The Uncommercial Traveller

by Dickens, Charles

counting an exhausted charity school in a gallery, which has

  dwindled away to four boys, and two girls. In the porch, is a

  benefaction of loaves of bread, which there would seem to be nobody

  left in the exhausted congregation to claim, and which I saw an

  exhausted beadle, long faded out of uniform, eating with his eyes

  for self and family when I passed in. There is also an exhausted

  clerk in a brown wig, and two or three exhausted doors and windows

  have been bricked up, and the service books are musty, and the

  pulpit cushions are threadbare, and the whole of the church

  furniture is in a very advanced stage of exhaustion. We are three

  old women (habitual), two young lovers (accidental), two tradesmen,

  one with a wife and one alone, an aunt and nephew, again two girls

  (these two girls dressed out for church with everything about them

  limp that should be stiff, and VICE VERSA, are an invariable

  experience), and three sniggering boys. The clergyman is, perhaps,

  the chaplain of a civic company; he has the moist and vinous look,

  and eke the bulbous boots, of one acquainted with 'Twenty port, and

  comet vintages.

  We are so quiet in our dulness that the three sniggering boys, who

  have got away into a corner by the altar-railing, give us a start,

  like crackers, whenever they laugh. And this reminds me of my own

  village church where, during sermon-time on bright Sundays when the

  birds are very musical indeed, farmers' boys patter out over the

  stone pavement, and the clerk steps out from his desk after them,

  and is distinctly heard in the summer repose to pursue and punch

  them in the churchyard, and is seen to return with a meditative

  countenance, making believe that nothing of the sort has happened.

  The aunt and nephew in this City church are much disturbed by the

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  sniggering boys. The nephew is himself a boy, and the sniggerers

  tempt him to secular thoughts of marbles and string, by secretly

  offering such commodities to his distant contemplation. This young

  Saint Anthony for a while resists, but presently becomes a

  backslider, and in dumb show defies the sniggerers to 'heave' a

  marble or two in his direction. Here in he is detected by the aunt

  (a rigorous reduced gentlewoman who has the charge of offices), and

  I perceive that worthy relative to poke him in the side, with the

  corrugated hooked handle of an ancient umbrella. The nephew

  revenges himself for this, by holding his breath and terrifying his

  kinswoman with the dread belief that he has made up his mind to

  burst. Regardless of whispers and shakes, he swells and becomes

  discoloured, and yet again swells and becomes discoloured, until

  the aunt can bear it no longer, but leads him out, with no visible

  neck, and with his eyes going before him like a prawn's. This

  causes the sniggerers to regard flight as an eligible move, and I

  know which of them will go out first, because of the over-devout

  attention that he suddenly concentrates on the clergyman. In a

  little while, this hypocrite, with an elaborate demonstration of

  hushing his footsteps, and with a face generally expressive of

  having until now forgotten a religious appointment elsewhere, is

  gone. Number two gets out in the same way, but rather quicker.

  Number three getting safely to the door, there turns reckless, and

  banging it open, flies forth with a Whoop! that vibrates to the top

  of the tower above us.

  The clergyman, who is of a prandial presence and a muffled voice,

  may be scant of hearing as well as of breath, but he only glances

  up, as having an idea that somebody has said Amen in a wrong place,

  and continues his steady jog-trot, like a farmer's wife going to

  market. He does all he has to do, in the same easy way, and gives

  us a concise sermon, still like the jog-trot of the farmer's wife

  on a level road. Its drowsy cadence soon lulls the three old women

  asleep, and the unmarried tradesman sits looking out at window, and

  the married tradesman sits looking at his wife's bonnet, and the

  lovers sit looking at one another, so superlatively happy, that I

  mind when I, turned of eighteen, went with my Angelica to a City

  church on account of a shower (by this special coincidence that it

  was in Huggin-lane), and when I said to my Angelica, 'Let the

  blessed event, Angelica, occur at no altar but this!' and when my

  Angelica consented that it should occur at no other - which it

  certainly never did, for it never occurred anywhere. And O,

  Angelica, what has become of you, this present Sunday morning when

  I can't attend to the sermon; and, more difficult question than

  that, what has become of Me as I was when I sat by your side!

  But, we receive the signal to make that unanimous dive which surely

  is a little conventional - like the strange rustlings and settlings

  and clearings of throats and noses, which are never dispensed with,

  at certain points of the Church service, and are never held to be

  necessary under any other circumstances. In a minute more it is

  all over, and the organ expresses itself to be as glad of it as it

  can be of anything in its rheumatic state, and in another minute we

  are all of us out of the church, and Whity-brown has locked it up.

  Another minute or little more, and, in the neighbouring churchyard

  - not the yard of that church, but of another - a churchyard like a

  great shabby old mignonette box, with two trees in it and one tomb

  - I meet Whity-brown, in his private capacity, fetching a pint of

  beer for his dinner from the public-house in the corner, where the

  keys of the rotting fire-ladders are kept and were never asked for,

  and where there is a ragged, white-seamed, out-at-elbowed bagatelle

  board on the first floor.

  In one of these City churches, and only in one, I found an

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  individual who might have been claimed as expressly a City

  personage. I remember the church, by the feature that the

  clergyman couldn't get to his own desk without going through the

  clerk's, or couldn't get to the pulpit without going through the

  reading-desk - I forget which, and it is no matter - and by the

  presence of this personage among the exceedingly sparse

  congregation. I doubt if we were a dozen, and we had no exhausted

  charity school to help us out. The personage was dressed in black

  of square cut, and was stricken in years, and wore a black velvet

  cap, and cloth shoes. He was of a staid, wealthy, and dissatisfied

  aspect. In his hand, he conducted to church a mysterious child: a

  child of the feminine gender. The child had a beaver hat, with a

  stiff drab plume that surely never belonged to any bird of the air.

  The child was further attired in a nankeen frock and spencer, brown

  boxing-gloves, and a veil. It had a blemish, in the nature of

  currant jelly, on its chin; and was a thirsty child. Insomuch that

  the personage carried in his pocket a green bottle, from which,

  when the first p
salm was given out, the child was openly refreshed.

  At all other times throughout the service it was motionless, and

  stood on the seat of the large pew, closely fitted into the corner,

  like a rain-water pipe.

  The personage never opened his book, and never looked at the

  clergyman. He never sat down either, but stood with his arms

  leaning on the top of the pew, and his forehead sometimes shaded

  with his right hand, always looking at the church door. It was a

  long church for a church of its size, and he was at the upper end,

  but he always looked at the door. That he was an old bookkeeper,

  or an old trader who had kept his own books, and that he might be

  seen at the Bank of England about Dividend times, no doubt. That

  he had lived in the City all his life and was disdainful of other

  localities, no doubt. Why he looked at the door, I never

  absolutely proved, but it is my belief that he lived in expectation

  of the time when the citizens would come back to live in the City,

  and its ancient glories would be renewed. He appeared to expect

  that this would occur on a Sunday, and that the wanderers would

  first appear, in the deserted churches, penitent and humbled.

  Hence, he looked at the door which they never darkened. Whose

  child the child was, whether the child of a disinherited daughter,

  or some parish orphan whom the personage had adopted, there was

  nothing to lead up to. It never played, or skipped, or smiled.

  Once, the idea occurred to me that it was an automaton, and that

  the personage had made it; but following the strange couple out one

  Sunday, I heard the personage say to it, 'Thirteen thousand

  pounds;' to which it added in a weak human voice, 'Seventeen and

  fourpence.' Four Sundays I followed them out, and this is all I

  ever heard or saw them say. One Sunday, I followed them home.

  They lived behind a pump, and the personage opened their abode with

  an exceeding large key. The one solitary inscription on their

  house related to a fire-plug. The house was partly undermined by a

  deserted and closed gateway; its windows were blind with dirt; and

  it stood with its face disconsolately turned to a wall. Five great

  churches and two small ones rang their Sunday bells between this

  house and the church the couple frequented, so they must have had

  some special reason for going a quarter of a mile to it. The last

  time I saw them, was on this wise. I had been to explore another

  church at a distance, and happened to pass the church they

  frequented, at about two of the afternoon when that edifice was

  closed. But, a little side-door, which I had never observed

  before, stood open, and disclosed certain cellarous steps.

  Methought 'They are airing the vaults to-day,' when the personage

  and the child silently arrived at the steps, and silently

  descended. Of course, I came to the conclusion that the personage

  had at last despaired of the looked-for return of the penitent

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  citizens, and that he and the child went down to get themselves

  buried.

  In the course of my pilgrimages I came upon one obscure church

  which had broken out in the melodramatic style, and was got up with

  various tawdry decorations, much after the manner of the extinct

  London may-poles. These attractions had induced several young

  priests or deacons in black bibs for waistcoats, and several young

  ladies interested in that holy order (the proportion being, as I

  estimated, seventeen young ladies to a deacon), to come into the

  City as a new and odd excitement. It was wonderful to see how

  these young people played out their little play in the heart of the

  City, all among themselves, without the deserted City's knowing

  anything about it. It was as if you should take an empty countinghouse

  on a Sunday, and act one of the old Mysteries there. They

  had impressed a small school (from what neighbourhood I don't know)

  to assist in the performances, and it was pleasant to notice

  frantic garlands of inscription on the walls, especially addressing

  those poor innocents in characters impossible for them to decipher.

  There was a remarkably agreeable smell of pomatum in this

  congregation.

  But, in other cases, rot and mildew and dead citizens formed the

  uppermost scent, while, infused into it in a dreamy way not at all

  displeasing, was the staple character of the neighbourhood. In the

  churches about Mark-lane, for example, there was a dry whiff of

  wheat; and I accidentally struck an airy sample of barley out of an

  aged hassock in one of them. From Rood-lane to Tower-street, and

  thereabouts, there was often a subtle flavour of wine: sometimes,

  of tea. One church near Mincing-lane smelt like a druggist's

  drawer. Behind the Monument the service had a flavour of damaged

  oranges, which, a little further down towards the river, tempered

  into herrings, and gradually toned into a cosmopolitan blast of

  fish. In one church, the exact counterpart of the church in the

  Rake's Progress where the hero is being married to the horrible old

  lady, there was no speciality of atmosphere, until the organ shook

  a perfume of hides all over us from some adjacent warehouse.

  Be the scent what it would, however, there was no speciality in the

  people. There were never enough of them to represent any calling

  or neighbourhood. They had all gone elsewhere over-night, and the

  few stragglers in the many churches languished there

  inexpressively.

  Among the Uncommercial travels in which I have engaged, this year

  of Sunday travel occupies its own place, apart from all the rest.

  Whether I think of the church where the sails of the oyster-boats

  in the river almost flapped against the windows, or of the church

  where the railroad made the bells hum as the train rushed by above

  the roof, I recall a curious experience. On summer Sundays, in the

  gentle rain or the bright sunshine - either, deepening the idleness

  of the idle City - I have sat, in that singular silence which

  belongs to resting-places usually astir, in scores of buildings at

  the heart of the world's metropolis, unknown to far greater numbers

  of people speaking the English tongue, than the ancient edifices of

  the Eternal City, or the Pyramids of Egypt. The dark vestries and

  registries into which I have peeped, and the little hemmed-in

  churchyards that have echoed to my feet, have left impressions on

  my memory as distinct and quaint as any it has in that way

  received. In all those dusty registers that the worms are eating,

  there is not a line but made some hearts leap, or some tears flow,

  in their day. Still and dry now, still and dry! and the old tree

  at the window with no room for its branches, has seen them all out.

  So with the tomb of the old Master of the old Company, on which it

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  drips. His son restored it and died, his daughter restored it and

  died, and then he had been remembered long enough, and the tree
/>
  took possession of him, and his name cracked out.

  There are few more striking indications of the changes of manners

  and customs that two or three hundred years have brought about,

  than these deserted churches. Many of them are handsome and costly

  structures, several of them were designed by WREN, many of them

  arose from the ashes of the great fire, others of them outlived the

  plague and the fire too, to die a slow death in these later days.

  No one can be sure of the coming time; but it is not too much to

  say of it that it has no sign in its outsetting tides, of the

  reflux to these churches of their congregations and uses. They

  remain like the tombs of the old citizens who lie beneath them and

  around them, Monuments of another age. They are worth a Sundayexploration,

  now and then, for they yet echo, not unharmoniously,

  to the time when the City of London really was London; when the

  'Prentices and Trained Bands were of mark in the state; when even

  the Lord Mayor himself was a Reality - not a Fiction conventionally

  be-puffed on one day in the year by illustrious friends, who no

  less conventionally laugh at him on the remaining three hundred and

  sixty-four days.

  CHAPTER X - SHY NEIGHBOURHOODS

  So much of my travelling is done on foot, that if I cherished

  betting propensities, I should probably be found registered in

  sporting newspapers under some such title as the Elastic Novice,

  challenging all eleven stone mankind to competition in walking. My

  last special feat was turning out of bed at two, after a hard day,

  pedestrian and otherwise, and walking thirty miles into the country

  to breakfast. The road was so lonely in the night, that I fell

  asleep to the monotonous sound of my own feet, doing their regular

  four miles an hour. Mile after mile I walked, without the

  slightest sense of exertion, dozing heavily and dreaming

  constantly. It was only when I made a stumble like a drunken man,

  or struck out into the road to avoid a horseman close upon me on

  the path - who had no existence - that I came to myself and looked

  about. The day broke mistily (it was autumn time), and I could not

  disembarrass myself of the idea that I had to climb those heights

  and banks of cloud, and that there was an Alpine Convent somewhere

  behind the sun, where I was going to breakfast. This sleepy notion

  was so much stronger than such substantial objects as villages and