The Mystery of Edwin Drood quotes

“

There is said to be a hidden skeleton in every house; but you thought there was none in mine, dear Ned.

”

“I hate it.

The cramped monotony of my existence grinds me away by the grain.

How does our service sound to you?”

while every ploughman in its outlying fields renders to once puissant Lord Treasurers, Archbishops, Bishops, and suchlike, the attention which the Ogre in the storybook desired to render to his unbidden visitor, and grinds their bones to make his bread.

A drowsy city, Cloisterham, whose inhabitants seem to suppose, with an inconsistency more strange than rare, that all its changes lie behind it, and that there are no more to come.

A queer moral to derive from antiquity, yet older than any traceable antiquity. So silent are the streets of Cloisterham (though prone to echo on the smallest provocation), that of a summer-day the sunblinds of its shops scarce dare to flap in the south wind;

a venerable brick edifice whose present appellation is doubtless derived from the legend of its conventual uses. On the trim gate enclosing its old courtyard is a resplendent brass plate flashing forth the legend: “Seminary for Young Ladies. Miss Twinkleton.”

The house-front is so old and worn, and the brass plate is so shining and staring, that the general result has reminded imaginative strangers of a battered old beau with a large modern eyeglass stuck in his blind eye.

Whether the nuns of yore, being of a submissive rather than a stiff-necked generation, habitually bent their contemplative heads to avoid collision with the beams in the low ceilings of the many chambers of their House;

“The whole thing is.

It is so absurd to be an engaged orphan; and it is so absurd to have the girls and the servants scuttling about after one, like mice in the wainscot; and it is so absurd to be called upon!

”

“Ah!” cries Rosa, shaking her head and bursting into real tears, “I wish we could be friends! It’s because we can’t be friends, that we try one another so.

I am a young little thing, Eddy, to have an old heartache; but I really, really have, sometimes.

Don’t be angry. I know you have one yourself, too often. We should both of us have done better, if What is to be had been left, What might have been. I am quite a little serious thing now, and not teasing you.

“Ah!” cries Rosa, shaking her head and bursting into real tears, “I wish we could be friends!

It’s because we can’t be friends, that we try one another so.

I am a young little thing, Eddy, to have an old heartache; but I really, really have, sometimes. Don’t be angry. I know you have one yourself, too often.

and then on his railed-off garden. Mr. Sapsea has a bottle of port wine on a table before the fire—the fire is an early luxury, but pleasant on the cool, chilly autumn evening—and is characteristically attended by his portrait, his eight-day clock, and his weatherglass.

Characteristically, because he would uphold himself against mankind, his weatherglass against weather, and his clock against time.

By Mr. Sapsea’s side on the table are a writing-desk and writing materials. Glancing at a scrap of manuscript, Mr.

“Anything old, I think you mean,” growls Durdles. “

It ain’t a spot for novelty.

”

“I wouldn’t have it at a gift,” returns Durdles, by no means receiving the observation in good part. “I worked it out for myself.

Durdles comes by his knowledge through grubbing deep for it, and having it up by the roots when it don’t want to come.

—Holloa you Deputy!”

You were to have universal concord, and were to get it by eliminating all the people who wouldn’t, or conscientiously couldn’t, be concordant.

You were to love your brother as yourself, but after an indefinite interval of maligning him (very much as if you hated him), and calling him all manner of names.

Above all things, you were to do nothing in private, or on your own account. You were to go to the offices of the Haven of Philanthropy, and put your name down as a Member and a Professing Philanthropist.

Mrs. Crisparkle had need of her own share of philanthropy when she beheld this very large and very loud excrescence on the little party.

Always something in the nature of a Boil upon the face of society, Mr. Honeythunder expanded into an inflammatory Wen in Minor Canon Corner.

Though it was not literally true, as was facetiously charged against him by public unbelievers, that he called aloud to his fellow-creatures: “Curse your souls and bodies, come here and be blessed!”

“

Because we both know we are ridiculous, my dear!

” Rosa gave that answer as if it were the most conclusive answer in the world.

“O, don’t, don’t, don’t!” cried Rosa, dropping on her knees, and clinging to her new resource. “Don’t tell me of it!

He terrifies me. He haunts my thoughts, like a dreadful ghost.

I feel that I am never safe from him. I feel as if he could pass in through the wall when he is spoken of.” She actually did look round, as if she dreaded to see him standing in the shadow behind her.

“

He has made a slave of me with his looks. He has forced me to understand him, without his saying a word; and he has forced me to keep silence, without his uttering a threat.

When I play, he never moves his eyes from my hands. When I sing, he never moves his eyes from my lips.

Mr. Grewgious had been well selected for his trust, as a man of incorruptible integrity, but certainly for no other appropriate quality discernible on the surface.

He was an arid, sandy man, who, if he had been put into a grinding-mill, looked as if he would have ground immediately into high-dried snuff.

He had a scanty flat crop of hair, in colour and consistency like some very mangy yellow fur tippet; it was so unlike hair, that it must have been a wig, but for the stupendous improbability of anybody’s voluntarily sporting such a head.

“Dear me,” said Mr. Grewgious, peeping in, “it’s like looking down the throat of Old Time.”

Old Time heaved a mouldy sigh from tomb and arch and vault; and gloomy shadows began to deepen in corners; and damps began to rise from green patches of stone; and jewels, cast upon the pavement of the nave from stained glass by the declining sun, began to perish.

Within the grill-gate of the chancel, up the steps surmounted loomingly by the fast-darkening organ, white robes could be dimly seen, and one feeble voice, rising and falling in a cracked, monotonous mutter, could at intervals be faintly heard.

Edwin glanced at his face, uncertain whether or no he seriously objected to the appellation.

But Edwin might as well have glanced at the face of a clock.

“A pet name, sir,” he explained again.

The host had gone below to the cellar, and had brought up bottles of ruby, straw-coloured, and golden drinks, which had ripened long ago in lands where no fogs are, and had since lain slumbering in the shade.

Sparkling and tingling after so long a nap, they pushed at their corks to help the corkscrew (like prisoners helping rioters to force their gates), and danced out gaily.

If P. J. T. in seventeen-forty-seven, or in any other year of his period, drank such wines—then, for a certainty, P. J. T. was Pretty Jolly Too.

Externally, Mr. Grewgious showed no signs of being mellowed by these glowing vintages.

Instead of his drinking them, they might have been poured over him in his high-dried snuff form, and run to waste, for any lights and shades they caused to flicker over his face.

Neither was his manner influenced. But, in his wooden way, he had observant eyes for Edwin;

Edwin bit his lip again, and still sat looking at the fire.

“He must not make a plaything of a treasure. Woe betide him if he does! Let him take that well to heart,” said Mr. Grewgious.

Though he said these things in short sentences, much as the supposititious charity boy just now referred to, might have repeated a verse or two from the Book of Proverbs, there was something dreamy (for so literal a man) in the way in which he …

“We must finish this bottle, Mr. Edwin. Let me help you. I’ll help Bazzard too, though he is asleep. He mightn’t like it else.”

He helped them both, and helped himself, and drained his glass, and stood it bottom upward on the table, as though he had just caught a bluebottle in it.

“And now, Mr. Edwin,” he proceeded, wiping his mouth and hands upon his handkerchief: “to a little piece of business. You received from me, the other day, a certified copy of Miss Rosa’s father’s will.

Mr. Grewgious crossed the staircase to his raw and foggy bedroom, and was soon ready for bed. Dimly catching sight of his face in the misty looking-glass, he held his candle to it for a moment.

“A likely someone, you, to come into anybody’s thoughts in such an aspect!”

he exclaimed. “There! there! there! Get to bed, poor man, and cease to jabber!”

Sapsea is confident that he invented that forcible figure—would fall to pieces. Mayors have been knighted for “going up” with addresses: explosive machines intrepidly discharging shot and shell into the English Grammar.

Mr. Sapsea may “go up” with an address. Rise, Sir Thomas Sapsea! Of such is the salt of the earth.

Mr. Sapsea has improved the acquaintance of Mr. Jasper, since their first meeting to partake of port, epitaph, backgammon, beef, and salad. Mr. Sapsea has been received at the gatehouse with kindred hospitality; and on that occasion Mr.

“You’re out of temper,” says Mr. Sapsea, winking to the company to observe how smoothly he will manage him. “My friend concerns me, and Mr. Jasper is my friend. And you are my friend.”

“Don’t you get into a bad habit of boasting,” retorts Durdles, with a grave cautionary nod. “It’ll grow upon you.”

“You are out of temper,” says Sapsea again; reddening, but again sinking to the company.

“Do you mean animal spirits, or ardent?”

“The one’s the t’other,” answers Durdles, “and I mean ’em both.”

He takes a lantern from a hook, puts a match or two in his pocket wherewith to light it, should there be need; and they go out together, dinner-bundle and all.

“They don’t show, you see, the old uns don’t, Mister Jarsper!”

“It would be a more confused world than it is, if they could.”

“Well, it would lead towards a mixing of things,” Durdles acquiesces: pausing on the remark, as if the idea of ghosts had not previously presented itself to him in a merely inconvenient light, domestically, or chronologically.

Miss Giggles (deficient in sentiment) did indeed profess that she, for her part, acknowledged such homage by making faces at the golden youth; but this young lady was outvoted by an immense majority.

On the last night before a recess, it was always expressly made a point of honour that nobody should go to sleep, and that Ghosts should be encouraged by all possible means. This compact invariably broke down, and all the young ladies went to sleep very soon, and got up very early.

The concluding ceremony came off at twelve o’clock on the day of departure; when Miss Twinkleton, supported by Mrs.

Miss Twinkleton then said, “Ladies, another revolving year had brought us round to that festive period at which the first feelings of our nature bounded in our—”

Miss Twinkleton was annually going to add “bosoms,” but annually stopped on the brink of that expression, and substituted “hearts.”

“Hearts; our hearts. Hem!

Let them be. Let them lie unspoken of, in his breast. However distinctly or indistinctly he entertained these thoughts, he arrived at the conclusion, Let them be.

Among the mighty store of wonderful chains that are forever forging, day and night, in the vast ironworks of time and circumstance, there was one chain forged in the moment of that small conclusion, riveted to the foundations of heaven and earth, and gifted with invincible force to hold and drag.

They walked on by the river. They began to speak of their separate plans. He would quicken his departure from England, and she would remain where she was, at least as long as Helena remained.

John Jasper is truly sorry to hear Mr. Sapsea speak thus, for he knows right well that Mr. Sapsea never speaks without a meaning, and that he has a subtle trick of being right.

Mr. Sapsea (by a very remarkable coincidence) is of exactly that opinion.

Mr. Jasper is in beautiful voice this day. In the pathetic supplication to have his heart inclined to keep this law, he quite astonishes his fellows by his melodious power.

… midnight, when the streets are empty, the storm goes thundering along them, rattling at all the latches, and tearing at all the shutters, as if warning the people to get up and fly with it, rather than have the roofs brought down upon their brains.

Still, the red light burns steadily. Nothing is steady but the red light.

All through the night, the wind blows, and abates not. But early in the morning, when there is barely enough light in the east to dim the stars, it begins to lull.

All through the night, the wind blows, and abates not. But early in the morning, when there is barely enough light in the east to dim the stars, it begins to lull.

From that time, with occasional wild charges, like a wounded monster dying, it drops and sinks; and at full daylight it is dead.

It is then seen that the hands of the Cathedral clock are torn off; that lead from the roof has been stripped away, rolled up, and blown into the Close; and that some stones have been displaced upon the summit of the great tower.

“Not at all,” returned the Dean. “And yet, do you know, I don’t think,” with a very nice and neat emphasis on those two words: “I don’t think I would state it, emphatically. State it? Ye‑e‑es! But emphatically? No‑o‑o. I think not.

In point of fact, Mr. Crisparkle, keeping our hearts warm and our heads cool, we clergy need do nothing emphatically.

”

also to hit him when he was down, hit him anywhere and anyhow, kick him, stamp upon him, gouge him, and maul him behind his back without mercy.

In these last particulars the Professors of the Noble Art were much nobler than the Professors of Philanthropy.

Mr.

“I don’t sit here, sir,” returned the Philanthropist, raising his voice to a roar, “to be browbeaten.”

“As the only other person present, no one can possibly know that better than I do,” returned the Minor Canon very quietly.

“But I interrupt your explanation.”

He was simply and staunchly true to his duty alike in the large case and in the small. So all true souls ever are.

So every true soul ever was, ever is, and ever will be. There is nothing little to the really great in spirit.

“Then who do you make out did the deed?” asked Mr. Honeythunder, turning on him abruptly.

But Mr. Crisparkle said he had a moment’s call to make on Mr. Grewgious as an act of courtesy, and would run across to that gentleman’s chambers, and rejoin Neville on his own doorstep if he would come down there to meet him.

Mr. Grewgious, bolt upright as usual, sat taking his wine in the dusk at his open window; his wineglass and decanter on the round table at his elbow; himself and his legs on the window-seat; only one hinge in his whole body, like a bootjack.

“How do you do, reverend sir?” said Mr. Grewgious, with abundant offers of hospitality which were as cordially declined as made.

“Now you know my name,” said the gentleman; “Dick Datchery. Hang it up again. I was saying something old is what I should prefer, something odd and out of the way; something venerable, architectural, and inconvenient.”

“We have a good choice of inconvenient lodgings in the town, sir, I think,”

replied the waiter, with modest confidence in its resources that way; “indeed, I have no doubt that we could suit you that far, however particular you might be. But a architectural lodging!” That seemed to trouble the waiter’s head, and he shook it.

Said Mr. Datchery to himself that night, as he looked at his white hair in the gas-lighted looking-glass over the coffee-room chimneypiece at the Crozier, and shook it out:

“For a single buffer, of an easy temper, living idly on his means, I have had a rather busy afternoon!”

“Yes, sir. I brought it with me.”

“It is not an extensive bag,” said Mr. Grewgious, candidly, “though admirably calculated to contain a day’s provision for a canary-bird. Perhaps you brought a canary-bird?”

Rosa smiled and shook her head.

Rosa’s expressive little eyebrows asked him what he meant?

“The sensation of having a sweet young presence in the place, that whitewashes it, paints it, papers it, decorates it with gilding, and makes it Glorious!”

said Mr. Grewgious. “Ah me! Ah me!”

Mr. Tartar’s chambers were the neatest, the cleanest, and the best-ordered chambers ever seen under the sun, moon, and stars.

The floors were scrubbed to that extent, that you might have supposed the London blacks emancipated forever, and gone out of the land for good. Every inch of brass-work in Mr. Tartar’s possession was polished and burnished, till it shone like a brazen mirror.

“Mr. Grewgious,” returned Mrs. Billickin,

“I will not deceive you; far from it. I have apartments available.”

This with the air of adding: “Convey me to the stake, if you will; but while I live, I will be candid.”

It do come in, and it do not come in. You may lay dry there, half your lifetime; but the time will come, and it is best that you should know it, when a dripping sop would be no name for you.”

Mr. Grewgious looked much disgraced by being prefigured in this pickle.

“Have you any other apartments, ma’am?” he asked.

and, all too soon, the great black city cast its shadow on the waters, and its dark bridges spanned them as death spans life, and the everlastingly-green garden seemed to be left for everlasting, unregainable and far away.

“Cannot people get through life without gritty stages, I wonder?”

Rosa thought next day, when the town was very gritty again, and everything had a strange and an uncomfortable appearance of seeming to wait for something that wouldn’t come. NO.

I shall sleep it off. It has been too short and easy. I must have a better vision than this; this is the poorest of all. No struggle, no consciousness of peril, no entreaty—and yet I never saw that before.” With a start.

“Look at it! Look what a poor, mean, miserable thing it is! That must be real. It’s over.”

He has accompanied this incoherence with some wild unmeaning gestures; but they trail off into the progressive inaction of stupor, and he lies a log upon the bed.

But seeming may be false or true. It is false in this case; for, the moment the stairs have ceased to creak under his tread, she glides after him, muttering emphatically:

“I’ll not miss ye twice!”

There is no egress from the court but by its entrance. With a weird peep from the doorway, she watches for his looking back. He does not look back before disappearing, with a wavering step.