The Personal History of David Copperfield

“Afraid!” I said, with a becoming air of boldness, and looking very big at the mighty ocean. “I a’nt!”

“Ah! but it’s cruel,” said Em’ly. “I have seen it very cruel to some of our men. I have seen it tear a boat as big as our house, all to pieces.”

“I hope it wasn’t the boat that – ”

“That father was drownded in?” said Em’ly. “No. Not that one, I never see that boat.”

“Nor him?” I asked her.

Little Em’ly shook her head. “Not to remember!”

Here was a coincidence! I immediately went into an explanation how I had never seen my own father; and how my mother and I had always lived by ourselves in the happiest state imaginable, and lived so then, and always meant to live so; and how my father’s grave was in the churchyard near our house, and shaded by a tree, beneath the boughs of which I had walked and heard the birds sing many a pleasant morning. But there were some differences between Em’ly’s orphanhood and mine, it appeared. She had lost her mother before her father; and where her father’s grave was no one knew, except that it was somewhere in the depths of the sea.

“Besides,” said Em’ly, as she looked about for shells and pebbles, “your father was a gentleman and your mother is a lady; and my father was a fisherman and my mother was a fisherman’s daughter, and my uncle Dan is a fisherman.”

“Dan is Mr. Peggotty, is he?” said I.

“Uncle Dan – yonder,” answered Em’ly, nodding at the boat-house.

“Yes. I mean him. He must be very good, I should think?”

“Good?” said Em’ly. “If I was ever to be a lady, I’d give him a sky-blue coat with diamond buttons, nankeen trousers, a red velvet waistcoat, a cocked hat, a large gold watch, a silver pipe, and a box of money.”

I said I had no doubt that Mr. Peggotty well deserved these treasures. I must acknowledge that I felt it difficult to picture him quite at his ease in the raiment proposed for him by his grateful little niece, and that I was particularly doubtful of the policy of the cocked hat; but I kept these sentiments to myself.

Little Em’ly had stopped and looked up at the sky in her enumeration of these articles, as if they were a glorious vision. We went on again, picking up shells and pebbles.

“You would like to be a lady?” I said.

Emily looked at me, and laughed and nodded “yes.”

“I should like it very much. We would all be gentlefolks together, then. Me, and uncle, and Ham, and Mrs. Gummidge. We wouldn’t mind then, when there come stormy weather. – Not for our own sakes, I mean. We would for the poor fishermen’s, to be sure, and we’d help ’em with money when they come to any hurt.”

This seemed to me to be a very satisfactory and therefore not at all improbable picture. I expressed my pleasure in the contemplation of it, and little Em’ly was emboldened to say, shyly,

“Don’t you think you are afraid of the sea, now?”

It was quiet enough to reassure me, but I have no doubt if I had seen a moderately large wave come tumbling in, I should have taken to my heels, with an awful recollection of her drowned relations. However, I said “No,” and I added, “You don’t seem to be, either, though you say you are;” – for she was walking much too near the brink of a sort of old jetty or wooden causeway we had strolled upon, and I was afraid of her falling over.

“I’m not afraid in this way,” said little Em’ly. “But I wake when it blows, and tremble to think of uncle Dan and Ham, and believe I hear ’em crying out for help. That’s why I should like so much to be a lady. But I’m not afraid in this way. Not a bit. Look here!”

She started from my side, and ran along a jagged timber which protruded from the place we stood upon, and overhung the deep water at some height, without the least defence. The incident is so impressed on my remembrance, that if I were a draughtsman I could draw its form here, I daresay, accurately as it was that day, and little Em’ly springing forward to her destruction (as it appeared to me), with a look that I have never forgotten, directed far out to sea.

The light, bold, fluttering little figure turned and came back safe to me, and I soon laughed at my fears, and at the cry I had uttered; fruitlessly in any case, for there was no one near. But there have been times since, in my manhood, many times there have been, when I have thought, Is it possible, among the possibilities of hidden things, that in the sudden rashness of the child and her wild look so far off, there was any merciful attraction of her into danger, any tempting her towards him permitted on the part of her dead father, that her life might have a chance of ending that day. There has been a time since when I have wondered whether, if the life before her could have been revealed to me at a glance, and so revealed as that a child could fully comprehend it, and if her preservation could have depended on a motion of my hand, I ought to have held it up to save her. There has been a time since – I do not say it lasted long, but it has been – when I have asked myself the question, would it have been better for little Em’ly to have had the waters close above her head that morning in my sight; and when I have answered Yes, it would have been.

This may be premature. I have set it down too soon, perhaps. But let it stand.

We strolled a long way, and loaded ourselves with things that we thought curious, and put some stranded star-fish carefully back into the water – I hardly know enough of the race at this moment to be quite certain whether they had reason to feel obliged to us for doing so, or the reverse – and then made our way home to Mr. Peggotty’s dwelling. We stopped under the lee of the lobster-outhouse to exchange an innocent kiss, and went in to breakfast glowing with health and pleasure.

“Like two young mavishes,” Mr. Peggotty said. I knew this meant, in our local dialect, like two young thrushes, and received it as a compliment.

Of course I was in love with little Em’ly. I am sure I loved that baby quite as truly, quite as tenderly, with greater purity, and more disinterestedness, than can enter into the best love of a later time of life, high and ennobling as it is. I am sure my fancy raised up something round that blue-eyed mite of a child, which etherealised, and made a very angel of her. If, any sunny forenoon, she had spread a little pair of wings and flown away before my eyes, I don’t think I should have regarded it as much more than I had had reason to expect.

We used to walk about that dim old flat at Yarmouth in a loving manner, hours and hours. The days sported by us, as if Time had not grown up himself yet, but were a child too, and always at play. I told Em’ly I adored her, and that unless she confessed she adored me I should be reduced to the necessity of killing myself with a sword. She said she did, and I have no doubt she did.

As to any sense of inequality, or youthfulness, or other difficulty in our way, little Em’ly and I had no such trouble, because we had no future. We made no more provision for growing older, than we did for growing younger. We were the admiration of Mrs. Gummidge and Peggotty, who used to whisper of an evening when we sat, lovingly, on our little locker side by side, “Lor! wasn’t it beautiful!” Mr. Peggotty smiled at us from behind his pipe, and Ham grinned all the evening and did nothing else. They had something of the sort of pleasure in us, I suppose, that they might have had in a pretty toy, or a pocket model of the Colosseum.

I soon found out that Mrs. Gummidge did not always make herself so agreeable as she might have been expected to do, under the circumstances of her residence with Mr. Peggotty. Mrs. Gummidge’s was rather a fretful disposition, and she whimpered more sometimes than was comfortable for other parties in so small an establishment. I was very sorry for her; but there were moments when it would have been more agreeable, I thought, if Mrs. Gummidge had had a convenient apartment of her own to retire to, and had stopped there until her spirits revived.

Mr. Peggotty went occasionally to a public house called The Willing Mind. I discovered this, by his being out on the second or third evening of our visit, and by Mrs. Gummidge’s looking up at the dutch clock, between eight and nine, and saying he was there, and that, what was more, she had known in the morning he would go there.

Mrs. Gummidge had been in a low state all day, and had burst into tears in the forenoon, when the fire smoked. “I am a lone lorn creetur’,” were Mrs. Gummidge’s words, when that unpleasant occurrence took place, “and everythink goes contrairy with me.”

“Oh, it’ll soon leave off,” said Peggotty – I again mean our Peggotty – “and besides, you know, it’s not more disagreeable to you than to us.”

“I feel it more,” said Mrs. Gummidge.

It was a very cold day, with cutting blasts of wind. Mrs. Gummidge’s peculiar corner of the fireside seemed to me to be the warmest and snuggest in the place, as her chair was certainly the easiest, but it didn’t suit her that day at all. She was constantly complaining of the cold, and of its occasioning a visitation in her back which she called “the creeps.” At last she shed tears on that subject, and said again that she was “a lone lorn creetur’ and everythink went contrairy with her.”

“It is certainly very cold,” said Peggotty. “Everybody must feel it so.”

“I feel it more than other people,” said Mrs. Gummidge.

So at dinner; when Mrs. Gummidge was always helped immediately after me, to whom the preference was given as a visitor of distinction. The fish were small and bony, and the potatoes were a little burnt. We all acknowledged that we felt this something of a disappointment; but Mrs. Gummidge said she felt it more than we did, and shed tears again, and made that former declaration with great bitterness.

Accordingly, when Mr. Peggotty came home about nine o’clock, this unfortunate Mrs. Gummidge was knitting in her corner in a very wretched and miserable condition. Peggotty had been working cheerfully. Ham had been patching up a great pair of water-boots; and I, with little Em’ly by my side, had been reading to them. Mrs. Gummidge had never made any other remark than a forlorn sigh, and had never raised her eyes since tea.

“Well, Mates,” said Mr. Peggotty, taking his seat, “and how are you?”

We all said something, or looked something, to welcome him, except Mrs. Gummidge, who only shook her head over her knitting.

“What’s amiss,” said Mr. Peggotty, with a clap of his hands. “Cheer up, old Mawther!” (Mr. Peggotty meant old girl.)

Mrs. Gummidge did not appear to be able to cheer up. She took out an old black silk handkerchief and wiped her eyes; but instead of putting it in her pocket, kept it out, and wiped them again, and still kept it out, ready for use.

“What’s amiss, dame!” said Mr. Peggotty.

“Nothing,” returned Mrs. Gummidge. “You’ve come from The Willing Mind, Dan’l?”

“Why yes, I’ve took a short spell at The Willing Mind to-night,” said Mr. Peggotty.

“I’m sorry I should drive you there,” said Mrs. Gummidge.

“Drive! I don’t want no driving,” returned Mr. Peggotty with an honest laugh. “I only go too ready.”

“Very ready,” said Mrs. Gummidge, shaking her head, and wiping her eyes. “Yes, yes, very ready. I am sorry it should be along of me that you’re so ready.”

“Along o’ you? It an’t along o’ you!” said Mr. Peggotty. “Don’t ye believe a bit on it.”