"Get on, my lad!"

Bleak House. Charles Dickens. What a story teller. What a writer.

There are so many memorable scenes, characters, too many characters were I honest and I shan't be, not now, another time. This is a time to marvel, not to quibble. 

That is an economical memorable line. I had forgotten about it. I have read this book several times, parts at a time. Have dog-eared it and post noted it. I had forgotten about this line. It is economical, understated drama. Det. Bucket and Esther Summerson are making a late, desperate attempt to find Lady Honoria Dedlock before it is too late. Det. Bucket has already discovered her suicide note and is an hour or more behind her, and he knows not whence she is. He takes Esther, Lady Dedlock's illegitimate daughter, with him to soften the visual if Lady Dedlock were to see a lone detective frantic after her.

"Don't you be alarmed, Miss Summerson, on account of our coming down here...I only want to have everything in train and to know that it is in train by looking after it my self. Get on, my lad!"
...

[The next page]

"...whenever he took his seat upon the box again, his face resumed its watchul steady look, and he always said to the driver in the same business tone, "Get on, my lad!"

...

[Nine pages later]
"All this time, kept fresh by a certain enjoyment of the work in which he was engaged, he was up and down at every house we came to;...yet never seeming to lose time, and always mounting to the box again with his watchful, steady face, and his business-like "Get on, my lad!"

[It is totally authentic as the intensity of a detective who is literally on the scent.]

..."But whatever you do, don't you fall a-crying my dear; and don't worry yourself no more than you can help. Get on, my lad!"

[Next page]

"He always gave me a reassuring beck of his finger, and lift of his eyelid, as he got upon the box again; but he seemed perplexed now, when he said "Get on, my lad!"

[He is off the trail and he knows it and he is worried. Two pages later at the close of the chapter "A Wintry Day and Night":]

"...I knew by his yet graver face, as he stood watching the ostler, that he had heard nothing. Almost in an instant afterwards, as I leaned back in my seat, he looked in,...an excited and quite different man.

"What is it?" said I, staring. "Is she here?"

"No, no...Nobody's here. But I've got it!"

..."Four horses out there for the next stage up! Quick!"

"There was a commotion in the yard."

"Look alive here with them horses. Send a man for'ard in the saddle to the next stage, and let him send another for'ard again, and order four on, up, right through."

"These orders, and the way in which he ran about the yard, urging them, caused a general excitement...[A] mounted man galloped away to order the relays, and our horses were put to with great speed."

"My dear...you keep up as good a heart as you can, and you rely upon me for standing by you...Now are you right there?"

"All right, sir!"

"Off she goes, then. And get on, my lads!"

I gave me chills. It is just as powerful on my mind as the trip up Shooters Hill in Tale of Two Cities. Not as evocative of scene. I can see the horses struggle, the vapor expelled strenuously from their nostrils, the creeping gray mist working up the hill from the valley engulfing the riders, the danger when the stage approaches, their driver reaching for his blunderbuss. Oh, a remarkable scene that. But here, in Bleak House, we have an early example, perhaps the first example, of a character we have become familiar with, the driven detective investigator. "We are vertebrates," said Vladimir Nabokov in his Cornell lectures on Bleak House. "We feel that tingle down our spine for we are vertebrates tipped at the head by a divine flame." Charles Dickens had the divine flame and he was singular in creating in us, his readers, the tingle down our vertebrate's spine.

Good night.