Chapter: The passengers were landing from the packet on the pier at Calais.
A low-lying place and a low-spirited place Calais was, with the tide
ebbing out towards low water-mark. There had been no more water on the
bar than had sufficed to float the packet in; and now the bar itself,
    with a shallow break of sea over it, looked like a lazy marine monster
    just risen to the surface, whose form was indistinctly shown as it lay
    asleep. The meagre lighthouse all in white, haunting the seaboard as if
    it were the ghost of an edifice that had once had colour and rotundity,
    dropped melancholy tears after its late buffeting by the waves. The long
    rows of gaunt black piles, slimy and wet and weather-worn, with funeral
    garlands of seaweed twisted about them by the late tide, might
    have represented an unsightly marine cemetery. Every wave-dashed,
    storm-beaten object, was so low and so little, under the broad grey sky,
    in the noise of the wind and sea, and before the curling lines of surf,
    making at it ferociously, that the wonder was there was any Calais left,
    and that its low gates and low wall and low roofs and low ditches and
    low sand-hills and low ramparts and flat streets, had not yielded
    long ago to the undermining and besieging sea, like the fortifications
    children make on the sea-shore.

    After slipping among oozy piles and planks, stumbling up wet steps and
    encountering many salt difficulties, the passengers entered on their
    comfortless peregrination along the pier; where all the French vagabonds
    and English outlaws in the town (half the population) attended to
    prevent their recovery from bewilderment. After being minutely inspected
    by all the English, and claimed and reclaimed and counter-claimed as
    prizes by all the French in a hand-to-hand scuffle three quarters of a
    mile long, they were at last free to enter the streets, and to make off
    in their various directions, hotly pursued.

    Clennam, harassed by more anxieties than one, was among this devoted
    band. Having rescued the most defenceless of his compatriots from
    situations of great extremity, he now went his way alone, or as nearly
    alone as he could be, with a native gentleman in a suit of grease and
    a cap of the same material, giving chase at a distance of some fifty
    yards, and continually calling after him, 'Hi! Ice-say! You! Seer!
    Ice-say! Nice Oatel!'

    Even this hospitable person, however, was left behind at last, and
    Clennam pursued his way, unmolested. There was a tranquil air in the
    town after the turbulence of the Channel and the beach, and its dulness
    in that comparison was agreeable. He met new groups of his countrymen,
    who had all a straggling air of having at one time overblown themselves,
    like certain uncomfortable kinds of flowers, and of being now mere
    weeds. They had all an air, too, of lounging out a limited round, day
    after day, which strongly reminded him of the Marshalsea. But, taking
    no further note of them than was sufficient to give birth to the
    reflection, he sought out a certain street and number which he kept in
    his mind.

    'So Pancks said,' he murmured to himself, as he stopped before a dull
    house answering to the address. 'I suppose his information to be correct
    and his discovery, among Mr Casby's loose papers, indisputable; but,
    without it, I should hardly have supposed this to be a likely place.'

    A dead sort of house, with a dead wall over the way and a dead gateway
    at the side, where a pendant bell-handle produced two dead tinkles, and
    a knocker produced a dead, flat, surface-tapping, that seemed not to
    have depth enough in it to penetrate even the cracked door. However, the
    door jarred open on a dead sort of spring; and he closed it behind him
    as he entered a dull yard, soon brought to a close by another dead wall,
    where an attempt had been made to train some creeping shrubs, which were
    dead; and to make a little fountain in a grotto, which was dry; and to
    decorate that with a little statue, which was gone.

    The entry to the house was on the left, and it was garnished as the
    outer gateway was, with two printed bills in French and English,
    announcing Furnished Apartments to let, with immediate possession. A
    strong cheerful peasant woman, all stocking, petticoat, white cap, and
    ear-ring, stood here in a dark doorway, and said with a pleasant show of
    teeth, 'Ice-say! Seer! Who?'

    Clennam, replying in French, said the English lady; he wished to see
    the English lady. 'Enter then and ascend, if you please,' returned the
    peasant woman, in French likewise. He did both, and followed her up a
    dark bare staircase to a back room on the first-floor. Hence, there was
    a gloomy view of the yard that was dull, and of the shrubs that were
    dead, and of the fountain that was dry, and of the pedestal of the
    statue that was gone.

    'Monsieur Blandois,' said Clennam.

    'With pleasure, Monsieur.'

    Thereupon the woman withdrew and left him to look at the room. It was
    the pattern of room always to be found in such a house. Cool, dull, and
    dark. Waxed floor very slippery. A room not large enough to skate in;
    nor adapted to the easy pursuit of any other occupation. Red and
    white curtained windows, little straw mat, little round table with a
    tumultuous assemblage of legs underneath, clumsy rush-bottomed chairs,
    two great red velvet arm-chairs affording plenty of space to be
    uncomfortable in, bureau, chimney-glass in several pieces pretending to
    be in one piece, pair of gaudy vases of very artificial flowers; between
    them a Greek warrior with his helmet off, sacrificing a clock to the
    Genius of France.

    After some pause, a door of communication with another room was opened,
    and a lady entered. She manifested great surprise on seeing Clennam, and
    her glance went round the room in search of some one else.

    'Pardon me, Miss Wade. I am alone.'

    'It was not your name that was brought to me.'

    'No; I know that. Excuse me. I have already had experience that my name
    does not predispose you to an interview; and I ventured to mention the
    name of one I am in search of.'

    'Pray,' she returned, motioning him to a chair so coldly that he
    remained standing, 'what name was it that you gave?'

    'I mentioned the name of Blandois.'

    'Blandois?'

    'A name you are acquainted with.'

    'It is strange,' she said, frowning, 'that you should still press an
    undesired interest in me and my acquaintances, in me and my affairs, Mr
    Clennam. I don't know what you mean.'

    'Pardon me. You know the name?'

    'What can you have to do with the name? What can I have to do with the
    name? What can you have to do with my knowing or not knowing any name?
    I know many names and I have forgotten many more. This may be in the
    one class, or it may be in the other, or I may never have heard it. I am
    acquainted with no reason for examining myself, or for being examined,
    about it.'

    'If you will allow me,' said Clennam, 'I will tell you my reason for
    pressing the subject. I admit that I do press it, and I must beg you to
    forgive me if I do so, very earnestly. The reason is all mine, I do not
    insinuate that it is in any way yours.'

    'Well, sir,' she returned, repeating a little less haughtily than before
    her former invitation to him to be seated: to which he now deferred, as
    she seated herself. 'I am at least glad to know that this is not another
    bondswoman of some friend of yours, who is bereft of free choice, and
    whom I have spirited away. I will hear your reason, if you please.'

    'First, to identify the person of whom we speak,' said Clennam, 'let me
    observe that it is the person you met in London some time back. You will
    remember meeting him near the river--in the Adelphi!'

    'You mix yourself most unaccountably with my business,' she replied,
    looking full at him with stern displeasure. 'How do you know that?'

    'I entreat you not to take it ill. By mere accident.'

    'What accident?'

    'Solely the accident of coming upon you in the street and seeing the
    meeting.'

    'Do you speak of yourself, or of some one else?'

    'Of myself. I saw it.'

    'To be sure it was in the open street,' she observed, after a few
    moments of less and less angry reflection. 'Fifty people might have seen
    it. It would have signified nothing if they had.'

    'Nor do I make my having seen it of any moment, nor (otherwise than as
            an explanation of my coming here) do I connect my visit with it or the
    favour that I have to ask.'

    'Oh! You have to ask a favour! It occurred to me,' and the handsome face
    looked bitterly at him, 'that your manner was softened, Mr Clennam.'

    He was content to protest against this by a slight action without
    contesting it in words. He then referred to Blandois' disappearance, of
    which it was probable she had heard? However probable it was to him, she
    had heard of no such thing. Let him look round him (she said) and judge
    for himself what general intelligence was likely to reach the ears of
    a woman who had been shut up there while it was rife, devouring her own
    heart. When she had uttered this denial, which he believed to be true,
    she asked him what he meant by disappearance? That led to his narrating
    the circumstances in detail, and expressing something of his anxiety
    to discover what had really become of the man, and to repel the dark
    suspicions that clouded about his mother's house. She heard him with
    evident surprise, and with more marks of suppressed interest than he
    had seen in her; still they did not overcome her distant, proud, and
    self-secluded manner. When he had finished, she said nothing but these
    words:

    'You have not yet told me, sir, what I have to do with it, or what the
    favour is? Will you be so good as come to that?'

    'I assume,' said Arthur, persevering, in his endeavour to soften
    her scornful demeanour, 'that being in communication--may I say,
    confidential communication?--with this person--'

    'You may say, of course, whatever you like,' she remarked; 'but I do not
    subscribe to your assumptions, Mr Clennam, or to any one's.'

    '--that being, at least in personal communication with him,' said
    Clennam, changing the form of his position in the hope of making
    it unobjectionable, 'you can tell me something of his antecedents,
    pursuits, habits, usual place of residence. Can give me some little clue
    by which to seek him out in the likeliest manner, and either produce
    him, or establish what has become of him. This is the favour I ask,
    and I ask it in a distress of mind for which I hope you will feel some
    consideration. If you should have any reason for imposing conditions
    upon me, I will respect it without asking what it is.'

    'You chanced to see me in the street with the man,' she observed,
    after being, to his mortification, evidently more occupied with her own
    reflections on the matter than with his appeal. 'Then you knew the man
    before?'

    'Not before; afterwards. I never saw him before, but I saw him again on
    this very night of his disappearance. In my mother's room, in fact. I
    left him there. You will read in this paper all that is known of him.'

    He handed her one of the printed bills, which she read with a steady and
    attentive face.

    'This is more than _I_ knew of him,' she said, giving it back.
    Clennam's looks expressed his heavy disappointment, perhaps his
    incredulity; for she added in the same unsympathetic tone: 'You don't
    believe it. Still, it is so. As to personal communication: it seems that
    there was personal communication between him and your mother. And yet
    you say you believe _her_ declaration that she knows no more of him!'

    A sufficiently expressive hint of suspicion was conveyed in these words,
    and in the smile by which they were accompanied, to bring the blood into
    Clennam's cheeks.

    'Come, sir,' she said, with a cruel pleasure in repeating the stab, 'I
    will be as open with you as you can desire. I will confess that if I
    cared for my credit (which I do not), or had a good name to preserve
    (which I have not, for I am utterly indifferent to its being considered
     good or bad), I should regard myself as heavily compromised by having
    had anything to do with this fellow. Yet he never passed in at _my_
    door--never sat in colloquy with _me_ until midnight.'

    She took her revenge for her old grudge in thus turning his subject
    against him. Hers was not the nature to spare him, and she had no
    compunction.

    'That he is a low, mercenary wretch; that I first saw him prowling about
    Italy (where I was, not long ago), and that I hired him there, as the
    suitable instrument of a purpose I happened to have; I have no objection
    to tell you. In short, it was worth my while, for my own pleasure--the
    gratification of a strong feeling--to pay a spy who would fetch and
    carry for money. I paid this creature. And I dare say that if I had
    wanted to make such a bargain, and if I could have paid him enough, and
    if he could have done it in the dark, free from all risk, he would have
    taken any life with as little scruple as he took my money. That, at
    least, is my opinion of him; and I see it is not very far removed from
    yours. Your mother's opinion of him, I am to assume (following your
            example of assuming this and that), was vastly different.'

    'My mother, let me remind you,' said Clennam, 'was first brought into
    communication with him in the unlucky course of business.'

    'It appears to have been an unlucky course of business that last brought
    her into communication with him,' returned Miss Wade; 'and business
    hours on that occasion were late.'

    'You imply,' said Arthur, smarting under these cool-handed thrusts, of
    which he had deeply felt the force already, 'that there was something--'

    'Mr Clennam,' she composedly interrupted, 'recollect that I do not speak
    by implication about the man. He is, I say again without disguise, a low
    mercenary wretch. I suppose such a creature goes where there is occasion
    for him. If I had not had occasion for him, you would not have seen him
    and me together.'

    Wrung by her persistence in keeping that dark side of the case before
    him, of which there was a half-hidden shadow in his own breast, Clennam
    was silent.

    'I have spoken of him as still living,' she added, 'but he may have been
    put out of the way for anything I know. For anything I care, also. I
    have no further occasion for him.'

    With a heavy sigh and a despondent air, Arthur Clennam slowly rose.
    She did not rise also, but said, having looked at him in the meanwhile
    with a fixed look of suspicion, and lips angrily compressed:

    'He was the chosen associate of your dear friend, Mr Gowan, was he not?
    Why don't you ask your dear friend to help you?'

    The denial that he was a dear friend rose to Arthur's lips; but he
    repressed it, remembering his old struggles and resolutions, and said:

    'Further than that he has never seen Blandois since Blandois set out for
    England, Mr Gowan knows nothing additional about him. He was a chance
    acquaintance, made abroad.'

    'A chance acquaintance made abroad!' she repeated. 'Yes. Your dear
    friend has need to divert himself with all the acquaintances he can
    make, seeing what a wife he has. I hate his wife, sir.'

    The anger with which she said it, the more remarkable for being so much
    under her restraint, fixed Clennam's attention, and kept him on the
    spot. It flashed out of her dark eyes as they regarded him, quivered in
    her nostrils, and fired the very breath she exhaled; but her face was
    otherwise composed into a disdainful serenity; and her attitude was as
    calmly and haughtily graceful as if she had been in a mood of complete
    indifference.

    'All I will say is, Miss Wade,' he remarked, 'that you can have received
    no provocation to a feeling in which I believe you have no sharer.'

    'You may ask your dear friend, if you choose,' she returned, 'for his
    opinion upon that subject.'

    'I am scarcely on those intimate terms with my dear friend,' said
    Arthur, in spite of his resolutions, 'that would render my approaching
    the subject very probable, Miss Wade.'

    'I hate him,' she returned. 'Worse than his wife, because I was once
    dupe enough, and false enough to myself, almost to love him. You have
    seen me, sir, only on common-place occasions, when I dare say you have
    thought me a common-place woman, a little more self-willed than the
    generality. You don't know what I mean by hating, if you know me no
    better than that; you can't know, without knowing with what care I have
    studied myself and people about me. For this reason I have for some
    time inclined to tell you what my life has been--not to propitiate your
    opinion, for I set no value on it; but that you may comprehend, when
    you think of your dear friend and his dear wife, what I mean by hating.
    Shall I give you something I have written and put by for your perusal,
    or shall I hold my hand?'

    Arthur begged her to give it to him. She went to the bureau, unlocked
    it, and took from an inner drawer a few folded sheets of paper. Without
    any conciliation of him, scarcely addressing him, rather speaking as if
    she were speaking to her own looking-glass for the justification of her
    own stubbornness, she said, as she gave them to him:

    'Now you may know what I mean by hating! No more of that. Sir, whether
    you find me temporarily and cheaply lodging in an empty London house, or
    in a Calais apartment, you find Harriet with me. You may like to see
    her before you leave. Harriet, come in!' She called Harriet again. The
    second call produced Harriet, once Tattycoram.

    'Here is Mr Clennam,' said Miss Wade; 'not come for you; he has given
    you up,--I suppose you have, by this time?'

    'Having no authority, or influence--yes,' assented Clennam.

    'Not come in search of you, you see; but still seeking some one. He
    wants that Blandois man.'

    'With whom I saw you in the Strand in London,' hinted Arthur.

    'If you know anything of him, Harriet, except that he came from
    Venice--which we all know--tell it to Mr Clennam freely.'

    'I know nothing more about him,' said the girl.

    'Are you satisfied?' Miss Wade inquired of Arthur.

    He had no reason to disbelieve them; the girl's manner being so natural
    as to be almost convincing, if he had had any previous doubts. He
    replied, 'I must seek for intelligence elsewhere.'

    He was not going in the same breath; but he had risen before the girl
    entered, and she evidently thought he was. She looked quickly at him,
    and said:

    'Are they well, sir?'

    'Who?'

    She stopped herself in saying what would have been 'all of them;'
    glanced at Miss Wade; and said 'Mr and Mrs Meagles.'

    'They were, when I last heard of them. They are not at home. By the way,
    let me ask you. Is it true that you were seen there?'

    'Where? Where does any one say I was seen?' returned the girl, sullenly
    casting down her eyes.

    'Looking in at the garden gate of the cottage.'

    'No,' said Miss Wade. 'She has never been near it.'

    'You are wrong, then,' said the girl. 'I went down there the last time
    we were in London. I went one afternoon when you left me alone. And I
    did look in.'

    'You poor-spirited girl,' returned Miss Wade with infinite contempt;
    'does all our companionship, do all our conversations, do all your old
    complainings, tell for so little as that?'

    'There was no harm in looking in at the gate for an instant,' said the
    girl. 'I saw by the windows that the family were not there.'

    'Why should you go near the place?'

    'Because I wanted to see it. Because I felt that I should like to look
    at it again.'

    As each of the two handsome faces looked at the other, Clennam felt how
    each of the two natures must be constantly tearing the other to pieces.

    'Oh!' said Miss Wade, coldly subduing and removing her glance; 'if you
    had any desire to see the place where you led the life from which I
    rescued you because you had found out what it was, that is another
    thing. But is that your truth to me? Is that your fidelity to me? Is
    that the common cause I make with you? You are not worth the confidence
    I have placed in you. You are not worth the favour I have shown you. You
    are no higher than a spaniel, and had better go back to the people who
    did worse than whip you.'

    'If you speak so of them with any one else by to hear, you'll provoke me
    to take their part,' said the girl.

    'Go back to them,' Miss Wade retorted. 'Go back to them.'

    'You know very well,' retorted Harriet in her turn, 'that I won't go
    back to them. You know very well that I have thrown them off, and never
    can, never shall, never will, go back to them. Let them alone, then,
    Miss Wade.'

    'You prefer their plenty to your less fat living here,' she rejoined.
    'You exalt them, and slight me. What else should I have expected? I
    ought to have known it.'

    'It's not so,' said the girl, flushing high, 'and you don't say what you
    mean. I know what you mean. You are reproaching me, underhanded, with
    having nobody but you to look to. And because I have nobody but you
    to look to, you think you are to make me do, or not do, everything you
    please, and are to put any affront upon me. You are as bad as they were,
    every bit. But I will not be quite tamed, and made submissive. I will
    say again that I went to look at the house, because I had often thought
    that I should like to see it once more. I will ask again how they are,
    because I once liked them and at times thought they were kind to me.'

    Hereupon Clennam said that he was sure they would still receive her
    kindly, if she should ever desire to return.

    'Never!' said the girl passionately. 'I shall never do that. Nobody
    knows that better than Miss Wade, though she taunts me because she has
    made me her dependent. And I know I am so; and I know she is overjoyed
    when she can bring it to my mind.'

    'A good pretence!' said Miss Wade, with no less anger, haughtiness, and
    bitterness; 'but too threadbare to cover what I plainly see in this. My
    poverty will not bear competition with their money. Better go back at
    once, better go back at once, and have done with it!'

    Arthur Clennam looked at them, standing a little distance asunder in the
    dull confined room, each proudly cherishing her own anger; each, with
    a fixed determination, torturing her own breast, and torturing the
    other's. He said a word or two of leave-taking; but Miss Wade barely
    inclined her head, and Harriet, with the assumed humiliation of an
    abject dependent and serf (but not without defiance for all that), made
    as if she were too low to notice or to be noticed.

    He came down the dark winding stairs into the yard with an increased
    sense upon him of the gloom of the wall that was dead, and of the shrubs
    that were dead, and of the fountain that was dry, and of the statue that
    was gone. Pondering much on what he had seen and heard in that house,
    as well as on the failure of all his efforts to trace the suspicious
    character who was lost, he returned to London and to England by the
    packet that had taken him over. On the way he unfolded the sheets of
    paper, and read in them what is reproduced in the next chapter.

 Arthur gets off the boat at Calais, the French town across the Channel from England. There's a mob of French scam artists there, jockeying for the tourists - kind of like taxicabs at an airport. He gets around them and goes to find a specific address, which apparently was found by Pancks in some of Casby's papers. It's a gross, beat-up house. He goes up and announces himself as Monsieur Blandois. Miss Wade comes out and is shocked to see Arthur. He apologizes for the false name, and she kind of half-lies about not even knowing who Blandois is, until Arthur says that he saw them talking on the street. The situation is tense. Miss Wade is as cold, stone-faced, and haughty as ever, and Arthur is uncomfortable. Still, he asks her if she knows anything about where Blandois might be, so that he can clear his mother's name. Miss Wade mocks him and wonders what makes him think his mother doesn't have anything to do with the disappearance. She is evasive and things are fishy, but basically she says she has no idea where he is and that she hasn't had any contact with him. She then tells him what she knows: he was some kind of thuggish lowlife that she hired to be "a spy who would fetch and carry for money" . She assumes that if he could have gotten more out of her by killing her, he wouldn't have thought twice about it. Then she asks Arthur why he doesn't ask Gowan about his close friend. Arthur says Gowan has no idea where Blandois is. Miss Wade then announces that she hates Gowan's wife - a lot. Like really, really hates her. Then she says she has written down some of her life history for Arthur to explain what she means by hate. Arthur takes the writing. Then Miss Wade calls in Harriet to say hello. Harriet has no info about Blandois either but asks about the Meagleses. Arthur says they are doing well, and in turns asks her if she really went by their cottage that time the servant saw her. Miss Wade is all, no way! But Harriet says, way. She also says that she didn't go to gloat over her old masters, but went because sometimes she misses them. Miss Wade is all, you are almost a pet dog then and should go back to them if you miss their money so much. She and Harriet have bitter words back and forth and both clearly just spend their days tearing each other down. It's all very dysfunctional, and it's still unclear if they are lovers, or if Harriet is now Miss Wade's adopted daughter, or servant, or what on earth is going on. Arthur has had enough of them, leaves, and gets back on the boat to go back to England. On the boat, he reads the pages Miss Wade gave him.

