“Now, my good madam,” said Mr. Pecksniff, “I know the rules of your establishment, and that you only receive gentlemen boarders. But it occurred to me, when I left home, that perhaps you would give my daughters houseroom, and make an exception in their favour.”
“Perhaps?” cried Mrs. Todgers ecstatically. “Perhaps?”
“I may say then, that I was sure you would,” said Mr. Pecksniff. “I know that you have a little room of your own, and that they can be comfortable there, without appearing at the general table.”
“Dear girls!” said Mrs. Todgers. “I must take that liberty once more.”
Mrs. Todgers meant by this that she must embrace them once more, which she accordingly did with great ardour. But the truth was that the house being full with the exception of one bed, which would now be occupied by Mr. Pecksniff, she wanted time for consideration; and so much time too (for it was a knotty point how to dispose of them), that even when this second embrace was over, she stood for some moments gazing at the sisters, with affection beaming in one eye, and calculation shining out of the other.
“I think I know how to arrange it,” said Mrs. Todgers, at length. “A sofa bedstead in the little third room which opens from my own parlour—Oh, you dear girls!”
Thereupon she embraced them once more, observing that she could not decide which was most like their poor mother (which was highly probable, seeing that she had never beheld that lady), but that she rather thought the youngest was; and then she said that as the gentlemen would be down directly, and the ladies were fatigued with travelling, would they step into her room at once?
It was on the same floor; being, in fact, the back parlour; and had, as Mrs. Todgers said, the great advantage (in London) of not being overlooked; as they would see when the fog cleared off. Nor was this a vainglorious boast, for it commanded at a perspective of two feet, a brown wall with a black cistern on the top. The sleeping apartment designed for the young ladies was approached from this chamber by a mightily convenient little door, which would only open when fallen against by a strong person. It commanded from a similar point of sight another angle of the wall, and another side of the cistern. “Not the damp side,” said Mrs. Todgers. “That is Mr. Jinkins’s.”
In the first of these sanctuaries a fire was speedily kindled by the youthful porter, who, whistling at his work in the absence of Mrs. Todgers (not to mention his sketching figures on his corduroys with burnt firewood), and being afterwards taken by that lady in the fact, was dismissed with a box on his ears. Having prepared breakfast for the young ladies with her own hands, she withdrew to preside in the other room; where the joke at Mr. Jinkins’s expense seemed to be proceeding rather noisily.
“I won’t ask you yet, my dears,” said Mr. Pecksniff, looking in at the door, “how you like London. Shall I?”
“We haven’t seen much of it, Pa!” cried Merry.
“Nothing, I hope,” said Cherry. (Both very miserably.)
“Indeed,” said Mr. Pecksniff, “that’s true. We have our pleasure, and our business too, before us. All in good time. All in good time!”
Whether Mr. Pecksniff’s business in London was as strictly professional as he had given his new pupil to understand, we shall see, to adopt that worthy man’s phraseology, “all in good time.”
IX
Town and Todger’s.
Surely there never was, in any other borough, city, or hamlet in the world, such a singular sort of a place as Todgers’s. And surely London, to judge from that part of it which hemmed Todgers’s round and hustled it, and crushed it, and stuck its brick-and-mortar elbows into it, and kept the air from it, and stood perpetually between it and the light, was worthy of Todgers’s, and qualified to be on terms of close relationship and alliance with hundreds and thousands of the odd family to which Todgers’s belonged.
You couldn’t walk about Todgers’s neighbourhood, as you could in any other neighbourhood. You groped your way for an hour through lanes and byways, and courtyards, and passages; and you never once emerged upon anything that might be reasonably called a street. A kind of resigned distraction came over the stranger as he trod those devious mazes, and, giving himself up for lost, went in and out and round about and quietly turned back again when he came to a dead wall or was stopped by an iron railing, and felt that the means of escape might possibly present themselves in their own good time, but that to anticipate them was hopeless. Instances were known of people who, being asked to dine at Todgers’s, had travelled round and round for a weary time, with its very chimney-pots in view; and finding it, at last, impossible of attainment, had gone home again with a gentle melancholy on their spirits, tranquil and uncomplaining. Nobody had ever found Todgers’s on a verbal direction, though given within a few minutes’ walk of it. Cautious emigrants from Scotland or the North of England had been known to reach it safely, by impressing a charity-boy, town-bred, and bringing him along with them; or by clinging tenaciously to the postman; but these were rare exceptions, and only went to prove the rule that Todgers’s was in a labyrinth, whereof the mystery was known but to a chosen few.
Several fruit-brokers had their marts near Todgers’s; and one of the first impressions wrought upon the stranger’s senses was of oranges—of damaged oranges, with blue and green bruises on them, festering in boxes, or mouldering away in cellars. All day long, a stream of porters from the wharves beside the river, each bearing on his back a bursting chest of
