Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0064/00648.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 14KB | 210 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00648}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Anthology Of Shorter Works
First Branch - Myself: Part II}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Dickens, Charles}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{inns
never
sir
hundred
might
next
old
inn
little
night}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       Anthology Of Shorter Works
Book:        Holly Tree: Three Branches, The
Author:      Dickens, Charles

First Branch - Myself: Part II

     The Holly-Tree was getting rather dismal.  I made an overland expedition
beyond the screen, and penetrated as far as the fourth window.  Here I was
driven back by stress of weather.  Arrived at my winter-quarters once more,
I made up the fire, and took another Inn.

     It was in the remotest part of Cornwall.  A great annual Miners' Feast
was being holden at the Inn, when I and my travelling companions presented
ourselves at night among the wild crowd that were dancing before it by
torchlight.  We had had a breakdown in the dark, on a stony morass some miles
away; and I had the honour of leading one of the unharnessed post-horses.
If any lady or gentleman on perusal of the present lines will take any very
tall post-horse with his traces hanging about his legs, and will conduct him
by the bearing-rein into the heart of a country dance of a hundred and fifty
couples, that lady or gentleman will then, and only then, form an adequate
idea of the extent to which that post-horse will tread on his conductor's
toes.  Over and above which, the post-horse, finding three hundred people
whirling about him, will probably rear, and also lash out with his hind legs,
in a manner incompatible with dignity or self-respect on his conductor's
part.  With such little drawbacks on my usually impressive aspect, I appeared
at this Cornish Inn, to the unutterable wonder of the Cornish Miners.  It was
full, and twenty times full, and nobody could be received but the post-horse,
- though to get rid of that noble animal was something.  While my
fellow-travellers and I were discussing how to pass the night and so much of
the next day as must intervene before the jovial blacksmith and the jovial
wheelwright would be in a condition to go out on the morass and mend the
coach, an honest man stepped forth from the crowd and proposed his unlet
floor of two rooms, with supper of eggs and bacon, ale and punch.  We
joyfully accompanied him home to the strangest of clean houses, where we were
well entertained to the satisfaction of all parties.  But the novel feature
of the entertainment was, that our host was a chair-maker, and that the
chairs assigned to us were mere frames, altogether without bottoms of any
sort; so that we passed the evening on perches.  Nor was this the absurdest
consequence; for when we unbent at supper, and any one of us gave way to
laughter, he forgot the peculiarity of his position, and instantly
disappeared.  I myself, doubled up into an attitude from which
self-extrication was impossible, was taken out of my frame, like a clown in
a comic pantomime who has tumbled into a tub, five times by the taper's light
during the eggs and bacon.

     The Holly-Tree was fast reviving within me a sense of loneliness.  I
began to fell conscious that my subject would never carry me on until I was
dug out.  I might be a week here, - weeks!

     There was a story with a singular idea in it, connected with an Inn I
once passed a night at in a picturesque old town on the Welsh border.  In a
large, double-bedded room of this Inn there had been a suicide committed by
poison, in one bed, while a tired traveller slept unconscious in the other.
After that time, the suicide bed was never used, but the other constantly
was; the disused bedstead remaining in the room empty, though as to all other
respects in its old state.  The story ran, that whosoever slept in this room,
though never so entire a stranger, from never so far off, was invariably
observed to come down in the morning with an impression that he smelt
Laudanum, and that his mind always turned upon the subject of suicide; to
which, whatever kind of man he might be, he was certain to make some
reference if he conversed with any one.  This went on for years, until it at
length induced the landlord to take the disused bedstead down, and bodily
burn it, - bed, hangings, and all.  The strange influence (this was the
story) now changed to a fainter one, but never changed afterwards.  The
occupant of that room, with occasional but very rare exceptions, would come
down in the morning, trying to recall a forgotten dream he had had in the
night.  The landlord, on his mentioning his perplexity, would suggest various
common-place subjects, not one of which, as he very well knew, was the true
subject.  But the moment the landlord suggested, "Poison," the traveller
started, and cried, "Yes!" He never failed to accept that suggestion, and he
never recalled any more of the dream.

     This reminiscence brought the Welsh Inns in general before me; with
the women in their round hats, and the harpers with their white beards
(venerable, but humbugs, I am afraid), playing outside the door while I took
my dinner.  The transition was natural to the Highland Inns, with the oatmeal
bannocks, the honey, the venison steaks, the trout from the loch, the whiskey
and perhaps (having the materials so temptingly at hand) the Athol brose.
Once was I coming south from the Scottish Highlands in hot haste, hoping to
change quickly at the station at the bottom of a certain wild historical
glen, when these eyes did with mortification see the landlord come out with
a telescope and sweep the whole prospect for the horses; which horses were
away picking up their own living, and did not heave in sight under four
hours.  Having thought of the loch-trout, I was taken by quick association
to the Anglers' Inns of England (I have assisted at innumerable feats of
angling by lying in the bottom of the boat, whole summer days, doing nothing
with the greatest perseverance; which I have generally found to be as
effectual towards the taking of fish as the finest tackle and the utmost
science), and to the pleasant white, clean, flower-pot-decorated, bedrooms
of those inns, overlooking the river, and the ferry, and the green ait, and
the church-spire, and the country bridge; and to the peerless Emma with the
bright eyes and the pretty smile, who waited, bless her!  with the natural
grace that would have converted Blue-Beard.  Casting my eyes upon my
Holly-Tree fire, I next discerned among the glowing coals the pictures of a
score or more of those wonderful English posting-inns which we are all so
sorry to have lost, which were so large and so comfortable, and which were
such monuments of British submission to rapacity and extortion.  He who would
see these houses pining away, let him walk from Basingstoke, or even Windsor,
to London, by way of Hounslow, and moralize on their perishing remains; the
stables crumbling to dust; unsettled labourers and wanderers bivouacking in
the out-houses; grass growing in the yards; the rooms, where erst so many
hundred beds of down were made up, let off to Irish lodgers at eighteen-pence
a week; a little ill-looking beer-shop shrinking in the tap of former days,
burning coach-house gates for firewood, having one of its two windows bunged
up, as if it had received punishment in a fight with the railroad; a low,
bandy-legged, brick-making bulldog standing in the doorway.  What could I
next see in my fire so naturally as the new railway-house of these times near
the dismal country station; with nothing particular on draught but cold air
and damp, nothing worth mentioning in the larder but new mortar, and no
business doing beyond a conceited affectation of luggage in the hall?  Then
I came to the Inns of Paris, with the pretty apartment of four pieces up one
hundred and seventy-five waxed stairs, the privilege of ringing the bell all
day long without influencing anybody's mind or body but your own, and the
not-too-much-for dinner, considering the price.  Next to the provincial Inns
of France, with the great church-tower rising above the court-yard, the
horse-bells jingling merrily up and down the street beyond, and the clocks
of all descriptions in all the rooms, which are never right, unless taken at
the precise minute when, by getting exactly twelve hours too fast or too
slow, they unintentionally become so.  Away I went, next, to the lesser
roadside Inns of Italy; where all the dirty clothes in the house (not in
wear) are always lying in your anteroom; where the mosquitoes make a raisin
pudding of your face in summer, and the cold bites it blue in winter; where
you get what you can, and forget what you can't; where I should again like
to be boiling my tea in a pocket-handkerchief dumpling, for want of a teapot.
So the old palace Inns and old monastery Inns, in towns and cities of the
same bright country; with their massive quadrangular staircases, whence you
may look from among clustering pillars high into the blue vault of Heaven;
with their stately banqueting-rooms, and vast refectories; with their
labyrinths of ghostly bedchambers, and their glimpses into gorgeous streets
that have no appearance of reality or possibility.  So to the close little
Inns of the Malaria districts, with their pale attendants, and their peculiar
smell of never letting in the air.  So to the immense fantastic Inns of
Venice, with the cry of the gondolier below, as he skims the corner; the grip
of the watery odours on one particular little bit of the bridge of your nose
(which is never released while you stay there); and the great bell of St.
Mark's Cathedral tolling midnight.  Next I put up for a minute at the
restless Inns upon the Rhine, where your going to bed, no matter at what
hour, appears to be the tocsin for everybody else's getting up; and where,
in the table d'hote room at the end of the long table (with several Towers
of Babel on it at the other end, all made of white plates) one knot of
stoutish men, entirely dressed in jewels and dirt, and having nothing else
upon them, will remain all night, clinking glasses, and singing about the
river that flows, and the grape that grows, and Rhine wine that beguiles, and
Rhine woman that smiles and hi drink drink my friend and ho drink drink my
brother, and all the rest of it.  I departed thence, as a matter of course,
to other German Inns, where all the eatables are sodden down to the same
flavour, and where the mind is disturbed by the apparition of hot puddings,
and boiled cherries, sweet and slab, at awfully unexpected periods of the
repast.  After a draught of sparkling beer from a foaming glass jug, and a
glance of recognition through the windows of the student beer-houses at
Heidelberg and elsewhere, I put out to sea for the Inns of America, with
their four hundred beds apiece, and their eight or nine hundred ladies and
gentlemen at dinner every day.  Again I stood in the barrooms thereof, taking
my evening cobbler, julep, sling, or cocktail.  Again I listened to my friend
the General, - whom I had known for five minutes, in the course of which
period he had made me intimate for life with two Majors, who again had made
me intimate for life with three Colonels, who again had made me brother to
twenty-two civilians, - again I say, I listened to my friend the General,
leisurely expounding the resources of the establishment, as to gentlemen's
morning-room, sir; ladies' morning-room, sir; gentlemen's evening-room, sir;
ladies' evening-room, sir; ladies' and gentlemen's evening reuniting-room,
sir; music-room, sir; reading-room, sir; over four hundred sleeping-rooms,
sir; and the entire planned and finited within twelve calendar months from
the first clearing off of the old encumbrances on the plot, at a cost of five
hundred thousand dollars, sir.  Again I found, as to my individual way of
thinking, that the greater, the more gorgeous, and the more dollarous the
establishment was, the less desirable it was.  Nevertheless, again I drank
my cobbler, julep, sling, or cocktail, in all good-will, to my friend the
General, and my friends the to Majors, Colonels, and civilians all; full well
knowing that, whatever little motes my beamy eyes may have described in
theirs, they belong to a kind, generous, large-hearted, and great people.

     I had been going on lately at a quick pace to keep my solitude out of
my mind; but here I broke down for good, and gave up the subject.  What was
I to do?  What was to become of me?  Into what extremity was I submissively
to sink?  Supposing that, like Baron Trenck, I looked out for a mouse or
spider, and found one, and beguiled my imprisonment by training it?  Even
that might be dangerous with a view to the future.  I might be so far gone
when the road did come to be cut through the snow, that, on my way forth, I
might burst into tears, and beseech, like the prisoner who was released in
his old age from the Bastile, to be taken back again to the five windows, the
ten curtains, and the sinuous drapery.

     A desperate idea came into my head.  Under any other circumstances I
should have rejected it; but, in the strait at which I was, I held it fast.
Could I so far overcome the inherent bashfulness which withheld me from the
landlord's table and the company I might find there, as to call up the Boots,
and ask him to take a chair, - and something in a liquid form, - and talk to
me?  I could.  I would.  I did.