Reprinted Pieces

by Dickens, Charles

  in church well. We are a little bilious sometimes, about these

  days of fraternisation, and about nations arriving at a new and

  more unprejudiced knowledge of each other (which our Christianity

  don't quite approve), but it soon goes off, and then we get on very

  well.

  There are two dissenting chapels, besides, in our small wateringplace;

  being in about the proportion of a hundred and twenty guns

  to a yacht. But the dissension that has torn us lately, has not

  been a religious one. It has arisen on the novel question of Gas.

  Our watering-place has been convulsed by the agitation, Gas or No

  Gas. It was never reasoned why No Gas, but there was a great No

  Gas party. Broadsides were printed and stuck about - a startling

  circumstance in our watering-place. The No Gas party rested

  content with chalking 'No Gas!' and 'Down with Gas!' and other such

  angry war-whoops, on the few back gates and scraps of wall which

  the limits of our watering-place afford; but the Gas party printed

  and posted bills, wherein they took the high ground of proclaiming

  against the No Gas party, that it was said Let there be light and

  there was light; and that not to have light (that is gas-light) in

  our watering-place, was to contravene the great decree. Whether by

  these thunderbolts or not, the No Gas party were defeated; and in

  this present season we have had our handful of shops illuminated

  for the first time. Such of the No Gas party, however, as have got

  shops, remain in opposition and burn tallow - exhibiting in their

  windows the very picture of the sulkiness that punishes itself, and

  a new illustration of the old adage about cutting off your nose to

  be revenged on your face, in cutting off their gas to be revenged

  on their business.

  Other population than we have indicated, our watering-place has

  none. There are a few old used-up boatmen who creep about in the

  sunlight with the help of sticks, and there is a poor imbecile

  shoemaker who wanders his lonely life away among the rocks, as if

  he were looking for his reason - which he will never find.

  Sojourners in neighbouring watering-places come occasionally in

  flys to stare at us, and drive away again as if they thought us

  very dull; Italian boys come, Punch comes, the Fantoccini come, the

  Tumblers come, the Ethiopians come; Glee-singers come at night, and

  hum and vibrate (not always melodiously) under our windows. But

  they all go soon, and leave us to ourselves again. We once had a

  travelling Circus and Wombwell's Menagerie at the same time. They

  both know better than ever to try it again; and the Menagerie had

  nearly razed us from the face of the earth in getting the elephant

  away - his caravan was so large, and the watering-place so small.

  We have a fine sea, wholesome for all people; profitable for the

  body, profitable for the mind. The poet's words are sometimes on

  its awful lips:

  And the stately ships go on

  To their haven under the hill;

  But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand.

  And the sound of a voice that is still!

  Break, break, break,

  At the foot of thy crags, O sea!

  But the tender grace of a day that is dead

  Will never come back to me.

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  Yet it is not always so, for the speech of the sea is various, and

  wants not abundant resource of cheerfulness, hope, and lusty

  encouragement. And since I have been idling at the window here,

  the tide has risen. The boats are dancing on the bubbling water;

  the colliers are afloat again; the white-bordered waves rush in;

  the children

  Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him

  When he comes back;

  the radiant sails are gliding past the shore, and shining on the

  far horizon; all the sea is sparkling, heaving, swelling up with

  life and beauty, this bright morning.

  OUR FRENCH WATERING-PLACE

  HAVING earned, by many years of fidelity, the right to be sometimes

  inconstant to our English watering-place, we have dallied for two

  or three seasons with a French watering-place: once solely known to

  us as a town with a very long street, beginning with an abattoir

  and ending with a steam-boat, which it seemed our fate to behold

  only at daybreak on winter mornings, when (in the days before

  continental railroads), just sufficiently awake to know that we

  were most uncomfortably asleep, it was our destiny always to

  clatter through it, in the coupe of the diligence from Paris, with

  a sea of mud behind us, and a sea of tumbling waves before. In

  relation to which latter monster, our mind's eye now recalls a

  worthy Frenchman in a seal-skin cap with a braided hood over it,

  once our travelling companion in the coupe aforesaid, who, waking

  up with a pale and crumpled visage, and looking ruefully out at the

  grim row of breakers enjoying themselves fanatically on an

  instrument of torture called 'the Bar,' inquired of us whether we

  were ever sick at sea? Both to prepare his mind for the abject

  creature we were presently to become, and also to afford him

  consolation, we replied, 'Sir, your servant is always sick when it

  is possible to be so.' He returned, altogether uncheered by the

  bright example, 'Ah, Heaven, but I am always sick, even when it is

  IMpossible to be so.'

  The means of communication between the French capital and our

  French watering-place are wholly changed since those days; but, the

  Channel remains unbridged as yet, and the old floundering and

  knocking about go on there. It must be confessed that saving in

  reasonable (and therefore rare) sea-weather, the act of arrival at

  our French watering-place from England is difficult to be achieved

  with dignity. Several little circumstances combine to render the

  visitor an object of humiliation. In the first place, the steamer

  no sooner touches the port, than all the passengers fall into

  captivity: being boarded by an overpowering force of Custom-house

  officers, and marched into a gloomy dungeon. In the second place,

  the road to this dungeon is fenced off with ropes breast-high, and

  outside those ropes all the English in the place who have lately

  been sea-sick and are now well, assemble in their best clothes to

  enjoy the degradation of their dilapidated fellow-creatures. 'Oh,

  my gracious! how ill this one has been!' 'Here's a damp one coming

  next!' 'HERE'S a pale one!' 'Oh! Ain't he green in the face,

  this next one!' Even we ourself (not deficient in natural dignity)

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  have a lively remembrance of staggering up this detested lane one

  September day in a gale of wind, when we were received like an

  irresistible comic actor, with a burst of laughter and applause,

  occasioned by the extreme imbecility of our legs.

  We were coming to the third place. In the third place, the

  captives, being shut up in the gloomy dungeon, are strained, two or

  three at a time, into an inner cell, to be examined
as to

  passports; and across the doorway of communication, stands a

  military creature making a bar of his arm. Two ideas are generally

  present to the British mind during these ceremonies; first, that it

  is necessary to make for the cell with violent struggles, as if it

  were a life-boat and the dungeon a ship going down; secondly, that

  the military creature's arm is a national affront, which the

  government at home ought instantly to 'take up.' The British mind

  and body becoming heated by these fantasies, delirious answers are

  made to inquiries, and extravagant actions performed. Thus,

  Johnson persists in giving Johnson as his baptismal name, and

  substituting for his ancestral designation the national 'Dam!'

  Neither can he by any means be brought to recognise the distinction

  between a portmanteau-key and a passport, but will obstinately

  persevere in tendering the one when asked for the other. This

  brings him to the fourth place, in a state of mere idiotcy; and

  when he is, in the fourth place, cast out at a little door into a

  howling wilderness of touters, he becomes a lunatic with wild eyes

  and floating hair until rescued and soothed. If friendless and

  unrescued, he is generally put into a railway omnibus and taken to

  Paris.

  But, our French watering-place, when it is once got into, is a very

  enjoyable place. It has a varied and beautiful country around it,

  and many characteristic and agreeable things within it. To be

  sure, it might have fewer bad smells and less decaying refuse, and

  it might be better drained, and much cleaner in many parts, and

  therefore infinitely more healthy. Still, it is a bright, airy,

  pleasant, cheerful town; and if you were to walk down either of its

  three well-paved main streets, towards five o'clock in the

  afternoon, when delicate odours of cookery fill the air, and its

  hotel windows (it is full of hotels) give glimpses of long tables

  set out for dinner, and made to look sumptuous by the aid of

  napkins folded fan-wise, you would rightly judge it to be an

  uncommonly good town to eat and drink in.

  We have an old walled town, rich in cool public wells of water, on

  the top of a hill within and above the present business-town; and

  if it were some hundreds of miles further from England, instead of

  being, on a clear day, within sight of the grass growing in the

  crevices of the chalk-cliffs of Dover, you would long ago have been

  bored to death about that town. It is more picturesque and quaint

  than half the innocent places which tourists, following their

  leader like sheep, have made impostors of. To say nothing of its

  houses with grave courtyards, its queer by-corners, and its manywindowed

  streets white and quiet in the sunlight, there is an

  ancient belfry in it that would have been in all the Annuals and

  Albums, going and gone, these hundred years if it had but been more

  expensive to get at. Happily it has escaped so well, being only in

  our French watering-place, that you may like it of your own accord

  in a natural manner, without being required to go into convulsions

  about it. We regard it as one of the later blessings of our life,

  that BILKINS, the only authority on Taste, never took any notice

  that we can find out, of our French watering-place. Bilkins never

  wrote about it, never pointed out anything to be seen in it, never

  measured anything in it, always left it alone. For which relief,

  Heaven bless the town and the memory of the immortal Bilkins

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  likewise!

  There is a charming walk, arched and shaded by trees, on the old

  walls that form the four sides of this High Town, whence you get

  glimpses of the streets below, and changing views of the other town

  and of the river, and of the hills and of the sea. It is made more

  agreeable and peculiar by some of the solemn houses that are rooted

  in the deep streets below, bursting into a fresher existence a-top,

  and having doors and windows, and even gardens, on these ramparts.

  A child going in at the courtyard gate of one of these houses,

  climbing up the many stairs, and coming out at the fourth-floor

  window, might conceive himself another Jack, alighting on enchanted

  ground from another bean-stalk. It is a place wonderfully populous

  in children; English children, with governesses reading novels as

  they walk down the shady lanes of trees, or nursemaids

  interchanging gossip on the seats; French children with their

  smiling bonnes in snow-white caps, and themselves - if little boys

  - in straw head-gear like bee-hives, work-baskets and church

  hassocks. Three years ago, there were three weazen old men, one

  bearing a frayed red ribbon in his threadbare button-hole, always

  to be found walking together among these children, before dinnertime.

  If they walked for an appetite, they doubtless lived en

  pension - were contracted for - otherwise their poverty would have

  made it a rash action. They were stooping, blear-eyed, dull old

  men, slip-shod and shabby, in long-skirted short-waisted coats and

  meagre trousers, and yet with a ghost of gentility hovering in

  their company. They spoke little to each other, and looked as if

  they might have been politically discontented if they had had

  vitality enough. Once, we overheard red-ribbon feebly complain to

  the other two that somebody, or something, was 'a Robber;' and then

  they all three set their mouths so that they would have ground

  their teeth if they had had any. The ensuing winter gathered redribbon

  unto the great company of faded ribbons, and next year the

  remaining two were there - getting themselves entangled with hoops

  and dolls - familiar mysteries to the children - probably in the

  eyes of most of them, harmless creatures who had never been like

  children, and whom children could never be like. Another winter

  came, and another old man went, and so, this present year, the last

  of the triumvirate, left off walking - it was no good, now - and

  sat by himself on a little solitary bench, with the hoops and the

  dolls as lively as ever all about him.

  In the Place d'Armes of this town, a little decayed market is held,

  which seems to slip through the old gateway, like water, and go

  rippling down the hill, to mingle with the murmuring market in the

  lower town, and get lost in its movement and bustle. It is very

  agreeable on an idle summer morning to pursue this market-stream

  from the hill-top. It begins, dozingly and dully, with a few sacks

  of corn; starts into a surprising collection of boots and shoes;

  goes brawling down the hill in a diversified channel of old

  cordage, old iron, old crockery, old clothes, civil and military,

  old rags, new cotton goods, flaming prints of saints, little

  looking-glasses, and incalculable lengths of tape; dives into a

  backway, keeping out of sight for a little while, as streams will,

  or only sparkling for a moment in the shape of a market drinkingshop;

  and suddenly reappears behind the great church, shooting

>   itself into a bright confusion of white-capped women and bluebloused

  men, poultry, vegetables, fruits, flowers, pots, pans,

  praying-chairs, soldiers, country butter, umbrellas and other sunshades,

  girl-porters waiting to be hired with baskets at their

  backs, and one weazen little old man in a cocked hat, wearing a

  cuirass of drinking-glasses and carrying on his shoulder a crimson

  temple fluttering with flags, like a glorified pavior's rammer

  without the handle, who rings a little bell in all parts of the

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  scene, and cries his cooling drink Hola, Hola, Ho-o-o! in a shrill

  cracked voice that somehow makes itself heard, above all the

  chaffering and vending hum. Early in the afternoon, the whole

  course of the stream is dry. The praying-chairs are put back in

  the church, the umbrellas are folded up, the unsold goods are

  carried away, the stalls and stands disappear, the square is swept,

  the hackney coaches lounge there to be hired, and on all the

  country roads (if you walk about, as much as we do) you will see

  the peasant women, always neatly and comfortably dressed, riding

  home, with the pleasantest saddle-furniture of clean milk-pails,

  bright butter-kegs, and the like, on the jolliest little donkeys in

  the world.

  We have another market in our French watering-place - that is to

  say, a few wooden hutches in the open street, down by the Port -

  devoted to fish. Our fishing-boats are famous everywhere; and our

  fishing people, though they love lively colours, and taste is

  neutral (see Bilkins), are among the most picturesque people we

  ever encountered. They have not only a quarter of their own in the

  town itself, but they occupy whole villages of their own on the

  neighbouring cliffs. Their churches and chapels are their own;

  they consort with one another, they intermarry among themselves,

  their customs are their own, and their costume is their own and

  never changes. As soon as one of their boys can walk, he is

  provided with a long bright red nightcap; and one of their men

  would as soon think of going afloat without his head, as without

  that indispensable appendage to it. Then, they wear the noblest

  boots, with the hugest tops - flapping and bulging over anyhow;

  above which, they encase themselves in such wonderful overalls and