Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0054/00547.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 8KB | 154 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00547}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Mystery Of Edwin Drood, The
Chapter I}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Dickens, Charles}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{poor
ye
cathedral
chinaman
deary
upon
bed
spike
tower
woman}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       Mystery Of Edwin Drood, The
Author:      Dickens, Charles

Chapter I

The Dawn

     An ancient English Cathedral Tower?  How can the ancient English
Cathedral tower be here!  The well-known massive gray square tower of its old
Cathedral?  How can that be here!  There is no spike of rusty iron in the air,
between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What is the spike
that intervenes, and who has set it up?  Maybe it is set up by the Sultan's
orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one.  It is so,
for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession.
Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand
dancing-girls strew flowers.  Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in
countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants.  Still the
Cathedral Tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no
writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay!  Is the spike so low a thing as
the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all
awry?  Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to the
consideration of this possibility.

     Shaking from head to foot, the man whose scattered consciousness has thus
fantastically pieced itself together, at length rises, supports his trembling
frame upon his arms, and looks around.  He is in the meanest and closest of
small rooms.  Through the ragged window-curtain, the light of early days
steals in from a miserable court.  He lies, dressed, across a large unseemly
bed, upon a bedstead that has indeed given way under the weight upon it.
Lying, also dressed and also across the bed, not longwise, are a Chinaman, a
Lascar, and a haggard woman.  The two first are in a sleep or stupor; the last
is blowing at a kind of pipe, to kindle it.  And as she blows, and shading it
with her lean hand, concentrates its red spark of light, it serves in the dim
morning as a lamp to show him what he sees of her.

     'Another?' says this woman, in a querulous, rattling whisper.  'Have
another?'

     He looks about him, with his hand to his forehead.

     'Ye've smoked as many as five since ye come in at midnight,' the woman
goes on, as she chronically complains.  'Poor me, poor me, my head is so bad.
Them two come in after ye.  Ah, poor me, the business is slack, is slack!  Few
Chinamen about the Docks, and fewer Lascars, and no ships coming in, these
say!  Here's another ready for ye, deary.  Ye'll remember like a good soul,
won't ye, that the market price is dreffle high just now?  More nor three
shillings and sixpence for a thimbleful!  And ye'll remember that nobody but
me (and Jack Chinaman t'other side the court; but he can't do it as well as
me) has the true secret of mixing it? Ye'll pay up according, deary, won't
ye?'

     She blows at the pipe as she speaks, and, occasionally bubbling at it,
inhales much of its contents.

     'O me, O me, my lungs is weak, my lungs is bad!  It's nearly ready
for ye, deary.  Ah poor me, poor me, my poor hand shakes like to drop off!
I see ye coming-to, and I ses to my poor self, "I'll have another ready
for him, and he'll bear in mind the market price of opium, and pay
according." O my poor head!  I makes my pipes of old penny inkbottles, ye
see, deary - this is one - and I fits-in a mouthpiece, this way, and I
takes my mixter out of this thimble with this little horn spoon; and so I
fills, deary.  Ah, my poor nerves!  I got Heavens-hard drunk for sixteen
year afore I took to this; but this don't hurt me, not to speak of.  And
it takes away the hunger as well as wittles, deary.'

     She hands him the nearly-emptied pipe, and sinks back, turning over
on her face.

     He rises unsteadily from the bed, lays the pipe upon the hearthstone,
draws back the ragged curtain, and looks with repugnance at his three
companions.  He notices that the woman has opium-smoked herself into a
strange likeness of the Chinaman.  His form of cheek, eye, and temple, and
his colour, are repeated in her.  Said Chinaman convulsively wrestles with
one of his many Gods or Devils, perhaps, and snarls horribly.  The Lascar
laughs and dribbles at the mouth.  The hostess is still.

     'What visions can she have?' the waking man muses, as he turns her
face towards him, and stands looking down at it.  'Visions of many
butchers' shops, and public-houses, and much credit?  Of an increase of
hideous customers, and this horrible bedstead set upright again, and this
horrible court swept clean?  What can she rise to, under any quantity of
opium, higher than that! - Eh?'

     He bends down his ear, to listen to her mutterings.

     'Unintelligible!'

     As he watches the spasmodic shoots and darts that break out of her
face and limbs, like fitful lightning out of a dark sky, some contagion in
them seizes upon him: insomuch that he has to withdraw himself to a lean
arm-chair by the hearth - placed there, perhaps, for such emergencies -
and to sit in it, holding tight, until he has got the better of this
unclean spirit of imitation.

     Then he comes back, pounces on the Chinaman, and seizing him with
both hands by the throat, turns him violently on the bed.  The Chinaman
clutches the aggressive hands, resists, gasps, and protests.

     'What do you say?'

     A watchful pause.

     'Unintelligible!'

     Slowly loosening his grasp as he listens to the incoherent jargon
with an attentive frown, he turns to the Lascar and fairly drags him forth
upon the floor.  As he falls, the Lascar starts into a half-risen
attitude, glares with his eyes, lashes about him fiercely with his arms,
and draws a phantom knife.  It then becomes apparent that the woman has
taken possession of this knife, for safety sake; for, she too starting up,
and restraining and expostulating with him, the knife is visible in her
dress, not in his, when they drowsily drop back, side by side.

     There has been chattering and clattering enough between them, but to
no purpose.  When any distinct word has been flung into the air, it has
had no sense or sequence.  Wherefore 'unintelligible!' is again the
comment of the watcher, made with some reassured nodding of his head, and
a gloomy smile.  He then lays certain silver money on the table, finds his
hat, gropes his way down the broken stairs, gives a good morning to some
rat-ridden doorkeeper, in bed in a black hutch beneath the stairs, and
passes out.

     That same afternoon, the massive gray square tower of an old
Cathedral rises before the sight of a jaded traveller.  The bells are
going for daily vesper service, and he must needs attend it, one would
say, from his haste to reach the open Cathedral door.  The choir are
getting on their sullied white robes, in a hurry, when he arrives among
them, gets on his own robe, and falls into the procession filing in to
service.  Then, the Sacristan locks the iron-barred gates that divide the
sanctuary from the chancel, and all of the procession having scuttled into
their places, hide their faces; and then the intoned words, 'When the
Wicked Man - ' rise among groins of arches and beams of roof, awakening
muttered thunder.