The Old Curiosity Shop

by Dickens, Charles

physical deformities in children are held to be the consequence of

  bad nursing, so, if in a mind so beautiful any moral twist or

  handiness could be found, Miss Sally Brass's nurse was alone to

  blame.

  It was on this lady, then, that Mr Swiveller burst in full

  freshness as something new and hitherto undreamed of, lighting up

  Page 190

  Dickens, Charles - The Old Curiosity Shop

  the office with scraps of song and merriment, conjuring with

  inkstands and boxes of wafers, catching three oranges in one hand,

  balancing stools upon his chin and penknives on his nose, and

  constantly performing a hundred other feats with equal ingenuity;

  for with such unbendings did Richard, in Mr Brass's absence,

  relieve the tedium of his confinement. These social qualities,

  which Miss Sally first discovered by accident, gradually made such

  an impression upon her, that she would entreat Mr Swiveller to

  relax as though she were not by, which Mr Swiveller, nothing loth,

  would readily consent to do. By these means a friendship sprung up

  between them. Mr Swiveller gradually came to look upon her as her

  brother Sampson did, and as he would have looked upon any other

  clerk. He imparted to her the mystery of going the odd man or

  plain Newmarket for fruit, ginger-beer, baked potatoes, or even a

  modest quencher, of which Miss Brass did not scruple to partake.

  He would often persuade her to undertake his share of writing in

  addition to her own; nay, he would sometimes reward her with a

  hearty slap on the back, and protest that she was a devilish good

  fellow, a jolly dog, and so forth; all of which compliments Miss

  Sally would receive in entire good part and with perfect

  satisfaction.

  One circumstance troubled Mr Swiveller's mind very much, and that

  was that the small servant always remained somewhere in the bowels

  of the earth under Bevis Marks, and never came to the surface

  unless the single gentleman rang his bell, when she would answer it

  and immediately disappear again. She never went out, or came into

  the office, or had a clean face, or took off the coarse apron, or

  looked out of any one of the windows, or stood at the street-door

  for a breath of air, or had any rest or enjoyment whatever. Nobody

  ever came to see her, nobody spoke of her, nobody cared about her.

  Mr Brass had said once, that he believed she was a 'love-child'

  (which means anything but a child of love), and that was all the

  information Richard Swiveller could obtain.

  'It's of no use asking the dragon,' thought Dick one day, as he sat

  contemplating the features of Miss Sally Brass. 'I suspect if I

  asked any questions on that head, our alliance would be at an end.

  I wonder whether she is a dragon by-the-bye, or something in the

  mermaid way. She has rather a scaly appearance. But mermaids are

  fond of looking at themselves in the glass, which she can't be.

  And they have a habit of combing their hair, which she hasn't. No,

  she's a dragon.'

  'Where are you going, old fellow?' said Dick aloud, as Miss Sally

  wiped her pen as usual on the green dress, and uprose from her

  seat.

  'To dinner,' answered the dragon.

  'To dinner!' thought Dick, 'that's another circumstance. I don't

  believe that small servant ever has anything to eat.'

  'Sammy won't be home,' said Miss Brass. 'Stop till I come back.

  I sha'n't be long.'

  Dick nodded, and followed Miss Brass--with his eyes to the door,

  and with his ears to a little back parlour, where she and her

  brother took their meals.

  'Now,' said Dick, walking up and down with his hands in his

  pockets, 'I'd give something--if I had it--to know how they use

  that child, and where they keep her. My mother must have been a

  very inquisitive woman; I have no doubt I'm marked with a note of

  Page 191

  Dickens, Charles - The Old Curiosity Shop

  interrogation somewhere. My feelings I smother, but thou hast been

  the cause of this anguish, my--upon my word,' said Mr Swiveller,

  checking himself and falling thoughtfully into the client's chair,

  'I should like to know how they use her!'

  After running on, in this way, for some time, Mr Swiveller softly

  opened the office door, with the intention of darting across the

  street for a glass of the mild porter. At that moment he caught a

  parting glimpse of the brown head-dress of Miss Brass flitting down

  the kitchen stairs. 'And by Jove!' thought Dick, 'she's going to

  feed the small servant. Now or never!'

  First peeping over the handrail and allowing the head-dress to

  disappear in the darkness below, he groped his way down, and

  arrived at the door of a back kitchen immediately after Miss Brass

  had entered the same, bearing in her hand a cold leg of mutton. It

  was a very dark miserable place, very low and very damp: the walls

  disfigured by a thousand rents and blotches. The water was

  trickling out of a leaky butt, and a most wretched cat was lapping

  up the drops with the sickly eagerness of starvation. The grate,

  which was a wide one, was wound and screwed up tight, so as to hold

  no more than a little thin sandwich of fire. Everything was locked

  up; the coal-cellar, the candle-box, the salt-box, the meat-safe,

  were all padlocked. There was nothing that a beetle could have

  lunched upon. The pinched and meagre aspect of the place would

  have killed a chameleon. He would have known, at the first

  mouthful, that the air was not eatable, and must have given up the

  ghost in despair.

  The small servant stood with humility in presence of Miss Sally,

  and hung her head.

  'Are you there?' said Miss Sally.

  'Yes, ma'am,' was the answer in a weak voice.

  'Go further away from the leg of mutton, or you'll be picking it,

  I know,' said Miss Sally.

  The girl withdrew into a corner, while Miss Brass took a key

  from her pocket, and opening the safe, brought from it a dreary

  waste of cold potatoes, looking as eatable as Stonehenge. This she

  placed before the small servant, ordering her to sit down before

  it, and then, taking up a great carving-knife, made a mighty show

  of sharpening it upon the carving-fork.

  'Do you see this?' said Miss Brass, slicing off about two square

  inches of cold mutton, after all this preparation, and holding it

  out on the point of the fork.

  The small servant looked hard enough at it with her hungry eyes to

  see every shred of it, small as it was, and answered, 'yes.'

  'Then don't you ever go and say,' retorted Miss Sally, 'that you

  hadn't meat here. There, eat it up.'

  This was soon done. 'Now, do you want any more?' said Miss Sally.

  The hungry creature answered with a faint 'No.' They were

  evidently going through an established form.

  'You've been helped once to meat,' said Miss Brass, summing up the

  facts; 'you have had as much as you can eat, you're asked if you

  want any more, and you answer, 'no!' Then don't you ever go and say

  Page 192

  Dickens, Charles - The Ol
d Curiosity Shop

  you were allowanced, mind that.'

  With those words, Miss Sally put the meat away and locked the safe,

  and then drawing near to the small servant, overlooked her while

  she finished the potatoes.

  It was plain that some extraordinary grudge was working in Miss

  Brass's gentle breast, and that it was that which impelled her,

  without the smallest present cause, to rap the child with the blade

  of the knife, now on her hand, now on her head, and now on her

  back, as if she found it quite impossible to stand so close to her

  without administering a few slight knocks. But Mr Swiveller was

  not a little surprised to see his fellow-clerk, after walking

  slowly backwards towards the door, as if she were trying to

  withdraw herself from the room but could not accomplish it, dart

  suddenly forward, and falling on the small servant give her some

  hard blows with her clenched hand. The victim cried, but in a

  subdued manner as if she feared to raise her voice, and Miss Sally,

  comforting herself with a pinch of snuff, ascended the stairs, just

  as Richard had safely reached the office.

  CHAPTER 37

  The single gentleman among his other peculiarities--and he had a

  very plentiful stock, of which he every day furnished some new

  specimen--took a most extraordinary and remarkable interest in the

  exhibition of Punch. If the sound of a Punch's voice, at ever so

  remote a distance, reached Bevis Marks, the single gentleman,

  though in bed and asleep, would start up, and, hurrying on his

  clothes, make for the spot with all speed, and presently return at

  the head of a long procession of idlers, having in the midst the

  theatre and its proprietors. Straightway, the stage would be set

  up in front of Mr Brass's house; the single gentleman would

  establish himself at the first floor window; and the entertainment

  would proceed, with all its exciting accompaniments of fife and

  drum and shout, to the excessive consternation of all sober

  votaries of business in that silent thoroughfare. It might have

  been expected that when the play was done, both players and

  audience would have dispersed; but the epilogue was as bad as the

  play, for no sooner was the Devil dead, than the manager of the

  puppets and his partner were summoned by the single gentleman to

  his chamber, where they were regaled with strong waters from his

  private store, and where they held with him long conversations, the

  purport of which no human being could fathom. But the secret of

  these discussions was of little importance. It was sufficient to

  know that while they were proceeding, the concourse without still

  lingered round the house; that boys beat upon the drum with their

  fists, and imitated Punch with their tender voices; that the

  office-window was rendered opaque by flattened noses, and the

  key-hole of the street-door luminous with eyes; that every time the

  single gentleman or either of his guests was seen at the upper

  window, or so much as the end of one of their noses was visible,

  there was a great shout of execration from the excluded mob, who

  remained howling and yelling, and refusing consolation, until the

  exhibitors were delivered up to them to be attended elsewhere. It

  was sufficient, in short, to know that Bevis Marks was

  revolutionised by these popular movements, and that peace and

  quietness fled from its precincts.

  Nobody was rendered more indignant by these proceedings than Mr

  Page 193

  Dickens, Charles - The Old Curiosity Shop

  Sampson Brass, who, as he could by no means afford to lose so

  profitable an inmate, deemed it prudent to pocket his lodger's

  affront along with his cash, and to annoy the audiences who

  clustered round his door by such imperfect means of retaliation as

  were open to him, and which were confined to the trickling down of

  foul water on their heads from unseen watering pots, pelting them

  with fragments of tile and mortar from the roof of the house, and

  bribing the drivers of hackney cabriolets to come suddenly round

  the corner and dash in among them precipitately. It may, at first

  sight, be matter of surprise to the thoughtless few that Mr Brass,

  being a professional gentleman, should not have legally indicted

  some party or parties, active in the promotion of the nuisance, but

  they will be good enough to remember, that as Doctors seldom take

  their own prescriptions, and Divines do not always practise what

  they preach, so lawyers are shy of meddling with the Law on their

  own account: knowing it to be an edged tool of uncertain

  application, very expensive in the working, and rather remarkable

  for its properties of close shaving, than for its always shaving

  the right person.

  'Come,' said Mr Brass one afternoon, 'this is two days without a

  Punch. I'm in hopes he has run through 'em all, at last.'

  'Why are you in hopes?' returned Miss Sally. 'What harm do they

  do?'

  'Here's a pretty sort of a fellow!' cried Brass, laying down his

  pen in despair. 'Now here's an aggravating animal!'

  'Well, what harm do they do?' retorted Sally.

  'What harm!' cried Brass. 'Is it no harm to have a constant

  hallooing and hooting under one's very nose, distracting one from

  business, and making one grind one's teeth with vexation? Is it no

  harm to be blinded and choked up, and have the king's highway

  stopped with a set of screamers and roarers whose throats must be

  made of--of--'

  'Brass,' suggested Mr Swiveller.

  'Ah! of brass,' said the lawyer, glancing at his clerk, to assure

  himself that he had suggested the word in good faith and without

  any sinister intention. 'Is that no harm?'

  The lawyer stopped short in his invective, and listening for a

  moment, and recognising the well-known voice, rested his head upon

  his hand, raised his eyes to the ceiling, and muttered faintly,

  'There's another!'

  Up went the single gentleman's window directly.

  'There's another,' repeated Brass; 'and if I could get a break and

  four blood horses to cut into the Marks when the crowd is at its

  thickest, I'd give eighteen-pence and never grudge it!'

  The distant squeak was heard again. The single gentleman's door

  burst open. He ran violently down the stairs, out into the street,

  and so past the window, without any hat, towards the quarter whence

  the sound proceeded--bent, no doubt, upon securing the strangers'

  services directly.

  'I wish I only knew who his friends were,' muttered Sampson,

  filling his pocket with papers; 'if they'd just get up a pretty

  Page 194

  Dickens, Charles - The Old Curiosity Shop

  little Commission de lunatico at the Gray's Inn Coffee House and

  give me the job, I'd be content to have the lodgings empty for one

  while, at all events.'

  With which words, and knocking his hat over his eyes as if for the

  purpose of shutting out even a glimpse of the dreadful visitation,

  Mr Brass rushed from the house and hurried away.

  As Mr Swiveller
was decidedly favourable to these performances,

  upon the ground that looking at a Punch, or indeed looking at

  anything out of window, was better than working; and as he had

  been, for this reason, at some pains to awaken in his fellow clerk

  a sense of their beauties and manifold deserts; both he and Miss

  Sally rose as with one accord and took up their positions at the

  window: upon the sill whereof, as in a post of honour, sundry young

  ladies and gentlemen who were employed in the dry nurture of

  babies, and who made a point of being present, with their young

  charges, on such occasions, had already established themselves as

  comfortably as the circumstances would allow.

  The glass being dim, Mr Swiveller, agreeably to a friendly custom

  which he had established between them, hitched off the brown

  head-dress from Miss Sally's head, and dusted it carefully

  therewith. By the time he had handed it back, and its beautiful

  wearer had put it on again (which she did with perfect composure

  and indifference), the lodger returned with the show and showmen at

  his heels, and a strong addition to the body of spectators. The

  exhibitor disappeared with all speed behind the drapery; and his

  partner, stationing himself by the side of the Theatre, surveyed

  the audience with a remarkable expression of melancholy, which

  became more remarkable still when he breathed a hornpipe tune into

  that sweet musical instrument which is popularly termed a

  mouth-organ, without at all changing the mournful expression of the

  upper part of his face, though his mouth and chin were, of

  necessity, in lively spasms.

  The drama proceeded to its close, and held the spectators enchained

  in the customary manner. The sensation which kindles in large

  assemblies, when they are relieved from a state of breathless

  suspense and are again free to speak and move, was yet rife, when

  the lodger, as usual, summoned the men up stairs.

  'Both of you,' he called from the window; for only the actual

  exhibitor--a little fat man--prepared to obey the summons. 'I

  want to talk to you. Come both of you!'

  Come, Tommy,' said the little man.

  I an't a talker,' replied the other. 'Tell him so. What should I

  go and talk for?'

  'Don't you see the gentleman's got a bottle and glass up there?'

  returned the little man.

  'And couldn't you have said so at first?' retorted the other with