Interesting! Bah!” And Mr. Grimwig poked the fire with a flourish.
“He was a dear, grateful, gentle child, sir,” retorted Mrs.
Bedwin indignantly. “I know what children are, sir, and have done
these forty years; and people who can’t say the same, shouldn’t say
anything about them. That’s my opinion!”
This was a hard hit at Mr. Grimwig, who was a bachelor. As it
extorted nothing from that gentleman but a smile, the old lady
tossed her head, and smoothed down her apron preparatory to
another speech, when she was stopped by Mr. Brownlow.
“Silence!” said the old gentleman, feigning an anger he was far
from feeling. “Never let me hear the boy’s name again. I rang to
tell you that. Never. Never, on any pretence, mind! You may leave
the room, Mrs. Bedwin. Remember! I am in earnest.”
There were sad hearts at Mr. Brownlow’s that night.
Oliver’s heart sank within him, when he thought of his good
kind friends; it was well for him that he could not know what they
had heard, or it might have broken outright.
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Chapter 18
How Oliver Passed His Time In The Improving
Society Of His Reputable Friends.
About noon next day, when the Dodger and Master Bates
had gone out to pursue their customary avocations, Mr.
Fagin took the opportunity of reading Oliver a long
lecture on the crying sin of ingratitude; of which he clearly
demonstrated he had been guilty, to no ordinary extent, in wilfully
absenting himself from the society of his anxious friends; and, still
more, in endeavouring to escape from them after so much trouble
and expense had been incurred in his recovery. Mr. Fagin laid
great stress on the fact of his having taken Oliver in, and cherished
him, when, without his timely aid, he might have perished with
hunger; and he related the dismal and affecting history of a young
lad whom, in his philanthropy, he had succoured under parallel
circumstances, but who, proving unworthy of his confidence and
evincing a desire to communicate with the police, had
unfortunately come to be hanged at the Old Bailey one morning.
Mr. Fagin did not seek to conceal his share in the catastrophe, but
lamented, with tears in his eyes, that the wrong-headed and
treacherous behaviour of the young person in question, had
rendered it necessary that he should become the victim of certain
evidence for the Crown; which, if it were not precisely true, was
indispensably necessary for the safety of him (Mr. Fagin) and a
few select friends. Mr. Fagin concluded by drawing a rather
disagreeable picture of the discomforts of hanging; and, with great
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friendliness and politeness of manner, expressed his anxious
hopes that he might never be obliged to submit Oliver Twist to
that unpleasant operation.
Little Oliver’s blood ran cold, as he listened to the Jew’s words,
and imperfectly comprehended the dark threats conveyed in
them. That it was possible even for justice itself to confound the
innocent with the guilty when they were in accidental
companionship, he knew already; and that deeply-laid plans for
the destruction of inconveniently knowing or over-communicative
persons, had been really devised and carried out by the old Jew on
more occasions than one, he thought by no means unlikely, when
he recollected the general nature of the altercations between that
gentleman and Mr. Sikes: which seemed to bear reference to some
foregone conspiracy of the kind. As he glanced timidly up, and met
the Jew’s searching look, he felt that his pale face and trembling
limbs were neither unnoticed nor unrelished by that wary old
gentleman.
The Jew smiled hideously; and patting Oliver on the head, said,
that if he kept himself quiet, and applied himself to business, he
saw they would be very good friends yet. Then, taking his hat, and
covering himself with an old patched greatcoat, he went out, and
locked the room door behind him.
And so Oliver remained all that day, and for the greater part of
many subsequent days, seeing nobody, between early morning
and midnight, and left during the long hours to commune with his
own thoughts: which, never failing to revert to his kind friends,
and the opinion they must long ago have formed of him, were sad
indeed.
After the lapse of a week or so, the Jew left the room door
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unlocked; and he was at liberty to wander about the house.
It was a very dirty place. The rooms upstairs had great high
wooden chimney-pieces and large doors, with panelled walls, and
cornices to the ceilings; which, although they were black with
neglect and dust, were ornamented in various ways; from all of
these tokens Oliver concluded that a long time ago, before the old
Jew was born, it had belonged to better people, and had perhaps
been quite gay and handsome, dismal and dreary as it looked now.
Spiders had built their webs in the angles of the walls and
ceilings; and sometimes, when Oliver walked softly into a room,
the mice would scamper across the floor, and run back, terrified,
to their holes. With these exceptions, there was neither sight nor
sound of any living thing; and often, when it grew dark, and he
was tired of wandering from room to room, he would crouch in the
corner of the passage by the street door, to be as near living people
as he could; and would remain there, listening and counting the
hours, until the Jew or the boys returned In all the rooms, the
mouldering shutters were fast closed; the bars which held them
were screwed tight into the wood; the only light which was
admitted, stealing its way through round holes at the top, which
made the rooms more gloomy, and filled them with strange
shadows. There was a back-garret window with rusty bars outside
which had no shutter; and out of this, Oliver often gazed with a
melancholy face for hours together; but nothing was to be
described from it but a confused and crowded mass of house-tops,
blackened chimneys, and gable-ends. Sometimes, indeed, a grizzly
head might be seen, peering over a parapet-wall of a distant
house: but it was quickly withdrawn again; and as the window of
Oliver’s observation was nailed down, and dimmed with the rain
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and smoke of years, it was as much as he could do to make out the
forms of the different objects beyond, without making any attempt
to be seen or heard—which he had as much chance of being, as if
he had lived inside the ball of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
One afternoon, the Dodger and Master Bates being engaged out
that evening, the first-named young gentleman took it into his
head to evince some anxiety regarding the decoration of his
person (which to do him justice, was by no means an habitual
weakness with him); and, with this end and aim, he
condescendingly commanded Oliver to assist him in his toilet,
straightway.
Oliver was but too glad to make himself useful, too happy to
have some faces, however bad, to look upon, and too desirous to
conciliate those about him, when he could honestly do so, to throw
any objection in the way of this proposal. So he at once expressed
his readiness; and, kneeling on the floor, while the Dodger sat
upon the table, so that he could take his foot in his lap, he applied
himself to a process which Mr. Dawkins designated as “japanning
his trotter-cases.” Which phrase, rendered into plain English,
signifieth, cleaning his boots.
Whether it was the sense of freedom and independence which a
rational animal may be supposed to feel when he sits on a table in
an easy attitude smoking a pipe, swinging one leg carelessly to and
fro, and having his boots cleaned all the time, without even the
past trouble of having taken them off, or the prospective misery of
putting them on, to disturb his reflections; or whether it was the
goodness of the tobacco that soothed the feelings of the Dodger, or
the mildness of the beer that mollified his thoughts, he was
evidently tinctured, for the nonce, with a spice of romance and
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enthusiasm, foreign to his general nature. He looked down on
Oliver, with a thoughtful countenance, for a brief space; and then,
raising his head, and heaving a gentle sigh, said, half in
abstractions, and half to Mr. Bates:
“What a pity it is he isn’t a prig!”
“Ah!” said Master Charles Bates; “he don’t know what’s good
for him.”
The Dodger sighed again, and resumed his pipe: as did Charley
Bates. They both smoked, for some seconds, in silence.
“I suppose you don’t even know what a prig is?” said the
Dodger mournfully.
“I think I know that,” replied Oliver, looking up. “It’s a th—
You’re one, are you not?” inquired Oliver, checking himself.
“I am,” replied the Dodger. “I’d scorn to be anything else.” Mr.
Dawkins gave his hat a ferocious cock, after delivering this
sentiment, and looked at Master Bates, as if to denote that he
would feel obliged by his saying anything to the contrary.
“I am,” repeated the Dodger. “So’s Charley. So’s Fagin. So’s
Sikes. So’s Nancy. So’s Bet. So we all are, down to the dog; and
he’s the downiest one of the lot!”
“And the least given to preaching,” added Charley Bates.
“He wouldn’t so much as bark in a witness-box, for fear of
committing himself; no, nor if you tied him up in one, and left him
there without wittles for a fortnight,” said the Dodger.
“Not a bit of it,” observed Charley.
“He’s a rum dog. Don’t he look fierce at any strange cove that
laughs or sings when he’s in company!” pursued the Dodger.
“Won’t he growl at all, when he hears a fiddle playing! And don’t
he hate other dogs as ain’t of his breed! Oh, no!”
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“He’s an out-and-out Christian,” said Charley.
This was merely intended as a tribute to the animal’s abilities,
but it was an appropriate remark in another sense, if Master Bates
had only known it; for there are a good many ladies and
gentlemen, claiming to be out-and-out Christians, between whom,
and Mr. Sikes’s dog, there exist strong and singular points of
resemblance.
“Well, well,” said the Dodger, recurring to the point from which
they had strayed, with that mindfulness of his profession which
influenced all his proceedings. “This hasn’t got anything to do
with young Green here.”
“No more it has,” said Charley. “Why don’t you put yourself
under Fagin, Oliver—”
“And make your fortun’ out of hand?” added the Dodger, with a
grin.
“And so be able to retire on your property, and do the genteel,
as I mean to, in the very next leap-year but four that ever comes,
and the forty-second Tuesday in Trinity-week,” said Charley
Bates.
“I don’t like it,” rejoined Oliver timidly; “I wish they would let
me go. I—I—would rather go.”
“And Fagin would rather not!” rejoined Charley.
Oliver knew this too well: but thinking it might be dangerous to
express his feelings more openly, he only sighed, and went on with
his boot-cleaning.
“Go!” exclaimed the Dodger. “Why, where’s your spirit? Don’t
you take any pride out of yourself? Would you go and be
dependent on your friends?”
“Oh, blow that!” said Master Bates, drawing two or three silk
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handkerchiefs from his pocket, and tossing them into a cupboard,
“that’s too mean; that is.”
“I couldn’t do it,” said the Dodger, with an air of haughty
disgust.
“You can leave your friends, though,” said Oliver, with a half-
smile; “and let them be punished for what you did.”
“That,” rejoined the Dodger, with a wave of his pipe—“that was
all out of consideration for Fagin, ’cause the traps know that we
work together, and he might have got into trouble if we hadn’t
made our lucky; that was the move, wasn’t it, Charley?”
Master Bates nodded assent, and would have spoken; but the
recollection of Oliver’s flight came so suddenly upon him, that the
smoke he was inhaling got entangled with a laugh, and went up
into his head, and down into his throat; and brought on a fit of
coughing and stamping, about five minutes long.
“Look here!” said the Dodger, drawing forth a handful of
shillings and halfpence; “here’s a jolly life! What’s the odds where
it comes from? Here, catch hold; there’s plenty more where they
were took from. You won’t, won’t you? Oh, you precious flat!”
“It’s naughty, ain’t it, Oliver?” inquired Charley Bates. “He’ll
come to be scragged, won’t he?”
“I don’t know what that means,” replied Oliver.
“Something in this way, old feller,” said Charley. As he said it,
Master Bates caught up an end of his neckerchief; and, holding it
erect in the air, dropped his head on his shoulder, and jerked a
curious sound through his teeth; thereby indicating, by a lively
pantomimic representation, that scragging and hanging were one
and the same thing.
“That’s what it means,” said Charley. “Look how he stares,
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Jack! I never did see such prime company as that ’ere boy; he’ll be
the death of me, I know he will.” Master Charles Bates, having
laughed heartily again, resumed his pipe with tears in his eves.
“You’ve been brought up bad,” said the Dodger, surveying his
boots with much satisfaction when Oliver had polished them.
“Fagin will make something of you, though, or you’ll be the first he
ever had that turned out unprofitable. You’d better begin at once;
for you’ll come to the trade long before you think of it; and you’re
only losing time, Oliver.”
Master Bates backed this advice with sundry moral
admonitions of his own; which, being exhausted, he and his friend
Mr. Dawkins launched into a glowing description of the numerous
pleasures incidental to the life they led, interspersed with a variety
of hints to Oliver that the best thing he could do, would be to
secure Fagin’s favour without more delay, by the means which
they themselves had employed to gain it.
“And always put this in your pipe, Nolly,” said the Dodger, as
the Jew was heard unlocking the door above, “if you don’t take
fogles and tickers—”
“What’s the good of talking in that way?” interposed Master
Bates; “he don’t know what you mean.”
“If you don’t take pocket-handkerchiefs and watches,” said the
Dodger, reducing his conversation to the level of Oliver’s capacity,
“some other cove will; so that the coves that lose ’em will be all the
worse, and you’ll be all the worse too, and nobody half a ha’p’orth
the better, except the chaps wot gets them—and you’ve just as
good a right to them as they have.”
“To be sure, to be sure!” said the Jew, who had entered, unseen
by Oliver. “It all lies in a nutshell, my dear; in a nutshell, take the
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Dodger’s word for it. Ha! ha! ha! He understands the catechism of
his trade.”
The old man rubbed his hands gleefully together, as he
corroborated the Dodger’s reasoning in these terms; and chuckled
with delight at his pupil’s proficiency.
The conversation proceeded no further at this time, for the Jew
had returned home accompanied by Miss Betsy, and a gentleman
whom Oliver had never seen before, but who was accosted by the
Dodger as Tom Chitling; and who, having lingered on the stairs to
exchange a few gallantries with the lady, now made his
appearance.
Mr. Chitling was older in years than the Dodger, having
perhaps numbered eighteen winters; but there was a degree of
deference in his deportment towards the young gentleman which
seemed to indicate that he felt himself conscious of a slight
inferiority in point of genius and professional acquirements. He
had small, twinkling eyes, and a pock-marked face; wore a fur cap,
a dark corduroy jacket, greasy fustian trousers, and an apron. His
wardrobe was, in truth, rather out of repair; but he excused
himself to the company by stating that his “time” was only out an
hour before; and that, in consequence of having worn the
regimentals for six weeks past, he had not been able to bestow any
attention on his private clothes. Mr. Chitling added, with strong
marks of irritation, that the new way of fumigating clothes up
yonder was infernal unconstitutional, for it burned holes in them,
and there was no remedy against the county. The same remark he
considered to apply to the regulation mode of cutting the hair;
which he held to be decidedly unlawful. Mr. Chitling wound up his
observations by stating that he had not touched a drop of anything
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for forty-two mortal long hard-working days; and that he “Wished
he might be busted if he warn’t as dry as a lime-basket.”
“Where do you think the gentleman has come from, Oliver”?
inquired the Jew, with a grin, as the other boys put a bottle of
spirits on the table.
“I—I—don’t know, sir,” replied Oliver.
