FOR HANWITCH.
If a man has one good reason for being grateful for living in these
times, it is because they are _not_ coaching days.
The old stage-coach, the Wellerian coachman, the spruce guard with his
horn and his jokes, the fat people inside, the gruff people outside,
all contributed a picturesque detail to the age they belonged to; but I
have generally found that the more picturesque an object is, the fitter
it is to be surveyed at a distance only.
If in the days to which the old stage-coach belonged it never rained,
it was never cold, one was never in a hurry, there were no missions
of life and death to make one curse the delay of a moment--if one’s
companions were always good-tempered, and one’s body was so constituted
as to endure jerks and jolts and a sitting posture for hours at
a stretch without inconvenience--then the old stage-coach may be
conceived to have been a very agreeable means of locomotion. But as
I have been informed by several elderly gentlemen that the weather
forty years ago was pretty much the same sort of weather that it now
is, that strokes of death and strokes of business requiring immense
despatch happened then as they happen every day; in a word, that in
most atmospherical, moral, and civic respects the early years of this
century differed but very little from these its maturer days, I can
only repeat, in spite of the protests of several venerable friends who
seem to find most things (even whilst enjoying them) objectionable
which are not as aged as themselves, that if we have one excuse better
than another for being on good terms with the times we live in, it is
because the picturesque old stage-coach makes no condition of our daily
existence.
Hanwitch was about fifty miles from London. To-day a traveller would be
carried the distance in about an hour and three-quarters. Holdsworth,
starting at half-past seven in the morning, would, providing that the
coach did not break down or overturn, reach the town at about four
o’clock in the afternoon.
He awoke at half-past six, and at once rose. The morning was a bright
one, but all the efforts of the sunshine to squeeze itself through
the wire blinds and dusty panes of the coffee-room windows could not
avail to communicate the faintest spark of cheerfulness to the dingy
apartment, with its bare tables and blue-coloured looking-glass over
the chimney, and the old-fashioned prints around the walls, suggestive,
one knew not why, of London milk and discoloured blankets.
The waiter came in, looking dejected, limp, and fluey, and perhaps
to pay Holdsworth out for neglecting to leave word at the bar before
going to bed, that he should want to breakfast at an unreasonable hour,
declaimed a bill of fare, nearly every item of which, as Holdsworth
named it, he declared could not possibly be got ready before half-past
eight. Cold ham and tea must suffice, with which order the waiter
sleepily withdrew, and after a long absence returned--when Holdsworth
was on the point of starting up and leaving the house in the full
belief that he should miss the coach--bearing a teapot of which the
contents looked like rain-water, a loaf of bread as hard and slippery
as glass under the knife, a lump of butter of the colour and perfume of
soaked cheese, and a ham of which what was not bone was brine.
Very lightly breaking his fast with these things, Holdsworth called
for his bill, and obtaining the services of the Boots to carry his
portmanteau, which was all the baggage he had brought with him from
Australia, walked to the house from which the Canterbury coach started.
It wanted but ten minutes of the starting-time, but no coach was
visible. However, it was up the yard, and would be brought round in a
few minutes, the book-keeper said. As these few minutes threatened to
expand into half an hour, Holdsworth entered the bar of the “Canterbury
Arms” to obtain a biscuit and some brandy-and-water, partly to complete
the wretched breakfast he had made, and partly to exterminate the vile
flavour of the tea that lingered in his mouth.
When he returned, the coach was out, the horses were in, several
passengers were getting into, or climbing on top of, the vehicle; the
coachman, muffled about the throat as though the month were November,
and the air full of snow, stood on the pavement, smoking a cigar and
surveying the whole picture with a lordly and commanding, though a
somewhat inflamed eye; and the busy scene was completed by a body of
boys and men offering newspapers, walking-sticks, knives, combs, and
broad sheets of songs to the passengers, and striving to drown each
other’s importunities with loud and ceaseless clamour.
Off went the coach at last, with Holdsworth by the coachman’s side. The
wheels rattled over the hard roads, the houses in long lines swept by,
lost by degrees their frowsy exteriors and dingy metropolitan aspects,
and attempted little revelations of bucolic life in small gardens,
with glimpses of trees in the rear. Then came houses standing alone in
grounds of their own, cottages purely pastoral in appearance, with the
noise of farmyards about them, and their atmosphere sweetened by the
smell of hay and flowers. These dropped away, the breeze grew pure and
elastic, the country opened in wide spaces of waving cornfields spotted
with bright poppies, and swelling meadow lands and green fields shaded
by groups of trees, with here and there a lark whistling in the blue
sky, and all London lying behind, marking its mighty presence by a haze
that seemed to stretch for miles and miles, and paled the heavens to
the hue of its own complexion.
Holdsworth was such bad company that the coachman soon ceased his
“observations” touching the different scenes through which they
passed, and addressed himself to his companion on the right, a young
gentleman who was going as far as Chatham, and who lighted several
large cigars in less than half an hour, pulling at them with hollows in
his cheeks, and looking at the ash of them, and preserving a very pale
face. Holdsworth had something else to think about than the coachman’s
refined and classical remarks, delivered from the depth of three
shawls. The quick rolling of the coach over the smooth turnpike-road
was inducing an exhilaration that acted upon him as good wine acts upon
the brain, giving clearness and freedom to thought, and causing life
to be felt at her most secret sources. There was the impression in his
mind that he had once before travelled on the top of a stage-coach
along this very road, though when, or under what circumstances, or
whether he had actually performed the journey or had read of some
one else having done it, he could not tell. The scenery they were
travelling through was altogether delicious, and better than a cordial
to a man who had just landed from a three and a half months’ voyage
at sea. The aspect of the country was full of that sober sweetness
of general effect which soothes the heart with a deep sense of home;
of broad yellow tracts burnished by the sunshine, of the delicate
shadowing of green, and the neutral tint of fallow soil; houses made
as dainty by distance as pictures on ivory; great trees spreading
their broad abundant leaves over cool spaces of gleaming water; with
the animation, now and again, of human life, where men worked in the
fields, or where children sported before the houses, stopping their
frolics to cheer the coach, while women held babies high in their hands
and swayed to the delighted plunging of the chubby limbs.
Holdsworth, however, was by no means a sample of the “outsides” carried
by the coach, whatever the deportment of the invisible “insides”
might have been. There were some half-a-dozen people on the roof,
including two girls, one of whom was decidedly pretty and the other
decidedly coquettish. These young ladies, at the first going off, had
been ceaseless in the expression of their fears that, though it was
true they were up all right, they should never be able to get down
again. A gentleman with a turn-up nose, expressive of the utmost
self-complacency, had taken it upon himself to comfort the ladies, by
remarking that getting down was in every case easier than getting up,
because the natural tendency of the human body was to fall; at which
the ladies had murmured “Impertinence!” and “Some people are better
seen than heard,” and such-like scathing phrases, thereby sanctioning
the display of such wit as the turn-up-nosed gentleman possessed,
which he exerted with such good effect that the ladies grew crimson
under uncontrollable fits of laughter. Then the guard struck in, and
provoked the other outsiders to talk; and presently a large flat bottle
was handed around, which had the effect of making everybody who put
it to his or her lips merrier still. Onwards rattled the coach with
its noisy, laughing burden, flinging sounds of life broadcast over the
green country, provoking many a pair of slow bucolic eyes to stare it
gravely out of sight, raising clouds of dust as the wheels went softly
over the floury highway, spinning under mile-lengths of trees darkening
the road with twinkling shadows, and throbbing with the piercing
shrilling of innumerable birds buried in the dense foliage, catching
the hot sunshine again in the open, and gleaming like a gigantic
looking-glass as it sped gaily forward under the broad eye of Heaven.
It was two o’clock when they changed horses for the second time at a
smart little Kentish town, with a gray ruin right in its midst, and an
old church hard by it, with one of the snuggest of rectories peeping
at the world out of the silence and shadow of a rich orchard. Some
of the “insides” got out here and went their ways, and were no more
seen. The young ladies on the roof were entreated to alight by the
small-nosed man, but this they noisily refused to do, the mere idea
of such a thing causing them to catch hold of each other. The delay,
however, was a short one. The jaded horses, with streaks of white foam
upon their polished hides, were taken out and fresh ones put in; the
coachman, smelling strongly of gin and peppermint, climbed into his
place, cracked his whip, and off started the coach, followed by a crowd
of excited boys, who chased it clear of the town and then threw stones
after it.
“Where might you be for, sir?” inquired the coachman of Holdsworth,
speaking out of his stomach like a ventriloquist.
“Hanwitch.”
“Several stoppages afore Hanwitch,” said the coachman.
“How many?”
“Vy, there’s Saltwell, Halton, Gadstone, and Southbourne.”
“Southbourne?”
“Yes, Southbourne, of course. That’s the willage jist afore Hanwitch.”
“Southbourne! Southbourne!” repeated Holdsworth, with the old look of
bewilderment that invariably entered his face when some familiar name
was sounded in his ear.
The coachman glanced at him over his shawls, and said to himself, quite
in the pit of his stomach. “You’re a rum ’un, you are!”
“P’raps you ar’n’t acquainted with the road, sir?” said he.
“I think--I am sure I know Southbourne,” replied Holdsworth. “What sort
of place is it?”
“Vot sort o’ place? Vy, a willage.”
“But what kind of village?”
“All that I know is this, there’s a hinn there vere they serves you
vith werry good liquor. Blow’d if I can tell you anything furder. But
that’s my veakness, sir. Vould you believe me, I’ve drove coaches
through that willage for the last two-and-twenty year, and may I be
bil’d if I can tell you anything about it.”
Holdsworth sank into deep thought, while the coachman, twisting his
eyes over his shawls, examined his face and clothes with side-long
attention; then his curiosity being evidently aroused by something in
Holdsworth’s appearance which widely differed from the cut and style of
the passengers he was in the habit of carrying, he said:
“Might you be a furriner, sir?”
“No,” answered Holdsworth.
“I’ve a brother in Californy. P’raps you might know them parts, sir?”
“I have just returned from Australia.”
“Oh!” exclaimed the coachman, looking staggered; “that’s a good vays
off ain’t it?”
“The other side of the world.”
“Gor bless me! A queer place, I’ve heerd. Full of conwicks. One of our
guards was sent out there t’other day for abstracting of money from a
wallis.”
This reference operating upon his sympathies, he entered into a
story, as long as a newspaper account, of the trial; “how beautiful
the counsill as hadvocated the pore fellow spoke, vich the court vos
crowded vith coachmen, who groaned venhever the hadvocate as vos
opposed to the guard began to speak, vich behaviour, though it warn’t
p’raps quite correck, vasn’t to be stopped nohows, although the judge
looks werry fierce, and the counsill kep’ on sayin’, ‘My lud, if this
here noise ain’t stopped, I’ll throw the case up,’ vich was just the
thing the coachmen vanted” (here he made as though he would poke
Holdsworth in the ribs with the butt-end of his whip); “but, lor’ save
yer, it was no go.”
Holdsworth paid no attention to this story, his mind being engaged in
a desperate struggle with memory. Indeed, the word “Southbourne” had
affected him as no other allusion had. Pale, dim phantoms of memory,
comparable to nothing so much as the phosphorescent outlines which the
eye may mark fluctuating in the black sea-water, rose and sank in his
mind; and though whispering nothing to his breathless anxiety, clearly
proving that the faculty which he had long believed dead was beginning
to stir and awaken.
One by one the towns and villages named by the coachman had been
passed, and now Southbourne was to come.
An indescribable anxiety, at once breathless and thrilling, suspending,
it seemed to him, the very pulsations of his heart, making his breath
come and go in quick, fierce respirations, possessed Holdsworth.
He held his hands tightly clasped; all colour had fled from his face,
and his deep-sunk eyes glowed with unnatural fire.
Repeatedly he muttered to himself, “What does this portend?”
Already his prophetic soul had caught the light, and seemed to know
herself, and maddened him and wrung his frame with her wild and bitter
struggles to proclaim her inspiration and pierce her reflected beam
through the film that still blinded the eye of the mind.
The sun was still high, and flung its yellow brilliance over the fair
and gilded prospect. The coach had turned the corner of the long road
that led straight as an arrow into Southbourne; and far away at the
extremity, in mingled shadow and shine, the few houses could be seen,
with the spire of St. George’s Church rearing high its flaming vane,
and on the left the gleam of the river shadowed by many trees.
“There’s Southbourne!” said the coachman, pointing with his whip.
The dust whirled in a cloud behind the wheels, the guard sounded his
horn, and with a rush and a rattle the coach drew up opposite the “Hare
and Hounds,” a tavern as familiar to Holdsworth as the sight of his own
hand.
* * * * *
“Hullo!” cried the coachman. “Hi, you there! Help! A glass o’ brandy!
Blowed if the gentleman hasn’t fainted!”
“Fainted!” cried the young ladies on the top of the coach, leaning
forward to catch a sight of his face.
No, not fainted; but struck down by a revelation such as, had the two
young ladies and the small-nosed man and the coachman been told the
story of it, would have supplied them with enough matter to keep them
talking without intermission as long as the coach-wheels turned.
Memory, coming out of the little house at the bottom of the long
familiar thoroughfare, out of the little house that turned its shoulder
upon the highway and parted it into lanes, had rushed upon him like an
armed man, and struck him a staggering blow. He had dropped under it,
and, but for the support of the apron over his knees, would have fallen
to the ground.
The guard ran into the tavern and returned with a glass of brandy,
which the coachman put to Holdsworth’s lips.
“Thank you, I am better now,” he exclaimed.
“Glad to hear it,” said the coachman.
“I will get down here.”
“Aren’t you booked for Hanwitch!” exclaimed the guard, who imagined
that the gentleman’s head wandered.
“No--this will do--I will go no further. Help me with your hand--thank
you.”
He reached the ground, watched by a group of persons who made a
movement as though to support him, when they saw him swaying to and fro
like a drunken man, and staring fixedly down the road. But in a moment
or two, with a struggle, he stood firm. His portmanteau was handed out
and carried into the bar. The guard took his place; the coachman, with
a glance over his shawls to see that Holdsworth stood clear of the
wheels, jerked the reins, and the coach rattled out of sight.