Dick, having inspected the amiable creature in a glance, was nothing loath. So the waiter, having brought the wine, was sent for an additional glass, and then again for eatables. Dick's companion proved so agreeable that he soon ordered more wine and presently forgot the music in contemplating her charms, her air of piquant impudence, her affectations, and the shallow smartness of her talk. He was so entertained by her that, when the night was late, on arriving with her at Westminster Bridge, he took a hackney coach and accompanied her to her lodgings, which, to his astonishment, were in the quite respectable-looking house of a hosier in High Holborn.
At his frank expression of surprise, she seemed huffed; wondered why she should not be supposed to live like any other lady, and said it was nobody's business if she chose now and then to go out for an evening of pleasure in a free and easy manner. Her ruffled feelings were soon smoothed down, however, and when Dick left her it was with an appointment to take her to the next Hampstead Assembly.
This Vauxhall incident cost Dick so much of the money got from the sale of his new suit that he was soon fain to visit the Monmouth Street dealer again, this time carrying the gamekeeper's suit and wearing that bestowed on him by the whimsical gentleman met at Taunton. For both these suits, the shopkeeper gave him a sum of money and a very plain blue frock, a worn white waistcoat, and a pair of mended black breeches. Thus Dick left the shop in vastly different attire from that in which he had entered it, and when he returned to his lodging the change made his landlady's son gape with wonder.
Before Dick had made up his mind as to how he should rebuild his fortunes, he received one afternoon a visitor in a hackney coach, who was none other than the companionable young lady of Vauxhall, to whom he had made known his place of residence. Her errand now was to learn why he had failed to keep his engagement for the Hampstead Assembly. She did not stay long to reproach him, for no sooner had she taken note of his cheapened appearance, and made sure that it came from necessity, than she swept out of his room and back to the coach, on the pretence of being offended at the broken appointment.
On leaving the house, she was seen by the landlady's son, who came to Dick presently, with a grin, and remarked that Sukey Green had become a great lady since she had ceased to walk the Strand of nights. On inquiring, Dick learned that his visitor was well known by sight to the landlady's son as having been, not many weeks before, one of the countless frail damsels infesting the sidewalks of the town after nightfall. Some turn of fortune had taken her from her rags and a hole in Butcher Row to the fine clothes and comfortable lodgings she now possessed, instead of to the Bridewell or the river or a pauper's grave, as another turn might have done. Perhaps she had but returned to the condition from which she had fallen.
Dick soon had fallen fortunes of his own to think of. He knew not how to attempt to make his money multiply; or rather he devised in his mind so many methods that he could not confine his thoughts to any one of them. Thus rendered inert by his very versatility, he saw his money go for mere necessities, and at last he had to seek still cheaper lodgings, which he found in Green Arbor Court, a place redeemed in his eyes by the fact that Oliver Goldsmith had once lived there.
It was not a locality designed to increase his cheerfulness. He had a narrow, bare room, high up in a dirty, squalid house; from his window he could see old clothes flying from countless windows and lines; and the sounds most common to his ears were the voices of washerwomen laughing or quarrelling and of children shouting or squalling. Not far in one direction was Newgate Prison, and not far in another was that of the Fleet.
In going to Fleet Street, he had to descend Breakneck Stairs,—which numbered thirty-two and were in two steep flights and led him to the edge of Fleet Ditch,—traverse a narrow street, and go through Fleet Market. This was a route that Dick often took, for he preferred still to dine in and about Fleet Street, though no longer at the Grecian Coffee-house or Dick's or the Mitre Tavern, to all which places he had resorted while lodging in George Street, but at the cheaper places,—Clifton's Eating-house, in Butcher Row, for one. Sometimes his meal consisted solely of a pot of beer at the Goat Ale House in Shire Lane. He fell at last to the down-stairs eating-houses, where his table-mates were hackney coachmen, servants poorly paid or unemployed, and poverty-stricken devils and unsuccessful rascals of every sort. It was here that his fortune took an upward course again.
Appealed to, one day, in a low tavern, to settle a card dispute between two bloated, sore-faced fellows who had come to the point of accusing each other of being, one a footpad and the other a grave robber, Dick acted the umpire to the satisfaction of both, and then went on to do a few astonishing things with their cards. Others in the tavern gathered round him, until presently, seeing the crowd and the interest both increasing, Dick observed that his time was valuable and that he could not afford to show any more skill for nothing. But the body-stealer refused to receive the dirty cards handed back to him by Dick, and the footpad speedily took up a collection, with such a "money-or-your-life" air that a hatful of greasy coins was soon raised to induce Dick to go on with his tricks. As many of these tricks were of old Tom's invention, they differed from those with which the London scamps were familiar.
The footpad and the resurrectionist now persuaded Dick to go to another tavern, where they opened the way for his apparently extemporaneous performances, and where they raised good sums for him. He wondered at first at the zeal with which they worked to enrich him, but he presently saw that they, pretending to be chance observers, were quietly making bets with other spectators on the results of certain of his card manipulations. He thereupon left off, and escaped from this undesired partnership. But he now engaged an honest, impoverished hack writer, whom he met in an eating-cellar, to sit at tavern tables with him and appear an interested observer of his card tricks, enlist the crowd's attention, and suggest the inevitable passing around of the hat. This combination continued for a week, during which time the low taverns were visited in succession, from Whitefriars to St. Catherine's, from Cripplegate to Southwark. Dick's earnings consisted only of what the spectators willingly gave for their amusement, but at the week's end that amount sufficed for the purchase of a good suit of clothes at a tailor's in the Strand, and for another purpose besides, which Dick, once more clad like a gentleman, speedily set out upon.