Читать книгу The Dry Pickwick and Other Incongruities - Стивен Ликок - Страница 5

The evening was that of the twenty-fourth of December. Mr. Pickwick had retired early to his room in the inn and had betaken himself and his night-cap early to bed, in anticipation of an early start for Dingley Dell by the coach of the morrow. Mr. Pickwick, we say, had retired early to bed, and reclined well propped up with the pillows with a bedside book open on the coverlet before him as a scarcely necessary aid in the summons of slumber. Mr. Pickwick’s night-cap, in the corporeal or, so to speak, the flannel, sense was upon his head, while his night-cap in the metaphorical sense, stood beside the bed upon the settee in the form of a tall glass of smoking toddy, from which the great man punctuated his reading from time to time with little sips. If we had looked sideways over Mr. Pickwick’s shoulder at the book before him, we could have read its title as “The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, together with the federal and state legislation for the enforcement thereof.” We would have observed, moreover, that as the great man read further and further into the volume before him his usual genial face took on a serious air which almost deepened into an expression of indignation. We should have heard Mr. Pickwick from time to time give vent to such expressions as “Most extraordinary!” “Not to be tolerated,” and various other ejaculations of surprise, indignation and protest. Nay, we should have noted that the repeated sips taken by Mr. Pickwick from the tall flagon of punch became more and more frequent and accentuated, as if assuming the form of a personal assertion of independence against an unwarranted intrusion upon the liberty of a Briton. Indeed we should have finally noted that nothing but the emptying of the flagon and the simultaneous expiration of Mr. Pickwick’s candle as if blushing for shame to have illuminated such a page, put an end to Mr. Pickwick’s reading. Indeed we may well imagine that the brain of that august gentleman, usually so well poised as to admit of a dreamless slumber, may for once have been carried into a dreamland, haunted with the uncomfortable visions called up by what he had read. Mr. Pickwick indeed slept, but——

“Better get up,” growled a voice at Mr. Pickwick’s ear before he seemed to have slept at all; “only ten minutes to coach time.”

If that was the voice of Tracy Tupman, Mr. Pickwick’s friend and contemporary, it was greatly changed; a surly voice with no good fellowship left in it; a mean voice—reflected Mr. Pickwick, as he sadly pulled on his clothes in the chill of a winter dawn—not like Tupman’s at all. No suggestion of a morning draught of gin and bitters, or of something that might warm the system and set it all a-tune for Christmas Day! Not even a “Merry Christmas,” thought Mr. Pickwick, as he dressed and descended to the yard where the coach stood in readiness. Mr. Pickwick’s friends were already gathered. They looked blue in the jowl and mournful in the chops; a sour-looking hostler half awake fussed about beside the horses.

“Don’t tip him,” whispered Mr. Snodgrass to Mr. Tupman.

“Tip him!” replied Tupman; “a mean, disobliging fellow like that; not a farthing.”

“Don’t tip the postboys either,” added Snodgrass.

“Certainly not,” said Tupman; “such a couple of lubberly stupid fellows I never saw in my life.”

Mr. Winkle, the fourth of the party, approached Mr. Tupman. “Have you got the hooch?” he asked in a half-voice.

“For God’s sake, Winkle, not so loud,” said Snodgrass. “You can’t tell who is hearing. I’m told they’ve got spotters now in all these yards. You’re never safe.”

With a sigh Mr. Pickwick ascended to the roof of the coach. “I never realized before,” he reflected, “what dirty smelly things these coaches are, intolerable.”

There were several other passengers on the Muggleton coach that morning. It had been Mr. Pickwick’s agreeable custom, hitherto, to invite conversation with his fellow-passengers, in whom he was accustomed to find a mine of interest and information. But the passengers of this morning—silent, muffled and mournful, their noses red with the cold, their hearts heavy with depression—inspired no such invitation to social intercourse. Mr. Pickwick left them alone. “They are a pack of bums,” he murmured, unconsciously making use of a word not known until fifty years after his own demise, “not worth talking to.” And then, as it were, suddenly taken with surprise at his own lack of urbanity: “I wish, Winkle,” he said behind his hand, “I wish I could get a gin and bitters.”

“Shut up!” said Mr. Winkle.

Mr. Pickwick looked down from the coach roof at a mournful-looking man who was helping to adjust the luggage into the boot. “Is everything there all right, Sam?” he inquired.

“Eh, what?” replied the man in a surly tone. “I guess it is. Get down yourself and see, if you doubt it.”

“Surly fellow,” murmured Mr. Pickwick to Mr. Tupman, and he added with a sigh, “How I ever could have thought that fellow Sam Weller obliging and amusing, passes my belief.”

“Why not get rid of him?” said Mr. Tupman in the same cautious whisper.

“Can’t,” said Mr. Pickwick, emphatically, “he belongs to the union.”

At length, with no more delay than coaches usually take in starting at such a season of the year, the coach with a fierce cracking of the whips and with sundry snarls from the postboys was off upon its way. “Mean, nasty weather,” muttered Mr. Snodgrass, shivering into the collar of his overcoat.

“What you can expect,” rejoined Mr. Winkle in a tone of equal complaint, “at this time of the year. It’s, let me see, the twenty-fifth of December: always rotten weather then.”

“Dear me!” murmured Mr. Pickwick, “Christmas!” and he repeated as if lingering on the sound of a remembered melody, “Christmas!”

“What’s that?” said Mr. Tupman.

“Nothing,” said Mr. Pickwick.

It would be too painful to trace the slow progress of the coach along miry roads, down muddy lanes with ragged snow in the hedgerows and past gaunt trees shivering in the winter gloom. There was no gleam of sunlight. A chill east wind flaked with sleet, blew in the faces of the travellers, while the sky darkened almost to the point of night. Conversation survived only in a few muttered imprecations at the weather, couched rather in the form of profane soliloquy than in that of mutual intercourse. Even the heart of the noble Mr. Pickwick sank within him. “I wish I had a drink,” he murmured from time to time. “Winkle, don’t you think we might take a sip out of the bottle?”

“Too dangerous,” replied Mr. Winkle with a guarded look at the other passengers. “One of those men,” he whispered behind his hand, “is evidently a clergyman. You can’t trust him. But wait awhile,” he added. “There’s an inn a little farther on, the Blue Boar. We can get in there and take a drink.”

“Ah, yes,” murmured Mr. Pickwick, “the Blue Boar!” and at the very name of that comfortable hostelry such a flood of recollections poured into his mind—memories of blazing fires and smoking viands, of hot punches and warm brandies, that for a moment the countenance of the great man resumed its usual aspect of serene good nature. “The Blue Boar,” he kept repeating to himself, “the Blue Boar,” and with his hat, face and spectacles well drawn within the folds of his collar and muffler, Mr. Pickwick was able, in spite of all discomforts, to relapse into something like a doze, in which no doubt his mind passed once more in review those pleasant scenes and episodes which had made his name famous throughout the civilized world.

“Get down here for awhile if you want to. We’re changing horses.” It was the voice of the guard which had rudely broken in on the somnolence of Mr. Pickwick.

He sat forward with a start. “Where are we?” he murmured, looking through the sleet at a large building, its main door boarded up, its windows for the most part shuttered and the swinging sign in front of it painted over with white-wash. “Where are we?”

“The Blue Boar, coach-stop number six,” said the guard. “Get down if you like. You have four minutes.”

Mr. Pickwick looked in silent dismay at what had once been the spacious and hospitable hostelry of the Blue Boar. Where now was the genial landlord of the bygone days, and where the buxom landlady, bustling about the inn, with a swarm of pretty chambermaids busy at her bidding, with serving-men stirring up huge fires, dinners on vast trays moving to private dining-rooms, with activity, happiness, merriment everywhere, whither had it fled? This gloomy shuttered building with makeshift stables at the back, the bar boarded up, the licence painted out, the chimneys almost smokeless! Mr. Pickwick sat motionless, scarce able to credit the transformation of the world he had once known.

“Get down, Pickwick, if you’re coming,” called Tupman from the ground, and accompanied his words with sundry taps at his side-pockets and with sundry rapid and furtive gestures, apparently indicative of the general idea of drink. “We may be able to get in,” continued Tupman, when Mr. Pickwick had made his way to the ground, “and we can perhaps get glasses and some soda water inside.”

The Pickwickians gathered in a little group in front of the closed-up door of the inn. They stood huddled together, their backs against the driving snow, while Mr. Pickwick, as became the senior and the leader of the party, delivered with the head of his cane a series of firm, dignified and expressive knocks at the closed door. There was no response. “Knock again,” said Mr. Winkle. “I understand that the landlady still lives here; if she once recognizes us she’ll let us in in a moment.”

Mr. Pickwick again delivered a series of firm raps upon the door in which the authority of command was delicately blended with plaintiveness of appeal. This time the response was not long in coming. An upper casement banged open. A fierce-looking virago, a shawl thrown about her head, leaned out of the window. “If you loafers don’t beat it out of there in five seconds,” she shouted, “I’ll put the sheriff after you.”

“My dear madam,” began Mr. Pickwick in mild expostulation.

“You madam me, and I’ll have you in the jug. You beat it,” cried the woman, and the window shut with a slam.

Aghast at what he heard, albeit couched in language he could not understand, Mr. Pickwick turned to his followers. “Can that be the same woman?” he asked.

“Certainly not,” said Mr. Tupman.

“Certainly not,” repeated Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Winkle.

Yet they all knew that it was.

“It seems to me,” said Mr. Snodgrass, whose mild poetic disposition was ever disposed to make the best of anything, “that if we went around out of sight behind the stable we might take a drink out of the bottle. That’s better than nothing.”

In accordance with this excellent advice, the four Pickwickians, with much dodging and manœuvring, retreated into a hidden angle behind the stable fence. Here Mr. Winkle produced from the pocket of his greatcoat a bottle—alas! only a pint bottle—of a beverage which had already been referred to as hooch. “There’s no glass,” he said mournfully.

“That doesn’t matter,” said Tupman.

“—and no soda or water.”

“It’s of no consequence,” said Mr. Pickwick majestically; “drink it as it is. You, Winkle, drink first—I insist—you bought it.”

“I think it’s all right,” said Mr. Winkle, a little dubiously. “I got it from a chemist in the Strand. He said it was all right. Try it yourself.”

“Drink first,” repeated Mr. Pickwick sternly.

Thus adjured and with his eyes upon that Heaven to which he looked for protection Mr. Nathaniel Winkle took a long pull at the bottle, and then removed it from his lips with a deep “Ah!” of satisfaction. “It’s all right,” he said.

The bottle passed from lip to lip. The four Pickwickians under its genial influence regained in some measure their wonted cheerfulness. Mr. Tupman straightened up his coat collar and his shirt and adjusted his hat at a more becoming angle. Mr. Pickwick beamed upon his companions with a kindly eye.

But, alas! their little glow of happiness was as brief as it was welcome. One drink and one half-drink, even with the most honourable division done with the greatest sacrifice of self, exhausted the little bottle. In vain it was tilted to an angle of ninety degrees to the horizon. The little bottle was empty. Mr. Pickwick gazed sadly at his followers, while a gust of wind and snow that rounded the corner of their little shelter, recalled them to an inclement world.

Mr. Pickwick rebuttoned his coat about his neck. “Come,” he said, “let us get back to the coach. But I wish we had kept a drink for Wardle. Too bad.”

“Too bad,” re-echoed Mr. Tupman, buttoning up his coat.

“Too bad,” echoed again Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Winkle, buttoning up their coats.

Indeed the Pickwickians were just about to retrace their steps to the coach, filled with humanitarian sympathy for the fate of Mr. Wardle, when there occurred one of those peculiar intrusions of fate into human affairs such as can only be attributed to a direct intervention of Providence.

Round the corner of the stable wall there approached with sidelong steps and a stealthy backward glance, an individual whom even the charitable mind of Mr. Pickwick could only classify as obviously one of the criminal class. The shabby habiliments, the tight scarf about the neck, the cap close down over the cropped head combined with the saturnine cast of an ill-shaven face and sunken eye to suggest an atmosphere of malevolence and crime.

“I seen yous,” snarled this ill-omened individual—“I seen yous take that drink.”

Mr. Winkle, as one acknowledged to be the most martial and combative of the Pickwickians, assumed an air of indignation and stepped forwards towards the newcomer as if fully prepared to take him by the scruff of the neck and hurl him over the adjacent fence. “See here, fellow,” he began in a tone of mingled anger and contempt.

The “fellow” backed towards the fence. “Cut out that high hat stuff,” he sneered, and as he spoke he drew from his pocket an object which even the inexperienced eyes of Mr. Winkle surmised to be a weapon of a mortal character. None of the Pickwickians, indeed, could from any freak of supernatural forecast have ever seen an automatic pistol, but there was something in the menacing clutch with which the villainous-looking scoundrel held the weapon which seemed to warn them of its power. Mr. Winkle’s naturally pale face grew a trifle paler, while even Mr. Pickwick put up one hand as if to screen himself from an imaginary stream of bullets. “My dear sir,” he protested.

The man put his weapon back in his pocket.

“I didn’t come for no scrap,” he said. “I seen yous take the drink and I seen yous finish the bottle. Now, then, do you want to buy some more? I’ve got it right here. How about it?”

“Ah,” said Mr. Pickwick in a tone of enlightenment and relief, “more liquor. You have some to sell? By all means, what is it—brandy?”

“It’s the real thing,” said the man, pulling out a long black bottle from an inside pocket of his shabby coat. “You don’t get stuff like that every day.”

He held the bottle up in the dim daylight. It bore no label; the bottle itself looked greasy and no gleam of sunshine was reflected back from its contents.

“What is it?” again asked Mr. Pickwick.

“The real thing,” repeated the man fiercely. “Didn’t I tell you it was the real stuff?”

“And how much,” asked Mr. Winkle, whose martial air had entirely evaporated, “do you ask for it?”

“For you gents,” said the ragged man, “I’ll make the price at five sovereigns!”

“Five sovereigns!” gasped all the Pickwickians.

“Five sovereigns,” replied the man, “and you’d better hand it over quick or I’ll report to the coachguard what I seen here, and you’ll learn what the law is, if you don’t know it already.”

“Give it to him, Tupman,” said Mr. Pickwick, “give it to him.” It was characteristic of that great and magnanimous man, that the aspect of anger and quarrelling was overwhelmingly distasteful to him. Financial loss was easier to bear than a breach of those relations of goodwill and concord which alone hold humanity together.

Mr. Tupman, as the treasurer of the party, counted five golden sovereigns into the hands of the ragged man. The black bottle was duly transferred to a capacious pocket of Mr. Pickwick’s coat. The ragged man with a surly attempt at civility, based on the possibility of future business, took his departure.

“We might try a sip of it,” said Winkle suggestively.

“Let it be understood,” said Mr. Pickwick, “that there is to be no further mention of this bottle, until I myself produce it at the right time and place for the entertainment of our dear friend Wardle.”

With this understanding the four companions betook themselves sadly back to the coach, and were hustled up to the roof by the guard already impatient at their long delay. There they resumed their melancholy journey, the wet sleet and the drizzling rain alternately in their faces. The long day wore its gradual length away as the four Pickwickians were dragged over muddy roads, past mournful fields and leafless woods across the face of what had once been Merry England. Not till the daylight had almost faded did they find themselves, on reaching a turn in the road, in the familiar neighbourhood of the Manor Farm of Dingley Dell.

“There’s Wardle,” cried Mr. Pickwick, waking up to a new alacrity and making sundry attempts at waving signals with an umbrella. “There’s Wardle, waiting at the corner of the road.”

There, right enough, was the good old gentleman, his stout figure unmistakable, waiting at the corner of the road. Close by was a one-horse cart, evidently designed for the luggage, beside which stood a tall thin boy, whose elongated figure seemed to Mr. Pickwick at once extremely strange and singularly familiar.

“You’re late,” said Mr. Wardle in a slightly testy tone. “I’ve waited at this infernal corner the best part of an hour. What sort of journey did you have?”

“Abominable,” said Mr. Pickwick.

“Always that way at this infernal time of the year,” said Wardle. “Here, Joe, make haste with that luggage. Drive it on in the cart. We’ll walk up.”

“Joe!” repeated Mr. Pickwick with a glance of renewed wonder and partial recognition at the tall thin boy whose long legs seemed to have left his scanty trousers and his inadequate stockings far behind in their growth. “Is that Joe? Why, Joe was——”

“Was the ‘Fat Boy,’ ” interrupted Wardle, “exactly so. But when I had to cut his beer off he began to grow. Look at him!”

“Does he still sleep as much as ever?” asked Mr. Tupman.

“Never!” said Mr. Wardle.

The cart having set off at a jog-trot for the Manor Farm the five gentlemen, after sundry adjustments of mufflers, gaiters and gloves, disposed themselves to follow.

“And how are you, Wardle?” asked Mr. Pickwick as they fell in side by side.

“Not so well,” said Mr. Wardle.

“Too bad,” said Mr. Pickwick.

“I find I don’t digest as well as I used to.”

“Dear me!” said Mr. Pickwick, who has passed more than half a century of life without being aware that he digested at all, and without connecting that interesting process with the anatomy of Wardle or of any other of his friends.

“No,” continued Wardle, “I find that I have to keep away from starch. Proteids are all right for me, but I find that nitrogenous foods in small quantities are about all that I can take. You don’t suffer from inflation at all, do you?”

“Good Lord, no!” said Mr. Pickwick. He had no more idea of what inflation was than of the meaning of nitrogenous food. But the idea of itself was enough to make him aghast.

They walked along for some time in silence.

Presently Mr. Wardle spoke again.

“I think that the lining of my œsophagus must be punctured here and there,” he said.

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Mr. Pickwick.

“Either that or some sort of irritation in the alimentary canal. Ever have it?”

“My dear sir!” said Mr. Pickwick.

“It’s this damn bootleg stuff,” said Mr. Wardle.

Mr. Pickwick turned as he walked to take a closer look at his old and valued friend, whose whole manner and person seemed, as it were, transformed. He scrutinized closely the legs of Mr. Wardle’s boots, but was unable to see in those stout habiliments any suggested cause for the obvious alteration of mind and body which his friend had undergone. But when he raised his eyes from Wardle’s boots to Wardle’s face, he realized that the change was great. The jolly rubicund features had faded to a dull, almost yellow complexion. There were pouches beneath the eyes and heavy lines in the once smooth cheeks.

Musing thus on the obvious and distressing changes in his old friend, Mr. Pickwick found himself arriving once more in sight of the Manor Farm, a prospect which even on such a gloomy day filled him with pleasant reminiscences. The house at any rate had not changed. Here was still the same warm red brick, the many gables and the smoking chimneys of that hospitable home. Around and beside it were the clustering evergreens and the tall elm trees which had witnessed the marksmanship of Mr. Winkle in the slaughter of rooks. Mr. Pickwick breathed a sigh of satisfaction at the familiar and pleasant prospect. Yet even here, in a nearer view, he could not but feel as if something of the charm of past years had vanished. The whole place seemed smaller, the house on a less generous scale, the grounds far more limited, and even the spruce trees fewer and the elms less venerable than at his previous visit.

In fact Dingley Dell seemed somehow oddly shrunken from what it had been. But Mr. Pickwick, who contained within himself like all great intellects the attitude of the philosopher, resolutely put aside this feeling, as one always familiar in visits paid to scenes of former happiness.

Here at least as he entered the good old house was the same warm and hearty welcome as of yore. The old lady, Mr. Wardle’s mother, her deafness entirely laid aside, greeted Mr. Pickwick and his younger companions with affectionate recognition: while the charming Emily Wardle and the dashing Arabella Allen appeared in a bevy of pretty girls for the especial welcome and the complete distraction of the susceptible hearts of Messrs. Snodgrass and Winkle. Here too, as essential members of the Christmas party, were the two young medical students, those queer combinations of rowdiness and good-humour, Mr. Bob Sawyer and Mr. Benjamin Allen, the brother of the fair Arabella.

Mr. Wardle, also, as he re-entered his home and assumed his duties as host, seemed to recover in great measure his genial good nature and high spirits.

“Now, then, mother,” he exclaimed, “our friends I am sure are thirsty; before they go to their rooms let us see what we can offer them in the way of wine. Joe—where’s that boy?—a couple of bottles of the red wine, the third bin in the cellar, and be smart about it.” The tall thin boy, whom the very word “wine” seemed to galvanize out of his mournful passivity into something like energy, vanished in the direction of the cellar, while Mr. Pickwick and his companions laid aside their outer wraps and felt themselves suddenly invaded with a glow of good-fellowship at the mere prospect of a “drink.” Such is the magic of anticipation that the Pickwickians already felt their hearts warm and their pulses tingle at the very word.

“Now then,” said the hospitable Wardle, “bustle about, girls—glasses—a corkscrew—that’s right—ah, here’s Joe. Set it on the sideboard, Joe.”

The cork of the first bottle came out with a “pop” that would have done credit to the oldest vintage of the Rhine, and Mr. Wardle proceeded to fill the trayful of glasses with the rich red liquid.

“What is it?” asked Mr. Pickwick, beaming through his spectacles at the fluid through which the light of the blazing fire upon the hearth reflected an iridescent crimson. “What is it—Madeira?”

“No,” said Mr. Wardle, “it’s a wine that we made here at home.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Pickwick. Volumes could not have said more.

“It’s made,” continued the hospitable old gentleman, passing round the glasses as he talked, “from cranberries. I don’t know whether one would exactly call it a claret——”

“No,” said Mr. Pickwick, as he sipped the wine—“hardly a claret.”

“No,” said Wardle, “a little more of a Burgundy taste——”

“Yes,” said Mr. Pickwick, “a little more of a Burgundy taste.”

“Drink it,” said Mr. Wardle.

“I am,” said Mr. Pickwick, “but I like to sip it rather slowly, to get the full pleasure of it.”

“You like it?” said Mr. Wardle eagerly.

“It is excellent,” said Mr. Pickwick.

“Then let me fill up your glass again,” said Wardle. “Come along, there’s lots more in the cellar. Here, Winkle, Tupman, your glasses.”

There was no gainsaying Mr. Wardle’s manner. It had in it something of a challenge, which forbade the Pickwickians from expressing their private thoughts, if they had any, on the merits of Mr. Wardle’s wine. Even Mr. Pickwick himself found the situation difficult. “I think, perhaps,” he said as he stood with a second bumper of wine untasted in his hand, “I will carry this up to my room and have the pleasure of drinking it as I dress for dinner.” Which no doubt he did, for at any rate the empty glass was found in due course in Mr. Pickwick’s bedroom. But whether or not certain splashes of red in the snow beneath Mr. Pickwick’s bedroom window may have been connected with the emptiness of the glass we are not at liberty to say.

Now just as the gentlemen were about to vanish upstairs to prepare for dinner the sprightly Emily pulled Mr. Winkle aside. “Wait till the old guys are out of the way,” she whispered. “Arabella’s got a flask of real old tanglefoot, and Bob Sawyer and Mr. Allen are going to make cocktails. Come into our room and have some.”

“God bless my soul,” murmured Mr. Winkle.

The assemblage of the party for dinner found much the same group gathered at the Manor Farm as on the occasion of Mr. Pickwick’s previous visit. Here among the first was the elderly clergyman whose charming poetic talent had afforded such pleasure to the company.

“I am glad to see you,” said Mr. Pickwick heartily. “I trust, sir, I see you well.”

“Not altogether,” said the old man. “I am well enough except when it’s humid, but I find that after a certain saturation of the air, it affects me at once.”

“Indeed,” said Mr. Pickwick.

“I imagine,” continued the clergyman, “that it’s my sebaceous glands? Don’t you think so?”

“Possibly so,” said Mr. Pickwick.

“Though it may be merely some form of subcutaneous irritation——”

“Quite likely,” said Mr. Pickwick.

“You see,” continued the old gentleman, “it’s always possible that there’s some kind of duodenal perforation——”

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Mr. Pickwick.

The fortunate entry of Mr. Wardle with a trayful of cocktails carried aloft by the Thin Boy interrupted this ultra-medical conversation.

“These cocktails,” proclaimed Mr. Wardle in the same tone of irritation and challenge with which he had passed the wine, “you may rely upon absolutely. There is no bootlegged stuff used in them.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Pickwick, smiling, “and what is the principal ingredient?”

“Harness oil,” said Mr. Wardle. “They were made here in the house by my old mother herself. Mother, your health!”

“Your health, madam,” echoed all the company, while the guests with a resolution worthy of the sturdy race from which they sprang, drained the glasses with the unflinching courage of the Briton.

It would be as tedious as it would be needless to trace in detail the slow progress of the meal which followed. The oil cocktails indeed induced a temporary and hectic rise in spirits which lasted through the first of the many courses of that interminable meal. But the fires, thus falsely raised, died easily down.

Mr. Pickwick found himself seated between the old lady, who entertained him with a sustained account of her rheumatism, and the ancient clergyman, who apparently found his sole intellectual diversion in the discussion of his glands.

Nor is it necessary to relate in detail the drear passage of the long evening in the drawing-room which followed upon the long dinner in the dining-room. Mr. Pickwick found himself at the card table, with his friend Mr. Tupman as his opponent and two elderly, angular and silent spinsters as their partners. Here Mr. Pickwick slowly passed from dryness to desiccation; from desiccation to utter aridity such that the sand in the desert of Sahara was moistness itself in comparison. More than once he almost broke his fixed resolutions and dashed off to his room to fetch down the bottle of the “real old stuff” which lay in the pocket of his greatcoat. But his firm resolve to share it with his host and to produce it as the final triumph of the evening kept him from so doing. His sufferings were all the more intense in that some instinct warned him that there was, as it were, “something doing” among the younger people to which he was not a party. There were frequent absences from the card-room on the part of Winkle and Snodgrass and the two young medicos, closely coincident with similar absences of the lovely Emily and the dashing Arabella—absences from which the young people returned with laughing faces and sparkling eyes—in short, Mr. Pickwick had that exasperating feeling that somebody somewhere was getting a drink and that he was not in on it. Only those who have felt this—and their numbers are many—can measure the full meaning of it.

The evening, however, like all things human, drew at length to its close. And as the guests rose from the card tables Mr. Pickwick felt that the moment had at length arrived when he might disclose to the assembled company his carefully planned and welcome surprise.

Mr. Pickwick signalled to the Thin Boy, who had remained in attendance in a corner of the room. “Go up to my bedroom, Joe,” he said, “and you’ll see a bottle——”

“I seen it already,” said the Thin Boy.

“Very good,” said Mr. Pickwick, “fetch it here.”

“And now,” said Mr. Pickwick, when the bottle was presently brought and placed with the cork removed beside him on the table, “I have a toast to propose.” He knocked upon the table in order to call the attention of the company, some of whom were already leaving the room while others still stood about the table.

“The toast of Christmas!” said Mr. Pickwick, holding aloft the bottle. At the sight of it and with the prospect of a real drink before them the company broke into loud applause.

“This bottle, my dear old friend,” continued Mr. Pickwick, his face resuming as he spoke all of its old-time geniality and his gold spectacles irradiating the generosity of his heart, as he turned to Mr. Wardle, “—this bottle I have bought specially for you. I could have wished that this bottle, like the fabled bottle of the Arabian nights (I think it was the Arabian nights; at any rate, certain nights)—that this bottle was everlasting and unemptiable. As it is, I fear I can only offer to each of us a mere pretence of a potation. But for you, my dear Wardle, I insist that there shall be a real bumper, a brimming bumper.”

Mr. Pickwick suited the action to the word, and filling a glass to the brim, he handed it across the table to Mr. Wardle.

“You, Wardle, shall set us a good example by first draining this glass in honour of the spirit of Christmas!”

The kindly face of Mr. Wardle betrayed a noble struggle in which the desire for a drink, a real drink, struggled for mastery with more magnanimous feelings. He hesitated. He paused. The liquid in the glass might be dull in colour and lustreless to the eye, but the pungent aroma, or odour, with which it seemed to fill the room bore witness at least to the strength of it.

“Pickwick,” said Wardle, deeply moved, “I can’t. You are too kind,” and then suddenly: “Damn it. I will.”

And as if anxious to leave no room for any weakening of his resolution, Mr. Wardle lifted the glass and drained it to the bottom. Only when he had consumed the last drop did he set the glass down upon the table. He set it down, so it seemed to those about him, with a slow and heavy hand, and stood a moment, after his potation, as if pausing for speech.

“Pickwick,” he said at last, “it’s—you are——”

His utterance sounded suddenly thick. His eye seemed fixed in a strange way. He looked straight in front of him, not at his old friend, but as it were into nothingness.

“Pickwick,” he repeated, and then, in a loud voice like a cry of fear:

“Pickwick!”

Wardle’s hands groped at the edge of the table. He swayed a moment, trying in vain to hold his balance, and then sank down in a heap against the edge of the table, unconscious, his breath coming in heavy gasps.

Mr. Pickwick rushed to Wardle’s side. The affrighted guests gathered about him in a group, vainly endeavouring to recall the good old man to consciousness.

Mr. Pickwick alone retained some measure of decision. “Sawyer,” he said, “where’s Sawyer? Sam, Joe—quick, go and find Mr. Sawyer!”

“Here, sir,” said the voice of the young medico re-entering the room to which the tumult had recalled him.

He stepped up to Wardle’s side and seized his wrist with one hand and with the other opened Mr. Wardle’s waistcoat to feel the beating of the heart.

Silence fell upon the room, broken only by the stertorous breathing of the old man lying against the table. The eyes of the guests were fixed upon young Bob Sawyer, who stood silent and intent, feeling for the beating of the flickering pulse, transformed in a moment by the instinct and inspiration of his profession from a roystering boy to a man of medicine.

Sawyer’s eye fell upon the empty and reeking glass. “What did he drink?” he asked.

“This,” said Mr. Pickwick, silently passing the bottle to the young man. Bob Sawyer, with a shake of the head, released the wrist of Mr. Wardle. He poured a few spoonfuls of the liquid into the glass and with the utmost caution tasted it with the tip of his tongue.

“Good God!” he said.

“What is it,” said Mr. Pickwick, “raw alcohol?”

“With at least fifteen per cent of cyanide,” said Bob Sawyer.

“And that means?” Mr. Pickwick asked with an agonized look at his old friend, whose breath had now grown faint and from whose face all vestige of colour was rapidly fading.

Bob Sawyer shook his head.

“It means death,” he said. “He is dying now.”

Mr. Pickwick threw his arms about the shoulders of his old friend. In an agony of remorse, he felt himself the destroyer of the man whom he had loved beyond all his friends. His own hand, his own act had brought about this terrible and overwhelming tragedy.

“Wardle, Wardle,” he cried in tones of despair, “speak to me. Wake up! Wake up!”

Again and again, so it seemed at least to himself, he cried, “Wake up, wake up!”

Then as he repeated the words yet again Mr. Pickwick suddenly realized that not he but some one else was vociferating, “Wake up, wake up!”

The voice echoed in his brain, driving out of it the last vestiges of sleep.

With a gasp of relief, as of one rescued from the terrors of a dreadful dream, Mr. Pickwick slowly opened his eyes and assumed a sitting posture, his hands still grasping the coverlet of the bed.

“Wake up, Pickwick, wake up. Merry Christmas!”

There was no doubt of it now! It was the voice of Mr. Tupman, or rather the combined voices of Mr. Tupman, Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Winkle, all fully dressed for the coaching journey and gathered in gay assemblage about the bed of their tardy leader.

It seemed too good to be true! Here was the cheerful face of Mr. Tupman beaming with Christmas salutations as he pulled back the window curtains and let the sunlight flood into the room—here was Mr. Snodgrass arrayed in the bright finery of a poet on a Christmas holiday, and here, most emphatical of all, was Mr. Winkle proffering to Mr. Pickwick a tall bubbling glass of brandy and soda that leaped and sparkled in the beams of sunlight as one of those early pick-me-ups or restoratives, so essential for the proper beginning of a proper Christmas.

“Bless my soul!” said Mr. Pickwick, shaking off the remnants of his terrible dream. The great man leaped from his bed and assuming a dressing-gown rushed to the window and looked into the inn yard. There was the coach, gaily bedecked with sprigs of holly, in the very imminence of preparation for departure, the horses tossing at the bits, the postillions about to mount, the guard fingering his key bugle for a preparatory blast and Mr. Sam Weller in his familiar wide-awake, his face illuminated with its familiar good nature, gaily tossing minor articles of luggage in graceful spirals to the roof of the coach.

Mr. Pickwick, with one last shuddering recollection of the world of the future, slipped back a hundred years into the Good Old Days of the past.