Without remarking that mantraps 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 cashbox 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 upstairs. 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