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The Uncommercial Traveller

C >> Charles Dickens >> The Uncommercial Traveller




The sands of the hour had all run out when we got back to the
Temeraire. Says Bullfinch, then, to the youth in livery, with
boldness, 'Lavatory!'

When we arrived at the family vault with a skylight, which the
youth in livery presented as the institution sought, we had already
whisked off our cravats and coats; but finding ourselves in the
presence of an evil smell, and no linen but two crumpled towels
newly damp from the countenances of two somebody elses, we put on
our cravats and coats again, and fled unwashed to the coffee-room.

There the waiter who ought to wait upon us had set forth our knives
and forks and glasses, on the cloth whose dirty acquaintance we had
already had the pleasure of making, and which we were pleased to
recognise by the familiar expression of its stains. And now there
occurred the truly surprising phenomenon, that the waiter who ought
not to wait upon us swooped down upon us, clutched our loaf of
bread, and vanished with the same.

Bullfinch, with distracted eyes, was following this unaccountable
figure 'out at the portal,' like the ghost in Hamlet, when the
waiter who ought to wait upon us jostled against it, carrying a
tureen.

'Waiter!' said a severe diner, lately finished, perusing his bill
fiercely through his eye-glass.

The waiter put down our tureen on a remote side-table, and went to
see what was amiss in this new direction.

'This is not right, you know, waiter. Look here! here's
yesterday's sherry, one and eightpence, and here we are again, two
shillings. And what does sixpence mean?'

So far from knowing what sixpence meant, the waiter protested that
he didn't know what anything meant. He wiped the perspiration from
his clammy brow, and said it was impossible to do it,--not
particularising what,--and the kitchen was so far off.

'Take the bill to the bar, and get it altered,' said Mr.
Indignation Cocker, so to call him.

The waiter took it, looked intensely at it, didn't seem to like the
idea of taking it to the bar, and submitted, as a new light upon
the case, that perhaps sixpence meant sixpence.

'I tell you again,' said Mr. Indignation Cocker, 'here's
yesterday's sherry--can't you see it?--one and eightpence, and here
we are again, two shillings. What do you make of one and
eightpence and two shillings?'

Totally unable to make anything of one and eightpence and two
shillings, the waiter went out to try if anybody else could; merely
casting a helpless backward glance at Bullfinch, in acknowledgement
of his pathetic entreaties for our soup-tureen. After a pause,
during which Mr. Indignation Cocker read a newspaper and coughed
defiant coughs, Bullfinch arose to get the tureen, when the waiter
reappeared and brought it,--dropping Mr. Indignation Cocker's
altered bill on Mr. Indignation Cocker's table as he came along.

'It's quite impossible to do it, gentlemen,' murmured the waiter;
'and the kitchen is so far off.'

'Well, you don't keep the house; it's not your fault, we suppose.
Bring some sherry.'

'Waiter!' from Mr. Indignation Cocker, with a new and burning sense
of injury upon him.

The waiter, arrested on his way to our sherry, stopped short, and
came back to see what was wrong now.

'Will you look here? This is worse than before. DO you
understand? Here's yesterday's sherry, one and eightpence, and
here we are again two shillings. And what the devil does ninepence
mean?'

This new portent utterly confounded the waiter. He wrung his
napkin, and mutely appealed to the ceiling.

'Waiter, fetch that sherry,' says Bullfinch, in open wrath and
revolt.

'I want to know,' persisted Mr. Indignation Cocker, 'the meaning of
ninepence. I want to know the meaning of sherry one and eightpence
yesterday, and of here we are again two shillings. Send somebody.'

The distracted waiter got out of the room on pretext of sending
somebody, and by that means got our wine. But the instant he
appeared with our decanter, Mr. Indignation Cocker descended on him
again.

'Waiter!'

'You will now have the goodness to attend to our dinner, waiter,'
said Bullfinch, sternly.

'I am very sorry, but it's quite impossible to do it, gentlemen,'
pleaded the waiter; 'and the kitchen--'

'Waiter!' said Mr. Indignation Cocker.

'--Is,' resumed the waiter, 'so far off, that--'

'Waiter!' persisted Mr. Indignation Cocker, 'send somebody.'

We were not without our fears that the waiter rushed out to hang
himself; and we were much relieved by his fetching somebody,--in
graceful, flowing skirts and with a waist,--who very soon settled
Mr. Indignation Cocker's business.

'Oh!' said Mr. Cocker, with his fire surprisingly quenched by this
apparition; 'I wished to ask about this bill of mine, because it
appears to me that there's a little mistake here. Let me show you.
Here's yesterday's sherry one and eightpence, and here we are again
two shillings. And how do you explain ninepence?'

However it was explained, in tones too soft to be overheard. Mr.
Cocker was heard to say nothing more than 'Ah-h-h! Indeed; thank
you! Yes,' and shortly afterwards went out, a milder man.

The lonely traveller with the stomach-ache had all this time
suffered severely, drawing up a leg now and then, and sipping hot
brandy-and-water with grated ginger in it. When we tasted our
(very) mock-turtle soup, and were instantly seized with symptoms of
some disorder simulating apoplexy, and occasioned by the surcharge
of nose and brain with lukewarm dish-water holding in solution sour
flour, poisonous condiments, and (say) seventy-five per cent. of
miscellaneous kitchen stuff rolled into balls, we were inclined to
trace his disorder to that source. On the other hand, there was a
silent anguish upon him too strongly resembling the results
established within ourselves by the sherry, to be discarded from
alarmed consideration. Again, we observed him, with terror, to be
much overcome by our sole's being aired in a temporary retreat
close to him, while the waiter went out (as we conceived) to see
his friends. And when the curry made its appearance he suddenly
retired in great disorder.

In fine, for the uneatable part of this little dinner (as
contradistinguished from the undrinkable) we paid only seven
shillings and sixpence each. And Bullfinch and I agreed
unanimously, that no such ill-served, ill-appointed, ill-cooked,
nasty little dinner could be got for the money anywhere else under
the sun. With that comfort to our backs, we turned them on the
dear old Temeraire, the charging Temeraire, and resolved (in the
Scotch dialect) to gang nae mair to the flabby Temeraire.



CHAPTER XXXIV--MR. BARLOW



A great reader of good fiction at an unusually early age, it seems
to me as though I had been born under the superintendence of the
estimable but terrific gentleman whose name stands at the head of
my present reflections. The instructive monomaniac, Mr. Barlow,
will be remembered as the tutor of Master Harry Sandford and Master
Tommy Merton. He knew everything, and didactically improved all
sorts of occasions, from the consumption of a plate of cherries to
the contemplation of a starlight night. What youth came to without
Mr. Barlow was displayed in the history of Sandford and Merton, by
the example of a certain awful Master Mash. This young wretch wore
buckles and powder, conducted himself with insupportable levity at
the theatre, had no idea of facing a mad bull single-handed (in
which I think him less reprehensible, as remotely reflecting my own
character), and was a frightful instance of the enervating effects
of luxury upon the human race.

Strange destiny on the part of Mr. Barlow, to go down to posterity
as childhood's experience of a bore! Immortal Mr. Barlow, boring
his way through the verdant freshness of ages!

My personal indictment against Mr. Barlow is one of many counts. I
will proceed to set forth a few of the injuries he has done me.

In the first place, he never made or took a joke. This
insensibility on Mr. Barlow's part not only cast its own gloom over
my boyhood, but blighted even the sixpenny jest-books of the time;
for, groaning under a moral spell constraining me to refer all
things to Mr. Barlow, I could not choose but ask myself in a
whisper when tickled by a printed jest, 'What would HE think of it?
What would HE see in it?' The point of the jest immediately became
a sting, and stung my conscience. For my mind's eye saw him
stolid, frigid, perchance taking from its shelf some dreary Greek
book, and translating at full length what some dismal sage said
(and touched up afterwards, perhaps, for publication), when he
banished some unlucky joker from Athens.

The incompatibility of Mr. Barlow with all other portions of my
young life but himself, the adamantine inadaptability of the man to
my favourite fancies and amusements, is the thing for which I hate
him most. What right had he to bore his way into my Arabian
Nights? Yet he did. He was always hinting doubts of the veracity
of Sindbad the Sailor. If he could have got hold of the Wonderful
Lamp, I knew he would have trimmed it and lighted it, and delivered
a lecture over it on the qualities of sperm-oil, with a glance at
the whale fisheries. He would so soon have found out--on
mechanical principles--the peg in the neck of the Enchanted Horse,
and would have turned it the right way in so workmanlike a manner,
that the horse could never have got any height into the air, and
the story couldn't have been. He would have proved, by map and
compass, that there was no such kingdom as the delightful kingdom
of Casgar, on the frontiers of Tartary. He would have caused that
hypocritical young prig Harry to make an experiment,--with the aid
of a temporary building in the garden and a dummy,--demonstrating
that you couldn't let a choked hunchback down an Eastern chimney
with a cord, and leave him upright on the hearth to terrify the
sultan's purveyor.

The golden sounds of the overture to the first metropolitan
pantomime, I remember, were alloyed by Mr. Barlow. Click click,
ting ting, bang bang, weedle weedle weedle, bang! I recall the
chilling air that ran across my frame and cooled my hot delight, as
the thought occurred to me, 'This would never do for Mr. Barlow!'
After the curtain drew up, dreadful doubts of Mr. Barlow's
considering the costumes of the Nymphs of the Nebula as being
sufficiently opaque, obtruded themselves on my enjoyment. In the
clown I perceived two persons; one a fascinating unaccountable
creature of a hectic complexion, joyous in spirits though feeble in
intellect, with flashes of brilliancy; the other a pupil for Mr.
Barlow. I thought how Mr. Barlow would secretly rise early in the
morning, and butter the pavement for HIM, and, when he had brought
him down, would look severely out of his study window and ask HIM
how he enjoyed the fun.

I thought how Mr. Barlow would heat all the pokers in the house,
and singe him with the whole collection, to bring him better
acquainted with the properties of incandescent iron, on which he
(Barlow) would fully expatiate. I pictured Mr. Barlow's
instituting a comparison between the clown's conduct at his
studies,--drinking up the ink, licking his copy-book, and using his
head for blotting-paper,--and that of the already mentioned young
prig of prigs, Harry, sitting at the Barlovian feet, sneakingly
pretending to be in a rapture of youthful knowledge. I thought how
soon Mr. Barlow would smooth the clown's hair down, instead of
letting it stand erect in three tall tufts; and how, after a couple
of years or so with Mr. Barlow, he would keep his legs close
together when he walked, and would take his hands out of his big
loose pockets, and wouldn't have a jump left in him.

That I am particularly ignorant what most things in the universe
are made of, and how they are made, is another of my charges
against Mr. Barlow. With the dread upon me of developing into a
Harry, and with a further dread upon me of being Barlowed if I made
inquiries, by bringing down upon myself a cold shower-bath of
explanations and experiments, I forbore enlightenment in my youth,
and became, as they say in melodramas, 'the wreck you now behold.'
That I consorted with idlers and dunces is another of the
melancholy facts for which I hold Mr. Barlow responsible. That
pragmatical prig, Harry, became so detestable in my sight, that, he
being reported studious in the South, I would have fled idle to the
extremest North. Better to learn misconduct from a Master Mash
than science and statistics from a Sandford! So I took the path,
which, but for Mr. Barlow, I might never have trodden. Thought I,
with a shudder, 'Mr. Barlow is a bore, with an immense constructive
power of making bores. His prize specimen is a bore. He seeks to
make a bore of me. That knowledge is power I am not prepared to
gainsay; but, with Mr. Barlow, knowledge is power to bore.'
Therefore I took refuge in the caves of ignorance, wherein I have
resided ever since, and which are still my private address.

But the weightiest charge of all my charges against Mr. Barlow is,
that he still walks the earth in various disguises, seeking to make
a Tommy of me, even in my maturity. Irrepressible, instructive
monomaniac, Mr. Barlow fills my life with pitfalls, and lies hiding
at the bottom to burst out upon me when I least expect him.

A few of these dismal experiences of mine shall suffice.

Knowing Mr. Barlow to have invested largely in the moving panorama
trade, and having on various occasions identified him in the dark
with a long wand in his hand, holding forth in his old way (made
more appalling in this connection by his sometimes cracking a piece
of Mr. Carlyle's own Dead-Sea fruit in mistake for a joke), I
systematically shun pictorial entertainment on rollers. Similarly,
I should demand responsible bail and guaranty against the
appearance of Mr. Barlow, before committing myself to attendance at
any assemblage of my fellow-creatures where a bottle of water and a
note-book were conspicuous objects; for in either of those
associations, I should expressly expect him. But such is the
designing nature of the man, that he steals in where no reasoning
precaution or provision could expect him. As in the following
case:-

Adjoining the Caves of Ignorance is a country town. In this
country town the Mississippi Momuses, nine in number, were
announced to appear in the town-hall, for the general delectation,
this last Christmas week. Knowing Mr. Barlow to be unconnected
with the Mississippi, though holding republican opinions, and
deeming myself secure, I took a stall. My object was to hear and
see the Mississippi Momuses in what the bills described as their
'National ballads, plantation break-downs, nigger part-songs,
choice conundrums, sparkling repartees, &c.' I found the nine
dressed alike, in the black coat and trousers, white waistcoat,
very large shirt-front, very large shirt-collar, and very large
white tie and wristbands, which constitute the dress of the mass of
the African race, and which has been observed by travellers to
prevail over a vast number of degrees of latitude. All the nine
rolled their eyes exceedingly, and had very red lips. At the
extremities of the curve they formed, seated in their chairs, were
the performers on the tambourine and bones. The centre Momus, a
black of melancholy aspect (who inspired me with a vague uneasiness
for which I could not then account), performed on a Mississippi
instrument closely resembling what was once called in this island a
hurdy-gurdy. The Momuses on either side of him had each another
instrument peculiar to the Father of Waters, which may be likened
to a stringed weather-glass held upside down. There were likewise
a little flute and a violin. All went well for awhile, and we had
had several sparkling repartees exchanged between the performers on
the tambourine and bones, when the black of melancholy aspect,
turning to the latter, and addressing him in a deep and improving
voice as 'Bones, sir,' delivered certain grave remarks to him
concerning the juveniles present, and the season of the year;
whereon I perceived that I was in the presence of Mr. Barlow--
corked!

Another night--and this was in London--I attended the
representation of a little comedy. As the characters were lifelike
(and consequently not improving), and as they went upon their
several ways and designs without personally addressing themselves
to me, I felt rather confident of coming through it without being
regarded as Tommy, the more so, as we were clearly getting close to
the end. But I deceived myself. All of a sudden, Apropos of
nothing, everybody concerned came to a check and halt, advanced to
the foot-lights in a general rally to take dead aim at me, and
brought me down with a moral homily, in which I detected the dread
hand of Barlow.

Nay, so intricate and subtle are the toils of this hunter, that on
the very next night after that, I was again entrapped, where no
vestige of a spring could have been apprehended by the timidest.
It was a burlesque that I saw performed; an uncompromising
burlesque, where everybody concerned, but especially the ladies,
carried on at a very considerable rate indeed. Most prominent and
active among the corps of performers was what I took to be (and she
really gave me very fair opportunities of coming to a right
conclusion) a young lady of a pretty figure. She was dressed as a
picturesque young gentleman, whose pantaloons had been cut off in
their infancy; and she had very neat knees and very neat satin
boots. Immediately after singing a slang song and dancing a slang
dance, this engaging figure approached the fatal lamps, and,
bending over them, delivered in a thrilling voice a random eulogium
on, and exhortation to pursue, the virtues. 'Great Heaven!' was my
exclamation; 'Barlow!'

There is still another aspect in which Mr. Barlow perpetually
insists on my sustaining the character of Tommy, which is more
unendurable yet, on account of its extreme aggressiveness. For the
purposes of a review or newspaper, he will get up an abstruse
subject with definite pains, will Barlow, utterly regardless of the
price of midnight oil, and indeed of everything else, save cramming
himself to the eyes.

But mark. When Mr. Barlow blows his information off, he is not
contented with having rammed it home, and discharged it upon me,
Tommy, his target, but he pretends that he was always in possession
of it, and made nothing of it,--that he imbibed it with mother's
milk,--and that I, the wretched Tommy, am most abjectly behindhand
in not having done the same. I ask, why is Tommy to be always the
foil of Mr. Barlow to this extent? What Mr. Barlow had not the
slightest notion of himself, a week ago, it surely cannot be any
very heavy backsliding in me not to have at my fingers' ends to-
day! And yet Mr. Barlow systematically carries it over me with a
high hand, and will tauntingly ask me, in his articles, whether it
is possible that I am not aware that every school-boy knows that
the fourteenth turning on the left in the steppes of Russia will
conduct to such and such a wandering tribe? with other disparaging
questions of like nature. So, when Mr. Barlow addresses a letter
to any journal as a volunteer correspondent (which I frequently
find him doing), he will previously have gotten somebody to tell
him some tremendous technicality, and will write in the coolest
manner, 'Now, sir, I may assume that every reader of your columns,
possessing average information and intelligence, knows as well as I
do that'--say that the draught from the touch-hole of a cannon of
such a calibre bears such a proportion in the nicest fractions to
the draught from the muzzle; or some equally familiar little fact.
But whatever it is, be certain that it always tends to the
exaltation of Mr. Barlow, and the depression of his enforced and
enslaved pupil.

Mr. Barlow's knowledge of my own pursuits I find to be so profound,
that my own knowledge of them becomes as nothing. Mr. Barlow
(disguised and bearing a feigned name, but detected by me) has
occasionally taught me, in a sonorous voice, from end to end of a
long dinner-table, trifles that I took the liberty of teaching him
five-and-twenty years ago. My closing article of impeachment
against Mr. Barlow is, that he goes out to breakfast, goes out to
dinner, goes out everywhere, high and low, and that he WILL preach
to me, and that I CAN'T get rid of him. He makes me a Promethean
Tommy, bound; and he is the vulture that gorges itself upon the
liver of my uninstructed mind.



CHAPTER XXXV--ON AN AMATEUR BEAT



It is one of my fancies, that even my idlest walk must always have
its appointed destination. I set myself a task before I leave my
lodging in Covent-garden on a street expedition, and should no more
think of altering my route by the way, or turning back and leaving
a part of it unachieved, than I should think of fraudulently
violating an agreement entered into with somebody else. The other
day, finding myself under this kind of obligation to proceed to
Limehouse, I started punctually at noon, in compliance with the
terms of the contract with myself to which my good faith was
pledged.

On such an occasion, it is my habit to regard my walk as my beat,
and myself as a higher sort of police-constable doing duty on the
same. There is many a ruffian in the streets whom I mentally
collar and clear out of them, who would see mighty little of
London, I can tell him, if I could deal with him physically.

Issuing forth upon this very beat, and following with my eyes three
hulking garrotters on their way home,--which home I could
confidently swear to be within so many yards of Drury-lane, in such
a narrow and restricted direction (though they live in their
lodging quite as undisturbed as I in mine),--I went on duty with a
consideration which I respectfully offer to the new Chief
Commissioner,--in whom I thoroughly confide as a tried and
efficient public servant. How often (thought I) have I been forced
to swallow, in police-reports, the intolerable stereotyped pill of
nonsense, how that the police-constable informed the worthy
magistrate how that the associates of the prisoner did, at that
present speaking, dwell in a street or court which no man dared go
down, and how that the worthy magistrate had heard of the dark
reputation of such street or court, and how that our readers would
doubtless remember that it was always the same street or court
which was thus edifyingly discoursed about, say once a fortnight.

Now, suppose that a Chief Commissioner sent round a circular to
every division of police employed in London, requiring instantly
the names in all districts of all such much-puffed streets or
courts which no man durst go down; and suppose that in such
circular he gave plain warning, 'If those places really exist, they
are a proof of police inefficiency which I mean to punish; and if
they do not exist, but are a conventional fiction, then they are a
proof of lazy tacit police connivance with professional crime,
which I also mean to punish'--what then? Fictions or realities,
could they survive the touchstone of this atom of common sense? To
tell us in open court, until it has become as trite a feature of
news as the great gooseberry, that a costly police-system such as
was never before heard of, has left in London, in the days of steam
and gas and photographs of thieves and electric telegraphs, the
sanctuaries and stews of the Stuarts! Why, a parity of practice,
in all departments, would bring back the Plague in two summers, and
the Druids in a century!

Walking faster under my share of this public injury, I overturned a
wretched little creature, who, clutching at the rags of a pair of
trousers with one of its claws, and at its ragged hair with the
other, pattered with bare feet over the muddy stones. I stopped to
raise and succour this poor weeping wretch, and fifty like it, but
of both sexes, were about me in a moment, begging, tumbling,
fighting, clamouring, yelling, shivering in their nakedness and
hunger. The piece of money I had put into the claw of the child I
had over-turned was clawed out of it, and was again clawed out of
that wolfish gripe, and again out of that, and soon I had no notion
in what part of the obscene scuffle in the mud, of rags and legs
and arms and dirt, the money might be. In raising the child, I had
drawn it aside out of the main thoroughfare, and this took place
among some wooden hoardings and barriers and ruins of demolished
buildings, hard by Temple Bar.

Unexpectedly, from among them emerged a genuine police-constable,
before whom the dreadful brood dispersed in various directions, he
making feints and darts in this direction and in that, and catching
nothing. When all were frightened away, he took off his hat,
pulled out a handkerchief from it, wiped his heated brow, and
restored the handkerchief and hat to their places, with the air of
a man who had discharged a great moral duty,--as indeed he had, in
doing what was set down for him. I looked at him, and I looked
about at the disorderly traces in the mud, and I thought of the
drops of rain and the footprints of an extinct creature, hoary ages
upon ages old, that geologists have identified on the face of a
cliff; and this speculation came over me: If this mud could
petrify at this moment, and could lie concealed here for ten
thousand years, I wonder whether the race of men then to be our
successors on the earth could, from these or any marks, by the
utmost force of the human intellect, unassisted by tradition,
deduce such an astounding inference as the existence of a polished
state of society that bore with the public savagery of neglected
children in the streets of its capital city, and was proud of its
power by sea and land, and never used its power to seize and save
them!

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