Author's lips, would have been so irresistibly ridiculous--the tent
bedstead ornamented with pippins carved in timber, that tumbled down
on the slightest provocation like a wooden shower-bath--the chest of
drawers, from which the handles had long been pulled off, so that its
contents could only be got at either by tilting the whole structure
until all the drawers fell out together, or by opening each of them
singly with knives like oysters--the miscellaneous salad bought for
twopence by Betsey Prig on condition that the vendor could get it all
into her pocket (including among other items a green vegetable of an
expansive nature, of such magnificent proportions that before it could
be got either in or out it had to be shut up like an umbrella), which
was happily accomplished in High Holborn, to the breathless interest of
a hackney-coach stand.
One inestimable portion, however, of this memorable occasion of
festivity between those frequend pardners, Betsey Prig and Sairey Gamp,
was, by a most ingenious dovetailing together of two disjointed parts,
incorporated with the adroitly compacted materials of a Reading that
was as brief as the laughter provoked by it was boisterous and
inextinguishable. As to the manner of the dovetailing, it will be
readily recalled to recollection. Immediately upon Mrs. Gamp's awaking
at the close of her night watch, we were told that Mrs. Prig relieved
punctually, but that she relieved in an ill temper. “The best among us
have their failings, and it must be conceded of Mrs. Prig,” observed the
Reader with a hardly endurable gravity of explanation, “that if there
were a blemish in the goodness of her disposition, it was a habit she
had of not bestowing all its sharp and acid properties upon her patients
(as a thoroughly amiable woman would have done), but of keeping
a considerable remainder for the service of her friends.” Looking
offensively at Mrs. Gamp, and winking her eye, as Mrs. Prig does
immediately upon her entrance, it is felt by the former to be necessary
that Betsey should at once be made sensible of her exact station in
society; wherefore Mrs. Gamp prefaced a remonstrance with--
“Mrs. Harris, Betsey------”
“Bother Mrs. Harris!”
Then it was that the Reader added:--
“Mrs. Gamp looked at Betsey with amazement, incredulity, and
indignation. Mrs. Prig, winking her eye tighter, folded her arms and
uttered these tremendous words:--
“'I don't believe there's no sich a person!'
“With these expressions, she snapped her fingers, once, twice, thrice,
each time nearer to Mrs. Gamp, and then turned away as one who felt
that there was now a gulf between them that nothing could ever bridge
across.”
The most comic of all the Readings closed thus abruptly with a roar.
BOOTS AT THE HOLLY TREE INN.
Even the immortal Boots at the White Hart, Borough, who was first
revealed to us in a coarse striped waistcoat with black calico sleeves
and blue glass buttons, drab breeches and gaiters, and who answered to
the name of Sam, would not, we are certain, have disdained to have been
put in friendly relations with Cobbs, as one in every way worthy of
his companionship. The Boots at the Holly Tree Inn, though more lightly
sketched, was quite as much of an original creation in his way as that
other Christmas friend of ours, the warm-hearted and loquacious Cheap
Jack, Doctor Marigold. And each of those worthies, it should be added,
had really about him an equal claim to be regarded, as an original
creation, as written, or as impersonated by the Author. As a character
orally portrayed, Cobbs was fully on a par with Doctor Marigold.
Directly the Reader opened his lips, whether as the Boots or as the
Cheap Jack, the Novelist seemed to disappear, and there instead, talking
glibly to us from first to last just as the case might happen to be, was
either the patterer on the cart footboard or honest Cobbs touching
his hair with a bootjack. His very first words not only lead up to
his confidences, but in the same breath struck the key-note of his
character. “Where had he been? Lord, everywhere! What had he been? Bless
you, everything a'most. Seen a good deal? Why, of course he had. Would
be easier for him to tell what he hadn't seen than what he had. Ah! A
deal, it would. What was the curiosest thing he'd seen? Well! He didn't
know--couldn't name it momently--unless it was a Unicorn, and he see
_him_ over at a Fair. But”--and here came the golden retrospect, a fairy
tale of love told by a tavern Boots, and told all through, moreover, as
none but a Boots could tell it--“Supposing a young gentleman not eight
year'old, was to run away with a fine young woman of seven, might I
think _that_ a queer start? Certainly! Then, that was a start as he
himself had had his blessed eyes on--and he'd cleaned the shoes they
run away in--and they was so little he couldn't get his hand into 'em.”
Whereupon, following up the thread of his discourse, Boots would take
his crowd of hearers, quite willingly on their part, into the heart of
the charming labyrinth.
The descriptive powers of Cobbs, it will be admitted, were for one thing
very remarkable. Master Harry Walmers' father, for instance, he hits off
to a nicety in a phrase or two. “He was a gentleman of spirit, and good
looking, and held his head up when he walked, and had what you may call
Fire about him:” adding, that he wrote poetry, rode, ran, cricketed,
danced and acted, and “done it all equally beautiful.” Another and
a very significant touch, by the way, was imparted to that same
portraiture later on, just, in point of fact before the close of Cobbs's
reminiscence, and one so lightly given that it was conveyed through a
mere passing parenthesis--namely, where the young father was described
by Boots as standing beside Master Harry Walmers' bed, in the Holly Tree
Inn, looking down at the little sleeping face, “looking wonderfully
like it,” says Cobbs, who adds, “(they do say as he ran away with Mrs.
Walmers).” Although Boots described Master Harry's father from the
first as “uncommon proud of him, as his only child, you see,” the worthy
fellow took especial care at once to add, that “he didn't spoil him
neither.” Having a will of his own, and a eye of his own, and being one
that would be minded, while he never tired of hearing the fine bright
boy “sing his songs about Young May Moons is beaming, love, and When he
who adores thee has left but the name, and that: still,” said Boots, “he
kept the command over the child, and the child _was_ a child, and
it's very much to be wished more of 'em was.” At the particular
period referred to in this portion of his narrative, Boots informed us
pleasantly, that he came to know all about it by reason of his being in
his then capacity as Mr. Wahners' under-gardener, always about in the
summer time, near the windows, on the lawn “a-mowing and sweeping, and
weeding and pruning, and this and that”--with his eyes and ears open,
of course, we may presume, in a manner befitting his intelligence.
Perhaps, there was after all nothing better in the delivery of the whole
of this Reading, than the utterance of the two words italicised below
in the first dialogue, reported by Boots as having taken place between
himself and Master Harry Walmers, junior, when “that mite,” as Boots
calls him, stops one day, along with the fine young woman of seven
already mentioned, where Boots (then under-gardener, remember) was
hoeing weeds in the gravel:--
“'Cobbs,' he says, 'I like _you._' 'Do you, sir? I'm proud to hear it.'
'Yes, I do, Cobbs. Why do I like you, do you think, Cobbs?' 'Don't know,
Master Harry, I'm sure.' 'Because Norah likes you, Cobbs.' 'Indeed, sir?
That's very gratifying.' 'Gratifying, Cobbs? It is better than millions
of the brightest diamonds, to be liked by Norah?' '_Certainly_, sir.'”
Confirmed naturally enough in his good opinion of Cobbs by this thorough
community of sentiment, Master Harry, who has been given to understand
from the latter that he is going to leave, and, further than that, on
inquiring, that he wouldn't object to another situation “if it was
a good 'un,” observes, while tucking that other mite in her little
sky-blue mantle under his arm, “Then, Cobbs, you shall be our head
gardener when we are married.” Boots, thereupon, in the person of the
Reader, went on to describe how “the babies with their long bright
curling hair, their sparkling eyes, and their beautiful light tread,
rambled about the garden deep in love,” sometimes here, sometimes there,
always under his own sympathetic and admiring observation, until one
day, down by the pond, he heard Master Harry say, “Adorable Norah, kiss
me and say you love me to distraction.” Altogether Cobbs seemed exactly,
and with delicious humour, to define the entire situation when he
declared, that “on the whole the contemplation of them two babies had a
tendency to make him feel as if he was in love himself--only he didn't
know who with!”
The delightful gravity of countenance (with a covert sparkle in the eye
where the daintiest indications of fun were given by the Reader) lent a
charm of its own to the merest nothing, comparatively, in the whimsical
dialogues he was reporting. Master Harry, for example, having confided
to Cobbs one evening, when the latter was watering the flowers, that he
was going on a visit to his grandmama at York--“'Are you indeed, sir? I
hope you'll have a pleasant time. I'm going into Yorkshire myself, when
I leave here.' 'Are you going to your grandmama's, Cobbs?' 'No, sir.
I haven't got such a thing.' 'Not as a grandmama, Cobbs?' 'No, sir.'”
Immediately after which, on the boy observing to his humble confidant,
that he shall be so glad to go because “Norah's going,” Cobbs, naturally
enough, as it seemed, took occasion to remark, “You'll be all right
then, sir, with your beautiful sweetheart by your side.” Whereupon we
realised more clearly than ever the delicate whimsicality of the whole
delineation, when we saw, as well as heard, the boy return a-flushing,
“Cobbs, I never let anybody joke about that when I can prevent them,”
Cobbs immediately explaining in all humility, “It wasn't a joke,
sir--wasn't so meant.” No wonder, Boots had exclaimed previously: “And
the courage of that boy! Bless you, he'd have throwed off his little
hat and tucked up his little sleeves and gone in at a lion, he would--if
they'd happened to meet one, and she [Norah] had been frightened.” At
the close of Boots's record of this last-quoted conversation with Master
Harry, came one of the drollest touches in the Reading--“'Cobbs,' says
that boy, 'I'll tell you a secret. At Norah's house, they have been
joking her about me, and [with a wondering look] pretending to laugh at
our being engaged! Pretending to make game of it, Cobbs!' 'Such, sir,' I
says, 'is the depravity of human natur.'” A glance during the utterance
of which words, either at the Reader himself or at his audience, was
something enjoyable.
Hardly less inspiriting in its way was the incidental mention, directly
after this by Cobbs, of the manner in which he gave Mr. Walmers notice,
not that he'd anything to complain of--“'Thanking you, sir, I find
myself as well sitiwated here as I could hope to be anywheres. The truth
is, sir, that I'm a going to seek my fortun.' 'O, indeed, Cobbs?' he
says, 'I hope you may find it.'” Boots hereupon giving his audience
the assurance, with the characteristic touch of the bootjack to his
forehead, that “he hadn't found it yet!”
Then came the delectable account of the elopement--full, true, and
particular--from the veracious lips of Cobbs himself, at that time, and
again some years afterwards, when he came to call up his recollections,
Boots at the Holly Tree Inn. Passages here and there in his description
of the incident were irrisistibly laughable. Master Harry's going down
to the old lady's in York, for example, “which old lady were so wrapt up
in that child as she would have give that child the teeth in her head
(if she had had any).” The arrival of “them two children,” again at the
Holly Tree Inn, he, as bold as brass, tucking her in her little sky-blue
mantle under his arm, with the memorable dinner order, “Chops and cherry
pudding for two!” Their luggage, even, when gravely enumerated--the lady
having “a parasol, a smelling bottle, a round and a half of cold
buttered toast, eight peppermint drops, and a doll's hair-brush;” the
gentleman having “about half a dozen yards of string, a knife, three or
four sheets of writing paper folded up surprisingly small, a orange, and
a chaney mug with his name on it.” Several of the little chance phrases,
the merest atoms of exclamation here and there, will still be borne in
mind as having had an intense flavour of fun about them, as syllabled in
the Reading. Boots's “Sir, to you,” when his governor, the hotel-keeper,
proposes to run over to York to quiet their friends' minds, while Cobbs
keeps his eye upon the innocents! Master Harry's replying to Boots'
suggestion, that they should wile away the time by a walk down
Love-lane--“'Get out with you, Cobbs!'--that was that there boy's
expression.” The glee of the children was prettily told too on their
finding “Good Cobbs! Dear Cobbs!” among the strangers around them at
their temporary halting-place. They themselves appearing smaller than
ever in his eyes, by reason of his finding them “with their little legs
entirely off the ground, of course--and it really is not possible to
express how small them children looked!--on a e-normous sofa;” immense
at any time, but looking like a Great Bed of Ware then by comparison.
How, during the governor's absence in search of their friends, Cobbs,
feeling himself all the while to be “the meanest rascal for deceiving
'em, that ever was born,” gets up a cock and a bull story about a pony
he's acquainted with, who'll take them on nicely to Gretna Green--but
who was not at liberty the first day, and the next was only “half
clipped, you see, and couldn't be took out in that state for fear it
should strike to his inside”--was related with the zest of one who had
naturally the keenest relish possible for every humorous particular.
Finding the lady in tears one time when Boots goes to see how the
runaway couple are getting on, “Mrs. Harry Walmers, junior, fatigued,
sir?” asks Cobbs. “Yes, she is tired, Cobbs; but she is not used to be
away from home, and she has been in low spirits again. Cobbs, do you
think you could bring a biffin, please?”--“I ask your pardon, sir, What
was it you ------?” “I think a Norfolk biffin would rouse her, Cobbs.”
Restoratives of that kind, Boots would seem to have regarded as too
essential to Mrs. Harry Walmers junior's happiness. Hence, when he comes
upon the pair over their dinner of “biled fowl and bread-and-butter
pudding,” Boots privately owns that “he could have wished to have seen
her more sensible to the woice of love, and less abandoning of herself
to the currants in the pudding.” According to Cobbs's own account of the
gentleman, however, it should be added that _he_ too could play his part
very effectively at table, for--having mentioned another while, how the
two of them had ordered overnight sweet milk-and-water and toast and
currant jelly for breakfast--when Cobbs comes upon them the next morning
at their meal, he describes Master Harry as sitting behind his breakfast
cup “a tearing away at the jelly as if he had been his own father!”
Remorseful in the thought of betraying them, Boots at one moment
declared, that rather than combine any longer against them, he would by
preference “have had it out in half-a-dozen rounds with the governor!”
And at another time, when the said governor had returned from York,
“with Mr. Walmers and a elderly lady,” Boots, while conducting Mr.
Walmers upstairs, could not for the life of him help pausing at the
room door, with, “I beg your pardon, sir, I hope you are not angry with
Master Harry. For Master Harry's a fine boy, sir, and will do you credit
and honour.” Boots signifying while he related the circumstance, that
“if the fine boy's father had contradicted him in the state of mind in
which he then was, he should have 'fetched him a crack' and took the
consequences.” As for the appreciation of Master Harry by the female
dependents at the Holly Tree, there were two allusions to _that_--one
general, as may be said, the other particular--that were always the
most telling hits, the two chief successes of the Reading. Who that once
heard it, for example, has forgotten the Author's inimitable manner
of saying, as the Boots--“The way in which the women of that
house--_without_ exception--_every_ one of 'em--married _and_
single--took to that boy when they heard the story, is surprising. It
was as much as could be done to keep 'em from dashing into the room and
kissing him. They climbed up all sorts of places, at the risk of their
lives, to look at him through a pane of glass. _They was seven deep at
the key-hole!_” The climax of fun came naturally at the close, however,
when, having described how Mr. Walmers lifted his boy up to kiss the
sleeping “little warm face of little Mrs. Harry Walmers, junior,” at the
moment of their separation, Boots, that is the Reader, cried out in the
shrill voice of one of the chambermaids, “_It's a shame to part 'em!_”
Two reflections indulged in by Boots during the course of his narrative,
being among the pleasantest in connection with this most graceful of all
the purely comic Readings, may here, while closing these allusions to
it, be recalled to mind not inappropriately. One--where Cobbs “wished
with all his heart there was any impossible place where them two babies
could have made an impossible marriage, and have lived impossibly happy
ever afterwards.” The other--where, with genial sarcasm, Boots propounds
this brace of opinions by way of general summing up--“Firstly, that
there are not many couples on their way to be married who are half as
innocent as them two children. Secondly, that it would be a jolly good
thing for a great many couples on their way to be married, if they could
only be stopped in time, and brought back separate.” With which cynical
scattering of sugar-plums in the teeth, of married and single, the
blithe Reading was laughingly brought to its conclusion.
BARBOX BROTHERS.
Nobody but the writer of this little freak of fancy could possibly have
rendered the Reading of it in public worthy even of toleration. Perhaps
no Reading that could be selected presents within the same compass so
many difficulties to the audience who are listening, and to the
Reader who is hardy enough to adventure upon its delivery. The closing
incidents of the narrative are in themselves so improbable, we had all
but said so impossible! Polly, at once so quaint and so captivating,
when her words are perused upon the printed page, is so incapable of
having her baby-prattle repeated by anybody else, without the imminent
risk, the all but certainty, of its degenerating into mere childishness.
It can scarcely be wondered, therefore, that “Barbox Brothers,” though
it actually was Read, and Read successfully, was hardly ever repeated.
Everybody who has once looked into the story will bear in mind how,
quite abruptly, almost haphazard, it comes to be narrated.
The lumbering, middle-aged, grey-headed hero of it, in obedience to
the whim of a moment, gets out of a night train at the great central
junction of the whole railway system of England. A drenching rain-storm
and a windy platform, darkness and solitude are, to begin with, the
agreeable surroundings of this eccentric traveller. He is stranded
there, not high and dry, anything but that--on the contrary, soaked
through and through, and at very low level indeed--during what the local
officials regard as their deadest time in all the twenty-four hours:
what one of them, later on, terms emphatically their deadest and
buriedest time.
Already, even here, before the tale itself is in any way begun, the
Author of it, in his capacity as Reader, somehow, by the mere manner of
his delivery of a descriptive sentence or two, contrived to realise
to his hearers in a wonderfully vivid way the strange incidents of
the traffic in a scene like this, at those blackest intervals between
midnight and daybreak. Now revealing--“Mysterious goods trains,
covered with palls, and gliding on like vast weird funerals, conveying
themselves guiltily away, as if their freight had come to a secret and
unlawful end.” Now, again--“Half miles of coal pursuing in a Detective
manner, following when they led, stopping when they stopped, backing
when they backed.” One while the spectacle, conjured up by a word or two
was that of--“Unknown languages in the air, conspiring in red, green,
and white characters.” Another, with startling effect, it was--“An
earthquake, with thunder and lightning, going up express to London.”
Here it is that Barbox Brothers, in the midst of these ghostly
apparitions, is eventually extricated from the melancholy plight
in which he finds himself saturated and isolated in the middle of a
spiderous web of railroads.
His extricator is--Lamps! A worthy companion portrait to that of
cinderous Mr. Toodles, the stoker, familiar to the readers of Dombey.
Characters, those two, quite as typical, after their fashion, of the
later railway period of Dickens, as even Sam Weller, the boots, and Old
Weller, the coachman, were of his earlier coaching period in the days of
Pickwick. To see him, in his capacity as Lamps, when excited, take what
he called “a rounder”--that is to say, giving himself, with his oily
handkerchief rolled up in the form of a ball, “an elaborate smear from
behind the right ear, up the cheek, across the forehead, and down the
other cheek, behind his left ear,” after which operation he is described
as having shone exceedingly--was to be with him, again, at once, in his
greasy little cabin, which was suggestive to the sense of smell of a
cabin in a whaler. How it came to pass that Lamps sang comic songs,
of his own composition, to his bed-ridden daughter Phoebe, by way of
enlivening her solitude, and how Phoebe, while manipulating the threads
on her lace-pillow, as though she were playing a musical instrument,
taught her little band of children to chant to a pleasant tune the
multiplication-table, and so fix it and other useful knowledge indelibly
upon the tablets of their memory, the Author-Reader would then relate,
as no other Reader, however gifted, who was not also the Author, would
have been allowed to do, supposing this latter had had the hardihood to
attempt the relation.
As the Reading advanced, the difficulties not only increased, they
became tenfold, immediately upon the introduction of Polly. Dickens,
however, conquered them all somehow. But to anybody else, setting forth
the story histrionically, impersonating the characters as they appeared,
these difficulties would by necessity have been insuperable or simply
overwhelming. Catching the very little fair-haired girl's Christian
name readily enough, when she comes up to him in the street, with the
surprising announcement, “O! if you please, I am lost!” Barbox Brothers
can't for the life of him conjecture what her surname is,--carefully
imitating, though he does, the sound that comes from the childish lips,
each time on its repetition. Hazarding “Trivits,” first of all,
then “Paddens,” then “Tappi-tarver.” Eventually, when the two arrive
hand-in-hand at Barbox Brothers' hotel, nobody there could make out
her name as she set it forth, “except one chambermaid, who said it was
Constantinople--which it wasn't.”
No wonder Barbox feels bigger and heavier in person every minute when he
is being catechised by Polly! Asked by her if he knows any stories, and
compelled to answer, “No! What a dunce you must be, mustn't you?” says
Polly. Frightened nearly out of his wits at the dinner-table, when they
are feasting together, by her getting on her feet upon her chair to
reward him with a kiss, and then toppling forward among the dishes--he
himself crying out in dismay, “Gracious angels! Whew! I thought we were
in the fire, Polly!”--“What a coward you are, ain't you?” says Polly,
when replaced.