The Adelphi - ONE: Trotwood In The Company Of Steerforth

Adelphi meant brothers in Greek and the name referred to the builder brothers of the housing chambers.  Trotwood Copperfield felt it wonderful to walk about the town with the key of his house in his pocket.  But there were times it was very dreary.

It was fine in the fine mornings.  Fresh and free by day light; still fresher and more free by sunlight.  As the day declined the life seemed to go down.  It seldom looked well by candle light.  Trotwood wanted someone to talk, and felt that he missed Agnes.  Mrs Crupp was a long way off.  He thought of the previous occupant of the house.  Mrs Crupp revealed his story when Miss Betsey asked her whether the furniture belonged to previous occupant.  He died of smoking and drinking.

Steerforth not appearing, Trotwood felt that he must be ill.  On the third day he left Commons a bit early and walked to Highgate.  Mrs Steerforth was very glad to see him.  Steerforth had gone away with one of his Oxford friends who lived near St Albans, but she expected him to return soon.  Trotwood felt quite jealous of his Oxford friends.

Trotwood remained to dinner as Mrs Steerforth pressed him to.  Miss Dartle came with her questions and doubts.  He thought that both ladies were agreeable to each other.  Strangely Trotwood felt that he was falling in love with Miss Dartle.  Several times in the course of the evening and when he walked home at night he thought what delightful company she would be in Buckingham street.

Steerforth came in one morning when Trotwood was taking his coffee and roll.

'My dear Steerforth,' said Trotwood, 'I thought I should never see you again.'

'I was carried off by circumstances,' said Steerforth, 'very next morning after I got home.  Why, Daisy, what a rare old bachelor you are here!'

Trotwood showed him over the chambers, not omitting the pantry, with no little pride, and he commended it highly.

'I tell you what, old boy,' he added, 'I shall make quite a town-house of this place, unless you give me notice to quit.'

'But you shall have some breakfast!' said Trotwood with his hand on the bell rope.

'No, no!' said Steerforth.  'Don't ring! I can't! I am going to be with one of these fellows who is at Pizza Hotel, in Convent Garden.'

'But you'll come back to dinner.'

'I can't, upon my life.  There's nothing I should like better, but I must remain with these fellows.  We are all three off together tomorrow morning.'

'Then bring them here to dinner.' said Trotwood, 'Do you think they would come?'

'They would come fast enough,' said Steerforth, 'but we should inconvenience you.  You had better come and dine with us somewhere.'

It occurred to Trotwood that he should have a little house warming. He shared his thoughts to Steerforth, and got him convinced of it, and made him promise positively to the dinner-hour at six o'clock.

Trotwood spoke to Mrs Crupp about the dinner.  She made arrangements to bring a young handy young man, who would accomplish everything for dinner at five shillings. Again she arranged a young girl to be stationed in the pantry with a bedroom candle and to wash plates at eighteen pence.  After much discussion Mrs Crupp recommended the purchase of a pair of hot roast fowls from the pastry cook's, a dish of stewed beef with vegetables, again from the pastry cook's; two little corner things, as a raised pie and a dish of kidneys; and a tart and shaped jelly - again all from the pastry cook's.  This will leave Mrs Crupp at full liberty to concentrate her mind on potatoes and to serve up the cheese and celery. 

Trotwood acted on her opinion and gave the order at pastry cook's.  Walking along the Strands ( a street in Westminster), afterwards, and observing a hard mottled substance in the window of a ham and beef shop, Trotwood went in and bought a slab of it.  Later he found that it would have sufficed for fifteen people.  This substance, Mrs Crupp later warmed up into a liquid state.  Steerforth called it 'rather tight fit for four'.

After these preparation, Trotwood bought a little desert in Convent Garden Market.  The wine bottles ordered were received intact, but later found two bottles missing, which frightened Trotwood.  Mrs Crupp was uncomfortable when it was brought to her notice.

Steerforth's friends - one Grainger and the other Markham - were happy and lively fellows.  Grainger was older than Steerforth, but Markham was around twenty.

'A man might get on very well,' said Markham -  a man meaning himself, and he never used 'I'.

'It is not a bad situation,' said Trotwood, 'and rooms are really  commodious.'

'I hope you have both brought appetite with you?' said Steerforth.

'Upon my honour,' returned Markham 'town seems to sharpen a man's apetite.  A man is hungry all day long. A man is perpetually eating.'

At the dining table, Trotwood made Steerforth to take the head and he sat on the opposite side.  Dinner went off well, but the handy man and young girl distracted Trotwood.  The handy young man often went out of the room, and his shadow presented itself on the wall opposite Trotwood, with a bottle at its mouth.  The young girl neglected to wash the plates and broke some of them.  Being of inquisitive and restless she had been peering at dining table and the people around it, and with a feeling of being detected stumbled on the plates, which she put here and there on the floor.  He asked handy man to remove the young girl to the basement and seek the association of Mrs Crupp. 

The wine had begun its work with Trotwood.  He became singularly cheerful and light-hearted, he felt that he along with Steerforth and his friends had been moving in a boat swinging left and right.  He laughed heartily at his own jokes, and every body else's; called Steerforth to order for not passing the wine; made several engagements to go to Oxford, made an announcement that he meant to have a dinner party, once every week, and madly took so much  snuff out of Grainger's box, went into the pantry, and had a private fit of sneezing ten minutes long.

With too much wine in his belly and too little sense in his head Trotwood began his intoxicated oration on the virtues of his friend, and also virtues the wine.  A song by Markham 'when the heart of a man is depressed with care', and it followed by more wine.  And then there was wrangle between Trotwood and Markham over the toast. 

Somebody was talking.  And all were talking.  They were only four, but they talked as if they were forty. Somebody was smoking and they were all smoking.  Steerforth made a speech about Trotwood, that brought tears to his eyes.  Somebody said, 'Let us go to theatre Trotwood!'

And all of them were in the theater.  To his surprise Trotwood saw Agnes, sitting on a seat before him in the same box, with a lady and gentleman beside her.  Agnes! Her face with indelible look of regret and wonder turned upon Trotwood.

'Agnes!' he said thickly, 'Lorblessmer!' 

'Hush! Pray!' she answered, 'You disturb the company, look at the stage!'

Trotwood, on her injunction, tried in vain to see what was going on the stage, but quite in vain.  He looked at her by and by, and saw her shrink into her corner, and put her gloved hand to her forehead.

'Agnes!' he said.  'I'mafraidyou'renorewell.'

'Yes, yes.  Do not mind me, Trotwood,' she returned.  'Listen!  Are you going away soon?'

'Amigoarawaysoo?' Trotwood repeated.

'Yes.'

Trotwood was going to wait, and he doubted that he said it to her somehow; after she had a look at him attentively for a little while, she appeared to understand, and replied in a low tone.

'I know you will do as I ask you, if I tell you.  I am very earnest in it.  Go away now, Trotwood, for my sake, and ask your friends to take you home.'

Trotwood came to his senses, felt ashamed, and said 'Goori' (Good night) got up and stepped at once out of the box-door.  His friends followed.  When he was in his bedroom at the Adelphi, he found only Steerforth helping him to undress. 

Next day, when he was conscious he felt ashamed, and was in agony and remorse.  He did not know when Steerforth had gone.

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