The Uncommercial Traveller

by Dickens, Charles

  a hayfield; it is possible to imagine his desk, like the desk of a

  clerk at church, without him; but imagination is unable to pursue

  the men who wait at Garraway's all the week for the men who never

  come. When they are forcibly put out of Garraway's on Saturday

  night - which they must be, for they never would go out of their

  own accord - where do they vanish until Monday morning? On the

  first Sunday that I ever strayed here, I expected to find them

  hovering about these lanes, like restless ghosts, and trying to

  peep into Garraway's through chinks in the shutters, if not

  endeavouring to turn the lock of the door with false keys, picks,

  and screw-drivers. But the wonder is, that they go clean away!

  And now I think of it, the wonder is, that every working-day

  pervader of these scenes goes clean away. The man who sells the

  dogs' collars and the little toy coal-scuttles, feels under as

  great an obligation to go afar off, as Glyn and Co., or Smith,

  Payne, and Smith. There is an old monastery-crypt under Garraway's

  (I have been in it among the port wine), and perhaps Garraway's,

  taking pity on the mouldy men who wait in its public-room all their

  lives, gives them cool house-room down there over Sundays; but the

  catacombs of Paris would not be large enough to hold the rest of

  the missing. This characteristic of London City greatly helps its

  being the quaint place it is in the weekly pause of business, and

  greatly helps my Sunday sensation in it of being the Last Man. In

  my solitude, the ticket-porters being all gone with the rest, I

  venture to breathe to the quiet bricks and stones my confidential

  wonderment why a ticket-porter, who never does any work with his

  hands, is bound to wear a white apron, and why a great

  Ecclesiastical Dignitary, who never does any work with his hands

  either, is equally bound to wear a black one.

  CHAPTER XXIV - AN OLD STAGE-COACHING HOUSE

  Before the waitress had shut the door, I had forgotten how many

  stage-coaches she said used to change horses in the town every day.

  But it was of little moment; any high number would do as well as

  another. It had been a great stage-coaching town in the great

  stage-coaching times, and the ruthless railways had killed and

  buried it.

  The sign of the house was the Dolphin's Head. Why only head, I

  don't know; for the Dolphin's effigy at full length, and upside

  down - as a Dolphin is always bound to be when artistically

  treated, though I suppose he is sometimes right side upward in his

  natural condition - graced the sign-board. The sign-board chafed

  its rusty hooks outside the bow-window of my room, and was a shabby

  work. No visitor could have denied that the Dolphin was dying by

  inches, but he showed no bright colours. He had once served

  another master; there was a newer streak of paint below him,

  displaying with inconsistent freshness the legend, By J. MELLOWS.

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  My door opened again, and J. Mellows's representative came back. I

  had asked her what I could have for dinner, and she now returned

  with the counter question, what would I like? As the Dolphin stood

  possessed of nothing that I do like, I was fain to yield to the

  suggestion of a duck, which I don't like. J. Mellows's

  representative was a mournful young woman with eye susceptible of

  guidance, and one uncontrollable eye; which latter, seeming to

  wander in quest of stage-coaches, deepened the melancholy in which

  the Dolphin was steeped.

  This young woman had but shut the door on retiring again when I

  bethought me of adding to my order, the words, 'with nice

  vegetables.' Looking out at the door to give them emphatic

  utterance, I found her already in a state of pensive catalepsy in

  the deserted gallery, picking her teeth with a pin.

  At the Railway Station seven miles off, I had been the subject of

  wonder when I ordered a fly in which to come here. And when I gave

  the direction 'To the Dolphin's Head,' I had observed an ominous

  stare on the countenance of the strong young man in velveteen, who

  was the platform servant of the Company. He had also called to my

  driver at parting, 'All ri-ight! Don't hang yourself when you get

  there, Geo-o-rge!' in a sarcastic tone, for which I had entertained

  some transitory thoughts of reporting him to the General Manager.

  I had no business in the town - I never have any business in any

  town - but I had been caught by the fancy that I would come and

  look at it in its degeneracy. My purpose was fitly inaugurated by

  the Dolphin's Head, which everywhere expressed past coachfulness

  and present coachlessness. Coloured prints of coaches, starting,

  arriving, changing horses, coaches in the sunshine, coaches in the

  snow, coaches in the wind, coaches in the mist and rain, coaches on

  the King's birthday, coaches in all circumstances compatible with

  their triumph and victory, but never in the act of breaking down or

  overturning, pervaded the house. Of these works of art, some,

  framed and not glazed, had holes in them; the varnish of others had

  become so brown and cracked, that they looked like overdone piecrust;

  the designs of others were almost obliterated by the flies

  of many summers. Broken glasses, damaged frames, lop-sided

  hanging, and consignment of incurable cripples to places of refuge

  in dark corners, attested the desolation of the rest. The old room

  on the ground floor where the passengers of the Highflyer used to

  dine, had nothing in it but a wretched show of twigs and flowerpots

  in the broad window to hide the nakedness of the land, and in

  a corner little Mellows's perambulator, with even its parasol-head

  turned despondently to the wall. The other room, where post-horse

  company used to wait while relays were getting ready down the yard,

  still held its ground, but was as airless as I conceive a hearse to

  be: insomuch that Mr. Pitt, hanging high against the partition

  (with spots on him like port wine, though it is mysterious how port

  wine ever got squirted up there), had good reason for perking his

  nose and sniffing. The stopperless cruets on the spindle-shanked

  sideboard were in a miserably dejected state: the anchovy sauce

  having turned blue some years ago, and the cayenne pepper (with a

  scoop in it like a small model of a wooden leg) having turned

  solid. The old fraudulent candles which were always being paid for

  and never used, were burnt out at last; but their tall stilts of

  candlesticks still lingered, and still outraged the human intellect

  by pretending to be silver. The mouldy old unreformed Borough

  Member, with his right hand buttoned up in the breast of his coat,

  and his back characteristically turned on bales of petitions from

  his constituents, was there too; and the poker which never had been

  among the fire-irons, lest post-horse company should overstir the

  fire, was NOT there, as of old.

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  Pur
suing my researches in the Dolphin's Head, I found it sorely

  shrunken. When J. Mellows came into possession, he had walled off

  half the bar, which was now a tobacco-shop with its own entrance in

  the yard - the once glorious yard where the postboys, whip in hand

  and always buttoning their waistcoats at the last moment, used to

  come running forth to mount and away. A 'Scientific Shoeing -

  Smith and Veterinary Surgeon,' had further encroached upon the

  yard; and a grimly satirical jobber, who announced himself as

  having to Let 'A neat one-horse fly, and a one-horse cart,' had

  established his business, himself, and his family, in a part of the

  extensive stables. Another part was lopped clean off from the

  Dolphin's Head, and now comprised a chapel, a wheelwright's, and a

  Young Men's Mutual Improvement and Discussion Society (in a loft):

  the whole forming a back lane. No audacious hand had plucked down

  the vane from the central cupola of the stables, but it had grown

  rusty and stuck at N-Nil: while the score or two of pigeons that

  remained true to their ancestral traditions and the place, had

  collected in a row on the roof-ridge of the only outhouse retained

  by the Dolphin, where all the inside pigeons tried to push the

  outside pigeon off. This I accepted as emblematical of the

  struggle for post and place in railway times.

  Sauntering forth into the town, by way of the covered and pillared

  entrance to the Dolphin's Yard, once redolent of soup and stablelitter,

  now redolent of musty disuse, I paced the street. It was a

  hot day, and the little sun-blinds of the shops were all drawn

  down, and the more enterprising tradesmen had caused their

  'Prentices to trickle water on the pavement appertaining to their

  frontage. It looked as if they had been shedding tears for the

  stage-coaches, and drying their ineffectual pocket-handkerchiefs.

  Such weakness would have been excusable; for business was - as one

  dejected porkman who kept a shop which refused to reciprocate the

  compliment by keeping him, informed me - 'bitter bad.' Most of the

  harness-makers and corn-dealers were gone the way of the coaches,

  but it was a pleasant recognition of the eternal procession of

  Children down that old original steep Incline, the Valley of the

  Shadow, that those tradesmen were mostly succeeded by vendors of

  sweetmeats and cheap toys. The opposition house to the Dolphin,

  once famous as the New White Hart, had long collapsed. In a fit of

  abject depression, it had cast whitewash on its windows, and

  boarded up its front door, and reduced itself to a side entrance;

  but even that had proved a world too wide for the Literary

  Institution which had been its last phase; for the Institution had

  collapsed too, and of the ambitious letters of its inscription on

  the White Hart's front, all had fallen off but these:

  L Y INS T

  - suggestive of Lamentably Insolvent. As to the neighbouring

  market-place, it seemed to have wholly relinquished marketing, to

  the dealer in crockery whose pots and pans straggled half across

  it, and to the Cheap Jack who sat with folded arms on the shafts of

  his cart, superciliously gazing around; his velveteen waistcoat,

  evidently harbouring grave doubts whether it was worth his while to

  stay a night in such a place.

  The church bells began to ring as I left this spot, but they by no

  means improved the case, for they said, in a petulant way, and

  speaking with some difficulty in their irritation, WHAT'S-be-comeof-

  THE-coach-ES!' Nor would they (I found on listening) ever vary

  their emphasis, save in respect of growing more sharp and vexed,

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  but invariably went on, 'WHAT'S-be-come-of-THE-coach-ES!' - always

  beginning the inquiry with an unpolite abruptness. Perhaps from

  their elevation they saw the railway, and it aggravated them.

  Coming upon a coachmaker's workshop, I began to look about me with

  a revived spirit, thinking that perchance I might behold there some

  remains of the old times of the town's greatness. There was only

  one man at work - a dry man, grizzled, and far advanced in years,

  but tall and upright, who, becoming aware of me looking on,

  straightened his back, pushed up his spectacles against his brownpaper

  cap, and appeared inclined to defy me. To whom I pacifically

  said:

  'Good day, sir!'

  'What?' said he.

  'Good day, sir.'

  He seemed to consider about that, and not to agree with me. - 'Was

  you a looking for anything?' he then asked, in a pointed manner.

  'I was wondering whether there happened to be any fragment of an

  old stage-coach here.'

  'Is that all?'

  'That's all.'

  'No, there ain't.'

  It was now my turn to say 'Oh!' and I said it. Not another word

  did the dry and grizzled man say, but bent to his work again. In

  the coach-making days, the coach-painters had tried their brushes

  on a post beside him; and quite a Calendar of departed glories was

  to be read upon it, in blue and yellow and red and green, some

  inches thick. Presently he looked up again.

  'You seem to have a deal of time on your hands,' was his querulous

  remark.

  I admitted the fact.

  'I think it's a pity you was not brought up to something,' said he.

  I said I thought so too.

  Appearing to be informed with an idea, he laid down his plane (for

  it was a plane he was at work with), pushed up his spectacles

  again, and came to the door.

  'Would a po-shay do for you?' he asked.

  'I am not sure that I understand what you mean.'

  'Would a po-shay,' said the coachmaker, standing close before me,

  and folding his arms in the manner of a cross-examining counsel -

  'would a po-shay meet the views you have expressed? Yes, or no?'

  'Yes.'

  'Then you keep straight along down there till you see one. YOU'LL

  see one if you go fur enough.'

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  With that, he turned me by the shoulder in the direction I was to

  take, and went in and resumed his work against a background of

  leaves and grapes. For, although he was a soured man and a

  discontented, his workshop was that agreeable mixture of town and

  country, street and garden, which is often to be seen in a small

  English town.

  I went the way he had turned me, and I came to the Beer-shop with

  the sign of The First and Last, and was out of the town on the old

  London road. I came to the Turnpike, and I found it, in its silent

  way, eloquent respecting the change that had fallen on the road.

  The Turnpike-house was all overgrown with ivy; and the Turnpikekeeper,

  unable to get a living out of the tolls, plied the trade of

  a cobbler. Not only that, but his wife sold ginger-beer, and, in

  the very window of espial through which the Toll-takers of old

  times used with awe to behold the grand London coaches coming on at

  a gallop, exhibited for sale little barber's-p
oles of sweetstuff in

  a sticky lantern.

  The political economy of the master of the turnpike thus expressed

  itself.

  'How goes turnpike business, master?' said I to him, as he sat in

  his little porch, repairing a shoe.

  'It don't go at all, master,' said he to me. 'It's stopped.'

  'That's bad,' said I.

  'Bad?' he repeated. And he pointed to one of his sunburnt dusty

  children who was climbing the turnpike-gate, and said, extending

  his open right hand in remonstrance with Universal Nature. 'Five

  on 'em!'

  'But how to improve Turnpike business?' said I.

  'There's a way, master,' said he, with the air of one who had

  thought deeply on the subject.

  'I should like to know it.'

  'Lay a toll on everything as comes through; lay a toll on walkers.

  Lay another toll on everything as don't come through; lay a toll on

  them as stops at home.'

  'Would the last remedy be fair?'

  'Fair? Them as stops at home, could come through if they liked;

  couldn't they?'

  'Say they could.'

  'Toll 'em. If they don't come through, it's THEIR look out.

  Anyways, - Toll 'em!'

  Finding it was as impossible to argue with this financial genius as

  if he had been Chancellor of the Exchequer, and consequently the

  right man in the right place, I passed on meekly.

  My mind now began to misgive me that the disappointed coach-maker

  had sent me on a wild-goose errand, and that there was no postchaise

  in those parts. But coming within view of certain

  allotment-gardens by the roadside, I retracted the suspicion, and

  confessed that I had done him an injustice. For, there I saw,

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  surely, the poorest superannuated post-chaise left on earth.

  It was a post-chaise taken off its axletree and wheels, and plumped

  down on the clayey soil among a ragged growth of vegetables. It

  was a post-chaise not even set straight upon the ground, but tilted

  over, as if it had fallen out of a balloon. It was a post-chaise

  that had been a long time in those decayed circumstances, and

  against which scarlet beans were trained. It was a post-chaise

  patched and mended with old tea-trays, or with scraps of iron that

  looked like them, and boarded up as to the windows, but having A

  KNOCKER on the off-side door. Whether it was a post-chaise used as