Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens [big ebook reader txt] 📗

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 person who provides it with all sorts of expensive things to eat and drink and look at. But, to tell me that I am not fit for it after all I have done for it⁠—after all I have done for it,” repeated Mr. Merdle, with a wild emphasis that made his wife lift up her eyelids, “after all⁠—all!⁠—to tell me I have no right to mix with it after all, is a pretty reward.”

“I say,” answered Mrs. Merdle composedly, “that you ought to make yourself fit for it by being more degage, and less preoccupied. There is a positive vulgarity in carrying your business affairs about with you as you do.”

“How do I carry them about, Mrs. Merdle?” asked Mr. Merdle.

“How do you carry them about?” said Mrs. Merdle. “Look at yourself in the glass.”

Mr. Merdle involuntarily turned his eyes in the direction of the nearest mirror, and asked, with a slow determination of his turbid blood to his temples, whether a man was to be called to account for his digestion?

“You have a physician,” said Mrs. Merdle.

“He does me no good,” said Mr. Merdle.

Mrs. Merdle changed her ground.

“Besides,” said she, “your digestion is nonsense. I don’t speak of your digestion. I speak of your manner.”

“Mrs. Merdle,” returned her husband, “I look to you for that. You supply manner, and I supply money.”

“I don’t expect you,” said Mrs. Merdle, reposing easily among her cushions, “to captivate people. I don’t want you to take any trouble upon yourself, or to try to be fascinating. I simply request you to care about nothing⁠—or seem to care about nothing⁠—as everybody else does.”

“Do I ever say I care about anything?” asked Mr. Merdle.

“Say? No! Nobody would attend to you if you did. But you show it.”

“Show what? What do I show?” demanded Mr. Merdle hurriedly.

“I have already told you. You show that you carry your business cares and projects about, instead of leaving them in the City, or wherever else they belong to,” said Mrs. Merdle. “Or seeming to. Seeming would be quite enough: I ask no more. Whereas you couldn’t be more occupied with your day’s calculations and combinations than you habitually show yourself to be, if you were a carpenter.”

“A carpenter!” repeated Mr. Merdle, checking something like a groan. “I shouldn’t so much mind being a carpenter, Mrs. Merdle.”

“And my complaint is,” pursued the lady, disregarding the low remark, “that it is not the tone of Society, and that you ought to correct it, Mr. Merdle. If you have any doubt of my judgment, ask even Edmund Sparkler.” The door of the room had opened, and Mrs. Merdle now surveyed the head of her son through her glass. “Edmund; we want you here.”

Mr. Sparkler, who had merely put in his head and looked round the room without entering (as if he were searching the house for that young lady with no nonsense about her), upon this followed up his head with his body, and stood before them. To whom, in a few easy words adapted to his capacity, Mrs. Merdle stated the question at issue.

The young gentleman, after anxiously feeling his shirt-collar as if it were his pulse and he were hypochondriacal, observed, “That he had heard it noticed by fellers.”

“Edmund Sparkler has heard it noticed,” said Mrs. Merdle, with languid triumph. “Why, no doubt everybody has heard it noticed!” Which in truth was no unreasonable inference; seeing that