David Copperfield
her prayer-book, and makes my side ache.
Yes, and again, as we walk home, I note some neighbours looking at my
mother and at me, and whispering. Again, as the three go on arm-in-arm,
and I linger behind alone, I follow some of those looks, and wonder if
my mother’s step be really not so light as I have seen it, and if the
gaiety of her beauty be really almost worried away. Again, I wonder
whether any of the neighbours call to mind, as I do, how we used to
walk home together, she and I; and I wonder stupidly about that, all the
dreary dismal day.
There had been some talk on occasions of my going to boarding-school.
Mr. and Miss Murdstone had originated it, and my mother had of course
agreed with them. Nothing, however, was concluded on the subject yet.
In the meantime, I learnt lessons at home. Shall I ever forget those
lessons! They were presided over nominally by my mother, but really by
Mr. Murdstone and his sister, who were always present, and found them
a favourable occasion for giving my mother lessons in that miscalled
firmness, which was the bane of both our lives. I believe I was kept
at home for that purpose. I had been apt enough to learn, and willing
enough, when my mother and I had lived alone together. I can faintly
remember learning the alphabet at her knee. To this day, when I look
upon the fat black letters in the primer, the puzzling novelty of their
shapes, and the easy good-nature of O and Q and S, seem to present
themselves again before me as they used to do. But they recall no
feeling of disgust or reluctance. On the contrary, I seem to have walked
along a path of flowers as far as the crocodile-book, and to have been
cheered by the gentleness of my mother’s voice and manner all the
way. But these solemn lessons which succeeded those, I remember as the
death-blow of my peace, and a grievous daily drudgery and misery. They
were very long, very numerous, very hard--perfectly unintelligible,
some of them, to me--and I was generally as much bewildered by them as I
believe my poor mother was herself.
Let me remember how it used to be, and bring one morning back again.
I come into the second-best parlour after breakfast, with my books,
and an exercise-book, and a slate. My mother is ready for me at her
writing-desk, but not half so ready as Mr. Murdstone in his easy-chair
by the window (though he pretends to be reading a book), or as Miss
Murdstone, sitting near my mother stringing steel beads. The very sight
of these two has such an influence over me, that I begin to feel the
words I have been at infinite pains to get into my head, all sliding
away, and going I don’t know where. I wonder where they do go, by the
by?
I hand the first book to my mother. Perhaps it is a grammar, perhaps a
history, or geography. I take a last drowning look at the page as I give
it into her hand, and start off aloud at a racing pace while I have
got it fresh. I trip over a word. Mr. Murdstone looks up. I trip
over another word. Miss Murdstone looks up. I redden, tumble over
half-a-dozen words, and stop. I think my mother would show me the book
if she dared, but she does not dare, and she says softly:
‘Oh, Davy, Davy!’
‘Now, Clara,’ says Mr. Murdstone, ‘be firm with the boy. Don’t say, “Oh,
Davy, Davy!” That’s childish. He knows his lesson, or he does not know
it.’
‘He does NOT know it,’ Miss Murdstone interposes awfully.
‘I am really afraid he does not,’ says my mother.
‘Then, you see, Clara,’ returns Miss Murdstone, ‘you should just give
him the book back, and make him know it.’
‘Yes, certainly,’ says my mother; ‘that is what I intend to do, my dear
Jane. Now, Davy, try once more, and don’t be stupid.’
I obey the first clause of the injunction by trying once more, but am
not so successful with the second, for I am very stupid. I tumble down
before I get to the old place, at a point where I was all right before,
and stop to think. But I can’t think about the lesson. I think of the
number of yards of net in Miss Murdstone’s cap, or of the price of Mr.
Murdstone’s dressing-gown, or any such ridiculous problem that I have
no business with, and don’t want to have anything at all to do with. Mr.
Murdstone makes a movement of impatience which I have been expecting
for a long time. Miss Murdstone does the same. My mother glances
submissively at them, shuts the book, and lays it by as an arrear to be
worked out when my other tasks are done.
There is a pile of these arrears very soon, and it swells like a rolling
snowball. The bigger it gets, the more stupid I get. The case is so
hopeless, and I feel that I am wallowing in such a bog of nonsense, that
I give up all idea of getting out, and abandon myself to my fate. The
despairing way in which my mother and I look at each other, as I blunder
on, is truly melancholy. But the greatest effect in these miserable
lessons is when my mother (thinking nobody is observing her) tries
to give me the cue by the motion of her lips. At that instant, Miss
Murdstone, who has been lying in wait for nothing else all along, says
in a deep warning voice:
‘Clara!’
My mother starts, colours, and smiles faintly. Mr. Murdstone comes out
of his chair, takes the book, throws it at me or boxes my ears with it,
and turns me out of the room by the shoulders.
Even when the lessons are done, the worst is yet to happen, in the shape
of an appalling sum. This is invented for me, and delivered to me orally
by Mr. Murdstone, and begins, ‘If I go into a cheesemonger’s shop, and
buy five thousand double-Gloucester cheeses at fourpence-halfpenny each,
present payment’--at which I see Miss Murdstone secretly overjoyed.
I pore over these cheeses without any result or enlightenment until
dinner-time, when, having made a Mulatto of myself by getting the dirt
of the slate into the pores of my skin, I have a slice of bread to help
me out with the cheeses, and am considered in disgrace for the rest of
the evening.
It seems to me, at this distance of time, as if my unfortunate studies
generally took this course. I could have done very well if I had been
without the Murdstones; but the influence of the Murdstones upon me was
like the fascination of two snakes on a wretched young bird. Even when
I did get through the morning with tolerable credit, there was not
much gained but dinner; for Miss Murdstone never could endure to see me
untasked, and if I rashly made any show of being unemployed, called her
brother’s attention to me by saying, ‘Clara, my dear, there’s nothing
like work--give your boy an exercise’; which caused me to be clapped
down to some new labour, there and then. As to any recreation with other
children of my age, I had very little of that; for the gloomy theology
of the Murdstones made all children out to be a swarm of little vipers
(though there WAS a child once set in the midst of the Disciples), and
held that they contaminated one another.
The natural result of this treatment, continued, I suppose, for some six
months or more, was to make me sullen, dull, and dogged. I was not
made the less so by my sense of being daily more and more shut out and
alienated from my mother. I believe I should have been almost stupefied
but for one circumstance.
It was this. My father had left a small collection of books in a little
room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which
nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room,
Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the
Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came
out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and
my hope of something beyond that place and time,--they, and the Arabian
Nights, and the Tales of the Genii,--and did me no harm; for whatever
harm was in some of them was not there for me; I knew nothing of it. It
is astonishing to me now, how I found time, in the midst of my porings
and blunderings over heavier themes, to read those books as I did. It
is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my
small troubles (which were great troubles to me), by impersonating my
favourite characters in them--as I did--and by putting Mr. and Miss
Murdstone into all the bad ones--which I did too. I have been Tom Jones
(a child’s Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together. I have
sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch, I
verily believe. I had a greedy relish for a few volumes of Voyages and
Travels--I forget what, now--that were on those shelves; and for days
and days I can remember to have gone about my region of our house,
armed with the centre-piece out of an old set of boot-trees--the perfect
realization of Captain Somebody, of the Royal British Navy, in danger of
being beset by savages, and resolved to sell his life at a great price.
The Captain never lost dignity, from having his ears boxed with the
Latin Grammar. I did; but the Captain was a Captain and a hero, in
despite of all the grammars of all the languages in the world, dead or
alive.
This was my only and my constant comfort. When I think of it, the
picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play
in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life.
Every barn in the neighbourhood, every stone in the church, and every
foot of the churchyard, had some association of its own, in my mind,
connected with these books, and stood for some locality made famous in
them. I have seen Tom Pipes go climbing up the church-steeple; I have
watched Strap, with the knapsack on his back, stopping to rest himself
upon the wicket-gate; and I know that Commodore Trunnion held that club
with Mr. Pickle, in the parlour of our little village alehouse.
The reader now understands, as well as I do, what I was when I came to
that point of my youthful history to which I am now coming again.
One morning when I went into the parlour with my books, I found my
mother looking anxious, Miss Murdstone looking firm, and Mr. Murdstone
binding something round the bottom of a cane--a lithe and limber cane,
which he left off binding when I came in, and poised and switched in the
air.
‘I tell you, Clara,’ said Mr. Murdstone, ‘I have been often flogged
myself.’
‘To be sure; of course,’ said Miss Murdstone.
‘Certainly, my dear Jane,’ faltered my mother, meekly. ‘But--but do you
think it did Edward good?’
‘Do you think it did Edward harm, Clara?’ asked Mr. Murdstone, gravely.
‘That’s the point,’ said his sister.
To this my mother returned, ‘Certainly, my dear Jane,’ and said no more.
I felt apprehensive that I was personally interested in this dialogue,
and sought Mr. Murdstone’s eye as it lighted on mine.
‘Now, David,’ he said--and I saw that cast again as he said it--‘you
must be far more careful today than usual.’ He gave the cane another
poise, and another switch; and having finished his preparation of it,
laid it down beside him, with an impressive look, and took up his book.
This was a good freshener to my presence of mind, as a beginning. I felt
the words of my lessons slipping off, not one by one, or line by line,
but by the entire page; I tried to lay hold of them; but they seemed,
if I may so express it, to have put skates on, and to skim away from me
with a smoothness there was no checking.
We began badly, and went on worse. I had come in with an idea of
distinguishing myself rather, conceiving that I was very well prepared;
but it turned out to be quite a mistake. Book after book was added to
the heap of failures, Miss Murdstone being firmly watchful of us all the
time. And when we came at last to the five thousand cheeses (canes he
made it that day, I remember), my mother burst out crying.
‘Clara!’ said Miss Murdstone, in her warning voice.