Chapter-4
The day after my mother’s funeral, Peggotty was fired from Blunderstone Rookery. With the unhappy changes that had come into the place, I hardly thought she minded leaving, but she worried terribly about me and how I would manage in such a grey and uncaring environment.
I wondered, too, what was next for me. When would I return to school? Or would one of the Murdstones be taking on the chore of my education? When at last I mustered the courage to ask Miss Murdstone about Salem House, she said she thought I would not be returning. No one seemed very interested in me.
Peggotty decided to go to Yarmouth and stay with her brother until she could find work. The Murdstones’ dislike of me was evident and she thought they might well agree to let me travel with her for a stay by the sea. To be surrounded again by the honest and smiling faces of Daniel, Ham, and, best of all, Em’ly; to spend Sunday mornings listening to the bells ringing and watching shadowy ships breaking through the mist; to search the beach for shells and pebbles—such a wounderful way to live!
Peggotty had little difficulty getting permission for my going with her.
“The boy will be lazy and useless there,” Miss Murdstone declared, “and idleness is the beginning of every evil. But he’d be idle here, too—or anywhere, I’d say. So to save my brother the annoyance of looking after him he can go.”
And so we did. Mr Barkis, the cartdriver who carried all travellers from Blunderstone to Yarmouth and who had taken me several times on my trips to and from Salem House came to get us. Barkis was a bachelor, cheerful and gentle enough. He took real notice of Peggotty and his attentions made her blush and laugh like a young girl. By the time we arrived in Yarmouth, the two of them had decided to see one another again when Barkis made his next trip to the waterside village.
The Peggotty cottage looked just the way I remembered, but a bit smaller. My room was exactly as it had been, clean and sparkling in the sunshine coming through the porthole.
After dinner that evening we sat by the fire, Peggotty knitting and rocking, Daniel and Ham sucking on pipes full of apple-sweet tobacco, Em’ly staring at the dancing flames, and the conversation turned to my not returning to Salem House. Saying I would miss my friends Traddles and Steerforth, I launched into a long and glowing description of their many virtues. I was well into the talk of Steerforth’s good character, good grades and good looks before I noticed the attention Em’ly was paying to my words.
“He’s as brave as a lion,” I said, “and smart and funny. Such a speaker that he can win anybody to his side, and he sings, too.”
I was unknowingly sealing Em’ly’s fate. The romantic picture I painted of the marvellous Steerforth was enough to enchant any young girl.
The time spent in Yarmouth flew past. I’d never seen such sky and water and marvellous ships as when I sat in the doorway of the creaky old boat, letting my eyes fill with memoires to carry back to the gloom of Blunderstone.
Barkis visited many times during those weeks. He was friendly to everyone, but he had only one interest: Peggotty. Barkis was not a man used to courting women, but he was clearly fascinated with Peggotty. He never came without a gift—a bundle of oranges tied in a napkin, a pair of ebony ear-rings, a huge pincushion, some Spanish onions, two boxes of dominoes, a canary in a cage, a leg of pickled pork. Peggotty was enchanted, and before the weeks of my stay in Yarmouth were over, she and Barkis were married.
On the trip back home, Peggotty made sure I knew she would never abandon me to the neglect of the Murdstones. “You’ll always have a home with Barkis and me, Davy,” she said again and again, “If you go as far as China, you can always come home to me.”
Life in the Rookery was a sort of solitary confinement. I had no companions other than my own thoughts and my father’s books. The harsh and grimy ruin of Salem House would have been more pleasant than the loneliness I felt at home. I wasn’t beaten or starved, not actively mistreated. Just disliked and overlooked, and made to feel like a wrinkle in the Murdstones’ otherwise comfortable clothing. Month after month, I was simply neglected. When they were at home, I had my meals with them in silence; when they were away, I was alone, caring for myself. It was well into late autumn when Mr Murdstone announced an abrupt change in the course of my life.
“David, this is Mr Quinion, a manager at Murdstone and Grinby in London,” he said, introducing me to a dinner guest one evening. “He has inquired about your education and I’ve told him you’re no longer in school—that you aren’t doing much but lying around reading or staring out the window.”
“To the young, this is world of action, my boy,” Mr Quinion joined in. “Not for moping, not for wasting time!” he smiled at me kindly, but, I thought, with a little greediness in his look.
“I’m not a rich man, David,” Mr Murdstone began again, “Your education thus far has been costly. But I don’t think more schooling will do you any good. It’s time you stepped out to begin your fight with the world on your own terms.” He turned towards the fire and I stole a glance at Miss Murdstone who sat sewing and smiling. “So, you’ll go with Mr Quinion to our warehouse in London and work there. You’ll earn enough to provide you with food and spending money. I’ve paid for a place for you to live and your laundry will be done for you.”
“In short,” he concluded, “you’re going to begin life on your own. And good luck.”
Although I knew that this arrangement was made to get rid of me, I was neither pleased nor frightened. Rather, the entire thing came so out of the blue that when I was packed up and sent off with Mr Quinion the next morning I was too confused to know how I felt about the future.
I sat in the carriage with all that I owned stashed in a small, black trunk, and watched the garden gate, the church steeple, and the neighbouring graveyard slip out of my sight.
The Murdstone and Grinby bottling warehouse was at the water’s edge at the end of a narrow street that curved downhill to the river. It was an old building with a boat dock of its own. The panelled rooms, discoloured with the dirt and smoke of a hundred years, the rotting floors and stairways, and the squeaking and scuffling of hundreds of grey rats in the cellar were its only features.
There was a corner of the main floor set aside for bottle cleaning and labelling. Here a few men and several boys examined old bottles against the light from the sooty windows. The cracked or broken ones were tossed in a heap, and the others were washed and rinsed.
Into the noise of breaking glass and the hiss of steamy water, I followed Mr Quinion on the first morning.
“You, boy!” Quinion shouted at a couple of sweaty, dirty youngsters bent over a crate of bottles, “Over here, fast now!”
“What is it you want, captain?” The taller boy straightened and approached us.
“This is a new boy for the work. See that he learns the ropes and keep him busy.”
“Mealy, make room for another pair of hands!” said the boy, directing me to the crate. “What did they call you?”
“Davy,” I shouted. “Davy Copperfield.”
“I’m Mick and he’s Mealy Potatoes—at least that’s what everybody calls him,” Mick explained.
Mick and Mealy showed me how to sort the bottles and where to wash them. They pointed out the boxes of tables and the bags of corks to be fitted to all the clean ones. And they talked about their lives outside the warehouse, of their fathers who were bargemen living most of the time on the river, and of Mealy’s little sister who danced at a theatre uptown. All the while I worked, I thought how different these boys were from those at Salem House, so unlike Traddles and Steerforth. So unlike me. As I sank into this uneasy companisonship, I ached for my dreams of learning and of growing into some kind of distinguished and educated manhood. Trapped was what I felt, trapped and smothered in the musty, ratty warehouse.
At day’s end, Mr Quinion returned and took me to the manager’s office. A large man sat waiting there. His clothes were shabby and a little too small, and he carried a sort of walking stick with a large pair of rusty tassels hanging from it. There was no more hair on his head than on a hen’s egg, his face bulged out over a stiff, tight collar, and a magnifying glass hung from a long cord around his neck.
“David, this is Mr Micawber,” Mr Quinion said, closing the door behind us.
“Master Copperfield.” Micawber bowed his head briskly and tapped the stick’s tip for punctuation. “So glad.” Tap. “So glad. You’re to take a room at my house, and I think you’ll be comfortable there. Mrs Micawber and our babies will make you feel right at home, I’m sure. So glad. So glad.” Again the stick tapped. A brisk spin towards Mr Quinion, and another tap.
“So, we’re off then, sir.” Tap. “I’ll take David to the house so he won’t get lost in our great city.” Tap. “Good-day. Good-day.” Tap. Tap.
The Micawber house was in Windsor Terrace—a neighbourhood every bit as shabby as its tenants, but better than the waterfront. I was presented to Mrs Micawber, a thin and faded woman carrying twin infants on her hips, and to two other toddlers, a girl and a boy. My room, at the housetop, was scarcely furnished.
While I stayed with them, the only visitors I ever saw or heard of were people to whom Mr Micawber owed money…and they were many. They would come by at all hours, day and night, and some were fierce. One dirty-faced man, a bootmaker, would stand on the front porch as early as seven a.m. and shout through the door at Mr Micawber.
“Come out here!” the bootmaker would yell, “You’re in there, I known you are. Pay me what you owe me and be rid of me for good.”
When no miraculous cash was thrust out the door or tossed through the window, he upped his verbal attack to include the words ‘robbers’ and ‘thieves’. This was no more effective—not because Micawber was dishonest, not because he had any quarrel with the amounts owed, but because there was barely enough money to put milk on the table. He wasn’t a layman—in fact, he was busy every day trying to make a go of one effort or another. And he was unfailingly optimistic, absolutely convinced that something wonderful was just around the next corner.
“Something will turn up,” he said several times a day. His confidence was amazing in the face of great proof to the contrary, and I tried to imitate his positive attitude in my own bitter surroundings at the warehouse.
Mr Micawber’s money woes eventually came to a crises. He was arrested early one morning for his debts and taken to the King’s Bench Prison to work off some of what he owed.
I took my few things to another boarding house in the neighbourhood and, not yet 12 years old, continued on the business of marking my own way in the world.
Several months passed and Mr Micawber’s petition for release from debtors’ prison was approved. He was freed as well from his creditors. He moved his family to a small house near mine, but soon decided to move them out of London to a country place near Plymouth. Exactly what he would do there he had no idea. “Something will turn up,” he had no idea, “Something will turn up,” he assured me, “It always does you know.”
Micawber made travel plans for the weekend. I’d grown so accustomed to this family and was so truly friendless without them that the idea of being alone again was too awful to be considered. I began to form a radical plan.
On their last night in London, the Micawbers invited me to dinner. Over pork roast and applesauce, we talked about the our coming separation.
“Master Copperfield,” said Mrs Micawber, passing me a second helping of pudding, “You have never been a boarder in our home. You have been a friend.”
“Quite so, Mrs,” said Mr Micawber, “David, at present, and until something turns up, I have nothing but advice to give you. And it’s good advice, although I’ve not had the sense to take it myself. Never wait for tomorrow when you can do something today. Putting things off steals time from you. Don’t let it happen.”
After supper, Mr Micawber walked me to the door and we said farewell on the front steps.
“Happiness to you, Copperfield! If my bad times have taught you any better way to make a life for yourself, then I’m glad I had them.” He shook my hand, then leaned the stick against the doorframe and gave me a warm hug. The last thing I heard before I closed my door was “David something will turn up.”
The next day’s bottle scrubbing required the usual small amount of my attention, so I was free to plan an escape from my unhappy surroundings. By day’s end I knew there were not many more gritty, rat-bitten days left for me at Murdstone and Grinby. I knew I was running away from London into the countryside to find the only relative I had left in the world—my aunt, Miss Betsey Trotwood.
How this desperate idea came to me I had no idea. But once it had arrived, it planted itself so firmly that no amount of doubt or difficulty would dislodge it. All I knew of my aunt came from the old story of my birthnight—a story that I delighted in hearing my mother tell and retell. My aunt walked into and stomped out of that story, a scary and stern form. But I remembered that, for all the strangeness of her actions the night I was born, my mother had said she sensed a gentleness beneath the hardbitten outer layer, and on that sense I built all my hopes for a better future.
I had no idea where to find Miss Betsey Trotwood, so I wrote to Peggotty, casually mentioning that I had heard of a lady much like Miss Betsey who lived at a place I made up, and I wondered if it could be the same person. Peggotty wrote back, enclosing a small amount of money, and told me my aunt lived somewhere close to Dover. That was enough for me.
On the last day of the workweek, I left a message with Mr Quinion and packed my black trunk for travel. It was too heavy to drag to the coach-office, so I went looking for someone to help me carry it there.
A long-legged young man with a very small horse cart caught my eye. I went up to him and asked if he might like a job moving a box. I told him where I had left it and where I wanted it moved.
“Righto!” he said and was up behind the donkey and off down the street so quick I had trouble keeping up with him.
We brought the box down and put it on the cart. I needed to attach a label to the top of the box with instructions for the agent at the coach-office, and pulled paper and a pencil from my pocket. The paper pulled my money from my pocket as well and my few precious coins rolled under the young man’s cart. Swiftly he was into the street, under the cart, and gripping my fortune in his filthy fingers.
“Why, look what I’ve found here!” he squealed delightedly, “I’ve found money someone lost. Well, they won’t be back for it, I’m sure. They’re long gone now, I’m sure. It’s my money now, I’m sure.”
“No!” I cried, jumping towards the cart, “That’s mine. Please give it to me.”
“What? Trying to steal from a poor man who has just been blessed with some rare good luck?” he said. “Get away. This is my fortune. I found it.” And with that he gave the horse’s reins a quick snap and the cart jolted away—the man, my money, and my trunk all gone in a flash.
I bolted off behind him, running as fast as I could, but I had not enough breath to catch him. Exhausted and defeated, I gave up the chase and let him go with everything I owned.
I rested several moments against a low wall at the end of a bridge, until my breath came back and a rush of tears with it. Then I turned in the direction of the Dover Road and ran, panting and crying, slowing and speeding, but not stopping until I could run no more.
