Page:The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.djvu/272

210 i>10 POSTHUMOUS papers of

Here there was another pause. Mr. Pickwick was a stranger, and his coming- had evidently cast a damp upon the party.

" Mr. Grundy's going- to oblige the company with a song," said the chairman.

" No he ain't," said Mr. Grundy.

<i Why not ? " said the chairman.

" Because I can't," said Mr. Grundy.

" You had better say you won't," replied the chairman.

" Well, vhen, I won't," retorted Mr. Grundy. Mr. Grundy's positive refusal to gratify the company, occasioned another silence.

" Won't anybody enliven us ?" said the chairman, despondingly.

" Why don't you enliven us yourself, Mr. Chairman ?" said a young man with a whisker, a squint, and an open shirt collar (dirty) from the bottom of the table.

" Hear! hear!" said the smoking gentleman, in the Mosaic jewellery.

" Because I only know one song, and I have sung it already, and it's a fine of ' glasses round' to sing the same song twice in a night," replied the chairman.

This was an unanswerable reply, and silence prevailed again.

" I have been to-night, gentlemen," said Mr. Pickwick, hoping to start a subject which all the company could take part in discussing, " I have been to-night in a place which you all know very well, doubtless, but which I have not been in before, for some years, and know very little of; I mean Gray's Inn, gentlemen. Curious little nooks in a great place, like London, these old inns are."

'*' By Jove," said the chairman, whispering across the table to Mr.* Pickwick, " you have hit upon something that one of us, at least, would talk upon for ever. You'll draw old Jack Bamber out ; he was never heard to talk about anything else but the Inns, and he has lived alone in them, till he's half crazy."

The individual to whom Lowten alluded, was a little yellow high- shouldered man, whose countenance, from his habit of stooping forward when silent, Mr. Pickwick had not observed before. He wondered though, when the old man raised his shrivelled face, and bent his bright grey eye upon him, with a keen inquiring look, that such remarkable features could have escaped his attention for a moment. There was a fixed grim smile perpetually on his countenance ; he leant his chin on a long skinny hand, with nails of extraordinary length ; and as he incHned his head to one side, and looked keenly out from beneath his ragged grey eyebrows, there was a strange, wild slyness in his leer, quite repulsive to behold.

This was the figure that now started forward, and burst into an animated torrent of words. As this chapter has been a long one how- ever, and as the old man was a remarkable personage, it will be more respectful to him, and more convenient to us, to let him speak for himself in a fresh one.