Oliver Twist (24 page)

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 descried 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 Sometimes, indeed, a grizzly head might be seen, peering over the parapet wall of a distant house, but it was quickly withdrawn again; and as the window of Oliver’s observatory was nailed down, and dimmed with the rain and smoke of years, it was as much as he could do to make out the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 (to do him justice, this 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; 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.” The 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 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 abstraction and half to Master 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 peaching,” added Charley Bates.

“He wouldn’t so much as bark in a witness-box, for fear of committing himself; no, not 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!”

“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’ 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 gen teel, 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 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, 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 eyes.

“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-handkechers 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 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 farther 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 that 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 burnt 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 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.

“Who’s that?” inquired Tom Chitling, casting a contemptuous look at Oliver.

“A young friend of mine, my dear,” replied the Jew.

“He’s in luck, then,” said the young man, with a meaning look at Fagin. “Never mind where I came from, young ‘un; you’ll find your way there, soon enough, I’ll bet a crown!”

At this sally, the boys laughed. After some more jokes on the same subject, they exchanged a few short whispers with Fagin and withdrew.

After some words apart between the last comer and Fagin, they drew their chairs towards the fire; and the Jew, telling Oliver to come and sit by him, led the conversation to the topics most calculated to interest his hearers. These were, the great advantages of the trade, the proficiency of the Dodger, the amiability of Charley Bates, and the liberality of the Jew himself. At length these subjects displayed signs of being thoroughly exhausted; and Mr. Chitling did the same, for the house of correction becomes fatiguing after a week or two. Miss Betsy accordingly withdrew and left the party to their repose.

From this day Oliver was seldom left alone, but was placed in almost constant communication with the two boys, who played the old game with the Jew every day: whether for their own improvement or Oliver‘s, Mr. Fagin best knew. At other times the old man would tell them stories of robberies he had committed in his younger days, mixed up with so much that was droll and curious that Oliver could not help laughing heartily and showing that he was amused in spite of all his better feelings.

In short, the wily old Jew had the boy in his toils. Having prepared his mind, by solitude and gloom, to prefer any society to the companionship of his own sad thoughts in such a dreary place, he was now slowly instilling into his soul the poison which he hoped would blacken it and change its hue for ever.

 

IT WAS A CHILL, DAMP, WINDY NIGHT, WHEN THE JEW, BUTTONING his greatcoat tight round his shrivelled body, and pulling the collar up over his ears so as completely to obscure the lower part of his face, emerged from his den. He paused on the step as the door was locked and chained behind him; and having listened while the boys made all secure, and until their retreating footsteps were no longer audible, slunk down the street as quickly as he could.

The house to which Oliver had been conveyed was in the neighborhood of Whitechapel. The Jew stopped for an instant at the corner of the street and, glancing suspiciously round, crossed the road and struck off in the direction of Spitalfields.

The mud lay thick upon the stones, and a black mist hung over the streets; the rain fell sluggishly down, and everything felt cold and clammy to the touch. It seemed just the night when it befitted such a being as the Jew to be abroad. As he glided stealthily along, creeping beneath the shelter of the walls and doorways, the hideous old man seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved, crawling forth, by night, in search of some rich offal for a meal.

He kept on his course, through many winding and narrow ways, until he reached Bethnal Green; then, turning suddenly off to the left, he soon became involved in a maze of the mean and dirty streets which abound in that close and densely populated quarter.