第99章

DE FINIBUS.

When Swift was in love with Stella, and despatching her a letter from London thrice a month by the Irish packet, you may remember how he would begin letter No.XXIII., we will say, on the very day when XXII.had been sent away, stealing out of the coffee-house or the assembly so as to be able to prattle with his dear; "never letting go her kind hand, as it were," as some commentator or other has said in speaking of the Dean and his amour.When Mr.Johnson, walking to Dodsley's, and touching the posts in Pall Mall as he walked, forgot to pat the head of one of them, he went back and imposed his hands on it,--impelled I know not by what superstition.I have this Ihope not dangerous mania too.As soon as a piece of work is out of hand, and before going to sleep, I like to begin another: it may be to write only half a dozen lines: but that is something towards Number the Next.The printer's boy has not yet reached Green Arbor Court with the copy.Those people who were alive half an hour since, Pendennis, Clive Newcome, and (what do you call him? what was the name of the last hero? I remember now!) Philip Firmin, have hardly drunk their glass of wine, and the mammas have only this minute got the children's cloaks on, and have been bowed out of my premises--and here I come back to the study again: tamen usque recurro.How lonely it looks now all these people are gone! My dear good friends, some folks are utterly tired of you, and say, "What a poverty of friends the man has! He is always asking us to meet those Pendennises, Newcomes, and so forth.Why does he not introduce us to some new characters? Why is he not thrilling like Twostars, learned and profound like Threestars, exquisitely humorous and human like Fourstars? Why, finally, is he not somebody else?"My good people, it is not only impossible to please you all, but it is absurd to try.The dish which one man devours, another dislikes.

Is the dinner of to-day not to your taste? Let us hope to-morrow's entertainment will be more agreeable....I resume my original subject.What an odd, pleasant, humorous, melancholy feeling it is to sit in the study, alone and quiet, now all these people are gone who have been boarding and lodging with me for twenty months! They have interrupted my rest: they have plagued me at all sorts of minutes: they have thrust themselves upon me when I was ill, or wished to be idle, and I have growled out a "Be hanged to you, can't you leave me alone now?" Once or twice they have prevented my going out to dinner.Many and many a time they have prevented my coming home, because I knew they were there waiting in the study, and a plague take them! and I have left home and family, and gone to dine at the Club, and told nobody where I went.They have bored me, those people.They have plagued me at all sorts of uncomfortable hours.They have made such a disturbance in my mind and house, that sometimes I have hardly known what was going on in my family, and scarcely have heard what my neighbor said to me.They are gone at last; and you would expect me to be at ease? Far from it.I should almost be glad if Woolcomb would walk in and talk to me; or Twysden reappear, take his place in that chair opposite me, and begin one of his tremendous stories.

Madmen, you know, see visions, hold conversations with, even draw the likeness of, people invisible to you and me.Is this making of people out of fancy madness? and are novel-writers at all entitled to strait-waistcoats? I often forget people's names in life; and in my own stories contritely own that I make dreadful blunders regarding them; but I declare, my dear sir, with respect to the personages introduced into your humble servant's fables, I know the people utterly--I know the sound of their voices.A gentleman came in to see me the other day, who was so like the picture of Philip Firmin in Mr.Walker's charming drawings in the cornhill Magazine, that he was quite a curiosity to me.The same eyes, beard, shoulders, just as you have seen them from month to month.Well, he is not like the Philip Firmin in my mind.Asleep, asleep in the grave, lies the bold, the generous, the reckless, the tender-hearted creature whom I have made to pass through those adventures which have just been brought to an end.It is years since I heard the laughter ringing, or saw the bright blue eyes.When I knew him both were young.I become young as I think of him.And this morning he was alive again in this room, ready to laugh, to fight, to weep.As I write, do you know, it is the gray of evening; the house is quiet;everybody is out; the room is getting a little dark, and I look rather wistfully up from the paper with perhaps ever so little fancy that HE MAY COME IN.--No? No movement.No gray shade, growing more palpable, out of which at last look the well-known eyes.No, the printer came and took him away with the last page of the proofs.

And with the printer's boy did the whole cortege of ghosts flit away, invisible? Ha! stay! what is this? Angels and ministers of grace! The door opens, and a dark form--enters, bearing a black--a black suit of clothes.It is John.He says it is time to dress for dinner.