BARTLEBY, THE SCRIVENER.
A STORY OF WALL-STREET.
I am a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations for the last
thirty years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what
would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as
yet nothing that I know of has ever been written:--I mean the
law-copyists or scriveners. I have known very many of them,
professionally and privately, and if I pleased, could relate divers
histories, at which good-natured gentlemen might smile, and sentimental
souls might weep. But I waive the biographies of all other scriveners
for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener of the
strangest I ever saw or heard of. While of other law-copyists I might
write the complete life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done.
I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography
of this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature. Bartleby was one
of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the
original sources, and in his case those are very small. What my own
astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, _that_ is all I know of him, except,
indeed, one vague report which will appear in the sequel.
Ere introducing the scrivener, as he first appeared to me, it is fit I
make some mention of myself, my _employees_, my business, my chambers,
and general surroundings; because some such description is indispensable
to an adequate understanding of the chief character about to be
presented.
Imprimis: I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with
a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best. Hence,
though I belong to a profession proverbially energetic and nervous, even
to turbulence, at times, yet nothing of that sort have I ever suffered
to invade my peace. I am one of those unambitious lawyers who never
addresses a jury, or in any way draws down public applause; but in the
cool tranquility of a snug retreat, do a snug business among rich men's
bonds and mortgages and title-deeds. All who know me, consider me an
eminently _safe_ man. The late John Jacob Astor, a personage little
given to poetic enthusiasm, had no hesitation in pronouncing my first
grand point to be prudence; my next, method. I do not speak it in
vanity, but simply record the fact, that I was not unemployed in my
profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love
to repeat, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings
like unto bullion. I will freely add, that I was not insensible to the
late John Jacob Astor's good opinion.
Some time prior to the period at which this little history begins, my
avocations had been largely increased. The good old office, now extinct
in the State of New York, of a Master in Chancery, had been conferred
upon me. It was not a very arduous office, but very pleasantly
remunerative. I seldom lose my temper; much more seldom indulge in
dangerous indignation at wrongs and outrages; but I must be permitted to
be rash here and declare, that I consider the sudden and violent
abrogation of the office of Master in Chancery, by the new Constitution,
as a--premature act; inasmuch as I had counted upon a life-lease of the
profits, whereas I only received those of a few short years. But this
is by the way.
My chambers were up stairs at No.--Wall-street. At one end they looked
upon the white wall of the interior of a spacious sky-light shaft,
penetrating the building from top to bottom. This view might have been
considered rather tame than otherwise, deficient in what landscape
painters call "life." But if so, the view from the other end of my
chambers offered, at least, a contrast, if nothing more. In that
direction my windows commanded an unobstructed view of a lofty brick
wall, black by age and everlasting shade; which wall required no
spy-glass to bring out its lurking beauties, but for the benefit of all
near-sighted spectators, was pushed up to within ten feet of my window
panes. Owing to the great height of the surrounding buildings, and my
chambers being on the second floor, the interval between this wall and
mine not a little resembled a huge square cistern.
At the period just preceding the advent of Bartleby, I had two persons
as copyists in my employment, and a promising lad as an office-boy.
First, Turkey; second, Nippers; third, Ginger Nut. These may seem
names, the like of which are not usually found in the Directory. In
truth they were nicknames, mutually conferred upon each other by my
three clerks, and were deemed expressive of their respective persons or
characters. Turkey was a short, pursy Englishman of about my own age,
that is, somewhere not far from sixty. In the morning, one might say,
his face was of a fine florid hue, but after twelve o'clock,
meridian--his dinner hour--it blazed like a grate full of Christmas
coals; and continued blazing--but, as it were, with a gradual wane--till
6 o'clock, P.M. or thereabouts, after which I saw no more of the
proprietor of the face, which gaining its meridian with the sun, seemed
to set with it, to rise, culminate, and decline the following day, with
the like regularity and undiminished glory. There are many singular
coincidences I have known in the course of my life, not the least among
which was the fact, that exactly when Turkey displayed his fullest beams
from his red and radiant countenance, just then, too, at that critical
moment, began the daily period when I considered his business capacities
as seriously disturbed for the remainder of the twenty-four hours. Not
that he was absolutely idle, or averse to business then; far from it.
The difficulty was, he was apt to be altogether too energetic. There
was a strange, inflamed, flurried, flighty recklessness of activity
about him. He would be incautious in dipping his pen into his inkstand.
All his blots upon my documents, were dropped there after twelve
o'clock, meridian. Indeed, not only would he be reckless and sadly
given to making blots in the afternoon, but some days he went further,
and was rather noisy. At such times, too, his face flamed with
augmented blazonry, as if cannel coal had been heaped on anthracite. He
made an unpleasant racket with his chair; spilled his sand-box; in
mending his pens, impatiently split them all to pieces, and threw them
on the floor in a sudden passion; stood up and leaned over his table,
boxing his papers about in a most indecorous manner, very sad to behold
in an elderly man like him. Nevertheless, as he was in many ways a most
valuable person to me, and all the time before twelve o'clock, meridian,
was the quickest, steadiest creature too, accomplishing a great deal of
work in a style not easy to be matched--for these reasons, I was willing
to overlook his eccentricities, though indeed, occasionally, I
remonstrated with him. I did this very gently, however, because, though
the civilest, nay, the blandest and most reverential of men in the
morning, yet in the afternoon he was disposed, upon provocation, to be
slightly rash with his tongue, in fact, insolent. Now, valuing his
morning services as I did, and resolved not to lose them; yet, at the
same time made uncomfortable by his inflamed ways after twelve o'clock;
and being a man of peace, unwilling by my admonitions to call forth
unseemly retorts from him; I took upon me, one Saturday noon (he was
always worse on Saturdays), to hint to him, very kindly, that perhaps
now that he was growing old, it might be well to abridge his labors; in
short, he need not come to my chambers after twelve o'clock, but, dinner
over, had best go home to his lodgings and rest himself till teatime.
But no; he insisted upon his afternoon devotions. His countenance
became intolerably fervid, as he oratorically assured me--gesticulating
with a long ruler at the other end of the room--that if his services in
the morning were useful, how indispensable, then, in the afternoon?
"With submission, sir," said Turkey on his occasion, "I consider myself
your right-hand man. In the morning I but marshal and deploy my
columns; but in the afternoon I put myself at their head, and gallantly
charge the foe, thus!"--and he made a violent thrust with the ruler.
"But the blots, Turkey," intimated I.
"True,--but, with submission, sir, behold these hairs! I am getting
old. Surely, sir, a blot or two of a warm afternoon is not to be
severely urged against gray hairs. Old age--even if it blot the
page--is honorable. With submission, sir, we _both_ are getting old."
This appeal to my fellow-feeling was hardly to be resisted. At all
events, I saw that go he would not. So I made up my mind to let him
stay, resolving, nevertheless, to see to it, that during the afternoon
he had to do with my less important papers.
Nippers, the second on my list, was a whiskered, sallow, and, upon the
whole, rather piratical-looking young man of about five and twenty. I
always deemed him the victim of two evil powers--ambition and
indigestion. The ambition was evinced by a certain impatience of the
duties of a mere copyist, an unwarrantable usurpation of strictly
professional affairs, such as the original drawing up of legal
documents. The indigestion seemed betokened in an occasional nervous
testiness and grinning irritability, causing the teeth to audibly grind
together over mistakes committed in copying; unnecessary maledictions,
hissed, rather than spoken, in the heat of business; and especially by a
continual discontent with the height of the table where he worked.
Though of a very ingenious mechanical turn, Nippers could never get this
table to suit him. He put chips under it, blocks of various sorts, bits
of pasteboard, and at last went so far as to attempt an exquisite
adjustment by final pieces of folded blotting paper. But no invention
would answer. If, for the sake of easing his back, he brought the table
lid at a sharp angle well up towards his chin, and wrote there like a
man using the steep roof of a Dutch house for his desk:--then he
declared that it stopped the circulation in his arms. If now he lowered
the table to his waistbands, and stooped over it in writing, then there
was a sore aching in his back. In short, the truth of the matter was,
Nippers knew not what he wanted. Or, if he wanted any thing, it was to
be rid of a scrivener's table altogether. Among the manifestations of
his diseased ambition was a fondness he had for receiving visits from
certain ambiguous-looking fellows in seedy coats, whom he called his
clients. Indeed I was aware that not only was he, at times,
considerable of a ward-politician, but he occasionally did a little
business at the Justices' courts, and was not unknown on the steps of
the Tombs. I have good reason to believe, however, that one individual
who called upon him at my chambers, and who, with a grand air, he
insisted was his client, was no other than a dun, and the alleged
title-deed, a bill. But with all his failings, and the annoyances he
caused me, Nippers, like his compatriot Turkey, was a very useful man to
me; wrote a neat, swift hand; and, when he chose, was not deficient in a
gentlemanly sort of deportment. Added to this, he always dressed in a
gentlemanly sort of way; and so, incidentally, reflected credit upon my
chambers. Whereas with respect to Turkey, I had much ado to keep him
from being a reproach to me. His clothes were apt to look oily and
smell of eating-houses. He wore his pantaloons very loose and baggy in
summer. His coats were execrable; his hat not to be handled. But while
the hat was a thing of indifference to me, inasmuch as his natural
civility and deference, as a dependent Englishman, always led him to
doff it the moment he entered the room, yet his coat was another matter.
Concerning his coats, I reasoned with him; but with no effect. The
truth was, I suppose, that a man of so small an income, could not afford
to sport such a lustrous face and a lustrous coat at one and the same
time. As Nippers once observed, Turkey's money went chiefly for red
ink. One winter day I presented Turkey with a highly-respectable
looking coat of my own, a padded gray coat, of a most comfortable
warmth, and which buttoned straight up from the knee to the neck. I
thought Turkey would appreciate the favor, and abate his rashness and
obstreperousness of afternoons. But no. I verily believe that
buttoning himself up in so downy and blanket-like a coat had a
pernicious effect upon him; upon the same principle that too much oats
are bad for horses. In fact, precisely as a rash, restive horse is said
to feel his oats, so Turkey felt his coat. It made him insolent. He
was a man whom prosperity harmed.
Though concerning the self-indulgent habits of Turkey I had my own
private surmises, yet touching Nippers I was well persuaded that
whatever might by his faults in other respects, he was, at least, a
temperate young man. But indeed, nature herself seemed to have been his
vintner, and at his birth charged him so thoroughly with an irritable,
brandy-like disposition, that all subsequent potations were needless.
When I consider how, amid the stillness of my chambers, Nippers would
sometimes impatiently rise from his seat, and stooping over his table,
spread his arms wide apart, seize the whole desk, and move it, and jerk
it, with a grim, grinding motion on the floor, as if the table were a
perverse voluntary agent, intent on thwarting and vexing him; I plainly
perceive that for Nippers, brandy and water were altogether superfluous.
It was fortunate for me that, owing to its peculiar
cause--indigestion--the irritability and consequent nervousness of
Nippers, were mainly observable in the morning, while in the afternoon
he was comparatively mild. So that Turkey's paroxysms only coming on
about twelve o'clock, I never had to do with their eccentricities at one
time. Their fits relieved each other like guards. When Nippers' was
on, Turkey's was off; and _vice versa_. This was a good natural
arrangement under the circumstances.
Ginger Nut, the third on my list, was a lad some twelve years old. His
father was a carman, ambitious of seeing his son on the bench instead of
a cart, before he died. So he sent him to my office as student at law,
errand boy, and cleaner and sweeper, at the rate of one dollar a week.
He had a little desk to himself, but he did not use it much. Upon
inspection, the drawer exhibited a great array of the shells of various
sorts of nuts. Indeed, to this quick-witted youth the whole noble
science of the law was contained in a nut-shell. Not the least among
the employments of Ginger Nut, as well as one which he discharged with
the most alacrity, was his duty as cake and apple purveyor for Turkey
and Nippers. Copying law papers being proverbially dry, husky sort of
business, my two scriveners were fain to moisten their mouths very often
with Spitzenbergs to be had at the numerous stalls night the Custom
House and Post Office. Also, they sent Ginger Nut very frequently for
that peculiar cake--small, flat, round, and very spicy--after which he
had been named by them. Of a cold morning when business was but dull,
Turkey would gobble up scores of these cakes, as if they were mere
wafers--indeed they sell them at the rate of six or eight for a
penny--the scrape of his pen blending with the crunching of the crisp
particles in his mouth. Of all the fiery afternoon blunders and
flurried rashnesses of Turkey, was his once moistening a ginger-cake
between his lips, and clapping it on to a mortgage for a seal. I came
within an ace of dismissing him then. But he mollified me by making an
oriental bow, and saying--"With submission, sir, it was generous of me
to find you in stationery on my own account."
Now my original business--that of a conveyancer and title hunter, and
drawer-up of recondite documents of all sorts--was considerably
increased by receiving the master's office. There was now great work
for scriveners. Not only must I push the clerks already with me, but I
must have additional help. In answer to my advertisement, a motionless
young man one morning, stood upon my office threshold, the door being
open, for it was summer. I can see that figure now--pallidly neat,
pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn! It was Bartleby.
After a few words touching his qualifications, I engage him, glad to
have among my corps of copyists a man of so singularly sedate an aspect,
which I thought might operate beneficially upon the flighty temper of
Turkey, and the fiery one of Nippers.
I should have stated before that ground glass folding-doors divided my
premises into two parts, one of which was occupied by my scriveners, the
other by myself. According to my humor I threw open these doors, or
closed them. I resolved to assign Bartleby a corner by the
folding-doors, but on my side of them, so as to have this quiet man
within easy call, in case any trifling thing was to be done. I placed
his desk close up to a small side-window in that part of the room, a
window which originally had afforded a lateral view of certain grimy
back-yards and bricks, but which, owing to subsequent erections,
commanded at present no view at all, though it gave some light. Within
three feet of the panes was a wall, and the light came down from far
above, between two lofty buildings, as from a very small opening in a
dome. Still further to a satisfactory arrangement, I procured a high
green folding screen, which might entirely isolate Bartleby from my
sight, though not remove him from my voice. And thus, in a manner,
privacy and society were conjoined.
At first Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long
famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my
documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night
line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light. I should have been
quite delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully
industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically.
It is, of course, an indispensable part of a scrivener's business to
verify the accuracy of his copy, word by word. Where there are two or
more scriveners in an office, they assist each other in this
examination, one reading from the copy, the other holding the original.
It is a very dull, wearisome, and lethargic affair. I can readily
imagine that to some sanguine temperaments it would be altogether
intolerable. For example, I cannot credit that the mettlesome poet
Byron would have contentedly sat down with Bartleby to examine a law
document of, say five hundred pages, closely written in a crimpy hand.
Now and then, in the haste of business, it had been my habit to assist
in comparing some brief document myself, calling Turkey or Nippers for
this purpose. One object I had in placing Bartleby so handy to me
behind the screen, was to avail myself of his services on such trivial
occasions. It was on the third day, I think, of his being with me, and
before any necessity had arisen for having his own writing examined,
that, being much hurried to complete a small affair I had in hand, I
abruptly called to Bartleby. In my haste and natural expectancy of
instant compliance, I sat with my head bent over the original on my
desk, and my right hand sideways, and somewhat nervously extended with
the copy, so that immediately upon emerging from his retreat, Bartleby
might snatch it and proceed to business without the least delay.
In this very attitude did I sit when I called to him, rapidly stating
what it was I wanted him to do--namely, to examine a small paper with
me. Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving
from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, "I
would prefer not to."
I sat awhile in perfect silence, rallying my stunned faculties.
Immediately it occurred to me that my ears had deceived me, or Bartleby
had entirely misunderstood my meaning. I repeated my request in the
clearest tone I could assume. But in quite as clear a one came the
previous reply, "I would prefer not to."
"Prefer not to," echoed I, rising in high excitement, and crossing the
room with a stride. "What do you mean? Are you moon-struck? I want
you to help me compare this sheet here--take it," and I thrust it
towards him.
"I would prefer not to," said he.
I looked at him steadfastly. His face was leanly composed; his gray eye
dimly calm. Not a wrinkle of agitation rippled him. Had there been the
least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in
other words, had there been any thing ordinarily human about him,
doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises. But
as it was, I should have as soon thought of turning my pale
plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero out of doors. I stood gazing at him
awhile, as he went on with his own writing, and then reseated myself at
my desk. This is very strange, thought I. What had one best do? But
my business hurried me. I concluded to forget the matter for the
present, reserving it for my future leisure. So calling Nippers from
the other room, the paper was speedily examined.
