The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, Matthew Pearl Read Free Book Online Page B

of tombstones to dine. This dinner of
Durdles's has become quite a Cloisterham institution: not only because of his
never appearing in public without it, but because of its having been, on
certain renowned occasions, taken into custody along with Durdles (as drunk and
incapable), and exhibited before the Bench of justices at the townhall. These
occasions, however, have been few and far apart: Durdles being as seldom drunk
as sober. For the rest, he is an old bachelor, and he lives in a little
antiquated hole of a house that was never finished: supposed to be built, so
far, of stones stolen from the city wall. To this abode there is an approach,
ankle-deep in stone chips, resembling a petrified grove of tombstones, urns,
draperies, and broken columns, in all stages of sculpture. Herein two
journeymen incessantly chip, while other two journeymen, who face each other,
incessantly saw stone; dipping as regularly in and out of their sheltering
sentry-boxes, as if they were mechanical figures emblematical of Time and
Death.
     
  To Durdles, when he had consumed his
glass of port, Mr. Sapsea intrusts that precious effort of his Muse. Durdles
unfeelingly takes out his two-foot rule, and measures the lines calmly,
alloying them with stone-grit.
     
  “This is for the monument, is it, Mr.
Sapsea?”
     
  “The Inscription. Yes.” Mr. Sapsea waits
for its effect on a common mind.
     
  “It'll come in to a eighth of a inch,”
says Durdles. “Your servant, Mr. Jasper. Hope I see you well.”
     
  “How are you Durdles?”
     
  “I've got a touch of the Tombatism on
me, Mr. Jasper, but that I must expect.”
     
  “You mean the Rheumatism,” says Sapsea,
in a sharp tone. (He is nettled by having his composition so mechanically
received.)
     
  “No, I don't. I mean, Mr. Sapsea, the
Tombatism. It's another sort from Rheumatism. Mr. Jasper knows what Durdles
means. You get among them Tombs afore it's well light on a winter morning, and
keep on, as the Catechism says, a-walking in the same all the days of your
life, and YOU'LL know what Durdles means.”
     
  “It is a bitter cold place,” Mr. Jasper
assents, with an antipathetic shiver.
     
  “And if it's bitter cold for you, up in
the chancel, with a lot of live breath smoking out about you, what the
bitterness is to Durdles, down in the crypt among the earthy damps there, and
the dead breath of the old “uns,” returns that individual, “Durdles leaves you
to judge. —Is this to be put in hand at once, Mr. Sapsea?”
     
  Mr. Sapsea, with an Author's anxiety to
rush into publication, replies that it cannot be out of hand too soon.
     
  “You had better let me have the key
then,” says Durdles.
     
  “Why, man, it is not to be put inside
the monument!”
     
  “Durdles knows where it's to be put, Mr.
Sapsea; no man better. Ask “ere a man in Cloisterham whether Durdles knows his
work.”
     
  Mr. Sapsea rises, takes a key from a
drawer, unlocks an iron safe let into the wall, and takes from it another key.
     
  “When Durdles puts a touch or a finish
upon his work, no matter where, inside or outside, Durdles likes to look at his
work all round, and see that his work is a-doing him credit,” Durdles explains,
doggedly.
     
  The key proffered him by the bereaved
widower being a large one, he slips his two-foot rule into a side-pocket of his
flannel trousers made for it, and deliberately opens his flannel coat, and
opens the mouth of a large breast-pocket within it before taking the key to
place it in that repository.
     
  “Why, Durdles!” exclaims Jasper, looking
on amused, “you are undermined with pockets!”
     
  “And I carries weight in “em too, Mr.
Jasper. Feel those!” producing two other large keys.
     
  “Hand me Mr. Sapsea's likewise. Surely
this is the heaviest of the three.”
     
  “You'll find “em much of a muchness, I
expect,” says Durdles. “They all belong to monuments. They