Next, Jasper and Sapsea, a pompous ass, auctioneer, and mayor, sit at
their wine, expecting a third guest. Mr. Sapsea reads his absurd epitaph
for his late wife, who is buried in a “Monument,” a vault of some sort in
the Cathedral churchyard. To them enter Durdles, a man never sober, yet
trusted with the key of the crypt, “as contractor for rough repairs.” In
the crypt “he habitually sleeps off the fumes of liquor.” Of course no
Dean would entrust keys to this incredibly dissipated, dirty, and
insolent creature, to whom Sapsea gives the key of his vault, for no
reason at all, as the epitaph, of course, is to be engraved on the
outside, by Durdles’s men. However, Durdles insists on getting the key
of the vault: he has two other large keys. Jasper, trifling with them,
keeps clinking them together, so as to know, even in the dark, by the
sound, which is the key that opens Sapsea’s vault, in the railed-off
burial ground, beside the cloister arches. He has met Durdles at
Sapsea’s for no other purpose than to obtain access at will to Mrs.
Sapsea’s monument. Later in the evening Jasper finds Durdles more or
less drunk, and being stoned by a _gamin_, “Deputy,” a retainer of a
tramp’s lodging-house. Durdles fees Deputy, in fact, to drive him home
every night after ten. Jasper and Deputy fall into feud, and Jasper has
thus a new, keen, and omnipresent enemy. As he walks with Durdles that
worthy explains (in reply to a question by Jasper), that, by tapping a
wall, even if over six feet thick, with his hammer, he can detect the
nature of the contents of the vault, “solid in hollow, and inside solid,
hollow again. Old ’un crumbled away in stone coffin, in vault.” He can
also discover the presence of “rubbish left in that same six foot space
by Durdles’s men.” Thus, if a foreign body were introduced into the
Sapsea vault, Durdles could detect its presence by tapping the outside
wall. As Jasper’s purpose clearly is to introduce a foreign body—that of
Edwin who stands between him and Rosa—into Mrs. Sapsea’s vault, this
“gift” of Durdles is, for Jasper, an uncomfortable discovery. He goes
home, watches Edwin asleep, and smokes opium.