warious gammon.’
‘Sir?’ said I.
‘And warious gammon,’ he repeated, in a louder voice. ‘You might
have seen me in armour, too, if you had looked sharp. Blessed if I
ha’n’t stood in half the suits of armour as ever came out of
Pratt’s shop: and sat, for weeks together, a-eating nothing, out of
half the gold and silver dishes as has ever been lent for the
purpose out of Storrses, and Mortimerses, or Garrardses, and
Davenportseseses.’
Excited, as it appeared, by a sense of injury, I thought he would
never have found an end for the last word. But, at length it
rolled sullenly away with the thunder.
‘Pardon me,’ said I, ‘you are a well-favoured, well-made man, and
yet – forgive me – I find, on examining my mind, that I associate
you with – that my recollection indistinctly makes you, in short –
excuse me – a kind of powerful monster.’
‘It would be a wonder if it didn’t,’ he said. ‘Do you know what my
points are?’
‘No,’ said I.
‘My throat and my legs,’ said he. ‘When I don’t set for a head, I
mostly sets for a throat and a pair of legs. Now, granted you was
a painter, and was to work at my throat for a week together, I
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Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces
suppose you’d see a lot of lumps and bumps there, that would never
be there at all, if you looked at me, complete, instead of only my
throat. Wouldn’t you?’
‘Probably,’ said I, surveying him.
‘Why, it stands to reason,’ said the Model. ‘Work another week at
my legs, and it’ll be the same thing. You’ll make ’em out as
knotty and as knobby, at last, as if they was the trunks of two old
trees. Then, take and stick my legs and throat on to another man’s
body, and you’ll make a reg’lar monster. And that’s the way the
public gets their reg’lar monsters, every first Monday in May, when
the Royal Academy Exhibition opens.’
‘You are a critic,’ said I, with an air of deference.
‘I’m in an uncommon ill humour, if that’s it,’ rejoined the Model,
with great indignation. ‘As if it warn’t bad enough for a bob ahour,
for a man to be mixing himself up with that there jolly old
furniter that one ‘ud think the public know’d the wery nails in by
this time – or to be putting on greasy old ‘ats and cloaks, and
playing tambourines in the Bay o’ Naples, with Wesuvius a smokin’
according to pattern in the background, and the wines a bearing
wonderful in the middle distance – or to be unpolitely kicking up
his legs among a lot o’ gals, with no reason whatever in his mind
but to show ’em – as if this warn’t bad enough, I’m to go and be
thrown out of employment too!’
‘Surely no!’ said I.
‘Surely yes,’ said the indignant Model. ‘BUT I’LL GROW ONE.’
The gloomy and threatening manner in which he muttered the last
words, can never be effaced from my remembrance. My blood ran
cold.
I asked of myself, what was it that this desperate Being was
resolved to grow. My breast made no response.
I ventured to implore him to explain his meaning. With a scornful
laugh, he uttered this dark prophecy:
‘I’LL GROW ONE. AND, MARK MY WORDS, IT SHALL HAUNT YOU!’
We parted in the storm, after I had forced half-a-crown on his
acceptance, with a trembling hand. I conclude that something
supernatural happened to the steamboat, as it bore his reeking
figure down the river; but it never got into the papers.
Two years elapsed, during which I followed my profession without
any vicissitudes; never holding so much as a motion, of course. At
the expiration of that period, I found myself making my way home to
the Temple, one night, in precisely such another storm of thunder
and lightning as that by which I had been overtaken on board the
steamboat – except that this storm, bursting over the town at
midnight, was rendered much more awful by the darkness and the
hour.
As I turned into my court, I really thought a thunderbolt would