The Charles Dickens Christmas Megapack

by Charles Dickens

  “No,” said Mr. The Englishman, glancing down at the Barber’s, “he is not there at present. There’s the child, though.”

  A mere mite of a girl stood on the steps of the Barber’s shop, looking across the Place. A mere baby, one might call her, dressed in the close white linen cap which small French country children wear (like the children in Dutch pictures), and in a frock of homespun blue, that had no shape except where it was tied round her little fat throat. So that, being naturally short and round all over, she looked, behind, as if she had been cut off at her natural waist, and had had her head neatly fitted on it.

  “There’s the child, though.”

  To judge from the way in which the dimpled hand was rubbing the eyes, the eyes had been closed in a nap, and were newly opened. But they seemed to be looking so intently across the Place, that the Englishman looked in the same direction.

  “O!” said he presently. “I thought as much. The Corporal’s there.”

  The Corporal, a smart figure of a man of thirty, perhaps a thought under the middle size, but very neatly made—a sunburnt Corporal with a brown peaked beard—faced about at the moment, addressing voluble words of instruction to the squad in hand. Nothing was amiss or awry about the Corporal. A lithe and nimble Corporal, quite complete, from the sparkling dark eyes under his knowing uniform cap to his sparkling white gaiters. The very image and presentment of a Corporal of his country’s army, in the line of his shoulders, the line of his waist, the broadest line of his Bloomer trousers, and their narrowest line at the calf of his leg.

  Mr. The Englishman looked on, and the child looked on, and the Corporal looked on (but the last-named at his men), until the drill ended a few minutes afterwards, and the military sprinkling dried up directly, and was gone. Then said Mr. The Englishman to himself, “Look here! By George!” And the Corporal, dancing towards the Barber’s with his arms wide open, caught up the child, held her over his head in a flying attitude, caught her down again, kissed her, and made off with her into the Barber’s house.

  Now Mr. The Englishman had had a quarrel with his erring and disobedient and disowned daughter, and there was a child in that case too. Had not his daughter been a child, and had she not taken angel-flights above his head as this child had flown above the Corporal’s?

  “He’s a ”—National Participled—“fool!” said the Englishman, and shut his window.

  But the windows of the house of Memory, and the windows of the house of Mercy, are not so easily closed as windows of glass and wood. They fly open unexpectedly; they rattle in the night; they must be nailed up. Mr. The Englishman had tried nailing them, but had not driven the nails quite home. So he passed but a disturbed evening and a worse night.

  By nature a good-tempered man? No; very little gentleness, confounding the quality with weakness. Fierce and wrathful when crossed? Very, and stupendously unreasonable. Moody? Exceedingly so. Vindictive? Well; he had had scowling thoughts that he would formally curse his daughter, as he had seen it done on the stage. But remembering that the real Heaven is some paces removed from the mock one in the great chandelier of the Theatre, he had given that up.

  And he had come abroad to be rid of his repudiated daughter for the rest of his life. And here he was.

  At bottom, it was for this reason, more than for any other, that Mr. The Englishman took it extremely ill that Corporal Théophile should be so devoted to little Bebelle, the child at the Barber’s shop. In an unlucky moment he had chanced to say to himself, “Why, confound the fellow, he is not her father!” There was a sharp sting in the speech which ran into him suddenly, and put him in a worse mood. So he had National Participled the unconscious Corporal with most hearty emphasis, and had made up his mind to think no more about such a mountebank.

  But it came to pass that the Corporal was not to be dismissed. If he had known the most delicate fibres of the Englishman’s mind, instead of knowing nothing on earth about him, and if he had been the most obstinate Corporal in the Grand Army of France, instead of being the most obliging, he could not have planted himself with more determined immovability plump in the midst of all the Englishman’s thoughts. Not only so, but he seemed to be always in his view. Mr. The Englishman had but to look out of window, to look upon the Corporal with little Bebelle. He had but to go for a walk, and there was the Corporal walking with Bebelle. He had but to come home again, disgusted, and the Corporal and Bebelle were at home before him. If he looked out at his back windows early in the morning, the Corporal was in the Barber’s back yard, washing and dressing and brushing Bebelle. If he took refuge at his front windows, the Corporal brought his breakfast out into the Place, and shared it there with Bebelle. Always Corporal and always Bebelle. Never Corporal without Bebelle. Never Bebelle without Corporal.

  Mr. The Englishman was not particularly strong in the French language as a means of oral communication, though he read it very well. It is with languages as with people—when you only know them by sight, you are apt to mistake them; you must be on speaking terms before you can be said to have established an acquaintance.

  For this reason, Mr. The Englishman had to gird up his loins considerably before he could bring himself to the point of exchanging ideas with Madame Bouclet on the subject of this Corporal and this Bebelle. But Madame Bouclet looking in apologetically one morning to remark, that, O Heaven! she was in a state of desolation because the lamp-maker had not sent home that lamp confided to him to repair, but that truly he was a lamp-maker against whom the whole world shrieked out, Mr. The Englishman seized the occasion.

  “Madame, that baby—”

  “Pardon, monsieur. That lamp.”

  “No, no, that little girl.”

  “But, pardon!” said Madame Bonclet, angling for a clew, “one cannot light a little girl, or send her to be repaired?”

  “The little girl—at the house of the barber.”

  “Ah-h-h!” cried Madame Bouclet, suddenly catching the idea with her delicate little line and rod. “Little Bebelle? Yes, yes, yes! And her friend the Corporal? Yes, yes, yes, yes! So genteel of him—is it not?”

  “He is not—?”

  “Not at all; not at all! He is not one of her relations. Not at all!”

  “Why, then, he—”

  “Perfectly!” cried Madame Bouclet, “you are right, monsieur. It is so genteel of him. The less relation, the more genteel. As you say.”

  “Is she—?”

  “The child of the barber?” Madame Bouclet whisked up her skilful little line and rod again. “Not at all, not at all! She is the child of—in a word, of no one.”

  “The wife of the barber, then—?”

  “Indubitably. As you say. The wife of the barber receives a small stipend to take care of her. So much by the month. Eh, then! It is without doubt very little, for we are all poor here.”

  “You are not poor, madame.”

  “As to my lodgers,” replied Madame Bouclet, with a smiling and a gracious bend of her head, “no. As to all things else, so-so.”

  “You flatter me, madame.”

  “Monsieur, it is you who flatter me in living here.”

  Certain fishy gasps on Mr. The Englishman’s part, denoting that he was about to resume his subject under difficulties, Madame Bouclet observed him closely, and whisked up her delicate line and rod again with triumphant success.

  “O no, monsieur, certainly not. The wife of the barber is not cruel to the poor child, but she is careless. Her health is delicate, and she sits all day, looking out at window. Consequently, when the Corporal first came, the poor little Bebelle was much neglected.”

  “It is a curious—” began Mr. The Englishman.

  “Name? That Bebelle? Again you are right, monsieur. But it is a playful name for Gabrielle.”

  “And so the child is a mere fancy of the Corporal’s?” said Mr. The Englishman, in a gruffly disparaging tone of voice.

  “Eh, well!” returned Madame Bouclet, with a pleading shrug: “one must love something.
Human nature is weak.”

  (“Devilish weak,” muttered the Englishman, in his own language.)

  “And the Corporal,” pursued Madame Bouclet, “being billeted at the barber’s—where he will probably remain a long time, for he is attached to the General—and finding the poor unowned child in need of being loved, and finding himself in need of loving—why, there you have it all, you see!”

  Mr. The Englishman accepted this interpretation of the matter with an indifferent grace, and observed to himself, in an injured manner, when he was again alone: “I shouldn’t mind it so much, if these people were not such a”—National Participled—“sentimental people!”

  There was a Cemetery outside the town, and it happened ill for the reputation of the Vaubanois, in this sentimental connection, that he took a walk there that same afternoon. To be sure there were some wonderful things in it (from the Englishman’s point of view), and of a certainty in all Britain you would have found nothing like it. Not to mention the fanciful flourishes of hearts and crosses in wood and iron, that were planted all over the place, making it look very like a Firework-ground, where a most splendid pyrotechnic display might be expected after dark, there were so many wreaths upon the graves, embroidered, as it might be, “To my mother,” “To my daughter,” “To my father,” “To my brother,” “To my sister,” “To my friend,” and those many wreaths were in so many stages of elaboration and decay, from the wreath of yesterday, all fresh colour and bright beads, to the wreath of last year, a poor mouldering wisp of straw! There were so many little gardens and grottos made upon graves, in so many tastes, with plants and shells and plaster figures and porcelain pitchers, and so many odds and ends! There were so many tributes of remembrance hanging up, not to be discriminated by the closest inspection from little round waiters, whereon were depicted in glowing lines either a lady or a gentleman with a white pocket-handkerchief out of all proportion, leaning, in a state of the most faultless mourning and most profound affliction, on the most architectural and gorgeous urn! There were so many surviving wives who had put their names on the tombs of their deceased husbands, with a blank for the date of their own departure from this weary world; and there were so many surviving husbands who had rendered the same homage to their deceased wives; and out of the number there must have been so many who had long ago married again! In fine, there was so much in the place that would have seemed more frippery to a stranger, save for the consideration that the lightest paper flower that lay upon the poorest heap of earth was never touched by a rude hand, but perished there, a sacred thing!

  “Nothing of the solemnity of Death here,” Mr. The Englishman had been going to say, when this last consideration touched him with a mild appeal, and on the whole he walked out without saying it. “But these people are,” he insisted, by way of compensation, when he was well outside the gate, “they are so”—Participled—“sentimental!”

  His way back lay by the military gymnasium-ground. And there he passed the Corporal glibly instructing young soldiers how to swing themselves over rapid and deep watercourses on their way to Glory, by means of a rope, and himself deftly plunging off a platform, and flying a hundred feet or two, as an encouragement to them to begin. And there he also passed, perched on a crowning eminence (probably the Corporal’s careful hands), the small Bebelle, with her round eyes wide open, surveying the proceeding like a wondering sort of blue and white bird.

  “If that child was to die,” this was his reflection as he turned his back and went his way—“and it would almost serve the fellow right for making such a fool of himself—I suppose we should have him sticking up a wreath and a waiter in that fantastic burying-ground.”

  Nevertheless, after another early morning or two of looking out of window, he strolled down into the Place, when the Corporal and Bebelle were walking there, and touching his hat to the Corporal (an immense achievement), wished him Good-day.

  “Good-day, monsieur.”

  “This is a rather pretty child you have here,” said Mr. The Englishman, taking her chin in his hand, and looking down into her astonished blue eyes.

  “Monsieur, she is a very pretty child,” returned the Corporal, with a stress on his polite correction of the phrase.

  “And good?” said the Englishman.

  “And very good. Poor little thing!”

  “Hah!” The Englishman stooped down and patted her cheek, not without awkwardness, as if he were going too far in his conciliation. “And what is this medal round your neck, my little one?”

  Bebelle having no other reply on her lips than her chubby right fist, the Corporal offered his services as interpreter.

  “Monsieur demands, what is this, Bebelle?”

  “It is the Holy Virgin,” said Bebelle.

  “And who gave it you?” asked the Englishman.

  “Théophile.”

  “And who is Théophile?”

  Bebelle broke into a laugh, laughed merrily and heartily, clapped her chubby hands, and beat her little feet on the stone pavement of the Place.

  “He doesn’t know Théophile! Why, he doesn’t know any one! He doesn’t know anything!” Then, sensible of a small solecism in her manners, Bebelle twisted her right hand in a leg of the Corporal’s Bloomer trousers, and, laying her cheek against the place, kissed it.

  “Monsieur Théophile, I believe?” said the Englishman to the Corporal.

  “It is I, monsieur.”

  “Permit me.” Mr. The Englishman shook him heartily by the hand and turned away. But he took it mighty ill that old Monsieur Mutuel in his patch of sunlight, upon whom he came as he turned, should pull off his cap to him with a look of pleased approval. And he muttered, in his own tongue, as he returned the salutation, “Well, walnut-shell! And what business is it of yours?”

  Mr. The Englishman went on for many weeks passing but disturbed evenings and worse nights, and constantly experiencing that those aforesaid windows in the houses of Memory and Mercy rattled after dark, and that he had very imperfectly nailed them up. Likewise, he went on for many weeks daily improving the acquaintance of the Corporal and Bebelle. That is to say, he took Bebelle by the chin, and the Corporal by the hand, and offered Bebelle sous and the Corporal cigars, and even got the length of changing pipes with the Corporal and kissing Bebelle. But he did it all in a shamefaced way, and always took it extremely ill that Monsieur Mutuel in his patch of sunlight should note what he did. Whenever that seemed to be the case, he always growled in his own tongue, “There you are again, walnut-shell! What business is it of yours?”

  In a word, it had become the occupation of Mr. The Englishman’s life to look after the Corporal and little Bebelle, and to resent old Monsieur Mutuel’s looking after him. An occupation only varied by a fire in the town one windy night, and much passing of water-buckets from hand to hand (in which the Englishman rendered good service), and much beating of drums—when all of a sudden the Corporal disappeared.

  Next, all of a sudden, Bebelle disappeared.

  She had been visible a few days later than the Corporal—sadly deteriorated as to washing and brushing—but she had not spoken when addressed by Mr. The Englishman, and had looked scared and had run away. And now it would seem that she had run away for good. And there lay the Great Place under the windows, bare and barren.

  In his shamefaced and constrained way, Mr. The Englishman asked no question of any one, but watched from his front windows and watched from his back windows, and lingered about the Place, and peeped in at the Barber’s shop, and did all this and much more with a whistling and tune-humming pretence of not missing anything, until one afternoon when Monsieur Mutuel’s patch of sunlight was in shadow, and when, according to all rule and precedent, he had no right whatever to bring his red ribbon out of doors, behold here he was, advancing with his cap already in his hand twelve paces off!

  Mr. The Englishman had got as far into his usual objurgation as, “What bu-si—” when he checked himself.

  “Ah, it is sad, it is sad!
Hélas, it is unhappy, it is sad!” Thus old Monsieur Mutuel, shaking his gray head.

  “What busin—at least, I would say, what do you mean, Monsieur Mutuel?”

  “Our Corporal. Hélas, our dear Corporal!”

  “What has happened to him?”

  “You have not heard?”

  “No.”

  “At the fire. But he was so brave, so ready. Ah, too brave, too ready!”

  “May the Devil carry you away!” the Englishman broke in impatiently; “I beg your pardon—I mean me—I am not accustomed to speak French—go on, will you?”

  “And a falling beam—”

  “Good God!” exclaimed the Englishman. “It was a private soldier who was killed?”

  “No. A Corporal, the same Corporal, our dear Corporal. Beloved by all his comrades. The funeral ceremony was touching—penetrating. Monsieur The Englishman, your eyes fill with tears.”

  “What bu-si—”

  “Monsieur The Englishman, I honour those emotions. I salute you with profound respect. I will not obtrude myself upon your noble heart.”

  Monsieur Mutuel—a gentleman in every thread of his cloudy linen, under whose wrinkled hand every grain in the quarter of an ounce of poor snuff in his poor little tin box became a gentleman’s property—Monsieur Mutuel passed on, with his cap in his hand.

  “I little thought,” said the Englishman, after walking for several minutes, and more than once blowing his nose, “when I was looking round that cemetery—I’ll go there!”