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
The Old Curiosity Shop Page 39