Christmas gold, p.771
Christmas Gold, page 771
Mr. Traveller looked all around him on Tom Tiddler’s ground, and his glance at last encountered a dusky Tinker lying among the weeds and rank grass, in the shade of the dwelling-house. A rough walking-staff lay on the ground by his side, and his head rested on a small wallet. He met Mr. Traveller’s eye without lifting up his head, merely depressing his chin a little (for he was lying on his back) to get a better view of him.
“Good day!” said Mr. Traveller.
“Same to you, if you like it,” returned the Tinker.
“Don’t you like it? It’s a very fine day.”
“I ain’t partickler in weather,” returned the Tinker, with a yawn.
Mr. Traveller had walked up to where he lay, and was looking down at him. “This is a curious place,” said Mr. Traveller.
“Ay, I suppose so!” returned the Tinker. “Tom Tiddler’s ground, they call this.”
“Are you well acquainted with it?”
“Never saw it afore to-day,” said the Tinker, with another yawn, “and don’t care if I never see it again. There was a man here just now, told me what it was called. If you want to see Tom himself, you must go in at that gate.” He faintly indicated with his chin a little mean ruin of a wooden gate at the side of the house.
“Have you seen Tom?”
“No, and I ain’t partickler to see him. I can see a dirty man anywhere.”
“He does not live in the house, then?” said Mr. Traveller, casting his eyes upon the house anew.
“The man said,” returned the Tinker, rather irritably,—“him as was here just now, ‘this what you’re a laying on, mate, is Tom Tiddler’s ground. And if you want to see Tom,’ he says, ‘you must go in at that gate.’ The man come out at that gate himself, and he ought to know.”
“Certainly,” said Mr. Traveller.
“Though, perhaps,” exclaimed the Tinker, so struck by the brightness of his own idea, that it had the electric effect upon him of causing him to lift up his head an inch or so, “perhaps he was a liar! He told some rum’uns—him as was here just now, did about this place of Tom’s. He says—him as was here just now—‘When Tom shut up the house, mate, to go to rack, the beds was left, all made, like as if somebody was a-going to sleep in every bed. And if you was to walk through the bedrooms now, you’d see the ragged mouldy bedclothes a heaving and a heaving like seas. And a heaving and a heaving with what?’ he says. ‘Why, with the rats under ’em.’”
“I wish I had seen that man,” Mr. Traveller remarked.
“You’d have been welcome to see him instead of me seeing him,” growled the Tinker; “for he was a long-winded one.”
Not without a sense of injury in the remembrance, the Tinker gloomily closed his eyes. Mr. Traveller, deeming the Tinker a short-winded one, from whom no further breath of information was to be derived, betook himself to the gate.
Swung upon its rusty hinges, it admitted him into a yard in which there was nothing to be seen but an outhouse attached to the ruined building, with a barred window in it. As there were traces of many recent footsteps under this window, and as it was a low window, and unglazed, Mr. Traveller made bold to peep within the bars. And there to be sure he had a real live Hermit before him, and could judge how the real dead Hermits used to look.
He was lying on a bank of soot and cinders, on the floor, in front of a rusty fireplace. There was nothing else in the dark little kitchen, or scullery, or whatever his den had been originally used as, but a table with a litter of old bottles on it. A rat made a clatter among these bottles, jumped down, and ran over the real live Hermit on his way to his hole, or the man in his hole would not have been so easily discernible. Tickled in the face by the rat’s tail, the owner of Tom Tiddler’s ground opened his eyes, saw Mr. Traveller, started up, and sprang to the window.
“Humph!” thought Mr. Traveller, retiring a pace or two from the bars. “A compound of Newgate, Bedlam, a Debtors’ Prison in the worst time, a chimney-sweep, a mudlark, and the Noble Savage! A nice old family, the Hermit family. Hah!”
Mr. Traveller thought this, as he silently confronted the sooty object in the blanket and skewer (in sober truth it wore nothing else), with the matted hair and the staring eyes. Further, Mr. Traveller thought, as the eye surveyed him with a very obvious curiosity in ascertaining the effect they produced, “Vanity, vanity, vanity! Verily, all is vanity!”
“What is your name, sir, and where do you come from?” asked Mr. Mopes the Hermit—with an air of authority, but in the ordinary human speech of one who has been to school.
Mr. Traveller answered the inquiries.
“Did you come here, sir, to see me?”
“I did. I heard of you, and I came to see you.—I know you like to be seen.” Mr. Traveller coolly threw the last words in, as a matter of course, to forestall an affectation of resentment or objection that he saw rising beneath the grease and grime of the face. They had their effect.
“So,” said the Hermit, after a momentary silence, unclasping the bars by which he had previously held, and seating himself behind them on the ledge of the window, with his bare legs and feet crouched up, “you know I like to be seen?”
Mr. Traveller looked about him for something to sit on, and, observing a billet of wood in a corner, brought it near the window. Deliberately seating himself upon it, he answered, “Just so.”
Each looked at the other, and each appeared to take some pains to get the measure of the other.
“Then you have come to ask me why I lead this life,” said the Hermit, frowning in a stormy manner. “I never tell that to any human being. I will not be asked that.”
“Certainly you will not be asked that by me,” said Mr. Traveller, “for I have not the slightest desire to know.”
“You are an uncouth man,” said Mr. Mopes the Hermit.
“You are another,” said Mr. Traveller.
The Hermit, who was plainly in the habit of overawing his visitors with the novelty of his filth and his blanket and skewer, glared at his present visitor in some discomfiture and surprise: as if he had taken aim at him with a sure gun, and his piece had missed fire.
“Why do you come here at all?” he asked, after a pause.
“Upon my life,” said Mr. Traveller, “I was made to ask myself that very question only a few minutes ago—by a Tinker too.”
As he glanced towards the gate in saying it, the Hermit glanced in that direction likewise.
“Yes. He is lying on his back in the sunlight outside,” said Mr, Traveller, as if he had been asked concerning the man, “and he won’t come in; for he says—and really very reasonably—‘What should I come in for? I can see a dirty man anywhere.’”
“You are an insolent person. Go away from my premises. Go!” said the Hermit, in an imperious and angry tone.
“Come, come!” returned Mr. Traveller, quite undisturbed. “This is a little too much. You are not going to call yourself clean? Look at your legs. And as to these being your premises:—they are in far too disgraceful a condition to claim any privilege of ownership, or anything else.”
The Hermit bounced down from his window-ledge, and cast himself on his bed of soot and cinders.
“I am not going,” said Mr. Traveller, glancing in after him; “you won’t get rid of me in that way. You had better come and talk.”
“I won’t talk,” said the Hermit, flouncing round to get his back towards the window.
“Then I will,” said Mr. Traveller. “Why should you take it ill that I have no curiosity to know why you live this highly absurd and highly indecent life? When I contemplate a man in a state of disease, surely there is no moral obligation on me to be anxious to know how he took it.”
After a short silence, the Hermit bounced up again, and came back to the barred window.
“What? You are not gone?” he said, affecting to have supposed that he was.
“Nor going,” Mr. Traveller replied: “I design to pass this summer day here.”
“How dare you come, sir, upon my promises——” the Hermit was returning, when his visitor interrupted him.
“Really, you know, you must not talk about your premises. I cannot allow such a place as this to be dignified with the name of premises.”
“How dare you,” said the Hermit, shaking his bars, “come in at my gate, to taunt me with being in a diseased state?”
“Why, Lord bless my soul,” returned the other, very composedly, “you have not the face to say that you are in a wholesome state? Do allow me again to call your attention to your legs. Scrape yourself anywhere—with anything—and then tell me you are in a wholesome state. The fact is, Mr. Mopes, that you are not only a Nuisance——”
“A Nuisance?” repeated the Hermit, fiercely.
“What is a place in this obscene state of dilapidation but a Nuisance? What is a man in your obscene state of dilapidation but a Nuisance? Then, as you very well know, you cannot do without an audience, and your audience is a Nuisance. You attract all the disreputable vagabonds and prowlers within ten miles around, by exhibiting yourself to them in that objectionable blanket, and by throwing copper money among them, and giving them drink out of those very dirty jars and bottles that I see in there (their stomachs need be strong!); and in short,” said Mr. Traveller, summing up in a quietly and comfortably settled manner, “you are a Nuisance, and this kennel is a Nuisance, and the audience that you cannot possibly dispense with is a Nuisance, and the Nuisance is not merely a local Nuisance, because it is a general Nuisance to know that there can be such a Nuisance left in civilisation so very long after its time.”
“Will you go away? I have a gun in here,” said the Hermit.
“Pooh!”
“I have!”
“Now, I put it to you. Did I say you had not? And as to going away, didn’t I say I am not going away? You have made me forget where I was. I now remember that I was remarking on your conduct being a Nuisance. Moreover, it is in the last and lowest degree inconsequent foolishness and weakness.”
“Weakness?” echoed the Hermit.
“Weakness,” said Mr. Traveller, with his former comfortably settled final air.
“I weak, you fool?” cried the Hermit, “I, who have held to my purpose, and my diet, and my only bed there, all these years?”
“The more the years, the weaker you,” returned Mr. Traveller. “Though the years are not so many as folks say, and as you willingly take credit for. The crust upon your face is thick and dark, Mr. Mopes, but I can see enough of you through it, to see that you are still a young man.”
“Inconsequent foolishness is lunacy, I suppose?” said the Hermit.
“I suppose it is very like it,” answered Mr. Traveller.
“Do I converse like a lunatic?”
“One of us two must have a strong presumption against him of being one, whether or no. Either the clean and decorously clad man, or the dirty and indecorously clad man. I don’t say which.”
“Why, you self-sufficient bear,” said the Hermit, “not a day passes but I am justified in my purpose by the conversations I hold here; not a day passes but I am shown, by everything I hear and see here, how right and strong I am in holding my purpose.”
Mr. Traveller, lounging easily on his billet of wood, took out a pocket pipe and began to fill it. “Now, that a man,” he said, appealing to the summer sky as he did so, “that a man—even behind bars, in a blanket and skewer—should tell me that he can see, from day to day, any orders or conditions of men, women, or children, who can by any possibility teach him that it is anything but the miserablest drivelling for a human creature to quarrel with his social nature—not to go so far as to say, to renounce his common human decency, for that is an extreme case; or who can teach him that he can in any wise separate himself from his kind and the habits of his kind, without becoming a deteriorated spectacle calculated to give the Devil (and perhaps the monkeys) pleasure,—is something wonderful! I repeat,” said Mr. Traveller, beginning to smoke, “the unreasoning hardihood of it is something wonderful—even in a man with the dirt upon him an inch or two thick—behind bars—in a blanket and skewer!”
The Hermit looked at him irresolutely, and retired to his soot and cinders and lay down, and got up again and came to the bars, and again looked at him irresolutely, and finally said with sharpness: “I don’t like tobacco.”
“I don’t like dirt,” rejoined Mr. Traveller; “tobacco is an excellent disinfectant. We shall both be the better for my pipe. It is my intention to sit here through this summer day, until that blessed summer sun sinks low in the west, and to show you what a poor creature you are, through the lips of every chance wayfarer who may come in at your gate.”
“What do you mean?” inquired the Hermit, with a furious air.
“I mean that yonder is your gate, and there are you, and here am I; I mean that I know it to be a moral impossibility that any person can stray in at that gate from any point of the compass, with any sort of experience, gained at first hand, or derived from another, that can confute me and justify you.”
“You are an arrogant and boastful hero,” said the Hermit. “You think yourself profoundly wise.”
“Bah!” returned Mr. Traveller, quietly smoking. “There is little wisdom in knowing that every man must be up and doing, and that all mankind are made dependent on one another.”
“You have companions outside,” said the Hermit. “I am not to be imposed upon by your assumed confidence in the people who may enter.”
“A depraved distrust,” returned the visitor, compassionately raising his eyebrows, “of course belongs to your state, I can’t help that.”
“Do you mean to tell me you have no confederates?”
“I mean to tell you nothing but what I have told you. What I have told you is, that it is a moral impossibility that any son or daughter of Adam can stand on this ground that I put my foot on, or on any ground that mortal treads, and gainsay the healthy tenure on which we hold our existence.”
“Which is,” sneered the Hermit, “according to you——”
“Which is,” returned the other, “according to Eternal Providence, that we must arise and wash our faces and do our gregarious work and act and re-act on one another, leaving only the idiot and the palsied to sit blinking in the corner. Come!” apostrophising the gate. “Open Sesame! Show his eyes and grieve his heart! I don’t care who comes, for I know what must come of it!”
With that, he faced round a little on his billet of wood towards the gate; and Mr. Mopes, the Hermit, after two or three ridiculous bounces of indecision at his bed and back again, submitted to what he could not help himself against, and coiled himself on his window-ledge, holding to his bars and looking out rather anxiously.
Chapter II.
Picking Up Evening Shadows
Table of Contents
Charles Allston Collins
The first person to appear at the gate, was a gentleman who looked in accidentally, and who carried a sketch-book under his arm. From the amazement and alarm expressed in his look and manner, it was plain that the Hermit's fame had not reached him. As soon as he could speak, he mentioned apologetically that he had been struck, as a stranger in that part of the country, by the picturesquely-ruinous appearance of the yard and outhouses, and that he had looked in at the gate, with the idea of finding nothing more remarkable than the materials for a sketch of still-life.
After revealing the mystery of the Hermit to this bewildered stranger, Mr. Traveller explained that any narrative-contributions towards the enlivening of Mr. Mopes and the morning, drawn from the personal experience of visitors at the gate, would be highly appreciated in that mouldy locality. At first, the visitor thus addressed hesitated; not so much, as it afterwards appeared, from want of means to answer the call made upon him, as from want of resources in his own memory to use on the spur of the moment. Pondering on Mr. Traveller's request, he entered rather absently into conversation with the Hermit.
"I never knew any good to come yet," said this gentleman, "of a man shutting himself up in the way you're doing. I know the temptation to it myself, have experienced it myself, and yielded to it myself; but I never knew any good—stop, though," he added, correcting himself as a scrupulous man does, who will not accept the help of the smallest false statement to aid his dearest theory—"I do remember one good thing which came, in some degree, of a man's leading a solitary life."
The Hermit hugged his bars in triumph. Mr. Traveller, nothing discouraged, requested the stranger to mention the circumstance.
"You shall hear it," was the answer. "But, before I begin, I must tell you that the period of my tale dates some years back into the past, that at the time of which I shall speak I had newly experienced a considerable reverse of fortune, and that, fancying my friends would make me feel the loss if I remained among them, I had determined to shut myself up away from them, and lead an entirely solitary life till I could in some degree retrieve my losses."
It is a tale, this that I am about to tell, of good deeds revealed, of good instincts roused, of a good work done, and a good result attained, and all through Evening Shadows.
I have often thought what tell-tell things shadows are. I mean the shadows that one who stands outside sees in the windows of a lighted-up room or building; the shadows thrown on a blind by figures interposing between it and the lamp-light. I have noticed these in churches during divine service, when I, wandering about outside, have looked up at the windows and seen the shades of a pair of lovers reading out of the same hymn-book; of children evidently chattering and grinning together; and sometimes a shadow which bobbing forward from time to time in a jerking fashion, then catching itself, still with a jerk, then remaining preternaturally erect and still, and then beginning to bob again, has suggested to me that the fourth head of a sermon in eight compartments was being developed, and that the shadow before me was that of one who was taking refuge from oratory in sleep.
Among the number of the shadows which my memory retains, there are some that lie upon it with no dark and shuddering chill; some that were cast by objects in themselves so pure and noble that the shade itself seemed only a subdued brightness, and the light that cast it—a glory.
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