A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Oprah's Book Club) (21 page)

‘Well then, I’ll tell you,’ said Stryver, coming slowly into a sitting posture. ‘Sydney, I rather despair of making myself intelligible to you, because you are such an insensible dog.’

‘And you,’ returned Sydney, busy concocting the punch, ‘are such a sensitive and poetical spirit.’

‘Come!’ rejoined Stryver, laughing boastfully, ‘though I don’t prefer any claim to being the soul of Romance (for I hope I know better), still, I am a tenderer sort of fellow than
you
.’

‘You are a luckier, if you mean that.’

‘I don’t mean that. I mean, I am a man of more—more—’

‘Say gallantry, while you are about it,’ suggested Carton.

‘Well! I’ll say gallantry. My meaning is that, I am a man,’ said Stryver, inflating himself at his friend as he made the punch, ‘who cares more to be agreeable, who takes more pains to be agreeable, who knows better how to be agreeable, in a woman’s society, than you do.’

‘Go on,’ said Sydney Carton.

‘No; but before I go on,’ said Stryver, shaking his head in his bullying way, ‘I’ll have this out with you. You have been at Doctor Manette’s house as much as I have, or more than I have. Why, I have been ashamed of your moroseness there! Your manners have been of that silent and sullen and hang-dog kind, that, upon my life and soul, I have been ashamed of you, Sydney!’

‘It should be very beneficial to a man in your practice at the bar, to be ashamed of anything,’ returned Sydney; ‘you ought to be much obliged to me.’

‘You shall not get off in that way,’ rejoined Stryver, shouldering the rejoinder at him; ‘no, Sydney, it’s my duty to tell you – and I tell you to your face to do you good – that you are a devilish ill-conditioned fellow in that sort of society. You are a disagreeable fellow.’

Sydney drank a bumper of the punch he had made, and laughed.

‘Look at me!’ said Stryver, squaring himself; ‘I have less need to make myself agreeable than you have, being more independent in circumstances. Why do I do it?’

‘I never saw you do it yet,’ muttered Carton.

‘I do it because it’s politic; I do it on principle. And look at me! I get on.’

‘You don’t get on with your account of your matrimonial intentions, ’ answered Carton, with a careless air, ‘I wish you would keep to that. As to me – will you never understand that I am incorrigible? ’

He asked the question with some appearance of scorn.

‘You have no business to be incorrigible,’ was his friend’s answer, delivered in no very soothing tone.

‘I have no business to be, at all, that I know of,’ said Sydney Carton. ‘Who is the lady?’

‘Now, don’t let my announcement of the name make you uncomfortable, Sydney,’ said Mr Stryver, preparing him with ostentatious friendliness for the disclosure he was about to make, ‘because I know you don’t mean half you say; and if you meant it all, it would be of no importance. I make this little preface, because you once mentioned the young lady to me in slighting terms.’

‘I did?’

‘Certainly; and in these chambers.’

Sydney Carton looked at his punch and looked at his complacent friend; drank his punch and looked at his complacent friend.

‘You made mention of the young lady as a golden-haired doll. The young lady is Miss Manette. If you had been a fellow of any sensitiveness or delicacy of feeling in that kind of way, Sydney, I might have been a little resentful of your employing such a designation; but you are not. You want that sense altogether; therefore, I am no more annoyed when I think of the expression, than I should be annoyed by a man’s opinion of a picture of mine, who had no eye for pictures; or of a piece of music of mine, who had no ear for music.’

Sydney Carton drank the punch at a great rate; drank it by bumpers, looking at his friend.

‘Now you know all about it, Syd,’ said Mr Stryver. ‘I don’t care about fortune: she is a charming creature, and I have made up my mind to please myself: on the whole, I think I can afford to please myself. She will have in me a man already pretty well off, and a rapidly rising man, and a man of some distinction: it is a piece of good fortune for her, but she is worthy of good fortune. Are you astonished?’

Carton, still drinking the punch, rejoined, ‘Why should I be astonished?’

‘You approve?’

Carton, still drinking the punch, rejoined, ‘Why should I not approve?’

‘Well!’ said his friend Stryver, ‘you take to it more easily than I fancied you would, and are less mercenary on my behalf than I thought you would be; though, to be sure, you know well enough by this time that your ancient chum is a man of a pretty strong will. Yes, Sydney, I have had enough of this style of life, with no other as a change from it; I feel that it is a pleasant thing for a man to have a home when he feels inclined to go to it (when he doesn’t, he can stay away), and I feel that Miss Manette will tell well in any station, and will always do me credit. So I have made up my mind. And now, Sydney, old boy, I want to say a word to
you
about
your
prospects. You are in a bad way, you know; you really are in a bad way. You don’t know the value of money, you live hard, you’ll knock up one of these days, and be ill and poor; you really ought to think about a nurse.’

The prosperous patronage with which he said it, made him look twice as big as he was, and four times as offensive.

‘Now, let me recommend you,’ pursued Stryver, ‘to look it in the face. I have looked it in the face, in my different way; look it in the face, you, in your different way. Marry. Provide somebody to take care of you. Never mind your having no enjoyment of women’s society, nor understanding of it, nor tact for it. Find out somebody. Find out some respectable woman with a little property – somebody in the landlady way, or lodging-letting way – and marry her, against a rainy day. That’s the kind of thing for
you
. Now, think of it, Sydney.’

‘I’ll think of it,’ said Sydney.

 

 

[END OF INSTALMENT 11]

Mr Stryver having made up his mind to that magnanimous bestowal of good fortune on the doctor’s daughter, resolved to make her happiness known to her before he left town for the Long Vacation. After some mental debating of the point, he came to the conclusion that it would be as well to get all the preliminaries done with, and they could then arrange at their leisure whether he should give her his hand a week or two before Michaelmas Term, or in the little Christmas vacation between it and Hilary.

As to the strength of his case, he had not a doubt about it, but clearly saw his way to the verdict. Argued with the jury on substantial worldly grounds – the only grounds ever worth taking into account – it was a plain case, and had not a weak spot in it. He called himself for the plaintiff, there was no getting over his evidence, the counsel for the defendant threw up his brief, and the jury did not even turn to consider. After trying it, Stryver C. J. was satisfied that no plainer case could be.

Accordingly, Mr Stryver inaugurated the Long Vacation with a formal proposal to take Miss Manette to Vauxhall Gardens; that failing, to Ranelagh; that unaccountably failing too, it behoved him to present himself in Soho, and there declare his noble mind.

Towards Soho, therefore, Mr Stryver shouldered his way from the Temple, while the bloom of the Long Vacation’s infancy was still upon it. Anybody who had seen him projecting himself into Soho while he was yet on Saint Dunstan’s side of Temple Bar, bursting in his full-blown way along the pavement, to the jostlement of all weaker people, might have seen how safe and strong he was.

His way taking him past Tellson’s, and he both banking at Tellson’s and knowing Mr Lorry as the intimate friend of the Manettes, it entered Mr Stryver’s mind to enter the bank, and reveal to Mr Lorry the brightness of the Soho horizon. So, he pushed open the door with the weak rattle in its throat, stumbled down the two steps, got past the two ancient cashiers, and shouldered himself into the musty back closet where Mr Lorry sat at great books ruled for figures, with perpendicular iron bars to his window as if that were ruled for figures too, and everything under the clouds were a sum.

‘Halloa!’ said Mr Stryver. ‘How do you do? I hope you are well!’

It was Stryver’s grand peculiarity that he always seemed too big for any place, or space. He was so much too big for Tellson’s that old clerks in distant corners looked up with looks of remonstrance, as though he squeezed them against the wall. The House itself, magnificently reading the paper quite in the far-off perspective, lowered displeased, as if the Stryver head had been butted into its responsible waistcoat.

The discreet Mr Lorry said, in a sample tone of the voice he would recommend under the circumstances, ‘How do you do, Mr Stryver? How do you do, sir?’ and shook hands. There was a peculiarity in his manner of shaking hands, always to be seen in any clerk at Tellson’s who shook hands with a customer when the House pervaded the air. He shook in a self-abnegating way, as one who shook for Tellson and Co.

‘Can I do anything for you, Mr Stryver?’ asked Mr Lorry, in his business character.

‘Why, no thank you; this is a private visit to yourself, Mr Lorry; I have come for a private word.’

‘Oh indeed!’ said Mr Lorry, bending down his ear, while his eye strayed to the House afar off.

‘I am going,’ said Mr Stryver, leaning his arms confidentially on his desk: whereupon, although it was a large double one, there appeared to be not half desk enough for him: ‘I am going to make an offer of myself in marriage to your agreeable little friend Miss Manette, Mr Lorry.’

‘Oh dear me!’ cried Mr Lorry, rubbing his chin, and looking at his visitor dubiously.

‘Oh dear me, sir?’ repeated Stryver, drawing back. ‘Oh dear you, sir? What may your meaning be, Mr Lorry?’

‘My meaning?’ answered the man of business, ‘is, of course, friendly and appreciative, and that it does you the greatest credit, and – in short, my meaning is everything you could desire. But – really, you know, Mr Stryver—’ Mr Lorry paused, and shook his head at him in the oddest manner, as if he were compelled against his will to add, internally, ‘you know there really is so much too much of you!’

‘Well!’ said Stryver, slapping the desk with his contentious hand, opening his eyes wider, and taking a long breath, ‘if I understand you, Mr Lorry, I’ll be hanged!’

Mr Lorry adjusted his little wig at both ears as a means towards that end, and bit the feather of a pen.

‘D-n it all, sir!’ said Stryver, staring at him, ‘am I not eligible?’

‘Oh dear yes! Yes. Oh yes, you’re eligible!’ said Mr Lorry. ‘If you say eligible, you are eligible.’

‘Am I not prosperous?’ asked Stryver.

‘Oh! if you come to prosperous, you are prosperous,’ said Mr Lorry.

‘And advancing?’

‘If you come to advancing, you know,’ said Mr Lorry, delighted to be able to make another admission, ‘nobody can doubt that.’

‘Then what on earth is your meaning, Mr Lorry?’ demanded Stryver, perceptibly crestfallen.

‘Well! I—Were you going there now?’ asked Mr Lorry.

‘Straight!’ said Stryver, with a plump of his fist on the desk.

‘Then I think I wouldn’t, if I was you.’

‘Why?’ said Stryver. ‘Now, I’ll put you in a corner,’ forensically shaking a forefinger at him. ‘You are a man of business and bound to have a reason. State your reason. Why wouldn’t you go?’

‘Because,’ said Mr Lorry, ‘I wouldn’t go on such an object without having some cause to believe that I should succeed.’

‘D-n ME!’ cried Stryver, ‘but this beats everything!’

Mr Lorry glanced at the distant House, and glanced at the angry Stryver.

‘Here’s a man of business – a man of years – a man of experience
– in
a Bank,’ said Stryver; ‘and having summed up three leading reasons for complete success, he says there’s no reason at all! Says it with his head on!’ Mr Stryver remarked upon the peculiarity as if it would have been infinitely less remarkable if he had said it with his head off.

‘When I speak of success, I speak of success with the young lady; and when I speak of causes and reasons to make success probable, I speak of causes and reasons that will tell as such with the young lady. The young lady, my good sir,’ said Mr Lorry, mildly tapping the Stryver arm, ‘the young lady. The young lady goes before all.’

‘Then you mean to tell me, Mr Lorry,’ said Stryver, squaring his elbows, ‘that it is your deliberate opinion that the young lady at present in question is a mincing Fool?’

‘Not exactly so. I mean to tell you, Mr Stryver,’ said Mr Lorry, reddening, ‘that I will hear no disrespectful word of that young lady from any lips; and that if I knew any man – which I hope I do not – whose taste was so coarse, and whose temper was so overbearing, that he could not restrain himself from speaking disrespectfully of that young lady at this desk, not even Tellson’s should prevent my giving him a piece of my mind.’

The necessity of being angry in a suppressed tone had put Mr Stryver’s blood-vessels into a dangerous state when it was his turn to be angry; Mr Lorry’s veins, methodical as their courses could usually be, were in no better state now it was his turn.

‘That is what I mean to tell you, sir,’ said Mr Lorry. ‘Pray let there be no mistake about it.’

Mr Stryver sucked the end of a ruler for a little while, and then stood hitting a tune out of his teeth with it, which probably gave him the toothache. He broke the awkward silence by saying:

‘This is something new to me, Mr Lorry. You deliberately advise me not to go up to Soho and offer myself –
my
self, Stryver of the King’s Bench bar?’

‘Do you ask me for my advice, Mr Stryver?’

‘Yes I do.’

‘Very good. Then I give it, and you have repeated it correctly.’

‘And all I can say of it, is,’ laughed Stryver with a vexed laugh, ‘that this – ha, ha! – beats everything, past, present, and to come.’