Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens [ereader iphone .txt] 📗

her glass to look at him, and said, ‘Bird! Do be quiet!’ ‘But, young men,’ resumed Mrs Merdle, ‘and by young men you know what I mean, my love—I mean people’s sons who have the world before them—they must place themselves in a better position towards Society by marriage, or Society really will not have any patience with their making fools of themselves. Dreadfully worldly all this sounds,’ said Mrs Merdle, leaning back in her nest and putting up her glass again, ‘does it not?’

‘But it is true,’ said Mrs Gowan, with a highly moral air.

‘My dear, it is not to be disputed for a moment,’ returned Mrs Merdle; ‘because Society has made up its mind on the subject, and there is nothing more to be said. If we were in a more primitive state, if we lived under roofs of leaves, and kept cows and sheep and creatures instead of banker’s accounts (which would be delicious; my dear, I am pastoral to a degree, by nature), well and good. But we don’t live under leaves, and keep cows and sheep and creatures. I perfectly exhaust myself sometimes, in pointing out the distinction to Edmund Sparkler.’

Mrs Gowan, looking over her green fan when this young gentleman’s name was mentioned, replied as follows:

‘My love, you know the wretched state of the country—those unfortunate concessions of John Barnacle’s!—and you therefore know the reasons for my being as poor as Thingummy.’

‘A church mouse?’ Mrs Merdle suggested with a smile.

‘I was thinking of the other proverbial church person—Job,’ said Mrs Gowan. ‘Either will do. It would be idle to disguise, consequently, that there is a wide difference between the position of your son and mine. I may add, too, that Henry has talent—’

‘Which Edmund certainly has not,’ said Mrs Merdle, with the greatest suavity.

‘—and that his talent, combined with disappointment,’ Mrs Gowan went on, ‘has led him into a pursuit which—ah dear me! You know, my dear. Such being Henry’s different position, the question is what is the most inferior class of marriage to which I can reconcile myself.’

Mrs Merdle was so much engaged with the contemplation of her arms (beautiful-formed arms, and the very thing for bracelets), that she omitted to reply for a while. Roused at length by the silence, she folded the arms, and with admirable presence of mind looked her friend full in the face, and said interrogatively, ‘Ye-es? And then?’

‘And then, my dear,’ said Mrs Gowan not quite so sweetly as before, ‘I should be glad to hear what you have to say to it.’

Here the parrot, who had been standing on one leg since he screamed last, burst into a fit of laughter, bobbed himself derisively up and down on both legs, and finished by standing on one leg again, and pausing for a reply, with his head as much awry as he could possibly twist it.

‘Sounds mercenary to ask what the gentleman is to get with the lady,’ said Mrs Merdle; ‘but Society is perhaps a little mercenary, you know, my dear.’

‘From what I can make out,’ said Mrs Gowan, ‘I believe I may say that Henry will be relieved from debt—’

‘Much in debt?’ asked Mrs Merdle through her eyeglass.

‘Why tolerably, I should think,’ said Mrs Gowan.

‘Meaning the usual thing; I understand; just so,’ Mrs Merdle observed in a comfortable sort of way.

‘And that the father will make them an allowance of three hundred a-year, or perhaps altogether something more, which, in Italy-‘

‘Oh! Going to Italy?’ said Mrs Merdle.

‘For Henry to study. You need be at no loss to guess why, my dear.

That dreadful Art—’

True. Mrs Merdle hastened to spare the feelings of her afflicted friend. She understood. Say no more!

‘And that,’ said Mrs Gowan, shaking her despondent head, ‘that’s all. That,’ repeated Mrs Gowan, furling her green fan for the moment, and tapping her chin with it (it was on the way to being a double chin; might be called a chin and a half at present), ‘that’s all! On the death of the old people, I suppose there will be more to come; but how it may be restricted or locked up, I don’t know. And as to that, they may live for ever. My dear, they are just the kind of people to do it.’

Now, Mrs Merdle, who really knew her friend Society pretty well, and who knew what Society’s mothers were, and what Society’s daughters were, and what Society’s matrimonial market was, and how prices ruled in it, and what scheming and counter-scheming took place for the high buyers, and what bargaining and huckstering went on, thought in the depths of her capacious bosom that this was a sufficiently good catch. Knowing, however, what was expected of her, and perceiving the exact nature of the fiction to be nursed, she took it delicately in her arms, and put her required contribution of gloss upon it.

‘And that is all, my dear?’ said she, heaving a friendly sigh. ‘Well, well! The fault is not yours. You have nothing to reproach yourself with. You must exercise the strength of mind for which you are renowned, and make the best of it.’ ‘The girl’s family have made,’ said Mrs Gowan, ‘of course, the most strenuous endeavours to—as the lawyers say—to have and to hold Henry.’

‘Of course they have, my dear,’ said Mrs Merdle.

‘I have persisted in every possible objection, and have worried myself morning, noon, and night, for means to detach Henry from the connection.’

‘No doubt you have, my dear,’ said Mrs Merdle.

‘And all of no use. All has broken down beneath me. Now tell me, my love. Am I justified in at last yielding my most reluctant consent to Henry’s marrying among people not in Society; or, have I acted with inexcusable weakness?’

In answer to this direct appeal, Mrs Merdle assured Mrs Gowan (speaking as a Priestess of Society) that she was highly to be commended, that she was much to be sympathised with, that she had taken the highest of parts, and had come out of the furnace refined. And Mrs Gowan, who of course saw through her own threadbare blind perfectly, and who knew that Mrs Merdle saw through it perfectly, and who knew that Society would see through it perfectly, came out of this form, notwithstanding, as she had gone into it, with immense complacency and gravity.

The conference was held at four or five o’clock in the afternoon, when all the region of Harley Street, Cavendish Square, was resonant of carriage-wheels and double-knocks. It had reached this point when Mr Merdle came home from his daily occupation of causing the British name to be more and more respected in all parts of the civilised globe capable of the appreciation of worldwide commercial enterprise and gigantic combinations of skill and capital. For, though nobody knew with the least precision what Mr Merdle’s business was, except that it was to coin money, these were the terms in which everybody defined it on all ceremonious occasions, and which it was the last new polite reading of the parable of the camel and the needle’s eye to accept without inquiry.

For a gentleman who had this splendid work cut out for him, Mr Merdle looked a little common, and rather as if, in the course of his vast transactions, he had accidentally made an interchange of heads with some inferior spirit. He presented himself before the two ladies in the course of a dismal stroll through his mansion, which had no apparent object but escape from the presence of the chief butler.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, stopping short in confusion; ‘I didn’t know there was anybody here but the parrot.’

However, as Mrs Merdle said, ‘You can come in!’ and as Mrs Gowan said she was just going, and had already risen to take her leave, he came in, and stood looking out at a distant window, with his hands crossed under his uneasy coat-cuffs, clasping his wrists as if he were taking himself into custody. In this attitude he fell directly into a reverie from which he was only aroused by his wife’s calling to him from her ottoman, when they had been for some quarter of an hour alone.

‘Eh? Yes?’ said Mr Merdle, turning towards her. ‘What is it?’

‘What is it?’ repeated Mrs Merdle. ‘It is, I suppose, that you have not heard a word of my complaint.’

‘Your complaint, Mrs Merdle?’ said Mr Merdle. ‘I didn’t know that you were suffering from a complaint. What complaint?’

‘A complaint of you,’ said Mrs Merdle.

‘Oh! A complaint of me,’ said Mr Merdle. ‘What is the—what have I—what may you have to complain of in me, Mrs Merdle?’ In his withdrawing, abstracted, pondering way, it took him some time to shape this question. As a kind of faint attempt to convince himself that he was the master of the house, he concluded by presenting his forefinger to the parrot, who expressed his opinion on that subject by instantly driving his bill into it.

‘You were saying, Mrs Merdle,’ said Mr Merdle, with his wounded finger in his mouth, ‘that you had a complaint against me?’

‘A complaint which I could scarcely show the justice of more emphatically, than by having to repeat it,’ said Mrs Merdle. ‘I might as well have stated it to the wall. I had far better have stated it to the bird. He would at least have screamed.’

‘You don’t want me to scream, Mrs Merdle, I suppose,’ said Mr Merdle, taking a chair.

‘Indeed I don’t know,’ retorted Mrs Merdle, ‘but that you had better do that, than be so moody and distraught. One would at least know that you were sensible of what was going on around you.’

‘A man might scream, and yet not be that, Mrs Merdle,’ said Mr Merdle, heavily.

‘And might be dogged, as you are at present, without screaming,’ returned Mrs Merdle. ‘That’s very true. If you wish to know the complaint I make against you, it is, in so many plain words, that you really ought not to go into Society unless you can accommodate yourself to Society.’

Mr Merdle, so twisting his hands into what hair he had upon his head that he seemed to lift himself up by it as he started out of his chair, cried: ‘Why, in the name of all the infernal powers, Mrs Merdle, who does more for Society than I do? Do you see these premises, Mrs Merdle?

Do you see this furniture, Mrs Merdle? Do you look in the glass and see yourself, Mrs Merdle? Do you know the cost of all this, and who it’s all provided for? And yet will you tell me that I oughtn’t to go into Society? I, who shower money upon it in this way? I, who might always be said—to—to—to harness myself to a watering-cart full of money, and go about saturating Society every day of my life.’

‘Pray, don’t be violent, Mr Merdle,’ said Mrs Merdle.

‘Violent?’ said Mr Merdle. ‘You are enough to make me desperate. You don’t know half of what I do to accommodate Society. You don’t know anything of the sacrifices I make for it.’

‘I know,’ returned Mrs Merdle, ‘that you receive the best in the land. I know that you move in the whole Society of the country. And I believe I know (indeed, not to make any ridiculous pretence about it, I know I know) who sustains you in it, Mr Merdle.’

‘Mrs Merdle,’ retorted that gentleman, wiping his dull red and yellow face, ‘I know that as well as you do. If you were not an ornament to Society, and if I was not a benefactor to Society, you and I would never have come together. When I say a benefactor to it, I mean a