Have you ever thought about what fiction is? Probably, such a question may seem surprising: and so everything is clear. Every person throughout his life has to repeatedly create the works he needs for specific purposes - statements, autobiographies, dictations - using not gypsum or clay, not musical notes, not paints, but just a word. At the same time, almost every person will be very surprised if he is told that he thereby created a work of fiction, which is very different from visual art, music and sculpture making. However, everyone understands that a student's essay or dictation is fundamentally different from novels, short stories, news that are created by professional writers. In the works of professionals there is the most important difference - excogitation. But, oddly enough, in a school literature course, you don’t realize the full power of fiction. So using our website in your free time discover fiction for yourself. The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens (online e book reader .TXT) 📖
- Author: Charles Dickens
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Book online «The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens (online e book reader .TXT) 📖». Author Charles Dickens
‘Have been brought together, eh?’ said the dwarf as he walked the streets alone. ‘My friend has stolen a march upon me. It led him to nothing, and therefore is no great matter, save in the intention. I’m glad he has lost his mistress. Ha ha! The blockhead mustn’t leave the law at present. I’m sure of him where he is, whenever I want him for my own purposes, and, besides, he’s a good unconscious spy on Brass, and tells, in his cups, all that he sees and hears. You’re useful to me, Dick, and cost nothing but a little treating now and then. I am not sure that it may not be worth while, before long, to take credit with the stranger, Dick, by discovering your designs upon the child; but for the present we’ll remain the best friends in the world, with your good leave.’
Pursuing these thoughts, and gasping as he went along, after his own peculiar fashion, Mr Quilp once more crossed the Thames, and shut himself up in his Bachelor’s Hall, which, by reason of its newly-erected chimney depositing the smoke inside the room and carrying none of it off, was not quite so agreeable as more fastidious people might have desired. Such inconveniences, however, instead of disgusting the dwarf with his new abode, rather suited his humour; so, after dining luxuriously from the public-house, he lighted his pipe, and smoked against the chimney until nothing of him was visible through the mist but a pair of red and highly inflamed eyes, with sometimes a dim vision of his head and face, as, in a violent fit of coughing, he slightly stirred the smoke and scattered the heavy wreaths by which they were obscured. In the midst of this atmosphere, which must infallibly have smothered any other man, Mr Quilp passed the evening with great cheerfulness; solacing himself all the time with the pipe and the case-bottle; and occasionally entertaining himself with a melodious howl, intended for a song, but bearing not the faintest resemblance to any scrap of any piece of music, vocal or instrumental, ever invented by man. Thus he amused himself until nearly midnight, when he turned into his hammock with the utmost satisfaction.
The first sound that met his ears in the morning—as he half opened his eyes, and, finding himself so unusually near the ceiling, entertained a drowsy idea that he must have been transformed into a fly or blue-bottle in the course of the night, —was that of a stifled sobbing and weeping in the room. Peeping cautiously over the side of his hammock, he descried Mrs Quilp, to whom, after contemplating her for some time in silence, he communicated a violent start by suddenly yelling out—‘Halloa!’
‘Oh, Quilp!’ cried his poor little wife, looking up. ‘How you frightened me!’
‘I meant to, you jade,’ returned the dwarf. ‘What do you want here? I’m dead, an’t I?’
‘Oh, please come home, do come home,’ said Mrs Quilp, sobbing; ‘we’ll never do so any more, Quilp, and after all it was only a mistake that grew out of our anxiety.’
‘Out of your anxiety,’ grinned the dwarf. ‘Yes, I know that—out of your anxiety for my death. I shall come home when I please, I tell you. I shall come home when I please, and go when I please. I’ll be a Will o’ the Wisp, now here, now there, dancing about you always, starting up when you least expect me, and keeping you in a constant state of restlessness and irritation. Will you begone?’
Mrs Quilp durst only make a gesture of entreaty.
‘I tell you no,’ cried the dwarf. ‘No. If you dare to come here again unless you’re sent for, I’ll keep watch-dogs in the yard that’ll growl and bite—I’ll have man-traps, cunningly altered and improved for catching women—I’ll have spring guns, that shall explode when you tread upon the wires, and blow you into little pieces. Will you begone?’
‘Do forgive me. Do come back,’ said his wife, earnestly.
‘No-o-o-o-o!’ roared Quilp. ‘Not till my own good time, and then I’ll return again as often as I choose, and be accountable to nobody for my goings or comings. You see the door there. Will you go?’
Mr Quilp delivered this last command in such a very energetic voice, and moreover accompanied it with such a sudden gesture, indicative of an intention to spring out of his hammock, and, night-capped as he was, bear his wife home again through the public streets, that she sped away like an arrow. Her worthy lord stretched his neck and eyes until she had crossed the yard, and then, not at all sorry to have had this opportunity of carrying his point, and asserting the sanctity of his castle, fell into an immoderate fit of laughter, and laid himself down to sleep again.
The bland and open-hearted proprietor of Bachelor’s Hall slept on amidst the congenial accompaniments of rain, mud, dirt, damp, fog, and rats, until late in the day; when, summoning his valet Tom Scott to assist him to rise, and to prepare breakfast, he quitted his couch, and made his toilet. This duty performed, and his repast ended, he again betook himself to Bevis Marks.
This visit was not intended for Mr Swiveller, but for his friend and employer Mr Sampson Brass. Both gentlemen however were from home, nor was the life and light of law, Miss Sally, at her post either. The fact of their joint desertion of the office was made known to all comers by a scrap of paper in the hand-writing of Mr Swiveller, which was attached to the bell-handle, and which, giving the reader no clue to the time of day when it was first posted, furnished him with the rather vague and unsatisfactory information that that gentleman would ‘return in an hour.’
‘There’s a servant, I suppose,’ said the dwarf, knocking at the house-door. ‘She’ll do.’
After a sufficiently long interval, the door was opened, and a small voice immediately accosted him with, ‘Oh please will you leave a card or message?’
‘Eh?’ said the dwarf, looking down, (it was something quite new to him) upon the small servant.
To this, the child, conducting her conversation as upon the occasion of her first interview with Mr Swiveller, again replied, ‘Oh please will you leave a card or message?’
‘I’ll write a note,’ said the dwarf, pushing past her into the office; ‘and mind your master has it directly he comes home.’ So Mr Quilp climbed up to the top of a tall stool to write the note, and the small servant, carefully tutored for such emergencies, looked on with her eyes wide open, ready, if he so much as abstracted a wafer, to rush into the street and give the alarm to the police.
As Mr Quilp folded his note (which was soon written: being a very short one) he encountered the gaze of the small servant. He looked at her, long and earnestly.
‘How are you?’ said the dwarf, moistening a wafer with horrible grimaces.
The small servant, perhaps frightened by his looks, returned no audible reply; but it appeared from the motion of her lips that she was inwardly repeating the same form of expression concerning the note or message.
‘Do they use you ill here? is your mistress a Tartar?’ said Quilp with a chuckle.
In reply to the last interrogation, the small servant, with a look of infinite cunning mingled with fear, screwed up her mouth very tight and round, and nodded violently. Whether there was anything in the peculiar slyness of her action which fascinated Mr Quilp, or anything in the expression of her features at the moment which attracted his attention for some other reason; or whether it merely occurred to him as a pleasant whim to stare the small servant out of countenance; certain it is, that he planted his elbows square and firmly on the desk, and squeezing up his cheeks with his hands, looked at her fixedly.
‘Where do you come from?’ he said after a long pause, stroking his chin.
‘I don’t know.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nonsense!’ retorted Quilp. ‘What does your mistress call you when she wants you?’
‘A little devil,’ said the child.
She added in the same breath, as if fearful of any further questioning, ‘But please will you leave a card or message?’
These unusual answers might naturally have provoked some more inquiries. Quilp, however, without uttering another word, withdrew his eyes from the small servant, stroked his chin more thoughtfully than before, and then, bending over the note as if to direct it with scrupulous and hair-breadth nicety, looked at her, covertly but very narrowly, from under his bushy eyebrows. The result of this secret survey was, that he shaded his face with his hands, and laughed slyly and noiselessly, until every vein in it was swollen almost to bursting. Pulling his hat over his brow to conceal his mirth and its effects, he tossed the letter to the child, and hastily withdrew.
Once in the street, moved by some secret impulse, he laughed, and held his sides, and laughed again, and tried to peer through the dusty area railings as if to catch another glimpse of the child, until he was quite tired out. At last, he travelled back to the Wilderness, which was within rifle-shot of his bachelor retreat, and ordered tea in the wooden summer-house that afternoon for three persons; an invitation to Miss Sally Brass and her brother to partake of that entertainment at that place, having been the object both of his journey and his note.
It was not precisely the kind of weather in which people usually take tea in summer-houses, far less in summer-houses in an advanced state of decay, and overlooking the slimy banks of a great river at low water. Nevertheless, it was in this choice retreat that Mr Quilp ordered a cold collation to be prepared, and it was beneath its cracked and leaky roof that he, in due course of time, received Mr Sampson and his sister Sally.
‘You’re fond of the beauties of nature,’ said Quilp with a grin. ‘Is this charming, Brass? Is it unusual, unsophisticated, primitive?’
‘It’s delightful indeed, sir,’ replied the lawyer.
‘Cool?’ said Quilp.
‘N-not particularly so, I think, sir,’ rejoined Brass, with his teeth chattering in his head.
‘Perhaps a little damp and ague-ish?’ said Quilp.
‘Just damp enough to be cheerful, sir,’ rejoined Brass. ‘Nothing more, sir, nothing more.’
‘And Sally?’ said the delighted dwarf. ‘Does she like it?’
‘She’ll like it better,’ returned that strong-minded lady, ‘when she has tea; so let us have it, and don’t bother.’
‘Sweet Sally!’ cried Quilp, extending his arms as if about to embrace her. ‘Gentle, charming, overwhelming Sally.’
‘He’s a very remarkable man indeed!’ soliloquised Mr Brass. ‘He’s quite a Troubadour, you know; quite a Troubadour!’
These complimentary expressions were uttered in a somewhat absent and distracted manner; for the unfortunate lawyer, besides having a bad cold in his head, had got wet in coming, and would have willingly borne some pecuniary sacrifice if he could have shifted his present raw quarters to a warm room, and dried himself at a fire. Quilp, however—who, beyond the gratification of his demon whims, owed Sampson some acknowledgment of the part he had played in the mourning scene of which he had been a hidden
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