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Updated: June 29, 2025
Snagsby has dealt in all sorts of blank forms of legal process; in skins and rolls of parchment; in paper foolscap, brief, draft, brown, white, whitey- brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office-quills, pens, ink, India- rubber, pounce, pins, pencils, sealing-wax, and wafers; in red tape and green ferret; in pocket-books, almanacs, diaries, and law lists; in string boxes, rulers, inkstands glass and leaden pen-knives, scissors, bodkins, and other small office-cutlery; in short, in articles too numerous to mention, ever since he was out of his time and went into partnership with Peffer.
The housemaid's hand had failed to give a look of order to the jumble of heterogeneous objects left on the dressing-table and the mantel-shelf pipes, pen-knives, pencils, keys, golf-balls, old letters, photographs, small boxes, tins and bottles. Two fine etchings and some water-color sketches hung on the walls; leaning against the end of the wardrobe, unhung, were a few framed engravings.
Sometimes a paper rose tipped each arm-end sometimes also, there were pendant sprays of pea-shaped blossoms. How they were made, with nothing beyond scissors, pen-knives for crimping, and the palm of the hand for mold, I confess I do not understand but I know they were marvels. The marvels required a special knack, of course also much time and patience.
Shell hole upon shell hole yawned down there. From time to time thick, black pillars of earth leaped up and for moments hid small parts of this desert burned to ashes, where the cloven stumps of trees, whittled as by pen-knives, stuck up like a jeering challenge to the impotent imagination, a challenge to recognize in this field of death and refuse, the landscape it once had been, before the great madness had swept over it and sown it with ruins, leaving it like a dancing floor on which two worlds had fought for a loose woman.
His ripe experience on the subject was gleaned partly from neighbouring families, partly from infrequent visits to "Aunt Jane" whom he hated with a deep unreasoned hate and "Uncle George," who had a kind, stupid face, but anyhow tried to be funny and made futile bids for favour with pen-knives and half-crowns.
I remember a growth of thorny plants, with spines that stabbed like pen-knives. I emerged bleeding and with torn clothes upon the lip of a long creek opening northward. I went straight into the water without a minute's hesitation, wading up the creek, and presently finding myself kneedeep in a little stream.
When Ptitsin was seventeen he slept in the street, he sold pen-knives, and began with a copeck; now he has sixty thousand roubles, but to get them, what has he not done? Well, I shall be spared such a hard beginning, and shall start with a little capital. In fifteen years people will say, 'Look, that's Ivolgin, the king of the Jews! You say that I have no originality.
Others, again, were engaged at domino; and others still busied in scoring the walls with their pen-knives, or whittling shingles as they whistled for want of thought. These latter were Yankees of course; but an air of idleness and indifference pervaded the apartments, which almost begets a yawn in the remembrance.
The family don't want her here, and they'll say it's because I've been ill, because I'm a weak old woman, that she's persuaded me. I'm not well enough yet to fight them one by one, and you've got to do it for me." "I?" he stammered. "You. Why not?" she jerked back at him, her round eyes suddenly as sharp as pen-knives.
But his economic plea was as unintelligible to her as the silly problems about pen-knives and apples in the "Mental Arithmetic" of her infancy; and when he struck a tenderer note and spoke of the duty of providing for the son he hoped for, she put her arms about him to whisper: "But then I oughtn't to be worried..."
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