented. It was the steady joy of her life to see the Doctor’s young gentlemen go out walking, unlike all other young gentlemen, in the largest possible shirt-collars, and the stiffest possible cravats. It was so classical, she said.
As to Mr. Feeder, B.A., Doctor Blimber’s assistant, he was a kind of human barrel-organ, with a little list of tunes at which he was continually working, over and over again, without any variation. He might have been fitted up with a change of barrels, perhaps, in early life, if his destiny had been favourable; but it had not been; and he had only one, with which, in a monotonous round, it was his occupation to bewilder the young ideas of Doctor Blimber’s young gentlemen. The young gentlemen were prematurely full of carking anxieties. They knew no rest from the pursuit of stony-hearted verbs, savage noun-substantives, inflexible syntactic passages, and ghosts of exercises that appeared to them in their dreams. Under the forcing system, a young gentleman usually took leave of his spirits in three weeks. He had all the cares of the world on his head in three months. He conceived bitter sentiments against his parents or guardians in four; he was an old misanthrope, in five; envied Curtius that blessed refuge in the earth, in six; and at the end of the first twelvemonth had arrived at the conclusion, from which he never afterwards departed, that all the fancies of the poets, and lessons of the sages, were a mere collection of words and grammar, and had no other meaning in the world.
But he went on blow, blow, blowing, in the Doctor’s hothouse, all the time; and the Doctor’s glory and reputation were great, when he took his wintry growth home to his relations and friends.
Upon the Doctor’s doorsteps one day, Paul stood with a fluttering heart, and with his small right hand in his father’s. His other hand was locked in that of Florence. How tight the tiny pressure of that one; and how loose and cold the other!
Mrs. Pipchin hovered behind the victim, with her sable plumage and her hooked beak, like a bird of ill-omen. She was out of breath—for Mr. Dombey, full of great thoughts, had walked fast—and she croaked hoarsely as she waited for the opening of the door.
“Now, Paul,” said Mr. Dombey, exultingly. “This is the way indeed to be Dombey and Son, and have money. You are almost a man already.”
“Almost,” returned the child.
Even his childish agitation could not master the sly and quaint yet touching look, with which he accompanied the reply.
It brought a vague expression of dissatisfaction into Mr. Dombey’s face; but the door being opened, it was quickly gone.
“Doctor Blimber is at home, I believe?” said Mr. Dombey.
The man said yes; and as they passed in, looked at Paul as if he were a little mouse, and the house were a trap. He was a weak-eyed young man, with the first faint streaks or early dawn of a grin on his countenance. It was mere imbecility; but Mrs. Pipchin took it into her head that it was impudence, and made a snap at him directly.
“How dare you laugh behind the gentleman’s back?” said Mrs. Pipchin. “And what do you take me for?”
“I ain’t a laughing at nobody, and I’m sure I don’t take you for nothing, Ma’am,” returned the young man, in consternation.
“A pack of idle dogs!” said Mrs. Pipchin, “only fit to be turnspits. Go and tell your master that Mr. Dombey’s here, or it’ll be worse for you!”
The weak-eyed young man went, very meekly, to discharge himself of this commission; and soon came back to invite them to the Doctor’s study.
“You’re laughing again, Sir,” said Mrs. Pipchin, when it came to her turn, bringing up the rear, to pass him in the hall.
“I ain’t,” returned the young man, grievously oppressed. “I never see such a thing as this!”
“What is the matter, Mrs. Pipchin?” said Mr. Dombey, looking round. “Softly! Pray!”
Mrs. Pipchin, in her deference, merely muttered at the young man as she passed on, and said, “Oh! he was a precious fellow”—leaving the young man, who was all meekness and incapacity, affected even to tears by the incident. But Mrs. Pipchin had a way of falling foul of all meek people; and her friends said who could wonder at it, after the Peruvian mines!
The Doctor was sitting in his portentous study, with a globe at each knee, books all round him, Homer over the door, and Minerva on the mantel-shelf. “And how do you do, Sir?” he said to Mr. Dombey, “and how is my little friend?” Grave as an organ was the Doctor’s speech; and when he ceased, the great clock in the hall seemed (to Paul at least) to take him up, and to go on saying, “how, is, my, lit, tle, friend? how, is, my, lit, tle, friend?” over and over and over again.
The little friend being something too small to be seen at all from where the Doctor sat, over the books on his table, the Doctor made several futile attempts to get a view of him round the legs; which Mr. Dombey perceiving, relieved the Doctor from his embarrassment by taking Paul up in his arms, and sitting him on another little table, over against the Doctor, in the middle of the room.
“Ha!” said the Doctor, leaning back in his chair with his hand in his breast. “Now I see my little friend. How do you do, my little friend?”
The clock in the hall wouldn’t subscribe to this alteration in the form of words,
