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Updated: August 13, 2024
There was a strange hoarse chorus of sounds; they were the voices of women who were poor bedraggled drabs, men who were thieves and cutthroats, a few shrill voices of lads who were pickpockets and ripe for the gallows already. "Ay, we know thee! Ay, your Grace!
But when he gradually came to discover the mean tricks and miserable treacheries used by his fellow-actors to keep a rising comrade down, when he felt to the core of his soul the sordidness and uncleanness of his surroundings, when he shudderingly repulsed the would-be attentions of the painted drabs called "ladies of the stage", and above all, when he thought of the peace and refinement of the home he had, for a mere freak, forsaken, the high tone of thought and feeling maintained there, the exquisite gracefulness and charm of womanhood, of which his mother had been, and was still a perfect embodiment, some new and far stronger spirit rose up within him, crying "What is this folly?
"His mother at one time persuaded me that he was a child of mine; but such infernal gipsy drabs as that can't be depended on, you know. I have the honour to wish you a very good afternoon, sir, thanking you for your information, and hoping your counsel will secure a speedy conviction.
Had it been brought to maturity we should have had further traits of autobiography, the room already described was probably his own squalid quarters in Green Arbor Court; and in a subsequent morsel of the poem we have the poet himself, under the euphonious name of Scroggin: "Where the Red Lion peering o'er the way, Invites each passing stranger that can pay; Where Calvert's butt and Parson's black champagne Regale the drabs and bloods of Drury Lane: There, in a lonely room, from bailiffs snug, The muse found Scroggin stretch'd beneath a rug; A nightcap deck'd his brows instead of bay, A cap by night, a stocking all the day!"
These people, only two days ago, had been leading a thousand different lives, in indifference or in antagonism to each other, as alien as enemies across a frontier: now workers and idlers, thieves, beggars, saints, poets, drabs and sharpers, genuine people and showy shams, were all bumping up against each other in an instinctive community of emotion.
Men quietly fell aside, making place for him, so that he stood with Beauvayse, in a clear half-circle of figures attired like his own, in Service browns and drabs and umbers, waiting until the three approaching feminine shapes should pass across the open space. One or two Staff monocles went up.
His wife had adored him once on a time; she had bored him with a thousand servilities that had only estranged him the more. She had suffered so much without complaint at first, until she had seem him going after all the village drabs, and until a score of bad houses sent him back to her at night, weary, stinking drunk. Then her pride revolted.
Marcella stood in the doorway and watched the scene, the gradual disappearance of the helpless form on the stretcher, with its fevered face under the dark mat of hair; the figures of the straining men heavily descending step by step, their heads and shoulders thrown out against the dirty drabs and browns of the staircase; the crowd of Jewesses on the stairs and landing, craning their necks, gesticulating and talking, so that Dr.
Pickwick sat down unbidden, and listened to the loud ticking of the clock and the murmured conversation of the clerks. 'That was a game, wasn't it? said one of the gentlemen, in a brown coat and brass buttons, inky drabs, and bluchers, at the conclusion of some inaudible relation of his previous evening's adventures. 'Devilish good devilish good, said the Seidlitz-powder man.
There were no smart carriages, no touch of gay paint, no glittering new harnesses; the whole procession was keyed down among the most desolate and sorrowful grays, browns, and drabs. Slowly they moved past. In some of the wagons, banners, rudely painted on cotton cloth, uttered the farmers' protest in words. "Good God!" said Davis, as he dashed away at his writing.
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