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The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices
THE LAZY TOUR OF TWO IDLE APPRENTICES
* * * * *
By CHARLES DICKENS
* * * * *
_With Illustrations by Harry Furniss and A. J. Goodman_
* * * * *
LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LD.
NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1905
* * * * *
CHAPTER I
IN the autumn month of September, eighteen hundred and fifty-seven,
wherein these presents bear date, two idle apprentices, exhausted by the
long, hot summer, and the long, hot work it had brought with it, ran away
from their employer. They were bound to a highly meritorious lady (named
Literature), of fair credit and repute, though, it must be acknowledged,
not quite so highly esteemed in the City as she might be. This is the
more remarkable, as there is nothing against the respectable lady in that
quarter, but quite the contrary; her family having rendered eminent
service to many famous citizens of London. It may be sufficient to name
Sir William Walworth, Lord Mayor under King Richard II., at the time of
Wat Tyler’s insurrection, and Sir Richard Whittington: which latter
distinguished man and magistrate was doubtless indebted to the lady’s
family for the gift of his celebrated cat. There is also strong reason
to suppose that they rang the Highgate bells for him with their own
hands.
The misguided young men who thus shirked their duty to the mistress from
whom they had received many favours, were actuated by the low idea of
making a perfectly idle trip, in any direction. They had no intention of
going anywhere in particular; they wanted to see nothing, they wanted to
know nothing, they wanted to learn nothing, they wanted to do nothing.
They wanted only to be idle. They took to themselves (after HOGARTH),
the names of Mr. Thomas Idle and Mr. Francis Goodchild; but there was not
a moral pin to choose between them, and they were both idle in the last
degree.
Between Francis and Thomas, however, there was this difference of
character: Goodchild was laboriously idle, and would take upon himself
any amount of pains and labour to assure himself that he was idle; in
short, had no better idea of idleness than that it was useless industry.
Thomas Idle, on the other hand, was an idler of the unmixed Irish or
Neapolitan type; a passive idler, a born-and-bred idler, a consistent
idler, who practised what he would have preached if he had not been too
idle to preach; a one entire and perfect chrysolite of idleness.
The two idle apprentices found themselves, within a few hours of their
escape, walking down into the North of England, that is to say, Thomas
was lying in a meadow, looking at the railway trains as they passed over
a distant viaduct—which was _his_ idea of walking down into the North;
while Francis was walking a mile due South against time—which was _his_
idea of walking down into the North. In the meantime the day waned, and
the milestones remained unconquered.
‘Tom,’ said Goodchild, ‘the sun is getting low. Up, and let us go
forward!’
‘Nay,’ quoth Thomas Idle, ‘I have not done with Annie Laurie yet.’ And
he proceeded with that idle but popular ballad, to the effect that for
the bonnie young person of that name he would ‘lay him doon and
dee’—equivalent, in prose, to lay him down and die.
‘What an ass that fellow was!’ cried Goodchild, with the bitter emphasis
of contempt.
‘Which fellow?’ asked Thomas Idle.
‘The fellow in your song. Lay him doon and dee! Finely he’d show off
before the girl by doing _that_. A sniveller! Why couldn’t he get up,
and punch somebody’s head!’
‘Whose?’ asked Thomas Idle.
‘Anybody’s. Everybody’s would be better than nobody’s! If I fell into
that state of mind about a girl, do you think I’d lay me doon and dee?
No, sir,’ proceeded Goodchild, with a disparaging assumption of the
Scottish accent, ‘I’d get me oop and peetch into somebody. Wouldn’t
you?’
‘I wouldn’t have anything to do with her,’ yawned Thomas Idle. ‘Why
should I take the trouble?’
‘It’s no trouble, Tom, to fall in love,’ said Goodchild, shaking his
head.
‘It’s trouble enough to fall out of it, once you’re in it,’ retorted Tom.
‘So I keep out of it altogether. It would be better for you, if you did
the same.’
Mr. Goodchild, who is always in love with somebody, and not unfrequently
with several objects at once, made no reply. He heaved a sigh of the
kind which is termed by the lower orders ‘a bellowser,’ and then, heaving
Mr. Idle on his feet (who was not half so heavy as the sigh), urged him
northward.
These two had sent their personal baggage on by train: only retaining
each a knapsack. Idle now applied himself to constantly regretting the
train, to tracking it through the intricacies of Bradshaw’s Guide, and
finding out where it is now—and where now—and where now—and to asking
what was the use of walking, when you could ride at such a pace as that.
Was it to see the country? If that was the object, look at it out of the
carriage windows. There was a great deal more of it to be seen there
than here. Besides, who wanted to see the country? Nobody. And again,
whoever did walk? Nobody. Fellows set off to walk, but they never did
it. They came back and said they did, but they didn’t. Then why should
he walk? He wouldn’t walk. He swore it by this milestone!
It was the fifth from London, so far had they penetrated into the North.
Submitting to the powerful chain of argument, Goodchild proposed a return
to the Metropolis, and a falling back upon Euston Square Terminus.
Thomas assented with alacrity, and so they walked down into the North by
the next morning’s express, and carried their knapsacks in the
luggage-van.
It was like all other expresses, as every express is and must be. It
bore through the harvest country a smell like a large washing-day, and a
sharp issue of steam as from a huge brazen tea-urn. The greatest power
in nature and art combined, it yet glided over dangerous heights in the
sight of people looking up from fields and roads, as smoothly and
unreally as a light miniature plaything. Now, the engine shrieked in
hysterics of such intensity, that it seemed desirable that the men who
had her in charge should hold her feet, slap her hands, and bring her to;
now, burrowed into tunnels with a stubborn and undemonstrative energy so
confusing that the train seemed to be flying back into leagues of
darkness. Here, were station after station, swallowed up by the express
without stopping; here, stations where it fired itself in like a volley
of cannon-balls, swooped away four country-people with nosegays, and
three men of business with portmanteaus, and fired itself off again,
bang, bang, bang! At long intervals were uncomfortable
refreshment-rooms, made more uncomfortable by the scorn of Beauty towards
Beast, the public (but to whom she never relented, as Beauty did in the
story, towards the other Beast), and where sensitive stomachs were fed,
with a contemptuous sharpness occasioning indigestion. Here, again, were
stations with nothing going but a bell, and wonderful wooden razors set
aloft on great posts, shaving the air. In these fields, the horses,
sheep, and cattle were well used to the thundering meteor, and didn’t
mind; in those, they were all set scampering together, and a herd of pigs
scoured after them. The pastoral country darkened, became coaly, became
smoky, became infernal, got better, got worse, improved again, grew
rugged, turned romantic; was a wood, a stream, a chain of hills, a gorge,
a moor, a cathedral town, a fortified place, a waste. Now, miserable
black dwellings, a black canal, and sick black towers of chimneys; now, a
trim garden, where the flowers were bright and fair; now, a wilderness of
hideous altars all a-blaze; now, the water meadows with their fairy
rings; now, the mangy patch of unlet building ground outside the stagnant
town, with the larger ring where the Circus was last week. The
temperature changed, the dialect changed, the people changed, faces got
sharper, manner got shorter, eyes got shrewder and harder; yet all so
quickly, that the spruce guard in the London uniform and silver lace, had
not yet rumpled his shirt-collar, delivered half the dispatches in his
shiny little pouch, or read his newspaper.
Carlisle! Idle and Goodchild had got to Carlisle. It looked congenially
and delightfully idle. Something in the way of public amusement had
happened last month, and something else was going to happen before
Christmas; and, in the meantime there was a lecture on India for those
who liked it—which Idle and Goodchild did not. Likewise, by those who
liked them, there were impressions to be bought of all the vapid prints,
going and gone, and of nearly all the vapid books. For those who wanted
to put anything in missionary boxes, here were the boxes. For those who
wanted the Reverend Mr. Podgers (artist’s proofs, thirty shillings), here
was Mr. Podgers to any amount. Not less gracious and abundant, Mr.
Codgers also of the vineyard, but opposed to Mr. Podgers, brotherly tooth
and nail. Here, were guide-books to the neighbouring antiquities, and
eke the Lake country, in several dry and husky sorts; here, many
physically and morally impossible heads of both sexes, for young ladies
to copy, in the exercise of the art of drawing; here, further, a large
impression of MR. SPURGEON, solid as to the flesh, not to say even
something gross. The working young men of Carlisle were drawn up, with
their hands in their pockets, across the pavements, four and six abreast,
and appeared (much to the satisfaction of Mr. Idle) to have nothing else
to do. The working and growing young women of Carlisle, from the age of
twelve upwards, promenaded the streets in the cool of the evening, and
rallied the said young men. Sometimes the young men rallied the young
women, as in the case of a group gathered round an accordion-player, from
among whom a young man advanced behind a young woman for whom he appeared
to have a tenderness, and hinted to her that he was there and playful, by
giving her (he wore clogs) a kick.
On market morning, Carlisle woke up amazingly, and became (to the two
Idle Apprentices) disagreeably and reproachfully busy. There were its
cattle market, its sheep market, and its pig market down by the river,
with raw-boned and shock-headed Rob Roys hiding their Lowland dresses
beneath heavy plaids, prowling in and out among the animals, and
flavouring the air with fumes of whiskey. There was its corn market down
the main street, with hum of chaffering over open sacks. There was its
general market in the street too, with heather brooms on which the purple
flower still flourished, and heather baskets primitive and fresh to
behold. With women trying on clogs and caps at open stalls, and ‘Bible
stalls’ adjoining. With ‘Doctor Mantle’s Dispensary for the cure of all
Human Maladies and no charge for advice,’ and with Doctor Mantle’s
‘Laboratory of Medical, Chemical, and Botanical Science’—both healing
institutions established on one pair of trestles, one board, and one
sun-blind. With the renowned phrenologist from London, begging to be
favoured (at sixpence each) with the company of clients of both sexes, to
whom, on examination of their heads, he would make revelations ‘enabling
him or her to know themselves.’ Through all these bargains and
blessings, the recruiting-sergeant watchfully elbowed his way, a thread
of War in the peaceful skein. Likewise on the walls were printed hints
that the Oxford Blues might not be indisposed to hear of a few fine
active young men; and that whereas the standard of that distinguished
corps is full six feet, ‘growing lads of five feet eleven’ need not
absolutely despair of being accepted.
Scenting the morning air more pleasantly than the buried majesty of
Denmark did, Messrs. Idle and Goodchild rode away from Carlisle at eight
o’clock one forenoon, bound for the village of Hesket, Newmarket, some
fourteen miles distant. Goodchild (who had already begun to doubt
whether he was idle: as his way always is when he has nothing to do) had
read of a certain black old Cumberland hill or mountain, called Carrock,
or Carrock Fell; and had arrived at the conclusion that it would be the
culminating triumph of Idleness to ascend the same. Thomas Idle,
dwelling on the pains inseparable from that achievement, had expressed
the strongest doubts of the expediency, and even of the sanity, of the
enterprise; but Goodchild had carried his point, and they rode away.
Up hill and down hill, and twisting to the right, and twisting to the
left, and with old Skiddaw (who has vaunted himself a great deal more
than his merits deserve; but that is rather the way of the Lake country),
dodging the apprentices in a picturesque and pleasant manner. Good,
weather-proof, warm, pleasant houses, well white-limed, scantily dotting
the road. Clean children coming out to look, carrying other clean
children as big as themselves. Harvest still lying out and much rained
upon; here and there, harvest still unreaped. Well-cultivated gardens
attached to the cottages, with plenty of produce forced out of their hard
soil. Lonely nooks, and wild; but people can be born, and married, and
buried in such nooks, and can live and love, and be loved, there as
elsewhere, thank God! (Mr. Goodchild’s remark.) By-and-by, the village.
Black, coarse-stoned, rough-windowed houses; some with outer staircases,
like Swiss houses; a sinuous and stony gutter winding up hill and round
the corner, by way of street. All the children running out directly.
Women pausing in washing, to peep from doorways and very little windows.
Such were the observations of Messrs. Idle and Goodchild, as their
conveyance stopped at the village shoemaker’s. Old Carrock gloomed down
upon it all in a very ill-tempered state; and rain was beginning.
The village shoemaker declined to have anything to do with Carrock. No
visitors went up Carrock. No visitors came there at all. Aa’ the world
ganged awa’ yon. The driver appealed to the Innkeeper. The Innkeeper
had two men working in the fields, and one of them should be called in,
to go up Carrock as guide. Messrs. Idle and Goodchild, highly approving,
entered the Innkeeper’s house, to drink whiskey and eat oatcake.
The Innkeeper was not idle enough—was not idle at all, which was a great
fault in him—but was a fine specimen of a north-country man, or any kind
of man. He had a ruddy cheek, a bright eye, a well-knit frame, an
immense hand, a cheery, outspeaking voice, and a straight, bright, broad
look. He had a drawing-room, too, upstairs, which was worth a visit to
the Cumberland Fells. (This was Mr. Francis Goodchild’s opinion, in
which Mr. Thomas Idle did not concur.)
The ceiling of this drawing-room was so crossed and recrossed by beams of
unequal lengths, radiating from a centre, in a corner, that it looked
like a broken star-fish. The room was comfortably and solidly furnished
with good mahogany and horsehair. It had a snug fireside, and a couple
of well-curtained windows, looking out upon the wild country behind the
house. What it most developed was, an unexpected taste for little
ornaments and nick-nacks, of which it contained a most surprising number.
They were not very various, consisting in great part of waxen babies with
their limbs more or less mutilated, appealing on one leg to the parental
affections from under little cupping glasses; but, Uncle Tom was there,
in crockery, receiving theological instructions from Miss Eva, who grew
out of his side like a wen, in an exceedingly rough state of profile
propagandism. Engravings of Mr. Hunt’s country boy, before and after his
pie, were on the wall, divided by a highly-coloured nautical piece, the
subject of which had all her colours (and more) flying, and was making
great way through a sea of a regular pattern, like a lady’s collar. A
benevolent, elderly gentleman of the last century, with a powdered head,
kept guard, in oil and varnish, over a most perplexing piece of furniture
on a table; in appearance between a driving seat and an angular
knife-box, but, when opened, a musical instrument of tinkling wires,
exactly like David’s harp packed for travelling. Everything became a
nick-nack in this curious room. The copper tea-kettle, burnished up to
the highest point of glory, took his station on a stand of his own at the
greatest possible distance from the fireplace, and said: ‘By your leave,
not a kettle, but a bijou.’ The Staffordshire-ware butter-dish with the
cover on, got upon a little round occasional table in a window, with a
worked top, and announced itself to the two chairs accidentally placed
there, as an aid to polite conversation, a graceful trifle in china to be
chatted over by callers, as they airily trifled away the visiting moments
of a butterfly existence, in that rugged old village on the Cumberland
Fells. The very footstool could not keep the floor, but got upon a sofa,
and there-from proclaimed itself, in high relief of white and
liver-coloured wool, a favourite spaniel coiled up for repose. Though,
truly, in spite of its bright glass eyes, the spaniel was the least
successful assumption in the collection: being perfectly flat, and
dismally suggestive of a recent mistake in sitting down on the part of
some corpulent member of the family.
There were books, too, in this room; books on the table, books on the
chimney-piece, books in an open press in the corner. Fielding was there,
and Smollett was there, and Steele and Addison were there, in dispersed
volumes; and there were tales of those who go down to the sea in ships,
for windy nights; and there was really a choice of good books for rainy
days or fine. It was so very pleasant to see these things in such a
lonesome by-place—so very agreeable to find these evidences of a taste,
however homely, that went beyond the beautiful cleanliness and trimness
of the house—so fanciful to imagine what a wonder a room must be to the
little children born in the gloomy village—what grand impressions of it
those of them who became wanderers over the earth would carry away; and
how, at distant ends of the world, some old voyagers would die,
cherishing the belief that the finest apartment known to men was once in
the Hesket-Newmarket Inn, in rare old Cumberland—it was such a charmingly
lazy pursuit to entertain these rambling thoughts over the choice oatcake
and the genial whiskey, that Mr. Idle and Mr. Goodchild never asked
themselves how it came to pass that the men in the fields were never
heard of more, how the stalwart landlord replaced them without
explanation, how his dog-cart came to be waiting at the door, and how
everything was arranged without the least arrangement for climbing to old
Carrock’s shoulders, and standing on his head.
Without a word of inquiry, therefore, the Two Idle Apprentices drifted
out resignedly into a fine, soft, close, drowsy, penetrating rain; got
into the landlord’s light dog-cart, and rattled off through the village
for the foot of Carrock. The journey at the outset was not remarkable.
The Cumberland road went up and down like all other roads; the Cumberland
curs burst out from backs of cottages and barked like other curs, and the
Cumberland peasantry stared after the dog-cart amazedly, as long as it
was in sight, like the rest of their race. The approach to the foot of
the mountain resembled the approaches to the feet of most other mountains
all over the world. The cultivation gradually ceased, the trees grew
gradually rare, the road became gradually rougher, and the sides of the
mountain looked gradually more and more lofty, and more and more
difficult to get up. The dog-cart was left at a lonely farm-house. The
landlord borrowed a large umbrella, and, assuming in an instant the
character of the most cheerful and adventurous of guides, led the way to
the ascent. Mr. Goodchild looked eagerly at the top of the mountain,
and, feeling apparently that he was now going to be very lazy indeed,
shone all over wonderfully to the eye, under the influence of the
contentment within and the moisture without. Only in the bosom of Mr.
Thomas Idle did Despondency now hold her gloomy state. He kept it a
secret; but he would have given a very handsome sum, when the ascent
began, to have been back again at the inn. The sides of Carrock looked
fearfully steep, and the top of Carrock was hidden in mist. The rain was
falling faster and faster. The knees of Mr. Idle—always weak on walking
excursions—shivered and shook with fear and damp. The wet was already
penetrating through the young man’s outer coat to a brand-new
shooting-jacket, for which he had reluctantly paid the large sum of two
guineas on leaving town; he had no stimulating refreshment about him but
a small packet of clammy gingerbread nuts; he had nobody to give him an
arm, nobody to push him gently behind, nobody to pull him up tenderly in
front, nobody to speak to who really felt the difficulties of the ascent,
the dampness of the rain, the denseness of the mist, and the unutterable
folly of climbing, undriven, up any steep place in the world, when there
is level ground within reach to walk on instead. Was it for this that
Thomas had left London? London, where there are nice short walks in
level public gardens, with benches of repose set up at convenient
distances for weary travellers—London, where rugged stone is humanely
pounded into little lumps for the road, and intelligently shaped into
smooth slabs for the pavement! No! it was not for the laborious ascent
of the crags of Carrock that Idle had left his native city, and travelled
to Cumberland. Never did he feel more disastrously convinced that he had
committed a very grave error in judgment than when he found himself
standing in the rain at the bottom of a steep mountain, and knew that the
responsibility rested on his weak shoulders of actually getting to the
top of it.
The honest landlord went first, the beaming Goodchild followed, the
mournful Idle brought up the rear. From time to time, the two foremost
members of the expedition changed places in the order of march; but the
rearguard never altered his position. Up the mountain or down the
mountain, in the water or out of it, over the rocks, through the bogs,
skirting the heather, Mr. Thomas Idle was always the last, and was always
the man who had to be looked after and waited for. At first the ascent
was delusively easy, the sides of the mountain sloped gradually, and the
material of which they were composed was a soft spongy turf, very tender
and pleasant to walk upon. After a hundred yards or so, however, the
verdant scene and the easy slope disappeared, and the rocks began. Not
noble, massive rocks, standing upright, keeping a certain regularity in
their positions, and possessing, now and then, flat tops to sit upon, but
little irritating, comfortless rocks, littered about anyhow, by Nature;
treacherous, disheartening rocks of all sorts of small shapes and small
sizes, bruisers of tender toes and trippers-up of wavering feet. When
these impediments were passed, heather and slough followed. Here the
steepness of the ascent was slightly mitigated; and here the exploring
party of three turned round to look at the view below them. The scene of
the moorland and the fields was like a feeble water-colour drawing half
sponged out. The mist was darkening, the rain was thickening, the trees
were dotted about like spots of faint shadow, the division-lines which
mapped out the fields were all getting blurred together, and the lonely
farm-house where the dog-cart had been left, loomed spectral in the grey
light like the last human dwelling at the end of the habitable world.
Was this a sight worth climbing to see? Surely—surely not!
Up again—for the top of Carrock is not reached yet. The land-lord, just
as good-tempered and obliging as he was at the bottom of the mountain.
Mr. Goodchild brighter in the eyes and rosier in the face than ever; full
of cheerful remarks and apt quotations; and walking with a springiness of
step wonderful to behold. Mr. Idle, farther and farther in the rear,
with the water squeaking in the toes of his boots, with his two-guinea
shooting-jacket clinging damply to his aching sides, with his overcoat so
full of rain, and standing out so pyramidically stiff, in consequence,
from his shoulders downwards, that he felt as if he was walking in a
gigantic extinguisher—the despairing spirit within him representing but
too aptly the candle that had just been put out. Up and up and up again,
till a ridge is reached and the outer edge of the mist on the summit of
Carrock is darkly and drizzingly near. Is this the top? No, nothing
like the top. It is an aggravating peculiarity of all mountains, that,
although they have only one top when they are seen (as they ought always
to be seen) from below, they turn out to have a perfect eruption of false
tops whenever the traveller is sufficiently ill-advised to go out of his
way for the purpose of ascending them. Carrock is but a trumpery little
mountain of fifteen hundred feet, and it presumes to have false tops, and
even precipices, as if it were Mont Blanc. No matter; Goodchild enjoys
it, and will go on; and Idle, who is afraid of being left behind by
himself, must follow. On entering the edge of the mist, the landlord
stops, and says he hopes that it will not get any thicker. It is twenty
years since he last ascended Carrock, and it is barely possible, if the
mist increases, that the party may be lost on the mountain. Goodchild
hears this dreadful intimation, and is not in the least impressed by it.
He marches for the top that is never to be found, as if he was the
Wandering Jew, bound to go on for ever, in defiance of everything. The
landlord faithfully accompanies him. The two, to the dim eye of Idle,
far below, look in the exaggerative mist, like a pair of friendly giants,
mounting the steps of some invisible castle together. Up and up, and
then down a little, and then up, and then along a strip of level ground,
and then up again. The wind, a wind unknown in the happy valley, blows
keen and strong; the rain-mist gets impenetrable; a dreary little cairn
of stones appears. The landlord adds one to the heap, first walking all
round the cairn as if he were about to perform an incantation, then
dropping the stone on to the top of the heap with the gesture of a
magician adding an ingredient to a cauldron in full bubble. Goodchild
sits down by the cairn as if it was his study-table at home; Idle,
drenched and panting, stands up with his back to the wind, ascertains
distinctly that this is the top at last, looks round with all the little
curiosity that is left in him, and gets, in return, a magnificent view
of—Nothing!
The effect of this sublime spectacle on the minds of the exploring party
is a little injured by the nature of the direct conclusion to which the
sight of it points—the said conclusion being that the mountain mist has
actually gathered round them, as the landlord feared it would. It now
becomes imperatively necessary to settle the exact situation of the
farm-house in the valley at which the dog-cart has been left, before the
travellers attempt to descend. While the landlord is endeavouring to
make this discovery in his own way, Mr. Goodchild plunges his hand under
his wet coat, draws out a little red morocco-case, opens it, and displays
to the view of his companions a neat pocket-compass. The north is found,
the point at which the farm-house is situated is settled, and the descent
begins. After a little downward walking, Idle (behind as usual) sees his
fellow-travellers turn aside sharply—tries to follow them—loses them in
the mist—is shouted after, waited for, recovered—and then finds that a
halt has been ordered, partly on his account, partly for the purpose of
again consulting the compass.
The point in debate is settled as before between Goodchild and the
landlord, and the expedition moves on, not down the mountain, but
marching straight forward round the slope of it. The difficulty of
following this new route is acutely felt by Thomas Idle. He finds the
hardship of walking at all greatly increased by the fatigue of moving his
feet straight forward along the side of a slope, when their natural
tendency, at every step, is to turn off at a right angle, and go straight
down the declivity. Let the reader imagine himself to be walking along
the roof of a barn, instead of up or down it, and he will have an exact
idea of the pedestrian difficulty in which the travellers had now
involved themselves. In ten minutes more Idle was lost in the distance
again, was shouted for, waited for, recovered as before; found Goodchild
repeating his observation of the compass, and remonstrated warmly against
the sideway route that his companions persisted in following. It
appeared to the uninstructed mind of Thomas that when three men want to
get to the bottom of a mountain, their business is to walk down it; and
he put this view of the case, not only with emphasis, but even with some
irritability. He was answered from the scientific eminence of the
compass on which his companions were mounted, that there was a frightful
chasm somewhere near the foot of Carrock, called The Black Arches, into
which the travellers were sure to march in the mist, if they risked
continuing the descent from the place where they had now halted. Idle
received this answer with the silent respect which was due to the
commanders of the expedition, and followed along the roof of the barn, or
rather the side of the mountain, reflecting upon the assurance which he
received on starting again, that the object of the party was only to gain
‘a certain point,’ and, this haven attained, to continue the descent
afterwards until the foot of Carrock was reached. Though quite
unexceptionable as an abstract form of expression, the phrase ‘a certain
point’ has the disadvantage of sounding rather vaguely when it is
pronounced on unknown ground, under a canopy of mist much thicker than a
London fog. Nevertheless, after the compass, this phrase was all the
clue the party had to hold by, and Idle clung to the extreme end of it as
hopefully as he could.
More sideway walking, thicker and thicker mist, all sorts of points
reached except the ‘certain point;’ third loss of Idle, third shouts for
him, third recovery of him, third consultation of compass. Mr. Goodchild
draws it tenderly from his pocket, and prepares to adjust it on a stone.
Something falls on the turf—it is the glass. Something else drops
immediately after—it is the needle. The compass is broken, and the
exploring party is lost!
It is the practice of the English portion of the human race to receive
all great disasters in dead silence. Mr. Goodchild restored the useless
compass to his pocket without saying a word, Mr. Idle looked at the
landlord, and the landlord looked at Mr. Idle. There was nothing for it
now but to go on blindfold, and trust to the chapter of chances.
Accordingly, the lost travellers moved forward, still walking round the
slope of the mountain, still desperately resolved to avoid the Black
Arches, and to succeed in reaching the ‘certain point.’
A quarter of an hour brought them to the brink of a ravine, at the bottom
of which there flowed a muddy little stream. Here another halt was
called, and another consultation took place. The landlord, still
clinging pertinaciously to the idea of reaching the ‘point,’ voted for
crossing the ravine, and going on round the slope of the mountain. Mr.
Goodchild, to the great relief of his fellow-traveller, took another view
of the case, and backed Mr. Idle’s proposal to descend Carrock at once,
at any hazard—the rather as the running stream was a sure guide to follow
from the mountain to the valley. Accordingly, the party descended to the
rugged and stony banks of the stream; and here again Thomas lost ground
sadly, and fell far behind his travelling companions. Not much more than
six weeks had elapsed since he had sprained one of his ankles, and he
began to feel this same ankle getting rather weak when he found himself
among the stones that were strewn about the running water. Goodchild and
the landlord were getting farther and farther ahead of him. He saw them
cross the stream and disappear round a projection on its banks. He heard
them shout the moment after as a signal that they had halted and were
waiting for him. Answering the shout, he mended his pace, crossed the
stream where they had crossed it, and was within one step of the opposite
bank, when his foot slipped on a wet stone, his weak ankle gave a twist
outwards, a hot, rending, tearing pain ran through it at the same moment,
and down fell the idlest of the Two Idle Apprentices, crippled in an
instant.
The situation was now, in plain terms, one of absolute danger. There lay
Mr. Idle writhing with pain, there was the mist as thick as ever, there
was the landlord as completely lost as the strangers whom he was
conducting, and there was the compass broken in Goodchild’s pocket. To
leave the wretched Thomas on unknown ground was plainly impossible; and
to get him to walk with a badly sprained ankle seemed equally out of the
question. However, Goodchild (brought back by his cry for help) bandaged
the ankle with a pocket-handkerchief, and assisted by the landlord,
raised the crippled Apprentice to his legs, offered him a shoulder to
lean on, and exhorted him for the sake of the whole party to try if he
could walk. Thomas, assisted by the shoulder on one side, and a stick on
the other, did try, with what pain and difficulty those only can imagine
who have sprained an ankle and have had to tread on it afterwards. At a
pace adapted to the feeble hobbling of a newly-lamed man, the lost party
moved on, perfectly ignorant whether they were on the right side of the
mountain or the wrong, and equally uncertain how long Idle would be able
to contend with the pain in his ankle, before he gave in altogether and
fell down again, unable to stir another step.
Slowly and more slowly, as the clog of crippled Thomas weighed heavily
and more heavily on the march of the expedition, the lost travellers
followed the windings of the stream, till they came to a faintly-marked
cart-track, branching off nearly at right angles, to the left. After a
little consultation it was resolved to follow this dim vestige of a road
in the hope that it might lead to some farm or cottage, at which Idle
could be left in safety. It was now getting on towards the afternoon,
and it was fast becoming more than doubtful whether the party, delayed in
their progress as they now were, might not be overtaken by the darkness
before the right route was found, and be condemned to pass the night on
the mountain, without bit or drop to comfort them, in their wet clothes.
The cart-track grew fainter and fainter, until it was washed out
altogether by another little stream, dark, turbulent, and rapid. The
landlord suggested, judging by the colour of the water, that it must be
flowing from one of the lead mines in the neighbourhood of Carrock; and
the travellers accordingly kept by the stream for a little while, in the
hope of possibly wandering towards help in that way. After walking
forward about two hundred yards, they came upon a mine indeed, but a
mine, exhausted and abandoned; a dismal, ruinous place, with nothing but
the wreck of its works and buildings left to speak for it. Here, there
were a few sheep feeding. The landlord looked at them earnestly, thought
he recognised the marks on them—then thought he did not—finally gave up
the sheep in despair—and walked on just as ignorant of the whereabouts of
the party as ever.
The march in the dark, literally as well as metaphorically in the dark,
had now been continued for three-quarters of an hour from the time when
the crippled Apprentice had met with his accident. Mr. Idle, with all
the will to conquer the pain in his ankle, and to hobble on, found the
power rapidly failing him, and felt that another ten minutes at most
would find him at the end of his last physical resources. He had just
made up his mind on this point, and was about to communicate the dismal
result of his reflections to his companions, when the mist suddenly
brightened, and begun to lift straight ahead. In another minute, the
landlord, who was in advance, proclaimed that he saw a tree. Before
long, other trees appeared—then a cottage—then a house beyond the
cottage, and a familiar line of road rising behind it. Last of all,
Carrock itself loomed darkly into view, far away to the right hand. The
party had not only got down the mountain without knowing how, but had
wandered away from it in the mist, without knowing why—away, far down on
the very moor by which they had approached the base of Carrock that
morning.
The happy lifting of the mist, and the still happier discovery that the
travellers had groped their way, though by a very roundabout direction,
to within a mile or so of the part of the valley in which the farm-house
was situated, restored Mr. Idle’s sinking spirits and reanimated his
failing strength. While the landlord ran off to get the dog-cart, Thomas
was assisted by Goodchild to the cottage which had been the first
building seen when the darkness brightened, and was propped up against
the garden wall, like an artist’s lay figure waiting to be forwarded,
until the dog-cart should arrive from the farm-house below. In due
time—and a very long time it seemed to Mr. Idle—the rattle of wheels was
heard, and the crippled Apprentice was lifted into the seat. As the
dog-cart was driven back to the inn, the landlord related an anecdote
which he had just heard at the farm-house, of an unhappy man who had been
lost, like his two guests and himself, on Carrock; who had passed the
night there alone; who had been found the next morning, ‘scared and
starved;’ and who never went out afterwards, except on his way to the
grave. Mr. Idle heard this sad story, and derived at least one useful
impression from it. Bad as the pain in his ankle was, he contrived to
bear it patiently, for he felt grateful that a worse accident had not
befallen him in the wilds of Carrock.
CHAPTER II
THE dog-cart, with Mr. Thomas Idle and his ankle on the hanging seat
behind, Mr. Francis Goodchild and the Innkeeper in front, and the rain in
spouts and splashes everywhere, made the best of its way back to the
little inn; the broken moor country looking like miles upon miles of
Pre-Adamite sop, or the ruins of some enormous jorum of antediluvian
toast-and-water. The trees dripped; the eaves of the scattered cottages
dripped; the barren stone walls dividing the land, dripped; the yelping
dogs dripped; carts and waggons under ill-roofed penthouses, dripped;
melancholy cocks and hens perching on their shafts, or seeking shelter
underneath them, dripped; Mr. Goodchild dripped; Thomas Idle dripped; the
Inn-keeper dripped; the mare dripped; the vast curtains of mist and cloud
passed before the shadowy forms of the hills, streamed water as they were
drawn across the landscape. Down such steep pitches that the mare seemed
to be trotting on her head, and up such steep pitches that she seemed to
have a supplementary leg in her tail, the dog-cart jolted and tilted back
to the village. It was too wet for the women to look out, it was too wet
even for the children to look out; all the doors and windows were closed,
and the only sign of life or motion was in the rain-punctured puddles.
Whiskey and oil to Thomas Idle’s ankle, and whiskey without oil to
Francis Goodchild’s stomach, produced an agreeable change in the systems
of both; soothing Mr. Idle’s pain, which was sharp before, and sweetening
Mr. Goodchild’s temper, which was sweet before. Portmanteaus being then
opened and clothes changed, Mr. Goodchild, through having no change of
outer garments but broadcloth and velvet, suddenly became a magnificent
portent in the Innkeeper’s house, a shining frontispiece to the fashions
for the month, and a frightful anomaly in the Cumberland village.
Greatly ashamed of his splendid appearance, the conscious Goodchild
quenched it as much as possible, in the shadow of Thomas Idle’s ankle,
and in a corner of the little covered carriage that started with them for
Wigton—a most desirable carriage for any country, except for its having a
flat roof and no sides; which caused the plumps of rain accumulating on
the roof to play vigorous games of bagatelle into the interior all the
way, and to score immensely. It was comfortable to see how the people
coming back in open carts from Wigton market made no more of the rain
than if it were sunshine; how the Wigton policeman taking a country walk
of half-a-dozen miles (apparently for pleasure), in resplendent uniform,
accepted saturation as his normal state; how clerks and schoolmasters in
black, loitered along the road without umbrellas, getting varnished at
every step; how the Cumberland girls, coming out to look after the
Cumberland cows, shook the rain from their eyelashes and laughed it away;
and how the rain continued to fall upon all, as it only does fall in hill
countries.
Wigton market was over, and its bare booths were smoking with rain all
down the street. Mr. Thomas Idle, melodramatically carried to the inn’s
first floor, and laid upon three chairs (he should have had the sofa, if
there had been one), Mr. Goodchild went to the window to take an
observation of Wigton, and report what he saw to his disabled companion.
‘Brother Francis, brother Francis,’ cried Thomas Idle, ‘What do you see
from the turret?’
‘I see,’ said Brother Francis, ‘what I hope and believe to be one of the
most dismal places ever seen by eyes. I see the houses with their roofs
of dull black, their stained fronts, and their dark-rimmed windows,
looking as if they were all in mourning. As every little puff of wind
comes down the street, I see a perfect train of rain let off along the
wooden stalls in the market-place and exploded against me. I see a very
big gas lamp in the centre which I know, by a secret instinct, will not
be lighted to-night. I see a pump, with a trivet underneath its spout
whereon to stand the vessels that are brought to be filled with water. I
see a man come to pump, and he pumps very hard, but no water follows, and
he strolls empty away.’
‘Brother Francis, brother Francis,’ cried Thomas Idle, ‘what more do you
see from the turret, besides the man and the pump, and the trivet and the
houses all in mourning and the rain?’
‘I see,’ said Brother Francis, ‘one, two, three, four, five,
linen-drapers’ shops in front of me. I see a linen-draper’s shop next
door to the right—and there are five more linen-drapers’ shops down the
corner to the left. Eleven homicidal linen-drapers’ shops within a short
stone’s throw, each with its hands at the throats of all the rest! Over
the small first-floor of one of these linen-drapers’ shops appears the
wonderful inscription, BANK.’
‘Brother Francis, brother Francis,’ cried Thomas Idle, ‘what more do you
see from the turret, besides the eleven homicidal linen-drapers’ shops,
and the wonderful inscription, “Bank,”—on the small first-floor, and the
man and the pump and the trivet and the houses all in mourning and the
rain?’
‘I see,’ said Brother Francis, ‘the depository for Christian Knowledge,
and through the dark vapour I think I again make out Mr. Spurgeon looming
heavily. Her Majesty the Queen, God bless her, printed in colours, I am
sure I see. I see the _Illustrated London News_ of several years ago,
and I see a sweetmeat shop—which the proprietor calls a “Salt
Warehouse”—with one small female child in a cotton bonnet looking in on
tip-toe, oblivious of rain. And I see a watchmaker’s with only three
great pale watches of a dull metal hanging in his window, each in a
separate pane.’
‘Brother Francis, brother Francis,’ cried Thomas Idle, ‘what more do you
see of Wigton, besides these objects, and the man and the pump and the
trivet and the houses all in mourning and the rain?’
‘I see nothing more,’ said Brother Francis, ‘and there is nothing more to
see, except the curlpaper bill of the theatre, which was opened and shut
last week (the manager’s family played all the parts), and the short,
square, chinky omnibus that goes to the railway, and leads too rattling a
life over the stones to hold together long. O yes! Now, I see two men
with their hands in their pockets and their backs towards me.’
‘Brother Francis, brother Francis,’ cried Thomas Idle, ‘what do you make
out from the turret, of the expression of the two men with their hands in
their pockets and their backs towards you?’
‘They are mysterious men,’ said Brother Francis, ‘with inscrutable backs.
They keep their backs towards me with persistency. If one turns an inch
in any direction, the other turns an inch in the same direction, and no
more. They turn very stiffly, on a very little pivot, in the middle of
the market-place. Their appearance is partly of a mining, partly of a
ploughing, partly of a stable, character. They are looking at
nothing—very hard. Their backs are slouched, and their legs are curved
with much standing about. Their pockets are loose and dog’s-eared, on
account of their hands being always in them. They stand to be rained
upon, without any movement of impatience or dissatisfaction, and they
keep so close together that an elbow of each jostles an elbow of the
other, but they never speak. They spit at times, but speak not. I see
it growing darker and darker, and still I see them, sole visible
population of the place, standing to be rained upon with their backs
towards me, and looking at nothing very hard.’
‘Brother Francis, brother Francis,’ cried Thomas Idle, ‘before you draw
down the blind of the turret and come in to have your head scorched by
the hot gas, see if you can, and impart to me, something of the
expression of those two amazing men.’
‘The murky shadows,’ said Francis Goodchild, ‘are gathering fast; and the
wings of evening, and the wings of coal, are folding over Wigton. Still,
they look at nothing very hard, with their backs towards me. Ah! Now,
they turn, and I see—’
‘Brother Francis, brother Francis,’ cried Thomas Idle, ‘tell me quickly
what you see of the two men of Wigton!’
‘I see,’ said Francis Goodchild, ‘that they have no expression at all.
And now the town goes to sleep, undazzled by the large unlighted lamp in
the market-place; and let no man wake it.’
At the close of the next day’s journey, Mr. Thomas Idle’s ankle became
much swollen and inflamed. There are reasons which will presently
explain themselves for not publicly indicating the exact direction in
which that journey lay, or the place in which it ended. It was a long
day’s shaking of Thomas Idle over the rough roads, and a long day’s
getting out and going on before the horses, and fagging up hills, and
scouring down hills, on the part of Mr. Goodchild, who in the fatigues of
such labours congratulated himself on attaining a high point of idleness.
It was at a little town, still in Cumberland, that they halted for the
night—a very little town, with the purple and brown moor close upon its
one street; a curious little ancient market-cross set up in the midst of
it; and the town itself looking much as if it were a collection of great
stones piled on end by the Druids long ago, which a few recluse people
had since hollowed out for habitations.
‘Is there a doctor here?’ asked Mr. Goodchild, on his knee, of the
motherly landlady of the little Inn: stopping in his examination of Mr.
Idle’s ankle, with the aid of a candle.
‘Ey, my word!’ said the landlady, glancing doubtfully at the ankle for
herself; ‘there’s Doctor Speddie.’
‘Is he a good Doctor?’
‘Ey!’ said the landlady, ‘I ca’ him so. A’ cooms efther nae doctor that
I ken. Mair nor which, a’s just THE doctor heer.’
‘Do you think he is at home?’
Her reply was, ‘Gang awa’, Jock, and bring him.’
Jock, a white-headed boy, who, under pretence of stirring up some bay
salt in a basin of water for the laving of this unfortunate ankle, had
greatly enjoyed himself for the last ten minutes in splashing the carpet,
set off promptly. A very few minutes had elapsed when he showed the
Doctor in, by tumbling against the door before him and bursting it open
with his head.
‘Gently, Jock, gently,’ said the Doctor as he advanced with a quiet step.
‘Gentlemen, a good evening. I am sorry that my presence is required
here. A slight accident, I hope? A slip and a fall? Yes, yes, yes.
Carrock, indeed? Hah! Does that pain you, sir? No doubt, it does. It
is the great connecting ligament here, you see, that has been badly
strained. Time and rest, sir! They are often the recipe in greater
cases,’ with a slight sigh, ‘and often the recipe in small. I can send a
lotion to relieve you, but we must leave the cure to time and rest.’
This he said, holding Idle’s foot on his knee between his two hands, as
he sat over against him. He had touched it tenderly and skilfully in
explanation of what he said, and, when his careful examination was
completed, softly returned it to its former horizontal position on a
chair.
He spoke with a little irresolution whenever he began, but afterwards
fluently. He was a tall, thin, large-boned, old gentleman, with an
appearance at first sight of being hard-featured; but, at a second
glance, the mild expression of his face and some particular touches of
sweetness and patience about his mouth, corrected this impression and
assigned his long professional rides, by day and night, in the bleak
hill-weather, as the true cause of that appearance. He stooped very
little, though past seventy and very grey. His dress was more like that
of a clergyman than a country doctor, being a plain black suit, and a
plain white neck-kerchief tied behind like a band. His black was the
worse for wear, and there were darns in his coat, and his linen was a
little frayed at the hems and edges. He might have been poor—it was
likely enough in that out-of-the-way spot—or he might have been a little
self-forgetful and eccentric. Any one could have seen directly, that he
had neither wife nor child at home. He had a scholarly air with him, and
that kind of considerate humanity towards others which claimed a gentle
consideration for himself. Mr. Goodchild made this study of him while he
was examining the limb, and as he laid it down. Mr. Goodchild wishes to
add that he considers it a very good likeness.
It came out in the course of a little conversation, that Doctor Speddie
was acquainted with some friends of Thomas Idle’s, and had, when a young
man, passed some years in Thomas Idle’s birthplace on the other side of
England. Certain idle labours, the fruit of Mr. Goodchild’s
apprenticeship, also happened to be well known to him. The lazy
travellers were thus placed on a more intimate footing with the Doctor
than the casual circumstances of the meeting would of themselves have
established; and when Doctor Speddie rose to go home, remarking that he
would send his assistant with the lotion, Francis Goodchild said that was
unnecessary, for, by the Doctor’s leave, he would accompany him, and
bring it back. (Having done nothing to fatigue himself for a full
quarter of an hour, Francis began to fear that he was not in a state of
idleness.)
Doctor Speddie politely assented to the proposition of Francis Goodchild,
‘as it would give him the pleasure of enjoying a few more minutes of Mr.
Goodchild’s society than he could otherwise have hoped for,’ and they
went out together into the village street. The rain had nearly ceased,
the clouds had broken before a cool wind from the north-east, and stars
were shining from the peaceful heights beyond them.
Doctor Speddie’s house was the last house in the place. Beyond it, lay
the moor, all dark and lonesome. The wind moaned in a low, dull,
shivering manner round the little garden, like a houseless creature that
knew the winter was coming. It was exceedingly wild and solitary.
‘Roses,’ said the Doctor, when Goodchild touched some wet leaves
overhanging the stone porch; ‘but they get cut to pieces.’
The Doctor opened the door with a key he carried, and led the way into a
low but pretty ample hall with rooms on either side. The door of one of
these stood open, and the Doctor entered it, with a word of welcome to
his guest. It, too, was a low room, half surgery and half parlour, with
shelves of books and bottles against the walls, which were of a very dark
hue. There was a fire in the grate, the night being damp and chill.
Leaning against the chimney-piece looking down into it, stood the
Doctor’s Assistant.
A man of a most remarkable appearance. Much older than Mr. Goodchild had
expected, for he was at least two-and-fifty; but, that was nothing. What
was startling in him was his remarkable paleness. His large black eyes,
his sunken cheeks, his long and heavy iron-grey hair, his wasted hands,
and even the attenuation of his figure, were at first forgotten in his
extraordinary pallor. There was no vestige of colour in the man. When
he turned his face, Francis Goodchild started as if a stone figure had
looked round at him.
‘Mr. Lorn,’ said the Doctor. ‘Mr. Goodchild.’
The Assistant, in a distraught way—as if he had forgotten something—as if
he had forgotten everything, even to his own name and
himself—acknowledged the visitor’s presence, and stepped further back
into the shadow of the wall behind him. But, he was so pale that his
face stood out in relief again the dark wall, and really could not be
hidden so.
‘Mr. Goodchild’s friend has met with accident, Lorn,’ said Doctor
Speddie. ‘We want the lotion for a bad sprain.’
A pause.
‘My dear fellow, you are more than usually absent to-night. The lotion
for a bad sprain.’
‘Ah! yes! Directly.’
He was evidently relieved to turn away, and to take his white face and
his wild eyes to a table in a recess among the bottles. But, though he
stood there, compounding the lotion with his back towards them, Goodchild
could not, for many moments, withdraw his gaze from the man. When he at
length did so, he found the Doctor observing him, with some trouble in
his face. ‘He is absent,’ explained the Doctor, in a low voice. ‘Always
absent. Very absent.’
‘Is he ill?’
‘No, not ill.’
‘Unhappy?’
‘I have my suspicions that he was,’ assented the Doctor, ‘once.’
Francis Goodchild could not but observe that the Doctor accompanied these
words with a benignant and protecting glance at their subject, in which
there was much of the expression with which an attached father might have
looked at a heavily afflicted son. Yet, that they were not father and
son must have been plain to most eyes. The Assistant, on the other hand,
turning presently to ask the Doctor some question, looked at him with a
wan smile as if he were his whole reliance and sustainment in life.
It was in vain for the Doctor in his easy-chair, to try to lead the mind
of Mr. Goodchild in the opposite easy-chair, away from what was before
him. Let Mr. Goodchild do what he would to follow the Doctor, his eyes
and thoughts reverted to the Assistant. The Doctor soon perceived it,
and, after falling silent, and musing in a little perplexity, said:
‘Lorn!’
‘My dear Doctor.’
‘Would you go to the Inn, and apply that lotion? You will show the best
way of applying it, far better than Mr. Goodchild can.’
‘With pleasure.’
The Assistant took his hat, and passed like a shadow to the door.
‘Lorn!’ said the Doctor, calling after him.
He returned.
‘Mr. Goodchild will keep me company till you come home. Don’t hurry.
Excuse my calling you back.’
‘It is not,’ said the Assistant, with his former smile, ‘the first time
you have called me back, dear Doctor.’ With those words he went away.
‘Mr. Goodchild,’ said Doctor Speddie, in a low voice, and with his former
troubled expression of face, ‘I have seen that your attention has been
concentrated on my friend.’
‘He fascinates me. I must apologise to you, but he has quite bewildered
and mastered me.’
‘I find that a lonely existence and a long secret,’ said the Doctor,
drawing his chair a little nearer to Mr. Goodchild’s, ‘become in the
course of time very heavy. I will tell you something. You may make what
use you will of it, under fictitious names. I know I may trust you. I
am the more inclined to confidence to-night, through having been
unexpectedly led back, by the current of our conversation at the Inn, to
scenes in my early life. Will you please to draw a little nearer?’
Mr. Goodchild drew a little nearer, and the Doctor went on thus:
speaking, for the most part, in so cautious a voice, that the wind,
though it was far from high, occasionally got the better of him.
When this present nineteenth century was younger by a good many years
than it is now, a certain friend of mine, named Arthur Holliday, happened
to arrive in the town of Doncaster, exactly in the middle of a race-week,
or, in other words, in the middle of the month of September. He was one
of those reckless, rattle-pated, open-hearted, and open-mouthed young
gentlemen, who possess the gift of familiarity in its highest perfection,
and who scramble carelessly along the journey of life making friends, as
the phrase is, wherever they go. His father was a rich manufacturer, and
had bought landed property enough in one of the midland counties to make
all the born squires in his neighbourhood thoroughly envious of him.
Arthur was his only son, possessor in prospect of the great estate and
the great business after his father’s death; well supplied with money,
and not too rigidly looked after, during his father’s lifetime. Report,
or scandal, whichever you please, said that the old gentleman had been
rather wild in his youthful days, and that, unlike most parents, he was
not disposed to be violently indignant when he found that his son took
after him. This may be true or not. I myself only knew the elder Mr.
Holliday when he was getting on in years; and then he was as quiet and as
respectable a gentleman as ever I met with.
Well, one September, as I told you, young Arthur comes to Doncaster,
having decided all of a sudden, in his harebrained way, that he would go
to the races. He did not reach the town till towards the close of the
evening, and he went at once to see about his dinner and bed at the
principal hotel. Dinner they were ready enough to give him; but as for a
bed, they laughed when he mentioned it. In the race-week at Doncaster,
it is no uncommon thing for visitors who have not bespoken apartments, to
pass the night in their carriages at the inn doors. As for the lower
sort of strangers, I myself have often seen them, at that full time,
sleeping out on the doorsteps for want of a covered place to creep under.
Rich as he was, Arthur’s chance of getting a night’s lodging (seeing that
he had not written beforehand to secure one) was more than doubtful. He
tried the second hotel, and the third hotel, and two of the inferior inns
after that; and was met everywhere by the same form of answer. No
accommodation for the night of any sort was left. All the bright golden
sovereigns in his pocket would not buy him a bed at Doncaster in the
race-week.
To a young fellow of Arthur’s temperament, the novelty of being turned
away into the street, like a penniless vagabond, at every house where he
asked for a lodging, presented itself in the light of a new and highly
amusing piece of experience. He went on, with his carpet-bag in his
hand, applying for a bed at every place of entertainment for travellers
that he could find in Doncaster, until he wandered into the outskirts of
the town. By this time, the last glimmer of twilight had faded out, the
moon was rising dimly in a mist, the wind was getting cold, the clouds
were gathering heavily, and there was every prospect that it was soon
going to rain.
The look of the night had rather a lowering effect on young Holliday’s
good spirits. He began to contemplate the houseless situation in which
he was placed, from the serious rather than the humorous point of view;
and he looked about him, for another public-house to inquire at, with
something very like downright anxiety in his mind on the subject of a
lodging for the night. The suburban part of the town towards which he
had now strayed was hardly lighted at all, and he could see nothing of
the houses as he passed them, except that they got progressively smaller
and dirtier, the farther he went. Down the winding road before him shone
the dull gleam of an oil lamp, the one faint, lonely light that struggled
ineffectually with the foggy darkness all round him. He resolved to go
on as far as this lamp, and then, if it showed him nothing in the shape
of an Inn, to return to the central part of the town and to try if he
could not at least secure a chair to sit down on, through the night, at
one of the principal Hotels.
As he got near the lamp, he heard voices; and, walking close under it,
found that it lighted the entrance to a narrow court, on the wall of
which was painted a long hand in faded flesh-colour, pointing with a lean
forefinger, to this inscription:—
THE TWO ROBINS.
Arthur turned into the court without hesitation, to see what The Two
Robins could do for him. Four or five men were standing together round
the door of the house which was at the bottom of the court, facing the
entrance from the street. The men were all listening to one other man,
better dressed than the rest, who was telling his audience something, in
a low voice, in which they were apparently very much interested.
On entering the passage, Arthur was passed by a stranger with a knapsack
in his hand, who was evidently leaving the house.
‘No,’ said the traveller with the knapsack, turning round and addressing
himself cheerfully to a fat, sly-looking, bald-headed man, with a dirty
white apron on, who had followed him down the passage. ‘No, Mr.
landlord, I am not easily scared by trifles; but, I don’t mind confessing
that I can’t quite stand _that_.’
It occurred to young Holliday, the moment he heard these words, that the
stranger had been asked an exorbitant price for a bed at The Two Robins;
and that he was unable or unwilling to pay it. The moment his back was
turned, Arthur, comfortably conscious of his own well-filled pockets,
addressed himself in a great hurry, for fear any other benighted
traveller should slip in and forestall him, to the sly-looking landlord
with the dirty apron and the bald head.
‘If you have got a bed to let,’ he said, ‘and if that gentleman who has
just gone out won’t pay your price for it, I will.’
The sly landlord looked hard at Arthur.
‘Will you, sir?’ he asked, in a meditative, doubtful way.
‘Name your price,’ said young Holliday, thinking that the landlord’s
hesitation sprang from some boorish distrust of him. ‘Name your price,
and I’ll give you the money at once if you like?’
‘Are you game for five shillings?’ inquired the landlord, rubbing his
stubbly double chin, and looking up thoughtfully at the ceiling above
him.
Arthur nearly laughed in the man’s face; but thinking it prudent to
control himself, offered the five shillings as seriously as he could.
The sly landlord held out his hand, then suddenly drew it back again.
‘You’re acting all fair and above-board by me,’ he said: ‘and, before I
take your money, I’ll do the same by you. Look here, this is how it
stands. You can have a bed all to yourself for five shillings; but you
can’t have more than a half-share of the room it stands in. Do you see
what I mean, young gentleman?’
‘Of course I do,’ returned Arthur, a little irritably. ‘You mean that it
is a double-bedded room, and that one of the beds is occupied?’
The landlord nodded his head, and rubbed his double chin harder than
ever. Arthur hesitated, and mechanically moved back a step or two
towards the door. The idea of sleeping in the same room with a total
stranger, did not present an attractive prospect to him. He felt more
than half inclined to drop his five shillings into his pocket, and to go
out into the street once more.
‘Is it yes, or no?’ asked the landlord. ‘Settle it as quick as you can,
because there’s lots of people wanting a bed at Doncaster to-night,
besides you.’
Arthur looked towards the court, and heard the rain falling heavily in
the street outside. He thought he would ask a question or two before he
rashly decided on leaving the shelter of The Two Robins.
‘What sort of a man is it who has got the other bed?’ he inquired. ‘Is
he a gentleman? I mean, is he a quiet, well-behaved person?’
‘The quietest man I ever came across,’ said the landlord, rubbing his fat
hands stealthily one over the other. ‘As sober as a judge, and as
regular as clock-work in his habits. It hasn’t struck nine, not ten
minutes ago, and he’s in his bed already. I don’t know whether that
comes up to your notion of a quiet man: it goes a long way ahead of mine,
I can tell you.’
‘Is he asleep, do you think?’ asked Arthur.
‘I know he’s asleep,’ returned the landlord. ‘And what’s more, he’s gone
off so fast, that I’ll warrant you don’t wake him. This way, sir,’ said
the landlord, speaking over young Holliday’s shoulder, as if he was
addressing some new guest who was approaching the house.
‘Here you are,’ said Arthur, determined to be beforehand with the
stranger, whoever he might be. ‘I’ll take the bed.’ And he handed the
five shillings to the landlord, who nodded, dropped the money carelessly
into his waistcoat-pocket, and lighted the candle.
‘Come up and see the room,’ said the host of The Two Robins, leading the
way to the staircase quite briskly, considering how fat he was.
They mounted to the second-floor of the house. The landlord half opened
a door, fronting the landing, then stopped, and turned round to Arthur.
‘It’s a fair bargain, mind, on my side as well as on yours,’ he said.
‘You give me five shillings, I give you in return a clean, comfortable
bed; and I warrant, beforehand, that you won’t be interfered with, or
annoyed in any way, by the man who sleeps in the same room as you.’
Saying those words, he looked hard, for a moment, in young Holliday’s
face, and then led the way into the room.
It was larger and cleaner than Arthur had expected it would be. The two
beds stood parallel with each other—a space of about six feet intervening
between them. They were both of the same medium size, and both had the
same plain white curtains, made to draw, if necessary, all round them.
The occupied bed was the bed nearest the window. The curtains were all
drawn round this, except the half curtain at the bottom, on the side of
the bed farthest from the window. Arthur saw the feet of the sleeping
man raising the scanty clothes into a sharp little eminence, as if he was
lying flat on his back. He took the candle, and advanced softly to draw
the curtain—stopped half-way, and listened for a moment—then turned to
the landlord.
‘He’s a very quiet sleeper,’ said Arthur.
‘Yes,’ said the landlord, ‘very quiet.’
Young Holliday advanced with the candle, and looked in at the man
cautiously.
‘How pale he is!’ said Arthur.
‘Yes,’ returned the landlord, ‘pale enough, isn’t he?’
Arthur looked closer at the man. The bedclothes were drawn up to his
chin, and they lay perfectly still over the region of his chest.
Surprised and vaguely startled, as he noticed this, Arthur stooped down
closer over the stranger; looked at his ashy, parted lips; listened
breathlessly for an instant; looked again at the strangely still face,
and the motionless lips and chest; and turned round suddenly on the
landlord, with his own cheeks as pale for the moment as the hollow cheeks
of the man on the bed.
‘Come here,’ he whispered, under his breath. ‘Come here, for God’s sake!
The man’s not asleep—he is dead!’
‘You have found that out sooner than I thought you would,’ said the
landlord, composedly. ‘Yes, he’s dead, sure enough. He died at five
o’clock to-day.’
‘How did he die? Who is he?’ asked Arthur, staggered, for a moment, by
the audacious coolness of the answer.
‘As to who is he,’ rejoined the landlord, ‘I know no more about him than
you do. There are his books and letters and things, all sealed up in
that brown-paper parcel, for the Coroner’s inquest to open to-morrow or
next day. He’s been here a week, paying his way fairly enough, and
stopping in-doors, for the most part, as if he was ailing. My girl
brought him up his tea at five to-day; and as he was pouring of it out,
he fell down in a faint, or a fit, or a compound of both, for anything I
know. We could not bring him to—and I said he was dead. And the doctor
couldn’t bring him to—and the doctor said he was dead. And there he is.
And the Coroner’s inquest’s coming as soon as it can. And that’s as much
as I know about it.’
Arthur held the candle close to the man’s lips. The flame still burnt
straight up, as steadily as before. There was a moment of silence; and
the rain pattered drearily through it against the panes of the window.
‘If you haven’t got nothing more to say to me,’ continued the landlord,
‘I suppose I may go. You don’t expect your five shillings back, do you?
There’s the bed I promised you, clean and comfortable. There’s the man I
warranted not to disturb you, quiet in this world for ever. If you’re
frightened to stop alone with him, that’s not my look out. I’ve kept my
part of the bargain, and I mean to keep the money. I’m not Yorkshire,
myself, young gentleman; but I’ve lived long enough in these parts to
have my wits sharpened; and I shouldn’t wonder if you found out the way
to brighten up yours, next time you come amongst us.’ With these words,
the landlord turned towards the door, and laughed to himself softly, in
high satisfaction at his own sharpness.
Startled and shocked as he was, Arthur had by this time sufficiently
recovered himself to feel indignant at the trick that had been played on
him, and at the insolent manner in which the landlord exulted in it.
‘Don’t laugh,’ he said sharply, ‘till you are quite sure you have got the
laugh against me. You shan’t have the five shillings for nothing, my
man. I’ll keep the bed.’
‘Will you?’ said the landlord. ‘Then I wish you a goodnight’s rest.’
With that brief farewell, he went out, and shut the door after him.
A good night’s rest! The words had hardly been spoken, the door had
hardly been closed, before Arthur half-repented the hasty words that had
just escaped him. Though not naturally over-sensitive, and not wanting
in courage of the moral as well as the physical sort, the presence of the
dead man had an instantaneously chilling effect on his mind when he found
himself alone in the room—alone, and bound by his own rash words to stay
there till the next morning. An older man would have thought nothing of
those words, and would have acted, without reference to them, as his
calmer sense suggested. But Arthur was too young to treat the ridicule,
even of his inferiors, with contempt—too young not to fear the momentary
humiliation of falsifying his own foolish boast, more than he feared the
trial of watching out the long night in the same chamber with the dead.
‘It is but a few hours,’ he thought to himself, ‘and I can get away the
first thing in the morning.’
He was looking towards the occupied bed as that idea passed through his
mind, and the sharp, angular eminence made in the clothes by the dead
man’s upturned feet again caught his eye. He advanced and drew the
curtains, purposely abstaining, as he did so, from looking at the face of
the corpse, lest he might unnerve himself at the outset by fastening some
ghastly impression of it on his mind. He drew the curtain very gently,
and sighed involuntarily as he closed it. ‘Poor fellow,’ he said, almost
as sadly as if he had known the man. ‘Ah, poor fellow!’
He went next to the window. The night was black, and he could see
nothing from it. The rain still pattered heavily against the glass. He
inferred, from hearing it, that the window was at the back of the house;
remembering that the front was sheltered from the weather by the court
and the buildings over it.
While he was still standing at the window—for even the dreary rain was a
relief, because of the sound it made; a relief, also, because it moved,
and had some faint suggestion, in consequence, of life and companionship
in it—while he was standing at the window, and looking vacantly into the
black darkness outside, he heard a distant church-clock strike ten. Only
ten! How was he to pass the time till the house was astir the next
morning?
Under any other circumstances, he would have gone down to the
public-house parlour, would have called for his grog, and would have
laughed and talked with the company assembled as familiarly as if he had
known them all his life. But the very thought of whiling away the time
in this manner was distasteful to him. The new situation in which he was
placed seemed to have altered him to himself already. Thus far, his life
had been the common, trifling, prosaic, surface-life of a prosperous
young man, with no troubles to conquer, and no trials to face. He had
lost no relation whom he loved, no friend whom he treasured. Till this
night, what share he had of the immortal inheritance that is divided
amongst us all, had laid dormant within him. Till this night, Death and
he had not once met, even in thought.
He took a few turns up and down the room—then stopped. The noise made by
his boots on the poorly carpeted floor, jarred on his ear. He hesitated
a little, and ended by taking the boots off, and walking backwards and
forwards noiselessly. All desire to sleep or to rest had left him. The
bare thought of lying down on the unoccupied bed instantly drew the
picture on his mind of a dreadful mimicry of the position of the dead
man. Who was he? What was the story of his past life? Poor he must
have been, or he would not have stopped at such a place as The Two Robins
Inn—and weakened, probably, by long illness, or he could hardly have died
in the manner in which the landlord had described. Poor, ill,
lonely,—dead in a strange place; dead, with nobody but a stranger to pity
him. A sad story: truly, on the mere face of it, a very sad story.
While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he had stopped
insensibly at the window, close to which stood the foot of the bed with
the closed curtains. At first he looked at it absently; then he became
conscious that his eyes were fixed on it; and then, a perverse desire
took possession of him to do the very thing which he had resolved not to
do, up to this time—to look at the dead man.
He stretched out his hand towards the curtains; but checked himself in
the very act of undrawing them, turned his back sharply on the bed, and
walked towards the chimney-piece, to see what things were placed on it,
and to try if he could keep the dead man out of his mind in that way.
There was a pewter inkstand on the chimney-piece, with some mildewed
remains of ink in the bottle. There were two coarse china ornaments of
the commonest kind; and there was a square of embossed card, dirty and
fly-blown, with a collection of wretched riddles printed on it, in all
sorts of zig-zag directions, and in variously coloured inks. He took the
card, and went away, to read it, to the table on which the candle was
placed; sitting down, with his back resolutely turned to the curtained
bed.
He read the first riddle, the second, the third, all in one corner of the
card—then turned it round impatiently to look at another. Before he
could begin reading the riddles printed here, the sound of the
church-clock stopped him. Eleven. He had got through an hour of the
time, in the room with the dead man.
Once more he looked at the card. It was not easy to make out the letters
printed on it, in consequence of the dimness of the light which the
landlord had left him—a common tallow candle, furnished with a pair of
heavy old-fashioned steel snuffers. Up to this time, his mind had been
too much occupied to think of the light. He had left the wick of the
candle unsnuffed, till it had risen higher than the flame, and had burnt
into an odd pent-house shape at the top, from which morsels of the
charred cotton fell off, from time to time, in little flakes. He took up
the snuffers now, and trimmed the wick. The light brightened directly,
and the room became less dismal.
Again he turned to the riddles; reading them doggedly and resolutely, now
in one corner of the card, now in another. All his efforts, however,
could not fix his attention on them. He pursued his occupation
mechanically, deriving no sort of impression from what he was reading.
It was as if a shadow from the curtained bed had got between his mind and
the gaily printed letters—a shadow that nothing could dispel. At last,
he gave up the struggle, and threw the card from him impatiently, and
took to walking softly up and down the room again.
The dead man, the dead man, the _hidden_ dead man on the bed! There was
the one persistent idea still haunting him. Hidden? Was it only the
body being there, or was it the body being there, concealed, that was
preying on his mind? He stopped at the window, with that doubt in him;
once more listening to the pattering rain, once more looking out into the
black darkness.
Still the dead man! The darkness forced his mind back upon itself, and
set his memory at work, reviving, with a painfully-vivid distinctness the
momentary impression it had received from the first sight of the corpse.
Before long the face seemed to be hovering out in the middle of the
darkness, confronting him through the window, with the paleness whiter,
with the dreadful dull line of light between the imperfectly-closed
eyelids broader than he had seen it—with the parted lips slowly dropping
farther and farther away from each other—with the features growing larger
and moving closer, till they seemed to fill the window and to silence the
rain, and to shut out the night.
The sound of a voice, shouting below-stairs, woke him suddenly from the
dream of his own distempered fancy. He recognised it as the voice of the
landlord. ‘Shut up at twelve, Ben,’ he heard it say. ‘I’m off to bed.’
He wiped away the damp that had gathered on his forehead, reasoned with
himself for a little while, and resolved to shake his mind free of the
ghastly counterfeit which still clung to it, by forcing himself to
confront, if it was only for a moment, the solemn reality. Without
allowing himself an instant to hesitate, he parted the curtains at the
foot of the bed, and looked through.
There was a sad, peaceful, white face, with the awful mystery of
stillness on it, laid back upon the pillow. No stir, no change there!
He only looked at it for a moment before he closed the curtains again—but
that moment steadied him, calmed him, restored him—mind and body—to
himself.
He returned to his old occupation of walking up and down the room;
persevering in it, this time, till the clock struck again. Twelve.
As the sound of the clock-bell died away, it was succeeded by the
confused noise, down-stairs, of the drinkers in the tap-room leaving the
house. The next sound, after an interval of silence, was caused by the
barring of the door, and the closing of the shutters, at the back of the
Inn. Then the silence followed again, and was disturbed no more.
He was alone now—absolutely, utterly, alone with the dead man, till the
next morning.
The wick of the candle wanted trimming again. He took up the
snuffers—but paused suddenly on the very point of using them, and looked
attentively at the candle—then back, over his shoulder, at the curtained
bed—then again at the candle. It had been lighted, for the first time,
to show him the way up-stairs, and three parts of it, at least, were
already consumed. In another hour it would be burnt out. In another
hour—unless he called at once to the man who had shut up the Inn, for a
fresh candle—he would be left in the dark.
Strongly as his mind had been affected since he had entered his room, his
unreasonable dread of encountering ridicule, and of exposing his courage
to suspicion, had not altogether lost its influence over him, even yet.
He lingered irresolutely by the table, waiting till he could prevail on
himself to open the door, and call, from the landing, to the man who had
shut up the Inn. In his present hesitating frame of mind, it was a kind
of relief to gain a few moments only by engaging in the trifling
occupation of snuffing the candle. His hand trembled a little, and the
snuffers were heavy and awkward to use. When he closed them on the wick,
he closed them a hair’s breadth too low. In an instant the candle was
out, and the room was plunged in pitch darkness.
The one impression which the absence of light immediately produced on his
mind, was distrust of the curtained bed—distrust which shaped itself into
no distinct idea, but which was powerful enough in its very vagueness, to
bind him down to his chair, to make his heart beat fast, and to set him
listening intently. No sound stirred in the room but the familiar sound
of the rain against the window, louder and sharper now than he had heard
it yet.
Still the vague distrust, the inexpressible dread possessed him, and kept
him to his chair. He had put his carpet-bag on the table, when he first
entered the room; and he now took the key from his pocket, reached out
his hand softly, opened the bag, and groped in it for his travelling
writing-case, in which he knew that there was a small store of matches.
When he had got one of the matches, he waited before he struck it on the
coarse wooden table, and listened intently again, without knowing why.
Still there was no sound in the room but the steady, ceaseless, rattling
sound of the rain.
He lighted the candle again, without another moment of delay and, on the
instant of its burning up, the first object in the room that his eyes
sought for was the curtained bed.
Just before the light had been put out, he had looked in that direction,
and had seen no change, no disarrangement of any sort, in the folds of
the closely-drawn curtains.
When he looked at the bed, now, he saw, hanging over the side of it, a
long white hand.
It lay perfectly motionless, midway on the side of the bed, where the
curtain at the head and the curtain at the foot met. Nothing more was
visible. The clinging curtains hid everything but the long white hand.
He stood looking at it unable to stir, unable to call out; feeling
nothing, knowing nothing, every faculty he possessed gathered up and lost
in the one seeing faculty. How long that first panic held him he never
could tell afterwards. It might have been only for a moment; it might
have been for many minutes together. How he got to the bed—whether he
ran to it headlong, or whether he approached it slowly—how he wrought
himself up to unclose the curtains and look in, he never has remembered,
and never will remember to his dying day. It is enough that he did go to
the bed, and that he did look inside the curtains.
The man had moved. One of his arms was outside the clothes; his face was
turned a little on the pillow; his eyelids were wide open. Changed as to
position, and as to one of the features, the face was, otherwise,
fearfully and wonderfully unaltered. The dead paleness and the dead
quiet were on it still.
One glance showed Arthur this—one glance, before he flew breathlessly to
the door, and alarmed the house.
The man whom the landlord called ‘Ben,’ was the first to appear on the
stairs. In three words, Arthur told him what had happened, and sent him
for the nearest doctor.
I, who tell you this story, was then staying with a medical friend of
mine, in practice at Doncaster, taking care of his patients for him,
during his absence in London; and I, for the time being, was the nearest
doctor. They had sent for me from the Inn, when the stranger was taken
ill in the afternoon; but I was not at home, and medical assistance was
sought for elsewhere. When the man from The Two Robins rang the
night-bell, I was just thinking of going to bed. Naturally enough, I did
not believe a word of his story about ‘a dead man who had come to life
again.’ However, I put on my hat, armed myself with one or two bottles
of restorative medicine, and ran to the Inn, expecting to find nothing
more remarkable, when I got there, than a patient in a fit.
My surprise at finding that the man had spoken the literal truth was
almost, if not quite, equalled by my astonishment at finding myself face
to face with Arthur Holliday as soon as I entered the bedroom. It was no
time then for giving or seeking explanations. We just shook hands
amazedly; and then I ordered everybody but Arthur out of the room, and
hurried to the man on the bed.
The kitchen fire had not been long out. There was plenty of hot water in
the boiler, and plenty of flannel to be had. With these, with my
medicines, and with such help as Arthur could render under my direction,
I dragged the man, literally, out of the jaws of death. In less than an
hour from the time when I had been called in, he was alive and talking in
the bed on which he had been laid out to wait for the Coroner’s inquest.
You will naturally ask me, what had been the matter with him; and I might
treat you, in reply, to a long theory, plentifully sprinkled with, what
the children call, hard words. I prefer telling you that, in this case,
cause and effect could not be satisfactorily joined together by any
theory whatever. There are mysteries in life, and the condition of it,
which human science has not fathomed yet; and I candidly confess to you,
that, in bringing that man back to existence, I was, morally speaking,
groping haphazard in the dark. I know (from the testimony of the doctor
who attended him in the afternoon) that the vital machinery, so far as
its action is appreciable by our senses, had, in this case,
unquestionably stopped; and I am equally certain (seeing that I recovered
him) that the vital principle was not extinct. When I add, that he had
suffered from a long and complicated illness, and that his whole nervous
system was utterly deranged, I have told you all I really know of the
physical condition of my dead-alive patient at The Two Robins Inn.
When he ‘came to,’ as the phrase goes, he was a startling object to look
at, with his colourless face, his sunken cheeks, his wild black eyes, and
his long black hair. The first question he asked me about himself, when
he could speak, made me suspect that I had been called in to a man in my
own profession. I mentioned to him my surmise; and he told me that I was
right.
He said he had come last from Paris, where he had been attached to a
hospital. That he had lately returned to England, on his way to
Edinburgh, to continue his studies; that he had been taken ill on the
journey; and that he had stopped to rest and recover himself at
Doncaster. He did not add a word about his name, or who he was: and, of
course, I did not question him on the subject. All I inquired, when he
ceased speaking, was what branch of the profession he intended to follow.
‘Any branch,’ he said, bitterly, ‘which will put bread into the mouth of
a poor man.’
At this, Arthur, who had been hitherto watching him in silent curiosity,
burst out impetuously in his usual good-humoured way:—
‘My dear fellow!’ (everybody was ‘my dear fellow’ with Arthur) ‘now you
have come to life again, don’t begin by being down-hearted about your
prospects. I’ll answer for it, I can help you to some capital thing in
the medical line—or, if I can’t, I know my father can.’
The medical student looked at him steadily.
‘Thank you,’ he said, coldly. Then added, ‘May I ask who your father
is?’
‘He’s well enough known all about this part of the country,’ replied
Arthur. ‘He is a great manufacturer, and his name is Holliday.’
My hand was on the man’s wrist during this brief conversation. The
instant the name of Holliday was pronounced I felt the pulse under my
fingers flutter, stop, go on suddenly with a bound, and beat afterwards,
for a minute or two, at the fever rate.
‘How did you come here?’ asked the stranger, quickly, excitably,
passionately almost.
Arthur related briefly what had happened from the time of his first
taking the bed at the inn.
‘I am indebted to Mr. Holliday’s son then for the help that has saved my
life,’ said the medical student, speaking to himself, with a singular
sarcasm in his voice. ‘Come here!’
He held out, as he spoke, his long, white, bony, right hand.
‘With all my heart,’ said Arthur, taking the hand-cordially. ‘I may
confess it now,’ he continued, laughing. ‘Upon my honour, you almost
frightened me out of my wits.’
The stranger did not seem to listen. His wild black eyes were fixed with
a look of eager interest on Arthur’s face, and his long bony fingers kept
tight hold of Arthur’s hand. Young Holliday, on his side, returned the
gaze, amazed and puzzled by the medical student’s odd language and
manners. The two faces were close together; I looked at them; and, to my
amazement, I was suddenly impressed by the sense of a likeness between
them—not in features, or complexion, but solely in expression. It must
have been a strong likeness, or I should certainly not have found it out,
for I am naturally slow at detecting resemblances between faces.
‘You have saved my life,’ said the strange man, still looking hard in
Arthur’s face, still holding tightly by his hand. ‘If you had been my
own brother, you could not have done more for me than that.’
He laid a singularly strong emphasis on those three words ‘my own
brother,’ and a change passed over his face as he pronounced them,—a
change that no language of mine is competent to describe.
‘I hope I have not done being of service to you yet,’ said Arthur. ‘I’ll
speak to my father, as soon as I get home.’
‘You seem to be fond and proud of your father,’ said the medical student.
‘I suppose, in return, he is fond and proud of you?’
‘Of course, he is!’ answered Arthur, laughing. ‘Is there anything
wonderful in that? Isn’t _your_ father fond—’
The stranger suddenly dropped young Holliday’s hand, and turned his face
away.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Arthur. ‘I hope I have not unintentionally
pained you. I hope you have not lost your father.’
‘I can’t well lose what I have never had,’ retorted the medical student,
with a harsh, mocking laugh.
‘What you have never had!’
The strange man suddenly caught Arthur’s hand again, suddenly looked once
more hard in his face.
‘Yes,’ he said, with a repetition of the bitter laugh. ‘You have brought
a poor devil back into the world, who has no business there. Do I
astonish you? Well! I have a fancy of my own for telling you what men
in my situation generally keep a secret. I have no name and no father.
The merciful law of Society tells me I am Nobody’s Son! Ask your father
if he will be my father too, and help me on in life with the family
name.’
Arthur looked at me, more puzzled than ever. I signed to him to say
nothing, and then laid my fingers again on the man’s wrist. No! In
spite of the extraordinary speech that he had just made, he was not, as I
had been disposed to suspect, beginning to get light-headed. His pulse,
by this time, had fallen back to a quiet, slow beat, and his skin was
moist and cool. Not a symptom of fever or agitation about him.
Finding that neither of us answered him, he turned to me, and began
talking of the extraordinary nature of his case, and asking my advice
about the future course of medical treatment to which he ought to subject
himself. I said the matter required careful thinking over, and suggested
that I should submit certain prescriptions to him the next morning. He
told me to write them at once, as he would, most likely, be leaving
Doncaster, in the morning, before I was up. It was quite useless to
represent to him the folly and danger of such a proceeding as this. He
heard me politely and patiently, but held to his resolution, without
offering any reasons or any explanations, and repeated to me, that if I
wished to give him a chance of seeing my prescription, I must write it at
once. Hearing this, Arthur volunteered the loan of a travelling
writing-case, which, he said, he had with him; and, bringing it to the
bed, shook the note-paper out of the pocket of the case forthwith in his
usual careless way. With the paper, there fell out on the counterpane of
the bed a small packet of sticking-plaster, and a little water-colour
drawing of a landscape.
The medical student took up the drawing and looked at it. His eye fell
on some initials neatly written, in cypher, in one corner. He started
and trembled; his pale face grew whiter than ever; his wild black eyes
turned on Arthur, and looked through and through him.
‘A pretty drawing,’ he said in a remarkably quiet tone of voice.
‘Ah! and done by such a pretty girl,’ said Arthur. ‘Oh, such a pretty
girl! I wish it was not a landscape—I wish it was a portrait of her!’
‘You admire her very much?’
Arthur, half in jest, half in earnest, kissed his hand for answer.
‘Love at first sight!’ he said, putting the drawing away again. ‘But the
course of it doesn’t run smooth. It’s the old story. She’s monopolised
as usual. Trammelled by a rash engagement to some poor man who is never
likely to get money enough to marry her. It was lucky I heard of it in
time, or I should certainly have risked a declaration when she gave me
that drawing. Here, doctor! Here is pen, ink, and paper all ready for
you.’
‘When she gave you that drawing? Gave it. Gave it.’ He repeated the
words slowly to himself, and suddenly closed his eyes. A momentary
distortion passed across his face, and I saw one of his hands clutch up
the bedclothes and squeeze them hard. I thought he was going to be ill
again, and begged that there might be no more talking. He opened his
eyes when I spoke, fixed them once more searchingly on Arthur, and said,
slowly and distinctly, ‘You like her, and she likes you. The poor man
may die out of your way. Who can tell that she may not give you herself
as well as her drawing, after all?’
Before young Holliday could answer, he turned to me, and said in a
whisper, ‘Now for the prescription.’ From that time, though he spoke to
Arthur again, he never looked at him more.
When I had written the prescription, he examined it, approved of it, and
then astonished us both by abruptly wishing us good night. I offered to
sit up with him, and he shook his head. Arthur offered to sit up with
him, and he said, shortly, with his face turned away, ‘No.’ I insisted
on having somebody left to watch him. He gave way when he found I was
determined, and said he would accept the services of the waiter at the
Inn.
‘Thank you, both,’ he said, as we rose to go. ‘I have one last favour to
ask—not of you, doctor, for I leave you to exercise your professional
discretion—but of Mr. Holliday.’ His eyes, while he spoke, still rested
steadily on me, and never once turned towards Arthur. ‘I beg that Mr.
Holliday will not mention to any one—least of all to his father—the
events that have occurred, and the words that have passed, in this room.
I entreat him to bury me in his memory, as, but for him, I might have
been buried in my grave. I cannot give my reasons for making this
strange request. I can only implore him to grant it.’
His voice faltered for the first time, and he hid his face on the pillow.
Arthur, completely bewildered, gave the required pledge. I took young
Holliday away with me, immediately afterwards, to the house of my friend;
determining to go back to the Inn, and to see the medical student again
before he had left in the morning.
I returned to the Inn at eight o’clock, purposely abstaining from waking
Arthur, who was sleeping off the past night’s excitement on one of my
friend’s sofas. A suspicion had occurred to me as soon as I was alone in
my bedroom, which made me resolve that Holliday and the stranger whose
life he had saved should not meet again, if I could prevent it. I have
already alluded to certain reports, or scandals, which I knew of,
relating to the early life of Arthur’s father. While I was thinking, in
my bed, of what had passed at the Inn—of the change in the student’s
pulse when he heard the name of Holliday; of the resemblance of
expression that I had discovered between his face and Arthur’s; of the
emphasis he had laid on those three words, ‘my own brother;’ and of his
incomprehensible acknowledgment of his own illegitimacy—while I was
thinking of these things, the reports I have mentioned suddenly flew into
my mind, and linked themselves fast to the chain of my previous
reflections. Something within me whispered, ‘It is best that those two
young men should not meet again.’ I felt it before I slept; I felt it
when I woke; and I went, as I told you, alone to the Inn the next
morning.
I had missed my only opportunity of seeing my nameless patient again. He
had been gone nearly an hour when I inquired for him.
* * * * *
I have now told you everything that I know for certain, in relation to
the man whom I brought back to life in the double-bedded room of the Inn
at Doncaster. What I have next to add is matter for inference and
surmise, and is not, strictly speaking, matter of fact.
I have to tell you, first, that the medical student turned out to be
strangely and unaccountably right in assuming it as more than probable
that Arthur Holliday would marry the young lady who had given him the
water-colour drawing of the landscape. That marriage took place a little
more than a year after the events occurred which I have just been
relating. The young couple came to live in the neighbourhood in which I
was then established in practice. I was present at the wedding, and was
rather surprised to find that Arthur was singularly reserved with me,
both before and after his marriage, on the subject of the young lady’s
prior engagement. He only referred to it once, when we were alone,
merely telling me, on that occasion, that his wife had done all that
honour and duty required of her in the matter, and that the engagement
had been broken off with the full approval of her parents. I never heard
more from him than this. For three years he and his wife lived together
happily. At the expiration of that time, the symptoms of a serious
illness first declared themselves in Mrs. Arthur Holliday. It turned out
to be a long, lingering, hopeless malady. I attended her throughout. We
had been great friends when she was well, and we became more attached to
each other than ever when she was ill. I had many long and interesting
conversations with her in the intervals when she suffered least. The
result of one of these conversations I may briefly relate, leaving you to
draw any inferences from it that you please.
The interview to which I refer, occurred shortly before her death. I
called one evening, as usual, and found her alone, with a look in her
eyes which told me that she had been crying. She only informed me at
first, that she had been depressed in spirits; but, by little and little,
she became more communicative, and confessed to me that she had been
looking over some old letters, which had been addressed to her, before
she had seen Arthur, by a man to whom she had been engaged to be married.
I asked her how the engagement came to be broken off. She replied that
it had not been broken off, but that it had died out in a very mysterious
way. The person to whom she was engaged—her first love, she called
him—was very poor, and there was no immediate prospect of their being
married. He followed my profession, and went abroad to study. They had
corresponded regularly, until the time when, as she believed, he had
returned to England. From that period she heard no more of him. He was
of a fretful, sensitive temperament; and she feared that she might have
inadvertently done or said something that offended him. However that
might be, he had never written to her again; and, after waiting a year,
she had married Arthur. I asked when the first estrangement had begun,
and found that the time at which she ceased to hear anything of her first
lover exactly corresponded with the time at which I had been called in to
my mysterious patient at The Two Robins Inn.
A fortnight after that conversation, she died. In course of time, Arthur
married again. Of late years, he has lived principally in London, and I
have seen little or nothing of him.
I have many years to pass over before I can approach to anything like a
conclusion of this fragmentary narrative. And even when that later
period is reached, the little that I have to say will not occupy your
attention for more than a few minutes. Between six and seven years ago,
the gentleman to whom I introduced you in this room, came to me, with
good professional recommendations, to fill the position of my assistant.
We met, not like strangers, but like friends—the only difference between
us being, that I was very much surprised to see him, and that he did not
appear to be at all surprised to see me. If he was my son or my brother,
I believe he could not be fonder of me than he is; but he has never
volunteered any confidences since he has been here, on the subject of his
past life. I saw something that was familiar to me in his face when we
first met; and yet it was also something that suggested the idea of
change. I had a notion once that my patient at the Inn might be a
natural son of Mr. Holliday’s; I had another idea that he might also have
been the man who was engaged to Arthur’s first wife; and I have a third
idea, still clinging to me, that Mr. Lorn is the only man in England who
could really enlighten me, if he chose, on both those doubtful points.
His hair is not black, now, and his eyes are dimmer than the piercing
eyes that I remember, but, for all that, he is very like the nameless
medical student of my young days—very like him. And, sometimes, when I
come home late at night, and find him asleep, and wake him, he looks, in
coming to, wonderfully like the stranger at Doncaster, as he raised
himself in the bed on that memorable night!
The Doctor paused. Mr. Goodchild, who had been following every word that
fell from his lips up to this time, leaned forward eagerly to ask a
question. Before he could say a word, the latch of the door was raised,
without any warning sound of footsteps in the passage outside. A long,
white, bony hand appeared through the opening, gently pushing the door,
which was prevented from working freely on its hinges by a fold in the
carpet under it.
‘That hand! Look at that hand, Doctor!’ said Mr. Goodchild, touching
him.
At the same moment, the Doctor looked at Mr. Goodchild, and whispered to
him, significantly:
‘Hush! he has come back.’
CHAPTER III
THE Cumberland Doctor’s mention of Doncaster Races, inspired Mr. Francis
Goodchild with the idea of going down to Doncaster to see the races.
Doncaster being a good way off, and quite out of the way of the Idle
Apprentices (if anything could be out of their way, who had no way), it
necessarily followed that Francis perceived Doncaster in the race-week to
be, of all possible idleness, the particular idleness that would
completely satisfy him.
Thomas, with an enforced idleness grafted on the natural and voluntary
power of his disposition, was not of this mind; objecting that a man
compelled to lie on his back on a floor, a sofa, a table, a line of
chairs, or anything he could get to lie upon, was not in racing
condition, and that he desired nothing better than to lie where he was,
enjoying himself in looking at the flies on the ceiling. But, Francis
Goodchild, who had been walking round his companion in a circuit of
twelve miles for two days, and had begun to doubt whether it was reserved
for him ever to be idle in his life, not only overpowered this objection,
but even converted Thomas Idle to a scheme he formed (another idle
inspiration), of conveying the said Thomas to the sea-coast, and putting
his injured leg under a stream of salt-water.
Plunging into this happy conception headforemost, Mr. Goodchild
immediately referred to the county-map, and ardently discovered that the
most delicious piece of sea-coast to be found within the limits of
England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, and the Channel
Islands, all summed up together, was Allonby on the coast of Cumberland.
There was the coast of Scotland opposite to Allonby, said Mr. Goodchild
with enthusiasm; there was a fine Scottish mountain on that Scottish
coast; there were Scottish lights to be seen shining across the glorious
Channel, and at Allonby itself there was every idle luxury (no doubt)
that a watering-place could offer to the heart of idle man. Moreover,
said Mr. Goodchild, with his finger on the map, this exquisite retreat
was approached by a coach-road, from a railway-station called Aspatria—a
name, in a manner, suggestive of the departed glories of Greece,
associated with one of the most engaging and most famous of Greek women.
On this point, Mr. Goodchild continued at intervals to breathe a vein of
classic fancy and eloquence exceedingly irksome to Mr. Idle, until it
appeared that the honest English pronunciation of that Cumberland country
shortened Aspatria into ‘Spatter.’ After this supplementary discovery,
Mr. Goodchild said no more about it.
By way of Spatter, the crippled Idle was carried, hoisted, pushed, poked,
and packed, into and out of carriages, into and out of beds, into and out
of tavern resting-places, until he was brought at length within sniff of
the sea. And now, behold the apprentices gallantly riding into Allonby
in a one-horse fly, bent upon staying in that peaceful marine valley
until the turbulent Doncaster time shall come round upon the wheel, in
its turn among what are in sporting registers called the ‘Fixtures’ for
the month.
‘Do you see Allonby!’ asked Thomas Idle.
‘I don’t see it yet,’ said Francis, looking out of window.
‘It must be there,’ said Thomas Idle.
‘I don’t see it,’ returned Francis.
‘It must be there,’ repeated Thomas Idle, fretfully.
‘Lord bless me!’ exclaimed Francis, drawing in his head, ‘I suppose this
is it!’
‘A watering-place,’ retorted Thomas Idle, with the pardonable sharpness
of an invalid, ‘can’t be five gentlemen in straw hats, on a form on one
side of a door, and four ladies in hats and falls, on a form on another
side of a door, and three geese in a dirty little brook before them, and
a boy’s legs hanging over a bridge (with a boy’s body I suppose on the
other side of the parapet), and a donkey running away. What are you
talking about?’
‘Allonby, gentlemen,’ said the most comfortable of landladies as she
opened one door of the carriage; ‘Allonby, gentlemen,’ said the most
attentive of landlords, as he opened the other.
Thomas Idle yielded his arm to the ready Goodchild, and descended from
the vehicle. Thomas, now just able to grope his way along, in a
doubled-up condition, with the aid of two thick sticks, was no bad
embodiment of Commodore Trunnion, or of one of those many gallant
Admirals of the stage, who have all ample fortunes, gout, thick sticks,
tempers, wards, and nephews. With this distinguished naval appearance
upon him, Thomas made a crab-like progress up a clean little bulk-headed
staircase, into a clean little bulk-headed room, where he slowly
deposited himself on a sofa, with a stick on either hand of him, looking
exceedingly grim.
‘Francis,’ said Thomas Idle, ‘what do you think of this place?’
‘I think,’ returned Mr. Goodchild, in a glowing way, ‘it is everything we
expected.’
‘Hah!’ said Thomas Idle.
‘There is the sea,’ cried Mr. Goodchild, pointing out of window; ‘and
here,’ pointing to the lunch on the table, ‘are shrimps. Let us—’ here
Mr. Goodchild looked out of window, as if in search of something, and
looked in again,—‘let us eat ’em.’
The shrimps eaten and the dinner ordered, Mr. Goodchild went out to
survey the watering-place. As Chorus of the Drama, without whom Thomas
could make nothing of the scenery, he by-and-by returned, to have the
following report screwed out of him.
In brief, it was the most delightful place ever seen.
‘But,’ Thomas Idle asked, ‘where is it?’
‘It’s what you may call generally up and down the beach, here and there,’
said Mr. Goodchild, with a twist of his hand.
‘Proceed,’ said Thomas Idle.
It was, Mr. Goodchild went on to say, in cross-examination, what you
might call a primitive place. Large? No, it was not large. Who ever
expected it would be large? Shape? What a question to ask! No shape.
What sort of a street? Why, no street. Shops? Yes, of course (quite
indignant). How many? Who ever went into a place to count the shops?
Ever so many. Six? Perhaps. A library? Why, of course (indignant
again). Good collection of books? Most likely—couldn’t say—had seen
nothing in it but a pair of scales. Any reading-room? Of course, there
was a reading-room. Where? Where! why, over there. Where was over
there? Why, _there_! Let Mr. Idle carry his eye to that bit of waste
ground above high-water mark, where the rank grass and loose stones were
most in a litter; and he would see a sort of long, ruinous brick loft,
next door to a ruinous brick out-house, which loft had a ladder outside,
to get up by. That was the reading-room, and if Mr. Idle didn’t like the
idea of a weaver’s shuttle throbbing under a reading-room, that was his
look out. _He_ was not to dictate, Mr. Goodchild supposed (indignant
again), to the company.
‘By-the-by,’ Thomas Idle observed; ‘the company?’
Well! (Mr. Goodchild went on to report) very nice company. Where were
they? Why, there they were. Mr. Idle could see the tops of their hats,
he supposed. What? Those nine straw hats again, five gentlemen’s and
four ladies’? Yes, to be sure. Mr. Goodchild hoped the company were not
to be expected to wear helmets, to please Mr. Idle.
Beginning to recover his temper at about this point, Mr. Goodchild
voluntarily reported that if you wanted to be primitive, you could be
primitive here, and that if you wanted to be idle, you could be idle
here. In the course of some days, he added, that there were three
fishing-boats, but no rigging, and that there were plenty of fishermen
who never fished. That they got their living entirely by looking at the
ocean. What nourishment they looked out of it to support their strength,
he couldn’t say; but, he supposed it was some sort of Iodine. The place
was full of their children, who were always upside down on the public
buildings (two small bridges over the brook), and always hurting
themselves or one another, so that their wailings made more continual
noise in the air than could have been got in a busy place. The houses
people lodged in, were nowhere in particular, and were in capital
accordance with the beach; being all more or less cracked and damaged as
its shells were, and all empty—as its shells were. Among them, was an
edifice of destitute appearance, with a number of wall-eyed windows in
it, looking desperately out to Scotland as if for help, which said it was
a Bazaar (and it ought to know), and where you might buy anything you
wanted—supposing what you wanted, was a little camp-stool or a child’s
wheelbarrow. The brook crawled or stopped between the houses and the
sea, and the donkey was always running away, and when he got into the
brook he was pelted out with stones, which never hit him, and which
always hit some of the children who were upside down on the public
buildings, and made their lamentations louder. This donkey was the
public excitement of Allonby, and was probably supported at the public
expense.
The foregoing descriptions, delivered in separate items, on separate days
of adventurous discovery, Mr. Goodchild severally wound up, by looking
out of window, looking in again, and saying, ‘But there is the sea, and
here are the shrimps—let us eat ’em.’
There were fine sunsets at Allonby when the low flat beach, with its
pools of water and its dry patches, changed into long bars of silver and
gold in various states of burnishing, and there were fine views—on fine
days—of the Scottish coast. But, when it rained at Allonby, Allonby
thrown back upon its ragged self, became a kind of place which the donkey
seemed to have found out, and to have his highly sagacious reasons for
wishing to bolt from. Thomas Idle observed, too, that Mr. Goodchild,
with a noble show of disinterestedness, became every day more ready to
walk to Maryport and back, for letters; and suspicions began to harbour
in the mind of Thomas, that his friend deceived him, and that Maryport
was a preferable place.
Therefore, Thomas said to Francis on a day when they had looked at the
sea and eaten the shrimps, ‘My mind misgives me, Goodchild, that you go
to Maryport, like the boy in the story-book, to ask _it_ to be idle with
you.’
‘Judge, then,’ returned Francis, adopting the style of the story-book,
‘with what success. I go to a region which is a bit of water-side
Bristol, with a slice of Wapping, a seasoning of Wolverhampton, and a
garnish of Portsmouth, and I say, “Will _you_ come and be idle with me?”
And it answers, “No; for I am a great deal too vaporous, and a great deal
too rusty, and a great deal too muddy, and a great deal too dirty
altogether; and I have ships to load, and pitch and tar to boil, and iron
to hammer, and steam to get up, and smoke to make, and stone to quarry,
and fifty other disagreeable things to do, and I can’t be idle with you.”
Then I go into jagged up-hill and down-hill streets, where I am in the
pastrycook’s shop at one moment, and next moment in savage fastnesses of
moor and morass, beyond the confines of civilisation, and I say to those
murky and black-dusty streets, “Will _you_ come and be idle with me?” To
which they reply, “No, we can’t, indeed, for we haven’t the spirits, and
we are startled by the echo of your feet on the sharp pavement, and we
have so many goods in our shop-windows which nobody wants, and we have so
much to do for a limited public which never comes to us to be done for,
that we are altogether out of sorts and can’t enjoy ourselves with any
one.” So I go to the Post-office, and knock at the shutter, and I say to
the Post-master, “Will _you_ come and be idle with me?” To which he
rejoins, “No, I really can’t, for I live, as you may see, in such a very
little Post-office, and pass my life behind such a very little shutter,
that my hand, when I put it out, is as the hand of a giant crammed
through the window of a dwarf’s house at a fair, and I am a mere
Post-office anchorite in a cell much too small for him, and I can’t get
out, and I can’t get in, and I have no space to be idle in, even if I
would.” So, the boy,’ said Mr. Goodchild, concluding the tale, ‘comes
back with the letters after all, and lives happy never afterwards.’
But it may, not unreasonably, be asked—while Francis Goodchild was
wandering hither and thither, storing his mind with perpetual observation
of men and things, and sincerely believing himself to be the laziest
creature in existence all the time—how did Thomas Idle, crippled and
confined to the house, contrive to get through the hours of the day?
Prone on the sofa, Thomas made no attempt to get through the hours, but
passively allowed the hours to get through _him_. Where other men in his
situation would have read books and improved their minds, Thomas slept
and rested his body. Where other men would have pondered anxiously over
their future prospects, Thomas dreamed lazily of his past life. The one
solitary thing he did, which most other people would have done in his
place, was to resolve on making certain alterations and improvements in
his mode of existence, as soon as the effects of the misfortune that had
overtaken him had all passed away. Remembering that the current of his
life had hitherto oozed along in one smooth stream of laziness,
occasionally troubled on the surface by a slight passing ripple of
industry, his present ideas on the subject of self-reform, inclined
him—not as the reader may be disposed to imagine, to project schemes for
a new existence of enterprise and exertion—but, on the contrary, to
resolve that he would never, if he could possibly help it, be active or
industrious again, throughout the whole of his future career.
It is due to Mr. Idle to relate that his mind sauntered towards this
peculiar conclusion on distinct and logically-producible grounds. After
reviewing, quite at his ease, and with many needful intervals of repose,
the generally-placid spectacle of his past existence, he arrived at the
discovery that all the great disasters which had tried his patience and
equanimity in early life, had been caused by his having allowed himself
to be deluded into imitating some pernicious example of activity and
industry that had been set him by others. The trials to which he here
alludes were three in number, and may be thus reckoned up: First, the
disaster of being an unpopular and a thrashed boy at school; secondly,
the disaster of falling seriously ill; thirdly, the disaster of becoming
acquainted with a great bore.
The first disaster occurred after Thomas had been an idle and a popular
boy at school, for some happy years. One Christmas-time, he was
stimulated by the evil example of a companion, whom he had always trusted
and liked, to be untrue to himself, and to try for a prize at the ensuing
half-yearly examination. He did try, and he got a prize—how, he did not
distinctly know at the moment, and cannot remember now. No sooner,
however, had the book—Moral Hints to the Young on the Value of Time—been
placed in his hands, than the first troubles of his life began. The idle
boys deserted him, as a traitor to their cause. The industrious boys
avoided him, as a dangerous interloper; one of their number, who had
always won the prize on previous occasions, expressing just resentment at
the invasion of his privileges by calling Thomas into the play-ground,
and then and there administering to him the first sound and genuine
thrashing that he had ever received in his life. Unpopular from that
moment, as a beaten boy, who belonged to no side and was rejected by all
parties, young Idle soon lost caste with his masters, as he had
previously lost caste with his schoolfellows. He had forfeited the
comfortable reputation of being the one lazy member of the youthful
community whom it was quite hopeless to punish. Never again did he hear
the headmaster say reproachfully to an industrious boy who had committed
a fault, ‘I might have expected this in Thomas Idle, but it is
inexcusable, sir, in you, who know better.’ Never more, after winning
that fatal prize, did he escape the retributive imposition, or the
avenging birch. From that time, the masters made him work, and the boys
would not let him play. From that time his social position steadily
declined, and his life at school became a perpetual burden to him.
So, again, with the second disaster. While Thomas was lazy, he was a
model of health. His first attempt at active exertion and his first
suffering from severe illness are connected together by the intimate
relations of cause and effect. Shortly after leaving school, he
accompanied a party of friends to a cricket-field, in his natural and
appropriate character of spectator only. On the ground it was discovered
that the players fell short of the required number, and facile Thomas was
persuaded to assist in making up the complement. At a certain appointed
time, he was roused from peaceful slumber in a dry ditch, and placed
before three wickets with a bat in his hand. Opposite to him, behind
three more wickets, stood one of his bosom friends, filling the situation
(as he was informed) of bowler. No words can describe Mr. Idle’s horror
and amazement, when he saw this young man—on ordinary occasions, the
meekest and mildest of human beings—suddenly contract his eye-brows,
compress his lips, assume the aspect of an infuriated savage, run back a
few steps, then run forward, and, without the slightest previous
provocation, hurl a detestably hard ball with all his might straight at
Thomas’s legs. Stimulated to preternatural activity of body and
sharpness of eye by the instinct of self-preservation, Mr. Idle
contrived, by jumping deftly aside at the right moment, and by using his
bat (ridiculously narrow as it was for the purpose) as a shield, to
preserve his life and limbs from the dastardly attack that had been made
on both, to leave the full force of the deadly missile to strike his
wicket instead of his leg; and to end the innings, so far as his side was
concerned, by being immediately bowled out. Grateful for his escape, he
was about to return to the dry ditch, when he was peremptorily stopped,
and told that the other side was ‘going in,’ and that he was expected to
‘field.’ His conception of the whole art and mystery of ‘fielding,’ may
be summed up in the three words of serious advice which he privately
administered to himself on that trying occasion—avoid the ball.
Fortified by this sound and salutary principle, he took his own course,
impervious alike to ridicule and abuse. Whenever the ball came near him,
he thought of his shins, and got out of the way immediately. ‘Catch it!’
‘Stop it!’ ‘Pitch it up!’ were cries that passed by him like the idle
wind that he regarded not. He ducked under it, he jumped over it, he
whisked himself away from it on either side. Never once, through the
whole innings did he and the ball come together on anything approaching
to intimate terms. The unnatural activity of body which was necessarily
called forth for the accomplishment of this result threw Thomas Idle, for
the first time in his life, into a perspiration. The perspiration, in
consequence of his want of practice in the management of that particular
result of bodily activity, was suddenly checked; the inevitable chill
succeeded; and that, in its turn, was followed by a fever. For the first
time since his birth, Mr. Idle found himself confined to his bed for many
weeks together, wasted and worn by a long illness, of which his own
disastrous muscular exertion had been the sole first cause.
The third occasion on which Thomas found reason to reproach himself
bitterly for the mistake of having attempted to be industrious, was
connected with his choice of a calling in life. Having no interest in
the Church, he appropriately selected the next best profession for a lazy
man in England—the Bar. Although the Benchers of the Inns of Court have
lately abandoned their good old principles, and oblige their students to
make some show of studying, in Mr. Idle’s time no such innovation as this
existed. Young men who aspired to the honourable title of barrister
were, very properly, not asked to learn anything of the law, but were
merely required to eat a certain number of dinners at the table of their
Hall, and to pay a certain sum of money; and were called to the Bar as
soon as they could prove that they had sufficiently complied with these
extremely sensible regulations. Never did Thomas move more harmoniously
in concert with his elders and betters than when he was qualifying
himself for admission among the barristers of his native country. Never
did he feel more deeply what real laziness was in all the serene majesty
of its nature, than on the memorable day when he was called to the Bar,
after having carefully abstained from opening his law-books during his
period of probation, except to fall asleep over them. How he could ever
again have become industrious, even for the shortest period, after that
great reward conferred upon his idleness, quite passes his comprehension.
The kind Benchers did everything they could to show him the folly of
exerting himself. They wrote out his probationary exercise for him, and
never expected him even to take the trouble of reading it through when it
was written. They invited him, with seven other choice spirits as lazy
as himself, to come and be called to the Bar, while they were sitting
over their wine and fruit after dinner. They put his oaths of
allegiance, and his dreadful official denunciations of the Pope and the
Pretender, so gently into his mouth, that he hardly knew how the words
got there. They wheeled all their chairs softly round from the table,
and sat surveying the young barristers with their backs to their bottles,
rather than stand up, or adjourn to hear the exercises read. And when
Mr. Idle and the seven unlabouring neophytes, ranged in order, as a
class, with their backs considerately placed against a screen, had begun,
in rotation, to read the exercises which they had not written, even then,
each Bencher, true to the great lazy principle of the whole proceeding,
stopped each neophyte before he had stammered through his first line, and
bowed to him, and told him politely that he was a barrister from that
moment. This was all the ceremony. It was followed by a social supper,
and by the presentation, in accordance with ancient custom, of a pound of
sweetmeats and a bottle of Madeira, offered in the way of needful
refreshment, by each grateful neophyte to each beneficent Bencher. It
may seem inconceivable that Thomas should ever have forgotten the great
do-nothing principle instilled by such a ceremony as this; but it is,
nevertheless, true, that certain designing students of industrious habits
found him out, took advantage of his easy humour, persuaded him that it
was discreditable to be a barrister and to know nothing whatever about
the law, and lured him, by the force of their own evil example, into a
conveyancer’s chambers, to make up for lost time, and to qualify himself
for practice at the Bar. After a fortnight of self-delusion, the curtain
fell from his eyes; he resumed his natural character, and shut up his
books. But the retribution which had hitherto always followed his little
casual errors of industry followed them still. He could get away from
the conveyancer’s chambers, but he could not get away from one of the
pupils, who had taken a fancy to him,—a tall, serious, raw-boned,
hard-working, disputatious pupil, with ideas of his own about reforming
the Law of Real Property, who has been the scourge of Mr. Idle’s
existence ever since the fatal day when he fell into the mistake of
attempting to study the law. Before that time his friends were all
sociable idlers like himself. Since that time the burden of bearing with
a hard-working young man has become part of his lot in life. Go where he
will now, he can never feel certain that the raw-boned pupil is not
affectionately waiting for him round a corner, to tell him a little more
about the Law of Real Property. Suffer as he may under the infliction,
he can never complain, for he must always remember, with unavailing
regret, that he has his own thoughtless industry to thank for first
exposing him to the great social calamity of knowing a bore.
These events of his past life, with the significant results that they
brought about, pass drowsily through Thomas Idle’s memory, while he lies
alone on the sofa at Allonby and elsewhere, dreaming away the time which
his fellow-apprentice gets through so actively out of doors. Remembering
the lesson of laziness which his past disasters teach, and bearing in
mind also the fact that he is crippled in one leg because he exerted
himself to go up a mountain, when he ought to have known that his proper
course of conduct was to stop at the bottom of it, he holds now, and will
for the future firmly continue to hold, by his new resolution never to be
industrious again, on any pretence whatever, for the rest of his life.
The physical results of his accident have been related in a previous
chapter. The moral results now stand on record; and, with the
enumeration of these, that part of the present narrative which is
occupied by the Episode of The Sprained Ankle may now perhaps be
considered, in all its aspects, as finished and complete.
‘How do you propose that we get through this present afternoon and
evening?’ demanded Thomas Idle, after two or three hours of the foregoing
reflections at Allonby.
Mr. Goodchild faltered, looked out of window, looked in again, and said,
as he had so often said before, ‘There is the sea, and here are the
shrimps;—let us eat ’em’!’
But, the wise donkey was at that moment in the act of bolting: not with
the irresolution of his previous efforts which had been wanting in
sustained force of character, but with real vigour of purpose: shaking
the dust off his mane and hind-feet at Allonby, and tearing away from it,
as if he had nobly made up his mind that he never would be taken alive.
At sight of this inspiring spectacle, which was visible from his sofa,
Thomas Idle stretched his neck and dwelt upon it rapturously.
‘Francis Goodchild,’ he then said, turning to his companion with a solemn
air, ‘this is a delightful little Inn, excellently kept by the most
comfortable of landladies and the most attentive of landlords, but—the
donkey’s right!’
The words, ‘There is the sea, and here are the—’ again trembled on the
lips of Goodchild, unaccompanied however by any sound.
‘Let us instantly pack the portmanteaus,’ said Thomas Idle, ‘pay the
bill, and order a fly out, with instructions to the driver to follow the
donkey!’
Mr. Goodchild, who had only wanted encouragement to disclose the real
state of his feelings, and who had been pining beneath his weary secret,
now burst into tears, and confessed that he thought another day in the
place would be the death of him.
So, the two idle apprentices followed the donkey until the night was far
advanced. Whether he was recaptured by the town-council, or is bolting
at this hour through the United Kingdom, they know not. They hope he may
be still bolting; if so, their best wishes are with him.
It entered Mr. Idle’s head, on the borders of Cumberland, that there
could be no idler place to stay at, except by snatches of a few minutes
each, than a railway station. ‘An intermediate station on a line—a
junction—anything of that sort,’ Thomas suggested. Mr. Goodchild
approved of the idea as eccentric, and they journeyed on and on, until
they came to such a station where there was an Inn.
‘Here,’ said Thomas, ‘we may be luxuriously lazy; other people will
travel for us, as it were, and we shall laugh at their folly.’
It was a Junction-Station, where the wooden razors before mentioned
shaved the air very often, and where the sharp electric-telegraph bell
was in a very restless condition. All manner of cross-lines of rails
came zig-zagging into it, like a Congress of iron vipers; and, a little
way out of it, a pointsman in an elevated signal-box was constantly going
through the motions of drawing immense quantities of beer at a
public-house bar. In one direction, confused perspectives of embankments
and arches were to be seen from the platform; in the other, the rails
soon disentangled themselves into two tracks and shot away under a
bridge, and curved round a corner. Sidings were there, in which empty
luggage-vans and cattle-boxes often butted against each other as if they
couldn’t agree; and warehouses were there, in which great quantities of
goods seemed to have taken the veil (of the consistency of tarpaulin),
and to have retired from the world without any hope of getting back to
it. Refreshment-rooms were there; one, for the hungry and thirsty Iron
Locomotives where their coke and water were ready, and of good quality,
for they were dangerous to play tricks with; the other, for the hungry
and thirsty human Locomotives, who might take what they could get, and
whose chief consolation was provided in the form of three terrific urns
or vases of white metal, containing nothing, each forming a breastwork
for a defiant and apparently much-injured woman.
Established at this Station, Mr. Thomas Idle and Mr. Francis Goodchild
resolved to enjoy it. But, its contrasts were very violent, and there
was also an infection in it.
First, as to its contrasts. They were only two, but they were Lethargy
and Madness. The Station was either totally unconscious, or wildly
raving. By day, in its unconscious state, it looked as if no life could
come to it,—as if it were all rust, dust, and ashes—as if the last train
for ever, had gone without issuing any Return-Tickets—as if the last
Engine had uttered its last shriek and burst. One awkward shave of the
air from the wooden razor, and everything changed. Tight office-doors
flew open, panels yielded, books, newspapers, travelling-caps and
wrappers broke out of brick walls, money chinked, conveyances oppressed
by nightmares of luggage came careering into the yard, porters started up
from secret places, ditto the much-injured women, the shining bell, who
lived in a little tray on stilts by himself, flew into a man’s hand and
clamoured violently. The pointsman aloft in the signal-box made the
motions of drawing, with some difficulty, hogsheads of beer. Down Train!
More bear! Up Train! More beer. Cross junction Train! More beer!
Cattle Train! More beer. Goods Train! Simmering, whistling, trembling,
rumbling, thundering. Trains on the whole confusion of intersecting
rails, crossing one another, bumping one another, hissing one another,
backing to go forward, tearing into distance to come close. People
frantic. Exiles seeking restoration to their native carriages, and
banished to remoter climes. More beer and more bell. Then, in a minute,
the Station relapsed into stupor as the stoker of the Cattle Train, the
last to depart, went gliding out of it, wiping the long nose of his
oil-can with a dirty pocket-handkerchief.
By night, in its unconscious state, the Station was not so much as
visible. Something in the air, like an enterprising chemist’s
established in business on one of the boughs of Jack’s beanstalk, was all
that could be discerned of it under the stars. In a moment it would
break out, a constellation of gas. In another moment, twenty rival
chemists, on twenty rival beanstalks, came into existence. Then, the
Furies would be seen, waving their lurid torches up and down the confused
perspectives of embankments and arches—would be heard, too, wailing and
shrieking. Then, the Station would be full of palpitating trains, as in
the day; with the heightening difference that they were not so clearly
seen as in the day, whereas the Station walls, starting forward under the
gas, like a hippopotamus’s eyes, dazzled the human locomotives with the
sauce-bottle, the cheap music, the bedstead, the distorted range of
buildings where the patent safes are made, the gentleman in the rain with
the registered umbrella, the lady returning from the ball with the
registered respirator, and all their other embellishments. And now, the
human locomotives, creased as to their countenances and purblind as to
their eyes, would swarm forth in a heap, addressing themselves to the
mysterious urns and the much-injured women; while the iron locomotives,
dripping fire and water, shed their steam about plentifully, making the
dull oxen in their cages, with heads depressed, and foam hanging from
their mouths as their red looks glanced fearfully at the surrounding
terrors, seem as though they had been drinking at half-frozen waters and
were hung with icicles. Through the same steam would be caught glimpses
of their fellow-travellers, the sheep, getting their white kid faces
together, away from the bars, and stuffing the interstices with trembling
wool. Also, down among the wheels, of the man with the sledge-hammer,
ringing the axles of the fast night-train; against whom the oxen have a
misgiving that he is the man with the pole-axe who is to come by-and-by,
and so the nearest of them try to get back, and get a purchase for a
thrust at him through the bars. Suddenly, the bell would ring, the steam
would stop with one hiss and a yell, the chemists on the beanstalks would
be busy, the avenging Furies would bestir themselves, the fast
night-train would melt from eye and ear, the other trains going their
ways more slowly would be heard faintly rattling in the distance like
old-fashioned watches running down, the sauce-bottle and cheap music
retired from view, even the bedstead went to bed, and there was no such
visible thing as the Station to vex the cool wind in its blowing, or
perhaps the autumn lightning, as it found out the iron rails.
The infection of the Station was this:—When it was in its raving state,
the Apprentices found it impossible to be there, without labouring under
the delusion that they were in a hurry. To Mr. Goodchild, whose ideas of
idleness were so imperfect, this was no unpleasant hallucination, and
accordingly that gentleman went through great exertions in yielding to
it, and running up and down the platform, jostling everybody, under the
impression that he had a highly important mission somewhere, and had not
a moment to lose. But, to Thomas Idle, this contagion was so very
unacceptable an incident of the situation, that he struck on the fourth
day, and requested to be moved.
‘This place fills me with a dreadful sensation,’ said Thomas, ‘of having
something to do. Remove me, Francis.’
‘Where would you like to go next?’ was the question of the ever-engaging
Goodchild.
‘I have heard there is a good old Inn at Lancaster, established in a fine
old house: an Inn where they give you Bride-cake every day after dinner,’
said Thomas Idle. ‘Let us eat Bride-cake without the trouble of being
married, or of knowing anybody in that ridiculous dilemma.’
Mr. Goodchild, with a lover’s sigh, assented. They departed from the
Station in a violent hurry (for which, it is unnecessary to observe,
there was not the least occasion), and were delivered at the fine old
house at Lancaster, on the same night.
It is Mr. Goodchild’s opinion, that if a visitor on his arrival at
Lancaster could be accommodated with a pole which would push the opposite
side of the street some yards farther off, it would be better for all
parties. Protesting against being required to live in a trench, and
obliged to speculate all day upon what the people can possibly be doing
within a mysterious opposite window, which is a shop-window to look at,
but not a shop-window in respect of its offering nothing for sale and
declining to give any account whatever of itself, Mr. Goodchild concedes
Lancaster to be a pleasant place. A place dropped in the midst of a
charming landscape, a place with a fine ancient fragment of castle, a
place of lovely walks, a place possessing staid old houses richly fitted
with old Honduras mahogany, which has grown so dark with time that it
seems to have got something of a retrospective mirror-quality into
itself, and to show the visitor, in the depth of its grain, through all
its polish, the hue of the wretched slaves who groaned long ago under old
Lancaster merchants. And Mr. Goodchild adds that the stones of Lancaster
do sometimes whisper, even yet, of rich men passed away—upon whose great
prosperity some of these old doorways frowned sullen in the brightest
weather—that their slave-gain turned to curses, as the Arabian Wizard’s
money turned to leaves, and that no good ever came of it, even unto the
third and fourth generations, until it was wasted and gone.
It was a gallant sight to behold, the Sunday procession of the Lancaster
elders to Church—all in black, and looking fearfully like a funeral
without the Body—under the escort of Three Beadles.
‘Think,’ said Francis, as he stood at the Inn window, admiring, ‘of being
taken to the sacred edifice by three Beadles! I have, in my early time,
been taken out of it by one Beadle; but, to be taken into it by three, O
Thomas, is a distinction I shall never enjoy!’
CHAPTER IV
WHEN Mr. Goodchild had looked out of the Lancaster Inn window for two
hours on end, with great perseverance, he begun to entertain a misgiving
that he was growing industrious. He therefore set himself next, to
explore the country from the tops of all the steep hills in the
neighbourhood.
He came back at dinner-time, red and glowing, to tell Thomas Idle what he
had seen. Thomas, on his back reading, listened with great composure,
and asked him whether he really had gone up those hills, and bothered
himself with those views, and walked all those miles?
‘Because I want to know,’ added Thomas, ‘what you would say of it, if you
were obliged to do it?’
‘It would be different, then,’ said Francis. ‘It would be work, then;
now, it’s play.’
‘Play!’ replied Thomas Idle, utterly repudiating the reply. ‘Play! Here
is a man goes systematically tearing himself to pieces, and putting
himself through an incessant course of training, as if he were always
under articles to fight a match for the champion’s belt, and he calls it
Play! Play!’ exclaimed Thomas Idle, scornfully contemplating his one
boot in the air. ‘You _can’t_ play. You don’t know what it is. You
make work of everything.’
The bright Goodchild amiably smiled.
‘So you do,’ said Thomas. ‘I mean it. To me you are an absolutely
terrible fellow. You do nothing like another man. Where another fellow
would fall into a footbath of action or emotion, you fall into a mine.
Where any other fellow would be a painted butterfly, you are a fiery
dragon. Where another man would stake a sixpence, you stake your
existence. If you were to go up in a balloon, you would make for Heaven;
and if you were to dive into the depths of the earth, nothing short of
the other place would content you. What a fellow you are, Francis!’ The
cheerful Goodchild laughed.
‘It’s all very well to laugh, but I wonder you don’t feel it to be
serious,’ said Idle. ‘A man who can do nothing by halves appears to me
to be a fearful man.’
‘Tom, Tom,’ returned Goodchild, ‘if I can do nothing by halves, and be
nothing by halves, it’s pretty clear that you must take me as a whole,
and make the best of me.’
With this philosophical rejoinder, the airy Goodchild clapped Mr. Idle on
the shoulder in a final manner, and they sat down to dinner.
‘By-the-by,’ said Goodchild, ‘I have been over a lunatic asylum too,
since I have been out.’
‘He has been,’ exclaimed Thomas Idle, casting up his eyes, ‘over a
lunatic asylum! Not content with being as great an Ass as Captain
Barclay in the pedestrian way, he makes a Lunacy Commissioner of
himself—for nothing!’
‘An immense place,’ said Goodchild, ‘admirable offices, very good
arrangements, very good attendants; altogether a remarkable place.’
‘And what did you see there?’ asked Mr. Idle, adapting Hamlet’s advice to
the occasion, and assuming the virtue of interest, though he had it not.
‘The usual thing,’ said Francis Goodchild, with a sigh. ‘Long groves of
blighted men-and-women-trees; interminable avenues of hopeless faces;
numbers, without the slightest power of really combining for any earthly
purpose; a society of human creatures who have nothing in common but that
they have all lost the power of being humanly social with one another.’
‘Take a glass of wine with me,’ said Thomas Idle, ‘and let _us_ be
social.’
‘In one gallery, Tom,’ pursued Francis Goodchild, ‘which looked to me
about the length of the Long Walk at Windsor, more or less—’
‘Probably less,’ observed Thomas Idle.
‘In one gallery, which was otherwise clear of patients (for they were all
out), there was a poor little dark-chinned, meagre man, with a perplexed
brow and a pensive face, stooping low over the matting on the floor, and
picking out with his thumb and forefinger the course of its fibres. The
afternoon sun was slanting in at the large end-window, and there were
cross patches of light and shade all down the vista, made by the unseen
windows and the open doors of the little sleeping-cells on either side.
In about the centre of the perspective, under an arch, regardless of the
pleasant weather, regardless of the solitude, regardless of approaching
footsteps, was the poor little dark-chinned, meagre man, poring over the
matting. “What are you doing there?” said my conductor, when we came to
him. He looked up, and pointed to the matting. “I wouldn’t do that, I
think,” said my conductor, kindly; “if I were you, I would go and read,
or I would lie down if I felt tired; but I wouldn’t do that.” The
patient considered a moment, and vacantly answered, “No, sir, I won’t;
I’ll—I’ll go and read,” and so he lamely shuffled away into one of the
little rooms. I turned my head before we had gone many paces. He had
already come out again, and was again poring over the matting, and
tracking out its fibres with his thumb and forefinger. I stopped to look
at him, and it came into my mind, that probably the course of those
fibres as they plaited in and out, over and under, was the only course of
things in the whole wide world that it was left to him to understand—that
his darkening intellect had narrowed down to the small cleft of light
which showed him, “This piece was twisted this way, went in here, passed
under, came out there, was carried on away here to the right where I now
put my finger on it, and in this progress of events, the thing was made
and came to be here.” Then, I wondered whether he looked into the
matting, next, to see if it could show him anything of the process
through which _he_ came to be there, so strangely poring over it. Then,
I thought how all of us, GOD help us! in our different ways are poring
over our bits of matting, blindly enough, and what confusions and
mysteries we make in the pattern. I had a sadder fellow-feeling with the
little dark-chinned, meagre man, by that time, and I came away.’
Mr. Idle diverting the conversation to grouse, custards, and bride-cake,
Mr. Goodchild followed in the same direction. The bride-cake was as
bilious and indigestible as if a real Bride had cut it, and the dinner it
completed was an admirable performance.
The house was a genuine old house of a very quaint description, teeming
with old carvings, and beams, and panels, and having an excellent old
staircase, with a gallery or upper staircase, cut off from it by a
curious fence-work of old oak, or of the old Honduras Mahogany wood. It
was, and is, and will be, for many a long year to come, a remarkably
picturesque house; and a certain grave mystery lurking in the depth of
the old mahogany panels, as if they were so many deep pools of dark
water—such, indeed, as they had been much among when they were trees—gave
it a very mysterious character after nightfall.
When Mr. Goodchild and Mr. Idle had first alighted at the door, and
stepped into the sombre, handsome old hall, they had been received by
half-a-dozen noiseless old men in black, all dressed exactly alike, who
glided up the stairs with the obliging landlord and waiter—but without
appearing to get into their way, or to mind whether they did or no—and
who had filed off to the right and left on the old staircase, as the
guests entered their sitting-room. It was then broad, bright day. But,
Mr. Goodchild had said, when their door was shut, ‘Who on earth are those
old men?’ And afterwards, both on going out and coming in, he had
noticed that there were no old men to be seen.
Neither, had the old men, or any one of the old men, reappeared since.
The two friends had passed a night in the house, but had seen nothing
more of the old men. Mr. Goodchild, in rambling about it, had looked
along passages, and glanced in at doorways, but had encountered no old
men; neither did it appear that any old men were, by any member of the
establishment, missed or expected.
Another odd circumstance impressed itself on their attention. It was,
that the door of their sitting-room was never left untouched for a
quarter of an hour. It was opened with hesitation, opened with
confidence, opened a little way, opened a good way,—always clapped-to
again without a word of explanation. They were reading, they were
writing, they were eating, they were drinking, they were talking, they
were dozing; the door was always opened at an unexpected moment, and they
looked towards it, and it was clapped-to again, and nobody was to be
seen. When this had happened fifty times or so, Mr. Goodchild had said
to his companion, jestingly: ‘I begin to think, Tom, there was something
wrong with those six old men.’
Night had come again, and they had been writing for two or three hours:
writing, in short, a portion of the lazy notes from which these lazy
sheets are taken. They had left off writing, and glasses were on the
table between them. The house was closed and quiet. Around the head of
Thomas Idle, as he lay upon his sofa, hovered light wreaths of fragrant
smoke. The temples of Francis Goodchild, as he leaned back in his chair,
with his two hands clasped behind his head, and his legs crossed, were
similarly decorated.
They had been discussing several idle subjects of speculation, not
omitting the strange old men, and were still so occupied, when Mr.
Goodchild abruptly changed his attitude to wind up his watch. They were
just becoming drowsy enough to be stopped in their talk by any such
slight check. Thomas Idle, who was speaking at the moment, paused and
said, ‘How goes it?’
‘One,’ said Goodchild.
As if he had ordered One old man, and the order were promptly executed
(truly, all orders were so, in that excellent hotel), the door opened,
and One old man stood there.
He did not come in, but stood with the door in his hand.
‘One of the six, Tom, at last!’ said Mr. Goodchild, in a surprised
whisper.—‘Sir, your pleasure?’
‘Sir, _your_ pleasure?’ said the One old man.
‘I didn’t ring.’
‘The bell did,’ said the One old man.
He said BELL, in a deep, strong way, that would have expressed the church
Bell.
‘I had the pleasure, I believe, of seeing you, yesterday?’ said
Goodchild.
‘I cannot undertake to say for certain,’ was the grim reply of the One
old man.
‘I think you saw me? Did you not?’
‘Saw _you_?’ said the old man. ‘O yes, I saw you. But, I see many who
never see me.’
A chilled, slow, earthy, fixed old man. A cadaverous old man of measured
speech. An old man who seemed as unable to wink, as if his eyelids had
been nailed to his forehead. An old man whose eyes—two spots of fire—had
no more motion than if they had been connected with the back of his skull
by screws driven through it, and rivetted and bolted outside, among his
grey hair.
The night had turned so cold, to Mr. Goodchild’s sensations, that he
shivered. He remarked lightly, and half apologetically, ‘I think
somebody is walking over my grave.’
‘No,’ said the weird old man, ‘there is no one there.’
Mr. Goodchild looked at Idle, but Idle lay with his head enwreathed in
smoke.
‘No one there?’ said Goodchild.
‘There is no one at your grave, I assure you,’ said the old man.
He had come in and shut the door, and he now sat down. He did not bend
himself to sit, as other people do, but seemed to sink bolt upright, as
if in water, until the chair stopped him.
‘My friend, Mr. Idle,’ said Goodchild, extremely anxious to introduce a
third person into the conversation.
‘I am,’ said the old man, without looking at him, ‘at Mr. Idle’s
service.’
‘If you are an old inhabitant of this place,’ Francis Goodchild resumed.
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps you can decide a point my friend and I were in doubt upon, this
morning. They hang condemned criminals at the Castle, I believe?’
‘_I_ believe so,’ said the old man.
‘Are their faces turned towards that noble prospect?’
‘Your face is turned,’ replied the old man, ‘to the Castle wall. When
you are tied up, you see its stones expanding and contracting violently,
and a similar expansion and contraction seem to take place in your own
head and breast. Then, there is a rush of fire and an earthquake, and
the Castle springs into the air, and you tumble down a precipice.’
His cravat appeared to trouble him. He put his hand to his throat, and
moved his neck from side to side. He was an old man of a swollen
character of face, and his nose was immoveably hitched up on one side, as
if by a little hook inserted in that nostril. Mr. Goodchild felt
exceedingly uncomfortable, and began to think the night was hot, and not
cold.
‘A strong description, sir,’ he observed.
‘A strong sensation,’ the old man rejoined.
Again, Mr. Goodchild looked to Mr. Thomas Idle; but Thomas lay on his
back with his face attentively turned towards the One old man, and made
no sign. At this time Mr. Goodchild believed that he saw threads of fire
stretch from the old man’s eyes to his own, and there attach themselves.
(Mr. Goodchild writes the present account of his experience, and, with
the utmost solemnity, protests that he had the strongest sensation upon
him of being forced to look at the old man along those two fiery films,
from that moment.)
‘I must tell it to you,’ said the old man, with a ghastly and a stony
stare.
‘What?’ asked Francis Goodchild.
‘You know where it took place. Yonder!’
Whether he pointed to the room above, or to the room below, or to any
room in that old house, or to a room in some other old house in that old
town, Mr. Goodchild was not, nor is, nor ever can be, sure. He was
confused by the circumstance that the right forefinger of the One old man
seemed to dip itself in one of the threads of fire, light itself, and
make a fiery start in the air, as it pointed somewhere. Having pointed
somewhere, it went out.
‘You know she was a Bride,’ said the old man.
‘I know they still send up Bride-cake,’ Mr. Goodchild faltered. ‘This is
a very oppressive air.’
‘She was a Bride,’ said the old man. ‘She was a fair, flaxen-haired,
large-eyed girl, who had no character, no purpose. A weak, credulous,
incapable, helpless nothing. Not like her mother. No, no. It was her
father whose character she reflected.
‘Her mother had taken care to secure everything to herself, for her own
life, when the father of this girl (a child at that time) died—of sheer
helplessness; no other disorder—and then He renewed the acquaintance that
had once subsisted between the mother and Him. He had been put aside for
the flaxen-haired, large-eyed man (or nonentity) with Money. He could
overlook that for Money. He wanted compensation in Money.
‘So, he returned to the side of that woman the mother, made love to her
again, danced attendance on her, and submitted himself to her whims. She
wreaked upon him every whim she had, or could invent. He bore it. And
the more he bore, the more he wanted compensation in Money, and the more
he was resolved to have it.
‘But, lo! Before he got it, she cheated him. In one of her imperious
states, she froze, and never thawed again. She put her hands to her head
one night, uttered a cry, stiffened, lay in that attitude certain hours,
and died. And he had got no compensation from her in Money, yet. Blight
and Murrain on her! Not a penny.
‘He had hated her throughout that second pursuit, and had longed for
retaliation on her. He now counterfeited her signature to an instrument,
leaving all she had to leave, to her daughter—ten years old then—to whom
the property passed absolutely, and appointing himself the daughter’s
Guardian. When He slid it under the pillow of the bed on which she lay,
He bent down in the deaf ear of Death, and whispered: “Mistress Pride, I
have determined a long time that, dead or alive, you must make me
compensation in Money.”’
‘So, now there were only two left. Which two were, He, and the fair
flaxen-haired, large-eyed foolish daughter, who afterwards became the
Bride.
‘He put her to school. In a secret, dark, oppressive, ancient house, he
put her to school with a watchful and unscrupulous woman. “My worthy
lady,” he said, “here is a mind to be formed; will you help me to form
it?” She accepted the trust. For which she, too, wanted compensation in
Money, and had it.
‘The girl was formed in the fear of him, and in the conviction, that
there was no escape from him. She was taught, from the first, to regard
him as her future husband—the man who must marry her—the destiny that
overshadowed her—the appointed certainty that could never be evaded. The
poor fool was soft white wax in their hands, and took the impression that
they put upon her. It hardened with time. It became a part of herself.
Inseparable from herself, and only to be torn away from her, by tearing
life away from her.
‘Eleven years she had lived in the dark house and its gloomy garden. He
was jealous of the very light and air getting to her, and they kept her
close. He stopped the wide chimneys, shaded the little windows, left the
strong-stemmed ivy to wander where it would over the house-front, the
moss to accumulate on the untrimmed fruit-trees in the red-walled garden,
the weeds to over-run its green and yellow walks. He surrounded her with
images of sorrow and desolation. He caused her to be filled with fears
of the place and of the stories that were told of it, and then on pretext
of correcting them, to be left in it in solitude, or made to shrink about
it in the dark. When her mind was most depressed and fullest of terrors,
then, he would come out of one of the hiding-places from which he
overlooked her, and present himself as her sole resource.
‘Thus, by being from her childhood the one embodiment her life presented
to her of power to coerce and power to relieve, power to bind and power
to loose, the ascendency over her weakness was secured. She was
twenty-one years and twenty-one days old, when he brought her home to the
gloomy house, his half-witted, frightened, and submissive Bride of three
weeks.
[Picture: A submissive bride]
‘He had dismissed the governess by that time—what he had left to do, he
could best do alone—and they came back, upon a rain night, to the scene
of her long preparation. She turned to him upon the threshold, as the
rain was dripping from the porch, and said:
‘“O sir, it is the Death-watch ticking for me!”
‘“Well!” he answered. “And if it were?”
‘“O sir!” she returned to him, “look kindly on me, and be merciful to me!
I beg your pardon. I will do anything you wish, if you will only forgive
me!”
‘That had become the poor fool’s constant song: “I beg your pardon,” and
“Forgive me!”
‘She was not worth hating; he felt nothing but contempt for her. But,
she had long been in the way, and he had long been weary, and the work
was near its end, and had to be worked out.
‘“You fool,” he said. “Go up the stairs!”
‘She obeyed very quickly, murmuring, “I will do anything you wish!” When
he came into the Bride’s Chamber, having been a little retarded by the
heavy fastenings of the great door (for they were alone in the house, and
he had arranged that the people who attended on them should come and go
in the day), he found her withdrawn to the furthest corner, and there
standing pressed against the paneling as if she would have shrunk through
it: her flaxen hair all wild about her face, and her large eyes staring
at him in vague terror.
‘“What are you afraid of? Come and sit down by me.”
‘“I will do anything you wish. I beg your pardon, sir. Forgive me!”
Her monotonous tune as usual.
‘“Ellen, here is a writing that you must write out to-morrow, in your own
hand. You may as well be seen by others, busily engaged upon it. When
you have written it all fairly, and corrected all mistakes, call in any
two people there may be about the house, and sign your name to it before
them. Then, put it in your bosom to keep it safe, and when I sit here
again to-morrow night, give it to me.”
‘“I will do it all, with the greatest care. I will do anything you
wish.”
‘“Don’t shake and tremble, then.”
‘“I will try my utmost not to do it—if you will only forgive me!”
‘Next day, she sat down at her desk, and did as she had been told. He
often passed in and out of the room, to observe her, and always saw her
slowly and laboriously writing: repeating to herself the words she
copied, in appearance quite mechanically, and without caring or
endeavouring to comprehend them, so that she did her task. He saw her
follow the directions she had received, in all particulars; and at night,
when they were alone again in the same Bride’s Chamber, and he drew his
chair to the hearth, she timidly approached him from her distant seat,
took the paper from her bosom, and gave it into his hand.
‘It secured all her possessions to him, in the event of her death. He
put her before him, face to face, that he might look at her steadily; and
he asked her, in so many plain words, neither fewer nor more, did she
know that?
‘There were spots of ink upon the bosom of her white dress, and they made
her face look whiter and her eyes look larger as she nodded her head.
There were spots of ink upon the hand with which she stood before him,
nervously plaiting and folding her white skirts.
‘He took her by the arm, and looked her, yet more closely and steadily,
in the face. “Now, die! I have done with you.”
‘She shrunk, and uttered a low, suppressed cry.
‘“I am not going to kill you. I will not endanger my life for yours.
Die!”
‘He sat before her in the gloomy Bride’s Chamber, day after day, night
after night, looking the word at her when he did not utter it. As often
as her large unmeaning eyes were raised from the hands in which she
rocked her head, to the stern figure, sitting with crossed arms and
knitted forehead, in the chair, they read in it, “Die!” When she dropped
asleep in exhaustion, she was called back to shuddering consciousness, by
the whisper, “Die!” When she fell upon her old entreaty to be pardoned,
she was answered “Die!” When she had out-watched and out-suffered the
long night, and the rising sun flamed into the sombre room, she heard it
hailed with, “Another day and not dead?—Die!”
‘Shut up in the deserted mansion, aloof from all mankind, and engaged
alone in such a struggle without any respite, it came to this—that either
he must die, or she. He knew it very well, and concentrated his strength
against her feebleness. Hours upon hours he held her by the arm when her
arm was black where he held it, and bade her Die!
‘It was done, upon a windy morning, before sunrise. He computed the time
to be half-past four; but, his forgotten watch had run down, and he could
not be sure. She had broken away from him in the night, with loud and
sudden cries—the first of that kind to which she had given vent—and he
had had to put his hands over her mouth. Since then, she had been quiet
in the corner of the paneling where she had sunk down; and he had left
her, and had gone back with his folded arms and his knitted forehead to
his chair.
‘Paler in the pale light, more colourless than ever in the leaden dawn,
he saw her coming, trailing herself along the floor towards him—a white
wreck of hair, and dress, and wild eyes, pushing itself on by an
irresolute and bending hand.
‘“O, forgive me! I will do anything. O, sir, pray tell me I may live!”
‘“Die!”
‘“Are you so resolved? Is there no hope for me?”
‘“Die!”
‘Her large eyes strained themselves with wonder and fear; wonder and fear
changed to reproach; reproach to blank nothing. It was done. He was not
at first so sure it was done, but that the morning sun was hanging jewels
in her hair—he saw the diamond, emerald, and ruby, glittering among it in
little points, as he stood looking down at her—when he lifted her and
laid her on her bed.
‘She was soon laid in the ground. And now they were all gone, and he had
compensated himself well.
‘He had a mind to travel. Not that he meant to waste his Money, for he
was a pinching man and liked his Money dearly (liked nothing else,
indeed), but, that he had grown tired of the desolate house and wished to
turn his back upon it and have done with it. But, the house was worth
Money, and Money must not be thrown away. He determined to sell it
before he went. That it might look the less wretched and bring a better
price, he hired some labourers to work in the overgrown garden; to cut
out the dead wood, trim the ivy that drooped in heavy masses over the
windows and gables, and clear the walks in which the weeds were growing
mid-leg high.
‘He worked, himself, along with them. He worked later than they did,
and, one evening at dusk, was left working alone, with his bill-hook in
his hand. One autumn evening, when the Bride was five weeks dead.
‘“It grows too dark to work longer,” he said to himself, “I must give
over for the night.”
‘He detested the house, and was loath to enter it. He looked at the dark
porch waiting for him like a tomb, and felt that it was an accursed
house. Near to the porch, and near to where he stood, was a tree whose
branches waved before the old bay-window of the Bride’s Chamber, where it
had been done. The tree swung suddenly, and made him start. It swung
again, although the night was still. Looking up into it, he saw a figure
among the branches.
‘It was the figure of a young man. The face looked down, as his looked
up; the branches cracked and swayed; the figure rapidly descended, and
slid upon its feet before him. A slender youth of about her age, with
long light brown hair.
‘“What thief are you?” he said, seizing the youth by the collar.
‘The young man, in shaking himself free, swung him a blow with his arm
across the face and throat. They closed, but the young man got from him
and stepped back, crying, with great eagerness and horror, “Don’t touch
me! I would as lieve be touched by the Devil!”
‘He stood still, with his bill-hook in his hand, looking at the young
man. For, the young man’s look was the counterpart of her last look, and
he had not expected ever to see that again.
‘“I am no thief. Even if I were, I would not have a coin of your wealth,
if it would buy me the Indies. You murderer!”
‘“What!”
‘“I climbed it,” said the young man, pointing up into the tree, “for the
first time, nigh four years ago. I climbed it, to look at her. I saw
her. I spoke to her. I have climbed it, many a time, to watch and
listen for her. I was a boy, hidden among its leaves, when from that
bay-window she gave me this!”
‘He showed a tress of flaxen hair, tied with a mourning ribbon.
‘“Her life,” said the young man, “was a life of mourning. She gave me
this, as a token of it, and a sign that she was dead to every one but
you. If I had been older, if I had seen her sooner, I might have saved
her from you. But, she was fast in the web when I first climbed the
tree, and what could I do then to break it!”
‘In saying those words, he burst into a fit of sobbing and crying: weakly
at first, then passionately.
‘“Murderer! I climbed the tree on the night when you brought her back.
I heard her, from the tree, speak of the Death-watch at the door. I was
three times in the tree while you were shut up with her, slowly killing
her. I saw her, from the tree, lie dead upon her bed. I have watched
you, from the tree, for proofs and traces of your guilt. The manner of
it, is a mystery to me yet, but I will pursue you until you have rendered
up your life to the hangman. You shall never, until then, be rid of me.
I loved her! I can know no relenting towards you. Murderer, I loved
her!”
‘The youth was bare-headed, his hat having fluttered away in his descent
from the tree. He moved towards the gate. He had to pass—Him—to get to
it. There was breadth for two old-fashioned carriages abreast; and the
youth’s abhorrence, openly expressed in every feature of his face and
limb of his body, and very hard to bear, had verge enough to keep itself
at a distance in. He (by which I mean the other) had not stirred hand or
foot, since he had stood still to look at the boy. He faced round, now,
to follow him with his eyes. As the back of the bare light-brown head
was turned to him, he saw a red curve stretch from his hand to it. He
knew, before he threw the bill-hook, where it had alighted—I say, had
alighted, and not, would alight; for, to his clear perception the thing
was done before he did it. It cleft the head, and it remained there, and
the boy lay on his face.
‘He buried the body in the night, at the foot of the tree. As soon as it
was light in the morning, he worked at turning up all the ground near the
tree, and hacking and hewing at the neighbouring bushes and undergrowth.
When the labourers came, there was nothing suspicious, and nothing
suspected.
‘But, he had, in a moment, defeated all his precautions, and destroyed
the triumph of the scheme he had so long concerted, and so successfully
worked out. He had got rid of the Bride, and had acquired her fortune
without endangering his life; but now, for a death by which he had gained
nothing, he had evermore to live with a rope around his neck.
‘Beyond this, he was chained to the house of gloom and horror, which he
could not endure. Being afraid to sell it or to quit it, lest discovery
should be made, he was forced to live in it. He hired two old people,
man and wife, for his servants; and dwelt in it, and dreaded it. His
great difficulty, for a long time, was the garden. Whether he should
keep it trim, whether he should suffer it to fall into its former state
of neglect, what would be the least likely way of attracting attention to
it?
‘He took the middle course of gardening, himself, in his evening leisure,
and of then calling the old serving-man to help him; but, of never
letting him work there alone. And he made himself an arbour over against
the tree, where he could sit and see that it was safe.
‘As the seasons changed, and the tree changed, his mind perceived dangers
that were always changing. In the leafy time, he perceived that the
upper boughs were growing into the form of the young man—that they made
the shape of him exactly, sitting in a forked branch swinging in the
wind. In the time of the falling leaves, he perceived that they came
down from the tree, forming tell-tale letters on the path, or that they
had a tendency to heap themselves into a churchyard mound above the
grave. In the winter, when the tree was bare, he perceived that the
boughs swung at him the ghost of the blow the young man had given, and
that they threatened him openly. In the spring, when the sap was
mounting in the trunk, he asked himself, were the dried-up particles of
blood mounting with it: to make out more obviously this year than last,
the leaf-screened figure of the young man, swinging in the wind?
‘However, he turned his Money over and over, and still over. He was in
the dark trade, the gold-dust trade, and most secret trades that yielded
great returns. In ten years, he had turned his Money over, so many
times, that the traders and shippers who had dealings with him,
absolutely did not lie—for once—when they declared that he had increased
his fortune, Twelve Hundred Per Cent.
‘He possessed his riches one hundred years ago, when people could be lost
easily. He had heard who the youth was, from hearing of the search that
was made after him; but, it died away, and the youth was forgotten.
‘The annual round of changes in the tree had been repeated ten times
since the night of the burial at its foot, when there was a great
thunder-storm over this place. It broke at midnight, and roared until
morning. The first intelligence he heard from his old serving-man that
morning, was, that the tree had been struck by Lightning.
‘It had been riven down the stem, in a very surprising manner, and the
stem lay in two blighted shafts: one resting against the house, and one
against a portion of the old red garden-wall in which its fall had made a
gap. The fissure went down the tree to a little above the earth, and
there stopped. There was great curiosity to see the tree, and, with most
of his former fears revived, he sat in his arbour—grown quite an old
man—watching the people who came to see it.
‘They quickly began to come, in such dangerous numbers, that he closed
his garden-gate and refused to admit any more. But, there were certain
men of science who travelled from a distance to examine the tree, and, in
an evil hour, he let them in!—Blight and Murrain on them, let them in!
‘They wanted to dig up the ruin by the roots, and closely examine it, and
the earth about it. Never, while he lived! They offered money for it.
They! Men of science, whom he could have bought by the gross, with a
scratch of his pen! He showed them the garden-gate again, and locked and
barred it.
‘But they were bent on doing what they wanted to do, and they bribed the
old serving-man—a thankless wretch who regularly complained when he
received his wages, of being underpaid—and they stole into the garden by
night with their lanterns, picks, and shovels, and fell to at the tree.
He was lying in a turret-room on the other side of the house (the Bride’s
Chamber had been unoccupied ever since), but he soon dreamed of picks and
shovels, and got up.
‘He came to an upper window on that side, whence he could see their
lanterns, and them, and the loose earth in a heap which he had himself
disturbed and put back, when it was last turned to the air. It was
found! They had that minute lighted on it. They were all bending over
it. One of them said, “The skull is fractured;” and another, “See here
the bones;” and another, “See here the clothes;” and then the first
struck in again, and said, “A rusty bill-hook!”
‘He became sensible, next day, that he was already put under a strict
watch, and that he could go nowhere without being followed. Before a
week was out, he was taken and laid in hold. The circumstances were
gradually pieced together against him, with a desperate malignity, and an
appalling ingenuity. But, see the justice of men, and how it was
extended to him! He was further accused of having poisoned that girl in
the Bride’s Chamber. He, who had carefully and expressly avoided
imperilling a hair of his head for her, and who had seen her die of her
own incapacity!
‘There was doubt for which of the two murders he should be first tried;
but, the real one was chosen, and he was found Guilty, and cast for
death. Bloodthirsty wretches! They would have made him Guilty of
anything, so set they were upon having his life.
‘His money could do nothing to save him, and he was hanged. _I_ am He,
and I was hanged at Lancaster Castle with my face to the wall, a hundred
years ago!’
* * * * *
At this terrific announcement, Mr. Goodchild tried to rise and cry out.
But, the two fiery lines extending from the old man’s eyes to his own,
kept him down, and he could not utter a sound. His sense of hearing,
however, was acute, and he could hear the clock strike Two. No sooner
had he heard the clock strike Two, than he saw before him Two old men!
Two.
The eyes of each, connected with his eyes by two films of fire: each,
exactly like the other: each, addressing him at precisely one and the
same instant: each, gnashing the same teeth in the same head, with the
same twitched nostril above them, and the same suffused expression around
it. Two old men. Differing in nothing, equally distinct to the sight,
the copy no fainter than the original, the second as real as the first.
‘At what time,’ said the Two old men, ‘did you arrive at the door below?’
‘At Six.’
‘And there were Six old men upon the stairs!’
Mr. Goodchild having wiped the perspiration from his brow, or tried to do
it, the Two old men proceeded in one voice, and in the singular number:
‘I had been anatomised, but had not yet had my skeleton put together and
re-hung on an iron hook, when it began to be whispered that the Bride’s
Chamber was haunted. It _was_ haunted, and I was there.
‘_We_ were there. She and I were there. I, in the chair upon the
hearth; she, a white wreck again, trailing itself towards me on the
floor. But, I was the speaker no more, and the one word that she said to
me from midnight until dawn was, ‘Live!’
‘The youth was there, likewise. In the tree outside the window. Coming
and going in the moonlight, as the tree bent and gave. He has, ever
since, been there, peeping in at me in my torment; revealing to me by
snatches, in the pale lights and slatey shadows where he comes and goes,
bare-headed—a bill-hook, standing edgewise in his hair.
‘In the Bride’s Chamber, every night from midnight until dawn—one month
in the year excepted, as I am going to tell you—he hides in the tree, and
she comes towards me on the floor; always approaching; never coming
nearer; always visible as if by moon-light, whether the moon shines or
no; always saying, from mid-night until dawn, her one word, “Live!”
‘But, in the month wherein I was forced out of this life—this present
month of thirty days—the Bride’s Chamber is empty and quiet. Not so my
old dungeon. Not so the rooms where I was restless and afraid, ten
years. Both are fitfully haunted then. At One in the morning. I am
what you saw me when the clock struck that hour—One old man. At Two in
the morning, I am Two old men. At Three, I am Three. By Twelve at noon,
I am Twelve old men, One for every hundred per cent. of old gain. Every
one of the Twelve, with Twelve times my old power of suffering and agony.
From that hour until Twelve at night, I, Twelve old men in anguish and
fearful foreboding, wait for the coming of the executioner. At Twelve at
night, I, Twelve old men turned off, swing invisible outside Lancaster
Castle, with Twelve faces to the wall!
‘When the Bride’s Chamber was first haunted, it was known to me that this
punishment would never cease, until I could make its nature, and my
story, known to two living men together. I waited for the coming of two
living men together into the Bride’s Chamber, years upon years. It was
infused into my knowledge (of the means I am ignorant) that if two living
men, with their eyes open, could be in the Bride’s Chamber at One in the
morning, they would see me sitting in my chair.
‘At length, the whispers that the room was spiritually troubled, brought
two men to try the adventure. I was scarcely struck upon the hearth at
midnight (I come there as if the Lightning blasted me into being), when I
heard them ascending the stairs. Next, I saw them enter. One of them
was a bold, gay, active man, in the prime of life, some five and forty
years of age; the other, a dozen years younger. They brought provisions
with them in a basket, and bottles. A young woman accompanied them, with
wood and coals for the lighting of the fire. When she had lighted it,
the bold, gay, active man accompanied her along the gallery outside the
room, to see her safely down the staircase, and came back laughing.
‘He locked the door, examined the chamber, put out the contents of the
basket on the table before the fire—little recking of me, in my appointed
station on the hearth, close to him—and filled the glasses, and ate and
drank. His companion did the same, and was as cheerful and confident as
he: though he was the leader. When they had supped, they laid pistols on
the table, turned to the fire, and began to smoke their pipes of foreign
make.
‘They had travelled together, and had been much together, and had an
abundance of subjects in common. In the midst of their talking and
laughing, the younger man made a reference to the leader’s being always
ready for any adventure; that one, or any other. He replied in these
words:
‘“Not quite so, Dick; if I am afraid of nothing else, I am afraid of
myself.”
‘His companion seeming to grow a little dull, asked him, in what sense?
How?
‘“Why, thus,” he returned. “Here is a Ghost to be disproved. Well! I
cannot answer for what my fancy might do if I were alone here, or what
tricks my senses might play with me if they had me to themselves. But,
in company with another man, and especially with Dick, I would consent to
outface all the Ghosts that were ever of in the universe.”
‘“I had not the vanity to suppose that I was of so much importance
to-night,” said the other.
‘“Of so much,” rejoined the leader, more seriously than he had spoken
yet, “that I would, for the reason I have given, on no account have
undertaken to pass the night here alone.”
‘It was within a few minutes of One. The head of the younger man had
drooped when he made his last remark, and it drooped lower now.
‘“Keep awake, Dick!” said the leader, gaily. “The small hours are the
worst.”
‘He tried, but his head drooped again.
‘“Dick!” urged the leader. “Keep awake!”
‘“I can’t,” he indistinctly muttered. “I don’t know what strange
influence is stealing over me. I can’t.”
‘His companion looked at him with a sudden horror, and I, in my different
way, felt a new horror also; for, it was on the stroke of One, and I felt
that the second watcher was yielding to me, and that the curse was upon
me that I must send him to sleep.
‘“Get up and walk, Dick!” cried the leader. “Try!”
‘It was in vain to go behind the slumber’s chair and shake him. One
o’clock sounded, and I was present to the elder man, and he stood
transfixed before me.
‘To him alone, I was obliged to relate my story, without hope of benefit.
To him alone, I was an awful phantom making a quite useless confession.
I foresee it will ever be the same. The two living men together will
never come to release me. When I appear, the senses of one of the two
will be locked in sleep; he will neither see nor hear me; my
communication will ever be made to a solitary listener, and will ever be
unserviceable. Woe! Woe! Woe!’
As the Two old men, with these words, wrung their hands, it shot into Mr.
Goodchild’s mind that he was in the terrible situation of being virtually
alone with the spectre, and that Mr. Idle’s immoveability was explained
by his having been charmed asleep at One o’clock. In the terror of this
sudden discovery which produced an indescribable dread, he struggled so
hard to get free from the four fiery threads, that he snapped them, after
he had pulled them out to a great width. Being then out of bonds, he
caught up Mr. Idle from the sofa and rushed down-stairs with him.
* * * * *
‘What are you about, Francis?’ demanded Mr. Idle. ‘My bedroom is not
down here. What the deuce are you carrying me at all for? I can walk
with a stick now. I don’t want to be carried. Put me down.’
Mr. Goodchild put him down in the old hall, and looked about him wildly.
‘What are you doing? Idiotically plunging at your own sex, and rescuing
them or perishing in the attempt?’ asked Mr. Idle, in a highly petulant
state.
‘The One old man!’ cried Mr. Goodchild, distractedly,—‘and the Two old
men!’
Mr. Idle deigned no other reply than ‘The One old woman, I think you
mean,’ as he began hobbling his way back up the staircase, with the
assistance of its broad balustrade.
‘I assure you, Tom,’ began Mr. Goodchild, attending at his side, ‘that
since you fell asleep—’
‘Come, I like that!’ said Thomas Idle, ‘I haven’t closed an eye!’
With the peculiar sensitiveness on the subject of the disgraceful action
of going to sleep out of bed, which is the lot of all mankind, Mr. Idle
persisted in this declaration. The same peculiar sensitiveness impelled
Mr. Goodchild, on being taxed with the same crime, to repudiate it with
honourable resentment. The settlement of the question of The One old man
and The Two old men was thus presently complicated, and soon made quite
impracticable. Mr. Idle said it was all Bride-cake, and fragments, newly
arranged, of things seen and thought about in the day. Mr. Goodchild
said how could that be, when he hadn’t been asleep, and what right could
Mr. Idle have to say so, who had been asleep? Mr. Idle said he had never
been asleep, and never did go to sleep, and that Mr. Goodchild, as a
general rule, was always asleep. They consequently parted for the rest
of the night, at their bedroom doors, a little ruffled. Mr. Goodchild’s
last words were, that he had had, in that real and tangible old
sitting-room of that real and tangible old Inn (he supposed Mr. Idle
denied its existence?), every sensation and experience, the present
record of which is now within a line or two of completion; and that he
would write it out and print it every word. Mr. Idle returned that he
might if he liked—and he did like, and has now done it.
CHAPTER V
TWO of the many passengers by a certain late Sunday evening train, Mr.
Thomas Idle and Mr. Francis Goodchild, yielded up their tickets at a
little rotten platform (converted into artificial touchwood by smoke and
ashes), deep in the manufacturing bosom of Yorkshire. A mysterious bosom
it appeared, upon a damp, dark, Sunday night, dashed through in the train
to the music of the whirling wheels, the panting of the engine, and the
part-singing of hundreds of third-class excursionists, whose vocal
efforts ‘bobbed arayound’ from sacred to profane, from hymns, to our
transatlantic sisters the Yankee Gal and Mairy Anne, in a remarkable way.
There seemed to have been some large vocal gathering near to every lonely
station on the line. No town was visible, no village was visible, no
light was visible; but, a multitude got out singing, and a multitude got
in singing, and the second multitude took up the hymns, and adopted our
transatlantic sisters, and sang of their own egregious wickedness, and of
their bobbing arayound, and of how the ship it was ready and the wind it
was fair, and they were bayound for the sea, Mairy Anne, until they in
their turn became a getting-out multitude, and were replaced by another
getting-in multitude, who did the same. And at every station, the
getting-in multitude, with an artistic reference to the completeness of
their chorus, incessantly cried, as with one voice while scuffling into
the carriages, ‘We mun aa’ gang toogither!’
The singing and the multitudes had trailed off as the lonely places were
left and the great towns were neared, and the way had lain as silently as
a train’s way ever can, over the vague black streets of the great gulfs
of towns, and among their branchless woods of vague black chimneys.
These towns looked, in the cinderous wet, as though they had one and all
been on fire and were just put out—a dreary and quenched panorama, many
miles long.
Thus, Thomas and Francis got to Leeds; of which enterprising and
important commercial centre it may be observed with delicacy, that you
must either like it very much or not at all. Next day, the first of the
Race-Week, they took train to Doncaster.
And instantly the character, both of travellers and of luggage, entirely
changed, and no other business than race-business any longer existed on
the face of the earth. The talk was all of horses and ‘John Scott.’
Guards whispered behind their hands to station-masters, of horses and
John Scott. Men in cut-away coats and speckled cravats fastened with
peculiar pins, and with the large bones of their legs developed under
tight trousers, so that they should look as much as possible like horses’
legs, paced up and down by twos at junction-stations, speaking low and
moodily of horses and John Scott. The young clergyman in the black
strait-waistcoat, who occupied the middle seat of the carriage, expounded
in his peculiar pulpit-accent to the young and lovely Reverend Mrs.
Crinoline, who occupied the opposite middle-seat, a few passages of
rumour relative to ‘Oartheth, my love, and Mithter John Eth-COTT.’ A
bandy vagabond, with a head like a Dutch cheese, in a fustian
stable-suit, attending on a horse-box and going about the platforms with
a halter hanging round his neck like a Calais burgher of the ancient
period much degenerated, was courted by the best society, by reason of
what he had to hint, when not engaged in eating straw, concerning
‘t’harses and Joon Scott.’ The engine-driver himself, as he applied one
eye to his large stationary double-eye-glass on the engine, seemed to
keep the other open, sideways, upon horses and John Scott.
Breaks and barriers at Doncaster Station to keep the crowd off; temporary
wooden avenues of ingress and egress, to help the crowd on. Forty extra
porters sent down for this present blessed Race-Week, and all of them
making up their betting-books in the lamp-room or somewhere else, and
none of them to come and touch the luggage. Travellers disgorged into an
open space, a howling wilderness of idle men. All work but race-work at
a stand-still; all men at a stand-still. ‘Ey my word! Deant ask noon o’
us to help wi’ t’luggage. Bock your opinion loike a mon. Coom! Dang
it, coom, t’harses and Joon Scott!’ In the midst of the idle men, all
the fly horses and omnibus horses of Doncaster and parts adjacent,
rampant, rearing, backing, plunging, shying—apparently the result of
their hearing of nothing but their own order and John Scott.
Grand Dramatic Company from London for the Race-Week. Poses Plastiques
in the Grand Assembly Room up the Stable-Yard at seven and nine each
evening, for the Race-Week. Grand Alliance Circus in the field beyond
the bridge, for the Race-Week. Grand Exhibition of Aztec Lilliputians,
important to all who want to be horrified cheap, for the Race-Week.
Lodgings, grand and not grand, but all at grand prices, ranging from ten
pounds to twenty, for the Grand Race-Week!
Rendered giddy enough by these things, Messieurs Idle and Goodchild
repaired to the quarters they had secured beforehand, and Mr. Goodchild
looked down from the window into the surging street.
‘By Heaven, Tom!’ cried he, after contemplating it, ‘I am in the Lunatic
Asylum again, and these are all mad people under the charge of a body of
designing keepers!’
All through the Race-Week, Mr. Goodchild never divested himself of this
idea. Every day he looked out of window, with something of the dread of
Lemuel Gulliver looking down at men after he returned home from the
horse-country; and every day he saw the Lunatics, horse-mad, betting-mad,
drunken-mad, vice-mad, and the designing Keepers always after them. The
idea pervaded, like the second colour in shot-silk, the whole of Mr.
Goodchild’s impressions. They were much as follows:
Monday, mid-day. Races not to begin until to-morrow, but all the
mob-Lunatics out, crowding the pavements of the one main street of pretty
and pleasant Doncaster, crowding the road, particularly crowding the
outside of the Betting Rooms, whooping and shouting loudly after all
passing vehicles. Frightened lunatic horses occasionally running away,
with infinite clatter. All degrees of men, from peers to paupers,
betting incessantly. Keepers very watchful, and taking all good chances.
An awful family likeness among the Keepers, to Mr. Palmer and Mr.
Thurtell. With some knowledge of expression and some acquaintance with
heads (thus writes Mr. Goodchild), I never have seen anywhere, so many
repetitions of one class of countenance and one character of head (both
evil) as in this street at this time. Cunning, covetousness, secrecy,
cold calculation, hard callousness and dire insensibility, are the
uniform Keeper characteristics. Mr. Palmer passes me five times in five
minutes, and, so I go down the street, the back of Mr. Thurtell’s skull
is always going on before me.
Monday evening. Town lighted up; more Lunatics out than ever; a complete
choke and stoppage of the thoroughfare outside the Betting Rooms.
Keepers, having dined, pervade the Betting Rooms, and sharply snap at the
moneyed Lunatics. Some Keepers flushed with drink, and some not, but all
close and calculating. A vague echoing roar of ‘t’harses’ and ‘t’races’
always rising in the air, until midnight, at about which period it dies
away in occasional drunken songs and straggling yells. But, all night,
some unmannerly drinking-house in the neighbourhood opens its mouth at
intervals and spits out a man too drunk to be retained: who thereupon
makes what uproarious protest may be left in him, and either falls asleep
where he tumbles, or is carried off in custody.
Tuesday morning, at daybreak. A sudden rising, as it were out of the
earth, of all the obscene creatures, who sell ‘correct cards of the
races.’ They may have been coiled in corners, or sleeping on door-steps,
and, having all passed the night under the same set of circumstances, may
all want to circulate their blood at the same time; but, however that may
be, they spring into existence all at once and together, as though a new
Cadmus had sown a race-horse’s teeth. There is nobody up, to buy the
cards; but, the cards are madly cried. There is no patronage to quarrel
for; but, they madly quarrel and fight. Conspicuous among these hyænas,
as breakfast-time discloses, is a fearful creature in the general
semblance of a man: shaken off his next-to-no legs by drink and devilry,
bare-headed and bare-footed, with a great shock of hair like a horrible
broom, and nothing on him but a ragged pair of trousers and a pink
glazed-calico coat—made on him—so very tight that it is as evident that
he could never take it off, as that he never does. This hideous
apparition, inconceivably drunk, has a terrible power of making a
gong-like imitation of the braying of an ass: which feat requires that he
should lay his right jaw in his begrimed right paw, double himself up,
and shake his bray out of himself, with much staggering on his next-to-no
legs, and much twirling of his horrible broom, as if it were a mop. From
the present minute, when he comes in sight holding up his cards to the
windows, and hoarsely proposing purchase to My Lord, Your Excellency,
Colonel, the Noble Captain, and Your Honourable Worship—from the present
minute until the Grand Race-Week is finished, at all hours of the
morning, evening, day, and night, shall the town reverberate, at
capricious intervals, to the brays of this frightful animal the
Gong-donkey.
No very great racing to-day, so no very great amount of vehicles: though
there is a good sprinkling, too: from farmers’ carts and gigs, to
carriages with post-horses and to fours-in-hand, mostly coming by the
road from York, and passing on straight through the main street to the
Course. A walk in the wrong direction may be a better thing for Mr.
Goodchild to-day than the Course, so he walks in the wrong direction.
Everybody gone to the races. Only children in the street. Grand
Alliance Circus deserted; not one Star-Rider left; omnibus which forms
the Pay-Place, having on separate panels Pay here for the Boxes, Pay here
for the Pit, Pay here for the Gallery, hove down in a corner and locked
up; nobody near the tent but the man on his knees on the grass, who is
making the paper balloons for the Star young gentlemen to jump through
to-night. A pleasant road, pleasantly wooded. No labourers working in
the fields; all gone ‘t’races.’ The few late wenders of their way
‘t’races,’ who are yet left driving on the road, stare in amazement at
the recluse who is not going ‘t’races.’ Roadside innkeeper has gone
‘t’races.’ Turnpike-man has gone ‘t’races.’ His thrifty wife, washing
clothes at the toll-house door, is going ‘t’races’ to-morrow. Perhaps
there may be no one left to take the toll to-morrow; who knows? Though
assuredly that would be neither turnpike-like nor Yorkshire-like. The
very wind and dust seem to be hurrying ‘t’races,’ as they briskly pass
the only wayfarer on the road. In the distance, the Railway Engine,
waiting at the town-end, shrieks despairingly. Nothing but the
difficulty of getting off the Line, restrains that Engine from going
‘t’races,’ too, it is very clear.
At night, more Lunatics out than last night—and more Keepers. The latter
very active at the Betting Rooms, the street in front of which is now
impassable. Mr. Palmer as before. Mr. Thurtell as before. Roar and
uproar as before. Gradual subsidence as before. Unmannerly
drinking-house expectorates as before. Drunken negro-melodists,
Gong-donkey, and correct cards, in the night.
On Wednesday morning, the morning of the great St. Leger, it becomes
apparent that there has been a great influx since yesterday, both of
Lunatics and Keepers. The families of the tradesmen over the way are no
longer within human ken; their places know them no more; ten, fifteen,
and twenty guinea-lodgers fill them. At the pastry-cook’s second-floor
window, a Keeper is brushing Mr. Thurtell’s hair—thinking it his own. In
the wax-chandler’s attic, another Keeper is putting on Mr. Palmer’s
braces. In the gunsmith’s nursery, a Lunatic is shaving himself. In the
serious stationer’s best sitting-room, three Lunatics are taking a
combination-breakfast, praising the (cook’s) devil, and drinking neat
brandy in an atmosphere of last midnight’s cigars. No family sanctuary
is free from our Angelic messengers—we put up at the Angel—who in the
guise of extra waiters for the grand Race-Week, rattle in and out of the
most secret chambers of everybody’s house, with dishes and tin covers,
decanters, soda-water bottles, and glasses. An hour later. Down the
street and up the street, as far as eyes can see and a good deal farther,
there is a dense crowd; outside the Betting Rooms it is like a great
struggle at a theatre door—in the days of theatres; or at the vestibule
of the Spurgeon temple—in the days of Spurgeon. An hour later. Fusing
into this crowd, and somehow getting through it, are all kinds of
conveyances, and all kinds of foot-passengers; carts, with brick-makers
and brick-makeresses jolting up and down on planks; drags, with the
needful grooms behind, sitting cross-armed in the needful manner, and
slanting themselves backward from the soles of their boots at the needful
angle; postboys, in the shining hats and smart jackets of the olden time,
when stokers were not; beautiful Yorkshire horses, gallantly driven by
their own breeders and masters. Under every pole, and every shaft, and
every horse, and every wheel as it would seem, the
Gong-donkey—metallically braying, when not struggling for life, or
whipped out of the way.
By one o’clock, all this stir has gone out of the streets, and there is
no one left in them but Francis Goodchild. Francis Goodchild will not be
left in them long; for, he too is on his way, ‘t’races.’
A most beautiful sight, Francis Goodchild finds ‘t’races’ to be, when he
has left fair Doncaster behind him, and comes out on the free course,
with its agreeable prospect, its quaint Red House oddly changing and
turning as Francis turns, its green grass, and fresh heath. A free
course and an easy one, where Francis can roll smoothly where he will,
and can choose between the start, or the coming-in, or the turn behind
the brow of the hill, or any out-of-the-way point where he lists to see
the throbbing horses straining every nerve, and making the sympathetic
earth throb as they come by. Francis much delights to be, not in the
Grand Stand, but where he can see it, rising against the sky with its
vast tiers of little white dots of faces, and its last high rows and
corners of people, looking like pins stuck into an enormous
pincushion—not quite so symmetrically as his orderly eye could wish, when
people change or go away. When the race is nearly run out, it is as good
as the race to him to see the flutter among the pins, and the change in
them from dark to light, as hats are taken off and waved. Not less full
of interest, the loud anticipation of the winner’s name, the swelling,
and the final, roar; then, the quick dropping of all the pins out of
their places, the revelation of the shape of the bare pincushion, and the
closing-in of the whole host of Lunatics and Keepers, in the rear of the
three horses with bright-coloured riders, who have not yet quite subdued
their gallop though the contest is over.
Mr. Goodchild would appear to have been by no means free from lunacy
himself at ‘t’races,’ though not of the prevalent kind. He is suspected
by Mr. Idle to have fallen into a dreadful state concerning a pair of
little lilac gloves and a little bonnet that he saw there. Mr. Idle
asserts, that he did afterwards repeat at the Angel, with an appearance
of being lunatically seized, some rhapsody to the following effect: ‘O
little lilac gloves! And O winning little bonnet, making in conjunction
with her golden hair quite a Glory in the sunlight round the pretty head,
why anything in the world but you and me! Why may not this day’s
running-of horses, to all the rest: of precious sands of life to me—be
prolonged through an everlasting autumn-sunshine, without a sunset!
Slave of the Lamp, or Ring, strike me yonder gallant equestrian Clerk of
the Course, in the scarlet coat, motionless on the green grass for ages!
Friendly Devil on Two Sticks, for ten times ten thousands years, keep
Blink-Bonny jibbing at the post, and let us have no start! Arab drums,
powerful of old to summon Genii in the desert, sound of yourselves and
raise a troop for me in the desert of my heart, which shall so enchant
this dusty barouche (with a conspicuous excise-plate, resembling the
Collector’s door-plate at a turnpike), that I, within it, loving the
little lilac gloves, the winning little bonnet, and the dear
unknown-wearer with the golden hair, may wait by her side for ever, to
see a Great St. Leger that shall never be run!’
Thursday morning. After a tremendous night of crowding, shouting,
drinking-house expectoration, Gong-donkey, and correct cards. Symptoms
of yesterday’s gains in the way of drink, and of yesterday’s losses in
the way of money, abundant. Money-losses very great. As usual, nobody
seems to have won; but, large losses and many losers are unquestionable
facts. Both Lunatics and Keepers, in general very low. Several of both
kinds look in at the chemist’s while Mr. Goodchild is making a purchase
there, to be ‘picked up.’ One red-eyed Lunatic, flushed, faded, and
disordered, enters hurriedly and cries savagely, ‘Hond us a gloss of sal
volatile in wather, or soom dommed thing o’ thot sart!’ Faces at the
Betting Rooms very long, and a tendency to bite nails observable.
Keepers likewise given this morning to standing about solitary, with
their hands in their pockets, looking down at their boots as they fit
them into cracks of the pavement, and then looking up whistling and
walking away. Grand Alliance Circus out, in procession; buxom
lady-member of Grand Alliance, in crimson riding-habit, fresher to look
at, even in her paint under the day sky, than the cheeks of Lunatics or
Keepers. Spanish Cavalier appears to have lost yesterday, and jingles
his bossed bridle with disgust, as if he were paying. Reaction also
apparent at the Guildhall opposite, whence certain pickpockets come out
handcuffed together, with that peculiar walk which is never seen under
any other circumstances—a walk expressive of going to jail, game, but
still of jails being in bad taste and arbitrary, and how would _you_ like
it if it was you instead of me, as it ought to be! Mid-day. Town filled
as yesterday, but not so full; and emptied as yesterday, but not so
empty. In the evening, Angel ordinary where every Lunatic and Keeper has
his modest daily meal of turtle, venison, and wine, not so crowded as
yesterday, and not so noisy. At night, the theatre. More abstracted
faces in it than one ever sees at public assemblies; such faces wearing
an expression which strongly reminds Mr. Goodchild of the boys at school
who were ‘going up next,’ with their arithmetic or mathematics. These
boys are, no doubt, going up to-morrow with _their_ sums and figures.
Mr. Palmer and Mr. Thurtell in the boxes O. P. Mr. Thurtell and Mr.
Palmer in the boxes P. S. The firm of Thurtell, Palmer, and Thurtell, in
the boxes Centre. A most odious tendency observable in these
distinguished gentlemen to put vile constructions on sufficiently
innocent phrases in the play, and then to applaud them in a Satyr-like
manner. Behind Mr. Goodchild, with a party of other Lunatics and one
Keeper, the express incarnation of the thing called a ‘gent.’ A
gentleman born; a gent manufactured. A something with a scarf round its
neck, and a slipshod speech issuing from behind the scarf; more depraved,
more foolish, more ignorant, more unable to believe in any noble or good
thing of any kind, than the stupidest Bosjesman. The thing is but a boy
in years, and is addled with drink. To do its company justice, even its
company is ashamed of it, as it drawls its slang criticisms on the
representation, and inflames Mr. Goodchild with a burning ardour to fling
it into the pit. Its remarks are so horrible, that Mr. Goodchild, for
the moment, even doubts whether that _is_ a wholesome Art, which sets
women apart on a high floor before such a thing as this, though as good
as its own sisters, or its own mother—whom Heaven forgive for bringing it
into the world! But, the consideration that a low nature must make a low
world of its own to live in, whatever the real materials, or it could no
more exist than any of us could without the sense of touch, brings Mr.
Goodchild to reason: the rather, because the thing soon drops its downy
chin upon its scarf, and slobbers itself asleep.
Friday Morning. Early fights. Gong-donkey, and correct cards. Again, a
great set towards the races, though not so great a set as on Wednesday.
Much packing going on too, upstairs at the gun-smith’s, the
wax-chandler’s, and the serious stationer’s; for there will be a heavy
drift of Lunatics and Keepers to London by the afternoon train. The
course as pretty as ever; the great pincushion as like a pincushion, but
not nearly so full of pins; whole rows of pins wanting. On the great
event of the day, both Lunatics and Keepers become inspired with rage;
and there is a violent scuffling, and a rushing at the losing jockey, and
an emergence of the said jockey from a swaying and menacing crowd,
protected by friends, and looking the worse for wear; which is a rough
proceeding, though animating to see from a pleasant distance. After the
great event, rills begin to flow from the pincushion towards the
railroad; the rills swell into rivers; the rivers soon unite into a lake.
The lake floats Mr. Goodchild into Doncaster, past the Itinerant
personage in black, by the way-side telling him from the vantage ground
of a legibly printed placard on a pole that for all these things the Lord
will bring him to judgment. No turtle and venison ordinary this evening;
that is all over. No Betting at the rooms; nothing there but the plants
in pots, which have, all the week, been stood about the entry to give it
an innocent appearance, and which have sorely sickened by this time.
Saturday. Mr. Idle wishes to know at breakfast, what were those dreadful
groanings in his bedroom doorway in the night? Mr. Goodchild answers,
Nightmare. Mr. Idle repels the calumny, and calls the waiter. The Angel
is very sorry—had intended to explain; but you see, gentlemen, there was
a gentleman dined down-stairs with two more, and he had lost a deal of
money, and he would drink a deal of wine, and in the night he ‘took the
horrors,’ and got up; and as his friends could do nothing with him he
laid himself down and groaned at Mr. Idle’s door. ‘And he DID groan
there,’ Mr. Idle says; ‘and you will please to imagine me inside, “taking
the horrors” too!’
* * * * *
So far, the picture of Doncaster on the occasion of its great sporting
anniversary, offers probably a general representation of the social
condition of the town, in the past as well as in the present time. The
sole local phenomenon of the current year, which may be considered as
entirely unprecedented in its way, and which certainly claims, on that
account, some slight share of notice, consists in the actual existence of
one remarkable individual, who is sojourning in Doncaster, and who,
neither directly nor indirectly, has anything at all to do, in any
capacity whatever, with the racing amusements of the week. Ranging
throughout the entire crowd that fills the town, and including the
inhabitants as well as the visitors, nobody is to be found altogether
disconnected with the business of the day, excepting this one
unparalleled man. He does not bet on the races, like the sporting men.
He does not assist the races, like the jockeys, starters, judges, and
grooms. He does not look on at the races, like Mr. Goodchild and his
fellow-spectators. He does not profit by the races, like the
hotel-keepers and the tradespeople. He does not minister to the
necessities of the races, like the booth-keepers, the postilions, the
waiters, and the hawkers of Lists. He does not assist the attractions of
the races, like the actors at the theatre, the riders at the circus, or
the posturers at the Poses Plastiques. Absolutely and literally, he is
the only individual in Doncaster who stands by the brink of the
full-flowing race-stream, and is not swept away by it in common with all
the rest of his species. Who is this modern hermit, this recluse of the
St. Leger-week, this inscrutably ungregarious being, who lives apart from
the amusements and activities of his fellow-creatures? Surely, there is
little difficulty in guessing that clearest and easiest of all riddles.
Who could he be, but Mr. Thomas Idle?
Thomas had suffered himself to be taken to Doncaster, just as he would
have suffered himself to be taken to any other place in the habitable
globe which would guarantee him the temporary possession of a comfortable
sofa to rest his ankle on. Once established at the hotel, with his leg
on one cushion and his back against another, he formally declined taking
the slightest interest in any circumstance whatever connected with the
races, or with the people who were assembled to see them. Francis
Goodchild, anxious that the hours should pass by his crippled
travelling-companion as lightly as possible, suggested that his sofa
should be moved to the window, and that he should amuse himself by
looking out at the moving panorama of humanity, which the view from it of
the principal street presented. Thomas, however, steadily declined
profiting by the suggestion.
‘The farther I am from the window,’ he said, ‘the better, Brother
Francis, I shall be pleased. I have nothing in common with the one
prevalent idea of all those people who are passing in the street. Why
should I care to look at them?’
‘I hope I have nothing in common with the prevalent idea of a great many
of them, either,’ answered Goodchild, thinking of the sporting gentlemen
whom he had met in the course of his wanderings about Doncaster. ‘But,
surely, among all the people who are walking by the house, at this very
moment, you may find—’
‘Not one living creature,’ interposed Thomas, ‘who is not, in one way or
another, interested in horses, and who is not, in a greater or less
degree, an admirer of them. Now, I hold opinions in reference to these
particular members of the quadruped creation, which may lay claim (as I
believe) to the disastrous distinction of being unpartaken by any other
human being, civilised or savage, over the whole surface of the earth.
Taking the horse as an animal in the abstract, Francis, I cordially
despise him from every point of view.’
‘Thomas,’ said Goodchild, ‘confinement to the house has begun to affect
your biliary secretions. I shall go to the chemist’s and get you some
physic.’
‘I object,’ continued Thomas, quietly possessing himself of his friend’s
hat, which stood on a table near him,—‘I object, first, to the personal
appearance of the horse. I protest against the conventional idea of
beauty, as attached to that animal. I think his nose too long, his
forehead too low, and his legs (except in the case of the cart-horse)
ridiculously thin by comparison with the size of his body. Again,
considering how big an animal he is, I object to the contemptible
delicacy of his constitution. Is he not the sickliest creature in
creation? Does any child catch cold as easily as a horse? Does he not
sprain his fetlock, for all his appearance of superior strength, as
easily as I sprained my ankle! Furthermore, to take him from another
point of view, what a helpless wretch he is! No fine lady requires more
constant waiting-on than a horse. Other animals can make their own
toilette: he must have a groom. You will tell me that this is because we
want to make his coat artificially glossy. Glossy! Come home with me,
and see my cat,—my clever cat, who can groom herself! Look at your own
dog! see how the intelligent creature curry-combs himself with his own
honest teeth! Then, again, what a fool the horse is, what a poor,
nervous fool! He will start at a piece of white paper in the road as if
it was a lion. His one idea, when he hears a noise that he is not
accustomed to, is to run away from it. What do you say to those two
common instances of the sense and courage of this absurdly overpraised
animal? I might multiply them to two hundred, if I chose to exert my
mind and waste my breath, which I never do. I prefer coming at once to
my last charge against the horse, which is the most serious of all,
because it affects his moral character. I accuse him boldly, in his
capacity of servant to man, of slyness and treachery. I brand him
publicly, no matter how mild he may look about the eyes, or how sleek he
may be about the coat, as a systematic betrayer, whenever he can get the
chance, of the confidence reposed in him. What do you mean by laughing
and shaking your head at me?’
‘Oh, Thomas, Thomas!’ said Goodchild. ‘You had better give me my hat;
you had better let me get you that physic.’
‘I will let you get anything you like, including a composing draught for
yourself,’ said Thomas, irritably alluding to his fellow-apprentice’s
inexhaustible activity, ‘if you will only sit quiet for five minutes
longer, and hear me out. I say again the horse is a betrayer of the
confidence reposed in him; and that opinion, let me add, is drawn from my
own personal experience, and is not based on any fanciful theory
whatever. You shall have two instances, two overwhelming instances. Let
me start the first of these by asking, what is the distinguishing quality
which the Shetland Pony has arrogated to himself, and is still
perpetually trumpeting through the world by means of popular report and
books on Natural History? I see the answer in your face: it is the
quality of being Sure-Footed. He professes to have other virtues, such
as hardiness and strength, which you may discover on trial; but the one
thing which he insists on your believing, when you get on his back, is
that he may be safely depended on not to tumble down with you. Very
good. Some years ago, I was in Shetland with a party of friends. They
insisted on taking me with them to the top of a precipice that overhung
the sea. It was a great distance off, but they all determined to walk to
it except me. I was wiser then than I was with you at Carrock, and I
determined to be carried to the precipice. There was no carriage-road in
the island, and nobody offered (in consequence, as I suppose, of the
imperfectly-civilised state of the country) to bring me a sedan-chair,
which is naturally what I should have liked best. A Shetland pony was
produced instead. I remembered my Natural History, I recalled popular
report, and I got on the little beast’s back, as any other man would have
done in my position, placing implicit confidence in the sureness of his
feet. And how did he repay that confidence? Brother Francis, carry your
mind on from morning to noon. Picture to yourself a howling wilderness
of grass and bog, bounded by low stony hills. Pick out one particular
spot in that imaginary scene, and sketch me in it, with outstretched
arms, curved back, and heels in the air, plunging headforemost into a
black patch of water and mud. Place just behind me the legs, the body,
and the head of a sure-footed Shetland pony, all stretched flat on the
ground, and you will have produced an accurate representation of a very
lamentable fact. And the moral device, Francis, of this picture will be
to testify that when gentlemen put confidence in the legs of Shetland
ponies, they will find to their cost that they are leaning on nothing but
broken reeds. There is my first instance—and what have you got to say to
that?’
‘Nothing, but that I want my hat,’ answered Goodchild, starting up and
walking restlessly about the room.
‘You shall have it in a minute,’ rejoined Thomas. ‘My second
instance’—(Goodchild groaned, and sat down again)—‘My second instance is
more appropriate to the present time and place, for it refers to a
race-horse. Two years ago an excellent friend of mine, who was desirous
of prevailing on me to take regular exercise, and who was well enough
acquainted with the weakness of my legs to expect no very active
compliance with his wishes on their part, offered to make me a present of
one of his horses. Hearing that the animal in question had started in
life on the turf, I declined accepting the gift with many thanks; adding,
by way of explanation, that I looked on a race-horse as a kind of
embodied hurricane, upon which no sane man of my character and habits
could be expected to seat himself. My friend replied that, however
appropriate my metaphor might be as applied to race-horses in general, it
was singularly unsuitable as applied to the particular horse which he
proposed to give me. From a foal upwards this remarkable animal had been
the idlest and most sluggish of his race. Whatever capacities for speed
he might possess he had kept so strictly to himself, that no amount of
training had ever brought them out. He had been found hopelessly slow as
a racer, and hopelessly lazy as a hunter, and was fit for nothing but a
quiet, easy life of it with an old gentleman or an invalid. When I heard
this account of the horse, I don’t mind confessing that my heart warmed
to him. Visions of Thomas Idle ambling serenely on the back of a steed
as lazy as himself, presenting to a restless world the soothing and
composite spectacle of a kind of sluggardly Centaur, too peaceable in his
habits to alarm anybody, swam attractively before my eyes. I went to
look at the horse in the stable. Nice fellow! he was fast asleep with a
kitten on his back. I saw him taken out for an airing by the groom. If
he had had trousers on his legs I should not have known them from my own,
so deliberately were they lifted up, so gently were they put down, so
slowly did they get over the ground. From that moment I gratefully
accepted my friend’s offer. I went home; the horse followed me—by a slow
train. Oh, Francis, how devoutly I believed in that horse I how
carefully I looked after all his little comforts! I had never gone the
length of hiring a man-servant to wait on myself; but I went to the
expense of hiring one to wait upon him. If I thought a little of myself
when I bought the softest saddle that could be had for money, I thought
also of my horse. When the man at the shop afterwards offered me spurs
and a whip, I turned from him with horror. When I sallied out for my
first ride, I went purposely unarmed with the means of hurrying my steed.
He proceeded at his own pace every step of the way; and when he stopped,
at last, and blew out both his sides with a heavy sigh, and turned his
sleepy head and looked behind him, I took him home again, as I might take
home an artless child who said to me, “If you please, sir, I am tired.”
For a week this complete harmony between me and my horse lasted
undisturbed. At the end of that time, when he had made quite sure of my
friendly confidence in his laziness, when he had thoroughly acquainted
himself with all the little weaknesses of my seat (and their name is
Legion), the smouldering treachery and ingratitude of the equine nature
blazed out in an instant. Without the slightest provocation from me,
with nothing passing him at the time but a pony-chaise driven by an old
lady, he started in one instant from a state of sluggish depression to a
state of frantic high spirits. He kicked, he plunged, he shied, he
pranced, he capered fearfully. I sat on him as long as I could, and when
I could sit no longer, I fell off. No, Francis! this is not a
circumstance to be laughed at, but to be wept over. What would be said
of a Man who had requited my kindness in that way? Range over all the
rest of the animal creation, and where will you find me an instance of
treachery so black as this? The cow that kicks down the milking-pail may
have some reason for it; she may think herself taxed too heavily to
contribute to the dilution of human tea and the greasing of human bread.
The tiger who springs out on me unawares has the excuse of being hungry
at the time, to say nothing of the further justification of being a total
stranger to me. The very flea who surprises me in my sleep may defend
his act of assassination on the ground that I, in my turn, am always
ready to murder him when I am awake. I defy the whole body of Natural
Historians to move me, logically, off the ground that I have taken in
regard to the horse. Receive back your hat, Brother Francis, and go to
the chemist’s, if you please; for I have now done. Ask me to take
anything you like, except an interest in the Doncaster races. Ask me to
look at anything you like, except an assemblage of people all animated by
feelings of a friendly and admiring nature towards the horse. You are a
remarkably well-informed man, and you have heard of hermits. Look upon
me as a member of that ancient fraternity, and you will sensibly add to
the many obligations which Thomas Idle is proud to owe to Francis
Goodchild.’
Here, fatigued by the effort of excessive talking, disputatious Thomas
waved one hand languidly, laid his head back on the sofa-pillow, and
calmly closed his eyes.
At a later period, Mr. Goodchild assailed his travelling companion boldly
from the impregnable fortress of common sense. But Thomas, though tamed
in body by drastic discipline, was still as mentally unapproachable as
ever on the subject of his favourite delusion.
* * * * *
The view from the window after Saturday’s breakfast is altogether
changed. The tradesmen’s families have all come back again. The serious
stationer’s young woman of all work is shaking a duster out of the window
of the combination breakfast-room; a child is playing with a doll, where
Mr. Thurtell’s hair was brushed; a sanitary scrubbing is in progress on
the spot where Mr. Palmer’s braces were put on. No signs of the Races
are in the streets, but the tramps and the tumble-down-carts and trucks
laden with drinking-forms and tables and remnants of booths, that are
making their way out of the town as fast as they can. The Angel, which
has been cleared for action all the week, already begins restoring every
neat and comfortable article of furniture to its own neat and comfortable
place. The Angel’s daughters (pleasanter angels Mr. Idle and Mr.
Goodchild never saw, nor more quietly expert in their business, nor more
superior to the common vice of being above it), have a little time to
rest, and to air their cheerful faces among the flowers in the yard. It
is market-day. The market looks unusually natural, comfortable, and
wholesome; the market-people too. The town seems quite restored, when,
hark! a metallic bray—The Gong-donkey!
The wretched animal has not cleared off with the rest, but is here, under
the window. How much more inconceivably drunk now, how much more
begrimed of paw, how much more tight of calico hide, how much more
stained and daubed and dirty and dunghilly, from his horrible broom to
his tender toes, who shall say! He cannot even shake the bray out of
himself now, without laying his cheek so near to the mud of the street,
that he pitches over after delivering it. Now, prone in the mud, and now
backing himself up against shop-windows, the owners of which come out in
terror to remove him; now, in the drinking-shop, and now in the
tobacconist’s, where he goes to buy tobacco, and makes his way into the
parlour, and where he gets a cigar, which in half-a-minute he forgets to
smoke; now dancing, now dozing, now cursing, and now complimenting My
Lord, the Colonel, the Noble Captain, and Your Honourable Worship, the
Gong-donkey kicks up his heels, occasionally braying, until suddenly, he
beholds the dearest friend he has in the world coming down the street.
The dearest friend the Gong-donkey has in the world, is a sort of
Jackall, in a dull, mangy, black hide, of such small pieces that it looks
as if it were made of blacking bottles turned inside out and cobbled
together. The dearest friend in the world (inconceivably drunk too)
advances at the Gong-donkey, with a hand on each thigh, in a series of
humorous springs and stops, wagging his head as he comes. The
Gong-donkey regarding him with attention and with the warmest affection,
suddenly perceives that he is the greatest enemy he has in the world, and
hits him hard in the countenance. The astonished Jackall closes with the
Donkey, and they roll over and over in the mud, pummelling one another.
A Police Inspector, supernaturally endowed with patience, who has long
been looking on from the Guildhall-steps, says, to a myrmidon, ‘Lock ’em
up! Bring ’em in!’
Appropriate finish to the Grand Race-Week. The Gong-donkey, captive and
last trace of it, conveyed into limbo, where they cannot do better than
keep him until next Race-Week. The Jackall is wanted too, and is much
looked for, over the way and up and down. But, having had the good
fortune to be undermost at the time of the capture, he has vanished into
air.
On Saturday afternoon, Mr. Goodchild walks out and looks at the Course.
It is quite deserted; heaps of broken crockery and bottles are raised to
its memory; and correct cards and other fragments of paper are blowing
about it, as the regulation little paper-books, carried by the French
soldiers in their breasts, were seen, soon after the battle was fought,
blowing idly about the plains of Waterloo.
Where will these present idle leaves be blown by the idle winds, and
where will the last of them be one day lost and forgotten? An idle
question, and an idle thought.; and with it Mr. Idle fitly makes his bow,
and Mr. Goodchild his, and thus ends the Lazy Tour of Two Idle
Apprentices.
***
