fall, and plough the pavement up. Every brick and stone in the
place seemed to have an echo of its own for the thunder. The
waterspouts were overcharged, and the rain came tearing down from
the house-tops as if they had been mountain-tops.
Page 47
Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces
Mrs. Parkins, my laundress – wife of Parkins the porter, then newly
dead of a dropsy – had particular instructions to place a bedroom
candle and a match under the staircase lamp on my landing, in order
that I might light my candle there, whenever I came home. Mrs.
Parkins invariably disregarding all instructions, they were never
there. Thus it happened that on this occasion I groped my way into
my sitting-room to find the candle, and came out to light it.
What were my emotions when, underneath the staircase lamp, shining
with wet as if he had never been dry since our last meeting, stood
the mysterious Being whom I had encountered on the steamboat in a
thunderstorm, two years before! His prediction rushed upon my
mind, and I turned faint.
‘I said I’d do it,’ he observed, in a hollow voice, ‘and I have
done it. May I come in?’
‘Misguided creature, what have you done?’ I returned.
‘I’ll let you know,’ was his reply, ‘if you’ll let me in.’
Could it be murder that he had done? And had he been so successful
that he wanted to do it again, at my expense?
I hesitated.
‘May I come in?’ said he.
I inclined my head, with as much presence of mind as I could
command, and he followed me into my chambers. There, I saw that
the lower part of his face was tied up, in what is commonly called
a Belcher handkerchief. He slowly removed this bandage, and
exposed to view a long dark beard, curling over his upper lip,
twisting about the corners of his mouth, and hanging down upon his
breast.
‘What is this?’ I exclaimed involuntarily, ‘and what have you
become?’
‘I am the Ghost of Art!’ said he.
The effect of these words, slowly uttered in the thunder-storm at
midnight, was appalling in the last degree. More dead than alive,
I surveyed him in silence.
‘The German taste came up,’ said he, ‘and threw me out of bread. I
am ready for the taste now.’
He made his beard a little jagged with his hands, folded his arms,
and said,
‘Severity!’
I shuddered. It was so severe.
He made his beard flowing on his breast, and, leaning both hands on
the staff of a carpet-broom which Mrs. Parkins had left among my
books, said:
‘Benevolence.’
I stood transfixed. The change of sentiment was entirely in the
beard. The man might have left his face alone, or had no face.
Page 48
Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces
The beard did everything.
He lay down, on his back, on my table, and with that action of his
head threw up his beard at the chin.
‘That’s death!’ said he.
He got off my table and, looking up at the ceiling, cocked his
beard a little awry; at the same time making it stick out before
him.
‘Adoration, or a vow of vengeance,’ he observed.
He turned his profile to me, making his upper lip very bulky with
the upper part of his beard.
‘Romantic character,’ said he.
He looked sideways out of his beard, as if it were an ivy-bush.
‘Jealousy,’ said he. He gave it an ingenious twist in the air, and
informed me that he was carousing. He made it shaggy with his
fingers – and it was Despair; lank – and it was avarice: tossed it
all kinds of ways – and it was rage. The beard did everything.
‘I am the Ghost of Art,’ said he. ‘Two bob a-day now, and more
when it’s longer! Hair’s the true expression. There is no other.
I SAID I’D GROW IT, AND I’VE GROWN IT, AND IT SHALL HAUNT YOU!’
He may have tumbled down-stairs in the dark, but he never walked
down or ran down. I looked over the banisters, and I was alone
with the thunder.
Need I add more of my terrific fate? IT HAS haunted me ever since.