But what is Mr. Bigg, when he has courteously wished the ladies good
night, when he has secretly summoned the footman with the surreptitious
tray, and when he has deluded the unprincipled married men of the party
into having half an hour's cozy chat with him before they go up-stairs?
Another being--a being unknown to the ladies, and unsuspected by the
respectable guests. Inside the Bedroom, the outward aspect of Mr. Bigg
changes as if by magic; and a kind of gorgeous slovenliness pervades
him from top to toe. Buttons which have rigidly restrained him within
distinct physical boundaries, slip exhausted out of their buttonholes;
and the figure of Mr. Bigg suddenly expands and asserts itself for the
first time as a protuberant fact. His neckcloth flies on to the nearest
chair, his rigid shirt-collar yawns open, his wiry under-whiskers ooze
multitudinously into view, his coat, waistcoat, and braces drop off
his shoulders. If the two young ladies who sleep in the room above, and
who most unreasonably complain of the ceaseless nocturnal croaking and
growling of voices in the Bachelor Bedroom, could look down through the
ceiling now, they would not know Mr. Bigg again, and would suspect that
a dissipated artisan had intruded himself into Sir John's house.
In the same way, the company who have sat in Mr. Bigg's neighbourhood at
the dinner-table at seven o'clock, would find it impossible to recognise
his conversation at midnight. Outside the Bachelor Bedroom, if his talk
has shown him to be anything at all, it has shown him to be the exact
reverse of an enthusiast. Inside the Bachelor Bedroom, after all due
attention has been paid to the cigar-box and the footman's tray, it
becomes unaccountably manifest to everybody that Mr. Bigg is, after all,
a fanatical character, a man possessed of one fixed idea. Then, and then
only, does he mysteriously confide to his fellow revellers that he is the
one remarkable man in Great Britain who has discovered the real authorship
of Junius's Letters. In the general society of the house, nobody ever
hears him refer to the subject; nobody ever suspects that he takes more
than the most ordinary interest in literary matters. In the select society
of the Bedroom, inspired by the surreptitious tray and the midnight
secrecy, wrapped in clouds of tobacco smoke, and freed from the restraint
of his own magnificent garments, the truth flies out of Mr. Bigg, and the
authorship of Junius's Letters becomes the one dreary subject which this
otherwise variously gifted man persists in dilating on for hours together.
But for the Bachelor Bedroom, nobody alive would ever have discovered that
the true key to unlock Mr. Bigg's character is Junius. If the subject is
referred to the next day by his companions of the night, he declines to
notice it; but, once in the Bedroom again, he takes it up briskly, as if
the attempted reference to it had been made but the moment before. The
last time I saw him was in the Bachelor Bedroom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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