Dickens at Christmas (Vintage Classics)

by Charles Dickens

  ‘Now, Alfred,’ said the Doctor, ‘for a word or two of business, while we are yet at breakfast.’

  ‘While we are yet at breakfast,’ said Snitchey and Craggs, who seemed to have no present idea of leaving off.

  Although Alfred had not been breakfasting, and seemed to have quite enough business on his hands as it was, he respectfully answered:

  ‘If you please, sir.’

  ‘If anything could be serious,’ the Doctor began, ‘in such a –’

  ‘Farce as this, sir,’ hinted Alfred.

  ‘In such a farce as this,’ observed the Doctor, ‘it might be this recurrence, on the eve of separation, of a double birthday, which is connected with many associations pleasant to us four, and with the recollection of a long and amicable intercourse. That’s not to the purpose.’

  ‘Ah! yes, yes, Dr Jeddler,’ said the young man. ‘It is to the purpose. Much to the purpose, as my heart bears witness this morning; and as yours does too, I know, if you would let it speak. I leave your house today; I cease to be your ward today; we part with tender relations stretching far behind us, that never can be exactly renewed, and with others dawning – yet before us,’ he looked down at Marion beside him, ‘fraught with such considerations as I must not trust myself to speak of now. Come, come!’ he added, rallying his spirits and the Doctor at once, ‘there’s a serious grain in this large foolish dust-heap, Doctor. Let us allow today, that there is One.’

  ‘Today!’ cried the Doctor. ‘Hear him! Ha, ha, ha! Of all days in the foolish year. Why, on this day, the great battle was fought on this ground. On this ground where we now sit, where I saw my two girls dance this morning, where the fruit has just been gathered for our eating from these trees, the roots of which are struck in Men, not earth, – so many lives were lost, that within my recollection, generations afterwards, a churchyard full of bones, and dust of bones, and chips of cloven skulls, has been dug up from underneath our feet here. Yet not a hundred people in that battle knew for what they fought, or why; not a hundred of the inconsiderate rejoicers in the victory, why they rejoiced. Not half a hundred people were the better for the gain or loss. Not half-a-dozen men agree to this hour on the cause or merits; and nobody, in short, ever knew anything distinct about it, but the mourners of the slain. Serious, too!’ said the Doctor, laughing. ‘Such a system!’

  ‘But, all this seems to me,’ said Alfred, ‘to be very serious.’

  ‘Serious!’ cried the Doctor. ‘If you allowed such things to be serious, you must go mad, or die, or climb up to the top of a mountain, and turn hermit.’

  ‘Besides – so long ago,’ said Alfred.

  ‘Long ago!’ returned the Doctor. ‘Do you know what the world has been doing, ever since? Do you know what else it has been doing? I don’t!’

  ‘It has gone to law a little,’ observed Mr Snitchey, stirring his tea.

  ‘Although the way out has been always made too easy,’ said his partner.

  ‘And you’ll excuse my saying, Doctor,’ pursued Mr Snitchey, ‘having been already put a thousand times in possession of my opinion, in the course of our discussions, that, in its having gone to law, and in its legal system altogether, I do observe a serious side – now, really, a something tangible, and with a purpose and intention in it –’

  Clemency Newcome made an angular tumble against the table, occasioning a sounding clatter among the cups and saucers.

  ‘Heyday! what’s the matter there?’ exclaimed the Doctor.

  ‘It’s this evil-inclined blue bag,’ said Clemency, ‘always tripping up somebody!’

  ‘With a purpose and intention in it, I was saying,’ resumed Snitchey, ‘that commands respect. Life a farce, Dr Jeddler? With law in it?’

  The Doctor laughed, and looked at Alfred.

  ‘Granted, if you please, that war is foolish,’ said Snitchey. ‘There we agree. For example. Here’s a smiling country,’ pointing it out with his fork, ‘once overrun by soldiers – trespassers every man of ’em – and laid waste by fire and sword. He, he, he! The idea of any man exposing himself, voluntarily, to fire and sword! Stupid, wasteful, positively ridiculous; you laugh at your fellow-creatures, you know, when you think of it! But take this smiling country as it stands. Think of the laws appertaining to real property; to the bequest and devise of real property; to the mortgage and redemption of real property; to leasehold, freehold, and copyhold estate; think,’ said Mr Snitchey, with such great emotion that he actually smacked his lips, ‘of the complicated laws relating to title and proof of title, with all the contradictory precedents and numerous Acts of Parliament connected with them; think of the infinite number of ingenious and interminable chancery suits, to which this pleasant prospect may give rise; and acknowledge, Dr Jeddler, that there is a green spot in the scheme about us! I believe,’ said Mr Snitchey, looking at his partner, ‘that I speak for Self and Craggs?’

  Mr Craggs having signified assent, Mr Snitchey, somewhat freshened by his recent eloquence, observed that he would take a little more beef and another cup of tea.

  ‘I don’t stand up for life in general,’ he added, rubbing his hands and chuckling, ‘it’s full of folly; full of something worse. Professions of trust, and confidence, and unselfishness, and all that! Bah, bah, bah! We see what they’re worth. But, you mustn’t laugh at life; you’ve got a game to play; a very serious game indeed! Everybody’s playing against you, you know, and you’re playing against them. Oh! It’s a very interesting thing. There are deep moves upon the board. You must only laugh, Dr Jeddler, when you win – and then not much. He, he, he! And then not much,’ repeated Snitchey, rolling his head and winking his eye, as if he would have added, ‘you may do this instead!’

  ‘Well, Alfred!’ cried the Doctor, ‘what do you say now?’

  ‘I say, sir,’ replied Alfred, ‘that the greatest favour you could do me, and yourself too, I am inclined to think, would be to try sometimes to forget this battle-field and others like it in that broader battle-field of Life, on which the sun looks every day.’

  ‘Really, I’m afraid that wouldn’t soften his opinions, Mr Alfred,’ said Snitchey. ‘The combatants are very eager and very bitter in that same battle of Life. There’s a great deal of cutting and slashing, and firing into people’s heads from behind. There is terrible treading down, and trampling on. It is rather a bad business.’

  ‘I believe, Mr Snitchey,’ said Alfred, ‘there are quiet victories and struggles, great sacrifices of self, and noble acts of heroism, in it – even in many of its apparent lightnesses and contradictions – not the less difficult to achieve, because they have no earthly chronicle or audience – done every day in nooks and corners, and in little households, and in men’s and women’s hearts – any one of which might reconcile the sternest man to such a world, and fill him with belief and hope in it, though two-fourths of its people were at war, and another fourth at law; and that’s a bold word.’

  Both the sisters listened keenly.

  ‘Well, well!’ said the Doctor, ‘I am too old to be converted, even by my friend Snitchey here, or my good spinster sister, Martha Jeddler; who had what she calls her domestic trials ages ago, and has led a sympathising life with all sorts of people ever since; and who is so much of your opinion (only she’s less reasonable and more obstinate, being a woman), that we can’t agree, and seldom meet. I was born upon this battle-field. I began, as a boy, to have my thoughts directed to the real history of a battle-field. Sixty years have gone over my head, and I have never seen the Christian world, including Heaven knows how many loving mothers and good enough girls like mine here, anything but mad for a battle-field. The same contradictions prevail in everything. One must either laugh or cry at such stupendous inconsistencies; and I prefer to laugh.’

  Britain, who had been paying the profoundest and most melancholy attention to each speaker in his turn, seemed suddenly to decide in favour of the same preference, if a deep sepulchral sound that escaped him might be construed into a demonstration of
risibility. His face, however, was so perfectly unaffected by it, both before and afterwards, that although one or two of the breakfast party looked round as being startled by a mysterious noise, nobody connected the offender with it.

  Except his partner in attendance, Clemency Newcome; who rousing him with one of those favourite joints, her elbows, inquired, in a reproachful whisper, what he laughed at.

  ‘Not you!’ said Britain.

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘Humanity,’ said Britain. ‘That’s the joke!’

  ‘What between master and them lawyers, he’s getting more and more addle-headed every day!’ cried Clemency, giving him a lunge with the other elbow, as a mental stimulant. ‘Do you know where you are? Do you want to get warning?’

  ‘I don’t know anything,’ said Britain, with a leaden eye and an immovable visage. ‘I don’t care for anything. I don’t make out anything. I don’t believe anything. And I don’t want anything.’

  Although this forlorn summary of his general condition may have been overcharged in an access of despondency, Benjamin Britain – sometimes called Little Britain, to distinguish him from Great; as we might say Young England, to express Old England with a decided difference – had defined his real state more accurately than might be supposed. For, serving as a sort of man Miles to the Doctor’s Friar Bacon, and listening day after day to innumerable orations addressed by the Doctor to various people, all tending to show that his very existence was at best a mistake and an absurdity, this unfortunate servitor had fallen, by degrees, into such an abyss of confused and contradictory suggestions from within and without, that Truth at the bottom of her well, was on the level surface as compared with Britain in the depths of his mystification. The only point he clearly comprehended, was, that the new element usually brought into these discussions by Snitchey and Craggs, never served to make them clearer, and always seemed to give the Doctor a species of advantage and confirmation. Therefore, he looked upon the Firm as one of the proximate causes of his state of mind, and held them in abhorrence accordingly.

  ‘But, this is not our business, Alfred,’ said the Doctor. ‘Ceasing to be my ward (as you have said) today; and leaving us full to the brim of such learning as the Grammar School down here was able to give you, and your studies in London could add to that, and such practical knowledge as a dull old country Doctor like myself could graft upon both; you are away, now, into the world. The first term of probation appointed by your poor father, being over, away you go now, your own master, to fulfil his second desire. And long before your three years’ tour among the foreign schools of medicine is finished, you’ll have forgotten us. Lord, you’ll forget us easily in six months!’

  ‘If I do – But you know better; why should I speak to you!’ said Alfred, laughing.

  ‘I don’t know anything of the sort,’ returned the Doctor. ‘What do you say, Marion?’

  Marion, trifling with her teacup, seemed to say – but she didn’t say it – that he was welcome to forget, if he could. Grace pressed the blooming face against her cheek, and smiled.

  ‘I haven’t been, I hope, a very unjust steward in the execution of my trust,’ pursued the Doctor; ‘but I am to be, at any rate, formally discharged, and released, and what not this morning; and here are our good friends Snitchey and Craggs, with a bagful of papers, and accounts, and documents, for the transfer of the balance of the trust fund to you (I wish it was a more difficult one to dispose of, Alfred, but you must get to be a great man and make it so), and other drolleries of that sort, which are to be signed, sealed, and delivered.’

  ‘And duly witnessed as by law required,’ said Snitchey, pushing away his plate, and taking out the papers, which his partner proceeded to spread upon the table; ‘and Self and Crags having been co-trustees with you, Doctor, in so far as the fund was concerned, we shall want your two servants to attest the signatures – can you read, Mrs Newcome?’

  ‘I an’t married, Mister,’ said Clemency.

  ‘Oh! I beg your pardon. I should think not,’ chuckled Snitchey, casting his eyes over her extraordinary figure. ‘You can read?’

  ‘A little,’ answered Clemency.

  ‘The marriage service, night and morning, eh?’ observed the lawyer, jocosely.

  ‘No,’ said Clemency. ‘Too hard. I only reads a thimble.’

  ‘Read a thimble!’ echoed Snitchey. ‘What are you talking about, young woman?’

  Clemency nodded. ‘And a nutmeg-grater.’

  ‘Why, this is a lunatic! a subject for the Lord High Chancellor!’ said Snitchey, staring at her.

  – ‘If possessed of any property,’ stipulated Craggs.

  Grace, however, interposing, explained that each of the articles in question bore an engraved motto, and so formed the pocket library of Clemency Newcome, who was not much given to the study of books.

  ‘Oh, that’s it, is it, Miss Grace!’ said Snitchey.

  ‘Yes, yes. Ha, ha, ha! I thought our friend was an idiot. She looks uncommonly like it,’ he muttered, with a supercilious glance. ‘And what does the thimble say, Mrs Newcome?’

  ‘I an’t married, Mister,’ observed Clemency.

  ‘Well, Newcome. Will that do?’ said the lawyer. ‘What does the thimble say, Newcome?’

  How Clemency, before replying to this question, held one pocket open, and looked down into its yawning depths for the thimble which wasn’t there, – and how she then held an opposite pocket open, and seeming to descry it, like a pearl of great price, at the bottom, cleared away such intervening obstacles as a handkerchief, an end of wax candle, a flushed apple, an orange, a lucky penny, a cramp bone, a padlock, a pair of scissors in a sheath more expressively describable as promising young shears, a handful or so of loose beads, several balls of cotton, a needle-case, a cabinet collection of curl-papers, and a biscuit, all of which articles she entrusted individually and separately to Britain to hold, – is of no consequence.

  Nor how, in her determination to grasp this pocket by the throat and keep it prisoner (for it had a tendency to swing, and twist itself round the nearest corner), she assumed and calmly maintained, an attitude apparently inconsistent with the human anatomy and the laws of gravity. It is enough that at last she triumphantly produced the thimble on her finger, and rattled the nutmeg-grater: the literature of both those trinkets being obviously in course of wearing out and wasting away, through excessive friction.

  ‘That’s the thimble, is it, young woman?’ said Mr Snitchey, diverting himself at her expense. ‘And what does the thimble say?’

  ‘It says,’ replied Clemency, reading slowly round as if it were a tower, ‘For-get and For-give.’

  Snitchey and Craggs laughed heartily. ‘So new!’ said Snitchey.

  ‘So easy!’ said Craggs. ‘Such a knowledge of human nature in it!’ said Snitchey. ‘So applicable to the affairs of life!’ said Craggs.

  ‘And the nutmeg-grater?’ inquired the head of the Firm.

  ‘The grater says,’ returned Clemency, ‘Do as you – wold – be – done by.’

  ‘Do, or you’ll be done brown, you mean,’ said Mr Snitchey.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ retorted Clemency, shaking her head vaguely. ‘I an’t no lawyer.’

  ‘I am afraid that if she was, Doctor,’ said Mr Snitchey, turning to him suddenly, as if to anticipate any effect that might otherwise be consequent on this retort, ‘she’d find it to be the golden rule of half her clients. They are serious enough in that – whimsical as your world is – and lay the blame on us afterwards. We, in our profession, are little else than mirrors after all, Mr Alfred; but, we are generally consulted by angry and quarrelsome people who are not in their best looks, and it’s rather hard to quarrel with us if we reflect unpleasant aspects. I think,’ said Mr Snitchey, ‘that I speak for Self and Craggs?’

  ‘Decidedly,’ said Craggs.

  ‘And so, if Mr Britain will oblige us with a mouthful of ink,’ said Mr Snitchey, returning to the papers, ‘we’ll sign, seal, and de
liver as soon as possible, or the coach will be coming past before we know where we are.’

  If one might judge from his appearance, there was every probability of the coach coming past before Mr Britain knew where he was; for he stood in a state of abstraction, mentally balancing the Doctor against the lawyers, and the lawyers against the Doctor, and their clients against both, and engaged in feeble attempts to make the thimble and nutmeg-grater (a new idea to him) square with anybody’s system of philosophy; and, in short, bewildering himself as much as ever his great namesake has done with theories and schools. But, Clemency, who was his good Genius – though he had the meanest possible opinion of her understanding, by reason of her seldom troubling herself with abstract speculations, and being always at hand to do the right thing at the right time – having produced the ink in a twinkling, tendered him the further service of recalling him to himself by the application of her elbows; with which gentle flappers she so jogged his memory, in a more literal construction of that phrase than usual, that he soon became quite fresh and brisk.

  How he laboured under an apprehension not uncommon to persons in his degree, to whom the use of pen and ink is an event, that he couldn’t append his name to a document, not of his own writing, without committing himself in some shadowy manner, or somehow signing away vague and enormous sums of money; and how he approached the deeds under protest, and by dint of the Doctor’s coercion, and insisted on pausing to look at them before writing (the cramped hand, to say nothing of the phraseology, being so much Chinese to him), and also on turning them round to see whether there was anything fraudulent underneath; and how, having signed his name, he became desolate as one who had parted with his property and rights; I want the time to tell. Also, how the blue bag containing his signature, afterwards had a mysterious interest for him, and he couldn’t leave it; also, how Clemency Newcome, in an ecstasy of laughter at the idea of her own importance and dignity, brooded over the whole table with her two elbows, like a spread eagle, and reposed her head upon her left arm as a preliminary to the formation of certain cabalistic characters, which required a deal of ink, and imaginary counterparts whereof she executed at the same time with her tongue. Also, how, having once tasted ink, she became thirsty in that regard, as tame tigers are said to be after tasting another sort of fluid, and wanted to sign everything, and put her name in all kinds of places. In brief, the Doctor was discharged of his trust and all its responsibilities; and Alfred, taking it on himself, was fairly started on the journey of life.