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- 2026-01-30T07:57:34.136Z
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- structure-extraction-lambda
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- 379
- text
- “I would prefer not to.”
With any other man I should have flown outright into a dreadful
passion, scorned all further words, and thrust him ignominiously from
my presence. But there was something about Bartleby that not only
strangely disarmed me, but in a wonderful manner touched and
disconcerted me. I began to reason with him.
“These are your own copies we are about to examine. It is labor saving
to you, because one examination will answer for your four papers. It is
common usage. Every copyist is bound to help examine his copy. Is it
not so? Will you not speak? Answer!”
“I prefer not to,” he replied in a flute-like tone. It seemed to me
that while I had been addressing him, he carefully revolved every
statement that I made; fully comprehended the meaning; could not
gainsay the irresistible conclusions; but, at the same time, some
paramount consideration prevailed with him to reply as he did.
“You are decided, then, not to comply with my request—a request made
according to common usage and common sense?”
He briefly gave me to understand that on that point my judgment was
sound. Yes: his decision was irreversible.
It is not seldom the case that when a man is browbeaten in some
unprecedented and violently unreasonable way, he begins to stagger in
his own plainest faith. He begins, as it were, vaguely to surmise that,
wonderful as it may be, all the justice and all the reason is on the
other side. Accordingly, if any disinterested persons are present, he
turns to them for some reinforcement for his own faltering mind.
“Turkey,” said I, “what do you think of this? Am I not right?”
“With submission, sir,” said Turkey, with his blandest tone, “I think
that you are.”
“Nippers,” said I, “what do _you_ think of it?”
“I think I should kick him out of the office.”
(The reader of nice perceptions will here perceive that, it being
morning, Turkey’s answer is couched in polite and tranquil terms, but
Nippers replies in ill-tempered ones. Or, to repeat a previous
sentence, Nippers’ ugly mood was on duty and Turkey’s off.)
“Ginger Nut,” said I, willing to enlist the smallest suffrage in my
behalf, “what do you think of it?”
“I think, sir, he’s a little _luny_,” replied Ginger Nut with a grin.
“You hear what they say,” said I, turning towards the screen, “come
forth and do your duty.”
But he vouchsafed no reply. I pondered a moment in sore perplexity. But
once more business hurried me. I determined again to postpone the
consideration of this dilemma to my future leisure. With a little
trouble we made out to examine the papers without Bartleby, though at
every page or two, Turkey deferentially dropped his opinion that this
proceeding was quite out of the common; while Nippers, twitching in his
chair with a dyspeptic nervousness, ground out between his set teeth
occasional hissing maledictions against the stubborn oaf behind the
screen. And for his (Nippers’) part, this was the first and the last
time he would do another man’s business without pay.
Meanwhile Bartleby sat in his hermitage, oblivious to every thing but
his own peculiar business there.
Some days passed, the scrivener being employed upon another lengthy
work. His late remarkable conduct led me to regard his ways narrowly. I
observed that he never went to dinner; indeed that he never went any
where. As yet I had never of my personal knowledge known him to be
outside of my office. He was a perpetual sentry in the corner. At about
eleven o’clock though, in the morning, I noticed that Ginger Nut would
advance toward the opening in Bartleby’s screen, as if silently
beckoned thither by a gesture invisible to me where I sat. The boy
would then leave the office jingling a few pence, and reappear with a
handful of ginger-nuts which he delivered in the hermitage, receiving
two of the cakes for his trouble.
- title
- Chunk 1