Chapter-5
In the obscure parlour of a low public-house in the filthiest part of Little Saffron Hill, a dark and gloomy den where a flaring gaslight burnt all day in the winter time, and where no ray of sun ever shone in the summer, there sat Mr William Sikes. At his feet sat a white-coated, red-eyed dog. The door opened and Fagin entered.
‘Well, what have you got to say to me?’ demanded Sikes of the newcomer.
‘It’s all passed safe through the melting-pot,’ replied Fagin, ‘and this is your share. Here it is, all safe!’ As he spoke he drew forth an old cotton handkerchief from his breast and untying a large knot in one corner, produced a small brown paper packet. Sikes, snatching it from him, hastily opened it and proceeded to count the sovereigns it contained.
‘This is all, is it?’ inquired Sikes.
‘All,’ replied the Jew.
‘Jerk the tinkler,’ said Sikes.
These words, in plain English, conveyed an injunction to ring the bell. It was answered by another Jew, younger than Fagin, but nearly as vile and repulsive in appearance.
‘Is anybody here, Barney?’ inquired Fagin.
‘Not a soul,’ replied Barney, whose words, whether they came from the heart or not, made their way through the nose. ‘Nobody but Miss Nancy; she’s having a plate of boiled beef in the bar.’
‘Send her here,’ said Sikes, pouring out a glass of liquor, ‘Send her here.’
Barney retired and, presently returning, ushered in Nancy, who was decorated with the bonnet, apron, basket, and street-door key.
‘You are on the scent, aren’t you, Nancy?’ inquired Sikes, proffering the glass.
‘Yes, I am, Bill,’ replied the young lady, ‘and tired enough of it. The brat’s been ill and confined to the crib.’
Ah, Nancy dear,’ said Fagin, looking up and checking her with a look.
Nancy suddenly checked herself and with several gracious smiles upon Mr Sikes, turned the conversation to other matters, declaring in about ten minutes that it was time to go. Mr Sikes expressed his intention of accompanying her and they went away together.
Meanwhile, Oliver Twist, little dreaming that he was within so very short a distance of the merry old gentleman, was on his way to the bookstall. When he got into Clerkenwell he accidentally turned down a by-street which was not exactly in his way; he was startled by a young woman screaming out very loud:
‘Oh, my dear brother!’ And he had hardly looked up to see what the matter was, when he was stopped by having a pair of arms thrown tight round his neck.
‘Don’t,’ cried Oliver, struggling, ‘let go of me. Who is it? What are you stopping me for?’
The only reply to this was a great number of loud lamentations from the young woman who had embraced him.
‘Oh, Oliver, Oliver, you naughty boy. Come home directly, you cruel boy!’
‘Why, it’s Nancy!’ exclaimed Oliver.
‘You see, he knows me,’ cried Nancy, appealing to the bystanders. ‘Make him come home or he’ll kill his dear mother and father.’
‘What the devil’s this?’ said a man, bursting out of a beer-shop with a white dog at his heel, ‘Young Oliver, come home to your mother, you young dog.’
They were in a dark corner, quite out of the track of passengers. Oliver saw, but too plainly, that resistance would be of no avail. He held out his hand, which Nancy clasped tight in hers, and Sikes seized the other.
They walked on by little-frequented and dirty ways, for a full half-hour. At length they turned into a filthy narrow street, nearly full of old clothes shops; the dog, running forward as if conscious that there was no further occasion for his keeping on guard, stopped before the door of a shop that was closed and apparently untenanted; the house was in a ruinous condition.
‘All right,’ cried Sikes, glancing cautiously about.
Nancy stooped below the shutters and Oliver heard the sound of a bell. They crossed to the opposite side of the street and stood for a few moments under a lamp. A noise, as if a sash window were gently raised, was heard; and soon afterwards the door softly opened. Mr Sikes then seized the terrified boy by the collar with very little ceremony, and all three were quickly inside the house.
The passage was perfectly dark. They waited while the person who had let them in, chained and barred the door. He brought a light and Oliver recognized Mr John Dawkins, otherwise the Artful Dodger. He bore in his right hand a tallow candle stuck in the end of a cleft stick.
The young gentleman did not stop to bestow any other mark of recognition upon Oliver than a humorous grin, but, turning away, beckoned the visitors to follow him down a flight of stairs. They crossed an empty kitchen and, opening the door of a low earthy-smelling room, which seemed to have been built in a small backyard, were received with a shout of laughter.
‘Oh, my wig, my wig!’ cried Master Charles Bates, from whose lungs the laughter had proceeded, ‘here he is! Oh, cry, here he is! Oh, Fagin, look at him!’
The Jew, taking off his nightcap, made a number of low bows to the bewildered boy. The Artful, meantime, who was of a rather saturnine disposition and seldom gave way to merriment when it interfered with business, rifled Oliver’s pockets with steady assiduity. Sikes seized the money and Fagin the books.
‘They belong to the old gentleman,’ said Oliver, wringing his hands, ‘to the good, kind old gentleman who took me into his house, and had me nursed when I was near dying of the fever. Oh, send them back; send him back the books and money. Keep me here all my life long; but, do have mercy upon me and send them back!’
‘They will think you have stolen them. Ha! Ha!’ chuckled the Jew, rubbing his hands; ‘it couldn’t have happened better if we had chosen our time.’
Oliver jumped suddenly to his feet and tore wildly from the room, uttering shrieks for help which made the bare old house echo to the roof. The Jew and his two pupils darted out in pursuit and soon returned, dragging Oliver among them.
‘So you wanted to get away, my dear, did you,’ said the Jew, taking up a jagged and knotted club which lay in a corner of the fireplace.
He inflicted a smart blow on Oliver’s shoulders with the club, and was raising it for a second when the girl, rushing forward, wrested it from his hand. She flung it into the fire with a force that brought some of the glowing coals whirling out into the room.
‘I won’t stand by and see it done, Fagin,’ cried the girl. ‘You’ve got the boy, and what more would you have? Let him be—let him be—or I shall put that mark on some of you, that will bring me to the gallows before my time.’
‘Why, Nancy I’ said the Jew in a soothing tone, after a pause during which he and Mr Sikes had stared at each other in a disconcerted manner, ‘you—you’re more clever than ever tonight. Ha! Ha! my dear, you are acting beautifully.’
The girl made such a rush at the Jew as would probably have left signal marks of her revenge upon him, had not her wrists been seized by Sikes at the right moment; upon which, she made a few ineffectual struggles, and fainted.
‘She’s all right now,’ said Sikes, laying her down in a corner, ‘She’s uncommon strong in the arms when she’s up in this way.’
‘It’s the worst of having to do with women,’ said the Jew, replacing his club, ‘but they’re clever, and we can’t get on in our line without ‘them. Charley, show Oliver to bed.’
Master Bates led Oliver into an adjacent kitchen, where there were two or three of the beds on which he had slept before; he produced the identical old suit of clothes which Oliver had so much congratulated himself upon leaving off at Mr Brownlow’s, and the accidental display of which to Fagin, by the Jew who had purchased them, had been the very first clue received of his whereabouts. Charley told him, amid laughter, to change.
Poor Oliver unwillingly complied. Master Bates, rolling up the new clothes under his arm, departed from the room, leaving Oliver in the dark and locking the door behind him. Oliver, sick and weary, soon fell sound asleep.
Oliver’s heart sank within him when he thought of his good kind friends; it was as well for him that he could not know what they had heard, or it might have broken outright.
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. He told him of another boy who had escaped and had ended his life on the gallows, and drew a rather disagreeable picture of the discomforts of hanging.
Little Oliver’s blood ran cold as he listened to the Jew’s words, and imperfectly comprehended the dark threats conveyed in them.
The Jew, smiling hideously, patted him on the head and said that if he kept himself quiet, and applied himself to business, he saw that they would be very good friends. 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 unlocked; and Oliver was at liberty to wander about the house; instructed from time to time by the Dodger as to the benefits of securing Fagin’s favour without more delay, by the means which they themselves had employed to gain it.
‘If you don’t take pocket-handkerchieves and watches,’ said the Dodger, reducing his conversation to the level of Oliver’s capacity, ‘some other guy will; so that the guys that lose them will be all the worse, and you’ll be all the worse too, and nobody half a pennyworth the better, except the chaps won’t get 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 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 pockmarked face, wore a fur cap, a dark corduroy jacket, greasy fustian trousers and an apron. Oliver was told he had just come out of prison.
‘Where do you think the gentleman has come from, Oliver,’ inquired the Jew with a grin, as the other boy put a bottle of spirits on the table.
‘I—I—don’t know, sir,’ replied Oliver.
‘He’s in luck, then,’ said the young man, with a meaning look at Fagin, ‘Never mind where I come from, young guy; you’ll find your way there soon enough, I’ll bet a crown!’
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 the 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 companionship to 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.
