Our Mutual Friend
Wrayburn, and see what profit came of it. Stumblingly pursuing these
two designs—they both meant rum, the only meaning of which he was
capable—the degraded creature staggered into Covent Garden Market and
there bivouacked, to have an attack of the trembles succeeded by an
attack of the horrors, in a doorway.
This market of Covent Garden was quite out of the creature’s line of
road, but it had the attraction for him which it has for the worst of
the solitary members of the drunken tribe. It may be the companionship
of the nightly stir, or it may be the companionship of the gin and
beer that slop about among carters and hucksters, or it may be the
companionship of the trodden vegetable refuse which is so like their own
dress that perhaps they take the Market for a great wardrobe; but be
it what it may, you shall see no such individual drunkards on doorsteps
anywhere, as there. Of dozing women-drunkards especially, you shall come
upon such specimens there, in the morning sunlight, as you might
seek out of doors in vain through London. Such stale vapid rejected
cabbage-leaf and cabbage-stalk dress, such damaged-orange countenance,
such squashed pulp of humanity, are open to the day nowhere else. So,
the attraction of the Market drew Mr Dolls to it, and he had out his two
fits of trembles and horrors in a doorway on which a woman had had out
her sodden nap a few hours before.
There is a swarm of young savages always flitting about this same place,
creeping off with fragments of orange-chests, and mouldy litter—Heaven
knows into what holes they can convey them, having no home!—whose bare
feet fall with a blunt dull softness on the pavement as the policeman
hunts them, and who are (perhaps for that reason) little heard by
the Powers that be, whereas in top-boots they would make a deafening
clatter. These, delighting in the trembles and the horrors of Mr Dolls,
as in a gratuitous drama, flocked about him in his doorway, butted
at him, leaped at him, and pelted him. Hence, when he came out of
his invalid retirement and shook off that ragged train, he was much
bespattered, and in worse case than ever. But, not yet at his worst;
for, going into a public-house, and being supplied in stress of business
with his rum, and seeking to vanish without payment, he was collared,
searched, found penniless, and admonished not to try that again,
by having a pail of dirty water cast over him. This application
superinduced another fit of the trembles; after which Mr Dolls, as
finding himself in good cue for making a call on a professional friend,
addressed himself to the Temple.
There was nobody at the chambers but Young Blight. That discreet youth,
sensible of a certain incongruity in the association of such a
client with the business that might be coming some day, with the best
intentions temporized with Dolls, and offered a shilling for coach-hire
home. Mr Dolls, accepting the shilling, promptly laid it out in
two threepennyworths of conspiracy against his life, and two
threepennyworths of raging repentance. Returning to the Chambers with
which burden, he was descried coming round into the court, by the wary
young Blight watching from the window: who instantly closed the outer
door, and left the miserable object to expend his fury on the panels.
The more the door resisted him, the more dangerous and imminent became
that bloody conspiracy against his life. Force of police arriving,
he recognized in them the conspirators, and laid about him hoarsely,
fiercely, staringly, convulsively, foamingly. A humble machine, familiar
to the conspirators and called by the expressive name of Stretcher,
being unavoidably sent for, he was rendered a harmless bundle of torn
rags by being strapped down upon it, with voice and consciousness gone
out of him, and life fast going. As this machine was borne out at the
Temple gate by four men, the poor little dolls’ dressmaker and her
Jewish friend were coming up the street.
‘Let us see what it is,’ cried the dressmaker. ‘Let us make haste and
look, godmother.’
The brisk little crutch-stick was but too brisk. ‘O gentlemen,
gentlemen, he belongs to me!’
‘Belongs to you?’ said the head of the party, stopping it.
‘O yes, dear gentlemen, he’s my child, out without leave. My poor bad,
bad boy! and he don’t know me, he don’t know me! O what shall I do,’
cried the little creature, wildly beating her hands together, ‘when my
own child don’t know me!’
The head of the party looked (as well he might) to the old man for
explanation. He whispered, as the dolls’ dressmaker bent over the
exhausted form and vainly tried to extract some sign of recognition from
it: ‘It’s her drunken father.’
As the load was put down in the street, Riah drew the head of the party
aside, and whispered that he thought the man was dying. ‘No, surely
not?’ returned the other. But he became less confident, on looking, and
directed the bearers to ‘bring him to the nearest doctor’s shop.’
Thither he was brought; the window becoming from within, a wall of
faces, deformed into all kinds of shapes through the agency of globular
red bottles, green bottles, blue bottles, and other coloured bottles. A
ghastly light shining upon him that he didn’t need, the beast so furious
but a few minutes gone, was quiet enough now, with a strange mysterious
writing on his face, reflected from one of the great bottles, as if
Death had marked him: ‘Mine.’
The medical testimony was more precise and more to the purpose than it
sometimes is in a Court of Justice. ‘You had better send for something
to cover it. All’s over.’
Therefore, the police sent for something to cover it, and it was covered
and borne through the streets, the people falling away. After it,
went the dolls’ dressmaker, hiding her face in the Jewish skirts, and
clinging to them with one hand, while with the other she plied her
stick. It was carried home, and, by reason that the staircase was very
narrow, it was put down in the parlour—the little working-bench being
set aside to make room for it—and there, in the midst of the dolls with
no speculation in their eyes, lay Mr Dolls with no speculation in his.
Many flaunting dolls had to be gaily dressed, before the money was in
the dressmaker’s pocket to get mourning for Mr Dolls. As the old man,
Riah, sat by, helping her in such small ways as he could, he found it
difficult to make out whether she really did realize that the deceased
had been her father.
‘If my poor boy,’ she would say, ‘had been brought up better, he might
have done better. Not that I reproach myself. I hope I have no cause for
that.’
‘None indeed, Jenny, I am very certain.’
‘Thank you, godmother. It cheers me to hear you say so. But you see it
is so hard to bring up a child well, when you work, work, work, all day.
When he was out of employment, I couldn’t always keep him near me. He
got fractious and nervous, and I was obliged to let him go into the
streets. And he never did well in the streets, he never did well out of
sight. How often it happens with children!’
‘Too often, even in this sad sense!’ thought the old man.
‘How can I say what I might have turned out myself, but for my back
having been so bad and my legs so queer, when I was young!’ the
dressmaker would go on. ‘I had nothing to do but work, and so I worked.
I couldn’t play. But my poor unfortunate child could play, and it turned
out the worse for him.’
‘And not for him alone, Jenny.’
‘Well! I don’t know, godmother. He suffered heavily, did my unfortunate
boy. He was very, very ill sometimes. And I called him a quantity of
names;’ shaking her head over her work, and dropping tears. ‘I don’t
know that his going wrong was much the worse for me. If it ever was, let
us forget it.’
‘You are a good girl, you are a patient girl.’
‘As for patience,’ she would reply with a shrug, ‘not much of that,
godmother. If I had been patient, I should never have called him names.
But I hope I did it for his good. And besides, I felt my responsibility
as a mother, so much. I tried reasoning, and reasoning failed. I tried
coaxing, and coaxing failed. I tried scolding and scolding failed. But I
was bound to try everything, you know, with such a charge upon my hands.
Where would have been my duty to my poor lost boy, if I had not tried
everything!’
With such talk, mostly in a cheerful tone on the part of the industrious
little creature, the day-work and the night-work were beguiled until
enough of smart dolls had gone forth to bring into the kitchen,
where the working-bench now stood, the sombre stuff that the occasion
required, and to bring into the house the other sombre preparations.
‘And now,’ said Miss Jenny, ‘having knocked off my rosy-cheeked young
friends, I’ll knock off my white-cheeked self.’ This referred to her
making her own dress, which at last was done. ‘The disadvantage of
making for yourself,’ said Miss Jenny, as she stood upon a chair to look
at the result in the glass, ‘is, that you can’t charge anybody else for
the job, and the advantage is, that you haven’t to go out to try on.
Humph! Very fair indeed! If He could see me now (whoever he is) I hope
he wouldn’t repent of his bargain!’
The simple arrangements were of her own making, and were stated to Riah
thus:
‘I mean to go alone, godmother, in my usual carriage, and you’ll be so
kind as keep house while I am gone. It’s not far off. And when I return,
we’ll have a cup of tea, and a chat over future arrangements. It’s a
very plain last house that I have been able to give my poor unfortunate
boy; but he’ll accept the will for the deed if he knows anything about
it; and if he doesn’t know anything about it,’ with a sob, and wiping
her eyes, ‘why, it won’t matter to him. I see the service in the
Prayer-book says, that we brought nothing into this world and it is
certain we can take nothing out. It comforts me for not being able to
hire a lot of stupid undertaker’s things for my poor child, and seeming
as if I was trying to smuggle ’em out of this world with him, when of
course I must break down in the attempt, and bring ’em all back again.
As it is, there’ll be nothing to bring back but me, and that’s quite
consistent, for I shan’t be brought back, some day!’
After that previous carrying of him in the streets, the wretched old
fellow seemed to be twice buried. He was taken on the shoulders of half
a dozen blossom-faced men, who shuffled with him to the churchyard,
and who were preceded by another blossom-faced man, affecting a
stately stalk, as if he were a Policeman of the D(eath) Division, and
ceremoniously pretending not to know his intimate acquaintances, as he
led the pageant. Yet, the spectacle of only one little mourner hobbling
after, caused many people to turn their heads with a look of interest.
At last the troublesome deceased was got into the ground, to be buried
no more, and the stately stalker stalked back before the solitary
dressmaker, as if she were bound in honour to have no notion of the way
home. Those Furies, the conventionalities, being thus appeased, he left
her.
‘I must have a very short cry, godmother, before I cheer up for good,’
said the little creature, coming in. ‘Because after all a child is a
child, you know.’
It was a longer cry than might have been expected. Howbeit, it wore
itself out in a shadowy corner, and then the dressmaker came forth, and
washed her face, and made the tea. ‘You wouldn’t mind my cutting out
something while we are at tea, would you?’ she asked her Jewish friend,
with a coaxing air.
‘Cinderella, dear child,’ the old man expostulated, ‘will you never
rest?’
‘Oh! It’s not work, cutting out a pattern isn’t,’ said Miss Jenny, with
her busy little scissors already snipping at some paper. ‘The truth is,