* (Here Thackeray reduces to an absurdity the literary fashion of
the day--the vogue for startling stories and "Tales of Terror,"
which was high in his time, and which influenced several of the
stories which precede in this volume. But while Dickens made fun,
with mental reservations; while Bulwer Lytton tried to explain by
rising to the heights of natural philosophy, and Maturin did not
explain at all, but let his extravagant genius roam between heaven
and earth--Thackeray's keen wit saw mainly one chance for exquisite
literary satire and parody. At one point or another in this skit,
the style of each principal sensational novelist of the day is
delightfully imitated.--EDITOR.)
I
Every one remembers in the Fourth Book of the immortal poem of your
Blind Bard (to whose sightless orbs no doubt Glorious Shapes were
apparent, and Visions Celestial), how Adam discourses to Eve of the
Bright Visitors who hovered round their Eden--
'Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth,
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.'
"'How often,' says Father Adam, 'from the steep of echoing hill or
thicket, have we heard celestial voices to the midnight air, sole,
or responsive to each other's notes, singing!' After the Act of
Disobedience, when the erring pair from Eden took their solitary
way, and went forth to toil and trouble on common earth--though the
Glorious Ones no longer were visible, you cannot say they were
gone. It was not that the Bright Ones were absent, but that the
dim eyes of rebel man no longer could see them. In your chamber
hangs a picture of one whom you never knew, but whom you have long
held in tenderest regard, and who was painted for you by a friend
of mine, the Knight of Plympton. She communes with you. She
smiles on you. When your spirits are low, her bright eyes shine on
you and cheer you. Her innocent sweet smile is a caress to you.
She never fails to soothe you with her speechless prattle. You
love her. She is alive with you. As you extinguish your candle
and turn to sleep, though your eyes see her not, is she not there
still smiling? As you lie in the night awake, and thinking of your
duties, and the morrow's inevitable toil oppressing the busy,
weary, wakeful brain as with a remorse, the crackling fire flashes
up for a moment in the grate, and she is there, your little
Beauteous Maiden, smiling with her sweet eyes! When moon is down,
when fire is out, when curtains are drawn, when lids are closed, is
she not there, the little Beautiful One, though invisible, present
and smiling still? Friend, the Unseen Ones are round about us.
Does it not seem as if the time were drawing near when it shall be
given to men to behold them?"
The print of which my friend spoke, and which, indeed, hangs in my
room, though he has never been there, is that charming little
winter piece of Sir Joshua, representing the little Lady Caroline
Montague, afterwards Duchess of Buccleuch. She is represented as
standing in the midst of a winter landscape, wrapped in muff and
cloak; and she looks out of her picture with a smile so exquisite
that a Herod could not see her without being charmed.
"I beg your pardon, Mr. PINTO," I said to the person with whom I
was conversing. (I wonder, by the way, that I was not surprised at
his knowing how fond I am of this print.) "You spoke of the Knight
of Plympton. Sir Joshua died 1792: and you say he was your dear
friend?"
As I spoke I chanced to look at Mr. Pinto; and then it suddenly
struck me: Gracious powers! Perhaps you ARE a hundred years old,
now I think of it. You look more than a hundred. Yes, you may be
a thousand years old for what I know. Your teeth are false. One
eye is evidently false. Can I say that the other is not? If a
man's age may be calculated by the rings round his eyes, this man
may be as old as Methuselah. He has no beard. He wears a large
curly glossy brown wig, and his eyebrows are painted a deep olive-
green. It was odd to hear this man, this walking mummy, talking
sentiment, in these queer old chambers in Shepherd's Inn.
Pinto passed a yellow bandanna handkerchief over his awful white
teeth, and kept his glass eye steadily fixed on me. "Sir Joshua's
friend?" said he (you perceive, eluding my direct question). "Is
not everyone that knows his pictures Reynolds's friend? Suppose I
tell you that I have been in his painting room scores of times, and
that his sister The has made me tea, and his sister Toffy has made
coffee for me? You will only say I am an old ombog." (Mr. Pinto,
I remarked, spoke all languages with an accent equally foreign.)
"Suppose I tell you that I knew Mr. Sam Johnson, and did not like
him? that I was at that very ball at Madame Cornelis', which you
have mentioned in one of your little--what do you call them?--bah!
my memory begins to fail me--in one of your little Whirligig
Papers? Suppose I tell you that Sir Joshua has been here, in this
very room?"
"Have you, then, had these apartments for--more--than--seventy
years?" I asked.
"They look as if they had not been swept for that time--don't they?
Hey? I did not say that I had them for seventy years, but that Sir
Joshua has visited me here."
"When?" I asked, eying the man sternly, for I began to think he was
an impostor.
He answered me with a glance still more stern: "Sir Joshua Reynolds
was here this very morning, with Angelica Kaufmann and Mr. Oliver
Goldschmidt. He is still very much attached to Angelica, who still
does not care for him. Because he is dead (and I was in the fourth
mourning coach at his funeral) is that any reason why he should not
come back to earth again? My good sir, you are laughing at me. He
has sat many a time on that very chair which you are now occupying.
There are several spirits in the room now, whom you cannot see.
Excuse me." Here he turned round as if he was addressing somebody,
and began rapidly speaking a language unknown to me. "It is
Arabic," he said; "a bad patois, I own. I learned it in Barbary,
when I was a prisoner among the Moors. In anno 1609, bin ick aldus
ghekledt gheghaen. Ha! you doubt me: look at me well. At least I
am like--"
Perhaps some of my readers remember a paper of which the figure of
a man carrying a barrel formed the initial letter, and which I
copied from an old spoon now in my possession. As I looked at Mr.
Pinto I do declare he looked so like the figure on that old piece
of plate that I started and felt very uneasy. "Ha!" said he,
laughing through his false teeth (I declare they were false--I
could see utterly toothless gums working up and down behind the
pink coral), "you see I wore a beard den; I am shafed now; perhaps
you tink I am A SPOON. Ha, ha!" And as he laughed he gave a cough
which I thought would have coughed his teeth out, his glass eye
out, his wig off, his very head off; but he stopped this convulsion
by stumping across the room and seizing a little bottle of bright
pink medicine, which, being opened, spread a singular acrid
aromatic odor through the apartment; and I thought I saw--but of
this I cannot take an affirmation--a light green and violet flame
flickering round the neck of the vial as he opened it. By the way,
from the peculiar stumping noise which he made in crossing the
bare-boarded apartment, I knew at once that my strange entertainer
had a wooden leg. Over the dust which lay quite thick on the
boards, you could see the mark of one foot very neat and pretty,
and then a round O, which was naturally the impression made by the
wooden stump. I own I had a queer thrill as I saw that mark, and
felt a secret comfort that it was not CLOVEN.
In this desolate apartment in which Mr. Pinto had invited me to see
him, there were three chairs, one bottomless, a little table on
which you might put a breakfast tray, and not a single other
article of furniture. In the next room, the door of which was
open, I could see a magnificent gilt dressing case, with some
splendid diamond and ruby shirt studs lying by it, and a chest of
drawers, and a cupboard apparently full of clothes.
Remembering him in Baden-Baden in great magnificence I wondered at
his present denuded state. "You have a house elsewhere, Mr.
Pinto?" I said.
"Many," says he. "I have apartments in many cities. I lock dem
up, and do not carry mosh logish."
I then remembered that his apartment at Baden, where I first met
him, was bare, and had no bed in it.
"There is, then, a sleeping room beyond?"
"This is the sleeping room." (He pronounces it DIS. Can this, by
the way, give any clew to the nationality of this singular man?)
"If you sleep on these two old chairs you have a rickety couch; if
on the floor, a dusty one."
"Suppose I sleep up dere?" said this strange man, and he actually
pointed up to the ceiling. I thought him mad or what he himself
called "an ombog." "I know. You do not believe me; for why should
I deceive you? I came but to propose a matter of business to you.
I told you I could give you the clew to the mystery of the Two
Children in Black, whom you met at Baden, and you came to see me.
If I told you you would not believe me. What for try and convinz
you? Ha hey?" And he shook his hand once, twice, thrice, at me,
and glared at me out of his eye in a peculiar way.
Of what happened now I protest I cannot give an accurate account.
It seemed to me that there shot a flame from his eye into my brain,
while behind his GLASS eye there was a green illumination as if a
candle had been lit in it. It seemed to me that from his long
fingers two quivering flames issued, sputtering, as it were, which
penetrated me, and forced me back into one of the chairs--the
broken one--out of which I had much difficulty in scrambling, when
the strange glamour was ended. It seemed to me that, when I was so
fixed, so transfixed in the broken chair, the man floated up to the
ceiling, crossed his legs, folded his arms as if he was lying on a
sofa, and grinned down at me. When I came to myself he was down
from the ceiling, and, taking me out of the broken cane-bottomed
chair, kindly enough--"Bah!" said he, "it is the smell of my
medicine. It often gives the vertigo. I thought you would have
had a little fit. Come into the open air." And we went down the
steps, and into Shepherd's Inn, where the setting sun was just
shining on the statue of Shepherd; the laundresses were traipsing
about; the porters were leaning against the railings; and the
clerks were playing at marbles, to my inexpressible consolation.
"You said you were going to dine at the 'Gray's-Inn Coffee-House,'"
he said. I was. I often dine there. There is excellent wine at
the "Gray's-Inn Coffee-House"; but I declare I NEVER SAID so. I
was not astonished at his remark; no more astonished than if I was
in a dream. Perhaps I WAS in a dream. Is life a dream? Are
dreams facts? Is sleeping being really awake? I don't know. I
tell you I am puzzled. I have read "The Woman in White," "The
Strange Story"--not to mention that story "Stranger than Fiction"
in the Cornhill Magazine--that story for which THREE credible
witnesses are ready to vouch. I have had messages from the dead;
and not only from the dead, but from people who never existed at
all. I own I am in a state of much bewilderment: but, if you
please, will proceed with my simple, my artless story.
Well, then. We passed from Shepherd's Inn into Holborn, and looked
for a while at Woodgate's bric-a-brac shop, which I never can pass
without delaying at the windows--indeed, if I were going to be
hung, I would beg the cart to stop, and let me have one look more
at that delightful omnium gatherum. And passing Woodgate's, we
come to Gale's little shop, "No. 47," which is also a favorite
haunt of mine.
Mr. Gale happened to be at his door, and as we exchanged
salutations, "Mr. Pinto," I said, "will you like to see a real
curiosity in this curiosity shop? Step into Mr. Gale's little back
room."
In that little back parlor there are Chinese gongs; there are old
Saxe and Sevres plates; there is Furstenberg, Carl Theodor,
Worcester, Amstel, Nankin and other jimcrockery. And in the corner
what do you think there is? There is an actual GUILLOTINE. If you
doubt me, go and see--Gale, High Holborn, No. 47. It is a slim
instrument, much slighter than those which they make now;--some
nine feet high, narrow, a pretty piece of upholstery enough. There
is the hook over which the rope used to play which unloosened the
dreadful ax above; and look! dropped into the orifice where the
head used to go--there is THE AX itself, all rusty, with A GREAT
NOTCH IN THE BLADE.
As Pinto looked at it--Mr. Gale was not in the room, I recollect;
happening to have been just called out by a customer who offered
him three pound fourteen and sixpence for a blue Shepherd in pate
tendre,--Mr. Pinto gave a little start, and seemed crispe for a
moment. Then he looked steadily toward one of those great
porcelain stools which you see in gardens--and--it seemed to me--I
tell you I won't take my affidavit--I may have been maddened by the
six glasses I took of that pink elixir--I may have been sleep-
walking: perhaps am as I write now--I may have been under the
influence of that astounding MEDIUM into whose hands I had fallen--
but I vow I heard Pinto say, with rather a ghastly grin at the
porcelain stool,
"Nay, nefer shague your gory locks at me,
Dou canst not say I did it."
(He pronounced it, by the way, I DIT it, by which I KNOW that Pinto
was a German.)
I heard Pinto say those very words, and sitting on the porcelain
stool I saw, dimly at first, then with an awful distinctness--a
ghost--an EIDOLON--a form--A HEADLESS MAN seated with his head in
his lap, which wore an expression of piteous surprise.
At this minute, Mr. Gale entered from the front shop to show a
customer some Delft plates; and he did not see--but WE DID--the
figure rise up from the porcelain stool, shake its head, which it
held in its hand, and which kept its eyes fixed sadly on us, and
disappear behind the guillotine.
"Come to the 'Gray's-Inn Coffee-House,'" Pinto said, "and I will
tell you how the notch came to the ax." And we walked down Holborn
at about thirty-seven minutes past six o'clock.
If there is anything in the above statement which astonishes the
reader, I promise him that in the next chapter of this little story
he will be astonished still more.