a hayfield; it is possible to imagine his desk, like the desk of a
clerk at church, without him; but imagination is unable to pursue
the men who wait at Garraway's all the week for the men who never
come. When they are forcibly put out of Garraway's on Saturday
night - which they must be, for they never would go out of their
own accord - where do they vanish until Monday morning? On the
first Sunday that I ever strayed here, I expected to find them
hovering about these lanes, like restless ghosts, and trying to
peep into Garraway's through chinks in the shutters, if not
endeavouring to turn the lock of the door with false keys, picks,
and screw-drivers. But the wonder is, that they go clean away!
And now I think of it, the wonder is, that every working-day
pervader of these scenes goes clean away. The man who sells the
dogs' collars and the little toy coal-scuttles, feels under as
great an obligation to go afar off, as Glyn and Co., or Smith,
Payne, and Smith. There is an old monastery-crypt under Garraway's
(I have been in it among the port wine), and perhaps Garraway's,
taking pity on the mouldy men who wait in its public-room all their
lives, gives them cool house-room down there over Sundays; but the
catacombs of Paris would not be large enough to hold the rest of
the missing. This characteristic of London City greatly helps its
being the quaint place it is in the weekly pause of business, and
greatly helps my Sunday sensation in it of being the Last Man. In
my solitude, the ticket-porters being all gone with the rest, I
venture to breathe to the quiet bricks and stones my confidential
wonderment why a ticket-porter, who never does any work with his
hands, is bound to wear a white apron, and why a great
Ecclesiastical Dignitary, who never does any work with his hands
either, is equally bound to wear a black one.
CHAPTER XXIV - AN OLD STAGE-COACHING HOUSE
Before the waitress had shut the door, I had forgotten how many
stage-coaches she said used to change horses in the town every day.
But it was of little moment; any high number would do as well as
another. It had been a great stage-coaching town in the great
stage-coaching times, and the ruthless railways had killed and
buried it.
The sign of the house was the Dolphin's Head. Why only head, I
don't know; for the Dolphin's effigy at full length, and upside
down - as a Dolphin is always bound to be when artistically
treated, though I suppose he is sometimes right side upward in his
natural condition - graced the sign-board. The sign-board chafed
its rusty hooks outside the bow-window of my room, and was a shabby
work. No visitor could have denied that the Dolphin was dying by
inches, but he showed no bright colours. He had once served
another master; there was a newer streak of paint below him,
displaying with inconsistent freshness the legend, By J. MELLOWS.
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My door opened again, and J. Mellows's representative came back. I
had asked her what I could have for dinner, and she now returned
with the counter question, what would I like? As the Dolphin stood
possessed of nothing that I do like, I was fain to yield to the
suggestion of a duck, which I don't like. J. Mellows's
representative was a mournful young woman with eye susceptible of
guidance, and one uncontrollable eye; which latter, seeming to
wander in quest of stage-coaches, deepened the melancholy in which
the Dolphin was steeped.
This young woman had but shut the door on retiring again when I
bethought me of adding to my order, the words, 'with nice
vegetables.' Looking out at the door to give them emphatic
utterance, I found her already in a state of pensive catalepsy in
the deserted gallery, picking her teeth with a pin.
At the Railway Station seven miles off, I had been the subject of
wonder when I ordered a fly in which to come here. And when I gave
the direction 'To the Dolphin's Head,' I had observed an ominous
stare on the countenance of the strong young man in velveteen, who
was the platform servant of the Company. He had also called to my
driver at parting, 'All ri-ight! Don't hang yourself when you get
there, Geo-o-rge!' in a sarcastic tone, for which I had entertained
some transitory thoughts of reporting him to the General Manager.
I had no business in the town - I never have any business in any
town - but I had been caught by the fancy that I would come and
look at it in its degeneracy. My purpose was fitly inaugurated by
the Dolphin's Head, which everywhere expressed past coachfulness
and present coachlessness. Coloured prints of coaches, starting,
arriving, changing horses, coaches in the sunshine, coaches in the
snow, coaches in the wind, coaches in the mist and rain, coaches on
the King's birthday, coaches in all circumstances compatible with
their triumph and victory, but never in the act of breaking down or
overturning, pervaded the house. Of these works of art, some,
framed and not glazed, had holes in them; the varnish of others had
become so brown and cracked, that they looked like overdone piecrust;
the designs of others were almost obliterated by the flies
of many summers. Broken glasses, damaged frames, lop-sided
hanging, and consignment of incurable cripples to places of refuge
in dark corners, attested the desolation of the rest. The old room
on the ground floor where the passengers of the Highflyer used to
dine, had nothing in it but a wretched show of twigs and flowerpots
in the broad window to hide the nakedness of the land, and in
a corner little Mellows's perambulator, with even its parasol-head
turned despondently to the wall. The other room, where post-horse
company used to wait while relays were getting ready down the yard,
still held its ground, but was as airless as I conceive a hearse to
be: insomuch that Mr. Pitt, hanging high against the partition
(with spots on him like port wine, though it is mysterious how port
wine ever got squirted up there), had good reason for perking his
nose and sniffing. The stopperless cruets on the spindle-shanked
sideboard were in a miserably dejected state: the anchovy sauce
having turned blue some years ago, and the cayenne pepper (with a
scoop in it like a small model of a wooden leg) having turned
solid. The old fraudulent candles which were always being paid for
and never used, were burnt out at last; but their tall stilts of
candlesticks still lingered, and still outraged the human intellect
by pretending to be silver. The mouldy old unreformed Borough
Member, with his right hand buttoned up in the breast of his coat,
and his back characteristically turned on bales of petitions from
his constituents, was there too; and the poker which never had been
among the fire-irons, lest post-horse company should overstir the
fire, was NOT there, as of old.
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Pur
suing my researches in the Dolphin's Head, I found it sorely
shrunken. When J. Mellows came into possession, he had walled off
half the bar, which was now a tobacco-shop with its own entrance in
the yard - the once glorious yard where the postboys, whip in hand
and always buttoning their waistcoats at the last moment, used to
come running forth to mount and away. A 'Scientific Shoeing -
Smith and Veterinary Surgeon,' had further encroached upon the
yard; and a grimly satirical jobber, who announced himself as
having to Let 'A neat one-horse fly, and a one-horse cart,' had
established his business, himself, and his family, in a part of the
extensive stables. Another part was lopped clean off from the
Dolphin's Head, and now comprised a chapel, a wheelwright's, and a
Young Men's Mutual Improvement and Discussion Society (in a loft):
the whole forming a back lane. No audacious hand had plucked down
the vane from the central cupola of the stables, but it had grown
rusty and stuck at N-Nil: while the score or two of pigeons that
remained true to their ancestral traditions and the place, had
collected in a row on the roof-ridge of the only outhouse retained
by the Dolphin, where all the inside pigeons tried to push the
outside pigeon off. This I accepted as emblematical of the
struggle for post and place in railway times.
Sauntering forth into the town, by way of the covered and pillared
entrance to the Dolphin's Yard, once redolent of soup and stablelitter,
now redolent of musty disuse, I paced the street. It was a
hot day, and the little sun-blinds of the shops were all drawn
down, and the more enterprising tradesmen had caused their
'Prentices to trickle water on the pavement appertaining to their
frontage. It looked as if they had been shedding tears for the
stage-coaches, and drying their ineffectual pocket-handkerchiefs.
Such weakness would have been excusable; for business was - as one
dejected porkman who kept a shop which refused to reciprocate the
compliment by keeping him, informed me - 'bitter bad.' Most of the
harness-makers and corn-dealers were gone the way of the coaches,
but it was a pleasant recognition of the eternal procession of
Children down that old original steep Incline, the Valley of the
Shadow, that those tradesmen were mostly succeeded by vendors of
sweetmeats and cheap toys. The opposition house to the Dolphin,
once famous as the New White Hart, had long collapsed. In a fit of
abject depression, it had cast whitewash on its windows, and
boarded up its front door, and reduced itself to a side entrance;
but even that had proved a world too wide for the Literary
Institution which had been its last phase; for the Institution had
collapsed too, and of the ambitious letters of its inscription on
the White Hart's front, all had fallen off but these:
L Y INS T
- suggestive of Lamentably Insolvent. As to the neighbouring
market-place, it seemed to have wholly relinquished marketing, to
the dealer in crockery whose pots and pans straggled half across
it, and to the Cheap Jack who sat with folded arms on the shafts of
his cart, superciliously gazing around; his velveteen waistcoat,
evidently harbouring grave doubts whether it was worth his while to
stay a night in such a place.
The church bells began to ring as I left this spot, but they by no
means improved the case, for they said, in a petulant way, and
speaking with some difficulty in their irritation, WHAT'S-be-comeof-
THE-coach-ES!' Nor would they (I found on listening) ever vary
their emphasis, save in respect of growing more sharp and vexed,
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but invariably went on, 'WHAT'S-be-come-of-THE-coach-ES!' - always
beginning the inquiry with an unpolite abruptness. Perhaps from
their elevation they saw the railway, and it aggravated them.
Coming upon a coachmaker's workshop, I began to look about me with
a revived spirit, thinking that perchance I might behold there some
remains of the old times of the town's greatness. There was only
one man at work - a dry man, grizzled, and far advanced in years,
but tall and upright, who, becoming aware of me looking on,
straightened his back, pushed up his spectacles against his brownpaper
cap, and appeared inclined to defy me. To whom I pacifically
said:
'Good day, sir!'
'What?' said he.
'Good day, sir.'
He seemed to consider about that, and not to agree with me. - 'Was
you a looking for anything?' he then asked, in a pointed manner.
'I was wondering whether there happened to be any fragment of an
old stage-coach here.'
'Is that all?'
'That's all.'
'No, there ain't.'
It was now my turn to say 'Oh!' and I said it. Not another word
did the dry and grizzled man say, but bent to his work again. In
the coach-making days, the coach-painters had tried their brushes
on a post beside him; and quite a Calendar of departed glories was
to be read upon it, in blue and yellow and red and green, some
inches thick. Presently he looked up again.
'You seem to have a deal of time on your hands,' was his querulous
remark.
I admitted the fact.
'I think it's a pity you was not brought up to something,' said he.
I said I thought so too.
Appearing to be informed with an idea, he laid down his plane (for
it was a plane he was at work with), pushed up his spectacles
again, and came to the door.
'Would a po-shay do for you?' he asked.
'I am not sure that I understand what you mean.'
'Would a po-shay,' said the coachmaker, standing close before me,
'would a po-shay meet the views you have expressed? Yes, or no?'
'Yes.'
'Then you keep straight along down there till you see one. YOU'LL
see one if you go fur enough.'
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With that, he turned me by the shoulder in the direction I was to
take, and went in and resumed his work against a background of
leaves and grapes. For, although he was a soured man and a
discontented, his workshop was that agreeable mixture of town and
country, street and garden, which is often to be seen in a small
English town.
I went the way he had turned me, and I came to the Beer-shop with
the sign of The First and Last, and was out of the town on the old
London road. I came to the Turnpike, and I found it, in its silent
way, eloquent respecting the change that had fallen on the road.
The Turnpike-house was all overgrown with ivy; and the Turnpikekeeper,
unable to get a living out of the tolls, plied the trade of
a cobbler. Not only that, but his wife sold ginger-beer, and, in
the very window of espial through which the Toll-takers of old
times used with awe to behold the grand London coaches coming on at
a gallop, exhibited for sale little barber's-p
oles of sweetstuff in
a sticky lantern.
The political economy of the master of the turnpike thus expressed
itself.
'How goes turnpike business, master?' said I to him, as he sat in
his little porch, repairing a shoe.
'It don't go at all, master,' said he to me. 'It's stopped.'
'That's bad,' said I.
'Bad?' he repeated. And he pointed to one of his sunburnt dusty
children who was climbing the turnpike-gate, and said, extending
his open right hand in remonstrance with Universal Nature. 'Five
on 'em!'
'But how to improve Turnpike business?' said I.
'There's a way, master,' said he, with the air of one who had
thought deeply on the subject.
'I should like to know it.'
'Lay a toll on everything as comes through; lay a toll on walkers.
Lay another toll on everything as don't come through; lay a toll on
them as stops at home.'
'Would the last remedy be fair?'
'Fair? Them as stops at home, could come through if they liked;
couldn't they?'
'Say they could.'
'Toll 'em. If they don't come through, it's THEIR look out.
Anyways, - Toll 'em!'
Finding it was as impossible to argue with this financial genius as
if he had been Chancellor of the Exchequer, and consequently the
right man in the right place, I passed on meekly.
My mind now began to misgive me that the disappointed coach-maker
had sent me on a wild-goose errand, and that there was no postchaise
in those parts. But coming within view of certain
allotment-gardens by the roadside, I retracted the suspicion, and
confessed that I had done him an injustice. For, there I saw,
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surely, the poorest superannuated post-chaise left on earth.
It was a post-chaise taken off its axletree and wheels, and plumped
down on the clayey soil among a ragged growth of vegetables. It
was a post-chaise not even set straight upon the ground, but tilted
over, as if it had fallen out of a balloon. It was a post-chaise
that had been a long time in those decayed circumstances, and
against which scarlet beans were trained. It was a post-chaise
patched and mended with old tea-trays, or with scraps of iron that
looked like them, and boarded up as to the windows, but having A
KNOCKER on the off-side door. Whether it was a post-chaise used as