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person who provides it with all sorts of expensive things to eat and drink and look at. But, to tell me that I am not fit for it after all I have done for it—after all I have done for it,’ repeated Mr Merdle, with a wild emphasis that made his wife lift up her eyelids, ‘after all—all!—to tell me I have no right to mix with it after all, is a pretty reward.’

‘I say,’ answered Mrs Merdle composedly, ‘that you ought to make yourself fit for it by being more degage, and less preoccupied. There is a positive vulgarity in carrying your business affairs about with you as you do.’ ‘How do I carry them about, Mrs Merdle?’ asked Mr Merdle.

‘How do you carry them about?’ said Mrs Merdle. ‘Look at yourself in the glass.’

Mr Merdle involuntarily turned his eyes in the direction of the nearest mirror, and asked, with a slow determination of his turbid blood to his temples, whether a man was to be called to account for his digestion?

‘You have a physician,’ said Mrs Merdle.

‘He does me no good,’ said Mr Merdle.

Mrs Merdle changed her ground.

‘Besides,’ said she, ‘your digestion is nonsense. I don’t speak of your digestion. I speak of your manner.’ ‘Mrs Merdle,’ returned her husband, ‘I look to you for that. You supply manner, and I supply money.’

‘I don’t expect you,’ said Mrs Merdle, reposing easily among her cushions, ‘to captivate people. I don’t want you to take any trouble upon yourself, or to try to be fascinating. I simply request you to care about nothing—or seem to care about nothing— as everybody else does.’

‘Do I ever say I care about anything?’ asked Mr Merdle.

‘Say? No! Nobody would attend to you if you did. But you show it.’

‘Show what? What do I show?’ demanded Mr Merdle hurriedly.

‘I have already told you. You show that you carry your business cares an projects about, instead of leaving them in the City, or wherever else they belong to,’ said Mrs Merdle. ‘Or seeming to. Seeming would be quite enough: I ask no more. Whereas you couldn’t be more occupied with your day’s calculations and combinations than you habitually show yourself to be, if you were a carpenter.’

‘A carpenter!’ repeated Mr Merdle, checking something like a groan.

‘I shouldn’t so much mind being a carpenter, Mrs Merdle.’

‘And my complaint is,’ pursued the lady, disregarding the low remark, ‘that it is not the tone of Society, and that you ought to correct it, Mr Merdle. If you have any doubt of my judgment, ask even Edmund Sparkler.’ The door of the room had opened, and Mrs Merdle now surveyed the head of her son through her glass. ‘Edmund; we want you here.’

Mr Sparkler, who had merely put in his head and looked round the room without entering (as if he were searching the house for that young lady with no nonsense about her), upon this followed up his head with his body, and stood before them. To whom, in a few easy words adapted to his capacity, Mrs Merdle stated the question at issue.

The young gentleman, after anxiously feeling his shirt-collar as if it were his pulse and he were hypochondriacal, observed, ‘That he had heard it noticed by fellers.’

‘Edmund Sparkler has heard it noticed,’ said Mrs Merdle, with languid triumph. ‘Why, no doubt everybody has heard it noticed!’ Which in truth was no unreasonable inference; seeing that Mr Sparkler would probably be the last person, in any assemblage of the human species, to receive an impression from anything that passed in his presence.

‘And Edmund Sparkler will tell you, I dare say,’ said Mrs Merdle, waving her favourite hand towards her husband, ‘how he has heard it noticed.’ ‘I couldn’t,’ said Mr Sparkler, after feeling his pulse as before, ‘couldn’t undertake to say what led to it—‘cause memory desperate loose. But being in company with the brother of a doosed fine gal—well educated too—with no biggodd nonsense about her—at the period alluded to—’

‘There! Never mind the sister,’ remarked Mrs Merdle, a little impatiently. ‘What did the brother say?’

‘Didn’t say a word, ma’am,’ answered Mr Sparkler. ‘As silent a feller as myself. Equally hard up for a remark.’

‘Somebody said something,’ returned Mrs Merdle. ‘Never mind who it was.’

(‘Assure you I don’t in the least,’ said Mr Sparkler.)

 

‘But tell us what it was.’

Mr Sparkler referred to his pulse again, and put himself through some severe mental discipline before he replied:

‘Fellers referring to my Governor—expression not my own— occasionally compliment my Governor in a very handsome way on being immensely rich and knowing—perfect phenomenon of Buyer and Banker and that—but say the Shop sits heavily on him. Say he carried the Shop about, on his back rather—like Jew clothesmen with too much business.’

‘Which,’ said Mrs Merdle, rising, with her floating drapery about her, ‘is exactly my complaint. Edmund, give me your arm upstairs.’

Mr Merdle, left alone to meditate on a better conformation of himself to Society, looked out of nine windows in succession, and appeared to see nine wastes of space. When he had thus entertained himself he went downstairs, and looked intently at all the carpets on the ground-floor; and then came upstairs again, and looked intently at all the carpets on the first-floor; as if they were gloomy depths, in unison with his oppressed soul. Through all the rooms he wandered, as he always did, like the last person on earth who had any business to approach them. Let Mrs Merdle announce, with all her might, that she was at Home ever so many nights in a season, she could not announce more widely and unmistakably than Mr Merdle did that he was never at home.

At last he met the chief butler, the sight of which splendid retainer always finished him. Extinguished by this great creature, he sneaked to his dressing-room, and there remained shut up until he rode out to dinner, with Mrs Merdle, in her own handsome chariot. At dinner, he was envied and flattered as a being of might, was Treasuried, Barred, and Bishoped, as much as he would; and an hour after midnight came home alone, and being instantly put out again in his own hall, like a rushlight, by the chief butler, went sighing to bed.

CHAPTER 34 A Shoal of Barnacles

Mr Henry Gowan and the dog were established frequenters of the cottage, and the day was fixed for the wedding. There was to be a convocation of Barnacles on the occasion, in order that that very high and very large family might shed as much lustre on the marriage as so dim an event was capable of receiving.

To have got the whole Barnacle family together would have been impossible for two reasons. Firstly, because no building could have held all the members and connections of that illustrious house. Secondly, because wherever there was a square yard of ground in British occupation under the sun or moon, with a public post upon it, sticking to that post was a Barnacle. No intrepid navigator could plant a flag-staff upon any spot of earth, and take possession of it in the British name, but to that spot of earth, so soon as the discovery was known, the Circumlocution Office sent out a Barnacle and a despatch-box. Thus the Barnacles were all over the world, in every direction—despatch-boxing the compass.

But, while the so-potent art of Prospero himself would have failed in summoning the Barnacles from every speck of ocean and dry land on which there was nothing (except mischief) to be done and anything to be pocketed, it was perfectly feasible to assemble a good many Barnacles. This Mrs Gowan applied herself to do; calling on Mr Meagles frequently with new additions to the list, and holding conferences with that gentleman when he was not engaged (as he generally was at this period) in examining and paying the debts of his future son-in-law, in the apartment of scales and scoops.

One marriage guest there was, in reference to whose presence Mr Meagles felt a nearer interest and concern than in the attendance of the most elevated Barnacle expected; though he was far from insensible of the honour of having such company. This guest was Clennam. But Clennam had made a promise he held sacred, among the trees that summer night, and, in the chivalry of his heart, regarded it as binding him to many implied obligations. In forgetfulness of himself, and delicate service to her on all occasions, he was never to fail; to begin it, he answered Mr Meagles cheerfully, ‘I shall come, of course.’

His partner, Daniel Doyce, was something of a stumbling-block in Mr Meagles’s way, the worthy gentleman being not at all clear in his own anxious mind but that the mingling of Daniel with official Barnacleism might produce some explosive combination, even at a marriage breakfast. The national offender, however, lightened him of his uneasiness by coming down to Twickenham to represent that he begged, with the freedom of an old friend, and as a favour to one, that he might not be invited. ‘For,’ said he, ‘as my business with this set of gentlemen was to do a public duty and a public service, and as their business with me was to prevent it by wearing my soul out, I think we had better not eat and drink together with a show of being of one mind.’ Mr Meagles was much amused by his friend’s oddity; and patronised him with a more protecting air of allowance than usual, when he rejoined: ‘Well, well, Dan, you shall have your own crotchety way.’

To Mr Henry Gowan, as the time approached, Clennam tried to convey by all quiet and unpretending means, that he was frankly and disinterestedly desirous of tendering him any friendship he would accept. Mr Gowan treated him in return with his usual ease, and with his usual show of confidence, which was no confidence at all.

‘You see, Clennam,’ he happened to remark in the course of conversation one day, when they were walking near the Cottage within a week of the marriage, ‘I am a disappointed man. That you know already.’

‘Upon my word,’ said Clennam, a little embarrassed, ‘I scarcely know how.’

‘Why,’ returned Gowan, ‘I belong to a clan, or a clique, or a family, or a connection, or whatever you like to call it, that might have provided for me in any one of fifty ways, and that took it into its head not to do it at all. So here I am, a poor devil of an artist.’

Clennam was beginning, ‘But on the other hand—’ when Gowan took him up.

‘Yes, yes, I know. I have the good fortune of being beloved by a beautiful and charming girl whom I love with all my heart.’ (‘Is there much of it?’ Clennam thought. And as he thought it, felt ashamed of himself.)

‘And of finding a father-in-law who is a capital fellow and a liberal good old boy. Still, I had other prospects washed and combed into my childish head when it was washed and combed for me, and I took them to a public school when I washed and combed it for myself, and I am here without them, and thus I am a disappointed man.’

Clennam thought (and as he thought it, again felt ashamed of himself), was this notion of being disappointed in life, an assertion of station which the bridegroom brought into the family as his property, having already carried it detrimentally into his pursuit? And was it a hopeful or a promising thing anywhere?

‘Not bitterly disappointed, I think,’ he said aloud. ‘Hang it, no; not bitterly,’ laughed Gowan. ‘My people are not worth that—though they are charming fellows, and I have the greatest affection

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