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And in December, weazened, old, Frost-powdered, white, [Earth] dreams beside old Winter cold, Who sleeps all night.

Théophile Gautier, “Earth and the Seasons” from Théophile Gautier’s short stories (trans. George Burnham Ives)

Word of the Day

Weazen, v. /wēzən/ - To shrink, shrivel.

      Source: The Oxford Universal Dictionary, 1933

A Christmas Present for @leahtheclownofdistruction123 💜💜💜 hope you like 💜💜💜💜💜 part 2 will be nastY

Playing With Bob Gray Pt 1

Leah runs her finger tips down the front of her pleated skirt, smoothing the material here as she watches the scene before her. A strong man. A massive mountain of sweating flesh, straining and groaning as he hoists the massive circular atlas stone over his shoulder. Crumbled white powder dusts from his hands as they slide along the surface. He is a little frightening with the intensity of his facial expressions as he projects this supreme effort. 

Leah turns from the scene to take in the rest of the circus. At least what she can see from where she stands. There is so much to see. So many things to take in. 

It is July in 1912, a bustling productive year in Derry history. Ripe with historical importance. The nation has only just begun to get over the reeling blow of the sinking of the Titanic. Wireless communication has begun to open the farthest reaches of the globe to the rest of the world. Thru the power of steel and steam and the bustle of industry it seems as if humanity has reached the peak of its existence. 

But none of this enters Leah's mind. She is solely focused on the cacophony of noise and color which seems to explode and twist before her very eyes. Everything she could have ever imagined, as well as some things she's sure she could never imagine, are simply strolling by her.

There are dwarves! She's never seen one before! Dressed in bright colors and tossing flowers and sweets, they skip by her. And there! Not 20 feet from her, a weazened man leading a trundling kangaroo on a leash. The creature appears careworn and bored. And upon its front paws are tied a pair of boxing gloves. Leah's eyes are saucers as she watches them walk into a small tent with a painting of a man boxing a kangaroo on the side. At first, she feels tempted to follow, but yet even more noise and movement catches her attention and she turns.

This fresh sight is a little more horrifying than the last. It is a man. Giggling and dancing. His sleeves rolled up above his elbows. Leah watches as he pulls an 18 inch long sharp pin from an oversized pin cushion suspended from a stick that an assistant is carrying. His eyes meet hers and he slows, an intense and maniacal smile splitting his features. He takes the pin and runs its sleek cylindrical form thru the flame of a nearby torch. Then curls his tongue around it and slides the pin along the appendage, the heat from the metal causing steam to rise as well as causing hissing crackling noises. His eyes never leave hers as he then takes this pin and inserts it into one of his naked forearms. All the way thru, bringing his arm across his face so that he might gaze at her from around the protruding point of the pin on the opposite side of his arm. Gasping she turns and flees as fast as propriety will allow her.

She feels herself growing a bit disoriented and overstimulated as she walks quickly, head low, just trying to get away from the human pin cushion. Losing track of time, she doesn't notice that the stands and tents and throngs of people are growing thinner. She's nearing the edge of the entire affair. 

Stopping to lean against the side of a wagon, she gasps at the tightness of her shirt The heat of a mid July sinking sun causes the garment to feel even more constricting as well as causing little beads of perspiration to form on her skin. The air is hot and stagnant. The scents of exotic animal feces and circus foods are stifling within her flaring nostrils. 

A motion in her peripheral vision makes her lift her head. It is a clown. A clown! She has never seen a clown either! At least not in any other way aside from drawings and circus posters. This one is just as brilliant as any artwork. Bright red hair circles his bald head. His costume flares triumphantly around him in a yellow cascade of pluming silk. The silk around his arms is lined with purple and green stripes. And he's smoking a fat cigar, the great purplish puffs of smoke curling up his white cheeks and red circular nose. The garish black lines over his eyes are relaxed. He looks so very bored. 

Leah is still a little disturbed from the human pin cushion so the vision of this human that does not look human brings that discomfort back full force. She freezes, hoping the clown will not notice her. 

And he doesn't. Taking one last suck off the brown cylinder, he crushes the burning end against the side of a wagon, effectively stubbing it out, and stalks off out of Leah's vision. 

It is now that Leah notices all the wagons. Parked discreetly at the periphery of the circus, they go unnoticed by most of the patrons. Holding things like beds and supplies, they are the spine and bones of this place. 

Leah reads the painted side of the wagon that the clown had been leaning against. 

MILDRED THE ONE TON WOMAN

And below that a painted caricature of a morbidly obese woman laying in repose and suggestively licking her fingers. Leah feels a blush creep up her neck to paint her cheeks a delicate pink which mingles with the flush from the heat. She chooses not to think of what that clown must have been doing near that wagon.

She finds that each wagon has a painting of its inhabitants on the side. One for the dwarves. One for the wolf girl. One for the jugglers. She even sees the wagon for that awful human pin cushion.

But it is the wagon set furthest back that truly catches her eye and holds its attention. Upon it is the ghostly face of a clown. But the face paint is even more disturbing than the clown she'd seen earlier. Twin lines cut up over his cheeks and thru his eyes. The clown wears a large buck toothed smile. And the ornate words are very commanding in sparkling gold paint.

PENNYWISE THE DANCING CLOWN

The afternoon light is now beginning to fade into evening. And in the lower light, Leah can see the soft glow of lantern light coming from the open door of this wagon.. As she approaches she passes a sign nailed onto the side of another wagon.

No visitors beyond this point. 

Feeling curious and naughty, Leah turns her head in all directions. Slowly looking to see if anyone is watching. The lateness of the hour means that a lot of the guests are leaving. Or at least this is what she assumes as, although she can hear the sounds of people beyond the wagons, not a living soul greets her vision here. She leans over and slowly removes each of her leather shoes, careful to be as quiet as possible. Then she tip toes over the dry brown grass towards the beacon of light which is that open doorway. 

Her first sight, as she gazes into the door, is disappointing at first. There appears to be no one here. It is a good sized wagon. And she can see a large bed over in the far corner. And there is a rack of clothing in the middle of the wagon that impedes her vision of the rest of that side. Soft music floats up from a gramophone next to the very door she is peeking thru. 

She is nearly ready to turn and scamper back to the throngs of people when she hears a sound coming from the other side of the clothing rack. Like a hard object clicking against a table top. And….. Humming! There is someone humming back there! The voice is raspy and out of tune, but soft enough to explain why she'd not heard it at first over the music. 

She should leave. She needs to leave. She knows she should not be here. And as she places her sock clad toes upon the first step leading into the wagon, her heart thunders with the adrenaline only a precocious person, who knows they are being mischievous, can produce. Excitement bubbles thru her very finger tips as she enters the wagon. The air is strangely much cooler in here than it is outside. She had expected it to be stifling and enclosed and hot.

She pads as quietly as she can, around the clothing rack and, dropping into a very unladylike crouch, peeks her head stealthily around the last piece of clothing between herself and her quarry. What she sees makes her mouth go dry. 

It's a very broad set of shoulders. Naked and tapering into a slender waist. A thin sheen of sweat makes the skin on the man's back glisten. A few stray droplets accumulate to trail down into the hem of his trousers. His suspenders crease the flesh bilaterally down his back. He's hunched over, concentrating on whatever is on the table before him. 

As he sits up, rocking back slightly on the stool he is sitting upon, his face becomes visible in the mirror before him. Leah's blood turns to nervous ice in her veins. If he looks. If he merely stops focusing solely on what he's doing. If she so much as flinches. He will see her, crouching there, peeping with a blush upon his flesh like some wanton wild animal. What had she been THINKING sneaking in here like this??? This is the very most improper behavior she can possibly think of! Still, she must not move. Must hold perfectly still and watch this scene unfold.

She focuses on the slightly blurred reflection of the man's face. And heat returns to her blood. And not ONLY her blood. He has the most piercing blue eyes she has ever seen. His brow is very prominent, lending a severity to his features that she's never seen before.  Buck teeth rest on a lush lower lip underneath his nose. His jaw line is angled and sharp. He looks dangerous and devilish. And he's a very large man. And strong based off the lean muscle roping and bunching upon his back as his arms move. He appears to be mixing something that she cannot see.

This doesn't remain a mystery for long, as the man brings a short thick brush to his face and spreads a thick white line of paint from his wide forehead, around his temple, and then down his cheek to his chin. His mouth widens, stretching his lips over his teeth, distorting his humming even more, as he uses the brush to begin working the paint over that side of his face.

It is at this point that, her shoes, hanging forgotten till this moment from her hooked forefinger and middle finger, begin to slip from her grasp. Instinctively, her palm curls and she yanks her hand to her chest, wrapping her other arm around both shoes. She looks back up to the man, fully expecting to have been caught. But he's still working face paint under his eye. That was close! Too close! Leah takes in those broad shoulders one last time, shivering underneath her dress from something other than cold. Then slowly backs away around the clothes rack. She feels relief wash over her as she realizes she's no longer in his vision. All she's gotta do is just tip toe back over to that door and then she's a free bird.

Time seems to slow to a horrifying crawl, as she watches the door begin to swing closed. The thing opens towards the interior of the wagon so Leah can clearly see that no mortal hand is closing it. Throwing caution to the wind, she stands and full on sprints towards the shrinking line of twilight sky visible around the edges of the closing door. She knows the very moment that she will not make it. Electric bolts of numbing terror shoot thru her limbs. Her mouth widens, teeth bared, in a silent scream of sheer horror. Her lungs wheeze from an extra jolt of adrenaline laced energy. But it is to no avail. And she knows this. Even before the click of the handle into the door frame announces that she's closed in, she instinctively knows that It will be locked. 

And as her hands fumble with the knob and feel no turning nor give, she feels the first fearful tears leave her eyes.

And then a raspy voice rings out behind her.

"Hello Leah. Come to play with ole Bob Gray?" 

Leah turns, her hands flailing behind her. One still struggling uselessly to turn the doorknob. The other raking nails against the solid wood grains of the door, her shoes clattering to the floor and very much forgotten. Her body stands upon tip toes, leaning back, as if instinctively trying to use her weight to somehow break thru the door. 

And there before her, so tall that even at this distance of several feet she must crane her head, stands the man who had been sitting in front of a mirror applying paint to his face mere moments ago. His back is hunched slightly as if his very being is being restrained from pouncing on her. He's rubbing his long thin hands together as if he's preparing to experience some sort of victory. His lower lip droops obscenely as he grins at her. A thin line of spittle runs from this lip, as if he is slavering at the scent of a sumptuous feast. His brows are creased even further over those haunting eagle like eyes. In this moment, he does not look entirely HUMAN.

"I'm so sorry!" Leah stammers. "I….. I didn't mean to intrude. I was just curious. I'll leave right away. I promise!" 

With each quivering word, the man's….. Bob's…….. Drooling too wide smile grows ever more wide. Baring more and more crooked teeth. He's now rubbing his hands so tightly that Leah can hear popping sounds arising from his knuckles. 

"Oh. You're not going anywhere Leah. Not yet. We haven't even begun to play." His voice is something between a hiss and a growl, and spittle flies upon the 'play'. Leah openly gasps as he jerks a large foot forward, taking a step towards her. He's hunching even more now, and it's quite obvious that he's preparing to spring if she tries to get around him. But why even try? Without a way out of the door behind her, there's really nowhere to go. 

Still, Leah simply cannot stand by. Her skin is alight with electric adrenaline. She takes a small step to the right, testing him. Bob responds by tilting his head at her and advancing another step. His grin is so wide now that it shall surely split his face in 2. She feigns another step to the right before attempting to actually go left. Her very blood is screaming although her lips emit only desperate panting. 

She doesn't get far. She feels his hand around her wrist, cold and vice like. So large that her own hand is engulfed. The door knob strikes her back as Bob shoves her into the door, making her cry out. Keeping his hand around her wrist, he pulls it above her head, bringing his large body flush with hers. She can feel the lean iron like musculature of him thru her clothes. Can feel her clothes sticking to the sweat upon him. She reaches up, pressing her free palm against his chest to try to push him away. A cracking hyena like laugh erupts from him as he snatches up this free hand and pulls it effortlessly up to its twin. He uses only one hand to trap her smaller hands there. Using his free hand, he cups her face and pushes it upward so that her eyes meet his own. 

"Oh but you're a pretty one, Leah. Let me introduce myself properly. Name's Robert Gray. Friends call me Bobby." 

A Very American Ghost Story for Christmas: The Curse of the Cat People

I’m a great fan of Christmas movies and Christmas specials. For me, the standard fare can be great. But sometimes, for some people, yet another Christmas Carol adaptation or Christmas Story marathon isn’t so appealing.

(Side note: can we sit and think for a second about how It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and A Christmas Story (1983) became Christmastime classics and A Christmas Carol (1951) only became the seminal adaptation of the Dickens book after their TV broadcast rates became cheap/free? They’re fine movies, but it’s a strong illustration of how familiarity breeds fondness. I’ve already noticed a big revival in the popularity of White Christmas (1954) after a few years of it being the only Christmas classic consistently available on Netflix in December.)

Here’s a movie to branch out with if you suddenly find that The Muppets just don’t bring the holiday spirit like they used to.

Even these muppets???

The Curse of the Cat People (1944)

70 min. | 2 March 1944 | Dir. Robert Wise, Gunther von Fritsch

There is a genre-shift phenomenon that occurs every once in a while among genre films. Most often it happens with horror films, when a sequel leans into a popular aspect of the first film. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) took on a more outrageous comedic bent with A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985). With Cat People (1942) and Curse of the Cat People, Val Lewton pivots to a holiday film.

(FYI: I talked about Cat People in my 1940s Glamour Ghouls series, if you’d like to learn more about the first film.)

The film picks up several years after Irena’s untimely demise. In Tarrytown, NY, Ollie and Alice have married and had a daughter, Amy. Amy not only bears a striking resemblance to Ollie’s first wife, Irena, but she also acts absent-mindedly, losing herself in imagination. It worries Ollie that his daughter is exhibiting traits that, in his opinion, led to Irena’s death. When out playing one day, Amy is summoned into an old dark house, that may look familiar, and makes friends with the elderly retired actress who lives there with her estranged daughter, who might also look familiar.

čija sestra?

The old woman gifts Amy a wishing ring, upon which she wishes for a friend. Soon after, Amy starts playing with a beautiful blonde woman clad in all white. It’s Irena. Ollie and Alice are understandably upset to learn that their flighty daughter’s imaginary friend might actually be the ghost of Irena.

Like Cat People, Curse questions the role psychological predisposition plays in creating and blurring the lines between reality and fantasy. Both films leave you wondering what really happened and what was created by the minds of the characters to deal with stress and crises. As a twist on the premise from the first movie, the stress Amy undergoes is caused largely by Ollie and his undealt-with trauma surrounding the loss of Irena.

You might think from reading all this that I’m making the case for Curse as a Christmas movie just because it takes place around Christmas, but I promise it’s more than that.

Curse deals frankly with familial love. The film illustrates how it can get twisted when family members abuse each other and project neuroses on each other but also how familial love based in mutual respect and understanding can save a family. All together, I feel that this generates a perfect Christmassy sentimentality, without being too saccharin.

Curse also plays into a Christmas tradition I’m quite fond of: the Christmas ghost story. While many Americans today only know A Christmas Carol as far as holiday ghost stories go, the novel was paying homage to an older practice of telling tales of the supernatural on Christmas.

Washington Irving wrote this in his Old Christmas, regarding a post-dinner activities on a Christmas night in the English countryside:

“From this venerable piece of furniture, with which his shadowy figure and dark weazen face so admirably accorded, he was dealing forth strange accounts of popular superstitions and legends of the surrounding country, with which he had become acquainted in the course of his antiquarian researches.”

Dickens was inspired to write A Christmas Carol because of these writings by Washington Irving. Published in the same collection of works that gave us Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon (1819), Irving wrote three quasi-ethnographic Christmas stories that ended up shaping how we would view the holiday. Prior to the work of these two men, Christmas had faded in popularity as a holiday.

Returning to The Curse of the Cat People, Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is used throughout the film to undergird some tense moments--made even more appropriate as the story is set in Tarrytown.

The ghost at hand in Curse isn’t a horseman of course, but Irena. Her materialization is heralded by breezes catching the curtains a certain way, unexpected lighting shifts and a sense of time slowing suddenly. The film leaves the tangibility of Irena’s apparition unresolved, in keeping with the original film. Also unresolved is whether Irena is malevolent, vengefully sabotaging Ollie and Alice’s perfect life through their daughter, or if she’s a guardian angel, her love for Ollie transmuted into something protective in a positive sense.

There’s a line from Washington Irving’s Christmas that I think applies perfectly to The Curse of the Cat People and its wistful, wintry mood:

“There is a tone of solemn and sacred feeling that blends with our conviviality, and lifts the spirit to a state of hallowed and elevated enjoyment.”

[By the way: The Curse of the Cat People (1944) is currently on Filmstruck if you’ve been looking for a reason to check out their service!]

How the Poor Die (1946)

In the year 1929 I spent several weeks in the Hôpital X, in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris. The clerks put me through the usual third-degree at the reception desk, and indeed I was kept answering questions for some twenty minutes before they would let me in. If you have ever had to fill up forms in a Latin country you will know the kind of questions I mean. For some days past I had been unequal to translating Réaumur into Fahrenheit, but I know that my temperature was round about 103, and by the end of the interview I had some difficulty in standing on my feet. At my back a resigned little knot of patients, carrying bundles done up in coloured handkerchiefs, waiting their turn to be questioned.

After the questioning came the bath — a compulsory routine for all newcomers, apparently, just as in prison or the workhouse. My clothes were taken away from me, and after I had sat shivering for some minutes in five inches of warm water I was given a linen nightshirt and a short blue flannel dressing-gown — no slippers, they had none big enough for me, they said — and led out into the open air. This was a night in February and I was suffering from pneumonia. The ward we were going to was 200 yards away and it seemed that to get to it you had to cross the hospital grounds. Someone stumbled in front of me with a lantern. The gravel path was frosty underfoot, and the wind whipped the nightshirt round my bare calves. When we got into the ward I was aware of a strange feeling of familiarity whose origin I did not succeed in pinning down till later in the night. It was a long, rather low, ill-lit room, full of murmuring voices and with three rows of beds surprisingly close together. There was a foul smell, faecal and yet sweetish. As I lay down I saw on a bed nearly opposite me a small, round-shouldered, sandy-haired man sitting half naked while a doctor and a student performed some strange operation on him. First the doctor produced from his black bag a dozen small glasses like wine glasses, then the student burned a match inside each glass to exhaust the air, then the glass was popped on to the man’s back or chest and the vacuum drew up a huge yellow blister. Only after some moments did I realize what they were doing to him. It was something called cupping, a treatment which you can read about in old medical text-books but which till then I had vaguely thought of as one of those things they do to horses.

The cold air outside had probably lowered my temperature, and I watched this barbarous remedy with detachment and even a certain amount of amusement. The next moment, however, the doctor and the student came across to my bed, hoisted me upright and without a word began applying the same set of glasses, which had not been sterilized in any way. A few feeble protests that I uttered got no more response than if I had been an animal. I was very much impressed by the impersonal way in which the two men started on me. I had never been in the public ward of a hospital before, and it was my first experience of doctors who handle you without speaking to you, or, in a human sense, taking any notice of you. They only put on six glasses in my case, but after doing so they scarified the blisters and applied the glasses again. Each glass now drew about a dessert-spoonful of dark-coloured blood. As I lay down again, humiliated, disgusted and frightened by the thing that had been done to me, I reflected that now at least they would leave me alone. But no, not a bit of it. There was another treatment coming, the mustard poultice, seemingly a matter of routine like the hot bath. Two slatternly nurses had already got the poultice ready, and they lashed it round my chest as tight as a strait jacket while some men who were wandering about the ward in shirt and trousers began to collect round my bed with half-sympathetic grins. I learned later that watching a patient have a mustard poultice was a favourite pastime in the ward. These things are normally applied for a quarter of an hour and certainly they are funny enough if you don’t happen to be the person inside. For the first five minutes the pain is severe, but you believe you can bear it. During the second five minutes this belief evaporates, but the poultice is buckled at the back and you can’t get it off. This is the period the onlookers most enjoy. During the last five minutes, I noted a sort of numbness supervenes. After the poultice had been removed a waterproof pillow packed with ice was thrust beneath my head and I was left alone. I did not sleep and to the best of my knowledge this was the only night of my life — I mean the only night spent in bed — in which I have not slept at all, not even a minute.

During my first hour in the Hôpital X, I had had a whole series of different and contradictory treatments, but this was misleading, for in general you got very little treatment at all, either good or bad, unless you were ill in some interesting and instructive way. At five in the morning the nurses came round, woke the patients and took their temperatures, but did not wash them. If you were well enough you washed yourself, otherwise you depended on the kindness of some walking patient. It was generally patients, too, who carried the bed-bottles and the grim bed-pan, nicknamed la casserole. At eight breakfast arrived, called army fashion la soupe. It was soup, too, a thin vegetable soup with slimy hunks of bread floating about in it. Later in the day the tall, solemn, black-bearded doctor made his rounds, with an interne and a troop of students following at his heels, but there were about sixty of us in the ward and it was evident that he had other wards to attend to as well. There were many beds past which he walked day after day, sometimes followed by imploring cries. On the other hand if you had some disease with which the students wanted to familiarize themselves you got plenty of attention of a kind. I myself, with an exceptionally fine specimen of a bronchial rattle, sometimes had as many as a dozen students queuing up to listen to my chest. It was a queer feeling — queer, I mean, because of their intense interest in learning their job, together with a seeming lack of any perception that the patients were human beings. It is strange to relate, but sometimes as some young student stepped forward to take his turn at manipulating you he would be actually tremulous with excitement, like a boy who has at last got his hands on some expensive piece of machinery. And then ear after ear — ears of young men, of girls, of Negroes — pressed against your back, relays of fingers solemnly but clumsily tapping, and not from any one of them did you get a word of conversation or a look direct in your face. As a non-paying patient, in the uniform nightshirt, you were primarily a specimen, a thing I did not resent but could never quite get used to.

After some days I grew well enough to sit up and study the surrounding patients. The stuffy room, with its narrow beds so close together that you could easily touch your neighbour’s hand, had every sort of disease in it except, I suppose, acutely infectious cases. My right-hand neighbour was a little red-haired cobbler with one leg shorter than the other, who used to announce the death of any other patient (this happened a number of times, and my neighbour was always the first to hear of it) by whistling to me, exclaiming ‘Numéro 43!’ (or whatever it was) and flinging his arms above his head. This man had not much wrong with him, but in most of the other beds within my angle of vision some squalid tragedy or some plain horror was being enacted. In the bed that was foot to foot with mine there lay, until he died (I didn’t see him die — they moved him to another bed), a little weazened man who was suffering from I do not know what disease, but something that made his whole body so intensely sensitive that any movement from side to side, sometimes even the weight of the bed-clothes, would make him shout out with pain. His worst suffering was when he urinated, which he did with the greatest difficulty. A nurse would bring him the bed-bottle and then for a long time stand beside his bed, whistling, as grooms are said to do with horses, until at last with an agonized shriek of ‘Je pisse!’ he would get started. In the bed next to him the sandy-haired man whom I had seen being cupped used to cough up blood-streaked mucus at all hours. My left-hand neighbour was a tall, flaccid-looking young man who used periodically to have a tube inserted into his back and astonishing quantities of frothy liquid drawn off from some part of his body. In the bed beyond that a veteran of the war of 1870 was dying, a handsome old man with a white imperial, round whose bed, at all hours when visiting was allowed, four elderly female relatives dressed all in black sat exactly like crows, obviously scheming for some pitiful legacy. In the bed opposite me in the further row was an old bald-headed man with drooping moustaches and greatly swollen face and body, who was suffering from some disease that made him urinate almost incessantly. A huge glass receptacle stood always beside his bed. One day his wife and daughter came to visit him. At sight of them the old man’s bloated face lit up with a smile of surprising sweetness, and as his daughter, a pretty girl of about twenty, approached the bed I saw that his hand was slowly working its way from under the bed-clothes. I seemed to see in advance the gesture that was coming — the girl kneeling beside the bed, the old man’s hand laid on her head in his dying blessing. But no, he merely handed her the bed-bottle, which she promptly took from him and emptied into the receptacle.

About a dozen beds away from me was numéro 57 — I think that was his number — a cirrhosis-of-the-liver case. Everyone in the ward knew him by sight because he was sometimes the subject of a medical lecture. On two afternoons a week the tall, grave doctor would lecture in the ward to a party of students, and on more than one occasion old numéro 57 was wheeled in on a sort of trolley into the middle of the ward, where the doctor would roll back his nightshirt, dilate with his fingers a huge flabby protuberance on the man’s belly — the diseased liver, I suppose — and explain solemnly that this was a disease attributable to alcoholism, commoner in the wine-drinking countries. As usual he neither spoke to his patient nor gave him a smile, a nod or any kind of recognition. While he talked, very grave and upright, he would hold the wasted body beneath his two hands, sometimes giving it a gentle roll to and fro, in just the attitude of a woman handling a rolling-pin. Not that numéro 57 minded this kind of thing. Obviously he was an old hospital inmate, a regular exhibit at lectures, his liver long since marked down for a bottle in some pathological museum. Utterly uninterested in what was said about him, he would lie with his colourless eyes gazing at nothing, while the doctor showed him off like a piece of antique china. He was a man of about sixty, astonishingly shrunken. His face, pale as vellum, had shrunken away till it seemed no bigger than a doll’s.

One morning my cobbler neighbour woke me up plucking at my pillow before the nurses arrived. ‘Numéro 57!’ — he flung his arms above his head. There was a light in the ward, enough to see by. I could see old numéro 57 lying crumpled up on his side, his face sticking out over the side of the bed, and towards me. He had died some time during the night, nobody knew when. When the nurses came they received the news of his death indifferently and went about their work. After a long time, an hour or more, two other nurses marched in abreast like soldiers, with a great clumping of sabots, and knotted the corpse up in the sheets, but it was not removed till some time later. Meanwhile, in the better light, I had had time for a good look at numéro 57. Indeed I lay on my side to look at him. Curiously enough he was the first dead European I had seen. I had seen dead men before, but always Asiatics and usually people who had died violent deaths. Numéro 57′s eyes were still open, his mouth also open, his small face contorted into an expression of agony. What most impressed me however, was the whiteness of his face. It had been pale before, but now it was little darker than the sheets. As I gazed at the tiny, screwed-up face it struck me that this disgusting piece of refuse, waiting to be carted away and dumped on a slab in the dissecting room, was an example of ‘natural’ death, one of the things you pray for in the Litany. There you are, then, I thought, that’s what is waiting for you, twenty, thirty, forty years hence: that is how the lucky ones die, the ones who live to be old. One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think now, as I thought then, that it’s better to die violently and not too old. People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? ‘Natural’ death, almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful. Even at that, it makes a difference if you can achieve it in your own home and not in a public institution. This poor old wretch who had just flickered out like a candle-end was not even important enough to have anyone watching by his deathbed. He was merely a number, then a ‘subject’ for the students’ scalpels. And the sordid publicity of dying in such a place! In the Hôpital X the beds were very close together and there were no screens. Fancy, for instance, dying like the little man whose bed was for a while foot to foot with mine, the one who cried out when the bed-clothes touched him! I dare say Je pisse! were his last recorded words. Perhaps the dying don’t bother about such things — that at least would be the standard answer: nevertheless dying people are often more or less normal in their minds till within a day or so of the end.

In the public wards of a hospital you see horrors that you don’t seem to meet with among people who manage to die in their own homes, as though certain diseases only attacked people at the lower income levels. But it is a fact that you would not in any English hospitals see some of the things I saw in the Hôpital X. This business of people just dying like animals, for instance, with nobody standing by, nobody interested, the death not even noticed till the morning — this happened more than once. You certainly would not see that in England, and still less would you see a corpse left exposed to the view of the other patients. I remember that once in a cottage hospital in England a man died while we were at tea, and though there were only six of us in the ward the nurses managed things so adroitly that the man was dead and his body removed without our even hearing about it till tea was over. A thing we perhaps underrate in England is the advantage we enjoy in having large numbers of well-trained and rigidly-disciplined nurses. No doubt English nurses are dumb enough, they may tell fortunes with tea-leaves, wear Union Jack badges and keep photographs of the Queen on their mantelpieces, but at least they don’t let you lie unwashed and constipated on an unmade bed, out of sheer laziness. The nurses at the Hôpital X still had a tinge of Mrs Gamp about them, and later, in the military hospitals of Republican Spain, I was to see nurses almost too ignorant to take a temperature. You wouldn’t, either, see in England such dirt as existed in the Hôpital X. Later on, when I was well enough to wash myself in the bathroom, I found that there was kept there a huge packing-case into which the scraps of food and dirty dressings from the ward were flung, and the wainscottings were infested by crickets.

When I had got back my clothes and grown strong on my legs I fled from the Hôpital X, before my time was up and without waiting for a medical discharge. It was not the only hospital I have fled from, but its gloom and bareness, its sickly smell and, above all, something in its mental atmosphere stand out in my memory as exceptional. I had been taken there because it was the hospital belonging to my arrondissement, and I did not learn till after I was in it that it bore a bad reputation. A year or two later the celebrated swindler, Madame Hanaud, who was ill while on remand, was taken to the Hôpital X, and after a few days of it she managed to elude her guards, took a taxi and drove back to the prison, explaining that she was more comfortable there. I have no doubt that the Hôpital X was quite untypical of French hospitals even at that date. But the patients, nearly all of them working men, were surprisingly resigned. Some of them seemed to find the conditions almost comfortable, for at least two were destitute malingerers who found this a good way of getting through the winter. The nurses connived because the malingerers made themselves useful by doing odd jobs. But the attitude of the majority was: of course this is a lousy place, but what else do you expect? It did not seem strange to them that you should be woken at five and then wait three hours before starting the day on watery soup, or that people should die with no one at their bedside, or even that your chance of getting medical attention should depend on catching the doctor’s eye as he went past. According to their traditions that was what hospitals were like. If you are seriously ill and if you are too poor to be treated in your own home, then you must go into hospital, and once there you must put up with harshness and discomfort, just as you would in the army. But on top of this I was interested to find a lingering belief in the old stories that have now almost faded from memory in England — stories, for instance, about doctors cutting you open out of sheer curiosity or thinking it funny to start operating before you were properly ‘under’. There were dark tales about a little operating room said to be situated just beyond the bathroom. Dreadful screams were said to issue from this room. I saw nothing to confirm these stories and no doubt they were all nonsense, though I did see two students kill a sixteen-year-old boy, or nearly kill him (he appeared to be dying when I left the hospital, but he may have recovered later) by a mischievous experiment which they probably could not have tried on a paying patient. Well within living memory it used to be believed in London that in some of the big hospitals patients were killed off to get dissection subjects. I didn’t hear this tale repeated at the Hôpital X, but I should think some of the men there would have found it credible. For it was a hospital in which not the methods, perhaps, but something of the atmosphere of the nineteenth century had managed to survive, and therein lay its peculiar interest.

During the past fifty years or so there has been a great change in the relationship between doctor and patient. If you look at almost any literature before the later part of the nineteenth century, you find that a hospital is popularly regarded as much the same thing as a prison, and an old-fashioned, dungeon-like prison at that. A hospital is a place of filth, torture and death, a sort of antechamber to the tomb. No one who was not more or less destitute would have thought of going into such a place for treatment. And especially in the early part of the last century, when medical science had grown bolder than before without being any more successful, the whole business of doctoring was looked on with horror and dread by ordinary people. Surgery, in particular, was believed to be no more than a peculiarly gruesome form of sadism, and dissection, possible only with the aid of body-snatchers, was even confused with necromancy. From the nineteenth century you could collect a large horror-literature connected with doctors and hospitals. Think of poor old George III, in his dotage, shrieking for mercy as he sees his surgeons approaching to ‘bleed him till he faints’! Think of the conversations of Bob Sawyer and Benjamin Allen, which no doubt are hardly parodies, or the field hospitals in La Débâcle and War and Peace, or that shocking description of an amputation in Melville’s Whitejacket! Even the names given to doctors in nineteenth-century English fiction, Slasher, Carver, Sawyer, Fillgrave and so on, and the generic nickname ‘sawbones’, are about as grim as they are comic. The anti-surgery tradition is perhaps best expressed in Tennyson’s poem, ‘The Children’s Hospital’, which is essentially a pre-chloroform document though it seems to have been written as late as 1880. Moreover, the outlook which Tennyson records in this poem had a lot to be said for it. When you consider what an operation without anaesthetics must have been like, what it notoriously was like, it is difficult not to suspect the motives of people who would undertake such things. For these bloody horrors which the students so eagerly looked forward to (‘A magnificent sight if Slasher does it!’) were admittedly more or less useless: the patient who did not die of shock usually died of gangrene, a result which was taken for granted. Even now doctors can be found whose motives are questionable. Anyone who has had much illness, or who has listened to medical students talking, will know what I mean. But anaesthetics were a turning-point, and disinfectants were another. Nowhere in the world, probably, would you now see the kind of scene described by Axel Munthe in The Story of San Michele, when the sinister surgeon in top-hat and frock-coat, his starched shirtfront spattered with blood and pus, carves up patient after patient with the same knife and flings the severed limbs into a pile beside the table. Moreover, national health insurance has partly done away with the idea that a working-class patient is a pauper who deserves little consideration. Well into this century it was usual for ‘free’ patients at the big hospitals to have their teeth extracted with no anaesthetic. They didn’t pay, so why should they have an anaesthetic — that was the attitude. That too has changed.

And yet every institution will always bear upon it some lingering memory of its past. A barrack-room is still haunted by the ghost of Kipling, and it is difficult to enter a workhouse without being reminded of Oliver Twist. Hospitals began as a kind of casual ward for lepers and the like to die in, and they continued as places where medical students learned their art on the bodies of the poor. You can still catch a faint suggestion of their history in their characteristically gloomy architecture. I would be far from complaining about the treatment I have received in any English hospital, but I do know that it is a sound instinct that warns people to keep out of hospitals if possible, and especially out of the public wards. Whatever the legal position may be, it is unquestionable that you have far less control over your own treatment, far less certainty that frivolous experiments will not be tried on you, when it is a case of ‘accept the discipline or get out’. And it is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots. However great the kindness and the efficiency, in every hospital death there will be some cruel, squalid detail, something perhaps too small to be told but leaving terribly painful memories behind, arising out of the haste, the crowding, the impersonality of a place where every day people are dying among strangers.

The dread of hospitals probably still survives among the very poor and in all of us it has only recently disappeared. It is a dark patch not far beneath the surface of our minds. I have said earlier that, when I entered the ward at the Hôpital X, I was conscious of a strange feeling of familiarity. What the scene reminded me of, of course, was the reeking, pain-filled hospitals of the nineteenth century, which I had never seen but of which I had a traditional knowledge. And something, perhaps the black-clad doctor with his frowsy black bag, or perhaps only the sickly smell, played the queer trick of unearthing from my memory that poem of Tennyson’s, ‘The Children’s Hospital’, which I had not thought of for twenty years. It happened that as a child I had had it read aloud to me by a sick-nurse whose own working life might have stretched back to the time when Tennyson wrote the poem. The horrors and sufferings of the old-style hospitals were a vivid memory to her. We had shuddered over the poem together, and then seemingly I had forgotten it. Even its name would probably have recalled nothing to me. But the first glimpse of the ill-lit, murmurous room, with the beds so close together, suddenly roused the train of thought to which it belonged, and in the night that followed I found myself remembering the whole story and atmosphere of the poem, with many of its lines complete.

Now, No. 6, November 1946

THE PRINCESS OF THE GOLDEN CASTLE -A Free Story

From the ebook “The Counterpane Fairy”

TEDDY was all alone, for his mother had been up with him so much the night before that at about four o'clock in the afternoon she said that she was going to lie down for a little while.

 The room where Teddy lay was very pleasant, with two big windows, and the furniture covered with gay old-fashioned India calico. His mother had set a glass of milk on the table beside his bed, and left the stair door ajar so that he could call Hannah, the cook, if he wanted anything, and then she had gone over to her own room.

 The little boy had always enjoyed being ill, for then he was read aloud to and had lemonade, but this had been a real illness, and though he was better now, the doctor still would not let him have anything but milk and gruel. He was feeling rather lonely, too, though the fire crackled cheerfully, and he could hear Hannah singing to herself in the kitchen below.

 Teddy turned over the leaves of Robinson Crusoe for a while, looking at the gaily colored pictures, and then he closed it and called, "Hannah!" The singing in the kitchen below ceased, and Teddy knew that Hannah was listening. "Hannah!" he called again.

 At the second call Hannah came hurrying up the stairs and into the room. "What do you want, Teddy?" she asked.

 "Hannah, I want to ask mamma something," said Teddy.

 "Oh," said Hannah, "you wouldn't want me to call your poor mother, would you, when she was up with you the whole of last night and has just gone to lie down a bit?"

 "I want to ask her something," repeated Teddy.

 "You ask me what you want to know," suggested Hannah. "Your poor mother's so tired that I'm sure you are too much of a man to want me to call her."

 "Well, I want to ask her if I may have a cracker," said Teddy.

 "Oh, no; you couldn't have that," said Hannah. "Don't you know that the doctor said you mustn't have anything but milk and gruel? Did you want to ask her anything else?"

 "No," said Teddy, and his lip trembled.

 After that Hannah went down-stairs to her work again, and Teddy lay staring out of the window at the windy gray clouds that were sweeping across the April sky. He grew lonelier and lonelier and a lump rose in his throat; presently a big tear trickled down his cheek and dripped off his chin.

 "Oh dear, oh dear!" said a little voice just back of the hill his knees made as he lay with them drawn up in bed; "what a hill to climb!"

 Teddy stopped crying and gazed wonderingly toward where the voice came from, and presently over the top of his knees appeared a brown peaked hood, a tiny withered face, a flapping brown cloak, and last of all two small feet in buckled shoes. It was a little old woman, so weazened and brown that she looked more like a dried leaf than anything else.

 She seated herself on Teddy's knees and gazed down at him solemnly, and she was so light that he felt her weight no more than if she had been a feather.

 Teddy lay staring at her for a while, and then he asked, "Who are you?"

 "I'm the Counterpane Fairy," said the little figure, in a thin little voice.

 "I don't know what that is," said Teddy.

 "Well," said the Counterpane Fairy, "it's the sort of a fairy that lives in houses and watches out for the children. I used to be one of the court fairies, but I grew tired of that. There was nothing in it, you know."

 "Nothing in what?" asked Teddy.

 "Nothing in the court life. All day the fairies were swinging in spider-webs and sipping honey-dew, or playing games of hide-and-go-seek. The only comfort I had was with an old field-mouse who lived at the edge of the wood, and I used to spend a great deal of time with her; I used to take care of her babies when she was out hunting for something to eat; cunning little things they were, -- five of them, all fat and soft, and with such funny little tails."

 "What became of them?"

 "Oh, they moved away. They left before I did. As soon as they were old enough, Mother Field-mouse went. She said she couldn't stand the court fairies. They were always playing tricks on her, stopping up the door of her house with sticks and acorns, and making faces at her babies until they almost drove them into fits. So after that I left too."

 "Where did you go?"

 "Oh, hither and yon. Mostly where there were little sick boys and girls."

 "Do you like little boys?"

 "Yes, when they don't cry," said the Counterpane Fairy, staring at him very hard.

 "Well, I was lonely," said Teddy. "I wanted my mamma."

 "Yes, I know, but you oughtn't to have cried. I came to you, though, because you were lonely and sick, and I thought maybe you would like me to show you a story."

 "Do you mean tell me a story?" asked Teddy.

 "No," said the fairy, "I mean show you a story. It's a game I invented after I joined the Counterpane Fairies. Choose any one of the squares of the counterpane and I will show you how to play it. That's all you have to do, -- to choose a square."

 Teddy looked the counterpane over carefully. "I think I'll choose that yellow square," he said, "because it looks so nice and bright."

 "Very well," said the Counterpane Fairy. "Look straight at it and don't turn your eyes away until I count seven times seven and then you shall see the story of it."

 Teddy fixed his eyes on the square and the fairy began to count. "One--two--three--four," she counted; Teddy heard her voice, thin and clear as the hissing of the logs on the hearth. "Don't look away from the square," she cried. "Five--six--seven" --it seemed to Teddy that the yellow silk square was turning to a mist before his eyes and wrapping everything about him in a golden glow. "Thirteen--fourteen" --the fairy counted on and on. "Forty-six--forty-seven--forty-eight--FORTY-NINE!"

 At the words forty-nine, the Counterpane Fairy clapped her hands and Teddy looked about him. He was no longer in a golden mist. He was standing in a wonderful enchanted garden. The sky was like the golden sky at sunset, and the grass was so thickly set with tiny yellow flowers that it looked like a golden carpet. From this garden stretched a long flight of glass steps. They reached up and up and up to a great golden castle with shining domes and turrets.

 "Listen!" said the Counterpane Fairy. "In that golden castle there lies an enchanted princess. For more than a hundred years she has been lying there waiting for the hero who is to come and rescue her, and you are the hero who can do it if you will."

 With that the fairy led him to a little pool close by, and bade him look in the water. When Teddy looked, he saw himself standing there in the golden garden, and he did not appear as he ever had before. He was tall and strong and beautiful, like a hero.

 "Yes," said Teddy, "I will do it."

 At these words, from the grass, the bushes, and the tress around, suddenly started a flock of golden birds. They circled about him and over him, clapping their wings and singing triumphantly. Their song reminded Teddy of the blackbirds that sang on the lawn at home in the early spring, when the daffodils were up. Then in a moment they were all gone, and the garden was still again.

 Their song had filled his heart with a longing for great deeds, and, without pausing longer, he ran to the glass steps and began to mount them.

 Up and up and up he went. Once he turned and waved his hand to the Counterpane Fairy in the golden garden far below. She waved her hand in answer, and he heard her voice faint and clear. "Good-bye! Good-bye! Be brave and strong, and beware of that that is little and gray."

 Then Teddy turned his face toward the castle, and in a moment he was standing before the great shining gates.

 He raised his hand and struck bravely upon the door. There was no answer. Again he struck upon it, and his blow rang through the hall inside; then he opened the door and went in.

 The hall was five-sided, and all of pure gold, as clear and shining as glass. Upon three sides of it were three arched doors; one was of emerald, one was of ruby, and one was of diamond; they were arched, and tall, and wide, -- fit for a hero to go through. The question was, behind which one lay the enchanted princess.

 While Teddy stood there looking at them and wondering, he heard a little thin voice, that seemed to be singing to itself, and this is what it sang:

 "In and out and out and in, Quick as a flash I weave and spin. Some may mistake and some forget, But I'll have my spider-web finished yet."

 When Teddy heard the song, he knew that someone must be awake in the enchanted castle, so he began looking about him.

 On the fourth side of the wall there hung a curtain of silvery-gray spider-web, and the voice seemed to come from it. The hero went toward it, but he saw nothing, for the spider that was spinning it moved so fast that no eyes could follow it. Presently it paused up in the left-hand corner of the web, and then Teddy saw it. It looked very little to have spun all that curtain of silvery web.

 As Teddy stood looking at it, it began to sing again:

 "Here in my shining web I sit, To look about and rest a bit. I rest myself a bit and then, Quick as a flash, I begin again."

 "Mistress Spinner! Mistress Spinner!" cried Teddy. "Can you tell me where to find the enchanted princess who lies asleep waiting for me to come and rescue her?"

 The spider sat quite still for a while, and then it said in a voice as thin as a hair: "You must go through the emerald door; you must go through the emerald door. What so fit as the emerald door for the hero who would do great deeds?"

 Teddy did not so much as stay to thank the little gray spinner, he was in such a hurry to find the princess, but turning he sprang to the emerald door, flung it open, and stepped outside.

 He found himself standing on the glass steps, and as his foot touched the topmost one the whole flight closed up like an umbrella, and in a moment Teddy was sliding down the smooth glass pane, faster and faster and faster until he could hardly catch his breath.

 The next thing he knew he was standing in the golden garden, and there was the Counterpane Fairy beside him looking at him sadly. "You should have known better than to try the emerald door," she said; "and now shall we break the story?"

 "Oh, no, no!" cried Teddy, and he was still the hero. "Let me try once more, for it may be I can yet save the princess."

 Then the Counterpane Fairy smiled. "Very well," she said, "you shall try again; but remember what I told you, beware of that that is little and gray, and take this with you, for it may be of use." Stooping, she picked up a blade of grass from the ground and handed it to him.

 The hero took it wondering, and in his hands it was changed to a sword that shone so brightly that it dazzled his eyes. Then he turned, and there was the long flight of glass steps leading up to the golden castle just as before; so thrusting the magic sword into his belt, he ran nimbly up and up and up, and not until he reached the very topmost step did he turn and look back to wave farewell to the Counterpane Fairy below. She waved her hand to him. "Remember," she called, "beware of what is little and gray."

 He opened the door and went into the five-sided golden hall, and there were the three doors just as before, and the spider spinning and singing on the fourth side:

 "Now the brave hero is wiser indeed; He may have failed once, but he still may succeed. Dull are the emeralds; diamonds are bright; So is his wisdom that shines as the light."

 "The diamond door!" cried Teddy. "Yes, that is the door that I should have tried. How could I have thought the emerald door was it?" and opening the diamond door he stepped through it.

 He hardly had time to see that he was standing at the top of the glass steps, before --br-r-r-r! --they had shut up again into a smooth glass hill, and there he was spinning down them so fast that the wind whistled past his ears.

 In less time than it takes to tell, he was back again for the third time in the golden garden, with the Counterpane Fairy standing before him, and he was ashamed to raise his eyes.

 "So!" said the Counterpane Fairy. "Did you know no better than to open the diamond door?"

 "No," said Teddy, "I knew no better."

 "Then," said the fairy, "if you can pay no better heed to my warnings than that, the princess must wait for another hero, for you are not the one."

 "Let me try but once more," cried Teddy, "for this time I shall surely find her."

 "Then you may try once more and for the last time," said the fairy, "but beware of what is little and gray." Stooping she picked from the grass beside her a fallen acorn cup and handed it to him. "Take this with you," she said, "for it may serve you well."

 As he took it from her, it was changed in his hand to a goblet of gold set round with precious stones. He thrust it into his bosom, for he was in haste, and turning he ran for the third time up the flight of glass steps. This time so eager was he that he never once paused to look back, but all the time he ran on up and up he was wondering what it was that she meant about her warning. She had said, "Beware of what is little and gray." What had he seen that was little and gray?

 As soon as he reached the great golden hall he walked over to the curtain of spider-web. The spider was spinning so fast that it was little more than a gray streak, but presently it stopped up in the left-hand corner of the web. As the hero looked at it he saw that it was little and gray. Then it began to sing to him in its little thin voice:

 "Great hero, wiser than ever before, Try the red door, try the red door. Open the door that is ruby, and then You never need search for the princess again."

 "No, I will not open the ruby door," cried Teddy. "Twice have you sent me back to the golden garden, and now you shall fool me no more."

 As he said this he saw that one corner of the spider-web curtain was still unfinished, in spite of the spider's haste, and underneath was something that looked like a little yellow door. Then suddenly he knew that that was the door he must go through. He caught hold of the curtain and pulled, but it was as strong as steel. Quick as a flash he snatched from his belt the magic sword, and with one blow the curtain was cut in two, and fell at his feet.

 He heard the little gray spider calling to him in its thin voice, but he paid no heed, for he had opened the little yellow door and stooped his head and entered.

 Beyond was a great courtyard all of gold, and with a fountain leaping and splashing back into a golden basin in the middle. Bet what he saw first of all was the enchanted princess, who lay stretched out as if asleep upon a couch all covered with cloth of gold. He knew she was a princess, because she was so beautiful and because she wore a golden crown.

 He stood looking at her without stirring, and at last he whispered: "Princess! Princess! I have come to save you."

 Still she did not stir. He bent and touched her, but she lay there in her enchanted sleep, and her eyes did not open. Then Teddy looked about him, and seeing the fountain he drew the magic cup from his bosom and, filling it, sprinkled the hands and face of the princess with the water.

 Then her eyes opened and she raised herself upon her elbow and smiled. "Have you come at last?" she cried.

 "Yes," answered Teddy, "I have come."

 The princess looked about her. "But what became of the spider?" she said. Then Teddy, too, looked about, and there was the spider running across the floor toward where the princess lay.

 Quickly he sprang from her side and set his foot upon it. There was a thin squeak and then --there was nothing left of the little gray spinner but a tiny gray smudge on the floor.

 Instantly the golden castle was shaken from top to bottom, and there was a sound of many voices shouting outside. The princess rose to her feet and caught the hero by the hand. "You have broken the enchantment," she cried, "and now you shall be the King of the Golden Castle and reign with me."

 "Oh, but I can't," said Teddy, "because --because---"

 But the princess drew him out with her through the hall, and there they were at the head of the flight of glass steps. A great host of soldiers and courtiers were running up it. They were dressed in cloth of gold, and they shouted at the sight of Teddy: "Hail to the hero! Hail to the hero!" and Teddy knew them by their voices for the golden birds that had fluttered around him in the garden below.

 "And all this is yours," said the beautiful princess, turning toward him with---

 "So that is the story of the yellow square," said the Counterpane Fairy.

 Teddy looked about him. The golden castle was gone, and the stairs, and the shouting courtiers.

 He was lying in bed with the silk coverlet over his little knees and Hannah was still singing in the kitchen below.

 "Did you like it?" asked the fairy.

 Teddy heaved a deep sigh. "Oh! Wasn't it beautiful?" he said. Then he lay for a while thinking and smiling. "Wasn't the princess lovely?" he whispered half to himself.

 The Counterpane Fairy got up slowly and stiffly, and picked up the staff that she had laid down beside her. "Well, I must be journeying on," she said.

 "Oh, no, no!" cried Teddy. "Please don't go yet."

 "Yes, I must," said the Counterpane Fairy. "I hear your mother coming."

 "But will you come back again?" cried Teddy.

 The Counterpane Fairy made no answer. She was walking down the other side of the bedquilt hill, and Teddy heard her voice, little and thin, dying away in the distance: "Oh dear, dear, dear! What a hill to go down! What a hill it is! Oh dear, dear, dear!"

 Then the door opened and his mother came in. She was looking rested, and she smiled at him lovingly, but the little brown Counterpane Fairy was gone.

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ISBN: 9788834181928

URL/Download Link: https://bit.ly/2XypbiD

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"When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life. You know how if a person laughs at your jokes you become funnier and funnier, and if he does not, every tiny little joke in you weazens up and dies. Well, that is the principle of it.”

      - Brenda Ueland, Strength to Your Sword Arm

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— Anadrome (@anadromeo) February 26, 2019

SOME OLD SCENES, AND SOME NEW PEOPLE

Steerforth and I stayed for more than a fortnight in that part of the country. We were very much together, I need not say; but occasionally we were asunder for some hours at a time. He was a good sailor, and I was but an indifferent one; and when he went out boating with Mr. Peggotty, which was a favourite amusement of his, I generally remained ashore. My occupation of Peggotty's spare-room put a constraint upon me, from which he was free: for, knowing how assiduously she attended on Mr. Barkis all day, I did not like to remain out late at night; whereas Steerforth, lying at the Inn, had nothing to consult but his own humour. Thus it came about, that I heard of his making little treats for the fishermen at Mr. Peggotty's house of call, 'The Willing Mind', after I was in bed, and of his being afloat, wrapped in fishermen's clothes, whole moonlight nights, and coming back when the morning tide was at flood. By this time, however, I knew that his restless nature and bold spirits delighted to find a vent in rough toil and hard weather, as in any other means of excitement that presented itself freshly to him; so none of his proceedings surprised me. Another cause of our being sometimes apart, was, that I had naturally an interest in going over to Blunderstone, and revisiting the old familiar scenes of my childhood; while Steerforth, after being there once, had naturally no great interest in going there again. Hence, on three or four days that I can at once recall, we went our several ways after an early breakfast, and met again at a late dinner. I had no idea how he employed his time in the interval, beyond a general knowledge that he was very popular in the place, and had twenty means of actively diverting himself where another man might not have found one. For my own part, my occupation in my solitary pilgrimages was to recall every yard of the old road as I went along it, and to haunt the old spots, of which I never tired. I haunted them, as my memory had often done, and lingered among them as my younger thoughts had lingered when I was far away. The grave beneath the tree, where both my parents lay - on which I had looked out, when it was my father's only, with such curious feelings of compassion, and by which I had stood, so desolate, when it was opened to receive my pretty mother and her baby - the grave which Peggotty's own faithful care had ever since kept neat, and made a garden of, I walked near, by the hour. It lay a little off the churchyard path, in a quiet corner, not so far removed but I could read the names upon the stone as I walked to and fro, startled by the sound of the church-bell when it struck the hour, for it was like a departed voice to me. My reflections at these times were always associated with the figure I was to make in life, and the distinguished things I was to do. My echoing footsteps went to no other tune, but were as constant to that as if I had come home to build my castles in the air at a living mother's side. There were great changes in my old home. The ragged nests, so long deserted by the rooks, were gone; and the trees were lopped and topped out of their remembered shapes. The garden had run wild, and half the windows of the house were shut up. It was occupied, but only by a poor lunatic gentleman, and the people who took care of him. He was always sitting at my little window, looking out into the churchyard; and I wondered whether his rambling thoughts ever went upon any of the fancies that used to occupy mine, on the rosy mornings when I peeped out of that same little window in my night-clothes, and saw the sheep quietly feeding in the light of the rising sun. Our old neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Grayper, were gone to South America, and the rain had made its way through the roof of their empty house, and stained the outer walls. Mr. Chillip was married again to a tall, raw-boned, high-nosed wife; and they had a weazen little baby, with a heavy head that it couldn't hold up, and two weak staring eyes, with which it seemed to be always wondering why it had ever been born. It was with a singular jumble of sadness and pleasure that I used to linger about my native place, until the reddening winter sun admonished me that it was time to start on my returning walk. But, when the place was left behind, and especially when Steerforth and I were happily seated over our dinner by a blazing fire, it was delicious to think of having been there. So it was, though in a softened degree, when I went to my neat room at night; and, turning over the leaves of the crocodile-book (which was always there, upon a little table), remembered with a grateful heart how blest I was in having such a friend as Steerforth, such a friend as Peggotty, and such a substitute for what I had lost as my excellent and generous aunt. MY nearest way to Yarmouth, in coming back from these long walks, was by a ferry. It landed me on the flat between the town and the sea, which I could make straight across, and so save myself a considerable circuit by the high road. Mr. Peggotty's house being on that waste-place, and not a hundred yards out of my track, I always looked in as I went by. Steerforth was pretty sure to be there expecting me, and we went on together through the frosty air and gathering fog towards the twinkling lights of the town. One dark evening, when I was later than usual - for I had, that day, been making my parting visit to Blunderstone, as we were now about to return home - I found him alone in Mr. Peggotty's house, sitting thoughtfully before the fire. He was so intent upon his own reflections that he was quite unconscious of my approach. This, indeed, he might easily have been if he had been less absorbed, for footsteps fell noiselessly on the sandy ground outside; but even my entrance failed to rouse him. I was standing close to him, looking at him; and still, with a heavy brow, he was lost in his meditations. He gave such a start when I put my hand upon his shoulder, that he made me start too. 'You come upon me,' he said, almost angrily, 'like a reproachful ghost!' 'I was obliged to announce myself, somehow,' I replied. 'Have I called you down from the stars?' 'No,' he answered. 'No.' 'Up from anywhere, then?' said I, taking my seat near him. 'I was looking at the pictures in the fire,' he returned. 'But you are spoiling them for me,' said I, as he stirred it quickly with a piece of burning wood, striking out of it a train of red-hot sparks that went careering up the little chimney, and roaring out into the air. 'You would not have seen them,' he returned. 'I detest this mongrel time, neither day nor night. How late you are! Where have you been?' 'I have been taking leave of my usual walk,' said I. 'And I have been sitting here,' said Steerforth, glancing round the room, 'thinking that all the people we found so glad on the night of our coming down, might - to judge from the present wasted air of the place - be dispersed, or dead, or come to I don't know what harm. David, I wish to God I had had a judicious father these last twenty years!' 'My dear Steerforth, what is the matter?' 'I wish with all my soul I had been better guided!' he exclaimed. 'I wish with all my soul I could guide myself better!' There was a passionate dejection in his manner that quite amazed me. He was more unlike himself than I could have supposed possible. 'It would be better to be this poor Peggotty, or his lout of a nephew,' he said, getting up and leaning moodily against the chimney-piece, with his face towards the fire, 'than to be myself, twenty times richer and twenty times wiser, and be the torment to myself that I have been, in this Devil's bark of a boat, within the last half-hour!' I was so confounded by the alteration in him, that at first I could only observe him in silence, as he stood leaning his head upon his hand, and looking gloomily down at the fire. At length I begged him, with all the earnestness I felt, to tell me what had occurred to cross him so unusually, and to let me sympathize with him, if I could not hope to advise him. Before I had well concluded, he began to laugh - fretfully at first, but soon with returning gaiety. 'Tut, it's nothing, Daisy! nothing!' he replied. 'I told you at the inn in London, I am heavy company for myself, sometimes. I have been a nightmare to myself, just now - must have had one, I think. At odd dull times, nursery tales come up into the memory, unrecognized for what they are. I believe I have been confounding myself with the bad boy who "didn't care", and became food for lions - a grander kind of going to the dogs, I suppose. What old women call the horrors, have been creeping over me from head to foot. I have been afraid of myself.' 'You are afraid of nothing else, I think,' said I. 'Perhaps not, and yet may have enough to be afraid of too,' he answered. 'Well! So it goes by! I am not about to be hipped again, David; but I tell you, my good fellow, once more, that it would have been well for me (and for more than me) if I had had a steadfast and judicious father!' His face was always full of expression, but I never saw it express such a dark kind of earnestness as when he said these words, with his glance bent on the fire. 'So much for that!' he said, making as if he tossed something light into the air, with his hand. "'Why, being gone, I am a man again," like Macbeth. And now for dinner! If I have not (Macbeth-like) broken up the feast with most admired disorder, Daisy.' 'But where are they all, I wonder!' said I. 'God knows,' said Steerforth. 'After strolling to the ferry looking for you, I strolled in here and found the place deserted. That set me thinking, and you found me thinking.' The advent of Mrs. Gummidge with a basket, explained how the house had happened to be empty. She had hurried out to buy something that was needed, against Mr. Peggotty's return with the tide; and had left the door open in the meanwhile, lest Ham and little Em'ly, with whom it was an early night, should come home while she was gone. Steerforth, after very much improving Mrs. Gummidge's spirits by a cheerful salutation and a jocose embrace, took my arm, and hurried me away. He had improved his own spirits, no less than Mrs. Gummidge's, for they were again at their usual flow, and he was full of vivacious conversation as we went along. 'And so,' he said, gaily, 'we abandon this buccaneer life tomorrow, do we?' 'So we agreed,' I returned. 'And our places by the coach are taken, you know.' 'Ay! there's no help for it, I suppose,' said Steerforth. 'I have almost forgotten that there is anything to do in the world but to go out tossing on the sea here. I wish there was not.' 'As long as the novelty should last,' said I, laughing. 'Like enough,' he returned; 'though there's a sarcastic meaning in that observation for an amiable piece of innocence like my young friend. Well! I dare say I am a capricious fellow, David. I know I am; but while the iron is hot, I can strike it vigorously too. I could pass a reasonably good examination already, as a pilot in these waters, I think.' 'Mr. Peggotty says you are a wonder,' I returned. 'A nautical phenomenon, eh?' laughed Steerforth. 'Indeed he does, and you know how truly; I know how ardent you are in any pursuit you follow, and how easily you can master it. And that amazes me most in you, Steerforth- that you should be contented with such fitful uses of your powers.' 'Contented?' he answered, merrily. 'I am never contented, except with your freshness, my gentle Daisy. As to fitfulness, I have never learnt the art of binding myself to any of the wheels on which the Ixions of these days are turning round and round. I missed it somehow in a bad apprenticeship, and now don't care about it. - You know I have bought a boat down here?' 'What an extraordinary fellow you are, Steerforth!' I exclaimed, stopping - for this was the first I had heard of it. 'When you may never care to come near the place again!' 'I don't know that,' he returned. 'I have taken a fancy to the place. At all events,' walking me briskly on, 'I have bought a boat that was for sale - a clipper, Mr. Peggotty says; and so she is - and Mr. Peggotty will be master of her in my absence.' 'Now I understand you, Steerforth!' said I, exultingly. 'You pretend to have bought it for yourself, but you have really done so to confer a benefit on him. I might have known as much at first, knowing you. My dear kind Steerforth, how can I tell you what I think of your generosity?' 'Tush!' he answered, turning red. 'The less said, the better.' 'Didn't I know?' cried I, 'didn't I say that there was not a joy, or sorrow, or any emotion of such honest hearts that was indifferent to you?' 'Aye, aye,' he answered, 'you told me all that. There let it rest. We have said enough!' Afraid of offending him by pursuing the subject when he made so light of it, I only pursued it in my thoughts as we went on at even a quicker pace than before. 'She must be newly rigged,' said Steerforth, 'and I shall leave Littimer behind to see it done, that I may know she is quite complete. Did I tell you Littimer had come down?' ' No.' 'Oh yes! came down this morning, with a letter from my mother.' As our looks met, I observed that he was pale even to his lips, though he looked very steadily at me. I feared that some difference between him and his mother might have led to his being in the frame of mind in which I had found him at the solitary fireside. I hinted so. 'Oh no!' he said, shaking his head, and giving a slight laugh. 'Nothing of the sort! Yes. He is come down, that man of mine.' 'The same as ever?' said I. 'The same as ever,' said Steerforth. 'Distant and quiet as the North Pole. He shall see to the boat being fresh named. She's the "Stormy Petrel" now. What does Mr. Peggotty care for Stormy Petrels! I'll have her christened again.' 'By what name?' I asked. 'The "Little Em'ly".' As he had continued to look steadily at me, I took it as a reminder that he objected to being extolled for his consideration. I could not help showing in my face how much it pleased me, but I said little, and he resumed his usual smile, and seemed relieved. 'But see here,' he said, looking before us, 'where the original little Em'ly comes! And that fellow with her, eh? Upon my soul, he's a true knight. He never leaves her!' Ham was a boat-builder in these days, having improved a natural ingenuity in that handicraft, until he had become a skilled workman. He was in his working-dress, and looked rugged enough, but manly withal, and a very fit protector for the blooming little creature at his side. Indeed, there was a frankness in his face, an honesty, and an undisguised show of his pride in her, and his love for her, which were, to me, the best of good looks. I thought, as they came towards us, that they were well matched even in that particular. She withdrew her hand timidly from his arm as we stopped to speak to them, and blushed as she gave it to Steerforth and to me. When they passed on, after we had exchanged a few words, she did not like to replace that hand, but, still appearing timid and constrained, walked by herself. I thought all this very pretty and engaging, and Steerforth seemed to think so too, as we looked after them fading away in the light of a young moon. Suddenly there passed us - evidently following them - a young woman whose approach we had not observed, but whose face I saw as she went by, and thought I had a faint remembrance of. She was lightly dressed; looked bold, and haggard, and flaunting, and poor; but seemed, for the time, to have given all that to the wind which was blowing, and to have nothing in her mind but going after them. As the dark distant level, absorbing their figures into itself, left but itself visible between us and the sea and clouds, her figure disappeared in like manner, still no nearer to them than before. 'That is a black shadow to be following the girl,' said Steerforth, standing still; 'what does it mean?' He spoke in a low voice that sounded almost strange to Me. 'She must have it in her mind to beg of them, I think,' said I. 'A beggar would be no novelty,' said Steerforth; 'but it is a strange thing that the beggar should take that shape tonight.' 'Why?' I asked. 'For no better reason, truly, than because I was thinking,' he said, after a pause, 'of something like it, when it came by. Where the Devil did it come from, I wonder!' 'From the shadow of this wall, I think,' said I, as we emerged upon a road on which a wall abutted. 'It's gone!' he returned, looking over his shoulder. 'And all ill go with it. Now for our dinner!' But he looked again over his shoulder towards the sea-line glimmering afar off, and yet again. And he wondered about it, in some broken expressions, several times, in the short remainder of our walk; and only seemed to forget it when the light of fire and candle shone upon us, seated warm and merry, at table. Littimer was there, and had his usual effect upon me. When I said to him that I hoped Mrs. Steerforth and Miss Dartle were well, he answered respectfully (and of course respectably), that they were tolerably well, he thanked me, and had sent their compliments. This was all, and yet he seemed to me to say as plainly as a man could say: 'You are very young, sir; you are exceedingly young.' We had almost finished dinner, when taking a step or two towards the table, from the corner where he kept watch upon us, or rather upon me, as I felt, he said to his master: 'I beg your pardon, sir. Miss Mowcher is down here.' 'Who?' cried Steerforth, much astonished. 'Miss Mowcher, sir.' 'Why, what on earth does she do here?' said Steerforth. 'It appears to be her native part of the country, sir. She informs me that she makes one of her professional visits here, every year, sir. I met her in the street this afternoon, and she wished to know if she might have the honour of waiting on you after dinner, sir.' 'Do you know the Giantess in question, Daisy?' inquired Steerforth. I was obliged to confess - I felt ashamed, even of being at this disadvantage before Littimer - that Miss Mowcher and I were wholly unacquainted. 'Then you shall know her,' said Steerforth, 'for she is one of the seven wonders of the world. When Miss Mowcher comes, show her in.' I felt some curiosity and excitement about this lady, especially as Steerforth burst into a fit of laughing when I referred to her, and positively refused to answer any question of which I made her the subject. I remained, therefore, in a state of considerable expectation until the cloth had been removed some half an hour, and we were sitting over our decanter of wine before the fire, when the door opened, and Littimer, with his habitual serenity quite undisturbed, announced: 'Miss Mowcher!' I looked at the doorway and saw nothing. I was still looking at the doorway, thinking that Miss Mowcher was a long while making her appearance, when, to my infinite astonishment, there came waddling round a sofa which stood between me and it, a pursy dwarf, of about forty or forty-five, with a very large head and face, a pair of roguish grey eyes, and such extremely little arms, that, to enable herself to lay a finger archly against her snub nose, as she ogled Steerforth, she was obliged to meet the finger half-way, and lay her nose against it. Her chin, which was what is called a double chin, was so fat that it entirely swallowed up the strings of her bonnet, bow and all. Throat she had none; waist she had none; legs she had none, worth mentioning; for though she was more than full-sized down to where her waist would have been, if she had had any, and though she terminated, as human beings generally do, in a pair of feet, she was so short that she stood at a common-sized chair as at a table, resting a bag she carried on the seat. This lady - dressed in an off-hand, easy style; bringing her nose and her forefinger together, with the difficulty I have described; standing with her head necessarily on one side, and, with one of her sharp eyes shut up, making an uncommonly knowing face - after ogling Steerforth for a few moments, broke into a torrent of words. 'What! My flower!' she pleasantly began, shaking her large head at him. 'You're there, are you! Oh, you naughty boy, fie for shame, what do you do so far away from home? Up to mischief, I'll be bound. Oh, you're a downy fellow, Steerforth, so you are, and I'm another, ain't I? Ha, ha, ha! You'd have betted a hundred pound to five, now, that you wouldn't have seen me here, wouldn't you? Bless you, man alive, I'm everywhere. I'm here and there, and where not, like the conjurer's half-crown in the lady's handkercher. Talking of handkerchers - and talking of ladies what a comfort you are to your blessed mother, ain't you, my dear boy, over one of my shoulders, and I don't say which!' Miss Mowcher untied her bonnet, at this passage of her discourse, threw back the strings, and sat down, panting, on a footstool in front of the fire - making a kind of arbour of the dining table, which spread its mahogany shelter above her head. 'Oh my stars and what's-their-names!' she went on, clapping a hand on each of her little knees, and glancing shrewdly at me, 'I'm of too full a habit, that's the fact, Steerforth. After a flight of stairs, it gives me as much trouble to draw every breath I want, as if it was a bucket of water. If you saw me looking out of an upper window, you'd think I was a fine woman, wouldn't you?' 'I should think that, wherever I saw you,' replied Steerforth. 'Go along, you dog, do!' cried the little creature, making a whisk at him with the handkerchief with which she was wiping her face, 'and don't be impudent! But I give you my word and honour I was at Lady Mithers's last week - THERE'S a woman! How SHE wears! - and Mithers himself came into the room where I was waiting for her THERE'S a man! How HE wears! and his wig too, for he's had it these ten years - and he went on at that rate in the complimentary line, that I began to think I should be obliged to ring the bell. Ha! ha! ha! He's a pleasant wretch, but he wants principle.' 'What were you doing for Lady Mithers?' asked Steerforth. 'That's tellings, my blessed infant,' she retorted, tapping her nose again, screwing up her face, and twinkling her eyes like an imp of supernatural intelligence. 'Never YOU mind! You'd like to know whether I stop her hair from falling off, or dye it, or touch up her complexion, or improve her eyebrows, wouldn't you? And so you shall, my darling - when I tell you! Do you know what my great grandfather's name was?' 'No,' said Steerforth. 'It was Walker, my sweet pet,' replied Miss Mowcher, 'and he came of a long line of Walkers, that I inherit all the Hookey estates from.' I never beheld anything approaching to Miss Mowcher's wink except Miss Mowcher's self-possession. She had a wonderful way too, when listening to what was said to her, or when waiting for an answer to what she had said herself, of pausing with her head cunningly on one side, and one eye turned up like a magpie's. Altogether I was lost in amazement, and sat staring at her, quite oblivious, I am afraid, of the laws of politeness. She had by this time drawn the chair to her side, and was busily engaged in producing from the bag (plunging in her short arm to the shoulder, at every dive) a number of small bottles, sponges, combs, brushes, bits of flannel, little pairs of curling-irons, and other instruments, which she tumbled in a heap upon the chair. From this employment she suddenly desisted, and said to Steerforth, much to my confusion: 'Who's your friend?' 'Mr. Copperfield,' said Steerforth; 'he wants to know you.' 'Well, then, he shall! I thought he looked as if he did!' returned Miss Mowcher, waddling up to me, bag in hand, and laughing on me as she came. 'Face like a peach!' standing on tiptoe to pinch my cheek as I sat. 'Quite tempting! I'm very fond of peaches. Happy to make your acquaintance, Mr. Copperfield, I'm sure.' I said that I congratulated myself on having the honour to make hers, and that the happiness was mutual. 'Oh, my goodness, how polite we are!' exclaimed Miss Mowcher, making a preposterous attempt to cover her large face with her morsel of a hand. 'What a world of gammon and spinnage it is, though, ain't it!' This was addressed confidentially to both of us, as the morsel of a hand came away from the face, and buried itself, arm and all, in the bag again. 'What do you mean, Miss Mowcher?' said Steerforth. 'Ha! ha! ha! What a refreshing set of humbugs we are, to be sure, ain't we, my sweet child?' replied that morsel of a woman, feeling in the bag with her head on one side and her eye in the air. 'Look here!' taking something out. 'Scraps of the Russian Prince's nails. Prince Alphabet turned topsy-turvy, I call him, for his name's got all the letters in it, higgledy-piggledy.' 'The Russian Prince is a client of yours, is he?' said Steerforth. 'I believe you, my pet,' replied Miss Mowcher. 'I keep his nails in order for him. Twice a week! Fingers and toes.' 'He pays well, I hope?' said Steerforth. 'Pays, as he speaks, my dear child - through the nose,' replied Miss Mowcher. 'None of your close shavers the Prince ain't. You'd say so, if you saw his moustachios. Red by nature, black by art.' 'By your art, of course,' said Steerforth. Miss Mowcher winked assent. 'Forced to send for me. Couldn't help it. The climate affected his dye; it did very well in Russia, but it was no go here. You never saw such a rusty Prince in all your born days as he was. Like old iron!' 'Is that why you called him a humbug, just now?' inquired Steerforth. 'Oh, you're a broth of a boy, ain't you?' returned Miss Mowcher, shaking her head violently. 'I said, what a set of humbugs we were in general, and I showed you the scraps of the Prince's nails to prove it. The Prince's nails do more for me in private families of the genteel sort, than all my talents put together. I always carry 'em about. They're the best introduction. If Miss Mowcher cuts the Prince's nails, she must be all right. I give 'em away to the young ladies. They put 'em in albums, I believe. Ha! ha! ha! Upon my life, "the whole social system" (as the men call it when they make speeches in Parliament) is a system of Prince's nails!' said this least of women, trying to fold her short arms, and nodding her large head. Steerforth laughed heartily, and I laughed too. Miss Mowcher continuing all the time to shake her head (which was very much on one side), and to look into the air with one eye, and to wink with the other. 'Well, well!' she said, smiting her small knees, and rising, 'this is not business. Come, Steerforth, let's explore the polar regions, and have it over.' She then selected two or three of the little instruments, and a little bottle, and asked (to my surprise) if the table would bear. On Steerforth's replying in the affirmative, she pushed a chair against it, and begging the assistance of my hand, mounted up, pretty nimbly, to the top, as if it were a stage. 'If either of you saw my ankles,' she said, when she was safely elevated, 'say so, and I'll go home and destroy myself!' 'I did not,' said Steerforth. 'I did not,' said I. 'Well then,' cried Miss Mowcher,' I'll consent to live. Now, ducky, ducky, ducky, come to Mrs. Bond and be killed.' This was an invocation to Steerforth to place himself under her hands; who, accordingly, sat himself down, with his back to the table, and his laughing face towards me, and submitted his head to her inspection, evidently for no other purpose than our entertainment. To see Miss Mowcher standing over him, looking at his rich profusion of brown hair through a large round magnifying glass, which she took out of her pocket, was a most amazing spectacle. 'You're a pretty fellow!' said Miss Mowcher, after a brief inspection. 'You'd be as bald as a friar on the top of your head in twelve months, but for me. just half a minute, my young friend, and we'll give you a polishing that shall keep your curls on for the next ten years!' With this, she tilted some of the contents of the little bottle on to one of the little bits of flannel, and, again imparting some of the virtues of that preparation to one of the little brushes, began rubbing and scraping away with both on the crown of Steerforth's head in the busiest manner I ever witnessed, talking all the time. 'There's Charley Pyegrave, the duke's son,' she said. 'You know Charley?' peeping round into his face. 'A little,' said Steerforth. 'What a man HE is! THERE'S a whisker! As to Charley's legs, if they were only a pair (which they ain't), they'd defy competition. Would you believe he tried to do without me - in the Life-Guards, too?' 'Mad!' said Steerforth. 'It looks like it. However, mad or sane, he tried,' returned Miss Mowcher. 'What does he do, but, lo and behold you, he goes into a perfumer's shop, and wants to buy a bottle of the Madagascar Liquid.' 'Charley does?' said Steerforth. 'Charley does. But they haven't got any of the Madagascar Liquid.' 'What is it? Something to drink?' asked Steerforth. 'To drink?' returned Miss Mowcher, stopping to slap his cheek. 'To doctor his own moustachios with, you know. There was a woman in the shop - elderly female - quite a Griffin - who had never even heard of it by name. "Begging pardon, sir," said the Griffin to Charley, "it's not - not - not ROUGE, is it?" "Rouge," said Charley to the Griffin. "What the unmentionable to ears polite, do you think I want with rouge?" "No offence, sir," said the Griffin; "we have it asked for by so many names, I thought it might be." Now that, my child,' continued Miss Mowcher, rubbing all the time as busily as ever, 'is another instance of the refreshing humbug I was speaking of. I do something in that way myself - perhaps a good deal - perhaps a little - sharp's the word, my dear boy - never mind!' 'In what way do you mean? In the rouge way?' said Steerforth. 'Put this and that together, my tender pupil,' returned the wary Mowcher, touching her nose, 'work it by the rule of Secrets in all trades, and the product will give you the desired result. I say I do a little in that way myself. One Dowager, SHE calls it lip-salve. Another, SHE calls it gloves. Another, SHE calls it tucker-edging. Another, SHE calls it a fan. I call it whatever THEY call it. I supply it for 'em, but we keep up the trick so, to one another, and make believe with such a face, that they'd as soon think of laying it on, before a whole drawing-room, as before me. And when I wait upon 'em, they'll say to me sometimes - WITH IT ON - thick, and no mistake - "How am I looking, Mowcher? Am I pale?" Ha! ha! ha! ha! Isn't THAT refreshing, my young friend!' I never did in my days behold anything like Mowcher as she stood upon the dining table, intensely enjoying this refreshment, rubbing busily at Steerforth's head, and winking at me over it. 'Ah!' she said. 'Such things are not much in demand hereabouts. That sets me off again! I haven't seen a pretty woman since I've been here, jemmy.' 'No?' said Steerforth. 'Not the ghost of one,' replied Miss Mowcher. 'We could show her the substance of one, I think?' said Steerforth, addressing his eyes to mine. 'Eh, Daisy?' 'Yes, indeed,' said I. 'Aha?' cried the little creature, glancing sharply at my face, and then peeping round at Steerforth's. 'Umph?' The first exclamation sounded like a question put to both of us, and the second like a question put to Steerforth only. She seemed to have found no answer to either, but continued to rub, with her head on one side and her eye turned up, as if she were looking for an answer in the air and were confident of its appearing presently. 'A sister of yours, Mr. Copperfield?' she cried, after a pause, and still keeping the same look-out. 'Aye, aye?' 'No,' said Steerforth, before I could reply. 'Nothing of the sort. On the contrary, Mr. Copperfield used - or I am much mistaken - to have a great admiration for her.' 'Why, hasn't he now?' returned Miss Mowcher. 'Is he fickle? Oh, for shame! Did he sip every flower, and change every hour, until Polly his passion requited? - Is her name Polly?' The Elfin suddenness with which she pounced upon me with this question, and a searching look, quite disconcerted me for a moment. 'No, Miss Mowcher,' I replied. 'Her name is Emily.' 'Aha?' she cried exactly as before. 'Umph? What a rattle I am! Mr. Copperfield, ain't I volatile?' Her tone and look implied something that was not agreeable to me in connexion with the subject. So I said, in a graver manner than any of us had yet assumed: 'She is as virtuous as she is pretty. She is engaged to be married to a most worthy and deserving man in her own station of life. I esteem her for her good sense, as much as I admire her for her good looks.' 'Well said!' cried Steerforth. 'Hear, hear, hear! Now I'll quench the curiosity of this little Fatima, my dear Daisy, by leaving her nothing to guess at. She is at present apprenticed, Miss Mowcher, or articled, or whatever it may be, to Omer and Joram, Haberdashers, Milliners, and so forth, in this town. Do you observe? Omer and Joram. The promise of which my friend has spoken, is made and entered into with her cousin; Christian name, Ham; surname, Peggotty; occupation, boat-builder; also of this town. She lives with a relative; Christian name, unknown; surname, Peggotty; occupation, seafaring; also of this town. She is the prettiest and most engaging little fairy in the world. I admire her - as my friend does - exceedingly. If it were not that I might appear to disparage her Intended, which I know my friend would not like, I would add, that to me she seems to be throwing herself away; that I am sure she might do better; and that I swear she was born to be a lady.' Miss Mowcher listened to these words, which were very slowly and distinctly spoken, with her head on one side, and her eye in the air as if she were still looking for that answer. When he ceased she became brisk again in an instant, and rattled away with surprising volubility. 'Oh! And that's all about it, is it?' she exclaimed, trimming his whiskers with a little restless pair of scissors, that went glancing round his head in all directions. 'Very well: very well! Quite a long story. Ought to end "and they lived happy ever afterwards"; oughtn't it? Ah! What's that game at forfeits? I love my love with an E, because she's enticing; I hate her with an E, because she's engaged. I took her to the sign of the exquisite, and treated her with an elopement, her name's Emily, and she lives in the east? Ha! ha! ha! Mr. Copperfield, ain't I volatile?' Merely looking at me with extravagant slyness, and not waiting for any reply, she continued, without drawing breath: 'There! If ever any scapegrace was trimmed and touched up to perfection, you are, Steerforth. If I understand any noddle in the world, I understand yours. Do you hear me when I tell you that, my darling? I understand yours,' peeping down into his face. 'Now you may mizzle, jemmy (as we say at Court), and if Mr. Copperfield will take the chair I'll operate on him.' 'What do you say, Daisy?' inquired Steerforth, laughing, and resigning his seat. 'Will you be improved?' 'Thank you, Miss Mowcher, not this evening.' 'Don't say no,' returned the little woman, looking at me with the aspect of a connoisseur; 'a little bit more eyebrow?' 'Thank you,' I returned, 'some other time.' 'Have it carried half a quarter of an inch towards the temple,' said Miss Mowcher. 'We can do it in a fortnight.' 'No, I thank you. Not at present.' 'Go in for a tip,' she urged. 'No? Let's get the scaffolding up, then, for a pair of whiskers. Come!' I could not help blushing as I declined, for I felt we were on my weak point, now. But Miss Mowcher, finding that I was not at present disposed for any decoration within the range of her art, and that I was, for the time being, proof against the blandishments of the small bottle which she held up before one eye to enforce her persuasions, said we would make a beginning on an early day, and requested the aid of my hand to descend from her elevated station. Thus assisted, she skipped down with much agility, and began to tie her double chin into her bonnet. 'The fee,' said Steerforth, 'is -' 'Five bob,' replied Miss Mowcher, 'and dirt cheap, my chicken. Ain't I volatile, Mr. Copperfield?' I replied politely: 'Not at all.' But I thought she was rather so, when she tossed up his two half-crowns like a goblin pieman, caught them, dropped them in her pocket, and gave it a loud slap. 'That's the Till!' observed Miss Mowcher, standing at the chair again, and replacing in the bag a miscellaneous collection of little objects she had emptied out of it. 'Have I got all my traps? It seems so. It won't do to be like long Ned Beadwood, when they took him to church "to marry him to somebody", as he says, and left the bride behind. Ha! ha! ha! A wicked rascal, Ned, but droll! Now, I know I'm going to break your hearts, but I am forced to leave you. You must call up all your fortitude, and try to bear it. Good-bye, Mr. Copperfield! Take care of yourself, jockey of Norfolk! How I have been rattling on! It's all the fault of you two wretches. I forgive you! "Bob swore!" - as the Englishman said for "Good night", when he first learnt French, and thought it so like English. "Bob swore," my ducks!' With the bag slung over her arm, and rattling as she waddled away, she waddled to the door, where she stopped to inquire if she should leave us a lock of her hair. 'Ain't I volatile?' she added, as a commentary on this offer, and, with her finger on her nose, departed. Steerforth laughed to that degree, that it was impossible for me to help laughing too; though I am not sure I should have done so, but for this inducement. When we had had our laugh quite out, which was after some time, he told me that Miss Mowcher had quite an extensive connexion, and made herself useful to a variety of people in a variety of ways. Some people trifled with her as a mere oddity, he said; but she was as shrewdly and sharply observant as anyone he knew, and as long-headed as she was short-armed. He told me that what she had said of being here, and there, and everywhere, was true enough; for she made little darts into the provinces, and seemed to pick up customers everywhere, and to know everybody. I asked him what her disposition was: whether it was at all mischievous, and if her sympathies were generally on the right side of things: but, not succeeding in attracting his attention to these questions after two or three attempts, I forbore or forgot to repeat them. He told me instead, with much rapidity, a good deal about her skill, and her profits; and about her being a scientific cupper, if I should ever have occasion for her service in that capacity. She was the principal theme of our conversation during the evening: and when we parted for the night Steerforth called after me over the banisters, 'Bob swore!' as I went downstairs. I was surprised, when I came to Mr. Barkis's house, to find Ham walking up and down in front of it, and still more surprised to learn from him that little Em'ly was inside. I naturally inquired why he was not there too, instead of pacing the streets by himself? 'Why, you see, Mas'r Davy,' he rejoined, in a hesitating manner, 'Em'ly, she's talking to some 'un in here.' 'I should have thought,' said I, smiling, 'that that was a reason for your being in here too, Ham.' 'Well, Mas'r Davy, in a general way, so 't would be,' he returned; 'but look'ee here, Mas'r Davy,' lowering his voice, and speaking very gravely. 'It's a young woman, sir - a young woman, that Em'ly knowed once, and doen't ought to know no more.' When I heard these words, a light began to fall upon the figure I had seen following them, some hours ago. 'It's a poor wurem, Mas'r Davy,' said Ham, 'as is trod under foot by all the town. Up street and down street. The mowld o' the churchyard don't hold any that the folk shrink away from, more.' 'Did I see her tonight, Ham, on the sand, after we met you?' 'Keeping us in sight?' said Ham. 'It's like you did, Mas'r Davy. Not that I know'd then, she was theer, sir, but along of her creeping soon arterwards under Em'ly's little winder, when she see the light come, and whispering "Em'ly, Em'ly, for Christ's sake, have a woman's heart towards me. I was once like you!" Those was solemn words, Mas'r Davy, fur to hear!' 'They were indeed, Ham. What did Em'ly do?' 'Says Em'ly, "Martha, is it you? Oh, Martha, can it be you?" - for they had sat at work together, many a day, at Mr. Omer's.' 'I recollect her now!' cried I, recalling one of the two girls I had seen when I first went there. 'I recollect her quite well!' 'Martha Endell,' said Ham. 'Two or three year older than Em'ly, but was at the school with her.' 'I never heard her name,' said I. 'I didn't mean to interrupt you.' 'For the matter o' that, Mas'r Davy,' replied Ham, 'all's told a'most in them words, "Em'ly, Em'ly, for Christ's sake, have a woman's heart towards me. I was once like you!" She wanted to speak to Em'ly. Em'ly couldn't speak to her theer, for her loving uncle was come home, and he wouldn't - no, Mas'r Davy,' said Ham, with great earnestness, 'he couldn't, kind-natur'd, tender-hearted as he is, see them two together, side by side, for all the treasures that's wrecked in the sea.' I felt how true this was. I knew it, on the instant, quite as well as Ham. 'So Em'ly writes in pencil on a bit of paper,' he pursued, 'and gives it to her out o' winder to bring here. "Show that," she says, "to my aunt, Mrs. Barkis, and she'll set you down by her fire, for the love of me, till uncle is gone out, and I can come." By and by she tells me what I tell you, Mas'r Davy, and asks me to bring her. What can I do? She doen't ought to know any such, but I can't deny her, when the tears is on her face.' He put his hand into the breast of his shaggy jacket, and took out with great care a pretty little purse. 'And if I could deny her when the tears was on her face, Mas'r Davy,' said Ham, tenderly adjusting it on the rough palm of his hand, 'how could I deny her when she give me this to carry for her - knowing what she brought it for? Such a toy as it is!' said Ham, thoughtfully looking on it. 'With such a little money in it, Em'ly my dear.' I shook him warmly by the hand when he had put it away again - for that was more satisfactory to me than saying anything - and we walked up and down, for a minute or two, in silence. The door opened then, and Peggotty appeared, beckoning to Ham to come in. I would have kept away, but she came after me, entreating me to come in too. Even then, I would have avoided the room where they all were, but for its being the neat-tiled kitchen I have mentioned more than once. The door opening immediately into it, I found myself among them before I considered whither I was going. The girl - the same I had seen upon the sands - was near the fire. She was sitting on the ground, with her head and one arm lying on a chair. I fancied, from the disposition of her figure, that Em'ly had but newly risen from the chair, and that the forlorn head might perhaps have been lying on her lap. I saw but little of the girl's face, over which her hair fell loose and scattered, as if she had been disordering it with her own hands; but I saw that she was young, and of a fair complexion. Peggotty had been crying. So had little Em'ly. Not a word was spoken when we first went in; and the Dutch clock by the dresser seemed, in the silence, to tick twice as loud as usual. Em'ly spoke first. 'Martha wants,' she said to Ham, 'to go to London.' 'Why to London?' returned Ham. He stood between them, looking on the prostrate girl with a mixture of compassion for her, and of jealousy of her holding any companionship with her whom he loved so well, which I have always remembered distinctly. They both spoke as if she were ill; in a soft, suppressed tone that was plainly heard, although it hardly rose above a whisper. 'Better there than here,' said a third voice aloud - Martha's, though she did not move. 'No one knows me there. Everybody knows me here.' 'What will she do there?' inquired Ham. She lifted up her head, and looked darkly round at him for a moment; then laid it down again, and curved her right arm about her neck, as a woman in a fever, or in an agony of pain from a shot, might twist herself. 'She will try to do well,' said little Em'ly. 'You don't know what she has said to us. Does he - do they - aunt?' Peggotty shook her head compassionately. 'I'll try,' said Martha, 'if you'll help me away. I never can do worse than I have done here. I may do better. Oh!' with a dreadful shiver, 'take me out of these streets, where the whole town knows me from a child!' As Em'ly held out her hand to Ham, I saw him put in it a little canvas bag. She took it, as if she thought it were her purse, and made a step or two forward; but finding her mistake, came back to where he had retired near me, and showed it to him. 'It's all yourn, Em'ly,' I could hear him say. 'I haven't nowt in all the wureld that ain't yourn, my dear. It ain't of no delight to me, except for you!' The tears rose freshly in her eyes, but she turned away and went to Martha. What she gave her, I don't know. I saw her stooping over her, and putting money in her bosom. She whispered something, as she asked was that enough? 'More than enough,' the other said, and took her hand and kissed it. Then Martha arose, and gathering her shawl about her, covering her face with it, and weeping aloud, went slowly to the door. She stopped a moment before going out, as if she would have uttered something or turned back; but no word passed her lips. Making the same low, dreary, wretched moaning in her shawl, she went away. As the door closed, little Em'ly looked at us three in a hurried manner and then hid her face in her hands, and fell to sobbing. 'Doen't, Em'ly!' said Ham, tapping her gently on the shoulder. 'Doen't, my dear! You doen't ought to cry so, pretty!' 'Oh, Ham!' she exclaimed, still weeping pitifully, 'I am not so good a girl as I ought to be! I know I have not the thankful heart, sometimes, I ought to have!' 'Yes, yes, you have, I'm sure,' said Ham. 'No! no! no!' cried little Em'ly, sobbing, and shaking her head. 'I am not as good a girl as I ought to be. Not near! not near!' And still she cried, as if her heart would break. 'I try your love too much. I know I do!' she sobbed. 'I'm often cross to you, and changeable with you, when I ought to be far different. You are never so to me. Why am I ever so to you, when I should think of nothing but how to be grateful, and to make you happy!' 'You always make me so,' said Ham, 'my dear! I am happy in the sight of you. I am happy, all day long, in the thoughts of you.' 'Ah! that's not enough!' she cried. 'That is because you are good; not because I am! Oh, my dear, it might have been a better fortune for you, if you had been fond of someone else - of someone steadier and much worthier than me, who was all bound up in you, and never vain and changeable like me!' 'Poor little tender-heart,' said Ham, in a low voice. 'Martha has overset her, altogether.' 'Please, aunt,' sobbed Em'ly, 'come here, and let me lay my head upon you. Oh, I am very miserable tonight, aunt! Oh, I am not as good a girl as I ought to be. I am not, I know!' Peggotty had hastened to the chair before the fire. Em'ly, with her arms around her neck, kneeled by her, looking up most earnestly into her face. 'Oh, pray, aunt, try to help me! Ham, dear, try to help me! Mr. David, for the sake of old times, do, please, try to help me! I want to be a better girl than I am. I want to feel a hundred times more thankful than I do. I want to feel more, what a blessed thing it is to be the wife of a good man, and to lead a peaceful life. Oh me, oh me! Oh my heart, my heart!' She dropped her face on my old nurse's breast, and, ceasing this supplication, which in its agony and grief was half a woman's, half a child's, as all her manner was (being, in that, more natural, and better suited to her beauty, as I thought, than any other manner could have been), wept silently, while my old nurse hushed her like an infant. She got calmer by degrees, and then we soothed her; now talking encouragingly, and now jesting a little with her, until she began to raise her head and speak to us. So we got on, until she was able to smile, and then to laugh, and then to sit up, half ashamed; while Peggotty recalled her stray ringlets, dried her eyes, and made her neat again, lest her uncle should wonder, when she got home, why his darling had been crying. I saw her do, that night, what I had never seen her do before. I saw her innocently kiss her chosen husband on the cheek, and creep close to his bluff form as if it were her best support. When they went away together, in the waning moonlight, and I looked after them, comparing their departure in my mind with Martha's, I saw that she held his arm with both her hands, and still kept close to him.

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— Anadrome (@anadromeo) February 26, 2019

via https://twitter.com/anadromeo February 26, 2019 at 01:54PM