James Greenwood - The True History of a Little Ragamuffin

“Well, I wasn’t long a-gettin’ to Guy’s, you may lay your life, Smiff; and goin’ up to the cove what stands at the gate, ses I, ‘Please, I come to see my brother,’ ses I. ‘What name?’ he ses.

‘Mouldy,’ ses I; ‘he’s got both of his legs broke, and a whole lot of his ribs.’ ‘I know,’ ses he; ‘he fell off a house, or somethink. You’re a ’spectable sort of visitor!’ ses he; ‘but never mind, you are the on’y one as has come to inquire arter him, so you may go through. Ask for sister ’Melia’s ward,’ ses he; ‘that’s where they’ve took him.’

“So I did; and when I gets to the door, there was sister ’Melia, and I asks her civil if she’d show me the way to the boy Mouldy. ‘Is your name Ripston?’ ses she. ‘Yes, mum,’ I ses. ‘Come along,’ ses she; ‘that’s all he keeps saying on, “Where’s Ripston?” He ain’t long for this world, poor boy!’ ses she; ‘you’ll be in bare time to see him alive, I’m afraid.’ Well, there he was, Smiff. They’d washed him, and they’d put him on a white shirt; and he did look so orful white, and his eyes looked such great ’uns—blue eyes Mouldy had; blest if I ever know’d he had blue eyes till that time, Smiff—that I was reg’ler frightened. A gen’leman wot was a parson, I think, was talkin’ with Mouldy when I got up to the bed; but when the poor cove see me, he put his hand out for me. ‘What cheer, Rip? I’m so jolly glad you’ve come,’ he whispered;

‘I thought I was a-goin’ to die without never seein’ on yer agin, Rip. Shake hands, old son,—don’t yer squeedge.’ Blest if I could answer him, Smiff; there was a summat stickin’ in my throat that come up higher when I went to open my mouth, and I couldn’t say a word. ‘Mister,’ ses Mouldy to the gen’lman wot was a parson, ‘Mister,’ ses he, ‘would yer mind talkin’ to Ripston a little wot you’ve been a-talkin to me?’ ‘All right,’ the parson says; and he did, while Mouldy ketched hold of my hand. All about bein’ honest and that, the talk was; but, in the middle on it, Mouldy give my hand a sudden squeedge, and was took wuss. He couldn’t speak, but he looked at the parson werry hard, and then he looked at me and nodded his head, and then he died.”

Here Ripston once more evinced serious symptoms of an outburst of grief, seeing which, I dexterously pressed on his acceptance my largest orange, which he instantly commenced to suck with a vigour that showed the tremendous strength of the emotion that I had so happily been the means of diverting.

“Reg’ler struck of a heap I was, I can tell yer, after that talk, and seein’ of poor Mouldy turn his toes up,” continued Ripston, throwing the orange-peel into the pit, with a sigh. “I was good to change, don’t yer see, like Mouldy asked me to; but how can a cove change when he’s got nothink to change on? This was wot I thought on when I come out of the ’orspidle; and I thought on it a good bit, till at last I made up my mind that I would stop about the gate till the parson come out, and ask him how a cove wot had a mind to change had better set about it. By and by he comes out, and just as he was a-gettin’ into the carridge, I up and arst him. I forgets all his questions he asked me; but the best on it was that he winds up by givin’ me a shillin’, and where he lived ’rit on a card. ‘If you’re in the same mind to-morrow mornin’ as you are now, come to me,’ ses he, ‘and I’ll see what I can do for yer.’ I was in the same mind sharp enough, never fear; and it was the luckiest mind as ever I made up. He give me some togs, and then he went along with me hisself to the cove wot keeps the tater shop in Spitalfields, and he gets me the place; and that’s where I am now, and where I means to stick. There, now yer knows all about my changin’; which I’d ha’ done long afore if I’d on’y ha’ known how easy it was. Didn’t you find it easy, Smiff?”

I couldn’t trust myself to answer Ripston’s embarrassing question verbally, but I nodded my head in a manner intended to convey to him that I found “changing” the easiest thing in the world.

“Well, yer see, I dessay you found it easier than we did, yer didn’t have so much to change from as wot me and Mouldy had,” continued Rip. “Yer never got reg’ler hardened to it, like. Lor’! well I recollects what larks it used to be for me and poor Mouldy to watch yer in the market, sometimes, when yer thought we wasn’t lookin’, and see the funky way you had of doing things. You’d never ha’ made a out-and-out regular prig, don’t yer know; you never had pluck enough, Smiff; leastways, not pluck; it ain’t, it’s summat wot’s like pluck—like pluck wot’s gone bad, like a speckt apple; it’s the shape of pluck, but it’s rotten. Why, I don’t b’lieve, Smiff, that you’d ever ha’ knowed wot nailin’ even was, if we hadn’t ha’ put yer on it so jolly close as wot we did.”

“P’r’aps I never should,’ I replied, giving Ripston a look that must have been to him altogether incomprehensible.

“Well, you didn’t go werry deep—leastways not nigh so deep as me and Mouldy did; that’s a comfort, ain’t it?”

“Course it’s a comfort.”

“I say, Smiff, ain’t it rummy that we should come acrost each other, both changed?”

“Rather. That’s a pretty sort o’ dance, Rip.”

“Jigger dancin’, it’s jolly rubbish; that’s wot I calls dancin’. It wouldn’t ha’ been half so rummy if one on us had changed and the t’other one hadn’t. Lord, Smiff! I wonder what I should ha’ thought if I’d ha’ been carryin’ on the old game, and come acrost you to-night lookin’ so jolly ’spectable’! I wonder what I’d ha’ done if you’d spoke to me, as werry likely you wouldn’t? I’d ha’ hooked it away, I think. Yet I dunno; it’s werry likely I should ha’ cheeked it out—p’r’aps made larks ’bout yer bein’ a draper cove, and dressin’ like a toff. I should ha’ pretended not to b’lieve about yer havin’ grow’d ’spectable, and gone in for aggrawatin’ yer by callin’ yer swell-mobs, and that.”

All this while Ripston had talked to me in whispers, and with his head inclined to mine, so that it was impossible for the old woman who sat to my left, or the two girls in front, to hear a word of his discourse. I had never seen him so sprightly in all my life—never known him so chatty and communicative; but, as may easily be imagined, his talk had anything but an exhilarating effect on me. His every word and gesture was a reproach to me. Hard usage and studied neglect had corned my conscience so that it had lost its fine susceptibility, and was not easily pricked to wakefulness; but here was Ripston assailing it butt and bayonet, as it were. My acquaintance with the two boys had been of a peculiar sort—of a sort more likely than any other to beget friendship the most durable. The news of Mouldy’s death, and of the manner of it, had given me a terrible twisting. That alone was enough to make me cast down and miserable; but when my old friend Rip, whom I had always liked even better than Mouldy—Rip, turned honest, talking honest, looking honest unmistakably—took to gouging the wound, to stabbing and re-stabbing it so unmercifully, and yet so innocently, I felt ground down to the earth in shame and remorse. That I looked almost as bad as I felt I could not but be aware, and the dread lest Ripston should presently, by this means, detect me, increased each moment. The dread was not groundless. Rip’s natural shrewdness had not suffered in his conversion to honest ways. When he had finished drawing his funny picture of our meeting under other circumstances—him still a little prig, and me, as I was, a respectable linen-draper’s boy—he was convulsed with glee, in which, by a poke in the ribs, he invited me to join. Not I. At that moment I would have given very much more ready money than I was in possession of to have been able to have forced a laugh, though never so lame a one. But I couldn’t laugh or smile even. I could only look hard before me, as though I didn’t hear him, with my lips squeezed tight together, and my brow lowering. Ripston broke off short in the midst of a promising chuckle, and, with a face turned suddenly grave, laid his hand on my arm—