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CHAPTER 36
As the single gentleman after some weeks’ occupation of his
lodgings, still declined to correspond, by word or gesture, either
with Mr Brass or his sister Sally, but invariably chose Richard Swiveller as his channel of communication; and as he proved himself in
all respects a highly desirable inmate, paying for everything beforehand, giving very little trouble, making no noise, and keeping early
hours; Mr Richard imperceptibly rose to an important position in
the family, as one who had infl uence over this mysterious lodger,
and could negotiate with him, for good or evil, when nobody else
durst approach his person.
If the truth must be told, even Mr Swiveller’s approaches to
the single gentleman were of a very distant kind, and met with small
encouragement; but, as he never returned from a monosyllabic conference with the unknown, without quoting such expressions as
‘Swiveller, I know I can rely upon you,’ – ‘I have no hesitation in saying, Swiveller, that I entertain a regard for you,’ – ‘Swiveller, you are
my friend, and will stand by me I am sure,’ with many other short
speeches of the same familiar and confi ding kind, purporting to
have been addressed by the single gentleman to himself, and to
form the staple of their ordinary discourse, neither Mr Brass nor
Miss Sally for a moment questioned the extent of his infl uence, but
accorded to him their fullest and most unqualifi ed belief. But quite
apart from, and independent of, this source of popularity, Mr Swiveller had another, which promised to be equally enduring, and to
lighten his position considerably.
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CHARLES DICKENS
He found favour in the eyes of Miss Sally Brass. Let not the light
scorners of female fascination erect their ears to listen to a new tale
of love which shall serve them for a jest; for Miss Brass, however
accurately formed to be beloved, was not of the loving kind. That
amiable virgin, having clung to the skirts of the Law from her earliest youth; having sustained herself by their aid, as it were, in her
fi rst running alone, and maintained a fi rm grasp upon them ever
since; had passed her life in a kind of legal childhood. She had been
remarkable, when a tender prattler for an uncommon talent in
counterfeiting the walk and manner of a bailiff: in which character
she had learned to tap her little playfellows on the shoulder, and to
carry them off to imaginary sponging-houses, with a correctness of
imitation which was the surprise and delight of all who witnessed
her performances, and which was only to be exceeded by her exquisite manner of putting an execution into her doll’s house, and taking an exact inventory of the chairs and tables. These artless sports
had naturally soothed and cheered the decline of her widowed father: a most exemplary gentleman (called ‘old Foxey’ by his friends
from his extreme sagacity,) who encouraged them to the utmost, and
whose chief regret, on fi nding that he drew near to Houndsditch
churchyard, was, that his daughter could not take out an attorney’s
certifi cate and hold a place upon the roll. Filled with this affectionate and touching sorrow, he had solemnly confi ded her to his son
Sampson as an invaluable auxiliary; and from the old gentleman’s
decease to the period of which we treat, Miss Sally Brass had been
the prop and pillar of his business.
It is obvious that, having devoted herself from infancy to this
one pursuit and study, Miss Brass could know but little of the world,
otherwise than in connection with the law; and that from a lady
gifted with such high tastes, profi ciency in those gentler and softer
arts in which women usually excel, was scarcely to be looked for.
Miss Sally’s accomplishments were all of a masculine and strictly
legal kind. They began with the practice of an attorney and they
ended with it. She was in a state of lawful innocence, so to speak.
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THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP
The law had been her nurse. And, as bandy-legs or such 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 the offi ce 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 confi nement. These social qualities, which Miss Sally fi rst 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 offi ce, or had a clean face, or took off the coarse
apron, or looked out of any one of the windows, or stood at the streetdoor for a breath of air, or had any rest or enjoyment whatever. No-
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CHARLES DICKENS
body 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 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 offi ce 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 fl itting
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THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP
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
disfi gured 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 fi re. 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 fi rst 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.’
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CHARLES DICKENS
‘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
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 fi nished 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 offi ce.
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 fi rst fl oor
window; and the entertainment would proceed, with all its exciting
accompaniments of fi fe 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 suffi cient to
know that while they were proceeding, the concourse without still
lingered round the house; that boys beat upon the drum with their
fi sts, and imitated Punch with their tender voices; that the offi cewindow was rendered opaque by fl attened noses, and the key-hole of
the street-door luminous with eyes; that every time the single gentle-
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CHARLES DICKENS
man 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 suffi cient, in short, to know
that Bevis Marks was revolutionised by these popular movements,
and that peace and quietness fl ed from its precincts.
Nobody was rendered more indignant by these proceedings
than Mr Sampson Brass, who, as he could by no means afford to lose
so profi table 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 confi ned 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 fi rst 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
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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,
fi lling his pocket with papers; ‘if they’d just get up a pretty 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
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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.
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