The Charles Dickens Christmas Megapack Page 22

  “Not ugly enough,” said Tackleton.

  “Or for a fire-box either,” observed Caleb in deep contemplation, “what a model! Unscrew his head to put the matches in; turn him heels up’ards for the light; and what a fire-box for a gentleman’s mantel-shelf, just as he stands!”

  “Not half ugly enough,” said Tackleton. “Nothing in him at all. Come! Bring that box! All right now, I hope?”

  “Oh, quite gone! Quite gone!” said the little woman, waving him hurriedly away. “Good night!”

  “Good night!” said Tackleton. “Good night, John Peerybingle! Take care how you carry that box, Caleb. Let it fall, and I’ll murder you! Dark as pitch, and weather worse than ever, eh? Good night!”

  So, with another sharp look round the room, he went out at the door; followed by Caleb with the wedding-cake on his head.

  The Carrier had been so much astounded by his little wife, and so busily engaged in soothing and tending her, that he had scarcely been conscious of the Stranger’s presence until now, when he again stood there, their only guest.

  “He don’t belong to them, you see,” said John. “I must give him a hint to go.”

  “I beg your pardon, friend,” said the old gentleman, advancing to him; “the more so as I fear your wife has not been well; but the Attendant whom my infirmity,” he touched his ears, and shook his head, “renders almost indispensable, not having arrived, I fear there must be some mistake. The bad night which made the shelter of your comfortable cart (may I never have a worse!) so acceptable, is still as bad as ever. Would you, in your kindness, suffer me to rent a bed here?”

  “Yes, yes,” cried Dot. “Yes! Certainly!”

  “Oh!” said the Carrier, surprised by the rapidity of this consent. “Well! I don’t object; but still I’m not quite sure that—”

  “Hush!” she interrupted. “Dear John!”

  “Why, he’s stone deaf,” urged John.

  “I know he is, but— Yes, sir, certainly. Yes, certainly! I’ll make him up a bed directly, John.”

  As she hurried off to do it, the flutter of her spirits, and the agitation of her manner, were so strange, that the Carrier stood looking after her, quite confounded.

  “Did its mothers make it up a Beds, then!” cried Miss Slowboy to the Baby; “and did its hair grow brown and curly when its caps was lifted off, and frighten it, a precious Pets, a sitting by the fires!”

  With that unaccountable attraction of the mind to trifles, which is often incidental to a state of doubt and confusion, the Carrier, as he walked slowly to and fro, found himself mentally repeating even these absurd words, many times. So many times, that he got them by heart, and was still conning them over and over, like a lesson, when Tilly, after administering as much friction to the little bald head with her hand as she thought wholesome (according to the practice of nurses), had once more tied the Baby’s cap on.

  “And frighten it, a precious Pets, a sitting by the fires. What frightened Dot, I wonder?” mused the Carrier, pacing to and fro.

  He scouted, from his heart, the insinuations of the toy merchant, and yet they filled him with a vague, indefinite uneasiness. For Tackleton was quick and sly; and he had that painful sense, himself, of being a man of slow perception, that a broken hint was always worrying to him. He certainly had no intention in his mind of linking anything that Tackleton had said with the unusual conduct of his wife, but the two subjects of reflection came into his mind together, and he could not keep them asunder.

  The bed was soon made ready; and the visitor, declining all refreshment but a cup of tea, retired. Then, Dot—quite well again, she said, quite well again—arranged the great chair in the chimney-corner for her husband; filled his pipe and gave it him; and took her usual little stool beside him on the hearth.

  She always would sit on that little stool. I think she must have had a kind of notion that it was a coaxing, wheedling little stool.

  She was, out and out, the very best filler of a pipe, I should say, in the four quarters of the globe. To see her put that chubby little finger in the bowl, and then blow down the pipe to clear the tube, and, when she had done so, affect to think that there was really something in the tube, and blow a dozen times, and hold it to her eye like a telescope, with a most provoking twist in her capital little face, as she looked down it, was quite a brilliant thing. As to the tobacco, she was perfect mistress of the subject; and her lighting of the pipe, with a wisp of paper, when the Carrier had it in his mouth—going so very near his nose, and yet not scorching it—was Art, high Art.

  And the Cricket and the Kettle, turning up again, acknowledged it! The bright fire, blazing up again, acknowledged it! The little Mower on the clock, in his unheeded work, acknowledged it! The Carrier, in his smoothing forehead and expanding face, acknowledged it, the readiest of all.

  And as he soberly and thoughtfully puffed at his old pipe, and as the Dutch clock ticked, and as the red fire gleamed, and as the Cricket chirped, that Genius of his Hearth and Home (for such the Cricket was) came out, in fairy shape, into the room, and summoned many forms of Home about him. Dots of all ages and all sizes filled the chamber. Dots who were merry children, running on before him, gathering flowers in the fields; coy Dots, half shrinking from, half yielding to, the pleading of his own rough image; newly-married Dots, alighting at the door, and taking wondering possession of the household keys; motherly little Dots, attended by fictitious Slowboys, bearing babies to be christened; matronly Dots, still young and blooming, watching Dots of daughters, as they danced at rustic balls; fat Dots, encircled and beset by troops of rosy grandchildren; withered Dots, who leaned on sticks, and tottered as they crept along. Old Carriers, too, appeared with blind old Boxers lying at their feet; and newer carts with younger drivers (“Peerybingle Brothers” on the tilt); and sick old Carriers, tended by the gentlest hands; and graves of dead and gone old Carriers, green in the churchyard. And as the Cricket showed him all these things—he saw them plainly, though his eyes were fixed upon the fire—the Carrier’s heart grew light and happy, and he thanked his Household Gods with all his might, and cared no more for Gruff and Tackleton than you do.

  * * * *

  But what was that young figure of a man, which the same Fairy Cricket set so near Her stool, and which remained there, singly and alone? Why did it linger still, so near her, with its arm upon the chimney-piece, ever repeating “Married! and not to me!”

  Oh, Dot! Oh, failing Dot! There is no place for it in all your husband’s visions. Why has its shadow fallen on his hearth?

  CHIRP THE SECOND

  Caleb Plummer and his Blind Daughter lived all alone by themselves, as the Story Books say—and my blessing, with yours, to back it I hope, on the Story Books, for saying anything in this work-a-day world!—Caleb Plummer and his Blind Daughter lived all alone by themselves, in a little cracked nutshell of a wooden house, which was, in truth, no better than a pimple on the prominent red-brick nose of Gruff and Tackleton. The premises of Gruff and Tackleton were the great feature of the street; but you might have knocked down Caleb Plummer’s dwelling with a hammer or two, and carried off the pieces in a cart.

  If any one had done the dwelling-house of Caleb Plummer the honour to miss it after such an inroad, it would have been, no doubt, to commend its demolition as a vast improvement. It stuck to the premises of Gruff and Tackleton like a barnacle to a ship’s keel, or a snail to a door, or a little bunch of toadstools to the stem of a tree. But it was the germ from which the full-grown trunk of Gruff and Tackleton had sprung; and, under its crazy roof, the Gruff before last had, in a small way, made toys for a generation of old boys and girls, who had played with them, and found them out, and broken them, and gone to sleep.

  I have said that Caleb and his poor Blind Daughter lived here. I should have said that Caleb lived here, and his poor Blind Daughter somewhere else—in an enchanted home of Caleb’s furnishing, where scarcity and shabbiness were not, and trouble never entered. Caleb was no sorcerer; but in t
he only magic art that still remains to us, the magic of devoted, deathless love, Nature had been the mistress of his study; and, from her teaching, all the wonder came.

  The Blind Girl never knew that ceilings were discoloured, walls blotched and bare of plaster here and there, high crevices unstopped and widening every day, beams mouldering and tending downward. The Blind Girl never knew that iron was rusting, wood rotting, paper peeling off; the size, and shape, and true proportion of the dwelling, withering away. The Blind Girl never knew that ugly shapes of delf and earthenware were on the board; that sorrow and faint-heartedness were in the house; that Caleb’s scanty hairs were turning greyer and more grey before her sightless face. The Blind Girl never knew they had a master, cold, exacting, and uninterested—never knew that Tackleton was Tackleton, in short; but lived in the belief of an eccentric humorist, who loved to have his jest with them, and who, while he was the Guardian Angel of their lives, disdained to hear one word of thankfulness.

  And all was Caleb’s doing; all the doing of her simple father! But he, too, had a Cricket on his Hearth; and listening sadly to its music when the motherless Blind Child was very young that Spirit had inspired him with the thought that even her great deprivation might be almost changed into a blessing, and the girl made happy by these little means. For all the Cricket tribe are potent Spirits, even though the people who hold converse with them do not know it (which is frequently the case), and there are not in the unseen world voices more gentle and more true, that may be so implicitly relied on, or that are so certain to give none but tenderest counsel, as the Voices in which the Spirits of the Fireside and the Hearth address themselves to humankind.

  Caleb and his daughter were at work together in their usual working-room, which served them for their ordinary living-room as well; and a strange place it was. There were houses in it, finished and unfinished, for Dolls of all stations in life. Suburban tenements for Dolls of moderate means; kitchens and single apartments for Dolls of the lower classes; capital town residences for Dolls of high estate. Some of these establishments were already furnished according to estimate, with a view to the convenience of Dolls of limited income; others could be fitted on the most expensive scale, at a moment’s notice, from whole shelves of chairs and tables, sofas, bedsteads, and upholstery. The nobility and gentry and public in general, for whose accommodation these tenements were designed, lay here and there, in baskets, staring straight up at the ceiling; but in denoting their degrees in society, and confining them to their respective stations (which experience shows to be lamentably difficult in real life), the makers of these Dolls had far improved on Nature, who is often froward and perverse; for they, not resting on such arbitrary marks as satin, cotton print, and bits of rag, had superadded striking personal differences which allowed of no mistake. Thus, the Doll-lady of distinction had wax limbs of perfect symmetry; but only she and her compeers. The next grade in the social scale being made of leather, and the next of coarse linen stuff. As to the common people, they had just so many matches out of tinder-boxes for their arms and legs, and there they were—established in their sphere at once, beyond the possibility of getting out of it.

  There were various other samples of his handicraft besides Dolls in Caleb Plummer’s room. There were Noah’s arks, in which the Birds and Beasts were an uncommonly tight fit, I assure you; though they could be crammed in, anyhow, at the roof, and rattled and shaken into the smallest compass. By a bold poetical licence, most of these Noah’s arks had knockers on the doors; inconsistent appendages, perhaps, as suggestive of morning callers and a Postman, yet a pleasant finish to the outside of the building. There were scores of melancholy little carts, which, when the wheels went round, performed most doleful music. Many small fiddles, drums, and other instruments of torture; no end of cannon, shields, swords, spears, and guns. There were little tumblers in red breeches, incessantly swarming up high obstacles of red tape, and coming down, head first, on the other side; and there were innumerable old gentlemen of respectable, not to say venerable appearance, insanely flying over horizontal pegs, inserted, for the purpose, in their own street-doors. There were beasts of all sorts; horses, in particular, of every breed, from the spotted barrel on four pegs with a small tippet for a mane, to the thorough-bred rocker on his highest mettle. As it would have been hard to count the dozens upon dozens of grotesque figures that were ever ready to commit all sorts of absurdities on the turning of a handle, so it would have been no easy task to mention any human folly, vice, or weakness that had not its type, immediate or remote, in Caleb Plummer’s room. And not in an exaggerated form, for very little handles will move men and women to as strange performances as any Toy was ever made to undertake.

  In the midst of all these objects, Caleb and his daughter sat at work. The Blind Girl busy as a Doll’s dressmaker; Caleb painting and glazing the four-pair front of a desirable family mansion.

  The care imprinted in the lines of Caleb’s face, and his absorbed and dreamy manner, which would have sat well on some alchemist or abstruse student, were at first sight an odd contrast to his occupation and the trivialities about him. But trivial things, invented and pursued for bread, become very serious matters of fact: and, apart from this consideration, I am not at all prepared to say, myself, that if Caleb had been a Lord Chamberlain, or a Member of Parliament, or a lawyer, or even a great speculator, he would have dealt in toys one whit less whimsical, while I have a very great doubt whether they would have been as harmless.

  “So you were out in the rain last night, father, in your beautiful new great-coat,” said Caleb’s daughter.

  “In my beautiful new great-coat,” answered Caleb, glancing towards a clothes-line in the room, on which the sackcloth garment previously described was carefully hung up to dry.

  “How glad I am you bought it, father!”

  “And of such a tailor too,” said Caleb. “Quite a fashionable tailor. It’s too good for me.”

  The Blind Girl rested from her work, and laughed with delight. “Too good, father! What can be too good for you?”

  “I’m half ashamed to wear it, though,” said Caleb, watching the effect of what he said upon her brightening face, “upon my word! When I hear the boys and people say behind me, ‘Halloa! Here’s a swell!’ I don’t know which way to look. And when the beggar wouldn’t go away last night; and, when I said I was a very common man, said, ‘No, your Honour! Bless your Honour, don’t say that!’ I was quite ashamed. I really felt as if I hadn’t a right to wear it.”

  Happy Blind Girl! How merry she was in her exultation!

  “I see you, father,” she said, clasping her hands, “as plainly as if I had the eyes I never want when you are with me. A blue coat—”

  “Bright blue,” said Caleb.

  “Yes, yes! Bright blue!” exclaimed the girl, turning up her radiant face; “the colour I can just remember in the blessed sky! You told me it was blue before! A bright blue coat—”

  “Made loose to the figure,” suggested Caleb.

  “Yes! loose to the figure!” cried the Blind Girl, laughing heartily; “and in it, you, dear father, with your merry eye, your smiling face, your free step, and your dark hair—looking so young and handsome!”

  “Halloa! Halloa!” said Caleb. “I shall be vain presently!”

  “I think you are already,” cried the Blind Girl, pointing at him in her glee. “I know you, father! Ha, ha, ha! I’ve found you out, you see!”

  How different the picture in her mind, from Caleb, as he sat observing her! She had spoken of his free step. She was right in that. For years and years he had never once crossed that threshold at his own slow pace, but with a footfall counterfeited for her ear; and never had he, when his heart was heaviest, forgotten the light tread that was to render hers so cheerful and courageous!

  Heaven knows! But I think Caleb’s vague bewilderment of manner may have half originated in his having confused himself about himself and everything around him, for the love of his Blind Daughter.
How could the little man be otherwise than bewildered, after labouring for so many years to destroy his own identity, and that of all the objects that had any bearing on it?

  “There we are,” said Caleb, falling back a pace or two to form the better judgment of his work; “as near the real thing as sixpenn’orth of halfpence is to sixpence. What a pity that the whole front of the house opens at once! If there was only a staircase in it now, and regular doors to the rooms to go in at! But that’s the worst of my calling, I’m always deluding myself, and swindling myself.”

  “You are speaking quite softly. You are not tired, father?”

  “Tired!” echoed Caleb with a great burst of animation. “What should tire me, Bertha? I was never tired. What does it mean?”

  To give the greater force to his words, he checked himself in an involuntary imitation of two half-length stretching and yawning figures on the mantel-shelf, who were represented as in one eternal state of weariness from the waist upwards; and hummed a fragment of a song. It was a Bacchanalian song, something about a Sparkling Bowl. He sang it with an assumption of a Devil-may-care voice, that made his face a thousand times more meagre and more thoughtful than ever.

  “What! You’re singing, are you?” said Tackleton, putting his head in at the door. “Go it! I can’t sing.”

  Nobody would have suspected him of it. He hadn’t what is generally termed a singing face, by any means.

  “I can’t afford to sing,” said Tackleton. “I’m glad you can. I hope you can afford to work too. Hardly time for both, I should think?”

  “If you could only see him, Bertha, how he’s winking at me!” whispered Caleb. “Such a man to joke! You’d think, if you didn’t know him, he was in earnest—wouldn’t you now?”

  The Blind Girl smiled and nodded.

  “The bird that can sing and won’t sing must be made to sing, they say,” grumbled Tackleton. “What about the owl that can’t sing, and oughtn’t to sing, and will sing; is there anything that he should be made to do?”