Selected Short Fiction Page 41

  As there had been no bid at all, everybody looked about and grinned at everybody, while I touched little Sophy’s face and asked her if she felt faint or giddy. ‘Not very, father. It will soon be over.’ Then turning from the pretty patient eyes, which were opened now, and seeing nothing but grins across my lighted grease-pot, I went on again in my Cheap Jack style. ‘Where’s the butcher?’ (My sorrowful eye had just caught sight of a fat young butcher on the outside of the crowd.) She says the good luck is the butcher’s. ‘Where is he?’ Everybody handed on the blushing butcher to the front, and there was a roar, and the butcher felt himself obliged to put his hand in his pocket and take the lot. The party so picked out, in general does feel obliged to take the lot - good four times out of six. Then we had another lot the counterpart of that one, and sold it sixpence cheaper, which is always very much enjoyed. Then we had the spectacles. It ain’t a special profitable lot, but I put ‘em on, and I see what the Chancellor of the Exchequer is going to take off the taxes, and I see what the sweetheart of the young woman in the shawl is doing at home, and I see what the Bishops has got for dinner, and a deal more that seldom fails to fetch ’em up in their spirits; and the better their spirits, the better their bids. Then we had the ladies’ lot - the teapot, tea-caddy, glass sugar basin, half a dozen spoons, and caudle-cup - and all the time I was making similar excuses to give a look or two and say a word or two to my poor child. It was while the second ladies’ lot was holding ‘em enchained that I felt her lift herself a little on my shoulder, to look across the dark street. ‘What troubles you, darling?’ ‘Nothing troubles me, father. I am not at all troubled. But don’t I see a pretty churchyard over there?’ ‘Yes, my dear.’ ‘Kiss me twice, dear father, and lay me down to rest upon that churchyard grass so soft and green.’ I staggered back into the cart with her head dropped on my shoulder, and I says to her mother, ‘Quick. Shut the door! Don’t let those laughing people see!’ ‘What’s the matter?’ she cries. ‘O, woman, woman,’ I tells her, ‘you’ll never catch my little Sophy by her hair again, for she has flown away from you! ’

  Maybe those were harder words than I meant ‘em, but from that time forth my wife took to brooding, and would sit in the cart or walk beside it, hours at a stretch, with her arms crossed and her eyes looking on the ground. When her furies took her (which was rather seldomer than before) they took her in a new way, and she banged herself about to that extent that I was forced to hold her. She got none the better for a little drink now and then, and through some years I used to wonder as I plodded along at the old horse’s head whether there was many carts upon the road that held so much dreariness as mine, for all my being looked up to as the King of the Cheap Jacks. So sad our lives went on till one summer evening, when as we were coming into Exeter out of the further West of England, we saw a woman beating a child in a cruel manner, who screamed, ‘Don’t beat me! O mother, mother, mother!’ Then my wife stopped her ears and ran away like a wild thing, and next day she was found in the river.

  Me and my dog were all the company left in the cart now, and the dog learned to give a short bark when they wouldn’t bid, and to give another and a nod of his head when I asked him: ‘Who said half-a-crown? Are you the gentleman, sir, that offered half-a-crown?’ He attained to an immense heighth of popularity, and I shall always believe taught himself entirely out of his own head to growl at any person in the crowd that bid as low as sixpence. But he got to be well on in years, and one night when I was conwulsing York with the spectacles, he took a conwulsion on his own account upon the very footboard by me, and it finished him.

  Being naturally of a tender turn, I had dreadful lonely feelings on me arter this. I conquered ’em at selling times, having a reputation to keep (not to mention keeping myself), but they got me down in private and rolled upon me. That’s often the way with us public characters. See. us on the footboard, and you’d give pretty well anything you possess to be us. See us off the footboard, and you’d add a trifle to be off your bargain. It was under those circumstances that I come acquainted with a giant. I might have been too high to fall into conversation with him, had it not been for my lonely feelings. For the general rule is, going round the country, to draw the line at dressing up. When a man can’t trust his getting a living to his undisguised abilities, you consider him below your sort. And this giant when on view figured as a Roman.

  He was a languid young man, which I attribute to the distance betwixt his extremities. He had a little head and less in it, he had weak eyes and weak knees, and altogether you couldn’t look at him without feeling that there was greatly too much of him both for his joints and his mind. But he was an amiable though timid young man (his mother let him out, and spent the money), and we come acquainted when he was walking to ease the horse betwixt two fairs. He was called Rinaldo di Velasco, his name being Pickleson.

  This giant otherwise Pickleson mentioned to me under the seal of confidence, that beyond his being a burden to himself, his life was made a burden to him, by the cruelty of his master towards a step-daughter who was deaf and dumb. Her mother was dead, and she had no living soul to take her part, and was used most hard. She travelled with his master’s caravan only because there was nowhere to leave her, and this giant otherwise Pickleson did go so far as to believe that his master often tried to lose her. He was such a very languid young man, that I don’t know how long it didn’t take him to get this story out, but it passed through his defective circulation to his top extremity in course of time.

  When I heard this account from the giant otherwise Pickleson, and likewise that the poor girl had beautiful long dark hair, and was often pulled down by it and beaten, I couldn’t see the giant through what stood in my eyes. Having wiped ’em, I give him sixpence (for he was kept as short as he was long), and he laid it out in two threepennorths of gin-and-water, which so brisked him up, that he sang the Favourite Comic of Shivery Shakey, ain’t it cold.6 A popular effect which his master had tried every other means to get out of him as a Roman, wholly in vain.

  His master’s name was Mim, a wery hoarse man and I knew him to speak to. I went to that Fair as a mere civilian, leaving the cart outside the town, and I looked about the back of the Vans while the performing was going on, and at last sitting dozing against a muddy cartwheel, I come upon the poor girl who was deaf and dumb. At the first look I might almost have judged that she had escaped from the Wild Beast Show, but at the second I thought better of her, and thought that if she was more cared for and more kindly used she would be like my child. She was just the same age that my own daughter would have been, if her pretty head had not fell down upon my shoulder that unfortunate night.

  To cut it short, I spoke confidential to Mim while he was beating the gong outside betwixt two lots of Pickleson’s publics, and I put it to him, ‘She lies heavy on your own hands; what’ll you take for her?’ Mim was a most ferocious swearer. Suppressing that part of his reply, which was much the longest part, his reply was, ‘A pair of braces.’ ‘Now I’ll tell you,’ says I, ‘what I’m a going to do with you. I’m a going to fetch you half a dozen pair of the primest braces in the cart, and then to take her away with me.’ Says Mim (again ferocious), ‘I’ll believe it when I’ve got the goods, and no sooner.’ I made all the haste I could, lest he should think twice of it, and the bargain was completed, which Pickleson he was thereby so relieved in his mind that he come out at his little back door, long-ways like a serpent, and give us Shivery Shakey in a whisper among the wheels at parting.

  It was happy days for both of us when Sophy and me began to travel in the cart. I at once give her the name of Sophy, to put her ever towards me in the attitude of my own daughter. We soon made out to begin to understand one another through the goodness of the Heavens, when she knowed that I meant true and kind by her. In a very little time she was wonderful fond of me. You have no idea what it is to have any body wonderful fond of you, unless you have been got down and rolled upon by the lonely feelings that I have mentioned as having on
ce got the better of me.

  You’d have laughed - or the rewerse - it’s according to your disposition - if you could have seen me trying to teach Sophy. At first I was helped - you’d never guess by what - milestones. I got large alphabets in a box, all the letters separate on bits of bone, and say we was going to WINDSOR, I give her those letters in that order, and then at every milestone I showed her those same letters in that same order again, and pointed towards the abode of royalty. Another time I give her CART, and then chalked the same upon the cart. Another time I give her DOCTOR MARIGOLD, and hung a corresponding inscription outside my waistcoat. People that met us might stare a bit and laugh, but what did I care if she caught the idea? She caught it after long patience and trouble, and then we did begin to get on swimmingly, I believe you! At first she was a little given to consider me the cart, and the cart the abode of royalty, but that soon wore off.

  We had our signs, too, and they was hundreds in number. Sometimes, she would sit looking at me and considering hard how to communicate with me about something fresh - how to ask me what she wanted explained - and then she was (or I thought she was; what does it signify?) so like my child with those years added to her, that I half believed it was herself, trying to tell me where she had been to up in the skies, and what she had seen since that unhappy night when she flied away. She had a pretty face, and now that there was no one to drag at her bright dark hair and it was all in order, there was a something touching in her looks that made the cart most peaceful and most quiet, though not at all melancolly. [N.B. In the Cheap Jack patter, we generally sound it, lemonjolly, and it gets a laugh.]

  The way she learnt to understand any look of mine was truly surprising. When I sold of a night, she would sit in the cart unseen by them outside, and would give a eager look into my eyes when I looked in, and would hand me straight the precise article or articles I wanted. And then she would clap her hands and laugh for joy. And as for me, seeing her so bright, and remembering what she was when I first lighted on her, starved and beaten and ragged, leaning asleep against the muddy cart-wheel, it give me such heart that I gained a greater heighth of reputation than ever, and I put Pickleson down (by the name of Mim’s Travelling Giant otherwise Pickleson) for a fypunnote in my will.

  This happiness went on in the cart till she was sixteen year old. By which time I began to feel not satisfied that I had done my whole duty by her, and to consider that she ought to have better teaching than I could give her. It drew a many tears on both sides when I commenced explaining my views to her, but what’s right is right and you can’t neither by tears nor laughter do away with its character.

  So I took her hand in mine, and I went with her one day to the Deaf and Dumb Establishment in London, and when the gentleman come to speak to us, I says to him: ‘Now I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you sir. I am nothing but a Cheap Jack, but of late years I have laid by for a rainy day notwithstanding. This is my only daughter (adopted) and you can’t produce a deafer nor a dumber. Teach her the most that can be taught her, in the shortest separation that can be named - state the figure for it - and I am game to put the money down. I won’t bate you a single farthing sir but I’ll put down the money here and now, and I’ll thankfully throw you in a pound to take it. There!’ The gentleman smiled, and then, ‘Well, well,’ says he, ‘I must first know what she has learnt already. How do you communicate with her?’ Then I showed him, and she wrote in printed writing many names of things and so forth, and we held some sprightly conversation, Sophy and me, about a little story in a book which the gentleman showed her and which she was able to read. ‘This is most extraordinary,’ says the gentleman; ‘is it possible that you have been her only teacher?’ ‘I have been her only teacher, sir,’ I says, ‘besides herself.’ ‘Then,’ says the gentleman, and more acceptable words was never spoke to me, ‘you’re a clever fellow, and a good fellow.’ This he makes known to Sophy, who kisses his hands, claps her own, and laughs and cries upon it.

  We saw the gentleman four times in all, and when he took down my name and asked how in the world it ever chanced to be Doctor, it come out that he was own nephew by the sister’s side, if you’ll believe me, to the very Doctor that I was called after. This made our footing still easier, and he says to me:

  ‘Now Marigold, tell me what more do you want your adopted daughter to know?’

  ‘I want her sir to be cut off from the world as little as can be, considering her deprivations, and therefore to be able to read whatever is wrote; with perfect ease and pleasure.’

  ‘My good fellow,’ urges the gentleman, opening his eyes wide, ‘why I can’t do that myself!’

  I took his joke and give him a laugh (knowing by experience how flat you fall without it) and I mended my words accordingly.

  ‘What do you mean to do with her afterwards?’ asks the gentleman, with a sort of a doubtful eye. To take her about the country?’

  ‘In the cart sir, but only in the cart. She will live a private life, you understand, in the cart. I should never think of bringing her infirmities before the public. I wouldn’t make a show of her, for any money.’

  The gentleman nodded and seemed to approve.

  ‘Well,’ says he, ‘can you part with her for two years?’

  ‘To do her that good - yes, sir.’

  ‘There’s another question,’ says the gentleman, looking towards her: ‘Can she part with you for two years?’

  I don’t know that it was a harder matter of itself (for the other was hard enough to me), but it was harder to get over. However, she was pacified to it at last, and the separation betwixt us was settled. How it cut up both of us when it took place, and when I left her at the door in the dark of an evening, I don’t tell. But I know this: - remembering that night, I shall never pass that same establishment without a heart-ache and a swelling in the throat, and I couldn’t put you up the best of lots in sight of it with my usual spirit - no, not even the gun, nor the pair of spectacles - for five hundred pound reward from the Secretary of State for the Home Department, and throw in the honour of putting my legs under his mahogany arterwards.

  Still, the loneliness that followed in the cart was not the old loneliness, because there was a term put to it however long to look forward to, and because I could think, when I was anyways down, that she belonged to me and I belonged to her. Always planning for her coming back, I bought in a few months’ time another cart, and what do you think I planned to do with it? I’ll tell you. I planned to fit it up with shelves, and books for her reading, and to have a seat in it where I could sit and see her read, and think that I had been her first teacher. Not hurrying over the job, I had the fittings knocked together in contriving ways under my own inspection, and here was her bed in a berth with curtains, and there was her reading-table, and here was her writing-desk, and elsewhere was her books in rows upon rows, picters and no picters, bindings and no bindings, gilt-edged and plain, just as I could pick ’em up for her in lots up and down the country, North and South and West and East, Winds liked best and winds liked least, Here and there and gone astray, Over the hills and far away.7 And when I had got together pretty well as many books as the cart would neatly hold, a new scheme come into my head which, as it turned out, kept my time and attention a good deal employed and helped me over the two years stile.

  Without being of an awaricious temper, I like to be the owner of things. I shouldn’t wish, for instance, to go partners with yourself in the Cheap Jack cart. It’s not that I mistrust you, but that I’d rather know it was mine. Similarly, very likely you’d rather know it was yours. Well! A kind of a jealousy began to creep into my mind when I reflected that all those books would have been read by other people long before they was read by her. It seemed to take away from her being the owner of ’em like. In this way, the question got into my head : — Couldn’t I have a book new-made express for her, which she should be the first to read?