The Mystery of Edwin Drood - Charles Dickens (crime books to read txt) 📗

common stair; and he held some not empty cellarage at the bottom of the common stair. Three hundred days in the year, at least, he crossed over to the hotel in Furnival’s Inn for his dinner, and after dinner crossed back again, to make the most of these simplicities until it should become broad business day once more, with P. J. T., date seventeen-forty-seven.

As Mr. Grewgious sat and wrote by his fire that afternoon, so did the clerk of Mr. Grewgious sit and write by HIS fire. A pale, puffy-faced, dark-haired person of thirty, with big dark eyes that wholly wanted lustre, and a dissatisfied doughy complexion, that seemed to ask to be sent to the baker’s, this attendant was a mysterious being, possessed of some strange power over Mr. Grewgious. As though he had been called into existence, like a fabulous Familiar, by a magic spell which had failed when required to dismiss him, he stuck tight to Mr. Grewgious’s stool, although Mr. Grewgious’s comfort and convenience would manifestly have been advanced by dispossessing him. A gloomy person with tangled locks, and a general air of having been reared under the shadow of that baleful tree of Java which has given shelter to more lies than the whole botanical kingdom, Mr. Grewgious, nevertheless, treated him with unaccountable consideration.

‘Now, Bazzard,’ said Mr. Grewgious, on the entrance of his clerk: looking up from his papers as he arranged them for the night: ‘what is in the wind besides fog?’

‘Mr. Drood,’ said Bazzard.

‘What of him?’

‘Has called,’ said Bazzard.

‘You might have shown him in.’

‘I am doing it,’ said Bazzard.

The visitor came in accordingly.

‘Dear me!’ said Mr. Grewgious, looking round his pair of office candles. ‘I thought you had called and merely left your name and gone. How do you do, Mr. Edwin? Dear me, you’re choking!’

‘It’s this fog,’ returned Edwin; ‘and it makes my eyes smart, like Cayenne pepper.’

‘Is it really so bad as that? Pray undo your wrappers. It’s fortunate I have so good a fire; but Mr. Bazzard has taken care of me.’

‘No I haven’t,’ said Mr. Bazzard at the door.

‘Ah! then it follows that I must have taken care of myself without observing it,’ said Mr. Grewgious. ‘Pray be seated in my chair. No. I beg! Coming out of such an atmosphere, in MY chair.’

Edwin took the easy-chair in the corner; and the fog he had brought in with him, and the fog he took off with his greatcoat and neck-shawl, was speedily licked up by the eager fire.

‘I look,’ said Edwin, smiling, ‘as if I had come to stop.’

‘—By the by,’ cried Mr. Grewgious; ‘excuse my interrupting you; do stop. The fog may clear in an hour or two. We can have dinner in from just across Holborn. You had better take your Cayenne pepper here than outside; pray stop and dine.’

‘You are very kind,’ said Edwin, glancing about him as though attracted by the notion of a new and relishing sort of gipsy-party.

‘Not at all,’ said Mr. Grewgious; ‘YOU are very kind to join issue with a bachelor in chambers, and take pot-luck. And I’ll ask,’ said Mr. Grewgious, dropping his voice, and speaking with a twinkling eye, as if inspired with a bright thought: ‘I’ll ask Bazzard. He mightn’t like it else.—Bazzard!’

Bazzard reappeared.

‘Dine presently with Mr. Drood and me.’

‘If I am ordered to dine, of course I will, sir,’ was the gloomy answer.

‘Save the man!’ cried Mr. Grewgious. ‘You’re not ordered; you’re invited.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Bazzard; ‘in that case I don’t care if I do.’

‘That’s arranged. And perhaps you wouldn’t mind,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘stepping over to the hotel in Furnival’s, and asking them to send in materials for laying the cloth. For dinner we’ll have a tureen of the hottest and strongest soup available, and we’ll have the best made-dish that can be recommended, and we’ll have a joint (such as a haunch of mutton), and we’ll have a goose, or a turkey, or any little stuffed thing of that sort that may happen to be in the bill of fare—in short, we’ll have whatever there is on hand.’

These liberal directions Mr. Grewgious issued with his usual air of reading an inventory, or repeating a lesson, or doing anything else by rote. Bazzard, after drawing out the round table, withdrew to execute them.

‘I was a little delicate, you see,’ said Mr. Grewgious, in a lower tone, after his clerk’s departure, ‘about employing him in the foraging or commissariat department. Because he mightn’t like it.’

‘He seems to have his own way, sir,’ remarked Edwin.

‘His own way?’ returned Mr. Grewgious. ‘O dear no! Poor fellow, you quite mistake him. If he had his own way, he wouldn’t be here.’

‘I wonder where he would be!’ Edwin thought. But he only thought it, because Mr. Grewgious came and stood himself with his back to the other corner of the fire, and his shoulder-blades against the chimneypiece, and collected his skirts for easy conversation.

‘I take it, without having the gift of prophecy, that you have done me the favour of looking in to mention that you are going down yonder—where I can tell you, you are expected—and to offer to execute any little commission from me to my charming ward, and perhaps to sharpen me up a bit in any proceedings? Eh, Mr. Edwin?’

‘I called, sir, before going down, as an act of attention.’

‘Of attention!’ said Mr. Grewgious. ‘Ah! of course, not of impatience?’

‘Impatience, sir?’

Mr. Grewgious had meant to be arch—not that he in the remotest degree expressed that meaning—and had brought himself into scarcely supportable proximity with the fire, as if to burn the fullest effect of his archness into himself, as other subtle impressions are burnt into hard metals. But his archness suddenly flying before the composed face and manner of his visitor, and only the fire remaining, he started and rubbed himself.

‘I have lately been down yonder,’ said Mr. Grewgious, rearranging his skirts; ‘and that was what I referred to, when I said I could tell you you are expected.’

‘Indeed, sir! Yes; I knew that Pussy was looking out for me.’

‘Do you keep a cat down there?’ asked Mr. Grewgious.

Edwin coloured a little as he explained: ‘I call Rosa Pussy.’

‘O, really,’ said Mr. Grewgious, smoothing down his head; ‘that’s very affable.’

Edwin glanced at his face, uncertain whether or no he seriously objected to the appellation. But Edwin might as well have glanced at the face of a clock.

‘A pet name, sir,’ he explained again.

‘Umps,’ said Mr. Grewgious, with a nod. But with such an extraordinary compromise between an unqualified assent and a qualified dissent, that his visitor was much disconcerted.

‘Did PRosa—’ Edwin began by way of recovering himself.

‘PRosa?’ repeated Mr. Grewgious.

‘I was going to say Pussy, and changed my mind;—did she tell you anything about the Landlesses?’

‘No,’ said Mr. Grewgious. ‘What is the Landlesses? An estate? A villa? A farm?’

‘A brother and sister. The sister is at the Nuns’ House, and has become a great friend of P—’

‘PRosa’s,’ Mr. Grewgious struck in, with a fixed face.

‘She is a strikingly handsome girl, sir, and I thought she might have been described to you, or presented to you perhaps?’

‘Neither,’ said Mr. Grewgious. ‘But here is Bazzard.’

Bazzard returned, accompanied by two waiters—an immovable waiter, and a flying waiter; and the three brought in with them as much fog as gave a new roar to the fire. The flying waiter, who had brought everything on his shoulders, laid the cloth with amazing rapidity and dexterity; while the immovable waiter, who had brought nothing, found fault with him. The flying waiter then highly polished all the glasses he had brought, and the immovable waiter looked through them. The flying waiter then flew across Holborn for the soup, and flew back again, and then took another flight for the made-dish, and flew back again, and then took another flight for the joint and poultry, and flew back again, and between whiles took supplementary flights for a great variety of articles, as it was discovered from time to time that the immovable waiter had forgotten them all. But let the flying waiter cleave the air as he might, he was always reproached on his return by the immovable waiter for bringing fog with him, and being out of breath. At the conclusion of the repast, by which time the flying waiter was severely blown, the immovable waiter gathered up the tablecloth under his arm with a grand air, and having sternly (not to say with indignation) looked on at the flying waiter while he set the clean glasses round, directed a valedictory glance towards Mr. Grewgious, conveying: ‘Let it be clearly understood between us that the reward is mine, and that Nil is the claim of this slave,’ and pushed the flying waiter before him out of the room.

It was like a highly-finished miniature painting representing My Lords of the Circumlocution Department, Commandership-in-Chief of any sort, Government. It was quite an edifying little picture to be hung on the line in the National Gallery.

As the fog had been the proximate cause of this sumptuous repast, so the fog served for its general sauce. To hear the out-door clerks sneezing, wheezing, and beating their feet on the gravel was a zest far surpassing Doctor Kitchener’s. To bid, with a shiver, the unfortunate flying waiter shut the door before he had opened it, was a condiment of a profounder flavour than Harvey. And here let it be noticed, parenthetically, that the leg of this young man, in its application to the door, evinced the finest sense of touch: always preceding himself and tray (with something of an angling air about it), by some seconds: and always lingering after he and the tray had disappeared, like Macbeth’s leg when accompanying him off the stage with reluctance to the assassination of Duncan.

The host had gone below to the cellar, and had brought up bottles of ruby, straw-coloured, and golden drinks, which had ripened long ago in lands where no fogs are, and had since lain slumbering in the shade. Sparkling and tingling after so long a nap, they pushed at their corks to help the corkscrew (like prisoners helping rioters to force their gates), and danced out gaily. If P. J. T. in seventeen-forty-seven, or in any other year of his period, drank such wines—then, for a certainty, P. J. T. was Pretty Jolly Too.

Externally, Mr. Grewgious showed no signs of being mellowed by these glowing vintages. Instead of his drinking them, they might have been poured over him in his high-dried snuff form, and run to waste, for any lights and shades they caused to flicker over his face. Neither was his manner influenced. But, in his wooden way, he had observant eyes for Edwin; and when at the end of dinner, he motioned Edwin back to his own easy-chair in the fireside corner, and Edwin sank luxuriously into it after very brief remonstrance, Mr. Grewgious, as he turned his seat round towards the fire too, and smoothed his head and face, might have been seen looking at his visitor between his smoothing fingers.

‘Bazzard!’ said Mr. Grewgious, suddenly turning to him.

‘I follow you, sir,’ returned Bazzard; who had done his work of consuming meat and drink in a workmanlike manner, though mostly in speechlessness.

‘I drink to you, Bazzard; Mr. Edwin, success to Mr. Bazzard!’

‘Success to Mr. Bazzard!’ echoed Edwin, with a totally unfounded appearance of enthusiasm, and with the unspoken addition: ‘What in, I wonder!’

‘And May!’ pursued Mr. Grewgious—‘I am not at liberty to be definite—May!—my conversational powers are so very limited that I know I shall not come well out of this—May!—it ought to be put