Bleak House - Charles Dickens (read this if txt) 📗

says the coroner. “You have heard the boy.

‘Can’t exactly say’ won’t do, you know. We can’t take THAT in a

court of justice, gentlemen. It’s terrible depravity. Put the boy

aside.”

 

Boy put aside, to the great edification of the audience, especially

of Little Swills, the comic vocalist.

 

Now. Is there any other witness? No other witness.

 

Very well, gentlemen! Here’s a man unknown, proved to have been in

the habit of taking opium in large quantities for a year and a half,

found dead of too much opium. If you think you have any evidence to

lead you to the conclusion that he committed suicide, you will come

to that conclusion. If you think it is a case of accidental death,

you will find a verdict accordingly.

 

Verdict accordingly. Accidental death. No doubt. Gentlemen, you

are discharged. Good afternoon.

 

While the coroner buttons his great-coat, Mr. Tulkinghorn and he

give private audience to the rejected witness in a corner.

 

That graceless creature only knows that the dead man (whom he

recognized just now by his yellow face and black hair) was sometimes

hooted and pursued about the streets. That one cold winter night

when he, the boy, was shivering in a doorway near his crossing, the

man turned to look at him, and came back, and having questioned him

and found that he had not a friend in the world, said, “Neither have

I. Not one!” and gave him the price of a supper and a night’s

lodging. That the man had often spoken to him since and asked him

whether he slept sound at night, and how he bore cold and hunger,

and whether he ever wished to die, and similar strange questions.

That when the man had no money, he would say in passing, “I am as

poor as you to-day, Jo,” but that when he had any, he had always (as

the boy most heartily believes) been glad to give him some.

 

“He was wery good to me,” says the boy, wiping his eyes with his

wretched sleeve. “Wen I see him a-layin’ so stritched out just now,

I wished he could have heerd me tell him so. He wos wery good to

me, he wos!”

 

As he shuffles downstairs, Mr. Snagsby, lying in wait for him, puts

a half-crown in his hand. “If you ever see me coming past your

crossing with my little woman—I mean a lady—” says Mr. Snagsby

with his finger on his nose, “don’t allude to it!”

 

For some little time the jurymen hang about the Sol’s Arms

colloquially. In the sequel, half-a-dozen are caught up in a cloud

of pipe-smoke that pervades the parlour of the Sol’s Arms; two

stroll to Hampstead; and four engage to go half-price to the play at

night, and top up with oysters. Little Swills is treated on several

hands. Being asked what he thinks of the proceedings, characterizes

them (his strength lying in a slangular direction) as “a rummy

start.” The landlord of the Sol’s Arms, finding Little Swills so

popular, commends him highly to the jurymen and public, observing

that for a song in character he don’t know his equal and that that

man’s character-wardrobe would fill a cart.

 

Thus, gradually the Sol’s Arms melts into the shadowy night and then

flares out of it strong in gas. The Harmonic Meeting hour arriving,

the gentleman of professional celebrity takes the chair, is faced

(red-faced) by Little Swills; their friends rally round them and

support first-rate talent. In the zenith of the evening, Little

Swills says, “Gentlemen, if you’ll permit me, I’ll attempt a short

description of a scene of real life that came off here to-day.” Is

much applauded and encouraged; goes out of the room as Swills; comes

in as the coroner (not the least in the world like him); describes

the inquest, with recreative intervals of pianoforte accompaniment,

to the refrain: With his (the coroner’s) tippy tol li doll, tippy

tol lo doll, tippy tol li doll, Dee!

 

The jingling piano at last is silent, and the Harmonic friends rally

round their pillows. Then there is rest around the lonely figure,

now laid in its last earthly habitation; and it is watched by the

gaunt eyes in the shutters through some quiet hours of night. If

this forlorn man could have been prophetically seen lying here by

the mother at whose breast he nestled, a little child, with eyes

upraised to her loving face, and soft hand scarcely knowing how to

close upon the neck to which it crept, what an impossibility the

vision would have seemed! Oh, if in brighter days the now-extinguished fire within him ever burned for one woman who held him

in her heart, where is she, while these ashes are above the ground!

 

It is anything but a night of rest at Mr. Snagsby’s, in Cook’s

Court, where Guster murders sleep by going, as Mr. Snagsby himself

allows—not to put too fine a point upon it—out of one fit into

twenty. The occasion of this seizure is that Guster has a tender

heart and a susceptible something that possibly might have been

imagination, but for Tooting and her patron saint. Be it what it

may, now, it was so direfully impressed at tea-time by Mr. Snagsby’s

account of the inquiry at which he had assisted that at supper-time

she projected herself into the kitchen, preceded by a flying Dutch

cheese, and fell into a fit of unusual duration, which she only came

out of to go into another, and another, and so on through a chain of

fits, with short intervals between, of which she has pathetically

availed herself by consuming them in entreaties to Mrs. Snagsby not

to give her warning “when she quite comes to,” and also in appeals

to the whole establishment to lay her down on the stones and go to

bed. Hence, Mr. Snagsby, at last hearing the cock at the little

dairy in Cursitor Street go into that disinterested ecstasy of his

on the subject of daylight, says, drawing a long breath, though the

most patient of men, “I thought you was dead, I am sure!”

 

What question this enthusiastic fowl supposes he settles when he

strains himself to such an extent, or why he should thus crow (so

men crow on various triumphant public occasions, however) about what

cannot be of any moment to him, is his affair. It is enough that

daylight comes, morning comes, noon comes.

 

Then the active and intelligent, who has got into the morning papers

as such, comes with his pauper company to Mr. Krook’s and bears off

the body of our dear brother here departed to a hemmed-in

churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are

communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have

not departed, while our dear brothers and sisters who hang about

official back-stairs—would to heaven they HAD departed!—are very

complacent and agreeable. Into a beastly scrap of ground which a

Turk would reject as a savage abomination and a Caffre would shudder

at, they bring our dear brother here departed to receive Christian

burial.

 

With houses looking on, on every side, save where a reeking little

tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate—with every villainy

of life in action close on death, and every poisonous element of

death in action close on life—here they lower our dear brother down

a foot or two, here sow him in corruption, to be raised in

corruption: an avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside, a shameful

testimony to future ages how civilization and barbarism walked this

boastful island together.

 

Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon or stay too

long by such a place as this! Come, straggling lights into the

windows of the ugly houses; and you who do iniquity therein, do it

at least with this dread scene shut out! Come, flame of gas,

burning so sullenly above the iron gate, on which the poisoned air

deposits its witch-ointment slimy to the touch! It is well that you

should call to every passerby, “Look here!”

 

With the night comes a slouching figure through the tunnel-court to

the outside of the iron gate. It holds the gate with its hands and

looks in between the bars, stands looking in for a little while.

 

It then, with an old broom it carries, softly sweeps the step and

makes the archway clean. It does so very busily and trimly, looks

in again a little while, and so departs.

 

Jo, is it thou? Well, well! Though a rejected witness, who “can’t

exactly say” what will be done to him in greater hands than men’s,

thou art not quite in outer darkness. There is something like a

distant ray of light in thy muttered reason for this: “He wos wery

good to me, he wos!”