_ I got into the travelling chariot--it was of German make, roomy,
heavy, and unvarnished--I got into the travelling chariot, pulled
up the steps after me, shut myself in with a smart bang of the
door, and gave the word, 'Go on!'
Immediately, all that W. and S.W. division of London began to slide
away at a pace so lively, that I was over the river, and past the
Old Kent Road, and out on Blackheath, and even ascending Shooter's
Hill, before I had had time to look about me in the carriage, like
a collected traveller.
I had two ample Imperials on the roof, other fitted storage for
luggage in front, and other up behind; I had a net for books
overhead, great pockets to all the windows, a leathern pouch or two
hung up for odds and ends, and a reading lamp fixed in the back of
the chariot, in case I should be benighted. I was amply provided
in all respects, and had no idea where I was going (which was
delightful), except that I was going abroad.
So smooth was the old high road, and so fresh were the horses, and
so fast went I, that it was midway between Gravesend and Rochester,
and the widening river was bearing the ships, white sailed or
black-smoked, out to sea, when I noticed by the wayside a very
queer small boy.
'Holloa!' said I, to the very queer small boy, 'where do you live?'
'At Chatham,' says he.
'What do you do there?' says I.
'I go to school,' says he.
I took him up in a moment, and we went on. Presently, the very
queer small boy says, 'This is Gads-hill we are coming to, where
Falstaff went out to rob those travellers, and ran away.'
'You know something about Falstaff, eh?' said I.
'All about him,' said the very queer small boy. 'I am old (I am
nine), and I read all sorts of books. But DO let us stop at the
top of the hill, and look at the house there, if you please!'
'You admire that house?' said I.
'Bless you, sir,' said the very queer small boy, 'when I was not
more than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me to be
brought to look at it. And now, I am nine, I come by myself to
look at it. And ever since I can recollect, my father, seeing me
so fond of it, has often said to me, "If you were to be very
persevering and were to work hard, you might some day come to live
in it." Though that's impossible!' said the very queer small boy,
drawing a low breath, and now staring at the house out of window
with all his might.
I was rather amazed to be told this by the very queer small boy;
for that house happens to be MY house, and I have reason to believe
that what he said was true.
Well! I made no halt there, and I soon dropped the very queer
small boy and went on. Over the road where the old Romans used to
march, over the road where the old Canterbury pilgrims used to go,
over the road where the travelling trains of the old imperious
priests and princes used to jingle on horseback between the
continent and this Island through the mud and water, over the road
where Shakespeare hummed to himself, 'Blow, blow, thou winter
wind,' as he sat in the saddle at the gate of the inn yard noticing
the carriers; all among the cherry orchards, apple orchards, corn-
fields, and hop-gardens; so went I, by Canterbury to Dover. There,
the sea was tumbling in, with deep sounds, after dark, and the
revolving French light on Cape Grinez was seen regularly bursting
out and becoming obscured, as if the head of a gigantic light-
keeper in an anxious state of mind were interposed every half-
minute, to look how it was burning.
Early in the morning I was on the deck of the steam-packet, and we
were aiming at the bar in the usual intolerable manner, and the bar
was aiming at us in the usual intolerable manner, and the bar got
by far the best of it, and we got by far the worst--all in the
usual intolerable manner.
But, when I was clear of the Custom House on the other side, and
when I began to make the dust fly on the thirsty French roads, and
when the twigsome trees by the wayside (which, I suppose, never
will grow leafy, for they never did) guarded here and there a dusty
soldier, or field labourer, baking on a heap of broken stones,
sound asleep in a fiction of shade, I began to recover my
travelling spirits. Coming upon the breaker of the broken stones,
in a hard, hot, shining hat, on which the sun played at a distance
as on a burning-glass, I felt that now, indeed, I was in the dear
old France of my affections. I should have known it, without the
well-remembered bottle of rough ordinary wine, the cold roast fowl,
the loaf, and the pinch of salt, on which I lunched with
unspeakable satisfaction, from one of the stuffed pockets of the
chariot.
I must have fallen asleep after lunch, for when a bright face
looked in at the window, I started, and said:
'Good God, Louis, I dreamed you were dead!'
My cheerful servant laughed, and answered:
'Me? Not at all, sir.'
'How glad I am to wake! What are we doing Louis?'
'We go to take relay of horses. Will you walk up the hill?'
'Certainly.'
Welcome the old French hill, with the old French lunatic (not in
the most distant degree related to Sterne's Maria) living in a
thatched dog-kennel half-way up, and flying out with his crutch and
his big head and extended nightcap, to be beforehand with the old
men and women exhibiting crippled children, and with the children
exhibiting old men and women, ugly and blind, who always seemed by
resurrectionary process to be recalled out of the elements for the
sudden peopling of the solitude!
'It is well,' said I, scattering among them what small coin I had;
'here comes Louis, and I am quite roused from my nap.'
We journeyed on again, and I welcomed every new assurance that
France stood where I had left it. There were the posting-houses,
with their archways, dirty stable-yards, and clean post-masters'
wives, bright women of business, looking on at the putting-to of
the horses; there were the postilions counting what money they got,
into their hats, and never making enough of it; there were the
standard population of grey horses of Flanders descent, invariably
biting one another when they got a chance; there were the fleecy
sheepskins, looped on over their uniforms by the postilions, like
bibbed aprons when it blew and rained; there were their Jack-boots,
and their cracking whips; there were the cathedrals that I got out
to see, as under some cruel bondage, in no wise desiring to see
them; there were the little towns that appeared to have no reason
for being towns, since most of their houses were to let and nobody
could be induced to look at them, except the people who couldn't
let them and had nothing else to do but look at them all day. I
lay a night upon the road and enjoyed delectable cookery of
potatoes, and some other sensible things, adoption of which at home
would inevitably be shown to be fraught with ruin, somehow or
other, to that rickety national blessing, the British farmer; and
at last I was rattled, like a single pill in a box, over leagues of
stones, until--madly cracking, plunging, and flourishing two grey
tails about--I made my triumphal entry into Paris.
At Paris, I took an upper apartment for a few days in one of the
hotels of the Rue de Rivoli; my front windows looking into the
garden of the Tuileries (where the principal difference between the
nursemaids and the flowers seemed to be that the former were
locomotive and the latter not): my back windows looking at all the
other back windows in the hotel, and deep down into a paved yard,
where my German chariot had retired under a tight-fitting archway,
to all appearance for life, and where bells rang all day without
anybody's minding them but certain chamberlains with feather brooms
and green baize caps, who here and there leaned out of some high
window placidly looking down, and where neat waiters with trays on
their left shoulders passed and repassed from morning to night.
Whenever I am at Paris, I am dragged by invisible force into the
Morgue. I never want to go there, but am always pulled there. One
Christmas Day, when I would rather have been anywhere else, I was
attracted in, to see an old grey man lying all alone on his cold
bed, with a tap of water turned on over his grey hair, and running,
drip, drip, drip, down his wretched face until it got to the corner
of his mouth, where it took a turn, and made him look sly. One New
Year's Morning (by the same token, the sun was shining outside, and
there was a mountebank balancing a feather on his nose, within a
yard of the gate), I was pulled in again to look at a flaxen-haired
boy of eighteen, with a heart hanging on his breast--'from his
mother,' was engraven on it--who had come into the net across the
river, with a bullet wound in his fair forehead and his hands cut
with a knife, but whence or how was a blank mystery. This time, I
was forced into the same dread place, to see a large dark man whose
disfigurement by water was in a frightful manner comic, and whose
expression was that of a prize-fighter who had closed his eyelids
under a heavy blow, but was going immediately to open them, shake
his head, and 'come up smiling.' Oh what this large dark man cost
me in that bright city!
It was very hot weather, and he was none the better for that, and I
was much the worse. Indeed, a very neat and pleasant little woman
with the key of her lodging on her forefinger, who had been showing
him to her little girl while she and the child ate sweetmeats,
observed monsieur looking poorly as we came out together, and asked
monsieur, with her wondering little eyebrows prettily raised, if
there were anything the matter? Faintly replying in the negative,
monsieur crossed the road to a wine-shop, got some brandy, and
resolved to freshen himself with a dip in the great floating bath
on the river.
The bath was crowded in the usual airy manner, by a male population
in striped drawers of various gay colours, who walked up and down
arm in arm, drank coffee, smoked cigars, sat at little tables,
conversed politely with the damsels who dispensed the towels, and
every now and then pitched themselves into the river head foremost,
and came out again to repeat this social routine. I made haste to
participate in the water part of the entertainments, and was in the
full enjoyment of a delightful bath, when all in a moment I was
seized with an unreasonable idea that the large dark body was
floating straight at me.
I was out of the river, and dressing instantly. In the shock I had
taken some water into my mouth, and it turned me sick, for I
fancied that the contamination of the creature was in it. I had
got back to my cool darkened room in the hotel, and was lying on a
sofa there, before I began to reason with myself.
Of course, I knew perfectly well that the large dark creature was
stone dead, and that I should no more come upon him out of the
place where I had seen him dead, than I should come upon the
cathedral of Notre-Dame in an entirely new situation. What
troubled me was the picture of the creature; and that had so
curiously and strongly painted itself upon my brain, that I could
not get rid of it until it was worn out.
I noticed the peculiarities of this possession, while it was a real
discomfort to me. That very day, at dinner, some morsel on my
plate looked like a piece of him, and I was glad to get up and go
out. Later in the evening, I was walking along the Rue St. Honore,
when I saw a bill at a public room there, announcing small-sword
exercise, broad-sword exercise, wrestling, and other such feats. I
went in, and some of the sword-play being very skilful, remained.
A specimen of our own national sport, The British Boaxe, was
announced to be given at the close of the evening. In an evil
hour, I determined to wait for this Boaxe, as became a Briton. It
was a clumsy specimen (executed by two English grooms out of
place), but one of the combatants, receiving a straight right-
hander with the glove between his eyes, did exactly what the large
dark creature in the Morgue had seemed going to do--and finished me
for that night.
There was rather a sickly smell (not at all an unusual fragrance in
Paris) in the little ante-room of my apartment at the hotel. The
large dark creature in the Morgue was by no direct experience
associated with my sense of smell, because, when I came to the
knowledge of him, he lay behind a wall of thick plate-glass as good
as a wall of steel or marble for that matter. Yet the whiff of the
room never failed to reproduce him. What was more curious, was the
capriciousness with which his portrait seemed to light itself up in
my mind, elsewhere. I might be walking in the Palais Royal, lazily
enjoying the shop windows, and might be regaling myself with one of
the ready-made clothes shops that are set out there. My eyes,
wandering over impossible-waisted dressing-gowns and luminous
waistcoats, would fall upon the master, or the shopman, or even the
very dummy at the door, and would suggest to me, 'Something like
him!'--and instantly I was sickened again.
This would happen at the theatre, in the same manner. Often it
would happen in the street, when I certainly was not looking for
the likeness, and when probably there was no likeness there. It
was not because the creature was dead that I was so haunted,
because I know that I might have been (and I know it because I have
been) equally attended by the image of a living aversion. This
lasted about a week. The picture did not fade by degrees, in the
sense that it became a whit less forcible and distinct, but in the
sense that it obtruded itself less and less frequently. The
experience may be worth considering by some who have the care of
children. It would be difficult to overstate the intensity and
accuracy of an intelligent child's observation. At that
impressible time of life, it must sometimes produce a fixed
impression. If the fixed impression be of an object terrible to
the child, it will be (for want of reasoning upon) inseparable from
great fear. Force the child at such a time, be Spartan with it,
send it into the dark against its will, leave it in a lonely
bedroom against its will, and you had better murder it.
On a bright morning I rattled away from Paris, in the German
chariot, and left the large dark creature behind me for good. I
ought to confess, though, that I had been drawn back to the Morgue,
after he was put underground, to look at his clothes, and that I
found them frightfully like him--particularly his boots. However,
I rattled away for Switzerland, looking forward and not backward,
and so we parted company.
Welcome again, the long, long spell of France, with the queer
country inns, full of vases of flowers and clocks, in the dull
little town, and with the little population not at all dull on the
little Boulevard in the evening, under the little trees! Welcome
Monsieur the Cure, walking alone in the early morning a short way
out of the town, reading that eternal Breviary of yours, which
surely might be almost read, without book, by this time! Welcome
Monsieur the Cure, later in the day, jolting through the highway
dust (as if you had already ascended to the cloudy region), in a
very big-headed cabriolet, with the dried mud of a dozen winters on
it. Welcome again Monsieur the Cure, as we exchange salutations;
you, straightening your back to look at the German chariot, while
picking in your little village garden a vegetable or two for the
day's soup: I, looking out of the German chariot window in that
delicious traveller's trance which knows no cares, no yesterdays,
no to-morrows, nothing but the passing objects and the passing
scents and sounds! And so I came, in due course of delight, to
Strasbourg, where I passed a wet Sunday evening at a window, while
an idle trifle of a vaudeville was played for me at the opposite
house.
How such a large house came to have only three people living in it,
was its own affair. There were at least a score of windows in its
high roof alone; how many in its grotesque front, I soon gave up
counting. The owner was a shopkeeper, by name Straudenheim; by
trade--I couldn't make out what by trade, for he had forborne to
write that up, and his shop was shut.
At first, as I looked at Straudenheim's, through the steadily
falling rain, I set him up in business in the goose-liver line.
But, inspection of Straudenheim, who became visible at a window on
the second floor, convinced me that there was something more
precious than liver in the case. He wore a black velvet skull-cap,
and looked usurious and rich. A large-lipped, pear-nosed old man,
with white hair, and keen eyes, though near-sighted. He was
writing at a desk, was Straudenheim, and ever and again left off
writing, put his pen in his mouth, and went through actions with
his right hand, like a man steadying piles of cash. Five-franc
pieces, Straudenheim, or golden Napoleons? A jeweller,
Straudenheim, a dealer in money, a diamond merchant, or what?
Below Straudenheim, at a window on the first floor, sat his
housekeeper--far from young, but of a comely presence, suggestive
of a well-matured foot and ankle. She was cheerily dressed, had a
fan in her hand, and wore large gold earrings and a large gold
cross. She would have been out holiday-making (as I settled it)
but for the pestilent rain. Strasbourg had given up holiday-making
for that once, as a bad job, because the rain was jerking in gushes
out of the old roof-spouts, and running in a brook down the middle
of the street. The housekeeper, her arms folded on her bosom and
her fan tapping her chin, was bright and smiling at her open
window, but otherwise Straudenheim's house front was very dreary.
The housekeeper's was the only open window in it; Straudenheim kept
himself close, though it was a sultry evening when air is pleasant,
and though the rain had brought into the town that vague refreshing
smell of grass which rain does bring in the summer-time.
The dim appearance of a man at Straudenheim's shoulder, inspired me
with a misgiving that somebody had come to murder that flourishing
merchant for the wealth with which I had handsomely endowed him:
the rather, as it was an excited man, lean and long of figure, and
evidently stealthy of foot. But, he conferred with Straudenheim
instead of doing him a mortal injury, and then they both softly
opened the other window of that room--which was immediately over
the housekeeper's--and tried to see her by looking down. And my
opinion of Straudenheim was much lowered when I saw that eminent
citizen spit out of window, clearly with the hope of spitting on
the housekeeper.
The unconscious housekeeper fanned herself, tossed her head, and
laughed. Though unconscious of Straudenheim, she was conscious of
somebody else--of me?--there was nobody else.
After leaning so far out of the window, that I confidently expected
to see their heels tilt up, Straudenheim and the lean man drew
their heads in and shut the window. Presently, the house door
secretly opened, and they slowly and spitefully crept forth into
the pouring rain. They were coming over to me (I thought) to
demand satisfaction for my looking at the housekeeper, when they
plunged into a recess in the architecture under my window and
dragged out the puniest of little soldiers, begirt with the most
innocent of little swords. The tall glazed head-dress of this
warrior, Straudenheim instantly knocked off, and out of it fell two
sugar-sticks, and three or four large lumps of sugar.
The warrior made no effort to recover his property or to pick up
his shako, but looked with an expression of attention at
Straudenheim when he kicked him five times, and also at the lean
man when HE kicked him five times, and again at Straudenheim when
he tore the breast of his (the warrior's) little coat open, and
shook all his ten fingers in his face, as if they were ten
thousand. When these outrages had been committed, Straudenheim and
his man went into the house again and barred the door. A wonderful
circumstance was, that the housekeeper who saw it all (and who
could have taken six such warriors to her buxom bosom at once),
only fanned herself and laughed as she had laughed before, and
seemed to have no opinion about it, one way or other.
But, the chief effect of the drama was the remarkable vengeance
taken by the little warrior. Left alone in the rain, he picked up
his shako; put it on, all wet and dirty as it was; retired into a
court, of which Straudenheim's house formed the corner; wheeled
about; and bringing his two forefingers close to the top of his
nose, rubbed them over one another, cross-wise, in derision,
defiance, and contempt of Straudenheim. Although Straudenheim
could not possibly be supposed to be conscious of this strange
proceeding, it so inflated and comforted the little warrior's soul,
that twice he went away, and twice came back into the court to
repeat it, as though it must goad his enemy to madness. Not only
that, but he afterwards came back with two other small warriors,
and they all three did it together. Not only that--as I live to
tell the tale!--but just as it was falling quite dark, the three
came back, bringing with them a huge bearded Sapper, whom they
moved, by recital of the original wrong, to go through the same
performance, with the same complete absence of all possible
knowledge of it on the part of Straudenheim. And then they all
went away, arm in arm, singing.
I went away too, in the German chariot at sunrise, and rattled on,
day after day, like one in a sweet dream; with so many clear little
bells on the harness of the horses, that the nursery rhyme about
Banbury Cross and the venerable lady who rode in state there, was
always in my ears. And now I came to the land of wooden houses,
innocent cakes, thin butter soup, and spotless little inn bedrooms
with a family likeness to Dairies. And now the Swiss marksmen were
for ever rifle-shooting at marks across gorges, so exceedingly near
my ear, that I felt like a new Gesler in a Canton of Tells, and
went in highly-deserved danger of my tyrannical life. The prizes
at these shootings, were watches, smart handkerchiefs, hats,
spoons, and (above all) tea-trays; and at these contests I came
upon a more than usually accomplished and amiable countryman of my
own, who had shot himself deaf in whole years of competition, and
had won so many tea-trays that he went about the country with his
carriage full of them, like a glorified Cheap-Jack.
In the mountain-country into which I had now travelled, a yoke of
oxen were sometimes hooked on before the post-horses, and I went
lumbering up, up, up, through mist and rain, with the roar of
falling water for change of music. Of a sudden, mist and rain
would clear away, and I would come down into picturesque little
towns with gleaming spires and odd towers; and would stroll afoot
into market-places in steep winding streets, where a hundred women
in bodices, sold eggs and honey, butter and fruit, and suckled
their children as they sat by their clean baskets, and had such
enormous goitres (or glandular swellings in the throat) that it
became a science to know where the nurse ended and the child began.
About this time, I deserted my German chariot for the back of a
mule (in colour and consistency so very like a dusty old hair trunk
I once had at school, that I half expected to see my initials in
brass-headed nails on his backbone), and went up a thousand rugged
ways, and looked down at a thousand woods of fir and pine, and
would on the whole have preferred my mule's keeping a little nearer
to the inside, and not usually travelling with a hoof or two over
the precipice--though much consoled by explanation that this was to
be attributed to his great sagacity, by reason of his carrying
broad loads of wood at other times, and not being clear but that I
myself belonged to that station of life, and required as much room
as they. He brought me safely, in his own wise way, among the
passes of the Alps, and here I enjoyed a dozen climates a day;
being now (like Don Quixote on the back of the wooden horse) in the
region of wind, now in the region of fire, now in the region of
unmelting ice and snow. Here, I passed over trembling domes of
ice, beneath which the cataract was roaring; and here was received
under arches of icicles, of unspeakable beauty; and here the sweet
air was so bracing and so light, that at halting-times I rolled in
the snow when I saw my mule do it, thinking that he must know best.
At this part of the journey we would come, at mid-day, into half an
hour's thaw: when the rough mountain inn would be found on an
island of deep mud in a sea of snow, while the baiting strings of
mules, and the carts full of casks and bales, which had been in an
Arctic condition a mile off, would steam again. By such ways and
means, I would come to the cluster of chalets where I had to turn
out of the track to see the waterfall; and then, uttering a howl
like a young giant, on espying a traveller--in other words,
something to eat--coming up the steep, the idiot lying on the wood-
pile who sunned himself and nursed his goitre, would rouse the
woman-guide within the hut, who would stream out hastily, throwing
her child over one of her shoulders and her goitre over the other,
as she came along. I slept at religious houses, and bleak refuges
of many kinds, on this journey, and by the stove at night heard
stories of travellers who had perished within call, in wreaths and
drifts of snow. One night the stove within, and the cold outside,
awakened childish associations long forgotten, and I dreamed I was
in Russia--the identical serf out of a picture-book I had, before I
could read it for myself--and that I was going to be knouted by a
noble personage in a fur cap, boots, and earrings, who, I think,
must have come out of some melodrama.
Commend me to the beautiful waters among these mountains! Though I
was not of their mind: they, being inveterately bent on getting
down into the level country, and I ardently desiring to linger
where I was. What desperate leaps they took, what dark abysses
they plunged into, what rocks they wore away, what echoes they
invoked! In one part where I went, they were pressed into the
service of carrying wood down, to be burnt next winter, as costly
fuel, in Italy. But, their fierce savage nature was not to be
easily constrained, and they fought with every limb of the wood;
whirling it round and round, stripping its bark away, dashing it
against pointed corners, driving it out of the course, and roaring
and flying at the peasants who steered it back again from the bank
with long stout poles. Alas! concurrent streams of time and water
carried ME down fast, and I came, on an exquisitely clear day, to
the Lausanne shore of the Lake of Geneva, where I stood looking at
the bright blue water, the flushed white mountains opposite, and
the boats at my feet with their furled Mediterranean sails, showing
like enormous magnifications of this goose-quill pen that is now in
my hand.
- The sky became overcast without any notice; a wind very like the
March east wind of England, blew across me; and a voice said, 'How
do you like it? Will it do?'
I had merely shut myself, for half a minute, in a German travelling
chariot that stood for sale in the Carriage Department of the
London Pantechnicon. I had a commission to buy it, for a friend
who was going abroad; and the look and manner of the chariot, as I
tried the cushions and the springs, brought all these hints of
travelling remembrance before me.
'It will do very well,' said I, rather sorrowfully, as I got out at
the other door, and shut the carriage up. _