Bartleby, The Scrivener | Page 6

for such extraordinary conduct.
"Why do you refuse?"
"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.
He lives, then, on ginger-nuts, thought I; never eats a dinner, properly speaking; he must
be a vegetarian then; but no; he never eats even vegetables, he eats nothing but
ginger-nuts. My mind then ran on in reveries concerning the probable effects upon the
human constitution of living entirely on ginger-nuts. Ginger-nuts are so called because
they contain ginger as one of their peculiar constituents, and the final flavoring one. Now
what was ginger? A hot, spicy thing. Was Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all. Ginger, then,
had no effect upon Bartleby. Probably he preferred it should have none.
Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance. If the individual so
resisted be of a not inhumane temper, and the resisting one perfectly harmless in his
passivity;