The Uncommercial Traveller

by Dickens, Charles

  that had been attracting greatly when the litter was first descried

  coming dancing round the corner by the great cathedral, were so

  completely deposed now, that nobody save two little girls (one

  showing them to a doll) would look at them. Yet the chief of the

  three, the article in the front row, had received jagged injury of

  the left temple; and the other two in the back row, the drowned two

  lying side by side with their heads very slightly turned towards

  each other, seemed to be comparing notes about it. Indeed, those

  two of the back row were so furtive of appearance, and so (in their

  puffed way) assassinatingly knowing as to the one of the front,

  that it was hard to think the three had never come together in

  their lives, and were only chance companions after death. Whether

  or no this was the general, as it was the uncommercial, fancy, it

  is not to be disputed that the group had drawn exceedingly within

  ten minutes. Yet now, the inconstant public turned its back upon

  them, and even leaned its elbows carelessly against the bar outside

  the window and shook off the mud from its shoes, and also lent and

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  borrowed fire for pipes.

  Custodian re-enters from his door. 'Again once, gentlemen, you are

  invited - ' No further invitation necessary. Ready dash into the

  street. Toilette finished. Old man coming out.

  This time, the interest was grown too hot to admit of toleration of

  the boys on the stone posts. The homicidal white-lead worker made

  a pounce upon one boy who was hoisting himself up, and brought him

  to earth amidst general commendation. Closely stowed as we were,

  we yet formed into groups - groups of conversation, without

  separation from the mass - to discuss the old man. Rivals of the

  tall and sallow mason sprang into being, and here again was popular

  inconstancy. These rivals attracted audiences, and were greedily

  listened to; and whereas they had derived their information solely

  from the tall and sallow one, officious members of the crowd now

  sought to enlighten HIM on their authority. Changed by this social

  experience into an iron-visaged and inveterate misanthrope, the

  mason glared at mankind, and evidently cherished in his breast the

  wish that the whole of the present company could change places with

  the deceased old man. And now listeners became inattentive, and

  people made a start forward at a slight sound, and an unholy fire

  kindled in the public eye, and those next the gates beat at them

  impatiently, as if they were of the cannibal species and hungry.

  Again the hinges creaked, and we rushed. Disorderly pressure for

  some time ensued before the uncommercial unit got figured into the

  front row of the sum. It was strange to see so much heat and

  uproar seething about one poor spare, white-haired old man, quiet

  for evermore. He was calm of feature and undisfigured, as he lay

  on his back - having been struck upon the hinder part of his head,

  and thrown forward - and something like a tear or two had started

  from the closed eyes, and lay wet upon the face. The uncommercial

  interest, sated at a glance, directed itself upon the striving

  crowd on either side and behind: wondering whether one might have

  guessed, from the expression of those faces merely, what kind of

  sight they were looking at. The differences of expression were not

  many. There was a little pity, but not much, and that mostly with

  a selfish touch in it - as who would say, 'Shall I, poor I, look

  like that, when the time comes!' There was more of a secretly

  brooding contemplation and curiosity, as 'That man I don't like,

  and have the grudge against; would such be his appearance, if some

  one - not to mention names - by any chance gave him an knock?'

  There was a wolfish stare at the object, in which homicidal whitelead

  worker shone conspicuous. And there was a much more general,

  purposeless, vacant staring at it - like looking at waxwork,

  without a catalogue, and not knowing what to make of it. But all

  these expressions concurred in possessing the one underlying

  expression of LOOKING AT SOMETHING THAT COULD NOT RETURN A LOOK.

  The uncommercial notice had established this as very remarkable,

  when a new pressure all at once coming up from the street pinioned

  him ignominiously, and hurried him into the arms (now sleeved

  again) of the Custodian smoking at his door, and answering

  questions, between puffs, with a certain placid meritorious air of

  not being proud, though high in office. And mentioning pride, it

  may be observed, by the way, that one could not well help investing

  the original sole occupant of the front row with an air

  depreciatory of the legitimate attraction of the poor old man:

  while the two in the second row seemed to exult at this superseded

  popularity.

  Pacing presently round the garden of the Tower of St. Jacques de la

  Boucherie, and presently again in front of the Hotel de Ville, I

  called to mind a certain desolate open-air Morgue that I happened

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  to light upon in London, one day in the hard winter of 1861, and

  which seemed as strange to me, at the time of seeing it, as if I

  had found it in China. Towards that hour of a winter's afternoon

  when the lamp-lighters are beginning to light the lamps in the

  streets a little before they are wanted, because the darkness

  thickens fast and soon, I was walking in from the country on the

  northern side of the Regent's Park - hard frozen and deserted -

  when I saw an empty Hansom cab drive up to the lodge at Gloucestergate,

  and the driver with great agitation call to the man there:

  who quickly reached a long pole from a tree, and, deftly collared

  by the driver, jumped to the step of his little seat, and so the

  Hansom rattled out at the gate, galloping over the iron-bound road.

  I followed running, though not so fast but that when I came to the

  right-hand Canal Bridge, near the cross-path to Chalk Farm, the

  Hansom was stationary, the horse was smoking hot, the long pole was

  idle on the ground, and the driver and the park-keeper were looking

  over the bridge parapet. Looking over too, I saw, lying on the

  towing-path with her face turned up towards us, a woman, dead a day

  or two, and under thirty, as I guessed, poorly dressed in black.

  The feet were lightly crossed at the ankles, and the dark hair, all

  pushed back from the face, as though that had been the last action

  of her desperate hands, streamed over the ground. Dabbled all

  about her, was the water and the broken ice that had dropped from

  her dress, and had splashed as she was got out. The policeman who

  had just got her out, and the passing costermonger who had helped

  him, were standing near the body; the latter with that stare at it

  which I have likened to being at a waxwork exhibition without a

  catalogue; the former, looking over his stock, with professional

  stiffness and coolness, in the direction in which the bea
rers he

  had sent for were expected. So dreadfully forlorn, so dreadfully

  sad, so dreadfully mysterious, this spectacle of our dear sister

  here departed! A barge came up, breaking the floating ice and the

  silence, and a woman steered it. The man with the horse that towed

  it, cared so little for the body, that the stumbling hoofs had been

  among the hair, and the tow-rope had caught and turned the head,

  before our cry of horror took him to the bridle. At which sound

  the steering woman looked up at us on the bridge, with contempt

  unutterable, and then looking down at the body with a similar

  expression - as if it were made in another likeness from herself,

  had been informed with other passions, had been lost by other

  chances, had had another nature dragged down to perdition - steered

  a spurning streak of mud at it, and passed on.

  A better experience, but also of the Morgue kind, in which chance

  happily made me useful in a slight degree, arose to my remembrance

  as I took my way by the Boulevard de Sebastopol to the brighter

  scenes of Paris.

  The thing happened, say five-and-twenty years ago. I was a modest

  young uncommercial then, and timid and inexperienced. Many suns

  and winds have browned me in the line, but those were my pale days.

  Having newly taken the lease of a house in a certain distinguished

  metropolitan parish - a house which then appeared to me to be a

  frightfully first-class Family Mansion, involving awful

  responsibilities - I became the prey of a Beadle. I think the

  Beadle must have seen me going in or coming out, and must have

  observed that I tottered under the weight of my grandeur. Or he

  may have been in hiding under straw when I bought my first horse

  (in the desirable stable-yard attached to the first-class Family

  Mansion), and when the vendor remarked to me, in an original

  manner, on bringing him for approval, taking his cloth off and

  smacking him, 'There, Sir! THERE'S a Orse!' And when I said

  gallantly, 'How much do you want for him?' and when the vendor

  said, 'No more than sixty guineas, from you,' and when I said

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  smartly, 'Why not more than sixty from ME?' And when he said

  crushingly, 'Because upon my soul and body he'd be considered cheap

  at seventy, by one who understood the subject - but you don't.' - I

  say, the Beadle may have been in hiding under straw, when this

  disgrace befell me, or he may have noted that I was too raw and

  young an Atlas to carry the first-class Family Mansion in a knowing

  manner. Be this as it may, the Beadle did what Melancholy did to

  the youth in Gray's Elegy - he marked me for his own. And the way

  in which the Beadle did it, was this: he summoned me as a Juryman

  on his Coroner's Inquests.

  In my first feverish alarm I repaired 'for safety and for succour'

  - like those sagacious Northern shepherds who, having had no

  previous reason whatever to believe in young Norval, very prudently

  did not originate the hazardous idea of believing in him - to a

  deep householder. This profound man informed me that the Beadle

  counted on my buying him off; on my bribing him not to summon me;

  and that if I would attend an Inquest with a cheerful countenance,

  and profess alacrity in that branch of my country's service, the

  Beadle would be disheartened, and would give up the game.

  I roused my energies, and the next time the wily Beadle summoned

  me, I went. The Beadle was the blankest Beadle I have ever looked

  on when I answered to my name; and his discomfiture gave me courage

  to go through with it.

  We were impanelled to inquire concerning the death of a very little

  mite of a child. It was the old miserable story. Whether the

  mother had committed the minor offence of concealing the birth, or

  whether she had committed the major offence of killing the child,

  was the question on which we were wanted. We must commit her on

  one of the two issues.

  The Inquest came off in the parish workhouse, and I have yet a

  lively impression that I was unanimously received by my brother

  Jurymen as a brother of the utmost conceivable insignificance.

  Also, that before we began, a broker who had lately cheated me

  fearfully in the matter of a pair of card-tables, was for the

  utmost rigour of the law. I remember that we sat in a sort of

  board-room, on such very large square horse-hair chairs that I

  wondered what race of Patagonians they were made for; and further,

  that an undertaker gave me his card when we were in the full moral

  freshness of having just been sworn, as 'an inhabitant that was

  newly come into the parish, and was likely to have a young family.'

  The case was then stated to us by the Coroner, and then we went

  down-stairs - led by the plotting Beadle - to view the body. From

  that day to this, the poor little figure, on which that sounding

  legal appellation was bestowed, has lain in the same place and with

  the same surroundings, to my thinking. In a kind of crypt devoted

  to the warehousing of the parochial coffins, and in the midst of a

  perfect Panorama of coffins of all sizes, it was stretched on a

  box; the mother had put it in her box - this box - almost as soon

  as it was born, and it had been presently found there. It had been

  opened, and neatly sewn up, and regarded from that point of view,

  it looked like a stuffed creature. It rested on a clean white

  cloth, with a surgical instrument or so at hand, and regarded from

  that point of view, it looked as if the cloth were 'laid,' and the

  Giant were coming to dinner. There was nothing repellent about the

  poor piece of innocence, and it demanded a mere form of looking at.

  So, we looked at an old pauper who was going about among the

  coffins with a foot rule, as if he were a case of Self-Measurement;

  and we looked at one another; and we said the place was well

  whitewashed anyhow; and then our conversational powers as a British

  Jury flagged, and the foreman said, 'All right, gentlemen? Back

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  again, Mr. Beadle!'

  The miserable young creature who had given birth to this child

  within a very few days, and who had cleaned the cold wet door-steps

  immediately afterwards, was brought before us when we resumed our

  horse-hair chairs, and was present during the proceedings. She had

  a horse-hair chair herself, being very weak and ill; and I remember

  how she turned to the unsympathetic nurse who attended her, and who

  might have been the figure-head of a pauper-ship, and how she hid

  her face and sobs and tears upon that wooden shoulder. I remember,

  too, how hard her mistress was upon her (she was a servant-of-allwork),

  and with what a cruel pertinacity that piece of Virtue spun

  her thread of evidence double, by intertwisting it with the

  sternest thread of construction. Smitten hard by the terrible low

  wail from the utterly friendless orphan girl, which never ceased

  during the whole inquiry, I took hear
t to ask this witness a

  question or two, which hopefully admitted of an answer that might

  give a favourable turn to the case. She made the turn as little

  favourable as it could be, but it did some good, and the Coroner,

  who was nobly patient and humane (he was the late Mr. Wakley), cast

  a look of strong encouragement in my direction. Then, we had the

  doctor who had made the examination, and the usual tests as to

  whether the child was born alive; but he was a timid, muddle-headed

  doctor, and got confused and contradictory, and wouldn't say this,

  and couldn't answer for that, and the immaculate broker was too

  much for him, and our side slid back again. However, I tried

  again, and the Coroner backed me again, for which I ever afterwards

  felt grateful to him as I do now to his memory; and we got another

  favourable turn, out of some other witness, some member of the

  family with a strong prepossession against the sinner; and I think

  we had the doctor back again; and I know that the Coroner summed up

  for our side, and that I and my British brothers turned round to

  discuss our verdict, and get ourselves into great difficulties with

  our large chairs and the broker. At that stage of the case I tried

  hard again, being convinced that I had cause for it; and at last we

  found for the minor offence of only concealing the birth; and the

  poor desolate creature, who had been taken out during our

  deliberation, being brought in again to be told of the verdict,

  then dropped upon her knees before us, with protestations that we

  were right - protestations among the most affecting that I have

  ever heard in my life - and was carried away insensible.

  (In private conversation after this was all over, the Coroner

  showed me his reasons as a trained surgeon, for perceiving it to be

  impossible that the child could, under the most favourable

  circumstances, have drawn many breaths, in the very doubtful case

  of its having ever breathed at all; this, owing to the discovery of

  some foreign matter in the windpipe, quite irreconcilable with many

  moments of life.)

  When the agonised girl had made those final protestations, I had

  seen her face, and it was in unison with her distracted heartbroken

  voice, and it was very moving. It certainly did not impress me by

  any beauty that it had, and if I ever see it again in another world