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_ Once upon a time (no matter when), I was engaged in a pursuit (no
matter what), which could be transacted by myself alone; in which I
could have no help; which imposed a constant strain on the
attention, memory, observation, and physical powers; and which
involved an almost fabulous amount of change of place and rapid
railway travelling. I had followed this pursuit through an
exceptionally trying winter in an always trying climate, and had
resumed it in England after but a brief repose. Thus it came to be
prolonged until, at length--and, as it seemed, all of a sudden--it
so wore me out that I could not rely, with my usual cheerful
confidence, upon myself to achieve the constantly recurring task,
and began to feel (for the first time in my life) giddy, jarred,
shaken, faint, uncertain of voice and sight and tread and touch,
and dull of spirit. The medical advice I sought within a few
hours, was given in two words: 'instant rest.' Being accustomed
to observe myself as curiously as if I were another man, and
knowing the advice to meet my only need, I instantly halted in the
pursuit of which I speak, and rested.
My intention was, to interpose, as it were, a fly-leaf in the book
of my life, in which nothing should be written from without for a
brief season of a few weeks. But some very singular experiences
recorded themselves on this same fly-leaf, and I am going to relate
them literally. I repeat the word: literally.
My first odd experience was of the remarkable coincidence between
my case, in the general mind, and one Mr. Merdle's as I find it
recorded in a work of fiction called LITTLE DORRIT. To be sure,
Mr. Merdle was a swindler, forger, and thief, and my calling had
been of a less harmful (and less remunerative) nature; but it was
all one for that.
Here is Mr. Merdle's case:
'At first, he was dead of all the diseases that ever were known,
and of several bran-new maladies invented with the speed of Light
to meet the demand of the occasion. He had concealed a dropsy from
infancy, he had inherited a large estate of water on the chest from
his grandfather, he had had an operation performed upon him every
morning of his life for eighteen years, he had been subject to the
explosion of important veins in his body after the manner of
fireworks, he had had something the matter with his lungs, he had
had something the matter with his heart, he had had something the
matter with his brain. Five hundred people who sat down to
breakfast entirely uninformed on the whole subject, believed before
they had done breakfast, that they privately and personally knew
Physician to have said to Mr. Merdle, "You must expect to go out,
some day, like the snuff of a candle;" and that they knew Mr.
Merdle to have said to Physician, "A man can die but once." By
about eleven o'clock in the forenoon, something the matter with the
brain, became the favourite theory against the field; and by twelve
the something had been distinctly ascertained to be "Pressure."
'Pressure was so entirely satisfactory to the public mind, and
seemed to make every one so comfortable, that it might have lasted
all day but for Bar's having taken the real state of the case into
Court at half-past nine. Pressure, however, so far from being
overthrown by the discovery, became a greater favourite than ever.
There was a general moralising upon Pressure, in every street. All
the people who had tried to make money and had not been able to do
it, said, There you were! You no sooner began to devote yourself
to the pursuit of wealth, than you got Pressure. The idle people
improved the occasion in a similar manner. See, said they, what
you brought yourself to by work, work, work! You persisted in
working, you overdid it, Pressure came on, and you were done for!
This consideration was very potent in many quarters, but nowhere
more so than among the young clerks and partners who had never been
in the slightest danger of overdoing it. These, one and all
declared, quite piously, that they hoped they would never forget
the warning as long as they lived, and that their conduct might be
so regulated as to keep off Pressure, and preserve them, a comfort
to their friends, for many years.'
Just my case--if I had only known it--when I was quietly basking in
the sunshine in my Kentish meadow!
But while I so rested, thankfully recovering every hour, I had
experiences more odd than this. I had experiences of spiritual
conceit, for which, as giving me a new warning against that curse
of mankind, I shall always feel grateful to the supposition that I
was too far gone to protest against playing sick lion to any stray
donkey with an itching hoof. All sorts of people seemed to become
vicariously religious at my expense. I received the most
uncompromising warning that I was a Heathen: on the conclusive
authority of a field preacher, who, like the most of his ignorant
and vain and daring class, could not construct a tolerable sentence
in his native tongue or pen a fair letter. This inspired
individual called me to order roundly, and knew in the freest and
easiest way where I was going to, and what would become of me if I
failed to fashion myself on his bright example, and was on terms of
blasphemous confidence with the Heavenly Host. He was in the
secrets of my heart, and in the lowest soundings of my soul--he!--
and could read the depths of my nature better than his A B C, and
could turn me inside out, like his own clammy glove. But what is
far more extraordinary than this--for such dirty water as this
could alone be drawn from such a shallow and muddy source--I found
from the information of a beneficed clergyman, of whom I never
heard and whom I never saw, that I had not, as I rather supposed I
had, lived a life of some reading, contemplation, and inquiry; that
I had not studied, as I rather supposed I had, to inculcate some
Christian lessons in books; that I had never tried, as I rather
supposed I had, to turn a child or two tenderly towards the
knowledge and love of our Saviour; that I had never had, as I
rather supposed I had had, departed friends, or stood beside open
graves; but that I had lived a life of 'uninterrupted prosperity,'
and that I needed this 'check, overmuch,' and that the way to turn
it to account was to read these sermons and these poems, enclosed,
and written and issued by my correspondent! I beg it may be
understood that I relate facts of my own uncommercial experience,
and no vain imaginings. The documents in proof lie near my hand.
Another odd entry on the fly-leaf, of a more entertaining
character, was the wonderful persistency with which kind
sympathisers assumed that I had injuriously coupled with the so
suddenly relinquished pursuit, those personal habits of mine most
obviously incompatible with it, and most plainly impossible of
being maintained, along with it. As, all that exercise, all that
cold bathing, all that wind and weather, all that uphill training--
all that everything else, say, which is usually carried about by
express trains in a portmanteau and hat-box, and partaken of under
a flaming row of gas-lights in the company of two thousand people.
This assuming of a whole case against all fact and likelihood,
struck me as particularly droll, and was an oddity of which I
certainly had had no adequate experience in life until I turned
that curious fly-leaf.
My old acquaintances the begging-letter writers came out on the
fly-leaf, very piously indeed. They were glad, at such a serious
crisis, to afford me another opportunity of sending that Post-
office order. I needn't make it a pound, as previously insisted
on; ten shillings might ease my mind. And Heaven forbid that they
should refuse, at such an insignificant figure, to take a weight
off the memory of an erring fellow-creature! One gentleman, of an
artistic turn (and copiously illustrating the books of the
Mendicity Society), thought it might soothe my conscience, in the
tender respect of gifts misused, if I would immediately cash up in
aid of his lowly talent for original design--as a specimen of which
he enclosed me a work of art which I recognized as a tracing from a
woodcut originally published in the late Mrs. Trollope's book on
America, forty or fifty years ago. The number of people who were
prepared to live long years after me, untiring benefactors to their
species, for fifty pounds apiece down, was astonishing. Also, of
those who wanted bank-notes for stiff penitential amounts, to give
away:- not to keep, on any account.
Divers wonderful medicines and machines insinuated recommendations
of themselves into the fly-leaf that was to have been so blank. It
was specially observable that every prescriber, whether in a moral
or physical direction, knew me thoroughly--knew me from head to
heel, in and out, through and through, upside down. I was a glass
piece of general property, and everybody was on the most
surprisingly intimate terms with me. A few public institutions had
complimentary perceptions of corners in my mind, of which, after
considerable self-examination, I have not discovered any
indication. Neat little printed forms were addressed to those
corners, beginning with the words: 'I give and bequeath.'
Will it seem exaggerative to state my belief that the most honest,
the most modest, and the least vain-glorious of all the records
upon this strange fly-leaf, was a letter from the self-deceived
discoverer of the recondite secret 'how to live four or five
hundred years'? Doubtless it will seem so, yet the statement is
not exaggerative by any means, but is made in my serious and
sincere conviction. With this, and with a laugh at the rest that
shall not be cynical, I turn the Fly-leaf, and go on again. _
Read next: CHAPTER XXXVII - A PLEA FOR TOTAL ABSTINENCE
Read previous: CHAPTER XXXV - ON AN AMATEUR BEAT
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