The door of the cell opened, and the attendants returned.
"Press on, press on," cried Fagin. "Softly, but not so slow. Faster, faster!"
The men laid hands upon him and, disengaging Oliver from his grasp, held him back. He struggled with the power of desperation for an instant, and then sent up cry upon cry that penetrated even those massive walls and rang in their ears until they reached the open yard.
It was some time before they left the prison. Oliver nearly swooned after this frightful, scene, and was so weak that for an hour or more he had not the strength to walk.
Day was dawning when they again emerged. A great multitude had already assembled; the windows were filled with people, smoking and playing cards to beguile the time; the crowd were pushing, quarrelling, joking. Everything told of life and animation but one dark cluster of objects in the centre of all--the black stage, the cross-beam, the rope, and all the hideous apparatus of death.
CHAPTER LIII
And last.
THE FORTUNES OF THOSE WHO HAVE FIGURED IN THIS TALE ARE nearly closed. The little that remains to their historian to relate is told in few and simple words.
Before three months had passed, Rose Fleming and Harry Maylie were married in the village church which was henceforth to be the scene of the young clergyman's labours; on the same day they entered into possession for their new and happy home.
Mrs. Maylie took up her abode with her son and daughter-in-law. to enjoy, during the tranquil.remainder of her days, the greatest felicity that age and worth can know--die contemplation of the happiness of those on whom the warmest affections and tenderest cares of a well-spent life have been unceasingly bestowed.
It appeared, on full and careful investigation, that if the wreck of property remaining in the custody of Monks (which had never prospered either in his hands or in those of his mother) were equally divided between himself and Oliver, it would yield, to each, little more than three thousand pounds. By the provisions of his father's will, Oliver' would have been entitled to the whole; but-Mr. Brownlow, unwilling to deprive the elder son of the opportunity of retrieving his former vices and pursing an honest career, proposed this mode of distribution, to which his young charge joyfully acceded.
Monks, still bearing that assumed name, retired with his portion to a distant part of the New World, where, having quickly squandered it, he once more fell into his old courses and, after undergoing a long confinement for some fresh act of fraud and knavery, at length sunk under an attack of his old disorder, and died in prison. As far from home, died the chief remaining members of his friend Fagin's gang.
Mr. Brownlow adopted Oliver as his son. Removing with him and the old housekeeper to within a mile of the parsonage-house, where his dear friends resided, he gratified the only remaining wish of Oliver's warm and earnest heart, and thus linked together a little society whose condition approached as nearly to one of perfect happiness as can ever be known in this changing world.
Soon after the marriage of the young people, the worthy doctor returned to Chertsey, where, bereft of the presence of his old friends, he would have been discontented if his temperament had admitted of such a feeling, and would have turned quite peevish if he had known how. For two or three months he contented himself with hinting that he feared the air began to disagree with him; then, finding that the place really no longer was to him what it had been, he settled his business on his assistant, took a bachelor's cottage outside the village of which his young friend was pastor, and instantaneously recovered. Here he took to gardening, planting, fishing, carpentering, and various other pursuits of a similar kind, all undertaken with his characteristic impetuosity. In each and all, he has since become famous throughout the neighbourhood as a most profound authority.
Before his removal, he had managed to contract a strong friendship for Mr. Grimwig, which that eccentric gentleman cordially reciprocated. He is accordingly visited by Mr. Grimwig a great many times in the course of the year. On all such occasions Mr. Grimwig plants, fishes, and carpenters, with great ardour, doing everything in a very singular and unprecedented manner but always maintaining, with his favourite asseveration, that his mode is the right one. On Sundays he never fails to criticize the sermon to the young clergyman's face, always informing Mr. Losberne, in strict confidence afterwards, that he considers it an excellent performance but deems it as well not to say so. It is a standing and very favourite joke for Mr. Brownlow to rally him on his old prophecy concerning Oliver and to remind him of the night on which they sat with the watch between them, waiting his return ; but Mr. Grimwig contends that he was right in the main, and, in proof thereof, remarks that Oliver did not come back, after all--which always calls forth a laugh on his side, and increases his good humour.
Mr. Noah Claypole, receiving a free pardon from the Crown in consequence of being admitted approver against Fagin, and considering his profession not altogether as safe a one as he could wish, was for some little time at a loss for the means of a livelihood not burthened with too, much work. After some consideration he went into business as an Informer, in which calling he realizes a genteel subsistence. His plan is to walk out once a week during church time attended by Charlotte in respectable attire. The lady faints away at the doors of charitable publicans, and the gentleman, being accommodated with threepennyworth of brandy to restore her, lays an information next day and pockets half the penalty. Sometimes Mr. Claypole faints himself, but the result is the same.
Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, deprived of their situations, were gradually reduced to great indigence and misery, and finally became paupers in that very same workhouse in which they had once lorded it over others. Mr. Bumble has been heard to say that in this reverse and degradations, he has not even spirits to be thankful for being separated from his wife.
As to Mr. Giles and Brittles, they still remain in their old posts, although the former is bald and the last-named boy quite grey. They sleep at the parsonage, but divide their attentions so equally among its inmates, and Oliver, and Mr. Brownlow, and Mr. Losberne, that to this day the villagers have never been able to discover to which establishment they properly belong.
Master Charles Bates, appalled by Sikes' crime, fell into a train of reflection whether an honest life was not, after all, the best. Arriving at the conclusion that it certainly was, he turned his back upon the scenes of the past, resolved to amend it in some new sphere of action. He struggled hard, and suffered much, for some time; but, having a contented disposition, and a good purpose, succeeded in the end; and, from being a farmer's drudge, and a carrier's lad, he is now the merriest young grazier in all Northamptonshire.
And now the hand that traces these words falters as it approaches the conclusion of its task, and would weave, for a little longer space, the thread of these adventures.
I would fain linger yet with a few of those among whom I have so long moved, and share their happiness by endeavouring to depict it. I would show Rose Maylie in all the bloom and grace of early womanhood, shedding on her secluded path in life soft and gentle light, that fell on all who trod it with her, and shone into their hearts. I would paint her the life and joy of the fireside circle and the lively summer group; I would follow her through the sultry fields at noon, and hear the low tones of her sweet voice in the moonlit evening walk; I would watch her in all her goodness and charity abroad, and the smiling untiring discharge of domestic duties at home; I would paint her and her dead sister's child happy in their love for one another, and passing whole hours together in picturing the friends whom they had so sadly lost ; I would summon before me, once again, those joyous little faces that clustered round her knee and listen to their merry prattle: I would recall the tones of that clear laugh, and conjure up the sympathizing tear that glistened in the soft blue eye. These, and a thousand looks and smiles, and turns of thought and speech--I would fain recall them every one.
How Mr. Brownlow went on, from day to day, filling the mind of his adopted child with stores of knowledge,
and becoming attached to him more and more as his nature developed itself and showed the thriving seeds of all he wished him to become--how he traced in him new traits of his early friend, that awakened in his own bosom old remembrances, melancholy and yet sweet and soothing--how the two orphans, tried by adversity, remembered its lessons in mercy to others, and mutual love, and fervent thanks to Him who had protected and preserved them--these are all matters which need not to be told. I have said that they were truly happy; and without strong affection and humanity of heart, and gratitude to that Being whose code is Mercy and whose great attribute is Benevolence to all things that breathe, happiness can never be attained.
Within the altar of the old village church there stands a white marble tablet which-bears as yet but one word; "AGNES." There is no coffin in that tomb; and may it be many, many years before another name is placed above it! But, if the spirits of the Dead ever come back to earth to visit spots hallowed by the love--the love beyond the grave--of those whom they knew in life, I believe that the shade of Agnes sometimes hovers round that solemn nook. I believe it none the less because that nook is in a Church, and she was weak and erring.
THE END
AFTERWORD
Oliver Twist might be subtitled "From Rags to Riches, or The Male Cinderella." It was in fact, with a backward glance at Bunyan, subtitled "The Parish Boy's Progress." It is a child's success story, with some of the qualities--and those who know their Grimm know that these include nightmarish qualities--of a fairy tale. The orphan does not fare badly in finding substitute mothers--Mrs. Bedwin, Rose Maylie, even Nancy. Virtually all his anguish comes from the false fathers--Bumble, Fagin (with his habitual irony of "my dear"), Bill Sikes. If Nancy and Sikes had been legally married and Oliver their son. there is not the slightest reason to suppose either parent would have acted differently. It would still have been that archetypal domestic situation which so fascinated Dickens, in which the mother pleads, and pleads in vain, with the brutal or drunken father, who abuses his child as he abuses his dog and sends him out to toil or beg or steal. The boy Dickens, sent to the blacking factory (where one of his fellow workers was named Bob Fagin) to contribute to his parents' support, never forgot and never forgave this reversal of the proper situation: the result is episode after episode where the all-devouring ne'er-do-well or criminal father bites the little hand that feeds him. Long before the autobiographical David Copperfield this theme haunts the author, in "The Drunkard's Death" of the Sketches, in Chapter III of Pickwick--"The Stroller's Tale."
The emaciation of the "pale thin child" of nine is like that of the younger brother in the fairy tales. (The older brother is meanwhile thriving and scheming.) When Oliver is due to be indentured to the ogrelike Mr. Gamfield, the chimney sweep, he is given by Mr. Bumble "a basin of gruel and the holiday allowance of two ounces and a quarter of bread. At this tremendous sight, Oliver began to cry very piteously, thinking, not unnaturally, that the board must have determined to kill him for some useful purpose, or they never would have begun to fatten him up in that way" (III). This is Hansel without Gre tel. And the change to bliss is just as sharp. "There was dinner prepared, and there were bedrooms ready, and everything was arranged as if by magic" (LI) That last phrase still had force and freshness in Dickens's day.
The human needs are simple--a little coddling and two bowls of a better cereal. But these are what are hard, it seems, for an orphan to get in the England of 1837, and it is in the development of this point that Dickens becomes what will soon be recognized as his usual crusading self. This is low life as it must have been, in its inexhaustible and monotonous squalor, with the creaking rat-infested buildings, the oozing walls and fetid clothes and foul-smelling food. The reader whose ordinary fare is present-day realism must marvel that the author is able to convey' what he wants to convey without large splatter ings of criminal jargon and lascivious suggestion. A low word here and there puts in an embarrassed appearance--"drab" is the worst, dropped three times, but it need mean no more than slattern. (The repeatedly indecent mode of referring to Charley Bates belongs apparently to the humor of the unconscious.) For the most part Dickens more than gets along without the spice now considered indispensable. Bill Sikes is pure of speech. He curses, but the curses are not spelled out. Nancy is a prostitute, but she is never--with the possible exception just noted--called that in the story. She is called that in the Preface, the place where the author defends himself, "I saw no reason, when I wrote this book, why the very dregs of life, so long as their speech did not offend the ear, should not serve the purpose of a moral"; and again, "I endeavoured, while I painted it in all its fallen and degraded aspects, to banish from the lips of the lowest character I introduced, any expression that could by possibility offend." He was driven to defend himself, for the Quarterly reviewer and others had found the book immoral. But it is as moral as periphrasis can make it.
But need it be a limitation? Is it in Oliver Twist? I think not. We understand Nancy's status, and that is all that is required. "Do you know who you are, and what you are?" (xvi) It is enough for Sikes to say this to her, and we need not dictate that he substitute one monosyllable for these ten. Or it is enough that Oliver, long before, noticed the "great deal of colour" in her face. It is suggested that certain characters are foul-mouthed: the details can properly be left to the imagination. The data are not given, the words are not there, but we react as if they were. It is a case of successful illusion as distinguished from documentation.
Oliver can no more be contaminated by the surrounding filth than the Lady in Comus. If he got even physically smudged, we are not told. His mastery of the Queen's English extends to the distinction between "should" and "would," and a difficult sequence of tenses does not trouble him a bit: "I should have been very sorry not to have been at home when you and Mr. Maylie went away, sir," he tells Mr. Losberne, who responds, "That's a fine fellow." (xxxvi). It may be indeed that the remark is too fine, too grammatically correct and too gratuitously polite, in the manner of Little Lord Fauntleroy. But this comes when Oliver is secure and is being treated like a lord. (Also we can catch him, in a moment of stress, using "don't" for "doesn't," but perhaps he spells it "do'n't." xxxiii).
Unlike the Lady in Comus (who does not really need rescuing), Oliver does have, for more than half the story, the pathos of helplessness. Maybe he should have it longer. He conspicuously retires from the narrative while, in the last third, Nancy and Sikes and Fagin carry on alone. First he escaped from them to Mr. Brownlow's, then he escaped from them to the Maylies, and after that Dickens gives up trying to involve him. (The last-minute visit to Fagin's cell is patently artificial.) At the end, when Sikes is being cornered, Charley Bates is put in the place of Oliver Twist. We have a happy ending before the ending, and this looks like a structural oddity. The British film of a decade ago made a logical adjustment when it put Oliver back into Sikes's vile hands and onto the roof of the last perilous scene. Dickens may have loved Oliver too much to expose him for the third and most horrendous. time. He was unwilling to strain his own heart for the sake of straining his reader's.
The strain was in any case considerable, and was there for the paying public to see in Dickens's last series of readings, for as Forster reports, "the Sikes and Nancy scenes, everywhere his prominent subject, exacted the most terrible physical exertion from him." There would be a physician-in the wings to take the author's puise after each performance and frown at the way it had shot up. Reading these scenes to semi-hysterical audiences (the evening was not a success if no woman screamed or fainted) may literally have killed Dickens; the nervous energy that went into the writing is still coiled in the last chapters for all to sense. The inescapable fact is that murder took for Dickens the place of central excitement that sex takes for others. With morbid relish he pursued in book after book this crime and its terrifying after-effects, as felt by the haunted and hunted criminal. It is total--for the psychoanalyzing critic suspiciously total--identification with the murderer, with
each slow ticking of his consciousness: He had not moved; he had been afraid to stir. There had been a moan and motion of the hand; and, with terror added to rage, he had struck and struck again. Once he threw a rug over it; but it was worse to fancy the eyes and imagine them moving towards him than to see them glaring upward, as if watching the reflection of the pool of gore that quivered and danced in the sunlight on the ceiling. He had plucked it off again. And there was the body--mere flesh and blood, no more--but such flesh, and so much blood!
He struck a light, kindled a fire, and thrust the club into it. There was hair upon the end, which blazed and shrunk into a fight cinder... (XLVII).
The pulp of a clubbed-in head in which the eyes are still horribly in place, the way human hair adheres to the club and the way it bums--what an obscene instinctive knowledge (assisted by newspaper accounts) this Victorian has of such things!
Dickens takes many opportunities to insist on "the wide contrast" between the two worlds of his story (reaching a climax in the interviews with Nancy), and when he has Fagin and Monks scowling in at the window on Oliver as he dozes "in his own little room" at the Maylies', all the ingredients of a nightmare are present (as they were when Oliver had to go to bed among the coffins of Mr. Sowerberry). And these frightening figures prove repeatedly to be a seclusive as any spectre--" 'tis here, 'tis there, 'tis gone"--when the world of light goes to look for them, so that his benign friends really find Oliver difficult to believe; nor are matters helped when Mr. Brownlow vanishes mysteriously from London like a good fairy. If a dream does not separate the two worlds, a fever does-after Oliver's false arrest, that blessing in Mr. Fang's disguise. The ending can only come when the spectres are themselves haunted, Sikes tumbling down to self-execution because he thinks he sees a dead woman's eyes, Fagin in the death cell tortured by the church-clock's striking of the hours and hoping it was all "a trick to frighten him."
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