Reprinted Pieces

by Dickens, Charles

  put it in my head that I really ought to go out and take a walk in

  the wind; so, I gave up the magnificent chapter for that day,

  entirely persuading myself that I was under a moral obligation to

  have a blow.

  I had a good one, and that on the high road - the very high road -

  on the top of the cliffs, where I met the stage-coach with all the

  outsides holding their hats on and themselves too, and overtook a

  flock of sheep with the wool about their necks blown into such

  great ruffs that they looked like fleecy owls. The wind played

  upon the lighthouse as if it were a great whistle, the spray was

  driven over the sea in a cloud of haze, the ships rolled and

  pitched heavily, and at intervals long slants and flaws of light

  made mountain-steeps of communication between the ocean and the

  sky. A walk of ten miles brought me to a seaside town without a

  cliff, which, like the town I had come from, was out of the season

  too. Half of the houses were shut up; half of the other half were

  to let; the town might have done as much business as it was doing

  then, if it had been at the bottom of the sea. Nobody seemed to

  flourish save the attorney; his clerk's pen was going in the bowwindow

  of his wooden house; his brass door-plate alone was free

  from salt, and had been polished up that morning. On the beach,

  among the rough buggers and capstans, groups of storm-beaten

  boatmen, like a sort of marine monsters, watched under the lee of

  those objects, or stood leaning forward against the wind, looking

  out through battered spy-glasses. The parlour bell in the Admiral

  Benbow had grown so flat with being out of the season, that neither

  could I hear it ring when I pulled the handle for lunch, nor could

  the young woman in black stockings and strong shoes, who acted as

  waiter out of the season, until it had been tinkled three times.

  Admiral Benbow's cheese was out of the season, but his home-made

  bread was good, and his beer was perfect. Deluded by some earlier

  spring day which had been warm and sunny, the Admiral had cleared

  the firing out of his parlour stove, and had put some flower-pots

  in - which was amiable and hopeful in the Admiral, but not

  judicious: the room being, at that present visiting, transcendantly

  cold. I therefore took the liberty of peeping out across a little

  stone passage into the Admiral's kitchen, and, seeing a high settle

  with its back towards me drawn out in front of the Admiral's

  kitchen fire, I strolled in, bread and cheese in hand, munching and

  looking about. One landsman and two boatmen were seated on the

  settle, smoking pipes and drinking beer out of thick pint crockery

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  mugs - mugs peculiar to such places, with parti-coloured rings

  round them, and ornaments between the rings like frayed-out roots.

  The landsman was relating his experience, as yet only three nights

  old, of a fearful running-down case in the Channel, and therein

  presented to my imagination a sound of music that it will not soon

  forget.

  'At that identical moment of time,' said he (he was a prosy man by

  nature, who rose with his subject), 'the night being light and

  calm, but with a grey mist upon the water that didn't seem to

  spread for more than two or three mile, I was walking up and down

  the wooden causeway next the pier, off where it happened, along

  with a friend of mine, which his name is Mr. Clocker. Mr. Clocker

  is a grocer over yonder.' (From the direction in which he pointed

  the bowl of his pipe, I might have judged Mr. Clocker to be a

  merman, established in the grocery trade in five-and-twenty fathoms

  of water.) 'We were smoking our pipes, and walking up and down the

  causeway, talking of one thing and talking of another. We were

  quite alone there, except that a few hovellers' (the Kentish name

  for 'long-shore boatmen like his companions) 'were hanging about

  their lugs, waiting while the tide made, as hovellers will.' (One

  of the two boatmen, thoughtfully regarding me, shut up one eye;

  this I understood to mean: first, that he took me into the

  conversation: secondly, that he confirmed the proposition: thirdly,

  that he announced himself as a hoveller.) 'All of a sudden Mr.

  Clocker and me stood rooted to the spot, by hearing a sound come

  through the stillness, right over the sea, LIKE A GREAT SORROWFUL

  FLUTE OR AEOLIAN HARP. We didn't in the least know what it was,

  and judge of our surprise when we saw the hovellers, to a man, leap

  into the boats and tear about to hoist sail and get off, as if they

  had every one of 'em gone, in a moment, raving mad! But THEY knew

  it was the cry of distress from the sinking emigrant ship.'

  When I got back to my watering-place out of the season, and had

  done my twenty miles in good style, I found that the celebrated

  Black Mesmerist intended favouring the public that evening in the

  Hall of the Muses, which he had engaged for the purpose. After a

  good dinner, seated by the fire in an easy chair, I began to waver

  in a design I had formed of waiting on the Black Mesmerist, and to

  incline towards the expediency of remaining where I was. Indeed a

  point of gallantry was involved in my doing so, inasmuch as I had

  not left France alone, but had come from the prisons of St. Pelagie

  with my distinguished and unfortunate friend Madame Roland (in two

  volumes which I bought for two francs each, at the book-stall in

  the Place de la Concorde, Paris, at the corner of the Rue Royale).

  Deciding to pass the evening tete-a-tete with Madame Roland, I

  derived, as I always do, great pleasure from that spiritual woman's

  society, and the charms of her brave soul and engaging

  conversation. I must confess that if she had only some more

  faults, only a few more passionate failings of any kind, I might

  love her better; but I am content to believe that the deficiency is

  in me, and not in her. We spent some sadly interesting hours

  together on this occasion, and she told me again of her cruel

  discharge from the Abbaye, and of her being re-arrested before her

  free feet had sprung lightly up half-a-dozen steps of her own

  staircase, and carried off to the prison which she only left for

  the guillotine.

  Madame Roland and I took leave of one another before mid-night, and

  I went to bed full of vast intentions for next day, in connexion

  with the unparalleled chapter. To hear the foreign mail-steamers

  coming in at dawn of day, and to know that I was not aboard or

  obliged to get up, was very comfortable; so, I rose for the chapter

  in great force.

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  I had advanced so far as to sit down at my window again on my

  second morning, and to write the first half-line of the chapter and

  strike it out, not liking it, when my conscience reproached me with

  not having surveyed the watering-place out of the season, after

  all, yesterday, but with having gone straight out of it at the rate

  of four miles and a half an ho
ur. Obviously the best amends that I

  could make for this remissness was to go and look at it without

  another moment's delay. So - altogether as a matter of duty - I

  gave up the magnificent chapter for another day, and sauntered out

  with my hands in my pockets.

  All the houses and lodgings ever let to visitors, were to let that

  morning. It seemed to have snowed bills with To Let upon them.

  This put me upon thinking what the owners of all those apartments

  did, out of the season; how they employed their time, and occupied

  their minds. They could not be always going to the Methodist

  chapels, of which I passed one every other minute. They must have

  some other recreation. Whether they pretended to take one

  another's lodgings, and opened one another's tea-caddies in fun?

  Whether they cut slices off their own beef and mutton, and made

  believe that it belonged to somebody else? Whether they played

  little dramas of life, as children do, and said, 'I ought to come

  and look at your apartments, and you ought to ask two guineas aweek

  too much, and then I ought to say I must have the rest of the

  day to think of it, and then you ought to say that another lady and

  gentleman with no children in family had made an offer very close

  to your own terms, and you had passed your word to give them a

  positive answer in half an hour, and indeed were just going to take

  the bill down when you heard the knock, and then I ought to take

  them, you know?' Twenty such speculations engaged my thoughts.

  Then, after passing, still clinging to the walls, defaced rags of

  the bills of last year's Circus, I came to a back field near a

  timber-yard where the Circus itself had been, and where there was

  yet a sort of monkish tonsure on the grass, indicating the spot

  where the young lady had gone round upon her pet steed Firefly in

  her daring flight. Turning into the town again, I came among the

  shops, and they were emphatically out of the season. The chemist

  had no boxes of ginger-beer powders, no beautifying sea-side soaps

  and washes, no attractive scents; nothing but his great goggle-eyed

  red bottles, looking as if the winds of winter and the drift of the

  salt-sea had inflamed them. The grocers' hot pickles, Harvey's

  Sauce, Doctor Kitchener's Zest, Anchovy Paste, Dundee Marmalade,

  and the whole stock of luxurious helps to appetite, were

  hybernating somewhere underground. The china-shop had no trifles

  from anywhere. The Bazaar had given in altogether, and presented a

  notice on the shutters that this establishment would re-open at

  Whitsuntide, and that the proprietor in the meantime might be heard

  of at Wild Lodge, East Cliff. At the Sea-bathing Establishment, a

  row of neat little wooden houses seven or eight feet high, I SAW

  the proprietor in bed in the shower-bath. As to the bathingmachines,

  they were (how they got there, is not for me to say) at

  the top of a hill at least a mile and a half off. The library,

  which I had never seen otherwise than wide open, was tight shut;

  and two peevish bald old gentlemen seemed to be hermetically sealed

  up inside, eternally reading the paper. That wonderful mystery,

  the music-shop, carried it off as usual (except that it had more

  cabinet pianos in stock), as if season or no season were all one to

  it. It made the same prodigious display of bright brazen windinstruments,

  horribly twisted, worth, as I should conceive, some

  thousands of pounds, and which it is utterly impossible that

  anybody in any season can ever play or want to play. It had five

  triangles in the window, six pairs of castanets, and three harps;

  likewise every polka with a coloured frontispiece that ever was

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  published; from the original one where a smooth male and female

  Pole of high rank are coming at the observer with their arms akimbo,

  to the Ratcatcher's Daughter. Astonishing establishment,

  amazing enigma! Three other shops were pretty much out of the

  season, what they were used to be in it. First, the shop where

  they sell the sailors' watches, which had still the old collection

  of enormous timekeepers, apparently designed to break a fall from

  the masthead: with places to wind them up, like fire-plugs.

  Secondly, the shop where they sell the sailors' clothing, which

  displayed the old sou'-westers, and the old oily suits, and the old

  pea-jackets, and the old one sea-chest, with its handles like a

  pair of rope ear-rings. Thirdly, the unchangeable shop for the

  sale of literature that has been left behind. Here, Dr. Faustus

  was still going down to very red and yellow perdition, under the

  superintendence of three green personages of a scaly humour, with

  excrescential serpents growing out of their blade-bones. Here, the

  Golden Dreamer, and the Norwood Fortune Teller, were still on sale

  at sixpence each, with instructions for making the dumb cake, and

  reading destinies in tea-cups, and with a picture of a young woman

  with a high waist lying on a sofa in an attitude so uncomfortable

  as almost to account for her dreaming at one and the same time of a

  conflagration, a shipwreck, an earthquake, a skeleton, a churchporch,

  lightning, funerals performed, and a young man in a bright

  blue coat and canary pantaloons. Here, were Little Warblers and

  Fairburn's Comic Songsters. Here, too, were ballads on the old

  ballad paper and in the old confusion of types; with an old man in

  a cocked hat, and an arm-chair, for the illustration to Will Watch

  the bold Smuggler; and the Friar of Orders Grey, represented by a

  little girl in a hoop, with a ship in the distance. All these as

  of yore, when they were infinite delights to me!

  It took me so long fully to relish these many enjoyments, that I

  had not more than an hour before bedtime to devote to Madame

  Roland. We got on admirably together on the subject of her convent

  education, and I rose next morning with the full conviction that

  the day for the great chapter was at last arrived.

  It had fallen calm, however, in the night, and as I sat at

  breakfast I blushed to remember that I had not yet been on the

  Downs. I a walker, and not yet on the Downs! Really, on so quiet

  and bright a morning this must be set right. As an essential part

  of the Whole Duty of Man, therefore, I left the chapter to itself -

  for the present - and went on the Downs. They were wonderfully

  green and beautiful, and gave me a good deal to do. When I had

  done with the free air and the view, I had to go down into the

  valley and look after the hops (which I know nothing about), and to

  be equally solicitous as to the cherry orchards. Then I took it on

  myself to cross-examine a tramping family in black (mother alleged,

  I have no doubt by herself in person, to have died last week), and

  to accompany eighteenpence which produced a great effect, with

  moral admonitions which produced none at all. Finally, it was late

  in the afternoon before I got back to the unprecedented chapter,

  and then I determined that it was out of
the season, as the place

  was, and put it away.

  I went at night to the benefit of Mrs. B. Wedgington at the

  Theatre, who had placarded the town with the admonition, 'DON'T

  FORGET IT!' I made the house, according to my calculation, four

  and ninepence to begin with, and it may have warmed up, in the

  course of the evening, to half a sovereign. There was nothing to

  offend any one, - the good Mr. Baines of Leeds excepted. Mrs. B.

  Wedgington sang to a grand piano. Mr. B. Wedgington did the like,

  and also took off his coat, tucked up his trousers, and danced in

  clogs. Master B. Wedgington, aged ten months, was nursed by a

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  shivering young person in the boxes, and the eye of Mrs. B.

  Wedgington wandered that way more than once. Peace be with all the

  Wedgingtons from A. to Z. May they find themselves in the Season

  somewhere!

  A POOR MAN'S TALE OF A PATENT

  I AM not used to writing for print. What working-man, that never

  labours less (some Mondays, and Christmas Time and Easter Time

  excepted) than twelve or fourteen hours a day, is? But I have been

  asked to put down, plain, what I have got to say; and so I take

  pen-and-ink, and do it to the best of my power, hoping defects will

  find excuse.

  I was born nigh London, but have worked in a shop at Birmingham

  (what you would call Manufactories, we call Shops), almost ever

  since I was out of my time. I served my apprenticeship at

  Deptford, nigh where I was born, and I am a smith by trade. My

  name is John. I have been called 'Old John' ever since I was

  nineteen year of age, on account of not having much hair. I am

  fifty-six year of age at the present time, and I don't find myself

  with more hair, nor yet with less, to signify, than at nineteen

  year of age aforesaid.

  I have been married five and thirty year, come next April. I was

  married on All Fools' Day. Let them laugh that will. I won a good

  wife that day, and it was as sensible a day to me as ever I had.

  We have had a matter of ten children, six whereof are living. My

  eldest son is engineer in the Italian steam-packet 'Mezzo Giorno,

  plying between Marseilles and Naples, and calling at Genoa,

  Leghorn, and Civita Vecchia.' He was a good workman. He invented

  a many useful little things that brought him in - nothing. I have