THE readers of these our lucubrations need not be informed that we keep
no carriage. The consequence is, that being visitors of the theatre, and
having some inconsiderate friends who grow pleasanter and pleasanter
till one in the morning, we are great walkers home by night; and this
has made us great acquaintances of watchmen, moonlight, _mud_-light, and
other accompaniments of that interesting hour. Luckily we are fond of a
walk by night. It does not always do us good; but that is not the fault
of the hour, but our own, who ought to be stouter; and therefore we
extract what good we can out of our necessity, with becoming temper. It
is a remarkable thing in nature, and one of the good-naturedest things
we know of her, that the mere fact of looking about us, and being
conscious of what is going on, is its own reward, if we do but notice it
in good-humour. Nature is a great painter (and art and society are among
her works), to whose minutest touches the mere fact of becoming alive is
to enrich the stock of our enjoyments.
We confess there are points liable to cavil in a walk home by night in
February. Old umbrellas have their weak sides; and the quantity of mud
and rain may surmount the picturesque. Mistaking a soft piece of mud for
hard, and so filling your shoe with it, especially at setting out, must
be acknowledged to be "aggravating." But then you ought to have boots.
There are sights, indeed, in the streets of London, which can be
rendered pleasant by no philosophy; things too grave to be talked about
in our present paper; but we must premise, that our walk leads us out of
town, and through streets and suburbs of by no means the worst
description. Even there we may be grieved if we will. The farther the
walk into the country, the more tiresome we may choose to find it; and
when we take it purely to oblige others, we must allow, as in the case
of a friend of ours, that generosity itself on two sick legs may find
limits to the notion of virtue being its own reward, and reasonably
"curse those comfortable people" who, by the lights in their windows,
are getting into their warm beds, and saying to one another, "Bad thing
to be out of doors to-night."
Supposing, then, that we are in a reasonable state of health and comfort
in other respects, we say that a walk home at night has its merits, if
you choose to meet with them. The worst part of it is the setting out;
the closing of the door upon the kind faces that part with you. But
their words and looks, on the other hand, may set you well off. We have
known a word last us all the way home, and a look make a dream of it. To
a lover, for instance, no walk can be bad. He sees but one face in the
rain and darkness; the same that he saw by the light in the warm room.
This ever accompanies him, looking in his eyes; and if the most pitiable
and spoilt face in the world should come between them, startling him
with the saddest mockery of love, he would treat it kindly for her sake.
But this is a begging of the question. A lover does not walk. He is
sensible neither to the pleasures nor pains of walking. He treads on
air; and in the thick of all that seems inclement has an avenue of light
and velvet spread for him, like a sovereign prince.
[Illustration: The HACKNEY COACH]
To resume, then, like men of this world. The advantage of a late hour
is, that everything is silent and the people fast in their beds. This
gives the whole world a tranquil appearance. Inanimate objects are no
calmer than passions and cares now seem to be, all laid asleep. The
human being is motionless as the house or the tree; sorrow is suspended;
and you endeavour to think that love only is awake. Let not readers of
true delicacy be alarmed, for we mean to touch profanely upon nothing
that ought to be sacred; and as we are for thinking the best on these
occasions, it is of the best love we think; love of no heartless order,
and such only as ought to be awake with the stars.
As to cares and curtain-lectures, and such-like abuses of the
tranquillity of night, we call to mind, for their sakes, all the sayings
of the poets and others about "balmy sleep," and the soothing of hurt
minds, and the weariness of sorrow, which drops into forgetfulness. The
great majority are certainly "fast as a church" by the time we speak of;
and for the rest, we are among the workers who have been sleepless for
their advantage; so we take out our licence to forget them for the time
being. The only thing that shall remind us of them is the red lamp,
shining afar over the apothecary's door; which, while it does so,
reminds us also that there is help for them to be had. I see him now,
the pale blinker suppressing the conscious injustice of his anger at
being roused by the apprentice, and fumbling himself out of the house,
in hoarseness and great-coat, resolved to make the sweetness of the
Christmas bill indemnify him for the bitterness of the moment.
But we shall be getting too much into the interior of the houses. By
this time the hackney-coaches have all left the stands--a good symptom
of their having got their day's money. Crickets are heard, here and
there, amidst the embers of some kitchen. A dog follows us. Will nothing
make him "go along"? We dodge him in vain; we run; we stand and "hish!"
at him, accompanying the prohibition with dehortatory gestures, and an
imaginary picking up of a stone. We turn again, and there he is vexing
our skirts. He even forces us into an angry doubt whether he will not
starve, if we do not let him go home with us. Now if we could but lame
him without being cruel; or if we were only an overseer, or a beadle, or
a dealer in dog-skin; or a political economist, to think dogs
unnecessary. Oh! come, he has turned a corner, he has gone: we think we
see him trotting off at a distance, thin and muddy, and our heart
misgives us. But it was not our fault; we were not "hishing" at the
time. His departure was lucky, for he had got our enjoyments into a
dilemma; our "article" would not have known what to do with him. These
are the perplexities to which your sympathisers are liable. We resume
our way, independent and alone; for we have no companion this time,
except our never-to-be-forgotten and ethereal companion, the reader. A
real arm within another's puts us out of the pale of walking that is to
be made good. It is good already. A fellow-pedestrian is company--is the
party you have left; you talk and laugh, and there is no longer anything
to be contended with. But alone, and in bad weather, and with a long way
to go, here is something for the temper and spirits to grapple with and
turn to account; and accordingly we are booted and buttoned up, an
umbrella over our heads, the rain pelting upon it, and the lamp-light
shining in the gutters; "mudshine," as an artist of our acquaintance
used to call it, with a gusto of reprobation. Now, walk cannot well be
worse; and yet it shall be nothing if you meet it heartily. There is a
pleasure in overcoming obstacles; mere action is something; imagination
is more; and the spinning of the blood, and vivacity of the mental
endeavour, act well upon one another, and gradually put you in a state
of robust consciousness and triumph. Every time you set down your leg
you have a respect for it. The umbrella is held in the hand like a
roaring trophy.
We are now reaching the country: the fog and rain are over; and we meet
our old friends the watchmen, staid, heavy, indifferent, more coat than
man, pondering, yet not pondering, old but not reverend, immensely
useless. No; useless they are not; for the inmates of the houses think
them otherwise, and in that imagination they do good. We do not pity
the watchmen as we used. Old age often cares little for regular sleep.
They could not be sleeping perhaps if they were in their beds; and
certainly they would not be earning. What sleep they get is perhaps
sweeter in the watch-box,--a forbidden sweet; and they have a sense of
importance, and a claim on the persons in-doors, which, together with
the amplitude of their coating, and the possession of the box itself,
make them feel themselves, not without reason, to be "somebody." They
are peculiar and official. Tomkins is a cobbler as well as they; but
then he is no watchman. He cannot speak to "things of night;" nor bid
"any man stand in the king's name." He does not get fees and gratitude
from the old, the infirm, and the drunken; nor "let gentlemen go;" nor
is he "a parish-man." The churchwardens don't speak to him. If he put
himself ever so much in the way of "the great plumber," he would not
say, "How do you find yourself, Tomkins?"--"An ancient and quiet
watchman." Such he was in the time of Shakespeare, and such he is now.
Ancient, because he cannot help it; and quiet, because he will not help
it, if possible; his object being to procure quiet on all sides, his own
included. For this reason he does not make too much noise in crying the
hour, nor is offensively particular in his articulation. No man shall
sleep the worse for him, out of a horrid sense of the word "three." The
sound shall be three, four, or one, as suits their mutual convenience.
Yet characters are to be found even among watchmen. They are not all
mere coat, and lump, and indifference. By-the-way, what do they think of
in general? How do they vary the monotony of their ruminations from one
to two, and from two to three, and so on? Are they comparing themselves
with the unofficial cobbler; thinking of what they shall have for dinner
to-morrow; or what they were about six years ago; or that their lot is
the hardest in the world, as insipid old people are apt to think, for
the pleasure of grumbling; or that it has some advantages nevertheless,
besides fees; and that if they are not in bed, their wife is?
Of characters, or rather varieties among watchmen, we remember several.
One was a Dandy Watchman, who used to ply at the top of Oxford Street,
next the park. We called him the dandy, on account of his utterance. He
had a mincing way with it, pronouncing the _a_ in the word "past" as it
is in _hat_, making a little preparatory hem before he spoke, and then
bringing out his "past ten" in a style of genteel indifference; as if,
upon the whole, he was of that opinion.
Another was the Metallic Watchman, who paced the same street towards
Hanover Square, and had a clang in his voice like a trumpet. He was a
voice and nothing else; but any difference is something in a watchman.
A third, who cried the hour in Bedford Square, was remarkable in his
calling for being abrupt and loud. There was a fashion among his tribe
just come up at that time, of omitting the words "past" and "o'clock,"
and crying only the number of the hour. I know not whether a
recollection I have of his performance one night is entire matter of
fact, or whether any subsequent fancies of what might have taken place
are mixed up with it; but my impression is, that as I was turning the
corner into the square with a friend, and was in the midst of a
discussion in which numbers were concerned, we were suddenly startled,
as if in solution of it, by a brief and tremendous outcry of--ONE. This
paragraph ought to have been at the bottom of the page, and the word
printed abruptly round the corner.
A fourth watchman was a very singular phenomenon, a _Reading_ Watchman.
He had a book, which he read by the light of his lantern; and instead of
a pleasant, gave you a very uncomfortable idea of him. It seemed cruel
to pitch amidst so many discomforts and privations one who had
imagination enough to wish to be relieved from them. Nothing but a
sluggish vacuity befits a watchman.
But the oddest of all was the _Sliding_ Watchman. Think of walking up a
street in the depth of a frosty winter, with long ice in the gutters,
and sleet over head, and then figure to yourself a sort of bale of a man
in white coming sliding towards you with a lantern in one hand, and an
umbrella over his head. It was the oddest mixture of luxury and
hardship, of juvenility and old age! But this looked agreeable. Animal
spirits carry everything before them; and our invincible friend seemed a
watchman for Rabelais. Time was run at and butted by him like a goat.
The slide seemed to bear him half through the night at once; he slipped
from out of his box and his commonplaces at one rush of a merry thought,
and seemed to say "Everything's in imagination--here goes the whole
weight of my office."
But we approach our home. How still the trees! How deliciously asleep
the country! How beautifully grim and nocturnal this wooded avenue of
ascent against the cold white sky! The watchmen and patrols, which the
careful citizens have planted in abundance within a mile of their doors,
salute us with their "Good mornings"--not so welcome as we pretend; for
we ought not to be out so late; and it is one of the assumptions of
these fatherly old fellows to remind us of it. Some fowls, who have made
a strange roost in a tree, flutter as we pass them--another pull up the
hill, unyielding; a few strides on a level; and _there_ is the light in
the window, the eye of the warm soul of the house--one's home. How
particular, and yet how universal, is that word; and how surely does it
deposit every one for himself in his own nest!
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