Charles Dickens as a Reader Part 6

"Why not [slowly and wonderingly]?"

"Never you mind, sir [shorter and sharper than ever]. Remember the story of the little boy that was gored to death by a mad bull for asking questions."

"If the bull [in a high falsetto voice and with greater deliberation than ever] was mad, how did he know that the boy asked questions? n.o.body can go and whisper secrets to a mad bull. I don't believe that story."

Little Dombey's fellow-sufferers at Mrs. Pipchin's were hardly less ludicrous in their way than that bitter old victim of the Peruvian mines in her perennial weeds of black bombazeen. Miss Pankey, for instance, the mild little blue-eyed morsel of a child who was instructed by the Ogress that "n.o.body who sniffed before visitors ever went to heaven!"

And her a.s.sociate in misery, one Master Bitherstone, from India, who objected so much to the Pipchinian system, that before Little Dombey had been in the house five minutes, he privately consulted that gentleman if he could afford him any idea of the way back to Bengal! What the Pipchinian system was precisely, the Reader indicated perhaps the most happily by his way of saying, that instead of its encouraging a child's mind to develop itself, like a flower, it strove to open it by force, like an oyster. Fading slowly away while he is yet under Mrs. Pipchin's management, poor little Paul, as the audience well knew, was removed on to Doctor Blimber's Academy for Young Gentlemen. There the humorous company gathered around Paul immediately increased. But, before his going amongst them, the Reader enabled us more vividly to realise, by an additional touch or two, the significance of the peculiarity of being "old fashioned," for which the fading child appeared in everybody's eyes so remarkable.

Wheeled down to the beach in a little invalid-carriage, he would cling fondly to his sister Florence. He would say to any chance child who might come to bear him company [in a soft, drawling, half-querulous voice, and with the gravest look], "Go away, if you please. Thank you, but I don't want you." He would wonder to himself and to Floy what the waves were always saying--always saying! At about the middle of the 47th page of the Reading copy of this book about Little Dombey, the copy from which d.i.c.kens Read, both in England and America, there is, in his handwriting, the word--"Pause." It occurs just in between Little Dombey's confiding to his sister, that if she were in India he should die of being so sorry and so lonely! and the incident of his suddenly waking up at another time from a long sleep in his little carriage on the shingles, to ask her, not only "What the rolling waves are saying so constantly, but What place is over there?--far away!--looking eagerly, as he inquires, towards some invisible region beyond the horizon!" That momentary pause will be very well remembered by everyone who attended this Reading.

One single omission we are still disposed to regret in the putting together of the materials for this particular Reading from the original narrative. In approaching Dr. Blimber's establishment for the first time, we would gladly have witnessed the sparring-match, as one may say, on the very threshold, between Mrs. Pipchin the Ogress in bombazeen and the weak-eyed young man-servant who opens the door! The latter of whom, having "the first faint streaks or early dawn of a grin on his countenance--(it was mere imbecility)" as the Author himself explains parenthetically--Mrs. Pipchin at once takes it into her head, is inspired by impudence, and snaps at accordingly. Of this we saw nothing, however, in the Reading. We heard nothing of Mrs. Pipchin's explosive, "How dare you laugh behind the gentleman's back?" or of the weak-eyed young man's answering in consternation, "I ain't a laughing at n.o.body, ma'am." Any more than of the Ogress saying a while later, "You're laughing again, sir!" or of the young man, grievously oppressed, repudiating the charge with, "I _ain't_. I never see such a thing as this!" The old lady as she pa.s.sed on with, "Oh! he was a precious fellow," leaving him, who was in fact all meekness and incapacity, "affected even to tears by the incident." If we saw nothing, however, of that retainer of Dr. Blimber, we were introduced to another, meaning the blue-coated, bright-b.u.t.toned butler, "who gave quite a winey flavour to the table-beer--he poured it out so superbly!" We had Dr. Blimber himself, besides, with his learned legs, like a clerical pianoforte--a bald head, highly polished, and a chin so double, it was a wonder how he ever managed to shave into the creases. We had Miss Blimber, in spectacles, like a ghoul, "dry and sandy with working in the graves of deceased languages." We had Mrs. Blimber, not learned herself, but pretending to be so, which did quite as well, languidly exclaiming at evening parties, that if she could have known Cicero, she thought she could have died contented. We had Mr. Feeder, clipped to the stubble, grinding out his cla.s.sic stops like a barrel-organ of erudition. Above all, we had Toots, the head boy, or rather "the head and shoulder boy," he was so much taller than the rest! Of whom in that intellectual forcing-house (where he had "gone through" everything so completely, that one day he "suddenly left off blowing, and remained in the establishment a mere stalk") people had come at last to say, "that the Doctor had rather overdone it with young Toots, and that when he began to have whiskers he left off having brains." From the moment when Young Toots's voice was first heard, in tones so deep, and in a manner so sheepish, that "if a lamb had roared it couldn't have been more surprising," saying to Little Dombey with startling suddenness, "How are you?"--every time the Reader opened his lips, as speaking in that character, there was a burst of merriment. His boastful account always called forth laughter--that his tailor was Burgess and Co., "fash'nable, but very dear." As also did his constantly reiterated inquiries of Paul--always as an entirely new idea--"I say--it's not of the slightest consequence, you know, but I should wish to mention it--how are you, you know?" Hardly less provocative of mirth was Briggs's confiding one evening to Little Dombey, that his head ached ready to split, and "that he should wish himself dead if it wasn't for his mother and a blackbird he had at home."

Wonderful fun used to be made by the Beader of the various incidents at the entertainment given upon the eve of the vacations by Doctor and Mrs.

Blimber to the Young Gentlemen and their Friends, when "the hour was half-past seven o'clock, and the object was quadrilles." The Doctor pacing up and down in the drawing-room, full dressed, before anybody had arrived, "with a dignified and unconcerned demeanour, as if he thought it barely possible that one or two people might drop in by-and-by!" His exclaiming, when Mr. Toots and Mr. Feeder were announced by the butler, and as if he were extremely surprised to see them, "Aye, aye, aye!

G.o.d bless my soul!" Mr. Toots, one blaze of jewellery and b.u.t.tons, so undecided, "on a calm revision of all the circ.u.mstances," whether it were better to have his waistcoat fastened or unfastened both at top and bottom, as the arrivals thickened, so influencing him by the force of example, that at the last he was "continually fingering that article of dress as if he were performing on some instrument!" Thoroughly enjoyable though the whole scene was in its throng of ludicrous particulars, it merely led the way up appreciably and none the less tenderly, for all the innocent laughter, to the last and supremely pathetic incidents of the story as related thenceforth (save only for one startling instant) _sotto voce_, by the Reader.

The exceptional moment here alluded to, when his voice was suddenly raised, to be hushed again the instant afterwards, came at the very opening of the final scene by Little Dombey's death-bed, where the sunbeams, towards evening, struck through the rustling blinds and quivered on the opposite wall like golden water. Overwhelmed, as little Paul was occasionally, with "his only trouble," a sense of the swift and rapid river, "he felt forced," the Reader went on to say, "to try and stop it--to stem it with his childish hands, or choke its way with sand--and when he saw it coming on, resistless, he cried out!" Dropping his voice from that abrupt outcry instantly afterwards, to the gentlest tones, as he added, "But a word from Florence, who was always at his side, restored him to himself"--the Reader continued in those subdued and tender accents to the end.

The child's pity for his father's sorrowing, was surpa.s.sed only, as all who witnessed this Reading will readily recollect, by the yet more affecting scene with his old nurse. Waking upon a sudden, on the last of the many evenings, when the golden water danced in shining ripples on the wall, waking mind and body, sitting upright in his bed--

"And who is this? Is this my old nurse?" asked the child, regarding with a radiant smile a figure coming in.

"Yes, yes. No other stranger would have shed those tears at sight of him, and called him her dear boy, her pretty boy, her own poor blighted child. No other woman would have stooped down by his bed and taken up his wasted hand and put it to her lips and breast, as one who had some right to fondle it. No other woman would have so forgotten everybody there but him and Floy, and been so full of tenderness and pity."

The child's words coming then so lovingly: "Floy! this is a kind good face! I am glad to see it again. Don't go away, old nurse! Stay here!

Good bye!" prepared one exquisitely for the rest. "Not goodbye?" "Ah, yes! good-bye!"

Then the end! The child having been laid down again with his arms clasped round his sister's neck, telling her that the stream was lulling him to rest, that now the boat was out at sea and that there was sh.o.r.e before him, and--Who stood upon the bank! Putting his hands together "as he had been used to do at his prayers "--not removing his arms to do it, but folding them so behind his sister's neck--"Mamma is like you, Floy!"

he cried; "I know her by the face! But tell them that the picture on the stairs at school is not Divine enough. The light about the head is shining on me as I go!"

Then came two n.o.ble pa.s.sages, n.o.bly delivered.

First--when there were no eyes unmoistened among the listeners--

"The golden ripple on the wall came back again, and nothing else stirred in the room. The old, old fashion! The fashion that came in with our first garments, and will last unchanged until our race has run its course, and the wide firmament is rolled up like a scroll. The old, old fashion--Death!"

And lastly--with a tearful voice--

"Oh, thank G.o.d, all who see it, for that older fashion yet of Immortality! And look upon us, Angels of young children, with regards not quite estranged, when the swift river bears us to the ocean!"

Remembering which exquisite words as he himself delivered them, having the very tones of his voice still ringing tenderly in our recollection, the truth of that beautiful remark of Dean Stanley's comes back anew as though it were now only for the first time realised, where, in his funeral sermon of the 19th June, 1870, he said that it was the inculcation of the lesson derived from precisely such a scene as this which will always make the grave of Charles d.i.c.kens seem "as though it were the very grave of those little innocents whom he created for our companionship, for our instruction, for our delight and solace." The little workhouse-boy, the little orphan girl, the little cripple, who "not only blessed his father's needy home, but softened the rude stranger's hardened conscience," were severally referred to by the preacher when he gave this charming thought its affecting application.

But, foremost among these bewitching children of the Novelist's imagination, might surely be placed the child-hero of a story closing hardly so much with his death as with his apotheosis.

MR CHOPS, THE DWARF.

It remains still a matter of surprise how so much was made out of this slight sketch by the simple force of its humorous delivery. "Mr. Chops, the Dwarf," as, indeed, was only befitting, was the smallest of all the Readings. The simple little air that so caught the dreamer's fancy, when played upon the harp by Scrooge's niece by marriage, is described after all, as may be remembered by the readers of the Carol, to to have been intrinsically "a mere nothing; you might learn to whistle it in two minutes." Say that in twenty minutes, or, at the outside, in half-an-hour, any ordinarily glib talker might have rattled through these comic recollections of Mr. Magsman, yet, when rattled through by d.i.c.kens, the laughter awakened seems now in the retrospect to have been altogether out of proportion. In itself the subject was anything but attractive, relating, as it did, merely to the escapade of a monstrosity. The surroundings are ign.o.ble, the language is illiterate, the narrative from first to last is characterised by its grotesque extravagance. Yet the whole is presented to view in so utterly ludicrous an aspect, that one needs must laugh just as surely as one listened.

Turning over the leaves now, and recalling to mind the hilarity they used to excite even among the least impressionable audience whenever they were fluttered (there are not a dozen of them altogether) on the familiar reading-desk, one marvels over the success of such an exceedingly small oddity as over the remembrance, let us say, of the brilliant performance of a fantasia on the jew's-harp by Rubenstein.

Nevertheless, slight though it is, the limning all through has touches of the most comic suggestiveness. Magsman's account of the show-house during his occupancy is sufficiently absurd to begin with--"the picter of the giant who was himself the heighth of the house," being run up with a line and pulley to a pole on the roof till "his 'ed was coeval with the parapet;" the picter of the child of the British Planter seized by two Boa Constrictors, "not that we never had no child, nor no Constrictors either;" similarly, the picter of the Wild a.s.s of the Prairies, "not that _we_ never had no wild a.s.ses, nor wouldn't have had 'em at a gift." And to crown all, the picter of the Dwarf--who was "a uncommon small man, he really was. Certainly not so small as he was made out to be; but where _is_ your Dwarf as is?" A picter "like him, too considering, with George the Fourth, in such a state of astonishment at him as his Majesty couldn't with his utmost politeness and stoutness express." Wrote up the Dwarf was, we are told by Mr. Magsman, as Major Tpschoffski--"n.o.body couldn't p.r.o.nounce the name," he adds, "and it never was intended anybody should." Corrupted into Chopski by the public, he gets called in the line Chops, partly for that reason, "partly because his real name, if he ever had any real name (which was dubious), was Stakes." Wearing a diamond ring "(or quite as good to look at)" on his forefinger, having the run of his teeth, "and he was a Woodp.e.c.k.e.r to eat--but all dwarfs are," receiving a good salary, and gathering besides as his perquisites the ha'pence collected by him in a Chaney sa.r.s.er at the end of every entertainment, the Dwarf never has any money somehow. Nevertheless, having what his admiring proprietor considers "a fine mind, a poetic mind," Mr. Chops indulges himself in the pleasing delusion that one of these days he is to Come Into his Property, his ideas respecting which are never realised by him so powerfully as when he sits upon a barrel-organ and has the handle turned! "Arter the wibration has run through him a little time,"

says Mr. Magsman, "he screeches out, 'Toby, I feel my property a-coming--gr-r-rind away! I feel the Mint a-jingling in me. I'm a-swelling out into the Bank of England!' Such," reflectively observes his proprietor, "is the influence of music on a poetic mind!" Adding, however, immediately afterwards, "Not that he was partial to any other music but a barrel-organ; on the contrairy, hated it." Indulging in day-dreams about Coming Into his Property and Going Into Society, for which he feels himself formed, and to aspire towards which is his avowed ambition, the mystery, as to where the Dwarf's salary and ha'pence all go, is one day cleared up by his winning a prize in the Lottery, a half-ticket for the twenty-five thousand pounder.

Mr. Chops Comes Into his Property--twelve thousand odd hundred. Further than that, he Goes Into Society "in a chay and four greys with silk jackets." It was at this turning-point in the career of his large-headed but diminutive hero that the grotesque humour of the Reader would play upon the risible nerves of his hearers, as, according to Mr. Disraeli's phrase, Sir Robert Peel used to play upon the House of Commons, "like an old fiddle." Determined to Go Into Society in style, with his twelve thousand odd hundred, Mr. Chops, we are told, "sent for a young man he knowed, as had a very genteel appearance, and was a Bonnet at a gaming-booth. Most respectable brought up," adds Mr. Magsman--"father having been imminent in the livery-stable line, but unfortunate in a commercial crisis through painting a old grey ginger-bay, and sellin'

him with a pedigree." In intimate companionship with this Bonnet, "who said his name was Normandy, which it warn't," Mr. Magsman, on invitation by note a little while afterwards, visits Mr. Chops at his lodgings in Pall Mall, London, where he is found carousing not only with the Bonnet but with a third party, of whom we were then told with unconscionable gravity, "When last met, he had on a white Roman shirt, and a bishop's mitre covered with leopard-skin, and played the clarionet all wrong in a band at a Wild Beast Show." How the reverential Magsman, finding the three of them blazing away, blazes away in his turn while remaining in their company, who, that once heard it, has forgotten? "I made the round of the bottles," he says--evidently proud of his achievement--"first separate (to say I had done it), and then mixed 'em altogether (to say I had done it), and then tried two of 'em as half-and-half, and then t'other two; altogether," he adds, "pa.s.sin' a pleasin' evenin' with a tendency to feel muddled." How all Mr. Chop's blazing away is to terminate everybody but himself perceives clearly enough from the commencement.

Normandy having bolted with the plate, and "him as formerly wore the bishop's mitre" with the jewels, the Dwarf gets out of society by being, as he significantly expresses it, "sold out," and in this plight returns penitently one evening to the show-house of his still-admiring proprietor. Mr. Magsman happens at the moment to be having a dull _tete-a-tete_ with a young man without arms, who gets his living by writing with his toes, "which," says the low-spirited narrator, "I had taken on for a month--though he never drawed--except on paper." Hearing a kicking at the street-door, "'Halloa!' I says to the young man, 'what's up?' He rubs his eyebrows with his toes, and he says, 'I can't imagine, Mr. Magsman'--which that young man [with an air of disgust]

never _could_ imagine nothin', and was monotonous company." Mr.

Chops--"I never dropped the 'Mr.' with him," says his again proprietor; "the world might do it, but not me"--eventually dies. Having sat upon the barrel-organ over night, and had the handle turned through all the changes, for the first and only time after his fall, Mr. Chops is found on the following morning, as the disconsolate Magsman expresses it, "gone into much better society than either mine or Pall Mall's." Out of such unpromising materials as these could the alembic of a genius all-embracing in its sympathies extract such an abundance of innocent mirth--an illiterate showman talking to us all the while about such people as the Bonnet of a gaming-booth, or a set of monstrosities he himself has, for a few coppers, on exhibition. Yet, as Mr. Magsman himself remarks rather proudly when commenting on his own establishment, "as for respectability,--if threepence ain't respectable, what is?"

THE POOR TRAVELLER.

Apart altogether from the Readings of Charles d.i.c.kens, has the reader of this book any remembrance of the original story of "The Poor Traveller"?

If he has, he will recognise upon the instant the truth of the words in which we would here speak of it, as of one of those, it may be, slight but exquisite sketches, which are sometimes, in a happy moment, thrown off by the hand of a great master. Comparatively trivial in itself--carelessly dashed off, apparently hap-hazard--having no pretension about it in the least, it is anything, in short, but a finished masterpiece. Yet, for all that, it is marked, here and there, by touches so felicitous and inimitable in their way, that we hardly find the like in the artist's more highly elaborated and ambitious productions. Not that one would speak of it, however, as of a drawing upon toned paper in neutral tint, or as of a picture pencilled in sepia or with crayons; one would rather liken it to a radiant water-colour, chequered with mingled storm and sunshine, sparkling with lifelike effects, and glowing with brilliancy. And yet the little work is one, when you come to look into it, that is but the product of a seemingly artless _abandon_, in which without an effort the most charming results have been arrived at, obviously upon the instant, and quite unerringly.

Trudging down to Chatham, footsore and without a farthing in his pocket, it is in this humble guise first of all that he comes before us, this Poor Traveller. Christian name, Eichard, better known as d.i.c.k, his own surname dropped upon the road, he a.s.sumes that of Doubled.i.c.k--being thenceforth spoken of all through the tale, even to the very end of it, by his new name, as Eichard Doubled.i.c.k. A scapegrace, a ne'er-do-well, an incorrigible, hopeless of himself, despaired of by others, he has "gone wrong and run wild." His heart, still in the right place, has been sealed up. "Betrothed to a good and beautiful girl whom he had loved better than she--or perhaps even he--believed," he had given her cause, in an evil hour, to tell him solemnly that she would never marry any other man; that she would live single for his sake, but that her lips, "that Mary Marshall's lips," would never address another word to him on earth, bidding him in the end--Go! and Heaven forgive him! Hence, in point of fact, this journey of his on foot down to Chatham, for the purpose of enlisting, if possible, in a cavalry regiment, his object being to get shot, though he himself thinks in his devil-may-care indifference, that "he might as well ride to death as be at the trouble of walking." Premising simply that his hero's age is at this time twenty-two, and his height five foot ten, and that, there being no cavalry at the moment in Chatham, he enlists into a regiment of the line, where he is glad to get drunk and forget all about it, the Author readily made the path clear for the opening up of his narrative.

Whenever Charles d.i.c.kens introduced this tale among his Readings, how beautifully he related it! After recounting how Private Doubled.i.c.k was clearly going to the dogs, a.s.sociating himself with the dregs of every regiment, seldom being sober and constantly under punishment, until it became plain at last to the whole barracks that very soon indeed he would come to be flogged, when the Reader came at this point to the words--"Now the captain of Doubled.i.c.k's company was a young gentleman not above five years his senior, whose eyes had an expression in them which affected Private Doubled.i.c.k in a very remarkable way"--the effect was singularly striking. Out of the Reader's own eyes would look the eyes of that Captain, as the Author himself describes them: "They were bright, handsome, dark eyes, what are called laughing eyes generally, and, when serious, rather steady than severe." But, he immediately went on to say, they were the only eyes then left in his narrowed world that could not be met without a sense of shame by Private Doubled.i.c.k.

Insomuch that if he observed Captain Taunton coming towards him, even when he himself was most callous and unabashed, "he would rather turn back and go any distance out of the way, than encounter those two handsome, dark, bright eyes." Here it was that came, what many will still vividly remember, as one of the most exquisitely portrayed incidents in the whole of this Reading--the interview between Captain Taunton and Private Doubled.i.c.k!

The latter, having pa.s.sed forty-eight hours in the Black Hole, has been just summoned, to his great dismay, to the Captain's quarters. Having about him all the squalor of his incarceration, he shrinks from making his appearance before one whose silent gaze even was a reproach.

However, not being so mad yet as to disobey orders, he goes up to the officers' quarters immediately upon his release from the Black Hole, twisting and breaking in his hands as he goes along a bit of the straw that had formed its decorative furniture.

"'Come in!'

"Private Doubled.i.c.k pulled off his cap, took a stride forward and stood in the light of the dark bright eyes."

From that moment until the end of the interview, the two men alternately were standing there distinctly before the audience upon the platform.

"Doubled.i.c.k! do you know where you are going to?"

"To the devil, sir!"

"Yes, and very fast."

Thereupon one did not hear the words simply, one saw it done precisely as it is described in the original narrative: "Private Richard Doubled.i.c.k turned the straw of the Black Hole in his mouth and made a _miserable_ salute of acquiescence." Captain Taunton then remonstrates with him thus earnestly: "Doubled.i.c.k, since I entered his Majesty's service, a boy of seventeen, I have been pained to see many men of promise going that road; but I have never been _so_ pained to see a man determined to make the shameful journey, as I have been, ever since you joined the regiment, to see _you_." At this point in the printed story, as it was originally penned, one reads that "Private Richard Doubled.i.c.k began to find a film stealing over the floor at which he looked; also to find the legs of the Captain's breakfast-table turning crooked as if he saw them through water." Although those words are erased in the reading copy, and were not uttered, pretty nearly the effect of them was visible when, after a momentary pause, the disheartened utterance was faltered out--

"I am only a common soldier, sir. It signifies very little what such a poor brute comes to."

In answer to the next remonstrance from his officer, Doubled.i.c.k's words are blurted out yet more despairingly--

"I hope to get shot soon, sir, and then the regiment, and the world together, will be rid of me!"

What are the descriptive words immediately following this in the printed narrative? They also were visibly expressed upon the platform. "Looking up he met the eyes that had so strong an influence over him. He put his hand before his own eyes, and the breast of his disgrace-jacket swelled as if it would fly asunder." His observant adviser thereupon quietly but very earnestly remarks, that he "would rather see this in him (Doubled.i.c.k) than he would see five thousand guineas counted out upon the table between them for a gift to his (the Captain's) good mother,"