Five Chapters

by
Charles Dickens

I

Rich Mr. Dombey sat in the corner of his wife’s darkened bedchamber in the great arm-chair by the bedside, and rich Mr. Dombey’s Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket, carefully placed on a low settee in front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new.

Rich Mr. Dombey was about eight-and-forty years of age. Rich Mr. Dombey’s Son, about eight-and-forty minutes. Mr. Dombey was rather bald, rather red, and rather stern and pompous. Mr. Dombey’s Son was very bald, and very red, and rather crushed and spotty in his general effect, as yet.

Mr. Dombey, exulting in the long-looked for event, — the birth of a son, — jingled his heavy gold watch-chain as he sat in his blue coat and bright buttons by the side of the bed, and said: —

“Our house of business will once again be not only in name but in fact Dombey and Son; Dombey and Son! He will be christened Paul, of course. His father’s name, Mrs. Dombey, and his grandfather’s! I wish his grandfather were alive this day!” And again he said, “Dombey and Son.”

Those three words conveyed the one idea of Mr. Dombey’s life. The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light. Common abbreviations took new meanings in his eyes, and had sole reference to them. A. D. had no concern with anno Domini, but stood for anno Dombei — and Son.

He had been married ten years, and, until this present day on which he sat jingling his gold watch-chain in the great arm-chair by the side of the bed, had had no issue.

— To speak of.
There had been a girl some six years before, and she, who had stolen into the chamber unobserved, was now crouching in a corner whence she could see her mother’s face. But what was a girl to Dombey and Son!

Mr. Dombey’s cup of satisfaction was so full, however, that he said: “Florence, you may go and look at your pretty brother, if you like. “Don’t touch him!”

Next moment, the sick lady had opened her eyes and seen the little girl; and the little girl had run towards her; and, standing on tiptoe, to hide her face in her embrace, had clung about her with a desperate affection very much at variance with her years. The lady herself seemed to faint.

“O Lord bless me!” said Mr. Dombey, “I don’t like the look of this. A very ill-advised and feverish proceeding having this child here. I had better ask Doctor if he’ll have the goodness to step up stairs again; “which he did, returning with the Doctor himself, and closely followed by his sister, Mrs. Chick, a lady rather past the middle age than otherwise, but dressed in a very juvenile manner, who flung her arms round his neck, and said: —

“My dear Paul! This last child is quite a Dombey! He’s such a perfect Dombey!”

“Well, well! I think he is like the family. But what is this they have told me, since the child was born, about Fanny herself. How is Fanny?”

“My dear Paul, there’s nothing whatever wrong with Fanny. Take my word, nothing whatever. There is exhaustion, certainly, but nothing like what I underwent myself either with George or Frederick. An effort is necessary. That’s all. Ah! if dear Fanny were a Dombey! But I dare say, although she is not a born Dombey herself, she’ll make an effort; I have no doubt she’ll make an effort. But I dare say, although she is not a born Dombey herself, she’ll make an effort;

The lady lay immovable upon her bed, clasping her little daughter to her breast. The girl clung close about her, with the same intensity as before, and never raised her head, or moved her soft cheek from her mother’s face, or looked on those who stood around, or spoke, or moved, or shed a tear.

There was such a solemn stillness round the bed, and the Doctor seemed to look on the impassive form with so much compassion and so little hope, that Mrs. Chick was for the moment diverted from her purpose. But presently summoning courage, and what she called presence of mind, she sat down by the bedside, and said, in the tone of one who endeavours to awaken a sleeper, —

“Fanny! Fanny!”

There was no sound in answer but the loud ticking of Mr. Dombey’s watch and the Doctor’s watch, which seemed in the silence to be running a race.

“Fanny, my dear, here’s Mr. Dombey come to see you. Won’t you speak to him? They want to lay your little boy in bed, — the baby, Fanny, you know; you have hardly seen him yet, I think, — but they can’t till you rouse yourself a little. Don’t you think it’s time you roused yourself a little? Eh?”

No word or sound in answer. Mr. Dombey’s watch and the Doctor’s watch seemed to be racing faster.

“Now really, Fanny my dear, I shall have to be quite cross with you if you don’t rouse yourself. It’s necessary for you to make an effort, and perhaps a very great and painful effort, which you are not disposed to make; but this is a world of effort, you know, Fanny, and we must never yield when so much depends upon us. Come! Try! I must really scold you if you don’t. Fanny! Only look at me; only open your eyes, to show me that you hear and understand me; will you? Good Heaven, gentlemen, what is to be done?”

The physician, stooping down, whispered in the little girl’s ear. Not having understood the purport of his whisper, the little creature turned her deep dark eyes towards him.

The whisper was repeated.

“Mamma!”

The little voice, familiar and dearly loved, awakened some show of consciousness, even at that ebb. For a moment, the closed eyelids trembled, and the nostril quivered, and the faintest shadow of a smile was seen.

“Mamma! O dear mamma! O dear mamma!”

The Doctor gently brushed the scattered ringlets of the child aside from the face and mouth of the mother. And thus, clinging fast to that frail spar within her arms, the mother drifted out upon the dark and unknown sea that rolls round all the world.

II

We must all be weaned. After that sharp season in Little Dombey’s life had come and gone, it began to seem as if no vigilance or care could make him a thriving boy. In his steeplechase towards manhood, he found it very rough riding. Every tooth was a break-neck fence, and every pimple in the measles a stone wall to him. He was down in every fit of the whooping-cough. Some bird of prey got into his throat, instead of the thrush; and the very chickens, turning ferocious, — if they have anything to do with that infant malady to which they lend their name, — worried him like tiger-cats.

He grew to be nearly five years old. A pretty little fellow; but with something wan and wistful in his small face, that gave occasion to many significant shakes of his nurse’s head. She said he was too old-fashioned.

He was childish and sportive enough at times, but he had a strange, weird, thoughtful way, at other times, of sitting brooding in his miniature arm-chair, when he looked (and talked) like one of those terrible little Beings in the Fairy tales, who, at a hundred and fifty or two hundred years of age, fantastically represent the children for whom they have been substituted. At no time did he fall into this mood so surely, as when — his little chair being carried down into his father’s room — he sat there with him after dinner, by the fire.

On one of these occasions, when they had both been perfectly quiet for a long time, and Mr. Dombey only knew that the child was awake by occasionally glancing at his eye, where the bright fire was sparkling like a jewel, little Paul broke silence thus: —
“Papa! what’s money?”

Mr. Dombey was in a difficulty; for he would have liked to give him some explanation involving the terms “circulating-medium, currency, depreciation of currency, paper, bullion, rates of exchange, value of precious metals in the market,” and so forth; but looking down at the little chair, and seeing what a long way down it was, he answered: —
“Gold, and silver, and copper. Guineas, shillings, half-pence. You know what they are?”

“O yes, I know what they are. I don’t mean that, papa; I mean, what’s money, after all?”
“What is money after all!”
“I mean, papa, what can it do?”
“You’ll know better by and by, my man. Money, Paul, can do anything.”
“It isn’t cruel, is it?”
“No, a good thing can’t be cruel.”

“As you are so rich, if money can do anything, and isn’t cruel, I wonder it didn’t save me my mamma. It can’t make me strong and quite well, either. I am so tired sometimes, and my bones ache so, that I don’t know what to do!”

Mr. Dombey became uneasy about this odd child, and, in consequence of his uneasiness, resolved to send him, accompanied by his sister Florence and a nurse, to board with one Mrs. Pipchin at Brighton — an old lady who had acquired an immense reputation as “a great manager” of children, and the secret of whose management was, to give them everything that they didn’t like and nothing that they did.

Mrs. Pipchin had also founded great fame on being a widow lady whose husband had broken his heart in pumping water out of some Peruvian mines. This was a great recommendation to Mr. Dombey, for it had a rich sound. Broke his heart of the Peruvian mines, mused Mr. Dombey. Well! a very respectable way of doing it.

This celebrated Mrs. Pipchin was a marvellous ill-favoured, ill-conditioned old lady, of a stooping figure, with a mottled face, like bad marble, a hook nose, and a hard grey eye, that looked as if it might have been hammered at on an anvil. Forty years at least had elapsed since the Peruvian mines had been the death of Mr. Pipchin; but his relict still wore black bombazine. And she was such a bitter old lady that one was tempted to believe there had been some mistake in the application of the Peruvian machinery, and that all her waters of gladness and milk of human kindness had been pumped out dry, instead of the mines.

The castle of this ogress was in a steep by-street at Brighton, where the small front gardens had the unaccountable property of producing nothing but marigolds, whatever was sown in them; and where snails were constantly discovered holding on to the street doors, and other public places they were not expected to ornament, with the tenacity of cupping-glasses. There were two other very small boarders in the house where Little Dombey (first called so by Mrs. Pipchin) arrived. These were one Master Bitherstone, from India, and a certain Miss Pankey. As to Master Bitherstone, he objected so much to the Pipchinian system, that before Little Dombey had been established in the house five minutes he privately asked that young gentleman if he could give him any idea of the way back to Bengal. As to Miss Pankey, she was disabled from offering any remark by being in solitary confinement for the offence of having sniffed three times in the presence of visitors. At one o’clock there was dinner, and then this young person (a mild little blue-eyed morsel of a child, who was shampooed every morning, and seemed in danger of being rubbed away altogether) was led in from captivity by the ogress herself, and instructed that nobody who sniffed before visitors ever went to heaven. When this great truth had been thoroughly impressed upon her, she was regaled with rice, while all the rest had cold pork, except Mrs. Pipchin, whose constitution required warm nourishment, and who had hot mutton-chops, which smelt uncommonly nice. Also, at tea, that good lady’s constitution demanded hot toast, while all the rest had bread and butter.

After breakfast next morning Master Bitherstone read aloud to the rest a pedigree from Genesis (judiciously selected by Mrs. Pipchin), getting over the names with the ease and clearness of a young gentleman tumbling up the treadmill. That done, Miss Pankey was borne away to be shampooed; and Master Bitherstone to have something else done to him with salt water, from which he always returned very blue and dejected. Then there were lessons. It being a part of Mrs. Pipchin’s system not to encourage a child’s mind to develop itself like a young flower, but to open it by force like an oyster, the moral of all her lessons was of a violent and stunning character; the hero — always a naughty boy — seldom, in the mildest catastrophe, being finished off by anything less than a lion or a bear.

At the exemplary Pipchin, Little Dombey would sit staring in his little arm-chair by the fire, for any length of time.

Once she asked him, when they were alone, what he was thinking about.
“You,” said Paul, without the least reserve.
“And what are you thinking about me?”
“I have been thinking you ain’t like my sister. There’s nobody like my sister.”

“Well! there’s nobody like me, either, perhaps.”
“Ain’t there though? I am very glad there’s nobody like you!”
“Upon my word, sir! And what else are you thinking about me?”
“I am thinking how old you must be.”

“You mustn’t say such things as that, young gentleman. That’ll never do.”
“Why not?”
“Never you mind, sir. Remember the story of the little boy that was gored to death by a mad bull for asking questions.”

“If the bull was mad, how did he know that the boy had asked questions? Nobody can go and whisper secrets to a mad bull. I don’t believe that story.”
“You don’t believe it, sir?”
“No.”
“Not if it should happen to have been a tame bull, you little Infidel?”

As Paul had not considered the subject in that light, and had founded his conclusions on the alleged lunacy of the bull, he allowed himself to be put down for the present. But he sat turning it over in his mind, with such an obvious intention of fixing Mrs. Pipchin presently, that even that hardy old lady deemed it prudent to retreat.

Such was life at Mrs. Pipchin’s; and Mrs. Pipchin said, and they all said, that Little Dombey (who watched it all from his little arm-chair by the fire) was an old, old-fashioned child.

But as Little Dombey was no stronger at the expiration of weeks of this life than he had been on his first arrival, a little carriage was got for him, in which he could lie at his ease, with an alphabet and other elementary works of reference, and be wheeled down to the seaside. Consistent in his odd tastes, the child set aside a ruddy-faced lad who was proposed as the drawer of this carriage, and selected instead a weazen, old, crab-faced man, who was the lad’s grandfather.

With this notable attendant to pull him along, and Florence always walking by his side, he went down to the margin of the ocean every day; and there he would sit or lie in his carriage for hours together, never so distressed as by the company of children, — his sister Florence alone excepted always.

“Go away if you please,” he would say to any child who came to bear him company. “Thank you, but I don’t want you.”
Some small voice, near his ear, would ask him how he was, perhaps.
“I am very well, I thank you. But you had better go and play, if you please.”

Then he would turn his head and watch the child away, and would say to Florence, “We don’t want any others, do we? Kiss me, Floy.”

He had even a dislike, at such times, to the company of his nurse, and was well pleased when she strolled away, as she generally did, to pick up shells and acquaintances. His favourite spot was quite a lonely one, far away from most loungers; and with Florence sitting by his side at work, or reading to him, or talking to him, and the wind blowing on his face, and the water coming up among the wheels of his bed, he wanted nothing more.

“Floy,” he said one day, “where’s India, where the friends of that boy Bitherstone live, — the other boy who stays with us at Mrs. Pipchin’s?”

“O, it’s a long, long distance off.”