box of blankets which I knew contained the snakes, were set forth
the cups and saucers and the teapot. It was on an evening in
August, that I chanced upon this ravishing spectacle, and I noticed
that, whereas the Giant reclined half concealed beneath the
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overhanging boughs and seemed indifferent to Nature, the white hair
of the gracious Lady streamed free in the breath of evening, and
her pink eyes found pleasure in the landscape. I heard only a
single sentence of her uttering, yet it bespoke a talent for modest
repartee. The ill-mannered Giant - accursed be his evil race! -
had interrupted the Lady in some remark, and, as I passed that
enchanted corner of the wood, she gently reproved him, with the
words, 'Now, Cobby;' - Cobby! so short a name! - 'ain't one fool
enough to talk at a time?'
Within appropriate distance of this magic ground, though not so
near it as that the song trolled from tap or bench at door, can
invade its woodland silence, is a little hostelry which no man
possessed of a penny was ever known to pass in warm weather.
Before its entrance, are certain pleasant, trimmed limes; likewise,
a cool well, with so musical a bucket-handle that its fall upon the
bucket rim will make a horse prick up his ears and neigh, upon the
droughty road half a mile off. This is a house of great resort for
haymaking tramps and harvest tramps, insomuch that as they sit
within, drinking their mugs of beer, their relinquished scythes and
reaping-hooks glare out of the open windows, as if the whole
establishment were a family war-coach of Ancient Britons. Later in
the season, the whole country-side, for miles and miles, will swarm
with hopping tramps. They come in families, men, women, and
children, every family provided with a bundle of bedding, an iron
pot, a number of babies, and too often with some poor sick creature
quite unfit for the rough life, for whom they suppose the smell of
the fresh hop to be a sovereign remedy. Many of these hoppers are
Irish, but many come from London. They crowd all the roads, and
camp under all the hedges and on all the scraps of common-land, and
live among and upon the hops until they are all picked, and the
hop-gardens, so beautiful through the summer, look as if they had
been laid waste by an invading army. Then, there is a vast exodus
of tramps out of the country; and if you ride or drive round any
turn of any road, at more than a foot pace, you will be bewildered
to find that you have charged into the bosom of fifty families, and
that there are splashing up all around you, in the utmost
prodigality of confusion, bundles of bedding, babies, iron pots,
and a good-humoured multitude of both sexes and all ages, equally
divided between perspiration and intoxication.
CHAPTER XII - DULLBOROUGH TOWN
It lately happened that I found myself rambling about the scenes
among which my earliest days were passed; scenes from which I
departed when I was a child, and which I did not revisit until I
was a man. This is no uncommon chance, but one that befalls some
of us any day; perhaps it may not be quite uninteresting to compare
notes with the reader respecting an experience so familiar and a
journey so uncommercial.
I call my boyhood's home (and I feel like a Tenor in an English
Opera when I mention it) Dullborough. Most of us come from
Dullborough who come from a country town.
As I left Dullborough in the days when there were no railroads in
the land, I left it in a stage-coach. Through all the years that
have since passed, have I ever lost the smell of the damp straw in
which I was packed - like game - and forwarded, carriage paid, to
the Cross Keys, Wood-street, Cheapside, London? There was no other
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inside passenger, and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and
dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life
sloppier than I had expected to find it.
into Dullborough the other day, by train. My ticket had been
previously collected, like my taxes, and my shining new portmanteau
had had a great plaster stuck upon it, and I had been defied by Act
of Parliament to offer an objection to anything that was done to
it, or me, under a penalty of not less than forty shillings or more
than five pounds, compoundable for a term of imprisonment. When I
had sent my disfigured property on to the hotel, I began to look
about me; and the first discovery I made, was, that the Station had
swallowed up the playing-field.
It was gone. The two beautiful hawthorn-trees, the hedge, the
turf, and all those buttercups and daisies, had given place to the
stoniest of jolting roads: while, beyond the Station, an ugly dark
monster of a tunnel kept its jaws open, as if it had swallowed them
and were ravenous for more destruction. The coach that had carried
me away, was melodiously called Timpson's Blue-Eyed Maid, and
belonged to Timpson, at the coach-office up-street; the locomotive
engine that had brought me back, was called severely No. 97, and
belonged to S.E.R., and was spitting ashes and hot water over the
blighted ground.
When I had been let out at the platform-door, like a prisoner whom
his turnkey grudgingly released, I looked in again over the low
wall, at the scene of departed glories. Here, in the haymaking
time, had I been delivered from the dungeons of Seringapatam, an
immense pile (of haycock), by my own countrymen, the victorious
British (boy next door and his two cousins), and had been
recognised with ecstasy by my affianced one (Miss Green), who had
come all the way from England (second house in the terrace) to
ransom me, and marry me. Here, had I first heard in confidence,
from one whose father was greatly connected, being under
Government, of the existence of a terrible banditti, called 'The
Radicals,' whose principles were, that the Prince Regent wore
stays, and that nobody had a right to any salary, and that the army
and navy ought to be put down - horrors at which I trembled in my
bed, after supplicating that the Radicals might be speedily taken
and hanged. Here, too, had we, the small boys of Boles's, had that
cricket match against the small boys of Coles's, when Boles and
Coles had actually met upon the ground, and when, instead of
instantly hitting out at one another with the utmost fury, as we
had all hoped and expected, those sneaks had said respectively, 'I
hope Mrs. Boles is well,' and 'I hope Mrs. Coles and the baby are
doing charmingly.' Could it be that, after all this, and much
more, the Playing-field was a Station, and No. 97 expectorated
boiling water and redhot cinders on it, and the whole belonged by
Act of Parliament to S.E.R.?
As it could be, and was, I left the place with a heavy heart for a
walk all over the town
. And first of Timpson's up-street. When I
departed from Dullborough in the strawy arms of Timpson's Blue-Eyed
Maid, Timpson's was a moderate-sized coach-office (in fact, a
little coach-office), with an oval transparency in the window,
which looked beautiful by night, representing one of Timpson's
coaches in the act of passing a milestone on the London road with
great velocity, completely full inside and out, and all the
passengers dressed in the first style of fashion, and enjoying
themselves tremendously. I found no such place as Timpson's now -
no such bricks and rafters, not to mention the name - no such
edifice on the teeming earth. Pickford had come and knocked
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Timpson's down. Pickford had not only knocked Timpson's down, but
had knocked two or three houses down on each side of Timpson's, and
then had knocked the whole into one great establishment with a pair
of big gates, in and out of which, his (Pickford's) waggons are, in
these days, always rattling, with their drivers sitting up so high,
that they look in at the second-floor windows of the old-fashioned
houses in the High-street as they shake the town. I have not the
honour of Pickford's acquaintance, but I felt that he had done me
an injury, not to say committed an act of boyslaughter, in running
over my Childhood in this rough manner; and if ever I meet Pickford
driving one of his own monsters, and smoking a pipe the while
(which is the custom of his men), he shall know by the expression
of my eye, if it catches his, that there is something wrong between
us.
Moreover, I felt that Pickford had no right to come rushing into
Dullborough and deprive the town of a public picture. He is not
Napoleon Bonaparte. When he took down the transparent stage-coach,
he ought to have given the town a transparent van. With a gloomy
conviction that Pickford is wholly utilitarian and unimaginative, I
proceeded on my way.
It is a mercy I have not a red and green lamp and a night-bell at
my door, for in my very young days I was taken to so many lyings-in
that I wonder I escaped becoming a professional martyr to them in
after-life. I suppose I had a very sympathetic nurse, with a large
circle of married acquaintance. However that was, as I continued
my walk through Dullborough, I found many houses to be solely
associated in my mind with this particular interest. At one little
greengrocer's shop, down certain steps from the street, I remember
to have waited on a lady who had had four children (I am afraid to
write five, though I fully believe it was five) at a birth. This
meritorious woman held quite a reception in her room on the morning
when I was introduced there, and the sight of the house brought
vividly to my mind how the four (five) deceased young people lay,
side by side, on a clean cloth on a chest of drawers; reminding me
by a homely association, which I suspect their complexion to have
assisted, of pigs' feet as they are usually displayed at a neat
tripe-shop. Hot candle was handed round on the occasion, and I
further remembered as I stood contemplating the greengrocer's, that
a subscription was entered into among the company, which became
extremely alarming to my consciousness of having pocket-money on my
person. This fact being known to my conductress, whoever she was,
I was earnestly exhorted to contribute, but resolutely declined:
therein disgusting the company, who gave me to understand that I
must dismiss all expectations of going to Heaven.
How does it happen that when all else is change wherever one goes,
there yet seem, in every place, to be some few people who never
alter? As the sight of the greengrocer's house recalled these
trivial incidents of long ago, the identical greengrocer appeared
on the steps, with his hands in his pockets, and leaning his
shoulder against the door-post, as my childish eyes had seen him
many a time; indeed, there was his old mark on the door-post yet,
as if his shadow had become a fixture there. It was he himself; he
might formerly have been an old-looking young man, or he might now
be a young-looking old man, but there he was. In walking along the
street, I had as yet looked in vain for a familiar face, or even a
transmitted face; here was the very greengrocer who had been
weighing and handling baskets on the morning of the reception. As
he brought with him a dawning remembrance that he had had no
proprietary interest in those babies, I crossed the road, and
accosted him on the subject. He was not in the least excited or
gratified, or in any way roused, by the accuracy of my
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recollection, but said, Yes, summut out of the common - he didn't
remember how many it was (as if half-a-dozen babes either way made
no difference) - had happened to a Mrs. What's-her-name, as once
lodged there - but he didn't call it to mind, particular. Nettled
by this phlegmatic conduct, I informed him that I had left the town
when I was a child. He slowly returned, quite unsoftened, and not
without a sarcastic kind of complacency, HAD I? Ah! And did I
find it had got on tolerably well without me? Such is the
difference (I thought, when I had left him a few hundred yards
behind, and was by so much in a better temper) between going away
from a place and remaining in it. I had no right, I reflected, to
be angry with the greengrocer for his want of interest, I was
nothing to him: whereas he was the town, the cathedral, the
bridge, the river, my childhood, and a large slice of my life, to
me.
Of course the town had shrunk fearfully, since I was a child there.
I had entertained the impression that the High-street was at least
as wide as Regent-street, London, or the Italian Boulevard at
Paris. I found it little better than a lane. There was a public
clock in it, which I had supposed to be the finest clock in the
world: whereas it now turned out to be as inexpressive, moonfaced,
and weak a clock as ever I saw. It belonged to a Town Hall,
where I had seen an Indian (who I now suppose wasn't an Indian)
swallow a sword (which I now suppose he didn't). The edifice had
appeared to me in those days so glorious a structure, that I had
set it up in my mind as the model on which the Genie of the Lamp
built the palace for Aladdin. A mean little brick heap, like a
demented chapel, with a few yawning persons in leather gaiters, and
in the last extremity for something to do, lounging at the door
with their hands in their pockets, and calling themselves a Corn
Exchange!
The Theatre was in existence, I found, on asking the fishmonger,
who had a compact show of stock in his window, consisting of a sole
and a quart of shrimps - and I resolved to comfort my mind by going
to look at it. Richard the Third, in a very uncomfortable cloak,
had first appeared to me there, and had made my heart leap with
terror by backing up against the stage-box in which I was posted,
while struggling for life against the virtuous Richmond. It was
within those walls that I had learnt as from a page of English
history, how that wicked King slept in war-time on a sofa much too
short for him, and how fearfully his conscience troubled his boots.
There, too, had I first seen the funny countryman, but countryman
of noble principles, in a flowered waistcoat, crunch up his little
hat and throw it on the ground, and pull off his coat, saying, 'Dom
thee, squire, coom on with thy fistes then!' At which the lovely
young woman who kept company with him (and who went out gleaning,
in a narrow white muslin apron with five beautiful bars of five
different-coloured ribbons across it) was so frightened for his
sake, that she fainted away. Many wondrous secrets of Nature had I
come to the knowledge of in that sanctuary: of which not the least
terrific were, that the witches in Macbeth bore an awful
resemblance to the Thanes and other proper inhabitants of Scotland;
and that the good King Duncan couldn't rest in his grave, but was
constantly coming out of it and calling himself somebody else. To
the Theatre, therefore, I repaired for consolation. But I found
very little, for it was in a bad and declining way. A dealer in
wine and bottled beer had already squeezed his trade into the boxoffice,
and the theatrical money was taken - when it came - in a
kind of meat-safe in the passage. The dealer in wine and bottled
beer must have insinuated himself under the stage too; for he
announced that he had various descriptions of alcoholic drinks 'in
the wood,' and there was no possible stowage for the wood anywhere
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else. Evidently, he was by degrees eating the establishment away
to the core, and would soon have sole possession of it. It was To
Let, and hopelessly so, for its old purposes; and there had been no
entertainment within its walls for a long time except a Panorama;
and even that had been announced as 'pleasingly instructive,' and I
know too well the fatal meaning and the leaden import of those
terrible expressions. No, there was no comfort in the Theatre. It
was mysteriously gone, like my own youth. Unlike my own youth, it
might be coming back some day; but there was little promise of it.