Chapter-10
I kept on loving Dora. Thinking of her was my refuge when everything was sad or in upset. I wasn’t just crazy about her—I was drowning in love.
A week after Daniel had left London, Mr Spenlow told me his daughter was having a birthday and invited me to join them and some other friends for a picnic on Sunday. My excitement was boundless. I bought new clothes—boots too tight, a shirt too expensive. I rented a grey mare to ride, and at sunup Sunday I was in the flower stalls at Convent Garden buying a bouquet of roses and baby’s breath for the Birthday Girl, tucking them into the silk band on my hat to keep them fresh for the gallop out to the country.
I found Dora sitting among the butterflies on a garden seat under a huge lilac bush—a lovely sight in a white bonnet and a dress of sky blue. Her dog jip, a yappy little furball with slim patience for anyone but his mistress, and her friend Julia Mills were with her. My flowers pleased her, and she kept them at hand and sniffed them often, throwing direct and flirting glances at me over their tops. I was in paradise.
We all rode some miles into the countryside where a couple dozen Spenlow family members and friends had raised a brightly striped tent, tossed large quilts about on the grass, and set up nets and hoops for games. There was music and singing, food and champagne, play and dancing, and a bonfire. A perfect day except that Dora didn’t know my feelings. So three days later I told her. In grand phrases and with eloquent vows, I spoke of my loving as no one had loved before, of my wishing to perish if without her love in return, of my dreams for our marvellous future. She trembled. I knelt. She wept. I pleaded. She laughed. I spun her around until we were dizzy. She loved me. She loved me.
And so we were engaged. My happiness was complete. In its bright and quiet intensity, it formed a cushion to all my days, making holidays out of workdays, vacations out of weekends, and journeys of my every night’s dreaming.
I loved Dora. Dora loved me. It was enough.
Peggotty and I returned from a walk through the markets to find Aunt Betsey Trotwood and the faithful Mr Bick in the boarding house hallway. My aunt sat on one of a half-dozen trunks with her two birds in a cage and her tabby cat nestled into the sling her skirt formed between her knees. Mr Bick stood bolt-upright, starting at my door.
“Aunt Betsey, Mr Bick! Welcome!” I shouted. “Aunt, you remember Peggotty, don’t you?”
Peggotty looked worried when she realized that was the aunt she’d last seen on the night I was born, the one who’d so upset my mother. Aunt Betsey gave her hand a firm shake and told her how sorry she was to hear about her recent loss.
We went inside, settled ourselves, and I waited to hear why they’d come so unexpectedly—and so fully packed. For a new minutes no one said anything. A curious and unusual process of hesitation appeared to be going on within my aunt.
“Trot,” she finally began, “have you become self-reliant?”
“I think so, Aunt.”
“And why do you suppose I’m sitting here on top of all my trunks, with my budgies and my cat and my dear companion Mr Bick?”
I shook my head, unable to guess.
“Because it’s all I have,” she said, “I’m ruined. I have nothing but the cottage left.” She said this not with despair or anger, but with confidence. “It’s the fact, Trot. We’ve got to meet our bad times boldly and not let them frighten us.”
I knew I would hear all of the story when she was ready to share it, but until then we needed to get everyone a place to stay. Peggotty was leaving in the morning for Yarmouth, but her room was so small that my aunt’s trunks and birds and cat would have flowed into the hall. So I offered Aunt Betsey my bedroom and moved my things into the sitting room beside the sofa where I would sleep. I took Mr Bick around the corner to another house with rooms to rent. The landlady apologized for the tininess of the available room, saying there was barely room to swing a cat. Mr Bick assured her he didn’t keep pets, and that the room was just delightful.
I left him staring out the window and went back around to my house. Aunt Betsey was pacing back and forth the length of my sitting room, twisting the ruffled edges of her night-cap, when I went in. I poured some ale for both of us and we sat in the candlelight. We talked of Peggotty and of Barkis’ death, of Em’ly’s hasty leaving and Daniel’s search, and finally of Dora and my lighthearted love.
“Lighthearted? More lightheaded!” cried my aunt, “Silly and impractical and selfish, like many young creatures.”
Aunt Betsey calmed herself and said, “Earnestness and dedication and patience are better sought in lovers, and there is someone who offers you all of that. But I can tell your heart is set on Dora.”
It was a few moments before she spoke again, this time quietly, almost too softly to be heard: “Ah, Trot, blind, blind, blind!”
I was locking the office door at Doctors’ Commons the next afternoon when a carriage drew to a sharp stop at the curb not three feet from me. A graceful hand stretched out the window, followed by a face I never saw without feeling serene and happy in its presence.
“Agnes!” I shouted, “Of all people on earth, this is a surprise and a pleasure. Where are you going?”
She stepped out of the carriage, sending the driver away, and said she was on her way to my house to see my aunt. She’d got a typically odd and abrupt note from Aunt Betsey saying she’d fallen on difficult times and was leaving Dover. Agnes had come at once at London, but not alone for her father and Uriah Heep were along on business.
“I suppose they’re partners now,” I said.
“Confound that evil man! Does he exert the same influence over your father?”
“Things are so much changed,” Agnes said.
“They live with us—Uriah and his mother. He sleeps in your old room. The worst part is that Uriah puts himself so much between father and me now that I can’t watch over him as well as I could before.” She slipped her arm through mine and I felt her tremble.
My aunt was delighted with the surprise visitor and the two women huddled immediately in quiet conversation. I fixed tea and joined them. We began to talk of my aunt’s losses.
“I had some property,” she said, “and made some good investments on the advice of your own father, Agnes. Then he seemed to change, and Uriah Heep entered, meddling in my account, so I no longer felt I could rely on wise counsel from the Wickfield firm. I made some bad decisions, and that’s what happened. Lost it all—well, very close to all. And here I am at the kind mercy of my dear Trot.”
“Aunt, you’re welcome to everything I have,” I said, “You and Mr Bick and I are going to be a fine family again.”
We sat talking about our pleasant old Canterbury days for a couple of hours, then Agnes and I went for dinner at an inn close by. How sweet it was to sit with her—how peaceful I always felt. I told her about Dora, and Agnes wished me every blessing and joy.
We walked back to her hotel and said goodnight. As I crossed the road and glanced back up at her window, a beggar crouched in the shadows called out to me: “Blind! Blind! Blind!”
I was out early the next day. My plan was to find an extra job or two during my apprenticeship that would add to the very small salary I received from Spenlow and Jorkin so that I could provide for my aunt and for Mr Bick. I went first to see an old schoolmaster. He’d been writing a dictionary for all the years I’d known him and had often complained of having no assistant he could count on. I found his poor eyesight much more advanced than the number of alphabet letters completed, and we arrived at a work and pay schedule that suited us both.
My next visit was to Tommy Traddles’ office. We’d talked before about work as a freelance reporter covering debates in the Houses of Parliament. I wanted to do it and needed his advice. I took Mr Bick with me because I thought there might be a chance of coming up with something useful that he could do there.
“How’s your penmanship? Do you make letters that are clean and easily read?” Traddles asked Mr Bick, “Do you think you could make copies of written papers, rewriting them on clean sheets of paper, exactly as the originals are written?”
I said I thought so, Traddles said he hoped so, and Mr Bick said he’d certainly like to try it. He wanted to start at once, so Traddles got him set up at a corner desk with some contracts that needed to be copied for four partners.
Thereafter, Mr Bick was up each day before dawn and off to Traddles’ office. He worked fast and wrote clearly, and every week he brought a pay envelope to my aunt.
“No starving now!” he declared, “I’ll provide for you with these.” And he waved his ten inky fingers around in the air above his head, smiling his biggest smile.
After about a week of working all day at Doctor’s Commons and then spending several hours either on the dictionary or scribbling furious notes of the heated discussions at Parliament, I went to visit Dora.
She came to the parlour door to greet me, and Jip shot past her skirt’s hem, yapping and snapping at my pant’s cuffs as if to warm away the worst robber. She scooped him up with a quick tap to the nose, and I followed her into the garden. We sat in silence on a stone bench while I gazed with delight at her perky nose and pointy little chin.
“Dora,” I blurted out without any preparation, “can you love a beggar?”
“How can you ask anything so silly?” she cried.
“Because, my dearest, that is just what I am,” I said.
I put my arms around her and said that I loved her too much to keep her bound in an engagement with a man so poor as I, but that I would never recover if I lost her. I explained the drain on my finances and how I was working several ways to provide for all those who relied on me.
“And when we’re married, we’ll have to be practical. My aunt is handy with a needle and can show you how to sew,” I said.
Dora made a noise halfway between a sob and a sequeal.
“And it would help so much if you would read a little about cooking and keeping a household budget.”
This time it was a full-throated scream. Jip set to growling and barking and snapping at my leg. Dora’s friend Julia came running from the house, clearly certain that warriors had broken through the trellises.
Dora would not be comforted and Julia led her away to her room. I sat in the garden, cursing myself for being a vicious beast, until Julia came back.
“Mr Copperfield, Dora is not a strong person,” Julia said, sadly, “She’s made of light and air. She’s been pampered all her life, and she’s not going to take well to any change in that. The practical realities are entirely beyond her. She’s had a terrific upset just now, but she’ll be all right. If there’s any hope of her making peace with household duties, I’ll encourage her in it. But don’t count on it.”
I left in a very low mood and sat at the pub for an hour trying to cheer myself up. Well, I loved her and there was no changing that. And I would go on loving her entirely, and working harder than ever. That night I fell asleep wishing life were more peaceful and Dora were more like Agnes.
I arrived at Doctor’s Commons one morning several weeks later to find a small crowd in the street outside our offices. The central door stood open and I could see all the clerks inside.
“It’s the worst calamity,” said Tiffy, the office manager. “Mr Spenlow’s dead! I found him this morning. The doctor says it must have been his heart. Awful!”
There was a terrible vacancy in Mr Spenlow’s office, where his desk and chair seemed to wait for him, and the handwriting on his tablet was like a ghost. I expected him to come in at any moment, not to be gone from here for all time.
There was a flurry of unanticipated activity to be handled that day, clients to be contacted, appointments to be changed. When I left the Commons I took a coach out to the country, to Norwood, to comfort Dora.
Julia Mills met me at the gate and said that Dora was much too upset to see anyone, even me. “She can only cry and cry,” she said, “She needs to sleep. This has been too much of a shock for someone as delicate as Dora. I’ll tell her you came by and I’m sure she’ll be in touch with you soon, Mr Copperfield.”
There was no reaching my grieving love, so I returned to London. And no word came from her the rest of the week. Mr Jorkins found that Mr Spenlow was a better preacher than a doer—he had made no will, had overspent his personal budget, and was all but penniless.
At the start of the next week, a letter came for me from Julia. She explained that Dora had at last recovered herself a bit and that Mr Spenlow’s two sisters had come to take her home with them to Putney. The house was to be closed and sold. Dora, she wrote, would surely write me as soon as she was able.
I felt as if I had been living in a palace of playing cards, and that a large puff of wind had blown it all to the ground.
