David Copperfield

by Charles Dickens

  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 occasion 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 laugh 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 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 mourning, 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 everythink that reminds me of creeturs that ain't lone and lorn, goes contrairy with me."

  "Come, old gall" 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 proposed 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 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 we were going along, Mr. Barkis turned to me, and said, with a wink--by-the-by, 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 witness 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 her unimpaired affection, but she soon became herself again, and said she was very glad it was over.

  We drove to a little inn in a bye-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 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 sat under it 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 growing older, never growing wiser, children ever, rambling hand-in-hand through sunshine and among flowery meadows, laying down our heads on moss at night, in a sweet sleep of purity 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 guileless 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.
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  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. I felt then, for the first time, that I had lost Peggotty. I should have gone to bed with a sore heart indeed under any other roof but that which sheltered little Em'ly's 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. Gummidge, 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 Cats 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, 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 a beautiful little home it was. Of all the mov ables in it, I must have been most impressed by a certain old bureau of some dark wood in the parlour (the tile-ftoored 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 always mine, 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, and I went 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 neglect, 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 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 relenting, 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, what they 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 someone. 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 happiness of passing an afternoon in his closet of 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 disappointments 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 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 old books. They were my only comfort, 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, turning the comer 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 these 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. Murdstone 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 walk 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 eye 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?"

  "Ay! He is sharp enough," said Mr. Murdstone, impatiently. "You had better l
et him go. He will not thank you for troubling him."

  On his 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 break it."

  "For stubbornness won't do here," said his sister. "What it wants is, to be 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, 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.