Chapter-2
Mr Bumble, who had been dispatched by the board to make various preliminary inquiries, with a view to finding out some captain or other who wanted a cabin-boy without any friends, was returning to the workhouse when he encountered at the gate no less a person than Mr Sowerberry, the parochial undertaker.
Mr Sowerberry was a tall, gaunt, large-jointed man, attired in a suit of threadbare black, with darned cotton stockings of the same colour and shoes to answer. His features were not naturally intended to wear a smiling aspect, but he was in general rather given to professional jocosity. His step was elastic and his face betokened inward pleasantry, as he advanced to Mr Bumble and shook him cordially by the hand.
‘By the bye,’ said Mr Bumble, ‘You don’t know anybody who wants a boy, do you? A porochial ‘apprentice, who is at present a deadweight-a millstone, as I may say-round the porochial throat. Liberal terms, Mr Sowerberry, liberal terms!’
‘Gadso!’ said the undertaker, taking Mr Bumble by the gilt-edged lapel of his official coat; ‘that’s just the very thing I wanted to speak to you about. I pay a good deal towards the poor’s rates.’
‘Hem!’ said Mr Bumble. ‘Well?’
‘Well,’ replied the undertaker, ‘I was thinking that as I pay so much towards ‘them, I’ve a right to get as much out of ‘them as I can, Mr Bumble; and so-and so-I think I’ll take the boy myself.’
Mr Bumble grasped the undertaker by the arm, and led him into the building. Mr Sowerberry was closeted with the board for five minutes; and it was arranged that Oliver should go to him that evening ‘upon liking’—a phrase which means, in case of a parish apprentice, that if the master finds upon a short trial that he can get enough work out of a boy without putting too much food into him, he shall have him for a term of years to do what he likes with.
When little Oliver was taken before ‘the gentlemen’ that evening and informed that he was to go, that night, as general house-lad to a coffin-maker, and that if he complained of his situation, or ever came back to the parish again, he would be sent to sea, there to be drowned or knocked on the head, as the case might be, he evinced so little emotion that they by common consent pronounced him a hardened young rascal, and ordered Mr Bumble to remove him forthwith.
For some time Mr Bumble drew Oliver along without notice or remark, but as they drew near to their destination, Mr Bumble thought it expedient to look down and see that the boy was in good order for inspection by his new master.
‘Oliver!’ said Mr Bumble.
‘Yes, sir,’ replied Oliver in a low, tremulous voice.
‘Pull that cap off your eyes, and hold up your head.’
Although Oliver did as desired he wept until the tears sprung out from between his thin and bony fingers.
‘Well!’ exclaimed Mr Bumble, ‘Of all the ungratefullest and worst-disposed boy as ever I see, Oliver, you are the—’
‘No, no, sir,’ sobbed Oliver, clinging to the hand which held the well-known cane. ‘No, no, sir, I will be good indeed; indeed, indeed, I will, sir. I am a very little boy, sir, and it is so-so—’
‘So what?’ inquired Mr Bumble in amazement.
‘So lonely, sir, so very lonely!’ cried the child. ‘Everybody hates me. Oh, sir, don’t, don’t pray be cross to me!’ The child beat his hand upon his heart, and looked into his companion’s face with the tears of real agony.
Mr Bumble, after regarding Oliver’s piteous and helpless look with some astonishment, bade him dry his eyes and be a good boy. Then once more taking his hand, he walked on with him in silence.
‘Aha!’ said the undertaker, when they arrived, ‘that’s the boy, is it?’ He raised the candle above his head to get a better view of Oliver. ‘Mrs Sowerberry, will you have the goodness to come here a moment, my dear?’
Mrs Sowerberry emerged from a little room behind the shop, and presented the form of a short, thin, squeezed-up woman, with a vixenish countenance.
‘Dear me,’ said the undertaker’s wife, ‘he’s very small.’ Turning to Oliver, she cried, ‘Get downstairs, little bag of bones.’ With this, the undertaker’s wife opened a side door and pushed Oliver down a steep flight of stairs into a stone cell, damp and dark, forming the anteroom to the coal-cellar, and denominated ‘kitchen’, wherein sat a slatternly girl, in shoes down at heel and blue worsted stockings very much out of repair.
‘Here, Charlotte,’ said Mrs Sowerberry, who had followed Oliver down, ‘give the boy some of the cold bits that were put by for Trip.’
Oliver clutched at the dainty viands that the dog had neglected, and tore the bits asunder with all the ferocity of famine.
‘Well,’ said the undertaker’s wife, when Oliver had finished his supper, which she had regarded in silent horror and with fearful auguries of his future appetite, ‘have you done?’
There being nothing eatable within his reach, Oliver replied in the affirmative.
‘Then come with me,’ said Mrs Sowerberry, taking up a dim and dirty lamp, and leading the way upstairs. ‘Your bed’s under the counter. You don’t mind sleeping among the coffins, I suppose.’
Oliver meekly followed his new mistress.
Being left to himself in the undertaker’s shop, Oliver set the lamp down on a workman’s bench and gazed timidly about him with a feeling of awe and dread, which many people a good deal older than he will be at no loss to understand. The shop was close and hot, the atmosphere seemed tainted with the smell of coffins. The recess beneath the counter in which his flock mattress was thrust, looked like a grave; and he wished as he crept into his narrow bed, that were his own coffin.
Oliver was awakened in the morning by a loud kicking at the outside of the shop door.
‘Open the door, will you?’ cried the voice which belonged to the legs which had kicked the door.
‘I will directly, sir,’ replied Oliver, undoing the chain and turning the key.
‘I suppose you the new boy, aren’t you?’ said the voice through the keyhole.
‘Yes, sir,’ replied Oliver.
‘How old are you?’ inquired the voice.
‘Ten, sir,’ replied Oliver.
‘Then I’ll whip you when I get in,’ said the voice; ‘you just see if I don’t, that’s all and having made this obliging promise, the voice began to whistle. Oliver drew back the bolts with a trembling hand and opened the door.
For a second or two, Oliver glanced up the street and down the street and over the way, impressed with the belief that the unknown who had addressed him through the keyhole, had walked a few paces off to warm himself; for nobody did he see but a big charity boy, sitting on a post in front of the house, eating a slice of bread and butter which he cut into wedges, the size of his mouth, with a clasp knife, and then consumed with great dexterity.
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said Oliver at length, seeing that no other visitor made his appearance; ‘did you knock?’
‘I kicked,’ replied the charity boy.
‘Did you want a coffin, sir?’ inquired Oliver innocently.
At this the charity boy looked monstrous fierce; and said that Oliver would want one before long, if he cut jokes with his superiors in that way.
‘You don’t know who I am, I suppose,’ said the charity boy, ‘I’m Mr Noah Claypole, and you’re under me. Take down the shutters, you idle young ruffian!’
Oliver, having taken down the shutters, and broken a pane of glass in his efforts to stagger away beneath the weight of the first one to a small court at the side of the house in which they were kept during the day, was graciously assisted by Noah, who having consoled him with the assurance that ‘he’d catch it’, condescended to help him. Mr Sowerberry came down soon after. Shortly afterwards Mrs Sowerberry appeared. Oliver having ‘caught it’ in fulfilment ol Noah’s prediction, followed that young gentleman down the stairs to breakfast.
‘Come near the fire, Noah,’ said Charlotte. ‘I saved a nice little bit of bacon for you from the Master’s breakfast. Oliver, shut that door at Ms. Noah’s back, and take them bits that I’ve put out on the cover of the bread-pan. There’s your tea; take it away to that box, and drink it there, and make haste, for they’ll want you to mind the shop.’
Noah was a charity boy, but no workhouse orphan. No chance child was he, his mother being a washerwoman and his father a drunken soldier. The shop-boys in the neighbourhood had long been in the habit of branding Noah, in the public streets, with the ignominious epithets of ‘leathers’, ‘charity’ and the like; and Noah had borne them without reply. But now that fortune had cast in his way a nameless orphan at whom even the meanest could point the finger of scorn, he retorted on him with interest.
Oliver had been sojourning at the undertaker’s for some three weeks or a month. Mr and Mrs Sowerberry-the shop being shut up-were taking their supper in the little backparlour, when Mr Sowerberry, after several deferential glances at his wife, said:
‘It’s about young Twist, my dear. A very good-looking boy my dear.’
‘He need be, for he eats enough,’ observed the lady.
‘There’s an expression of melancholy in his face, my dear,’ resumed Mr Sowerberry, ‘which is very interesting. He would make a delightful mute, my love.’
Mrs Sowerberry looked up with an expression of considerable wonder. It was speedily determined, therefore, that Oliver should at once be initiated into the mysteries of the trade.
The occasion was not long in coming. Half an hour after breakfast next morning, Mr Bumble entered the shop and, supporting his cane against the counter, drew forth his large, leather pocket-book from which he selected a small scrap of paper, which he handed over to Sowerberry.
‘Aha!’ said the undertaker, glancing over it with a lively countenance; ‘an order for a coffin, oh?’
‘For a coffin first, and a porochial funeral afterwards,’ replied Mr Bumble, fastening the strap of the leather pocket-book, which like himself, was very corpulent.
‘Bayton,’ said the undertaker looking from the scrap of paper to Mr Bumble, ‘I never heard the name before.’
‘We only heard of the family night before last,’ said the beadle, ‘A woman who lodges in the same house made an application to the porochial committee for them to send the porochial surgeon to see a woman as was very bad. He had gone out to dinner; but his apprentice (which is a very clever lad) sent them some medicine in a blacking-bottle, off-hand. But what’s the consequence? Why, the husband sent back word that the medicine won’t suit his wife’s complaint, and so she should’t take it—says she should’t take it, sir! Good, strong, wholesome medicine, as was given with great success to two Irish labourers and a coal-heaver only a week before sent—them for nothing, with a blacking’ bottle in.’
So saying, Ms. Bumble flounced out of the shop.
‘Why, he was so angry, Oliver, he forgot even to ask after you!’ said Mr Sowerberry, looking after the beadle as he strode down the street, ‘Noah, look after the shop. Oliver, put on your cap and come with me.’
They walked on for some time through the most crowded and densely inhabited part of the town; and then, striking down a narrow street more dirty and miserable than any they had yet passed through, paused to look for the house which was the object of their search. It was a poky, evil-smelling hovel. The very rats, which here and there lay putrefying in its rottenness, were hideous with famine.
The undertaker mounted to the top of the first flight of stairs. Stumbling against a door on the landing, he rapped at it with his knuckles. It was opened by a young girl of thirteen or fourteen.
There was no fire in the room; but a man was crouching, mechanically, over the empty stove. An old woman, too, had drawn a low stool to the cold hearth, and was sitting beside him. There were some ragged children in another corner; and in a small recess, opposite the door, there lay upon the ground something covered with an old blanket. Oliver shuddered as he cast his eyes towards the place, and crept involuntarily closer to his master; for though it was covered up, the boy felt that it was a corpse. The undertaker, producing a tape from his pocket, knelt down for a moment by the side of the body.
The terrified children cried bitterly; but the old woman who had hitherto remained as quiet as if she had been wholly deaf to all that passed, menaced them into silence.
‘She was my daughter,’ said the old woman, nodding her head in the direction of the corpse and speaking with an idiotic leer, more ghastly than even the presence of death in such a place. ‘Lord! Lord! Well, it is strange that I, who gave birth to her, and was a woman then, should be alive and merry now, and she lying there, so cold and stiff!’
The undertaker drew Oliver after him and hurried away.
The next day, Oliver and his master returned to the miserable abode, where Mr Bumble had already arrived, accompanied by four men from the workhouse, who were to act as bearers. An old black cloak had been thrown over the rags of the old woman and the man; and the bare coffin, having been screwed down, was hoisted on the shoulders of the bearers and carried into the street.
When they reached the obscure corner of the churchyard in which the nettles grew, and where the parish graves were made, the clergyman had not arrived. At length, after a lapse of something more than an hour, Mr Bumble, and Sowerberry, and the clerk were seen running towards the grave. Immediately afterwards the clergyman appeared, putting on his surplice as he came along. Mr Bumble then thrashed a boy or two, to keep up appearances, and the reverend gentleman, having read as much of the burial service as could be compressed into four minutes, gave his surplice to the clerk and walked away again.
‘Now, Bill!’ said Sowerberry to the grave-digger, ‘Fill up!’
‘Well, Oliver,’ said Sowerberry, as they walked home, ‘how do you like it?’
‘Pretty well, thank you, sir,’ said Oliver with considerable hesitation, ‘Not very much, sir.’
‘Ah, you’ll get used to it in time, Oliver,’ said Sowerberry, ‘Nothing when you are used to it, my boy.’
The month’s trial over, Oliver was formally apprenticed. It was a nice sickly season just at this time. In commercial phrase, coffins were looking up; and, in the course of a few weeks, Oliver acquired a great deal of experience.
He continued meekly to submit, for many months, to the domination and ill-treatment of Noah Claypole, who used him far worse than before, now that his jealousy was aroused by seeing the new boy promoted to the black stick and hat band, while he, the old one, remained stationary in muffin cap and leathers. Charlotte treated him ill because Noah did; and Mrs Sowerberry was his decided enemy, because Mr Sowerberry was disposed to be his friend; so between these three on one side, and a glut of funerals on the other, Oliver was not always as comfortable as the hungry pig was when he was shut up, by mistake, in the grain department of a brewery.
One day, Oliver and Noah had descended into the kitchen at the usual dinner hour to banquet upon a small joint of mutton, when Charlotte being called out of the way, there ensued a brief interval of time, which Noah Claypole, being hungry and vicious, considered he could not possibly devote to a worthier purpose than aggravating and tantalizing young Oliver.
‘O Oliver,’ said Noah, ‘how’s you mother?’
‘She’s dead,’ replied Oliver. ‘Don’t you say anything about her to me.’
Oliver’s colour rose as he said this; he breathed quickly and there was a curious working of the mouth and nostrils, which Mr Claypole thought must be the immediate precursor of a violent fit of crying. Under this impression he returned to the charge.
‘What did she die of?’ said Noah.
‘Of a broken heart, some of our old nurses told me,’ replied Oliver, more as if he were talking to himself, than answering Noah. Then he added sharply: ‘Don’t say anything more to me about her; you’d better not!’
‘Better not!’ exclaimed Noah. ‘Well! Better not! O rascal, don’t be impudent. Your mother too! You must know, that your mother was a regular, right-down bad nun.’
‘What did you say?’ inquired Oliver, looking up quickly.
‘A regular right-down bad nun,’ replied Noah coolly.
Crimson with fury, Oliver started up, overthrew the chair and table, seized Noah by the throat, shook him in the violence of his rage, till his teeth chattered in his head, and, collecting his whole force into one heavy blow, felled him to the ground.
A minute ago the boy had looked the quiet, mild, dejected creature that harsh treatment had made him. But his spirit was roused at last; the cruel insult to his dead mother had set his blood on fire. His whole person changed as he stood glaring over the cowardly tormentor who now lay crouching at his feet, and defied him with energy he had never known before.
‘He’ll murder me!’ blubbered Noah. ‘Charlotte! Help! Help! Oliver’s gone mad! Charlotte!’
Charlotte and Mrs Sowerberry rushed screaming into the kitchen and set upon Oliver, while Noah rose from the ground and pommelled him behind. When they could tear and beat no longer, they dragged Oliver, struggling and shouting, but nothing daunted, into the dust-cellar and there locked him up. This being done, Mrs Sowerberry sank into a chair and burst into tears.
‘What’s to be done, Charlotte?’ she exclaimed, ‘Your master’s not at home; there’s not a man in the house, and he’ll kick that door down in ten minutes.’ Oliver’s plunges against the bit of timber in question rendered this occurrence highly probable.
‘Dear, dear! I don’t know, ma’am,’ said Charlotte.
‘Run to Mr Bumble, Noah,’ said Mrs Sowerberry, and tell him to come here directly, and not to lose a minute; never mind your cap! Make haste. You can hold a knife to that black eye as you run along. It’ll keep the swelling down.’
Noah stopped to make no reply, but started off at his fullest speed; and very much it astonished the people who were out walking, to see a charity boy tearing through the streets pell-mell, with no cap on his head and a clasp knife at his eye.
Noah Claypole did not pause until he reached the workhouse gate.
‘Why, what’s the matter with the boy?’ said the old pauper who opened the gate to him.
‘Mr Bumble! Mr Bumble!’ cried Noah, with well-affected dismay; and in tones so loud and agitated they not only caught the ear of Mr Bumble himself, who happened to be hard by, but alarmed him so much that he rushed into the yard without his cocked hat.
‘Oh, Mr Bumble, sir,’ said Noah: ‘Oliver, sir—Oliver turned vicious. He tried to murder me, sir; and then he tried to murder Charlotte; Oh! What a dreadful pain it is! Such agony, please, sir!’ And here Noah writhed and twisted his body into an extensive variety of eel-like positions, as if suffering the acutest torture.
