expected to see the loaf disappear under the efficacy of his wife’s
petitions. “I ain’t a going to be blest out of house and home. I won’t
have my wittles blest off my table. Keep still!”
Exceedingly red-eyed and grim, as if he had been up all night at
a party which had taken anything but a convivial turn, Jerry
Cruncher worried his breakfast rather than ate it, growling over it
like any four-footed inmate of a menagerie. Towards nine o’clock
he smoothed his ruffled aspect, and, presenting as respectable and
business-like an exterior as he could overlay his natural self with,
issued forth to the occupation of the day.
It could scarcely be called a trade, in spite of his favourite
description of himself as “a honest tradesman.” His stock
consisted of a wooden stool, made out of a broken-backed chair
cut down, which stool, young Jerry, walking at his father’s side,
carried every morning to beneath the banking-house window that
was nearest Temple Bar: where, with the addition of the first
handful of straw that could be gleaned from any passing vehicle to
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keep the cold and wet from the odd-job-man’s feet, it formed the
encampment for the day. On this post of his, Mr. Cruncher was as
well known to Fleet Street and the Temple, as the Bar itself,—and
was almost as ill-looking.
Encamped at a quarter before nine, in good time to touch his
three-cornered hat to the oldest of the men as they passed in to
Tellson’s, Jerry took up his station on this windy March morning,
with young Jerry standing by him, when not engaged in making
forays through the Bar, to inflict bodily and mental injuries of an
acute description on passing boys who were small enough for his
amiable purpose. Father and son, extremely like each other,
looking silently on at the morning traffic in Fleet Street, with their
two heads as near to one another as the two eyes of each were,
bore a considerable resemblance to a pair of monkeys. The
resemblance was not lessened by the accidental circumstance,
that the mature Jerry bit and spat out straw, while the twinkling
eyes of the youthful Jerry were as restlessly watchful of him as of
everything else in Fleet Street. The head of one of the regular
indoor messengers attached to Tellson’s establishment was put
through the door, and the word was given:
“Porter wanted!”
“Hooray, father! Here’s an early job to begin with!”
Having thus given his parent God speed, young Jerry seated
himself on the stool, entered on his reversionary interest in the
straw his father had been chewing, and cogitated.
“Always rusty! His fingers is always rusty!” muttered young
Jerry. “Where does my father get all that iron rust from? He don’t
get no iron rust here!”
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
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Chapter VIII
A SIGHT
“Y ou know the Old Bailey well, no doubt?” said one of
the oldest of clerks to Jerry the messenger.
“Ye-es, sir,” returned Jerry, in something of a
dogged manner. “I do know the Bailey.”
“Just so. And you know Mr. Lorry.”
“I know Mr. Lorry, sir, much better than I know the Bailey.
Much better,” said Jerry, not unlike a reluctant witness at the
establishment in question, “than I, as a honest tradesman, wish to
know the Bailey.”
“Very well. Find the door where the witnesses go in, and show
the door-keeper this note for Mr. Lorry. He will then let you in.”
“Into the court, sir?”
“Into the court.”
Mr. Cruncher’s eyes seemed to get a little closer to one another,
and to interchange the inquiry, “What do you think of this?”
“Am I to wait in the court, sir?” he asked, as the result of that
conference.
“I am going to tell you. The door-keeper will pass the note to
Mr. Lorry, and do you make any gesture that will attract Mr.
Lorry’s attention, and show him where you stand. Then what you
have to do is, to remain there until he wants you.”
“Is that all, sir?”
“That is all. He wishes to have a messenger at hand. This is to
tell him you are there.”
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As the ancient clerk deliberately folded and superscribed the
note, Mr. Cruncher, after surveying him in silence until he came to
the blotting-paper stage, remarked:
“I suppose they’ll be trying Forgeries this morning?”
“Treason!”
“That’s quartering,” said Jerry. “Barbarous!”
“It is the law,” remarked the ancient clerk, turning his
surprised spectacles upon him. “It is the law.”
“It’s hard in the law to spile a man, I think. It’s hard enough to
kill him, but it’s werry hard to spile him, sir.”
“Not at all,” returned the ancient clerk. “Speak well of the law.
Take care of your chest and voice, my good friend, and leave the
law to take care of itself. I give you that advice.”
“It’s the damp, sir, what settles on my chest and voice,” said
Jerry. “I leave you to judge what a damp way of earning a living
mine is.”
“Well, well,” said the old clerk; “we all have our various ways of
gaining a livelihood. Some of us have damp ways, and some of us
have dry ways. Here is the letter. Go along.”
Jerry took the letter, and, remarking to himself with less
internal deference than he made an outward show of, “You are a
lean old one, too,” made his bow, informed his son, in passing, of
his destination, and went his way.
They hanged at Tyburn in those days, so the street outside
Newgate had not obtained one infamous notoriety that has since
attached to it. But, the gaol was a vile place, in which most kinds of
debauchery and villainy were practised, and where dire diseases
were bred, that came into court with the prisoners, and sometimes
rushed straight from the dock at my Lord Chief Justice himself,
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and pulled him off the bench. It had more than once happened,
that the Judge in the black cap pronounced his own doom as
certainly as the prisoner’s, and even died before him. For the rest,
the Old Bailey was famous as a kind of deadly inn-yard, from
which pale travellers set out continually, in carts and coaches, on a
violent passage into the other world: traversing some two miles
and a half of public street and road, and shaming few good
citizens, if any. So powerful is use, and so desirable to be good use
in the beginning. It was famous, too, for the pillory, a wise old
institution, that inflicted a punishment of which no one could
foresee the extent; also, for the whipping-post, another dear old
institution, very humanising and softening to behold in action;
also, for extensive transactions in blood-money, another fragment
of ancestral wisdom, systematically leading to the most frightful
mercenary crimes that could be committed under Heaven.
Altogether, the Old Bailey, at that date, was a choice illustration of
the precept that “Whatever is, is right”; an aphorism that would be
as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome
consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong.
Making his way through the tainted crowd, dispersed up and
down this hideous scene of action, with the skill of a man
accustomed to make his way quietly, the messenger found out the
door he sought, and handed in his letter through a trap in it. For,
people then paid to see the play at the Old Bailey, just as they paid
to see the play in Bedlam—only the former entertainment was
much the dearer. Therefore, all the Old Bailey doors were well
guarded—except, indeed, the social doors by which the criminals
got there, and those were always left wide open.
After some delay and demur, the door grudgingly turned on its
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hinges a very little way, and allowed Mr. Jerry Cruncher to
squeeze himself into court.
“What’s on?” he asked, in a whisper, of the man he found
himself next to.
“Nothing yet.”
“What’s coming on?”
“The Treason case.”
“The quartering one, eh?”
“Ah!” returned the man, with a relish; “he’ll be drawn on a
hurdle to be half hanged, and then he’ll be taken down and sliced
before his own face, and then his inside will be taken out and
burnt while he looks on, and then his head will be chopped off,
and he’ll be cut into quarters. That’s the sentence.”
“If he’s found Guilty, you mean to say?” Jerry added, by way of
proviso.
“Oh! they’ll find him guilty,” said the other. “Don’t you be
afraid of that.”
Mr. Cruncher’s attention was here diverted to the door-keeper,
whom he saw making his way to Mr. Lorry, with the note in his
hand. Mr. Lorry sat at a table, among the gentlemen in wigs: not
far from a wigged gentleman, the prisoner’s counsel, who had a
great bundle of papers before him: and nearly opposite another
wigged gentleman with his hands in his pockets, whose whole
attention, when Mr. Cruncher looked at him then or afterwards,
seemed to be concentrated on the ceiling of the court. After some
gruff coughing and rubbing of his chin and signing with his hand,
Jerry attracted the notice of Mr. Lorry, who had stood up to look
for him, and who quietly nodded and sat down again.
“What’s he got to do with the case?” asked the man he had
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spoken with.
“Blest if I know,” said Jerry.
“What have you got to do with it, then, if a person may
inquire?”
“Blest if I know that either,” said Jerry.
The entrance of the Judge, and a consequent great stir and
settling down in the court, stopped the dialogue. Presently, the
dock became the central point of interest. Two gaolers, who had
been standing there, went out, and the prisoner was brought in,
and put to the bar.
Everybody present, except the one wigged gentleman who
looked at the ceiling, stared at him. All the human breath in the
place, rolled at him, like a sea, or a wind, or a fire. Eager faces
strained round pillars and corners, to get a sight of him; spectators
in back rows stood up, not to miss a hair of him; people on the
floor of the court, laid their hands on the shoulders of the people
before them, to help themselves, at anybody’s cost, to a view of
him, stood a-tiptoe, got upon ledges, stood upon next to nothing, to
see every inch of him. Conspicuous among these latter, like an
animated bit of the spiked wall of Newgate, Jerry stood: aiming at
the prisoner the beery breath of a whet he had taken as he came
along, and discharging it to mingle with the waves of other beer,
and gin, and tea, and coffee, and what not, that flowed at him, and
already broke upon the great windows behind him in an impure
mist and rain.
The object of all this staring and blaring, was a young man of
about five and twenty, well-grown and well-looking, with a
sunburnt cheek and a dark eye. His condition was that of a young
gentleman. He was plainly dressed in black, or very dark grey, and
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his hair, which was long and dark, was gathered in a ribbon at the
back of his neck; more to be out of his way than for ornament. As
an emotion of the mind will express itself through any covering of
the body, so the paleness which his situation engendered came
through the brown upon his cheek, showing the soul to be
stronger than the sun. He was otherwise quite self-possessed,
bowed to the Judge, and stood quiet.
The sort of interest with which this man was stared and
breathed at, was not a sort that elevated humanity. Had he stood
in peril of a less horrible sentence—had there been a chance of
any one of its savage details being spared—by just so much would
he have lost in his fascination. The form that was to be doomed to
be so shamefully mangled, was the sight; the immortal creature
that was to be so butchered and torn asunder, yielded the
sensation. Whatever gloss the various spectators put upon the
interest, according to their several arts and powers of self-deceit,
the interest was, at the root of it, Ogreish.
Silence in the court! Charles Darnay had yesterday pleaded Not
Guilty to an indictment denouncing him (with infinite jingle and
jangle) for that he was a false traitor to our serene, illustrious,
excellent, and so forth, prince, our Lord the King, by reason of his
having, on divers occasions, and by divers means and ways,
assisted Lewis, the French King, in his wars against our said
serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth; that was to say, by
coming and going, between the dominions of our said serene,
illustrious, excellent, and so forth, and those of the said French
Lewis, and wickedly, falsely, traitorously, and otherwise eviladverbiously, revealing to the said French Lewis what forces our
said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, had in preparation
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to send to Canada and North America. This much, Jerry, with his
head becoming more and more spiky as the law terms bristled it,
made out with huge satisfaction, and so arrived circuitously at the
understanding that the aforesaid, and over and over again
aforesaid, Charles Darnay, stood there before him upon his trial;
that the jury were swearing in; and that Mr. Attorney-General was
making ready to speak.
The accused, who was (and who knew he was) being mentally
hanged, beheaded, and quartered, by everybody there, neither
flinched from the situation, nor assumed any theatrical air in it. He
was quiet and attentive; watched the opening proceedings with a
grave interest; and stood with his hands resting on the slab of
wood before him, so composedly, that they had not displaced a leaf
of the herbs with which it was strewn. The court was all bestrewn
with herbs and sprinkled with vinegar, as a precaution against
gaol air and gaol fever.
Over the prisoner’s head there was a mirror, to throw the light
down upon him. Crowds of the wicked and the wretched had been
reflected in it, and had passed from its surface and this earth’s
together. Haunted in a most ghastly manner that abominable
place would have been, if the glass could ever have rendered back
its reflections, as the ocean is one day to give up its dead. Some
passing thought of the infamy and disgrace for which it had been
reserved, may have struck the prisoner’s mind. Be that as it may, a
change in his position making him conscious of a bar of light
across his face, he looked up; and when he saw the glass his face
flushed, and his right hand pushed the herbs away.
It happened that the action turned his face to that side of the
court which was on his left. About on a level with his eyes, there
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sat, in that corner of the Judge’s bench, two persons upon whom
his look immediately rested; so immediately, and so much to the
changing of his aspect, that all the eyes that were turned upon
him, turned to them.
The spectators saw in the two figures, a young lady of little
more than twenty, and a gentleman who was evidently her father;
a man of a very remarkable appearance in respect of the absolute
whiteness of his hair, and a certain indescribable intensity of face:
not of an active kind, but pondering and self-communing. When
this expression was upon him, he looked as if he were old; but
when it was stirred and broken up—as it was now, in a moment,
on his speaking to his daughter—he became a handsome man, not
past the prime of life.
His daughter had one of her hands drawn through his arm, as
she sat by him, and the other pressed upon it. She had drawn
close to him, in her dread of the scene, and in her pity for the
prisoner. Her forehead had been strikingly expressive of an
engrossing terror and compassion that saw nothing but the peril of
the accused. This had been so very noticeable, so very powerfully
and naturally shown, that starers who had had no pity for him
were touched by her; and the whisper went about, “Who are
they?”
Jerry, the messenger, who had made his own observations, in
his own manner, and who had been sucking the rust off his fingers
in his absorption, stretched his neck to hear who they were. The
crowd about him had pressed and passed the inquiry on to the
nearest attendant, and from him it had been more slowly pressed
and passed back; at last it got to Jerry:
“Witnesses.”
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“For which side?”
“Against.”
“Against what side?”
“The prisoner’s.”
The Judge, whose eyes had gone in the general direction,
recalled them, leaned back in his seat, and looked steadily at the
man whose life was in his hand, as Mr. Attorney-General rose to
