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THE READERS' CLASSICS

EDITED BT

G. K. Chesterton, Holbrook Jackson, and
R. Brimley Johnson

DAVID COPPERFIELD
By CHAllLES DICKENS

THE READERS' CLASSICS

A WORD ABOUT THEIR AIM
AND PURPOSE

Perhaps the educational value of books has never been more
tersely and forcibly expressed than in Carlyle's somewhat startling
statement that "all a University can do for us is — teach us to read."
Indeed, we have but an elementary notion, most of us, of how to read;
that is, how to enjoy, digest, to extract the kernel from "The Best
Books." Such teaching, if it constitute the chief work of a Univer-
sity, is also the highest function of a critic.

Mr. Cedric Chivers has been for some years elaborating a novel
and original scheme for presenting standard literature, and standard
criticism, directed towards this very purpose; in a series of reprints
which should afford the public an unique opportunity of reading old
favourites with profit and pleasure. The Readers' Classics will contain
the masterpieces of many literatures, with Introductory matter,
carefully edited for each volume, comprising the most suggestive
critical appreciations by writers of every age and country. Each
criticism will express an individual point of view, an interpreta-
tion, a reason for praise or censure; since mere eulogy, however
enthusiastic, will not carry us far. We want to know why great
men have loved certain books and what they found in them. It is
believed that each reader may probably find here an interpreta-
tion peculiarly fitted to his temperament which, had he the skill
to word it, might well have been his own. But whether, on inde-
pendent reflection, we agree — or agree to differ, these comments
will have set us thinking, have taught us to read.

It would be impossible, in a paragraph, to estimate the educa-
tional value of this unique material, or to enumerate the many
advantages thus secured to the readers of any volume in the series.
The personal equation, necessarily dominant in the usual introduc-
tion by one Editor, has been eliminated; and we have, not one sound
guide, but many.

The appreciations here selected are arranged in chronological
order, so as to provide an historical outlook.

THE READERS' CLASSICS iii

We should add that the co-operation of the public is cordially
invited for any development of the Introductory matter. All sug-
gestions for appropriate quotations which may have escaped our
notice will be carefully considered and original criticisms are wel-
come. Either may be used in subsequent editions of volumes already
published; while the preparation of those announced as forthcom-
ing may be materially assisted by anyone kindly disposed to the
scheme. All such contributions, if accepted, will, of course, be fully
acknowledged.

G. K. Chesterton.

HoLBRooK Jackson.

R. Bbimlst Johnson.

EDITORIAL NOTE

The aim of this series is to promote the better under-
standing and the keener enjoyment of standard liter-
ature by presenting as Introductory matter a consensus
of criticism from writers of various periods and countries.
For each volume we have obtained new appreciations
by living writers; and have further collected the most
suggestive comments hitherto published, whether in re-
views, letters, journals, or even in poems and works of
fiction — wherever and whenever a worthy opinion may
happen to have been set down. Each passage expresses
an individual point of view, an interpretation, a reason
for praise or blame. It is to the enthusiastic co-operation
of Monsieur Davray that we owe both the new French
appreciations and the comments from French literature.

In the future development of this work we cordially
invite the co-operation of the public. Every reader, it
is hoped, may like to suggest some further critical com-
ment which has attracted his notice or roused his en-
thusiasm. All such matter submitted to us will receive
immediate attention and may be incorporated in future
issues with the contributor's name.

The Editors.

THE

PEI\SONAL HISTORYOP

DAVID COPPERFIELD

CHARLES DICKENS

WITH

CRITICAL APPRECIATIONS

OUD AND NEW

.=:::^rf:

Edited by
G. IC. CHESTERTON -

HOIwBI^OOK: JACKSON
Qnd

I^.BI^IMLEY JOHNSON

• •.•.♦,

Printed by

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDOB, U.S.A.

CONTENTS hAl^

ORIGINAL APPRECIATIONS

Paob

William Archer 15

Ford Madox Hueffer 17

Alice Meynell 18

Jules Claretie 20

^mile Legouis 21

Theodor de Wyzewa 23

HoLBROOK Jackson, 1874- 25

COMMENTS

Am6d6e Pichot, 1796-1856 35

John Forster. 1812-1876 36

George Henry Lewes, 1817-1878 37

Dr. Julian Schmidt, 1820-1885 38

Matthew Arnold, 1822-1888 39

David Masson, 1822-1907 42

Charles Kent, 1823-1902 42

H. A. Taine, 1828-1893 44

Frederic Harrison, 1831- 46

A. C. Swinburne, 1837-1909 47

William D. Howells, 1837- 48

Sir Adolphus William Ward, 1837- 49

Sir* Frank Thomas Marzla.ls, 1840- 52

Andrew Lang, 1844-1912 52 .

Anatole France, 1844- 55

Ferdinand BrunetiI:re, 1849- 5Q

R. Du PoNTAVicE, 1850-1893 56

Smile Hennequin, 1853-1888 57

EUll Caine, 1853- 59

57407G

viii CONTENTS

Page

Geokge Gissing, 1857-1904 60

Jerome K. Jerome, 1859- 62

G. K. Chesterton, 1874- 63

Edwin Pugh, 1874- 67

Anne Thackeray Ritchie 68

We are indebted for permission to quote from John Forater's Life
of Dickens, and from Charles Kent's Charles Dickens as a Reader,
to Messrs. Chapman & Hall, Ltd. ; from George Henry Lewes'
Dickens in Relation to Criticism, and from Mr. Mowbray Morris'
Charles Dickens, to Mr. W. L. Courtney and the managing director
of the "Fortnightly Review" ; from Matthew Arnold's The Incom-
patibles to Mr. Wray Skilbeck, editor of the "Nineteenth Century
and After" ; from David Masson's British Novelists and their Styles
to Mrs. Masson and to Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd.; from H. A.
Taine's History of English Literature (translated by H. van Laun)
to Messrs. Chatto & Windus; from George Gissing's Charles Dickens
to the Gresham Publishing Company; from Mr. Frederic Harrison's
Studies in Early Victorian Literature to the author and to Mr. Edward
Arnold; from Mrs. Meynell's article in the "Atlantic Monthly"
to the author; from Mr. Hall Caine's introduction to The Cricket
and the Hearth to Mr. William Heinemann; from Mr. Jerome K.
Jerome's My Favourite Novelist and his Best Book to the author, to
Messrs. A. P. Watt & Sons, and to the Frank A. Munsey Co. ; from
Mr. G. K. Chesterton's Charles Dickens to Messrs. Methuen & Co.;
from A. C. Swinburne's article in the "Quarterly Review" to the
editor and Mr. John Murray. It is by the generous courtesy thus
extended to us on all hands that we have been enabled to present so
interesting and so complete a consensus of critical opinion, for which
we hereby tender sincere thanks.

G. K. Chesterton.

HoLBBooK Jackson.

R. Bbimley JomiBON.

LIST OF ANNOUNCEMENTS OF VOLUMES TO
BE PUBLISHED IN THIS SERIES

Adam Bede

Andersen's Fairy Tales

Arabian Nights

Bacon's Essays

Ben Hub

Bible

Bride of Lammermoor

Byron

Caxtons

Cloister and the Heiarth

David Copperfield

DOMBEY AND SoN

Don Quixote

Emerson

Grammar of Assent and Rb-

NAN

Grimm's Fairy Tales
Gulliver's Travels
Henry Esmond
House of the Seven Gables
Hypatia
Ivanhoe
Jane Eyre

John Halifax, Gentleman
Keats

Kenilworth
Lamb's Essays

Lamb's Tales from Shake-
speare
Last Days of Pompeii
Last of the Mohicans
Les Miserables
Life of Christ (A Kenipis)
Longfellow
lorna doonb
Mill on the Floss

Milton
Montaigne
Monte Cristo
Nicholas Nickleby
Notre Dame
Old Curiosity Shop
Old Mortauty
Oliver Twist
Pickwick Papers
Pilgrim's Proobebs

PiRATB

Plato
7* Poe's Tales

Pride and Prejudicb -
' Robinson Crusob

Rob Roy

Sartor Resartus
/ Scarlet Letter

Scenes of Clerical Lifb

Shelley

Shirley

Silas Marnbr

Spy

Sterne's Tristram Shandy
~\Tale of Two Cities

Three Musketeers

Twenty Years After
^ Uncle Tom's Cabin
A Vanity Fair

Vicar of Wakefield

Wandering Jew

Waverley

Westward Ho!

Wonder Book

Wordsworth

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS OF ORIGINAL
ARTICLES TO THIS SERIES

Archeb, William
Bardoux, Jacques
Baring-Gould, S.
Belloc, Hilaire
Benson, A. C.
Bentley, E. C.
Browning, Oscar
Charles, J. Ernest
Chesterton, G. K.
Chevrillon, Andre
Claretie, Jules
Clodd, Edward
Craik, Sir Henry
Deschamps, Gaston
DouMic, Rene
Faguet, Emile
Garnett, Robert
Gilder, Joseph B.

GOURMONT, ReMY DE

Grant, A. J.

Higginson, Thomas Went-

WORTH

HuEFFER, Ford Madox

Jackson, Holbrook
Johnson, R. Brimley
Lamont, Hammond
Lang, Andrew
Le Gallienne, Richard
Legouis, Emile
Mabie, Hamilton W.
Macauley, E. C.
Maxwell, Sir Herbert
Meynell, Alice
More, Paul E.
Pollard, A. W.
Rod, Edouard
Shedlock, Marie L.
SiDGWicK, Arthur
Sparrow, W. Shaw
Thomas, Edward
Ward, Wilfrid
Ward, Mrs. Wilfrid
Washington, Booker
Written, Wilfred
Wyzewa, Theodore

APPRECIATIONS

Like many fond parentSy I have in my heart of hearts
a favorite child. And his name is David Copperjleld.

Charles Dickens.

I think ** David Copperjleld'* is his greatest work, on
account of the balance of its construction, the subtle play-
fulness of its humour, and the restraint of its deep
pathos, W. J. Locke.

** David Copperjleld** should be counted among the first
half-dozen of the greatest novels of the world.

Sir Arthur Pinero.

I think of these past writers and of one who lives
amongst us now, and lam grateful for the innocent
laughter and the sweet and unsullied page which the
author of " David Copperfleld ** gives to my children.

W. M. Thackeray.

This book is perhaps the greatest gift bestowed on us
by this magnificent and immortal benefactor.

Algernon Charles Swinburne.

A pearl without a peer among the later fictions of our
English school. A. W. Ward.

APPRECIATIONS OF
DAVID COPPERFIELD

WILLIAM ARCHER

(185^

[Dramatic critic, editor, and translator of Ibsen. Author of Poeh
of the Younger Generation (1901) and Masks or Faces (1888).]

There is a peculiar, not to say a providential, appro-
priateness in the fact that David Copperfield and
Pendennis were publislied simultaneously in 1849-50,
exactly in the middle of the nineteenth century. Each
was, if not its author's greatest, at any rate his most
characteristic, work; each was in some measure auto-
biographic, treating of the youth and rising fortunes
of a man of letters; and the two together stand forth
as the twin types of mid-nineteenth century fiction.
Those of us who are weak in dates may find it con-
venient to remember that just a hundred years earlier,
in 1749, Fielding published Tom Jones.

To say that Dickens was at the summit of his powers
when he wrote David Copperfield would not be quite
accurate; for it would imply that he began to descend
on the other side. That was not the fact; he continued
to mount, but he mounted with labour. Let us say, then,
that in David Copperfield we find him at the happiest
moment of his career. His earlier works, with all their
abundance of genius, had been more or less crude and
careless. He had thrown them off in the youthful ex-
uberance of his animal spirits. In his later works a
more or less noticeable sense of strain is seldom entirely
absent. He has always a great rival to contend with,

16 APPRECIATIONS OF

hjs oi^ly possible rival — himself. But in the days of
Copp^rfield that, r^T'al had as yet no terrors. He felt
himself riper in knowledge and in power than even the
Dickens of Chuzzlewit and Dombey. He saw weak-
nesses in these works which he knew he could amend.
He was now master of a conscious art which had not yet
become self-conscious.

And the result was an almost evenly inspired master-
piece. There are only two inequalities in David Copper-
field. The Emily-Martha passages in the second half
of the book one instinctively skips. They are altogether
too early Victorian. On the other hand, the Micawbers
are so incomparably delightful that when they are not
on the stage we are always a little impatient for their
next appearance. But the feeling is wholly unreason-
able ; for the book is crowded with figures of at least as
great intrinsic excellence. Perhaps no other book in the
language has provided us with so much psychological
shorthand — so many names that instantly call up a
distinct and familiar type. How often do we say
" She is a Dora " or " a Betsy Trotwood " or " a Rosa
Dartle" or "a Mrs. Gummidge"; "He is a Uriah Heep"
or " a Traddles " or " a Littimer " or " a Mr. Dick " !
What a benefaction is the phrase " I have a partner —
Mr. Jorkins/' expressing in six words a constantly recur-
ring situation! For the mere catchwords of the book,
"Brooks of Sheffield/' "Barkis is willinV "King
Charles the First's head/* and so forth, one has a
tolerance born of grateful association. Even the melo-
drama (apart from the passages above mentioned) is
good of its kind, and the storm is an achievement sur-
passed only Afr. Conrad's Typhoon. Steerforth
(was he model.,.. )n Byron?) seems to me one of
Dickens's successes ; and, before closing this ruthlessly
restricted note, I must say t^he same of Agnes. She
is an " ideal figure," no doubt, but how exquisitely
touched !

DAVID COPPERFIELD 17

FORD MADOX HUEFFER

(1873- )

[Novelist, critic, and poet. Author of the JAfe of Ford Madox
Brown (1896), The Soul of London (1903), and Ancient Lights (1911).J

Copperfield is the adventures of Charles Dickens,
little more and in certain ways much less. For if, in
writing the book, Charles Dickens seldom or never
comments in the dissection of the character, he draws a
man little less vital than himself. He drew this man
less vital because — not to the public, but in his heart
— he was set on justifying certain of his own actions.
And these certain of his own actions could only be justi-
fied by saying: " I am Charles Dickens — these things
are necessary to my life, and I am a man whose life is
of supreme value to the world. Let him who is of more
cast the first stone."

But Dickens was not subtle; he took the line of least
resistance; the way the most obvious. And in white-
washing Dickens-Copperfield he has given us a David
who is a little anaemic. He is anaemic because of his
ideals: of woman, of virtue, of comfort. We are not
in the least interested in Dora; yet she is a little more
interesting than Agnes. We are a little suspicious of
the denouement of Copperfield's life, because, on the
whole, it is only a falsified version of the denouement
of Dickens's own career. Yet this falsification is done
only in the interest of Dickens's own ideals.

For Dickens, in differing ways, was a figure like that
of the Knight of La Mancha. He tilted at windmills;
he assailed false chimeras; he uph Id impracticable
ideals in a work-a-day world. For, after all, what are
Dora and Agnes and the Berlin Wool domesticities but
ideals — like those of chivalry and knight-errantry —
practicable or supportable only in a golden age of some
Island of the Blest?

18 APPRECIATIONS OF

But, after all, when all the reductions have been
made, David Copperfield remains a figure like that of
Dickens, traversing adventurous regions to a goal of
sufficient glory. Had Copperfield one characteristic as
great as Charles Dickens the man, Copperfield the book
would have been a work as great, as supreme, as Don
Quixote; as it is, it falls a little short.

But it is enough: it is one of those books which have
blemishes, but the blemishes do not count; after all,
we do not think of these: we think of the gallery of
pictures, of Mr. Micawber, of Uriah Heep, of Mr. Mell
who played the flute, of Steerforth, of Barkis, of Peg-
gotty, and hardly remember Agnes — just as we remem-
ber the huge and splendid activities of Charles Dickens,
we forget that one of his ideals was to have two footmen
in plush breeches behind his carriage. Without these
illusions Charles Dickens could not have kept on going
at all; without these blemishes Copperfield and work
like it, of huge scale and generous design, could not
have been written. The mind of man, generous in this
particular, because it needs these pleasures of the large
and the generous, consigns the lesser parts to a benign
Nirvana. For it would be foolish to seek for peachstone
carvings on the walls of Durham Cathedral; just as it
is, so the Chinese proverb has it, hypocrisy to seek for
the person of the sacred Emperor in a low tea-house.

ALICE MEYNELL

[Poet and essayist. Author of The Rhythms of Life (1893), The
Colour of Life (1896), and Collected Poems (1913).]

It is chiefly for the sake of Mr. Micawber (from
whom Mrs. Micawber shall not be divided) that we prize
this great novel of humour. Micawber is one of a notable
little company of elderly men. For what we under-
stand by humour (remembering, but modifying, the first
meaning of that word) is not a young incident. The

DAVID COPPERFIELD 19

character, the temperament, the habit, the will and whim
under the observation of the humourist are matter of
custom and of years. Some large portion of a lifetime
is needed to repeat them, to accumulate them, to prove
them incorrigible, so that the humourist may be one of
them.

Accordingly, the chief humorous figures of our fiction
are these men proved by time in their singularities : Has-
pagen, Argan, M. Jourdain, my uncle Toby, Sir Roger
de Coverley, the uncle in the Wrong Box, Shallow, Si-
lence, FalstaflF, Major Pendennis, Mr. Micawber. Time
is of the essence of our contract with all these. If we
meet them for no more than the space of a stage-scene,
we know that we have before us the sum of long years.
What a past is here! They are produced in due time.
We are not to urge them. We are to take at an easy
pace Falstaff's scene with Shallow, and to recall old
Double as the hour shall serve.

In a novel we must give some of our own time to
the elderly. We are to hear Mrs. Bennet allude re-
peatedly to the entail, for obviously the second reference
to that inconsiderate deed of law is more than twice as
absurd as the first, and for the humours of a fourth
allusion geometrical progression gives us no image. We
are to know that Mr. Micawber is repeatedly in diffi-
culties, and the difficulties are to outlast (in their long
monotony, and in the freshness of Mr. Micawber's hope)
David Copperfield's childhood and his youth.

Dickens must have always been alert on his walch
for the genially or the grotesquely comic elderly man;
not seldom he is importunate in his showmanship in their
regard. But we sijffer all his fools gladly for the sake
of this perfect success ; for the sake of Mr. Dorrit, too,
in difficulties, we must all make haste to forget.

20 APPRECIATIONS OF

JULES CLARETIE

(1840-1913)

[French journalist, dramatist, and historian.]

It was in a translation — or it might possibly have
been an adaptation — that I first read David Copper'
field. At that time Charles Dickens, who has since be-
come so popular in France, was known and appreciated
only by a select few, but these, at least, were enthusiastic
over the Christmas Books and other works of the great
English novelist. It was Amedee Pichot who introduced
to us this masterpiece, which we read with eager interest.
Only Pichot, the editor of the " Revue Britannique,'*
thought that the title David Copper field was not suffi-
cient to attract the attention of the French public. He
therefore rechristened the book, and the David Copper-
field that we read in Paris was called Le Neveu de
ma Tante.

Whether Dickens had consented to this change of title
I know not. In any case he was grateful to his trans-
lator, whom he certainly did not regard as a traditore,
and to whom he wrote: " David Copperfield is the child
of my heart, and I thank you for what you have done
for him."

And certainly Dickens was right in calling this book
" the child of his heart." Among his many admirable
and varied writings, David Copperfield is like a veri-
table confession of the hardships, the sadness, and the
struggles which the writer himself had experienced. It
is a kind of autobiography where one may find the
heart-throbs of the author, and even the tears that
fall from his eyes. The unhappy childhood of little
David, his painful early experiences, his impressions as
a journalist, his boarding-house reminiscences — which
may be compared with those he recalls in Nicholas
Nickleby — all this, which was his youth, and all that

DAVID COPPERFIELD 21

which filled with bravely endured sadness the early
years of the inimitable Boz, forms the very foundation of
this touching book, so full of tenderness and compassion.
Who can ever forget the charming Dora, the " child-
wife," whom we occasionally meet again in the pages of
our French novelists? For Charles Dickens has exer-
cised a considerable influence upon us and upon our gen-
eration. Daudet mingled a little British pale ale with
his delicious southern muscatel. Jack reminds us of the
plaintive little children of Dickens, and Oliver Twist and
poor Joe belong to the same family.

David Copperfield, the favourite of Charles Dickens,
is our own favourite also. I often take up this book and
read again some pages of it with feelings of emotion.
The flowers in it are not yet faded, nor are the tears all
dry. In spite of my admiration for Thackeray, I remain
faithful to Dickens, who has the " tearful eye " of which
Sterne spoke; and the masterful irony of The Book of
Snobs, the wonderful satire of Vanity Fair, cannot make
us forget the fascinating story-teller whose work is per-
meated throughout by the supreme quality of Pity —
Pity for the victims of Hard Times, for children, and for
the weak and suffering.

EMILE LEGOUIS

(1861- )

[Professor of English Literature at the Sorbonne, Paris. French
authority on Wordsworth and Chaucer.l

Dickens has said of this book that, in his heart of
hearts, it was his favourite child. There are few of his
readers who have not thought the same. It is certainly
the best proportioned of his novels, the one in which his
very diverse gifts are most finely balanced: his senti-
ment and humour, his sublimity, and his talent for the
grotesque. The laughter of Pickwick is undoubtedly

22 APPRECIATIONS OF

more irresistible, and its animation gives rise to more
boisterous merriment, but if anything serious or pa-
thetic appears in that burlesque epic, it has the effect of
an intrusion, and is immediately submerged, disappear-
ing in the flood of comedy. There is no doubt that in
Hard Times there is a more pleasing and intellectual
criticism of the material and calculating spirit of the
times, but the satire which pervades it disfigures every-
thing; it gives a leer even to the humour and pathos.
Oliver Twist has undoubtedly a melodramatic interest
which is more alluring to the reader in quest of keen
excitement, and in The Old Curiosity Shop the sentimen-
tality is more profuse and more freely exploited ; but the
prominence of these characteristics exacts a sacrifice in
each case, the sacrifice of probability or of art. And in
none of the other novels which resemble David Copper-
field — neither in Nicholas Nicklehy, in Domhey and
Son, nor in Bleak House — do we find such a continuity
of interest, such care in the construction of the plot and
in the handling of his characters.

This greater homogeneity is due to the fact that in
this book there is really a central character, and that the
hero is, in the main, the author himself. In David,
Dickens has put much of his own unhappy youth, of his
young ambitions, his perseverance, and his dreams of
love. If the personal appearance of David is not pic-
tured so clearly as that of some of the subordinate
characters, on the other hand the sketch of his recollec-
tions and impressions is, in truth, most charmingly
poetic. Never has any one approached more nearly to
childhood than has Dickens in those first chapters of his
David Copperfield, which are filled with a charm that
is both tender and amusing. These few pages are, per-
haps, pre-eminently those in all literature in which pathos
and humour are most closely united.

And, in addition to the hero, what a number and
variety of figures are contrasted and balanced to such

DAVID COPPERFIELD 23

a point that, on shutting the book, one does not really
know whether one has laughed or cried the most, nor
which has most warmed our hearts and done us the
most good, the laughter or the tears.

THEODOR DE WYZEWA

Among all the novels of Dickens The Personal Ilis'
tory of David Copperfield is that in which the wonderful
story-teller has put the greatest part of his own recol-
lections, or rather of his own personal history, for there
is not another of his novels which is so full of figures,
actions, and words stored for long years in the keen and
inexhaustible memory of the author. But although, even
from the standpoint of " personal recollections," the
other novels are hardly less rich than David Copperfield,
this is the only one in which Dickens has expressly set
out with the intention of relating to us the story of a
childhood and youth like his own. Therefore must we
not endeavour to understand the especial sympathy that
the novelist always had for the work which seemed to
him to be almost a part of his own flesh and blood ? The
truth is, besides, that the evocation of his own past has
permitted him to lend to the adventures of young David
a warmth and movement, a vigorous life and truth, which
suffice to place David Copperfield in the first rank of all
his work. In no other of his novels, except perhaps
in the admirable story of Great Expectations, has the
romantic action more unity, nor are we touched so deeply ;
while in other respects such figures as Aunt Betsy, Clara
Peggotty, and her husband, Mr. Barkis, the melancholy
Mrs. Gummidge, Creakle, the petty schoolmaster, and
the poor Mr. Mell, Tommy Traddles, and that immortal
couple, the Micawbers, if they do not surpass in piquant
interest many figures of his other novels, yet impress
themselves more powerfully upon us because of the
closeness of the bonds by which they are united to the

24 APPRECIATIONS OF

chief action of the story, which is more affecting than
Martin Chuzzlewit or Domhey and Son. In spite of a
secret preference among the works of Dickens for some
of his novels which are less artistically perfect, but
which are suffused with a more delicate inspiration, and
illuminated by a brilliance of colour more varied and
bright, one is forced to admit that David Copperfield,
from a literary point of view, is the masterpiece of the
author.

And, notwithstanding, this masterpiece is not allowed
to suffer, in a certain sense, because it is by design an
autobiography, to which fact it owes its especial value.
Dickens has often been reproached with having intro-
duced by the side of his own " personal history " the
group formed by the Byronic Steerforth and his two
victims, Rosa Dartle and Little Em'ly; in reality the
introduction of these characters makes no obstruction,
in spite of the author's sentimentality; and if the char-
acter of Steerforth is spoiled a little towards the end of
the story, the essence of this character, at least, is no less
human and, at the same time, very truly " English."

But I cannot help thinking that Dickens, in a novel
that was not the idealised adaptation of his own life,
would have treated in an entirely different manner a
much more essential and significant incident than the
love affair of Little Em'ly: the love affair of David, the
hero, and his marriage with the child-wife. For a
creature like Dora, with her refined smiling sweetness,
and her incompetence in all practi<^l matters, was made
passionately to delight the soul of that poet who has
given us the charming pictures of Tom Pinch, of Little
Nell, and of Dombey's son; and, besides, we feel cer-
tain that Dickens adores her in spite of himself, and pre-
fers her infinitely to the too excellent Agnes, when he
can succeed in forgetting that his own wife, in his own
personal existence, had resembled that bird of fancy, and
had annoyed and vexed the prosaic bourgeois who lived

DAVID COPPERFIELD 25

with her, in himself side by side with the poet who was
noble, and filled with Christian ardour. All his heart
of romance goes out, as by instinct, towards Dora; but
his recollections as a husband dispose him to turn against
her. So that, at times, we have the impression that he
is suddenly interrupted in his love for her, being recalled
to the obligation of detesting her ; and among these hesi-
tations we regret that we could not have met her in
another novel where the author would have been more at
liberty to turn her to better account; and perhaps also
from this cause comes the unconscious grievance against
the most perfect of the works of Dickens, which will not
allow us to love him in our secret hearts as fully as we
admire him.

HOLBROOK JACKSON

(1874- )

[Essayist and editor. Author of Romance and Reality, The Eighteen
Nineties, and studies of Bernard Shaw and William Morris,]

In spite of all the changes that have taken place since
his time, Charles Dickens is still our supreme master
of laughter and tears. He was to the townsmen of his
day (and of our day), in a very real sense, what the
ballad singer was to the peasantry of the past. He pro-
vided a medium for that community of feeling which is
the great need of social life. He wrote for a people
who had been separated from their traditions by the
great change which the industrial era had brought about;
for people who were beginning to realise that they were
no longer peasants and craftsmen, but citizens and
workers. Charles Dickens was the first writer to inter-
pret the moods and sentiments of this new race; he
gave articulation to their aspirations, and found a local
habitation and a name for their antipathies. And he
did this in a new way. His method was in many ways

26 APPRECIATIONS OF

that of all the great novelists; indeed, it was in the
school of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett that he
learnt his craft; but to their imagination and humour,
to .their observation and skill in the use of words, he
added a genial note which was hitherto unknown in
letters, and which came like a revelation to a people who
had been offered nothing for their forgotten ballads but
the di^ant literature of the study or the ribald stories
of the' gutter. Dickens was one of themselves, and he
wrote with a fine sympathy and a first-hand knowledge
of their habits. He did not write of them as though they
were a different species, and he did not write at them as
though they were unclean. He wrote for them and,
as it were, with them, and this was the secret of more
than half his power over the emotions of his fellow-men.

The personality of Charles Dickens was in itself
attractive, and would have made an irresistible appeal
in any walk of life. He had magnetism which affected
all, and contributed much to the success of those read-
ings in which he gave to the public more than he could
spare even of his abounding vitality. His nature was
dramatic, and he had the rare gift of public effective-
ness; his readings gave scope to the play of this gift,
they became in his hands not so much public readings as
dramatic recitals, as unique in their way as were his
novels. His dramatic sense is obvious throughout the
novels, in his entirely unnecessary and often damaging
insistence upon plot, and in his trick of accounting
severally for his characters at the end of his story, like
the grouping and disposition of the actors in the last
act of a play. And here and there, in every one of his
books, there are passages and incidents which are more
fitted for melodrama than for narrative fiction.

His method as a writer was to reproduce the familiar
moods of daily life and the homely ways of the people
by a quaint symbolism, half humour and half a rare
power of catching certain whimsies of appearance and

DAVID COPPERFIELD 27

manner which most people see, but only genius observes.
The result of this is that, in spite of the unique qualities
of his characters, each one is a familiar personage,
indeed, a revelation of familiarity, in a more familiar
and more memorable form than it had ever had before.
The whole effect is steeped in the warm light of his
own genial personality — a personality which always
strikes one as being dominant, yet kind; tolerant to a
degree, yet fiercely indignant of injustice and tyranny.
This large good-humour makes his fictions irresistible at
their best, and even tolerable at their worst. For in
this last few authors have survived so many real defects,
defects of verbosity, due to his period; of exuberance,
due to his own immense vitality; of irregularity, due to
the serial form in which the novels generally appeared;
but in spite of all, his personal genius alone, even were
he artless (which he is not), would make us overlook
such blemishes, indeed, no other writer has inspired
his admirers to declare that his faults were more toler-
able than the virtues of others, with such genuine
earnestness.

Dickens, being a child of that lower middle class
which is poor but respectable, knew best the ins and
outs of the lives of those people who have neither the
satisfaction nor the peace that follows the abandonment
of all social ties. He was the first novelist to interpret
the lives of the impecunious as distinguished from the
poor; one might almost say that he discovered the
average person. No previous writer had seen fit to do
more than make the common people the supernumeraries
of his arrangements: backgrounds and foils for the
dignified and pompous doings of his principal people.
Charles Dickens would have been impossible before
the French Revolution, and, coming after it as he did,
at a time when the common people were acquiring a new
and distinct consciousness, he took the opportunity of
giving them their true perspective in literature^

28 APPRECIATIONS OF

Dickens is a great novelist, not because he wrote per-
fect novels, for with one possible exception. Great Ex-
I pectationSf his novels are not impeccable from the point
' of view of construction. His gift was characterisation
and his mode was the picaresque novel, and when he
kept to that form, as he did by sheer accident of publi-
cation, in Pickwick, he produced a masterpiece. But he
risked sacrificing every other novel he wrote on the altar
of plot, and if there was one faculty outside the genius
of Dickens it was that easy trick of plot construction.
His novels are rarely remembered for their stories, but
/^ for their atmosphere and character. The works of
Dickens fill the mind like one gigantic novel.
/ He excels in the personalisation of quaint objects and
^' the characterisation of odd persons. He drew with an
imerring pen the flotsam and jetsam of our cities, and
the peculiar and the whimsical were his special province.
His method is interpretation by means of idiosyncrasy:
a mental kink as in Miss Flight, an uncommon touch
of humour or language as in Sam Weller and Alfred
Jingle, a peculiarity of garment as in Mr. Mantalini, or
in most instances by a note in the personal appearance,
as in those unique descriptions which introduce each of
his people to the reader. This method reaches its height
/^ in those masterly creations, Mrs. Gamp, Mr. Micawber,
and Mr. Pickwick, who must always rank with the
greatest characters of literature, with Sancho Panza,
Falstaff, and Gargantua.

This interpretative power is not confined to peculiar
people, but to peculiar places — he makes every gable or
odd nook, every disfigurement or strangeness in a place
or building, render tribute. His pictures are not gor-
geously detailed like the almost pre-Raphaelite work of
Balzac, nor have they the hardness of the realistic
massing of facts which distinguishes Zola; but whilst
being full of detail they always give the impression of
some distinct and dominating attribute which forms a

DAVID COPPERFIELD 29

keynote to the whole. He seems to permeate inanimate
things with the personalities of his characters, and to
give them a subconscious existence closely associated
with the psychology of the story. One remembers many
such descriptions — that of the old Maypole Inn in
Barnahy Rudge, of the wood and Jonas Chuzzlewit
after the murder of Montague Tigg, and of the marsh
country of Pip's childhood in Great Expectations.

But it is in London and its surroundings that Dickens
is most at home. The London that is fast disappearing
will live for ever in his books. His work is the epic of
London, and all phases of its vast and complex life are
revealed in his pages. The London of the rich, and
the London of the poor; of the railway and the dili-
gence; in peace and war; London cruel and London
kind; her humours and horrors, hardships and merry-
makings, were all known to him, and her incessant roar
was a siren-song ever calling him back to her and hold-
ing him enthralled. Few have known London and her
many moods and tenses better and no one has depicted
her so well. No part was foreign to Charles Dickens,
whether it was comfortable Bloomsbury with its great
quadrangles, or the pinched and squalid Borough; the
Temple with its surprising silences; cosmopolitan Soho
or the Seven Dials; Petticoat Lane or Cadogan Square,
it was all the same to him. All the odd corners and
remote places, pleasant and unpleasant, were familiar
— grimy little graveyards hedged in with warehouses
or theatres; foetid slums, riverside dens of infamy, and
the places of commerce or pleasure or crime. All these
things live in his great prose epic of London, the Iliad
of the work-a-day world.

The humanitarian side of Dickens's character is never
very far away from his work. He is often more
humanist than artist, so that to-day there are great
patches in his work which, robbed of their purpose by
having effected it or by reason of its having shifted

30 APPRECIATIONS OF

its position, are, to all but the enthusiast, arid wastes.
Although many of his propagandist passages must al-
ways retain their interest and their intrinsic value as art
— Charles Dickens is most effective when he denounces
with laughter, for his pathos is often strained, especially
when it is deliberately purposeful. One is reminded of
Jo, the crossing-sweeper, who " never knowed nuthink,"
and for whose sad lot Dickens strives to excite our sym-
pathy by giving the urchin the psychology of an ill-
used puritan who is doleful at his lack of knowledge and
friends. Now, any one who knows the slum-dweller,
knows that the most striking thing about him is that he
is fairly happy in his squalor, and that when he wails
about his lot his wailing has a decidedly commercial
objective, such, for instance, as extracting half-crowns
from the pockets of kind-hearted old gentlemen like
Mr. Snagsby. In such instances Dickens spoils his
case by protesting over much; poor Jo in Bleak House
lacks the touch of comedy which makes the Artful
Dodger immortal in the pages of Oliver Twist,

But Dickens generally overdoes his pathetic passages,
whether propagandist or otherwise; he sheds too many
tears. There is something that cloys in his descriptions
of Little Nell and Paul Dombey. The pathos is laid
on with a trowel to such an extent that one would
require torrential tears to do it justice. But this is
not entirely the fault of the novelist, but rather that
of his age. The middle part of the nineteenth century
demanded emotional excesses, and Dickens was de-
cidedly a man of his period, which is one of the reasons
of his instantaneous success. In much the same way he
' overdoes his descriptions of normal people; he makes
normal goodness too good and normal badness too bad.
This is evident in his treatment of women. His suc-
cesses are his eccentric and peculiar characters — Mrs.
Gamp, the chaste and beautiful Miggs, 'Guster and the
Marchioness. His failures fail in realities, because

DAVID COPPERFIELD 31

they are not real women, but personifications of the
popular conception of what a woman should or should
not be. Dickens's desirable women are docile and
angelic, as the second Mrs. Copperfield and Esther
Summerson; the undesirable are shrews and termagants.
These are but the defects of the quality that produced
his best work. Defects of a personality that knew no
bounds to its interest in the doings of men and women,
nor to its desire for their happiness, as it whipped
hypocrisy and injustice with laughter and satire, and
shed tears for the incapable, the outcast, and the op-
pressed. For Charles Dickens loved his fellows, even
to deferring to their judgment; in fact, he trusted them.
This is a rare thing in a great artist, but Dickens was a
great artist because of this large sympathy, and it is to
be noted that he is at his best where his sympathy is/
most profound, and this always occurs when he dealsV
with the least fortunate of human beings.

COMMENTS

COMMENTS ON
DAVID COPPERFIELD

AMEDEE PICHOT

(1796- 1 856)

[After travclUng in England and Scotland published several
remarkable works on these countries, besides translating the novels of
Bulwer and Thackeray. Editor of the " Revue Britannique," author
of Galerie des Personnagea de Shakespeare and UHutoir^ de Charles
Edouard.]

It was the " Revue Britannique " which first brought
Charles Dickens before the French public, and Charles
Dickens declared that he owed a part of his popularity
in France to the director of this paper by the translation
which appeared in it of David Cdpperfield, his chief
work " perhaps," and " certainly " his most popular,
for it is the work in which he has attributed to his hero
many of his own feelings, as well as some of the adven-
tures of his own life. Certainly the author of David
Copperfield had the art of gaining for himself a public
composed of all classes of society and of all ages, dis-
tinguished men or humble readers, male or female; he
is more loved than admired because even in his satirical
sketches, his caricatures, or his portraits there is no
sting, no injurious personalities, although many of his
characters have really lived and left, unknown to them,
their image on his magic mirror. — Revue Britannique,
1870.

36 COMMENTS ON

JOHN FORSTER

(1812-1876)

[A thoughtful and trustworthy biographer, whose Life of Dickens
remains the standard work on a most fascinating subject. He also
wrote an admirable Life of Goldsmith.]

It can hardly have had a reader, man or lad, who did
not discover that he vras something of a Copperfield
himself. Childhood and youth live again for all of us in
its marvellous boy-experiences. . . .

The ludicrous so helps the pathos, and the humour
so uplifts and refines the sentiment, that mere rude
affection and simple manliness in these Yarmouth boat-
men, passed through the fires of unmerited suffering and
heroic endurance, take forms half chivalrous, half
sublime. . . .

Dickens has done nothing better, for solidness and
truth all round, than Betsy Trotwood, abrupt, angular,
extravagant, but the very soul of magnanimity and rec-
titude ; a character thoroughly made out in all its parts ;
a gnarled and knotted piece of female timber, sound to
the core ; a woman Captain Shandy would have loved for
her startling oddities, and who is linked to the gentlest
of her sex by perfect womanhood. . . .

Too much has been assumed of a full identity of
Dickens with his hero. . . . Many as are the resem-
blances in Copperfield's adventures to portions of those
of Dickens, and often as reflections occur to David
which no one intimate with Dickens could fail to recog-
nise as but the reproduction of his, it would be the
greatest mistake to imagine anything like a complete
identity of the fictitious novelist with the real one,
beyond the Hungerford scenes; or to suppose that the
youth, who then received his first harsh schooling in
life, came out of it as little harmed or hardened as
David did. The language of the fiction reflects only

DAVID COPPERFIELD 37

faintly the narrative of the actual fact; and the man
whose character it helped to form was expressed not
less faintly in the impulsive, impressionable youth, in-
capable of resisting the leading of others, and only
disciplined into self-control by tlie later griefs of his
entrance into manhood. — Life of Dickens, 1874.

GEORGE HENRY LEWES

(1817-1878)

[The husband of George Eliot, and himself a brilliantly versatile
writer on politics, philosophy, and literature. Author of two novels.
The Physiology of Common Life and a Life of Goethe.]

There probably never was a writer of so vast a popu-
larity whose genius was so little appreciated by the
critics. . . . Yet it was not by their defects that these
works were carried over Europe and America. . . .

There is considerable light shed upon his works by
the action of the imagination in hallucination. To him
also revived images have the vividness of sensations; to
him also created images have the coercive force of reali-
ties, excluding all control, all contradiction. What seems
preposterous, impossible, to us, seemed to him simple
fact of observation. When he imagined a street, a house,
a room, a figure, he saw it not in the vague schematic way
of ordinary imagination, but in the sharp definition of
actual perception, all the salient details obtruding them-
selves on his attention. He, seeing it thus vividly, made
us also see it; and believing in its reality however fan-
tastic, he communicated something of his belief to us.
He presented it in such relief that we ceased to think
of it as a picture. So definite and insistent was the
image that even while knowing it was false we could
not help, for a moment, being affected, as it were, by his
hallucination.

This glorious energy of imagination is that which
Dickens had in common with all great writers. It was

88 COMMENTS ON

this which made him a creator, and made his creations
universally intelligible, no matter how fantastic and
unreal. His types established themselves in the public
mind like personal experiences. Their falsity was un-
noticed in the blaze of their illumination. . . .

In vain critical reflection showed these figures to be
merely masks, not characters, but personified character-
istics, caricatures, and distortions of human nature. . . .

When one thinks of Micawber always presenting him-
self in the same situation, moved with the same springs,
and uttering the same sound, always confident on some-
thing turning up, always crushed and rebounding, always
making punch — and his wife always declaring she will
never part from him, always referring to his talents
and her family — when one thinks of the " catchwords "
personified as characters, one is reminded of the frogs
whose brains have been taken out for physiological pur-
poses, and whose actions henceforth want the distinc-
tive peculiarity of organic action, that of fluctuating
spontaneity. ...

Yet the peculiarity of Dickens is not the incorrectness
of his drawing, but the vividness of the imagination
which, while rendering that incorrectness insensible to
him, also renders it potent with multitudes of his fellow-
men. — Dickens in Relation to Criticism, " The Fort-
nightly Review," January, 1872.

DR. JULIAN SCHMIDT

(1820-1885)

[In his day, the most celebrated lecturer on literature in Germany.]

Dickens's latest novel, David Copperfield, is declared
almost unanimously by English critics to be his master-
piece. With this view, however, we cannot agree.
Dickens's humour is purely subjective and therefore for
immediate effect requires strong colouring. The fan-

DAVID COPPERFIELD 39

tastic nature of his characters can only be justified by
the very extreme of boldness. In the passages where he
suflfers himself to adopt a more moderate tone, room is
given us for serious doubts. The same is true of his
language, which is not " correct," not academic. Yet
the very genius of the nation is dominant in it. There
must be decision absolute between academic exactitude
and the license of the humourist. There is no means
of reconciling the two. — A Characterisation of Charles
Dickens, 1852.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

(1822-1888)

[Poet and essayist, not inaptly termed the apostle of culture.
Matthew Arnold introduced a new kind of criticism into England,
and set people thinking on a great number of ethical and literary
questions. Author of Culture and Anarchy, Literature and Dogma,
etc.]

Intimately, indeed, did Dickens know the middle;

class; he was bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh.
Intimately he knew its bringing up. With the hand of a
master he has drawn for us a type of the teachers and
trainers of its youth, a type of its* places of^education.-
Mr. Creakle and Salem House are immortal; the type
itself, it is to be hoped, will perish, but the drawing
which Dickens has given of it cannot die/ "Mr. Creakle,
the " stout gentleman with a bunch of watch-chain and
seals, in an arm-chair," with the fiery face and the thick
veins in his forehead, Mr. Creakle sitting at breakfast
with the cane, and a newspaper, and the buttered toast
before him, will sit on, like Theseus, for ever. — The
Incompatibles, in the " Nineteenth Century," 1881.

In Murdstone we see English middle-class civilisation
by its severe and serious side only. That civilisation
has undoubtedly also its gayer and lighter side. And
this gayer and lighter side, as well as the other, we

40 COMMENTS ON

shall find, wonderful to relate, in that all-containing
treasure-house of ours, the History of David Copper-
field. Mr. Quinion, with his gaiety, his chaff, his rough
coat, his incessant smoking, his brandy and water, is
the jovial, genial man of our middle-class civilisation,
prepared by Salem House and Mr. Creakle, as Mr.
Murdstone is its severe mail. Quinion, we are told in
our History, was the manager of Murdstone's business,
and he is truly his pendant. He is the answer of our
middle-class civilisation to the demand imrram for beauty
and enjoyment, as MuTdstone is its answer to the de-
mand for temper and manners. But to a quick, senti-
mental race, Quinion can be hardly more attractive than
Murdstone, Quinion produces our towns considered as
seats of pleasure, as Murdstone produces them as seats
of business and religion. As it is Murdstone, the seri-
ous man, whose view of life and demands on life have
made our Hell-holes as Cobbett calls our manufacturing
towns, have made the dissidence of dissent and the
Protestantism of the Protestant religion, and the refusal
to let Irish Catholics have schools and Universities
suited to them because their religion is a lie and heathen-
ish superstition, so it is Quinion, the jovial man, whose
view of life and demands on it have made our popular
songs, comedy, art, pleasure, — made the City Com-
panies and their feasts, made the London streets, made
the Griffin. . . .

We may even go further still in our use of that
charming and instructive book. The History of David
Copperfield. We may lay our finger there on the very
types in adult life which are the natural product of
Salem House and of Mr. Creakle: the vety types of
our middle class, nay of Englishmen and the English
nature in general, as to the Irish imagination they
appear. We have only to recall, on the one hand, Mr.
Murdstone. Mr. Murdstone may be called the natural
product of a course of Salem House and of Mr. Creakle,

DAVID COPPERFIELD 41

acting upon hard, stem, and narrow natures. Let us
recall, then, Mr. Murdstone: Mr. Murdstone with his
firmness and severity: with his austere religion and his
tremendous visage in church; with his view of the
world as " a place for action, and not for moping and
droning in " ; his view of young Copperfield's disposi-
tion as " requiring a great deal of correcting, and to
which no greater service can be done than force it to
conform to the ways of the working world, and to bend
it and break it." -Wc may recall, too. Miss Murdstone,
his sister, with the same religion, the same tremendous
visage in church, the same firmness; Miss Murdstone
with her " hard steel purse " and her " uncomprising
hard black boxes with her initials on the lids in hard
black nails " ; severe and formidable like her brother,
" whom she greatly resembled in face and voice." These
two people with their hardness, their narrowness, their
want of consideration for other people's feelings, their
inability to enter into them, are just the type of the
Englishman and his civilisation as he presents himself
to the Irish mind by his serious side. His energy, firm-
ness, industry, religion, exhibit themselves with these
unpleasant features ; his bad qualities exhibit themselves
without mitigation or relief. . . . One can understand
Cromwell himself . . . standing before the Irish imagi-
nation as a glorified Murdstone, and the late Lord
Leitrim, again, as an aristocratical Murdstone. . . . But
the genuine, unmitigated Murdstone is the common
middle-class Englishman, who has come forth from
Salem House and Mr. Creakle. He is seen in full force,
of course, in the Protestant north: but throughout Ire-
land he is a prominent figure of the English garrison. —
Irish Essays, 1882.

42 COMMENTS ON

DAVID MASSON

(182 2- 1 907)

[Late Professor of English Literature in University College, Lon-
don, and a critical biographer of great authority. He issued standard
editions of Milton and De Quincey, besides writing monographs on
Chatterton, Carlyle, and others.]

Dickens, with all his keenness of observation, is more
light and poetic [than Thackeray] in his method. Hav-
ing once caught a hint from actual fact, he generalises
it, runs away with this generalisation into a corner, and
develops it there into a character to match, which char-
acter he then transports, along with others similarly
suggested, into a world of semi-fantastic conditions, where
the laws need not be those of ordinary probability. He
has characters of ideal perfection and beauty, as well as
of ideal ugliness and brutality — characters of a human
kind verging on the supernatural, as well as characters
actually belonging to the supernatural. . . .

There never was a Mr. Micawber in nature, exactly
as he appears in the pages of Dickens ; but Micawber-
ism pervades nature through and through; and to have
extracted this quality from nature, embodying the full
essence of a thousand instances of it in one ideal mon-
strosity, is a feat of invention. — British Novelists and
their Styles, 1859.

CHARLES KENT

(1823-1902)

' [Besides writing much on Dickens, with the authority of friend-
ship, Charles Kent edited editions of Burns, Moore, and Lamb. He
also published original poetry.]

There was the great storm at Yarmouth, for example,
at the close of David Copperfield. Listening to that
Reading, the very portents of the coming tempest came
before us ! — the flying clouds in wild and murky con-

DAVID COPPERFIELD 43

fusion^ the moon apparently plunging headlong among
them, " as if in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature,
she had lost her way and was frightened," the wind
rising " with an extraordinary great sound," the sweep-
ing gusts of rain coming before it " like showers of steel,"
and at last down upon the shore and by the surf, among
the turmoil of the blinding wind, the flying stones and
sand, " the tremendous sea itself," that came rolling in
with an awful noise absolutely confounding to the be-
holder! In all fiction there is no grander description
than that of one of the sublimest spectacles in nature.
The merest fragments of it conjured up the entire scene

— aided as those fragments were by the look, the tones,
the whole manner of the Reader. The listener was there
with him in imagination upon the beach, beside David.
He was there, lashed and saturated with the salt spray,
the briny taste of it on his lips, the roar and tumult of
it in his ears, — the height to which the breakers rose,
and, looking over one another, bore one another down
and rolled in, in interminable hosts, becoming at last, as
it is written in that wonderful chapter (55) of David
Copperfield, "most appalling!" There, in truth, the
success achieved was more than an elocutionary triumph,

— it was the realisation to his hearers, by one who had
the soul of a poet, and the gifts of an orator, and the
genius of a great and vividly imaginative author, of a
convulsion of nature when nature bears an aspect the
grandest and the most astounding. However much a
masterly description, like that of the great storm at
Yarmouth, may be admired henceforth by those who
never had the opportunity of attending these Readings,
one might surely say to them, as ^schines said to the
Rhodians, when they were applauding the speech of his
victorious rival, " How much greater would have been
your admiration if only you could have heard him deliver
it!" — Charles Dickens as a Reader, 1872.

44 COMMENTS ON

H. A. TAINE

(1828-1893)

[A very celebrated French critic, whose Les Origines de la France
Contemporaine (in three books) is the strongest attack ever pubhshed
on the men and motives of the Revolution. His Histoire de LittSrature
Anglaise also proves him one of the most discriminating foreign
critics of our literature.]

The imagination of Dickens is like that of monoma-
niacs. To plunge oneself into an idea, to be absorbed
by it, to see nothing else, to repeat it under a hundred
forms, to enlarge it, to carry it, thus enlarged, to the
eye of the spectator, to dazzle and overwhelm him with
it, to stamp it upon him so firmly and deeply that he
can never again tear it from his memory, — these are the
great features of this imagination and style. In this
David Copper field is a masterpiece. Never did objects
j-emain more visible and present to the memory of a
reader than those which he describes. The old house, the
parlour, the kitchen, Peggotty's boat, and above all the
school playground, are interiors whose relief, energy, and
precision are unequalled. Dickens has the passion and
patience of the painters of his nation; he reckons his
details one Iby one, notes the various lines of the old
tree-trunks ; sees the dilapidated cask, the green and
broken flagstones, the chinks of the damp walls ; he dis-
tinguishes the strange smells which rise from them, marks
the size of tlie mossy spots, reads the names of the
scholars carved on the door, and dwells on the form of
the letters. And this minute description has nothing cold
about it; if it is thus detailed, it is because the contem-
plation was intense ; it proves its passion by its exactness.
We felt this passion without accounting for it. . . .

This impassioned style is extremely potent, and to
it may be attributed half the glory of Dickens. The
majority of men have only weak emotions. We labour
mechanically, and yawn much . . . we end by ceasing

DAVID COPPERFIELD 45

to remark the household scenes, petty details, stale ad-
ventures, which are the basis of our existence. A man
comes, who suddenly renders them interesting; nay,
who makes them dramatic, changes them into objects of
admiration, tenderness, and dread. Without leaving
the fireside or the omnibus, we are trembling, our eyes
full of tears, or shaken by fits of inextinguishable
^laughter. . . .

If, in Copperfield, you relate the emotions and follies
of love, you will rally this poor affection, depict its little-
nesses, not venture to make us hear the ardent, generous,
undisciplined blast of the all-powerful passion ; you will
turn it into a toy for good children, or a pretty marriage-
trinket. . . . You will find charming or grave portraits
of women: of Dora, who after marriage continues to be
a little girl, whose pouting, prettinesses, childishnesses,
laughter, make the house gay, like the chirping of a bird ;
. . . Agnes, so calm, patient, sensible, pure, worthy of
respect, a very model of a wife, sufficient in herself to
claim for marriage the respect we demand for it. . . .

Mr. Micawber will speak through three volumes the
same kind of emphatic phrases, and will pass five or six
times, with comical suddenness, from joy to grief. Each
of your characters will be a vice, a virtue, a ridicule per-
sonified ; and the passion, which you lend it, will be so
frequent, so invariable, so absorbing, that it will no
longer be like a living man, but an abstraction in man's
clothes. . . .

In reality, the novels of Dickens can all be reduced
to one phrase, to wit : Be good, and love ; there is genu-
ine joy only in the emotions of the heart; sensibility is
the whole man. ... To live is nothing ; to be powerful,
learned, illustrious, is little; to be useful is not enough.
He alone has lived, and is a man, who has wept at the
remembrance of a benefit, given or received. — History
of English Literature, trans, by H. van Laun, 1871.

46 COMMENTS ON

FREDERIC HARRISON

(1831- )

[Historian and critic. The leader of the Positivists in England.
Author of the Meaning of History (1862), The Philosophy of Common-
sense (1907), and studies of Chatham, Ruskin, King Alfred, and Wil-
liam the Silent.]

y^ Charles Dickens was, before all things, a great
humourist — doubtless the greatest of this century. . . ,

His humane kinship with the vulgar and the common,
the magic which strikes poetry out of the dust of the
streets, and discovers traces of beauty and joy in the
most monotonous of lives, is, in the true and best sense
of the term, Christlike, with a message and gospel of
hope. . . .
^J Dickens is a realist in that he probes the gloonjiest
recesses and faces the most disheartening problems of
life; he is an idealist in that he never presents us the
common or the vile with mere commonplace or repulsive-
ness, and without some ray of humane and genial charm
to which ordinary eyes are blind. . . .

David Copperfield's little wife is called a lap-dog,
acts like a lap-dog, and dies like a lap-dog; the lap-dog
simile is so much overdone that we are glad to get rid
of her, and instead of weeping with Copperfield, we
feel disposed to call him a ninny.

Nothing was more wonderful in Dickens than his ex-
uberance of animal spirits, that inexhaustible fountain of
life and gaiety, in which he equals Scott and far sur-
passes any other modern. The intensity of the man, his
electric activity, his spasmodic power, quite dazzle and
stun us.
/ He hardly ever drew a character, painted a scene
7^ even of the most subordinate kind, which he had not
studied from the life with minute care. . . . But this
task of his, to cast the sunshine of pathos and of genial
mirth over the humblest, dullest, and most uninviting

DAVID COPPERFIELD 47

of our fellow creatures was a great social mission to
which his whole genius was devoted. No waif and stray
was so repulsive, no drudge was so mean, no criminal
was so atrocious, but what Charles Dickens could feel
for him some ray of sympathy, or extract some pathetic
mirth out of his abject state.

Here lies the secret of his power over such countless
millions of readers. He not only paints a vast range
of ordinary humanity and suflfering or wearied humanity,
but he speaks for it and lives in it himself, and throws
a halo of imagination over it, and brings home to the
great mass of average readers a new sense of sympathy
and gaiety. This humane kinship with the vulgar and
the common, this magic which strikes poetry out of the
dust of the streets and discovers traces of beauty and
joy in the most monotonous of lives, is in the true and
best sense of the term Christlike, with a message and
gospel of hope. Thackeray must have had Charles
Dickens in his mind, when he wrote: "The humourous
writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your
pity, your kindness — your scorn for untruth, preten-
sion, imposture — your tenderness for the weak, the
poor, the oppressed, the unhappy." Charles Dickens, of
all writers of our age, assuredly did this in every work
of his pen, for thirty-three years of incessant production.
It is his great title to honour: and a novelist can desire
no higher title than this. — Studies in Early Victorian
Literature, 1895.

A. C. SWINBURNE

(1837-1909)

[Poet and critic. Author of Songs before Sunrise, Atalanta in
Calydon, and studies of Blake and Dickens.]

David Copperfield, from the first chapter to the
last, is unmistakable, by any eye above the level and
beyond the insight of a beetle's, as one of the master-

48 COMMENTS ON

pieces to which time can only add a new charm and an
unimaginable value. The narrative is as coherent and
harmonious as that of Tom Jones; and to say this is to
try it by the very highest and apparently the most un-
attainable standard. But I must venture to reaffirm my
conviction, that even the glorious masterpiece of Field-
ing's radiant and beneficent genius, if in some points
superior, is by no means superior in all. Tom is a far
completer and more living type of gallant boyhood and
generous young manhood than David; but even the
lustre of Partridge is pallid and lunar beside the noon-
tide glory of Micawber. Blifil is a more poisonously
plausible villain than Uriah; Sophia Western remains
unequalled except by her sister heroine Amelia as a
perfectly credible and adorable type of young Eng-
lish womanhood, naturally " like one of Shakespeare's
women," socially as fine and true a lady as Congreve's
Millamant or Angelica. But even so large-minded and
liberal a genius as Fielding's could never have con-
ceived any figure like Miss Trotwood's, any group like
that of the Peggottys. As easily could it have imagined
and realised the magnificent setting of the story, with
its homely foreground of street or wayside and its
background of tragic sea. — Quarterly Review, 1902.

WILLIAM D. HOWELLS

(1837- )

[American novelist and critic. Author of many novels and literary
studies.]

It remains the best of his novels, the shapeliest, the
sanest; and the necessity which he was in, through the
form of working out character inductively, kept him
truer to what he had seen in life. In no other book,
probably, did he draw so much and so directly from life.
It was autobiographical in fact as well as in form, and
it was biographical through the introduction, with little

DAVID COPPERFIELD 49

disguise of Dickens's father and family circumstance.
. . . In spite of his Gothic tendency to grotesque and
monstrous decoration, he did something primarily struc-
tural for once, and though certain parts of the work
were overlaid with adventitious and impertinent epi-
sodes, it was not weakened by them. It comes together
in the retrospect, it does not struggle about, nor tumble
apart; one can almost recall it as a whole. The char- ;/.
acters obey the law of the comprehensive yet coherent
story, and have an uncommon logic and unity. — Hero-
ines of Fiction, 1901.

SIR ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD

(1837- )

[Historian and critic. Master of Pctcrhousc, Cambridge, Eng-
land. Author of the History of English Dramatic Literature (1875).
Joint editor of the Cambridge Modern History and the Cambridge
History of English Literature.]

No reader could divine, what very probably even the
author may hardly have ventured to confess to himself,
that in the lovely little idyll of the loves of Doady and
Dora — with Jip, as Dora's father might have said,
intervening — there were, besides the reminiscences of
an innocent juvenile amour, the vestiges of a man's un-
confessed tliough not altogether unrepressed disappoint-
ment — the sense that " there was always something
wanting."

Of the idyll of Davy and Dora — what shall I say?
Its earliest stages are full of the gayest comedy. What,
for instance, could surpass the story of the picnic —
where was it? Perhaps it was near Guildford. At
that feast an imaginary rival, " Red Whisker," made
the salad — how could they eat it? — and "voted him-
self into the charge of the wine-cellar, which he con-
structed, being an ingenious beast, in the hollow trunk
of a tree." Better still are the backward ripples in the

50 COMMENTS ON

course of true love; best of all, the deep wisdom of
Miss Mills, in whose nature mental trial and suffering
supplied, in some measure, the place of years. In the
narrative of the young housekeeping, David's real
trouble is most skilfully mingled with the comic woes of
the situation; and thus the idyll almost imperceptibly
passes into the last phase, where the clouds dissolve in
a rain of tears. The genius which conceived and exe-
cuted these closing scenes was touched by a pity towards
the fictitious creatures of his own imagination, which
melted his own heart; and thus his pathos is here
irresistible. . . .

Dickens had had his own experience, of shabby-
genteel life, and of the struggle which he had himself
seen a happy and buoyant temperament maintaining
against a sea of troubles. But Mr. Micawber, whatever
features may have been transferred to him, is the type
of a whole race of men who will not vanish from the
face of the earth so long as the hope which lives eternal
in the human breast is only temporarily suspended by
the laws of debtor and creditor, and is always capable of
revival with the aid of a bowl of milk punch. A kindlier
and a merrier, a more humorous and a more genuine
character was never conceived than this; and if any-
thing was wanted to complete the comicality of the
conception, it was the wife of his bosom, with the twins
at her own, and her mind made up not to desert Mr.
Micawber. ... In contrast, the shambling, fawning,
y villainous hypocrisy of Uriah Heep is a piece of intense
and elaborate workmanship, almost cruelly done without
^' being overdone. It was in his figures of hypocrites that
Dickens's satirical power most diversely displayed it-
self; and by the side of Uriah Heep in this story,
literally so in the prison-scene at the close, stands
another species of the race, the valet Littimer, a sketch
which Thackeray himself could not have surpassed. . . .
As to the construction of David Copperfield, however.

DAVID COPPERFIELD 51

I frankly confess that I perceive no serious fault in
it. It is a story with a plot, and not merely a string
of adventures and experiences, like little Davy's old
favourites upstairs at Blunderstone. In the conduct of
this plot blemishes may here and there occur. The
boy's flight from London, and the direction which it
takes, are insufficiently accounted for. A certain amount
of obscurity as well perhaps as of improbability per-
vades the relations between Uriah and the victim, round
whom the unspeakable slimy thing writhes and wriggles.
On the other hand, the mere conduct of the story has
much that is beautiful in it. Thus there is real art in
the way in which the scene of Barkis's death — written
with admirable moderation — prepares for the " greater
loss " at hand for the mourning family. And in the
entire treatment of his hero's double love story, Dickens
has, to my mind, avoided that discord which, in spite of
himself, jars upon the reader both in Esmond and in
Adam Bede. The best constructed part of David Cop-
perfield is, however, unmistakably the story of Little
Em'ly and her kinsfolk. This is most skilfully inter-
woven with the personal experiences of David, of which
— except in its very beginnings — it forms no integral
part: and throughout the reader is haunted by a pre-
sentiment of the coming catastrophe, though unable to
divine the tragic force and justice of its actual accom-
plishment. A touch altered here and there in Steer-
forth, with the Rosa Dartle episode excluded or greatly
reduced, and this part of David Copperfield might chal-
lenge comparison as to workmanship with the whole
literature of modern fiction. — Dickens (English Men
of Letters).

52 COMMENTS ON

SIR FRANK THOMAS MARZIALS

(1840- )

[Litterateur. Vice-President of the London Library. Author of
studies of Dickens, Hugo, Thackeray, and Browning.]

David Copperfield was published between May, 1849,
and the autumn of 1850, and marks, I think, the cul-
minating point in Dickens's career as a writer. So far
there had been, not perhaps from book to book, but on
the whole, decided progress, the gradual attainment of
great ease and of the power of obtaining results of equal
power by simpler means. Beyond this, there was, if
not absolute declension — for he never wrote anything
that could properly be called careless and unworthy of
himself — yet at least no advance. Of the interest that
attaches to the book from the fact that so many portions
are autobiographical, I have already spoken: nor need
I go over the ground again. But quite apart from such
adventitious attractions the novel is an admirable one. —
Life of Charles Dickens, 1887.

ANDREW LANG

(1844-1912)

[Poet, historian, and critic. A versatile and delightful writer on
numerous subjects literary, psychological, and historical.]

I DO not say that Dickens's pathos is always of the
too facile sort, which plays round children's death-beds.
Other pathos he has, more fine and not less genuine.
It may be morbid and contemptible to feel " a great
inclination to cry " over David Copperfield's boyish
infatuation for Steerforth; but I feel it. Steerforth
was a "tiger," as Major Pendennis would have said; a
tiger with his curly hair and his ambrosial whiskers.
But when a little boy loses his heart to a big boy
he does not think of this. Traddles thought of it.

DAVID COPPERFIELD 53

" Shame, J. Steerforth ! " cried Traddles, when Steer-
forth bullied the usher. Traddles had not lost his heart,
not set up the big boy as a god in the shrine thereof.
But boys do these things; most of us have had
our Steerforths — tall, strong, handsome, brave, good-
humoured.

But Dickens is always excellent in his boys, of whom
he had drawn dozens of types — all capital. There is
Tommy Traddles, for example. And how can people
say that Dickens could not draw a gentleman.'* The
boy who shouted " Shame, J. Steerforth! " was a gentle-
man, if one may pretend to have an opinion about a
theme so difficult.

Little David Copperfield is a jewel of a boy with a
turn for books. Doubtless he is created out of Dickens's
memories of himself as a child. That is true pathos
again, and not overwrought, when David is sent to
Creakle's and his poor troubled mother dare hardly say
farewell to him. — Essays in Little, 1891.

David Copperfield is so excellent that criticism is
swallowed up in pleasure. . . . The tender grace of the
opening chapter . . . the pretty child-mother twisting
her bright curls ; Peggotty, with her unexaggerated love
and goodness and needle-marked finger and red cheeks;
the little boy's nature studies in Tom Jones and Pere-
grine Pickle, his lectures on crocodiles, his keen notice
of things, and fantastic reflections, and inspired antipa-
thies, can never cease to charm in any change of taste.
The Murdstone passages we can hardly bear to read,
but, happily, the immortal waiter, with his fable of
Mr. Topsawyer, comes in as a relief. Even Creakle is
a relief from the Murdstones. Dickens excelled in
drawing private schools. Mr. Creakle is not a repeti-
tion of Mr. Squeers, and, with his inaudible voice, is
terrible in a new fashion. . . .

The race of Creakles is probably not extinct. But

54 COMMENTS ON

Dickens has helped to thin it. There is not, probably,
elsewhere in our literature, so fine a study of a small
boy's hero-worship, as in the story of David and his
Jonathan, Steerforth. As a little boy of eleven, I
remember being glad, with precocious foresight, that
David had not the pretty sister about whose existence
Steerforth inquired. But Tommy Traddles had the
sharper sight — Tommy, who bravely cried " Shame,
J. Steerforth ! " One used to draw many skeletons in
imitation of Tommy.

The episode in London, the bottle-cleaning, the strug-
gle with poverty, the delightful Micawber, are all in
the foremost places of fact, glorified by imagination.
The flight to Dover is a masterpiece, which dwells un-
alterable in the memory, from the young man with the
donkey-cart to Mr. Dolloby, and the dealer in coats
whose slogan was Goo-roo! Miss Trotwood's is a haven
inexpressibly welcome, and Mr. Dick is an author from
whose failing most professional scribes know that they
cannot free themselves. We all have our King Charles'
Head.

Indeed, we linger fondly over the whole of David's
youth. His love for Miss Shepherd, his epic encounters
with the young butcher's boy. . . . Dickens expressed
a just pride in David's first dissipation: "it will be
found worthy of attention, I hope, as a piece of
grotesque truth,"

The affair of Steerforth and Little Em'ly is, of course,
" indicated " and inevitable. If the crushing charge of
" obviousness " is to be brought against any part of the
novel, it is against this. The aristocratic seducer, the
confiding rural maid, her poor but honest relations, her
return, betrayed, the necessary Nemesis, the whole set
of situations, are, we may venture to hope, very much
more common in books, and on the stage, than in life. —
Introduction to David Copperfield.

DAVID COPPERFIELD 55

ANATOLE FRANCE

(1844- )

[French novelist and critic. Author of Le Crime de Sylvester
Bonnard and La Vie LittSraire.]

Charles Dickens always liked madmen, he who
described with such tender grace the innocence of the
good Mr. Dick. Everybody knows Mr. Dick, for every-
body has read David Copperfield. Everybody in France
at least, for to-day it is the fashion in England to
neglect the best of English story-tellers. A young
aesthetic lately informed me that Dombey and Son can
only be read in translations. He also told me that
Lord Byron was a rather dull poet, something like our
own Ponsard. I do not believe it. I believe that Byron
is one of the greatest poets of the century, and I believe
that Dickens had more feeling tlian any other writer.
I believe that his novels are as beautiful as the love
and the pity that inspired them. I believe that David
Copperfield is a new gospel. I believe, lastly, that Mr.
Dick, with whom alone I have to do here, is a sensible
madman, for the only reason left him is the reason of
the heart, and that is hardly ever deceived. What
matter if he flies kites on which he has written some
reflections regarding the death of King Charles I ? He
is benevolent; he wishes ill to no one, and that is a
piece of wisdom to which many sane men do not attain
as easily as he does. It was a piece of good luck for
Mr. Dick to be born in England. Individual liberty is
greater there than in France. Originality is more favour-
ably regarded there, more respected, than it is with
us. And what is madness, after all, but a sort of mental
originality? I say madness, and not insanity. Insanity
is the loss of the intellectual faculties. Madness is only
a strange and singular use of those faculties. — On Life
and Letters (English Edition, 1909).

56 COMMENTS ON

FERDINAND BRUNETIERE

(1849- )

[Eminent French litterateur.]

If one had to point out the most English character-
istic of the author of David Copperfield, I think it would
>y be his imagination^ magnifying, reforming, and, if one
may use the word, " swarming." But what is not less
characteristic is the way Dickens changes the form of
obj ects, making them assume unusual, one might almost
say eccentric, forms, really caricaturing them, imparting
to them a life which is by no means theirs, but for all
that is none the less interesting and poetic. Dickens
has excelled in the art of hearing and of rendering the
language of things, he can even express the soul of them,
and I admit, if you wish it, that his descriptions are not
exact, but you must agree that they are better than
exact. . . .

His jokes are perhaps not always very refined, the
turn of his humour is sometimes doubtful, he abuses
certain forms; but the result is irresistible, one must
laugh in spite of all. And what is perhaps not less
characteristic is his gift of calling up tears. ... It may
well be said of him that one laughs through tears, and
that, in one novel, one experiences the double pleasure of
amusement and sympathy. — Revue des Deux Mondes,
1889.

R. DU PONTAVICE

(1850-1893)

From the point of view of workmanship David Cop-
perfield seems to be the best written of his novels. As
in all his works, there is an endless crowd of characters
introduced at each instant, but every one seems to have
his place and does not destroy the story. From begin-

DAVID COPPERFIELD 57

ning to end the unity of the plot is apparent and the
moral of the story is quite in keeping with the events.
In this book, Dickens's favourite, appears the group of
Peggottys. These good people, as most of the other
characters, have become types in England; it would
be hard to find a more pleasing personification of purity
and domestic beauty. Poor fishermen, vulgar in language
and appearance, they are sometimes almost sublime.
Those superior beings who call themselves critics have
always treated with a certain disdain the serious passages
in Dickens ; they try to detract from him by calling him
a caricaturist. Let them read the final scene of David
Copper field, the tempest and shipwreck where the body
of the betrayer is cast up by the sea on the ruins of that
house he overthrew, and at the feet of the man whose
heart he broke, — then let them say if they know any-
thing in their own literature more eloquent or more finely
drawn !

And then what of Betsy Trotwood, abrupt, angular,
eccentric, but kindness and uprightness itself? Has
Dickens ever described any one more living or more real.''
Of the two heroines who share Dickens's affection I
prefer the child, lovable, spoilt, frivolous, and tender,
little Dora, to the angel, always good, always superior,
always unselfish, the pure and inaccessible Agnes. —
The Inimitable Boy, 1889.

EMILE HENNEQUIN

(1853-1888)

[Editor of " Le Temps."]

His heroes are only fixed in one's mind by some weak-
ness, some pose, some phrase, some special characteristic,
without which they would cease to be, as a piece of wood
which is no longer ligneous. Even when he attempts, as
in David Copperfield or Great Expectations, that easiest

58 COMMENTS ON

style of psychological analysis, autobiography, the hero,
who talks with us throughout the length of two volumes
in small print, is even more unreal and less living than
the secondary characters of the book.

If Dickens could not observe men, nor represent the
impulses of his own soul, nor even employ the psychology
which unwittingly he must have learnt, he is even more
palpably ignorant of the art of knowing and describing
the scenery of his story. Few English writers are so
fond of description as Dickens, and few are so unskilled
in reproducing the beauty of the country, of the sea, of
rivers. What is even more remarkable is that this writer,
who has passed his childhood in prowling the streets of
London, and who at a later age, before beginning his
work, has experienced the need of scouring the town
and mixing with the crowd, gives of this dispiriting city
of monuments such a fantastic and unreal description,
attempting to make it grotesque and amusing, that one
might really take it for a magnified begrimed portrait of
Nuremberg or Harlem,
y^ In the handling of_diak)gue Dickens is excellent. How-
J ever spiritless may be his descriptions of men, however
eccentric and unnatural the type he wishes to represent,
/ by one phrase, one speech, one story, the whole nature
I and character of the man appear with all their detail
\and individuality. This art is marvellous, it even bears
translation; it cannot be explained, for it consists as
much of the characteristic and uncouth turn given to
their appearance as of the quaint sayings put in their
mouths. ""

(^ Consider in David Copperfield the scene in which the
distinguished and loquacious Mr. Micawber is introduced
to the young hero and offers to furnish him with a room.
At first one only notices his threadbare clothes, his shabby
gentility, his bald head, his chubby cheeks, his eyeglass,
his tasselled cane, his imposing shirt-collar, but listen
to him ! His expressions are well chosen and vague, a

DAVID COPPERFIELD 59

sudden snug smile of friendly confidence brightens his
face, he solemnly waves his hand, pronounces several
sonorous phrases, walks away majestically humming a
tune, and there he is for the rest of the book. His ex-
pression, his speech, his figure, his goodness, his care-
lessness, his kindness, his feeble vanity, are fixed, by
one stroke, for ever. — Ecrivains Francises, 1889.

HALL CAINE

1853- )

[Novelist. Author of The Manxman, The Prodigal Son^ and The
Deemster, and of volumes on Rossetti and other literary subjects-l

Dickens was the son of a man whose pecuniary em-
barrassments, easy good-nature, and utter impractica-
bility furnished the hint out of which was evolved the
immortal portrait of Wilkins Micawber. The boy's
early years were saddened by many privations, and
everyone remembers the thrill which passed over Eng-
land when the first page of Forster's Life made known
the hidden secret of a nature that had been incurably
injured. All the world knew that Dickens had said:
" In my heart of hearts there is a favourite child, and
his name is David Copperfield," but it was now to realise
that in depicting under that name the suffering that
could be crushed into a child's experience, the novelist
was laying bare the cruel trials of his own boyish years,
about which he could write without resentment or pain,
for he knew that all things had in the end worked
together to make him what he was. — Introduction to
The Cricket on the Hearth, 1906.

60 COMMENTS ON

GEORGE GISSING

(1857-1904)

[One of the most original novelists of the later nineteenth century.
Though realistic in manner, an incurable idealist in thought. Author
of New Qrub Street, Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, etc.]

To speak severely of Mr. Micawber is beyond the
power of the most conscientious critic, whether in life
or art; the most rigid economist would be glad to grasp
him by the hand and to pay for the bowl of punch, over
which this type of genial impecuniosity would dilate upon
his embarrassments and his hopes ; the least compromis-
ing realist has but to open at a dialogue or a letter in
which Mr. Micawber's name is seen, and straightway
he forgets his theories. . . . No man ever lived who was
so consistently delightful — certainly Dickens's father
cannot have been so, — but in this idealised portraiture
we have the essential truth. Men of this stamp do not
abound, but they are met with, even to-day. . . .

The one point on which experience gives no support
to the imaginative figure is his conversion to practical
activity. Mr. Micawber in Australia does the heart
good; but he is a pious vision. We refuse to think
of a wife worn out by anxieties, of children growing up
in squalor ; we gladly accept the flourishing colonist ;
but this is tribute to the author whom we love. Dickens
never wrought more successfully for our pleasure and
for his own fame. . . .

Little Em'ly belongs to the stage, where such a story
as hers is necessarily presented in the falsest possible
light. Let us note one thing, however. Out of regard
for what we call propriety, is it not obvious that this girl
is shown to us as acting with something like cold-blooded
deliberation, the simplest form of true immorality? We
have no hint of her temptation, and it really looks very
much as if she had calculated the probable advantages

DAVID COPPERFIELD 61

of flight with Steerforth. ... So determined is Dickens
not to offend our precious delicacy that in the upshot he
offends it beyond endurance, springing upon us, so to
speak, the results of uncontrollable passion, without ever
allowing us to suspect that such a motive was in play.
The effect of this is a sort of grossness, which dishonours
our heroine. . . .

Little Em'ly has, after all, a subordinate part in David
Copperfield. The leading lady is Dora. Dora is wooed,
Dora is wed, — the wooing and wedding of a butterfly.
Yet it is Dickens's prettiest bit of love, and I shall scarce
find it in my heart to criticise the " little Blossom," the
gauze-winged fairy of that " insubstantial, happy, foolish
time." . . . Think only of David at his desk and Dora
holding the pens ! Pray, how much work was our friend
likely to get through with that charming assistance ? But
it is all a fantasy and defies the test of common daylight.
Take Dora seriously, and at once you are compelled to
ask by what right an author demands your sympathy for -
such a brainless, nerveless, profitless simpleton. Enter
into the spirit of the chapter, and you are held by one
of the sweetest dreams of humour and tenderness ever
translated into language. . . .

In the story of David Copperfield's journey on the
Dover Road, we have as good a piece of narrative prose
as can be found in English. Equally good, in another
way, are those passages of rapid retrospect, in which
David tells us of his later boyhood, — a concentration
of memory perfumed with the sweetest humour. It is
not an easy thing to relate with perfect proportion of
detail the course of a year or two of wholly uneventful
marriage ; but read the chapter entitled " Our Domestic
Life," and try to award adequate praise to the great
artist who composed it. One can readily suggest how
the chapter might have been spoiled; ever so little un-
due satire, ever so little excess of sentiment; but who
can point to a line in which it might be bettered ? It is

62 COMMENTS ON

perfect writing; one can say no more and no
Charles Dickens, A Critical Study, 1898.

JEROME K. JEROME

(1859- )

[Novelist and playwright. Author of Three Men in a Boat and
The Passing of the Third-floor-back.]

And you, sweet Dora, let me confess I love you,
though sensible friends deem you foolish. Ah ! silly
Dora, fashioned by wise mother nature, who knows that
weakness and helplessness are a talisman, calling forth
strength and tenderness in man, trouble yourself not un-
duly about the oysters and the underdone mutton, little
woman. Good plain cooks at twenty pounds a year will
see to these things for us. Your work is to teach us
gentleness and kindness. Lay your foolish curls just
here, child. It is from such as you we learn wisdom.
Foolish wise folk sneer at you. Foolish wise folk would
pull up the laughing lilies, the needless roses, from the
garden, would plant in their places only useful whole-
some cabbage. But the gardener, knowing better, plants
the silly short-lived flowers, foolish wise folk asking for
what purpose. . , . From an artistic point of view David
Copper field is undoubtedly Dickens' best work. Its
humour is less boisterous than its author's wont, its
pathos less highly coloured. ... To sum up: David
Copperfield is a plain tale simply told, and such are all
books that live. Eccentricities of style, artistic trickery,
may please the critic of a day, but literature is a story
that interests us, boys and girls, men and women. It
is a sad book, too, and that, again, gives it an added
charm in the sad later days. Humanity is nearing its
old age, and we have come to love sadness, as the friend
who has been longest with us. In the young days of our
vigour we were merry. With Ulysses' boatmen, we took

DAVID COPPERFIELD 63

alike tlie sunshine and the thunder of life with a frolic
welcome. The red blood flowed in our veins, and we
laughed, and our tales were of strength and hope. Now
we sit like old men, watching faces in the fire; and
the stories that we love are sad stories, — like the stories
that we ourselves have lived. — My Favourite Novelist
and his Best Booh, 1900.

G. K. CHESTERTON

(1874- )

[Novelist and critic. Author of The Napoleon of NoHing Hill,
The Man who teas Thursday, and studies of Dickens, Blake and

Browning.]

While these are real characters, they are real char-
acters lit up with the colours of youth and passion.
They are real people romantically felt; that is to say,
they are real people felt as real people feel them. They
are exaggerated, like all Dickens's figures; but they ^C
are not exaggerated as personalities are exaggerated by
an artist ; they are exaggerated as personalities are exag-
gerated by their own friends and enemies. . . .

All the characters seem a little larger than they really
were, for David is looking up at them. . . .

A child who has once had to respect a kind and
capable woman of the lower classes will respect the
lower classes for ever. . . .

As morals become less urgent, manners will become
more so; and men who have forgotten the fear of God
will retain the fear of Littimer. We shall merely sink
into a much meaner bondage, ^or when you break the
great laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get
anarchy. You get the small laws. . . .

David Copperfield is the great answer of a great
romancer to the realists. David says in effect: " What!
you say that the Dickens tales are too purple really to
have happened! Why, this is what happened to me,

64 COMMENTS ON

and it seemed the most purple of all. . . . Other pi
pie's lives may easily be human documents. But a man's
own life is always a melodrama." . . .

Mrs. Micawber is very nearly the best thing in
Dickens. . . . If we regard David Copperfield as an un-
conscious defence of the poetic view of life, we might
j regard Mrs. Micawber as an unconscious satire on the

logical view of life. She sits as a monument of the
hopelessness and helplessness of reason in the face of
this romantic and unreasonable world. . . .

The whole meaning of the character of Mr. Micawber
is that a man can be always almost rich by constantly
expecting riches. The lesson is a really important one
in our sweeping modern sociology. We talk of the man
whose life is a failure; but Micawber's life never is a
failure, because it is always a crisis. We think con-
stantly of the man who if he looked back would see that
his existence was unsuccessful; but Micawber never
does look back; he always looks forward, because the
bailiff is coming to-morrow. You cannot say he is de-
feated, for his absurd battle never ends; he cannot
despair of life, for he is so much occupied in living. All
this is of immense importance in the understanding of
the poor; it is worth all the slum novelists that ever
insulted democracy. But how did it happen, how could
it happen, that the man who created this Micawber could
pension him off at the end of the story and make him a
successful colonial mayor? Micawber never did suc-
ceed, never ought to succeed; his kingdom is not of this
world. — Charles Dickens, 1906.

There is at the end of this book too much tendency
^ / to bless people and get rid of them. Micawber is a
nuisance. Dickens the despot condemns him to exile.
Dora is a nuisance. Dickens the despot condemns her
to death. But Dickens the despot is a man immeasurably
inferior to Dickens the poet and Dickens the lover of

DAVID COPPERFIELD 65

mankind. It is the whole business of Dickens in the
world; it is the whole business of his particular in-
spiration and insight to perceive and to express the fact
that such people are the spice and interest of life. It
is the whole point of Dickens that there is nobody more
worth living with than a strong, splendid, entertaining,
immortal nuisance. Micawber interrupts practical life;
but what is practical life that it should venture to in-
terrupt Micawber.^ Dora confuses the housekeeping;
but we are not angry with Dora because she confuses the
housekeeping. We are angry with the housekeeping
becauses it confuses Dora. I repeat, and it cannot be
too much repeated, that the whole lesson of Dickens is
here. It is better to know Micawber than not to know
the minor worries that arise out of knowing Micawber.
It is better to have a bad debt and a good friend. In
the same way it is better to marry a human and healthy
personality which happens to attract you than to marry
a mere housewife; for a mere housewife is a mere house-
keeper. It is better to marry a woman and turn her into
a wife; it is miserable to marry a wife and try in vain
to turn her into a woman. All this was what Dickens
stood for; that the very people who are most irritating
in small business circumstances are often the people who
are most delightful in long stretches of experience of life.
It is just the man who is maddening when he is ordering
a cutlet or arranging an appointment who is probably
the man in whose company it is worth while to journey
steadily towards the grave. Distribute the dignified
people and the capable people and the highly business-
like people among all the situations which their ambition
or their innate corruption may demand; but keep close
to your heart, keep deep in your inner councils, the
absurd people; let the clever people pretend to govern
you, let the unimpeachable people pretend to advise you,
but let the fools alone influence you; let the laughable
people whose faults you see and understand be the only

66 COMMENTS ON

people who are really inside your life, who really come
near you or accompany you on your lonely march
towards the last impossibility. That is the whole mean-
ing of Dickens; that we should keep the absurd people
-f- for our friends. And here at the end of David Copper-
field he seems in some dim way to deny it. He seems to
want to get rid of the preposterous people simply be-
cause they will always continue to be preposterous. I
have a horrible feeling that David Copperfield will send
even his aunt to Australia if she worries him too much
about donkeys. Then he will be left with all the admi-
rable and dignified characters in the story ; with Agnes,
with Mr. Wickfield (whom not even drunkenness could
enliven), and with Mr. and Mrs. Traddles (Mr. Trad-
dies very much tamed) ; then the whole purpose of this
sort of optimistic romance will be fulfilled, and David
will be quite comfortable and entirely unhappy.

I repeat, then, that this wrong ending of David Cop-
perfield is one of the very few examples in Dickens
of a real symptom of fatigue. Having created splendid
beings for whom alone life might be worth living, he
cannot endure the thought of his hero living with them.
Having given his hero superb and terrible friends, he
Is afraid of the awful and tempestuous vista of their
friendship. He slips back into a more superficial kind
of story and ends it in a more superficial way. He is
afraid of the things he has made ; of that terrible figure
Micawber; of that yet more terrible figure Dora. He
cannot make up his mind to see his hero perpetually en-
^y^ tangled in the splendid tortures and sacred surprises that
come from living with really individual and unmanageable
people. He cannot endure the idea that his fairy prince
will not have henceforward a perfectly peaceful time.
But the wise old fairy tales (which are the wisest things
in the world, at any rate the wisest things of worldly
origin), the wise old fairy tales never were so silly as
to say that the prince and the princes lived peacefully

DAVID COPPERFIELD 67

ever afterwards. The fairy tales said that the prince
and princess lived happily ever afterwards ; and so they
did. They lived happily, although it is very likely that
from time to time they threw the furniture at each other.
Most marriages, 1 think, are happy marriages ; but there
is no such thing as a contented marriage. The whole
pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis.
David Copperfield and Dora quarrelled over the cold
mutton ; and if they had gone on quarrelling to the end
of their lives, they would have gone on loving each other
to the end of their lives; it would have been a human
marriage. But David Copperfield and Agnes would
agree about the cold mutton. And that cold mutton
would be very cold. — Introduction to David Copper-
field, 1907.

EDWIN PUGH

(1874- )

[Novelist. Author of A Street in Surburbia and The Fruit of the
Vine.]

Of all the novels that Dickens wrote, David Copper-
field undoubtedly embodies the most complete exposition
of his many-sided genius in its best, and may be its
worst, manifestations. It would be a great book in any
literature. Divested of its humour (as it is in its
French translation) it stands forth as a novel which any
nation, however great its literary traditions — and, after
all, there are none greater than the English — might
justly place among the very best of its fiction. It was
the supreme expression of the author's personality —
as an artist, as one of the most popular of writers of any
age or country, and as a man of a peculiarly sympa-
thetic or emotional temperament. Dickens was pre-
pared to stake his reputation on this book, and to stand
or fall by the final judgment passed upon it. The book
has survived the test and stands higher to-day in the

68 COMMENTS

estimation of all men qualified to voice an opinion upon
it than ever it did, perhaps. — Charles Dickens — The
Apostle of the People, 1908.

LADY RITCHIE (ANNE THACKERAY
RITCHIE)

[Novelist. Daughter of Thackeray. Author of The Village on the
Cliff and Old Kensington.]

I CAN remember, when David Copperfield came out,
hearing my father saying vi^ith emphasis to my grand-
mother that " little Em'ly's letter to old Peggotty was a
masterpiece." I wondered to hear him at the time, for
that was not at all the part I cared for most, nor indeed
could I imagine how little Em'ly was so stupid as to run
away from Peggotty's enchanted house-boat. But we
each and all enjoyed in turn our share of those thin
green books full of delicious things, and how glad we
were when they came to our hands at last after our
elders and our governess and our butler had all read
them in turn. . . . The Dickens books were as much
part of our home as our own father's. — Some Memories,
1894.

THE PERSONAL HISTORY

DAVID COPPERFIELD

THE PERSONAL HISTORY

DAVID
COPPERFIELD

CHARLES DICKENS

CEDRIC CHIVERS L^^d.

PORTWAY, BATH, ENGLAND

PREFACE

I REMARKED in thc original Preface to this Book, that I did
not find it easy to get sufficiently far away from it, in the
first sensations of having finished it, to refer to it with the
composure which this formal heading would seem to require.
My interest in it was so recent and strong, and my mind
was so divided between pleasure and regret — pleasure in the
achievement of a long design, regret in the separation from
many companions — that I was in danger of wearying the
reader with personal confidences and private emotions.

Besides which, all that I could have said of the Story to any
purpose, I had endeavoured to say in it.

It would concern the reader little, perhaps, to know how
sorrowfully the pen is laid down at the close of a two-years'
imaginative task ; or how an Author feels as if he were dis-
missing some portion of himself into the shadowy world, when
a crowd of the creatures of his brain are going from him for
ever. Yet, I had nothing else to tell ; unless, indeed, I were
to confess (which might be of less moment still), that no one
can ever believe this Narrative in the reading more than I
believed it in the writing.

So true are these avowals at the present day, that I can now

VI Preface

only take the reader into one confidence more. Of all my
books, I like this the best. It will be easily believed that I am
a fond parent to every child of my fancy, and that no one can
ever love that family as dearly as I love them. But, like many
fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child.
And his name is David Copperfield.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PACB

I. I AM Born i

II. I Observe 12

III. I HAVE A Change 26

IV. I FALL INTO Disgrace 40

V. I AM SENT away FROM HOME 58

VI. I enlarge mv Circle of Acquaintance . . 76

VII. Mv "First Half" at Salem House ... 83

VIII. Mv Holidays. Especially one Happy Afternoon too

— iIX. I have a Memorable Birthday . . . .114

X. I BECOME Neglected, and am Provided for . 125

XI. I begin Life on my own Account, and don't

like it 144

XII. Liking Life on .my own Account no better, I

form a great Resolution 159

XIII. The Sequel of my Rf.solution .... 168

XIV. My Aunt makes up her Mind about mk . . 187

XV. I MAKE another BEGINNING 202

XVI. I AM A New Boy in more Senses than One . 211

, XVII. Somebody turns up 231

XVIII. A Retrospect 248

XIX. I look about me, and make a Discovery . . 255

XX. Steerforth's Home 270

XXI. Little Em'ly 279

XXII. Some old Scenes, and some new People . . zgf^

XXIII. I corroborate Mr. Dick, and choose a Profession 318

XXIV. My first Dissipation 332

XXV. Good and Bad Angels 340

XXVI. I fall into Captivity 359

XXVII. Tommy Traddles 373

XXVIII. Mr. Micawber's Gauntlet 383

XXIX. I visit Steerforth at his Home, again . . 401

XXX. A Loss 408

XXXI. A GREATER LoSS 416

XXXII. The Beginning of a long Journey . . . 425

XXXIII. Blissful 442

XXXIV. My Aunt astonishes me . . . . . 458

viii Contents

CHAPTEK PAGE

XXXV. Depression 466

XXXVI. Enthusiasm 486

XXXVn. A LITTLE Cold Water . . . . ' . . 502 ^

XXXVni. A Dissolution of Partnership .... 510-'

XXXIX. WiCKFIELD AND HeEP . . . . . . 525

XL. The Wanderer 544

XLI. Dora's Aunts 551

XLII. Mischief 567

XLIII. Another Retrospect 586.

XLIV. Our Housekeeping 593

XLV. Mr. Dick fulfils my Aunt's Predictions . . 608

XLVI. Intelligence 623

XLVII. Martha 635

XLVIII. Domestic 646

XLIX. I AM Involved in Mystery 657

L. Mr. Peggotty's Dream comes true . . . 668

LI. The Beginning of a longer Journey . . . 678

^^ LII. I assist at an Explosion 694

.y^ LIII. Another Retrospect 71 7 -v

LIV. Mr. Micawber's Transactions . . . . 72K

LV. Tempest 736

LVI. The New Wound, and the Old .... 747

LVII. The Emigrants . . . . . . . . 753

LVI II. Absence 763

LIX. Return 769

LX. Agnes 784

LXI. I AM shown Two Interesting Penitents . . 793

LXII. A Light shines on my Way 804

LXIIL A Visitor .8121

LXIV. a Last Retrospect . 819

DAVID COPPERFIELD

CHAPTER I

I A*M BORN I

Whether I shall turn out to be the h^ro jof mY own life, or
whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages
must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I
record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe)
on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that
the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was
declared by the nurse, and by some sage women in the neigh-
bourhood who had taken a lively interest in me several months
before there was any possibility of our becoming personally
acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky in life ; and
secondly, that I was privileged to see jhpsts 1^*3 spirits ; both
these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky
infants of either gender, born towards the small hours on a
Friday night.

I need say nothing here on the first head, because nothing
can show better than my history whether that prediction was
verified or falsified by the result. On the second branch of
the question, I will only remark, that unless I ran through
that part of my inheritance while I was still a baby, I have not
come into it yet. But I do not at all complain of having been
kept out of this property ; and if anybody else should be in the
present enjoyment of it, he is heartily welcome to keep it.

I was bom with a caul, which was advertised for sale, in the
newspapers, at the low price of fifteen guineas. Whether sea-
going people were short of money about that time, or were
short of faith and preferred cork jackets, I don't know; all I
know is, that there was but one solitary bidding, and that was
from an attorney connected with the bill-broking business, who
offered two pounds in cash, and the balance in sherry, but
declined to be guaranteed from drowning on any higher bargain.
Consequently the advertisement was withdrawn at a dead loss
— for as to sherry, my poor dear mother's own sherry was in
the market then — and ten years afterwards the caul was put up

2 ' ' ' i E)avid Copperfield

ih a raffle. 40?^^"^^ Qur'part:of the country, to fifty members at
half-a-crown' a head, the winner to spend five shillings. I was
present myself, and I remember to have felt quite uncom-
fortable and confused, at a part of myself being disposed of in
that way. The caul was won, I recollect, by an old lady with
a hand-basket, who, very reluctantly, produced from it the
stipulated five shillings, all in halfpence, and twopence half-
penny short — as it took an immense time and a great waste of
arithmetic, to endeavour without any effect to prove to her. It
is a fact which will be long remembered as remarkable down
there, that she was never drowned, but died triumphantly in
bed, at ninety-two. I have understood that it was, to the last,
her proudest boast, that she never had been on the water in
her life, except upon a bridge ; and that over her tea (to which
she was extremely partial) she, to the last, expressed her indig-
nation at the impiety of mariners and others, who had the
presumption to go " meandering " about the world. It was in
vain to represent to her that some conveniences, tea perhaps
included, resulted from this objectionable practice. She always
returned, with greater emphasis and with an instinctive know-
ledge of the strength of her objection, "Let us have no
meandering."

NoUQ^eander myself, at present, I will go back to my birth.

I was born aFBIunderstone, in Suffolk, or " thereby," as they
say in Scotland. I was a posthumous child. My father's eyes
had closed upon the light of this world six months when mine
opened on it. There is something strange to me, even now,
in the reflection that he never saw me; and something stranger

/yet in the shadowy remembrance that I have of my first childish
associations with his white gravestone in the churchyard, and
of the indefinable compassion I used to feel for it lying out
alone there in the dark night, when our little parlour was warm
and bright with fire and candle, and the doors of our house
were — almost cruelly, it seemed to me sometimes — bolted and
Ipcked against it.
/' An aunt of my father's, and consequently a great-aunt of
' mine, of whom I shall have more to relate by and by, was
the principal magnate of our family. Miss Trotwood, or Miss
Betsey, as my poor mother always called her, when she suffi-
ciently overcame her dread of this formidable personage to
mention her at all (which was seldom), had been married to a
husband younger than herself, who was very handsome, except
in the sense of the homely adage, "handsome is, that handsome
does " — for he was strongly suspected of having beaten Miss

David Copperfield 3

Betsey, and even of having once, on a disputed question of
supplies, made some hasty but determined arrangements to
throw her out of a two pair of stairs* window. These evidences
of an incompatibility of temper induced Miss Betsey to pay
him off, and effect a separation by mutual consent He went
to India with his capital, and there, according to a wild legend
in our family, he was once seen riding on an elephant, in com-
pany ¥nth a Baboon ; but I think it must have been a Baboo —
or a Begum. Any how, from India tidings of his death reached
home, within ten years. How they affected my aunt, nobody
knew; for immediately upon the separation she look her maiden
name again, bought a cottage in a hamlet on the sea-coast a
long way off, established herself there as a single woman with
one servant, and was understood to live secluded, ever afterwards,
in an inflexible retirement. " —J

My father had once been a favourite of hers, I believe ; but
she was mortally affronted by his marriage, on the ground that
my mother was " a wax doll." She had never seen my mother,
but she knew her~to~be~not yet twenty. My father and Miss
Betsey never met again. He was double my mother's age when
he married, and of but a delicate constitution. He died a year
afterwards, and, as I have said, six months before I came into
the world.

This was the state of matters on the afternoon of, what 1
may be excused for calling, that eventful and important Friday.
I can make no claim, therefore, to have known, at that time,
how matters stood ; or to have any remembrance, founded on
the evidence of my own senses, of what follows.

My mother was sitting by the fire, but poorly in health, and
very low in spirits, looking at it through her tears, and despond-
ing heavily about herself and the fatherless little_stranger, who
was already welcomed by some grosses of^prophetfc pin§_in a
drawer up-stairs, to a world not at all excited on the subject
of his arrival ; my mother, I say, was sitting by the fire, that
bright, windy March afternoon, very timid and sad, auid very
doubtful of ever coming alive out of the trial that was before
her, when, lifting her eyes as she dried them, to the window
opposite, she saw a strange lady coming up the garden.

My mother had a sure foreboding at the second glance, that
it was Miss Betsey. The setting sun was glowing on the strange
lady, over the garden-fence, and she came walking up to the
door with a fell rigidity of figure and composure of countenance
that could have belonged to nobody else.

When she reached the house she gave another proof of her

4 David Copperfield

identity. My father had often hinted that she seldom con-
ducted herself like any ordinary Christian; and now, instead
of ringing the bell, she came and looked in at that identical
j window, pressing the end of her nose against the glass to that
(extent that my poor dear mother used to say it became perfectly
flat and white in a moment.

She gave my mother such a turn, that I have always been
convinced I am indebted to Miss Betsey for having been bom
on a Friday.

My mother had left her chair in her agitation, and gone
behind it in the comer. Miss Betsey, looking round the room,
slowly and inquiringly, began on the other side, and carried
her eyes on, like a Saracen's Head in a Dutch clock, until they
reached my mother. Then she made a frown and a gesture to
my mother, like one who was accustomed to be obeyed, to
come and open the door. My mother went.

" Mrs. David Copperfield, I think" said Miss Betsey ; the
emphasis referring, perhaps, to my mother's mourning weeds,
and her condition.

" Yes," said my mother, faintly.

"Miss Trotwood," said the visitor. "You have heard of
her, I dare say ? **

My mother answered she had had that pleasure. And she
had a disagreeable consciousness of not appearing to imply that
it had been an overpowering pleasure.

" Now you see her," said Miss Betsey. My mother bent her
head, and begged her to walk in.

They went into the parlour my mother had come from, the
fire in the best room on the other side of the passage not being
lighted — not having been lighted, indeed, since my father's
funeral; and when they were both seated, and Miss Betsey
said nothing, my mother, after vainly trying to restrain herself,
began to cry.

" Oh tut, tut, tut ! " said Miss Betsey, in a hurry. " Don't
do that ! Come, come ! "

My mother couldn't help it notwithstanding, so she cried
until she had had her cry out.

"Take off your cap, child," said Miss Betsey, "and let me
see you."

My mother was too much afraid of her to refuse compliance
with this odd request, if she had any disposition to do so.
Therefore she did as she was told, and did it with. such nervous
hands that her hair (which was luxuriant and beautiful) fell all
about her face.

David Copperfield 5

"Why, bless my heart 1" exclaimed Miss Betsey. "You are
aj;ery Baby ! "

My~motRerwas, no doubt, unusually youthful in appearance
even for her years ; she hung her head, as if it were her fault,
poor thing, and said, sobbing, that indeed she was afraid she
was but a childish widow, and would be but a childish mother
if she lived. In a short pause which ensued, she had a fancy
that she felt Miss Betsey touch her hair, and that with no
ungentle hand ; but, looking at her, in her timid hope, she
found that lady sitting with the skirt of her dress tucked up,
her hands folded on one knee, and her feet upon the fender,
frowning at the fire.

"In the name of Heaven/' said Miss Betsey, suddenly,
"why Rookery?"

" Do you mean the house, ma'am ? " asked my mother.

" Why Rookery ? " said Miss Betsey. "Cookery would have
been more to the purpose, if you had had any practical ideas
of life, either of you."

"The name was Mr. Copperfield's choice," returned my
mother. " When he bought the house, he liked to think that
there were rooks about it."

The evening wind made such a disturbance just now, among
some tall old elm-trees at the bottom of the garden, that neither
my mother nor Miss Betsey could forbear glancing that way.
As the elms bent to one another, like giants who were
whispering secrets, and after a few seconds of such repose,
fell into a violent flurry, tossing their wild arms about, as if
their late confidences were really too wicked for their peace of
mind, some weather-beaten ragged old rooks'-nests burdening
their higher branches, swung like wrecks upon a stormy
sea.

" Where are the birds ? " asked Miss Betsey.

" The ? " My mother had been thinking of something

else.

" The rooks — what has become of them ? " asked Miss
Betsey.

" There have not been any since we have lived here," said
my mother. " We thought — Mr. Copperfield thought — it was
quite a large rookery ; but the nests were very old ones, and the
birds have deserted them a long while."

" David Copperfield all over 1 " cried Miss Betsey. " David |
Copperfield from head to foot ! Calls a house a rookery when
there's not a rook near it, and takes the birds on trust, because
he sees the nests I "

6 David Copperfield

"Mr. Copperfield," returned my mother, "is dead, and if you
dare to speak unkindly of him to me "

My poor dear mother, I suppose, had some momentary
intention of committing an assault and battery upon my aunt,
who could easily have settled her with one hand, even if my
mother had been in far better training for such an encounter
than she was that evening. But it passed with the action of
rising from her chair; and she sat down again very meekly, and
fainted.

When she came to herself, or when Miss Betsey had restored
her, whichever it was, she found the latter standing at the
window. The twilight was by this time shading down into
darkness ; and dimly as they saw each other, they could not
have done that without the aid of the fire.

" Well ? " said Miss Betsey, coming back to her chair, as if
she had only been taking a casual look at the prospect ; " and
when do you expect "

"I am all in a tremble," faltered my mother. "I don't know
what's the matter. I shall die, I am sure ! "

" No, no, no," said Miss Betsey. " Have some tea."

"Oh dear me, dear me, do you think it will do me any
good?" cried my mother in a helpless manner.

" Of course it will," said Miss Betsey. " It's nothing but
fancy. What do you call your girl ? "

" I don't know that it will be a girl, yet, ma'am," said my
mother innocently.

" Bless the Baby ! " exclaimed Miss Betsey, unconsciously
quoting the second sentiment of the pincushion in the drawer
up-stairs, but applying it to my mother instead of me, " I don't
mean that. I mean your servant."

" Peggotty," said my mother.

" Peggotty ! " repeated Miss Betsey, with some indignation.
" Do you mean to say, child, that any human being has gone
into a Christian church, and got herself named Peggotty ? "

" It's her surname," said my mother, faintly. " Mr. Copper-
field called her by it, because her Christian name was the same
as mine."

" Here Peggotty ! " cried Miss Betsey, opening the parlour-
door. "Tea. Your mistress is a little unwell. Don't
dawdle."

Having issued this mandate with as much potentiality as
if she had been a recognised authority in the house ever since
it had been a house, and having looked out to confront the
amazed Peggotty coming along the passage with a candle at

David Copperfield

the sound of a strange voice, Miss Betsey shut the door
again, and sat down as before ; with her feet on the fender,
the skirt of her dress tucked up, and her hands folded on one
knee.

" You were speaking about its being a girl," said Miss Betsey.
" I have no doubt it will be a girl. I have a presentiment
that it must be a girl. Now, child, from the moment of the
birth of this girl "

" Perhaps boy," my mother took the liberty of putting in.

" I tell you I have a presentiment that it must be a girl,"
returned Miss Betsey. "Don't contradict. From the moment
of this girl's birth, child, I intend to be her friend. I intend to
be her godmother, and I beg you'll call her Betsey Trotwood
Copperfield. There must be no mistakes in life with this
Betsey Trotwood. There must be no trifling with her affections,
poor dear. She must be well brought up, and well guarded
from reposing any foolish confidences where they are not
deserved. I must make that my care."

There was a twitch of Miss Betsey's head, after each of
these sentences, as if her own old wrongs were working within
her, and she repressed any plainer reference to them by strong
constraint. So my mother suspected, at least, as she observed
her by the low glimmer of the fire : too much scared by Miss
Betsey, too uneasy in herself, and too subdued and bewildered
altogether, to observe anything very clearly, or to know what
to say.

** And was David good to you, child ? *' asked Miss Betsey,
when she had been silent for a little while, and these motions
of her head had gradually ceased. "Were you comfortable
together ? "

"We were very happy," said my mother. " Mr. Copperfield
was only too good to me."

" What, he spoilt you, I suppose ? " returned Miss Betsey.

"For being quite alone and dependent on myself in this
rough world again, yes, I fear he did indeed," sobbed my
mother.

" Well ! Don't cry ! " said Miss Betsey. " You were not
equally matched, child — if any two people can be equally
matched — and so I asked the question. You were an orphan,
weren't you ? "

"Yes."

" And a governess ? "

" I was nursery-governess in a family where Mr. Copperfield
came to visit. Mr. Copperfield was very kind to me, and took

8 David Copperfield

a great deal of notice of me, and paid me a good deal of
attention, and at last proposed to me. And I accepted him.
And so we were married," said my mother simply.

" Ha ! Poor Baby 1 " mused Miss Betsey, with her frown
still bent upon the fire. " Do you know anything ? "

" I beg your pardon, ma'am," faltered my mother.

" About keeping house, for instance," said Miss Betsey.

" Not much, I fear," returned my mother. " Not so
much as I could wish. But Mr. Copperfield was teaching
me—"

("Much he knew about it himself!") said Miss Betsey in a
parenthesis.

— " And I hope I should have improved, being very anxious
to learn, and he very patient to teach, if the great misfortune
of his death " — my mother broke down again here, and could
get no farther.

" Well, well ! " said Miss Betsey.

— " I kept my housekeeping-book regularly, and balanced it
with Mr, Copperfield every night," cried my mother in another
burst of distress, and breaking down again.

" Well, well ! " said Miss Betsey. " Don't cry any more."

— "And I am sure we never had a word of difference
respecting it, except when Mr. Copperfield objected to my
threes and fives being too much like each other, or to my
putting curly tails to my sevens and nines," resumed my mother
in another burst, and breaking down again.

" You'll make yourself ill," said Miss Betsey, " and you know
that will not be good either for you or for my god-daughter.
Come ! You mustn't do it I "

This argument had some share in quieting my mother,
though her increasing indisposition had perhaps a larger one.
There was an interval of silence, only broken by Miss Betsey's
occasionally ejaculating " Ha ! " as she sat with her feet upon
the fender.

" David has bought an annuity for himself with his money, I
know," said she, by and by. " What did he do for you ? "

" Mr. Copperfield," said my mother, answering with some
difficulty, "was so considerate and good as to secure the
reversion of a part of it to me."

" How much ? " asked Miss Betsey.

" A hundred and five pounds a year," said my mother.

" He might have done worse," said my aunt.

The word was appropriate to the moment. My mother was
so much worse that Peggotty, coming in with the tea-board and

David Copperfield 9

candles, and seeing at a glance how ill she was, — as Miss
Betsey might have done sooner, if there had been light enough,
— conveyed her up-stairs to her own room with all speed : and
immediately despatched Ham Peggotty, her nephew, who had
been for some days past secreted in the house, unknown to my
mother, as a special messenger in case of emergency, ■ to fetch
the nurse and doctor.

Those allied powers were considerably astonished, when
they arrived within a few minutes of each other, to find an
unknown lady of portentous appearance sitting before the fire,
with her bonnet tied over her left arm, stopping her ears^ with
jewellers' cotton. Peggotty knowing nothing about her, and
my mother saying nothing about her, she was quite a mystery
in the parlour; and the fact of her having a magazine of
jewellers' cotton in her pocket, and sticking the article in her
ears in that way, did not detract from the solemnity of her
presence.

The doctor having been up-stairs and come down again,
and having satisfied himself, I suppose, that there was a proba-
bility of this unknown lady and himself having to sit there, face
to face, for some hours, laid himself out to be polite and
social. He was the meekest of his sex, the mildest of little
men. He sidled in and out of a room, to take up the less
space. He walked as softly as the Ghost in Hamlet, and more
slowly. He carried his head on one side, partly in modest
depreciation of himself, partly in modest propitiation of every-
body else. It is nothing to say that he hadn't a word to throw
at a dog. He couldn't have thrown a word at a mad dog.
He might have offered him one gently, or half a one, or a
fragment of one ; for he spoke as slowly as he walked ; but he
wouldn't have been rude to him, and he couldn't have been
quick with him, for any earthly consideration.

Mr. Chillip, looking mildly at my aunt with his head on one
side, and making her a little bow, said, in allusion to the
jewellers' cotton, as he softly touched his left ear :

" Some local irritation, ma'am ? "

" What 1 " replied my aunt, pulling the cotton out of one ear
like a cork.

Mr. Chillip was so alarmed by her abruptness — as he told
my mother afterwards — that it was a mercy he didn't lose his
presence of mind. But he repeated sweetly :

" Some local irritation, ma'am ? "

" Nonsense I " replied my aunt, and corked herself again, at
one blow.

lo David Copperfield

Mr. Chillip could do nothing after this, but sit and look at
her feebly, as she sat and looked at the fire, until he was called
up-stairs again. After some quarter of an hour's absence, he
returned.

"Well?" said my aunt, taking the cotton out of the ear
nearest to him.

"Well, ma'am," returned Mr. Chillip, "we are — we are
progressing slowly, ma'am."

" Ba — a — ah ! " said my aunt, with a perfect shake on the
contemptuous mterjection. And corked herself as before.

Really — really — as Mr. Chillip told my mother, he was
almost shocked ; speaking in a professional point of view
alone he was almost shocked. But he sat and looked at her,
notwithstanding, for nearly two hours, as she sat looking at
the fire, until he was again called out. After another absence,
he again returned.

" Well ? " said my aunt, taking out the cotton on that side
again.

"Well, ma'am," returned Mr. ChDlip, "we are — we are
progressing slowly, ma'am."

** Ya — a — ah ! " said my aunt. With such a snarl at him,
that Mr. Chillip absolutely could not bear it. It was really
calculated to break his spirit, he said afterwards. He preferred
to go and sit upon the stairs, in the dark and a strong draught,
until he was again sent for.

Ham Peggotty, who went to the national school, and was a
very dragon at his catechism, and who may therefore be
regarded as a credible witness, reported next day, that happen-
ing to peep in at the parlour-door an hour after this, he was
instantly descried by Miss Betsey, then walking to and fro in a
state of agitation, and pounced upon before he could make his
escape. That there were now occasional sounds of feet and
voices overheard which he inferred the cotton did not exclude,
from the circumstance of his evidently being clutched by the
lady as a victim on whom to expend her superabundant agita-
tion when the sounds were loudest. That, marching him
constantly up and down by the collar (as if he had been taking
too much laudanum), she, at those times, shook him, rumpled
his hair, made light of his linen, stopped his ears as if she
confounded them with her own, and otherwise touzled and
maltreated him. This was in part confirmed by his aunt, who
saw him at half-past twelve o'clock, soon after his release,
and affirmed that he was then as red as I was.

The mild Mr. Chillip could not possibly bear malice at such

David Copperfield ii

a time, if at any time. He sidled into the parlour as soon as
he was at liberty, and said to my aunt in his meekest maimer :

" Well, ma'am, I am happy to congratulate you."

"What upon ? " said my aunt, sharply.

Mr. Chillip was fluttered again, by the extreme severity of
my aunt's manner ; so he made her a little bow, and gave her
a little smile to mollify her.

"Mercy on the man, what's he doing!" cried my aunt,
impatiently. " Can't he speak ? "

" Be calm, my dear ma'am," said Mr. Chillip, in his softest
accents. "There is no longer any occasion for uneasiness,
ma'am. Be calm."

It has since been considered almost a miracle that my aunt
didn't shake him, and shake what he had to say out of him.
She only shook her own head at him, but in a way that made
him quail.

"Well, ma'am," resumed Mr. Chillip, as soon as he had
courage, " I am happy to congratulate you. All is now over,
ma'am, and well over."

During the five minutes or so that Mr. Chillip devoted to
the delivery of this oration, my aunt eyed him narrowly.

" How is she ? " said my aunt, folding her arms with her
bonnet still tied on one of them.

" Well, ma'am, she will soon be quite comfortable, I hope,"
returned Mr. Chillip. " Quite as comfortable as we can expect
a young mother to be, under these melancholly domestic
circumstances. There cannot be any objection to your seeing
her presently, ma'am. It may do her good."

" And she. How is she ? " said my aunt, sharply.

Mr. Chillip laid his head a little more on one side, and
looked at my aunt like an amiable bird.

" The baby," said my aunt. " How is she ? " ^

" Ma'am," returned Mr. Chillip, " I apprehended you had
known. It's a boy."

My aunt said never a word, but took her bormet by the
strings, in the manner of a sling, aimed a blow at Mr. Chillip's
head with it, put it on bent, walked out, and never came back.
She vanished like a discontented fairy ; or like one of those
supernatural beings whom it was popularly supposed I was
entitled to see : and never came back any more.

No. I lay in my basket, and my mother lay in her bed ; but
Betsey Trotwood Copperfield was for ever in the land of
dreams and shadows, the tremendous region whence I had so
lately travelled ; and the light upon the window of our room

12 David Copperfield

shone out upon the earthly bourne of all such travellers, and
the mound above the ashes and the dust that once was he,
without whom I had never, been.

CHAPTER II

I OBSERVE

The first objects that assume a distinct presence before me,
as I look far back, into the blank of my infancy, are my mother
with her pretty hair and youthful shape, and^PgggOtJtir with"n^
shape at all, and eyes so dark that they seemed to darken their
whole neighbourhood in her face, and cheeks and arms so hard
and red that I wondered the birds didn't peck her in preference
to apples.

I believe I can remember these two at a little distance apart,
dwarfed to my sight by stooping down or kneeling on the floor,
and I going unsteadily from the one to the other. I have an
impression on my mind which I cannot distinguish from actual
remembrance, of the touch of Peggotty's forefinger as she used
to hold it out to me, and of its being roughened by needlework,
like a pocket nutmeg-grater.

This may be fancy, though I think the memory of most of
us can go farther back into such times than many of us suppose ;
just as I believe the power of observation in numbers of very
young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and
accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown men who are
remarkable in this respect, may with greater propriety be said
not to have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it; the
rather, as I generally observe such men to retain a certain
freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased,
which are also an inheritance they have preserved from their
childhood.

I might have a misgiving that I am " meandering." in stopping
to say this, but that it brings me to remark that I build these
conclusions, in part upon my own experience of myself; and
if it should appear from anything I may set down in this
narrative that I was a child of close observation, or that as
a man I have a strong memory of my childhood, I undoubtedly
lay claim to both of these characteristics.

Looking back, as I was saying, into the blank of my infancy,
the first objects I can remember as standing out by themselves

David Copperfield 13

from a confusion of things, are my motherand Peggottj.^ What
else do I remember ? Let me see.

There comes out of the cloud, our house — not new to me,
but quite familiar, in its earliest remembrance. On the ground-
floor is Peggotty's kitchen, opening into a back yard ; with a
pigeon-house on a pole, in the centre, without any pigeons in
it; a great dog-kennel in a comer, without any dog; and a
quantity of fowls that look terribly tall to me, walking about in
a menacing and ferocious manner. There is one cock who gets
upon a post to crow, and seems to take particular notice of me
as I look at him through the kitchen window, who makes me
shiver, he is so fierce. Of the geese outside the side-gate who
come waddling after me with their long necks stretched out
when I go that way, I dream at night ; as a man environed by
wild beasts might dream of lions.

Here is a long passage — what an enormous perspective I
make of it ! — leading from Peggotty's kitchen to the front door.
A dark store-room opens out of it, and that is a place to be
run past at night ; for I don't know what may be among those
tubs and jars and old tea-chests, when there is nobody in there
with a dimly-buming light, letting a mouldy air come out at the
door, in which there is the smell of soap, pickles, pepper,
candles, and coffee, all at one whiflf. Then there are the two
parlours ; the parlour in which we sit of an evening, my mother
and I and Peggotty — for Peggotty is quite our companion, when
her work is done and we are alone — and the best parlour where
we sit on a Sunday ; grandly, but not so comfortably. There
is something of a doleful air about that room to me, for Peggotty
has told me — I don't know when, but apparently ages ago —
about my father's funeral, and the company having their black
cloaks put on. One Sunday night my mother reads to Peggotty
and me in there, how Lazarus was raised up from the dead.
And I am so frightened that they are afterwards obliged to take
me out of bed, and show me the quiet churchyard out of the
bedroom window, with the dead all lying in their graves at rest,
below the solemn moon.

There is nothing half so green that I know anywhere, as the
grass of that churchyard ; nothing half so shady as its trees ;
nothing half so quiet as its tombstones. The sheep are feeding
there, when I kneel up, early in the morning, in my little bed
in a closet within my mother's room, to look out at it ; and I
see the red light shining on the sun-dial, and think within
myself, "Is the sun-dial glad, I wonder, that it can tell the
time again?"

14 David Copperfield

Here is our pew in the church. What a high-backed pew !
With a window' near it, out of which our house can be seen,
and is seen many times during the morning's service, by
Peggotty, who likes to make herself as sure as she can that it's
not being robbed, or is not in flames. But though Peggotty's
eye wanders, she is much offended if mine does, and frowns to
me, as I stand upon the seat, that I am to look at the clergy-
man. But I can't always look at him — I know him without
that white thing on, and I am afraid • of his wondering why I
stare so, and perhaps stopping the service to inquire — and what
am I to do? It's a dreadful thing to gape, but I must do
something. I look at my mother, but she pretends not to se^
me. I look at a boy in the aisle, and he makes faces at me.
I look at the sunlight coming in at the open door through the
porch, and there I see a stray sheep — I don't mean a sinner,
but mutton — half making up his mind to come into the church,
I feel that if I looked at him any longer, I might be tempted
to say something out loud ; and what would become of me
then ! I look up at the monumental tablets on the wall, and
try to think of Mr. Bodgers late of this parish, and what the\^
feelings of Mrs. Bodgers must have been, when affliction sore,
long time Mr. Bodgers bore, and physicians were in vain. 1/
wonder whether they called in Mr. Chillip, and he was in vain ;
and if so, how he likes to be reminded of it once a week. I
look from Mr. Chillip, in his Sunday neckcloth, to the pulpi^f
and think what a good place it would be to play in, and what
a castle it would make, with another boy coming up the st&irs
to attack it, and having the velvet cushion with the tassels
thrown down on his head. In time my eyes gradually shut
up; and, from seeming to hear the clergyman singing a
drowsy song in the heat, I hear nothing, until I fall off the
seat with a crash, and am taken out, more dead than alive, by
Peggotty.

And now I see the outside of our house, with the latticed
bedroom windows standing open to let in the sweet-smelling
air, and the ragged old rooks'-nests still dangling in the elm-
trees at the bottom of the front garden. Now I am in the
garden at the back, beyond the yard where the empty pigeon-
house and dog-kennel are — a very preserve of butterflies, as 1
remember it, with a high fence, and a gate and padlock ; where
the fruit clusters on the trees, riper and richer than fruit has
ever been since, in any other garden, and where my mother
gathers some in a basket, while I stand by, bolting furtive
gooseberries, and trying to look unmoved. A great wind rises,

David Copperfield 15

and the summer is gone in a moment We are playing in the
winter twilight, dancing about the parlour. When my mother
is out of breath and rests herself in an e\bow-chair, I watch her
winding her bright curls round her fingers, and straightening her
waist, and nobody knows better than I do that she likes to look
so well, and is proud of being so pretty.

That is among my very earliest impressions. That, and a ]
sense that we were both a little afraid of Peggotty, and submitted j
ourselves in most things to her direction, were among the first
opinions — if they, may be so called — that I ever derived from
what I saw.

Peggotty and I were sitting one night by the parlour fire,
alone. I had been reading to Peggotty about crocodiles. I
must have read very perspicuously, or the poor soul must have
been deeply interested, for I remember she had a cloudy im-
pression, after I had done, that they were a sort of vegetable.
I was tired of reading, and dead sleepy ; but having leave, as a
high treat, to sit up until my mother came home from spending
the evening at a neighbour's, I would rather have died upon my
post (of course) than have gone to bed. I had reached that
stage of sleepiness when Peggotty seemed to swell and grow
immensely large./ I propped my eyelids open with my two
forefingers, and looked perseveringly at her as she sat at work ;
at the little bit of wax-candle she kept for her thread — how old
it looked, being so wrinkled in all directions ! — at the little
house with a thatched roof, where the yard-measure lived ; at
her work-box with a sliding lid, with a view of St. Paul's Cathedral
(with a pink dome) painted on the top ; at the brass thimble on
her finger ; ^jtherseif,_ffihQin T thnugblJQyely- [ I felt so sleepy,
that I knewlrXlost sight of anything, for a moment, I was
gone.

" Peggotty," says I, suddenly, " were you ever married ? "

"Lord, Master Davy," replied Peggotty. "What's put
marriage in your head?"

She answered with such a start, that it quite awoke me.
And then she stopped in her work, and looked at me, with her
needle drawn out to its thread's length.

"But were you ever married, Peggotty?" says I. "You ]
are a very handsome woman, an't you?"

I thought her in a different style from my mother, certainly ;
but of another school of beauty, I considered her a perfect
example. There was a red velvet footstool in the best parlour,
on which my mother had painted a nosegay. The ground-
work of that stool and Peggotty's complexion appeared to me

1 6 David Copperfield

to be one and the same thing. The stool was smooth, and
Peggotty was rough, bat that made no diflference.

" Me handsome, Davy ? " said Peggotty. " Lawk, no, my
dear! But what put marriage in your head?"

" I don't know 1 — You mustn't marry more than one person
at a time, may you, Peggotty ? "

" Certainly not," says Peggotty, with the promptest decision.

" But if you marry a person, and the person dies, why then
you may marry another person, mayn't you, Peggotty ? "

" You MAY," says Peggotty, " if you choose, my dear. That's
a matter of opinion."

" But what is your opinion, Peggotty ? " said I.

I asked her, and looked curiously at her, because she looked
so curiously at me.

" My opinion is," said Peggotty, taking her eyes from me,
after a little indecision and going on with her work, " that I
never was married myself, Master Davy, and that I don't
expect to be. That's all I know about the subject."

"You an't cross, I suppose, Peggotty, are you?" said I,
after sitting quiet for a minute.

I really thought she was, she had been so short with me ;
but I was quite mistaken : for she laid aside her work (which
was a stocking of her own), and opening her arms wide, took
my curly head within them, and gave it a good squeeze. I
know it was a good squeeze, because, being very plump, when-
ever she made any little exertion after she was dressed, some
of the buttons on the back of her gown flew off. And I
recollect two bursting to the opposite side of the parlour, while
she was hugging me.

" Now let me hear some more about the Crorkindills," said
Peggotty, who was not quite right in the name yet, " for I an't
heard half enough."

I couldn't quite understand why Peggotty looked so queer,
or why she was so ready to go back to the crocodiles. How-
ever, we returned to those monsters, with fresh wakefulness on
my part, and we left their eggs in the sand for the sun to
hatch ; and we ran away from them, and baffled them by con-
stantly turning, which they were unable to do quickly, on
account of their unwieldy make ; and we went into the water
after them, as natives, and put sharp pieces of timber down
their throats ; and in short we ran the whole crocodile gauntlet.
/ did, at least ; but I had my doubts of Peggotty, who was
\ thoughtfully sticking her needle into various parts of her face
\ and arms all the time.

David Copperfield 17

We had exhausted the crocodiles, and begun with the
alligators, when the garden-bell rang. We went out to the
door ; and there was my mother, looking unusually pretty, I
thought, and with her a gentleman with beautiful black hair
and whiskers, who had walked home with us from church last
Sunday.

As my mother stooped down on the threshold to take me
in her arms and kiss me, the gentleman said I was a more
highly privileged little fellow than a monarch — or something
like that ; for my later understanding comes, I am sensible, to j ^ ;
my aid here. / '|

" What does that mean ? " I asked him, over her shoulder. *

He patted me on the head ; but somehow, I didn't like him
or his deep voice, and I was jealous that his hand should touch
my mother's in touching me — which it did. I put ^it away as
well as I could.

" Oh, Davy ! " remonstrated my mother.

" Dear boy ! " said the gentleman. " I cannot wonder at
his devotion ! "

I never saw such a beautiful colour on my mother's face
before. She gently chid me for being rude ; and, keeping me
close to her shawl, turned to thank the gentleman for taking
so much trouble as to bring her home. She put out her hand
to him as she spoke, and, as he met it with his own, she glanced,
I thought, at me.

"Let us say 'good night,' my fine boy," said the gentleman,
when he had bent his head — 1 saw him ! — over my mother's
little glove.

"Goodnight!" said I.

" Come ! Let us be the best friends in the world ! " said
the gentleman, laughing. " Shake hands ! "

My right hand was in my mother's left, so I gave him the
other.

"Why, that's the wrong hand, Davy!" laughed the
gentleman.

My mother drew my right hand forward, but I was resolved,
for my former reason, not to give it him, and I did not. I
gave him the other, and he shook it heartily, and said I was a
brave fellow, and went away.

At this minute I see him turn round in the garden, and give
us a last look with his ill-omened black eyes, before the door
was shut.

Peggotty, who had not said a word or moved a finger,
secured the fastenings instantly, and we all went into the

1 8 David Copperfield

parlour. My mother, contrary to her usual habit, instead of
coming to the elbow-chair by the fire, remained at the other
end of the room, and sat singing to herself.

— "Hope you have had a pleasant evening, ma'am," said
I Peggotty, standing as stiff as a barrel in the centre of the room,
\ with a candlestick in her hand.

" Much obliged to you, Peggotty," returned my mother in a
cheerful voice, " I have had a very pleasant evening."

" A stranger or so makes an agreeable change," suggested
Peggotty.

" A very agreeable change, indeed," returned my mother.

Peggotty continuing to stand motionless in the middle of
the room, and my mother resuming her singing, I fell asleep,
though I was not so sound asleep but that I could hear voices,
without hearing what they said. When I half awoke from this
uncomfortable doze, I found Peggotty and my mother both in
tears, and both talking.

"Not such a one as this, Mr. Copperfield wouldn't have
liked," said Peggotty. "That I say, and that I swear ! "

" Good Heavens ! " cried my mother, " you'll drive me mad !
Was ever any poor girl so ill-used by her servants as I am !
Why do I do myself the injustice of calling myself a girl?
Have I never been married, Peggotty?"

" God knows you have, ma'am," returned Peggotty.

"Then, how can you dare," said my mother — "you know
I don't mean how can you dare, Peggotty, but how can you
have the heart — to make me so uncomfortable and say such
bitter things to me, when you are well aware that I haven't,
out of this place, a single friend to turn to?"
~^*The more's the reason," returned Peggotty, "for saying
that it won't do. No ! That it won't do. No ! No price
could make it do. No!" — I thought Peggotty would have
thrown the candlestick away, she was so emphatic with it.

" How can you be so aggravating," said my mother, shed-
ing more tears than before, "as to talk in such an unjust
manner ! How can you go on as if it was all settled and
arranged, Peggotty, when I tell you over and over again, you
cruel thing, that beyond the commonest civilities nothing has
passed! You talk of admiration. What am I to do? If
people are so silly as to indulge the sentiment, is it my fault ?
What am I to do, I ask you ? Would you wish me to shave
my head and black my face, or disfigure myself with a burn,
or a scald, or something of that sort ? I dare say you would,
Peggotty. I dare say you'd quite enjoy it."

David Copperfield 19

Peggotty seemed to take this aspersion very much to heart,
I thought.

"And my dear boy," cried my mother, coming to the elbow-
chair in which I was, and caressing me, " my own little Davy !
Is it to be hinted to me that I am wanting in affection for my
precious treasure, the dearest little fellow that ever was ! "

" Nobody never went and hinted no such a thing," said
Peggotty.

" You did, Peggotty ! " returned my mother. " You know
you did. What else was it possible to infer from what you
said, you unkind creature, when you know as well as I do, that
on his account only last quarter I wouldn't buy myself a new
parasol, though that old green one is frayed the whole way up,
and the fringe is perfectly mangy ? You know it is, Peggotty ;
you can't deny it." Then, turning affectionately to me, with
her cheek against mine, "Am I a naughty mama to you,
Davy ? Am I a nasty, cruel, selfish, bad mama ? Say I am,
my child ; say * yes,' dear boy, and Peggotty will love you ;
and Peggotty's love is a great deal better than mine, Davy. /
don't love you at all, do I ? "

At this, we all fell a-crying together. I think I was the
loudest of the party, but I am sure we were all sincere about
it. I was quite heart-broken myself, and am afraid that in the
first transports of wounded tenderness I called Peggotty a
"Beast." That honest creature was in deep affliction, I
remember, and must have become quite buttonless on the
occasion ; for a little volley of those explosives went off, when,
after having made it up with my mother, she kneeled down by
the elbow-chair, and made it up with me.

We went to bed greatly dejected. My sobs kept waking me,
for a long time ; and when one very strong sob quite hoisted
me up in bed, I found my mother sitting on the coverlet, and
leaning over me. I fell asleep in her arms, after that, and slept/
soundly.

Whether it was the following Sunday when I saw the gentle-
man again, or whether there was any greater lapse of time
before he re-appeared, I cannot recall. I don't profess to be
clear about dates. But there he was, in church, and he walked
home with us afterwards. He came in, too, to look at a
famous geranium we had, in the parlour-window. It did not
appear to me that he took much notice of it, but before he
went he asked my mother to give him a bit of the blossom.
She begged him to choose it for himself, but he refused to do
that — I could not understand why — so she plucked it for him,

20 David Copperfield

and gave it into his hand. He said he would never, never
part with it any more ; and I thought he must be quite a fool
not to know that it would fall to pieces in a day or two.

Peggotty began to be less with us, of an evening, than she
had always been. My mother deferred to her very much —
more than usual, it occurred to me — and we were all three
excellent friends; still we were different from what we used
to be, and were not so comfortable among ourselves. Some-
times I fancied that Peggotty perhaps objected to my mother's
wearing all the pretty dresses she had in her drawers, or to
her going so often to visit at that neighbour's ; but I couldn't,
to my satisfaction, make out how it was.

Gradually, I became used to seeing the gentleman with the
black whiskers. I liked him no better than at first, and had
the same uneasy jealousy of him ; but if I had any reason for
it beyond a"child's instinctive dislike, and a general idea that
Peggotty and I could make much of my mother without any
help, it certainly was not the reason that I might have found
if I had been older. No such thing came into my mind, or
near it. I could observe, in little pieces, as it were ; but as to
making a net of a number of these pieces, and catching anybody
in it, that was, as yet, beyond me.

One autumn morning I was with my mother in the front
garden, when Mr. Murdstone — I knew him by that name
now — came by, on horseback. He reined up his horse to
salute my mother, and said he was going to Lowestoft to
see some friends who were there with a yacht, and merrily
proposed to take me on the saddle before him if I would
like the ride.

The air was so clear and pleasant, and the horse seemed
to like the idea of the ride so much himself, as he stood
snorting and pawing at the garden-gate, that I had a great
desire to go. So I was sent up-stairs to Peggotty to be made
spruce; and, in the meantime, Mr. Murdstone dismounted,
and, with his horse's bridle drawn over his arm, walked slowly
up and down on the outer side of the sweetbriar fence,
while my mother walked slowly up and down on the inner,
to keep him company. I recollect Peggotty and I peeping
out at them from my little window; I recollect how closely
they seemed to be examining the sweetbriar between them, as
they strolled along ; and how, from being in a perfectly angelic
temper, Peggotty turned cross in a moment, and brushed my
hair the wrong way, excessively hard.

Mr. Murdstone and I were soon off, and trotting along on

David Copperfield 21

the green turf by the side of the road. He held me quite
easily with one arm, and I don't think I was restless usually ;
but I could not make up my mind to sit in front of him
without turning my head sometimes, and looking up in his
face. He had that kind of shallow black eye — I want a
better word to express an eye that has no depth in it to be
looked into — which, when it is abstracted, seems, from some
peculiarity of light, to be disfigured, for a moment at a time,
by a cast. Several times when I glanced at him, I observed
that appearance with a sort of awe, and wondered what he
was thinking about so closely. His hair and whiskers were
blacker and thicker, looked at so near, than even I had given
them credit for being. A squareness about the lower part of
his face, and the dotted indication of the strong black beard
he shaved close every day, reminded me of the waxwork that
had travelled into our neighbourhood some half-a-year before.
This, his regular eyebrows, and the rich white, and black,
and brown, of his complexion — coiifau»44ns complexion, and
his memory ! — made me think him, in spite of my misgivings,
a very handsome man. I have no doubt that my poor dear
mother thought him so too.

We went to an hotel by the sea, where two gentlemen were
smoking cigars in a room by themselves. Each of them was
lying on at least four chairs, and had a large rough jacket on.
In a corner was a heap of coats and boat-cloaks, and a flag, all
bundled up together.

They both rolled on to their feet, in an untidy sort of
manner, when we came in, and said, " Halloa, Murdstone I
We thought you were dead ! "

" Not yet," said Mr. Murdstone.

"And who's this shaver?" said one of the gentlemen, taking
hold of me.

" That's Davy," returned Mr. Murdstone.

*' Davy who ? " said the gentleman. " Jones ? **

" Copperfield," said Mr. Murdstone.

" What ! Bewitching Mrs. Copperfield's incumbrance?" cried
the gentleman. " The pretty little widow ? "

" Quinion," said Mr. Murdstone, " take care, if you please.
Somebody's sharp,"

" Who is ? " asked the gentleman, laughing.

I looked up, quickly ; being curious to know.

" Only Brooks of Sheffield," said Mr. Murdstone.

I was quite relieved to find that it was only Brooks of
Sheffield; for, at first, I really thought it was I.

22 David Copperfield

There seemed to be something very comical in the reputation
of Mr. Brooks of Sheffield, for both the gentlemen laughed
heartily when he was mentioned, and Mr. Murdstone was a
good deal amused also. After some laughing, the gentleman
whom he had called Quinion said:

" And what is the opinion of Brooks of Sheffield, in reference
to the projected business ? "

" Why, I don't know that Brooks understands much about it
at present," replied Mr. Murdstone ; " but he is not generally
favourable, I believe."

There was more laughter at this, and Mr. Quinion said he
would ring the bell for some sherry in which to drink to
Brooks. This he did; and when the wine came, he made
me have a little, with a biscuit, and, before I drank it, stand
up and say, " Confusion to Brooks of Sheffield ! " The toast
was received with great applause, " and such hearty laughter
that it made me laugh too ; at which they laughed the more.
In short, we quite enjoyed ourselves.

We walked about on the cliff after that, and sat on the
grass, and looked at things through a telescope — I could
make out nothing myself when it was put to my eye, but I
pretended I could — and then we came back to the hotel to
an early dinner. All the time we were out, the two gentle-
men smoked incessantly — which, I thought, if I might judge
from the smell of their rough coats, they must have been doing,
ever since the coats had first come home from the tailor's.
I must not forget that we went on board the yacht, where
they all three descended into the cabin, and were busy with
some papers. I saw them quite hard at work, when I looked
down through the open skylight. They left me, during this
time, with a very nice man, with a very large head of red
hair and a very small shiny hat upon it, who had got a cross-
barred shirt or waistcoat on, with " Skylark " in capital letters
across the chest. I thought it was his name ; and that as he
lived on board ship and hadn't a street-door to put his name
on, he put it there instead ; but when I called him Mr. Skylark,
he said it meant the vessel.

I observed all day that Mr. Murdstone was graver and steadier
than the two gentlemen. They were very gay and careless.
They joked freely with one another, but seldom with him. It
appeared to me that he was more clever and cold than they
were, and that they regarded him with something of my own
feeling. I remarked that, once or twice, when Mr. Quinion
was talking, he looked at Mr. Murdstone sideways, as if to

David Copperfield 23

make sure of his not being displeased; and that once when
Mr. Passnidge (the other gentleman) was in high spirits, he
trod upon his foot, and gave him a secret caution with his
eyes, to observe Mr. Murdstone, who was sitting stem and
silent. Nor do I recollect that Mr. Murdstone laughed at all
that day, except at the Sheffield joke — and that, by the bye, was
his own.

We went home early in the evening. It was a very fine
evening, and my mother and he had another stroll by the
sweetbriar, while I was sent in to get my tea. When he was
gone, my mother asked me all about the day I had had,
and what they had said and done. I mentioned what they
had said about her, and she laughed, and told me they were
impudent fellows who talked nonsense — but I knew it pleased
her. I knew it quite as well as I know it now. I took the
opportunity of asking if she was at all acquainted with Mr.
Brooks of Sheffield, but she answered No, only she supposed
he must be a manufacturer in the knife and fork way. ,

Can I say of her face — altered as I have reason to remember
it, perished as I know it is — that it is gone, when here it
comes before me at this instant, as distinct as any face that
I may choose to look on in a crowded street? Can I say
of her innocent and girlish beauty, that it faded, and was no .
more, when its breath falls on my cheek now, as it fell that \
night ? Can I say she ever changed, when my remembrance \
brings her back to life, thus only; and, truer to its loving \
youth than I have been, or man ever is, still holds fast what I
it cherished then ? "^J

I write of her just as she was when I had gone to bed after
this talk, and she came to bid me good night. She kneeled
down playfully by the side of the bed, and laying her chin upon
her hands, and laughing, said :

" What was it they said, Davy ? Tell me again. I can't
believe it."

" * Bewitching ' " I began.

My mother put her hands upon my lips to stop me.

" It was never bewitching," she said, laughing. " It never
could have been bewitching, Davy. Now I know it wasn't ! "

"Yes, it was. 'Bewitching Mrs. Copperfield,' " I repeated
stoutly. " And, ' pretty.' "

" No, no, it was never pretty. Not pretty," interposed my
mother, laying her fingers on my lips again.

" Yes it was. ' Pretty little widow.' "

"What foolish, impudent creatures]" cried my mother,

24 David Copperfield

laughing and covering her face. " What ridiculous men !
An't they? Davy dear "

"Well, Ma."

" Don't tell Peggotty ; she might be angry with them. I am
dreadfully angry with them myself; but I would rather Peggotty
didn't know."

I promised, of course ; and we kissed one another over and
over again, and I soon fell fast asleep.

It seems to me, at this distance of time, as if it were the next
day when Peggotty broached the striking and adventurous
proposition I am about to mention ; but it was probably about
two months afterwards.

We were sitting as before, one evening (when my mother
was out as before), in company with the stocking and the
yard measure, and the bit of wax, and the box with Saint
Paul's on the lid, and the crocodile book, when Peggotty
after looking at me several times, and opening her mouth
as if she were going to speak, without doing it — which I
thought was merely gaping, or I should have been rather
alarmed — said coaxingly :

" Master Davy, how should you like to go along with me
and spend a fortnight at my brother's at Yarmouth ? Wouldn't
that be a treat ? "

" Is your brother an agreeable man, Peggotty ? " I inquired,
provisionally.

" Oh, what an agreeable man he is ! " cried Peggotty,
holding up her hands. " Then there's the sea ; and the boats
and ships ; and the fishermen ; and the beach ; and Am to
play with "

Peggotty meant her nephew Ham, mentioned in my first
chapter ; but she spoke of him as a morsel of English
Grammar.

I was flushed by her summary of delights, and replied that
it would indeed be a treat, but what would my mother say ?

" Why then I'll as good as bet a guinea," said Peggotty, intent
upon my face, " that she'll let us go. I'll ask her, if you like,
as soon as ever she comes home. There now ! "

" But what's she to do while we are away ? " said I, puttmg
my small elbows on the table to argue the point. " She can't
live by herself."

If Peggotty were looking for a hole, all of a sudden, in the
heel of that stocking, it must have been a very little one indeed,
and not worth darning.

" I say ! Peggotty ! She can't live by herself, you know."

David Copperfield 25

" Oh bless you ! " said Peggotty, looking at me again at
last. " Don't you know ? She's going to stay for a fortnight
with Mrs. Grayper. Mrs. Grayper's going to have a lot of
company."

Oh ! If that was it, I was quite ready to go. I waited,
in the utmost impatience, until my mother came home from
Mrs. Grayper's (for it was that identical neighbour), to ascertain
if we could get leave to carry out this great idea. Without
being nearly so much surprised as I expected, my mother
entered into it readily ; and it was all arranged that night, and
my board and lodging during the visit were to be paid for.

The day soon came for our going. It was such an early
day that it came soon, even to me, who was in a fever of
expectation, and half afraid that an earthquake or a fiery
mountain, or some other great convulsion of nature, might
interpose to stop the expedition. We were to go in a carrier's
cart, which departed in the morning after breakfast. I would
have given any money to have been allowed to wrap myself up
over-night, and sleep in my hat and boots.

It touches me nearly now, although I tell it lightly, tpj
recollect how eager I was to leave my happy home ; to think |
how little I suspected what I did leave for ever.

I am glad to recollect that when the carrier's cart was at
the gate, and my mother stood there kissing me, a grateful
fondness for her and for the old place I had never turned
my back upon before, made me cry. I am glad to know that
my. mother cried too, and that I felt her heart beat against
mine.

I am glad to recollect that when the carrier began to move,
my mother ran out at the gate, and called to him to stop, that
she might kiss me once more. I am glad to dwell upon the
earnestness and love with which she lifted up her face to mine,
and did so.

As we left her standing in the road, Mr. Murdstone came
up to where she was, and seemed to expostulate with her for
being so moved. I was looking back round the awning of
the cart, and wondered what business it was of his. Peggotty,
who was also looking back on the other side, seemed any-
thing but satisfied ; as the face she brought back in the cart
denoted.

I sat looking at Peggotty for some time, in a reverie on this
supposititious case : whether, if she were employed to lose me
like the boy in the fairy tale, I should be able to track my way
home again by the buttons she would shed.

26 David Copperfield

CHAPTER III

I HAVE A CHANGE

The carrier's horse was the laziest horse in the world, I
should hope, and shuffled along, with his head down, as if
he liked to keep people waiting to whom the packages were
directed. I fancied, indeed, that he sometimes chuckled
audibly over this reflection, but the carrier said he was only
troubled with a cough.

The carrier had a way of keeping his head down, like his
horse, and of drooping sleepily forward as he drove, with one
of his arms on each of his knees. I say " drove," but it struck
me that the cart would have gone to Yarmouth quite as well
without him, for the horse did all that ; and as to conversation,
be had no idea of it but whistling.

Peggotty had a basket of refreshments on her knee, which
would have lasted us out handsomely, if we had been going
to London by the same conveyance. We ate a good deal, and
slept a good deal. Peggotty always went to sleep with her
chin upon the handle of the basket, her hold of which never
. relaxed ; and I could not have believed unless I had heard
'^er do it, that one defenceless woman could have snored so
much.

We made so many deviations up and down lanes, and were
such a long time delivering a bedstead at a public-house, and
calling at other places, that I was quite tired, and very glad,
when we saw Yarmouth. It looked rather spongy and soppy,
I thought, as I carried my eye over the great dull waste that
lay across the river ; and I could not help wondering, if the
world were really as round as my geography-book said, how
any part of it came to be so flat. But I reflected that Yarmouth
might be situated at one of the poles ; which would account
for it.

As we drew a little nearer, and saw the whole adjacent
prospect lying a straight low line under the sky, I hinted to
Peggotty that a mound or so might have improved it; and also
that if the land had been a little more separated from the sea,
and the town and the tide had not been quite so much mixed
up, like toast and water, it would have been nicer. But
Peggotty said, with greater emphasis than usual, that we must

David Copperfield 27

take things as we found them, and that, for her part, she was
proud to call herself a Yarmouth Bloater.

When we got into the street (which was strange enough to
me), and smelt the fish, and pitch, and oakum, and tar, and saw
the sailors walking about, and the carts jingling up and down
over the stones, I felt that I had done so busy a place an
injustice ; and said as much to Peggotty, who heard my expres-
sions of delight with great complacency, and told me it was
well known (I suppose to those who had the good fortune to be
born Bloaters) that Yarmouth was, upon the whole, the finest
place in the universe.

"Here's my Am!" screamed Peggotty, "growed out of
knowledge I "

He was waiting for us, in fact, at the public-house; and
asked me how I found myself, like an old acquaintance. I
did not feel, at first, that I knew him as well as he knew me,
because he had never come to our house since the night I was
born, and naturally he had the advantage of me. But our
intimacy was much advanced by his taking me on bis back to
carry me home. He was, now, a huge, strong fellow of sij
feet high, broad in proportion, and round-shouldered; but
with a simpering boy's face and curly light hair that gave him
quite a sheepish look. He was dressed in a canvas jacket, and
a pair of such very stiff trousers that they would have stood
quite as well alone, without any legs in them. And you couldn't
so properly have said he wore a hat, as that he was covered icjf
a-top, like an old building, with something pitchy.

Ham carrying me on his back and a small box of ours under
his arm, and Peggotty carrying another small box of ours, we
turned down lanes bestrewn with bits of chips and little hillocks
of sand, and went past gas-works, rope-walks, boat-builders'
yards, shifhwrights' yards, ship-breakers' yards, caulkers' yards,
riggers' lofts, smiths' forges, and a great litter of such places,
until we came out upon the dull waste I had already seen at a
distance ; when Ham said,

" Yon's our house, Mas'r Davy ! "

I looked in all directions, as far as I could stare over the
wilderness, and away at the sea, and away at the river, but no
house could / make out. There was a black barge, or some
other kind of superannuated boat, not far off, high and dry on
the ground, with an iron funnel sticking out of it for a chimney
and smoking very cosily; but nothing else in the way of a
habitation that was visible to me.

" That's not it ? " said I. " That ship-looking thing ? "

28 David Copperfield

" That's it, Mas'r Davy," returned Ham.

If it had been Aladdin's palace, roc's egg and all, I suppose
I could not have been more charmed with the romantic idea of
living in it. There was a delightful door cut in the side, and
it was roofed in, and there were little windows in it ; but the
wonderful charm of it was, that it was a real boat which had
no doubt been upon the water hundreds of times, and which
had never been intended to be lived in, on dry land. That
was the captivation of it to me. If it had ever been meant to
be lived in, I might have thought it small, or inconvenient, or
lonely; but never having been designed for any such use, it
became a perfect abode.

It was beautifully clean inside, and as tidy as possible. There
was a table, and a Dutch clock, and a chest of drawers, and on
the chest of drawers there was a tea-tray with a painting on it
of a lady with a parasol taking a walk with a military-looking
child who was trundling a hoop. The tray was kept from
tumbling down by a bible ; and the tray, if it had tumbled down,
would have smashed a quantity of cups and saucers and a tea-
pot that were grouped around the book. On the walls there
were some common coloured pictures, framed and glazed, of
scripture subjects ; such as I have never seen since in the
hands of pedlars, without seeing the whole interior of Peggotty's
brother's house again, at one view. Abraham in red going to
sacrifice Isaac in blue, and Daniel in yellow cast into a den of
green lions, were the most prominent of these. Over the
little mantel-shelf, was a picture of the Sarah Jane lugger, built
at Sunderland, with a real little wooden stern stuck on to it ; a
work of art, combining composition with carpentry, which I
considered to be one of the most enviable possessions that the
world could afford. There were some hooks in the beams of
the ceiling, the use of which I did not divine then ; and some
lockers and boxes and conveniences of that sort, which served
for seats and eked out the chairs.

All this I saw in the first glance after I crossed the threshold
— child-like, according to my theory — and then Peggotty opened
a little door and showed me my bedroom. It was the com-
pletest and most desirable bedroom ever seen — in the stem of
the vessel ; with a little window, where the rudder used to go
through ; a little looking-glass, just the right height for me,
nailed against the wall, and framed with oyster-shells ; a little
bed, which there was just room enough to get into ; and a
nosegay of seaweed in a blue mug on the table. The walls
were whitewashed as white as milk, and the patchwork

David Copperfield 29

counterpane made my eyes quite ache with its brightness. One
thing I particularly noticed in this delightful house, was the
smell of fish ; which was so searching, that when I took out my
pocket-handkerchief to wipe my nose, I found it smelt exactly as
if it had wrapped up a lobster. On my imparting this discovery
in confidence to Peggotty, she informed me that her brother
dealt in lobsters, crabs, and crawfish ; and I afterwards found
that a heap of these creatures, in a state of wonderful con-
glomeration with one another, and never leaving off pinching
whatever they laid hold of, were usually to be found in a little
wooden outhouse where the pots and kettles were kept.

We were welcomed by a very civil woman in a white apron,
whom I had seen curtseying at the door when I was on Ham's
back, about a quarter of a mile off. Likewise by a most beau-
ful little girl (or I thought her so), with a necklace of blue
beads on, who wouldn't let me kiss her when I offered to, but
ran away and hid herself. By and by, when we had dined in
a sumptuous manner oflf boiled dabs, melted butter, and
potatoes, with a chop for me, a hairy man with a very good-
natured face came home. As he called Peggotty " Lass," and
gave her a hearty smack on the cheek, I had no doubt, from the
general propriety of her conduct, that he was her brother ; and
so he turned out — being presently introduced to me as Mr.
Peggotty, the master of the house.

" Glad to see you, sir," said Mr. Peggotty. " You'll find us
rough, sir, but you'll find us ready."

I thanked him, and replied that I was sure I should be
happy in such a delightful place.

" How's your Ma, sir ? " said Mr. Peggotty. " Did you leave
her pretty jolly ? "

I gave Mr. Peggotty to understand that she was as jolly as I
could wish — and that she desired her compliments — which
was a polite fiction on my part.

" I'm much obleeged to her, I'm sure," said Mr. Peggotty.
"Well, sir, if you can make out here, for a fortnut, 'long wi'
her," nodding at his sister, *' and Ham, and little Emiy, we
shall be proud of your company."

Having done the honours of his house in this hospitable
manner, Mr. Peggotty went out to wash himself in a kettleful
of hot water, remarking that " cold would never get his muck
off." He soon returned, greatly improved in appearance ; but
so rubicund, that I couldn't help thinking his face had this
in common with the lobsters, crabs, and crawfish — that it went
into the hot water very black and came out very red.

30 David Copperfield

After tea, when the door was shut and all was made snug (the
nights being cold and misty now), it seemed to me the most
delicious retreat that the imagination of man could conceive.
To hear the wind getting up out at sea, to know that the fog
was creeping over the desolate flat outside, and to look at the
fire and think that there was no house near but this one, and
this one a boat, was like enchantment. Little Em'ly had over-
come her shyness, and was sitting by my side upon the lowest
and least of the lockers, which was just large enough for us two,
and just fitted into the chimney corner. Mrs. Peggotty, with
the white apron, was knitting on the opposite side of the fire.
Peggotty at her needlework was as much at home with Saint
Paul's and the bit of wax-candle, as if they had never known
any other roof. Ham, who had been giving me my first lesson
in all fours, was trying to recollect a scheme of telling fortunes
with the dirty cards, and was printing off fishy impressions of his
thumb on all the cards he turned./ Mr Peggotty was smoking
his pipe. I felt it was a time for conversation and confidence.

" Mr. Peggotty ! " says I.

" Sir," says he.

"Did you give your son the name of Ham, because you
lived in a sort of ark ? "

Mr. Peggotty seemed to think it a deep idea, but answered :

" No, sir. I never giv him no name."

" Who gave him that name, then ? " said I, putting question
number two of the catechism to Mr. Peggotty.

" Why, sir, his. father giv it him," said Mr. Peggotty.

" I thought you were his father ! "

" My brother Joe was his father," said Mr. Peggotty.

" Dead, Mr. Peggotty ? " I hinted, after a respectful pause.

," Drowndead," said Mr. Peggotty.

I was very much surprised that Mr. Peggotty was not Ham's
father, and began to wonder whether I was mistaken about his
relationship to anybody else there. I was so curious to know,
that I made up my mind to have it out with Mr. Peggotty.

"Little Em'ly," I said, glancing at her. "She is your
daughter, isn't she, Mr. Peggotty?"

" No, sir. My brother-in-law, Tom, was her father."

I couldn't help it. "—Dead, Mr. Peggotty?" I hinted,
after another respectful silence.

"Drowndead," said Mr. Peggotty.

I felt the difficulty of resuming the subject, but had not got
to the bottom ^ it yet, and must get to the bottom somehow.
So I said ;

David Copperfield 31

" Haven't you any children, Mr. Peggotty ? "

" No, master," he answered, with a short laugh. " I'm a
bacheldore."

" A bachelor ! " I said, astonished. " Why, who's that, Mr.
Peggotty?" Pointing to the person in the apron who was
knitting.

" That's Missis Gummidge," said Mr. Peggotty.

"Gummidge, Mr. Peggotty?"

But at this point Peggotty — I mean my own peculiar Peggotty
— made such impressive motions to me not to ask any more
questions, that I could only sit and look at all the silent com-
pany, until it was time to go to bed.^ Then, in the privacy of
my own little cabin, she informed me that Ham and Em'ly
were an orphanjaephew and niece, whom my host had at
different times adopted in their childhood, when they were
left destitute ; and that Mrs. Gummidge was the widow of his
partner in a boat, who had died very poor. He was but a poor
man himself, said Peggotty, but as good as gold and as true as
steel — those were her similes. The only subject, she informed
me, on which he ever showed a violent temper or swore an
oath, was this generosity of his ; and if it were ever referred to,
by any one of them, he struck the table a heavy blow with his
right hand (had split it on one such occasion), and swore a
dreadful oath that he would be " Gormed " if he didn't cut and
run for good, if it was ever mentioned again. It appeared, in
answer to my inquiries, that nobody had the least idea of the
etymology of this terrible verb passive to be gormed ; but that
they all regarded it as constituting a most solemn imprecation.

I was very sensible of my entertainer's goodness, and listened
to the women's going to bed in another little crib like mine at
the opposite end of the boat, and to him and Ham hanging up
two hammocks for themselves on the hooks I had noticed in
the roof, in a very luxurious state of mind, enhanced by my
being sleepy. As slumber gradually stole upon me, I heard
the wind howling out at sea and coming on across the flat so
fiercely, that I had a lazy apprehension of the great deep rising
in the night. But I bethought myself that I was in a boat,
after all; and that a man like Mr. Peggotty was not a bad
person to have on board if anything did happen.

Nothing happened, however, worse than morning. Almost
as soon as it shone upon the oyster-shell frame of my mirror I
was out of bed, and out with little Em'ly, picking up stones
upon the beach.

" You're quite a sailor, I suppose ? " I said to Em'ly. I don't

32 David Copperfield

l^now that I supposed anything of the kind, but I felt it an act
of gallantry to say something; and a shining sail close to us
made such a pretty little image of itself, at the moment, in her
bright eye, that it came into my head to say this.

"No," replied Em'ly, shaking her head, "I'm afraid of the
sea,"

" Afraid ! " I said, with a becoming air of boldness, and looking
very big at the mighty ocean, "/ain't ! "

"Ah ! but it's cruel," said Em'ly. " I have seen it very cruel
to some of our men. I have seen it tear a boat as big as our
house all to pieces."

" I hope it wasn't the boat that "

"That father was drownded in?" said Em'ly. "No. Not
that one, I never see that boat."

" Nor him ? " I asked her.
.3;^Xittle Em'ly shook. her head. " Not to remember ! "
/^^ Here was a coincidence! I immediately went into an ex-
/ planation how I had never seen my own father ; and how my
/ mother and I had always lived by ourselves in the happiest
I state imaginable, and lived so then, and always meant to Uve
so ; and how my father's grave was in the churchyard near our
house, and shaded by a tree, beneath the bows of which I had
walked and heard the birds sing many a pleasant morning. But
there were some differences between Em'ly's orphanhood and
mine, it appeared. She had lost her mother before her father ;
and where her father's grave was no one knew, except that it
was somewhere in the depths of the sea.
^ "Besides," said Em'ly, as she looked about for shells and
pebbles, " your father was a gentleman and your mother is a
lady; and my father was a fisherman and my mother was a
fisherman's daughter, and my uncle Dan is a fisherman."

" Dan is Mr. Peggotty, is he ? " said I.

"Uncle Dan — yonder," answered Em'ly, nodding at the
boat-house.

"Yes. I mean him. He must be very good, I should
think?"

"Good ? " said Em'ly. " If I was ever to be a lady, I'd give
him a sky-blue coat with diamond buttons, nankeen trousers, a
red velvet waistcoat, a cocked hat, a large gold watch, a silver
pipe, and a box of money."

I said I had no doubt that Mr. Peggotty well deserved these
treasures. I must acknowledge that I felt it difficult to picture
him quite at his ease in the raiment proposed for him by his •
grateful little niece, and that I was particularly doubtful of the

David Copperfield 33

policy of the cocked hat; but I kept these sentiments to
myself.

Little Em'ly had stopped and looked up at the sky in her
enumeration of these articles, as if they were a glorious vision.
We went on again, picking up shells and pebbles.

" You would like to be a lady ? " I said. '

Em'ly looked at me, and laughed and nodded "yes."

"I should like it very much. We would all be gentlefolks
'together, then. Me, and uncle, and Ham, and Mrs. Gummidge.
: We wouldn't mind then, when there come stormy weather. —
[Not for our own sakes, I mean. We would for the poor
fishermen's, to be sure, and we'd help 'em with money when
they come to any hurt."

This seemed to me to be a very satisfactory, and therefore
not at all improbable, picture. I expressed my pleasure in
the contemplation of it, and little Em'ly was emboldened to
say, shyly,

" Don't you think you are afraid of the sea, now?"

It was quiet enough to reassure me, but I have no doubt if
I had seen a moderately large wave come tumbling in, I should
have taken to my heels, with an awful recollection of her
drowned relations. However, I said " No," and I added,
" You don't seem to be, either, though you say you are ; " —
for she was walking much too near the brink of a sort of old
jetty or wooden causeway we had strolled upon, and I was
afraid of her falling over.

"I'm not afraid in this way," said little Em'ly. "But I
wake when it blows, and tremble to think of Uncle Dan and
Ham, and believe I hear *em crying out for help. That's why
I should like so much to be a lady. But I'm not afraid in this
way. Not a bit. Lx)ok here ! "

She started from my side, and ran along a jagged timber
which protruded from the place we stood upon, and overhung
the deep water at some height, without the least defence. The
incident is sq impressed on my remembrance, that if I were a
draughtsman I could dravTiTrtOFm "Here, I dare say, accurately |
as it was that day, and little -Em^ly^springing forward to her I \\
ilestruction (as it appeared to me), wTth* a lootTthatl-havei \
never forgotten, directed far out to sea. ' ^

The light, bold, fluttering little figure turned and came back
safe to me, and I soon laughed at my fears, and at the cry I
had uttered ; fruitlessly in any case, for there was no one near.
But there have been times since, in my manhood, many times
there have been, when I have thought, Is it possible, among

34 David Copperfield

the possibilities of hidden things, that in the sudden rashness of
the child and her wild look so far off, there was any merciful
attraction of her into danger, any tempting her towards him
permitted on the part of her dead father, that her life might
have a chance of ending that day? There has been a time
since when I have wondered whether, if the life before her
could have been revealed to me at a glance, and so revealed as
that a child could fully comprehend it, and if her preservation
could have depended on a motion of my hand, I ought to have
held it up to save her. There has been a time since — I do not
say it lasted long, but it has been — when I have asked myself
the question, would it have been better for little Em'ly to have
had the waters close above her head that morning in my sight ;
and when I have answered Yes, it would have been.

This may be premature. I have set it down too soon,
perhaps. But let it stand.

We strolled a long way, and loaded ourselves with things that
we thought curious, and put some stranded starfish carefully
back into the water — I hardly know enough of the race at this
moment to be quite certain whether they had reason to feel
obliged to us for doing so, or the reverse — and then made our
way home to Mr. Peggotty's dwelling. We stopped under the
lee of the lobster-outhouse to exchange an innocent kiss, and
went in to breakfast glowing with health and pleasure.

" Like two young mavishes," Mr. Peggotty said. I knew this
meant, in our local dialect, like two young thrushes, and received
jt_as a compliment.

Of course I was in love with little Em'ly. I am sure I loved
that bajyuquite as truly, quite as tenderly, with greater purity
and more disinterestedness, than can enter into the best love of
a later time of life, high and ennobling as it is. I am sure my
fancy raised up something round that blue-eyed mite of a child,
which etherealised, and made a very angel of her. If, any sunny
fofenoonjTsheTiad spread a little pair of wings, and flown away
before my eyes, I don't think I should have regarded it as much
more than 1 had had reason to expect.

We used to walk about that dim old flat at Yarmouth in a
loving manner, hours and hours. The days sported by us, as
if Time had not grown up himself yet, but were a child too,
and always at play. I told Em'ly I adored her, and that unless
she confessed she adored me I should be reduced to the
necessity of killing myself with a sword. She said she did, and
I have no doubt she did.

As to any sense of inequality, or youthfulness, or other

David Copperiield 35

difficulty in our way, little Em'ly and I had no such trouble,
because we had no future. We made no more provision for
growing older, than we did for growing younger. We were the
admiration of Mrs. Gummidge and Peggotty, who used to
whisper of an evening when we sat lovingly, on our little locker
side by side, " Lor ! wasn't it beautiful ■ " Mr. Peggotty smiled
at us from behind his pipe, and Ham grinned all the evening
and did nothing else. They had something of the sort of
pleasure in us, I suppose, that they might have had in a pretty
toy, or a pocket model of the Colosseum.

I soon found out that Mrs. Gummidge did not always make
herself so agreeable as she might have been expected to do,
under the circumstances of her residence with Mr. Peggotty.
Mrs. Gum midge's was rather a fretful disposition, and she
whimpered more sometimes than was comfortable for other
parties in so small an establishment. I was very sorry for her ;
but there were moments when it would have been more
agreeable, I thought, if Mrs. Gummidge had had a convenient
apartment of her own to retire to, and had stopped there until
her spirits revived.

Mr. Peggotty went occasionally to a public-house called The
Willing Mind. I discovered this, by his being out on the
second or third evening of our visit, and by Mrs. Gummidge's
looking up at the Dutch clock, between eight and nine, and
saying he was there, and that, what was more, she had known
in the' morning he would go there.

Mrs. Gummidge had been in a low state all day, and had
burst into tears in the forenoon, when the fire smoked. "I
am a lone lorn creetur'," were Mrs. Gummidge's words, when
that unpleasant occurrence took place, "and everythink goes
contrairy with me."

"Oh, it'll soon leave off," said Peggotty — I again mean our
Peggotty — " and, besides, you know, it's not more disagreeable
to you than to us."

" I feel it more," said Mrs. Gummidge.

It was a very cold day, with cutting blasts of wind. Mrs.
Gummidge's peculiar corner of the fireside seemed to me to be
the warmest and snuggest in the place, as her chair was certainly
the easiest, but it didn't suit her that day at all. She was
constantly complaining of the cold, and of its occasioning a
visitation in her back which she called "the creeps." At
last she shed tears on that subject, and said again that she
was "a lone lorn creetur' and everythink went contrairy with
her."

^V^''

36 David Copperfield

"It is certainly very cold," said Peggotty. "Everybody
must feel it so."

'* I feel it more than other people," said Mrs. Gummidge.

So at dinner ; when Mrs. Gummidge was always helped
immediately after me, to whom the preference was given as a
visitor of distinction. The fish were small and bony, and the
potatoes were a little burnt. We all acknowledged that we felt
this something of a disappointment ; but Mrs. Gummidge said
she felt it more than we did, and shed tears again, and made
that former declaration with great bitterness.

Accordingly, when Mr. Peggotty came home about nine
o'clock, this unfortunate Mrs. Gummidge was knitting in her
corner, in a very wretched and miserable condition. Peggotty
had been working cheerfully. Ham had been patching up a
great pair of waterboots ; and I, with little Em'ly by my side,
had been reading to them. Mrs. Gummidge had never made
any other remark than a forlorn sigh, and had never raised her
eyes since tea.

"Well, Mates," said Mr. Peggotty, taking his seat, "and how
are you ? "

We all said something, or looked something, to welcome
him, except Mrs. Gummidge, who only shook her head over
her knitting.

"What's amiss?" said Mr. Peggotty, with a clap of his
hands. "Cheer up, old Mawther!" (Mr. Peggotty meant
old girl.)

Mrs. Gummidge did not appear to be able to cheer up.
She took out an old black silk handkerchief and wiped her
eyes ; but instead of putting it in her pocket, kept it out, and
wiped them again, and still kept it out, ready for use.

" What's amiss, dame ? " said Mr. Peggotty.

" Nothing," returned Mrs. Gummidge. " You've come from
The Willing Mind, Dan'l ? "

"Why yes, I've took a short spell at The Willing Mind
to-night," said Mr. Peggotty.

" I'm sorry I should drive you there," said Mrs. Gummidge.

" Drive ! I don't want no driving," returned Mr. Peggotty
with an honest laugh. " I only go too ready."

" Very ready," said Mrs. Gummidge, shaking her head, and
wiping her eyes. " Yes, yes, very ready. I am sorry it should
be along of me that you're so ready."

"Along o' you ! It an't along o' you ! " said Mr. Peggotty.
" Don't ye believe a bit on it."

" Yes, yes, it is," cried Mrs. Gummidge. " I know what I

David Copperfield 37

am. I know that I am a lone lorn creetur,' and not only that
everythink goes contrairy with me, but that I go contrairy with
everybody. Yes, yes, I feel more than other people do, and I
show it more. It's my misfortun'. "

I really couldn't help thinking, as I sat taking in all this,
that the misfortune extended to some other members of that
family besides Mrs. Gummidge. But Mr. Peggotty made no
such retort, only answering with another entreaty to Mrs.
Gummidge to cheer up.

" I an't what I could wish myself to be," said Mrs. Gummidge.
" I am far from it. I know what I am. My troubles has made
me contrairy. I feel my troubles, and they make me contrairy.
I wish I didn't feel 'em', but I do. I wish I could be hardened
to 'em, but I an't. I make the house uncomfortable. I don't
wonder at it. I've made your sister so all day, and Master Davy."

Here I was suddenly melted, and roared out, " No, you
haven't, Mrs. Gummidge," in great mental distress.

" It's far from right that I should do it," said Mrs. Gummidge.
"It an't a fit return. I had better go into the house and die.
I am a lone lorn creetur,' and had much better not make
myself contrairy here. If thinks must go contrairy with me,
and I must go contrairy myself, let me go contrairy in my
parish. Dan'l, I'd better go into the house, and die and be a
riddance ! "

Mrs. Gummidge retired with these words, and betook her-
self to bed. When she was gone, Mr. Peggotty, who had not
exhibited a trace of any feeling but the profoundest sympathy,
looked round upon us, and nodding his head with a lively
expression of that sentiment still animating his face, said in a
whisper :

" She's been thinking of the old 'un ! "

I did not quite understand what old one Mrs. Gummidge
was supposed to have fixed her mind upon, until Peggotty, on
seeing me to bed, explained that it was the late Mr. Gummidge ;
and that her brother always took that for a received truth on
such occasions, and that it always had a moving effect upon
him. Some time after he was in his hammock that night, I
heard him myself repeat to Ham, "Poor thing! She's been
thinking of the old 'un ! " And whenever Mrs. Gummidge was
overcome in a similar manner during the remainder of our stay
(which happened some few times), he always said the same
thing in extenuation of the circumstance, and always with the
tenderest commiseration.

So the fortnight slipped away, varied by nothing but the

38 David Copperfield

variation of the tide, which altered Mr. Peggotty's times of
going out and coming in, and altered Ham's engagements
also. When the latter was unemployed, he sometimes walked
with us to show us the boats and ships, and once or twice he
took us for a row. I don't know why one slight set of im-
pressions should be more particularly associated with a place
than another, though I believe this obtains with most people,
in reference especially to the associations of their childhood.
I never hear the name, or read the name, of Yarmouth, but I
am reminded of a certain Sunday morning on the beach, the
bells ringing for church, little Em'ly leaning on my shoulder.
Ham lazily dropping stones into the water, and the sun, away
at sea, just breaking through the heavy mist, and showing us
the ships, like their own shadows.

At last the day came for going home. I bore up against the
separation from Mr. Peggotty and Mrs. Gummidge, but my
agony of mind at leaving little Em'ly was piercing. We went
arm-in-arm to the public-house where the carrier put up, and I
promised, on the road, to write to her. (I redeemed that
promise afterwards, in characters larger than those in which
apartments are usually announced in manuscript, as being to
let.) We were greatly overcome at parting ; and if ever in my
life, I have had a void made in my heart, I had one made that
day.

Now, all the time I had been on my visit, I had been un-
grateful to my home again, and had thought little or nothing
about it. But I was no sooner turned towards it, than my
reproachful young conscience seemed to point that way with a
steady finger ; and I felt, all the more for the sinking of my
spirits, that it was my nest, and that my mother was my
comforter and friend.

This gained upon me as we went along ; so that the nearer
we drew, and the more familiar the objects became that we
passed, the more excited I was to get there, and to run into her
arms. But Peggotty, instead of sharing in these transports,
tried to check them (though very kindly), and looked confused
and out of sorts.

Blunderstone Rookery would come, however, in spite of
her, when the carrier's horse pleased — and did. How well I
recollect it, on a cold grey afternoon, with a dull sky, threatening
rain !

The door opened, and I looked, half laughing and half
crying in my pleasant agitation, for my mother. It was not she,
but a strange servant.

David Copperfield 39

" Why, Peggotty ! " I said, ruefully, " isn't she come
home?"

"Yes, yes, Master Davy," said Peggotty. "She's come
home. Wait a bit. Master Davy, and I'll — I'll tell you
something."

Between her agitation, and her natural awkwardness in
getting out of the cart, Peggotty was making a most extra-
ordinary festoon of herself, but I felt too blank and strange to
tell her so. When she had got down, she took me by the
hand ; led me, wondering, into the kitchen ; and shut the
door.

"Peggotty!" said I, quite frightened. "What's the
matter ? "

" Nothing's the matter, bless you, Master Davy dear ! " she
answered, assuming an air of sprightliness.

"Something's the matter, I'm sure. Where's mama?"

" Where's mama. Master Davy ? " repeated Peggotty.

" Yes. Why hasn't she come out to the gate, and what have
we come in here for ? Oh, Peggotty ! " My eyes were full,
and I felt as if I were going to tumble down.

" Bless the precious boy ! " cried Peggotty, taking hold of me.
" What is it ? Speak, my pet ! "

" Not dead, too ! Oh, she's not dead, Peggotty ? "

Peggotty cried out No ! with an astonishing volume of voice ;
and then sat down, and began to pant, and said I had given her
a turn.

I gave her a hug to take away the turn, or to give her
another turn in the right direction, and then stood before her,
looking at her in anxious inquiry.

" You see, dear, I should have told you before now," said
Peggotty, " but I hadn't an opportunity. I ought to have made
it, perhaps, but I couldn't azackly " — that was always the sub-
stitute for exactly, in Peggotty 's militia of words — " bring my
mind to it."

"Go on, Peggotty," said I, more frightened than before. ^ —

" Master Davy," said Peggotty, untying her bonnet with a
shaking hand, and speaking in a breathless sort of way.
" What do you think ? You have got a Pa ! "

I trembled, and turned white. Something — I don't know
what, or how — connected with the grave in the churchyard,
and the raising of the dead, seemed to strike me like sm
unwholesome wind. '

" A new one," said Peggotty.

" A new one ? " I repeated.

40 David Copperfield

Peggotty gave a gasp, as if she were swallowing something
that was very hard, and, putting out her hand, said :

" Come and see him."

" I don't want to see him."

— " And your mama," said Peggotty.

I ceased to draw back, and we went straight to the best
parlour, where she left me. On one side of the fire, sat my
mother ; on the other, Mr. Murdstone. My mother dropped
her work, and arose hurriedly, but timidly I thought.

"Now, Clara my dear," said Mr. Murdstone. "Recollect!
control yourself, always control yourself! Davy boy, how do
you do?"

I gave him my hand. After a moment of suspense, I went
and kissed my mother : she kissed me, patted me gently on
the shoulder, and sat down again to her work. I could not
look at her, I could not look at him, I knew quite well that he
was looking at us both ; and I turned to the window and looked
out there at some shrubs that were drooping their heads in
tjie cold.

' As soon as I could creep away, I crept upstairs. My old
dear bedroom was changed, and I was to lie a long way off.
I rambled down-stairs to find anything that was like itself, so
^alteredLit all seemed ; and roamed into the yard. I very soon
started back from there, for the empty dog-kennel was filled up
with a great dog — deep-mouthed and black-haired like Him —
and he was very angry at the sight of me, and sprang out to
get at me.

CHAPTER IV

I FALL INTO DISGRACE

If the room to which my bed was removed were a sentient
thing that could give evidence, I might appeal to it at this
day — who sleeps there now, I wonder ! — to bear witness for
me what a heavy heart I carried to it. I went up there,
hearing the dog in the yard bark after me all the way while I
climbed the stairs ; and, looking as blank and strange upon the
room as the room looked upon me, sat down with my small
hands crossed, and thought.

I thought of the oddest things. Of the shape of the room,
of the cracks in the ceiling, of the paper on the wall, of the

David Copperfield 41

flaws in the window-glass making ripples and dimples on the
prospect, of the washing-stand being ricketty on its three legs,
and having a discontented something about it, which reminded
me of Mrs. Gummidge under the influence of the old one. I
was crying all the time, but, except that I was conscious of
being cold and dejected, I am sure I never thought why I cried.
At last in my desolation I began to consider that I was dread-
fully in love with little Em'ly, and had been torn away from
her to come here where no one seemed to want me, or to care
about me, half as much as she did. This made such a very
miserable piece of business of it, that I rolled myself up in a
corner of the counterpane, and cried myself to sleep.

I was awakened by somebody saying " Here he is ! " and
uncovering my hot head. My mother and Peggotty had come
to look for me, and it was one of them who had done it.

" Davy," said my mother. " What's the matter ? **

I thought it was very strange that she should ask me, and
answered, " Nothing." I turned over on my face, I recollect,
to hide my trembling lip, which answered her with greater
truth.

" Davy," said my mother. " Davy, my child ! "

I dare say no words she could have uttered would have
affected me so much, then, as her calling me her child. I hid
my tears in the bedclothes, and pressed her from me with my
hand, when she would have raised me up.

" This is your doing, Peggotty, you cruel thing ! " said my
mother. "I have no doubt at all about it. How can you
reconcile it to your conscience, I wonder, to prejudice my own
boy against me, or against anybody who is dear to me ? What
do you mean by it, Peggotty ? "

Poor Peggotty lifted up her hands and eyes, and only
answered, in a sort of paraphrase of the grace I usually
repeated after dinner, " Lord forgive you, Mrs. Copperfield,
and for what you have said this minute, may you never be
truly sorry ! "

"It's enough to distract me," cried my mother. "In my
honeymoon, too, when my most inveterate enemy might relent,
one would think, and not envy me a little peace of mind and
happiness. Davy, you naughty boy ! Peggotty, you savage
creature ! Oh, dear me ! " cried my mother, turning from one
of us to the other, in her pettish, wilful manner, "What a
troublesome world this is, when one has the most right to
expect it to be as agreeable as possible ! "

I felt the touch of a hand that I knew was neither hers nor

42 David Copperfield

Peggotty's, and slipped to my feet at the bed-side. It was Mr.
Murdstone's hand, and he kept it on my arm as he said :

" What's this ? Clara, my love, have you forgotten ? —
Firmness, my dear ! "

" I am very sorry, Edward," said my mother. " I meant to
be very good, but I am so uncomfortable."

" Indeed ! " he answered. " That's a bad hearing, so soon,
Clara."

" I say it's very hard I should be made so now," returned
my mother, pouting ; " and it is — very hard — isn't it ? "

He drew her to him, whispered in her ear, and kissed her.
I knew as well, when I saw my mother's head lean down upon
his shoulder, and her arm touch his neck — I knew as well that
he could mould her pliant nature into any form he chose, as I
know, now, that he did it.

" Go you below, my love," said Mr. Murdstone. " David
and I will come down, together. My friend," turning a
darkening face on Peggotty, when he had watched my mother
out, and dismissed her with a nod and a smile ; " do you know
your mistress's name ? "

" She has been my mistress a long time, sir," answered
Peggotty. " I ought to it."

"That's true," he answered. "But I thought I heard
you, as I came up-stairs, address her by a name that is not
hers. She has taken mine, you know. Will you remember
that?"

Peggotty, with some uneasy glances at me, curtseyed herself
out of the room without replying ; seeing, I suppose, that she
was expected to go, and had no excuse for remaining. When
we two were left alone, he shut the door, and sitting on a chair,
and holding me standing before him, looked steadily into my
eyes. I felt my own attracted, no less steadily, to his. As I
recall our being opposed thus, face to face, I seem again to
hear my heart beat fast and high.

" David," he said, making his lips thin, by pressing them
together, "if I have an obstinate horse or dog to deal with,
what do you think I do ? "

" I don't know."

"I beat him.'"

I had answered in a kind of breathless whisper, but I felt, in
my silence, that my breath was shorter now.

" I make him wince, and smart. I say to myself, ' I'll
conquer that fellow ; ' and if it were to cost him all the blood
he had, I should do it. What is that upon your face ? "

David Copperfield 43

••Dirt," I said.

He knew it was the mark of tears as well as I. But if he
had asked the question twenty times, each time with twenty
blows, I believe my baby heart would have burst before I
would have told him so.

" You have a good deal of intelligence for a little fellow," he
said, with a grave smile that belonged to him, " and you under-
stood me very well, I see. Wash that face, sir, and come down
with me."

He pointed to the washing-stand, which I had made out to
be like Mrs. Gummidge, and motioned me with his head to
obey him directly. I had little doubt then, and I have less
doubt now, that he would have knocked me down without the
least compunction, if I had hesitated.

" Clara, my dear," he said, when I had done his bidding,
and he walked me into the parlour, with his hand still on my
arm ; " you will not be made uncomfortable any more, I hope.
We shall soon improve our youthful humours."

God help me, I might have been improved for my whole
life, I might have been made another creature perhaps, for
life, by a kind word at that season. A word of encouragement
and explanation, of pity for my childish ignorance, of welcome
home, of reassurance to me that it was home, might have made
me dutiful to him in my heart henceforth, instead of in my
hypocritical outside, and might have made me respect instead
of hate him. I thought my mother was sorry to see me stand-
ing in the room so scared and strange, and that, presently,
when I stole to a chair, she followed me with her eyes
more sorrowfully still — missing, perhaps, some freedom in my
childish tread — but the word was not spoken, and the time
for it was gone.

We dined alone, we three together. He seemed to be very
fond of my mother — I am afraid I liked him none the better
for that — and she was very fond of him. I gathered from what
they said, that an elder sister of his was coming to stay with
them, and that she was expecl5d~^at evening. I am not
certain whether I found out then or afterwards, that, without
being actively concerned in any business, he had some share
in, or some annual charge upon the profits of, a wine-merchant's
house in London, with which his family had been connected
from his great-grandfather's time, and in which his sister had a
similar interest ; but I may mention it in this place, whether
or no.

After dinner, when we were sitting by the fire, and I was

44 David Copperfield

meditating an escape to Peggotty without having the hardi-
hood to slip away, lest it should offend the master of the
house, a coach drove up to the garden-gate, and he went out
to receive the visitor. My mother followed him. I was
timidly following her, when she turned round at the parlour-
door, in the dusk, and taking me in her embrace as she had
been used to do, whispered me to love my new father and be
obedient to him. She did this hurriedly and secretly, as if it
were wrong, but tenderly; and, putting out her hand behind
her, held mine in it, until we came near to where he was
standing in the garden, where she let mine go, and drew hers
irough his arm.

It was Miss Murdstone who was arrived, and a gloomy-
looking lady she was ; dark, like her brother, whom she greatly
resembled in face and voice; and with very heavy eyebrows,
nearly meeting over her large nose, as if, being disabled by the
wrongs of her sex from wearing whiskers, she had carried them
to that account. She brought with her two uncompromising
bard""black boxes, with her initials on the lids in hard brass
nails. When she paid the coachman she took her money out
of a hard steel purse, and she kept the purse in a very jail of a
bag_5yhich hung upon her arm by a heavy chain, and shut up
like a bite. I had never, at that time, seen such a mgtallic_

iy altogether as Miss Murdstone was.

She was brought into the parlour with many tokens of
welcome, and there formally recognized my mother as a new
and near relation. Then she looked at me, and said :

" Is that your boy, sister-in-law ? "

My mother acknowledged me.

("Generally speaking," said Miss Murdstone, "I don't like
boys. How d'ye do, boy ? "

Under these encouraging circumstances, I replied that I was
very well, and that I hoped she was the same ; with such an
indifferent grace, that Miss Murdstone disposed of me in two
words :

" Wants manner ! "

Having uttered which with great distinctness, she begged

the favour of being shown to her room, which became to me

from that time forth a place of awe and dread, wherein the

two black boxes were never seen open or known to be left

t unlocked, and where (for I peeped in once or twice when she

was out) numerous little steel fetters and rivets, with which

I Miss Murdstone embellished herself when she was dressed,

' generally hung upon the looking-glass in formidable array.

David Copper field 45

As well as I could make out, she had come for good, and
had no intention of ever going again. She began to " help "
my mother next morning, and was in and out of the store-
closet all day, putting things to rights, and making havoc in
the old arrangements. Almost the first remarkable thing I [
observed in Miss Murdstone was, her being constantly haunted I
by a suspicion that the servants had , a man secreted some-
where on the premises. Under the influence of this delusion,
she dived into the coal-cellar at the most untimely hours,
and scarcely ever opened the door of a dark cupboard without
clapping it to again, in the belief that she had got him. —

Though there was nothing very airy about Miss Murdstone,
she was a perfect Lark in point of getting up. She was up (and,
as I believe to this hour, looking for that man) before anybody
in the house was stirring. Feggotty gave it as her opinion that
she even slept with one eye open ; but I could not concur in
this idea; for I tried it myself after hearing the suggestion
thrown out, and found it couldn't be done.

On the very first morning after her arrival she was up and
ringing her bell at cock-crow. When my mother came down
to breakfast and was going to make the tea. Miss Murdstone
gave her a kind of peck on the cheek, which was her nearest
approach to a kiss, and said :

" Now, Clara, my dear, I am come here, you know, to relieve
you of all the trouble I can. You're much too pretty and
thoughtless" — my mother blushed but laughed, and seemed
not to dislike this character — " to have any duties imposed
upon you that can be undertaken by me. If you'll be so good
is to give me your keys, my dear, I'll attend to all this sort of
thing in future."

From that time. Miss Murdstone kept the keys in her own
littlejaiLall day, and under her pillow all night, and my mother
had no more to do with them than I had.

My mother did not suffer her authority to pass from her
without a shadow of protest. One night when Miss Murdstone
had been developing certain household plans to her brother,
of which he signified his approbation, my mother suddenly
began to cry, and said she thought she might have been
consulted.

" Clara ! " said Mr. Murdstone sternly. " Clara ! I wonder
at you."

" Oh, it's very well to say you wonder, Edward ! " cried my
mother, " and it's very well for you to talk about firmness, but
you wouldn't like it yourself."

46 David Copperfield

Firmness, I may observe, was the grand quality on which
both Mr. tod Miss Murdstone took their stand. However I
might have expressed my comprehension of it at that time, if I
had been called upon, I nevertheless did clearly comprehend
in my own way, that it was another name for tyranny ; and for
a certain gloomy, arrogant, devil's humour, that was in them
both. The creed, as I should state it now, was this. Mr.
Murdstone was firm ; nobody in his world was to be so firm
as Mr. Murdstone; nobody else in his world was to be firm
at all, for everybody was to be bent to his firmness. Miss
Murdstone was an exception. She might be firm, but only
by relationship, and in an inferior and tributary degree. My
mother was another exception. She might be firm, and must
be; but only in bearing their firmness, and firmly believing
there was no other firmness upon earth.

" It's very hard," said my mother, " that in my own
house "

" My own house ? " repeated Mr. Murdstone. " Clara ! "

""^SFown house, I mean," faltered my mother, evidently
frightened — " I hope you must know what I mean, Edward —
it's very hard that in your own house I may not have a word to
say about domestic matters. I am sure I managed very well
before we were married. There's evidence," said my mother
sobbing ; " ask Peggotty if I didn't do very well when I wasn't
interfered with ! "

" Edward," said Miss Murdstone, " let there be an end of
this. I go to-morrow."

" Jane Murdstone," said her brother, " be silent I How dare
you to insinuate that you don't know my character better than
your words imply ? "

"I am sure," my poor mother went on at a grievous
disadvantage, and with many tears, " I don't want anybody to
go. I should be very miserable and unhappy if anybody was
to go. I don't ask much. I am not unreasonable. I only
want to be consulted sometimes. I am very much obliged to
anybody who assists me, and I only want to be consulted as a
mere form, sometimes. I thought you were pleased, once, with
my being a little inexperienced and girlish, Edward — I am sure
you said so — but you seem to hate me for it now, you are so
severe."

" Edward," said Miss Murdstone, again, " let there be an end
of this. I go to-morrow."

" Jane Murdstone," thundered Mr. Murdstone. " Will you
be silent ? How dare you ? "

David Copperfield 47

Miss Murdstone made a jail-delivery of her pocket-handker-
chief, and held it before her eyes.

" Clara," he continued, looking at my mother, " you surprise
me ! You astound me ! Yes, I had a satisfaction in the
thought of marrying an inexperienced and artless person, and
forming her character, and infusing into it some amount of that
firmness and decision of which it stood in need. But when
Jane Murdstone is kind enough to come to my assistance in
this endeavour, and to assume, for my sake, a condition some-
thing like a housekeeper's, and when she meets with a base
return "

" Oh, pray, pray, Edward," cried my mother, " don't accuse
me of being ungrateful. I am sure I am not ungrateful. No
one ever said I was before. I have many faults, but not that.
Oh, don't, my dear ! "

" When Jane Murdstone meets, I say," he went on, after
waiting until my mother was silent, " with a base return, that
feeling of mine is chilled and altered."

" Don't, my love, say that ! " implored my mother very
piteously. " Oh, don't, Edward ! I can't bear to hear it.
Whatever I am, I am affectionate. I know I am affectionate.
I wouldn't say it, if I wasn't certain that I am. Ask Peggotty.
I am sure she'll tell you I'm affectionate."

"There is no extent of mere weakness, Clara," said Mr.
Murdstone in reply, " that can have the least weight with me.
You lose breath."

" Pray let us be friends," said my mother, " I couldn't live
under coldness or unkindness. I am so sorry. I have a great
many defects, I know, and it's very good of you, Edward, with
your strength of mind, to endeavour to correct them for me.
Jane, I don't object to anything. I should be quite broken-
hearted if you thought of leaving " My mother was too

much overcome to go on.

"Jane Murdstone," said Mr. Murdstone to his sister, "any
harsh words between us are, I hope, uncommon. It is not my
fault that so unusual an occurrence has taken place to-night. I
was betrayed into it by another. Nor is it your fault. You
were betrayed into it by another. Let us both try to forget it.
And as this," he added, after these magnanimous words, "is
not a fit scene for the boy — David, go to bed ! "

I could hardly find the door, through the tears that stood in
my eyes. I was so sorry for my mother's distress ; but I groped
my way out, and groped my way up to my room in the dark,
without even having the heart to say good-night to Peggotty, oi

48 David Copperfield

to get a candle from her. When her coming up to look for me,
an hour or so afterwards, awoke me, she said that my mother
had gone to bed poorly, and that Mr. and Miss Murdstone
were sitting alone.

Going down next morning rather earlier than usual, I paused
outside the parlour-door, on hearing my mother's voice. She
was very earnestly and humbly entreating Miss Murdstone's
pardon, which that lady granted, and a perfect reconciliation
took place. I never knew my mother afterwards to give an
opinion on any matter, without first appealing to Miss Murd-
stone, or without having first ascertained by some sure means,
what Miss Murdstone's opinion was; and I never saw Miss
Murdstone, when out of temper (she was infirm that way), move
her hand towards her bag as if she were going to take out
tiie keys and offer to resign them to my mother, without seeing
that my mother was in a terrible fright.

The gloomy taint that was in the Murdstone blood, darkened
the Murdstone religion, which was austere and wrathful. I
have thought, since, that its assuming that character was a
necessary consequence of Mr. Murdstone's firmness, which
wouldn't allow him to let anybody off from the utmost weight
of the severest penalties he could find any excuse for. Be this
as it may, I well remember the tremendous visages with which
we used to go to church, and the changed air of the place.
Again the dreaded Sunday comes round, and I file into the
old pew first, like a guarded captive brought to a condemned
service. Again, Miss Murdstone, in a black velvet gown, that
looks as if it had been made out of a pall, follows close
upon me ; then my mother ; then her husband. There is no
Peggotty now, as in the old time. Again, I listen to Miss
Murdstone mumbling the responses, and emphasising all the
• dread words with a cruel relish. Again, I see her dark eyes
1 roll round the church when she says " miserable sinners," as if
she were calling all the congregation names. Again, I catch
rare glimpses of my mother, moving her lips timidly between
the two, with one of them muttering at each other like low
thunder. Again, I wonder with a sudden fear whether it is
likely that our good old clergyman can be wrong, and Mr. and
Miss Murdstone right, and that all the angels in Heaven can be
destroying angels. Again, if I move a finger or relax a muscle
of my face, Miss Murdstone pokes me with her prayer-book,
and makes my side ache.

Yes, and again, as we walk home, I note some neighbours
looking at my mother and at me, and whispering. Again, as

David Copperfield 49

the three go on arm-in-arm, and I linger behind alone, I follow
some of those looks, and wonder if my mother's step be really
not so light as I have seen it, and if the gaiety of her beauty be
really almost worried away. Again, I wonder whether any of
the neighbours call to mind, as I do, how we used to walk
home together, she and I ; and I wonder stupidly about that,
all the dreary, dismal day.

There had been some talk on occasions of my going to
boarding-school. Mr. and Miss Murdstone had originated it,
and my mother had of course agreed with them. Nothing,
however, was concluded on the subject yet In the meantime
I learnt lessons at home.

Shall I ever forget those lessons ! They were presided over
nominally by my mother, but really by Mr. Murdstone and his
sister, who were always present, and found them a favourable
occasion for giving my mother lessons in that miscalled firm-
ness, which was the bane of both our lives. I believe I was
kept at home for that purpose. I had been apt enough to
learn, and willing enough, when my mother and I had lived
alone together. I can faintly remember learning the alphabet
at her knee. To this day, when I look upon the fat black
letters in the primer, the puzzling novelty of their shapes, and
the easy good-nature of O and Q and S, seem to present them-
selves again before me as they used to do. But they recall no
feeling of disgust or reluctance. On the contrary, I seem to
have walked along a path of flowers as far as the crocodile-
book, and to have been cheered by the gentleness of my
mother's voice and manner all the way. But these solemn
lessons which succeeded those, I remember as the death-blow
at my peace, and a grievous daily drudgery and misery. They
were very long, very numerous, very hard — perfectly unintel-
ligible, some of them, to me — and I was generally as much
bewildered by them as I believe my poor mother was
herself.

Let me remember how it used to be, and bring one morning
back again.

I come into the second best parlour after breakfast, with my
books, and an exercise-book, and a slate. My mother is ready
for me at her writing-desk, but not half so ready as Mr. Murd-
stone in his easy-chair by the window (though he pretends to
be reading a book), or as Miss Murdstone, sitting near my
mother stringing steel beads^^ The very sight of these two has
such an inriuence over me^that I begin to feel the words I
have been at infinite pains to get into my head, all sliding away,

50 David Copperfield

and going I don't know where. I wonder where they do go,
by-the-by ?

I hand the first book to my mother. Perhaps it is a grammar,
perhaps a history or geography. I take a last drowning look
at the page as I give it into her hand, and start off aloud at a
racing pace while I have got it fresh. I trip over a word. Mr.
Murdstone looks up. I trip over another word. Miss Murd-
stone looks up. I redden, tumble over half-a-dozen words, and
stop. I think my mother would show me the book if she
dared, but she does not dare, and she says softly:

" Oh, Davy, Davy ! "

" Now, Clara," says Mr. Murdstone, " be firm with the boy.
" Don't say, ' Oh, Davy, Davy ! ' That's childish. He knows
his lesson, or he does not know it."

" He does not know it," Miss Murdstone interposes
awfully.

" I am really afraid he does not," says my mother.

" Then, you see, Clara," returns Miss Murdstone, "you should
just give him the book back, and make him know it."

"Yes, certainly," says my mother; " that is what I intend to
do, my dear Jane. Now, Davy, try once more, and don't be
stupid."

I obey the first clause of the injunction by trying once more,
but am not so successful with the second, for I am very stupid.
I tumble down before I get to the old place, at a point where
I was all right before, and stop to think. But I can't think
about the lesson. I think of the number of yards of net in
Miss Murdstone's cap, or of the price of Mr. Murdstone's
dressing-gown, or any such ridiculous problem that I have no
business with, and don't want to have anything at all to do
with. Mr. Murdstone makes a movement of impatience which
I have been expecting for a long time. Miss Murdstone does
the same. My mother glances submissively at them, shuts the
book, and lays it by as an arrear to be worked out when my
other tasks are done.

There is a pile of these arrears very soon, and it swells like a
rolling snowball. The bigger it gets, the more stupid / get.
The case is so hopeless, and I feel that I am wallowing in such
a bog of nonsense, that I give up all idea of getting out, and
abandon myself to my fate. The despairing way in which my
mother and I look at each other, as I blunder on, is truly
melancholy. But the greatest effect in these miserable lessons
is when my mother (thinking nobody is observing her) tries to
-give me the cue by the motion of her lips. At that instant

David Copperfield 51

Miss Murdstone, who has been lying in wait for nothing else
all along, says in a deep warning voice :

"Clara!"

My mother starts, colours, and smiles faintly. Mr. Murd-J]
stone comes out of his chair, takes the book, throws it at me /
or boxes my ears with it, and turns me out of the room by the/
shoulders.

Even when the lessons are done, the worst is yet to happen,
in the shape of an appalling sum. This is invented for me,
and delivered to me orally by Mr. Murdstone, and begins, " If
I go into a cheesemonger's shop, and buy five thousand double-
Gloucester cheeses at fourpence-halfpenny each, present pay-
ment " — at which I see Miss Murdstone secretly overjoyed. I
pore over these cheeses without any result or enlightenment
until dinner-time, when, having made a Mulatto of myself by
getting the dirt of the slate into the pores of my skin, I have
a slice of bread to help me out with the cheeses, and am
considered in disgrace for the rest of the evening.

It seems to me, at this distance of time, as if my unfortunate
studies generally took this course. I could have done very
well if I had been without the Murdstones ; but the influence
of the Murdstones upon me was. like the fascination of Jwg,
snakes on a wretched young bird^ Even when I did get
through the mornmg with tolerable credit, there was not millh
gained but dinner; for Miss Murdstone never could en'duiti>
to see me untasked, and if I rashly made any show of being
unemployed,~cane<l~iier brother's attention to me by saying,
" Clara, my dear, there's nothing like work — give your boy an
exercise ; " which caused me to be clapped down to some new
labour there and then. As to any recreation with other children
of my age, I had very little of that ; for the gloomy theology
of the Murdstones made all children out to be a swarm of
little vipers (though there was a child once set in the midst of
the Disciples), and held that they contaminated one another.

The natural result of this treatment, continued, I suppose,
for some six months or more, was to make me sullen, dull, and
dogged. I was not made the less so by my sense of being
daily more and more shut out and alienated from my mother.
I believe I should have been almost stupefied but for one
circumstance.

It was this. My father had left a small collection of books
in a little room up-stairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined
my own) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled.
From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine

jU" 52 David Copperfield

\ Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield,
\ Don Quixote, Gil Bias, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a
\glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy,
'and my hope of something, beyond that place and time, — they,
and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales of the Genii, — and did
me no harm ; for whatever harm was in some of them was not
there for me ; / knew nothing of it. It is astonishing to me
now, how I found time, in the midst of my porings and
blunderings over heavier themes, to read those books as I did.
It is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself
under my small troubles (which were great troubles to me), by
impersonating my favourite characters in them — as I did — and
by putting Mr. and Miss Murdstone into all the bad ones — ■
which I did too. I have been Tom Jones (a child's Tom
'"V /Jones, a harmless creature) for a week""together. I have sus-
tained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a
\'j stretch, I verily believe. I had a greedy relish for a few
f"^" volumes of Voyages and Travels — I forget what, now — that
were on those shelves ; and for days and days I can remember
to have gone about my region of our house, armed with the
centre-piece out of an old set of boot-trees — the perfect realisa-
tion of Captain Somebody, of the Royal British Navy, in danger
of being beset by savages, and resolved to sell his life at a great
price. The Captain never lost dignity, from having his ears
boxed with the Latin Grammar. I did ; but the Captain was
a Captain and a hero, in despite of all the grammars of all the
languages in the world, dead or alive.

This was my only and my constant comfort. When I think
of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening,
the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed,
reading as if for life. Every barn in the neighbourhood, every
stone in the church, and every foot of the churchyard, had
some association of its own, in my mind, connected with these
books, and stood for some locality made famous in them. I
have seen Tom Pipes go climbing up the church-steeple; I
have watched Strap, with the knapsack on his back, stopping
to rest himself upon the wicket-gate ; and I know that Com-
modore Trunnion held that club with Mr. Pickle, in the parlour
of our little village alehouse.

The reader now understands, as well as I do, what I was
when I came to that point of my youthful history to which I
am now coming again.

One morning when I went into the parlour with my books,
I found my mother looking anxious. Miss Murdstone looking

David Copperfield 53

firm, and Mr. Murdstone binding something round the bottom
of a cane — a lithe and limber cane, which he left off binding
when I came in, and poised and switched in the air.

"I tell you, Clara," said Mr. Murdstone, "I have been
often flogged myself."

"To be sure; of course," said Miss Murdstone.

"Certainly, my dear Jane," faltered my mother, meekly.)
" But — but do you think it did Edward good ? " /

" Do you think it did Edward harm, Clara ? " asked Mr.
Murdstone, gravely.

" That's the point," said his sister.

To this my mother returned, "Certainly, my dear Jane,"
and said no more.

I felt apprehensive that I was personally interested in this
dialogue, and sought Mr. Murdstone's eye as it lighted on
mine.

"Now, David," he said — and I saw that cast again as he
said it — "you must be far more careful to-day than usual."
He gave the cane another poise, and another switch ; and
having finished his preparation of it, laid it down beside him,
with an impressive look, and took up his book.

This was a good freshener to my presence of mind, as a
beginning. I felt the words of my lessons slipping off, not
one by one, or line by line, but by the entire page ; I tried to
lay hold of them ; but they seemed, if I may so express it, to
have put skates on, and to skim away from me with a smooth-
ness there was no checking.

We began badly, and went on worse. I had come in with
an idea of distinguishing myself rather, conceiving that I was
very well prepared ; but it turned out to be quite a mistake.
Book after book was added to the heap of failures, Miss
Murdstone being firmly watchful of us all the time. And
when we came at last to the five thousand cheeses (canes he
made it that day, I remember), my mother burst out crying.

" Clara ! " said Miss Murdstone, in her warning voice.

" I am not quite well, my dear Jane, I think," said my
mother.

I saw him wink, solemnly, at his sister, as he rose and said,
taking up the cane :

"Why, Jane, we can hardly expect Clara to bear, with
perfect firmness, the worry and torment that David has
occasioned her to-day. That would be stoical. Clara is
greatly strengthened and improved, but we can hardly expect
so much from her. David, you and I will go upstairs, boy."

54 David Copperfield

As he took me out at the door, my mother ran towards us.
Miss Murdstone said, "Clara! are you a perfect fool?" and
interfered. I saw my mother stop her ears then, and I heard
her crying.

He walked me up to my room slowly and gravely — I am
certain he had a delight in that formal parade of executing
justice— ^nd when we got there, suddenly twisted my head
under his arm.

" Mr. Murdstone ! Sir ! " I cried to him. " Don't ! Pray
don't beat me ! I have tried to learn, sir, but I can't learn
while you and Miss Murdstone are by. I can't indeed ! "

" Can't you, indeed, David ? " he said. " We'll try that."

He had my head as in a vice, but I twined round him some-
how, and stopped him for a moment, entreating him not to
beat me. It was only for a moment that I stopped him, for
he cut me heavily an instant afterwards, and in the same
I instant I caught the hand with which he held me in my mouth,
I between my teeth, and bit it through. It sets my teeth on
ledge to think of it.

\ He beat me then as if he would have beaten me to death.
Above all the noise we made, I heard them running up the
stairs, and crying out — I heard my mother crying out — and
Peggotty. Then he was gone ; and the door was locked out-
side ; and I was lying, fevered and hot, and torn, and sore, and
raging in my puny way, upon the floor.

How well I recollect, when I became quiet, what an un-
natural stillness seemed to reign through the whole house !
How well I remember, when my smart and passion began to
cool, how wicked I began to feel !

I sat listening for a long while, but there was not a sound.
I crawled up from the floor, and saw my face in the glass, so
swollen, red, and ugly that it almost frightened me. My
stripes were sore and stiff, and made me cry afresh, when I
moved; but they were nothing to the guilt I felt. It lay
heavier on my breast than if I had been a most atrocious
criminal, I dare say.

It had begun to grow dark, and I had shut the window (I
had been lying, for the most part, with my head upon the sill,
by turns crying, dozing, and looking listlessly out), when the
key was turned, and Miss Murdstone came in with some
bread and meat, and milk. These she put down upon the
table without a word, glaring at me the while with exemplary

firmness, and then retired, locking the door after her.

' Long after it was dark I sat there, wondering whether

David Copperfield 55

anybody else would come. When this appeared improbable for
that night, I undressed, and went to bed ; and there, I began
to wonder fearfully what would be done to me. Whether it
was a criminal act that I had committed? Whether I should
be taken into custody, and sent to prison ? Whether I was at
all in danger of being hanged ?

I never shall forget the waking next morning; the being
cheerful and fresh for the first moment, and then the being
weighed down by the stale and dismal oppression of remem-
brance. Miss Murdstone re-appeared before I was out of bed ;
told me, in so many words, that I was free to walk in the
garden for half an hour and no longer; and retired, leaving
the door open, that I might avail myself of that permission.

I did so, and did so every morning of my imprisonment,
which lasted five days. If I could have seen my mother alone,
I should have gone down on my knees to her and besought
her forgiveness ; but I saw no one, Miss Murdstone excepted,
during the whole time — except at evening prayers in the
parlour; to which I was escorted by Miss Murdstone after
everybody else was placed; where I was stationed, a young
outlaw, all alone by myself near the door ; and whence I was
solemnly conducted by my jailer, before any one arose from
the devotional posture. I only observed that my mother was
as far off from me as she could be, and kept her face another
way, so that I never saw it ; and that Mr. Murdstone's hand
was bound up in a large linen wrapper.

The length of those five days I can convey no idea of to
any one. They occupy the place of years in my remembrance.
The way in which I listened to all the incidents of the house
that made themselves audible to me ; the ringing of bells, the
opening and shutting of doors, the murmuring of voices, the
footsteps on the stairs ; to any laughing, whistling, or singing,
outside, which seemed more dismal than anything else to me
in my solitude and disgrace — the uncertain pace of the hours,
especially at night, when I would wake thinking it was morn-
ing, and find that the family were not yet gone to bed, and
that all the length of night had yet to come — the depressed
dreams and nightmares I had — the return of day, noon, after-
noon, evening, when the boys played in the churchyard, and I
watched them from a distance within the room, being ashamed
to show myself at the window lest they should know I was a
prisoner — the strange sensation of never hearing myself speak —
the fleeting intervals of something like cheerfulness, which
came with eating and drinking, and went away with it — the

56 David Copperfield

setting in of rain one evening, with a fresh smell, and its
coming down faster and faster between me and the church,
until it and gathering night seemed to quench me in gloom,
and fear, and remorse — all this appears to have gone round
and round for years instead of days, it is so vividly and
strongly stamped on my remembrance.

On the last night of my restraint, I was awakened by hearing
my own name spoken in a whisper. I started up in bed, and
putting out my arms in the dark, said :

" Is that you, Peggotty ? "

There was no immediate answer, but presently I heard my
name again, in a tone so very mysterious and awful, that 1
think I should have gone into a fit, if it had not occurred to
me that it must have come through the keyhole.

I groped my way to the door, and putting my own lips to
the keyhole, whispered :

" Is that you, Peggotty dear ? "

" Yes, my own precious Davy," she replied. " Be as soft as
a mouse, or the CatlLbear us."

I understood this to mean Miss Murdstone, and was sensible
of the urgency of the case ; her room being close by.

"How's mama, dear Peggotty? Is she very angry with
me?"

I could hear Peggotty crying softly on her side of the key-
hole, as I was doing on mine, before she answered. "No.
Not very."

" What is going to be done with me, Peggotty dear ? Do
you know ? "

"School. Near London," was Peggotty's answer. I was
obliged to get her to repeat it, for she spoke it the first time
quite down my throat, in consequence of my having forgotten
to take my mouth away from the keyhole and put my ear
there ; and though her words tickled me a good deal, I didn't
hear them.

"When, Peggotty?"

" To-morrow."

" Is that the reason why Miss Murdstone took the clothes
out of my drawers?" which she had done, though I have
forgotten to mention it.

" Yes," said Peggotty. " Box."

" Shan't I see mama ? "

" Yes," said Peggotty. " Morning.*'

Then Peggotty fitted her mouth close to the keyhole, and
delivered these words through it with as much feeling and

David Copperfield j^^

earnestness as a keyhole has ever been the medium of com-
municating, I will venture to assert : shooting in each broken
little sentence in a convulsive little burst of its own.

" Davy, dear. If I ain't been azackly as intimate with you.
Lately, as I used to be. It ain't because I don't love you.
Just as well and more, my pretty poppet. It's because I
thought it better for you. And for some one else besides.
Davy, my darling, are you listening ? Can you hear ? "

" Ye — ye — ye — yes, Peggotty ! " I sobbed.

" My own ! " said Peggotty, with infinite compassion.
"What I want to say, is. That you must never forget me.
For I'll never forget you. And I'll take as much care of your
mama, Davy. As ever I took of you. And I won't leave
her. The day may come when she'll be glad to lay her poor
head. On her stupid, cross, old Peggotty's arm again. And
I'll write to you, my dear. Though I ain't no scholar. And

I'll— I'll " Peggotty fell to kissing the keyhole, as she

couldn't kiss me.

" Thank you, dear Peggotty ! " said I. " Oh, thank you !
Thank you ! Will you promise me one thing, Peggotty ?
Will you write and tell Mr. Peggotty and little Em'ly, and
Mrs. Gummidge and Ham, that I am not so bad as they might
suppose, and that I sent 'em all my love — especially to little
Em'ly ? Will you, if you please, Peggotty ? "

The kind soul promised, and we both of us kissed the key-
hole with the greatest affection — I patted it with my hand, I
recollect, as if it had been her honest face — and parted. From
that night there grew up in my breast a feeling for Peggotty
which I cannot very well define. She did not replace my
mother ; no one could do that ; but she came into a vacancy
in my heart, which closed upon her, and I felt towards her
something I have never felt for any other human being. It
was a sort of comical affection, too ; and yet if she had died, I
cannot think what I should have done, or how I should have
acted out the tragedy it would have been to me.

In the morning Miss Murdstone appeared as usual, and told
me I was going to school ; which was not altogether such news
to me as she supposed. She also informed me that when
I was dressed, I was to come down-stairs into the parlour, and
have my breakfast. There I found my mother, very pale and
with red eyes : into whose arms I ran, and begged her pardon
from my suffering soul.

" Oh, Davy ! " she said. " That you could hurt any one I
love ! Try to be better, pray to be better ! I forgive you ; but

S8 David Copperfield

I am so grieved, Davy, that you should have such bad passions
in your heart."

They had persuaded her that I was a wicked fellow, and
she was more sorry for that than for my going away. I felt
it sorely. I tried to eat' my parting breakfast, but my tears
dropped upon my bread-and-butter, and trickled into my tea.
I saw my mother look at me sometimes, and then glance at
the watchful Miss Murdstone, and then look down, or look
away.

"Master Copperfield's box there!" said Miss Murdstone,
when wheels were heard at the gate.

I looked for Peggotty, but it was not she ; neither she nor
Mr. Murdstone appeared. My former acquaintance, the
carrier, was at the door; the box was taken out to his cart,
and lifted in.

" Clara ! " said Miss Murdstone, in her warning note.

"Ready, my dear Jane," returned my mother. "Good-
bye, Davy. You are going for your own good. Good-bye,
my child. You will come home in the holidays, and be a
better boy."

" Clara ! " Miss Murdstone repeated.

"Certainly, my dear Jane," replied my mother, who was
holding me. " I forgive you, my dear boy. God bless
you ! "

" Clara ! " Miss Murdstone repeated.

Miss Murdstone was good enough to take me out to the cart^
and to say on the way that she hoped I would repent, before I
came to a bad end ; and then I got into the cart, and the lazy
horse walked off with it.

CHAPTER V

1 AM SENT AWAY FROM HOME

We might have gone about half a mile, and my pockety
handkerchief was quite wet through, when the carrier stopped
short.

Looking out to ascertain for what, I saw, to my amazement,
Peggotty burst from a hedge and climb into the cart. She
took me in both her arms, and squeezed me to her stays until
the pressure on my nose was extremely painful, though I never
thought of that till afterwards when I found it very tender.

David Copperfield 59

Not a single word did Peggotty speak. Releasing one of her
arms, she put it down in her pocket to the elbow, and brought
out some paper bags of cakes which she crammed into my
pockets, and a purse which she put into my hand, but not one
word did she say. After another and a final squeeze with both
arms, she got down from the cart and ran away; and my belief
is, and has always been, without a solitary button on her gown.
I picked up one, of several that were rolling about, and treasured
it as a keepsake for a long time.

The carrier looked at me, as if to inquire if she were comings
back. I shook my head, and said I thought not. " Then,
come up," said the carrier to the lazy horse ; who came up
accordingly.

Having by this time cried as much as I possibly could, I
began to think it was of no use crying any more, especially as
neither Roderick Random, nor that Captain in the Royal
British Navy had ever cried, that I could remember, in trying
situations. The carrier seeing me in this resolution, proposed
that my pocket-handkerchief should be spread upon the horse's
back to dry. I thanked him, and assented ; and particularly
small it looked, under those circumstances.

I had now leisure to examine the purse. It was a stiff
leather purse, with a snap, and had three bright shillings in
it, which Peggotty had evidently polished up with whitening,
for my greater delight. But its most precious contents were
two half-crowns folded together in a bit of paper, on which
was written, in my mother's hand, "For Davy. With my
love." I was so overcome by this, that I asked the carrier to
be so good as to reach me my pocket-handkerchief again;
but he said he thought I had better do without it, and I
thought I really had, so I wiped my eyes on my sleeve and
stopped myself.

For good, too; though in consequence of my previous
emotions, I was still occasionally seized with a stormy sob.
After we had jogged on for some little time, I asked the
carrier if he was going all the way?
/ " All the way where ? " inquired the carrier.

*' There," I said.

" Where's there ? " inquired the carrier.

" Near London," I said.

"Why, that horse," said the carrier, jerking the rein to
point him out, "would be deader than pork afore he got
over half the ground."

" Are you only going to Yarmouth, then ? " I asked.

6o David Copperfield

"That's about it," said the carrier. "And there I shall
take you to the stage-cutch, and the stage-cutch that'll take
you to — wherever it is."

As this was a great deal for the carrier (whose name was
Mr. Barkis) to say — he being, as I observed in a former
chapter, of a phlegmatic temperament, and not at all con-
versational— I offered him a cake as a mark of attention,
which he ate at one gulp, exactly like an elephant, and which
made no more impression on his big face than it would have
tjione on an elephant's.

" Did she make 'em, now ? " said Mr. Barkis, always leaning
/orward, in his slouching way, on the footboard of the cart
with an arm on each knee.

" Peggotty, do you mean, sir ? "

" Ah ! " said Mr. Barkis. " Her."

"Yes. She makes all our pastry and does all our
cooking."

)o she though ? " said Mr. Barkis.

He made up his mouth as if to whistle, but he didn't
whistle. He sat looking at the horse's ears, as if he saw
something new there \ and sat so for a considerable time.
JBy-and-by, he said:
^ "No sweethearts, I b'lieve ? "

(.-^"Sweetmeats did you say, Mr. Barkis?" For I thought
he wanted something else to eat, and had pointedly alluded
to that description of refreshment.

" Hearts," said Mr. Barkis. " Sweethearts ; no person walks
with her ? "

"With Peggotty?"

"Ah!" he said. "Her."

" Oh, no. She never had a sweetheart."

C," Didn't she, though ? " said Mr. Barkis.
Again he made up his mouth to whistle, and again he didn't
^istle, but sat looking at the horse's ears.
" So she makes," said Mr. Barkis, after a long interval of
reflection, " all the apple parsties, and does all the cooking,
do she?"

I replied that such was the fact.

"Well. I'll tell you what," said Mr. Barkis. "P'raps
you might be writin' to her?"

" I shall certainly write to her," I rejoined.
" Ah ! " he said, slowly turning his eyes towards me. " Well !
If you was writin' to her, p'raps you'd recollect to say that
Barkis was willin'; would you?"

David Copperfield 6i

••That Barkis was willing," I repeated innocently. "Is
that all the message ? "

" Ye — es," he said, considering. " Ye — es. Barkis is
__willin'."

— " But you will be at Blunderstone again to-morrow, Mr.
Barkis," I said, faltering a little at the idea of my being far
away from it then, "and could give your own message so
much better."

As he repudiated this suggestion, however, with a jerk of
his head, and once more confirmed his previous request by^
saying, with profound gravity, "Barkis is willin'. That's the
message," I readily undertook its transmission. While I was
waiting for the coach in the hotel at Yarmouth that very
afternoon, I procured a sheet of paper and an inkstand and
wrote a note to Peggotty, which ran thus : My dear Peggotty.
I have come here safe. Barkis is willing. My love to mama.
Yours affectionately. P.S. He says he particularly wants
you to know — Barkis is willing."

When I had taken this commission on myself prospectively,
Mr. Barkis relapsed into perfect silence ; and I, feeling quits
worn out by all that had happened lately, lay down on a sack
in the cart and fell asleep. I slept soundly until we got to
Yarmouth : which was so entirely new and strange to me in
the inn-yard to which we drove, that I at once abandoned a
latent hope I had had of meeting with some of Mr. Peggotty's
family there, perhaps even with little Em'ly herself.

The coach was in the yard, shining very much all over,
but without any horses to it as yet ; and it looked in that
state as if nothing was more likely than its ever going to
London. I was thinking this, and wondering what would
ultimately become of my box, which Mr. Barkis had put
down on the yard-pavement by the pole (he having driven
up the yard to turn his cart), and also what would ultimately
become of me, when a lady looked out of a bow-window where
some fowls and joints of meat were hanging up, and said :

" Is that the little gentleman from Blunderstone ? "

"Yes, ma'am," I said.

" What name ? " inquired the lady

" Copperfield, ma'am," I said.

" That won't do," returned the lady. " Nobody's dinner is
paid for here, in that name."

" Is it Murdstone, ma'am ? " I said.

" If you're Master Murdstone," said the lady, " why do you
go and give another name, first ? "

62 David Copperfield

I explained to the lady how it was, who then rang a bell,
and called out, " William ! show the coffee-room ! " upon
which a waiter came running out of a kitchen on the opposite
side of a yard to show it, and seemed a good deal surprised
when he was only to show it to me.

It was a large long room with some large maps in it. I
doubt if I could have felt much stranger if the maps had been
real foreign countries, and I cast away in the middle of them.
I felt it was taking a liberty to sit down, with my cap in my
hand, on the comer of the chair nearest the door ; and when
the waiter laid a cloth on purpose for me, and put a set of
casters on it, I think I must have turned red all over with
modesty.

Hfe brought me some chops, and vegetables, and took the
covers off in such a bouncing manner that I was afraid I must
have given him some offence. But he greatly relieved my
mind by putting a chair for me at the table, and saying very
affably, " Now, six-foot ! come on ! "v

I thanked" himi-and -took my seat at the boardybut found
it extremely difficult to handle my knife and fork with any-
thing like dexterity, or to avoid splashing myself with the
gravy, while he was standing opposite, staring so hard, and
making me blush in the most dreadful manner every time
I caught his eye. After watching me into the second chop,
he said :
0ft^ There's half a pint of ale for you. Will you have it now?"

I thanked him and said " Yes." Upon which he poured it
out of a jug into a large tumbler, and held it up against the
light, and made it look beautiful.

" My eye ! " he said. " It seems a good deal, don't it ? '\

" It does seem a good deal," I answered with a smile."CFor
it was quite delightful to me to find him so pleasant. ^He
was a twinkling-eyed, pimple-faced man, with his hair standing
upright all over his head ; and as he stood with one arm
a-kimbo, holding up the glass to the light with the other hand,
he looked quite friendly.

•-^^ There was a gentleman here yesterday," he said — "a stout
gentleman, by the name of Topsawyer — perhaps you know
him?"

"No," I said, "I don't think "

" In breeches and gaiters, broad-brimmed hat, grey coat,
speckled choke v' said the waiter.

" No," I said bashfully, " I haven't the pleasure "

"He came in here" said the waiter, looking at the light

David Copperfield 63

through the tumbler, "ordered a glass of this ale — would
order it — I told him not — drank it, and fell dead. It was
too old for him. It oughtn't to be drawn ; that's the fact."

I was very much shocked to hear of this melancholy accident,
and said I thought I had better have some water.

"Why, you see," said the waiter, still looking at the light
through the tumbler, with one of his eyes shut up, " our
people don't like things being ordered and left. It offends
'em. But r\\ drink it, if you like. I'm used to it, and use
is everything. I don't think it'll hurt me, if I throw my head
back, and take it off quick. Shall I ? "

I replied that he would much oblige me by drinking it, if
he thought he could do it safely, but by no means otherwise.
When he did throw his head back, and take it off quick, I had
a horrible fear, I confess, of seeing him meet the fate of the
lamented Mr. Topsawyer, and fall lifeless on the carpet. But
it didn't hurt him. On the contrary, 1 thought he seemed the
fresher for it.

" What have we got here ? " he said, putting a fork into my
dish. "Not chops?"

" Chops," I said.

" Lord bless my soul ! " he exclaimed, " I didn't know they
were chops. Why a chop's the very thing to take off the bad
effects of that beer ! Ain't it lucky ? "

So he took a chop by the bone in one hand, and a potato in
the other, and ate away with a very good appetite, to my
extreme satisfaction. He afterwards took another chop, and
another potato; and after that another chop and another
potato. When he had done, he brought me a pudding, and
having set it before me, seemed to ruminate, and to become
absent in his mind for some moments.

" How's the pie ? " he said, rousing himself.

"It's a pudding," I made answer.

" Pudding ! " he exclaimed. " Why, bless me, so it is !
What ! " looking at it nearer. " You don't mean to say it's a
batter-pudding ? "

" Yes, it is indeed."

" Why, a batter-pudding," he said, taking up a table-spoon,
is my favourite pudding ! Ain't that lucky ? Come on, little
'un, and let's see who'll get most.y^^j^

The waiter certainly got most. rHe entreated more than once
to come in and win, but what with his table-spoon to my tea-
spoon, his dispatch to my dispatch, and his appetite to my
appetite, I was left far behind at the first mouthful, and had no

64 David Copperfield

chance with himt'^I never saw any one enjoy a pudding so
much, I think ; ■ and he laughed, when it was all gone, as if
his enjoyment of it lasted still.

Finding him so very friendly and companionable, it was then
that I asked for the pen and ink and paper, to write to Peggotty.
He not only brought it immediately, but was good enough to
look over me while I wrote the letter. When I had finished
it, he asked me where I was going to school.

I said, " Near London," which was all I knew.

" Oh ! my eye ! " be said, looking very low-spirited, " I am
sorry for that."

"Why?" I asked him.

" Oh, Lord ! " he said, shaking his head, " that's the school
where they broke the boy's ribs — two ribs — a little boy he
was. I should say he was — let me see — how old are you,
about?"

I told him between eight and nine.

" That's just his age," he said. " He was eight years and
six months old when they broke his first rib ; eight years and
eight months old when they broke his second, and did for
him."

I could not disguise from myself, or from the waiter, that
this was an uncomfortable coincidence, and inquired how it
was done. His answer was not cheering to my spirits, for it
consisted of two dismal words, " With whopping."

The blowing of the coach-horn in the yard was a seasonable
diversion, which made me get up and hesitatingly inquire, in
the mingled pride and diffidence of having a purse (which I
took out my pocket), if there were anything to pay.

" There's a sheet of letter-paper," he returned. "Did you
ever buy a sheet of letter-paper ? "

I could not remember that I ever had.

" It's dear," he said, " on account of the duty. Threepence.
That's the way we're taxed in this country. There's nothing
else, except the waiter. Never mind the ink. / lose by
that."

" What should you — what should I — how much ought I to
— what would it be right to pay the waiter, if you please ? " I
stammered, blushing.

" If I hadn't a family, and that family hadn't the cowpock,"
said the waiter, "I wouldn't take a sixpence. If I didn't
support a aged pairint, and a lovely sister," — here the waiter
was greatly ^Itarai=^ I wouldn't take a farthing. If I had a
good place, and was treated well here, I should beg acceptance

David Copperfield 65

of a trifle, instead of taking of it But I live on broken
wittles — and I sleep on the coals " — here the waiter burst into
tears.

I was very much concerned for his misfortunes, and felt that
any recognition short of ninepence would be mere brutality and
hardness of heart. Therefore I gave him one of my three
bright shillings, which he received with much humility and
veneration, and spun up with his thumb, directly afterwards, to
try the goodness of.

It was a little disconcerting to me, to find, when I was being
helped up behind the coach, that I was supposed to have eaten
all the dinner without any assistance. I discovered this, from
overhearing the lady in the bow-window say to the guard, " Take
care of that child, George, or he'll burst ! " and from observing
that the women-servants who were about the place came out to
look and giggle at me as a young phenomenon. My unfortun-
ate friend the waiter, who had quite recovered his spirits, did
not appear to be disturbed by this, but joined in the general
admiration without being at all confused. If I had any doubt
of him, I suppose this half awakened it ; but I am inclined to
believe that with the simple confidence of a child, and the
natural reliance of a child upon superior years (qualities I am
very sorry any children should prematurely change for worldly
wisdom), I had no serious mistrust of him on the whole, even
then.

I felt it rather hard, I must own, to be made, without deserv-
ing it, the subject of jokes between the coachman and guard
as to the coach drawing heavy behind, on account of my
sitting there, and as to the greater expediency of my travelling
by waggon. The story of my supposed appetite getting wind
among the outside passengers, they were merry upon it like-
wise ; and asked me whether I was going to be paid for, at
school, as two brothers or three, and whether I was contracted
for, or went upon the regular terms ; with other pleasant
questions. But the worst of it was, that I knew I should be
ashamed to eat anything, when an opportunity offered, and
that, after a rather light dinner, I should remain hungry all
night — for I had left my cakes behind, at the hotel, in my hurry.
My apprehensions were realised. When we stopped for supper
I couldn't muster courage to take any, though I should have
liked it very much, but sat by the fire and said I didn't want
anything. This did not save me from more jokes, either ; for
a husky-voiced gentleman with a rough face, who had been
eating out of a sandwich-box nearly all the way, except when

66 David Copperfield

he had been drinking out of a bottle, said I was like a boa con-
strictor, who took enough at one meal to last him a long time ;
after which he actually brought a rash out upon himself with
boiled beef.

We had started from Yarmouth at three o'clock in the after-
noon, and we were due in London about eight next morning.
It was Midsummer weather, and the evening was very pleasant.
When we passed through a village, I pictured to myself what
the insides of the houses were like, and what the inhabitants
were about ; and when boys came running after us, and got up
behind and swung there for a little way, I wondered whether
their fathers were alive, and whether they were happy at home.
I had plenty to think of, therefore, besides my mind running
continually on the kind of place I was going to — which was an
awful speculation. Sometimes, I remember, I resigned myself
to thoughts of home and Peggotty ; and to endeavouring, in a
confused blind way, to recall how I had felt, and what sort of
boy I used to be, before I bit Mr. Murdstone : which I couldn't
satisfy myself about by any means, I seemed to have bitten
him in such a remote antiquity.

The night was not so pleasant as the evening, for it got
chilly ; and being put between two gentlemen (the rough-faced
one and another) to prevent my tumbling off the coach, I was
nearly smothered by their falling asleep, and completely block-
ing me up. They squeezed me so hard sometimes, that I
could not help crying out, " Oh, if you please ! " — which they
didn't like at all, because it woke them. Opposite me was an
elderly lady in a great fur cloak, who looked in the dark more
like a haystack than a lady, she was wrapped up to such a
degree. This lady had a basket with her, and she hadn't
known what to do with it, for a long time, until she found that,
on account of my legs being short, it could go underneath me.
It cramped and hurt me so, that it made me perfectly miserable ;
but if I moved in the least, and made a glass that was in the
basket rattle against something else (as it was sure to do), she
gave me the cruellest poke with her foot, and said, " Come,
don't you fidget. Your bones are young enough, /m sure ! "

At last the sun rose, and then my companions seemed to
sleep easier. The difficulties under which they had laboured
all night, and which had found utterance in the most terrific
gasps and snorts, are not to be conceived. As the sun got
higher, their sleep became lighter, and so they gradually one by
one awoke. I recollect being very much surprised by the
feint everybody made, then, of not having been to sleep at all,

David Copperfield 67

and by the uncommon indignation with which every one
repelled the charge. I labour under the same kind of aston-
ishment to this day, having invariably observed that of all human
weaknesses, the one to which our common nature is the least
disposed to confess (I cannot imagine why) is the weakness of
having gone to sleep in a coach.

What an amazing place London was to me when I saw it in
the distance, and how I believed all the adventures of all my
favourite heroes to be constantly enacting and re-enacting there,
and how I vaguely made it out in my own mind to be fuller
of wonders and wickedness than all the cities of the earth, I
need not stop here to relate. We approached it by degrees, and
got, in due time, to the inn in the Whitechapel district, for
which we were bound. I forget whether it was the Blue Bull,
or the Blue Boar ; but I know it was the Blue Something, and
that its likeness was painted up on the back of the coach.

The guard's eye lighted on me as he was getting down, and
he said at the booking-office door :

" Is there anybody here for a yoongster booked in the name
of Murdstone, from Bloonderstone, Sooffolk, to be left till
called for?"

Nobody answered.

"Try Copperfield, if you please, sir," said I, looking help-
lessly down.

" Is there anybody here for a yoongster, booked in the name
of Murdstone, from Bloonderstone, Sooffolk, but owning to
the name of Copperfield, to be left till called for ? " said the
guard. " Come ! Is there anybody ? "

No. There was nobody. I looked anxiously around ; but
the inquiry made no impression on any of the bystanders, if I
except a man in gaiters, with one eye, who suggested that they
had better put a brass collar round my neck, and tie me up in
the stable.

A ladder was brought, and I got down after the lady, who
was like a haystack : not daring to stir until her basket was
removed. The coach was clear of passengers by that time,
the luggage was very soon cleared out, the horses had been
taken out before the luggage, and now the coach itself was
wheeled and backed off by some hostlers, out of the way.
Still, nobody appeared to claim the dusty youngster from
Blunderstone, Suffolk.

More solitary than Robinson Cmsoe, who had nobody to
look at him, and see that he was solitary, I went into the
booking-office, and, by invitation of the clerk on duty, passed

68 David Copperfield

behind the counter, and sat down on the scale at which they
weighed the luggage. Here, as I sat looking at the parcels,
packages, an(i..-tkpoks, and inhaling the smell of stables (ever
since- aSsoQatejJ' with that morning), a procession of most
tremendous considerations begarr to march through my mind.
Supposing nobody should ever fetch me, how long would they
consent to keep me there ? Would they keep me long enough
to spend seven shillings ? Should I sleep at night in one of
those wooden bins, with the other luggage, and wash myself at
the pump in the yard in the morning ; or should I be turned
out every night, and expected to come again to be left till
called for, when the office opened next day ? Supposing there
was no mistake in the case, and Mr. Murdstone had devised
this plan to get rid of me, what should I do ? If they allowed
me to remain there until my seven shillings were spent, I
couldn't hope to remain there when I began to starve. That
would obviously be inconvenient and unpleasant to the
customers, besides entailing on the Blue Whatever-it-was the
risk of funeral expenses. If I started off at once, and tried to
walk back home, how could I ever find my way, how could I
ever hope to walk so far, how could I make sure of any one
but Peggotty, even if I got back ? If I found out the nearest
proper authorities, and offered myself to go for a soldier, or a
sailor, I was such a little fellow that it was most likely they
wouldn't take me in. These thoughts, and a hundred other
such thoughts, turned me burning hot, and made me giddy
with apprehension and dismay. I was in the height of my
fever when a man entered and whispered to the clerk, who
presently slanted me off the scale, and pushed me over to him,
as if I were weighed, bought, delivered, and paid for.

As I went out of the office, hand in hand with this new
acquaintance, I stole a look at him. He was a gaunt, sallow
young man, with hollow cheeks, and a.diin almost a§Jblack-ctt — '
Mr._^urdstone's; but there the likeness en^ed, for his whiskers
were shaved off, and his hair, instead of being glossy, was rusty
and dry. He was dressed in a suit of black clothes which
were rather rusty and dry too, and rather short in the sleeves
and legs ; and he had a white neckerchief on, that was not
over-clean. I did not, and do not, suppose that this necker-
chief was all the linen he wore, but it was all he showed or
gave any hint of,

"You're the new boy ? " he said.

" Yes, sir," I said.

I supposed I was. I didn't know.

David Copperfield 69

•* I'm one of the masters at Salem House," he said.

I made him a bow and felt very much overawed. I was so
ashamed to allude to a commonplace thing like my box, to a
scholar and a master at Salem House, that we had gone some
little distance from the yard before I had the hardihood to
mention it. We turned back, on my humbly insinuating that
it might be useful to me hereafter ; and he told the clerk that
the carrier had instructions to call for it at noon.

"If you please, sir," I said, when we had accomplished
about the same distance as before, " is it far ? "

" It's down by Blackheath," he said.

•' Is that far, sir ? " I diffidently asked.

" It's a good step," he said. " We shall go by the stage-
coach. It's about six miles."

I was so faint and tired, that the idea of holding out for six
miles more was too much for me. I took heart to tell him
that I had had nothing all night, and that if he would allow
me to buy something to eat, I should be very much obliged to
him. He appeared surprised at this — I see him stop and look
at me now — and after considering for a few moments, said he
wanted to call on an old person who lived not far off, and that
the best way would be for me to buy some bread, or whatever
I liked best that was wholesome, and make my breakfast at her
house, where we could get some milk.

Accordingly we looked in at a baker's window, and after I
had made a series of proposals to buy everything that was
bilious in the shop, and he had rejected them one by one, we
decided in favour of a nice little loaf of brown bread, which
cost me threepence. Then, at a grocer's shop, we bought an
egg and a slice of streaky bacon ; which still left what I thought
a good deal of change, out of the second of the bright shillings,
and made me consider London a very cheap place. These
provisions laid in, we went on through a great noise and uproar
that confused my weary head beyond description, and over a
bridge which, no doubt, was London Bridge (indeed I think
he told me so, but I was half asleep), until we came to the poor
person's house, which was a part of some alms-houses, as I
knew by their look, and by an inscription on a stone over the
gate, which said they were established for twenty-five poor
women.

The Master at Salem House lifted the latch of one of a
number of little black doors that were all alike, and had each
a little diamond-paned window on one side, and another little
diamond-paned window above; and we went into the little

yo David Copperfield

house of one of these poor old women, who was blowing a fire
to make a little saucepan boil. On seeing the Master enter,
the old woman stopped with the bellows on her knee, and said
something that I thought sounded like " My Charley ! " but on
seeing me come in too, she got up, and rubbing her hands
made a confused sort of half curtsey.

" Can you cook this young gentleman's breakfast for him, if
you please ? " said the Master at Salem House.

" Can I ? " said the old woman. " Yes can I, sure ! "

" How's Mrs. Fibbitson to-day ? " said the Master, looking
at another old woman in a large chair by the fire, who was such
a bundle of clothes that I feel grateful to this hour for not
having sat upon her by mistake.

" Ah, she's poorly," said the first old woman. " It's one
of her bad days. If the fire was to go out, through any
accident, I verily believe she'd go out too, and never come to
life again."

As they looked at her, I looked at her also. Although it
was a warm day, she seemed to think of nothing but the fire.
I fancied she was jealous even of the saucepan on it ; and I
have reason to know that she took its impressment into the
service of boiling my egg and broiling my bacon, in dudgeon ;
for I saw her, with my own discomfited eyes, shake her fist at
me once, when those culinary operations were going on, and
no one else was looking. The sun streamed in at the little
window, but she sat with her own back and the back of the
large chair towards it, screening the fire as if she were sedulously
keeping // warm, instead of it keeping her warm, and watching
it in a most distrustful manner. The completion of the pre-
parations for my breakfast, by relieving the fire, gave her such
extreme joy that she laughed aloud — and a very unmelodious
laugh she had, I must say.

I sat down to my brown loaf, my egg, and my rasher of
bacon, with a basin of milk besides, and made a most delicious
meal. While I was yet in the full enjoyment of it, the old
woman of the house said to the Master :

" Have you got your flute with you?"

" Yes," he returned.

" Have a blow at it," said the old woman, coaxingly. " Do ! "

The Master, upon this, put his hand underneath the skirts of
his coat, and brought out his flute in three pieces, which he
screwed together, and began immediately to play. My im-
pression is, after many years of consideration, that there never
can have been anybody in the world who played worse. He

David Copperfield 71

made the most dismal sounds I have ever heard produced by
any means, natural or artificial. I don't know what the tunes
were — if there were such things in the performance at all, which
I doubt — but the influence of the strain upon me was, first, to
make me think of all my sorrows until I could hardly keep my
tears back ; then to take away my appetite ; and lastly, to make
me so sleepy that I couldn't keep my eyes open. They begin
to close again, and I begin to nod, as the recollection rises
fresh upon me. Once more the little room, with its open
comer cupboard, and its square-backed chairs, and its angular
little staircase leading to the room above, and its three peacock's
feathers displayed over the mantelpiece — I remember wondering
when I first went in, what that peacock would have thought if
he had known what his finery was doomed to come to — ^fades
from before me, and I nod, and sleep. The flute becomes
inaudible, the wheels of the coach are heard instead, and I am
on my journey. The coach jolts, I wake with a start, and the
flute has come back again, and the Master at Salem House is
sitting with his legs crossed, playing it dolefully, while the old
woman of the house looks on delighted. She fades in her
turn, and he fades, and all fades, and there is no flute, no
Master, no Salem House, no David Copperfield, no anything
but heavy sleep.

I dreamed, I thought, that once while he was blowing into
this dismal flute, the old woman of the house, who had gone
nearer and nearer to him in her ecstatic admiration, leaned
over the back of his chair and gave him an affectionate squeeze
round the neck, which stopped his playing for a moment. I
was in the middle state between sleeping and waking, either
then or immediately afterwards ; for, as he resumed — it was a
real fact that he had stopped playing — I saw and heard the
same old woman ask Mrs. Fibbitson if it wasn't delicious
(meaning the flute), to which Mrs. Fibbitson replied, " Ay, ay !
yes ! " and nodded at the fire : to which, I am persuaded, she
gave the credit of the whole performance.

When I seemed to have been dozing a long while, the
Master at Salem House unscrewed his ^ute into the three
pieces, put them up as before, and took me away. We found
the coach very near at hand, and got upon the roof ; but I was
so dead sleepy, that when we stopped on the road to take
up somebody else, they put me inside where there were no
passengers, and where I slept profoundly, until I found the
coach going at a footpace up a steep hill among green leaves.
Presently, it stopped, and had come to its destination.

72- David Copperfield

A short walk brought us — I mean the Master and me — tc
Salem House, which was enclosed with a high brick wall, and
looked very dull. Over a door in this wall was a board with
Salem House upon it ; and through a grating in this door we
were surveyed, when we rang the bell, by a surly face, which I
found, on the door being opened, belonged to a stout man with
a bull-neck, a wooden leg, overhanging temples, and his hair
cut close all round his head.

" The new boy," said the Master.

The man with the wooden leg eyed me all over — it didn't
take long, for there was not much of me — and locked the gate
behind us, and took out the key. We were going up to the
house, among some dark heavy trees, when he called after my
conductor.

"Hallo!"

We looked back, and he was standing at the door of a little
lodge, where he lived, with a pair of boots in his hand.

" Here ! The cobbler's been," he said, " since you've been
out, Mr. Mell, and he says he can't mend 'em any more. He
says there ain't a bit of the original boot left, and he wonders
you expect it."

With these words he threw the boots towards Mr. Mell, who
went back a few paces to pick them up, and looked at them
(very disconsolately, I was afraid) as we went on together. I
observed then, for the first time, that the boots he had on were
a good deal the worse for wear, and t;hat his stocking was just
breaking out in one place, like a bud.

Salem House was a square brick building with wings, of a
bare and unfurnished appearance. All about it was so very
quiet, that I said to Mr. Mell I supposed the boys were out ;
but he seemed surprised at my not knowing that it was holiday-
time. That all the boys were at their several homes. That
Mr. Creakle, the proprietor, was down by the sea-side with
^Mrs. and Miss Creakle. And that I was sent in holiday-time
V as a punishment for my misdoing. All of which he explained
I to me as we went along.

I gazed upon the schoolroom into which he took me, as the
most forlorn and desolate place I had ever seen. I see it now.
A long room, with three long rows of desks, and six of forms,
and bristling all round with pegs for hats and slates. Scraps of
old copy-books and exercises litter the dirty floor. Some silk-
worms' houses, made of the same materials, are scattered over
the desks. Two miserable little white mice, left behind by
their owner, are running up and down in a fusty castle made

David Copperfield 73

of pasteboard and wire, looking in all the comers with their red
eyes for anything to eat. A bird, in a cage very little bigger
than himself, makes a mournful rattle now and then in hopping
on his perch, two inches high, or dropping from it ; but neither
sings nor chirps. There is a strange unwholesome smell upon
the room, like mildewed corduroys, sweet apples wanting air,
and rotten books. There could not well be more ink splashed
about it, if it had been roofless from its first construction, and
the skies had rained, snowed, hailed, and blown ink through
the varying seasons of the year.

Mr. Mell having left me while he took his irreparable boots

up-stairs, I went softly to the upper end of the room, observing

all this as I crept along. Suddenly I came upon a pasteboard |
placard, beautifully written, which was lying on the desk, and I
bore these words : " Tah^ratvji^ him Hf. JdUr^ ^^

I got upon the desk immediately, apprehensive of at least a
great dog underneath. But, though I looked all round with
anxious eyes, I could see nothing of him. I was still engaged
in peering about, when Mr. Mell came back, and asked me what
I did up there ?

" I beg your pardon, sir,** says I, " if you please, I'm looking
for the dog."

" Dog ? " says he. " What dog ? "

" Isn't it a dog, sir ? "

" Isn't what a dog ? "

" That's to be taken care of, sir ; that bites ? "

"No, Copperfield," says he, gravely, "that's not a dog.
That's a boy. My instructions are, Copperfield, to put this
placard on your back. I am sorry to make such a beginning
with you, but I must do it."

With that he took me down, and tied the placard, which was
neatly constructed for the purpose, on my shoulders like a
knapsack ; and wherever I went, afterwards, I had the consola-
tion of carrying it.

What I suffered from that placard nobody can imagine.
Whether it was possible for people to see me or not, I always
fancied that somebody was reading it. It was no relief to turn
round and find nobody; for wher^vf^r my haHf ivf^fi, rhnrn T
imagined somebodyalways-tQ-Joe. That cruel man with the
wooden leg aggravated my sufferings. He was in authority,
and if he ever saw me leaning against a tree, or a wall, or the
house, he roared out from his lodge-door in a stupendous voice,
" Hallo, you sir ! You Copperfield ! Show that badge con-
spicuous, or I'll report you ! " The playground was a bare

74 David Copperfield

gravelled yard, open to all the baQk of the house and the
offices ; and I knew that the servants read it, and the butcher
read it, and the baker read it ; that everybody, in a word, who
came backwards and forwards to the house, of a morning when
I was ordered to walk there, read that I was to be taken care of,
for I bit. I recollect that I positively began to have a dread of
myself, as a kind of wild boy who did bite.

There was an old door in this playground, on which the boys
had a custom of carving their names. It was completely
covered with such inscriptions. In my dread of the end of the
vacation and their coming back, I could not read a boy's name,
without inquiring in what tone and with what emphasis he
would read, ** Take care of him. He bites." There was one
boy — a certain J. Steerforth — who cut his name very deep and
very often, who, I conceived, would read it in a rather strong
voice, and afterwards pull my hair. There was another boy,
one Tommy Traddles, who I dreaded would make game of it,
and pretend to be dreadfully frightened of me. There was a
third, George Demple, who I fancied would sing it. I have
looked, a little shrinking creature, at that door, until the owners
of all the names — there were five-and-forty of them in the
school then, Mr. Mell said — seemed to send me to Coventry
by general acclamation, and to cry out, each in his own way,
" Take care of him. ' He bites ! "

It was the same with the places at the desks and forms. It
was the same with the groves of deserted bedsteads I peeped
at, on my way to, and when I was in, my own bed. I remem-
ber dreaming night after night, of being with my mother as she
used to be, or of going to a party at Mr. Peggotty's, or of
travelling outside the stage-coach, or of dining again with my
unfortunate friend the waiter, and in all these circumstances
making people scream and stare, by the unhappy disclosure
that I had nothing on but my little night-shirt, and that placard.

In the monotony of my life, and in my constant apprehen-
sion of the re-opening of the school, it was such an insupport-
able affliction ! I had long tasks every day to do with Mr.
Mell ; but I did them, there being no Mr. and Miss Murdstone
here, and got through them without disgrace. Before, and after
them, I walked about — supervised, as I have mentioned, by
the man with the wooden leg. How vividly I call to mind the
damp about the house, the green cracked flagstones in the
court, an old leaky water-butt, and the discoloured trunks of
some of the grim trees, which seemed to have dripped more in
the rain than other trees, and to have blown less in the sun 1

David Copperfield 75

At one we dined, Mr. Mell and I, at the upper end of a long
bare dining-room, full of deal tables, and smelling of fat.
Then, we had more tasks until tea, which Mr. Mell drank out
of a blue tea-cup, and I out of a tin pot. All day long, and
until seven or eight in the evening, Mr. Mell, at his own
detached desk in the school-room, worked hard with pen, ink,
ruler, books, and writing-paper, making out the bills (as I found)
for last half-year. When he had put up his things for the
night, he took out his flute, and blew at it, until I almost
thought he would gradually blow his whole being into the large
hole at the top, and ooze away at the keys.

I picture my small self in the dimly-lighted rooms, sitting
with my head upon my hand, listening to the doleful perform-
ance of Mr. Mell, and conning to-morrow's lessons. I picture
myself with my books shut up, still listening to the doleful
performance of Mr. Mell, and listening through it to what used
to be at home, and to the blowing of the wind on Yarmouth
flats, and feeling very sad and solitary. I picture myself going
up to bed, among the unused rooms, and sitting on my bedside,
crying for a comfortable word from Peggotty. I picture myself
coming down-stairs in the morning, and looking through a long
ghastly gash of a staircase window at the school-bell hanging
on the top of an outhouse with a weathercock above it ; and
dreading the time when it shall ring J. Steerforth and the rest
to work. Such time is only second, in my foreboding appre-
hensions, to the time when the man vnth the wooden leg shall
unlock the rusty gate to give admission to the awful Mr. Creakle.
I cannot think 1 was a very dangerous character in any of these
aspects, but in all of them I carried the same warning on my
back.

Mr. Mell never said much to me, but he was never harsh to
me. I suppose we were company to each other, without talk-
ing. I forgot to mention that he would talk to himself
sometimes, and grin, and clench his fist, and grind his teeth,
and pull his hair in an unaccountable manner. But he had
these peculiarities. At first they frightened me, though I soon
got used to them.

76 David Copperfield

CHAPTER VI

I ENLARGE MY CIRCLE OF ACQUAINTANCE

I HAD led this life about a month, when the man with the wooden
leg began to stump about with a mop and a bucket of water,
from which I inferred that preparations were making to receive
Mr. Creakle and the boys. I was not mistaken ; for the mop
came into the schoolroom before long, and turned out Mr. Mell
and me, who lived where we could, and got on how we could,
for some days, during 'which we were always in the way of two
or three young women, who had rarely shown themselves
before, and were so continually in the midst of dust that I
sneezed almost as much as if Salem House had been a great
snuff-box.

One day I was informed by Mr. Mell that Mr. Creakle would
be home that evening. In the evening, after tea, I heard that
he was come. Before bed-time, I was fetched by thi^man with
Jhe... wooden leg to appear before him.

Mr. CreaHe's part of the house was a good deal more
comfortable than ours, and he had a snug bit of garden that
looked pleasant after the dusty playground, which was such a
desert in miniature, that I thought no one but a camel, or a
dromedary, could have felt at home in it. It seemed to me a
bold thing even to take notice that the passage looked comfort-
able, as I went on my way, trembling, to Mr. Creakle's presence :
which so abashed me, when I was ushered into it, that I hardly
saw Mrs. Creakle or Miss Creakle (who were both there, in the
parlour), or anything but Mr. Creakle, a stout gentleman with
a bunch of watch-chain and seals, in an arm-chair, with a
tumbler and bottle beside him.

" So ! " said Mr. Creakle. " This is the young gentleman
whose teeth are to be filed ! Turn him round."

The wooden-legged man turned me about so as to exhibit the
placard ; and having afforded time for a full survey of it, turned
me about again, with my face to Mr. Creakle, and posted him-
self at Mr. Creakle's side. Mr. Creakle's face was fiery, and
his eyes were small, and deep in his head ; he had thick veins
in his forehead, a little nose, and a large chin. He was bald
on the top of his head ; and had some thin wet-looking hair
that was just turning grey, brushed across each temple, so that
the two sides interlaced on his forehead. But the circumstance

David Copperfield 77

about him which impressed me most, was, that he had no voice,
but spoke in a whisper. The exertion this cost him, or the con-
sciousness of talking in that feeble way, made his angry face so
much more angry, and his thick veins so much thicker, when
he spoke, that I am not surprised, on looking back, at this
peculiarity striking me as his chief one.

" Now," said Mr. Creakle. " What's the report of this boy ? "

" There's nothing against him yet," returned the man with
the wooden leg. " There has been no opportunity."

I thought Mr. Creakle was disappointed. I thought Mrs.
and Miss Creakle (at whom I now glanced for the first time,
and who were, both, thin and quiet) were not disappointed.

" Come here, sir!" said Mr. Creakle, beckoning to me.

" Come here ! " said the man ¥rith the wooden leg, repeating
the gesture.

"I have the happiness of knowing your father-in-law,"
whispered Mr. Creakle, taking me by the ear ; " and a worthy
man he is, and a man of a strong character. He knows me, and
I know him. Do you know me ? Hey ? " said Mr. Creakle,
pinching my ear with ferocious playfulness.

" Not yet, sir," I said, flinching with the pain.

" Not yet ? Hey ? " repeated Mr. Creakle. " But you will
soon. Hey ? "

" You will soon. Hey ? " repeated the man with the wooden
leg. I afterwards found that he generally acted, with his strong
voice, as Mr. Creakle's interpreter to the boys.

I was very much frightened, and said I hoped so, if he
pleased. I felt, all this while, as if my ear were blazing ; he
pinched it so hard.

" I'll tell you what I am," whispered Mr. Creakle, letting it
go at last, with a screw at parting that brought the water into
my eyes. " I'm-ar Tartar."

" A Tartar," said the man with the wooden leg.

" When I say I'll do a thing, I do it," said Mr. Creakle ;
" and when I say I will have a thing done, I will have it done."

" — Will have a thing done, I will have it done," repeated
the man with the wooden leg.

" I am a determined character," said Mr. Creakle. " That's
what I am. I do my duty. That's what / do. My flesh and
blood," he looked at Mrs. Creakle as he said this, " when it
rises against me, is not my flesh and blood. I discard it.
Has that fellow," to the man with the wooden leg, "been
here again ? "

"No," was the answer.

78 David Copperfield

"No," said Mr. Creakle. "He knows better. He knows
me. Let him keep away. I say let him keep away," said Mr.
Creakle, striking his hand upon the table, and looking at Mrs.
Creakle, "for he knows me. Now you have begun to know
me too, my young friend, and you may go. Take him away."

I was very glad to be ordered away, for Mrs. and Miss
Creakle were both wiping their eyes, and I felt as uncomfort-
able for them as I did for myself. But I had a petition on my
mind which concerned me so nearly, that I couldn't help
saying, though I wondered at my own courage:

" If you please, sir "

Mr. Creakle whispered, " Hah ! What's this ? " and bent
his eyes upon me, as if he would have burnt me up with them.

"If you please, sir," I faltered, "if I might be allowed (I
am very sorry indeed, sir, for what I did) to take this writing
off, before the boys come back "

Whether Mr. Creakle was in earnest, or whether he only did
it to frighten me, I don't know, but he made a burst out of his
chair, before which I precipitately retreated, without waiting
for the escort of the man with the wooden leg, and never once
stopped until I reached my own bedroom, where, finding I was
not pursued, I went to bed, as it was time, and lay quaking,
for a couple of hours.

Next morning Mr. Sharp came back. Mr. Sharp was the
first master, and superior to Mr. Mell. Mr. Mell took his
meals with the boys, but Mr. Sharp dined and supped at Mr.
Creakle's table. He was a limp, delicate-looking gentleman, I
thought, with a good deal of nose, and a way of carrying his
head on one side, as if it were a little too heavy for him. His
hair was very smooth and wavy ; but I was informed by the
very first boy who came back that it was a wig (a second-hand
one he said), and that Mr. Sharp went out every Saturday
afternoon to get it curled.

It was no other than Tommy Traddles who gave me this
piece of intelligence. He was the first boy who returned. He
introduced himself by informing me that I should find his
name on the right-hand corner of the gate, over the top-bolt ;
upon that I said, " Traddles ? " to which he replied, " The
same," and then he asked me for a full account of myself
and family.

It was a happy circumstance for me that Traddles came
back first. He enjoyed my placard so much, that he saved
me from the embarrassment of either disclosure or conceal-
ment, by presenting me to every other boy who came back,

David Copperfield 79

great or small, immediately on his arrival, in this form of
introduction, " Look here ! Here's a game ! " Happily, too,
the greater part of the boys came back low-spirited, and were
not so boisterous at my expense as I had expected. Some of
them certainly did dance about me like wild Indians, and the
greater part could not resist the temptation of pretending that
I was a dog, and patting and smoothing me, lest I should bite,
and saying, " Lie down, sir ! " and calling me Towzer. This
was naturally confusing, among so many strangers, and cost
me some tears, but on the whole it was much better than 1
had anticipated.

I was not considered as being formally received into the
school, however, until L__St£eif6rth_5rrived. Before this boy,
who was reputed to Sea great scholar, and was very good-
looking, and at least half-a-dozen years my senior, I was carried
as before a magistrate. He inquired, under a shed in the play-
ground, into the particulars of my punishment, and was pleased
to express his opinion that it was " a jolly shame ; " for which
I became bound to him ever afterwards.

" What money have you got, Copperfield ? " he said, walking
aside with me when he had disposed of my affair in these
terms.

I told him seven shillings.

"You had better give it to me to take care of," he said.
"At least, you can if you like. You needn't if you don't
like."

I hastened to comply with his friendly suggestion, and
opening Peggotty's purse, turned it upside down into his hand.

" Do you want to spend anything now ? " he asked me.

" No, thank you," I replied.

"You can, if you like, you know," said Steerfortb. "Say
the word."

" No, thank you, sir," I repeated.

" Perhaps you'd like to spend a couple of shillings or so, in
a bottle of currant wine by-and-by, up in the bedroom ? " said
Steerforth. " You belong to my bedroom, I find ? "

It certainly had not occurred to me before, but I said, Yes,
I should like that.

"Very good," said Steerforth. "You'll be glad to spend
another shilling or so, in almond cakes, I dare say?"

I said. Yes, I should like that, too.

" And another shilling or so in biscuits, and another in fruit,
eh ? " said Steerforth. " I say, young Copperfield, you're
going it!" >«r

8o David Copperfield

I smiled because he smiled, but I was a little troubled in my
mind, too.

" Well ! " said Steer forth. " We must make it stretch as far
as we can ; that's all. I'll do the best in my power for you.
I can go out when I like, and I'll smuggle the prog in." With
these words he put the money in his pocket, and kindly told
me not to make myself uneasy ; he would take care it should
be all right.

He was as good as his word, if that were all right which I
had a secret misgiving was nearly all wrong — for I feared it
was a waste of my mother's two half-crowns — though I had
preserved the piece of paper they were wrapped in : which was
a precious saving. When we went up-stairs to bed, he pro-
duced the whole seven shillings' worth, and laid it out on my
bed in the moonlight, saying :

"There you are, young Copperfield, and a royal spread
you've got."

I couldn't think of doing the honours of the feast, at my
time of life, while he was by : my hand shook at the very
thought of it. I begged him to do me the favour of presiding ;
and my request being seconded by the other boys who were in
that room, he acceded to it, and sat upon my pillow, handing
round the viands — with perfect fairness, I must say — and
dispensing the currant wine in a little glass without a foot,
which was his own property. As to me, I sat on his left hand,
and the rest were grouped about us, on the nearest beds and
on the floor.

How well I recollect our sitting there, talking in whispers :
or their talking, and my respectfully listening, I ought rather
to say ; the moonlight falling a little way into the room, through
the window, painting a pale window on the floor, and the
greater part of us in shadow, except when Steerforth dipped a
match into a phosphorus-box, when he wanted to look for any-
thing on the board, and shed a blue glare over us that was
gone directly! A certain mysterious feeling, consequent on
the darkness, the secrecy of the revel, and the whisper in
which everything was said, steals over me again, and I listen to
all they tell me with a vague feeling of solemnity and awe,
which makes me glad that they are all so near, and frightens
me (though I feign to laugh) when Traddles pretends to see a
ghost in the corner.

I heard all kinds of things about the school and all belong-
ing to it. I heard that. Mr. Creakle had not preferred his
claim to being a Tartar without reason; that he was the

David Copperfield 8i

sternest and most severe of masters ; that he laid about him,
right and left, every day of his Hfe, charging in among the
boys like a trooper, and slashing away, unmercifully. That he
knew nothing himself, but the art of slashing, being more
ignorant (J. Steerforth said) than the lowest boy in the school ;
that he had been, a good many years ago, a small hop-dealer
in the Borough, and had taken to the schooling business after
being bankrupt in hops, and making away with Mrs. Creakle's
money. With a good deal more of that sort, which I wondered
how they knew.

I heard that the man with the wooden leg, whose name was
Tungay, was an obstinate barbarian who had formerly assisted
in the hop business, but had come into the scholastic line with
Mr. Creakle, in consequence, as was supposed among the boys,
of his having broken his leg in Mr. Creakle's service, and
having done a deal of dishonest work for him, and knowing his
secrets. I heard that with the single exception of Mr. Creakle,
Tungay considered the whole establishment, masters and boys,
as his natural enemies, and that the only delight of his Ufe was
to be sour and malicious. I heard that Mr. Creakle had a son,
who had not been Tungay's friend, and who, assisting in the
school, had once held some remonstrance with his father on an
occasion when its discipline was very cruelly exercised, and
was supposed, besides, to have protested against his father's
usage of his mother. I heard that Mr. Creakle had turned
him out of doors, in consequence, and that Mr. and Mrs.
Creakle had been in a sad way, ever since.

But the greatest wonder that I heard of Mr. Creakle was,
there being one boy in the school on whom he never ventured
to lay a hand, and that boy being J. Steerforth. Steerforth
himself confirmed this when it was stated, and said that he
should like to begin to see him do it. On being asked by a
mild boy (not me) how he would proceed if he did begin to
see him do it, he dipped a match into his phosphorus-box on
purpose to shed a glare over his reply, and said he would
commence by knocking him down with a blow on the
forehead from the seven-and-sixpenny ink-bottle that was
always on the mantelpiece. We sat in the dark for some time,
breathless.

I heard that Mr. Sharp and Mr. Mell were both supposed to
be wretchedly paid ; and that when there was hot and cold
meat for diimer at Mr. Creakle's table, Mr. Sharp was always
expected to say he preferred cold ; which was again corroborated
by J. Steerforth, the only parlour-boarder. I heard that Mr.

82 David Copperfield

Sharp's wig didn't fit him ; and that he needn't be so " bounce-
able" — somebody else said "bumptious" — about it, because
his own red hair was very plainly to be seen behind.

I heard that one boy, who was a coal-merchant's son, came
as a set-ofF against the coal-bill, and was called, on that account,
"Exchange or Barter" — a name selected from the arithmetic-
book as expressing this arrangement. I heard that the table-
beer was a robbery of parents, and the pudding an imposition.
I heard that Miss Creakle was regarded by the school in general
as being in love with Steerforth ; and I am sure, as I sat in the
dark, thinking of his nice voice, and his fine face, and his easy
manner, and his curling hair, I thought it very likely. I heard
that Mr. Mell was not a bad sort of fellow, but hadn't a sixpence
to bless himself with ; and that there was no doubt that old
Mrs. Mell, his mother, was as poor as Job. I thought of my
breakfast then, and what had sounded like " My Charley ! "
but I was, I am glad to remember, as mute as a mouse
about it.

The hearing of all this, and a good deal more, outlasted the
banquet some time. The greater part of the guests had gone
to bed as soon as the eating and drinking were over ; and we,
who had remained whispering and listening half undressed, at
last betook ourselves to bed, too.

"Good night, young Copperfield," said Steerforth. "I'll
take care of you."

"You're very kind," I gratefully returned. "I am very
much obliged to you."

"You haven't got a sister, have you?" said Steerforth,
yawning.

"No," I answered.

"That's a pity," said Steerforth. "If you had had one, I
should think she would have been a pretty, timid, little, bright-
eyed sort of girl. I should have liked to know her. Good
night, young Copperfield."

" Good night, sir," I replied.

I thought of him very much after I went to bed, and raised
myself, I recollect, to look at him where he lay in the moon-
light, with his handsome face turned up, and his head reclining
easily on his arm. He was a person of great power in my eyes ;
that was, of course, the reason of my mind running on him.
No veiled future dimly glanced upon him in the moonbeams.
There was no shadowy picture of his footsteps, in the garden
that I dreamed of walking in all night

David Copperfield 83

CHAPTER VII

MY "first half" at SALEM HOUSE

School began in earnest next day. A profound impression
was made upon me, I remember, by the roar of voices in the
schoolroom suddenly becoming hushed as death when Mr.
Creakle entered after breakfast, and stood in the doorway
looking round upon us like a giant in a story-book surveying
his captives.

Tungay stood at Mr. Creakle's elbow. He had no occasion,
I thought, to cry out " Silence ! " so ferociously, for the boys
were all struck speechless and motionless.

Mr. Creakle was seen to speak, and Tungay was heard, to
this effect.

"Now, boys, this is a new half. Take care what you're
about, in this new half. Come fresh up to the lessons, I advise
you, for I come fresh up to the punishment. I won't flinch.
It will be of no use your rubbing yourselves; you won't rub
the marks out that I shall give you. Now get to work, every
boy ! "

When this dreadful exordium was over, and Tungay had
stumped out again, Mr. Creakle came to where I sat, and told
me that if I were famous for biting, he was famous for biting,
too. He then showed me the cane, and asked me what I
thought of that^ for a tooth ? Was it a sharp tooth, hey ? Was
it a double tooth, hey ? Had it a deep prong, hey ? Did it
bite, hey? Did it bite? At every question he gave me a
fleshy cut with it that made me writhe; so I was very soon
made free of Salem House (as Steerforth said), and was very
soon in tears also.

Not that I mean to say these were special marks of dis-
tinction, which only I received. On the contrary, a large
majority of the boys (especially the smaller ones) were visited
with similar instances of notice, as Mr. Creakle made the round
of the schoolroom. Half the establishment was writhing and]
crying, before the day's work began ; and how much of it had
writhed and cried before the day's work was over I am really
afraid to recollect, lest I should seem to exaggerate.

I should think there never can have been a man who enjoyed
his profession more than Mr. Creakle did. He had a delight

84 David Copperfield

in cutting at the boys, which was like the satisfaction of a
craving appetite. I am confident that he couldn't resist a
chubby boy, especially ; that there was a fascination in such a
subject, which made him restless in his mind, until he had
scored and marked him for the day. I was chubby myself, and
ought to know. I am sure when I think of the fellow now, my
blood rises against him with the disinterested indignation I
should feel if I could have known all about him without having
ever been in his power ; but it rises hotly, because I know him
to have been an incapable brute, who had no more right to be
possessed of the great trust he held, than to be Lord High
Admiral, or Commander-in-Chief — in either of which capacities
it is probable that he would have done infinitely less mischief.

Miserable little propitiators of a remorseless Idol, how abject
we were to him ! What a launch in life I think it now, on
looking back, to be so mean and servile to a man of such part?
and pretensions ! I

Here I sit at the desk again, watching his eye — humbl^
watching his eye, as he rules a ciphering book for another
victim whose hands have just been flattened by that identical
ruler, and who is trying to wipe the sting out with a pocket-
handkerchief. I have plenty to do. I don't watch his eye in
idleness, but because I am morbidly attracted to it, in a dread
desire to know what he will do next, and whether it will be my
turn to suffer, or somebody else's. A lane of small boys
beyond me, with the same interest in his eye, watch it too. I
think he knows it, though he pretends he don't. He makes
dreadful mouths as he rules the ciphering book ; and now he
throws his eye sideways down our lane, and we all droop over
our books and tremble. A moment afterwards we are again
eyeing him. An unhappy culprit, found guilty of imperfect
exercise, approaches at his command. The culprit falters
excuses, and professes a determination to do better to-morrow.
Mr. Creakle cuts a joke before he beats him, and we laugh at
it, — miserable little dogs, we laugh, with our visages as white as
ashes, and our hearts sinking into our boots.

Here I sit at the desk again, on a drowsy summer afternoon.
A buzz and hum go up around me, as if the boys were so many
blue-bottles. A cloggy sensation of the lukewarm fat of meat
is upon me (we dined an hour or two ago), and my head is as
heavy as so much lead. I would give the world to go to sleep.
I sit with my eye on Mr. Creakle, blinking at him hke a young
owl ; when sleep overpowers me for a minute, he still looms
through my slumber, ruling those ciphering books, until he

David Copperfield 85

softly comes behind me and wakes me to plainer perception of
him, with a red ridge across my back.

Here I am in the playground, with my eye still fascinated by
him, though I can't see him. The window at a little distance
from which I know he is having his dinner, stands for him, and
I eye that instead. If he shows his face near it, mine assumes
an imploring and submissive expression. If he looks out
through the glass, the boldest boy (Steerforth excepted) stops
in the middle of a shout or yell, and becomes contemplative.
One day, Traddles (the most unfortunate boy in the world)
breaks that window accidentally with a ball. I shudder at this
moment with the tremendous sensation of seeing it done, and
feeling that the ball has bounded on to Mr. Creakle's sacred
head.

Poor Traddles ! In a tight sky-blue suit that made his arms
and legs like German sausages, or roly-poly puddings, he was
the merriest and most miserable of all the boys. He was
always being caned — I think he was caned every day that half-
year, except one holiday Monday when he was only ruler'd on
both hands — and was always going to write to his uncle about
it, and never did. After laying his head on the desk for a little
while, he would cheer up somehow, begin to laugh again, and
draw skeletons all over his slate, before his eyes were dry. I
used at first to wonder what comfort Traddles found in drawing
skeletons ; and for some time looked upon him as a sort of
hermit, who reminded himself by those symbols of mortality
that caning couldn't last for ever. But I believe he only did it
because they were easy, and didn't want any features.

He was very honourable, Traddles was, and held it as a
solemn duty in the boys to stand by one another. He suffered
for this on several occasions ; and particularly once, when Steer-
forth laughed in church, and the Beadle thought it was Traddles,
and took him out. I see him now, going away in custody,
despised by the congregation. He never said who was the real
offender, though he smarted for it next day, and was imprisoned
so many hours that he came forth with a whole churchyardful
of skeletons swarming all over his Latin Dictionary. But he
had his reward. Steerforth said there was nothing of the sneak
in Traddles, and we all felt that to be the highest praise. For
my part, I could have gone through a good deal (though I was
much less brave than Traddles, and nothing like so old) to
have won such a recompense.

To see Steetforth walk to church before us, arm-in-arm with
Miss Creakle, wasTJne of the great sights of my life. I didn't

86 David Copperfield

think Miss Creakle equal to little Em'ly in point of beauty, and
I didn't love her (I didn't dare)Ttnat-^ thought her a young
lady of extraordinary attractions, and in point of gentility not
to be surpassed. When Steerforth, in white trousers, carried
her parasol for her, I felt proud to know him ; and believed
-that she could not choose but adore him with all her heart.
Mr. Sharp and Mr. Mell were both notable personages in my
eyes; but Steerforth was to them what the sun was to two
stars.

Steerforth continued his protection of me, and proved a very
useful friend, since nobody dared to annoy one whom he
honoured with his countenance. He couldn't — or at all events
he didn't — defend me from Mr. Creakle, who was very severe
with me ; but whenever I had been treated worse than usual,
he always told me that I wanted a little of his pluck, and that
he wouldn't have stood it himself; which I felt he intended for
encouragement, and considered to be very kind of him. There
was one advantage, and only one that I know of, in Mr. Creakle's
severity. He found my placard in his way when he came up or
down behind the form on which I sat, and wanted to make a
cut at me in passing ; for this reason it was soon taken off, and
I saw it no more.

An accidental circumstance cemented the intimacy between
Steerforth and me, in a manner that inspired me with great
pride and satisfaction, though it sometimes led to inconvenience.
It happened on one occasion, when he was doing me the honour
of talking to me in the playground, that I hazarded the observa-
tion that something or somebody — I forget what now — was like
something or somebody in Peregrine Pickle. He said nothing
at the time ; but when I was going to bed at night, asked me if
I had got that book ?

I told him no, and explained how it was that I had read it,
and all those other books of which I have made mention.

" And do you recollect them ? " Steerforth said.

Oh, yes, I replied ; I had a good memory, and I believed I
recollected them very well.

" Then I tell you what, young Copperfield," said Steerforth,
" you shall tell 'em to me. I can't get to sleep very early at
night, and I generally wake rather early in the morning. We'll
go over 'em one after another. We'll make some regular
Arabian Nights of it."

I felt extremely flattered by this arrangement, and we
commenced carrying it into execution that very evening.
What ravages I committed on my favourite authors in the

cM^

VV>MC/%

David Copperfield 87

course of my interpretation of them, I am not in a condition
to say, and should be very unwilling to know; but I had a
profound faith in them, and I had, to the best of my belief, a
simple earnest manner of narrating what I did narrate; and
these qualities went a long way.

The drawback was, that I was often sleepy at night, or out
of spirits and indisposed to resume the story, and then it was
rather hard work, and it must be done ; for to disappoint or to
displease Steerforth was of course out of the question. In the
morning too, when I felt weary, and should have enjoyed
another hour's repose very much, it was a tiresome thing to be
roused, like the Sultana Scheherazade, and forced into a long
story before the getting-up bell rang; but Steerforth was resolute ;
and as he explained to me, in return, my sums and exercises,
and anything in my tasks that was too hard for me, I was no
loser by the transaction. Let me do myself justice, however.
I was moved by no interested or selfish motive, nor was I
moved by fear of him. I admired and loved him, and his
approval was return enough. It was so precious to me, that I
look back on these trifles, now, with an aching heart.

Steerforth was considerate too, and showed his consideration,
in one particular instance, in an unflinching manner that was a
little tantalising, I suspect, to poor Traddles and the rest.
Peggotty's promised letter — what a comfortable letter it was ! —
arrived before "the half" was many weeks old, and with it a
cake in a perfect nest of oranges, and two bottles of cowslip
wine. This treasure, as in duty bound, I laid at the feet of
Steerforth, and begged him to dispense.

"Now, ril tell you what, young Copperfield," said he:
"the wine shall be kept to wet your whistle when you are)
story-telling."

~I blushed at the idea, and begged him, in my modesty, not
to think of it But he said he had observed I was sometimes
hoarse — a little roopy was his exact expression — and it should
be, every drop, devoted to the purpose he had mentioned.
Accordingly, it was locked up in his box, and drawn off by
himself in a phial, and administered to me through a piece of
quill in the cork, when I was supposed to be in want of a
restorative. Sometimes, to make it a more sovereign specific,
he was so kind as to squeeze orange juice into it, or to stir it
up with ginger, or dissolve a peppermint drop in it; and
although I cannot assert that the flavour was improved by
these experiments, or that it was exactly the compound one
would have chosen for a stomachic, the last thing at night and

88 David Copperfield

the first thing in the morning, I drank it gratefully, and was

' — very sensible of his attention.

We seem, to me, to have been months over Peregrine, and
months more over the other stories. The institution never
flagged for want of a story, I am certain>..and the wine lasted
out almost as well as the matter. PooV Traddles-^-I never
think of that boy but with a strange disposition to laugh, and
with tears in my eyes — was a sort of chorus, in general, and
affected to be convulsed with mirth at the comic parts, and to
be overcome with fear when there was any passage of an alarm-
ing character in the narrative. This rather put me out, very
often. It was a great jest of his, I recollect, to pretend that he
couldn't keep his teeth from chattering, whenever mention was
made of an Alguazil in connexion with the adventures of Gil
Bias ; and I remember that when Gil Bias met the captain of
the robbers in Madrid, this unlucky joker counterfeited such an
ague of terror, that he was overheard by Mr. Creakle, who
was prowling about the passage, and handsomely flogged for
/^disorderly conduct in the bedroom.

/ Whatever I had within me that was romantic and dreamy,

I was encouraged by so much story-telling^ in the dark ; and in
Mhat respect the pursuit may not have been very profitable to
me. But the being cherished as a kind of plaything in my
room, and the consciousness that this accomplishment of mine
was bruited about among the boys, and attracted a good deal
of notice to me though I was the youngest there, stimulated me
to exertion. In a school carried on by sheer cruelty, whether
it is presided over by a dunce or not, there is not likely to be

1 much learnt. I believe our boys were, generally, as ignorant
a set as any schoolboys in existence; they were too much
troubled and knocked about to learn ; they could no more do
that to advantage, than any one can do anything to advantage

' in a life of. constant misfortune, torment, and worry. But my
little vanity, and Steerforth's help, urged me on somehow ; and
without saving me from much, if anything, in the way of punish-
ment, made me, for the time I was there, an exception to the
general body, insomuch that I did steadily pick up some crumbs
of knowledge.

fin this I was much assisted by Mr. MelJL who had a liking
for me that I am grateful to remember. It always gave me
pain to observe that Steerforth treated him with systematic
disparagement, and seldom lost an occasion of wounding his
feelings, or inducing others to do so. This troubled me the
more for a long time, because I had soon told Steerforth, from

David Copperfield 89

whom I could no more keep such a secret than I could keep a
cake or any other tangible possession, about the two old women
Mr. Mell had taken me to see ; and I was always afraid that
Steerforth would let it out, and twit him with it.

We little thought, any one of us, I dare say, when I ate my
breakfast that first morning, and went to sleep under the
shadow of the peacock's feathers to the sound of the flute,
what consequences would come of the introduction into
those alms-houses of my insignificant person. But the visit
had its unforeseen consequences ; and of a serious sort, too,
in their way.

One day when Mr. Creakle kept the house from indisposition,
which naturally diffused a lively joy through the school, there
was a good deal of noise in the course of the morning's work.
The great relief and satisfaction experienced by the boys made
them difficult to manage; and though the dreaded Tungay
brought his wooden leg in twice or thrice, and took notes of
the principal offenders' names, no great impression was made
by it, as they were pretty sure of getting into trouble to-morrow,
do what they would, and thought it wise, no doubt, to enjoy
themselves to-day.

It was, properly, a half-holiday ; being Saturday. But as the
noise in the playground would have disturbed Mr. Creakle,
and the weather was not favourable for going out walking, we
were ordered into school in the afternoon, and set some lighter
tasks than usual, which were made for the occasion. It was
the day of the week on which Mr. Sharp went out to get his
wig curled ; so Mr. Mell, who always did the drudgery, whatever |
it was, kept school by himself. I

If I could associate the idea of a bull or a bear with any one
so mild as Mr. Mell, I should think of him, in connexion with
that afternoon when the uproar was at its height, as of one
of those animals, baited by a thousand dogs. I recall him
bending his aching head, supported on his bony hand, over the
book on his desk, and wretchedly endeavouring to get on with i
his tiresome work, amidst an uproar that might have made the |
Speaker of the House of Commons giddy. Boys started in
and out of their places, playing at puss-in-the-corner with other
boys; there were laughing boys, singing boys, talking boys,
dancing boys, howling boys ; boys shuffled with their feet, boys
whirled about him, grinning, making faces, mimicking him
behind his back and before his eyes ; mimicking his poverty,
his boots, his coat, his mother, everything belonging to him
that they should have had consideration for.

go David Copperfield

" Silence ! " cried Mr. Mell, suddenly rising up, and striking
his desk with the book. " What does this mean ? It's
impossible to bear it. It's maddening. How can you do it
to me, boys?"

It was my book that he struck his desk with; and as I stood
beside him, following his eye as it glanced round the room, I
saw the boys all stop, some suddenly surprised, some half
afraid, and some sorry perhaps.

Steerforth's place was at the bottom of the school, at the
opposite end of the long room. He was lounging with his
back against the wail, and his hands in his pockets, and looked
at Mr. Mell with his mouth shut up as if he were whistling,
when Mr. Mell looked at him.

" Silence, Mr. Steerforth ! " said Mr. Mell.

"Silence yourself," said Steerforth, turning red. "Whom
are you talking to?"

"Sit down," said Mr. Mell.

"Sit down yourself," said Steerforth, "and mind your
business."

There was a titter, and some applause ; but Mr. Mell was so
white, that silence immediately succeeded ; and one boy, who
had darted out behind him to imitate his mother again, changed
his mind, and pretended to want a pen mended.

" If you think, Steerforth," said Mr. Mell, " that I am not
acquainted with the power you can establish over any mind
here " — he laid his hand, without considering what he did (as
I supposed), upon my head — "or that I have not observed
you, within a few minutes, urging your juniors on to every sort
of outrage against me, you are mistaken."

" I don't give myself the trouble of thinking at all about you,"
said Steerforth, coolly; "so I'm not mistaken, as it happens."

" And when you make use of your position of favouritism
here, sir," pursued Mr. Mell, with his lip trembling very much,
" to insult a gentleman — "

" A what ? — where is he ? " said Steerforth.

Here somebody cried out, "Shame, J. Steerforth! Too
bad ! " It was Traddles ; whom Mr. Mell instantly discomfited
by bidding him hold his tongue.

— " To insult one who is not fortunate in life, sir, and who
never gave you the least offence, and the many reasons for not
insulting whom you are old enough and wise enough to
understand," said Mr. Mell, with his lip trembling more and
more, "you commit a mean and base action. You can sit
down or stand up as you please, sir Copperfield, go on."

David Copperfield 91

"Young Copperfield," said Steerforth, coming forward up
the room, " stop a bit. I tell you what, Mr. Mell, once for all.
When you take the liberty of calling me mean or base, or
anything of that sort, you are an impudent beggar. You are
always a beggar, you know ; but when you do that, you are an
impudent beggar."

I am not clear whether he was going to strike Mr. Mell, or
Mr. Mell was going to strike him, or there was any such
intention on either side. I saw a rigidity come upon the whole
school as if they had been turned into stone, and found Mr.
Creakle in the midst of us, with Tungay at his side, and Mrs.
and Miss Creakle looking in at the door as if they were
frightened. Mr. Mell, with his elbows on his desk and his face
in his hands, sat, for some moments, quite still.

" Mr. Mell," said Mr. Creakle, shaking him by the arm ;
and his whisper was so audible now, that Tungay felt it
unnecessary to repeat his words; "you have not forgotten
yourself, I hope?"

" No, sir, no," returned the Master, showing his face, and
shaking his head, and rubbing his hands in great agitation.
" No, sir, no. I have remembered myself, I — no, Mr. Creakle,
I have not forgotten myself, I — I have remembered myself, sir.
I — I — could wish you had remembered me a little sooner, Mr.
Creakle. It — it — would have been more kind, sir, more just,
sir. It would have saved me something, sir."

Mr. Creakle, looking hard at Mr. Mell, put his hand on
Tungay's shoulder, and got his feet upon the form close by,
and sat upon the desk. After still looking hard at Mr. Mell
from his throne, as he shook his head, and rubbed his hands,
and remained in the same state of agitation, Mr. Creakle turned
to Steerforth, and said :

"Now, sir, as he don't condescend to tell me, what t's this?"

Steerforth evaded the question for a little while ; looking in
scorn and anger on his opponent, and remaining silent. I
could not help thinking even in that interval, I remember, what
a noble fellow he was in appearance, and how homely and plain
Mr. Mell looked opposed to him.

" What did he mean by talking about favourites, then ?" said
Steerforth, at length.

" Favourites ? " repeated Mr. Creakle, with the veins in his
forehead swelling quickly. "Who talked about favourites?"

" He did," said Steerforth.

" And pray, what did you mean by that, sir ? " demanded
Mr. Creakle, turning angrily on his assistant

92 David Copperfield

" I meant, Mr. Creakle," he returned in a low voice, " as I
said ; that no pupil had a right to avail himself of his position
of favouritism to degrade me."

" To degrade you 1 " said Mr. Creakle. " My stars ! But
give me leave to ask you, Mr. What's-your-name ; " and here
Mr. Creakle folded his arms, cane and all, upon his chest, and
made such a knot of his brows that his little eyes were hardly
visible below them; "\vhether, when you talk about favourites,
you showed proper respect to me? To me, sir," said Mr.
Creakle, darting his head at him suddenly, and drawing it back
again, "the principal of this establishment, and your employer."

" It was not judicious, sir, I am willing to admit," said Mr.
Mell. " I should not have done so, if I had been cool."

Here Steerforth struck in.

" Then he said I was mean, and then he said I was base, and
then I called him a beggar. If I had been cool, perhaps I
shouldn't have called him a beggar. But I did, and I am ready
to take the consequences of it."

Without considering, perhaps, whether there were any conse-
quences to be taken, I felt quite in a glow at this gallant speech.
It made an impression on the boys, too, for there was a low stir
among them, though no one spoke a word.

" I am surprised, Steerforth — although your candour does you
honour," said Mr. Creakle, "does you honour, certainly — I am
surprised, Steerforth, I must say, that you should attach such
an epithet to any person employed and paid in Salem House,
sir."

Steerforth gave a short laugh.

"That's not an answer, sir," said Mr. Creakle, "to my
remark. I expect more than that from you, Steerforth."

If Mr. Mell looked homely, in my. eyes, before the handsome
boy, it would be quite impossible to say how homely Mr. Creakle
looked.

" Let him deny it," said Steerforth.

"Deny that he is a beggar, Steerforth?" cried "Mr. Creakle.
•^ Why, where does he go a-begging ? "
l" "If he is not a beggar himself, his near relation's one," said
X Steerforth. " It's all the same."

He glanced at me, and Mr. Mell's hand gently patted me
upon the shoulder. I looked up with a flush upon my face
and remorse in my heart, but Mr. Mell's eyes were fixed on
Steerforth. He continued to pat me kindly on the shoulder,
but he looked at him.
• "Since you expect me, Mr. Creakle, to justify myself," said

David Copperficld 93

Steerforth, " and to say what I mean, — what I have to say is,
that his mother lives on charity in an alms-house."

Mr. Mali still looked at him, and still patted me kindly on
the shoulder, and said to himself in a whisper, if I heard right :
" Yes, I thought so."

Mr. Creakle turned to his assistant, with a severe frown and
laboured politeness :

" Now you hear what this gentleman says, Mr. Mell. Have
the goodness, if you please, to set him right before the assembled
school."

" He is right, sir, without correction," returned Mr. Mell, in
the midst of a dead silence ; " what he has said is true."

" Be so good then as declare publicly, will you ? " said Mr.
Creakle, putting his head on one side, and rolling his eyes round
the school, " whether it ever came to my knowledge until this
moment ? "

" I believe not directly," he returned.

"Why, you know not," said Mr. Creakle. "Don't you,
man?"

" I apprehend you never supposed my worldly circumstances
to be very good," replied the assistant. "You know what my
position is, and always has been here."

" I apprehend, if you come to that," said Mr. Creakle, with
his veins swelling again bigger than ever, " that you've been in
a wrong position altogether, and mistook this for a charity
school. Mr. Mell, we'll part, if you please. The sooner the
better."

"There is no time," answered Mr. Mell, rising, "like the
present."

" Sir, to y6u ! " said Mr. Creakle.

" I take my leave of you, Mr. Creakle, and all of you,** said
Mr. Mell, glancing round the room, and again patting me
gently on the shoulder. "James Steerforth, the best wish I
can leave you is that you may come to be ashamed of what you
have done to-day. At present I would prefer to see you
anything rather than a friend, to me, or to any one in whom
I feel an interest."

Once more he laid his hand upon my shoulder; and then
taking his flute and a few books from his desk, and leaving the
key in it for his successor, he went out of the school, with his
property under his arm. Mr. Creakle then made a speech,
through Tungay, in which he thanked Steerforth for asserting
(though perhaps too warmly) the independence and respect-
ability of Salem House ; and which he wound up by shaking

94 David Copperfield

hands with Steerforth, while we gave three cheers — I did not
quite know what for, but I supposed for Steerforth, and so joined
in them ardently, though I felt miserable. Mr. Creakle then
caned Tommy Traddles for being discovered in tears, instead
of cheers, on account of Mr. Mell's departure ; and went back
to his sofa, or his bed, or wherever he had come from.

We were left to ourselves now, and looked very blank, I
recollect, on one another. For myself, I felt so much self-
reproach and contrition for my part in what had happened, that
nothing would have enabled me to keep back my tears but the
fear that Steerforth, who often looked at me, I saw, might
think it unfriendly — or, I should rather say, considering our
relative ages, and the feeling with which I regarded him,
undutiful — if I showed the emotion which distressed me. He
was very angry with Traddles, and said he was glad he had
caught it.
r Poor Traddles, who had passed the stage of lying with his
head upon the desk, and was relieving himself as usual with
a burst of skeletons, said he didn't care. Mr. Mell was
ill-used.
' " Who has ill-used him, you girl ? " said Steerforth.

" Why, you have," returned Traddles.

"What have I done?" said Steerforth.

"What have you done?" retorted Traddles. "Hurt his
feelings and lost him his situation."

"His feelings?" repeated Steerforth disdainfully. "His

feelings will soon get the better of it, I'll be bound. His

feelings are not like yours, Miss Traddles. As to his situation

— which was a precious one, wasn't it ? — do you suppose I am

not going to write home, and take care that he gets some

money ? Polly ! "

/ We thought this intention very noble in Steerforth, whose

I mother was a widow, and rich, and would do almost anything,

^ it was said, that he asked her. We were all extremely glad

to see Traddles so put down, and exalted Steerforth to the

skies ; especially when he told us, as he condescended to do,

that what he had done had been done expressly for us, and for

our cause, and that he had conferred a great boon upon us by

unselfishly doing it.

But I must say that when I was going on with a story in the
dark that night, Mr. Mell's old flute seemed more than once to
sound mournfully in my ears ; and that when at last Steerforth
was tired, and I lay down in my bed, I fancied it playing so
sorrowfully somewhere, that I was quite wretched.

David Copperfield 95

I soon forgot him in the contemplation of Steerforth, who, in
an easy, amateur way, and without any book (he seemed to me
to know everything by heart), took some of his classes until a i
new master was found. The new master came from a grammar- 1
school, and before he entered on his duties, dined in the parlour
one day, to be introduced to Steerforth. Steerforth approved
of him highly, and told us he was a Brick. Without exactly
understanding what learned distinction was meant by this, I
respected him greatly for it, and had no doubt whatever of his
superior knowledge : though he never took the pains with me —
not that / was anybody — that Mr. Mell had taken.

There was only one other event in this half-year, out of the
daily school-life, that made an impression upon me which still
survives. It survives for many reasons.

One afternoon, when we were all harassed into a state of dire
confusion, and Mr. Creakle was laying about him dreadfully,
Tungay came in, and called out in his usual strong way:
" Visitors for Copperfield ! "

A few words were interchanged between him and Mr. Creakle,
as, who the visitors were, and what room they were to be shown
into ; and then I, who had, according to custom, stood up on
the announcement being made, and felt quite faint with astonish-
ment, was told to go by the back stairs and get a clean frill on,
before I repaired to the dining-room. These orders I obeyed,
in such a flutter and hurry of my young spirits as I had never
known before; and when I got to the parlour-door, and the
thought came into my head that it might be my mother — I had
only thought of Mr. or Miss Murdstone until then — I drew
back my hand from the lock, and stopped to have a sob before
I went in.

At first I saw nobody; but feeling a pressure against the
door, I looked round it, and there, to my amazement, were Mr.
Peggotty and Ham, ducking at me with their hats, and squeezing
one another against the wall. I could not help laughing ; but
it was much more in the pleasure of seeing them, than at the
appearance they made. We shook hands in a very cordial way ;
and I laughed and laughed, until I pulled out my pocket-
handkerchief and wiped my eyes.

Mr. Peggotty (who never shut his mouth once, I remember,
during the visit) showed great concern when he saw me do this,
and nudged Ham to say something.

" Cheer up, Mas'r Davy bor' ! " said Ham, in his simpering
way. *' Why, how you have growed ! "

" Am I grown ? " I said, drying my eyes. I was not crying

96 David Copperfield

[at anything particular that I know of; but somehow it made
me cry, to see old friends.

" Growed, Mas'r Davy bor' ? Ain't he growed ! " said Ham.

" Ain't he growed ! " said Mr. Peggotty.

They made me laugh again by laughing at each other, and
then we all three laughed until I was in danger of crying again.

"Do you know how mama is, Mr. Peggotty?" I said.
" And how my dear, dear old Peggotty is ? "

" Oncommon," said Mr. Peggotty.

" And little Em'ly, and Mrs. Gummidge ? "

** On — common," said Mr. Peggotty.

There was a silence. Mr. Peggotty, to relieve it, took two
prodigious lobsters, and an enormous crab, and a large canvas
bag of shrimps, out of his pockets, and piled them up in Ham's
arms.

" You see," said Mr. Peggotty, " knowing as you was partial
to a little relish with your wittles when you was along with us,
we took the liberty. The old Mawther biled 'em, she did.
Mrs. Gummidge biled 'em. Yes," said Mr. Peggotty, slowly,
who I thought appeared to stick to the subject on account of
having no other subject ready, " Mrs. Gummidge, I do assure
you, she biled 'em."

I expressed my thanks. Mr. Peggotty, after looking at Ham,
who stood' smiling sheepishly over the shell-fish, without making
any attempt to help him, said :

" We come, you see, the wind and tide making in our favour,
in one of our Yarmouth lugs to Gravesen'. My sister she
wrote to me the name of this here place, and wrote to me as if
ever I chanced to come to Gravesen', I was to come over and
inquire for Mas'r Davy, and give her dooty, humbly wishing
him well, and reporting of the fam'ly as they was oncommon
toe-be-sure. Little Em'ly, you see, she'll write to my sister
when I go back as I see you, and as you was similarly
oncommon, and so we make it quite a merry-go-rounder."

I was obliged to consider a little before I understood what
Mr. Peggotty meant by this figure, expressive of a complete
circle of intelligence. I then thanked him heartily ; and said,
with a consciousness of reddening, that I supposed little Em'ly
was altered too, since we used to pick up shells and pebbles
on the beach.

"She's getting to be a woman, that's wot she's getting to
be," said Mr. Peggotty. "Ask him:'

He meant Ham, who beamed with delight and assent over
the bag of shrimps.

David Copperfield 97

" Her pretty face ! " said Mr. Peggotty, with his own shining
like a light.

" Her learning ! " said Ham.

" Her writing ! " said Mr. Peggotty. " Why it's as black as
jet ! And so large it is, you might see it anywheres."

It was perfectly delightful to behold with what enthusiasm
Mr. Peggotty became inspired when he thought of his little
favourite. He stands before me again, his bluff hairy face
irradiating with a joyful love and pride for which I can find no
description. His honest eyes fire up, and sparkle, as if their
depths were stirred by something bright. His broad chest
heaves with pleasure. His strong loose hands clench them-
selves, in his earnestness ; and he emphasises what he says
with a right arm that shows, in my pigmy view, like a sledge-
hammer.

Ham was quite as earnest as he. I dare say they would
have said much more about her, if they had not been abashed
by the unexpected coming in of Steerforth, who, seeing me in
a comer speaking with two strangers, stopped in a song he was
singing, and said : " I didn't know you were here, young
Copperfield ! " (for it was not the usiud visiting room) and
crossed by us on his way out

I am not sure whether it was in the pride of having such a
friend as Steerforth, or in the desire to explain to him how I
came to have such a friend as Mr. Peggotty, that I called to
him as he was going away. But I said, modestly — Good
Heaven, how it all comes back to me this long time after-
wards ! —

" Don't go, Steerforth, if you please. These are two
Yarmouth boatmen — very kind, good people — who are rela-
tions of my nurse, and have come from Gravesend to see me."

" Aye, aye ? " said Steerforth, returning. *♦ I am glad to see
them. How are you both ? "

There was an ease in his manner — a gay and light manner
it was, but not swaggering — which I still believe to have borne
a kind of enchantment with it. I still believe him, in virtue
of this carriage, his animal spirits, his delightful voice, his
handsome face and figure, and, for aught I know, of some
inborn power of attraction besides (which I think a few people
possess), to have carried a spell with him to which it was a
natural weakness to yield^aad which not many persons could
withstand. I could^noTDut see how pleased they were with
him, and how they seemed to open their hearts to him in ai
moment. i

98 David Copperfield

"You must let them know at home, if you please, Mr,
Peggotty," I said, "when that letter is sent, that Mr. Steer-
forth is very kind to me, and that I don't know what I should
ever do here without him."

" Nonsense ! " said Steerforth, laughing. " You mustn't
tell them anything of the kind."

" And if Mr. Steerforth ever comes into Norfolk or Suffolk,
Mr. Peggotty," I said, " while I am there, you may depend
upon it I shall bring him to Yarmouth, if he will let me, to see
your house. You never saw such a good house, Steerforth.
It's made out of a boat ! "

"Made out of a boat, is it?" said Steerforth. "It's the
right sort of house for such a thorough-built boatman."

"So 'tis, sir, so 'tis, sir," said Ham, grinning. "You're
right, young gen'l'm'n. Mas'r Davy, bor', gen'l'm'n's right.
A thorough-built boatman ! Hor, hor ! That's what he is,
too ! "

Mr. Peggotty was no less pleased than his nephew, though
his modesty forbade him to claim a personal compliment so
vociferously.

" Well, sir," he said, bowing and chuckling, and tucking in
the ends of his neckerchief at his breast : "I thankee, sir, I
thankee ! I do my endeavours in my line of life, sir."

"The best of men can do no more, Mr. Peggotty," said
Steerforth. He had got his name already.

"I'll pound it it's wot you do yourself, sir," said Mr.
Peggotty, shaking his head, " and wot you do well — bright
well ! I thankee, sir. I'm obleeged to you, sir, for your
welcoming manner of me. I'm rough, sir, but I'm ready —
least ways, I hope I'm ready, you unnerstand. My house ain't
much for to see, sir, but it's hearty at your service if ever you
should come along with Mas'r Davy to see it. I'm a reg'lar
Dodman, I am," said Mr. Peggotty, by which he meant snail,
and this was in allusion to his being slow to go, for he had
attempted to go after every sentence, and had somehow or
other come back again; "but I wish you both well, and I
wish you happy ! "

Ham echoed this sentiment, and we parted with them in
' the heartiest manner. I was almost tempted that evening to
tell Steerforth about pretty little Em'ly, but I was too timid of
mentioning her name, and too much afraid of his laughing at
• me. I remember that I thought a good deal, and in an uneasy
sort of way, about Mr. Peggotty having said that she was
getting on to be a woman ; but I decided that was nonsense.

David Copperfield 99

We transported the shell-fish, or the " relish " as Mr.
Peggotty had modestly called it, up into our room unobserved,
and made a great supper that evening. But Traddies couldn't
get happily out of it. He was too unfortunate even to come
through a supper like anybody else. He was taken ill in the
night — quite prostrate he was — in consequence of Crab ; and
after being drugged with black draughts and blue pills, to an
extent which Demple (whose father was a doctor) said was
enough to undermine a horse's constitution, received a caning
and six chapters of Greek Testament for refusing to confess.

The rest of the half-year is a jumble in my recollection of
the daily strife and struggle of our lives ; of the waning summer
and the changing season ; of the frosty mornings when we
were rung out of bed, and the cold, cold smell of the dark
nights when we were rung into bed ; of the evening schoolroom
dimly lighted and indifferently warmed, and the morning
schoolroom which was nothing but a great shivering-machine ;
of the alternation of boiled beef with roast beef, and boiled
mutton with roast mutton ; of clods of bread-and-butter, dog's-
eared lesson-books, cracked slates, tear-blotted copy-books,
canings, rulerings, hair-cuttings, rainy Sundays, suet-puddings,
and a dirty atmosphere of ink surrounding all.

I well remember though, how the distant idea of the holidays,
after seeming for an immense time to be a stationary speck,
began to come towards us, and to grow and grow. How from
counting months, we came to weeks, and then to days ; and
how I then began to be afraid that I should not be sent for
and when I learnt from Steerforth that I had been sent for,
and was certainly to go home, had dim forebodings that I
might break my leg first. How the breaking-up day changed
its place fast, at last, from the week after next to next week,
this week, the day after to-morrow, to-morrow, to-day, to-night —
when I was inside the Yarmouth mail, and going home.

I had many a broken sleep inside the Yarmouth mail, and
many an incoherent dream of all these things. But when I
awoke at intervals, the ground outside the window was not the
playground of Salem House, and the sound in my ears was not
the sound of Mr. Creakle giving it to Traddies, but was the
sound of the coachman touching up the horses.

Ill

lOO David Copperfield

CHAPTER VIII

MY HOLIDAYS. ESPECIALLY ONE HAPPY AFTERNOON

When we arrived before day at the inn where the mail stopped,
which was not the inn where my friend the waiter lived, I was
shown up to a nice little bedroom, with Dolphin painted on
the door. Very cold I was, I know, notwithstanding the hot
tea they had given me before a large fire down-stairs ; and very
glad I was to turn into the Dolphin's bed, pull the Dolphin's
blankets round my head, and go to sleep.

Mr. Barkis the carrier was to call for me in the morning at
nine o'clock. I got up at eight, a little giddy from the short-
ness of my night's rest, and was ready for him before the
appointed time. He received me exactly as if not five minutes
had elapsed since we were last together, and I had only been
into the hotel to get change for sixpence, or something of that
sort.

As soon as I and my box were in the cart, and the carrier
was seated, the lazy horse walked away with us all at his
accustomed pace.

^^* You look very well, Mr. Barkis," I said, thinking he would
like to know it.

Mr. Barkis rubbed his cheek with his cuff, and then looked
at his cuflf as if he expected to find some of the bloom upon it ;
but made no other acknowledgment of the compliment.

" I gave your message, Mr. Barkis," I said : " I wrote to
Peggotty."

"Ah!" said Mr. Barkis.

Mr. Barkis seemed gruff, and answered drily.

"Wasn't it right, Mr. Barkis?" I asked, after a little
hesitation.

" Why, no," said Mr. Barkis.

" Not the message ? "

" The message was right enough, perhaps," said Mr. Barkis ;
" but it come to an end there."

Not understanding what he meant, I repeated inquisitively :
" Came to an end, Mr. Barkis ? "

" Nothing come of it," he explained, looking at me sideways.
" No answer."

" There was an answer expected, was there, Mr. Barkis ? "
said I, opening my eyes. For this was a new light to me.

David Coppjerfield' loi

"When a man says he's willin', said Mr.* Barkis,* turning his
glance slowly on me again, " it's as much as to say, that man's
a waitin' for a answer."

"Well, Mr. Barkis?"

" Well,'' said Mr. Barkis, carrying his eyes back to his horse's
ears; "that man's been a waitin' for a answer ever since."

" Have you told her so, Mr. Barkis ? "

" N — no," growled Mr. Barkis, reflecting about it. " I ain't
got no call to go and tell her so. I never said six words to her
myself, /ain't a goin' to tell her so."

"Would you like me to do it, Mr. Barkis?" said I,
doubtfully.

" You might tell her, if you would," said Mr. Barkis, with
another slow look at me, "that Barkis was a waitin' for a
answer. Says you — what name is it ? "

" Her name ? "

" Ah ! " said Mr. Barkis, with a nod of his head.

" Peggotty."

" Chrisen name ? Or nat'ral name ? " said Mr. Barkis.

" Oh, it's not her christian name. Her christian name is
Clara."

"Is it though ? " said Mr. Barkis.

CHe seemed to find an immense fund of reflection in this
circumstance, and sat pondering and inwardly whistling for
some time.

^ " Well ! " he resumed at length. " Says you, * Peggotty !
Barkis is a waitin' for a answer.' Says she, perhaps, 'Answer
to what ? ' Says you, * To what I told you.' ' What is that ? '
says she. * Barkis is willin',' says you."

This extremely artful suggestion Mr. Barkis accompanied
with a nudge of his elbow that gave me quite a stitch in
my side. After that, he slouched over his horse in his usual
manner ; and made no other reference to the subject except,
half an hour afterwards, taking a piece of chalk from his
pocket, and writing up, inside the tilt of the cart, " Clara
Peggotty" — apparently as a private memorandum.
-^^Ah, what a strange feeling it was to be going home when
it was not home, and to find that every object I looked at,
reminded me of the happy old home, which was like a dream
I could never dream again ! The days when my mother and I
and Peggotty were all in all to one another, and there was no
one to come between us, rose up before me so sorrowfully on
the road, that I am not sure I was glad to be there — not sure
but that I would rather have remained away, and forgotten it

IQ2* David . Copperfield

in Steerfbrth's compaay. But there I was ; and soon I was
at our house, where the bare old elm trees wrung their many
hands in the bleak wintry air, and shreds of the old rooks' nests
drifted away upon the wind.

The carrier put my box down at the garden-gate, and left
me. I walked along the path towards the house, glancing at
the windows, and fearing at every step to see Mr. Murdstone
or Miss Murdstone lowering out of one of them. No face
appeared, however; and being come to the house, and knowing
how to open the door, before dark, without knocking, I went
in with a quiet, timid step.

God knows how infantine the memory may have been, that
was awakened within me by the sound of my mother's voice in
the old parlour, when I set foot in the hall. She was singing
in a low tone. I think I must have lain in her arms, and heard
her singing so to me when I was but a baby. The strain was
new to me, and yet it was so old that it filled my heart brimful;
like a friend come back from a long absence.

I believed, from the solitary and thoughtful way in which my
mother murmured her song, that she was alone. And I went
softly into the room. She was sitting by the fire, suckling an
infant, whose tiny hand she held against her neck. Her eyes
were looking down upon its face, and she sat singing to it. I
was so far right, that she had no other companion.

I spoke to her, and she started, and cried out. But seeing
me, she called me her dear Davy, her own boy ! and coming
half across the room to meet me, kneeled down upon the
ground and kissed me, and laid my head down on her bosom
near the little creature that was nestling there, and put its hand
up to my lips.

I wish I had died. I wish I had died then, with that feeling
in my heart ! I should have been more fit for Heaven than
I ever have been since.

" He is your brother," said my mother, fondling me. " Davy,
my pretty boy ! My poor child ! " Then she kissed me more
and more, and clasped me round the neck. This she was
doing when Peggotty came running in, and bounced down
on the ground beside us, and went mad about us both for
a quarter of an hour.

It seemed that I had not been expected so soon, the
carrier being much before his usual time. It seemed, too
that Mr. and Miss Murdstone had gone out upon a visit in
the neighbourhood, and would not return before night. I
had never hoped for this. I had never thought it possible

David Copperfield 103

that we^lhree could be together undisturbed, once more ; and
I felt, for the time, as if the old days were come back.

We dined together by the fireside. Peggotty was in attend-
ance to wait upon us, but my mother wouldn't let her do it,
and made her dine with us. I had my own old plate, with
a brown view of a man-of-war in full sail upon it, which
Peggotty had hoarded somewhere all the time I had been
away, and would not have had broken, she said, for a hundred
pounds. I had my own old mug with David on it, and my own
old little knife and fork that wouldn't cut.

While we were at table, I thought it a favourable occasion
to tell Peggotty about Mr. Barkis, who, before I had finished
what I had to tell her, began to laugh, and throw her apron
over her face.

" Peggotty," said my mother. " What's the matter ? "

Peggotty only laughed the more, and held her apron tight
over her face when my mother tried to pull it away, and sat as
if her head were in a bag.

" What are you doing, you stupid creature ? " said my mother,
laughing.

" Oh, drat the man ! " cried Peggotty. " He wants to marry
me."

" It would be a very good match for you ; wouldn't it ? "
said my mother.

" Oh ! I don't know," said Peggotty. " Don't ask me. I
wouldn't have him if he was made of gold. Nor I wouldn't
have anybody."

"Then, why don't you tell him so, you ridiculous thing?"
said my mother.

" Tell him so," retorted Peggotty, looking out of her apron.
" He has never said a word to me about it. He knows better.
If he was to make so bold as say a word to me, I should slap
his face."

Her own was as red as ever I saw it, or any other face,
I think ; but she only covered it again, for a few moments
at a time, when she was taken with a violent fit of laughter ;
and after two or three of those attacks, went on with her dinner.

I remarked that my mother, though she smiled when Peggotty
looked at her, became more serious and thoughtful. I had
seen at first that she was changed. Her face was very pretty
still, but it looked careworn,, and- too delicate ; and her hand
was so thip— and-white that it seemed to me to be almost
transparefit. But the change to which I now refer was super-
added to this : it was in her manner, which became anxious

(f.

104 David Copperfield

and fluttered. At last she said, putting out her hand, and
laying it affectionately on the hand of her old servant :

" Peggotty dear, you are not going to be married ? "

" Me, ma'am ? " returned Peggotty, staring. " Lord bless
you, no ! "

" Not just yet ? " said my mother, tenderly.

" Never ! " cried Peggotty.

My mother took her hand, and said :

" Don't leave me, Peggotty. Stay with me. It will not be
or long, perhaps. What should I ever do without you ! "

" Me leave you, my precious ! " cried Peggotty. " Not for
all the world and his wife. Why, what's put that in your silly
little head ? " For Peggotty had been used of old to talk to
my mother sometimes, like a child.

But my mother made no answer, except to thank her, and
Peggotty went running on in her own fashion.

" Me leave you ? I think I see myself. Peggotty go away
from you? I should like to catch her at it! No, no, no,"
said Peggotty, shaking her head, and folding her arms ; " not
she, my dear. It isn't that there ain't some Catsthat would be
well enough pleased if she did, but they shaTrTt be pleased.
They shall be aggravated. I'll stay with you till I am a cross
cranky old woman. And when I'm too deaf, and too lame,
and too blind, and too mumbly for want of teeth, to be of any
use at all, even to be found fault with, then I shall go to my
Davy, and ask him to take me in."

"And, Peggotty," says I, "I shall be glad to see you, and
I'll make you as welcome as a queen."

"Bless your dear heart," cried Peggotty. "I know you will! "
And she kissed me beforehand, in grateful acknowledgment of
my hospitality. After that, she covered her head up with her
apron again, and had another laugh about Mr. Barkis. After
that, she took the baby out of its little cradle, and nursed it.
After that, she cleared the dinner-table; after that, came in
with another cap on, and her work-box, and the yard-measure,
and the bit of wax-candle, all just the same as ever.

We sat round the fire, and talked delightfully. I told them
what a hard master Mr. Creakle was, and they pitied me very
much. I told them what a fine fellow Steerforth was, and what
a patron of mine, and Peggotty said she would walk a score of
miles to see him. I took the little baby in my arms when it
was awake, and nursed it lovingly. When it was aleep again,
I crept close to my mother's side, according to my old custom,
broken now a long time, and sat with my arms embracing her

David Copperfield 105

waist, and my little red cheek on her shoulder, and once more
felt her beautiful hair drooping over me — like an angel's wing
as I used to think, l_recollect — and was very happy indeed.

While I sat thus, looking at the fire, and seeing pictures in
the red-hot coals, I almost believed that I had never been away ;
that Mr. and Miss Murdstone were such pictures, and would
vanish when the fire got low; and that there was nothing real
in all that I remembered, save my mother, Peggotty, and I.

Peggotty darned away at a stocking as long as she could see,
and then sat with it drawn on her left hand like a glove, and
her needle in her right, ready to take another stitch whenever
there was a blaze. I carmot conceive whose stockings they
can have been that Peggotty was always darning, or where such
an unfailing supply of stockings in want of darning can have
come from. From my earliest infancy she seems to have been
always employed in that class of needlework, and never by any
chance in any other.

" I wonder," said Peggotty, who was sometimes seized with a
fit of wondering on some most unexpected topic, "what's
become of Davy's great aunt ? "

"Lor, Peggotty t** observed my mother, rousing herself from
a reverie, " what nonsense you talk ! "

" Well, but I really do wonder, ma'am," said Peggotty.

" What can have put such a person in your head ? " inquired
my mother. "Is there nobody else in the world to come
there?"

" I don't know how it is," said Peggotty, " unless it's on
account of being stupid, but my head never can pick and choose
people. They come and they go, and they don't come and
they don't go, just as they like. I wonder what's become of
her?"

"How absurd you are, Peggotty!" returned my mother.
" One would suppose you wanted a second visit from her."

" Lord forbid ! " cried Peggotty.

"Well, then, don't talk about such uncomfortable things,
there's a good soul," said my mother. " Miss Bets^^4s- shut
up in her cottage by the sea, no doubt, and will remain there.
At all events, she is not likely ever to trouble us again."

" No ! " mused Peggotty. " No, that ain't likely at all —
I wonder, if she was to die, whether she'd leave Davy
anything ? "

" Good gracious me, Peggotty," returned my mother, " what
a nonsensical woman you are ! when you know that she took
ofience at the poor dear boy's ever being bom at all."

io6 David Copperfield

" I suppose she wouldn't be inclined to forgive him now,"
hinted Peggotty.

" Why should she be inclined to forgive him now ? " said my
mother, rather sharply.

" Now that he's got a brother, I mean," said Peggotty.

My mother immediately began to cry, and wondered how
Peggotty dared to say such a thing.

/ "As if this poor little innocent in its cradle had ever done
any harm to you or anybody else, you jealous thing ! " said she.
I" You had much better go and marry Mr. Barkis, the carrier.
(Why don't you ? "

" I should make Miss Murdstone happy, if I was to," said
Peggotty.

" What a bad disposition you have, Peggotty ! " returned my
mother. "You are as jealous of Miss Murdstone as it is
possible for a ridiculous creature to be. You want to keep the
keys yourself, and give out all the things, I suppose? I
shouldn't be surprised if you did. When you know that she
only does it out of kindness and the best intentions ! You
know she does, Peggotty — you know it well."

Peggotty muttered something to the effect of " Bother the
best intentions!" and something else to the effect that there
was a little too much of the best intentions going on.

" I know what you mean, you cross thing," said my mother.
" I understand you, Peggotty, perfectly. You know I do, and
I wonder you don't colour up like fire. But one point at a
time. Miss Murdstone is the point now, Peggotty, and you
sha'n't escape from it. Haven't you heard her say, over and
over again, that she thinks I am too thoughtless and too — a —

a "

" Pretty," suggested Peggotty.

" Well," returned my mother, half laughing, " and if she is so
silly as to say so, can I be blamed for it ? "

" No one says you can," said Peggotty.

" No, I should hope not, indeed ! " returned my mother.
" Haven't you heard her say, over and over again, that on this
account she wishes to spare me a great deal of trouble, which
she thinks I am not suited for, and which I really don't know
myself that I am suited for ; and isn't she up early and late,
and going to and fro continually — and doesn't she do all sorts
of things, and grope into all sorts of places, coal-holes and pan-
tries and I don't know where, that can't be very agreeable —
and do you mean to insinuate that there is not a sort of
devotion in that ? "

David Copperfield 107

•* I don't insinuate at all," said Peggotty.

" You do, Peggotty,' ' returned my mother. " You never do
anything else, except your work. You are always insinuating.
You revel in it And when you talk of Mr. Murdstone's good
intentions "

" I never talked of 'em," said Peggotty.
• "No, Peggotty," returned my mother, "but you insinuated.
That's what I told you just now. That's the worst of you. You
will insinuate. I said, at the moment, that I understood you,
and you see I did. When you talk of Mr. Murdstone's good
intentions, and pretend to slight them (for I don't believe you
really do, in your heart, Peggotty), you must be as well convinced
as I am how good they are, and how they actuate him in every-
thing. If he seems to have been at all stern with a certain
person, Peggotty — you understand, and so I am sure does Davy,
that I am not alluding to anybody present — it is solely because
he is satisfied that it is for a certain person's benefit He
naturally loves a certain person, on my account ; and acts solely
for a certain person's good. He is better able to judge of it
than I am ; for I very well know that I am a weak, light,
girlish creature, and that he is a firm, grave, serious man. And
he takes," said my mother, with the tears which were engendered
in her affectionate nature, stealing down her face, "he takes
great pains with me ; and I ought to be very thankful to him,
and very submissive to him even in my thoughts ; and when
I am not, Peggotty, I worry and condemn myself, and feel
doubtful of my own heart, and don't know what to do."

Peggotty sat with her chin on the foot of the stocking,
looking silently at the fire.

"There, Peggotty," said my mother, changing her tone,
"don't let us fall out with one another, for I couldn't bear it.
You are my true friend, I know, if I have any in the world.
When I call you a ridiculous creature, or a vexatious thing, or
anything of that sort, Peggotty, I only mean that you are my
true friend, and always have been, ever since the night when
Mr. Copperfield first brought me home here, and you came out
to the gate to meet me."

Peggotty was not slow to respond, and ratify the treaty of
friendship by giving me one of her best hugs. I think I had
some glimpses of the real character of this conversation at the
time ; but I am sure, now, that the good creature originated it,
and took her part in it, merely that my mother might comfort
herself with the little contradictory summary in which she had
indulged. The design was efficacious ; for I remember that my

io8 David Copperfield

mother seemed more at ease during the rest of the evening,
and that Peggotty observed her less.

When we had had our tea, and the ashes were thrown up,
and the candles snuffed, I read Peggotty a chapter out of the
Crocodile Book, in remembrance of old times — she took it out
of her pocket : I don't know whether she had kept it there ever
since — and then we talked about Salem House, which brought
me round again to Steerforth, who was my great subject. We
were very happy ; and that evening, as the last of its race, and
destined evermore to close that volume of my life, will never
pass out of my memory.

It was almost ten o'clock before we heard the sound of

wheels. We all got up then ; and my mother said hurriedly

that, as it was so late, and Mr. and Miss Murdstone approved

of early hours for young people, perhaps I had better go to bed.

, I kissed her, and went up-stairs, with my candle directly, before

i they came in. It appeared to mychildish fancy, as I ascended

\ to the bedroom where I had been impHspnea,~that they brought

a cold blast of aif-into the house which blew away the old

' familiar feeling like a feather.

I felt uncomfortable about going down to breakfast in the
morning, as I had never set eyes on Mr. Murdstone since the
day when I committed my memorable offence. However, as
it must be done, I went down, after two or three false starts
half-way, and as many runs back on tiptoe to my own room,
and presented myself in the parlour.

He was standing before the fire with his back to it, while
Miss Murdstone made the tea. He looked at me steadily as I
entered, but made no sign of recognition whatever.

I went up to him, after a moment of confusion, and said : " I
beg your pardon, sir. I am very sorry for what I did, and
I hope you will forgive me."

" I am glad to hear you are sorry, David," he replied.

The hand he gave me was the hand I had bitten. I could
not restrain my eye from resting for a instant on axedspotupoBb-
it; butit-.wag not so red^s I turned, when I met that sinister
expression in his face.

" How do you do, ma'am ? " I said to Miss Murdstone.

" Ah, dear me ! " sighed Miss Murdstone, giving me the tea-
caddy scoop instead of her fingers. "How long are the
holidays ? "

"A month, ma'am."

" Counting from when ? "

" From to-day, ma'am."

David Copperfield 109

I " Oh ! " said Miss Murdstone. " Then here's one day off."

She kept a calendar of the holidays in this way, and every
morning checked a day off in exactly the same manner. She
did it gloomily until she came to ten, but when she got into
two figures she became more hopeful, and, as the time advanced, i
even jocular. '

It was on this very first day that I had the misfortune to
throw her, though she was not subject to such weakness in
general, into a state of violent consternation. I came into the
room where she and my mother were sitting ; and the baby
(who was only a few weeks old) being on my mother's lap, I
took it very carefully in my arms. Suddenly Miss Murdstone
gave such a scream that I all but dropped it.

" My dear Jane ! " cried my mother.

"Good heavens, Clara, do you see?" exclaimed Miss
Murdstone.

" See what, my dear Jane ? " said my mother ; ** where ? " >^

" He's got it 1 " cried Miss Murdstone. The boy has got )
the baby ! " /

She was limp with horror ; but stiffened herself to make a dart
at me, and take it out of my arms. Then she turned faint, and
was so very ill that they were obliged to give her cherry-brandy.
I was solemnly interdicted by her, on her recovery, from touch- \
ing my brother any more on any pretence whatever ; and my
poor mother, who, I could see, wished otherwise, meekly
confirmed the interdict, by saying, " No doubt you are right,
my dear Jane."

On another occasion, when we three were together, this
same dear baby — it was truly dear to me, for our mother's sake-
—was the innocent occasion of Miss Murdstone's going into a
passion. My mother, who had been looking at its eyes as it
lay upon her lap, said :

" Davy ! come here ! " and looked at mine.

I saw Miss Murdstone lay her beads down.

" I declare," said my mother, gently, " they are exactly alike.
I suppose they are mine. I think they are the colour of mine.
But they are wonderfully alike."

" What are you talking about, Clara ? " said Miss Murdstone.

" My dear Jane," faltered my mother, a little abashed by the
harsh tone of this inquiry, " I find that the baby's eyes and j
Davy's are exactly alike." )

" Clara ! " said Miss Murdstone, rising angrily, " you are a
positive fool sometimes."

" My dear Jane," remonstrated my mother.

no DaviH Copperfield

" A positive fool," said Miss Murdstone. " Who else coy^
compare my brother's baby with your boy ? They are not at
all alike. They are exactly unlike. They are utterly dissimilar
in all respects. I hope they will ever remain so. I will not
sit here, and hear such comparisons made." With that she
stalked out, and made the door bang after her.
.^ In short, I was not a favourite with Miss Murdstone. In short,
I was not a favourite there with anybody, not even with
myself; for those who did like me could not show it, and
those who did not showed it so plainly that I had a sensitive
consciousness of always appearing constrained, boorish, and dull.

I felt that I made them as uncomfortable as they made me.
If I came into the room where they were, and they were talking
together and my mother seemed cheerful, an anxious cloud
would steal over her face from the moment of my entrance. If
Mr. Murdstone were in his best humour, I checked him. If
Miss Murdstone were in her worst, I intensified it. I had per-
ception enough to know that my mother was the victim always ';
that she was afraid to speak to me, or be kind to me, lest she
should give them some offence by her manner of doing so, and
receive a lecture afterwards ; that she was not only ceaselessly
afraid of her own offending, but of my offending, and uneasily
watched their looks if I only moved. Therefore I resolved to
keep myself as much out of their way as I could ; and many
a wintry hour did I hear the church clock strike, when I was
sitting in my cheerless bedroom, wrapped in my little great-coat,
poring over a book.

In the evening, sometimes, I went and sat with Peggotty in
the kitchen. There I was comfortable, and not afraid of being
myself. But neither of these resources was approved of in the
parlour. The tormenting humour which was dominant there
stopped them both. I was still held to be necessary to my
poor mother's training, and, as one of her trials, could not be
suffered to absent myself.

" David," said Mr. Murdstone, one day after dinner when I
was going to leave the room as usual ; " I am sorry to observe
that you are of a sullen disposition."

" As sulky as a bear ! " said Miss Murdstone.

I stood still, and hung my head.

" Now, David," said Mr. Murdstone, " a sullen obdurate
disposition is, of all tempers, the worst."

" And the boy's is, of all such dispositions that ever I have
seen," remarked his sister, " the most confirmed and stubborn.
I think, my dear Clara, even you must observe it ? "

David Copperfield iii

"I beg your pardon, my dear Jane," said my mother, "but
are you quite sure — I am certain you'll excuse me, my dear
Jane — that you understand Davy?"

" I should be somewhat ashamed of myself, Clara," returned
Miss Murdstone, " if I could not understand the boy, or any
boy. I don't profess to be profound ; but I do lay claim to
common sense."

"No doubt, my dear Jane," returned my mother, "your
understanding is very vigorous."

" Oh dear, no ! Pray don't say that, Clara," interposed Miss
Murdstone, angrily.

" But I am sure it is," resumed my mother ; ** and everybody
knows it is. I profit so much by it myself, in many ways— at
least I ought to — that no one can be more convinced of it than
myself; and therefore I speak with great diffidence, my dear
Jane, I assure you."

" We'll say I don't understand the boy, Clara," returned Miss
Murdstone, arranging the little fetters on her wrists. " We'll
agree, if you please, that I don't understand him at all. He is
much too deep for me. But perhaps my brother's penetration
may enable him to have some insight into his character. And
I believe my brother was speaking on the subject when we —
not very decently — interrupted him."

" I think, Clara," said Mr. Murdstone, in a low grave voice,
"that there may be better and more dispassionate judges of
such a question than you."

" Edward," replied my mother, timidly, " you are a far better
judge of all questions than I pretend to be. Both you and
Jane are. I only said "

"You only said something weak and inconsiderate," he
replied. " Try not to do it again, my dear Clara, and keep a
watch upon yourself."

My mother's lips moved, as if she answered " Yes, my dear
Edward," but she said nothing aloud.

"I was sorry, David, I remarked," said Mr. Murdstone,
turning his head and his eyes stiffly towards me, " to observe
that you are of a sullen disposition. This is not a character
that I can suffer to develope itself beneath my eyes without an
effort at improvement. You must endeavour, sir, to change it
We must endeavour to change it for you."

" I beg your pardon, sir," I faltered. " I have never meant
to be sullen since I came back."

" Don't take refuge in a lie, sir ! " he returned so fiercely, that
I saw my motlier involuntarily put out her trembling hand as if

112 David Copperfield

to interpose between us. "You have withdrawn yourself in
your sullenness to your own room. You have kept your own
room when you ought to have been here. You know now,
once for all, that I require you to be here, and not there.
Further, that I require you to bring obedience here. You
know me, David. I will have it done."

Miss Murdstone gave a hoarse chuckle.

" I will have a respectful, prompt, and ready bearing towards
myself," he continued, "and towards Jane Murdstone, and
towards your mother. I will not have this room shunned as if
it were infected, at the pleasure of a child. Sit down."

He ordered me like a dog, and I obeyed like a dog.

" One thing more," he said. " I observe that you have an
attachment to low and common company. You are not to
associate with servants. The kitchen will not improve you, in
the many respects in which you need improvement. Of the
woman who abets you, I say nothing — since you, Clara,"
addressing my mother in a lower voice, " from old associations
and long-established fancies, have a weakness respecting her
which is not yet overcome."

"A most unaccountable delusion it is!" cried Miss
Murdstone.

" I only say," he resumed, addressing me, " that I disapprove
of your preferring such company as Mistress Peggotty, and that
it is to be abandoned. Now, David, you understand me, and
you know what will be the consequence if you fail to obey me
to the letter."

I knew well — better perhaps than he thought, as far as my
poor mother was concerned — and I obeyed him to the letter.
I retreated to my own room no more; I took refuge with
Peggotty no more ; but sat wearily in the parlour day after day
looking forward to night, and bedtime.

What irksome constraint I underwent, sitting in the same
attitude hours upon hours, afraid to move an arm or a leg lest
Miss Murdstone should complain (as she did on the least
pretence) of my restlessness, and afraid to move an eye lest she
should light on some look of dislike or scrutiny that would find
new cause for complaint in mine ! What intolerable dulness
to sit listening to the ticking of the clock ; and watching Miss
Murdstone's little shiny steel beads as she strung them ; and
wondering whether she would ever hejusurried, and if so, to what
sort of unhappy man ; and counting the divisions in the moulding
on the chimney-piece ; and wandering away, with my eyes, to the
ceiling, among the curls and corkscrews in the paper on the wall !

David Copperfield 113

What walks I took alone, down muddy lanes, in the bad
winter weather, carrying that parlour, and Mr. and Miss
Murdstone in it, everywhere: a monstrous load that I was
obliged to bear, a daymare that there was no possibility of
breaking in, a weight that brooded on my wits, and blunted
them I

What meals I had in silence and embarrassment, always/
feeling that there were a knife and fork too many, and those
mine ; an appetite too many, and that mine ; a plate and chair
too many, and those mine ; a somebody too many, and that I !

What evenings, when the candles came, and I was expected
to employ myself, but not daring to read an entertaining book,
pored over some hard-headed harder-hearted treatise on
arithmetic ; when the tables of weights and measures set them-
selves to tunes, as Rule Britannia, or Away with Melancholy ;
when they wouldn't stand still to be learnt, but would go
threading my grandmother's needle through my unfortunate
head, in at one ear and out at the other !

What yawns and dozes I lapsed into, in spite of all my care ;
what starts I came out of concealed sleeps with ; what answers
I never got, to little observations that I rarely made ; what a
blank space I seemed, which everybody overlooked, and yet
was in everybody's way ; what a heavy relief it was to hear Miss
Murdstone hail the first stroke of nine at night, and order me
to bed !

Thus the holidays lagged away, until the morning came
when Miss Murdstone said: "Here's the last day off!" and
gave me the closing cup of tea of the vacation.

I was not sorry to go. I had lapsed into a stupid state ; but
I was recovering a little and looking forward to Steerforth,
albeit Mr. Creakle loomed behind him. Again Mr. Barkis
appeared at the gate, and again Miss Murdstone in her
warning voice, said : " Clara ! " when my mother bent over me,
to bid me farewell.

I kissed her, and my baby brother, and was very sorry then ;
but not sorry to go away, for the gulf between us was there,
and the parting was there, every day. And it is not so much
the embrace she gave me, that lives in my mind, though it was
as fervent as could be, as what followed the embrace.

I was in the carrier's cart when I heard her calling to me.
I looked out, and she stood at the garden-gate alone, holding
her baby up in her arms for me to see. It was cold still
weather ; and not a hair of her head, nor a fold of her dress,
was stirred, as she looked intently at me, holding up her child.

114 David Copperfield

So I lost her. So I saw her afterwards, in my sleep at
school — a silent presence near my bed — looking at me with
the same intent face — holding up her baby in her arms.

CHAPTER IX

I HAVE A MEMORABLE BIRTHDAY

I PASS over all that happened at school, until the anni-
versary of my birthday came round in March. Except that
Steerforth was more to be admired than ever, I remember
nothing. He was going away at the end of the half-year, if
not sooner, and was more spirited and independent tlfen before
in my eyes, and therefore more engaging than before ; but be-
yond this I remember nothing. The great remembrance by
which that time is marked in my mind, seems to have swallowed
up all lesser recollections, and to exist alone.

It is even difficult for me to believe that there was a gap of
full two months between my return to Salem House and the
arrival of that birthday. I can only understand that the fact
was so, because I know it must have been so; otherwise I
should feel convinced that there was no interval, and that the
one occasion trod upon the other's heels.

How well I recollect the kind of day it was ! I smell the fog
that hung about the place ; I see the hoar frost, ghostly, through
it ; I feel my rimy hair fall clammy on my cheek ; I look along
the dim perspective of the schoolroom, with a sputtering candle
here and there to light up the foggy morning, and the breath
of the boys wreathing and smoking in the raw cold as they
blow upon their fingers, and tap their feet upon the floor.
f^It was after breakfast, and we had been summoned in from
tne playground, when Mr. Sharp entered and said :

" David Copperfield is to go into the parlour."

I expected a hamper from Peggotty, and brightened at the
order. Some of the boys about me put in their claim not to
be forgotten in the distribution of the good things, as I got
out of my seat with great alacrity.

" Don't hurry, David," said Mr. Sharp. "There's time enough,
my boy, don't hurry."

I might have been surprised by thfe-feeling tone in which he
spoke, if I had given it a thought ; but I gave it none until

David Copperfield 115

afterwards. I hurried away to the parlour ; and there I found
Mr. Creakle, sitting at his breakfast with the cane and a news-
paper before him, and Mrs. Creakle with an opened letter in
her hand. But no hamper.

" David Copperfield," said Mrs. Creakle, leading me to a
sofa, and sitting down beside me. " I want to speak to you
very particularly. I have something to tell you, my child."
'^ZMIj- CilMkit, al wliULli Uf Lumse I l<»uKt.d, aliuuK. lllj> TTead
witnout looking &.1 uiB, aiiU blupped up a sigh with a. veiy targe
piece 6f buiieidd luast.

" You are too young to know how the world changes every
day," said Mrs. Creakle, " and how the people in it pass away.
But we all have to learn it, David ; some of us when we are
young, some of us when we are old, some of us at all times of
our lives."

I looked at her earnestly.

"When you came away from home at the end of the
vacation," said Mrs. Creakle, after a pause, "were they all
well ? " After another pause, " Was your mama well ?"

I trembled without distinctly knowing why, and still looked
at her earnestly, making no attempt to answer.

"Because," said she, "I grieve to tell you that I hear this
morning your mama is very ill."

A mist rose between Mrs. Creakle and me, and her figure
seemed to move in it for an instant. Then I felt the burning
tears run down my face, and it was steady again.

" She is very dangerously ill," she added.

I knew all now. /

''SEeTsdeadT' . /

There was no need to tell me so. I had already broken out j
into a desolate cry, and felt an orphan in the wide world. y

She was very kind to mei §He kepr-nre theicgir^ay, and
left me alone sometimes; and I cried, and wore myself to
sleep, and awoke and cried again. When I could cry no more,
I began to think ; and then the oppression on my breast was
heaviest, and my grief a dull pain that there was no ease fo£]

And yet my thoughts were idle ; not intent on the calamity
that weighed upon my heart, but idly loitering near it. I thought
of our house shut up and hushed. I thought of the little baby,
who, Mrs. Creakle said, had been pining away for some time,
and who, they believed, would die too. I thought of my father's \
grave in the churchyard by our house, and of my mother lying I
there beneath the tree I knew so well. I stood upon a chair '
when I was left alone, and looked into the glass to see how red

^>"^

J David Copperfield

0
my eyes were, and how sorrowful my face. I considered, after
some hours were gone, if my tears were really hard to flow now,
as they seemed to be, what, in connexion with my loss, it would
affect me most to think of when I drew near home — for I was
going home to the funeral. I am sensible of having felt that
a dignity attached to me among the rest of the boys, and that
/ 1 was important in my affliction.

If ever a child were stricken with sincere grief, I was. But
I remember that this importance was a kind of satisfaction to
me, when I walked in the playground that afternoon while the
boys were in school. When I saw them glancing at me out of
the windows, as they went up to their classes, I jelt_distinguished,
and looked more melancholy, and walked slower. When school
was over, and tliey came out and~s^^ me, I felt it rather

good in myself not to be proud to any of them, and to take
exactly the same notice of them all, as before.

I was to go home next night ; not by the mail, but by the
heavy night coach, which was called the Farmer, and was prin-
cipally used by country-people travelling short intermediate
distances upon the road. We had nojtoryrtelUng. that evening,
and Traddles insisted on lending me his pillow. I don't know
what good he thought it would do me, for I had one of my own :
but it was all he had to lend, poor fellow, except a sheet of
i letter-paper full of skeletons ; and that he gave me at parting,
I as a soother of my sorrows and a contribution to my peace of
\mind.

I left Salem House upon the morrow afternoon. I little
thought then that I left it, never to return. We travelled very
slowly all night, and did not get into Yarmouth before nine or
ten o'clock in the morning. I looked out for Mr. Barkis, but
he was not there ; and instead of him a fat, short-winded, merry-
looking, little old man in black, with rusty little bunches of
ribbons at the knees of his breeches, black stockings, and a
broad-brimmed hat, came puffing up to the coach-window, and
said :

" Master Copperfield ?

"Yes, sir."

" Will you come with me, young sir, if you please," he said,
opening the door, " and I shall have the pleasure of taking you
home?"

I put my hand in his, wondering who he was, and we walked
away to a shop in a narrow street on which was written Omer,
Draper, Tailor, Haberdasher, Funeral Furnisher, &c.
It was a close and stifling little shop; full of all sorts of clothing,

David Copperfield 117

made and unmade, including one window full of beaver hats
and bonnets. We went into a little back -parlour, behind the
shop, where we found three young women at work on a quantity
of black materials, which were heaped upon the table, and little
bits and cuttings of which were littered all over the floor.
There was a good fire in the room, and a breathless smell of
warm black crape. I did not know what the smell was then,
but I know now.

The three young women, who appeared to be very industrious
and comfortable, raised their heads to look at me, and then
went on with their work. Stitch, stitch, stitch. At the same
time there came from a workshop across a little yard outside
the window, a regular sound of hammering, that kept a kind
of tune : Rat — tat-tat, rat — tat-tat, rat — tat-tat, without any
variation.

" Well," said my conductor to one of the three young women,
*• How do you get on, Minnie ? "

" We shall be ready by the trying-on time," she replied gaily,
without looking up. " Don't you be afraid, father." ,

Mr. Omer took off his broad-brimmed hat, and sat down
and panted. He was so fdl that he was obliged to pant some
time before he could say :

"That's right."

" Father 1 " said Minnie, playfiilly. " What a porpoise you do
grow ! " —

" Well, I don't know how it is, my dear," he replied, con-
sidering about it " I am rather so."

"You are such a comfortable man, you see," said Minnie.
'* You take things so easy."

" No use taking 'em otherwise, my dear," said Mr. Omer.

" No, indeed," returned his daughter. " We are all pretty
gay here, thank Heaven ! Ain't we, father ? "

" I hope so, my dear," said Mr. Omer. " As I have got my
breath now, I think I'll measure this young scholar. Would
you walk into the shop, Master Copperfield ? "

I preceded Mr. Omer, in compliance with his request ; and
after showing me a roll of cloth which he said was extra
super, and too good mourning for anything short of parents, — ■
he took my various dimensions, and put them down in a book.
While he was recording them he called my attention to his stock-
in-trade, and to certain fashions which he said had " just come
up," and to certain other fashions which he said had "just gone
out."

" And by that sort of thing we very often lose a little mint

ii8 V David Copperfield

of money," said Mr. Omer. "But fashions are like human
beings. They come in, nobody knows when, why, or how;
and they go out, nobody knows when, why, or how. Every-
thing is like life, in my opinion, if you look at it in that point
' of view."

I was too sorrowful to discuss the question, which would
possibly have been beyond me under any circumstances ; and
Mr. Omer took me back into the parlour, breathing with some
difficulty on the way.

He then called down a little break-neck range of steps
behind a door : " Bring up that tea and bread-and-butter ! "
which, after some time, during which I sat looking about me
and thinking, and listening to the stitching in the room and
the tune that was being hammered across the yard, appeared
on a tray, and turned out to be for me.

" I have been acquainted with you," said Mr. Omer, after
watching me for some minutes, during which I had not made
much impression on the breakfast, for the black things destroyed
my appetite, " I have been acquainted with you a long time,
*my young friend."

"Have you, sir?"

"All your life," said Mr. Omer. "I may say before it. I
knew your father before you. He was five foot nine and a
half, and he lays in five and twen-ty foot of ground."

" Rat — tat-tat, rat — tat-tat, rat — tat-tat," across the yard.

" He lays in five and twen-ty foot of ground, if he lays in
a fraction," said Mr. Omer, pleasantly. "It was either his
request or her direction, I forget which."

" Do you know how my little brother is, sir ? " I inquired.

Mr. Omer shook his head.

" Rat— tat-tat, rat— tat-tat, rat— tat-tat."

" He is in his mother's arms," said he.

" Oh, poor little fellow ! Is he dead ? "

" Don't mind it more than you can help," said Mr. Omer.
" Yes. The baby's dead."

My wounds broke out afresh at this intelligence. I left the

scarcely tasted breakfast, and went and rested my head on

another table in a comer of the little room, which Minnie

( hastily cleared, lest I should spot the mourning that was lying

\ there with my tears. She was a pretty good-natured girl, and

* put my hair away from my eyes with a soft, kind touch ; but

she was very cheerful at having nearly finished her work and

being in good time, and was so different from me !

Presently the tune left off, and "a^gbbd-Iooking young fellow

David Copperfield • 119

came across the yard into the room. He had a hammer in
his hand, and his mouth was full of little nails, which he was
obliged to take out before he could speak.

" Well, Joram ! " said Mr. Omer. " How do you get on ? "

" All right," said Joram. " Done, sir."

Minnie coloured a little, and the other two girls smiled at
one another.

" What ! you were at it by candle-light last night, when I
was at the club, then ? Were you ? " said Mr. Omer, shutting
up one eye.

" Yes," said Joram. " As you said we could make a little
trip of it, and go over together, if it was done, Minnie and me
— and you."

" Oh ! I thought you were going to leave me out altogether,"
said Mr. Omer, laughing till he coughed.

" — As you was so good as to say that," resumed the young
man, " why I turned to with a will, you see. Will you give me
your opinion of it ? "

" I will," said Mr. Omer, rising. " My dear ; " and he stopped
and turned to me ; " would you like to see your "

" No, father," Minnie interposed.

" I thought it might be agreeable, my dear," said Mr. Omer.
"But perhaps you're right."

I can't say how I knew it was my dear, dear mother's coffin
that they went to look at. I had never heard one making ; I
had never seen one that I know of: but it came into my mind
what the noise was, while it was going on ; and when the young
man entered, I am sure I knew what he had been doing.

The work being now finished, the two girls, whose names
I had not heard, brushed the shreds and threads from their
dresses, and went into the shop to put that to rights, and wait
for customers. Miimie stayed behind to fold up what they
had made, and pack it in two baskets. This she did upon
her knees, humming a lively little tune the while. Joram, who
I had no doubt was her lover, came in and stole a kiss from
her while she was busy (he didn't appear to mind me, at all),
and said her father was gone for the chaise, and he must make
haste and get himself ready. Then he went out again ; and
then she put her thimble and scissors in her pocket, and stuck
a needle threaded with black thread neatly in the bosom of
her gown, and put on her outer clothing smartly, at a little
glass behind the door, in which I saw the reflection of her
pleased face.

All this I observed, sitting at the table in the comer with

I20 ., David Copperfield

my head leaning on my hand, and my thoughts running on
very different things. The chaise soon came round to the
front of the shop, and the baskets being put in first, I was put
in next, and those three followed. I remember it as a kind
of half chaise-cart, half pianoforte van, painted of a sombre
colour, and drawn by a black horse with a long tail. There
was plenty of room for us all.

I do not think I have ever experienced so strange a feeling
in my life (I am wiser now, perhaps) as that of being with
them, remembering how they had been employed, and seeing
them enjoy the ride. I was not angry with them ; I was more
afraid of them, as if I were cast away among creatures with
whom I had no community of nature. They were very cheerful.
The old man sat in front to drive, and the two young people
sat behind him, and whenever he spoke to them leaned for-
ward, the one on one side of his chubby face and the other on
the other, and made a great deal of him. They would have
talked to me, too, but I held back, and moped in my corner ;
scared by their love-making and hilarity, though it was far
from boisterous, and almost wondering that no judgment came
upon them for their hardness of heart.

So, when they stopped to bait the horse, and ate and drank
and enjoyed themselves, I could touch nothing that they
touched, but kept my fast unbroken. So, when we reached
home, I dropped out of the chaise behind, as quickly as
possible, that I might not be in their company before those
solemn windows, looking blindly on me like closed eyes once
bright. And oh, how little need I had had to think what
would move me to tears when I came back — seeing the window
of my mother's room, and next it that which, in the better
time, was mine !

I was in Peggotty's arms before I got to the door, and she

took me into the house. Her grief burst out when she first

saw me ; but she controlled it soon, and spoke in whispers,

and walked softly, as if the dead could be disturbed. She

had not been in bed, I found, for a long time. She sat up

at night still, and watched. As long as her poor dear pretty

was above the ground, she said, she would never desert her.

/ Mr. Murdstone took no heed of me when I went into the

/parlour, where he was, but sat by the fireside, weeping silently,

'and pondering in his elbow-chair. Miss Murdstone, who was

busy at her writing-desk, which was covered with letters and

papers, gave me her cold finger-nails, and asked me, in an

\iron whis{^f7"if I had been measured for my mourning.

David Copperfield 121

I said: "Yes."

"And your shirts," said Miss Murdstone; "have you
brought 'em home?"

" Yes, ma'am. I have brought home all my clothes."

This was all the consolation that her firmness administered
to me. I do not doubt that she had a choice pleasure in
exhibiting what she called her self-command, and her firmness,
and her strength of mind, and her common sense, and the
whole diabolical catalogue of her unamiable quahties, on such
an occasion. She was particularly proud of her turn for busi-
ness ; and she showed it now in reducing everything to pen
and ink, and being moved by nothing. All the rest of that
day, and from morning to night afterwards, she sat at that
desk ; scratching composedly with a hard pen, speaking in the
same imperturbable whisper to everybody; never relaxing a
muscle of her face, or softening a tone of her voice, or appearing
with an atom of her dress astray.

Her brother took a book sometimes, but never read it that
I saw. He would open it and look at it as if he were reading,
but would remain for a whole hour without turning the leaf,
and then put it down and walk to and fro in the room. I
used to sit with folded hands watching him, and counting his
footsteps, hour after hour. He very seldom spoke to her, and
never to me. He seemed to be the only restless thing, except
the clocks, in the whole motionless house.

In these days before the funeral, I saw but little of Peggotty,
except that, in passing up or down stairs, I always found her
close to the room where my mother and her baby lay, and
except that she came to me every night, and sat by my bed's
head while I went to sleep. A day or two before the burial
— I think it was a day or two before, but I am conscious of
confusion in my mind about that heavy time, with nothing
to mark its progress — she took me into the room. I only
recollect that underneath some white covering on the bed,
with a beautiful cleanliness and freshness all around it, there
seemed to me to lie embodied the solemn stillness that was
in the house; and that when she would have turned the
cover gently back, I cried : " Oh no ! oh no ! " and held her
hand.

If the funeral had been yesterday, I could not recollect it
better. The very air of the best parlour, when I went in at the
door, the bright condition of the fire, the shining of the wine in
the decanters, the patterns of the glasses and plates, the faint
sweet smell of cake, the odour of Miss Murdstone's dress, and

122 David Copperfield

our black clothes. Mr. Chillip is in the room, and comes to
speak to me.

" And how is Master David ? " he says, kindly.

I cannot tell him very well. I give him my hand, which he
holds in his.

" Dear me ! " says Mr. Chillip, meekly smiling, with some-
thing shining in his eye. "Our little friends grow up around
us. They grow out of our knowledge, ma'am ? "

This is to Miss Murdstone, who makes no reply.

" There is a great improvement here, ma'am ? " says Mr.
Chillip.

Miss Murdstone merely answers with a frown and a formal
bend ; Mr. Chillip, discomfited, goes into a corner, keeping me
with him, and opens his mouth no more.

I remark this, because I remark everything that happens, not

because I care about myself, or have done since I came home.

And now the bell begins to sound, and Mr. Omer and another

\ come to make us ready. As Peggotty was wont to tell me, long

« ago, the followers of my father to the same grave were made

1 ready in the same room.

There are Mr. Murdstone, our neighbour Mr. Grayper, Mr.
Chillip, and I. When we go out to the door, the Bearers and
their load are in the garden ; and they move before us down
the path, and past the elms, and through the gate, and into the
churchyard, where I have so often heard the birds sing on a
summer morning.

We stand around the grave. The day seems different to me
from every other day, and the light not of the same colour — of
a sadder colour. Now there is a solemn hush, which we have
brought from home with what is resting in the mould ; and
while we stand bare-headed, I hear the voice of the clergyman,
sounding remote in the open air, and yet distinct and plain,
saying : " I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord ! "
Then I hear sobs ; and, standing apart among the lookers-on,
I see that good and faithful servant, whom of all the people
upon earth I love the best, and unto whom my childish heart
is certain that the Lord will one day say : " Well done."

There are many faces that I know, among the little crowd ;
faces that I knew in church, when mine was always wondering
there ; faces that first saw my mother, when she came to the
village in her youthful bloom. I do not mind them — I mind
nothing but my grief-— and yet I see and know them all ; and
even in the background, far away, see Minnie looking on, and
her eye glancing on her sweetheart, wlw) is near me.

David Copperfield 123

It is over, and the earth is filled in, and we turn to come
away. Before us stands our house, so pretty and unchanged,
so linked in my mind with the young idea of what is gone, that
all my sorrow has been nothing to the sorrow it calls forth.
But they take me on ; and Mr. Chillip talks to me ; and when
we get home, put some water to my lips ; and when I ask his
leave to go up to my room, dismisses me with the gentleness
of a woman.

AU this, I say, is yesterday's event Events of later date
have Hoated from me to the shore where all forgotten things
will re-appear, but this stands like a high rock in the ocean. j

I knew that Peggotty would come to me in my room. The
Sabbath stillness of the time (the day was so like Sunday ! I
have forgotten that) was suited to us both. She sat down by
my side upon my little bed ; and holding my hand, and some-
times putting it to her lips, and sometimes smoothing it with
hers, as she might have comforted my little brother, told me, in
her way, all that she had to tell concerning what had happened.

" She was never well," said Peggotty, " for a long time. She
was uncertain in her mind, and not happy. When her baby
was bom, I thought at first she would get better, but she was
more delicate, and sunk a little every day. She used to like to
sit alone before her baby came, and then she cried ; but after-
wards she used to sing to it — so soft, that I once thought, when
I heard her, it was like a voice up in the air, that was rising
away.

" I think she got to be more timid, and more frightened-like,
of late ; and that a hard word was like a blow to her. But she
was always the same to me. She never changed to her foolish
Peggotty, didn't my sweet girl."

Here Peggotty stopped, and softly beat upon my hand a
little while.

" The last time that I saw her like her own old self, was the
night when you came home, my dear. The day you went
away, she said to me, 'I never shall see my pretty darling
again. Something tells me so, that tells the truth, I know.'

" She tried to hold up after that ; and many a time, when
they told her she was thoughtless and light-hearted, made
believe to be so ; but it was all a bygone then. She never
told her husband what she had told me — she was afraid of
saying it to anybody else — till one night, a little more than a
week before it happened, when she said to him : ' My dear, I
think I am dying.'

124 David Copperfield

" ' It's off my mind now, Peggotty,' she told me, when I laid

her in her bed that night. * He will believe it more and more,

poor fellow, every day for a few days to come ; and then it will

be past. I am very tired. If this is sleep, sit by me while I

j sleep ; don't leave me. God bless both my children ! God

/ protect and keep my fatherless boy ! '

" I never left her afterwards," said Peggotty. " She often
talked to them two down-stairs— for she loved them ; she
couldn't bear not to love any one who was about her — but
when they went away from her bedside, she alw9^ys turned to
me, as if there was rest where Peggotty was, and never fell
asleep in any other way.

"On the last night, in the evening, she kissed me, an4 said:
' If my baby should die too, Peggotty, please let them li^y him
in my arms, and bury us together.' (It was done; fpr the
poor lamb lived but a day beyond her.) * Let my dearest boy
go with us to our resting-place,' she said, 'and tell hirn that
his mother, when she lay here, blessed him not once, but a
thousand times.' "

Another silence followed this, and another gentle beating on
my hand.

"It was pretty far in the night," said Peggotty, "w'hen she
asked me for some drink ; and when she had taken it, gave me
such a patient smile, the dear ! — so beautiful ! '

\ " Daybreak had come, and the sun was rising, wheri^ she said
to me, how kind and considerate Mr. Copperfield had always
been to her, and how he had borne with her, and tola' her,
when she doubted herself, that a loving heart was better* and
stronger than wisdom, and that he was a happy man in hi-rs.
* Peggotty, my dear,' she said then, * put me nearer to you,' /or
she was very weak. ' Lay your good arm underneath my nec'i^/
she said, * and turn me to you, for your face is going far off
and I want it to be near.' I put it as she asked; and oh'
Davy ! the time had come when my first parting words to you*-
were true — when she was glad to lay her poor head on her '
stupid cross old Peggotty's arm — and she died like a child that
had gone to sleep ! "

^Thus ended Peggotty's narration. From the moment of my
knowing of the death of my mother, the idea of her as she had
been of late vanished from me. I remembered her, from that
instant, only as the young mother of my earliest impressions,
who had been used to wind her bright curls round and round
her finger, and to dance with me at twilight in the parlour.

David Copperfield 125

What Peggotty had told me now, was so far from bringing me
back to the later period, that it rooted the earlier image in my
mind. It may be curious, but it is true. In her death she
winged her way back to her calm untroubled youth, and

cancelled all the rest.

The mother who lay in the grave, was the mother of my
infancy ; the little creature in her arms, was myself, as I had
once been, hushed for ever on her bosom.

CHAPTER X

I BECOME NEGLECTED, AND AM PROVIDED FOR

The first act of business Miss Murdstone performed when the
day of the solemnity was over, and light was freely admitted
into the house, was to give Peggotty a month's warning.
Much as Peggotty would have disliked such a service, I believe
she would have retained it, for my sake, in preference to the
best upon earth. She told me we must part, and told we why ;
and we condoled with one another in all sincerity.

As to me or my future, not a word was said, or a step taken.
Happy they would have been, I dare say, if they could have
dismissed me at a month's warning too. I mustered courage
once, to ask Miss Murdstone when I was going back to school ;
and she answered drily, she believed I was not going back at
all. I was told nothing more. I was very anxious to know
what was going to be done with me, and so was Peggotty ; but
neither she nor I could pick up any uiformation on the
subject.

There was one change in my condition, which, while it re-
lieved me of a great deal of present uneasiness, might have
made me, if I had been capable of considering it closely, yet
more uncomfortable about the future. It was this. The con-
straint that had been put upon me was quite abandoned.
I was so far from being required to keep my dull post in the
parlour, that on several occasions, when I took my seat there.
Miss Murdstone frowned to me to go away. I was so far from
being warned off from Peggotty's society, that, provided I was
not in Mr. Murdstone's, I was never sought out or inquired
for. At first I was in daily dread of his taking my education
in hand again, or of Miss Murdstone's devoting herself to it ;

126 David Copperfield

but I soon began to think that such fears were groundless, and
that all I had to anticipate was neglect.

I do not conceive that this discovery gave me much pain
then. I was still giddy with the shock of my mother's death,
and in a kind of stunned state as to all tributary things. I can
recollect, indeed, to have speculated, at odd times, on the
possibility of my not being taught any more, or cared for any
more ; and growing up to be a shabby moody man, lounging
an idle life away, about the village ; as well as on the feasibility
of my getting rid of this picture by going away somewhere,
like the hero in a story, to seek my fortune : but these were
transient visions, day-dreams I sat looking at sometimes, as
if they were faintly painted or written on the wall of my
room, and which, as they melted away, left the wall blank
again.

"Peggotty," I said in a thoughtful whisper, one evening,
when I was warming my hands at the kitchen fire, " Mr.
Murdstone likes me less than he used to. He never liked
me much, Peggotty; but he would rather not even see me
now, if he can help it."

"Perhaps it's his sorrow," said Peggotty, stroking my hair.

" I am sure, Peggotty, I am sorry too. If I believed it was
his sorrow, I should not think of it at all. But it's not that ;
oh, no, it's not that."

"How do you know it's not that?" said Peggotty, after a
silence.

" Oh, his sorrow is another and quite a different thing. He
is sorry at this moment, sitting by the fireside with Miss
Murdstone; but if I was to go in, Peggotty, he would be
something besides."

"What would he be?" said Peggotty.

"Angry," I answered, with an involuntary imitation of his
dark frown. " If he was only sorry, he wouldn't look at me as
he does, /am only sorry, and it makes me feel kinder."

Peggotty said nothing for a little while ; and I warmed my
hands, as silent as she.

" Davy," she said at length.

"Yes, Peggotty?"

" I have tried, my dear, all ways I could think of — all the
ways there are, and all the ways there ain't, in short — to get a
suitable service here, in Blunderstone ; but there's no such
a thing, my love."

" And what do you mean to do, Peggotty," says I, wistfully.
" Do you mean to go and seek your fortune ? "

David Copperfield 127

"I expect I shall be forced to go to Yarmouth," replied
Peggotty, "and live there."

"You might have gone farther off," I said, brightening a
little, "and been as bad as lost. I shall see you sometimes,
my dear old Peggotty, there. You won't be quite at the other
end of the world, will you ? "

" Contrary ways, please God ! " cried Peggotty, with great
animation. "As long as you are here, my pet, I shall come
over every week of my life to see you. One day every week
of my life ! "

I felt a great weight taken off my mind by this promise : but
even this was not all, for Peggotty went on to say :

"I'm a going, Davy, you see, to my brother's, first, for
another fortnight's visit — just till I have had time to look
about me, and get to be something like myself again. Now,
I have been thinking that perhaps, as they don't want you here
at present, you might be let to go along with me."

If anything, short of being in a different relation to every
one about me, Peggotty excepted, could have given me a sense
of pleasure at that time, it would have been this project of all
others. The idea of being again surrounded by those honest
faces, shining welcome on me; of renewing the peacefulness
of the sweet Sunday morning, when the bells were ringing, the
stones dropping in the water, and the shadowy ships breaking
through the mist ; of roaming up and down with little Em'ly,
telling her my troubles, and finding charms against them in
the shells and pebbles on the beach ; made a calm in my
heart. It was ruffled next moment, to be sure, by a doubt of
Miss Murdstone giving her consent ; but even that was set at
rest soon, for she came out to take an evening grope in the
store-closet while we were yet in conversation, and Peggotty,
with a boldness that amazed me, broached the topic on the
spot.

"The boy will be idle there," said Miss Murdstone, looking
into a pickle-jar, " and idleness is the root of all evil. But, to
be sure, he would be idle here — or anywhere, in my opinion."
Peggotty had an angry answer ready, I could see ; but she
swallowed it for my sake, and remained silent

*' Humph ! " said Miss Murdstone, still keeping her eye on
the pickles ; " it is of more importance than anything else — it
is of paramount importance — that my brother should not be
disturbed or made uncomfortable. I suppose I had better
say yes."

I thanked her, without making any demonstration of joy,

128 David Copperfield

lest it should induce her to withdraw her assent. Nor could
I help thinking this a prudent course, since she looked at me
out of the pickle-jar, with as great an access of sourness as if
her black eyes had absorbed its contents. However, the per-
mission was given, and was never retracted ; for when the
month was out, Peggotty and I were ready to depart.

Mr. Barkis came into the house for Peggotty's boxes. I
had never known him to pass the garden-gate before, but on
this occasion he came into the house. And he gave me a look
as he shouldered the largest box and went out, which I thought
had meaning in it, if meaning could ever be said to find its
way into Mr. Barkis's visage.

Peggotty was naturally in low spirits at leaving what had
been her home so many years, and where the two strong
attachments of her life — for my mother and myself — had been
formed. She had been walking in the churchyard, too, very
early ; and she got into the cart, and sat in it with her hand-
kerchief at her eyes.

So long as she remained in this condition, Mr. Barkis gave
no sign of life whatever. He sat in his usual place and
attitude, like a great stuffed figure. But when she began to
look about her, and to speak to me, he nodded his head and
grinned several times. I have not the least notion at whom,
or what he meant by it.

"It's a beautiful day, Mr. Barkis!" I said, as an act of
politeness.

" It ain't bad," said Mr. Barkis, who generally qualified his
speech, and rarely committed himself.

" Peggotty is quite comfortable now, Mr. Barkis," I remarked,
for his satisfaction.

" Is she, though ? " said Mr. Barkis.

After reflecting about it, with a sagacious air, Mr. Barkis
eyed her, and said :

" Are you pretty comfortable ? "

Peggotty laughed, and answered in the affirmative

" But really and truly, you know. Are you ? " growled Mr.
Barkis, sliding nearer to her on the seat, and nudging her with
his elbow. " Are you ? Really and truly, pretty comfortable ?
Are you? Eh?" At each of these inquiries Mr. Barkis
shuffled nearer to her, and gave her another nudge ; so that at
last we were all crowded together in the left-hand corner of
the cart, and I was so squeezed that I could hardly bear it.

Peggotty calling his attention to my sufferings, Mr. Barkis
gave me a little more room at once, and got away by degrees.

David Copperfield 129

But I could not help observing that he seemed to think he had
hit upon a wonderful expedient for expressing himself in a
neat, agreeable, and pointed manner, without the inconvenience
of inventing conversation. He manifestly chuckled over it
for some time. By-and-by he turned to Peggotty again, and
repeating, " Are you pretty comfortable, though ?" bore down
upon us as before, until the breath was nearly wedged out of
my body. By-and-by he made another descent upon us with
the same inquiry, and the same result. At length, I got up
whenever I saw him coming, and standing on the foot-board,
pretended to look at the prospect; after which I did very
well.

He was so polite as to stop at a public-house, expressly on
our account, and entertain us with broiled mutton and beer.
Even when Peggotty was in the act of drinking, he was seized
with one of those approaches, and almost choked her. But as
we drew nearer to the end of our journey, he had more to do
and less time for gallantry; and when we got on Yarmouth
pavement, we were all too much shaken and jolted, I apprehend,
to have any leisure for anything else.

Mr. Peggotty and Ham waited for us at the old place.
They received me and Peggotty in an affectionate manner, and
shook hands with Mr. Barkis, who, with his hat on the very
back of his head, and a shamefaced leer upon his countenance,
and pervading his very legs, presented but a vacant appearance,
I thought. They each took one of Peggotty's trunks, and we
were going away, when Mr. Barkis solemnly made a sign to me
with his forefinger to come under an archway.

" I say," growled Mr. Barkis, " it was all right."

I looked up into his face, and answered, with an attempt to
be very profound : " Oh ! "

" It didn't come to an end, there," said Mr. Barkis, nodding
confidentially. " It was all right."

Again I answered, " Oh ! "

" You know who was willin','* said my friend. " It was
Barkis, and Barkis only."

I nodded assent.

"It's all right," said Mr. Barkis, shaking hands ; " I'm a
friend of your'n. You made it all right, first. It's all right"

In his attempts to be particularly lucid, Mr. Barkis was so
extremely mysterious that I might have stood looking in his
face for an hour, and most assuredly should have got as much
information out of it as out of the face of a clock that had
stopped, but for Peggotty's calling me away. As we were

130 David Copperfield

going along, she asked me what he had said ; and I told her
he had said it was all right.

"Like his impudence," said Peggotty, "but I don't mind
that ! Davy dear, what should you think if I was to think of
being married?''

" Why — I suppose you would like me as much then,
Peggotty, as you do now?" I returned, after a little con-
sideration.

Greatly to the astonishment of the passengers in the street,
as well as of her relations going on before, the good soul was
obliged to stop and embrace me on the spot, with many
protestations of her unalterable love.

" Tell me what should you say, darling ? " she asked again,
when this was over, and we were walking on.

" If you were thinking of being married — to Mr. Barkis,
Peggotty?"

" Yes," said Peggotty.

" I should think it would be a very good thing. For then
you know, Peggotty, you would always have the horse and cart
to bring you over to see me, and could come for nothing, and
be sure of coming."

" The sense of the dear ! " cried Peggotty. " What I have
been thinking of, this month back ! Yes, my precious ; and
I think I should be more independent altogether, you see ; let
alone my working with a better heart in my own house, than I
could in anybody else's now. I don't know what I might be
fit for, now, as a servant to a stranger. And I shall be always
near my pretty's resting-place," said Peggotty, musing, " and be
able to see it when I like ; and when /lie down to rest, I may
be laid not far off from my darling girl ! "

We neither of us said anything for a little while.

" But I wouldn't so much as give it another thought," said
Peggotty, cheerily, " if my Davy was anyways against it — not
if I had been asked in church thirty times three times over,
and was wearing out the ring in my pocket."

" Look at me, Peggotty," I replied ; " and see if I am not
really glad, and don't truly wish it I " As indeed I did, with
all my heart.

" Well, my life," said Peggotty, giving me a squeeze, " I have
thought of it night and day, every way I can, and I hope the
right way ; but I'll think of it again, and speak to my brother
about it, and in the meantime we'll keep it to ourselves, Davy,
you and me. Barkis is a good plain creatur'," said Peggotty,
" and if I tried to do my duty by him, I think it would be my

David Copperfield 131

fault if I wasn't — if I wasn't pretty comfortable," said Peggotty,
laughing heartily.

This quotation from Mr. Barkis was so appropriate, and
tickled us both so much, that we laughed again and again, and
were quite in a pleasant humour when we came within view of
Mr. Peggotty's cottage.

It looked just the same, except that it may, perhaps, have •
shrunk a little in my eyes ; and Mrs. Gummidge was waiting at
the door as if she had stood there ever since. All within was
the same, down to the seaweed in the blue mug in my bedroom.
I went into the outhouse to look about me ; and the very same
lobsters, crabs, and crawfish possessed by the same desire to
pinch the world in general, appeared to be in the same state of
conglomeration in the same old corner.

But there was no little Em'ly to be seen, so I asked Mr.
Peggotty where she was.

"She's at school, sir," said Mr. Peggotty, wiping the heat
consequent on the porterage of Peggotty's box from his
forehead ; " she'll be home," looking at the Dutch clock, " in
from twenty minutes to half-an-hour^s time. We all on us feel
the loss of her, bless ye ! "

Mrs. Gummidge moaned.

" Cheer up, Mawther ! " cried Mr. Peggotty.

" I feel it more than anybody else," said Mrs. Gummidge :
" I'm a lone lorn creetur', and she used to be a'most the only
thing that didn't go contrairy with me."

Mrs. Gummidge, whimpering and shaking her head, applied
herself to blowing the fire. Mr. Peggotty, looking round upon
us while she was so engaged, said in a low voice, which he
shaded with his hand : " The old 'un ! " From this I rightly \
conjectured that no improvement had taken place since my last !
visit in the state of Mrs. Gummidge's spirits.

Now, the whole place was, or it should have been, quite as
delightful a place as ever ; and yet it did not impress me in the
same way. I felt rather disappointed with it. Perhaps it was
because little Em'ly was not at home. I knew the way by
which she would come, and presently found myself strolling
along the path to meet her.

A figure appeared in the distance before long, and I soon
knew it to be Em'ly, who was a little creature still in stature,
though she was grown. But when she drew nearer, and I saw
her blue eyes looking bluer, and her dimpled face looking
brighter, and her whole self prettier and gayer, a curious
feeling ::ame over me that made me pretend not to know her,

132 David Copperfield

and pass by as if I were looking at something a long way
off. I have done such a thing since in later life, or I am
mistaken.

Little Em'ly didn't care a bit. She saw me well enough;
but instead of turning round and calling after me, ran away
laughing. This obliged me to run after her, and she ran so
fast that we were very near the cottage before I caught her.

" Oh, it's you, is it?" said little Em'ly.

" Why, you knew who it was, Em'ly," said I.

" And didn't you know who it was ? " said Em'ly. I was
going to kiss her, but she covered her cherry lips with her
hands, and said she wasn't a baby now, and ran away, laughing
more than ever, into the house.

She seemed to delight in teasing me, which was a change in
her I wondered at very much. The tea-table was ready, and
our little locker was put out in its old place, but instead of
coming to sit by me, she went and bestowed her company upon
that grumbling Mrs. Gummidge : and on Mr. Peggotty's
inquiring why, rumpled her hair all over her face to hide it, and
would do nothing but laugh.

" A little puss it is ! " said Mr. Peggotty, patting her with his
great hand.

" So sh' is ! so sh' is ! " cried Ham. " Mas'r Davy bor',
so sh' is ! " and he sat and chuckled at her for some time, in a
state of mingled admiration and delight, that made his face
a burning red.

Little Em'ly was spoiled by them all, in fact ; and by no one
more than Mr. Peggotty himself, whom she could have coaxed
into anything by only going and laying her cheek against his
rough whisker. That was my opinion, at least, when I saw
her do it ; and I held Mr. Peggotty to be thoroughly in the
right. But she was so affectionate and sweet-natured, and had
such a pleasant manner of being both sly and shy at once,
that she captivated me more than ever.

She was tender-hearted, too ; for when, as we sat round the
fire after tea, an allusion was made by Mr. Peggotty over his
pipe to the loss I had sustained, the tears stood in her eyes,
and she looked at me so kindly across the table, that I felt
quite thankful to her.

" Ah ! " said Mr. Peggotty, taking up her curls, and running
them over his hand like water, " here's another orphan, you see,
sir. And here," said Mr. Peggotty, giving Ham a back-handed
knock in the chest, "is another of 'm, though he don't look
much like it."

David Copperfield 133

*' If I had you for my guardian, Mr. Peggotty," said I, shaking
my head, " I don't think I should /<rtf/ much like it."

" Well said, Mas'r Davy, bor* ! " cried Ham in an ecstasy.
" Hoorah 1 Well said ! Nor more you wouldn't ! Hor !
Hor ! " — Here he returned Mr. Peggotty's back-hander, and
little Em'ly got up and kissed Mr. Peggotty.

" And how's your friend, sir ? " said Mr. Peggotty to me.

" Steerforth ? " said I.

" That's the name ! " cried Mr. Peggotty, turning to Ham.
" I knowed it was something in our way."

"You said it was Rudderford," observed Ham, laughing.

"Well!" retorted Mr. Peggotty. "And ye steer with a
rudder, don't ye ? It ain't fur off. How is he, sir ? "

" He was very well indeed when I came away, Mr. Peggotty."

" There's a friend ! " said Mr. Peggotty, stretching out his
pipe. " There's a friend, if you talk of friends ! Why, Lord
love my heart alive, if it ain't a treat to look at him ! "

" He is very handsome, is he not ? " said I, my heart warming
with this praise.

" Handsome ! " cried Mr. Peggotty. " He stands up to you
like — like a — why I don't know what he dofCt stand up to you
like. He's so bold!",

" Yes ! ThatVjusT his character,*' said I. " He's as braxfi.
as a lion, and you can't think how fra»lr-he is, Mr. Peggotty."

" And I do suppose, now," said Mr. Peggotty, looking at
me through the smoke of his pipe, " that in the way of book-
larning he'd take the wind out of almost anything."

"Yes," said I, delighted; "he knows everything. He is
astonishingly clever."

" There's a friend ! " murmured Mr. Peggotty, with a grave
toss of his head.

" Nothing seems to cost him any trouble," said I. " He
knows a task if he only looks at it. He is the best cricketer
you ever saw. He will give you almost as many men as you
like at draughts, and beat you easily."

Mr. Peggotty gave his head another toss, as much as to say :
" Of course he will."

" He is such a speaker," I pursued, " that he can win any-
body over ; and I don't know what you'd say if you were to
hear him sing, Mr. Peggotty."

Mr. Peggotty gave his head another toss, as much as to say :
"I have no doubt of it."

" Then, he's such a generous, fine, noble fellow," said I, quite
carried away by my favourite theme, " that it's hardly possible to

134 David Copperfield

give him as much praise as he deserves. I am sure I can never
feel thankful enough for the generosity with which he has pro-
tected me, so much younger and lower in the school than
himself."

I was running on, very fast indeed, when my eyes rested on
little Em'ly's face, which was bent forward over the table,
listening with the deepest attention, her breath held, her blue
eyes sparkling like jewels, and the colour mantling in her
cheeks. She looked so extraordinarily earnest and pretty, that
I stopped in a sort of wonder ; and they all observed her at the
same time, for as I stopped, they laughed and looked at her.

" Em'ly is like me," said Peggotty, " and would like to
see him."

Em'ly was confused by our all observing her, and hung down
her head, and her face was covered with blushes. Glancing up
presently through her stray curls, and seeing that we were all
looking at her still (I am sure I, for one, could have looked at
her for hours), she ran away, and kept away until it was nearly
bedtime.

I lay down in the old little bed in the stern of the boat, and
the wind came moaning on across the flat as it had done
^ before. But I could not help fancyirig, now, that it moaned of
' those who were gone ; and iristeSd of thinking that the sea
might rise in the night and float the boat away, I thought of
the sea that had risen, since I last heard those sounds, and
drowned my happy home. I recollect, as the wind and
water began to sound fainter in my ears, putting a short clause
into my prayers, petitioning that I might grow up to marry
4ittle Em'ly, and so dropping lovingly asleep.

The days passed pretty much as they had passed before,
except — it was a great exception — that little Em'ly and I seldom
wandered on the beach now. She had tasks to learn, and
needlework to do ; and was absent during the greater part of
each day. But I felt that we should not have had these old
wanderings, even if it had been otherwise. Wild and full of
childish whims as Em'ly was, she was more of a little woman
than I had supposed. She seemed to have got a great distance
away from me, in little more than a year. She liked me, but
she laughed at me, and tormented me ; and when I went to
meet her, stole home another way, and was laughing at the
door when I came back, disappointed. The best times were
when she sat quietly at work in the doorway, and I sat on the
wooden steps at her feet, reading to her. It seems to me at
this hour, that I have never seen such sunlight as on those bright

David Copperfield 135

April afternoons ; that I have never seen such a sunny little
figure as I used to see, sitting in the doorway of the old boat ;
that I have never beheld such sky, such water, such glorified
ships sailing away intcugplden air. '

' On the very first evening after our arrival, Mr. Barkis
appeared in an exceedingly vacant and awkward condition, and
with a bundle of oranges tied up in a handkerchief. As he
made no allusion of any kind to this property, he was supposed
to have left it behind him by accident when he went away ;
until Ham, running after him to restore it, came back with the
information that it was intended for Peggotty. After that occa-
sion he appeared every evening at exactly the same hour, and
always with a little bundle, to which he never alluded, and
which he regularly put behind the door, and left there. These
offerings of affection were of a most various and eccentric
description. Among them I remember a double set of pigs'
trotters, a huge pin-cushion, half a bushel or so of apples, a pair
of jet earrings, some Spanish onions, a box of dominoes, a canary
bird and cage, and a leg of pickled pork.

Mr. Barkis's wooing, as I remember it, was altogether of a
peculiar kind. He very seldom said anything ; but would sit
by the fire in much the same attitude as he sat in his cart, and
stare heavily at Peggotty, who was opposite. One night, being,
as I suppose, inspired by love, he made a dart at the bit of wax-
candle she kept for her thread, and put it in his waistcoat pocket
and carried it off. After that, his great delight was to produce
it when it was wanted, sticking to the lining of his pocket, in a
partially melted state, and pocket it again when it was done
with. He seemed to enjoy himself very much, and not to feel'
at all called upon to talk. Even when he took Peggotty out;
for a walk on the flats, he had no uneasiness on that head, I
believe ; contenting himself with now and then asking her if she
was pretty comfortable ; and I remember that sometimes, after
he was gone, Peggotty would throw her apron over her face,
and jaugh for half-an-hour. Indeed, we were all more or less
amused, except that miserable Mrs. Gummidge, whose courtship
would appear to have been of an exactly parallel nature, she
was so continually reminded by these transactions of the old
one.

At length, when the term of my visit was nearly expired, it
was given out that Peggotty and Mr. Barkis were going to make
a day's holiday together, and that little Em'ly and I were to
accompany them. I had but a broken sleep the night before,
in anticipation of the pleasure of a whole day with Em'ly. We

136 David Copperfield

were all astir betimes in the morning ; and while we were yet
at breakfast, Mr. Barkis appeared in the distance, driving a
chaise-cart towards the object of his affections.

Peggotty was dressed as usual, in her neat and quiet mourn-
ing ; but Mr. Barkis bloomed in a new blue coat, of which the
tailor had given him such good measure, that the cuffs would
have rendered gloves unnecessary in the coldest weather, while
the collar was so high that it pushed his hair up on end
on the top of his head. His bright buttons, too, were of the
largest size. Rendered complete by drab pantaloons and
a buff waistcoat, I thought Mr. Barkis a phenomenon of
respectability.

When we were all in a bustle outside the door, I found that
Mr. Peggotty was prepared with an old shoe, which was to be
thrown after us for luck, and which he offered to Mrs.
Gummidge for that purpose.

" No. It had better be done by somebody else, Dan'l," said
Mrs. Gummidge. " I'm a lone lorn creetur' myself, and every-
think that reminds me of creeturs that ain't lone and lorn, goes
contrairy with me."

" Come, old gal ! " cried Mr. Peggotty. " Take and heave it."

"No, Dan'l," returned Mrs. Gummidge, whimpering and
shaking her head. " If I felt less, I could do more. You
don't feel like me, Dan'l ; thinks don't go contrairy with you,
nor you with them ; you had better do it yourself."

But here Peggotty, who had been going about from one to
another in a hurried way, kissing everybody, called out from
the cart, in which we all were by this time (Em'ly and I on two
little chairs, side by side), that Mrs. Gummidge must do it. So
Mrs. Gummidge did it ; and, I am sorry to relate, cast a damp
upon the festive character of our departure, by immediately
bursting into tears, and sinking subdued into the arms of Ham,
with the declaration that she knowed she was a burden, and
had better be carried to the House at once. Which I really
thought was a sensible idea, that Ham might have acted on.

Away we went, however, on our holiday excursion ; and the
first thing we did was to stop at a church, where Mr. Barkis
tied the horse to some rails, and went in with Peggotty, leaving
little Em'ly and me alone in the chaise. I took that occasion
to put my arm round Em'ly's waist, and propose that as I was
going away so very soon now, we should determine to be very
affectionate to one another, and very happy, all day. Little
Em'ly consenting, and allowing me to kiss her, I became
desperate ; informing her, I recollect, that I never could love

David Copperfield 137

another, and that I was prepared to shed the blood of anybody
who should aspire to her affections.

How merry little Em'ly made herself about it ! With what
a demure assumption of being immensely older and wiser than
I, the fairy little woman said I was " a silly boy ; " and then
laughed so charmingly that I forgot the pain of being called by
that disparaging name, in the pleasure of looking at her.

Mr. Barkis and Peggotty were a good while in the church,
but came out at last, and then we drove away into the country.
As >ye were going along, Mr. Barkis turned to me, and said,
with a wink, — by-the-bye, I should hardly have thought, before,
that he could wink :

" What name was it as I wrote up in the cart ? "

" Clara Peggotty," I answered.

" What name would it be as I should write up now, if there
was a tilt here ? "

" Clara Peggotty, again ? " I suggested.

" Clara Peggotty Barkis ! " he returned, and burst into a
roar of laughter that shook the chaise.

In a word, they were married, and had gone into the church
for no other purpose. Peggotty was resolved that it should be
quietly done , and the clerk had given her away, and there had
been no witnesses of the ceremony. She was a little confused
when Mr. Barkis made this abrupt announcement of their
union, and could not hug me enough in token of herjinim-
pairedjjfection ; but she soon became herself again, and said
she was very glad it was over.

We drove to a little inn in a by-road, where we were
expected, and where we had a very comfortable dinner, and
passed the day with great satisfaction. If Peggotty had been
married every day for the last ten years, she could hardly have
been more at her ease about it ; it made no sort of difference
in her : she was just the same as ever, and went out for a
stroll with little Em'ly and me before tea, while Mr. Barkis
philosophically smoked his pipe, and enjoyed himself, I suppose,
with the contemplation of his happiness. If so, it sharpened
his appetite ; for I distinctly called to mind that, although he
had eaten a good deal of pork and greens at dinner, and had
finished off with a fowl or two, he was obliged to have cold
boiled bacon for tea, and disposed of a large quantity without
any emotion.

I have often thought, since, what an odd, innocent, out-of-
the-way kind of wedding it must have been ! We got into the
chaise again soon after dark, and drove cosily back, looking up

138 David Copperfield

at the stars, and talking about them. I was their chief
exponent, and opened Mr. Barkis's mind to an amazing extent.
I told him all I knew, but he would have believed anything I
might have taken it into my head to impart to him ; for he
had a profound veneration for my abilities, and informed his
«! wife in my hearing, on that very occasion, that I was " a young
' Roeshus " — by which I think he meant prodigy.

When we had exhausted the subject of the stars, or rather
when I had exhausted the mental faculties of Mr. Barkis, little
Em'ly and I made a cloak of an old wrapper, and satuader
V for the rest of the journey. Ah, how I loved her ! What
happiness (I thought) if we were married, and were going away
anywhere to live among the trees and in the fields, never^grow^
ing_plder, nfiver growing wiser, cMdren ever, rambling hand in
hand through sunshine and among flowiiry meadows, laying
down our heads on moss at night, in a sweet sleep of puri
and peace, and buried by the birds when we were dead ! "Some
such picture, with no real world in it, bright with the light of
our innocence, and vague as the stars afar off, was in my mind
all the way. I am glad to think there were two such._guilfcless
hearts at Peggotty's marriage as little Em' ly's and mine. I am
glad to think the Loves and Graces took such airy forms in its
homely procession.

Well, we came to the old boat again in good time at night ;

and there Mr. and Mrs. Barkis bade us good-bye, and drove

away snugly to their own home. Jfelt Jheiij^ for_lhfi-fiist-tnne,

^ fhflt T hfl^ lost Pep[p^ottv. I should have gone to bed with a

vV . sore heart indeed u^der any other roof but that which sheltered

J^ r littlejaniljds head.

^ "Mr. Peggotty and Ham knew what was in my thoughts as

well as I did, and were ready with some supper and their
hospitable faces to drive it away. Little Em'ly came and sat
beside me on the locker for the only time in all that visit ; and
it was altogether a wonderful close to a wonderful day.

It was a night tide ; and soon after we went to bed, Mr.
Peggotty and Ham went out to fish. I felt very brave at being
left alone in the solitary house, the protector of Em'ly and Mrs.
Gum midge, and only wished that a lion or a serpent, or any
ill-disposed monster, would make an attack upon us, that I
might destroy him, and cover myself with glory. But as
nothing of the sort happened to be walking about on Yarmouth
fiats that night, I provided the best substitute I could by
dreaming of dragons until morning.

With morning came Peggotty ; who called to me, as usual,

David Copperfield 139

under my window, as if Mr. Barkis the carrier had been
from first to last a dream too. After breakfast she took me to
her own home, and h beautiful little home it was. Of all the
moveables in it, I must have been most impressed by a certain
old bureau of some dark wood in the parlour (the tile-floored
kitchen was the general sitting-room), with a retreating top
which opened, let down, and became a desk, within which was
a large quarto edition of Foxe's Book of Martyrs. This precious
volume, of which I do not recollect one word, I immediately
discovered and immediately applied myself to ; and I never
visited the house afterwards, but I kneeled on a chair, opened
the casket where this gem was enshrined, spread my arms over
the desk, and fell to devouring the book afresh. I was chiefly
edified, I am afraid, by the pictures, which were numerous, and
represented all kinds of dismal horrors ; but the Martyrs and
Peggotty's house have been inseparable in my mind ever since,
and are now.

I took leave of Mr. Peggotty, and Ham, and Mrs. Gummidge,
and little Em'ly, that day ; and passed the night at Peggotty's
in a little room in the roof (with the crocodile-book on a shelf
by the bed's head), which was to be alwuyy mint, Peggotty said,
and should always be kept for me in exactly the same state.

" Young or old, Davy dear, as long as I am alive and have
this house over my head," said Peggotty, " you shall find it as
if I expected you here directly minute. I shall keep it every
day, as I used to keep your old little room, my darling ; and if
you was to go to China, you might think of it as being kept
just the same, all the time you were away."

I felt the truth and constancy of my dear old nurse, with all
my heart, and thanked her as well as I could. That was not
very well, for she spoke to me thus, with her arms round my
neck, in the morning, and I was going home in the morning,
with herself and Mr. Barkis in the cart. They left me at the
gate, not easily or lightly ; and it was a strange sight to me to see
the cart go on, taking Peggotty away, and leaving me under the
old elm-trees looking at the house in which there was no face
to look on mine with love or liking any more.

And now I fell into a state of nep;lect, which I cannot look
back upon without compassion. I fell at once into a solitary
condition, — apart from all friendly notice, apart from the society
of all other boys of my own age, apart from all companionship
but my own spiritless thoughts, — which seems to cast its gloom
upon this paper as I write.

What would I have given, to have been sent to the hardest

I40 David Copperfield

school that ever was kept ! — to have been taught something,
anyhow, anywhere ! No such hope dawned upon me. They
disliked me ; and they sullenly, sternly, steadily, overlooked
me. I think Mr. Murdstone's means were straitened at
about this time ; but it is little to the purpose. He could not
bear me ; and in putting me from him, he tried, as I believe,
to put away the notion that I had any claim upon him — and
succeeded.

I was not actively ill-used. I was not beaten, or starved ;
but the wrong that was done to me had no intervals of relent-
ing, and was done in a systematic, passionless manner. Day
after day, week after week, month after month, I was coldly
neglected. I wonder sometimes, when I think of it, whafTlTBy"
would have done if I had been taken with an illness ; whether
I should have lain down in my lonely room, and languished
through it in my usual solitary way, or whether anybody would
have helped me out.

When Mr. and Miss Murdstone were at home, I took my
meals with them ; in their absence, I ate and drank by myself.
At all times I lounged about the house and neighbourhood
quite disregarded, except that they were jealous of my making
any friends : thinking, perhaps, that if I did, I might complain
to some one. For this reason, though Mr. Chillip often asked
me to go and see him (he was a widower, having, some years
before that, lost a little small light-haired wife, whom I can
just remember connecting in my own thoughts with a pale
tortoise-shell cat), it was but seldom that I enjoyed the happi-
ness of passing an afternoon in his closet of a surgery ; reading
some book that was new to me, with the smell of the whole
pharmacopoeia coming up my nose, or pounding something in
a mortar under his mild directions.

For the same reason, added no doubt to the old dislike of
her, I was seldom allowed to visit Peggotty. Faithful to her
promise, she either came to see me, or met me somewhere
near, once every week, and never empty-handed; but many
and bitter were the disappoinliiients I had, in being refused
permission to pay a visit to her at her house. Some few times,
however, at long intervals, I was allowed to go there, and then
I found out that Mr. Barkis was something of a miser, or, as
Peggotty dutifully expressed it, was " a little near," and kept a
heap of money in a box under his bed, which he pretended
was only full of coats and trousers. In this coffer, his riches
hid themselves with such a tenacious modesty, that the smallest
instalments could only be tempted out by artifice; so that

David Copperfield 141

Peggotty had to prepare a long and elaborate scheme, a very
Gunpowder Plot, for every Saturday's expenses.

All this time I was so conscious of the waste of any promise
I had given, and of my being utterly neglected, that I should
have been perfectly miserable, I have no doubt, but for the_Qld
books. They were mj^^oflljucomfort ; and I was as true to
them as they were to me, and read them over and over I don't
know how many times more.

I now approach a period of my life, which I can never lose
the remembrance of, while I remember anything ; and the
recollection of which has often, without my invocation, come
before me like a ghost, and haunted happier times.

I had been out, one day, loitering somewhere, in the listless
meditative manner that my way of life engendered, when, turn-
ing the corner of a lane near our house, I came upon Mr.
Murdstone walking with a gentleman. I was confused, and
was going by them, when the gentleman cried:

"What! Brooks!"

•' No, sir, David Copperfield," I said.

" Don't tell me. You are Brooks," said the gentleman.
" You are Brooks of Sheffield. That's your name."

At Ihese words, I observed the gentleman more attentively.
His laugh coming to my remembrance too, I knew him to be
Mr. Quinion, whom I had gone over to Lowestoft with Mr.
KTufdstone to see, before — it is no matter — I need not recall
when.

" And how do you get on, and where are you being educated,
Brooks ? " said Mr. Quinion.

He had put his hand upon my shoulder, and turned me
about, to talk with them. I did not know what to reply, and
glanced dubiously at Mr. Murdstone.

" He is at home at present," said the latter. " He is not
being educated anywhere. I don't know what to do with him.
He is a difficult subject."

That old, double look was on me for a moment ; and then
his eyes darkened with a frown, as it turned, in its aversion,
elsewhere.

" Humph ! " said Mr. Quinion, looking at us both, I thought.
"Fine weather."

Silence ensued, and I was considering how I could best
disengage my shoulder from his hand, and go away, when he
said:

" I suppose you are a pretty sharp fellow still ? Eh,
Brooks ? "

14^ David Copperfield

" Ay ! He is sharp enough," said Mr. Murdstone, im-
patiently. " You had better let him go. He will not thank
you for troubling him."

On this hint, Mr. Quinion released me, and I made the best
of my way home. Looking back as I turned into the front
garden, I saw Mr. Murdstone leaning against the wicket of
the churchyard, and Mr. Quinion talking to him. They were
both looking after me, and I felt that they were speaking
of me.

Mr. Quinion lay at our house that night. After breakfast,
the next morning, I had put my chair away, and was going out
of the room, when Mr. Murdstone called me back. He then
gravely repaired to another table, where his sister sat herself at
her desk. Mr. Quinion, with his hands in his pockets, stood
looking out of window ; and I stood looking at them all.

"David," said Mr. Murdstone, "to the young this is a
world for action ; not for moping and droning in."

— "As you do," added his sister.

"Jane Murdstone, leave it to me, if you please. I say,
David, to the young this is a world for action, and not for
moping and droning in. It is especially so for a young boy of
your disposition, which requires a great deal of correcting ; and
to which no greater service can be done than to force it to
conform to the ways of the working world, and to bend it and
it."

For stubbornness won't do here," said his sister. " What
it wants is, tgjbe crushed. And crushed it must be. Shall
be, too ! "

He gave her a look, half in remonstrance, half in approval,
and went on :

"I suppose you know, David, that I am not rich. At any
rate, you know it now. You have received some considerable
education already. Education is costly; and even if it were
not, and I could afford it, I am of opinion that it would not be
at all advantageous to you to be kept at a school. What is
before you, is a fight with the world j , and the sooner you begin
it, the better. '''^

I think it occurred to me that I had already begun it, in my
poor way : but it occurs to me now, whether or no.

" You have heard the ' counting-house ' mentioned some-
times," said Mr. Murdstone.

" The counting-house, sir ? " I repeated.

" Of Murdstone and Grinby, in the wine trade," he replied.

I suppose I looked uncertain, for he went on hastily :

David Copperfield 143

"You have heard the 'counting-house' mentioned, or the
business, or the cellars, or the wharf, or something about it."

'* I think I have heard the business mentioned, sir," I said,
remembering what I vaguely knew of his and his sister's
resources. "But I don't know when."

"It does not matter when," he returned. "Mr. Quinion
manages that business."

I glanced at the latter deferentially as he stood looking out
of window.

"Mr. Quinion suggests that it gives employment to some
other boys, and that he sees no reason why it shouldn't, on the
same terms, give employment to you."

" He having," Mr. Quinion observed in a low voice, and |
half turning round, "no other prospect, Murdstone."

Mr. Murdstone, with an impatient, even an angry gesture,
resumed, without noticing what he had said :

"Those terms are, that you earn enough for yourself to
provide for your eating and drinking, and pocket-money. Your
lodging (which I have arranged for) will be paid by me. So
will your washing."

"Which will be kept down to my estimate," said his
sister.

" Your clothes will be looked after for you, too," said Mr.
Murdstone ; " as you will not be able, yet awhile, to get them
for yourself. So you are now going to London, David, with
Mr. Quinion, to begin the world on your own account."

" In short, you are provided for," observed his sister ; "and
will please to do your duty.^ ' j^y

Though I quite understood that the purpose of this an- ^^
nrMipnAmpnf ^as to get rid of me, I have no distrngTieuiem-
brance whetherlt pleased or frightened me. My impression is,
that I was in a state of confusion about it, and, oscillating
between two points, touched neither. Nor had I much time
for the clearing of my thoughts, as Mr. Quinion was to go upon
the morrow.

Behold me, on the morrow, in a much-worn little white hat,
with a black crape round it for my mother, a black jacket, and
a pair of hard stiff corduroy trousers — which Miss Murdstone
considered the best armour-for the legs in that fight with the
world-whieh was now to come""ofF-— behotd me so attired, and
with my little worldly all before me in a small trunk, sitting, a
lone lorn child (as Mrs. Gummidge might have said), in the
post-chaise that was carrying Mr. Quinion to the London coach
at Yarmouth ! See, how our house and church are lessening

144 David Copperfield

in the distance ; how the grave beneath the tree is blotted out
by intervening objects ; how the spire points upwards from my
old playground no more, and the sky is empt^

CHAPTER XI

I BEGIN LIFE ON MY OWN ACCOUNT^ AND DON't LIKE IT

I KNOW enough of the world now, to have almost lost the

capacity of being much surprised by anything ; but it is matter

'Of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so

/easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent

J abilities, and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager,

I delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful

I to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf.

j But none was made ; and I became, at ten years old, a little
^ labouring hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinby.

Murdstone and Grinby's warehouse was at the water side.
It was down in Blackfriars. Modern improvements have
altered the place ; but it was the last house at the bottom of a
narrow street, curving down hill to the river, with some stairs
at the end, where people took boat. It was a crazy old house
with a wharf of its own, abutting on the water when the tide
was in, and on the mud when the tide was out, and literally
overrun with rats. Its panelled rooms, discoloured with the
dirt and smoke of a hundred years, I dare say; its decaying
floors and staircase ; the squeaking and scuffling of the old grey
Eats down in the cellars; and the dirt and rottjenness of the
' place ; are things, not of many years ago, in my mind, but of
; the present instant. They are all before me, just as they were
in the evil hour when I went among them for the first time,
with my trembling hand in Mr. Quinion's.

Murdstone and Grinby's trade was among a good many kinds
of people, but an important branch of it was the supply of wines
and spirits to certain packet ships. I forget now where they
chiefly went, but I think there were some among them that
made voyages both to the East and West Indies. I know that
a great many empty bottles were one of the consequences of
this traffic, and that certain men and boys were employed to
examine them against the light, and reject those, that were
flawed, and to rinse and wash them. When the empty bottles

David Copperfield 145

ran short, there were labels to be pasted on full ones, or
corks to be fitted to them, or seals to be put upon the corks, or
finished bottles to be packed in casks. All this work was my
work, and of the boys employed upon it I was one.

There were three or four of us, counting me. My working
place was established in a corner of the warehouse, where Mr.
Quinion could see me, when he chose to stand up on the
bottom rail of his stool in the counting-house, and look at me
through a window above the desk. Hither, on the first morning
of my so auspiciously beginning life on my own account, the
oldest of the regular boys was summoned to show me my
business. His name was Mick Walker, and he wore a ragged
apron and a paper cap. He informed me that his father was a
bargeman, and walked, in a black velvet head-dress, in the
Lord Mayor's Show. He also informed me that our principal
associate would be another boy whom he introduced by the —
to me — extraordinary name of Mealy Potatoes. I discovered,
however, that this youth had not been christened by that name,
but that it had been bestowed up)on him in the warehouse, on
account of his complexion, which was pale or mealy. Mealy's
father was a waterman, who had the additional distinction of
being a fireman, and was engaged as such at one of the large
theatres ; where some young relation of Mealy's — I think his
little sister — did Imps in the Pantomimes.

No words can Express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk
into this companionship ; compared these henceforth every-day
associates with those of my happier childhood — not to say with
Steerforth, Traddles, and the rest of those boys ; and felt my
hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man
crushed in my bosom. The deep remembrance of the sense I
had, of being utterly without hope now ; of the shame I felt in
my position ; of the misery it was to my young heart fb believe
that day by day what I had learned, and thought, and delighted
in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, would pass
away from me, little by little, never to be brought back any
more ; cannot be written. As often as Mick Walker went away
in the course of that forenoon, I mingled my tears with the
water in which I was washing the bottles ; and sobbed as if
there were a flaw in my own breast, and it were in danger of
bursting.

The counting-house clock was at half-past twelve, and there
was general preparation for going to dinner, when Mr. Quinion

tapped at the counting-house window, and beckoned to me to .

go in. I went in, and found there a stoutish, middle-aged 1

146 David Copperfield

person, in a brown surtout and black tights and shoes, with no
more hair upon his head (which was a large one and very shining)
than there is upon an egg, and with a very extensive face, which
he turned full upon me. His clothes were shabby, but he had
an imposing shirt-collar on. He carried a jaunty sort of stick,
with a large pair of rusty tassels to it; and a quizzing-glass
hung outside his coat, — for ornament, I afterwards found, as
he very seldom looked through it, and couldn't see anything
when he did.

" This," said Mr. Quinion, in allusion to myself, " is he."

" This," said the stranger, with a certain condescending roll
in his voice, and a certain indescribable air of doing something
genteel, which impressed me very much, " is Master Copper-
field. I hope I see you well, sir ? "

I said I was very well, and hoped he was. I was sufficiently
ill at ease. Heaven knows ; but it was not in my nature to
complain much at that time of my life, so I said I was very
well, and hoped he was.

" I am," said the stranger, " thank Heaven, quite well. I
have received a letter from Mr. Murdstone, in which he
mentions that he would desire me to receive into an apartment
in the rear of my house, which is at present unoccupied — and
is, in short, to be let as a — in short," said the stranger, with a
smile, and in a burst of confidence, " as a bedroom — the young
beginner whom I have now the pleasure to — " and the stranger
waved his hand, and settled his chin in his shirt-collar.

" This is Mr. Micawber," said Mr. Quinion to me.

" Ahem ! " said the stranger, " that is my name."

*' Mr. Micawber," said Mr. Quinion, " is known to Mr. Murd-
I stone. He takes orders for us on commission, when he can
get any. He has been written to by Mr. Murdstone, on the
subject of your lodgings, and he will receive you as a lodger."

" My address," said Mr. Micawber, " is Windsor Terrace,
City Road. I — 'm sh6rt,^said Mr. Micawber, with the same
genteel air, and in ahot^ier^burst of confidence — " I live there."
, I made him a bow.

" Under the impression," said Mr. Micawber, " that your
peregrinations in this metropolis have not as yet been extensive,
and that you might have some difficulty in penetrating the
arcana x)f the Modern Babylon in the direction of the City
Road— ^in short;" said Mr. Micawber, in another burst of con-
fidence, " that yi)u might lose yourself — I shall be happy to call
this evening, and instal you in the knowledge of the nearest
way."

David Copperfield 147

I thanked him with all my heart, for it was friendly in him to
offer to take that trouble.

" At what hour," said Mr. Micawber, " shall I "

" At about eight," said Mr. Quinion.

" At about eight," said Mr. Micawber. " 1 beg to wish you
good day, Mr. Quinion. I will intrude no longer."

So he put on his hat, and went out with his cane under his
arm : very upright, and humming a tune when he was clear of
the^£ounting-house.

Mr. Quinion then formally engaged me to be as useful as I
could in the warehouse of Murdstone and Grinby, at a salary,
I think, of six shillings a week. I am not clear whether it was
six or seven. I am inclined to believe, from my uncertainty on
this head, that it was six at first and seven afterwards. He paid
me a week down (from his own pocket, I believe), and I gave
Mealy sixpence out of it to get my trunk carried to Windsor
Terrace that night : it being too heavy for my strength, small as
it was. I paid sixpence more for my dinner, which was a meat
pie and a turn at a neighbouring pump ; and passed the hour
which was allowed for that meal, in walking about the streets.

At the appointed time in the evening, Mr. Micawber re-
appeared. I washed my hands and face, to do the greater
honour to his gentility, and we walked to our house, as I suppose
I must now call it, together ; Mr. Micawber impressing the
names of streets, and the shapes of comer houses upon me, as
we went along, that I might find my way back, easily, in the
morning.

Arrived at his house in Windsor Terrace (which I noticed
was shabby like himself, but also, like himself, made all the
show it could), he presented me to Mrs^ Mjcawber, a thin and
faded lady, not at all young, who was sitting in the parlour (the
first floor was altogether unfurnished, and the blinds were kept
down to delude the neighbours), with a baby at her breast.
This baby was one of twins ; and I may remark here that I\
hardly ever, in all my experience of the family, saw both the
twins detached from Mrs. Micawber at the same time. One of
them was always taking refreshment. I

There were two other children ; Master Micawber, aged
about four, and Miss Micawber, aged about three. These,
and a dark-complexioned young woman, with a habit of
snorting, who was servant to the family, an^~~tiifui iiied~raie,
before half-an-hour had expired, that she was " a Orfling," and
came from St. Luke's workhouse, in the neighbourhood,
completed the establishment. My room was at the top of

148 David Copperfield

the house, at the back : a close chamber ; stencilled all over
with an ornament which my young imagination represented as
a blue muffin ; and very scantily furnished.

" I never thought," said Mrs. Micawber, when she came up,
twin and all, to show me the apartment, and sat down to take
breath, "before I was married, when I lived with papa and
mama, that I should ever find it necessary to take a lodger.
But Mr. Micawber being in difficulties, all considerations of
private feeling must give way."

I said : " Yes, ma'am."

" Mr. Micawber's difficulties are almost overwhelming just
at present," said Mrs. Micawber ; " and whether it is possible
to bring him through them, I don't know. When I lived at
home with papa and mama, I really should have hardly under-
stood what the word meant, in the sense in which I now
employ it, but experientia does it — as papa used to say."
f I cannot satisfy myself whether she told me that Mr.
Micawber had been an officer in the Marines, or whether I
have imagined it. I only know that I believe to this hour
that he was in the Marines once upon a time, without knowing
why. He was a sort of town traveller for a number of
miscellaneous houses, now ; but made little or nothing of it,
I am afraid.

" If Mr. Micawber's creditors will not give him time," said
Mrs. Micawber, " they must take the consequences ; and the
sooner they bring it to an issue the better. Blood cannot be
obtained from a stone, neither can anything on account be
obtained at present (not to mention law expenses) from
Mr. Micawber."

I never can quite understand whether my precocious self-
dependence confused Mrs. Micawber in reference to my age,
or whether she was so full of the subject that she would have
talked about it to the very twins if there had been nobody else
to communicate with, but this was the strain in which she
began, and she went on accordingly all the time I knew her.

Poor Mrs. Micawber ! She said she had tried to exert
herself; and so, I have no doubt, she had. The centre of the
street-door was perfectly covered with a great brass-plate, on
which was engraved " Mrs. Micawber's Boarding Establish-
ment for Young Ladies : " but I never found that any young
lady had ever been to school there ; or that any young lady
ever came, or proposed to come ; or that the least preparation
was ever made to receive any young lady. The only visitors I
ever saw or heard of, were creditors. TTiey used to come at

David Copperfield 149

all hours, and some of them were quite ferocious. One dirty-
faced man, I think he was a boot-maker, used to edge himself
into the passage as early as seven o'clock in the morning, and
call up the stairs to Mr. Micawber — " Come ! You ain't out
yet, you know. Pay us, will you ? Don't hide, you know ;
that's mean. I wouldn't be mean if I was you. Pay us, will
you ? You just pay us, d'ye hear ? Come ! " Receiving no
answer to these taunts, he would mount in his wrath to the
words " swindlers " and *' robbers ; " and these being ineffectual
too, would sometimes go to the extremity of crossing the
street, and roaring up at the windows of the second floor,
where he knew Mr. Micawber was. At these times Mr.
Micawber would be transported with grief and mortification,
even to the length (as I was once made aware by a scream
from his wife) of making motions at himself with a razor;
but within half-an-hour afterwards, he would polish up his
shoes with extraordinary pains, and go out, humming a tune
with a greater air of gentility than ever. Mrs. Micawber was
quite as elastic. I have known her to be thrown into fainting
fits by the king's taxes at three o'clock, and to eat lamb-chops
breaded, and drink warm ale (paid for with two tea-spoons
that had gone to the pawnbroker's) at four. On one occasion,
when an execution had just been put in, coming home through
some chance as early as six o'clock, I saw her lying (of course
with a twin) under the grate in a swoon, with her hair all torn
about her face ; but I never knew her more cheerful than she
was, that very same night, over a veal-cutlet before the kitchen
fire, telling me stories about her papa and mama, and the
company they used to keep.

In this house, and with this family, I passed my leisure time.
My own exclusive breakfast of a penny loaf and a pennyworth
of milk, I provided myself ; I kept another small loaf, and a
modicum of cheese, on a particular shelf of a particular cup-
board, to make my supper on when I came back at night.
This made a hole in the six or seven shillings, I know well ;
and I was out at the warehouse all day, and had to support
myself on that money all the week. From Monday morning
until Saturday night, I had no advice, no counsel, no
encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support,
of any kind, from any one, that I can call to mind, as I hope
to go to heaven !

I was so young and childish, and so little qualified — how
could I be otherwise? — to undertake the whole charge of
my own existence, that often, in going to Murdstone and

150 David Copperfield

Grinby's, of a morning, I could not resist the stale pastry put
out for sale at half-price at the pastrycooks' doors, and spent
in that, the money I should have kept for my dinner. Then,
I went without my dinner, or bought a roll or a slice of
pudding. I remember two pudding shops, between which I
was divided, according to my finances. One was in a court
close to St. Martin's Church — at the back of the church, —
which is now removed altogether. The pudding at that shop
was made of currants, and was rather a special pudding, but
was dear, twopennyworth not being larger than a permyworth
of more ordinary pudding. A good shop for the latter was in
the Strand — somewhere in that part which has been rebuilt
since. It was a stout pale pudding, heavy and flabby, and
with great flat raisins in it, stuck in whole, at wide distances
apart. It came up hot at about my time every day, and many
a day did I dine off it. When I dined regularly and hand-
somely, I had a saveloy and a penny loaf, or a fourpenny
plate of red beef from a cook's shop ; or a plate of bread and
cheese and a glass of beer, from a miserable old public-house
opposite our place of business, called the Lion, or the Lion
and something else that I have forgotten. Once, I remember
carrying my own bread (which I had brought from home in
the morning) under my arm, wrapped in a piece of paper, like
a book, and going to a famous alamode beef-house near Drury
Lane, and ordering a " small plate " of that delicacy to eat
with it. What the waiter thought of such a strange little
apparition coming in all alone, I don't know ; but I can see
him now, staring at me as I ate my dinner, and bringing up
the other waiter to look. I gave him a halfpenny for himself,
and I wish he hadn't taken it.

We had half-an-hour, I think, for tea. When I had money
enough, I used to get half-a-pint of ready-made coffee and a
slice of bread and butter. When I had none, I used to look
at a venison-shop in Fleet Street ; or I have strolled, at such a
time, as far as Covent Garden Market, and stared at the pine-
apples. I was fond of wandering about the Adelphi, because
it was a mysterious place, with those dark arches. I see
myself emerging one evening from some of these arches, on a
little public-house close to the river, with an open space before
it, where some coal-heavers were dancing ; to look at whom I
sat down upon a bench. I wonder what they thought of me !

I was such a child, and so little, that frequently when I
went into the bar of a strange public-house for a glass of ale or
porter, to moisten what I had had for dinner, they were afraid

David Copperfield 151

to give it me. I remember one hot evening I went into the
bar of a public-house, and said to the landlord :

" What is your best — your very best — ale a glass ? " For it
was a special occasion. I don't know what. It may have
been my birthday.

" Twopence-halfpenny," says the landlord, " is the price of
the Genuine Stunning aJe."

"Then," says I, producing the money, "just draw me a
glass of the Genuine Stunning, if you please, with a good head
to it"

The landlord looked at me in return over the bar, from
head to foot, with a strange smile on his face ; and instead of
drawing the beer, looked round the screen and said something
to his wife. She came out from behind it, with her work in
her hand, and joined him in surveying me. Here we stand,
all three, before me now. The landlord in his shirt-sleeves,
leaning against the bar window frame ; his wife looking over
the little half-door ; and I, in some confusion, looking up at
them from outside the partition. They asked me a good
many questions ; as, what my name was, how old I was, where
I lived, how I was employed, and how I came there. To all
of which, that I might commit nobody, I invented, I am
afraid, appropriate answers. They served me with the ale,
though I suspect it was not the Genuine Stunning : and the
landlord's wife, opening the little half-door of the bar, and
bending down, gave me my money back, and gave me a kiss
that was half admiring, and half compassionate, but all
womanly and good, I am sure.

I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and uninten-
tionally, the scantiness of my resources or the difficulties
of my life. I know that if a shilling were given me by
Mr. Quinion at any time, I spent it in a dinner or a tea. I
know that I worked from morning until night, with common
men and boys, a shabby child. I know that I lounged about
the streets, insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that,
but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any
care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond.

Yet I held some station at Murdstone and Grinby's too. ^
Besides that Mr. Quinion did what a careless man so occupied,
and dealing with a thing so anomalous, could, to treat me as
one upon a different footing from the rest, I never said, to man
or boy, how it was that I came to be there, or gave the least
indication of being sorry that I was there. That I suffered in :
secret, and that I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew but I. !

152 David Copperfield

How much I suffered, it is, as I have said already, utterly
beyond my power to tell. But I kept my own counsel, and I
did my work. I knew from the first, that, if I could not do
my work as well as any of the rest, I could not hold myself
above slight and contempt. I soon became at least as expedi-
tious and as skilful as either of the other boys. Though
perfectly familiar with them, my conduct and manner were
different enough from theirs to place a space between us.
They and the men generally spoke of me as " the little gent,"
or "the young Suffolker." A certain man named Gregory,
who was foreman of the packers, and another named Tipp,
who was the carman, and wore a red jacket, used to address
me sometimes as "David:" but I think it was mostly when
we were very confidential, and when I had made some efforts
to entertain them, over our work, with some results of the old
readings ; which were fast perishing out of my remembrance.
Mealy Potatoes uprose once, and rebelled against my being so
distinguished ; but Mick Walker settled him in no time.

My rescue from this kind of existence I considered quite
hopeless, and abandoned, as such, altogether. I am solemnly
convinced that I never for one hour was reconciled to it, 01
was otherwise than miserably unhappy; but I bore it; and
even to Peggotty, partly for the love of her and partly for
shame, never in any letter (though many passed between us)
revealed the truth.

Mr. Micawber's difficulties were sin addition to the distressed
I state of my mind. In my forlorn state I became quite attached
I to the family, and used to walk about, busy with Mrs.
Micawber's calculations of ways and means, and heavy with
the weight of Mr. Micawber's debts. On a Saturday night,
which was my grand treat, — partly because it was a great thing
to walk home with six or seven shillings in my pocket, looking
into the shops and thinking what such a sum would buy, and
partly because I went home early, — Mrs. Micawber would
make the most heart-rending confidences to me ; also on a
Sunday morning, when I mixed the portion of tea or coffee I
had bought over-night, in a little shaving-pot, and sat late at
my breakfast It was nothing at all unusual for Mr. Micawber
to sob violently at the beginning of one of these Saturday night
conversations, and sing about Jack's delight being his lovely
Nan, towards the end of it. I have known him come home
to supper with a flood of tears, and a declaration that nothing
was now left but a jail ; and go to bed making a calculation of
the expense of putting bow-windows to the house, " in case

David Copperfield 153

any thi ngjtuined iip^'i-whicb.^as-hifr-favourito expression . And
Mfs.~Kiicawber was just the same.

A curious equality of friendship, originating, I suppose, in
our respective circumstances, sprung up between me and these
people, notwithstanding the ludicrous disparity in our years.
But I never allowed myself to be i:»revailed upon to accept any
invitation to eat and drink with them out of their stock
(knowing that they got on badly with the butcher and baker,
and had often not too much for themselves), until Mrs.
Micawber took me into her entire confidence. This she did
one evening as follows :

" Master Copperfield," said Mrs. Micawber, " I make no
stranger of you, and therefore do not hesitate to say that Mr.
Micawber's difficulties are coming to a crisis."

It made me very miserable to hear it, and I looked at Mrs.
Micawber's red eyes with the utmost sympathy.

" With the exception of the heel of a Dutch cheese — which
is not adapted to the wants of a young family" — said Mrs.
Micawber, "there is really not a scrap of anything in the
larder. I was accustomed to speak of the larder when I lived
with papa and mama, and I use the word almost unconsciously.
What I mean to express is, that there is nothing to eat in the
house."

" Dear me ! " I said, in great concern.

I had two or three shillings of my week's money in my
pocket — from which I presume that it must have been on a
Wednesday night when we held this conversation — and I
hastily produced them, and with heartfelt emotion begged Mrs.
Micawber to accept of them as a loan. But that lady, kissing
me, and making me put them back in my pocket, replied that
she couldn't think of it

"No, my dear Master Copperfield," said she, "far be it from
my thoughts ! But you have a discretion beyond your years,
and can render me another kind of service, if you will ; and a
service I will thankfully accept of."

I begged Mrs. Micawber to name it.

" I have parted with the plate myself," said Mrs. Micawber.
" Six tea, two salt, and a pair of sugars, I have at different
times borrowed money on, in secret, with my own hands.
But the twins are a great tie ; and to me, with my recollections
of papa and mama, these transactions are very painful. There
are still a few trifles that we could part with. Mr. Micawber's
feelings would never allow him to dispose of them ; and
Clickett " — this was the girl from the workhouse — " being of a

154 David Copperfield

vulgar mind, would take painful liberties if so much confidence
was reposed in her. Master Copperfield, if I might ask
you "

I understood Mrs. Micawber now, and begged her to make
use of me to any extent. I began to dispose of the more
portable articles of property that very evening ; and went out
on a similar expedition almost every morning, before I went to
Murdstone and Grinby's.

Mr. Micawber had a few books on a little chiffonier, which
he called the library ; and those went first. I carried them,
one after another, to a bookstall in the City Road— one part of
which, near our house, was almost all bookstalls and birdshops
then — and sold them for whatever they would bring. The
keeper of this bookstall, who lived in a little house behind it,
used to get tipsy every night, and to be violently scolded by
his wife every morning. More than once, when I went there
early, I had audience of him in a turn-up bedstead, with a cut
in his forehead or a black eye, bearing witness to his excesses
over-nigh't (I am afraid he was quarrelsome in his drink), and
he with a shaking hand, endeavouring to find the needful
shillings in one or other of the pockets of his clothes, which
lay upon the floor, while his wife, with a baby in her arms and
her shoes down at heel, never left off rating him. Sometimes
he had lost his money, and then he would ask me to call
again ; but his wife had always got some — had taken his, I dare
say, while he was drunk — and secretly completed the bargain
on the stairs, as we went down together.

At the pawnbroker's shop, too, I began to be very well
known. The principal gentleman who officiated behind the
counter, took a good deal of notice of me ; and often got me,
I recollect, to decline a Latin noun or adjective, or to conjugate
a Latin verb, in his ear, while he transacted my business.
After all these occasions Mrs. Micawber made a little treat,
which was generally a supper ; and there was a peculiar relish
in these meals which I well remember.

At last Mr, Micawber's difficulties came to a crisis, and he
was arrested early one morning, and carried over to the King's
Bench Prison in the Borough. He told me, as he went out of
the house, that the God of day had now gone down upon
him — and I really thought his heart was broken and mine too.
But I heard, afterwards, that he was seen to play a lively game
at skittles, before noon.

On the first Sunday after he was taken there, I was to go
and see him, and have dinner with him. I was to ask my way

David Copperfield 155

to such a place, and just short of that place I should see such
another place, and just short of that I should see a yard, which
I was to cross, and keep straight on until I saw a turnkey. All
this I did ; and when at last I did see a turnkey (poor little
fellow that I was !), and thought how, when Roderick Random
was in a debtors' prison, there was a man there with nothing
on him but an old rug, the turnkey swam before my dimmed
eyes and my beating heart.

Mr. Micawber was waiting for me within the gate, and we
went up to his room (top story but one), and cried very much.
He solemnly conjured me, I remember, to take warning by his
fate ; and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a year
for his income, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings
and sixpence, he would be happy, but that if he spent twenty
pounds one he would be miserable. After which he borrowed
a shilling of me for porter, gave me a written order on Mrs.
Micawber for the amount, and put away his pocket-handkerchief,
and cheered up.

We sat before a little fire, with two bricks put within the
rusted grate, one on each side, to prevent its burning too
many coals ; until another debtor, who shared the room with
Mr. Micawber, came in from the bakehouse with the loin of
mutton which was our joint-stock repast. Then I was sent
up to " Captain Hopkins " in the room overhead, with Mr.
Micawber's compliments, and I was his young friend, and
would Captain Hopkins lend me a knife and fork.

Captain Hopkins lent me the knife and fork, with his com-
pliments to Mr. Micawber. There was a very dirty lady in his
little room, and two wan girls, his daughters, with shock heads
of hair. I thought it was better to borrow Captain Hopkins's
knife and fork, than Captain Hopkins's comb. The Captain
himself was in the last extremity of shabbiness, with large
whiskers, and an old, old brown great-coat with no other coat
below it. I saw his bed rolled up in a corner ; and what plates
and dishes and pots he had, on a shelf; and I divined (God
knows how) that though the two girls with the shock heads of
hair were Captain Hopkins's children, the dirty lady was not
married to Captain Hopkins. My timid station on his threshold
was not occupied more than a couple of minutes at most ; but
I came down again with all this in my knowledge, as surely as
the knife and fork were in my hand.

There was something gipsy-like and agreeable in the dinner,
after all. I took back Captain Hopkins's knife and fork early
in the afternoon, and went home to comfort Mrs. Micawber

156 David Copperfield

with an account of my visit. She fainted when she saw me
return, and made a little jug of egg-hot afterwards to console us
while we talked it over.

I don't know how the household furniture came to be sold
for the family benefit, or who sold it, except that /did not.
Sold it was, however, and carried away in a van ; except the
bed, a few chairs, and the kitchen-table. With these posses-
sions we encamped, as it were, in the two parlours of the
emptied house in Windsor Terrace; Mrs. Micawber, the
children, the Orfling, and myself; and lived in those rooms
night and day. I have no idea for how long, though it seems
to me for a long time. At last Mrs. Micawber resolved to move
into the prison, where Mr. Micawber had now secured a room
to himself. So I took the key of the house to the landlord,
who was very glad to get it ; and the beds were sent over to the
King's Bench, except mine, for which a little room was hired
outside the walls in the neighbourhood of that Institution, very
much to my satisfaction, since the Micawbers and I had become
too used to one another, in our troubles, to part. The Orfling
was likewise accommodated with an inexpensive lodging in the
same neighbourhood. Mine was a quiet back-garret with a
sloping roof, commanding a pleasant prospect of a timber-yard,
and when I took possession of it, with the reflection that Mr.
Micawber's troubles had come to a crisis at last, I thought it
quite a paradise.

All this time I was working at Murdstone and Grinby's in
the same common way, and with the same common companions,
and with the same sense of unmerited degradation as at first.
But I never, happily for me no doubt, made a single acquaint-
ance, or spoke to any of the many boys whom I saw daily in
going to the warehouse, in coming from it, and in prowling
about the streets at meal-times. I led the same secretly
unhappy life; but I led it in the same lonely, self-reliant
manner. The only changes I am conscious of are, firstly, that
I had grown more shabby, and secondly, that I was now relieved
of much of the weight of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber's cares ; for
some relatives or friends had engaged to help them at their
present pass, and they lived more comfortably in the prison
than they had lived for a long while out of it. I used to break-
fast with them now, in virtue of some arrangement, of which I
have forgotten the details. I forget, too, at what hour the gates
were opened in the morning, admitting of my going in ; but I
know that I was often up at six o'clock, and that my favourite
lounging-place in the interval was old London Bridge, where I

David Copperfield 157

was wont to sit in one of the stone recesses, watching the people
going by, or to look over the balustrades at the sun shining in
the water, and lighting up the golden flame on the top of the
Monument. The Orfling met me here sometimes, to be told
some astonishing fictions respecting the wharves and the Tower ;
of which I can say no more than that I hope I believed them
myself. In the evening I used to go back to the prison, and
walk up and down the parade with Mr. Micawber ; or play
casino with Mrs. Micawber, and hear reminiscences of her
papa and mama. Whether Mr. Murdstone knew where I was,
I am unable to say. I never told them at Murdstone and
Grinby's.

Mr. Micawber's affairs, although past their crisis, were very
much involved by reason of a certain " Deed^" of which I used
to hear a great deal, and which I supp6§ernow, to have been
some former composition with his creditors, though I was so far
from being clear about it then, that I am conscious of having
confounded it with those demoniacal parchments which are
held to have, once upon a time, obtained to a great extent in
Germany. At last this document appeared to be got out of the
way, somehow ; at all events it ceased to be the rock ahead it
had been ; and Mrs. Micawber informed me that " her family"
had decided that Mr. Micawber should apply for his release
under the Insolvent Debtors' Act, which would set him free,
slie expected, in about six weeks.

"And then," said Mr. Micawber, who was present, " I have
no doubt I shall, please Heaven, begin to be beforehand with
the world, and to live in a perfectly new manner, if — in short,
if anything turns up."

By way of going in for anything that might be on the cards,
I call to mind that Mr. Micawber, about this time, composed a
petition to the House of Commons, praying for an alteration
in the law of imprisonment for debt. I set down this remem-
brance here, because it is an instance to myself of the manner
in which I fitted my old books to my altered life, and made
stories for myself, out of the streets, and out of men and women ;
and how some main points in the character I shall unconsciously
develop, I suppose, in writing my life, were gradually forming
all this while.

There was a club in the prison, in which Mr. Micawber, as a
gentleman, was a great authority. Mr. Micawber had stated
his idea of this petition to the club, and the club had strongly
approved of the same. Wherefore Mr. Micawber (who was a
thoroughly good-natured man, and as active a creature about

s y q8 David Copperfield

y everything but his own affairs as ever existed, and never so
happy as when he was busy about something that could never
be of any profit to him) set to work at the petition, invented it,
engrossed it on an immense sheet of paper, spread it out on a
table, and appointed a time for all the club, and all within the
walls if they chose, to come up to his room and sign it.

When I heard of this approaching ceremony, I was so anxious
to see them all come in, one after another, though I knew the
greater part of them already, and they me, that I got an hour's
leave of absence from Murdstone and Grinby's, and established
myself in a corner for that purpose. As many of the principal
members of the club as could be got into the small room with-
out filling it, supported Mr. Micawber in front of the petition,
while my old friend Captain Hopkins (who had washed himself,
to do honour to so solemn an occasion) stationed himself close
to it, to read it to all who were unacquainted with its contents.
The door was then thrown open, and the general population
began to come in, in a long file : several waiting outside, while
one entered, affixed his signature, and went out. To everybody
in succession. Captain Hopkins said : " Have you read it ? " —
" No." " Would you like to hear it read ? " If he weakly
showed the least disposition to hear it, Captain Hopkins, in a
loud sonorous voice, gave him every word of it. The Captain
would have read it twenty thousand times, if twenty thousand
people would have heard him, one by one. I remember a
, certain luscious roll he gave to such phrases as " The people's
\ representatives in Parliament assembled," " Your petitioners
I therefore humbly approach your honourable house," ''His
j gracious Majesty's unfortunate subjects," as if the words were
t something real, in his mouth, and__4eUciou9 to taste; Mr.
Micawber, meanwhile, iistenmg with a little of an author's
variity, and contemplating (not severely) the spikes on the
opposite wall.

As I walked to and fro daily between South wark and

Blackfriars, and lounged about at meal-times in obscure streets,

I the stones of which may, for anything I know, be worn at this

moment by my childish feet, I wonder how many of these

people were wanting in the crowd that used to come filing

before me in review again, to the echo of Captain Hopkins's

voice ! When my thoughts go back now, to that slow agony of

my youth, I wonder how much of the histories I invented for

such people hangs like a mist of fancy over well-remembered

j facts ! When I tread the old ground, I do not wonder that I

I seem to see and pity, going on before me, an innocent romantic

David Copperfield 159.

boy, making hisixnaginativo woiid outof siif-h strangp eypfirienges^
and sordid things. ^

CHAPTER XII

LIKING LIFE ON MY OWN ACCOUNT NO BETTER, I FORM A
GREAT RESOLUTION

In due time, Mr. Micawber's petition was ripe for hearing ;
and that gentleman was ordered to be discharged under the
Act, to my great joy. His creditors were not implacable ; and
Mrs. Micawber informed me that even the revengeful boot-
maker had declared in open court that he bore him no malice,
but that when money was owing to him he liked to be paid.
He said he thought it was human nature.
•^ Mr. Micawber returned to the King's Bench when his case
was over, as some fees were to be settled/and some formalities
observed, before he could be actually released. The club
received him with transport, and held an harmonic meeting
that evening in his honour;/ while Mrs. Micawber and I had a
lamb's fry in private, surrounded by the sleeping family.

"On such an occasion I will give you, Master Copperfield,"
said Mrs. Micawber, " in a little more flip," for we had been
having some already, " the memory of my papa and mama."

"Are they dead, ma'am?" I inquired, after drinking the
toast in a wine-glass.

"My mama departed this life," said Mrs. Micawber, "before
Mr. Micawber's difficulties commenced, or at least before they
became pressing. My papa lived to bail Mr. Micawber several
times, and then expired, regretted by a numerous circle."

Mrs. Micawber shook her head, and dropped a pious tear
upon the twin who happened to be in hand.

As I could hardly hope for a more favourable opportunity
of putting a question in which I had a near interest, I said to
Mrs. Micawber:

" May I ask, ma'am, what you and Mr. Micawber intend to
o, now that Mr. Micawber is out of his difficulties, and at

ierty ? Have you settled yet ? "

" My family," said Mrs. Micawber, who always said those
tv-o words with an air, though I never could discover who
C.I me under the denomination, " my family are of opinion that

r. Micawber should quit London, and exert his talents in the

i6o David Copperfield

country. Mr. Micawber is a man of great talent, Master
Copperfield."

1 said I was sure of that.

"Of great talent," repeated Mrs. Micawber. "My family
are of opinion, that, with a little interest, something might be
done for a man of his ability in the Custom House. The
influence of my family being local, it is their wish that
Mr. Micawber should go down to Plymouth. They think it
indispensable that he should be upon the spot."

" That he may be ready ? " I suggested.

" Exactly," returned Mrs. Micawber. " That he may be
ready, in case of anything turning up."

"And do you go too, ma'am? "

The events of the day, in combination with the twins, if not
with the flip, had made Mrs. Micawber hysterical, and she shed
tears as she replied :

"I never will desert Mr. Micawber. Mr. Micawber may
have concealed his difficulties from me in the first instance, but
his sanguine temper may have led him to expect that he would
overcome them. The pearl necklace and bracelets which I
inherited from mama, have been disposed of for less than half
their value ; and the set of coral, which was the wedding gift
of my papa, has been actually thrown away for nothing. But
I never will desert Mr. Micawber. No ! " cried Mrs. Micawber,
more affected than before, " I never will do it ! It's of no use
asking me ! "

I felt quite uncomfortable — as if Mrs. Micawber supposed I
had asked her to do anything of the sort ! — and sat looking at
her in alarm.

" Mr. Micawber has his faults. I do not deny that he is
improvident. I do not deny that he has kept me in the
dark as to his resources and his liabilities, both," she went
on, looking at the wall ; " but I never will desert Mr.
Micawber ! "

Mrs. Micawber having now raised her voice into a perfect
scream, I was so frightened that I ran off to the club-room,^
and disturbed Mr. Micawber in the act of presiding at a long
table, and leading the chorus of

Gee up, Dobbin,
Gee ho, Dobbin,
Gee up, Dobbin,
Gee up, and gee ho — o — o !

— with the tidings that Mrs. Micawber was in an alarming

David Copperfield i6i

state, upon which he immediately burst into tears, and came
away with me with his waistcoat full of the heads and tails of
shrimps, of which he had been partaking.

" Emma, my angel ! " cried Mr. Micawber, running into the
room ; " what is the matter ? "

" I never will desert you, Micawber ! " she exclaimed.

" My life ! " said Mr. Micawber, taking her in his arms. " I
am perfectly aware of it."

" He is the parent of my children ! He is the father of
my twins ! He is the husband of my affections," cried Mrs.
Micawber, struggling; "and I ne — ver — will— desert Mr.
Micawber ! "

Mr. Micawber was so deeply affected by this proof of her
devotion (as to me, I was dissolved in tears), that he hung over
her in a passionate manner, imploring her to look up, and to
be calm. But the more he asked Mrs. Micawber to look up,
the more she fixed her eyes on nothing ; and the more he
asked her to compose herself, the more she wouldn't. Conse-
quently Mr. Micawber was soon so overcome, that he mingled
his tears with hers and mine ; until he begged me to do him
the favour of taking a chair on the staircase, while he got her
into bed. I would have taken my leave for the night, but he
would not hear of my doing that until the strangers' bell should
ring. So I sat at the staircase window, until he came out with
another chair and joined me.

" How is Mrs. Micawber now, sir ? " I said.

' • Very low," said Mr. Micawber, shaking his head ; " reactioiL
Ah, this has been a dreadful day ! We stand alone now —
everything is gone from us!"

Mr. Micawber pressed my hand, and groaned, and afterwards
shed tears. I was greatly touched, and disappointed too, for
I had expected that we should be quite gay on this happy and
long-looked-for occasion. But Mr. and Mrs. Micawber were
so used to their old difficulties, I think, that they felt quite
shipwrecked when they came to consider that they were released
from them. All their elasticity was departed, and I never saw
them half so wretched as on this night ; insomuch that when
the bell rang, and Mr. Micawber walked with me to the lodge,
and parted from me there with a blessing, I felt quite afraid to
leave him by himself, he was so profoundly miserable.

But through all the confusion and lowness of spirits in
which we had been, so unexpectedly to me, involved, I plainly
discerned that Mr. and Mrs. Micawber and their family were
going away from London, and that a parting between us was

1 62 David Copperfield

near at hand. It was in my walk home that night, and in
the sleepless hours which followed when I lay in bed, that the
thought first occurred to me — though I don't know how it
came into my head — which afterwards shaped itself into a
settled resolution.

I had grown to be so accustomed to the Micawbers, and
had been so intimate with them in their distresses, and was so
utterly friendless without them, that the prospect of being
thrown upon some new shift for a lodging, and going once
more among unknown people, was like being that moment
turned adrift into my present life, with such a knowledge of it
ready made as experience had given me. All the sensitive
feelings it wounded so cruelly, all the shame and misery it kept
alive within my breast, became more poignant as I thought of
this ; and I determined that the life was unendurable.

That there was no hope of escape from it, unless the escape
was my own act, I knew quite well. I rarely heard from Miss
Murdstone, and never from Mr. Murdstone ; but two or three
parcels of made or mended clothes had come up for me, con-
signed to Mr. Quinion, and in each there was a scrap of paper
to the effect that J. M. trusted D. C. was applying himself to
business, and devoting himself wholly to his duties — not the
least hint of my ever being anything else than the common
drudge into which I was fast settling down.

The very next day showed me, while my mind was in the
first agitation of what it had conceived, that Mrs. Micawber
had not spoken of their going away without warrant. They
took a lodging in the house where I lived, for a week ; at the
expiration of which time they were to start for Plymouth.
Mr. Micawber himself came down to the counting-house, in
the afternoon, to tell Mr. Quinion that he must relinquish me
on the day of his departure, and to give me a high character,
which I am sure I deserved. And Mr. Quinion, calling in
Tipp the carman, who was a married man, and had a room to
let, quartered me prospectively on him — by our mutual consent,
as he had every reason to think ; for I said nothing, though my
resolution was now taken.

I passed my evenings with Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, during
the remaining term of our residence under the same roof; and
I think we became fonder of one another as the time went on.
On the last Sunday, they invited me to dinner ; and we had a
loin of pork and apple sauce, and a pudding. I had bought
a spotted wooden horse over-night as a parting gift to little
Wilkins Micawber — that was the boy — and a doll for little

David Copperfield 163

Emma. I had also bestowed a shilling on the Orfling, who
was about to be disbanded.

We had a very pleasant day, though we were all in a tender
state about our approaching separation.

" I shall never, Master Copperfield," said Mrs. Micawber,
" revert to the period when Mr. Micawber was in difficulties,
without thinking of you. Your conduct has always been of
the most delicate and obliging description. You have never
been a lodger. You have been a friend."

" My dear," said Mr. Micawber ; "Copperfield," for so he
had been accustomed to call me of late, "has a heart to feel for
the distresses of his fellow-creatures when they are behind a cloud,
and a head to plan, and a hand to — in short, a general ability to
dispose of such available property as could be made away with."

I expressed my sense of this commendation, and said I was
very sorry we were going to lose one another.

" My dear young friend," said Mr. Micawber, " I am older
than you; a man of some experience in life, and — and of
some experience, in short, in difficulties, generally speaking.
At present, and until something turns up (which I am, I may
say, hourly expecting), I have nothing to bestow but advice.
Still my advice is so far worth taking that — in short, that I
have never taken it myself, and am the" — here Mr. Micawber,
who had been beaming and smiling, all over his head and face,
up to the present moment, checked himself and frowned — "the
miserable wretch you behold."

" My dear Micawber ! " urged his wife.

" I say," returned Mr. Micawber, quite forgetting himself, and
smiling again, " the miserable wretch you behold. My advice
is, never do to-morrow what you can do to-day. Procrastination
is the thief of time. Collar him ! "

"My poor papa's maxim," Mrs. Micawber observed.

"My dear," said Mr. Micawber, "your papa was very well
in his way, and Heaven forbid that I should disparage him.
Take him for all in all, we ne'er shall — in short, make the
acquaintance, probably, of anybody else possessing, at his time
of life, the same legs for gaiters, and able to read the same
description of print, without spectacles. But he applied that
maxim to our marriage, my dear ; and that was so far pre-
maturely entered into, in consequence, that I never recovered
the expense."

Mr. Micawber looked aside at Mrs. Micawber, and added :
" Not that I am sorry for it. Quite the contrary, my love."
After which he was grave for a minute or so.

164 David Copperfield

" My other piece of advice, Copperfield," said Mr. Micawber,
" you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expendi-
ture nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income
twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and
six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered,
the God of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and — and in
short you are for ever floored. As I am ! "

To make his example the more impressive, Mr. Micawber
drank a glass of punch with an air of great enjoyment and
satisfaction, and whistled the College Hornpipe.

I did not fail to assure him that I would store these precepts
in my mind, though indeed I had no need to do so, for, at the
time, they affected me visibly. Next morning I met the whole
family at the coach-office, and saw them, with a desolate heart,
take their places outside, at the back.

" Master Copperfield," said Mrs. Micawber, "God bless you!
I never can forget all that, you know, and I never would if I
could."

"Copperfield," said Mr. Micawber, "farewell! Every happi-
ness and prosperity ! If, in the progress of revolving years, 1
could persuade myself that my blighted destiny had been a
warning to you, I should feel that I had not occupied another
man's place in existence altogether in vain. In case of anything
turning up (of which I am rather confident), J shall be extremely
happy if it should be in my power to improve your prospects."

I think, as Mrs. Micawber sat at the back of the coach, with
the children, and I stood in the road looking wistfully at them,
a mist cleared from her eyes, and she saw what a little creature
I really was. I think so, because she beckoned to me to climb
up, with quite a new and motherly expression in her face, and
put her arm round my neck, and gave me just such a kiss as
she might have given to her own boy. I had barely time to
get down again before the coach started, and I could hardly see
the family for the handkerchiefs they waved. It was gone in a
minute. The Orfling and I stood looking vacantly at each
other in the middle of the road, and then shook hands and
said good-bye; she going back, I suppose, to St. Luke's
workhouse, as I went to begin my weary day at Murdstone
and Grinby's.

'" But with no intention of passing many more weary days
there. No. I had resolved to run away. — To go, by some
means or other, down into the country, to the only relation I
had in the world, and tell my story to my aunt. Miss Betsey.

I have already observed that I don't know how this desperate

David Copperfield 165

idea came into my brain. But, once there, it remained there ;
and hardened into a purpose than which I had never enter-
tained a more determined purpose in my life. I am far from
sure that I believed there was anything hopeful in it, but my
mind was thoroughly made up that it must be carried into
execution.

Again, and again, and a hundred times again, since the night
when the thought had first occurred to me and banished sleep,
I had gone over that old story of my poor mother's about my
birth, which it had been one of my great delights in the old
time to hear her tell, and which I knew by heart. My aunt
walked into that story, and walked out of it, a dread and awful
personage ; but there was one little trait in her behaviour
which I liked to dwell on, and which gave me some faint
shadow of encouragement. I could not forget how my mother
had thought that she felt her touch her pretty hair with no
ungentle hand ; and though it might have been altogether my
mother's fancy, and might have had no foundation whatever in
fact, I made a little picture, out of it, of my terrible aunt
relenting towards the girlish beauty that I recollected so well
and loved so much, which softened the whole narrative. It is
very possible that it had been in my mind a long time, and had
gradually engendered my determination.

As I did not even know where Miss Betsey lived, I wrote a
long letter to Peggotty, and asked her, incidentally, if she re-
membered ; pretending that I had heard of such a lady living
at a certain place I named at random, and had a curiosity to
know if it were the same. In the course of that letter, I told
Peggotty that I had a particular occasion for half a guinea ;
and that if she could lend me that sum until I could repay it,
I should be very much obliged to her, and would tell her
afterwards what I had wanted it for.

Peggotty's answer soon arrived, and was, as usual, full of
affectionate devotion. She enclosed the half-guinea (I was
afraid she must have had a world of trouble to get it out of
Mr. Barkis's box), and told me that Miss Betsey lived near
Dover, but whether at Dover itself, at Hythe, Sandgate, or
Folkestone, she could not say. One of our men, however,
informing me on my asking him about these places, that they
were all close together, I deemed this enough for my object,
and resolved to set out at the end of that week.

Being a very honest little creature, and unwilling to disgrace
the memory I was going to leave behind me at Murdstone and
Grinby's, I considered myself bound to remain until Saturday

1 66 David Copperfield

night; and, as I had been paid a week's wages in advance
when I first came there, not to present myself in the counting-
house at the usual hour, to receive my stipend. For this ex-
press reason I had borrowed the half-guinea, that I might not
be without a fund for my travelling expenses. Accordingly,
when the Saturday night came, and we were all waiting in the
warehouse to be paid, and Tipp the carman, who always took
precedence, went in first to draw his money, I shook Mick
Walker by the hand ; asked him, when it came to his turn to
be paid, to say to Mr. Quinion that I had gone to move my
box to Tipp's; and, bidding a last good-night to Mealy
Potatoes, ran away.

My box was at my old lodging over the water, and I had
written a direction for it on the back of one of our address
cards that we nailed on the casks : " Master David, to be left
till called for, at the Coach Office, Dover." This I had in my
pocket ready to put on the box, after I should have got it out
of the house; and as I went towards my lodging, I looked
about me for some one who would help me to carry it to the
booking-office.

There was a long-legged young man, with a very little
empty donkey-cart, standing near the Obelisk, in the Black-
friars Road, whose eye I caught as I was going by, and who,
addressing me as '* Sixpenn'orth of bad ha'pence," hoped " I
should know him agin to swear to " — in allusion, I have no
doubt, to my staring at him. I stopped to assure him that I
had not done so in bad manners, but uncertain whether he
might or might not like a job.

** Wot job ? " said the long-legged young man.

" To move a box," I answered.

" Wot box ? " said the long-legged young man.

I told him mine, which was down that street there, and
which I wanted him to take to the Dover coach-office for
sixpence.

" Done with you for a tanner ! " said the long-legged young
man, and directly got upon his cart, which was nothing but a
large wooden tray on wheels, and rattled away at such a rate,
that it was as much as I could do to keep pace with the
•donkey.

There was a defiant manner about this young man, and
particularly about the way in which he chewed straw as he
spoke to me, that I did not much like ; as the bargain was
made, however, I took him up-stairs to the room I was leaving,
and we brought the box down, and put it on his cart. Now, I

David Copperfield 167

was unwilling to put the direction-card on there, lest any of my
landlord's family should fathom what I was doing, and detain
me ; so I said to the young man that I would be glad if he
would stop for a minute, when he came to the dead-wall of
the King's Bench prison. The words were no sooner out of
my mouth, than he rattled away as if he, my box, the cart, and
the donkey, were all equally mad; and I was quite out of
breath with running and calling after him, when I caught him
at the place appointed.

Being much flushed and excited, I tumbled my half-guinea
out of my pocket in pulling the card out. I put it in my
mouth for safety, and though my hands trembled a good deal,
had just tied the card on very much to my satisfaction, when I
felt myself violently chucked under the chin by the long-legged
young man, and saw my half-guinea fly out of my mouth into
his hand.

" Wot ! " said the young man, seizing me by my jacket
collar, with a frightful grin. "This is a pollis case, is it?
You're a-going to bolt, are you ? Come to the pollis, you
young warmin, come to the pollis ! "

•' You give me my money back, if you please," said I, very
much frightened ; " and leave me alone."

" Come to the pollis ! " said the young man. " You shall
prove it yourn to the pollis."

" Give me my box and money,, will you ? " I cried, bursting
into tears.

The young man still replied : " Come to the pollis ! " and
was dragging me against the donkey in a violent manner, as
if there were any affinity between that animal and a magistrate,
when he changed his mind, jumped into the cart, sat upon my
box, and, exclaiming that he would drive to the pollis straight,
rattled away harder than ever.

I ran after him as fast as I could, but I had no breath to
call out with, and should not have dared to call out, now, if
I had. I narrowly escaped being run over, twenty times at
least, in half a mile. Now I lost him, now I saw him, now
I lost him, now I was cut at with a whip, now shouted at, now
down in the mud, now up again, now running into somebody's
arms, now running headlong at a post At length, confused by
fright and heat, and doubting whether half London might not
by this time be turning out for my apprehension, I left the
young man to go where he would with my box and money ;
and, panting and crying, but never stopping, faced about for
Greenwich, which I had understood was on the Dover Road :

1 68 David Copperfield

taking very little more out of the world, towards the retreat of
my aunt, Miss Betsey, than I had brought into it, on the night
when my arrival gave her so much umbrage.

CHAPTER XIII

THE SEQUEL OF MY RESOLUTION

For anything I know, I may have had some wild idea of
running all the way to Dover, when I gave up the pursuit of
the young man with the donkey-cart, and started for Green-
wich. My scattered senses were soon collected as to that
point, if I had ; for I came to a stop in the Kent Road, at
a terrace with a piece of water before it, and a great foolish
image in the middle, blowing a dry shell. Here I sat down
on a doorstep, quite spent and exhausted with the efforts I had
already made, and with hardly breath enough to cry for the
loss of my box and half-guinea.

It was by this time dark ; I heard the clocks strike ten, as I
sat resting. But it was a summer night, fortunately, and fine
weather. When I had recovered my breath, and had got rid
of a stifling sensation in my throat, I rose up and went on.
In the midst of my distress, I had no notion of going back.
I doubt if I should have had any, though there had been a
Swiss snow-drift in the Kent Road.

But my standing possessed of only three-halfpence in the
world (and I am sure I wonder how they came to be left in my
pocket on a Saturday night !) troubled me none the less because
I went on. I began to picture to myself, as a scrap of news-
paper intelligence, my being found dead in a day or two, under
some hedge ; and I trudged on miserably, though as fast as I
could, until I happened to pass a little shop, where it was
written up that ladies' and gentlemen's wardrobes were bought,
and that the best price was given for rags, bones, and kitchen-
stuff. The master of this shop was sitting at the door in his
shirt-sleeves, smoking ; and as there were a great many coats
and pairs of trousers dangling from the low ceiling, and only
two feeble candles burning inside to show what they were, I
fancied that he looked like a man of a revengeful disposition,
who had hung all his enemies, and was enjoying himself.

My late experiences with Mr. and Mrs. Micawber suggested

David Copperfield 169

to me that here might be a means of keeping off the wolf for a
little while. I went up the next bye-street, took off my waist-
coat, rolled it neatly under my arm, and came back to the
shop-door. " If you please, sir," I said, " I am to sell this
for a fair price."

Mr. Dolloby — DoUoby was the name over the shop-door, at
least — took the waistcoat, stood his pipe on its head against
the door-post, went into the shop, followed by me, snuffed the
two candles with his fingers, spread the waistcoast on the
counter, and looked at it there, held it up against the light,
and looked at it there, and ultimately said :

"What do you call a price, now, for this here little
weskit?"

" Oh ! you know best, sir," I returned, modestly.

" I can't be buyer and seller too," said Mr. Dolloby. " Put
a price on this here little weskiL"

" Would eighteenpence be?" — I hinted, after some hesitation.

Mr. Dolloby rolled it up again, and gave it me back. "I
should rob my family," he said, " if I was to offer ninepence
for it."

This was a disagreeable way of putting the business ; because
it imposed upon me, a perfect stranger, the unpleasantness of
asking Mr. Dolloby to rob his family on my account My
circumstances being so very pressing, however, I said I would
take ninepence for it, if he pleased. Mr. Dolloby, not without
some grumbling, gave ninepence. I wished him good-night,
and walked out of the shop, the richer by that sum, and the
poorer by a waistcoat. But when I buttoned my jacket, that
was not much.

Indeed, I foresaw pretty clearly that my jacket would go
next, and that I should have to make the best of my way to
Dover in a shirt and a pair of trousers, and might deem
myself lucky if I got there even in that trim. But my mind
did not run so much on this as might be supposed. Beyond
a general impression of the distance before me, and of the
young man with the donkey-cart having used me cruelly, I
think I had no very urgent sense of my difficulties when
I once again set off with my ninepence in my pocket.

A plan had occurred to me for passing the night, which I
was going to carry into execution. This was, to lie behind the
wall at the back of my old school, in a corner where there used
to be a haystack. I imagined it would be a kind of company
to have the boys, and the bedroom where I used to tell the
stories, so near me : although the boys would know nothing

lyo David Copperfield

of my being there, and the bedroom would yield me no
shelter.

I had had a hard day's work, and was pretty well jaded
when I came climbing out, at last, upon the level of Black-
heath. It cost me some trouble to find out Salem House ; but
I found it, and I found a haystack in the corner, and I lay
down by it ; having first walked round the wall, and looked up
at the windows, and seen that all was dark and silent within.
Never shall I forget the lonely sensation of first lying down,
without a roof above my head !

Sleep came upon me as it came on many other outcasts,
against whom house-doors were locked, and house-dogs barked,
that night — and I dreamed of lying on my old school-bed,
talking to the boys in my room; and found myself sitting
upright, with Steerforth's name upon my lips, looking wildly at
the stars that were glistening and glimmering above me. When
I remembered where I was at that untimely hour, a feeling stole
upon me that made me get up, afraid of I don't know what, and
walk about. But the fainter glimmering of the stars, and the
pale light in the sky where the day was coming, reassured me :
and my eyes being very heavy, I lay down again, and slept —
though with a knowledge in my sleep that it was cold — until
the warm beams of the sun, and the ringing of the getting-up
bell at Salem House, awoke me. If I could have hoped that
Steerforth was there, I would have lurked about until he
came out alone ; but I knew he must have left long since.
Traddles still remained, perhaps, but it was very doubtful ; and
I had not sufficient confidence in his discretion or good luck,
however strong my reliance was on his good-nature, to wish to
trust him with my situation. So I crept away from the wall as
Mr. Creakle's boys were getting up, and struck into the long
dusty track which I had first known to be the Dover Road
when I was one of them, and when I little expected that any
eyes would ever see me the wayfarer I was now, upon it.

What a different Sunday morning from the old Sunday
morning at Yarmouth ! In due time I heard the church-bells
ringing, as I plodded on ; and I met people who were going to
church ; and I passed a church or two where the congregation
were inside, and the sound of singing came out into the
sunshine, while the beadle '■sat and cooled himself in the shade
of the porch, or stood beneath the yew-tree, with his hand to
his forehead, glowering at me going by. But the peace and
rest of the old Sunday morning were on everything, except
me. That was the difference. I felt quite wicked in my dirt

David Copperfield 171

and dust, with my tangled hair. But for the quiet picture I
had conjured up, of my mother in her youth and beauty,
weeping by the fire, and my aunt relenting to her, I hardly
think I should have had the courage to go on until next day.
But it always went before me, and I followed.

I got, that Sunday, through three-and-twenty miles on the
straight road, though not very easily, for I was new to that
kind of toil. I see myself, as evening closes in, coming over
the bridge at Rochester, footsore and tired, and eating bread
that I had bought for supper. One or two little houses, with
the notice, " Lodgings for Travellers," hanging out, had tempted
me ; but I was afraid of spending the few pence I had, and
was even more afraid of the vicious looks of the trampers I
had met or overtaken. I sought no shelter, therefore, but the
sky ; and toiling into Chatham, — which, in that night's aspect,
is a mere dream of chalk, and drawbridges, and mastless ships
in a muddy river, roofed like Noah's arks — crept, at last, upon
a sort of grass-grown battel /overhanging a lane, where a sentry
was walking to and fro. Here I lay down, near a cannon ;
and, happy in the society of the sentry's footsteps, though he
knew no more of my being above him than the boys of Salem
House had known of my lying by the wall, slept soundly until
morning.

Very stiff and sore of foot I was in the morning, and quite
dazed by the beating of drums and marching of troops, which
seemed to hem me in on every side when I went down towards
the long narrow street. Feeling that I could go but a very
little way that day, if I were to reserve any strength for getting
to my journey's end, I resolved to make the sale of my jacket
its principal business. Accordingly, I took the jacket off, that
I might learn to do without it ; and carrying it under my arm,
began a tour of inspection of the various slop-shops.

It was a likely place to sell a jacket in ; for the dealers in
second-hand clothes were numerous, and were, generally speak-
ing, on the look-out for customers at their shop-doors. But, as
most of them had, hanging up among their stock, an officer's
coat or two, epaulettes and all, I was rendered timid by the
costly nature of their dealings, and walked about for a long time
without offering my merchandise to any one.

This modesty of mine directed my attention to the marine-
store shops, and such shops as Mr. DoUoby's, in preference to
the regular dealers. At last I found one that I thought looked
promising, at the corner of a dirty lane, ending in an inclosure
full of stinging-nettles, against the palings of which some

172 David Copperfield

second-hand sailors' clothes, that seemed to have overflowed
the shop, were fluttering among some cots, and rusty guns, and
oilskin hats, and certain trays full of so many old rusty keys of
so many sizes that they seemed various enough to open all the
doors in the world.

Into this shop, which was low and small, and which was
darkened rather than lighted by a little window, overhung with
clothes, and was descended into by some steps, I went with a
palpitating heart; which was not relieved when an ugly old
man, with the lower part of his face all covered with a stubbly
grey beard, rushed out of a dirty den behind it, and seized me
by the hair of my head. He was a dreadful old man to look
at, in a filthy flannel waistcoat, and smelling terribly of rum.
His bedstead, covered with a tumbled and ragged piece of
patchwork, was in the den he had come from, where another
little window showed a prospect of more stinging-nettles, and a
/ lame donkey.

I " Oh, what do you want ? " grinned this old man, in a fierce,
^ monotonous whine. " Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you
want ? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want ? Oh, goroo,
goroo ! "

I was so much dismayed by these words, and particularly by
the repetition of the last unknown one, which was a kind of
rattle in his throat, that I could make no answer ; hereupon the
old man, still holding me by the hair, repeated :

" Oh, what do you want ? Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do
you want ? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want ? Oh,
goroo ! " — which he screwed out of himself, with an energy that
made his eyes start in his head.

" I wanted to know," I said, trembling, " if you would buy a
jacket ? "

" Oh, let's see the jacket ! " cried the old man. " Oh, my
heart on fire, show the jacket to us ! Oh, my eyes and limbs,
bring the jacket out ! "

With that he took his trembling hands, which were like the
claws of a great bird, out of my hair ; and put on a pair of
spectacles, not at all ornamental, to his inflamed eyes.
" Oh, how much for the jacket ? " cried the old man, after
, examining it. " Oh — goroo ! — how much for the jacket ? "
" Half-a-crown," I answered, recovering myself.
" Oh, my lungs and liver," cried the old man, " no ! Oh,
my eyes, no ! Oh, my limbs, no ! Eighteenpence. Goroo ! "
Every time he uttered this ejaculation, his eyes seemed to
be in danger of starting out ; and every sentence he spoke, he

David Copperfield 173

delivered in a sort of tune, always exactly the same, amd more
like a gust of wind, which begins low, mounts up high, and falls
again, than any other comparison I can find for it.

" Well," said I, glad to have closed the bargain, " HI take
eighteen pence."

" Oh, my liver ! " cried the old man, throwing the jacket on
a shelf. " Get out of the shop ! Oh, my lungs, get out of the
shop 1 Oh, my eyes and limbs — goroo ! — don't ask for money ;
make it an exchange."

I never was so frightened in my life, before or since ; but I
told him humbly that I wanted money, and that nothing else
was of any use to me, but that I would wait for it, as he
desired, outside, and had no wish to hurry him. So I went
outside, and sat down in the shade in a comer. And I sat
there so many hours, that the shade became sunlight, and the
sunlight became shade again, and still I sat there waiting for
the money.

There never was such another drunken madman in that line
of business, I hope. That he was well known in the neigh-
bourhood, and enjoyed the reputation of having sold himself
to the devil, I soon understood from the visits he received
from the boys, who continually came skirmishing about the
shop, shouting that legend, and calling to him to bring out his
gold. "You ain't poor, you know, Charley, as you pretend.
Bring out your gold. Bring out some of the gold you sold
yourself to the devil for. Come! It's in the lining of the
mattress, Charley. Rip it open and let's have some ! " This,
and many offers to lend him a knife for the purpose, exasper-
ated him to such a degree, that the whole day was a succession
of rushes on his part, and flights on the part of the boys.
Sometimes in his rage he would take me for one of them, and
come at me, mouthing as if he were going to tear me in pieces ;
then, remembering me, just in time, would dive into the shop,
and lie upon his bed, as I thought from the sound of his voice,
yelling in a frantic way, to his own windy tune, the Death of
Nelson ; with an Oh ! before every line, and innumerable
Goroos interspersed. As if this were not bad enough for me,
the boys, connecting me with the establishment, on account of
the patience and perseverance with which I sat outside, half-
dressed, pelted me, and used me very ill all day.

He made many attempts to induce me to consent to an
exchange ; at one time coming out with a fishing-rod, at another
with a fiddle, at another with a cocked hat, at another with a
flute. But I resisted all these overtures, and sat there in

174 David Copperfield

desperation ; each time asking him, with tears in my eyes, for
my money or my jacket. At last he began to pay me in half-
pence at a time ; and was full two hours at getting by easy
stages to a shilling.

" Oh, my eyes and limbs ! " he then cried, peeping hideously
out of the shop, after a long pause, " will you go for twopence
more?"

" I can't," I said, " I shall be starved."

" Oh, my lungs apd liver, will you go for threepence ? "

" I would go for nothing, if I could," I said, " but I want the
money badly."

" Oh, go — roo ! " (it is really impossible to express how he
twisted this ejaculation out of himself, as he peeped round the
doorpost at me, showing nothing but his crafty old head ;) " will
you go for fourpence ? "

I was so faint and weary that I closed with this offer ; and
taking the money out of his claw, not without trembling, went
away more hungry and thirsty than I had ever been, a little
before sunset. But at an expense of threepence I soon
refreshed myself completely ; and, being in better spirits then,
limped seven miles upon my road.

My bed at night was under another haystack, where I rested
comfortably, after having washed my bhstered feet in a stream,
and dressed them as well as I was able, with some cool leaves.
When I took the road again next morning, I found that it lay
through a succession of hop-grounds and orchards. It was
sufficiently late in the year for the orchards to be ruddy with
ripe apples ; and in a few places the hop-pickers were already
at work. I thought it all extremely beautiful, and made up my
mind to sleep among the hops that night : imagining some
cheerful companionship in the long perspective of poles, with
the graceful leaves twining round them.

The trampers were worse than ever that day, and inspired me
with a dread that is yet quite fresh in my mind. Some of them
were most ferocious-looking ruffians, who stared at me as I
went by ; and stopped, perhaps, and called after me to come
back and speak to them, and when I took to my heels, stoned
me. I recollect one young fellow — a tinker, I suppose, from his
wallet and brazier — who had a woman with him, and who faced
about and stared at me thus ; and then roared at me in such
a tremendous voice to come back, that I halted and looked
round.

" Come here, when you're called," said the tinker, "or I'll
rip your young body open."

David Copperfield 175

I thought it best to go back. As I drew nearer to them,
trying to propitiate the tinker by my looks, I observed that
the woman had a black eye.

" Where are you going? " said the tinker, gripping the bosom
of my shirt with his blackened hand.

"I am going to Dover," I said.

" Where do you come from ? " asked the tinker, giving his
hand another turn in my shirt, to hold me more securely.

"I come from London," I said.

" What lay are you upon ? " asked the tinker. " Are you a
prig?"

" N— no," I said.

" Ain't you, by G — ? If you make a brag of your honesty
to me," said the tinker, "I'll knock your brains out."

With his disengaged hand he made a menace of striking me,
and then looked at me from head to foot

"Have you got the price of a pint of beer about you?"
said the tinker. " If you have, out with it, afore I take it
away 1 "

I should certainly have produced it, but that I met the
woman's look, and saw her very slightly shake her head, and
form "No!" with her lips.

" I am very poor," I said, attempting to smile, "and have got
no money."

"Why, what do you mean?" said the tinker, looking so
sternly at me, that I almost feared he saw the money in my
pocket.

" Sir ! " I stammered.

" What do you mean," said the tinker, " by wearing my
brother's silk handkercher ! Give it over here I " And he had
mine off my neck in a moment, and tossed it to the woman.

The woman burst into a fit of laughter, as if she thought
this a joke, and tossed it back to me, nodded once, as slightly
as before, and made the word "Go I" with her lips. Before
I could obey, however, the tinker seized the handkerchief out
of my hand with a roughness that threw me away like a
feather, and putting it loosely round his own neck, turned
upon the woman with an oath, and knocked her down. I
never shall forgot seeing her fall backward on the hard road,
and He there with her bonnet tumbled off, and her hair all
whitened in the dust; nor, when I looked back from a distance,
seeing her sitting on the pathway, which was a bank by the
roadside, wiping the blood from her face with a corner of her
shawl, while he went on ahead.

176 David Copperfield

This adventure frightened me so, that, afterwards, when I
saw any of these people coming, I turned back until I could
find a hiding-place, where I remained until they had gone out
of sight ; which happened so often, that I was very seriously
delayed. But under this difficulty, as under all the other
difficulties of my journey, I seemed to be sustained and led
on by my fanciful picture of my mother in her youth, before
I came into the world. It always kept me company. It was
there, among the hops, when I lay down to sleep : it was with
me on my waking in the morning ; it went before me all day.
I have associated it, ever since, with the sunny street of Canter-
bury, dozing as it were in the hot light; and with the sight of
its old houses and gateways, and the stately, grey Cathedral,
with the rooks sailing round the towers. When I came, at last,
upon the bare wide downs near Dover, it relieved the solitary
aspect of the scene with hope ; and not until I reached that
first great aim of my journey, and actually set foot in the town
itself, on the sixth day of my flight, did it desert me. But then,
strange to say, when I stood with my ragged shoes, and my
dusty, sunburnt, half-clothed figure, in the place so long desired,
it seemed to vanish like a dream, and to leave me helpless and
dispirited.

I inquired about my aunt among the boatmen first, and
received various answers. One said she lived in the South
Foreland Light, and had singed her whiskers by doing so;
another, that she was made fast to the great buoy outside the
harbour, and could only be visited at half-tide ; a third, that she
was locked up in Maidstone Jail for child-stealing ; a fourth,
that she was seen to mount a broom, in the last high wind, and
make direct for Calais. The fly-drivers, among whom I inquired
next, were equally jocose and equally disrespectful ; and the
shopkeepers, not liking my appearance, generally replied, with-
out hearing what I had to say, that they had got nothing for
me. I felt more miserable and destitute than I had done
at any period of my running away. My money was all gone,
I had nothing left to dispose of ; I was hungry, thirsty, and worn
out ; and seemed as distant from the end as if I had remained
in London.

The morning had worn away in these inquiries, and I was
sitting on the step of an empty shop at a street corner, near the
market-place, deliberating upon wandering towards those other
places which had been mentioned, when a fly-driver, coming by
with his carriage, dropped a horsecloth. Something good-
natured in the man's face, as I handed it up, encouraged me

David Copperfield 177

to ask him if he could tell me where Miss Trotwood lived;
though I had asked the question so often, that it almost died
upon my lips.

"Trotwood," said he. "Let me see. I know the name,
too. Old lady?"

"Yes," I said, "rather."

" Pretty stiff in the back ? " said he, making himself up-
right.

" Yes," I said. " I should think it very likely."

" Carries a bag ? " said he : "bag with a good deal of room in
it : is gruffish, and comes down upon you sharp ? "

My heart sank within me as I acknowledged the undoubted
accuracy of this description.

"Why then, I tell you what," said he. "If you go up there,"
pointing with his whip towards the heights, " and keep right on
till you come to some houses facing the sea, I think you'll hear
of her. My opinion is, she won't stand anything, so here's a
penny for you."

I accepted the gift thankfully, and bought a loaf with it.
Despatching this refreshment by the way, I went in the
direction my friend had indicated, and walked on a good
distance without coming to the houses he had mentioned. At
length I saw some before me ; and approaching them, went into a
little shop (it was what we used to call a general shop, at home),
and inquired if they could have the goodness to tell me where
Miss Trotwood lived. I addressed myself to a man behind
the counter, who was weighing some rice for a young woman ;
but the latter, taking the inquiry to herself, turned round
quickly.

" My mistress ? " she said. " What do you want with her,
boy?"

" I want," I replied, "to speak to her, if you please."

" To beg of her, you mean," retorted the damsel.

"No," I said, "indeed." But suddenly remembering that in
truth I came for no other purpose, I held my peace in confusion,
and felt my face burn.

My aunt's handmaid, as I supposed she was from what she
had said, put her rice in a little basket and walked out of the
shop ; telling me that I could follow her, if I wanted to know
where Miss Trotwood lived. I needed no second permission ;
though I was by this time in such a state of consternation and
agitation, that my legs shook under me. I followed the young
woman, and we soon came to a very neat little cottage with
cheerful bow-windows : in front of it, a small square gravelled

178 David Copperfield

court or garden full of flowers, carefully tended, and smelling
deliciously.

"This is Miss Trotwood's," said the young woman. "Now
you know; and that's all I have got to say." With which
words she hurried into the house, as if to shake off the re-
sponsibility of my appearance; and left me standing at the
garden-gate, looking disconsolately over the top of it towards
the parlour-window, where a muslin curtain partly undrawn in
the middle, a large round green screen or fan fastened on to
the window-sill, a small table, and a great chair, suggested to
me that my aunt might be at that moment seated in awful state.
My shoes were by this time in a woeful condition. The
soles had shed themselves bit by bit, and the upper leathers
had broken and burst until the very shape and form of shoes
had departed from them. My hat (which had served me for
a night-cap, too) was so crushed and b^^nt, that no old battered
handleless saucepan on a dunghill need have been ashamed to
vie with it. My shirt and trousers, stained with heat, dew,
grass, and the Kentish soil on which I had slept — and torn
besides — might have frightened the birds from my aunt's garden,
as I stood at the gate. My hair had known no comb or brush
since I left London. My face, neck, and hands, from un-
accustomed exposure to the air and sun, were burnt to a berry-
brown. From head to foot I was powdered almost as white
with chalk and dust, as if I had come out of a lime-kiln. In
this plight, and with a strong consciousness of it, I waited to
introduce myself to, and make my first impression on, my
formidable aunt.

The unbroken stillness of the parlour-window leading me to

infer, after a while, that she was not there, I lifted up my eyes

/ to the window above it, where I saw a florid, pleasant-looking

1 gentleman, with a grey head, who shut up one eye in a grotesque

' manner, nodded his head at me several times, shook it at me

as often, laughed, and went away.

I had been discomposed enough before ; but I was so much
the more discomposed by this unexpected behaviour, that I was
on the point of slinking off, to think how I had best proceed,
when there came out of the house a lady with her handkerchief
tied over her cap, and a pair of gardening gloves on her hands,
wearing a gardening pocket like a tollman's apron, and carrying
a great knife. I knew her immediately to be Miss Betsey, for
she came stalking out of the house exactly as my poor mother
had so often described her stalking up our garden at
Blunderstone Rookery.

David Copperfield 179

"Go away!" said Miss Betsey, shaking her head, and
making a distant chop in the air with her knife. " Go along !
No boys here ! "

I watched her, with my heart at my lips, as she marched to
a corner of her garden, and stooped to dig up some little root
there. Then, without a scrap of courage, but with a great deal
of desperation, I went softly in and stood beside her, touching
her with my finger.

" If you please, ma'am," I began.

She started and looked up.

" If you please, aunt."

"Eh?" exclaimed Miss Betsey, in a tone of amazement I
have never heard approached.

" If you please, aunt, I am your nephew."

"Oh, Lord ! " said my aunt. And sat flat down in the
garden- path. ^

" I am David Copperfield, of Blunderstone, in Suffolk —
where you came, on the night when I was born, and saw my
dear mama. I have been very unhappy since she died. I
have been slighted, and taught nothing, and thrown upon
myself, and put to work not fit for me. It made me run away
to you. I was robbed at first setting out, and have walked all
the way, and have never slept in a bed since 1 began th^
journey." Here my self-support gave way all at once ; and with
a movement of my hands, intended to show her my ragged
state, and call it to witness that I had suffered something, il
broke into a passion of crying, which I suppose had been peijt
up within me all the week.

My aunt, with every sort of expression but wonder discharged
from her countenance, sat on the gravel, staring at me, until I
began to cry ; when she got up in a great hurry, collared me,
and took me into the parlour. Her first proceeding there was
to unlock a tall press, bring out several bottles, and pour some
of the contents of each into my mouth. I think they must
have been taken out at random, for I am sure I tasted aniseed
water, anchovy sauce, and salad dressing. When she had
administered these restoratives, as I was still quite hysterical,
and unable to control my sobs, she put me on the sofa, with a
shawl under my head, and the handkerchief from her own head
under my feet, lest I should sully the cover ; and then, sitting
herself down behind the green fan or screen I have already
mentioned, so that I could not see her face, ejaculated at
intervals, "Mercy on us!" letting those exclamations off like
minute guns.

i8o David Copperfield

After a time she rang the bell. "Janet," said my aunt, when
her servant came in. " Go up-stairs, give my compliments to
Mr. Dick, and say I wish to speak to him."

Janet looked a little surprised to see me lying stiffly on the
sofa (I was afraid to move lest it should be displeasing to my
aunt), but went on her errand. My aunt, with her hands
behind her, walked up and down the room, until the gentle-
man who had squinted at me from the upper window came in
laughing.

" Mr. Dick," said my aunt, "don't be a fool, because nobody
can be more discreet than you can, when you choose. We all
know that. So don't be a fool, whatever you are."

The gentleman was serious immediately, and looked at me,
I thought, as if he would entreat me to say nothing about the
window.

"Mr. Dick," said my aunt, "you have heard me mention
David Copperfield ? Now don't pretend not to have a memory,
because you and I know better."

" David Copperfield ? " said Mr. Dick, who did not appear to
me to remember much about it. " David Copperfield ? Oh
yes, to be sure. David, certainly."

" Well," said my aunt, " this is his boy, his son. He would
be as like his father as it's possible to be, if he was not so like
his mother, too."

" His son ? " said Mr. Dick. " David's son ? Indeed ! "

" Yes," pursued my aunt, " and he has done a pretty piece
of business. He has run away. Ah ! His sister, Betsey
Trotwood, never would have run away." My aunt shook her
bead firmly, confident in the character and behaviour of the
girl who never was born.

" Oh ! you think she wouldn't have run away ? " said Mr. Dick.

"Bless and save the man," exclaimed my aunt, sharply,
" how he talks ! Don't I know she wouldn't ? She would
have lived with her god-mother, and we should have been
devoted to one another. Where, in the name of wonder, should
his sister, Betsey Trotwood, have run from, or to ? "

" Nowhere," said Mr. Dick.

" Well then," returned my aunt, softened by the reply, " how
can you pretend to be wool-gathering, Dick, when you are as
sharp as a surgeon's lancet? Now, here you see young David
Copperfield, and the question I put to you is, what shall I do
with him ? "

"What shall you do with him?" said Mr. Dick, feebly,
scratching his head. "Oh! do with him?"

David Copperfield i8i

•• Ves," said my aunt, with a grave look, and her forefinger
held up. "Come! I want some very sound advice."

" Why, if I was you," said Mr. Dick, considering, and looking
vacantly at me, " I should — " The contemplation of me
seemed to inspire him with a sudden idea, and he added,
briskly, " I should wash him ! "

" Janet," said my aunt, turning round with a quiet triumph,
which I did not then understand, " Mr. Dick sets us all right.
Heat the bath!"

Although I was deeply interested in this dialogue, I could
not help observing my aunt, Mr. Dick, and Janet, while it was
in progress, and completing a survey I had akeady been
engaged in making of the room.

My aunt was a tall, hard-featured lady, but by no means ill-
looking. There was an inflexibility in her face, in her voice,
in her gait and carriage, amply sufficient to account for the
effect she had made upon a gentle creature like my mother;
but her features were rather handsome than otherwise, though
unbending and austere. I particularly noticed that she had a
very quick, bright eye. Her hair, which was grey, was arranged
in two plain divisions, under what I believe would be called a
mob-cap ; I mean a cap, much more common then than now,
with side-pieces fastening under the chin. Her dress was of a
lavender colour, and perfectly neat ; but scantily made, as if
she desired to be as little encumbered as possible. I remember
that I thought it, in form, more like a riding-habit with the
superfluous skirt cut off, than anything else. She wore at her
side a gentleman's gold watch, if I might judge from its size
and make, with an appropriate chain and seals ; she had some
linen at her throat not unlike a shirt-collar, and things at her
wrists like little shirt-wristbands.

Jiih!. Dicl^ ao I have already said, was grey-headed and florid :
I should have said all about him, in saying so, had not his
head been curiously bowed — not by age ; it reminded me of
one of Mr. Creakle's boys' heads after a beating — and his grey
eyes prominent and large, with a strange kind of watery bright-
ness in them that made me, in combination with his vacant
manner, his submission to my aunt, and his childish delight
when she praised him, suspect him of being a Uittle_jnad ;
though, if he were mad, how he came to be there, puzzled me
extremely. He was dressed like any other ordinary gentleman,
in a loose grey morning coat and waistcoat, and white trousers ;
and had his watch in his fob, and his money in his pockets :
which he rattled as if he were very proud of it.

David Copperfield

] Janet was a pretty blooming girl, of about nineteen or
twenty, and a perfect picture of neatness. Though I made no
further observation of her at the moment, 1 may mention here
. what I did not discover until afterwards, namely, that she was
I one oCaseries_of prot^g^es whom my aunt had taken into her
service expressly to educate in a renouncement of mankind,
and who had generally completed their abjuration by marrying
the baker.

The room was as neat-as Janet or my aunt. As I laid down
my pen, a moment since, to think of it, the air from the sea
came blowing in again, mixed with the perfume of the flowers ;
and I saw the old-fashioned furniture brightly rubbed and
polished, my aunt's inviolable chair and table by the round
green fan in the bow-window, the drugget -covered carpet, the
cat, the kettle-holder, the two canaries, the old china, the punch-
bowl full of dried rose-leaves, the tall press guarding all sorts of
bottles and pots, and, wonderfully out of keeping with the rest,
my dusty self upon the sofa, taking note of everything.

Janet had gone away to get the bath ready, when my
aunt, to my great alarm, became in one moment rigid with
indignation, and had hardly voice to cry out, " Janet !
Donkeys ! "

Upon which, Janet came running up the stairs as if the
house were in flames, darted out on a little piece of green in
front, and warned off two saddle-donkeys, lady-ridden, that
had presumed to set hoof upon it ; while my aunt, rushing out
of the house, seized the bridle of a third animal laden with
a bestriding child, turned him, led him forth from those
sacred precincts, and boxed the ears of the unlucky urchin in
attendance who had dared to profane that hallowed ground.

To this hour I don't know whether my aunt had any lawful
right of way over that patch of green ; but she had settled it
in her own mind that she had, and it was all the same to her.
The one great outrage of her life, demanding to be constantly
avenged, was the passage of a donkey over that immaculate
spot. In whatever occupation she was engaged, however
interesting to her the conversation in which she was taking
part, a donkey turned the current of her ideas in a moment,
and she was upon him straight. Jugs of water, and watering-
pots, were kept in secret places ready to be discharged on the
offending boys ; sticks were laid in ambush behind the door ;
sallies were made at all hours; and incessant war prevailed.
Perhaps this was an agreeable excitement to the donkey-boys ;
or perhaps the more sagacious of the donkeys, understanding

David Copperfield 183

how the case stood, dehghted with constitutional obstinacy in
coming that way. I only know that there were three alarms
before the bath was ready ; and that on the occasion of the
last and most desperate of all, I saw my aunt engage, single-
handed, with a sandy-headed lad of fifteen, and bump his
sandy head against her own gate, before he seemed to compre-
hend what was the matter. These interruptions were the njore
ridiculous to me, because she was giving me broth out of a
table-spoon at the time (having firmly persuaded herself that I
was actually starving, and must receive nourishment at first in
very small quantities), and, while my mouth was yet open to
receive the spoon, she would put it back into the basin, cry,
" Janet ! Donkeys ! " and go out to the assault.

The bath was a great comfort. For I began to be sensible
of acute pains in my limbs from lying out in the fields, and
was now so tired and low that I could hardly keep myself awake
for five minutes together. When I had bathed, they (I mean
my aunt and Janet) enrobed me in a shirt and a pair of
trousers belonging to Mr. Dick, and tied me up in two or
three great shawls. What sort of bundle I looked like, 1 don't
know, but I felt a very hot one. Feeling also very faint and
drowsy, I soon lay down on the sofa again and fell asleep.

It might have been a dream, originating in the fancy which
had occupied my mind so long, but I awoke with the impres-
sion that my aunt had come and bent over me, and had put
my hair away from my face, and laid my head more comfort-
ably, and had then stood looking at me. The words, " Pretty
fellow," or " Poor fellow," seemed to be in my ears, too ; but
certainly there was nothing else, when I awoke, to lead me to
believe that they had been uttered by my aunt, who sat in the
bow-window gazing at the sea from behind the green fan, which
was mounted on a kind of swivel, and turned any way.

We dined soon after I awoke, off a roast fowl and a pudding;
I sitting at table, not unlike a trussed bird myself, and moving
my arms with considerable difficulty. But as my aunt had
swathed me up, I made no complaint of being inconvenienced.
All this time I was deeply anxious to know what she was going
to do with me ; but she took her dinner in profound silence,
except when she occasionally fixed her eyes on me sitting
opposite, and said, " Mercy upon us ! " which did not by any
means relieve my anxiety.

The cloth being drawn, and some sherry put upon the table
(of which I had a glass), my aunt sent up for Mr. Dick again,
who joined us, and looked as wise as he could when she

184 David Copperfield

requested him to attend to my story, which she elicited from
me, gradually, by a course of questions. During my recital,
she kept her eyes on Mr. Dick, who I thought would have
gone to sleep but for that, and who, whensoever he lapsed into
a smile, was checked by a frown from my aunt.

" Whatever possessed that poor unfortunate Baby, that she
must go and be married again," said my aunt, when I had
finished, " / can't conceive."

"Perhaps she fell in love with her second husband," Mr.
Dick suggested.

" Fell in love ! " repeated my aunt. " What do you mean ?
What business had she to do it?"

" Perhaps," Mr. Dick simpered, after thinking a little, " she
did it for pleasure."

" Pleasure, indeed ! " replied my aunt. " A mighty pleasure
for the poor Baby to fix her simple faith upon any dog of a
fellow, certain to ill-use her in some way or other. What did
she propose to herself, I should like to know ! She had had
one husband. She had seen David Copperfield out of the
world, who was always rnnnjng a^f^^j way dolls frnm his Cradle.
She had got a baby — ohPtHerewere a pair of babies when she
gave birth to this child sitting here, that Friday night ! — and
what more did she want ? "

Mr. Dick secretly shook his head at me, as if he thought
there was no getting over this.

" She couldn't even have a baby like anybody else," said my
aunt. "Where was this child's sister, Betsy Trotwood? Not
forthcoming. Don't tell me ! "
^^ Mr. Dick seemed quite frightened.

" That little man of a doctor, with his head on one side,"
said my aunt, " Jellips, or whatever his name was, what was kg
about ? All he could do was to say to me, like a robin red-
breast— as he IS — ' It's a boy.' A boy ! Yah, the imbecility
of the whole set of 'em ! "

The heartiness of the ejaculation startled Mr. Dick exceed-
ingly ; and me, too, if I am to tell the truth.

" And then, as if this was not enough, and she had not
stood'sufficiently in the light of this child's sister, Betsy Trot-
wood," said my aunt, "she marries a second time — goes and
marries a Murderer — or a man with a name like it — and stands
in fh's child's light ! And the natural consequence is, as any-
body but a baby might have foreseen, that he prowls and
wanders. He's as like Cain before he was grown up, as he
can be."

David Copperfield 185

Mr. Dick looked hard at me, as if to identify me in this
character.

" And then there's that woman with the Pagan name,"
said my aunt, " that Peggotty, she goes and gets married next.
Because she has not seen enough of the evil attending such
things, she goes and gets married next, as the child relates. I
only hope," said my aunt, shaking her head, "that her husband
is one of those Poker husbands who abound in the newspapers,
and will beat her well with one."

I could not bear to hear my old nurse so decried, and made
the subject of such a wish. I told my aunt that indeed she was
mistaken. That Peggotty was the best, the truest, the most
faithful, most devoted, and most self-denying friend and servant
in the world ; who had ever loved me dearly, who had ever
loved my mother dearly; who had held my mother's dying
head upon her arm, on whose face my mother had imprinted
her last grateful kiss. And my remembrance of them both,
choking me, I broke down as I was trying to say that her home
was my home, and that all she had was mine, and that I would
have gone to her for shelter, but for her humble station, which
made me fear that I might bring some trouble on her — I broke
down, I say, as I was trying to say so, and laid my face in my
hands upon the table.

" Well, well ! " said my aunt, " the child is right to stand by
those who have stood by him. — Janet ! Donkeys ! "

I thoroughly believe that but for those unfortunate donkeys,
we should have come to a good understanding ; for my aunt
had laid her hand on my shoulder, and the impulse was upon
me, thus emboldened, to embrace her and beseech her pro-
tection. But the interruption, and the disorder she was thrown
into by the struggle outside, put an end to all softer ideas for
the present, and kept my aunt indignantly declaiming to Mr.
Dick about her determination to appeal for redress to the laws
of her country, and to bring actions for trespass against the
whole donkey proprietorship of Dover, until tea-time.

After tea, we sat at the window, on the look-out, as I
imagined, from my aunt's sharp expression of face, for more
invaders — until dusk, when Janet set candles, and a back-
gammon board, on the table, and pulled down the blinds.

** Now, Mr. Dick," said my aunt, with her grave look, and
her forefinger up as before, " I am going to ask you another
question. I^ok at this child."

" David's son ? " said Mr. Dick, with an attentive, puzzled
face.

1 86 David Copperfield

" Exactly so," returned my aunt. " What would you do with
him, now?"

"Do with David's son?" said Mr. Dick.

" Ay,'' replied my aunt, " with David's son."

" Oh ! " said Mr. Dick. " Yes. Do with— I should put him
to bed."

'* Janet ! " cried my aunt, with the same complacent triumph
that I had remarked before. " Mr. Dick sets us all right. If
the bed is ready, we'll take him up to it."

Janet reporting it to be quite ready, I was taken up to it ;
kindly, but in some sort like a prisoner ; my aunt going in
front, and Janet bringing up the rear. The only circumstance
which gave me any new hope, was my aunt's stopping on the
stairs to inquire about a smell of fire that was prevalent there ;
and Janet's replying that she had been making tinder down in the
kitchen, of my old shirt. But there were no other clothes in my
room than the odd heap of things I wore ; and when I was
left there, with a little taper which my aunt forewarned me
would burn exactly five minutes, I heard them lock my door on
the outside. Turning these things over in my mind, I deemed
it possible that my aunt, who could know nothing of me, might
suspect I had a habit of running away, and took precautions,
on that account, to have me in safe keeping.

The room was a pleasant one, at the top of the house, over-
looking the sea, on which the moon was shining brilliantly.
After I had said my prayers and the candle had burnt out, I
remember how I still sat looking at the moonlight on the
water, as if I could hope to read my fortune in it, as in a
bright book ; or to see my mother with her child, coming from
Heaven, along that shining path, to look upon me as she had
looked when I last saw her sweet face. I remember how the
solemn feeling with which at length I turned my eyes away,
yielded to the sensation of gratitude and rest which the sight of
the white-curtained bed — and how much more the lying softly
down upon it, nestling in the snow-white sheets ! — inspired. I
remember how I thought of all the solitary places under the
night sky where I had slept, and how I prayed that I never
might be houseless any more, and never might forget the
houseless. I remember how I seemed to float, then, down the
melancholy glory of that track upon the sea, away into the
world of dreams.

David Coppcrfield 187

CHAPTER XIV

MY AUNT MAKES UP HER MIND ABOUT ME

On going down in the morning, I found my aunt musing so
profoundly over the breakfast-table, with her elbow on the tray,
that the contents of the urn had overflowed the teapot and
were laying the whole table-cloth under water, when my entrance
put her meditations to flight. I felt sure that I had been the
subject of her reflections, and was more than ever anxious to
know her intentions towards me. Vet I dared not express my
anxiety, lest it should give her offence.

My eyes, however, not being so much under control as my
tongue, were attracted towards my aunt very often during
breakfast. I never could look at her for a few moments together
but I found her looking at me — in an odd thoughtful manner,
as if I were an immense way off, instead of being on the other
side of the small round table. When she had finished her
breakfast, my aunt very deliberately leaned back in her chair,
knitted her brows, folded her arms, and contemplated me at
her leisure, with such a fixedness of attention that I was quite
overpowered by embarrassment. Not having as yet finished
my own breakfast, I attempted to hide my confusion by pro-
ceeding with it ; but my knife tumbled over my fork, my fork
tripped up my knife, 1 chipped bits of bacon a surprising
height into the air instead of cutting them for my own eating,
and choked myself with my tea, which persisted in going the
wrong way instead of the right one, until I gave in altogether,
and sat blushing under my aunt's close scrutiny.

" Hallo ! " said my aunt, after a long time.

I looked up, and met her sharp bright glance respectfully.

" I have written to him," said my aunt.

"To—?"

" To your father-in-law," said my aunt. " I have sent him a
letter that I'll trouble him to attend to, or he and I will fall
out, I can tell him ! "

" Does he know where I am, aunt ? " I inquired, alarmed.

" I have told him," said my aunt, with a nod.

" Shall I — be — given up to him ? " I faltered.

*' I don't know," said my aunt. " We shall see."

" Oh ! I can't think what I shall do," I exclaimed, " if I have
tq go back to Mr. Murdstone 1 "

1 88 David Copperfield

" I don't know anything about it," said my aunt, shaking her
head. " I can't say, I am sure. We shall see."

My spirits sank under these words, and I became very down-
cast and heavy of heart. My aunt, without appearing to take
much heed of me, put on a coarse apron with a bib, which she
took out of the press ; washed up the teacups with her own
hands ; and, when everything was washed and set in the tray
again, and the cloth folded and put on the top of the whole,
rang for Janet to remove it. She next swept up the crumbs
with a little broom (putting on a pair of gloves first), until there
did not appear to be one microscopic speck left on the carpet ;
next dusted and arranged the room, which was dusted and
arranged to a hair's-breadth already. When all these tasks
were performed to her satisfaction, she took off the gloves and
apron, folded them up, put them in the particular corner of the
press from which they had been taken, brought out her work-
box to her own table in the open window, and sat down, with
the green fan between her and the light, to work.

" I wish you'd go up-stairs," said my aunt, as she threaded
her needle, "and give my compliments to Mr. Dick, and I'll
be glad to know how he gets on with his Memorial."

I rose with all alacrity, to acquit myself of this commission.
" I suppose," said my aunt, eyeing me as narrowly as she
had eyed the needle in threading it, " you think Mr. Dick a
short name, eh ? "

"I thought it was rather a short name, yesterday," I
confessed.

" You are not to suppose that he hasn't got a longer
name, if he chose to use it," said my aunt, with a loftier air.
" Babley — Mr. Richard Babley — that's the gentleman's true
name."

I was going to suggest, with a modest sense of my youth
and the familiarity I had been already guilty of, that I had
better give him the full benefit of that name, when my aunt
went on to say :

" But don't you call him by it, whatever you do. He can't
bear his name. That's a peculiarity of his. Though I don't
know that it's much of a peculiarity, either ; for he has been
iUdUSed enough, by some that bear it, to have a mortal antipathy
for i^^eaven knows. Mr. Dick is his name here, and every-
where else, now — if he ever went anywhere else, which he
don't. So take care, child, you don't call him anything but
Mr. Dick."

I promised to obey, and went upstairs with my message ;

David Copperfield 189

thinking, as I went, that if Mr. Dick had been working at his
Memorial long, at the same rate as I had seen him working
at it, through the open door, when I came down, he was
probably getting on very well indeed. I found him still
driving at it with a long pen, and his head almost laid upon
the paper. lie was so intent upon it, that I had ample
leisure to observe the large paper kite in a comer, the con-
fusion of bundles of manuscript, the number of pens, and,
above all, the quantity of ink (which he seemed to have in, in
half-gallon jars by the dozen), before he observed my being
present.

" Ha ! Phoebus ! " said Mr. Dick, laying down his pen.
" How does the world go ? I'll tell you what," he added, in
a lower tone, " I shouldn't wish it to be mentioned, but it's
a" — here he beckoned to me, and put his lips close to my
ear — " it!s_-a_mad _world. Mad as Bedlam, boy ! " said Mr.
Dick, taking snuff from a round box on the table, and laughing
heartily.

Without presuming to give my opinion on this question, I
delivered my message.

"Well," said Mr. Dick, in answer, "my compliments to her,
and I — I believe I have made a start. I think I have made a
start," said Mr. Dick, passing his hand among his grey hair,
and casting anything but a confident look at his manuscript.
" You have been to school ? "

" Yes, sir," I answered ; " for a short time."

"Do you recollect the date," said Mr. Dick, looking
earnestly at me, and taking up his pen to note it down, \
"when King Cbar4es the First had his head cut off?"

I said I believed it happened in the year sixteen hundred
and forty-nine.

" Well," returned Mr. Dick, scratching his ear with his pen,
and looking dubiously at me. " So the books say ; but I
don't see how that can be. Because, if it was so long ago,
how could the people about him have made that mistake of
putting some of the trouble out of his head, after it was taken
off, into mineV

I was very much surprised by the inquiry ; but could give
no information on this point.

" It's very strange," said Mr. Dick, with a despondent look
upon his papers, and with his hand among his hair again,
"that I never can get that quite right. I never can make
that perfectly clear. But no matter, no matter ! " he said
cheerfully, and rousing himself, " there's time enough ! My

igo David Copperfield

compliments to Miss Trotwood, I am getting on very well
indeed."

I was going away, when he directed my attention to the kite.

" What do you think of that for a kite ? " he said.

I answered that it was a beautiful one. I should think it
must have been as much as seven feet high.

** I made it. We'll go and fly it, you and I," said Mr. Dick.
" Do you see this ? "

He showed me that it was cover^-witli. jnanuscri pt, very
closely and laboriously written ; but so plainly, that as 1 looked
along the lines, I thought I saw some allusion to King Charles
the First's head again, in one or two places.
I "There's plenty of string," said Mr. Dick, "and when
fit flies high, it takes the facts a long way. That's my manner
of diffusing 'em. I don't know where they may come down.
It's according to circumstances, and the wind, and so forth ;
but I take my chance of that."

His face was so very mild and pleasant, and had something
so reverend in it, though it was hale and hearty, that I was
not sure but that he was having a good-humoured jest with me.
So I laughed, and he laughed, and we parted the best friends
possible.

" Well, child," said my aunt, when I went down-stairs.
" And what of Mr. Dick, this morning ? "

I informed her that he sent his compliments, and was
getting on very well indeed.

" What do you think of him ? " said my aunt.

I had some shadowy idea of endeavouring to evade the
question by replying that I thought him a very nice gentle-
man ; but my aunt was not to be so put off, for she laid her
work down in her lap, and said, folding her hands upon it :

" Come ! Your sister Betsey Trotwood would have told
me what she ThOugRt~bT~any-t)ner^ifectIy. Be as like your
sister as you can, and speak out I "

" Is he — is Mr. Dick — I ask because I don't know, aunt —
is he at all out of his mind, then ? " I stammered ; for I felt
I was on dangerous ground.

" Not a morsel," said my aunt.

" Oh, indeed I " I observed faintly.

" If there is anything in the world," said my aunt, with
great decision and force of manner, ''that Mr. Dick is not,
it's that."

I had nothing better to offer, than another timid "Oh,
indeed 1 "

David Copperfield 191

" He has been called mad," said my aunt. " I have a selfish
pleasure in saying he has been called mad, or I should not
have had the benefit of his society and advice for these last
ten years and upwards — in fact, ever since your sister, Betsey
Trotwood, disappointed me."

" So long as that ? " I said.

" And nice people they were, who had the audacity to call \
him mad," pursued my aunt. " Mr. Dick is a sort of distant j
connexion of mine ; it doesn't matter how ; I needn't enter j
into that. If it hadn't been for me, his own brother would I
have shut him up for life. That's all."

I am afraid it was hypocritical in me, but seeing that my
aunt felt strongly on the subject, I tried to look as if I felt
strongly too.

" A proud fool ! " said my aunt. " Because his brother
was a little eccentric — though he is not half so eccentric as
a good many people — he didn't like to have him visible
about his house, and sent him away to some private asylum-
place : though he had been left to his particular care by
their deceased father, who thought him almost a natural.
And a wise man he must have been to think him so ! Mad
himself, no doubt."

Again, as my aunt looked quite convinced, I endeavoured
to look quite convinced also.

" So I stepped in," said my aunt, " and made him an offer.
I said, 'Your brother's sane — a great deal more sane than
you are, or ever will be, it is to be hoped. Let him have
his little income, and come and live with me. / am not
afraid of him, / am not proud, / am ready to take care of
him, and shall not ill-treat him as some people (besides the
asylum-folks) have done.' After a good deal of squabbling,"
said my aunt, " I got him ; and he has been here ever since^
He is the most friendly and amenable creature in existence ; \ .
and as for advice ! — But njihndy km^wnyhpt thfft ~nT?r'^v-w^^«^ 1 ^^
is, except-myseK^" *

My aunt smoothed her dress and shook her head, as if she
smoothed defiance of the whole world out of the one, and
shook It out of the other.N

" He had a favourite sister," said my aunt, "a good creature,
and very kind to him. But she did what they all do — took a
husband. And he did what they all do — made her wretched.
It had such an effect upon the mind of Mr. Dick {thafs not
madness, I hope !) that, combined with his fear of his brother,
and his sense of his unkindness, it threw him into a fever.

192 David Copperfield

That was before he came to me, but the recollection of it is
oppressive to him even now. Did he say anything to you
about King Charles the First, child ? "

"Yes, aunt."

" Ah ! " said my aunt, rubbing her nose as if she were a
little vexed. " That's hi§_allegorical way of expressing it.
He connects his illness with great disturbance and agitation,
naturally, and that's the figure, or the simile, or whatever it's
called, which he chooses to use. And why shouldn't he, if
he thinks proper ? "

I said : " Certainly, aunt."

" It's not a business-like way of speaking," said my aunt,
" nor a worldly way. I am aware of that ; and that's the
reason why I insist upon it, that there shan't be a word about
it in his Memorial."

" Is it a Memorial about his own history that he is writing,
aunt ? "

" Yes, child," said my aunt, rubbing her nose again. " He
is memorialising the Lord Chancellor, or the Lord Somebody
or other — one of those people, at all events, who are paid to
he memorialised — about his affairs. I suppose it will go in,
one of these days. He hasn't been able to draw it up yet,
without introducing that mode of expressing himself; but it
don't signify ; Jt-i^eeps him employed."

In fact, I found out afterwards that Mr. Dick had been
for upwards of ten years endeavouring to keep King Charles
the First out of the Memorial; but he had been constantly
getting into it, and was there now.

"I say again," said my aunt, "nobody knows what that
man's mind is except myself; and he's the most amenable
and friendly creature in existence. If he likes to fly a kite
sometimes, what of that ! Franklin used to fly a kite. He
was a Quaker, or something of that sort, if I am not mistaken.
And a Quaker flying a kite is a much more ridiculous object
than anybody else."

If I could have supposed that my aunt had recounted these
particulars for my especial behoof, and as a piece of confi-
dence in me, I should have felt very much distinguished, and
should have augured favourably from such a mark of her good
opinion. But I could hardly help observing that she had
launched into them, chiefly because the question was raised
in her own mind, and with very little reference to me, though
she had addressed herself to me in the absence of anybody
else

David Copperfield 193

At the same time, I must say that the generosity of her
championship of poor harmless Mr. Dick, not only inspired
my young breast with some selfish hope for myself, but
warmed it unselfishly towards her. I believe that I began to
know that there was something about my aunt, notwithstanding
her many eccentricities and odd humours, to be honoured and
trusted in. Though she was just as sharp that day as on the
day before, and was in and out about the donkeys just as often,
and was thrown into a tremendous state of indignation, when
a young man, going by, ogled Janet at a window (which was
one of the gravest misdemeanours that could be committed
against my aunt's dignity), she seemed to me to command
more of my respect, if not less of my fear.

The anxiety I underwent, in the interval which necessarily
elapsed before a reply could be received to her letter to Mr.
Murdstone, was extreme ; but I made an endeavour to sup-
press it, and to be as agreeable as I could in a quiet way, both
to my aunt and Mr. Dick. The latter and I would have gone
out to fly the great kite ; but that I had still no other clothes
than the anything but ornamental garments with which I had
been decorated on the first day, and which confined me to
the house, except for an hour after dark, when my aunt, for
my health's sake, paraded me up and down on the cliff outside
before going to bed. At length the reply from Mr. Murdstone
came, and my aunt informed me, to my infinite terror, that he
was coming to speak to her himself on the next day. On the
next day, still bundled up in my curious habiliments, I sat
counting the time, flushed and heated by the conflict of sinking
hopes and rising fears within me ; and waiting to be startled
by the sight of the gloomy face whose non-arrival startled me
every minute.

My aunt was a little more imperious and stem than usual,
but I observed no other token of her preparing herself to
receive the visitor so much dreaded by me. She sat at work
in the window, and I sat by, with my thoughts running astray
on all possible and impossible results of Mr. Murdstone's visit,
until pretty late in the afternoon. Our dinner had been in-
definitely postponed ; but it was growing so late, that my aunt
had ordered it to be got ready, when she gave a sudden alarm
of donkeys, and to my consternation and amazement, I beheld
Miss Murdstone, on a side-saddle, ride deliberately over the
sacred piece of green, and stop in front of the house, looking
about her.

" Go along with you 1 " cried my aunt, shaking her head and

194 David Copperfield

her fist at the window. " You have no business there. How
dare you trespass ? Go along ! Oh ! you bold-faced thing ! "

My aunt was so exasperated by the coolness with which
Miss Murdstone looked about her, that I really believe she
was motionless, and unable for the moment to dart out
according to custom. I seized the opportunity to inform her
who it was; and that the gentleman now coming near the
offender (for the way up was very steep, and he had dropped
behind), was Mr. Murdstone himself.

" I don't care who it is ! " cried my aunt, still shaking her
head, and gesticulating anything but welcome from the bow-
window. "I won't be trespassed upon. I won't allow it.
Go away! Janet, turn him round. Lead him off!" and I
saw, from behind my aunt, a sort of hurried battle-piece, in
which the donkey stood resisting everybody, with all his four
legs planted different ways, while Janet tried to pull him round
by the bridle, Mr. Murdstone tried to lead him on. Miss Murd-
stone struck at Janet with a parasol, and several boys, who
had come to see the engagement, shouted vigorously. But
my aunt, suddenly descrying among them the young male-
factor who was the donkey's guardian, and who was one of the
most inveterate offenders against her, though hardly in his
teens, rushed out to the scene of action, pounced upon him,
captured him, dragged him, with his jacket over his head and
his heels grinding the ground, into the garden, and, calling
upon Janet to fetch the constables and justices, that he might
be taken, tried, and executed on the spot, held him at bay
there. This part of the business, however, did not last long ;
for the young rascal, being expert at a variety of feints and
dodges, of which my aunt had no conception, soon went
whooping away, leaving some deep impressions of his nailed
boots in the flower-beds, and taking his donkey in triumph
with him.

Miss Murdstone, durmg the latter portion of the contest, "
had dismounted, and was now waiting with her brother at the
bottom of the steps, until my aunt should be at leisure to
receive them. My aunt, a little ruffled by the combat, marched
past them into the house, with great dignity, and took no
notice of their presence, until they were announced by Janet.

" Shall I go away, aunt ? " I asked, trembling.

"No, sir," said my aunt. "Certainly not!" With which
she pushed me into a corner near her, and fenced me in with
a chair, as if it were a prison or a bar of justice. This
position I continued to occupy during the whole interview,

David Copperfield 195

and from it I now saw Mr. and Miss Murdstone enter the
room.

" Oh ! " said my aunt, " I was not aware at first to whom I
had the pleasure of objecting. But I don't allow anybody to
ride over that turf. I make no exceptions. I don't allow
anybody to do it."

" Your regulation is rather awkward to strangers," said Miss
Murdstone. ,

" Is it ? " said my aunt.

Mr. Murdstone seemed afraid of a renewal of hostilities, and
interposing began :

"MissTrotwood!"

" I beg your pardon," observed my aunt with a keen look.
"You are the Mr. Murdstone who married the widow of my
late nephew, David Copperfield, of Blunderstone Rookery ? —
Though why Rookery, / don't know I "

" I am," said Mr. Murdstone.

" You'll excuse my saying, sir," returned my aunt, " that I
think it would have been a much better and happier thing if
you had let that poor child alone."

" I so far agree with what Miss Trotwood has remarked,"
observed Miss Murdstone, bridling, "that I consider our
lamented Clara to have been, in all essential respects, a mere
child." _

"It is a comfort to you and me, ma'am," said my aunt,
"who are getting on in life, and are not likely to be made
unhappy by our personal attractions, that nobody can say the
same of us."

" No doubt ! " returned Miss Murdstone, though, I thought,
not with a very ready or gracious assent. " And it certainly
might have been, as you say, a better and happier thing for my
brother if he had never entered into such a marriage. I have
always been of that opinion."

"I have no doubt you have," said my aunt. "Janet,"
ringing the bell, " my compliments to Mr. Dick, and beg him
to come down."

Until he came, my aunt sat perfectly upright and stiff,
frowning at the wall. When he came, my aunt performed the
ceremony of introduction.

" Mr. Dick. An old and intimate friend. On whose judg-
ment," said my aunt, with emphasis, as an admonition to Mr.
Dick, who was biting his forefinger and looking rather foolish,
"I rely."

Mr. Dick took his finger out of his mouth, on this hint, and

196 David Copperfield

stood among the group, with a grive and attentive expression
of face. My aunt inclined her head to Mr. Murdstone, who
went on :

"Miss Trotwood. On the receipt of your letter, I con-
sidered it an act of greater justice to myself, and perhaps of
more respect to you "

" Thank you," said my aunt, still eyeing him keenly. " You
needn't mind me."

" To answer it in person, however inconvenient the journey,"
pursued Mr. Murdstone, " rather than by letter. This unhappy
boy who has run away from his friends and his occupation "

"And whose appearance," interposed his sister, directing
general attention to me in my indefinable costume, " is perfectly
scandalous and disgraceful."

"Jane Murdstone," said her brother, "have the goodness
not to interrupt me. This unhappy boy, Miss Trotwood, has
been the occasion of much domestic trouble and uneasiness ;
both during the lifetime of my late dear wife, and since. He
has a sullen, rebellious spirit ; a violent temper ; and an un-
toward, intractable disposition. Both my sister and myself have
endeavoured to correct his vices, but ineffectually. And I
have felt — we both have felt, I may say ; my sister being fully
in my confidence — that it is right you should receive this
grave and dispassionate assurance from our lips."

"It can hardly be necessary for me to confirm anything
stated by my brother," said Miss Murdstone ; " but I beg to
observe, that, of all the boys in the world, I believe this is thfe_
worst boy."

*' Strong ! " said my aunt, shortly.

"But not at all too strong for the facts," returned Miss
Murdstone.

" Ha ! " said my aunt. " Well, sir ? "

" I have my own opinions," resumed Mr. Murdstone, whose
face darkened more and more, the more he • and my aunt
observed each other, which they did very narrowly, "as to
the best mode of bringing him up; they are founded, in part,
on my knowledge of him, and in part on my knowledge of my
own means and resources. I am responsible for them to myself,
I act upon them, and I say no more about them. It is enough
that I place this boy under the eye of a friend of my own, in a
respectable business ; that it does not please him ; that he runs
away from it ; makes himself a common vagabond about the
country; and comes here, in rags, to appeal to you, Miss
Trotwood. X wish to set before you, honourably, the exact

David Copperfield 197

consequences — so far as they are within my knowledge — of
your abetting him in this appeal."

" But about the respectable business first," said my aunt.
" If he had been your own boy, you would have put him to it,
just the same, I suppose ? "

"If he had been my brother's own boy," returned Miss
Murdstone, striking in, " his character, I trust, would have been
altogether different."

" Or if the poor child, his mother, had been alive, he would
still have gone into the respectable business, would he ? " said
my aunt.

" I believe," said Mr. Murdstone, with an inclination of his
head, "that Clara would have disputed nothing which myself
and my sister Jane Murdstone were agreed was for the best."
Miss Murdstone confirmed this with an audible murmur.
" Humph ! " said my aunt, " Unfortunate baby ! " "^

Mr. Dick, who had been rattling his money all this time, was
rattling it so loudly now, that my aunt felt it necessary to check
him with a look, before saying :

" The poor child's annuity died with her ? "
" Died with her," replied Mr. Murdstone.
"And there was no settlement of the little property — the
house and garden — the what's-its-name Rookery without any
rooks in it — upon her boy?"

" It had been left to her, unconditionally, by her first husband,"
Mr. Murdstone began, when my aunt caught him up with the
greatest irascibility and impatience. ^^

" Good Lord, man, there's no occasion to say that. Left to^
her unconditionally ! I think I see David Copperfield looking |
forward to any condition of any sort or kind, though it stared
him point-blank in the face ! Of course it was left to her
unconditionally. But when she married again — when she took
that most disastrous step of marrying you, in short," said my
aunt, "to be plain — did no one put in a word for the boy at
that time?"

" My late wife loved her second husband, ma'am," said
Murdstone, "and trusted implicitly in him."

" Your late wife, sir, was a most unworldly, most unhappy,
most unfortunate baby," returned my aunt, shaking her head at
him. " That's what she was. And now, what have you got to
say next ? "

" Merely this. Miss Trotwood," he returned. " I am here to
take David back ; to take him back unconditionally, to dispose
dm as I think proper, and to deal with him as I think right.

198 David Copperfield

I am not here to make any promise, or give any pledge to
anybody. You may possibly have some idea, Miss Trotwood,
of abetting him in his running away, and in his complaints to
you. Your manner, which I must say does not seem intended
to propitiate, induces me to think it possible. Now I must
caution you that if you abet him once, you abet him for good
and all ; if you step in between him and me, now, you must
step in, Miss Trotwood, for ever. I cannot trifle, or be trifled
with. I am here, for the first and last time, to take him away.
Is he ready to go ? If he is not — and you tell me he is not ;
on any pretence; it is indifferent to me what — my doors are
shut against him henceforth, and yours, I take it for granted,
are open to him."

To this address, my aunt had Hstened with the closest atten-
tion, sitting perfectly upright, with her hands folded on one
knee, and looking grimly on the speaker. When he had
finished, she turned her eyes so as to command Miss Murdstone,
without otherwise disturbing her attitude, and said :

" Well, ma'am, have you got anything to remark ? "

" Indeed, Miss Trotwood," said Miss Murdstone, " all that I
could say has been so well said by my brother, and all that I know
to be the fact has been so plainly stated by him, that I have
nothing to add except my thanks for your politeness. For your
very great politeness, I am sure," said Miss Murdstone ; with an
irony which no more affected my aunt than it discomposed the
cannon I had slept by at Chatham.

" And what does the boy say ? " said my aunt. " Are you
ready to go, David ? "

I answered no, and entreated her not to let me go. I said
that neither Mr. nor Miss Murdstone had ever liked me, or had
ever been kind to me. That they had made my mama, who
always loved me dearly, unhappy about me, and that I knew it
well, and that Peggotty knew it. I said that I had been more
miserable than I thought anybody could believe who only
knew how young I was. And I begged and prayed my aunt —
I forget in what terms now, but I remember that they aff'ected
me very much then — to befriend and protect me, for my father's
sake.

" Mr. Dick," said my aunt ; " what shall I do with this
child?"

Mr. Dick considered, hesitated, brightened, and rejoined;
"Have him measured for a suit of clothes directly."

" Mr. Dick," said my aunt triumphantly, " give me your hand,
for your common sense is invaluable." Having shaken it with

David Copperfield 199

great cordiality, she pulled me towards her and said to Mr.
Murdstone :

" You can go when you like ; I'll take my chance with the
boy. If he's all you say he is, at least I can do as much for
him then, as you have done. But I don't believe a word Jy
of it." ^

" Miss Trotwood," rejoined Mr. Murdstone, shrugging his
shoulders, as he rose, "if you were a gentleman "

" Bah ! Stuff and nonsense ! " said my aunt. " Don't talk
to me!"

" How exquisitely polite ! " exclaimed Miss Murdstone, rising.
" Overpowering, really ! "

" Do you think I don't know," said my aunt, turning a deaf
ear to the sister, and continuing to address the brother, and to
shake her head at him with infinite expression, " what kind of
life you must have led that poor, unhappy, misdirected baby ?
Do you think I don't know what a woeful day it was for the
soft little creature when you first came in her way — smirking
and making great eyes at her, I'll be bound, as if you couldn't
say boh ! to a goose ! "

" I never heard anything so elegant ! " said Miss Murdstone.

" Do you think I can't understand you as well as if I had
seen you," pursued my aunt, " now that I do see and hear you
— which I tell you candidly, is anything but a pleasure to me ?
Oh yes, bless us ! who so smooth and silky as Mr. Murdstone
at first ! The poor, benighted innocent had never seen such a
man. He was made of sweetness. He worshipped her. He
doted on her boy — tenderly doted on him ! He was to be
another father to him, and they were all to live together in a
garden of roses, weren't they ? Ugh ! Get along with you,
do I " said my aunt.

"I never heard anything like this person in my life!"
exclaimed Miss Murdstone.

" And when you had made sure of the poor little fool," said
my aunt — " God forgive me that I should call her so, and she
gone where you won't go in a hurry — because you had not
done wrong enough to her and hers, you must begin to train
her, must you ? begin to break her, like a poor caged bird, and
wear her deluded life away, in teaching her to sing your
notes ? "

" This is either insanity or intoxication," said Miss Murdstone,
in a perfect agony at not being able to turn the current of my
aunt's address towards herself ; " and my suspicion is that it's
intoxication."

200 David Copperfield

Miss Betsey, without taking the least notice of the interruption,
continued to address herself to Mr. Murdstone as if there had
been no such thing.

" Mr. Murdstone," she said, shaking her finger at him, " you
were a tyrant to the simple baby, and you broke her heart.
She was a loving baby — I know that ; I knew it years before
you ever saw her — and through the best part of her weakness
you gave her the wounds she died of. There is the truth for your
comfort, however you like it. And you and your instruments
may make the most of it."

"Allow me to inquire, Miss Trotwood," interposed Miss
Murdstone, " whom you are pleased to call, in a choice of words
in which I am not experienced, my brother's instruments ? "

Still stone-deaf to the voice, and utterly unmoved by it, Miss
Betsey pursued her discourse.

" It was clear enough, as I have told you, years before you
'\ever saw her — and why, in the mysterious dispensations of
^Providence, you ever did see her, is more than humanity can
comprehend — it was clear enough that the poor soft little thing
would marry somebody, at some time or other ; but I did hope
it wouldn't have been as bad as it has turned out. That was
the time, Mr. Murdstone, when she gave birth to her boy here,"
said my aunt ; " to the poor child you sometimes tormented
her through afterwards, which is a disagreeable remembrance,
.and makes the sight of him odious now. Aye, aye ! you
(needn't wince 1 " said my aunt. " I know it's true without
that."

He had stood by the door, all this while, observant of her,
with a smile upon his face, though his black eyebrows were
heavily contracted. I remarked now, that, though the smile
was on his face still, his colour had gone in a moment, and he
seemed to breathe as if he had been running.

"Good day, sir," said my aunt, "and good-bye ! Good day
to you, too, ma'am," said my aunt, turning suddenly upon his
sister. " Let me see you ride a donkey over my green again,
and as sure as you have a head upon your shoulders, I'll knock
your bonnet off, and tread upon it ! "

It would require a painter, and no common painter too,
to depict my aunt's face as she delivered herself of this very
unexpected sentiment, and Miss Murdstone's face as she
heard it. But the manner of the speech, no less than the
matter, was so fiery, that Miss Murdstone, without a word
in answer, discreetly put her arm through her brother's, and
walked haughtily out of the cottage; my aunt remaining in

David Copperfield 201

the window looking after them; prepared, I have no doubt,
in case of the donkey's reappearance, to carry her threat into
instant execution.

No attempt at defiance being made, however, her face
gradually relaxed, and became so pleasant, that I was em-
boldened to kiss and thank her ; which I did with great
heartiness, and with both my arms clasped round her neck.
I then shook hands with Mr. Dick, who shook hands with
me a great many times, and hailed this happy close of the
proceedings with repeated bursts of laughter.

" You'll consider yourself guardian, jointly with me, of this
child, Mr. Dick," said my aunt.

" I shall be delighted," said Mr. Dick, " to be the guardian
of David's son."

"Very good," returned my aunt, '■^thafs settled. I have
been thinking, do you know, Mr. Dick, that_l_might- call-bim
Trotwood ? "

^^TTertainly, certainly. Call him Trotwood, certainly," said
Mr. Dick. " David's son's Trotwood."

" Trotwood Copperfield, you mean," returned my aunt.

"Yes, to be sure. Yes. Trotwood Copperfield," said Mr.
Dick, a little abashed.

My aunt took so kindly to the notion, that some ready-
made clothes, which were purchased for me that afternoon,
were marked "Trotwood Copperfield," in her own hand-
writing, and in indelible marking-ink, before I put them
on; and it was settled that all the other clothes which were
ordered to be made for me (a complete outfit was bespoke
that afternoon) should be marked in the same way.

Thus I began my new life, in a new name, and with every-
thing new about me. Now that the state of doubt was over, I
felt, for many days, like one in a dream. I never thought that
I had a curious couple of guardians, in my aunt and Mr. Dick.
I never thought of anything about myself, distinctly. The two
things clearest in my mind were, that a remoteness had come
upon the old Blunderstone life — which seemed to lie in th^
haze of an immeasurable distance ; and that a curtain had for
ever fallen on my life at Murdstone and Grinby's. No one has
ever raised that curtain since. I have lifted it for a moment,
even in this narrative, with a reluctant hand, and dropped it
gladly. The remembrance of that life is fraught with so much
pain to me, with so much mental suffering and want of hope,
that I have never had the courage even to examine how long I
was doomed to lead it. Whether it lasted for a year, or more,

202 David Copperfield

or less, I do not know. I only know that it was, and ceased
to be ; and that I have written, and there I leave it.

CHAPTER XV

I MAKE ANOTHER BEGINNING

Mr. Dick and I soon became the best of friends, and very
often, when his day's work was done, went out together to
fly the great kite. Every day of his life he had a long sitting
at the Memorial, which never made the. least progress, how-
ever hard he laboured, for King Charles the First always
strayed into it, sooner or later, and then it was thrown aside,
and another one begun. The patience and hope with which
he bore these perpetual disappointments, the mild perception
he had that there was something wrong about King Charles
the First, the feeble efforts he made to keep him out, and the
certainty with which he came in, and tumbled the Memorial
out of all shape, made a deep impression on me. What Mr.
Dick supposed would come of the Memorial, if it were com-
pleted; where he thought it was to go, or what he thought
it was to do ; he knew no more than anybody else, I believe.
Nor was it at all necessary that he should trouble himself with
such questions, for if anything were certain under the sun, it
was certain that the Memorial never would be finished.

It was quite an affecting sight, I used to think, to see him
with the kite when it was up a great height in the air. What
he had told me, in his room, about his belief in its dissemin-
ating the statements pasted on it, which were nothing but old
leaves of abortive Memorials, might have been a fancy with
him sometimes ; but not when he was out, looking up at the
kite in the sky, and feeling it pull and tug at his hand. He
never looked so serene as he did then. I used to fancy, as
I sat by him of an evening, on a green slope, and saw him
watch the kite high in the quiet air, that it lifted his mind out
of its confusion, and bore it (such was my boyish thought)
into the skies. As he wound the string in, and it came lower
and lower down out of the beautiful light, until it fluttered
to the ground, and lay there like a dead thing, he seemed
to wake gradually out of a dream ; and I remember to have
seen him take it up, and look about him in a lost way, as

David Copperfield 203

if they had both come down together, so that I pitied him
with all my heart.

While I advanced in friendship and intimacy with Mr. Dick,
I did not go backward in the favour of his staunch friend, my
aunt. She took so kindly to me, that, in the course of a few
weeks, she shortened my adopted name of Trotwood into
Trot ; and even encouraged me to hope, that if I went on as I
had begun, I might take equal rank in her affections with my
sister Betsey Trotwood.

"Trot," said my aunt one evening, when the backgammon-
board was placed as usual for herself and Mr. Dick, " we must
not forget your education."

This was my only subject of anxiety, and I felt quite
delighted by her referring to it.

" Should you like to go to school at Canterbury ? " said my
aunt.

I replied that I should like it very much, as it was so near
her.

" Good," said my aunt. " Should you like to go to-
morrow ? "

Being already no stranger to the general rapidity of my
aunt's evolutions, I was not surprised by the suddenness of
the proposal, and said : " Yes."

"Good," said my aunt again. "Janet, hire the grey pony
and chaise to-morrow morning at ten o'clock, and pack up
Master Trot wood's clothes to-night"

I was greatly elated by these orders ; but my heart smote me
for my selfishness, when I witnessed their effect on Mr. Dick,
who was so low-spirited at the prospect of our separation, and
played so ill in consequence, that my aunt, after giving him
several admonitory raps on the knuckles with her dice-box, shut
up the board, and declined to play with him any more. But,
on hearing from my aunt that I should sometimes come over
on a Saturday, and that he could sometimes come and see me
on a Wednesday, he revived ; and vowed to make another kite
for those occasions, of proportions greatly surpassing the present
one. In the morning he was down-hearted again, and would
have sustained himself by giving me all the money he had in
his possession, gold and silver too, if my aunt had not inter-
posed, and limited the gift to five shillings, which, at his
earnest petition, were afterwards increased to ten. We parted
at the garden-gate in a most affectionate manner, and Mr.
Dick did not go into the house until my aunt had driven me
out of sight of it

204 David Copperfield

My aunt, who was perfectly indifferent to public opinion,
drove the grey pony through Dover in a masterly manner ;
sitting high and stiff like a state coachman, keeping a steady
eye upon him wherever he went, and making a point of not
letting him have his own way in any respect. When we came
into the country road, she permitted him to relax a little, how-
ever ; and looking at me down in a valley of cushion by her
side, asked me whether I was happy?

" Very happy indeed, thank you, aunt," I said.

She was much gratified ; and both her hands being occupied,
patted me on the head with her whip.

" Is it a large school, aunt ? " I asked.

" Why, I don't know," said my aunt. " We are going to Mr.
Wickfield's first."

" Does he keep a school ? " I asked.

" No, Trot," said my aunt. " He keeps an office."

I asked for no more information about Mr. Wickfield, as she
offered none, and we conversed on other subjects until we came
to Canterbury, where, as it was market-day, my aunt had a
great opportunity of insinuating the grey pony among carts,
baskets, vegetables, and hucksters' goods. The hair-breadth
turns and twists we made, drew down upon us a variety of
speeches from the people standing about, which were not
always complimentary ; but my aunt drove on with perfect
indifference, and I dare say would have taken her own way
with as much coolness through an enemy's country.

At length we stopped before a very old house bulging out
over the road ; a house with long low lattice-windows bulging
out still farther, and beams with carved heads on the ends
bulging out too, so that I fancied the whole house was leaning
forward, trying to see who was passing on the narrow pavement
below. It was quite spotless in its cleanliness. The old fash-
ioned brass knocker on the low arched door, ornamented with
carved garlands of fruit and flowers, twinkled like a star ; the
two stone steps descending to the door were as white as if they
had been covered with fair linen ; and all the angles and corners,
and carvings and mouldings, and quaint little panes of glass,
and quainter little windows, though as old as the hills, were as
pure as any snow that ever fell upon the hills.

When the pony-chaise stopped at the door, and my eyes were
intent upon the house, I saw a cadaverous face appear at a small
window on the ground floor (in a little found tower that formed
one side of the house), and quickly disappear. The low arched
door then opened, and the face came out. It was quite as

David Copperfield 205

cadaverous as it had looked in the window, though in the grain
of it there was that tinge of red which is sometimes to be
observed in the skins of red-haired people. It belonged to a
red-haired person — a youth of fifteen, as I take it now, but
looking much older — whose hair was cropped as close as the
closest stubble ; who had hardly any eyebrows, and no eye- 1
lashes, and eyes of a red-brown, so unsheltered and unshaded, (
tliat I remember wondering how he went to sleep. He was
high-shouldered and bony ; dressed in decent black, with a white
wisp of a neckcloth ; buttoned up to the throat ; and had a long,
lank, skeleton hand, which particularly attracted my attention,
as he stood at the pony's head, rubbing his chin with it, and
looking up at us in the chaise.

"Is Mr. Wickfield at home, Uriah Heep ? " said my aunt.

" Mr. Wickfield's at home, ma'am," said Uriah Heep, " if
you'll please to walk in there : " pointing with hislong hand to
the room he meant. ^

We got out ; and leaving him to hold the pony, went into a
long low parlour looking towards the street, from the window of
which I caught a glimpse, as I went in, of Uriah Heep breath-
ing into the pony's nostrils, and immediately covering them with
his hand, as if he were putting some spell upon him. Opposite
to the tall old chimney-piece were two portraits : one of a
gentleman with grey hair (though not by any means an old
man) and black eyebrows, who was looking over some papers
tied together with red tape ; the other, of a lady, with a very
placid and sweet expression of face, who was looking at me.

I believe I was turning about in search of Uriah's picture,
when, a door at the farther end of the room opening, a gentle-
man entered, at sight of whom I turned to the first-mentioned
portrait again, to make quite sure that it had not come out
of its frame. But it was stationary : and as the gentleman
advanced into the light, I saw that he was some years oldei
than when he had had his picture painted.

"Miss Betsey Trotwood," said the gentleman, "pray walk in.
I was engaged for a moment, but you'll excuse my being busy.
You know my motive. I have but one in life."

Miss Betsey thanked him, and we went into his room, which
v/as furnished as an office, with books, papers, tin boxes, and so
forth. It looked into a garden, and had an iron safe let into
the wall ; so immediately over the mantelshelf, that I wondered,
as I sat down, how the sweeps got round it when they swept
the chimney.

"Well, Miss Trotwood," said Mr. Wickfield; for I soon

2o6 David Copperfield

found that it was he, and that he was a lawyer, and steward of
the estates of a rich gentleman of the county; "what wind
blows you here ? Not an ill wind, I hope ? "

" No," replied my aunt, " I have not come for any law."

"That's right, ma'am," said Mr. Wickfield. "You had
better come for anything else."

His hair was quite white now, though his eyebrows were still
black. He had a very agreeable face, and, I thought, was hand-
some. There was a certain richness in his complexion, which I
had been long accustomed, under Peggotty's tuition, to connect
with port wine ; and I fancied it was in his voice too, and
referred his growing corpulency to the same cause. He was
very cleanly dressed, in a blue coat, striped waistcoat, and nan-
keen trousers ; and his fine frilled shirt and cambric neckcloth
looked unusually soft and white, reminding my strolling fancy
(I call to mind) of the plumage on the breast of a swan.

" This is my nephew," said my aunt.

" Wasn't aware you had one. Miss Trotwood," said Mr.
Wickfield.

" My grand-nephew, that is to say," observed my aunt.

" Wasn't aware you had a grand-nephew, I give you my
word," said Mr. Wickfield.

" I have adopted him," said my aunt, with a wave of her
hand, importing that his knowledge and his ignorance were all
one to her, "and I have brought him here, to put him to a
school where he may be thoroughly well taught, and well treated.
Now tell me where that school is, and what it is, and all
about it."

" Before I can advise you properly," said Mr. Wickfield, —
" the old question, you know. What's your motive^in this ? "

" Deuce take the man ! " exclaimed my aunt. " Always
fishing for motives, when they're on the surface ! Why, to
make the child happy and useful."

" It must be a mixed motive, I think," said Mr. Wickfield,
shaking his head and smiling incredulously.

"A mixed fiddlestick," returned my aunt. "You claim to
have one plain motive in all you do yourself. You don't sup-
pose, I hope, that you are the only plain dealer in the world ? "

"Ay, but I have o»ly-one motive irrjIlQ^--Miss Trotwood,"
he rejoined, smiling." '' OlHef people have dozens, scores,
hundreds. I have only one. There's the difference. How-
ever, that's beside the question. The best school ? Whatever
the motive, you want the best ? "

My aunt nodded assent.

David Copperfield 207

" At the best we have," said Mr. Wickfield, considering, " your
nephew couldn't board just now,"

•' But he could board somewhere else, I suppose ? " suggested
my aunt.

Mr. Wickfield thought I could. After a little discussion, he
proposed to take my aunt to the school, that she might see it
and judge for herself; also, to take her, with the same object,
to two or three houses where he thought I could be boarded.
My aunt embracing the proposal, we were all three going out
together, when he stopped and said :

" Our little friend here might have some motive, perhaps, for
objecting to the arrangements. I think we had better leave him
behind ? "

My aunt seemed disposed to contest the point ; but to
facilitate matters I said I would gladly remain behind, if they
pleased ; and returned into Mr. Wickfield's office, where I sat
down again, in the chair I had first occupied, to await their
return.

It so happened that this chair was opposite a narrow passage,
which ended in the little circular room where I had seen Uriah
Heep's pale face looking out of window. Uriah, having
taken the pony to a neighbouring stable, was at work at a
desk in this room, which had a brass frame on the top to hang
paper upon, and on which the writing he was making a copy of
was then hanging. Though his face was towards me, I thought,
for some time, the writing being between us, that he could not see
me ; but looking that way more attentively, it made me uncom-
fortable to observe that, every now and then, his sleepless eyes
would come below the writing, like two red suns, and stealthily
stare at me for I dare say a whole minute at a time, during
which his pen went, or pretended to go, as cleverly as ever. I
made several attempts to get out of their way — such as standing
on a chair to look at a map on the other side of the room, and
poring over the columns of a Kentish newspaper — but they
always attracted me back again ; and whenever I looked towards
those two red suns, I was sure to find them, either just rising
or just setting.

At length, much to my relief, my aunt and Mr. Wickfield
came back, after a pretty long absence. They were not so
successful as I could have wished ; for though the advantages
of the school were undeniable, my aunt had not approved of
any of the boarding-houses proposed for me.

" It's very unfortunate," said my aunt. " I don't know what
to do, Trot"

2o8 David Copperfield

" It does happen unfortunately," said Mr. Wickfield. " But
I'll tell you what you can do, Miss Trotwood."

" What's that ? " inquired my aunt.

" Leave your nephew here, for the present. He's a quiet
fellow. He won't disturb me at all. It's a capital house for
study. As quiet as a monastery, and almost as roomy. Leave
him here."

My aunt evidently liked the offer, though she was delicate of
accepting it. So did I.

" Come, Miss Trotwood," said Mr. Wickfield. " This is the
way out of the difficulty. It's only a temporary arrangement,
you know. If it don't act well, or don't quite accord with our
mutual convenience, he can easily go to the right-about
There will be time to find some better place for him in the
meanwhile. You had better determine to leave him here for
the present ! "

" I am very much obliged to you," said my aunt ; " and so
is he, I see ; but "

"Come! I know what you mean," cried Mr. Wickfield.
" You shall not be oppressed by the receipt of favours, Miss
Trotwood. You may pay for him, if you like. We won't be
hard about terms, but you shall pay if you will."

" On that understanding," said my aunt, " though it doesn't
lessen the real obligation, I shall be very glad to leave him."

"Then come and see my little housekeeper," said Mr.
Wickfield.

We accordingly went up a wonderful old staircase; with a
balustrade so broad that we might have gone up that, almost
as easily ; and into a shady old drawing-room, lighted by some
three or four of the quaint windows I had looked up at from
the street : which had old oak seats in them, that seemed to
have come of the same trees as the shining oak floor, and the
great beams in the ceiling. It was a prettily furnished room,
with a piano and some lively furniture in red and green, and
some flowers. It seemed to be all old nooks and corners ;
and in every nook and corner there was some queer little table,
or cupboard, or bookcase, or seat, or something or other, that
made me think there was not such another good corner in the
room ; until I looked at the next one, and found it equal to it,
if not better. On everything there was the same air of retirement
and cleanliness that marked the house outside.

Mr. Wickfield tapped at a door in a corner of the panelled
wall, and a girl of about my own age came quickly out and
kissed him. On her face, I saw immediately the placid^-atid

David Copperfield 209

§^(^£t-.«(pression of the lady whose picture had looked at me
down-stairs. It seemed to my imagination as if the portrait
had grown womanly, and the original remained a child. Al-
though her face was quite bright and happy, there was a
tranquillity about it, and about her — a quiet, good, calm spirit,
— that I never have forgotten ; that I never shall forget.

This was his little housekeeper, his daughter Agnes, Mr.
Wickfield said. When I heard how he said it, and saw
how he held her hand, I guessed what the one motive oi^
his life was.

She had a little basket-trifle hanging at her side, with keys in
it ; and she looked as staid and as discreet a housekeeper as
the old house could have. She listened to her father as he
told her about me, with a pleasant face; and when he had
concluded, proposed to my aunt that we should go up-stairs
and see my room. We all went together, she before us. A
glorious old room it was, with more oak beams, and diamond
panes ; and the broad balustrade going all the way up to it.

I cannot call to mind where or when, in my childhood, I
had seen a stained glass window in a church. Nor do I
recollect its subject. But I know that when I saw her turn
round, in the grave light of the old staircase, and wait
for us, above, I thought of that window; and I associated
something of its tranquil brightness with Agnes Wickfield ever
afterwards.

My aunt was as happy as I was in the arrangement made
for me, and we went down to the drawing-room again, well
pleased and gratified. As she would not hear of staying to
dinner, lest she should by any chance fail to arrive at home
with the grey pony before dark ; and as I apprehend Mr.
Wickfield knew her too well to argue any point with her ;
some lunch was provided for her there, and Agnes went back
to her governess, and Mr. Wickfield to his office. So we were
left to take leave of one another without any restraint.

She told me that everything would be arranged for me by
Mr. Wickfield, and that I should want for nothing, and gave
me the kindest words and the best advice.

"Trot," said my aunt in conclusion, "be a credit to your-
self, to me, and Mr. Dick, and Heaven be with you ! "

I was gready overcome, and could only thank her, again and
again, and send my love to Mr. Dick.

" Never," said my aunt, " be mean in anything ; never be
false ; never be cruel. Avoid those three vices, Trot, and I
can always be hopeful of you."

2IO David Copperfield

I promised, as well as I could, that I would not abuse her
kindness or forget her admonition.

" The pony's at the door," said my aunt, " and I am off f '
Stay here."

With these words she embraced me hastily, and went out of

the room, shutting the door after her. At first I was startled

by so abrupt a departure, and almost feared I had displeased

her ; but when I looked into the street, and saw how dejectedly

\ she got into the chaise, and drove away without looking up, I

/' understood her better, and did not do her that injustice.

By five o'clock, which was Mr. Wickfield's dinner-hour, I
had mustered up my spirits again, and was ready for my knife
and fork. The cloth was only laid for us two ; but Agnes was
waiting in the drawing-room before dinner, went down with her
father, and sat opposite to him at table. I doubted whether he
could have dined without her.

We did not stay there, after dinner, but came up-stairs into
the drawing-room again : in one snug corner of which, Agnes
set glasses for her father, and a decanter of port wine. I
thought he would have missed its usual flavour, if it had been
put there for him by any other hands.
/ There he sat, taking his wine, and taking a good deal of it,
i for two hours ; while Agnes played on the piano, worked, and
talked to him and me. He was, for the most part, gay and
cheerful with us ; but sometimes his eyes rested on her, and he
fell into a brooding state, and was silent. She always observed
this quickly, I thought, and always roused him with a question
or caress. Then he came out of his meditation, and drank
more wine.

Agnes made the tea, and presided over it; and the time
passed away after it, as after dinner, until she went to bed;
when her father took her in his arms and kissed her, and, she
being gone, ordered candles in his office. Then I went to
bed too.

But in the course of the evening I had rambled down to the
door, and a little way along the street, that I might have
another peep at the old houses, and the grey Cathedral ; and
might think of my coming through that old city on my journey,
and of my passing the very house I lived in, without knowing
it. As I came back, I saw Uriah Heep shutting up the office ;
and, feeling friendly towards everybody, went in and spoke to
him, and at parting, gave him my hand. But oh, what a
clammy hand his was ! as ghostly to the touch as to the sight !
I rubbed mine afterwards, to warm it, and to rub his off.

David Copperfield 211

It was such an uncomfortable hand, that, when I went to my
room, it was still cold and wet upon my memory. Leaning
out of window, and seeing one of the faces on the beam-ends
looking at me sideways, I fancied it was Uriah Heep got up
there somehow, and shut him out in a hurry.

CHAPTER XVI

I AM A NEW BOY IN MORE SENSES THAN ONE

Next morning, after breakfast, I entered on school life again.
I went, accompanied by Mr. Wickfield, to the scene of my
future studies — a grave building in a courtyard, with a learned
air about it that seemed very well suited to the stray rooks and
jackdaws who came down from the Cathedral towers to walk
with a clerkly bearing on the grass-plot — and was introduced to
my new master. Doctor Strong.

Doctor Strong looked almost as rusty, to my thinking, as the
tall ffon rails and gates outside the house ; and almost as stiff
and heavy as the great stone urns that flanked them, and were
set up, on the top of the red-brick wall, at regular distances all
round the court, like sublimated skittles, for Time to play at.
He was in his library (I mean Doctor Strong was), with his
clothes not particularly well brushed, and his hair not particu-
larly well combed ; his knee-smalls unbraced ; his long black
gaiters unbuttoned ; and his shoes yawning like two caverns on
the hearth-rug. Turning upon me a lustreless eye, that re-
minded me of a long-forgotten blind old horse who once used
to crop the grass, and tumble over the graves, in Blunderstone
churchyard, he said he was glad to see me : and then he gave
me his hand ; which I didn't know what to do with, as it did
nothing for itself.

But, sitting at work, not far off" from Doctor Strong, was a very
pretty young lady — whom he called Annie, and who was_his_
daughter, I supposed — who got me ouTlDf my difficulty by
kheelirig'down tu put Doctor Strong's shoes on, and button his
gaiters, which she did with great cheerfulness and quickness.
When she had finished, and we were going out to the school-
room, I was much surprised to hear Mr. Wickfield, in bidding
her good morning, address her as "Mrs. Strong;" and I was.
wondering could she be Doctor Strong's son's wife, or could

212 David Copperfield

she be Mrs. Doctor Strong, when Doctor Strong himself
unconsciously enlightened me.

" By-the-by, Wickfield," he said, stopping in a passage with
his hand on my shoulder ; " you have not found any suitable
provision for my wife's cousin yet?"

" No," said Mr. Wickfield. " No. Not yet."

" I could wish it done as soon as it can be done, Wickfield,"
said Doctor Strong, " for Jack Maldon is needy, and idle ; and
of those two bad things, worse things sometimes come. What
does Doctor Watts say," he added, looking at me, and moving
his head to the time of his quotation, " * Satan finds some
mischief still, for idle hands to do.' "

" Egad, Doctor," returned Mr. Wickfield, " if Doctor Watts
knew mankind, he might have written, with as much truth,
^atan fintjs §9171^ mischief still, for busy hands to do.' The
)eople achie«^ ^-hfiin^fuJT sharT'ornijschiefJnth^ world,
you may rely upon i^. Whatliave the people been about, who
have been the busiest in getting money, and in getting power,
this century or two ? No mischief? "

" Jack Maldon will never be very busy in getting either, I
expect," said Doctor Strong, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

" Perhaps not," said Mr. Wickfield ; " and you bring me
back to the question, with an apology for digressing. No, I
have not been able to dispose of Mr. Jack Maldon yet. I
believe," he said this with some hesitation, " I penetrate your
motive, and it makes the thing more difficult."

" My motive," returned Doctor Strong, " is to make some
suitable provision for a cousin, and an old playfellow, of
Annie's."

"Yes, I know," said Mr. Wickfield, "at home or abroad."

" Ay ! " replied the Doctor, apparently wondering why he
emphasised those words so much. " At home or abroad."

"Your own expression, you know," said Mr. Wickfield.
" Or abroad."

"Surely," the Doctor answered. "Surely. One or other."

" One or other ? Have you no choice ? " asked Mr. Wick-
field.

"No," returned the Doctor.

" No ? " with astonishment.

" Not the least."

" No motive," said Mr. Wickfield, " for meanmg abroad, and
not at home ? "

" No," returned the Doctor.

" I am bound to believe you, and of course I do believe you "

David Copperfield 213

said Mr. Wickfield. " It might have simplified my office very
much, if I had known it before. But I confess I entertained
another impression."

Doctor Strong regarded him with a puzzled and doubting
look, which almost immediately subsided into a smile that gave
me great encouragement ; for it was full of amiability and sweet-
ness, and there was a simplicity in it, and indeed in his whole
manner, when the studious, pondering frost upon it was got
through, very attractive and hopeful to a young scholar like me.
Repeating " no," and " not the least," and other short assur-
ances to the same purport, Doctor Strong jogged on before
us, at a queer, uneven pace ; and we followed : Mr. Wickfield
looking grave, I observed, and shaking his head to himself,
without knowing that I saw him.

The school-room was a pretty large hall, on the quietest side
of the house, confronted by the stately stare of some half-dozen
of the great urns, and commanding a peep of an old secluded
garden belonging to the Doctor, where the peaches were ripen-
ing on the sunny south wall. There were two great aloes, in
tubs, on the turf outside the windows ; the broad hard leaves
of which plant (looking as if they were made of painted tin)
have ever since, by association, been symbolical to me of
silence and retirement. About five-and-twenty boys were
studiously engaged at their books when we went in, but they
rose to give the Doctor good morning, and remained standing
when they saw Mr. Wickfield and me.

" A new boy, young gentlemen," said the Doctor ; " Trot-
wood Copperfield."

One Adams, who was the head-boy, then stepped out of his
place and welcomed me. He looked like a young clergyman,
in his white cravat, but he was very affable and good-humoured ;
and he showed me my place, and presented me to the masters,
in a gentlemanly way that would have put me at my ease, if
anything could.

It seemed to me so long, however, since I had been among
such boys, or among any companions of my own age, except
Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes, that I felt as strange as ever
I have done in all my life. I was so conscious of having passed
through scenes of which they could have no knowledge, and of
having acquired experiences foreign to my age, appearance,
and condition as one of them, that I half believed it was an
imposture to come there as an ordinary little schoolboy. I
had become, in the Murdstone and Grinby time, however short
or long it may have been, so unused to the sports and games

J14 David Copperfield

of boys, that I knew I was awkward and inexperienced in the
commonest things belonging to them. Whatever I had learnt,
had so slipped away from me in the sordid cares of my life from
day to night, that now, when I was examined about what I
knew, I knew nothing, and was put into the lowest form of the
school. But, troubled as I was, by my want of boyish skill, and
of book-learning too, I was made infinitely more uncomfortable
by the consideration that, in what I did know, I was much
farther removed from my companions than in what I did not.
My mind ran upon what they would think, if they knew of my
familiar acquaintance with the King's Bench Prison? Was
there anything about me which would reveal my proceedings
in connexion with the Micawber family — all those pawnings,
and sellings, and suppers — in spite of myself? Suppose some
of the boys had seen me coming through Canterbury, wayworn
and ragged, and should find me out ? What would they say,
who made so light of money, if they could know how I had
scraped my halfpence together, for the purchase of my daily
saveloy and beer, or my slices of pudding ? How would it
affect them, who were so innocent of London life and London
streets, to discover how knowing I was (and was ashamed to be)
in some of the meanest phases of both ? All this ran in my
head so much, on that first day at Doctor Strong's, that I felt
distrustful of my slightest look and gesture ; shrunk within my-
self whensoever I was approached by one of my new school-
fellows ; and hurried off, the minute school was over, afraid of
committing myself in my response to any friendly notice or
advance.

But there was such an influence in Mr. Wickfield's old house,
that when I knocked at it, with my new school-books under
my arm, I began to feel my uneasiness softening away. As I
went up to my airy old room, the grave shadow of the staircase
seemed to fall upon my doubts and fears, and to make the past
more indistinct. I sat there, sturdily conning my books, until
dinner-time (we were out of school for good at three) : and
went down, hopeful of becoming a passable sort of boy yet.

Agnes was in the drawing-room, waiting for her father, who
was detained by some one in his office. She met me with her
pleasant smile, and asked me how I liked the school. I told
her I should like it very much, I hoped ; but I was a little
strange to it at first.

" You have never been to school," I said, " have you ? "

" Oh yes ! Every day."

" Ah, but you mean here, at your own home ? "

David Copperfield 215

" Papa couldn't spare me to go anywhere else," she answered,
smiling and shaking her head. " His housekeeper must be in
his house, you know."

" He is very fond of you, I am sure," I said.

She nodded " Yes," and went to the door to listen for his
coming up, that she might meet him on the stairs. But, as he
was not there, she came back again.

" Mama has been dead ever since I was bom," she said, in
her quiet way. " I only know her picture down-stairs. I saw
you looking at it yesterday. Did you think whose it was ? "

I told her yes, because it was so like herself.

" Papa says so, too," said Agnes, pleased. " Hark ! That's
papa now ! "

Her bright calm face Hghted up with pieastire as she went to
meet him, and as they came in, hand in hand. He greeted me
cordially; and told me I should certainly be happy under
Doctor Strong, who was one of the geatlest of men.

" There may be some, perhaps — I don't know that there are
— who abuse his kindness," said Mr. Wickfield. " Never be
one of those, Trotwood, in anything. He is the least suspicious
of mankind ; and whether that's a merit, or whether it's a
blemish, it deserves consideration in all dealings with the
Doctor, great or small."

He spoke, I thought, as if he were weary, or dissatisfied with
something ; but I did not pursue the question in my mind, for
dinner was just then announced, and we went down and took
the same seats as before.

We had scarcely done so, when Uriah Heep put in his red
head and his lank hand at the door, and said :

" Here's Mr. Maldon begs the favour of a word, sir."

"I am but this moment quit of Mr. Maldon," said his
master.

" Yes, sir," returned Uriah ; " but Mr. Maldon has come
back, and he begs the favour of a word." -,

As he held the door open with his hand, Uriah looked at me,
and looked at Agnes, and looked at the dishes, and looked at
the plates, and looked at every object in the room, I thought,
— yet seemed to look at nothing ; he made such an appearance
all the while of keeping his red eyes dutifully on his master. —

" I beg your pardon. It's only to say, on reflection," observed
a voice behind Uriah, as Uriah's head was pushed away, and
the speaker's substituted — " pray excuse me for this intrusion —
that as it seems I have no choice in the matter, the sooner I go
abroad the better. My cousin Annie did say, when we talked

2i6 David Copperfield

of it, that she liked to have her friends within reach rather than
to have them banished, and the .0I4 Doctor "

"Doctor Strong, was that ?^"' Mr. Wickfield interposed,
gravely.

" Doctor Strong, of course," returned the other ; " I call him
the old Doctor ; it's all the same, you know."

" I don't know," returned Mr. Wickfield.

" Well, Doctor Strong," said the other. " Doctor Strong was
of the same mind, I believed. But as it appears from the course
you take with me that he has changed his mind, why there's no
more to be said, except that the sooner I am off, the better.
Therefore, I thought I'd come back and say, that the sooner I
am off the better. When a plunge is to be made into the water,
it's of no use lingering on the bank."

"There shall be as little lingering as possible, in your
case, Mr. Maldon, you may depend upon it," said Mr.
Wickfield.

" Thank'ee," said the other. " Much obliged. I don't
want to look a gift-horse in the mouth, which is not a gracious
thing to do ; otherwise, I dare say, my cousin Annie could
easily arrange it in her own way. I suppose Annie would only
have to say to the old Doctor "

" Meaning that Mrs. Strong would only have to say to her
husband — do I follow you ? " said Mr. Wickfield.

" Quite so," returned the other, " — would only have to say,
that she wanted such and such a thing to be so and so ; and it
would be so and so, as a matter of course."

" And why as a matter of course, Mr. Maldon ? " asked Mr.
Wickfield, sedately eating his dinner

" Why, because Annie's a charming young girl, and the old
Doctor — Doctor Strong, I mean — is not quite a charming young
boy," said Mr. Jack Maldon, laughing. " No offence to any-
body, Mr. Wickfield. I only mean that I suppose some
compensation is fair and reasonable in that sort of marriage."
"^ "Compensation to the lady, sir?" asked Mr. Wickfield
gravely.

"To the lady, sir," Mr. Jack Maldon answered, laughing.
But appearing to remark that Mr. Wickfield went on with his
dinner in the same sedate, immoveable manner, and that there
was no hope of making him relax a muscle of his face, he
added :

" However, I have said what I came back to say, and, with
another apology for this intrusion, I may take myself off. Of
course I shall observe your directions, in considering the matter

David Copperfield 217

as one to be arranged between you and me solely, and not to
be referred to, up at the Doctor's."

"Have you dined?" asked Mr. Wickfield, with a motion of
his hand towards the table.

"Thank'ee. I am going to dine," said Mr. Maldon, "with
my cousin Annie. Good-bye ! "

Mr. Wickfield, without rising, looked after him thoughtfully
as he went out. He was rather a shallow sort of young gentle-
man, I thought, with a handsome face, a rapid utterance, and a
confident bold air. And this was the first I ever saw of Mr.
Jack Maldon ; whom I had not expected to see so soon, when
I heard the Doctor speak of him that morning.

When we had dined, we went up-stairs again, where every-
thing went on exactly as on the previous day. Agnes set the
glasses and decanters in the same comer, and Mr. Wickfield
sat down to drink, and drank a good deal. Agnes played the
piano to him, sat by him,^ana~wcrked and talked, and played
some games at dominoes with me. In good time she made
tea ; and afterwards, when I brought down my books, looked
into them, and showed me what she knew of them (which was
no slight matter, though she said it was), and what was the best
way to learn and understand them. I see her, with her modest,
orderly, placid manner, and I hear her beautiful calm voice, as
I write these words. The influence for all good, whiph she
came to exercise over me at a later time, begins already to ^

descend upon my breast. I love little EnoUj, and I don't \ 7/ <
love Agnes — no, not at all in that way — but I feel that there \
are goodness, peace, and truth, wherever Agnes is; and that
the soft light of the coloured window in the church, seen long
ago, falls on her always, and on me when I am near her, and on
everything around.

The time having come for her withdrawal for the night, and
she having left us, I gave Mr. Wickfield my hand, preparatory
to going away myself. But he checked me and said : " Should
you like to stay with us, Trotwood, or to go elsewhere ? "

" To stay," I answered quickly.

" You are sure ? "

" If you please. If I may ! "

" Why, it's but a dull life that we lead here, boy, I am afraid,"
he said.

" Not more dull for me than Agnes, sir. Not dull at all ! "

" Than Agnes," he repeated, walking slowly to the great \
chimney-piece, and leaning against it. " Than Agnes ! " I

He had drank wine that evening (or I fancied it), until his '

2i8 David Copperfield

eyes were bloodshot. Not that I could see them now, for they
were cast down, and shaded by his hand ; but I had noticed
them a little while before.

"Now I wonder," he muttered, "whether my Agnes tires of
me. When should I ever tire of her ! But that's different,
that's quite different."

He was musing, not speaking to me ; so I remained quiet.

"A dull old house," he said, "and a monotonous life; but
I must have her near me. I must keep her near me. If the
thought that I may die and leave my darling, or that my darling
may die and leave me, comes like a spectre, to distress my
happiest hours, and is only to be drowned in "

He did not supply the word ; but pacing slowly to the place
where he had sat, and mechanically going through the action
of pouring wine from the empty decanter, set it down and paced
back again.

" If it is miserable to bear when she is here," he said, " what
would it be, and she away ? No, no, no. I cannot try that."

He leaned against the chimney-piece, brooding so long that
I could not decide whether to run the risk of disturbing him
by going, or to remain quietly where I was, until he should
come out of his reverie. At length he aroused himself, and
looked about the room until his eyes encountered mine.

" Stay with us, Trotwood, eh ? " he said in his usual manner,

and as if he were answering something I had just said. " I am

\ glad of it. You are company to us both. It is wholesome to

^ave you here. Wholesome for me, wholesome for Agnes,

wholesome perhaps for all of us."

" I am sure it is for me, sir," I said. " I am so glad to be
here."

"That's a fine fellow!" said Mr. Wickfield. "As long as
you are glad to be here, you shall stay here." He shook
hands with me upon it, and clapped me on the back ; and told
me that when I had anything to do at night after Agnes had
left us, or when I wished to read for my own pleasure, I was
free to come down to his room, if he were there, and if I de-
sired it for company's sake, and to sit with him. I thanked
him for his consideration ; and, as he went down soon after-
wards, and I was not tired, went down too, with a book in my
hand, to avail myself, for half-an-hour, of his permission.

But, seeing a light in the little round office, and immediately
feeling myself attracted towards Uriah Heep, who had a sort
of fascination for me, I went in there instead. I found Uriah
reading a great fat book, with such demonstrative attention,

David Copperfield 219

that his lank forefinger followed up every line as he read, and
made clammy tracks along the page (or so I fully beheved)
like a snail.

" You are working late to-night, Uriah," says I.

" Yes, Master Copperfield," says Uriah.

As I was getting on the stool opposite, to talk to him more
conveniently, I observed that he had not such a thing as a
smile about him, and that he could only widen his mouth and
make two hard creases down his cheeks, one on each side, to
stand for one.

"I am not doing office-work. Master Copperfield," said
Uriah.

" What work, then ? " I asked.

" I am improving my legal knowledge, Master Copperfield,"
said Uriah. " I am going through Tidd's Practice. Oh, what
a writer Mr. Tidd is, Master Copperfield ! "
* My stool was such a tower of observation, that as I watched
him reading on again, after this rapturous exclamation, and
following up the lines with his forefinger, I observed that his
nostrils, which were thin and pointed, with sharp dints in them,
had a singular and most uncomfortable way of expanding and
contracting themselves ; that they seemed to twinkle instead of
his eyes, which hardly ever twinkled at all.

" I suppose you are quite a great lawyer ? " I said, after
looking at him for some time.

" Me, Master Copperfield ? " said Uriah. " Oh, no ! I'm a
very ujnble person."

It was no fancy of mine about his hands, I observed ; for he
frequently ground the palms against each other as if to squeeze
them dry and warm, besides often wiping them, in a stealthy
way, on his pocket-handkerchief.

" I am well aware that I am the umblest person going," said
Uriah Heep, modestly ; "let the other be where he may. My
mother is likewise a very umble person. We live in a numble
abode, Master Copperfield, but have much to be thankful for.
My father's former calling was umble. He was a sexton."

" What is he now ? " I asked.

" He is a partaker of glory at present. Master Copperfield,"
said Uriah Heep. "But we have much to be thankful for.
How much have I to be thankful for in living with Mr.
Wickfield ! "

I asked Uriah if he had been with Mr. Wickfield long ?

" I have been with him going on four year. Master Copper-
field," said Uriah ; shutting up his book, after carefully marking

220 David Copperfield

the place where he had left off. " Since a year after my
father's death. How much have I to be thankful for, in that !
How much have I to be thankful for, in Mr. Wickfield's kind
intention to give me my articles, which would otherwise not
lay within the umble means of mother and self ! "

"Then, when your articled time is over, you'll be a regular
lawyer, I suppose ? " said I.

"With the blessing of Providence, Master Copperfield,"
returned Uriah.

"Perhaps you'll be a partner in Mr. Wickfield's business,
one of these days," I said, to make myself agreeable ; " and it
will be Wickfield and Heep, or Heep late Wickfield."

"Oh no, Master Copperfield," returned Uriah, shaking his
head, " I am much too umble for that ! "

He certainly did look uncommonly like the carved face on
the beam outside my window, as he sat, in his humility, eyeing
me sideways, with his mouth widened, and the creases in his
cheeks.

"Mr. Wickfield is a most excellent man. Master Copper-
field," said Uriah. " If you have known him long, you know
it, I am sure, much better than I can inform you."

I replied that I was certain he was; but that I had not
known him long myself, though he was a friend of my aunt's.

" Oh, indeed. Master Copperfield," said Uriah. " Your
aunt is a sweet lady, Master Copperfield ! "

He had a way of writhing when he wanted to express
enthusiasm, which was very ugly; and which diverted my
attention from the compliment he had paid my relation, to
the snaky twistings of his throat and body.

" A sweet lady, Master Copperfield ! " said Uriah Heep.
" She has a great admiration for Miss Agnes, Master Copper-
field, I believe?"

I said " Yes," boldly ; not that I knew anything about it,
Heaven forgive me !

" I hope you have, too. Master Copperfield," said Uriah.
"But I am sure you must have."

" Everybody must have," I returned.

" Oh, thank you, Master Copperfield," said Uriah Heep,
" for that remark ! It is so true ! Umble as I am, I know it
is so true ! Oh, thank you. Master Copperfield ! "
- He writhed himself quite off his stool in the excitement of
his feelings, and, being off, began to make arrangements for
going home.

" Mother will be expecting me," he said, referring to a pale,

David Copperfield 221

inexpressive-faced watch in his pocket, " and getting uneasy ;
for though we are very umble, Master Copperfield, we are
much attached to one another. If you would come and see
us, any afternoon, and take a cup of tea at our lowly
dwelling, mother would be as proud of your company as I
should be."

I said I should be glad to come.

" Thank you. Master Copperfield," returned Uriah, putting
his book away upon the shelf — " I suppose you stop here,
some time. Master Copperfield ? "

I said I was going to be brought up there, I believed, as
long as I remained at school.

" Oh, indeed ! " exclaimed Uriah. ** I should think you
would come into the business at last, Master Copperfield ! "

I protested that I had no views of that sort, and that no
such scheme was entertained in my behalf by anybody ; but
Uriah insisted on blandly replying to all my assurances, " Oh,
yes. Master Copperfield, I should think you would, indeed ! "
and, "Oh, indeed. Master Copperfield, I should think you
would, certainly ! " over and over again. Being, at last, ready
to leave the office for the night, he asked me if it would suit
my convenience to have the light put out ; and on my answer-
ing " Yes," instantly extinguished it. After shaking hands with
me — his hand felt like a fish, in the dark — he opened the door
into the street a very little, and crept out, and shut it, leaving
me to grope my way back into the house : which cost me some
trouble and a fall over his stool. This was the proximate cause,
I suppose, of my dreaming about him, for what appeared to
me to be half the night ; and dreaming, among other things,
that he had launched Mr. Peggotty's house on a piratical
expedition, with a black flag at the masthead, bearing the
inscription " Tidd's Practice," under which diabolical ensign he
was carrying me and little Em'ly to the Spanish Main, to be
drowned.

I got a. little the better of my uneasiness when I went to
school next day, and a good deal the better next day, and so
shook it ofi" by degrees, that in less than a fortnight I was quite
at home, and happy, amon^i; my new companions. I was
awkward enough in their games, and backward enough in their
studies ; but custom would improve me in the first respect, I
hoped, and hard work in the second. Accordingly, I went to
work very hard, both in play and in earnest, and gained great
commendation. And, in a very little while, the Murdstone and
Grinby life became so strange to me that I hardly believed in

222

David Copperfield

it, while my present life grew so familiar, that I seemed to have
been leading it a long time.

Doctor Strong's was an excellent school; as different from
Mr. Creakle's as good is from eyjl. It was very gravely and de-
corously ordered, "Hfid'OTi a sound system ; with an appeal, in
everytliing, to the honour and good faith of the boys, and an
avowed intention to rely on their possession of those qualities
unless they proved themselves unworthy of it, which worked
wonders. We all felt that we had a part in the management of
the place, and in sustaining its character and dignity. Hence,
we soon became warmly attached to it — I am sure I did for
one, and I never knew, in all my time, of any other boy being
otherwise — and learnt with a good will, desiring to do it credit.
We had noble games out of hours, and plenty of liberty ; but
even then, as I remember, we were well spoken of in the town,
and rarely did any disgrace, by our appearance or manner, to
the reputation of Doctor Strong and Doctor Strong's boys.

Some of the higher scholars boarded in the Doctor's house,
and through them I learned, at second hand, some particulars
of the Doctor's history. As, how he had not yet been married
twelve months to the beautiful young lady I had seen in the
study, whom he had married for love ; for she had not a six-
pence, and had a world of poor relations (so our fellows sai j)
ready to swarm the Doctor out of house and home. Also, how
the Doctor's cogitating manner was attributable to his being
always engaged in looking out for Gree^oots ; which, in my
innocence and ignorance, I supposed to be^a Sotanical furor on
the Doctor's part, especially as he always looked at the ground
when he walked about, until I understood that they were roots
of words, with a view to a new Dictionary which he had in
contemplation. Adams, our head-boy, who had a turn for
mathematics, had made a calculation, I was informed, of the
time this Dictionary would take in completing, on the Doctor's
plan, and at the Doctor's rate of going. He considered that it
might be done in one thousand six hundred and forty-nine
years, counting from the Doctor's last, or sixty-second, birthday.

But the Doctor himself was the idol of the whole school :
and it must have been a badly-composed school if he had been
anything else, for he was the kimiest .ol-men ; with a simple
Jaith in him that might have touched the stone hearts of the
very iirns upon the wall. As he walked up and down that pari
of the court-yard which was at the side of the house, with the
stray rooks and jackdaws looking after him with their heads
cocked slyly, as if they knew how much more knowing they

David Copperfield 223

were in worldly affairs than he, if any sort of vagabond could
only get near enough to his creaking shoes to attract his
attention to one sentence of a tale of distress, that vagabond
was made for the next two days. It was so notorious in the
house, that the masters and head-boys took pains to cut these
marauders off at angles, and to get out of windows, and turn
them out of the court-yard, before they could make the Doctor
aware of their presence ; which was sometimes happily effected
within a few yards of him, without his knowing anything of the
matter, as he jogged to and fro. Outside his own domain, and
unprotected, he was a very sheep for the shearers. He would
have taken his gaiters off his legs, to give away. In fact, there
was a story current among us (I have no idea, and never had,
on what authority, but I have believed it for so many years
that I feel quite certain it is true), that on a frosty day, one
winter-time, he actually did bestow his gaiters on a beggar-
woman, who occasioned some scandal in the neighbourhood
by exhibiting a fine infant from door to door, wrapped in those
garments, which were universally recognised, being as well
known in the vicinity as the Cathedral. The legend added
that the only person who did not identify them was the Doctor
himself, who, when they were shortly afterwards displayed at
the door of a little second-hand shop of no very good repute,
where such things were taken in exchange for gin, was more
than once observed to handle them approvingly, as if admiring
some curious novelty in the pattern, and considering them an
improvement on his own.

It was very pleasant to see the Doctor with his pretty young
jsdfe. He had a fatherly, benignant way of showing his fondness
for her, which seemed in itself to express a good man. I often
saw them walking in the garden where the peaches were, and I
sometimes had a nearer observation of them in the study or the
parlour. She appeared to me to take great care of the Doctor,
and to like him very much, though I never thought her vitally
interested in the Dictionary: some cumbrous fragments of
which work the Doctor always carried in his pockets, and in
the lining of his hat, and generally seemed to be expounding
to her as they walked about.

I saw a good deal of Mrs. Strong, both because she had
taken a liking for me on the morning of my introduction to the
Doctor, and was always afterwards kind to me, and interested
in me ; and because she was very fond of Agnes, and was often ^
backwards and forwards at our house. There was a curious \
constraint between her and Mr. Wickfield, I thought (of whom

224 David Copperfield

she seemed to be afraid), that never wore off. When she
came there of an evening, she always shrunk from accepting
his escort home, and ran away with me instead. And some-
times, as we were running gaily across the Cathedral yard
together, expecting to meet nobody, we would meet Mr. Jack
Maldon, who was always surprised to see us.

Mrs. Strong's mama was a lady I took great delight in. Her
name was Mt;s.^Mar^.eham ; but our boys used to call her the
Old Soldier, on account of her generalship, and the skill with
which she marshalled great forces of relations against the
Doctor. She was a little, sharp-eyed woman, who used to
wear, when she was dressed, one unchangeable cap, ornamented
with some artificial flowers, and two artificial butterflies supposed
to be hovering above the flowers. There was a superstition
among us that this cap had come from France, and could only
originate in the workmanship of that ingenious nation : but all
I certainly know about it is, that it always made its appearance
of an evening, wheresoever Mrs. Markleham made her appear-
ance; that it was carried about to friendly meetings in a
Hindoo basket ; that the butterflies had the gift of trembling
constantly; and that they improved the shining hours at
Doctor Strong's expense, like busy bees.

I observed the Old Soldier — not to adopt the name
disrespectfully — to pretty good advantage, on a night which is
made memorable to me by something else I shall relate. It
was the night of a little party at the Doctor's, which was given
on the occasion of Mr. Jack Maldon's departure for India,
whither he was going as a cadet, or something of that kind :
j Mr. Wickfield having at length arranged the business. It
happened to be the Doctor's birthday, too. We had had a
^ hoUday, had made presents to him in the morning, had made
a speech to him through the head-boy, and had cheered him
until we were hoarse, and until he had shed tears. And now,
in the evening, Mr. Wickfield, Agnes, and I, went to have
tea with him in his private capacity.

Mr. Jack Maldon was there, before us. Mrs. Strong, dressed
in white, with cherry-coloured ribbons, was playing the piano,
when we went in; and he was leaning over her to turn the
leaves. The clear red and white of her complexion was not so
blooming and flower-like as usual, I thought, when she turned
round ; but she looked very pretty, wonderfully pretty.

" I have forgotten, Doctor," said Mrs. Strong's mama, when
we were seated, "to pay you the compliments of the day:
though they are, as you may suppose, very far from being mere

David Copperfield 225

compliments in my case. Allow me to wish you many happy
returns."

" I thank you, ma'am," replied the Doctor.

" Many, many, many, happy returns," said the Old Soldier.
" Not only for your own sake, but for Annie's and John
Maldon's, and many other people's. It seems but yesterday
to me, John, when you were a little creature, a head shorter
than Master Copperfield, making baby love to Annie behind
the gooseberry bushes in the back-garden."

"My dear mama," said Mrs. Strong, "never mind that now."'

" Annie, don't be absurd," returned her mother. " If you
are to blush to hear of such things now you are an old married
woman, when are you not to blush to hear of them ? "

" Old ? " exclaimed Mr. Jack Maldon. " Annie ? Come ? "

"Yes, John," returned the Soldier. "Virtually, an old
married woman. Although not old by years — for when did
you ever hear me say, or who has ever heard me say, that a
girl of twenty was old by years ! — your cousin is the wife of
the Doctor, and, as such, what I have described her. It is
well for you, John, that your cousin is the wife of the Doctor.
You have found in him an influential and kind friend, who will
be kinder yet, I venture to predict, if you deserve it. I have
no false pride. I never hesitate to admit, frarikly, that there
are some members of our family who want a friend. You were
one yourself, before your cousin's influence raised up one for
you."

The Doctor, in the goodness of his heart, waved his hand as
if to make light of it, and save Mr. Jack Maldon from any
further reminder. But Mrs. Markleham changed her chair for
one next the Doctor's, and putting her fan on his coat-sleeve,
said:

"No, really, my dear Doctor, you must excuse me if I
appear to dwell on this rather, because I feel so very strongly.
I call it quite jny monomania, it is such a subject of mine.
You are a blessing to us. You really are a Boon, you know."

"Nonsense, nonsense," said the Doctor.

" No, no, I beg your pardon," retorted the Old Soldier.
" With nobody present, but our dear and confidential friend
Mr. Wickfield, I cannot consent to be put down. I shall begin
to assert the privileges of a mother-in-law, if you go on like that,
and scold you. I am perfectly honest and outspoken. What
I am saying, is what I said when you first overpowered me with
surprise — you remember how surprised I was ? — by proposing
for Annie. Not that there was anything so very much out of

226 David Copperfield

the way, in the mere fact of the proposal — it would be ridiculous

\ to say that ! — but because, you having known her poor father

! and having known her from a baby six months old, I hadn't

i thought of you in such a light at all, or indeed as a marrying

^ ^ man in any way, — simply that, you know."

" Aye, aye," returned the Doctor, good-humouredly. "Never
mind."

" But I do mind," said the Old Soldier, laying her fan upon
his lips. " I mind very much. I recall these things that I may
be contradicted if I am wrong. Well ! Then I spoke to Annie,
and I told her what had happened. I said, ' My dear, here's
Doctor Strong has positively been and made you the subject of
a handsome declaration and an offer.' Did I press it in the
least? No. I said, 'Now, Annie, tell me the truth this
moment ; is your heart free ? ' * Mama,' she said crymg, * I am
extremely young' — which was perfectly true — 'a^Tl hardly
know if I have a heart at all.' * Then, my dear,' I said, ' you
may rely upon it, it's free. At all events, my love,' said I,

* Doctor Strong is in an agitated state of mind, and must be
answered. He cannot be kept in his present state of suspense.'

* Mama,' said Annie, still crying, ' would he be unhappy
without me ? If he would, I honour and respect him so much,
that I think I will have him.' So it was settled. And then,
^nd not till then, I said to Annie, ' Annie, Doctor Strong will
not only be your husband, but he will represent your late
father : he will represent the head of our family, he will
represent the wisdom and station, and I may say the means,
of our family ; and will be, in short, a Boon to it.' I used the
word at the time, and I have used it again, to-day. If I have
any merit it is consistency."

The daughter had sat quite silent and still during this speech,
with her eyes fixed on the ground ; her cousin standing near
her, and looking on the ground too. She now said very softly,
in a trembling voice :

" Mama, I hope you have finished ? "

"No, my dear Annie," returned the Soldier, "I have not
quite finished. Since you ask me, my love, I reply that I have
not. I complain that you really are a little unnatural towards
your own family ; and, as it is of no use complaining to you, I
mean to complain to your husband. Now, my dear Doctor,
do look at that silly wife of yours."

As the Doctor turned his kind face, with its smile of
simplicity and gentleness, towards her, she drooped her head
more. I noticed that Mr. Wickfield looked at her steadily.

David Copperfield 227

" When I happened to say to that naughty thing, the other
day," pursued her mother, shaking her head and her fan at her,
playfully, "that there was a family circumstance she might
mention to you — indeed, I think, was bound to mention — she
said, that to mention it was to ask a favour ; and that, as you
were too generous, and as for her to ask was always to have,
she wouldn't."

"Annie, my dear," said the Doctor. "That was wrong.
It robbed me of a pleasure."

" Almost the very words I said to her ! " exclaimed her
mother. "Now really, another time, when I know what she
would tell you but for this reason, and won't, I have a great
mind, my dear Doctor, to tell you myself."

" I shall be glad if you will," returned the Doctor.

"Shall I?"

" Certainly."

"Well, then, I will!" said the Old Soldier. "That's a
bargain." And having, I suppose, carried her point, she
tapped the Doctor's hand several times with her fan (which
she kissed first), and returned triumphantly to her former
station.

Some more company coming in, among whom were the two
masters and Adams, the talk became general ; and it naturally
turned on Mr. Jack Maldon, and his voyage, and the country
he was going to, and his various plans and prospects. He was
to leave that night, after supper, in a postchaise, for Gravesend ;
where the ship, in which he was to make the voyage, lay ; and
was to be gone — unless he came home on leave, or for his
health — I don't know how many years. I recollect it was
settled by general consent that India was quite a misrepresented
country, and had nothing objectionable in it, but a tiger or two,
and a little heat in the warm part of the day. For my own
part, I looked on Mr. Jack Maldon as a modem Sindbad, and
pictured him the bosom friend of all the Rajahs in the East,
sitting under canopies, smoking curly golden pipes — a mile
long, if they could be straightened out.

Mrs. Strong was a very pretty singer : as I knew, who often
heard her singing by herself. But, whether she was afraid of
singing before people, or was out of voice that evening, it was
certain that she couldn't sing at all. She tried a duet, once,
with her cousin Maldon, but could not so much as begin ; and
afterwards, when she tried to sing by herself, although she
began sweetly, her voice died away on a sudden, and left her
quite distressed, with her head hanging down over the keys.

228 David Copperfield

The good Doctor said she was nervous, and, to relieve her,
proposed a round game at cards ; of which he knew as much
as of the art of playing the trombone. But I remarked that
the Old Soldier took him into custody directly, for her partner ;
and instructed him, as the first preliminary of initiation, to give
her all the silver he had in his pocket.

We had a merry game, not made the less merry by the
Doctor's mistakes, of which he committed an innumerable
quantity, in spite of the watchfulness of the butterflies, and to
their great aggravation. Mrs. Strong had declined to play, on
the ground of not feeling very well; and her cousin Maldon
had excused himself because he had some packing to do.
When he had done it, however, he returned, and they sat
together, talking, on the sofa. From time to time she came
and looked over the Doctor's hand, and told him what to play.
She was very pale, as she bent over him, and I thought her
finger trembled as she pointed out the cards ; but the Doctor
was quite happy in her attention, and took no notice of this, if
it were so.

At supper, we were hardly so gay. Every one appeared to
feel that a parting of that sort was an awkward thing, and that
the nearer it approached, the more awkward it was. Mr. Jack
Maldon tried to be very talkative, but was not at his ease, and
made matters worse. And they were not improved, as it
appeared to me, by the Old Soldier : who continually recalled
passages of Mr. Jack Maldon's youth.

The Doctor, however, who felt, I am sure, that he was
making everybody happy, was well pleased, and had no
suspicion but that we were all at the utmost height of
enjoyment.

" Annie, my dear," said he, looking at his watch, and filling
his glass, " it is past your cousin Jack's time, and we must not
detain him, since time and tide — both concerned in this case —
wait for no man. Mr. Jack Maldon, you have a long voyage,
and a strange country, before you ; but many men have had
both, and many men will have both, to the end of time. The
winds you are going to tempt, have wafted thousands upon
thousands to fortune, and brought thousands upon thousands
happily back."

"It's an affecting thing," said Mrs. Markleham, "however
it's viewed, it's affecting, to see a fine young man one has
known from an infant, going away to the other end of the
world, leaving all he knows behind, and not knowing what's
before him. A young man really well deserves constant

David Copperfield 229

support and patronage," looking at the Doctor, " who makes
such sacrifices."

" rime will go fast with you, Mr. Jack Maldon," pursued
the Doctor, " and fast with all of us. Some of us can hardly
expect, perhaps, m the natural course of things, to greet you
on your return. The next best thing is to hope to do it, and
that's my case. I shall not weary you with good advice. You
have long had a good model before you, in your cousin Annie.
Imitate her virtues as nearly as you can."

Mrs. Markleham fanned herself, and shook her head.

"Farewell, Mr. Jack," said the Doctor, standing up; on
which we all stood up. " A prosperous voyage out, a thriving
career abroad, and a happy return home ! "

We all drank the toast, and all shook hands with Mr. Jack
Maldon ; after which he hastily took leave of the ladies who
were there, and hurried to the door, where he was received, as
he got into the chaise, with a tremendous broadside of cheers
discharged by our boys, who had assembled on the lawn for
the purpose. Running in among them to swell the ranks, I
was very near the chaise when it rolled away ; and I had a
lively impression made upon me, in the midst of the noise and
dust, of having seen Mr. Jack Maldon rattle past with aD
agitated face, and something cherry-coloured in his hand.

After another broadside for the Doctor, and another for the
Doctor's wife, the boys dispersed, and I went back into the
house, where I found the guests all standing in a group about
the Doctor, discussing how Mr. Jack Maldon had gone away,
and how he had borne it, and how he had felt it, and all the
rest of it. In the midst of these remarks, Mrs. Markleham
cried : " Where's Annie ? "

No Annie was there ; and when they called to her, no Annie
replied. But all pressing out of the room, in a crowd, to see
what was the matter, we found her lying on the hall floor.
There was great alarm at first, until it was found that she was
in a swoon, and that the swoon was yielding to the usual
means of recovery ; when the Doctor, who had lifted her head
upon his knee, put her curls aside with his hand, and said,
looking round:

" Poor Annie ! She's so faithful and tender-hearted I It's
the parting from her old playfellow and friend, her favourite
cousin, that has done this. Ah ! It's a pity 1 I am very
sorry ! "

When she opened her eyes, and saw where she was, and
that we were all standing about her, she arose with assistance :

230 David Copperfield

turning her head, as she did so, to lay it on the Doctor's
shoulder — or to hide it, I don't know which. We went into
the drawing-room, to leave her with the Doctor and her
mother ; but she said, it seemed, that she was better than she
had been since morning, and that she would rather be brought
among us ; so they brought her in, looking very white and
weak, I thought, and sat her on a sofa.

" Annie, my dear," said her mother, doing something to her
dress. " See here ! You have lost a bow. Will anybody be
so good as find a ribbon ; a cherry-coloured ribbon ? "

It was the one she had worn at her bosom. We all looked
for it ; I myself looked everywhere, I am certain ; but nobody
could find it.

" Do you recollect where you had it last, Annie ? " said her
mother.

I wondered how I could have thought she looked white, or
anything but burning red, when she answered that she had had
it safe, a little while ago, she thought, but it was not worth
looking for.

Nevertheless, it was looked for again, and still not found.
She entreated that there might be no more searching ; but it
was still sought for in a desultory way, until she was quite well,
and the company took their departure.

We walked very slowly home, Mr. Wickfield, Agnes, and I ;
Agnes and I admiring the moonlight, and Mr. Wickfield
scarcely raising his eyes from the ground. When we, at last,
reached our own door, Agnes discovered that she had left her
little reticule behind. Delighted to be of any service to her, I
ran back to fetch it.

I went into the supper-room where it had been left, which
was deserted and dark. But a door of communication between
that and the Doctor's study, where there was a light, being open,
I passed on there, to say what I wanted, and to get a candle.

The Doctor was sitting in his easy-chair by the fireside, and
his young wife was on a stool at his feet. The Doctor, with a
complacent smile, was reading aloud some manuscript explan-
ation or statement of a theory out of that interminable
Dictionary, and she was looking up at him. But with such
a face as I never saw. It was so beautiful in its form, it was so
ashy pale, it was so fixed in its abstraction, it was so full of a
wild, sleep-walking, dreamy horror of I don't know what. The
eyes were wide open, and her brown hair fell in two rich clusters
on her shoulders, and on her white dress, disordered by the
want of the lost ribbon. Distinctly as I recollect her look, I

David Copperfield 231

cannot say of what it was expressive. I cannot even say of
what it is expressive to me now, rising again before my older
judgment. Penitence, humiliation, shame, pride, love, and
trustfulness, I see them all • and in them all, I see that horror
of I don't know what.

My entrance, and my saying what I wanted, roused her. It
disturbed the Doctor too, for when I went back to replace the
candle I had taken from the table, he was patting her head, in
his fatherly way, and saying he was a merciless drone to let her
tempt him into reading on ; and he would have her go to bed.

But she asked him, in a rapid, urgent manner, to let her stay.
To let her feel assured (I heard her murmur some broken words
to this effect) that she was in his confidence that night And,
as she turned again towards him, after glancing at me as I left
the room and went out at the door, I saw her cross her hands
upon his knee, and look up at him with the same face,
something quieted, as he resumed his reading.

It made a great impression on me, and I remembered it a
long time afterwards, as I shall have occasion to narrate when
the time comes.

CHAPTER XVII

SOMKBODV TURNS UP

It has not occurred to me to mention Peggotty since I ran
away ; but, of course, I wrote her a letter almost as soon as I
was housed at Dover, and another and a longer letter, contain-
ing all particulars fully related, when my aunt took me formally
under her protection. On my being settled at Doctor Strong's
I wrote to her again, detailing my happy condition and prospects.
I never could have derived anything like the pleasure from
spending the money Mr. Dick had given me, that I felt in
sending a gold half-guinea to Peggotty, per post, inclosed in
this last letter, to discharge the sum I had borrowed of her :
in which epistle, not before, I mentioned about the young man
with the donkey-cart.

To these communications Peggotty replied as promptly, if
not as concisely, as a merchant's clerk. Her utmost powers of
expression (which were certainly not great in ink) were exhausted
in the attempt to write what she felt on the subject of my
journey. Four sides of incoherent and interjectional beginnings

232 David Copperfield

of sentences, that had no end, except blots, were inadequate to
afford her any relief. But the blots were more expressive to me
than the best composition ; for they showed me that Peggotty
had been crying all over the paper, and what could I have
desired more?

I made out, without much difficulty, that she could not take
quite kindly to my aunt yet. The notice was too short after so
long a prepossession the other way. We never knew a person,
she wrote ; but to think that Miss Betsey should seem to be so
different from what she had been thought to be, was a Moral !
That was her word. She was evidently still afraid of Miss
Betsey, for she sent her grateful duty to her but timidly ; and
she was evidently afraid of me, too, and entertained the
probability of my running away again soon ; if I might judge
from the repeated hints she threw out, that the coach-fare to
Yarmouth was always to be had of her for the asking.

She gave me one piece of intelligence which affected me very
much, namely, that there had been a sale of the furniture at our
old home, and that Mr. and Miss Murdstone were gone away,
and the house was shut up, to be let or sold. God knows 1
had no part in it while they remained there, but it pained me to
think of the dear old place as altogether abandoned; of the
weeds growing tall in the garden, and the fallen leaves lying
thick and wet upon the paths. I imagined how the winds of
n\^ winter would howl round it, how the cold rain would beat upon
the window-glass, how the moon would make ghosts on the
walls of the empty rooms, watching their solitude all night. I
thought afresh of the grave in the churchyard, underneath the
tree : and it seemed as if the house were dead too, now, and all
connected with my father and mother were faded away.

There was no other news in Peggotty's letters. Mr. Barkis
was an excellent husband, she said, though still a little near ;
but we all had our faults, and she had plenty (though I am sure
I don't know what they were) ; and he sent his duty, and my
little bedroom was always ready for me. Mr. Peggotty was
well, and Ham was well, and Mrs. Gum midge was but poorly,
and little Em'ly wouldn't send her love, but said that Peggotty
might send it, if she liked.

All this intelligence I dutifully imparted to my aunt, only
reserving to myself the mention of little Em'ly, to whom I
instinctively felt that she would not very tenderly incline.
While I was yet new at Doctor Strong's, she made several
excursions over to Canterbury to see me, and always at
unseasonable hours : with the view, I suppose, of taking me by

David Copperfield 233

surprise. But, finding me well employed, and bearing a good
character, and hearing on all hands that I rose fast in the
school, she soon discontinued these visits. I saw her on a
Saturday, every third or fourth week, when I went over to
Dover for a treat; and I saw Mr. Dick every alternate
Wednesday, when he arrived by stage-coach at noon, to stay
until next morning.

On these occasions Mr. Dick never travelled without a
leathern writing-desk, containing a supply of stationery and the
Memorial ; in relation to which document he had a notion that
time was beginning to press now, and that it really must be got
out of hand.

Mr. Dick was very partial to gingerbread. To render his
visits the more agreeable, my aunt had instructed me to open
a credit for him at a cake-shop, which was hampered with the
stipulation that he should not be served with more than one
shilling's-worth in the course of any one day. This, and the
reference of all his litde bills at the county inn where he slept,
to my aunt, before they were paid, induced me to suspect that
he was only allowed to rattle his money, and not to spend it.
I found on further investigation that this was so, or at least
there was an agreement between him and my aunt that he
should account to her for all his disbursements. As he had no
idea of deceiving her, and always desired to please her, he was
thus made chary of launching into expense. On this point, as
well as on all other possible points, Mr. Dick was convinced
that my aunt was the wisest and most wonderful of women ; as
he repeatedly told me with infinite secrecy, and always in a
whisper.

"Trotwood," said Mr. Dick, with an air of mystery, after
imparting this confidence to me, one Wednesday ; " who's the
man that hides near our house and frightens her ? "

" Frightens my aunt, sir ? "

Mr. Dick nodded. " I thought nothing would have

frightened her," he said, " for she's " here he whispered

softly, "don't mention it — the wisest and most wonderful of
women." Having said which, he drew back, to observe the
effect which this description of her made upon me.

" The first time he came," said Mr. Dick, " was — let me see
— sixteen hundred and forty-nine was the date of King Charles's
execution. I think you said sixteen hundred and forty-nine ? "

"Yes, sir."

" I don't know how it can be," said Mr. Dick, sorely puzzled
and shaking his head. " I don't think I am as old as that,"

234 David Copperfield ^

" Was it in that year that the man appeared, sir ? " 1 asked

" Why, really," said Mr. Dick, " I don't see how it can have
been in that year, Trotwood. Did you get that date out of
history ? "

"Yes, sir."

" I suppose history never lies, does it ? " said Mr. Dick, with
a gleam of hope.

" Oh dear, no, sir ! " I replied, most decisively. I was
ingenuous and young, and I thought so.

"I can't make it out," said Mr. Dick, shaking his head.
"There's something wrong, somewhere. However, it was
very soon after the mistake was made of putting some of the
trouble out of King Charles's head into my head, that the man
first came. I was walking out with Miss Trotwood after tea,
just at dark, and there he was, close to our house."

" Walking about ? " I inquired.

" Walking about ? " repeated Mr. Dick. " Let me see. I
must recollect a bit. N — no, no ; he was not walking about."

I asked, as the shortest way to get at it, what he was doing.

"Well, he wasn't there at all," said Mr. Dick, "until he
came up behind her, and whispered. Then she turned round
and fainted, and I stood still and looked at him, and he
walked away ; but that he should have been hiding ever since
(in the ground or somewhere), is the most extraordinary
thing ! "

" Has he been hiding ever since ? " I asked.

" To be sure he has," retorted Mr. Dick, nodding his head
gravely. " Never came out, till last night ! We were walking
last night, and he came up behind her again, and I knew him
again."

" And did he frighten my aunt again ? "

"All of a shiver," said Mr. Dick, counterfeiting that affection
and making his teeth chatter. " Held by the palings. Cried.
But, Trotwood, come here," getting me close to him, that he
might whisper very softly ; " why did she give him money, boy,
in the moonlight ? "

" He was a beggar, perhaps."

Mr. Dick shook his head, as utterly renouncing the sug-
gestion ; and having replied a great many times, and with
great confidence, " No beggar, no beggar, no beggar, sir ! "
went on to say, that from his window he had afterwards, and
late at night, seen my aunt give this person money outside
the garden rails in the moonlight, who then slunk away — into
the ground again, as he thought probable — and was seen no

David Copperfield 235

more: while my aunt came hurriedly and secretly back into
the house, and had, even that morning, been quite different
from her usual self; which preyed on Mr. Dick's mind.

I had not the least belief, in the outset of this story, that
the unknown was anything but a delusion of Mr. Dick's, and
one of the line of that ill-fated Prince who occasioned him so
much difficulty ; but after some reflection I began to entertain
the question whether an attempt, or threat of an attempt,
might have been twice made to take poor Mr. Dick himself
from under my aunt's protection, and whether my aunt, the
strength of whose kind feeling towards him I knew from
herself, might have been induced to pay a price for his peace
and quiet. As I was already much attached to Mr. Dick, and
very solicitous for his welfare, my fears favoured this sup-
position; and for a long time his Wednesday hardly ever
came round, without my entertaining a misgiving that he would
not be on the coach-box as usual. There he always appeared,
however, grey-headed, laughing, and happy; and he never
had anything more to tell of the man who could frighten my
aunt.

These Wednesdays were the happiest days of Mr. Dick's
life ; they were far from being the least happy of mine. He
soon became known to every boy in the school ; and though
he never took an active part in any game but kite-flying, was
as deeply interested in all our sports as any one among us.
How often have I seen him, intent upon a match at marbles
or pegtop, looking on with a face of unutterable interest,
and hardly breathing at the critical times! How often, at
hare and hounds, have I seen him mounted on a little knoll,
cheering the whole field on to action, and waving his hat
above his grey head, oblivious of King Charles the Martyr's
head, and all belonging to it ! How many a summer-hour
have I known to be but blissful minutes to him in the cricket-
field ! How many winter days have I seen him, standing
blue-nosed, in the snow and east wind, looking at the boys
going down the long slide, and clapping his worsted gloves
in rapture !

He was an universal favourite, and his ingenuity in little
things was transcendent. He could cut oranges into such
devices as none of us had an idea of. He could make a boat
out of anything, from a skewer upwards. He could turn
crampbones into chessmen ; fashion Roman chariots from old
court cards ; make spoked wheels out of cotton reels, and
birdcages of old wire. But he was greatest of all, perhaps,

236 David Copperfield

in the articles of string and straw; with which we were all
persuaded he could do anything that could be done by hands.

Mr. Dick's renown was not long confined to us. After a
few Wednesdays, Doctor Strong himself made some inquiries
of me about him, and I told him all my aunt had told me ;
which interested the Doctor so much that he requested, on
the occasion of his next visit, to be presented to him. This
ceremony I performed ; and the Doctor begging Mr. Dick,
whensoever he should not find me at the coach-office, to
come on there, and rest himself until our morning's work
was over, it soon passed into a custom for Mr. Dick to come
on as a matter of course, and, if we were a little late, as often
happened on a Wednesday, to walk about the court-yard,
waiting for me. Here he made the acquaintance of the
Doctor's beautiful young wife (paler than formerly, all this
time; more rarely seen by me or any one, I think; and not
so gay, but not less beautiful), and so became more and more
familiar by degrees, until, at last, he would come into the
school and wait. He always sat in a particular corner, on
a particular stool, which was called " Dick," after him ; here
he would sit, with his grey head bent forward, attentively
listening to whatever might be going on, with a profound
veneration for the learning he had never been able to acquire.

This veneration Mr. Dick extended to the Doctor, whom he
thought the most subtle and accomplished philosopher of any
age. It was long before Mr. Dick ever spoke to him otherwise
than bareheaded; and even when he and the Doctor had
struck up quite a friendship, and would walk together by the
hour, on that side of the court-yard which was known among
us as the Doctor's Walk, Mr. Dick would pull off his hat at
intervals to show his respect for wisdom and knowledge. How
it ever came about that the Doctor began to read out scraps of
the famous Dictionary, in these walks, I never knew; perhaps
he felt it all the same, at first, as reading to himself. How-
ever, it passed into a custom too; and Mr. Dick, listening
with a face shining with pride and pleasure, in his heart of
hearts, believed the Dictionary to be the most delightful book
in the world.

As I think of them going up and down before those school-
room windows — the Doctor reading with his complacent smile,
an occasional flourish of the manuscript, or grave motion of
his head ; and Mr. Dick listening, enchained by interest, with
his poor wits calmly wandering God knows where, upon the
wings of hard words — I think of it as one of the pleasantest

David Copperfield 237

things, in a quiet way, that I have ever seen. I feel as if they
might go walking to and fro for ever, and the world might
somehow be the better for it. As if a thousand things it makes
a noise about, were not one-half so good for it, or me.

Agnes was one of Mr. Dick's friends, very soon ; and in
often coming to the house, he made acquaintance with Uriah.
The friendship between himself and me increased continually,
and it was maintained on this odd footing : that, while Mr. Dick
came professedly to look after me as my guardian, he always
consulted me in any little matter of doubt that arose, and
invariably guided himself by my advice ; not only having a high
' respect for my native sagacity, but considering that I inherited
id deal from my aunt.

One Thursday morning, when I was about to walk with Mr.
Dick from the hotel to the coach-office before going back to
school (for we had an hour's school before breakfast), I met
Uriah in the street, who reminded me of the promise I had
made to take tea with himself and his mother : adding, with a
writhe, " But I didn't expect you to keep it. Master Copperfield,
we're so very umble."

I really had not yet been able to make up my mind whether I
liked Uriah or detested him ; and I was very doubtful about it
still, as I stood looking him in the face in the street. But I
felt it quite an affront to be supposed proud, and said I only
wanted to be asked.

" Oh, if that's all. Master Copperfield," said Uriah, " and it
really isn't our umbleness that prevents you, will you come this
evening ? But if it is our umbleness, I hope you won't mind
owning to it. Master Copperfield ; for we are all well aware of
our condition."

I said I would mention it to Mr. Wickfield, and if he ap-
proved, as I had no doubt he would, I would come with
pleasure. So, at six o'clock that evening, which was one
of the early office evenings, I announced myself as ready, to
Uriah.

" Mother will be proud, indeed," he said, as we walked away
together. " Or she would be proud, if it wasn't sinful. Master
Copperfield."

*' Yet you didn't mind supposing / was proud this morning,"
I returned.

" Oh dear, no. Master Copperfield ! " returned Uriah. " Oh,
believe me, no ! Such a thought never came into my head !
I shouldn't have deemed it at all proud if you had thought us
too umble for you. Because we are so very umble."

238 David Copperfield

"Have you been studying much law lately?" I asked, to
change the subject.

*' Oh, Master Copperfield," he said, with an air of self-denial,
" my reading is hardly to be called study. I have passed an
hour or two in the evening, sometimes, with Mr. Tidd."

" Rather hard, I suppose ? " said I.

"He is hard to me sometimes," returned Uriah. "But I
don't know what he might be to a gifted person."

After beating a little tune on his chin as he walked on, with
the two forefingers of his skeleton right hand, he added :

" There are expressions, you see, Master Copperfield — Latin
words and terms — in Mr. Tidd, that are trying to a reader of
my umble attainments."

"Would you like to be taught Latin?" I said, briskly. " I
will teach it you with pleasure, as I learn it."

" Oh, thank you, Master Copperfield," he answered, shaking
his head. " I am sure it's very kind of you to make the offer,
but I am much too umble to accept it."

" What nonsense, Uriah ! "

" Oh, indeed you must excuse me, Master Copperfield ! I
am greatly obliged, and I should like it of all things, I assure
you ; but I am far too umble. There are people enough to
tread upon me in my lowly state, without my doing outrage to
their feelings by possessing learning. Learning ain't for me.
A person like myself had better not aspire. If he is to get on
in life, he must get on umbly. Master Copperfield ! "

I never saw his mouth so wide, or the creases in his cheeks
so deep, as when he delivered himself of these sentiments :
shaking his head all the time, and writhing modestly.

"I think you are wrong, Uriah," I said. " I dare say there
are several things that I could teach you, if you would like to
learn them."

" Oh, I don't doubt that, Master Copperfield," he answered ;
"not in the least. But not being umble yourself, you don't
judge well, perhaps, for them that are. I won't provoke my
betters with knowledge, thank you. I'm much too umble.
Here is my humble dwelling, Master Copperfield ! "
"■"We entered a low, old-fashioned room, walked straight into
from the street, and found there Mrs. Heep, who was the dead
image of Uriah, only short. She received me with the utmost
humility, and apologised to me for giving her son a kiss,
observing that, lowly as they were, they had their natural
affections, which they hoped would give no offence to any one.
It was a perfectly decent room, half parlour and half kitchen,

David Copperfield 239

but not at all a snug room. The tea-things were set upon the
table, and the kettle was boiling on the hob. There was a
chest of drawers with an escritoire top, for Uriah to read or
write at of an evening ; there was Uriah's blue bag lying down
and vomiting papers ; there was a company of Uriah's books
commanded by Mr. Tidd ; there was a comer cupboard ; and
there were the usual articles of furniture. I don't remember
that any individual object had a bare, pinched, spare look ; but
I do remember that the whole place had.

It was perhaps a part of Mrs. Heep's humility, that she still
wore weeds. Notwithstanding the lapse of time that had
occurred since Mr. Heep's decease, she still wore weeds. I
think there was some compromise in the cap ; but otherwise
she was as weedy as in the early days of her mourning.

"This is a day to be remembered, my Uriah, I am sure,"
said Mrs. Heep, making the tea, "when Master Copperfield
pays us a visit."

'* I said you'd think so, mother," said Uriah.

" If I could have wished father to remain among us for any
reason," said Mrs. Heep, " it would have been, that he might
have known his company this afternoon."

I felt embarrassed by these compliments ; but I was sensible,
too, of being entertained as an honoured guest, and I thought
Mrs. Heep an agreeable woman.

"My Uriah," said Mrs. Heep, "has looked forward to
this, sir, a long while. He had his fears that our umbleness
stood in the way, and I joined in them myself. Umble we
are, umble we have been, umble we shall ever be," said Mrs.
Heep.

" I am sure you have no occasion to be so, ma'am," I said,
"unless you like."

"Thank you, sir," retorted Mrs. Heep. "We know our
station and are thankful in it."

I found that Mrs. Heep gradually got nearer to me, and that
Uriah gradually got opposite to me, and that they respectfully
plied me with the choicest of the eatables on the table. There
was nothing particularly choice there, to be sure ; but I took
the will for the deed, and felt that they were very attentive.
Presently they began to talk about aunts, and then I told them
about mine ; and about fathers and mothers, and then I told
them about mine ; and then Mrs. Heep began to talk about
fathers-in-law, and then I began to tell her about mine ; but
stopped, because my aunt had advised me to observe silence
on that subject A tender young cork, however, would have

240 David Copperfield

had no more chance against a pair of corkscrews, or a tender
young tooth against a pair of dentists, or a little shuttlecock
against two battledores, than I had against Uriah and Mrs.
Heep. They did just what they liked with me ; and wormed
things out of me that I had no desire to tell, with a certainty I
blush to think of : the more especially as, in my juvenile frank-
ness, I took some credit to myself for being so confidential,
and felt that I was quite the patron of my two respectful
entertainers.

They were very fond of one another : that was certain. I
take it, that had its effect upon me, as a touch of nature ; but
the skill with which the one followed up whatever the other
said, was a touch of art which I was still less proof against.
When there was nothing more to be got out of me about
myself (for on the Murdstone and Grinby life, and on my
journey, I was dumb), they began about Mr. Wickfield and
Agnes. Uriah threw the ball to Mrs. Heep, Mrs. Heep caught it
and threw it back to Uriah, Uriah kept it up a little while, then
sent it back to Mrs. Heep, and so they went on tossing it about
until I had 'no idea who had got it, and was quite bewildered.
The ball itself was always changing too. Now it was Mr.
Wickfield, now Agnes, now the excellence of Mr. Wickfield,
now my admiration of Agnes ; now the extent of Mr. Wickfield's
business and resources, now our domestic life after dinner ; now,
the wine that Mr. Wickfield took, the reason why he took it,
and the pity that it was he took so much ; now one thing, now
another, then everything at once; and all the time, without
appearing to speak very often, or to do anything but sometimes
encourage them a little, for fear they should be overcome by
their humility and the honour of my company, I found myself
perpetually letting out something or other that I had no business
to let out, and seeing the effect of it in the twinkling of Uriah's
dinted nostrils.

^js^ had begun to be a little uncomfortable, and to wish myself
well out of the visit, when a figure coming down the street
passed the door — it stood open to air the room, which was
warm, the weather being close for the time of year — came
back again, looked in, and walked in, exclaiming loudly,
"Copperfield! Is it possible?"

It was Mr. Micawber 1 It was Mr. Micawber, with his eye-
glass, and his walking-stick, and his shirt-collar, and his genteel
air, and the condescending roll in his voice, all complete !

" My dear Copperfield, "y^aid Mr. Micawber, putting out his
hand,)" this is indeed a meeting which is calculated to impress

David Copperfield 241

the mind with a sense of the instability and uncertainty of all
human — in short, it is a most extraordinary meeting. Walking
along the street, reflecting upon the probabiHty of something
turning up (of which I am at present rather sanguine), I find a
young but valued friend turn up, who is connected with the
most eventful period of my life ; I may say, with the turning-
point of my existence. Copperifield, my dear fellow, how do
you do?"

I cannot say — I really cannot say — that I was glad to see
Mr. Micawber there; but I was glad to see him too, and
shook hands with him heartily, inquiring how Mrs. Micawber
was.

"Thank you,'/said Mr. Micawber, waving his hand as of old,
and settling his chin in his shirt-collarl " She is tolerably con-
valescent. The twins no longer derive their sustenance from
Nature's founts — in short," said Mr. Micawber, in one of his
bursts of confidence, *' they are weaned — and Mrs. Micawber is,
at present, my travelling companion. She will be rejoiced,
Copperfield, to renew her acquaintance with one who has
proved himself in all respects a worthy minister at the sacred
altar of friendship."

I said I should be delighted to see her.

'* You are very good," said Mr. Micawber.

Mr. Micawber then smiled, settled his chin again, and looked
about him.

" I have discovered my friend Copperfield," /said Mr.
Micawber genteelly, and without addressing himself particularly
to any one^" not in solitude, but partaking of a social meal in
company with a widow lady, and one who is apparently her
offspring— in short," ('said Mr. Micawber, in another of his
bursts of confidence) " her son. I shall esteem it an honour to
be presented."

I could do no less, under these circumstances, than make
Mr. Micawber known to Uriah Heep and his mother ; which I
accordingly did. As they abased themselves before him, Mr.
Micawber took a seat, and waved his hand in his most courtly
manner.

" Any friend of my friend Copperfield's,"^said Mr. Micawber,^
" has a personal claim upon myself"

"We are too umble, sir," said Mrs. Heep, "my son and me,
to be the friends of Master Copperfield. He has been so good
as take his tea with us, and we are thankful to him for his
company; also to you, sir, for your notice."

" Ma'am," /returned Mr. Micawber, with a bow,^ " you are

242 David Copperfield

very obliging : and what are you doing, Copperfield ? Still in
the wine trade ? "

I was excessively anxious to get Mr. Micawber away ; and
replied, with my hat in my hand, and a very red face, I have
no doubt, that I was a pupil at Doctor Strong's.

"A pupil? "/said Mr. Micawber, raising his eyebrows.) "I
am extremely nappy to hear it. Although a mind like my
friend Copperfield's ; " Tto Uriah and Mrs. HeepJ "does not
require that cultivation which, without his knowledge of men
and things, it would require, still it is a rich soil teeming with
latent vegetation — in short, 'Ysaid Mr. Micawber, smiling, in
another burst of confidence) " it is an intellect capable of getting
up the classics to any extent."

Uriah, with his long hands slowly twining over one another,
made a ghastly writhe from the waist upwards, to express his
concurrence in this estimation of me.

" Shall we go and see Mrs. Micawber, sir ? " I said, to get
Mr. Micawber away.

" If you will do her that favour, Copperfield, "(replied Mr.
Micawber, rising.] " I have no scruple in saying, in the presence
of our friends here, that I am a man who has, for some years,
contended against the pressure of pecuniary difficulties." (l
knew he was certain to say something of Jthis kind; he always
would be so boastful about his difficulties. Jf "Sometimes I have
risen superior to my difficulties. Sometimes my difficulties
have — in short, have floored me. There have been times when
I have administered a succession of facers to them ; there have
been times when they have been too many for me, and I have
given in, and said to Mrs. Micawber, in the words of Cato,
* Plato, thou reasonest well. It's all up now. I can show fight
no more.' But at no time of my life, "/said Mr. Micawber,)
•'have I enjoyed a higher degree of satisfaction than in pouring
my griefs (if I may describe difficulties, chiefly arising out of
warrants of attorney and promissory notes at two and four
months, by that word) into the bosom of my friend Copperfield."

Mr. Micawber closed this handsome tribute by saying, " Mr.
Heep ! Good evening. Mrs. Heap ! Your servant," and then
walking out with me in his most fashionable manner, making a
good deal of noise on the pavement with his shoes, and
humming a tune as we went^/

It was a little inn wherp^ Mr. Micawber put up, and he
occupied a little room in it, partitioned off" from the commercial
room, and strongly flavoured with tobacco-smoke. I think it
was over the kitchen, because a warm greasy smell appeared

David Copperfield 243

to come up through the chinks in the floor, and there was a
flabby perspiration on the walls. I know it was near the bar,
on account of the smell of spirits and jingling of glasses.
Here, recumbent on a small sofa, underneath a picture of a
race-horse, with her head close to the fire, and her feet pushing
the mustard off the dumb-waiter at the other end of the room,
was Mrs. Micawber, to whom Mr, Micawber entered first,
saying, "My dear, allow me to introduce to you a pupil of
Doctor Strong's."

I noticed, by-the-by, that although Mr. Micawber was just as
much confused as ever about my age and standing, he always
remembered, as a genteel thing, that I was a pupil of Doctor
Strong's.

Mrs. Micawber was amazed, but very glad to see me, I was
very glad to see her too, and, after an affectionate greeting on
both sides, sat down on the small sofa near her.

"My dear," said Mr. Micawber, "if you will mention to
Copperfield what our present position is, which I have no doubt
he will like to know, I will go and look at the paper the while,
and see whether anything turns up among the advertisements "

"I thought you were at Plymouth, ma'am," I said to Mrs,
Micawber, as he went out.

"My dear Master Copperfield," she replied, "we went to
Plymouth."

"To be on the spot," I hinted.

" Just so," said Mrs. Micawber. " To be on the spot. But
the truth is, talent is not wanted in the Custom House. The
local influence of my family was quite unavailing to obtain any
employment in that department, for a man of Mr. Micawber's
abilities. They would rather not have a man of Mr. Micawber's
abilities. He would only show the deficiency of the others.
Apart from which," said Mrs. Micawber, " I will not disguise
from you, my dear Master Copperfield, that when that branch
of my family which is settled in Plymouth became aware that
Mr. Micawber was accompanied by myself, and by little Wilkins
and his sister, and by the twins, they did not receive him with
that ardour which he might have expected, being so newly
released from captivity. In fact," said Mrs. Micawber, lowering
her voice, — "this is between ourselves — our reception was
cool."

" Dear me ! " I said.

" Yes," said Mrs. Micawber. " It is truly painful to con-
template mankind in such an aspect, Master Copperfield, but
our reception was decidedly cool. There is no doubt about it.

244 David Copperfield

In fact, that branch of my family which is settled in Plymouth
became quite personal to Mr. Micawber, before we had been
there a week."

I said, and thought, that they ought to be ashamed of
themselves.

"Still, so it was," continued Mrs. Micawber. "Under such
circumstances, what could a man of Mr. Micawber's spirit do?
But one obvious course was left. To borrow of that branch of
my family the money to return to London, and to return at any
sacrifice."

"Then you all came back again, ma'am?" I said.

"We all came back again," replied Mrs. Micawber. "Since
then, I have consulted other branches of my family on the
course which it is most expedient for Mr. Micawber to take —
for I maintain that he must take some course, Master Copper-
field," said Mrs. Micawber, argumentatively. " It is clear that
a family of six, not including a domestic, cannot live upon air."

"Certainly, ma'am," said I.

" The opinion of those other branches of my family," pursued
Mrs. Micawber, "is, that Mr. Micawber should immediately
turn his attention to coals."

" To what, ma'am ? "

" To coals," said Mrs. Micawber. " To the coal trade. Mr.
Micawber was induced to think, on inquiry, that there might be
an opening for a man of his talent in the Medway Coal Trade.
Then, as Mr. Micawber very properly said, the first step to be
taken clearly was, to come and see the Medway. Which we
came and saw. I say ' we,' Master Copperfield ; for I never
will," said Mrs. Micawber with emotion, " I never will desert
Mr. Micawber."

I murmured my admiration and approbation.

" We came," repeated Mrs. Micawber, "and saw the Medway.
My opinion of the coal trade on that river is, that it may
require talent, but that it certainly requires capital. Talent,
Mr. Micawber has ; capital, Mr. Micawber has not. We saw,
I think, the greater part of the Medway; and that is my
individual conclusion. Being so near here, Mr. Micawbei
was of opinion that it would be rash not to come on, and see
the Cathedral. Firstly, on account of its being so well worth
seeing, and our never having seen it ; and secondly, on account
of the great probability of something turning up in a cathedral
town. We have been here," said Mrs. Micawber, " three days.
Nothing has, as yet, turned up ; and it may not surprise you,
my dear Master Copperfield, so much as it would a stranger,

David Copperfield 245

to know that we are at present waiting for a remittance from
London, to discharge our pecuniary obligations at this hotel
Until the arrival of that remittance," said Mrs. Micawber with
much feeling, "I am cut off from my home (I allude to
lodgings in Pentonville), from my boy and girl, and from my
twins."

I felt the utmost sympathy for Mr. and Mrs. Micawber in
this anxious extremity, and said as much to Mr. Micawber,
who now returned : adding that I only wished I had money
enough, to lend them the amount they needed. Mr. Micawber's
answer expressed the disturbance of his mind. He said, shaking
hands with me, " Copperfield, you are a true friend ; but when
the worst comes to the worst, no man is without a friend who
is possessed of shaving materials." At this dreadful hint Mrs.
Micawber threw her arms round Mr. Micawber's neck and
entreated him to be calm. He wept; but so far recovered,
almost immediately, as to ring the bell for the waiter, and
bespeak a hot kidney pudding and a plate of shrimps for
breakfast in the morning.

When I took my leave of them, they both pressed me so
much to come and dine before they went away, that I could
not refuse. But, as I knew I could not come next day, when
I should have a good deal to prepare in the evening, Mr.
Micawber arranged that he would call at Dr. Strong's in the
course of the morning (having a presentiment that the remit-
tance would arrive by that post), and propose the day after, if
it would suit me better. Accordingly I was called out of school
next forenoon, and found Mr. Micawber in the parlour ; who
had called to say that the dinner would take place as proposed.
When I asked him if the remittance had come, he pressed my
hand and departed.

As I was looking out of window that same evening, it sur-
prised me, and made me rather uneasy, to see Mr. Micawber
and Uriah Heep walk past, arm in arm : Uriah humbly sensible
of the honour that was done him, and Mr. Micawber taking a
bland delight in extending his patronage to Uriah. But I was
still more surprised, when I went to the little hotel next day at
the appointed dinner-hour, which was four o'clock, to find,
from what Mr. Micawber said, that he had gone home with
Uriah, and had drunk brandy-and-water at Mrs. Heep's.

"And I'll tell you what, my dear Copperfield," said Mr.
Micawber, " your friend Heep is a young fellow who might be
attorney- general. If I had known that young man, at the period
when my difficulties came to a crisis, all I can say is, that

246 David Copperfield

I believe my creditors would have been a great deal better
managed than they were."

I hardly understood how this could have been, seeing that
Mr. Micawber had paid them nothing at all as it was ; but I
did not like to ask. Neither did I like to say, that I hoped he
had not been too communicative to Uriah; or to inquire if
they had talked much about me. I was afraid of hurting Mr.
Micawber's feelings, or, at all events, Mrs. Micawber's, she
being very sensitive ; but I was uncomfortable about it, too, and
often thought about it afterwards.

We had a beautiful little dinner. Quite an elegant dish of
fish ; the kidney-end of a loin of veal, roasted ; fried sausage-
meat ; a partridge, and a pudding. There was wine, and there
was strong ale ; and after dinner Mrs. Micawber made us a
bowl of hot punch with her own hands.

Mr. Micawber was uncommonly convivial. I never saw him
such good company. He made his face shine with the punch,
so that it looked as if it had been varnished all over. He got
cheerfully sentimental about the town, and proposed success to
it ; observing that Mrs. Micawber and himself had been made
extremely snug and comfortable there, and that he never should
forget the agreeable hours they had passed in Canterbury. He
proposed me afterwards ; and he, and Mrs. Micawber, and I,
took a review of our past acquaintance, in the course of which,
we sold the property all over again. Then I proposed Mrs.
Micawber ; or, at least, said, modestly, " If you'll allow me,
Mrs. Micawber, I shall now have the pleasure of drinking your
health, ma'am." On which Mr. Micawber delivered an eulogium
on Mrs. Micawber's character, and said she had ever been his
guide, philosopher, and friend, and that he would recommend
me, when I came to a marrying-time of life, to marry such
another woman, if such another woman could be found.

As the punch disappeared, Mr. Micawber became still more
friendly and convivial. Mrs. Micawber's spirits becoming
elevated, too, we sang "Auld Lang Syne." When we came
to " Here's a hand, my trusty frere," we all joined hands round
the table ; and when we declared we would " take a right gude
Willie Waught," and hadn't the least idea what it meant, we
were really affected.

In a word, I never saw anybody so thoroughly jovial as Mr.
Micawber was, down to the very last moment of the evening,
when I took a hearty farewell of himself and his amiable wife.
Consequently, I was not prepared, at seven o'clock next morn-
ing, to receive the following communication, dated half-past

David Copperfield 247

nine in the evening ; a quarter of an hour after I had left
him : —

" My Dear Young Friend,

" The die is cast — all is over. Hiding the ravages of
care with a sickly mask of mirth, I have not informed you, this
evening, that there is no hope of the remittance ! Under
these circumstances, alike humiliating to endure, humiliating to
contemplate, and humiliating to relate, I have discharged the
pecuniary liability contracted at this establishment, by giving a
note of hand, made payable fourteen days after date, at my
residence, Pentonville, London. When it becomes due, it
will not be taken up. The result is destruction. The bolt is
impending, and the tree must fall.

" Let the wretched man who now addresses you, my dear
Copperfield, be a beacon to you through life. He writes with
that intention, and in that hope. If he could think himself ot
so much use, one gleam of day might, by possibility, penetrate
into the cheerless dungeon of his remaining existence — though
his longevity is, at present (to say the least of it), extremely
problematical.

"This is the last communication, my dear Copperfield, you
will ever receive

** From
"The

" Beggared Outcast,

"WiLKINS MlCAWBER."

I was so shocked by the contents of this heartrending letter,
that I ran off directly towards the little hotel with the intention
of taking it on my way to Doctor Strong's, and trying to soothe
Mr. Micawber with a word of comfort. But, half-way there, I
met the London coach with Mr. and Mrs. Micawber up behind ;
Mr. Micawber, the very picture of tranquil enjoyment, smiling
at Mrs. Micawber's conversation, eating walnuts out of a paper
bag, with a bottle sticking out of his breast pocket. As they
did not see me, I thought it best, all things considered, not to
see them. So, with a great weight taken off my mind, I turned
into a by-street that was the nearest way to school, and felt,
upon the whole, relieved that they were gone : though I still
liked them very much, nevertheless.

248 David Copperfield

CHAPTER XVIII

A RETROSPECT

My school-days ! The silent gliding on of my existence — the
unseen, unfelt progress of my life — from childhood up to
youth ! Let me think, as I look back upon that flowing water,
now a dry channel overgrown with leaves, whether there are
any marks along its course, by which I can remember how
it ran.

A moment, and I occupy my place in the Cathedral, where
we all went together, every Sunday morning, assembling first
at school for that purpose. The earthy smell, the sunless
air, the sensation of the world being shut out, the resounding
of the organ through the black and white arched galleries
and aisles, are wings that take me back, and hold me
hovering above those days, in a half-sleeping and half-waking
dream.

I am not the last boy in the school. I have risen, in a few
months, over several heads. But the first boy seems to me a
mighty creature, dwelling afar off, whose giddy height is
unattainable. Agnes says "No," but I say "Yes," and tell
her that she little thinks what stores of knowledge have been
mastered by the wonderful Being, at whose place she thinks
I, even I, weak aspirant, may arrive in time. He is not my
private friend and public patron, as Steerforth was ; but I hold
him in a reverential respect. I chiefly wonder what he'll be,
when he leaves Dr. Strong's, and what mankind will do to
maintain any place against him.

But who is this that breaks upon me? This is Miss Shepherd,
whom I love.

Miss Shepherd is a boarder at the Misses Nettingalls'
establishment. I adore Miss Shepherd. She is a little girl, in
a spencer, with a round face and curly flaxen hair. The
Misses Nettingalls' young ladies come to the Cathedral too. I
cannot look upon my book, for I must look upon Miss Shep-
herd. When the choristers chaunt, I hear Miss Shepherd. In
the service I mentally insert Miss Shepherd's name ; I put her
in among the Royal Family. At home, in my own room, I am
sometimes moved to cry out, "Oh, Miss Shepherd!" in a
transport of love.

For some time I am doubtful of Miss Shepherd's feelings,

David Copperfield 249

but, at length, fate being propitious, we meet at the dancing-
school. I have Miss Shepherd for my partner. I touch Miss
Shepherd's glove, and feel a thrill go up the right arm of my
jacket, and come out at my hair. I say nothing tender to Miss
Shepherd, but we understand each other. Miss Shepherd and
myself live but to be united.

Why do I secretly give Miss Shepherd twelve Brazil nuts for
a present, I wonder ? They are not expressive of affection, they
are difficult to pack into a parcel of any regular shape, they are
hard to crack, even in room doors, and they are oily when
cracked ; yet 1 feel that they are appropriate to Miss Shep-
herd. Soft, seedy biscuits, also, I bestow upon Miss Shepherd,
and oranges innumerable. Once, I kiss Miss Shepherd in
the cloak room. Ecstasy ! What are my agony and indignation
next day, when I hear a flying rumour that the Misses Netting-
all have stood Miss Shepherd in the stocks for turning in her
toes !

Miss Shepherd being the one pervading theme and vision of
my life, how do I ever come to break with her ? I can't con-
ceive. And yet a coolness grows between Miss Shepherd and
myself. Whispers reach me of Miss Shepherd having said
she wished I wouldn't stare so, and having avowed a prefer-
ence for Master Jones — for Jones ! a boy of no merit whatever !
The gulf between me and Miss Shepherd widens. At last, one
day, I meet the Misses Nettingalls' establishment out walking.
Miss Shepherd makes a face as she goes by and laughs at her
companion. All is over. The devotion of a life — it seems a
life, it is all the same — is at an end ; Miss Shepherd comes out
of the morning service, and the Royal Family know her no
more.

I am higher in the school, and no one breaks my peace. I
am not at all polite, now, to the Misses Nettingalls' young ladies,
and shouldn't dote on any of them, if they were twice as many
and twenty times as beautiful. I think the dancing-school a
tiresome affair, and wonder why the girls can't dance by them-
selves and leave us alone. I am growing great in Latin verses,
and neglect the laces of my boots. Doctor Strong refers to
me in public as a promising young scholar. Mr. Dick is
wild with joy, and my aunt remits me a guinea by the next
post.

The shade of a young butcher rises, like the apparition of an
armed head in Macbeth. Who is this young butcher ? He
is the terror of the youth of Canterbury. There is a vague
belief abroad, that the beef suet with which he anoints his hair

250 David Copperfield

gives him unnatural strength, and that he is a match for a man.
He is a broad-faced, bull-necked young butcher, with rough red
cheeks, an ill-conditioned mind, and an injurious tongue. His
main use of the tongue is to disparage Doctor Strong's young
gentlemen. He says, publicly, that if they want anything
he'll give it 'em. He names individuals among them (myself
included), whom he could undertake to settle with one hand,
and the other tied behind him. He waylays the smaller boys
to punch their unprotected heads, and calls challenges after
me in the open streets. For these sufficient reasons I resolve
to fight the butcher.

It is a summer evening, down in a green hollow, at the corner
of a wall. I meet the butcher by appointment. I am attended
by a select body of our boys ; the butcher, by two other butchers,
a young publican, and a sweep. The preliminaries are adjusted,
and the butcher and myself stand face to face. In a moment
the butcher lights ten thousand candles out of my left eyebrow.
In another moment, I don't know where the wall is, or where I
am, or where anybody is. I hardly know which is myself and
which the butcher, we are always in such a tangle and tussle,
knocking about upon the trodden grass. Sometimes I see the
butcher, bloody but confident ; sometimes I see nothing, and
sit gasping on my second's knee ; sometimes I go in at the
butcher madly, and cut my knuckles open against his face,
without appearing to discompose him at all. At last I awake,
very queer about the head, as from a giddy sleep, and see the
butcher walking off, congratulated by the two other butchers
and the sweep and publican, and putting on his coat as he goes;
from which I augur, justly, that the victory is his.

I am taken home in a sad plight, and I have beef- steaks put
to my eyes, and am rubbed with vinegar and brandy, and find
a great white puffy place bursting out on my upper lip,
which swells immoderately. For three or four days I remain
at home, a very ill-looking subject, with a green shade over my
eyes ; and I should be very dull, but that Agnes is a sister to
me, and condoles with me, and reads to me, and makes the
time light and happy. Agnes has my confidence completely,
always ; I tell her all about the butcher, and the wrongs he
has heaped upon me ; she thinks I couldn't have done other-
wise than fight the butcher, while she shrinks and trembles at
my having fought him.

Time has stolen on unobserved, for Adams is not the head,
boy in the days that are come now, nor has he been this many
and many a day. Adams has left the school so long, that

David Copperfield 251

when he comes back, on a visit to Dr. Strong, there are not
many there, besides myself, who know him. Adams is going
to be called to the bar almost directly, and is to be an advo-
cate, and to wear a wig. I am surprised to find him a meeker
man than I had thought, and less imposing in appearance.
He has not staggered the world yet, either ; for it goes on (as
well as I can make out) pretty much the same as if he had
never joined it.

A blank, through which the warriors of poetry and history
march on in stately hosts that seem to have no end — and what
comes next ! / am the head-boy, now ! I look down on the
line of boys below me, with a condescending interest in such
of them as bring to my mind the boy I was myself, when I
first came there. That little fellow seems to be no part of me ;
I remember him as something left behind upon the road of life
— as something I have passed, rather than have actually been —
and almost think of him as of some one else.

And the little girl I saw on that first day at Mr. Wickfield's,
where is she ? Gone also. In her stead, the perfect likeness
of the picture, a child likeness no more, move about the house ;
and Agnes, my sweet sister, as J call her in my thoughts, my
counsellor and friend, the better angel of the lives of all who
come within her calm, good, self-denying influence, is quite a
woman.

What other changes have come upon me, besides the
changes in my growth and looks, and in the knowledge I
have garnered all this while ? I wear a gold watch and chain,
a ring upon my little finger, and a long-tailed coat ; and I use
a great deal of bear's grease — which, taken in conjunction
with the ring, looks bad. Am I in love again? I am. I
worship the eldest Miss Larkins.

The eldest Miss Larkins is not a little girl. She is a tall,
dark, black-eyed, fine figure of a woman. The eldest Miss
Larkins is not a chicken ; for the youngest Miss Larkins is not
that, and the eldest must be three or four years older. Perhaps
the eldest Miss Larkins may be about thirty. My passion for
her is beyond all bounds.

The eldest Miss Larkins knows officers. It is an awful thing
to bear. I see them speaking to her in the street. I see them
cross the way to meet her, when her bonnet (she has a bright
taste in bonnets) is seen coming down the pavement, accom-
panied by her sister's bonnet. She laughs and talks, and
seems to like it. I spend a good deal of my own spare time in
walking up and down to meet her. If I can bow to her once

252 David Copperfield

in the day (I know her to bow to, knowing Mr. Larkins), I am
happier. I deserve a bow now and then. The raging agonies
I suffer on the night of the Race Ball, where I know the eldest
Miss Larkins will be dancing with the military, ought to have
some compensation, if there be even-handed justice in the
world.

My passion takes away my appetite, and makes me wear my
newest silk neckerchief continually. I have no relief but in
putting on my best clothes, and having my boots cleaned over
and over again. I seem, then, to be worthier of the eldest
Miss Larkins. Everything that belongs to her, or is connected
with her, is precious to me. Mr. Larkins (a gruff old gentle-
man with a double chin, and one of his eyes immovable in his
head) is fraught with interest to me. When I can't meet his
daughter, I go where I am likely to meet him. To say " How
do you do, Mr. Larkins? Are the young ladies and all the
family quite well ? " seems so pointed, that I blush.

I think continually about my age. Say I am seventeen, and
say that seventeen is young for the eldest Miss Larkins, what
of that? Besides, I shall be one-and-twenty in no time almost
I regularly take walks outside Mr. Larkins's house in the even-
ing, though it cuts me to the heart to see the officers go in,
or to hear them up in the drawing-room, where the eldest Miss
Larkins plays the harp. I even walk, on two or three occasions,
in a sickly, spoony manner, round and round the house after
the family are gone to bed, wondering which is the eldest Miss
Larkins's chamber (and pitching, I dare say now, on Mr.
Larkins's instead); wishing that a fire would burst out; that
the assembled crowd would stand appalled; that I, dashing
through them with a ladder, might rear it against her window,
save her in my arms, go back for something she had left
behind, and perish in the flames. For I am generally dis-
interested in my love, and think I could be content to make a
figure before Miss Larkins, and expire. Generally, but not
always. Sometimes brighter visions rise before me. When
I dress (the occupation of two hours), for a great ball given
at the Larkins's (the anticipation of three weeks), I indulge
my fancy with pleasing images. I picture myself taking courage
to make a declaration to Miss Larkins. I picture Miss Larkins
sinking her head upon my shoulder, and saying, "Oh, Mr.
Copperfield, can I believe my ears ! " I picture Mr. Larkins
waiting on me next morning, and saying, "My dear Copper-
field, my daughter has told me all. Youth is no objection.
Here are twenty thousand pounds. Be happy!" I picture

David Copperfield 253

my aunt relenting, and blessing us ; and Mr. Dick and Doctor
Strong being present at the marriage ceremony. I am a
sensible fellow, I believe — I believe, on looking back, I mean
— and modest I am sure; but all this goes on notwith-
standing.

I repair to the enchanted house, where there are lights,
chattering, music, flowers, officers (I am sorry to see), and
the eldest Miss Larkins, a blue of beauty. She is dressed
in blue, with blue flowers in her hair — forget-me-nots. As
if she had any need to wear forget-me-nots ! It is the first
really grown-up party that I have ever been invited to, and
I am a little uncomfortable ; for I appear not to belong to
anybody, and nobody appears to have anything to say to
me, except Mr. Larkins, who asks me how my schoolfellows
are, which he needn't do, as I have not come there to be
insulted.

But after I have stood in the doorway for some time, and
feasted my eyes upon the goddess of my heart, she approaches
me — she, the eldest Miss Larkins! — and asks me pleasantly,
if I dance?

I stammer, with a bow, "With you. Miss Larkins."

" With no one else ? " inquires Miss Larkins.

" I should have no pleasure in dancing with any one else.*

Miss Larkins laughs and blushes (or I think she blushes),
and says, " Next time but one, I shall be very glad."

The time arrives. "It is a waltz, I think," Miss Larkins
doubtfully observes, when I present myself. " Do you waltz ?
If not, Captain Bailey "

But I do waltz (pretty well, too, as it happens), and I take
Miss Larkins out. I take her sternly from the side of Captain
Bailey. He is wretched, I have no doubt ; but he is nothing
to me. 1 have been wretched, too. I waltz with the eldest
Miss Larkins 1 I don't know where, among whom, or how
long. I only know that I swim about in space, with a blue
angel, in a state of blissful delirium, until I find myself alone
with her in a little room, resting on a sofa. She admires a
flower (pink camellia japonica, price half-a-crown), in my
button-hole. I give it her, and say:

" I ask an inestimable price for it, Miss Larkins."

" Indeed ! What is that ? " returns Miss Larkins.

" A flower of yours, that I may treasure it as a miser does
gold."

"You're a bold boy," says Miss Larkins. "There."

She gives it me, not displeased ; and I put it to my lips, and

254 David Copperfield

then into my breast. Miss Larkins, laughing, draws her hand
through my arm, and says, "Now take me back to Captain
Bailey."

I am lost in the recollection of this delicious interview, and
the waltz, when she comes to me again, with a plain elderly
gentleman, who has been playing whist all night, upon her
arm, and says :

" Oh ! here is my bold friend ! Mr. Chestle wants to know
you, Mr. Copperiield."

I feel at once that he is a friend of the family, and am much
gratified.

" I admire your taste, sir," says Mr. Chestle. " It does you
credit. I suppose you don't take much interest in hops ; but
I am a pretty large grower myself; and if you ever like to
come over to our neighbourhood — neighbourhood of Ashford
— and take a run about our place, we shall be glad for you to
stop as long as you like."

I thank Mr. Chestle warmly, and shake hands. I think I
am in a happy dream. I waltz with the eldest Miss Larkins
once again. She says I waltz so well ! I go home in a state
of unspeakable bliss, and waltz in imagination, all night long,
with my arm round the blue waist of my dear divinity. For
some days afterwards, I am lost in rapturous reflections ; but I
neither see her in the street, nor when I call. I am imperfectly
consoled for this disappointment by the sacred pledge, the
perished flower.

"Trotwood," says Agnes, one day after dinner. "Who do
you think is going to be married to-morrow ? Some one you
admire."

" Not you, I suppose, Agnes ? "

" Not me ! " raising her cheerful face from the music she is
copying. " Do you hear him. Papa ? — The eldest Miss Larkins."

"To — to Captain Bailey?" I have just enough power to
ask.

" No ; to no Captain. To Mr. Chestle, a hop-grower."

I am terribly dejected for about a week or two. I take ofl"
my ring, I wear my worst clothes, I use no bear's grease, and I
frequently lament over the late Miss Larkins's faded flower.
Being, by that time, rather tired of this kind of life, and having
received new provocation from the butcher, I throw the flower
away, go out with the butcher, and gloriously defeat him.

This, and the resumption of my ring, as well as of the bear's
grease in moderation, are the last marks I can discern, now, in
my progress to seventeen.

David Copperfield 255

CHAPTER XIX

I LOOK ABOUT ME, AND MAKE A DISCOVERY

I AM doubtful whether I was at heart glad or sorry, when my
school-days drew to an end, and the time came for my leaving
Doctor Strong's. I had been very happy there, I had a great
attachment for the Doctor, and I was eminent and distinguished
in that little world. For these reasons I was sorry to go ; but
for other reasons, unsubstantial enough, I was glad. Misty
ideas of being a young man at my own disposal, of the import-
ance attaching to a young man at his own disposal, of the
wonderful things to be seen and done by that magnificent
animal, and the wonderful effects he could not fail to make
upon society, lured me away. So powerful were these visionary
considerations in my boyish mind, that I seem, according to
my present way of thinking, to have left school without natural
regret. The separation has not made the impression on me
that other separations have. I try in vain to recall how I
felt about it, and what its circumstances were; but it is not
momentous in my recollection. I suppose the opening prospect
confused me. I know that my juvenile experiences went for
little or nothing then ; and that life was more like a great fairy
story, which I was just about to begin to read, than anything
else.

My aunt and I had held many grave deliberations on the
calling to which I should be devoted. For a year or more I
had endeavoured to find a satisfactory answer to her often-
repeated question, " What I would like to be ? " But I had no
particular liking, that I could discover, for anything. If I could
have been inspired with a knowledge of the science of navigation,
taken the command of a fast-sailing expedition, and gone round
the world on a triumphant voyage of discovery, I think I might
have considered myself completely suited. But in the absence
of any such miraculous provision, my desire was to apply myself
to some pursuit that would not lie too heavily upon her purse ;
and to do my duty in it, whatever it might be.

Mr. Dick had regularly assisted at our councils, with a
meditative and sage demeanour. He never made a suggestion
but once ; and on that occasion (I don't know what put it in
his head), he suddenly proposed that I should be " a Brazier."
My aunt received this proposal so very ungraciously, that he

256 David Copperfield

never ventured on a second; but ever afterwards confined
himself to looking watchfully at her for her suggestions, and
rattling his money.

"Trot, I tell you what, my dear," said my aunt, one morning
in the Christmas season when I left school: "as this knotty
point is still unsettled, and as we must not make a mistake in
our decision if we can help it, I think we had better take a
little breathing-time. In the meanwhile, you must try to look
at it from a new point of view, and not as a schoolboy."

"I will, aunt."

"It has occurred to me," pursued my aunt, "that a little
change, and a glimpse of life out of doors, may be useful, in
helping you to know your own mind, and form a cooler judg-
ment. Suppose you were to take a little journey now. Suppose
you were to go down into the old part of the country again, for
instance, and see that — that out-of-the-way woman with the
savagest of names," said my aunt, rubbing her nose, for she
could never thoroughly forgive Peggotty for being so called.

" Of all things in the world, aunt, I should like it best ! "

"Well," said my aunt, " that's lucky, for I should like it too.
But it's natural and rational that you should like it. And I am
very well persuaded that whatever you do, Trot, will always be
natural and rational."

" I hope so, aunt."

" Your sister, Betsey Trotwood," said my aunt, " would have
been as natural and rational a girl as ever breathed. You'll be
worthy of her, won't you ? "

" I hope I shall be worthy oiyou, aunt. That will be enough
for me."

" It's a mercy that poor dear baby of a mother of yours didn't
live," said my aunt, looking at me approvingly, " or she'd have
been so vain of her boy by this time, that her soft little head
would have been completely turned, if there was anything of it
left to turn." (My aunt always excused any weakness of her
own iiumy behalf, by transferring it in this way to my poor
mother.) "Bless me, Trotwood, how you do remind me
of her ! "

" Pleasantly, I hope, aunt ? " said I.

" He's as like her, Dick," said my aunt, emphatically, " he's
as like her, as she was that afternoon, before she began to fret.
Bless my heart, he's as like her, as he can look at me out of his
two eyes ! "

" Is he indeed ? " said Mr. Dick.

" And he's like David, too," said my aunt, decisively.

David Copperfield 257

" He is very like David ! " said Mr. Dick.

" But what I want you to be, Trot," resumed ray aunt, " — I
don't mean physically, but morally ; you are very well physic-
ally— is, a firm fellow. A fine firm fellow, with a will of your
own. With resolution," said my aunt, shaking her cap at me,
and clenching her hand. " With determination. With character.
Trot. With strength of character that is not to be influenced,
except on good reason, by anybody, or by anything. That's
what I want you to be. That's what your father and mother
might both have been, Heaven knows, and been the better
for it."

I intimated that I hoped I should be what she described.

"That you may begin, in a small way, to have a reliance
upon yourself, and to act for yourself," said my aunt, " I shall
send you upon your trip, alone. I did think, once, of Mr.
Dick's going with you ; but, on second thoughts, I shall keep
him to take care of me."

Mr. Dick, for a moment, looked a little disappointed ; until
the honour and dignity of having to take care of the most
wonderful woman in the world, restored the sunshine to his
face.

"Besides," said my aunt, "there's the Memorial."

" Oh, certainly, " said Mr. Dick, in a hurry, " I intend, Trot-
wood, to get that done immediately — it really must be done
immediately ! And then it will go in, you know — and then — ,"
said Mr. Dick, after checking himself, and pausing a long time,
" there'll be a pretty kettle of fish 1 "

In pursuance of my aunt's kind scheme, I was shortly after-
wards fitted out with a handsome purse of money, and a
portmanteau, and tenderly dismissed upon my expedition. At
parting, my aunt gave me some good advice, and a good many
kisses ; and said that as her object was that I should look about
me, and should think a Httle, she would recommend me to stay
a few days in London, if I liked it, either on my way down into
Suffolk, or in coming back. In a word, I was at lib«ty to do
what I would, for three weeks or a month ; and no other
conditions were imposed upon my freedom than the before-
mentioned thinking and looking about me, and a pledge to
write three times a week and faithfully report myself.

I went to Canterbury first, that I might take leave of Agnes
and Mr. Wickfield (my old room in whose house I had not yet
relinquished), and also of the good Doctor. Agnes was very
glad to see me, and told me that the house had not been like
itself since I had left it.

258 David Copperfield

" I am sure I am not like myself when I am away," said I.
" I seem to want my right hand, when I miss you. Though
that's not saying much ; for there's no head in my right hand,
and no heart. Every one who knows you, consults with you,
and is guided by you, Agnes."

"Every one who knows me, spoils me, I believe," she
answered, smiling.

" No. It's because you are like no one else. You are so
good, and so sweet-tempered. You have such a gentle nature,
and you are always right."

" You talk," said Agnes, breaking into a pleasant laugh, as
she sat at work. " as if I were the late Miss Larkins."

" Come ! It's not fair to abuse my confidence," I answered,
reddening at the recollection of my blue enslaver. "But I
shall confide in you, just the same, Agnes. I can never grow
out of that. Whenever I fall into trouble, or fall in love, I
shall always tell you, if you'll let me — even when I come to
fall in love in earnest."

" Why, you have always been in earnest ! " said Agnes,
laughing again.

" Oh ! that was as a child, or a schoolboy," said I, laughing
in my turn, not without being a little shamefaced. "Times are
altering now, and I suppose I shall be in a terrible state of
earnestness one day or other. My wonder is, that you are not
in earnest yourself, by this time, Agnes."

Agnes laughed again, and shook her head.

" Oh, I know you are not ! " said I, " because if you had been,
you would have told me. Or at least," for I saw a faint blush
in her face, "you would have let me find it out for myself.
But there is no one that I know of, who deserves to love you^
Agnes. Some one of a nobler character, and more worthy
altogether than any one I have ever seen here, must rise up,
before I give my consent. In the time to come, I shall have
a wary eye on all admirers ; and shall exact a great deal from
the successful one, I assure you."

We had gone on, so far, in a mixture of confidential jest and
earnest, that had long grown naturally out of our familiar rela-
tions, begun as mere children. But Agnes, now suddenly
lifting up her eyes to mine, and speaking in a different manner,
said :

" Trot wood, there is something that I want to ask you, and
that I may not have another opportunity of asking for a long
time, perhaps. Something I would ask, I think, of no one
else. Have you observed any gradual alteration in Papa ? "

David Copperfield 259

I had observed it, and had often wondered whether she had
too. I must have shown as much, now, in my face ; for her
eyes were in a moment cast down, and I saw tears in them.

" Tell me what it is," she said, in a low voice.

"I think — shall I be quite plain, Agnes, liking him so
much ? "

" Yes," she said.

" I think he does himself no good by the habit that has
increased upon him since I first came here. He is often very
nervous, or I fancy so."

" It is not fancy," said Agnes, shaking her head.

" His hand trembles, his speech is not plain, and his eyes
look wild. I have remarked that at those times, and when he
is least like himself, he is most certain to be wanted on some
business."

" By Uriah," said Agnes.

" Yes ; and the sense of being unfit for it, or of not having
understood it, or of having shown his condition in spite of him-
self, seems to make him so uneasy, that next day hie is worse,
and next day worse, and so he becomes jaded and haggard.
Do not be alarmed by what I say, Agnes, but in this state I
saw him, only the other evening, lay down his head upon his
desk, and shed tears like a child."

Her hand passed softly before my lips while I was yet speak-
ing, and in a moment she had met her father at the door of
the room, and was hanging on his shoulder. The expression
of her face, as they both looked towards me, I felt to be very
touching. There was such deep fondness for him, and grati-
tude to him for all his love and care, in her beautiful look ; and
there was such a fcvent appeal to me to deal tenderly by him,
even in my inmost thoughts, and to let no harsh construction
find any place against him ; she was, at once, so proud of him
and devoted to him, yet so compassionate and sorry, and so
reliant upon me to be so, too ; that nothing she could have
said would have expressed more to me, or moved me more.

We were to drink tea at the Doctor's. We went there at the
usual hour; and round the study fireside found the Doctor,
and his young wife, and her mother. The Doctor, who made
as much of my going away as if I were going to China, received
me as an honoured guest ; and called for a log of wood to be
thrown on the fire, that he might see the face of his old pupil
reddening in the blaze.

" I shall not see many more new faces in Trotwood's stead,
Wickfield," said the Doctor, warming his hands ; " I am getting

26o David Copperfield

lazy, and want ease. I shall relinquish all my young people in
another six months, and lead a quieter life."

" You have said so, any time these ten years, Doctor," Mr.
Wickfield answered.

"But now I mean to do it," returned the Doctor. "My
first master will succeed me — I am in earnest at last — so you'll
soon have to arrange our contracts, and to bind us firmly to
them, like a couple of knaves."

"And to take care," said Mr. Wickfield, "that you're not
imposed on, eh ? As you certainly would be, in any contract
you should make for yourself. Well ! 1 am ready. There are
worse tasks than that, in my calling."

" I shall have nothing to think of, then," said the Doctor,
with a smile, "but my Dictionary; and this other contract-
bargain — Annie. "

As Mr. Wickfield glanced towards her, sitting at the tea-
table by Agnes, she seemed to. me to avoid his look with such
unwonted hesitation and timidity, that his attention became
fixed upon her, as if something were suggested to his thoughts.

" There is a post come in from India, I observe," he said,
after a short silence.

*' By-the-by ! and letters from Mr. Jack Maldon ! " said the
Doctor.

" Indeed ! "

" Poor dear Jack ! " said Mrs. Markleham, shaking her head.
"That trying climate! Like living, they tell me, on a sand-
heap, underneath a burning-glass! He looked strong, but
he wasn't. My dear Doctor, it was his spirit, not his con-
stitution, that he ventured on so boldly. Annie, my dear, I
am sure you must perfectly recollect that your cousin never
was strong; not what can be called robust^ you know," said
Mrs. Markleham, with emphasis, and looking round upon us
generally; "from the time when my daughter and himself were
children, together, and walking about, arm-in-arm, the livelong
day."

Annie, thus addressed, made no reply.

" Do I gather from what you say, ma'am, that Mr. Maldon
is ill?" asked Mr. Wickfield.

" 111 ! " replied the Old Soldier. " My dear sir, he's all sorts
of things."

" Except well ? " said Mr. Wickfield.

" Except well, indeed ! " said the Old Soldier. " He has
had dreadful strokes of the sun, no doubt, and jungle fevers
and agues, and every kind of thing you can mention. As to

David Copperfield 261

his liver," said the Old Soldier resignedly, " that, ot course, he
gave up altogether, when he first went out ! "

" Does he say all this ? " asked Mr. Wickfield.

"Say? My dear sir," returned Mrs. Markleham, shaking
her head and her fan, " you little know my poor Jack Maldon
when you ask that question. Say ? Not he. You might drag
him at the heels of four wild horses first."

' Mama ! " said Mrs. Strong.

" Annie, my dear," returned her mother, " once for all, I
must really beg that you will not interfere with me, unless it is
to confirm what I say. You know as well as I do that your
cousin Maldon would be dragged at the heels of any number
of wild horses — why should I confine myself to four ! I won'f
confine myself to four — eight, sixteen, two-and-thirty, rather
than say anything calculated to overturn the Doctor's plans."

" Wickfield's plans," said the Doctor, stroking his face, and
looking penitently at his adviser. " That is to say, our joint
plans for him. I said myself, abroad or at home."

"And I said," added Mr. Wickfield gravely, "abroad. I
was the means of sending him abroad. It's my responsibility."

" Oh ! Responsibility ! " said the Old Soldier. " Everything
was done for the best, my dear Mr. Wickfield ; everything was
done for the kindest and best, we know. But if the dear fellow
can't live there, he can't live there. And if he can't live there,
he'll die there, sooner than he'll overturn the Doctor's plans.
I know him," said the Old Soldier, fanning herself, in a sort of
calm prophetic agony, "and I know he'll die there, sooner than
he'll overturn the Doctor's plans."

" Well, well, ma'am," said the Doctor cheerfully, " I am not
bigoted to my plans, and I can overturn them myself. I can
substitute some other plans. If Mr. Jack Maldon comes home
on account of ill health, he must not be allowed to go back,
and we must endeavour to make some more suitable and
fortunate provision for him in this country."

Mrs. Markleham was so overcome by this generous speech
(which, I need not say, she had not at all expected or led up
to) that she could only tell the Doctor it was like himself, and
go several times through that operation of kissing the sticks of
her fan, and then tapping his hand with it After which she
gently chid her daughter Annie, for not being more demon-
strative when such kindnesses were showered, for her sake, on
her old playfellow : and entertained us with some particulars
concerning other deserving members of her family, whom it
was desirable to set on their deserving legs.

262 David Copperfield

All this time, her daughter Annie never once spoke, or lifted
up her eyes. AH this time, Mr. Wickfield had his glance upon
her as she sat by his own daughter's side. It appeared
to me that he never thought of being observed by any one ;
but was so intent upon her, and upon his own thoughts in
connexion with her, as to be quite absorbed. He now asked
what Mr. Jack Maldon had actually written in reference to
himself, and to whom he had written it ?

"Why, here," said Mrs. Markleham, taking a letter from
the chimney-piece above the Doctor's head, " the dear fellow
says to the Doctor himself — where is it ? Oh ! — ' I am
sorry to inform you that my health is suffering severely, and
that I fear I may be reduced to the necessity of returning
home for a time, as the only hope of restoration.' That's
pretty plain, poor fellow ! His only hope of restoration ! But
Annie's letter is plainer still. Annie, show me that letter
again."

" Not now, mama," she pleaded in a low tone.

" My dear, you absolutely are, on some subjects, one of the
most ridiculous persons in the world," returned her mother,
"and perhaps the most unnatural to the claims of your own
family. We never should have heard of the letter at all, I
believe, unless I had asked for it myself. Do you call that
confidence, my love, towards Doctor Strong ? I am surprised.
Vou ought to know better."

The letter was reluctantly produced ; and as I handed it to
the old lady, I saw how the unwilling hand from which I took
it, trembled.

" Now let us see," said Mrs. Markleham, putting her glass
to her eye, " where the passage is. ' The remembrance of old
times, my dearest Annie ' — and so forth — it's not there. 'The
amiable old Proctor ' — who's he ? Dear me, Annie, how
illegibly your cousin Maldon writes, and how stupid I am !
• Doctor,' of course. Ah ! amiable indeed ! " Here she left
off, to kiss her fan again, and shake it at the Doctor, who was
looking at us in a state of placid satisfaction. " Now I have
found it. * You may not be surprised to hear, Annie,' — no,
to be sure, knowing that he never was really strong ; what did
I say just now? — 'that I have undergone so much in this
distant place, as to have decided to leave it at all hazards ; on
sick leave, if I can \ on total resignation, if that is not to bfe
obtained. What I have endured, and do endure here, is
insupportable.' And but for the promptitude of that best of
creatures," said Mrs. Markleham, telegraphing the Doctor as

David Copperfield 263

before, and refolding the letter, " it would be insupportable to
me to think of."

Mr. Wickfield said not one word, though the old lady looked
to him as if for his commentary on this intelligence ; but sat
severely silent, with his eyes fixed on the ground. Long after
the subject was dismissed, and other topics occupied us, he
remained so ; seldom raising his eyes, unless to rest them for
a moment, with a thoughtful frown, upon the Doctor, or his
wife, or both.

The Doctor was very fond of music. Agnes sang with great
sweetness and expression, and so did Mrs. Strong. They
sang together, and played duets together, and we had quite a
little concert. But I remarked two things : first, that though
Annie soon recovered her composure, and was quite herself,
there was a blank between her and Mr. Wickfield which
separated them wholly from each other; secondly, that Mr.
Wickfield seemed to dislike the intimacy between her and
Agnes, and to watch it with uneasiness. And now, I must
confess, the recollection of what I had seen on that night
when Mr. Maldon went away, first began to return upon me
with a meaning it had never had, and to trouble me. The
innocent beauty of her face was not as innocent to me as it
had been ; I mistrusted the natural grace and charm of her
manner ; and when I looked at Agnes by her side, and thought
how good and true Agnes was, suspicions arose within me that
it was an ill-assorted friendship.

She was so happy in it herself, however, and the other was
so happy too, that they made the evening fly away as if it were
but an hour. It closed in an incident which I well remember.
They were taking leave of each other, and Agnes was going to
embrace her and kiss her, when Mr. Wickfield stepped between
them, as if by accident, and drew Agnes quickly away. Then
I saw, as though all the intervening time had been cancelled,
and I were still standing in the doorway on the night of the
departure, the expression of that night in the face of Mrs.
Strong, as it confronted his.

I cannot say what an impression this made upon me, or
how impossible I found it, when I thought of her afterwards,
to separate her from this look, and remember her face in its
innocent loveliness again. It haunted me when I got home.
I seemed to have left the Doctor's roof with a dark cloud
lowering on it. The reverence that I had for his grey head,
was mingled with commiseration for his faith in tiiose who
were treacherous to him, and with resentment against those

264 David Copperfield

who injured him. The impending shadow of a great affliction;
and a great disgrace that had no distinct form in it yet, fell like
a stain upon the quiet place where I had worked and played
as a boy, and did it a cruel wrong. I had no pleasure in
thinking, any more, of the grave old broad-leaved aloe-trees
which remained shut up in themselves a hundred years
together, and of the trim smooth grass-plot, and the stone
urns, and the Doctor's walk, and the congenial sound of the
Cathedral bell hovering above them all. It was as if the
tranquil sanctuary of my boyhood had been sacked before my
face, and its peace and honour given to the winds.

But morning brought with it my parting from the old house,
which Agnes had filled with her influence ; and that occupied
my mind sufficiently. I should be there again soon, no
doubt ; I might sleep again — perhaps often — in my old room ;
but the days of my inhabiting there were gone, and the old
time was past. I was heavier at heart when I packed up such
of my books and clothes as still remained there to be sent to
Dover, than I cared to show to Uriah Heep : who was so
officious to help me, that I uncharitably thought him mighty
glad that I was going.

I got away from Agnes and her father, somehow, with an
indifferent show of being very manly, and took my seat upon
the box of the London coach. I was so softened and for-
giving, going through the town, that I had half a mind to nod
to my old enemy the butcher, and throw him five shillings to
drink. But he looked such a very obdurate butcher as he
stood scraping the great block in the shop, and moreover, his
appearance was so little improved by the loss of a front tooth
which I had knocked out, that I thought it best to make no
advances.

The main object on my mind, I remember, when we got
fairly on the road, was to appear as old as possible to the
coachman, and to speak extremely grufif. The latter point I
achieved at great personal inconvenience : but I stuck to it,
because I felt it was a grown-up sort of thing.

" You are going through, sir ? " said the coachman.

" Yes, William," I said, condescendingly (I knew him) ; " I
am going to London. I shall go down into Suffolk aftfj-
wards."

•' wShooting, sir ? " said the coachman.

He knew as well as I did that it was just as likely, at that
time of year, I was going down there whaling; but I felt
complimented, too.

David Copperficld 265

"I don't know," I said, pretending to be undecided,
"whether I shall take a shot or not."

" Birds is got wery shy, I'm told," said William.

" So I understand," said I.

" Is Suffolk your county, sir ? " asked William.

"Yes," I said, with some importance. "Suffolk's my
county."

"I'm told the dumplings is uncommon fine down there,"
said William.

I was not aware of it myself, but I felt it necessary to
uphold the institutions of my county, and to evince a famili-
arity with them ; so I shook my head, as much as to say, " I
believe you ! "

"And the Punches," said William. "There's cattle! A
Suffolk Punch, when he's a good un, is worth his weight in
gold. Did you ever breed any Suffolk Punches yourself, sir ? "

" N— no," I said, " not exactly."

" Here's a gen'lm'n behind me, I'll pound it," said William,
"as has bred 'em by wholesale."

The gentleman spoken of was a gentleman with a very
unpromising squint, and a prominent chin, who had a tall
white hat on with a narrow flat brim, and whose close-fitting
drab trousers seemed to button all the way up outside his legs
from his boots to his hips. His chin was cocked over the
coachman's shoulder, so near to me, that his breath quite
tickled the back of my head ; and as I looked round at him,
he leered at the leaders with the eye with which he didn't
squint, in a very knowing manner.

" Ain't you ? " asked William.

" Ain't I what ? " said the gentleman behind.

" Bred them Suffolk Punches by wholesale ? "

" I should think so," said the gentleman. " There ain't no
sort of orse that I ain't bred, and no sort of dorg. Orses and
dorgs is some men's fancy. They're wittles and drink to me
— lodging, wife, and children — reading, writing, and 'rithmetic
— snuff, tobacker, and sleep."

" That ain't a sort of man to see sitting behind a coach-box,
is it though ? " said William in my ear, as he handled the
reins.

I construed this remark into an indication of a wish that he
should have my place, so I blushingly offered to resign it.

" Well, if you don't mind, sir," said William, " I think it
would be more correct,"

I have always considered this as the first fall I had in life.

266 David Copperfield

When I booked my place at the coach-office I had had " Box
Seat " written against the entry, and had given the book-
keeper half-a-crown. I was got up in a special great-coat and
shawl, expressly to do honour to that distinguished eminence ;
had glorified myself upon it a good deal ; and had felt that I
was a credit to the coach. And here, in the very first stage,
I was supplanted by a shabby man with a squint, who had no
other merit than smelling like a livery-stables, and being able
to walk across me, more like a fly than a human being, while
the horses were at a canter !

A distrust of myself, which has often beset me in life on
small occasions, when it would have been better away, was
assuredly not stopped in its growth by this little incident
outside the Canterbury coach. It was in vain to take refuge
in gruffness of speech. I spoke from the pit of my stomach
for the rest of the journey, but I felt completely extinguished,
and dreadfully young.

It was curious and interesting, nevertheless, to be sitting up
there, behind four horses : well educated, well dressed, and
with plenty of money in my pocket ; and to look out for the
places where I had slept on my weary journey. I had abundant
occupation for my thoughts, in every conspicuous landmark on
the road. When I looked down at the tramps whom we
passed, and saw that well-remembered style of face turned up,
I felt as if the tinker's blackened hand were in the bosom of
my shirt again. When we clattered through the narrow street
of Chatham, and I caught a glimpse, in passing, of the lane
where the old monster lived who had bought my jacket, I
stretched my neck eagerly to look for the place where I had
sat, in the sun and in the shade, waiting for my money. When
we came, at last, within a stage of London, and passed the
veritable Salem House where Mr. Creakle had laid about him
with a heavy hand, 1 would have given all I had, for lawful
permission to get down and thrash him, and let all the boys
out like so many caged sparrows.

We went to the Golden Cross, at Charing Cross, then a
mouldy sort of establishment in a close neighbourhood. A
waiter showed me into the coffee-room ; and a chamber-maid
introduced me to my small bedchamber, which smelt like a
hackney-coach, and was shut up like a family vault. I was
still painfully conscious of my youth, for nobody stood in any
awe of me at all : the chambermaid being utterly indifferent to
my opinions on any subject, and the waiter being familiar with
me, and offering advice to my inexperience.

David Copperfield 267

" Well now," said the waiter, in a tone of confidence, "what
would you like for dinner? Young gentlemen likes poultry in
general : have a fowl ! "

I told him, as majestically as I could, that I wasn't in the
humour for a fowl.

"Aint you?" said the waiter. "Young gentlemen is
generally tired of beef and mutton : have a weal cutlet ! "

I assented to this proposal, in default of being able to
suggest anything else.

"Do you care for taters?" said the waiter, with an insinuating
smile, and his head on one side. "Young gentlemen generally
has been overdosed with taters."

I commanded him, in my deepest voice, to order a veal
cutlet and potatoes, and all things fitting ; and to inquire at
the bar if there were any letters for Trotwood Copperfield,
Esquire — which I knew there were not, and couldn't be, but
thought it manly to appear to expect.

He soon came back to say that there were none (at which I
was much surprised), and began to lay the cloth for my dinner
in a box by the fire. While he was so engaged, he asked me
what I would take with it ; and on my replying " Half a pint
of sherry," thought it a favourable oppx)rtunity, I am afraid, to
extract that measure of wine from the stale leavings at the
bottoms of several small decanters. I am of this opinion,
because, while I was reading the newspaper, I observed him
behind a low wooden partition, which w£ls his private apart-
ment, very busy pouring out of a number of those vessels into
one, like a chemist and druggist making up a prescription.
When the wine came, too, I thought it flat ; and it certainly
had more English crumbs in it, than were to be expected in a
foreign wine in anything like a pure state ; but 1 was bashful
enough to drink it, and say nothing.

Being then in a pleasant frame of mind (from which I infer
that poisoning is not always disagreeable in some stages of the
process), I resolved to go to the play. It was Covent Garden
Theatre that I chose ; and there, from the back of a centre
box, I saw Julius Caesar and the new Pantomime. To have
all those noble Romans alive before me, and walking in and
out for my entertainment, instead of being the stern taskmasters
they had been at school, was a most novel and delightful
effect. But the mingled reality and mystery of the whole show,
the influence upon me of the poetry, the lights, the music, the
company, the smooth stupendous changes of glittering and
brilliant scenery, were so dazzling, and opened up such

268 David Copperfield

illimitable regions of delight, that when I came out into the
rainy street, at twelve o'clock at night, I felt as if I had come
from the clouds, where I had been leading a romantic life for
ages, to a bawling, splashing, link-lighted, umbrella-struggling,
hackney-coach-jostling, patten-clinking, muddy, miserable
world.

I had emerged by another door, and stood in the street for
a little while, as if 1 really were a stranger upon earth ; but the
unceremonious pushing and hustling that I received, soon
recalled me to myself, and put me in the road back to the
hotel; whither I went, revolving the glorious vision all the
way ; and where, after some porter and oysters, I sat revolving
it still, at past one o'clock, with my eyes on the coffee-room
fire.

I was so filled with the play, and with the past — for it was,
in a manner, like a shining transparency, through which I saw
my earlier life moving along — that I don't know when the
figure of a handsome well-formed young man, dressed with a
tasteful easy negligence which I have reason to remember very
well, became a real presence to me. But I recollect being
conscious of his company without having noticed his coming in
— and my still sitting, musing, over the coffee-room fire.

At last I rose to go to bed, much to the relief of the sleepy
waiter, who had got the fidgets in his legs, and was twisting
them, and hitting them, and putting them through all kinds of
contortions in his small pantry. In going towards the door, I
passed the person who had come in, and saw him plainly. I
turned directly, came back, and looked again. He did not
know me, but I knew him in a moment.

At another time I might have wanted the confidence or the
decision to speak to him, and might have put it off until next
day, and might have lost him. But, in the then condition of
my mind, where the play was still running high, his former
protection of me appeared so deserving of my gratitude, and
my old love for him overflowed my breast so freshly and
spontaneously, that I went up to him at once, with a fast-
beating heart, and said :

" Steerforth ! won't you speak to me ? "

He looked at me — ^just as he used to look, sometimes — but
I saw no recognition in his face.

" You don't remember me, I am afraid," said I.

" My God ! " he suddenly exclaimed. " It's little Copper-
field ! "

I grasped him by both hands, and could not let them go.

David Copperfield 269

But for very shame, and the fear that I might displease him, I
could have held him round the neck and cried.

" I never, never, never was so glad ! My dear Steerforth, I
am so overjoyed to see you ! "

" And I am rejoiced to see you, too 1 " he said, shaking my
hands heartily. " Why, Copperfield, old boy, don't be over-
powered ! " And yet he was glad, too, I thought, to see how
the delight I had in meeting him affected me.

I brushed away the tears that my utmost resolution had not
been able to keep back, and I made a clumsy laugh of it, and
we sat down together, side by side.

"Why, how do you come to be here?" said Steerforth,
clapping me on the shoulder.

" I came here by the Canterbury coach, to-day. I have
been adopted by an aunt down in that part of the country, and
have just finished my education there. How do you come to
be here, Steerforth?"

" Well, I am what they call an Oxford man," he returned ;
" that is to say, I get bored to death down there, periodically
— and I am on my way now to my mother's. You're a devilish
amiable-looking fellow, Copperfield. Just what you used to be,
now I look at you ! Not altered in the least ! "

" I knew you immediately," I said ; " but you are more
easily remembered."

He laughed as he ran his hand through the clustering curls
of his hair, and said gaily :

" Yes, I am on an expedition of duty. My mother lives a
little way out of town ; and the roads being in a beastly
condition, and our house tedious enough, I remained here
to-night instead of going on. I have not been in town half-a-
dozen hours, and those I have been dozing and grumbling
away at the play."

" I have been at the play, too," said I. " At Covent
Garden. What a delightful and magnificent entertainment,
Steerforth ! "

Steerforth laughed heartily.

" My dear young Davy," he said, clapping me on the
shoulder again, " you are a very Daisy. The daisy of the field,
at sunrise, is not fresher than you are. I have been at Covent
Garden, too, and there never was a more miserable business.
HolloEi, you sir ! "

This was addressed to the waiter, who had - been very
attentive to our recognition, at a distance, and now came
forward deferentially.

270 David Copperfield

"Where have you put my friend, Mr. Copperfield?" said
Steerforth.

" Beg your pardon, sir?"

"Where does he sleep? What's his number? You know
what I mean," said Steerforth.

" Well, sir," said the waiter, with an apologetic air. " Mr.
Copperfield is at present in forty-four, sir."

" And what the devil do you mean," retorted Steerforth, "by
putting Mr. Copperfield into a little loft over a stable ? "

"Why, you see we wasn't aware, sir," returned the waiter,
still apologetically, " as Mr. Copperfield was anyways particular.
We can give Mr. Copperfield seventy-two, sir, if it would be
preferred.- Next you, sir."

" Of course it would be preferred," said Steerforth. " And
do it at once."

The waiter immediately withdrew to make the exchange.
Steerforth, very much amused at my having been put into
forty-four, laughed again, and clapped me on the shoulder
again, and invited me to breakfast with him next morning at
ten o'clock — an invitation I was only too proud and happy to
accept. It being now pretty late, we took our candles and
went up-stairs, where we parted with friendly heartiness at his
door, and where I found my new room a great improvement
on my old one, it not being at all musty, and having an
immense four-post bedstead in it, which was quite a little
landed estate. Here, among pillows enough for six, I soon
fell asleep in a blissful condition, and dreamed of ancient
Rome, Steerforth, and friendship, until the early morning
coaches, rumbling out of the archway underneath, made me
dream of thunder and the gods.

CHAPTER XX

steerforth's home

When the chambermaid tapped at my door at eight o'clock,
and informed me that my shaving-water was outside, I felt
severely the having no occasion for it, and blushed in my bed.
The suspicion that she laughed too, when she said it, preyed
upon my mind all the time I was dressing ; and gave me, I was
conscious, a sneaking and guilty air when I passed her on the
staircase, as I was going down to breakfast. I was so sensitively

David Copperfield 271

aware, indeed, of being younger than I could have wished, that
for some time I could not make up my mind to pass her at all,
under the ignoble circumstances of the case ; but, hearing her
there with a broom, stood peeping out of window at King
Charles on horseback, surrounded by a maze of hackney-
coaches, and looking anything but regal in a drizzling rain and
a dark-brown fog, until I was admonished by the waiter that
the gentleman was waiting for me.

It was not in the coffee-room that I found Steerforth ex-
pecting me, but in a snug private apartment, red-curtained and
Turkey-carpeted, where the fire burnt bright, and a fine hot
breakfast was set forth on a table covered with a clean cloth ;
and a cheerful miniature of the room, the fire, the breakfast,
Steerforth, and all, was shining in the little round mirror over
the sideboard. I was rather bashful at first, Steerforth being
so self-possessed, and elegant, and superior to me in all respects
(age included) ; but his easy patronage soon put that to rights,
and made me quite at home. I could not enough admire the
change he had wrought in the Golden Cross ; or compare the
dull forlorn state I had held yesterday, with this morning's
comfort and this morning's entertainment. As to the waiter's
familiarity, it was quenched as if it had never been. He
attended on us, as I may say, in sackcloth and ashes.

" Now, Copperfield," said Steerforth, when we were alone,
" I should like to hear what you are doing, and where you
are going, and all about you. I feel as if you were my
property."

Glowing with pleasure to find that he had still this interest
in me, I told him how my aunt had proposed the little ex-
pedition that I had before me, and whither it tended.

"As you are in no hurry, then," said Steerforth, "come
home with me to Highgate, and stay a day or two. You will
be pleased with my mother — she is a little vain and prosy about
me, but that you can forgive her — and she will be pleased with
you."

" I should like to be as sure of that, as you are kind enough
to say you are," I answered, smiling.

"Oh!" said Steerforth, "every one who likes me, has a
claim on her that is sure to be acknowledged."

" Then I think I shall be a favourite," said I.

" Good ! " said Steerforth. " Come and prove it. We will
go and see the lions for an hour or two — it's something to have
a fresh fellow like you to show them to, Copperfield — and then
we'll journey out to Highgate by the coach."

272 David Copperfield

I could hardly believe but that I was in a dream, and that 1
should wake presently in number forty-four, to the solitary box
in the coffee-room and the familiar waiter again. After I had
written to my aunt and told her of my fortunate meeting with
my admired old schoolfellow, and my acceptance of his in-
vitation, we went out in a hackney-chariot, and saw a Panorama
and some other sights, and took a walk through the Museum,
where I could not help observing how much Steerforth knew,
on an infinite variety of subjects, and of how little account he
seemed to make his knowledge.

" You'll take a high degree at college, Steerforth," said I, " if
you have not done so already ; and they will have good reason
to be proud of you."

" / take a degree ! " cried Steerforth. " Not I ! my dear
Daisy — will you mind my calling you Daisy?"

" Not at all ! " said I.

" That's a good fellow ! My dear Daisy," said Steerforth,
laughing, " I have not the least desire or intention to distinguish
myself in that way. I have done quite sufficient for my pur-
pose. I find that I am heavy company enough for myself as
I am."

" But the fame " I was beginning.

" You romantic Daisy ! " said Steerforth, laughing still more
heartily ; " why should I trouble myself, that a parcel of heavy-
headed fellows may gape and hold up their hands ? Let them
do it at some other man. There's fame for him, and he's
welcome to it."

I was abashed at having made so great a mistake, and was
glad to change the subject. Fortunately it was not difficult to
do, for Steerforth could always pass from one subject to another
with a carelessness and Hghtness that were his own.

Lunch succeeded to our sight-seeing, and the short winter
day wore away so fast, that it was dusk when the stage-ooach
stopped with us at an old brick house at Highgate on the
summit of the hill. An elderly lady, though not very far
advanced in years, with a proud carriage and a handsome face,
was in the doorway as we alighted ; and greeting Steerforth as
" My dearest James," folded him in her arms. To this lady he
presented me as his mother, and she gave me a stately welcome.

It was a genteel old-fashioned house, very quiet and orderly.
From the windows of my room I saw all London lying in the
distance like a great vapour, with here and there some lights
twinkling through it. I had only time, in dressing, to glance
at the solid furniture, the framed pieces of work (done, I

David Copperfield 273

supposed, by Steerforth's mother when she was a girl), and
some pictures in crayons of ladies with powdered hair and
bodices, coming and going on the walls, as the newly-kindled
fire crackled and sputtered, when I was called to dinner.

There was a second lady in the dining-room, of a slight short
figure, dark, and not agreeable to look at, but with some
appearance of good looks too, who attracted my attention :
perhaps because I had not expected to see her : perhaps
because I found myself sitting opposite to her : perhaps because
of something really remarkable in her. She had black hair and
eager black eyes, and was thin, and had a scar upon her lip.
It was an old scar — I should rather call it, seam, for it was not
discoloured, and had healed years ago — which had once cut
through her mouth, downward towards the chin, but was now
barely visible across the table, except above and on her upper
lip, the shape of which it had altered. I concluded in my own
mind that she was about thirty years of age, and that she wished
to be married. She was a little dilapidated — like a house —
with having been so long to let ; yet had, as I have said, an
appearance of good looks. Her thinness seemed to be the
effect of some wasting fire within her, which found a vent in
her gaunt eyes.

She was introduced as Miss Dartle, and both Steerforth
and his mother called her Rosa. I found that she lived there,
and had been for a long time Mrs. Steerforth's companion.
It appeared to me that she never said anything she wanted to
say, outright ; but hinted it, and made a great deal more of it
by this practice. For example, when Mrs. Steerforth observed,
more in jest than earnest, that she feared her son led but a wild
life at college. Miss Dartle put in thus :

" Oh, really ? You know how ignorant I am, and that I
only ask for information, but isn't it always so? I thought
that kind of life was on all hands understood to be — eh ? "

" It is education for a very grave profession, if you mean
that, Rosa," Mrs. Steerforth answered with some coldness.

" Oh ! Yes ! That's very true," returned Miss Dartle.
"But isn't it, though? — I want to be put right, if I am
wrong — isn't it, really?"

" Really what ? " said Mrs. Steerforth.

" Oh ! You mean it's not ! " returned Miss Dartle. " Well,
I'm very glad to hear it ! Now, I know what to do ! That's
the advantage of asking. I shall never allow people to talk
before me about wastefulness and profligacy, and so forth, in
connexion with that life, any more."

274 David Copperfield

"And you will be right," said Mrs. Steerforth. "My
son's tutor is a conscientious gentleman ; and if I had not
implicit reliance on my son, I should have reliance on him."

" Should you ? " said Miss Dartle. " Dear me ! Con-
scientious, is he ? Really conscientious, now ? "

" Yes, I am convinced of it," said Mrs. Steerforth.

" How very nice ! " exclaimed Miss Dartle. " What a
comfort! Really conscientious? Then he's not — but of
course he can't be, if he's really conscientious. Well, I shall
be quite happy in my opinion of him, from this time. You
can't think how it elevates him in my opinion, to know for
certain that he's really conscientious ! "

Her own views of every question, and her correction of
everything that was said to which she was opposed. Miss Dartle
insinuated in the same way : sometimes, I could not conceal
from myself, with great power, though in contradiction even of
Steerforth. An instance happened before dinner was done.
Mrs. Steerforth speaking to me about my intention of going
down into Suffolk, I said at hazard how glad I sliould be, if
Steerforth would only go there with me ; and explaining to him
that I was going to see my old nurse, and Mr. Peggotty's
family, I reminded him of the boatman whom he had seen at
school.

" Oh ! That bluff fellow ! " said Steerforth. " He had a
son with him, hadn't he ? "

" No. That was his nephew," I replied ; " whom he
adopted, though, as a son. He has a very pretty little niece
too, whom he adopted as a daughter. In short, his house (or
rather his boat, for he lives in one, on dry land) is full of people
who are objects of his generosity and kindness. You would be
delighted to see that household."

"Should I ?" said Steerforth. " Well, I think I should. I
must see what can be done. It would be worth a journey (not
to mention the pleasure of a journey with you, Daisy), to see
that sort of people together, and to make one of 'em."

My heart leaped with a new hope of pleasure. But it was
in reference to the tone in which he had spoken of " that sort
of people," that Miss Dartle, whose sparkling eyes had been
watchful of us, now broke in again.

" Oh, but, really ? Do tell me. Are they, though ? " she
said.

" Are they what ? And are who what ? " said Steerforth.

" That sort of people. Are they really animals and clods,
and beings of another order ? / 1 want to know so much."

David Copperfield 275

"Why, there's a pretty wide separation between them and
us," said Steerforth, with indifference. " They are not to be
expected to be as sensitive as we are. Their delicacy is not to
be shocked, or hurt very easily. They are wonderfully virtuous,
I day say. Some people contend for that, at least ; and I am
sure I don't want to contradict them. But they have not
very fine natures, and they may be thankful that, like their
coarse rough skins, they are not easily wounded."

" Really ! " said Miss Dartle. " Well, I don't know, now,
when I have been better pleased than to hear that. It's so
consoling ! It's such a delight to know that, when they
suffer, they don't feel ! Sometimes I have been quite uneasy
for that sort of people ; but now I shall just dismiss the
idea of them altogether. Live and learn. I had my doubts,
I confess, but now they're cleared up. I didn't know, and
now I do know, and that shows the advantage of asking —
don't it?"

I believed that Steerforth had said what he had, in jest, or
to draw ^Jiss Dartle out ; and I expected him to say as much
when she was gone, and we two were sitting before the fire.
But he merely asked me what I thought of her.

" She is very clever, is she not ? " I asked.

"Clever! She brings everything to a grindstone," said
Steerforth, "and sharpens it, as she has sharpened her own
face and figure these years past. She has worn herself away
by constant sharpening. She is all edge."

" What a remarkable scar that is upon her lip ! " I said. f

Steerforth's face fell, and he paused a moment. *i^

"Why, the fact is," he returned, "/did that."

" By an unfortunate accident ? "

" No. I was a young boy, and she exasperated me, and I
threw a hammer at her. A promising young angel I must
have been ! "

I was deeply sorry to have touched on such a painful theme,
but that was useless now.

"She has borne the mark ever since, as you see," said
Steerforth ; " and she'll bear it to her grave, if she ever rests
in one ; thoifgh I can hardly believe she will ever rest any-
where. She was the motherless child of a sort of cousin of
my father's. He died one day. My mother, who was then
a widow, brought her here to be company to her. She has a
couple of thousand pounds of her own, and saves the interest
of it every year, to add to the principal. There's the history
of Miss Rosa Dartle for you."

276 David Copperfield

" And I have no doubt she loves you like a brother ? "
said I.

" Humph ! " retorted Steerforth, looking at the fire. " Some
brothers are not loved over much ; and some love — but help
yourself, Copperfield ! We'll drink the daisies of the field, in
comphment to you ; and the lilies of the valley that toil not,
neither do they spin, in compliment to me — the more shame
for me ! " A moody smile that had overspread his features
cleared off as he said this merrily, and he was his own frank,
winning self again.

I could not help glancing at the scar with a painful interest
when we went in to tea. It was not long before I observed
that it was the most susceptible part of her face, and that,
when she turned pale, that mark altered first, and became a
dull, lead-coloured streak, lengthening out to its full extent,
like a mark in invisible ink brought to the fire. There was a
little altercation between her and Steerforth about a cast of
the dice at backgammon, when I thought her, for one moment,
in a storm of rage ; and then I saw it start forth like the old
writing on the wall.

It was no matter of wonder to me to find Mrs. Steerforth
devoted to her son. She seemed to be able to speak or think
about nothing else. She showed me his picture as an infant,
in a locket, with some of his baby-hair in it ; she showed me
his picture as he had been when I first knew him ; and she
wore at her breast his picture as he was now. All the letters
he had ever written to her, she kept in a cabinet near her
own chair by the fire ; and she would have read me some of
them, and I should have been very glad to hear them too, if
he had not interposed, and coaxed her out of the design.

" It was at Mr. Creakle's, my son tells me, that you first
became acquainted," said Mrs. Steerforth, as she and I were
talking at one table, while they played backgammon at
another. " Indeed, I recollect his speaking, at that time, of a
pupil younger than himself who had taken his fancy there ;
but your name, as you may suppose, has not lived in my
memory."

"He was very generous and noble to. me in those days,
I assure you, ma'am," said I, " and I stood in need of such a
friend. I should have been quite crushed without him."

" He is always generous and noble," said Mrs. Steerforth,
proudly.

I subscribed to this with all my heart, God knows. She
knew I did ; for the stateliness of her manner already abated

David Copperfield 277

towards me, except when she spoke in praise of him, and then
her air was always lofty.

" It was not a fit school generally for my son," said she ;
"far from it; but there were particular circumstances to be
considered at the time, of more importance even than that
selection. My son's high spirit made it desirable that he
should be placed with some man who felt its superiority, and
would be content to bow himself before it ; and we found
such a man there."

I knew that, knowing the fellow. And yet I did not despise
him the more for it, but thought it a redeeming quality in
him, if he could be allowed any grace for not resisting one so
irresistible as Steerforth.

" My son's great capacity was tempted on, there, by a feel-
ing of voluntary emulation and conscious pride," the fond lady
went on to say. " He would have risen against all constraint ;
but he found himself the monarch of the place, and he
haughtily determined to be worthy of his station. It was like
himself."

I echoed, with all my heart and soul, that it was like
himself.

" So my son took, of his own will, and on no compulsion,
to the course in which he can always, when it is his pleasure,
outstrip every competitor," she pursued. " My son informs
me. Mr. Copperfield, that you were quite devoted to him, and
that when you met yesterday you made yourself known to him
with tears of joy. I should be an affected woman if I made
any pretence of being surprised by my son's inspiring such
emotions ; but I cannot be indifferent to any one who is so
sensible of his merit, and I am very glad to see you here, and
can assure you that he feels an unusual friendship for you, and
that you may rely on his protection."

Miss Dartle played backgammon as eagerly as she did every-
thing else. If I had seen her, first, at the board, I should
have fancied that her figure had got thin, and her eyes had
got large, over that pursuit, and no other in the world. But
I am very much mistaken if she missed a word of this, or lost
a look of mine as I received it with the utmost pleasure, and,
honoured by Mrs. Steerforth's confidence, felt older than I had
done since I left Canterbury.

When the evening was pretty far spent, and a tray of glasses
and decanters came in, Steerforth promised, over the fire, that
he would seriously think of going down into the country with
me. There was no hurry, he said ; a week hence would do ;

278 David Copperfield

and his mother hospitably said the same. While we were
talking, he more than once called me Daisy ; which brought
Miss Dartle out again.

" But really, Mr. Copperfield," she asked, ** is it a nickname ?
And why does he give it you ? Is it — eh ? — because he
thinks you young and innocent ? I am so stupid in these
things."

I coloured in replying that I believed it was.

" Oh ! " said Miss Dartle. " Now I am glad to know that !
I ask for information, and I am glad to know it. He thinks
you young and innocent ; and so you are his friend ? Well,
that's quite delightful ! "

She went to bed soon after this, and Mrs. Steerforth retired
too. Steerforth and I, after lingering for half-an-hour over
the fire, talking about Traddles and all the rest of them at
old Salem House, went up-stairs together. Steerforth's room
was next to mine, and I went in to look at it. It was a
picture of comfort, full of easy-chairs, cushions and footstools,
worked by his mother's hand, and with no sort of thing
omitted that could help to render it complete. Finally, her
handsome features looked down on her darling from a portrait
on the wall, as if it were even something to her that her likeness
should watch him while he slept.

I found the fire burning clear enough in my room by this
time, and the curtains drawn before the windows and round
the bed, giving it a very snug appearance. I sat down in a
great chair upon the hearth to meditate on my happiness ; and
had enjoyed the contemplation of it for some time, when I
found a likeness of Miss Dartle looking eagerly at me from
above the chimney-piece.

It was a startling likeness, and necessarily had a startling
look. The painter hadn't made the scar, but I made it ; and
there it was, coming and going : now confined to the upper
lip as I had seen it at dinner, and now showing the whole
extent of the wound inflicted by the hammer, as I had seen it
when she was passionate.

I wondered peevishly why they couldn't put her anywhere
else instead of quartering her on me. To get rid of her, I
undressed quickly, extinguished my light, and went to bed.
But, as I fell asleep, I could not forget that she was still
there looking, "Is it really, though? I want to know;" and
when I awoke in the night, I found that I was uneasily asking
all sorts of people in my dreams whether it really was or not
— without knowing what I meant.

David Copperfield 279

CHAPTER XXI

LITTLE EM'LY

There was a servant in that house, a man who, I understood,
was usually with Steerforth, and had come into his service at
the University, who was in appearance a pattern of respect-
ability. I believe there never existed in his station a more
respectable-looking man. He was taciturn, soft-footed, very
quiet in his manner, deferential, observant, always at hand
when wanted, and never near when not wanted ; but his great
claim to consideration was his respectability. He had not a
pliant face, he had rather a stiff neck, rather a tight smooth
head with short hair clinging to it at the sides, a soft way of
speaking, with a peculiar habit of whispering the letter S so
distinctly, that he seemed to use it oftener than any other
man ; but every peculiarity that he had he made respectable.
If his nose had been upside-down, he would have made that
respectable. He surrounded himself with an atmosphere of
respectability, and walked secure in it. It would have been
next to impossible to suspect him of anything wrong, he was
so thoroughly respectable. Nobody could have thought of
putting him in a livery, he was so highly respectable. To
have imposed any derogatory work upon him, would have been
to inflict a wanton insult on the feelings of a most respectable
man. And of this, I noticed the women-servants in the house-
hold were so intuitively conscious, that they always did such
work themselves, and generally while he read the paper by the
pantry fire.

Such a self-contained man I never saw. But in that quality,
as in every other he possessed, he only seemed to be the more
respectable. Even the fact that no one knew his Christian
name, seemed to form a part of his respectability. Nothing
could be objected against his surname, Littimer, by which he
was known. Peter might have been hanged, or Tom trans-
ported; but Littimer was perfectly respectable.

It was occasioned, I suppose, by the reverend nature of
respectability in the abstract, but I felt particularly young in
this man's presence. How old he was himself, I could not
guess. And that again went to his credit on the same score ;
for in the calmness of respectability he might have numbered
fifty years as well as thirty.

28o David Copperfield

Littimer was in my room in the morning before I was up, to
bring me that reproachful shaving-water, and to put out my
clothes. When I undrew the curtains and looked out of bed,
I saw him, in an equable temperature of respectability, un-
affected by the east wind of January, and not even breathing
frostily, standing my boots right and left in the first dancing
position, and blowing specks of dust off my coat as he laid it
down like a baby.

I gave him good morning, and asked him what o'clock it
was. He took out of his pocket the most respectable hunting-
watch I ever saw, and preventing the spring with his thumb
from opening far, looked in at the face as if he were con-
sulting an oracular oyster, shut it up again, and said, if I
pleased, it was half-past eight.

" Mr. Steerforth will be glad to hear how you have rested,
sir."

"Thank you," said I, "very well indeed. Is Mr. Steerforth
quite well ? "

" Thank you, sir, Mr. Steerforth is tolerably well." Another
of his characteristics. No use of superlatives. A cool calm
medium always.

" Is there anything more I can have the honour of doing for
you, sir ? The warning-bell will ring at nine ; the family take
breakfast at half-past nine."

"Nothing, I thank you."

" I thank you^ sir, if you please ; " and with that, and with
a little inclination of his head when he passed the bedside, as
an apology for correcting me, he went out, shutting the door
as delicately as if I had just fallen into a sweet sleep on which
my life depended.

Every morning we held exactly this conversation : never any
more, and never any less ; and yet, invariably, however far I
might have been lifted out of myself over-night, and advanced
towards maturer years, by Steerforth's companionship, or Mrs.
Steerforth's confidence, or Miss Dartle's conversation, in the
presence of this most respectable man I became, as our smallar
poets sing, "a boy again."

He got horses for us ; and Steerforth, who knew everything,
gave me lessons in riding. He provided foils for us, and
Steerforth gave me lessons in fencing — gloves, and I began, of
the same master, to improve in boxing. It gave me no manner
of concern that Steerforth should find me a novice in these
sciences, but I never could bear to show my want of skill
before the respectable Littimer. I had no reason to believe

David Copperfield 281

that Littimer understood such arts himself; he never led me
to suppose anything of the kind, by so much as the vibration
of one of his respectable eyelashes ; yet whenever he was by,
while we were practising, I felt myself the greenest and most
inexperienced of mortals.

I am particular about this man, because he made a particular
effect on me at that time, and because of what took place
thereafter.

The week passed away in a most delightful manner. It
passed rapidly, as may be supposed, to one entranced as I
was ; and yet it gave me so many occasions for knowing Steer-
forth better, and admiring him more in a thousand respects,
that at its close I seemed to have been with him for a much
longer time. A dashing way he had of treating me like a
plaything, was more agreeable to me than any behaviour he
could have adopted. It reminded me of our old acquaintance ;
it seemed the natural sequel of it ; it showed me that he was
unchanged ; it relieved me of any uneasiness I might have felt,
in comparing my merits with his, and measuring my claims
upon his friendship by any equal standard ; above all, it was
a familiar, unrestrained, affectionate demeanour that he used
towards no one else. As he had treated me at school
differently from all the rest, I joyfully believed that he treated
me in life unlike any other friend he had. I believed that I
was nearer to his heart than any other friend, and my own heart
warmed with attachment to him.

He made up his mind to go with me into the country, and
the day arrived for our departure. He had been doubtful at
first whether to take Littimer or not, but decided to leave him
at home. The respectable creature, satisfied with his lot
whatever it was, arranged our portmanteaus on the little
carriage that was to take us into London, as if they were
intended to defy the shocks of ages ; and received my modestly
proffered donation wHh perfect tranquillity.

We bade adieu to Mrs. Steerfouh and Miss Dartle, with
many thanks on my part, and much kindness on the devoted
mother's. The last thing I saw was Littimer's unruffled eye ;
fraught, as I fancied, with the silent conviction that I was very
young indeed.

What I felt, in returning so auspiciously to the old familiar
places, I shall not endeavour to describe. We went down by
the Mail. I was so concerned, I recollect, even for the honour
of Yarmouth, that when Steerforth said, as we drove through
its dark streets to the inn, that, as well as he could make out,

282 David Copperfield

it was a good, queer, out-of-the-way kind of hole, I was highly
pleased. We went to bed on our arrival (I observed a pair of
dirty shoes and gaiters in connexion with my old friend the
Dolphin as we passed that door), and breakfasted late in the
morning. Steerforth, who was in great spirits, had been stroll-
ing about the beach before I was up, and had made acquaint-
ance he said, with half the boatmen in the place. Moreover,
he had seen, in the distance, what he was sure must be the
identical house of Mr. Peggotty, with smoke coming out of the
chimney ; and had had a great mind, he told me, to walk in
and swear he was myself grown out of knowledge.

" When do you propose to introduce me there, Daisy ? " he
said. " I am at your disposal. Make your own arrangements."

"Why, I was thinking that this evening would be a good
time, Steerforth, when they are all sitting round the fire. I
should like you to see it when it's snug, it's such a curious
place."

" So be it ! " returned Steerforth. " This evening."

"I shall not give them any notice that we are here, you
know," said I, delighted. " We must take them by surprise."

" Oh, of course ! It's no fun," said Steerforth, " unless we
take them by surprise. Let us see the natives in their
aboriginal condition."

"Though they are that sort of people that you mentioned,"
I returned.

" Aha ! What ! you recollect my skirmishes with Rosa, do
you ? " he exclaimed with a quick look. " Confound the girl,
I am half afraid of her. She's like a goblin to me. But never
mind her. Now what are you going to do ? You are going
to see your nurse, I suppose ? "

"Why, yes," I said, " I must see Peggotty first of all."

" Well," replied Steerforth, looking at his watch. "Suppose
I deliver you up to be cried over for a couple of hours. Is
that long enough?"

I answered, laughing, that I thought we might get through
it in that time, but that he must come also ; for he would find
that his renown had preceded him, and that he was almost as
great a personage as I was.

" I'll come anywhere you like," said Steerforth, " or do any-
thing you like. Tell me where to come to ; and in two hours
I'll produce myself in any state you please, sentimental or
comical."

I gave him minute directions for finding the residence
of Mr. Barkis, carrier to Blunderstone and elsewhere ; and,

David Copperfield 283

on this understanding, went out alone. There was a sharp
bracing air ; the ground was dry ; the sea was crisp and clear ;
the sun was diffusing abundance of light, if not much warmth ;
and everything was fresh and lively. I was so fresh and lively
myself, in the pleasure of being there, that I could have
stopped the people in the streets and shaken hands with them.

The streets looked small, of course. The streets that we
have only seen as children always do, I believe, when we go
back to them. But I had forgotten nothing in them, and
found nothing changed, until I came to Mr. Omer's shop.
Omer and Joram was now written up, where Omer used to
be; but the inscription. Draper, Tailor, Haberdasher,
Funeral Furnisher, etc., remained as it was.

My footsteps seemed to tend so naturally to the shop-door,
after I had read these words from over the way, that I went
across the road and looked in. There was a pretty woman at
the back of the shop, dancing a little child in her arms, while
another little fellow clung to her apron. I had no difficulty in
recognising either Minnie or Minnie's children. The glass-
door of the parlour was not open ; but in the workshop across
the yard I could faintly hear the old tune playing, as if it had
never left off.

" Is Mr. Omer at home?" said I, entering. " I should like
to see him, for a moment, if he is."

*' Oh yes, sir, he is at home," said Minnie; "this weather
don't suit his asthma out of doors. Joe, call your grandfather ! "

The little fellow, who was holding her apron, gave such a
lusty shout, that the sound of it made him bashful, and he
buried his face in her skirts, to her great admiration. I heard
a heavy puffing and blowing coming towards us, and soon Mr.
Omer, shorter-winded than of yore, but not much older-looking,
stood before me.

" Servant, sir," said Mr. Omer. " What can I do for you,
sir?"

" You can shake hands with me, Mr. Omer, if you please,"
said I, putting out my own. " You were very good-natured to
me once, when I am afraid I didn't show that I thought so."

" Was I though ? " returned the old man. " I'm glad to hear
it, but I don't remember when. Are you sure it was me ? "

" Quite."

" I think my memory has got as short as my breath," said
Mr. Omer, looking at me and shaking his head; "for I don't
remember you."

" Don't you remember your coming to the coach to meet

284 David Copperfield

me, and my having breakfast here, and our riding out to
Blunderstone together : you, and I, and Mrs. Joram, and Mr.
Joram too — who wasn't her husband then?"

" Why, Lord bless my soul ! " exclaimed Mr. Omer, after
being thrown by his surprise into a fit of coughing, " you don't
say so ! Minnie, my dear, you recollect ? Dear me, yes ; the
party was a lady, I think ? "

" My mother," I rejoined.

"To — be — sure," said Mr. Omer, touching my waistcoat
with his forefinger, " and there was a little child too ! There
was two parties. The little party was laid along with the other
party. Over at Blunderstone it was, of course. Dear me!
And how have you been since?"

Very well, I thanked him, as I hoped he had been too.

" Oh ! nothing to grumble at, you know," said Mr. Omer.
" I find my breath gets short, but it seldom gets longer as a
man gets older. I take it as it comes, and make the most of
it. That's the best way, ain't it ? "

Mr. Omer coughed again, in consequence of laughing, and
was assisted out of his fit by his daughter, who now stood close
beside us, dancing her smallest child on the counter.

" Dear me ! " said Mr. Omer. " Yes, to be sure. Two
parties ! Why, in that very ride, if you'll believe me, the day
was named for my Minnie to marry Joram. ' Do name it, sir,'
says Joram. 'Yes, do, father,' says Minnie. And now he's
come into the business. And look here ! The youngest ! "

Minnie laughed, and stroked her banded hair upon her
temples, as her father put one of his fat fingers into the hand
of the child she was dancing on the counter.

" Two parties, of course ! " said Mr. Omer, nodding his head
retrospectively. " Ex-actly so ! And Joram's at work, at this
minute, on a grey one with silver nails, not this measurement "
— the measurement of the dancing child upon the counter —
" by a good two inches. Will you take something ? "

I thanked him, but declined.

" Let me see," said Mr. Omer. " Barkis's the carrier's wife
— Peggott/s the boatman's sister — she had something to do
with your family ? She was in service there, sure ? "

My answering in the affirmative gave him great satisfaction.

" I believe my breath will get long next, my memory's getting
so much so," said Mr. Omer. " Well, sir, we've got a young
relation of hers here, under articles to us, that has as elegant a
taste in the dress-making business — I assure you I don't believe
there's a Duchess in England can touch her."

David Copperfield 285

" Not little Em'ly ? " said I, involuntarily.

" Em'ly's her name," said Mr. Omer, "and she's little too.
But if you'll believe me, she lias such a face of her own that
half the women in this town are mad against her."

" Nonsense, father ! " cried Minnie.

" My dear," said Mr. Omer, " I don't say it's the case with
you," winking at me, " but I say that half the women in Yar-
mouth, ah ! and in five mile round, are mad against that girl."

"Then she should have kept to her own station in life,
father," said Minnie, " and not have given them any hold to
talk about her, and then they couldn't have done it."

" Couldn't have done it, my dear ! " retorted Mr. Omer,
" Couldn't have done it ! Is that your knowledge of life ?
What is there that any woman couldn't do, that she shouldn't
do — especially on the subject of another woman's good looks ? "

I really thought it was all over with Mr. Omer, after he had
uttered this libellous pleasantry. He coughed to that extent,
and his breath eluded all his attempts to recover it with that
obstinacy, that I fully expected to see his head go down behind
the counter, and his little black breeches, with the rusty little
bunches of ribbons at the knees, come quivering up in a last
ineffectual struggle. At length, however, he got better, though
he still panted hard, and was so exhausted that he was obliged
to sit on the stool of the shop-desk.

"You see," he said, wiping his head, and breathing with
difficulty, "she hasn't taken much to any companions here;
she hasn't taken kindly to any particular acquaintances and
friends, not to mention sweethearts. In consequence, an ill-
natured story got about, that Em'ly wanted to be a lady. Now,
my opinion is, that it came into circulation principally on
account of her sometimes saying at the school, that if she was
a lady, she would like to do so-and-so for her uncle — don't you
see ? — and buy him such-and-such fine things."

" I assure you, Mr. Omer, she has said so to me," I returned
eagerly, " when we were both children."

Mr. Omer nodded his head and rubbed his chin. " Just so.
Then out of a very little, she could dress herself, you see, better
than most others could out of a deal, and that made things
unpleasant. Moreover, she was rather what might be called
wayward. I'll go so far as to say what I should call way-
ward myself," said Mr. Omer ; " didn't know her own mind
quite ; a little spoiled ; and couldn't, at first, exactly bind her-
self down. No more than that was ever said against her,
Minnie?"

286 David Copperfield

"No, father," said Mrs. Joram. "That's the worst, I
believe."

" So when she got a situation," said Mr. Omer, " to keep a
fractious old lady company, they didn't very well agree, and
she didn't stop. At last she came here, apprenticed for three
years. Nearly two of 'em are over, and she has been as good
a girl as ever was. Worth any six ! Mirmie, is she worth any
six, now?"

" Yes, father," replied Minnie. " Never say / detracted
from her ! "

"Very good," said Mr. Omer. " That's right. And so,
young gentleman," he added, after a few moments' further
rubbing of his chin, " that you may not consider me long-winded
as well as short-breathed, I believe that's all about it"

As they had spoken in a subdued tone, while speaking of
Em'ly, I had no doubt that she was near. On my asking now,
if that were not so, Mr. Omer nodded yes, and nodded towards
the door of the parlour. My hurried inquiry if I might peep
in, was answered with a free permission ; and, looking through
the glass, I saw her sitting at her work. I saw her, a most
beautiful little creature, with the cloudless blue eyes, that had
looked into my childish heart, turned laughingly upon another
child of Minnie's who was playing near her ; with enough of
wilfulness in her bright face to justify what I had heard ; with
much of the old capricious coyness lurking in it ; but with
nothing in her pretty looks, I am sure, but what was meant for
goodness and for happiness, and what was on a good and happy
course.

The tune across the yard that seemed as if it never had left
off — alas ! it was the tune that never does leave off — was
beating, softly, all the while.

" Wouldn't you like to step in," said Mr. Omer, "and speak
to her ? Walk in and speak to her, sir ! Make yourself at
home!"

I was too bashful to do so then — I was afraid of confusing
her, and I was no less afraid of confusing myself : but I informed
myself of the hour at which she left of an evening, in order that
our visit might be timed accordingly ; and taking leave of Mr.
Omer, and his pretty daughter, ^nd her little children, went
away to my dear old Peggotty's.

Here she was, in the tiled kitchen, cooking dinner ! The
moment I knocked at the door she opened it, and asked me
what I pleased to want. I looked at her with a smile, but she
gave me no smile in return. I had never ceased to write

David Copperfield 287

to her, but it must have been seven years since we had
met.

" Is Mr. Barkis at home, ma'am ? " I said, feigning to speak
roughly to her.

" He's at home, sir," said Peggotty, " but he's bad abed with
the rheumatics." »

" Don't he go over to Blunderstone now ? " I asked.

" When he's well he do," she answered.

" Do you ever go there, Mrs. Barkis ? "

She looked at me more attentively, and I noticed a quick
movement of her hands towards each other.

" Because I want to ask a question about a house there, that
they call the — what is it ? — the Rookery," said I.

She took a step backward, and put out her hands in an
undecided frightened way, as if to keep me off.

" Peggotty ! " I cried to her.

She cried, "My darling boy ! " and we both burst into
tears, and were locked in one another's arms.

What extravagancies she committed ; what laughing and
crying over me ; what pride she showed, what joy, what sorrow
that she whose pride and joy I might have been, could nevei
hold me in a fond embrace ; I have not the heart to tell. I was
troubled with no misgiving that it was young in me to respond
to her emotions. I had never laughed and cried in all my
life, I dare say, not even to her, more freely than I did that
morning.

" Barkis will be so glad," said Peggott>', wiping her eyes with
her apron, " that it'll do him more good than pints of liniment.
May I go and tell him you are here ? Will you come up and
see him, my dear ? "

Of course I would. But Peggotty could not get out of the
room as easily as she meant to, for as often as she got to the
door and looked round at me, she came back again to have
another laugh and another cry upon my shoulder. At last, to
make the matter easier, I went up-stairs with her ; and having
waited outside for a minute, while she said a word of preparation
to Mr. Barkisi presented myself before that invalid.

He received me with absolute enthusiasm. He was too
rheumatic to be shaken hands with, but he begged me to shake
the tassel on the top of his nightcap, which I did most cordially.
When I sat down by the side of the bed, he said that it did him
a world of good to feel as if he was driving me on the Blunder-
stone road again. As he lay in bed, face upward, and so
covered, with that exception, that he seemed to be nothing but

288 David Copperfield

a face — like a conventional cherubim — he looked the queerest
object I ever beheld.

" What name was it as I wrote up in the cart, sir ? " said Mr.
Barkis, with a slow rheumatic smile.

" Ah ! Mr. Barkis, we had some grave talks about that
matter, hadn't we ? "

" I was willin' a long time, sir? " said Mr. Barkis.

" A long time," said I.

"And I don't regret it," said Mr. Barkis. "Do you
remember what you told me once, about her making all the
apple parsties and doing all the cooking ? "

" Yes, very well," I returned.

" It was as true," said Mr. Barkis, " as turnips is. It was as
true," said Mr. Barkis, nodding his nightcap, which was his only
means of emphasis, "as taxes is. And nothing's truer than
them."

Mr. Barkis turned his eyes upon me, as if for my assent to
this result of his reflections in bed ; and I gave it.

" Nothing's truer than them," repeated Mr. Barkis ; " a man
as poor as I am, finds that out in his mind when he's laid up.
I'm a very poor man, sir ! "

" I am sorry to heai' it, Mr. Barkis."

" A very poor man, indeed I am," said Mr. Barkis.

Here his right hand came slowly and feebly from under the
bedclothes, and with a purposeless uncertain grasp took hold of
a stick which was loosely tied to the side of the bed. After
some poking about with this instrument, in the course of which
his face assumed a variety of distracted expressions, Mr. Barkis
poked it against a box, an end of which had been visible to
me all the time. Then his face became composed.

" Old clothes," said Mr. Barkis.

"Oh .'"said I.

" I wish it was Money, sir," said Mr. Barkis.

" I wish it was, indeed," said I.

"But it ain't," said Mr. Barkis, opening both his eyes as
wide as he possibly could.

I expressed myself quite sure of that, and Mr. Barkis, turning
his eyes more gently to his wife, said :

" She's the usefullest and best of women, C. P. Barkis. All
the praise that any one can give to C. P. Barkis she deserves,
and more ! My dear, you'll get a dinner to-day, for company ;
something good to eat and drink, will you ? "

I should have protested against this unnecessary demonstra-
tion in my honour, but that I saw Peggotty, on the opposite

David Copperfield 289

side of the bed, extremely anxious I should not. So I held my
peace.

" I have got a trifle of money somewhere about me, my dear,"
said Mr. Barkis, " but I'm a little tired. If you and Mr. David
will leave me for a short nap, I'll try and find it when I wake."

We left the room, in compliance with this request. When
we got outside the door, Peggotty informed me that Mr. Barkis,
being now " a little nearer " than he used to be, always resorted
to this same device before producing a single coin from his
store ; and that he endured unheardof agonies in crawling out
of bed alone, and taking it from that unlucky box. In effect,
we presently heard him uttering suppressed groans of the most
dismal nature, as this magpie proceeding racked him in every
joint ; but while Peggotty's eyes were full of compassion for
him, she said his generous impulse would do him good, and it
was better not to check it. So he groaned on, until he had got
into bed again, suffering, I have no doubt, a martyrdom ; and
then called us in, pretending to have just woke up from a
refreshing sleep, and to produce a guinea from under his pillow.
His satisfaction in which happy imposition on us, and in having
preserved the impenetrable secret of the box, appeared to be a
sufficient compensation to him for all his tortures.

I prepared Peggotty for Steerforth's arrival, and it was not
long before he came. I am persuaded she knew no difference
between his having been a personal benefactor of hers and a
kind friend to me, and that she would have received him with
the utmost gratitude and devotion in any case. But his easy,
spirited good humour ; his genial manner, his handsome looks,
his natural gift of adapting himself to whomsoever he pleased,
and making direct, when he cared to do it, to the main point of
interest in anybody's heart ; bound her to him wholly in five
minutes. His manner to me, alone, would have won her. But,
through all these causes combined, I sincerely believe she had
a kind of adoration for him before he left the house that night.

He stayed there with me to dinner — if I were to say willingly,
I should not half express how readily and gaily. He went into
Mr. Barkis's room like light and air, brightening and refreshing
it as if he were healthy weather. There was no noise, no
effort, no consciousness, in anything he did ; but in everything
an indescribable lightness, a seeming impossibility of doing
anything else, or doing anything better, which was so graceful,
so natural and agreeable, that it overcomes me, even now, in
remembrance.

We made merry in the little parlour, where the Book of

290 David Copperfield

Martyrs, unthumbed since my time, was laid out upon the desk
as of old, and where I now turned over its terrific pictures,
remembering the old sensations they had awakened, but not
feeling them. When Peggotty spoke of what she called my
room, and of its being ready for me at night, and of her hoping
I would occupy it, before I could so much as look at Steerforth,
hesitating, he was possessed of the whole case.

"Of course," he said. "You'll sleep here, while we stay,
and I shall sleep at the hotel."

" But to bring you so far," I returned, " and to separate,
seems bad companionship, Steerforth."

"Why, in the name of Heaven, where do you naturally
belong ? " he said. " What is * seems,' compared to that ? "
It was settled at once.

He maintained all his delightful qualities to the last, until
we started forth, at eight o'clock, for Mr. Peggotty's boat.
Indeed, they were more and more brightly exhibited as the
hours went on ; for I thought even then, and I have no doubt
now, that the consciousness of success in his determination to
please, inspired him with a new delicacy of perception, and
made it, subtle as it was, more easy to him. If any one had
told me, then, that all this was a brilliant game, played for
the excitement of the moment, for the employment of high
spirits, in the thoughtless love of superiority, in a mere waste-
ful, careless course of winning what was worthless to him, and
next minute thrown away : I say, if any one had told me such
a lie that night, I wonder in what manner of receiving it my
indignation would have found a vent !

Probably only in an increase, had that been possible, of the
romantic feelings of fidelity and friendship with which I walked
beside him, over the dark wintry sands towards the old boat ;
the wind sighing around us even more mournfully than it had
sighed and moaned upon the night when I first darkened Mr.
Peggotty's door.

" This is a wild kind of place, Steerforth, is it not ? "

" Dismal enough in the dark," he said : " and the sea roars
as if it were hungry for us. Is that the boat, where I see a
light yonder?"

"That's the boat," said I.

"And it's the same I saw this morning," he returned. "I
came straight to it, by instinct, I suppose."

We said no more as we approached the light, but made
softly for the door. I laid my hand upon the latch; and
whispering Steerforth to keep close to me, went in.

David Copperfield 291

A murmur of voices had been audible on the outside, and,
at the moment of our entrance, a clapping of hands : which
latter noise, I was surprised to see, proceeded from the generally
disconsolate Mrs. Gummidge. But Mrs. Gummidge was not
the only person there who was unusually excited. Mr.
Peggotty, his face lighted up with uncommon satisfaction, and
laughing with all his might, held his rough arms wide open, as
if for little Em'ly to run into them ; Ham, with a mixed expres-
sion in his face of admiration, exultation, and a lumbering
sort of bashfulness that sat upon him very well, held little Em'ly
by the hand, as if he were presenting her to Mr. Peggotty ; little
Em'ly herself, blushing and shy, but delighted with Mr.
Peggotty's delight, as her joyous eyes expressed, was stopped
by our entrance (for she saw us first) in the very act of
springing from Ham to nestle in Mr. Peggotty's embrace. In
the first glimpse we had of them all, and at the moment
of our passing from the dark cold night into the warm light
room, this was the way in which they were all employed :
Mrs. Gummidge in the background clapping her hands like
a madwoman.

The little picture was so instantaneously dissolved by our
going in, that one might have doubted whether it had ever
been. I was in the midst of the astonished family, face to
face with Mr. Peggotty, and holding out my hand to him,
when Ham shouted :

" Mas'r Davy I It's Mas'r Davy I "

In a moment we were all shaking hands with one another,
and asking one another how we did, and telling one another
how glad we were to meet, and all talking at once. Mr.
Peggotty was so proud and overjoyed to see us, that he did
not know what to say or do, but kept over and over again
shaking hands with me, and then with Steerforth, and then
with me, and then ruffling his shaggy hair all over his head,
and laughing with such glee and triumph, that it was a treat
to see him.

" Why, that you two gent'lmen — gentlmen growed — should
come to this here roof to-night, of all nights in my life," said
Mr. Peggotty, " is such a thnig as never happened afore, I do
rightly believe ! Em'ly, my darling, come here ! Come here,
my little witch I There's Mas'r Davy's friend, my dear !
There's the gent'lman as you've heerd on, Em'ly. He comes
to see you, along with Mas'r Davy, on the brightest night of
your uncle's life as ever was or will be, Gorm the t'other one,
and horroar for it ! "

292 David Copperfield

After delivering this speech all in a breath, and with extra-
ordinary animation and pleasure, Mr. Peggotty put one of his
large hands rapturously on each side of his niece's face, and
kissing it a dozen times, laid it with a gentle pride and love
upon his broad chest, and patted it as if his hand had been a
lady's. Then he let her go; and as she ran into the little
chamber where I used to sleep, looked round upon us, quite
hot and out of breath with his uncommon satisfaction.

"If you two gent'lmen — gent'lmen growed now, and such
gent'lmen — " said Mr. Peggotty.

" So th' are, so th' are ! " cried Ham. " Well said ! So th'
are. Mas'r Davy bor — gent'lmen growed — so th' are ! "

" If you two gent'lmen, gent'lmen growed," said Mr. Peggotty,
" don't ex-cuse me for being in a state of mind, when you
understand matters, I'll arks your pardon. Em'ly, my dear ! —
She knows I'm a going to tell,'' here his delight broke out
again, "and has made off. Would you be so good as look
arter her, Mawther, for a minute ? "

Mrs. Gummidge nodded and disappeared.

" If this ain't," said Mr. Peggotty, sitting down among us by
Ihe fire, " the brightest night o' my life, I'm a shellfish — biled
too — and more I can't say. This here little Em'ly, sir," in a
low voice to Steerforth, " — her as you see a blushing here
just now "

Steerforth only nodded ; but with such a pleased expression
of interest, and of participation in Mr. Peggotty' s feelings, that
the latter answered him as if he had spoken.

" To be sure," said Mr. Peggotty. " Thaf s her, and so she
is. Thankee, sir."

Ham nodded to me several times, as if he would have said
so too.

" This here little Em'ly of ours," said Mr. Peggotty, " has
been, in our house, what I suppose (I'm a ignorant man, but
that's my belief) no one but a little bright-eyed creetur can
be in a house. She ain*t my child ; I never had one ; but
I couldn't love her more. You understand ! I couldn't
do it ! "

" I quite understand," said Steerforth.

"I know you do, sir," returned Mr. Peggotty, "and thankee
again. Mas'r Davy, he can remember what she was ; you may
judge for your own self what she is ; but neither of you can't
fully know what she has been, is, and will be, to my loving art
I am rough, sir," said Mr. Peggotty, " I am as rough as a Sea
Porkypine; but no one, unless, mayhap, it is a woman, can

David Copperfield 293

know, I think, what our little Emiy is to me. And betwixt
ourselves," sinking his voice lower yet, " that woman's name
ain't Missis Gummidge neither, though she has a world of
merits."

Mr. Peggotty ruffled his hair again with both hands, as a
further preparation for what he was going to say, and went on,
with a hand upon each of his knees :

" There was a certain person as had know'd our Em'ly, from
the time when her father was drownded; as had seen her
constant ; when a babby, when a young gal, when a woman.
Not much of a person to look at, he warn't," said Mr. Peggotty,
"something of my own build — rough — a good deal o' the
sou'-wester in him — wery salt — but, on the whole, a honest
sort of a chap, with his art in the right place."

I thought I had never seen Ham grin to anything like
the extent to which he sat grinning at us now,

"What does this here blessed tarpaulin go and do," said
Mr. Peggotty, with his face one high noon of enjoyment, " but
he loses that there art of his to our little Em'ly. He follers
her about, he makes hisself a sort o' sarvant to her, he loses in
a great measure his relish for his wittles, and in the long-run
he makes it clear to me wot's amiss. Now I could wish
myself, you see, that our little Em'ly was in a fair way of being
married. I could wish to see her, at all ewents, under articles
to a honest man as had a right to defend her. I don't know
how long I may live, or how soon I may die ; but I know that
if I was capsized, any night, in a gale of wind in Yarmouth
Roads here, and was to see the town-lights shining for the last
time over the rollers as I couldn't make no head against, I
could go down quieter for thinking 'There's a man ashore
there, iron-true to my little Em'ly, God bless her, and no
wrong can touch my Em'ly while so be as that man lives.' "

Mr. Peggotty, in simple earnestness, waved his right arm,
as if he were waving it at the town-lights for the last time, and
then, exchanging a nod with Ham, whose eye he caught,
proceeded as before :

" Well ! I counsels him to speak to Em'ly. He's big
enough, but he's bashfuller than a little un, and he don't like.
So / speak. • What ! Him ! ' says Em'ly. ' Him that I've
know'd so intimate so many years, and like so much. Oh,
Uncle ! I never can have him. He's such a good fellow ! ' I
gives her a kiss, and I says no more to her than ' My dear,
you're right to speak out, you're to choose for yourself, you're
as free as a little bird.' Then I aways to him, and I says, ' I

294 David Copperfield

wish it could have been so, but it can't. But you can both be
as you was, and wot I say to you is, Be as you was with her,
like a man.' He says to me, a-shaking of my hand, ' I will ! '
he says. And he was — honourable and manful — for two year
going on, and we was just the same at home here as afore."

Mr. Peggotty's face, which had varied in its expression with
the various stages of his narrative, now resumed all its former
triumphant delight, as he laid a hand upon my knee and a hand
upon Steerforth's (previously wetting them both, for the greater
emphasis of the action), and divided the following speech
between us:

" All of a sudden, one evening — as it might be to-night —
comes little Em'ly from her work, and him with her ! There
ain't so much in that^ you'll say. No, because he takes care
on her, like a brother, arter dark, and indeed afore dark, and
at all times. But this tarpaulin chap, he takes hold of her
hand, and he cries out to me, joyful, ' Look here ! This is to
be my little wife ! ' And she says, half bold and half shy, and
half a-laughing and half a-crying, * Yes, Uncle ! If you please.'
— If I please!" cried Mr. Peggotty, rolling his head in an
ecstasy at the idea ; " Lord, as if I should do anythink else ! —
' If you please, I am steadier now, and I have thought better of
it, and I'll be as good a little wife as I can to him, for he's a
dear, good fellow ! ' Then Missis Gummidge, she claps her
hands like a play, and you come in. Theer! the murder's
out ! " said Mr. Peggotty — " You come in ! It took place this
here present hour ; and here's the man that'll marry her, the
minute she's out of her time."

Ham staggered, as well he might, under the blow Mr.
Peggotty dealt him in his unbounded joy, as a mark of
confidence and friendship; but feeling called upon to say
something to us, he said, with much faltering and gteat
difficulty :

" She wam't no higher than you was, ^as'r Davy — when
you first come — when I thought what she'd grow up to be. I
see her grow up — gent'lmen — like a flower. I'd lay down my
life for her — Mas'r Davy — Oh ! most content and cheerful !
She's more to me — gent'lmen — than — she's all to me that ever
I can want, and more than ever I — than ever I could say. I
I — love her true. There ain't a gent'lman in all the land — nor
yet sailing upon all the sea — that can love his lady more than
I love her, though there's many a common man — would say
better — what he meant."

I thought it affecting to see such a sturdy fellow as Ham was

David Copperfield 295

now, trembling in the strength of what he felt for the pretty
little creature who had won his heart. I thought the simple
confidence reposed in us by Mr. Peggotty and by himself, was,
in itself, affecting. I was affected by the story altogether.
How far my emotions were influenced by the recollections of
my childhood, I don't know. Whether I had come there with
any lingering fancy that I was still to love little Em'ly, I don't
know. I know that I was filled with pleasure by all this ; but,
at first, with an indescribably sensitive pleasure, that a very
little would have changed to pain.

Therefore, if it had depended upon me to touch the prevail-
ing chord among them with any skill, I should have made a
poor hand of it. But it depended upon Steerforth ; and he
did it with such address, that in a few minutes we were all as
easy and as happy as it was possible to be.

" Mr. Peggotty," he said, " you are a thoroughly good fellow,
and deserve to be as happy as you are to-night. My hand
upon it ! Ham, I give you joy, my boy. My hand upon that,
too I Daisy, stir the fire, and make it a brisk one ! and Mr.
Peggotty, unless you can induce your gentle niece to come back
(for whom I vacate this seat in the comer), I shall go. Any
gap at your fireside on such a night — such a gap least of all —
I wouldn't make, for the wealth of the Indies ! "

So Mr. Peggotty went into my old room to fetch little Em'ly.
At first, little Em'ly didn't like to come, and then Ham went.
Presently they brought her to the fireside, very much confused,
and very shy, — but she soon became more assured when she
found how gently and respectfully Steerforth spoke to her;
how skilfully he avoided anything that would embarrass her ;
how he talked to Mr. Peggotty of boats, and ships, and tides,
and fish ; how he referred to me about the time when he had
seen Mr. Peggotty at Salem House ; how delighted he was with
the boat and all belonging to it; how lightly and easily he
carried on, until he brought us, by degrees, into a charmed
circle, and we were all talking away without any reserve.

Em'ly, indeed, said little all the evening; but she looked,
and listened, and her face got animated, and she was charming.
Steerforth told a story of a dismal shipwreck (which arose out
of his talk with Mr. Peggotty), as if he saw it all before him —
and little Em'ly's eyes were fastened on him all the time, as if
she saw it too. He told us a merry adventure of his own, as a
relief to that, with as much gaiety as if the narrative were as
fresh to him as it was to us — and little Em'ly laughed until the
boat rang with the musical sounds, and we all laughed (Steerforth

296 David Copperfield

too), in irresistible sympathy with what was so pleasant and
light-hearted. He got Mr. Peggotty to sing, or rather to
roar, " When the stormy winds do blow, do blow, do blow ; "
and he sang a sailor's song himself, so pathetically and beauti-
fully, that I could have almost fancied that the real wind
creeping sorrowfully round the house, and murmuring low
through our unbroken silence, was there to listen.

As to Mrs. Gummidge, he roused that victim of despondency
with a success never attained by any one else (so Mr. Peggotty
informed me), since the decease of the old one. He left her so
little leisure for being miserable, that she said next day she
thought she must have been bewitched.

But he set up no monopoly of the general attention, or the
conversation. When little Em'ly grew more courageous, and
talked (but still bashfully) across the fire to me, of our old
wanderings upon the beach, to pick up shells and pebbles ; and
when I asked her if she recollected how I used to be devoted
to her ; and when we both laughed and reddened, casting these
looks back on the pleasant old times, so unreal to look at now ;
he was silent and attentive, and observed us thoughtfully. She
sat, at this time, and all the evening, on the old locker in her
old little corner by the fire, with Ham beside her, where I used
to sit. I could not satisfy myself whether it was in her own
little tormenting way, or in a maidenly reserve before us, that
she kept quite close to the wall, and away from him ; but I
observed that she did so, all the evening.

As I remember, it was almost midnight when we took our
leave. We had had some biscuit and dried fish for supper, and
Steerforth had produced from his pocket a full flask of Hollands,
which we men (I may say we men, now, without a blush) had
emptied. We parted merrily ; and as they all stood crowded
round the door to light us as far as they could upon our road,
I saw the sweet blue eyes of little Em'ly peeping after us, from
behind Ham, and heard her soft voice calling to us to be
careful how we went.

" A most engaging little Beauty ! " said Steerforth, taking
my arm. " Well ! It's a quaint place, and they are quaint
company ; and it's quite a new sensation to mix with them."

" How fortunate we are, too," I returned, " to have arrived
to witness their happiness in that intended marriage ! I never
saw people so happy. How delightful to see it, and to be
made the sharers in their honest joy, as we have been!"

" That's rather a chuckle-headed fellow for the girl ; isn't
he ? " said Steerforth.

David Copperfield 297

He had been so hearty with him, and with them all, that I
felt a shock in this unexpected and cold reply. But turning
quickly upon him, and seeing a laugh in his eyes, 1 answered,
much relieved :

" Ah, Steerforth ! It's well for you to joke about the poor !
You may skirmish with Miss Dartle, or try to hide your
sympathies in jest from me, but I know better. When I see
how perfectly you understand them, how exquisitely you can
enter into happiness like this plain fisherman's, or humour a
love like my old nurse's, I know that there is not a joy or sorrow,
not an emotion, of such people, that can be indifferent to you.
And I admire and love you for it, Steerforth, twenty times the
more ! "

He stopped, and looking in my face, said : " Daisy, I believe
you are in earnest, and are good. I wish we all were ! " Next
moment he was gaily singing Mr. Peggotty's song, as we walked
at a round pace back to Yarmouth.

CHAPTER XXII

SOME OLD SCENES, AND SOME NEW PEOPLE

Steerforth and I stayed for more than a fortnight in that part
of the country. We were very much together, I need not say ;
but occasionally we were asunder for some hours at a time.
He was a good sailor, and I was but an indifferent one ; and
when he went out boating with Mr. Peggotty, which was a
favourite amusement of his, I generally remained ashore. My
occupation of Peggotty's spare-room put a constraint upon me,
from which he was free : for, knowing how assiduously she
attended on Mr. Barkis all day, I did not like to remain out
late at night ; whereas Steerforth, lying at the Inn, had nothing
to consult but his own humour. Thus it came about, that
I heard of his making little treats for the fishermen at Mr. j
Peggotty's house of call, " The Willing Mind," after I was in\/
bed, and of his being afloat, wrapped in fishermen's clothes,
whole moonlight nights, and coming back when the morning
tide was at flood. By this time, however, I knew that his rest-
less nature and bold spirits delighted to find a vent in rough
toil and hard weather, as in any other means of excitement that
presented itself freshly to him ; so none of his proceedings
surprised me.

298 David Copperfield

Another cause of our being sometimes apart was, that I had
naturally an interest in going over to Blunderstone, and revisit-
ing the old familiar scenes of my childhood ; while Steerforth,
after being there once, had naturally no great interest in going
there again. Hence, on three or four days that I can at once
recall, we went our several ways after an early breakfast, and
met again at a late dinner. I had no idea how he employed
his time in the interval, beyond a general knowledge that he
was very popular in the place, and had twenty means of actively
diverting himself where another man might not have found one.

For my own part, my occupation in my solitary pilgrimages
was to recall every yard of the old road as I went along it, and
to haunt the old spots, of which I never tired. I haunted
them, as my memory had often done, and lingered among
them as my younger thoughts had lingered when I was far
away. The grave beneath the tree, where both my parents
lay — on which I had looked out, when it was my father's only,
with such curious feelings of compassion, and by which I had
stood, so desolate, when it was opened to receive my pretty
mother and her baby — the grave which Peggotty's own faithful
care had ever since kept neat, and made a garden of, I walked
near, by the hour. It lay a little off the churchyard path, in a
quiet corner, not so far removed but I could read the names
upon the stone as I walked to and fro, startled by the sound of
the church-bell when it struck the hour, for it was like a
departed voice to me. My reflections at these times were
always associated with the figure I was to make in life, and the
distinguished things I was to do. My echoing footsteps went
to no other tune, but were as constant to that as if I had come
home to build my castles in the air at a living mother's side.

There were great changes in my old home. The ragged
nests, so long deserted by the rooks, were gone ; and the trees
were lopped and topped out of their remembered shapes. The
garden had run wild, and half the windows of the house were
shut up. It was occupied, but only by a poor lunatic gentle-
man, and the people who took care of him. He was always
sitting at my little window, looking out into the churchyard ;
and I wondered whether his rambling thoughts ever went upon
any of the fancies that used to occupy mine, on the rosy
mornings when I peeped out of that same little window in my
night-clothes, and saw the sheep quietly feeding in the light of
the rising sun.

Our old neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Grayper, were gone to
South America, and the rain had made its way through the

David Copperfield 299

roof of their empty house, and stained the outer walls. Mr.
Chillip was married again to a tall, raw-boned, high-nosed wife ;
and they had a weazen little baby, with a heavy head that it
couldn't hold up, and two weak staring eyes, with which it
seemed to be always wondering why it had ever been born.

It was with a singular jumble of sadness and pleasure that I
used to linger about my native place, until the reddening winter
sun admonished me that it was time to start on my returning
walk. But, when the placcwas left behind, and especially when
Steerforth and I were happily seated over our dinner by a
blazing fire, it was delicious to think of having been there. So
it was, though in a softened degree, when I went to my neat
room at night ; and, turning over the leaves of the crocodile-
book (which was always there, upon a little table), remembered
with a grateful heart how blest I was in having such a friend as
Steerforth, such a friend as Peggotty, and such a substitute for
what I had lost as my excellent and generous aunt.

My nearest way to Yarmouth, in coming back from these
long walks, was by a ferry. It landed me on the flat between
the town and the sea, which I could make straight across, and
so save myself a considerable circuit by the high road. Mr.
Peggotty's house being on that waste-place, and not a hundred
yards out of my track, I always looked in as I went by. Steer-
forth was pretty sure to be there expecting me, and we went on
together through the frosty air and gathering fog towards the
twinkling lights of the town.

One dark evening, when I was later than usual — for I had,
that day, been making my parting visit to Blunderstone as we
were now about to return home — I found him alone in Mr.
Peggotty's house, sitting thoughtfully before the fire. He was
so intent upon his own reflections that he was quite uncon-
scious of my approach. This, indeed, he might easily have
been if he had been less absorbed, for footsteps fell noiselessly
on the sandy ground outside ; but even my entrance failed to
rouse him. I was standing close to him, looking at him ; and
still, with a heavy brow, he was lost in his meditations.

He gave such a start when I put my hand upon his shoulder,
that he made me start too.

"You come upon me," he said, almost angrily, "like a
reproachful ghost!"

"I was obliged to announce myself, somehow," I replied.
" Have I called you down from the stars ? "

" No," he answered. " No."

" Up from anywhere, then ? " said I, taking my seat near him.

300 David Copperfield

" I was looking at the pictures in the fire," he returned.

" But you are spoiling them for me," said I, as he stirred it
quickly with a piece of burning wood, striking out of it a train
of red-hot sparks that went careering up the little chimney, and
roaring out into the air.

" You would not have seen them," he returned. " I detest
this mongrel time, neither day nor night. How late you are !
Where have you been ? "

"I have been taking leave of my usual walk," said I.

"And I have been sitting here," said Steerforth, glancing
round the room, " thinking that all the people we found so
glad on the night of our coming down, might — to judge from
the present wasted air of the place — be dispersed, or dead,
or come to I don't know what harm. David, I wish to God
I had had a judicious father these last twenty years ! "

" My dear Steerforth, what is the matter ? "

" I wish with all my soul I had been better guided I " he
exclaimed. " I wish with all my soul I could guide myself
better ! "

There was a passionate dejection in his manner that quite
amazed me. He was more unlike himself than I could have
supposed possible.

" It would be better to be this poor Peggotty, or his lout of
a nephew," he said, getting up and leaning moodily against the
chimney-piece, with his face towards the fire, "than to be
myself, twenty times richer and twenty times wiser, and be the
torment to myself that I have been, in this Devil's bark of a
boat, within the last half-hour ! "

I was so confounded by the alteration in him, that at first I
could only observe him in silence, as he stood leaning his head
upon his hand, and looking gloomily down at the fire. At
length I begged him, with all the earnestness I felt, to tell me
what had occurred to cross him so unusually, and to let me
sympathise with him, if I could not hope to advise him. Before
I had well concluded, he began to laugh — fretfully at first, but
soon with returning gaiety.

" Tut, it's nothing, Daisy ! nothing ! " he replied. " I told
you at the inn in London, I am heavy company for myself,
sometimes. I have been a nightmare to myself, just now —
must have had one, I think. At odd dull times, nursery tales
come up into the memory, unrecognised for what they are. I
believe I have been confounding myself with the bad boy who
'didn't care,' and became food for lions — a grander kind of
going to the dogs, I suppose. What old women call the

David Copperfield 301

horrors, have been creeping over me from head to foot I
have been afraid of myself."

" You are afraid of nothing else, I think," said I.

"Perhaps not, and yet may have enough to be afraid of
too," he answered. " Well ! So it goes by ! I am not about
to be hipped again, David ; but I tell you, my good fellow,
once more, that it would have been well for me (and for more
than me) if I had had a steadfast and judicious father ! "

His face was always full of expression, but I never saw it
express such a dark kind of earnestness as when he said these
words, with his glance bent on the fire.

"So much for that!" he said, making as if he tossed
something light into the air, with his hand.

'• 'Why, being gone, I am a man again/"

like Macbeth. And now for dinner ! If I have not (Macbeth-
like) broken up the feast with most admired disorder, Daisy."

" But where are they all, I wonder ! " said I.

" God knows," said Steerforth. " After strolling to the ferry
looking for you, I strolled in here and found the place deserted.
That set me thinking, and you found me thinking."

The advent of Mrs. Gummidge with a basket, explained how
the house had happened to be empty. She had hurried out to
buy something that was needed, against Mr. Peggotty's return
with the tide ; and had left the door open in the meanwhile,
lest Ham and little Em'ly, with whom it was an early night,
should come home while she was gone. Steerforth, after very
much improving Mrs. Gummidge's spirits by a cheerful saluta-
tion and a jocose embrace, took my arm, and hurried me away.

He had improved his own spirits no less than Mrs. Gum-
midge's, for they were again at their usual flow, and he was
full of vivacious conversation as we went along.

" And so," he said, gaily, " we abandon this buccaneer life
to-morrow, do we ? "

" So we agreed," I returned. " And our places by the coach
are taken, you know."

"Ay! there's no help for it, I suppose," said Steerforth.
"I have almost forgotten that there is anything to do in the
world but to go out tossing on the sea here. I wish there was
not."

" As long as the novelty should last," said I, laughing.

"Like enough," he returned; "though there's a sarcastic
meaning in that observation for an amiable piece of innocence
like my young friend. Well! I dare say I am a capricious

302 David Copperfield

fellow, David. I know I am ; but while the iron is hot, 1
can strike it vigorously too. I could pass a reasonably good
examination already, as a pilot in these waters, I think."

" Mr. Peggotty says you are a wonder," I returned.

" A nautical phenomenon, eh ? " laughed Steerforth.

" Indeed he does, and you know how truly ; knowing how
ardent you are in any pursuit you follow, and how easily you
can master it. And that amazes me most in you, Steerforth —
that you should be contented with such fitful uses of your
powers."

"Contented?" he answered, merrily. "I am never con-
tented, except with your freshness, my gende Daisy. As to
fitfulness, I have never learnt the art of binding myself to
any of the wheels on which the Ixions of these days are
turning round and round. I missed it somehow in a bad
apprenticeship, and now don't care about it. — You know I
have bought a boat down here?"

" What an extraordinary fellow you are, Steerforth ! " I
exclaimed, stopping — for this was the first I had heard of
it. "When you may never care to come near the place
again ! "

" I don't know that," he returned. " I have taken a fancy
to the place. At all events," walking me briskly on, " I have
bought a boat that was for sale — a clipper, Mr. Peggotty says ]
and so she is — and Mr. Peggotty will be master of her in my
absence."

" Now I understand you, Steerforth ! " said I, exultingly.
"You pretend to have bought it for yourself, but you have
really done so to confer a benefit on him. I might have known
as much at first, knowing you. My dear kind Steerforth, how
can I tell you what I think of your generosity?"

" Tush ! " he answered, turning red. " The less said, the
better."

" Didn't I know ? " cried I, " didn't I say that there was not
a joy, or sorrow, or any emotion of such honest hearts that was
indifferent to you ? "

"Aye, aye," he answered, "you told me all that. There let
it rest. We have said enough ! "

Afraid of offending him by pursuing the subject when he
made so light of it, I only pursued it in my thoughts as we
went on at even a quicker pace than before.

" She must be newly rigged," said Steerforth, " and I shall
leave Littimer behind to see it done, that I may know she is
quite complete. Did I tell you Littimer had come down ? "

David Copperfield 303

"No/'

" Oh, yes 1 came down this morning, with a letter from my
mother."

As our looks met, I observed that he was pale even to his
lips, though he looked very steadily at me. I feared that some
difference between him and his mother might have led to his
being in the frame of mind in which I had found him at the
solitary fireside. I hinted so.

" Oh no ! " he said, shaking his head, and giving a slight
laugh. " Nothing of the sort 1 Yes. He is come down, that
man of mine."

"The same as ever?" said I.

"The same as ever," said Steerforth. "Distant and quiet
as the North Pole. He shall see to the boat being fresh
named. She's the Stormy Petrel now. What does Mr.
Peggotty care for Stormy Petrels! Ill have her christened
again."

" By what name ? " I asked.
"The Little Em'ly."

As he had continued to look steadily at me, I took it as
a reminder that he objected to being extolled for his con-
sideration. I could not help showing in my face how much
it pleased me, but I said little, and he resumed his usual smile,
and seemed relieved.

"But see here," he said, looking before us, "where the
original little Em'ly comes ! And that fellow with her, eh ?
Upon my soul, he's a true knight. He never leaves her ! "

Ham was a boat-builder in these days, having improved a
natural ingenuity in that handicraft, until he had become a
skilled workman. He was in his working-dress, and looked
rugged enough, but manly withal, and a very fit protector for
the blooming little creature at his side. Indeed, there was
a frankness in his face, an honesty, and an undisguised show of
his pride in her, and his love for her, which were, to me, the
best of good looks. I thought, as they came towards us, that
they were well matched even in that particular.

She withdrew her hand timidly from his arm as we stopped
to speak to them, and blushed as she gave it to Steerforth and
to me. When they passed on, after we had exchanged a few
words, she did not like to replace that hand, but, still appear-
ing timid and constrained, walked by herself. I thought all
this very pretty and engaging, and Steerforth seemed to think
so too, as we looked after them fading away in the light of
a young moon.

304 David Copperfield

Suddenly there passed us — evidently following them — a
young woman whose approach we had not observed, but
whose face I saw as she went by, and thought I had a faint
remembrance of. She was lightly dressed, looked bold, and
haggard, and flaunting, and poor; but seemed, for the time,
to have given all that to the wind which was blowing, and
to have nothing in her mind but going after them. As the
dark distant level, absorbing their figures into itself, left but
itself visible between us and the sea and clouds, her figure
disappeared in like manner, still no nearer to them than
before.

"That is a black shadow to be following the girl," said
Steerforth, standing still; "what does it mean?"

He spoke in a low voice that sounded almost strange to
me.

" She must have it in her mind to beg of them, I think,"
said I.

"A beggar would be no novelty," said Steerforth; "but
it is a strange thing that the beggar should take that shape
to-night."

"Why?" I asked him.

" For no better reason, truly, than because I was thinking,"
he said, after a pause, " of something like it, when it came by.
Where the Devil did it come from, I wonder ! "

"From the shadow of this wall, I think," said I, as we
emerged upon a road on which a wall abutted.

" It's gone ! " he returned, looking over his shoulder. " And
all ill go with it. Now for our dinner ! "

But he looked again over his shoulder towards the sea-line
glimmering afar off; and yet again. And he wondered about
it, in some broken expressions, several times, in the short
remainder of our walk; and only seemed to forget it when
the light of fire and candle shone upon us, seated warm and
merry, at table.

Littimer was there, and had his usual effect upon me.
When I said to him that I hoped Mrs. Steerforth and Miss
Dartle were well, he answered respectfully (and of course
respectably), that they were tolerably well, he thanked me,
and had sent their compliments. This was all ; and yet he
seemed to me to say as plainly as a man could say: "You
are very young, sir; you are exceedingly young."

We had almost finished dinner, when taking a step or two
towards the table, from the corner where he kept watch upon
us, or rather upon me, as I felt, he said to his master :

David Copperfield 305

" I beg your pardon, sir. Miss Mowcher is down here."

" Who ?" cried Steerforth, much astonished.

" Miss Mowcher, sir."

" Why, what on earth does she do here ? " said Steerforth.

" It appears to be her native part of the country, sir. She
informs me that she makes one of her professional visits here,
every year, sir. I met her in the street this afternoon, and she
wished to know if she might have the honour of waiting on you
after dinner, sir."

" Do you know the Giantess in question, Daisy ? " inquired
Steerforth.

I was obliged to confess — I felt ashamed, even of being at
this disadvantage before Littimer — that Miss Mowcher and I
were wholly unacquainted.

" Then you shall know her," said Steerforth, " for she is one
of the seven wonders of the world. When Miss Mowcher
comes, show her in."

I felt some curiosity and excitement about this lady,
especially as Steerforth burst into a fit of laughing when I
referred to her, and positively refused to answer any question
of which I made her the subject. I remained, therefore, in
a state of considerable expectation until the cloth had been
removed some half an hour, and we were sitting over our
decanter of wine before the fire, when the door opened,
and Littimer, with his habitual serenity quite undisturbed,
announced :

" Miss Mowcher ! "

I looked at the doorway and saw nothing. I was still looking
at the doorway, thinking that Miss Mowcher was a long while
making her appearance, when, to my infinite astonishment,
there came waddling round a sofa which stood between me and
it, a pursy dwarf, of about forty or forty-five, with a very large
head and face, a pair of roguish grey eyes, and such extremely
little arms, that, to enable herself to lay a finger archly against
her snub nose as she ogled Steerforth, she was obliged to meet
the finger half-way, and lay her nose against it. Her chin,
which was what is called a double-chin, was so fat that it
entirely swallowed up the strings of her bonnet, bow and all.
Throat she had none ; waist she had none ; legs she had none,
worth mentioning; for though she was more than full-sized
down to where her waist would have been, if she had had any, /
and though she terminated, as human beings generally do, in a V
pair of feet, she was so short that she stood at a common-sized
chair as at a table, resting a bag she carried on the seat. This

3o6 David Copperfield

lady — dressed in an off-hand, easy style ; bringing her nose and
her forefinger together, with the difficuhy I have described ;
standing with her head necessarily on one side, and, with one of
her sharp eyes shut up, making an uncommonly knowing face
— after ogling Steerforth for a few moments, broke into a torrent
of words.

" What ! My flower ! " she pleasantly began, shaking her
large head at him. " You're there, are you ! Oh, you naughty
boy, fie for shame, what do you do so far away from home ? Up
to mischief, I'll be bound. Oh, you're a downy fellow, Steer-
forth, so you are, and I'm another, ain't I ? Ha, ha, ha ! You'd
have betted a hundred pound to five, now, that you wouldn't
have seen me here, wouldn't you ? Bless you, man alive, I'm
everywhere. I'm here, and there, and where not, like the
conjurer's half-crown in the lady's hankercher. Talking of
hankerchers — and talking of ladies — what a comfort you are to
your blessed mother, ain't you, my dear boy, over one of my
shoulders, and I don't say which ! "

Miss Mowcher untied her bonnet, at this passage of her
discourse, threw back the strings, and sat down, panting, on
a footstool in front of the fire — making a kind of arbour of
the dining-table, which spread its mahogany shelter above her
head.

"Oh my stars and what's-their-names ! " she went on, clap-
ping a hand on each of her little knees, and glancing shrewdly
at me. " I'm of too full a habit, that's the fact, Steerforth.
After a flight of stairs, it gives me as much trouble to draw
every breath I want, as if it was a bucket of water. If you saw
me looking out of an upper window, you'd think I was a fine
woman, wouldn't you ? "

" I should think that, wherever I saw you," replied Steer-
forth.

** Go along, you dog, do ! " cried the little creature, making a
whisk at him with the handkerchief with which she was wiping
her face, " and don't be impudent ! But I give you my word
and honour I was at Lady Mithers's last week — there^s a
woman ! How she wears ! — and Mithers himself came into the
room where I was waiting for her — there^s a man ! How he
wears I and his wig too, for he's had it these ten years — and he
went on at that rate in the complimentary line, that I began to
think I should be obliged to ring the bell. Ha ! ha ! ha ! He's
a pleasant wretch, but he wants principle."

" What were you doing for Lady Mithers ? " asked Steerforth.

"That's tellings, my blessed infant," she retorted, tapping

David Copperfield 307

her nose again, screwing up her face, and twinkling her eyes like
an imp of supernatural intelligence. " Never you mind 1
You'd like to know whether I stop her hair from falling
off, or dye it, or touch up her complexion, or improve her
eyebrows, wouldn't you ? And so you shall, my darling —
when I tell you ! Do you know what my great grandfather's
name was ? "

" No," said Steerforth.

"It was Walker, my sweet pet," replied Miss Mowcher,
" and he came of a long line of Walkers, that I inherit all the
Hookey estates from."

I never beheld anything approaching to Miss Mowcher's
wink, except Miss Mowcher's self-possession. She had a
wonderful way too, when listening to what was said to her, or
when waiting for an answer to what she had said herself, of
pausing with her head cunningly on one side, and one eye
turned up like a magpie's. Altogether I was lost in amaze-
ment, and sat staring at her, quite oblivious, I am afraid, of the
laws of politeness.

She had by this time drawn the chair to her side, and was
busily engaged in producing from the bag (plunging in her short
arm to the shoulder, at every dive) a number of small bottles,
sponges, combs, brushes, bits of flannel, little pairs of curling-
irons, and other instruments, which she tumbled in a heap upon
the chair. From this employment she suddenly desisted, and
said to Steerforth, much to my confusion :

"Who's your friend?"

"Mr. Copperfield," said Steerforth; "he wants to know
you."

" Well, then, he shall ! I thought he looked as if he did ! **
returned Miss Mowcher, waddling up to me, bag in hand, and
laughing on me as she came. " Face like a peach ! " standing
on tiptoe to pinch my cheek as I sat. "Quite tempting ! I'm
very fond of peaches. Happy to make your acquaintance, Mr.
Copperfield, I'm sure."

I said that I congratulated myself on having the honour to
make hers, and that the happiness was mutual.

" Oh, my goodness, how polite we are I " exclaimed Miss
Mowcher, making a preposterous attempt to cover her large
face with her morsel of a hand. " What a world of gammon
and spinnage it is, though, ain't it 1 "

This was addressed confidentially to both of us, as the morsel
of a hand came away from the face, and buried itself, arm and
all, in the bag again.

3o8 David Copperfield

" What do you mean, Miss Mowcher ? " said Steerforth.

" Ha ! ha ! ha ! What a refreshing set of humbugs we are,
to be sure, ain't we, my sweet child ? " replied that morsel of a
woman, feeling in the bag with her head on one side and her eye
in the air. " Look here ! " taking something out. " Scraps of
the Russian Prince's nails. Prince Alphabet turned topsy-
turvy, / call him, for his name's got all the letters in it,
higgledy-piggledy."

" The Russian Prince is a client of yours, is he ? " said
Steerforth.

" I believe you, my pet," replied Miss Mowcher '< I keep
his nails in order for him. Twice a week ! Fingers and toes."

" He pays well, I hope ? " said Steerforth.

" Pays as he speaks, my dear child — through the nose," re-
plied Miss Mowcher. " None of your close shavers the Prince
ain't. You'd say so, if you saw his moustachios. Red by
nature, black by art."

" By your art, of course," said Steerforth.

Miss Mowcher winked assent. " Forced to send for me.
Couldn't help it. The climate affected kis dye ; it did very
well in Russia, but it was no go here. You never saw such a
rusty Prince in all your born days as he was. Like old iron ! "

" Is that why you called him a humbug, just now ? " inquired
Steerforth.

" Oh, you're a broth of a boy, ain't you ? " returned Miss
Mowcher, shaking her head violently. " I said, what a set of
humbugs we were in general, and I showed you the scraps of
the Prince's nails to prove it. The Prince's nails do more for
me in private families of the genteel sort, than all my talents
put together. I always carry 'em about. They're the best
introduction. If Miss Mowcher cuts the Prince's nails, she
must be all right. I give 'em away to the young ladies. They
put 'em in albums, I believe. Ha ! ha ! ha ! Upon my life,
' the whole social system ' (as the men call it when they make
speeches in Parliament) is a system of Prince's nails ! " said this
least of women, trying to fold her short arms, and nodding her
large head.

Steerforth laughed heartily, and I laughed too. Miss Mowcher
continuing all the time to shake her head (which was very much
on one side), and to look into the air with one eye, and to wink
with the other.

" Well, well ! " she said, smiting her small knees, and rising,
" this is not business. Come, Steerforth, let's explore the polar
regions, and have it over."

[sh

David Copperfield 309

She then selected two or three of the Httle instruments, and
a Httle bottle, and asked (to my surprise) if the table would
bear. On Steerforth's replying in the affirmative, she pushed a
chair against it, and begging the assistance of my hand, mounted
up, pretty nimbly, to the top, as if it were a stage.

" If either of you saw my ankles,*' she said, when she was
safely elevated, "say so, and I'll go home and destroy
myself."

*' / did not," said Steerforth.

" / did not," said I.

"Well then," cried Miss Mowcher, "IHl consent to live.
Now, ducky, ducky, ducky, come to Mrs. Bond and be killed."

This was an invocation to Steerforth to place himself under
her hands ; who, accordingly, sat himself down, with his back
to the table, and his laughing face towards me, and submitted
his head to her inspection, evidently for no other purpose than
our entertainment. To see Miss Mowcher standing over him,
looking at his rich profusion of brown hair through a large
round magnifying glass, which she took out of her pocket, was
a most amazing spectacle.

" You're a pretty fellow ! " said Miss Mowcher, after a brief
inspection. " You'd be as bald as a friar on the top of your
head in twelve months, but for me. Just half a minute, my
young friend, and we'll give you a polishing that shall keep
your curls on for the next ten years!"

With this, she tilted some of the contents of the little bottle
on to one of the little bits of flannel, and, again imparting some
of the virtues of that preparation to one of the little brushes,
began rubbing and scraping away with both on the crown of
Steerforth's head in the busiest manner I ever witnessed, talking
all the time.

" There's Charley Pyegrave, the duke's son," she said. " You
know Charley ? " peeping round into his face.

" A little," said Steerforth.

" What a man he is ! Theris a whisker ! As to Charley's
legs, if they were only a pair (which they ain't), they'd defy
competition. Would you believe he tried to do without me
— in the Life-Guards, too?"

" Mad ! " said Steerforth,

*' It looks like it. However, mad or sane, he tried," returned
Miss Mowcher. " What does he do, but, lo and behold you,
he goes into a perfumer's shop, and wants to buy a bottle of the
Madagascar Liquid."

" Charley does ? " said Steerforth.

3IO David Copperfield

" Charley does. But they haven't got any of the Madagascar
Liquid."

" What is it ? Something to drink ? " asked Steerforth.

" To drink ? " returned Miss Mowcher, stopping to slap his
cheek. " To doctor his own moustachios with, you know.
There was a woman in the shop — elderly female — quite a
Griffin — who had never even heard of it by name. * Begging
pardon, sir,' said the Griffin to Charley, 'it's not — not — not
ROUGE, is it ? ' ' Rouge,' said Charley to the Griffin. * What
the unmentionable to ears polite, do you think I want with
rouge ? ' * No offence, sir,' said the Griffin ; ' we have it asked
for by so many names, I thought it might be.' Now that, my
child," continued Miss Mowcher, rubbing all the time as busily
as ever, " is another instance of the refreshing humbug I was
speaking of. /do something in that way myself — perhaps a
good deal — perhaps a little — sharp's the word, my dear boy —
never mind ! "

"In what way do you mean? In the rouge way?" said
Steerforth.

" Put this and that together, my tender pupil," returned the
wary Mowcher, touching her nose, "work it by the rule of
Secrets in all trades, and the product will give you the desired
result. I say / do a little in that way myself. One Dowager,
she calls it lip-salve. Another, she calls it gloves. Another, she
calls it tucker-edging. Another, she calls it a fan. I call it
whatever they call it. I supply it for 'em, but we keep up
the trick so, to one another, and make believe with such a
face, that they'd as soon think of laying it on before a whole
drawing-room, as before me. And when I wait upon 'em,
they'll say to me sometimes — with it on — thick, and no mistake
— ' How am I looking, Mowcher ? Am I pale ? ' Ha ! ha !
ha ! ha ! Isn't that refreshing, my young friend ! "

I never did in my days behold anything like Mowcher as
she stood upon the dining-table, intensely enjoying this refresh-
ment, rubbing busily at Steerforth's head, and winking at me
overjtj

" Ah ! " she said. " Such things are not much in demand
hereabouts. That sets me off again ! I haven't seen a pretty
woman since I've been here. Jemmy."

" No ? " said Steerforth.

" Not the ghost of one," replied Miss Mowcher.

" We could show her the substance of one, I think ? " said
Steerforth, addressing his eyes to mine. "Eh, Daisy?"

" Yes, indeed," said I.

David Copperfield 311

" Aha ? " cried the little creature, glancing sharply at my face,
and then peeping round at Steerforth's. " Umph ?"

The first exclamation sounded like a question put to both
of us, and the second like a question put to Steerforth only.
She seemed to have found no answer to either, but continued
to rub, with her head on one side and her eye turned up, as if
she were looking for an answer in the air and were confident
of its appearing presently.

" A sister of yours, Mr. Copperfield ! " she cried, after a
pause, and still keeping the same look-out. " Aye, aye ? "

" No," said Steerforth, before I could reply. " Nothing of
the sort. On the contrary, Mr. Copperfield used — or I am
much mistaken — to have a great admiration for her."

" Why, hasn't he now ? " returned Miss Mowcher. " Is he
fickle ? oh, for shame ! Did he sip every flower, and change
every hour, until Polly his passion requited? — Is her name
Polly ? "

The Elfin suddenness with which she pounced upon me
with this question, and a searching look, quite disconcertea
me for a moment.

"No, Miss Mowcher," I replied. " Her name is Emily."

" Aha ? " she cried exactly as before. " Umph ? What a
rattle I am ! Mr. Copperfield, ain't I volatile ? "

Her tone and look implied something that was not agreeable
to me in connexion with the subject. So I said, in a graver
manner than any of us had yet assumed :

" She is as virtuous as she is pretty. She is engaged to be
married to a most worthy and deserving man in her own
station of life. I esteem her for her good sense, as much as
I admire her for her good looks."

" Well said ! " cried Steerforth. " Hear, hear, hear ! Now
I'll quench the curiosity of this little Fatima, my dear Daisy, by
leaving her nothing to guess at. She is at present apprenticed.
Miss Mowcher, or articled, or whatever it may be, to Omer
and Joram, Haberdashers, Milliners, and so forth, in this town.
Do you observe ? Omer and Joram. The promise of which
my friend has spoken, is made and entered into with her cousin;
Christian name, Ham ; surname, Peggotty ; occupation, boat-
builder; also of this town. She lives with a relative; Christian
name, unknown; surname, Peggotty; occupation, seafaring;
also of this town. She is the prettiest and most engaging little
fairy in the world. I admire her — as my friend does — exceed-
ingly. If it were not that I might appear to disparage her
Intended, which I know my friend would not like, I would

312 David Copperfield

add, that to me she seems to be throwing herself away; that
I am sure she might do better ; and that I swear she was born
to be a lady."

Miss Mowcher listened to these words, which were very
slowly and distinctly spoken, with her head on one side, and
her eye in the air, as if she were still looking for that answer.
When he ceased she became brisk again in an instant, and
rattled away with surprising volubility.

"Oh! And that's all about it, is it?" she exclaimed,
trimming his whiskers with a little restless pair of scissors,
that went glancing round his head in all directions. "Very
well : very well ! Quite a long story. Ought to end ' and
they lived happy ever afterwards ; ' oughtn't it ? Ah ! What's
that game at forfeits? I love my love with an E, because
she's enticing; I hate her with an E, because she's engaged.
I took her to the sign of the exquisite, and treated her with
an elopement ; her name's Emily, and she lives in the east ?
Ha ! ha ! ha ! Mr. Copperfield, ain't I volatile ? "

Merely looking at me with extravagant slyness, and not waiting
for any reply, she continued, without drawing breath :

" There ! If ever any scapegrace was trimmed and touched
up to perfection, you are, Steerforth. If I understand any
noddle in the world, I understand yours. Do you hear me
when I tell you that, my darling? I understand yours,"
peeping down into his face. "Now you may mizzle, Jemmy
(as we say at Court), and if Mr. Copperfield will take the
chair I'll operate on him."

"What do you say, Daisy?" inquired Steerforth, laughing,
and resigning his seat. " Will you be improved ? "

" Thank you. Miss Mowcher, not this evening."

"Don't say no," returned the little woman, looking at
me with the aspect of a connoisseur; "a little bit more
eyebrow ? "

" Thank you," I returned, " some other time."

"Have it carried half a quarter of an inch towards the
temple," said Miss Mowcher. " We can do it in a fortnight."

"No, I thank you. Not at present."

"Go in for a tip," she urged. "No? Let's get the
scaffolding up, then, for a pair of whiskers. Come ! "

I could not help blushing as I declined, for I felt we were
on my weak point, now. But Miss Mowcher, finding that I
was not at present disposed for any decoration within the range
of her art, and that I was, for the time being, proof against the
blandishments of the small bottle which she held up before

David Copperfield 313

one eye to enforce her persuasions, said we would make a
beginning on an early day, and requested the aid of my hand
to descend from her elevated station. Thus assisted, she
skipped down with much agility, and began to tie her double
chin into her bonnet.

"The fee," said Steerforth, "is "

"Five bob," replied Miss Mowcher, "and dirt cheap, my
chicken. Ain't I volatile, Mr. Copperfield ? "

I replied politely: "Not at all." But I thought she was
rather so, when she tossed up his two half-crowns like a goblin
pieman, caught them, dropped them in her pocket, and gave
it a loud slap.

"That's the Till!" observed Miss Mowcher, standing at the
chair again, and replacing in the bag a miscellaneous collection
of little objects she had emptied out of it. " Have I got all my
traps ? It seems so. It won't do to be like long Ned Bead-
wood, when they took him to church * to marry him to some-
body,' as he says, and left the bride behind. Ha I ha ! ha I
A wicked rascal, Ned, but droll ! Now, I know I'm going to
break your hearts, but I am forced to leave you. You must
call up all your fortitude, and try to bear it. Good-bye, Mr.
Copperfield ! Take care of yourself, Jocky of Norfolk ! How
I have been rattling on ! It's all the fault of you two wretches.
/ forgive you ! ' Bob swore ! ' — as the Englishman said for
'Good night,' when he first learnt French, and thought it so like
English. ' Bob swore,' my ducks ! "

With the bag slung over her arm, and rattling as she waddled
away, she waddled to the door, where she stopped to inquire
if she should leave us a lock of her hair. "Ain't I volatile?"
she added, as a commentary on this offer, and, with her finger
on her nose, departed.

Steerforth laughed to that degree, that it was impossible
for me to help laughing too ; though I am not sure I should
have done so, but for this inducement. When we had had
our laugh quite out, which was after some time, he told me that
Miss Mowcher had quite an extensive connexion, and made
herself useful to a variety of people in a variety of ways.
Some people trifled with her as a mere oddity, he said; but
she was as shrewdly and sharply observant as any one he
knew, and as long-headed as she was short-armed. He told
me that what she had said of being here, and there, and every-
where, was true enough ; for she made little darts into the
provinces, and seemed to pick up customers everywhere, and
to know everybody. I asked him what her disposition was :

314 David Copperfield

whether it was at all mischievous, and if her sympathies were
generally on the right side of things : but, not succeeding in
attracting his attention to these questions after two or three
attempts, I forbore or forgot to repeat them. He told me
instead, with much rapidity, a good deal about her skill, and
her profits; and about her being a scientific cupper, if I
should ever have occasion for her service in that capacity.

She was the principal theme of our conversation during
the evening: and when we parted for the night Steerforth
called after me over the banisters, "Bob swore!" as I went
down-stairs.

I was surprised, when I came to Mr. Barkis's house, to find
Ham walking up and down in front of it, and still more
surprised to learn from him that little Em'ly was inside. I
naturally inquired why he was not there too, instead of pacing
the streets by himself?

" Why, you see, Mas'r Davy," he rejoined, in a hesitating
manner, " Em'ly, she's talking to some 'un in here."

" I should have thought," said I smihng, " that that was a
reason for your being in here too, Ham."

" Well, Mas'r Davy, in a general way, so 't would be," he
returned ; " but look'ee here, Mas'r Davy," lowering his voice,
and speaking very gravely. "It's a young woman, sir — a
young woman, that Em'ly knowed once, and doen't ought to
know no more."

When I heard these words, a light began to fall upon the
figure I had seen following them, some hours ago.

"It's a poor wurem, Mas'r Davy," said Ham, "as is trod
under foot by all the town. Up street and down street. The
mowld o' the churchyard don't hold any that the folk shrink
away from, more."

" Did I see her to-night, Ham, on the sands, after we met
you?"

"Keeping us in sight?" said Ham. "It's like you did,
Mas'r Davy. Not that I know'd then, she was theer, sir, but
along of her creeping soon arterwards under Em'ly's little
winder, when she see the light come, and whisp'ring ' Em'ly,
Em'ly, for Christ's sake, have a woman's heart towards me. I
was once like you ! ' Those was solemn words, Mas'r Davy,
fur to hear ! "

" They were indeed. Ham. What did Em'ly do ? "

"Says Em'ly, 'Martha, is it you? Oh, Martha, can it be
you ? ' — for they had sat at work together, many a day, at Mr.
Omer's."

David Copperfield 315

" I recollect her now ! " cried I, recalling one of the two
girls I had seen when I first went there. "I recollect her
quite well ! "

"Martha Endell," said Ham. "Two or three year older
than Em'ly, but was at the school with her."

"I never heard her name," said I. "I didn't mean to
interrupt you."

" For the matter o' that, Mas'r Davy," replied Ham, " all's
told a'rnost in them words, ' Em'ly, Em'ly, for Christ's sake,
have a woman's heart towards me. I was once like you ! '
She wanted to speak to Em'ly. Em'ly couldn't speak to her
theer. fur her loving uncle was come home, and he wouldn't —
no, Mas'r Davy," said Ham, with great earnestness, "he
couldn't, kind-natur'd, tender-hearted as he is, see them two
together, side by side, for all the treasures that's wrecked in
the sea."

I felt how true this was. I knew it, on the instant, quite as
well as Ham.

"So Em1y writes in pencil on a bit of paper," he pursued,
"and gives it to her out o' winder to bring here. 'Show that,'
she says, * to my aunt, Mrs. Barkis, and she'll set you down by
her fire, for the love of me, till uncle is gone out, and I can
come.' By-and-by she tells me what 1 tell you, Mas'r Davy,
and asks me to bring her. What can I do? She doen't
ought to know any such, but I can't deny her, when the tears
is on her face."

He put his hand into the breast of his shaggy jacket, and
took out with great care a pretty little purse.

" And if I could deny her when the tears was on her face,
Mas'r Davy," said Ham, tenderly adjusting it on the rough
palm of his hand, " how could I deny her when she give me
this to carry for her — knowing what she brought it for ? Such
a toy as it is ! " said Ham, thoughtfully looking on it " With
such a little money in it, Em'ly, my dear."

I shook him warmly by the hand when he had put it away
again — for that was more satisfactory to me than saying any-
thing— and we walked up and down, for a minute or two, in
silence. The door opened then, and Peggotty appeared,
beckoning to Ham to come in. I would have kept away,
but she came after me, entreating me to come in too. Even
then, I would have avoided the room where they all were, but
for its being the neat-tiled kitchen I have mentioned more
than once. The door opening immediately into it, I found
myself among them, before I considered whither I was going

316 David Copperfield

The girl — the same I had seen upon the sands — was near
the fire. She was sitting on the ground, with her head and
one arm lying on a chair. I fancied, from the disposition of
her figure, that Em'ly had but newly risen from the chair,
and that the forlorn head might perhaps have been lying on
her lap. I saw but little of the girl's face, over which her hair
fell loose and scattered, as if she had been disordering it with
her own hands ; but I saw that she was young, and of a fair
complexion. Peggotty had been crying. So had little Em'ly.
Not a word was spoken when we first went in ; and the Dutch
clock by the dresser seemed, in the silence, to tick twice as
loud as usual.

Em'ly spoke first.

"Martha wants," she said to Ham, "to go to London."

" Why to London ? " returned Ham.

He stood between them, looking on the prostrate girl with
a mixture of compassion for her, and of jealousy of her holding
any companionship with her whom he loved so well, which I
have always remembered distinctly. They both spoke as if
she were ill ; in a soft, suppressed tone that was plainly heard,
although it hardly rose above a whisper.

" Better there than here," said a third voice aloud — Martha's,
though she did not move. " No one knows me there. Every-
body knows me here."

" What will she do there ? " inquired Ham.

She lifted up her head, and looked darkly round at him for
a moment ; then laid it down again, and curved her right arm
about her neck, as a woman in a fever, or in an agony of pain
from a shot, might twist herself.

"She will try to do well," said little Em'ly. "You don't
know what she has said to us. Does he — do they — aunt ? "

Peggotty shook her head compassionately.

"I'll try," said Martha, "if you'll help me away. I never
can do worse than I have done here. I may do better. Oh ! "
with a dreadful shiver, " take me out of these streets, where the
whole town knows me from a child ! "

As Em'ly held out her hand to Ham, I saw him put in it a
little canvas bag. She took it, as if she thought it were her
purse, and made a step or two forward ; but finding her
mistake, came back to where he had retired near me, and
showed it to him.

" It's all yourn, Em'ly," I could hear him say. " I haven't
nowt in all the wureld that ain't yourn, my dear. It ain't of no
delight to me, except for you ! "

David Copperfield 317

The tears rose freshly in her eyes, but she turned away and
went to Martha. What she gave her, I don't know. I saw
her stooping over her, and putting money in her bosom. She
whispered something, as she asked was that enough ? " More
than enough," the other said, and took her hand and
kissed it.

Then Martha arose, and gathering her shawl about her,
covering her face with it, and weeping aloud, went slowly to
the door. She stopped a moment before going out, as if she
would have uttered something or turned back ; but no word
passed her lips. Making the sam« low, dreary, wretched
moaning in her shawl, she went away.

As the door closed, little Em'ly looked at us three in a
hurried manner, and then hid her face in her hands, and fell
to sobbing.

" Doen't Em'ly ! " said Ham, tapping her gently on the
shoulder. " Doen't, my dear 1 You doen't ought to cry so,
pretty ! "

" Oh, Ham ! " she exclaimed, still weeping pitifully, " I am
not so good a girl as I ought to be ! I know I have not the
thankful heart, sometimes, I ought to have ! "

" Yes, yes, you have, I'm sure," said Ham.

" No ! no ! no ! " cried little Em'ly, sobbing, and shaking her
head. " I am not as good a girl as I ought to be. Not near !
not near ! "

And still she cried, as if her heart would break.

" I try your love too much. I know I do ! " she sobbed.
" I'm often cross to you, and changeable with you, when I
ought to be far different. You are never so to me. Why am
I ever so to you, when I should think of nothing but how to
be grateful, and to make you happy ! "

"You always make me so," said Ham, "my dear! I am
happy in the sight of you. I am happy, all day long, in the
thoughts of you."

" Ah ! that's not enough 1 " she cried. " That is because
you are good ; not because I am ! Oh, my dear, it might have
been a better fortune for you, if you had been fond of some
one else — of some one steadier and much worthier than me,
who was all bound up in you, and never vain and changeable
Ukeme!"

"Poor little tender-heart," said Ham, in a low voice.
" Martha has overset her, altogether."

" Please, aunt," sobbed Em'ly, " come here, and let me lay
my head upon you. Oh, I am very miserable to-night, aunt I

3i8 David Copperfield

Oh, I am not as good a girl as I ought to be. I am not,
I know ! "

Peggotty had hastened to the chair before the fire. Emly,
with her arms around her neck, kneeled by her, looking up
most earnestly into her face.

" Oh, pray, aunt, try to help me ! Ham, dear, try to help
me ! Mr. David, for the sake of old times, do, please, try to
help me ! I want to be a better girl than I am. I want to
feel a hundred times more thankful than I do. I want to feel
more, what a blessed thing it is to be the wife of a good man,
and to lead a peaceful life. Oh me, oh me ! Oh my heart,
my heart ! "

She dropped her face on my old nurse's breast, and, ceasing
this supplication, which in its agony and grief was half a
woman's, half a child's, as all her manner was (being, in that,
more natural, and better suited to her beauty, as I thought,
than any other manner could have been), wept silently, while
my old nurse hushed her like an infant.

She got calmer by degrees, and then we soothed her ; now
talking encouragingly, and now jesting a little with her, until
she began to raise her head and speak to us. So we got on,
until she was able to smile, and then to laugh, and then to sit
up, half ashamed ; while Peggotty recalled her stray ringlets,
dried her eyes, and made her neat again, lest her uncle should
wonder, when she got home, why his darling had been crying.

I saw her do, that night, what I had never seen her do before.
I saw her innocently kiss her chosen husband on the cheek,
and creep close to his bluff form as if it were her best support.
-4 When they went away together, in the waning moonlight, and
I looked after them, comparing their departure in my mind
with Martha's, I saw that she held his arm with both her hands,
and still kept close to him.

CHAPTER XXIII

I CORROBORATE MR. DICK, AND CHOOSE A PROFESSION

When I awoke in the morning I thought very much of little
Em'ly, and her emotion last night, after Martha had left. I
felt as if I had come into the knowledge of those domestic
weaknesses and tendernesses in a sacred confidence, and that
to disclose them, even to Steerforth, would be wrong. I had

David Copperfield 319

no gentler feeling towards any one than towards the pretty
creature who had been my playmate, and whom I have always
been persuaded, and shall always be persuaded, to my dying
day, I then devotedly loved. The repetition to any ears — even
to Steerforth's— of what she had been unable to repress when
her heart lay open to me by an accident, I felt would be a
rough deed, unworthy of myself, unworthy of the light of our
pure childhood, which I always saw encircling her head. I
made a resolution, therefore, to keep it in my own breast; and
there it gave her image a new grace.

While we were at breakfast, a letter was delivered to me from
my aunt. As it contained matter on which I thought Steer-
forth could advise me as well as any one, and on which I knew
I should be delighted to consult him, I resolved to make it a
subject of discussion on our journey home. For the present
we had enough to do, in taking leave of all our friends. Mr.
Barkis was far from being the last among them, in his regret at
our departure ; and I believe would even have opened the box
again, and sacrificed another guinea, if it would have kept U8
eight-and-forty hours in Yarmouth. Peggotty and all her
family were full of grief at our going. The whole house of
Omer and Joram turned out to bid us good-bye ; and there
were so many seafaring volunteers in attendance on Steerforth,
when our portmanteaus went to the coach, that if we had had
the baggage of a regiment with us, we should hardly have
wanted porters to ca/ry it. In a word, we departed to the
regret and admiration of all concerned, and left a great many
people very sorry behind us.

" Do you stay long here, Littimer ? " said I, as he stood
waiting to see the ccjach start.

"No, sir," he replied; "probably not very long, sir."

" He can hardly say, just now," observed Steerforth, carelessly.
" Pe knows what he has to do, and he'll do it."

"That I am sure he will," said I.

Littimer touched his hat in acknowledgment of my good
opinion, and I felt about eight years old. He touched it once
more, wishing us a good journey ; and we left him standing
on the pavement, as respectable a mystery as any pyramid in
Egypt.

For fome little time we held no conversation, Steerforth
being unusually silent, and I being sufficiently engaged in
wondering, within myself, when I should see the old places
again, and what new changes might happen to me or them
in the meanwhile. At length Steerforth, becoming gay and

320 David Copperfield

talkative in a moment, as he could become anything he liked
at any moment, pulled me by the arm :

"Find a voice, David. What about that letter you were
speaking of at breakfast?"

" Oh ! " said I, taking it out of my pocket. " It's from my
aunt."

"And what does she say, requiring consideration?"

" Why, she reminds me, Steerforth," said I, " that I came
out on this expedition to look about me, and to think a little."

"Which, of course, you have done?"

" Indeed I can't say I have, particularly. To tell you the
truth, I am afraid I had forgotten it."

" Well ! look about you now, and make up for your neg-
ligence," said Steerforth. " Look to the right, and you'll see
a flat country, with a good deal of marsh in it ; look to the left,
and you'll see the same. Look to the front, and you'll find no
difference ; look to the rear, and there it is still."

I laughed, and replied that I saw no suitable profession in
the whole prospect ; which was perhaps to be attributed to its
flatness,

" What says our aunt on the subject ? " inquired Steerforth,
glancing at the letter in my hand. " Does she suggest anything ? "

" Why, yes," said I. " She asks me, here, if I think I should
like to be a proctor ? What do you think of it ? "

" Well, I don't know, " replied Steerforth, coolly. " You may
as well do that as anything else, I suppose ? "

I could not help laughing again, at his b?.i^ncing all callings
and professions so equally ; and I told him so.

" What is a proctor, Steerforth ? " said I.

" Why, he is a sort of monkish attorney," replied Steerforth.
" He is, to some faded courts held in Doctors' Commons — a lazy
old nook near St. Paul's Churchyard — what solicitors are to the
courts of law and equity. He is a functionary whose existence,
in the natural course of things, would have terminated about
two hundred years ago. I can tell you best what he is, by
telling you what Doctors' Commons is. It's a little out-of-the-
way place, where they administer what is called ecclesiastical
law, and play all kinds of tricks with obsolete old monsters of
acts of Parliament, which three-fourths of the world know
nothing about, and the other fourth supposes to have been dug
up, in a fossil state, in the days of the Edwards. It's a place
that has an ancient monopoly in suits about people's wills and
people's marriages, and disputes amonf ships and boats."

" Nonsense, Steerforth ! " I exclaim?.d. " You don't mean

David Copperfield 321

to say that there is any affinity between nautical matters and
ecclesiastical matters ? "

" I don't, indeed, my dear boy," he returned ; " but I mean
to say that they are managed and decided by the same set of
people, down in that same Doctors' Commons. You shall go
there one day, and find them blundering through half the
nautical terms in Young's Dictionary, apropos of the ' Nancy '
having run down the 'Sarah Jane,' or Mr. Peggotty and the
Yarmouth boatmen having put off in a gale of wind with an
anchor and cable to the ' Nelson ' Indiaman in distress ; and
you shall go there another day, and find them deep in the
evidence, pro and con., respecting a clergyman who has mis-
behaved himself; and you shall find the judge in the nautical
case, the advocate in the clergyman's case, or contrariwise.
They are like actors : now a man's a judge, and now he is not
a judge; now he's one thing, now he's another; now he's
something else, change and change about ; but it's always a
very pleasant, profitable little affair of private theatricals,
presented to an uncommonly select audience."

" But advocates and proctors are not one and the same ? "
said I, a little puzzled. "Are they?"

"No," returned Steerforth, "the advocates are civilians —
men who have taken a doctor's degree at college — which is the
first reason of my knowing anything about it. The proctors
employ the advocates. Both get very comfortable fees, and
altogether they make a mighty snug litde party. On the whole,
I would recommend you to take to Doctors' Commons kindly,
David. They plume themselves on their gentility there, I can
tell you, if that's any satisfaction,"

I made allowance for Steerforth's light way of treating the
subject, and, considering it with reference to the staid air of
gravity and antiquity which I associated with that "lazy old
nook near St. Paul's Churchyard," did not feel indisposed
towards my aunt's suggestion ; which she left to my free
decision, making no scruple of telling me that it had occurred
to her, on her lately visiting her own proctor in Doctors'
Commons for the purpose of settling her will in my favour.

" That's a laudable proceeding on the part of our aunt, at all
events," said Steerforth, when I mentioned it; "and one
deserving -of all encouragement. Daisy, my advice is that you
take kindly to Doctors' Commons."

I quite made up my mind to do so. I then told Steerforth
that my aunt was in town awaiting me (as I found from her
letter), and that she had taken lodgings for a week at a kind of

322 David Copperfield

private hotel in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where there was a stone
staircase, and a convenient door in the roof; my aunt being
firmly persuaded that every house in London was going to be
burnt down every night.

We achieved the rest of our journey pleasantly, sometimes
recurring to Doctors' Commons, and anticipating the distant
days when I should be a proctor there, which Steerforth pictured
in a variety of humorous and whimsical lights, that made us
both merry. When we came to our journey's end, he went
home, engaging to call upon me next day but one ; and I drove
to Lincoln's Inn Fields, where I found my aunt up, and waiting
supper.

If I had been round the world since we parted, we could
hardly have been better pleased to meet again. My aunt cried
outright as she embraced me ; and said, pretending to laugh,
that if my poor mother had been alive, that silly little creature
would have shed tears, she had no doubt.

" So you have left Mr. Dick behind, aunt ? " said I. " I am
sorry for that. Ah, Janet, how do you do ? "

As Janet curtsied, hoping I was well, I observed my aunt's
visage lengthen very much.

*' I am sorry for it, too," said my aunt, rubbing her nose. " I
have had no peace of mind. Trot, since I have been here."

Before I could ask why, she told me.

" I am convinced," said my aunt, laying her hand with melan-
choly firmness on the table, "that Dick's character is not a
character to keep the donkeys off. I am confident he wants
strength of purpose. I ought to have left Janet at home,
instead, and then my mind might perhaps have been at ease.
If ever there was a donkey trespassing on my green," said my
aunt, with emphasis, "there was one this afternoon at four
o'clock. A cold feeling came over me from head to foot, and
I know it was a donkey ! "

I tried to comfort her on this point, but she rejected
consolation.

" It was a donkey," said my aunt ; " and it was the one with
the stumpy tail which that Murdering sister of a woman rode,
when she came to my house." This had been, ever since, the
only name my aunt knew for Miss Murdstone. " If there is
any Donkey in Dover, whose audacity it is harder to me to
bear than another's, that," said my aunt, striking the table, " is
the animal ! "

Janet ventured to suggest that my aunt might be disturbing
herself unnecessarily, and that she believed the donkey in

David Copperfield 323

question was then engaged in the sand-and-gravel line of
business, and was not available for purposes of trespass.
But my aunt wouldn't hear of it.

Supper was comfortably served and hot, though my aunt's
rooms were very high up — whether that she might have more
stone stairs for her money, or might be nearer to the door in
the roof, I don't know — and consisted of a roast fowl, a steak,
and some vegetables, to all of which I did ample justice, and
which were all excellent. But my aunt had her own ideas
concerning London provision, and ate but little.

" I suppose this unfortunate fowl was bom and brought up
in a cellar," said my aunt, "and never took the air except on a
hackney coach-stand. I hope the steak may be beef, but I don't
believe it. Nothing's genuine in the place, in my opinion, but
the dirt."

"Don't you think the fowl may have come out of the
country, aunt?" I hinted.

"Certainly not," returned my aunt. "It would be no
pleasure to a London tradesman to sell anything which was
what he pretended it was."

I did not venture to controvert this opinion, but I made
a good supper, which it greatly satisfied her to see me do.
When the table was cleared, Janet assisted her to arrange
her hair, to put on her nightcap, which was of a smarter
construction than usual ("in case of fire," my aunt said), and
to fold her gown back over her knees, these being her usual
preparations for warming herself before going to bed. I then
made her, according to certain established regulations from
which no deviation, however slight, could ever be permitted,
a glass of hot white wine and water, and a slice of toast cut
into long thin strips. With these accompaniments we were
left alone to finish the evening, my aunt sitting opposite to me
drinking her wine and water ; soaking her strips of toast in it,
one by one, before eating them ; and looking benignantly on
me, from among the borders of her nightcap.

"Well, Trot," she began, "what do you think of the proctor
plan ? Or have you not begun to think about it yet ? "

" I have thought a good deal about it, my dear aunt, and I
have talked a good deal about it with Steerforth. I like it very
much indeed. I like it exceedingly."

" Come," said my aunt. " That's cheering."

" I have only one difficulty, aunt."

" Say what it is, Trot," she returned.

"Why, I want to ask, aunt, as this seems, from what I

324 David Copperfield

understand, to be a limited profession, whether my entrance
into it would not be very expensive?"

"It will cost," returned my aunt, "to article you, just a
thousand pounds."

"Now, my dear aunt," said I, drawing my chair nearer, "I
am uneasy in my mind about that. It's a large sum of money.
You have expended a great deal on my education, and have
always been as liberal to me in all things as it was possible to
be. You have been the soul of generosity. Surely there are
some ways in which I might begin life with hardly any outlay,
and yet begin with a good hope of getting on by resolution and
exertion. Are you sure that it would not be better to try that
course ? Are you certain that you can afford to part with so
much money, and that it is right that it should be so expended ?
I only ask you, my second mother, to consider. Are you
certain ? "

My aunt finished eating the piece of toast on which she was
then engaged, looking me full in the face all the while ; and
then setting her glass on the chimney-piece, and folding her
hands upon her folded skirts, replied as follows :

" Trot, my child, if I have any object in life, it is to provide
for your being a good, a sensible, and a happy man. I am
bent upon it — so is Dick. I should like some people that I
know to hear Dick's conversation on the subject. Its sagacity
is wonderful. But no one knows the resources of that man's
intellect except myself ! "

She stopped for a moment to take my hand between hers,
and went on :

" It's in vain. Trot, to recall the past, unless it works some
influence upon the present. Perhaps I might have been better
friends with your poor father. Perhaps I might have been
better friends with that poor child your mother, even after your
sister Betsey Trotwood disappointed me. When you came to
me, a little runaway boy, all dusty and way-worn, perhaps I
thought so. From that time until now. Trot, you have ever
been a credit to me and a pride and a pleasure. I have no
other claim upon my means; at least" — here to my surprise
she hesitated, and was confused — "no, I have no other claim
upon my means — and you are my adopted child. Only be a
loving child to me in my age, and bear with my whims and
fancies ; and you will do more for an old woman whose prime
of life was not so happy or conciliating as it might have been,
than ever that old woman did for you."

It was the first time I had heard my aunt refer to her past

David Copperfield 325

history. There was a magnanimity in her quiet way of doing
so, and of dismissing it, which would have exalted her in my
respect and affection, if anything could.

" All is agreed and understood between us now. Trot," said
my aunt, " and we need talk of this no more. Give me a kiss,
and we'll go to the Commons after breakfast to-morrow."

We had a long chat by the fire before we went to bed. I
slept in a room on the same floor with my aunt's, and was a
little disturbed in the course of the night by her knocking at
my door as often as she was agitated by a distant sound of
hackney-coaches or market-carts, and inquiring " if I heard the
engines ? " But towards morning she slept better, and suffered
me to do so too.

At about mid-day, we set out for the office of Messrs.
Spenlow and Jorkins, in Doctors' Commons. My aunt, who
had this other general opinion in reference to London, that
every man she saw was a pickpocket, gave me her purse to
carry for her, which had ten guineas in it and some silver.

We made a pause at the toy-shop in Fleet Street, to see the
giants of Saint Dunstan's strike upon the bells — we had timed
our going, so as to catch them at it, at twelve o'clock — and
then went on towards Ludgate Hill and St. Paul's Churchyard.
We were crossing to the former place, when I found that my
aunt greatly accelerated her speed, and looked frightened. I
observed, at the same time, that a lowering ill-dressed man
who had stopped and stared at us in passing, a little before,
was coming so close after us as to brush against her.

" Trot ! My dear Trot ! " cried my aunt, in a terrified
whisper, and pressing my arm. "I don't know what I am
to do."

"Don't be alarmed," said I. "There's nothing to be afraid
of. Step into a shop, and I'll soon get rid of this fellow."

" No, no, child ! " she returned. " Don't speak to him for
the world. I entreat, I order you ! "

" Good Heaven, aunt ! " said I. " He is nothing but a
sturdy beggar."

*' You don't know what he is ! " replied my aunt. " You
don't know who he is ! You don't know what you say ! "

We had stopped in an empty doorway, while this was
passing, and he had stopped too.

" Don't look at him 1 " said my aunt, as I turned my head
indignantly, " but get me a coach, my dear, and wait for me in
St. Paul's Churchyard."

" Wait for you ? " I repeated.

326 David Copperfield

"Yes," rejoined my aunt. "I must go alone. I must go
with him."

" With him, aunt ? This man ? "

" I am in my senses," she replied, " and I tell you I must.
Get me a coach ! "

However much astonished I might be, I was sensible that
I had no right to refuse compliance with such a peremptory
command. I hurried away a few paces, and called a hackney
chariot which was passing empty. Almost before I could
let down the steps, my aunt sprang in, I don't know how, and
the man followed. She waved her hand to me to go away, so
earnestly, that, all confounded as I was, I turned from them at
once. In doing so, I heard her say to the coachman, " Drive
anywhere ! Drive straight on ! " and presently the chariot
passed me, going up the hill.

What Mr. Dick had told me, and what I had supposed to
be a delusion of his, now came into my mind. I could not
doubt that this person was the person of whom he had made
such mysterious mention, though what the nature of his hold
upon my aunt could possibly be, I was quite unable to imagine.
After half an hour's cooling in the churchyard, I saw the
chariot coming back. The driver stopped beside me, and my
aunt was sitting in it alone.

She had not yet sufficiently recovered from her agitation to
be quite prepared for the visit we had to make. She desired
me to get into the chariot, and to tell the coachman to drive
slowly up and down a little while. She said no more, except,
" My dear child, never ask me what it was, and don't refer to
it," until she had perfectly regained her composure, when she
told me she was quite herself now, and we might get out. On
her giving me her purse, to pay the driver, I found that all the
guineas were gone, and only the loose silver remained.

Doctors' Commons was approached by a little low archway.
Before we had taken many paces down the street beyond it,
the noise of the city seemed to melt, as if by magic, into a
softened distance. A few dull courts and narrow ways brought
us to the sky-lighted offices of Spenlow and Jorkins; in the
vestibule of which temple, accessible to pilgrims without the
ceremony of knocking, three or four clerks were at work as
copyists. One of these, a little dry man, sitting by himself,
who wore a stiff brown wig that looked as if it were made of
gingerbread, rose to receive my aunt, and show us into Mr.
Spenlow's room.

" Mr. Spenlow's in Court, ma'am," said the dry man ; " it's

David Copperfield 327

an Arches day; but it's close by, and I'll send for him
directly."

As we were left to look about us while Mr. Spenlow was
fetched, I availed myself of the opportunity. The furniture
of the room was old-fashioned and dusty ; and the green baize
on the top of the writing-table had lost all its colour, and was
as withered and pale as an old pauper. There were a great
many bundles of papers on it, some indorsed as Allegations,
and some (to my surprise) as Libels, and some as being in the
Consistory Court, and some in the Arches Court, and some in
the Prerogative Court, and some in the Admiralty Court, and
some in the Delegates' Court ; giving me occasion to wonder
much, how many Courts there might be in the gross, and how
long it would take to understand them all. Besides these,
there were sundry immense manuscript Books of Evidence
taken on affidavit, strongly bound, and tied together in massive
sets, a set to each cause, as if every cause were a history in ten
or twenty volumes. All this looked tolerably expensive, I
thought, and gave me an agreeable notion of a proctor's busi-
ness. I was casting my eyes with increasing complacency over
these and many similar objects, when hasty footsteps were
heard in the room outside, and Mr. Spenlow, in a black gown
trimmed with white fur, came hurrying in, taking off his hat as
he came.

He was a little light-haired gentleman, with undeniable boots,
and the stiffest of white cravats and shirt-collars. He was
buttoned up mighty trim and tight, and must have taken a
great deal of pains with his whiskers, which were accurately
curled. His gold watch-chain was so massive, that a fancy
came across me, that he ought to have a sinewy golden arm,
to draw it out with, like those which are put up over the gold-
beaters' shops. He was got up with such care, and was so
stiff, that he could hardly bend himself; being obliged, wheti
he glanced at some papers on his desk, after sitting down in his
chair, to move his whole body, from the bottom of his spine,
like Punch.

I had previously been presented by my aunt, and had been
courteously received. He now said :

" And so, Mr. Copperfield, you think of entering into our
profession ? I casually mentioned to Miss Trotwood, when I
had the pleasure of an interview with her the other day," —
with another inclination of his body — Punch again — "that
there was a vacancy here. Miss Trotwood was good enough
to mention that she had a nephew who was her peculiar care,

328 David Copperfield

and for whom she was seeking to provide genteelly in life.
That nephew, I believe, I have now the pleasure of" — Punch
again.

I bowed my acknowledgments, and said, my aunt had
mentioned to me that there was that opening, and that I
believed I should like it very much. That I was strongly
inclined to like it, and had taken immediately to the proposal.
That I could not absolutely pledge myself to like it, until I
knew something more about it. That although it was little
else than a matter of form, I presumed I should have an
opportunity of trying how I liked it, before I bound myself to
it irrevocably.

"Oh surely! surely!" said Mr. Spenlow. "We always, in
this house, propose a month — an initiatory month. I should
be happy, myself, to propose two months — three — an indefinite
period, in fact — but I have a partner. Mr. Jorkins."

"And the premium, sir," I returned, "is a thousand
poupds ? "

" And the premium, Stamp included, is a thousand pounds,"
said Mr. Spenlow. " As I have mentioned to Miss Trotwood,
I am actuated by no mercenary considerations ; few men are
less so, I believe ; but Mr. Jorkins has his opinions on these
subjects, and I am bound to respect Mr. Jorkins's opinions.
Mr. Jorkins thinks a thousand pounds too little, in short"

" I suppose, sir," said I, still desiring to spare my aunt, "that
it is not the custom here, if an articled clerk were particularly
useful, and made himself a perfect master of his profession — "
I could not help blushing, this looked so like praising myself —
" I suppose it is not the custom, in the later years of his time,
to allow him any "

Mr. Spenlow, by a great effort, just lifted his head far enough
out of his cravat, to shake it, and answered, anticipating the
word " salary."

" No. I will not say what consideration I might give to that
point myself, Mr. Copperfield, if I were unfettered. Mr. Jorkins
is immovable."

I was quite dismayed by the idea of this terrible Jorkins.
But I found out afterwards that he was a mild man of a heavy
temperament, whose place in the business was to keep himself
in the background, and be constantly exhibited by name as the
most obdurate and ruthless of men. If a clerk wanted his
salary raised, Mr. Jorkins wouldn't listen to such a proposition.
If a client were slow to settle his bill of costs, Mr. Jorkins was
resolved to have it paid; and however painful these things

David Copperfield 329

might be (and always were) to the feelings of Mr. Spenlow, Mr.
Jorkins would have his bond. The heart and hand of the good
angel Spenlow would have been always open, but for the
restraining demon Jorkins. As I have grown older, I think
I have had experience of some other houses doing business on
the principle of Spenlow and Jorkins !

It was settled that I should begin my month's probation as
soon as I pleased, and that my aunt need neither remain in
town nor return at its expiration, as the articles of agreement
of which I was to be the subject, could easily be sent to her at
home for her signature. When we had got so far, Mr. Spenlow
offered to take me into Court then and there, and show me
what sort of place it was. As I was willing enough to know,
we went out with this object, leaving my aunt behind; who
would trust herself, she said, in no such place, and who, I
think, regarded all Courts of Law as a sort of powder-mills that
might blow up at any time.

Mr. Spenlow conducted me through a paved courtyard formed
of grave brick houses, which I inferred, from the Doctors' names
upon the doors, to be the official abiding-places of the learned
advocates of whom Steerforth had told me ; and into a large
dull room, not unlike a chapel to my thinking, on the left hand.
The upper part of this room was fenced off from the rest ; and
there, on the two sides of a raised platform of the horse-shoe
form, sitting on easy old-fashioned dining-room chairs, were
sundry gentlemen in red gowns and grey wigs, whom I found
to be the Doctors aforesaid. Blinking over a little desk like a
pulpit-desk, in the curve of the horse-shoe, was an old gentle-
man, whom, if I had seen him in an aviary, I should certainly
have taken for an owl, but who, I learned, was the presiding
judge. In the space within the horse-shoe, lower than these,
that is to say on about the level of the floor, were sundry other
gentlemen of Mr. Spenlow's rank, and dressed like him in black
gowns with white fur upon them, sitting at a long green table.
Their cravats were in general stiff, I thought, and their looks
haughty ; but in this last respect, I presently conceived I had done
them an injustice, for when two or three of them had to rise and
answer a question of the presiding dignitary, I never saw any-
thing more sheepish. The public, represented by a boy with
a comforter, and a shabby-genteel man secretly eating crumbs
out of his coat pockets, was warming itself at a stove in the
centre of the Court. The languid stillness of the place was
only broken by the chirping of this fire and by the voice of
one of the Doctors, who was wandering slowly through a

330 David Copperfield

perfect library of evidence, and stopping to put up, from time
to time, at little roadside inns of argument on the journey.
Altogether, I have never, on any occasion, made one at such
a cosey, dosey, old-fashioned, time-forgotten, sleepy-headed
little family-party in all my life ; and I felt it would be quite a
soothing opiate to belong to it in any character — except perhaps
as a suitor.

Very well satisfied with the dreamy nature of this retreat, I
informed Mr. Spenlow that I had seen enough for that time,
and we rejoined my aunt ; in company with whom I presently
departed from the Commons, feeling very young when I went
out of Spenlow and Jorkins's, on account of the clerks poking
one another with their pens to point me out.

We arrived at Lincoln's Inn Fields without any new adventures,
except encountering an unlucky donkey in a costermonger's
cart, who suggested painful associations to my aunt. We had
another long talk about my plans, when we were safely
housed ; and as I knew she was anxious to get home, and,
between fire, food, and pickpockets, could never be considered
at her ease for half-an-hour in London, I urged her not to be
uncomfortable on my account, but to leave me to take care of
myself.

" I have not been here a week to-morrow, without considering
that too, my dear," she returned. " There is a furnished little
set of chambers to be let in the Adelphi, Trot, which ought to
suit you to a marvel."

With this brief introduction, she produced from her pocket
an advertisement, carefully cut out of a newspaper, setting forth
that in Buckingham Street in the Adelphi there was to be let
furnished, with a view of the river, a singularly desirable and
compact set of chambers, forming a genteel residence for a
young gentleman, a member of one of the Inns of Court, or
otherwise, with immediate possession. Terms moderate, and
could be taken for a month only, if required.

" Why, this is the very thing, aunt ! " said I, flushed with the
possible dignity of living in chambers.

" Then come," replied my aunt, immediately resuming the
bonnet she had a minute before laid aside. "We'll go and
look at 'em."

Away we went. The advertisement directed us to apply
to Mrs. Crupp on the premises, and we rung the area bell,
which we supposed to communicate with Mrs. Crupp. It was
not until we had rung three or four times that we could prevail
on Mrs. Crupp to communicate with us, but at last she appeared,

David Copperfield 331

being a stout lady with a flounce of flannel petticoat below a
nankeen gown.

'* Let us see these chambers of yours, if you please, ma'am,"
said my aunt.

"For this gentleman?" said Mrs. Crupp, feeling in her
pocket for her keys.

" Yes, for my nephew," said my aunt.

" And a sweet set they is for sich ! " said Mrs. Crupp.

So we went up-stairs.

They were on the top of the house — a great point with my
aunt, being near the fire-escape — and consisted of a little
half-blind entry where you could see hardly anything, a little
stone-blind pantry where you could see nothing at all, a sitting-
room, and a bedroom. The furniture was rather faded, but
quite good enough for me ; and, sure enough, the river was
outside the windows.

As I was delighted with the place, my aunt and Mrs. Crupp
withdrew into the pantry to discuss the terms, while I remained
on the sitting-room sofa, hardly daring to think it possible that I
could be destined to live in such a noble residence. After
a single combat of some duration they returned, and I saw, to
my joy, both in Mrs. Crupp's countenance and in my aunt's,
that the deed was done.

" Is it the last occupant's furniture ? " inquired my aunt.

" Yes, it is, ma'am," said Mrs. Crupp.

" What's become of him ? " asked my aunt.

Mrs. Crupp was taken with a troublesome cough, in the
midst of which she articulated with much difficulty. " He was
took ill here, ma'am, and — ugh I ugh ! ugh ! dear me 1 — and
he died ! "

" Hey ! What did he die of? " asked my aunt.

"Well, ma'am, he died of drink," said Mrs. Crupp, in
confidence. "And smoke."

" Smoke ? You don't mean chimneys ? " said my aunt.

" No, ma'am," returned Mrs. Crupp. " Cigars and pipes."

" Thafs not catching, Trot, at any rate," remarked my
aunt, turning to me.

" No, indeed," said I.

In short, my aunt, seeing how enraptured I was with the
premises, took them for a month, with leave to remain for
twelve months when that time was out. Mrs. Crupp was to
find linen, and to cook; every other necessary was already
provided ; and Mrs. Crupp expressly intimated that she should
always yearn towards me as a son. I was to take possession

332 David Copperfield

the day after to-morrow, and Mrs. Crupp said, thank Heaven
she had now found summun she could care for !

On our way back, my aunt informed me how she confidently
trusted that the life I was now to lead would make me firm
and self-reliant, which was all I wanted. She repeated this
several times next day, in the intervals of our arranging for the
transmission of my clothes and books from Mr. Wickfield's ;
relative to which, and to all my late holiday, I wrote a long
letter to Agnes, of which my aunt took charge, as she was
to leave on the succeeding day. Not to lengthen these par-
ticulars, I need only add, that she made a handsome provision
for all my possible wants during my month of trial ; that
Steerforth, to my great disappointment and hers too, did not
make his appearance before she went away ; that I saw her
safely seated in the Dover coach, exulting in the coming
discomfiture of the vagrant donkeys, with Janet at her side ;
and that when the coach was gone, I turned my face to the
Adelphi, pondering on the old days when I used to roam about
its subterranean arches, and on the happy changes which had
brought me to the surface.

CHAPTER XXIV

MY FIRST DISSIPATION

It was a wonderfully fine thing to have that lofty castle to
myself, and to feel, when I shut my outer door, like Robinson
Crusoe, when he had got into his fortification, and pulled
his ladder up after him. It was a wonderfully fine thing to
walk about town with the key of my house in my pocket, and to
know that I could ask any fellow to come home, and make
quite sure of its being inconvenient to nobody, if it were not so
to me. It was a wonderfully fine thing to let myself in and out,
and to come up and go without a word to any one, and to ring
Mrs. Crupp up, gasping, from the depths of the earth, when I
wanted her — and when she was disposed to come. All this,
I say, was wonderfully fine ; but I must say, too, that there
were times when it was very dreary.

It was fine in the morning, particularly in the fine mornings.
It looked a very fresh, free life, by daylight : still fresher, and
more free, by sunlight. But as the day declined, the hfe seemed

David Copperfield 333

to go down too. I don't know how it was ; it seldom looked
well by candle-light. I wanted somebody to talk to, then. I
missed Agnes. I found a tremendous blank, in the place
of that smiling repository of my confidence. Mrs. Crupp
appeared ^ to be a long way off. I thought about my prede-
cessor, who had died of drink and smoke ; and I could have
wished he had been so good as to live, and not bother me with
his decease.

After two days and nights, I felt as if I had lived there for a
year, and yet I was not an hour older, but was quite as much
tormented by my own youthfulness as ever.

Steerforth not yet appearing, which induced me to apprehend
that he must be ill, I left the Commons early on the third day,
and walked out to Highgate. Mrs. Steerforth was very glad to
see me, and said that he had gone away with one of his Oxford
friends to see another who lived near St. Albans, but that
she expected him to return to-morrow. I was so fond of him,
that I felt quite jealous of his Oxford friends.

As she pressed me to stay to dinner, I remained, and I believe
we talked about nothing but him all day. I told her how much
the people liked him at Yarmouth, and what a delightful
companion he had been. Miss Dartle was full of hints and
mysterious questions, but took a great interest in all our pro-
ceedings there, and said, " Was it really though ? " and so forth,
so often, that she got everything out of me she wanted to know.
Her appearance was exactly what I have described it, when
I first saw her ; but the society of the two ladies was so agree-
able, and came so natural to me, that I felt myself falling
a little in love with her. I could not help thinking, several
times in the course of the evening, and particularly when I
walked home at night, what delightful company she would be
in Buckingham Street.

I was taking my coffee and roll in the morning, before going
to the Commons — and I may observe in this place that it
is surprising how much coffee Mrs. Crupp used, and how weak
it was, considering — when Steerforth himself walked in, to my
unbounded joy.

" My dear Steerforth," cried I, " I began to think I should
never see you again ! "

" I was carried off, ijby force of arms," said Steerforth, " the
very next morning after I got home. Why, Daisy, what a rare
old bachelor you are here ! "

I showed him over the establishment, not omitting the pantry,
with no little pride, and he commended it highly. " I tell

334 David Copperfield

you what, old boy," he added, " I shall make quite a town-house
of this place, unless you give me notice to quit."

This was a delightful hearing. I told him if he waited
for that, he would have to wait till doomsday.

" But you shall have some breakfast ! " said I, with^ my hand
on the bell-rope, "and Mrs. Crupp shall make you some
fresh coffee, and I'll toast you some bacon in a bachelor's
Dutch-oven that I have got here."

" No, no ! " said Steerforth. " Don't ring 1 I can't ! I am
going to breakfast with one of these fellows who is at the Piazza
Hotel, in Covent Garden."

" But you'll come back to dinner ? " said I.

"I can't, upon my life. There's nothing I should like
better, but I must remain with these two fellows. We are all
three off together to-morrow morning."

" Then bring them here to dinner," I returned. " Do you
think they would come ? "

" Oh ! they would come fast enough," said Steerforth ; " but
we should inconvenience you. You had better come and dine
with us somewhere."

I would not by any means consent to this, for it occurred to
me that I really ought to have a little house-warming, and that
there never could be a better opportunity. I had a new pride
in my rooms after his approval of them, and burned with a
desire to develop their utmost resources. I therefore made
him promise positively in the names of his two friends, and we
appointed six o'clock as the dinner-hour.

When he was gone, I rang for Mrs. Crupp, and acquainted
her with my desperate design. Mrs. Crupp said, in the first
place, of course it was well known she couldn't be expected to
wait, but she knew a handy young man, who she thought could
be prevailed upon to do it, and whose terms would be five
shillings, and what I pleased. I said, certainly we would have
him. Next, Mrs. Crupp said it was clear she couldn't be in
two places at once (which I felt to be reasonable), and that " a
young gal" stationed in the pantry with a bedroom candle,
there never to desist from washing plates, would be indispens-
able. I said, what would be the expense of this young female ?
and Mrs. Crupp said she supposed eighteen-pence would
neither make me nor break me. I said I supposed not ;
and that was settled. Then Mrs. Crupp said. Now about the
dinner.

It was a remarkable instance of want of forethought on the
part of the ironmonger who had made Mrs. Crupp's kitchen

David Copperfield 335

fireplace, that it was capable of cooking nothing but chops and
mashed potatoes. As to a fish-kittle, Mrs. Crupp said, well !
would I only come and look at the range ? She couldn't say
fairer than that. Would I come and look at it ? As I should
not have been much the wiser if I had looked at it, I declined,
and said, " Never mind fish." But Mrs. Crupp said. Don't say
that; oysters was in, why not them? So that was settled.
Mrs. Crupp then said what she would recommend would be
this. A pair of hot roast fowls — from the pastry-cook's ; a dish
of stewed beef, with vegetables — from the pastry-cook's; two
little corner things, as a raised pie and a dish of kidneys — from
the pastry-cook's ; a tart, and (if I liked) a shape of jelly —
from the pastry-cook's. This, Mrs. Crupp said, would leave
her at full liberty to concentrate her mind on the potatoes, and
to serve up the cheese and celery as she could wish to see it done.

I acted on Mrs. Crupp's opinion, and gave the order at the
pastry-cook's myself. Walking along the Strand, afterwards,
and observing a hard mottled substance in the window of a
ham and beef shop, which resembled marble, but was labelled
" Mock Turtle," I went in and bought a slab of it, which I
have since seen reason to believe would have sufl5ced for fifteen
people. This preparation, Mrs. Crupp, after some difficulty,
consented to warm up ; and it shrunk so much in a liquid state,
that we found it what Steerforth called " rather a tight fit " for
four.

These preparations happily completed, I bought a little dessert
in Covent Garden Market, and gave a rather extensive order
at a retail wine-merchant's in that vicinity. When I came home
in the afternoon, and saw the bottles drawn up in a square on
the pantry-floor, they looked so numerous (though there were
two missing, which made Mrs. Crupp very uncomfortable), that
I was absolutely frightened at them.

One of Steerforth's friends was named Grainger, and the
other Markham. They were both very gay and lively fellows ;
Grainger, something older than Steerforth ; Markham, youthful-
looking, and I should say not more than twenty. I observed
that the latter always spoke of himself indefinitely, as " a man,"
and seldom or never in the first person singular.

" A man might get on very well here, Mr. Copperfield," said
Markham — meaning himself.

" It's not a bad situation," said I, "and the rooms are really
commodious."

" I hope you have both brought appetites with you ? " said
Steerforth.

336 David Copperfield

"Upon my honour," returned Markham, "town seems to
sharpen a man's appetite. A man is hungry all day long. A
man is perpetually eating."

Being a little embarrassed at first, and feeling much too
young to preside, I made Steerforth take the head of the table
when dinner was announced, and seated myself opposite to
him. Everything was very good ; we did not spare the wine ;
and he exerted himself so brilliantly to make the thing pass off
well, that there was no pause in our festivity. I was not quite
such good company during dinner as I could have wished to
be, for my chair was opposite the door, and my attention was
distracted by observing that the handy young man went out of
the room very often, and that his shadow always presented
itself, immediately afterwards, on the wall of the entry, with a
bottle at its mouth. The " young gal " likewise occasioned me
some uneasiness: not so much by neglecting to wash the
plates, as by breaking them. For being of an inquisitive
disposition, and unable to confine herself (as her positive in-
structions were) to the pantry, she was constantly peering in at
us, and constantly imagining herself detected ; in which belief,
she several times retired upon the plates (with which she had
carefully paved the floor), and did a great deal of destruction.

These, however, were small drawbacks, and easily forgotten
when the cloth was cleared, and the dessert put on the table ;
at which period of the entertainment the handy young man
was discovered to be speechless. Giving him private direc-
tions to seek the society of Mrs. Crupp, and to remove the
"young gal" to the basement also, I abandoned myself to
enjoyment.

I began, by being singularly cheerful and light-hearted ; all
sorts of half-forgotten things to talk about, came rushing into
my mind, and made me hold forth in a most unwonted manner.
I laughed heartily at my own jokes, and everybody else's ; called
Steerforth to order for not passing the wine; made several
engagements to go to Oxford ; announced that I meant to have
a dinner-party exactly like that, once a week, until further
notice ; and madly took so much snuff out of Grainger's box,
that I was obliged to go into the pantry, and have a private fit
of sneezing ten minutes long.

I went on, by passing the wine faster and faster yet, and
continually starting up with a corkscrew to open more wine,
long before any was needed. I proposed Steerforth's health.
I said he was my dearest friend, the protector of my boyhood,
and the companion of my prime. I said I was delighted to

David Copperfield 337

propose his health. I said I owed him more obligations than
I could ever repay, and held him in a higher admiration than
I could ever express. I finished by saying, "I'll give you
Steerforth ! God bless him ! Hurrah ! " We gave him three
times three, and another, and a good one to finish with. I
broke my glass in going round the table to shake hands with
him, and I said (in two words) " Steerforth, you'retheguiding-
starofmyexistence. "

I went on, by finding suddenly that somebody was in the
middle of a song. Markham was the singer, and he sang
"When the heart of a man is depressed with care." He said,
when he had sung it, he would give us " Woman ! " I took
objection to that, and I couldn't allow it. I said it was not a
respectful way of proposing the toast, and I would never permit
that toast to be drunk in my house otherwise than as " The
Ladies ! " I was very high with him, mainly I think because I
saw Steerforth and Grainger laughing at me — or at him — or at
both of us. He said a man was not to be dictated to. I said
a man was. He said a man was not to be insulted, then. I
said he was right there — never under my roof, where the Lares
were sacred, and the laws of hospitality paramount. He said
it was no derogation from a man's dignity to confess that I was
a devilish good fellow. I instantly proposed his health.
f^Somebodv was smoking. We were all smoking. / was
smoking, and trying to suppress a rising tendency to shudder.
Steerforth had made a speech about me, in the course of which
I had been affected almost to tears. I returned thanks, and
hoped the present company would dine with me to-morrow, and
the day after — each day at five o'clock, that we might enjoy
the pleasures of conversation and society through a long
evening. I felt called upon to propose an individual. I
would give them my aunt. Miss Betsey Trotwood, the best of
her sex I

Somebody was leaning out of my bedroom window, refresh-
ing his forehead against the cool stone of the parapet, and
feeling the air upon his face. It was myself. I was addressing
myself as "Copperfield," and saying, "Why did you try to
smoke ? You might have known you couldn't do it." Now,
somebody was unsteadily contemplating his features in the
looking-glass. That was I too. I was very pale in the looking-
glass ; my eyes had a vacant appearance ; and my hair — only
my hair, nothing else — looked drunk.

Somebody said to me, " Let us go to the theatre. Copper-
field!" There was no bedroom before me, but again the

338 David Copperfield

jingling table covered with glasses ; the lamp ; Grainger on my
right hand, Markham on my left, and Steerforth opposite — all
sitting in a mist, and a long way off. The theatre ? To be
sure. The very thing. Come along ! But they must excuse
me if I saw everybody out first, and turned the lamp off — in
case of fire.

Owing to some confusion in the dark, the door was gone. I
was feeling for it in the window-curtains, when Steerforth,
laughing, took me by the arm and led me out. We went
down-stairs, one behind another. Near the bottom, somebody
fell, and rolled down. Somebody else said it was Copperfield.
I was angry at that false report, until, finding myself on my
back in the passage, I began to think there might be some
foundation for itT]

A very foggynight, with great rings round the lamps in
the streets ! There was an indistinct talk of its being wet.
/ considered it frosty. Steerforth dusted me under a lamp-
post, and put my hat into shape, which somebody produced
from somewhere in a most extraordinary manner, for I hadn't
had it on before. Steerforth then said, " You are all right,
Copperfield, are you not ? " and I told him, " Neverberrer."

A man, sitting in a pigeon-hole-place, looked out of the fog,
and took money from somebody, inquiring if I was one of the
gentlemen paid for, and appearing rather doubtful (as I re-
member in the glimpse I had of him) whether to take the
money for me or not. Shortly afterwards, we were very high
up in a very hot theatre, looking down into a large pit, that
seemed to me to smoke; the people with whom it was
crammed were so indistinct. There was a great stage, too,
looking very clean and smooth after the streets ; and there
were people upon it, talking about something or other, but
not at all intelligibly. There was an abundance of bright
lights, and there was music, and there were ladies down in
the boxes, and I don't know what more. The whole building
looked to me as if it were learning to swim ; it conducted
itself in such an unaccountable manner, when I tried to
steady it.

On somebody's motion, we resolved to go down-stairs to
the dress-boxes, where the ladies were. A gentleman lounging,
full dressed, on a sofa, with an opera-glass in his hand, passed
before my view, and also my own figure at full length in a
glass. Then I was being ushered into one of these boxes,
and found myself saying something as I sat down, and people
about me crying " Silence ! " to somebody, and ladies casting

David Copperfield 339

indignant glances at me, and — what ! yes ! — Agnes, sitting on
the seat before me, in the same box, with a lady and gentleman
beside her, whom I didn't know. I see her face now, better
than I did then, I dare say, with its indelible look of regret
and wonder turned upon me.

" Agnes ! " I said, thickly, " Lorblessmer ! Agnes ! "

" Hush ! Pray ! " she answered, I could not conceive why,
" You disturb the company. Look at the stage ! "

I tried, on her injunction, to fix it, and to hear something of
what was going on there, but quite in vain. I looked at her
again by-and-bye, and saw her shrink into her comer, and put
her gloved hand to her forehead.

"Agnes!" I said. " I'mafraidyou'renorwell."

"Yes, yes. Do not mind me, Trotwood," she returned.
" Listen ! Are you going away soon ? "

" Amigoarawaysoo ? " I repeated.

" Yes."

I had a stupid intention of replying that I was going to
wait, to hand her down-stairs. I suppose I expressed it
somehow ; for, after she had looked at me attentively for a
little while, she appeared to understand, and rephed in a
low tone :

" I know you will do as I ask you, if I tell you I am very
earnest in it. Go away now, Trotwood, for my sake, and
ask your friends to take you home."

She had so far improved me, for the time, that though I
was angry with her, I felt ashamed, and with- a short
" Goori ! " (which I intended for " Good-night ! ") got up and
went away. They followed, and I stepped at once out of the
box-door into my bedroom, where only Steerforth was with
me, helping me to undress, and where I was by turns telling
him that Agnes was my sister, and adjuring him to bring the
corkscrew, that I might open another bottle of wine.

How somebody, lying in my bed, lay saying and doing all
this over again, at cross purposes, in a feverish dream all night
— the bed a rocking sea that was never still ! How, as that
somebody slowly settled down into myself, did I begin to
parch, and feel as if my outer covering of skin were a hard
board ; my tongue the bottom of an empty kettle, furred
with long service, and burning up over a slow fire; the
palms of my hands, hot plates of metal which no ice could
cool !

But the agony of mind, the remorse, and shame I felt,
when I became conscious next day ! My horror of having

340 David Copperfield

committed a thousand offences I had forgotten, and which
nothing could ever expiate — my recollection of that indelible
look which Agnes had given me — the torturing impossibility
of communicating with her, not knowing. Beast that I was,
how she came to be in London, or where she stayed — my
disgust of the very sight of the room where the revel had been
held — my racking head — the smell of smoke, the sight of
glasses, the impossibility of going out, or even getting up !
Oh, what a day it was !

Oh, what an evening, when I sat down by my fire to a basin
of mutton broth, dimpled all over with fat, and thought I was
going the way of my predecessor, and should succeed to his
dismal story as well as to his chambers, and had half a mind
to rush express to Dover and reveal all ! What an evening,
when Mrs. Crupp, coming in to take away the broth-basin,
produced one kidney on a cheese -plate as the entire remains of
yesterday's feast, and I was really inclined to fall upon her
nankeen breast, and say, in heartfelt penitence, "Oh, Mrs.
Crupp, Mrs. Crupp, never mind the broken meats ! I am very
miserable ! " — only that I doubted, even at that pass, if Mrs.
Crupp were quite the sort of woman to confide in I

CHAPTER XXV

GOOD AND BAD ANGELS

I WAS going out at my door on the morning after that deplorable
day of headache, sickness, and repentance, with an odd con-
fusion in my mind relative to the date of my dinner-party, as if
a body of Titans had taken an enormous lever and pushed the
day before yesterday some months back, when I saw a ticket-
porter coming up-stairs, with a letter in his hand. He was
taking his time about his errand, then ; but when he saw me on
the top of the staircase, looking at him over the banisters, he
swung into a trot, and came up panting, as if he had run himself
into a state of exhaustion.

"T. Copperfield, Esquire," said the ticket-porter, touching
his hat with his little cane.

I could scarcely lay claim to the name : I was so disturbed
by the conviction that the letter came from Agnes. However,
I told him I was T. Copperfield, Esquire, and he believed it,
and gave me the letter, which he said required an answer. I

David Copperfield . 341

shut him out on the landing to wait for the answer, and went
into my chambers again, in such a nervous state that I was
fain to lay the letter down on my breakfast-table, and familiarise
myself with the outside of it a little, before I could resolve to
break the seal.

I found, when I did open it, that it was a very kind note,
containing no reference to my condition at the theatre. All it
said was, " My dear Trotwood. I am staying at the house of
papa's agent, Mr. Waterbrook, in Ely-place, Holbom. Will
you come and see me to-day, at any time you like to appoint ?
Ever yours affectionately, Agnes."

It took me such a long time to write an answer at all to my
satisfaction, that I don't know what the ticket-porter can have
thought, unless he thought I was learning to write. I must
have written half-a-dozen answers at least. I began one, " How
can I ever hope, my dear Agnes, to efface from your remem-
brance the disgusting impression " — there I didn't like it, and
then 1 tore it up. I began another, " Shakspeare has observed,
my dear Agnes, how strange it is that a man should put an
enemy into his mouth " — that reminded me of Markham, and
it got no farther. I even tried poetry. I began one note, in
a six-syllable line, " Oh, do not remember " — but that associated
itself with the fifth of November, and became an absurdity.
After many attempts, I wrote, " My dear Agnes. Your letter
is like you, and what could I say of it that would be higher
praise than that ? I will come at four o'clock. Affectionately
and sorrowfully, T. C." With this missive (which I was in
twenty minds at once about recalling, as soon as it was out of
my hands), the ticket-porter at last departed.

If the day were half as tremendous to any other professional
gentleman in Doctors' Commons as it was to me, I sincerely
believe he made some expiation for his share in that rotten old
ecclesiastical cheese. Although I left the office at half-past
three, and was prowling about the place of appointment within
a few minutes afterwards, the appointed time was exceeded by
a full quarter of an hour, according to the clock of St. Andrew's,
Holborn, before I could muster up sufficient desperation to
pull the private bell-handle let into the left-hand door-post of
Mr. Waterbrook's house.

The professional business of Mr. Waterbrook's establishment
was done on the ground floor, and the genteel business (of
which there was a good deal) in the upper part of the building.
I was shown into a pretty but rather close drawing-room, and
there sat Agnes, netting a purse.

342 David Copperfield

She looked so quiet and good, and reminded me so strongly j
of my airy fresh school-days at Canterbury, and the sodden, 1
smoky, stupid wretch I had been the other night, that, nobody ^
being by, I yielded to my self-reproach and shame, and — in
short, made a fool of myself. I cannot deny that I shed tears.
To this hour I am undecided whether it was upon the whole
the wisest thing I could have done, or the most ridiculous.

" If it had been any one but you, Agnes," said I, turning
away my head, " I should not have minded it half so much.
But that it should have been you who saw me ! I almost wish
I had been dead, first."

She put her hand — its touch was like no other hand — upon
my arm for a moment ; and I felt so befriended and comforted,
that I could not help moving it to my lips, and gratefully
kissing it.

" Sit down," said Agnes, cheerfully. " Don't be unhappy,
Trotwood. If you cannot confidently trust me, whom will you
trust ? "

"Ah, Agnes ! " I returned. "You are my good Angel ! "

She smiled rather sadly, I thought, and shook her head.

" Yes, Agnes, my good Angel ! Always my good Angel ! "

"If I were, indeed, Trotwood," she returned, "there is one
thing that I should set my heart on very much."

I looked at her inquiringly ; but already with a foreknowledge
of her meaning.

"On warning you," said Agnes, with a steady glance,
"against your bad Angel."

" My dear Agnes," I began, " if you mean Steerforth "

"I do, Trotwood," she returned.

"Then, Agnes, you wrong him very much. He my bad
Angel, or any one's ! He, anything but a guide, a support,
and a friend to me ! My dear Agnes ! Now, is it not unjust,
and unlike you, to judge him from what you saw of me the other
night?"

" I do not judge him from what I saw of you the other night,"
she quietly replied.

" From what, then ? "

" From many things — trifles in themselves, but they do not
seem to me to be so, when they are put together. I judge him,
partly from your account of him, Trotwood, and your character,
and the influence he has over you."

There was always something in her modest voice that seemed ,
to touch a chord within me, answering to that sound alone. It
was always earnest ; but when it was very earnest, as it was now,

David Copperfield 343

there was a thrill in it that quite subdued me. I sat looking
at her as she cast her eyes down on her work ; I sat seeming
still to listen to her ; and Steerforth, in spite of all my attach-
ments to him, darkened in that tone.

" It is very bold in me," said Agnes, looking up again, " who
have lived in such seclusion, and can know so little of the
world, to give you my advice so confidently, or even to have
this strong opinion. But I know in what it is engendered,
Trotwood, — in how true a remembrance of our having grown
up together, and in how true an interest in all relating to you.
It is that which makes me bold. I am certain that what I say
is right. I am quite sure it is. I feel as if it were some one
else speaking to you, and not I, when I caution you that you
have made a dangerous friend."

Again I looked at her, again I listened to her after she was
silent, and again his image, though it was still fixed in my
heart, darkened.

"I am not so unreasonable as to expect," said Agnes,
resuming her usual tone, after a little while, " that you will, or
that you can, at once, change any sentiment that has become
a conviction to you ; least of all a sentiment that is rooted in
your trusting disposition. You ought not hastily to do that.
I only ask you, Trotwood, if you ever think of me — I mean,"
with a quiet smile, for I was going to interrupt her, and she
knew why, " as often as you think of me — to think of what I
have said. Do you forgive me for all this ? "

" I will forgive you, Agnes," I replied, " when you come to
do Steerforth justice, and to like him as well as I do."

"Not until then ? " said Agnes.

I saw a passing shadow on her face when I made this mention
of him, but she returned mj smile, and we were again as
unreserved in our mutual confidence as of old.

" And when, Agnes," said I, " will you forgive me the other
night?"

" When I recall it," said Agnes.

She would have dismissed the subject so, but I was too full
of it to allow that, and insisted on telling her how it happened
that I had disgraced myself, and what chain of accidental
circumstances had had the theatre for its final link. It was a
great relief to me to do this, and to enlarge on the obligation
that I owed to Steerforth for his care of me when I was unable
to take care of myself.

" You must not forget," said Agnes, calmly changing the con-
versation as soon as I had concluded, " that you are always to

344 David Copperfield

tell me, not only when you fall into trouble, but when you fall
in love. Who has succeeded to Miss Larkins, Trotwood ? "

" No one, Agnes."

"Some one, Trotwood," said Agnes, laughing, and holding
up her finger.

" No, Agnes, upon my word ! There is a lady, certainly, at
Mrs. Steerforth's house, who is very clever, and whom I like to
talk to — Miss Dartle — but I don't adore her."

Agnes laughed again at her own penetration, and told me
that if I were faithful to her in my confidence she thought she
should keep a little register of my violent attachments, with the
date, duration, and termination of each, like the table of the
reigns of the kings and queens, in the History of England.
Then she asked me if I had seen Uriah.

" Uriah Heep ? " said I. " No. Is he in London ? "

" He comes to the office down-stairs, every day," returned
Agnes. " He was in London a week before me. I am afraid
on disagreeable business, Trotwood."

" On some business that makes you uneasy, Agnes, I see,"
said I. " What can that be ? "

Agnes laid aside her work, and replied, folding her hands
upon one another, and looking pensively at me out of those
^Jieautiful soft eyes of hers :

.^ -" I believe he is going to enter into partnership with

papa."

"What? Uriah? That mean, fawning fellow, worm him-
self into such promotion ! " I cried, indignantly. " Have you
made no remonstrance about it, Agnes ? Consider what a con-
nexion it is likely to be. You must speak out. You must
not allow your father to take such a mad step. You must
prevent it, Agnes, while there's time."

Still looking at me, Agnes shook her head while I was
speaking, with a faint smile at my warmth; and then
replied :

" You remember our last conversation about papa ? It was
not long after that — not more than two or three days — when he
gave me the first intimation of what I tell you. It was sad to
see him struggling between his desire to represent it to me as a
matter of choice on his part, and his inability to conceal that it
was forced upon him. I felt very sorry."

" Forced upon him, Agnes ! Who forces it upon him ? "

" Uriah," she replied, after a moment's hesitation, "has made
himself indispensable to papa. He is subtle and watchful. He
has mastered papa's weaknesses, fostered them, and taken

I David Copperfield 345

advantage of them, until — to say all that I mean in a word,
Trotwood — until papa is afraid of him."

There was more that she might have said ; more that she
knew, or that she suspected ; I clearly saw. I could not give
her pain by asking what it was, for I knew that she withheld
it from me to spare her father. It had long been going on
to this, I was sensible : yes, I could not but feel, on the least
reflection, that it had been going on to this for a long time. I
remained silent.

" His ascendancy over papa," said Agnes, " is very great.
He professes humility and gratitude — with truth, perhaps : I
hope so — but his position is really one of power, and I fear he
makes a hard use of his power."

I said he was a hound, which, at the moment, was a great
satisfaction to me.

" At the time I speak of, as the time when papa spoke to
me," pursued Agnes, "he had told papa that he was going
away ; that he was very sorry and unwilling to leave, but that
he had better prospects. Papa was very much depressed then,
and more bowed down by care than ever you or I have seen
him ; but he seemed relieved by this expedient of the partner-
ship, though at the same time he seemed htirt by it and
ashamed of it."

" And how did you receive it, Agnes ? "

"I did, Trotwood," she replied, "what I hope was right.
Feeling sure that it was necessary for papa's peace that the
sacrifice should be made, I entreated him to make it. I said
it would lighten the load of his life — I hope it will ! — and that
it would give me increased opportunities of being his com-
panion. Oh, Trotwood ! " cried Agnes, putting her hands
before her face, as her tears started on it, "I almost feel as if
I had been papa's enemy, instead of his loving child. For I
know how he has altered, in his devotion to me. I know how
he has narrowed the circle of his sympathies and duties, in the
concentration of his whole mind upon me. I know what a
multitude of things he has shut out for my sake, and how his
anxious thoughts of me have shadowed his life, and weakened
his strength and energy, by turning them always upon one
idea. If I could ever set this right ! If I could ever work out
his restoration, as I have so innocently been the cause of his
decline ! "

I had never before seen Agnes cry. I had seen tears in
her eyes when I had brought new honours home from school,
and I had seen them there when we last spoke about her

346 David Copperfield

father, and I had seen her turn her gentle head aside when we
took leave of one another ; but I had never seen her grieve like
this. It made me so sorry that I could only say, in a foolish,
helpless manner, " Pray, Agnes, don't ! Don't, my dear sister."

But Agnes was too superior to me in character and purpose,
as I know well now, whatever I might know or not know then,
to be long in need of my entreaties. The beautiful, calm
manner, which makes her so different in my remembrance from
everybody else, came back again, as if a cloud had passed
from a serene sky.

"We are not likely to remain alone much longer," said
Agnes ; " and while I have an opportunity, let me earnestly
entreat you, Trotwood, to be friendly to Uriah. Don't repel
him. Don't resent (as I think you have a general disposition
to do) what may be uncongenial to you in him. He may not
deserve it, for we know no certain ill of him. In any case,
think first of papa and me ! "

Agnes had no time to say more, for the room door opened,
and Mrs. Waterbrook, who was a large lady — or who wore
a large dress : I don't exactly know which, for I don't know
which was dress and which was lady — came sailing in. I had
a dim recollection of having seen her at the theatre, as if I
had seen her in a pale magic lantern; but she appeared to
remember me perfectly, and still to suspect me of being in a
state of intoxication.

Finding by degrees, however, that I was sober, and (I hope)
that I was a modest young gentleman, Mrs. Waterbrook
softened towards me considerably, and inquired, firstly, if I
went much into the parks, and secondly, if I went much into
society. On my replying to both these questions in the
negative, it occurred to me that I fell again in her good
opinion ; but she concealed the fact gracefully, and invited
me to dinner next day. I accepted the invitation, and took
my leave, making a call on Uriah in the office as I went out,
and leaving a card for him in his absence.

When I went to dinner next day, and, on the street-door
being opened, plunged into a vapour-bath of haunch of mutton,
I divined that I was not the only guest, for I immediately
identified the ticket-porter in disguise, assisting the family
servant, and waiting at the foot of the stairs to carry up my
name. He looked, to the best of his ability, when he asked
me for it confidentially, as if he had never seen me before ;
but well did I know him, and well did he know me. Conscience
made cowards of us both.

David Copperfield 347

1 found Mr. Waterbrook to be a middle-aged gentleman,
with a short throat, and a good deal of shirt-collar, who only
wanted a black nose to be the portrait of a pug-dog. He told
me he was happy to have the honour of making my acquaint-
ance ; and when I had paid my homage to Mrs. Waterbrook,
presented me, with much ceremony, to a very awful lady in
a black velvet dress, and a great black velvet hat, whom I
remember as looking like a near relation of Hamlef s — say his
aunt.

Mrs. Henry Spiker was this lady's name ; and her husband
was there too : so cold a man, that his head, instead of being
grey, seemed to be sprinkled with hoar-frost. Immense
deference was shown to the Henry Spikers, male and female ;
which Agnes told me was on account of Mr. Henry Spiker
being solicitor to something or to somebody, I forget what or
which, remotely connected with the Treasury.

I found Uriah Heep among the company, in a suit of black,
and in deep humility. He told me, when I shook hands with
him, that he was proud to be noticed by me, and that he really
felt obliged to me for my condescension. I could have wished
he had been less obliged to me, for he hovered about me in
his gratitude all the rest of the evening; and whenever 1
said a word to Agnes, was sure, with his shadowless eyes and
cadaverous face, to be looking gauntly down upon us from
behind.

There were other guests — all iced for the occasion, as it
struck me, like the wine. But there was one who attracted
my attention before he came in, on account of my hearing him
announced as Mr. Traddles ! My mind flew back to Salem
House ; and could it be Tommy, I thought, who used to draw
the skeletons !

I looked for Mr. Traddles with unusual interest. He was
a sober, steady looking young man of retiring manners, with a
comic head of hair, and eyes that were rather wide open ; and
he got into an obscure corner so soon, that I had some diffi-
culty in making him out. At length I had a good view of him,
and either my vision deceived me, or it was the old unfortunate
Tommy.

1 made my way to Mr. Waterbrook, and said, that I believed
I had the pleasure of seeing an old schoolfellow there.

" Indeed ! " said Mr. Waterbrook, surprised. " You are too
young to have been at school with Mr. Henry Spiker ? "

" Oh, I don't mean him ! " I returned. " I mean the
gentleman named Traddles."

348 David Copperfield

" Oh ! Aye, aye ! Indeed ! " said my host, with much
diminished interest. "Possibly."

*' If it's really the same person," said I, glancing towards him,
" it was at a place called Salem House where we were together,
and he was an excellent fellow."

"Oh yes. Traddles is a good fellow," returned my host,
nodding his head with an air of toleration. " Traddles is quite
a good fellow."

" It's a curious coincidence," said I.

"It is really," returned my host, "quite a coincidence, that
Traddles should be here at all : as Traddles was only invited
this morning, when the place at table, intended to be occupied
by Mrs. Henry Spiker's brother, became vacant, in consequence
of his indisposition. A very gentlemanly man, Mrs. Henry
Spiker's brother, Mr. Copperfield."

I murmured an assent, which was full of feeling, considering
that I knew nothing at all about him; and I inquired what
Mr. Traddles was by profession.

" Traddles," returned Mr. Waterbrook, " is a young man
reading for the bar. Yes. He is quite a good fellow —
nobody's enemy but his own."

" Is he his own enemy ? " said I, sorry to hear this.
"Well," returned Mr. Waterbrook, pursing up his mouth,
and playing with his watch-chain, in a comfortable, prosperous
sort of way. " I should say he was one of those men who
stand in their own light. Yes, I should say he would never,
for example, be worth five hundred pound. Traddles was
recommended to me by a professional friend. Oh yes. Yes.
He has a kind of talent for drawing briefs, and stating
a case in writing, plainly. I am able to throw something in
Traddles's way, in the course of the year ; something — for him
— considerable. Oh yes. Yes."

I was much impressed by the extremely comfortable and
satisfied manner in which Mr. Waterbrook delivered himself of
this little word "Yes," every now and then. There was
wonderful expression in it. It completely conveyed the idea
of a man who had been bom, not to say with a silver spoon,
but with a scaling-ladder, and had gone on mounting all the
heights of life one after another, until now he looked, from the
top of the fortifications, with the eye of a philosopher and a
patron, on the people down in the trenches.

My reflections on this theme were still in progress when
dinner was announced. Mr. Waterbrook went down with
Hamlet's aunt. Mr. Henry Spiker took Mrs. Waterbrook.

David Copperfield 349

Agnes, whom I should have liked to take myself, was given
to a simpering fellow with weak legs. Uriah, Traddles, and
I, as the junior part of the company, went down last, how we
could. I was not so vexed at losing Agnes as I might have
been, since it gave me an opportunity of making myself known
to Traddles on the stairs, who greeted me with great fervour :
while Uriah writhed with such obtrusive satisfaction and self-
abasement, that I could gladly have pitched him over the
banisters.

Traddles and I were separated at table, being billeted in two
remote corners : he in the glare of a red velvet lady ; I, in the
gloom of Hamlet's aunt The dinner was very long, and the
conversation was about the Aristocracy — and Blood. Mrs.
Waterbrook repeatedly told us, that if she had a weakness, it
was Blood.

It occurred to me several times that we should have got on
better, if we had not been quite so genteel. We were so
exceedingly genteel, that our scope was very limited. A Mr.
and Mrs. Gulpidge were of the party, who had something to do
at second-hand (at least, Mr. Gulpidge had) with the law busi-
ness of the Bank ; and what with the Bank, and what with the
Treasury, we were as exclusive as the Court Circular. To mend
the matter, Hamlet's aunt had the family failing of indulging in
soliloquy, and held forth in a desultory manner, by herself, on
every topic that was introduced. These were few enough, to
be sure; but as we always fell back upon Blood, she had as
wide a field for abstract speculation as her nephew himself.

We might have been a party of Ogres, the conversation
assumed such a sanguine complexion.

" I confess I am of Mrs. Waterbrook's opinion," said Mr.
Waterbrook, with his wine-glass at his eye. " Other things are
all very well in their way, but give me Blood I "

" Oh ! There is nothing," observed Hamlet's aunt, " so
satisfactory to one ! There is nothing that is so much one's
beau-ideal of — of all that sort of thing, speaking generally. There
are some low minds (not many, I am happy to believe, but there
are some) that would prefer to do what / should call bow down
before idols. Positively Idols ! Before services, intellect, and
so on. But these are intangible points. Blood is not so. We
see Blood in a nose, and we know it. We meet with it in a
chin, and we say, * There it is ! That's Blood ! ' It is an
actual matter of fact. We point it out. It admits of no
doubt."

The simpering fellow with the weak legs who had taken

350 David Copperfield

Agnes down, stated the question more decisively yet, I
thought.

"Oh, you know, deuce take it," said this gentleman, looking
round the board with an imbecile smile, "we can't forego
Blood, you know. We must have Blood, you know. Some
young fellows, you know, may be a little behind their station,
perhaps, in point of education and behaviour, and may go a
little wrong, you know, and get themselves and other people
into a variety of fixes — and all that — but deuce take it, it's
delightful to reflect that they've got Blood in 'em. Myself, I'd
rather at any time be knocked down by a man who had got
Blood in him, than I'd be picked up by a man who hadn't ! "

This sentiment, as compressing the general question into a
nutshell, gave the utmost satisfaction, and brought the gentle-
man into great notice until the ladies retired. After that,
I observed that Mr. Gulpidge and Mr. Henry Spiker, who had
hitherto been very distant, entered into a defensive alliance
against us, the common enemy, and exchanged a mysterious
dialogue across the table for our defeat and overthrow.

" That affair of the first bond for four thousand five hundred
pounds has not taken the course that was expected, Spiker,"
said Mr. Gulpidge.

" Do you mean the D. of A.'s ? " said Mr. Spiker.

" The C. of B.'s ! " said Mr. Gulpidge.

Mr. Spiker raised his eyebrows, and looked much concerned.

" When the question was referred to Lord — I needn't name
him," said Mr. Gulpidge, checking himself —

" I understand," said Mr. Spiker, " N."

Mr. Gulpidge darkly nodded — "was referred to him, his
answer was, 'Money, or no release.'"

"Lord bless my soul ! " cried Mr. Spiker.

" * Money, or no release,' " repeated Mr. Gulpidge, firmly.
"The next in reversion — you understand me?"

" K.," said Mr. Spiker, with an ominous look.

" — K. then positively refused to sign. He was attended
at Newmarket for that purpose, and he point-blank refused
to do it."

Mr. Spiker was so interested, that he became quite stony.

"So the matter rests at this hour," said Mr. Gulpidge,
throwing himself back in his chair. " Our friend Waterbrook
will excuse me if I forbear to explain myself generally, on
account of the magnitude of the interests involved."

Mr. Waterbrook was only too happy, as it appeared to me,
to have such interests, and such names, even hinted at, across

David Copperfield 351

his table. He assumed an expression of gloomy intelligence
(though I am persuaded he knew no more about the discussion
than I did), and highly approved of the discretion that had been
observed. Mr. Spiker, after the receipt of such a confidence,
naturally desired to favour his friend with a confidence of his
own ; therefore the foregoing dialogue was succeeded by
another, in which it was Mr. Gulpidge's turn to be surprised,
and that by another in which the surprise came round to Mr.
Spiker's turn again, and so on, turn and turn about. All this
time we, the outsiders, remained oppressed by the tremendous
interests involved in the conversation ; and our host regarded
us with pride, as the victims of a salutary awe and astonishment.
I was very glad indeed to get up-stairs to Agnes, and to talk
with her in a corner, and to introduce Traddles to her, who
was shy, but agreeable, and the same good-natured creature
still. As he was obliged to leave early, on account of going
away next morning for a month, I had not nearly so much
conversation with him as I could have wished ; but we
exchanged addresses, and promised ourselves the pleasure of
another meeting when he should come back to town. He
was greatly interested to hear that I knew Steerforth, and
spoke of him with such warmth that I made him tell Agnes
what he thought of him. But Agnes only looked at me the
while, and very slightly shook her head when only I observed
her.

As she was not among people with whom I believed she
could be very much at home, I was almost glad to hear that
she was going away within a few days, though I was sorry at
the prospect of parting from her again so soon. This caused
me to remain until all the company were gone. Conversing
with her, and hearing her sing, was such a delightful reminder
to me of my happy life in the grave old house she had made
so beautiful, that I could have remained there half the night ;
but, having no excuse for staying any longer, when the lights
of Mr. Waterbrook's society were all snuffed out, I took my
leave very much against my inclination. I felt then, more
than ever, that she was my better Angel ; and if I thought of
her sweet face and placid smile, as though they had shone on
me from some removed being, like an Angel, I hope I thought
no harm.

I have said that the company were all gone ; but I ought to
have excepted Uriah, whom I don't include in that denomina-
tion, and who had never ceased to hover near us. He was
close behind me when I went down-stairs. He was close

352 David Copperfield

beside me, when I walked away from the house, slowly fitting
his long skeleton fingers into the still longer fingers of a great
Guy Fawkes pair of gloves.

It was in no disposition for Uriah's company, but in remem-
brance of the entreaty Agnes had made to me, that I asked
him if he would come home to my rooms, and have some
coffee.

" Oh, really, Master Copperfield," he rejoined, — " I beg
your pardon, Mister Copperfield, but the other comes so
natural, — I don't like that you should put a constraint upon
yourself to ask a numble person like me to your ouse."

" There is no constraint in the case," said I. " Will you
come ? "

" I should like to, very much," replied Uriah, with a writhe.

" Well, then, come along ! " said I.

I could not help being rather short with him, but he
appeared not to mind it. We went the nearest way, without
conversing much upon the road; and he was so humble in
respect of those scarecrow gloves, that he was still putting
them on, and seemed to have made no advance in that labour,
when we got to my place.

I led him up the dark stairs, to prevent his knocking his
head against anything, and really his damp cold hand felt so
like a frog in mine, that I was tempted to drop it and run
away. Agnes and hospitality prevailed, however, and I con-
ducted him to my fireside. When I lighted my candles, he
fell into meek transports with the room that was revealed to
him ; and when I heated the coffee in an unassuming block-
tin vessel in which Mrs. Crupp delighted to prepare it (chiefly,
I believe, because it was not intended for the purpose, being
a shaving-pot, and because there was a patent invention of
great price mouldering away in the pantry), he professed so
much emotion, that I could joyfully have scalded him.

"Oh, really. Master Copperfield, — I mean Mister Copper-
field," said Uriah, "to see you waiting upon me is what I
never could have expected ! But, one way and another, so
many things happen to me which I never could have expected,
I am sure, in my umble station, that it seems to rain blessings
on my ed. You have heard something, I des-say, of a change
in my expectations. Master Copperfield, — / should say. Mister
Copperfield ?"

As he sat on my sofa, with his long knees drawn up under
his coffee-cup, his hat and gloves upon the ground close to
him, his spoon going softly round and round, his shadowless

David Copperfield 353

red eyes, which looked as if they had scorched their lashes off,
turned towards me without looking at me, the disagreeable
dints I have formerly described in his nostrils coming and
going with his breath, and a snaky undulation pervading his
frame from his chin to his boots, I decided in my own mind
that I disliked him intensely. It made me very uncomfortable
to have him for a guest, for I was young then, and unused to
disguise what I so strongly felt.

" You have heard something, I des-say, of a change in my
expectations. Master Copperfield, — I should say. Mister
Copperfield?" observed Uriah.

"Yes," said I, "something."

" Ah ! I thought Miss Agnes would know of it ! " he
quietly returned. " I'm glad to find Miss Agnes knows of it.
Oh, thank you, Master — Mister Copperfield ! "

I could have thrown my bootjack at him (it lay ready on
the rug), for having entrapped me into the disclosure of any-
thing concerning Agnes, however immaterial. But I only
drank my coffee.

" What a prophet you have shown yourself, Mister Copper-
field ! " pursued Uriah. " Dear me, what a prophet you have
proved yourself to be ! Don't you remember saying to me
once, that perhaps I should be a partner in Mr. Wickfield's
business, and perhaps it might be Wickfield and Heep ? You
may not recollect it; but when a person is umble. Master
Copperfield, a person treasures such things up ! "

"I recollect talking about it," said I, "though I certainly
did not think it very likely then."

" Oh ! who would have thought it likely. Mister Copper-
field ! " returned Uriah, enthusiastically. " I am sure I didn't
myself. I recollect saying with my own lips that I was much
too umble. So I considered myself really and truly."

He sat, with that carved grin on his face, looking at the fire,
as I looked at him.

"But the umblest persons. Master Copperfield," he pre-
sently resumed, " may be the instruments of good. I am glad
to think I have been the instrument of good to Mr. Wickfield,
and that I may be more so. Oh what a worthy man he is.
Mister Copperfield, but how imprudent he has been ! "

" I am sorry to hear it," said I. I could not help adding,
rather pointedly, "on all accounts."

" Decidedly so, Mister Copperfield," replied Uriah. " On
all accounts. Miss Agnes's above all ! You don't remember
your own eloquent expressions, Master Copperfield; but /

354 David Copperfield

remember how you said one day that everybody must admire
her, and how I thanked you for it ! You have forgot that, I
have no doubt, Master Copperfield?"

"No," said I, drily.

" Oh how glad I am you have not ! " exclaimed Uriah. " To
think that you should be the first to kindle the sparks of
ambition in my umble breast, and that you've not forgot it I
Oh ! — Would you excuse me asking for a cup more coffee ? "

Something in the emphasis he laid upon the kindling of
those sparks, and something in the glance he directed at me
as he said it, had made me start as if I had seen him illumin-
ated by a blaze of light. Recalled by his request, preferred in
quite another tone of voice, I did the honours of the shaving-
pot ; but I did them with an unsteadiness of hand, a sudden
sense of being no match for him, and a perplexed suspicious
anxiety as to what he might be going to say next, which I felt
could not escape his observation.

He said nothing at all. He stirred his coffee round and
round, he sipped it, he felt his chin softly with his grisly hand,
he looked at the fire, he looked about the room, he gasped
rather than smiled at me, he writhed and undulated about, in
his deferential servility, he stirred and sipped again, but he
left the renewal of the conversation to me.

" So, Mr. Wickfield," said I, at last, " who is worth five
hundred of you — or me ; " for my life, I think, I could not
have helped dividing that part of the sentence with an
awkward jerk; "has been imprudent, has he, Mr. Heep?"

" Oh, very imprudent indeed, Master Copperfield," returned
Uriah, sighing modestly. "Oh, very much so! But I wish
you'd call me Uriah, if you please. It's like old times."

" Well ! Uriah," said I, bolting it out with some difficulty.

" Thank you," he returned, with fervour. " Thank you,
Master Copperfield ! It's like the blowing of old breezes or
the ringing of old bellses to hear you say Uriah. I beg your
pardon. Was I making any observation?"

" About Mr. Wickfield," I suggested.

" Oh 1 Yes, truly," said Uriah. " Ah ! Great imprudence.
Master Copperfield. It's a topic that I wouldn't touch upon,
to any soul but you. Even to you I can only touch upon it,
and no more. If any one else had been in my place during
the last few years, by this time he would have had Mr. Wick-
field (oh, what a worthy man he is. Master Copperfield, too !)
under his thumb. Un — der — his thumb," said Uriah, very
slowly, as he stretched out his cruel-looking hand above my

David Copperfield 355

table, and pressed his own thumb down upon it, until it
shook, and shook the room.

If I had been obliged to look at him with his splay foot on
Mr. Wickfieid's head, I think I could scarcely have hated him
more.

" Oh, dear, yes, Master Copperfield," he proceeded, in a soft
voice, most remarkably contrasting with the action of his thumb,
which did not diminish its hard pressure in the least degree,
" there's no doubt of it. There would have been loss, disgrace,
I don't know what all. Mr. Wickfield knows it. I am the
umble instrument of umbly serving him, and he puts me on an
eminence 1 hardly could have hoped to reach. How thankful
should I be 1 " With his face turned towards me, as he finished,
but without looking at me, he took his crooked thumb off the
spot where he had planted it, and slowly and thoughtfully
scraped his lank jaw with it, as if he were shaving himself.

1 recollect well how indignantly my heart beat, as 1 saw his
crafty face, with the appropriately red light of the fire upon it,
preparing for something else.

" Master Copperfield," he began — " but am I keeping you
up?"

" You are not keeping me up. I generally go to bed late."

" Thank you, Master Copperfield ! I have risen from my
umble station since first you used to address me, it is true ; but
I am umble still. I hope 1 never shall be otherwise than
umble. You will not thmk the worse of my umbleness, if I
make a little confidence to you. Master Copperfield? Will
you ? "

**Oh no," said I, with an effort.

" Thank you ! " He took out his pocket-handkerchief, and
began wiping the palms of his hands. " Miss Agnes, Master
Copperfield "

" Well, Uriah ? "

" Oh, how pleasant to be called Uriah, spontaneously I "
he cried ; and gave himself a jerk, Hke a convulsive fish.
" You thought her looking very beautiful to-night. Master
Copperfield ? "

" 1 thought her looking as she always dges : superior, in all
respects, to every one around her," I returned.

" Oh, thank you ! It's so true 1 " he cried. " Oh, thank you
very much for that ! "

"Not at all," I said, loftily. " There is no reason why you
should thank me."

"Why that, Master Copperfield," said Uriah, "is, in. fact,

356 David Copperfield

the confidence that I am going to take the liberty of reposing.
Umble as I am," he wiped his hands harder, and looked at
them and at the fire by turns, " umble as my mother is, and lowly
as our poor but honest roof has ever been, the image of Miss
Agnes (I don't mind trusting you with my secret. Master
Copperfield, for I have always overflowed towards you since
the first moment I had the pleasure of beholding you in a
pony-shay) has been' in my breast for years. Oh, Master
Copperfield, with what a pure affection do I love the ground
my Agnes walks on ! "

I believe I had a delirious idea of seizing the red-hot poker
out of the fire, and running him through with it. It went from
me with a shock, like a ball fired from a rifle : but the image of
Agnes, outraged by so much as a thought of this red-headed
animal's, remained in my mind (when I looked at him, sitting
all awry as if his mean soul griped his body), and made me
giddy. He seemed to swell and grow before my eyes ; the
room seemed full of the echoes of his voice ; and the strange
feeling (to which, perhaps, no one is quite a stranger) that all
this had occurred before, at some indefinite time, and that I
knew what he was going to say next, took possession of me.

A timely observation of the sense of power that there was
in his face, did more to bring back to my remembrance the
entreaty of Agnes, in its full force, than any effort I could have
made. I asked him, with a better appearance of composure
than I could have thought possible a minute before, whether
he had made his feelings known to Agnes.

" Oh no, Master Copperfield ! " he returned ; " oh dear, no !
Not to any one but you. You see I am only just emerging
from my lowly station. I rest a good deal of hope on her
observing how useful I am to her father (for I trust to be very
useful to him indeed. Master Copperfield), and how I smooth
the way for him, and keep him straight. She's so much
attached to her father, Master Copperfield (oh what a lovely
thing it is in a daughter !), that I think she may come, on his
account, to be kind to me."

I fathomed the depth of the rascal's whole scheme, and
understood why he laid it bare.

"If you'll have the goodness to keep my secret. Master
Copperfield," he pursued, " and not, in general, to go against
me, I shall take it as a particular favour. You wouldn't wish
to make unpleasantness. I know what a friendly heart you've
got ; but having only known me on my umble footing (on my
umblest, I should say, for I am very umble still), you migh^

David Copperfield 357

unbeknown, go against me rather, with my Agnes, I call her
mine, you see. Master Copp)erfield. There's a song that says,
* I'd crowns resign, to call her mine ! ' I hope to do it, one of
these days."

Dear Agnes ! So much too loving and too good for any one
that I could think of, was it possible that she was reserved to
be the wife of such a wretch as this !

" There's no hurry at present, you know. Master Copperfield,"
Uriah proceeded, in his slimy way, as I sat gazing at him,
with this thought in my mind. " My Agnes is very young
still ; and mother and me will have to work our way upwards,
and make a good many new arrangements, before it would be
quite convenient. So I shall have time gradually to make her
familiar with my hopes, as opportunities offer. Oh, I'm so
much obliged to you for this confidence ! Oh, it's such a
relief, you can't think, to know that you understand our
situation, and are certain (as you wouldn't wish to make
unpleasantness in the family) not to go against me ! "

He took the hand which I dared not withhold, and having
given it a damp squeeze, referred to his pale-faced watch.

" Dear me ! " he said, " it's past one. The moments slip
away so, in the confidence of old times. Master Copperfield,
that it's almost half-past one ! "

I answered that I had thought it was later. Not that I had
really thought so, but because my conversational powers were
effectually scattered.

" Dear me ! " he said, considering. " The ouse that I am
stopping at — a sort of a private hotel and boarding ouse,
Master Copperfield, near the New River ed — will have gone to
bed these two hours."

" I am sorry," I returned, " that there is only one bed here,
and that I "

" Oh, don't think of mentioning beds. Master Copperfield I "
he rejoined ecstatically, drawing up one leg. " But would you
have any objections to my laying down before the fire ? "

"If it comes to that," I said, "pray take my bed, and I'll
lie down before the fire."

His repudiation of this offer was almost shrill enough, in the
excess of its surprise and humility, to have penetrated to the
ears of Mrs. Crupp, then sleeping, I suppose, in a distant
chamber, situated at about the level of low-water mark, soothed
in her slumbers by the ticking of an incorrigible clock, to
which she always referred me when we had any little difference
on the score of punctuality, and which was never less than

358 David Copperfield

three-quarters of an hour too slow, and had always been put
right in the morning by the best authorities. As no arguments
I could urge, in my bewildered condition, had the least effect
upon his modesty in inducing him to accept my bedroom, I
was obliged to make the best arrangements I could, for his re-
pose before the fire. The mattress of the sofa (which was a
great deal too short for his lank figure), the sofa pillows, a
blanket, the table-cover, a clean breakfast-cloth, and a great-
coat, made him a bed and covering, for which he was more
than thankful. Having lent him a night-cap, which he put on
at once, and in which he made such an awful figure, that I have
never worn one since, I left him to his rest.

I never shall forget that night. I never shall forget how I
turned and tumbled ; how I wearied myself with thinking
about Agnes and this creature ; how I considered what could
I do, and what ought I to do ; how I could come to no other
conclusion than that the best course for her peace was to do
nothing, and to keep to myself what I had heard. If I went
to sleep for a few moments, the image of Agnes with her
tender eyes, and of her father looking fondly on her, as I had
so often seen him look, arose before me with appealing faces,
and filled me with vague terrors. When I awoke, the recol-
lection that Uriah was lying in the next room, sat heavy on me
like a waking nightmare; and oppressed me with a leaden
dread, as if I had had some meaner quality of devil for a
lodger.

The poker got into my dozing thoughts besides, and
wouldn't come out. I thought, between sleeping and waking,
that it was still red hot, and I had snatched it out of the fire,
and run him through the body. I was so haunted at last by
the idea, though I knew there was nothing in it, that I stole
into the next room to look at him. There I saw him, lying
on his back, with his legs extending to I don't know where,
gurglings taking place in his throat, stoppages in his nose, and
his mouth open like a post-office. He was so much worse in
reality than in my distempered fancy, that afterwards I was
attracted to him in very repulsion, and could not help
wandering in and out every half-hour or so, and taking another
look at him. Still, the long, long night seemed heavy and
hopeless as ever, and no promise of day was in the murky
sky.

When I saw him going down-stairs early in the morning (for,
thank Heaven ! he would not stay to breakfast), it appeared to
me as if the night was going away in his person. When I went

David Copperfield 359

out to the Commons, I charged Mrs. Cnipp with particular
directions to leave the windows open, that my sitting-room
might be aired, and purged ol his presence.

CHAPTER XXVI

I FALL INTO CAPTIVITY

I SAW no more of Uriah Heep until the day when Agnes left
town. I was at the coach office to take leave of her and see
her go ; and there was he, returning to Canterbury by the same
conveyance. It was some small satisfaction to me to observe
his spare, short-waisted, high-shouldered, mulberry-coloured
great-coat perched up, in company with an umbrella like a
small tent, on the edge of the back seat on the roof, while
Agnes was, of course, inside; but what I underwent in my
efforts to be friendly with him, while Agnes looked on, perhaps
deserved that little recompense. At the coach-window, as at
the dinner-party, he hovered about us without a moment's
intermission, like a great vulture : gorging himself on every
syllable that I said to Agnes, or Agnes said to me.

In the state of trouble into which his disclosure by my fire
had thrown me, I had thought very much of the words Agnes
had used in reference to the partnership : " I did what I hope
was right. Feeling sure that it was necessary for papa's peace
that the sacrifice should be made, I entreated him to make it."
A miserable foreboding that she would yield to, and sustam
herself by, the same feeling in reference to any sacrifice for his
sake, had oppressed me ever since. I knew how she loved
him. I knew what the devotion of her nature was. I knew
from her own lips that she regarded herself as the innocent
cause of his errors, and as owing him a great debt she ardently
desired to pay. I had no consolation in seeing how different
she was from this detestable Rufus with the mulberry-coloured
great-coat, for I felt that in the very difference between them,
in the self-denial of her pure soul and the sordid baseness of
his, the greatest danger lay. All this, doubtless, he knew
thoroughly, and had, in his cunning, considered well.

Yet I was so certain that the prospect of such a sacrifice afar
off, must destroy the happiness of Agnes ; and I was so sure,
from her manner, of its being unseen by her then, and having
cast no shadow on her yet ; that I could as soon have injured

360 David Copperfield

her, as given her any warning of what impended. Thus it was
that we parted without explanation : she waving her hand and
smiling farewell from the coach-window; her evil genius
writhing on the roof, as if he had her in his clutches and
triumphed.

I could not get over this farewell glimpse of them for a long
time. When Agnes wrote to tell me of her safe arrival, I was
as miserable as when I saw her going away. Whenever I fell
into a thoughtful state, this subject was sure to present itself,
and all my uneasiness was sure to be redoubled. Hardly a
night passed without my dreaming of it. It became a part of
my life, and as inseparable from my life as my own head.

I had ample leisure to refine upon my uneasiness : for
Steerforth was at Oxford, as he wrote to me, and when I was
not at the Commons, I was very much alone. I believe I had
at this time some lurking distrust of Steerforth. I wrote to him
most affectionately in reply to his, but I think I was glad, upon
the whole, that he could not come to London just then. I
suspect the truth to be, that the influence of Agnes was upon
me, undisturbed by the sight of him ; and that it was the more
powerful with me, because she had so large a share in my
thoughts and interest.

In the meantime, days and weeks slipped away. I was
articled to Spenlow and Jorkins. I had ninety pounds a year
(exclusive of my house-rent and sundry collateral matters) from
my aunt. My rooms were engaged for twelve months certain :
and though I still found them dreary of an evening, and the
evenings long, I could settle down into a state of equable low
spirits, and resign myself to coffee ; which I seem, on looking
back, to have taken by the gallon at about this period of my
existence. At about this time, too, I made three discoveries :
first, that Mrs. Crupp was a martyr to a curious disorder called
"the spazzums," which was generally accompanied with in-
flammation of the nose,, and required to be consta^ntly treated
with peppermint; secondly, that something peculiar in the
temperature of my pantry, made the brandy-bottles burst;
thirdly, that I was alone in the world, and much given to
record that circumstance in fragments of English versification.

On the day when I was articled, no festivity took place,
beyond my having sandwiches and sherry into the office for
the clerks, and going alone to the theatre at night. I went to
see " The Stranger " as a Doctors' Commons sort of play, and
was so dreadfully cut up, that I hardly knew myself in my own
glass when I got home. Mr. Spenlow remarked, on this

David Copperfield 361

occasion, when we concluded our business, that he should
have been happy to have seen me at his house at Norwood to
celebrate our becoming connected, but for his domestic
arrangements being in some disorder, on account of the
expected return of his daughter from finishing her education
at Paris. But he intimated that when she came home he
should hope to have the pleasure of entertaining me. I knew
that he was a widower with one daughter, and expressed my
acknowledgments.

Mr. Spenlow was as good as his word. In a week or two,
he referred to this engagement, and said, that if I would do
him the favour to come down next Saturday, and stay till
Monday, he would be extremely happy. Of course I said I
would do him the favour ; and he was to drive me down in his
phaeton, and to bring me back.

When the day arrived, my very carpet-bag was an object of
veneration to the stipendiary clerks, to whom the house at
Norwood was a sacred mystery. One of them informed me
that he had heard that Mr. Spenlow ate entirely off plate and
china ; and another hinted at champagne being constantly on
draught, after the usual custom of table beer. The old clerk
with the wig, whose name was Mr. Tiffey, had been down on
business several times in the course of his career, and had
on each occasion penetrated to the breakfast-parlour. He
described it as an apartment of the most sumptuous nature,
and said that he had drank brown East India sherry there, of a
quality so precious as to make a man wink.

We had an adjourned cause in the Consistory that day —
about excommunicating a baker who had been objecting in a
vestry to a paving-rate — and as the evidence was just twice the
length of Robinson Crusoe, according to a calculation I made,
it was rather late in the day before we finished. However, we
got him excommunicated for six weeks, and sentenced in no
end of costs*; and then the baker's proctor, and the judge, and
the advocates on both sides (who were all nearly related),
went out of town together, and Mr. Spenlow and I drove away
in the phaeton.

The phaeton was a very handsome affair ; the horses arched
their necks and lifted up their legs as if they knew they belonged
to Doctors' Commons. There was a good deal of competition
in the Commons on all points of display, and it turned out
some very choice equipages then ; though I always have con-
sidered, and always shall consider, that in my time the great
article of competition there was starch : which I think was

362 David Copperfield

worn among the proctors to as great an extent as it is in the
nature of man to bear.

We were very pleasant, going down, and Mr. Spenlow gave
me some hints in reference to my profession. He said it was
the genteelest profession in the world, and must on no account
be confounded with the profession of a solicitor : being quite
another sort of thing, infinitely more exclusive, less mechanical,
and more profitable. We took things much more easily in the
Commons than they could be taken anywhere else, he observed,
and that sets us, as a privileged class, apart. He said it was
impossible to conceal the disagreeable fact, that we were
chiefly employed by solicitors; but he gave me to under-
stand that they were an inferior race of men, universally looked
down upon by all proctors of any pretensions.

I asked Mr. Spenlow what he considered the best sort of
professional business ? He replied, that a good case of a dis-
puted will, where there was a neat little estate of thirty or forty
thousand pounds, was, perhaps, the best of all. In such a case,
he said, not only were there very pretty pickings, in the way of
arguments at every stage of the proceedings, and mountains
upon mountains of evidence on interrogatory and counter-inter-
rogatory (to say nothing of an appeal lying, first to the
Delegates, and then to the Lords) ; but, the costs being pretty
sure to come out of the estate at last, both sides went at it in a
lively and spirited manner, and expense was no consideration.
Then, he launched into a general eulogium on the Commons.
What was to be particularly admired (he said) in the Commons,
was its compactness. It was the most conveniently organised
place in the world. It was the complete idea of snugness. It
lay in a nut-shell. For example : You brought a divorce case,
or a restitution case, into the Consistory. Very good. You
tried it in the Consistory. You made a quiet little round game
of it, among a family group, and you played it out at leisure.
Suppose you were not satisfied with the Consistory, what did
you do then ? Why, you went into the Arches. What was the
Arches ? The same court, in the same room, with the same
bar, and the same practitioners, but another judge, for there
the Consistory judge could plead any court-day as an advocate.
Well, you played your round game out again. Still you were
not satisfied. Very good. What did you do then? Why,
you went to the Delegates. Who were the Delegates ? Why,
the Ecclesiastical Delegates were the advocates without any
business, who had looked on at the round game when it was
playing in both courts, and had seen the cards shuffled, and

David Copperfield 363

cut, and played, and had talked to all the players about it, and
now came fresh, as judges, to settle the matter to the satisfaction
of everybody 1 Discontented people might talk of corruption
in the Commons, closeness in the Commons, and the necessity
of reforming the Commons, said Mr. Spenlow solemnly, in
conclusion ; but when the price of wheat per bushel had been
highest, the Commons had been busiest ; and a man might lay
his hand upon his heart, and say this to the whole world, —
'• Touch the Commons, and down comes the country ! "

I listened to all this with attention ; and though, I must say,
I had my doubts whether the country was quite as much
obliged to the Commons as Mr. Spenlow made out, I respect-
fully deferred to his opinion. That about the price of wheat
per bushel, I modestly felt was too much for my strength, and
quite settled the question. I have never, to this hour, got the
better of that bushel of wheat. It has re-appeared to armihilate
me, all through my Hfe, in connexion with all kinds of subjects.
I don't know now, exactly, what it has to do with me, or what
right it has to crush me, on an infinite variety of occasions ; but
whenever I see my old friend the bushel brought in by the
head and shoulders (as he always is, I observe), I give up a
subject for lost.

This is a digression. / was not the man to touch the
Commons, and bring down the country. I submissively
expressed, by my silence, my acquiescence in all I had heard
from my superior in years and knowledge ; and we talked about
" The Stranger " and the Drama, and the pair of horses, until
we came to Mr. Spenlow's gate.

There was a lovely garden to Mr. Spenlow's house; and
though that was not the best time of the year for seeing a
garden, it was so beautifully kept, that I was quite enchanted.
There was a charming lawn, there were clusters of trees, and
there were perspective walks that I could just distinguish in the
dark, arched over with trellis-work, on which shrubs and flowers
grew in the growing season. " Here Miss Spenlow walks by
herself," I thought. " Dear me ! "

We went into the house, which was cheerfully lighted up,
and into a hall where there were all sorts of hats, caps, great-
coats, plaids, gloves, whips, and walking-sticks. " Where is
Miss Dora ? " said Mr. Spenlow to the servant. " Dora I " I
thought. " What a beautiful name ! "

We turned into a room near at hand (I think it was the
identical breakfast -room, made memorable by the brown East
Indian sherry), and I heard a voice say, " Mr. Copperfield, my

364 David Copperfield

daughter Dora, and my daughter Dora's confidential friend!''
It was, no doubt, Mr. Spenlow's voice, but I didn't know it,
and I didn't care whose it was. All was over in a moment. I
had fulfilled my destiny. I was a captive and a slave. I loved
Dora Spenlow to distraction !

She was more than human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph,
I don't know what she was — anything that no one ever saw,
and everything that everybody ever wanted. I was swallowed
up in an abyss of love in an instant. There was no pausing
on the brink ; no looking down, or looking back ; I was gone,
headlong, before I had sense to say a word to her.

" /," observed a well-remembered voice, when I had bowed
and murmured something, " have seen Mr. Copperfield before."

The speaker was not Dora. • No ; the confidential friend.
Miss Murdstone !

I don't think I was much astonished. To the best of my
judgment, no capacity of astonishment was left in me. There
was nothing worth mentioning in the material world, but Dora
Spenlow, to be astonished about. I said, "How do you
do, Miss Murdstone ? I hope you are well." She answered,
" Very well." I said, " How is Mr. Murdstone ? " She replied,
" My brother is robust, I am obliged to you."

Mr. Spenlow, who, I suppose, had been surprised to see us
recognise each other, then put in his word.

" I am glad to find," he said, " Copperfield, that you and Miss
Murdstone are already acquainted."

" Mr. Copperfield and myself," said Miss Murdstone, with
severe composure, " are connexions. We were once slightly
acquainted. It was in his childish days. Circumstances have
separated us since. I should not have known him."

I replied that I should have known her, anywhere. Which
was true enough.

—-"Miss Murdstone has had the goodness," said Mr. Spenlow
to me, " to accept the office — if I may so describe it — of my
daughter Dora's confidential friend. My daughter Dora
having, unhappily, no mother, Miss Murdstone is obliging
enough to become her companion and protector."

A passing thought occurred to me that Miss Murdstone, like
the pocket instrument called a life-preserver, was not so much
designed for purposes of protection as of assault. But as I had
none but passing thoughts for any subject save Dora, I glanced
at her, directly afterwards, and was thinking that I saw, in her
prettily pettish manner, that she was not very much inclined
to be particularly confidential to her companion and protector,

David Copperfield 365

when a bell rang, which Mr. Spenlow said was the first dinner-
bell, and so carried me off to dress.

The idea of dressing one's self, or doing anything in the way
of action, in that state of love, was a little too ridiculous. I
could only sit down before my fire, biting the key of my carpet-
bag, and think of the captivating, girlish, bright-eyed, lovely
Dora. What a form she had, what a face she had, what a
graceful, variable, enchanting manner !

The bell rang again so soon that I made a mere scramble of
my dressing, instead of the careful operation 1 could have
wished under the circumstances, and went down-stairs. There
was some company. Dora was talking to an old gentleman
with a grey head. Grey as he was — and a great-grandfather
into the bargain, for he said so — I was madly jealous of him.

What a state of mind I was in ! I was jealous of everybody.
I couldn't bear the idea of anybody knowing Mr. Spenlow
better than I did. It was torturing to me to bear them talk
of occurrences in which I had had no share. When a most
amiable person, with a highly polished bald head, asked me
across the dinner-table, if that were the first occasion of my
seeing the grounds, I could have done anything to him that
was savage and revengeful.

I don't remember who was there, except Dora. I have not
the 'least idea what we had for dinner, besides Dora. My
impression is, that I dined off Dora entirely, and sent away
half-a-dozen plates untouched. I sat next to her. I talked to
her. She had the most delightful little voice, the gayest little
laugh, the pleasantest and most fascinating little ways, that
ever led a lost youth into hopeless slavery. She was rather
diminutive altogether. So much the more precious, I thought.

When she went out of the room with Miss Murdstone (no
other ladies were of the party), I fell into a reverie, only dis-
turbed by the cruel apprehension that Miss Murdstone would
disparage me to her. The amiable creature with the polished
head told me a long story, which I think was about gardening.
I think I heard him say, "my gardener," several times. I
seemed to pay the deepest attention to him, but I was
wandering in a garden of Eden all the while, with Dora.

My apprehensions of being disparaged to the object of my
engrossing affection were revived when we went into the
drawing-room, by the grim and distant aspect of Miss Murd-
stone. But I was relieved of them in an unexpected manner.

" David Copperfield," said Miss Murdstone, beckoning me
aside into a window. " A word."

366 David Copperfield

I confronted Miss Murdstone alone.

"David Copperfield," said Miss Murdstone, "I need not
enlarge upon family circumstances. They are not a tempting
subject."

" Far from it, ma'am," I returned.

"Far from it," assented Miss Murdstone. "I do not wish
to revive the memory of past differences, or of past outrages.
I have received outrages from a person — a female, I am sorry
to say, for the credit of my sex — who is not to be mentioned
without scorn and disgust ; and therefore I would rather not
mention her."

I felt very fiery on my aunt's account ; but I said it would
certainly be bettter, if Miss Murdstone pleased, not to mention
her. I could not hear her disrespectfully mentioned, I added,
without expressing my opinion in a decided tone.

Miss Murdstone shut her eyes, and disdainfully inclined her
head ; then, slowly opening her eyes, resumed :

" David Copperfield, I shall not attempt to disguise the
fact, that I formed an unfavourable opinion of you in your
childhood. It may have been a mistaken one, or you may
have ceased to justify it. That is not in question between us
now. I belong to a family remarkable, I believe, for some
firmness ; and 1 am not the creature of circumstance or change.
I may have my opinion of you. You may have your opinion
of me."

I inclined my head, in my turn.

" But it is not necessary," said Miss Murdstone, " that these
opinions should come into collision here. Under existing
circumstances, it is as well on all accounts that they should
not. As the chances of life have brought us together again,
and may bring us together on other occasions, I would say,
let us meet here as distant acquaintances. Family circum-
stances are a sufficient reason for our only meeting on that
footing, and it is quite unnecessary that either of us should
make the other the subject of remark. Do you approve of
this?"

" Miss Murdstone," I returned, " I think you and Mr.
Murdstone used me very cruelly, and treated my mother with
great unkindness. I shall always think so, as long as I live.
But I quite agree in what you propose."

Miss Murdstone shut her eyes again, and bent her head.
Then, just touching the back of my hand with the tips of iier
cold, stiff fingers, she walked away, arranging the little fetters
on her wrists and neck : which seemed to be the same set, in

David Copperfield 367

exactly the same state, as when I had seen her last. These
reminded me, in reference to Miss Murdstone's nature, of the
fetters over a jail-door ; suggesting on the outside, to all
beholders, what was to be expected within.

All I know of the rest of the evening is, that I heard the
empress of my heart sing enchanted ballads in the French
language, generally to the e(Tect that, whatever was the matter,
we ought always to dance, Ta ra la, Ta ra la ! accompanying
herself on a glorified instrument, resembling a guitar. That I
was lost in blissful delirium. That I refused refreshment.
That my soul recoiled from punch particularly. That when
Miss Murdstone took her into custody and led her away, she
smiled and gave me her delicious hand. That I caught a view
of myself in a mirror, looking perfectly imbecile and idiotic.
That I retired to bed in a most maudlin state of mind, and
got up in a crisis of feeble infatuation.

It was a fine morning, and early, and I thought I would go
and take a stroll down one of those wire-arched walks, and
indulge my passion by dwelling on her image. On my way
through the hall, I encountered her little dog, who was called
Jip — short for Gipsy. I approached him tenderly, for I loved
even him ; but he showed his whole set of teeth, got under a
chair expressly to snarl, and wouldn't hear of the least
familiarity.

The garden was cool and solitary. I walked about, wonder-
ing what my feelings of happiness would be, if I could ever V
become engaged to this dear wonder. As to marriage, and
fortune, and all that, I believe I was almost as innocently
undesigning then, as when I loved little Em'ly. To be allowed
to call her " Dora," to write to her, to dote upon and worship
her, to have reason to think that when she was with other
people she was yet mindful of me, seemed to me the summit
of human ambition — I am sure it was the summit of mine.
There is no doubt whatever that I was a lackadaisical young
spooney ; but there was a purity of heart in all this, that pre-
vents my having quite a contemptuous recollection of it, let
me laugh as I may.

I had not been walking long, when I turned a corner, and
met her. I tingle again from head to foot as my recollection
turns that corner, and my pen shakes in my hand.

" You — are — out early, Miss Spenlow," said I.

"It's so stupid at home," she replied, "and Miss Murd-
stone is so absurd 1 She talks such nonsense about its being
necessary for the day to be aired, before I come out. Aired 1 "

368 David Copperfield

(She laughed, here, in the most melodious manner.) "On a
Sunday morning, when I don't practise, I must do something.
So I told papa last night I must come out. Besides, it's the
brightest time of the whole day. Don't you think so ? "

I hazarded a bold flight, and said (not without stammering)
that it was very bright to me then, though it had been very
dark to me a minute before.

" Do you mean a compliment ? " said Dora, " or that the
weather has really changed ? "

I stammered worse than before, in replying that I meant
no compliment, but the plain truth ; though I was not aware
of any change having taken place in the weather. It was in
the state of my own feelings, I added bashfully : to clench the
explanation.

I never saw such curls — how could I, for there never were
such curls ! — as those she shook out to hide her blushes. As to
the straw hat and blue ribbons which was on the top of the
curls, if I could only have hung it up in my room in Bucking-
ham Street, what a priceless possession it would have been I

''You have just come home from Paris," said I.

" Yes," said she. " Have you ever been there ? "

" No."

" Oh ! I hope you'll go soon ! You would like it so
much ! »

Traces of deep-seated anguish appeared in my countenance.
That she should hope I would go, that she should think it
possible I could go, was insupportable. I depreciated Paris ;
I depreciated France. I said I wouldn't leave England,
under existing circumstances, for any earthly consideration.
Nothing should induce me. In short, she was shaking the
curls again, when the little dog came running along the walk
to our relief.

He was mortally jealous of me, and persisted in barking at
me. She took him up in her arms — oh my goodness ! — and
caressed him, but he persisted upon barking still. He wouldn't
let me touch him, when I tried ; and then she beat him. It
increased my sufferings greatly to see the pats she gave him
for punishment on the bridge of his blunt nose, while he
winked his eyes, and hcked her hand, and still growled within
himself like a little double-bass. At length he was quiet —
well he might be with her dimpled chin upon his head ! —
and we walked away to look at a greenhouse.

" You are not very intimate with Miss Murdstone, are you ? *
said Dora.—" My pet."

David Copperfield 369

(The two last words were to the dog. Oh if they had only
been to me !)

" No," I replied. " Not at all so."

" She is a tiresome creature," said Dora, pouting. " I can't
think what papa can have been about, when he chose such a
vexatious thing to be my companion. Who wants a protector ?
I am sure / don't want a protector. Jip can protect me a
great deal better than Miss Murdstone, — can't you, Jip, dear ? "

He only winked lazily, when she kissed his ball of a head.

" Papa calls her my confidential friend, but I am sure she is
no such thing — is she, Jip? We are not going to confide
in any such cross people, Jip and I. We mean to bestow
our confidence where we like, and to find out our own friends,
instead of having them found out for us — don't we, Jip ? "

Jip made a comfortable noise, in answer, a little like a
tea-kettle when it sings. As for me, every word was a new
heap of fetters, rivetted above the last.

" It is very hard, because we have not a kind mama, that
we are to have, instead, a sulky, gloomy old thing like Miss
Murdstone, always following us about — isn't it, Jip ? Never
mind, Jip. We won't be confidential, and we'll make our-
selves as happy as we can in spite of her, and well teaze her,
and not please her — won't we, Jip ? "

If it had lasted any longer, I think I must have gone down
on my knees on the gravel, with the probability before me of
grazing them, and of being presently ejected from the premises
besides. But by good fortune the greenhouse was not far off,
and these words brought us to it.

It contained quite a show of beautiful geraniums. We
loitered along in front of them, and Dora often stopped to
admire this one or that one, and I stopped to admire the same
one, and Dora, laughing, held the dog up childishly, to smell
the flowers ; and if we were not all three in Fairyland, certainly
/ was. The scent of a geranium leaf, at this day, strikes me
with a half comical, half serious wonder as to what change has
come over me in a moment ; and then I see a straw hat and
blue ribbons, and a quantity of curls, and a little black dog
being held up, in two slender arms, against a bank of blossoms
and bright leaves.

Miss Murdstone had been looking for us. She found us
here ; and presented her uncongenial cheek, the little wrinkles
in it filled with hair powder, to Dora to be kissed. Then she
took Dora's arm in hers, and marched us into breakfast as if
it were a soldier's funeral.

370 David Copperfield

How many cups of tea I drank, because Dora made it, I
don't know. But I perfectly remember that I sat swilling tea
until my whole nervous system, if I had had any in those days,
must have gone by the board. By-and-bye we went to church.
Miss Murdstone was between Dora and me in the pew ; but
I heard her sing, and the congregation vanished. A sermon
was delivered — about Dora, of course — and I am afraid that is
all I know of the service.

We had a quiet day. No company, a walk, a family dinner
of four, and an evening of looking over books and pictures;
Miss Murdstone with a homily before her, and her eye upon
us, keeping guard vigilantly. Ah ! little did Mr. Spenlow
imagine, when he sat opposite to me after dinner that day, with
his pocket-handkerchief over his head, how fervently I was
embracing him, in my fancy, as his son-in-law ! Little did he
think, when I took leave of him at night, that he had just
given his full consent to my being engaged to Dora, and that
I was invoking blessings on his head I

We departed early in the morning, for we had a Salvage
case coming on in the Admiralty Court, requiring a rather
accurate knowledge of the whole science of navigation, in
which (as we couldn't be expected to know much about those
matters in the Commons) the judge had entreated two old
Trinity Masters, for charity's sake, to come and help him out.
Dora was at the breakfast-table to make the tea again, however ;
and I had the melancholy pleasure of taking off my hat to her
in the phaeton, as she stood on the door-step with Jip in her
arms.

What the Admiralty was to me that day ; what nonsense I
made of our case in my mind, as I listened to it ; how I saw
" Dora " engraved upon the blade of the silver oar which they
lay upon the table, as the emblem of that high jurisdiction;
and how I felt when Mr. Spenlow went home without me (I
had had an insane hope that he might take me back again), as
if I were a mariner myself, and the ship to which I belonged
had sailed away and left me on a desert island ; I shall make
no fruitless effort to describe. If that sleepy old court could
rouse itself, and present in any visible form the day-dreams I
have had in it about Dora, it would reveal my truth.

I don't mean the dreams that I dreamed on that day alone,
but day after day, from week to week, and term to term. I
went there, not to attend to what was going on, but to think
about Dora. If ever I bestowed a thought upon the cases,
as they dragged their slow length before me, it was only to

David Copperfield 371

wonder, in the matrimonial cases (remembering Dora), how
it was that married people could ever be otherwise than happy;
and, in the Prerogative cases, to consider, if the money in
question had been left to me, what were the foremost steps I
should immediately have taken in regard to Dora. Within
the first week of my passion, I bought four sumptuous waistcoats
— not for myself; / had no pride in them; for Dora — and
took to wearing straw-coloured kid gloves in the streets, and
laid the foundations of all the corns I have ever had. If the
boots I wore at that period could only be produced and com-
pared with the natural size of my feet, they would show what
the state of my heart was, in a most affecting manner.

And yet, wretched cripple as I made myself by this act of
homage to Dora, 1 walked miles upon miles daily in the hope
of seeing her. Not only was I soon as well known on the
Norwood Road as the postmen on that beat, but I pervaded
London likewise I walked about the streets where the best
shops for ladies were, 1 haunted the Bazaar like an unquiet
spirit, I fagged through the Park again and again, long after
I was quite knocked up. Sometimes, at long intervals and
on rare occasions, 1 saw her. Perhaps I saw her glove waved
in a carriage window ; perhaps I met her, walked with her
and Miss Murdstone a little way, and spoke to her. In the
latter case I was always very miserable afterwards, to think that
I had said nothing to the purpose ; or that she had no idea of
the extent of my devotion, or that she cared nothing about
me. I was always looking out, as may be supposed, for
another invitation to Mr. Spenlow's house. I was always
being disappointed, for I got none.

Mrs. Crupp must have been a woman of penetration ; for
when this attachment was but a few weeks old, and I had
not had the courage to write more explicitly even to Agnes,
than that I had been to Mr. Spenlow's house, "whose family,"
I added, " consists of one daughter ; " — I say Mrs. Crupp
must have been a woman of penetration, for, even in that
early stage, she found it out. She came up to me one evening,
when I was very low, to ask (she being then afflicted with the
disorder I have mentioned) if I could oblige her with a little
tincture of cardamums mixed with rhubarb, and flavoured
with seven drops of the essence of cloves, which was the best
remedy for her complaint ; — or, if I had not such a thing
by me, with a little brandy, which was the next best. It was
not, she remarked, so palatable to her, but it was the next
best As I had never even heard of the first remedy, and

372 David Copperfield

always had the second in the closet, I gave Mrs. Crupp a glass
of the second, which (that I might have no suspicion of
its being devoted to any improper use) she began to take in
my presence.

" Cheer up, sir," said Mrs. Crupp. " I can't abear to see
you so, sir : I'm a mother myself."

I did not quite perceive the application of this fact to
myself, but I smiled on Mrs. Crupp, as benignly as was in
my power.

" Come, sir," said Mrs. Crupp. " Excuse me. I know
what it is, sir. There's a lady in the case."

" Mrs. Crupp ? " I returned, reddening.

" Oh, bless you ! Keep a good heart, sir ! " said Mrs.
Crupp, nodding encouragement. " Never say die, sir ! If
She don't smile upon you, there's a many as will. You are
a young gentleman to h smiled on, Mr. Copperfull, and you
must learn your walue, sir."

Mrs. Crupp always called me Mr. Copperfull : firstly, no
doubt, because it was not my name ; and secondly, I am
inclined to think, in some indistinct association with a
washing-day.

" What makes you suppose there is any young lady in the
case, Mrs. Crupp ? " said I.

" Mr. Copperfull," said Mrs. Crupp, with a great ^eal of
feeling, "I'm a mother myself."

For some time Mrs. Crupp could only lay her hand upon
her nankeen bosom, and fortify herself against returning pain
with sips of her medicine. At length she spoke again.

"When the present set were took for you by your dear
aunt, Mr. Copperfull," said Mrs. Crupp, " my remark were,
I had now found summun I could care for. ' Thank Ev'in ! '
were the expression, ' I have now found summun I can care
for ! ' — You don't eat enough, sir, nor yet drink."

" Is that what you found your supposition on, Mrs. Crupp ?"
said I.

"Sir," said Mrs. Crupp, in a tone approaching to severity,
"I've laundressed other young gentlemen besides yourself.
A young gentleman may be over-careful of himself, or he
may be under-careful of himself. He may brush his hair too
regular, or too unregular. He may wear his boots much too
large for him, or much too small. That is according as the
young gentleman has his original character formed. But let
him go to which extreme he may, sir, there's a young lady in
both of 'em."

David Copperfield 373

Mrs. Crupp shook her head in such a determined manner,
that I had not an inch of 'vantage-ground left.

" It was but the gentleman which died here before your-
self," said Mrs. Crupp, " that fell in love — with a barmaid —
and had his waistcoats took in directly, though much swelled
by drinking."

" Mrs. Crupp," said I, " I must beg you not to connect
the young lady in my case with a barmaid, or anything of
that sort, if you please."

" Mr. Copperfull," returned Mrs. Crupp, " I'm a mother
myself, and not likely. I ask your pardon, sir, if I intrude.
I should never wish to intrude where I were not welcome.
But you are a young gentleman, Mr. Copperfull, and my
adwice to you is, to cheer up, sir, to keep a good heart, and
to know your own walue. If you was to take to something,
sir," said Mrs. Crupp, *' if you was to take to skittles, now,
which is healthy, you might find it divert your mind, and do
you good."

With these words, Mrs. Crupp, affecting to be very careful
of the brandy — which was all gone — thanked me with a
majestic curtsey, and retired. As her figure disappeared into
the gloom of the entry, this counsel certainly presented itself
to my mind in the light of a slight liberty on Mrs. Crupp's
part ; but, at the same time, I was content to receive it, in
another point of view, as a word to the wise, and a warning
in future to keep my secret better.

CHAPTER XXVII

TOMMY TRADDLES

It may have been in consequence of Mrs. Crupp's advice, and,
perhaps, for no better reason than because there was a certain
similarity in the sound of the word skittles and Traddles,
that it came into my head, next day, to go and look after
Traddles. The time he had mentioned was more than out,
and he lived in a little street near the Veterinary College at
Camden Town, which was principally tenanted, as one of our
clerks who lived in that direction informed me, by gentlemen
students, who bought live donkeys, and made experiments
on those quadrupeds in their private apartments. Having

374 David Copperfield

obtained from this clerk a direction to the academic grove
in question, I set out, the same afternoon, to visit my old
schoolfellow.

I found that the street was not as desirable a one as I
could have wished it to be, for the sake of Traddles. The
inhabitants appeared to have a propensity to throw any little
trifles they were not in want of, into the road : which not
only made it rank and sloppy, but untidy too, on account of
the cabbage-leaves. The refuse was not wholly vegetable
either, for I myself saw a shoe, a doubled-up saucepan, a
black bonnet, and an umbrella, in various stages of decom-
position, as I was looking out for the number I wanted.

The general air of the place reminded me forcibly of the
days when I lived with Mr. and Mrs. Micawber. An inde-
scribable character of faded gentility that attached to the
house I sought, and made it unlike all the other houses in
the street — though they were all built on one monotonous
pattern, and looked like the early copies of a blundering boy
who was learning to make houses, and had not yet got out of
his cramped brick-and-mortar pothooks — reminded me still
more of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber. Happening to arrive at the
door as it was opened to the afternoon milkman, I was
reminded of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber more forcibly yet.

"Now," said the milkman to a very youthful servant girl.
" Has that there little bill of mine been heerd on ? "

**0h, master says he'll attend to it immediate," was the
reply.

" Because," said the milkman, going on as if he had received
no answer, and speaking, as I judged from his tone, rather for
the edification of somebody within the house, than of the
youthful servant — an impression which was strengthened by
his manner of glaring down the passage — " because that there
little bill has been running so long, that I begin to believe it's
run away altogether, and never won't be heerd of. Now, I'm
not a going to stand it, you know ! " said the milkman, still
throwing his voice into the house, and glaring down the
passage.

As to his dealing in the mild article of milk, by-the-bye,
there never was a greater anomaly. His deportment would
have been fierce in a butcher or a brandy-merchant.

The voice of the youthful servant became faint, but she
seemed to me, from the action of her lips, again to murmur
that it would be attended to immediate.

" I tell you what," said the milkman, looking hard at her for

David Copperfield 375

the first time, and taking her by the chin, " are you fond of
milk?"

" Yes, I likes it," she replied.

"Good," said the milkman. "Then you won't have none
to-morrow. D'ye hear? Not a fragment of milk you won't
have to-morrow."

I thought she seemed, upon the whole, relieved by the
prospect of having any to-day. The milkman, after shaking
his head at her darkly, released her chin, and with anything
rather than good-will opened his can, and deposited the usufd
quantity in the family jug. This done, he went away, mutter-
ing, and uttered the cry of his trade next door, in a vindictive
shriek.

" Does Mr. Traddles live here ? " I then inquired.

A mysterious voice from the end of the passage rephed
"Yes." Upon which the youthful servant replied "Yes."

" Is he at home ? " said I.

Again the mysterious voice replied in the affirmative, and
again the servant echoed it. Upon this, I walked in, and in
pursuance of the servant's directions walked upstairs ; con-
scious, as I passed the back parlour-door, that I was surveyed
by a mysterious eye, probably belonging to the mysterious
voice.

When I got to the top of the stairs — the house was only a
story high above the ground floor — Traddles was on the land-
ing to meet me. He was delighted to see me, and gave me
welcome, with great heartiness, to his little room. It was in
the front of the house, and extremely neat, though sparely
furnished. It was his only room, I saw ; for there was a sofa-
bedstead in it, and his blacking-brushes and blacking were
among his books — on the top shelf, behind a dictionary. His
table was covered with papers, and he was hard at work in an
old coat. I looked at nothing, that I know of, but I saw
everything, even to the prospect of a church upon his china
inkstand, as I sat down — and this, too, was a faculty con-
firmed in me in the old Micawber times. Various ingenious
arrangements he had made, for the disguise of his chest of
drawers, and the accommodation of his boots, his shaving-glass,
and so forth, particularly impressed themselves upon me, as
evidences of the same Traddles who used to make models of
elephants' dens in writing-paper to put flies in ; and to comfort
himself under ill usage, with the memorable works of art I
have so often mentioned.

In a corner of the room was something neatly covered up

376 David Copperfield

with a large white cloth. I could not make out what that
was.

" Traddles," said I, shaking hands with him again, after I
had sat down, " I am delighted to see you."

"I am delighted to see you^ Copperfield," he returned.
" I am very glad indeed to see you. It was because I was
thoroughly glad to see you when we met in Ely Place, and
was sure you were thoroughly glad to see me, that I gave you
this address instead of my address at chambers."

" Oh ! You have chambers ? " said I.

" Why, I have the fourth of a room and a passage, and the
fourth of a clerk," returned Traddles. "Three others and
myself unite to have a set of chambers — to look business-like —
and we quarter the clerk too. Half-a-crown a week he costs
me."

His old simple character and good temper, and something
of his old unlucky fortune also, I thought, smiled at me in the
smile with which he made this explanation.

" It's not because I have the least pride, Copperfield, you
understand," said Traddles, " that I don't usually give my
address here. It's only on account of those who come to me,
who might not like to come here. For myself, I am fighting
my way on in the world against difficulties, and it would be
ridiculous if I made a pretence of doing anything else."

"You are reading for the bar, Mr. Waterbrook informed
me?" said I.

" Why, yes," said Traddles, rubbing his hands, slowly over
one another, " I am reading for the bar. The fact is, I have
just begun to keep my terms, after rather a long delay. It's
some time since I was articled, but the payment of that
hundred pounds was a great pull. A great pull ! " said
Traddles, with a wince, as if he had had a tooth out.

" Do you know what I can't help thinking of, Traddles, as
I sit here looking at you ? " I asked him.

" No," said he.

" That sky-blue suit you used to wear."

" Lord, to be sure ! " cried Traddles, laughing. " Tight in
the arms and legs, you know ? Dear me ! Well ! Those
were happy times, weren't they?"

" I think our schoolmaster might have made them happier,
without doing any harm to any of us, I acknowledge," I
returned.

" Perhaps he might," said Traddles. " But dear me, there
was a good deal of fun going on. Do you remember the

David Copperfield 377

nights in the bedroom ? When we used to have the suppers ?
And when you used to tell the stories ? Ha, ha, ha ! And
do you remember when I got caned for crying about Mr. Mell ?
Old Creakle ! I should like to see him again, too ! "

" He was a brute to you, Traddles," said I, indignantly ; for
his good-humour made me feel as if I had seen him beaten
but yesterday.

" Do you think so ? " returned Traddles. "Really? Perhaps
he was, rather. But it's all over, a long while. Old Creakle ! "

" You were brought up by an uncle, then ? " said I.

" Of course I was ! " said Traddles. " The one I was always
going to write to. And always didn't, eh ! Ha, ha, ha ! Yes,
I had an uncle then. He died soon after I left school."

" Indeed ! "

"Yes. He was a retired — what do you call it! — draper —
cloth-merchant — and had made me his heir. But he didn't
like me when I grew up."

" Do you really mean that ? " said I. He was so composed,
that I fancied he must have some other meaning.

" Oh dear, yes, Copperfield ! I mean it," replied Traddles.
" It was an unfortunate thing, but he didn't like me at alL
He said I wasn't at all what he expected, and so he married his
housekeeper."

" And what did you do ? " I asked.

"I didn't do anything in particular," said Traddles. "I
lived with them, waiting to be put out in the world, until his
gout unfortunately flew to his stomach — and so he died, and so
she married a young man, and so I wasn't provided for."

" Did you get nothing, Traddles, after all ? "

"Oh dear, yes!" said Traddles. "I got fifty pounds. I
had neVer been brought up to any profession, and at first I was
at a loss what to do for myself. However, I began, with the
assistance of the son of a professional man, who had been to
Salem House — Yawler, with his nose on one side. Do you
recollect him?"

No. He had not been there with me ; all the noses were
straight in my day.

" It don't matter," said Traddles. " I began, by means of
his assistance, to copy law writings. That didn't answer very
well ; and then I began to state cases for them, and make
abstracts, and do that sort of work. For I am a plodding kind
of fellow, Copperfield, and had learnt the way of doing such
things pithily. Well I That put it in my head to enter myself
as a law student ; and that ran away with all that was left of

378 David Copperfield

the fifty pounds. Yawler recommended me to one or two
other offices, however— Mr. Waterbrook's for one — and I got
a good many jobs. I was fortunate enough, too, to become
acquainted with a person in the pubUshing way, who was
getting up an Encyclopaedia, and he set me to work; and,
indeed " (glancing at his table), " I am at work for him at this
minute. I am not a bad compiler, Copperfield," said Traddles,
preserving the same air of cheerful confidence in all he said,
"but I have no invention at all; not a particle. I suppose
there never was a young man with less originality than I
have."

As Traddles seemed to expect that I should assent to this
as a matter of course, I nodded; and he went on, with the
same sprightly patience — I can find no better expression — as
before.

'* So, by little and little, and not living high, I managed to
scrape up the hundred pounds at last," said Traddles ; " and
thank Heaven that's paid — though it was — though it certainly
was," said Traddles, wincing again as if he had had another
tooth out, " a pull. I am living by the sort of work I have
mentioned, still, and I hope, one of these days, to get con-
nected with some newspaper: which would almost be the
making of my fortune. Now, Copperfield, you are so exactly
what you used to be, with that agreeable face, and if s so
pleasant to see you, that I sha'n't conceal anything. Therefore
you must know that I am engaged."

Engaged ! Oh Dora !

"She is a curate's daughter," said Traddles ; "one of ten,
down in Devonshire. Yes ! " For he saw me glance, involun-
tarily, at the prospect on the inkstand. " That's the church !
You come round here, to the left, out of this gate," tmcing his
finger along the inkstand, ** and exactly where I hold this pen,
there stands the house — facing, you understand, towards the
church."

The delight with which he entered into these particulars did
not fully present itself to me until afterwards ; for my selfish
thoughts were making a ground plan of Mr. Spenlow's house
and garden at the same moment.

" She is such a dear girl ! " said Traddles ; " a little older
than me, but the dearest girl ! I told you I was going out of
town ? I have been down there. I walked there, and I walked
back, and I had the most delightful time ! I dare say ours is
likely to be a rather long engagement, but our motto is * Wait
and hope!' We always say that. 'Wait and hope,' we always

David Copperfield 379

say. And she would wait, Copperfield, till she was sixty — any
age you can mention — for me ! "

Traddles rose from his chair, and, with a triumphant smile,
put his hand upon the white cloth I had observed.

" However," he said, " it's not that we haven't made a be-
ginning towards housekeeping. No, no ; we have begun. We
must get on by degrees, but we have begun. Here," drawing
the cloth off with great pride and care, " are two pieces of
furniture to commence with. This flower-pot and stand, she ly^
bought herself. You put that in a parlour-window," said
Traddles, falling a little back from it to survey it with the
greater admiration, " with a plant in it, and — and there you
are ! This little round table with the marble top (it's two feet
ten in circumference), / bought. You want to lay a book
down, you know, or somebody comes to see you or your wife,
and wants a place to stand a cup of tea upon, and — and there
you are again! "said Traddles. "It's an admirable piece of
workmanship — firm as a rock ! "

I praised them both, highly, and Traddles replaced the
covering as carefully as he had removed it.

" It's not a great deal towards the furnishing," said Traddles,
"but it's something. The table-cloths, and pillow-cases, and
articles of that kind, are what discourage me most, Copperfield.
So does the ironmongery — candle-boxes, and gridirons, and
that sort of necessaries — because those things tell, and mount
up. However, * wait and hope ! ' And I assure you she's the
dearest girl I "

" I am quite certain of it," said I.

"In the meantime," said Traddles, coming back to his chair;
" and this is the end of my prosing about myself, I get on as
well as I can. I don't make much, but I don't spend much.
In general, I board with the people down-stairs, who are very
agreeable people indeed. Both Mr. and Mrs. Micawber have
seen a good deal of life, and are excellent company."

" My dear Traddles 1 " I quickly exclaimed. " What are
you talking about?"

Traddles looked at me, as if he wondered what /was talking
about.

"Mr. and Mrs. Micawber!" I repeated. "Why, I am
intimately acquainted with them ! "

An opportune double knock at the door, which I knew well
from old experience in Windsor Terrace, and which nobody
but Mr. Micawber could ever have knocked at that door,
resolved any doubt in my mind as to their being my old

380 David Copperfield

friends. I begged Traddles to ask his landlord to walk up.
Traddles accordingly did so, over the banister; and Mr.
Micawber, not a bit changed — his tights, his stick, his shirt-
collar, and his eye-glass, all the same as ever — came into the
room with a genteel and youthful air.

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Traddles," said Mr. Micawber,
with the old roll in his voice, as he checked himself in hum-
ming a soft tune. " I was not aware that there was any
individual, alien to this tenement, in your sanctum."

Mr. Micawber slightly bowed to me, and pulled up his shirt-
collar.

"How do you do, Mr. Micawber? " said I.

" Sir," said Mr. Micawber, " you are exceedingly obliging. I
am in statu quo"

" And Mrs. Micawber ? " I pursued.

" Sir," said Mr. Micawber, " she is also, thank God, in
statu quo."

" And the children, Mr. Micawber ? "

" Sir," said Mr. Micawber, " I rejoice to reply that they are,
likewise, in the enjoyment of salubrity."

All this time, Mr. Micawber had not known me in the least,
though he had stood face to face with me. But now, seeing me
smile, he examined my features with more attention, fell back,
cried, " Is it possible ! Have I the pleasure of again beholding
Copperfield ! " and shook me by both hands with the utmost
fervour.

" Good Heaven, Mr. Traddles ! " said Mr. Micawber, " to
think that I should find you acquainted with the friend of my
youth, the companion of earlier days ! My dear ! " calling
over the banisters to Mrs. Micawber, while Traddles looked
(with reason) not a little amazed at this description of me.
" Here is a gentleman in Mr. Traddles's apartment, wiiom he
wishes to have the pleasure of presenting to you, my love ! "

Mr. Micawber immediately reappeared, and shook hands
with me again.

"And how is our good friend the Doctor, Copperfield?"
said Mr. Micawber, " and all the circle at Canterbury ? "

" I have none but good accounts of them," said I.

" I am most delighted to hear it," said Mr. Micawber. " It
was at Canterbury where we last met. Within the shadow, I
may figuratively say, of that religious edifice, immortalized by
Chaucer, which was anciently the resort of Pilgrims from the
remotest corners of — in short," said Mr. Micawber, "in the
immediate neighbourhood of the Cathedral."

David Copperfield 381

I replied that it was. Mr. Micawber continued talking as
volubly as he could ; but not, I thought, without showing, by
some marks of concern in his countenance, that he was sensible
of sounds in the next room, as of Mrs. Micawber washing her
hands, and hurriedly opening and shutting drawers that were
uneasy in their action.

" You find us, Copperfield," said Mr. Micawber, with one
eye on Traddles, "at present established, on what may be
designated as a small and unassuming scale; but, you are
aware that I have, in the course of my career, surmounted
difficulties, and conquered obstacles. You are no stranger
to the fact, that there have been periods of my life, when it
has been requisite that I should pause, until certain expected
events should turn up ; when it has been necessary that I
should fall back, before making what I trust I shall not be
accused of presumption in terming — a spring. The present is
one of those momentous stages in the life of man. You find
me, fallen back, for a spring; and I have every reason to
believe that a vigorous leap will shortly be the result."

I was expressing my satisfaction, when Mrs. Micawber came
in; a little more slatternly than she used to be, or so she
seemed now, to my unaccustomed eyes, but still with some
preparation of herself for company, and with a pair of brown
gloves on.

"My dear," said Mr. Micawber, leading her towards me,
" here is a gentleman of the name of Copperfield, who wishes
to renew his acquaintance with you."

It would have been better, as it turned out, to have led
gently up to this announcement, for Mrs. Micawber, being in
a delicate state of health, was overcome by it, and was t^en
so unwell, that Mr. Micawber was obliged, in great trepidation,
to run down to the water-butt in the back yard, and draw a
basinful to lave her brow with. She presently revived, how-
ever, and was really pleased to see me. We had half-an-hour's
talk, all together ; and I asked her about the twins, who, she
said, were "grown great creatures ;" and after Master and Miss
Micawber, whom she described as " absolute giants," but they
were not produced on that occasion.

Mr. Micawber was very anxious that I should stay to dinner.
I should not have been averse to do so, but that I imagined
I detected trouble, and calculation relative to the extent of the
cold meat, in Mrs. Micawber's eye. I therefore pleaded another
engagement ; and observing that Mrs. Micawber's spirits were
immediately lightened, I resisted all persuasion to forego it.

382 David Copperfield

But I told Traddles, and Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, that before
I could think of leaving, they must appoint a day when they
would come and dine with me. The occupations to which
Traddles stood pledged, rendered it necessary to fix a some-
what distant one ; but an appointment was made for the
purpose, that suited us all, and then I took my leave.

Mr. Micawber, under pretence of showing me a nearer way
than that by which I had come, accompanied me to the corner
of the street ; being anxious (he explained to me) to say a few
words to an old friend, in confidence.

" My dear Copperfield," said Mr. Micawber, " I need hardly
tell you that to have beneath our roof, under existing circum-
stances, a mind like that which gleams — if I may be allowed
the expression — which gleams — in your friend Traddles, is an
unspeakable comfort. With a washerwoman, who exposes
hard-bake for sale in her parlour-window, dwelling next door,
and a Bow-street officer residing over the way, you may imagine
that his society is a source of consolation to myself and to
Mrs. Micawber. I am at present, my dear Copperfield, en-
gaged in the sale of corn upon commission. It is not an
avocation of a remunerative description — in other words, it
does not pay — and some temporary embarrassments of a
pecuniary nature have been the consequence. I am, how-
ever, delighted to add that I have now an immediate prospect
of something turning up (I am not at liberty to say in what
direction), which I trust will enable me to provide, permanently,
both for myself and for your friend Traddles, in whom I have
an unaffected interest. You may, perhaps, be prepared to hear
p that Mrs. Micawber is in a state of health which renders it
^ not wholly improbable that an addition may be ultimately
made to those pledges of affection which — in short, to the
infantine group. Mrs. Micawber's family have been so good
as to express their dissatisfaction at this state of things. I
have merely to observe, that I am not aware it is any business
of theirs, and that I repel that exhibition of feeling with scorn,
and with defiance ! "

Mr. Micawber then shook hands with me again, and
left me.

David Copperfield 383

CHAPTER XXVIII

MR. MICAWBER'S gauntlet

Until the day arrived on which I was to entertain my
newly-found old friends, I lived principally on Dora and
coffee. In my love-lorn condition, my appetite languished ;
and I was glad of it, for I felt as though it would have
been an act of perfidy towards Dora to have a natural relish
for my dinner. The quantity of walking exercise I took,
was not in this respect attended with its usual consequence, as
the disappointment counteracted the fresh air. I have my
doubts, too, founded on the acute experience acquired at this
period of my life, whether a sound enjoyment of animal food
can develop itself freely in any human subject who is always in
torment from tight boots. I think the extremities require
to be at peace before the stomach will conduct itself with
vigour.

On the occasion of this domestic little party, I did not
repeat my former extensive preparations. I merely provided a
pair of soles, a small leg of mutton, and a pigeon-pie. Mrs.
Crupp broke out into rebellion on my first bashful hint in
reference to the cooking of the fish and joint, and said, with
a dignified sense of injury, " No 1 No, sir ! You will not ask
me sich a thing, for you are better acquainted with me than to
suppose me capable of doing what I cannot do with ampial
satisfaction to my own feelings ! " But, in the end, a com-
promise was effected ; and Mrs. Crupp consented to achieve
this feat, on condition that I dined from home for a fortnight
afterwards.

And here I may remark, that what I underwent from
Mrs. Crupp, in consequence of the tyranny she established
over me, was dreadful. I never was so much afraid of any
one. We made a compromise of everything. If I hesitated,
she was taken with that wonderful disorder which was always
lying in ambush in her system, ready, at the shortest notice, to
prey upon her vitals. If I rang the bell impatiently, after half-
a-dozen unavailing modest pulls, and she appeared at last —
which was not by any means to be relied upon — she would
appear with a reproachful aspect, sink breathless on a chair
near the door, lay her hand upon her nankeen bosom, and be-
come so ill, that I was glad, at any sacrifice of brandy or
anything else, to get rid of her. If I objected to having my

384 David Copperfield

bed made at five o'clock in the afternoon — which I do still
think an uncomfortable arrangement — one motion of her
hand towards the same nankeen region of wounded sensibility
was enough to make me falter an apology. In short, I would
have done anything in an honourable way rather than give
Mrs. Crupp offence : and she was the terror of my life.

I bought a second-hand dumb-waiter for this dinner-party,
in preference to re-engaging the handy young man ; against
whom I had conceived a prejudice, in consequence of meeting
him in the Strand, one Sunday morning, in a waistcoat
remarkably like one of mine, which had been missing since the
former occasion. The " young gal " was re-engaged ; but on
the stipulation that she should only bring in the dishes, and
then withdraw to the landing-place, beyond the outer door;
where a habit of sniffing she had contracted would be lost upon
the guests, and where her retiring on the plates would be a
physical impossibility.

Having laid in the materials for a bowl of punch, to be
compounded by Mr. Micawber ; having provided a bottle of
lavender-water, two wax candles, a paper of mixed pins, and
a pincushion, to assist Mrs. Micawber in her toilette at my
dressing-table ; having also caused the fire in my bedroom to
be lighted for Mrs. Micawber's convenience ; and having laid
the cloth with my own hands, I awaited the result with
composure.

At the appointed time, my three visitors arrived together.
Mr. Micawber with more shirt-collar than usual, and a new
ribbon to his eye-glass; Mrs. Micawber with her cap in a
whity-brown paper parcel; Traddles carrying the parcel, and
supporting Mrs. Micawber on his arm. They were all delighted
with my residence. When I conducted Mrs. Micawber to my
dressing-table, and she saw the scale on which it was prepared
for her, she was in such raptures, that she called Mr. Micawber
to come in and look.

" My dear Copperfield," said Mr. Micawber, " this is
luxurious. This is a way of life which reminds me of the
period when I was myself in a state of celibacy, and Mrs.
Micawber had not yet been solicited to plight her faith at the
Hymeneal altar."

" He means, solicited by him, Mr. Copperfield," said Mrs.
Micawber, archly. " He cannot answer for others."

" My dear," returned Mr. Micawber with sudden serious-
ness, "I have no desire to answer for others. I am too well
aware that when, in the inscrutable decrees of Fate, you were

David Copperfield 385

reserved for me, it is possible you may have been reserved for
one, destined, after a protracted struggle, at length to fall a
victim to pecuniary involvements of a complicated nature.
I understand your allusion, my love. I regret it, but I can
bear it."

"Micawber!" exclaimed Mrs. Micawber, in tears. "Have
I deserved this ! I, who never have deserted you ; who never
will desert you, Micawber ! "

" My love," said Mr. Micawber, much affected, " you will
forgive, and our old and tried friend Copperfield will, I am
sure, forgive, the momentary laceration of a wounded spirit,
made sensitive by a recent collision with the Minion of
Power — in other words, with a ribald Turncock attached to the
waterworks — and will pity, not condemn, its excesses."

Mr. Micawber then embraced Mrs. Micawber, and pressed
my hand; leaving me to infer from this broken allusion that
his domestic supply of water had been cut off that afternoon,
in consequence of default in the payment of the company's
rates.

To divert his thoughts from this melancholy subject, I
informed Mr. Micawber that 1 relied upon him for a bowl of
punch, and led him to the lemons. His recent despondency,
not to say despair, was gone in a moment. I never saw a man
so thoroughly enjoy himself amid the fragrance of lemon-peel
and sugar, the odour of burning rum, and the steam of boiling
water, as Mr. Micawber did that afternoon. It was wonderful
to see his face shining at us out of a thin cloud of these delicate
fumes, as he stirred, and mixed, and tasted, and looked as if he
were making, instead of punch, a fortune for his family down
to the latest posterity. As to Mrs. Micawber, I don't know
whether it was the effect of the cap, or the lavender-water, or
the pins, or the fire, or the wax candles, but she came out of
my room, comparatively speaking, lovely. And the lark was
never gayer than that excellent woman.

I suppose — I never ventured to inquire, but I suppose — that
Mrs. Crupp, after frying the soles, was taken ill. Because we
broke down at that point. The leg of mutton came up very
red within, and very pale without : besides having a foreign
substance of a gritty nature sprinkled over it, as if it had had
a fall into the ashes of that remarkable kitchen fire-place. But
we were not in a condition to judge of this fact from the
appearance of the gravy, forasmuch as the " young gal " had
dropped it all upon the stairs — where it remained, by-the-bye,
in a long train, until it was worn out. The pigeon-pie was not

386 David Copperfield

bad, but it was a delusive pie: the crust being like a disappoint-
ing head, phrenologically speaking : full of lumps and bumps,
with nothing particular underneath. In short, the banquet was
such a failure that I should have been quite unhappy — about
the failure, I mean, for I was always unhappy about Dora — if I
had not been relieved by the great good-humour of my company,
and by a bright suggestion from Mr. Micawber.

"My dear friend Copperfield," said Mr. Micawber, "accidents
will occur in the best-regulated families; and in families not
regulated by that pervading influence which sanctifies while it
enhances the — a — I would say, in short, by the influence of
Woman, in the lofty character of Wife, they may be expected
with confidence, and must be borne with philosophy. If you
will allow me to take the liberty of remarking that there are few
comestibles better, in their way, than a Devil, and that I believe,
with a little division of labour, we could accomplish a good one
if the young person in attendance could produce a gridiron, I
would put it to you, that this little misfortune may be easily
repaired."

There was a gridiron in the pantry, on which my morning
rasher of bacon was cooked. We had it in, in a twinkling, and
immediately applied ourselves to carrying Mr. Micawber's idea
into effect. . The division of labour to which he had referred
was this : — Traddles cut the mutton into slices ; Mr. Micawber
(who could do anything of this sort to perfection) covered them
with pepper, mustard, salt, and cayenne; I put them on the
gridiron, turned them with a fork, and took them off", under
Mr. Micawber's direction; and Mrs. Micawber heated, and
continually stirred, some mushroom ketchup in a little
saucepan. When ^we had slices enough done to begin upon,
we fell-to, with our sleeves still tucked up at the wrist, more
slices spluttering and blazing on the fire, and our attention
divided between the mutton on our plates, and the mutton
then preparing.

What with the novelty of this cookery, the excellence of it,
the bustle of it, the frequent starting up to look after it, the
fi-equent sitting down to dispose of it as the crisp slices came
off" the gridiron hot and hot, the being so busy, so flushed with
the fire, so amused, and in the midst of such a tempting noise
and savour, we reduced the leg of mutton to the bone. Myj
own appetite came back miraculously. I am ashamed to recor'
it, but I really believe I forgot Dora for a little while. I am
satisfied that Mr. and Mrs. Micawber could not have enjoyed
the feast more, if they had sold a bed to provide it. Traddles

David Copperfield 387

laughed as heartily, almost the whole time, as he ate and
worked. Indeed we all did, all at once ; and I dare say there
never was a greater success.

We were at the height of our enjoyment, and were all busily
engaged, in our several departments, endeavouring to bring the
last batch of slices to a state of perfection that should crown
the feast, when I was aware of a strange presence in the room,
and my eyes encountered those of the staid Littimer, standing
hat in hand before me.

" What's the matter?" I involuntarily asked.

" I beg your pardon, sir, I was directed to come in. Is my
master not here, sir ? "

« No."

" Have you not seen him, sir ? "

" No ; don't you come from him ? "

" Not immediately so, sir."

" Did he tell you you would find him here ? "

" Not exactly so, sir. But I should think he might be here
to-morrow, as he has not been here to-day."

" Is he coming up from Oxford ? "

*• I beg, sir," he returned respectfully, •' that you will be
seated, and allow me to do this." With which he took the
fork from my unresisting hand, and bent over the gridiron, as if
his whole attention were concentrated on it.

We should not have been much discomposed, I dare say, by
the appearance of Steerforth himself, but we became in a
moment the meekest of the meek before his respectable
serving-man. Mr. Micawber, humming a tune, to show that
he was quite at ease, subsided into his chair, with the handle
of a hastily concealed fork sticking out of the bosom of his
coat, as if he had stabbed himself. Mrs. Micawber put on her
brown gloves, and assumed a genteel languor. Traddles ran
his greasy hands through his hair, and stood it bolt upright,
and stared in confusion on the table-cloth. As for me, I was a
mere infant at the head of my own table ; and hardly ventured
to glance at the respectable phenomenon, who had come from
Heaven knows where, to put my establishment to rights.

Meanwhile he took the mutton off the gridiron, and gravely
handed it round. We all took some, but our appreciation of
it was gone, and we merely made a show of eating it. As we
severally pushed away our plates, he noiselessly removed them,
and set on the cheese. He took that off, too, when it was
done with ; cleared the table ; piled everything on the dumb-
waiter ; gave us our wine-glasses ; and, of his own accord,

388 David Copperfield

wheeled the dumb-waiter into the pantry. All this was done
in a perfect manner, and he never raised his eyes from what he
was about. Yet his very elbows, when he had his back towards
me, seemed to teem with the expression of his fixed opinion
that I was extremely young.

" Can I do anything more, sir ? "

I thanked him and said, No ; but would he take no dinner
himself?

" None, I am obliged to you, sir."

" Is Mr. Steerforth coming from Oxford ? "

"I beg your pardon, sir? "

" Is Mr. Steerforth coming from Oxford ? "

"I should imagine that he might be here to-morrow, sir.
I rather thought he might have been here to-day, sir. The
mistake is mine, no doubt, sir."

" If you should see him first — " said I.

"If you'll excuse me, sir, I don't think I shall see him
first."

" In case you do," said I, "pray say that I am sorry he was
not here to-day, as an old schoolfellow of his was here."

"Indeed, sir!" and he divided a bow between me and
Traddles, with a glance at the latter.

He was moving softly to the door, when, in a forlorn hope
of saying something naturally — which I never could, to this
man — I said :

"Oh! Littimer!"

"Sir!"

" Did you remain long at Yarmouth, that time?"

" Not particularly so, sir."

" You saw the boat completed ? "

" Yes, sir. I remained behind on purpose to see the boat
completed."

" I know ! " He raised his eyes to mine respectfully. " Mr.
Steerforth has not seen it yet, I suppose ? "

" I really can't say, sir. I think — but I really can't say, sir.
I wish you good night, sir."

He comprehended everybody present, in the respectful bow
with which he followed these words, and disappeared. My
visitors seemed to breathe more freely when he was gone ; but
my own relief was very great, for besides the constraint, arising
from that extraordinary sense of being at a disadvantage which
I always had in this man's presence, my conscience had em-
barrassed me with whispers that I had mistrusted his master,
und I could not repress a vague uneasy dread that he might

David Copperfield 389

find it out. How was it, having so little in reality to conceal,
that I always did feel as if this man were finding me out?

Mr. Micawber roused me from this reflection, which was
blended with a certain remorseful apprehension of seeing
Steerforth himself, by bestowing many encomiums on the
absent Littimer as a most respectable fellow, and a thoroughly
admirable servant. Mr. Micawber, I may remark, had taken
his full share of the general bow, and had received it with
infinite condescension.

"But punch, my dear Copperfield," said Mr. Micawber,
tasting it, "hke time and tide, waits for no man. Ah! it
is at the present moment in high flavour. My love, will
you give me your opinion ? "

Mrs. Micawber pronounced it excellent.

"Then I will drink," said Mr. Micawber, "if my friend
Copperfield will permit me to take that social liberty, to the
days when my friend Copperfield and myself were younger,
and fought our way in the world side by side. I may say,
of myself and Copperfield, in words we have sung together
before now, that

• We twa hae run al)Out the braes
And pu'd the gowans fine'

— in a figurative point of view — on several occasions. I am
not exactly aware," said Mr. Micawber, with the old roll in
his voice, and the old indescribable air of saying something
genteel, "what gowans may be, but I have no doubt that
Copperfield and myself would frequently have taken a pull
at them, if it had been feasible."

Mr. Micawber, at the then present moment, took a pull at
his punch. So we all did : Traddles evidently lost in wonder-
ing at what distant time Mr. Micawber and I could have been
comrades in the battle of the world.

'• Ahem ! " said Mr. Micawber, clearing his throat, and
warming with the punch and with the fire. "My dear,
another glass?"

Mrs. Micawber said it must be very little ; but we couldn't
allow that, so it was a glassful.

"As we are quite confidential here, Mr. Copperfield," said
Mrs. Micawber, sipping her punch, "Mr. Traddles being a
part of our domesticity, I should much like to have your
opinion on Mr. Micawber's prospects. For corn," said Mrs.
Micawber argumentatively, " as I have repeatedly said to Mr.
Micawber, may be gentlemanly, but it is not remunerative.

390 David Copperfield

Commission to the extent of two and ninepence in a fortnight
cannot, however limited our ideas, be considered remunerative."

We were all agreed upon that.

" Then," said Mrs. Micawber, who prided herself on taking
a clear view of things, and keeping Mr. Micawber straight by
her woman's wisdom, when he might otherwise go a little
crooked, " then I ask myself this question. If corn is not
to be relied upon, what is? Are coals to be relied upon?
Not at all. We have turned our attention to that experiment,
on the suggestion of my family, and we find it fallacious."

Mr. Micawber, leaning back in his chair with his hands in
his pockets, eyed us aside, and nodded his head, as much as
to say that the case was very clearly put.

" The articles of corn and coals," said Mrs. Micawber, still
more augumentatively, "being equally out of the question,
Mr. Copperfield, I naturally look round the world, and say,
' What is there in which a person of Mr. Micawber's talent is
likely to succeed?' And I exclude the doing anything on
commission, because commission is not a certainty. What is
best suited to a person of Mr. Micawber's peculiar temperament
is, I am convinced, a certainty.*'

Traddles and I both expressed, by a feeling murmur, that
this great discovery was no doubt true of Mr. Micawber, and
that it did him much credit.

" I will not conceal from you, my dear Mr. Copperfield,"
said Mrs. Micawber, "that / have long felt the Brewing
business to be particularly adapted to Mr. Micawber. Look
at Barclay and Perkins! Look at Truman, Hanbury, and
Buxton ! It is on that extensive footing that Mr. Micawber,
I know from my own knowledge of him, is calculated to shine ;
and the profits, I am told, are e-NOR — mous ! But if Mr.
Micawber cannot get into those firms — which decline to
answer his letters, when he offers his services even in an
inferior capacity — what is the use of dwelling upon that
idea? None. I may have a conviction that Mr. Micawber's
manners "

" Hem ! Really, my dear," interposed Mr. Micawber.

" My love, be silent," said Mrs. Micawber, laying her brown
glove on his hand. " I may have a conviction, Mr. Copperfield,
that Mr. Micawber's manners peculiarly qualify him for the
Banking business. I may argue within myself, that if I had a
deposit at a banking-house, the manners of Mr. Micawber, as
representing that banking-house, would inspire confidence, and
must extend the connexion. But if the various banking-houses

David Copperfield 391

refuse to avail themselves of Mr. Micawber's abilities, or receive
the offer of them with contumely, what is the use of dwelling
upon that idea ? None. As to originating a banking-business,
I may know that there are members of my family who, if they
chose to place their money in Mr. Micawber's hands, might
found an establishment of that description. But if they do not
choose to place their money in Mr. Micawber's hands — which
they don't — what is the use of that ? Again I contend that
we are no farther advanced than we were before."

I shook my head, and said, "Not a bit." Traddles also
shook his head, and said, "Not a bit."

" What do I deduce from this ? " Mrs. Micawber went on to
say, still with the same air of putting a case lucidly. " What is
the conclusion, my dear Mr. Copperfield, to which I am
irresistibly brought? Am I wrong in saying, it is clear that
we must live ? "

I answered " Not at all ! " and Traddles answered " Not at
all ! " and I found myself afterwards sagely adding, alone, that
a person must either live or die.

" Just so," returned Mrs. Micawber. " It is precisely that.
And the fact is, my dear Mr. Copperfield, that we can not live
without something widely different from existing circumstances
shortly turning up. Now I am convinced, myself, and this I
have pointed out to Mr. Micawber several times of late, that
things cannot be expected to turn up of themselves. We must,
in a measure, assist to turn them up. I may be wrong, but I
have formed that opinion."

Both Traddles and I applauded it highly.

"Very well," said Mrs. Micawber. "Then what do I
recommend? Here is Mr. Micawber with a variety of
qualifications — with great talent "

" Really, my love," said Mr. Micawber.

" Pray, my dear, allow me to conclude. Here is Mr. Micawber,
with a Variety of qualifications, with great talent — / should say,
with genius, but that may be the partiality of a wife "

Traddles and I both murmured " No."

" And here is Mr. Micawber without any suitable position or
employment. Where does that responsibility rest? Clearly
on society. Then I would make a fact so disgraceful known,
and boldly challenge society to set it right. It appears to me,
my dear Mr. Copperfield," said Mrs. Micawber, forcibly, "that
what Mr. Micawber has to do, is to throw down the gauntlet to
society, and say, in effect, 'Show me who will take that up.
Let the party immediately step forward.' "

392 David Copperfield

I ventured to ask Mrs. Micawber how this was to be done.

" By advertising," said Mrs. Micawber — " in all the papers.
It appears to me, that what Mr. Micawber has to do, in justice
to himself, in justice to his family, and I will even go so far as
to say in justice to society, by which he has been hitherto over-
looked, is to advertise in all the papers ; to describe himself
plainly as so-and-so, with such and such qualifications, and to
put it thus : * Now employ me, on remunerative terms, and
address, post-paid, \.o W. M., Post Office, Camden Town.' "

" This idea of Mrs. Micawber's, my dear Copperfield," said
Mr. Micawber, making his shirt-collar meet in front of his chin,
and glancing at me sideways, " is, in fact, the Leap to which I
alluded, when I last had the pleasure of seeing you."

" Advertising is rather expensive," I remarked, dubiously.

" Exactly so ! " said Mrs. Micawber, preserving the same
logical air. " Quite true, my dear Mr. Copperfield ! I have
made the identical observation to Mr. Micawber. It is for that
reason especially, that I think Mr. Micawber ought (as I have
already said, in justice to himself, in justice to his family, and
in justice to society) to raise a certain sum of money — on a
bill."

Mr. Micawber, leaning back in his chair, trifled with his eye-
glass, and cast his eyes up at the ceiling ; but I thought him
observant of Traddles, too, who was looking at the fire.

"If no member of my family," said Mrs. Micawber, "is
possessed of sufficient natural feeling to negotiate that bill —
I believe there is a better business-term to express what I
mean "

Mr. Micawber, with his eyes still cast up at the ceiling,
suggested " Discount."

"To discount that bill," said Mrs. Micawber, "then my
opinion is, that Mr. Micawber should go into the City, should
take that bill into the Money Market, and should dispose of it
for what he can get. If the individuals in the Money Market
oblige Mr. Micawber to sustain a great sacrifice, that is between
themselves and their consciences. I view it, steadily, as an
investment. I recommend Mr. Micawber, my dear Mr.
Copperfield, to do the same; to regard it as an investment
which is sure of return, and to make up his mind to any
sacrifice."

I felt, but I am sure I don't know why, that this was self-
denying and devoted in Mrs. Micawber, and I uttered a
murmur to that effect. Traddles, who took his tone from me,
did likewise, still looking at the fire.

David Copperfield 393

" I will not," said Mrs. Micawber, finishing her punch, and
gathering her scarf about her shoulders, preparatory to her
withdrawal to my bedroom : " I will not protract these remarks
on the subject of Mr. Micawber's pecuniary affairs. At your
fireside, my dear Mr. Copperfield, and in the presence of Mr.
Traddles, who, though not so old a friend, is quite one of our-
selves, I could not refrain from making you acquainted with
the course / advise Mr. Micawber to take. I feel that the
time is arrived when Mr. Micawber should exert himself and —
I will add — assert himself, and it appears to me that these are
the means. I am aware that I am merely a female, and that a
masculine judgment is usually considered more competent to
the discussion of such questions ; still I must not forget that,
when I li\ ed at home with my papa and mama, my papa was
in the habit of saying, ' Emma's form is fragile, but her grasp
of a subject is inferior to none.' That my papa was too partial,
I well know; but that he was an observer of character in
some degree, my duty and my reason equally forbid me to
doubt."

With these words, and resisting our entreaties that she would
grace the remaining circulation of the punch with her presence,
Mrs. Micawber retired to my bedroom. And really I felt that
she was a noble woman — the sort of woman who might have
been a Roman matron, and done all manner of heroic things,
in times of public trouble.

In the fervour of this impression, I congratulated Mr.
Micawber on the treasure he possessed. So did Traddles.
Mr. Micawber extended his hand to each of us in succession,
and then covered his face with his pocket-handkerchief,
which I think had more snuff upon it than he was aware
of. He then returned to the punch, in the highest state of
exhilaration.

He was full of eloquence. He gave us to understand that
in our children we lived again, and that, under the pressure of
pecuniary difficulties, any accession to their number was doubly
welcome. He said that Mrs. Micawber had latterly had her
doubts on this point, but that he had dispelled them, and
reassured her. As to her family, they were totally unworthy
of her, and their sentiments were utterly indifferent to him,
and they might — I quote his own expression — go to the
Devil.

Mr. Micawber then delivered a warm eulogy on Traddles.
He said Traddles's was a character, to the steady virtues of
which he (Mr. Micawber) could lay no claim, but which, he

394 David Copperfield

thanked Heaven, he could admire. He feelingly alluded to
the young lady, unknown, whom Traddles had honoured with
his affection, and who had reciprocated that affection by
honouring and blessing Traddles with her affection. Mr.
Micawber pledged her. So did I. Traddles thanked us both,
by saying, with a simplicity and honesty I had sense enough to
be quite charmed with, ' ' I am very much obliged to you indeed.
And I do assure you, she's the dearest girl ! "

Mr. Micawber took an early opportunity, after that, of hinting,
with the utmost delicacy and ceremony, at the state of my
affections. Nothing but the serious assurance of his friend
Copperfield to the contrary, he observed, could deprive him
of the impression that his friend Copperfield loved and was
beloved. After feeling very hot and uncomfortable for some
time, and after a good deal of blushing, stammering, and deny-
ing, I said, having my glass in my hand, " Well ! I would give
them D. ! " which so excited and gratified Mr. Micawber, that
he ran with a glass of punch into my bedroom, in order that
Mrs. Micawber might drink D., who drank it with enthusiasm,
crying from within, in a shrill voice, " Hear, hear ! My dear
Mr. Copperfield, I am delighted. Hear ! " and tapping at the
wall, by way of applause.

Our conversation, afterwards, took a more worldly turn ; Mr.
Micawber telling us that he found Camden Town inconvenient,
and that the first thing he contemplated doing, when the
advertisement should have been the cause of something satis-
factory turning up, was to move. He mentioned a terrace at
the western end of Oxford Street, fronting Hyde Park, on
which he had always had his eye, but which he did not expect
to attain immediately, as it would require a large establishment.
There would probably be an interval, he explained, in which
he should content himself with the upper part of a house, over
some respectable place of business — say in Piccadilly, — which
would be a cheerful situation for Mrs. Micawber ; and where,
by throwing out a bow window, or carrying up the roof another
story, or making some little alteration of that sort, they might
live, comfortably and reputably, for a few years. Whatever was
reserved for him, he expressly said, or wherever his abode might
be, we might rely on this — there would always be a room for
Traddles, and a knife and fork for me. We acknowledged his
kindness; and he begged us to forgive his having launched
into these practical and business-like details, and to excuse it
as natural in one who was making entirely new arrangements
in life.

David Copperfield 395

Mrs. Micawber, tapping at the wall aigain, to know if tea
were ready, broke up this particular phase of our friendly con-
versation. She made tea for us in a most agreeable manner ;
and, whenever I went near her, in handing about the tea-cups
and bread-and-butter, asked me, in a whisper, whether D. was
fair, or dark, or whether she was short, or tall : or something
of that kind ; which I think I liked. After tea, we discussed
a variety of topics before the fire ; and Mrs. Micawber was
good enough to sing us (in a small, thin, fiat voice, which I
remembered to have considered, when I first knew her, the
very table-beer of acoustics) the favourite ballads of "The
Dashing White Serjeant," and " Little Tafflin." For both of
these songs Mrs. Micawber had been famous when she lived at
home with her papa and mama. Mr. Micawber told us, that
when he heard her sing the first one, on the first occasion of
his seeing her beneath the parental roof, she had attracted his
attention in an extraordinary degree ; but that when it came to
Little Tafflin, he had resolved to win that woman or perish in
the attempt.

It was between ten and eleven o'clock when Mrs. Micawber
rose to replace her cap in the whity-brown paper parcel, and to
put on her bonnet. Mr. Micawber took the opportunity of
Traddles putting on his great-coat, to slip a letter into my
hand, with a whispered request that I would read it at my
leisure. I also took the opportunity of my holding a candle
over the banisters to light them down, when Mr. Micawber
was going first, leading Mrs. Micawber, and Traddles was
following with the cap, to detain Traddles for a moment on
the top of the stairs.

" Traddles," said I, " Mr. Micawber don't mean any harm,
poor fellow : but, if I were you, I wouldn't lend him anything."

"My dear Copperfield," returned Traddles, smiling, "I
haven't got anything to lend."

"You have got a name, you know," said I.

"Oh! You call /y^/ something to lend?" returned Traddles,
with a thoughtful look.

"Certainly."

" Oh ! " said Traddles. " Yes, to be sure ! I am very much
obliged to you, Copperfield ; but — I am afraid I have lent him
that already."

" For the bill that is to be a certain investment ? ** I
inquired.

" No," said Traddles. " Not for that one. This is the first
I have heard of that one. I have been thinking that he will

396 D^id Copperfield

most likely propose that one, on the way home. Mine's
another." /

" I hope there ^ill be nothing wrong about it," said I.

" I hope not," said Traddles. " I should think not, though,
because he told me, only the other day, that it was provided
for. That was Mr. Micawber's expression, ' Provided for.' "

Mr. Micawber looking up at this juncture to where we were
standing, I had only time to repeat my caution. Traddles
thanked me, and descended. But I was much afraid, when
I observed the good-natured manner in which he went down
with the cap in his hand, and gave Mrs. Micawber his arm,
that he would be carried into the Money Market neck and
heels.

I returned to my fireside, and was musing, half gravely and
half laughing, on the character of Mr. Micawber and the old
relations between us, when I heard a quick step ascending the
stairs. At first, I thought it was Traddles coming back for
something Mrs. Micawber had left behind ; but as the step
approached, I knew it, and felt my heart beat high, and the
blood rush to my face, for it was Steerforth's.

I was never unmindful of Agnes, and she never left that
sanctuary in my thoughts — if I may call it so — where I had
placed her from the first. But when he entered, and stood
before me with his hand out, the darkness that had fallen
on him changed to light, and I felt confounded and ashamed
of having doubted one I loved so heartily. I loved her none
the less ; I thought of her as the same benignant, gentle angel
in my life; I reproached myself, not her, with having done
him an injury ; and I would have made him any atonement,
if I had known what to make, and how to make it.

" Why, Daisy, old boy, dumb-foundered ! " laughed Steer-
forth, shaking my hand heartily, and throwing it gaily away.
" Have I detected you in another feast, you Sybarite ! These
Doctors' Commons fellows are the gayest men in town, I
believe, and beat us sober Oxford people all to nothing!"
His bright glance went merrily round the room, as he took
the seat on the sofa opposite to me, which Mrs. Micawber had
recently vacated, and stirred the fire into a blaze.

"I was so surprised at first," said I, giving him welcome
with all the cordiality I felt, "that I had hardly breath to
greet you with, Steerforth."

" Well, the sight of me is good for sore eyes, as the Scotch
say," replied Steerforth, " and so is the sight of you, Daisy, in
full bloom. How are you, my Bacchanal ? "

David CopperSeld 397

"I am very well," said I; "and noi at all Bacchanalian
to-night, though I confess to another party of three."

"All of whom I met in the street, ta'iking loud in your
praise," returned Steerforth. "Who's oui friend in the
tights?"

I gave him the best idea I could, in a few vrords, of Mr.
Micawber. He laughed heartily at my feeble portrait of that
gentleman, and said he was a man to know, and he must know
him.

" But who do you suppose our other friend is ? " said I, in
my turn.

"Heaven knows," said Steerforth. "Not a bore, I hope?
I thought he looked a little like one."

" Traddles ! " I replied, triumphantly.

" Who's he ? " asked Steerforth, in his careless way.

" Don't you remember Traddles? Traddles in our room at
Salem House?"

"Oh! That fellow!" said Steerforth, beating a lump of
coal on the top of the fire, with the poker. " Is he as soft
as ever ? And where the deuce did you pick him up ? "

I extolled Traddles in reply, as highly as I could ; for I felt
that Steerforth rather slighted him. Steerforth, dismissing
the subject with a light nod, and a smile, and the remark
that he would be glad to see the old fellow too, for he had
always been an odd fish, inquired if I could give him anything
to eat ? During most of this short dialogue, when he had not
been speaking in a wild vivacious manner, he had sat idly
beating on the lump of coal with the poker. I observed that
he did the same thing while I was getting out the remains of
the pigeon-pie, and so forth.

"Why, Daisy, here's a supper for a king!" he exclaimed,
starting out of his silence with a burst, and taking his seat at the
table. " I shall do it justice, for I have come from Yarmouth."

" I thought you came from Oxford ? " I returned.

"Not I," said Steerforth. "I have been seafaring — better
employed."

" Littimer was here to-day, to inquire for you," I remarked,
" and I understood him that you were at Oxford ; though, now
I think of it, he certainly did not say so."

" Littimer is a greater fool than I thought him, to have been
inquiring for me at all," said Steerforth, jovially pouring out
a glass of wine, and drinking to me. "As to understanding
him, you are a cleverer fellow than most of us, Daisy, if you
can do that."

398 Da/id Copperfield

" That's true, indeed," said I, moving my chair to the table.
" So you have been at Yarmouth, Steerforth ! " interested to
know all about it. " Have you been there long ? "

" No," he returned. " An escapade of a week or so."

"And how are they all? Of course, little Em'ly is not
married yet?"

"Not yet. Going to be, I believe — in so many weeks, or
months, or something or other. I have not seen much of
'em. By-the-bye;" he laid down his knife and fork, which
he had been using with great diligence, and began feeling in
his pockets ; " I have a letter for you."

" From whom ? "

"Why, from your old nurse," he returned, taking some
papers out of his breast pocket. " ' J. Steerforth, Esquire,
debtor, to The Willing Mind;' that's not it. Patience, and
we'll find it presently. Old what's-his-name's in a bad way,
and it's about that, I believe."

" Barkis, do you mean ? "

" Yes ! " still feeling in his pockets, and looking over their
contents : " it's all over with poor Barkis, I am afraid. I saw
a little apothecary there — surgeon, or whatever he is — who
brought your worship into the world. He was mighty learned
about the case, to me ; but the upshot of his opinion was, that
the carrier was making his last journey rather fast. — Put your
hand into the breast pocket of my great-coat on the chair
yonder, and I think you'll find the letter. Is it there ? "

" Here it is ! " said I.

"That's right!"

It was from Peggotty; something less legible than usual, and
brief. It informed me of her husband's hopeless state, and
hinted at his being " a little nearer " than heretofore, and con-
sequently more difficult to manage for his own comfort. It
said nothing of her weariness and watching, and praised him
highly. It was written with a plain, unaffected, homely piety
that I knew to be genuine, and ended with " my duty to my
ever darling " — meaning myself.

While I deciphered it, Steerforth continued to eat and
drink.

" It's a bad job," he said, when I had done ; " but the sun
sets every day, and people die every minute, and we mustn't
be scared by the common lot. If we failed to hold our own,
because that equal foot at all men's doors was heard knocking
somewhere, every object in this world would slip from us.
No 1 Ride on ! Rough-shod if need be, smooth-shod if that

David Copperfeld 399

will do, but ride on ! Ride on over all tbstacles, and win the

race

" And win what race ? " said I.

" The race that one has started in," said he. " Ride on ! "

I noticed, I remember, as he paused, looking at me with his
handsome head a little thrown back, and his glass raised in his [/^
hand, that, though the freshness of the sea-wind was on his
face, and it was ruddy, there were traces in it, made since I
last saw it, as if he had applied himself to some habitual strain
of the fervent energy which, when roused, was so passionately
roused within him. I had it in my thoughts to remonstrate
with him upon his desperate way of pursuing any fancy that
he took — such as this buffeting of rough seas, and braving of
hard weather, for example — when my mind glanced off to the
immediate subject of our conversation again, and pursued that
instead.

•* I tell you what, Steerforth," said I, " if your high spirits
will listen to me "

" They are potent spirits, and will do whatever you like," he
answered, moving from the table to the fireside again.

" Then I tell you what, Steerforth. I think I will go down
and see my old nurse. It is not that I can do her any good,
or render her any real service ; but she is so attached to me
that my visit wrll have as much effect on her, as if I could do
both. She will take it so kindly, that it will be a comfort and
support to her. It is no great effort to make, I am sure, for
such a friend as she has been to me. Wouldn't you go a day's
journey, if you were in my place ? "

His face was thoughtful, and he sat considering a little
before he answered, in a low voice, " Well ! Go. You can do
no harm."

" You have just come back," said I, " and it would be in
vain to ask you to go with me ? "

"Quite," he returned. "I am for Highgate to-night. I
have not seen my mother this long time, and it lies upon my
conscience, for it's something to be loved as she loves her
prodigal son.— Bah ! Nonsense ! — You mean to go to-morrow,
I suppose ? " he said, holding me out at arm's length, with a
hand on each of my shoulders.

"Yes, I think so."

" Well, then, don't go till next day. I wanted you to come
and stay a few days with us. Here I am, on purpose to bid
you, and you fly off to Yarmouth ! "

" You are a nice fellow to talk of flying off, Steerforth, who

400 Dayid Copperfield

are always running mid on some unknown expedition or
other ! "

He looked at we for a moment without speaking, and then
rejoined, still holding me as before, and giving me a shake :

" Come ! Say the next day, and pass as much of to-morrow
as you can vith us ! Who knows when we may meet again,
else ? Come ! Say the next day ! I want you to stand
between Kosa Dartle and me, and keep us asunder."

" Would you love each other too much, without me ? "

" Yes ; or hate," laughed Steerforth ; " no matter which.
Come! Say the next day!"

I said the next day ; and he put on his great-coat and
lighted his cigar, and set off to walk home. Finding him in
this intention, I put on my own great-coat (but did not light
my own cigar, having had enough of that for one while) and
walked with him as far as the open road ; a dull road, then,
at night. He was in great spirits all the way ; and when we
parted, and I looked after him going so gallantly and airily
homeward, I thought of his saying, " Ride on over all obstacles,
and win the race ! " and wished, for the first time, that he had
some worthy race to run.

I was undressing in my own room, when Mr. Micawber's
letter tumbled on the floor. Thus reminded of it, I broke
the seal and read as follows. It was dated an hour and a half
before dinner. I am not sure whether I have mentioned that,
when Mr. Micawber was at any particularly desperate crisis,
he used a sort of legal phraseology : which he seemed to think
equivalent to winding up his affairs.

" Sir — for I dare not say my dear Copperfield,
" It is expedient that I should inform you that the under-
signed is Crushed. Some flickering efforts to spare you the
premature knowledge of his calamitous position, you may
observe in him this day; but hope has sunk beneath the
horizon, and the undersigned is Crushed.

" The present communication is penned within the personal
range (I cannot call it the society) of an individual, in a state
closely bordering on intoxication, employed by a broker. That
individual is in legal possession of the premises, under a
distress for rent. His inventory includes, not only the chattels
and effects of every description belonging to the undersigned,
as yearly tenant of this habitation, but also those appertaining
to Mr. Thomas Traddles, lodger, a member of the Honourable
Society of the Inner Temple.

David Copperfield 401

" If any drop of gloom were wanting in the overflowing cup,
which is now ' commended ' (in the language of an immortal
Writer) to the lips of the undersigned, it would be found in
the fact, that a friendly acceptance granted to the undersigned,
by the before-mentioned Mr. Thomas Traddles, for the sum of
;^23 4s. ^\d, is over due, and is not provided for. Also, in
the fact that the living responsibilities clinging to the under-
signed will, in the course of nature, be increased by the sum
of one more helpless victim ; whose miserable appearance may
be looked for — in round numbers — at the expiration of a period
not exceeding six lunar months from the present date.

" After premising thus much, it would be a work of super-
erogation to add, that dust and ashes are for ever scattered.
"On

"The
« Head
"Of

"WiLKINS MiCAWBER.**

Poor Traddles ! I knew enough of Mr. Micawber by this
time, to foresee that he might be expected to recover the
blow ; but my night's rest was sorely distressed by thoughts of
Traddles, and of the curate's daughter, who was one of ten,
down in Devonshire, and who was such a dear girl, and who
would wait for Traddles (ominous praise !) until she was sixty,
or any age that could be mentioned.

CHAPTER XXIX

I VISIT STEERFORTH AT HIS HOME, AGAIN

I MENTIONED to Mr. Spenlow in the morning, that I wanted
leave of absence for a short time; and as I was not in the
receipt of any salary, and consequently was not obnoxious to
the implacable Jorkins, there was no difficulty about it. I
took that opportunity, with my voice sticking in my throat,
and my sight failing as I uttered the words, to express my hope
that Miss Spenlow was quite well ; to which Mr. Spenlow
replied, with no more emotion than if he had been speaking
of an ordinary human being, that he was much obliged to me,
and she was very well.

We articled clerks, as germs of the patrician order of

402 David Copperfield

proctors, were treated with so much consideration, that I was
almost my own master at all times. As I did not care, however,
to get to Highgate before one or two o'clock in the day, and
as we had another little excommunication case in court that
morning, which was called The office of the Judge promoted
by Tipkins against Bullock for his soul's correction, I passed
an hour or two in attendance on it with Mr. Spenlow very
agreeably. It arose out of a scuffle between two church-
wardens, one of whom was alleged to have pushed the other
against a pump ; the handle of which pump projecting into a
school-house, which school-house was under a gable of the
church-roof, made the push an ecclesiastical offence. It was
an amusing case ; and sent me up to Highgate, on the box of
the stage-coach, thinking about the Commons, and what Mr.
Spenlow had said about touching the Commons and bringing
down the country.

Mrs. Steerforth was pleased to see me, and so was Rosa
Dartle. I was agreeably surprised to find that Littimer was
not there, and that we were attended by a modest little parlour-
maid, with blue ribbons in her cap, whose eye it was much
more pleasant, and much less disconcerting, to catch by
accident, than the eye of that respectable man. But what
I particularly observed, before I had been half-an-hour in the
house, was the close and attentive watch Miss Dartle kept
upon me; and the lurking manner in which she seemed to
compare my face with Steerforth's, and Steerforth's with mine,
and to lie in wait for something to come out between the, two.
So surely as I looked towards her, did I see that eager visage,
with its gaunt black eyes and searching brow, intent on mine ;
or passing suddenly from mine to Steerforth's ; or comprehend-
ing both of us at once. In this lynxlike scrutiny she was so
far from faltering when she saw I observed it, that at such a
time she only fixed her piercing look upon me with a more
intent expression still. Blameless as I was, and knew that I
was, in reference to any wrong she could possibly suspect me
of, I shrunk before her strange eyes, quite unable to endure
their hungry lustre.

All day, she seemed to pervade the whole house. If I
talked to Steerforth in his room, I heard her dress rustle in
the little gallery outside. When he and I engaged in some of
our old exercises on the lawn behind the house, I saw her face
pass from window to window, like a wandering light, uqtil
it fixed itself in one, and watched us. When we all four went
out walking in the afternoon, she closed her thin hand on my

David Copperfield 403

arm like a spring, to keep me back, while Steerforth and his
mother went on out of hearing : and then spoke to me.

"You have been a long time," she said, "without coming
here. Is your profession really so engaging and interesting as
to absorb your whole attention ? I ask because I always want
to be informed, when I am ignorant. Is it really though ? "

I replied that I liked it well enough, but that I certainly
could not claim so much for it.

" Oh ! I am glad to know that, because I always like to be
put right when I am wrong," said Rosa Dartle. " You mean
it is a little dry, perhaps ? "

" Well," I replied ; " perhaps it was a Httle dry."

" Oh ! and that's a reason why you want relief and change —
excitement, and all that ? " said she. " Ah ! very true ! But
isn't it a little Eh? — for him ; I don't mean you?"

A quick glance of her eye towards the spot where Steerforth
was walking, with his mother leaning on his arm, showed
me whom she meant ; but beyond that, I was quite lost. And
I looked so, I have no doubt.

" Don't it — I don't say that it does, mind I want to know —
don't it rather engross him ? Don't it make him, perhaps,
a little more remiss than usual in his visits to his blindly-doting
— eh ? " With another quick glance at them, and such a glance
at me as seemed to look into my innermost thoughts.

" Miss Dartle," I returned, " pray do not think "

" I don't ! " she said. " Oh dear me, don't suppose that
I think anything ! I am not suspicious. I only ask a question.
I don't state any opinion. I want to found an opinion on what
you tell me. Then, it's not so? Well ! I am very glad to
know it."

" It certainly is not the fact," said I, perplexed, " that I am
accountable for Steerforth's having been away from home longer
than usual — if he has been ; which I really don't know at this
moment, unless I understand it from you. I have not seen
him this long while, until last night."

"No?"

" Indeed, Miss Dartle, no ! "

As she looked full at me, I saw her face grow sharper and
paler, and the marks of the old wound lengthen out until it cut
through the disfigured lip, and deep into the nether lip, and
slanted down the face. There was something positively awful
to me in this, and in the brightness of her eyes, as she said,
looking fixedly at me :

"What is he doing?"

404 David Copperfield

I repeated the words, more to myself than her, being so
amazed.

" What is he doing ? " she said, with an eagerness that
seemed enough to consume her like a fire. " In what is that
man assisting him, who never looks at me without an inscrutable
falsehood in his eyes? If you are honourable and faithful,
I don't ask you to betray your friend. I ask you only to tell
me, is it anger, is it hatred, is it pride, is it restlessness, is it
some wild fancy, is it love, what is it, that is leading him ? "

"Miss Dartle," I returned, "how shall I tell you, so that you
will believe me, that I know of nothing in Steerforth different
from what there was when I first came here ? I can think
of nothing. I firmly believe there is nothing. I hardly
understand even what you mean."

As she still stood looking fixedly at me, a twitching or throb-
bing, from which I could not dissociate the idea of pain, came
into that cruel mark ; and lifted up the corner of her lip as
if with scorn, or with a pity that despised its object. She put
her hand upon it hurriedly — a hand so thin and delicate, that
when I had seen her hold it up before the fire to shade her
face, I had compared it in my thoughts to fine porcelain — and
saying, in a quick, fierce, passionate way, " I swear you to secrecy
about this ! " said not a word more.

Mrs. Steerforth was particularly happy in her son's society,
and Steerforth was, on this occasion, particularly attentive
and respectful to her. It was very interesting to me to see
them together, not only on account of their mutual affection,
but because of the strong personal resemblance between them,
and the manner in which what was haughty or impetuous in
him was softened by age and sex, in her, to a gracious dignity.
I thought, more than once, that it was well no serious cause of
division had ever come between them ; or two such natures—
I ought rather to express it, two such shades of the same
nature — might have been harder to reconcile than the two
extremest opposites in creation. The idea did not originate in
my own discernment, I am bound to confess, but in a speech
of Rosa Dartle's.

She said at dinner :

"Oh, but do tell me, though, somebody, because I have
been thinking about it all day, and I want to know."

" You want to know what, Rosa ? " returned Mrs. Steerforth.
" Pray, pray, Rosa, do not be mysterious."

" Mysterious I " she cried. " Oh ! really? Do you consider
me so ? "

David Copperfield 405

"Do I constantly entreat you," said Mrs. Steerforth, "to
speak plainly, in your own natural manner ? "

" Oh ! then this is not my natural manner ? " she rejoined.
" Now you must really bear with me, because I ask for inform-
ation. We never know ourselves."

" It has become a second nature," said Mrs. Steerforth,
without any displeasure ; " but I remember, — and so must you,
I think, — when your manner was different, Rosa ; when it was
not so guarded, and was more trustful."

" I am sure you are right," she returned ; " and so it is that
bad habits grow upon one ! Really ? Less guarded and more
trustful ? How can I, imperceptibly, have changed, I wonder ?
Well, thaf s very odd ! I must study to regain my former
self."

" I wish you would," said Mrs. Steerforth, with a smile.

" Oh ! I really will, you know ! " she answered. " I will
learn frankness from — let me see — from James.**

"You cannot learn frankness, Rosa," said Mrs. Steerforth
quickly — for there was always some effect of sarcasm in what
Rosa Dartle said, though it was said, as this was, in the most
unconscious manner in the world — " in a better school."

"That I am sure of," she answered, with uncommon fervour.
" If I am sure of anything, of course, you know, I am sure
of that."

Mrs. Steerforth appeared to me to regret having been a little
nettled ; for she presently said, in a kind tone :

" Well, my dear Rosa, we have not heard what it is that you
want to be satisfied about ? "

"That I want to be satisfied about?" she replied, with
provoking coldness. " Oh ! It was only whether people, who
are like each other in their moral constitution — is that the
phrase ? "

" It's as good a phrase as another," said Steerforth.

" Thank you : — whether people, who are like each other in
their moral constitution, are in greater danger than people not
so circumstanced, supposing any serious cause of variance to
arise between them, of being divided angrily and deeply ? "

" I should say yes," said Steerforth.

" Should you ? " she retorted. " Dear me ! Supposing then,
for instance — any unlikely thing will do for a supposition —
that you and your mother were to have a serious quarrel."

" My dear Rosa," interposed Mrs. Steerforth, laughing good-
naturedly, " suggest some other supposition ! James and I
know our duty to each other better, I pray Heaven!"

4o6 David Copperfield

" Oh ! " said Miss Dartle, nodding her head thoughtfully.
"To be sure. That would prevent it? Why, of course it
would. Ex-actly. Now, I am glad I have been so foolish as
to put the case, for it is so very good to know that your
duty to each other would prevent it ! Thank you very
much."

One other little circumstance connected with Miss Dartle
I must not omit ; for I had reason to remember it thereafter,
when all the irremediable past was rendered plain. During the
whole of this day, but especially from this period of it, Steerforth
exerted himself with his utmost skill, and that was with his
utmost ease, to charm this singular creature into a pleasant and
pleased companion. That he should succeed, was no matter of
surprise to me. That she should struggle against the fascinat-
ing influence of his delightful art — delightful nature I thought
it then — did not surprise me either ; for I knew that she was
sometimes jaundiced and perverse. I saw her features and her
manner slowly change ; I saw her look at him with growing
admiration ; I saw her try, more and more faintly, but always
angrily, as if she condemned a weakness in herself, to resist
the captivating power that he possessed ; and finally, I saw her
sharp glance soften, and her smile become quite gentle, and
I ceased to be afraid of her as I had really been all day,
and we all sat about the fire, talking and laughing together,
with as little reserve as if we had been children.

Whether it was because we had sat there so long, or because
Steerforth was resolved not to lose the advantage he had
gained, I do not know ; but we did not remain in the dining-
room more than five minutes after her departure. "She is
playing her harp," said Steerforth, softly, at the drawing-room
door, " and nobody but my mother has heard her do that, I
believe, these three years." He said it with a curious smile,
which was gone directly ; and we went into the room and found
her alone.

" Don't get up," said Steerforth (which she had already done) ;
" my dear Rosa, don't ! Be kind for once, and sing us an Irish
song."

" What do you care for an Irish song ? " she returned.

" Much ! " said Steerforth. " Much more than for any other.
Here is Daisy, too, loves music from his soul. Sing us an Irish
song, Rosa ! and let me sit and listen as I used to do."

He did not touch her, or the chair from which she had risen,
but sat himself near the harp. She stood beside it for some
little while, in a curious way, going through the motion of

David Copperfield 407

playing it with her right hand, but not sounding it. At length
she sat down, and drew it to her with one sudden action, and
played and sang.

I don't know what it was, in her touch or voice, that made
that song the most unearthly I have ever heard in my life, or
can imagine. There was something fearful in the reality of it.
It was as if it had never been written, or set to music, but
sprung out of the passion within her ; which found imperfect
utterance in the low sounds of her voice, and crouched again
when all was still. I was dumb when she leaned beside the
harp again, playing it, but not sounding it, with her right
hand.

A minute more, and this had roused me from my trance : —
Steerforth had left his seat, and gone to her, and had put his
arm laughingly about her, and had said, " Come, Rosa, for the
future we will love each other very much ! " And she had
struck him, and had thrown him off with the fury of a wild cat,
and had burst out of the room.

"What is the matter with Rosa?" said Mrs. Steerforth,
coming in.

" She has been an angel, mother," returned Steerforth, " for
a little while ; and has run into the opposite extreme, since, by
way of compensation."

"You should be careful not to irritate her, James. Her
temper has been soured, remember, and ought not to be tried."

Rosa did not come back ; and no other mention was made
of her, until I went with Steerforth into his room to say Good-
night. Then he laughed about her, and asked me if I had evei
seen such a fierce little piece of incomprehensibility.

I expressed as much of my astonishment as was then capable
of expression, and asked if he could guess what it was that she
had taken so much amiss, so suddenly.

"Oh, Heaven knows," said Steerforth. "Anything you like
— or nothing ! I told you she took everything, herself included,
to a grindstone, and sharpened it. She is an edge-tool, and
requires great care in dealing with. She is always dangerous.
Good-night ! "

" Good-night ! " said I, " my dear Steerforth ! I shall be
gone before you wake in the momirig. Good-night ! "

He was unwilling to let me go ; and stood, holding me out,
with a hand on each of my shoulders, as he had done in my
own room.

" Daisy," he said, with a smile — " for though that's not the
name your Godfathers and Godmothers gave you, it's the

4o8 David Copperfield

name I like best to call you by — and I wish, I wish, I wish, you
could give it to me ! "

'* Why, so I can, if I choose," said I.

^* Daisy, if anything should ever separate us, you must think
of me at my best, old boy. Come ! Let us make that bargain.
Think of me at my best, if circumstances should ever part us ! "

"You have no best to me, Steerforth," said I, "and no
worst. You are always equally loved, and cherished in my
heart."

So much compunction for having ever wronged him, even by
a shapeless thought, did I feel within me, that the confession of
having done so was rising to my lips. But for the reluctance I
had, to betray the confidence of Agnes, but for my uncertainty
how to approach the subject with no risk of doing so, it would
have reached them before he said, " God bless you, Daisy, and
good night ! " In my doubt, it did not reach them ; and we
shook hands, and we parted.

I was up with the dull dawn, and, having dressed as quietly
as I could, looked into his room. He was fast asleep ; lying,
easily, with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie
at school.

The time came in its season, and that was very soon, when
I almost wondered that nothing troubled his repose, as I looked
at him. But he slept — let me think of him so again — as I had
often seen him sleep at school ; and thus, in this silent hour, I
left him.

— Never more, oh God forgive you, Steerforth ! to touch that
passive hand in love and friendship. Never, never more !

CHAPTER XXX

A LOSS

I GOT down to Yarmouth in the evening, and went to the inn.
I knew that Peggotty's spare room — my room — was likely to
have occupation enough in a little while, if that great Visitor,
before whose presence all the living must give place, were not
already in the house ; so I betook myself to the inn, and dined
there, and engaged my bed.

It was ten o'clock when I went out. Many of the shops
were shut, and the town was dull. When I came to Omer and
Joram's, I found the shutters up, but the shop-door standing

David Copperfield 409

open. As I could obtain a perspective view of Mr. Omer inside,
smoking his pipe by the parlour-door, I entered, and asked him
how he was.

"Why, bless my life and soul !" said Mr. Omer, "how do
you find yourself? Take a seat. — Smoke not disagreeable, I
hope?"

" By no means," said I. " I like it — in somebody else's
pipe."

" What, not in your own, eh ? " Mr. Omer returned, laughing.
" All the better, sir. Bad habit for a young man. Take a seat.
I smoke, myself, for the asthma."

Mr. Omer had made room for me, and placed a chair. He
now sat down again very much out of breath, gasping at his
pipe as if it contained a supply of that necessary, without which
he must perish.

" I am sorry to have heard bad news of Mr. Barkis," said I.

Mr. Omer looked at me, with a steady countenance, and
shook his head.

" Do you know how he is to-night ? " I asked.

" The very question I should have put to you, sir," returned
Mr. Omer, " but on account of delicacy. It's one of the draw-
backs of our line of business. When a party's ill, we carCt ask
how the party is."

The difficulty had not occurred to me ; though I had had
my apprehensions too, when I went in, of hearing the old tune.
On its being mentioned, I recognised it, however, and said as
much.

"Yes, yes, you understand," said Mr. Omer, nodding his
head, "We dursn't do it. Bless you, it would be a shock
that the generality of parties mightn't recover, to say ' Omer
and Joram's compliments, and how do you find yourself this
morning ? ' — or this afternoon — as it may be."

Mr. Omer and I nodded at each other, and Mr. Omer
recruited his wind by the aid of his pipe.

" It's one of the things that cut the trade off from attentions
they could often wish to show," said Mr. Omer. " Take my-
self. If I have known Barkis a year, to move to as he went
by, I have known him forty year. But / can't go and say,
' how is he ? ' "

I felt it was rather hard on Mr. Omer, and I told him so.

" I'm not more self-interested, I hope, than another man,"
said Mr. Omer. " Look at me ! My wind may fail me at any
moment, and it ain't likely that, to my own knowledge, I'd be
self-interested under such circumstances. I say it ain't likely,

4IO David Copperfield

in a, man who knows his wind will go, when it docs go, as if a
pair of bellows was cut open ; and that man a grandfather,"
said Mr. Omer.

I said, "Not at all."

" It ain't that I complain of my line of business," said Mr.
Omer. "It ain't that. Some good and some bad goes, no
doubt, to all callings. What I wish is, that parties was brought
up stronger-minded."

Mr. Omer, with a very complacent and amiable face, took
several puffs in silence; and then said, resuming his first
point :

"Accordingly we're obleeged, in ascertaining how Barkis
goes on, to limit ourselves to Em'ly. She knows what our real
objects are, and she don't have any more alarms or suspicions
about us, than if we was so many lambs. Minnie and Joram
have just stepped down to the house, in fact (she's there, after
hours, helping her aunt a bit), to ask her how he is to-night ;
and if you was to please to wait till they come back, they'd give
you full partic'lers. Will you take something ? A glass of srub
and water, now? I smoke on srub and water, myself," said
Mr. Omer, taking up his glass, " because it's considered soften-
ing to the passages, by which this troublesome breath of mine
gets into action. But, Lord bless you," said Mr. Omer,
huskily, " it ain't the passages that's out of order ! ' Give me
breath enough,' says I to my daughter Minnie, * and /'U find
passages, my dear.' "

He really had no breath to spare, and it was very alarming
to see him laugh. When he was again in a condition to be
talked to, I thanked him for the proffered refreshment, which
I declined, as I had just had dinner; and, observing that I
would wait, since he was so good as to invite me, until his
daughter and his son-in-law came back, I inquired how little
Em'ly was ?

"Well, sir," said Mr. Omer, removing his pipe, that he might
rub his chin; "I tell you truly, I shall be glad when her
marriage has taken place."

" Why so ? " I inquired.

"Well, she's unsettled at present," said Mr. Omer. "It
ain't that she's not as pretty as ever, for she's prettier — I do
assure you, she is prettier. It ain't that she don't work as well
as ever, for she does. She was worth any six, and she is worth
any six. But somehow she wants heart. If you understand,"
said Mr. Omer, after rubbing his chin again, and smoking a
little, " what I mean in a general way by the expression, * A

David Copperfield 411

long pull, and a strong pull, and a pull altogether, my hearties,
hurrah ! ' I should say to you, that that was — in a general way
— what I miss in Em'ly."

Mr. Omer's face and manner went for so much, that I could
conscientiously nod my head, as divining his meaning. My
quickness of apprehension seemed to please him, and he went
on :

'• Now, I consider this is principally on account of her being
in an unsettled state, you see. We have talked it over a good
deal, her uncle and myself, and her sweetheart and myself,
after business ; and I consider it is principally on account ol
her being unsettled. You must always recollect of Em'ly," said
Mr. Omer, shaking his head gently, " that she's a most extra-
ordinary affectionate little thing. The proverb says, ' You can't
make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.* Well, I don't know about
that. I rather think you may, if you begin early in life. She
has made a home out of that old boat, sir, that stone and marble
couldn't beat."

" I am sure she has ! " said I.

" To see the clinging of that pretty little thing to her uncle,"
said Mr. Omer ; " to see the way she holds on to him, tighter
and tighter, and closer and closer, every day, is to see a
sight. Now, you know, there's a struggle going on when
that's the case. Why should it be made a longer one than is
needful?"

I listened attentively to the good old fellow, and acquiesced,
with all my heart, in what he said.

"Therefore, I mentioned to them," said Mr. Omer, in a
comfortable, easy-going tone, " this. I said, ' Now, don't con-
sider Em'ly nailed down in point of time, at all. Make it your
own time. Her services have been more valuable than was
supposed ; her learning has been quicker than was supposed ;
Omer and Joram can run their pen through what remains ; and
she's free when you wish. If she likes to make any little
arrangement, afterwards, in the way of doing any little thing
for us at home, very well. If she don't, very well still. We're
no losers, anyhow.' For — don't you see," said Mr. Omer,
touching me with his pipe, " it ain't likely that a man so short
of breath as myself, and a grandfather too, would go and strain
points with a little bit of a blue-eyed blossom, like her ? "

" Not at all, I am certain," said I.

" Not at all ! You're right ! " said Mr. Omer. " Well, sir,
her cousin — you know it's a cousin she's going to be married
to?"

412 David Copperfield

"Oh yes," I replied. " I know him well."

"Of course you do," said Mr. Omer. "Well, sir! Her
cousin being, as it appears, in good work, and well to do,
thanked me in a very manly sort of manner for this (conducting
himself altogether, I must say, in a way that gives me a high
opinion of him), and went and took as comfortable a little
house as you or I could wish to clap eyes on. That little
house is now furnished, right through, as neat and complete as
a doll's parlour ; and but for Barkis's illness having taken this
bad turn, poor fellow, they would have been man and wife — I
dare say, by this time. As it is, there's a postponement."

" And Emily, Mr. Omer ? " I inquired. " Has she become
more settled ? "

" Why that, you know," he returned, rubbing his double chin
again, "can't naturally be expected. The prospect of the
change and separation, and all that, is, as one may say, close
to her and far away from her, both at once. Barkis's death
needn't put it off much, but his lingering might. Anyway, it's
an uncertain state of matters, you see."

"I see," said I.

"Consequently," pursued Mr. Omer, "Em'ly's still a little
down and a little fluttered; perhaps, upon the whole, she's
more so than she was. Every day she seems to get fonder and
fonder of her uncle, and more loth to part from all of us. A
kind word from me brings the tears into her eyes ; and if you
was to see her with my daughter Minnie's little girl, you'd never
forget it. Bless my heart alive ! " said Mr. Omer, pondering,
" how she loves that child ! "

Having so favourable an opportunity, it occurred to me to
ask Mr. Omer, before our conversation should be interrupted
by the return of his daughter and her husband, whether he
knew anything of Martha.

" Ah ! " he rejoined, shaking his head, and looking very much
dejected. " No good. A sad story, sir, however you come to
know it. I never thought there was harm in the girl. I
wouldn't wish to mention it before my daughter Minnie — for
she'd take me up directly — but I never did. None of us ever
did."

Mr. Omer, hearing his daughter's footstep before I heard it,
touched me with his pipe, and shut up one eye, as a caution.
She and her husband came in immediately afterwards.

Their report was, that Mr. Barkis was " as bad as bad could
be ; " that he was quite unconscious ; and that Mr. Chillip had
mournfully said in the kitchen, on going away just now, that

David Copperfield 413

the College of Physicians, the College of Surgeons, and Apothe-
caries' Hall, if they were all called in together, couldn't help
him. He was past both Colleges, Mr. Chillip said, and the
Hall could only poison him.

Hearing this, and learning that Mr. Peggotty was there, I
determined to go to the house at once. I bade good-night to
Mr. Omer, and to Mr. and Mrs. Joram ; and directed my steps
thither, with a solemn feeling, which made Mr. Barkis quite a
new and different creature.

My low tap at the door was answered by Mr. Peggotty. He
was not so much surprised to see me as I had expected. I
remarked this in Peggotty, too, when she came down; and
I have seen it since ; and I think, in the expectation of that
dread surprise, all other changes and surprises dwindle into
nothing.

I shook hands with Mr. Peggotty, and passed into the
kitchen, while he softly closed the door. Little Emily was
sitting by the fire, with her hands before her face. Ham was
standing near her.

We spoke in whispers; listening, between whiles, for any
sound in the room above. I had not thought of it on the
occasion of my last visit, but how strange it was to me now, to
miss Mr. Barkis out of the kitchen !

"This is very kind of you, Mas'r Davy," said Mr. Peggotty.

" It's oncommon kind," said Ham.

" Em'ly, my dear," cried Mr. Peggotty. " See here ! Here's
Mas'r Davy come ! What, cheer up, pretty ! Not a wured to
Mas'r Davy ? "

There was a trembling upon her, that I can see now. The
coldness of her hand when I touched it, I can feel yet. Its
only sign of animation was to shrink from mine ; and then she
glided from the chair, and, creeping to the other side of her
uncle, bowed herself, silently and trembling still, upon his
breast.

"It's such a loving art," said Mr. Peggotty, smoothing
her rich hair with his great hard hand, " that it can't abear the
sorror of this. It's nat'ral in young folk, Mas'r Davy, when
they're new to these here trials, and timid, like my little bird,
—it's nat'ral."

She clung the closer to him, but neither lifted up her face,
nor spoke a word.

" It's getting late, my dear," said Mr. Peggotty, " and here's
Ham come fur to take you home. Theer ! Go along with t'
other loving art ! What, Em'ly ? Eh, my pretty ? "

414 David Copperfield

The sound of her voice had not reached me, but he bent his
head as if he listened to her, and then said :

"Let you stay with your uncle? Why, you doen't mean
to ask me that ! Stay with your uncle, Moppet ? When your
husband that'll be so soon, is here fur to take you home?
Now a person wouldn't think it, fur to see this little thing
alongside a rough-weather chap like me," said Mr. Peggotty,
looking round at both of us, with infinite pride ; " but the sea
ain't more salt in it than she has fondness in her for her uncle
—a foolish little Em'ly ! "

" Em'ly 's in the right in that, Mas'r Davy ! " said Ham.
" Lookee here ! As Em'ly wishes of it, and as she's hurried
and frightened, like, besides, I'll leave her till morning. Let
me stay too ! "

" No, no," said Mr. Peggotty. " You doen't ought — a
married man like you — or what's as good — to take and hull
away a day's work. And you doen't ought to watch and work
both. That won't do. You go home and turn in. You ain't
afeerd of Em'ly not being took good care on, / know."

Ham yielded to this persuasion, and took his hat to go.
Even when he kissed her, — and I never saw him approach her,
but I felt that nature had given him the soul of a gentleman, —
she seemed to cling closer to her uncle, even to the avoidance
of her chosen husband. I shut the door after him, that it
might cause no disturbance of the quiet that prevailed ; and
when I turned back, I found Mr. Peggotty still talking to
her.

" Now, I'm a going up-stairs to tell your aunt as Mas'r
Davy's here, and that'll cheer her up a bit," he said. " Sit ye
down by the fire, the while, my dear, and warm these mortal
cold hands. You doen't need to be so fearsome, and take on
so much. What ? You'll go along with me ? — Well ! come
along with me — come I If her uncle was turned out of house
and home, and forced to lay down in a dyke, Mas'r Davy,"
said Mr. Peggotty, with no less pride than before, "it's my
belief she'd go along with him, now ! But there'll be some one
else, soon — some one else, soon, Em'ly ! "

Afterwards, when I went up-stairs, as I passed the door of
my little chamber, which was dark, I had an indistinct im-
pression of her being within it, cast down upon the floor.
But, whether it was really she, or whether it was a confusion of
the shadows in the room, I don't know now.

I had leisure to think, before the kitchen-fire, of pretty little
Em'ly's dread of death — which, added to what Mr. Omer had

David Copperfield 415

told me, I took to be the cause of her being so unlike herself
— and I had leisure, before Peggotty came down, even to
think more leniently of the weakness of it : as I sat counting
the ticking of the clock, and deepening my sense of the solemn
hush around me. Peggotty took me in her arms, and blessed
and thanked me over and over again for being such a comfort
to her (that was what she said) in her distress. She then
entreated me to come up-stairs, sobbing that Mr. Barkis had
always liked me and admired me ; that he had often talked of
me, before he fell into a stupor; and that she believed, in
case of his coming to himself again, he would brighten up at
sight of me, if he could brighten up at any earthly thing.

The probability of his ever doing so, appeared to me, when
I saw him, to be very small. He was lying with his head
and shoulders out of bed, in an uncomfortable attitude, half
resting on the box which had cost him so much pain and
trouble. I learned that, when he was past creeping out of
bed to open it, and past assuring himself of its safety by
means of the divining rod I had seen him use, he had
required to have it placed on the chair at the bedside, where
he had ever since embraced it, night and day. His arm lay
on it now. Time and the world were slipping from beneath
him, but the box was there ; and the last words he had uttered
were (in an explanatory tone) ''Old Clothes !"

" Barkis, my dear ! " said Peggotty, almost cheerfully :
bending over him, while her brother and I stood at the bed's
foot. " Here's my dear boy — my dear boy. Master Davy,
who brought us together, Barkis ! That you sent messages
by, you know ! Won't you speak to Master Davy ? "

He was as mute and senseless as the box, from which his
form derived the only expression it had.

" He's a going out with the tide," said Mr. Peggotty to
me, behind his hand.

My eyes were dim, and so were Mr. Peggotty's ; but
I repeated in a whisper, " With the tide ? "

"People can't die, along the coast," said Mr. Peggotty,
"except when the tide's pretty nigh out. They can't be
bom, unless it's pretty nigh in — not properly born, till flood.
He's a going out with the tide. It's ebb at half-arter
three, slack water half-an-hour. If he lives 'till it turns,
he'll hold his own till past the flood, and go out with the
next tide."

We remained there, watching him, a long time — hours.
What mysterious influence my presence had upon him in

4i6 David Copperfield

that state of his senses, I shall not pretend to say ; but when
he at last began to wander feebly, it is certain he was
muttering about driving me to school.

" He's coming to himself," said Peggotty.

Mr. Peggotty touched me, and whispered with much awe
and reverence, " They are both a going out fast."

" Barkis, my dear ! " said Peggotty.

" C. P. Barkis," he cried faintly. " No better woman
anywhere ! "

" Look ! Here's Master Davy ! " said Peggotty. For he
now opened his eyes.

I was on the point of asking him if he knew me, when he
tried to stretch out his arm, and said to me, distinctly, with
a pleasant smile :

" Barkis is willin' ! "

And, it being low water, he went out with the tide.

CHAPTER XXXI

A GREATER LOSS

It was not difficult for me, on Peggotty's solicitation, to
resolve to stay where I was, until after the remains of the
poor carrier should have made their last journey to Blunder-
stone. She had long ago bought, out of her own savings,
a little piece of ground in our old churchyard near the grave
of "her sweet girl," as she always called my mother; and
there they were to rest.

In keeping Peggotty company, and doing all I could for
her (little enough at the utmost), I was as grateful, I rejoice
to think, as even now I could wish myself to have been.
But I am afraid I had a supreme satisfaction, of a personal
and professional nature, in taking charge of Mr. Barkis's
will, and expounding its contents.

I may claim the merit of having originated the suggestion
that the will should be looked for in the box. After some
search, it was found in the box, at the bottom of a horse's
nose-bag ; wherein (besides hay) there was discovered an old
gold watch, with chain and seals, which Mr. Barkis had worn
on his wedding-day, and which had never been seen before
or since ; a silver tobacco-stopper, in the form of a leg ; an
imitation lemon, full of minute cups and saucers, which

David Copperfield 417

I have some idea Mr. Barkis must have purchased to present
to me when I was a child, and afterwards found himself
unable to part with ; eighty-seven guineas and a half, in
guineas and half-guineas ; two hundred and ten pounds, in
perfectly clean Bank notes ; certain receipts for Bank of
England stock ; an old horse-shoe, a bad shilling, a piece
of camphor, and an oyster-shell. From the circumstance of
the latter article having been much polished, and displaying
prismatic colours on the inside, I conclude that Mr. Barkis
had some general ideas about pearls, which never resolved
themselves into anything definite.

For years and years, Mr. Barkis had carried this box, on
all his journeys, every day. That it might the better escape
notice, he had invented a fiction that it belonged to " Mr.
Blackboy," and was '* to be left with Barkis till called for ; "
a fable he had elaborately written on the lid, in characters
now scarcely legible.

He had hoarded, all these years, I found, to good purpose.
His property in money amounted to nearly three thousand
pounds. Of this he bequeathed the interest of one thousand
to Mr. Peggotty for his life ; on his decease, the principal to
be equally divided between Peggotty, little Em'ly, and me,
or the survivor or survivors of us, share and share alike.
All the rest he died possessed of, he bequeathed to Peggotty j
whom he left residuary legatee, and sole executrix of that his
last will and testament.

I felt myself quite a proctor when I read this document
aloud with all possible ceremony, and set forth its pro-
visions, any number of times, to those whom they concerned.
I began to think there was more in the Commons than I had
supposed. I examined the will with the deepest attention,
pronounced it perfectly formal in all respects, made a pencil-
mark or so in the margin, and thought it rather extraordinary
that I knew so much.

In this abstruse pursuit ; in making an account for
Peggotty, of all the property into which she had come ; in
arranging all the affairs in an orderly manner ; and in being
her referee and adviser on every point, to our joint delight ;
I passed the week before the funeral. I did not see little
Emily in that interval, but they told me she was to be
quietly married in a fortnight.

I did not attend the funeral in character, if I may venture
to say so. I mean I was not dressed up in a black cloak . /
and a streamer, to frighten the birds ; but I walked over to ^

4i8 David Copperfield

Blunderstone early in the morning, and was in the church-
yard when it came, attended only by Peggotty and her
brother. The mad gentleman looked on, out of my little
window ; Mr. Chillip's baby wagged its heavy head, and
rolled its goggle eyes, at the clergyman, over its nurse's
shoulder; Mr. Omer breathed short in the background; no
one else was there; and it was very quiet. We walked
about the churchyard for an hour, after all was over ; and
pulled some young leaves from the tree above my mother's
grave.

A dread falls on me here. A cloud is lowering on the
distant town, towards which I retraced my solitary steps. I
fear to approach it. I cannot bear to think of what did
come, upon that memorable night ; of what must come again,
if I go on.

It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no
better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. It is done.
Nothing can undo it ; nothing can make it otherwise than as
it was.

My old nurse was to go to London with me next day, on the
business of the will. Little Emily was passing that day at Mr.
Omer's. We were all to meet in the old boathouse that night.
Ham would bring Emily at the usual hour. I would walk
back at my leisure. The brother and sister would return as
they had come, and be expecting us, when the day closed in, at
the fireside.

I parted from them at the wicket-gate, where visionary Straps
had rested with Roderick Random's knapsack in the days of
yore ; and, instead of going straight back, walked a little dis-
tance on the road to Lowestoft. Then I turned, and walked
back towards Yarmouth. I stayed to dine at a decent alehouse,
some mile or two from the Ferry I have mentioned before ;
and thus the day wore away, and it was evening when I
reached it. Rain was falling heavily by that time, and it was a
, wild night ; but there was a moon behind the clouds, and it was
not dark.

I was soon within sight of Mr. Peggotty's house, and of the
light within it shining through the window. A little floundering
across the sand, which was heavy, brought me to the door, and
I went in.

It looked very comfortable indeed. Mr. Peggotty had
smoked his evening pipe, and there were preparations for some
supper by-and-bye. The fire was bright, the ashes were thrown
up, the locker was ready for little Emily in her old place. In

David Copperfield 419

her own old place sat Peggotty, once more, looking (but for
her dress) as if she had never left it. She had fallen back,
already, on the society of the work-box with Saint Paul's
upon the lid, the yard-measure in the cottage, and the bit of
wax candle : and there they all were, just as if they had never
been disturbed. Mrs. Gummidge appeared to be fretting a
little, in her old corner ; and consequently looked quite natural,
too.

" You're first of the lot, Mas'r Davy ! " said Mr. Peggotty,
with a happy face. "Doen't keep in that coat, sir, if it's
wet."

"Thank you, Mr. Peggotty," said I, giving him my outer coat
to hang up. " It's quite dry."

" So 'tis ! " said Mr. Peggotty, feeling my shoulders. " As a
chip ! Sit ye down, sir. It ain't o' no use saying welcome to
you, but you're welcome, kind and hearty."

"Thank you, Mr. Peggotty, I am sure of that. Well,
Peggotty ! " said I, giving her a kiss. " And how are you, old
woman ? "

" Ha, ha ! " laughed Mr. Peggotty, sitting down beside us, and
rubbing his hands in his sense of relief from recent trouble, and
in the genuine heartiness of his nature ; " there's not a woman
in the wureld, sir — as I tell her — that need to feel more easy
in her mind than her 1 Slie done her dooty by the departed,
and the departed know'd it ; and the departed done what was
right by her, as she done what was right by the departed ; — and
— and — and it's all right ! "

Mrs. Gummidge groaned.

"Cheer up, my pritty mawther!" said Mr. Peggotty.
(But he shook his head aside at us, evidently sensible of
the tendency of the late occurrences to recall the memory of
the old one.) " Doen't be down I Cheer up, for your own
self, on'y a little bit, and see if a good deal more doen't come
nat'ral!"

" Not to me, Dan'l," returned Mrs. Gummidge. " Nothink's
nat'ral to me but to be lone and lorn."

*' No, no," said Mr. Peggotty, soothing her sorrows.

" Yes, yes, Dan'l ! " said Mrs. Gummidge. " I ain't a person
to live with them as has had money left. Thinks go too
contrairy with me. I had better be a riddance."

" Why, how should I ever spend it without you ? " said Mr.
Peggotty, with an air of serious remonstrance. "What are
you a talking on ? Doen't I want you more now, than ever I
did?"

420 David Copperfield

" I know'd I was never wanted before ! " cried Mrs.
Gummidge, with a pitiable whimper, " and now I'm told so !
How could I expect to be wanted, being so lone and lorn, and
so contrairy ! "

Mr. Peggotty seemed very much shocked at himself for
having made a speech capable of this unfeeling construction,
but was prevented from replying, by Peggotty's pulling his
sleeve, and shaking her head. After looking at Mrs. Gum-
midge for some moments, in sore distress of mind, he glanced
at the Dutch clock, rose, snuffed the candle, and put it in the
window.

"Theer!" said Mr. Peggotty, cheerily. "Theer we are,
Missis Gummidge 1 " Mrs. Gummidge slightly groaned.
" Lighted up, accordin' to custom ! You're a wonderin' what
that's fur, sir ! Well, it's fur our little Em'ly. You see, the
path ain't over light or cheerful arter dark ; and when I'm here
at th« hour as she's a comin' home, I put the light in the
winder. That, you see," said Mr. Peggotty, bending over me
with great glee, "meets two objects. She says, says Em'ly,
' Theer's home ! ' she says. And likewise, says Em'ly, * My
uncle's theer ! ' For if I ain't theer, I never have no light
showed."

" You're a baby ! " said Peggotty ; very fond of him for it, if
she thought so.

" Well," returned Mr. Peggotty, standing with his legs
pretty wide apart, and rubbing his hands up and down them
in his comfortable satisfaction, as he looked alternately at us
and at the fire, " I doen't know but I am. Not, you see, to
look at."

" Not azackly," observed Peggotty.

"No," laughed Mr. Peggotty, "aot to look at, but to— to
consider on, you know. / doen't care, bless you ! Now I tell
you. When I go a looking and looking about that theer
pritty house of our Em'ly's, I'm — I'm Gormed," said Mr.
Peggotty, with sudden emphasis — " theer ! I can't say more —
if I doen't feel as if the littlest things was her, a'most. I
takes 'em up and I puts 'em down, and I touches of 'em
as delicate as if they was our Em'ly. So 'tis with her
little bonnets and that. I couldn't see one on 'em rough
used a purpose — not fur the whole wureld. There's a
babby for you, in the form of a great Sea Porkypine ! "
said Mr. Peggotty, relieving his earnestness with a roar of
laughter.

Peggotty and I both laughed, but not so loud.

David Copperfield 421

"It's my opinion^ you see," said Mr. Peggotty, with a
delighted face, after some further rubbing of his legs, " as this
is along of my havin' played with her so much, and made
believe as we was Turks, and French, and sharks, and every
wariety of forrinners — bless you, yes ; and lions and whales,
and I doen't know what all ! — when she wam't no higher than
my knee. I've got into the way on it, you know. Why, this
here candle, now ! " said Mr. Peggotty, gleefully holding out his
hand towards it, *' / know wery well that arter she's married
and gone, I shall put that candle theer, just that same as now.
I know wery well that when I'm here o' nights (and where else
should / live, bless your arts, whatever fortun I come into !)
and she ain't heer, or I ain't theer, I shall put the candle in the
winder, and sit afore the fire, pretending I'm expecting of her,
like I'm a doing now. TJur^s a babby for you," said Mr.
Peggotty, with another roar, " in the form of a Sea Porkypine !
Why, at the present minute, when I see the candle sparkle up,
I says to myself, * She's a looking at it ! Em'ly's a coming ! '
There's a babby for you, in the form of a Sea Porkypine I Right
for all that," said Mr. Peggotty, stopping in his roar, and smiting
his hands together ; " fur here she is ! "

It was only Ham. The night should have turned more wet
since I came in, for he had a large sou'wester hat on, slouched
over his face.

" Wheer's Em'ly ? " said Mr. Peggotty.

Ham made a motion with his head, as if she were outside
Mr. Peggotty took the light from the window, trimmed it, put
it on the table, and was busily stirring the fire, when Ham, who
had not moved, said :

" Mas'r Davy, will you come out a minute, and see what
Em'ly and me has got to show you?"

We went out. As I passed him at the door, I saw, to my
astonishment and fright, that he was deadly pale. He pushed
me hastily into the open air, and closed the door upon us.
Only upon us two.

" Ham ! what's the matter? "

" Mas'r Davy ! — " Oh, for his broken heart, how dreadfully
he wept !

I was paralyzed by the sight of such grief I don't
know what I thought, or what I dreaded. I could only look
at him.

" Ham ! Poor good fellow ! For Heaven's sake, tell me
what's the matter ! "

" My love, Mas'r Davy — the pride and hope of my art —

422 David Copperfield

her that I'd have died for, and would die for now — she's
gone ! "

" Gone ! "

" Em'ly's run away ! Oh, Mas'r Davy, think how she's run
away, when I pray my good and gracious God to kill her (her
that is so dear above all things) sooner than let her come to ruin
and disgrace ! "

The face he turned up to the troubled sky, the quivering of
his clasped hands, the agony of his figure, remain associated
with that lonely waste, in my remembrance, to this hour. It is
always night there, and he is the only object in the scene.

"You're a scholar," he said, hurriedly, "and know what's
right and best. What am I to say, indoors ? How am I ever
to break it to him, Mas'r Davy ? "

I saw the door move, and instinctively tried to hold the latch
on the outside, to gain a moment's time. It was too late.
Mr. Peggotty thrust forth his face ; and never could I forget
the change that came upon it when he saw us, if I were to live
five hundred years.

I remember a great wail and cry, and the women hanging
about him, and we all standing in the room ; I with a paper in
my hand, which Ham had given me ; Mr. Peggotty, with his
vest torn open, his hair wild, his face and lips quite white, and
blood trickling down his bosom (it had sprung from his mouth,
I think), looking fixedly at me.

" Read it, sir," he said, in a low shivering voice. *' Slow,
please. I doen't know as I can understand."

In the midst of the silence of death, I read thus, from a
blotted letter:

** 'When you, who love me so much better than I ever have deserved,
even when my mind was innocent, see this, I shall be far away.' "

" I shall be fur away," he repeated slowly. " Stop ! Em'ly
fur away. Well ! "

•* ' When I leave my dear home — my dear home — oh, my dear home I —
in the morning — ' "

the letter bore date on the previous night :

«' « — it will be never to come back, unless he brings me back a lady.
This will be found at night, many hours after, instead of me. Oh, if you
knew how my heart is torn. If even you, that I have wronged so much,
that never can forgive me, could only know what I suffer! I am too
wicked to write about myself. Oh, take comfort in thinking that I am so
bad. Oh, for mercy's sake, tell uncle that I never loved him half so dear
as now. Oh, don't remember how affectionate and kind you have all bfeen

David Copperfield 423

to me — don*t remember we were ever to be married — but try to think as if
I died when I was little, and was buried somewhere. Pray Heaven that I
am going away from, have compassion on my uncle ! Tell him that I
never loved him half so dear. Be his comfort. Love some good girl, that
will be what I was once to uncle, and be true to you, and worthy of you,
and know no shame but me. God bless all 1 I'll pray for all, often, on
my knees. If he don't bring me back a lady, and I don't pray for my own
self, I'll pray for all. My parting love to uncle. My last tears, and my
last thanks, for uncle I ' "

That was all.

He stood, long after I had ceased to read, still looking at
me. At length I ventured to take his hand, and to entreat
him, as well as I could, to endeavour to get some command
of himself. He replied, " I thankee, sir, I thankee ! " without
moving.

Ham spoke to him. Mr. Peggotty was so far sensible of his
affliction, that he wrung his hand ; but, otherwise, he remained
in the same state, and no one dared to disturb him.

Slowly, at last he moved his eyes from my face, as if he were
waking from a vision, and cast them round the room. Then
he said, in a low voice :

" Who's the man ? I want to know his name."

Ham glanced at me, and suddenly I felt a shock that struck
me back.

"There's a man suspected," said Mr. Peggotty. "Who
is it?"

" Mas'r Davy ! " implored Ham. " Go out a bit, and let me
tell him what I must. You doen't ought to hear it, sir."

•I felt the shock again. I sank down in a chair, and tried to
utter some reply ; but my tongue was fettered, and my sight
was weak.

" I want to know his name ! " I heard said, once more.

"For some time past," Ham faltered, "there's been a servant
about here, at odd times. There's been a gen'lm'n too. Both
of 'em belonged to one another."

Mr. Peggotty stood fixed as before, but now looking at him.

"The servant," pursued Ham, "was seen along with — our
poor girl — last night. He's been in hiding about here, this
week or over. He was thought to have gone, but he was
hiding. Doen't stay, Mas'r Davy, doen't ! "

I felt Peggotty's arm round my neck, but I could not have
moved if the house had been about to fall upon me.

" A strange chay and bosses was outside town, this morning,
on the Norwich road, a'most afore the day broke," Ham went
on. "The servant went to it, and come from it, and went to it

4^4 David Copperfield

again. When he went to it again, Em'ly was nigh him. The
t'other was inside. He's the man."

"For the Lord's love," said Mr. Peggotty, falling back,
and putting out his hand, as if to keep off what he dreaded.
" Doen't tell me his name's Steerforth ! "

" Mas'r Davy," exclaimed Ham, in a broken voice, " it ain't
no fault of youm — and I am far from laying of it to you — but
his name is Steerforth, and he's a damned villaih ! "

Mr. Peggotty uttered no cry, and shed no tear, and moved
no more, until he seemed to wake again, all at once, and pulled
down his rough coat from its peg in a comer.

" Bear a hand with this ! I'm struck of a heap, and can't
do it," he said, impatiently. "Bear a hand and help me.
Well ! " when somebody had done so. " Now give me that
theer hat!"

Ham asked him whither he was going.

" I'm a going to seek my niece. I'm a going to seek my
Em'ly. I'm a going, first, to stave in that theer boat, and sink
it where I would have drownded hifti^ as I'm a livin' soul, if I
had had one thought of what was in him ! As he sat afore
me," he said, wildly, holding out his clenched right hand, " as
he sat afore me, face to face, strike me down dead, but I'd have
drownded him, and thought it right ! — I'm a going to seek my
niece."

" Where ? " cried Ham, interposing himself before the door.

" Anywhere ! I'm a going to seek my niece through the
wureld. I'm a going to find my poor niece in her shame, and
bring her back. No one stop me ! I tell you I'm a going to
seek my niece ! "

" No, no ! " cried Mrs. Gummidge, coming between them, in
a fit of crying. " No, no, Danl, not as you are now. Seek
her in a little while, my lone lorn Dan'l, and that'll be but
right ! but not as you are now. Sit ye down, and give me your
forgiveness for having ever been a worrit to you, Dan'l — what
have tny contrairies ever been to this ! — and let us speak a word
about them times when she was first an orphan, and when Ham
was too, and when I was a poor widder woman, and you took
me in. It'll soften your poor heart, Dan'l," laying her head
upon his shoulder, " and you'll bear your sorrow better ; for you
know the promise, Dan'l, * As you have done it unto one of the
least of these, you have done it unto me ' ; and that can never
fail under this roof, that's been our shelter for so many, many
year ! "

He was quite passive now ; and when I heard him crying, the

David Copperfield 425

impulse that had been upon me to go down upon my knees,
and ask their pardon for the desolation I had caused, and curse
Steerforth, yielded to a better feeling. My overcharged heart
found the same relief, and I cried too.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE BEGINNING OF A LONG JOURNEY

What is natural in me, is natural in many other men,
I infer, and so I am not afraid to write that I never had
loved Steerforth better than when the ties that bound me to
him were broken. In the keen distress of the discovery of
his unworthiness, I thought more of all that was brilliant in
him, I softened more towards all that was good in him, I did
more justice to the qualities that might have made him a
man of a noble nature and a great name, than ever I had
done in the height of my devotion to him. Deeply as I felt
my own unconscious part in his pollution of an honest home,
I believed that if I had been brought face to face with him,
I could not have uttered one reproach. I should have loved
him so well still — though he fascinated me no longer — I
should have held in so much tenderness the memory of my
affection for him, that I think I should have been as weak
as a spirit-wounded child, in all but the entertainment of
a thought that we could ever be re-united. That thought
I never had. I felt, as he had felt, that all was at an end
between us. What his remembrances of me were, I have
never known — they were light enough, perhaps, and easily
dismissed — but mine of him were as the remembrances of
a cherished friend, who was dead.

Yes, Steerforth, long removed from the scenes of this poor
history ! My sorrow may bear involuntary witness against
you at the Judgment Throne ; but my angry thoughts or
my reproaches never will, I know !

The news of what had happened soon spread through the
town ; insomuch that as I passed along the streets next
morning, I overheard the people speaking of it at their doors.
Many were hard upon her, some few were hard upon him,
but towards her second father and her lover there was but
one sentiment. Among all kinds of people a respect for
them in their distress prevailed, which was full of gentleness

426 David Copperfield

and delicacy. The seafaring men kept apart, when those two
were seen early, walking with slow steps on the beach ; and
stood in knots, talking compassionately among themselves.

It was on the beach, close down by the sea, that I found
them. It would have been easy to perceive that they had
not slept all last night, even if Peggotty had failed to tell
me of their still sitting just as I left them, when it was broad
day. They looked worn ; and I thought Mr. Peggotty's head
was bowed in one night more than in all the years I had
known him. But they were both as grave and steady as the
sea itself : then lying beneath a dark sky, waveless — yet with
a heavy roll upon it, as if it breathed in its rest — and
touched, on the horizon, with a strip of silvery light from
the unseen sun.

"We have had a mort of talk, sir," said Mr. Peggotty to
me, when we had all three walked a little while in silence,
"of what we ought and doen't ought to do. But we see
our course now."

I happened to glance at Ham, then looking out to sea
upon the distant light, and a frightful thought came into my
mind — not that his face was angry, for it was not ; I recall
nothing but an expression of stern determination in it — that
if ever he encountered Steerforth, he would kill him.

"My dooty here, sir," said Mr. Peggotty, "is done. I'm
a going to seek my — " he stopped, and went on in a firmer
voice : " I'm a going to seek her. That's my dooty, evermore."

He shook his head when I asked him where he would
seek her, and inquired if I were going to London to-morrow ?
I told him I had not gone to-day, fearing to lose the chance
of being of any service to him ; but that I was ready to go
when he would.

" I'll go along with you, sir," he rejoined, " if you're agree-
able, to-morrow."

We walked again, for a while, in silence.

" Ham," he presently resumed, " he'll hold to his present '■%
work, and go and live along with my sister. The old boat
yonder "

"Will you desert the old boat, Mr. Peggotty?" I gently
interposed.

"My station, Mas'r Davy," he returned, "ain't there no
longer ; and if ever a boat foundered, since there was darkness
on the face of the deep, that one's gone down. But no,
sir, no ; I doen't mean as it should be deserted. Fur from
that."

David Copperfield 427

We walked again for a while, as before, until he explained :

" My wishes is, sir, as it shall look, day and night, winter
and summer, as it has always looked, since she fust know'd
it. If ever she should come a wandering back, I wouldn't
have the old place seem to cast her oflf, you understand, but
seem to tempt her to draw nigher to 't, and to peep in,
maybe, like a ghost, out of the wind and rain, through the
old winder, at the old seat by the fire. Then, maybe, Mas'r
Davy, seein' none but Missis Gummidge there, she might
take heart to creep in, trembling ; and might come to be laid
down in her old bed, and rest her weary head where it
was once so gay."

I could not speak to him in reply, though I tried.

"Every night," said Mr. Peggotty, "as reg'lar as the night
comes, the candle must be stood in its old pane of glass,
that if ever she should see it, it may seem to say 'Come
back, my child, come back ! ' If ever tljere's a knock. Ham
(partic'ler a soft knock), arter dark, at your aunt's door,
doen't you go nigh it. Let it be her — not you — that sees
my fallen child ! "

He walked a little in front of us, and kept before us for
some minutes. During this interval, I glanced at Ham again,
and observing the same expression on his face, and his eye,
still directed to the distant light, I touched his arm.

Twice I called him by his name, in the tone in which I
might have tried to rouse a sleeper, before he heeded me.
When I at last inquired on what his thoughts were so bent,
he replied:

" On what's afore me, Mas'r Davy ; and over yon."

" On the life before you, do you mean ? " He had pointed
confusedly out to sea.

"Ay, Mas'r Davy. I doen't rightly know how 'tis, but
from over yon there seemed to me to come — the end of
it like;" looking at me as if he were waking, but with the
same determined face.

" What end ? " I asked, possessed by my former fear.

" I doen't know," he said, thoughtfully ; " I was calling to
mind that the beginning of it all did take place here — and then
the end come. But it's gone 1 Mas'r Davy," he added ;
answering, as I think, my look ; " you han't no call to be afeerd
of me : but I'm kiender muddled ; I don't fare to feel no
matters," — which was as much as to say that he was not
himself, and quite confounded.

Mr. Peggotty stopping for us to join him : we did so, and

428 David Copperfield

said no more. The remembrance of this, in connexion with
my former thought, however, haunted me at intervals, even
until the inexorable end came at its appointed time.

We insensibly approached the old boat, and entered.
Mrs. Gummidge, no longer moping in her especial corner,
was busy preparing breakfast. She took Mr. Peggotty's hat,
and pkced his seat for him, and spoke so comfortably and
softly, that I hardly knew her.

"Dan'l, my good man," said she, "you must eat and drink,
and keep up your strength, for without it you'll do nowt.
Try, that's a dear soul ! And if I disturb you with my
clicketten," she meant her chattering, "tell me so, Dan'l,
and I won't."

When she had served us all, she withdrew to the window,
where she sedulously employed herself in repairing some
shirts and other clothes belonging to Mr. Peggotty, and
neatly folding and packing them in an old oilskin bag, such
as sailors carry. Meanwhile, she continued talking, in the
same quiet manner :

"All times and seasons, you know, Dan'l," said Mrs.
Gummidge, " I shall be alius here, and everythink will look
accordin' to your wishes. I'm a poor scholar, but I shall
write to you, odd times, when you're away, and send my
letters to Mas'r Davy. Maybe you'll write to me too, Dan'l,
odd times, and tell me how you fare to feel upon your lone
lorn journeys."

"You'll be a solitary woman here, I'm afeerd!" said
Mr. Peggotty.

"No, no, Dan'l," she returned, "I shan't be that. Doen't
you mind me. I shall have enough to do to keep a Beein
for you" (Mrs. Gummidge meant a home), "again you come
back — to keep a Beein here for any that may hap to come
back, Dan'l. In the fine time, I shall set outside the door
as I used to do. If any should come nigh, they shall see
the old widder woman true to 'em, a long way off."

What a change in Mrs. Gummidge in a little time ! She
was another woman. She was so devoted, she had such
a quick perception of what it would be well to say, and what
it would be well to leave unsaid; she was so forgetful of
herself, and so regardful of the sorrow about her, that I held
her in a sort of veneration. The work she did that day !
There were many things to be brought up from the beach
and stored in the outhouse — as oars, nets, sails, cordage,
spars, lobster-pots, bags of ballast, and the like ; and though

David Copperfield 429

there was abundance of assistance rendered, there being not
a pair of working hands on all that shore but would have
laboured hard for Mr. Peggotty, and being well paid in being
asked to do it, yet she persisted, all day long, in toiling under
weights that she was quite unequal to, and fagging to and
fro on all sorts of unnecessary errands. As to deploring her
misfortunes, she appeared to have entirely lost the recollec-
tion of ever having had any. She preserved an equable
cheerfulness in the midst of her sympathy, which was not
the least astonishing part of the change that had come over
her. Querulousness was out of the question. I did not even
observe her voice to falter, or a tear to escape from her eyes,
the whole day through, until twilight ; when she and I and
Mr. Peggotty being alone together, and he having fallen
asleep in perfect exhaustion, she broke into a half-suppressed
fit of sobbing and crying, and taking me to the door, said,
" Ever bless you, Mas'r Davy, be a friend to him, poor dear ! "
Then she immediately ran out of the house to wash her
face, in order that she might sit quietly beside him, and be
found at work there, when he should awake. In short,
I left her, when I went away at night, the prop and staff of
Mr. Peggotty's affliction : and I could not meditate enough
upon the lesson that I read in Mrs. Gummidge, and the new
experience she unfolded to me.

It was between nine and ten o'clock when, strolling in a
melancholy manner through the town, I stopped at Mr. Omer's
door. Mr. Omer had taken it so much to heart, his daughter
told me, that he had been very low and poorly all day, and had
gone to bed without his pipe.

"A deceitful, bad-hearted girl," said Mrs. Joram. "There
was no good in her, ever ! "

" Don't say so," I returned. " You don't think so."

" Yes, I do ! " cried Mrs. Joram, angrily.

"No, no," said I.

Mrs. Joram tossed her head, endeavouring to be very stem
and cross ; but she could not command her softer self, and
began to cry. I was young, to be sure ; but I thought much
the better of her for this sympathy, and fancied it became her,
as a virtuous wife and mother, very well indeed.

"What will she ever do!" sobbed Minnie. "Where will
she go ! What will become of her ! Oh, how could she be so
cruel, to herself and him ! "

I remembered the time when Minnie was a young and pretty
girl ; and I was glad that she remembered it too, so feelingly.

430 David Copperfield

"My little Minnie," said Mrs. Joram, "has only just now
been got to sleep. Even in her sleep she is sobbing for Em'ly.
All day long, little Minnie has cried for her, and asked me,
over and over again, whether Em'ly was wicked ? What can I
say to her, when Em'ly tied a ribbon off her own neck round
little Minnie's the last night she was here, and laid her head
down on the pillow beside her till she was fast asleep ! The rib-
bon's round my little Minnie's neck now. It ought not to be,
perhaps, but what can I do ? Em'ly is very bad, but they were
fond of one another. And the child knows nothing ! "

Mrs. Joram was so unhappy, that her husband came out to
take care of her. Leaving them together, I went home to
Peggotty's ; more melancholy myself, if possible, than I had
been yet.

That good creature — I mean Peggotty — all untired by her
late anxieties and sleepless nights, was at her brother's, where
she meant to stay till morning. An old woman, who had been
employed about the house for some weeks past, while Peggotty
had been unable to attend to it, was the house's only other
occupant besides myself. As I had no occasion for her ser-
vices, I sent her to bed, by no means against her will ; and sat
down before the kitchen fire a little while, to think about all
this.

I was blending it with the deathbed of the late Mr. Barkis,
and was driving out with the tide towards the distance at
which Ham had looked so singularly in the morning, when I
was recalled from my wanderings by a knock at the door.
There was a knocker upon the door, but it was not that which
made the sound. The tap was from a hand, and low down
upon the door, as if it were given by a child.

It made me start as much as if it had been the knock of a
footman to a person of distinction. I opened the door ; and
at first looked down, to my amazement, on nothing but a great
umbrella that appeared to be walking about of itself. But
presently I discovered underneath it, Miss Mowcher.

I might not have been prepared to give the little creature a
very kind reception, if, on her removing the umbrella, which her
utmost efforts were unable to shut up, she had shown me the
" volatile " expression of face which had made so great an
impression on me at our first and last meeting. But her face,
as she turned it up to mine, was so earnest ; and when I
relieved her of the umbrella (which would have been an incon-
venient one for the Irish giant), she wrung her little hands in
such an afflicted manner ; that I rather inclined towards her.

David Copperfield 431

** Miss Mowcher ! " said I, after glancing up and down the
empty street, without distinctly knowing what 1 expected to see
besides ; " how do you come here ? What is the matter ? "

She motioned to me with her short right arm, to shut the
umbrella for her ; and passing me hurriedly, went into the
kitchen. When I had closed the door, and followed, with the
umbrella in my hand, I found her sitting on the corner of the
fender — it was a low iron one, with two flat bars at top to stand
plates upon — in the shadow of the boiler, swaying herself back-
wards and forwards, and chafing her hands upon her knees like
a person in pain.

Quite alarmed at being the only recipient of this untimely
visit, and the only spectator of this portentous behaviour, I
exclaimed again, " Pray tell me, Miss Mowcher, what is the
matter ! are you ill ? "

" My dear young soul," returned Miss Mowcher, squeezing
her hands upon her heart one over the other. " I am ill here,
I am very ill. To think that it should come to this, when I
might have known it and perhaps prevented it, if I hadn't been
a thoughtless fool ! "

Again her large bonnet (very disproportionate to her figure)
went backwards and forwards, in her swaying of her little body
to and fro ; while a most gigantic bonnet rocked, in unison with
it, upon the wall.

"I am surprised," I began, "to see you so distressed and
serious" — when she interrupted me.

"Yes, it's always so!" she said. "They are all surprised,
these inconsiderate young people, fairly and full grown, to see
any natural feeling in a little thing like me ! They make a
plaything of me, use me for their amusement, throw me away
when they are tired, and wonder that I feel more than a toy
horse or a wooden soldier ! Yes, yes, that's the way. The old
way ! "

" It may be, with others," I returned, " but I do assure you
it is not with me. Perhaps I ought not to . be at all surprised
to see you as you are now : I know so little of you. I said,
without consideration, what I thought."

" What can I do ? " returned the little woman, standing up,
holding out her arms to show herself. " See ! What I am, my
father was ; and my sister* is ; and my brother is. I have
worked for sister and brother these many years — hard, Mr.
Copperfield — all day. I must live. I do no harm. If there
are people so unreflecting or so cruel, as to make a jest of me,
what is left for me to do but to make a jest of myself, them, and

432 David Copperfield

everything? If I do so, for the time, whose fault is that?
Mine?"

No. Not Miss Mowcher's, I perceived.

" If I had shown myself a sensitive dwarf to your false
friend," pursued the little woman, shaking her head at me, with
reproachful earnestness, " how much of his help or goodwill do
you think / should ever have had ? If little Mowcher (who
had no hand, young gentleman, in the making of herself)
addressed herself to him, or the like of him, because of her
misfortunes, when do you suppose her small voice would have
been heard ? Little Mowcher would have as much need to live,
if she was the bitterest and dullest of pigmies ; but she couldn't
do it. No. She might whistle for her bread and butter till she
died of Air."

Miss Mowcher sat down on the fender again, and took out
her handkerchief, and wiped her eyes.

" Be tjaankful'for me, if you have a kind heart, as I think you
have," she sai^, " that while I know well what I am, I can be
cheerful and endure it all. I am thankful for myself, at any
rate, that I can find my tiny way through the world, without
being beholden to any one ; and that in return for all that is
thrown at me, in folly or vanity, as I go along, I can throw
bubbles back. If I don't brood over all I want, it is the better
for me, and not the worse for any one. If I am a plaything
for you giants, be gentle with me."

Miss Mowcher replaced her handkerchief in her pocket,
looking at me with very intent expression all the while, and
pursued :

" I saw you in the street just now. You may suppose I am
not able to walk as fast as you, with my short legs and short
breath, and I couldn't overtake you ; but I guessed where you
came, and came after you. I have been here before, to-day,
but the good woman wasn't at home."

" Do you know her ? " I demanded.

" I know of her, and about her," she replied, " from Omer
and Joram. I was there at seven o'clock this morning. Do
you remember what Steerforth said to me about this unfor-
tunate girl, that time when I saw you both at the inn ? "

The great bonnet on Miss Mowcher's head, and the greater
bonnet on the wall, began to go backwards and forwards again
when she asked this question.

I remembered very well what she referred to, having had
it in my thoughts many times that day. I told her so.

"May the Father of all Evil confound him," said the little

David Copperfield 433

woman, holding up her forefinger between me and her sparkling
eyes ; " and ten times more confound that wicked servant ;
but I believed it was you who had a boyish passion for
her I "

" I ? " I repeated.

" Child, child ! In the name of blind ill-fortune," cried
Miss Mowcher, wringing her hands impatiently, as she went to
and fro again upon the fender, "why did you praise her so,
and blush, and look disturbed ? "

I could not conceal from myself that I had done this,
though for a reason very different from her supposition.

" What did I know ? " said Miss Mowcher, taking out her
handkerchief again, and giving one little stamp on the ground
whenever, at short intervals, she applied it to her eyes with
both hands at once. " He was crossing you and wheedling
you, I saw ; and you were soft wax in his hands, I saw. Had
1 left the room a minute, when his man told me that * Young
Innocence ' (so he called you, and you may call him ' Old
Guilt' all the days of your life) had set his heart upon her,
and she was giddy and liked him, but his master was resolved
that no harm should come of it — more for your sake than for
hers — and that that was their business here? How could I
but believe him ? I saw Steerforth soothe and please you by
his praise of her ! You were the first to mention her name.
You owned to an old admiration of her. You were hot and
cold, and red and white, all at once when I spoke to you of
her. What could I think — what did I think — but that you
were a young libertine in everything but experience, and had
fallen into hands that had experience enough, and could
manage you (having the fancy) for your own good ? Oh ! oh !
oh ! They were afraid of my finding out the truth," exclaimed
Miss Mowcher, getting off the fender, and trotting up and
down the kitchen with her two short arms distressfully lifted
up, "because I am a sharp little thing — I need be, to get
through the world at all ! — and they deceived me altogether,
and I gave the poor unfortunate girl a letter, which I fully
believe was the beginning of her ever speaking to Littimer,
who was left behind on purpose ! "

I stood amazed at the revelation of all this perfidy, looking
at Miss Mowcher as she walked up and down the kitchen
until she was out of breath : when she sat upon the fender
again, and, drying her face with her handkerchief, shook her
head for a long time, without otherwise moving, and without
breaking silence.

434 David Copperfield

" My country rounds," she added at length, " brought me
to Norwich, Mr. Copperfield, the night before last. What I
happened to find out there, about their secret way of coming
and going, without you — which was strange — led to my sus-
pecting something wrong. I got into the coach from London
last night, as it came through Norwich, and was here this
morning. Oh, oh, oh ! too late ! "

Poor little Mowcher turned so chilly after all her crying and
fretting, that she turned round on the fender, putting her poor
little wet feet in among the ashes to warm them, and sat
looking at the fire like a large doll. I sat in a chair on
the other side of the hearth, lost in unhappy reflections, and
looking at the fire too, and sometimes at her.

" I must go," she said at last, rising as she spoke. " It's
late. You don't mistrust me?"

Meeting her sharp glance, which was as sharp as ever
when she asked me, I could not on that short challenge
answer no, quite frankly.

" Come ! " said she, accepting the offer of my hand to help
her over the fender, and looking wistfully up into my face,
"you know you wouldn't mistrust me, if I was a full-sized
woman ! ">

I felt that there was much truth in this ; and I felt rather
ashamed of myself.

"You are a young man," she said, nodding. "Take a
word of advice, even from three foot nothing. Try not to
associate bodily defects with mental, my good friend, except
for a solid reason."

She had got over the fender now, and I had got over my
suspicion. I told her that I believed she had given me a
faithful account of herself, and that we had both been hapless
instruments in designing hands. She thanked me, and said I
was a good fellow.

" Now, mind ! " she exclaimed, turning back on her way to
the door, and looking shrewdly at me, with her forefinger up
again. " I have some reason to suspect, from what I have
heard — my ears are always open ; I can't afford to spare what
powers I have — that they are gone abroad. But if ever they
return, if ever any one of them returns, while I am alive, I am
more likely than another, going about as I do, to find it out
soon. Whatever I know, you shall know. If ever I can do
anything to serve the poor betrayed girl, I will do it faithfully,
please Heaven ! And Littimer had better have a bloodhound
at his back than little Mowcher ! "

David Copperfield 435

I placed implicit faith in this last statement, when I marked
the look with which it was accompanied.

" Trust me no more, but trust me no less, than you would
trust a full-sized woman," said the little creature, touching me
appealingly on the wrist. " If ever you see me again, unlike
what I am now, and like what I was when you first saw me,
observe what company I am in. Call to mind that I am a
very helpless and defenceless little thing. Think of me at
home with my brother like myself and sister like myself, when
my day's work is done. Perhaps you won't, then, be very hard
upon me, or surprised if I can be distressed and serious.
Good-night I "

I gave Miss Mowcher my hand, with a very different opinion
of her from that wliich I had hitherto entertained, and opened
the door to let her out. It was not a trifling business to get
the great umbrella up, and properly balanced in her grasp ;
but at last I successfully accomplished this, and saw it go
bobbing down the street through the rain, without the least
appearance of having anybody underneath it, except when a
heavier fall than usual from some over-charged waterspout sent
it toppling over, on one side, and discovered Miss Mowcher
struggling violently to get it right. After making one or two
sallies to her relief, which were rendered futile by the umbrella's
hopping on again, like an imihense bird, before I could reach
it, I came in, went to bed, and slept till morning.

In the morning I was joined by Mr. Peggotty and by my
old nurse, and we went at an early hour to the coach-office,
where Mrs. Gummidge and Ham were waiting to take leave
of us.

"Mas'r Davy," Ham whispered, drawing me aside, while
Mr. Peggotty was stowing his bag among the luggage, "his
life is quite broke up. He doen't know wheer he's going ; he
doen't know what's afore him ; he's bound upon a voyage
that'll last, on and off, all the rest of his days, take my wured
for't, unless he finds what he's a seeking of. I am sure you'll
be a friend to him, Mas'r Davy ? "

" Trust me, I will indeed," said I, shaking hands with Ham
earnestly.

** Thankee. Thankee, very kind, sir. One thing furder.
I'm in good employ, you know, Mas'r Davy, and I han't no
way now of spending what I gets. Money's of no use to me
no more, except to live. If you can lay it out for him, I shall
do my work with a better art. Though as to that, sir," and he
spoke very steadily and mildly, "you're not to think but I

436 David Copperfield

shall work at all times, like a man, and act the best that lays
in my power ! "

I told him I was well convinced of it ; and I hinted that I
hoped the time might even come, when he would cease to lead
the lonely life he naturally contemplated now.

" No, sir," he said, shaking his head, " all that's past and
over with me, sir. No one can never fill the place that's
empty. But you'll bear in mind about the money, as theer's
at all times some laying by for him ? "

Reminding him of the fact, that Mr. Peggotty derived a
steady, though certainly a very moderate income from the
bequest of his late brother-in-law, I promised to do so. We
then took leave of each other. I cannot leave him even now,
without remembering with a pang, at once his modest fortitude
and his great sorrow.

As to Mrs. Gummidge, if I were to endeavour to describe
how she ran down the street by the side of the coach, seeing
nothing but Mr. Peggotty on the roof, through the tears she
tried to repress, and dashing herself against the people who
were coming in the opposite direction, I should enter on a
task of some difficulty. Therefore I had better leave her
sitting on a baker's door-step, out of breath, with no shape at
all remaining in her bonnet, and one of her shoes off, lying on
the pavement at a considerable distance.

When we got to our journey's end, our first pursuit was to
look about for a little lodging for Peggotty, where her brother
could have a bed. We were so fortunate as to find one, of a
very clean and cheap description, over a chandler's shop, only
two streets removed from me. When we had engaged this
domicile, I bought some cold meat at an eating-house, and
took my fellow-travellers home to tea ; a proceeding, I regret
to state, which did not meet with Mrs. Crupp's approval, but
quite the contrary. I ought to observe, however, in explan-
ation of that lady's state of mind, that she was much offended
by Peggotty's tucking up her widow's gown before she had
been ten minutes in the place, and setting to work to dust my
bedroom. This Mrs. Crupp regarded in the light of a liberty,
and a liberty, she said, was a thing she never allowed.

Mr. Peggotty had made a communication to me on the way
to London for which I was not unprepared. It was, that he
purposed first seeing Mrs. Steerforth. As I felt bound to
assist him in this, and also to mediate between them ; with
the view of sparing the mother's feelings as much as possible,
I wrote to her that night. I told her as mildly as I could

David Copperfield 437

what his wrong was, and what my own share in his injury. I
I said he was a man in very common life, but of a most gentle
and upright character ; and that I ventured to express a hope
that she would not refuse to see him in his heavy trouble. I
mentioned two o'clock in the afternoon as the hour of our
coming, and I sent the letter myself by the first coach in the
morning.

At the appointed time, we stood at the door — the door of
that house where I had been, a few 4^ys since, so happy :
where my youthful confidence and warmth of heart had been
yielded up so freely : which was closed against me henceforth :
which was now a waste, a ruin.

No Littimer appeared. The pleasanter face which had
replaced his, on the occasion of my last visit, answered to our
summons, and went before us to the drawing-room. Mrs.
Steerforth was sitting there. Rosa Dartle glided, as we went
in, from another part of the room, and stood behind her
chair.

I saw, directly, in his mother's face, that she knew from
himself what he had done. It was very pale, and bore the
traces of deeper emotion than my letter alone, weakened by
the doubts her fondness would have raised upon it, would
have been likely to create. I thought her more like him than
ever I had thought her ; and I felt, rather than saw, that the
resemblance was not lost on my companion.

She sat upright in her arm-chair, with a stately, immoveable,
passionless air, that it seemed as if nothing could disturb.
She looked very stedfastly at Mr. Peggotty when he stood
before her ; and he looked quite as stedfastly at her. Rosa
Dartle's keen glance comprehended all of us. For some
moments not a word was spoken. She motioned to Mr.
Peggotty to be seated. He said, in a low voice, " I shouldn't
feel it nat'ral, ma'am, to sit down in this house. I'd sooner
stand." And this was succeeded by another silence, which
she broke thus :

" I know, with deep regret, what has brought you here.
What do you want of me ? What do you ask me to do ? "

He put his hat under his arm, and feeling in his breast for
Em'ly's letter, took it out, unfolded it, and gave it to her.

" Please to read that, ma'am. That's my niece's hand ! "

She read it, in the same stately and impassive way, —
untouched by its contents, as far as I could see, — and returned
it to him.

** • Unless he brings me back a lady,' " said Mr. Peggotty,

43^ David Copperfield

tracing out that part with his finger. " I come to know,
ma'am, whether he will keep his wured?"

" No," she returned.

" Why not ? " said Mr. Peggotty.

" It is impossible. He would disgrace himself. You can-
not fail to know that she is far below him."

" Raise her up ! " said Mr. Peggotty.

" She is uneducated and ignorant."

" Maybe she's not ; maybe she is," said Mr. Peggotty. " /
think not, ma'am ; but I'm no judge of them things. Teach
her better!"

" Since you oblige me to speak more plainly, which I am
very unwilling to do, her humble connexions would render
such a thing impossible, if nothing else did."

"Hark to this, ma'am," he returned, slowly and quietly.
" You know what it is to love your child. So do I. If she
was a hundred times my child, I couldn't love her more.
You doen't know what it is to lose your child. I do. All the
heaps of riches in the wureld would be nowt to me (if they
was mine) to buy her back ! But save her from this disgrace,
and she shall never be disgraced by us. Not one of us that
she's growed up among, not one of us that's lived along with
her, and had her for their all in all these many year, will ever
look upon her pritty face again. We'll be content to let her
be ; we'll be content to think of her, far off, as if she was
underneath another sun and sky ; we'll be content to trust her
to her husband, — to her little children, p'raps, — and bide the
time when all of us shall be alike in quality afore our God ! "

The rugged eloquence with which he spoke, was not devoid
of all effect. She still preserved her proud manner, but there
was a touch of softness in her voice, as she answered :

" I justify nothing. I make no counter-accusations. But I
am sorry to repeat, it is impossible. Such a marriage would
irretrievably blight my son's career, and ruin his prospects.
Nothing is more certain than that it never can take place, and
never will. If there is any other compensation "

" I am looking at the likeness of the face," interrupted Mr.
Peggotty, with a steady but a- kindling eye, "that has looked at
me, in my home, at my fireside, in my boat — wheer not? —
smiling and friendly, when it was so treacherous, that I go half
wild when I think of it. If the likeness of that face don't turn
to burning fire, at the thought of offering money to me for my
child's blight and ruin, it's as bad. I doen't know, being a
lady's, but what it's worse."

David Copperfield 439

She changed now, in a moment. An angry flush overspread
her features ; and she said, in an intolerant manner, grasping
the arm-chair tightly with her hands :

" What compensation can you make to me for opening such
a pit between me and my son ? What is your love to mine ?
What is your separation to ours ? "

Miss Dartle softly touched her, and bent down her head to
whisper, but she would not hear a word.

" No, Rosa, not a word ! Let the man listen to what I say !
My son, who has been the object of my life, to whom its every
thought has been devoted, whom I have gratified from a child
in every wish, from whom I have had no separate existence
since his birth, — to take up in a moment with a miserable
girl, and avoid me ! To repay my confidence with systematic
deception, for her sake, and quit me for her ! To set this
wretched fancy, against his mother's claims upon his duty,
love, respect, gratitude — claims that every day and hour of his
life should have strengthened into ties that nothing could be
proof against ! Is this no injury ? "

Again Rosa Dartle tried to soothe her ; again ineffectually.

" I say, Rosa, not a word ! If he can stake his all upon the
lightest object, I can stake my all upon a greater purpose. Let
him go where he will, with the means that my love has secured
to him ! Does he think to reduce me by long absence ? He
knows his mother very little if he does. Let him put away his
whim now, and he is welcome back. Let him not put her away
now, and he never shall come near me, living or dying, while I
can raise my hand to make a sign against it, unless, being rid
of her for ever, he comes humbly to me and begs for my for-
giveness. This is my right. This is the acknowledgment I
will have. This is the separation that there is between us !
And is this," she added, looking at her visitor with the proud
intolerant air with >^hich she had begun, " no injury ? "

While I heard and saw the mother as she said these words,
I seemed to hear and see the son, defying them. All that I
had ever seen in him of an unyielding, wilful spirit, I saw in
her. All the understanding that I had now of his misdirected
energy, became an understanding of her character too, and a
perception that it was, in its strongest springs, the same.

She now observed to me, aloud, resuming her former restraint,
that it was useless to hear more, or to say more, and that she
begged to put an end to the interview. She rose with an air
of dignity to leave the room, when Mr. Peggotty signified that
it was needless.

440 David Copperfield

"Doen't fear me being any hindrance to you, I have no
more to say, ma'am," he remarked as he moved towards the
door. " I come heer with no hope, and I take away no hope.
I have done what I thowt should be done, but I never looked
fur any good to come of my stan'ning where I do. This has
been too evil a house fur me and mine, fur me to be in my right
senses and expect it."

With this, we departed ; leaving her standing by her elbow-
chair, a picture of a noble presence and a handsome face.

We had, on our way out, to cross a paved hall, with glass
sides and roof, over which a vine was trained. Its leaves and
shoots were green then, and the day being sunny, a pair of glass
doors leading to the garden were thrown open. Rosa Dartle,
entering this way with a noiseless step, when we were close to
them, addressed herself to me :

"You do well," she said, "indeed, to bring this fellow
here!"

Such a concentration of rage and scorn as darkened her
face, and flashed in her jet-black eyes, I could not have
thought compressible even into that face. The scar made
by the hammer was, as usual in this excited state of her
features, strongly marked. When the throbbing I had seen
before, came into it as I looked at her, she absolutely lifted
up her hand and struck it.

" This is a fellow," she said, " to champion and bring here,
is he not ? You are a true man ! "

"Miss Dartle," I returned, "you are surely not so unjust as
to condemn me ! "

"Why do you bring division between these two mad
creatures ? " she returned. " Don't you know that they are
both mad with their own self-will and pride?"

" Is it my doing? " I returned.

"Is it your doing ! " she retorted. " Why do you bring this
man here?"

" He is a deeply injured man. Miss Dartle," I replied. " You
may not know it."

" I know that James Steerforth," she said, with her hand on
her bosom, as if to prevent the storm that was raging there
from being loud, " has a false, corrupt heart, and is a traitor.
But what need I know or care about this fellow, and his common
niece ? "

" Miss Dartle," I returned, " you deepen the injury. It is
sufficient already. I will only say, at parting, that you do him
a great wrong."

David Copperfield 441

" I do him no wrong," she returned. " They are a depraved,
worthless set. I would have her whipped ! "

Mr. Peggotty passed on, without a word, and went out at
the door.

" Oh, shame. Miss Dartle ! shame ! " I said indignantly.
" How can you bear to trample on his undeserved affliction ! "

" I would trample on them all," she answered. " I would
have his house pulled down. I would have her branded on the
face, drest in rags, and cast out in the streets to starve. If I
had the power to sit in judgment on her, I would see it done.
See it done? I would do it ! I detest her. If I ever could
reproach her with her infamous condition, I would go anywhere
to do so. If I could hunt her to her grave, I would. If there
was any word of comfort that would be a solace to her in her
dying hour, and only I possessed it, I wouldn't part with it for
Life itself."

The mere vehemence of her words can convey, I am sensible,
but a weak impression of the passion by which she was possessed,
and which made itself articulate in her whole figure, though
her voice, instead of being raised, was lower than usual. No
description I could give of her would do justice to my recollec-
tion of her, or to her entire deliverance of herself to her anger.
I have seen passion in many forms, but I have never seen it in
such a form as that.

When I joined Mr. Peggotty, he was walking slowly and
thoughtfully down the hill. He told me, as soon as I came
up with him, that having now discharged his mind of what
he had purposed doing in London, he meant "to set out
on his travels," that night. I asked him where he meant
to go? He only answered, "Fm a going, sir, to seek my
niece."

We went back to the little lodging over the chandler's shop,
and there I found an opportunity of repeating to Peggotty what
he had said to me. She informed me, in return, that he had
said the same to her that morning. She knew no more than I
did, where he was going, but she thought he had some project
shaped out in his mind.

I did not like to leave him, under such circumstances, and
we all three dined together off a beefsteak pie — which was one
of the many good things for which Peggotty was famous — and
which was curiously flavoured on this occasion, I recollect
well, by a miscellaneous taste of tea, coffee, butter, bacon,
cheese, new loaves, firewood, candles, and walnut ketchup,
continually ascending from the shop. After dinner we sat for

442 David Copperfield

an hour or so near the window, without talking much; and
then Mr. Peggotty got up, and brought his oilskin bag and his
stout stick, and laid them on the table.

He accepted, from his sister's stock of ready money, a small
sum on account of his legacy ; barely enough, I should have
thought, to keep him for a month. He promised to com-
municate with me, when anything befell him ; and he slung
his bag about him, took his hat and stick, and bade us both
"Good-bye!"

"All good attend you, dear old woman," he said, embracing
Peggotty, " and you too, Mas'r Davy ! " shaking hands with
me. " I'm a-going to seek her, fur and wide. If she should
come home while I'm away, — but ah, that ain't like to be ! — or
if I should bring her back, my meaning is, that she and me
shall live and die where no one can't reproach her. If any hurt
should come to me, remember that the last words I left for
her was, ' My unchanged love is with my darling child, and I
forgive her ! ' "

He said this solemnly, bare-headed; then, putting on his
hat, he went down the stairs, and away. We followed to the
door. It was a warm, dusty evening, just the time when, in
the great main thoroughfare out of which that bye-way turned,
there was a temporary lull in the eternal tread of feet upon the
pavement, and a strong red sunshine. He turned, alone, at
the corner of our shady street, into a glow of light, in which
we lost him.

Rarely did that hour of the evening come, rarely did I wake
at night, rarely did I look up at the moon, or stars, or watch
. the falling rain, or hear the wind, but I thought of his solitary
\figure toiling on, poor pilgrim, and recalled the words :

" I'm a-going to seek her, fur and wide. If any hurt should
come to me, remember that the last words I left for her was,
' My unchanged love is with my darling child, and I forgive
her]'"

CHAPTER XXXIII

BLISSFUL

All this time, I had gone on loving Dora harder than ever.
Her idea was my refuge in disappointment and distress, and
made some amends to me, even for the loss of my friend.
The more I pitied myself, or pitied others, the more I sought

David Copperfield 443

for consolation in the image of Dora. The greater the accumu-
lation of deceit and trouble in the world, the brighter and the
purer shone the star of Dora high above the world. I don't
think I had any definite idea where Dora came from, or in
what degree she was related to a higher order of beings ; but
I am quite sure I should have scouted the notion of her being
simply human, like any other young lady, with indignation and
contempt.

If I may so express it, I was steeped in Dora. I was not
merely over head and ears in love with her, but I was saturated
through and through. Enough love might have been wrung
out of me, metaphorically speaking, to drown anybody in ;
and yet there would have remained enough within me, and all
over me, to pervade my entire existence.

The first thing I did, on my own account, when I came
back, was to take a night-walk to Norwood, and, like the subject
of a venerable riddle of my childhood, to go " round and round
the house, without ever touching the house," thinking about
Dora. I believe the theme of this incomprehensible conun-
drum was the moon. No matter what it was, I, the moon-struck I/'
slave of Dora, perambulated round and round the house and
garden for two hours, looking through crevices in the palings,
getting my chin by dint of violent exertion above the rusty
nails on the top, blowing kisses at the lights in the windows,
and romantically calling on the night, at intervals, to shield
my Dora — I don't exactly know what from, I suppose from
fire. Perhaps from mice, to which she had a great objection.

My love was so much on my mind, and it was so natural
to me to confide in Peggotty, when I found her again by my
side of an evening with the old set of industrial implements,
busily making the tour of my wardrobe, that I imparted to
her, in a sufl5ciently roundabout way, my great secret. Peggotty
was strongly interested, but I could not get her into my view
of the case at all. She was audaciously prejudiced in my
favour, and quite unable to understand why I should have any
misgivings, or be low-spirited about it. "The young lady
might think herself well off," she observed, " to have such a
beau. And as to her Pa," she said, " what did the gentleman
expect, for gracious sake ! "

I observed, however, that Mr. Spenlow's Proctorial gown
and stiff cravat took Peggotty down a little, and inspired her
with a greater reverence for the man who was gradually
becoming more and more etherealized in my eyes every day,
and about whom a reflected radiance seemed to me to beam

444 David Copperfield

when he sat erect in Court among his papers, like a little
lighthouse in a sea of stationery. And by-the-bye, it used to
be uncommonly strange to me to consider, I remember, as I
sat in Court too, how those dim old judges and doctors
wouldn't have cared for Dora, if they had known her; how
they wouldn't have gone out of their senses with rapture, if
marriage with Dora had been proposed to them; how Dora
might have sung and played upon that glorified guitar, until
she led me to the verge of madness, yet not have tempted one
of those slow-goers an inch out of his road !

I despised them, to a man. Frozen-out old gardeners in
the flower-beds of the heart, I took a personal offence against
them all. The Bench was nothing to me but an insensible
blunderer. The Bar had no more tenderness or poetry in it
than the Bar of a public-house.

Taking the management of Peggotty's affairs into my own
hands, with no little pride, I proved the will, and came to a
settlement with the Legacy Duty-office, and took her to the
Bank, and soon got everything into an orderly train. We
varied the legal character of these proceedings by going to see
some perspiring Wax-work, in Fleet Street (melted, I should
hope, these twenty years); and by visiting Miss Linwood's
Exhibition, which I remember as a Mausoleum of needlework,
favourable to self-examination and repentance; and by inspecting
the Tower of London; and going to the top of St. Paul's.
All these wonders afforded Peggotty as much pleasure as she
was able to enjoy, under existing circumstances : except, I
think, St. Paul's, which, from her long attachment to her
work-box, became a rival of the picture on the lid, and was,
in some particulars, vanquished, she considered, by that work
of art.

Peggotty's business, which was what we used to call
"common-form business" in the Commons (and very light
and lucrative the common-form business was), being settled,
I took her down to the office one morning to pay her bill.
Mr. Spenlow had stepped out, old Tiffey said, to get a gentle-
man sworn for a marriage licence ; but as I knew he would be
back directly, our place lying close to the Surrogate's, and to
the Vicar-General's office too, I told Peggotty to wait.

We were a little like undertakers, in the Commons, as
regarded Probate transactions ; generally making it a rule to
look more or less cut up, when we had to deal with clients
in mourning. In a similar feeling of delicacy, we were always
blithe and light-hearted with the licence clients. Therefore I

David Copperfield 4'45

hinted to Peggotty that she would find Mr. Spenlow much
recovered from the shock of Mr. Barkis's decease ; and indeed
he came in like a bridegroom.

But neither Peggotty nor I had eyes for him, when we saw,
in company with him, Mr, Murdstone. He was very little
changed. His hair looked as thick, and was certainly as black,
as ever ; and his glance was as little to be trusted as of old.

" Ah, Copperfield ? " said Mr. Spenlow. " You know this
gentleman, I believe ? "

I made my gentleman a distant bow, and Peggotty barely
recognised him. He was, at first, somewhat disconcerted to
meet us two together ; but quickly decided what to do, and
came up to me.

" I hope," he said, " that you are doing well ? "

"It can hardly be interesting to you," said I. '*Yes, if you
wish to know."

We looked at each other, and he addressed himself to
Peggotty.

"And you," said he. "I am sorry to observe that you
have lost your husband."

" It's not the first loss I have had in my life, Mr. Murdstone,"
replied Peggotty, trembling from head to foot. " I am glad
to hope that there is nobody to blame for this one, — nobody
to answer for it."

" Ha ! " said he ; " that's a comfortable reflection. You
have done your duty ? "

" I have not worn anybody's life away," said Peggotty, " I
am thankful to think ! No, Mr. Murdstone, I have not worrited
and frightened any sweet creetur to an early grave ! "

He eyed her gloomily — remorsefully I thought — for an
instant ; and said, turning his head towards me, but looking at
my feet instead of my face :

"We are not likely to encounter soon again; a source of
satisfaction to us both, no doubt, for such meetings as this can
never be agreeable. I do not expect that you, who always
rebelled against my just authority, exerted for your benefit and
reformation, should owe me any good-will now. There is an
antipathy between us "

" An old one, I believe ? " said I, interrupting him.

He smiled, and shot as evil a glance at me as could come
from his dark eyes.

" It rankled in your baby breast," he said. "It embittered
the life of your poor mother. You are right. I hope you may
do better, yet ; I hope you may correct yourself."

44'6 David Copperfield

Here he ended the dialogue, which had been carried on in
a low voice, in a comer of the outer office, by passing into Mr.
Spenlow's room, and saying aloud, in his smoothest manner :

" Gentlemen of Mr. Spenlow's profession are accustomed to
family differences, and know how complicated and difficult they
always are ! " With that, he paid the money for his licence ;
and, receiving it neatly folded from Mr. Spenlow, together with
a shake of the hand, and a poHte wish for his happiness and
the lady's, went out of the office.

I might have had more difficulty in constraining myself to
be silent under his words, if I had had less difficulty in impress-
ing upon Peggotty (who was only angry on my account, good
creature ! ) that we were not in a place for recrimination, and
that I besought her to hold her peace. She was so unusually
roused, that I was glad to compound for an affectionate hug,
elicited by this revival in her mind of our old injuries, and to
make the best I could of it, before Mr. Spenlow and the clerks.

Mr. Spenlow did not appear to know what the connexion
between Mr. Murdstone and myself was ; which I was glad of,
for I could not bear to acknowledge him, even in my own
breast, remembering what I did of the history of my poor
mother. Mr. Spenlow seemed to think, if he thought anything
about the matter, that my aunt was the leader of the state
party in our family, and that there was a rebel party com-
manded by somebody else — so I gathered at least from what
he said, while we were waiting for Mr. Tiffey to make out
Peggotty's bill of costs.

'* Miss Trot wood," he remarked, " is very firm, no doubt,
and not likely to give way to opposition. I have an admira-
tion for her character, and I may congratulate you. Copper-
field, on being on the right side. Differences between relations
are much to be deplored — but they are extremely general —
and the great thing is, to be on the right side : " meaning,
I take it, on the side of the moneyed interest.

" Rather a good marriage this, I beheve ? " said Mr. Spenlow.

I explained that I knew nothing about it.

** Indeed ! " he said. " Speaking from the few words Mr.
Murdstone dropped — as a man frequently does on these occa-
sions— and from what Miss Murdstone let fall, I should say it
was rather a good marriage."

" Do you mean that there is money, sir?" I asked.

*' Yes," said Mr. Spenlow, " I understand there's money.
Beauty too, I am told."

" Indeed I Is his new wife young ? "

David Copperfield 447

" Just of age," said Mr. Spenlow. " So lately, that I should
think they had been waiting for that."

" Lord deliver her ! " said Peggotty. So very emphatically
and unexpectedly, that we were all three discomposed ; until
Tiffey came in with the bill.

Old Tiffey soon appeared, however, and handed it to Mr.
Spenlow, to look over. Mr. Spenlow, settling his chin in his
cravat and rubbing it softly, went over the items with a
deprecatory air — as if it were all Jorkins's doing — and handed
it back to Tiffey with a bland sigh.

"Yes," he said. "That's right. Quite right I should
have been extremely happy, Copperfield, to have limited these
charges to the actual expenditure out of pocket, but it is an
irksome incident in my professional life, that I am not at liberty
to consult my own wishes. I have a partner — Mr. Jorkins."

As he said this with a gentle melancholy, which was the next
thing to making no charge at all, I expressed my acknowledg-
ments on Peggotty 's behalf, and paid Tiffey in bank-notes.
Peggotty then retired to her lodging, and Mr. Spenlow and I
went into Court, where we had a divorce-suit coming on, under
an ingenious little statute (repealed now, I believe, but in virtue
of which I have seen several marriages annulled), of which the
merits were these. The husband, whose name was Thomas
Benjamin, had taken out his marriage licence as Thomas only;
suppressing the Benjamin, in case he should not find himself
as comfortable as he expected. Not finding himself as com-
fortable as he expected, or being a little fatigued with his wife,
poor fellow, he now came forward, by a friend, after being
married a year or two, and declared that his name was Thomas
Benjamin, and therefore he was not married at all. Which the
Court confirmed, to his great satisfaction.

I must say that I had my doubts about the strict justice of
this, and was not even frightened out of them by the bushel of
wheat which reconciles all anomalies.

But Mr. Spenlow argued the matter with me. He said. Look
at the world, there was good and evil in that; look at the
ecclesiastical law, there was good and evil in that. It was all
part of a system. Very good. There you were !

I had not the hardihood to suggest to Dora's father that
possibly we might even improve the world a little, if we got up
early in the morning, and took off our coats to the work ; but I ;
confessed that I thought we might improve the Commons. Mr. j
Spenlow replied that he would particularly advise me to dismiss
that idea from my mind, as not being worthy of my gentlemanly

448 David Copperfield

character ; but that he would be glad to hear from me of what
improvement I thought the Commons susceptible ?

Taking that part of the Commons which happened to be
nearest to us — for our man was unmarried by this time, and we
were out of Court, and strolling past the Prerogative Office — I
submitted that I thought the Prerogative Office rather a queerly
managed institution. Mr. Spenlow inquired in what respect?
I replied, with all due deference to his experience (but with
more deference, I am afraid, to his being Dora's father), that
perhaps it was a little nonsensical that the Registry of that
Court, containing the original wills of all persons leaving effects
within the immense province of Canterbury, for three whole
centuries, should be an accidental building, never designed for
the purpose, leased by the registrars for their own private emolu-
ment, unsafe, not even ascertained to be fire-proof, choked with
the important documents it held, and positively, from the roof
to the basement, a mercenary speculation of the registrars, who
took great fees from the public, and crammed the public's wills
away anyhow and anywhere, having no other object than to
get rid of them cheaply. That, perhaps, it was a little unreason-
able that these registrars in the receipt of profits amounting to
eight or nine thousand pounds a year (to say nothing of the
profits of the deputy registrars, and clerks of seats), should not
be obliged to spend a little of that money, in finding a reason-
ably safe place for the important documents which all classes
of people were compelled to hand over to them, whether they
would or no. That, perhaps, it was a little unjust, that all the
great offices in this great office should be magnificent sinecures,
while the unfortunate working-clerks in the cold dark room up-
stairs were the worst rewarded, and the least considered men,
doing important services, in London. That perhaps it was a
little indecent that the principal registrar of all, whose duty it
was to find the public, constantly resorting to this place, all
needful accommodation, should be an enormous sinecurist in
virtue of that post (and might be, besides, a clergyman, a
pluralist, the holder of a stall in a cathedral, and what not),
while the public was put to the inconvenience of which we had
a specimen every afternoon when the office was busy, and
which we knew to be quite monstrous. That, perhaps, in short,
this Prerogative Office of the diocese of Canterbury was alto-
gether such a pestilent job, and such a pernicious absurdity,
that but for its being squeezed away in a corner of Saint Paul's
Churchyard, which few people knew, it must have been turned
completely inside out, and upside down, long ago.

David Copperfield 449

Mr. Spenlow smiled as I became modestly warm on the
subject, and then argued this question with me as he h/u^
argued the other. He said, what was it after all ? It was^v
question of feeling. If the public felt that their wills were in
safe keeping, and took it for granted that the office was not to
be made better, who was the worse for it? Nobody. Who
was the better for it ? All the sinecurists. Very well. Then
the good predominated. It might not be a perfect system;
nothing was perfect ; but what he objected to, was, the inser-
tion of the wedge. Under the Prerogative Office, the country
had been glorious. Insert the wedge into the Prerogative Office,
and the country would cease to be glorious. He considered it
the principle of a gentleman to take things as he found them ;
and he had no doubt the Prerogative Office would last our
time. I deferred to his opinion, though I had great doubts of
it myself. I find he was right, however ; for it has not only
lasted to the present moment, but has done so in the teeth of a
great parliamentary report made (not too willingly) eighteen
years ago, when all thesei. objections of mine were set forth in
detail, and when the'existing stowage for wills was described as
equal to the accumulation of only two years and a half more.
What they have done with them since ; whether they have lost
many, or whether they sell any, now and then, to the butter
shops ; I don't know. I am glad mine is not there, and I hope
it may not go there, yet awhile.

I have set all this down, in my present blissful chapter,
because here it comes into its natural place. Mr. Spenlow
and I falling into this conversation, prolonged it and our
saunter to and fro until we diverged into general topics. And
so it came about, in the end, that Mr. Spenlow told me this
day week was Dora's birthday, and he would be glad if I would
come down and join a little picnic on the occasion. I went
out of my senses immediately ; became a mere driveller next
day, on receipt of a little lace-edged sheet of note-paper,
" Favoured by papa. To remind ; " and passed the intervening
period in a state of dotage.

I think I committed every possible absurdity in the way
of preparation for this blessed event. I turn hot when I
remember the cravat I bought. My boots might be placed
in any collection of instruments of torture. I provided, and
sent down by the Norwood coach the night before, a delicate
linle hamper, amounting in itself, I thought, almost to a
declaration. There were crackers in it with the tenderest
mottoes that could be got for money. At six in the morning,

450 David Copperfield

I was in Covent Garden Market, buying a bouquet for Dora.
^t ten I was on horseback (I hired a gallant grey, for the
^dcasion), with the bouquet in my hat, to keep it fresh, trotting
down to Norwood.

I suppose that when I saw Dora in the garden and pretended
not to see her, and rode past the house pretending to be
anxiously looking for it, I committed two small fooleries which
other young gentlemen in my circumstances might have com-
mitted— because they came so very natural to me. But oh !
when I did find the house, and did dismount at the garden
gate, and drag those stony-hearted boots across the lawn to
Dora sitting on a garden seat under a lilac tree, what a
spectacle she was, upon that beautiful morning, among the
butterflies, in a white chip bonnet and a dress of celestial blue !

There was a young lady with her — comparatively stricken in
years — almost twenty, I should say. Her name was Miss Mills,
and Dora called her Julia. She was the bosom friend of Dora.
Happy Miss Mills !

Jip was there, and Jip would bark at me again. When I
presented my bouquet, he gnashed his teeth with jealousy.
Well he might. If he had the least idea how I adored his
mistress, well he might !

"Oh, thank you, Mr. Copperfield 1 What dear flowers!"
said Dora.

I had had an intention of saying (and had been studying
the best form of words for three miles) that I thought them
beautiful before I saw them so near her. But I couldn't
manage it. She was too bewildering. To see her lay the
flowers against her little dimpled chin, was to lose all presence
of mind and power of language in a feeble ecstasy. I wonder
I didn't say, " Kill me, if you have a heart, Miss Mills. Let
me die here ! "

Then Dora held my flowers to Jip to smell. Then Jip
growled, and wouldn't smell them. Then Dora laughed, and
held them a little closer to Jip, to make him. Then Jip laid
hold of a bit of geranium with his teeth, and worried imaginary
cats in it. Then Dora beat him, and pouted, and said, " My
poor beautiful flowers ! " as compassionately, I thought, as if
Jip had laid hold of me. I wished he had !

" You'll be glad to hear, Mr. Copperfield," said Dora, " that
that cross Miss Murdstone is not here. She has gone to her
brother's marriage, and will be away at least three weeks. Isn't
that delightful?"

I said I was sure it must be delightful to her, and all that

David Copperfield 451

was delightful to her was delightful to me. Miss Mills, with
an air of superior wisdom and benevolence, smiled upon us^^^

" She is the most disagreeable thing I ever saw," said Daj^
"You can't believe how ill-tempered and shocking she is,
Julia."

" Yes, I can, my dear ! " said Julia.

" Vou can, perhaps, love," returned Dora, with her hand on
Julia's. " Forgive my not excepting you, my dear, at first."

I learnt, from this, that Miss Mills had had her trials in the
course of a chequered existence; and that to these, perhaps,
I might refer that wise benignity of manner which I had
already noticed. I found, in the course of the day, that this
was the case : Miss Mills having been unhappy in a misplaced
affection, and being understood to have retired from the world
on her awful stock of experience, but still to take a calm interest
in the unblighted hopes and loves of youth.

But now Mr. Spenlow came out of the house, and Dora
went to him, saying, "Look, papa, what beautiful flowers!"
And Miss Mills smiled thoughtfully, as who should say, " Ye
May-flies, enjoy your brief existence in the bright morning of
life ! " And we all walked from the lawn towards the carriage,
which was getting ready.

I shall never have such a ride again. I have never had
such another. There were only those three, their hamper, my
hamper, and the guitar-case, in the phaeton ; and, of course,
the phaeton was open; and I rode behind it, and Dora sat
with her back to the horses, looking towards me. She kept
the bouquet close to her on the cushion, and wouldn't allow
Jip to sit on that side of her at all, for fear he should crush it.
She often carried it in her hand, often refreshed herself with
its fragrance. Our eyes at those times often met; and my
great astonishment is that I didn't go over the head of my
gallant grey into the carriage.

There was dust, I believe. There was a good deal of dust,
I believe. I have a faint impression that Mr. Spenlow remon-
strated with me for riding in it ; but I knew of none. I was
sensible of a mist of love and beauty about Dora, but of nothing
else. He stood up sometimes, and asked me what I thought
of the prospect. I said it was delightful, and I dare say it
was ; but it was all Dora to me. The sun shone Dora, and
the birds sang Dora. The south wind blew Dora, and the wild
flowers in the hedges were all Doras, to a bud. My comfort is,
Miss Mills understood me. Miss Mills alone could enter into
my feelings thoroughly.

452 David Copperfield

I don't know how long we were going, and to this hour I
.know as little where we went. Perhaps it was near Guildford.
Perhaps some Arabian-night magician opened up the place for
the day, and shut it up for ever when we came away. It was
a green spot, on a hill, carpeted with soft turf. There were
shady trees, and heather, and, as far as the eye could see, a
rich landscape.

It was a trying thing to find people here, waiting for us;
and my jealousy, even of the ladies, knew no bounds. But
all of my own sex — especially one impostor, three or four
years my elder, with a red whisker, on which he established an
amount of presumption not to be endured — were my mortal
foes.

We all unpacked our baskets, and employed ourselves in
getting dinner ready. Red Whisker pretended he could make
a salad (which I don't believe), and obtruded himself on public
notice. Some of the young ladies washed the lettuces for him,
and sliced them under his directions. Dora was among these.
I felt that fate had pitted me against this man, and one of us
must fall.

Red Whisker made his salad (I wondered how they could
eat it. Nothing should have induced me to touch it !) and
voted himself into the charge of the wine-cellar, which he con-
structed, being an ingenious beast, in the hollow trunk of a
tree. By-and-bye, I saw him, with the majority of a lobster on
his plate, eating his dinner at the feet of Dora !

I have but an indistinct idea of what happened for some
time after this baleful object presented itself to my view. I
was very merry, I know; but it was hollow merriment. I
attached myself to a young creature in pink, with little eyes,
and flirted with her desperately. She received my attentions
with favour ; but whether on my account solely, or because she
had any designs on Red Whisker, I can't say. Dora's health
was drunk. When I drank it, I affected to interrupt my
conversation for that purpose, and to resume it immediately
afterwards. I caught Dora's eye as I bowed to her, and I
thought it looked appealing. But it looked at me over the
head of Red Whisker, and I was adamant.

The young creature in pink had a mother in green ; and I
rather think the latter separated us from motives of policy.
Howbeit, there was a general breaking up of the party, while
the remnants of the dinner were being put away ; and I strolled
oflf by myself among the trees, in a raging and remorseful
state. I was debating whether I should pretend that I was

David Copperfield 453

not well, and fly — I don't know where — upon my gallant grey,
when Dora and Miss Mills met me.

*' Mr. Copperfield," said Miss Mills, " you are dull."

I begged her pardon. Not at all.

" And Dora," said Miss Mills, ''you are dulL"

Oh dear no ! Not in the least.

" Mr. Copperfield and Dora," said Miss Mills, with an
almost venerable air. " Enough of this. Do not allow a
trivial misunderstanding to wither the blossoms of spring,
which, once put forth and blighted, cannot be renewed. I
speak," said Miss Mills, " from experience of the past — the
remote irrevocable past. The gushing fountains which sparkle
in the sun must not be stopped in mere caprice ; the oasis in
the desert of Sahara must not be plucked up idly."

I hardly knew what I did, I was burning all over to that
extraordinary extent ; but I took Dora's little hand and kissed
it — and she let me ! I kissed Miss Mills's hand ; and we all
seemed, to my thinking, to go straight up to the seventh
heaven.

We did not come down again. We stayed up there all the
evening. At first we strayed to and fro among the trees : I
with Dora's shy arm drawn through mine : and Heaven knows,
folly as it all was, it would have been a happy fate to have
been struck immortal with those foolish feelings, and have
strayed among the trees for ever!

But, much too soon, we heard the others laughing and talk-
ing, and calling " where's Dora ? " So we went back, and they
wanted Dora to sing. Red Whisker would have got the guitar-
case out of the carriage, but Dora told him nobody knew where
it was, but I. So Red Whisker was done for in a moment ;
and / got it, and / unlocked it, and / took the guitar out, and
/ sat by her, and / held her handkerchief and gloves, and 1
drank in every note of her dear voice, and she sang to me who
loved her, and all the others might applaud as much as they
liked, but they had nothing to do with it !

I was intoxicated with joy. I was afraid it was too happy to
be real, and that I should wake in Buckingham Street pre-
sently, and hear Mrs. Crupp clinking the teacups in getting
breakfast ready. But Dora sang, and others sang, and Miss
Mills sang — about the slumbering echoes in the caverns of
Memory ; as if she were a hundred years old — and the evening
came on; and we had tea, with the kettle boiling gipsy-fashion;
and I was still as happy as ever.

I was happier than ever when the party broke up, and the

454 David Copperfield

other people, defeated Red Whisker and all, went their several
ways, and we went ours through the still evening and the dying
light, with sweet scents rising up around us. Mr. Spenlow
being a little drowsy after the champagne — honour to the soil
that grew the grape, to the grape that made the wine, to the
sun that ripened it, and to the merchant who adulterated it ! —
and being fast asleep in a corner of the carriage, I rode by the
side and talked to Dora. She admired my horse and patted
him — oh, what a dear little hand it looked upon a horse ! — and
her shawl would not keep right, and now and then I drew it
round her with my arm ; and I even fancied that Jip began to
see how it was, and to understand that he must make up his
mind to be friends with me.

That sagacious Miss Mills, too ; that amiable, though quite
used-up, recluse ; that little patriarch of something less than
twenty, who had done with the world, and mustn't on any
account have the slumbering echoes in the caverns of Memory
awakened ; what a kind thing she did !

" Mr. Copperfield," said Miss Mills, " come to this side of
the carriage a moment — if you can spare a moment. I want
to speak to you."

Behold me, on my gallant grey, bending at the side of Miss
Mills, with my hand upon the carriage door !

" Dora is coming to stay with me. She is coming with me
the day after to-morrow. If you would like to call, I am sure
papa would be happy to see you."

What could I do but invoke a silent blessing on Miss Mills's
head, and store Miss Mills's address in the securest corner of
my memory ! What could I do but tell Miss Mills, with grate-
ful looks and fervent words, how much I appreciated her good
offices, and what an inestimable value I set upon her friendship !

Then Miss Mills benignantly dismissed me, saying, "Go
back to Dora ! " and I went ; and Dora leaned out of the
carriage to talk to me, and we talked all the rest of the way ;
and I rode my gallant grey so close to the wheel that I grazed
his near fore leg against it, and " took the bark off," as his
owner told me, " to the tune of three pun' sivin " — which I
paid, and thought extremely cheap for so much joy. What
time Miss Mills sat looking at the moon, murmuring verses
and recalling, I suppose, the ancient days when she and earth
had anything in common.

Norwood was many miles too near, and we reached it many
hours too soon ; but Mr. Spenlow came to himself a little
short of it, and said, " You must come in, Copperfield, and

David Copperfield 455

rest ! " and I consenting, we had sandwiches and wine-and-
water. In the light room, Dora blushing looked so lovely,
that I could not tear myself away, but sat there staring, in a
dream, until the snoring of Mr. Spenlow inspired me with
sufficient consciousness to take my leave. So we parted ; I
riding all the way to London with the farewell touch of Dora's
hand still light on mine, recalling every incident and word ten
thousand times ; lying down in my own bed at last, as enrap-
tured a young noodle as ever was carried out of his five wits by
love.

When I awoke next morning, I was resolute to declare my
passion to Dora, and know my fate. Happiness or misery was
now the question. There was no other question that I knew
of in the world, and only Dora could give the answer to it. I
passed three days in a luxury of wretchedness, torturing myself
by putting every conceivable variety of discouraging con-
struction on all that ever had taken place between Dora and
me. At last, arrayed for the purpose at a vast expense, I went
to Miss Mills's, fraught with a declaration.

How many times I went up and down the street, and round
the square — painfully aware of being a much better answer tc
the old riddle than the original one — before I could persuade
myself to go up the steps and knock, is no matter now. Even
when, at last, I had knocked, and was waiting at the door, I
had some flurried thought of asking if that were Mr. Blackboy's
(in imitation of poor Barkis), begging pardon, and retreating.
But I kept my ground.

Mr. Mills was not at home. I did not expect he would be.
Nobody wanted him. Miss Mills was at home. Miss Mills
would do.

I was shown into a room up-stairs, where Miss Mills and
Dora were. Jip was there. Miss Mills was copying music
(I recollect, it was a new song, called Affection's Dirge),' and
Dora was painting flowers. What were my feelings, when I
recognised my own flowers ; the identical Covent Garden
Market purchase ! I cannot say that they were very like,
or that they particularly resembled any flowers that have ever
come under my observation ; but I knew from the paper round
them, which was accurately copied, what the composition was.

Miss Mills was very glad to see me, and very sorry her papa
was not at home : though I thought we all bore that with forti-
tude. Miss Mills was conversational for a few minutes, and
then, laying down her pen upon Affection's Dirge, got up, and
left the room.

456 David Copperfield

I began to think I would put it off till to-morrow.

" I hope your poor horse was not tired, when he got home
at night," said Dora, lifting up her beautiful eyes. " It was a
long way for him."

I began to think I would do it to-day.

" It was a long way for >%/>«," said I, " for Ju had nothing to
uphold him on the journey."

" Wasn't he fed, poor thing ? " asked Dora.

I began to think I would put it off till to-morrow.

" Ye — yes," I said, " he was well taken care of. I mean he
had not the unutterable happiness that I had in being so near
you."

Dora bent her head over her drawing, and said, after a little
while — I had sat, in the interval, in a burning fever, and with
my legs in a very rigid state —

" You didn't seem to be sensible of that happiness yourself,
at one time of the day."

I saw now that I was in for it, and it must be done on the
spot.

" You didn't care for that happiness in the least," said Dora,
slightly raising her eyebrows, and shaking her head, " when
you were sitting by Miss Kitt."

Kitt, I should observe, was the name of the creature in pink,
with the little eyes.

"Though certainly I don't know why you should," said
Dora, " or why you should call it a happiness at all. But of
course you don't mean what you say. And I am sure no one
doubts your being at liberty to do whatever you like. Jip,
you naughty boy, come here ! "

I don't know how I did it. I did it in a moment. I
intercepted Jip. I had Dora in my arms. I was full of
eloquence. I never stopped for a word. I told her how I
loved her. I told her I should die without her. I told her
that I idolised and worshipped her. Jip barked madly all the
time.

When Dora hung her head and cried, and trembled, my
eloquence increased so much the more. If she would like me
to die for her, she had but to say the word, and I was ready.
Life without Dora's love was not a thing to have on any terms.
I couldn't bear it, and I wouldn't. I had loved her every
minute, day and night, since I first saw her. I loved her at
that minute to distraction. I should always love her, every
minute, to distraction. Lovers had loved before, and lovers
would love again ; but no lover had ever loved, might, could,

David Copperfield 457

would, or should ever love, as I loved Dora. The more I
raved, the more Jip barked. Each of us, in his own way, got
more mad every moment.

Well, well ! Dora and I were sitting on the sofa by-and-
bye, quiet enough, and Jip was lying in her lap, winking peace-
fully at me. It was off my mind. I was in a state of perfect
rapture. Dora and I were engaged.

I suppose we had some notion that this was to end in
marriage. We must have had some, because Dora stipulated
that we were never to be married without her papa's consent.
But, in our youthful ecstasy, I don't think that we really looked
before us or behind us ; or had any aspiration beyond the
ignorant present. We were to keep our secret from Mr.
Spenlow ; but I am sure the idea never entered my head, then,
that there was anything dishonourable in that.

Miss Mills was more than usually pensive when Dora, going
to find her, brought her back ; — I apprehend, because there
was a tendency in what had passed to awaken the slumbering
echoes in the caverns of Memory. But she gave us her bless-
ing, and the assurance of her lasting friendship, and spoke to
us, generally, as became a Voice from the Cloister.

What an idle time it was 1 What an unsubstantial, happy,
foolish time it was !

When I measured Dora's finger for a ring that was to be
made of Forget-me-nots, and when the jeweller, to whom I
took the measure, found me out, and laughed over his order-
book, and charged me anything he liked for the pretty little
toy, with its blue stones — so associated in my remembrance
with Dora's hand, that yesterday, when I saw such another,
by chance, on the finger of my own daughter, there was a
momentary stirring in my heart, like pain !

When I walked about, exalted with my secret, and full of my
own interest, and felt the dignity of loving Dora, and of being
beloved, so much, that if I had walked the air, I could not
have been more above the people not so situated, who were
creeping on the earth !

When we had those meetings in the garden of the square,
and sat within the dingy summer-house, so happy, that I love
the London sparrows to this hour, for nothing else, and see the *^^
plumage of the tropics in their smoky feathers 1

When we had our first great quarrel (within a week of our
betrothal), and when Dora sent me back the ring, enclosed
in a despairing cocked-hat note, wherein she used the terrible
expression that " our love had begun in folly, and ended in

458 David Copperfield

madness!" which dreadful words occasioned me to tear my
hair, and cry that all was over !

"\Vhen, under cover of the night, I flew to Miss Mills, whom
I saw by stealth in a back kitchen where there was a mangle,
and implored Miss Mills to interpose between us and avert
insanity. When Miss Mills undertook the office and returned
with Dora, exhorting us, from the pulpit of her own bitter
youth, to mutual concession, and the avoidance of the desert
of Sahara !

When we cried, and made it up, and were so blest again, that
the back kitchen, mangle and all, changed to Love's own
temple, where we arranged a plan of correspondence through
Miss Mills, always to comprehend at least one letter on each
side every day !

What an idle time ! What an unsubstantial, happy, foolish
time ! Of all the times of mine that Time has in his grip,
there is none that in one retrospect I can smile at half so much,
and think of half so tenderly.

CHAPTER XXXIV

. ^ MY AUNT ASTONISHES ME

I WROTE to Agnes as soon as Dora and I were engaged. I
wrote her a long letter, in which I tried to make her compre-
hend how blest I was, and what a darling Dora was. I en-
treated Agnes not to regard this as a thoughtless passion
which could ever yield to any other, or had the least resem-
blance to the boyish fancies that we used to joke about. I
assured her that its profundity was quite unfathomable, and
expressed my belief that nothing like it had ever been known.

Somehow, as I wrote to Agnes on a fine evening by my open
window, and the remembrance of her clear calm eyes and
gentle face came stealing over me, it shed such a peaceful influ-
ence upon the hurry and agitation in which I had been living
lately, and of which my very happiness partook in some degree,
that it soothed me into tears. I remember that I sat resting
my head upon my hand, when the letter was half done,
cherishing a general fancy as if A ^nes were one of the elements
of my natural home. As if, in the retirement of the house
made almost sacred to me by her presence, Dora and I must
be happier than anywhere. As if, in love, joy, sorrow, hope,

David Copperfield 459

or disappointment ; in all emotions ; my heart turned naturally
there, and found its refuge and best friend.

Of Steerforth ^ said nothing. I only told her there had
been sad grief at Yarmouth, on account of Emily's flight ; and
that on me it made a double wound, by reason of the circum-
stances attending it. I knew how quick she always was to
divine the truth, and that she would never be the first to breathe
his name.

To this letter I received an answer by return of post. As I
read it, I seemed to hear Agnes speaking to me. It was like
her cordial voice in my ears. What can I say more !

While I had been away from home lately, Traddles had
called twice or thrice. Finding Peggotty within, and being
informed by Peggotty (who always volunteered that informa-
tion to whomsoever would receive it), that she was my old
nurse, he had established a good-humoured acquaintance with
her, and had stayed to have a little chat with her about me. So
Peggotty said ; but I am afraid the chat was all on her own
side, and of immoderate length, as she was very difficult indeed
to stop, God bless her ! when she had me for her theme.

This reminds me, not only that I expected Traddles on a
certain afternoon of his own appointing, which was now come,
but that Mrs. Crupp had resigned everything appertaining to
her office (the salary excepted) until Peggotty should cease to
present herself. Mrs. Crupp, after holding divers conversations
respecting Peggotty, in a very high-pitched voice, on the stair-
case— with some invisible Familiar it would appear, for corpore-
ally speaking she was quite alone at those times — addressed a
letter to me, developing her views. Beginning it with that
statement of universal application, which fitted every occur-
rence of her life, namely, that she was a mother herself, she
went on to inform me that she had once seen very different
days, but that at all periods of her existence she had had a
constitutional objection to spies, intruders, and informers. She
named no names, she said ; let them the cap fitted, wear it ;
but spies, intruders and informers, especially in widders* weeds
(this clause was underlined), she had ever accustomed herself
to look down upon. If a gentleman was the victim of spies,
intruders, and informers (but still naming no names), that was
his own pleasure. He had a right to please himself; so let
him do. All that she, Mrs .Crupp, stipulated for, was, that
she should not be " brought in contract " with such persons.
Therefore she begged to be excused from any further attend-
ance on the top set, until things were as they formerly was.

460 David Copperfield

and as they could be wished to be ; and further mentioned
that her little book would be found upon the breakfast-table
every Saturday morning, when she requested an immediate
settlement of the same, with the benevolent view of saving
trouble, "and an ill-con wenience " to all parties.

After this, Mrs. Crupp confined herself to making pitfalls on
the stairs, principally with pitchers, and endeavouring to delude
Peggotty into breaking her legs. I found it rather harassing to
live in this state of siege, but was too much afraid of Mrs. Crupp
to see any way out of it.

" My dear Copperfield," cried Traddles, punctually appear-
ing at the door, in spite of all these obstacles, " how do you
do?"

" My dear Traddles," said I, " I am delighted to see you at
last, and very sorry I have not been at home before. But I
have been so much engaged "

"Yes, yes, I know," said Traddles, "of course. Yours lives
in London, I think." *

" What did you say ? "

"She — excuse me — Miss D., you know," said Traddles,
colouring in his great delicacy, " lives in London, I believe ? "

" Oh yes. Near London."

" Mine, perhaps you recollect," said Traddles, with a serious
look, "lives down in Devonshire — one of ten. Consequently,
I am not so much engaged as you — in that sense."

" I wonder you can bear," I returned, " to see her so seldom."

" Hah ! " said Traddles, thoughtfully. " It does seem a
wonder. I suppose it is, Copperfield, because there's no help
for it?"

" I suppose so," I replied with a smile, and not without a
blush. " And because you have so much constancy and
patience, Traddles."

" Dear me ! " said Traddles, considering about it, " do I
strike you in that way, Copperfield? Really I didn't know
that I had. But she is such an extraordinarily dear girl
herself, that it's possible she may have imparted something of
those virtues to me. Now you mention it, Copperfield, I
shouldn't wonder at all. I assure you she is always forgetting
herself, and takin^are of the other nine."

" Is she the eldest ? " I inquired.

" Oh dear, no," said Traddles. " The eldest is a Beauty."

He saw, I suppose, tihat I could not help smiling at the
simplicity of this reply; and added, with a smile upon his
own ingenuous face:

" David topperfield 461

" Not, of course, but that my Sophy — pretty name, Copper-
field, I always think ? "

" Very pretty ! " said I.

" Not of course, but that Sophy is beautiful too in my eyes,
and would be one of the dearest girls that ever was, in any-
body's eyes, I should think. But when I say the eldest is a
Beauty, I mean she really is a — " he seemed to be describing
clouds about hinjself, with both hands : " Splendid, you know,"
said Traddles, energetically.

" Indeed ! " said I.

"Oh, I assure you," said Traddles, "something very un-
common, indeed ! Then, you know, being formed for society
and admiration, and not being able to enjoy much of it in
consequence of their limited means, she naturally gets a little
irritable and exacting sometimes. Sophy puts her in good
humour ! "

" Is Sophy the youngest ? " I hazarded.

" Oh dear, no ! " said Traddles, stroking his chin. " The
two youngest are only nine and ten. Sophy educates 'em."

" The second daughter, perhaps ? " I hazarded.

"No," said Traddles. "Sarah's the second. Sarah has
something the matter with her spine, poor girl. The malady
will wear out by-and-bye, the doctors say, but in the meantime
she has to lie down for a twelvemonth. Sophy nurses her.
Sophy's the fourth."

" Is the mother living ? " I inquired.

"Oh yes," said Traddles, "she is alive. She is a very
superior woman indeed, but the damp country is not adapted
to her constitution, and — in fact she has lost the use of her
limbs."

" Dear me ! " said I.

" Very sad, is it not ? " returned Traddles. " But in a
merely domestic view it is not so bad as it might be, because
Sophy takes her place. She is quite as much a mother to her
mother, as she is to the other nine."

I felt the greatest admiration for the virtues of this young
lady ; and, honestly with the view of doing my best to prevent
the good-nature of Traddles from being imposed upon, to the
detriment of their joint prospects in life, ipquired how Mr.
Micawber was?

"He is quite well, Copperfield, thank you," said Traddles.
" I am not living with him at present.**

"No?"

" No. You see the truth is," said Traddles, in a whisper,

462 David Copperfield

" he has changed his name to Mortimer, in consequence of
his temporary embarrassments ; and he don't come out till
after dark — and then in spectacles. There was an execution
put into our house, for rent. Mrs. Micawber was in such
a dreadful state that I really couldn't resist giving my name
to that second bill we spoke of here. You may imagine
how delightful it was to my feelings, Copperfield, to see
the matter settled with it, and Mrs. Micawber recover her
spirits."

"Hum! "said I.

"Not that her happiness was of long duration," pursued
Traddles, " for, unfortunately, within a week another execution
came in. It broke up the establishment. I have been living
in a furnished apartment since then, and the Mortimers have
been very private indeed. I hope you won't think it selfish,
Copperfield, if I mention that the broker carried off my little
round table with the marble top, and Sophy's flower-pot and
stand?"

" What a hard thing 1 " I exclaimed indignantly.

" It was a it was a pull," said Traddles, with his usual

wince at that expression. " I don't mention it reproachfully,
however, but with a motive. The fact is, Copperfield, I was
unable to repurchase them at the time of their seizure ; in the
first place, because the broker, having an idea that I wanted
them, ran the price up to an extravagant extent ; and, in the
second place, because I — hadn't any money. Now, I have
kept my eye since, upon the broker's shop," said Traddles,
with a great enjoyment of his mystery, " which is up at the top
of Tottenham Court Road, and, at last, to-day I find them put
out for sale. I have only noticed them from over the way,
because if the broker saw me^ bless you, he'd ask any price for
them ! What has occurred to me, having now the money, is,
that perhaps you wouldn't object to ask that good nurse of
yours to come with me to the shop — I can show it her from
round the comer of the next street — and make the best bargain
for them, as if they were for herself, that she can ! "

The delight with which Traddles propounded this plan to
me, and the sense he had of its uncommon artfulness, are
among the freshest things in my remembrance.

I told him that my old nurse would be delighted to assist
him, and that we would all three take the field together, but
on one condition. That condition was, that he should make
a solemn resolution to grant no more loans of his name, or
anything else, to Mr. Micawber.

David Copperfield 463

"My dear Copperfield," said Traddles, "I have already
done so, because I begin to feel that I have not only been
inconsiderate, but that I have been positively unjust to
Sophy. My word being passed to myself, there is no longer
any apprehension ; but I pledge it to you, too, with the
greatest readiness. That first unlucky obligation, I have
paid. I have no doubt Mr. Micawber would have paid it if
he could, but he could not. One thing I ought to mention,
which I like very much in Mr. Micawber, Copperfield. It
refers to the second obligation, which is not yet due. He
don't tell me that it is provided for, but he says it will be.
Now, I think there is something very fair and honest about
that!"

I was unwilling to damp my good friend's confidence, and
therefore assented. After a little further conversation, we
went round to the chandler's shop, to enlist Peggotty ;
Traddles declining to pass the evening with me, both because
he endured the liveliest apprehensions that his property would
be bought by somebody else before he could repurchase it,
and because it was the evening he always devoted to writing
to the dearest girl in the world.

I never shall forget him peeping round the comer of the
street in Tottenham Court Road, while Peggotty was bar-
gaining for the precious articles ; or his agitation when she
came slowly towards us after vainly offering a price, and
was hailed by the relenting broker, and went back again.
The end of the negotiation was, that she bought the property
on tolerably easy terms, and Traddles was transported with
pleasure.

"I am very much obliged to you, indeed," said Traddles
on hearing it was to be sent to where he lived, that night. " If
I might ask one other favour, I hope you would not think it
absurd, Copperfield ? "

I said beforehand, certainly not.

"Then if you would be good enough," said Traddles to
Peggotty, " to get the flower-pot now, I think I should like (it
being Sophy's, Copperfield) to carry it home myself ! "

Peggotty was glad to get it for him, and he overwhelmed
her with thanks, and went his way up Tottenham Court Road,
carrying the flower-pot affectionately in his arms, with one of
the most delightful expressions of countenance I ever saw.

We then turned back towards my chambers. As the shops
had charms for Peggotty which I never knew them possess in
the same degree for anybody else, I sauntered easily along,

464 David Copperfield

amused by her staring in at the windows, and waiting for her
as often as she chose. We were thus a good while in getting
to the Adelphi.

On our way up-stairs, I called her attention to the sudden
disappearance of Mrs. Crupp's pitfalls, and also to the prints
of recent footsteps. We were both very much surprised,
coming higher up, to find my outer door standing open (which
I had shut), and to hear voices inside.

We looked at one another, without knowing what to make
of this, and went into the sitting-room. What was my amaze-
ment to find, of all people upon earth, my aunt there, and
Mr. Dick ! My aunt sitting on a quantity of luggage, with her
two birds before her, and her cat on her knee, like a female
Robinson Crusoe, drinking tea. Mr. Dick leaning thoughtfully
on a great kite, such as we had often been out together to fly,
with more luggage piled about him !

"My dear aunt!" cried I. "Why, what an unexpected
pleasure ! "

1 We cordially embraced ; and Mr. Dick and I cordially shook
hands ; and Mrs. Crupp, who was busy making tea, and could
not be too attentive, cordially said she had knowed well as
Mr. Copperfull would have his heart in his mouth, when he
see his dear relations.

" Holloa ! " said my aunt to Peggotty, who quailed before
her awful presence. " How are you ? "

" You remember my aunt, Peggotty ? " said I.

" For the love of goodness, child," exclaimed my aunt,
" don't call the woman by that South Sea Island name ! If
she married and got rid of it, which was the best thing she
could do, why don't you give her the benefit of the change ?
What's your name now, — P ? " said my aunt, as a compromise
for the obnoxious appellation.

'* Barkis, ma'am," said Peggotty, with a curtsey.

"Well ! That's human," said my aunt. "It sounds less as
if you wanted a missionary. How d'ye do, Barkis ? I hope
you're well ? "

Encouraged by these gracious words, and by my aunt's
extending her hand, Barkis came forward, and took the hand,
i and curtseyed her acknowledgments.

4 4/ « We are older than we were, I see," said my aunt. " We
have only met each other once before, you know. A nice
business we made of it then! Trot, my dear, another
cup."

I handed it dutifully to my aunt, who was in her usual

David Copperfield 465

inflexible state of figure ; and ventured a remonstrance with
her on the subject of her sitting on a box.

" Let me draw the sofa here, or the easy chair, aunt," said I.
" Why should you be so uncomfortable ? "

"Thank you, Trot," replied my aunt, "I prefer to sit upon
my property." Here my aunt looked hard at Mrs. Crupp, and
observed, " We needn't trouble you to wait, ma'am."

"Shall I put a little more teai^ the pot afore I go, ma'am?"
said Mrs. Crupp.

" No, I thank you, ma'am," replied my aunt.

" Would you let me fetch another pat of butter, ma'am ? "
said Mrs. Crupp. " Or would you be persuaded to try a new-
laid hegg ? or should I brile a rasher ? Ain't there nothing I
could do for your dear aunt, Mr. CopperfuU ? "

'• Nothing, ma'am," returned my aunt. " I shall do very well,
I thank you."

Mrs. Crupp, who had been incessantly smiling to express
sweet temper, and incessantly holding her head on one side,
to express a general feebleness of constitution, and incessantly
rubbing her hands, to express a desire to be of service to all
deserving objects, gradually smiled herself, one-sided herself,
and rubbed herself, out of the room.

" Dick ! " said my aunt. " You know what I told you about
time-servers and wealth- worshippers ? "

Mr. Dick — with rather a scared look, as if he had forgotten
it— returned a hasty answer in the affirmative.

" Mrs. Crupp is one of them," said my aunt. " Barkis, I'll
trouble you to look after the tea, and let me have another cup,
for I don't fancy that woman's pouring-out ! '>

I knew my aunt sufficiently well to know that she had some-
thing of importance on her mind, and that there was far more
matter in this arrival than a stranger might have supposed. I
noticed how her eye lighted on me, when she thought my
attention otherwise occupied ; and what a curious process of
hesitation appeared to be going on within her, while she pre-
served her outward stiffness and composure. I began to reflect
whether I had done anything to offend her ; and my conscience
whispered me that I had not yet told her about Dora. Could
it by any means be that, I wondered !

As I knew she would only speak in her own good time, I
sat down near her, and spoke to the birds, and played with the
cat, and was as easy as I could be. But I was very far from
being really easy ; and I should still have been so, even if Mr.
Dick, leaning over the great kite behind my aunt, had not

466 David Copperfield

taken every secret opportunity of shaking his head darkly at
me, and pointing at her.

" Trot," said my aunt at last, when she had finished her tea,
and carefully smoothed down her dress, and wiped her lips" —
" you needn't go, Barkis ! — Trot, have you got to be firm and
self-reliant ? "

" I hope so, aunt."

" What do you think ? " inquired Miss Betsey.

" I think so, aunt."

"Then why, my love," said my aunt, looking earnestly at
me, " why do you think I prefer to sit upon this property of
mine to-night ? "

I shook my head, unable to guess.

"Because," said my aunt, "it's all I have. Because I'm
ruined, my dear ! "

If the house, and every one of us, had tumbled out into the
river together, I could hardly have received a greater shock.

" Dick knows it," said my aunt, laying her hand calmly on
my shoulder. " I am ruined, my dear Trot ! All I have in
the world is in this room, except the cottage ; and that I have
left Janet to let. Barkis, I want to get a bed for this gentle-
man to-night. To save expense, perhaps you can make up
something here for myself. Anything will do. It's only for
to-night. We'll talk about this, more, to-morrow."

I was roused from my amazement, and concern for her — I
am sure, for her — by her falling on my neck for a moment, and
crying that she only grieved for me. In another moment she
suppressed this emotion^ and said with an aspect more
triumphant than dejected:

"We must meet reverses boldly, and not suffer them to
frighten us, my dear. We must learn to act the play out. We
must live misfortune down, Trot 1 "

CHAPTER XXXV

DEPRESSION

As soon as I could recover my presence of mind, which quite
deserted me in the first overpowering shock of my aunt's
intelligence, I proposed to Mr. Dick to come round to the
chandler's shop, and take possession of the bed which Mr.
Peggotty had lately vacated. The chandler's shop being in

David Copperfield 467

Hungerford Market, and Hungerford Market being a very
different place in those days, there was a low wooden colonnade
before the door (not very unlike that before the house where
the little man and woman used to live, in the old weather-
glass), which pleased Mr. Dick mightily. The glory of lodging
over this structure would have compensated him, I dare say,
for many inconveniences ; but, as there were really few to bear,
beyond the compound of flavours I have already mentioned,
and perhaps the want of a little more elbow-room, he was
perfectly charmed with his accommodation. Mrs. Crupp had
indignantly assured him that there wasn't room to swing a cat
there ; but, as Mr. Dick justly observed to me, sitting down on
the foot of the bed, nursing his leg, " You know, Trotwood, I
don't want to swing a cat. I never do swing a cat. Therefore,
what does that signify to rru 1^^

I tried to ascertain whether Mr. Dick had any understand-
ing of the causes of this sudden and great change in my aunt's
affairs. As I might have expected, he had none at all. The
only account he could give of it was, that my aunt had said
to him, the day before yesterday, " Now, Dick, are you really
and truly the philosopher I take you for?" That then he
had said. Yes, he hoped so. That then my aunt had said,
" Dick, I am ruined." That then he had said, "Oh, indeed ! "
That then my aunt had praised him highly, which he was very
glad of. And that then they had come to me, and had
had bottled porter and sandwiches on the road.

Mr. Dick was so very complacent, sitting on the foot of the
bed, nursing his leg, and telling me this, with his eyes wide
open and a surprised smile, that I am sorry to say I was pro-
voked into explaining to him that ruin meant distress, want, and
starvation ; but I was soon bitterly reproved for this harsh-
ness, by seeing his face turn pale, and tears course down his
lengthened cheeks, while he fixed upon me a look of such
unutterable woe, that it might have softened a far harder heart
than mine. I took infinitely greater pains to cheer him up
again than I had taken to depress him ; and I soon under-
stood (as I ought to have known at first) that he had been so
confident, merely because of his faith in the wisest and most
wonderful of women, and his unbounded reliance on my in-
tellectual resources. The latter, I believe, he considered a
match for any kind of disaster not absolutely mortal.

" What can we do, Trotwood ? " said Mr. Dick. " There's
the Memorial "

" To be sure there is," said I. " But all we can do just now,

468 David Copperfield

Mr. Dick, is to keep a cheerful countenance, and not let my
aunt see that we are thinking about it."

He assented to this in the most earnest manner ; and implored
me, if I should see him wandering an inch out of the right
course, to recall him by some of those superior methods which
were always at my command. But I regret to state that the
fright I had given him proved too much for his best attempts
at concealment. All the evening his eyes wandered to my
aunt's face, with an expression of the most dismal appre-
hension, as if he saw her growing thin on the spot. He was
conscious of this, and put a constraint upon his head ; but his
keeping that immovable, and sitting rolling his eyes like a
piece of machinery, did not mend the matter at all I saw him
look at the loaf at supper (which happened to be a small one),
as if nothing else stood between us and famine ; and when my
aunt insisted on his making his customary repast, I detected
him in the act of pocketing fragments of his bread and cheese ;
I have no doubt for the purpose of reviving us with those
savings, when we should have reached an advanced stage of
attenuation.

My aunt, on the other hand, was in a composed frame of
mind, which ^was a lesson to all of us — to me, I am sure.
She was extremely gracious to Peggotty, except when I in-
advertently called her by that name ; and, strange as I knew
she felt in London, appeared quite at home. She was to have
my bed, and I was to lie in the sitting-room, to keep guard over
her. She made a great point of being so near the river, in
case of a conflagration ; and I suppose really did find some
satisfaction in that circumstance.

" Trot, my dear," said my aunt, when she saw me making
preparations for compounding her usual night-draught, " No ! "

"Nothing, aunt?"

" Not wine, my dear. Ale."

"But there is wine here, aunt. And you always have it
made of wine."

" Keep that, in case of sickness," said my aunt. " We
mustn't use it carelessly. Trot. Ale for me. Half a pint."

I thought Mr. Dick would have fallen, insensible. My aunt
being resolute, I went out and got the ale myself. As it was
growing late, Peggotty and Mr. Dick took that opportunity of
repairing to the chandler's shop together. I parted from him,
poor fellow, at the corner of the street, with his great kite at
his back, a very monument of human misery.

My aunt was walking up and down the room when I

David Copperfield 469

returned, crimping the borders of her nightcap with her fingers.
I warmed the ale and made the toast on the usual infallible
principles. When it was ready for her, she was ready for it,
with her nightcap on, and the skirt of her gown turned back on
her knees.

" My dear," said my aunt, after taking a spoonful of it ; " it's
a great deal better than wine. Not half so bilious."

I suppose I looked doubtful, for she added :

"Tut, tut, child. If nothing worse than Ale happens to us,
we are well off."

" I should think so myself, aunt, I am sure," said I.

" Well, then, why don't you think so ? " said my aunt

" Because you and I are very different people," I returned.

" Stuff and nonsense, Trot ! " replied my aunt.

My aunt went on with a quiet enjoyment, in which there
was very little affectation, if any ; drinking the warm ale with a
tea-spoon, and soaking her strips of toast in it.

** Trot," said she, " I don't care for strange faces in general,
but I rather like that Barkis of yours, do you know ! "

" It's better than a hundred pounds to hear you say so ! **
said I.

" It's a most extraordinary world," observed my aunt, rubbing
her nose ; " how that woman ever got into it with that name,
is unaccountable to me. It would be much more easy to be
bom a Jackson, or something of that sort, one would think."

" Perhaps she thinks so, too ; it's not her fault," said I.

" I suppose not," returned my aunt, rather grudging the
admission ; " but it's very aggravating. However, she's Barkis
now. That's some comfort. Barkis is imcommonly fond of
you. Trot."

"There is nothing she would leave undone to prove it,"
said I.

" Nothing, I believe," returned my aunt " Here, the poor
fool has been begging and praying about handing over some
of her money — because she has got too much of it. A
simpleton ! "

My aunt's tears of pleasure were positively trickling down
into the warm ale.

"She's the most ridiculous creature that ever was bom,"
said my aunt. " I knew, from the first moment when I saw
her with that poor dear blessed baby of a mother of yours, that
she was the most ridiculous of mortals. But there are good
points in Barkis ! "

Affecting to laugh, she got an opportunity of putting her

470 David Copperfield

hand to her eyes. Having availed herself of it, she resumed
her toast and her discourse together.

" Ah ! Mercy upon us ! " sighed my aunt. " I know all
about it, Trot ! Barkis and myself had quite a gossip while
you were out with Dick. I know all about it. I don't know
where these wretched girls expect to go to, for my part. I
wonder they don't knock out their brains against — against
mantelpieces," said my aunt; an idea which was probably
suggested to her by her contemplation of mine.

" Poor Emily ! " said I.

"Oh, don't talk to me about poor," returned my aunt.
"She should have thought of that, before she caused so much
misery ! Give me a kiss, Trot. I am sorry for your early
experience."

As I bent forward, she put her tumbler on my knee to detain
me, and said :

" Oh, Trot, Trot ! And so you fancy yourself in love ! Do
you?"

" Fancy, aunt ! " I exclaimed, as red as I could be. " I
adore her with my whole soul ! "

" Dora, indeed ! " returned my aunt. " And you mean to say
the little thing is very fascinating, I suppose ? "

" My dear aunt," I replied, " no one can form the least idea
what she is ! "

" Ah ! And not silly ? " said my aunt.

"Silly, aunt!"

I seriously believe it had never once entered my head for
a single moment, to consider whether she was or not. I
resented the idea, of course ; but I was in a manner struck by
it, as a new one altogether.

" Not light-headed ? " said my aunt.

" Light-headed, aunt ! " I could only repeat this daring
speculation with the same kind of feeling with which I had
repeated the preceding question.

" Well, well ! " said my aunt. " I only ask. I don't
depreciate her. Poor little couple ! And so you think you
were formed for one another, and are to go through a party-
supper-table kind of life, like two pretty pieces of confectionery,
do you, Trot?"

She asked me this so kindly, and with such a gentle air, half
playful and half sorrowful, that I was quite touched.

" We are young and inexperienced, aunt, I know," I replied ;
" and I dare say we say and think a good deal that is rather
foolish. But we love one another truly, I am sure. If I

David Copperfield 471

thought Dora could ever love anybody else, or cease to love
me ; or that I could ever love anybody else, or cease to love
her ; I don't know what I should do — go out of my mind, I
think ! "

" Ah, Trot 1 " said my aunt, shaking her head, and smiling
gravely, " blind, blind, blind ! "

"Some one that I know. Trot," my aunt pursued, after a
pause, " though of a very pliant disposition, has an earnestness
of affection in him that reminds me of poor Baby. Earnest-
ness is what that Somebody must look for, to sustain him and
improve him. Trot. Deep, downright, faithful earnestness."
" If you only knew the earnestness of Dora, aunt ! " I cried.
" Oh, Trot ! " she said again ; " blind, blind ! " and without
knowing why, I felt a vague unhappy loss or want of something
overshadow me like a cloud.

" However," said my aunt, " I don't want to put two young
creatures out of conceit with themselves, or to make them
unhappy ; so, though it is a girl and boy attachment, and girl
and boy attachments very often — mind ! I don't say always ! —
come to nothing, still we'll be serious about it, and hope for a
prosperous issue one of these days. There's time enough for
it to come to anything ! "

This was not upon the whole very comforting to a rapturous
lover ; but I was glad to have my aunt in my confidence, and
I was mindful of her being fatigued. So I thanked her ardently
for this mark of her affection, and for all her other kindnesses
towards me ; and after a tender good-night she took her
nightcap into my bedroom.

How miserable I was, when I lay down ! How I though t\
and thought about my being poor, in Mr. Spenlow's eyes ; »
about my not being what I thought I was, when I proposed to
Dora; about the chivalrous necessity of telling Dora what
my worldly condition was, and releasing her from her engage-
ment if she thought fit ; about how I should contrive to live,
during the long term of my articles, when I was earning ^
nothing ; about doing something to assist my aunt, and seeing
no way of doing anything; about coming down to have no
money in my pocket, and to wear a shabby coat, and to be
able to carry Dora no little presents, and to ride no gallant
greys, and to show myself in no agreeable light! Sordid
and selfish as I knew it was, and as I tortured myself by
knowing that it was, to let my mind run on my own dis-
tress so much, I was so devoted to Dora that I could not
help it. I knew that it was base in me not to think more

472 David Copperfield

of my aunt, and less of myself; but, so far, selfishness was
inseparable from Dora, and I could not put Dora on one
side for any mortal creature. How exceedingly miserable I
was, that night !

As to sleep, I had dreams of poverty in all sorts of shapes,
but I seemed to dream without the previous ceremony of
going to sleep. Now I was ragged, wanting to sell Dora
matches, six bundles for a halfpenny; now I was at the
office in a nightgown and boots, remonstrated with by Mr.
Spenlow on appearing before the clients in that airy attire ;
now I was hungrily picking up the crumbs that fell from old
Tiffey's daily biscuit, regularly eaten when St. Paul's struck
one ; now I was hopelessly endeavouring to get a licence to
marry Dora, having nothing but one of Uriah Heep's gloves
to offer in exchange, which the whole Commons rejected ; and
still, more or less conscious of my own room, I was always
tossing about like a distressed ship in a sea of bed-clothes.

My aunt was restless, too, for I frequently heard her walking
to and fro. Two or three times in the course of the night,
attired in a long flannel wrapper in which she looked seven
feet high, she appeared, like a disturbed ghost, in my room,
and came to the side of the sofa on which I lay. On the
first occasion I started up in alarm, to learn that she inferred
from a particular light in the sky, that Westminster Abbey
was on fire ; and to be consulted in reference to the proba-
bility of its igniting Buckingham Street, in case the wind
changed. Lying still, after that, I found that she sat down
near me, whispering to herself " Poor boy ! " And then it
made me twenty times more wretched, to know how un-
/ selfishly mindful she was ol me, and how selfishly mindful
I was of myself.

It was difficult to believe that a night so long to me, could
be short to anybody else. This consideration set me
thinking and thinking of an imaginary party where people
were dancing the hours away, until that became a dream
too, and I heard the music incessantly playing one tune, and
saw Dora incessantl)' dancing one dance, without taking the
least notice of me. The man who had been playing the harp
all night, was trying in vain to cover it with an ordinary-sized
nightcap, when I awoke ; or I should rather say, when I left
off trying to go to sleep, and saw the sun shining in through
the window at last.

There was an old Roman bath in those day at the bottom
of one of the streets out of the Strand — it may be there still

David Copperfield 473

— in which I have had many a cold plunge. Dressing myself
as quietly as I could, and leaving Peggotty to look after my
aunt, I tumbled head foremost into it, and then went for a
walk to Hampstead. I had a hope that this brisk treatment
might freshen my wits a little ; and I think it did them good,
for I soon came to the conclusion that the first step I ought
to take was to try if my articles could be cancelled and the
premium recovered. I got some breakfast on the Heath, and
walked back to Doctors' Commons, along the watered roads
and through a pleasant smell of summer flowers, growing in
gardens and carried into town on hucksters' heads, intent on
this first effort to meet our altered circumstances.

I arrived at the office so soon, after all, that I had half-an-
hour's loitering about the Commons, before old Tiffey, who
was always first, appeared with his key. Then I sat down in
my shady corner, looking up at the sunlight on the opposite
chimney-pots, and thinking about Dora; until Mr. Spenlow
came in, crisp and curly.

" How are you, Copperfield ? " said he. " Fine morning ! "

" Beautiful morning, sir," said I. " Could I say a word to
you before you go into Court ? "

" By all means," said he. " Come into my room."

I followed him into his room, and he began putting on
his gown, and touching himself up before a little glass he
had, hanging inside a closet door.

" I am sorry to say," said I, " that I have some rather
disheartening intelligence from my aunt."

" No ! " said he. " Dear me ! Not paralysis, I hope ? "

" It has no reference to her health, sir," I replied. " She
has met with some large lossrs. In fact, she has very little
left, indeed."

" You as-tound me, Copperfield ! " cried Mr. Spenlow.

I shook my head. " Indeed, sir," said I, " her affairs are so
changed, that I wished to ask you whether it would be pos-
sible— at a sacrifice on our part of some portion of the
premium, of course," I put in this, on the spur of the
moment, warned by the blank expression of his face — "to
cancel my articles?"

What it cost me to make this proposal, nobody knows.
It was like asking, as a favour, to be sentenced to trans-
portation from Dora.

" To cancel your articles, Copperfield ? Cancel ? "

I explained with tolerable firmness, that I really did not
know where my means of subsistence were to come from,

474 David Copperfield

unless I could earn them for myself. I had no fear for the
future, I said — and I laid great emphasis on that, as if to
imply that I should still be decidedly eligible for a son-in-law
one of these days — but, for the present, I was thrown upon
my own resources.

" I am extremely sorry to hear this, Copperfield," said Mr.
Spenlow. "Extremely sorry. It is not usual to cancel articles
for any such reason. It is not a professional course of pro-
ceeding. It is not a convenient precedent at all. Far from it.
At the same time "

"You are very good, sir," I murmured, anticipating a
concession.

" Not at all. Don't mention it," said Mr. Spenlow. " At
the same time, I was going to say, if it had been my lot to
have my hands unfettered — if I had not a partner — Mr.
Jorkins "

My hopes were dashed in a moment, but I made another
effort.

" Do you think, sir," said I, " if I were to mention it to
Mr. Jorkins "

Mr. Spenlow shook his head discouragingly. "Heaven
forbid, Copperfield," he replied, " that I should do any man
an injustice : still less, Mr. Jorkins. But I know my partner,
Copperfield. Mr. Jorkins is not a man to respond to a
proposition of this peculiar nature. Mr. Jorkins is very
difficult to move from the beaten track. You know what
he is ! "

I am sure I knew nothing about him, except that he had
originally been alone in the business, and now lived by him-
self in a house near Montagu Square, which was fearfully in
want of painting ; that he came very late of a day, and went
away very early ; that he never appeared to be consulted about
anything ; and that he had a dingy little black-hole of his own
up-stairs, where no business was ever done, and where there
was a yellow old cartridge-paper pad upon his desk, unsoiled
by ink, and reported to be twenty years of age.

"Would you object to my mentioning it to him, sir?" I
asked.

"By no means," said Mr. Spenlow. "But I have some
experience of Mr. Jorkins, Copperfield. I wish it were other-
wise, for I should be happy to meet your views in any respect.
I cannot have the least objection to your mentioning it to
Mr. Jorkins, Copperfield, if you think it worth while."

Availing myself of this permission, which was given with a

David Copperfield * 475

warm shake of the hand, I sat thinking about Dora, and look-
ing at the sunlight stealing from the chimney-pots down the
wall of the opposite house, until Mr. Jorkins came. I then
went up to Mr. Jorkins's room, and evidently astonished Mr.
Jorkins very much by making my appearance there.

"Come in, Mr. Copperfield," said Mr. Jorkins. "Come
in!"

I went in, and sat down ; and stated my case to Mr. Jorkins
pretty much as I had stated it to Mr. Spenlow. Mr. Jorkins
was not by any means the awful creature one might have
expected, but a large, mild, smooth-faced man of sixty, who
took so much snuff that there was a tradition in the Commons
that he lived principally on that stimulant, having little room
in his system for any other article of diet.

"You have mentioned this to Mr. Spenlow, I suppose?"
said Mr. Jorkins ; when he had heard me, very restlessly, to an
end.

I answered Yes, and told him that Mr. Sp)enlow had intro-
duced his name.

" He said I should object ? " asked Mr. Jorkins.

I was obliged to admit that Mr. Spenlow had considered it
probable

" I am sorry to say, Mr. Copperfield, I can't advance your
object," said Mr. Jorkins, nervously. "The fact is — but I have
an appointment at the Bank, if you'll have the goodness to
excuse me."

With that he rose in a great hurry, and was going out of the
room, when I made bold to say that I feared, then, there was
no way of arranging the matter ?

" No ! " said Mr. Jorkins, stopping at the door to shake his
head. "Oh, no! I object, you know," which he said very
rapidly, and went out. " You must be aware, Mr. Copperfield,"
he added, looking restlessly in at the door again, "if Mr.
Spenlow objects "

" Personally, he does not object, sir," said I.

" Oh ! Personally I " repeated Mr. Jorkins, in an impatient
manner. " I assure you there's an objection, Mr. Copperfield.
Hopeless ! What you wish to be done, can't be done. I — I
really have got an appointment at the Bank." With that he
fairly ran away ; and to the best of my knowledge, it was three
days before he showed himself in the Commons again.

Being very anxious to leave no stone unturned, I waited
until Mr. Spenlow came in, and then described what had
passed ; giving him to understand that I was not hopeless of

476 David Copperfield

his being able to soften the adamantine Jorkins, if he would
undertake the task.

" Copperfield," returned Mr. Spenlow, with a gracious smile,
" you have not known my partner, Mr. Jorkins, as long as I
have. Nothing is farther from my thoughts than to attribute
any degree of artifice to Mr. Jorkins. But Mr. Jorkins has a
way of stating his objections which often deceives people. No,
Copperfield ! " shaking his head. " Mr. Jorkins is not to be
moved, believe me!"

I was completely bewildered between Mr. Spenlow and Mr.
Jorkins, as to which of them really was the objecting partner ;
but I saw with sufficient clearness that there was obduracy
somewhere in the firm, and that the recovery of my aunt's
thousand pounds was out of the question. In a state of
despondency, which I remember with anything but satisfaction,
for I know it still had too much reference to myself (though
always in cormexion with Dora), I left the office, and went
homeward.

I was trying to familiarise my mind with the worst, and to
present to myself the arrangements we should have to make for
the future in their sternest aspect, when a hackney chariot
coming after me, and stopping at my very feet, occasioned me
to look up. A fair hand was stretched forth to me from the
window ; and the face I had never seen without a feeling of
serenity and happiness, from the moment when it first turned
back on the old oak staircase with the great broad balustrade,
and when I associated its softened beauty with the stained
glass window in the church, was smiling on me.

" Agnes ! " I joyfully exclaimed. " Oh, my dear Agnes, of
all people in the world, what a pleasure to see you ! "

" Is it, indeed ? " she said, in her cordial voice.

" I want to talk to you so much ! " said I. " It's such a
lightening of my heart, only to look at you ! If I had had
a conjurer's cap, there is no one I should have wished for but
you!"

" What ? " returned Agnes.

" Well ! perhaps Dora first," I admitted, with a blush.

" Certainly, Dora first, I hope," said Agnes, laughing.

" But you next ! " said I. " Where are you going? "

She was going to my rooms to see my aunt. The day being
very fine, she was glad to come out of the chariot, which smelt
(I had my head in it all this time) like a stable put under
a cucumber-frame. I dismissed the coachman, and she took
my arm, and we walked on together. She was like Hope

David Copperfield 477

embodied, to me. How different I felt in one short minute,
having Agnes at my side !

My aunt had written her one of the odd, abrupt notes —
very little longer than a Bank note — to which her epistolary
efforts were usually limited. She had stated therein that she
had fallen into adversity, and was leaving Dover for good, but
had quite made up her mind to it, and was so well that nobody
need be uncomfortable about her. Agnes had come to London
to see my aunt, between whom and herself there had been
a mutual liking these many years ; indeed, it dated from the
time of my taking up my residence in Mr. Wick field's house.
She was not alone, she said. Her papa was with her — and
Uriah Heep.

** And now they are partners," said I. " Confound him ! "

** Yes," said Agnes. " They have some business here ; and
I took advantage of their coming, to come too. You must not
think my visit all friendly and disinterested, Trotwood, for — I
am afraid I may be cruelly prejudiced — I do not like to let
papa go away alone, with him."

" Does he exercise the same influence over Mr. Wickfield
still, Agnes?"

Agnes shook her head. " There is such a change at home,"
said she, " that you would scarcely know the dear old house.
They live with us now."

'•They?" said I.

" Mr. Heep and his mother. He sleeps in your old room,"
said Agnes, looking up into my face.

" I wish I had the ordering of his dreams," said I. " He
wouldn't sleep there long."

" I keep my own little room," said Agnes, "where I used to
learn my lessons. How the time goes ! You remember? The
little panelled room that opens from the drawing-room ? "

" Remember, Agnes ? When I saw you, for the first time,
coming out at the door, with your quaint little basket of keys
hanging at your side ? "

" It is just the same," said Agnes, smiling. " I am glad you
think of it so pleasantly. We were very happy."

" We were, indeed," said I.

" I keep that room to myself still ; but I cannot always
desert Mrs. Heep, you know. And so," said Agnes, quietly,
" I feel obliged to bear her company, when I might prefer to
be alone. But I have no other reason to complain of her. If
she tires me, sometimes, by her praises of her son, it is only
natural in a mother. He is a very good son to her."

478 David Copperfield

I looked at Agnes when she said these words, without
detecting in her any consciousness of Uriah's design. Her
mild but earnest eyes met mine with their own beautiful
frankness, and there was no change in her gentle face.

" The chief evil of their presence in the house," said Agnes,
"is that I cannot be as near papa as I could wish — Uriah
Heep being so much between us — and cannot watch over him,
if that is not too bold a thing to say, as closely as I would.
But if any fraud or treachery is practising against him, I hope
that simple love and truth will be stronger in the end. I hope
that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil
or misfortune in the world."

A certain bright smile, which I never saw on any other face,
died away, even while I thought how good it was, and how
familiar it had once been to me; and she asked me, with a
quick change of expression (we were drawing very near my
street), if I knew how the reverse in my aunt's circumstances
had been brought about. On my replying no, she had not
told me yet, Agnes became thoughtful, and I fancied I felt her
arm tremble in mine.

We found my aunt alone, in a state of some excitement. A
difference of opinion had arisen between herself and Mrs. Crupp,
on an abstract question (the propriety of chambers being in-
habited by the gentler sex) ; and my aunt, utterly indifferent
to spasms on the part of Mrs. Crupp, had cut the dispute short,
by informing that lady that she smelt of my brandy, and that
she would trouble her to walk out. Both of these expressions
Mrs. Crupp considered actionable, and had expressed her
intention of bringing before a " British Judy " — meaning, it was
supposed, the bulwark of our national liberties.

My aunt, however, having had time to cool, while Peggotty
was out showing Mr. Dick the soldiers at the Horse Guards
— ^and being, besides, greatly pleased to see Agnes — rather
plumed herself on the affair than otherwise, and received us
with unimpaired good humour. When Agnes laid her bonnet
on the table, and sat down beside her, I could not but think,
looking on her mild eyes and her radiant forehead, how natural
it seemed to have her there : how trustfully, although she was
so young and inexperienced, my aunt confided in her ; how
strong she was, indeed, in simple love and truth.

We began to talk about my aunt's losses, and I told them
what I had tried to do that morning.

"Which was injudicious. Trot," said my aunt, "but well
meant. You are a generous boy — I suppose I must say, young

David Copperfield 479

man, now — and I am proud of you, my dear. So far so good
Now, Trot and Agnes, let us look the case of Betsey Trotwood
in the face, and see how it stands."

I observed Agnes turn pale, as she looked very attentively at
my aunt. My aunt, patting her cat, looked very attentively at
Agnes.

" Betsey Trotwood," said my aunt, who had always kept her
money matters to herself: " — I don't mean your sister. Trot,
my dear, but myself — had a certain property. It don't matter
how much ; enough to live on. More ; for she had saved a
little, and added to it. Betsey funded her property for some
time, and then, by the advice of her man of business, laid it
out on landed security. That did very well, and returned very
good interest, till Betsey was paid oflf. I am talking of Betsey
as if she was a man-of-war. Well 1 Then, Betsey had to look
about her, for a new investment. She thought she was wiser,
now, than her man of business, who was not such a good man
of business by this time, as he used to be — I am alluding to
your father, Agnes — and she took it into her head to lay it out
for herself. So she took her pigs," said my aunt, "to a foreign
market ; and a very bad market it turned out to be. First, she
lost in the mining way, and then she lost in the diving way —
fishing up treasure, or some such Tom Tidier nonsense,"
explained my aunt, rubbing her nose; "and then she lost in
the mining way again, and, last of all, to set the thing entirely
to rights, she lost in the banking way. I don't know what the
Bank shares were worth for a little while," said my aunt;
" cent per cent was the lowest of it, I believe ; but the Bank
was at the other end of the world, and tumbled into space, for
what I know; anyhow, it fell to pieces, and never will and
never can pay sixpence; and Betsey's sixpences were all
there, and there's an end of them. Least said, soonest
mended!"

My aunt concluded this philosophical summary, by fixing
her eyes with a kind of triumph on Agnes, whose colour was
gradually returning.

" Dear Miss Trotwood, is that all the history?" said Agnes.

" I hope it's enough, child," said my aunt. " If there had
been more money to lose, it wouldn't hiave been all, I dare say.
Betsey would have contrived to throw that after the rest, and
make another chapter, I have little doubt. But there was no
more money, and there's no more story."

Agnes had listened at first with suspended breath. Her
colour still came and went, but she breathed more freely. I

480 David Copperfield

thought I knew why. I thought she had had some fear that
her unhappy father might be in some way to blame for what
had happened. My aunt took her hand in hers, and laughed.

"Is that all?" repeated my aunt. "Why, yes, that's all,
except, 'And she lived happy ever afterwards.' Perhaps I may
add that of Betsey yet, one of these days. Now, Agnes, you
have a wise head. So have you, Trot, in some things, though
I can't compliment you always ; " and here my aunt shook her
own at me, with an energy peculiar to herself. " What's to be
done ? Here's the cottage, taking one time with another, will
produce, say seventy pounds a-year. I think we may safely
put it down at that. Well ! — That's all we've got," said my
aunt; with whom it was an idiosyncrasy, as it is with some
horses, to stop very short when she appeared to be in a fair way
"^of going on for a long while.

"Then," said my aunt, after a rest, "there's Dick. He's
good for a hundred a-year, but of course that must be expended
on himself. I would sooner send him away, though I know I
am the only person who appreciates him, than have him, and
not spend his money on himself. How can Trot and I do best,
upon our means ? What do you say, Agnes ? "

"/say, aunt," I interposed, "that I muSt do something!"

" Go for a soldier, do you mean ?" returned my aunt, alarmed;
" or go to sea ? I won't hear of it. You are to be a proctor.
We're not going to have any knockings on the head in this
family, if you please, sir."

I was about to explain that I was not desirous of introducing
that mode of provision into the family, when Agnes inquired if
my rooms were held for any long term ?

" You come to the point, my dear," said my aunt. " They
are not to be got rid of, for six months at least, unless they
could be underlet, and that I don't believe. The last man died
here. Five people out of six would die — of course — of that
woman in nankeen with the flannel petticoat. I have a little
ready money ; and I agree with you, the best thing we can do,
is, to live the term out here, and get Dick a bedroom hard by."

I thought it my duty to hint at the discomfort my aunt would
sustain, from living in a continual state of guerilla warfare with
Mrs. Crupp ; but she disposed of that objection summarily by
declaring, that, on the first demonstration of hostilities, she was
prepared to astonish Mrs. Crupp for the whole remainder of
her natural life.

" I have been thinking, Trotwood," said Agnes, diffidently,
" that if you had time "

David Copperfield 481

" I have a good deal of time, Agnes. I am always disengaged
after four or five o'clock, and I have time early in the morning.
In one way and another," said I, conscious of reddening a little
as I thought of the hours and hours I had devoted to fagging
about town, and to and fro upon the Norwood Road, " I have
abundance of time."

" I know you would not mind," said Agnes, coming to me,
and speaking in a low voice, so full of sweet and hopeful
consideration that I hear it now, "the duties of a secretary."

" Mind, my dear Agnes ? "

"Because," continued Agnes, "Doctor Strong has acted on
his intention of retiring, and has come to live in London ; and
he asked papa, I know, if he could recommend him one. Don't
you think he would rather have his favourite old pupil near him,
than anybody else ? "

"Dear Agnes!" said I. "What should I do without you!
You are always my good angel. I told you so. I never think
of you in any other light."

Agnes answered with her pleasant laugh, that one good Angel
(meaning Dora) was enough ; and went on to remind me that
the Doctor had been used to occupy himself in his study, early
in the morning, and in the evening — and that probably my
leisure would suit his requirements very well. I was scarcely
more delighted with the prospect of earning my own bread,
than with the hope of earning it under my old master ; in short,
acting on the advice of Agnes^ I sat down and wrote a letter to
the Doctor, stating my object, and appointing to call on him
next day at ten in the forenoon. This I addressed to Highgate
— for in that place, so memorable to me, he lived — and went
and posted, myself, without losing a minute.

Wherever Agnes was, some agreeable token of her noiseless
presence seemed inseparable from the place. When I came
back, I found my aunt's birds hanging, just as they had hung
so long in the parlour window of the cottage ; and my easy
chair imitating my aunt's much easier chair in its position at
the open window ; and even the round green fan, which my
aunt had brought away with her, screwed on to the window-sill.
I knew who had done all this, by its seeming to have quietly
done itself ; and I should have known in a moment who had
arranged my neglected books in the old order of my school
days, even if I had supposed Agnes to be miles away, instead
of seeing her busy with them, and smiling at the disorder into
which they had fallen.

My aunt was quite gracious on the subject of the Thames

482 David Copperfield

(it really did look very well with the sun upon it, though not
like the sea before the cottage), but she could not relent towards
the London smoke, which, she said, " peppered everything." A
complete revolution, in which Peggotty bore a prominent part,
was being effected in every corner of my rooms, in regard of
this pepper ; and I was looking on, thinking how little even
Peggotty seemed to do with a good deal of bustle, and how
much Agnes did without any bustle at all, when a knock came
at the door.

" I think," said Agnes, turning pale, " it's papa. He promised
me that he would come."

I opened the door, and admitted, not only Mr. Wickfield,
but Uriah Heep. I had not seen Mr. Wickfield for some time.
I was prepared for a great change in him, after what I had
heard from Agnes, but his appearance shocked me.

It was not that he looked many years older, though still
dressed with the old scrupulous cleanliness ; or that there was
an unwholesome ruddiness upon his face ; or that his eyes were
full and bloodshot ; or that there was a nervous trembling in
his hand, the cause of which I knew, and had for some years
seen at work. It was not that he had lost his good looks, or
his old bearing of a gentleman — for that he had not — but the
thing that struck me most was, that with the evidences of his
native superiority still upon him, he should submit himself to
that crawling impersonation of meanness, Uriah Heep. The
reversal of the two natures, in their relative positions, Uriah's of
power and Mr. Wickfield's of dependence, was a sight more
painful to me than I can express. If I had seen an Ape taking
command of a Man, I should hardly have thought it a more
degrading spectacle.

He appeared to be only too conscious of it himself. When
he came in, he stood still ; and with his head bowed, as if he
felt it. This was only for a moment ; for Agnes softly said to
him, " Papa ! Here is Miss Trotwood — and Trotwood, whom
you have not seen for a long while ! " and then he approached,
and constrainedly gave my aunt his hand, and shook hands
more cordially with me. In the moment's pause I speak of, I
saw Uriah's countenance form itself into a most ill-favoured
smile. Agnes saw it too, I think, for she shrank from him.

What my aunt saw, or did not see, I defy the science of
physiognomy to have made out, without her own consent. I
believe there never was anybody with such an imperturbable
countenance when she chose. Her face might have been a
dead wall on the occasion in question, for any light it threw

David Copperfield 483

upon her thoughts ; until she broke silence with her usual
abruptness.

" Well, Wickfield 1 " said my aunt ; and he looked up at
her for the first time. " I have been telling your daughter
how well I have been disposing of my money for myself,
because I couldn't trust it to you, as you were growing rusty
in business matters. We have been taking counsel together,
and getting on very well, all things considered. Agnes is worth
the whole firm, in my opinion."

" If I may umbly make the remark," said Uriah Heep, with
a writhe, " I fully agree with Miss Betsey Trotwood, and should
be only too appy if Miss Agnes was a partner."

"You're a partner yourself, you know," returned my aimt,
"and that's about enough for you, I expect. How do you
find yourself, sir ? "

In acknowledgment of this question, addressed to him with
extraordinary curtness, Mr. Heep, uncomfortably clutching
the blue bag he carried, replied that he was pretty well, he
thanked my aunt, and hoped she was the same.

" And you. Master — I should say. Mister Copperfield," pur-
sued Uriah. " I hope I see you well ! I am rejoiced to see
you. Mister Copperfield, even under present circumstances." I
believed that; for he seemed to relish them very much.
" Present circumstances is not what your friends would wish
for you, Mister Copperfield, but it isn't money makes the
man : it's — I am really unequal with my umble powers to
express what it is," said Uriah, with a fawning jerk, "but it
isn't money ! "

Here he shook hands with me : not in the common way, but
standing at a good distance from me, and lifting my hand up
and down like a pump handle, that he was a little afraid of.

" And how do you think we are looking. Master Copperfield,
— I should say. Mister ? " fawned Uriah. " Don't you find
Mr. Wickfield blooming, sir? Years don't tell much in our
firm, Master Copperfield, except in raising up the umble,
namely, mother and self — and in developing," he added as an
after-thought, " the beautiful, namely. Miss Agnes."

He jerked himself about, after this compliment, in such an
intolerable manner, that my aunt, who had sat looking straight
at him, lost all patience.

" Deuce take the man ! " said my aunt, sternly, " what's
he about? Don't be galvanic, sir!"

" I ask your pardon, Miss Trotwood," returned Uriah ; " I'm
aware you're nervous.''

484 David Copperfield

" Go along with you, sir ! " said my aunt, anything but
appeased. " Don't presume to say so ! I am nothing of the
sort. If you're an eel, sir, conduct yourself like one. If you're
a man, control your limbs, sir ! Good God ! " said my aunt,
with great indignation, " I am not going to be serpentined and
corkscrewed out of my senses ! "

Mr. Heep was rather abashed, as most people might have
been, by this explosion ; which derived great additional force
from the indignant manner in which my aunt afterwards moved
in her chair, and shook her head as if she were making
snaps or bounces at him. But he said to me aside in a meek
voice :

" I am well aware, Master Copperfield, that Miss Trot wood,
though an excellent lady, has a quick temper (indeed I think I
had the pleasure of knowing her, when I was an umble clerk,
before you did. Master Copperfield), and it's only natural, I am
sure, that it should be made quicker by present circumstances.
The wonder is, that it isn't much worse ! I only called to say
that if there was anything we could do, in present circum-
stances, mother or self, or Wickfield and Heep, we should be
really glad. I may go so far ? " said Uriah, with a sickly smile
at his partner.

" Uriah Heep," said Mr. Wickfield, in a monotonous forced
way, " is active in the business, Trotwood. What he says, I
quite concur in. You know I had an old interest in you.
Apart from that, what Uriah says I quite concur in ! "

" Oh, what a reward it is," said Uriah, drawing up one leg,
at the risk of bringing down upon himself another visitation
from my aunt, " to be so trusted in ! But I hope I am able to
do something to relieve him from the fatigues of business,
Master Copperfield ! "

" Uriah Heep is a great relief to me," said Mr. Wickfield,
in the same dull voice. " It's a load off my mind, Trotwood,
to have such a partner."

The red fox made him say all this, I knew, to exhibit him
to me in the light he had indicated on the night when he
poisoned my rest. I saw the same ill-favoured smile upon his
face again, and saw how he watched me.

" You are not going, papa ? " said Agnes, anxiously. " Will
you not walk back with Trotwood and me ? "

He would have looked to Uriah, I believe, before replying,
if that worthy had not anticipated him.

"I am bespoke myself," said Uriah, "on business; other-
wise I should have been appy to have kept with my friends.

David Copperfield 485

But I leave my partner to represent the firm. Miss Agnes,
ever yours ! I wish you good-day, Master Copperfield, and
leave my umble respects for Miss Betsey Trotwood."

With those words, he retired, kissing his great hand, and
leering at us like a mask.

We sat there, talking about our pleasant old Canterbury
days, an hour or two. Mr. Wickfield, left to Agnes, soon
became more like his former self; though there was a settled
depression upon him, which he never shook off. For all that,
he brightened ; and had an evident pleasure in hearing us
recall the little incidents of our old life, many of which he
remembered very well. He said it was like those times, to be
alone with Agnes and me again ; and he wished to Heaven
they had never changed. I am sure there was an influence in
the placid face of Agnes, and in the very touch of her hand
upon his arm, that did wonders for him.

My aunt (who was busy nearly all this while with Peggotty,
In the inner room) would not accompany us to the place where
they were staying, but insisted on my going ; and I went We
dined together. After dinner, Agnes sat beside him, as of old,
and poured out his wine. He took what she gave him, and
no more — like a child — and we all three sat together at a
window as the evening gathered in. When it was almost dark,
he lay down on a sofa, Agnes pillowing his head and bending
over him a little while; and when she came back to the
window, it was not so dark but I could see tears glittering
Id her eyes.

I pray Heaven that I never may forget the dear girl in her
love and truth, at that time of my life ; for if I should, I must
be drawing near the end, and then I would desire to remember
her best ! She filled my heart with such good resolutions,
strengthened my weakness so, by her example, so directed — I
know not how, she was too modest and gentle to advise me in
many words — the wandering ardour and unsettled purpose
within me, that all the little good I have done, and all the
harm I have forborne, I solemnly believe I may refer to her.

And how she spoke to me of Dora, sitting at the window in
the dark ; listened to my praises of her ; praised again ; and
round the little fairy-figure shed some glimpses of her own
pure light, that made it yet more precious and more innocent
to me ! Oh, Agnes, sister of my boyhood, if I had known
then, what I knew long afterwards !

There was a beggar in the street, when I went down ; and
as I turned my head towards the window, thinking of her calm

486 David Copperfield

seraphic eyes, he made me start by muttering, as if he were an
echo of the morning :

"Blind! Blind! Blind 1"

CHAPTER XXXVI

ENTHUSIASM

I BEGAN the next day with another dive into the Roman bath,
and then started for Highgate. I was not dispirited now. I
was not afraid of the shabby coat, and had no yearnings after
gallant greys. My whole manner of thinking of our late mis-
fortune was changed. What I had to do, was, to show my
aunt that her past goodness to me had not been thrown away
on an insensible, ungrateful object. What I had to do,
was, to turn the painful discipline of my younger days to
account, by going to work with a resolute and steady heart.
What I had to do, was, to take my woodman's axe in my hand,
and clear my own way through the forest of difficulty, by
cutting down the trees until I came to Dora. And I went on
at a mighty rate, as if it could be done by walking.

When I found myself on the familiar Highgate road, pur-
suing such, a different errand from that old one of pleasure,
with which it was associated, it seemed as if a complete change
had come on my whole life. But that did not discourage me.
With the new life, came new purpose, new intention. Great
was the labour; priceless the reward. Dora was the reward,
and Dora must be won.

I got into such a transport, that I felt quite sorry my coat
was not a little shabby already. I wanted to be cutting at
those trees in the forest of difficulty, under circumstances that
should prove my strength. I had a good mind to ask an old
man, in wire spectacles, who was breaking stones upon the
road, to lend me his h .mmer for a little while, and let me
begin to beat a path to Dora out of granite. I stimulated
myself into such a heat, and got so out of breath, that I felt as
if I had been earning I don't know how much. In this state,
I went into a cottage that I saw was to let, and examined it
narrowly, — for I felt it necessary to be practical. It would do
for me and Dora admirably : with a little front garden for Jip
to run about in, and bark at the tradespeople through the rail-
ings, and a capital room upstairs for my aunt. I came out

David Copperfield 487

again, hotter and faster than ever, and dashed up to Highgate,
at such a rate that I was there an hour too early ; and, though
I had not been, should have been obliged to stroll about to
cool myself, before I was at all presentable.

My first care, after putting myself under this necessary
course of preparation, was to find the Doctor's house. It was
not in that part of Highgate where Mrs. Steerforth lived, but
quite on the opposite side of the little town. When I had
made this discovery, I went back, in an attraction I could not
resist, to a lane by Mrs. Steerforth's, and looked over the
corner of the garden wall. His room was shut up close. The
conservatory doors were standing open, and Rosa Dartle was
walking, bareheaded, with a quick impetuous step, up and
down a gravel walk on one side of the lawn. She gave me the
idea of some fierce thing, that was dragging the length of its
chain to and fro upon a beaten track, and wearing its heart out

I came softly away from my place of observation, and avoid-
ing that part of the neighbourhood, and wishing I had not
gone near it, strolled about until it was ten o'clock. The
church with the slender spire, that stands on the top of the hill
now, was not there then to tell me the time. An old red-brick
mansion, used as a school, was in its place ; and a fine old
house it must have been to go to school at, as I recollect it.

When I approached the Doctor's cottage — a pretty old place,
on which he seemed to have expended some money, if I might
judge from the embellishments and repairs that had the look of
being just completed — I saw him walking in the garden at the
side, gaiters and all, as if he had never left off walking since
the days of my pupilage. He had his old companions about
him, too ; for there were plenty of high trees in the neighbour-
hood, and two or three rooks were on the grass, looking after
him, as if they had been written to about him by the Canterbury
rooks, and were observing him closely in consequence.

Knowing the utter hopelessness of attracting his attention
from that distance, I made bold to open the gate, and walk
after him, so as to meet him when he should turn round.
When he did, and came towards me, he looked at me thought-
fully for a few moments, evidently without thinking about me
at all; and then his benevolent face expressed extraordinary
pleasure, and he took me by both hands.

" Why, my dear Copperfield," said the Doctor, " you are a
man! How do you do? I am delighted to see you. My
dear Copperfield, how very much you have improved I You
are quite — yes — dear me I "

488 David Copperfield

I hoped he was well, and Mrs. Strong too.

" Oh dear, yes ! " said the Doctor ; " Annie's quite well,
and she'll be delighted to see you. You were always her
favourite. She said so, last night, when I showed her your
letter. And — yes, to be sure — you recollect Mr. Jack Maldon,
Copperfield ? "

"Perfectly, sir."

" Of course," said the Doctor. "To be sure. H^s pretty
well, too."

" Has he come home, sir ? " I inquired.

" From India ?" said the Doctor. " Yes. Mr. Jack Maldon
couldn't bear the climate, my dear. Mrs. Markleham — you
have not forgotten Mrs. Markleham ? "

Forgotten the Old Soldier ! And in that short time !

"Mrs. Markleham," said the Doctor, " was quite vexed about
him, poor thing ; so we have got him at home again ; and we
have bought him a little Patent place, which agrees with him
much better. "

I knew enough of Mr. Jack Maldon to suspect from this
account that it was a place where there was not much to do,
and which was pretty well paid. The Doctor, walking up and
down with his hand on fny shoulder, and his kind face turned
encouragingly to mine, went on :

" Now, my dear Copperfield, in reference to this proposal of
yours. It's very gratifying and agreeable to me, I am sure;
but don't you think you could do better ? You achieved dis-
tinction, you know, when you were with us. You are qualified
for many good things. You have laid a foundation that any
edifice may be raised upon ; and is it not a pity that you should
devote the spring-time of your life to such a poor pursuit as I
can offer ? "

I became very glowing again, and, expressing myself in a
rhapsodical style, I am afraid, urged my request strongly :
reminding the Doctor that I had already a profession.

" Well, well," said the Doctor, " that's true. Certainly, your
having a profession, and being actually engaged in studying it,
makes a difference. But, my good young friend, what's seventy
pounds a year ? "

" It doubles our income, Doctor Strong," said I.

" Dear me ! " replied the Doctor. " To think of that ! Not
that I mean to say it's rigidly limited to seventy pounds a year,
because I have always contemplated making any young friend
I might thus employ, a present too. Undoubtedly," said the
Doctor, still walking me up and down with his hand on my

David Copperfield 489

shoulder. " I have always taken an annual present into
account."

" My dear tutor," said I (now, really, without any non-
sense), " to whom I owe more obligations already than I ever
can acknowledge "

" No, no," interposed the Doctor. " Pardon me ! "

"If you will take such time as I have, and that is my
mornings and evenings, and can think it worth seventy pounds
a year, you will do me such a service as I cannot express."

" Dear me ! " said the Doctor, innocently. " To think that
so little should go fok- so much ! Dear, dear ! And when you
can do better, you will ? On your word, now ? " said the
Doctor, — which he had always made a very grave appeal to the
honour of us boys.

" On my word, sir ! " I returned, answering in our old school
manner.

"Then be it so," said the Doctor, clapping me on the
shoulder, and still keeping his hand there, as we still walked
up and down.

"And I shall be twenty times happier, sir," said I, with a
little — I hope innocent — flattery, "if my employment is to be
on the Dictionary,"

The Doctor stopped, smilingly clapped me on the shoulder
again, and exclaimed, with a triumph most delightful to behold,
as if I had penetrated to the profoundest depths of mortal
sagacity, " My dear young friend, you have hit it It is the
Dictionary ! "

How could it be anything else ! His pockets were as full of
it as his head. It was sticking out of him in all directions.
He told me that since his retirement from scholastic life, he
had been advancing with it wonderfully; and that nothing
could suit him better than the proposed arrangements for
morning and evening work, as it was his custom to walk about
in the day-time with his considering cap on. His papers were
in a little confusion, in consequence of Mr. Jack Maldon
having lately proffered his occasional services as an amanuensis,
and not being accustomed to that occupation ; but we should
soon put right what was amiss, and go on swimmingly. After-
wards, when we were fairly at our work, I found Mr. Jack
Maldon's efforts more troublesome to me than I had expected,
as he had not confined himself to making numerous mistakes,
but had sketched so many soldiers, and ladies' heads, over the
Doctor's manuscript, that I often became involved in labyrinths
of obscurity

490 David Copperfield

The Doctor was quite happy in the prospect of our going
to work together on that wonderful performance, and we
settled to begin next morning at seven o'clock. We were to
work two hours every morning, and two or three hours every
night, except on Saturdays, when I was to rest. On Sundays,
of course, I was to rest also, and I considered these very easy
terms.

Our plans being thus arranged to our mutual satisfaction, the
Doctor took me into the house to present me to Mrs. Strong,
whom we found in the Doctor's new study, dusting his books,
— a freedom which he never permitted anybody else to take
with those sacred favourites.

They had postponed their breakfast on my account, and we
sat down to table together. We had not been seated long,
when I saw an approaching arrival in Mrs. Strong's face, before
I heard any sound of it. A gentleman on horseback came to
the gate, and leading his horse into the little court, with the
bridle over his arm, as if he were quite at home, tied him to
a ring in the empty coach-house wall, and came into the
breakfast parlour, whip in hand. It was Mr. Jack Maldon;
and Mr. Jack Maldon was not at all improved by India, I
thought. I was in a state of ferocious virtue, however, as
to young men who were not cutting down trees in the forest
of difficulty; and my impression must be received with due
allowance.

" Mr. Jack ! " said the Doctor. " Copperfield ! "

Mr. Jack Maldon shook hands with me; but not very
warmly, I believed ; and with an air of languid patronage, at
which I secretly took great umbrage. But his languor altogether
was quite a wonderful sight ; except when he addressed himself
to his cousin Annie.

" Have you breakfasted this morning, Mr. Jack ? " said
the Doctor.

" I hardly ever take breAkfast, sir," he replied, with his head
thrown back in an easy-chair. " I find it bores me."

" Is there any news to-day ? " inquired the Doctor.

"Nothing at all, sir," replied Mr. Maldon. "There's an
account about the people being hungry and discontented
down in the North, but they are always being hungry and
discontented somewhere."

The Doctor looked grave, and said, as though he wished to
change the subject, " Then there's no news at all ; and no
news, they say, is good news,"

"There's a long statement in the papers, sir, about a

David Copper field 491

murder," observed Mr. Maldon. "But somebody is always
being murdered, and I didn't read it,"

A display of indifference to all the actions and passions of
mankind was not supposed to be such a distinguished quality
at that time, I think, as I have observed it to be considered
since. I have known it very fashionable indeed. I have
seen it displayed with such success, that I have encountered
some fine ladies and gentlemen who might as well have been
born caterpillars. Perhaps it impressed me the more then,
because it was new to me, but it certainly did not tend to
exalt my opinion of, or to strengthen my confidence in, Mr.
Jack Maldon.

" I came out to inquire whether Annie would like to go to
the opera to-night," said Mr. Maldon, turning to her. "It's
the last good night there will be, this season ; and there's a
singer there, whom she really ought to hear. She is perfectly
exquisite. Besides which, she is so charmingly ugly," relapsing
into languor.

The Doctor, ever pleased with what was likely to please his
young wife, turned to her and said :

" You must go, Annie. You must go."

" I would rather not," she said to the Doctor. " I prefer to
remain at home. I would much rather remain at home."

Without looking at her cousin, she then addressed me, and
asked me about Agnes, and whether she should see her, and
whether she was not likely to come that day ; and was so much
disturbed, that I wondered how even the Doctor, buttering his
toast, could be blind to what was so obvious.

But he saw nothing. He told her, good-naturedly, that she
was young and ought to be amused and entertained, and
must not allow herself to be made dull by a dull old fellow.
Moreover, he said, he wanted to hear her sing all the new
singer's songs to him; and how could she do that well,
unless she went? So the Doctor persisted in making the
engagement for her, and Mr. Jack Maldon was to come back
to dinner. This concluded, he went to his Patent place, I
suppose ; but at all events went away on his horse, looking
very idle.

I was curious to find out next morning, whether she had
been. She had not, but had sent into London to put her
cousin off ; and had gone out in the afternoon to see Agnes,
and had prevailed upon the Doctor to go with her ; and they
had walked home by the fields, the Doctor told me, the even-
ing being delightful. I wondered then, whether she would

492 David Copperfield

have gone if Agnes had not been in town, and whether Agnes
had some good influence over her too !

She did not look very happy, I thought, but it was a good
face, or a very false one. I often glanced at it, for she sat
in the window all the time we were at work ; and made our
breakfast, which we took by snatches as we were employed.
When I left, at nine o'clock, she was kneeling on the ground
at the Doctor's feet, putting on his shoes and gaiters for
him. There was a softened shade upon her face, thrown
from some green leaves overhanging the open window of the
low room ; and I thought all the way to Doctors' Commons,
of the night when I had seen it looking at him as he read.

I was pretty busy now ; up at five in the morning, and
home at nine or ten at night. But I had infinite satisfaction
in being so closely engaged, and never walked slowly on any
account, and felt enthusiastically that the more I tired
myself, the more I was doing to deserve Dora. I had not
revealed myself in my altered character to Dora yet, because
she was coming to see Miss Mills in a few days, and I
deferred all I had to tell her until then ; merely informing
her in my letters (all our communications were secretly
forwarded through Miss Mills), that I had much to tell her.
In the meantime, I put myself on a short allowance of bear's
grease, wholly abandoned scented soap and lavender water,
and sold off three waistcoats at a prodigious sacrifice, as
being too luxurious for my stern career.

Not satisfied with all these proceedings, but burning with
impatience to do something more, I went to see Traddles,
now lodging up behind the parapet of a house in Castle
Street, Holborn. Mr. Dick, who had been with me to
Highgate twice already, and had resumed his companionship
with the Doctor, I took with me.

I took Mr. Dick with me, because, acutely sensitive to my
aunt's reverses, and sincerely believing that no galley-slave
or convict worked as I did, he had begun to fret and worry
himself out of spirits and appetite, as having nothing useful
to do. In this condition, he felt more incapable of finishing
the Memorial than ever ; and the harder he worked at it, the
oftener that unlucky head of King Charles the First got into
it. Seriously apprehending that his malady would increase,
unless we put some innocent deception upon him and caused
him to believe that he was useful, or unless we could put
him in the way of being really useful (which would be
better), I made up my mind to try if Traddles could help us.

David Copperfield 493

Before we went, I wrote Traddles a full statement of all that
had happened, and Traddles wrote me back a capital answer,
expressive of his sympathy and friendship.

We found him hard at work with his inkstand and papers,
refreshed by the sight of the flower-pot stand and the little
round table in a corner of the small apartment. He received
us cordially, and made friends with Mr. Dick in a moment.
Mr. Dick professed an absolute certainty of having seen him
before, and we both said, " Very likely."

The first subject on which I had to consult Traddles was
this. — I had heard that many men distinguished in various
pursuits had begun life by reporting the debates in Parlia-
ment. Traddles having mentioned newspaj)ers to me, as
one of his hopes, I had put the two things together, and told
Traddles in my letter that I wished to know how I could
qualify myself for this pursuit. Traddles now informed me,
as the result of his inquiries, that the mere mechanical
acquisition necessary, except in rare cases, for thorough
excellence in it, that is to say, a perfect and entire command
of the mystery of short-hand writing and reading, was about
equal in difficulty to the mastery of six languages ; and that
it might perhaps be attained, by dint of perseverance, in the
course of a few years. Traddles reasonably supposed that
this would settle the business; but I, only feeling that here
indeed were a few tall trees to be hewn down, immediately
resolved to work my way on to Dora through this thicket,
axe in hand.

" I am very much obliged to you, my dear Traddles ! "
said I. '* I'll begin to-morrow."

Traddles looked astonished, as he well might ; but he had
no notion as yet of my rapturous condition.

" rU buy a book," said I, " with a good scheme of this art
in it; I'll work at it at the Commons, where I haven't half
enough to do ; I'll take down the speeches in our court for
practice — Traddles, my dear fellow, I'll master it ! **

" Dear me," said Traddles, opening his eyes, " I had no
idea you were such a determined character, Copperfield 1 "

I don't know how he should have had, for it was new
enough to me. I passed that off, and brought Mr. Dick on
the carpet

"You see," said Mr. Dick, wistfully, "if I could exert
myself, Mr. Traddles — if I could beat a drum — or blow
anything ! "

Poor fellow I I have little doubt he would have preferred

494 David Copperfield

such an employment in his heart to all others. Traddles, who
would not have smiled for the world, replied composedly :

" But you are a very good penman, sir. You told me so,
Copperfield ? "

" Excellent ! " said I. And indeed he was. He wrote mth
extraordinary neatness.

" Don't you think," said Traddles, " you could copy writings,
sir, if I got them for you ? "

Mr. Dick looked doubtfully at me. " Eh, Trotwood ? "

I shook my head. Mr. Dick shook his, and sighed. " Tell
him about the Memorial," said Mr. Dick.

I explained to Traddles that there was a difficulty in
keeping King Charles the First out of Mr. Dick's manuscripts ;
Mr. Dick in the meanwhile looking very deferentially and
seriously at Traddles, and sucking his thumb.

" But these writings, you know, that I speak of, are already
drawn up and finished," said Traddles after a little considera-
tion. " Mr. Dick has nothing to do with them. Wouldn't
that make a difference, Copperfield ? At all events, wouldn't
it be well to try ? "

This gave us new hope. Traddles and I laying our heads
together apart, while Mr. Dick anxiously watched us from
his chair, we concocted a scheme in virtue of which we got
him to work next day, with triumphant success.

On a table by the window in Buckingham Street, we set
out the work Traddles procured for him — which was to
make, I forget how many copies of a legal document about
some right of way — and on another table we spread the last
unfinished original of the great Memorial. Our instructions
to Mr. Dick were that he should copy exactly what he had
before him, without the least departure from the original ;
and that when he felt it necessary to make the slightest
allusion to King Charles the First, he should fly to the
Memorial. We exhorted him to be resolute in this, and left
my aunt to observe him. My aunt reported to us, afterwards,
that, at first, he was like a man playing the kettle-drums,
and constantly divided his attentions between the two ; but
that, finding this confuse and fatigue him, and having his
copy there, plainly before his eyes, he soon sat at it in an
orderly business-like manner, and postponed the Memorial to
a more convenient time. In a word, although we took great
care that he should have no more to do than was good for
him, and although he did not begin with the beginning of
a week, he earned by the following Saturday night ten

David Copperfield 495

shillings and nine pence ; and never, while I live, shall I
forget his going about to all the shops in the neighbourhood
to change this treasure into sixpences, or his bringing them
to my aunt arranged in the form of a heart upon a waiter,
with tears of joy and pride in his eyes. He was like one
under the propitious influence of a charm, from the moment
of his being usefully employed ; and if there were a happy
man in the world, that Saturday night, it was the grateful
creature who thought my aunt the most wonderful woman in
existence, and me the most wonderful young man.

" No starving now, Trotwood," said Mr. Dick, shaking
hands with me in a corner. " I'll provide for her, sir ! " and
he flourished his ten fingers in the air, as if they were ten
banks.

I hardly know which was the better pleased, Traddles or
I. "It really," said Traddles, suddenly, taking a letter out
of his pocket, and giving it to me, " put Mr. Micawber quite
out of my head ! "

The letter (Mr. Micawber never missed any possible
opportunity of writing a letter) was addressed to me, " By
the kindness of T. Traddles, Esquire, of the Inner Temple."
It ran thus :

" My dear Copperfield,

" You may possibly not be unprepared to receive the
intimation that something has turned up. I may have men-
tioned to you on a former occasion that I was in expectation
of such an event.

" I am about to establish myself in one of the provincial
towns of our favoured island (where the society may be
described as a happy admixture of the agricultural and the
clerical), in immediate connexion with one of the learned
professions. Mrs. Micawber and our offspring will accompany
me. Our ashes, at a future period, will probably be found
commingled in the cemetery attached to a venerable pile, for
which the spot to which I refer has acquired a reputation,
shall I say from China to Peru ?

" In bidding adieu to the modem Babylon, where we have
undergone many vicissitudes, I trust not ignobly, Mrs. Micawber
and myself carmot disguise from our minds that we part, it may
be for years and it may be for ever, with an individual linked
by strong associations to the altar of our domestic life. If, on
the eve of such a departure, you will accompany our mutual
friend, Mr. Thomas Traddles, to our present abode; and there

49^ David Copperfield

reciprocate the wishes natural to the occasion, you will confer
a Boon

"On
"One
"Who
"Is

" Ever yours,

"WiLKINS MiCAWBER."

I was glad to find that Mr. Micawber had got rid of his dust
and ashes, and that something really had turned up at last.
Learning from Traddles that the invitation referred to the
evening then wearing away, I expressed my readiness to do
honour to it ; and we went off together to the lodging which
Mr. Micawber occupied as Mr. Mortimer, and which was
situated near the top of the Gray's Inn Road.

The resources of this lodging were so limited, that we found
the twins, now some eight or nine years old, reposing in a turn-
up bedstead in the family sitting-room, where Mr. Micawber
had prepared, in a wash-hand-stand jug, what he called a
"Brew" of the agreeable beverage for which he was famous.
I had the pleasure, on this occasion, of renewing the acquaint-
ance of Master Micawber, whom I found a promising boy of
about twelve or thirteen, very subject to that restlessness of
limb which is not an unfrequent phenomenon in youths of his
age. I also became once more known to his sister, Miss
Micawber, in whom, as Mr. Micawber told us, "her mother
renewed her youth, like the Phoenix."

**My dear Copperfield," said Mr. Micawber, "yourself and
Mr. Traddles find us on the brink of migration, and will excuse
any little discomforts incidental to that position."

Glancing round as I made a suitable reply, I observed that
the family effects were already packed, and that the amount of
luggage was by no means overwhelming. I congratulated Mrs.
Micawber on the approaching change.

" My dear Mr. Copperfield," said Mrs. Micawber, " of your
friendly interest in all our affairs, I am well assured. My family
may consider it banishment, if they please ; but I am a wife
and mother, and I never will desert Mr. Micawber."

Traddles, appealed to by Mrs. Micawber' s eye, feelingly
acquiesced.

"That," said Mrs. Micawber, "that, at least, is my view, my
dear Mr. Copperfield and Mr. Traddles, of the obligation which
I took upon myself when I repeated the irrevocable words, ' I,

David Copperfield 497

Emma, take thee, Wilkins.' I read the service over with a flat-
candle on the previous night, and the conclusion I derived from
it was, that I never could desert Mr. Micawber. And," said
Mrs. Micawber, " though it is possible I may be mistaken in
my view of the ceremony, I never will ! "

" My dear," said Mr. Micawber, a little impatiently, " I am
not conscious that you are expected to do anything of the
sort."

"I am aware, my dear Mr. Copperfield," pursued Mrs.
Micawber, "that I am now about to cast my lot among
strangers ; and I am also aware that the various members of
my family, to whom Mr. Micawber has written in the most
gentlemanly terms, announcing that fact, have not taken the
least notice of Mr. Micawber's communication. Indeed I may
be superstitious," said Mrs. Micawber, ** but it appears to me
that Mr. Micawber is destined never to receive any answers
whatever to the great majority of the communications he writes.
I may augur from the silence of my family, that they object to
the resolution I have taken ; but I should not allow myself to
be swerved from the path of duty, Mr. Copperfield, even by
my papa and mama, were they still living."

I expressed my opinion that this was going in the right
direction.

" It may be a sacrifice," said Mrs. Micawber, " to immure
one's-self in a Cathedral town ; but surely, Mr. Copperfield, if
it is a sacrifice in me, it is much more a sacrifice in a man of
Mr. Micawber's abilities."

" Oh ! You are going to a Cathedral town ? " said I.

Mr. Micawber, who had been helping us all, out of the
wash-hand-stand jug, replied:

"To Canterbury. In fact, my dear Copperfield, I have
entered into arrangements, by virtue of which I stand pledged
and contracted to our friend Heep, to assist and serve him in
the capacity of — and to be — his confidential clerk."

I stared at Mr. Micawber, who greatly enjoyed my surprise.

" I am bound to state to you," he said, with an official air,
" that the business habits, and the prudent suggestions, of Mrs.
Micawber, have in a great measure conduced to this result.
The gauntlet, to which Mrs. Micawber referred upon a formei
occasion, being thrown down in the form of an advertisement,
was taken up by my friend Heep, and led to a mutual recog-
nition. Of my friend Heep," said Mr. Micawber, " who is a
man of remarkable shrewdness, I desire to speak with all
possible respect My friend Heep has not fixed the positive

498 David Copperfield

remuneration at too high a figure, but he has made a great deal,
in the way of extrication from the pressure of pecuniary diffi-
culties, contingent on the value of my services; and on the
value of those services I pin my faith. Such address and
intelligence as I chance to possess," said Mr. Micawber,
boastfully disparaging himself, with the old genteel air, "will
be devoted to my friend Heep's service. I have already
some acquaintance with the law — as a defendant on civil
process — and I shall immediately apply myself to the Com-
mentaries of one of the most eminent and remarkable of our
English Jurists. I believe it is unnecessary to add that I
allude to Mr. Justice Blackstone."

These observations, and indeed the greater part of the
observations made that evening, were interrupted by Mrs.
Micawber's discovering that Master Micawber was sitting on
his boots, or holding his head on with both arms as if he felt
it loose, or accidentally kicking Traddles under the table, or
shuffling his feet over one another, or producing them at
distances from himself apparently outrageous to nature, or
lying sideways with his hair among the wine-glasses, or develop*
ing his restlessness of limb in some other form incompatible
with the general interests of society ; and by Master Micawber's
receiving those discoveries in a resentful spirit. I sat all the
while, amazed by Mr. Micawber's disclosure, and wondering
what it meant ; until Mrs. Micawber resumed the thread of the
discourse, and claimed my attention.

" What I particularly request Mr. Micawber to be careful
of, is," said Mrs. Micawber, " that he does not, my dear Mr.
Copperfield, in applying himself to this subordinate branch of
the law, place it out of his power to rise, ultimately, to the top
of the tree. I am convinced that Mr. Micawber, giving his
mind to a profession so adapted to his fertile resources, and
his flow of language, must distinguish himself. Now, for
example, Mr. Traddles," said Mrs. Micawber, assuming a
profound air, " a Judge, or even say a Chancellor. Does an
individual place himself beyond the pale of those prefer-
ments by entering on such an office as Mr. Micawber has
accepted ? "

" My dear," observed Mr, Micawber — but glancing inquisi-
tively at Traddles, too ; " we have time enough before us, for
the consideration of those questions."

" Micawber," she returned, '^ no ! Your mistake in life is,
that you do not look forward far enough. You are bound, in
justice to your family, if not to yourself, to take in at a

David Copperfield 499

comprehensive glance the extremest point in the horizon to
which your abilities may lead you."

Mr. Micawber coughed, and drank his punch with an air of
exceeding satisfaction — still glancing at Traddles, as if he desired
to have his opinion.

"Why, the plain state of the case, Mrs. Micawber," said
Traddles, mildly breaking the truth to her, " I mean the real
prosaic fact, you know — "

"Just so," said Mrs. Micawber, "my dear Mr. Traddles, I
wish to be as prosaic and literal as possible on a subject of so
much importance."

" — Is," said Traddles, "that this branch of the law, even if
Mr. Micawber were a regular solicitor — "

"Exactly so," returned Mrs. Micawber. ("Wilkins, you are
squinting, and will not be able to get your eyes back.")

" — Has nothing," pursued Traddles, " to do with that. Only
a barrister is eligible for such preferments ; and Mr. Micawber
could not be a barrister, without being entered at an inn of
court as a student, for five years."

"Do I follow you?" said Mrs. Micawber, with her most
affable air of business. "Do I understand, my dear Mr.
Traddles, that, at the expiration of that period, Mr. Micawber
would be eligible as a Judge or Chancellor ? "

"He would be eligible,'' returned Traddles, with a strong
emphasis on that word.

" Thank you," said Mrs. Micawber. " That is quite sufficient.
If such is the case, and Mr. Micawber forfeits no privilege by
entering on these duties, my anxiety is set at rest. I speak,"
said Mrs. Micawber, "as a female, necessarily; but I have
always been of opinion that Mr. Micawber possesses what I
have heard my papa call, when I lived at home, the judicial
mind; and I hope Mr. Micawber is now entering on a field
where that mind will develop itself, and take a commanding
station."

I quite believe that Mr. Micawber saw himself, in his
judicial mind's eye, on the woolsack. He passed his hand
complacently over his bald head, and said with ostentatious
resignation :

" My dear, we will not anticipate the decrees of fortune. If
I am reserved to wear a wig, I am at least prepared, externally,"
in allusion to his baldness, " for that distinction. I do not,"
said Mr. Micawber, " regret my hair, and I may have been
deprived of it for a specific purpose. I cannot say. It is my
intention, my dear Copperfield, to educate my son for the

500 David Copperfield

Church; I will not deny that I should be happy, on his
account, to attain to eminence."

" For the Church ? " said I, still pondering, between whiles,
on Uriah Heep.

"Yes," said Mr. Micawber. "He has a remarkable head-
voice, and will commence as a chorister. Our residence at
Canterbury, and our local connexion, will, no doubt, enable
him to take advantage of any vacancy that may arise in the
Cathedral corps."

On looking at Master Micawber again, I saw that he had a
certain expression of face, as if his voice were behind his eye-
brows ; where it presently appeared to be, on his singing us (as
an alternative between that and bed), "The Wood-Pecker
tapping." After many compliments on this performance, we
fell into some general conversation ; and as I was too full of
my desperate intentions to keep my altered circumstances to
myself, I made them known to Mr. and Mrs. Micawber. I
cannot express how extremely delighted they both were, by the
idea of my aunt's being in difficulties ; and how comfortable
and friendly it made them.

When we were nearly come to the last round of the punch,
I addressed myself to Traddles, and reminded him that we
must not separate, without wishing our friends health, happi-
ness, and success in their new career. I begged Mr. Micawber
to fill us bumpers, and proposed the toast in due form ; shaking
hands with him across the table, and kissing Mrs. Micawber,
to commemorate that eventful occasion. Traddles imitated
me in the first particular, but did not consider himself a
sufficiently old friend to venture on the second.

" My dear Copperfield," said Mr. Micawber, rising with one
of his thumbs in each of his waistcoat pockets, "the com-
panion of my youth : if I may be allowed the expression — and
my esteemed friend Traddles : if I may be permitted to call
him so — will allow me, on the part of Mrs. Micawber, myself,
and our offspring, to thank them in the warmest and most
uncompromising terms for their good wishes. It may be
expected that on the eve of a migration which will consign us
to a perfectly new existence," Mr. Micawber spoke as if they
were going five hundred thousand miles, " I should offer a few
valedictory remarks to two such friends as I see before me.
But all that I have to say in this way, I have said. Whatever
station in society I may attain, through the medium of the
learned profession of which I am about to become an un-
worthy member, I shall endeavour not to disgrace, and Mrs.

David Copperfield 501

Micawber will be safe to adorn. Under the temporary pres-
sure of pecuniary liabilities, contracted with a view to their
immediate liquidation, but remaining unliquidated through a
combination of circumstances, I have been under the necessity
of assuming a garb from which my natural instincts recoil — I
allude to spectacles — and possessing myself of a cognomen, to
which I can establish no legitimate pretensions. All I have to
say on that score is, that the cloud has passed from the dreary
scene, and the God of Day is once more high upon the
mountain tops. On Monday next, on the arrival of the four
o'clock afternoon coach at Canterbury, my foot will be on my
native heath— my name, Micawber 1 "

Mr. Micawber resumed his seat on the close of these remarks,
and drank two glasses of punch in grave succession. He then
said with much solemnity :

"One thing more I have to do, before this separation is
complete, and that is to perform an act of justice. My friend
Mr. Thomas Traddles has, on two several occasions, * put his
name,' if I may use a common expression, to bills of exchange
for my accommodation. On the first occasion Mr. Thomas
Traddles was left — let me say, in short, in the lurch. The
fulfilment of the second has not yet arrived. The amount of
the first obligation," here Mr. Micawber carefully referred to
papers, "was, I believe, twenty-three, four, nine and a half; of
the second, according to my entry of that transaction, eighteen,
six, two. These sums, united, make a total, if my calculation
is correct, amounting to forty-one, ten, eleven and a half. My
fiiend Copperfield will perhaps do me the favour to check that
total?"

I did so and found it correct.

" To leave this metropolis," said Mr. Micawber, " and my
friend Mr. Thomas Traddles, without acquitting myself of the
pecuniary part of this obligation, would weigh upon my mind
to an insupportable extent. I have, therefore, prepared for my
friend Mr. Thomas Traddles, and I now hold in my hand, a
document, which accomplishes the desired object. I beg to v^^
hand to my friend Mr. Thomas Traddles my I. O. U. for >
forty-one, ten, eleven and a half, and 1 am happy to recover ^
my moral dignity, and to know that I can once more walk j
erect before my fellow man 1 "

With this introduction (which greatly affected him), Mr.
Micawber placed his I. O. U. in the hands of Traddles, and
said he wished him well in every relation of life. I am
persuaded, not only that this was quite the same to Mr.

502 David Copperfield

Micawber as paying the money, but that Traddles himself
hardly knew the difference until he had had time to think
about it.

Mr. Micawber walked so erect before his fellow man, on the
strength of this virtuous action, that his chest looked half as
broad again when he lighted us down-stairs. We parted with
great heartiness on both sides ; and when I had seen Traddles
to his own door, and was going home alone, I thought, among
the other odd and contradictory things I mused upon, that,
slippery as Mr. Micawber was, I was probably indebted to
some compassionate recollection he retained of me as his boy-
lodger, for never having been asked by him for money. I
certainly should not have had the moral courage to refuse it ;
and I have no doubt he knew that (to his credit be it written)
quite as well as I did.

CHAPTER XXXVII

A LITTLE COLD WATER .

My new life had lasted for more than a week, and I was
stronger than ever in those tremendous practical resolutions
that I felt the crisis required. I continued to walk extremely
fast, and to have a general idea that I was getting on. I made
it a rule to take as much out of myself as I possibly could, in
my way of doing everything to which I applied my energies.
I made a perfect victim of myself. I even entertained some
idea of putting myself on a vegetable diet, vaguely conceiving
that, in becoming a graminivorous animal, I should sacrifice
to Dora.

As yet, little Dora was quite unconscious of my desperate
firmness, otherwise than as my letters darkly shadowed it forth.
But another Saturday came, and on that Saturday evening she
was to be at Miss Mills's; and when Mr. Mills had gone to
his whist-club (telegraphed to me in the street, by a bird-cage
in the drawing-room middle window), I was to go there to tea.

By this time, we were quite settled down in Buckingham
Street, where Mr. Dick continued his copying in a state of
absolute felicity. My aunt had obtained a signal victory over
Mrs. Crupp, by paying her oflf, throwing the first pitcher she
planted on the stairs out of window, and protecting in person,
up and down the staircase, a supernumerary whom she engaged

David Copperfield 503

from the outer world. These vigorous measures struck such
terror to the breast of Mrs. Crupp, that she subsided into her
own kitchen, under the impression that my aunt was mad.
My aunt being supremely indifferent to Mrs. Crupp's opinion
and everybody else's, and rather favouring than discouraging
the idea, Mrs. Crupp, of late the bold, became within a few
days so faint-hearted, that rather than encounter my aunt upon
the staircase, she would endeavour to hide her portly form
behind doors — leaving visible, however, a wide margin of
flannel petticoat— or would shrink into dark corners. This
gave my aunt such unspeakable satisfaction, that I believe she
took a delight in prowling up and down, with her bonnet
insanely perched on the top of her head, at times when Mrs.
Crupp was likely to be in the way.

My aunt, being uncommonly neat and ingenious, made so
many little improvements in our domestic arrangements, that
I seemed to be richer instead of poorer. Among the rest,
she converted the pantry into a dressing-room for me ; and
purchased and embellished a bedstead for my occupation,
which looked as like a bookcase in the daytime as a bedstead
could. I was the object of her constant solicitude ; and my
poor mother herself could not have loved me better, or studied
more how to make me happy.

Peggotty had considered herself highly privileged in being
allowed to participate in these labours ; and, although she still
retained something of her old sentiment of awe in reference to
my aunt, had received so many marks of encouragement and
confidence, that they were the best friends possible. But the
time had now come (I am speaking of the Saturday when I
was to take tea at Miss Mills's) when it was necessary for her
to return home, and enter on the discharge of the duties she
had undertaken in behalf of Ham. " So good-bye, Barkis,"
said my aunt, ''and take care of yourself! I am sure I never
thought I could be sorry to lose you ! "

I took Peggotty to the coach-office and saw her off. She
cried at parting, and confided her brother to my friendship as
Ham had done. We had heard nothing of him since he went
away, that sunny afternoon.

" And now, my own dear Davy," said Peggotty, " if, while
you're a prentice, you should want any money to spend ; or if,
when you're out of your time, my dear, you should want any
to set you up (and you must do one or other, or both, my
darling); who has such a good right to ask leave to lend it
you, as my sweet girl's own old stupid me ! "

504 David Copperfield

I was not so savagely independent as to say anything in
reply, but that if ever I borrowed money of any one, I would
borrow it of her. Next to accepting a large sum on the spot,
I believe this gave Peggotty more comfort than anything I
could have done.

" And, my dear ! " whispered Peggotty, ** tell the pretty
little angel that I should so have liked to see her, only for
a minute! And tell her that before she marries my boy,
I'll come and make your house so beautiful for you, if you'll
let me ! "

I declared that nobody else should touch it ; and this gave
Peggotty such delight, that she went away in good spirits.

I fatigued myself as much as I possibly could in the Com-
mons all day, by a variety of devices, and at the appointed
time in the evening repaired to Mr. Mills's street. Mr. Mills,
who was a terrible fellow to fall asleep after dinner, had not
yet gone out, and there was no bird-cage in the middle
window.

He kept me waiting so long, that I fervently hope the club
would fine him for being late. At last he came out ; and then
I saw my own Dora hang up the bird-cage, and peep into the
balcony to look for me, and run in again when she saw I was
there, while Jip remained behind, to bark injuriously at an
immense butcher's dog in the street, who could have taken
him like a pill.

(/ Dora came to the drawing-room door to meet me ; and Jip
came scrambling out, tumbling over his own growls, under the
impression that I was a Bandit ; and we all three went in, as
happy and loving as could be. I soon carried desolation into
the bosom of our joys — not that I meant to do it, but that I
was so full of the subject — by asking Dora, without the smallest
preparation, if she could love a beggar ?

My pretty, little, startled Dora ! Her only association with
the word was a yellow face and a nightcap, or a pair of crutches,
or a wooden leg, or a dog with a decanter-stand in his mouth,
or something of that kind ; arid she stared at me with the most
delightful wonder.

" How can you ask me anything so foolish ? " pouted Dora.
" Love a beggar ! "

" Dora, my own dearest ! " said I. " / am a beggar ! "

" How can you be such a silly thing," replied Dora, slapping
my hand, " as to sit there, telling such stories ? I'll make Jip
bite you ! " .

Her childish Way was the most delicious way in the world

David Copperfield 505

to me, but it was necessary to be explicit, and I solemnly
repeated :

" Dora, my own life, I am your ruined David ! "

" I declare I'll make Jip bite you ! " said Dora, shaking her
curls, " if you are so ridiculous."

But I looked so serious, that Dora left off shaking her curls,
and laid her trembling little hand upon my shoulder, and first
looked scared and anxious, then began to cry. That was
dreadful. I fell upon my knees before the sofa, caressing her,
and imploring her not to rend my heart ; but, for some time,
poor little Dora did nothing but exclaim Oh dear ! Oh dear !
And oh, she was so frightened ! And where was Julia Mills !
And oh, take her to Julia Mills, and go away, please ! until I
was almost beside myself.

At last, after an agony of supplication and protestation, I
got Dora to look at me, with a horrified expression of face,
which I gradually soothed until it was only loving, and her soft,
pretty cheek was lying against mine, ^hen I told her, with my
arms clasped round her, how I loved her, so dearly, and so
dearly ; how I felt it right to offer to release her from her engage-
ment, because now I was poor ; how I never could bear it, or
recover it, if I lost her ; how I had no fears of poverty, if she
had none, my arm being nerved and my heart inspired by her ;
how I was already working with a courage such as none but
lovers knew ; how I had begun to be practical, and look into
the future; how a crust well-earned was sweeter far than a
feast inherited ; and much more to the same purpose, which
I delivered in a burst of passionate eloquence quite surprising
to myself, though I had been thinking about it, day and night,
ever since my aunt had astonished me.

*'^" Is your heart mine still, dear Dora ? " said I, rapturously,
for I knew by her clinging to me that it was.

"Oh, yes!" cried Dora. "Oh, yes, it's all yours. Oh,
don't be dreadful!"

/dreadful! To Dora !

" Don't talk about being poor, and working hard ! " said
Dora, nestling closer to me. " Oh, don't, don't! "

" My dearest love," said I, " the crust well-earned "

" Oh, yes ; but I don't want to hear any more about crusts ! "
said Dora, " And Jip must have a mutton-chop every day at
twelve, or he'll die ! " '

I was charmed with her childish, winning way. I fondly
explained to Dora that Jip should have his mutton-chop with
his accustomed regularity. I drew a picture of our frugal

5o6 David Copperfield

home, made independent by my labour — sketching in the little
house I had seen at Highgate, and my aunt in her room
up-stairs.

" I am not dreadful now, Dora ? " said I, tenderly.

" Oh, no, no ! " cried Dora. " But I hope your aunt will
keep in her own room a good deal. And I hope she's not a
scolding old thing ! "

If it were possible for me to love Dora more than ever,
I am sure I did. But I felt she was a little impracticable.
It damped my new-born ardour, to find that ardour so difficult
of communication to her. I made another trial. When she
was quite herself again, and was curling Jip's ears, as he lay
upon her lap, I became grave, and said :

" My own ! May I mention something ? "

" Oh, please don't be practical ! " said Dora coaxingly.
" Because it frightens me so ! "

" Sweet heart ! " I returned ; " there is nothing to alarm you
in all this. I want you to think of it quite differently. I want
to make it nerve you, and inspire you, Dora ! "

" Oh, but that's so shocking ! " cried Dora.

" My love, no. Perseverance and strength of character will
enable us to bear much worse things."

" But I haven't got any strength at all," said Dora, shaking
her curls. " Have I, Jip ? Oh, do kiss Jip, and iDe agree-
able ! "

It was impossible to resist kissing Jip, when she held him
up to me for that purpose, putting her own bright, rosy little
mouth into kissing form, as she directed the operation, which
she insisted should be performed symmetrically, on the centre
of his nose. I did as she bade me — rewarding myself after-
wards for my obedience — and she charmed me out of my
graver character for I don't know how long.

" But, Dora, my beloved ! " said I, at last resuming it ; ** I
was going to mention something."

The Judge of the Prerogative Court might have fallen in
love with her, to see her fold her little hands and hold them
up, begging and praying me not to be dreadful any more.
^" Indeed I am not going to be, my darling ! " I assured
her. " But, Dora, my love, if you will sometimes think — not
despondingly, you know ; far from that ! — but if you will some-
times think — just to encourage yourself — that you are engaged
to a poor man "

" Don't, don't 1 Pray don't ! " cried Dora. " It's so very
dreadful ! "

David Copperfield 507

*' My soul, not at all ! " said I cheerfully. " If you will
sometimes think of that, and look about now and then at your
papa's housekeeping, and endeavour to acquire a little habit —
of accounts, for instance — "

Poor little Dora received tiris suggestion with something that
was half a sob and half a scream.

" — It would be so useful to us afterwards," I went on.
"And if you would promise me to read a little — a little
Cookery Book that I would send you, it would be so excellent
for both of us. For our path in life, my Dora," said I,
warming with the subject, " is stony and rugged now, and
it rests with us to smooth it. We must fight our way onward.
We must be brave. There are obstacles to be met, and we
must meet, and crush them !!'

I was going on at a "great rate, with a clenched hand, and a
most enthusiastic countenance ; but it was quite unnecessary to
proceed. I had said enough. I had done it again. Oh, she
was so frightened ! Oh, where was Julia Mills ! Oh, take her
to Julia Mills, and go away, please ! So that, in short, I was
quite distracted, and raved about the drawing-room.

I thought I had killed her, this time. I sprinkled water on
her face. I went down on my knees. I plucked at my hair.
I denounced myself as a remorseless brute and a ruthless beast.
I implored her forgiveness. I besought her to look up. I
ravaged Miss Mills's work-box for a smelling-bottle, and in my
agony of mind applied an ivory needle-case instead, and dropped
all the needles over Dora. I shook my fists at Jip, who was as
frantic as myself. I did every wild extravagance that could be
done, and was a long way beyond the end of my wits when
Miss Mills came into the room.

" Who has done this ! " exclaimed Miss Mills, succouring her
friend.

I replied, " /, Miss Mills ! / have done it ! Behold the
destroyer ! " — or words to that effect — and hid my face from
the light, in the sofa cushion.

At first Miss Mills thought it was a quarrel, and that we were
verging on the Desert of Sahara ; but she soon found out how
matters stood, for my dear affectionate little Dora, embracing
her, began exclaiming that 1 was "a poor labourer;" and then
cried for me, and embraced me, and asked me would I let her
give me all her money to keep, and then fell on Miss Mills's
neck, sobbing as if her tender heart were broken.

Miss Mills must have been bom to be a blessing to us.
She ascertained from me in a few words what it was all about,

So8 David Copperfield

comforted Dora, and gradually convinced her that I was not a
labourer— from my manner of stating the case I believe Dora
concluded that I was a navigator, and went balancing myself
up and down a plank all day with a wheelbarrow — and so
brought us together in peace. When we were quite composed,
and Dora had gone up-stairs to put some rose-water to her eyes,
Miss Mills rang for tea. In the ensuing interval, I told Miss
Mills that she was evermore my friend, and that my heart must
ce^se to vibrate ere I could forget her sympathy.
^l then expounded to Miss Mills what I had endeavoured, so
very unsuccessfully, to expound to Dora. Miss Mills replied,
on general principles, that the Cottage of content was better
than the Palace of cold splendour, and that where love was,
aU^^was.

r said to Miss Mills that this was very true, and who should
know it better than I, who loved Dora with a love that never
mortal had experienced yet? But on Miss Mills observing,
with despondency, that it were well indeed for some hearts
if this were so, I explained that I begged leave to restrict
the observation to mortals of the masculine gender.
^l then put it to Miss Mills, to say whether she considered
that there was or was not any practical merit in the suggestion
I had been anxious to make, concerning the accounts, the
housekeeping, and the Cookery Book ?

Miss Mills, after some consideration, thus replied :

" Mr. Copperfield, I will be plain with you. Mental suffering
and trial supply, in some natures, the place of years, and I will
be as plain with you as if I were a Lady Abbess. No. The
suggestion is not appropriate to our Dora. Our dearest Dora is
a favourite child of nature. She is a thing of light, and airiness,
and joy. I am free to confess that if it could be done, it might
be ,\yell, but — " And Miss Mills shook her head.
V^ was encouraged by this closing admission on the part of
Miss Mills to ask her, whether, for Dora's sake, if she had any
opportunity of luring her attention to such preparations for an
earnest life, she would avail herself of it ? Miss Mills replied
in the affirmative so readily, that I further asked her if she
would take charge of the Cookery Book ; and, if she ever could
insinuate it upon Dora's acceptance, without frightening her,
undertake to do me that crowning service. Miss Mills accepted
this trust, too ; but was not sanguine.

And Dora returned, looking such a lovely little creature, that
I really doubted whether she ought to be troubled with anything
so ordinary. And she loved me so much, and was so captivating

David Copperfield 509

(particularly when she made Jip stand on his hind legs for
toast, and when she pretended to hold that nose of his against
the hot tea-pot for punishment because he wouldn't), that I felt
like a sort of Monster who had got into a Fairy's bower, when
I thought of having frightened her, and made her cry.

After tea we had the guitar ; and Dora sang those same dear
old French songs about the impossibility of ever on any account
leaving off dancing, La ra la, La ra la, until I felt a much
greater Monster than before.

We had only one check to our pleasure, and that happened
a little while before I took my leave, when, Miss Mills chancing
to make some allusion to to-morrow morning, I unluckily let
out that, being obliged to exert myself now, I got up at five
o'clock. Whether Dora had any idea that I was a Private
Watchman, I am unable to say ; but it made a great impression
on her, and she neither played nor sang any more.

It was still on her mind when I bade her adieu ; and she said
to me, in her pretty coaxing way — as if I were a doll, I used to
think :

" Now don't get up at five o'clock, you naughty boy. It's so
nonsensical."

" My love," said I, " I have work to do."

" But don't do it I " returned Dora. " Why should you ? "

It was impossible to say to that sweet little surprised face,
otherwise than lightly and playfully, that we must work to live.

" Oh ! How ridiculous ! " cried Dora.

" How shall we live without, Dora ? " said I.

" How ? Any how I " said Dora.

She seemed to think she had quite settled the question, and
gave me such a triumphant little kiss, direct from her ixinocent
heart, that I would hardly have put her out of conceit with her
answer, for a fortune.

^ Well 1 I loved her, and I went on loving her, most absorb-
mgly, entirely, and completely. But going on, too, working
pretty hard, and busily keeping red-hot all the irons I now had
in the fire, I would sit sometimes of a night, opposite my aunt,
thinking how I had frightened Dora that time, and how I could
best make my way with a guitar-case through the forest of
difficulty, until I used to fancy that my head was turning
quite grey.

5IO David Copperfield

CHAPTER XXXVIII

A DISSOLUTION OF PARTNERSHIP

I DID not allow my resolution, with respect to the Parliamentary
Debates, to cool. It was one of the irons I began to heat
immediately, and one of the irons I kept hot, and hammered
at, with a perseverance I may honestly admire. I bought an
approved scheme of the noble art and mystery of stenography
(which cost me ten and sixpence), and plunged into a sea of
perplexity that brought me, in a few weeks, to the confines of
distraction. The changes that were rung upon dots, which in
such a position meant such a thing, and in such another posi-
tion something else, entirely different; the wonderful vagaries
that were played by circles ; the unaccountable consequences
that resulted from marks like flies' legs ; the tremendous effects
of a curve in a wrong place ; not only troubled my waking hours,
but reappeared before me in my sleep. When I had groped
my way, blindly, through these difficulties, and had mastered
the alphabet, which was.ian Egyptian Temple in itself, there
then appeared a proces^on of new horrors, called arbitrary
characters ; the most despotic characters I have ever known ;
who insisted, for instance, that a thing like the beginning of a
cobweb, meant expectation, and that a pen-and-ink sky-rocket
stood for disadvantageous. When I had fixed these wretches
in my mind, I found that they had driven everything else out
of it ; then, beginning again, I forgot them ; while I was picking
them up, I dropped the other fragmer*; of the system ; in short,
it was almost heart-breaking.

It might have been quite heart-breaking, but for Dora, who
was the stay and anchor of my tempest-driven bark. Every
scratch in the scheme was a gnarled oak in the forest of
difficulty, and I went on cutting them down, one after another,
with such vigour, that in three or four months I was in a
condition to make an experiment on one of our crack speakers
in the Commons. Shall I ever forget how the crack speaker
walked off from me before I began, and left my imbecile pencil
staggering about the paper as if it were in a fit !

This would not do, it was quite clear. I was flying too high,
and should never get on, so. I resorted to Traddles for advice ;
who suggested that he should dictate speeches to me, at a pace,
and with occasional stoppages, adapted to my weakness. Very

David Copperfield 511

grateful for this friendly aid, I accepted the proposal; and
night after night, almost every night, for a long time, we had a
sort of Private Parliament in Buckingham Street, after I came
home from the Doctor's.

I should like to see such a Parliament anywhere else ! My
aunt and Mr. Dick represented the Government or the
Opposition (as the case might be), and Traddles, with the
assistance of Enfield's Speaker or a volume of parliamentary
orations, thundered astonishing invectives against them.
Standing by the table, with his finger in the page to keep the
place, and his right arm flourishing above his head, Traddles,
as Mr. Pitt, Mr. Fox, Mr. Sheridan, Mr. Burke, Lord
Castlereagh, Viscount Sidmouth, or Mr. Canning, would work
himself into the most violent heats, and deliver the most wither-
ing denunciations of the profligacy and corruption of my aunt
and Mr. Dick ; while I used to sit, at a little distance, with my
note-book on my knee, fagging after him with all my might and
main. The inconsistency and recklessness of Traddles were
not to be exceeded by any real politician. He was for any
description of policy, in the compass of a week ; and nailed all
sorts of colours to every denomination of mast. My aunt,
looking very like an immoveable Chancellor of the Exchequer,
would occasionally throw in an interruption or two, as " Hear ! "
or " No ! " or " Oh ! " when the text seemed to require it : which
was always a signal to Mr. Dick (a perfect country gentleman)
to follow lustily with the same cry. But Mr. Dick got taxed
with such things in the course of his Parliamentary career, and
was made responsible for such awful consequences, that he
became uncomfortable in his mind sometimes. I believe he
actually began to be afraid he really had been doing something,
tending to the annihilation of the British constitution, and the
ruin of the country.

Often and often we pursued these debates until the clock
pointed to midnight, and the candles were burning down. The
result of so much good practice was, that by-and-bye I began
to keep pace with Traddles pretty well, and should have been
quite triumphant if I had had the least idea what my notes
were about. But, as to reading them after I had got them,
I might as well have copied the Chinese inscriptions on an
immense collection of tea-chests, or the golden characters on
all the great red and green bottles in the chemists' shops !

There was nothing for it, but to turn back and begin all over
again. It was very hard, but I turned back, though with a
heavy heart, and began laboriously and methodically to plod

512 David Copperfield

over the same tedious ground at a snail's pace ; stopping to
examine minutely every speck in the way, on all sides, and
making the most desperate efforts to know these elusive
characters by sight wherever I met them. I was always
punctual at the office ; at the Doctor's too ; and I really did
work, as the common expression is, like a cart-horse.

One day, when I went to the Commons as usual, I found
Mr. Spenlow in the doorway looking extremely grave, and talking
to himself. As he was in the habit of complaining of pains in
his head — he had naturally a short throat, and I do seriously
believe he overstarched himself — I was at first alarmed by the
idea that he was not quite right in that direction ; but he soon
relieved my uneasiness.

Instead of returning my "Good-morning" with his usual
affability, he looked at me in a distant, ceremonious manner,
and coldly requested me to accompany him to a certain coffee-
house, which, in those days, had a door opening into the
Commons, just within the little archway in St. Paul's church-
yard. I complied, in a very uncomfortable state, and with a
warm shooting all over me, as if my apprehensions were break-
ing out into buds. When I allowed him to go on a little
before, on account of the narrowness of the way, I observed
that he carried his head with a lofty air that was particularly
unpromising ; and my mind misgave me that he had found out
about my darling Dora.-

If I had not guessed this, on the way to the coffee-house,
I could hardly have failed to know what was the matter
when I followed him into an up-stairs room, and found Miss
Murdstone there, supported by a background of sideboard, on
which were several inverted tumblers sustaining lemons, and
two of those extraordinary boxes, all corners and flutings, for
sticking knives and forks in, which, happily for mankind, are
now obsolete.

Miss Murdstone gave me her chilly finger-nails, and sat
severely rigid. Mr. Spenlow shut the door, motioned me
to a chair, and stood on the hearth-rug in front of the
fireplace.

" Have the goodness to show Mr. Copperfield," said Mr.
Spenlow, " what you have in your reticule, Miss Murdstone."

I believe it was the old identical steel-clasped reticule of my
childhood, that shut up like a bite. Compressing her lips, in
sympathy with the snap. Miss Murdstone opened it — opening
her mouth a little at the same time — and produced my last
letter to Dora, teeming with expressions of devoted affection.

David Copperfield 513

" I believe that is your writing, Mr. Copperfield ? " said Mr.
Spenlow.

I was very hot, and the voice I heard was very unlike mine,
when I said, " It is, sir ! ''

*' If I am not mistaken," said Mr. Spenlow, as Miss Murd-
stone brought a parcel of letters out of her reticule, tied round
with the dearest bit of blue ribbon, " those are also from your
pen, Mr. Copperfield ? "

I took them from her with a most desolate sensation ; and,
glancing at such phrases at the top, as " My ever dearest and
own Dora," " My best beloved angel," " My blessed one for
ever," and the like, blushed deeply, and inclined my head.

" No, thank you ! " said Mr. Spenlow, coldly, as I mechani-
cally offered them back to him. " I will not deprive you of
them. Miss Murdstone, be so good as to proceed ! "

That gentle creature, after a moment's thoughtful survey of
the carpet, delivered herself with much dry unction as follows :

" I must confess to having entertained my suspicions of Miss
Spenlow, in reference to David Copperfield, for some time. I
observed Miss Spenlow and David Copperfield, when they first
met ; and the impression made upon me then was not agreeable.
The depravity of the human heart is such "

"You will oblige me, ma'am," interrupted Mr. Spenlow, "by
confining yourself to facts."

Miss Murdstone cast down her eyes, shook her head as if
protesting against this unseemly interruption, and with frowning
dignity resumed :

" Since I am to confine myself to facts, I will state them
as dryly as I can. Perhaps that will be considered an ac-
ceptable course of proceeding. I have already said, sir, that I
have had my suspicions of Miss Spenlow, in reference to David
Copperfield, for some time. I have frequently endeavoured to
find decisive corroboration of those suspicions, but without
effect. I have therefore forborne to mention them to Miss
Spenlow's father ; " looking severely at him ; " knowing how
little disposition there usually is in such cases, to acknowledge
the conscientious discharge of duty."

Mr. Spenlow seemed quite cowed by the gentlemanly
sternness of Miss Murdstone's manner, and deprecated her
severity with a conciliatory little wave of his hand.

"On my return to Norwood, after the period of absence
occasioned by my brother's marriage," pursued Miss Murd-
stone in a disdainful voice, "and on the return of Miss
Spenlow from her visit to her friend Miss Mills, I imagined

514 David Copperfield

that the manner of Miss Spenlow gave me greater occasion for
suspicion than before. Therefore I watched Miss Spenlow
closely."

Dear, tender little Dora, so unconscious of this Dragon's
eye.

" Still," resumed Miss Murdstone, " I found no proof until
last night. It appeared to me that Miss Spenlow received
too many letters from her friend Miss Mills ; but Miss Mills
being her friend with her father's full concurrence," another
telling blow at Mr Spenlow, " it was not for me to interfere.
If I may not be permitted to allude to the natural depravity of
the human heart, at least I may — I must — be permitted, so far
to refer to misplaced confidence."

Mr. Spenlow apologetically murmured his assent.

" Last evening after tea," pursued Miss Murdstone, " I
observed the little dog starting, rolling, and growling about the
drawing-room, worrying something. I said to Miss Spenlow,
• Dora, what is that the dog has in his mouth ? It's paper.'
Miss Spenlow immediately put her hand to her frock, gave a
sudden cry, and ran to the dog. I interposed, and said, ' Dora,
my love, you must permit me.'"

Oh Jip, miserable Spaniel, this wretchedness, then, was
your work !

" Miss Spenlow endeavoured," said Miss Murdstone, " to
bribe me with kisses, work-boxes, and small articles of jewellery
— that, of course, I pass over. The little dog retreated under
the sofa on my approaching him, and was with great difficulty
dislodged by the fire-irons. Even when dislodged, he still
kept the letter in his mouth ; and on my endeavouring to take
it from him, at .the imminent risk of being bitten, he kept it
between his teeth so pertinaciously as to suffer himself to be
held suspended in the air by means of the document. At
length I obtained possession of it. After perusing it, I taxed
Miss Spenlow with having many such letters in her possession ;
and ultimately obtained from her the packet which is now in
David Copperfield's hand."

Here she ceased ; and snapping her reticule again, and
shutting her mouth, looked as if she might be broken, but
could never be bent.

"You have heard Miss Murdstone," said Mr. Spenlow,
turning to me. " I beg to ask, Mr. Copperfield, if you have
anything to say in reply?"

The picture I had before me, of the beautiful little treasure
of my heart, sobbing and crying all night — of her being alone,

David Copperfield 515

frightened, and wretched, then — of her having so piteously
begged and prayed that stony-hearted woman to forgive her
— of her having vainly offered her those kisses, work-boxes,
and trinkets — of her being in such grievous distress, and all
for me — very much impaired the little dignity I had been able
to muster. I am afraid I was in a tremulous state for a minute
or so, though I did my best to disguise it.

"There is nothing I can say, sir," I returned, "except
that all the blame is mine. Dora — "

" Miss Spenlow, if you please," said her father, majestically.

" — was induced and persuaded by me," I went on, swallow-
ing that colder designation, " to consent to this concealment,
and I bitterly regret it."

" You are very much to blame, sir," said Mr. Spenlow,
walking to and fro upon the hearth-rug, and emphasizing
what he said with his whole body instead of his head, on
account of the stiflfness of his cravat and spine. " You have
done a stealthy and unbecoming action, Mr. Copperfield.
When I take a gentleman to my house, no matter whether
he is nineteen, twenty-nine, or ninety, I take him there in a
spirit of confidence. If he abuses my confidence, he commits
a dishonourable action, Mr. Copperfield."

"I feel it, sir, I assure you," I returned. But I never
thought so, before. Sincerely, honestly, indeed, Mr. Spenlow,
I never thought so, before. I love Miss Spenlow to that
extent "

" Pooh ! nonsense ! " said Mr. Spenlow, reddening. " Pray
don't tell me to my face that you love my daughter, Mr.
Copperfield ! "

" Could I defend my conduct if I did not, sir ? " I returned,
with all humility.

" Can you defend your conduct if you do, sir ? " said Mr.
Spenlow, stopping short upon the hearth-rug. " Have you /
considered your years, and my daughter's years, Mr. Copper- ^
field ? Have you considered what it is to undermine the confi-
dence that should subsist between my daughter and myself? J
Have you considered my daughter's station in life, the projects
I may contemplate for her advancement, the testamentary
intentions I may have with reference to her? Have you
considered anything, Mr. Copperfield ? "

*' Very little, sir, I am afraid ; " I answered, speaking to him
as respectfully and sorrowfully as I felt ; " but pray believe me,
I have considered my own worldly position. When I explained
it to you, we were already engaged '*

5i6 David Copperfield

** I BEG," said Mr. Spenlow, more like Punch than I had ever
seen him, as he energetically struck one hand upon the other
— I could not help noticing that even in my despair ; " that
you will NOT talk to me of engagements, Mr. Copperfield ! "

The otherwise immoveable Miss Murdstone laughed con-
temptuously in one short syllable.

" When I explained my altered position to you, sir," I began
again, substituting a new form of expression for what was so un-
palatable to him, " this concealment, into which I am so unhappy
as to have led Miss Spenlow, had begun. Since I have been
in that altered position, I have strained every nerve, I have
exerted every energy, to improve it. I am sure I shall improve
it in time. Will you grant me time — any length of time ? We
are both so young, sir, "

"You are right," interrupted Mr. Spenlow, nodding his head
a great many times, and frowning very much, "you are both
very young. It's all nonsense. Let there be an- end of the
nonsense. Take away those letters, and throw them in the fire.
Give me Miss Spenlow's letters to throw in the fire ; and although
our future intercourse must, you are aware, be restricted to the
Commons here, we will agree to make no further mention of
the past. Come, Mr. Copperfield, you don't want sense ; and
this is the sensible course."

No. I couldn't think of agreeing to it. I was very sorry,
but there was a higher consideration than sense. Love was
above all earthly considerations, and I loved Dora to idolatry,
and Dora loved me. I didn't exactly say so ; I softened it
down as much as I could ; but I implied it, and I was resolute
upon it. I don't think I made myself very ridiculous, but I
know I was resolute.

" Very well, Mr. Copperfield," said Mr. Spenlow, " I must
try my influence with my daughter."

Miss Murdstone, by an expressive sound, a long-drawn
respiration, which was neither a sigh nor a moan, but was like
both, gave it as her opinion that he should have done this at
first.

" I must try," said Mr. Spenlow, confirmed by this support,
" my influence with my daughter. Do you decline to take
those letters, Mr. Copperfield ? " For I had laid them on the
table.

Yes. I told him I hoped he would not think it wrong, but
1 couldn't possibly take them from Miss Murdstone.

" Nor from me ? " said Mr. Spenlow.

No, I replied with the profoundest respect ; nor from him.

David Copperfield 517

••Very well ! " said Mr. Spenlow.

A silence succeeding, I was undecided whether to go or stay.
At length I was moving quietly towards the door, with the
intention of saying that perhaps I should consult his feelings
best by withdrawing ; when he said, with his hands in his coat
pockets, into which it was as much as he could do to get them ;
and with what I should call, upon the whole, a decidedly pious
air :

"You are probably aware, Mr. Copperfield, that I am not
altogether destitute of worldly possessions, and that my daughter
is my nearest and dearest relative ? "

I hurriedly made him a reply to the effect, that I hoped the
error into which I had been betrayed by the desperate nature
of my love, did not induce him to think me mercenary too ?

" I don't allude to the matter in that light," said Mr. Spenlow.
" It would be better for yourself, and all of us, if you were
mercenary, Mr. Copperfield — I mean, if you were more discreet,
and less influenced by all this youthful nonsense. No. I
merely say, with quite another view, you are probably aware I
have some property to bequeath to my child ? "

I certainly supposed so.

" And you can hardly think," said Mr. Spenlow, " having
experience of what we see, in the Commons here, every day, of
the various unaccountable and negligent proceedings of men, in
respect of their testamentary arrangements — of all subjects, the
one on which perhaps the strangest revelations of human
inconsistency are to be met with — but that mine are made ? "

I inclined my head in acquiescence.

"I should not allow," said Mr. Spenlow, with an evident
increase of pious sentiment, and slowly shaking his head as he
poised himself upon his toes and heels alternately, " my suit-
able provision for my child to be influenced by a piece of
youthful folly like the present. It is mere folly. Mere
nonsense. In a little while, it will weigh lighter than any
feather. But I might — I might — if this silly business were not
completely relinquished altogether, be induced in some anxious
moment to guard her from, and surround her with protections
against, the consequences of any foolish step in the way of
marriage. Now, Mr. Copperfield, I hope that you will not
render it necessary for me to open, even for a quarter of an
hour, that closed page in the book of life, and unsettle, even
for a quarter of an hour, grave affairs long since composed."

There was a serenity, a tranquillity, a calm sunset air about
him, which quite affected me. He was so peaceful and resigned

5i8 David Copperfield

— clearly had his affairs in such perfect train, and so systemati
cally wound up — that he was a man to feel touched in the
contemplation of. I really think I saw tears rise to his eyes,
from the depth of his own feeling of all this.

But what could I do ? I could not deny Dora, and my own
heart. When he told me I had better take a week to consider
of what he had said, how could I say I wouldn't take a week,
yet how could I fail to know that no amount of weeks could
influence such love as mine ?

" In the meantime, confer with Miss Trotwood, or with any
person with any knowledge of life," said Mr. Spenlow, adjusting
his cravat with both hands. " Take a week, Mr. Copperfield."

I submitted ; and, with a countenance as expressive as I was
able to make it of dejected and despairing constancy, came out
of the room. Miss Murdstone's heavy eyebrows followed me
to the door — I say her eyebrows rather than her eyes, because
they were much more important in her face — and she looked so
exactly as she used to look, at about that hour of the morning,
in our parlour at Blunderstone, that I could have fancied I had
been breaking down in my lessons again, and that the dead
weight on my mind was that horrible old spelling-book with oval
woodcuts, shaped, to my youthful fancy, like the glasses out of
spectacles.

When I got to the office, and, shutting out old Tiffey and the
rest of them with my hands, sat at my desk, in my own particu-
lar nook, thinking of this earthquake that had taken place so
unexpectedly, and in the bitterness of my ^spirit cursing Jip, I
fell into such a state of torment about Dora, that I wonder I
did not take up my hat and rush insanely to Norwood. The
idea of their frightening her, and making her cry, and of my
not being there to comfort her, was so excruciating, that it
impelled me to write a wild letter to Mr. Spenlow, beseeching
him not to visit upon her the consequences of my awful destiny.
I implored him to spare her gentle : nature — not to crush a
fragile flower — and addressed him generally, to the best of my
remembrance, as if, instead of being her father, he had been an
Ogre, or the Dragon of Wantley. This letter I sealed and laid
upon his desk before he returned ; and when he came in, I saw
him, through the half-opened door of his room, take it up and
read it.

He said nothing about it all the morning; but before he
went away in the afternoon he called me in, and told me that I
need not make myself at all uneasy about his daughter's
happiness. He had assured her, he said, that it was all

David Copperfield 519

nonsense; and he had nothing more to say to her. He
believed he was an indulgent faiher (as indeed he was), and I
might spare myself any solicitude on her account.

" You may make it necessary, if you are foolish or obstinate,
Mr. Copperfield," he observed, " for me to send my daughter
abroad again, for a term ; but I have a better opinion of you. I
hope you will be wiser than that, in a few days. As to Miss
Murdstone," for I had alluded to her in the letter, " I respect
that lady's vigilance, and feel obliged to her ; but she has strict
charge to avoid the subject. All I desire, Mr. Copperfield, is,
that it should be forgotten. All you have got to do, Mr.
Copperfield, is to forget it."

All ! In the note I wrote to Miss Mills, I bitterly quoted
this sentiment. All I had to do, I said, with gloomy sarcasm,
was to forget Dora. That was all, and what was that? I
entreated Miss Mills to see me, that evening. If it could not
be done with Mr. Mills's sanction and concurrence, I besought
a clandestine interview in the back kitchen where the Mangle
was. I informed her that my reason was tottering on its
throne, and only she, Miss Mills, could prevent its being
deposed. I signed myself, hers distractedly; and I couldn't
help feeling, while I read this composition over, before sending
it by a porter, that it was something in the style of Mr. Micawber.

However, I sent it. At night I repaired to Miss Mills's
street, and walked up and down, until I was stealthily fetched
in by Miss Mills's maid, and taken the area way to the back
kitchen. I have since seen reason to believe that there was
nothing on earth to prevent my going in at the front door, and
being shown up into the drawing-room, except Miss Mills's love
of the romantic and mysterious.

In the back kitchen I raved as became me. I went there, I
suppose, to make a fool of myself, and I am quite sure I did it.
Miss Mills had received a hasty note from Dora, telling her
that all was discovered, and saying, "Oh pray come to me,
Julia, do, do ! " But Miss Mills, mistrusting the acceptability
of her presence to the higher powers, had not yet gone ; and
we were all benighted in the Desert of Sahara.

Miss Mills had a wonderful flow of words, and liked to pour
them out. I could not help feeling, though she mingled her
tears with mine, that she had a dreadful luxury in our afflic-
tions. She petted them, as I may say, and made the most
of them. A deep gulf, she observed, had opened between
Dora and me, and Love could only span it with its rainbow.
Love must suffer in this stem world; it ever had been so, it

520 David Copperfield

ever would be so. No matter, Miss Mills remarked. Hearts
confined by cobwebs would burst at last, and then Love was
avenged.

This was small consolation, but Miss Mills wouldn't encour-
age fallacious hopes. She made me much more wretched than
I was before, and I felt (and told her with the deepest grati-
tude) that she was indeed a friend. We resolved that she should
go to Dora the first thing in the morning, and find some means
of assuring her, either by looks or words, of my devotion and
misery. We parted, overwhelmed with grief ; and I think Miss
Mills enjoyed herself completely.

I confided all to my aunt when I got home ; and in spite of
all she could say to me, went to bed despairing. I got up
despairing, and went out despairing. It was Saturday morning,
and I went straight to the Commons.

I was surprised, when I came within sight of our office-door,
to see the ticket-porters standing outside talking together, and
some half-dozen stragglers gazing at the windows which were
shut up, I quickened my pace, and, passing among them,
wondering at their looks, went hurriedly in.

The clerks were there, but nobody was doing anything. Old
Tiffey, for the first time in his life I should think, was sitting on
somebody else's stool, and had not hung up his hat.

"This is a dreadful calamity, Mr. Copperfield," said he, as I
entered.

" What is ? " I exclaimed. ** What's the matter ? "

" Don't you know ? " cried Tiffey, and all the rest of them,
coming round me.

" No ! " said I, looking from face to face.

" Mr. Spenlow," said Tiffey.

" What about him ? "

**Dead!"

I thought it was the office reeling, and not I, as one of the
clerks caught hold of me. They sat me down in a chair,
untied my neckcloth, and brought me some water. I have no
idea whether this took any time.

"Dead?" said I.

" He dined in town yesterday, and drove down in the phaeton
by himself," said Tiffey, " having sent his own groom home by
the coach, as he sometimes did, you know "

"Well?"

" The phaeton went home without him. The horses stopped
at the stable gate. The man went out with a lantern. Nobody
in the carriage."

David Copperfield 521

" Had they run away ? "

" They were not hot," said Tiffey, putting on his glasses ; " no
hotter, I understand, than they would have been, going down
at the usual pace. The reins were broken, but they had been
dragging on the ground. The house was roused up directly,
and three of them went out along the road. They found him
a mile off."

" More than a mile off, Mr. Tiffey," interposed a junior.

"Was it? I believe you are right," said Tiffey,— '' ptorg
than a mile off — not far from the church — lying partly on the
road-side, and partly on the path, upon his face. Whether
he fell out in a fit, or got out, feeling ill before the fit came on
— or even whether he was quite dead then, though there is no
doubt he was quite insensible — no one appears to know. If
he breathed, certainly he never spoke. Medical assistance was
got as soon as possible, but it was quite useless."

I cannot describe the 'state of mind into which I was thrown
by this intelligence. The shock of such an event happening so
suddenly, and happening to one with whom I had been in any
respect at variance — the appalling vacancy in the room he had
occupied so lately, where his chair and table seemed to wait for
him, and his handwriting of yesterday was like a ghost — the
indefinable impossibility of separating him from the place, and
feeling, when the door opened, as if he might come in — the
lazy hush and rest there was in the office, and the insatiable
relish with which our people talked about it, and other people
came in and out all day, and gorged themselves with the sub-
ject— this is easily intelligible to any one. What I cannot
describe is, how, in the innermost recesses of my own heart, I
had a lurking jealousy even of Death. How I felt as if its might
would push me from my ground in Dora's thoughts. How I
was, in a grudging way I have no words for, envious of her
grief. How it made me restless to think of her weeping to
others, or being consoled by others. How I had a grasping,
avaricious wish to shut out everybody from her but myself, and
to be all in all to her, at that imseasonable time of all times.

In the trouble of this state of mind — not exclusively my own,
1 hope, but known to others — I went down to Norwood that
night ; and finding from one of the servants, when I made my
inquiries at the door, that Miss Mills was there, got my aunt to
direct a letter to her, which I wrote. I deplored the untimely
death of Mr. Spenlow most sincerely, and shed tears in doing so.
I entreated her to tell Dora, if Dora were in a state to hear it,
that he had spoken to me with the utmost kindness and

522 David Copperfield

consideration ; and had coupled nothing but tenderness, not a
single or reproachful word, with her name. I know I did this
selfishly, to have my name brought before her ; but I tried to
believe it was an act of justice to his memory. Perhaps I did
believe it.

My aunt received a few lines next day in reply ; addressed,
outside, to her ; within, to me. Dora was overcome by grief ;
and when her friend had asked her should she send her love to
me, had only cried, as she was always crying, " Oh, dear papa !
oh, poor papa ! " But she had not said No, and that I made
the most of.

Mr. Jorkins, who had been at Norwood since the occurrence,
came to the office a few days afterwards. He and Tiffey were
closeted together for some few moments, and then Tiffey looked
out at the door and beckoned me in.

" Oh ! " said Mr. Jorkins. " Mr. Tiffey and myself, Mr.
Copperfield, are about to examine the desks, the drawers, and
other such repositories of the deceased, with the view of sealing
up his private papers, and searching for a Will. There is no
trace of any, elsewhere. It may be as well for you to assist us,
if you please."

I had been in agony to obtain some knowledge of the cir-
cumstances in which my Dora would be placed — as, in whose
guardianship, and so forth — and this was something towards
it. We began the search at once ; Mr. Jorkins unlocking the
drawers and desks, and we all taking out the papers. The
ofifice-papers we placed on one side, and the private papers
(which were not numerous) on the other. We were very grave ;
and when we came to a stray seal, or pencil-case, or ring, or
any little article of that kind which we associated personally
with him, we spoke very low.

V^'^e had sealed up several packets ; and were still going on
dustily and quietly, when Mr. Jorkins said to us, applying
exactly the same words to his late partner as his late partner
had applied to him :

" Mr. Spenlow was very difificult to move from the beaten
track. You know what he was ! I am disposed to think he
had made no will."

" Oh, I know he had ! " said I.

They both stopped and looked at me.

" On the very day when I last saw him," said I, "he told me
that he had, and that his affairs were long since settled."

Mr. Jorkins and old Tiffey shook their heads with one
accord.

David Copperfield 523

" That looks unpromising," said Tiffey.

" Very unpromising," said Mr. Jorkins.

*' Surely you don't doubt — " I began.

" My good Mr. Copperfield ! " said Tiffey, laying his hand
upon my arm, and shutting up both his eyes as he shook his
liead : " if you had been in the Commons as long as I have,
you would know that there is no subject on which men are so
inconsistent, and so little to be trusted."

" Why, bless my soul, he made that very remark ! " I replied
persistently.

"I should call that almost final," observed Tiffey. "My
opinion is — no will."

It appeared a wonderful thing to me, but it turned out that
there was no will. He had never so much as thought of
making one, so far as his papers afforded any evidence ; for
there was no kind of hint, sketch, or memorandum, of any
testamentary intention whatever. What was scarcely less
astonishing to me was, that his affairs were in a most disordered
state. It was extremely difficult, I heard, to make out what he
owed, or what he had paid, or of what he died possessed. It
was considered likely that for years he could have had no clear
opinion on these subjects himself. By little and little it came
out, that, in the competition on all points of appearance and
gentility then running high in the Commons, he had spent
more than his professional income, which was not a very large
one, and had reduced his private means, if they ever had been
great (which was exceedingly doubtful), to a very low ebb
indeed. There was a sale of the furniture and lease, at
Norwood ; and Tiffey told me, little thinking how interested I
was in the story, that, paying all the just debts of the deceased,
and deducting his share of outstanding bad and doubtful debts
due to the firm, he wouldn't give a thousand pounds for all the
assets remaining.

This was at the expiration of about six weeks. I had
suffered tortures all the time, and thought I really must have
laid violent hands upon myself, when Miss Mills still reported
to me that my broken-hearted little Dora would say nothing,
when I was mentioned, but " Oh, poor papa ! Oh, dear papa !"
Also, that she had no other relations than two aunts, maiden
sisters of Mr. Spenlow, who lived at Putney, and who had not
held any other than chance communication with their brother
for many years. Not that they had ever quarrelled (Miss Mills
1 formed me) ; but that having been, on the occasion of Dora's
:iiristening, invited to tea, when they considered themselves

524 David Copperfield

privileged to be invited to dinner, they had expressed their
opinion in writing, that it was " better for the happiness of all
parties" that they should stay away. Since which they had
gone their road, and their brother had gone his.

These two ladies now emerged from their retirement, and
proposed to take Dora to live at Putney. Dora, clinging to
them both, and weeping, exclaimed, " O yes, aunts ! Please
take Julia Mills and me and Jip to Putney ! " So they went,
very soon after the funeral.

How I found time to haunt Putney, I am sure I don't
know; but I contrived, by some means or other, to prowl
about the neighbourhood pretty often. Miss Mills, for the
more exact discharge of the duties of friendship, kept a journal;
and she used to meet me sometimes, on the Common, and read
it, or (if she had not time to do that) lend it to me. How I
treasured up the entries, of which I subjoin a sample ! —

" Monday. My sweet D. still much depressed. Headache.
Called attention to J. as being beautifully sleek. D. fondled J.
Associations thus awakened, opened floodgates of sorrow.
Rush of grief admitted. (Are tears the dewdrops of the
heart? J. M.)

"Tuesday. D. weak and nervous. Beautiful in pallor.
(Do we not remark this in moon likewise? J. M.) D. J. M.
and J. took airing in carriage. J. looking out of window, and
barking violently at dustman, occasioned smile to overspread
features of D. (Of such slight links is chain of life composed !
J. M.)

" Wednesday. D. comparatively cheerful. Sang to her, as
congenial melody. Evening Bells. Effect not soothing, but
reverse. D. inexpressibly affected. Found sobbing afterwards,
in own room. Quoted verses respecting self and young Gazelle.
Ineffectually. Also referred to Patience on Monument. (Qy.
Why on monument ? J. M.)

"Thursday. D. certainly improved. Better night. Slight
tinge of damask revisiting cheek. Resolved to mention name
of D. C. Introduced same, cautiously, in course of airing.
D. immediately overcome. ' Oh, dear, dear Julia ! Oh, I have
been a naughty and undutiful child ! ' Soothed and caressed.
Drew ideal picture of D. C. on verge of tomb. D. again over-
come. ' Oh, what shall I do, what shall I do ? Oh, take me
somewhere ! ' Much alarmed. Fainting of D. and glass of
water from public-house. (Poetical affinity. Chequered sign
on door-post : chequered human life. Alas ! J. M.)

" Friday. Day of incident. Man appears in kitchen, with

David Copperfield 525

blue bag, 'for lady's boots left out to heel.' Cook replies,
'No such orders.' Man argues point. Cook withdraws to
inquire, leaving man alone with J. On Cook's return, man
still argues point, but ultimately goes. J. missing. D.
distracted. Information sent to police. Man to be identified
by broad nose, and legs like balustrades of bridge. Search
made in every direction. No J. D. weeping bitterly, and
inconsolable. Renewed reference to young Gazelle. Appro-
priate, but unavailing. Towards evening, strange boy calls.
Brought into parlour. Broad nose, but no balustrades. Says
he wants a pound, and knows a dog. Declines to explain
further, though much pressed. Pound being produced by D.
takes Cook to little house, where J. alone tied up to leg of table.
Joy of D. who dances round J. while he eats his supper.
Emboldened by this happy change, mention D. C. up-stairs.
D. weeps afresh, cries piteously, " Oh, don't, don't, don't ! It
is so wicked to think of anything but poor papa ! ' — embraces
J. and sobs herself to sleep. (Must not D. C. confine himself
to the broad pinions of Time? J. M.) "

Miss Mills and her journal were my sole consolation at this
period. To see her, who had seen Dora but a little while
before — to trace the initial letter of Dora's name through her
sympathetic pages — to be made more and more miserable by
her — were my only comforts. I felt as if I had been living in
a palace of cards, which had tumbled down, leaving only Miss
Mills and me among the ruins ; I felt as if some grim enchanter
had drawn a magic circle round the innocent goddess of my
heart, which nothing indeed but those same strong pinions,
capable of carrying so many people over so much, would enable
me to enter !

CHAPTER XXXIX

WICKFIELD AND HEEP

Mv aunt, beginning, I imagine, to be made seriously uncom-
fortable by my prolonged dejection, made a pretence of being
anxious that I should go to Dover to see that all was working
well at the cottage, which was let ; and to conclude an agree-
ment, with the same tenant, for a longer term of occupation.
Janet was drafted into the service of Mrs. Strong, where I saw
her every day. She had been undecided, on leaving Dover,
whether or no to give the finishing touch to that renunciation

526 David Copperfield

of mankind in which she had been educated, by marrying a
pilot ; but she decided against that venture. Not so much for
the sake of principle, I believe, as because she happened not
to like him.

Although it required an effort to leave Miss Mills, I fell
rather willingly into my aunt's pretence, as a means of enabling
me to pass a few tranquil hours with Agnes. I consulted the
good Doctor relative to an absence of three days; and the
Doctor wishing me to take that relaxation, — he wished me to
take more ; but my energy could not bear that, — I made up my
mind to go.

As to the Commons, I had no great occasion to be particular
about my duties in that quarter. To say the truth, we were
getting in no very good odour among the tip-top proctors, and
were rapidly sliding down to but a doubtful position. The
business had been indifferent under Mr. Jorkins, before Mr.
Spenlow's time ; and although it had been quickened by the
infusion of new blood, and by the display which Mr. Spenlow"
made, still it was not established on a sufficiently strong basis
to bear, without being shaken, such a blow as the sudden loss
of its active manager. It fell off very much. Mr. Jorkins,
notwithstanding his reputation in the firm, was an easy-going,
incapable sort of man, whose reputation out of doors was not
calculated to back it up. I was turned over to him now, and
when I saw him take his snuff and let the business go, I
regretted my aunt's thousand pounds more than ever.

But this was not the worst of it. There were a number
of hangers-on and outsiders about the Commons, who, with-
out being proctors themselves, dabbled in common-form
business, and got it done by real proctors, who lent their
names in consideration of a share in the spoil; — and there
were a good many of these too. As our house now wanted
business on any terms, we joined this noble band ; and threw
out lures to the hangers-on and outsiders, to bring their
business to us. Marriage licences and small probates were
what we all looked for, and what paid us best; and the
competition for these ran very high indeed. Kidnappers and
inveiglers were planted in all the avenues of entrance to the
Commons, with instructions to do their utmost to cut off all
persons in mourning, and all gentlemen with anything bashful
in their appearance, and entice them to the offices in which
their respective employers were interested ; which instructions
were so well observed, that I myself, before I was known
by sight, was twice hustled into the premises of our principal

David Copperfield 527

opponent. The conflicting interests of these touting gentle-
men being of a nature to irritate their feelings, personal
collisions took place ; and the Commons was even scanda-
lised by our principal inveigler (who had formerly been in
the wine trade, and afterwards in the sworn brokery line)
walking about for some days with a black eye. Any one
of these scouts used to think nothing of politely assisting
an old lady in black out of a vehicle, killing any proctor l^
whom she inquired for, representing his employer as the
lawful successor and representative of that proctor, and
bearing the old lady off (sometimes greatly affected) to his
employer's office. Many captives were brought to me in
this way. As to marriage licences, the competition rose to
such a pitch, that a shy gentleman in want of one, had
nothing to do but submit himself to the first inveigler, or
be fought for, and become the prey of the strongest. One
of our clerks, who was an outsider, used, in the height of
this contest, to sit with his hat on, that he might be ready
to rush out and swear before a surrogate any victim who
was brought in. The system of inveigling continues, I
believe, to this day. The last time I was in the Commons,
a civil able-bodied person in a white apron pounced out upon
me from a doorway, and whispering the word "Marriage-
licence" in my ear, was with great difficulty prevented from
taking me up in his arms and lifting me into a proctor's.

From this digression, let me proceed to Dover.

I found everything in a satisfactory state at the cottage;
and was enabled to gratify my aunt exceedingly by reporting
that the tenant inherited her feud; and waged incessant war
against donkeys. Having settled the little business I had
to transact there, and slept there one night, I walked on to
Canterbury early in the morning. It was now winter again;
and the fresh, cold windy day, and the sweeping downland,
brightened up my hopes a little.

Coming into Canterbury, I loitered through the old streets
with a sober pleasure that calmed my spirits, and eased my
heart. There were the old signs, the old names over the
shops, the old people serving in them. It appeared so long,
since I had been a schoolboy there, that I wondered the place
was so little changed, until I reflected how little I was changed
myself. Strange to say, that quiet influence which was in-
separable in my mind from Agnes, seemed to pervade even
the city where she dwelt. The venerable cathedral towers, and
the old jackdaws and rooks whose airy voices made them more

528 David Copperfield

retired than perfect silence would have done; the battered
gateways, once stuck full with statues, long thrown down, and
crumbled away, like the reverential pilgrims who had gazed
upon them; the still nooks, where the ivied growth of cen-
turies crept over gabled ends and ruined walls; the ancient
houses, the pastoral landscape of field, orchard, and garden;
everywhere — on everything — I felt the same serener air, the
same calm, thoughtful, softening spirit.

Arrived at Mr. Wickfield's house, I found, in the little
lower room on the ground floor, where Uriah Heep had been
of old accustomed to sit, Mr. Micawber plying his pen with
great assiduity. He was dressed in a legal-looking suit of
black, and loomed, burly and large, in that small office.

Mr. Micawber was extremely glad to see me, but a little
confused too. He would have conducted me immediately
into the presence of Uriah, but I declined.

" I know the house of old, you recollect," said I, " and will find
my way up-stairs. How do you like the law, Mr. Micawber ? "

" My dear Copperfield," he replied. " To a man possessed
of the higher imaginative powers, the objection to legal studies
is the amount of detail which they involve. Even in our
professional correspondence," says Mr. Micawber, glancing
at some letters he was writing, "the mind is not at liberty
to soar to any exalted form of expression. Still, it is a great
pursuit. A great pursuit ! "

He then told me that he had become the tenant of Uriah
Heep's old house ; and that Mrs. Micawber would be delighted
to receive me, once more, under her own roof.

"It is humble," said Mr. Micawber, "to quote a favourite
expression of my friend Heep ; but it may prove the stepping-
stone to more ambitious domiciliary accommodation."

I asked him whether he had reason, so far, to be satisfied
with his friend Heep's treatment of him? He got up to
ascertain if the door were close shut, before he replied, in
a lower voice :

"My dear Copperfield, a man who labours under the
pressure of pecuniary embarrassments, is, with the generality
of people, at a disadvantage. That disadvantage is not
diminished, when that pressure necessitates the drawing of
stipendiary emoluments, before those emoluments are strictly
due and payable. All I can say is, that my friend Heep has
responded to appeals to which I need not more particularly
refer, in a manner calculated to redound equally to the honour
of his head, and of his heart."

David Copperfield 529

" I should not have supposed him to be very free with his
money either," I observed.

"Pardon me!" said Mr. Micawber, with an air of constraint,
" I speak of ray friend Heep as I have experience."

" I am glad your experience is so favourable," I returned.

"You are very obliging, my dear Copperfield," said Mr.
Micawber; and hummed a tune.

" Do you see much of Mr. Wickfield ? " I asked, to change
the subject.

" Not much," said Mr. Micawber, slightingly. " Mr. Wick-
field is, I dare say, a man of very excellent intentions; but
he is — in short, he is obsolete."

" I am afraid his partner seeks to make him so," said I.

" My dear Copperfield ! " returned Mr. Micawber, after some
uneasy evolutions on his stool, " allow me to offer a remark !
I am here in a capacity of confidence. I am here in a position
of trust. The discussion of some topics, even with Mrs.
Micawber herself (so long the partner of my various vicissi-
tudes, and a woman of a remarkable lucidity of intellect),
is, I am led to consider, incompatible with the functions now
devolving on me. I would therefore take the liberty of
suggesting that in our friendly intercourse — which I trust
will never be disturbed ! — we draw a line. On one side of
this line," said Mr. Micawber, representing it on the desk
with the oflSce ruler, "is the whole range of the human
intellect, with a trifling exception ; on the other, is that
exception ; that is to say, the affairs of Messrs. Wickfield
and Heep, with all belonging and appertaining thereunto.
I trust I give no offence to the companion of my youth, in
submitting this proposition to his cooler judgment?"

Though I saw an uneasy change in Mr. Micawber, which
sat tightly on him, as if his new duties were a misfit, I felt
I had no right to be offended. My telling him so, appeared
to relieve him ; and he shook hands with me.

"I am charmed, Copperfield," said Mr. Micawber, "let
me assure you, with Miss Wickfield. She is a very superior
young lady, of very remarkable attractions, graces, and virtues.
Upon my honour," said Mr. Micawber, indefinitely kissing his
hand and bowing with his genteelest air, " I do Homage to
Miss Wickfield ! Hem ! "

" I am glad of that, at least," said I.

" If you had not assured us, my dear Copperfield, on the
occasion of that agreeable afternoon we had the happiness
of passing with you, that D. was your favourite letter," said

530 David Copperfield

Mr. Micawber, " I should unquestionably have supposed that
A. had been so."

We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over
us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been
said and done before, in a remote time — of our having been
surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and
circumstances — of our knowing perfectly what will be said
next, as if we suddenly remembered it ! I never had this
mysterious impression more strongly in my life, than before
he uttered those words.

I took my leave of Mr. Micawber, for the time, charging
him with my best remembrances to all at home. As I left
him, resuming his stool and his pen, and rolling his head in
his stock, to get it into easier writing order, I clearly perceived
that there was something interposed between him and me,
since he had come into his new functions, which prevented
our getting at each other as we used to do, and quite altered
the character of our intercourse.

There was no one in the quaint old drawing-room, though
it presented tokens of Mrs. Heep's whereabout. I looked
into the room still belonging to Agnes, and saw her sitting
by the fire, at a pretty old-fashioned desk she had, writing.

My darkening the light made her look up. What a pleasure
to be the cause of that bright change in her attentive face, and
the object of that sweet regard and welcome !

" Ah, Agnes ! " said I, when we were sitting together, side
by side ; " I have missed you so much, lately ! "

" Indeed ? " she replied. " Again ! And so soon ? "

I shook my head.

"I don't know how it is, Agnes; I seem to want some
faculty of mind that I ought to have. You were so much in
the habit of thinking for me, in the happy old days here, and
I came so naturally to you for counsel and support, that I
really think I have missed acquiring it ! "

" And what is it ? " said Agnes, cheerfully.

" I don't know what to call it," I replied. " I think I am
earnest and persevering ? "

" I am sure of it," said Agnes.

" And patient, Agnes ? " I inquired, with a little hesitation.

"Yes," returned Agnes, laughing. "Pretty well."

"And yet," said I, "I get so miserable and worried, and
am so unsteady and irresolute in my power of assuring myself,
that I know I must want — shall I call it — reliance, of some
kind?"

David Gopperfield 531

** Call it so, if you will," said Agnes.

** Well ! " I returned. " See here ! You come to London,
I rely on you, and I have an object and a course at once. I
am driven out of it, I come here, and in a moment I feel an
altered person. The circumstances that distressed me are
not changed, since I came into this room ; but an influence
comes over me in that short interval that alters me, oh, how
much for the better 1 What is it? What is your secret,
Agnes ? "

Her head was bent down, looking at the fire.

" It's the old story," said I. *' Don't laugh, when I say it
was always the same in little things as it is in greater ones.
My old troubles were nonsense, and now they are serious ; but
whenever I have gone away from my adopted sister "

Agnes looked up — with such a Heavenly face 1 — and gave
me her hand, which I kissed.

" Whenever I have not had you, Agnes, to advise and
approve in the beginning, I have seemed to go wild, and to
get into all sorts of difficulty. When I have come to you, at
last (as I have always done), I have come to peace and happi-
ness. I come home, now, like a tired traveller, and find such
a blessed sense of rest I "

I felt so deeply what I said, it afiected me so sincerely, that
my voice failed, and I covered my face with my hand, and
broke into tears. 1 write the truth. Whatever contradictions
and inconsistencies there were within me, as there are within
so many of us ; whatever might have been so different, and so
much better ; whatever I had done, in which I had perversely
wandered away from the voice of my own heart; I knew
nothing of. I only knew that I was fervently in earnest, when
I felt the rest and peace of having Agnes near me.

In her placid sisterly manner ; with her beaming eyes ; with
her tender voice ; and with that sweet composure, which had
long ago made the house that held her quite a sacred place to
me ; she soon won me from this weakness, and led me on to
tell all that had happened since our last meeting.

" And there is not another word to tell, Agnes," said I, when
I had made an end of my confidence. " Now, my reliance is
on you."

•' But it must not be on me, Trotwood," returned Agnes
with a pleasant smile. " It must be on some one else."

"On Dora?" said I.

" Assuredly."

"Why, 1 have not mentioned, Agnes," said I, a little

532 David Copperfield

embarrassed, " that Dora is rather difficult to — I would not, for
the world, say, to rely upon, because she is the soul of purity
and truth — but rather difficult to — I hardly know how to
express it, really, Agnes. She is a timid little thing, and
easily disturbed and frightened. Some time ago, before her
father's death, when I thought it right to mention to her — but
I'll tell you, if you will bear with me, how it was."

Accordingly, I told Agnes about my declaration of poverty,
about the cookery-book, the housekeeping accounts, and all
the rest of it.

"Oh, Trotwood!" she remonstrated, with a smile. "Just
your old headlong way ! You might have been in earnest in
striving to get on in the world, without being so very sudden
with a timid, loving, inexperienced girl. Poor Dora ! "

I never heard such sweet forbearing kindness expressed in a
voice, as she expressed in making this reply. It was as if I
had seen her admiringly and tenderly embracing Dora, and
tacitly reproving me, by her considerate protection, for my hot
haste in fluttering that little heart. It was as if I had seen
Dora, in all her fascinating artlessness, caressing Agnes, and
thanking her, and coaxingly appealing against me, and loving
me with all her childish innocence.

I felt so grateful to Agnes, and admired her so ! I saw those
two together, in a bright perspective, such well-associated
friends, each adorning the other so much !

"What ought I to do then, Agnes?" I inquired, after
looking at the fire a little while. "What would it be right
to do?"

" I think," said Agnes, " that the honourable course to take,
would be to write to those two ladies. Don't you think that
any secret course is an unworthy one ? "

" Yes. If you think so," said I.

"I am poorly qualified to judge of such matters," replied
Agnes, with a modest hesitation, " but I certainly feel — in short,
I feel that your being secret and clandestine, is not being like
yourself."

"Like myself, in the too high opinion you have of me,
Agnes, I am afraid," said I.

" Like yourself, in the candour of your nature," she returned \
"and therefore I would write to those two ladies. I would
relate, as plainly and as openly as possible, all that has taken
place ; and I would ask their permission to visit sometimes at
their house. Considering that you are young, and striving for
a place in life, I think it would be well to say that you would

David Copperfield 533

readily abide by any conditions they might impose upon you.
I would entreat them not to dismiss your request, without a
reference to Dora ; and to discuss it with her when they should
think the time suitable. I would not be too vehement," said
Agnes, gently, "or propose too much. I would trust to my
fidelity and perseverance — and to Dora."

" But if they were to frighten Dora again, Agnes, by speaking
to her," said I. "And if Dora were to cry, and say nothing
about me ! "

"Is that likely?" inquired Agnes, with the same sweet
consideration in her face.

" God bless her, she is as easily scared as a bird," said I.
" It might be ! Or if the two Miss Spenlows (elderly ladies of
that sort are odd characters sometimes) should not be likely
persons to address in that way ! "

"I don't think, Trotwood," returned Agnes, raising her
soft eyes to mine, " I would consider that. Perhaps it would
be better only to consider whether it is right to do this ; and,
if it is, to do it."

I had no longer any doubt on the subject With a lightened
heart, though with a profound sense of the weighty importance
of my task, I devoted the whole afternoon to the composition
of the draft of this letter; for which great purpose, Agnes
relinquished her desk to me. But first I went down-stairs to
see Mr. Wickfield and Uriah Heep.

I found Uriah in possession of a new, plaster-smelling office,
built out in the garden ; looking extraordinarily mean, in the
midst of a quantity of books and papers. He received me in
his usual fawning way, and pretended not to have heard of my
arrival from Mr. Micawber ; a pretence I took the liberty of
disbelieving. He accompanied me into Mr. Wickfield's room,
which was the shadow of its former self — having been divested
of a variety of conveniences, for the accommodation of the
new partner — and stood before the fire, warming his back, and
shaving his chin with his bony hand, while Mr. Wickfield and
I exchanged greetings.

" You stay with us, Trotwood, while you remain in Canter-
bury ? " said Mr. Wickfield, not without a glance at Uriah for
his approval.

" Is there room for me ? " said I.

" I am sure. Master Copperfield — I should say Mister, but
the other comes so natural," said Uriah, — " I would turn out
of your old room with pleasure, if it would be agreeable."

"No, no," said Mr. Wickfield. "Why should you be

534 David Copperfield

inconvenienced? There's another room. There's another
room."

"Oh, but you knew," returned Uriah, with a grin, "I should
really be delighted ! '

To cut the matter short, I said I would have the other room
or none at all ; so it was settled that I should have the other
room ; and, taking my leave of the firm until dinner, I went
up-stairs again.

I had hoped to have no other companion than Agnes. But
Mrs. Heep had asked permission to bring herself and her knit-
ting near the fire, in that room ; on pretence of its having an
aspect more favourable for her rheumatics, as the wind then
was, than the drawing-room or dining-parlour. Though I could
almost have consigned her to the mercies of the wind on the
topmost pinnacle of the Cathedral, without remorse, I made a
virtue of necessity, and gave her a friendly salutation.

" I'm umbly thankful to you, sir," said Mrs. Heep, in acknow-
ledgment of my inquiries concerning her health, " but I'm only
pretty well. I haven't much to boast of. If I could see my
Uriah well settled in life, I couldn't expect much more, I think.
How do you think my Ury looking, sir ? "

I thought him looking as villanous as ever, and I replied that
I saw no change in him.

" Oh, don't you think he's changed ? " said Mrs.. Heep.
"There I must umbly beg leave to differ from you. Don't
you see a thinness in him ? "

" Not more than usual," I replied.

^' Don't yon though!" said Mrs. Heep. "But you don't
take notice of him with a mother's eye ! "

His mother's eye was an evil eye to the rest of the world, I
thought as it met mine, howsoever affectionate to him ; and I
believe she and her son were devoted to one another. It
passed me, and went on to Agnes.

" Don't you see a wasting and a wearing in him, Miss
Wickfield ? " inquired Mrs. Heep.

" No," said Agnes, quietly pursuing the work on which she
was engaged. " You are too solicitous about him. He is very
well."

Mrs. Heep, with a prodigious sniff, resumed her knitting.

She never left off, or left us for a moment. I had arrived
early in the day, and we had still three or four hours before
dinner; but she sat there, plying her knitting-needles as
monotonously as an hour-glass might have poured out its
sands. She sat on one side of the fire; I sat at the desk in

David Copperfield 535

front of it ; a little beyond me, on the other side, sat Agnes.
Whensoever, slowly pondering over my letter, I lifted up my
eyes, and meeting the thoughtful face of Agnes, saw it clear,
and beam encouragement upon me, with its own angelic ex-
pression, I was conscious presently of the evil eye passing me,
and going on to her, and coming back to me again, and drop-
ping furtively upon the knitting. What the knitting was, I
don't know, not being learned in that art ; but it looked like a
net ; and as she worked away with those Chinese chopsticks
of knitting-needles, she showed in the firelight like an ill-
looking enchantress, baulked as yet by the radiant goodness
opposite, but getting ready for a cast of her net by-and-bye.

At dinner she maintained her watch, with the same unwink-
ing eyes. After dinner, her son took his turn ; and when Mr.
Wickfield, himself, and I were left alone together, leered at
me, and writhed until I could hardly bear it. In the drawing-
room, there was the mother knitting and watching again All
the time that Agnes sang and played, the mother sat at the
piano. Once she asked for a particular ballad, which she said
her Ury (who was yawning in a great chair) doted on ; and at
intervals she looked round at him, and reported to Agnes that
he was in raptures with the music. But she hardly ever spoke
— I question if she ever did — without making some mention of
him. It was evident to me that this was the duty assigned
to her.

This lasted until bedtime. To have seen the mother and
son, like two great bats hanging over the whole house, and
darkening it with their ugly forms, made me so uncomfortable,
that I would rather have remained down-stairs, knitting and all,
than gone to bed. I hardly got any sleep. Next day the
knitting and watching began again, and lasted all day.

I had not an opportunity of speaking to Agnes, for ten minutes.
I could barely show her my letter. I proposed to her to walk
out with me ; but Mrs. Heep repeatedly complaining that she
was worse, Agnes charitably remained within, to bear her com-
pany. Towards the twilight I went out by myself, musing on
what I ought to do, and whether I was justified in withholding
from Agnes, any longer, what Uriah Heep had told me in
London : for that began to trouble me again, very much.

I had not walked out far enough to be quite clear of the
town, upon the Ramsgate road, where there was a good path,
when I was hailed, through the dust, by somebody behind me.
The shambling figure, and the scanty great coat, were not to
be mistaken. I stopped, and Uriah Heep came up.

536 David Copperfield

" Well ? " said I.

" How fast you walk ! " said he. " My legs are pretty long,*
but you've given 'em quite a job."

" Where are you going ? " said I.

" I am coming with you, Master Copperfield, if you'll allow
me the pleasure of a walk with an old acquaintance." Saying
this, with a jerk of his body, which might have been either
propitiatory or derisive, he fell into step beside me.

" Uriah ! " said I, as civilly as I could, after a silence.

" Master Copperfield ! " said Uriah.

" To tell you the truth (at which you will not be offended),
I came out to walk alone, because I have had so much
company."

He looked at me sideways, and said with his hardest grin —
"You mean mother."

" Why, yes, I do," said I.

"Ah! But you know we're so very umble," he returned.
"And having such a knowledge of our own umbleness, we
must really take care that we're not pushed to the wall by them
as isn't umble. All stratagems are fair in love, sir."

Raising his great hands until they touched his chin, he
j rubbed them softly, and softly chuckled; looking as like a
malevolent baboon, I thought, as anything human could
look.

" You see," he said, still hugging himself in that unpleasant
way, and shaking his head at me, " you're quite a dangerous
rival. Master Copperfield. You always was, you know."

" Do you set a watch upon Miss Wickfield, and make her
home no home, because of me ? " said I.

" Oh ! Master Copperfield ! Those are very arsh words," he
replied.

" Put my meaning into any words you like," said I. " You
know what it is, Uriah, as well as I do."

" Oh no ! You must put it into words," he said. " Oh,
really! I couldn't myself."

" Do you suppose," said I, constraining myself to be very
temperate and quiet with him, on account of Agnes, " that I
regard Miss Wickfield otherwise than as a very dear sister ? "

" Well, Master Copperfield," he replied, " you perceive I am
not bound to answer that question. You may not, you know.
But then, you see, you may ! "
J Anything to equal the low cunning of his visage, and of his
shadowless eyes without the ghost of an eyelash, I never saw.

" Come then ! " said I. "For the sake of Miss Wickfield "

David Copperfield 537

" My Agnes ! " he exclaimed, with a sickly, angular contortion
of himself. " Would you be so good as call her Agnes, Master
Copperfield!"

" For the sake of Agnes Wickfield — Heaven bless her ! "

" Thank you for that blessing. Master Copperfield ! " he
interposed.

" I will tell you what I should, under any other circumstances,
as soon have thought of telling to — Jack Ketch."

" To who, sir ? " said Uriah, stretching out his neck, and
shading his ear with his hand.

" To the hangman," I returned. " The most unlikely person
I could think of," — though his own face had suggested the allu-
sion quite as a natural sequence. " I am engaged to another
young lady. I hope that contents you."

" Upon your soul ? " said Uriah.

I was about indignantly to give my assertion the confirma-
tion he required, when he caught hold of my hand, and gave
it a squeeze.

" Oh, Master Copperfield," he said. " If you had only had
the condescension to return my confidence when I poured out
the fulness of my art, the night I put you so much out of
the way by sleeping before your sitting-room fire, I never
should have doubted you. As it is, I'm sure I'll take off
mother directly, and only too appy. I know you'll excuse the
precautions of affection, won't you? What a pity, Master
Copperfield, that you didn't condescend to return my confi-
dence ! I'm sure I gave you every opportunity. But you
never have condescended to me, as much as I could have
wished. I know you have never liked me, as I have liked
you ! "

All this time he was squeezing my hand with his damp fishy
fingers, while I made every effort I decently could to get it
away. But I was quite unsuccessful. He drew it under the
sleeve of his mulberry-coloured great coat, and I walked on,
almost upon compulsion, arm in arm with him.

" Shall we turn ? " said Uriah, by-and-bye wheeling me face
about towards the town, on which the early moon was now
shining, silvering the distant windows.

" Before we leave the subject, you ought to understand,"
said I, breaking a pretty long silence, " that I believe Agnes
Wickfield to be as far above you, and as far removed from all
your aspirations, as that moon herself ! "

" Peaceful ! Ain't she ! " said Uriah. "Very ! Now confess,
Master Copperfield, that you haven't liked me quite as I have

538 David Copperfield

liked you. All along you've thought me too umble now, 1
shouldn't wonder?"

" I am not fond of professions of humility," I returned, " or
professions of anything else."

"There now ! " said Uriah, looking flabby and lead-coloured
in the moonlight. " Didn't I know it 1 But how little you
think of the rightful umbleness of a person in my station,
Master Copperfield ! .Father and me was both brought up
at a foundation school for boys ; and mother, she was like-
wise brought up at a public, sort of charitable, establishment.
They taught us all a deal of umbleness — not much else that
I know of, from morning to night. We was to be umble to
this person, and umble to that ; and to pull off our caps here,
and to make bows there ; and always to know our place, and
abase ourselves before our betters. And we had such a lot
of betters ! Father got the monitor-medal by being umble.
So did I. Father got made a sexton by being umble. He
« had the character, among the gentlefolks, of being such a
well-behaved man, that they were determined to bring him
in. * Be umble, Uriah,' says father to me, ' and you'll get on.
It was what was always being dinned into you and me at
school; it's what goes down best. Be umble,' says father,
* and you'll do ! ' And really it ain't done bad ! "

It was the first time it had ever occurred to me, that this
detestable cant of false humility might have originated out
of the Heep family. I had seen the harvest, but had never
thought of the seed.

" When I was quite a young boy," said Uriah, " I got to
know what umbleness did, and I took to it. I ate umble pie
with an appetite. I stopped at the umble point of my learn-
ing, and says I, ' Hold hard ! ' When you offered to teach
me Latin, I knew better. * People like to be above you,' says

1 father, * keep yourself down.' I am very umble to the present
moment. Master Copperfield, but I've got a little power ! "
. ' And he said all this — I knew, as I saw his face in the

I moonlight — that I might understand he was resolved to re-

\ compense himself by using his power. I had never doubted

\ his meanness, his craft and malice ; but I fully comprehended

\ now, for the first time, what a base, unrelenting, and revengeful

\ spirit, must have been engendered by this early and this long

\ suppression.

His account of himself was so far attended with an agreeable
result, that it led to his withdrawing his hand in order that he
might have another hug of himself under the chin. Once apart

David Copperfield 539

from him, I was determined to keep apart ; and we walked
back, side by side, saying very little more by the way.

Whether his spirits were elevated by the communication I
had made to him, or by his having indulged in this retrospect,
I don't know ; but they were raised by some influence. He
talked more at dinner than was usual with him ; asked his
mother (off duty from the moment of our re-entering the house)
whether he was not growing too old for a bachelor ; and once
looked at Agnes so, that I would have given all I had, for leave
to knock him down.

When we three males were left alone after dinner, he got
into a more adventurous state. He had taken little or no
wine; and I presume it was the mere insolence of triumph
that was upon him, flushed perhaps by the temptation ray
presence furnished to its exhibition.

I had observed yesterday, that he tried to entice Mr.
Wickfield to drink; and interpreting the look which Agnes
had given me as she went out, had limived myself to one glass,
and then proposed that we should follow her. I would have
done so again to-day ; but Uriah was too quick for me.

"We seldom see our present visitor, sir," he said, address-
ing Mr. Wickfield, sitting, such a contrast to him, at the end
of the table, " and I should propose to give him welcome in
another glass or two of wine, if you have no objections. Mr.
Copperfield, your elth and appiness ! "

I was obliged to make a show of taking the hand he
stretched across to me ; and then, with very different emotions,
I took the hand of the broken gentleman, his partner.

"Come, fellow-partner," said Uriah, "if I may take the
liberty, — now, suppose you give us something or another
appropriate to Copperfield ! "

I pass over Mr. Wickfield's proposing my aunt, his pro-
posing Mr. Dick, his proposing Doctors' Commons, his pro-
posing Uriah, his drinking everything twice ; his consciousness
of his own weakness, the ineffectual effort that he made against
it ; the struggle between his shame in Uriah's deportment, and
his desire to conciliate him ; the manifest exultation with which
Uriah twisted and turned, and held him up before me. It
made me sick at heart to see, and my hand recoils from
writing it.

"Come, fellow-partner!" said Uriah, at last, "/'ll give you
another one, and I umbly ask for bumpers, seeing I intend to
make it the divinest of her sex.'*

Her father had his empty glass in his hand. I saw him set

540 David Copperfield

it down, look at the picture she was so Hke, put his hand to his
forehead, and shrink back in his elbow-chair.

" I'm an umble individual to give you her elth," proceeded
Uriah, "but I admire — adore her."

No physical pain that her father's grey head could have
borne, I think, could have been more terrible to me, than
the mental endurance I saw compressed now within both his
bands.

"Agnes," said Uriah, either not regarding him, or not
knowing what the nature of his action was, " Agnes Wickfield
is, I am safe to say, the divinest of her sex. May I speak out,
among friends ? To be her father is a proud distinction, but to
be her usband "

Spare me from ever again hearing such a cry, as that with
which her father rose up from the table !

"What's the matter?" said Uriah, turning of a deadly
colour. "You are not gone mad, after all, Mr. Wickfield,
I hope ? If I say I've an ambition to make your Agnes my
Agnes, I have as good a right to it as another man. I have a
better right to it than any other man ! "

I had my arms round Mr. Wickfield, imploring him by
everything that I could think of, oftenest of all by his love
for Agnes, to calm himself a little. He was mad for the
moment; tearing out his hair, beating his head, trying to
force me from him, and to force himself from me, not answer-
ing a word, not looking at or seeing any one ; blindly striving
for he knew not what, his face all staring and distorted — a
frightful spectacle.

I conjured him, incoherently, but in the most impassioned
manner, not to abandon himself to this wildness, but to hear
me. I besought him to think of Agnes, to connect me with
Agnes, to recollect how Agnes and I had grown up together,
how I honoured her and loved her, how she was his pride and
joy. I tried to bring her idea before him in any form ; I even
reproached him with not having firmness to spare her the
knowledge of such a scene as this. I may have effected
something, or his wildness may have spent itself; but by
degrees he struggled less, and began to look at me — strangely
at first, then with recognition in his eyes. At length he said,
" I know, Trotwood ! My darling child and you — I know !
But look at him ! "

He pointed co Uriah, pale and glowering in a corner,
evidently very much out in his calculations, and taken by
surprise.

David Copperfield 541

"Look at my torturer," he replied. "Before him I have
step by step abandoned name and reputation, peace and quiet,
house and home."

" I have kept your name and reputation for you, and your
peace and quiet, and your house and home too," said Uriah,
with a sulky, hurried, defeated air of compromise. "Don't
be foolish, Mr. Wickfield. If I have gone a little beyond
what you were prepared for, I can go back, I suppose?
There's no harm done."

" I looked for single motives in every one," said Mr.
Wickfield, "and I was satisfied I had bound him to me by
motives of interest. But see what he is — oh, see what
he is ! "

"You had better stop him, Copperfield, if you can," cried
Uriah, with his long forefinger pointing towards me. " He'll
say something presently — mind you ! — he'll be sorry to have
said afterwards, and you'll be sorry to have heard ! "

" I'll say anything ! " cried Mr. Wickfield, with a desperate
air. " Why should I not be in all the world's power if I am in
yours ? "

" Mind ! I tell you ! " said Uriah, continuing to warn me.
" If you don't stop his mouth, you're not his friend ! Why
shouldn't you be in all the world's power, Mr. Wickfield?
Because you have got a daughter. You and me know what
we know, don't we? Let sleeping dogs lie — who wants to
rouse 'em ? I don't. Can't you see I am as umble as I can
be ? I tell you, if I've gone too far, I'm sorry. What would
you have, sir ? "

"Oh, Trot wood, Trotwood!" exclaimed Mr. Wickfield,
wringing his hands. "What I have come down to be, since
I first saw you in this house ! I was on my downward way
then, but the dreary, dreary road I have traversed since !
Weak indulgence has ruined me. Indulgence in remem-
brance, and indulgence in forge tfulness. My natural grief
for my child's mother turned to disease; my natural love
for my child turned to disease. I have infected everything I
touched. I have brought misery on what I dearly love, I
know — Vou know ! I thought it possible that I could truly
love one creature in the world, and not love the rest ; I thought
it possible that I could truly mourn for one creature gone out
of the world, and not have some part in the grief of all who
mourned. Thus the lessons of my life have been perverted !
I have preyed on my own morbid coward heart, and it has
preyed on me. Sordid in my grief, sordid in my love, sordid

542 David Copperfield

in my miserable escape from the darker side of both, oh see
the ruin I am, and hate me, shun me ! "

He dropped into a chair, and weakly sobbed. The excite-
ment into which he had been roused was leaving him. Uriah
came out of his corner.

" I don't know all I have done, in my fatuity," said Mr.
Wickfield, putting out his hands, as if to deprecate my
condemnation. " He knows best," meaning Uriah Heep, " for
he has always been at my elbow, whispering me. You see the
millstone that he is about my neck. You find him in my
house, you find him in my business. You heard him, but a
little time ago. What need have I to say more ! "

" You haven't need to say so much, nor half so much, nor
anything at all," observed Uriah, half defiant, and half fawning.
" You wouldn't have took it up so, if it hadn't been for the
wine. You'll think better of it to-morrow, sir. If I have said
too much, or more than I meant, what of it ? I haven't stood
by it ! "

The door opened, and Agnes, gliding in, without a vestige
of colour in her face, put her arm round his neck, and steadily
said, " Papa, you are not well. Come with me ! " He laid his
head upon her shoulder, as if he were oppressed with heavy
shame, and went out with her. Her eyes met mine for but an
instant, yet I saw how much she knew of what had passed.

" I didn't expect he'd cut up so rough, Master Copperfield,"
said Uriah. " But it's nothing. I'll be friends with him
to-morrow. It's for his good. I'm umbly anxious for his
good."

I gave him no answer, and went up-stairs into the quiet
room where Agnes had so often sat beside me at my books.
Nobody came near me until late at night. I took up a book
and tried to read. I heard the clocks strike twelve, and was
still reading, without knowing what I read, when Agnes
touched me.

" You will be going early in the morning, Trot wood ! Let
us say good-bye, now ! "

She had been weeping, but her face then was so calm and
beautiful !

" Heaven bless you ! " she said, giving me her hand.

" Dearest Agnes ! " I returned, "I see you ask me not to
speak of to-night — but is there nothing to be done?"

" There is God to trust in ! " she replied.

" Can / do nothing — /, who come to you with my poor
sorrows ? "

David Copperfield 543

" And make mine so much lighter," she replied. " Dear
Trotwood, no ! "

" Dear Agnes," I said, " it is presumptuous for me, who am
so poor in all in which you are so rich — goodness, resolution,
all noble qualities — to doubt or direct you ; but you know how
much I love you, and how much I owe you. You will never
sacrifice yourself to a mistaken sense of duty, Agnes ? "

More agitated for a moment than I had ever seen her, she
took her hand from me, and moved a step back.

" Say you have no such thought, dear Agnes ! Much more
than sister ! Think of the priceless gift of such a heart as
yours, of such a love as yours ! "

Oh ! long, long afterwards, I saw that face rise up before me,
with its momentary look, not wondering, not accusing, not
regretting. Oh, long, long afterwards, I saw that look subside,
as it did now, into the lovely smile, with which she told me she
had no fear for herself — I need have none for her — and parted
from me by the name of Brother, and was gone !

It was dark in the morning when I got upon the coach at
the inn door. The day was just breaking when we were about
to start, and then, as I sat thinking of her, came struggling up
the coach side, through the mingled day and night, Uriah's head.

"Copperfield!" said he, in a croaking whisper, as he hung
by the iron on the roof, " I thought you'd be glad to hear,
before you went off, that there are no squares broke between
us. I've been into his room already, and we've made it all
smooth. Why, though I'm umble, I'm useful to him, you
know; and he understands his interest when he isn't in
liquor! What an agreeable man he is, after all. Master
Copperfield ! "

I obliged myself to say that I was glad he had made his
apology.

" Oh, to be sure ! " said Uriah. " When a person's umble,
you know, what's an apology ? So easy ! I say ! I suppose,"
with a jerk, " you have sometimes plucked a pear before it was
ripe, Master Copperfield ? "

" I suppose I have," I replied.

" /did that last night," said Uriah ; " but it'll ripen yet ! It
only wants attending to. I can wait ! "

Profuse in his farewells, he got down again as the coachman
got up. For anything I know, he was eating something to
keep the raw morning air out ; but he made motions with his
mouth as if the pear were ripe already, and he were smacking
his lips over it

544 David Copperfield

CHAPTER XL

THE WANDERER

We had a very serious conversation in Buckingham Street that
night, about the domestic occurrences I have detailed in the
last chapter. My aunt was deeply interested in them, and
walked up and down the room with her arms folded, for more
than two hours afterwards. Whenever she was particularly
discomposed, she always performed one of these pedestrian
feats ; and the amount of her discomposure might always be
estimated by the duration of her walk. On this occasion she
was so much disturbed in mind as to find it necessary to open
the bedroom door, and make a course for herself, comprising
the full extent of the bedrooms from wall to wall ; and while
Mr. Dick and I sat quietly by the fire, she kept passing in and
out, along this measured track, at an unchanging pace, with the
regularity of a clock-pendulum.

When my aunt and I were left to ourselves by Mr. Dick's
going out to bed, I sat down to write my letter to the two old
ladies. By that time she was tired of walking, and sat by the
fire with her dress tucked up as usual. But instead of sitting
in her usual manner, holding her glass upon her knee, she
suffered it to stand neglected on the chimney-piece; and,
resting her left elbow on her right arm, and her chin on her
left hand, looked thoughtfully at me. As often as I raised my
eyes from what I was about, I met hers. "I am in the
lovingest of tempers, my dear," she would assure me with a
nod, " but I am fidgeted and sorry ! "

I had been too busy to observe, until after she was gone to
bed, that she had left her night-mixture, as she always called
it, untasted on the chimney-piece. She came to her door,
with even more than her usual aifection of manner, wh©n I
knocked to acquaint her with this discovery ; but only said,
"I have not the heart to take it, Trot, to-night," and shook her
head, and went in again.

She read my letter to the two old ladies, in the morning,
and approved of it. I posted it, and had nothing to do
then, but wait, as patiently as I could, for the reply. I was
still in this state of expectation, and had been, for nearly a
week ; when I left the Doctor's one snowy night, to walk home.

It had been a bitter day, and a cutting north-east wind had
blown for some time. The wind had gone down with the light,

David Copperfield 545

and so the snow had come on. It was a heavy, settled fall, I
recollect, in great flakes ; and it lay thick. The noise of wheels
and tread of people were as hushed as if the streets had been
strewn that depth with feathers.

My shortest way home, — and I naturally took the shortest
way on such a night — was through Saint Martin's Lane.
Now, the church which gives its name to the lane, stood in
a less free situation at that time ; there being no open space
before it, and the lane winding down to the Strand. As I
passed the steps of the portico, I encountered, at the corner,
a woman's face. It looked in mine, passed across the narrow
lane, and disappeared. I knew it. I had seen it somewhere.
But I could not remember where. I had some association with
it, that struck upon my heart directly; but I was thinking
of anything else when it came upon me, and was confused.

On the steps of the church, there was the stooping figure
of a man, who had put down some burden on the smooth
snow, to adjust it ; my seeing the face, and my seeing him, were
simultaneous. I don't think I had stopped in my surprise;
but, in any case, as I went on, he rose, turned and came
down towards me. I stood face to face with Mr. Peggotty !

Then I remembered the woman. It was Martha, to whom
Emily had given the money that night in the kitchen.
Martha Endell — side by side with whom, he would not have
seen his dear niece, Ham had told me, for all the treasures
wrecked in the sea.

We shook hands heartily. At first, neither of us could
speak a word.

" Mas'r Davy ! " he said, griping me tight, " it do my art
good to see you, sir. Well met, well met ! "

" Well met, my dear old friend ! " said I.

" I had my thowts o' coming to make inquiration for you,
sir, to-night," he said, " but knowing as your aunt was living
along wi' you — fur I've been down yonder — Yarmouth way — I
was afeered it was too late. I should have come early in the
morning, sir, afore going away."

" Again ? " said I.

" Yes, sir," he replied, patiently shaking his head, " I'm away
to-morrow."

" Where were you going now ? " 1 asked.

" Well ! " he replied, shaking the snow out of his long hair,
" I was a-going to turn in somewheers."

In those days there was a side-entrance to the stable-yard
of the Golden Cross, the inn so memorable to me in

546 David Copperfield

connexion with his misfortune, nearly opposite to where we
stood. I pointed out the gateway, put my arm through his,
and we went across. Two or three public-rooms opened out
of the stable-yard ; and looking into one of them, and finding
it empty, and a good fire burning, I took him in there.

When I saw him in the light, I observed, not only that his
hair was long and ragged, but that his face was burnt dark by
the sun. He was greyer, the lines in his face and forehead
were deeper, and he had every appearance of having toiled
and wandered through all varieties of weather ; but he looked
very strong, and like a man upheld by stedfastness of purpose,
whom nothing could tire out. He shook the snow from his
hat and clothes, and brushed it away from bis face, while I
was inwardly making these remarks. As he sate down opposite
to me at a table, with his back to the door by which we had
entered, he put out his rough hand again, and grasped mine
warmly.

" I'll tell you, Mas'r Davy," he said, — "wheer-all I've been,
and what-all we've heerd. I've been fur, and we've heerd
little ; but I'll tell you ! "

I rang the bell for something hot to drink. He would have
nothing stronger than ale; and while it was being brought,
and being warmed at the fire, he sat thinking. There was a
fine massive gravity in his face, I did not venture to disturb.

" When she was a child," he said, lifting up his head soon
after we were left alone, " she used to talk to me a deal about
the sea, and about them coasts wheer the sea got to be dark
blue, and to lay a-shining and a-shining in the sun. I thowt,
odd times, as her father being drownded made her think on it
so much. I doen't know, you see, but maybe she believed —
or hoped — he had drifted out to them parts, wheer the flowers
is always a-blowing, and the country bright."

" It is likely to have been a childish fancy," I replied.

" When she was — lost," said Mr. Peggotty, " I know'd
in my mind, as he would take her to them countries. I
know'd in my mind, as he'd have told her wonders of 'em,
and how she was to be a lady theer, and how he got her
listen to him fust, along o' sech like. When we see his
mother, I know'd quite well as I was right. I went across-
channel to France, and landed theer, as if I'd fell down from
the sky."

I saw the door move, and the snow drift in. I saw it move
a little more, and a hand softly interpose to keep it open.

"I found out an English gen'leman as was in authority,"

David Copperfield 547

said Mr. Peggotty, " and told him I was a-going to seek my
niece. He got me them papers as I wanted fur to carry me
through — I doen't rightly know how they're called — and he
would have give me money, but that I was thankful to have no
need on. I thank him kind, for all he done, I'm sure ! ' I've
wrote afore you,' he says to me, ' and I shall speak to many as
will come that way, and many will know you, fur distant from
heer, when you're a-travelling alone.' I told him, best as I
was able, what my gratitoode was, and went away through
France."

" Alone, and on foot ? " said I.

"Mostly a-foot," he rejoined; "sometimes in carts along
with people going to market ; sometimes in empty coaches.
Many mile a day a-foot, and often with some poor soldier or
another, travelling to see his friends. I couldn't talk to him,"
said Mr. Peggotty, " nor he to me ; but we was company for
one another, too, along the dusty roads."

I should have known that by his friendly tone.

" When I come to any town," he pursued, " I found the inn,
and waited about the yard till some one turned up (some one
mostly did) as know'd English. Then I told how that I was
on my way to seek my niece, and they told me what manner of
gentlefolks was in the house, and I waited to see any as seemed
like her, going in or out. When it warn't Em'ly, I went on
agen. By little and little, when I come to a new village or
that, among the poor people, I found they know'd about me.
They would set me down at their cottage doors, and give me
what-not fur to eat and drink, and show me wheer to sleep ;
and many a woman, Mas'r Davy, as has had a daughter of about
Em'ly's age, I've found a-waiting fur me, at Our Saviour's Cross
outside the village, fur to do me sim'lar kindnesses. Some has
had daughters as was dead. And God only knows how good
them mothers was to me ! "

It was Martha at the door. I saw her haggard, listening face
distinctly. My dread was lest he should turn his head, and see
her too.

" They would often put their children — partic'lar their little
girls," said Mr. Peggotty, " upon my knee ; and many a time
you might have seen me sitting at their doors, when night was
coming on, a' most as if they'd been my Darling's children. Oh,
my Darling ! "

Overpowered by sudden grief, he sobbed aloud. I laid my
trembling hand upon the hand he put before his face. " Thankee,
sir," he said, " doen't take no notice."

548 David Copperfield

In a very little while he took his hand away and put it on his
breast, and went on with his story.

"They often walked with me," he said, "in the morning,
maybe a mile or two upon my road ; and when we parted,
and I said, * I'm very thankful to you ! God bless you ! '
they always seemed to understand, and answered pleasant.
At last I come to the sea. It warn't hard, you may suppose,
for a seafaring man like me to work his way over to Italy.
When I got theer, I wandered on as I had done afore. The
people was just as good to me, and I should have gone from
town to town, maybe the country through, but that I got
news of her being seen among them Swiss mountains yonder.
One as know'd his sarvant see 'em theer, all three, and told
me how they travelled, and wheer they was. I made fur
them mountains, Mas'r Davy, day and night. Ever so fur
as I went, ever so fur the mountains seemed to shift away
from me. But I come up with 'em, and I crossed 'em.
When I got nigh the place as I had been told of, I began to
think within my own self, * What shall I do when I see her ? ' "

The listening face, insensible to the inclement night, still
drooped at the door, and the hands begged me — prayed me —
not to cast it forth.

" I never doubted her," said Mr. Peggotty. " No ! Not
a bit ! On'y let her see my face — on'y let her heer my
voice — on'y let my stanning still afore her bring to her
thoughts the home she had fled away from, and the child
she had been — and if she had growed to be a royal lady,
she'd have fell down at my feet ! I know'd it well ! Many a
time in my sleep had I heerd her cry out, ' Uncle ! ' and
seen her fall like death afore me. Many a time in my sleep
had I raised her up, and whispered to her, * Em'ly, my dear, I
am come fur to bring forgiveness, and to take you home ! ' "

He stopped and shook his head, and went on with a sigh.

^^ He was nowt to me now. Em'ly was all. I bought a
country dress to put upon her; and I know'd that, once
found, she would walk beside me over them stony roads, go
wheer I would, and never, never, leave me more. To put
that dress upon her, and to cast off what she wore — to take
her on my arm again, and wander towards home — to stop
sometimes upon the road, and heal her bruised feet and her
worse-bruised heart — was all that I thowt of now. I doen't
believe I should have done so much as look at him. But,
Mas'r Davy, it warn't to be — not yet ! I was too late, and
they was gone. Wheer, I couldn't learn. Some said heer,

David Copperfield 549

some said theer. I travelled heer, and I travelled theer, but
I found no Em'ly, and I travelled home."

" How long ago ? " I asked.

" A matter o' fower days," said Mr. Peggotty. " I sighted
the old boat arter dark, and the light a-shining in the winder.
When I come nigh and looked in through the glass, I see the
faithful creetur Missis Gummidge sittin' by the fire, as we had
fixed upon, alone. I called out, 'Doen't be afeerd! It's
Dan'l ! ' and I went in. I never could have thowt the old
boat would have been so strange!"

From some pocket in his breast he took out, with a very
careful hand, a small paper bundle containing two or three
letters or little packets, which he laid upon the table.

"This fust one come," he said, selecting it from the rest,
" afore I had been gone a week. A fifty pound Bank note, in
a sheet of paper, directed to me, and put underneath the door
in the night. She tried to hide her writing, but she couldn't
hide it from Me ! "

He folded up the note again, with great patience and care,
in exactly the same form, and laid it on one side.

"This come to Missis Gummidge," he said, opening another,
"two or three months ago." After looking at it for some
moments, he gave it to me, and added in a low voice, " Be so
good as read it, sir."

I read as follows :

*' Oh what will you feel when you see this writing, and know it comes
from my wicked hand I But try, try — not for my sake, but for uncle's
goodness, try to let your heart soften to me, only for a little little time !
Try, pray do, to relent towards a miserable girl, and write down on a bit
of paper whether he is well, and what he said about me before you left off
ever naming me among yourselves — and whether, of a night, when it is
my old time of coming home, you ever see him look as if he thought of one
he used to love so dear. Oh, my heart is breaking when I think about it !
I am kneeling down to you, begging and praying you not to be as hard
with me as I deserve — as I well, well know I deserve — but to be so gentle
and so good, as to write down something of him, and to send it to me.
You need not call me Little, you need not call me by the name I have
disgraced ; but oh, listen to my agony, and have mercy on me so far as to
write me some word of uncle, never, never to be seen in this world by my
eyes again !

"Dear, if your heart is hard towards me — ^justly hard, I know — but,
Listen, if it is hard, dear, ask him I have wronged the most — him whose
wife I was to have been — before you quite decide against my poor poor
prayer ! If he should be so compassionate as to say that you might write
something for me to read — I think he would, oh, I think he would, if you
would only ask him, for he always was so brave and so forgiving — tell him
then (but not else), that when I hear the wind blowing at night, I feel as
if it was passing angrily firom seeing him and uncle, and was going up to

550 David Copperfield

God against me. Tell him that if I was to die to-morrow (and oh, if I
was fit, I would be so glad to die !) I would bless him and uncle with my
last words, and pray for his happy home with my last breath ! "

Some money was enclosed in this letter also. Five pounds.
It was untouched like the previous sum, and he refolded it in
the same way. Detailed instructions were added relative to
the address of a reply, which, although they betrayed the
intervention of several hands, and made it difficult to arrive
at any very probable conclusion in reference to her place of
concealment, made it at least not unlikely that she had written
from that spot where she was stated to have been seen.

" What answer was sent ? " I inquired of Mr. Peggotty.

" Missis Gummidge," he returned, " not being a good
scholar, sir, Ham kindly drawed it out, and she made a copy
on it. They told her I was gone to seek her, and what my
parting words was."

" Is that another letter in your hand ? " said I.

"It's money, sir," said Mr. Peggotty, unfolding it a little
way. "Ten pound, you see. And wrote inside, 'From a true
friend,' like the fust. But the fust was put underneath the
door, and this come by the post, day afore yesterday. I'm
a-going to seek her at the post- mark."

He showed it to me. It was a town on the Upper Rhine.
He had found out, at Yarmouth, some foreign dealers who
knew that country, and they had drawn him a rude map on
paper, which he could very well understand. He laid it
between us on the table; and, with his chin resting on one
hand, tracked his course upon it with the other.

I asked him how Ham was ? He shook his head.

" He works," he said, " as bold as a man can. His name's
as good, in all that part, as any man's is, anywheers in the
wureld. Any one's hand is ready to help him, you understand,
and his is ready to help them. He's never been heerd fur to
complain. But my sister's belief is ('twixt ourselves) as it has
cut him deep."

" Poor fellow, I can believe it ! "

"He ain't no care, Mas'r Davy," said Mr. Peggotty in a
solemn whisper — " keinder no care no-how for his life. When
a man's wanted for rough sarvice in rough weather, he's theer.
When theer' s hard duty to be done with danger in it, he steps
for'ard afore all his mates. And yet he's as gentle as any child.
Theer ain't a child in Yarmouth that doen't know him."

He gathered up the letters thoughtfully, smoothing them
with his hand ; put them into their little bundle ; and placed it

David Copperfield 551

tenderly in his breast again. The face was gone from the door.
I still saw the snow drifting in ; but nothing else was there.

" Well ! " he said, looking to his bag, " having seen you
to-night, Mas'r Davy (and that doos me good !), I shall away
betimes to-morrow morning. You have seen what I've got
beer ; " putting his hand on where the little j)acket lay ; " all
that troubles me is, to think that any harm might come to me,
afore that money was give back. If I was to die, and it was
lost, or stole, or elseways made away with, and it was never
know'd by him but what I'd took it, I believe the t'other wureld
wouldn't hold me ! I believe I must come back ! "

He rose, and I rose too; we grasped each other by the
hand again, before going out.

" I'd go ten thousand mile," he said, " I'd go till I dropped
dead, to lay that money down afore him. If I do that, and
find my Em'ly, I'm content. If I doen't find her, maybe
she'll come to hear, sometime, as her loving uncle only ended
his search for her when he ended his life ; and if I know her,
even that will turn her home at last ! "

As he went out into the rigorous night, I saw the lonely figure
flit away before us. I turned him hastily on some pretence,
and held him in conversation until it was gone.

He spoke of a traveller's house on the Dover Road, where
he knew he could find a clean, plain lodging for the night. I
went with him over Westminster Bridge, and parted from him
on the Surrey shore. Everything seemed, to my imagination,
to be hushed in reverence for him, as he resumed his solitary
journey through the snow.

I returned to the inn yard, and, impressed by my remem-
brance of the face, looked awfully around for it. It was not
there. The snow had covered our late footprints; my new
track was the only one to be seen ; and even that began to die
away (it snowed so fast) as I looked back over my shoulder.

CHAPTER XLI

dora's aunts

At last, an answer came from the two old ladies. They
presented their compliments to Mr. Copperfield, and inforined
him that they had given his letter their best consideration,
"with a view to the happiness of both parties" — which I
thought rather an alarming expression, not only because of the

552 David Copperfield

use they had made of it in relation to the family difference
before-mentioned, but because I had (and have all my life)
observed that conventional phrases are a sort of fireworks,
easily let off, and liable to take a great variety of shapes and
colours not at all suggested by their original form. The
Misses Spenlow added that they begged to forbear expressing,
"through the medium of correspondence," an opinion on the
subject of Mr. Copperfield's communication ; but that if Mr.
Copperfield would do them the favour to call, upon a certain day
(accompanied, if he thought proper, by a confidential friend),
they would be happy to hold some conversation on the subject.

To this favour, Mr. Copperfield immediately replied, with
his respectful compliments, that he would have the honour of
waiting on the Misses Spenlow, at the time appointed ; accom-
panied, in accordance with their kind permission, by his friend
Mr. Thomas Traddles of the Iimer Court. Having dispatched
which missive, Mr. Copperfield fell into a condition of strong
nervous agitation ; and so remained until the day arrived.

It was a great augmentation of my uneasiness to be bereaved,
at this eventful crisis, of the inestimable services of Miss Mills.
But Mr. Mills, who was always doing something or other to
annoy me — or I felt as if he were, which was the same thing —
had brought his conduct to a climax, by taking it into his head
that he would go to India. Why should he go to India, except
to harass me? To be sure he had nothing to do with any
other part of the world, and had a good deal to do with that
part; being entirely in the Indian trade, whatever that was
(I had floating dreams myself concerning golden shawls and
elephants' teeth) ; having been at Calcutta in his youth ; and
designing now to go out there again, in the capacity of resident
partner. But this was nothing to me. However, it was so
much to him that for India he was bound, and Julia with him;
and Julia went into the country to take leave of her relations ;
and the house was put into a perfect suit of bills, announcing
that it was to be let or sold, and that the furniture (Mangle
and all) was to be taken at a valuation. So, here was another
earthquake of which I became the sport, before I had
recovered from the shock of its predecessor!

I was in several minds how to dress myself on the impor-
tant day; being divided between my desire to appear to
advantage, and my apprehensions of putting on anything that
might impair my severely practical character in the eyes of
the Misses Spenlow. I endeavoured to hit a happy medium
between these two extremes; my aunt approved the result;

David Copperfield 553

and Mr. Dick threw one of his shoes after Traddles and me,
for luck, as we went down-stairs.

Excellent fellow as I knew Traddles to be, and warmly
attached to him as I was, I could not help wishing, on that
delicate occasion, that he had never contracted the habit of
brushing his hair so very upright. It gave him a surprised
look — not to say a hearth-broomy kind of expression — which,
my apprehensions whispered, might be fatal to us.

I took the liberty of mentioning it to Traddles, as we were
walking to Putney; and saying that if he would smooth
it down a little

" My dear Copperfield," said Traddles, lifting off his hat,
and rubbing his hair all kinds of ways, " nothing would give
me greater pleasure. But it won't."

"Won't be smoothed down?" said I.

" No," said Traddles. " Nothing will induce it. If I was
to carry a half-hundredweight upon it, all the way to Putney,
it would be up again the moment the weight was taken off.
You have no idea what obstinate hair mine is, Copperfield.
I am quite a fretful porcupine."

I was a little disappointed, I must confess, but thoroughly
charmed by his good-nature too. I told him how I esteemed
his good-nature ; and said that his hair must have taken all
the obstinacy out of his character, for he had none.

" Oh ! " returned Traddles, laughing, " I assure you, it's
quite an old story, my unfortunate hair. My uncle's wife
couldn't bear it. She said it exasperated her. It stood very
much in my way, too, when I first fell in love with Sophy.
Very much ! "

" Did she object to it ? "

''She didn't," rejoined Traddles; "but her eldest sister—
the one that's the Beauty — quite made game of it, I under-
stand. In fact, all the sisters laugh at it."

" Agreeable ! " said I.

"Yes," returned Traddles with perfect innocence, "it's a
joke for us. They pretend that Sophy has a lock of it in her
desk, and is obliged to shut it in a clasped book, to keep it
down. We laugh about it."

" By-the-bye, my dear Traddles," said I, " your experience
may suggest something to me. When you became engaged to
the young lady whom you have just mentioned, did you make
a regular proposal to her family ? Was there anything like —
what we are going through to-day, for instance ? " I added,
nervously.

554 David Copperfield

" Why," replied Traddles, on whose attentive face a thought-
ful shade had stolen, "it was rather a painful transaction,
Copperfield, in my case. You see, Sophy being of so much
use in the family, none of them could endure the thought of
her ever being married. Indeed, they had quite settled among
themselves that she never was to be married, and they called
her the old maid. Accordingly, when I mentioned it, with
the greatest precaution, to Mrs. Crewler "

" The mama ? " said I.

" The mama," said Traddles — " Reverend Horace Crewler
— when I mentioned it with every possible precaution to Mrs.
Crewler, the effect upon her was such that she gave a scream
and became insensible. I couldn't approach the subject
again, for months."

" You did at last ? " said I.

" Well, the Reverend Horace did," said Traddles. " He
is an excellent man, most exemplary in every way ; and he
pointed out to her that she ought, as a Christian, to reconcile
herself to the sacrifice (especially as it was so uncertain), and
to bear no uncharitable feeling towards me. As to myself,
Copperfield, I give you my word, I felt a perfect bird of prey
towards the family."

"The sisters took your part, I hope, Traddles ? "

"Why, I can't say they did," he returned. "When we had
comparatively reconciled Mrs. Crewler to it, we had to break
it to Sarah. You recollect my mentioning Sarah, as the one
that has something the matter with her spine ? "

" Perfectly ! "

" She clenched both her hands," said Traddles, looking at
me in dismay ; " shut her eyes ; turned lead-colour ; became
perfectly stiff; and took nothing for two days but toast-and-
water, administered with a tea-spoon."

"What a very unpleasant girl, Traddles !" I remarked.

" Oh, I beg your pardon, Copperfield ! " said Traddles.
"She is a very charming girl, but she has a great deal of
feeling. In fact, they all have. Sophy told me afterwards,
that the self-reproach she underwent while she was in attend-
ance upon Sarah, no words could describe. I know it must
have been severe, by my own feelings, Copperfield ; which
were like a criminal's. After Sarah was restored, we still had
to break it to the other eight ; and it produced various effects
upon them of a most pathetic nature. The two little ones,
whom Sophy educates, have only just left off de-testing me."

" At any rate, they are all reconciled to it now, I hope ? " said I.

David Copperfield 555

"Ye — yes, I should say they were, on the whole, resigned
to it," said Traddles, doubtfully. "The fact is, we avoid
mentioning the subject ; and my unsettled prospects and
indifferent circumstances are a great consolation to them.
There will be a deplorable scene, whenever we are married.
It will be much more like a funeral than a wedding. And
they'll all hate me for taking her away ! "

His honest face, as he looked at me with a serio-comic
shake of his head, impresses me more in the remembrance
than it did in the reality, for I was by this time in a state of such
excessive trepidation and wandering of mind, as to be quite
unable to fix my attention on anything. On our approaching
the house where the Misses Spenlow lived, I was at such a
discount in respect of my personal looks and presence of mind,
that Traddles proposed a gentle stimulant in the form of a
glass of ale. This having been administered at a neighbour-
ing public-house, he conducted me, with tottering steps, to the
Misses SpenloVs door.

I had a vague sensation of being, as it were, on view, when
the maid opened it ; and of wavering, somehow, across a hall
with a weather-glass in it, into a quiet little drawing-room on
the ground-floor, commanding a neat garden. Also of sitting
down here, on a sofa, and seeing Traddles's hair start up, now
his hat was removed, like one of those obtrusive little figures
made of springs, that fly out of fictitious snuff-boxes when the
lid is taken off. Also of hearing an old-fashioned clock tick-
ing away on the chimney-piece, and trying to make it keep
time to the jerking of my heart, — which it wouldn't. Also of
looking round the room for any sign of Dora, and seeing none.
Also of thinking that Jip once barked in the distance, and
was instantly choked by somebody. Ultimately I found my-
self backing Traddles into the fireplace, and bowing in great
confusion to two dry little elderly ladies, dressed in black, and
each looking wonderfully like a preparation in chip or tan of
the late Mr. Spenlow.

" Pray," said one of the two little ladies, " be seated."

When I had done tumbling over Traddles, and had sat upon
something which was not a cat — my first seat was — I so far
recovered my sight, as to perceive that Mr. Spenlow had
evidently been the youngest of the family ; that there was a
disparity of six or eight years between the two sisters ; and
that the younger appeared to be the manager of the conference^
inasmuch as she had my letter in her hand — so familiar as it
looked to me, and yet so odd ! — and was referring to it through

556 David Copperfield

an eye-glass. They were dressed alike, but this sister wore hei
dress with a more youthful air than the other; and perhaps
had a trifle more frill, or tucker, or brooch, or bracelet, or some
little thing of that kind, which made her look more lively.
They were both upright in their carriage, formal, precise, com-
posed, and quiet. The sister who had not my letter, had her
arms crossed on her breast, and resting on each other, like an
Idol.

" Mr. Copperfield, I believe," said the sister who had got my
letter, addressing herself to Traddles.

This was a frightful beginning. Traddles had to indicate
that I was Mr. Copperfield, and I had to lay claim to myself,
and they had to divest themselves of a preconceived opinion
that Traddles was Mr. Copperfield, and altogether we were in
a nice condition. To improve it, we all distinctly heard Jip
give two short barks, and receive another choke.

" Mr. Copperfield ! " said the sister with the letter.

I did something — bowed, I suppose — and was all attention,
when the other sister struck in.

"My sister Lavinia," said she, "being conversant with
matters of this nature, will state what we consider most
calculated to promote the happiness of both parties."

I discovered afterwards that Miss Lavinia was an authority
in afiairs of the heart, by reason of there having anciently
existed a certain Mr. Pidger, who played short whist, and was
supposed to have been enamoured of her. My private opinion
is, that this was entirely a gratuitous assumption, and that
Pidger was altogether innocent of any such sentiments — to
which he had never given any sort of expression that I could
ever hear of. Both Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa had a
superstition, however, that he would have declared his passion,
if he had not been cut short in his youth (at about sixty) by
over-drinking his constitution, and over-doing an attempt to
set it right again by swilling Bath water. They had a lurking
suspicion even, that he died of secret love ; though I must
say there was a picture of him in the house with a damask,
nose, which concealment did not appear to have ever preyed
upon.

" We will not," said Miss Lavinia, "enter on the past history
of this matter. Our poor brother Francis's death has cancelled
that."

"We had not," said Miss Clarissa, "been in the habit of
frequent association with our brother Francis ; but there was
no decided division or disunion between us. Francis took his

David Copperfield 557

road; we took ours. We considered it conducive to the
happiness of all parties that it should be so. And it was so."

Each of the sisters leaned a little forward to speak, shook
her head after speaking, and became upright again when silent.
Miss Clarissa never moved her arms. She sometimes played
tunes upon them with her fingers — minuets and marches, I
should think — but never moved them.

" Our niece's position, or supposed position, is much changed
by our brother Francis's death," said Miss Lavinia ; " and
therefore we consider our brother's opinions as regarded her
position as being changed too. We have no reason to doubt,
Mr. Copperfield, that you are a young gentleman possessed of
good qualities and honourable character ; or that you have an
affection — or are fully persuaded that you have an affection —
for our niece."

1 replied, as I usually did whenever I had a chance, that
nobody had ever loved anybody else as I loved Dora. Traddles
came to my assistance with a confirmatory murmur.

Miss Lavinia was going on to make some rejoinder, when Miss
Clarissa, who appeared to be incessantly beset by a desire to
refer to her brother Francis, struck in again :

" If Dora's mama," she said, " when she married our brother
Francis, had at once said that there was not room for the
family at the dinner-table, it would have been better for the
happiness of all parties."

" Sister Clarissa," said Miss Lavinia. "Perhaps we needn't
mind that now."

"Sister Lavinia," said Miss Clarissa, "it belongs to the
subject. With your branch of the subject, on which alone
you are competent to speak, I should not think of interfering.
On this branch of the subject I have a voice and an opinion.
It would have been better for the happiness of all parties, if
Dora's mama, when she married our brother Francis, had
mentioned plainly what her intentions were. We should then
have known what we had to expect. We should have said
' pray do not invite us, at any time ; ' and all possibility of
misunderstanding would have been avoided."

When Miss Clarissa had shaken her head. Miss Lavinia
resumed: again referring to my letter through her eye-glass.
They both had little bright round twinkling eyes, by the way,
which were like birds' eyes. They were not unhke birds,
altogether ; having a sharp, brisk, sudden manner, and a little
short, spruce way of adjusting themselves, like canaries.

Miss Lavinia, as I have said, resumed :

558 David Copperfield

"You ask permission of my sister Clarissa and myself,
Mr. Copperfield, to visit here, as the accepted suitor of our
niece."

" If our brother Francis," said Miss Clarissa, breaking out
again, if I may call anything so calm a breaking out, " wished
to surround himself with an atmosphere of Doctors' Com-
mons, and of Doctors' Commons only, what right or desire
had we to object? None, I am sure. We have ever been far
from wishing to obtrude ourselves on any one. But why not
say so? Let our brother Francis and his wife have their
society. Let my sister Lavinia and myself have our society.
We can find it for ourselves, I hope."

As this appeared to be addressed to Traddles and me,
both Traddles and I made some sort of reply. Traddles was
inaudible. I think I observed, myself, that it was highly
creditable to all concerned. I don't in the least know what I
meant.

"Sister Lavinia," said Miss Clarissa, having now relieved her
mind, "you can go on, my dear."

Miss Lavinia proceeded :

" Mr. Copperfield, my sister Clarissa and I have been very
careful indeed in considering this letter ; and we have not
considered it without finally showing it to our niece, and
discussing it with our niece. We have no doubt that you
think you like her very much."

"Think, ma'am," I rapturously began, "oh ! "

But Miss Clarissa giving me a look (just like a sharp canary),
as requesting that I would not interrupt the oracle, I begged
pardon.

"Affection," said Miss Lavinia, glancing at her sister for
corroboration, which she gave in the form of a little nod to
every clause, " mature affection, homage, devotion, does not
easily express itself. Its voice is low. It is modest and
retiring, it lies in ambush, waits and waits. Such is the
mature fruit. Sometimes a life glides away, and finds it still
ripening in the shade."

Of course I did not understand then that this was an
allusion to her supposed experience of the stricken Pidger ;
but I saw, from the gravity with which Miss Clarissa nodded
her head, that great weight was attached to these words.

" The light — for I call them, in comparison with such
sentiments, the light — inclinations of very young people,"
pursued Miss Lavinia, " are dust, compared to rocks. It is
owing to the difficulty of knowing whether they are likely to

David Copperfield 559

endure or have any real foundation, that my sister Clarissa
and myself have been very undecided how to act. Mr.
Copperfield, and Mr. "

" Traddles," said my friend, finding himself looked at.

" I beg pardon. Of the Inner Temple, I believe ? " said
Miss Clarissa, again glancing at my letter.

Traddles said *' Exactly so," and became pretty red in the
face.

Now, although I had not received any express encourage-
ment as yet, 1 fancied that I saw in the two little sisters,
and particularly in Miss Lavinia, an intensified enjoyment of
this new and fruitful subject of domestic interest, a settling
down to make the most of it, a disposition to pet it, in
which there was a good bright ray of hope. I thought I
perceived that Miss I^vinia would have uncommon satis-
faction in superintending two young lovers, like Dora and
me; and that Miss Clarissa would have hardly less satis-
faction in seeing her superintend us, and in chiming in with
her own particular department of the subject whenever that
impulse was strong upon her. This gave me courage to
protest most vehemently that I loved Dora better than I
could tell, or any one believe ; that all my friends knew how
I loved her ; that my aunt, Agnes,' Traddles, every one who
Iwiew me, knew how I loved her, and how earnest my love
had made me. For the truth of this, I appealed to Traddles.
And Traddles, firing up as if he were plunging into a Par-
liamentary Debate, really did come out nobly: confirming
me in good round terms, and in a plain, sensible, practical
manner, that evidently made a favourable impression.

" I speak, if I may presume to say so, as one who has some
little experience of such things," said Traddles, "being myself
engaged to a young lady — one of ten, down in Devonshire —
and seeing no probability, at present, of our engagement
coming to a termination."

"You may be able to confirm what I have said, Mr.
Traddles," observed Miss Lavinia, evidently taking a new
interest in him, " of the affection that is modest and retiring ;
that waits and waits?"

" Entirely, ma'am," said Traddles.

Miss Clarissa looked at Miss Lavinia, and shook her head
gravely. Miss Lavinia looked consciously at Miss Clarissa,
and heaved a little sigh.

"Sister Lavinia," said Miss Clarissa, "take my smelling-
bottle "

560 David Copperfield

Miss Lavinia revived herself with a few whiffs of aromatic
vinegar- —Traddles and I looking on with great solicitude
the while ; and then went on to say, rather faintly :

"My sister and myself have been in great doubt, Mr.
Traddles, what course we ought to take in reference to the
likings, or imaginary likings, of such very young people as
your friend Mr. Copperfield and our niece."

"Our brother Francis's child," remarked Miss Clarissa.
"If our brother Francis's wife had found it convenient in
her life-time (though she had an unquestionable right to act
as she thought best) to invite the family to her dinner-table,
we might have known our brother Francis's child better at
the present moment. Sister Lavinia, proceed."

Miss Lavinia turned my letter, so as to bring the super-
scription towards herself, and referred through her eye-glass
to some orderly-looking notes she had made on that part
of it.

"It seems to us," said she, "prudent, Mr. Traddles, to
bring these feelings to the test of our own observation. At
present we know nothing of them, and are not in a situation
to judge how much reaUty there may be in them. Therefore
we are inclined so far to accede to Mr. Copperfield's proposal,
as to admit his visits here."

"I shall never, dear ladies," I exclaimed, relieved of aCki
immense load of apprehension, " forget your kindness ! "

"But," pursued Miss Lavinia, — "but we would prefer to
regard those visits, Mr. Traddles, as made, at present, to us.
We must guard ourselves from recognising any positive
engagement between Mr. Copperfield and our niece, until
we have had an opportunity "

"Until you have had an opportunity, sister Lavinia," said
Miss Clarissa.

"Be it so," assented Miss Lavinia, with a sigh — "until
I have had an opportunity of observing them."

"Copperfield," said Traddles, turning to me, "you feel,
I am sure, that nothing could be more reasonable or con-
siderate."

" Nothing ! " cried I. " I am deeply sensible of it."

"In this position of affairs," said Miss Lavinia, again
referring to her notes, "and admitting his visits on this
understanding only, we must require from Mr. Copperfield
a distinct assurance, on his word of honour, that no com-
munication of any kind shall take place between him and
our niece without our knowledge. That no project whatever

David Copperfield 561

shall be entertained with regard to our niece, without being
first submitted to us "

"To you, sister Lavinia," Miss Clarissa interposed.

" Be it so, Clarissa ! " assented Miss Lavinia resignedly —
"to me — and receiving our concurrence. We must make
this a most express and serious stipulation, not to be broken
on any account. We wished Mr. Copperfield to be accom-
panied by some confidential friend to-day," with an inclination
of her head towards Traddles, who bowed, "in order that
there might be no doubt or misconception on this subject.
If Mr. Copperfield, or if you, Mr. Traddles, feel the least
scruple in giving this promise, I beg you to take time to
consider it."

I exclaimed, in a state of high ecstatic fervour, that not
a moment's consideration could be necessary. I bound
myself by the required promise, in a most impassioned
manner ; called upon Traddles to witness it ; and denounced
myself as the most atrocious of characters if I ever swerved
from it in the least degree.

" Stay ! " said Miss Lavinia, holding up her hand ; " we
resolved, before we had the pleasure of receiving you two
gentlemen, to leave you alone for a quarter of an hour, to
consider this point. You will allow us to retire."

It was in vain for me to say that no consideration was
necessary. They persisted in withdrawing for the specified
time. Accordingly, these little birds hopped out with great
dignity ; leaving me to receive the congratulations of
Traddles, and to feel as if I were translated to regions
of exquisite happiness. Exactly at the expiration of the
quarter of an hour, they reappeared with no less dignity
than they had disappeared. They had gone rustling away
as if their little dresses were made of autumn-leaves : and they
came rustling back in like manner.

I then bound myself once more to the prescribed conditions.

" Sister Clarissa," said Miss Lavinia, " the rest is with you."

Miss Clarissa, unfolding her arms for the first time, took
the notes and glanced at them.

"We shall be happy," said Miss Clarissa, "to see Mr.
Copperfield to dinner, every Sunday, if it should suit his
convenience. Our hour is three."

I bowed.

"In the course of the week," said Miss Clarissa, "we shall
be happy to see Mr. Copperfield to tea. Our hour is half-
past six."

562 David Copperfield

I bowed again.

"Twice in the week," said Miss Clarissa, "but, as a rule,
not oftener."

I bowed again.

"Miss Trotwood," said Miss Clarissa, "mentioned in Mr.
Copperfield's letter, will perhaps call upon us. When visiting
is better for the happiness of all parties, we are glad to
receive visits, and return them. When it is better for the
happiness of all parties that no visiting should take place
(as in the case of our brother Francis, and his establishment),
that is quite different."

I intimated that my aunt would be proud and delighted
to make their acquaintance; though I must say I was not
quite sure of their getting on very satisfactorily together.
The conditions being now closed, I expressed my acknow-
ledgments in the warmest manner; and, taking the hand,
first of Miss Clarissa, and then of Miss Lavinia, pressed it,
in each case, to my lips.

Miss Lavinia then arose, and begging Mr. Traddles to
excuse us for a minute, requested me to follow her. I obeyed,
all in a tremble, and was conducted into another room.
There I found my blessed darling stopping her ears behind
the door, with her dear little face against the wall; and Jip
in the plate-warmer with his head tied up in a towel.

Oh ! How beautiful she was in her black frock, and how
she sobbed and cried at first, and wouldn't come out from
behind the door ! How fond we were of one another, when
she did come out at last ; and what a state of bliss I was in,
when we took Jip out of the plate-warmer, and restored
him to the light, sneezing very much, and were all three
re-united !

" My dearest Dora ! Now, indeed, my own for ever ! "

" Oh don't ! " pleaded Dora. " Please ! "

" Are you not my own for ever, Dora ? "

" Oh yes, of course I am ! " cried Dora, " but I am so
frightened ! "

" Frightened, my own ? "

"Oh yes! I don't like him," said Dora. "Why don't
he go?"

"Who, my life?"

" Your friend," said Dora. " It isn't any business of his
What a stupid he must be ! "

" My love ! " (There never was anything so coaxing as her
childish ways.) "He is the best creature I"

David Copperfield 563

"Oh, but we don't want any best creatures!" pouted
Dora.

•• My dear," I argued, " you will soon know him well, and
like him of all things. And here is my aunt coming soon :
and you'll like her of all things too, when you know her."

"No, please don't bring her!" said Dora, giving me a
horrified little kiss, and folding her hands. " Don't. I know
she's a naughty, mischief-making old thing ! Don't let her
come here, Doady ! " which was a corruption of David.

Remonstrance was of no use, then ; so I laughed, and
admired, and was very much in love and very happy ; and she
showed me Jip's new trick of standing on his hind legs in a
corner — which he did for about the space of a flash of lightning,
and then fell down — and I don't know how long I should have
stayed there, oblivious of Traddles, if Miss Lavinia had not
come in to take me away. Miss Lavinia was very fond of
Dora (she told me Dora was exactly like what she had been
herself at her age — she must have altered a good deal), and
she treated Dora just as if she had been a toy. I wanted
to persuade Dora to come and see Traddles, but on my
proposing it she ran off to her own room, and locked herself
in ; so I went to Traddles without her, and walked away with
him on air.

"Nothing could be more satisfactory," said Traddles ; "and
they are very agreeable old ladies, I am sure. I shouldn't be
at all surprised if you were to be married years before me,
Copperfield."

"Does your Sophy play on any instrument, Traddles?" I
inquired, in the pride of my heart.

" She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her Httle
sisters," said Traddles.

" Does she sing at all ? " I asked.

" Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the
others a little when they're out of spirits," said Traddles.
" Nothing scientific."

" She doesn't sing to the guitar ? " said I.

" Oh dear no I " said Traddles.

"Paint at all?"

« Not at all," said Traddles.

I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and
see some of her flower-painting. He said he should like it
very much, and we went home arm in arm in great good
humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk about Sophy,
on the way ; which he did'with a loving reliance on her that I

564 David Copperfield

very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora,
with considerable inward satisfaction ; but I candidly admitted
to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for
Traddles, too.

Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with
the successful issue of the conference, and with all that had
been said and done in the course of it. She was happy to see
me so happy, and promised to call on Dora's aunts without
loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and down our
rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to
think she meant to walk till morning.

My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating
all the good effects that had resulted from my following her
advice. She wrote, by return of post, to me. Her letter was
hopeful, earnest, and cheerful. She was always cheerful from
that time.

I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily
journeys to Highgate considered. Putney was a long way off ;
and I naturally wanted to go there as often as I could. The
proposed tea-drinkings being quite impracticable, I com-
pounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit every
Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged
Sundays. So the close of every week was a delicious time
for me ; and I got through the rest of the week by looking
forward to it.

I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's
aunts rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly
than I could have expected. My aunt made her promised
visit within a few days of the conference ; and within a few
more days, Dora's aunts called upon her, in due state and form.
Similar but more friendly exchanges took place afterwards,
usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my
aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much, by utterly setting at
naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney
at extraordinary times, as shortly after breakfast or just before
tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any manner that
happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all defer-
ring to the prejudices of civilisation on that subject. But
Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and
somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding ; and
although my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's
aunts, by expressing heretical opinions on various points of
ceremony, she loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her
little peculiarities to the general harmony.

David Copperfield 565

The only member of our small society who positively
refused to adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip, He never
saw my aunt without immediately displaying every tooth in his
head, retiring under a chair, and growling incessantly: with
now and then a doleful howl, as if she really were too much for
his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried with him —
coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street
(where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all
beholders) ; but he never could prevail upon himself to bear
my aunt's society. He would sometimes think he had got the
better of his objection, and be amiable for a few minutes ; and
then would put up his snub nose, and howl to that extent,
that there was nothing for it but to blind him and put him
in the plate- warmer. At length, Dora regularly muffled him'
in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was
reported at the door.

One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this
quiet train. It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be
regarded like a pretty toy or plaything. My aunt, with whom
she gradually became familiar, always called her Little
Blossom ; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia's life was to wait
upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat
her like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a
matter of course. It was very odd to me ; but they all seemed
to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his.

I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this ; and one
day when we were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss
Lavinia, after a while, to go out walking by ourselves), I . said
to her that I wished she could get them to behave towards her
differently.

" Because you know, my darling," I remonstrated, " you are
not a child."

" There ! " said Dora. " Now you're going to be cross ! "

" Cross, my love ? "

" I am sure they're very kind to me," said Dora, "and I am
very happy."

" ^Vell ! But, my dearest life ! " said I, " you might be very
happy, and yet be treated rationally."

Dora gave me a reproachful look — the prettiest look ! — and
then began to sob, saying, if I didn't like her, why had I ever
wanted so much to be engaged to her ? And why didn't I go
away now, if I couldn't bear her ?

What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how
I doted on her, after that !

566 David Copperfield

" I am sure I am very affectionate," said Dora ; " you
oughtn't to be cruel to me, Doady ! "

" Cruel, my precious love ! As if I would — or could — be
cruel to you, for the world ! "

"Then don't find fault with me," said Dora, making a
rosebud of her mouth; "and I'll be good."

I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own
accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of,
and to show her how to keep accounts, as I had once
promised I would. I brought the volume with me on my
next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry
and more inviting) ; and as we strolled about the Common, I
showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and gave
her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil-case, and box of
leads, to practise housekeeping with.

But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the
figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So
she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses
of me and Jip, all over the tablets.

Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters,
as we walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for
example, when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say :

" Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were
going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know
how to buy it ? "

My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make
her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer
to shut mine with a kiss.

"Would you know how to buy it, my darling?" I would
repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible.

Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with
great triumph :

" Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what
need / know ? Oh, you silly Boy ! "

So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-
book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to
say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would
tell the servant to make it ; and then clapped her little hands
together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming
manner that she was more delightful than ever.

Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book
was devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand
upon. But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to
stand upon it without offering to come off, and at the same

David Copperfield 567

time to hold the pencil-case in his mouth, that I was very glad
I had bought it.

And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting,
and the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la ! and
were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I
could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the
darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything ; and I
sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that I had
fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything
too — but not often.

• CHAPTER XLII

MISCHIEF

I FEEL as if it were not for me to record, even though this
manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I
worked at that tremendous shorthand, and all improvement
appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and
her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written
of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient
and continuous energy which then began to be matured
within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my
character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking
back, I find the source of my success. I have been very
fortunate in worldly matters ; many men have worked much
harder, and not succeeded half so well ; but I never could have
done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality,
order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate
myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its
successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed.
Heaven knows I write this in no spirit of self-laudation. The
man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here,
from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed,
if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents
neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and per-
verted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeat-
ing him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I
have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have
tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well ;
that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself
to completely ; that in great aims and in small, I have always

568 David Copperfield

been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible
that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from
the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities,
and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such
fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some for-
tunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on
which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must
be made of stuff to stand wear and tear ; and there is no
substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness.
Never to put one hand to anything on which I could throw
my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work,
whatever it was ; I find, now, to have been my golden rules.

How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept,
I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. ,My narrative pro-
ceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love.

She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's. Mr.
Wickfield was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished
to talk with him, and do him good. It had been matter of
conversation with Agnes when she was last in town, and this
visit was the result. She and her father came together. I was
not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged
to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose
rheumatic complaint required change of air, and who would
be charmed to have it in such company. Neither was I
surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a dutiful
son, brought his worthy mother to take possession.

" You see. Master Copperfield," said he, as he forced him-
self upon my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden,
''where a person loves, a person is a little jealous — leastways,
anxious to keep an eye on the beloved one."

" Of whom are you jealous, now?" said I.

"Thanks to you, Master Copperfield," he returned, "of no
one in particular just at present — no male person, at least."

" Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person ? "

He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes,
and laughed.

"Really, Master Copperfield," he said, *' — I should say
Mister, but I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into — you're
so insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew ! Well, I
don't mind telling you," putting his fish-like hand on mine,
" I'm not a lady's man in general, sir, and I never was, with
Mrs. Strong."

His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a
rascally cunning,

David Copperfield 569

" What do you mean ? " said I.

*'Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield," he
replied, with a dry grin, " 1 mean, just at present, what I say."

"And what do you mean by your look?" I retorted,
quietly.

" By my look ? Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice!
What do I mean by my look ? "

" Yes," said I. " By your look."

He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as
it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin
with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward
— still scraping, very slowly :

" When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down
upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and
forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to
you, Master Copperfield ; but I was too far beneath her,
myself, to be noticed."

♦* Well ? " said I ; " suppose you were ! "

" — And beneath him too," pursued Uriah, very distinctly,
and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape
his chin.

" Don't you know the Doctor better," said I, "than to suppose
him conscious of your existence, when you were not before
him?"

He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again,
and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater
convenience of scraping, as he answered:

"Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor ! Oh no, poor
man ! I mean Mr. Maldon ! "

My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and
apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and
peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and com-
promise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the
mercy of this fellow's twisting.

" He never could come into the office, without ordering and
shoving me about," said Uriah. " One of your fine gentlemen
he was 1 I was very meek and umble — and I am. But I
didn't like that sort of thing — and I don't ! "

He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until
they seemed to meet inside ; keeping his sidelong glance upon
me all the while.

"She is one of your lovely . women, she is," he pursued,
when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form ; " and
ready to be no friend to such as me, / know. She's just the

570 David Copperfield

person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game,
Now, I ain't one of your lady's men, Master Copperfield ; but
I've had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble
ones have got eyes, mostly speaking — and we look out of 'em."

I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted,
but, I saw in his face, with poor success.

" Now, I'm not a-going to let myself be run down, Copper-
field," he continued, raising that part of his countenance,
where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any,
with malignant triumph, " and I shall do what I can to put a
stop to this friendship. I don't approve of it. I don't mind
acknowledging to you that I've got rather a grudging disposi-
tion, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain't a-going, if I
know it, to run the risk of being plotted against."

" You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the
belief that everybody else is doing the like, I think," said I.

" Perhaps so. Master Copperfield," he replied. " But I've got
a motive, as my fellow-partner used to say ; and I go at it
tooth and nail. I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person,
too much. I can't allow people in my way. Really they must
come out of the cart, Master Copperfield ! "

" I don't understand you," said I.

" Don't you, though ? " he returned, with one of his jerks.
" I'm astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually
so quick ! I'll try to be plainer, another time. — Is that Mr.
Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?"

"It looks like him," I replied, as carelessly as I could.

Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs
of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With per-
fectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was
so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this con-
cluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony ;
and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a
scarecrow in want of support.

It was not on that evening ; but, as I well remember, on the
next evening but one, which was a Saturday ; that I took
Agnes to see Dora. I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with
Miss Lavinia ; and Agnes was expected to tea.

I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety ; pride in my dear
little betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All
the way to Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I
outside, I pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty
looks I knew so well ; now making up my mind that I should
like her to look exactly as she looked at such a time, and then

David Copperfield 571

doubting whether I should not prefer her looking as she looked
at such another time ; and almost worrying myself into a fever
about it.

I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any
case ; but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well.
She was not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to
her little aunts, but was shyly keeping out of the way. I knew
where to look for her, now; and sure enough I found her
stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old door.

At first she wouldn't come at all ; and then she pleaded for
five minutes by my watch. When at length she put her arm
through mine, to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming
little face was flushed, and had never been so pretty. But
when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she was ten
thousand times prettier yet.

Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew
Agnes was " too clever." But when she saw her looking at
once so cheerful and so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so
good, she gave a faint little cry of pleased surprise, and just
put her affectionate arms round Agnes's neck, and laid her
innocent cheek against her face.

I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I
saw those two sit down together, side by side. As when I saw
my little darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes.
As when I saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast
upon her.

Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my
joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss
Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake —
the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds
and pecking at sugar ; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant
patronage, as if our happy love were all her work ; and we
were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another.

The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts.
Her quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her
manner of making acquaintance with Jip (who responded
instantly); her pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to
come over to her usual seat by me ; her modest grace and
ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence
from Dora ; seemed to make our circle quite complete.

"I am so glad," said Dora, after tea, "that you like me.
I didn't think you would ; and I want, more than ever, to
be liked, now Julia Mills is gone."

I have omitted to mention it, by-the-bye. Miss Mills had

572 David Copperfield

sailed, and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East India-
man at Gravesend to see her; and we had had preserved
ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that sort for lunch ;
and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on the
quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which
the original reflections awakened by the contemplation of
Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key.

Agnes said she was afraid I must have given her an un-
promising character ; but Dora corrected that directly.

" Oh no ! " she said, shaking her curls at me ; " it was all
praise. He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite
afraid of it."

" My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to
some people whom he knows," said Agnes, with a smile ; " it
is not worth their having."

"But please let me have it," said Dora, in her coaxing way,
" if you can ! "

We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora
said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the
short evening flew away on gossamer-wings. The time was at
hand when the coach was to call for us. I was standing alone
before the fire, when Dora came stealing softly in, to give me
that usual precious little kiss before I went.

" Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time
ago, Doady," said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly,
and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the
buttons of my coat, " I might have been more clever, perhaps ? "

" My love ! " said I, " what nonsense ! "

" Do you think it is nonsense ? " returned Dora, without
looking at me. " Are you sure it is ? "

" Of course I am ! "

"I have forgotten," said Dora, still turning the button
round and round, " what relation Agnes is to you, you dear
bad boy."

" No blood-relation," I replied ; " but we were brought up
together, like brother and sister."

" I wonder why you ever fell in love with me? " said Dora,
beginning on another button of my coat.

" Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you,
Dora ! "

" Suppose you had never seen me at all," said Dora, going
to another button,

" Suppose we had never been born ! " said I, gaily.

I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in

David Copperfield 573

admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of
buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against
my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly
rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes
were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me,
more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss — once,
twice, three times — and went out of the room.

They all came back together within five minutes afterwards,
and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She
was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his
performances, before the coach came. They took some time
(not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance),
and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There
was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and
herself ; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind
her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to
Dora ; and they had a second parting at the coach-door, and
a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss
Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes
at the coach-window about writing, and to shake her curls at
me on the box.

The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden,
where we were to take another stage-coach for Highgate.
I was impatient for the short walk in the interval, that Agnes
might praise Dora to me. Ah ! what praise it was ! How
lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty creature I
had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my most
gentle care ! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no
pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the
orphan child !

Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as
I loved her that night. When we had again alighted, and
were walking in the starlight along the quiet road that led to
the Doctor's house, I told Agnes it was her doing.

" When you were sitting by her," said I, " you seemed to
be no less her guardian angel than mine; and you seem so
now, Agnes."

" A poor angel," she returned, " but faithful."

The clear tone of her voice going straight to my heart, made
it natural to me to say :

" The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no
one else that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed
to-day, that I have begun to hope that you are happier at
home?"

574 David Copperfield

" I am happier in myself," she said ; " I am quite cheerful
and light-hearted."

I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it
was the stars that made it seem so noble.

" There has been no change at home," said Agnes, after a
few moments.

" No fresh reference," said I, " to — I wouldn't distress you,
Agnes, but I cannot help asking — to what we spoke of, when
we parted last ? "

" No, none," she answered.

" I have thought so much about it."

" You must think less about it. Remember that I confide
in simple love and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for
me, Trotwood," she added, after a moment ; "the step you
dread my taking, I shall never take."

Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season
of cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have
this assurance from her own truthful lips. I told her so,
earnestly.

*' And when this visit is over," said I, — " for we may not be
alone another time, — how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes,
before you come to London again ? "

" Probably a long time," she replied ; " I think it will be
best — for papa's sake — to remain at home. We are not likely
to meet often, for some time to come ; but I shall be a good
correspondent of Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one
another that way."

We were now within the little court-yard of the Doctor's
cottage. It was growing late. There was a light in the
window of Mrs. Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it,
bade me good night.

" Do not be troubled," she said, giving me her hand, " by
our misfortunes and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing
than in your happiness. If you can ever give me help, rely
upon it I will ask you for it. God bless you always ! "

In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful
voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her
company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the
stars, with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked
slowly forth. I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close
by, and was going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my
head, I saw a light in the Doctor's study. A half-reproachful
fancy came into my mind, that he had been working at the
Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if this

David Copperfield 575

were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he
were yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going
softly across the hall, and gently opening the door, looked in.

The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober
light of the shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close
beside it, with one of his skeleton hands over his mouth,
and the other resting on the Doctor's table. The Doctor
sat in his study chair, covering his face with his hands.
Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning
forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's arm.

For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I
hastily advanced a step under that impression, when I met
Uriah's eye, and saw what was the matter. I would have with-
drawn, but the Doctor make a gesture to detain me, and I
remained.

" At any rate," observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly
person, " we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it
known to all the town."

Saying which, he went on his toes to the door, which I had
left open, and carefully closed it. He then came back, and
took up his former position. There was an obtrusive show of
compassionate zeal in his voice and manner, more intolerable
— at least to me — than any demeanour he could have assumed.

"I have felt it incumbent upon me, Master Copperfield,"
said Uriah, " to point out to Doctor Strong what you and me
have already talked about. You didn't exactly understand me,
though?"

I gave him a look, but no other answer; and, going to
my good old master, said a few words that I meant to be
words of comfort and encouragement. He put his hand
upon my shoulder, as it had been his custom to do when
I was quite a little fellow, but did not lift his grey head.

" As you didn't understand me. Master Copperfield," resumed
Uriah in the same officious manner, " I may take the liberty of
umbly mentioning, being among friends, that I have called
Doctor Strong's attention to the goings-on of Mrs. Strong. It's
much against the grain with me, I assure you, Copperfield, to
be concerned in anything so unpleasant; but really, as it is,
we're all mixing ourselves up with what oughtn't to be. That
was what my meaning was, sir, when you didn't understand me."

I wonder now, when I recall his leer, that I did not collar
him, and try to shake the breath out of his body.

" I dare say I didn't make myself very clear," he went on,
"nor you neither. Naturally, we was both of us inclined to

576 David Copperfield

give such a subject a wide berth. Hows'ever, at last I have
made up my mind to speak plain ; and I have mentioned to
Doctor Strong that — did you speak, sir ? "

This was to the Doctor, who had moaned. The sound
might have touched any heart, I thought, but it had no effect
upon Uriah's.

" — mentioned to Doctor Strong,'' he proceeded, " that any
one may see that Mr. Maldon, and the lovely and agreeable
lady as is Doctor Strong's wife, are too sweet on one another.
Really the time is come (we being at present all mixing our-
selves up with what oughtn't to be), when Doctor Strong must
be told that this was full as plain to everybody as the sun, before
Mr. Maldon went to India ; that Mr. Maldon made excuses to
come back, for nothing else; and that he's always here, for
nothing else. When you come in, sir, I was just putting it to
my fellow-partner," towards whom he turned, "to say to Doctor
Strong upon his word and honour, whether he'd ever been
of this opinion long ago, or not. Come, Mr. Wickfield, sir !
Would you be so good as tell us? Yes or no, sir? Come,
partner ! "

"For God's sake, my dear Doctor," said Mr. Wickfield,
again laying his irresolute hand upon the Doctor's arm,
"don't attach too much weight to any suspicions I may
have entertained."

"There!" cried Uriah, shaking his head. "What a
melancholy confirmation : ain't it ? Him ! Such an old
friend! Bless your soul, when I was nothing but a clerk
in his office, Copperfield, I've seen him twenty times, if I've
seen him once, quite in a taking about it — quite put out, you
, know (and very proper in him as a father : I'm sure / can't
blame him), to think that Miss Agnes was mixing herself up
with what oughtn't to be."

" My dear Strong," said Mr. Wickfield in a tremulous voice,
" my good friend, I needn't tell you that it has been my vice
to look for some one master motive in everybody, and to try
all actions by one narrow test. I may have fallen into such
doubts as I have had, through this mistake."

"You have had doubts, Wickfield," said the Doctor, without
lifting up his head. "You have had doubts."

" Speak up, fellow-partner," urged Uriah.

" I had, at one time, certainly," said Mr. Wickfield. " I —
God forgive me — I thought you had."

"No, no, no!" returned the Doctor, in a tone of most
pathetic grief.

David Copperfield 577

"I thought, at one time," said Mr. Wickfield, "that you
wished to send Maldon abroad to effect a desirable separation."

" No, no, no ! " returned the Doctor. " To give Annie
pleasure, by making some provision for the companion of
her childhood. Nothing else."

"So I found," said Mr. Wickfield. "I couldn't doubt it,
when you told me so. But I thought — I implore you to
remember the narrow construction which has been my beset-
ting sin — that, in a case where there was so much disparity in
point of years — "

"That's the way to put it, you see, Master Copperfield!"
observed Uriah, with fawning and offensive pity.

" — a lady of such youth, and such attractions, however real
her respect for you, might have been influenced in marrying,
by worldly considerations only. I make no allowance for
innumerable feelings and circumstances that may have all
tended to good. For Heaven's sake remember that!"

" How kind he puts it ! " said Uriah, shaking his head.

"Always observing her from one point of view," said Mr.
Wickfield ; " but by all that is dear to you, my old friend, I
entreat you to consider what it was ; I am forced to confess
now, having no escape — "

" No ! There's no way out of it, Mr. Wickfield, sir," observed
Uriah, " when it's got to this."

" — that I did," said Mr. Wickfield, glancing helplessly and
distractedly at his partner, "that I did doubt her, and think
her wanting in her duty to you ; and that I did sometimes, if
I must say all, feel averse to Agnes being in such a familiar
relation towards her, as to see what I saw, or in my diseased
theory fancied that I saw. I never mentioned this to any one.
I never meant it to be known to any one. And though it is
terrible to you to hear," said Mr. Wickfield, quite subdued,
"if you knew how terrible it is for me to tell, you would feel
compassion for me ! "

The Doctor, in the perfect goodness of his nature, put out
his hand. Mr. Wickfield held it for a little while in his, with
his head bowed down.

"I am sure," said Uriah, writhing himself into the silence
like a Conger-eel, " that this is a subject full of unpleasantness
to everybody. But since we have got so far, I ought to take the
liberty of mentioning that Copperfield has noticed it too."

I turned upon him, and asked him how he dared refer
to me I

" Oh 1 it's very kind of you, Copperfield," returned Uriah,

578 David Copperfield

undulating all over, " and we all know what an amiable character
yours is ; but you know that the moment I spoke to you the
other night, you knew what I meant. You know you knew
what I meant, Copperfield. Don't deny it ! You deny it with
the best intentions ; but don't do it, Copperfield."

I saw the mild eye of the good old Doctor turned upon me
for a moment, and I felt that the confession of my old mis-
^vings and remembrances was too plainly written in my face
to be overlooked. It was of no use raging. I could not undo
that. Say what I would, I could not unsay it.

We were silent again, and remained so, until the Doctor
rose and walked twice or thrice across the room. Presently he
returned to where his chair stood ; and, leaning on the back of
it, and occasionally putting his handkerchief to his eyes, with a
simple honesty that did him more honour, to my thinking, than
any disguise he could have affected, said :

" I have been much to blame. I believe I have been very
much to blame. I have exposed one whom I hold in my heart,
to trials and aspersions — I call them aspersions, even to have
been conceived in anybody's inmost mind — of which she never,
but for me, could have been the object."

Uriah Heep gave a kind of snivel. I think to express
sympathy.

"Of which my Annie," said the Doctor, "never, but for me,
could have been the object. Gentlemen, I am old now, as you
know ; I do not feel, to-night, that I have much to live for.
But my life — my Life — upon the truth and honour of the dear
lady who has been the subject of this conversation ! "

I do not think that the best embodiment of chivalry, the
realisation of the handsomest and most romantic figure ever
imagined by painter, could have said this with a more impressive
and affecting dignity than the plain old Doctor did.

" But I am not prepared," he went on, "to deny — perhaps I
may have been, without knowing it, in some degree prepared
to admit — that I may have unwittingly ensnared that lady into
an unhappy marriage. I am a man quite unaccustomed to
observe ; and I cannot but believe that the observation of
several people, of different ages and positions, all too plainly
tending in one direction (and that so natural), is better than
mine."

I had often admired, as I have elsewhere described, his
benignant manner towards his youthful wife ; but the respectful
tenderness he manifested in every reference to her on this
occasion, and the almost reverential manner in which he put

David Copperfield 579

away from him the lightest doubt of her intregrity, exalted him,
in my eyes, beyond description.

"I married that lady," said the Doctor, "when she was
extremely young. I took her to myself when her character was
scarcely formed. So far as it was developed, it had been my
happiness to form it. I knew her father well. 1 knew her
well. I had taught her what I could, for the love of all her
beautiful and virtuous qualities. If I did her wrong; as I
fear I did, in taking advantage (but I never meant it) of her
gratitude and her affection : I ask pardon of that lady, in my
heart!"

He walked across the room, and came back to the same
place ; holding the chair with a grasp that trembled, like his
subdued voice, in its earnestness.

" I regarded myself as a refuge, for her, from the dangers
and vicissitudes of life. I persuaded myself that, unequal
though we were in years, she would live tranquilly and con-
tentedly with me. I did not shut out of my consideration the
time when I should leave her free, and still young and still
beautiful, but with her judgment more matured — no, gentlemen
— upon my truth ! "

His homely figure seemed to be lightened up by his fidelity
and generosity. Every word he uttered had a force that no
other grace could have imparted to it.

" My life with this lady has been very happy. Until to-
night, I have had uninterrupted occasion to bless the day on
which I did her great injustice."

His voice, more and more faltering in the utterance of these
words, stopped for a few moments ; then he went on :

*' Once awakened from my dream — I have been a poor
dreamer, in one way or other, all my life — I see how natural
it is that she should have some regretful feeling towards her
old companion and her equal. That she does regard him with
some innocent regret, with some blameless thoughts of what
might have been, but for me, is, I fear, too true. Much that
I have seen, but not noted, has come back upon me with new
meaning, during this last trying hour. But, beyond this, gentle-
men, the dear' lady's name never must be coupled with a word,
a breath, of doubt."

For a little while, his eye kindled and his voice was firm ;
for a little while he was again silent. Presently, he proceeded
as before :

" It only remains for me to bear the knowledge of the un-
happiness I have occasioned, as submissively as I can. It is

580 David Copperfield

she who should reproach ; not I. To save her from miscon-
struction, cruel misconstruction, that even my friends have not
been able to avoid, becomes my duty. The more retired we
live, the better I shall discharge it. And when the time comes
— may it come soon, if it be His merciful pleasure ! — when my
death shall release her from constraint, I shall close my eyes
upon her honoured face, with unbounded confidence and love ;
and leave her, with no sorrow then, to happier and brighter
days."

I could not see him for the tears which his earnestness and
goodness, so adorned by, and so adorning, the perfect sim-
plicity of his manner, brought into my eyes. He had moved
to the door, when he added :

" Gentlemen, I have shown you my heart. I am sure you
will respect it. What we have said to-night is never to be said
more. Wickfield, give me an old friend's arm up-stairs ! "

Mr. Wickfield hastened to him. Without interchanging a
word they went slowly out of the room together, Uriah looking
after them.

,^ *i Well, Master Copperfield ! " said Uriah, meekly turning to

me. " The thing hasn't took quite the turn that might have
been expected, for the old Scholar — what an excellent man !—
is as blind as a brickbat ; but ^ki's family's out of the cart, I
think!"

I needed but the sound of his voice to be so madly enraged
as I never was before, and never have been since.

" You villain," said I, " what do you mean by entrapping me
into your schemes? How dare you appeal to me just now,
you false rascal, as if we had been in discussion together ? "

As we stood, front to front, I saw so plainly, in the stealthy
exultation of his face, what I already so plainly knew ; I mean
that he forced his confidence upon me, expressly to make me
miserable, and had set a deliberate trap for me in this very
matter ; that I couldn't bear it. The whole of his lank cheek
was invitingly before me, and I struck it with my open hand
with that force that my fingers tingled as if I had burnt them.

He caught the hand in his, and we stood in that connexion,
looking at each other. We stood so a long time ; long enough
for me to see the white marks of my fingers die out of the
deep red of his cheek, and leave it a deeper red.

" Copperfield," he said at length, in a breathless voice,
" have you taken leave of your senses ? "

" I have taken leave of you," said I, wresting my hand away.
" You dog, I'll know no more of you."

David Copperfield 581

"Won't you? " said he, constrained by the pain of his cheek
to put his hand there. " Perhaps you won't be able to help it.
Isn't this ungrateful of you, now ? "

" I have shown you often enough," said I, " that I despise
you. I have shown you now, more plainly, that I do. Why
should I dread your doing your worst to all about you ? What
else do you ever do ? "

He perfectly understood this allusion to the considerations
that had hitherto restrained me in my communications with
him. I rather think that neither the blow, nor the allusion,
would have escaped me, but for the assurance I had had from
Agnes that night. It is no matter.

There was another long pause. His eyes, as he looked at
me, seemed to take every shade of colour that could make eyes
ugly.

" Copperfield," he said, removing his hand from his cheek,
" you have always gone against me. I know you always used
to be against me at Mr. Wickfield's."

"You may think what you like," said I, still in a towering
rage. " If it is not true, so much the worthier you."

" And yet I always liked you, Copperfield ! " he rejoined.

I deigned to make him no reply ; and, taking up my hat,
was going out to bed, when he came between me and the
door.

"Copperfield," he said, "there must be two parties to a
quarrel. " I won't be one."

" You may go to the devil ! " said I.

" Don't say that ! " he replied. " I know you'll be sorry
afterwards. How can you make yourself so inferior to me, as
to show such a bad spirit ? But I forgive you."

" You forgive me ! " I repeated disdainfully.

" I do, and you can't help yourself," replied Uriah. " To
think of your going and attacking me^ that have always been a
friend to you ! But there can't be a quarrel without two parties,
and I won't be one. I will be a friend to you, in spite of you.
So now you know what you've got to expect."

The necessity of carrying on this dialogue (his part in which
was very slow ; mine very quick) in a low tone, that the house
might not be disturbed at an unseasonable hour, did not im-
prove my temper; though my passion was cooling down.
Merely telling him that I should expect from him what I
always had expected, and had never yet been disappointed in,
I opened the door upon him, as if he had been a great walnut
put there to be cracked, and went out of the house. But he

582 David Copperfield

slept out of the house too, at his mother's lodging ; and before
I had gone many hundred yards, came up with me.

" You know, Copperfield," he said, in my ear (I did not turn
my head), " you're in quite a wrong position ; " which I felt to
be true, and that made me chafe the more ; "you can't make
this a brave thing, and you can't help being forgiven. I don't
intend to mention it to mother, nor to any living soul. I'm
determined to forgive you. But I do wonder that you should
lift your hand against a person that you knew to be so
umble!"

I felt only less mean than he. He knew me better than I
knew myself. If he had retorted or openly exasperated me, it
would have been a relief and a justification ; but he had put
me on a slow fire, on which I lay tormented half the night.

In the morning, when I came out, the early church bell was
ringing, and he was walking up and down with his mother. He
addressed me as if nothing had happened, and I could do no
less than reply. I had struck him hard enough to give him the
toothache, I suppose. At all events his face was tied up in a
black silk handkerchief, which, with his hat perched on the top
of it, was far from improving his appearance. I heard that he
went to a dentist's in London on the Monday morning, and
had a tooth out. I hope it was a double one.

The Doctor gave out that he was not quite well; and re-
mained alone, for a considerable part of every day, during the
remainder of the visit. Agnes and her father had been gone a
week, before we resumed our usual work. On the day pre-
ceding its resumption, the Doctor gave me with his own hands
a folded note, not sealed. It was addressed to myself; and
laid an injunction on me, in a few affectionate words, never to
refer to the subject of that evening. I had confided it to my
aunt, but to no one else. It was not a subject I could discuss
with Agnes, and Agnes certainly had not the least suspicion of
what had passed.

Neither, I felt convinced, had Mrs. Strong then. Several
weeks elapsed before I saw the least change in her. It came
on slowly, like a cloud when there is no wind. At first, she
seemed to wonder at the gentle compassion with which the
Doctor spoke to her, and at his wish that she should have her
mother with her, to relieve the dull monotony of her life.
Often, when we were at work, and she was sitting by, I would
see her pausing and looking at him with that memorable face.
Afterwards, I sometimes observed her rise, with her eyes full of
tears, and go out of the room. Gradually, an unhappy shadow

David Copperfield 583

fell upon her beauty, and deepened every day. Mrs. Markle-
ham was a regular inmate of the cottage then ; but she talked
and talked, and saw nothing.

As this change stole on Annie, once like sunshine in the
Doctor's house, the Doctor became older in appearance, and
more grave ; but the sweetness of his temper, the placid kind-
ness of his manner, and his benevolent solicitude for her, if
they were capable of any increase, were increased. I saw him
once, early on the morning of her birthday, when she came to
sit in the window while we were at work (which she had always
done, but now began to do with a timid and uncertain air that
I thought very touching), take her forehead between his hands,
kiss it, and go hurriedly away, too much moved to remain. I
saw her stand where he had left her, like a statue ; and then
bend down her head, and clasp her hands, and weep, I cannot
say how sorrowfully.

Sometimes, after that, I fancied that she tried to speak, even
to me, in intervals when we were left alone. But she never
uttered a word. The Doctor always had some new project for
her participating in amusements away from home, with her
mother; and Mrs. Markleham, who was very fond of amuse-
ments, and very easily dissatisfied with anything else, entered
into them with great good will, and was loud in her com-
mendations. But Annie, in a spiritless unhappy way, only
went whither she was led, and seemed to have no care for
anything.

I did not know what to think. Neither did my aunt ; who
must have walked, at various times, a hundred miles in her
uncertainty. What was strangest of all was, that the only real
relief which seemed to make its way into the secret region of
this domestic unhappiness, made its way there in the person
of Mr. Dick.

What his thoughts were on the subject, or what his
observation was, I am as unable to explain, as I dare say
he would have been to assist me in the task. But, as I have
recorded in the narrative of my school days, his veneration
for the Doctor was unbounded; and there is a subtlety of
perception in real attachment, even when it is borne towards
man by one of the lower animals, which leaves the highest
intellect behind. To this mind of the heart, if I may
call it so, in Mr. Dick, some bright ray of the truth shot
straight.

He had proudly resumed his privilege, in many of his spare
hours, of walking up and down the garden with the Doctor ;

584 David Copperfield

as he had been accustomed to pace up and down The Doctor's
Walk at Canterbury. But matters were no sooner in this
state, than he devoted all his spare time (and got up earlier
to make it more) to these perambulations. If he had never
been so happy as when the Doctor read that marvellous per-
formance, the Dictionary, to him ; he was now quite miserable
unless the Doctor pulled it out of his pocket, and began.
When the Doctor and I were engaged, he now fell into the
custom of walking up and down with Mrs. Strong, and helping
her to trim her favourite flowers, or weed the beds. I dare say
he rarely spoke a dozen words in an hour: but his quiet
interest, and his wistful face, found immediate response in
both their breasts ; each knew that the other liked him, and
that he loved both ; and he became what no one else could
be — a link between them.

When I think of him, with his impenetrably wise face,
walking up and down with the Doctor, delighted to be battered
by the hard words in the Dictionary ; when I think of him
carrying huge watering-pots after Annie ; kneeling down, in very
paws of gloves, at patient microscopic work among the little
leaves ; expressing as no philosopher could have expressed, in
everything he did, a delicate desire to be her friend ; showering
sympathy, trustfulness, and affection, out of every hole in the
watering-pot; when I think of him never wandering in that
better mind of his to which unhappiness addressed itself, never
bringing the unfortunate King Charles into the garden, never
wavering in his grateful service, never diverted from his know-
ledge that there was something wrong, or from his wish to set
it right — I really feel almost ashamed of having known that
he was not quite in his wits, taking account of the utmost
I have done with mine.

" Nobody but myself, Trot, knows what that man is ! " my
aunt would proudly remark, when we conversed about it.
"Dick will distinguish himself yet!"

I must refer to one other topic before I close this chapter.
While the visit at the Doctor's was still in progress, I observed
that the postman brought two or three letters every morning
for Uriah Heep, who remained at Highgate until the rest went
back, it being a leisure time; and that these were always
directed in a business-like manner by Mr. Micawber, who now
assumed a round legal hand. I was glad to infer, from these
slight premises, that Mr. Micawber was doing well; and
consequently was much surprised to receive, about this time,
the following letter from his amiable wife:

David Copperfield 585

" Canterbury, Monday Evening.

" You will doubtless be surprised, my dear Mr. Copperfield,
to receive this communication. Still more so, by its contents.
Still more so, by the stipulation of implicit confidence which
I beg to impose. But my feelings as a wife and mother require
relief; and as I do not wish to consult my family (already
obnoxious to the feelings of Mr. Micawber), I know no one
of whom I can better ask advice than my friend and former
lodger.

" You may be aware, my dear Mr. Copperfield, that between
myself and Mr. Micawber (whom I will never desert), there has
always been preserved a spirit of mutual confidence. Mr.
Micawber may have occasionally given a bill without con-
sulting me, or he may have misled me as to the period
when that obligation would become due. This has actually
happened. But, in general, Mr. Micawber has had no secrets
from the bosom of affection — I allude to his wife — and has
invariably, on our retirement to rest, recalled the events of
the day.

"You will picture to yourself, my dear Mr. Copperfield,
what the poignancy of my feelings must be, when I inform
you that Mr. Micawber is entirely changed. He is reserved.
He is secret. His life is a mystery to the partner of his joys
and sorrows — I again allude to his wife — and if I should
assure you that beyond knowing that it is passed from morn-
ing to night at the oflfice, I now know less of it than I do
of the man in the south, connected with whose mouth the
thoughtless children repeat an idle tale respecting cold plum
porridge, I should adopt a popular fallacy to express an
actual fact.

"But this is not all. Mr. Micawber is morose. He is
severe. He is estranged from our eldest son and daughter,
he has no pride in his twins, he looks with an eye of coldness
even on the unoffending stranger who last became a member
of our circle. The pecuniary means of meeting our expenses,
kept down to the utmost farthing, are obtained from him with
great difficulty, and even under fearful threats that he will
Settle himself (the exact expression) ; and he inexorably
refuses to give any explanation whatever of this distracting
policy.

" This is hard to bear. This is heart-breaking. If you will
advise me, knowing my feeble powers such as they are, how
you think it will be best to exert them in a dilemma so
unwonted, you will add another friendly obligation to the

586 David Copperfield

many you have already rendered me. With loves from the
children, and a smile from the happily-unconscious stranger,
I remain, dear Mr. Copperfield,

"Your afflicted,

" Emma Micawber."

I did not feel justified in giving a wife of Mrs. Micawber's
experience any other recommendation, than that she should
try to reclaim Mr. Micawber by patience and kindness (as I
knew she would in any case) ; but the letter set me thinking
about him very much.

CHAPTER XLIII

ANOTHER RETROSPECT

Once again, let me pause upon a memorable period of my life.
Let me stand aside, to see the phantoms of those days go by
me, accompanying the shadow of myself, in dim procession.

Weeks, months, seasons, pass along. They seem little more
than a summer day and a winter evening. Now, the Common
where I walk with Dora is all in bloom, a field of bright gold ;
and now the unseen heather lies in mounds and bunches
underneath a covering of snow. In a breath, the river that
flows through our Sunday walks is sparkling in the summer
sun, is ruffled by the winter wind, or thickened with drifting
heaps of ice. Faster than ever river ran towards the sea, it
flashes, darkens, and rolls away.

Not a thread changes in the house of the two little bird-like
ladies. The clock ticks over the fireplace, the weather-glass
hangs in the hall. Neither clock nor weather-glass is ever right;
but we believe in both, devoutly.

I have come legally to man's estate. I have attained the
dignity of twenty-one. But this is a sort of dignity that may be
thrust upon one. Let me think what I have achieved.

I have tamed that savage stenographic mystery. I make a
respectable income by it. I am in high repute for my accom-
plishment in all pertaining to the art, and am joined with
eleven others in reporting the debates in Parliament for a
Morning Newspaper. Night after night, I record predictions
that never come to pass, professions that are never fulfilled,
[ explanations that are only meant to mystify. I wallow in words

David Copperfield 587

Britannia, that unfortunate female, is always before me, like a
trussed fowl : skewered through and through with office-pens,
and bound hand and foot with red tape. I am sufficiently
behind the scenes to know the worth of political life. I am
quite an Infidel about it, and shall never be converted.

My dear old Traddles has tried his hand at the same pursuit,
but it is not in Traddles's way. He is perfectly good-humoured
respecting his failure, and reminds me that he always did con-
sider himself slow. He has occasional employment on the
same newspaper, in getting up the facts of dry subjects, to be
written about and embellished by more fertile minds. He is
called to the bar ; and with admirable industry and self-denial
has scraped another hundred pounds together, to fee a con-
veyancer whose chambers he attends. A great deal of very hot
port wine was consumed at his call ; and, considering the
figure, I should think the Inner Temple must have made a
profit by it.

I have come out in another way. I have taken with fear
and trembling to authorship. I wrote a little something, in
secret, and sent it to a magazine, and it was published in the
magazine. Since then, I have taken heart to write a good
many trifling pieces. Now, I am regularly paid for them.
Altogether, I am well off; when I tell my income on the
fingers of my left hand, I pass the third finger and take in the
fourth to the middle joint.

We have removed from Buckingham Street, to a pleasant
little cottage very near the one I looked at, when my enthu-
siasm first came on. My aunt, however (who has sold the
house at Dover, to good advantage), is not going to remain
here, but intends removing herself to a still more tiny cottage
close at hand. What does this portend? My marriage?
Yes!

Yes ! I am going to be married to Dora ! Miss Lavinia
and Miss Clarissa have given their consent ; and if ever canary
birds were in a flutter, they are. Miss Lavinia, self-cl larged
with the superintendence of my darling's wardrobe, is constantly
cutting out brown-paper cuirasses, and differing in opinion
from a highly respectable young man, with a long bundle, and
a yard measure under his arm. A dressmaker, always stabbed
in the breast with a needle and thread, boards and lodges in
the house; and seems to me, eating, drinking, or sleeping,
never to take her thimble off". They make a lay-figure of my
dear. They are always sending for her to come and try some-
thing on. We can't be happy together for five minutes in the

588 David Copperfield

evening, but some intrusive female knocks at the door, and
says, " Oh, if you please, Miss Dora, would you step up-
stairs ! "

Miss Clarissa and my aunt roam all over London, to find out
articles of furniture for Dora and me to look at. It would be
better for them to buy the goods at once, without this ceremony
of inspection ; for, when we go to see a kitchen fender and
meat-screen, Dora sees a Chinese house for Jip, with little bells
on the top, and prefers that. And it takes a long time to
accustom Jip to his new residence, after we have bought it;
whenever he goes in or out, he makes all the little bells ring,
and is horribly frightened.

Peggotty comes up to make herself useful, and falls to work
immediately. Her department appears to be, to clean every-
thing over and over again. She rubs everything that can be
rubbed, until it shines, like her own honest forehead, with
perpetual friction. And now it is, that I begin to see her
solitary brother passing through the dark streets at night, and
looking, as he goes, among the wandering faces. I never speak
to him at such an hour. I know too well, as his grave figure
passes onward, what he seeks, and what he dreads.

Why does Traddles look so important when he calls upon
me this afternoon in the Commons — where I still occasionally
attend, for form's sake, when I have time ? The realisation of
my boyish day-dreams is at hand. I am going to take out the
licence.

It is a little document to do so much ; and Traddles con-
templates it, as it lies upon my desk, half in admiration, half
in awe. There are the names in the sweet old visionary con-
nexion, David Copperfield and Dora Spenlow ; and there, in the
corner, is that Parental Institution, the Stamp Office, which is
so benignantly interested in the various transactions of human
life, looking down upon our Union; and there is the Arch-
bishop of Canterbury invoking a blessing on us in print, and
doing it as cheap as could possibly be expected.

Nevertheless, I am in a dream, a flustered, happy, hurried
dream. I can't believe that it is going to be ; and yet I can't
believe but that every one I pass in the street must have some
kind of perception, that I am to be married the day after to-
morrow. The Surrogate knows me, when I go down to be
sworn, and disposes of me easily, as if there were a Masonic
understanding between us. Traddles is not at all wanted, but
is in attendance as my general backer.

" I hope the next time you come here, my dear fellow," I say

David Copperfield 589

to Traddles, " it will be on the same errand for yourself. And
I hope it will be soon."

"Thank you for your good wishes, my dear Copperfield," he
replies. " I hope so too. It's a satisfaction to know that she'll
wait for me any length of time, and that she really is the dearest
girl »

" When are you to meet her at the coach ? " I ask.

"At seven," says Traddles, looking at his plain old silver
watch — the very watch he once took a wheel out of, at school,
to make a water-mill. " That is about Miss Wickfield's time,
is it not ? "

" A little earlier. Her time is half-past eight."

" I assure you, my dear boy," says Traddles, " I am almost
as pleased as if I were going to be married myself, to think
that this event is coming to such a happy termination. And
really the great friendship and consideration of personally
associating Sophy with the joyful occasion, and inviting her to
be a bridesmaid in conjunction with Miss Wickfield, demands
my warmest thanks. I am extremely sensible of it."

I hear him, and shake hands with him ; and we talk, and walk,
and dine, and so on ; but I don't believe it. Nothing is real.

Sophy arrives at the house of Dora's aunts, in due course.
She has the most agreeable of faces, — not absolutely beautiful,
but extraordinarily pleasant, — and is one of the most genial,
unaffected, frank, engaging creatures I have ever seen.
Traddles presents her to us with great pride; and rubs his
hands for ten minutes by the clock, with every individual hair
upon his head standing on tiptoe, when I congratulate him in
a corner on his choice.

I have brought Agnes from the Canterbury coach, and her
cheerful and beautiful face is among us for the second time.
Agnes has a great liking for Traddles, and it is capital to see
them meet, and to observe the glory of Traddles as he commends
the dearest girl in the world to her acquaintance.

Still I don't believe it. We have a delightful evening, and
are supremely happy : but I don't believe it yet. I can't collect
myself. I can't check off my happiness as it takes place. I
feel in a misty and unsettled kind of state ; as if I had got up
very early in the morning a week or two ago, and had never
been to bed since. I can't make out when yesterday was. I
seem to have been carrying the licence about, in my pocket,
many months.

Next day, too, when we all go in a flock to see the house — •
our house — Dora's and mine — I am quite unable to regard

590 David Copperfield

myself as its master. I seem to be there, by permission of
somebody else. I half expect the real master to come home
presently, and say he is glad to see me. Such a beautiful little
house as it is, with everything so bright and new ; with the
flowers on the carpets looking as if freshly gathered, and the
green leaves on the paper as if they had just come out ; with
the spotless muslin curtains, and the blushing rose-coloured
furniture, and Dora's garden hat with the blue ribbon — do I
remember, now, how I loved her in such another hat when
I first knew her ! — already hanging on its little peg ; the
guitar-case quite at home on its heels in a comer ; and every-
body tumbling over Jip's Pagoda, which is much too big for the
establishment.

Another happy evening, quite as unreal as all the rest of it,
and I steal into the usual room before going away. Dora is
not there. I suppose they have not done trying on yet. Miss
Lavinia peeps in, and tells me mysteriously that she will not
be long. She is rather long, notwithstanding : but by-and-bye
I hear a rustling at the door, and some one taps.

I say, " Come in ! " but some one taps again.

I go to the door, wondering who it is; there, I meet a
pair of bright eyes, and a blushing face ; they are Dora's eyes
and face, and Miss Lavinia has dressed her in to-morrow's
dress, bonnet and all, for me to see. I take my little wife to
my heart; and Miss Lavinia gives a little scream because I
tumble the bonnet, and Dora laughs and cries at once, because
I am so pleased ; and I believe it less than ever.

" Do you think it pretty, Doady ? " says Dora.

Pretty 1 I should rather think I did.

" And are you sure you like me very much ? " says Dora.

The topic is fraught with such danger to the bonnet, that
Miss Lavinia gives another little scream, and begs me to
understand that Dora is only to be looked at, and on no
account to be touched. So Dora stands in a delightful state
of confusion for a minute or two, to be admired; and then
takes off her bonnet — looking so natural without it ! — and
runs away with it in her hand ; and comes dancing down again
in her own familiar dress, and asks Jip if I have got a beautiful
little wife, and whether he'll forgive her for being married, and
kneels down to make him stand upon the cookery-book, for
the last time in her single life.

I go home, more incredulous than ever, to a lodging that
I have hard by ; and get up very early in the morning, to ride
to the Highgate road and fetch my aunt.

David Copperfield 591

I have never seen my aunt in such state. She is dressed
in lavender-coloured silk, and has a white bonnet on, and is
amazing. Janet has dressed her, and is there to look at me.
Peggotty is ready to go to church, intending to behold the
ceremony from the gallery. Mr. Dick, who is to give my
darling to me at the altar, has had his hair curled. Traddles,
whom I have taken up by appointment at the turnpike,
presents a dazzling combination of cream colour and light
blue ; and both he and Mr. Dick have a general effect about
them of being all gloves.

No doubt I see this, because I know it is so ; but I am
astray, and seem to see nothing. Nor do I believe anything
whatever. Still, as we drive along in an open carriage, this
fairy marriage is real enough to fill me with a sort of wondering
pity for the unfortunate people who have no part in it, but are
sweeping out the shops, and going to their daily occupations.

My aunt sits with my hand in hers all the way. When we
stop a little way short of the church, to put down Peggotty,
whom we have brought on the box, she gives it a squeeze, and
me a kiss.

" God bless you, Trot ! My own boy never could be dearer.
I think of poor dear Baby this morning."

" So do I. And of all I owe to you, dear aunt."

" Tut, child ! " says my aunt ; and gives her hand in over-
flowing cordiality to Traddles, who then gives his to Mr. Dick,
who then gives his to me, who then give mine to Traddles,
and then we come to the church door.

The church is calm enough, I am sure ; but it might be a
steam-power loom in full action, for any sedative effect it has
on me. I am too far gone for that.

The rest is all a more or less incoherent dream.

A dream of their coming in with Dora ; of the pew-opener
arranging us, like a drill-sergeant, before the altar rails ; of my
wondering, even then, why pew-openers must always be the
most disagreeable females procurable, and whether there is any
religious dread of a disastrous infection of good humour which
renders it indispensable to set those vessels of vinegar upon
the road to Heaven.

Of the clergyman and clerk appearing ; of a few boatmen
and some other people strolling in ; of an ancient mariner
behind me, strongly flavouring the church with rum ; of the
service beginning in a deep voice, and our all being very
attentive.

Of Miss Lavinia, who acts as a semi-auxiliary bridesmaid.

592 David Copperfield

being the first to cry, and of her doing homage (as I take it)
to the memory of Pidger, in sobs ; of Miss Clarissa applying
a smelling-bottle ; of Agnes taking care of Dora ; of my aunt
endeavouring to represent herself as a model of sternness, with
tears rolling down her face ; of little Dora trembling very much,
and making her responses in faint whispers.

Of our kneeling down together, side by side ; of Dora's
trembling less and less, but always clasping Agnes by the
hand ; of the service being got through, quietly and gravely ;
of our all looking at each other in an April state of smiles and
tears, when it is over ; of my young wife being hysterical in the
vestry, and crying for her poor papa, her dear papa.

Of her soon cheering up again, and our signing the register
all round. Of my going into the gallery for Peggotty to bring
her to sign it ; of Peggotty's hugging me in a corner, and telling
me she saw my own dear mother married; of its being over,
and our going away.

Of my walking so proudly and lovingly down the aisle with
my sweet wife upon my arm, through a mist of half-seen
people, pulpits, monuments, pews, fonts, organs, and church-
windows, in which there flutter faint airs of association with
my childish church at home, so long ago.

Of their whispering, as we pass, what a youthful couple we
are, and what a pretty little wife she is. Of our all being so
merry and talkative in the carriage going back. Of Sophy
telling us that when she saw Traddles (whom I had entrusted
with the licence) asked for it, she almost fainted, having been
convinced that he would contrive to lose it, or to have his
pocket picked. Of Agnes laughing gaily ; and of Dora being
so fond of Agnes that she will not be separated from her, but
still keeps her hand.

Of there being a breakfast, with abundance of things, pretty
and substantial, to eat and drink, whereof I partake, as I should
do in any other dream, without the least perception of their
flavour ; eating and drinking, as I may say, nothing but love
and marriage, and no more believing in the viands than in
anything else.

Of my making a speech in the same dreamy fashion, with-
out having an idea of what I want to say, beyond such as may
be comprehended in the full conviction that I haven't said it.
Of our being very sociably and simply happy (always in a
dream though) ; and of Jip's having wedding cake, and its not
agreeing with him afterwards.

Of the pair of hired post-horses being ready, and of Dora's

David Copperfield 593

going away to change her dress. Of my aunt and Miss
Clarissa remaining with us ; and our walking in the garden ;
and my aunt, who has made quite a speech at breakfast
touching Dora's aunts, being mightily amused with herself, but
a little proud of it too.

Of Dora's being ready, and of Miss Lavinia's hovering
about her, loth to lose the pretty toy that has given her so
much pleasant occupation. Of Dora's making a long series
of surprised discoveries that she has forgotten all sorts of little
things ; and of everybody's running everywhere to fetch them.

Of their all closing about Dora, when at last she begins to
say good-bye, looking, with their bright colours and ribbons,
like a bed of flowers. Of my darling being almost smothered
among the flowers, and coming out, laughing and crying both
together, to my jealous arms.

Of my wanting to carry Jip (who is to go along with us),
and Dora's saying, No, that she must carry him, or else he'll
think she don't like him any more, now she is married, and
will break his heart. Of our going, arm in arm, and Dora
stopping and looking back, and saying, " If I have ever been
cross or ungrateful to anybody, don't remember it ! " and
bursting into tears.

Of her waving her little hand, and our going away once
more. Of her once more stopping and looking back, and
hurrying to Agnes, and giving Agnes, above all the others, her
last kisses and farewells.

We drive away together, and I awake from the dream. I
believe it at last. It is my dear, dear, little wife beside me,
whom I love so well !

"Are you happy now, you foolish boy?" says Dora, "and
sure you don't repent ? "

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by
me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.

CHAPTER XLIV

OUR HOUSEKEEPING

It was a strange condition of things, the honeymoon being
over, and the bridesmaids gone home, when I found myself
sitting down in my own small house with Dora ; quite thrown

594 David Copperfield

out of employment, as I may say, in respect of the delicious
old occupation of making love.

It seemed such an extraordinary thing to have Dora always
there. It was so unaccountable not to be obliged to go out
to see her, not to have any occasion to be tormenting myself
about her, not to have to write to her, not to be scheming and
devising opportunities of being alone with her. Sometimes of
an evening, when I looked up from my writing, and saw her
seated opposite, I would lean back in my chair, and think how
queer it was that there we were, alone together as a matter
of course — nobody's business any more — all the romance of
our engagement put away upon a shelf, to rust — no one to
please but one another — one another to please, for life.

When there was a debate, and I was kept out very late,
it seemed so strange to me, as I was walking home, to think
that Dora was at home ! It was such a wonderful thing, at
first, to have her coming softly down to talk to me as I ate my
supper. It was such a stupendous thing to know for certain
that she put her hair in papers. It was altogether such an
astonishing event to see her do it !

I doubt whether two young birds could have known less
about keeping house, than I and my pretty Dora did. We had
a servant, of course. She kept house for us. I have still a
latent belief that she must have been Mrs. Crupp's daughter
in disguise, we had such an awful time of it with Mary Anne.

Her name was Paragon. Her nature was represented to us,
when we engaged her, as being feebly expressed in her name.
She had a written character, as large as a proclamation ; and,
according to this document, could do everything of a domestic
nature that ever I heard of, and a great many things that I never
did hear of. She was a woman in the prime of life ; of a severe
countenance ; and subject (particularly in the arms) to a sort of
perpetual measles or fiery rash. She had a cousin in the Life
Guards, with such long legs that he looked like the afternoon
shadow of somebody else. IJis shell-jacket was as much too
little for him as he was too big for the premises. He made the
cottage smaller than it need have been, by being so very much
out of proportion to it. Besides which, the walls were not thick,
and whenever he passed the evening at our house, we always
knew of it by hearing one continual growl in the kitchen.

Our treasure was warranted sober and honest. I am therefore
willing to believe that she was in a fit when we found her under
the boiler ; and that the deficient tea-spoons were attributable
to the dustman.

David Copperfield 595

But she preyed upon our minds dreadfully. We felt our
inexperience, and were unable to help ourselves. We should
have been at her mercy, if she had had any ; but she was
a remorseless woman, and had none. She was the cause of our
first little quarrel.

" My dearest life," I said one day to Dora, *• do you think
Mary Anne has any idea of time ? "

"Why, Doady?" inquired Dora, looking up, innocently,
from her drawing.

" My love, because it's five, and we were to have dined at
four."

Dora glanced wistfully at the clock, and hinted that she
thought it was too fast.

" On the contrary, my love," said I, referring to my watch,
" it's a few minutes too slow."

My little wife came and sat upon my knee, to coax me to be
quiet, and drew a line with her pencil down the middle of my
nose ; but I couldn't dine off that, though it was very agreeable.

" Don't you think, my dear," said I, " it would be better
for you to remonstrate with Mary Anne ? "

" Oh no, please ! I couldn't, Doady ! " said Dora.

" Why not, my love ? " I gently asked.

" Oh, because I am such a little goose," said Dora, " and she
knows I am ! "

I thought this sentiment so incompatible with the establish-
ment of any system of check on Mary Anne, that I frowned
a little.

" Oh, what ugly wrinkles in my bad boy's forehead ! " said
Dora, and still being on my knee, she traced them with her
pencil ; putting it to her rosy lips to make it mark blacker, and
working at my forehead with a quaint little mockery of being
industrious, that quite delighted me in spite of myself.

"There's a good child," said Dora, "it makes its face so
much prettier to laugh."

" But, my love," said I.

" No, no ! please ! " cried Dora, with a kiss, " don't be a
naughty Blue Beard ! Don't be serious ! "

" My precious wife," said I, " we must be serious sometimes.
Come ! Sit down on this chair, close beside me ! Give me
the pencil ! There ! Now let us talk sensibly. You know,
dear;" what a little hand it was to hold, and what a tiny
wedding-ring it was to see ! " You know, my love, it is not
exactly comfortable to have to go out without one's dinner.
Now, is it?"

596 David Copperfield

" N — n — no ! " replied Dora, faintly.

" My love, how you tremble ! "

"Because I know you're going to scold me," exclaimed
Dora, in a piteous voice.

" My sweet, I am only going to reason."

*' Oh, but reasoning is worse than scolding ! " exclaimed
Dora, in despair. " I didn't marry to be reasoned with. If
you meant to reason with such a poor little thing as I am, you
ought to have told me so, you cruel boy ! "

I tried to pacify Dora, but she turned away her face, and
shook her curls from side to side, and said, " You cruel, cruel
boy ! " so many times, that I really did not exactly know what
to do : so I took a few turns up and down the room in my
uncertainty, and came back again.

" Dora, my darling ! "

" No, I am not your darling. Because you must be sorry
that you married me, or else you wouldn't reason with me ! "
returned Dora.

I felt so injured by the inconsequential nature of this charge,
that it gave me courage to be grave.

" Now, my own Dora," said I, " you are very childish, and
are talking nonsense. You must remember, I am sure, that I
was obliged to go out yesterday when dinner was half over ;
and that, the day before, I was made quite unwell by being
obliged to eat underdone veal in a hurry ; to-day, I don't dine
at all — and I am afraid to say how long we waited for breakfast
— and then the water didn't boil. I don't mean to reproach
you, my dear, but this is not comfortable."

" Oh, you cruel, cruel boy, to say I am a disagreeable wife ! "
cried Dora.

"Now, my dear Dora, you must know that I never said
that ! "

" You said I wasn't comfortable ! " said Dora.

" I said the housekeeping was not comfortable ! "

" It's exactly the same thing ! " cried Dora. And she evidently
thought so, for she wept most grievously.

I took another turn across the room, full of love for my
pretty wife, and distracted by self-accusatory inclinations to
knock my head against the door. I sat down again, and said :

" I am not blaming you, Dora. We have both a great deal
to learn. I am only trying to show you, my dear, that you
must — you really must " (I was resolved not to give this up)
"accustom yourself to look after Mary Anne. Likewise to act
a little for yourself, and me."

David Copperfield 597

"I wonder, I do, at your making such ungrateful speeches,"
sobbed Dora. " When you know that the other day, when you
said you would like a little bit of fish, I went out myself, miles
and miles, and ordered it, to surprise you."

" And it was very kind of you, my own darling," said I.
" I felt it so much that I wouldn't on any account have even
mentioned that you bought a Salmon — which was too much
for two. Or that it cost one pound six — which was more than
we can afford."

"You enjoyed it very much," sobbed Dora. " And you said
I was a Mouse."

" And I'll say so again, my love," I returned, " a thousand
times ! "

But I had wounded Dora's soft little heart, and she was not
to be comforted. She was so pathetic in her sobbing and be-
wailing, that I felt as if I had said I don't know what to hurt her.
I was obliged to hurry away ; I was kept out late ; and I felt all
night such pangs of remorse as made me miserable. I had the
conscience of an assassin, and was haunted by a vague sense
of enormous wickedness.

It was two or three hours past midnight when I got home.
I found my aunt, in our house, sitting up for me.

" Is anything the matter, aunt ? " said I, alarmed.

" Nothing, Trot," she replied. " Sit down, sit down. Little
Blossom has been rather out of spirits, and I have been keeping
her company. That's all."

I leaned my head upon my hand ; and felt more sorry and
downcast, as I sat looking at the fire, than I could have sup-
posed possible so soon after the fulfilment of my brightest
hopes. As I sat thinking, I happened to meet my aunt's
eyes, which were resting on my face. There was an anxious
expression in them, but it cleared directly.

" I assure you, aunt," said I, " I have been quite unhappy
myself all night, to think of Dora's being so. But I had no
other intention than to speak to her tenderly and lovingly
about our home-affairs."

My aunt nodded encouragement.

" You must have patience, Trot," said she.

" Of course. Heaven knows I don't mean to be unreason-
able, aunt ! "

" No, no," said my aunt. " But Little Blossom is a very
tender little blossom, and the wind must be gentle with her."

I thanked my good aunt, in my heart, for her tenderness
towards my wife; and I was sure that she knew I did.

598 David Copperfield

*• Don't you think, aunt," said I, after some further con-
templation of the fire, "that you could advise and counsel
Dora a little, for our mutual advantage, now and then ? "

" Trot," returned my aunt, with some emotion, "no ! Don't
ask me such a thing."

Her tone was so very earnest that I raised my eyes in
surprise.

" I look back on my life, child," said my aunt, " and I think
of some who are in their graves, with whom I might have been
on kinder terms. If I judged harshly of other people's mis-
takes in marriage, it may have been because I had bitter reason
to judge harshly of my own. Let that pass. I have been a
grumpy, frumpy, wayward sort of a woman, a good many years.
I am still, and I always shall be. But you and I have done
one another some good. Trot — at all events, you have done me
good, my dear; and division must not come between us, at
this time of day."

" Division between us I " cried I.

" Child, child ! " said my aunt, smoothing her dress, " how
soon it might come between us, or how unhappy I might
make our Little Blossom, if I meddled in anything, a prophet
couldn't say. I want our pet to like me, and be as gay as a
butterfly. Remember your own home, in that second mar-
riage ; and never do both me and her the injury you have
hinted at!"

I comprehended, at once, that my aunt was right ; and I
comprehended the full extent of her generous feeling towards
my dear wife.

" These are early days, Trot," she pursued, " and Rome was
not built in a day, nor in a year. You have chosen freely for
yourself;" a cloud passed over her face for a moment, I
thought ; " and you have chosen a very pretty and a very
affectionate creature. It will be your duty, and it will be your
pleasure too — of course I know that ; I am not delivering a
lecture — to estimate her (as you chose her) by the qualities she
has, and not by the qualities she may not have. The latter you
must develop in her, if you can. And if you cannot, child,'*
here my aunt rubbed her nose, " you must just accustom your-
self to do without 'em. But remember, my dear, your future
is between you two. No one can assist you ; you are to work
it out for yourselves. This is marriage, Trot ; and Heaven
bless you both in it, for a pair of babes in the wood as you are ! "

My aunt said this in a sprightly way, and gave me a kiss to
ratify the blessing.

David Copperfield 599

" Now," said she, " light my little lantern, and see me into my
bandbox by the garden path ; " for there was a communication
between our cottages in that direction. " Give Betsey Trot-
wood's love to Blossom, when you come back; and whatever
you do, Trot, never dream of setting Betsey up as a scarecrow,
for if / ever saw her in the glass, she's quite grim enough and
gaunt enough in her private capacity ! "

With this my aunt tied her head up in a handkerchief, with
which she was accustomed to make a bundle of it on such
occasions; and I escorted her home. As she stood in her
garden, holding up her little lantern to light me back, I thought
her observation of me had an anxious air again ; but I was too
much occupied in pondering on what she had said, and too
much impressed — for the first time, in reality — by the con-
viction that Dora and I had indeed to work out our future for
ourselves, and that no one could assist us, to take much notice
of it.

Dora came stealing down in her little slippers, to meet me,
now that I was alone ; and cried upon my shoulder, and said I
had been hard-hearted and she had been naughty ; and I said
much the same thing in effect, I believe ; and we made it up,
and agreed that our first little difference was to be our last, and
that we were never to have another if we lived a hundred years.

The next domestic trial we went through, was the Ordeal of
Servants. Mary Anne's cousin deserted into our coal-hole, and
was brought out, to our great amazement, by a piquet of his
companions in arms, who took him away handcuffed in a pro-
cession that covered our front-garden with ignominy. This
nerved me to get rid of Mary Anne, who went so mildly, on
receipt of wages, that I was surprised, until I found out about
the tea-spoons, and also about the little sums she had borrowed
in my name of the tradespeople without authority. After an
interval of Mrs. Kidgerbury — the oldest inhabitant of Kentish
Town, I believe, who went out charing, but was too feeble to
execute her conceptions of that art — we found another treasure,
who was one of the most amiable of women, but who generally
made a point of falling either up or down the kitchen stairs
with the tray, and almost plunged into the parlour, as into a
bath, with the tea-things. The ravages committed by this
unfortunate rendering her dismissal necessary, she was suc-
ceeded (with intervals of Mrs. Kidgerbury) by a long line of
Incapables ; terminating in a young person of genteel appear-
ance, who went to Greenwich Fair in Dora's bonnet. After
whom I remember nothing but an average equality of failure.

6oo David Copperfield

Everybody we had anything to do with seemed to cheat us.
Our appearance in a shop was a signal for the damaged goods
to be brought out immediately. If we bought a lobster, it was
full of water. All our meat turned out to be tough, and there
was hardly any crust to our loaves. In search of the principle
on which joints ought to be roasted, to be roasted enough, and
not too much, I myself referred to the Cookery Book, and
found it there established as the allowance of a quarter of an
hour to every pound, and say a quarter over. But the principle
always failed us by some curious fatality, and we never could
hit any medium between redness and cinders.

I had reason to believe that in accomplishing these failures
we incurred a far greater expense than if we had achieved a
series of triumphs. It appeared to me, on looking over the
tradesmen's books, as if we might have kept the basement story
paved with butter, such was the extensive scale of our con-
sumption of that article. I don't know whether the Excise
returns of the period may have exhibited any increase in the
demand for pepper ; but if our performances did not affect the
market, I should say several families must have left off using
it. And the most wonderful fact of all was, that we never had
anything in the house.

As to the washerwoman pawning the clothes, and coming in
a state of penitent intoxication to apologise, I suppose that
might have happened several times to anybody. Also the
chimney on fire, the parish engine, and perjury on the part of
the Beadle. But I apprehend that we were personally unfor-
tunate in engaging a servant with a taste for cordials, who
swelled our running account for porter at the public-house by
such inexplicable items as " quartern rum shrub (Mrs. C.) ; "
*' Half-quartern gin and cloves (Mrs. C.) ; " " Glass rum and
peppermint (Mrs. C.) " — the parentheses always referring to
Dora, who was supposed, it appeared on explanation, to have
imbibed the whole of these refreshments.

One of our first feats in the housekeeping way was a little
dinner to Traddles. I met him in town, and asked him to
walk out with me that afternoon. He readily consenting, I
wrote to Dora, saying I would bring him home. It was"
pleasant weather, and on the road we made my domestic
happiness the theme of conversation. Traddles was very full
of it ; and said, that, picturing himself with such a home, and
Sophy waiting and preparing for him, he could think of nothing
wanting to complete his bliss.

I could not have wished for a prettier little wife at the

David Copperfield 6oi

opposite end of the table, but I certainly could have wished,
when we sate down, for a little more room. I did not know
how it was, but though there were only two of us, we were at
once always cramped for room, and yet had always room
enough to lose everything in. I suspect it may have been
because nothing had a place of its own, except Jip's pagoda,
which invariably blocked up the main thoroughfare. On the
present occasion, Traddles was so hemmed in by the pagoda
and the guitar-case, and Dora's flower-painting, and my writing-
table, that I had serious doubts of the possibility of his using
his knife and fork ; but he protested, with his own good-humour,
" Oceans of room, Copperfield ! I assure you, Oceans ! "

There was another thing I could have wished ; namely, that
Jip had never been encouraged to walk about the table-cloth
during dinner. I began to think there was something disorderly
in his being there at all, even if he had not been in the habit
of putting his foot in the salt or the melted-butter. On this
occasion he seemed to think he was introduced expressly to
keep Traddles at bay ; and he barked at my old friend, and
made short runs at his plate, with such undaunted pertinacity,
that he may be said to have engrossed the conversation.

However, as I knew how tender-hearted my dear Dora was,
and how sensitive she would be to any slight upon her
favourite, I hinted no objection. For similar reasons I made
no allusion to the skirmishing plates upon the floor ; or to the
disreputable appearance of the castors, which were all at sixes
and sevens, and looked drunk ; or to the further blockade of
Traddles by wandering vegetable dishes and jugs. I could not
help wondering in my own mind, as I contemplated the boiled
leg of mutton before me, previous to carving it, how it came
to pass that our joints of meat were of such extraordinary shapes
— and whether our butcher contracted for all the deformed
sheep that came into the world ; but I kept my reflections to
myself.

" My love," said I to Dora, " what have you got in that dish ? "

I could not imagine why Dora had been making tempting
little faces at me, as if she wanted to kiss me.

" Oysters, dear," said Dora, timidly.

" Was that your thought ? " said I, delighted.

" Ye-yes, Doady," said Dora.

" There never was a happier one ! " I exclaimed, laying down
the carving-knife and fork. " There is nothing Traddles likes
so much ! "

" Ye-yes, Doady," said Dora, " and so I bought a beautiful

6o2 David Copperfield

little barrel of them, and the man said they were very good.
But I — I am afraid there's something the matter with them.
They don't seem right." Here Dora shook her head, and
diamonds twinkled in her eyes.

"They are only opened in both shells," said I. " Take the
top one off, my love."

"But it won't come off," said Dora, trying very hard, and
looking very much distressed.

"Do you know, Copperfield," said Traddles, cheerfully
examining the dish, "I think it is in consequence — they are
capital oysters, but I think it is in consequence — of their never
having been opened."

They never had been opened ; and we had no oyster-knives
— and couldn't have used them if we had ; so we looked at the
oysters and ate the mutton. At least we ate as much of it as
was done, and made up with capers. If I had permitted him,
I am satisfied that Traddles would have made a perfect savage
of himself, and eaten a plateful of raw meat, to express enjoy-
ment of the repast ; but I would hear of no such immolation
on the altar of friendship; and we had a course of bacon
instead; there happening, by good fortune, to be cold bacon
in the larder.

My poor little wife was in such affliction when she thought I
should be annoyed, and in such a state of joy when she found
I was not, that the discomfiture I had subdued very soon
vanished, and we passed a happy evening ; Dora sitting with
her arm on my chair while Traddles and I discussed a glass of
wine, and taking every opportunity of whispering in my ear
that it was so good of me not to be a cruel, cross old boy.
By-and-bye she made tea for us ; which it was so pretty to see
her do, as if she was busying herself with a set of doll's tea-
things, that I was not particular about the quality of the
beverage. Then Traddles and I played a game or two at
cribbage ; and Dora singing to the guitar the while, it seemed
to me as if our courtship and marriage were a tender dream of
mine, and the night when I first listened to her voice were not
yet over.

When Traddles went away, and I came back into the parlour
from seeing him out, my wife planted her chair close to mine,
and sat down by my side.

"I am very sorry," she said. "Will you try to teach me,
Doady?"

" I must teach myself first, Dora," said I. " I am as bad as
you, love."

David Copperfield 603

"Ah! But you can learn," she returned; "and you are a
clever, clever man ! "

" Nonsense, mouse ! " said I.

" I wish," resumed my wife, after a long silence, "that I could
have gone down into the country for a whole year, and lived
with Agnes I '*

Her hands were clasped upon my shoulder, and her chin
rested on them, and her blue eyes locked quietly into mine.

"Why so?" I asked.

" I think she might have improA ed me, and I think I might
have learned from her" said Dora.

"All in good time, my love. Agnes has had her father to
Xake care of for these many years, you should remember. Even
when she was quite a child, she was the Agnes whom we know,"
said I.

" Will you call me a name I want you to call me ? " inquired
Dora, without moving.

"What is it?" I asked with a smile.

"It's a stupid name," she said, shaking her curls for a
moment. " Child-wife."

I laughingly asked my child-wife what her fancy was in
desiring to be so called. She answered without moving,
otherwise than as the arm I twined about her may have
brought her blue eyes nearer to me:

"I don't mean, you silly fellow, that you should use the
name instead of Dora. I only mean that you should think of
me that way. When you are going to be angry with me, say to
yourself, ' it's only my child-wife ! ' When I am very disappoint-
ing, say, * I knew, a long time ago, that she would make but a
child- wife ! ' When you miss what I should like to be, and I
think can never be, say, * still my foolish child-wife loves me ! '
For indeed I do."

I had not been serious with her ; having no idea, until now,
that she was serious herself. But her affectionate nature was
so happy in what I now said to her with my whole heart, that
her face became a laughing one before her glittering eyes were
dry. She was soon my child-wife indeed ; sitting down on the
floor outside the Chinese House, ringing all the little bells one
after another, to punish Jip for his recent bad behaviour ; while
Jip lay blinking in the doorway with his head out, even too lazy
to be teased.

This appeal of Dora's made a strong impression on me. I
look back on the time I write of; I invoke the innocent figure
that I dearly loved, to come out from the mists and shadows

6o4 David Copperfield

of the past, and turn its gentle head towards me once again ;
and I can still declare that this one little speech was constantly
in my memory. I may not have used it to the best account ;
I was young and inexperienced ; but I never turned a deaf ear
to its artless pleading.

Dora told me, shortly afterwards, that she was going to be a
wonderful housekeeper. Accordingly, she polished the tablets,
pointed the pencil, bought an immense account-book, carefully
stitched up with a needle and thread all the leaves of the
Cookery Book which Jip had torn, and made quite a desperate
little attempt " to be good," as she called it. But the figures
had the old obstinate propensity — they would not add up.
When she had entered two or three laborious items in the
account-book, Jip would walk over the page, wagging his tail,
and smear them all out. Her own little right-hand middle
finger got steeped to the very bone in ink; and I think that
was the only decided result obtained.

Sometimes, of an evening, when I was at home and at work
— for I wrote a good deal now, and was beginning in a small
way to be known as a writer — I would lay down my pen, and
watch my child-wife trying to be good. First of all, she would
bring out the immense account-book, and lay it down upon the
table, with a deep sigh. Then she would open it at the place
where Jip had made it illegible last night, and call Jip up to
look at his misdeeds. This would occasion a diversion in Jip's
favour, and some inking of his nose, perhaps, as a penalty.
Then she would tell Jip to lie down on the table instantly,
"like a lion" — which was one of his tricks, though I cannot
say the likeness was striking — and, if he were in an obedient
humour, he would obey. Then she would take up a pen, and
begin to write, and find a hair in it. Then she would take up
another pen, and begin to write, and find that it spluttered.
Then she would take up another pen, and begin to write, and
say in a low voice, "Oh, it's a talking pen, and will disturb
Doady ! " And then she would give it up as a bad job, and
put the account-book away, after pretending to crush the lion
with it.

Or, if she were in a very sedate and serious state of mind,
she would sit down with the tablets, and a little basket of bills
and other documents, which looked more like curl-papers than
anything else, and endeavour to get some result out of them.
After severely comparing one with another, and making entries
on the tablets, and blotting them out, and counting all the
fingers of her left hand over and over again, backwards and

David Copperfield 605

forwards, she would be so vexed and discouraged, and would
look so unhappy, that it gave me pain to see her bright face
clouded — and for me! — and I would go softly to her, and
say :

" What's the matter, Dora ? "

.Dora would look up hopelessly, and reply, "They won't
come right. They make my head ache so. And they won't
do anything I want ! "

Then I would say, " Now let us try together. Let me show
you, Dora."

Then I would commence a practical demonstration, to which
Dora would pay profound attention, perhaps for five minutes ;
when she would begin to be dreadfully tired, and would lighten
the subject by curling my hair, or trying the effect of my face
with my shirt- collar turned down. If I tacitly checked this
playfulness, and persisted, she would look so scared and dis-
consolate, as she became more and more bewildered, that the
remembrance of her natural gaiety when I first strayed into her
path, and of her being my child-wife, would come reproachfully
upon me ; and I would lay the pencil down, and call for the
guitar.

I had a great deal of work to do, and had many anxieties,
but the same considerations made me keep them to myself.
I am far from sure, now, that it was right to do this, but I did
it for my child-wife's sake. I search my breast, and I commit
its secrets, if I know them, without any reservation to this paper.
The old unhappy loss or want of something had, I am con-
scious, some place in my heart ; but not to the embitterment
of my life. When I walked alone in the fine weather, and
thought of the summer days when all the air had been filled
with my boyish enchantment, I did miss something of the
realisation of my dreams ; but I thought it was a softened
glory of the Past, which nothing could have thrown upon the
present time. I did feel, sometimes, for a little while, that I
could have wished my wife had been my counsellor : had had
more character and purpose, to sustain me, and improve me by ;
had been endowed with power to fill up the void which some-
where seemed to be about me ; but I felt as if this were an
unearthly consummation of ray happiness, that never had been
meant to be, and never could have been.

I was a boyish husband as to years. I had known the
softening influence of no other sorrows or experiences than
those recorded in these leaves. If I did any wrong, as I may
have done much, I did it in mistaken love, and in my want of

6o6 David Copperfield

wisdom. I write the exact truth. It would avail me nothing
to extenuate it now.

Thus it was that I took upon myself the toils and cares of
our life, and had no partner in them. We lived much as
before, in reference to our scrambling household arrangements ;
but I had got used to those, and Dora I was pleased to see
was seldom vexed now. She was bright and cheerful in the
old childish way, loved me dearly, and was happy with her old
trifles.

When the debates were heavy — I mean as to length, not
quality, for in the last respect they were not often otherwise —
and I went home late, Dora would never rest when she heard
my footsteps, but would always come down-stairs to meet me.
When my evenings were unoccupied by the pursuit for which I
had qualified myself with so much pains, and I was engaged in
writing at home, she would sit quietly near me, however late
the hour, and be so mute, that I would often think she had
dropped asleep. But generally, when I raised my head, I saw
her blue eyes looking at me with the quiet attention of which I
have already spoken.

" Oh, what a weary boy ! " said Dora one night, when I met
her eyes as I was shutting up my desk.

" What a weary girl ! " said I. " That's more to the purpose.
You must go to bed another time, my love. It's far too late for
you."

" No, don't send me to bed ! " pleaded Dora, coming to my
side. " Pray, don't do that ! "

"Dora!"

To my amazement she was sobbing on my neck.

*' Not well, my dear ! not happy ! "

" Yes ! quite well, and very happy ! " said Dora. " But say
you'll let me stop, and see you write."

"Why, what a sight for such bright eyes at midnight," I
replied.

" Are they bright, though ? " returned Dora, laughing. " I'm
so glad they're bright."

" Little Vanity ! " said I.

But it was not vanity ; it was only harmless delight in my
admiration. I knew that very well, before she told me so.

" If you think them pretty, say I may always stop, and see
you write ! " said Dora. " Do you think them pretty ? "

" Very pretty."

" Then let me always stop and see you write."

" I am afraid that won't improve their brightness, Dora."

David Copperfield 607

" Yes, it will ! Because, you clever boy, you'll not forget me
then, while you are full of silent fancies. Will you mind it, if
I say something very, very silly ? — more than usual ? " inquired
Dora, peeping over my shoulder into my face.

" What wonderful thing is that ? " said I.

" Please let me hold the pens," said Dora. " I want to have
something to do with all those many hours when you are so
industrious. May I hold the pens?"

The remembrance of her pretty joy when I said Yes, brings
tears into my eyes. The next time I sat down to write, and
regularly afterwards, she sat in her old place, with a spare
bundle of pens at her side. Her triumph in this connexion
with my work, and her delight when I wanted a new pen —
which I very often feigned to do — suggested to me a new way
of pleasing my child-wife. I occasionally made a pretence of
wanting a page or two of manuscript copied. Then Dora was
in her glory. The preparations she made for this great work,
the aprons she put on, the bibs she borrowed from the kitchen
to keep off the ink, the time she took, the innumerable stop-
pages she made to have a laugh with Jip as if he understood it
all, her conviction that her work was incomplete unless she
signed her name at the end, and the way in which she would
bring it to me, like a school-copy, and then, when I praised it,
clasp me round the neck, are touching recollections to me,
simple as they might appear to other men.

She took possession of the keys soon after this, and went
jingling about the house with the whole bunch, in a little
basket, tied to her slender waist. I seldom found that the
places to which they belonged were locked, or that they were of
any use except as a plaything for Jip — but Dora was pleased,
and that pleased me. She was quite satisfied that a good
deal was effected by this make-belief of housekeeping; and
was as merry as if we had been keeping a baby-house for a
joke.

So we went on. Dora was hardly less affectionate to my
aunt than to me, and often told her of the time when she was
"a cross old thing." I never saw my aunt unbend more
systematically to any one. She courted Jip, though Jip never
responded; listened, day after day, to the guitar, though
I am afraid she had no taste for music ; never attacked
the Incapables, though the temptation must have been severe ;
went wonderful distances on foot to purchase, as surprises, any
trifles that she found out Dora wanted ; and never came in by
the garden, and missed her from the room, but she would call

6o8 David Copperfield

out, at the foot of the stairs, in a voice that sounded cheerfully
all over the house —

" Where's Little Blossom ? "

CHAPTER XLV

MR. DICK FULFILS MY AUNt's PREDICTIONS

It was some time now, since I had left the Doctor. Living in
his neighbourhood, 1 saw him frequently ; and we all went to
his house on two or three occasions to dinner or tea. The Old
Soldier was in permanent quarters under the Doctor's roof.
She was exactly the same as ever, and the same immortal
butterflies hovered over her cap.

Like some other mothers, whom I have known in the course
of my life, Mrs. Markleham was far more fond of pleasure than
her daughter was. She required a great deal of amusement,
and, like a deep old soldier, pretended, in consulting her own
inclinations, to be devoting herself to her child. The Doctor's
desire that Annie should be entertained, was therefore particu-
larly acceptable to this excellent parent; who expressed
unqualified approval of his discretion.

I have no doubt, indeed, that she probed the Doctor's wound
without knowing it. Meaning nothing but a certain matured
frivolity and selfishness, not always inseparable from full-blown
years, I think she confirmed him in his fear that he was a con-
straint upon his young wife, and that there was no congeniality
of feeling between them, by so strongly commending his design
of lightening the load of her life.

" My dear soul," she said to him one day when I was present,
" you know there is no doubt it would be a little pokey for
Annie to be always shut up here."

The Doctor nodded his benevolent head.

" When she comes to her mother's age," said Mrs. Markle-
ham, with a flourish of her fan, " then it'll be another thing.
You might put me into a Jail, with genteel society and a rubber,
and I should never care to come out. But I am not Annie,
you know ; and Annie is not her mother."

" Surely, surely," said the doctor.

"You are the best of creatures — no, I beg your pardon !"
for the Doctor made a gesture of deprecation, " I must say
before your face, as I always say behind your back, you are the

David Copperfield 609

best of creatures ; but of course you don't — now do you ? — enter

into the same pursuits and fancies as Annie."

'*No," said the Doctor, in a sorrowful tone.

" No, of course not," retorted the Old Soldier. " Take your
Dictionary, for example. What a useful work a Dictionary is !
What a necessary work ! The meanings of words ! Without
Doctor Johnson, or somebody of that sort, we might have been
at this present moment calling an Italian-iron a bedstead. But
we can't expect a Dictionary — especially when it's making — to
interest Annie, can we ? "

The Doctor shook his head.

" And that's why I so much approve," said Mrs. Markleham,
tapping him on the shoulder with her shut-up fan, " of your
thoughtfulness. It shows that you don't expect, as many
elderly people do expect, old heads on young shoulders. You
have studied Annie's character, and you understand it. Thafs
what I find so charming ! "

Even the calm and patient face of Doctor Strong expressed
some little sense of pain, I thought, under the infliction of
these compliments.

" Therefore, my dear Doctor," said the Soldier, giving him
several affectionate taps, " you may command me, at all times
and seasons. Now, do understand that I am entirely at your
service. I am ready to go with Annie to operas, concerts,
exhibitions, all kinds of places ; and you shall never find that
I am tired. Duty, my dear Doctor, before every consideration
in the universe ! "

She was as good as her word. She was one of those people
who can bear a great deal of pleasure, and she never flinched
in her perseverance in the cause. She seldom got hold of
the newspaper (which she settled herself down in the softest
chair in the house to read through an eye-glass, every day,
for two hours), but she found out something that she was
certain Annie would like to see. It was in vain for Annie
to protest that she was weary of such things. Her mother's
remonstrance always was, "Now, my dear Annie, I am sure
you know better; and I must tell you, my love, that you
are not making a proper return for the kindness of Doctor
Strong."

This was usually said in the Doctor's presence, and appeared
to me to constitute Annie's principal inducement for withdraw-
ing her objections when she made any. But in general she
resigned herself to her mother, and went where the Old
Soldier would.

6io David Copperfield

It rarely happened now that Mr. Maldon accompanied
them. Sometimes my aunt and Dora were invited to do so,
and accepted the invitation. Sometimes Dora only was asked.
The time had been when I should have been uneasy in her
going; but reflection on what had passed that former night
in the Doctor's study, had made a change in my mistrust.
I believed that the Doctor was right, and I had no worse
suspicions.

My aunt rubbed her nose sometimes when she happened
to be alone with me, and said she couldn't make it out ; she
wished they were happier ; she didn't think our military friend
(so she always called the Old Soldier) mended the matter at
all. My aunt further expressed her opinion, "that if our
military friend would cut off those butterflies, and give 'em
to the chimney-sweepers for May-day, it would look like the
beginning of something sensible on her part."

But her abiding reliance was on Mr. Dick. That man
had evidently an idea in his head, she said ; and if he could
only once pen it up into a corner, which was his great
difficulty, he would distinguish himself in some extraordinary
manner.

Unconscious of this prediction, Mr. Dick continued to
occupy precisely the same ground in reference to the Doctor
and to Mrs. Strong. He seemed neither to advance nor to
recede. He appeared to have settled into his original found-
ation, like a building; and I must confess that my faith in
his ever moving, was not much greater than if he had been
a building.

But one night, when I had been married some months, Mr.
Dick put his head into the parlour, where I was writing alone
(Dora having gone out with my aunt to take tea with the two
little birds), and said, with a significant cough :

"You couldn't speak to me without inconveniencing your-
self, Trotwood, I am afraid?"

" Certainly, Mr. Dick," said I ; " come in ! "

" Trotwood," said Mr. Dick, laying his finger on the side
of his nose, after he had shaken hands with me. "Before
I sit down, I wish to make an observation. You know
your aunt ? "

" A little," I replied.

" She is the most wonderful woman in the world, sir ! '*

After the delivery of this communication, which he shot out
of himself as if he were loaded with it, Mr. Dick sat down with
greater gravity than usual, and looked at me.

David Copperfield 6ii

" Now, boy," said Mr. Dick, " I am going to put a question
to you."

" As many as you please," said I.

" What do you consider me, sir ? " asked Mr. Dick, folding
his arms.

" A dear old friend," said I.

" Thank you, Trotwood," returned Mr. Dick, laughing, and
reaching across in high glee to shake hands with me. " But
I mean, boy," resuming his gravity, " what do you consider me
in this respect ? " touching his forehead.

I was puzzled how to answer, but he helped me with a word.

"Weak? "said Mr. Dick. ,

" Well," I replied, dubiously. « Rather so."

" Exactly ! " cried Mr. Dick, who seemed quite enchanted by
my reply. " That is, Trotwood, when they took some of the
trouble out of you-know-who's head, and put it you know where,

there was a " Mr. Dick made his two hands revolve very

fast about each other a great number of times, and then brought
them into collision, and rolled them over and over one another,
to express confusion. " There was that sort of thing done to
me somehow. Eh ? '*

I nodded at him, and he nodded back again.

" In short, boy," said Mr. Dick, dropping his voice to a
whisper, "I am simple."

I would have qualified that conclusion, but he stopped me.

"Yes, I am! She pretends I am not. She won't hear of
it ; but I am. I know I am. If she hadn't stood my friend,
sir, I should have been shut up, to lead a dismal life these
many years. But I'll provide for her! I never spend the
copying money. I put it in a box. I have made a will. I'll
leave it all to her. She shall be rich — noble ! "

Mr. Dick took out his pocket-handkerchief, and wiped his
eyes. He then folded it up with great care, pressed it smooth
between his two hands, put it in his pocket, and seemed to put
my aunt away with it.

" Now you are a scholar, Trotwood," said Mr. Dick. " You
are a fine scholar. You know what a learned man, what a
great man, the Doctor is. You know what honour he has
always done me. Not proud in his wisdom. Humble, humble
— condescending even to poor Dick, who is simple and knows
nothing. I have sent his name up, on a scrap of paper, to the
kite, along the string, when it has been in the sky, among the
larks. The kite has been glad to receive it, sir, and the sky
lias been brighter with it."

6i2 David Copperfield

I delighted him by saying, most heartily, that the Doctor was
deserving of our best respect and highest esteem.

" And his beautiful wife is a star," said Mr. Dick. " A
shining star. I have seen her shine, sir. But," bringing his
chair nearer, and laying one hand upon my knee — " clouds,
sir — clouds."

I answered the solicitude which his face expressed, by
conveying the same expression into my own, and shaking
my head.

" What clouds ? " said Mr. Dick.

He looked so wistfully into my face, and was so anxious
to understand, th^t I took great pains to answer him slowly
and distinctly, as I might have entered on an explanation to
a child.

"There is some unfortunate division between them," I
replied. " Some unhappy cause of separation. A secret. It
may be inseparable from the discrepancy in their years. It may
have grown out of almost nothing."

Mr. Dick, who told off every sentence with a thoughtful nod,
paused when I had done, and sat considering, with his eyes
upon my face, and his hand upon my knee.

" Doctor not angry with her, Trotwood ? " he said, after
some time.

" No. Devoted to her."

" Then, I have got it, boy ! " said Mr. Dick.

The sudden exultation with which he slapped me on the
knee, and leaned back in his chair, with his eyebrows lifted up
as high as he could possibly lift them, made me think him
farther out of his wits than ever. He became as suddenly
grave again, and leaning forward as before, said — first respect-
fully taking out his pocket-handkerchief, as if it really did
represent my aunt:

" Most wonderful woman in the world, Trotwood. Why has
she done nothing to set things right ? "

" Too delicate and difficult a subject for such interference,"
I replied.

" Fine scholar," said Mr. Dick, touching me with his finger.
" Why has he done nothing?"

" For the same reason," I returned.

" Then, I have got it, boy ! " said Mr. Dick. And he stood
up before me, more exultingly than before, nodding his head,
and striking himself repeatedly upon the breast, until one might
have supposed that he had nearly nodded and struck all the
breath out of his body.

David Copperfield 613

" A poor fellow with a craze, sir," said Mr. Dick, " a simple-
ton, a weak-minded person — present company, you know ! "
striking himself again, " may do what wonderful people may
not do. I'll bring them together, boy. FU try. They'll not
blame me. They'll not object to me. They'll not mind what
/do, if it's wrong. I'm only Mr. Dick. And who minds
Dick ? Dick's nobody ! Whoo ! " He blew a slight, contemptu-
ous breath, as if he blew himself away.

It was fortunate he had proceeded so far with his mystery,
for we heard the coach stop at the little garden gate, which
brought my aunt and Dora home.

" Not a word, boy ! " he pursued in a whisper ; *' leave all
the blame with Dick — simple Dick — mad Dick. I have been
thinking, sir, for some time, that I was getting it, and now I
have got it. After what you have said to me, I am sure I have
got it. All right ! "

Not another word did Mr. Dick utter on the subject ; but he
made a very telegraph of himself for the next half-hour (to the
great disturbance of my aunt's mind), to enjoin inviolable
secrecy on me.

To my surprise, I heard no more about it for some two or
three weeks, though I was sufficiently interested in the result of
his endeavours ; descrying a strange gleam of good sense — I
say nothing of good feeling, for that he always exhibited — in
the conclusion to which he had come. At last I began to
believe, that, in the flighty and unsettled state of his mind, he
had either forgotten his intention or abandoned it.

One fair evening, when Dora was not inclined to go out, my
aunt and I strolled up to the Doctor's cottage. It was autumn,
when there were no debates to vex the evening air; and I
remember how the leaves smelt like our garden at Blunderstone
as we trod them under foot, and how the old, unhappy feeling
seemed to go by, on the sighing wind.

It was twilight when we reached the cottage. Mrs. Strong
was just coming out of the garden, where Mr. Dick yet lingered,
busy with his knife, helping the gardener to point some stakes.
The Doctor was engaged with some one in his study ; but the
visitor would be gone directly, Mrs. Strong said, and begged
us to remain and see him. We went into the drawing-room
with her, and sat down by the darkening window. There was
never any ceremony about the visits of such old friends and
neighbours as we were.

We had not sat here many minutes, when Mrs. Markleham,
who usually contrived to be in a fuss about something, came

6 14 David Copperfield

bustling in, with her newspaper in her hand, and said, out of
breath, " My goodness gracious, Annie, why didn't you tell me
there was some one in the Study ! "

" My dear mama," she quietly returned, "how could I know
that you desired the information ? "

" Desired the information ! " said Mrs. Markleham, sinking
on the sofa. " I never had such a turn in all my life ! "

" Have you been to the Study, then, mama ? " asked
Annie.

" Been to the Study, my dear ! " she returned emphatically.
" Indeed I have ! I came upon the amiable creature — if you'll
imagine my feelings. Miss Trotwood and David — in the act of
making his will."

Her daughter looked round from the window quickly.

" In the act, my dear Annie," repeated Mrs. Markleham,
spreading the newspaper on her lap like a table-cloth, and
patting her hands upon it, "of making his last Will and
Testament. The foresight and affection of the dear ! I must
tell you how it was. I really must, in justice to the darling —
for he is nothing less! — tell you how it was. Perhaps you
know. Miss Trotwood, that there is never a candle lighted in
this house, until one's eyes are literally falling out of one's head
with being stretched to read the paper. And that there is not
a chair in this house, in which a paper can be what / call, read,
except one in the Study. This took me to the Study, where I
saw a light. I opened the door. In company with the dear
Doctor were two professional people, evidently connected with
the law, and they were all three standing at the table: the
darling Doctor pen in hand. 'This simply expresses then,'
said the Doctor — Annie, my love, attend to the very words —
* this simply expresses then, gentlemen, the confidence I have
in Mrs. Strong, and gives her all unconditionally?' One of
the professional people replied, 'And gives her all uncondition-
ally.' Upon that, with the natural feelings of a mother, I said,
' Good God, I beg your pardon ! ' fell over the door-step, and
came away through the little back passage where the pantry is."
Mrs. Strong opened the window, and went out into the
verandah, where she stood leaning against a pillar.

" But now isn't it. Miss Trotwood, isn't it, David, invigor-
ating," said Mrs. Markleham, mechanically following her with
her eyes, " to find a man at Doctor Strong's time of life, with
the strength of mind to do this kind of thing ? It only shows
how right I was. I said to Annie, when Dr. Strong paid a
very flattering visit to myself, and made her the subject of a

David Copperfield 615

declaration and an offer, I said, ' My dear, there is no doubt
whatever, in my opinion, with reference to a suitable provision
for you, that Doctor Strong will do more than he binds
himself to do.'"

Here the bell rang, and we heard the sound of the visitors*
feet as they went out.

" It's all over, no doubt," said the Old Soldier, after listening;
" the dear creature has signed, sealed, and delivered, and his
mind's at rest. Well it may be ! What a mind ! Annie, my
love, I am going to the Study with my paper, for I am a poor
creature without news. Miss Trotwood, David, pray come and
see the Doctor."

I was conscious of Mr. Dick's standing in the shadow of the
room, shutting up his knife, when we accompanied her to the
Study; and of my aunt's rubbing her nose violently, by the
way, as a mild vent for her intolerance of our military friend ;
but who got first into the Study, or how Mrs. Markleham
settled herself in a moment in her easy chair, or how my aunt
and I came to be left together near the door (unless her eyes
were quicker than mine, and she held me back), I have
forgotten if I ever knew. But this I know, — that we saw the
Doctor before he saw us, sitting at his table, among the folio
volumes in which he delighted, resting his head calmly on his
hand. That, in the same moment, we saw Mrs. Strong glide
in, pale and trembling. That Mr. Dick supported her on his
arm. That he laid his other hand upon the Doctor's arm,
causing him to look up with an abstracted air. That, as the
Doctor moved his head, his wife dropped down on one knee
at his feet, and, with her hands imploringly lifted, fixed upon
his face the memorable look I had never forgotten. That at
this sight Mrs. Markleham dropped the newspaper, and stared
more like a figure-head intended for a ship to be called The
Astonishment, than anything else I can think of.

The gentleness of the Doctor's maimer and surprise, the
dignity that mingled with the supplicating attitude of his
wife, the amiable concern of Mr. Dick, and the earnestness
with which my aunt said to herself, " That man mad ! "
(triumphantly expressive of the misery fi-om which she had
saved him) — I see and hear, rather than remember, as I write
about it.

"Doctor!" said Mr. Dick. "What is it that's amiss?
Look here!"

" Annie ! " cried the Doctor. " Not at my feet, my dear ! "

" Yes 1 " she said. " I beg and pray that no one will leave

6i6 David Copperfield

the room ! Oh, my husband and father, break this long
silence. Let us both know what it is that has come between
us!"

Mrs. Markleham, by this time recovering the power of
speech, and seeming to swell with family pride and motherly
indignation, here exclaimed, "Annie, get up immediately,
and don't disgrace everybody belonging to you by humbling
yourself Uke that, unless you wish to see me go out of my
mind on the spot ! "

" Mama ! " returned Annie. " Waste no words on me,
for my appeal is to my husband, and even you are nothing
here."

" Nothing ! " exclaimed Mrs. Markleham. '* Me, nothing !
The child has taken leave of her senses. Please to get me
a glass of water ! "

I was too attentive to the Doctor and his wife, to give any
heed to this request ; and it made no impression on anybody
else ; so Mrs. Markleham panted, stared, and fanned herself.

" Annie ! " said the Doctor, tenderly taking her in his
hands. " My dear ! If any unavoidable change has come,
in the sequence of time, upon our married life, you are not
to blame. The fault is mine, and only mine. There is no
change in my affection, admiration, and respect. I wish to
make you happy. I truly love and honour you. Rise, Annie,
pray ! "

But she did not rise. After looking at him for a little while,
she sank down closer to him, laid her arm across his knee,
and dropping her head upon it, said :

" If I have any friend here, who can speak one word for
me, or for my husband in this matter ; if I have any friend
here, who can give a voice to any suspicion that my heart has
sometimes whispered to me ; if I have any friend here, who
honours my husband, or has ever cared for me, and has
anything within his knowledge, no matter what it is, that
may help to mediate between us, — I implore that friend to
speak ! "

There was a profound silence. After a few moments of
painful hesitation, I broke the silence.

" Mrs. Strong," I said, " there is something within my
knowledge, which I have been earnestly entreated by Doctor
Strong to conceal, and have concealed until to-night. But
I believe the time has come when it would be mistaken faith
and delicacy to conceal it any longer, and when your appeal
absolves me from his injunction."

David Copperfield 617

She turned "her face towards me for a moment, and I knew
that I was right. I could not have resisted its entreaty, il
the assurance that it gave me had been less convincing.

"Our future peace," she said, "may be in your hands.
I trust it confidently to your not suppressing anything. I
know beforehand that nothing you, or any one, can tell me,
will show my husband's noble heart in any other light than
one. Howsoever it may seem to you to touch me, disregard
that I will speak for myself, before him, and before God
afterwards."

Thus earnestly besought, I made no reference to the Doctor
for his permission, but, without any other compromise of the
truth than a little softening of the coarseness of Uriah Heep,
related plainly what had passed in that same room that night.
The staring of Mrs. Markleham during the whole narration,
and the shrill, sharp interjections with which she occasionally
interrupted it, defied description.

When I had finished, Annie remained, for some few
moments, silent, with her head bent down as I have described.
Then, she took the Doctor's hand (he was sitting in the same
attitude as when we had entered the room), and pressed it to
her breast, and kissed it. Mr. Dick softly raised her ; and
she stood, when she began to speak, leaning on him, " and
looking down upon her husband — from whom she never turned
her eyes.

" All that has ever been in my mind, since I was married,"
she said in a low, submissive, tender voice, " I will lay bare
before you. I could not live and have one reservation,
knowing what I know now."

" Nay, Annie," said the Doctor, mildly, " I have never
doubted you, my child. There in no need ; indeed there is
no need, my dear."

"There is great need," she answered, in the same way,
"that I should open my whole heart before the soul of
generosity and truth, whom, year by year, and day by day, I
have loved and venerated more and more, as Heaven knows ! "

" Really," interrupted Mrs. Markleham, " if I have any
discretion at all — "

(" Which you haven't, you Marplot," observed my aunt, in an
indignant whisper.)

" — I must be permitted to observe that it cannot be
requisite to enter into these details."

" No one but my husband can judge of that, mama," said
Annie, without removing her eyes from his face, " and he will

6i8 David Copperfield

hear me. If I say anything to give you pain, mama, forgive
me. I have borne pain first, often and long, myself."

" Upon my word ! " gasped Mrs. Markleham.

"When I was very young," said Annie, "quite a little
child, my first associations with knowledge of any kind were
inseparable from a patient friend and teacher — the friend of
my dead father — who was always dear to me. I can remember
nothing that I know, without remembering him. He stored
my mind with its first treasures, and stamped his character
upon them all. They never could have been, I think, as
good as they have been to me, if I had taken them from any
other hands."

" Makes her mother nothing ! " exclaimed Mrs. Markleham.

" Not so, mama," said Annie ; " but I make him what he
was. I must do that. As I grew up, he occupied the same
place still. I was proud of his interest: deeply, fondly,
gratefully attached to him. I looked up to him, I can hardly
describe how — as a father, as a guide, as one whose praise was
different from all other praise, as one in whom I could have
trusted and confided, if I had doubted all the world. You
know, mama, how young and inexperienced I was, when you
presented him before me, of a sudden, as a lover."

" I have mentioned the fact, fifty times at least, to everybody
here ! " said Mrs. Markleham.

("Then hold your tongue, for the Lord's sake, and don't
mention it any more ! " muttered my aunt.)

" It was so great a change : so great a loss, I felt it at first,"
said Annie, still preserving the same look and tone, "that I
was agitated and distressed. I was but a girl ; and when so
great a change came in the character in which I had so long
looked up to him, I think I was sorry. But nothing could
have made him what he used to be again ; and I was proud
that he should think me so worthy, and we were married."

" — At Saint Alphage, Canterbury," observed Mrs.
Markleham.

(" Confound the woman ! " said my aunt, " she wotCt be
quiet ! ")

" I never thought," proceeded Annie, with a heightened
colour, " of any worldly gain that my husband would bring to
me. My young heart had no room in its homage for any such
poor reference. Mama, forgive me when I say that it was you
who first presented to my mind the thought that any one
could wrong me, and wrong him, by such a cruel suspicion."

" Me ! " cried Mrs. Markleham.

David Copperfield 619

("Ah! You, to be sure!" observed my aunt, "and you
can't fan it away, my military friend ! ")

" It was the first unhappiness of my new life," said Annie.
" It was the first occasion of every unhappy moment I have
known. These moments have been more, of late, than I can
count ; but not — my generous husband ! — not for the reason
you suppose; for in my heart there is not a thought, a
recollection, or a hope, Uiat any power could separate from
you ! "

She raised her eyes, and clasped her hands, and looked as
beautiful and true, I thought, as any Spirit. The Doctor
looked on her, henceforth, as stedfastly as she on him.

" Mama is blameless," she went on, ** of having ever urged
you for herself, and she is blameless in intention every way, I
am sure, — but when I saw how many importunate claims were
pressed upon you in my name ; how you were traded on in
my name ; how generous you were, and how Mr. Wickfield,
who had your welfare very much at heart, resented it ; the
first sense of my exposure to the mean suspicion that my
tenderness was bought — and sold to you, of all men on earth
— fell upon me like unmerited disgrace, in which I forced you
to participate. I cannot tell you what it was — mama cannot
imagine what it was — to have this dread and trouble always on
my mind, yet know in my own soul that on my marriage-day
I crowned the love and honour of my life ! "

" A specimen of the thanks one gets," cried Mrs. Markle-
ham, in tears, " for taking care of one's family ! I wish I was
a Turk ! "

(" I wish you were, with all my heart — and in your native
country ! " said my aunt.)

" It was at that time that mama was most solicitous about
my Cousin Maldon. I had liked him : " she spoke softly, but
without any hesitation: "very much. We had been little
lovers once. If circumstances had not happened otherwise,
I might have come to persuade myself that I really loved him,
and might have married him, and been most wretched. There
can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and
purpose."

I pondered on those words, even while I was studiously
attending to what followed, as if they had some particular
interest, or some strange application that I could not divine.
"There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of
mind and purpose" — " no disparity in marriage like unsuitability
of mind and purpose."

620 David Copperfield

"There is nothing," said Annie, "that we have in common.
I have long found that there is nothing. If I were thankful tc
my husband for no more, instead of for so much, I should be
thankful to him for having saved me from the first mistaken
impulse of my undisciplined heart."

She stood quite still, before the Doctor, and spoke with an
earnestness that thrilled me. Yet her voice was just as quiet
as before.

" When he was waiting to be the object of your munificence,
so freely bestowed for my sake, and when I was unhappy in
the mercenary shape I was made to wear, I thought it would
have become him better to have worked his own way on. I
thought that if I had been . he, I would have tried to do it,
at the cost of almost any hardship. But I thought no worse
of him, until the night of his departure for India. That night
I knew he had a false and thankless heart. I saw a double
meaning, then, in Mr. Wickfield's scrutiny of me. I perceived,
for the first time, the dark suspicion that shadowed my life."-^

" Suspicion, Annie ! " said the Doctor. " No, no, no ! "

" In your mind there was none, I know, my husband ! " she
returned. " And when I came to you, that night, to lay down
all my load of shame and grief, and knew that I had to tell
that, underneath your roof, one of my own kindred, to whom
you had been a benefactor, for the love of me, had spoken to
me words that should have found no utterance, even if I had
been the weak and mercenary wretch he thought me — my
mind revolted from the taint the very tale conveyed. It died
upon my lips, and from that hour till now has never passed
them."

Mrs. Markleham, with a short groan, leaned back in her
easy chair; and retired behind her fan, as if she were never
coming out any more.

" I have never, but in your presence, interchanged a word
with him from that time ; then, only when it has been necessary
for the avoidance of this explanation. Years have passed
since he knew from me what his situation here was. The
kindnesses you have secretly done for his advancement, and
then disclosed to me, for my surprise and pleasure, have been,
you will believe, but aggravations of the unhappiness and
burden of my secret."

She sunk down gently at the Doctor's feet, though he did
his utmost to prevent her ; and said, looking up, tearfully, into
his face :

"Do not speak to me yet! Let me say a little more!

David Copperfield 621

Right or wrong, if this were to be done again, I think I should
do just the same. You never can know what it was to be
devoted to you, with those old associations ; to find that any
one could be so hard as to suppose that the truth of my heart
was bartered away, and to be surrounded by appearances con-
firming that belief. I was very young, and had no adviser.
Between mama and me, in all relating to you, there was a wide
division. If I shrunk into myself, hiding the disrespect I had
undergone, it was because I honoured you so much, and
so much wished that you should honour me ! "

" Annie, my pure heart ! " said the Doctor, " my dear girl ! "

" A little more ! a very few words more ! I used to think
there were so many whom you might have married, who would
not have brought such charge and trouble on you, and who
would have made your home a worthier home. I used to be
afraid that I had better have remained your pupil, and almost
your child. I used to fear that I was so unsuited to your
learning and wisdom. If all this made me shrink within my-
self (as indeed it did), when I had that to tell, it was still
because I honoured you so much, and hoped that you might
one day honour me."

"That day has shone this long time, Annie," said the
Doctor, "and can have but one long night, my dear."

" Another word ! I afterwards meant — stedfastly meant,
and purposed to myself — to bear the whole weight of knowing
the unworthiness of one to whom you had been so good. And
now a last word, dearest and best of friends ! The cause of
the late change in you, which I have seen with so much pain
and sorrow, and have sometimes referred to my old appre-
hension— at other times to lingering suppositions nearer to the
truth — has been made clear to-night ; and by an accident I
have also come to know, to-night, the full measure of your
noble trust in me, even under that mistake. I do not hope
that any love and duty I may render in return, will ever make
me worthy of your priceless confidence; but with all this
knowledge fresh upon me, I can lift my eyes to this dear face,
revered as a father's, loved as a husband's, sacred to me in
my childhood as a friend's, and solemnly declare that in my
lightest thought I had never wronged you; never wavered in
the love and the fidelity I owe you ! "

She had her arms around the Doctor's neck, and he leant
his head down over her, mingling his grey hair with her dark
brown tresses.

" Oh, hold me to your heart, my husband ! Never cast me

622 David Copperfield

out ! Do not think or speak of disparity between us, for there
is none, except in all my many imperfections. Every succeed-
ing year I have known this better, as I have esteemed you
more and more. Oh, take me to your heart, my husband, for
my love was founded on a rock, and it endures ! "

In the silence that ensued, my aunt walked gravely up to
Mr. Dick, without at all hurrying herself, and gave him a hug
and a sounding kiss. And it was very fortunate, with a view
to his credit, that she did so; for I am confident that I
detected him at that moment in the act of making preparations
to stand on one leg, as an appropriate expression of delight.

" You are a very remarkable man, Dick ! " said my aunt,
with an air of unqualified approbation; "and neve^retend
to be anything else, for I know better ! " ^

With that, my aunt pulled him by the sleeve, and nodded
to me ; and we three stole quietly out of the room, and came
away.

" That's a settler for our military friend, at any rate," said
my aunt, on the way home. " I should sleep the better for
that, if there was nothing else to be glad of!"

"She was quite overcome, I am afraid," said Mr. Dick,
with great commiseration.

"What! Did you ever see a crocodile overcome?" inquired
my aunt.

" I don't think I ever saw a crocodile," returned Mr. Dick,
mildly.

" There never would have been anything the matter, if it
hadn't been for that old Animal," said my aunt, with strong
emphasis. " It's very much to be wished that some mothers
would leave their daughters alone after marriage, and not be so
violently affectionate. They seem to think the only return
that can be made them for bringing an unfortunate young
woman into the world — God bless my soul, as if she asked
to be brought, or wanted to come ! — is full liberty to worry
her out of it again. What are you thinking of. Trot ? "

I was thinking of all that had been said. My mind was
still running on some of the expressions used. " There can be
no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose."
" The first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart." " My
love was founded on a rock." But we were at home ; and the
trodden leaves were lying under-foot, and the autumn wind
was blowing.

David Copperfield 623

CHAPTER XLVI

INTFLLIGENCE

I MUST have been married, if I may trust to my imperfect
memory for dates, about a year or so, when one evening, as
I was returning from a solitary walk, thinking of the book
I was then writing — for my success had steadily increased
with my steady application, and I was engaged at that time
upon my first work of fiction — I came past Mrs. Steerforth's
house. I had often passed it before, during my residence in
that nqi|hbourhood, though never when I could choose
another road. Howbeit, it did sometimes happen that it was
not easy to find another, without making a long circuit ; and
so I had passed that way, upon the whole, pretty often.

I had never done more than glance at the house, as I went
by with a quickened step. It had been uniformly gloomy and
dull. None of the best rooms abutted on the road ; and the
narrow, heavily-framed old-fashioned windows, never cheerful
under any circumstances, looked very dismal, close shut,
and with their blinds always drawn down. There was a
covered way across a little paved court, to an entrance that
was never used ; and there was one round staircase window,
at odds with all the rest, and the only one unshaded by a
blind, which had the same unoccupied blank look. I do not
remember that I ever saw a light in all the house. If I had
been a casual passer-by, I should have probably supposed that
some childless person lay dead in it. If I had happily
possessed no knowledge of the place, and had seen it often in
that changeless state, I should have pleased my fancy with
many ingenious speculations, I dare say.

As it was, I thought as little of it as I might. But my
mind could not go by it and leave it, as my body did ; and
it usually awakened a long train of meditations. Coming
before me on this particular evening that I mention, mingled
with the childish recollections and later fancies, the ghosts
of half-formed hopes, the broken shadows of disappointments
dimly seen and understood, the blending of experience and
imagination, incidental to the occupation with which my
thoughts had been busy, it was more than commonly sug-
gestive. I fell into a brown study as I walked on, and a
voice at my side made me start.

624 David Copperfield

It was a woman's voice, too. I was not long in recollect-
ing Mrs. Steerforth's little parlour-maid, who had formerly
worn blue ribbons in her cap. She had taken them out now,
to adapt herself, I suppose, to the altered character of the
house ; and wore but one or two disconsolate bows of sober
brown.

" If you please, sir, would you have the goodness to walk in,
and speak to Miss Dartle ? "

" Has Miss Dartle sent you for me ? " I inquired.

" Not to-night, sir, but it's just the same. Miss Dartle saw
you pass a night or two ago ; and I was to sit at work on
the staircase, and when I saw you pass again, to ask you to
step in and speak to her."

I turned back, and inquired of my conductor, as we went
along, how Mrs. Steerforth was. She said her lady was but
poorly, and kept her own room a good deal.

When we arrived at the house, I was directed to Miss Dartle
in the garden, and left to make my presence known to her
myself. She was sitting on a seat at one end of a kind of
terrace, overlooking the great city. It was a sombre evening,
with a lurid light in the sky ; and as I saw the prospect
scowling in the distance, with here and there some larger object
starting up into the sullen glare, I fancied it was no inapt
companion to the memory of this fierce woman.

She saw me as I advanced, and rose for a moment to receive
me. I thought her, then, still more colourless and thin than
when I had seen her last ; the flashing eyes still brighter, and
the scar still plainer.

Our meeting was not cordial. We had parted angrily on
the last occasion ; and there was an air of disdain about her,
which she took no pains to conceal.

" I am told you wish to speak to me. Miss Dartle," said I,
standing near her, with my hand upon the back of the seat,
and declining her gesture of invitation to sit down.

" If you please," said she. " Pray has this girl been
found ?

" No."

" And yet she has run away ! "

I saw her thin lips working while she looked at me, as if
they were eager to load her with reproaches.

" Run away ? " I repeated.

" Yes ! From him," she said, with a laugh. " If she is
not found, perhaps she never will be found. She may be
dead!"

David Copperfield 625

The vaunting cruelty with which she met my glance, I
never saw expressed in any other face that ever I have seen.

"To wish her dead," said I, " may be the kindest wish that
one of her own sex could bestow upon her. I am glad that
time has softened you so much. Miss Dartle."

She condescended to make no reply, but, turning on me
with another scornful laugh, said :

"The friends of this excellent and much-injured young lady
are friends of yours. You are their champion, and assert their
rights. Do you wish to know what is known of her ? "

"Yes," said I.

She rose with an ill-favoured smile, and taking a few steps
towards a wall of holly that was near at hand, dividing the
lawn from a kitchen-garden, said, in a louder voice, "Come
here ! " — as if she were calling to some unclean beast.

"You will restrain any demonstrative championship or
vengeance in this place, of course, Mr. Copperfield ? " said she,
looking over her shoulder at me with the same expression.

I inclined my head, without knowing what she meant;
and she said, " Come here ! " again ; and returned, followed
by the respectable Mr. Littimer, who, with undiminished
respectability, made me a bow, and took up his position behind
her. The air of wicked grace : of triumph, in which, strange
to say, there was yet something feminine and alluring : with
which she reclined upon the seat between us, and looked at
me, was worthy of a cruel Princess in a Legend.

" Now," said she, imperiously, without glancing at him,
and touching the old wound as it throbbed : perhaps, in
this instance, with pleasure rather than pain. "Tell Mr.
Copperfield about the flight."

" Mr. James and myself, ma'am "

" Don't address yourseljf to me ! " she interrupted with a
frown.

** Mr. James and myself, sir "

" Nor to me, if you please," said I.

Mr. Littimer, without being at all discomposed, signified
by a slight obeisance, that anything that was most agreeable to
us was most agreeable to him ; and began again :

" Mr. James and myself have been abroad with the young
woman, ever since she left Yarmouth under Mr. James's pro-
tection. We have been in a variety of places, and seen a deal
of foreign country. We have been in France, Switzerland,
Italy — in fact, almost all parts."

He looked at the back of the seat, as if he were addressing

626 David Copperfield

himself to that ; and softly played upon it with his hands, as if
he were striking chords upon a dumb piano.

" Mr. James took quite uncommonly to the young woman ;
and was more settled, for a length of time, than I have known
him to be since I have been in his service. The young
woman was very improvable, and spoke the languages; and
wouldn't have been known for the same country-person. I
noticed that she was much admired wherever we went."

Miss Dartle put her hand upon her side. I saw him steal a
glance at her, and slightly smile to himself.

"Very much admired, indeed, the young woman was.
What with her dress ; what with the air and sun ; what with
being made so much of ; what with this, that, and the other ;
her merits really attracted general notice."

He made a short pause. Her eyes wandered restlessly over
the distant prospect, and she bit her nether lip to stop that
busy mouth.

Taking his hands from the seat, and placing one of them
within the other, as he settled himself on one leg, Mr. Littimer
proceeded, with his eyes cast down, and his respectable head
a little advanced, and a little on one side :

" The young woman went on in this manner for some time,
being occasionally low in her spirits, until I think she began
to weary Mr. James by giving way to her low spirits and
tempers of that kind; and things were not so comfortable.
Mr. James he began to be restless again. The more restless
he got, the worse she got ; and I must say, for myself, that I
had a very difficult time of it indeed between the two. Still
matters were patched up here, and made good there, over and
over again ; and altogether lasted, I am sure, for a longer time
than anybody could have expected."

Recalling her eyes from the distance, she looked at me again
now, with her former air. Mr. Littimer, clearing his throat
behind his hand with a respectable short cough, changed legs,
and went on :

"At last, when there had been, upon the whole, a good
many words and reproaches, Mr. James he set off one morning,
from the neighbourhood of Naples, where we had a villa (the
young woman being very partial to the sea), and, under pre-
tence of coming back in a day or so, left it in charge with me
to break it out, that, for the general happiness of all concerned,
he was" — here an interruption of the short cough — "gone.
But Mr. James, I must say, certainly did behave extremely
honourable; for he proposed that the young woman should

David Copperfield 627

marry a very respectable person, who was fully prepared to
overlook the past, and who was, at least, as good as anybody
the young woman could have aspired to in a regular way : her
connexions being very common."

He changed legs again, and wetted his lips. I was con-
vinced that the scoundrel spoke of himself, and I saw my
conviction reflected in Miss Dartle's face.

"This I also had it in charge to communicate. I was
willing to do anything to relieve Mr. James from his difficulty,
and to restore harmony between himself and an affectionate
parent, who has undergone so much on his account. There-
fore I undertook the commission. The young woman's
violence when she came to, after I broke the fact of his
departure, was beyond all expectations. She was quite mad,
and had to be held by force ; or, if she couldn't have got to a
knife, or got to the sea, she'd have beaten her head against the
marble floor."

Miss Dartle, leaning back upon the seat, with a light of
exultation in her face, seemed almost to caress the sounds this
fellow had uttered.

" But when I came to the second part of what had been
entrusted to me," said Mr. Littimer, rubbing his hands un-
easily, " which anybody might have supposed would have been,
at all events, appreciated as a kind intention, then the young
woman came out in her true colours. A more outrageous
person I never did see. Her conduct was surprisingly bad.
She had no more gratitude, no more feeling, no more patience,
no more reason in her, than a stock or a stone. If I hadn't
been upon my guard, I am convinced she would have had my
blood."

" I think the better of her for it," said I, indignantly.

Mr. Littimer bent his head, as much as to say, "Indeed,
sir ? But you're young ! " and resumed his narrative.

" It was necessary, in short, for a time, to take away every-
thing nigh her, that she could do herself, or anybody else, an
injury with, and to shut her up close. Notwithstanding which,
she got out in the night ; forced the lattice of a window, that I
had nailed up myself; dropped on a vine that was trailed below ;
and never has been seen or heard of, to my knowledge, since."

" She is dead, perhaps," said Miss Dartle, with a smile, as if
she could have spurned the body of the ruined girl.

"She may have drowned herself, miss," returned Mr.
Littimer, catching at an excuse for addressing himself to some-
body. " It's very possible. Or she may have had assistance

628 David Copperfield

from the boatmen, and the boatmen's wives and children.
Being given to low company, she was very much in the habit
of talking to them on the beach, Miss Dartle, and sitting by
their boats. I have known her to do it, when Mr. James has
been away, whole days. Mr. James was far from pleased to
find out once, that she had told the children she was a boat-
man's daughter, and that in her own country, long ago, she had
roamed about the beach, like them."

Oh, Emily ! Unhappy beauty ! What a picture rose before
me of her sitting on the far-off shore among the children like
herself when she was innocent, listening to little voices such as
might have called her Mother had she been a poor man's
wife; and to the great voice of the sea, with its eternal
" Never more ! "

"When it was clear that nothing could be done, Miss
Darde "

" Did I tell you not to speak to me ? " she said, with stern
contempt.

" You spoke to me, miss," he replied. " I beg your pardon.
But it is my service to obey."

" Do your service," she returned. " Finish your story, and

go'"

" When it was clear," he said, with infinite respectability,

and an obedient bow, " that she was not to be found, I went

to Mr. James, at the place where it had been agreed that I

should write to him, and informed him of what had occurred.

Words passed between us in consequence, and I felt it due to

my character to leave him. I could bear, and I have borne, a

great deal from Mr. James ; but he insulted me too far. He

hurt me. Knowing the unfortunate difference between himself

and his mother, and what her anxiety of mind was likely to be,

I took the liberty of coming home to England, and relating — "

" For money which I paid him," said Miss Dartle to me.

"Just so, ma'am — and relating what I knew. I am not
aware," said Mr. Littimer, after a moment's reflection, "that
there is anything else. I am at present out of employment,
and should be happy to meet with a respectable situation."

Miss Dartle glanced at me, as though she would inquire if
there were anything that I desired to ask. As there was some-
thing which had occurred to my mind, I said in reply :

"I could wish to know from this — creature," I could not
bring myself to utter any more conciliatory word, " whether
they intercepted a letter that was written to her from home, or
whether he supposes that she received it."

David Copperfield 629

He remained calm and silent, with his eyes fixed on the
ground, and the tip of every finger of his right hand delicately
poised against the tip of every finger of his left.

Miss Dartle turned her head disdainfully towards him.

"I beg your pardon, miss," he said, awakening from his
abstraction, "but, however submissive to you, I have my
position, though a servant. Mr. Copperfield and you, miss,
are different people. If Mr. Copperfield wishes to know any-
thing from me, I take the liberty of reminding Mr. Copperfield
that he can put a question to me. I have a character to
maintain."

After a momentary struggle with myself, I turned my eyes
upon him, and said, " You have heard my question. Consider
it addressed to yourself, if you choose. What answer do you
make?"

"Sir," he rejoined, with an occasional separation and re-
union of those delicate tips, " my answer must be qualified ;
because, to betray Mr. James's confidence to his mother,
and to betray it to you, are two different actions. It is not
probable, I consider, that Mr. James would encourage the
receipt of letters likely to increase low spirits and unpleasant-
ness ; but further than that, sir, I should wish to avoid going."

" Is that all ? " inquired Miss Dartle of me.

I indicated that I had nothing more to say. " Except," I
added, as I saw him moving off", " that I understand this
fellow's part in the wicked story, and that, as I shall make it
known to the honest man who has been her father from her
childhood, I would recommend him to avoid going too much
into public."

He had stopped the moment I began, and had listened with
his usual repose of manner.

"Thank you, sir. But you'll excuse me if I say, sir, that
there are neither slaves nor slave-drivers in this country, and
that people are not allowed to take the law into their own
hands. If they do, it is more to their own peril, I believe,
than to other people's. Consequently speaking, I am not at
all afraid of going wherever I may wish, sir."

With that, he made a polite bow ; and, with another to Miss
Dartle, went away through the arch in the wall of holly by
which he had come. Miss Dartle and I regarded each other
for a little while in silence ; her manner being exactly what it
was, when she had produced the man.

" He says besides," she observed, with a slow curling of her
lip, " tliat his master, as he hears, is coasting Spain ; and this

630 David Copperfield

done, is away to gratify his seafaring tastes till he is weary.
But this is of no interest to you. Between these two proud
persons, mother and son, there is a wider breach than before,
and little hope of its healing, for they are one at heart, and
time makes each more obstinate and imperious. Neither is
this of any interest to you ; but it introduces what I wish to
say. This devil whom you make an angel of, I mean this low
girl whom he picked out of the tide-mud," with her black eyes
full upon me, and her passionate finger up, " may be alive, —
for I beUeve some common things are hard to die. If she is,
you will desire to have a pearl of such price found and taken
care of. We desire that, too ; that he may not by any chance
be made her prey again. So far, we are united in one interest ;
and that is why I, who would do her any mischief that so coarse
a wretch is capable of feeling, have sent for you to hear what
you have heard."

I saw, by the change in her face, that some one was advanc-
ing behind me. It was Mrs. Steerforth, who gave me her
hand more coldly than of yore, and with an augmentation of
her former stateliness of manner ; but still, I perceived — and I
was touched by it — with an ineffaceable remembrance of my
old love for her son. She was greatly altered. Her fine
figure was far less upright, her handsome face was deeply
marked, and her hair was almost white. But when she sat
down on the seat, she was a handsome lady still ; and well
I knew the bright eye with its lofty look, that had been a light
in my very dreams at school.

"Is Mr. Copperfield informed of everything, Rosa ? "

"Yes."

" And has he heard Littimer himself ? "

" Yes ; I have told him why you wished it."

" You are a good girl. I have had some slight correspond-
ence with your former friend, sir," addressing me, " but it has
not restored his sense of duty or natural obligation. Therefore
1 have no other object in this, than what Rosa has mentioned.
If, by the course which may relieve the mind of the decent
man you brought here (for whom I am sorry — I can say no
more), my son may be saved from again falling into the snares
of a designing enemy, well ! "

She drew herself up, and sat looking straight before her, far
away.

" Madam," I said respectfully, " I understand. I assure you
I am in no danger of putting any strained construction on your
motives. But I must say, even to you, having known this

David Copperfield 631

injured family from childhood, that if you suppose the girl, sc
deeply wronged, has not been cruelly deluded, and would not
rather die a hundred deaths than take a cup of water from your
son's hand now, you cherish a terrible mistake."

" Well, Rosa, well ! " said Mrs. Steerforth, as the other was
about to interpose, "it is no matter. Let it be. You are
married, sir, I am told ? "

I answered that I had been some time married.

" And are doing well ? I hear little in the quiet life I lead,
but I understand you are beginning to be famous."

" I have been very fortunate," I said, " and find my name
connected with some praise."

" You have no mother ? " — in a softened voice.

"No."

" It is a pity," she returned. "She would have been proud
of you. Good night 1 "

I took the hand she held out with a dignified, unbending air,
and it was as calm in mine as if her breast had been at peace.
Her pride could still its very pulses, it appeared, and draw the
placid veil before her face, through which she sat looking
straight before her on the far distance.

As I moved away from them along the terrace, I could not
help observing how steadily they both sat gazing on the pros-
pect, and how it thickened and closed around them. Here and
there, some early lamps were seen to twinkle in the distant
city ; and in the eastern quarter of the sky the lurid light still
hovered. But, from the greater part of the broad valley inter-
posed, a mist was rising like a sea, which, mingling with the
darkness, made it seem as if the gathering waters would
encompass them. I have reason to remember this, and think
of it with awe ; for before I looked upon those two again, a
stormy sea had risen to their feet.

Reflecting on what had been thus told me, I felt it right that
it should be communicated to Mr. Peggotty. On the following
evening I went into London in quest of him. He was always
wandering about from place to place, with his one object of
recovering his niece before him ; but was more in London than
elsewhere. Often and often, now, had I seen him in the dead
of night passing along the streets, searching, among the few
who loitered out of doors at those untimely hours, for what he
dreaded to find.

He kept a lodging over the little chandler's shop in Hunger-
ford Market, which I have had occasion to mention more than
once, and from which he first went forth upon his errand of

632 David Copperfield

mercy. Hither I directed my walk. On making inquiry for
him, I learned from the people of the house that he had not
gone out yet, and I should find him in his room up-stairs.

He was sitting reading by a window in which he kept a few
plants. The room was very neat and orderly. I saw in a
moment that it was always kept prepared for her reception, and
that he never went out but he thought it possible he might bring
her home. He had not heard my tap at the door, and only
raised his eyes when I laid my hand upon his shoulder.

" Mas'r Davy ! Thankee, sir ! thankee hearty, for this visit !
Sit ye down. You're kindly welcome, sir ! "

" Mr. Peggotty," said I, taking the chair he handed me, " don't
expect much ! I have heard some news."

" Of Em'ly ! "

He put his hand, in a nervous manner, on his mouth, and
turned pale, as he fixed his eyes on mine.

"It gives no clue to where she is; but she is not with
him."

He sat down, looking intently at me, and listened in pro-
found silence to all I had to tell. I well remember the sense
of dignity, beauty even, with which the patient gravity of his face
impressed me, when, having gradually removed his eyes from
mine, he sat looking downward, leaning his forehead on his
hand. He offered no interruption, but remained throughout
perfectly still. He seemed to pursue her figure through the
narrative, and to let every other shape go by him, as if it were
nothing.

When I had done, he shaded his face, and continued silent.
I looked out of the window for a little while, and occupied
myself with the plants.

" How do you fare to feel about it, Mas'r Davy ? " he inquired
at length.

" I think that she is living," I replied.

" I doen't know. Maybe the first shock was too rough, and

in the wildness of her art ! That there blue water as she

used to speak on. Could she have thowt o' that so many year,
because it was to be her grave ! "

He said this, musing, in a low, frightened voice ; and walked
across the Httle room.

" And yet," he added, " Mas'r Davy, I have felt so sure as
she was living — I have know'd, awake and sleeping, as it was
so trew that I should find her — I have been so led on by it, and
held up by it — that I doen't believe I can have been deceived.
No ! Em'ly's alive ! "

David Copperfield 633

He put his hand down firmly on the table, and set his
sunburnt face into a resolute expression.

" My niece, Em'ly, is alive, sir ! " he said, stedfastly. " I
doen't know wheer it comes from, or how 'tis, but / am told as
she's alive ! "

He looked almost like a man inspired, as he said it. I
waited for a few moments, until he could give me his undivided
attention ; and then proceeded to explain the precaution, that,
it had occurred to me last night, it would be wise to take.

" Now, my dear friend — " I began.

" Thankee, thankee, kind sir," he said, grasping my hand in
both of his.

" If she should make her way to London, which is likely —
for where could she lose herself so readily as in this vast city ;
and what would she wish to do, but lose and hide herself, if she
does not go home ? — "

" And she won't go home," he interposed, shaking his head
mournfully. "If she had left of her own accord, she might;
not as 't was, sir."

" If she should come here," said I, " I believe there is one
person, here, more likely to discover her than any other in the
world. Do you remember — hear what I say, with fortitude —
think of your great object ! — do you remember Martha ? "

" Of our town ? "

I needed no other answer than his face.

" Do you know that she is in London ? "

" I have seen her in the streets," he answered with a
shiver.

" But you don't know," said I, "that Emiy was charitable
to her, with Ham's help, long before she fied from home.
Nor, that, when we met one night, and spoke together in the
room yonder, over the way, she listened at the door."

" Mas'r Davy ! " he replied in astonishment. " That night
when it snew so hard ? "

" That night. I have never seen her since. I went back,
after parting from you, to speak to her, but she was gone. I
was unwilling to mention her to you then, and I am now ; but
she is the person of whom I speak, and with whom I think we
should communicate. Do you understand ? "

" Too well, sir," he replied. We had sunk our voices, almost
to a whisper, and continued to speak in that tone.

" You say you have seen her. Do you think that you could
find her ? I could only hope to do so by chance."

" I think, Mas'r Davy, I know wheer to look."

634 David Copperfield

" It is dark. Being together, shall we go out now, and try to
find her to-night ? "

He assented, and prepared to accompany me. Without
appearing to observe what he was doing, I saw how carefully he
adjusted the little room, put a candle ready and the means of
lighting it, arranged the bed, and finally took out of a drawer one
of her dresses (I remember to have seen her wear it), neatly
folded with some other garments, and a bonnet, which he placed
upon a chair. He made no allusion to these clothes, neither
did I. There they had been waiting for her, many and many a
night, no doubt.

" The time was, Mas'r Davy," he said, as we came down-stairs,
" when I thowt this girl, Martha, a'most like the dirt under-
neath my Em'ly's feet. God forgive me, theer's a difference
now!"

As we went along, partly to hold him in conversation, and
partly to satisfy myself, I asked him about Ham. He said,
almost in the same words as formerly, that Ham was just the
same, " wearing away his life with kiender no care nohow for 't ;
but never murmuring, and liked by all."

I asked him what he thought Ham's state of mind was,
in reference to the cause of their misfortunes ? Whether he
believed it was dangerous ? What he supposed, for example.
Ham would do, if he and Steerforth ever should encounter ?

" I doen't know, sir," he replied. " I have thowt of it
oftentimes, but I can't arrize myself of it, no matters."

I recalled to his remembrance the morning after her departure,
when we were all three on the beach. " Do you recollect," said
I, " a certain wild way in which he looked out to sea, and
spoke about * the end of it ' ? "

" Sure I do ! " said he.

" What do you suppose he meant ? "

" Mas'r Davy," he replied, " I've put the question to myself
a mort o' times, and never found no answer. And theer's
one curious thing — that, though he is so pleasant, I wouldn't
fare to feel comfortable to try and get his mind upon 't. He
never said a wured to me as warn't as dootiful as dootiful
could be, and it ain't Hkely as he'd begin to speak any other
ways now ; but it's fur from being fleet water in his mind, wheer
them thowts lays. It's deep, sir, and I can't see down."

" You are right," said I, " and that has sometimes made me
anxious."

" And me too, Mas'r Davy," he rejoined. " Even more so,
I do assure you, than his ventersome ways, though both belongs

David Copperfield 635

to the alteration in him. I doen't know as he'd do violence
under any circumstances, but I hope as them two may be kep
asunders."

We had come, through Temple Bar, into the city. Convers-
ing no more now, and walking at my side, he yielded himself
up to the one aim of his devoted life, and went on, with that
hushed concentration of his faculties which would have made
his figure solitary in a multitude. We were not far from
Blackfriars Bridge, when he turned his head and pointed to
a solitary female figure flitting along the opposite side of the
street. I knew it, readily, to be the figure that we sought.

We crossed the road, and were pressing on towards her, when
it occurred to me that she might be more disposed to feel a
woman's interest in the lost girl, if we spoke to her in a quieter
place, aloof from the crowd, and where we should be less
observed. I advised my companion, therefore, that we should
not address her yet, but follow her ; consulting in this, likewise,
an indistinct desire I had, to know where she went

He acquiescing, we followed at a distance : never losing
sight of her, but never caring to come very near, as she
frequently looked about. Once she stopped to listen to a
band of music : and then we stopped too.

She went on a long way. Still we went on. It was evident,
from the manner in which she held her course, that she was
going to some fixed destination ; and this, and her keeping in
the busy streets, and I suppose the strange fascination in the
secrecy and mystery of so following any one, made me adhere
to my first purpose. At length she turned into a dull, dark
street, where the noise and crowd were lost ; and I said, " We
may speak to her now : " and, mending our pace, we went
after her.

CHAPTER XLVII

MARTHA

We were now down in Westminster. We had turned back
to follow her, having encountered her coming towards us ;
and Westminster Abbey was the point at which she passed from
the lights and noise of the leading streets. She proceeded so
quickly, when she got free of the two currrents of passengers
setting towards and from the bridge, that, between this and the
advance she had of us when she struck off, we were m the

636 David Copperfield

narrow water-side street by Millbank before we came up with
her. At that moment she crossed the road, as if to avoid the
footsteps that she heard so close behind ; and, without looking
back, passed on even more rapidly.

A glimpse of the river through a dull gateway, where some
waggons were housed for the night, seemed to arrest my feet.
I touched my companion without speaking, and we both for-
bore to cross after her, and both followed on that opposite
side of the way ; keeping as quietly as we could in the shadow
of the houses, but keeping very near her.

There was, and is when I write, at the end of that low-lying
street, a dilapidated little wooden building, probably an obsolete
old ferry-house. Its position is just at that point where the
street ceases, and the road begins to lie between a row of
houses and the river. As soon as she came here, and saw the
water, she stopped as if she had come to her destination ; and
presently went slowly along by the brink of the river, looking
intently at it.

All the way here, I had supposed that she was going to some
house ; indeed, I had vaguely entertained the hope that the
house might be in some way associated with the lost girl. But
that one dark glimpse of the river, through the gateway, had
instinctively prepared me for her going no farther.

The neighbourhood was a dreary one at that time; as
oppressive, sad, and solitary by night, as any about London.
There were neither wharves nor houses on the melancholy
waste of road near the great blank Prison. A sluggish ditch
deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and rank
weeds straggled over all the marshy land in the vicinity. In
one part, carcases of houses, inauspiciously begun and never
finished, rotted away. In another, the ground was cumbered
with rusty iron monsters of steam-boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes,
furnaces, paddles, anchors, diving-bells, windmill-sails, and I
know not what strange objects, accumulated by some speculator,
and grovelling in the dust, underneath which — having sunk into
the soil of their own weight in wet weather — they had the
appearance of vainly trying to hide themselves. The clash and
glare of sundry fiery Works upon the river-side, arose by night
to disturb everything except the heavy and unbroken smoke
that poured out of their chimneys. Slimy gaps and cause-
ways, winding among old wooden piles, with a sickly substance
clinging to the latter, like green hair, and the rags of last year's
handbills offering rewards for drowned men fluttering above
high-water mark, led down through the ooze and slush to the

David Copperfield 637

ebb tide. Ihere was a story that one of the pits dug for the
dead in the time of the Great Plague was hereabout ; and a
bhghting influence seemed to have proceeded from it over the
whole place. Or else it looked as if it had gradually decom-
posed into that nightmare condition, out of the overflowings
of the polluted stream.

As if she were a part of the refuse it had cast out, and left to
corruption and decay, the girl we had followed strayed down to
the river's brink, and stood in the midst of this night-picture,
lonely and still, looking at the water.

There were some boats and barges astrand in the mud, and
these enabled us to come within a few yards of her without
being seen. I then signed to Mr. Peggotty to remain where he
was, and emerged from their shade to speak to her. I did not
approach her solitary figure without trembling ; for this gloomy
end to her determined walk, and the way in which she stood,
almost within the cavernous shadow of the iron bridge, looking
at the lights crookedly reflected in the strong tide, inspired a
dread within me.

I think she was talking to herself. I am sure, although
absorbed in gazing at the water, that her shawl was off her
shoulders, and that she was muffling her hands in it, in an
unsettled and bewildered way, more like the action of a sleep-
walker than a waking person. I know, and never can forget,
that there was that in her wild manner which gave me no
assurance but that she would sink before my eyes, until I had
her arm within my grasp.

At the same moment I said " Martha ! "

She uttered a terrified scream, and struggled with me with
such strength that I doubt if I could have held her alone.
But a stronger hand than mine was laid upon her ; and when
she raised her frightened eyes and saw whose it was, she made
but one more effort and dropped down between us. We
carried her away from the water to where there were some dry
stones, and there laid her down, crying and moaning. In a
little while she sat among the stones, holding her wretched head
with both her hands.

" Oh, the river ! " she cried passionately. " Oh, the river ! "

" Hush, hush ! " said I. " Calm yourself."

But she still repeated the same words, continually exclaiming,
" Oh, the river ! " over and over again.

" I know it's like me ! " she exclaimed. " I know that I
belong to it. I know that it's the natural company of such as
I am 1 It comes from country places, where there was once

638 David Copperfield

no harm in it — and it creeps through the dismal street, defiled
and miserable — and it goes away, like my life, to a great sea,
that is always troubled — and I feel that I must go with it ! "

I have never known what despair was, except in the tone of
those words.

*' 1 can't keep away from it. I can't forget it. It haunts
me day and night. It's the only thing in all the world that I
am fit for, or that's fit for me. Oh, the dreadful river ! "

The thought passed through my mind that in the face of my
companion, as he looked upon her without speech or motion,
I might have read his niece's history, if I had known nothing
of it. I never saw, in any painting or reality, horror and
compassion so impressively blended. He shook as if he would
have fallen ; and his hand — I touched it with my own, for his
appearance alarmed me — was deadly cold.

"She is in a state of frenzy," I whispered to him. "She
will speak differently in a little time."

I don't know what he would have said in answer. He made
some motion with his mouth, and seemed to think he had
spoken ; but he had only pointed to her with his outstretched
hand.

A new burst of crying came upon her now, in which she
once more hid her face among the stones, and lay before us, a
prostrate image of humiliation and ruin. Knowing that this
state must pass, before we could speak to her with any hope, I
ventured to restrain him when he would have raised her, and
we stood by in silence until she became more tranquil.

" Martha," said I then, leaning down, and helping her to
rise — she seemed to want to rise as if with the intention of
going away, but she was weak, and leaned against a boat.
" Do you know who this is, who is with me ? "

She said faintly, "Yes."

" Do you know that we have followed you a long way
to-night?"

She shook her head. She looked neither at him nor at me,
but stood in a humble attitude, holding her bonnet and shawl
in one hand, without appearing conscious of them, and pressing
the other, clenched against her forehead.

"Are you composed enough," said I, "to speak on the
subject which so interested you — I hope Heaven may remember
it ! — that snowy night ? "

Her sobs broke out afresh, and she murmured some in-
articulate thanks to me for not having driven her away from the
door.

David Copperfield 639

" I want to say nothing for myself," she said, after a few
momcnis. " I am bad, I am lost. I have no hope at all.
But^ tell him, sir," she had shrunk away from him, ** if you
don't feel too hard to me to do it, that I never was in any way
the cause of his misfortune."

" It has never been attributed to you," I returned, earnestly
responding to her earnestness.

" It was you, if I don't deceive myself," she said, in a broken
voice, *• that came into the kitchen, the night she took such
pity on me ; was so gentle to me ; didn't shrink away from me
like all the rest, and gave me such kind help 1 Was it you,
sir ? "

" It was," said I.

" I should have been in the river long ago," she said,
glancing at it with a terrible expression, " if any wrong to her
had been upon my mind. I never could have kept out of it a
single winter's night, if I had not been free of any share in
that ! "

"The cause of her flight is too well understood," I said.
" You are innocent of any part in it, we thoroughly believe, —
we know."

" Oh I might have been much the better for her, if I had
had a better heart ! " exclaimed the girl, with most forlorn
regret ; "for she was always good to me ! She never spoke a
word to me but what was pleasant and right. Is it likely I
would try to make her what I am myself, knowing what I am
myself so well ? When I lost everything that makes life dear,
the worst of all my thoughts was that I was parted for ever
from her ! "

Mr. Peggotty, standing with one hand on the gunwale of the
boat, and his eyes cast down, put his disengaged hand before
his face. •

"And when I heard what had happened before that snowy
night, from some belonging to our town," cried Martha, " the
bitterest thought in all my mind was, that the people would
remember she once kept company with me, and would say I
had corrupted her ! When, Heaven knows, I would have died
to have brought back her good name ! "

Long unused to any self-control, the piercing agony of her
remorse and grief was terrible.

"To have died, would not have been much — what can I
say ? — I would have lived ! " she cried. " I would have lived
to be old, in the wretched streets — and to wander about,
avoided, in the dark — and to see the day break on the ghastly

640 David Copperfield

line of houses, and remember how the same sun used to shine
into my room and wake me once — I would have done even
that to save her ! "

Sinking on the stones, she took some in each hand, and
clenched them up, as if she would have ground them. She
writhed into some new posture constantly : stiffening her arms,
twisting them before her face, as though to shut out from her
eyes the little light there was, and drooping her head, as if it
were heavy with insupportable recollections.

" What shall I ever do 1 " she said, fighting thus with her
despair. "How can I go on as I am, a solitary curse to
myself, a living disgrace to every one I come near ! " Suddenly
she turned to my companion. " Stamp upon me, kill me !
When she was your pride, you would have thought I had done
her harm if I had brushed against her in the street. You can't
believe — why should you? — a syllable that comes out of my
lips. It would be a burning shame upon you, even now, if she
and I exchanged a word. I don't complain. I don't say she
and I are alike. I know there is a long, long way between us.
I only say, with all my guilt and wretchedness upon my head,
that I am grateful to her from my soul, and love her. Oh,
don't think that all the power I had of loving anything is quite
worn out ! Throw me away, as all the world does. Kill me
for being what I am, and having ever known her ; but don't
think that of me ! "

He looked upon her, while she made this supplication, in a
wild distracted manner; and, when she was silent, gently
raised her.

" Martha," said Mr. Peggotty, " God forbid as I should judge
you. Forbid as I, of all men, should do that, my girl ! You
doen't know half the change that's come, in course of time,
upon me, when you think . it likely. Well ! " he paused a
moment, then went on. " You doen't understand how 'tis that
this here gentleman and me has wished to speak to you. You
doen't understand what 'tis we has afore us. Listen now ! "

His influence upon her was complete. She stood, shrink-
ingly, before him, as if she were afraid to meet his eyes ; but
her passionate sorrow was quite hushed and mute.

" If you heerd," said Mr. Peggotty, " owt of what passed
between Mas'r Davy and me, th' night when it snew so hard,
you know as I have been — wheer not — fur to seek my dear
niece. My dear niece," he repeated steadily. "Fur she's
more dear to me now, Martha, than ever she was dear
afore."

David Copperfield 641

She put her hands before her face ; but otherwise remained
quiet.

" I have heerd her tell," said Mr. Peggotty, " as you was
early left fatherless and motherless, with no friend fur to take,
in a rough seafaring-way, their place. Maybe you can guess
that if you'd had such a friend, you'd have got into a way of
being fond of him in course of time, and that my niece was
kiender daughter-like to me."

As she was silently trembling, he put her shawl carefully
about her, taking it up from the ground for that purpose.

'* Whereby," said he, " I know, both as she would go to the
wureld's furdest end with me, if she could once see me again ;
and that she would fly to the wureld's furdest end to keep off
seeing me. For though she ain't no call to doubt my love, and
doen't — and doen't," he repeated, with a quiet assurance of the
truth of what he said, "there's shame steps in, and keeps
betwixt us."

I read, in every word of his plain impressive way of delivering
himself, new evidence of his having thought of this one topic,
in every feature it presented.

" According to our reckoning," he proceeded, " Mas'r Davy's
here, and mine, she is like, one day, to make her own poor
solitary course to London. We believe — Mas'r Davy, me, and
all of us — that you are as innocent of everything that has befel
her, as the unborn child. You've spoke of her being pleasant,
kind, and gentle to you. Bless her, I knew she was ! I knew
she always was, to all. You're thankful to her, and you love
her. Help us all you can to find her, and may Heaven reward
you ! "

She looked at him 'hastily, and for the first time, as if she
were doubtful of what he had said.

"Will you trust me?" she asked, in a low voice of astonish-
ment.

" Full and free ! " said Mr. Peggotty.

" To speak to her, if I should ever find her ; shelter her, if I
have any shelter to divide with her ; and then without her
knowledge, come to you, and bring you to her ? " she asked
hurriedly.

We both replied together, " Yes ! "

She lifted up her eyes, and solemnly declared that she would
devote herself to this task, fervently and faithfully. That she
would never waver in it, never be diverted from it, never
relinquish it while there was any chance of hope. If she were
not true to it, might the object she now had in life, which

642 David Copperfield

bound her to something devoid of evil, in its passing away
from her, leave her more forlorn and more despairing, if that
were possible, than she had been upon the river's brink that
night ; and then might all help, human and Divine, renounce
her evermore !

She did not raise her voice above her breath, or address us,
but said this to the night sky ; then stood profoundly quiet,
looking at the gloomy water.

We judged it expedient, now, to tell her all we knew ; which
I recounted at length. She listened with great attention, and
with a face that often changed, but had the same purpose in all
its varying expressions. Her eyes occasionally filled with tears,
but those she repressed. It seemed as if her spirit were quite
altered, and she could not be too quiet.

She asked, when all was told, where we were to be com-
municated with, if occasion should arise. Under a dull lamp
in the road, I wrote our two addresses on a leaf of my pocket-
book, which I tore out and gave to her, and which she put in
her poor bosom. I asked her where she lived herself. She
said, after a pause, in no place long. It were better not to
know.

Mr. Peggotty suggesting to me, in a whisper, what had already
occurred to myself, I took out my purse ; but I could not pre-
vail upon her to accept any money, nor could I exact any
promise from her that she would do so at another time. I
represented to her that Mr. Peggotty could not be called, for
one in his condition, poor ; and that the idea of her engaging
in this search, while depending on her own resources, shocked
us both. She continued stedfast. In this particular, his influ-
ence upon her was equally powerless with mine. She gratefully
thanked him, but remained inexorable.

" There may be work to be got," she said. " I'll try."

" At least take some assistance," I returned, " until you have
tried."

" I could not do what I have promised, for money," she
replied. " I could not take it, if I was starving. To give me
money would be to take away your trust, to take away the
object that you have given me, to take away the only certain
thing that saves me from the river."

" In the name of the great Judge," said I, " before whom
you and all of us must stand at His dread time, dismiss that
terrible idea ! We can all do some good, if we will."

She trembled, and her lip shook, and her face was paler, as
she answered :

David Copperfield 643

" It has been put into your hearts, perhaps, to save a wretched
creature for repentance. I am afraid to think so ; it seems too
bold. If any good should come of me, I might begin to hope ;
for nothing but harm has ever come of my deeds yet. I am to
be trusted, for the first time in a long while, with my miserable
life, on account of what you have given me to try for. I know
no more, and I can say no more."

Again she repressed the tears that had begun to flow ; and,
putting out her trembling hand, and touching Mr. Peggotty, as
if there were some healing virtue in him, went away along the
desolate road. She had been ill, probably for a long time. I
observed, upon that closer opportunity of observation, that she
was worn and haggard, and that her sunken eyes expressed
privation and endurance.

We followed her at a short distance, our way l5nng in the
same direction, until we came back into the lighted and popu-
lous streets. I had such implicit confidence in her declaration,
that I then put it to Mr. Peggotty, whether it would not seem,
in the onset, like distrusting her, to follow her any further. He
being of the same mind, and equally reliant on her, we suffered
her to take her own road, and took ours, which was towards
Highgate. He accompanied me a good part of the way ; and
when we parted, with a prayer for the success of this fresh
effort, there was a new and thoughtful compassion in him that
I was at no loss to interpret.

It was midnight when I arrived at home. I had reached my
own gate, and was standing listening for the deep bell of Saint
Paul's, the sound of which I thought had been borne towards
me among the multitude of striking clocks, when I was rather
surprised to see that the door of my aunt's cottage was open,
and that a faint light in the entry was shining out across the
road.

Thinking that my aunt might have relapsed into one of her
old alarms, and might be watching the progress of some imagin-
ary conflagration in the distance, I went to speak to her. It was
with very great surprise that I saw a man standing in her little
garden.

He had a glass and bottle ip his hand, and was in the act of
drinking. I stopped short, among the thick foliage outside,
for the moon was up now, though obscured ; and I recognised
the man whom I had once supposed to be a delusion of Mr.
Dick's, and had once encountered with my aunt in the streets
of the city.

He was eating as well as drinking, and seemed to eat with a

644 David Copperfield

hungry appetite. He seemed curious regarding the cottage,
too, as if it were the first time he had seen it. After stooping
to put the bottle on the ground, he looked up at the windows,
and looked about ; though with a covert and impatient air, as
if he was anxious to be gone.

The light in the passage was obscured for a moment, and my
aunt came out. She was agitated, and told some money into
his hand. I heard it chink.

" What's the use of this ? " he demanded.

'* I can spare no more," returned my aunt.

" Then I can't go," said he. " Here ! You may take it back ! "

"You bad man," returned my aunt, with great emotion;
" how can you use me so ? But why do I ask ? It is because
you know how weak I am ! What have I to do, to free myself
for ever of your visits, but to abandon you to your deserts ? "

" And why don't you abandon me to my deserts ? " said he.

" Vou ask me why ! " returned my aunt. " What a heart
you must have ! "

He stood moodily rattling the money, and shaking his head,
until at length he said :

" Is this all you mean to give me, then ? "

" It is all I can give you," said my aunt. " You know I
have had losses, and am poorer than I used to be. I have told
you so. Having got it, why do you give me the pain of look-
ing at you for another moment, and seeing what you have
become ? "

"I have become shabby enough, if you mean that," he said.
" I lead the life of an owl."

" You stripped me of the greater part of all I ever had," said
my aunt. " You closed my heart against the whole world, years
and years. You treated me falsely, ungratefully and cruelly.
Go, and repent of it. Don't add new injuries to the long, long
list of injuries you have done me ! "

" Aye ! " he returned. " It's all very fine ! — Well I I must do
the best I can, for the present, I suppose."

In spite of himself, he appeared abashed by my aunt's indig-
nant tears, and came slouching out of the garden. Taking two
or three quick steps, as if I had. just come up, I met him at the
gate, and went in as he came out. We eyed one another
narrowly in passing, and with no favour.

" Aunt," said I, hurriedly. " This man alarming you again 1
Let me speak to him. Who is he ? "

" Child," returned my aunt, taking my arm, " come in, and
don't speak to me for ten minutes.''

David Copperfield 645

We sat down in her little parlour. My aunt retired behind
the round green fan of former days, which was screwed on the
back of a chair, and occasionally wiped her eyes, for about a
quarter of an hour. Then she came out, and took a seat
beside me.

"Trot," said my aunt, calmly, "it's my husband."

" Your husband, aunt ? I thought he had been dead ! "

" Dead to me," returned my aunt, "but living."

I sat in silent amazement.

" Betsey Trotwood don't look a likely subject for the tender
passion," said my aunt, composedly, "but the time was. Trot,
when she believed in that man most entirely. When she loved
him. Trot, right well When there was no proof of attach-
ment and affection that she would not have given him. He
repaid her by breaking her fortune, and nearly breaking her
heart. So she put all that sort of sentiment, once and for
ever, in a grave, and filled it up, and flattened it down."

" My dear good aunt ! "

" I left him," my aunt proceeded, laying her hand as usual
on the back of mine, " generously. I may say at this distance
of- time. Trot, that I left him generously. He had been so
cruel to me, that I might have effected a separation on easy
terms for myself; but I did not. He soon made ducks and
drakes of what I gave him, sank lower and lower, married
another woman, I believe, became an adventurer, a gambler,
and a cheat. What he is now, you see. But he was a fine-
looking man when I married him," said my aunt, with an echo
of her old pride and admiration in her tone ; " and I believed
him — I was a fool ! — to be the soul of honour ! "

She gave my hand a squeeze, and shook her head.

" He is nothing to me now. Trot, less than nothing. But,
sooner than have him punished for his offences (as he would
be if he prowled about in this country), I give him more
money than I can afford, at intervals when he reappears, to
go away. I was a fool when I married him ; and I am so far
an incurable fool on that subject, that, for the sake of what I
once believed him to be, I wouldn't have even this shadow of
my idle fancy hardly dealt with. For I was in earnest. Trot,
if ever a woman was."

My aunt dismissed the matter with a heavy sigh, and
smoothed her dress.

" There, my dear ! " she said. " Now you know the begin-
ning, middle, and end, and all about it. We won't mention
the subject to one another any more ; neither, of course, will

646 David Copperfield

you mention it to anybody else. This is my grumpy, frumpj
story, and we'll keep it to ourselves, Trot 1 "

CHAPTER XLVIII

DOMESTIC

I LABOURED hard at my book, without allowing it to interfere
with the punctual discharge of my newspaper duties; and
it came out and was very successful. I was not stunned
by the praise which sounded in my ears, notwithstanding
that I was keenly alive to it, and thought better of my
own performance, I have little doubt, than anybody else
did. It has always been in my observation of human nature,
that a man who has any good reason to believe in himself
never flourishes himself before the faces of other people in
order that they may believe in him. For this reason, I
retained my modesty in very self-respect; and the more
praise I got, the more I tried to deserve.

It is not my purpose, in this record, though in all other
essentials it is my written memory, to pursue the history of
my own fictions. They express themselves, and I leave them
to themselves. When I refer to them, incidentally, it is only
as a part of my progress.

Having some foundation for believing, by this time, that
nature and accident had made me an author, I pursued my
vocation with confidence. Without such assurance I should
certainly have left it alone, and bestowed my energy on some
other endeavour. I should have tried to find out what nature
and accident really had made me, and to be that, and nothing
else.

I had been writing, in the newspaper and elsewhere, so
prosperously, that when my new success was achieved, I
considered myself reasonably entitled to escape from the
dreary debates. One joyful night, therefore, I noted down
the music of the parliamentary bagpipes for the last time,
and I have never heard it since; though I still recognise
the old drone in the newspapers, without any substantial
variation (except, perhaps, that there is more of it) all the
livelong session.

I now write of the time when I had been married, I suppose,
about a year and a half. After several varieties of experiment,

David Copperfield 647

we had given up the housekeeping as a bad job. The house
kept itself, and we kept a page. The principal function of this
retainer was to quarrel with the cook ; in which respect he was
a perfect Whittington, without his cat, or the remotest chance
of being made Lord Mayor.

He appears to me to have lived in a hail of saucepan-lids.
His whole existence was a scuffle. He would shriek for help
on the most improper occasions, — as when we had a little
dinner party, or a few friends in the evening, — and would
come tumbling out of the kitchen, with iron missiles flying
after him. We wanted to get rid of him, but he was very
much attached to us, and wouldn't go. He was a tearful
boy, and broke into such deplorable lamentations, when a
cessation of our connexion was hinted at, that we were
obliged to keep him. He had no mother — no anything in
the way of a relative, that I could discover, except a sister,
who fled to America the moment we had taken him off" her
hands ; and he became quartered on us like a horrible young
changeling. He had a lively perception of his own unfor-
tunate state, and was always rubbing his eyes with the sleeve
of his jacket, or stooping to blow his nose on the extreme
corner of a little pocket-handkerchief, which he never would
take completely out of his pocket, but always economised and
secreted.

This unlucky page, engaged in an evil hour at six pounds
ten per annum, was a source of continual trouble to me. I
watched him as he grew — and he grew like scarlet beans —
with painful apprehensions of the time when he would begin
to shave; even of the days when he would be bald or grey.
I saw no prospect of ever getting rid of him , and, projecting
myself into the future, used to think what an inconvenience
he would be when he was an old man.

I never expected anything less, than this unfortunate's
manner of getting me out of my difficulty. He stole Dora's
watch, which, like everything else belonging to us, had no
particular place of its own; and, converting it into money,
spent the produce (he was always a weak-minded boy) in
incessantly riding up and down between London and Ux-
bridge outside the coach. He was taken to Bow Street, as
well as I remember, on the completion of his fifteenth journey ;
when four-and-sixpence, and a second-hand fife which he
couldn't play, were found upon his person.

The surprise and its consequences would have been much
less disagreeable to me if he had not been penitent. But

648 David Copperfield

he was very penitent indeed, and in a peculiar way — not in
the lump, but by instalments. For example: the day after
that on which I was obliged to appear against him, he made
certain revelations touching a hamper in the cellar, which
we believed to be full of wine, but which had nothing in it
except bottles and corks. We supposed he had now eased
his mind, and told the worst he knew of the cook; but, a
day or two afterwards, his conscience sustained a new twinge,
and he disclosed how she had a little girl, who, early every
morning, took away our bread; and also how he himself
had been suborned to maintain the milkman in coals. In
two or three days more, I was informed by the authorities
of his having led to the discovery of sirloins of beef among
the kitchen-stuff, and sheets in the rag-bag. A little while
afterwards, he broke out in an entirely new direction, and
confessed to a knowledge of burglarious intentions as to our
premises, on the part of the pot-boy, who was immediately
taken up. I got to be so ashamed of being such a victim,
that I would have given him any money to hold his tongue,
or would have offered a round bribe for his being permitted
to run away. It was an aggravating circumstance in the case
that he had no idea of this, but conceived that he was making
me amends in every new discovery; not to say, heaping
obligations on my head.

At last I ran away myself, whenever I saw an emissary of
the police approaching with some new intelligence ; and lived
a stealthy life until he was tried and ordered to be transported.
Even then he couldn't be quiet, but was always writing us
letters; and wanted so much to see Dora before he went
away, that Dora went to visit him, and fainted when she
found herself inside the iron bars. In short, I had no
peace of my life until he was expatriated, and made (as I
afterwards heard) a shepherd of, "up the country" some-
where; I have no geographical idea where.

All this led me into some serious reflections, and presented
our mistakes in a new aspect ; as I could not help communi-
cating to Dora one evening, in spite of my tenderness for her.

" My love," said I, "it is very painful to me to think that
our want of system and management involves not only our-
selves (which we have got used to), but other people."

"You have been silent for a long time, and now you are
going to be cross ! " said Dora.

" No, my dear, indeed 1 Let me explain to you what
I mean."

David Copperfield 649

** I think I don't want to know," said Dora.

" But I want you to know, my love. Put Jip down."

Dora put his nose to mine, and said " Boh ! " to drive my
seriousness away; but, not succeeding, ordered him into his
Pagoda, and sat looking at me, with her hands folded, and a
most resigned little expression of countenance.

" The fact is, my dear," I began, " there is contagion in us.
We infect every one about us."

I might have gone on in this figurative manner, if Dora's
face had not admonished me that she was wondering with all
her might whether I was going to propose any new kind of
vaccination, or other medical remedy, for this unwholesome
state of ours. Therefore I checked myself, and made my
meaning plainer.

"It is not merely, my pet," said I, "that we lose money
and comfort, and even temper sometimes, by not learning to
be more careful ; but that we incur the serious responsibility
of spoiling every one who comes into our service, or has any
dealings with us. I begin to be afraid that the fault is not
entirely on one side, but that these people all turn out ill
because we don't turn out very well ourselves."

"Oh, what an accusation," exclaimed Dora, opening her
eyes wide ; " to say that you ever saw me take gold watches 1
Oh ! "

" My dearest," I remonstrated^ " don't talk preposterous
nonsense ! Who has made the least allusion to gold watches ? "

" You did," returned Dora. " You know you did. You
said I hadn't turned out well, and compared me to him."

"To whom?" I asked.

"To the page," sobbed Dora. "Oh, you cruel fellow, to
compare your affectionate wife to a transported page! Why
didn't you tell me your opinion of me before we were married ?
Why didn't you say, you hard-hearted thing, that you were
convinced I was worse than a transported page? Oh, what
a dreadful opinion to have of me ! Oh, my goodness ! "

" Now, Dora, my love," I returned, gently trying to remove
the handkerchief she pressed to her eyes, "this is not only
very ridiculous of you, but very wrong. In the first place, it's
not true."

" You always said he was a story-teller," sobbed Dora.
" And now you say the same of me ! Oh, what shall I do !
What shall I do ! "

" My darling girl," I retorted, " I really must entreat you to
be reasonable, and listen to what I did say, and do say. My

650 David Copperfield

dear Dora, unless we learn to do our duty to those whom we
employ, they will never learn to do their duty to us. I am
afraid we present opportunities to people to do wrong, that
never ought to be presented. Even if we were as lax as we
are, in all our arrangements, by choice — which we are not —
even if we liked it, and found it agreeable to be so — which we
don't — I am persuaded we should have no right to go on
in this way. We are positively corrupting people. We are
bound to think of that. I can't help thinking of it, Dora. It
is a reflection I am unable to dismiss, and it sometimes makes
me very uneasy. There, dear, that's all. Come now. Don't
be foolish ! "

Dora would not allow me, for a long time, to remove the
handkerchief. She sat sobbing and murmuring behind it,
that, if I was uneasy, why had I ever been married? Why
hadn't I said, even the day before we went to church, that
I knew I should be uneasy, and I would rather not? If I
couldn't bear her, why didn't I send her away to her aunts
at Putney, or to Julia Mills in India? Julia would be glad
to see her, and would not call her a transported page ; Julia
never had called her anything of the sort. In short, Dora was
so afflicted, and so afflicted me by being in that condition,
that I felt it was of no use repeating this kind of effort, though
never so mildly, and I must take some other course.

What other course was left to take ? To " form her mind ? "
This was a common phrase of words which had a fair and
promising sound, and I resolved to form Dora's mind.

I began immediately. When Dora was very childish, and
I would have infinitely preferred to humour her, I tried to be
grave — and disconcerted her, and myself too. I talked to her
on the subjects which occupied my thoughts; and I read
Shakespeare to her — and fatigued her to the last degree.
I accustomed myself to giving her, as it were quite casually,
little scraps of useful information, or sound opinion — and she
started from them when I let them off, as if they had been
crackers. No matter how incidentally or naturally I endeav-
oured to form my little wife's mind, I could not help seeing
that she always had an instinctive perception of what I was
about, and became a prey to the keenest apprehensions. In
particular, it was clear to me, that she thought Shakespeare a
terrible fellow. The formation went on very slowly.

I pressed Traddles into the service without his knowledge ;
and whenever he came to see us, exploded my mines upon
him for the edification of Dora at second hand. The amount

David Copperfield 651

of practical wisdom I bestowed upon Traddles in this manner
was immense, and of the best quality; but it had no other
effect upon Dora than to depress her spirits, and make her
always nervous with the dread that it would be her turn nesrt.
I found myself in the condition of a schoolmaster, a trap,
a pitfall ; of always playing spider to Dora's fly, and always
pouncing out of my hole to her infinite disturbance.

Still, looking forward through this intermediate stage, to
the time when there should be a perfect sympathy between
Dora and me, and when I should have "formed her mind"
to my entire satisfaction, I persevered, even for months.
Finding at last, however, that, although I had been all this
time a very porcupine or hedgehog, bristling all over with
determination, I had effected nothing, it began to occur to
me that perhaps Dora's mind was already formed.

On further consideration this appeared so likely, that
I abandoned my scheme, which had had a more promising
appearance in words than in action; resolving henceforth to
be satisfied with my child-wife, and to try to change her into
nothing else by any process. I was heartily tired of being
sagacious and prudent by myself, and of seeing my darling
under restraint ; so I bought a pretty pair of ear-rings for her,
and a collar for Jip, and went home one day to make myself
agreeable.

Dora was delighted with the little presents, and kissed me
joyfully; but there was a shadow between us, however slight,
and I had made up my mind that it should not be there. If
there must be such a shadow anywhere, I would keep it for
the future in my own breast.

I sat down by my wife on the sofa, and put the ear-rings in
her ears ; and then I told her that I feared we had not been
quite as good company lately, as we used to be, and that the
fault was mine. Which I sincerely felt, and which indeed it was.

"The truth is, Dora, my life," I said, "I have been trying
to be wise."

" And to make me wise too," said Dora, timidly. " Haven't
you, Doady?"

I nodded assent to the pretty inquiry of the raised eyebrows,
and kissed the parted lips.

" It's of not a bit of use," said Dora, shaking her head, until
the ear-rings rang again. " You know what a little thing I am,
and what I wanted you to call me from the first. If you can't
do so, I am afraid you'll never like me. Are you sure you
don't think, sometimes, it would have been better to have—"

652 David Copperfield

"Done what, my dear?" For she made no effort to
proceed.

" Nothing ! " said Dora.
■ " Nothing ? " I repeated.

She put her arms round my neck, and laughed, and called
herself by her favourite name of a goose, and hid her face on
my shoulder in such a profusion of curls that it was quite a
task to clear them away and see it.

"Don't I think it would have been better to have done
nothing, than to have tried to form my little wife's mind ? "
said I, laughing at myself. "Is that the question? Yes,
indeed, I do."

"Is that what you have been trying?" cried Dora. "Oh
what a shocking boy ! "

" But I shall never try any more," said I. " For I love her
dearly as she is."

" Without a story — really ? " inquired Dora, creeping closer
to me.

"Why should I seek to change," said I, "what has been so
precious to me for so long ? You never can show better than
as your own natural self, my sweet Dora; and we'll try no
conceited experiments, but go back to our old way, and be
happy."

" And be happy ! " returned Dora. " Yes ! All day ! And
you won't mind things going a tiny morsel wrong, some-
times ? "

" No, no," said I. " We must do the best we can."

"And you won't tell me, any more, that we make other
people bad," coaxed Dora; "will you? Because you know
it's so dreadfully cross ! "

" No, no," said I.

" It's better for me to be stupid than uncomfortable, isn't
it?" said Dora.

"Better to be naturally Dora than anything else in the
world."

" In the world ! Ah, Doady, it's a large place ! "

She shook her head, turned her delighted bright eyes up to
mine, kissed me, broke into a merry laugh, and sprang away to
put on Jip's new collar.

So ended my last attempt to make any change in Dora. I
had been unhappy in trying it ; I could not endure my own
solitary wisdom; I could not reconcile it with her former
appeal to me as my child-wife. I resolved to do what I could,
in a quiet way, to improve our proceedings myself; but I foresaw

David Copperfield 653

that my utmost would be very little, or I must degenerate into
the spider again, and be for ever lying in wait.

And the shadow I have mentioned, that was not to be between
us any more, but was to rest wholly on my own heart. How
did that fall?

The old unhappy feeling pervaded my life. It was deepened,
if it were changed at all ; but it was as undefined as ever, and
addressed me Hke a strain of sorrowful music faintly heard in
the night I loved my wife dearly, and I was happy ; but the
happiness I had vaguely anticipated, once, was not the happiness
I enjoyed, and there was always something wanting.

In fulfilment of the compact I have made with myself, to
reflect my mind on this paper, I again examine it, closely, and
bring its secrets to the light. What I missed, I still regarded
— I always regarded — as something that had been a dream of
my youthful fancy ; that was incapable of realisation ; that I
was now discovering to be so, with some natural pain, as all
men did. But that it would have been better for me if my
wife could have helped me more, and shared the many thoughts
in which I had no partner ; and that this might have been ; I
knew.

Between these two irreconcileable conclusions : the one, that
what I felt was general and unavoidable ; the other, that it was
particular to me, and might have been different : I balanced
curiously, with no distinct sense of their opposition to each other.
When I thought of the airy dreams of youth that are incapable
of realisation, I thought of the better state preceding manhood
that I had outgrown. And then the contented days with Agnes,
in the dear old house, arose before me, like spectres of the
dead, that might have some renewal in another world, but never
never more could be reanimated here.

Sometimes, the speculation came into my thoughts, What
might have happened, or what would have happened, if Dora
and I had never known each other? But she was so incor-
porated with my existence, that it was the idlest of all fancies,
and would soon rise out of my reach and sight, like gossamer
floating in the air.

I always loved her. What I am describing, slumbered, and
half awoke, and slept again, in the innermost recesses of my
mind. There was no evidence of it in me ; I know of no
influence it had in anything I said or did. I bore the weight
of all our little cares, and all my projects ; Dora held the pens ;
and we both felt that our shares were adjusted as the case
required. She was truly fond of me, and proud of me ; and

654 David Copperfield

when Agnes wrote a few earnest words in her letters to Dora,
of the pride and interest with which my old friends heard of
my growing reputation, and read my book as if they heard me
speaking its contents, Dora read them out to me with tears of
joy in her bright eyes, and said I was a dear old clever, famous
boy.

"The first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart."
Those words of Mrs. Strong's were constantly recurring to me,
at this time ; were almost always present to my mind. I awoke
with them, often, in the night ; I remember to have even read
them, in dreams, inscribed upon the walls of houses. For I
knew, now, that my own heart was undisciplined when it first
loved Dora ; and that if it had been disciplined, it never could
have felt, when we were married, what it had felt in its secret
experience.

" There can be no disparity in marriage, like unsuitability of
mind and purpose." Those words I remembered too. I had
endeavoured to adapt Dora to myself, and found it impracticable.
It remained for me to adapt myself to Dora ; to share with her
what I could, and be happy; to bear on my own shoulders
what I must, and be still happy. This was the discipline to
which I tried to bring my heart, when I began to think. It
made my second year much happier than my first ; and, what
was better still, made Dora's Hfe all sunshine.

But, as that year wore on, Dora was not strong. I had
hoped that lighter hands than mine would help to mould her
character, and that a baby-smile upon her breast might change
my child-wife to a woman. It was not to be. The spirit
fluttered for a moment on the threshold of its little prison, and,
unconscious of captivity, took wing.

"When I can run about again, as I used to do, aunt," said
Dora, " I shall make Jip race. He is getting quite slow and
lazy."

" I suspect, my dear," said my aunt, quietly working by her
side, " he has a worse disorder than that. Age, Dora."

" Do you think he is old ? " said Dora, astonished. " Oh,
how strange it seems that Jip should be old ! "

" It's a complaint we are all Hable to, Little One, as we get
on in life," said my aunt, cheerfully ; " I don't feel more free
from it than I used to be, I assure you."

" But Jip," said Dora, looking at him with compassion, " even
little Jip ! Oh, poor fellow ! "

" I dare say he'll last a long time yet. Blossom," said my
aunt, patting Dora on the cheek, as she leaned out of her

David Copperfield 655

couch to look at Jip, who responded by standing on his hind
legs, and baulking himself in various asthmatic attempts to
scramble up by the head and shoulders. "He must have
a piece of flannel in his house this winter, and I shouldn't
wonder if he came out quite fresh again, with the flowers
in the spring. Bless the little dog!" exclaimed my aunt.
"If he had as many lives as a cat, and was on the point
of losing 'em all, he'd bark at me with his last breath, I
believe ! "

Dora had helped him up on the sofa ; where he really was
defying my aunt to such a furious extent, that he couldn't keep
straight, but barked himself sideways. The more my aunt
looked at him, the more he reproached her ; for she had lately
taken to spectacles, and for some inscrutable reason he con-
sidered the glasses personal.

Dora made him lie down by her, with a good deal of persua-
sion ; and when he was quiet, drew one of his long ears through
and through her hand, repeating thoughtfully, " Even little Jip I
Oh, poor fellow ! "

"His lungs are good enough," said my aunt, gaily, "and
his dislikes are not at all feeble. He has a good many years
before him, no doubt. But if you want a dog to race with,
Little Blossom, he has lived too well for that, and I'll give you
one."

"Thank you, aunt," said Dora, faintly. "But don't,
please ! "

" No ? " said my aunt, taking off her spectacles.

" I couldn't have any other dog but Jip," said Dora, " It
would be so unkind to Jip ! Besides, I couldn't be such
friends with any other dog but Jip ; because he wouldn't have
known me before I was married, and wouldn't have barked at
Doady when he first came to our house. I couldn't care for
any other dog but Jip, I am afraid, aunt."

" To be sure ! " said my aunt, patting her cheek again. " You
are right."

"You are not offended," said Dora, "are you?"

"Why, what a sensitive pet it is!" cried my aunt, bend-
ing over her affectionately. "To think that I could be
offended I "

"No, no, I didn't really think so," returned Dora; "but
1 am a little tired, and it made me silly for a moment — I
am always a silly little thing, you know; but it made me
more silly — to talk about Jip. He has known me in all
that has happened to me, haven't you, Jip ? And I couldn't

656 David Copperfield

bear to slight him, because he was a little altered — could I,

J'p?"

Jip nestled closer to his mistress, and lazily licked her
hand.

"You are not so old, Jip, are you, that you'll leave your
mistress yet?" said Dora. "We may keep one another
company a little longer ! "

My pretty Dora ! When she came down to dinner on the
ensuing Sunday, and was so glad to see old Traddles (who
always dined with us on Sunday), we thought she would be
" running about as she used to do," in a few days. But they
said, wait a few days more, and then, wait a few days more ;
and still she neither ran nor walked. She looked very pretty,
and was very merry; but the little feet that used to be so
nimble when they danced round Jip, were dull and motionless.

I began to carry her down-stairs every morning, and up-stairs
every night. She would clasp me round the neck and laugh,
the while, as if I did it for a wager. Jip would bark and caper
round us, and go on before, and look back on the landing,
breathing short, to see that we were coming. My aunt, the
best and most cheerful of nurses, would trudge after us, a
moving mass of shawls and pillows. Mr. Dick would not have
relinquished his post of candle-bearer to any one alive. Traddles
would be often at the bottom of the staircase, looking on, and
taking charge of sportive messages from Dora to the dearest
girl in the world. We made quite a gay procession of it, and
my child-wife was the gayest there.

But, sometimes, when I took her up, and felt that she was
lighter in my arms, a dead blank feeling came upon me, as if
I were approaching to some frozen region yet unseen, that
numbed my life. I avoided the recognition of this feeling by
any name, or by any communing with myself ; until one night,
when it was very strong upon me, and my aunt had left her
with a parting cry of "Good night, Little Blossom," I sat
down at my desk alone, and cried to think, Oh what a fatal
name it was, and how the blossom withered in its bloom upon
the tree I

David Copperfield 657

CHAPTER XLIX

1 AM INVOLVED IN MYSTERY

I RECEIVED one morning by the post, the following letter,
dated Canterbury, and addressed to me at Doctors' Commons ;
which I read with some surprise :

"My dear Sir,

" Circumstances beyond my individual control have,
for a considerable lapse of time, effected a severance of that
intimacy which, in the limited opportunities conceded to me
in the midst of my professional duties, of contemplating the
scenes and events of the past, tinged by the prismatic hues of
memory, has ever afforded me, as it ever must continue to
afford, gratifying emotions of no common description. This
fact, my dear sir, combined with the distinguished elevation to
which your talents have raised you, deters me from presuming
to aspire to the liberty of addressing the companion of my
youth, by the familiar appellation of Copperfield ! It is
sufficient to know that the name to which I do myself the
honour to refer, will ever be treasured among the muniments
of our house (I allude to the archives connected with our
former lodgers, preserved by Mrs. Micawber), with sentiments
of personal esteem amounting to affection.

" It is not for one situated, through his original errors and
a fortuitous combination of unpropitious events, as is the
foundered Bark (if he may be allowed to assume so maritime
a denomination), who now takes up the pen to address you —
it is not, I repeat, for one so circumstanced, to adopt the
language of compliment, or of congratulation. That he
leaves to abler and to purer hands.

" If your more important avocations should admit of your
ever tracing these imperfect characters thus far — which may
be, or may not be, as circumstances arise — you will naturally
inquire by what object am I influenced, then, in inditing the
present missive? Allow me to say that I fully defer to the
reasonable character of that inquiry, and proceed to develop
it : premising that it is not an object of a pecuniary nature.

" Without more directly referring to any latent ability that
may possibly exist on my part, of wielding the thunderbolt,
or directing the devouring and avenging flame in any quarter,
I may be permitted to observe, in passing, that my brightest

658 David Copperfield

visions are for ever dispelled — that my peace is shattered and
my power of enjoyment destroyed — that my heart is no longer
in the right place — and that I no more walk erect before my
fellow-man. The canker is in the flower. The cup is bitter
to the brim. The worm is at his work, and will soon dispose
of his victim. The sooner the better. But I will not digress.

" Placed in a mental position of peculiar painfulness, beyond
the assuaging reach even of Mrs. Micawber's influence, though
exercised in the tripartite character of woman, wife, and
mother, it is my intention to fly from myself for a short
period, and devote a respite of eight-and-forty hours to re-
visiting some metropolitan scenes of past enjoyment. Among
other havens of domestic tranquillity and peace of mind, my
feet will naturally tend towards the King's Bench. Prison. In
stating that I shall be (D.V.) on the outside of the south wall
of that place of incarceration on civil process, the day after
to-morrow, at seven in the evening, precisely, my object in
this epistolary communication is accomplished.

" I do not feel warranted in soliciting my former friend
Mr. Copperfield, or my former friend Mr. Thomas Traddles
of the Inner Temple, if that gentleman is still existent and
forthcoming, to condescend to meet me, and renew (so far as
may be) our past relations of the olden time. I confine
myself to throwing out the observation, that, at the hour and
place I have indicated, may be found such ruined vestiges
as yet

" Remain,
"Of
"A

" Fallen Tower,

"WiLKINS MiCAWBER.

" P.S. It may be advisable to superadd to the above, the
statement that Mrs. Micawber is not in confidential possession
of my intentions."

I read the letter over several times. Making due allowance
for Mr. Micawber's lofty style of composition, and for the
extraordinary relish with which he sat down and wrote long
letters on all possible and impossible occasions, I still believed
that something important lay hidden at the bottom of this
roundabout communication. I put it down, to think about
it ; and took it up again, to read it once more ; and was still
pursuing it, when Traddles found me in the height of my
perplexity.

David Copperfield 659

" My dear fellow," said I, " I never was better pleased to
see you. You come to give me the benefit of your sober
judgment at a most opportune time. I have received a very
singular letter, Traddles, from Mr. Micawber."

" No ? " cried Traddles. *' You don't say so ? And I have
received one from Mrs. Micawber ! "

With that, Traddles, who was flushed with walking, and
whose hair, under the combined effects of exercise and excite-
nient, stood on end as if he saw a cheerful ghost, produced
his letter and made an exchange with me. I watched him
into the heart of Mr. Micawber's letter, and returned the
elevation of eyebrows with which he said " ' Wielding the
thunderbolt, or directing the devouring and avenging flame ! *
Bless me, Copperfield ! " — and then entered on the perusal of
Mrs. Micawber's epistle.

It ran thus :

" My best regards to Mr. Thomas Traddles, and if he
should still remember one who formerly had the happiness
of being well acquainted with him, may I beg a few moments
of his leisure time ? I assure Mr. T. T. that I would not
intrude upon his kindness, were I in any other position than
on the confines of distraction.

" Though harrowing to myself to mention, the alienation of
Mr. Micawber (formerly so domesticated) from his wife and
family, is the cause of my addressing my unhappy appeal to
Mr. Traddles, and soliciting his best indulgence. Mr. T.
can form no adequate idea of the change in Mr. Micawber's
conduct, of his wildness, of his violence. It has gradually
augmented, until it assumes the appearance of aberration ot
intellect. Scarcely a day passes, I assure Mr. Traddles, on
which some paroxysm does not take place. Mr. T. will not
require me to depict my feelings, when I inform him that I
have become accustomed to hear Mr. Micawber assert that
he has sold himself to the D. Mystery and secrecy have long
been his principal characteristic, have long replaced unlimited
confidence. The slightest provocation, even being asked if
there is anything he would prefer for dinner, causes him to
express a wish for a separation. Last night, on being childishly
solicited for twopence, to buy ' lemon-stunners ' — a local
sweetmeat — he presented an oyster-knife at the twins!

" I entreat Mr. Traddles to bear with me in entering into these
details. Without them, Mr. T. would indeed find it difficult to
form the faintest conception of my heart-rending situation.

66o David Copperfield

" May I now venture to confide to Mr. T. the purport of my
letter ? Will he now allow me to throw myself on his friendly
consideration ? Oh yes, for I know his heart !

" The quick eye of affection is not easily blinded, when of
the female sex. Mr. Micawber is going to London. Though
he studiously concealed his hand, this morning before break-
fast, in writing the direction-card which he attached to the
little brown valise of happier days, the eagle-glance of matri-
monial anxiety detected d, o, n, distinctly traced. The West-
End destination of the coach is the Golden Cross. Dare I
fervently implore Mr. T. to see my misguided husband, and to
reason with him ? Dare I ask Mr. T. to endeavour to step in
between Mr. Micawber and his agonised family ? Oh no, for
that would be too much !

" If Mr. Copperfield should yet remember one unknown to
fame, will Mr. T. take charge of my unalterable regards and
similar entreaties ? In any case, he will have the benevolence
to consider this communication strictly private^ and on no
account whatever to be alluded to^ however distantly^ in the
presence of Mr, Micawber. If Mr. T. should ever reply to it
(which I cannot but feel to be most improbable), a letter
addressed to M. E., Post Office, Canterbury, will be fraught
with less painful consequences than any addressed immediately
to one, who subscribes herself, in extreme distress,

" Mr. Thomas Traddles's respectful friend and suppliant,

"Emma Micawber."

" What do you think of that letter ? " said Traddles, casting
his eyes upon me, when I had read it twice.

" What do you think of the other ? " said I. For he was
still reading it with knitted brows.

" I think that the two together, Copperfield," replied
Traddles, "mean more than Mr. and Mrs. Micawber usually
mean in their correspondence — but I don't know what. They
are both written in good faith, I have no doubt, and without
any collusion. Poor thing!" he was now alluding to Mrs.
Micawb,er's letter, and we were standing side by side comparing
the two : " it will be a charity to write to her, at all events, and
tell her that we will not fail to see Mr. Micawber."

I acceded to this the more readily, because I now reproached
myself with having treated her former letter rather lightly. It
had set me thinking a good deal at the time, as I have men-
tioned in its place ; but my absorption in my own affairs, my
experience of the fao'ily, and my hearing nothing more, had

David Copperfield 661

gradually ended in my dismissing the subject. I had often
thought of the Micawbers, but chiefly to wonder what
"pecuniary liabilities" they were establishing in Canterbury,
and to recall how shy Mr. Micawber was of me when he
became clerk to Uriah Heep.

However, I now wrote a comforting letter to Mrs. Micawber,
in our joint names, and we both signed it. As we walked into
town to post it, Traddles and I had a long conference, and
launched into a number of speculations, which I need not
repeat. We took my aunt into our counsels in the afternoon ;
but our only decided conclusion was, that we would be very
punctual in keeping Mr. Micawber's appointment.

Although we appeared at the stipulated place a quarter of
an hour before the time, we found Mr. Micawber already
there. He was standing with his arms folded, over against
the wall, looking at the spikes on the top, with a sentimental
expression, as if they were the interlacing boughs of trees that
had shaded him in his youth.

When we accosted him, his manner was something more
confused, and something less genteel than of yore. He had
relinquished his legal suit of black for the purposes of this
excursion, and wore the old surtout and tights, but not quite
with the old air. He gradually picked up more and more of
it as we conversed with him ; but his very eye-glass seemed to
hang less easily, and his shirt-collar, though still of the old
formidable dimensions, rather drooped.

" Gentlemen ! " said Mr. Micawber, after the first salutations,
" you are friends in need, and friends indeed. Allow me to
offer my inquiries with reference to the physical welfare of
Mrs. Copperfield in <f5J^,.»and Mrs. Traddles in posse, — presum-
ing, that is to say, that my friend Mr. Traddles is not yet
united to the object of his affections, for weal and for woe."

We acknowledged his politeness, and made suitable replies.
He then directed our attention to the wall, and was beginning,
" I assure, you, gentlemen," when I ventured to object to that
ceremonious form of address, and to beg that he would speak
to us in the old way.

" My dear Copperfield," he returned, pressing my hand,
*' your cordiality overpowers me. This reception of a shattered
fragment of the Temple once called Man — if I may be per-
mitted so to express myself — bespeaks a heart that is an
honour to our common nature. I was about to observe that I
again behold the serene spot where some of the happiest hours
of my exiiilence fleeted by."

662 David Copperfield

" Made so, I am sure, by Mrs. Micawber," said I. " I hope
she is well ? "

" Thank you," returned Mr. Micawber, whose face clouded
at this reference, "she is but so-so. And this," said Mr.
Micawber, nodding his head sorrowfully, " is the Bench !
Where, for the first time in many revolving years, the over-
whelming pressure of pecuniary liabilities was not proclaimed,
from day to day, by importunate voices declining to vacate
the passage ; where there was no knocker on the door for any
creditor to appeal to ; where personal service of process was
not required, and detainers were merely lodged at the gate !
Gentlemen," said Mr. Micawber, "when the shadow of that
iron-work on the summit of the brick structure has been re-
flected on the gravel of the Parade, I have seen my children
thread the mazes of the intricate pattern, avoiding the dark
marks. I have been familiar with every stone in the place.
If I betray weakness, you will know how to excuse me."

"We have all got on in life since then, Mr. Micawber,"
said I.

"Mr. Copperfield," returned Mr. Micawber, bitterly, "when
I was an inmate of that retreat I could look my fellow-man
in the face, and punch his head if he offended me. My
fellow-man and myself are no longer on those glorious terms ! "

Turning from the building in a downcast manner, Mr.
Micawber accepted my proffered arm on one side, and the
proffered arm of Traddles on the other, and walked away
between us.

"There are some landmarks," observed Mr. Micawber,
looking fondly back over his shoulder, "on the road to the
tomb, which, but for the impiety of the aspiration, a man
would wish never to have passed. Such is the Bench in my
chequered career."

" Oh, you are in low spirits, Mr. Micawber," said Traddles.

"I am, sir," interposed Mr. Micawber.

" I hope," said Traddles, "it is not because you have con-
ceived a dislike to the law — for I am a lawyer myself, you
know."

Mr. Micawber answered not a word.

"How is our friend Heep, Mr. Micawber?" said I, after
a silence.

"My dear Copperfield," returned Mr. Micawber, bursting
into a state of much excitement, and turning pale, "if you
ask after my employer 2Lsyour friend, I am sorry for it ; if you
ask after him as my friend, I sardonically smile at it. In

David Copperfield 663

whatever capacity you ask after my employer, I beg, without
offence to you, to limit my reply to this — that whatever his
state of health may be, his appearance is foxy : not to say
diabolical. You will allow me, as a private individual, to
decline pursuing a subject which has lashed me to the utmost
verge of desperation in my professional capacity."

I expressed my regret for having innocently touched upon
a theme that roused him so much. " May I ask," said I,
'* without any hazard of repeating the mistake, how my old
friends Mr. and Miss Wickfield are ? "

"Miss Wickfield," said Mr. Micawber, now turning red,
" is, as she always is, a pattern, and a bright example. My
dear Copperfield, she is the only starry spot in a miserable
existence. My respect for that young lady, my admiration of
her character, my devotion to her for her love and truth, and
goodness ! — Take me," said Mr. Micawber, " down a turning,
for, upon my soul, in my present state of mind I am not equal
to this ! "

We wheeled him off into a narrow street, where he took out
his pocket-handkerchief, and stood with his back to a wall.
If I looked as gravely at him as Traddles did, he must have
found our company by no means inspiriting.

"It is my fate," said Mr. Micawber, unfeignedly sobbing,
but doing even that, with a shadow of the old expression of
doing something genteel ; " it is my fate, gentlemen, that the
finer feelings of our nature have become reproaches to me.
My homage to Miss Wickfield is a flight of arrows in my
bosom. You had better leave me, if you please, to walk the
earth as a vagabond. The worm will settle my business in
double-quick time."

Without attending to this invocation, we stood by, until he put
up his pocket-handkerchief, pulled up his shirt-collar, and, to
delude any person in the neighbourhood who might have been
observing him, hummed a tune with his hat very much on one
side. I then mentioned — not knowing what might be lost if
we lost sight of him yet — that it would give me great pleasure
to introduce him to my aunt, if he would ride out to Highgate,
where a bed was at his service.

"You shall make us a glass of your own punch, Mr.
Micawber," said I, "and forget whatever you have on your
mind, in pleasanter reminiscences."

" Or, if confiding anything to friends will be more likely to
relieve you, you shall impart it to us, Mr. Micawber," said
Traddles, prudently.

664 David Copperfield

" Gentlemen," returned Mr. Micawber, " do with me as you
will ! I am a straw upon the surface of the deep, and am tossed
in all directions by the elephants — I beg your pardon ; I should
have said the elements."

We walked on, arm-in-arm, again ; found the coach in the act
of starting ; and arrived at Highgate without encountering any
difficulties by the way. I was very uneasy and very uncertain
in my mind what to say or do for the best — so was Traddles,
evidently. Mr. Micawber was for the most part plunged into
deep gloom. He occasionally made an attempt to smarten
himself, and hum the fag-end of a tune ; but his relapses into
profound melancholy were only made the more impressive by
the mockery of a hat exceedingly on one side, and a shirt-collar
pulled up to his eyes.

We went to my aunt's house rather than to mine, because of
Dora's not being well. My aunt presented herself on being
sent for, and welcomed Mr. Micawber with gracious cordiality.
Mr. Micawber kissed her hand, retired to the window, and
pulling out his pocket-handkerchief, had a mental wrestle with
himself.

Mr. Dick was at home. He was by nature so exceedingly
compassionate of any one who seemed to be ill at ease, and was
so quick to find any such person out, that he shook hands with
Mr. Micawber, at least half-a-dozen times in five minutes. To
Mr. Micawber, in his trouble, this warmth, on the part of a
stranger, was so extremely touching, that he could only say, on
the occasion of each successive shake, " My dear sir, you over-
power me ! " Which gratified Mr. Dick so much, that he went
at it again with greater vigour than before.

" The friendliness of this gentleman," said Mr. Micawber to
my aunt, " if you will allow me, ma'am, to cull a figure of speech
from the vocabulary of our coarser national sports — floors me.
To a man who is struggling with a complicated burden of
perplexity and disquiet, such a reception is trying, I assure you."

" My friend Mr. Dick," replied my aunt, proudly, " is not a
common man."

"That I am convinced of," said Mr. Micawber. " My dear
sir ! " for Mr. Dick was shaking hands with him again ; " I am
deeply sensible of your cordiality ! "

" How do you find yourself? "said Mr. Dick, with an anxious
look.

" Indifferent, my dear sir," returned Mr. Micawber, sighing.

" You must keep up your spirits," said Mr. Dick, " and make
yourself as comfortable as possible."

David Copperfield 665

Mr. Micawber was quite overcome by these friendly words,
and by finding Mr. Dick's hand again within his own. " It has
been my lot," he observed, " to meet, in the diversified panorama
of human existence, with an occasional oasis, but never with one
so green, so gushing, as the present ! "

At another time I should have been amused by this ; but I
felt that we were all constrained and uneasy, and I watched Mr.
Micawber so anxiously, in his vacillations between an evident
disposition to reveal something, and a counter-disposition to
reveal nothing, that I was in a perfect fever. Traddles, sitting
on the edge of his chair, with his eyes wide open, and his hair
more emphatically erect than ever, stared by turns at the ground
and at Mr. Micawber, without so much as attempting to put in a
word. My aunt, though I saw that her shrewdest observation
was concentrated on her new guest, had more useful posses-
sion of her wits than either of us ; for she held him in
conversation, and made it necessary for him to talk, whether
he liked it or not.

"You are a very old friend of my nephew's, Mr. Micawber,"
said my aunt. " I wish I had had the pleasure of seeing you
before."

" Madam," returned Mr. Micawber, " I wish I had had the
honour of knowing you at an earlier period. I was not always
the wreck you at present behold."

" I hope Mrs. Micawber and your family are well, sir," said
my aunt.

Mr. Micawber inclined his head. " They are as well, ma'am,"
he desperately observed, after a pause, "as Aliens and Outcasts
can ever hope to be."

" Lord bless you, sir 1 " exclaimed my aunt in her abrupt way.
" What are you talking about ? "

"The subsistence of my family, ma'am," returned Mr.
Micawber, "trembles in the balance. My employer "

Here Mr. Micawber provokingly left oflf; and began to
peel the lemons that had been under my directions set before
him, together with all the other appliances he used in making
punch.

" Your employer, yoft know," said Mr. Dick, jogging his arm
as a gentle reminder.

" My good sir," returned Mr. Micawber, " you recall me. I
am obliged to you." They shook hands again. " My employer,
ma'am — Mr. Heep — once did me the favour to observe to me,
that if I were not in the receipt of the stipendiary emoluments
appertaining to my engagement with him, I should probably

666 David Copperfield

be a mountebank about the country, swallowing a sword-blade,
and eating the devouring element. For anything that I can
perceive to the contrary, it is still probable that my children
may be reduced to seek a livelihood by personal contortion,
while Mrs. Micawber abets their unnatural feats by playing the
barrel-organ."

Mr. Micawber, with a random but expressive flourish of his
knife, signified that these performances might be expected to
take place after he was no more ; then resumed his peeling
with a desperate air.

My aunt leaned her elbow on the little round table that she
usually kept beside her, and eyed him attentively. Notwith-
standing the aversion with which L regarded the idea of en-
trapping him into any disclosure he was not prepared to make
voluntarily, I should have taken him up at this point, but for
the strange proceedings in which I saw him engaged ; whereot
his putting the lemon-peel into the kettle, the sugar into the
snuffer-tray, the spirit into the empty jug, and confidently
attempting to pour boiling water out of a candle-stick, were
among the most remarkable. I saw that a crisis was at hand,
and it came. He clattered all his means and implements
together, rose from his chair, pulled out his pocket-handker-
chief, and burst into tears.

"My dear Copperfield," said Mr. Micawber, behind his
handkerchief, "this is an occupation, of all others, requiring an
untroubled mind, and self-respect. I cannot perform it. It is
out of the question."

" Mr. Micawber," said I, " what is the matter ? Pray speak
out. You are among friends."

" Among friends, sir 1 " repeated Mr. Micawber ; and all he
had reserved came breaking out of him. "Good heavens, it is
principally because I am among friends that my state of mind
is what it is. What is the matter, gentlemen ? What is not the
matter ? Villany is the matter ; baseness is the matter ; decep-
tion, fraud, conspiracy, are the matter ; and the name of the
whole atrocious mass is — Heep ! "

My aunt clapped her hands, and we all started up as if we
were possessed.

" The struggle is over ! " said Mr. Micawber, violently
gesticulating with his pocket-handkerchief, and fairly striking
out from time to time with both arms, as if he were swimming
under superhuman difficulties. " I will lead this life no longer.
I am a wretched being, cut off from everything that makes
life tolerable. I have been under a Taboo in that infernal

David Copperfield 667

scoundrel's service. Give me back my wife, give me back my
family, substitute Micawber for the petty wretch who walks
about in the boots at present on my feet, and call upon me
to swallow a sword to-morrow, and I'll do it. With an
appetite ! "

I never saw a man so hot in my life. I tried to calm him,
that we might come to something rational ; but he got hotter
and hotter, and wouldn't hear a word.

"I'll put my hand in no man's hand," said Mr. Micawber,
gasping, puffing, and sobbing, to that degree that he was like a
man fighting with cold water, " until I have — blown to frag-
ments— the — a — detestable — serpent — Heep! I'll partake of ^
no one's hospitality, until I have — a — moved Mount Vesuvius
— to eruption — on — a — the abandoned rascal — Heep! Re-
freshment— 2l — underneath this roof — particularly punch —
would — a — choke me — unless — I had — previously — choked
the eyes — out of the head — a — of — interminable cheat, and
liar — Heep ! I — a — I'll know nobody — and — a — say nothing
— and — a — live nowhere — until I have crushed — to — a — un-
discoverable atoms — the — transcendent and immortal hypocrite
and perjurer — Heep ! "

I really had some fear of Mr. Micawber's dying on the spot.
The manner in which he struggled through these inarticulate
sentences, and, whenever he found himself getting near the
name of Heep, fought his way on to it, dashed at it in a
fainting state, and brought it out with a vehemence little less
than marvellous, was frightful ; but now, when he sank into a
chair, steaming, and looked at us, with every possible colour in
his face that had no business there, and an endless procession
of lumps following one another in hot haste up his throat,
whence they seemed to shoot into his forehead, he had the
appearance of being in the last extremity. I would have
gone to his assistance, but he waved me ofif, and wouldn't hear
a word.

" No, Copperfield ! — No communication — a — until — Miss
Wickfield — a — redress from wrongs inflicted by consummate
scoundrel — Heep!" (I am quite convinced he could not
have uttered three words, but for the amazing energy with
which this word inspired him when he felt it coming.) " In-
violable secret — a — from the whole world — a — no exceptions
— this day week — a — at breakfast time — a — everybody present
— including aunt — a — and extremely friendly gentleman — to
be at the hotel at Canterbury — a — where — Mrs. Micawber and
myself — Auld Lang Syne in chorus — and — a — will expose

668 David Copperfield

intolerable ruffian — Heep ! No more to say — a — or listen to
persuasion — go immediately — not capable — a — bear society —
upon the track of devoted and doomed traitor — Heep ! "

With this last repetition of the magic word that had kept
him going at all, and in which he surpassed all his previous
efforts, Mr. Micawber rushed out of the house; leaving us in a
state of excitement, hope, and wonder, that reduced us to a
condition little better than his own. But even then his passion
for writing letters was too strong to be resisted ; for while we
were yet in the height of our excitement, hope, and wonder,
the following pastoral note was brought to me from a neigh-
bouring tavern, at which he had called to write it : —

** Most secret and confidential

"My dear Sir,

"I beg to be allowed to convey, through you, my
apologies to your excellent aunt for my late excitement. An
explosion of a smouldering volcano long suppressed, was the
result of an internal contest more easily conceived than
described.

"I trust I rendered tolerably intelligible my appointment
for the morning of this day week, at the house of public
entertainment at Canterbury, where Mrs. Micawber and my-
self had once the honour of uniting our voices to yours, in the
well-known strain of the Immortal exciseman nurtured beyond
the Tweed.

"The duty done, and act of reparation performed, which
can alone enable me to contemplate my fellow-mortal, I shall
be known no more. I shall simply require to be deposited in
that place of universal resort, where

** Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
" The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep,

** — With the plain Inscription,

"WiLKiNS Micawber."

CHAPTER L

MR. PEGGOTTY'S dream COMES TRUE

By this time, some months had passed since our interview on
the bank of the river with Martha. I had never seen her
since, but she had communicated with Mr. Peggotty on

David Copperfield 669

several occasions. Nothing had come of her zealous inter-
vention ; nor could I infer, from what he told me, that
any clue had ever been obtained, for a moment, to Emily's
fate. I confess that I began to despair of her recovery, and
gradually to sink deeper and deeper into the belief that she
was dead.

His conviction remained unchanged. So far as I know —
and I believe his honest heart was transparent to me — he
never wavered again, in his solemn certainty of finding her.
His patience never tired. And, although I trembled for the
agony it might one day be to him to have his strong assurance
shivered at a blow, there was something so religious in it, so
affectingly expressive of its anchor being in the purest depths
of his fine nature, that the respect and honour in which I held
him were exalted every day.

His was not a lazy trustfulness, that hoped, and did no more.
He had been a man of sturdy action all his life, and he knew
that in all things wherein he wanted help he must do his own
part faithfully, and help himself. I have known him set out in
the night, on a misgiving that the light might not be, by some
accident, in the window of the old boat, and walk to Yarmouth.
I have known him, on reading something in the newspaper,
that might apply to her, take up his stick, and go forth on a
journey of three or four score miles. He made his way by sea
to Naples and back, after hearing the narrative to which Miss
Dartle had assisted me. All his journeys were ruggedly per-
formed ; for he was always stedfast in a purpose of saving
money for Emily's sake, when she should be found. In all
this long pursuit, I never heard him repine ; I never heard him
say he was fatigued, or out of heart.

Dora had often seen him since our marriage, and was quite
fond of him. I fancy his figure before me now, standing near
her sofa, with his rough cap in his hand, and the blue eyes of
my child-wife raised, with a timid wonder, to his face. Some-
times of an evening, about twilight, when he came to talk with
me, I would induce him to smoke his pipe in the gsu-den, as
we slowly paced to and fro together ; and then the picture of
his deserted home, and the comfortable air it used to have in
my childish eyes of an evening when the fire was burning, and
the wind moaning round it, came most vividly into my mind.

One evening, at this hour, he told me that he had found
Martha waiting near his lodging on the preceding night when
he came out, and that she had asked him not to leave London
on any account, until he should have seen her again.

670 David Copperfield

" Did she tell you why ? " I inquired.

" I asked her, Mas'r Davy," he replied, " but it is but fe^
words as she ever says, and she on'y got my promise and so
went away."

" Did she say when you might expect to see her again ? " I
demanded.

" No, Mas'r Davy," he returned, drawing his hand thought-
fully down his face. " I asked that too ; but it was more (she
said) than she could tell."

As I had long forborne to encourage him with hopes that
hung on threads, I made no other comment on this inform-
ation than that I supposed he would see her soon. Such
speculations as it engendered within me I kept to myself, and
those were faint enough.

I was walking alone in the garden, one evening, about a
fortnight afterwards. I remember that evening well. It was
the second in Mr. Micawber's week of suspense. There had
been rain all day, and there was a damp feeling in the air.
The leaves were thick upon the trees and heavy with wet ; but
the rain had ceased, though the sky was still dark; and the
hopeful birds were singing cheerfully. As I walked to and fro
in the garden, and the twilight began to close around me, their
little voices were hushed; and that peculiar silence which
belongs to such an evening in the country when the lightest
trees are quite still, save for the occasional droppings from their
boughs, prevailed.

There was a little green perspective of trellis-work and ivy at
the side of our cottage, through which I could see, from the
garden where I was walking, into the road before the house.
I happened to turn my eyes towards this place, as I was
thinking of many things ; and I saw a figure beyond, dressed
in a plain cloak. It was bending eagerly towards me, and
beckoning.

" Martha ! " said I, going to it.

"Can you come with me?" she inquired, in an agitated
whisper. "I have been to him, and he is not at home. I
wrote down where he was to come, and left it on his table
with my own hand. They said he would not be out long.
I have tidings for him. Can you come directly ? "

My answer was to pass out at the gate immediately. She
made a hasty gesture with her hand, as if to entreat my
patience and my silence, and turned towards London, whence,
as her dress betokened, she had come expeditiously on foot.

I asked her if that were not our destination ? On her

David Copperfield 671

motioning Yes, with the same hasty gesture as before, I stopped
an empty coach that was coming by, and we got into it. When
1 asked her where the coachman was to drive, she answered,
" Anywhere near Golden Square ! And quick ! " — then shrunk
into a corner, with one trembling hand before her face, and the
other making the former gesture, as if she could not bear a
voice.

Now much disturbed, and dazzled with conflicting gleams of
hope and dread, I looked at her for some explanation. But
seeing how strongly she desired to remain quiet, and feeling
that it was my own natural inclination too, at such a time, I did
not attempt to break the silence. We proceeded without a
word being spoken. Sometimes she glanced out of the window,
as though she thought we were going slowly, though indeed we
were going fast ; but otherwise remained exactly as at first.

We alighted at one of the entrances to the Square she had
mentioned, where I directed the coach to wait, not knowing
but that we might have some occasion for it. She laid her
hand on my arm, and hurried me on to one of the SDmbre
streets, of which there are several in that part, where the houses
were once fair dwellings in the occupation of single families,
but have, and had, long degenerated into poor lodgings let off
in rooms. Entering at the open door of one of these, and
releasing my arm, she beckoned me to follow her up the
common staircase, which was like a tributary channel to the
street

The house swarmed with inmates. As we went up, doors of
rooms were opened and people's heads put out ; and we passed
other people on the stairs, who were coming down. In
glancing up from the outside, before we entered, I had seen
women and children lolling at the windows over flowerpots ;
and we seemed to have attracted their curiosity, for these were
principally the observers who looked out of their doors. It
was a broad panelled staircase, with massive balustrades of
some dark wood ; cornices above the doors, ornamented with
carved fruit and flowers; and broad seats in the windows.
But all these tokens of past grandeur were miserably decayed
and dirty ; rot, damp, and age, had weakened the flooring,
which in many places was unsound and even unsafe. Some
attempts had -been made, I noticed, to infuse new blood into
this dwindling frame, by repairing the costly old wood-work
here and there with common deal ; but it was like the marriage
of a reduced old noble to a plebeian pauper, and each party to
the ill-assorted union shrunk away from the other. Several of

672 David Copperfield

the back windows on the staircase had been darkened or wholly
blocked up. In those that remained, there was scarcely any
glass; and, through the crumbling frames by which the bad
air seemed always to come in, and never to go out, I saw,
through other glassless windows, into other houses in a similar
condition, and looked giddily down into a wretched yard, which
was the common dust-heap of the mansion.

We proceeded to the top-story of the house. Two or three
times, by the way, I thought I observed in the indistinct light
the skirts of a female figure going up before us. As we turned
to ascend the last flight of stairs between us and the roof, we
caught a full view of this figure pausing for a moment, at a
door. Then it turned the handle, and went in.

" What's this ! " said Martha, in a whisper. " She has gone
into my room. I don't know her ! "

/ knew her. I had recognised her with amazement, for Miss
Dartle.

I said something to the effect that it was a lady whom I had
seen -before, in a few words, to my conductress; and had
scarcely done so when we heard her voice in the room, though
not, from where we stood, what she was saying. Martha, with
an astonished look, repeated her former action, and softly led
me up the stairs ; and then, by a little back door which seemed
to have no lock, and which she pushed open with a touch, into
a small empty garret with a low sloping roof : little better than
a cupboard. Between this, and the room she had called hers,
there was a small door of communication, standing partly open.
Here we stopped, breathless with our ascent, and she placed
her hand lightly on my lips. I could only see, of the room
beyond, that it was pretty large ; that there was a bed in it ;
and that there were some common pictures of ships upon the
walls. I could not see Miss Dartle, or the person whom we
had heard her address. Certainly, my companion could not,
for my position was the best.

A dead silence prevailed for some moments. Martha kept
one hand on my lips, and raised the other in a listening
attitude.

" It matters little to me her not being at home," said Rosa
Dartle, haughtily, " I know nothing of her. It is you I come
to see."

" Me ? " replied a soft voice.

At the sound of it, a thrill went through my frame. For it
was Emily's !

" Yes," retuiiied Miss Dartle, " I have come to look at you.

David Copperfield 673

What ? You are not ashamed of the face that has done so
much?"

The resolute and unrelenting hatred of her tone, its cold
stem sharpness, and its mastered rage, presented her before me,
as if I had seen her standing in the light. I saw the flashing
black eyes, and the passion-wasted figure ; and I saw the scar,
with its white track cutting through her lips, quivering and
throbbing as she spoke.

" I have come to see," she said, " James Steerforth's fancy ;
the girl who ran away with him, and is the town-talk of the
commonest people of her native place ; the bold, flaunting,
practised companion of persons like James Steerforth. I want
to know what such a thing is like."

There was a rustle, as if the unhappy girl, on whom she
heaped these taunts, ran towards the door, and the speaker
swiftly interposed herself before it. It was succeeded by a
moment's pause.

When Miss Dartle spoke again, it was through her set teeth,
and with a stamp upon the ground.

" Stay there ! " she said, " or I'll proclaim you to the
house, and the whole street! If you try to evade mey I'll
stop you, if it's by the hair, and raise the very stones against
you ! "

A frightened murmur was the only reply that reached my
ears. A silence succeeded. I did not know what to do.
Much as I desired to put an end to the interview, I felt that
I had no right to present myself; that it was for Mr. Peggotty
alone to see her and recover her. Would he never come?
I thought, impatiently.

" So ! " said Rosa Dartle, with a contemptuous laugh, " I see
her at last ! Why, he was a poor creature to be taken by that
delicate mock-modesty, and that hanging head ! "

"Oh, for Heaven's sake, spare me!" exclaimed Emily.
"Whoever you are, you know my pitiable story, and for
Heaven's sake spare me, if you would be spared yourself! "

" If / would be spared ! " returned the other fiercely ; " what
is there in common between us^ do you think ? "

"Nothing but our sex," said Emily, with a burst of
tears.

" And that," said Rosa Dartle, "is so strong a claim,
preferred by one so infamous, that if I had any feeling in my
breast but scorn and abhorrence of you, it would freeze it up.
Our sex ! You are an honour to our sex ! "

"I have deserved this," said Emily, "but it's dreadful!

674 David Copperfield

Dear, dear lady, think what I have suffered, and how I am
fallen ! Oh, Martha, come back ! Oh, home, home ! "

Miss Dartle placed herself in a chair, within view of the
door, and looked downward, as if Emily were crouching on
the floor before her. Being now between me and the light,
I could see her curled lip, and her cruel eyes intently fixed
on one place, with a greedy triumph.

"Listen to what I say !" she said ; " and reserve your false
arts for your dupes. Do you hope to move me by your tears ?
No more than you could charm me by your smiles, you
purchased slave."

" Oh, have some mercy on me ! " cried Emily. " Show me
some compassion, or I shall die mad ! "

" It would be no great penance," said Rosa Dartle, " for
your crimes. Do you know what you have done? Do you
ever think of the home you have laid waste ? "

" Oh, is there ever night or day, when I don't think of it ! "
cried Emily ; and now I could just see her, on her knees, with
her head thrown back, her pale face looking upward, her hands
wildly clasped and held out, and her hair streaming about her.
"Has there ever been a single minute, waking or sleeping,
when it hasn't been before me, just as it used to be in the lost
days when I turned my back upon it for ever and for ever !
Oh, home, home ! Oh dear, dear uncle, if you ever could have
known the agony your love would cause me when I fell away
from good, you never would have shown it to me so constant,
much as you felt it ; but would have been angry to me, at least
once in my life, that I might have had some comfort ! I have
none, none, no comfort upon earth, for all of them were always
fond of me ! " She dropped on her face, before the imperious
figure in the chair, with an imploring effort to clasp the skirt of
her dress.

Rosa Dartle sat looking down upon her, as inflexible as
a figure of brass. Her lips were tightly compressed, as if she
knew that she must keep a strong constraint upon herself —
I write what I sincerely believe — or she would be tempted to
strike the beautiful form with her foot. I saw her, distinctly,
and the whole power of her face and character seemed forced
into that expression. — Would he never come ?

" The miserable vanity of these earth-worms ! " she said,
when she had so far controlled the angry heavings of her
breast, that she could trust herself to speak. " Your home !
Do you imagine that I bestow a thought on it, or suppose
you could do any harm to that low place, which money

David Copperfield 675

would not pay for, and handsomely ? Your home ! You
were a part of the trade of your home, and were bought and
sold like any other vendible thing your people dealt in."

"Oh, not that!" cried Emily "Say anything of me; but
don't visit my disgrace and shame, more than I have done,
on folks who are as honourable as you ! Have some respect
for them, as you are a lady, if you have no mercy for me."

" I speak," she said, not deigning to take any heed of this
appeal, and drawing away her dress from the contamin-
ation of Emily's touch, " I speak of his home — where I live.
Here," she said, stretching out her hand with her con-
temptuous laugh, and looking down upon the prostrate girl,
"is a worthy cause of division between lady-mother and
gentleman-son ; of grief in a house where she wouldn't have
been admitted as a kitchen-girl \ of anger, and repining, and
reproach. This piece of pollution, picked up from the water-
side, to be made much of for an hour, and then tossed back
to her original place ! "

" No ! no ! " cried Emily, clasping her hands together.
" When he first came into my way — that the day had never
dawned upon me, and he had met me being carried to my
grave! — I had been brought up as virtuous as you or any
lady, and was going to be the wife of as good a man as you
or any lady in the world can ever marry. If you live in his
home and know him, you know, perhaps, what his power
with a weak, vain girl might be. I don't defend myself,
but I know well, and he knows well, or he will know when
he comes to die, and his mind is troubled with it, that he
used all his power to deceive me, and that I believed him,
trusted him, and loved him ! "

Rosa Dartle sprang up from her seat ; recoiled ; and in
recoiling struck at her, with a face of such malignity, so
darkened and disfigured by passion, that I had almost thrown
myself between them. The blow, which had no aim, fell
upon the air. As she now stood panting, looking at her
with the utmost detestation that she was capable of express-
ing, and trembling from head to foot with rage and scorn,
I thought I had never seen such a sight, and never could
see such another.

" You love him? YouV^ she cried, with her clenched
hand, quivering as if it only wanted a weapon to stab the
object of her wrath.

Emily had shrunk out of my view. There was no reply.

"And tell that to w<r," she added, "with your shameful

676 David Copperfield

lips ? Why don't they whip these creatures ? If I could
order it to be done, I would have this girl whipped to death."

And so she would, I have no doubt. I would not have
trusted her with the rack itself, while that furious look
lasted.

She slowly, very slowly, broke into a laugh, and pointed
at Emily with her hand, as if she were a sight of shame for
gods and men.

" She love ! " she said. " That carrion ! And he ever
cared for her, she'd tell me. Ha, ha! The liars that these
traders are!"

Her mockery was worse than her undisguised rage. Of
the two, I would have much preferred to be the object of the
latter. But, when she suffered it to break loose, it was only
for a moment. She had chained it up again, and however
it might tear her within, she subdued it to herself.

"I came here, you pure fountain of love," she said, "to see
— ^as I began by telling you — what such a thing as you was
'^ like. I was curious. I am satisfied. Also to tell you, that
you had best seek that home of yours, with all speed, and
hide your head among those excellent people who are expect-
ing you, and whom your money will console. When it's all
gone, you can believe, and trust, and love again, you know I
I thought you a broken toy that had lasted its time; a
worthless spangle that was tarnished, and thrown away.
But, finding you true gold, .a very lady, and an ill-used
innocent, with a fresh heart full of love and trustfulness —
which you look like, and is quite consistent with your story !
— I have something more to say. Attend to it ; for what
I say I'll do. Do you hear me, you fairy spirit? What
I say, I mean to do!"

Her rage got the better of her again for a moment; but
it passed over her face like a spasm, and left her smiling.

" Hide yourself," she pursued, " if not at home, somewhere.
Let it be somewhere beyond reach ; in some obscure life — or,
better still, in some obscure death. I wonder, if your loving
heart will not break, you have found no way of helping it to
be still ! I have heard of such means sometimes. I believe
they may be easily found."

A low crying, on the part of Emily, interrupted her here.

She stopped, and listened to it as if it were music.

\ "I am of a strange nature, perhaps," Rosa Dartle went on;

^ "but I can't breathe freely in the air you breathe. I find

it sickly. Therefore, I will have it cleared; I will have it

David Copperfield 677

purified of you. If you live here to-morrow, I'll have your
story and your character proclaimed on the common stair.
There are decent women in the house, I am told ; and it is
a pity such a light as you should be among them, and con-
cealed. If, leaving here, you seek any refuge in this town
in any character but your true one ^which you are welcome
to bear, without molestation from me), the same service
shall be done you, if I hear of your retreat. Being assisted
by a gentleman who not long ago aspired to the favour of
your hand, I am sanguine as to that."

Would he never, never come ? How long was I to bear
this ? How long could I bear it ?

" Oh me, oh me ! " exclaimed the wretched Emily, in a
tone that might have touched the hardest heart, I should
have thought; but there was no relenting in Rosa Dartle's
smile. " What, what, shall I do ! "

"Do?" returned the other. "Live happy in your own
reflections ! Consecrate your existence to the recollection of
James Steerforth's tenderness — he would have made you his
serving-man's wife, would he not? — or to feeling grateful to
the upright and deserving creature who would have taken
you as his gift. Or, if those proud remembrances, and the
consciousness of your own virtues, and the honourable posi-
tion to which they have raised you in the eyes of everything
that wears the human shape, will not sustain you, marry
that good man, and be happy in his condescension. If this
will not do either, die ! There are doorways and dust-heaps
for such deaths, and such despair — find one, and take your
flight to Heaven ! "

I heard a distant foot upon the stairs. I knew it, I was
certain. It was his, thank God !

She moved slowly from before the door when she said
this, and passed out of my sight.

" But mark ! " she added, slowly and sternly, opening the
other door to go away, " I am resolved, for reasons that
I have and hatreds that I entertain, to cast you out, unless
you withdraw from my reach altogether, or drop your pretty
mask. This is what I had to say ; and what I say, I mean
to do ! "

The foot upon the stairs came nearer — nearer — ^passed her
as she went down — rushed into the room !
"Uncle!"

A fearful cry followed the word. I paused a moment,
and, looking in, saw him supporting her insensible figure in

678 David Copperfield

his* arms. He gazed for a few seconds in the face ; then
stooped to kiss it — oh, how tenderly! — and drew a hand-
kerchief before it.

" Mas'r Davy," he said, in a low, tremulous voice, when it
was covered, " I thank my Heav'nly Father as my dream's
come true ! I thank rfim hearty for having guided of me,
in His own ways, to my darling ! "

With those words he took her up in his arms ; and, with
the veiled face lying on his bosom, and addressed towards
his own, carried her, motionless and unconscious, down the
stairs.

CHAPTER LI

THE BEGINNING OF A LONGER JOURNEY

It was yet early in the morning of the following day, when, as
I was walking in my garden with my aunt (who took little
other exercise now, being so much in attendance on my dear
Dora), I was told that Mr. Peggotty desired to speak with me.
He came into the garden to meet me half-way, on my going
towards the gate ; and bared his head, as it was always his
custom to do when he saw my aunt, for whom he had a high
respect, I had been telling her all that had happened over-
night. Without saying a word, she walked up with a cordial
face, shook hands with him, and patted him on the arm. It
was so expressively done, that she had no need to say a word.
Mr. Peggotty understood her quite as well as if she had said
a thousand.

" rU go in now, Trot," said my aunt, " and look after Little
Blossom, who will be getting up presently."

" Not along of my being heer, ma'am, I hope ? " said Mr.
Peggotty. "Unless my wits is gone a. bahd's-neezing " — by
which Mr. Peggotty meant to say, bird's-nesting — "this
morning, 'tis along of me as you're a-going to quit us ? "

" You have something to say, my good friend," returned my
aunt, "and will do better without me."

" By your leave, ma'am," returned Mr. Peggotty, " I should
take it kind, pervising you doen't mind my clicketten, if you'd
bide heer."

"Would you?" said my aunt, with short good-nature.
"Then I am sure I will!"

So she drew her arm through Mr. Peggotty's, and walked

David Copperfield 679

with him to a leafy little summer-house there was at the bottom
of the garden, where she sat down on a bench, and I beside
her. There was a seat for Mr. Peggotty too, but he preferred
to stand, leaning his hand on the small rustic table. As he
stood, looking at his cap for a little while before beginning to
speak, I could not help observing what power and force of
character his sinewy hand expressed, and what a good and
trusty companion it was to his honest brow and iron-grey
hair.

"I took my dear child away last night," Mr. Peggotty
began, as he raised his eyes to ours, "to my lodging, wheer
I have a long time been expecting of her and preparing fur
her. It was hours afore she knowed me right ; and when she
did, she kneeled down at my feet, and kiender said to me, as
if it was her prayers, how it all come to be. You may believe
me, when I heerd her voice, as I had heerd at home so
playful — and see her humbled, as it might be in the dust our
Saviour wrote in with his blessed hand — I felt a wownd go to
my 'art, in the midst of all its thankfulness."

He drew his sleeve across his face, without any pretence of
concealing why ; and then cleared his voice.

" It warn't for long as I felt that ; for she was found. I had
on'y to think as she was found, and it was gone. I doen't
know why I do so much as mention of it now, I'm sure. I
didn't have it in my mind a minute ago, to say a word about
myself ; but it come up so nat'ral, that I yielded to it afore I
was aweer."

" You are a self-denying soul," said my aunt, " and will have \/^
your reward."

Mr. Peggotty, with the shadows of the leaves playing
athwart his face, made a surprised inclination of the head
towards my aunt, as an acknowledgment of her good opinion;
then took up the thread he had relinquished.

" When my Em'ly took flight," he said, in stern wrath for
the moment, " from the house wheer she was made a pris'ner
by that theer spotted snake as Mas'r Davy see, — and his story's
trew, and may God confound him ! — she took flight in the
night. It was a dark night, with a many stars a-shining. She
was wild. She ran along the sea beach, believing the old boat
was theer ; and calling out to us to turn away our faces, for
she was a-coming by. She heerd herself a-crying out, like as
if it was another person ; and cut herself on them sharp-
pinted stones and rocks, and felt it no more than if she had
been rock herself. Ever so fur she run, and there was fire

68o David Copperfield

afore her eyes, and roarings in her ears. Of a sudden — or so
she thowt, you unnerstand — the day broke, wet and windy,
and she was lying b'low a heap of stone upon the shore, and
a woman was a-speaking to her, saying, in the language of that
country, what was it as had gone so much amiss ? "

He saw everything he related. It passed before him, as he
spoke, so vividly, that, in the intensity of his earnestness, he
presented what he described to me, with greater distinctness
than I can express. I can hardly believe, writing now long
afterwards, but that I was actually present in these scenes ;
they are impressed upon me with such an astonishing air of
fidelity.

"As Em'ly's eyes — which was heavy — see this woman
better," Mr. Peggotty went on, "she know'd as she was one
of them as she had often talked to on the beach. Fur though
she had run (as I have said) ever so fur in the night, she had
oftentimes wandered long ways, partly afoot, partly in boats
and carriages, and know'd all that country, 'long the coast,
miles and miles. She hadn't no children of her own, this
woman, being a young wife ; but she was a-looking to have
one afore long. And may my prayers go up to Heaven that
'twill be a happ'ness to her, and a comfort, and a honour, all
her life ! May it love her and be dootiful to her, in her
old age ; helpful of her at the last ; a Angel to her heer, and
heerafter ! "

" Amen ! " said my aunt.

"She had been summat timorous and down," said Mr.
Peggotty, " and had sat, at first, a little way off, at her spinning,
or such work as it was, when Em'ly talked to the children.
But Em'ly had took notice of her, and had gone and spoke to
her; and as the young woman was partial to the children
herself, they had soon made friends. Sermuchser, that when
Em'ly went that way, she always giv Em'ly flowers. This was
her as now asked what it was that had gone so much amiss.
Em'ly told her, and she — took her home. She did indeed.
She took her home," said Mr. Peggotty, covering his face.

He was more affected by this act of kindness, than I had
ever seen him affected by anything since the night she went
away. My aunt and I did not attempt to disturb him.

" It was a little cottage, you may suppose," he said, presently,
" but she found space for Em'ly in it, — her husband was away
at sea; — and she kep it secret, and prevailed upon such neigh-
bours as she had (they was not many near) to keep it secret
too. Em'ly was took bad with fever, and what is very strange

David Copperfield 68 1

to me is, — maybe 'tis not so strange to scholars, — the language
of that country went out of her head, and she could only
speak her own, that no one unnerstood. She recollects, as
if she had dreamed it, that she lay theer, always a-talking her
own tongue, always believing as the old boat was round the
next pint in the bay, and begging and imploring of 'em to
send theer and tell how she was dying, and bring back a
message of forgiveness, if it was on'y a wured. A'most the
whole time, she thowt, — now, that him as I made mention
on just now was lurking for her unnerneath the winder : now,
that him as had brought her to this was in the room, — and
cried to the good young woman not to give her up, and
know'd at the same time, that she couldn't unnerstand, and
dreaded that she must be took away. Likewise the fire was
afore her eyes, and the roarings in her ears ; and theer was
no to-day, nor yesterday, nor yet to-morrow; but everything
in her life as ever had been, or as ever could be, and every-
thing as never had been, and as never could be, was a-crowding
on her all at once, and nothing clear nor welcome, and yet
she sang and laughed about it ! How long this lasted, I doen't
know; but then theer come a sleep ; and in that sleep, from
being a many times stronger than her own self, she fell into
the weakness of the littlest child."

Here he stopped, as if for relief from the terrors of his
own description. After being silent for a few moments, he
pursued his story.

"It was a pleasant artemoon when she awoke; and so
quiet, that theer wam't a sound but the rippling of that blue
sea without a tide, upon the shore. It was her belief, at first,
that she was at home upon a Sunday morning; but the vine
leaves as she see at the winder, and the hills beyond, wam't
home, and contradicted of her. Then, come in her friend,
to watch alongside of her bed ; and then she know'd as the
old boat wam't round that next pint in the bay no more, but
was fur off ; and know'd wheer she was, and why ; and broke
out a-crying on that good young woman's bosom, wheer I
hope her baby is a-lying now, a-cheering of her with its pretty
eyes!"

He could not speak of this good friend of Emily's without
a flow of tears. It was in vain to try. He broke down
again, endeavouring to bless her !

"That done my Em'ly good," he resumed, after such
emotion as I could not behold without sharing in ; and as
to my aunt, she wept with all her heart ; " that done Em'ly

682 David Copperfield

good, and she begun to mend. But the language of that
country was quite gone from her, and she was forced to make
signs. So she went on, getting better from day to day, slow,
but sure, and trying to learn the names of common things —
names as she seemed never to have heerd in all her life — till
one evening come, Arhen she was a-setting at her window,
looking at a little girl at play upon the beach. And of a
sudden this child held out her hand, and said, what would be
in English, 'Fisherman's daughter, here's a shell' — for you
are to unnerstand that they used at first to call her * Pretty
lady,' as the general way in that country is, and that she had
taught 'em to call her * Fisherman's daughter ' instead. The
child says of a sudden, * Fisherman's daughter, here's a shell ! '
Then Em'ly unnerstands her ; and she answers, bursting out
a-crying ; and it all comes back !

"When Em'ly got strong again," said Mr. Peggotty, after
another short interval of silence, " she casts about to leave that
good young creetur, and get to her own country. The husband
was come home, then ; and the two together put her aboard a
small trader bound to Leghorn, and from that to France. She
had a little money, but it was less than little as they would take
for all they done. I'm a'most glad on it, though they was so
poor. What they done, is laid up wheer neither moth nor rust
doth corrupt, and wheer thieves do not break through nor steal.
Mas'r Davy, it'll outlast all the treasure in the wureld.

" Em'ly got to France, and took service to wait on travelling
ladies at a inn in the port. Theer, theer come, one day, that
snake. — Let him never come nigh me. I doen't know what
hurt I might do him ! — Soon as she see him, without him see-
ing her, all her fear and wildness returned upon her, and she
fled afore the very breath he draw'd. She come to England
aiad was set ashore at Dover.

" I doen't know," said Mr. Peggotty, '* for sure, when her 'art
begun to fail her ; but all the way to England she had thowt to
come to her dear home. Soon as she got to England she
turned her face tow'rds it. But fear of not being forgiv, fear
of being pinted at, fear of some of us being dead along of her,
fear of many things, turned her from it, kiender by force, upon
the road : * Uncle, uncle,' she says to me, ' the fear of not
being worthy to do what my torn and bleeding breast so longed
to do, was the most fright'ning fear of all ! I turned back,
when my 'art was full of prayers that I might crawl to the old
doorstep, in the night, kiss it, lay my wicked face upon it, and
theer be found dead in the morning.'

David Copperfield 683

"She come," said Mr. Peggotty, dropping his voice to an
awe-stricken whisper, " to London. She — as had never seen it
in her life — alone — without a penny — young — so pretty — come
to London. A'most the moment as she lighted heer, all so
desolate, she found (as she believed) a friend ; a decent woman
as spoke to her about the needlework as she had been brought
up to do, about finding plenty of it fur her, about a lodging fur
the night, and making secret inquiration concerning of me and
all at home, to-morrow. When my child," he said aloud, and
with an energy of gratitude that shook him from head to foot,
*' stood upon the brink of more than I can say or think on —
Martha, trew to her promise, saved her."

I could not repress a cry of joy.

" Mas'r Davy ! " said he, gripping my hand in that strong
hand of his, " it was you as first made mention of her to me.
I thankee, sir ! She was amest. She had know'd of her bitter
knowledge wheer to watch and what to do. She had done it.
And the Lord was above all ! She come, white and hurried,
upon Em'ly in her sleep. She says to her, 'Rise up from
worse than death, and come with me I' Them belonging to
the house would have stopped her, but they might as soon have
stopped the sea. 'Stand away from me,' she says, 'I am a
ghost that calls her from beside her open grave ! ' She told
Em'ly she had seen me, and know'd I loved her, and forgive
her. She wrapped her, hasty, in her clothes. She took her,
faint and trembling, on her arm. She heeded no more what
they said, than if she had had no ears. She walked among 'em
with my child, minding only her ; and brought her safe out, in
the dead of the night, from that black pit of ruin !

"She attended on Em'ly," said Mr. Peggotty, who had
released my hand, and put his own hand on his heaving chest ;
" she attended to my Em'ly, lying wearied out, and wandering
betwixt whiles, till late next day. Then she went in search of
me ; then in search of you, Mas'r Davy. She didn't tell Em'ly
what she come out fur, lest her 'art should fail, and she should
think of hiding of herself. How the cruel lady know'd of her
being theer, I can't say. Whether him as I have spoke so
much of, chanced to see 'em going theer, or whether (which is
most like to my thinking) he had heerd it from the woman, I
doen't greatly ask myself. My niece is found.

" All night long," said Mr. Peggotty, " we have been together,
Em'ly and me. 'Tis little (considering the time) as she has
said, in wureds, through them broken-hearted tears ; 'tis less as
I have seen of her dear face, as grow'd into a woman's at my

684 David Copperfield

hearth. But, all night long, her arms has been about my neck ,
and her head has laid heer ; and we knows full well, as we can
put our trust in one another ever more."

He ceased to speak, and his hand upon the table rested
there in perfect repose, with a resolution in it that might have
conquered lions.

" It was a gleam of light upon me. Trot," said my aunt,
drying her eyes, " when I formed the resolution of being god-
mother to your sister Betsey Trotwood, who disappointed me ;
but, next to that, hardly anything would have given me greater
pleasure, than to be godmother to that good young creature's
baby!"

Mr. Peggotty nodded his understanding of my aunt's feelings,
but could not trust himself with any verbal reference to the
subject of her commendation. We all remained silent, and
occupied with our own reflections (my aunt drying her eyes,
and now sobbing convulsively, and now laughing and calling
herself a fool), until I spoke.

"You have quite made up your mind," said I to Mr.
Peggotty, " as to the future, good friend ? I need scarcely ask
you."

" Quite, Mas'r Davy," he returned ; " and told Em'ly. Theer's
mighty countries, fur from heer. Our future life lays over the
sea."

"They will emigrate together, aunt," said I.

" Yes ! " said Mr. Peggotty, with a hopeful smile. " No one
can't reproach my darling in Australia. We will begin a new
life over theer ! "

I asked him if he yet proposed to himself any time for going
away.

" I was down at the Docks early this morning, sir," he
returned, "to get information concerning of them ships. In
about six weeks or two months from now, theer'll be one sailing
— I see her this morning — went aboard — and we shall take our
passage in her."

" Quite alone ? " I asked.

" Aye, Mas'r Davy ! " he returned. " My sister, you see,
she's that fond of you and yourn, and that accustomed to think
on'y of her own country, that it wouldn't be hardly fair to let
her go. Besides which, theer's one she has in charge, Mas'r
Davy, as doen't ought to be forgot."

" Poor Ham ! " said I.

" My good sister takes care of his house, you see, ma'am,
and he takes kindly to her," Mr. Peggotty explained for my

David Copperfield 685

aunt's better information. " He'll set and talk to her with a
calm spirit, wen it's like he couldn't bring himself to open his
lips to another. Poor fellow 1 " said Mr. Peggotty, shaking his
head, "theer's not so much left him, that he could spare the
little as he has ! "

'* And Mrs. Gummidge ? " said I.

"Well, I've had a mort of consideration, I do tell you,"
returned Mr. Peggotty, with a perplexed look which gradually
cleared as he went on, "concerning of Missis Gummidge.
You see, wen Missis Gummidge falls a-thinking of the old 'un,
she an't what you may call good company. Betwixt you and
me, Mas'r Davy — and you, ma'am — wen Mrs. Gummidge
takes to wimicking," — our old county word for crying, — " she's
liable to be considered to be, by them as didn't know the old
'un, peevish-like. Now I did know the old 'un," said Mr.
Peggotty, " and I know'd his merits, so I unnerstan' her ; but
'tan't entirely so, you see, with others — nat'rally can't be ! "

My aunt and I both acquiesced.

" Wheerby," said Mr, Peggotty, " my sister might — I doen't
say she would, but might — find Missis Gummidge give her a
leetle trouble now and again. Theerfur 'tan't my intentions to
moor Missis Gummidge 'long with them, but to find a Bein'
fur her wheer she can fisherate for herself." (A Bein' signi-
fies, in that dialect, a home, and to fisherate is to provide.)
" Fur which purpose," said Mr. Peggotty, " I means to make
her a 'lowance afore I go, as'U leave her pretty comfort'ble.
She's the faithfuUest of creeturs. 'Tan't to be expected, of
course, at her time of life, and being lone and lorn, as the good
old Mawther is to be knocked about aboardship, and in the
woods and wilds of a new and fur-away country. So that's
what I'm a-going to do with her."

He forgot nobody. He thought of everybody's claims and
strivings, but his own.

"Em'ly," he continued, "will keep along with me — poor
child, she's sore in need of peace and rest ! — until such time
as we goes upon our voyage. She'll work at them clothes,
as must be made ; and I hope her troubles will begin to seem
longer ago than they was, wen she finds herself once more by
her rough and loving uncle."

My aunt nodded confirmation of this hope, and imparted
great satisfaction to Mr. Peggotty.

" Theer's one thing furder, Mas'r Davy," said he, putting his
hand in his breast-pocket, and gravely taking out the little
paper bundle I had seen before, which he unrolled on the

686 David Copperfield

table. " Theer's these heer bank-notes — fifty pound, and ten..
To them I wish to add the money as she come away with.
I've asked her about that (but not saying why), and have added
of it up; I an't a scholar. Would you be so kind as see
how 'tis?"

He handed me, apologetically for his scholarship, a piece of
paper, and observed me while I looked it over. It was quite
right.

" Thankee, sir," he said, taking it back. " This money, if
you don't see objections, Mas'r Davy, I shall put up jest afore
I go, in a cover d'rected to him ; and put that up in another,
d'rected to his mother. I shall tell her, in no more wureds
than I speak to you, what it's the price on ; and that I'm gone,
and past receiving of it back."

I told him that I thought it would be right to do so — that
I was thoroughly convinced it would be, since he felt it to be
right.

" I said that theer was on'y one thing furder," he proceeded
with a grave smile, when he had made up his little bundle
again, and put it in his pocket ; " but theer was two. I wam't
sure in my mind, wen I come out this morning, as I could go
and break to Ham, of my own self, what had so thankfully
happened. So I writ a letter while I was out, and put it in
the post-office, telling of 'em how all was as 'tis, and that I
should come down to-morrow to unload my mind of what
little needs a-doing of down theer, and, most-like, take my
farewell leave of Yarmouth."

" And do you wish me to go with you ? " said I, seeing that
he left something unsaid.

"If you could do me that kind favour, Mas'r Davy," he
replied, " I know the sight on you would cheer 'em up
a bit."

My little Dora being in good spirits, and very desirous that
I should go — as I found on talking it over with her — I readily
pledged myself to accompany him in accordance with his wish.
Next morning, consequently, we were on the Yarmouth coach,
and again travelling over the old ground.

As we passed along the familiar street at night — Mr.
Peggotty, in despite of all my remonstrances, carrying my
bag — I glanced into Omer and Joram's shop, and saw my
old friend Mr. Omer there, smoking his pipe. I felt reluctant
to be present, when Mr. Peggotty first met his sister and
Ham; and made Mr. Omer my excuse for lingering behind.

" How is Mr. Omer after this long time ? " said I, going in.

David Copperfield 687

He fanned away the smoke of his pipe, that he might get
a better view of me, and soon recognised me with great
delight

"I should get up, sir, to acknowledge such an honour as
this visit," said he, "only my limbs are rather out of sorts, and
I am wheeled about. With the exception of my limbs and my
breath, hows'ever, I am as hearty as a man can be, I'm
thankful to say."

I congratulated him on his contented looks and his good*
spirits, and saw, now, that his easy-chair went on wheels.

"It's an ingenious thing, ain't it?" he inquired, following
the direction of my glance, and polishing the elbow with his
arm. " It runs as light as a feather, and tracks as true as a
mail-coach. Bless you, my little Minnie — my grand -daughter
you know, Minnie's child — puts her little strength against the
back, gives it a shove, and away we go, as clever and merry as
ever you see anything 1 And I tell you what — it's a most
uncommon chair to smoke a pipe in."

I never saw such a good old fellow to make the best of a
thing, and find out the enjoyment of it, as Mr. Omer. He
was as radiant as if his chair, his asthma, and the failure ot
his limbs, were the various branches of a great invention for
enhancing the luxury of a pipe.

" I see more of the world, I can assure you," said Mr. Omer,
"in this chair, than ever I see out of it. You'd be surprised
at the number of people that looks in of a day to have a chat.
You really would ! There's twice as much in the newspaper,
since I've taken to this chair, as there used to be. As to
general reading, dear me, what a lot of it I do get through !
That's what I feel so strong, you know 1 If it had been my
eyes, what should I have done ? If it had been my ears, what
should I have done ? Being my limbs, what does it signify ?
Why ; my limbs only made my breath shorter when I used 'em.
And now, if I want to go out into the street or down to the
sands, I've only got to call Dick, Joram's youngest 'prentice,
and away I go in my own carriage, like the Lord Mayor of
London."

He half suffocated himself with laughing here.

" Lord bless you ! " said Mr. Omer, resuming his pipe, " a
man must take the fat with the lean ; that's what he must make
up his mind to, in this life. Joram does a fine business.
Ex-cellent business!" <

" I am very glad to hear it," said I.

" I knew you would be," said Mr. Omer. •* And Joram and

688 David Copperfield

Minnie are like valentines. What more can a man expect?
What's his limbs to that I "

His supreme contempt for his own limbs, as he sat smoking,
was one of the pleasantest oddities I have ever encountered.

"And since I've took to general reading, you've took to
general writing, eh, sir?" said Mr. Omer, surveying me
admiringly. " What a lovely work that was of yours ! What
expressions in it ! I read it every word — every word. And
as to feeling sleepy ! Not at all ! "

I laughingly expressed my satisfaction, but I must confess
that I thought this association of ideas significant.

"I give you my word and honour, sir," said Mr. Omer,
"that when I lay that book upon the table, and look at it
outside ; compact in three separate and indiwidual wollumes
— one, two, three; I am as proud as Punch to think that I
once had the honour of being connected with your family.
And dear me, it's a long time ago, now, ain't it? Over at
Blunderstone. With a pretty little party laid along with the
other party. And you quite a small party then, yourself.
Dear, dear ! "

I changed the subject by referring to Emily. After assuring
him that I did not forget how interested he had always been
in her, and how kindly he had always treated her, I gave him
a general account of her restoration to her uncle by the aid
of Martha; which I knew would please the old man. He
listened with the utmost attention, and said, feelingly, when I
had done :

" I am rejoiced at it, sir ! It's the best news I have heard
for many a day. Dear, dear, dear ! And what's going to be
undertook for that unfortunate young woman, Martha, now ? "

" You touch a point that my thoughts have been dwelling
on since yesterday,'' said I, " but on which I can give you no
information yet, Mr. Omer. Mr. Peggotty has not alluded to
it, and I have a delicacy in doing so. I am sure he has not
forgotten it. He forgets nothing that is disinterested and
good."

"Because you know," said Mr. Omer, taking himself up,
where he had left off, " whatever is done, I should wish to be
a member of. Put me down for anything you may consider
right, and let me know. I never could think the girl all bad,
and I am glad to find she's not. So will my daughter Minnie
be. Young women are contradictory creatures in some things
— her mother was just the same as her — but their hearts are
soft and kind. It's all show with Minnie, about Martha.

David Copperfield 689

Why she should consider it necessary to make any show, I
don't undertake to tell you. But it's all show, bless you.
She'd do her any kindness in private. So put me down for
whatever you may consider right, will you be so good ? and
drop me a line where to forward it. Dear me ! " said Mr.
Omer, " when a man is drawing on to a time of life, where the
two ends of life meet ; when he finds himself, however hearty
he is, being wheeled about for the second time, in a speeches
of go-cart ; he should be over-rejoiced to do a kindness if he
can. He wants plenty. And I don't speak of myself, parti-
cular," said Mr. Omer, " because, sir, the way I look at it is,
that we are all drawing on to the bottom of the hill, whatever
age we are, on account of time never standing still for a single
moment. So let us always do a kindness, and be over-rejoiced.
To be sure ! "

He knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and put it on a ledge
in the back of his chair, expressly made for its reception.

"There's Em'ly's cousin, him that she was to have been
married to," said Mr. Omer, rubbing his hands feebly, "as
fine a fellow as there is in Yarmouth ! He'll come and talk
or read to me, in the evening, for an hour together some-
ti'^es. That's a kindness, I should call it! All his life's a
kmdness."

" I am going to see him now," said I.

" Are you ? " said Mr. Omer. " Tell him I was hearty, and
sent my respects. Minnie and Joram's at a ball. They would
be as proud to see you as I am, if they was at home. Minnie
won't hardly go out at all, you see, 'on account of father,' as
she says. So I swore to-night, that if she didn't go, I'd go to
bed at six. In consequence of which," Mr. Omer shook him-
self and his chair with laughter at the success of his device,
" she and Joram's at a ball."

I shook hands with him, and wished him good night.

" Half a minute, sir," said Mr. Omer. " If you was to go
without seeing my little elephant, you'd lose the best of sights.
You never see such a sight ! Minnie ! '

A musical little voice answered, from somewhere up-stairs,
"I am coming, grandfather!" and a pretty little girl with
long, flaxen, curling hair, soon came running into the shop.

"This is my little elephant, sir," said Mr. Omer, fondling
the child. " Siamese breed, sir. Now, little elephant ! "

The little elephant set the door of the parlour open, enabling
me to see that, in these latter days, it was converted into a
bedroom for Mr. Omer, who could not be easily conveyed

690 David Copperfield

up-stairs ; and then hid her pretty forehead, and tumbled her
long hair, against the back of Mr. Omer's chair.

" The elephant butts, you know, sir," said Mr. Omer, wink-
ing, "when he goes at a object. Once, elephant. Twice.
Three times ! "

At this signal, the little elephant, with a dexterity that was
next to marvellous in so small an animal, whisked the chair
round with Mr. Omer in it, and rattled it off, pell-mell, into the
parlour, without touching the doorpost : Mr. Omer indescrib-
ably enjoying the performance, and looking back at me on the
road as if it were the triumphant issue of his life's exertions.

After a stroll about the town, I went to Ham's house.
Peggotty had now removed here for good ; and had let her
own house to the successor of Mr. Barkis in the carrying
business, who had paid her very well for the goodwill, cart,
and horse. I believe the very same slow horse that Mr.
Barkis drove, was still at work.

I found them in the neat kitchen, accompanied by Mrs.
Gummidge, who had been fetched from the old boat by Mr.
Peggotty himself. I doubt if she could have been induced
to desert her post by any one else. He had evidently told
them all. Both Peggotty and Mrs. Gummidge had their
aprons to their eyes, and Ham had stepped out "to take
a turn on the beach." He presently came home, very glad
to see me ; and I hope they were all the better for my being
there. We spoke, with some approach to cheerfulness, of
Mr. Peggotty's growing rich in a new country, and of the
wonders he would describe in his letters. We said nothing
of Emily by name, but distantly referred to her more than
once. Ham was the serenest of the party.

But Peggotty told me, when she lighted me to a little
chamber where the Crocodile book was lying ready for me
on the table, that he always was the same. She believed
(she told me, crying) that he was broken-hearted; though
he was as full of courage as of sweetness, and worked harder
and better than any boat-builder in any yard in all that part.
There were times, she said, of an evening, when he talked
of their old life in the boat-house ; and then he mentioned
Emily as a child. But he never mentioned her as a woman.

I thought I had read in his face that he would like to speak
to me alone. I therefore resolved to put myself in his way
next evening, as he came home from his work. Having settled
this with myself, I fell asleep. That night, for the first time in
all those many nights, the candle was taken out of the window,

David Copperfield 691

Mr. Peggotty swung in his old hammock in the old boat, and
the wind murmured with the old sound round his head.

All next day he was occupied in disposing of his fishing-boat
and tackle ; in packing up, and sending to London by waggon,
such of his little domestic possessions as he thought would be
useful to him ; and in parting with the rest, or bestowing them
on Mrs. Gummidge. She was with him all day. As I had a
sorrowful wish to see the old place once more, before it was
locked up, I engaged to meet them there in the evening. But
I so arranged it, as that I should meet Ham first.

It was easy to come in his way, as I knew where he worked.
I met him at a retired part of the sands, which I knew he
would cross, and turned back with him, that he might have
leisure to speak to me if he really wished. I had not mistaken
the expression of his face. We had walked but a little way
together, when he said, without looking at me :

" Mas'r Davy, have you seen her ? "

" Only for a moment, when she was in a swoon," I softly
answered.

We walked a little farther, and he said :

" Mas'r Davy, shall you see her, d'ye think ? "

" It would be too painful to her, perhaps," said I.

•' I have thowt of that," he replied. " So 'twould, sir, so
'twould."

" But, Ham," said I, gently, " if there is anything that I
could write to her, for you, in case I could not tell it ; if there
is anything you would wish to make known to her through me;
I should consider it a sacred trust."

" I am sure on't I thankee, sir, most kind ! I think theer
is something I could wish said or wrote."

"What is it?"

We walked a little farther in silence, and then he spoke.

** 'Tan't that I forgive her. 'Tan't that so much. 'Tis rnore
as I beg of her to forgive me, for having pressed my affections
upon her. Odd times, I think that if I hadn't had her promise
fur to marry me, sir, she was that trustful of me, in a friendly
way, that she'd have told me what was struggling in her mind,
and would have counselled with me, and I might have saved
her."

I pressed his hand. " Is that all ? "

"Theer's yet a something else," he returned, " if I can say it,
Mas'r Davy."

We walked on, farther than we had walked yet, before he
spoke again. He was not crying when he made the pauses

692 David Copperfield

I shall express by lines. He was merely collecting himself
to speak very plainly.

" I loved her — and I love the mem'ry of her — too deep —
to be able to lead her to believe of my own self as I'm a happy
man. I could only be happy — by forgetting of her — and I'm
afeerd I couldn't hardly bear as she should be told I done that.
But if you, being so full of learning, Mas'r Davy, could think
of anything to say as might bring her to believe I wasn't greatly
hurt : still loving of her, and mourning for her : anything as
might bring her to believe as I was not tired of my life, and
yet was hoping fur to see her without blame, wheer the wicked
cease from troubling and the weary are at rest — anything as
would ease her sorrowful mind, and yet not make her think as
I could ever marry, or as 'twas possible that any one could
ever be to me what she was — I should ask of you to say that
— with my prayers for her — that was so dear."

I pressed his manly hand again, and told him I would charge
myself to do this as well as I could.

"I thankee, sir," he answered. "'Twas kind of you to
meet me. 'Twas kind of you to bear him company down.
Mas'r Davy, I unnerstan' very well, though my aunt will
come to Lon'on afore they sail, and they'll unite once more,
that I am not like to see him agen. I fare to feel sure on't.
We doen't say so, but so 'twill be, and better so. The last
you see on him — the very last — will you give him the lovingest
duty and thanks of the orphan, as he was ever more than a
father to?"

This I also promised, faithfully.

"I thankee agen, sir," he said, heartily shaking hands. "I
know wheer you're a-going. Good-bye ! "

With a slight wave of his hand, as though to explain to me
that he could not enter the old place, he turned away. As I
looked after his figure, crossing the waste in the moonlight, I
saw him turn his face towards a strip of silvery light upon the
sea, and pass on, looking at it, until he was a shadow in the
distance.

The door of the boat-house stood open when I approached ;
and, on entering, I found it emptied of all its furniture, saving
one of the old lockers, on which Mrs. Gummidge, with a
basket on her knee, was seated, looking at Mr. Peggotty.
He leaned his elbow on the rough chimney-piece, and gazed
upon a few expiring embers in the grate ; but he raised his
head, hopefully, on my coming in, and spoke in a cheery
manner.

David Copperfield 693

"Come, according to promise, to bid farewell to 't, eh, Mas'r
Davy ? " he said, taking up the candle. " Bare enough, now,
an't it ? "

" Indeed you have made good use of the time," said I.

"Why, we have not been idle, sir. Missis Gummidge has
worked like a — I doen't know what Missis Gummidge an't
worked like," said Mr. Peggotty, looking at her, at a loss for
a sufficiently approving simile.

Mrs. Gummidge, leaning on her basket, made no observation.

" Theer's the very locker that you used to sit on, 'long with
Em'ly!" said Mr. Peggotty, in a whisper. "I'm a-going to
carry it away with me, last of all. And heer's your old Httle
bedroom, see, Mas'r Davy ? A'most as bleak to-night, as 'art
could wish."

In truth, the wind, though it was low, had a solemn sound,
and crept around the deserted house with a whispered wailing
that was very mournful. Everything was gone, down to tne
little mirror with the oyster-shell frame. I thought of myself,
lying here, when that first great change was being wrought at
home. I thought of the blue-eyed child who had enchanted
me. I thought of Steerforth : and a foolish, fearful fancy
came upon me of his being near at hand, and liable to be met
at any turn.

"'Tis like to be long," said Mr. Peggotty, in a low voice,
" afore the boat finds new tenants. They look upon 't down
heer, as being unfort'nate now ! "

"Does it belong to anybody in the neighbourhood?" I
asked.

"To a mast-maker up town," said Mr. Peggotty. "I'm
a-going to give the key to him to-night."

We looked into the other little room, and came back to
Mrs. Gummidge, sitting on the locker, whom Mr. Peggotty,
putting the light on the chimney-piece, requested to rise, that
he might carry it outside the door before extinguishing the
candle.

"Dan'l," said Mrs. Gummidge, suddenly deserting her
basket, and clinging to his arm, " my dear Dan'l, the parting
words I speak in this house is, I mustn't be left behind.
Doen't ye think of leaving me behind, Dan'l ! Oh, doen't ye
ever do it ! **

Mr. Peggotty, taken aback, looked from Mrs. Gummidge
to me, and from me to Mrs. Gummidge, as if he had been
awakened from a sleep.

" Doen't ye, dearest Dan'l, doen't ye ! " cried Mrs. Gummidge.

694 David Copperfielcl

fervently. "Take me 'long with you, Dan'l, take me 'long
with you and Em'ly ! I'll be your servant, constant and trew.
If there's slaves in them parts where you're a-going, I'll be
bound to you for one, and happy, but doen't ye leave me
behind, Dan'l, that's a deary dear ! "

"My good soul," said Mr. Peggotty, shaking his head,
"you doen't know what a long voyage, and what a hard life
'tis ! "

" Yes, I do, Dan'l ! I can guess ! " cried Mrs. Gummidge.
" But my parting words under this roof is, I shall go into the
house and die, if I am not took. I can dig, Dan'l. I can
work. I can live hard. I can be loving and patient now —
more than you think, Dan'l, if you'll on'y try* me. I wouldn't
touch the 'lowance, not if I was dying of want, Dan'l Peggotty ;
but I'll go with you and Em'ly, if you'll on'y let me, to the
world's end ! I know how 'tis ; I know you think that I am
lone and lorn ; but, deary love, 'tan't so no more ! I ain't sat
here, so long, a-watching, and a-thinking of your trials, without
some good being done me. Mas'r Davy, speak to him for
me ! I knows his ways, and Em'ly's, and I knows their
sorrows, and can be a comfort to 'em, some odd times, and
labour for 'em alius ! Dan'l, deary Dan'l, let me go 'long with
you!"

And Mrs. Gummidge took his hand, and kissed it with a
homely pathos and affection, in a homely rapture of devotion
and gratitude, that he well deserved.

We brought the locker out, extinguished the candle, fastened
the door on the outside, and left the old boat close shut up, a
dark speck in the cloudy night. Next day, when we were
returning to London outside the coach, Mrs. Gummidge and
her basket were on the seat behind, and Mrs. Gummidge was
happy.

CHAPTER LII

I ASSIST AT AN EXPLOSION

When the time Mr. Micawber had appointed so mysteriously,
was within four-and-twenty hours of being come, my aunt and
I consulted how we should proceed ; for my aunt was very
unwilling to leave Dora. Ah ! how easily I carried Dora up
and down stairs, now !

David Copperfield 695

We were disposed, notwithstanding Mr. Micawber's stipu-
lation for my aunt's attendance, to arrange that she should stay
at home, and be represented by Mr. Dick and me. In short,
we had resolved to take this course, when Dora again unsettled
us by declaring that she never would forgive herself, and never
would forgive her bad boy, if my aunt remained behind, on
any pretence.

" I won't speak to you," said Dora, shaking her curls at my
aunt. "I'll be disagreeable! I'll make Jip bark at you all
day. I shall be sure that you really are a cross old thing, if
you don't go ! "

" Tut, Blossom ! " laughed my aunt. " You know you can't
do without me ! "

" Yes, I can," said Dora. " You are no use to me at all.
You never run up and down stairs for me, all day long. You
never sit and tell me stories about Doady, when his shoes were
worn out, and he was covered with dust — oh, what a poor little
mite of a fellow ! You never do anything at all to please me,
do you, dear ? " Dora made haste to kiss my aunt, and say.
" Yes, you do ! I'm only joking 1 " — lest my aunt should think
she really meant it.

"But, aunt," said Dora, coaxingly, "now listen. You must
go. I shall tease you, till you let me have my own way about
it. I shall lead my naughty boy such a life, if he don't make
you go. I shall make myself so disagreeable — and so will Jip !
You'll wish you had gone, like a good thing, for ever and ever
so long, if you don't go. Besides," said Dora, putting back
her hair, and looking wonderingly at my aunt and me, " why
shouldn't you both go ? I am not very ill indeed. Am I ? "

" Why, what a question ! " cried my aunt.

•* What a fancy ! " said I.

" Yes ! I know I am a silly little thing ! " said Dora, slowly
looking from one of us to the other, and then putting up her
pretty lips to kiss us as she lay upon her couch. " Well, then,
you must both go, or I shall not believe you ; and then I shall
cry!"

I saw, in my aunt's face, that she began to give way now, and
Dora brightened again, as she saw it too.

" You'll come back with so much to tell me, that it'll take at
least a week to make me understand ! " said Dora. " Because
1 hiow I shan't understand, for a length of time, if there's any
business in it. And there's sure to be some business in it I
If there's anything to add up, besides, I don't know when
I shall make it out ; and my bad boy will look so miserable all

696 David Copperfield

the time. There! Now you'll go, won't you? You'll only
be gone one night, and Jip will take care of me while you are
gone. Doady will carry me up-stairs before you go, and I
won't come down again till you come back ; and you shall take
Agnes a dreadfully scolding letter from me, because she has
never been to see us ! "

We agreed, without any more consultation, that we would
both go, and that Dora was a little Impostor, who feigned to be
rather unwell, because she liked to be petted. She was greatly
pleased, and very merry ; and we four, that is to say, my aunt,
Mr. Dick, Traddles, and I, went down to Canterbury by the
Dover mail that night.

At the hotel where Mr. Micawber had requested us to
await him, which we got into, with some trouble, in the
middle of the night, I found a letter, importing that he
would appear in the morning punctually at half-past nine.
After which, we went shivering, at that uncomfortable hour,
to our respective beds, through various close passages ; which
smelt as if they had been steeped for ages in a solution of soup
and stables.

Early in the morning, I sauntered through the dear old
tranquil streets, and again mingled with the shadows of the
venerable gateways and churches. The rooks were sailing
about the cathedral towers ; and the towers themselves, over-
looking many a long unaltered mile of the rich country and its
pleasant streams, were cutting the bright morning air, as if
there were no such thing as change on earth. Yet the bells,
when they sounded, told me sorrowfully of change in every-
thing ; told me of their own age, and my pretty Dora's youth ;
and of the many, never old, who had lived and loved and died,
while the reverberations of the bells had hummed through the
rusty armour of the Black Prince hanging up within, and, motes
upon the deep of Time, had lost themselves in air, as circles
do in water.

I looked at the old house from the corner of the street, but
did not go nearer to it, lest, being observed, I might unwittingly
do any harm to the design I had come to aid. The early sun
was striking edgewise on its gables and lattice-windows, touching
them with gold ; and some beams of its old peace seemed to
touch my heart.

I strolled into the country for an hour or so, and then
returned by the main street, which in the interval had shaken
off its last night's sleep. Among those who were stirring in
the shops, I saw my ancient enemy, the butcher, now advanced

David Copperfield 697

to top-boots and a baby, and in business for himself. He was
nursing the baby, and appeared to be a benignant member of
society.

We all became very anxious and impatient, when we sat
down to breakfast. As it approached nearer and nearer to
half-past nine o'clock, our restless expectation of Mr. Micawber
increased. At last we made no more pretence of attending to
the meal, which, except with Mr. Dick, had been a mere form
from the first ; but my aunt walked up and down the room,
Traddles sat upon the sofa affecting to read the paper with his
eyes on the ceiling ; and I looked out of the window to give
early notice of Mr. Micawber's coming. Nor had I long to
watch, for, at the first chime of the half-hour, he appeared in
the street.

" Here he is," said I, " and not in his legal attire ! "

My aunt tied the strings of her bonnet (she had come down
to breakfast in it), and put on her shawl, as if she were ready
for anything that was resolute and uncompromising. Traddles
buttoned his coat with a determined air. Mr. Dick, disturbed
by these formidable appearances, but feeling it necessary to
imitate them, pulled his hat, with both hands, as firmly over
his ears as he possibly could ; and instantly took it off again, to
welcome Mr. Micawber.

"Gentlemen, and madam," said Mr. Micawber, "good
morning ! My dear sir," to Mr. Dick, who shook hands with
him violently, " you are extremely good."

" Have you breakfasted ? " said Mr. Dick. " Have a chop ! "

" Not for the world, my good sir ! " cried Mr. Micawber,
stopping him on his way to the bell ; " appetite and myself,
Mr. Dixon, have long been strangers."

Mr. Dixon was so well pleased with his new name, and
appeared to think it so very obliging in Mr. Micawber to
confer it upon him, that he shook hands with him again, and
laughed rather childishly.

" Dick," said my aunt, " attention ! "

Mr. Dick recovered himself, with a blush.

"Now, sir," said my aunt to Mr. Micawber, as she put on
her gloves, " we are ready for Mount Vesuvius, or anything
else, as soon as you please."

" Madam," returned Mr. Micawber, " I trust you will shortly
witness an eruption. Mr. Traddles, I have your permissiori, I
believe, to mention here that we have been in communication
together?" . ^ ,,,

" It is undoubtedly the fact, Copperfield," said Traddles, to

698 David Copperfield

whom I looked in surprise. " Mr. Micawber has consulted
me, in reference to what he has in contemplation ; and I have
advised him to the best of my judgment."

"Unless I deceive myself, Mr. Traddles," pursued Mr.
Micawber, " what I contemplate is a disclosure of an important
nature."

" Highly so," said Traddles.

"Perhaps, under such circumstances, madam and gentle-
men," said Mr. Micawber, " you will do me the favour to
submit yourselves, for the moment, to the direction of one
who, however unworthy to be regarded in any other light but
as a Waif and Stray upon the shore of human nature, is still
your fellow-man, though crushed out of his original form by
individual errors, and the accumulative force of a combination
of circumstances ? "

" We have perfect confidence in you, Mr. Micawber," said I,
" and will do what you please."

" Mr. Copperfield," returned Mr. Micawber, " your confidence
is not, at the existing juncture, ill-bestowed. I would beg to
be allowed a start of five minutes by the clock ; and then to
receive the present company, inquiring for Miss Wickfield, at
the office of Wickfield and Heep, whose Stipendiary I am."

My aunt and I looked at Traddles, who nodded his
approval.

"I have no more," observed Mr. Micawber, "to say at
present."

With which, to my infinite surprise, he included us all in
a comprehensive bow, and disappeared; his manner being
extremely distant, and his face extremely pale.

Traddles only smiled, and shook his head (with his hair
standing upright on the top of it), when I looked to him for
an explanation ; so I took out my watch, and, as a last resource,
counted off the five minutes. My aunt, with her own watch in
her hand, did the like. When the time was expired, Traddles
gave her his arm ; and we all went out together to the old
house without saying one word on the way.

We found Mr. Micawber at his desk, in the turret office on
the ground floor, either writing, or pretending to write, hard.
The large office-ruler was stuck into his waistcoat, and was not
so well concealed but that a foot or more of that instrument
protruded from his bosom, like a new kind of shirt-frill.

As it appeared to me that I was expected to speak, I said
aloud :

" How do you do, Mr. Micawber ? "

David Copperfield 699

•* Mr. Copperfield," said Mr. Micawber, gravely, " I hope I
see you well ? "

" Is Miss Wickfield at home ? " said I.
" Mr. Wickfield is unwell in bed, sir, of a rheumatic fever,"
he returned ; " but Miss Wickfield, I have no doubt, will be
happy to see old friends. Will you walk in, sir?"

He preceded us to the dining-room — the first room I had
entered in that house — and flinging open the door of Mr.
Wickfield's former office, said, in a sonorous voice :

" Miss Trotwood, Mr. David Copperfield, Mr. Thomas
Traddles, and Mr. Dixon!"

I had not seen Uriah Heep since the time of the blow. Our
visit astonished him, evidently ; not the less, I dare say,
because it astonished ourselves. He did not gather his eye-
brows together, for he had none worth mentioning; but he
frowned to that degree that he almost closed his small eyes,
while the hurried raising of his gristly hand to his chin betrayed
some trepidation or surprise. This was only when we were in
the act of entering his room, and when I caught a glance at
him over my aunt's shoulder. A moment afterwards, he was
as fawning and as humble as ever.

" Well, I am sure," he said. ** This is indeed an unexpected
pleasure ! To have, as I may say, all friends round Saint
Paul's at once, is a treat unlooked for ! Mr. Copperfield, I
hope I see you well, and — if I may umbly express self so —
friendly towards them as is ever your friends, whether or not.
Mrs. Copperfield, sir, I hope she's getting on. We have been
made quite uneasy by the poor accounts we have had of her
state, lately, I do assure you."

I felt ashamed to let him take my hand, but I did not know
•yet what else to do.

" Things are changed in this office. Miss Trotwood, since I
was an umble clerk, and held your pony ; ain't they ? " said
Uriah, with his sickliest smile. " But /am not changed, Miss
Trotwood."

"Well, sir," returned my aunt, " to tell you the truth, I think
you are pretty constant to the promise of your youth ; if that's
any satisfaction to you."

"Thank you, Miss Trotwood," said Uriah, writhing in his
ungainly manner, " for your good opinion ! Micawber, tell 'em
to let Miss Agnes know — and mother. Mother will be quite in
a state, when she sees the present company!" said Uriah,
setting chairs.

" You are not busy, Mr. Heep ? " said Traddles, whose eye

700 David Copperfield

the cunning red eye accidentally caught, as it at once scrutinised
and evaded us.

"No, Mr. Traddles," replied Uriah, resuming his official
seat, and squeezing his bony hands, laid palm to palm, between
his bony knees. " Not so much as I could wish. But lawyers,
sharks, and leeches, are not easily satisfied, you know ! Not
but what myself and Micawber have our hands pretty full in
general, on account of Mr. Wickfield's being hardly fit for any
occupation, sir. But it's a pleasure as well as a duty, I am
sure, to work for him. You've not been intimate with Mr.
Wickfield, I think, Mr. Traddles? I believe I've only had
the honour of seeing you once myself?"

"No, I have not been intimate with Mr. Wickfield," re-
turned Traddles ; " or I might perhaps have waited on you
long ago, Mr. Heep."

There was something in the tone of this reply, which made
Uriah look at the speaker again, with a very sinister and
suspicious expression. But, seeing only Traddles, with his
good-natured face, simple manner, and hair on end, he dis-
missed it as he replied, with a jerk of his whole body, but
especially his throat :

" I am sorry for that, Mr. Traddles. You would have ad-
mired him as much as we all do. His little failings would only
have endeared him to you the more. But if you would like to
hear my fellow-partner eloquently spoken of, I should refer you
to Copperfield. The family is a subject he's very strong upon,
if you never heard him."

/' I was prevented from disclaiming the compliment (if I should
have done so, in any case), by the entrance of Agnes, now
ushered in by Mr. Micawber. She was not quite so self-
possessed as usual, I thought; and had evidently undergone
anxiety and fatigue. But her earnest cordiality, and her quiet
beauty, shone with the gentler lustre for it.

I saw Uriah watch her while she greeted us ; and he reminded

me of an ugly and rebellious genie watching a good spirit. In

the meanwhile, some slight sign passed between Mr. Micawber

and Traddles; and Traddles, unobserved except by me, went out.

" Don't wait, Micawber," said Uriah.

Mr. Micawber, with his hand upon the ruler in his breast,
stood erect before the door, most unmistakably contemplating
one of his fellow-men, and that man his emoloyer.

" What are you waiting for ? "(said Uriah^ " Micawber 1 did
you hear me tell you not to wait ? "
" Yes ! "/Ireplied the immovable Mr. Micawber.")

David Copperfield 701

" Then why do you wait ? "(said Uriah)

" Because I— in short, choose, "/feplied Mr. Micawber, with
a burst^ ^

Uriah's cheeks lost colour, and an unwholesome paleness,
still faintly tinged by his pervading red, overspread them. He
looked at Mr. Micawber attentively, with his whole face breathing
short and quick in every feature.

"You are a dissipated fellow, as all the world knows, 'Alie
said, with an effort at a smile,)" and I am afraid you'll oblige
me to get rid of you. Go along I I'll talk to you presently."

" If there is a scoundrel on this earth,"/feid Mr. Micawber,
suddenly breaking out again with the utmost vehemence^" with
whom I have already talked too much, that scoundrel's name
is — Heep ! "

Uriah fell back, as if he had been struck or stung. Looking
slowly round upon us with the darkest and wickedest expression
that his face could wear, he said, in a lower voice :

" Oho ! This is a conspiracy ! You have met here by
appointment ! You are playing Booty with my clerk, are you,
Copperfield ? Now, take care. You'll make nothing of this.
We understand each other, you and me. There's no love
between us. You were always a puppy with a proud stomach,
from your first coming here; and you envy me my rise, do
you ? None of your plots against me ; I'll counterplot you I
Micawber, you be off. Ill talk to you presently."

" Mr. Micawber," said I, " there is a sudden change in this
fellow, in more respects than the extraordinary one of his
speaking the truth in one particular, which assures me that he
is brought to bay. Deal with him as he deserves ! "

" You are a precious set of people, ain't you ? " said Uriah,
in the same low voice, and breaking out into a clammy heat,
which he wiped from his forehead with his long lean hand, "to
buy over my clerk, who is the very scum of society, — as you
yourself were, Copperfield, you know it, before any one had
charity on you, — to defame me with lies? Miss Trotwood,
you had better stop this; or I'll stop your husband shorter
than will be pleasant to you. I won't know your story profes-
sionally, for nothing, old lady ! Miss Wickfield, if you have
any love for your father, you had better not join that gang.
I'll ruin him, if you do Now, come ! I have got some of you
under the harrow. Think twice, before it goes over you. Think
twice, you, Micawber, if you don't want to be crushed. I
recommend you to take yourself off, and be talked to presently,
you fool 1 while there's time to retreat ! Where's mother ? " he

702 David Copperfield

said, suddenly appearing to notice, with alarm, the absence of
Traddles, and pulling down the bell-rope. I " Fine doings in a
person's own house ! "

" Mrs. Heep is here, sir," said Traddles, returning with that
worthy mother of a worthy son. " I have taken the liberty of
making myself known to her." »

"Who are you to make yourself known? "/retorted Uriah.^
" And what do you want here ? "

"I am the agent and friend of Mr. Wickfield, sir,"^aid
Traddles, in a composed business-like wa^ "And I have a
power of attorney from him in my pocket, to act for him in all
matters."

" The old ass has drunk himself into a stage of dotage, "('said
Uriah, turning uglier than before,] " and it has been got from
him by fraud ! " '

"Something has been got from him by fraud, I know,"
( returned Traddles quietly^ " and so do you, Mr. Heep. We
will refer that question, if you please, to Mr. Micawber."

" Ury — ! " Mrs. Heep began, with an anxious gesture.

"You hold your tongue, mother, "/lie returned^ "least said,
soonest mended." ^

"But, my Ury— "

" Will you hold your tongue, mother, and leave it to me ? "

Though I had long known that his servility was false, and all
his pretences knavish and hollow, I had had no adequate con-
ception of the extent of his hypocrisy, until I now saw him with
his mask off. The suddenness with which he dropped it, when
he perceived that it was useless to him ; the malice, insolence,
and hatred he revealed ; the leer with which he exulted, even
at this moment, in the evil he had done — all this time being
desperate too, and at his wits' end for the means of getting the
better of us — though perfectly consistent with the experience
I had of him, at first took even me by surprise, who had known
him so long, and disliked him so heartilyy^

I say nothing of the look he conferrra on me, as he stood
eyeing us, one after another ; for I had always understood that
he hated me, and I remembered the marks of my hand upon
his cheek. But when his eyes passed on to Agnes, and I saw
the rage with which he felt his power over her slipping away,
and the exhibition, in their disappointment, of the odious
passions that had led him to aspire to one whose virtues he
could never appreciate or care for, I was shocked by the mere
thought of her having lived, an hour, within sight of such a

David Copperfield 703

After some rubbing of the lower part of his face, and some
looking at us with those bad eyes, over his gristly fingers, he
made one more address to me, half whining, and half abusive.

" You think it justifiable, do you, Copperfield, you who pride
yourself so much on your honour and all the rest of it, to
sneak about my place, eaves-dropping with my clerk? If it
had been me^ I shouldn't have wondered ; /or I don't make
myself out a gentleman (though I never was in the streets either,
as you were, according to Micawber), but being you ! — And
you're not afraid of doing this, either ? You don't think at all
of what I shall do, in return ; or of getting yourself into trouble
for conspiracy and so forth ? Very well. We shall see ! Mr.
What's-your-name, you were going to refer some question to
Micawber. There's your referee. Why don't you make him
speak ? He has learnt his lesson, I see."

Seeing that what he said had no effect on me or any of us,
he sat on the edge of his table with his hands in his pockets,
and one of his splay feet twisted round the other leg, waiting
doggedly for what might follow.

Mr. Micawber, whose impetuosity I had restrained thus far
with the greatest difficulty, and who had repeatedly interposed
with the first syllable of ScouN-drel ! without getting to the
second, now burst forward, drew the ruler from his breast (ap-
parently as a defensive weapon), and produced from his pocket
a foolscap document, folded in the form of a large letter.
Opening this packet, with his old flourish, and glancing at the
contents, as if he cherished an artistic admiration of their style
of composition, he began to read as follows :

" ' Dear Miss Trotwood and gentlemen ' "

" Bless and save the man ! " exclaimed my aunt in a low
voice. " He'd write letters by the ream, if it was a capital
offence !"

Mr. Micawber, without hearing her, went on.

" ' In appearing before you to denounce probably the most
consummate Villain that has ever existed,'" Mr. Micawber,
without looking off the letter, pointed the ruler, like a ghostly
truncheon, at Uriah Heep. " ' I ask no consideration for my-
self. The victim, from my cradle, of pecuniary liabilities to
which I have been unable to respond, I have ever been the
sport and toy of debasing circumstances. Ignominy, Want,
Despair, and Madness, have, collectively or separately, been
the attendants of my career.'"

The relish with which Mr. Micawber described himself as a

704 David Copperfield

prey to those dismal calamities was only to be equalled by the
emphasis with which he read his letter ; and the kind of homage
he rendered to it with a roll of his head, when he thought he
had hit a sentence very hard indeed.

***In an accumulation of Ignominy, Want, Despair, and
Madness, I entered the office — or, as our lively neighbour the
Gaul would term it, the Bureau — of the Firm, nominally con-
ducted under the appellation of Wickfield and — Heep, but, in
reality, wielded by — Heep alone. Heep, and only Heep, is
the mainspring of that machine. Heep, and only Heep, is
the Forger and the Cheat.'"

Uriah, more blue than white at these words, made a dart
at the letter, as if to tear it in pieces. Mr. Micawber, with
a perfect miracle of dexterity or luck, caught his advancing
knuckles with the ruler, and disabled his right hand. It
dropped at the wrist, as if it were broken. The blow sounded
as if it had fallen on wood.

" The Devil take you ! " said Uriah, writhing in a new way
with pain. " I'll be even with you."

"Approach me again, you — you — you Heep of infamy,"
gasped Mr. Micawber, "and if your head is human, I'll break
it. Come on, come on ! "

I think I never saw anything more ridiculous — I was sensible
of it, even at the time — than Mr. Micawber making broad-sword
guards with the ruler, and crying, " Come on ! " while Traddles
and I pushed him back into a corner, from which, as often as
we got him into it, he persisted in emerging again.

His enemy, muttering to himself, after wringing his wounded
hand for some time, slowly drew off his neckerchief and bound
it up ; then held it in his other hand, and sat upon his table
with his sullen face looking down.

Mr. Micawber, when he was sufficiently cool, proceeded with
his letter.

" * The stipendiary emoluments in consideration of which I
entered into the service of — Heep,' " always pausing before that
word and uttering it with astonishing vigour, " * were not defined,
beyond the pittance of twenty-two shillings and six per week.
The rest was left contingent on the value of my professional
exertions ; in other and more expressive words, on the baseness
of my nature, the cupidity of my motives, the poverty of my
family, the general moral (or rather immoral) resemblance
between myself and — Heep. Need I say that it soon became
necessary for me to solicit from — Heep — pecuniary advances
towards the support of Mrs. Micawber, and our blighted but

David Copperfield 705

rising family ? Need I say that this necessity had been foreseen
by — Heep? That those advances were secured by I O U's
and other similar acknowledgments, known to the legal institu-
tions of this country ? And that I thus became immeshed in
the web he had spun for my reception ? '"

Mr. Micawber's enjoyment of his epistolary powers, in
describing this unfortunate state of things, really seemed to
outweigh any pain or anxiety that the reality could have caused
him. He read on :

"•Then it was that — Heep — began to favour me with just
so much of his confidence as was necessary to the discharge
of his infernal business. Then it was that I began, if I may so
Shakespearingly express myself, to dwindle, peak, and pine.
I found that my services were constantly called into requisition
for the falsification of business, and the mystification of an
individual whom I will designate as Mr. W. That Mr. W.
was imposed upon, kept in ignorance, and deluded, in every
possible way ; yet, that all this while, the ruffian — Heep — was
professing unbounded gratitude to, and unbounded friendship
for, that much-abused gentleman. This was bad enough ; but,
as the philosophic Dane observes, with that universal applicability
which distinguishes the illustrious ornament of the Elizabethan
Era, worse remains behind ! ' "

Mr. Micawber was so very much struck by this happy
rounding off with a quotation, that he indulged himself, and
us, with a second reading of the sentence, under pretence of
having lost his place.

"'It is not my intention,'" he continued, reading on, "'to
enter on a detailed list, within the compass of the present
epistle (though it is ready elsewhere), of the various mal-
practices of a minor nature, affecting the individual whom I
have denominated Mr. W., to which I have been a tacitly
consenting party. My object, when the contest within myself
between stipend and no stipend, baker and no baker, existence
and non-existence, ceased, was to take advantage of my
opportunities to discover and expose the major malpractices
committed, to that gentleman's grievous wrong and injury, by
— Keep. Stimulated by the silent monitor within, and by a no
less touching and appealing monitor without — to whom I will
briefly refer as Miss W. — I entered on a not unlaborious task
of clandestine investigation, protracted now, to the best of my
knowledge, information, and belief, over a period exceeding
twelve calendar months.'"

He read this passage as if it were from an Act of Parliament ;

A A

7o6 David Copperfield

and appeared majestically refreshed by the sound of the
words.

" ' My charges against — Heep,' " he read on, glancing at him,
and drawing the ruler into a convenient position under his left
arm, in case of need, " ' are as follows.' "

We all held our breath, I think. I am sure Uriah held his.

"' First,' " said Mr. Micawber. "'When Mr. W.'s faculties
and memory for business became, through causes into which it
is not necessary or expedient for me to enter, weakened and
confused, — Heep — designedly perplexed and complicated the
whole of the official transactions. When Mr. W. was least fit
to enter on business, — Heep was always at hand to force him
to enter on it. He obtained Mr. W.'s signature under such
circumstances to documents of importance, representing them
to be other documents of no importance. He induced Mr.
W. to empower him to draw out, thus, one particular sum of
trust-money, amounting to twelve six fourteen, two and nine,
and employed it to meet pretended business charges and
deficiencies which were either already provided for, or had
never really existed. He gave this proceeding, throughout,
the appearance of having originated in Mr. W.'s own dishonest
intention, and of having been accomplished by Mr. W.'s own
dishonest act; and has used it, ever since, to torture and
constrain him.'"

" You shall prove this, you Copperfield ! " said Uriah, with a
threatening shake of the head. " All in good time ! "

♦•Ask — Heep — Mr. Traddles, who lived in his house after
him," said Mr. Micawber, breaking ofi" from the letter ; " will
you?"

"The fool himself — and lives there now," said Uriah, dis-
dainfully.

" Ask — Heep — if he ever kept a pocket-book in that house,"
said Mr. Micawber ; " will you ? "

I saw Uriah's lank hand stop, involuntarily, in the scraping
of his chin.

"Or ask him," said Mr. Micawber, "if he ever burnt one
there. If he says Yes, and asks you where the ashes are, refer
him to Wilkins Micawber, and he will hear of something not
at all to his advantage ! "

The triumphant flourish with which Mr. Micawber delivered
himself of these words, had a powerful effect in alarming the
mother ; who cried out in much agitation :

" Ury, Ury ! Be umble, and make terms, my dear ! "

" Mother ! " he retorted, " will you keep quiet ? You're in sl<

David Copperfield 707

fright, and don't know what you say or mean. Umble ! " he
repeated, looking at me, with a snarl ; " I've umbled some of
'em for a pretty long time back, umble as I was ! "

Mr. Micawber, genteelly adjusting his chin in his cravat,
presently proceeded with his composition.

" * Second. Heep has, on several occasions, to the best of
my knowledge, information, and belief ' "

" But that won't do," muttered Uriah, relieved. " Mother,
you keep quiet."

" We will endeavour to provide something that will do, and
do for you finally, sir, very shortly," replied Mr. Micawber.

" ' Second. Heep has, on several occasions, to the best of
my knowledge, information, and belief, systematically forge'd,
to various entries, books, and documents, the signature of Mr.
W. ; and has distinctly done so in one instance, capable of
proof by me. To wit, in manner following, that is to say : ' "

Again, Mr. Micawber had a relish in this formal piling up of
words, which, however ludicrously displayed in his case, was, I
must say, not at all peculiar to him. I have observed it, in the
course of my life, in numbers of men. It seems to me to
be a general rule. In the taking of legal oaths, for instance,
deponents seem to enjoy themselves mightily when they come
to several good words in succession, for the expression of one
idea ; as, that they utterly detest, abominate, and abjure, or so
forth ; and the old anathemas were made relishing on the same
principle. We talk about the tyranny of words, but we like
to tyrannise over them too ; we are fond of having a large
superfluous establishment of words to wait upon us on great
occasions ; we think it looks important, and sounds well. As
we are not particular about the meaning of our liveries on state
occasions, if they be but fine and numerous enough, so the
meaning or necessity of our words is a secondary consideration,
if there be but a great parade of them. And as individuals get
into trouble by making too great a show of liveries, or as slaves
when they are too numerous rise against their masters, so I
think I could mention a nation that has got into many great
difficulties, and will get into many greater, from maintaining too
large a retinue of words.

Mr. Micawber read on, almost smacking his lips :

" • To wit, in manner following, that is to say. Mr. W. being
infirm, and it being within the bounds of probability that his
decease might lead to some discoveries, and to the downfall of
— Heep's — power over the W. family, — as I, Wilkins Micawber,
the undersigned, assume — unless the filial affection of his

7o8 David Copperfield

daughter could be secretly influenced from allowing any
investigation of the partnership affairs to be ever made, the
said — Heep — deemed it expedient to have a bond ready by
him, as from Mr. W., for the before-mentioned sum of twelve
six fourteen, two and nine, with interest, stated therein to have
been advanced by — Heep — to Mr. W. to save Mr. W. from
dishonour; though really the sum was never advanced by
him, and has long been replaced. The signatures to this
instrument purporting to be executed by Mr. W. and attested
by Wilkins Micawber, are forgeries by — Heep. I have, in my
possession, in his hand and pocket-book, several similar imita-
tions of Mr. W.'s signature, here and there defaced by fire, but
legible to any one. I never attested any such document. And
I have the document itself, in my possession.' "

Uriah Heep, with a start, took out of his pocket a bunch
of keys, and opened a certain drawer ; then, suddenly be-
thought himself of what he was about, and turned again
towards us, without looking in it.

"'And I have the document,'" Mr. Micawber read again,
looking about as if it were the text of a sermon, " * in my
possession,' — that is to say, I had, early this morning, when
this was written, but have since relinquished it to Mr.
Traddles."

" It is quite true," assented Traddles.

" Ury, Ury ! " cried the mother, " be umble and make terms.
I know my son will be umble, gentlemen, if you'll give him
time to think. Mr. Copperfield, I'm sure you know that he
was always very umble, sir ! "

It was singular to see how the mother still held to the old
trick, when the son had abandoned it as useless.

" Mother," he said, with an impatient bite at the handker-
chief in which his hand was wrapped, " you had better take
and fire a loaded gun at me."

" But I love you, Ury," cried Mrs. Heep. And I have no
doubt she did ; or that he loved her, however strange it may
appear ; though, to be sure, they were a congenial couple.
" And I can't bear to hear you provoking the gentleman, and
endangering of yourself more. I told the gentleman at first,
when he told me up-stairs it was come to light, that I would
answer for your being umble, and making amends. Oh, see
how umble /am, gentlemen, and don't mind him ! "

"Why, there's Copperfield, mother," he angrily retorted,
pointing his lean finger at me, against whom all his animosity
was levelled, as the prime mover in the discovery ; and I did

David Copperfield 709

not undeceive him; "there's Copperfield, would have given
you a hundred pound to say less than you've blurted out ! "

" I can't help it, Ury," cried his mother. " I can't see you
running into danger, through carrying your head so high.
Better be umble, as you always was."

He remained for a little, biting the handkerchief, and then
said to me with a scowl :

"What more have you got to bring forward? If anything,
go on with it. What do you look at me for ? "

Mr. Micawber promptly resumed his letter, glad to revert to
a performance with which he was so highly satisfied.

" 'Third. And last. I am now in a condition to show, by
— Heep's — false books, and — Heep's — real memoranda, be-
ginning with the partially destroyed pocket-book (which I was
unable to comprehend, at the time of its accidental discovery
by Mrs. Micawber, on our taking possession of our present
abode, in the locker or bin devoted to the reception of the ashes
calcined on our domestic hearth), that the weaknesses, the
faults, the very virtues, the parental affections, and the sense
of honour, of the unhappy Mr. W. have been for years acted
on by, and warped to the base purposes of — Heep. That Mr.
W, has been for years deluded and plundered, in every con-
ceivable manner, to the pecuniary aggrandisement of the
avaricious, false, and grasping — Heep. That the engrossing
object of — Heep — was, next to gain, to subdue Mr. and Miss
W. (of his ulterior views in reference to the latter I say nothing)
entirely to himself. That his last act, completed but a few
months since, was to induce Mr. W. to execute a relinquish-
ment of his share in the partnership, and even a bill of sale on
the very furniture of his house, in consideration of a certain
annuity, to be well and truly paid by — Heep — on the four
common quarter*days in each and every year. That these
meshes ; beginning with alarming and falsified accounts of the
estate of which Mr. W. is the receiver, at a period when Mr.
W. had launched into imprudent and ill-judged speculations,
and may not have had the money, for which he was morally
and legally responsible, in hand; going on with pretended
borrowings of money at enormous interest, really coming
from — Heep — and by — Heep — fraudulently obtained or with-
held from Mr. W. himself, on pretence of such speculations
or otherwise ; perpetuated by a miscellaneous catalogue of
unscrupulous chicaneries — gradually thickened, until the un-
happy Mr. W. could see no world beyond. Bankrupt, as he
believed, alike in circumstances, in all other hope, and in

7IO David Copperfield

honour, his sole reliance was upon the monster in the garb of
man,' " — Mr. Micawber made a good deal of this, as a new turn
of expression, — " ' who, by making himself necessary to him,
had achieved his destruction. All this I undertake to show.
Probably much more ! ' "

I whispered a few words to Agnes, who was weeping, hdlf
joyfully, half sorrowfully, at my side; and there was a move-
ment among us, as if Mr. Micawber had finished. He said,
with exceeding gravity, " Pardon me," and proceeded, with a
mixture of the lowest spirits and the most intense enjoyment,
to the peroration of his letter.

" ' I have now concluded. It merely remains for me to
substantiate these accusations ; and then, with my ill-starred
family, to disappear from the landscape on which we appear
to be an incumbrance. That is soon done. It may be
reasonably inferred that our baby will first expire of inanition,
as being the frailest member of our circle ; and that our twins
will follow next in order. So be it ! For myself, my Canter
bury Pilgrimage has done much; imprisonment on civil
process, and want, will soon do more. I trust that the labour
and hazard of an investigation — of which the smallest results
have been slowly pieced together, in the pressure of arduous
avocations, under grinding penurious apprehensions, at rise
of morn, at dewy eve, in the shadows of night, under the
watchful eye of one whom it were superfluous to call Demon —
combined with the struggle of parental Poverty to turn it,
when completed, to the right account, may be as the sprink-
ling of a few drops of sweet water on my funereal pyre. I ask
no more. Let it be, in justice, merely said of me, as of a
gallant and eminent naval Hero, with whom I have no pre-
tensions to cope, that what I have done, I did, in despite of
mercenary and selfish objects,

" For England, home, and Beauty.'*

" * Remaining always, &c. &c., Wilkins Micawber.' "

Much affected, but still intensely enjoying himself, Mr.
Micawber folded up his letter, and handed it with a bow to
my aunt, as something she might like to keep.

There was, as I had noticed on my first visit long ago, an
iron safe in the room. The key was in it. A hasty suspicion
seemed to strike Uriah; and, with a glance at Mr. Micawber,
he went to it, and threw the doors clanking open. It was
empty.

David Copperfield 711

"Where are the books?" he cried, with a frightful face.
" Some thief has stolen the books ! "

Mr. Micawber tapped himself with the ruler, "/did, when
I got the key from you as usual— but a little earlier— and
opened it this morning."

•' Don't be uneasy," said Traddles. " They have come into
my possession. I will take care of them, under the authority
I mentioned."

" You receive stolen goods, do you ? " cried Uriah.

" Under such circumstances," answered Traddles, " yes.

What was my astonishment when I beheld my aunt, who
had been profoundly quiet and attentive, make a dart at Uriah
Heep, and seize him by the collar with both hands !

" You know what / want ? " said my aunt.

" A strait- waistcoat," said he.

" No. My property ! " returned my aunt. " Agnes, my
dear, as long as I believed it had been really made away with
by your father, I wouldn't — and, my dear, I didn't, even to
Trot, as he knows — breathe a syllable of its having been placed
here for investment. But now I know this fellow's answerable
for it, and I'll have it ! Trot, come and take it away from him ! "

Whether my aunt supposed, for the moment, that he kept
her property in his neckerchief, I am sure I don't know ; but
she certainly pulled at it as if she thought so. I hastened to
put myself between them, and to assure her that we would
all take care that he should make the utmost restitution of
everything he had wrongly got. This, and a few moments'
reflection, pacified her ; but she was not at all disconcerted by
what she had done (though I cannot say as much for her
bonnet), and resumed her seat composedly.

During the last few minutes, Mrs. Heep had been clamour-
ing to her son to be " umble " ; and had been going down on
her knees to all of us in succession, and making the wildest
promises. Her son sat her down in his chair ; and, standing
sulkily by her, holding her arm with his hand, but not rudely,
said to me, with a ferocious look :

" What do you want done ? "

" I will tell you what must be done," said Traddles.

" Has that Copperfield no tongue ? " muttered Uriah. " I
would do a good deal for you if you could tell me, without lying,
that somebody had cut it out."

" My Uriah means to be umble ! " cried his mother. " Don't
mind what he says, good gentlemen ! "

•' What must be done," said Traddles, " is this. First, the

712 David Copperfield

deed of relinquishment, that we have heard of, must be given
over to me now — here."

" Suppose I haven't got it," he interrupted.

" But you have," said Traddles ; " therefore, you know, we
won't suppose so." And I cannot help avowing that this was
the first occasion on which I really did justice to the clear head,
and the plain, patient, practical good sense, of my old school-
fellow. " Then," said Traddles, " you must prepare to disgorge
all that your rapacity has become possessed of, and to make
restoration to the last farthing. All the partnership books and
papers must remain in our possession; all your books and
papers ; all money accounts and securities, of both kinds. In
short, everything here."

" Must it ? I don't know that," said Uriah. " I must have
time to think about that."

" Certainly," replied Traddles ; " but, in the meanwhile, and
until everything is done to our satisfaction, we shall maintain
possession of these things ; and beg you — in short, compel you
— to keep your own room, and hold no communication with
any one."

" I won't do it ! " said Uriah, with an oath.

"Maidstone Jail is a safer place of detention," observed
Traddles ; " and though the law may be longer in righting us,
and may not be able to right us so completely as you can, there
is no doubt of its punishing j't?2^. Dear me, you know that quite
as well as I ! Copperfield, will you go round to the Guildhall,
and bring a couple of officers ? "

Here, Mrs. Heep broke out again, crying on her knees
to Agnes to interfere in their behalf, exclaiming that he was
very humble, and it was all true, and if he didn't do what we
wanted, she would, and much more to the same purpose ; being
half frantic with fears for her darling. To inquire what he might
have done, if he had had any boldness, would be like inquiring
what a mongrel cur might do, if it had the spirit of a tiger. He
was a coward, from head to foot ; and showed his dastardly
nature through his sullenness and mortification, as much as at
any time of his mean life.

" Stop ! " he growled to me ; and wiped his hot face with his
hand. " Mother, hold your noise. Well ! Let 'em have that
deed. Go and fetch it ! "

" Do you help her, Mr. Dick," said Traddles, " if you please,"

Proud of his commission, and understanding it, Mr. Dick
accompanied her as a shepherd's dog might accompany a sheep.
But Mrs Heep gave him little trouble ; for she not only returned

David Copperfield 713

with the deed, but with the box in which it was, where we found
a banker's book and some other papers that were afterwards
serviceable.

" Good ! " said Traddles, when this was brought. " Now,
Mr. Heep, you can retire to think: particularly observing,
if you please, that I declare to you, on the part of all present,
that there is only one thing to be done ; that it is what I have
explained ; and that it must be done without delay."

Uriah, without lifting his eyes from the ground, shuffled
across the room with his hand to his chin, and pausing at
the door, said :

" Copperfield, I have always hated you. You've always been
an upstart, and you've always been against me."

" As I think I told you once before," said I, " it is you who
have been, in your greed and cunning, against all the world. .
It may be profitable to you to reflect, in future, that there ^
never were greed and cunning in the world yet, that did not
do too much, and over-reach themselves. It is as certain as
death."

" Or as certain as they used to teach at school (the same
school where I picked up so much umbleness), from nine
o'clock to eleven, that labour was a curse ; and from eleven
o'clock to one, that it was a blessing and a cheerfulness, and a
dignity, and I don't know what all, eh ? " said he with a sneer.
" You preach, about as consistent as they did. Won't umbleness
go down ? I shouldn't have got round my gentleman fellow-
partner without it, I think. — Micawber, you old bully, I'll pay
you I "

Mr. Micawber, supremely defiant of him and his extended
finger, and making a great deal of his chest until he had slunk
out at the door, then addressed himself to me, and proffered
me the satisfaction of " witnessing the re-establishment of mutual
confidence between himself and Mrs. Micawber.". After which,
he invited the company generally to the contemplation of that
aff'ecting spectacle.

" The veil that has long been interposed between Mrs.
Micawber and myself, is now withdrawn," said Mr. Micawber ;
"and my children and the Author of their Being can once
more come in contact on equal terms."

As we were all very grateful to him, and all desirous to show
that we were, as well as the hurry and disorder of our spirits
would permit, I dare say we should all have gone, but that it
was necessary for Agnes to return to her father, as yet unable
to bear more than the dawn of hope ; and for some one else to

714 David Copperfield

hold Uriah in safe keeping. So Traddles remained for the
latter purpose, to be presently relieved by Mr. Dick; and
Mr. Dick, my aunt, and I, went home with Mr. Micawber.
As I parted hurriedly from the dear girl to whom I owed
so much, and thought from what she had been saved, perhaps,
that morning — her better resolution notwithstanding — I felt
devoutly thankful for the miseries of my younger days which
had brought me to the knowledge of Mr. Micawber.

His house was not far off; and as the street-door opened
into the sitting-room, and he bolted in with a precipitation
quite his own, we found ourselves at once in the bosom of the
family. Mr. Micawber exclaiming, " Emma ! my life ! " rushed
into Mrs. Micawber's arms. Mrs. Micawber shrieked, and
folded Mr. Micawber in her embrace. Miss Micawber, nursing
the unconscious stranger of Mrs. Micawber's last letter to
me, was sensibly affected. The stranger leaped. The twins
testified their joy by several inconvenient but innocent demon-
strations. Master Micawber, whose disposition appeared to
have been soured by early disappointment, and whose aspect
had become morose, yielded to his better feelings, and
blubbered.

" Emma ! " said Mr. Micawber. " The cloud is past from my
mind. Mutual confidence, so long preserved between us once,
is restored, to know no further interruption. Now, welcome
poverty ! " cried Mr, Micawber, shedding tears. " Welcome
misery, welcome houselessness, welcome hunger, rags, tempest,
and beggary ! Mutual confidence will sustain us to the end ! "

With these expressions, Mr. Micawber placed Mrs. Micawber
in a chair, and embraced the family all round ; welcoming a
variety of bleak prospects, which appeared, to the best of my
judgment, to be anything but welcome to them ; and calling
upon them to come out into Canterbury and sing a chorus, as
nothing else v^s left for their support.

But Mrs. Micawber having, in the strength of her emotions,
fainted away, the first thing to be done, even before the chorus
could be considered complete, was to recover her. This my
aunt and Mr. Micawber did ; and then my aunt was introduced,
and Mrs. Micawber recognised me.

"Excuse me, dear Mr. Copperfield," said the poor lady,
giving me her hand, " but I am not strong ; and the removal of
the late misunderstanding between Mr. Micawber and myself
was at first too much for me."

" Is this all your family, ma'am ? " said my aunt.

" There are no more at present," returned Mrs. Micawber.

David Copperfield 715

"Good gracious, I didn't mean that, ma'am," said my aunt.
*' I mean, are all these yours ? "

" Madam," rephed Mr. Micawber, " it is a true bill."

"And that eldest young gentleman, now," said my aunt,
musing, "what has he been brought up to?"

" It was my hope when I came here," said Mr. Micawber,
" to have got Wilkins into the Church : or perhaps I shall
express my meaning more strictly, if I say the Choir. But
there was no vacancy for a tenor in the venerable Pile for which
this city is so justly eminent; and he has — in short, he has
contracted a habit of singing in public-houses, rather than
in sacred edifices."

" But he means well," said Mrs. Micawber, tenderly.

"I dare say, my love," rejoined Mr. Micawber, "that he
means particularly well ; but I have not yet found that he
carries out his meaning, in any given direction whatsoever."

Master Micawber's moroseness of aspect returned upon him
again, and he demanded, with some temper, what he was to do ?
Whether he had been born a carpenter, or a coach-painter, any
more than he had been born a bird ? Whether he could go
into the next street, and open a chemist's shop ? Whether he
could rush to the next assizes, and proclaim himself a lawyer ?
Whether he could come out by force at the opera, and succeed
by violence ? Whether he could do anything, without being
brought up to something?

My aunt mused a little while, and then said :

"Mr. Micawber, I wonder you have never turned your
thoughts to emigration."

" Madam," returned Mr. Micawber, " it was the dream of my
youth, and the fallacious aspiration of my riper years." I am
thoroughly persuaded, by-the-bye, that he had never thought of
it in his life.

" Aye ? " said my aunt, with a glance at me. " Why, what a
thing it would be for yourselves and your family, Mr. and Mrs.
Micawber, if you were to emigrate now."

"Capital, madam, capital," urged Mr. Micawber, gloomily.

" That is the principal, I may say the only difficulty, my dear
Mr. Copperfield," assented his wife.

" Capital ? " cried my aunt. " But you are doing us a great
service— have done us a great service, I may say, for surely
much will come out of the fire — and what could we do for you,
that would be half so good as to find the capital ? "

" I could not receive it as a gift," said Mr. Micawber, full of fire
and animation, " but if a sufficient sum could be advanced,

7i6 David Copperfield

say at five per cent, interest per annum, upon my personal
liability — say my notes of hand, at twelve, eighteen, and twenty-
four months, respectively, to allow time for something to turn
up "

" Could be ? Can be and shall be, on your own terms," re-
turned my aunt, " if you say the word. Think of this now,
both of you. Here are some people David knows, going out to
Australia shortly. If you decide to go, why shouldn't you go
in the same ship ? You may help each other. Think of this
now, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber. Take your time, and weigh it
well."

" There is but one question, my dear ma'am, I could wish to
ask," said Mrs. Micawber. " The climate, I believe, is healthy ? "

" Finest in the world ! " said my aunt.

"Just so," returned Mrs. Micawber. "Then my question
arises. Now, are the circumstances of the country such, thkt a
man of Mr. Micawber's abilities would have a fair chance of
rising in the social scale ? I will not say, at present, might he
aspire to be Governor, or anything of that sort ; but would there
be a reasonable opening for his talents to develop themselves —
that would be amply sufficient — and find their own expansion ? "

" No better opening anywhere," said my aunt, " for a man
who conducts himself well, and is industrious."

" For a man who conducts himself well," repeated Mrs.
Micawber, with her clearest business manner, " and is indus-
trious. Precisely. It is evident to me that Australia is the
legitimate sphere of action for Mr. Micawber."

" I entertain the conviction, my dear madam," said Mr.
Micawber, " that it is, under existing circumstances, the land,
the only land, for myself and family ; and that something of an
extraordinary nature will turn up on that shore. It is no
distance — comparatively speaking ; and though consideration is
due to the kindness of your proposal, I assure you that is a
mere matter of form."

Shall I ever forget how, in a moment, he was the most
sanguine of men, looking on to fortune ; or how Mrs. Micawber
presently discoursed about the habits of the kangaroo ! Shall
I ever recall that street of Canterbury on a market day, without
recalling him, as he walked back with us; expressing, in the
hardy roving manner he assumed, the unsettled habits of a
temporary sojourner in the land ; and looking at the bullocks,
as they came by, with the eye of an Austrnlian farmer '

David Copperfield ^\*j

CHAPTER LIII

ANOTHER RETROSPECT

I MUST pause yet once again. Oh, my child-wife, there is a
figure in the moving crowd before my memory, quiet and still,
saying in its innocent love and childish beauty. Stop to think of
me — turn to look upon the Little Blossom, as it flutters to the
ground !

I do. All else grows dim, and fades away. I am again with
Dora, in our cottage. I do not know how long she has been
ill. I am so used to it in feeling, that I cannot count the time.
It is not really long, in weeks or months ; but, in my usage and
experience, it is a weary, weary while.

They have left off" telling me to " wait a few days more." I
have begun to fear, remotely, that the day may never shine,
when I shall see my child-wife running in the sunlight with
her old friend Jip.

He is, as it were suddenly, grown very old. It may be that
he misses in his mistress something that enlivened him and
made him younger ; but he mopes, and his sight is weak, and his
limbs are feeble, and my aunt is sorry that he objects to her no
more, but creeps near her as he lies on Dora's bed — she sitting
at the bedside — and mildly licks her hand.

Dora lies smiling on us, and is beautiful, and utters no hasty
or complaining word. She says that we are very good to her ;
that her dear old careful boy is tiring himself out, she knows ;
that my aunt has no sleep, yet is always wakeful, active, and kind.
Sometimes, the little bird-like ladies come to see her ; and then
we talk about our wedding-day, and all that happy time.

What a strange rest and pause in my life there seems to be —
and in all life, within doors and without — when I sit in the
quiet, shaded, orderly room, with the blue eyes of my child-
wife turned towards me, and her little fingers twining round my
hand ! Many and many an hour I sit thus ; but of all those
times, three times come the freshest on my mind.

It is morning ; and Dora, made so trim by my aunt's hands,
shows me how her pretty hair will curl upon the pillow yet, and
how long and bright it is, and how she likes to have it loosely
gathered in that net she wears.

" Not that I am vain of it, now, you mocking boy," she says,

yi8 David Copperfield

when I smile ; " but because you used to say you thought it so
beautiful ; and because, when I first began to think about you,
I used to peep in the glass, and wonder whether you would like
very much to have a lock of it. Oh what a foolish fellow you
were, Doady, when I gave you one ! "

" That was on the day when you were painting the flowers I
had given you, Dora, and when I told you how much in love
I was."

"Ah ! but I didn't like to tell you," says Dora, '*f/ien, how I
had cried over them, because I believed you really liked me !
When I can run about again as I used to do, Doady, let us go
and see those places where we were such a silly couple, shall
we ? And take some of the old walks ? And not forget poor
papa ? "

" Yes, we will, and have some happy days. So you must
make haste to get well, my dear."

" Oh, I shall soon do that ! I am so much better, you don't
know ! "

It is evening ; and I sit in the same chair, by the same bed,
with the same face turned towards me. We have been silent,
and there is a smile upon her face. I have ceased to carry my
light burden up and down stairs now. She lies here all the day.

" Doady ! "

" My dear Dora ! "

"You won't think what I am going to say, unreasonable,
after what you told me, such a little while ago, of Mr. Wickfield's
not being well ? I want to see Agnes. Very much I want to
see her."

" I will write to her, my dear."

"Will you?"

*' Directly."

" What a good, kind boy ! Doady, take me on your arm.
Indeed, my dear, it's not a whim. It's not a foolish fancy. I
want, very much indeed, to see her ! "

" I am certain of it. I have only to tell her so, and she is
sure to come."

" You are very lonely when you go down-stairs, now ? "
Dora whispers, with her arm about my neck.

" How can I be otherwise, my own love, when I see your
empty chair?"

" My empty chair ! " She clings to me for a little while, in
silence. " And you really miss me, Doady ? " looking up, and
brightly smiling. " Even poor, giddy, stupid me ? "

David Copperfield 719

" My heart, who is there upon earth that I could miss so
much?"

" Oh, husband ! I am so glad, yet so sorry ! " creeping
closer to me, and folding me in both her arms. She laughs
and sobs, and then is quiet, and quite happy.

" Quite ! " she says. " Only give Agnes my dear love, and
tell her that I want very, very much to see her ; and I have
nothing left to wish for."

" Except to get well again, Dora."

" Ah, Doady ! Sometimes I think — you know I always was
a silly little thing ! — that that will never be ! "

" Don't say so, Dora ! Dearest love, don't think so 1 "

•* I won't, if I can help it, Doady. But I am very happy ;
though my dear boy is so lonely by himself, before his child-
wife's empty chair ! "

It is night ; and I am with her still. Agnes has arrived ; has
been among us for a whole day and an evening. She, my
aunt, and I, have sat with Dora since the morning, all together.
We had not talked much, but Dora has been perfectly con-
tented and cheerful. We are now alone.

Do I know, now, that my child-wife will soon leave me?
They have told me so ; they have told me nothing new to my
thoughts ; but I am far from sure that I have taken that truth
to heart. I cannot master it. I have withdrawn by myself,
many times to-day, to weep. I have remembered Who wept
for a parting between the living and the dead. I have be-
thought me of all that gracious and compassionate history. I
have tried to resign myself, and to console myself; and that,
I hope, I may have done imperfectly ; but what I cannot
firmly settle in my mind is, that the end will absolutely come.
I hold her hand in mine, I hold her heart in mine, I see her
love for me, alive in all its strength. I cannot shut out a pale
lingering shadow of belief that she will be spared.

" I am going to speak to you, Doady. I am going to say
something I have often thought of saying, lately. You won't
mind?" with a gentle look

" Mind, my darling ? "

" Because I don't know what you will think, or what you
may have thought sometimes. Perhaps you have often thought
the same. Doady, dear, I am afraid I was too young."

I lay my face upon the pillow by her, and she looks into my
eyes, and speaks very softly. Gradually, as she goes on, I feel,
with a stricken heart, that she is speaking of herself as past.

7SO David Copperfield

" I am afraid, dear, 1 was too young. I don't mean in years
only, but in experience, and thoughts, and everything. I was
such a silly little creature ! I am afraid it would have been
better, if we had only loved each other as a boy and girl, and
forgotten it. I have begun to think I was not fit to be a wife."

I try to stay my tears, and to reply, '* Oh, Dora, love, as fit
as I to be a husband ! "

" I don't know," with the old shake of her curls. " Perhaps !
But if I had been more fit to be married, I might have made
you more so, too. Besides, you are very clever, and I never
was."

" We have been very happy, my sweet Dora."

" I was very happy, very. But, as years went on, my dear
boy would have wearied of his child-wife. She would have
been less and less a companion for him. He would have been
more and more sensible of what was wanting in his home.
She wouldn't have improved. It is better as it is."

" Oh, Dora, dearest, dearest, do not speak to me so. Every
word seems a reproach ! "

" No, not a syllable ! " she answers, kissing me. " Oh, my
dear, you never deserved it, and I loved you far too well to say
a reproachful word to you, in earnest — it was all the merit I
had, except being pretty — or you thought me so. Is it lonely,
down-stairs, Doady?"

" Very ! Very ! "

" Don't cry ! Is my chair there ? "

" In its old place."

** Oh, how my poor boy cries ! Hush, hush ! Now, make
me one promise. I want to speak to Agnes. When you go
down-stairs, tell Agnes so, and send her up to me ; and while I
speak to her, let no one come — not even aunt. I want to
speak to Agnes by herself. I want to speak to Agnes, quite
alone."

I promise that she shall, immediately ; but I cannot leave
her, for my grief.

" I said that it was better as it is ! " she whispers, as she holds
me in her arms. " Oh, Doady, after more years, you never
could have loved your child-wife better than you do ; and,
after more years, she would so have tried and disappointed
you, that you might not have been able to love her half so
well ! I know I was too young and foolish. It is much better
as it is."

Agnes is down-stairs, when I go into the parlour ; and I

David Copperfield 721

give her the message. She disappears, leaving me alone
with Jip.

His Chinese house is by the fire ; and he lies within it, on
his bed of flannel, querulously trying to sleep. The bright
moon is high and clear. As I look out on the night, my
tears fall fast, and my undisciplined heart is chastened
heavily — heavily.

I sit down by the fire, thinking with a blind remorse of
all those secret feelings I have nourished since my marriage.
I think of every little trifle between me and Dora, and feel
the truth, that trifles make the sum of life. Ever rising
from the sea of my remembrance, is the image of the dear
child as I knew her first, graced by my young love, and by her
own, with every fascination wherein Such love is rich. Would
it, indeed, have been better if we had loved each other as a
boy and girl, and forgotten it ? Undisciplined heart, reply !

How the time wears, I know not ; until I am recalled by
my child-wife's old companion. More restless than he was,
he crawls out of his house, and looks at me, and wanders to
the door, and whines to go up-stairs.

" Not to-night, Jip ! Not to-night ! "

He comes very slowly back to me, licks my hand, and lifts
his dim eyes to my face*.

** Oh, Jip ! It may be, never again ! "

He lies down at my feet, stretches hirnself out as if to
sleep, and with a plaintive cry, is dead.

" Oh, Agnes ! Look, look, here ! "

— That face, so full of pity, and of grief, that rain of tears,
that awful mute appeal to me, that solemn hand upraised
towards Heaven !

"Agnes?"

It is over. Darkness comes before my eyes ; and, for a
time, all things are blotted out of my remembrance.

CHAPTER LIV

MR. micawber's transactions

This is not the time at which I am to enter on the state of
my mind beneath its load of sorrow. I came to think that the
Future was walled up before me, that the energy and action of
my life were at an end, that I never could find any refuge but

722 David Copperfield

in the grave. I came to think so, I say, but not in the first
shock of my grief. It slowly grew to that. If the events I go
on to relate, had not thickened around me, in the beginning
to confuse, and in the end to augment, my affliction, it is
possible (though I think not probable), that I might have
fallen at once into this condition. As it was, an interval
occurred before I fully knew my own distress ; an interval in
which I even supposed that its sharpest pangs were past ; and
when my mind could soothe itself by resting on all that was
most innocent and beautiful, in the tender story that was
closed for ever.

When it was first proposed that I should go abroad, or how
it came to be agreed among us that I was to seek the restora-
tion of my peace in change and travel, I do not, even now,
distinctly know. The spirit of Agnes so pervaded all we
thought, and said, and did, in that time of sorrow, that I
assume I may refer the project to her influence. But her
influence was so quiet that I know no more.

And now, indeed, I began to think that in my old associa-
tion of her with the stained-glass window in the church, a
prophetic foreshadowing of what she would be to me, in the
calamity that was to happen in the fulness of time, had
found a way into my mind. In all that sorrow, from the
moment, never to be forgotten, when she stood before me
with her upraised hand, she was like a sacred presence in my
lonely house. When the Angel of Death alighted there, my
child-wife fell asleep — they told me so when I could bear to
hear it — on her bosom, with a smile. From my swoon, I
first awoke to a consciousness of her compassionate tears, her
words of hope and peace, her gentle face bending down as
from a purer region nearer Heaven, over my undisciplined
heart, and softening its pain.

Let me go on.

I was to go abroad. That seemed to have been determined
among us from the first. The ground now covering all that
could perish of my departed wife, I waited only for what
Mr. Micawber called the "final pulverisation of Heep," and
for the departure of the emigrants.

At the request of Traddles, most affectionate and devoted
of friends in my trouble, we returned to Canterbury : I mean
my aunt, Agnes, and I. We proceeded by appointment
straight to Mr. Micawber's house ; where, and at Mr. Wick
field's, my friend had been labouring ever since our explosive
meeting. When poor Mrs. Micawber saw me come in, in my

David Copperfield 723

black clothes, she was sensibly affected. There was a great
deal of good in Mrs. Micawber's heart, which had not been
dunned out of it in all those many years.

"Well, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber," was my aunt's first
salutation after we were seated. " Pray, have you thought
about that emigration proposal of mine?"

" My dear madam," returned Mr. Micawber, " perhaps I
cannot better express the conclusion at which Mrs. Micawber,
your humble servant, and I may add our children, have jointly
and severally arrived, than by borrowing the language of an
illustrious poet, to reply that our Boat is on the shore, and
our Bark is on the sea."

" That's right," said my aunt. " I augur all sorts of good
from your sensible decision."

" Madam, you do us a great deal of honour," he rejoined.
He then referred to a memorandum. " With respect to the
pecuniary assistance enabling us to launch our frail canoe on
the ocean of enterprise, I have reconsidered that important
business point ; and would beg to propose my notes of hand
— drawn, it is needless to stipulate, on stamps of the amounts
respectively required by the various Acts of Parliament
applying to such securities — at eighteen, twenty-four, and
thirty months. The proposition I originally submitted, was
twelve, eighteen, and twenty-four ; but I am apprehensive
that such an arrangement might not allow sufficient time for
the requisite amount of — Something — to turn up. We might
not," said Mr. Micawber, looking round the room as if it
represented several hundred acres of highly cultivated land,
"on the first responsibility becoming due, have been successful
in our harvest, or we might not have got our harvest in.
Labour, I believe, is sometimes difficult to obtain in that
portion of our colonial possessions where it will be our lot to
combat with the teeming soil."

" Arrange it in any way you please, sir," said my aunt.

"Madam," he replied, "Mrs. Micawber and myself are
deeply sensible of the very considerate kindness of our friends
and patrons. What I wish is, to be perfectly business-like,
and perfectly punctual. Turning over, as we are about to turn
over, an entirely new leaf ; and falling back, as we are iiow in
the act of falling back, for a Spring of no common magnitude ;
it is important to my sense of self-respect, besides being an
example to my son, that these arrangements should be con-
cluded as between man and man."

I don't know that Mr. Micawber attached any meaning to

724 David Copperfield

this last phrase ; I don't know that anybody ever does, or did ;
but he appeared to relish it uncommonly, and repeated, with
an impressive cough, " as between man and man."

" I propose," said Mr. Micawber, " Bills — a convenience to
the mercantile world, for which, I believe, we are originally
indebted to the Jews, who appear to me to have had a devilish
deal too much to do with them ever since — because they are
negotiable. But if a Bond, or any other description of
security, would be preferred, I should be happy to execute any
such instrument. As between man and man."

My aunt observed, that in a case where both parties were
willing to agree to anything, she took it for granted there
would be no difficulty in settling this point. Mr. Micawber
was of her opinion.

"In reference to our domestic preparations, madam," said
Mr. Micawber, with some pride, " for meeting the destiny
to which we are now understood to be self-devoted, I beg
to report them. My eldest daughter attends at five every
morning in a neighbouring establishment, to acquire the
process — if process it may be called — of milking cows. My
younger children are instructed to observe, as closely as
circumstances will permit, the habits of the pigs and poultry
maintained in the poorer parts of this city : a pursuit from
which they have, on two occasions, been brought home, within
an inch of being run over. I have myself directed some
attention, during the past week, to the art of baking ; and my
son Wilkins has issued forth with a walking-stick and driven
cattle, when permitted, by the rugged hirelings who had them
in charge, to render any voluntary service in that direction —
which I regret to say, for the credit of our nature, was not
often ; he being generally warned, with imprecations, to
desist."

"All very right indeed," said my aunt, encouragingly.
" Mrs. Micawber has been busy, too, I have no doubt."

" My dear madam," returned Mrs. Micawber, with her
business-like air, " I am free to confess that I have not been
actively engaged in pursuits immediately connected with
cultivation or with stock, though well aware that both will
claim my attention on a foreign shore. Such opportunities as
I have been enabled to alienate from my domestic duties,
I have devoted to corresponding at some length with my
family. For I own it seems to me, my dear Mr. Copperfield,"
said Mrs. Micawber, who always fell back on me (I suppose
from old habit) to whomsoever else she might address her

David Copperfield 725

discourse at starting, "that the time is come when the
past should be buried in oblivion; when my family should
take Mr. Micawber by the hand, and Mr. Micawber should
take my family by the hand ; when the lion should lie
down with the lamb, and my family be on terms with
Mr. Micawber."

I said 1 thought so too.

"This, at least, is the light, my dear Mr. Copperfield,"
pursued Mrs. Micawber, " in which /view the subject. When
I lived at home with my papa and mama, my papa was
accustomed to ask, when any point was under discussion in our
limited circle, * In what light does my Emma view the
subject ? ' That my papa was too partial, I know ; still, on
such a point as the frigid coldness which has ever subsisted
between Mr. Micawber and my family, I necessarily have
formed an opinion, delusive though it may be."

" No doubt. Of course you have, ma'am," said my aunt.

" Precisely so," assented Mrs. Micawber. " Now, I may be
wrong in my conclusions; it is very likely that I am; but
my individual impression is, that the gulf between my family
and Mr. Micawber may be traced to an apprehension, on
the part of my family, that Mr. Micawber would require
pecuniary accommodation. I cannot help thinking," said
Mrs. Micawber, with an air of deep sagacity, "that there
are members of my family who have been apprehensive that
Mr. Micawber would solicit them for their names. — I do not
mean to be conferred in Baptism upon our children, but to
be inscribed on Bills of Exchange, and negotiated in the
Money Market."

The look of penetration with which Mrs. Micawber an-
nounced this discovery, as if no one had ever thought of it
before, seemed rather to astonish my aunt; who abruptly
replied, " Well, ma'am, upon the whole, I shouldn't wonder if
you were right ! "

"Mr. Micawber being now on the eve of casting off the
pecuniary shackles that have so long enthralled him," said
Mrs. Micawber, "and of commencing a new career in a
country where there is sufficient range for his abilities,--which,
in my opinion, is exceedingly important; Mr. Micawber's
abilities peculiarly requiring space, — it seems to me that my
family should signalise the occasion by coming forward. What
I could wish to see, would be a meeting between Mr. Micawber
and my family at a festive entertainment, to be given at rny
family's expense ; where Mr. Micawber's health and prosperity

726 David Copperfield

being proposed by some leading member of my family, Mr.
Micawber might have an opportunity of developing his views.''

"My dear," said Mr. Micawber, with some heat, "it may
be better for me to state distinctly, at once, that if I were
to develop my views to that assembled group, they would
possibly be found of an offensive nature ; my impression being
that your family are, in the aggregate, impertinent Snobs ; and,
in detail, unmitigated Ruffians."

"Micawber," said Mrs. Micawber, shaking her head, "nol
You have never understood them, and they have never
understood you."

Mr. Micawber coughed.

" They have never understood you, Micawber," said his
wife. "They may be incapable of it. If so, that is their
misfortune. I can pity their misfortune."

" I am extremely sorry, my dear Emma," said Mr. Micawber,
relenting, "to have been betrayed into any expressions that
might, even remotely, have the appearance of being strong
expressions. All I would say is, that I can go abroad without
your family coming forward to favour me, — in short, with a
parting Shove of their cold shoulders; and that, upon the
whole, I would rather leave England with such impetus as I
possess, than derive any acceleration of it from that quarter.
At the same time, my dear, if they should condescend to reply
to your communications — which our joint experience renders
most improbable — far be it from me to be a barrier to your
wishes."

The matter being thus amicably settled, Mr. Micawber gave
Mrs. Micawber his arm, and glancing at the heap of books and
papers lying before Traddles on the table, said they would
leave us to ourselves ; which they ceremoniously did.

" My dear Copperfield," said Traddles, leaning back in his
chair when they were gone, and looking at me with an affection
that made his eyes red, and his hair all kinds of shapes, " I
don't make any excuse for troubling you with business, because
I know you are deeply interested in it, and it may divert your
thoughts. My dear boy, I hope you are not worn out ? "

"I am quite myself," said I, after a pause. "We have
more cause to think of my aunt than of any one. You know
how much she has done."

"Surely, surely," answered Traddles. "Who can forget it!"

" But even that is not all," said I. " During the last fort-
night, some new trouble has vexed her ; and she has been in
and out of London every day. Several times she has gone

David Copperfield 727

out early, and been absent until evening. Last night, rTraddles,
with this journey before her, it was almost midnight before she
came home. You know what her consideration for others is.
She will not tell me what has happened to distress her."

My aunt, very pale, and with deep lines in her facfe, sat
immovable until I had finished ; when some stray tears found
their way to her cheeks, and she put her hand on mine.

"It's nothing. Trot ; it's nothing. There will be no more of
it. You shall know by-and-bye. Now, Agnes, my dear, let us
attend to these affairs."

" I must do Mr. Micawber the justice to say," Traddles
began, " that although he would appear not to have worked to
any good account for himself, he is a most untiring man when
he works for other people. I never saw such a fellow. If he
always goes on in the same way, he must be, virtually, about
two hundred years old at present. The heat into which he
has been continually putting himself; and the distracted and
impetuous manner in which he has been diving, day and night,
among papers and books ; to say nothing of the immense
number of letters he has written me between this house and
Mr. Wickfield's, and often across the table when he has been
sitting opposite, and might much more easily have spoken ; is
quite extraordinary."

" Letters 1 " cried my aunt. " I believe he dreams in
letters ! "

"There's Mr. Dick, too," said Traddles, "has been doing
wonders ! As soon as he was released from overlooking
Uriah Heep, whom he kept in such charge as / never saw
exceeded, he began to devote himself to Mr. Wickfield. And
really his anxiety to be of use in the investigations we have
been making, and his real usefulness in extracting, and
copying, and fetching, and carrying, have been quite stimulating
to us."

" Dick is a very remarkable man," exclaimed my aunt ; "and
I always said he was. Trot, you know it."

" I am happy to say. Miss Wickfield," pursued Traddles, at
once with great delicacy and with great earnestness, " that in
your absence Mr. Wickfield has considerably improved. Re-
lieved of the incubus that had fastened upon him for so long a
time, and of the dreadful apprehensions under which he had
lived, he is hardly the same person. At times, even his im-
paired power of concentrating his memory and attention on
particular points of business, has recovered itself very much ;
and he has been able to assist us in making some things clear,

728 David Copperfield

that we should have found very difficult indeed, if not hopeless,
without him. But what I have to do is to come to results,
which are short enough; not to gossip on all the hopeful
circumstances I have observed, or I shall never have done."

His natural manner and agreeable simplicity made it trans-
parent that he said this to put us in good heart, and to enable
Agnes to hear her father mentioned with greater confidence ;
but it was not the less pleasant for that.

*' Now, let me see," said Traddles, looking among the papers
on the table. "Having counted our funds, and reduced to
order a great mass of unintentional confusion in the first place,
and of wilful confusion and falsification in the second, we take
it to be clear that Mr. Wickfield might now wind up his
business, and his agency-trust, and exhibit no deficiency or
defalcation whatever."

" Oh, *thank Heaven ! " cried Agnes, fervently.

" But," said Traddles, " the surplus that would be left as his
means of support — and I suppose the house to be sold, even in
saying this — would be so small, not exceeding in all probability
some hundreds of pounds, that perhaps. Miss Wickfield, it
would be best to consider whether he might not retain his
agency of the estate to which he has so long been receiver.
His friends might advise him, you know ; now he is free.
You yourself, Miss Wickfield — Copperfield — I "

** I have considered it, Trotwood," said Agnes, looking to
me, " and I feel that it ought not to be, and must not be ;
even on the recommendation of a friend to whom I am so
grateful, and owe so much."

" I will not say that I recommend it," observed Traddles.
" I think it right to suggest it. No more."

" 1 am happy to hear you say so," answered Agnes, steadily,
" for it gives me hope, almost assurance, that we think alike.
Dear Mr. Traddles and dear Trotwood, papa once free with
honour, what could I wish for ! I have always aspired, if I
could have released him from the toils in which he was held,
to render back some little portion of the love and care I owe
him, and to devote my life to him. It has been, for years, the
utmost height of my hopes. To take our future on myself,
will be the next great happiness — the next to his release from
all trust and responsibility — that I can know."

" Have you thought how, Agnes ? "

" Often ! I am not afraid, dear Trotwood. I am certain of
success. So many people know me here, and think kindly of
me, that I am certain. Don't mistrust me. Our wants are

David Copperfield 729

not many. If I rent the dear old house, and keep a school, I
shall be useful and happy."

The calm fervour of her cheerful voice brought back so
vividly, first the dear old house itself, and then my solitary
home, that my heart was too full for speech. Traddles
pretended for a little while to be busily looking among the
papers.

" Next, Miss Trotwood," said Traddles, " That property of
yours."

" Well, sir," sighed my aunt. " All I have got to say about
it is, that if it's gone, I can bear it ; and if it's not gone, I shall
be glad to get it back."

" It was originally, I think, eight thousand pounds. Consols ?"
said Traddles.

" Right ! " replied my aunt.

" I can't account for more than five," said Traddles, with an
air of perplexity.

" — thousand, do you mean?" inquired my aunt, with
uncommon composure, "or pounds?"

"Five thousand pounds," said Traddles.

" It was all there was," returned my aunt. " I sold three,
myself. One, I paid for your articles, Trot, my dear ; and the
other two I have by me. When I lost the rest, I thought it
wise to say nothing about that sum, but to keep it secretly for
a rainy day. I wanted to see how you would come out of the
trial. Trot ; and you came out nobly — persevering, self-reliant,
selWenying ! So did Dick. Don't speak to me, for I find my
nerves a little shaken ! "

Nobody would have thought so, to see her sitting upright,
with her arms folded ; but she had wonderful self-command.

" Then I am delighted to say," cried Traddles, beaming with
joy, "that we have recovered the whole money ! "

" Don't congratulate me, anybody ! " exclaimed my aunt.
"How so, sir?"

"You believed it had been misappropriated by Mr. Wick-
field?" said Traddles.

"Of course I did," said my aunt, "and was therefore easily
silenced. Agnes, not a word ! "

" And indeed," said Traddles, " it was sold, by virtue of the
power of management he held from you ; but I needn't say by
whom sold, or on whose actual signature. It was afterwards
pretended to Mr. Wickfield, by that rascal, — and proved, too,
by figures, — that he had possessed himself of the money (on
general instructions, ht said) to keep other deficiencies and

730 David Copperfield

difficulties from the light. Mr. Wickfield, being so weak and
helpless in his hands as to pay you, afterwards, several sums of
interest on a pretended principal which he knew did not exist,
made himself, unhappily, a party to the fraud."

" And at last took the blame upon himself," added my aunt ;
"and wrote me a mad letter, charging himself with robbery,
and wrong unheard of. Upon which I paid him a visit early
one morning, called for a candle, burnt the letter, and told him
if he ever could right me and himself, to do it; and if he
couldn't, to keep his own counsel for his daughter's sake. — If
anybody speaks to me, I'll leave the house ! "

We all remained quiet ; Agnes covering her face.

"Well, my dear friend," said my aunt, after a pause, **and
you have really extorted the money back from him?"

" Why, the fact is," returned Traddles, " Mr. Micawber had
so completely hemmed him in, and was always ready with so
many new points if an old one failed, that he could not escape
from us. A most remarkable circumstance is, that I really
don't think he grasped this sum even so much for the gratifica-
tion of his avarice, which was inordinate, as in the hatred he
felt for Copperfield. He said so to me, plainly. He said
he would even have spent as much, to baulk or injure
Copperfield."

" Ha ! " said my aunt, knitting her brows thoughtfully, and
glancing at Agnes. "And what's become of him ? "

" I don't know. He left here," said Traddles, " with his
mother, who had been clamouring, and beseeching, and dis-
closing, the whole time. They went away by one of the
London night coaches, and I know no more about him ; except
that his malevolence to me at parting was audacious. He
seemed to consider himself hardly less indebted to me than to
, Mr. Micawber; which I consider (as I told him) quite a
compliment."

" Do you suppose he has any money, Traddles ? " I asked.

" Oh dear, yes, I should think so," he replied, shaking his
head, seriously. " I should say he must have pocketed a good
deal, in one way or other. But I think you would find. Copper-
field, if you had an opportunity of observing his course, that
money would never keep that man out of mischief. He is
such an incarnate hypocrite, that whatever object he pursues,
he must pursue crookedly. It's his only compensation for the
outward restraints he puts upon himself. Always creeping
along the ground to some small end or other, he will always
magnify every object in the way ; and consequently will hate

David Copperfield 731

and suspect everybody that comes, in the most innocent
manner, between him and it. So the crooked courses will
become crookeder, at any moment, for the least reason, or for
none. It's only necessary to consider his history here," said
Traddles, "to know that."

'* He's a monster of meanness ! " said my aunt.

** Really I don't know about that," observed Traddles,
thoughtfully. "Many people can be very mean, when they
give their minds to it."

" And now, touching Mr. Micawber," said my aunt.

"Well, really," said Traddles, cheerfully, "I must, once
more, give Mr. Micawber high praise. But for his having been
so patient and persevering for so long a time, we never could
have hoped to do anything worth speaking of. And I think
we ought to consider that Mr. Micawber did right, for right's
sake, when we reflect what terms he might have made with
Uriah Heep himself, for his silence."

" I think so too," said I.

" Now, what would you give him ? " inquired my aunt.

" Oh ! Before you come to that," said Traddles, a little dis-
concerted, " I am afraid I thought it discreet to omit (not being
able to carry everything before me) two points, in making this
lawless adjustment — for it's perfectly lawless from beginning to
end — of a difficult affair. Those I. O. U.'s, and so forth, which
Mr. Micawber gave him for the advances he had "

" Well ! They must be paid," said my aunt.

" Yes, but I don't know when they may be proceeded on, or
where they are," rejoined Traddles, opening his eyes; "and I
anticipate that, between this time and his departure, Mr.
Micawber will be constantly arrested, or taken in execution."

" Then he must be constantly set free again, and taken out of
execution," said my aunt. "What's the amount altogether?"

" Why, Mr. Micawber has entered the transactions — he calls
them transactions — with great form, in a book," rejoined
Traddles, smiling; "and he makes the amount a hundred
and three pounds, five."

" Now, what shall we give him, that sum included ? " said
my aunt. " Agnes, my dear, you and I can talk about division
of it afterwards. What should it be ? Five hundred pounds ? "

Upon this, Traddles and I both struck in at once. We both
recommended a small sum in money, and the payment, without
stipulation to Mr. Micawber, of the Uriah claims as they came
in. We proposed that the family should have their passage and
their outfit, and a hundred pounds ; and chat Mr. Micawber's

732 David Copperfield

arrangement for the repayment of the advances should be
gravely entered into, as it might be wholesome for him
to suppose himself under that responsibility. To this, I
added the suggestion, that I should give some explanation of
his character and history to Mr. Peggotty, who I knew could
be relied on; and that to Mr. Peggotty should be quietly
entrusted the discretion of advancing another hundred. I
further proposed to interest Mr. Micawber in Mr. Peggotty, by
confiding so much of Mr. Peggotty's story to him as I might
feel justified in relating, or might think expedient; and to
endeavour to bring each of them to bear upon the other, for
the common advantage. We all entered warmly into these
views ; and I may mention at once, that the principals
themselves did so, shortly afterwards, with perfect good will
and harmony.

Seeing that Traddles now glanced anxiously at my aunt
again, I reminded him of the second and last point to which
he had adverted.

" You and your aunt will excuse me, Copperfield, if I touch
upon a painful theme, as I greatly fear I shall," said Traddles,
hesitating; "but I think it necessary to bring it to your
recollection. On the day of Mr. Micawber's memorable
denunciation, a threatening allusion was made by Uriah Heep
to your aunt's — husband."

My aunt, retaining her stiff position, and apparent composure
assented with a nod.

"Perhaps," observed Traddles, "it was mere purposeless
impertinence ? "

"No," returned my aunt.

" There was — pardon me — really such a person, and at all in
his power ? " hinted Traddles.

" Yes, my good friend," said my aunt.

Traddles, with a perceptible lengthening of his face, explained
that he had not been able to approach this subject ; that it had
shared the fate of Mr. Micawber's liabilities, in not being com-
prehended in the terms he had made ; that we were no longer
of any authority with Uriah Heep ; and that if he could do us,
or any of us, any injury or annoyance, no doubt he would.

My aunt remained quiet ; until again some stray tears found
their way to her cheeks.

" You are quite right," she said. " It was very thoughtful to
mention it."

"Can I — or Copperfield — do anything?" asked Traddles,
gently.

David Copperfield 733

" Nothing," said my aunt I thank you many times. Trot,
my dear, a vain threat ! Let us have Mr. and Mrs. Micawber
back. And don't any of you speak to me ! " With that she
smoothed her dress, and sat, with her upright carriage, looking
at the door.

" Well, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber ! " said my aunt, when they
entered. "We have been discussing your emigration, with
many apologies to you for keeping you out of the room so
long ; and I'll tell you what arrangements we propose."

These she explained to the unbounded satisfaction of the
family, — children and all being then present, — and so much
to the awakening of Mr. Micawber's punctual habits in the
opening stage of all bill transactions, that he could not be dis-
suaded from immediately rushing out, in the highest spirits, to
buy the stamps for his notes of hand. But his joy received
a sudden check; for within five minutes he returned in the
custody of a sheriffs officer, informing us, in a flood of tears,
that all was lost. We, being quite prepared for this event,
which was of course a proceeding of Uriah Heep's, soon paid
the money; and in five minutes more Mr. Micawber was
seated at the table, filling up the stamps with an expression
of perfect joy, which only that congenial employment or the
making of punch, could impart in full completeness to his
shining face. To see him at work on the stamps, with the
relish of an artist, touching them like pictures, looking at them
sideways, taking weighty notes of dates and amounts in his
pocket-book, and contemplating them when finished, with a
high sense of their precious value, was a sight indeed.

"Now, the best thing you can do, sir, if you'll allow me to
advise you," said my aunt, after silently observing him, " is to
abjure that occupation for evermore."

"Madam," replied Mr. Micawber, "it is my intention to
register such a vow on the virgin page of the future. Mrs.
Micawber will attest it. I trust," said Mr. Micawber, solemnly,
"that my son Wilkins will ever bear in mind, that he had
infinitely better put his fist in the fire, than use it to handle
the serpents that have poisoned the life-blood of his unhappy
parent ! " Deeply affected, and changed in a moment to the
image of despair, Mr. Micawber regarded the serpents with a
look of gloomy abhorrence (in which his late admiration of
them was not quite subdued), folded them up and put them in
his pocket.

This closed the proceedings of the evening. We were weary
with sorrow and fatigue, and my aunt and I were to return to

734 David Copperfield

London on the morrow. It was arranged that the Micawbers
should follow us, after effecting a sale of their goods to a
broker; that Mr. Wickfield's affairs should be brought to a
settlement, with all convenient speed, under the direction of
Traddles ; and that Agnes should also come to London, pend-
ing those arrangements. We passed the night at the old house,
which, freed from the presence of the Heeps, seemed purged
of a disease; and I lay in my old room, like a shipwrecked
wanderer come home.

We went back next day to my aunt's house — not to mine ;
and when she and I sat alone, as of old, before going to bed,
she said :

" Trot, do you really wish to know what I have had upon
my mind lately ? "

" Indeed I do, aunt. If there ever was a time when I felt
unwilling that you should have a sorrow or anxiety which I
could not share, it is now."

"You have had sorrow enough, child," said my aunt,
affectionately, " without the addition of my little miseries.
I could have no other motive, Trot, in keeping anything from
you."

" I know that well," said I. " But tell me now."

" Would you ride with me a little way to-morrow morning?"
asked my aunt.

" Of course."

"At nine," said she. " I'll tell you then, my dear."

At nine, accordingly, we went out in a little chariot, and
drove to London. We drove a long way through the streets
until we came to one of the large hospitals. Standing hard
by the building was a plain hearse. The driver recognised my
aunt, and in obedience to a motion of her hand at the window,
drove slowly off; we following.

"You understand it now, Trot," said my aunt. "He is
gone ! "

" Did he die in the hospital ? "

"Yes."

She sat immovable beside me; but again I saw the stray
tears on her face.

" He was there once before," said my aunt presently.
" He was ailing a long time — a shattered, broken man, these
many years. When he knew his state in this last illness,
he asked them to send for me. He was sorry then. Very
sorry."

" You went, I know, aunt."

David Copperfield 735

" I went. I was with him a good deal afterwards."

"He died the night before we went to Canterbury ? "
said I.

My aunt nodded. " No one can harm him now," she said.
'• It was a vain threat."

We drove away, out of town, to the churchyard at Hornsey.
"Better here than in the streets," said my aunt. "He was
born here."

We alighted ; and followed the plain coffin to a corner I
remember well, where the service was read consigning it to the
dust.

" Six-and-thirty years ago, this day, my dear," said my aunt,
as we walked back to the chariot, " I was married. God
forgive us all ! "

We took our seats in silence ; and so she sat beside me for
a long time, holding my hand. At length she suddenly burst
into tears, and said :

" He was a fine-looking man when I married him. Trot — and
he was sadly changed ! "

It did not last long. After the relief of tears, she soon
became composed, and even cheerful. Her nerves were a
little shaken, she said, or she would not have given way to it.
God forgive us all !

So we rode back to her little cottage at Highgate, where
we found the following short note, which had arrived by that
morning's post from Mr. Micawber : .

" Canterbury,

" Friday.
" My dear Madam, and Copperfield,

"The fair land of promise lately looming on the
horizon is again enveloped in impenetrable mists, and for ever
withdrawn from the eyes of a drifting wretch whose Doom is
sealed !

"Another writ has been issued (in His Majesty's High
Court of King's Bench at Westminster), in another cause of
Heep v. Micawber, and the defendant in that cause is the
prey of the sheriff having legal jurisdiction in this bailiwick.

" Now's the day, and now's the hour.
See the front of battle lower,
See approach proud Edward's power —
Chauis and slavery !

Consigned to which, and to a speedy end (for mental torture
is not supportable beyond a certain point, and that point I

736 David Copperfield

feel I have attained), my course is run. Bless you, bless you !
Some future traveller, visiting, from motives of curiosity,
not unmingled, let us hope, with sympathy, the place of
confinement allotted to debtors in this city, may, and I trust
will, Ponder, as he traces on its wall, inscribed with a rusty
nail,

" The obscure initials

" W. M.

" P.S. I re-open this to say that our common friend, Mr.
Thomas Traddles (who has not yet left us, and is looking
extremely well), has paid the debt and costs, in the noble
name of Miss Trotwood; and that myself and family are at the
height of earthly bUss."

CHAPTER LV

TEMPEST

I NOW approach an event in my life, so indelible, so awful, so
bound by an infinite variety of ties to all that has preceded it
in these pages, that, from the beginning of my narrative, I have
seen it growing larger and larger as I advanced, like a great
tower in a plain, and throwing its fore-cast shadow even on the
incidents of my childish 'days.

For years after it occurred, I dreamed of it often. I have
started up so vividly impressed by it, that its fury has yet
seemed raging in my quiet room, in the still night. I dream
of it sometimes, though at lengthened and uncertain intervals,
to this hour. I have an association between it and a stormy
wind, or the lightest mention of a sea-shore, as strong as any
of which my mind is conscious. As plainly as I behold what
happened, I will try to write it down. I do not recall it, but
see it done ; for it happens again before me.

The time drawing on rapidly for the sailing of the emigrant-
ship, my good old nurse (almost broken-hearted for me, when
we first met) came up to London. I was constantly with her,
and her brother, and the Micawbers (they being very much
together); but Emily I never saw.

One evening when the time was close at hand, I was alone
with Peggotty and her brother. Our conversation turned on
Ham. She described to us how tenderly he had taken leave

David Copperfield 737

of her, and how manfully and quietly he had borne himself.
Most of all, of late, when she believed he was most tried. It
was a subject of which the affectionate creature never tired ;
and our interest in hearing the many examples which she,
who was so much with him, had to relate, was equal to hers
in relating them.

My aunt and I were at that time vacating the two cottages
at Highgate ; I intending to go abroad, and she to return to
her house at Dover. We had a temporary lodging in Covent
Garden. As I walked home to it, after this evening's convers-
ation, reflecting on what had passed between Ham and myself
when I was last at Yarmouth, I wavered in the original pur-
pose I had formed, of leaving a letter for Emily when I
should take leave of her uncle on board the ship, and thought
it would be better to write to her now. She might desire,
I thought, after receiving my communication, to send some
parting word by me to her unhappy lover. I ought to give her
the opportunity.

I therefore sat down in my room, before going to bed, and
wrote to her. I told her that I had seen him, and that he had
requested me to tell her what I have already written in its
place in these sheets. I faithfully repeated it. I had no need
to enlarge upon it, if I had had the right. Its deep fidelity
and goodness were not to be adorned by me or any man. I
left it out, to be sent round in the morning ; with a line to Mr.
Peggotty, requesting him to give it to her ; and went to bed
at daybreak.

I was weaker than I knew then; and, not falling asleep
until the sun was up, lay late, and unrefreshed, next day.
I was roused by the silent presence of my aunt at my
bedside. I felt it in my sleep, as I suppose we all do feel
such things.

"Trot, my dear," she said, when I opened my eyes, "I
couldn't make up my mind to disturb you. Mr. Peggotty is
here ; shall he come up ? "

I replied yes, and he soon appeared.

" Mas'r Davy," he said, when we had shaken hands, " I giv
Em'ly your letter, sir, and she writ this heer ; and begged of
me fur to ask you to read it, and if you see no hurt in't, to
be so kind as take charge on't."

" Have you read it ? " said I.

He nodded sorrowfully. I opened it, and read as follows :

" I have got your message. Oh, what can I write, to thank you for
your good and blessed kindness to me 1

738 David Copperfield

" I have put the words close to my heart. I shall keep them till I die.
They are sharp thorns, but they are such comfort. I have prayed over
them, oh, I have prayed so much. When I find what you are, and what
uncle is, I think what God must be, and can cry to him.

"Good-bye for ever. Now, my dear, my friend, good-bye for ever in
this world. In another world, if I am forgiven, I may wake a child and
come to you. All thanks and blessings. Farewell, evermore."

This, blotted with tears, was the letter.

" May I tell her as you doen't see no hurt in't, and as you'll
be so kind as take charge on't, Mas'r Davy ? " said Mr. Peggotty,
when I had read it.

" Unquestionably," said I — " but I am thinking "

" Yes, Mas'r Davy ? "

"I am thinking," said I, " that I'll go down again to Yar-
mouth. There's time, and to spare, for me to go and come
back before the ship sails. My mind is constantly running on
him, in his solitude ; to put this letter of her writing in his
hand at this time, and to enable you to tell her, in the moment
of parting, that he has got it, will be a kindness to both of
them. I solemnly accepted his commission, dear good fellow,
and cannot discharge it too completely. The journey is nothing
to me. I am restless, and shall be better in motion. I'll go
down to-night."

Though he anxiously endeavoured to dissuade me, I saw
that he was of my mind ; and this, if I had required to be
confirmed in my intention, would have had the effect. He
went round to the coach-office, at my request, and took the
box-seat for me on the mail. In the evening I started, by that
conveyance, down the road I had traversed under so many
vicissitudes.

" Don't you think that," I asked the coachman, in the first
stage out of London, " a very remarkable sky ? I don't
remember to have seen one like it."

" Nor I — not equal to it," he replied. " That's wind, sir.
There'll be mischief done at sea, I expect, before long."

It was a murky confusion — here and there blotted with a
colour like the colour of the smoke from damp fuel — of flying
clouds tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting
greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below
them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth,
through which the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as
if, in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature, she had lost
her way and were frightened. There had been a wind all day ;
and it was rising then, with an extraordinary great sound. In

David Copperfield 739

another hour it had much increased, and the sky was more
overcast, and blew hard.

But as the night advanced, the clouds closing in and densely
overspreading the whole sky, then very dark, it came on to
blow, harder and harder. It still increased, until our horses
could scarcely face the wind. Many times, in the dark part of
the night (it was then late in September, when the nights were
not short), the leaders turned about, or came to a dead stop ;
and we were often in serious apprehension that the coach
would be blown over. Sweeping gusts of rain came up before
this storm, like showers of steel ; and, at those times, when
there was any shelter of trees or lee walls to be got, we were
fain to stop, in a sheer impossibility of continuing the struggle.

When the day broke, it blew harder and harder. I had been
in Yarmouth when the seamen said it blew great guns, but I
had never known the like of this, or anything approaching to it.
We came to Ipswich — very late, having had to fight every inch
of ground since we were ten miles out of London ; and found
a cluster of people in the market-place, who had risen from
their beds in the night, fearful of falling chimneys. Some of
these, congregating about the inn-yard while we changed horses,
told us of great sheets of lead having been ripped off a high
church-tower, and flung into a bye-street, which they then
blocked up. Others had to tell of country people, coming in
from neighbouring villages, who had seen great trees lying torn
out of the earth, and whole ricks scattered about the roads
and fields. Still there was no abatement in the storm, but it
blew harder.

As we struggled on, nearer and nearer to the sea, from which
this mighty wind was blowing dead on shore, its force became
more and more terrific. Long before we saw the sea, its spray
was on our lips, and showered salt rain upon us. The water
was out, over miles and miles of the flat country adjacent to
Yarmouth ; and every sheet and puddle lashed its banks, and
had its stress of little breakers setting heavily towards us.
When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the
horizon, caught at intervals above the rolling abyss, were like
glimpses of another shore with towers and buildings. When
at last we got into the town, the people came out to their doors,
all aslant, and with streaming hair, making a wonder of the
mail that had come through such a night.

I put up at the old inn, and went down to look at the sea ;
staggering along the street, which was strewn with sand and
seaweed, and with flying blotches of sea-foam ; afraid of falling

740 David Copperfield

slates and tiles ; and holding by people I met, at angry corners.
Coming near the beach, I saw, not only the boatmen, but half
the people of the town, lurking behind buildings ; some, now
and then braving the fury of the storm to look away to sea,
and blown sheer out of their course in trying to get zigzag back.

Joining these groups, I found bewailing women whose
husbands were away in herring or oyster boats, which there
was too much reason to think might have foundered before
they could run in anywhere for safety. Grizzled old sailors
were among the people, shaking their heads, as they looked
from water to sky, and muttering to one another ; ship-owners,
excited and uneasy ; children, huddling together, and peering
into older faces ; even stout mariners, disturbed and anxious,
levelling their glasses at the sea from behind places of shelter,
as if they were surveying an enemy.

The tremendous sea itself, when I could find sufficient pause
to look at it, in the agitation of the blinding wind, the flying
stones and sand, and the awful noise, confounded me. As the
high watery walls came rolling in, and, at their highest, tumbled
into surf, they looked as if the least would engulf the town.
As the receding wave swept back with a hoarse roar, it seemed
to scoop out deep caves in the beach, as if its purpose were
to undermine the earth. When some white-headed billows
thundered on, and dashed themselves to pieces before they
reached the land, every fragment of the late whole seemed
possessed by the full might of its wrath, rushing to be gathered
to the composition of another monster. Undulating hills were
changed to valleys, undulating valleys (with a solitary storm-
bird sometimes skimming through them) were lifted up to
hills ; masses of water shivered and shook the beach with a
booming sound ; every shape tumultuously rolled on, as soon
as made, to change its shape and place, and beat another shape
and place away ; the ideal shore on the horizon, with its towers
and buildings, rose and fell ; the clouds fell fast and thick ; I
seemed to see a rending and upheaving of all nature.

Not finding Ham among the people whom this memorable
wind — for it is still remembered down there, as the greatest
ever known to blow upon that coast — had brought together, I
made my way to his house. It was shut; and as no one
anwered to my knocking, I went, by back ways and bye-lanes,
to the yard where he worked. I learned, there, that he had
gone to Lowestoft, to meet some sudden exigency of ship-
repairing in which his skill was required ; but that he would be
back to-morrow morning, in good time.

David Copperfield 741

I went back to the inn ; and when I had washed and dressed,
and tried to sleep, but in vain, it was five o'clock in the
afternoon. I had not sat five minutes by the coffee-room fire,
when the waiter coming to stir it, as an excuse for talking, told
me that two colliers had gone down, with all hands, a few miles
away ; and that some other ships had been seen labouring hard
in the Roads, and trying, in great distress, to keep off shore.
Mercy on them, and on all poor sailors, said he, if we had
another night like the last!

I was very much depressed in spirits ; very solitary ; and felt
an uneasiness in Ham's not being there, disproportionate to
the occasion. I was seriously affected, without knowing how
much, by late events ; and my long exposure to the fierce wind
had confused me. There was that jumble in my thoughts and
recollections, that I had lost the clear arrangement of time and
distance. Thus, if I had gone out into the town, I should not
have been surprised, I think, to encounter some one who I
knew must be then in London. So to speak, there was in
these respects a curious inattention in my mind. Yet it was
busy, too, with all the remembrances the place naturally
awakened; and they were particularly distinct and vivid.

In this state, the waiter's dismal intelligence about the ships
immediately connected itself, without any effort of my volition,
with my uneasiness about Ham. I was persuaded that I had
an apprehension of his returning from Lowestoft by sea, and
being lost. This grew so strong with me, that I resolved to go
back to the yard before I took my dinner, and ask the boat-
builder if he thought his attempting to return by sea at all
likely? If he gave me the least reason to think so, I
would go over to Lowestoft and prevent it by bringing him
with me.

I hastily ordered my dinner, and went back to the yard. I
was none too soon ; for the boat-builder, with a lantern in his
hand, was locking the yard-gate. He quite laughed when I
asked him the question, and said there was no fear ; no man in
his senses, or out of them, would put off in such a gale of
wind, least of all Ham Peggotty, who had been born to
seafaring.

So sensible of this, beforehand, that I had really felt ashamed
of doing what I was nevertheless impelled to do, I went back
to the inn. If such a wind could rise, I think it was rising.
The howl and roar, the rattling of the doors and windows, the
rumbling in the chimneys, the apparent rocking of the very
house that sheltered me, and the prodigious tumult of the sea,

742 David Copperfield

were more fearful than in the morning. But there was now a
great darkness besides ; and that invested the storm with new
terrors, real and fanciful.

I could not eat, I could not sit still, I could not continue
stedfast to anything. Something within me, faintly answering
to the storm without, tossed up the depths of my memory
and made a tumult in them. Yet, in all the hurry of my
thoughts, wild running with the thundering sea, — the storm
and my uneasiness regarding Ham were always in the fore-
ground.

My dinner went away almost untasted, and I tried to refresh
myself with a glass or two of wine. In vain. I fell into a dull
slumber before the fire, without losing my consciousness, either
of the uproar out of doors, or of the place in which I was.
Both became overshadowed by a new and indefinable horror ;
and when I awoke — or rather when I shook off the lethargy
that bound me in my chair — my whole frame thrilled with
objectless and unintelligible fear.

I walked to and fro, tried to read an old gazetteer, listened
to the awful noises : looked at faces, scenes and figures in the
fire. At length, the steady ticking of the undisturbed clock
on the wall tormented me to that degree that I resolved
to go to bed.

It was reassuring, on such a night, to be told that some of
the inn-servants had agreed together to sit up until morning.
I went to bed, exceedingly weary and heavy ; but, on my lying
down, all such sensations vanished, as if by magic, and I was
broad awake, with every sense refined.

For hours I lay there, listening to the wind and water;
imagining, now, that I heard shrieks out at sea ; now, that I
distinctly heard the firing of signal guns ; and now, the fall of
houses in the town. I got up several times, and looked out ;
but could see nothing, except the reflection in the window-
panes of the faint candle I had left burning, and of my own
haggard face looking in at me from the black void.

At length, my restlessness attained to such a pitch, that I
hurried on my clothes, and went down-stairs. In the large
kitchen, where I dimly saw bacon and ropes of onions hanging
from the beams, the watchers were clustered together, in
various attitudes, about a table, purposely moved away from
the great chimney, and brought near the door. A pretty girl,
who had her ears stopped with her apron, and her eyes upon
the door, screamed when I appeared, supposing me to be a
spirit; but the others had more presence of mind, and were

David Copperfield 743

glad of an addition to their company. One man, referring to
the topic they had been discussing, asked me whether I thought
the souls of the collier-crews who had gone down, were out in
the storm ?

I remained there, I dare say, two hours. Once, I opened
the yard-gate, and looked into the empty street. The sand,
the seaweed, and the flakes of foam, were driving by ; and I
was obliged to call for assistance before I could shut the gate
again, and make it fast against the wind.

There was a dark gloom in my solitary chamber, when I at
length returned to it ; but I was tired now, and, getting into bed
again, fell — off a tower and down a precipice — into the depths
of sleep. I have an impression that for a long time, though I
dreamed of being elsewhere and in a variety of scenes, it was
always blowing in my dream. At length, I lost that feeble hold
upon reality, and was engaged with two dear friends, but who
they were I don't know, at the siege of some town in a roar of
cannonading.

The thunder of the cannon was so loud and incessant, that
I could not hear something I much desired to hear, until I
made a great exertion and awoke. It was broad day — eight
or nine o'clock ; the storm raging, in lieu of the batteries ; and
some one knocking and calling at my door.

" What is the matter ? " I cried.

" A wreck ! Close by ! "

I sprung out of bed, and asked, what wreck ?

" A schooner, from Spain or Portugal, laden with fruit and
wine. Make haste, sir, if you want to see her ! It's thought,
down on the beach, she'll go to pieces every moment."

The excited voice went clamouring along the staircase ; and
I wrapped myself in my clothes as quickly as I could, and ran
into the street.

Numbers of people were there before me, all running in one
direction to the beach. I ran the same way, outstripping a
good many, and soon came facing the wild sea.

The wind might by this time have lulled a little, though not
more sensibly than if the cannonading I had dreamed of had
been diminished by the silencing of half-a-dozen guns out of
hundreds. But the sea, having upon it the additional agitation
of the whole night, was infinitely more terrific than when I had
seen it last. Every appearance it had then presented, bore the
expression of being swelled ; and the height to which the
breakers rose, and, looking over one another, bore one another
down, and rolled in, in interminable hosts, was most appalling.

744 David Copperfield

In the difficulty of hearing anything but wind and waves,
and in the crowd, and the unspeakable confusion, and my
first breathless efforts to stand against the weather, I was so
confused that I looked out to sea for the wreck, and saw
nothing but the foaming heads of the great waves. A half-
dressed boatman, standing next me, pointed with his bare arm
(a tattoo' d arrow on it, pointing in the same direction) to the
left. Then, O great Heaven, I saw it, close in upon us !

One mast was broken short off, six or eight feet from the
deck, and lay over the side, entangled in a maze of sail and
rigging ; and all that ruin, as the ship rolled and beat — which
she did without a moment's pause, and with a violence quite
inconceivable — beat the side as if it would stave it in. Some
efforts were even then being made, to cut this portion of the
wreck away ; for as the ship, which was broadside on, turned
towards us in her rolling, I plainly descried her people at work
with axes, especially one active figure with long curling hair,
conspicuous among the rest. But a great cry, which was
audible even above the wind and water, rose from the shore
at this moment; the sea, sweeping over the rolling wreck,
made a clean breach, and carried men, spars, casks, planks,
bulwarks, heaps of such toys, into the boiling surge.

The second mast was yet standing, with the rags of a rent
sail, and a wild confusion of broken cordage flapping to and
fro. The ship had struck once, the same boatman hoarsely
said in my ear, and then lifted in and struck again. I under-
stood him to add that she was parting amidships, and I could
readily suppose so, for the rolling and beating were too
tremendous for any human work to suffer long. As he spoke,
there was another great cry of pity from the beach ; four men
arose with the wreck out of the deep, clinging, to the rigging
of the remaining mast ; uppermost, the active figure with the
curling hair.

There was a bell on board; and as the ship rolled and
dashed, like a desperate creature driven mad, now showing
us the whole sweep of her deck, as she turned on her beam-
ends towards the shore, now nothing but her keel, as she
sprung wildly over and turned towards the sea, the bell rang ;
and its sound, the knell of those unhappy men, was borne
towards us on the wind. Again we lost her, and again she
rose. Two men were gone. The agony on shore increased.
Men groaned, and clasped their hands ; women shrieked, and
turned away their faces. Some ran wildly up and down along
the beach, crying for help where no help could be. I found

David Copperfield 745

myself one of these, frantically imploring a knot of sailors
whom I knew, not to let those two lost creatures perish before
our eyes.

They were making out to me, in an agitated way — I don't
know how, for the little I could hear I was scarcely composed
enough to understand — that the lifeboat had been bravely
manned an hour ago, and could do nothing; and that as
no man would be so desperate as to attempt to wade off with
a rope, and establish a communication with the shore, there
was nothing left to try ; when I noticed that some new sensa-
tion moved the people on the beach, and saw them part, and
Ham come breaking through them to the front.

I ran to him — as well as I know — to repeat my appeal for
help. But, distracted though I was by a sight so new to me
and terrible, the determination in his face, and his look out to
sea — exactly the same look as I remembered in connexion with
the morning after Emily's flight — awoke me to a knowledge of
his danger. I held him back with both arms ; and implored
the men with whom I had been speaking, not to listen to him,
not to do murder, not to let him stir from off that sand !

Another cry arose on shore ; and looking to the wreck, we
saw the cruel sail, with blow on blow, beat off the lower of the
two men, and fly up in triumph round the active figure left
alone upon the mast.

Against such a sight, and against such determination as that
of the calmly desperate man who was already accustomed to
lead half the people present, I might as hopefully have en-
treated the wind. " Mas'r Davy," he said, cheerily grasping
me by both hands, " if my time is come, 'tis come. If 'tan't,
I'll bide it. Lord above bless you, and bless all ! Mates,
make me ready! I'm a-going off!"

I was swept away, but not unkindly, to some distance, where
the people around made me stay, urging, as I confusedly per-
ceived, that he was bent on going, with help or without, and
that I should endanger the precautions for his safety by
troubling those with whom they rested. I don't know what
I answered, or what they rejoined; but I saw hurry on the
beach, and men running with ropes from a capstan that was
there, and penetrating into a circle of figures that hid him from
me. Then I saw him standing alone, in a seaman's frock and
trowsers : a rope in his hand, or slung to his wrist ; another
round his body; and several of the best men holding, at a
little distance, to the latter, which he laid out himself, slack
upon the shore, at his feet

746 David Copperfield

The wreck, even to my unpractised eye, was breaking up.
I saw that she was parting in the middle, and that the Hfe of
the solitary man upon the mast hung by a thread. Still, he
clung to it. He had a singular red cap on, — not like a sailor's
cap, but of a finer colour; and as the few yielding planks
between him and destruction rolled and bulged, and his
anticipative death-knell rung, he was seen by all of us to wave
it. I saw him do it now, and thought I was going distracted,
when his action brought an old remembrance to my mind of a
once dear friend.

Ham watched the sea, standing alone, with the silence of
suspended breath behind him, and the storm before, until
there was a great retiring wave, when, with a backward glance
at those who held the rope which was made fast round his
body, he dashed in after it, and in a moment was buffetting
with the water; rising with the hills, falling with the valleys,
lost beneath the foam; then drawn again to land. They
hauled in hastily.

He was hurt. I saw blood on his face, from where I stood ;
but he took no thought of that. He seemed hurriedly to give
them some directions for leaving him more free — or so I
judged from the motion of his arm — and was gone as before.

And now he made for the wreck, rising with the hills, falling
with the valleys, lost beneath the rugged foam, borne in towards
the shore, borne on towards the ship, striving hard and
valiantly. The distance was nothing, but the power of the
sea and wind made the strife deadly. At length he neared
the wreck. He was so near, that with one more of his vigorous
strokes he would be clinging to it, — when a high, green, vast
hill-side of water, moving on shoreward, from beyond the ship,
he seemed to leap up into it with a mighty bound, and the
ship was gone !

Some eddying fragments I saw in the sea, as if a mere cask
had been broken, in running to the spot where they were haul-
ing in. Consternation was in every face. They drew him to
my very feet — insensible — dead. He was carried to the nearest
house ; and, no one preventing me now, I remained near him,
busy, while every means of restoration were tried ; but he had
been beaten to death by the great wave, and his generous
heart was stilled for ever.

As I sat beside the bed, when hope was abandoned and all
was done, a fisherman, who had known me when Emily and
I were children, and ever since, whispered my name at the
door.

David Copperfield 747

"Sir," said he, with tears starting to his weather-beaten face,
which, with his trembling lips, was ashy pale, " will you come
over yonder ? "

The old remembrance that had been recalled to me, was in
his look. I asked him, terror-stricken, leaning on the arm he
held out to support me :

" Has a body come ashore ? "

He said, " Yes."

*' Do I know it ? " I asked then.

He answered nothing.

But he led me to the shore. And on that part of it where
she and I had looked for shells, two children — on that part of
it where some hghter fragments of the old boat, blown down
last night, had been scattered by the wind — among the ruins
of the home he had wronged — I saw him lying with his head
upon his arm, as I had often seen him Ue at school.

CHAPTER LVI

THE NEW WOUND, AND THE OLD

No need, O Steerforth, to have said, when he last spoke
together, in that hour which I so little deemed to be our
parting-hour — no need to have said, " Think of me at my best ! "
I had done that ever ; and could I change now, looking on this
sight !

They brought a hand-bier, and laid him on it, and covered
him with a flag, and took him up and bore him on towards the
houses. All the men who carried him had known him, and
gone sailing with him, and seen him merry and bold. They
carried him through the wild roar, a hush in the midst of all
the tumult; and took him to the cottage where Death was
already.

But when they set the bier down on the threshold, they looked
at one another, and at me, and whispered. I knew why. They
felt as if it were not right to lay him down in the same quiet
room.

We went into the town, and took our burden to the inn. So
soon as I could at all collect my thoughts, I sent for Joram,
and begged him to provide me a conveyance in which it
could be got to London in the night. I knew that the care of
it, and the hard duty of preparing his mother to receive it, could

748 David Copperfield

only rest with me ; and I was anxious to discharge that duty
as faithfully as I could.

I chose the night for the journey, that there might be less
curiosity when I left the town. But, although it was nearly
midnight when I came out of the yard in a chaise, followed by
what I had in charge, there were many people waiting. At
intervals, along the town, and even a little way out upon the
road, I saw more ; but at length only the bleak night and the
open country were around me, and the ashes of my youthful
friendship.

Upon a mellow autumn day, about noon, when the ground
was perfumed by fallen leaves, and many more, in beautiful
tints of yellow, red, and brown, yet hung upon the trees, through
which the sun was shining, I arrived at Highgate. I walked
the last mile, thinking as I went along of what I had to do ;
and left the carriage that had followed me all through the night,
awaiting orders to advance.

The house, when I came up to it, looked just the same.
Not a blind was raised ; no sign of life was in the dull paved
court, with its covered way leading to the disused door. The
wind had quite gone down, and nothing moved.

I had not, at first, the courage to ring at the gate ; and when
I did ring, my errand seemed to me to be expressed in the very
sound of the bell. The little parlour-maid came out, with the
key in her hand ; and looking earnestly at me as she unlocked
the gate, said :

" I beg your pardon, sir. Are you ill ? "

" I have been much agitated, and am fatigued."

" Is anything the matter, sir ? — Mr. James ? **

" Hush ! " said I. " Yes, something has happened, that I
have to break to Mrs. Steerforth. She is at home ? "

The girl anxiously replied that her mistress was very seldom
out now, even in a carriage ; that she kept her room ; that she
saw no company, but would see me. Her mistress was up, she
said, and Miss Dartle was with her. What message should she
take up-stairs?

Giving her a strict charge to be careful of her manner, and only
to carry in my card and say I waited, I sat down in the drawing-
room (which we had now reached) until she should come back.
Its former pleasant air of occupation was gone, and the shutters
were half closed. The harp had not been used for many and
many a day. His picture, as a boy, was there. The cabinet
in which his mother had kept his letters was there. I wondered
if she ever read them now ; if she would ever read them more 1

David Copperfield 749

The house was so still that I heard the girl's light step up-
stairs. On her return, she brought a message, to the effect
that Mrs. Steerforth was an invalid and could not come down ;
but that if I would excuse her being in her chamber, she would
be glad to see me. In a few moments I stood before her.

She was in his room ; not in her own. I felt, of course, that
she had taken to occupy it, in remembrance of him ; and that
the many tokens of his old sports and accomplishments, by
which she was surrounded, remained there, just as he had left
them, for the same reason. She murmured, however, even in
her reception of me, that she was out of her own chamber
because its aspect was unsuited to her infirmity ; and with her
stately look repelled the least suspicion of the truth.

At her chair, as usual, was Rosa Dartle. From the first
moment of her dark eyes resting on me, I saw she knew I was
the bearer of evil tidings. The scar sprung into view that
instant. She withdrew herself a step behind the chair, to keep
her own face out of Mrs. Steerforth's observation ; and
scrutinised me with a piercing gaze that never faltered, never
shrunk.

" I am sorry to observe you are in mourning, sir," said Mrs.
Steerforth.

" I am unhappily a widower," said I.

"You are very young to know so great a loss," she returned.
" I am grieved to hear it. I am grieved to hear it. I hope
Time will be good to you."

" I hope Time," said I, looking at her, " will be good to all
of us. Dear Mrs. Steerforth, we must all trust to that, in our
heaviest misfortunes."

The earnestness of my manner, and the tears in my eyes,
alarmed her. The whole course of her thoughts appeared to
stop, and change.

I tried to command my voice in gently saying his name, but
it trembled. She repeated it to herself, two or three times, in a
low tone. Then, addressing me, she said, with enforced calmness :

"My son is ill."

"Very ill"

" You have seen him ? "

" I have."

" Are you reconciled ? "

I could not say Yes, I could not say No. She slightly turned
her head towards the spot where Rosa Dartle had been standing
at her elbow, and in that moment I said, by the motion of my
lips, to Rosa, " Dead ! "

750 David Copperfield

That Mrs. Steerforth might not be induced to look behind
her, and read, plainly written, what she was not yet prepared to
know, I met her look quickly ; but I had seen Rosa Dartle throw
her hands up in the air with vehemence of despair and horror,
and then clasped them on her face.

The handsome lady — so like, oh so like ! — regarded me with
a fixed look, and put her hand to her forehead. I besought
her to be calm, and prepare herself to bear what I had to tell ;
but I should rather have entreated her to weep, for she sat like
a stone figure.

" When I was last here," I faltered, " Miss Dartle told me
he was sailing here and there. The night before last was a
dreadful one at sea. If he were at sea that night, and near a
dangerous coast, as it is said he was ; and if the vessel that was

seen should really be the ship which "

" Rosa ! " said Mrs. Steerforth, " come to me ! "
She came, but with no sympathy or gentleness. Her eyes
gleamed like fire as she confronted his mother, and broke into
a frightful laugh.

**Now," she said, " is your pride appeased, you madwoman?

Now has he made atonement to you with his life ! Do you

hear?— His life!"

Mrs. Steerforth, fallen back stiffly in her chair, and making
no sound but a moan, cast her eyes upon her with a wide stare.
" Aye ! " cried Rosa, smiting herself passionately on the
breast, " look at me ! Moan, and groan, and look at me !
Look here ! " striking the scar, " at your dead child's handi-
work!"

The moan the mother uttered, from time to time, went to
my heart. Always the same. Always inarticulate and stifled.
Always accompanied with an incapable motion of the head,
but with no change of face. Always proceeding from a rigid
mouth and closed teeth, as if the jaws were locked and the face
frozen up in pain.

" Do you remember when he did this ? she proceeded.
" Do you remember when, in his inheritance of your nature,
and in your pampering of his pride and passion, he did this,
and disfigured me for life ? Look at me, marked until I die
with his high displeasure ; and moan and groan for what you
made him !

" Miss Dartle," I entreated her. ♦' For Heaven's sake "

" I will speak ! " she said, turning on me with her lightning
eyes. " Be silent, you I Look at me, I say, proud mother of
a proud false son 1 Moan for your nurture of him, moan for

David Copperfield 751

your corruption of him, moan for your loss of him, moan for
mine ! "

She clenched her hand, and trembled through her spare worn
figure, as if her passion were killing her by inches.

" You, resent his self-will ! " she exclaimed. " You, injured
by his haughty temper! You, who opposed to both, when
your hair was grey, the qualities which made both when you
gave him birth ! You, who from his cradle reared him to be
what he was, and stunted what he should have been! Are
you rewarded, now^ for your years of trouble ? "

" Oh Miss Dartle, shame ! Oh cruel ! "

" I tell you," she returned, " I will speak to her. No power
on earth should stop me, while I was standing here ! Have I
been silent all these years, and shall I not speak now? I
loved him better than you ever loved him ! " turning on her
fiercely. " I could have loved him, and asked no return. If
I had been his wife, I could have been the slave of his caprices
for a word of love a year. I should have been. Who knows
it better than I ? You were exacting, proud, punctilious,
selfish. My love would have been devoted — would have trod
your paltry whimpering under foot ! "

With flashing eyes, she stamped upon the ground as if she
actually did it.

" Look here I " she said, striking the scar again, with a
relentless hand. " When he grew into the better understand-
ing of what he had done, he saw it, and repented of it ! I
could sing to him, and talk to him, and show the ardour that
I felt in all he did, and attain with labour to such knowledge
as most interested him ; and I attracted him. When he was
freshest and truest, he loved me. Yes, he did ! Many a time,
when you were put off with a slight word, he has taken Me to
his heart!"

She said it with a taunting pride in the midst of her frenzy —
for it was little less — yet with an eager remembrance of it, in
which the smouldering embers of a gentler feeling kindled for
the moment.

" I descended — as I might have known I should, but that
he fascinated me with his boyish courtship — into a doll, a
trifle for the occupation of an idle hour, to be dropped, and
taken up, and trifled with, as the inconstant humour took him.
When he grew weary, I grew weary. As his fancy died out,
I would no more have tried to strengthen any power I had,
than I would have married him on his being forced to take me
for his wife. We fell away from one another without a word.

752 David Copperfield

Perhaps you saw it, and were not sorry. Since then, I have
been a mere disfigured piece of furniture between you both ;
having no eyes, no ears, no feelings, no remembrances.
Moan ? Moan for what you made him ; not for your love.
I tell you that the time was, when I loved him better than
you ever did ! "

She stood with her bright angry eyes confronting the wide
stare, and the set face; and softened no more, when the
moaning was repeated, than if the face had been a picture.

" Miss Dartle," said I, " if you can be so obdurate as not to
feel for this afflicted mother "

"Who feels for me?" she sharply retorted. " She has sown
this. Let her moan for the harvest that she reaps to-day ! "

" And if his faults " I began.

*' Faults ! " she cried, bursting into passionate tears. " Who
dares malign him? He had a soul worth millions of the
friends to whom he stooped ! "

" No one can have loved him better, no one can hold him
in dearer remembrance than I," I replied. " I meant to say,
if you have no compassion for his mother ; or if his faults —
you have been bitter on them "

" It's false," she cried, tearing her black hair ; " I loved
him!"

" — if his faults cannot," I went on, "be banished from your
remembrance, in such an hour; look at that figure, even as
one you have never seen before, and render it some help ! "

All this time, the figure was unchanged, and looked un-
changeable. Motionless, rigid, staring ; moaning in the same
dumb way from time to time, with the same helpless motion of
the head ; but giving no other sign of life. Miss Dartle
suddenly kneeled down before it, and began to loosen the
dress.

" A curse upon you ! " she said, looking round at me, with
a mingled expression of rage and grief. " It was in an evil
hour that you ever came here ! A curse upon you ! Go ! "

After passing out of the room, I hurried back to ring the
bell, the sooner to alarm the servants. She had then taken the
impassive figure in her arms, and, still upon her knees, was
weeping over it, kissing it, calling to it, rocking it to and fro
upon her bosom like a child, and trying every tender means to
rouse the dormant senses. No longer afraid of leaving her,
I noiselessly turned back again; and alarmed the house as I
went out.

Later in the day, I returned, and we laid him in his mother's

David Copperfield 753

room. She was just the same, they told me; Miss Dartle
never left her ; doctors were in attendance, many things had
been tried ; but she lay like a statue, except for the low sound
now and then.

I went through the dreary house, and darkened the
windows. The windows of the chamber where he lay, I
darkened last. I lifted up the leaden hand, and held it to my
heart; and all the world seemed death and silence, broken
only by his mother's moaning.

CHAPTER LVII

THE EMIGRANTS

One thing more I had to do, before yielding myself to the
shock of these emotions. It was, to conceal what had
occurred, from those who were going away; and to dismiss
them on their voyage in happy ignorance. In this, no time
was to be lost.

I took Mr. Micawber aside that same night, and confided
to him the task of standing between Mr. Peggotty and in-
telligence of the late catastrophe. He zealously undertook to
do so, and to intercept any newspaper through which it might,
without such precautions, reach him.

" If it penetrates to him, sir," said Mr. Micawber, striking
himself on the breast, " it shall first pass through this body ! "

Mr. Micawber, I must observe, in his adaptation of himself
to a new state of society, had acquired a bold buccaneering
air, not absolutely lawless, but defensive and prompt. One
might have supposed him a child of the wilderness, long
accustomed to live out of the confines of civilisation, and
about to return to his native wilds.

He had provided himself, among other things, with a
complete suit of oil-skin, and a straw hat with a very low
crown, pitched or caulked on the outside. In this rough
clothing, with a common mariner's telescope under his arm,
and a shrewd trick of casting up his eye at the sky as looking
out for dirty weather, he was far more nautical, after his
manner, than Mr. Peggotty. His whole family, if I may so
express it, were cleared for action. I found Mrs. Micawber in
the closest and most uncompromising of bonnets, made fast
under the chin ; and in a shawl which tied her up (as I had

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been tied up, when my aunt first received me) like a bundle,
and was secured behind at the waist, in a strong knot. Miss
Micawber I found made snug for stormy weather, in the same
manner; with nothing superfluous about her. Master
Micawber was hardly visible in a Guernsey shirt, and the
shaggiest suit of slops I ever saw ; and the children were done
up, like preserved meats, in impervious cases. Both Mr.
Micawber and his eldest son wore their sleeves loosely turned
back at the wrists, as being ready to lend a hand in any
direction, and to "tumble up," or sing out,"Yeo — Heave —
Yeo!" on the shortest notice.

Thus Traddles and I found them at nightfall, assembled on
the wooden steps, at that time known as Hungerford Stairs,
watching the departure of a boat with some of their property
on board. I had told Traddles of the terrible event, and it
had greatly shocked him ; but there could be no doubt of the
kindness of keeping it a secret, and he had come to help me in
this last service. It was here that I took Mr. Micawber aside,
and received his promise.

The Micawber family were lodged in a little, dirty, tumble-
down public-house, which in those days was close to the stairs,
and whose protruding wooden rooms overhung the river. The
family, as emigrants, being objects of some interest in and
about Hungerford, attracted so many beholders, that we were
glad to take refuge in their room. It was one of the wooden
chambers up-stairs, with the tide flowing underneath. My aunt
•and Agnes were there, busily making some little extra comforts,
in the way of dress, for the children. Peggotty was quietly
assisting, with the old insensible work-box, yard measure,
and bit of wax candle before her, that had now outlived so
much.

It was not easy to answer her inquiries ; still less to whisper
Mr. Peggotty, when Mr. Micawber brought him in, that I had
given the letter, and all was well. But I did both, and made
them happy. If I showed any trace of what I felt, my own
sorrows were sufficient to account for it.

" And when does the ship sail, Mr. Micawber ? " asked my
aunt.

Mr. Micawber considered it necessary to prepare either my
aunt or his wife, by degrees, and said, sooner than he had
expected yesterday.

"The boat brought you word, I suppose?" said my aunt.

" It did, ma'am," he returned.

" Well ? " said my aunt. " And she sails "

David Copperfield 755

" Madam," he replied, "I am informed that we must positively
be on board before seven to-morrow morning."

" Heyday ! " said my aunt, " that's soon. Is it a sea-going
fact, Mr. Peggotty ? "

" 'Tis so, ma'am. She'll drop down the river with that theer
tide. If Mas'r Davy and my sister comes aboard at Gravesen',
arternoon o' next day, they'll see the last on us."

"And that we shall do," said I, " be sure ! "

" Until then, and until we are at sea," observed Mr. Micaw-
ber, with a glance of intelligence at me, " Mr. Peggotty and
myself will constantly keep a double look-out together, on our
goods and chattels. Emma, my love," said Mr. Micawber,
clearing his throat in his magnificent way, "my friend Mr.
Thomas Traddles is so obliging as to solicit, in my ear, that
he should have the privilege of ordering the ingredients
necessary to the composition of a moderate portion of that
Beverage which is peculiarly associated, in our minds, with
the Roast Beef of Old England. I allude to — in short.
Punch. Under ordinary circumstances, I should scruple to
entreat the indulgence of Miss Trotwood and Miss Wickfield,
but "

"I can only say for myself," said my aunt, "that I will drink
all happiness and success to you, Mr. Micawber, with the utmost
pleasure."

" And I too ! " said Agnes, with a smile.

Mr. Micawber immediately descended to the bar, where he
appeared to be quite at home ; and in due time returned with'
a steaming jug. I could not but observe that he had been
peeling the lemons with his own clasp-knife, which, as became
the knife of a practical settler, was about a foot long; and
which he wiped, not wholly without ostentation, on the sleeve
of his coat Mrs. Micawber and the two elder members of the
family I now found to be provided with similar formidable
instruments, while every child had its own wooden spoon
attached to its body by a strong line. In a similar anticipation
of life afloat, and in the Bush, Mr. Micawber, instead of help-
ing Mrs. Micawber and his eldest son and daughter to punch,
in wine-glasses, which he might easily have done, for there was
a shelf-full in the room, served it out to them in a series of
villainous little tin pots ; and I never saw him enjoy anything
so much as drinking out of his own particular pint pot, and
putting it in his pocket at the close of the evening.

" The luxuries of the old country," said Mr. Micawber, with
an intense satisfaction in their renouncement, " we abandon.

756 David Copperfield

The denizens of the forest cannot, of course, expect to participate
in the refinements of the land of the Free."

Here, a boy came in to say that Mr. Micawber was wanted
down-stairs.

" I have a presentiment," said Mrs. Micawber, setting down
her tin pot, " that it is a member of my family ! "

"If so, my dear," observed Mr. Micawber, with his usual
suddenness of warmth on that subject, " as the member of your
family — whoever he, she, or it, may be — has kept us waiting for
a considerable period, perhaps the Member may now wait my
convenience."

"Micawber," said his wife, in a low tone, "at such a time as
this "

" * It is not meet,' " said Mr. Micawber, rising, " ' that every
nice offence should bear its comment ! ' Emma, I stand
reproved."

"The loss, Micawber," observed his wife, "has been my
family's, not yours. If my family are at length sensible of the
deprivation to which their own conduct has, in the past, exposed
them, and now desire to extend the hand of fellowship, let it
not be repulsed."

" My dear," he returned, " so be it ! "

" If not for their sakes ; for mine, Micawber," said his wife.

" Emma," he returned, " that view of the question is, at such
a moment, irresistible. I cannot, even now, distinctly pledge
myself to fall upon your family's neck ; but the member of your
family, who is now in attendance, shall have no genial warmth
frozen by me."

Mr. Micawber withdrew, and was absent some little time ; in
the course of which Mrs. Micawber was not wholly free from
an apprehension that words might have arisen between him and
the Member. At length the same boy re-appeared, and presented
me with a note written in pencil, and headed, in a legal manner,
"Heep V. Micawber." From this document, I learned that
Mr. Micawber being again arrested, was in a final paroxysm of
despair ; and that he begged me to send him his knife and pint
pot, by bearer, as they might prove serviceable during the brief
remainder of his existence in jail. He also requested, as a last
act of friendship, that I would see his family to the Parish
Workhouse, and forget that such a Being ever lived.

Of course I answered this note by going down with the boy
to pay the money, where I found Mr. Micawber sitting in a
corner, looking darkly at the Sheriff's Officer who had effected
the capture. On his release, he embraced me with the utmost

David Copperfield 757

fervour ; and made an entry of the transaction in his pocket-
book — being very particular, I recollect, about a halfpenny I
inadvertently omitted from my statement of the total.

This momentous pocket-book was a timely reminder to him
of another transaction. On our return to the room up-stairs
(where he accounted for his absence by saying that it had been
occasioned by circumstances over which he had no control), he
took out of it a large sheet of paper, folded small, and quite
covered with long sums, carefully worked. From the glimpse
I had of them, I should say that I never saw such sums out of
a school ciphering-book. These, it seemed, were calculations
of compound interest on what he called " the principal amount
of forty-one, ten, eleven and a half," for various periods. After
a careful consideration of these, and an elaborate estimate of
his resources, he had come to the conclusion to select that sum
which represented the amount with compound interest to two
years, fifteen calendar months, and fourteen days, from that
date. For this he had drawn a note-of-hand with great neat-
ness, which he handed over to Traddles on the spot, a discharge
of his debt in full (as between man and man), with many
acknowledgments.

" I have still a presentiment," said Mrs. Micawber, pensively
shaking her head, "that my family will appear on board,
before we finally depart."

Mr. Micawber evidently had his presentiment on the subject
too, but he put it in his tin pot and swallowed it.

" If you have any opportunity of sending letters home, on
your passage, Mrs. Micawber," said my aunt, "you must let us
hear from you, you know."

" My dear Miss Trotwood," she replied, " I shall only be too
happy to think that any one expects to hear from us. I shall
not fail to correspond. Mr. Copperfield, I trust, as an old and
familiar friend, will not object to receive occasional intelligence,
himself, from one who knew him when the twins were yet
unconscious ? "

I said that I should hope to hear, whenever she had an
opportunity of writing.

"Please Heaven, there will be many such opportunities,"
said Mr. Micawber. " The ocean, in these times, is a perfect
fleet of ships ; and we can hardly fail to encounter many, in
running over. It is merely crossing," said Mr. Micawber,
trifling with his eye-glass, " merely crossing. The distance is
quite imaginary."

I think, now, how odd it was, but how wonderfully like Mr.

758 David Copperfield

Micawber, that, when he went from London to Canterbury, he
should have talked as if he were going to the farthest limits of
the earth ; and, when he went from England to Australia, as if
he were going for a little trip across the channel.

"On the voyage, I shall endeavour," said Mr. Micawber,
" occasionally to spin them a yarn ; and the melody of my son
Wilkins will, I trust, be acceptable at the galley-fire. When
Mrs. Micawber has her sea-legs on — an expression in which I
hope there is no conventional impropriety — she will give them,
I dare say. Little Tafflin. Porpoises and dolphins, I believe,
will be frequently observed athwart our Bows, and, either on
the Starboard or the Larboard Quarter, objects of interest will
be continually descried. In short," said Mr. Micawber, with
the old genteel air, " the probability is, all will be found so
exciting, alow and aloft, that when the look-out, stationed in
the main-top, cries Land-oh! we shall be very considerably
astonished ! "

With that he flourished off the contents of his little tin pot,
as if he had made the voyage, and had passed a first-class
examination before the highest naval authorities.

" What / chiefly hope, my dear Mr. Copperfield," said Mrs.
Micawber, "is, that in some branches of our family we may
live again in the old country. Do not frown, Micawber ! 1
do not now refer to my own family, but to our children's
children. However vigorous the sapling," said Mrs. Micawber,
shaking her head, " I cannot forget the parent-tree ; and when
our race attains to eminence and fortune, I own I should wish
that fortune to flow into the coffers of Britannia."

" My dear," said Mr. Micawber, " Britaimia must take her
chanci^ I am bound to say that she has never done much for
me, and that I have no particular wish upon the subject."

"Micawber," returned Mrs. Micawber, "there you are
wrong. You are going out, Micawber, to this distant clime,
to strengthen, not to weaken, the connexion between yourself
and Albion."

"The connexion in question, my love," rejoined Mr.
Micawber, "has not laid me, I repeat, under that load of
personal obligation, that I am at all sensitive as to the form-
ation of another connexion."

" Micawber," returned Mrs. Micawber, " there, I again say,
you are wrong. You do not know your power, Micawber. It
is that which will strengthen, even in this step you are about
to take, the connexion between yourself and Albion."

Mr. Micawber sat in his elbow-chair, with his eyebrows

David Copperfield 759

raised ; half receiving and half repudiating Mrs. Micawber's
views as they were stated, but very sensible of their foresight.

" My dear Mr. Copperfield," said Mrs. Micawber, " I wish
Mr. Micawber to feel his position. It appears to me highly
important that Mr. Micawber should, from the hour of his
embarkation, feel his position. Your old knowledge of me,
my dear Mr. Copperfield, will have told you that I have not
the sanguine disposition of Mr. Micawber. My disposition is,
if I may say so, eminently practical. I know that this is a
long voyage. I know that it will involve many privations and
inconveniences. I cannot shut my eyes to those facts. But
I also know what Mr. Micawber is. I know the latent power
of Mr. Micawber. And therefore I consider it vitally im-
portant that Mr. Micawber should feel his position."

"My love," he observed, "perhaps you will allow me to
remark that it is barely possible that I do feel my position at
the present moment."

" I think not, Micawber," she rejoined. " Not fully. My
dear Mr. Copperfield, Mr. Micawber's is not a common case.
Mr. Micawber is going to a distant country expressly in order
that he may be fully understood and appreciated for the first
time. I wish Mr. Micawber to take his stand upon that
vessel's prow, and firmly say, 'This country I am come to
conquer ! Have you honours ? Have you riches ? Have
you posts of profitable pecuniary emolument ? Let them be
brought forward. They are mine!'"

Mr. Micawber, glancing at us all, seemed to think there was
a good deal in this idea.

" I wish Mr. Micawber, if I make myself understood," said
Mrs. Micawber, in her argumentative tone, " to be the Caesar
of his own fortunes. That, my dear Mr. Copperfield, Appears
to me to be his true position. From the first moment of this
voyage, I wish Mr. Micawber to stand upon that vessel's
prow and say, * Enough of delay : enough of disappointment :
enough of limited means. That was in the old country. This
is the new. Produce your reparation. Bring it forward ! ' "

Mr. Micawber folded his arms in a resolute manner, as if he
were then stationed on the figure-head.

"And doing that," said Mrs. Micawber, " — feeling his
position — am I not right in saying that Mr. Micawber will
strengthen, and not weaken, his connexion with Britain ? An
important public character arising in that hemisphere, shall I
be told that its influence will not be felt at home ? Can I be
so weak as to imagine that Mr. Micawber, wielding the rod of

760 David Copperfield

talent and of power in Australia, will be nothing in England ?
I am but a woman ; but I should be unworthy of myself, and
of my papa, if I were guilty of such absurd weakness."

Mrs. Micawber's conviction that her arguments were un-
answerable, gave a moral elevation to her tone which I think
I had never heard in it before.

"And therefore it is," said Mrs. Micawber, "that I the
more wish, that, at a future period, we may live again on the
parent soil. Mr. Micawber may be — I cannot disguise from
myself that the probability is, Mr. Micawber will be — a page
of History; and he ought then to be represented in the
country which gave him birth, and did not give him em-
ployment ! "

"My love," observed Mr. Micawber, "it is impossible for
me not to be touched by your affection. I am always willing
to defer to your good sense. What will be — will be. Heaven
forbid that I should grudge my native country any portion of
the wealth that may be accumulated by our descendants ! "

" That's well," said my aunt, nodding towards Mr. Peggotty,
"and I drink my love to you all, and every blessing and
success attend you!"

Mr. Peggotty put down the two children he had been
nursing, one on each knee, to join Mr. and Mrs. Micawber in
drinking to all of us in return ; and when he and the Micawbers
cordially shook hands as comrades, and his brown face
brightened with a smile, I felt that he would make his way,
establish a good name, and be beloved, go where he would.

Even the children were instructed, each to dip a wooden
spoon into Mr. Micawber's pot, and pledge us in its contents.
When this was done, my aunt and Agnes rose, and parted
from the emigrants. It was a sorrowful farewell. They were
all crying ; the children hung about Agnes to the last ; and we
left poor Mrs. Micawber in a very distressed condition, sobbing
and weeping by a dim candle, that must have made the room
look, from the river, like a miserable lighthouse.

I went down again next morning to see that they were away.
They had departed, in a boat, as early as five o'clock. It was
a wonderful instance to me of the gap such partings make,
that although my association of them with the tumble-down
public-house and the wooden stairs dated only from last night,
both seemed dreary and deserted, now that they were gone.

In the afternoon of the next day, my old nurse and I went
down to Gravesend. We found the ship in the river, sur-
rounded by a crowd of boats ; a favourable wind blowing ; the

David Copperfield 761

signal for sailing at her mast head. I hired a boat directly,
and we put off to her ; and getting through the little vortex of
confusion of which she was the centre, went on board.

Mr. Peggotty was waiting for us on deck. He told me that
Mr. Micawber had just now been arrested again (and for the
last time) at the suit of Heep, and that, in compliance with a
request I had made to him, he had paid the money : which I
repaid him. He then took us down between decks ; and there,
any lingering fears I had of his having heard any rumours
of what had happened, were dispelled by Mr. Micawber's
coming out of the gloom, taking his arm with an air of friend-
ship and protection, and telling me that they had scarcely been
asunder for a moment, since the night before last.

It was such a strange scene to me, and so confined and
dark, that, at first, I could make out hardly anything ; but,
by degrees, it cleared, as my eyes became more accustomed to
the gloom, and I seemed to stand in a picture by Ostade.
Among the great beams, bulks, and ringbolts of the ship, and
the emigrant-berths, and chests, and bundles, and barrels, and
heaps of miscellaneous baggage — lighted up, here and there,
by dangling lanterns; and elsewhere by the yellow daylight
straying down a windsail or a hatchway — were crowded groups
of people, making new friendships, taking leave of one another,
talking, laughing, crying, eating and drinking ; some, already
settled down into the possession of their few feet of space, vrith
their little households arranged, and tiny children established
on stools, or in dwarf elbow-chairs ; others, despairing of a rest-
ing-place, and wandering disconsolately. From babies who
had but a week or two of life behind them, to crooked old men
and women who seemed to have but a week or two of life
before them ; and from ploughmen bodily carrying out soil of
England on their boots, to smiths taking away samples of its
'soot and smoke upon their skins ; every age and occupation
appeared to be crammed into the narrow compass of the
'tween decks.

As my eye glanced round this place, I thought I saw sitting,
by an open port, with one of the Micawber children near her,
a figure like Emily's ; it first attracted my attention, by another
figure parting from it with a kiss ; and as it glided calmly away
through the disorder, reminding me of — Agnes ! But in the
rapid motion and confusion, and in the unsettlement of my
own thoughts, I lost it again ; and only knew that the time was
come when all visitors were being warned to leave the ship ;
that my nurse was crying on a chest beside me ; and that Mrs.

762 David Copperfield

Gummidge, assisted by some younger stooping woman in
black, was busily arranging Mr. Peggotty's goods.

" Is there any last wured, Mas'r Davy ? " said he. " Is there
any one forgotten thing afore we parts ? "

" One thing ! " said I. " Martha ! "

He touched the younger woman I have mentioned on the
shoulder, and Martha stood before me.

"Heaven bless you, you good man ! " cried I. "You take
her with you ! "

She answered for him, with a burst of tears. I could speak
no more at that time, but I wrung his hand ; and if ever I have
loved and honoured any man, I loved and honoured that man
in my soul.

The ship was clearing fast of strangers. The greatest trial
that I had, remained. I told him what the noble spirit that
was gone, had given me in charge to say at parting. It moved
him deeply. But when he charged me, in return, with many
messages of affection and regret for those deaf ears, he moved
me more.

The time was come. I embraced him, took my weeping
nurse upon my arm, and hurried away. On deck, I took leave
of poor Mrs. Micawber. She was looking distractedly about
for her family, even then ; and her last words to me were, that
she never would desert Mr. Micawber.

We went over the side into our boat, and lay at a little
distance to see the ship wafted on her course. It was then
calm, radiant sunset. She lay between us and the red light ;
and every taper line and spar was visible against the glow. A
sight at once so beautiful, so mournful, and so hopeful, as the
glorious ship, lying still on the flushed water, with all the life
on board her crowded at the bulwarks, and there clustering, for
a moment, bare-headed and silent, I never saw.

Silent only for a moment. As the sails rose to the wind, and
the ship began to move, there broke from all the boats three
resounding cheers, which those on board took up, and echoed
back, and which were echoed and re-echoed. My heart burst
out when I heard the sound, and beheld the waving of the hats
and handkerchiefs — and then I saw her !

Then I saw her, at her uncle's side, and trembling on his
shoulder. He pointed to us with an eager hand ; and she saw
us, and waved her last good-bye to me. Aye, Emily, beautiful
and drooping, cling to him with the utmost trust of thy bruised
heart ; for he has clung to thee with all the might of his great
level

David Copperfield 763

Surrounded by the rosy light, and standing high upon the
deck, apart together, she clinging to him, and he holding her,
they solemnly passed away. The night had fallen on the
Kentish hills when we were rowed ashore — and fallen darkly
upon me.

CHAPTER LVIII

ABSENCE

It was a long and gloomy night that gathered on me, haunted
by the ghosts of many hopes, of many dear remembrances,
many errors, many unavailing sorrows and regrets.

I went away from England ; not knowing, even then, how
great the shock was that I had to bear. I left all who were
dear to me, and went away ; and believed that I had borne it,
and it was past. As a man upon a field of battle will receive a
mortal hurt, and scarcely know that he is struck, so I, when I
was left alone with my undisciplined heart, had no conception
of the wound with which it had to strive.

The knowledge came upon me, not quickly, but little by
little, and grain by grain. The desolate feeling with which I
went abroad, deepened and widened hourly. At first it was a
heavy sense of loss and sorrow, wherein I could distinguish
little else. By imperceptible degrees, it became a hopeless
consciousness of all that I had lost — love, friendship, interest ;
of all that had been shattered — my first trust, my first affection,
the whole airy castle of my life ; of all that remained — a ruined
blank and waste, lying wide around me, unbroken to the dark
horizon.

If my grief were selfish, I did not know it to be so. I
mourned for my child-wife, taken from her blooming world, so
young. I mourned for him who might have won the love and
admiration of thousands, as he had won mine long ago. I
mourned for the broken heart that had found rest in the
stormy sea ; and for the wandering remnants of the simple
home, where I had heard the night-wind blowing when I was
a child.

From the accumulated sadness into which I fell, I had at
length no hope of ever issuing again. I roamed from place to
place, carrying my burden with me everywhere. I felt its
whole weight now ; and I drooped beneath it, and I said in my
heart that it could never be lightened.

764 David Copperfield

When this despondency was at its worst, I believed that I
should die. Sometimes, I thought that I would like to die at
home ; and actually turned back on my road, that I might get
there soon. At other times, I passed on farther away, from
city to city, seeking I know not what, and trying to leave I know
not what behind.

It is not in my power to retrace, one by one, all the weary
phases of distress of mind through which I passed. There
are some dreams that can only be imperfectly and vaguely
described ; and when I oblige myself to look back on this
time of my life, I seem to be recalling such a dream. I see
myself passing on among the novelties of foreign towns, palaces,
cathedrals, temples, pictures, castles, tombs, fantastic streets —
the old abiding places of History and Fancy — as a dreamer
might; bearing my painful load through all, and hardly con-
scious of the objects as they fade before me. Listlessness to
everything, but brooding sorrow, was the night that fell on my
undisciplined heart. Let me look up from it — as at last I did,
thank Heaven ! — and from its long, sad, wretched dream, to
dawn.

For many months I travelled with this ever-darkening cloud
upon my mind. Some blind reasons that I had for not return-
ing home — reasons then struggling within me, vainly, for more
distinct expression — kept me on my pilgrimage. Sometimes, I
had proceeded restlessly from place to place, stopping nowhere ;
sometimes, I had lingered long in one spot. I had had no
purpose, no sustaining soul within me, anywhere.

I was in Switzerland. I had come out of Italy, over one of
the great passes of the Alps, and had since wandered with a
guide among the by-ways of the mountains. If those awful
solitudes had spoken to my heart, I did not know it. I had
found sublimity and wonder in the dread heights and precipices,
in the roaring torrents, and the wastes of ice and snow; but as
yet, they had taught me nothing else.

I came, one evening before sunset, down into a valley, where
I was to rest. In the course of my descent to it, by the winding
track along the mountain-side, from which I saw it shining far
below, I think some long-unwonted sense of beauty and tran-
quillity, some softening influence awakened by its peace,
moved faintly in my breast. I remember pausing once, with
a kind of sorrow that was not all oppressive, not quite despair-
ing. I remember almost hopmg that some better change was
possible within me.

I came into the valley, as the evening sun was shining on

David Copperfield 765

the remote heights of snow, that closed it in like eternal clouds.
The bases of the mountains forming the gorge in which the
little village lay, were richly green ; and high above this gentler
vegetation, grew forests of dark fir, cleaving the wintry snow
drift, wedge-like, and stemming the avalanche. Above these,
were range upon range of craggy steeps, grey rock, bright ice,
and smooth verdure-specks of pasture, all gradually blending
with the crowning snow. Dotted here and there on the
mountain's side, each tiny dot a home, were lonely wooden
cottages, so dwarfed by the towering heights that they appeared '
too small for toys. So did even the clustered village in the
valley, with its wooden bridge across the stream, where the
stream tumbled over broken rocks, and roared away among the
trees. In the quiet air, there was a sound of distant singing —
shepherd voices; but, as one bright evening cloud floated
midway along the mountain's side, I could almost have
believed it came from there, and was not earthly music. All at
once, in this serenity, great Nature spoke to me ; and soothed
me to lay down my weary head upon the grass, and weep as I
had not wept yet, since Dora died !

I had found a packet of letters awaiting me but a few
minutes before, and had strolled out of the village to read
them while my supper was making ready. Other packets had
missed me, and I had received none for a long time. Beyond
a line or two, to say that I was well, and had arrived at such a
place, I had not had fortitude or constancy to write a letter
since I left home.

The packet was in my hand. I opened it, and read the
writing of Agnes.

She was happy and useful, was prospering as she had hoped.
That was all she told me of herself. The rest referred to me.

She gave me no advice; she urged no duty on me; she
only told me, in her own fervent manner, what her trust in me
was. She knew (she said) how such a nature as mine would
turn affliction to good. She knew how trial and emotion would
exalt and strengthen it. She was sure that in my every
purpose I should gain a firmer and a higher tendency, through
the grief I had undergone. She, who so gloried in my fame,
and so looked forward to its augmentation, well knew that I
would labour on. She knew that in me, sorrow could not be
weakness, but must be strength. As the endurance of my
childish days had done its part to make me what I was, so
greater calamities would nerve me on, to be yet better than I
was ; and so, as they had taught me, would I teach others. She

766 David Copperfield

commended me to God, who had taken my innocent darling
to His rest ; and in her sisterly affection cherished me always,
and was always at my side go where I would ; proud of what
I had done, but infinitely prouder yet of what I was reserved
to do.

I put the letter in my breast, and thought what had I been
an hour ago ! When I heard the voices die away, and saw
the quiet evening cloud grow dim, and all the colours in the
valley fade, and the golden snow upon the mountain tops
become a remote part of the pale night sky, yet felt that the
night was passing from my mind, and all its shadows clearing,
there was no name for the love I bore her, dearer to me,
henceforward, than ever until then.

I read her letter, many times. I wrote to her before I slept.
I told her that I had been in sore need of her help ; that with-
out her I was not, and I never had been, what she thought
me ; but that she inspired me to be that, and I would try.

I did try. In three months more, a year would have passed
since the beginning of my sorrow. I determined to make no
resolutions until the expiration of those three months, but to
try. I lived in that valley, and its neighbourhood, all the
time.

The three months gone, I resolved to remain away from
home for some time longer ; to settle myself for the present in
Switzerland, which was growing dear to me in the remembrance
of that evening ; to resume my pen ; to work.

I resorted humbly whither Agnes had commended me; I
sought out Nature, never sought in vain ; and I admitted to
my breast the human interest I had lately shrunk from. It
was not long, before I had almost as many friends in the
valley as in Yarmouth : and when I left it, before the winter
set in, for Geneva, and came back in the spring, their cordial
greetings had a homely sound to me, although they were not
conveyed in English words.

I worked early and late, patiently and hard. I wrote a
Story, with a purpose growing, not remotely, out of my
experience, and sent it to Traddles, and he arranged for its
publication very advantageously for me ; and the tidings of my
growing reputation began to reach me from travellers whom I
encountered by chance. After some rest and change, I fell to
work, in my old ardent way, on a new fancy, which took strong
possession of me. As I advanced in the execution of this
task, I felt it more and more, and roused my utmost energies
to do it well. This was my third work of fiction. It was not

David Copperfield 767

half written, when, in an interval of rest, I thought of returning
home.

For a long time, though studying and working patiently,
I had accustomed myself to robust exercise. My health,
severely impaired when I left England, was quite restored.
I had seen much. I had been in many countries, and I hope
I had improved my store of knowledge.

I have now recalled all that I think it needful to recall
here, of this term of absence — with one reservation. I have
made it, thus far, with no purpose of suppressing any of my
thoughts ; for, as I have elsewhere said, this narrative is my
written memory. I have desired to keep the most secret
current of my mind apart, and to the last. I enter on it now.

I cannot so completely penetrate the mystery of my own
heart, as to know when I began to think that I might have
set its earliest and brightest hopes on Agnes. I cannot say
at what stage of my grief it first became associated with the
reflection that, in my wayward boyhood, I had thrown away
the treasure of her love. I believe I may have heard some
whisper of that distant thought, in the old unhappy loss or
want of something never to be realised, of which I had been
sensible. But the thought came into my mind as a new
reproach and a new regret, when I was left so sad and lonely
in the world.

If, at that time, I had been much with her, I should, in
the weakness of my desolation, have betrayed this. It was
what I remotely dreaded when I was first impelled to stay
away from England. I could not have borne to lose the
smallest portion of her sisterly affection; yet, in that be-
trayal, I should have set a constraint between us hitherto
unknown.

I could not forget that the feeling with which she now
regarded me had grown up in my own free choice and
course. That if she had ever loved me with another love —
and I sometimes thought the time was when she might have
done so — I had cast it away. It was nothing, now, that I
had accustomed myself to think of her, when we were both
mere children, as one who was far removed from my wild
fancies. I had bestowed my passionate tenderness upon
another object ; and what I might have done, I had not
done ; and what Agnes was to me, I and her own noble
heart had made her.

In the beginning of the change that gradually worked in
me, when I tried to get a better understanding of myself

768 David Copperfield

and be a better man, I did glance, through some indefinite
probation, to a period when I might possibly hope to cancel
the mistaken past, and to be so blessed as to marry her.
But, as time wore on, this shadowy prospect faded, and
departed from me. If she had ever loved me, then, I should
hold her the more sacred, remembering the confidences I
had reposed in her, her knowledge of my errant heart, the
sacrifice she must have made to be my friend and sister, and
the victory she had won. If she had never loved me, could
I believe that she would love me now?

I had always felt my weakness, in comparison with her
constancy and fortitude; and now I felt it more and more.
Whatever I might have been to her, or she to me, if I had
been more worthy of her long ago, I was not now, and she
was not. The time was past. I had let it go by, and had
deservedly lost her.

That I suffered much in these contentions, that they filled
me with unhappiness and remorse, and yet that I had a
sustaining sense that it was required of me, in right and
honour, to keep away from myself, with shame, the thought
of turning to the dear girl in the withering of my hopes,
from whom I had frivolously turned when they were bright
and fresh — which consideration was at the root of every
thought I had concerning her — is all equally true. I made
no effort to conceal from myself, now, that I loved her, that
I was devoted to her ; but I brought the assurance home to
myself, that it was now too late, and that our long-subsisting
relation must be undisturbed.

I had thought, much and often, of my Dora's shadowing
out to me what might have happened, in those years that
were destined not to try us. I had considered how the
things that never happen, are often as much realities to us,
in their effects, as those that are accomplished. The very
years she spoke of, were realities now, for my correction ; and
would have been, one day, a little later perhaps, though we
had parted in our earliest folly. I endeavoured to convert
what might have been between myself and Agnes, into a
means of making me more self-denying, more resolved, more
conscious of myself, and my defects and errors. Thus, through
the reflection that it might have been, I arrived at the conviction
that it could never be.

These, with their perplexities and inconsistencies, were the
shifting quicksands of my mind, from the time of my depar-
ture to the time of my return home, three years afterwards.

David Copperfield 769

Three years had elapsed since the sailing of the emigrant ship ;
when, at that same hour of sunset, and in the same place, I
stood on the deck of the packet vessel that brought me home,
looking on the rosy water where I had seen the image of that
ship reflected.

Three years. Long in the aggregate, though short as they
went by. And home was very dear to me, and Agnes too —
but she was not mine — she was never to be mine. She might
have been, but that was past J

CHAPTER LIX

RETURN

I LANDED in London on a wintry autumn evening. It was
dark and raining, and I saw more fog and mud in a minute
than I had seen in a year. I walked from the Custom House
to the Monument before I found a coach ; and although the
very house-fronts, looking on the swollen gutters, were like
old friends to me, I could not but admit that they were very
dingy friends.

I have often remarked — I suppose everybody has — that
one's going away from a familiar place, would seem to be the
signal for change in it. As I looked out of the coach-window,
and observed that an old house on Fish-street Hill, which had
stood untouched by painter, carpenter, or bricklayer, for a
century, had been pulled down in my absence ; and that a
neighbouring street, of time-honoured insalubrity and incon-
venience, was being drained and widened ; I half expected to
find St. Paul's Cathedral looking older.

For some changes in the fortunes of my friends, I was
prepared. My aunt had long been re-established at Dover,
and Trnddles had begun to get into some little practice at
the Bar, in the very first term after my departure. He had
chambers in Gray's Inn, now ; and had told me, in his last
letters, that he was not without hopes of being soon united
to the dearest girl in the world.

They expected me home before Christmas; but had no
idea of my returning so soon. I had purposely misled them,
that I might have the pleasure of taking them by surprise.
And yet, I was perverse enough to feel a chill of disappoint-
ment in receiving no welcome, and rattling, alone and silent,
through the misty streets.

c c

770 David Copperfield ^

The well-known shops, however, with their cheerful lights,
did something for me ; and when I alighted at the door of
the Gray's Inn Coffee-house, I had recovered my spirits. It
recalled, at first, that so-different time when I had put up at
the Golden Cross, and reminded me of the changes that had
come to pass since then ; but that was natural.

" Do you know where Mr. Traddles lives in the Inn ? " I
asked the waiter, as I warmed myself by the coffee-room fire.

" Holborn Court, sir. Number two."

" Mr. Traddles has a rising reputation among the lawyers,
I believe ? " said I.

" Well, sir," returned the waiter, "probably he has, sir; but
I am not aware of it myself."

This waiter, who was middle-aged and spare, looked for
help to a waiter of more authority — a stout, potential old
man, with a double-chin, in black breeches and stockings,
who came out of a place like a churchwarden's pew, at the
end of the coffee-room, where he kept company with a cash-
box, a Directory, a Law-list, and other books and papers.

" Mr. Traddles," said the spare waiter. " Number two in
the Court."

The potential waiter waved him away, and turned, gravely,
to me.

" I was inquiring," said I, " whether Mr. Traddles, at
number two in the Court, has not a rising reputation among
the lawyers ? "

" Never heard his name," said the waiter, in a rich husky
voice.

I felt quite apologetic for Traddles.

" He's a young man, sure ? " said the portentous waiter,
fixing his eyes severely on me. " How long has he been in
the Inn?"

" Not above three years," said I.

The waiter, who I supposed had lived in his churchwarden's
pew for forty years, could not pursue such an insignificant
subject. He asked me what I would have for dinner?

I felt I was in England again, and really was quite cast
down on Traddles's account. There seemed to be no hope
for him. I meekly ordered a bit of fish and a steak, and
stood before the fire musing on his obscurity.

As I followed the chief waiter with my eyes, I could not
help thinking that the garden in which he had gradually
blown to be the flower he was, was an arduous place to rise
in. It had such a prescriptive, stiff-necked, long-established,

David Copperfield 771

solemn, elderly air. I glanced about the room, which had
had its sanded floor sanded, no doubt, in exactly the same
manner when the chief waiter was a boy — if he ever was a
boy, which appeared improbable; and at the shining tables,
where I saw myself reflected, in unruffled depths of old
mahogany ; and at the lamps, without a flaw in their trimming
or cleaning ; and at the comfortable green curtains, with their
pure brass rods, snugly enclosing the boxes ; and at the two
large coal fires, brightly burning ; and at the rows of decanters,
burly as if with the consciousness of pipes of expensive old
port wine below ; and both England and the law appeared to me
to be very difficult indeed to be taken by storm. I went up
to my bedroom to change my wet clothes ; and the vast extent
of that old wainscotted apartment (which was over the archway
leading to the Inn, I remember), and the sedate immensity of
the four-post bedstead, and the indomitable gravity of the
chests of drawers, all seemed to unite in sternly frowning on
the fortunes of Traddles, or on any such daring youth. I
came down again to my dinner ; and even the slow comfort of
the meal, and the orderly silence of the place — which was
bare of guests, the Long Vacation not yet being over — were
eloquent on the audacity of Traddles, and his small hopes of
a livelihood for twenty years to come.

I had seen nothing like this since I went away, and it quite
dashed my hopes for my friend. The chief waiter had had
enough of me. He came near me no more; but devoted
himself to an old gentleman in long gaiters, to meet whom a
pint of special port seemed to come out of the cellar of its
own accord, for he gave no order. The second waiter informed
me, in a whisper, that this old gentleman was a retired con-
veyancer living in the Square, and worth a mint of money,
which it was expected he would leave to his laundress's
daughter ; likewise that it was rumoured that he had a service
of plate in a bureau, all tarnished with lying by, though more
than one spoon and a fork had never yet been beheld in his
chambers by mortal vision. By this time, I quite gave Traddles
up for lost; and settled in my own mind that there was no
hope for him.

Being very anxious to see the dear old fellow, nevertheless,
I despatched my dinner, in a manner not at all calculated to
raise me in the opinion of the chief waiter, and hurried out by
the back way. Number two in the Court was soon reached ;
and an inscription on the door-post informing me that
Mr. Traddles occupied a set of chambers on the top story, I

772 David Copperfield

ascended the staircase. A crazy old staircase I found it to be,
feebly lighted on each landing by a club-headed little oil wick,
dying away in a little dungeon of dirty glass.

In the course of my stumbling up-stairs, I fancied I heard
a pleasant sound of laughter; and not the laughter of an
attorney or barrister, or attorney's clerk or barrister's clerk,
but of two or three merry girls. Happening, however, as
I stopped to listen, to put my foot in a hole where the
Honourable Society of Gray's Inn had left a plank deficient,
I fell down with some noise, and when I recovered my footing
all was silent.

Groping my way more carefully, for the rest of the journey,
my heart beat high when I found the outer door, which had
Mr. Traddles painted on it, open. I knocked. A con-
siderable scuffling within ensued, but nothing else. I therefore
knocked again.

A small sharp-looking lad, half-footboy and half-clerk, who
was very much out of breath, but who looked at me as if he
defied me to prove it legally, presented himself.

" Is Mr. Traddles within?" I said.

" Yes, sir, but he's engaged."

" I want to see him."

After a moment's survey of me, the sharp-looking lad decided
to let me in; and opening the door wider for that purpose,
admitted me, first, into a little closet of a hall, and next into a
little sitting-room ; where I came into the presence of my
old friend (also out of breath), seated at a table, and bending
over papers.

"Good God!" cried Traddles, looking up. "It's Copper-
field ! " and rushed into my arms, where I held him tight.

" All well, my dear Traddles ? "

" All well, my dear, dear Copperfield, and nothing but good
news ! "

We cried with pleasure, both of us.

" My dear fellow," said Traddles, rumpling his hair in his
excitement, which was a most unnecessary operation, **my
dearest Copperfield, my long-lost and most welcome friend,
how glad I am to see you ! How brown you are ! How glad
I am ! Upon my life and honour, I never was so rejoiced,
my beloved Copperfield, never ! "

I was equally at a loss to express my emotions. I was
quite unable to speak, at first.

" My dear fellow ! " said Traddles. " And grown so famous !
My glorious Copperfield ! Good gracious me, w/ien did you

David Copperfield 773

come, where have you come from, what have you been
doing ? "

Never pausing for an answer to anything he said, Traddles,
who had clapped me into an easy-chair by the fire, all this
time impetuously stirred the fire with one hand, and pulled at
my neckerchief with the other, under some wild delusion that
it was a great coat. Without putting down the poker, he now
hugged me again; and I hugged him; and, both laughing,
and both wiping our eyes, we both sat down, and shook hands
across the hearth.

" To think," said Traddles, " that you should have been so
nearly coming home as you must have been, my dear old boy,
and not at the ceremony ! "

" What ceremony, my dear Traddles?"

"Good gracious me!" cried Traddles, opening his eyes in
his old way. " Didn't you get my last letter ? "

" Certainly not, if it referred to any ceremony."

"Why, my dear Copperfield," said Traddles, sticking his
hair upright with both hands, and then putting his hands on
my knees, " I am married ! "

" Married ! " I cried joyfully.

" Lord bless me, yes ! " said Traddles — " by the Rev. Horace
— to Sophy — down in Devonshire. Why, my dear boy, she's
behind the window curtain ! Look here \ "

To my amazement, the dearest girl in the world came at
that same instant, laughing and blushing, from her place of
concealment. And a more cheerful, amiable, honest, happy,
bright-looking bride, I believe (as I could not help saying on
the spot) the world never saw. I kissed her as an old
acquaintance should, and wished them joy with all my might
of heart.

"Dear me," said Traddles, "what a delightful re-union this
is ! You are so extremely brown, my dear Copperfield ! God
bless my soul, how happy I am ! "

" And so am I," said I.

" And I am sure I am ! " said the blushing and laughing
Sophy.

" We are all as happy as possible ! " said Traddles. " Even
the girls are happy. Dear me, I declare I forgot them ! "

"Forgot?" saidL

"The girls," said Traddles. "Sophy's sisters. They are
staying with us. They have come to have a peep at London.
The fact is, when — was it you that tumbled up-stairs,
Copperfield ? "

774 David Copperfield

" It was," said I, laughing.

" Well then, when you tumbled up-stairs," said Traddles, " 1
was romping with the girls. In point of fact, we were playing
at Puss in the Corner. But as that wouldn't do in Westminster
Hall," and as it wouldn't look quite professional if they were
seen by a client, they decamped. And they are now — listening,
I have no doubt," said Traddles, glancing at the door of
another room.

" I am sorry," said I, laughing afresh, " to have occasioned
such a dispersion."

" Upon my word," rejoined Traddles, greatly delighted, " if
you had seen them running away, and running back again,
after you had knocked, to pick up the combs they had dropped
out of their hair, and going on in the maddest manner, you
wouldn't have said so. My love, will you fetch the girls ? "

Sophy tripped away, and we heard her received in the
adjoining room with a peal of laughter.

"Really musical, isn't it, my dear Copperfield?" said
Traddles. "It's very agreeable to hear. It quite lights up
these old rooms. To an unfortunate bachelor of a fellow who
has lived alone all his life, you know, it's positively delicious.
It's charming. Poor things, they have had a great loss in
Sophy — who, I do assure you, Copperfield, is, and ever was,
the dearest girl ! — and it gratifies me beyond expression to find
them in such good spirits. The society of girls is a very
delightful thing, Copperfield. It's not professional, but it's
very delightful."

Observing that he slightly faltered, and comprehending that
in the goodness of his heart he was fearful of giving me some
pain by what he had said, I expressed my concurrence with a
heartiness that evidently relieved and pleased him greatly.

" But then," said Traddles, " our domestic arrangements are,
to say the truth, quite unprofessional altogether, my dear
Copperfield. Even Sophy's being here, is unprofessional. And
we have no other place of abode. We have put to sea in a
cockboat, but we are quite prepared to rough it. And Sophy's
an extraordinary manager ! You'll be surprised how those girls
are stowed away. I am sure I hardly know how it's done ! "

" Are many of the young ladies with you ? " I inquired.

"The eldest, the Beauty is here," said Traddles, in a low
confidential voice, " Caroline. And Sarah's here — the one I
mentioned to you as having something the matter with her
spine, you know. Immensely better ! And the two youngest
that Sophy educated are with us. And Louisa's here."

David Copperfield 775

" Indeed ! " cried I.

" Yes," said Traddles. " Now the whole set — I mean the
chambers — is only three rooms ; but Sophy arranges for the
girls in the most wonderful way, and they sleep as comfortably
as possible. Three in that room," said 1'raddles, pointing.
"Two in that."

I could not help glancing round, in search of the accom-
modation remaining for Mr. and Mrs. Traddles. Traddles
understood me.

" Well ! " said Traddles, " we are prepared to rough it, as I
said just now, and we did improvise a bed last week, upon the
floor here. But there's a little room in the roof — a very nice
room, when you're up there — which Sophy papered herself, to
surprise me ; and that's our room at present. It's a capital
little gipsy sort of place. There's quite a view from it."

" And you are happily married at last, my dear Traddles ! "
said I. " How rejoiced I am ! "

" Thank you, my dear Copperfield," said Traddles, as we
shook hands once more. " Yes, I am as happy as it's possible
to be. There's your old friend, you see," said Traddles,
nodding triumphantly at the flower-pot and stand ; "and
there's the table with the marble top ! All the other furniture
is plain and serviceable, you perceive. And as to plate. Lord
bless you, we haven't so much as a tea-spoon."

" All to be earned ? " said I, cheerfully.

" Exactly so," replied Traddles, " all to be earned. Of course
we have something in the shape of tea-spoons, because we stir
our tea. But they're Britannia metal."

" The silver will be the brighter when it comes," said I.

" The very thing we say ! " cried Traddles. " You see, my
dear Copperfield," falling again into the low confidential tone,
"after I had dehvered my argument in Doe dem. Jipes versus
WiGZELL, which did me great service with the profession, I
went down into Devonshire, and had some serious conversation
in private with the Reverend Horace. I dwelt upon the fact
that Sophy — who I do assure you, Copperfield, is the dearest

" I am certain she is ! " said I.

" She is, indeed ! " rejoined Traddles. " But I am afraid I
am wandering from the subject. Did I mention the Reverend
Horace?"

" You said that you dwelt upon the fact "

" True ! Upon the fact that Sophy and I had been engaged
for a long period, and that Sophy, with the permission of her

776 David Copper field

parents, was more than content to take me — in short," said
Traddles, with his old frank smile, " on our present Britannia-
metal footing. Very well. I then proposed to the Reverend
Horace — who is a most excellent clergyman, Copperfield, and
ought to be a Bishop ; or at least ought to have enough to live
upon, without pinching himself — that if I could turn the corner,
say of two hundred and fifty pounds, in one year ; and could
see my way pretty clearly to that, or something better, next
year ; and could plainly furnish a little place like this, besides ;
then, and in that case, Sophy and I should be united. I took
the liberty of representing that we had been patient for a good
many years ; and that the circumstance of Sophy's being
extraordinarily useful at home, ought not to operate with
her affectionate parents, against her establishment in life — don't
you see?"

"Certainly it ought not," said I.

" I am glad you think so, Copperfield," rejoined Traddles,
" because, without any imputation on the Reverend Horace, I
do think parents, and brothers, and so forth, are sometimes
rather selfish in such cases. Well ! I also pointed out, that
my most earnest desire was, to be useful to the family; and
that if I got on in the world, and anything should happen to
him — I refer to the Reverend Horace "

"I understand," said I.

" — Or to Mrs. Crewler — it would be the utmost gratification
of my wishes, to be a parent to the girls. He replied in a
most admirable manner, exceedingly flattering to my feelings,
and undertook to obtain the consent of Mrs. Crewler to this
arrangement. They had a dreadful time of it with her. It
mounted from her legs into her chest, and then into her
head "

" What mounted ? " I asked.

" Her grief," replied Traddles, with a serious look. " Her
feelings generally. As I mentioned on a former occasion, she
is a very superior woman, but has lost the use of her limbs.
Whatever occurs to harass her, usually settles in her legs ; but
on this occasion it mounted to the chest, and then to the head,
and, in short, pervaded the whole system in a most alarming
manner. However, they brought her through it by unremitting
and affectionate attention ; and we were married yesterday six
weeks. You have no idea what a Monster I felt, Copperfield,
when I saw the whole family crying and fainting away in every
direction! Mrs. Crewler couldn't see me before we left —
couldn't forgive me, then, for depriving her of her child — but

David Copperfield 777

she is a good creature, and has done so since. I had a
delightful letter from her, only this morning."

" And in short, my dear friend," said I, " you feel as blest as
you deserve to feel ! "

" Oh ! That's your partiality ! " laughed Traddles. " But,
indeed, I am in a most enviable state. I work hard, and read
Law insatiably. I get up at five every morning, and don't mind
it at all. I hide the girls in the day-time, and make merry with
them in the evening. And I assure you I am quite sorry that
they are going home on Tuesday, which is the day before the
first day of Michaelmas Term. But here," said Traddles,
breaking off in his confidence, and speaking aloud, " are the
girls ! Mr. Copperfield, Miss Crewler — Miss Sarah — Miss
Louisa — Margaret and Lucy ! "

They were a perfect nest of roses ; they looked so whole-
some and fresh. They were all pretty, and Miss Caroline was
very handsome ; but there was a loving, cheerful, fireside
quality in Sophy's bright looks, which was better than that,
and which assured me that my friend had chosen well. We
all sat round the fire ; while the sharp boy, who I now divined
had lost his breath in putting the papers out, cleared them
away again, and produced the tea-things. After that, he retired
for the night, shutting the outer door upon us with a bang. •
Mrs. Traddles, with perfect pleasure and composure beaming
from her household eyes, having made the tea, then quietly
made the toast as she sat in a corner by the fire.

She had seen Agnes, she told me, while she was toasting.
" Tom " had taken her down into Kent for a wedding trip, and
there she had seen my aunt, too ; and both my aunt and
Agnes were well, and they had all talked of nothing but me.
"Tom" had never had me out of his thoughts, she really
believed, all the time I had been away. "Tom" was the
authority for everything. "Tom" was evidently the idol of
her life ; never to be shaken on his pedestal by any commotion ;
always to be believed in, and done homage to with the whole
faith of her heart, come what might.

The deference which both she and Traddles showed towards
the Beauty, pleased me very much. I don't know that I
thought it very reasonable; but I thought it very delightful,
and essentially a part of their character. If Traddles ever for
an instant missed the tea-spoons that were still to be won, I
have no doubt it was when he handed the Beauty her tea. If
his sweet-tempered wife could have got up any self-assertion
against any one, I am satisfied it could only have been because

J •

778 David Copperfield

she was the Beauty's sister. A few slight indications of a
rather petted and capricious manner, which I observed in the
Beauty, were manifestly considered, by Traddles and his wife,
as her birthright and natural endowment. If she had been
born a Queen Bee, and they labouring Bees, they could not
have been more satisfied of that.

But their self-forgetfulness charmed me. Their pride in
these girls, and their submission of themselves to all their
whims, was the pleasantest little testimony to their own worth
I could have desired to see. If Traddles were addressed as
"a darling," once in the course of that evening; and besought
to bring something here, or carry something there, or take
something up, or put something down, or find something, or
fetch something, he was so addressed, by one or other of his
sisters-in-law, at least twelve times in an hour. Neither could
they do anything without Sophy. Somebody's hair fell down,
and nobody but Sophy could put it up. Somebody forgot how
a particular tune went, and nobody but Sophy could hum that
tune right. Somebody wanted to recall the name of a place in
Devonshire, and only Sophy knew it. Somebody was wanted
to be written home, and Sophy alone could be trusted to write
before breakfast in the morning. Somebody broke down in a
piece of knitting, and no one but Sophy was able to put the
defaulter in the right direction. They were entire mistresses
of the place, and Sophy and Traddles waited on them. How
many children Sophy could have taken care of in her time, I
can't imagine ; but she seemed to be famous for knowing every
sort of song that ever was addressed to a child in the English
tongue ; and she sang dozens to order with the clearest little
voice in the world, one after another (every sister issuing
directions for a different tune, and the Beauty generally
striking in last), so that I was quite fascinated. The best
of all was, that, in the midst of their exactions, all the
sisters had a great tenderness and respect both for Sophy
and Traddles. I am sure, when I took my leave, and
Traddles was coming out to walk with me to the coffee-
house, I thought I had never seen an obstinate head of hair,
or any other head of hair, rolling about in such a shower of
kisses.

Altogether, it was a scene I could not help dwelling on with
pleasure, for a long time after I got back and had wished
Traddles good night. If I had beheld a thousand roses
blowing in a top set of chambers, in that withered Gray's Inn,
they could not have brightened it half so much. The idea of

David Copperfield 779

those Devonshire girls, among the dry law-stationers and the
attorneys' offices ; and of the tea and toast, and children's
songs, in that grim atmosphere of pounce and parchment, red-
tape, dusty wafers, ink-jars, brief and draft paper, law reports,
writs, declarations, and bills of costs, seemed almost as
pleasantly fanciful as if I had dreamed that the Sultan's famous
family had been admitted on the roll of attorneys, and had
brought the talking bird, the singing tree, and the golden water
into Gray's Inn Hall. Somehow, I found that I had taken
leave of Traddles for the night, and come back to the coffee-
house, with a great change in my despondency about him. I
began to think he would get on, in spite of all the many orders
of chief waiters in England.

Drawing a chair before one of the coffee-room fires to think
about him at my leisure, I gradually fell from the consideration
of his happiness to tracing prospects in the live-coals, and to
thinking, as they broke and changed, of the principal vicissi-
tudes and separations that had marked my life. I had not seen
a coal fire, since I had left England three years ago : though
many a wood fire had I watched, as it crumbled into hoary
ashes, and mingled with the feathery heap upon the hearth,
which not inaptly figured to me, in my despondency, my own
dead hopes.

I could think of the past now, gravely, but not bitterly ; and
could contemplate the future in a brave spirit. Home, in its
best sense, was for me no more. She in whom I might have
inspired a dearer love, I had taught to be my sister. She
would marry, and would have new claimants on her tenderness :
and in doing it, would never know the love for her that had
grown up in my heart. It was right that I should pay the
forfeit of my headlong passion. What I reaped, I had sown.

I was thinking, And had I truly disciplined my heart
to this, and could I resolutely bear it, and calmly hold the
place in her home which she had calmly held in mine, —
when I found my eyes resting on a countenance that might
have arisen out of the fire, in its association with my early
remembrances.

Little Mr. Chillip the Doctor, to whose good offices I was
indebted in the very first chapter of this history, sat reading
a newspaper in the shadow of an opposite corner. He was
tolerably stricken in years by this time; but being a mild,
meek, calm little man, had worn so easily, that I thought he
looked at that moment just as he might have looked when he
sat in our parlour, waiting for me to be born.

]

780 David Copperfield

Mr. Chillip had left Blunderstone six or seven years ago, and
I had never seen him since. He sat placidly perusing the
newspaper, with his little head on one side, and a glass of warm
sherry negus at his elbow. He was so extremely conciliatory
in his manner that he seemed to apologise to the very newspaper
for taking the liberty of reading it.

I walked up to where he was sitting, and said, " How do you
do, Mr. Chillip?"

He was greatly fluttered by this unexpected address from a
stranger, and replied, in his slow way, " I thank you, sir, you
are very good. Thank you, sir. I hope you are well."

" You don't remember me ? " said I.

"Well, sir," returned Mr. Chillip, smiling very meekly,
and shaking his head as he surveyed me, " I have a kind of
an impression that something in your countenance is familiar
to me, sir ; but I couldn't lay my hand upon your name,
really."

"And yet you knew it, long before I knew it myself," I
returned.

" Did I indeed, sir ? " said Mr. Chillip. " Is it possible that
I had the honour, sir, of officiating when ? "

" Yes," said I.

" Dear me ! " cried Mr. Chillip. " But no doubt you are a
good deal changed since then, sir ? "

"Probably," said I.

" Well, sir," observed Mr. Chillip, " I hope you'll excuse me,
if I am compelled to ask the favour of your name ? "

On my telling him my name, he was really moved. He
quite shook hands with me — which was a violent proceeding
for him, his usual course being to slide a tepid little fish-
slice, an inch or two in advance of his hip, and evince the
greatest discomposure when anybody grappled with it. Even
now, he put his hand in his coat pocket as soon as he could
disengage it, and seemed relieved when he had got it safe
back.

" Dear me, sir!" said Mr. Chillip, surveying me with his head
on one side. "And it's Mr. Copperfield, is it? Well, sir, I
think I should have known you, if I had taken the liberty of
looking more closely at you. There's a strong resemblance
between you and your poor father, sir."

"I never had the happiness of seeing my father," I
observed.

" Very true, sir," said Mr. Chillip, in a soothing tone. " And
very much to be deplored it was, on all accounts ! We are not

David Copperfield 781

ignorant, sir," said Mr. Chillip, slowly shaking his little head
again, " down in our part of the country, of your fame. There
must be great excitement here, sir," said Mr. ChiUip, tapping
himself on the forehead with his forefinger. " You must find
it a trying occupation, sir I "

" What is your part of the country now ? " I asked, seating
myself near him.

" I am established within a few miles of Bury St. Edmund's,
sir," said Mr. Chillip. "Mrs. Chillip coming into a little
property in that neighbourhood, under her father's will, I
bought a practice down there, in which you will be glad to
hear I am doing well. My daughter is growing quite a tall lass
now, sir," said Mr. Chillip, giving his little head another little
shake. " Her mother let down two tucks in her frocks only
last week. Such is time, you see, sir ! "

As the little man put his now empty glass to his lips, when
he made this reflection, I proposed to him to have it refilled,
and I would keep him company with another. " Well, sir,"
he returned, in his slow way, " it's more than I am accustomed
to ; but I can't deny myself the pleasure of your conversation.
It seems but yesterday that I had the honour of attending you
in the measles. You came through them charmingly, sir ! "

I acknowledged this compliment, and ordered the negus,
which was soon produced. " Quite an uncommon dissipation ! "
said Mr. Chillip, stirring it, " but I can't resist so extraordinary
an occasion. You have no family, sir ? "

I shook my head.

" I was aware that you sustained a bereavement, sir, some
time ago," said Mr. Chillip. " I heard it from your father-in-
law's sister. Very decided character there, sir ? "

" Why, yes," said I, " decided enough. Where did you see
her, Mr. Chillip?"

"Are you not aware, sir," returned Mr. Chillip, with his
placidest smile, " that your father-in-law is again a neighbour
of mine?"

" No," said I.

'* He is indeed, sir ! " said Mr. Chillip. " Married a young
lady of that part, with a very good little property, poor thing.
— And this action of the brain now, sir ? Don't you find it
fatigue you ? " said Mr. Chillip, looking at me like an admiring
Robin.

I waived that question, and returned to the Murdstones.
" I was aware of his being married again. Do you attend the
family ? " I asked.

782 David Copperfield

" Not regularly. I have been called in," he replied. " Strong
phrenological development of the organ of firmness, in Mr.
Murdstone and his sister, sir."

I replied with such an expressive look, that Mr. Chillip was
emboldened by that, and the negus together, to give his head
several short shakes, and thoughtfully exclaim, " Ah, dear me !
We remember old times, Mr. Copperfield."

" And the brother and sister are pursuing their old course,
are they ? " said I.

" Well, sir," replied Mr. Chillip, " a medical man, being so
much in families, ought to have neither eyes nor ears for any-
thing but his profession. Still, I must say, they are very severe,
sir : both as to this life and the next."

" The next will be regulated without much reference to
them, I dare say," I returned: "what are they doing as to
this ? "

Mr. Chillip shook his head, stirred his negus, and sipped it.
"She was a charming woman, sir!" he observed in a
plaintive manner.

" The present Mrs. Murdstone ? "

"A charming woman indeed, sir," said Mr. Chillip; "as
amiable, I am sure, as it was possible to be ! Mrs. Chillip's
opinion is, that her spirit has been entirely broken since her
marriage, and that she is all but melancholy mad. And
the ladies," observed Mr. Chillip, timorously, "are great
observers, sir."

" I suppose she was to be subdued and broken to their
detestable mould, Heaven help her ! " said I. " And she has
been."

"Well, sir, there were violent quarrels at first, I assure
you," said Mr. Chillip; "but she is quite a shadow now.
Would it be considered forward if I was to say to you, sir, in
confidence, that since the sister came to help, the brother and
sister between them have nearly reduced her to a state of
imbecility ? "

I told him I could easily believe it.

" I have no hesitation in saying," said Mr. Chillip, fortifying
himself with another sip of negus, " between you and me, sir,
that her mother died of it — or that tyranny, gloom, and worry
have made Mrs. Murdstone nearly imbecile. She was a lively
young woman, sir, before marriage, and their gloom and
austerity destroyed her. They go about with her, now, more
like her keepers than her husband and sister-in-law. That was
Mrs. Chillip's remark to me, only last week. And I assure

David Copperfield 783

you, sir, the ladies are gieat observers. Mrs. Chlllip herself is
a great observer ! "

'• Does he gloomily profess to be (I am ashamed to use the
word in such association) religious still ? " I inquired.

"You anticipate, sir," said Mr. Chillip, his eyelids getting
quite red with the unwonted stimulus in which he was in-
dulging, " one of Mrs. Chillip's most impressive remarks. Mrs.
Chillip," he proceeded, in the calmest and slowest manner,
*' quite electrified me, by pointing out that Mr. Murdstone sets
up an image of himself, and calls it the Divine Nature. You
might have knocked me down on the flat of my back, sir, with
the feather of a pen, I assure you, when Mrs. Chillip said so.
The ladies are great observers, sir ? "

" Intuitively," said I, to his extreme delight.

" I am very happy to receive such support in my opinion,
sir," he rejoined. " It is not often that I venture to give a
non-medical opinion, I assure you. Mr. Murdstone delivers
public addresses sometimes, and it is said, — in short, sir, it is
said by Mrs. Chillip, — that the darker tyrant he has lately been,
the more ferocious is his doctrine."

" I believe Mrs. Chillip to be perfectly right," said I

" Mrs. Chillip does go so far as to say," pursued the meekest
of Httle men, much encouraged, " that what such people mis-
call their religion, is a vent for their bad humours and arrogance.
And do you know I must say, sir," he continued, mildly laying
his head on one side, " that I don't find authority for Mr. and
Miss Murdstone in the New Testament ? "

" I never found it either ! " said I.

"In the meantime, sir," said Mr. Chillip, "they are much
disliked; and as they are very free in consigning everybody
who dislikes them to perdition, we really have a good deal of
perdition going on in our neighbourhood ! However, as Mrs.
Chillip says, sir, they undergo a continual punishment; for
they are turned inward, to feed upon their own hearts, and
their own hearts are very bad feeding. Now, sir, about that
brain of yours, if you'll excuse my returning to it. Don't you
expose it to a good deal of excitement, sir ? "

I found it not difficult, in the excitement of Mr. Chillip's
own brain, under his potations of negus, to divert his attention
from this topic to his own affairs, on which, for the next
half-hour, he was quite loquacious ; giving me to understand,
among other pieces of information, that he was then at the
Gray's Inn Coffee-house to lay his professional evidence
before a Commission of Lunacy, touching the state of mind

784 David Copperfield

of a patient who had become deranged from excessive
drinking.

" And I assure you, sir," he said, " I am extremely nervous
on such occasions. I could not support being what is called
Bullied, sir. It would quite unman me. Do you know it was
some time before I recovered the conduct of that alarming
lady, on the night of your birth, Mr. Copperfield ? "

I told him that I was going down to my aunt, the Dragon
of that night, early in the morning ; and that she was one of
the most tender-hearted and excellent of women, as he would
know full well if he knew her better. The mere notion of
the possibility of his ever seeing her again, appeared to terrify
him. He replied with a small pale smile, " Is she so, indeed,
sir? Really?" and almost immediately called for a candle,
and went to bed, as if he were not quite safe anywhere else.
He did not actually stagger under the negus; but I should
think his placid little pulse must have made two or three more
beats in a minute, than it had done since the great night of
my aunt's disappointment, when she struck at him with her
bonnet.

Thoroughly tired, 1 went to bed too, at midnight; passed
the next day on the Dover coach ; burst safe and sound into
my aunt's old parlour while she was at tea (she wore spectacles
now) ; and was received by her, and Mr. Dick, and dear old
Peggotty, who acted as housekeeper, with open arms and tears
of joy. My aunt was mightily amused, when we began to talk
composedly, by my account of my meeting with Mr. Chillip,
and of his holding her in such dread remembrance ; and both
she and Peggotty had a great deal to say about my poor
mother's second husband, and "that murdering woman of a
sister," — on whom I think no pain or penalty would have
induced my aunt to bestow any Christian or Proper Name, or
any other designation.

CHAPTER LX

AGNES

My aunt and I, when we were left alone, talked far into the
night. How the emigrants never wrote home, otherwise than
cheerfully and hopefully; how Mr. Micawber had actually
remitted divers small sums of money, on account of those

David Copperfield 785

" pecuniary liabilities," in reference to which he had been so
business-like as between man and man ; how Janet, returning
into my aunt's service when she came back to Dover, had
finally carried out her renunciation of mankind by entering into
wedlock with a thriving tavern-keeper ; and how my aunt had
finally set her seal on the same great principle, by aiding and
abetting the bride, and crowning the marriage-ceremony with
her presence; were among our topics — already more or less
familiar to me through the letters I had had. Mr. Dick, as
usual, was not forgotten. My aunt informed me how he inces-
santly occupied himself in copying everything he could lay his
hands on, and kept King Charles the First at a respectful
distance by that semblance of employment ; how it was one of
the main joys and rewards of her life that he was free and
happy, instead of pining in monotonous restraint ; and how (as
a novel general conclusion) nobody but she could ever fully
know what he was.

"And when. Trot," said my aunt, patting the back of my
hand, as we sat in our old way before the fire, " when are you

going over to Canterbury ? "

" I shall get a horse, and ride over to-morrow morning, aunt,

unless you will go with me ? "

" No ! " said my aunt, in her short, abrupt way. *' I mean

to stay where I am."

Then, I should ride, I said. I could not have come through

Canterbury to-day without stopping, if I had been coming to

any one but her.

She was pleased, but answered, " Tut, Trot ; my old bones

would have kept till to-morrow ! " and softly patted my hand

again, as I sat thoughtfully looking at the fire.

Thoughtfully, for I could not be here once more, and so near

Agnes, without the revival of those regrets with which I had so

long been occupied. Softened regrets they might be, teaching

me what I had failed to learn when my younger life was all

before me, but not the less regrets. "Oh, Trot," I seemed to

hear my aunt say once more; and I understood her better

now—" Blind, blind, blind ! "

We both kept silence for some minutes. When I raised

my eyes, I found that she was steadily observant of me.

Perhaps she had followed the current of my mind ; for it

seemed to me an easy one to track now, wilful as it had been

once.

" You will find her father a white-haired old man," said my

aunt, " though a better man in all other respects — a reclaimed

786 David Copperfield

man. Neither will you find him measuring all human interests,
and joys, and sorrows, with his one poor little inch-rule now.
Trust me, child, such things must shrink very much, before
they can be measured off in that way."

" Indeed they must," said I.

"You will find her," pursued my aunt, "as good, as beautiful,
as earnest, as disinterested, as she has always been. If I knew
higher praise, Trot, I would bestow it on her."

There was no higher praise for her ; no higher reproach for
me. Oh, how had I strayed so far away !

" If she trains the young girls whom she has about her to be
like herself," said my aunt, earnest even to the filling of her
eyes with tears, " Heaven knows, her life will be well employed !
Useful and happy, as she said that day ! How could she be
otherwise than useful and happy ! "

"Has Agnes any " I was thinking aloud, rather than

speaking.

" Well ? Hey ? Any what ? " said my aunt, sharply. ,

" Any lover," said I.

" A score," cried my aunt, with a kind of indignant pride.
"She might have married twenty times, my dear, since you
have been gone ! "

" No doubt," said I. " No doubt. But has she any lover
who is worthy of her? Agnes could care for no other."

My aunt sat musing for a little while, with her chin upon
her hand. Slowly raising her eyes to mine, she said :

" I suspect she has an attachment, Trot."

" A prosperous one ? " said I.

"Trot," returned my aunt gravely, "I can't say. I have
no right to tell you even so much. She has never confided it
to me, but I suspect it."

She looked so attentively and anxiously at me (I even saw
her tremble), that I felt now, more than ever, that she had
followed my late thoughts. I summoned all the resolutions
I had made, in all those many days and nights, and all those
many conflicts of my heart.

"If it should be so," I began, "and I hope it is "

"I don't know that it is," said my aunt curtly. "You
must not be ruled by my suspicions. You must keep them
secret. They are very slight, perhaps. I have no right to
speak."

"If it should be so," I repeated, "Agnes will tell me at
her own good time. A sister to whom I have confided so
much, aunt, will not be reluctant to confide in me."

David Copperfield 787

My aunt withdrew her eyes from mine, as slowly as she
had turned them upon me; and covered them thoughtfully
with her hand. By-and-bye she put her other hand on my
shoulder ; and so we both sat, looking into the past, without
saying another word, until we parted for the night.

I rode away, early in the morning, for the scene of my old
school days. I cannot say that I was yet quite happy in the
hope that I was gaining a victory over myself; even in the'
prospect of so soon looking on her face again.

The well-remembered ground was soon traversed, and I
came into the quiet streets, where every stone was a boy's
book to me. I went on foot to the old house, and went
away with a heart too full to enter. I returned ; and look-
ing, as I passed, through the low window of the turret-room
where first Uriah Heep, and afterwards Mr. Micawber, had
been wont to sit, saw that it was a little parlour now, and
that there was no office. Otherwise the staid old house was,
as to its cleanliness and order, still just as it had been when
I first saw it. I requested the new maid who admitted me,
to tell Miss Wickfield that a gentleman who waited on her
from a friend abroad, was there ; and I was shown up the
grave old staircase (cautioned of the steps I knew so well),
into the unchanged drawing-room. The books that Agnes
and I had read together, were on their shelves ; and the desk
where I had laboured at my lessons, many a night, stood yet
at the same old corner of the table. All the little changes
that had crept in when the Heeps were there, were changed
again. Everything was as it used to be, in the happy time.

I stood in a window, and looked across the ancient street
at the opposite houses, recalling how I had watched them on
wet afternoons, when I first came there ; and how I had used
to speculate about the people who appeared at any of the
windows, and had followed them with my eyes up and down
stairs, while women went clicking along the pavement in
pattens, and the dull rain fell in slanting lines, and poured
out of the waterspout yonder, and flowed into the road. The
feeling with which I used to watch the tramps, as they came
into the town on those wet evenings, at dusk, and limped
past, with their bundles drooping over their shoulders at the
ends of sticks, came freshly back to me ; fraught, as then,
with the smell of damp earth, and wet leaves and briar, and
the sensation of the very airs that blew upon me in my own
toilsome journey.

The opening of the little door in the panelled wall made

788 David Copperfield

me start and turn. Her beautiful serene eyes met mine as
she came towards me. She stopped and laid her hand upon
her bosom, and I caught her in my arms.

" Agnes ! my dear girl ! I have come too suddenly upon
you."

" No, no ! I am so rejoiced to see you, Trotwood ! "

" Dear Agnes, the happiness it is to me, to see you once
again ! "

I folded her to my heart, and for a little while we were
both silent. Presently we sat down, side by side; and her
angel-face was turned upon me with the welcome I had
dreamed of, waking and sleeping, for whole years.

She was so true, she was so beautiful, she was so good, —
I owed her so much gratitude, she was so dear to me, that
I could find no utterance for what I felt. I tried to bless
her, tried to thank her, tried to tell her (as I had often done
in letters) what an influence she had upon me; but all my
efforts were in vain. My love and joy were dumb.

With her own sweet tranquillity she calmed my agitation ;
led me back to the time of our parting ; spoke to me of
Emily, whom she had visited, in secret, many times; spoke
to me tenderly of Dora's grave. With the unerring instinct
of her noble heart, she touched the chords of my memory so
softly and harmoniously, that not one jarred within me ; I
could listen to the sorrowful, distant music, and desire to
shrink from nothing it awoke. How could I, when, blended
with it all, was her dear self, the better angel of my life?

" And you, Agnes," I said, by-and-bye. " Tell me of your-
self. You have hardly ever told me of your own life, in all
this lapse of time ! "

"What should I tell?" she answered, with her radiant
smile. "Papa is well. You see us here, quiet in our own
home ; our anxieties set at rest, our home restored to us :
and knowing that, dear Trotwood, you know all."

•'All, Agnes?" said I.

She looked at me, with some fluttering wonder in her face.

" Is there nothing else. Sister ? " I said.

Her colour, which had just now faded, returned, and faded
again. She smiled; with a quiet sadness, I thought; and
shook her head.

I had sought to lead her to what my aunt had hinted at ;
for, sharply painful to me as it must be to receive that con-
fidence, I was to discipline my heart, and do my duty to her.
I saw, however, that she was uneasy, and I let it pass.

David Copperfield 789

" You have much to do, dear Agnes ? "

"With my school?" said she, looking up again, in all her
bright composure.

" Yes. It is laborious, is it not ? "

"The labour is so pleasant," she returned, "that it is
scarcely grateful in me to call it by that name."

"Nothing good is difficult to you," said I.

Her colour came and went once more ; and once more, as
she bent her head, I saw the same sad smile.

"You will wait and see papa," said Agnes, cheerfully,
" and pass the day with us ? Perhaps you will sleep in your
own room ? We always call it yours."

I could not do that, having promised to ride back to my
aunt's at night ; but I would pass the day there, joyfully.

"I must be a prisoner for a little while," said Agnes, "but
here are the old books, Trotwood, and the old music."

"Even the old flowers are here," said I, looking round;
"or the old kinds."

" I have found a pleasure," returned Agnes, smiling, " while
you have been absent, in keeping everything as it used to be
when we were children. For we were very happy then, I think."

" Heaven knows we were ! " said I.

"And every little thing that has reminded me of my
brother," said Agnes, with her cordial eyes turned cheerfully
upon me, "has been a welcome companion. Even this,"
showing me the basket-trifle, full of keys, still hanging at
her side, " seems to jingle a kind of old tune I "

She smiled again, and went out at the door by which she
had come.

It was for me to guard this sisterly affection with religious
care. It was all that I had left myself, and it was a treasure.
If I once shook the foundations of the sacred confidence and
usage, in virtue of which it was given to me, it was lost, and
could never be recovered. I set this steadily before myself.
The better I loved her, the more it behoved me never to
forget it.

I walked through the streets; and, once more seeing my
old adversary the butcher — now a constable, with his staff
hanging up in the shop — went down to look at the place
where I had fought him ; and there meditated on Miss
Shepherd and the eldest Miss Larkins, and all the idle loves
and likings, and dislikings, of that time. Nothing seemed
to have survived that time but Agnes ; and she, ever a star
abo\e me, was brighter and higher.

790 David Copperfield

When I returned, Mr. Wickfield had come home, from
a garden he had, a couple of miles or so out of town, where
he now employed himself almost every day. I found him as
my aunt had described him. We sat down to dinner, with
some half-dozen little girls; and he seemed but the shadow
of his handsome picture on the wall.

The tranquillity and peace belonging, of old, to that quiet
ground in my memory, pervaded it again. When dinner
was done, Mr. Wickfield taking no wine, and I desiring none,
we went up-stairs ; where Agnes and her little charges sang
and played, and worked. After tea the children left us ; and
we three sat together, talking of the bygone days.

" My part in them," said Mr. Wickfield, shaking his white
head, "has much matter for regret — for deep regret, and
deep contrition, Trotwood, you well know. But I would not
cancel it, if it were in my power."

I could readily believe that, looking at the face beside him.

" I should cancel with it," he pursued, " such patience and
devotion, such fidelity, such a child's love, as I must not
forget, no ! even to forget myself."

" I understand you, sir," I softly said. " I hold it — I have
always held it — in veneration."

" But no one knows, not even you," he returned, " how much
she has done, how much she has undergone, how hard she
has striven. Dear Agnes ! "

She had put her hand entreatingly on his arm, to stop him ;
and was very, very pale.

*' Well, well ! " he said with a sigh, dismissing, as I then saw,
some trial she had borne, or was yet to bear, in connexion with
what my aunt had told me. " Well ! I have never told you,
Trotwood, of her mother. Has any one ? "

" Never, sir."

" It's not much — though it was much to suffer. She married
me in opposition to her father's wish, and he renounced her.
She prayed him to forgive her, before my Agnes came into this
world. He was a very hard man, and her mother had long
been dead. He repulsed her. He broke her heart."

Agnes leaned upon his shoulder, and stole her arm about
his neck.

"She had an affectionate and gentle heart," he said ; "and
it was broken. I knew its tender nature very well. No one
could, if I did not. She loved me dearly, but was never
happy. She was always labouring, in secret, under this
distress ; and being delicate and downcast at the time of his

David Copper field 791

last repulse — for it was not the first, by many — pined away and
died. She left me Agnes, two weeks old ; and the grey hair
you recollect me with, when you first came."

He kissed Agnes on her cheek.

" My love for my dear child was a diseased love, but my
mind was all unhealthy then. I say no more of that. I am
not speaking of myself, Trotwood, but of her mother, and of
her. If I give you any clue to what I am, or to what I have
been, you will unravel it, I know. What Agnes is, I need not
say. I have always read something of her poor mother's story,
in her character ; and so I tell it you to-night, when we three
are again together, after such great changes. I have told it all."

His bowed head, and her angel-face and filial duty, derived a
more pathetic meaning from it than they had had before. If I
had wanted anything by which to mark this night of our
re-union, I should have found it in this.

Agnes rose up from her father's side, before long ; and going
softly to her piano, played some of the old airs to which we had
often listened in that place.

" Have you any intention of going away again ? " Agnes
asked me, as I was standing by.

"What does my sister say to that?"

" I hope not."

" Then I have no such intention, Agnes."

" I think you ought not, Trotwood, since you ask me," she
said, mildly. "Your growing reputation and success enlarge
your power of doing good ; and if / could spare my brother,"
with her eyes upon me, " perhaps the time could not."

" What I am, you have made me, Agnes. You should know
best."

" / made you, Trotwood ? "

" Yes ! Agnes, my dear girl ! " I said, bending over her. " I
tried to tell you, when we met to-day, something that has been
in my thoughts since Dora died. You remember, when you
came down to me in our little room — pointing upward, Agnes ? "

" Oh, Trotwood ! " she returned, her eyes filled with tears.
" So loving, so confiding, and so young ! Can I ever forget ? "

"As you were then, my sister, I have often thought since,
you have ever been to me. Ever pointing upward, Agnes ; ever
leading me to something better ; ever directing me to higher
things ! "

She only shook her head ; through her tears I saw the sad
quiet smile.

" And I am so grateful to you for it, Agnes, so bound to you,

792 David Copperfield

that there is no name for the affection of my heart. I want
you to know, yet don't know how to tell you, that all my life
long I shall look up to you, and be guided by you, as I have
been through the darkness that is past. Whatever betides,
whatever new ties you may form, whatever changes may come
between us, I shall always look to you, and love you, as I do
now, and have always done. You will always be my solace
and resource as you have always been. Until I die, my dearest
sister, I shall see you always before me, pointing upward ! "

She put her hand in mine, and told me she was proud of me,
and of what I said ; although I praised her very far beyond her
worth. Then she went on softly playing, but without removing
her eyes from me.

" Do you know, what I have heard to-night, Agnes," said I,
"strangely seems to be a part of the feeling with which I
regarded you when I saw you first — with which I sat beside you
in my rough school days ? "

" You knew I had no mother," she replied with a smile, " and
felt kindly towards me."

" More than that, Agnes, I knew, almost as if I had known
this story, that there was something inexplicably gentle and
softened, surrounding you ; something that might have been
sorrowful in some one else (as I can now understand it was),
but was not so in you."

She softly played on, looking at me still.

" Will you laugh at my cherishing such fancies, Agnes ? "

"No!"

"Or at my saying that I really believe I felt, even then, that
you could be faithfully affectionate against all discouragement,
and never cease to be so, until you ceased to live ? — Will you
laugh at such a dream ? "

" Oh, no ! Oh, no ! "

For an instant, a distressful shadow crossed her face ; but even
in the start it gave me, it was gone ; and she was playing on,
and looking at me with her own calm smile.

As I rode back in the lone night, the wind going by me like
a restless memory, I thought of this, and feared she was not
happy. / was not happy ; but, thus far, I had faithfully set the
seal upon the Past, and, thinking of her, pointing upward,
thought of her as pointing to that sky above me, where, in the
mystery to come, I might yet love her with a love unknown on
earth, and tell her what the strife had been within me when I
loved her here.

David Copperfield 793

CHAPTER LXI

I AM SHOWN TWO INTERESTING PENITENTS

For a time — at all events until my book should be completed,
which would be the work of several months — I took up my
abode in my aunt's house at Dover ; and there, sitting in the
window from which I had looked out at the moon upon the sea,
when that roof first gave me shelter, I quietly pursued my task.

In pursuance of my intention of referring to my own fictions
only when their course should incidentally connect itself with
the progress of my story, I do not enter on the aspirations, the
delights, anxieties, and triumphs of my art. That I truly
devoted myself to it with my strongest earnestness, and bestowed
upon it every energy of my soul, I have already said. If the
books I have written be of any worth, they will supply the
rest. I shall otherwise have written to poor purpose, and
the rest will be of interest to no one.

Occasionally I went to London ; to lose myself in the swarm
of life there, or to consult with Traddles on some business
point. He had managed for me, in my absence, with the
soundest judgment; and my worldly affairs were prospering.
As my notoriety began to bring upon me an enormous quantity
of letters from people of whom I had no knowledge — chiefly
about nothing, and extremely diflficult to answer — I agreed with
Traddles to have my name painted up on his door. There the
devoted postman on that beat delivered bushels of letters for
me ; and there, at intervals, I laboured through them, like a
Home Secretary of State without the salary.

Among this correspondence, there dropped in, every now and
then, an obliging proposal from one of the numerous outsiders
always lurking about the Commons, to practise under cover of
my name (if I would take the necessary steps remaining to
make a proctor of myself), and pay me a percentage on the
profits. But I declined these offers ; being already aware that
there were plenty of such covert practitioners in existence, and
considering the Commons quite bad enough, without my doing
anything to make it worse.

The girls had gone home, when my name burst into bloom
on Traddles's door ; and the sharp boy looked, all day, as if he
had never heard of Sophy, shut up in a back room, glancing
down from her work into a sooty little strip of garden with a

794 David Copperfield

pump in it. But there I always found her, the same bright
housewife ; often humming her Devonshire ballads when no
strange foot was coming up the stairs, and blunting the sharp
boy in his official closet with melody.

I wondered, at first, why I so often found Sophy writing in a
copy-book ; and why she always shut it up when I appeared,
and hurried it into the table-drawer. But the secret soon came
out. One day, Traddles (who had just come home through the
drizzHng sleet from Court) took a paper out of his desk, and
asked me what I thought of that handwriting ?

" Oh, don't^ Tom ! " cried Sophy, who was warming his
slippers before the fire.

" My dear," returned Tom, in a delighted state, " why not?
What do you say to that writing, Copperfield ? "

" It's extraordinarily legal and formal," said I. " I don't
think I ever saw such a stiff hand."

" Not like a lady's hand, is it ? " said Traddles.
" A lady's ! " I repeated. " Bricks and mortar are more like
a lady's hand ! "

Traddles broke into a rapturous laugh, and informed me that
it was Sophy's writing ; that Sophy had vowed and declared he
would need a copying-clerk soon, and she would be that clerk ;
that she had acquired this hand from a pattern ; and that she
could throw off — I forget how many folios an hour. Sophy
was very much confused by my being told all this, and said that
when " Tom " was made a judge he wouldn't be so ready to
proclaim it. Which "Tom" denied; averring that he should
always be equally proud of it, under all circumstances.

" What a thoroughly good and charming wife she is, my dear
Traddles ! " said I, when she had gone away, laughing.

" My dear Copperfield," returned Traddles, " she is, without
any exception, the dearest girl ! The ways she manages this
place ; her punctuality, domestic knowledge, economy, and
order ; her cheerfulness, Copperfield ! "

" Indeed, you have reason to commend her ! " I returned.
"You are a happy fellow. I believe you make yourselves,
and each other, two of the happiest people in the world."

" I am sure we are two of the happiest people," returned
Traddles. " I admit that, at all events. Bless my soul, when
I see her getting up by candle-light on these dark mornings,
busying herself in the day's arrangements, going out to market
before the clerks come into the Inn, caring for no weather,
devising the most capital little dinners out of the plainest
materials, making puddings and pies, keeping everything in its

David Copperfield 795

right place, always so neat and ornamental herself, sitting up at
night with me if it's ever so late, sweet-tempered and en-
couraging always, and all for me, I positively sometimes can't
believe it, Copperfield ! "

He was tender of the very slippers she had been warming as
he put them on, and stretched his feet enjoyingly upon the
fender.

"I positively sometimes can't believe it," said Traddles.
" Then, our pleasures ! Dear me, they are inexpensive, but
they are quite wonderful ! When we are at home here of an
evening, and shut the outer door, and draw those curtains —
which she made — where could we be more snug? When it's
fine, and we go out for a walk in the evening, the streets abound
in enjoyment for us. We look into the glittering windows of the
jewellers' shops ; and I show Sophy which of the diamond-eyed
serpents, coiled up on white satin rising grounds, I would give
her if I could afford it ; and Sophy shows me which of the gold
watches that are capped and jewelled and engine-turned, and
possessed of the horizontal lever-escape-movement, and all sorts
of things, she would buy for me if she could afford it ; and we
pick out the spoons and forks, fish-slices, butter-knives, and
sugar-tongs, we should both prefer if we could both afford it ;
and really we go away as if we had got them ! Then, when we
stroll into the squares and great streets, and see a house to let,
sometimes we look up at it, and say, how would that do, if I
was made a judge? And we parcel it out — such a room for us,
such rooms for the girls, and so forth ; until we settle to our
satisfaction that it would do, or it wouldn't do, as the case may
be. Sometimes, we go at half-price to the pit of the theatre
— the very smell of which is cheap, in my opinion, at the money
— and there we thoroughly enjoy the play: which Sophy believes
every word of, and so do I. In walking home, perhaps we buy
a little bit of something at a cook's- shop, or a little lobster at
the fishmonger's, and bring it here, and make a splendid
supper, chatting about what we have seen. Now, you know,
Copperfield, if I was Lord Chancellor, we couldn't do this ! "

"You would do something, whatever you were, my dear
Traddles," thought I, "that would be pleasant and amiable.
And by the way," I said aloud, " I suppose you never draw
any skeletons now?"

" Really," replied Traddles, laughing, and reddening, " I cari't
wholly deny that I do, my dear Copperfield. For being in
one of the back rows of the King's Bench the other day, with
a pen in my hand, the fancy came into my head to try how I

796 David Copperfield

had preserved that accomplishment. And I am afraid there's
a skeleton — in a wig — on the ledge of the desk."

After we had both laughed heartily, Traddles wound up by
looking with a smile at the fire, and saying, in his forgiving
way, "Old Creakle ! "

" I have a letter from that old — Rascal here," said I. For
I never was less disposed to forgive him the way he used to
batter Traddles, than when I saw Traddles so ready to forgive
him himself.

"From Creakle the schoolmaster?" exclaimed Traddles.
" No ! "

" Among the persons who are attracted to me in my rising
fame and fortune," said I, looking over my letters, " and who
discover that they were always much attached to me, is the
self-same Creakle. He is not a schoolmaster now, Traddles.
He is retired. He is a Middlesex Magistrate."

I thought Traddles might be surprised to hear it, but he
was not so at all.

" How do you suppose he comes to be a Middlesex Magis-
trate?" said I.

" Oh dear me ! " replied Traddles, " it would be very difficult
to answer that question. Perhaps he voted for somebody, or
lent money to somebody, or bought something of somebody,
or otherwise obliged somebody, or jobbed for somebody,
who knew somebody who got the lieutenant of the county to
nominate him for the commission."

J' On the commission he is, at any rate," said I. " And he
writes to me here, that he will be glad to show me, in operation,
the only true system of prison discipline ; the only unchallenge-
able way of making sincere and lasting converts and penitents
— which, you know, is by solitary confinement. What do you
say?"

"To the system?" inquired Traddles, looking grave.

" No. To my accepting the offer, and your going with me ? "

" I don't object," said Traddles.

" Then I'll write to say so. You remember (to say nothing
of our treatment) this same Creakle turning his son out of
doors, I suppose, and the life he used to lead his wife and
daughter?"

"Perfectly," said Traddles.

"Yet, if you'll read his letter, you'll find he is the tender-
est of men to prisoners convicted of the whole calendar of
felonies," said I; "though I can't find that his tenderness
extends to any other class of created beings."

David Copperfield 797

Traddles shrugged his shoulders, and was not at all sur-
prised. I had not expected him to be, and was not surprised
myself; or my observation of similar practical satires would
have been but scanty. We arranged the time of our visit, and
I wrote accordingly to Mr. Creakle that evening.

On the appointed day — I think it was the next day, but no
matter — Traddles and I repaired to the prison where Mr.
Creakle was powerful. It was an immense and solid building,
erected at a vast expense. I could not help thinking, as we
approached the gate, what an uproar would have been made in
the country, if any deluded man had proposed to spend one
half the money it had cost, on the erection of an industrial
scliool for the young, or a house of refuge for the deserving
old.

In an office that might have been on the ground-floor of the
Tower of Babel, it was so massively constructed, we were
presented to our old schoolmaster ; who was one of a group,
composed of two or three of the busier sort of magistrates, and
some visitors they had brought. He received me, like a man
who had formed my mind in bygone years, and had always
loved me tenderly. On my introducing Traddles, Mr. Creakle
expressed, in like manner, but in an inferior degree, that he
had always been Traddles's guide, philosopher, and friend.
Our venerable instructor was a great deal older, and not
improved in appearance. His face was as fiery as ever ; his
eyes were as small, and rather deeper set. The scanty, wet-
looking grey hair, by which I remembered him, was almost
gone; and the thick veins in his bald head were none the
more agreeable to look at.

After some conversation among these gentlemen, from which
I might have supposed that there was nothing in the world to
be legitimately taken into account but the supreme comfort of
prisoners, at any expense, and nothing on the wide earth to be
done outside prison-doors, we began our inspection. It being
then just dinner-time, we went first into the great kitchen,
where every prisoner's dinner was in course of being set out
separately (to be handed to him in his cell), with the regularity
and precision of clock-work. I said aside, to Traddles, that I
wondered whether it occurred to anybody, that there was a
striking contrast between these plentiful repasts of choice
quality, and the dinners, not to say of paupers, but of soldiers,
sailors, labourers, the great bulk of the honest, working
community ; of whom not one man in five hundred ever dined
half so well. But I learned that the " system " required high

798 David Copperfield

living ; and, in short, to dispose of the system, once for all, I
found that on that head and on all others, "the system" put
an end to all doubts, and disposed of all anomalies. Nobody
appeared to have the least idea that there was any other
system, but the system, to be considered.

As we were going through some of the magnificent passages,
I inquired of Mr. Creakle and his friends what were supposed
to be the main advantages of this all-governing and universally
over-riding system ? I found them to be the perfect isolation
of prisoners — so that no one man in confinement there, knew
anything about another; and the reduction of prisoners to
a wholesome state of mind, leading to sincere contrition and
repentance.

Now, it struck me, when we began to visit individuals in
their cells, and to traverse the passages in which those cells
were, and to have the manner of the going to chapel and so
forth, explained to us, that there was a strong probability of
the prisoners knowing a good deal about each other, and of
their carrying on a pretty complete system of intercourse.
This, at the time I write, has been proved, I believe, to be the
case ; but as it would have been flat blasphemy against the
system to have hinted such a doubt then, I looked out for
the penitence as diligently as I could.

And here again, I had great misgivings. I found as
prevalent a fashion in the form of the penitence, as I had left
outside in the forms of the coats and waistcoats in the windows
of the tailors' shops. I found a vast amount of profession,
varying very little in character : varying very little (which I
thought exceedingly suspicious) even in words. I found a
great many foxes, disparaging whole vineyards of inaccessible
grapes ; but I found very few foxes whom I would have trusted
within reach of a bunch. Above all, I found that the most
professing men were the greatest objects of interest : and that
their conceit, their vanity, their want of excitement, and their
love of deception (which many of them possessed to an almost
incredible extent, as their histories showed), all prompted to
these professions, and were all gratified by them.

However, I heard so repeatedly, in the course of our goings
to and fro, of a certain Number Twenty Seven, who was the
favourite, and who really appeared to be a Model Prisoner,
that I resolved to suspend my judgment until I should see
Twenty Seven. Twenty Eight, I understood, was also a bright
particular star ; but it was his misfortune to have his glory a
little dimmed by the extraordinary lustre of Twenty Seven. I

David Copperfield 799

heard so much of Twenty Seven, of his pious admonitions to
everybody around him, and of the beautiful letters he constantly
wrote to his mother (whom he seemed to consider in a very
bad way), that I became quite impatient to see him.

I had to restrain my impatience for some time, on account
of Twenty Seven being reserved for a concluding effect. But
at last we came to the door of his cell ; and Mr. Creakle, look-
ing through a little hole in it, reported to us, in a state of the
greatest admiration, that he was reading a Hymn Book.

There was such a rush of heads immediately, to see Number
Twenty Seven reading his Hymn Book, that the little hole
was blocked up, six or seven heads deep. To remedy this
inconvenience, and give us an opportunity of conversing with
Twenty Seven in all his purity, Mr. Creakle directed the door
of the cell to be unlocked, and Twenty Seven to be invited out
into the passage. This was done ; and whom should Traddles
and I then behold, to our amazement, in this converted
Number Twenty Seven, but Uriah Heep!

He knew us directly ; and said, as he came out — with the
old writhe, —

" How do you do, Mr. Copperfield? How do you do, Mr.
Traddles?"

This recognition caused a general admiration in the party.
I rather thought that every one was struck by his not being
proud, and taking notice of us.

"Well, Twenty Seven," said Mr. Creakle, mournfully
admiring him. " How do you find yourself to-day ? "

" I am very umble, sir ! " replied Uriah Heep.

" You are always so, Twenty Seven," said Mr. Creakle.

Here, another gentleman asked, with extreme anxiety : " Are
you quite comfortable ? "

" Yes, I thank you, sir ! " said Uriah Heep, looking in that
direction. " Far more comfortable here, than ever I was
outside. I see my follies now, sir. That's what makes me
comfortable."

Several gentlemen were much affected ; and a third ques-
tioner, forcing himself to the front, inquired with extreme
feeling : " How do you find the beef ? "

" Thank you, sir," replied Uriah, glancing in the new
direction of this voice, " it was tougher yesterday than I
could wish ; but it's my duty to bear. I have committed
follies, gentlemen," said Uriah, looking round with a meek
smile, "and I ought to bear the consequences without
repining."

8oo David Copperfield

A murmur, partly of gratification at Twenty Seven's celestial
state of mind, and partly of indignation against the Contractor
who had given him any cause of complaint (a note of which
was immediately made by Mr. Creakle), having subsided,
Twenty Seven stood in the midst of us, as if he felt himself
the principal object of merit in a highly meritorious museum.
That we, the neophytes, might have an excess of light shining
upon us all at once, orders were given to let out Twenty Eight.

I had been so much astonished already, that I only felt a
kind of resigned wonder when Mr. Littimer walked forth,
reading a good book !

"Twenty Eight," said a gentleman in spectacles, who had
not yet spoken, " you complained last week, my good fellow,
of the cocoa. How has it been since ? "

" I thank you, sir," said Mr. Littimer, " it has been better
made. If I might take the liberty of saying so, sir, I don't
think the milk which is boiled with it is quite genuine; but
I am aware, sir, that there is great adulteration of milk in
London, and that the article in a pure state is difficult to
be obtained." .

It appeared to me that the gentleman in spectacles backed
his Twenty Eight against Mr. Creakle's Twenty Seven, for
each of them took his own man in hand.

" What is your state of mind. Twenty Eight ? " said the
questioner in spectacles.

" I thank you, sir," returned Mr. Littimer ; " I see my follies
now, sir. I am a good deal troubled when I think of the sins
of my former companions, sir; but I trust they may find
forgiveness."

" You are quite happy yourself? " said the questioner,
nodding encouragement.

" I am much obliged to you, sir," returned Mr. Littimer.
"Perfectly so."

" Is there anything at all on your mind now ? " said the
questioner. " If so, mention it. Twenty Eight."

" Sir," said Mr. Littimer, without looking up, " if my eyes
have not deceived me, there is a gentleman present who was
acquainted with me in my former life. It may be profitable
to that gentleman to know, sir, that I attribute my past
follies entirely to having lived a thoughtless life in the service
of young men ; and to having allowed myself to be led by them
into weaknesses, which I had not the strength to resist. I
hope that gentleman will take warning, sir, and will not be
offended at my freedom. It is for his good. I am conscious

David Copperfield 80 1

of my own past follies. I hope he may repent of all the
wickedness and sin to which he has been a party."

1 observed that several gentlemen were shading their eyes,
each with one hand, as if they had just come into church.

•• This does you credit, Twenty Eight," ret'urned the ques-
tioner. " I should have expected it of you. Is there anything
else ? "

" Sir," returned Mr. Littimer, slightly lifting up his eyebrows,
but not his eyes, " there was a young woman who fell into dis-
solute courses, that I endeavoured to save, sir, but could not
rescue. 1 beg that gentleman, if he has it in his power, to in-
form that young woman from"' me that I forgive her her bad
conduct towards myself; and that I call her to repentance — if
he will be so good."

" 1 have no doubt, Twenty Eight," returned the questioner,
" that the gentleman you refer to feels very strongly — as we all
must — what you have so properly said. We will not detain
you."

'• I thank you, sir," said Mr. Littimer. " Gentlemen, I wish
you a good day, and hoping you and your families will also see
your wickedness, and amend ! "

With this, Number Twenty Eight retired, after a glance be-
tween him and Uriah ; as if they were not altogether unknown
to each other, through some medium of communication ; and
a murmur went round the group, as his door shut upon him,
that he was a most respectable man, and a beautiful case.

" Now, Twenty Seven," said Mr. Creakle, entering on a clear
stage with his man, •• is there anything that any one can do for
you ? If so, mention it."

" I would umbly ask, sir," returned Uriah, with a jerk of his
malevolent head, " for leave to write again to mother."

" It shall certainly be granted," said Mr. Creakle.

" Thank you, sir ! I am anxious about mother. I am
afraid she ain't safe."

Somebody incautiously asked, what from ? But there was
a scandalised whisper of " Hush ! "

" Immortally safe, sir," returned Uriah, writhing in the
direction of the voice. " I should wish mother to be got
into my state. I never should have been got into my pre-
sent state if I hadn't come here. I wish mother had come
here. It would be better for everybody, if they got took up,
and was brought here."

This sentiment gave unbounded satisfaction — greater satis-
faction, I think, than anything that had passed yet.

D O

8o2 David Copperfield

" Before I come here," said Uriah, stealing a look at us, as if
he would have blighted the outer world to which we belonged,
if he could, " 1 was given to follies ; but now I am sensible of
my follies. There's a deal of sin outside. There's a deal of sin
in mother. There's nothing but sin everywhere — except here."

" You are quite changed ? " said Mr. Creakle.

" Oh dear, yes, sir ! " cried this hopeful penitent.

" You wouldn't relapse, if you were going out ? " asked
somebody else.

" Oh de-ar no, sir ! "

".Well ! " said Mr. Creakle, " this is very gratifying. You
have addressed Mr. Copperfield, Twenty Seven. Do you wish
to say anything further to him ? "

" You knew me a long time before I came here and was
changed, Mr. Copperfield," said Uriah, looking at me ; and a
more villainous look I never saw, even on his visage. " You
knew me when, in spite of my follies, I was umble among them
that was proud, and meek among them that was violent — you
was violent to me yourself, Mr. Copperfield. Once, you struck
me a blow in the face, you know."

General commiseration. Several indignant glances directed
at me.

•' But I forgive you, Mr. Copperfield," said Uriah, making
his forgiving nature the subject of a most impious and awful
parallel, which I shall not record. " I forgive everybody. It
would ill become me to bear malice. I freely forgive you, and
I hope you'll curb your passions in future. I hope Mr. W.
will repent, and Miss W., and all of that sinful lot. You've
been visited with affliction, and I hope it may do you good ;
but you'd better have come here. Mr. W. had better have
come here, and Miss W. too. The best wish I could give you,
Mr. Copperfield, and give all of you gentlemen, is, that you
could be took up and brought here. When I think of my
past follies, and my present stale, I am sure it would be best
for you. I pity all who ain't brought here ! "

He sneaked back into his cell, amidst a little chorus of
approbation ; and both Traddles and I experienced a great
relief when he was locked in.

It was a characteristic feature in this repentance, that I was
fain to ask what these two men had done, to be there at all.
That appeared to be the last thing about which they had anything
to say. I addressed myself to one of the two warders, who, I
suspected, from certain latent indications in their faces, knew
pretty well what all this stir was worth.

David Copperfield 803

" Do you know," said I, as we walked along the passage,
" what felony was Number Twenty Seven's last ' folly ' ? "

The answer was that it was a Bank case.

" A fraud on the Bank of England ? " I asked.

" Yes, sir. Fraud, forgery, and conspiracy. He and some
others. He set the others on. It was a deep plot for a large
sum. Sentence, transportation for life. Twenty Seven was the
knowingest bird of the lot, and had very nearly kept himself
safe ; but not quite. The Bank was just able to put salt upon
his tail — and only just."

" Do you know Twenty Eight's offence ? "

" Twenty Eight," returned my informant, speaking through-
out in a low tone, and looking over his shoulder as we walked
along the passage, to guard himself from being overheard, in
such an unlawful reference to these Immaculates, by Creakle
and the rest ; " Twenty Eight (also transportation) got a place,
and robbed a young master of a matter of two hundred and
fifty pounds in money and valuables, the night before they
were going abroad. I particularly recollect his case, from his
being took by a dwarf."

"A what?"

" A little woman. I have forgot her name."

"Not Mowcher?"

"That's it I He had eluded pursuit, and was going to
America in a flaxen wig and whiskers, and such a complete
disguise as never you see in all your born days ; when the
little woman, being in Southampton, met him walking along
the street — picked him out with her sharp eye in a moment —
ran betwixt his legs to upset him — and held on to him like
grim Death."

" Excellent Miss Mowcher 1 " cried I.

"You'd have said so, if you had seen her, standing on a
chair in the witness-box at the trial, as I did," said my friend.
"He cut her face right open, and pounded her in the most
brutal manner, when she took him ; but she never loosed her
hold till he was locked up. She held so tight to him, in fact,
that the officers were obliged to take 'em both together. She
gave her evidence in the gamest way, and was highly com-
plimented by the Bench, and cheered right home to her
lodgings. She said in Court that she'd have took him single-
handed (on account of what she knew concerning him), if he
had been Samson. And it's my belief she would ! "

It was mine too, and I highly respected Miss Mowcher
for it

8o4 David Copperfield

We had now seen all there was to see. It would have
been in vain to represent to such a man as the worshipful
Mr. Creakle, that Twenty Seven and Twenty Eight were
perfectly consistent and unchanged ; that exactly what they
were then, they had always been ; that the hypocritical
knaves were just the subjects to make that sort of profession
in such a place ; that they knew its market-value at least as
well as we did, in the immediate service it would do them
when they were expatriated ; in a word, that it was a rotten,
hollow, painfully suggestive piece of business altogether. We
left them to their system and themselves, and went home
wondering.

" Perhaps it's a good thing, Traddles," said I, " to have an
unsound Hobby ridden hard; for it's the sooner ridden to
death."

" I hope so," replied Traddles.

CHAPTER LXII

A LIGHT SHINES ON MY WAY

The year came round to Christmas-time, and I had been at
home above two months. I had seen Agnes frequently.
However loud the general voice might be in giving me
encouragement, and however fervent the emotions and en-
deavours to which it roused me, I heard her lightest word
of praise as I heard nothing else.

At least once a week, and sometimes oftener, I rode over
there, and passed the evening. I usually rode back at night ;
for the old unhappy sense was always hovering about me
now — most sorrowfully when I left her — and I was glad to
be up and out, rather than wandering over the past in weary
wakefulness or miserable dreams. I wore away the longest
part of many wild sad nights, in those rides ; reviving, as I
went, the thoughts that had occupied me in my long absence.

Or, if I were to say rather that I listened to the echoes of
those thoughts, I should better express the truth. They spoke
to me from afar off. I had put them at a distance, and
accepted my inevitable place. When I read to Agnes what
I wrote ; when I saw her listening face ; moved her to smiles
or tears ; and heard her cordial voice so earnest on the
shadowy events of that imaginative world in which I lived;

David Copperfield 805

I thought what a fate mine might have been — but only thought
so, as I had thought after I was married to Dora, what I could
have wished my wife to be.

My duty to Agnes, who loved me with a love which, if I
disquieted, I wronged most selfishly and poorly, and could
never restore ; my matured assurance that I, who had worked
out my own destiny, and won what I had impetuously set my
heart on, had no right to murmur and must bear ; comprised
what I felt and what I had learned. But I loved her : and now
it even became some consolation to me, vaguely to conceive a
distant day when I might blamelessly avow it ; when all this
should be over ; when I could say " Agnes, so it was when I
came home ; and now I am old, and I never have loved since ! "

She did not once show me any change in herself. What she
always had been to me, she still was ; wholly unaltered.

Between my aunt and me there had been something, in this
connexion, since the night of my return, which I cannot call
a restraint, or an avoidance of the subject, so much as an
implied understanding that we thought of it together, but did
not shape our thoughts into words. When, according to our
old custom, we sat before the fire at night, we often fell into
this train ; as naturally, and as consciously to each other, as
if we had unreservedly said so. But we preserved an unbroken
silence. I believed that she had read, or partly read, my
thoughts that night; and that she fully comprehended why
I gave mine no more distinct expression.

This Christmas-time being come, and Agnes having reposed
no new confidence in me, a doubt that had several times arisen
in my mind — whether she could have that perception of the
true state of my breast, which restrained her with the appre-
hension of giving me pain — began to oppress me heavily. If
that were so, my sacrifice was nothing ; my plainest obligation
I to her unfulfilled ; and every poor action I had shrunk from,
I I was hourly doing. I resolved to set this right beyond all
doubt ; — if such a barrier were between us, to break it down
at once with a determined hand.

It was — what lasting reason have I to remember it ! — a cold,
harsh, winter day. There had been snow some hours before ;
and it lay, not deep, but hard-frozen on the ground. Out at
sea, beyond my window, the wind blew ruggedly from the
north. I had been thinking of it, sweeping over those
mountain wastes of snow in Switzerland, then inaccessible to
any human foot ; and had been speculating which was the
' lonelier, those solitary regions, or a deserted ocean.

■ D D2

8o6 David Copperfield

" Riding to-day, Trot ? " said my aunt, putting her head in
at the door.

" Yes," said I, " I am going over to Canterbury. It's a good
day for a ride."

" I hope your horse may think so, too," said my aunt ; " but
at present he is holding down his head and his ears, standing
before the door there, as if he thought his stable preferable."

My aunt, I may observe, allowed my horse on the forbidden
ground, but had not at all relented toward the donkeys.

" He will be fresh enough, presently ! " said I.

" The ride will do his master good, at all events," observed
my aunt, glancing at the papers on uy table. " Ah, child, you
pass a good many hours here ! I never thought, when 1 used
to read books, what work it was to write them."

"It's work enough to read them, sometimes," I returned.
"As to the writing, it has its own charms, aunt."

" Ah ! I see ! " said my aunt. " Ambition, love of appro-
bation, sympathy, and much more, I suppose ? Well : go
along with you 1 "

" Do you know anything more," said I, standing composedly
before her — she had patted me on the shoulder, and sat down
in my chair — " of that attachment of Agnes ? "

She looked up in my face a little while, before replying :

" I think I do. Trot."

" Are you confirmed in your impression ? " I inquired.

" I think I am, Trot."

She looked so stedfastly at me : with a kind of doubt, or
pity, or suspense in her affection : that I summoned the
stronger determination to show her a perfectly cheerful face.

"And what is more, Trot — " said my aunt.

" Yes ! "

" I think Agnes is going to be married."

" God bless her ! " said I, cheerfully.

" God bless her ! " said my aunt, " and her husband too i "

I echoed it, parted from my aunt, went lightly down-stairs,
mounted, and rode away. There was greater reason than
before to do what I had resolved to do.

How well I recollect the wintry ride ! The frozen particles
of ice, brushed from the blades of grass by the wind, and
borne across my face; the hard clatter of the horse's hoofs,
beating a tune upon the ground ; the stiff-tilled soil ; the
snow-drift, lightly eddying' in the chalk-pit as the breeze
ruffled it; the smoking team with the waggon of old hay,
stopping to breathe on the hill-top, and shaking their bells

David Copperfield 807

musically ; the whitened slopes and sweeps of Down-land
lying against the dark sky, as if they were drawn on a huge
slate !

I found Agnes alone. The little girls had gone to their
own homes now, and she was alone by the fire, reading. She
put down her book on seeing me come in ; and having
welcomed me as usual, took her work-basket and sat in one
of the old-fashioned windows.

I sat beside her on the window-seat, and we talked of what
I was doing, and when it would be done, and of the progress I
had made since my last visit. Agnes was very cheerful ; and
laughingly predicted that 1 should soon become too famous to
be talked to, on such subjects.

" So I make the most of the present time, you see," said
Agnes, " and talk to you while I may."

As I looked at her beautiful face, observant of her work, she
raised her mild clear eyes, and saw that I was looking at her.
" You are thoughtful to-day, Trotwood ! "
"Agnes, shall I tell you what about? I came to tell you."
She put aside her work, as she was used to do when we
were seriously discussing anything; and gave me her whole
attention.

" My dear Agnes, do you doubt my being true to you ? "
"No!" she answered, with a look of astonishment.
" Do you doubt my being what I always have been to
you?"

" No ! " she answered, as before.

" Do you remember that I tried to tell you, when I came
home, what a debt of gratitude I owed you, dearest Agnes, and
how fervently I felt towards you ? "

'* I remember it," she said gently, "very well."
" You have a secret," said I. " Let me share it, Agnes."
She cast down her eyes, and trembled.
" I could hardly fail to know, even if I had not heard — but
from other lips than yours, Agnes, which seems strange — that
there is some one upon whom you have bestcwed the treasure
of your love. Do not shut me out of what concerns your
happiness so nearly ! If you can trust me as you say you can,
and as I know you may, let me be your friend, your brother, in
this matter, of all others ! "

With an appealing, almost a reproachful, glance, she rose
from the window ; and hurrying across the room as if without
knowing where, put her hands before her face, and burst into
such tears as smote me to the heart

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And yet they awakened something in me, bringing promise
to my heart. Without my knowing why, these tears allied
themselves with the quietly sad smile which was so fixed in my
remembrance, and shook me more with hope than fear or
sorrow.

" Agnes ! Sister ! Dearest ! What have I done ? "

"Let me go away, Trotwood. I am not well. I am not
myself. I will speak to you by-and-bye — another time. I will
write to you. Don't speak to me now. Don't ! don't ! "

I sought to recollect what she had said, when I had spoken
to her on that former night, of her affection needing no return.
It seemed a very world that I must search through in a
moment.

" Agnes, I cannot bear to see you so, and think that I have
been the cause. My dearest girl, dearer to me than anything
in life, if you are unhappy, let me share your unhappiness. If
you are in need of help or counsel, let me try to give it to you.
If you have indeed a burden on your heart, let me try to
lighten it. For whom do I live now, Agnes, if it is not for
you?"

**0h, spare me! lam not myself! Another time!" was
all I could distinguish.

Was it a selfish error that was leading me away ? Or, having
once a clue to hope, was there something opening to me that I
had not dared to think of?

" I must say more. I cannot let you leave me so ! For
Heaven's sake, Agnes, let us not mistake each other after all
these years, and all that has come and gone with them ! I
must speak plainly. If you have any lingering thought that I
could envy the happiness you will confer; that I could not
resign you to a dearer protector, of your own choosing ; that I
could not, from my removed place, be a contented witness of
your joy ; dismiss it, for I don't deserve it ! I have not
suffered quite in vain. You have not taught me quite in vain.
There is no alloy of self in what I feel for you."

She was quiet now. In a little time, she turned her pale
face towards me, and said in a low voice, broken here and
there, but very clear:

"I owe it to your pure friendship for me, Trotwood —
which, indeed, I do not doubt — to tell you, you are mistaken.
I can do no more. If I have sometimes, in the course of
years, wanted help and counsel, they have come to me. If I
have sometimes been unhappy, the feeling has passed away.
If I had ever had a burden on my heart, it has been lightened

David Copperfield 809

for me. If I have any secret, it is — no new one ; and is — not
what you suppose. I cannot reveal it, or divide it. It has
long been mine, and must remain mine."

" Agnes ! Stay ! A moment 1 "

She was going away, but I detained her. I clasped my arm
about her waist. " In the course of years ! " " It is not a
new one ! " New thoughts and hopes were whirling through
my mind, and all the colours of my life were changing.

" Dearest Agnes ! Whom I so respect and honour — whom
I so devotedly love ! When I came here to-day, I thought
that nothing could have wrested this confession from me. I
thought I could have kept it in my bosom all our lives, till
we were old. But, Agnes, if I have indeed any new-bom
hope that I may ever call you something more than Sister,
widely different from Sister! "

Her tears fell fast; but they were not like those she had
lately shed, and I saw my hope brighten in them.

" Agnes ! Ever my guide and best support ! If you had
been more mindful of yourself, and less of me, when we
grew up here together, I think my heedless fancy never would
have wandered from you. But you were so much better than
I, so necessary to me in every boyish hope and disappointment,
that to have you to confide in, and rely upon in everything,
became a second nature, supplanting for the time the first and
greater one of loving you as I do ! "

Still weeping, but not sadly — ^joyfully ! And clasped in my
arms as she had never been, as I had thought she never was
to be!

" When I loved Dora — fondly, Agnes, as you know "

" Yes I " she cried, earnestly. " I am glad to know it ! "

" When I loved her — even then, my love would have been
incomplete, without your sympathy. I had it, and it was
perfected. And when I lost her, Agnes, what should I have
been without you, still ! "

Closer in my arms, nearer to my heart, her trembling hand
upon my shoulder, her sweet eyes shining through her tears,
on mine !

" I went away, dear Agnes, loving you. I stayed away,
loving you. I returned home, loving you ! "

And now, I tried to tell her of the struggle I had had, and
the conclusion I had come to. I tried to lay my mind before
her, truly and entirely. I tried to show her how I had hoped
I had come into the better knowledge of myself and of her ;
how I had resigned myself to what that better knowledge

8io David Copperfield

brought ; and how I had come there, even that day, in my
fidelity to this. If she did so love me (I said) that she could
take me for her husband, she could do so, on no deserving
of mine, except upon the truth of my love for her, and
the trouble in which it had ripened to be what it was ; and
hence it was that I revealed it. And O, Agnes, even out of
thy true eyes, in that same time, the spirit of my child-wife
looked upon me, saying it was well ; and winning me, through
thee, to tenderest recollections of the Blossom that had
withered in its bloom !

" I am so blest, Trotwood — my heart is so overcharged — but
there is one thing I must say."

" Dearest, what ? "

She laid her gentle hands upon my shoulders, and looked
calmly in my face.

" Do you know, yet, what it is ? "

" I am afraid to speculate on what it is. Tell me, my dear."

*' I have loved you all my life ! "

Oh, we were happy, we were happy ! Our tears were not for
the trials (hers so much the greater) through which we had
come to be thus, but for the rapture of being thus, never to
be divided more I

We walked, that winter evening, in the fields together ; and
the blessed calm within us seemed to be partaken by the frosty
air. The early stars began to shine while we were lingering
on, and looking up to them, we thanked our God for having
guided us to this tranquillity.

We stood together in the same old-fashioned window at
night, when the moon was shining ; Agnes with her quiet eyes
raised up to it ; I following her glance. Long miles of road
then opened out before my mind ; and, toiling on, I saw a
ragged way-worn boy forsaken and neglected, who should come
to call even the heart now beating against mine, his own.

It was nearly dinner-time next day when we appeared before
my aunt. She was up in my study, Peggotty said : which it
was her pride to keep in readiness and order for me. We
found her, in her spectacles, sitting by the fire.

''Goodness me!" said my aunt, peering through the dusk,
" who's this you're bringing home ? "

" Agnes," said I.

As we had arranged to say nothing at first, my aunt was not
a little discomfited. She darted a hopeful glance at me, when

David Copperfield 8ii

I said " Agnes ; " but seeing that I looked us usual, she took off
her spectacles in despair, and rubbed her nose with them.

She greeted Agnes heartily, nevertheless ; and we were soon
in the lighted parlour down-stairs, at dinner. My aunt put on
her spectacles twice or thrice, to take another look at me, but
as often took them off again, disappointed, and rubbed her
nose with them. Much to the discomfiture of Mr. Dick, who
knew this to be a bad symptom.

" By-the-bye, aunt," said I, after dinner ; " I have been
speaking to Agnes about what you told me."

" Then, Trot," said my aunt, turning scarlet, " you did wrong,
and broke your promise."

" You are not angry, aunt, I trust ? I am sure you won't be,
when you learn that Agnes is not unhappy in any attachment."

" Stuff and nonsense ! " said my aunt.

As my aunt appeared to be annoyed, I thought the best
way was to cut her annoyance short. I took Agnes in my arm
to the back of her chair, and we both leaned over her. My
aunt with one clap of her hands, and one look through her
spectacles, immediately went into hysterics, for the first and
only time in all my knowledge of her.

The hysterics called up Peggotty. The moment my aunt
was restored, she flew at Peggotty, and calling her a silly old
creature, hugged her with all her might. After that, she
hugged Mr. Dick (who was highly honoured, but a good
deal surprised); and after that, told them why. Then we
were all happy together.

I could not discover whether my aunt, in her last short
conversation with me, had fallen on a pious fraud, or had
really mistaken the state of my mind. It was quite enough,
she said, that she had told me Agnes was going to be married;
and that I now knew better than any one how true it was.

We were married within a fortnight. Traddles and Sophy,
and Doctor and Mrs. Strong, were the only guests at our
quiet wedding. We left them full of joy; and drove away
together. Clasped in my embrace, I held the source of every
worthy aspiration I had ever had ; the centre of myself, the
circle of my life, my own, my wife ; my love of whom was
founded on a rock !

" Dearest husband ! " said Agnes. " Now that I may call
you by that name, I have one thing more to tell you."

" Let me hear it, love."

" It grows out of the night when Dora died. She sent you
for me."

8i2 David Copperfield

"She did."

" She told me that she left me something. Can you think
what it was?"

I believed I could. I drew the wife who had so long loved
me, closer to my side.

"She told me that she made a last request to me, and
left me a last charge."

"And it was "

"That only I would occupy this vacant place."

And Agnes laid her head upon my breast, and wept ; and I
wept with her, though we were so happy.

CHAPTER LXIII

A VISITOR

What I have purposed to record is nearly finished ; but there
is yet an incident conspicuous in my memory, on which it
often rests with delight, and without which one thread in the
web I have spun would have a ravelled end.

I had advanced in fame and fortune, my domestic joy was
perfect, I had been married ten happy years. Agnes and I
were sitting by the fire, in our house in London, one night in
spring, and three of our children were playing in the room,
when I was told that a stranger wished to see me.

He had been asked if he came on business, and had
answered No ; he had come for the pleasure of seeing me, and
had come a long way. He was an old man, my servant said,
and looked like a farmer.

As this sounded mysterious to the children, and moreover
was like the beginning of a favourite story Agnes used to tell
them, introductory to the arrival of a wicked old Fairy in a
cloak who hated everybody, it produced some commotion. One
of our boys laid his head in his mother's lap to be out of harm's
way, and little Agnes (our eldest child) left her doll in a chair
to represent her, and thrust out her little heap of golden curls
from between the window-curtains, to see what happened next.

" Let him come in here ! " said I.

There soon appeared, pausing in the dark doorway as he
entered, a hale, grey-haired old man. Little Agnes, attracted
by his looks, had run to bring him in, and I had not yet
clearly seen his face, when my wife, starting up, cried out to
me, in a pleased and agitated voice, that it was Mr. Peggotty !

David Copperfield 813

It was Mr. Peggotty. An old man now, but in a ruddy,
hearty, strong old age. When our first emotion was over, and
he sat before the fire with the children on his knees, and the
blaze shining on his face, he looked, to me, as vigorous and
robust, withal as handsome, an old man, as ever I had seen.

" Mas'r Davy," said he. And the old name in the old tone
fell so naturally on my ear ! " Mas'r Davy, 'tis a joyful hour
as I see you, once more, long with your own trew wife I "

" A joyful hour indeed, old friend ! " cried I.

"And these heer pretty ones," said Mr. Peggotty. "To
look at these heer flowers I Why, Mas'r Davy, you was but
the heighth of the littlest of these, when I first see you ! When
Em'ly wam't no bigger, and our poor lad were but a lad ! "

" Time has changed me more than it has changed you since
then," said I. " But let these dear rogues go to bed ; and as
no house in England but this must hold you, tell me where to
send for your luggage (is the old black bag among it, that went
so far, I wonder !), and then, over a glass of Yarmouth grog, we
will have the tidings of ten years ! "

" Are you alone ? " asked Agnes.

" Yes, ma'am," he said, kissing her hand, " quite alone."

We sat him between us, not knowing how to give him
welcome enough ; and as I began to listen to his old familiar
voice, I could have fancied he was still pursuing his long
journey in search. of his darling niece.

" It's a mort of water," said Mr. Peggotty, " fur to come
across, and on'y stay a matter of fower weeks. But water
('specially when 'tis salt) comes nat'ral to me ; and friends is
dear, and I am heer. — Which is verse," said Mr. Peggotty,
surprised to find it out, " though I hadn't such intentions."

" Are you going back those many thousand miles, so soon ? "
asked Agnes.

" Yes, ma'am," he returned. " I giv the promise to Em'ly,
afore I come away. You see, I doen't grow younger as the
years comes round, and if I hadn't sailed as 'twas, most like I
shouldn't never have done 't. And it's alius been on my mind,
as I must come and see Mas'r Davy and your own sweet
blooming self, in your wedded happiness, afore I got to be
too old."

He looked at us, as if he could never feast his eyes on us
sufficiendy. Agnes laughingly put back some scattered locks
of his grey hair, that he might see us better.

"And now tell us," said I, "everything relating to your
fortunes."

8i4 David Copperfield

"Our fortuns, Mas'r Davy," he rejoined, "is soon told. We
haven't fared nohows, but fared to thrive. We've alius thrived.
We've worked as we ought to 't, and maybe we lived a leetle
hard at first or so, but we have alius thrived. What with
sheep-farming, and what with stock-farming, and what with
one thing and what with t'other, we are as well to do, as well
could be. Theer's been kiender a blessing fell upon us,"
said Mr. Peggotty, reverentially inclining his head, " and
we've done nowt but prosper. That is, in the long run. If
not yesterday, why then to-day. If not to-day, why then
to-morrow."

**And Emily?" said Agnes and I, both together.

"Em'ly," said he, "arter you left her, ma'am — and I never
heerd her saying of her prayers at night, t'other side the canvas
screen, when we was settled in the Bush, but what I heerd
your name — and arter she and me lost sight of Mas'r Davy,
that theer shining sundown — was that low, at first, that, if she
had know'd then what Mas'r Davy kep from us so kind and
thowtful, 'tis my opinion she'd have drooped away. But theer
was some poor folks aboard as had illness among 'em, and she
took care of them ; and theer was the children in our company,
and she took care of them ; and so she got to be busy, and to
be doing good, and that helped her."

" When did she first hear of it ? " I asked.

" I kep it from her arter I heerd on 't," ^aid Mr. Peggotty,
" going on nigh a year. We was living then in a solitary place,
but among the beautifullest trees, and with the roses a-covering
our Bein' to the roof. Theer come along one day, when I was
out a-working on the land, a traveller from our own Norfolk
or Suffolk in England (I doen't rightly mind which), and of
course we took him in, and giv him to eat and drink, and
made him welcome. We all do that, all the colony over.
He'd got an old newspaper with him, and some other account
in print of the storm. That's how she know'd it. When I
come home at night, I found she know'd it."

He dropped his voice as he said these words, and the
gravity I so well remembered overspread his face.

" Did it change her much ? " we asked.

" Aye, for a good long time," he said, shaking his head ;
" if not to this present hour. But I think the solitoode done
her good. And she had a deal to mind in the way of poultry
and the like, and minded of it, and come through. I wonder,"
he said thoughtfully, " if you could see my Em'ly now, Mas'r
Davy, whether you'd know her 1 "

David Copperfield 815

" Is she so altered ? " I inquired.

" I doen't know. I see her ev'ry day, and doen't know ; but,
odd-times, I have thowt so. A slight figure," said Mr. Peggotty,
looking at the fire, " k lender worn ; soft, sorrowful, blue eyes ;
a delicate face ; a pritty head, leaning a little down ; a quiet
voice and way — timid a'most. That's Em'ly ! "

We silently observed him as he sat, still looking at the fire.

" Some thinks," he said, " as her affection was ill-bestowed ;
some, as her marriage was broke off by death. No one knows
how 'tis. She might have married well a mort of times, * but,
uncle,' she says to me, ' that's gone for ever.' Cheerful along
with me ; retired when others is by ; fond of going any distance
fur to teach a child, or fur to tend a sick person, or fur to do
some kindness tow'rds a young girl's wedding (and she's done
a many, but has never seen one) ; fondly loving of her uncle ;
patient ; liked by young and old ; sowt out by all that has any
trouble. That's Em'ly!"

He drew his hand across his face, and with a half-suppressed
sigh looked up from the fire.

" Is Martha with you yet ? " I asked.

"Martha," he replied, "got married, Mas'r Davy, in the
second year. A young man, a farm-labourer, as come by us
on his way to market with his mas'r's drays — a journey of over
five hundred mile, theer and back — made offers fur to take her
fur his wife (wives is very scarce theer), and then to set up fur
their two selves in the Bush. She spoke to me fur to tell him
her trew story. I did. They was married, and they live fower
hundred mile away from any voices but their own and the
singing birds."

" Mrs. Gummidge ? " I suggested

It was a pleasant key to touch, for Mr. Peggotty suddenly
burst into a roar of laughter, and rubbed his hands up and
down his legs, as he had been accustomed to do when he
enjoyed himself in the long-shipwrecked boat.

" Would you believe it ! " he said, " Why, someun even
made offers fur to marry her I If a ship's cook that was
turning settler, Mas'r Davy, didn't make offers fur to marry
Missis Gummidge, I'm Gormed — and I can't say no fairer than
that ! "

I never saw Agnes laugh so. This sudden ecstasy on the
part of Mr, Peggotty was so delightful to her, that she could
not leave off laughing ; and the more she laughed the more
she made me laugh, and the greater Mr. Peggotty's ecstasy
became, and the more he rubbed his legs.

8i6 David Copperfield

" And what did Mrs. Gummidge say ? " I asked, when 1
was grave enough.

" If you'll believe me," returned Mr. Peggotty, " Missis
Gummidge, 'stead of saying * thank you, I'm much obleeged to
you, I ain't a-going fur to change my condition at my time of
life,' up'd with a bucket as was standing by, and laid it over
that theer ship's cook's head 'till he sung out for fur help, and
I went in and reskied of him."

Mr. Peggotty burst into a great roar of laughter, and Agnes
and I both kept him company.

"But I must say this for the good creetur," he resumed,
wiping his face when we were quite exhausted ; " she has been
all she said she'd be to us, and more. She's the willingest, the
trewest, the honestest-helping woman, Mas'r Davy, as ever
draw'd the breath of life. I have never know'd her to be
lone and lorn, for a single minute, not even when the colony
was all afore us, and we was new to it. And thinking of the
old 'un is a thing she never done, I do assure you, since she
left England!"

" Now, last, not least, Mr. Micawber," said I. " He has
paid off every obligation he incurred here — even to Traddles's
bill, you remember, my dear Agnes — and therefore we may
take it for granted that he is doing well. But what is the
latest news of him ? "

Mr. Peggotty, with a smile, put his hand in his breast-pocket,
and produced a flat-folded paper parcel, from which he took
out, with much care, a little odd-looking newspaper.

" You are to understan,' Mas'r Davy," said he, " as we have
left the Bush now, being so well to do ; and have gone right
away round to Port Middlebay Harbour, wheer theer's what
we call a town."

" Mr. Micawber was in the Bush near you ? " said I.

" Bless you, yes," said Mr. Peggotty, " and turned to with a
will. I never wish to meet a better gen'l'man for turning to
with a will. I've seen that theer bald head of his a-perspiring
in the sun, Mas'r Davy, 'till I a'most thowt it would have
melted away. And now he's a Magistrate."

" A Magistrate, eh ? " said I.

Mr. Peggotty pointed to a certain paragraph in the news-
paper, where I read aloud as follows, from the " Port Middle-
bay Times : "

" i^"The public dinner to our distinguished fellow-colonist
and townsman, Wilkins Micawber, Esquire, Port Middlebay

David Copperfield 817

District Magistrate, came oflf yesterday in the large room of
the Hotel, which was crowded to suffocation. It is estimated
that not fewer than forty-seven persons must have been accom-
modated with dinner at one time, exclusive of the company in
the passage and on the stairs. The beauty, fashion, and
exclusiveness of Port Middlebay, flocked to do honour to one
so deservedly esteemed, so highly talented, and so widely
popular. Doctor Mell (of Colonial Salem-House Grammar
School, Port Middlebay) presided, and on his right sat the
distinguished guest. After the removal of the cloth, and the
singing of Non Nobis (beautifully executed, and in which we
were at no loss to distinguish the bell-like notes of that gifted
amateur, Wilkins Micawbkr, Esquire, Junior), the usual
loyal and patriotic toasts were severally given and rapturously
received. Dr. Mell, in a speech replete with feeling, then
proposed ' Our distinguished Guest, the ornament of our town.
May he never leave us but to better himself, and may his
success among us be such as to render his bettering himself
impossible ! ' The cheering with which the toast was received
defies description. Again and again it rose and fell, like the
waves of ocean. At length all was hushed, and Wilkins
MiCAWBER, Esquire, presented himself to return thanks. Far
be it from us, in the present comparatively imperfect state of
the resources of our establishment, to endeavour to follow our
distinguished townsman through the smoothly-flowing periods
of his polished aud highly-ornate address! Suffice it to
observe, that it was a masterpiece of eloquence ; and that
those passages in which he more particularly traced his own
successful career to its source, and warned the younger portion
of his auditory from the shoals of ever incurring pecuniary
liabilities which they were unable to liquidate, brought a tear
into the manliest eye present The remaining toasts were
Doctor Mell; Mrs. Micawber (who gracefully bowed her
acknowledgments from the side-door, where a galaxy of beauty
was elevated on chairs, at once to witness and adorn the
gratifying scene) ; Mrs Ridger Begs (late Miss Micawber) ;
Mrs. Mell; Wilkins Micawber, Esquire, Junior (who
convulsed the assembly by humorously remarking that he found
himself unable to return thanks in a speech, but would do so,
with their permission, in a song) ; Mrs. Micawber's Family
(well known, it is needless to remark, in the mother-country), &c.
&c. &c. At the conclusion of the proceedings the tables were
cleared as if by art-magic for dancing. Among the votaries of
Terpsichore, who disported themselves until Sol gave warning

8i8 David Copperfield

for departure, Wilkins Micawber, Esquire, Junior, and the
lovely and accomplished Miss Helena, fourth daughter of
Doctor Mell, were particularly remarkable."

I was looking back to the name of Doctor Mell, pleased to
have discovered, in these happier circumstances, Mr. Mell,
formerly poor pinched usher to my Middlesex magistrate,
when Mr. Peggotty pointing to another part of the paper, my
eyes rested on my own name, and I read thus :

"TO DAVID COPPERFIELD, ESQUIRE,
"the eminent author.
"My Dear Sir,

" Years have elapsed, since I had an opportunity of
ocularly perusing the lineaments, now familiar to the imagina-
tions of a considerable portion of the civilised world.

" But, my dear sir, though estranged (by the force of cir-
cumstances over which I have had no control) fro.m the
personal society of the friend and companion of my youth, I
have not been unmindful of his soaring flight. Nor have I
been debarred.

Though seas between us braid ha' roared,

(Burns) from participating in the intellectual feasts he has
spread before us.

" I cannot, therefore, allow of the departure from this place
of an individual whom we mutually respect and esteem, with-
out, my dear sir, taking this public opportunity of thanking
you, on my own behalf, and, I may undertake to add on that
of the whole of the Inhabitants of Port Middlebay, for the
gratification of which you are the ministering agent.

"Go on, my dear sir! You are not unknown here, you
are not unappreciated. Though * remote,' we are neither
'unfriended,' 'melancholy,' nor (I may add) 'slow.' Go on,
my dear sir, in your Eagle course ! The inhabitants of Port
Middlebay may at least aspire to watch it, with delight, with
entertainment, with instruction !

" Among the eyes elevated towards you from this portion oi
the globe, will ever be found, while it has light and life,

"The
"Eye

" Appertaining to

"Wilkins Micawber,
• " Magistrate."

David Copperfield 819

I found, on glancing at the remaining contents of the
newspaper, that Mr. Micawber was a diligent and esteemed
correspondent of that Journal. There was another letter from
him in the same paper, touching a bridge ; there was an
advertisement of a collection of similar letters by him, to be
shortly republished, in a neat volume, "with considerable
additions ;" and, unless I am very much mistaken, the Leading
Article was his also.

We talked much of Mr. Micawber, on many other evenings
while Mr. Pcggotty remained with us. He lived with us
during the whole term of his stay, — which, I think, was some-
thing less than a month, — and his sister and my aunt came
to London to see him. Agnes and I parted from him
aboard-ship, when he sailed; and we shall never part from
him more, on earth.

But before he left, he went with me to Yarmouth, to see a
little tablet I had put up in the churchyard to the memory of
Ham. While I was copying the plain inscription for him at
his request, I saw him stoop, and gather a tuft of grass from
the grave, and a little earth.

"For Em'ly," he said, as he put it in his breast. "I
promised, Mas'r Davy."

CHAPTER LXIV

A LAST RETROSPECT

And now my written story ends. I look back, once more —
for the last time — before I close these leaves.

I see myself, with Agnes at my side, journeying along the
road of life. I see our children and our friends around us ;
and I hear the roar of many voices, not indifferent to me as I
travel on.

What faces are the most distinct to me in the fleeting crowd ?
Lo, these ; all turning to me as I ask my thoughts the question !

Here is my aunt, in stronger spectacles, an old woman of
fourscore years and more, but upright yet, and a steady walker
of six miles at a stretch in winter weather.

Always with her, here comes Peggotty, my good old nurse,
likewise in spectacles, accustomed to do needlework at night
very close to the lamp, but never sitting down to it without a
bit of wax candle, a yard measure in a little house, and a
work-box with a picture of St. Paul's upon the lid.

820 David Copperfield

The cheeks and arms of Peggotty, so hard and red in my
childish days, when I wondered why the birds didn't peck her
in preference to apples, are shrivelled now ; and her eyes, that
used to darken their whole neighbourhood in her face, are
fainter (though they glitter still) ; but her rough forefinger,
which I once associated with a pocket nutmeg-grater, is just
the same, and when I see my least child catching at it as it
totters from my aunt to her, I think of our little parlour at
home, when I could scarcely walk. My aunt's old disappoint-
ment is set right, now. She is godmother to a real Hving
Betsey Trotwood ; and Dora (the next in order) says she spoils
her.

There is something bulky in Peggotty's pocket. It is
nothing smaller than the Crocodile-Book, which is in rather a
dilapidated condition by this time, with divers of the leaves
torn and stitched across, but which Peggotty exhibits to the
children as a precious relic. I find it very curious to see my
own infant face, looking up at me from the Crocodile stories ;
and to be reminded by it of my old acquaintance Brooks of
Sheffield.

Among my boys, this summer holiday time, I see an old
man making giant kites, and gazing at them in the air, with
a delight for which there are no words. He greets me
rapturously, and whispers, with many nods and winks, " Trot-
wood, you will be glad to hear that I shall finish the Memorial
when I have nothing else to do, and that your aunt's the most
extraordinary woman in the world, sir ! "

Who is this bent lady, supporting herself by a stick, and
showing me a countenance in which there are some traces of
old pride and beauty, feebly contending with a querulous,
imbecile, fretful wandering of the mind ? She is in a garden ;
and near her stands a sharp, dark, withered woman, with a
white scar on her lip. Let me hear what they say.

"Rosa, I have forgotten this gentleman's name."

Rosa bends over her, and calls to her, " Mr. Copperfield."

" I am glad to see you, sir. I am sorry to observe you are
in mourning. I hope Time will be good to you."

Her impatient attendant scolds her, tells her I am not in
mourning, bids her look again, tries to rouse her.

"You have seen my son, sir," says the elder lady. "Are
you reconciled ? "

Looking fixedly at me, she puts her hand to her forehead,
and moans. Suddenly, she cries, in a terrible voice, " Rosa,
come to me. He is dead ! " Rosa kneeling at her feet, by

David Copperfield 821

turns caresses her, and quarrels with her ; now fiercely telling
her, "I loved him better than you ever did \" — now soothing
her to sleep on her breast, like a sick child. Thus I leave
them; thus. I always find them; thus they wear their time
away, from year to year.

What ship comes sailing home from India, and what English
lady is this, married to a growling old Scotch Croesus with
great flaps of ears? Can this be Julia Mills?

Indeed it is Julia Mills, peevish and fine, with a black man
to carry cards and letters to her on a golden salver, and a
copper-coloured woman in linen, with a bright handkerchief
round her head, to serve her Tiffin in her dressing-room. But
Julia keeps no diary in these days ; never sings Affection's
Dirge ; eternally quarrels with the old Scotch Croesus, who is
a sort of yellow bear with a tanned hide. Julia is steeped in
money to the throat, and talks and thinks of nothing else. I
liked her better in the Desert of Sahara.

Or perhaps this is the Desert of Sahara ! For, though Julia
has a stately house, and mighty company, and sumptuous
dinners every day, I see no green growth near her ; nothing
that can ever come to fruit or flower. What Julia calls
" society," I see ; among it Mr. Jack Maldon, from his Patent
Place, sneering at the hand that gave it him, and speaking to
me of the Doctor as "so charmingly antique." But when
society is the name for such hollow gentlemen and ladies,
Julia, and when its breeding is professed indifference to every
thing that can advance or can retard mankind, I think we must
have lost ourselves in that same Desert of Sahara, and had
better find the way out.

And lo, the Doctor, always our good friend, labouring at
his Dictionary (somewhere about the letter D), and happy in
his home and wife. Also the Old Soldier, on a considerably
reduced footing, and by no means so influential as in days of yore !

Working at his chambers in the Temple, with a busy aspect,
and his hair (where he is not bald) made more rebellious than
ever by the constant friction of his lawyer's wig, I come, in a
later time, upon my dear old Traddles. His table is covered
with thick piles of papers ; and I say, as I look around me :

" If Sophy were your clerk, now, Traddles, she would have
enough to do I "

" You may say that, my dear Copperfield ! But those were
capital days, too, in Holborn Court ! Were they not ? "

"When she told you you would be a Judge? But it was
not the town talk /^w/"

822 David Copperfield

"At all events," says Traddles, " if I ever am one "

" Why, you know you will be."

" Well, my dear Copperfield, when I am one, I shall tell the
story, as I said I would."

We walk away, arm in arm. I am going to have a family
dinner with Traddles. It is Sophy's birthday ; and, on our
road, Traddles discourses to me of the good fortune he has
enjoyed.

" I really have been able, my dear Copperfield, to do all
that I had most at heart. There's the Reverend Horace
promoted to that living at four hundred and fifty pounds a
year ; there are our two boys receiving the very best education,
and distinguishing themselves as steady scholars and good
fellows ; there are three of the girls married very comfortably ;
there are three more living with us ; there are three more keep-
ing house for the Reverend Horace since Mrs. Crewler's
decease; and all of them happy."

" Except " 1 suggest.

"Except the Beauty," says Traddles. "Yes. It was very
unfortunate that she should marry such a vagabond. But
there was a certain dash and glare about him that caught her.
However, now we have got her safe at our house, and got rid
of him, we must cheer her up again."

Tiaddles's house is one of the very houses — or it easily
may have been — which he and Sophy used to parcel out, in
their evening walks. It is a large house ; but Traddles keeps
his papers in his dressing-room, and his boots with his papers ;
and he and Sophy squeeze themselves into upper rooms,
reserving the best bedrooms for the Beauty and the girls.
There is no room to spare in the house ; for more of " the
girls" are here, and always are here, by some accident or
other, than I know how to count. Here, when we go in, is
a crowd of them, running down to the door, and handing
Traddles about to be kissed, until he is out of breath. Here,
established in perpetuity, is the poor Beauty, a widow with a
little girl; here, at dinner on Sophy's birthday, are the three
married girls with their three husbands, and one of the
husband's brothers, and another husband's cousin, and another
husband's sister, who appears to me to be engaged to the
cousin. Traddles, exactly the same simple, unaffected fellow
as he ever was, sits at the foot of the large table like a
Patriarch ; and Sophy beams upon him, from the head, across
a cheerful space that is certainly not glittering with Britannia
metal

David Copperfield 823

And now, as I close my task, subduing my desire to linger
yet, these faces fade away. But one face, shining on me like
a Heavenly light by which I see all other objects, is above
them and beyond them all. And that remains.

I turn my head, and see it, in its beautiful serenity, beside
me. My lamp bums low, and I have written far into the
night; but the dear presence, without which I were nothing,
bears me company.

Oh Agnes, oh my soul, so may thy face be by me when I
close my life indeed ; so may I, when realities are melting from
me like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near
me, pointing upward!

THE END

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