terrible thing happened next day. For, when dinner-time came, and
the Dock-bell rang to strike work, he put his rule into the long
pocket at the side of his trousers, and there he found a rat - not
that rat, but another rat. And in his hat, he found another; and
in his pocket-handkerchief, another; and in the sleeves of his
coat, when he pulled it on to go to dinner, two more. And from
that time he found himself so frightfully intimate with all the
rats in the Yard, that they climbed up his legs when he was at
work, and sat on his tools while he used them. And they could all
speak to one another, and he understood what they said. And they
got into his lodging, and into his bed, and into his teapot, and
into his beer, and into his boots. And he was going to be married
to a corn-chandler's daughter; and when he gave her a workbox he
had himself made for her, a rat jumped out of it; and when he put
his arm round her waist, a rat clung about her; so the marriage was
broken off, though the banns were already twice put up - which the
parish clerk well remembers, for, as he handed the book to the
clergyman for the second time of asking, a large fat rat ran over
the leaf. (By this time a special cascade of rats was rolling down
my back, and the whole of my small listening person was overrun
with them. At intervals ever since, I have been morbidly afraid of
my own pocket, lest my exploring hand should find a specimen or two
of those vermin in it.)
You may believe that all this was very terrible to Chips; but even
all this was not the worst. He knew besides, what the rats were
doing, wherever they were. So, sometimes he would cry aloud, when
he was at his club at night, 'Oh! Keep the rats out of the
convicts' burying-ground! Don't let them do that!' Or, 'There's
one of them at the cheese down-stairs!' Or, 'There's two of them
smelling at the baby in the garret!' Or, other things of that
sort. At last, he was voted mad, and lost his work in the Yard,
and could get no other work. But, King George wanted men, so
before very long he got pressed for a sailor. And so he was taken
off in a boat one evening to his ship, lying at Spithead, ready to
sail. And so the first thing he made out in her as he got near
her, was the figure-head of the old Seventy-four, where he had seen
the Devil. She was called the Argonaut, and they rowed right under
the bowsprit where the figure-head of the Argonaut, with a
sheepskin in his hand and a blue gown on, was looking out to sea;
and sitting staring on his forehead was the rat who could speak,
and his exact words were these: 'Chips ahoy! Old boy! We've
pretty well eat them too, and we'll drown the crew, and will eat
them too!' (Here I always became exceedingly faint, and would have
asked for water, but that I was speechless.)
The ship was bound for the Indies; and if you don't know where that
is, you ought to it, and angels will never love you. (Here I felt
myself an outcast from a future state.) The ship set sail that
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very night, and she sailed, and sailed, and sailed. Chips's
feelings were dreadful. Nothing ever equalled his terrors. No
wonder. At last, one day he asked leave to speak to the Admiral.
The Admiral giv' leave. Chips went down on his knees in the Great
State Cabin. 'Your Honour, unless your Honour, without a moment's
loss of time, makes sail for the nearest shore, this is a doomed
ship, and her name is the Coffin!' 'Young man, your words are a
madman's words.' 'Your Honour no; they are nibbling us away.'
'They?' 'Your Honour, them dreadful rats. Dust and hollowness
where solid oak ought to be! Rats nibbling a grave for every man
on board! Oh! Does your Honour love your Lady and your pretty
children?' 'Yes, my man, to be sure.' 'Then, for God's sake, make
for the nearest shore, for at this present moment the rats are all
stopping in their work, and are all looking straight towards you
with bare teeth, and are all saying to one another that you shall
never, never, never, never, see your Lady and your children more.'
'My poor fellow, you are a case for the doctor. Sentry, take care
So, he was bled and he was blistered, and he was this and that, for
six whole days and nights. So, then he again asked leave to speak
to the Admiral. The Admiral giv' leave. He went down on his knees
in the Great State Cabin. 'Now, Admiral, you must die! You took
no warning; you must die! The rats are never wrong in their
calculations, and they make out that they'll be through, at twelve
to-night. So, you must die! - With me and all the rest!' And so
at twelve o'clock there was a great leak reported in the ship, and
a torrent of water rushed in and nothing could stop it, and they
all went down, every living soul. And what the rats - being waterrats
- left of Chips, at last floated to shore, and sitting on him
was an immense overgrown rat, laughing, that dived when the corpse
touched the beach and never came up. And there was a deal of
seaweed on the remains. And if you get thirteen bits of seaweed,
and dry them and burn them in the fire, they will go off like in
these thirteen words as plain as plain can be:
'A Lemon has pips,
And a Yard has ships,
And I've got Chips!'
The same female bard - descended, possibly, from those terrible old
Scalds who seem to have existed for the express purpose of addling
the brains of mankind when they begin to investigate languages -
made a standing pretence which greatly assisted in forcing me back
to a number of hideous places that I would by all means have
avoided. This pretence was, that all her ghost stories had
occurred to her own relations. Politeness towards a meritorious
family, therefore, forbade my doubting them, and they acquired an
air of authentication that impaired my digestive powers for life.
There was a narrative concerning an unearthly animal foreboding
death, which appeared in the open street to a parlour-maid who
'went to fetch the beer' for supper: first (as I now recall it)
assuming the likeness of a black dog, and gradually rising on its
hind-legs and swelling into the semblance of some quadruped greatly
surpassing a hippopotamus: which apparition - not because I deemed
it in the least improbable, but because I felt it to be really too
large to bear - I feebly endeavoured to explain away. But, on
Mercy's retorting with wounded dignity that the parlour-maid was
her own sister-in-law, I perceived there was no hope, and resigned
myself to this zoological phenomenon as one of my many pursuers.
There was another narrative describing the apparition of a young
woman who came out of a glass-case and haunted another young woman
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until the other young woman questioned it and elicited that its
bones (Lord! To think of its being so particular about its bones!)
were buried un
der the glass-case, whereas she required them to be
interred, with every Undertaking solemnity up to twenty-four pound
ten, in another particular place. This narrative I considered - I
had a personal interest in disproving, because we had glass-cases
at home, and how, otherwise, was I to be guaranteed from the
intrusion of young women requiring ME TO bury them up to twentyfour
pound ten, when I had only twopence a week? But my
remorseless nurse cut the ground from under my tender feet, by
informing me that She was the other young woman; and I couldn't say
'I don't believe you;' it was not possible.
Such are a few of the uncommercial journeys that I was forced to
make, against my will, when I was very young and unreasoning. And
really, as to the latter part of them, it is not so very long ago -
now I come to think of it - that I was asked to undertake them once
again, with a steady countenance.
CHAPTER XVI - ARCADIAN LONDON
Being in a humour for complete solitude and uninterrupted
meditation this autumn, I have taken a lodging for six weeks in the
most unfrequented part of England - in a word, in London.
From this lonely spot I make pilgrimages into the surrounding
wilderness, and traverse extensive tracts of the Great Desert. The
first solemn feeling of isolation overcome, the first oppressive
consciousness of profound retirement conquered, I enjoy that sense
of freedom, and feel reviving within me that latent wildness of the
original savage, which has been (upon the whole somewhat
frequently) noticed by Travellers.
My lodgings are at a hatter's - my own hatter's. After exhibiting
no articles in his window for some weeks, but sea-side wide-awakes,
shooting-caps, and a choice of rough waterproof head-gear for the
moors and mountains, he has put upon the heads of his family as
much of this stock as they could carry, and has taken them off to
the Isle of Thanet. His young man alone remains - and remains
alone in the shop. The young man has let out the fire at which the
irons are heated, and, saving his strong sense of duty, I see no
reason why he should take the shutters down.
Happily for himself and for his country the young man is a
Volunteer; most happily for himself, or I think he would become the
prey of a settled melancholy. For, to live surrounded by human
hats, and alienated from human heads to fit them on, is surely a
great endurance. But, the young man, sustained by practising his
exercise, and by constantly furbishing up his regulation plume (it
is unnecessary to observe that, as a hatter, he is in a cock'sfeather
corps), is resigned, and uncomplaining. On a Saturday,
when he closes early and gets his Knickerbockers on, he is even
cheerful. I am gratefully particular in this reference to him,
because he is my companion through many peaceful hours.
My hatter has a desk up certain steps behind his counter, enclosed
like the clerk's desk at Church. I shut myself into this place of
seclusion, after breakfast, and meditate. At such times, I observe
the young man loading an imaginary rifle with the greatest
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precision, and maintaining a most galling and destructive fire upon
the national enemy. I thank him publicly for his companionship and
his patriotism.
The simple character of my life, and the calm nature of the scenes
by which I am surrounded, occasion me to rise early. I go forth in
my slippers, and promenade the pavement. It is pastoral to feel
the freshness of the air in the uninhabited town, and to appreciate
the shepherdess character of the few milkwomen who purvey so little
milk that it would be worth nobody's while to adulterate it, if
anybody were left to undertake the task. On the crowded sea-shore,
the great demand for milk, combined with the strong local
temptation of chalk, would betray itself in the lowered quality of
the article. In Arcadian London I derive it from the cow.
The Arcadian simplicity of the metropolis altogether, and the
primitive ways into which it has fallen in this autumnal Golden
Age, make it entirely new to me. Within a few hundred yards of my
retreat, is the house of a friend who maintains a most sumptuous
butler. I never, until yesterday, saw that butler out of superfine
black broadcloth. Until yesterday, I never saw him off duty, never
saw him (he is the best of butlers) with the appearance of having
any mind for anything but the glory of his master and his master's
friends. Yesterday morning, walking in my slippers near the house
of which he is the prop and ornament - a house now a waste of
shutters - I encountered that butler, also in his slippers, and in
a shooting suit of one colour, and in a low-crowned straw-hat,
smoking an early cigar. He felt that we had formerly met in
another state of existence, and that we were translated into a new
sphere. Wisely and well, he passed me without recognition. Under
his arm he carried the morning paper, and shortly afterwards I saw
him sitting on a rail in the pleasant open landscape of Regentstreet,
perusing it at his ease under the ripening sun.
My landlord having taken his whole establishment to be salted down,
I am waited on by an elderly woman labouring under a chronic sniff,
who, at the shadowy hour of half-past nine o'clock of every
evening, gives admittance at the street door to a meagre and mouldy
old man whom I have never yet seen detached from a flat pint of
beer in a pewter pot. The meagre and mouldy old man is her
husband, and the pair have a dejected consciousness that they are
not justified in appearing on the surface of the earth. They come
out of some hole when London empties itself, and go in again when
it fills. I saw them arrive on the evening when I myself took
possession, and they arrived with the flat pint of beer, and their
bed in a bundle. The old man is a weak old man, and appeared to me
to get the bed down the kitchen stairs by tumbling down with and
upon it. They make their bed in the lowest and remotest corner of
the basement, and they smell of bed, and have no possession but
bed: unless it be (which I rather infer from an under-current of
flavour in them) cheese. I know their name, through the chance of
having called the wife's attention, at half-past nine on the second
evening of our acquaintance, to the circumstance of there being
some one at the house door; when she apologetically explained,
'It's only Mr. Klem.' What becomes of Mr. Klem all day, or when he
goes out, or why, is a mystery I cannot penetrate; but at half-past
nine he never fails to turn up on the door-step with the flat pint
of beer. And the pint of beer, flat as it is, is so much more
important than himself, that it always seems to my fancy as if it
had found him drivelling in the street and had humanely brought him
home. In making his way below, Mr. Klem never goes down the middle
of the passage, like another Christian, but shuffles against the
wall as if entreating me to take notice that he is occupying as
little space as possible in the house; and whenever I come upon him
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face to face, he backs from me in fascinated confusion. The most
extraordinary circumstance I have traced in connexion with this
aged couple, is, that there is a Miss Klem, their daughter,
apparently ten years older than either of them, who has also a bed
and smells of it, and carries it about the earth at dusk and hides
it in deserted houses. I came into this piece of knowledge through
Mrs. Klem's beseeching me to sanction the sheltering of Miss Klem
under that roof for a single night, 'between her takin' care of the
upper part in Pall Mall which the family of his back, and a 'ouse
in Serjameses-street, which the family of leaves towng ter-morrer.'
I gave my gracious consent (having nothing that I know of to do
with it), and in the shadowy hours Miss Klem became perceptible on
the door-step, wrestling with a bed in a bundle. Where she made it
up for the night I cannot positively state, but, I think, in a
sink. I know that with the instinct of a reptile or an insect, she
stowed it and herself away in deep obscurity. In the Klem family,
I have noticed another remarkable gift of nature, and that is a
power they possess of converting everything into flue. Such broken
victuals as they take by stealth, appear (whatever the nature of
the viands) invariably to generate flue; and even the nightly pint
of beer, instead of assimilating naturally, strikes me as breaking
out in that form, equally on the shabby gown of Mrs. Klem, and the
threadbare coat of her husband.
Mrs. Klem has no idea of my name - as to Mr. Klem he has no idea of
anything - and only knows me as her good gentleman. Thus, if
doubtful whether I am in my room or no, Mrs. Klem taps at the door
and says, 'Is my good gentleman here?' Or, if a messenger desiring
to see me were consistent with my solitude, she would show him in
with 'Here is my good gentleman.' I find this to be a generic
custom. For, I meant to have observed before now, that in its
Arcadian time all my part of London is indistinctly pervaded by the
Klem species. They creep about with beds, and go to bed in miles