CHAPTER IV
We had taken the precaution to send, the day before, to secure our due complement of places—four in all, including one for Mrs. Primmins—in, or upon, the fast family coach called the “Sun,” which had lately been set up for the special convenience of the neighborhood.
This luminary, rising in a town about seven miles distant from us, described at first a very erratic orbit amidst the contiguous villages before it finally struck into the high-road of enlightenment, and thence performed its journey, in the full eyes of man, at the majestic pace of six miles and a half an hour. My father with his pockets full of books, and a quarto of “Gebelin on the Primitive World,” for light reading, under his arm; my mother with a little basket containing sandwiches, and biscuits of her own baking; Mrs. Primmins, with a new umbrella purchased for the occasion, and a bird-cage containing a canary endeared to her not more by song than age and a severe pip through which she had successfully nursed it; and I myself,—waited at the gates to welcome the celestial visitor. The gardener, with a wheel-barrow full of boxes and portmanteaus, stood a little in the van; and the footman, who was to follow when lodgings had been found, had gone to a rising eminence to watch the dawning of the expected “Sun,” and apprise us of its approach by the concerted signal of a handkerchief fixed to a stick.
The quaint old house looked at us mournfully from all its deserted windows. The litter before its threshold and in its open hall; wisps of straw or hay that had been used for packing; baskets and boxes that had been examined and rejected; others, corded and piled, reserved to follow with the footman; and the two heated and hurried serving-women left behind, standing halfway between house and garden-gate, whispering to each other, and looking as if they had not slept for weeks,—gave to a scene, usually so trim and orderly, an aspect of pathetic abandonment and desolation. The Genius of the place seemed to reproach us. I felt the omens were against us, and turned my earnest gaze from the haunts behind with a sigh, as the coach now drew up with all its grandeur. An important personage, who, despite the heat of the day, was enveloped in a vast superfluity of belcher, in the midst of which galloped a gilt fox, and who rejoiced in the name of “guard,” descended to inform us politely that only three places, two inside and one out, were at our disposal, the rest having been pre-engaged a fortnight before our orders were received.
Now, as I knew that Mrs. Primmins was indispensable to the comforts of my honored parents (the more so as she had once lived in London, and knew all its ways), I suggested that she should take the outside seat, and that I should perform the journey on foot,—a primitive mode of transport which has its charms to a young man with stout limbs and gay spirits. The guard’s outstretched arm left my mother little time to oppose this proposition, to which my father assented with a silent squeeze of the hand. And having promised to join them at a family hotel near the Strand, to which Mr. Squills had recommended them as peculiarly genteel and quiet, and waved my last farewell to my poor mother, who continued to stretch her meek face out of the window till the coach was whirled off in a cloud like one of the Homeric heroes, I turned within, to put up a few necessary articles in a small knapsack which I remembered to have seen in the lumber-room, and which had appertained to my maternal grandfather; and with that on my shoulder, and a strong staff in my hand, I set off towards the great city at as brisk a pace as if I were only bound to the next village. Accordingly, about noon I was both tired and hungry; and seeing by the wayside one of those pretty inns yet peculiar to England, but which, thanks to the railways, will soon be amongst the things before the Flood, I sat down at a table under some clipped limes, unbuckled my knapsack, and ordered my simple fare with the dignity of one who, for the first time in his life, bespeaks his own dinner and pays for it out of his own pocket.
While engaged on a rasher of bacon and a tankard of what the landlord called “No mistake,” two pedestrians, passing the same road which I had traversed, paused, cast a simultaneous look at my occupation, and induced no doubt by its allurements, seated themselves under the same lime-trees, though at the farther end of the table. I surveyed the new-comers with the curiosity natural to my years.
The elder of the two might have attained the age of thirty, though sundry deep lines, and hues formerly florid and now faded, speaking of fatigue, care, or dissipation, might have made him look somewhat older than he was. There was nothing very prepossessing in his appearance. He was dressed with a pretension ill suited to the costume appropriate to a foot-traveller. His coat was pinched and padded; two enormous pins, connected by a chain, decorated a very stiff stock of blue satin dotted with yellow stars; his hands were cased in very dingy gloves which had once been straw-colored, and the said hands played with a whalebone cane surmounted by a formidable knob, which gave it the appearance of a “life-preserver.” As he took off a white napless hat, which he wiped with great care and affection with the sleeve of his right arm, a profusion of stiff curls instantly betrayed the art of man. Like my landlord’s ale, in that wig there was “no mistake;” it was brought (after the fashion of the wigs we see in the popular effigies of George IV. in his youth), low over his fore-head, and was raised at the top. The wig had been oiled, and the oil had imbibed no small quantity of dust; oil and dust had alike left their impression on the forehead and cheeks of the wig’s proprietor. For the rest, the expression of his face was somewhat impudent and reckless, but not without a certain drollery in the corners of his eyes.
The younger man was apparently about my own age,—a year or two older, perhaps, judging rather from his set and sinewy frame than his boyish countenance. And this last, boyish as it was, could not fail to command the attention even of the most careless observer. It had not only the darkness, but the character of the gipsy face, with large, brilliant eyes, raven hair, long and wavy, but not curling; the features were aquiline, but delicate, and when he spoke he showed teeth dazzling as pearls. It was impossible not to admire the singular beauty of the countenance; and yet it had that expression, at once stealthy and fierce, which war with society has stamped upon the lineaments of the race of which it reminded me. But, withal, there was somewhat of the air of a gentleman in this young wayfarer. His dress consisted of a black velveteen shooting-jacket, or rather short frock, with a broad leathern strap at the waist, loose white trousers, and a foraging cap, which he threw carelessly on the table as he wiped his brow. Turning round impatiently, and with some haughtiness, from his companion, he surveyed me with a quick, observant flash of his piercing eyes, and then stretched himself at length on the bench, and appeared either to dose or muse, till, in obedience to his companion’s orders, the board was spread with all the cold meats the larder could supply.
“Beef!” said his companion, screwing a pinchbeck glass into his right eye. “Beef,—mottled, cowey; humph! Lamb,—oldish, rawish, muttony; humph! Pie,—stalish. Veal?—no, pork. Ah! what will you have?”
“Help yourself,” replied the young man peevishly, as he sat up, looked disdainfully at the viands, and, after a long pause, tasted first one, then the other, with many shrugs of the shoulders and muttered exclamations of discontent. Suddenly he looked up, and called for brandy; and to my surprise, and I fear admiration, he drank nearly half a tumblerful of that poison undiluted, with a composure that spoke of habitual use.
“Wrong!” said his companion, drawing the bottle to himself, and mixing the alcohol in careful proportions with water. “Wrong! coats of stomach soon wear out with that kind of clothes-brush. Better stick to the ‘yeasty foam,’ as sweet Will says. That young gentleman sets you a good example,” and therewith the speaker nodded at me familiarly. Inexperienced as I was, I surmised at once that it was his intention to make acquaintance with the neighbor thus saluted. I was not deceived. “Anything to tempt you, sir?” asked this social personage after a short pause, and describing a semicircle with the point of his knife.
“I thank you, sir, but I have dined.”
“What then? ‘Break out into a second course of mischief,’ as the Swan recommends,—Swan of Avon, sir! No? ‘Well, then, I charge you with this cup of sack.’ Are you going far, if I may take the liberty to ask?”
“To London.”
“Oh!” said the traveller, while his young companion lifted his eyes; and I was again struck with their remarkable penetration and brilliancy.
“London is the best place in the world for a lad of spirit. See life there,—‘glass of fashion and mould of form.’ Fond of the play, sir?”
“I never saw one.”
“Possible!” cried the gentleman, dropping the handle of his knife, and bringing up the point horizontally; “then, young man,” he added solemnly, “you have,—but I won’t say what you have to see. I won’t say,—no, not if you could cover this table with golden guineas, and exclaim, with the generous ardor so engaging in youth, ‘Mr. Peacock, these are yours if you will only say what I have to see!’”
I laughed outright. May I be forgiven for the boast, but I had the reputation at school of a pleasant laugh. The young man’s face grew dark at the sound; he pushed back his plate and sighed.
“Why,” continued his friend, “my companion here, who, I suppose, is about your own age, he could tell you what a play is,—he could tell you what life is. He has viewed the manners of the town; ‘perused the traders,’ as the Swan poetically remarks. Have you not, my lad, eh?”
Thus directly appealed to, the boy looked up with a smile of scorn on his lips,—
“Yes, I know what life is, and I say that life, like poverty, has strange bed-fellows. Ask me what life is now, and I say a melodrama; ask me what it is twenty years hence, and I shall say—”
“A farce?” put in his comrade.
“No, a tragedy,—or comedy as Moliere wrote it.”
“And how is that?” I asked, interested and somewhat surprised at the tone of my contemporary.
“Where the play ends in the triumph of the wittiest rogue. My friend here has no chance!”
“‘Praise from Sir Hubert Stanley,’ hem—yes, Hal Peacock may be witty, but he is no rogue.”
“This was not exactly my meaning,” said the boy, dryly.
“‘A fico for your meaning,’ as the Swan says.—Hallo, you sir! Bully Host, clear the table—fresh tumblers—hot water—sugar—lemon—and—The bottle’s out! Smoke, sir?” and Mr. Peacock offered me a cigar.
Upon my refusal, he carefully twirled round a very uninviting specimen of some fabulous havanna, moistened it all over, as a boa-constrictor may do the ox he prepares for deglutition, bit off one end, and lighting the other from a little machine for that purpose which he drew from his pocket, he was soon absorbed in a vigorous effort (which the damp inherent in the weed long resisted) to poison the surrounding atmosphere. Therewith the young gentleman, either from emulation or in self-defence, extracted from his own pouch a cigar-case of notable elegance,—being of velvet, embroidered apparently by some fair hand, for “From Juliet” was very legibly worked thereon,—selected a cigar of better appearance than that in favor with his comrade, and seemed quite as familiar with the tobacco as he had been with the brandy.
“Fast, sir, fast lad that,” quoth Mr. Peacock, in the short gasps which his resolute struggle with his uninviting victim alone permitted; “nothing but [puff, puff] your true [suck, suck] syl—syl—sylva—does for him. Out, by the Lord! the ‘jaws of darkness have devoured it up;’” and again Mr. Peacock applied to his phosphoric machine. This time patience and perseverance succeeded, and the heart of the cigar responded by a dull red spark (leaving the sides wholly untouched) to the indefatigable ardor of its wooer.
This feat accomplished, Mr. Peacock exclaimed triumphantly: “And now, what say you, my lads, to a game at cards? Three of us,—whist and a dummy; nothing better, eh?” As he spoke, he produced from his coat-pocket a red silk handkerchief, a bunch of keys, a nightcap, a tooth-brush, a piece of shaving-soap, four lumps of sugar, the remains of a bun, a razor, and a pack of cards. Selecting the last, and returning its motley accompaniments to the abyss whence they had emerged, he turned up, with a jerk of his thumb and finger, the knave of clubs, and placing it on the top of the rest, slapped the cards emphatically on the table.
“You are very good, but I don’t know whist,” said I.
“Not know whist—not been to a play—not smoke! Then pray tell me, young man,” said he majestically, and with a frown, “what on earth you do know.”
Much consternated by this direct appeal, and greatly ashamed of my ignorance of the cardinal points of erudition in Mr. Peacock’s estimation, I hung my head and looked down.
“That is right,” renewed Mr. Peacock, more benignly; “you have the ingenuous shame of youth. It is promising, sir; ‘lowliness is young ambition’s ladder,’ as the Swan says. Mount the first step, and learn whist,—sixpenny points to begin with.”
Notwithstanding any newness in actual life, I had had the good fortune to learn a little of the way before me, by those much-slandered guides called novels,—works which are often to the inner world what maps are to the outer; and sundry recollections of “Gil Blas” and the “Vicar of Wakefield” came athwart me. I had no wish to emulate the worthy Moses, and felt that I might not have even the shagreen spectacles to boast of in my negotiations with this new Mr. Jenkinson. Accordingly, shaking my head, I called for my bill. As I took out my purse,—knit by my mother,—with one gold piece in one corner, and sundry silver ones in the other, I saw that the eyes of Mr. Peacock twinkled.
“Poor spirit, sir! poor spirit, young man! ‘This avarice sticks deep,’ as the Swan beautifully observes. ‘Nothing venture, nothing have.’”
“Nothing have, nothing venture,” I returned, plucking up spirit.
“Nothing have! Young sir, do you doubt my solidity—my capital—my ‘golden joys’?”
“Sir, I spoke of myself. I am not rich enough to gamble.”
“Gamble!” exclaimed Mr. Peacock, in virtuous indignation—“gamble! what do you mean, sir? You insult me!” and he rose threateningly, and slapped his white hat on his wig. “Pshaw! let him alone, Hal,” said the boy, contemptuously. “Sir, if he is impertinent, thrash him.” (This was to me.) “Impertinent! thrash!” exclaimed Mr. Peacock, waxing very red; but catching the sneer on his companion’s lip, he sat down, and subsided into sullen silence.
Meanwhile I paid my bill. This duty—rarely a cheerful one—performed, I looked round for my knapsack, and perceived that it was in the boy’s hands. He was very coolly reading the address, which, in case of accidents, I prudently placed on it: “Pisistratus Caxton, Esq.,—Hotel,—Street, Strand.”
I took my knapsack from him, more surprised at such a breach of good manners in a young gentleman who knew life so well, than I should have been at a similar error on the part of Mr. Peacock. He made no apology, but nodded farewell, and stretched himself at full length on the bench. Mr. Peacock, now absorbed in a game of patience, vouchsafed no return to my parting salutation, and in another moment I was alone on the high-road. My thoughts turned long upon the young man I had left; mixed with a sort of instinctive compassionate foreboding of an ill future for one with such habits and in such companionship, I felt an involuntary admiration, less even for his good looks than his ease, audacity, and the careless superiority he assumed over a comrade so much older than himself.
The day twas far gone when I saw the spires of a town at which I intended to rest for the night. The horn of a coach behind made me turn my head, and as the vehicle passed me, I saw on the outside Mr. Peacock, still struggling with a cigar,—it could scarcely be the same,—and his young friend stretched on the roof amongst the luggage, leaning his handsome head on his hand, and apparently unobservant both of me and every one else.
CHAPTER V
I am apt—judging egotistically, perhaps, from my own experience—to measure a young man’s chance of what is termed practical success in life by what may seem at first two very vulgar qualities; viz., his inquisitiveness and his animal vivacity. A curiosity which springs forward to examine everything new to his information; a nervous activity, approaching to restlessness, which rarely allows bodily fatigue to interfere with some object in view,—constitute, in my mind, very profitable stock-in-hand to begin the world with.
Tired as I was, after I had performed my ablutions and refreshed myself in the little coffee-room of the inn at which I put up, with the pedestrian’s best beverage, familiar and oft calumniated tea, I could not resist the temptation of the broad, bustling street, which, lighted with gas, shone on me through the dim windows of the coffee-room. I had never before seen a large town, and the contrast of lamp-lit, busy night in the streets, with sober, deserted night in the lanes and fields, struck me forcibly.
I sauntered out, therefore, jostling and jostled, now gazing at the windows, now hurried along the tide of life, till I found myself before a cookshop, round which clustered a small knot of housewives, citizens, and hungry-looking children. While contemplating this group, and marvelling how it comes to pass that the staple business of earth’s majority is how, when, and where to eat, my ear was struck with “‘In Troy there lies the scene,’ as the illustrious Will remarks.”
Looking round, I perceived Mr. Peacock pointing his stick towards an open doorway next to the cookshop, the hall beyond which was lighted with gas, while painted in black letters on a pane of glass over the door was the word “Billiards.”
Suiting the action to the word, the speaker plunged at once into the aperture, and vanished. The boy-companion was following more slowly, when his eye caught mine. A slight blush came over his dark cheek; he stopped, and leaning against the door-jambs, gazed on me hard and long before he said: “Well met again, sir! You find it hard to amuse yourself in this dull place; the nights are long out of London.”
“Oh!” said I, ingenuously, “everything here amuses me,—the lights, the shops, the crowd; but, then, to me everything is new.”
The youth came from his lounging-place and moved on, as if inviting me to walk; while he answered, rather with bitter sullenness than the melancholy his words expressed,—
“One thing, at least, cannot be new to you,—it is an old truth with us before we leave the nursery: ‘Whatever is worth having must be bought;’ ergo, he who cannot buy, has nothing worth having.”
“I don’t think,” said I, wisely, “that the things best worth having can be bought at all. You see that poor dropsical jeweller standing before his shop-door: his shop is the finest in the street, and I dare say he would be very glad to give it to you or me in return for our good health and strong legs. Oh, no! I think with my father: ‘All that are worth having are given to all,’—that is, Nature and labor.”
“Your father says that; and you go by what your father says? Of course, all fathers have preached that, and many other good doctrines, since Adam preached to Cain; but I don’t see that the fathers have found their sons very credulous listeners.”
“So much the worse for the sons,” said I, bluntly. “Nature,” continued my new acquaintance, without attending to my ejaculation,—“Nature indeed does give us much, and Nature also orders each of us how to use her gifts. If Nature give you the propensity to drudge, you will drudge; if she give me the ambition to rise, and the contempt for work, I may rise,—but I certainly shall not work.”
“Oh,” said I, “you agree with Squills, I suppose, and fancy we are all guided by the bumps on our foreheads?”
“And the blood in our veins, and our mothers’ milk. We inherit other things besides gout and consumption. So you always do as your father tells you! Good boy!”
I was piqued. Why we should be ashamed of being taunted for goodness, I never could understand; but certainly I felt humbled. However, I answered sturdily: “If you had as good a father as I have, you would not think it so very extraordinary to do as he tells you.”
“Ah! so he is a very good father, is he? He must have a great trust in your sobriety and steadiness to let you wander about the world as he does.”
“I am going to join him in London.”
“In London! Oh, does he live there?”
“He is going to live there for some time.”
“Then perhaps we may meet. I too am going to town.”
“Oh, we shall be sure to meet there!” said I, with frank gladness; for my interest in the young man was not diminished by his conversation, however much I disliked the sentiments it expressed.
The lad laughed, and his laugh was peculiar,—it was low, musical, but hollow and artificial.
“Sure to meet! London is a large place: where shall you be found?”
I gave him, without scruple, the address of the hotel at which I expected to find my father, although his deliberate inspection of my knapsack must already have apprised him of that address. He listened attentively, and repeated it twice over, as if to impress it on his memory; and we both walked on in silence, till, turning up a small passage, we suddenly found ourselves in a large churchyard,—a flagged path stretched diagonally across it towards the market-place, on which it bordered. In this churchyard, upon a gravestone, sat a young Savoyard; his hurdy-gurdy, or whatever else his instrument might be called, was on his lap; and he was gnawing his crust and feeding some poor little white mice (standing on their hind legs on the hurdy-gurdy) as merrily as if he had chosen the gayest resting-place in the world.
We both stopped. The Savoyard, seeing us, put his arch head on one side, showed all his white teeth in that happy smile so peculiar to his race, and in which poverty seems to beg so blithely, and gave the handle of his instrument a turn. “Poor child!” said I.
“Aha, you pity him! but why? According to your rule, Mr. Caxton, he is not so much to be pitied; the dropsical jeweller would give him as much for his limbs and health as for ours! How is it—answer me, son of so wise a father—that no one pities the dropsical jeweller, and all pity the healthy Savoyard? It is, sir, because there is a stern truth which is stronger than all Spartan lessons,—Poverty is the master-ill of the world. Look round. Does poverty leave its signs over the graves? Look at that large tomb fenced round; read that long inscription: ‘Virtue’—‘best of husbands’—‘affectionate father’—‘inconsolable grief’—‘sleeps in the joyful hope,’ etc. Do you suppose these stoneless mounds hide no dust of what were men just as good? But no epitaph tells their virtues, bespeaks their wifes’ grief, or promises joyful hope to them!”
“Does it matter? Does God care for the epitaph and tombstone?”
“Datemi qualche cosa!” said the Savoyard, in his touching patois, still smiling, and holding out his little hand; therein I dropped a small coin. The boy evinced his gratitude by a new turn of the hurdy-gurdy.
“That is not labor,” said my companion; “and had you found him at work, you had given him nothing. I, too, have my instrument to play upon, and my mice to see after. Adieu!”
He waved his hand, and strode irreverently over the graves back in the direction we had come.
I stood before the fine tomb with its fine epitaph: the Savoyard looked at me wistfully.