পথ হারা পথিক

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my
own life, or whether that station will be held by
anybody else, these pages must show. To begin
my life with the beginning of my life, I record that
I was born (as I have been informed and believe)
on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was
remarked that the clock began to strike, and I
began to cry, simultaneously.
In consideration of the day and hour of my birth,
it was declared by the nurse, and by some sage
women in the neighbourhood who had taken a
lively interest in me several months before there
was any possibility of our becoming personally
acquainted, first, that I was destined to be
unlucky in life; and secondly, that I was privileged
to see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts
inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all
unlucky infants of either gender, born towards
the small hours on a Friday night.
I need say nothing here, on the first head,
because nothing can show better than my
history whether that prediction was verified or
falsified by the result. On the second branch of
the question, I will only remark, that unless I ran
through that part of my inheritance while I was
still a baby, I have not come into it yet. But I do
not at all complain of having been kept out of this
property; and if anybody else should be in the
present enjoyment of it, he is heartily welcome to
keep it.
I was born with a caul, which was advertised for
sale, in the newspapers, at the low price of fifteen
guineas. Whether sea-going people were short of
money about that time, or were short of faith and
preferred cork jackets, I don't know; all I know is,
that there was but one solitary bidding, and that
was from an attorney connected with the bill-
broking business, who offered two pounds in
cash, and the balance in sherry, but declined to
be guaranteed from drowning on any higher
bargain. Consequently the advertisement was
withdrawn at a dead loss - for as to sherry, my
poor dear mother's own sherry was in the
market then - and ten years afterwards, the caul
was put up in a raffle down in our part of the
country, to fifty members at half-a-crown a head,
the winner to spend five shillings. I was present
myself, and I remember to have felt quite
uncomfortable and confused, at a part of myself
being disposed of in that way. The caul was won,
I recollect, by an old lady with a hand-basket,
who, very reluctantly, produced from it the
stipulated five shillings, all in halfpence, and
twopence halfpenny short - as it took an
immense time and a great waste of arithmetic, to
endeavour without any effect to prove to her. It is
a fact which will be long remembered as
remarkable down there, that she was never
drowned, but died triumphantly in bed, at ninety-
two. I have understood that it was, to the last,
her proudest boast, that she never had been on
the water in her life, except upon a bridge; and
that over her tea (to which she was extremely
partial) she, to the last, expressed her .The first objects that assume a distinct presence
before me, as I look far back, into the blank of my
infancy, are my mother with her pretty hair and
youthful shape, and Peggotty with no shape at
all, and eyes so dark that they seemed to darken
their whole neighbourhood in her face, and
cheeks and arms so hard and red that I
wondered the birds didn't peck her in preference
to apples.
I believe I can remember these two at a little
distance apart, dwarfed to my sight by stooping
down or kneeling on the floor, and I going
unsteadily from the one to the other. I have an
impression on my mind which I cannot
distinguish from actual remembrance, of the
touch of Peggotty's forefinger as she used to hold
it out to me, and of its being roughened by
needlework, like a pocket nutmeg-grater.
This may be fancy, though I think the memory of
most of us can go farther back into such times
than many of us suppose; just as I believe the
power of observation in numbers of very young
children to be quite wonderful for its closeness
and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown
men who are remarkable in this respect, may
with greater propriety be said not to have lost the
faculty, than to have acquired it; the rather, as I
generally observe such men to retain a certain
freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being
pleased, which are also an inheritance they have
preserved from their childhood.
I might have a misgiving that I am 'meandering'
in stopping to say this, but that it brings me to
remark that I build these conclusions, in part
upon my own experience of myself; and if it
should appear from anything I may set down in
this narrative that I was a child of close
observation, or that as a man I have a strong
memory of my childhood, I undoubtedly lay
claim to both of these characteristics.
Looking back, as I was saying, into the blank of
my infancy, the first objects I can remember as
standing out by themselves from a confusion of
things, are my mother and Peggotty. What else
do I remember? Let me see.
There comes out of the cloud, our house - not
new to me, but quite familiar, in its earliest
remembrance. On the ground-floor is Peggotty's
kitchen, opening into a back yard; with a pigeon-
house on a pole, in the centre, without any
pigeons in it; a great dog- kennel in a corner,
without any dog; and a quantity of fowls that look
terribly tall to me, walking about, in a menacing
and ferocious manner. There is one cock who
gets upon a post to crow, and seems to take
particular notice of me as I look at him through
the kitchen window, who makes me shiver, he is
so fierce. Of the geese outside the side-gate who
come waddling after me with their long necks
stretched out when I go that way, I dream at
night: as a man environed by wild beasts might
dream of lions.
Here is a long passage - what an enormous
perspective I make of it! - leading from Peggotty's
kitchen to the front door. A dark store-room
.The carrier's horse was the laziest horse in the
world, I should hope, and shuffled along, with his
head down, as if he liked to keep people waiting
to whom the packages were directed. I fancied,
indeed, that he sometimes chuckled audibly over
this reflection, but the carrier said he was only
troubled with a cough. The carrier had a way of
keeping his head down, like his horse, and of
drooping sleepily forward as he drove, with one
of his arms on each of his knees. I say 'drove',
but it struck me that the cart would have gone to
Yarmouth quite as well without him, for the
horse did all that; and as to conversation, he had
no idea of it but whistling.
Peggotty had a basket of refreshments on her
knee, which would have lasted us out
handsomely, if we had been going to London by
the same conveyance. We ate a good deal, and
slept a good deal. Peggotty always went to sleep
with her chin upon the handle of the basket, her
hold of which never relaxed; and I could not have
believed unless I had heard her do it, that one
defenceless woman could have snored so much.
We made so many deviations up and down
lanes, and were such a long time delivering a
bedstead at a public-house, and calling at other
places, that I was quite tired, and very glad, when
we saw Yarmouth. It looked rather spongy and
soppy, I thought, as I carried my eye over the
great dull waste that lay across the river; and I
could not help wondering, if the world were
really as round as my geography book said, how
any part of it came to be so flat. But I reflected
that Yarmouth might be situated at one of the
poles; which would account for it.
As we drew a little nearer, and saw the whole
adjacent prospect lying a straight low line under
the sky, I hinted to Peggotty that a mound or so
might have improved it; and also that if the land
had been a little more separated from the sea,
and the town and the tide had not been quite so
much mixed up, like toast and water, it would
have been nicer. But Peggotty said, with greater
emphasis than usual, that we must take things as
we found them, and that, for her part, she was
proud to call herself a Yarmouth Bloater.
When we got into the street (which was strange
enough to me) and smelt the fish, and pitch, and
oakum, and tar, and saw the sailors walking
about, and the carts jingling up and down over
the stones, I felt that I had done so busy a place
an injustice; and said as much to Peggotty, who
heard my expressions of delight with great
complacency, and told me it was well known (I
suppose to those who had the good fortune to
be born Bloaters) that Yarmouth was, upon the
whole, the finest place in the universe.
'Here's my Am!' screamed Peggotty, 'growed out
of knowledge!'
He was waiting for us, in fact, at the public-house;
and asked me how I found myself, like an old
acquaintance. I did not feel, at first, that I knew
him as well as he knew me, because he had
never come to our house.If the room to which my bed was removed were
a sentient thing that could give evidence, I might
appeal to it at this day - who sleeps there now, I
wonder! - to bear witness for me what a heavy
heart I carried to it. I went up there, hearing the
dog in the yard bark after me all the way while I
climbed the stairs; and, looking as blank and
strange upon the room as the room looked upon
me, sat down with my small hands crossed, and
thought.
I thought of the oddest things. Of the shape of
the room, of the cracks in the ceiling, of the paper
on the walls, of the flaws in the window-glass
making ripples and dimples on the prospect, of
the washing-stand being rickety on its three legs,
and having a discontented something about it,
which reminded me of Mrs. Gummidge under
the influence of the old one. I was crying all the
time, but, except that I was conscious of being
cold and dejected, I am sure I never thought why
I cried. At last in my desolation I began to
consider that I was dreadfully in love with little
Em'ly, and had been torn away from her to come
here where no one seemed to want me, or to
care about me, half as much as she did. This
made such a very miserable piece of business of
it, that I rolled myself up in a corner of the
counterpane, and cried myself to sleep.
I was awoke by somebody saying 'Here he is!'
and uncovering my hot head. My mother and
Peggotty had come to look for me, and it was
one of them who had done it.
'Davy,' said my mother. 'What's the matter?'
I thought it was very strange that she should ask
me, and answered, 'Nothing.' I turned over on
my face, I recollect, to hide my trembling lip,
which answered her with greater truth. 'Davy,'
said my mother. 'Davy, my child!'
I dare say no words she could have uttered
would have affected me so much, then, as her
calling me her child. I hid my tears in the
bedclothes, and pressed her from me with my
hand, when she would have raised me up.
'This is your doing, Peggotty, you cruel thing!'
said my mother. 'I have no doubt at all about it.
How can you reconcile it to your conscience, I
wonder, to prejudice my own boy against me,
or against anybody who is dear to me? What do
you mean by it, Peggotty?'
Poor Peggotty lifted up her hands and eyes, and
only answered, in a sort of paraphrase of the
grace I usually repeated after dinner, 'Lord forgive
you, Mrs. Copperfield, and for what you have
said this minute, may you never be truly sorry!'
'It's enough to distract me,' cried my mother. 'In
my honeymoon, too, when my most inveterate
enemy might relent, one would think, and not
envy me a little peace of mind and happiness.
Davy, you naughty boy! Peggotty, you savage
creature! Oh, dear me!' cried my mother, turning
from one of us to the other, in her pettish wilful
manner, 'what a troublesome world this is, when
one has the most right to expect it to be as
agreeable as possible!'
I felt the