The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, Matthew Pearl

all open Durdles's
work. Durdles keeps the keys of his work mostly. Not that they're much used.”
     
  “By the bye,” it comes into Jasper's
mind to say, as he idly examines the keys, “I have been going to ask you, many
a day, and have always forgotten. You know they sometimes call you Stony
Durdles, don't you?”
     
  “Cloisterham knows me as Durdles, Mr.
Jasper.”
     
  “I am aware of that, of course. But the
boys sometimes—”
     
  “O! if you mind them young imps of
boys—” Durdles gruffly interrupts.
     
  “I don't mind them any more than you do.
But there was a discussion the other day among the Choir, whether Stony stood
for Tony;” clinking one key against another.
     
  ('Take care of the wards, Mr. Jasper. “)
     
  “Or whether Stony stood for Stephen;”
clinking with a change of keys.
     
  ('You can't make a pitch pipe of “em,
Mr. Jasper. “)
     
  “Or whether the name comes from your
trade. How stands the fact?”
     
  Mr. Jasper weighs the three keys in his
hand, lifts his head from his idly stooping attitude over the fire, and
delivers the keys to Durdles with an ingenuous and friendly face.
     
  But the stony one is a gruff one
likewise, and that hazy state of his is always an uncertain state, highly
conscious of its dignity, and prone to take offence. He drops his two keys back
into his pocket one by one, and buttons them up; he takes his dinner-bundle
from the chair-back on which he hung it when he came in; he distributes the
weight he carries, by tying the third key up in it, as though he were an
Ostrich, and liked to dine off cold iron; and he gets out of the room, deigning
no word of answer.
     
  Mr. Sapsea then proposes a hit at
backgammon, which, seasoned with his own improving conversation, and
terminating in a supper of cold roast beef and salad, beguiles the golden
evening until pretty late. Mr. Sapsea's wisdom being, in its delivery to mortals,
rather of the diffuse than the epigrammatic order, is by no means expended even
then; but his visitor intimates that he will come back for more of the precious
commodity on future occasions, and Mr. Sapsea lets him off for the present, to
ponder on the instalment he carries away.
     
   
     
   
     
  CHAPTER V—MR. DURDLES AND FRIEND
     
   
     
  JOHN JASPER, on his way home through the
Close, is brought to a stand-still by the spectacle of Stony Durdles,
dinner-bundle and all, leaning his back against the iron railing of the
burial-ground enclosing it from the old cloister-arches; and a hideous small
boy in rags flinging stones at him as a well-defined mark in the moonlight.
Sometimes the stones hit him, and sometimes they miss him, but Durdles seems
indifferent to either fortune. The hideous small boy, on the contrary, whenever
he hits Durdles, blows a whistle of triumph through a jagged gap, convenient
for the purpose, in the front of his mouth, where half his teeth are wanting;
and whenever he misses him, yelps out “Mulled agin!” and tries to atone for the
failure by taking a more correct and vicious aim.
     
  “What are you doing to the man?” demands
Jasper, stepping out into the moonlight from the shade.
     
  “Making a cock-shy of him,” replies the
hideous small boy.
     
  “Give me those stones in your hand.”
     
  “Yes, I'll give “em you down your
throat, if you come a-ketching hold of me,” says the small boy, shaking himself
loose, and backing. “I'll smash your eye, if you don't look out!”
     
  “Baby-Devil that you are, what has the
man done to you?”
     
  “He won't go home.”
     
  “What is that to you?”
     
  “He gives me a “apenny to pelt him home
if I ketches him out too late,” says the boy. And then chants, like a little
savage, half stumbling and half dancing among the rags and laces of his
dilapidated boots:—
     
   
     
  “Widdy widdy wen!
I—ket—ches—Im—out—ar—ter—ten, Widdy widdy wy!