Little Dorrit - Page 126/462

You was always at it--if not with your right hand, with your left. What

was they a doing in the Yard? Why, take a look at 'em and see. There

was the girls and their mothers a working at their sewing, or their

shoe-binding, or their trimming, or their waistcoat making, day and

night and night and day, and not more than able to keep body and soul

together after all--often not so much. There was people of pretty well

all sorts of trades you could name, all wanting to work, and yet not

able to get it.

There was old people, after working all their lives,

going and being shut up in the workhouse, much worse fed and lodged and

treated altogether, than--Mr Plornish said manufacturers, but appeared

to mean malefactors. Why, a man didn't know where to turn himself for a

crumb of comfort. As to who was to blame for it, Mr Plornish didn't know

who was to blame for it. He could tell you who suffered, but he couldn't

tell you whose fault it was. It wasn't HIS place to find out, and who'd

mind what he said, if he did find out? He only know'd that it wasn't put

right by them what undertook that line of business, and that it didn't

come right of itself. And, in brief, his illogical opinion was, that if

you couldn't do nothing for him, you had better take nothing from him

for doing of it; so far as he could make out, that was about what it

come to.

Thus, in a prolix, gently-growling, foolish way, did Plornish

turn the tangled skein of his estate about and about, like a blind man

who was trying to find some beginning or end to it; until they reached

the prison gate. There, he left his Principal alone; to wonder, as he

rode away, how many thousand Plornishes there might be within a day

or two's journey of the Circumlocution Office, playing sundry curious

variations on the same tune, which were not known by ear in that

glorious institution.