Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I
said I supposed he was very skilful?
"Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the
office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes
of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe.
"If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing his pen to
paper, "he'd be it."
Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said,
"Ca-pi-tal!" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he
replied,-"We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and
people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would
you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say."
I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the
post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key
of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his
coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went up stairs. The house was dark
and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr.
Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase
for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something
between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen
man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby
appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to
be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence
together," said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the
room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair
(his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was
similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented
to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt
me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration,
as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a
high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was
dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been
waxed, 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."