The Mystery of Edwin Drood
“Mind you take care of my friend,” is the injunction Mr. Sapsea lays
upon him.
“What friend o’ yourn is dead?” asks Durdles. “No orders has come in
for any friend o’ yourn.”
“I mean my live friend there.”
“O! him?” says Durdles. “He can take care of himself, can Mister
Jarsper.”
“But do you take care of him too,” says Sapsea.
Whom Durdles (there being command in his tone) surlily surveys from
head to foot.
“With submission to his Reverence the Dean, if you’ll mind what
concerns you, Mr. Sapsea, Durdles he’ll mind what concerns him.”
“You’re out of temper,” says Mr. Sapsea, winking to the company to
observe how smoothly he will manage him. “My friend concerns me, and
Mr. Jasper is my friend. And you are my friend.”
“Don’t you get into a bad habit of boasting,” retorts Durdles, with a
grave cautionary nod. “It’ll grow upon you.”
“You are out of temper,” says Sapsea again; reddening, but again
sinking to the company.
“I own to it,” returns Durdles; “I don’t like liberties.”
Mr. Sapsea winks a third wink to the company, as who should say: “I
think you will agree with me that I have settled _his_ business;” and
stalks out of the controversy.
Durdles then gives the Dean a good evening, and adding, as he puts his
hat on, “You’ll find me at home, Mister Jarsper, as agreed, when you
want me; I’m a-going home to clean myself,” soon slouches out of sight.
This going home to clean himself is one of the man’s incomprehensible
compromises with inexorable facts; he, and his hat, and his boots, and
his clothes, never showing any trace of cleaning, but being uniformly
in one condition of dust and grit.
The lamplighter now dotting the quiet Close with specks of light, and
running at a great rate up and down his little ladder with that
object—his little ladder under the sacred shadow of whose inconvenience
generations had grown up, and which all Cloisterham would have stood
aghast at the idea of abolishing—the Dean withdraws to his dinner, Mr.
Tope to his tea, and Mr. Jasper to his piano. There, with no light but
that of the fire, he sits chanting choir-music in a low and beautiful
voice, for two or three hours; in short, until it has been for some
time dark, and the moon is about to rise.
Then he closes his piano softly, softly changes his coat for a
pea-jacket, with a goodly wicker-cased bottle in its largest pocket,
and putting on a low-crowned, flap-brimmed hat, goes softly out. Why
does he move so softly to-night? No outward reason is apparent for it.
Can there be any sympathetic reason crouching darkly within him?
Repairing to Durdles’s unfinished house, or hole in the city wall, and
seeing a light within it, he softly picks his course among the
gravestones, monuments, and stony lumber of the yard, already touched
here and there, sidewise, by the rising moon. The two journeymen have
left their two great saws sticking in their blocks of stone; and two
skeleton journeymen out of the Dance of Death might be grinning in the
shadow of their sheltering sentry-boxes, about to slash away at cutting
out the gravestones of the next two people destined to die in
Cloisterham. Likely enough, the two think little of that now, being
alive, and perhaps merry. Curious, to make a guess at the two;—or say
one of the two!
“Ho! Durdles!”
The light moves, and he appears with it at the door. He would seem to
have been “cleaning himself” with the aid of a bottle, jug, and
tumbler; for no other cleansing instruments are visible in the bare
brick room with rafters overhead and no plastered ceiling, into which
he shows his visitor.
“Are you ready?”
“I am ready, Mister Jarsper. Let the old ’uns come out if they dare,
when we go among their tombs. My spirit is ready for ’em.”
“Do you mean animal spirits, or ardent?”
“The one’s the t’other,” answers Durdles, “and I mean ’em both.”
He takes a lantern from a hook, puts a match or two in his pocket
wherewith to light it, should there be need; and they go out together,
dinner-bundle and all.
Surely an unaccountable sort of expedition! That Durdles himself, who
is always prowling among old graves, and ruins, like a Ghoul—that he
should be stealing forth to climb, and dive, and wander without an
object, is nothing extraordinary; but that the Choir-Master or any one
else should hold it worth his while to be with him, and to study
moonlight effects in such company is another affair. Surely an
unaccountable sort of expedition, therefore!
“’Ware that there mound by the yard-gate, Mister Jarsper.”
“I see it. What is it?”
“Lime.”
Mr. Jasper stops, and waits for him to come up, for he lags behind.
“What you call quick-lime?”
“Ay!” says Durdles; “quick enough to eat your boots. With a little
handy stirring, quick enough to eat your bones.”
They go on, presently passing the red windows of the Travellers’
Twopenny, and emerging into the clear moonlight of the Monks’ Vineyard.
This crossed, they come to Minor Canon Corner: of which the greater
part lies in shadow until the moon shall rise higher in the sky.
The sound of a closing house-door strikes their ears, and two men come
out. These are Mr. Crisparkle and Neville. Jasper, with a strange and
sudden smile upon his face, lays the palm of his hand upon the breast
of Durdles, stopping him where he stands.
At that end of Minor Canon Corner the shadow is profound in the
existing state of the light: at that end, too, there is a piece of old
dwarf wall, breast high, the only remaining boundary of what was once a
garden, but is now the thoroughfare. Jasper and Durdles would have
turned this wall in another instant; but, stopping so short, stand
behind it.
“Those two are only sauntering,” Jasper whispers; “they will go out
into the moonlight soon. Let us keep quiet here, or they will detain
us, or want to join us, or what not.”
Durdles nods assent, and falls to munching some fragments from his
bundle. Jasper folds his arms upon the top of the wall, and, with his
chin resting on them, watches. He takes no note whatever of the Minor
Canon, but watches Neville, as though his eye were at the trigger of a
loaded rifle, and he had covered him, and were going to fire. A sense
of destructive power is so expressed in his face, that even Durdles
pauses in his munching, and looks at him, with an unmunched something
in his cheek.
Meanwhile Mr. Crisparkle and Neville walk to and fro, quietly talking
together. What they say, cannot be heard consecutively; but Mr. Jasper
has already distinguished his own name more than once.
“This is the first day of the week,” Mr. Crisparkle can be distinctly
heard to observe, as they turn back; “and the last day of the week is
Christmas Eve.”
“You may be certain of me, sir.”
The echoes were favourable at those points, but as the two approach,
the sound of their talking becomes confused again. The word
“confidence,” shattered by the echoes, but still capable of being
pieced together, is uttered by Mr. Crisparkle. As they draw still
nearer, this fragment of a reply is heard: “Not deserved yet, but shall
be, sir.” As they turn away again, Jasper again hears his own name, in
connection with the words from Mr. Crisparkle: “Remember that I said I
answered for you confidently.” Then the sound of their talk becomes
confused again; they halting for a little while, and some earnest
action on the part of Neville succeeding. When they move once more, Mr.
Crisparkle is seen to look up at the sky, and to point before him. They
then slowly disappear; passing out into the moonlight at the opposite
end of the Corner.
It is not until they are gone, that Mr. Jasper moves. But then he turns
to Durdles, and bursts into a fit of laughter. Durdles, who still has
that suspended something in his cheek, and who sees nothing to laugh
at, stares at him until Mr. Jasper lays his face down on his arms to
have his laugh out. Then Durdles bolts the something, as if desperately
resigning himself to indigestion.
Among those secluded nooks there is very little stir or movement after
dark. There is little enough in the high tide of the day, but there is
next to none at night. Besides that the cheerfully frequented High
Street lies nearly parallel to the spot (the old Cathedral rising
between the two), and is the natural channel in which the Cloisterham
traffic flows, a certain awful hush pervades the ancient pile, the
cloisters, and the churchyard, after dark, which not many people care
to encounter. Ask the first hundred citizens of Cloisterham, met at
random in the streets at noon, if they believed in Ghosts, they would
tell you no; but put them to choose at night between these eerie
Precincts and the thoroughfare of shops, and you would find that
ninety-nine declared for the longer round and the more frequented way.
The cause of this is not to be found in any local superstition that
attaches to the Precincts—albeit a mysterious lady, with a child in her
arms and a rope dangling from her neck, has been seen flitting about
there by sundry witnesses as intangible as herself—but it is to be
sought in the innate shrinking of dust with the breath of life in it
from dust out of which the breath of life has passed; also, in the
widely diffused, and almost as widely unacknowledged, reflection: “If
the dead do, under any circumstances, become visible to the living,
these are such likely surroundings for the purpose that I, the living,
will get out of them as soon as I can.” Hence, when Mr. Jasper and
Durdles pause to glance around them, before descending into the crypt
by a small side door, of which the latter has a key, the whole expanse
of moonlight in their view is utterly deserted. One might fancy that
the tide of life was stemmed by Mr. Jasper’s own gatehouse. The murmur
of the tide is heard beyond; but no wave passes the archway, over which
his lamp burns red behind his curtain, as if the building were a
Lighthouse.
They enter, locking themselves in, descend the rugged steps, and are
down in the Crypt. The lantern is not wanted, for the moonlight strikes
in at the groined windows, bare of glass, the broken frames for which
cast patterns on the ground. The heavy pillars which support the roof
engender masses of black shade, but between them there are lanes of
light. Up and down these lanes they walk, Durdles discoursing of the
“old uns” he yet counts on disinterring, and slapping a wall, in which
he considers “a whole family on ’em” to be stoned and earthed up, just
as if he were a familiar friend of the family. The taciturnity of
Durdles is for the time overcome by Mr. Jasper’s wicker bottle, which
circulates freely;—in the sense, that is to say, that its contents
enter freely into Mr. Durdles’s circulation, while Mr. Jasper only
rinses his mouth once, and casts forth the rinsing.
They are to ascend the great Tower. On the steps by which they rise to
the Cathedral, Durdles pauses for new store of breath. The steps are
very dark, but out of the darkness they can see the lanes of light they
have traversed. Durdles seats himself upon a step. Mr. Jasper seats
himself upon another. The odour from the wicker bottle (which has
somehow passed into Durdles’s keeping) soon intimates that the cork has
been taken out; but this is not ascertainable through the sense of
sight, since neither can descry the other. And yet, in talking, they
turn to one another, as though their faces could commune together.
“This is good stuff, Mister Jarsper!”
“It is very good stuff, I hope.—I bought it on purpose.”
“They don’t show, you see, the old uns don’t, Mister Jarsper!”
“It would be a more confused world than it is, if they could.”
“Well, it _would_ lead towards a mixing of things,” Durdles acquiesces: