Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1798 page)

But it may, not unreasonably, be asked — while Francis Goodchild was wandering hither and thither, storing his mind with perpetual observation of men and things, and sincerely believing himself to be the laziest creature in existence all the time — how did Thomas Idle, crippled and confined to the house, contrive to get through the hours of the day?

Prone on the sofa, Thomas made no attempt to get through the hours, but passively allowed the hours to get through
him
.  Where other men in his situation would have read books and improved their minds, Thomas slept and rested his body.  Where other men would have pondered anxiously over their future prospects, Thomas dreamed lazily of his past life.  The one solitary thing he did, which most other people would have done in his place, was to resolve on making certain alterations and improvements in his mode of existence, as soon as the effects of the misfortune that had overtaken him had all passed away.  Remembering that the current of his life had hitherto oozed along in one smooth stream of laziness, occasionally troubled on the surface by a slight passing ripple of industry, his present ideas on the subject of self-reform, inclined him — not as the reader may be disposed to imagine, to project schemes for a new existence of enterprise and exertion — but, on the contrary, to resolve that he would never, if he could possibly help it, be active or industrious again, throughout the whole of his future career.

It is due to Mr. Idle to relate that his mind sauntered towards this peculiar conclusion on distinct and logically-producible grounds.  After reviewing, quite at his ease, and with many needful intervals of repose, the generally-placid spectacle of his past existence, he arrived at the discovery that all the great disasters which had tried his patience and equanimity in early life, had been caused by his having allowed himself to be deluded into imitating some pernicious example of activity and industry that had been set him by others.  The trials to which he here alludes were three in number, and may be thus reckoned up: First, the disaster of being an unpopular and a thrashed boy at school; secondly, the disaster of falling seriously ill; thirdly, the disaster of becoming acquainted with a great bore.

The first disaster occurred after Thomas had been an idle and a popular boy at school, for some happy years.  One Christmas-time, he was stimulated by the evil example of a companion, whom he had always trusted and liked, to be untrue to himself, and to try for a prize at the ensuing half-yearly examination.  He did try, and he got a prize — how, he did not distinctly know at the moment, and cannot remember now.  No sooner, however, had the book — Moral Hints to the Young on the Value of Time — been placed in his hands, than the first troubles of his life began.  The idle boys deserted him, as a traitor to their cause.  The industrious boys avoided him, as a dangerous interloper; one of their number, who had always won the prize on previous occasions, expressing just resentment at the invasion of his privileges by calling Thomas into the play-ground, and then and there administering to him the first sound and genuine thrashing that he had ever received in his life.  Unpopular from that moment, as a beaten boy, who belonged to no side and was rejected by all parties, young Idle soon lost caste with his masters, as he had previously lost caste with his schoolfellows.  He had forfeited the comfortable reputation of being the one lazy member of the youthful community whom it was quite hopeless to punish.  Never again did he hear the headmaster say reproachfully to an industrious boy who had committed a fault, ‘I might have expected this in Thomas Idle, but it is inexcusable, sir, in you, who know better.’  Never more, after winning that fatal prize, did he escape the retributive imposition, or the avenging birch.  From that time, the masters made him work, and the boys would not let him play.  From that time his social position steadily declined, and his life at school became a perpetual burden to him.

So, again, with the second disaster.  While Thomas was lazy, he was a model of health.  His first attempt at active exertion and his first suffering from severe illness are connected together by the intimate relations of cause and effect.  Shortly after leaving school, he accompanied a party of friends to a cricket-field, in his natural and appropriate character of spectator only.  On the ground it was discovered that the players fell short of the required number, and facile Thomas was persuaded to assist in making up the complement.  At a certain appointed time, he was roused from peaceful slumber in a dry ditch, and placed before three wickets with a bat in his hand.  Opposite to him, behind three more wickets, stood one of his bosom friends, filling the situation (as he was informed) of bowler.  No words can describe Mr. Idle’s horror and amazement, when he saw this young man — on ordinary occasions, the meekest and mildest of human beings — suddenly contract his eye-brows, compress his lips, assume the aspect of an infuriated savage, run back a few steps, then run forward, and, without the slightest previous provocation, hurl a detestably hard ball with all his might straight at Thomas’s legs.  Stimulated to preternatural activity of body and sharpness of eye by the instinct of self-preservation, Mr. Idle contrived, by jumping deftly aside at the right moment, and by using his bat (ridiculously narrow as it was for the purpose) as a shield, to preserve his life and limbs from the dastardly attack that had been made on both, to leave the full force of the deadly missile to strike his wicket instead of his leg; and to end the innings, so far as his side was concerned, by being immediately bowled out.  Grateful for his escape, he was about to return to the dry ditch, when he was peremptorily stopped, and told that the other side was ‘going in,’ and that he was expected to ‘field.’  His conception of the whole art and mystery of ‘fielding,’ may be summed up in the three words of serious advice which he privately administered to himself on that trying occasion — avoid the ball.  Fortified by this sound and salutary principle, he took his own course, impervious alike to ridicule and abuse.  Whenever the ball came near him, he thought of his shins, and got out of the way immediately.  ‘Catch it!’  ‘Stop it!’  ‘Pitch it up!’ were cries that passed by him like the idle wind that he regarded not.  He ducked under it, he jumped over it, he whisked himself away from it on either side.  Never once, through the whole innings did he and the ball come together on anything approaching to intimate terms.  The unnatural activity of body which was necessarily called forth for the accomplishment of this result threw Thomas Idle, for the first time in his life, into a perspiration.  The perspiration, in consequence of his want of practice in the management of that particular result of bodily activity, was suddenly checked; the inevitable chill succeeded; and that, in its turn, was followed by a fever.  For the first time since his birth, Mr. Idle found himself confined to his bed for many weeks together, wasted and worn by a long illness, of which his own disastrous muscular exertion had been the sole first cause.

The third occasion on which Thomas found reason to reproach himself bitterly for the mistake of having attempted to be industrious, was connected with his choice of a calling in life.  Having no interest in the Church, he appropriately selected the next best profession for a lazy man in England — the Bar.  Although the Benchers of the Inns of Court have lately abandoned their good old principles, and oblige their students to make some show of studying, in Mr. Idle’s time no such innovation as this existed.  Young men who aspired to the honourable title of barrister were, very properly, not asked to learn anything of the law, but were merely required to eat a certain number of dinners at the table of their Hall, and to pay a certain sum of money; and were called to the Bar as soon as they could prove that they had sufficiently complied with these extremely sensible regulations.  Never did Thomas move more harmoniously in concert with his elders and betters than when he was qualifying himself for admission among the barristers of his native country.  Never did he feel more deeply what real laziness was in all the serene majesty of its nature, than on the memorable day when he was called to the Bar, after having carefully abstained from opening his law-books during his period of probation, except to fall asleep over them.  How he could ever again have become industrious, even for the shortest period, after that great reward conferred upon his idleness, quite passes his comprehension.  The kind Benchers did everything they could to show him the folly of exerting himself.  They wrote out his probationary exercise for him, and never expected him even to take the trouble of reading it through when it was written.  They invited him, with seven other choice spirits as lazy as himself, to come and be called to the Bar, while they were sitting over their wine and fruit after dinner.  They put his oaths of allegiance, and his dreadful official denunciations of the Pope and the Pretender, so gently into his mouth, that he hardly knew how the words got there.  They wheeled all their chairs softly round from the table, and sat surveying the young barristers with their backs to their bottles, rather than stand up, or adjourn to hear the exercises read.  And when Mr. Idle and the seven unlabouring neophytes, ranged in order, as a class, with their backs considerately placed against a screen, had begun, in rotation, to read the exercises which they had not written, even then, each Bencher, true to the great lazy principle of the whole proceeding, stopped each neophyte before he had stammered through his first line, and bowed to him, and told him politely that he was a barrister from that moment.  This was all the ceremony.  It was followed by a social supper, and by the presentation, in accordance with ancient custom, of a pound of sweetmeats and a bottle of Madeira, offered in the way of needful refreshment, by each grateful neophyte to each beneficent Bencher.  It may seem inconceivable that Thomas should ever have forgotten the great do-nothing principle instilled by such a ceremony as this; but it is, nevertheless, true, that certain designing students of industrious habits found him out, took advantage of his easy humour, persuaded him that it was discreditable to be a barrister and to know nothing whatever about the law, and lured him, by the force of their own evil example, into a conveyancer’s chambers, to make up for lost time, and to qualify himself for practice at the Bar.  After a fortnight of self-delusion, the curtain fell from his eyes; he resumed his natural character, and shut up his books.  But the retribution which had hitherto always followed his little casual errors of industry followed them still.  He could get away from the conveyancer’s chambers, but he could not get away from one of the pupils, who had taken a fancy to him, — a tall, serious, raw-boned, hard-working, disputatious pupil, with ideas of his own about reforming the Law of Real Property, who has been the scourge of Mr. Idle’s existence ever since the fatal day when he fell into the mistake of attempting to study the law.  Before that time his friends were all sociable idlers like himself.  Since that time the burden of bearing with a hard-working young man has become part of his lot in life.  Go where he will now, he can never feel certain that the raw-boned pupil is not affectionately waiting for him round a corner, to tell him a little more about the Law of Real Property.  Suffer as he may under the infliction, he can never complain, for he must always remember, with unavailing regret, that he has his own thoughtless industry to thank for first exposing him to the great social calamity of knowing a bore.

These events of his past life, with the significant results that they brought about, pass drowsily through Thomas Idle’s memory, while he lies alone on the sofa at Allonby and elsewhere, dreaming away the time which his fellow-apprentice gets through so actively out of doors.  Remembering the lesson of laziness which his past disasters teach, and bearing in mind also the fact that he is crippled in one leg because he exerted himself to go up a mountain, when he ought to have known that his proper course of conduct was to stop at the bottom of it, he holds now, and will for the future firmly continue to hold, by his new resolution never to be industrious again, on any pretence whatever, for the rest of his life.  The physical results of his accident have been related in a previous chapter.  The moral results now stand on record; and, with the enumeration of these, that part of the present narrative which is occupied by the Episode of The Sprained Ankle may now perhaps be considered, in all its aspects, as finished and complete.

‘How do you propose that we get through this present afternoon and evening?’ demanded Thomas Idle, after two or three hours of the foregoing reflections at Allonby.

Mr. Goodchild faltered, looked out of window, looked in again, and said, as he had so often said before, ‘There is the sea, and here are the shrimps; — let us eat ‘em’!’

But, the wise donkey was at that moment in the act of bolting: not with the irresolution of his previous efforts which had been wanting in sustained force of character, but with real vigour of purpose: shaking the dust off his mane and hind-feet at Allonby, and tearing away from it, as if he had nobly made up his mind that he never would be taken alive.  At sight of this inspiring spectacle, which was visible from his sofa, Thomas Idle stretched his neck and dwelt upon it rapturously.

‘Francis Goodchild,’ he then said, turning to his companion with a solemn air, ‘this is a delightful little Inn, excellently kept by the most comfortable of landladies and the most attentive of landlords, but — the donkey’s right!’

The words, ‘There is the sea, and here are the — ’ again trembled on the lips of Goodchild, unaccompanied however by any sound.

‘Let us instantly pack the portmanteaus,’ said Thomas Idle, ‘pay the bill, and order a fly out, with instructions to the driver to follow the donkey!’