Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens (best novels for students .TXT) 📗

arrived.” How the Circumlocution Office, being reminded that my lords had arrived at no decision, shelved the business. How there had been a final interview with the head of the Circumlocution Office that very morning, and how the Brazen Head had spoken, and had been, upon the whole, and under all the circumstances, and looking at it from the various points of view, of opinion that one of two courses was to be pursued in respect of the business: that was to say, either to leave it alone for evermore, or to begin it all over again.

“Upon which,” said Mr. Meagles, “as a practical man, I then and there, in that presence, took Doyce by the collar, and told him it was plain to me that he was an infamous rascal and treasonable disturber of the government peace, and took him away. I brought him out of the office door by the collar, that the very porter might know I was a practical man who appreciated the official estimate of such characters; and here we are!”

If that airy young Barnacle had been there, he would have frankly told them perhaps that the Circumlocution Office had achieved its function. That what the Barnacles had to do, was to stick on to the national ship as long as they could. That to trim the ship, lighten the ship, clean the ship, would be to knock them off; that they could but be knocked off once; and that if the ship went down with them yet sticking to it, that was the ship’s look out, and not theirs.

“There!” said Mr. Meagles, “now you know all about Doyce. Except, which I own does not improve my state of mind, that even now you don’t hear him complain.”

“You must have great patience,” said Arthur Clennam, looking at him with some wonder, “great forbearance.”

“No,” he returned, “I don’t know that I have more than another man.”

“By the Lord, you have more than I have, though!” cried Mr. Meagles.

Doyce smiled, as he said to Clennam, “You see, my experience of these things does not begin with myself. It has been in my way to know a little about them from time to time. Mine is not a particular case. I am not worse used than a hundred others who have put themselves in the same position⁠—than all the others, I was going to say.”

“I don’t know that I should find that a consolation, if it were my case; but I am very glad that you do.”

“Understand me! I don’t say,” he replied in his steady, planning way, and looking into the distance before him as if his grey eye were measuring it, “that it’s recompense for a man’s toil and hope; but it’s a certain sort of relief to know that I might have counted on this.”

He spoke in that quiet deliberate manner, and in that undertone, which is often observable in mechanics who consider and adjust with great nicety. It belonged to him like his suppleness of thumb, or his peculiar way of tilting up his hat at the back every now and then, as if he were contemplating some half-finished work of his hand and thinking about it.

“Disappointed?” he went on, as he walked between them under the trees. “Yes. No doubt I am disappointed. Hurt? Yes. No doubt I am hurt. That’s only natural. But what I mean when I say that people who put themselves in the same position are mostly used in the same way⁠—”

“In England,” said Mr. Meagles.

“Oh! of course I mean in England. When they take their inventions into foreign countries, that’s quite different. And that’s the reason why so many go there.”

Mr. Meagles very hot indeed again.

“What I mean is, that however this comes to be the regular way of our government, it is its regular way. Have you ever heard of any projector or inventor who failed to find it all but inaccessible, and whom it did not discourage and ill-treat?”

“I cannot say that I ever have.”

“Have you ever known it to be beforehand in the adoption of any useful thing? Ever known it to set an example of any useful kind?”

“I am a good deal older than my friend here,” said Mr. Meagles, “and I’ll answer that. Never.”

“But we all three have known, I expect,” said the inventor, “a pretty many cases of its fixed determination to be miles upon miles, and years upon years, behind the rest of us; and of its being found out persisting in the use of things long superseded, even after the better things were well known and generally taken up?”

They all agreed upon that.

“Well then,” said Doyce, with a sigh, “as I know what such a metal will do at such a temperature, and such a body under such a pressure, so I may know (if I will only consider), how these great lords and gentlemen will certainly deal with such a matter as mine. I have no right to be surprised, with a head upon my shoulders, and memory in it, that I fall into the ranks with all who came before me. I ought to have let it alone. I have had warning enough, I am sure.”

With that he put up his spectacle-case, and said to Arthur, “If I don’t complain, Mr. Clennam, I can feel gratitude; and I assure you that I feel it towards our mutual friend. Many’s the day, and many’s the way in which he has backed me.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Mr. Meagles.

Arthur could not but glance at Daniel Doyce in the ensuing silence. Though it was evidently in the grain of his character, and of his respect for his own case, that he should abstain from idle murmuring, it was evident that he had grown the older, the sterner, and the poorer, for his long endeavour. He could not but think what a blessed thing it would have been for this man, if he had taken a lesson from the gentlemen who were so kind as to take a nation’s affairs in