Now, whether in summer or winter, poor people can patronise as well as
rich; and so it fell out that the custom in poverty-stricken,
hunger-pinched Gutter-alley was for the poor folk there to speak
condescendingly to old Dick Bradds, when he stood at the door of Number
5, with his poor old head on one side as he looked up the court; head on
the other side as he looked down. "Dickey" he was generally called, and
more than one stout costermonger--they did a deal in costering in
Gutter-alley, and if you penetrated into the rooms of the human
rabbit-warren, fish could be found mingled with furniture, turnips
amongst the wash-tubs, and a good full bucket of mussels often formed
the seat of the father of a family while he helped his wife to make up
ropes of onions for the morrow's sale--well, many a stout costermonger
told his wife in confidence that old Dickey Bradds always put him in
mind of a moulting thrush. No inapt simile, and doubtless taken from
the life, for there were always plenty of feathered captives to be seen
in Gutter-alley.
It was quite true Dick--old Dickey Bradds--did look very much like some
aged and shabby bird, lame of one leg; and when he stood on a cold
winter's morning peering up and down through the fog that loved to hang
about the court, no one would have felt at all surprised to have seen
the old man begin to peck, or to whet his long sharp old nose against
the door-post.
Not that Dick did do anything of this kind--he only gave two or three
keen one-sided bird-like looks about before slowly hopping up-stairs to
his room on the second floor--the front room--to wait for Jenny.
A keen old blade though was Dick--a piece of that right good true steel
so often to be found in the humblest implements, while your
finely-polished, gaily-handled, ornamental upper-ten-thousand cutlery is
so often inferior, dull of edge, and given to shut up just when they are
wanted the most. Dick was not human hurried up, but a piece of fine old
charcoal-made steel. Toil and hard usage had ground and ground Dick
till there was little left of him but the haft, and seventy years of
existence rubbing away through the world--that hard grindstone to some
of us--had made that haft very rickety of rivet and springs. Certainly
there was blade enough left to cut in one direction, but you could not
trust Dick for fear of his giving way, or perhaps closing upon the hand
that employed him.
It was so with poor old Dick when he left the great auction-rooms, where
he had been kept as long as was possible; and, being proud, Dick would
not believe in Nature when she told him that he had grown to be an old
man, and that the time had gone by when he was lusty and strong, and
able to lift great weights; and when Dick's fellow-porters told him that
a piece of furniture was too heavy for him to lift, he only felt
annoyed, and grew angry and stubborn.
The fact was that Dick knew from old experience how hard a matter it was
for even an industrious man to get a living in the great city; and for
him, whose livelihood depended entirely upon his muscles, to turn weak
and helpless meant misery, privation, and perhaps the workhouse for his
old age.
That was what Dick thought, and therefore he fought hard against even
the very semblance of weakness, making a point always at the
auction-rooms of doing far more than he need, rushing at heavy pieces of
furniture, tiring himself with extra work, and making himself an object
of sport to the thoughtless, of pity to his older fellow-servants of the
firm.
The consequence was that poor old Dickey Bradds had to go one day to the
hospital, to lie there for many weary weeks, and come out at last lame
and uncured, for at threescore and ten there is not much chance of a man
building up new tissue, piling on fresh muscle and strength, and
renewing the waste of so many years.
Poor old Dick left the hospital a confirmed cripple, but hopeful ever of
regaining his strength and activity--at least he said so, whether merely
to cheer up his grandchild or to mask his sufferings, that was known
only to his own heart.
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