Martin Chuzzlewit
Painter in the bush, as ever was so riddled through and through as you
will be, I bet.’
‘What for?’ asked Mark.
‘We must be cracked up, sir,’ retorted Chollop, in a tone of menace.
‘You are not now in A despotic land. We are a model to the airth, and
must be jist cracked-up, I tell you.’
‘What! I speak too free, do I?’ cried Mark.
‘I have draw’d upon A man, and fired upon A man for less,’ said Chollop,
frowning. ‘I have know’d strong men obleeged to make themselves uncommon
skase for less. I have know’d men Lynched for less, and beaten into
punkin’-sarse for less, by an enlightened people. We are the intellect
and virtue of the airth, the cream of human natur’, and the flower
Of moral force. Our backs is easy ris. We must be cracked-up, or they
rises, and we snarls. We shows our teeth, I tell you, fierce. You’d
better crack us up, you had!’
After the delivery of this caution, Mr Chollop departed; with Ripper,
Tickler, and the revolvers, all ready for action on the shortest notice.
‘Come out from under the blanket, sir,’ said Mark, ‘he’s gone. What’s
this!’ he added softly; kneeling down to look into his partner’s
face, and taking his hot hand. ‘What’s come of all that chattering and
swaggering? He’s wandering in his mind to-night, and don’t know me!’
Martin indeed was dangerously ill; very near his death. He lay in that
state many days, during which time Mark’s poor friends, regardless of
themselves, attended him. Mark, fatigued in mind and body; working
all the day and sitting up at night; worn with hard living and the
unaccustomed toil of his new life; surrounded by dismal and discouraging
circumstances of every kind; never complained or yielded in the least
degree. If ever he had thought Martin selfish or inconsiderate, or had
deemed him energetic only by fits and starts, and then too passive for
their desperate fortunes, he now forgot it all. He remembered nothing
but the better qualities of his fellow-wanderer, and was devoted to him,
heart and hand.
Many weeks elapsed before Martin was strong enough to move about with
the help of a stick and Mark’s arm; and even then his recovery, for want
of wholesome air and proper nourishment, was very slow. He was yet in a
feeble and weak condition, when the misfourtune he had so much dreaded
fell upon them. Mark was taken ill.
Mark fought against it; but the malady fought harder, and his efforts
were in vain.
‘Floored for the present, sir,’ he said one morning, sinking back upon
his bed; ‘but jolly!’
Floored indeed, and by a heavy blow! As any one but Martin might have
known beforehand.
If Mark’s friends had been kind to Martin (and they had been very), they
were twenty times kinder to Mark. And now it was Martin’s turn to work,
and sit beside the bed and watch, and listen through the long, long
nights, to every sound in the gloomy wilderness; and hear poor Mr
Tapley, in his wandering fancy, playing at skittles in the Dragon,
making love-remonstrances to Mrs Lupin, getting his sea-legs on board
the Screw, travelling with old Tom Pinch on English roads, and burning
stumps of trees in Eden, all at once.
But whenever Martin gave him drink or medicine, or tended him in any
way, or came into the house returning from some drudgery without, the
patient Mr Tapley brightened up and cried: ‘I’m jolly, sir; ‘I’m jolly!’
Now, when Martin began to think of this, and to look at Mark as he lay
there; never reproaching him by so much as an expression of regret;
never murmuring; always striving to be manful and staunch; he began to
think, how was it that this man who had had so few advantages, was so
much better than he who had had so many? And attendance upon a sick bed,
but especially the sick bed of one whom we have been accustomed to see
in full activity and vigour, being a great breeder of reflection, he
began to ask himself in what they differed.
He was assisted in coming to a conclusion on this head by the frequent
presence of Mark’s friend, their fellow-passenger across the ocean,
which suggested to him that in regard to having aided her, for example,
they had differed very much. Somehow he coupled Tom Pinch with this
train of reflection; and thinking that Tom would be very likely to have
struck up the same sort of acquaintance under similar circumstances,
began to think in what respects two people so extremely different were
like each other, and were unlike him. At first sight there was nothing
very distressing in these meditations, but they did undoubtedly distress
him for all that.
Martin’s nature was a frank and generous one; but he had been bred up
in his grandfather’s house; and it will usually be found that the
meaner domestic vices propagate themselves to be their own antagonists.
Selfishness does this especially; so do suspicion, cunning, stealth, and
covetous propensities. Martin had unconsciously reasoned as a child, ‘My
guardian takes so much thought of himself, that unless I do the like by
MYself, I shall be forgotten.’ So he had grown selfish.
But he had never known it. If any one had taxed him with the vice, he
would have indignantly repelled the accusation, and conceived himself
unworthily aspersed. He never would have known it, but that being newly
risen from a bed of dangerous sickness, to watch by such another couch,
he felt how nearly Self had dropped into the grave, and what a poor
dependent, miserable thing it was.
It was natural for him to reflect--he had months to do it in--upon his
own escape, and Mark’s extremity. This led him to consider which of them
could be the better spared, and why? Then the curtain slowly rose a very
little way; and Self, Self, Self, was shown below.
He asked himself, besides, when dreading Mark’s decease (as all men do
and must, at such a time), whether he had done his duty by him, and had
deserved and made a good response to his fidelity and zeal. No. Short
as their companionship had been, he felt in many, many instances, that
there was blame against himself; and still inquiring why, the curtain
slowly rose a little more, and Self, Self, Self, dilated on the scene.
It was long before he fixed the knowledge of himself so firmly in his
mind that he could thoroughly discern the truth; but in the hideous
solitude of that most hideous place, with Hope so far removed, Ambition
quenched, and Death beside him rattling at the very door, reflection
came, as in a plague-beleaguered town; and so he felt and knew the
failing of his life, and saw distinctly what an ugly spot it was.
Eden was a hard school to learn so hard a lesson in; but there were
teachers in the swamp and thicket, and the pestilential air, who had a
searching method of their own.
He made a solemn resolution that when his strength returned he would not
dispute the point or resist the conviction, but would look upon it as an
established fact, that selfishness was in his breast, and must be rooted
out. He was so doubtful (and with justice) of his own character, that he
determined not to say one word of vain regret or good resolve to Mark,
but steadily to keep his purpose before his own eyes solely; and there
was not a jot of pride in this; nothing but humility and steadfastness;
the best armour he could wear. So low had Eden brought him down. So high
had Eden raised him up.
After a long and lingering illness (in certain forlorn stages of which,
when too far gone to speak, he had feebly written ‘jolly!’ on a slate),
Mark showed some symptoms of returning health. They came and went, and
flickered for a time; but he began to mend at last decidedly; and after
that continued to improve from day to day.
As soon as he was well enough to talk without fatigue, Martin consulted
him upon a project he had in his mind, and which a few months back he
would have carried into execution without troubling anybody’s head but
his own.
‘Ours is a desperate case,’ said Martin. ‘Plainly. The place is
deserted; its failure must have become known; and selling what we have
bought to any one, for anything, is hopeless, even if it were honest. We
left home on a mad enterprise, and have failed. The only hope left
us, the only one end for which we have now to try, is to quit this
settlement for ever, and get back to England. Anyhow! by any means! only
to get back there, Mark.’
‘That’s all, sir,’ returned Mr Tapley, with a significant stress upon
the words; ‘only that!’
‘Now, upon this side of the water,’ said Martin, ‘we have but one friend
who can help us, and that is Mr Bevan.’
‘I thought of him when you was ill,’ said Mark.
‘But for the time that would be lost, I would even write to my
grandfather,’ Martin went on to say, ‘and implore him for money to free
us from this trap into which we were so cruelly decoyed. Shall I try Mr
Bevan first?’
‘He’s a very pleasant sort of a gentleman,’ said Mark. ‘I think so.’
‘The few goods we brought here, and in which we spent our money, would
produce something if sold,’ resumed Martin; ‘and whatever they realise
shall be paid him instantly. But they can’t be sold here.’
‘There’s nobody but corpses to buy ‘em,’ said Mr Tapley, shaking his
head with a rueful air, ‘and pigs.’
‘Shall I tell him so, and only ask him for money enough to enable us by
the cheapest means to reach New York, or any port from which we may hope
to get a passage home, by serving in any capacity? Explaining to him
at the same time how I am connected, and that I will endeavour to
repay him, even through my grandfather, immediately on our arrival in
England?’
‘Why to be sure,’ said Mark: ‘he can only say no, and he may say yes. If
you don’t mind trying him, sir--’
‘Mind!’ exclaimed Martin. ‘I am to blame for coming here, and I would do
anything to get away. I grieve to think of the past. If I had taken your
opinion sooner, Mark, we never should have been here, I am certain.’
Mr Tapley was very much surprised at this admission, but protested, with
great vehemence, that they would have been there all the same; and that
he had set his heart upon coming to Eden, from the first word he had
ever heard of it.
Martin then read him a letter to Mr Bevan, which he had already
prepared. It was frankly and ingenuously written, and described their
situation without the least concealment; plainly stated the miseries
they had undergone; and preferred their request in modest but
straightforward terms. Mark highly commended it; and they determined to
dispatch it by the next steamboat going the right way, that might call
to take in wood at Eden--where there was plenty of wood to spare.
Not knowing how to address Mr Bevan at his own place of abode, Martin
superscribed it to the care of the memorable Mr Norris of New York,
and wrote upon the cover an entreaty that it might be forwarded without
delay.
More than a week elapsed before a boat appeared; but at length they were
awakened very early one morning by the high-pressure snorting of
the ‘Esau Slodge;’ named after one of the most remarkable men in the
country, who had been very eminent somewhere. Hurrying down to the
landing-place, they got it safe on board; and waiting anxiously to see
the boat depart, stopped up the gangway; an instance of neglect which
caused the ‘Capting’ of the Esau Slodge to ‘wish he might be sifted fine
as flour, and whittled small as chips; that if they didn’t come off that
there fixing right smart too, he’d spill ‘em in the drink;’ whereby the
Capting metaphorically said he’d throw them in the river.
They were not likely to receive an answer for eight or ten weeks at the
earliest. In the meantime they devoted such strength as they had to
the attempted improvement of their land; to clearing some of it, and
preparing it for useful purposes. Monstrously defective as their farming