194 KNOWING DICKENS
intelligible reason; to be going anywhere when met; to be about many places
rather than at any.” The familiar story of deterioration and decline still
troubles Dickens, now in images not altogether remote from the activities
of Houselessness himself.
On the steps of St. Martin’s church, just as the bells strike three, another
spectral double “rose up at my feet with a cry of loneliness and houseless-
ness, struck out of it by the bell, the like of which I never heard. We then
stood face to face looking at one another, frightened by one another.” The
bell, the cry of desolation, the church, hard by Warren’s Blacking—all sug-
gest the ancient terror, but the scene moves rapidly into a relation of guilt.
The staring of this “thing” or “creature” makes the well-clad narrator see
himself as “persecutor, devil, ghost—whatever it thought me,” and when he
reaches out to offer it money “it twisted out of its garment, like the young
man in the New Testament, and left me standing alone with rags in my
hand.” The young man in question is the last of Jesus’s followers to desert
him when he is taken in Gethsemane; as the persecutors catch him by his
linen cloth, he flees from them naked (Mark 14.51–52). The narrator is
guilty not only of wealth and security but also of betrayal, which hovers in
the air, oddly shared between the nightwalker and his young, lonely, terri-
fied ghost.
“The most spectral person my houselessness encountered” is a cadaverous-
looking man wearing nothing but a long coat and hat, who regularly eats
his pudding in a coffee-shop in Covent Garden market. The heavy meat
pudding comes out of the man’s hat as if it were his head or his brain. It
is repeatedly stabbed overhand with a large knife, torn apart with the fin-
gers, and devoured. The red face of this man is explained in this fashion:
“My mother was a red-faced women who liked drink, and I looked at her
hard when she laid in her coffin, and I took the complexion.” “Somehow,”
observes the narrator, “the pudding seemed an unwholesome pudding after
that, and I put myself in its way no more.” Whether or not this is an image
of cannibalizing the mother, it is a deeply disturbing scene. The “looking
hard” between the man and his dead mother mirrors the narrator’s own
fascination with the man, and suggests his morbid fear of kinship with the
man’s bestial violence. Recurrent images in Dickens of heads figuratively
separated from bodies may suggest something about the violence in his
desire to disperse the contents of his head among externalized figures, or
even to kill the head through the activity of the body. Like the terrified
young man in rags, the pudding-eater defies any definitive interpretation
and attests to the uncanny power that allowed Dickens to get his uncon-
scious into his writing.