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The Uncommercial Traveller

by Charles Dickens · English · Gutenberg #914 · 831,571 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Uncommercial Traveller

Author: Charles Dickens


        
Release date: May 1, 1997 [eBook #914]
                Most recently updated: June 8, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/914

Credits: David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER ***

                          [Picture: Book cover]

                       [Picture: Time and his Wife]





                             THE UNCOMMERCIAL
                                TRAVELLER


                                * * * * *

                            By CHARLES DICKENS

                                * * * * *

         _With Illustrations by Harry Furniss and A. J. Goodman_

                                * * * * *

                       LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LD.
                    NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
                                   1905

                                 CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. His General Line of Business
CHAPTER II. The Shipwreck
CHAPTER III. Wapping Workhouse
CHAPTER IV. Two Views of a Cheap Theatre
CHAPTER V. Poor Mercantile Jack
CHAPTER VI. Refreshments for Travellers
CHAPTER VII. Travelling Abroad
CHAPTER VIII. The Great Tasmania’s Cargo
CHAPTER IX. City of London Churches
CHAPTER X. Shy Neighbourhoods
CHAPTER XI. Tramps
CHAPTER XII. Dullborough Town
CHAPTER XIII. Night Walks
CHAPTER XIV. Chambers
CHAPTER XV. Nurse’s Stories
CHAPTER XVI. Arcadian London
CHAPTER XVII. The Italian Prisoner
CHAPTER XVIII. The Calais Night Mail
CHAPTER XIX. Some Recollections of Mortality
CHAPTER XX. Birthday Celebrations
CHAPTER XXI. The Short-Timers
CHAPTER XXII. Bound for the Great Salt Lake
CHAPTER XXIII. The City of the Absent
CHAPTER XXIV. An Old Stage-coaching House
CHAPTER XXV. The Boiled Beef of New England
CHAPTER XXVI. Chatham Dockyard
CHAPTER XXVII. In the French-Flemish Country
CHAPTER XXVIII. Medicine Men of Civilisation
CHAPTER XXIX. Titbull’s Alms-Houses
CHAPTER XXX. The Ruffian
CHAPTER XXXI. Aboard Ship
CHAPTER XXXII. A Small Star in the East
CHAPTER XXXIII. A Little Dinner in an Hour
CHAPTER XXXIV. Mr. Barlow
CHAPTER XXXV. On an Amateur Beat
CHAPTER XXXVI. A Fly-Leaf in a Life
CHAPTER XXXVII. A Plea for Total Abstinence




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

_Time and his Wife_
_A Cheap Theatre_
_The City Personage_ 
_Titbull’s Alms-Houses_




I
HIS GENERAL LINE OF BUSINESS


ALLOW me to introduce myself—first negatively.

No landlord is my friend and brother, no chambermaid loves me, no waiter
worships me, no boots admires and envies me.  No round of beef or tongue
or ham is expressly cooked for me, no pigeon-pie is especially made for
me, no hotel-advertisement is personally addressed to me, no hotel-room
tapestried with great-coats and railway wrappers is set apart for me, no
house of public entertainment in the United Kingdom greatly cares for my
opinion of its brandy or sherry.  When I go upon my journeys, I am not
usually rated at a low figure in the bill; when I come home from my
journeys, I never get any commission.  I know nothing about prices, and
should have no idea, if I were put to it, how to wheedle a man into
ordering something he doesn’t want.  As a town traveller, I am never to
be seen driving a vehicle externally like a young and volatile pianoforte
van, and internally like an oven in which a number of flat boxes are
baking in layers.  As a country traveller, I am rarely to be found in a
gig, and am never to be encountered by a pleasure train, waiting on the
platform of a branch station, quite a Druid in the midst of a light
Stonehenge of samples.

And yet—proceeding now, to introduce myself positively—I am both a town
traveller and a country traveller, and am always on the road.
Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of Human Interest
Brothers, and have rather a large connection in the fancy goods way.
Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and there from my rooms in
Covent-garden, London—now about the city streets: now, about the country
by-roads—seeing many little things, and some great things, which, because
they interest me, I think may interest others.

These are my chief credentials as the Uncommercial Traveller.




II
THE SHIPWRECK


NEVER had I seen a year going out, or going on, under quieter
circumstances.  Eighteen hundred and fifty-nine had but another day to
live, and truly its end was Peace on that sea-shore that morning.

So settled and orderly was everything seaward, in the bright light of the
sun and under the transparent shadows of the clouds, that it was hard to
imagine the bay otherwise, for years past or to come, than it was that
very day.  The Tug-steamer lying a little off the shore, the Lighter
lying still nearer to the shore, the boat alongside the Lighter, the
regularly-turning windlass aboard the Lighter, the methodical figures at
work, all slowly and regularly heaving up and down with the breathing of
the sea, all seemed as much a part of the nature of the place as the tide
itself.  The tide was on the flow, and had been for some two hours and a
half; there was a slight obstruction in the sea within a few yards of my
feet: as if the stump of a tree, with earth enough about it to keep it
from lying horizontally on the water, had slipped a little from the
land—and as I stood upon the beach and observed it dimpling the light
swell that was coming in, I cast a stone over it.

So orderly, so quiet, so regular—the rising and falling of the
Tug-steamer, the Lighter, and the boat—the turning of the windlass—the
coming in of the tide—that I myself seemed, to my own thinking, anything
but new to the spot.  Yet, I had never seen it in my life, a minute
before, and had traversed two hundred miles to get at it.  That very
morning I had come bowling down, and struggling up, hill-country roads;
looking back at snowy summits; meeting courteous peasants well to do,
driving fat pigs and cattle to market: noting the neat and thrifty
dwellings, with their unusual quantity of clean white linen, drying on
the bushes; having windy weather suggested by every cotter’s little rick,
with its thatch straw-ridged and extra straw-ridged into overlapping
compartments like the back of a rhinoceros.  Had I not given a lift of
fourteen miles to the Coast-guardsman (kit and all), who was coming to
his spell of duty there, and had we not just now parted company?  So it
was; but the journey seemed to glide down into the placid sea, with other
chafe and trouble, and for the moment nothing was so calmly and
monotonously real under the sunlight as the gentle rising and falling of
the water with its freight, the regular turning of the windlass aboard
the Lighter, and the slight obstruction so very near my feet.

O reader, haply turning this page by the fireside at Home, and hearing
the night wind rumble in the chimney, that slight obstruction was the
uppermost fragment of the Wreck of the Royal Charter, Australian trader
and passenger ship, Homeward bound, that struck here on the terrible
morning of the twenty-sixth of this October, broke into three parts, went
down with her treasure of at least five hundred human lives, and has
never stirred since!

From which point, or from which, she drove ashore, stern foremost; on
which side, or on which, she passed the little Island in the bay, for
ages henceforth to be aground certain yards outside her; these are
rendered bootless questions by the darkness of that night and the
darkness of death.  Here she went down.

Even as I stood on the beach with the words ‘Here she went down!’ in my
ears, a diver in his grotesque dress, dipped heavily over the side of the
boat alongside the Lighter, and dropped to the bottom.  On the shore by
the water’s edge, was a rough tent, made of fragments of wreck, where
other divers and workmen sheltered themselves, and where they had kept
Christmas-day with rum and roast beef, to the destruction of their frail
chimney.  Cast up among the stones and boulders of the beach, were great
spars of the lost vessel, and masses of iron twisted by the fury of the
sea into the strangest forms.  The timber was already bleached and iron
rusted, and even these objects did no violence to the prevailing air the
whole scene wore, of having been exactly the same for years and years.

Yet, only two short months had gone, since a man, living on the nearest
hill-top overlooking the sea, being blown out of bed at about daybreak by
the wind that had begun to strip his roof off, and getting upon a ladder
with his nearest neighbour to construct some temporary device for keeping
his house over his head, saw from the ladder’s elevation as he looked
down by chance towards the shore, some dark troubled object close in with
the land.  And he and the other, descending to the beach, and finding the
sea mercilessly beating over a great broken ship, had clambered up the
stony ways, like staircases without stairs, on which the wild village
hangs in little clusters, as fruit hangs on boughs, and had given the
alarm.  And so, over the hill-slopes, and past the waterfall, and down
the gullies where the land drains off into the ocean, the scattered
quarrymen and fishermen inhabiting that part of Wales had come running to
the dismal sight—their clergyman among them.  And as they stood in the
leaden morning, stricken with pity, leaning hard against the wind, their
breath and vision often failing as the sleet and spray rushed at them
from the ever forming and dissolving mountains of sea, and as the wool
which was a part of the vessel’s cargo blew in with the salt foam and
remained upon the land when the foam melted, they saw the ship’s
life-boat put off from one of the heaps of wreck; and first, there were
three men in her, and in a moment she capsized, and there were but two;
and again, she was struck by a vast mass of water, and there was but one;
and again, she was thrown bottom upward, and that one, with his arm
struck through the broken planks and waving as if for the help that could
never reach him, went down into the deep.

It was the clergyman himself from whom I heard this, while I stood on the
shore, looking in his kind wholesome face as it turned to the spot where
the boat had been.  The divers were down then, and busy.  They were
‘lifting’ to-day the gold found yesterday—some five-and-twenty thousand
pounds.  Of three hundred and fifty thousand pounds’ worth of gold, three
hundred thousand pounds’ worth, in round numbers, was at that time
recovered.  The great bulk of the remainder was surely and steadily
coming up.  Some loss of sovereigns there would be, of course; indeed, at
first sovereigns had drifted in with the sand, and been scattered far and
wide over the beach, like sea-shells; but most other golden treasure
would be found.  As it was brought up, it went aboard the Tug-steamer,
where good account was taken of it.  So tremendous had the force of the
sea been when it broke the ship, that it had beaten one great ingot of
gold, deep into a strong and heavy piece of her solid iron-work: in
which, also, several loose sovereigns that the ingot had swept in before
it, had been found, as firmly embedded as though the iron had been liquid
when they were forced there.  It had been remarked of such bodies come
ashore, too, as had been seen by scientific men, that they had been
stunned to death, and not suffocated.  Observation, both of the internal
change that had been wrought in them, and of their external expression,
showed death to have been thus merciful and easy.  The report was
brought, while I was holding such discourse on the beach, that no more
bodies had come ashore since last night.  It began to be very doubtful
whether many more would be thrown up, until the north-east winds of the
early spring set in.  Moreover, a great number of the passengers, and
particularly the second-class women-passengers, were known to have been
in the middle of the ship when she parted, and thus the collapsing wreck
would have fallen upon them after yawning open, and would keep them down.
A diver made known, even then, that he had come upon the body of a man,
and had sought to release it from a great superincumbent weight; but
that, finding he could not do so without mutilating the remains, he had
left it where it was.

It was the kind and wholesome face I have made mention of as being then
beside me, that I had purposed to myself to see, when I left home for
Wales.  I had heard of that clergyman, as having buried many scores of
the shipwrecked people; of his having opened his house and heart to their
agonised friends; of his having used a most sweet and patient diligence
for weeks and weeks, in the performance of the forlornest offices that
Man can render to his kind; of his having most tenderly and thoroughly
devoted himself to the dead, and to those who were sorrowing for the
dead.  I had said to myself, ‘In the Christmas season of the year, I
should like to see that man!’  And he had swung the gate of his little
garden in coming out to meet me, not half an hour ago.

So cheerful of spirit and guiltless of affectation, as true practical
Christianity ever is!  I read more of the New Testament in the fresh
frank face going up the village beside me, in five minutes, than I have
read in anathematising discourses (albeit put to press with enormous
flourishing of trumpets), in all my life.  I heard more of the Sacred
Book in the cordial voice that had nothing to say about its owner, than
in all the would-be celestial pairs of bellows that have ever blown
conceit at me.

We climbed towards the little church, at a cheery pace, among the loose
stones, the deep mud, the wet coarse grass, the outlying water, and other
obstructions from which frost and snow had lately thawed.  It was a
mistake (my friend was glad to tell me, on the way) to suppose that the
peasantry had shown any superstitious avoidance of the drowned; on the
whole, they had done very well, and had assisted readily.  Ten shillings
had been paid for the bringing of each body up to the church, but the way
was steep, and a horse and cart (in which it was wrapped in a sheet) were
necessary, and three or four men, and, all things considered, it was not
a great price.  The people were none the richer for the wreck, for it was
the season of the herring-shoal—and who could cast nets for fish, and
find dead men and women in the draught?

He had the church keys in his hand, and opened the churchyard gate, and
opened the church door; and we went in.

It is a little church of great antiquity; there is reason to believe that
some church has occupied the spot, these thousand years or more.  The
pulpit was gone, and other things usually belonging to the church were
gone, owing to its living congregation having deserted it for the
neighbouring school-room, and yielded it up to the dead.  The very
Commandments had been shouldered out of their places, in the bringing in
of the dead; the black wooden tables on which they were painted, were
askew, and on the stone pavement below them, and on the stone pavement
all over the church, were the marks and stains where the drowned had been
laid down.  The eye, with little or no aid from the imagination, could
yet see how the bodies had been turned, and where the head had been and
where the feet.  Some faded traces of the wreck of the Australian ship
may be discernible on the stone pavement of this little church, hundreds
of years hence, when the digging for gold in Australia shall have long
and long ceased out of the land.

Forty-four shipwrecked men and women lay here at one time, awaiting
burial.  Here, with weeping and wailing in every room of his house, my
companion worked alone for hours, solemnly surrounded by eyes that could
not see him, and by lips that could not speak to him, patiently examining
the tattered clothing, cutting off buttons, hair, marks from linen,
anything that might lead to subsequent identification, studying faces,
looking for a scar, a bent finger, a crooked toe, comparing letters sent
to him with the ruin about him.  ‘My dearest brother had bright grey eyes
and a pleasant smile,’ one sister wrote.  O poor sister! well for you to
be far from here, and keep that as your last remembrance of him!

The ladies of the clergyman’s family, his wife and two sisters-in-law,
came in among the bodies often.  It grew to be the business of their
lives to do so.  Any new arrival of a bereaved woman would stimulate
their pity to compare the description brought, with the dread realities.
Sometimes, they would go back able to say, ‘I have found him,’ or, ‘I
think she lies there.’  Perhaps, the mourner, unable to bear the sight of
all that lay in the church, would be led in blindfold.  Conducted to the
spot with many compassionate words, and encouraged to look, she would
say, with a piercing cry, ‘This is my boy!’ and drop insensible on the
insensible figure.

He soon observed that in some cases of women, the identification of
persons, though complete, was quite at variance with the marks upon the
linen; this led him to notice that even the marks upon the linen were
sometimes inconsistent with one another; and thus he came to understand
that they had dressed in great haste and agitation, and that their
clothes had become mixed together.  The identification of men by their
dress, was rendered extremely difficult, in consequence of a large
proportion of them being dressed alike—in clothes of one kind, that is to
say, supplied by slopsellers and outfitters, and not made by single
garments but by hundreds.  Many of the men were bringing over parrots,
and had receipts upon them for the price of the birds; others had bills
of exchange in their pockets, or in belts.  Some of these documents,
carefully unwrinkled and dried, were little less fresh in appearance that
day, than the present page will be under ordinary circumstances, after
having been opened three or four times.

In that lonely place, it had not been easy to obtain even such common
commodities in towns, as ordinary disinfectants.  Pitch had been burnt in
the church, as the readiest thing at hand, and the frying-pan in which it
had bubbled over a brazier of coals was still there, with its ashes.
Hard by the Communion-Table, were some boots that had been taken off the
drowned and preserved—a gold-digger’s boot, cut down the leg for its
removal—a trodden-down man’s ankle-boot with a buff cloth top—and
others—soaked and sandy, weedy and salt.

From the church, we passed out into the churchyard.  Here, there lay, at
that time, one hundred and forty-five bodies, that had come ashore from
the wreck.  He had buried them, when not identified, in graves containing
four each.  He had numbered each body in a register describing it, and
had placed a corresponding number on each coffin, and over each grave.
Identified bodies he had buried singly, in private graves, in another
part of the church-yard.  Several bodies had been exhumed from the graves
of four, as relatives had come from a distance and seen his register;
and, when recognised, these have been reburied in private graves, so that
the mourners might erect separate headstones over the remains.  In all
such cases he had performed the funeral service a second time, and the
ladies of his house had attended.  There had been no offence in the poor
ashes when they were brought again to the light of day; the beneficent
Earth had already absorbed it.  The drowned were buried in their clothes.
To supply the great sudden demand for coffins, he had got all the
neighbouring people handy at tools, to work the livelong day, and Sunday
likewise.  The coffins were neatly formed;—I had seen two, waiting for
occupants, under the lee of the ruined walls of a stone hut on the beach,
within call of the tent where the Christmas Feast was held.  Similarly,
one of the graves for four was lying open and ready, here, in the
churchyard.  So much of the scanty space was already devoted to the
wrecked people, that the villagers had begun to express uneasy doubts
whether they themselves could lie in their own ground, with their
forefathers and descendants, by-and-by.  The churchyard being but a step
from the clergyman’s dwelling-house, we crossed to the latter; the white
surplice was hanging up near the door ready to be put on at any time, for
a funeral service.

The cheerful earnestness of this good Christian minister was as
consolatory, as the circumstances out of which it shone were sad.  I
never have seen anything more delightfully genuine than the calm
dismissal by himself and his household of all they had undergone, as a
simple duty that was quietly done and ended.  In speaking of it, they
spoke of it with great compassion for the bereaved; but laid no stress
upon their own hard share in those weary weeks, except as it had attached
many people to them as friends, and elicited many touching expressions of
gratitude.  This clergyman’s brother—himself the clergyman of two
adjoining parishes, who had buried thirty-four of the bodies in his own
churchyard, and who had done to them all that his brother had done as to
the larger number—must be understood as included in the family.  He was
there, with his neatly arranged papers, and made no more account of his
trouble than anybody else did.  Down to yesterday’s post outward, my
clergyman alone had written one thousand and seventy-five letters to
relatives and friends of the lost people.  In the absence of
self-assertion, it was only through my now and then delicately putting a
question as the occasion arose, that I became informed of these things.
It was only when I had remarked again and again, in the church, on the
awful nature of the scene of death he had been required so closely to
familiarise himself with for the soothing of the living, that he had
casually said, without the least abatement of his cheerfulness, ‘indeed,
it had rendered him unable for a time to eat or drink more than a little
coffee now and then, and a piece of bread.’

In this noble modesty, in this beautiful simplicity, in this serene
avoidance of the least attempt to ‘improve’ an occasion which might be
supposed to have sunk of its own weight into my heart, I seemed to have
happily come, in a few steps, from the churchyard with its open grave,
which was the type of Death, to the Christian dwelling side by side with
it, which was the type of Resurrection.  I never shall think of the
former, without the latter.  The two will always rest side by side in my
memory.  If I had lost any one dear to me in this unfortunate ship, if I
had made a voyage from Australia to look at the grave in the churchyard,
I should go away, thankful to GOD that that house was so close to it, and
that its shadow by day and its domestic lights by night fell upon the
earth in which its Master had so tenderly laid my dear one’s head.

The references that naturally arose out of our conversation, to the
descriptions sent down of shipwrecked persons, and to the gratitude of
relations and friends, made me very anxious to see some of those letters.
I was presently seated before a shipwreck of papers, all bordered with
black, and from them I made the following few extracts.

A mother writes:

    REVEREND SIR.  Amongst the many who perished on your shore was
    numbered my beloved son.  I was only just recovering from a severe
    illness, and this fearful affliction has caused a relapse, so that I
    am unable at present to go to identify the remains of the loved and
    lost.  My darling son would have been sixteen on Christmas-day next.
    He was a most amiable and obedient child, early taught the way of
    salvation.  We fondly hoped that as a British seaman he might be an
    ornament to his profession, but, ‘it is well;’ I feel assured my dear
    boy is now with the redeemed.  Oh, he did not wish to go this last
    voyage!  On the fifteenth of October, I received a letter from him
    from Melbourne, date August twelfth; he wrote in high spirits, and in
    conclusion he says: ‘Pray for a fair breeze, dear mamma, and I’ll not
    forget to whistle for it! and, God permitting, I shall see you and
    all my little pets again.  Good-bye, dear mother—good-bye, dearest
    parents.  Good-bye, dear brother.’  Oh, it was indeed an eternal
    farewell.  I do not apologise for thus writing you, for oh, my heart
    is so very sorrowful.

A husband writes:

    MY DEAR KIND SIR.  Will you kindly inform me whether there are any
    initials upon the ring and guard you have in possession, found, as
    the Standard says, last Tuesday?  Believe me, my dear sir, when I say
    that I cannot express my deep gratitude in words sufficiently for
    your kindness to me on that fearful and appalling day.  Will you tell
    me what I can do for you, and will you write me a consoling letter to
    prevent my mind from going astray?

A widow writes:

    Left in such a state as I am, my friends and I thought it best that
    my dear husband should be buried where he lies, and, much as I should
    have liked to have had it otherwise, I must submit.  I feel, from all
    I have heard of you, that you will see it done decently and in order.
    Little does it signify to us, when the soul has departed, where this
    poor body lies, but we who are left behind would do all we can to
    show how we loved them.  This is denied me, but it is God’s hand that
    afflicts us, and I try to submit.  Some day I may be able to visit
    the spot, and see where he lies, and erect a simple stone to his
    memory.  Oh! it will be long, long before I forget that dreadful
    night!  Is there such a thing in the vicinity, or any shop in Bangor,
    to which I could send for a small picture of Moelfra or Llanallgo
    church, a spot now sacred to me?

Another widow writes:

    I have received your letter this morning, and do thank you most
    kindly for the interest you have taken about my dear husband, as well
    for the sentiments yours contains, evincing the spirit of a Christian
    who can sympathise with those who, like myself, are broken down with
    grief.

    May God bless and sustain you, and all in connection with you, in
    this great trial.  Time may roll on and bear all its sons away, but
    your name as a disinterested person will stand in history, and, as
    successive years pass, many a widow will think of your noble conduct,
    and the tears of gratitude flow down many a cheek, the tribute of a
    thankful heart, when other things are forgotten for ever.

A father writes:

    I am at a loss to find words to sufficiently express my gratitude to
    you for your kindness to my son Richard upon the melancholy occasion
    of his visit to his dear brother’s body, and also for your ready
    attention in pronouncing our beautiful burial service over my poor
    unfortunate son’s remains.  God grant that your prayers over him may
    reach the Mercy Seat, and that his soul may be received (through
    Christ’s intercession) into heaven!

    His dear mother begs me to convey to you her heartfelt thanks.

Those who were received at the clergyman’s house, write thus, after
leaving it:

    DEAR AND NEVER-TO-BE-FORGOTTEN FRIENDS.  I arrived here yesterday
    morning without accident, and am about to proceed to my home by
    railway.

    I am overpowered when I think of you and your hospitable home.  No
    words could speak language suited to my heart.  I refrain.  God
    reward you with the same measure you have meted with!

    I enumerate no names, but embrace you all.

MY BELOVED FRIENDS.  This is the first day that I have been able to leave
my bedroom since I returned, which will explain the reason of my not
writing sooner.

If I could only have had my last melancholy hope realised in recovering
the body of my beloved and lamented son, I should have returned home
somewhat comforted, and I think I could then have been comparatively
resigned.

I fear now there is but little prospect, and I mourn as one without hope.

The only consolation to my distressed mind is in having been so feelingly
allowed by you to leave the matter in your hands, by whom I well know
that everything will be done that can be, according to arrangements made
before I left the scene of the awful catastrophe, both as to the
identification of my dear son, and also his interment.

I feel most anxious to hear whether anything fresh has transpired since I
left you; will you add another to the many deep obligations I am under to
you by writing to me?  And should the body of my dear and unfortunate son
be identified, let me hear from you immediately, and I will come again.

Words cannot express the gratitude I feel I owe to you all for your
benevolent aid, your kindness, and your sympathy.

                                * * * * *

MY DEARLY BELOVED FRIENDS.  I arrived in safety at my house yesterday,
and a night’s rest has restored and tranquillised me.  I must again
repeat, that language has no words by which I can express my sense of
obligation to you.  You are enshrined in my heart of hearts.

I have seen him! and can now realise my misfortune more than I have
hitherto been able to do.  Oh, the bitterness of the cup I drink!  But I
bow submissive.  God _must_ have done right.  I do not want to feel less,
but to acquiesce more simply.

                                * * * * *

There were some Jewish passengers on board the Royal Charter, and the
gratitude of the Jewish people is feelingly expressed in the following
letter bearing date from ‘the office of the Chief Rabbi:’

    REVEREND SIR.  I cannot refrain from expressing to you my heartfelt
    thanks on behalf of those of my flock whose relatives have
    unfortunately been among those who perished at the late wreck of the
    Royal Charter.  You have, indeed, like Boaz, ‘not left off your
    kindness to the living and the dead.’

    You have not alone acted kindly towards the living by receiving them
    hospitably at your house, and energetically assisting them in their
    mournful duty, but also towards the dead, by exerting yourself to
    have our co-religionists buried in our ground, and according to our
    rites.  May our heavenly Father reward you for your acts of humanity
    and true philanthropy!

The ‘Old Hebrew congregation of Liverpool’ thus express themselves
through their secretary:

    REVEREND SIR.  The wardens of this congregation have learned with
    great pleasure that, in addition to those indefatigable exertions, at
    the scene of the late disaster to the Royal Charter, which have
    received universal recognition, you have very benevolently employed
    your valuable efforts to assist such members of our faith as have
    sought the bodies of lost friends to give them burial in our
    consecrated grounds, with the observances and rites prescribed by the
    ordinances of our religion.

The wardens desire me to take the earliest available opportunity to offer
to you, on behalf of our community, the expression of their warm
acknowledgments and grateful thanks, and their sincere wishes for your
continued welfare and prosperity.

A Jewish gentleman writes:

    REVEREND AND DEAR SIR.  I take the opportunity of thanking you right
    earnestly for the promptness you displayed in answering my note with
    full particulars concerning my much lamented brother, and I also
    herein beg to express my sincere regard for the willingness you
    displayed and for the facility you afforded for getting the remains
    of my poor brother exhumed.  It has been to us a most sorrowful and
    painful event, but when we meet with such friends as yourself, it in
    a measure, somehow or other, abates that mental anguish, and makes
    the suffering so much easier to be borne.  Considering the
    circumstances connected with my poor brother’s fate, it does, indeed,
    appear a hard one.  He had been away in all seven years; he returned
    four years ago to see his family.  He was then engaged to a very
    amiable young lady.  He had been very successful abroad, and was now
    returning to fulfil his sacred vow; he brought all his property with
    him in gold uninsured.  We heard from him when the ship stopped at
    Queenstown, when he was in the highest of hope, and in a few short
    hours afterwards all was washed away.

Mournful in the deepest degree, but too sacred for quotation here, were
the numerous references to those miniatures of women worn round the necks
of rough men (and found there after death), those locks of hair, those
scraps of letters, those many many slight memorials of hidden tenderness.
One man cast up by the sea bore about him, printed on a perforated lace
card, the following singular (and unavailing) charm:

                                 A BLESSING.

    May the blessing of God await thee.  May the sun of glory shine
    around thy bed; and may the gates of plenty, honour, and happiness be
    ever open to thee.  May no sorrow distress thy days; may no grief
    disturb thy nights.  May the pillow of peace kiss thy cheek, and the
    pleasures of imagination attend thy dreams; and when length of years
    makes thee tired of earthly joys, and the curtain of death gently
    closes around thy last sleep of human existence, may the Angel of God
    attend thy bed, and take care that the expiring lamp of life shall
    not receive one rude blast to hasten on its extinction.

A sailor had these devices on his right arm.  ‘Our Saviour on the Cross,
the forehead of the Crucifix and the vesture stained red; on the lower
part of the arm, a man and woman; on one side of the Cross, the
appearance of a half moon, with a face; on the other side, the sun; on
the top of the Cross, the letters I.H.S.; on the left arm, a man and
woman dancing, with an effort to delineate the female’s dress; under
which, initials.’  Another seaman ‘had, on the lower part of the right
arm, the device of a sailor and a female; the man holding the Union Jack
with a streamer, the folds of which waved over her head, and the end of
it was held in her hand.  On the upper part of the arm, a device of Our
Lord on the Cross, with stars surrounding the head of the Cross, and one
large star on the side in Indian Ink.  On the left arm, a flag, a true
lover’s knot, a face, and initials.’  This tattooing was found still
plain, below the discoloured outer surface of a mutilated arm, when such
surface was carefully scraped away with a knife.  It is not improbable
that the perpetuation of this marking custom among seamen, may be
referred back to their desire to be identified, if drowned and flung
ashore.

It was some time before I could sever myself from the many interesting
papers on the table, and then I broke bread and drank wine with the kind
family before I left them.  As I brought the Coast-guard down, so I took
the Postman back, with his leathern wallet, walking-stick, bugle, and
terrier dog.  Many a heart-broken letter had he brought to the Rectory
House within two months many; a benignantly painstaking answer had he
carried back.

As I rode along, I thought of the many people, inhabitants of this mother
country, who would make pilgrimages to the little churchyard in the years
to come; I thought of the many people in Australia, who would have an
interest in such a shipwreck, and would find their way here when they
visit the Old World; I thought of the writers of all the wreck of letters
I had left upon the table; and I resolved to place this little record
where it stands.  Convocations, Conferences, Diocesan Epistles, and the
like, will do a great deal for Religion, I dare say, and Heaven send they
may! but I doubt if they will ever do their Master’s service half so
well, in all the time they last, as the Heavens have seen it done in this
bleak spot upon the rugged coast of Wales.

Had I lost the friend of my life, in the wreck of the Royal Charter; had
I lost my betrothed, the more than friend of my life; had I lost my
maiden daughter, had I lost my hopeful boy, had I lost my little child; I
would kiss the hands that worked so busily and gently in the church, and
say, ‘None better could have touched the form, though it had lain at
home.’  I could be sure of it, I could be thankful for it: I could be
content to leave the grave near the house the good family pass in and out
of every day, undisturbed, in the little churchyard where so many are so
strangely brought together.

Without the name of the clergyman to whom—I hope, not without carrying
comfort to some heart at some time—I have referred, my reference would be
as nothing.  He is the Reverend Stephen Roose Hughes, of Llanallgo, near
Moelfra, Anglesey.  His brother is the Reverend Hugh Robert Hughes, of
Penrhos, Alligwy.




III
WAPPING WORKHOUSE


MY day’s no-business beckoning me to the East-end of London, I had turned
my face to that point of the metropolitan compass on leaving
Covent-garden, and had got past the India House, thinking in my idle
manner of Tippoo-Sahib and Charles Lamb, and had got past my little
wooden midshipman, after affectionately patting him on one leg of his
knee-shorts for old acquaintance’ sake, and had got past Aldgate Pump,
and had got past the Saracen’s Head (with an ignominious rash of posting
bills disfiguring his swarthy countenance), and had strolled up the empty
yard of his ancient neighbour the Black or Blue Boar, or Bull, who
departed this life I don’t know when, and whose coaches are all gone I
don’t know where; and I had come out again into the age of railways, and
I had got past Whitechapel Church, and was—rather inappropriately for an
Uncommercial Traveller—in the Commercial Road.  Pleasantly wallowing in
the abundant mud of that thoroughfare, and greatly enjoying the huge
piles of building belonging to the sugar refiners, the little masts and
vanes in small back gardens in back streets, the neighbouring canals and
docks, the India vans lumbering along their stone tramway, and the
pawnbrokers’ shops where hard-up Mates had pawned so many sextants and
quadrants, that I should have bought a few cheap if I had the least
notion how to use them, I at last began to file off to the right, towards
Wapping.

Not that I intended to take boat at Wapping Old Stairs, or that I was
going to look at the locality, because I believe (for I don’t) in the
constancy of the young woman who told her sea-going lover, to such a
beautiful old tune, that she had ever continued the same, since she gave
him the ’baccer-box marked with his name; I am afraid he usually got the
worst of those transactions, and was frightfully taken in.  No, I was
going to Wapping, because an Eastern police magistrate had said, through
the morning papers, that there was no classification at the Wapping
workhouse for women, and that it was a disgrace and a shame, and divers
other hard names, and because I wished to see how the fact really stood.
For, that Eastern police magistrates are not always the wisest men of the
East, may be inferred from their course of procedure respecting the
fancy-dressing and pantomime-posturing at St. George’s in that quarter:
which is usually, to discuss the matter at issue, in a state of mind
betokening the weakest perplexity, with all parties concerned and
unconcerned, and, for a final expedient, to consult the complainant as to
what he thinks ought to be done with the defendant, and take the
defendant’s opinion as to what he would recommend to be done with
himself.

Long before I reached Wapping, I gave myself up as having lost my way,
and, abandoning myself to the narrow streets in a Turkish frame of mind,
relied on predestination to bring me somehow or other to the place I
wanted if I were ever to get there.  When I had ceased for an hour or so
to take any trouble about the matter, I found myself on a swing-bridge
looking down at some dark locks in some dirty water.  Over against me,
stood a creature remotely in the likeness of a young man, with a puffed
sallow face, and a figure all dirty and shiny and slimy, who may have
been the youngest son of his filthy old father, Thames, or the drowned
man about whom there was a placard on the granite post like a large
thimble, that stood between us.

I asked this apparition what it called the place?  Unto which, it
replied, with a ghastly grin and a sound like gurgling water in its
throat:

‘Mr. Baker’s trap.’

As it is a point of great sensitiveness with me on such occasions to be
equal to the intellectual pressure of the conversation, I deeply
considered the meaning of this speech, while I eyed the apparition—then
engaged in hugging and sucking a horizontal iron bar at the top of the
locks.  Inspiration suggested to me that Mr. Baker was the acting coroner
of that neighbourhood.

‘A common place for suicide,’ said I, looking down at the locks.

‘Sue?’ returned the ghost, with a stare.  ‘Yes!  And Poll.  Likewise
Emily.  And Nancy.  And Jane;’ he sucked the iron between each name; ‘and
all the bileing.  Ketches off their bonnets or shorls, takes a run, and
headers down here, they doos.  Always a headerin’ down here, they is.
Like one o’clock.’

‘And at about that hour of the morning, I suppose?’

‘Ah!’ said the apparition.  ‘_They_ an’t partickler.  Two ’ull do for
_them_.  Three.  All times o’ night.  On’y mind you!’  Here the
apparition rested his profile on the bar, and gurgled in a sarcastic
manner.  ‘There must be somebody comin’.  They don’t go a headerin’ down
here, wen there an’t no Bobby nor gen’ral Cove, fur to hear the splash.’

According to my interpretation of these words, I was myself a General
Cove, or member of the miscellaneous public.  In which modest character I
remarked:

‘They are often taken out, are they, and restored?’

‘I dunno about restored,’ said the apparition, who, for some occult
reason, very much objected to that word; ‘they’re carried into the
werkiss and put into a ’ot bath, and brought round.  But I dunno about
restored,’ said the apparition; ‘blow _that_!’—and vanished.

As it had shown a desire to become offensive, I was not sorry to find
myself alone, especially as the ‘werkiss’ it had indicated with a twist
of its matted head, was close at hand.  So I left Mr. Baker’s terrible
trap (baited with a scum that was like the soapy rinsing of sooty
chimneys), and made bold to ring at the workhouse gate, where I was
wholly unexpected and quite unknown.

A very bright and nimble little matron, with a bunch of keys in her hand,
responded to my request to see the House.  I began to doubt whether the
police magistrate was quite right in his facts, when I noticed her quick,
active little figure and her intelligent eyes.

The Traveller (the matron intimated) should see the worst first.  He was
welcome to see everything.  Such as it was, there it all was.

This was the only preparation for our entering ‘the Foul wards.’  They
were in an old building squeezed away in a corner of a paved yard, quite
detached from the more modern and spacious main body of the workhouse.
They were in a building most monstrously behind the time—a mere series of
garrets or lofts, with every inconvenient and objectionable circumstance
in their construction, and only accessible by steep and narrow
staircases, infamously ill-adapted for the passage up-stairs of the sick
or down-stairs of the dead.

A-bed in these miserable rooms, here on bedsteads, there (for a change,
as I understood it) on the floor, were women in every stage of distress
and disease.  None but those who have attentively observed such scenes,
can conceive the extraordinary variety of expression still latent under
the general monotony and uniformity of colour, attitude, and condition.
The form a little coiled up and turned away, as though it had turned its
back on this world for ever; the uninterested face at once lead-coloured
and yellow, looking passively upward from the pillow; the haggard mouth a
little dropped, the hand outside the coverlet, so dull and indifferent,
so light, and yet so heavy; these were on every pallet; but when I
stopped beside a bed, and said ever so slight a word to the figure lying
there, the ghost of the old character came into the face, and made the
Foul ward as various as the fair world.  No one appeared to care to live,
but no one complained; all who could speak, said that as much was done
for them as could be done there, that the attendance was kind and
patient, that their suffering was very heavy, but they had nothing to ask
for.  The wretched rooms were as clean and sweet as it is possible for
such rooms to be; they would become a pest-house in a single week, if
they were ill-kept.

I accompanied the brisk matron up another barbarous staircase, into a
better kind of loft devoted to the idiotic and imbecile.  There was at
least Light in it, whereas the windows in the former wards had been like
sides of school-boys’ bird-cages.  There was a strong grating over the
fire here, and, holding a kind of state on either side of the hearth,
separated by the breadth of this grating, were two old ladies in a
condition of feeble dignity, which was surely the very last and lowest
reduction of self-complacency to be found in this wonderful humanity of
ours.  They were evidently jealous of each other, and passed their whole
time (as some people do, whose fires are not grated) in mentally
disparaging each other, and contemptuously watching their neighbours.
One of these parodies on provincial gentlewomen was extremely talkative,
and expressed a strong desire to attend the service on Sundays, from
which she represented herself to have derived the greatest interest and
consolation when allowed that privilege.  She gossiped so well, and
looked altogether so cheery and harmless, that I began to think this a
case for the Eastern magistrate, until I found that on the last occasion
of her attending chapel she had secreted a small stick, and had caused
some confusion in the responses by suddenly producing it and belabouring
the congregation.

So, these two old ladies, separated by the breadth of the
grating—otherwise they would fly at one another’s caps—sat all day long,
suspecting one another, and contemplating a world of fits.  For everybody
else in the room had fits, except the wards-woman; an elderly,
able-bodied pauperess, with a large upper lip, and an air of repressing
and saving her strength, as she stood with her hands folded before her,
and her eyes slowly rolling, biding her time for catching or holding
somebody.  This civil personage (in whom I regretted to identify a
reduced member of my honourable friend Mrs. Gamp’s family) said, ‘They
has ’em continiwal, sir.  They drops without no more notice than if they
was coach-horses dropped from the moon, sir.  And when one drops, another
drops, and sometimes there’ll be as many as four or five on ’em at once,
dear me, a rolling and a tearin’, bless you!—this young woman, now, has
’em dreadful bad.’

She turned up this young woman’s face with her hand as she said it.  This
young woman was seated on the floor, pondering in the foreground of the
afflicted.  There was nothing repellent either in her face or head.
Many, apparently worse, varieties of epilepsy and hysteria were about
her, but she was said to be the worst here.  When I had spoken to her a
little, she still sat with her face turned up, pondering, and a gleam of
the mid-day sun shone in upon her.

—Whether this young woman, and the rest of these so sorely troubled, as
they sit or lie pondering in their confused dull way, ever get mental
glimpses among the motes in the sunlight, of healthy people and healthy
things?  Whether this young woman, brooding like this in the summer
season, ever thinks that somewhere there are trees and flowers, even
mountains and the great sea?  Whether, not to go so far, this young woman
ever has any dim revelation of that young woman—that young woman who is
not here and never will come here; who is courted, and caressed, and
loved, and has a husband, and bears children, and lives in a home, and
who never knows what it is to have this lashing and tearing coming upon
her?  And whether this young woman, God help her, gives herself up then
and drops like a coach-horse from the moon?

I hardly knew whether the voices of infant children, penetrating into so
hopeless a place, made a sound that was pleasant or painful to me.  It
was something to be reminded that the weary world was not all aweary, and
was ever renewing itself; but, this young woman was a child not long ago,
and a child not long hence might be such as she.  Howbeit, the active
step and eye of the vigilant matron conducted me past the two provincial
gentlewomen (whose dignity was ruffled by the children), and into the
adjacent nursery.

There were many babies here, and more than one handsome young mother.
There were ugly young mothers also, and sullen young mothers, and callous
young mothers.  But, the babies had not appropriated to themselves any
bad expression yet, and might have been, for anything that appeared to
the contrary in their soft faces, Princes Imperial, and Princesses Royal.
I had the pleasure of giving a poetical commission to the baker’s man to
make a cake with all despatch and toss it into the oven for one
red-headed young pauper and myself, and felt much the better for it.
Without that refreshment, I doubt if I should have been in a condition
for ‘the Refractories,’ towards whom my quick little matron—for whose
adaptation to her office I had by this time conceived a genuine
respect—drew me next, and marshalled me the way that I was going.

The Refractories were picking oakum, in a small room giving on a yard.
They sat in line on a form, with their backs to a window; before them, a
table, and their work.  The oldest Refractory was, say twenty; youngest
Refractory, say sixteen.  I have never yet ascertained in the course of
my uncommercial travels, why a Refractory habit should affect the tonsils
and uvula; but, I have always observed that Refractories of both sexes
and every grade, between a Ragged School and the Old Bailey, have one
voice, in which the tonsils and uvula gain a diseased ascendency.

‘Five pound indeed!  I hain’t a going fur to pick five pound,’ said the
Chief of the Refractories, keeping time to herself with her head and
chin.  ‘More than enough to pick what we picks now, in sich a place as
this, and on wot we gets here!’

(This was in acknowledgment of a delicate intimation that the amount of
work was likely to be increased.  It certainly was not heavy then, for
one Refractory had already done her day’s task—it was barely two
o’clock—and was sitting behind it, with a head exactly matching it.)

‘A pretty Ouse this is, matron, ain’t it?’ said Refractory Two, ‘where a
pleeseman’s called in, if a gal says a word!’

‘And wen you’re sent to prison for nothink or less!’ said the Chief,
tugging at her oakum as if it were the matron’s hair.  ‘But any place is
better than this; that’s one thing, and be thankful!’

A laugh of Refractories led by Oakum Head with folded arms—who originated
nothing, but who was in command of the skirmishers outside the
conversation.

‘If any place is better than this,’ said my brisk guide, in the calmest
manner, ‘it is a pity you left a good place when you had one.’

‘Ho, no, I didn’t, matron,’ returned the Chief, with another pull at her
oakum, and a very expressive look at the enemy’s forehead.  ‘Don’t say
that, matron, cos it’s lies!’

Oakum Head brought up the skirmishers again, skirmished, and retired.

‘And _I_ warn’t a going,’ exclaimed Refractory Two, ‘though I was in one
place for as long as four year—_I_ warn’t a going fur to stop in a place
that warn’t fit for me—there!  And where the family warn’t ’spectable
characters—there!  And where I fortunately or hunfort’nately, found that
the people warn’t what they pretended to make theirselves out to
be—there!  And where it wasn’t their faults, by chalks, if I warn’t made
bad and ruinated—Hah!’

During this speech, Oakum Head had again made a diversion with the
skirmishers, and had again withdrawn.

The Uncommercial Traveller ventured to remark that he supposed Chief
Refractory and Number One, to be the two young women who had been taken
before the magistrate?

‘Yes!’ said the Chief, ‘we har! and the wonder is, that a pleeseman an’t
’ad in now, and we took off agen.  You can’t open your lips here, without
a pleeseman.’

Number Two laughed (very uvularly), and the skirmishers followed suit.

‘I’m sure I’d be thankful,’ protested the Chief, looking sideways at the
Uncommercial, ‘if I could be got into a place, or got abroad.  I’m sick
and tired of this precious Ouse, I am, with reason.’

So would be, and so was, Number Two.  So would be, and so was, Oakum
Head.  So would be, and so were, Skirmishers.

The Uncommercial took the liberty of hinting that he hardly thought it
probable that any lady or gentleman in want of a likely young domestic of
retiring manners, would be tempted into the engagement of either of the
two leading Refractories, on her own presentation of herself as per
sample.

‘It ain’t no good being nothink else here,’ said the Chief.

The Uncommercial thought it might be worth trying.

‘Oh no it ain’t,’ said the Chief.

‘Not a bit of good,’ said Number Two.

‘And I’m sure I’d be very thankful to be got into a place, or got
abroad,’ said the Chief.

‘And so should I,’ said Number Two.  ‘Truly thankful, I should.’

Oakum Head then rose, and announced as an entirely new idea, the mention
of which profound novelty might be naturally expected to startle her
unprepared hearers, that she would be very thankful to be got into a
place, or got abroad.  And, as if she had then said, ‘Chorus, ladies!’
all the Skirmishers struck up to the same purpose.  We left them,
thereupon, and began a long walk among the women who were simply old and
infirm; but whenever, in the course of this same walk, I looked out of
any high window that commanded the yard, I saw Oakum Head and all the
other Refractories looking out at their low window for me, and never
failing to catch me, the moment I showed my head.

In ten minutes I had ceased to believe in such fables of a golden time as
youth, the prime of life, or a hale old age.  In ten minutes, all the
lights of womankind seemed to have been blown out, and nothing in that
way to be left this vault to brag of, but the flickering and expiring
snuffs.

And what was very curious, was, that these dim old women had one company
notion which was the fashion of the place.  Every old woman who became
aware of a visitor and was not in bed hobbled over a form into her
accustomed seat, and became one of a line of dim old women confronting
another line of dim old women across a narrow table.  There was no
obligation whatever upon them to range themselves in this way; it was
their manner of ‘receiving.’  As a rule, they made no attempt to talk to
one another, or to look at the visitor, or to look at anything, but sat
silently working their mouths, like a sort of poor old Cows.  In some of
these wards, it was good to see a few green plants; in others, an
isolated Refractory acting as nurse, who did well enough in that
capacity, when separated from her compeers; every one of these wards, day
room, night room, or both combined, was scrupulously clean and fresh.  I
have seen as many such places as most travellers in my line, and I never
saw one such, better kept.

Among the bedridden there was great patience, great reliance on the books
under the pillow, great faith in GOD.  All cared for sympathy, but none
much cared to be encouraged with hope of recovery; on the whole, I should
say, it was considered rather a distinction to have a complication of
disorders, and to be in a worse way than the rest.  From some of the
windows, the river could be seen with all its life and movement; the day
was bright, but I came upon no one who was looking out.

In one large ward, sitting by the fire in arm-chairs of distinction, like
the President and Vice of the good company, were two old women, upwards
of ninety years of age.  The younger of the two, just turned ninety, was
deaf, but not very, and could easily be made to hear.  In her early time
she had nursed a child, who was now another old woman, more infirm than
herself, inhabiting the very same chamber.  She perfectly understood this
when the matron told it, and, with sundry nods and motions of her
forefinger, pointed out the woman in question.  The elder of this pair,
ninety-three, seated before an illustrated newspaper (but not reading
it), was a bright-eyed old soul, really not deaf, wonderfully preserved,
and amazingly conversational.  She had not long lost her husband, and had
been in that place little more than a year.  At Boston, in the State of
Massachusetts, this poor creature would have been individually addressed,
would have been tended in her own room, and would have had her life
gently assimilated to a comfortable life out of doors.  Would that be
much to do in England for a woman who has kept herself out of a workhouse
more than ninety rough long years?  When Britain first, at Heaven’s
command, arose, with a great deal of allegorical confusion, from out the
azure main, did her guardian angels positively forbid it in the Charter
which has been so much besung?

The object of my journey was accomplished when the nimble matron had no
more to show me.  As I shook hands with her at the gate, I told her that
I thought justice had not used her very well, and that the wise men of
the East were not infallible.

Now, I reasoned with myself, as I made my journey home again, concerning
those Foul wards.  They ought not to exist; no person of common decency
and humanity can see them and doubt it.  But what is this Union to do?
The necessary alteration would cost several thousands of pounds; it has
already to support three workhouses; its inhabitants work hard for their
bare lives, and are already rated for the relief of the Poor to the
utmost extent of reasonable endurance.  One poor parish in this very
Union is rated to the amount of FIVE AND SIXPENCE in the pound, at the
very same time when the rich parish of Saint George’s, Hanover-square, is
rated at about SEVENPENCE in the pound, Paddington at about FOURPENCE,
Saint James’s, Westminster, at about TENPENCE!  It is only through the
equalisation of Poor Rates that what is left undone in this wise, can be
done.  Much more is left undone, or is ill-done, than I have space to
suggest in these notes of a single uncommercial journey; but, the wise
men of the East, before they can reasonably hold forth about it, must
look to the North and South and West; let them also, any morning before
taking the seat of Solomon, look into the shops and dwellings all around
the Temple, and first ask themselves ‘how much more can these poor
people—many of whom keep themselves with difficulty enough out of the
workhouse—bear?’

I had yet other matter for reflection as I journeyed home, inasmuch as,
before I altogether departed from the neighbourhood of Mr. Baker’s trap,
I had knocked at the gate of the workhouse of St. George’s-in-the-East,
and had found it to be an establishment highly creditable to those parts,
and thoroughly well administered by a most intelligent master.  I
remarked in it, an instance of the collateral harm that obstinate vanity
and folly can do.  ‘This was the Hall where those old paupers, male and
female, whom I had just seen, met for the Church service, was
it?’—‘Yes.’—‘Did they sing the Psalms to any instrument?’—‘They would
like to, very much; they would have an extraordinary interest in doing
so.’—‘And could none be got?’—‘Well, a piano could even have been got for
nothing, but these unfortunate dissensions—’  Ah! better, far better, my
Christian friend in the beautiful garment, to have let the singing boys
alone, and left the multitude to sing for themselves!  You should know
better than I, but I think I have read that they did so, once upon a
time, and that ‘when they had sung an hymn,’ Some one (not in a beautiful
garment) went up into the Mount of Olives.

It made my heart ache to think of this miserable trifling, in the streets
of a city where every stone seemed to call to me, as I walked along,
‘Turn this way, man, and see what waits to be done!’  So I decoyed myself
into another train of thought to ease my heart.  But, I don’t know that I
did it, for I was so full of paupers, that it was, after all, only a
change to a single pauper, who took possession of my remembrance instead
of a thousand.

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he had said, in a confidential manner, on
another occasion, taking me aside; ‘but I have seen better days.’

‘I am very sorry to hear it.’

‘Sir, I have a complaint to make against the master.’

‘I have no power here, I assure you.  And if I had—’

‘But, allow me, sir, to mention it, as between yourself and a man who has
seen better days, sir.  The master and myself are both masons, sir, and I
make him the sign continually; but, because I am in this unfortunate
position, sir, he won’t give me the counter-sign!’




IV
TWO VIEWS OF A CHEAP THEATRE


AS I shut the door of my lodging behind me, and came out into the streets
at six on a drizzling Saturday evening in the last past month of January,
all that neighbourhood of Covent-garden looked very desolate.  It is so
essentially a neighbourhood which has seen better days, that bad weather
affects it sooner than another place which has not come down in the
World.  In its present reduced condition it bears a thaw almost worse
than any place I know.  It gets so dreadfully low-spirited when damp
breaks forth.  Those wonderful houses about Drury-lane Theatre, which in
the palmy days of theatres were prosperous and long-settled places of
business, and which now change hands every week, but never change their
character of being divided and sub-divided on the ground floor into
mouldy dens of shops where an orange and half-a-dozen nuts, or a
pomatum-pot, one cake of fancy soap, and a cigar box, are offered for
sale and never sold, were most ruefully contemplated that evening, by the
statue of Shakespeare, with the rain-drops coursing one another down its
innocent nose.  Those inscrutable pigeon-hole offices, with nothing in
them (not so much as an inkstand) but a model of a theatre before the
curtain, where, in the Italian Opera season, tickets at reduced prices
are kept on sale by nomadic gentlemen in smeary hats too tall for them,
whom one occasionally seems to have seen on race-courses, not wholly
unconnected with strips of cloth of various colours and a rolling
ball—those Bedouin establishments, deserted by the tribe, and tenantless,
except when sheltering in one corner an irregular row of ginger-beer
bottles, which would have made one shudder on such a night, but for its
being plain that they had nothing in them, shrunk from the shrill cries
of the news-boys at their Exchange in the kennel of Catherine-street,
like guilty things upon a fearful summons.  At the pipe-shop in Great
Russell-street, the Death’s-head pipes were like theatrical memento mori,
admonishing beholders of the decline of the playhouse as an Institution.
I walked up Bow-street, disposed to be angry with the shops there, that
were letting out theatrical secrets by exhibiting to work-a-day humanity
the stuff of which diadems and robes of kings are made.  I noticed that
some shops which had once been in the dramatic line, and had struggled
out of it, were not getting on prosperously—like some actors I have
known, who took to business and failed to make it answer.  In a word,
those streets looked so dull, and, considered as theatrical streets, so
broken and bankrupt, that the FOUND DEAD on the black board at the police
station might have announced the decease of the Drama, and the pools of
water outside the fire-engine maker’s at the corner of Long-acre might
have been occasioned by his having brought out the whole of his stock to
play upon its last smouldering ashes.

And yet, on such a night in so degenerate a time, the object of my
journey was theatrical.  And yet within half an hour I was in an immense
theatre, capable of holding nearly five thousand people.

What Theatre?  Her Majesty’s?  Far better.  Royal Italian Opera?  Far
better.  Infinitely superior to the latter for hearing in; infinitely
superior to both, for seeing in.  To every part of this Theatre, spacious
fire-proof ways of ingress and egress.  For every part of it, convenient
places of refreshment and retiring rooms.  Everything to eat and drink
carefully supervised as to quality, and sold at an appointed price;
respectable female attendants ready for the commonest women in the
audience; a general air of consideration, decorum, and supervision, most
commendable; an unquestionably humanising influence in all the social
arrangements of the place.

Surely a dear Theatre, then?  Because there were in London (not very long
ago) Theatres with entrance-prices up to half-a-guinea a head, whose
arrangements were not half so civilised.  Surely, therefore, a dear
Theatre?  Not very dear.  A gallery at three-pence, another gallery at
fourpence, a pit at sixpence, boxes and pit-stalls at a shilling, and a
few private boxes at half-a-crown.

My uncommercial curiosity induced me to go into every nook of this great
place, and among every class of the audience assembled in it—amounting
that evening, as I calculated, to about two thousand and odd hundreds.
Magnificently lighted by a firmament of sparkling chandeliers, the
building was ventilated to perfection.  My sense of smell, without being
particularly delicate, has been so offended in some of the commoner
places of public resort, that I have often been obliged to leave them
when I have made an uncommercial journey expressly to look on.  The air
of this Theatre was fresh, cool, and wholesome.  To help towards this
end, very sensible precautions had been used, ingeniously combining the
experience of hospitals and railway stations.  Asphalt pavements
substituted for wooden floors, honest bare walls of glazed brick and
tile—even at the back of the boxes—for plaster and paper, no benches
stuffed, and no carpeting or baize used; a cool material with a light
glazed surface, being the covering of the seats.

                        [Picture: A Cheap Theatre]

These various contrivances are as well considered in the place in
question as if it were a Fever Hospital; the result is, that it is sweet
and healthful.  It has been constructed from the ground to the roof, with
a careful reference to sight and sound in every corner; the result is,
that its form is beautiful, and that the appearance of the audience, as
seen from the proscenium—with every face in it commanding the stage, and
the whole so admirably raked and turned to that centre, that a hand can
scarcely move in the great assemblage without the movement being seen
from thence—is highly remarkable in its union of vastness with
compactness.  The stage itself, and all its appurtenances of machinery,
cellarage, height and breadth, are on a scale more like the Scala at
Milan, or the San Carlo at Naples, or the Grand Opera at Paris, than any
notion a stranger would be likely to form of the Britannia Theatre at
Hoxton, a mile north of St. Luke’s Hospital in the Old-street-road,
London.  The Forty Thieves might be played here, and every thief ride his
real horse, and the disguised captain bring in his oil jars on a train of
real camels, and nobody be put out of the way.  This really extraordinary
place is the achievement of one man’s enterprise, and was erected on the
ruins of an inconvenient old building in less than five months, at a
round cost of five-and-twenty thousand pounds.  To dismiss this part of
my subject, and still to render to the proprietor the credit that is
strictly his due, I must add that his sense of the responsibility upon
him to make the best of his audience, and to do his best for them, is a
highly agreeable sign of these times.

As the spectators at this theatre, for a reason I will presently show,
were the object of my journey, I entered on the play of the night as one
of the two thousand and odd hundreds, by looking about me at my
neighbours.  We were a motley assemblage of people, and we had a good
many boys and young men among us; we had also many girls and young women.
To represent, however, that we did not include a very great number, and a
very fair proportion of family groups, would be to make a gross
mis-statement.  Such groups were to be seen in all parts of the house; in
the boxes and stalls particularly, they were composed of persons of very
decent appearance, who had many children with them.  Among our dresses
there were most kinds of shabby and greasy wear, and much fustian and
corduroy that was neither sound nor fragrant.  The caps of our young men
were mostly of a limp character, and we who wore them, slouched,
high-shouldered, into our places with our hands in our pockets, and
occasionally twisted our cravats about our necks like eels, and
occasionally tied them down our breasts like links of sausages, and
occasionally had a screw in our hair over each cheek-bone with a slight
Thief-flavour in it.  Besides prowlers and idlers, we were mechanics,
dock-labourers, costermongers, petty tradesmen, small clerks, milliners,
stay-makers, shoe-binders, slop-workers, poor workers in a hundred
highways and byways.  Many of us—on the whole, the majority—were not at
all clean, and not at all choice in our lives or conversation.  But we
had all come together in a place where our convenience was well
consulted, and where we were well looked after, to enjoy an evening’s
entertainment in common.  We were not going to lose any part of what we
had paid for through anybody’s caprice, and as a community we had a
character to lose.  So, we were closely attentive, and kept excellent
order; and let the man or boy who did otherwise instantly get out from
this place, or we would put him out with the greatest expedition.

We began at half-past six with a pantomime—with a pantomime so long, that
before it was over I felt as if I had been travelling for six weeks—going
to India, say, by the Overland Mail.  The Spirit of Liberty was the
principal personage in the Introduction, and the Four Quarters of the
World came out of the globe, glittering, and discoursed with the Spirit,
who sang charmingly.  We were delighted to understand that there was no
liberty anywhere but among ourselves, and we highly applauded the
agreeable fact.  In an allegorical way, which did as well as any other
way, we and the Spirit of Liberty got into a kingdom of Needles and Pins,
and found them at war with a potentate who called in to his aid their old
arch enemy Rust, and who would have got the better of them if the Spirit
of Liberty had not in the nick of time transformed the leaders into
Clown, Pantaloon, Harlequin, Columbine, Harlequina, and a whole family of
Sprites, consisting of a remarkably stout father and three spineless
sons.  We all knew what was coming when the Spirit of Liberty addressed
the king with a big face, and His Majesty backed to the side-scenes and
began untying himself behind, with his big face all on one side.  Our
excitement at that crisis was great, and our delight unbounded.  After
this era in our existence, we went through all the incidents of a
pantomime; it was not by any means a savage pantomime, in the way of
burning or boiling people, or throwing them out of window, or cutting
them up; was often very droll; was always liberally got up, and cleverly
presented.  I noticed that the people who kept the shops, and who
represented the passengers in the thoroughfares, and so forth, had no
conventionality in them, but were unusually like the real thing—from
which I infer that you may take that audience in (if you wish to)
concerning Knights and Ladies, Fairies, Angels, or such like, but they
are not to be done as to anything in the streets.  I noticed, also, that
when two young men, dressed in exact imitation of the
eel-and-sausage-cravated portion of the audience, were chased by
policemen, and, finding themselves in danger of being caught, dropped so
suddenly as to oblige the policemen to tumble over them, there was great
rejoicing among the caps—as though it were a delicate reference to
something they had heard of before.

The Pantomime was succeeded by a Melo-Drama.  Throughout the evening I
was pleased to observe Virtue quite as triumphant as she usually is out
of doors, and indeed I thought rather more so.  We all agreed (for the
time) that honesty was the best policy, and we were as hard as iron upon
Vice, and we wouldn’t hear of Villainy getting on in the world—no, not on
any consideration whatever.

Between the pieces, we almost all of us went out and refreshed.  Many of
us went the length of drinking beer at the bar of the neighbouring
public-house, some of us drank spirits, crowds of us had sandwiches and
ginger-beer at the refreshment-bars established for us in the Theatre.
The sandwich—as substantial as was consistent with portability, and as
cheap as possible—we hailed as one of our greatest institutions.  It
forced its way among us at all stages of the entertainment, and we were
always delighted to see it; its adaptability to the varying moods of our
nature was surprising; we could never weep so comfortably as when our
tears fell on our sandwich; we could never laugh so heartily as when we
choked with sandwich; Virtue never looked so beautiful or Vice so
deformed as when we paused, sandwich in hand, to consider what would come
of that resolution of Wickedness in boots, to sever Innocence in flowered
chintz from Honest Industry in striped stockings.  When the curtain fell
for the night, we still fell back upon sandwich, to help us through the
rain and mire, and home to bed.

This, as I have mentioned, was Saturday night.  Being Saturday night, I
had accomplished but the half of my uncommercial journey; for, its object
was to compare the play on Saturday evening with the preaching in the
same Theatre on Sunday evening.

Therefore, at the same hour of half-past six on the similarly damp and
muddy Sunday evening, I returned to this Theatre.  I drove up to the
entrance (fearful of being late, or I should have come on foot), and
found myself in a large crowd of people who, I am happy to state, were
put into excellent spirits by my arrival.  Having nothing to look at but
the mud and the closed doors, they looked at me, and highly enjoyed the
comic spectacle.  My modesty inducing me to draw off, some hundreds of
yards, into a dark corner, they at once forgot me, and applied themselves
to their former occupation of looking at the mud and looking in at the
closed doors: which, being of grated ironwork, allowed the lighted
passage within to be seen.  They were chiefly people of respectable
appearance, odd and impulsive as most crowds are, and making a joke of
being there as most crowds do.

In the dark corner I might have sat a long while, but that a very
obliging passer-by informed me that the Theatre was already full, and
that the people whom I saw in the street were all shut out for want of
room.  After that, I lost no time in worming myself into the building,
and creeping to a place in a Proscenium box that had been kept for me.

There must have been full four thousand people present.  Carefully
estimating the pit alone, I could bring it out as holding little less
than fourteen hundred.  Every part of the house was well filled, and I
had not found it easy to make my way along the back of the boxes to where
I sat.  The chandeliers in the ceiling were lighted; there was no light
on the stage; the orchestra was empty.  The green curtain was down, and,
packed pretty closely on chairs on the small space of stage before it,
were some thirty gentlemen, and two or three ladies.  In the centre of
these, in a desk or pulpit covered with red baize, was the presiding
minister.  The kind of rostrum he occupied will be very well understood,
if I liken it to a boarded-up fireplace turned towards the audience, with
a gentleman in a black surtout standing in the stove and leaning forward
over the mantelpiece.

A portion of Scripture was being read when I went in.  It was followed by
a discourse, to which the congregation listened with most exemplary
attention and uninterrupted silence and decorum.  My own attention
comprehended both the auditory and the speaker, and shall turn to both in
this recalling of the scene, exactly as it did at the time.

‘A very difficult thing,’ I thought, when the discourse began, ‘to speak
appropriately to so large an audience, and to speak with tact.  Without
it, better not to speak at all.  Infinitely better, to read the New
Testament well, and to let _that_ speak.  In this congregation there is
indubitably one pulse; but I doubt if any power short of genius can touch
it as one, and make it answer as one.’

I could not possibly say to myself as the discourse proceeded, that the
minister was a good speaker.  I could not possibly say to myself that he
expressed an understanding of the general mind and character of his
audience.  There was a supposititious working-man introduced into the
homily, to make supposititious objections to our Christian religion and
be reasoned down, who was not only a very disagreeable person, but
remarkably unlike life—very much more unlike it than anything I had seen
in the pantomime.  The native independence of character this artisan was
supposed to possess, was represented by a suggestion of a dialect that I
certainly never heard in my uncommercial travels, and with a coarse swing
of voice and manner anything but agreeable to his feelings, I should
conceive, considered in the light of a portrait, and as far away from the
fact as a Chinese Tartar.  There was a model pauper introduced in like
manner, who appeared to me to be the most intolerably arrogant pauper
ever relieved, and to show himself in absolute want and dire necessity of
a course of Stone Yard.  For, how did this pauper testify to his having
received the gospel of humility?  A gentleman met him in the workhouse,
and said (which I myself really thought good-natured of him), ‘Ah, John?
I am sorry to see you here.  I am sorry to see you so poor.’  ‘Poor,
sir!’ replied that man, drawing himself up, ‘I am the son of a Prince!
_My_ father is the King of Kings.  _My_ father is the Lord of Lords.
_My_ father is the ruler of all the Princes of the Earth!’ &c.  And this
was what all the preacher’s fellow-sinners might come to, if they would
embrace this blessed book—which I must say it did some violence to my own
feelings of reverence, to see held out at arm’s length at frequent
intervals and soundingly slapped, like a slow lot at a sale.  Now, could
I help asking myself the question, whether the mechanic before me, who
must detect the preacher as being wrong about the visible manner of
himself and the like of himself, and about such a noisy lip-server as
that pauper, might not, most unhappily for the usefulness of the
occasion, doubt that preacher’s being right about things not visible to
human senses?

Again.  Is it necessary or advisable to address such an audience
continually as ‘fellow-sinners’?  Is it not enough to be
fellow-creatures, born yesterday, suffering and striving to-day, dying
to-morrow?  By our common humanity, my brothers and sisters, by our
common capacities for pain and pleasure, by our common laughter and our
common tears, by our common aspiration to reach something better than
ourselves, by our common tendency to believe in something good, and to
invest whatever we love or whatever we lose with some qualities that are
superior to our own failings and weaknesses as we know them in our own
poor hearts—by these, Hear me!—Surely, it is enough to be
fellow-creatures.  Surely, it includes the other designation, and some
touching meanings over and above.

Again.  There was a personage introduced into the discourse (not an
absolute novelty, to the best of my remembrance of my reading), who had
been personally known to the preacher, and had been quite a Crichton in
all the ways of philosophy, but had been an infidel.  Many a time had the
preacher talked with him on that subject, and many a time had he failed
to convince that intelligent man.  But he fell ill, and died, and before
he died he recorded his conversion—in words which the preacher had taken
down, my fellow-sinners, and would read to you from this piece of paper.
I must confess that to me, as one of an uninstructed audience, they did
not appear particularly edifying.  I thought their tone extremely
selfish, and I thought they had a spiritual vanity in them which was of
the before-mentioned refractory pauper’s family.

All slangs and twangs are objectionable everywhere, but the slang and
twang of the conventicle—as bad in its way as that of the House of
Commons, and nothing worse can be said of it—should be studiously avoided
under such circumstances as I describe.  The avoidance was not complete
on this occasion.  Nor was it quite agreeable to see the preacher
addressing his pet ‘points’ to his backers on the stage, as if appealing
to those disciples to show him up, and testify to the multitude that each
of those points was a clincher.

But, in respect of the large Christianity of his general tone; of his
renunciation of all priestly authority; of his earnest and reiterated
assurance to the people that the commonest among them could work out
their own salvation if they would, by simply, lovingly, and dutifully
following Our Saviour, and that they needed the mediation of no erring
man; in these particulars, this gentleman deserved all praise.  Nothing
could be better than the spirit, or the plain emphatic words of his
discourse in these respects.  And it was a most significant and
encouraging circumstance that whenever he struck that chord, or whenever
he described anything which Christ himself had done, the array of faces
before him was very much more earnest, and very much more expressive of
emotion, than at any other time.

And now, I am brought to the fact, that the lowest part of the audience
of the previous night, _was not there_.  There is no doubt about it.
There was no such thing in that building, that Sunday evening.  I have
been told since, that the lowest part of the audience of the Victoria
Theatre has been attracted to its Sunday services.  I have been very glad
to hear it, but on this occasion of which I write, the lowest part of the
usual audience of the Britannia Theatre, decidedly and unquestionably
stayed away.  When I first took my seat and looked at the house, my
surprise at the change in its occupants was as great as my
disappointment.  To the most respectable class of the previous evening,
was added a great number of respectable strangers attracted by curiosity,
and drafts from the regular congregations of various chapels.  It was
impossible to fail in identifying the character of these last, and they
were very numerous.  I came out in a strong, slow tide of them setting
from the boxes.  Indeed, while the discourse was in progress, the
respectable character of the auditory was so manifest in their
appearance, that when the minister addressed a supposititious ‘outcast,’
one really felt a little impatient of it, as a figure of speech not
justified by anything the eye could discover.

The time appointed for the conclusion of the proceedings was eight
o’clock.  The address having lasted until full that time, and it being
the custom to conclude with a hymn, the preacher intimated in a few
sensible words that the clock had struck the hour, and that those who
desired to go before the hymn was sung, could go now, without giving
offence.  No one stirred.  The hymn was then sung, in good time and tune
and unison, and its effect was very striking.  A comprehensive benevolent
prayer dismissed the throng, and in seven or eight minutes there was
nothing left in the Theatre but a light cloud of dust.

That these Sunday meetings in Theatres are good things, I do not doubt.
Nor do I doubt that they will work lower and lower down in the social
scale, if those who preside over them will be very careful on two heads:
firstly, not to disparage the places in which they speak, or the
intelligence of their hearers; secondly, not to set themselves in
antagonism to the natural inborn desire of the mass of mankind to
recreate themselves and to be amused.

There is a third head, taking precedence of all others, to which my
remarks on the discourse I heard, have tended.  In the New Testament
there is the most beautiful and affecting history conceivable by man, and
there are the terse models for all prayer and for all preaching.  As to
the models, imitate them, Sunday preachers—else why are they there,
consider?  As to the history, tell it.  Some people cannot read, some
people will not read, many people (this especially holds among the young
and ignorant) find it hard to pursue the verse-form in which the book is
presented to them, and imagine that those breaks imply gaps and want of
continuity.  Help them over that first stumbling-block, by setting forth
the history in narrative, with no fear of exhausting it.  You will never
preach so well, you will never move them so profoundly, you will never
send them away with half so much to think of.  Which is the better
interest: Christ’s choice of twelve poor men to help in those merciful
wonders among the poor and rejected; or the pious bullying of a whole
Union-full of paupers?  What is your changed philosopher to wretched me,
peeping in at the door out of the mud of the streets and of my life, when
you have the widow’s son to tell me about, the ruler’s daughter, the
other figure at the door when the brother of the two sisters was dead,
and one of the two ran to the mourner, crying, ‘The Master is come and
calleth for thee’?—Let the preacher who will thoroughly forget himself
and remember no individuality but one, and no eloquence but one, stand up
before four thousand men and women at the Britannia Theatre any Sunday
night, recounting that narrative to them as fellow creatures, and he
shall see a sight!




V
POOR MERCANTILE JACK


Is the sweet little cherub who sits smiling aloft and keeps watch on
the life of poor Jack, commissioned to take charge of Mercantile Jack,
as well as Jack of the national navy?  If not, who is?  What is the
cherub about, and what are we all about, when poor Mercantile Jack is
having his brains slowly knocked out by penny-weights, aboard the brig
Beelzebub, or the barque Bowie-knife—when he looks his last at that
infernal craft, with the first officer’s iron boot-heel in his
remaining eye, or with his dying body towed overboard in the ship’s
wake, while the cruel wounds in it do ‘the multitudinous seas
incarnadine’?

Is it unreasonable to entertain a belief that if, aboard the brig
Beelzebub or the barque Bowie-knife, the first officer did half the
damage to cotton that he does to men, there would presently arise from
both sides of the Atlantic so vociferous an invocation of the sweet
little cherub who sits calculating aloft, keeping watch on the markets
that pay, that such vigilant cherub would, with a winged sword, have that
gallant officer’s organ of destructiveness out of his head in the space
of a flash of lightning?

If it be unreasonable, then am I the most unreasonable of men, for I
believe it with all my soul.

This was my thought as I walked the dock-quays at Liverpool, keeping
watch on poor Mercantile Jack.  Alas for me!  I have long outgrown the
state of sweet little cherub; but there I was, and there Mercantile Jack
was, and very busy he was, and very cold he was: the snow yet lying in
the frozen furrows of the land, and the north-east winds snipping off the
tops of the little waves in the Mersey, and rolling them into hailstones
to pelt him with.  Mercantile Jack was hard at it, in the hard weather:
as he mostly is in all weathers, poor Jack.  He was girded to ships’
masts and funnels of steamers, like a forester to a great oak, scraping
and painting; he was lying out on yards, furling sails that tried to beat
him off; he was dimly discernible up in a world of giant cobwebs, reefing
and splicing; he was faintly audible down in holds, stowing and
unshipping cargo; he was winding round and round at capstans melodious,
monotonous, and drunk; he was of a diabolical aspect, with coaling for
the Antipodes; he was washing decks barefoot, with the breast of his red
shirt open to the blast, though it was sharper than the knife in his
leathern girdle; he was looking over bulwarks, all eyes and hair; he was
standing by at the shoot of the Cunard steamer, off to-morrow, as the
stocks in trade of several butchers, poulterers, and fishmongers, poured
down into the ice-house; he was coming aboard of other vessels, with his
kit in a tarpaulin bag, attended by plunderers to the very last moment of
his shore-going existence.  As though his senses, when released from the
uproar of the elements, were under obligation to be confused by other
turmoil, there was a rattling of wheels, a clattering of hoofs, a
clashing of iron, a jolting of cotton and hides and casks and timber, an
incessant deafening disturbance on the quays, that was the very madness
of sound.  And as, in the midst of it, he stood swaying about, with his
hair blown all manner of wild ways, rather crazedly taking leave of his
plunderers, all the rigging in the docks was shrill in the wind, and
every little steamer coming and going across the Mersey was sharp in its
blowing off, and every buoy in the river bobbed spitefully up and down,
as if there were a general taunting chorus of ‘Come along, Mercantile
Jack!  Ill-lodged, ill-fed, ill-used, hocussed, entrapped, anticipated,
cleaned out.  Come along, Poor Mercantile Jack, and be tempest-tossed
till you are drowned!’

The uncommercial transaction which had brought me and Jack together, was
this:—I had entered the Liverpool police force, that I might have a look
at the various unlawful traps which are every night set for Jack.  As my
term of service in that distinguished corps was short, and as my personal
bias in the capacity of one of its members has ceased, no suspicion will
attach to my evidence that it is an admirable force.  Besides that it is
composed, without favour, of the best men that can be picked, it is
directed by an unusual intelligence.  Its organisation against Fires, I
take to be much better than the metropolitan system, and in all respects
it tempers its remarkable vigilance with a still more remarkable
discretion.

Jack had knocked off work in the docks some hours, and I had taken, for
purposes of identification, a photograph-likeness of a thief, in the
portrait-room at our head police office (on the whole, he seemed rather
complimented by the proceeding), and I had been on police parade, and the
small hand of the clock was moving on to ten, when I took up my lantern
to follow Mr. Superintendent to the traps that were set for Jack.  In Mr.
Superintendent I saw, as anybody might, a tall, well-looking, well-set-up
man of a soldierly bearing, with a cavalry air, a good chest, and a
resolute but not by any means ungentle face.  He carried in his hand a
plain black walking-stick of hard wood; and whenever and wherever, at any
after-time of the night, he struck it on the pavement with a ringing
sound, it instantly produced a whistle out of the darkness, and a
policeman.  To this remarkable stick, I refer an air of mystery and magic
which pervaded the whole of my perquisition among the traps that were set
for Jack.

We began by diving into the obscurest streets and lanes of the port.
Suddenly pausing in a flow of cheerful discourse, before a dead wall,
apparently some ten miles long, Mr. Superintendent struck upon the
ground, and the wall opened and shot out, with military salute of hand to
temple, two policemen—not in the least surprised themselves, not in the
least surprising Mr. Superintendent.

‘All right, Sharpeye?’

‘All right, sir.’

‘All right, Trampfoot?’

‘All right, sir.’

‘Is Quickear there?’

‘Here am I, sir.’

‘Come with us.’

‘Yes, sir.’

So, Sharpeye went before, and Mr. Superintendent and I went next, and
Trampfoot and Quickear marched as rear-guard.  Sharp-eye, I soon had
occasion to remark, had a skilful and quite professional way of opening
doors—touched latches delicately, as if they were keys of musical
instruments—opened every door he touched, as if he were perfectly
confident that there was stolen property behind it—instantly insinuated
himself, to prevent its being shut.

Sharpeye opened several doors of traps that were set for Jack, but Jack
did not happen to be in any of them.  They were all such miserable places
that really, Jack, if I were you, I would give them a wider berth.  In
every trap, somebody was sitting over a fire, waiting for Jack.  Now, it
was a crouching old woman, like the picture of the Norwood Gipsy in the
old sixpenny dream-books; now, it was a crimp of the male sex, in a
checked shirt and without a coat, reading a newspaper; now, it was a man
crimp and a woman crimp, who always introduced themselves as united in
holy matrimony; now, it was Jack’s delight, his (un)lovely Nan; but they
were all waiting for Jack, and were all frightfully disappointed to see
us.

‘Who have you got up-stairs here?’ says Sharpeye, generally.  (In the
Move-on tone.)

‘Nobody, surr; sure not a blessed sowl!’  (Irish feminine reply.)

‘What do you mean by nobody?  Didn’t I hear a woman’s step go up-stairs
when my hand was on the latch?’

‘Ah! sure thin you’re right, surr, I forgot her!  ’Tis on’y Betsy White,
surr.  Ah! you know Betsy, surr.  Come down, Betsy darlin’, and say the
gintlemin.’

Generally, Betsy looks over the banisters (the steep staircase is in the
room) with a forcible expression in her protesting face, of an intention
to compensate herself for the present trial by grinding Jack finer than
usual when he does come.  Generally, Sharpeye turns to Mr.
Superintendent, and says, as if the subjects of his remarks were
wax-work:

‘One of the worst, sir, this house is.  This woman has been indicted
three times.  This man’s a regular bad one likewise.  His real name is
Pegg.  Gives himself out as Waterhouse.’

‘Never had sitch a name as Pegg near me back, thin, since I was in this
house, bee the good Lard!’ says the woman.

Generally, the man says nothing at all, but becomes exceedingly
round-shouldered, and pretends to read his paper with rapt attention.
Generally, Sharpeye directs our observation with a look, to the prints
and pictures that are invariably numerous on the walls.  Always,
Trampfoot and Quickear are taking notice on the doorstep.  In default of
Sharpeye being acquainted with the exact individuality of any gentleman
encountered, one of these two is sure to proclaim from the outer air,
like a gruff spectre, that Jackson is not Jackson, but knows himself to
be Fogle; or that Canlon is Walker’s brother, against whom there was not
sufficient evidence; or that the man who says he never was at sea since
he was a boy, came ashore from a voyage last Thursday, or sails to-morrow
morning.  ‘And that is a bad class of man, you see,’ says Mr.
Superintendent, when he got out into the dark again, ‘and very difficult
to deal with, who, when he has made this place too hot to hold him,
enters himself for a voyage as steward or cook, and is out of knowledge
for months, and then turns up again worse than ever.’

When we had gone into many such houses, and had come out (always leaving
everybody relapsing into waiting for Jack), we started off to a
singing-house where Jack was expected to muster strong.

The vocalisation was taking place in a long low room up-stairs; at one
end, an orchestra of two performers, and a small platform; across the
room, a series of open pews for Jack, with an aisle down the middle; at
the other end a larger pew than the rest, entitled SNUG, and reserved for
mates and similar good company.  About the room, some amazing
coffee-coloured pictures varnished an inch deep, and some stuffed
creatures in cases; dotted among the audience, in Snug and out of Snug,
the ‘Professionals;’ among them, the celebrated comic favourite Mr. Banjo
Bones, looking very hideous with his blackened face and limp sugar-loaf
hat; beside him, sipping rum-and-water, Mrs. Banjo Bones, in her natural
colours—a little heightened.

It was a Friday night, and Friday night was considered not a good night
for Jack.  At any rate, Jack did not show in very great force even here,
though the house was one to which he much resorts, and where a good deal
of money is taken.  There was British Jack, a little maudlin and sleepy,
lolling over his empty glass, as if he were trying to read his fortune at
the bottom; there was Loafing Jack of the Stars and Stripes, rather an
unpromising customer, with his long nose, lank cheek, high cheek-bones,
and nothing soft about him but his cabbage-leaf hat; there was Spanish
Jack, with curls of black hair, rings in his ears, and a knife not far
from his hand, if you got into trouble with him; there were Maltese Jack,
and Jack of Sweden, and Jack the Finn, looming through the smoke of their
pipes, and turning faces that looked as if they were carved out of dark
wood, towards the young lady dancing the hornpipe: who found the platform
so exceedingly small for it, that I had a nervous expectation of seeing
her, in the backward steps, disappear through the window.  Still, if all
hands had been got together, they would not have more than half-filled
the room.  Observe, however, said Mr. Licensed Victualler, the host, that
it was Friday night, and, besides, it was getting on for twelve, and Jack
had gone aboard.  A sharp and watchful man, Mr. Licensed Victualler, the
host, with tight lips and a complete edition of Cocker’s arithmetic in
each eye.  Attended to his business himself, he said.  Always on the
spot.  When he heard of talent, trusted nobody’s account of it, but went
off by rail to see it.  If true talent, engaged it.  Pounds a week for
talent—four pound—five pound.  Banjo Bones was undoubted talent.  Hear
this instrument that was going to play—it was real talent!  In truth it
was very good; a kind of piano-accordion, played by a young girl of a
delicate prettiness of face, figure, and dress, that made the audience
look coarser.  She sang to the instrument, too; first, a song about
village bells, and how they chimed; then a song about how I went to sea;
winding up with an imitation of the bagpipes, which Mercantile Jack
seemed to understand much the best.  A good girl, said Mr. Licensed
Victualler.  Kept herself select.  Sat in Snug, not listening to the
blandishments of Mates.  Lived with mother.  Father dead.  Once a
merchant well to do, but over-speculated himself.  On delicate inquiry as
to salary paid for item of talent under consideration, Mr. Victualler’s
pounds dropped suddenly to shillings—still it was a very comfortable
thing for a young person like that, you know; she only went on six times
a night, and was only required to be there from six at night to twelve.
What was more conclusive was, Mr. Victualler’s assurance that he ‘never
allowed any language, and never suffered any disturbance.’  Sharpeye
confirmed the statement, and the order that prevailed was the best proof
of it that could have been cited.  So, I came to the conclusion that poor
Mercantile Jack might do (as I am afraid he does) much worse than trust
himself to Mr. Victualler, and pass his evenings here.

But we had not yet looked, Mr. Superintendent—said Trampfoot, receiving
us in the street again with military salute—for Dark Jack.  True,
Trampfoot.  Ring the wonderful stick, rub the wonderful lantern, and
cause the spirits of the stick and lantern to convey us to the Darkies.

There was no disappointment in the matter of Dark Jack; _he_ was
producible.  The Genii set us down in the little first floor of a little
public-house, and there, in a stiflingly close atmosphere, were Dark
Jack, and Dark Jack’s delight, his _white_ unlovely Nan, sitting against
the wall all round the room.  More than that: Dark Jack’s delight was the
least unlovely Nan, both morally and physically, that I saw that night.

As a fiddle and tambourine band were sitting among the company, Quickear
suggested why not strike up?  ‘Ah, la’ads!’ said a negro sitting by the
door, ‘gib the jebblem a darnse.  Tak’ yah pardlers, jebblem, for ’um
QUAD-rill.’

This was the landlord, in a Greek cap, and a dress half Greek and half
English.  As master of the ceremonies, he called all the figures, and
occasionally addressed himself parenthetically—after this manner.  When
he was very loud, I use capitals.

‘Now den!  Hoy!  ONE.  Right and left.  (Put a steam on, gib ’um powder.)
LA-dies’ chail.  BAL-loon say.  Lemonade!  TWO.  AD-warnse and go back
(gib ’ell a breakdown, shake it out o’ yerselbs, keep a movil).
SWING-corners, BAL-loon say, and Lemonade!  (Hoy!)  THREE.  GENT come
for’ard with a lady and go back, hoppersite come for’ard and do what yer
can.  (Aeiohoy!)  BAL-loon say, and leetle lemonade.  (Dat hair nigger by
’um fireplace ’hind a’ time, shake it out o’ yerselbs, gib ’ell a
breakdown.)  Now den!  Hoy!  FOUR!  Lemonade.  BAL-loon say, and swing.
FOUR ladies meet in ’um middle, FOUR gents goes round ’um ladies, FOUR
gents passes out under ’um ladies’ arms, SWING—and Lemonade till ’a
moosic can’t play no more!  (Hoy, Hoy!)’

The male dancers were all blacks, and one was an unusually powerful man
of six feet three or four.  The sound of their flat feet on the floor was
as unlike the sound of white feet as their faces were unlike white faces.
They toed and heeled, shuffled, double-shuffled, double-double-shuffled,
covered the buckle, and beat the time out, rarely, dancing with a great
show of teeth, and with a childish good-humoured enjoyment that was very
prepossessing.  They generally kept together, these poor fellows, said
Mr. Superintendent, because they were at a disadvantage singly, and
liable to slights in the neighbouring streets.  But, if I were Light
Jack, I should be very slow to interfere oppressively with Dark Jack,
for, whenever I have had to do with him I have found him a simple and a
gentle fellow.  Bearing this in mind, I asked his friendly permission to
leave him restoration of beer, in wishing him good night, and thus it
fell out that the last words I heard him say as I blundered down the worn
stairs, were, ‘Jebblem’s elth!  Ladies drinks fust!’

The night was now well on into the morning, but, for miles and hours we
explored a strange world, where nobody ever goes to bed, but everybody is
eternally sitting up, waiting for Jack.  This exploration was among a
labyrinth of dismal courts and blind alleys, called Entries, kept in
wonderful order by the police, and in much better order than by the
corporation: the want of gaslight in the most dangerous and infamous of
these places being quite unworthy of so spirited a town.  I need describe
but two or three of the houses in which Jack was waited for as specimens
of the rest.  Many we attained by noisome passages so profoundly dark
that we felt our way with our hands.  Not one of the whole number we
visited, was without its show of prints and ornamental crockery; the
quantity of the latter set forth on little shelves and in little cases,
in otherwise wretched rooms, indicating that Mercantile Jack must have an
extraordinary fondness for crockery, to necessitate so much of that bait
in his traps.

Among such garniture, in one front parlour in the dead of the night, four
women were sitting by a fire.  One of them had a male child in her arms.
On a stool among them was a swarthy youth with a guitar, who had
evidently stopped playing when our footsteps were heard.

‘Well! how do _you_ do?’ says Mr. Superintendent, looking about him.

‘Pretty well, sir, and hope you gentlemen are going to treat us ladies,
now you have come to see us.’

‘Order there!’ says Sharpeye.

‘None of that!’ says Quickear.

Trampfoot, outside, is heard to confide to himself, ‘Meggisson’s lot this
is.  And a bad ’un!’

‘Well!’ says Mr. Superintendent, laying his hand on the shoulder of the
swarthy youth, ‘and who’s this?’

‘Antonio, sir.’

‘And what does _he_ do here?’

‘Come to give us a bit of music.  No harm in that, I suppose?’

‘A young foreign sailor?’

‘Yes.  He’s a Spaniard.  You’re a Spaniard, ain’t you, Antonio?’

‘Me Spanish.’

‘And he don’t know a word you say, not he; not if you was to talk to him
till doomsday.’  (Triumphantly, as if it redounded to the credit of the
house.)

‘Will he play something?’

‘Oh, yes, if you like.  Play something, Antonio.  _You_ ain’t ashamed to
play something; are you?’

The cracked guitar raises the feeblest ghost of a tune, and three of the
women keep time to it with their heads, and the fourth with the child.
If Antonio has brought any money in with him, I am afraid he will never
take it out, and it even strikes me that his jacket and guitar may be in
a bad way.  But, the look of the young man and the tinkling of the
instrument so change the place in a moment to a leaf out of Don Quixote,
that I wonder where his mule is stabled, until he leaves off.

I am bound to acknowledge (as it tends rather to my uncommercial
confusion), that I occasioned a difficulty in this establishment, by
having taken the child in my arms.  For, on my offering to restore it to
a ferocious joker not unstimulated by rum, who claimed to be its mother,
that unnatural parent put her hands behind her, and declined to accept
it; backing into the fireplace, and very shrilly declaring, regardless of
remonstrance from her friends, that she knowed it to be Law, that whoever
took a child from its mother of his own will, was bound to stick to it.
The uncommercial sense of being in a rather ridiculous position with the
poor little child beginning to be frightened, was relieved by my worthy
friend and fellow-constable, Trampfoot; who, laying hands on the article
as if it were a Bottle, passed it on to the nearest woman, and bade her
‘take hold of that.’  As we came out the Bottle was passed to the
ferocious joker, and they all sat down as before, including Antonio and
the guitar.  It was clear that there was no such thing as a nightcap to
this baby’s head, and that even he never went to bed, but was always kept
up—and would grow up, kept up—waiting for Jack.

Later still in the night, we came (by the court ‘where the man was
murdered,’ and by the other court across the street, into which his body
was dragged) to another parlour in another Entry, where several people
were sitting round a fire in just the same way.  It was a dirty and
offensive place, with some ragged clothes drying in it; but there was a
high shelf over the entrance-door (to be out of the reach of marauding
hands, possibly) with two large white loaves on it, and a great piece of
Cheshire cheese.

‘Well!’ says Mr. Superintendent, with a comprehensive look all round.
‘How do _you_ do?’

‘Not much to boast of, sir.’  From the curtseying woman of the house.
‘This is my good man, sir.’

‘You are not registered as a common Lodging House?’

‘No, sir.’

Sharpeye (in the Move-on tone) puts in the pertinent inquiry, ‘Then why
ain’t you?’

‘Ain’t got no one here, Mr. Sharpeye,’ rejoin the woman and my good man
together, ‘but our own family.’

‘How many are you in family?’

The woman takes time to count, under pretence of coughing, and adds, as
one scant of breath, ‘Seven, sir.’

But she has missed one, so Sharpeye, who knows all about it, says:

‘Here’s a young man here makes eight, who ain’t of your family?’

‘No, Mr. Sharpeye, he’s a weekly lodger.’

‘What does he do for a living?’

The young man here, takes the reply upon himself, and shortly answers,
‘Ain’t got nothing to do.’

The young man here, is modestly brooding behind a damp apron pendent from
a clothes-line.  As I glance at him I become—but I don’t know why—vaguely
reminded of Woolwich, Chatham, Portsmouth, and Dover.  When we get out,
my respected fellow-constable Sharpeye, addressing Mr. Superintendent,
says:

‘You noticed that young man, sir, in at Darby’s?’

‘Yes.  What is he?’

‘Deserter, sir.’

Mr. Sharpeye further intimates that when we have done with his services,
he will step back and take that young man.  Which in course of time he
does: feeling at perfect ease about finding him, and knowing for a moral
certainty that nobody in that region will be gone to bed.

Later still in the night, we came to another parlour up a step or two
from the street, which was very cleanly, neatly, even tastefully, kept,
and in which, set forth on a draped chest of drawers masking the
staircase, was such a profusion of ornamental crockery, that it would
have furnished forth a handsome sale-booth at a fair.  It backed up a
stout old lady—HOGARTH drew her exact likeness more than once—and a boy
who was carefully writing a copy in a copy-book.

‘Well, ma’am, how do _you_ do?’

Sweetly, she can assure the dear gentlemen, sweetly.  Charmingly,
charmingly.  And overjoyed to see us!

‘Why, this is a strange time for this boy to be writing his copy.  In the
middle of the night!’

‘So it is, dear gentlemen, Heaven bless your welcome faces and send ye
prosperous, but he has been to the Play with a young friend for his
diversion, and he combinates his improvement with entertainment, by doing
his school-writing afterwards, God be good to ye!’

The copy admonished human nature to subjugate the fire of every fierce
desire.  One might have thought it recommended stirring the fire, the old
lady so approved it.  There she sat, rosily beaming at the copy-book and
the boy, and invoking showers of blessings on our heads, when we left her
in the middle of the night, waiting for Jack.

Later still in the night, we came to a nauseous room with an earth floor,
into which the refuse scum of an alley trickled.  The stench of this
habitation was abominable; the seeming poverty of it, diseased and dire.
Yet, here again, was visitor or lodger—a man sitting before the fire,
like the rest of them elsewhere, and apparently not distasteful to the
mistress’s niece, who was also before the fire.  The mistress herself had
the misfortune of being in jail.

Three weird old women of transcendent ghastliness, were at needlework at
a table in this room.  Says Trampfoot to First Witch, ‘What are you
making?’  Says she, ‘Money-bags.’

‘_What_ are you making?’ retorts Trampfoot, a little off his balance.

‘Bags to hold your money,’ says the witch, shaking her head, and setting
her teeth; ‘you as has got it.’

She holds up a common cash-bag, and on the table is a heap of such bags.
Witch Two laughs at us.  Witch Three scowls at us.  Witch sisterhood all,
stitch, stitch.  First Witch has a circle round each eye.  I fancy it
like the beginning of the development of a perverted diabolical halo, and
that when it spreads all round her head, she will die in the odour of
devilry.

Trampfoot wishes to be informed what First Witch has got behind the
table, down by the side of her, there?  Witches Two and Three croak
angrily, ‘Show him the child!’

She drags out a skinny little arm from a brown dustheap on the ground.
Adjured not to disturb the child, she lets it drop again.  Thus we find
at last that there is one child in the world of Entries who goes to
bed—if this be bed.

Mr. Superintendent asks how long are they going to work at those bags?

How long?  First Witch repeats.  Going to have supper presently.  See the
cups and saucers, and the plates.

‘Late?  Ay!  But we has to ’arn our supper afore we eats it!’  Both the
other witches repeat this after First Witch, and take the Uncommercial
measurement with their eyes, as for a charmed winding-sheet.  Some grim
discourse ensues, referring to the mistress of the cave, who will be
released from jail to-morrow.  Witches pronounce Trampfoot ‘right there,’
when he deems it a trying distance for the old lady to walk; she shall be
fetched by niece in a spring-cart.

As I took a parting look at First Witch in turning away, the red marks
round her eyes seemed to have already grown larger, and she hungrily and
thirstily looked out beyond me into the dark doorway, to see if Jack was
there.  For, Jack came even here, and the mistress had got into jail
through deluding Jack.

When I at last ended this night of travel and got to bed, I failed to
keep my mind on comfortable thoughts of Seaman’s Homes (not overdone with
strictness), and improved dock regulations giving Jack greater benefit of
fire and candle aboard ship, through my mind’s wandering among the vermin
I had seen.  Afterwards the same vermin ran all over my sleep.  Evermore,
when on a breezy day I see Poor Mercantile Jack running into port with a
fair wind under all sail, I shall think of the unsleeping host of
devourers who never go to bed, and are always in their set traps waiting
for him.




VI
REFRESHMENTS FOR TRAVELLERS


IN the late high winds I was blown to a great many places—and indeed,
wind or no wind, I generally have extensive transactions on hand in the
article of Air—but I have not been blown to any English place lately, and
I very seldom have blown to any English place in my life, where I could
get anything good to eat and drink in five minutes, or where, if I sought
it, I was received with a welcome.

This is a curious thing to consider.  But before (stimulated by my own
experiences and the representations of many fellow-travellers of every
uncommercial and commercial degree) I consider it further, I must utter a
passing word of wonder concerning high winds.

I wonder why metropolitan gales always blow so hard at Walworth.  I
cannot imagine what Walworth has done, to bring such windy punishment
upon itself, as I never fail to find recorded in the newspapers when the
wind has blown at all hard.  Brixton seems to have something on its
conscience; Peckham suffers more than a virtuous Peckham might be
supposed to deserve; the howling neighbourhood of Deptford figures
largely in the accounts of the ingenious gentlemen who are out in every
wind that blows, and to whom it is an ill high wind that blows no good;
but, there can hardly be any Walworth left by this time.  It must surely
be blown away.  I have read of more chimney-stacks and house-copings
coming down with terrific smashes at Walworth, and of more sacred
edifices being nearly (not quite) blown out to sea from the same accursed
locality, than I have read of practised thieves with the appearance and
manners of gentlemen—a popular phenomenon which never existed on earth
out of fiction and a police report.  Again: I wonder why people are
always blown into the Surrey Canal, and into no other piece of water!
Why do people get up early and go out in groups, to be blown into the
Surrey Canal?  Do they say to one another, ‘Welcome death, so that we get
into the newspapers’?  Even that would be an insufficient explanation,
because even then they might sometimes put themselves in the way of being
blown into the Regent’s Canal, instead of always saddling Surrey for the
field.  Some nameless policeman, too, is constantly, on the slightest
provocation, getting himself blown into this same Surrey Canal.  Will SIR
RICHARD MAYNE see to it, and restrain that weak-minded and feeble-bodied
constable?

To resume the consideration of the curious question of Refreshment.  I am
a Briton, and, as such, I am aware that I never will be a slave—and yet I
have latent suspicion that there must be some slavery of wrong custom in
this matter.

I travel by railroad.  I start from home at seven or eight in the
morning, after breakfasting hurriedly.  What with skimming over the open
landscape, what with mining in the damp bowels of the earth, what with
banging, booming and shrieking the scores of miles away, I am hungry when
I arrive at the ‘Refreshment’ station where I am expected.  Please to
observe, expected.  I have said, I am hungry; perhaps I might say, with
greater point and force, that I am to some extent exhausted, and that I
need—in the expressive French sense of the word—to be restored.  What is
provided for my restoration?  The apartment that is to restore me is a
wind-trap, cunningly set to inveigle all the draughts in that
country-side, and to communicate a special intensity and velocity to them
as they rotate in two hurricanes: one, about my wretched head: one, about
my wretched legs.  The training of the young ladies behind the counter
who are to restore me, has been from their infancy directed to the
assumption of a defiant dramatic show that I am _not_ expected.  It is in
vain for me to represent to them by my humble and conciliatory manners,
that I wish to be liberal.  It is in vain for me to represent to myself,
for the encouragement of my sinking soul, that the young ladies have a
pecuniary interest in my arrival.  Neither my reason nor my feelings can
make head against the cold glazed glare of eye with which I am assured
that I am not expected, and not wanted.  The solitary man among the
bottles would sometimes take pity on me, if he dared, but he is powerless
against the rights and mights of Woman.  (Of the page I make no account,
for, he is a boy, and therefore the natural enemy of Creation.)  Chilling
fast, in the deadly tornadoes to which my upper and lower extremities are
exposed, and subdued by the moral disadvantage at which I stand, I turn
my disconsolate eyes on the refreshments that are to restore me.  I find
that I must either scald my throat by insanely ladling into it, against
time and for no wager, brown hot water stiffened with flour; or I must
make myself flaky and sick with Banbury cake; or, I must stuff into my
delicate organisation, a currant pincushion which I know will swell into
immeasurable dimensions when it has got there; or, I must extort from an
iron-bound quarry, with a fork, as if I were farming an inhospitable
soil, some glutinous lumps of gristle and grease, called pork-pie.  While
thus forlornly occupied, I find that the depressing banquet on the table
is, in every phase of its profoundly unsatisfactory character, so like
the banquet at the meanest and shabbiest of evening parties, that I begin
to think I must have ‘brought down’ to supper, the old lady unknown, blue
with cold, who is setting her teeth on edge with a cool orange at my
elbow—that the pastrycook who has compounded for the company on the
lowest terms per head, is a fraudulent bankrupt, redeeming his contract
with the stale stock from his window—that, for some unexplained reason,
the family giving the party have become my mortal foes, and have given it
on purpose to affront me.  Or, I fancy that I am ‘breaking up’ again, at
the evening conversazione at school, charged two-and-sixpence in the
half-year’s bill; or breaking down again at that celebrated evening party
given at Mrs. Bogles’s boarding-house when I was a boarder there, on
which occasion Mrs. Bogles was taken in execution by a branch of the
legal profession who got in as the harp, and was removed (with the keys
and subscribed capital) to a place of durance, half an hour prior to the
commencement of the festivities.

Take another case.

Mr. Grazinglands, of the Midland Counties, came to London by railroad one
morning last week, accompanied by the amiable and fascinating Mrs.
Grazinglands.  Mr. G. is a gentleman of a comfortable property, and had a
little business to transact at the Bank of England, which required the
concurrence and signature of Mrs. G.  Their business disposed of, Mr. and
Mrs. Grazinglands viewed the Royal Exchange, and the exterior of St.
Paul’s Cathedral.  The spirits of Mrs. Grazinglands then gradually
beginning to flag, Mr. Grazinglands (who is the tenderest of husbands)
remarked with sympathy, ‘Arabella’, my dear, ‘fear you are faint.’  Mrs.
Grazing-lands replied, ‘Alexander, I am rather faint; but don’t mind me,
I shall be better presently.’  Touched by the feminine meekness of this
answer, Mr. Grazinglands looked in at a pastrycook’s window, hesitating
as to the expediency of lunching at that establishment.  He beheld
nothing to eat, but butter in various forms, slightly charged with jam,
and languidly frizzling over tepid water.  Two ancient turtle-shells, on
which was inscribed the legend, ‘SOUPS,’ decorated a glass partition
within, enclosing a stuffy alcove, from which a ghastly mockery of a
marriage-breakfast spread on a rickety table, warned the terrified
traveller.  An oblong box of stale and broken pastry at reduced prices,
mounted on a stool, ornamented the doorway; and two high chairs that
looked as if they were performing on stilts, embellished the counter.
Over the whole, a young lady presided, whose gloomy haughtiness as she
surveyed the street, announced a deep-seated grievance against society,
and an implacable determination to be avenged.  From a beetle-haunted
kitchen below this institution, fumes arose, suggestive of a class of
soup which Mr. Grazinglands knew, from painful experience, enfeebles the
mind, distends the stomach, forces itself into the complexion, and tries
to ooze out at the eyes.  As he decided against entering, and turned
away, Mrs. Grazinglands becoming perceptibly weaker, repeated, ‘I am
rather faint, Alexander, but don’t mind me.’  Urged to new efforts by
these words of resignation, Mr. Grazinglands looked in at a cold and
floury baker’s shop, where utilitarian buns unrelieved by a currant,
consorted with hard biscuits, a stone filter of cold water, a hard pale
clock, and a hard little old woman with flaxen hair, of an
undeveloped-farinaceous aspect, as if she had been fed upon seeds.  He
might have entered even here, but for the timely remembrance coming upon
him that Jairing’s was but round the corner.

Now, Jairing’s being an hotel for families and gentlemen, in high repute
among the midland counties, Mr. Grazinglands plucked up a great spirit
when he told Mrs. Grazinglands she should have a chop there.  That lady,
likewise felt that she was going to see Life.  Arriving on that gay and
festive scene, they found the second waiter, in a flabby undress,
cleaning the windows of the empty coffee-room; and the first waiter,
denuded of his white tie, making up his cruets behind the Post-Office
Directory.  The latter (who took them in hand) was greatly put out by
their patronage, and showed his mind to be troubled by a sense of the
pressing necessity of instantly smuggling Mrs. Grazinglands into the
obscurest corner of the building.  This slighted lady (who is the pride
of her division of the county) was immediately conveyed, by several dark
passages, and up and down several steps, into a penitential apartment at
the back of the house, where five invalided old plate-warmers leaned up
against one another under a discarded old melancholy sideboard, and where
the wintry leaves of all the dining-tables in the house lay thick.  Also,
a sofa, of incomprehensible form regarded from any sofane point of view,
murmured ‘Bed;’ while an air of mingled fluffiness and heeltaps, added,
‘Second Waiter’s.’  Secreted in this dismal hold, objects of a mysterious
distrust and suspicion, Mr. Grazinglands and his charming partner waited
twenty minutes for the smoke (for it never came to a fire), twenty-five
minutes for the sherry, half an hour for the tablecloth, forty minutes
for the knives and forks, three-quarters of an hour for the chops, and an
hour for the potatoes.  On settling the little bill—which was not much
more than the day’s pay of a Lieutenant in the navy—Mr. Grazinglands took
heart to remonstrate against the general quality and cost of his
reception.  To whom the waiter replied, substantially, that Jairing’s
made it a merit to have accepted him on any terms: ‘for,’ added the
waiter (unmistakably coughing at Mrs. Grazinglands, the pride of her
division of the county), ‘when indiwiduals is not staying in the ’Ouse,
their favours is not as a rule looked upon as making it worth Mr.
Jairing’s while; nor is it, indeed, a style of business Mr. Jairing
wishes.’  Finally, Mr. and Mrs. Grazinglands passed out of Jairing’s
hotel for Families and Gentlemen, in a state of the greatest depression,
scorned by the bar; and did not recover their self-respect for several
days.

Or take another case.  Take your own case.

You are going off by railway, from any Terminus.  You have twenty minutes
for dinner, before you go.  You want your dinner, and like Dr. Johnson,
Sir, you like to dine.  You present to your mind, a picture of the
refreshment-table at that terminus.  The conventional shabby
evening-party supper—accepted as the model for all termini and all
refreshment stations, because it is the last repast known to this state
of existence of which any human creature would partake, but in the direst
extremity—sickens your contemplation, and your words are these: ‘I cannot
dine on stale sponge-cakes that turn to sand in the mouth.  I cannot dine
on shining brown patties, composed of unknown animals within, and
offering to my view the device of an indigestible star-fish in leaden
pie-crust without.  I cannot dine on a sandwich that has long been pining
under an exhausted receiver.  I cannot dine on barley-sugar.  I cannot
dine on Toffee.’  You repair to the nearest hotel, and arrive, agitated,
in the coffee-room.

It is a most astonishing fact that the waiter is very cold to you.
Account for it how you may, smooth it over how you will, you cannot deny
that he is cold to you.  He is not glad to see you, he does not want you,
he would much rather you hadn’t come.  He opposes to your flushed
condition, an immovable composure.  As if this were not enough, another
waiter, born, as it would seem, expressly to look at you in this passage
of your life, stands at a little distance, with his napkin under his arm
and his hands folded, looking at you with all his might.  You impress on
your waiter that you have ten minutes for dinner, and he proposes that
you shall begin with a bit of fish which will be ready in twenty.  That
proposal declined, he suggests—as a neat originality—‘a weal or mutton
cutlet.’  You close with either cutlet, any cutlet, anything.  He goes,
leisurely, behind a door and calls down some unseen shaft.  A
ventriloquial dialogue ensues, tending finally to the effect that weal
only, is available on the spur of the moment.  You anxiously call out,
‘Veal, then!’  Your waiter having settled that point, returns to array
your tablecloth, with a table napkin folded cocked-hat-wise (slowly, for
something out of window engages his eye), a white wine-glass, a green
wine-glass, a blue finger-glass, a tumbler, and a powerful field battery
of fourteen casters with nothing in them; or at all events—which is
enough for your purpose—with nothing in them that will come out.  All
this time, the other waiter looks at you—with an air of mental comparison
and curiosity, now, as if it had occurred to him that you are rather like
his brother.  Half your time gone, and nothing come but the jug of ale
and the bread, you implore your waiter to ‘see after that cutlet, waiter;
pray do!’  He cannot go at once, for he is carrying in seventeen pounds
of American cheese for you to finish with, and a small Landed Estate of
celery and water-cresses.  The other waiter changes his leg, and takes a
new view of you, doubtfully, now, as if he had rejected the resemblance
to his brother, and had begun to think you more like his aunt or his
grandmother.  Again you beseech your waiter with pathetic indignation, to
‘see after that cutlet!’  He steps out to see after it, and by-and-by,
when you are going away without it, comes back with it.  Even then, he
will not take the sham silver cover off, without a pause for a flourish,
and a look at the musty cutlet as if he were surprised to see it—which
cannot possibly be the case, he must have seen it so often before.  A
sort of fur has been produced upon its surface by the cook’s art, and in
a sham silver vessel staggering on two feet instead of three, is a
cutaneous kind of sauce of brown pimples and pickled cucumber.  You order
the bill, but your waiter cannot bring your bill yet, because he is
bringing, instead, three flinty-hearted potatoes and two grim head of
broccoli, like the occasional ornaments on area railings, badly boiled.
You know that you will never come to this pass, any more than to the
cheese and celery, and you imperatively demand your bill; but, it takes
time to get, even when gone for, because your waiter has to communicate
with a lady who lives behind a sash-window in a corner, and who appears
to have to refer to several Ledgers before she can make it out—as if you
had been staying there a year.  You become distracted to get away, and
the other waiter, once more changing his leg, still looks at you—but
suspiciously, now, as if you had begun to remind him of the party who
took the great-coats last winter.  Your bill at last brought and paid, at
the rate of sixpence a mouthful, your waiter reproachfully reminds you
that ‘attendance is not charged for a single meal,’ and you have to
search in all your pockets for sixpence more.  He has a worse opinion of
you than ever, when you have given it to him, and lets you out into the
street with the air of one saying to himself, as you cannot again doubt
he is, ‘I hope we shall never see _you_ here again!’

Or, take any other of the numerous travelling instances in which, with
more time at your disposal, you are, have been, or may be, equally ill
served.  Take the old-established Bull’s Head with its old-established
knife-boxes on its old-established sideboards, its old-established flue
under its old-established four-post bedsteads in its old-established
airless rooms, its old-established frouziness up-stairs and down-stairs,
its old-established cookery, and its old-established principles of
plunder.  Count up your injuries, in its side-dishes of ailing
sweetbreads in white poultices, of apothecaries’ powders in rice for
curry, of pale stewed bits of calf ineffectually relying for an
adventitious interest on forcemeat balls.  You have had experience of the
old-established Bull’s Head stringy fowls, with lower extremities like
wooden legs, sticking up out of the dish; of its cannibalic boiled
mutton, gushing horribly among its capers, when carved; of its little
dishes of pastry—roofs of spermaceti ointment, erected over half an apple
or four gooseberries.  Well for you if you have yet forgotten the
old-established Bull’s Head fruity port: whose reputation was gained
solely by the old-established price the Bull’s Head put upon it, and by
the old-established air with which the Bull’s Head set the glasses and
D’Oyleys on, and held that Liquid Gout to the three-and-sixpenny
wax-candle, as if its old-established colour hadn’t come from the dyer’s.

Or lastly, take to finish with, two cases that we all know, every day.

We all know the new hotel near the station, where it is always gusty,
going up the lane which is always muddy, where we are sure to arrive at
night, and where we make the gas start awfully when we open the front
door.  We all know the flooring of the passages and staircases that is
too new, and the walls that are too new, and the house that is haunted by
the ghost of mortar.  We all know the doors that have cracked, and the
cracked shutters through which we get a glimpse of the disconsolate moon.
We all know the new people, who have come to keep the new hotel, and who
wish they had never come, and who (inevitable result) wish _we_ had never
come.  We all know how much too scant and smooth and bright the new
furniture is, and how it has never settled down, and cannot fit itself
into right places, and will get into wrong places.  We all know how the
gas, being lighted, shows maps of Damp upon the walls.  We all know how
the ghost of mortar passes into our sandwich, stirs our negus, goes up to
bed with us, ascends the pale bedroom chimney, and prevents the smoke
from following.  We all know how a leg of our chair comes off at
breakfast in the morning, and how the dejected waiter attributes the
accident to a general greenness pervading the establishment, and informs
us, in reply to a local inquiry, that he is thankful to say he is an
entire stranger in that part of the country and is going back to his own
connexion on Saturday.

We all know, on the other hand, the great station hotel belonging to the
company of proprietors, which has suddenly sprung up in the back
outskirts of any place we like to name, and where we look out of our
palatial windows at little back yards and gardens, old summer-houses,
fowl-houses, pigeon-traps, and pigsties.  We all know this hotel in which
we can get anything we want, after its kind, for money; but where nobody
is glad to see us, or sorry to see us, or minds (our bill paid) whether
we come or go, or how, or when, or why, or cares about us.  We all know
this hotel, where we have no individuality, but put ourselves into the
general post, as it were, and are sorted and disposed of according to our
division.  We all know that we can get on very well indeed at such a
place, but still not perfectly well; and this may be, because the place
is largely wholesale, and there is a lingering personal retail interest
within us that asks to be satisfied.

To sum up.  My uncommercial travelling has not yet brought me to the
conclusion that we are close to perfection in these matters.  And just as
I do not believe that the end of the world will ever be near at hand, so
long as any of the very tiresome and arrogant people who constantly
predict that catastrophe are left in it, so, I shall have small faith in
the Hotel Millennium, while any of the uncomfortable superstitions I have
glanced at remain in existence.




VII
TRAVELLING ABROAD


I GOT into the travelling chariot—it was of German make, roomy, heavy,
and unvarnished—I got into the travelling chariot, pulled up the steps
after me, shut myself in with a smart bang of the door, and gave the
word, ‘Go on!’

Immediately, all that W. and S.W. division of London began to slide away
at a pace so lively, that I was over the river, and past the Old Kent
Road, and out on Blackheath, and even ascending Shooter’s Hill, before I
had had time to look about me in the carriage, like a collected
traveller.

I had two ample Imperials on the roof, other fitted storage for luggage
in front, and other up behind; I had a net for books overhead, great
pockets to all the windows, a leathern pouch or two hung up for odds and
ends, and a reading lamp fixed in the back of the chariot, in case I
should be benighted.  I was amply provided in all respects, and had no
idea where I was going (which was delightful), except that I was going
abroad.

So smooth was the old high road, and so fresh were the horses, and so
fast went I, that it was midway between Gravesend and Rochester, and the
widening river was bearing the ships, white sailed or black-smoked, out
to sea, when I noticed by the wayside a very queer small boy.

‘Holloa!’ said I, to the very queer small boy, ‘where do you live?’

‘At Chatham,’ says he.

‘What do you do there?’ says I.

‘I go to school,’ says he.

I took him up in a moment, and we went on.  Presently, the very queer
small boy says, ‘This is Gads-hill we are coming to, where Falstaff went
out to rob those travellers, and ran away.’

‘You know something about Falstaff, eh?’ said I.

‘All about him,’ said the very queer small boy.  ‘I am old (I am nine),
and I read all sorts of books.  But _do_ let us stop at the top of the
hill, and look at the house there, if you please!’

‘You admire that house?’ said I.

‘Bless you, sir,’ said the very queer small boy, ‘when I was not more
than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me to be brought to
look at it.  And now, I am nine, I come by myself to look at it.  And
ever since I can recollect, my father, seeing me so fond of it, has often
said to me, “If you were to be very persevering and were to work hard,
you might some day come to live in it.”  Though that’s impossible!’ said
the very queer small boy, drawing a low breath, and now staring at the
house out of window with all his might.

I was rather amazed to be told this by the very queer small boy; for that
house happens to be _my_ house, and I have reason to believe that what he
said was true.

Well!  I made no halt there, and I soon dropped the very queer small boy
and went on.  Over the road where the old Romans used to march, over the
road where the old Canterbury pilgrims used to go, over the road where
the travelling trains of the old imperious priests and princes used to
jingle on horseback between the continent and this Island through the mud
and water, over the road where Shakespeare hummed to himself, ‘Blow,
blow, thou winter wind,’ as he sat in the saddle at the gate of the inn
yard noticing the carriers; all among the cherry orchards, apple
orchards, corn-fields, and hop-gardens; so went I, by Canterbury to
Dover.  There, the sea was tumbling in, with deep sounds, after dark, and
the revolving French light on Cape Grinez was seen regularly bursting out
and becoming obscured, as if the head of a gigantic light-keeper in an
anxious state of mind were interposed every half-minute, to look how it
was burning.

Early in the morning I was on the deck of the steam-packet, and we were
aiming at the bar in the usual intolerable manner, and the bar was aiming
at us in the usual intolerable manner, and the bar got by far the best of
it, and we got by far the worst—all in the usual intolerable manner.

But, when I was clear of the Custom House on the other side, and when I
began to make the dust fly on the thirsty French roads, and when the
twigsome trees by the wayside (which, I suppose, never will grow leafy,
for they never did) guarded here and there a dusty soldier, or field
labourer, baking on a heap of broken stones, sound asleep in a fiction of
shade, I began to recover my travelling spirits.  Coming upon the breaker
of the broken stones, in a hard, hot, shining hat, on which the sun
played at a distance as on a burning-glass, I felt that now, indeed, I
was in the dear old France of my affections.  I should have known it,
without the well-remembered bottle of rough ordinary wine, the cold roast
fowl, the loaf, and the pinch of salt, on which I lunched with
unspeakable satisfaction, from one of the stuffed pockets of the chariot.

I must have fallen asleep after lunch, for when a bright face looked in
at the window, I started, and said:

‘Good God, Louis, I dreamed you were dead!’

My cheerful servant laughed, and answered:

‘Me?  Not at all, sir.’

‘How glad I am to wake!  What are we doing Louis?’

‘We go to take relay of horses.  Will you walk up the hill?’

‘Certainly.’

Welcome the old French hill, with the old French lunatic (not in the most
distant degree related to Sterne’s Maria) living in a thatched dog-kennel
half-way up, and flying out with his crutch and his big head and extended
nightcap, to be beforehand with the old men and women exhibiting crippled
children, and with the children exhibiting old men and women, ugly and
blind, who always seemed by resurrectionary process to be recalled out of
the elements for the sudden peopling of the solitude!

‘It is well,’ said I, scattering among them what small coin I had; ‘here
comes Louis, and I am quite roused from my nap.’

We journeyed on again, and I welcomed every new assurance that France
stood where I had left it.  There were the posting-houses, with their
archways, dirty stable-yards, and clean post-masters’ wives, bright women
of business, looking on at the putting-to of the horses; there were the
postilions counting what money they got, into their hats, and never
making enough of it; there were the standard population of grey horses of
Flanders descent, invariably biting one another when they got a chance;
there were the fleecy sheepskins, looped on over their uniforms by the
postilions, like bibbed aprons when it blew and rained; there were their
Jack-boots, and their cracking whips; there were the cathedrals that I
got out to see, as under some cruel bondage, in no wise desiring to see
them; there were the little towns that appeared to have no reason for
being towns, since most of their houses were to let and nobody could be
induced to look at them, except the people who couldn’t let them and had
nothing else to do but look at them all day.  I lay a night upon the road
and enjoyed delectable cookery of potatoes, and some other sensible
things, adoption of which at home would inevitably be shown to be fraught
with ruin, somehow or other, to that rickety national blessing, the
British farmer; and at last I was rattled, like a single pill in a box,
over leagues of stones, until—madly cracking, plunging, and flourishing
two grey tails about—I made my triumphal entry into Paris.

At Paris, I took an upper apartment for a few days in one of the hotels
of the Rue de Rivoli; my front windows looking into the garden of the
Tuileries (where the principal difference between the nursemaids and the
flowers seemed to be that the former were locomotive and the latter not):
my back windows looking at all the other back windows in the hotel, and
deep down into a paved yard, where my German chariot had retired under a
tight-fitting archway, to all appearance for life, and where bells rang
all day without anybody’s minding them but certain chamberlains with
feather brooms and green baize caps, who here and there leaned out of
some high window placidly looking down, and where neat waiters with trays
on their left shoulders passed and repassed from morning to night.

Whenever I am at Paris, I am dragged by invisible force into the Morgue.
I never want to go there, but am always pulled there.  One Christmas Day,
when I would rather have been anywhere else, I was attracted in, to see
an old grey man lying all alone on his cold bed, with a tap of water
turned on over his grey hair, and running, drip, drip, drip, down his
wretched face until it got to the corner of his mouth, where it took a
turn, and made him look sly.  One New Year’s Morning (by the same token,
the sun was shining outside, and there was a mountebank balancing a
feather on his nose, within a yard of the gate), I was pulled in again to
look at a flaxen-haired boy of eighteen, with a heart hanging on his
breast—‘from his mother,’ was engraven on it—who had come into the net
across the river, with a bullet wound in his fair forehead and his hands
cut with a knife, but whence or how was a blank mystery.  This time, I
was forced into the same dread place, to see a large dark man whose
disfigurement by water was in a frightful manner comic, and whose
expression was that of a prize-fighter who had closed his eyelids under a
heavy blow, but was going immediately to open them, shake his head, and
‘come up smiling.’  Oh what this large dark man cost me in that bright
city!

It was very hot weather, and he was none the better for that, and I was
much the worse.  Indeed, a very neat and pleasant little woman with the
key of her lodging on her forefinger, who had been showing him to her
little girl while she and the child ate sweetmeats, observed monsieur
looking poorly as we came out together, and asked monsieur, with her
wondering little eyebrows prettily raised, if there were anything the
matter?  Faintly replying in the negative, monsieur crossed the road to a
wine-shop, got some brandy, and resolved to freshen himself with a dip in
the great floating bath on the river.

The bath was crowded in the usual airy manner, by a male population in
striped drawers of various gay colours, who walked up and down arm in
arm, drank coffee, smoked cigars, sat at little tables, conversed
politely with the damsels who dispensed the towels, and every now and
then pitched themselves into the river head foremost, and came out again
to repeat this social routine.  I made haste to participate in the water
part of the entertainments, and was in the full enjoyment of a delightful
bath, when all in a moment I was seized with an unreasonable idea that
the large dark body was floating straight at me.

I was out of the river, and dressing instantly.  In the shock I had taken
some water into my mouth, and it turned me sick, for I fancied that the
contamination of the creature was in it.  I had got back to my cool
darkened room in the hotel, and was lying on a sofa there, before I began
to reason with myself.

Of course, I knew perfectly well that the large dark creature was stone
dead, and that I should no more come upon him out of the place where I
had seen him dead, than I should come upon the cathedral of Notre-Dame in
an entirely new situation.  What troubled me was the picture of the
creature; and that had so curiously and strongly painted itself upon my
brain, that I could not get rid of it until it was worn out.

I noticed the peculiarities of this possession, while it was a real
discomfort to me.  That very day, at dinner, some morsel on my plate
looked like a piece of him, and I was glad to get up and go out.  Later
in the evening, I was walking along the Rue St. Honoré, when I saw a bill
at a public room there, announcing small-sword exercise, broad-sword
exercise, wrestling, and other such feats.  I went in, and some of the
sword-play being very skilful, remained.  A specimen of our own national
sport, The British Boaxe, was announced to be given at the close of the
evening.  In an evil hour, I determined to wait for this Boaxe, as became
a Briton.  It was a clumsy specimen (executed by two English grooms out
of place), but one of the combatants, receiving a straight right-hander
with the glove between his eyes, did exactly what the large dark creature
in the Morgue had seemed going to do—and finished me for that night.

There was rather a sickly smell (not at all an unusual fragrance in
Paris) in the little ante-room of my apartment at the hotel.  The large
dark creature in the Morgue was by no direct experience associated with
my sense of smell, because, when I came to the knowledge of him, he lay
behind a wall of thick plate-glass as good as a wall of steel or marble
for that matter.  Yet the whiff of the room never failed to reproduce
him.  What was more curious, was the capriciousness with which his
portrait seemed to light itself up in my mind, elsewhere.  I might be
walking in the Palais Royal, lazily enjoying the shop windows, and might
be regaling myself with one of the ready-made clothes shops that are set
out there.  My eyes, wandering over impossible-waisted dressing-gowns and
luminous waistcoats, would fall upon the master, or the shopman, or even
the very dummy at the door, and would suggest to me, ‘Something like
him!’—and instantly I was sickened again.

This would happen at the theatre, in the same manner.  Often it would
happen in the street, when I certainly was not looking for the likeness,
and when probably there was no likeness there.  It was not because the
creature was dead that I was so haunted, because I know that I might have
been (and I know it because I have been) equally attended by the image of
a living aversion.  This lasted about a week.  The picture did not fade
by degrees, in the sense that it became a whit less forcible and
distinct, but in the sense that it obtruded itself less and less
frequently.  The experience may be worth considering by some who have the
care of children.  It would be difficult to overstate the intensity and
accuracy of an intelligent child’s observation.  At that impressible time
of life, it must sometimes produce a fixed impression.  If the fixed
impression be of an object terrible to the child, it will be (for want of
reasoning upon) inseparable from great fear.  Force the child at such a
time, be Spartan with it, send it into the dark against its will, leave
it in a lonely bedroom against its will, and you had better murder it.

On a bright morning I rattled away from Paris, in the German chariot, and
left the large dark creature behind me for good.  I ought to confess,
though, that I had been drawn back to the Morgue, after he was put
underground, to look at his clothes, and that I found them frightfully
like him—particularly his boots.  However, I rattled away for
Switzerland, looking forward and not backward, and so we parted company.

Welcome again, the long, long spell of France, with the queer country
inns, full of vases of flowers and clocks, in the dull little town, and
with the little population not at all dull on the little Boulevard in the
evening, under the little trees!  Welcome Monsieur the Curé, walking
alone in the early morning a short way out of the town, reading that
eternal Breviary of yours, which surely might be almost read, without
book, by this time!  Welcome Monsieur the Curé, later in the day, jolting
through the highway dust (as if you had already ascended to the cloudy
region), in a very big-headed cabriolet, with the dried mud of a dozen
winters on it.  Welcome again Monsieur the Curé, as we exchange
salutations; you, straightening your back to look at the German chariot,
while picking in your little village garden a vegetable or two for the
day’s soup: I, looking out of the German chariot window in that delicious
traveller’s trance which knows no cares, no yesterdays, no to-morrows,
nothing but the passing objects and the passing scents and sounds!  And
so I came, in due course of delight, to Strasbourg, where I passed a wet
Sunday evening at a window, while an idle trifle of a vaudeville was
played for me at the opposite house.

How such a large house came to have only three people living in it, was
its own affair.  There were at least a score of windows in its high roof
alone; how many in its grotesque front, I soon gave up counting.  The
owner was a shopkeeper, by name Straudenheim; by trade—I couldn’t make
out what by trade, for he had forborne to write that up, and his shop was
shut.

At first, as I looked at Straudenheim’s, through the steadily falling
rain, I set him up in business in the goose-liver line.  But, inspection
of Straudenheim, who became visible at a window on the second floor,
convinced me that there was something more precious than liver in the
case.  He wore a black velvet skull-cap, and looked usurious and rich.  A
large-lipped, pear-nosed old man, with white hair, and keen eyes, though
near-sighted.  He was writing at a desk, was Straudenheim, and ever and
again left off writing, put his pen in his mouth, and went through
actions with his right hand, like a man steadying piles of cash.
Five-franc pieces, Straudenheim, or golden Napoleons?  A jeweller,
Straudenheim, a dealer in money, a diamond merchant, or what?

Below Straudenheim, at a window on the first floor, sat his
housekeeper—far from young, but of a comely presence, suggestive of a
well-matured foot and ankle.  She was cheerily dressed, had a fan in her
hand, and wore large gold earrings and a large gold cross.  She would
have been out holiday-making (as I settled it) but for the pestilent
rain.  Strasbourg had given up holiday-making for that once, as a bad
job, because the rain was jerking in gushes out of the old roof-spouts,
and running in a brook down the middle of the street.  The housekeeper,
her arms folded on her bosom and her fan tapping her chin, was bright and
smiling at her open window, but otherwise Straudenheim’s house front was
very dreary.  The housekeeper’s was the only open window in it;
Straudenheim kept himself close, though it was a sultry evening when air
is pleasant, and though the rain had brought into the town that vague
refreshing smell of grass which rain does bring in the summer-time.

The dim appearance of a man at Straudenheim’s shoulder, inspired me with
a misgiving that somebody had come to murder that flourishing merchant
for the wealth with which I had handsomely endowed him: the rather, as it
was an excited man, lean and long of figure, and evidently stealthy of
foot.  But, he conferred with Straudenheim instead of doing him a mortal
injury, and then they both softly opened the other window of that
room—which was immediately over the housekeeper’s—and tried to see her by
looking down.  And my opinion of Straudenheim was much lowered when I saw
that eminent citizen spit out of window, clearly with the hope of
spitting on the housekeeper.

The unconscious housekeeper fanned herself, tossed her head, and laughed.
Though unconscious of Straudenheim, she was conscious of somebody else—of
me?—there was nobody else.

After leaning so far out of the window, that I confidently expected to
see their heels tilt up, Straudenheim and the lean man drew their heads
in and shut the window.  Presently, the house door secretly opened, and
they slowly and spitefully crept forth into the pouring rain.  They were
coming over to me (I thought) to demand satisfaction for my looking at
the housekeeper, when they plunged into a recess in the architecture
under my window and dragged out the puniest of little soldiers, begirt
with the most innocent of little swords.  The tall glazed head-dress of
this warrior, Straudenheim instantly knocked off, and out of it fell two
sugar-sticks, and three or four large lumps of sugar.

The warrior made no effort to recover his property or to pick up his
shako, but looked with an expression of attention at Straudenheim when he
kicked him five times, and also at the lean man when _he_ kicked him five
times, and again at Straudenheim when he tore the breast of his (the
warrior’s) little coat open, and shook all his ten fingers in his face,
as if they were ten thousand.  When these outrages had been committed,
Straudenheim and his man went into the house again and barred the door.
A wonderful circumstance was, that the housekeeper who saw it all (and
who could have taken six such warriors to her buxom bosom at once), only
fanned herself and laughed as she had laughed before, and seemed to have
no opinion about it, one way or other.

But, the chief effect of the drama was the remarkable vengeance taken by
the little warrior.  Left alone in the rain, he picked up his shako; put
it on, all wet and dirty as it was; retired into a court, of which
Straudenheim’s house formed the corner; wheeled about; and bringing his
two forefingers close to the top of his nose, rubbed them over one
another, cross-wise, in derision, defiance, and contempt of Straudenheim.
Although Straudenheim could not possibly be supposed to be conscious of
this strange proceeding, it so inflated and comforted the little
warrior’s soul, that twice he went away, and twice came back into the
court to repeat it, as though it must goad his enemy to madness.  Not
only that, but he afterwards came back with two other small warriors, and
they all three did it together.  Not only that—as I live to tell the
tale!—but just as it was falling quite dark, the three came back,
bringing with them a huge bearded Sapper, whom they moved, by recital of
the original wrong, to go through the same performance, with the same
complete absence of all possible knowledge of it on the part of
Straudenheim.  And then they all went away, arm in arm, singing.

I went away too, in the German chariot at sunrise, and rattled on, day
after day, like one in a sweet dream; with so many clear little bells on
the harness of the horses, that the nursery rhyme about Banbury Cross and
the venerable lady who rode in state there, was always in my ears.  And
now I came to the land of wooden houses, innocent cakes, thin butter
soup, and spotless little inn bedrooms with a family likeness to Dairies.
And now the Swiss marksmen were for ever rifle-shooting at marks across
gorges, so exceedingly near my ear, that I felt like a new Gesler in a
Canton of Tells, and went in highly-deserved danger of my tyrannical
life.  The prizes at these shootings, were watches, smart handkerchiefs,
hats, spoons, and (above all) tea-trays; and at these contests I came
upon a more than usually accomplished and amiable countryman of my own,
who had shot himself deaf in whole years of competition, and had won so
many tea-trays that he went about the country with his carriage full of
them, like a glorified Cheap-Jack.

In the mountain-country into which I had now travelled, a yoke of oxen
were sometimes hooked on before the post-horses, and I went lumbering up,
up, up, through mist and rain, with the roar of falling water for change
of music.  Of a sudden, mist and rain would clear away, and I would come
down into picturesque little towns with gleaming spires and odd towers;
and would stroll afoot into market-places in steep winding streets, where
a hundred women in bodices, sold eggs and honey, butter and fruit, and
suckled their children as they sat by their clean baskets, and had such
enormous goîtres (or glandular swellings in the throat) that it became a
science to know where the nurse ended and the child began.  About this
time, I deserted my German chariot for the back of a mule (in colour and
consistency so very like a dusty old hair trunk I once had at school,
that I half expected to see my initials in brass-headed nails on his
backbone), and went up a thousand rugged ways, and looked down at a
thousand woods of fir and pine, and would on the whole have preferred my
mule’s keeping a little nearer to the inside, and not usually travelling
with a hoof or two over the precipice—though much consoled by explanation
that this was to be attributed to his great sagacity, by reason of his
carrying broad loads of wood at other times, and not being clear but that
I myself belonged to that station of life, and required as much room as
they.  He brought me safely, in his own wise way, among the passes of the
Alps, and here I enjoyed a dozen climates a day; being now (like Don
Quixote on the back of the wooden horse) in the region of wind, now in
the region of fire, now in the region of unmelting ice and snow.  Here, I
passed over trembling domes of ice, beneath which the cataract was
roaring; and here was received under arches of icicles, of unspeakable
beauty; and here the sweet air was so bracing and so light, that at
halting-times I rolled in the snow when I saw my mule do it, thinking
that he must know best.  At this part of the journey we would come, at
mid-day, into half an hour’s thaw: when the rough mountain inn would be
found on an island of deep mud in a sea of snow, while the baiting
strings of mules, and the carts full of casks and bales, which had been
in an Arctic condition a mile off, would steam again.  By such ways and
means, I would come to the cluster of châlets where I had to turn out of
the track to see the waterfall; and then, uttering a howl like a young
giant, on espying a traveller—in other words, something to eat—coming up
the steep, the idiot lying on the wood-pile who sunned himself and nursed
his goître, would rouse the woman-guide within the hut, who would stream
out hastily, throwing her child over one of her shoulders and her goître
over the other, as she came along.  I slept at religious houses, and
bleak refuges of many kinds, on this journey, and by the stove at night
heard stories of travellers who had perished within call, in wreaths and
drifts of snow.  One night the stove within, and the cold outside,
awakened childish associations long forgotten, and I dreamed I was in
Russia—the identical serf out of a picture-book I had, before I could
read it for myself—and that I was going to be knouted by a noble
personage in a fur cap, boots, and earrings, who, I think, must have come
out of some melodrama.

Commend me to the beautiful waters among these mountains!  Though I was
not of their mind: they, being inveterately bent on getting down into the
level country, and I ardently desiring to linger where I was.  What
desperate leaps they took, what dark abysses they plunged into, what
rocks they wore away, what echoes they invoked!  In one part where I
went, they were pressed into the service of carrying wood down, to be
burnt next winter, as costly fuel, in Italy.  But, their fierce savage
nature was not to be easily constrained, and they fought with every limb
of the wood; whirling it round and round, stripping its bark away,
dashing it against pointed corners, driving it out of the course, and
roaring and flying at the peasants who steered it back again from the
bank with long stout poles.  Alas! concurrent streams of time and water
carried _me_ down fast, and I came, on an exquisitely clear day, to the
Lausanne shore of the Lake of Geneva, where I stood looking at the bright
blue water, the flushed white mountains opposite, and the boats at my
feet with their furled Mediterranean sails, showing like enormous
magnifications of this goose-quill pen that is now in my hand.

—The sky became overcast without any notice; a wind very like the March
east wind of England, blew across me; and a voice said, ‘How do you like
it?  Will it do?’

I had merely shut myself, for half a minute, in a German travelling
chariot that stood for sale in the Carriage Department of the London
Pantechnicon.  I had a commission to buy it, for a friend who was going
abroad; and the look and manner of the chariot, as I tried the cushions
and the springs, brought all these hints of travelling remembrance before
me.

‘It will do very well,’ said I, rather sorrowfully, as I got out at the
other door, and shut the carriage up.




VIII
THE GREAT TASMANIA’S CARGO


I TRAVEL constantly, up and down a certain line of railway that has a
terminus in London.  It is the railway for a large military depôt, and
for other large barracks.  To the best of my serious belief, I have never
been on that railway by daylight, without seeing some handcuffed
deserters in the train.

It is in the nature of things that such an institution as our English
army should have many bad and troublesome characters in it.  But, this is
a reason for, and not against, its being made as acceptable as possible
to well-disposed men of decent behaviour.  Such men are assuredly not
tempted into the ranks, by the beastly inversion of natural laws, and the
compulsion to live in worse than swinish foulness.  Accordingly, when any
such Circumlocutional embellishments of the soldier’s condition have of
late been brought to notice, we civilians, seated in outer darkness
cheerfully meditating on an Income Tax, have considered the matter as
being our business, and have shown a tendency to declare that we would
rather not have it misregulated, if such declaration may, without
violence to the Church Catechism, be hinted to those who are put in
authority over us.

Any animated description of a modern battle, any private soldier’s letter
published in the newspapers, any page of the records of the Victoria
Cross, will show that in the ranks of the army, there exists under all
disadvantages as fine a sense of duty as is to be found in any station on
earth.  Who doubts that if we all did our duty as faithfully as the
soldier does his, this world would be a better place?  There may be
greater difficulties in our way than in the soldier’s.  Not disputed.
But, let us at least do our duty towards _him_.

I had got back again to that rich and beautiful port where I had looked
after Mercantile Jack, and I was walking up a hill there, on a wild March
morning.  My conversation with my official friend Pangloss, by whom I was
accidentally accompanied, took this direction as we took the up-hill
direction, because the object of my uncommercial journey was to see some
discharged soldiers who had recently come home from India.  There were
men of HAVELOCK’S among them; there were men who had been in many of the
great battles of the great Indian campaign, among them; and I was curious
to note what our discharged soldiers looked like, when they were done
with.

I was not the less interested (as I mentioned to my official friend
Pangloss) because these men had claimed to be discharged, when their
right to be discharged was not admitted.  They had behaved with
unblemished fidelity and bravery; but, a change of circumstances had
arisen, which, as they considered, put an end to their compact and
entitled them to enter on a new one.  Their demand had been blunderingly
resisted by the authorities in India: but, it is to be presumed that the
men were not far wrong, inasmuch as the bungle had ended in their being
sent home discharged, in pursuance of orders from home.  (There was an
immense waste of money, of course.)

Under these circumstances—thought I, as I walked up the hill, on which I
accidentally encountered my official friend—under these circumstances of
the men having successfully opposed themselves to the Pagoda Department
of that great Circumlocution Office on which the sun never sets and the
light of reason never rises, the Pagoda Department will have been
particularly careful of the national honour.  It will have shown these
men, in the scrupulous good faith, not to say the generosity, of its
dealing with them, that great national authorities can have no small
retaliations and revenges.  It will have made every provision for their
health on the passage home, and will have landed them, restored from
their campaigning fatigues by a sea-voyage, pure air, sound food, and
good medicines.  And I pleased myself with dwelling beforehand, on the
great accounts of their personal treatment which these men would carry
into their various towns and villages, and on the increasing popularity
of the service that would insensibly follow.  I almost began to hope that
the hitherto-never-failing deserters on my railroad would by-and-by
become a phenomenon.

In this agreeable frame of mind I entered the workhouse of
Liverpool.—For, the cultivation of laurels in a sandy soil, had brought
the soldiers in question to _that_ abode of Glory.

Before going into their wards to visit them, I inquired how they had made
their triumphant entry there?  They had been brought through the rain in
carts it seemed, from the landing-place to the gate, and had then been
carried up-stairs on the backs of paupers.  Their groans and pains during
the performance of this glorious pageant, had been so distressing, as to
bring tears into the eyes of spectators but too well accustomed to scenes
of suffering.  The men were so dreadfully cold, that those who could get
near the fires were hard to be restrained from thrusting their feet in
among the blazing coals.  They were so horribly reduced, that they were
awful to look upon.  Racked with dysentery and blackened with scurvy, one
hundred and forty wretched soldiers had been revived with brandy and laid
in bed.

My official friend Pangloss is lineally descended from a learned doctor
of that name, who was once tutor to Candide, an ingenious young gentleman
of some celebrity.  In his personal character, he is as humane and worthy
a gentleman as any I know; in his official capacity, he unfortunately
preaches the doctrines of his renowned ancestor, by demonstrating on all
occasions that we live in the best of all possible official worlds.

‘In the name of Humanity,’ said I, ‘how did the men fall into this
deplorable state?  Was the ship well found in stores?’

‘I am not here to asseverate that I know the fact, of my own knowledge,’
answered Pangloss, ‘but I have grounds for asserting that the stores were
the best of all possible stores.’

A medical officer laid before us, a handful of rotten biscuit, and a
handful of split peas.  The biscuit was a honeycombed heap of maggots,
and the excrement of maggots.  The peas were even harder than this filth.
A similar handful had been experimentally boiled six hours, and had shown
no signs of softening.  These were the stores on which the soldiers had
been fed.

‘The beef—’ I began, when Pangloss cut me short.

‘Was the best of all possible beef,’ said he.

But, behold, there was laid before us certain evidence given at the
Coroner’s Inquest, holden on some of the men (who had obstinately died of
their treatment), and from that evidence it appeared that the beef was
the worst of possible beef!

‘Then I lay my hand upon my heart, and take my stand,’ said Pangloss, ‘by
the pork, which was the best of all possible pork.’

‘But look at this food before our eyes, if one may so misuse the word,’
said I.  ‘Would any Inspector who did his duty, pass such abomination?’

‘It ought not to have been passed,’ Pangloss admitted.

‘Then the authorities out there—’ I began, when Pangloss cut me short
again.

‘There would certainly seem to have been something wrong somewhere,’ said
he; ‘but I am prepared to prove that the authorities out there, are the
best of all possible authorities.’

I never heard of any impeached public authority in my life, who was not
the best public authority in existence.

‘We are told of these unfortunate men being laid low by scurvy,’ said I.
‘Since lime-juice has been regularly stored and served out in our navy,
surely that disease, which used to devastate it, has almost disappeared?
Was there lime-juice aboard this transport?’

My official friend was beginning ‘the best of all possible—’ when an
inconvenient medical forefinger pointed out another passage in the
evidence, from which it appeared that the lime-juice had been bad too.
Not to mention that the vinegar had been bad too, the vegetables bad too,
the cooking accommodation insufficient (if there had been anything worth
mentioning to cook), the water supply exceedingly inadequate, and the
beer sour.

‘Then the men,’ said Pangloss, a little irritated, ‘Were the worst of all
possible men.’

‘In what respect?’ I asked.

‘Oh!  Habitual drunkards,’ said Pangloss.

But, again the same incorrigible medical forefinger pointed out another
passage in the evidence, showing that the dead men had been examined
after death, and that they, at least, could not possibly have been
habitual drunkards, because the organs within them which must have shown
traces of that habit, were perfectly sound.

‘And besides,’ said the three doctors present, ‘one and all, habitual
drunkards brought as low as these men have been, could not recover under
care and food, as the great majority of these men are recovering.  They
would not have strength of constitution to do it.’

‘Reckless and improvident dogs, then,’ said Pangloss.  ‘Always are—nine
times out of ten.’

I turned to the master of the workhouse, and asked him whether the men
had any money?

‘Money?’ said he.  ‘I have in my iron safe, nearly four hundred pounds of
theirs; the agents have nearly a hundred pounds more and many of them
have left money in Indian banks besides.’

‘Hah!’ said I to myself, as we went up-stairs, ‘this is not the best of
all possible stories, I doubt!’

We went into a large ward, containing some twenty or five-and-twenty
beds.  We went into several such wards, one after another.  I find it
very difficult to indicate what a shocking sight I saw in them, without
frightening the reader from the perusal of these lines, and defeating my
object of making it known.

O the sunken eyes that turned to me as I walked between the rows of beds,
or—worse still—that glazedly looked at the white ceiling, and saw nothing
and cared for nothing!  Here, lay the skeleton of a man, so lightly
covered with a thin unwholesome skin, that not a bone in the anatomy was
clothed, and I could clasp the arm above the elbow, in my finger and
thumb.  Here, lay a man with the black scurvy eating his legs away, his
gums gone, and his teeth all gaunt and bare.  This bed was empty, because
gangrene had set in, and the patient had died but yesterday.  That bed
was a hopeless one, because its occupant was sinking fast, and could only
be roused to turn the poor pinched mask of face upon the pillow, with a
feeble moan.  The awful thinness of the fallen cheeks, the awful
brightness of the deep set eyes, the lips of lead, the hands of ivory,
the recumbent human images lying in the shadow of death with a kind of
solemn twilight on them, like the sixty who had died aboard the ship and
were lying at the bottom of the sea, O Pangloss, GOD forgive you!

In one bed, lay a man whose life had been saved (as it was hoped) by deep
incisions in the feet and legs.  While I was speaking to him, a nurse
came up to change the poultices which this operation had rendered
necessary, and I had an instinctive feeling that it was not well to turn
away, merely to spare myself.  He was sorely wasted and keenly
susceptible, but the efforts he made to subdue any expression of
impatience or suffering, were quite heroic.  It was easy to see, in the
shrinking of the figure, and the drawing of the bed-clothes over the
head, how acute the endurance was, and it made me shrink too, as if I
were in pain; but, when the new bandages were on, and the poor feet were
composed again, he made an apology for himself (though he had not uttered
a word), and said plaintively, ‘I am so tender and weak, you see, sir!’
Neither from him nor from any one sufferer of the whole ghastly number,
did I hear a complaint.  Of thankfulness for present solicitude and care,
I heard much; of complaint, not a word.

I think I could have recognised in the dismalest skeleton there, the
ghost of a soldier.  Something of the old air was still latent in the
palest shadow of life I talked to.  One emaciated creature, in the
strictest literality worn to the bone, lay stretched on his back, looking
so like death that I asked one of the doctors if he were not dying, or
dead?  A few kind words from the doctor, in his ear, and he opened his
eyes, and smiled—looked, in a moment, as if he would have made a salute,
if he could.  ‘We shall pull him through, please God,’ said the Doctor.
‘Plase God, surr, and thankye,’ said the patient.  ‘You are much better
to-day; are you not?’ said the Doctor.  ‘Plase God, surr; ’tis the slape
I want, surr; ’tis my breathin’ makes the nights so long.’  ‘He is a
careful fellow this, you must know,’ said the Doctor, cheerfully; ‘it was
raining hard when they put him in the open cart to bring him here, and he
had the presence of mind to ask to have a sovereign taken out of his
pocket that he had there, and a cab engaged.  Probably it saved his
life.’  The patient rattled out the skeleton of a laugh, and said, proud
of the story, ‘’Deed, surr, an open cairt was a comical means o’ bringin’
a dyin’ man here, and a clever way to kill him.’  You might have sworn to
him for a soldier when he said it.

One thing had perplexed me very much in going from bed to bed.  A very
significant and cruel thing.  I could find no young man but one.  He had
attracted my notice, by having got up and dressed himself in his
soldier’s jacket and trousers, with the intention of sitting by the fire;
but he had found himself too weak, and had crept back to his bed and laid
himself down on the outside of it.  I could have pronounced him, alone,
to be a young man aged by famine and sickness.  As we were standing by
the Irish soldier’s bed, I mentioned my perplexity to the Doctor.  He
took a board with an inscription on it from the head of the Irishman’s
bed, and asked me what age I supposed that man to be?  I had observed him
with attention while talking to him, and answered, confidently, ‘Fifty.’
The Doctor, with a pitying glance at the patient, who had dropped into a
stupor again, put the board back, and said, ‘Twenty-four.’

All the arrangements of the wards were excellent.  They could not have
been more humane, sympathising, gentle, attentive, or wholesome.  The
owners of the ship, too, had done all they could, liberally.  There were
bright fires in every room, and the convalescent men were sitting round
them, reading various papers and periodicals.  I took the liberty of
inviting my official friend Pangloss to look at those convalescent men,
and to tell me whether their faces and bearing were or were not,
generally, the faces and bearing of steady respectable soldiers?  The
master of the workhouse, overhearing me, said he had had a pretty large
experience of troops, and that better conducted men than these, he had
never had to do with.  They were always (he added) as we saw them.  And
of us visitors (I add) they knew nothing whatever, except that we were
there.

It was audacious in me, but I took another liberty with Pangloss.
Prefacing it with the observation that, of course, I knew beforehand that
there was not the faintest desire, anywhere, to hush up any part of this
dreadful business, and that the Inquest was the fairest of all possible
Inquests, I besought four things of Pangloss.  Firstly, to observe that
the Inquest _was not held in that place_, but at some distance off.
Secondly, to look round upon those helpless spectres in their beds.
Thirdly, to remember that the witnesses produced from among them before
that Inquest, could not have been selected because they were the men who
had the most to tell it, but because they happened to be in a state
admitting of their safe removal.  Fourthly, to say whether the coroner
and jury could have come there, to those pillows, and taken a little
evidence?  My official friend declined to commit himself to a reply.

There was a sergeant, reading, in one of the fireside groups.  As he was
a man of very intelligent countenance, and as I have a great respect for
non-commissioned officers as a class, I sat down on the nearest bed, to
have some talk with him.  (It was the bed of one of the grisliest of the
poor skeletons, and he died soon afterwards.)

‘I was glad to see, in the evidence of an officer at the Inquest,
sergeant, that he never saw men behave better on board ship than these
men.’

‘They did behave very well, sir.’

‘I was glad to see, too, that every man had a hammock.’  The sergeant
gravely shook his head.  ‘There must be some mistake, sir.  The men of my
own mess had no hammocks.  There were not hammocks enough on board, and
the men of the two next messes laid hold of hammocks for themselves as
soon as they got on board, and squeezed my men out, as I may say.’

‘Had the squeezed-out men none then?’

‘None, sir.  As men died, their hammocks were used by other men, who
wanted hammocks; but many men had none at all.’

‘Then you don’t agree with the evidence on that point?’

‘Certainly not, sir.  A man can’t, when he knows to the contrary.’

‘Did any of the men sell their bedding for drink?’

‘There is some mistake on that point too, sir.  Men were under the
impression—I knew it for a fact at the time—that it was not allowed to
take blankets or bedding on board, and so men who had things of that sort
came to sell them purposely.’

‘Did any of the men sell their clothes for drink?’

‘They did, sir.’  (I believe there never was a more truthful witness than
the sergeant.  He had no inclination to make out a case.)

‘Many?’

‘Some, sir’ (considering the question).  ‘Soldier-like.  They had been
long marching in the rainy season, by bad roads—no roads at all, in
short—and when they got to Calcutta, men turned to and drank, before
taking a last look at it.  Soldier-like.’

‘Do you see any men in this ward, for example, who sold clothes for drink
at that time?’

The sergeant’s wan eye, happily just beginning to rekindle with health,
travelled round the place and came back to me.  ‘Certainly, sir.’

‘The marching to Calcutta in the rainy season must have been severe?’

‘It was very severe, sir.’

‘Yet what with the rest and the sea air, I should have thought that the
men (even the men who got drunk) would have soon begun to recover on
board ship?’

‘So they might; but the bad food told upon them, and when we got into a
cold latitude, it began to tell more, and the men dropped.’

‘The sick had a general disinclination for food, I am told, sergeant?’

‘Have you seen the food, sir?’

‘Some of it.’

‘Have you seen the state of their mouths, sir?’

If the sergeant, who was a man of a few orderly words, had spoken the
amount of this volume, he could not have settled that question better.  I
believe the sick could as soon have eaten the ship, as the ship’s
provisions.

I took the additional liberty with my friend Pangloss, when I had left
the sergeant with good wishes, of asking Pangloss whether he had ever
heard of biscuit getting drunk and bartering its nutritious qualities for
putrefaction and vermin; of peas becoming hardened in liquor; of hammocks
drinking themselves off the face of the earth; of lime-juice, vegetables,
vinegar, cooking accommodation, water supply, and beer, all taking to
drinking together and going to ruin?  ‘If not (I asked him), what did he
say in defence of the officers condemned by the Coroner’s jury, who, by
signing the General Inspection report relative to the ship Great
Tasmania, chartered for these troops, had deliberately asserted all that
bad and poisonous dunghill refuse, to be good and wholesome food?’  My
official friend replied that it was a remarkable fact, that whereas some
officers were only positively good, and other officers only comparatively
better, those particular officers were superlatively the very best of all
possible officers.

My hand and my heart fail me, in writing my record of this journey.  The
spectacle of the soldiers in the hospital-beds of that Liverpool
workhouse (a very good workhouse, indeed, be it understood), was so
shocking and so shameful, that as an Englishman I blush to remember it.
It would have been simply unbearable at the time, but for the
consideration and pity with which they were soothed in their sufferings.

No punishment that our inefficient laws provide, is worthy of the name
when set against the guilt of this transaction.  But, if the memory of it
die out unavenged, and if it do not result in the inexorable dismissal
and disgrace of those who are responsible for it, their escape will be
infamous to the Government (no matter of what party) that so neglects its
duty, and infamous to the nation that tamely suffers such intolerable
wrong to be done in its name.




IX
CITY OF LONDON CHURCHES


IF the confession that I have often travelled from this Covent Garden
lodging of mine on Sundays, should give offence to those who never travel
on Sundays, they will be satisfied (I hope) by my adding that the
journeys in question were made to churches.

Not that I have any curiosity to hear powerful preachers.  Time was, when
I was dragged by the hair of my head, as one may say, to hear too many.
On summer evenings, when every flower, and tree, and bird, might have
better addressed my soft young heart, I have in my day been caught in the
palm of a female hand by the crown, have been violently scrubbed from the
neck to the roots of the hair as a purification for the Temple, and have
then been carried off highly charged with saponaceous electricity, to be
steamed like a potato in the unventilated breath of the powerful
Boanerges Boiler and his congregation, until what small mind I had, was
quite steamed out of me.  In which pitiable plight I have been haled out
of the place of meeting, at the conclusion of the exercises, and
catechised respecting Boanerges Boiler, his fifthly, his sixthly, and his
seventhly, until I have regarded that reverend person in the light of a
most dismal and oppressive Charade.  Time was, when I was carried off to
platform assemblages at which no human child, whether of wrath or grace,
could possibly keep its eyes open, and when I felt the fatal sleep
stealing, stealing over me, and when I gradually heard the orator in
possession, spinning and humming like a great top, until he rolled,
collapsed, and tumbled over, and I discovered to my burning shame and
fear, that as to that last stage it was not he, but I.  I have sat under
Boanerges when he has specifically addressed himself to us—us, the
infants—and at this present writing I hear his lumbering jocularity
(which never amused us, though we basely pretended that it did), and I
behold his big round face, and I look up the inside of his outstretched
coat-sleeve as if it were a telescope with the stopper on, and I hate him
with an unwholesome hatred for two hours.  Through such means did it come
to pass that I knew the powerful preacher from beginning to end, all over
and all through, while I was very young, and that I left him behind at an
early period of life.  Peace be with him!  More peace than he brought to
me!

Now, I have heard many preachers since that time—not powerful; merely
Christian, unaffected, and reverential—and I have had many such preachers
on my roll of friends.  But, it was not to hear these, any more than the
powerful class, that I made my Sunday journeys.  They were journeys of
curiosity to the numerous churches in the City of London.  It came into
my head one day, here had I been cultivating a familiarity with all the
churches of Rome, and I knew nothing of the insides of the old churches
of London!  This befell on a Sunday morning.  I began my expeditions that
very same day, and they lasted me a year.

I never wanted to know the names of the churches to which I went, and to
this hour I am profoundly ignorant in that particular of at least
nine-tenths of them.  Indeed, saying that I know the church of old
GOWER’S tomb (he lies in effigy with his head upon his books) to be the
church of Saint Saviour’s, Southwark; and the church of MILTON’S tomb to
be the church of Cripplegate; and the church on Cornhill with the great
golden keys to be the church of Saint Peter; I doubt if I could pass a
competitive examination in any of the names.  No question did I ever ask
of living creature concerning these churches, and no answer to any
antiquarian question on the subject that I ever put to books, shall
harass the reader’s soul.  A full half of my pleasure in them arose out
of their mystery; mysterious I found them; mysterious they shall remain
for me.

Where shall I begin my round of hidden and forgotten old churches in the
City of London?

It is twenty minutes short of eleven on a Sunday morning, when I stroll
down one of the many narrow hilly streets in the City that tend due south
to the Thames.  It is my first experiment, and I have come to the region
of Whittington in an omnibus, and we have put down a fierce-eyed, spare
old woman, whose slate-coloured gown smells of herbs, and who walked up
Aldersgate-street to some chapel where she comforts herself with
brimstone doctrine, I warrant.  We have also put down a stouter and
sweeter old lady, with a pretty large prayer-book in an unfolded
pocket-handkerchief, who got out at a corner of a court near Stationers’
Hall, and who I think must go to church there, because she is the widow
of some deceased old Company’s Beadle.  The rest of our freight were mere
chance pleasure-seekers and rural walkers, and went on to the Blackwall
railway.  So many bells are ringing, when I stand undecided at a street
corner, that every sheep in the ecclesiastical fold might be a
bell-wether.  The discordance is fearful.  My state of indecision is
referable to, and about equally divisible among, four great churches,
which are all within sight and sound, all within the space of a few
square yards.

As I stand at the street corner, I don’t see as many as four people at
once going to church, though I see as many as four churches with their
steeples clamouring for people.  I choose my church, and go up the flight
of steps to the great entrance in the tower.  A mouldy tower within, and
like a neglected washhouse.  A rope comes through the beamed roof, and a
man in the corner pulls it and clashes the bell—a whity-brown man, whose
clothes were once black—a man with flue on him, and cobweb.  He stares at
me, wondering how I come there, and I stare at him, wondering how he
comes there.  Through a screen of wood and glass, I peep into the dim
church.  About twenty people are discernible, waiting to begin.
Christening would seem to have faded out of this church long ago, for the
font has the dust of desuetude thick upon it, and its wooden cover
(shaped like an old-fashioned tureen-cover) looks as if it wouldn’t come
off, upon requirement.  I perceive the altar to be rickety and the
Commandments damp.  Entering after this survey, I jostle the clergyman in
his canonicals, who is entering too from a dark lane behind a pew of
state with curtains, where nobody sits.  The pew is ornamented with four
blue wands, once carried by four somebodys, I suppose, before somebody
else, but which there is nobody now to hold or receive honour from.  I
open the door of a family pew, and shut myself in; if I could occupy
twenty family pews at once I might have them.  The clerk, a brisk young
man (how does _he_ come here?), glances at me knowingly, as who should
say, ‘You have done it now; you must stop.’  Organ plays.  Organ-loft is
in a small gallery across the church; gallery congregation, two girls.  I
wonder within myself what will happen when we are required to sing.

There is a pale heap of books in the corner of my pew, and while the
organ, which is hoarse and sleepy, plays in such fashion that I can hear
more of the rusty working of the stops than of any music, I look at the
books, which are mostly bound in faded baize and stuff.  They belonged in
1754, to the Dowgate family; and who were they?  Jane Comport must have
married Young Dowgate, and come into the family that way; Young Dowgate
was courting Jane Comport when he gave her her prayer-book, and recorded
the presentation in the fly-leaf; if Jane were fond of Young Dowgate, why
did she die and leave the book here?  Perhaps at the rickety altar, and
before the damp Commandments, she, Comport, had taken him, Dowgate, in a
flush of youthful hope and joy, and perhaps it had not turned out in the
long run as great a success as was expected?

The opening of the service recalls my wandering thoughts.  I then find,
to my astonishment, that I have been, and still am, taking a strong kind
of invisible snuff, up my nose, into my eyes, and down my throat.  I
wink, sneeze, and cough.  The clerk sneezes; the clergyman winks; the
unseen organist sneezes and coughs (and probably winks); all our little
party wink, sneeze, and cough.  The snuff seems to be made of the decay
of matting, wood, cloth, stone, iron, earth, and something else.  Is the
something else, the decay of dead citizens in the vaults below?  As sure
as Death it is!  Not only in the cold, damp February day, do we cough and
sneeze dead citizens, all through the service, but dead citizens have got
into the very bellows of the organ, and half choked the same.  We stamp
our feet to warm them, and dead citizens arise in heavy clouds.  Dead
citizens stick upon the walls, and lie pulverised on the sounding-board
over the clergyman’s head, and, when a gust of air comes, tumble down
upon him.

In this first experience I was so nauseated by too much snuff, made of
the Dowgate family, the Comport branch, and other families and branches,
that I gave but little heed to our dull manner of ambling through the
service; to the brisk clerk’s manner of encouraging us to try a note or
two at psalm time; to the gallery-congregation’s manner of enjoying a
shrill duet, without a notion of time or tune; to the whity-brown man’s
manner of shutting the minister into the pulpit, and being very
particular with the lock of the door, as if he were a dangerous animal.
But, I tried again next Sunday, and soon accustomed myself to the dead
citizens when I found that I could not possibly get on without them among
the City churches.

Another Sunday.

After being again rung for by conflicting bells, like a leg of mutton or
a laced hat a hundred years ago, I make selection of a church oddly put
away in a corner among a number of lanes—a smaller church than the last,
and an ugly: of about the date of Queen Anne.  As a congregation, we are
fourteen strong: not counting an exhausted charity school in a gallery,
which has dwindled away to four boys, and two girls.  In the porch, is a
benefaction of loaves of bread, which there would seem to be nobody left
in the exhausted congregation to claim, and which I saw an exhausted
beadle, long faded out of uniform, eating with his eyes for self and
family when I passed in.  There is also an exhausted clerk in a brown
wig, and two or three exhausted doors and windows have been bricked up,
and the service books are musty, and the pulpit cushions are threadbare,
and the whole of the church furniture is in a very advanced stage of
exhaustion.  We are three old women (habitual), two young lovers
(accidental), two tradesmen, one with a wife and one alone, an aunt and
nephew, again two girls (these two girls dressed out for church with
everything about them limp that should be stiff, and _vice versâ_, are an
invariable experience), and three sniggering boys.  The clergyman is,
perhaps, the chaplain of a civic company; he has the moist and vinous
look, and eke the bulbous boots, of one acquainted with ’Twenty port, and
comet vintages.

We are so quiet in our dulness that the three sniggering boys, who have
got away into a corner by the altar-railing, give us a start, like
crackers, whenever they laugh.  And this reminds me of my own village
church where, during sermon-time on bright Sundays when the birds are
very musical indeed, farmers’ boys patter out over the stone pavement,
and the clerk steps out from his desk after them, and is distinctly heard
in the summer repose to pursue and punch them in the churchyard, and is
seen to return with a meditative countenance, making believe that nothing
of the sort has happened.  The aunt and nephew in this City church are
much disturbed by the sniggering boys.  The nephew is himself a boy, and
the sniggerers tempt him to secular thoughts of marbles and string, by
secretly offering such commodities to his distant contemplation.  This
young Saint Anthony for a while resists, but presently becomes a
backslider, and in dumb show defies the sniggerers to ‘heave’ a marble or
two in his direction.  Here in he is detected by the aunt (a rigorous
reduced gentlewoman who has the charge of offices), and I perceive that
worthy relative to poke him in the side, with the corrugated hooked
handle of an ancient umbrella.  The nephew revenges himself for this, by
holding his breath and terrifying his kinswoman with the dread belief
that he has made up his mind to burst.  Regardless of whispers and
shakes, he swells and becomes discoloured, and yet again swells and
becomes discoloured, until the aunt can bear it no longer, but leads him
out, with no visible neck, and with his eyes going before him like a
prawn’s.  This causes the sniggerers to regard flight as an eligible
move, and I know which of them will go out first, because of the
over-devout attention that he suddenly concentrates on the clergyman.  In
a little while, this hypocrite, with an elaborate demonstration of
hushing his footsteps, and with a face generally expressive of having
until now forgotten a religious appointment elsewhere, is gone.  Number
two gets out in the same way, but rather quicker.  Number three getting
safely to the door, there turns reckless, and banging it open, flies
forth with a Whoop! that vibrates to the top of the tower above us.

The clergyman, who is of a prandial presence and a muffled voice, may be
scant of hearing as well as of breath, but he only glances up, as having
an idea that somebody has said Amen in a wrong place, and continues his
steady jog-trot, like a farmer’s wife going to market.  He does all he
has to do, in the same easy way, and gives us a concise sermon, still
like the jog-trot of the farmer’s wife on a level road.  Its drowsy
cadence soon lulls the three old women asleep, and the unmarried
tradesman sits looking out at window, and the married tradesman sits
looking at his wife’s bonnet, and the lovers sit looking at one another,
so superlatively happy, that I mind when I, turned of eighteen, went with
my Angelica to a City church on account of a shower (by this special
coincidence that it was in Huggin-lane), and when I said to my Angelica,
‘Let the blessed event, Angelica, occur at no altar but this!’ and when
my Angelica consented that it should occur at no other—which it certainly
never did, for it never occurred anywhere.  And O, Angelica, what has
become of you, this present Sunday morning when I can’t attend to the
sermon; and, more difficult question than that, what has become of Me as
I was when I sat by your side!

But, we receive the signal to make that unanimous dive which surely is a
little conventional—like the strange rustlings and settlings and
clearings of throats and noses, which are never dispensed with, at
certain points of the Church service, and are never held to be necessary
under any other circumstances.  In a minute more it is all over, and the
organ expresses itself to be as glad of it as it can be of anything in
its rheumatic state, and in another minute we are all of us out of the
church, and Whity-brown has locked it up.  Another minute or little more,
and, in the neighbouring churchyard—not the yard of that church, but of
another—a churchyard like a great shabby old mignonette box, with two
trees in it and one tomb—I meet Whity-brown, in his private capacity,
fetching a pint of beer for his dinner from the public-house in the
corner, where the keys of the rotting fire-ladders are kept and were
never asked for, and where there is a ragged, white-seamed,
out-at-elbowed bagatelle board on the first floor.

In one of these City churches, and only in one, I found an individual who
might have been claimed as expressly a City personage.  I remember the
church, by the feature that the clergyman couldn’t get to his own desk
without going through the clerk’s, or couldn’t get to the pulpit without
going through the reading-desk—I forget which, and it is no matter—and by
the presence of this personage among the exceedingly sparse congregation.
I doubt if we were a dozen, and we had no exhausted charity school to
help us out.  The personage was dressed in black of square cut, and was
stricken in years, and wore a black velvet cap, and cloth shoes.  He was
of a staid, wealthy, and dissatisfied aspect.  In his hand, he conducted
to church a mysterious child: a child of the feminine gender.  The child
had a beaver hat, with a stiff drab plume that surely never belonged to
any bird of the air.  The child was further attired in a nankeen frock
and spencer, brown boxing-gloves, and a veil.  It had a blemish, in the
nature of currant jelly, on its chin; and was a thirsty child.  Insomuch
that the personage carried in his pocket a green bottle, from which, when
the first psalm was given out, the child was openly refreshed.  At all
other times throughout the service it was motionless, and stood on the
seat of the large pew, closely fitted into the corner, like a rain-water
pipe.

                      [Picture: The City Personage]

The personage never opened his book, and never looked at the clergyman.
He never sat down either, but stood with his arms leaning on the top of
the pew, and his forehead sometimes shaded with his right hand, always
looking at the church door.  It was a long church for a church of its
size, and he was at the upper end, but he alwa

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