ANOTHER MIGRATION--FROM THE RURALITIES OF CUT-THROAT LANE TO THE GROVES
OF ACADEMUS--I AM FORCED INTO GOOD CLOTHES AND THE PATHS OF LEARNING IN
SPITE OF MY TEETH, THOUGH I USE THEM SPITEFULLY.
Misfortunes never come single. I don't know why they should. They are
but scarecrow, lean-visaged, miserable associates, and so they arrive in
a body to keep each other in countenance. I had been but a few weeks in
our present miserable abode, and had fully recovered my health, though I
think that I was a little crazed with the prints, and the subjects of
them, over which I daily pored in the large Bible, when the greatest
misfortune of all came upon the poor Brandons--and that was, to add to
their other losses, the loss of my invaluable self.
The misery was unexpected--it was sudden--it was overwhelming. Brandon
was toeing a chalked line on a heavy log of mahogany, unconscious of the
mischief that was working at home. He afterwards told me, and I believe
him, that he would have opposed the proceeding by force, if force had
been requisite. A plain private or hired carriage drove up to the door,
and, after ascertaining that the Brandons lived at the house, a
business-like looking, elderly gentleman stepped out, paid every demand
immediately, and ordered my best clothes on. When I was thus equipped,
my nurse was told that she was perfectly welcome to the remainder of my
effects, and that I must get into the carriage.
The good woman was thunderstruck. There was a scene. She raved, and I
cried, and the four little Brandons, at least three of them, joined in
the chorus of lamentation, because the naughty man was going to take
brother Ralph away. I had been too well taught by old Ford, not to
visit my indignation upon the shins and hands of the carrier away of
captives, in well-applied kicks, and almost rabid bites. There was a
great disturbance. The neighbours thought it very odd that the mother
should allow her eldest son to be, carried off by force, by a stranger,
before her eyes, in the middle of the day; but then it was suggested
that "nothing could be well termed odd that concerned little Ralph
Brandon, for hadn't he been bit last year by a mad dog, and, when so and
so had all died raving, he had never nothing at all happen to him."
When the stranger heard this story of the mad dog (which, by-the-by, was
fact, and I have the scars to this day), he shook me off, pale with
consternation, and was, no doubt, extremely happy to find that my little
teeth had not penetrated the skin. I believe that he heartily repented
him of his office. At length he lost all patience. "Woman," said he,
"send these people out of the room." When they had departed,
marvelling, he resumed: "I cannot lose my time in altercation; I am
commissioned to tell you, that if you keep the boy in one sense, you'll
have to keep him in all. You may be sure that I would not trouble
myself about such a little ill-bred wretch for a moment, if I did not
act with authority, and by orders. Give up the child directly (I was
now sobbing in her arms), take your last look at him, for you will never
see him again. Come, hand the young gentleman into the carriage."
"I won't go," I screamed out.
"We shall soon see that, Master Rattlin," said he, dragging me along,
resisting. I bawled out, "My name's not Master Rattlin--you're a liar--
and when father comes from the pit he'll wop you."
This threat seemed to have an effect the very reverse of what I had
intended. Perhaps he thought that he had already enough to contend
with, without the addition of the brawny arm of the sawyer. I was
forcibly lifted up, placed in the coach, and, as it drove rapidly away,
I heard, amidst the rattling of the wheels, the cries of her whom I
loved as a mother, exclaiming, "My Ralph--my dear Ralph!"
Behold me, then, "hot with the fray, and weeping from the fight,"
confined in a locomotive prison with my sullen captor. I blubbered in
one corner of the coach, and he surveyed me with stern indifference from
the other. I had now fairly commenced my journey through life, but this
beginning was anything but auspicious. At length, the carriage stopped
at a place I have since ascertained to be near Hatton Garden, on Holborn
Hill. We alighted, and walked into a house, between two motionless
pages, excessively well dressed. At first, they startled me, but I soon
discovered they were immense waxen dolls. It was a ready-made clothes
warehouse into which we had entered. We went upstairs, and I was soon
equipped with three excellent suits. My grief had now settled down into
a sullen resentment, agreeably relieved, at due intervals, by
breath-catching sobs. The violence of the storm had passed, but its
gloom still remained. Seeing the little gladness that the possession of
clothes, the finest I had yet had, communicated to me, my director could
not avoid giving himself the pleasurable relief of saying, "Sulky little
brute!" A trunk being sent for, and my wardrobe placed in it, we then
drove to three or four other shops, not forgetting a hatter's, and in a
very short space of time I had a very tolerable fit-out. During all
this time, not a word did my silent companion address to me.
At length, the coach no longer rattled over the stones. It now
proceeded on more smoothly, and here and there the cheerful green
foliage relieved the long lines of houses. After about a half-hour's
ride, we stopped at a large and very old-fashioned house, built in
strict conformity with the Elizabethan style of architecture, over the
portals of which, upon a deep blue board, in very, very bright gold
letters, flashed forth that word so awful to little boys, so big with
associations of long tasks and wide-spreading birch, the Greek-derived
polysyllable, ACADEMY! Ignorant as I was, I understood it all in a
moment. I was struck cold as the dew-damp grave-stone. I almost grew
sick with terror. I was kidnapped, entrapped, betrayed. I had before
hated school, my horror now was intense of "Academy." I looked
piteously into the face of my persecutor, but I found there no sympathy.
"I want to go home," I roared out, and then burst into a fresh torrent
of tears.
Home! what solace is there in its very sound! Oh, how that blessed
asylum for the wounded spirit encloses within its sacred circle all that
is comforting, and sweet, and holy! 'Tis there that the soul coils
itself up and nestles like the dove in its own downiness, conscious that
everything around breathes of peace, security, and love. Home!
henceforward, I was to have none, until, through many, many years of
toil and misery, I should create one for myself. Henceforth, the word
must bring to me only the bitterness of regret--henceforth I was to
associate with hundreds who had that temple in which to consecrate their
household affections--but was, myself, doomed to be unowned, unloved,
and homeless.
"I want to go home," I blubbered forth with the pertinacity of anguish,
as I was constrained into the parlour of the truculent, rod-bearing,
ferula-wielding Mr Root. I must have been a strange figure. I was
taken from my nurse's in a hurry, and, though my clothes were quite new,
my face entitled me to rank among the much vituperated unwashed. When a
little boy has very dirty hands, with which he rubs his dirty, tearful
face, it must be confessed that grief does not, in his person, appear
under a very lovely form. The first impression that I made on him who
was to hold almost everything that could constitute my happiness in his
power, was the very reverse of, favourable. My continued iteration of
"I want to go home," was anything but pleasing to the pedagogue. The
sentence itself is not music to a man keeping a boarding-school. With
the intuitive perception of childhood, through my tears, my heart
acknowledged an enemy. What my conductor said to him, did not tend to
soften his feelings towards me. I did not understand the details of his
communication, but I knew that I was as a captive, bound hand and foot,
and delivered over to a foreign bondage. The interview between the
contracting parties was short, and when over, my conductor departed
without deigning to bestow the smallest notice upon the most important
personage of this history. I was then rather twitched by the hand, than
led, by Mr Root, into the middle of his capacious school-room, and in
the midst of more than two hundred and fifty boys: my name was merely
mentioned to one of the junior ushers, and the master left me. Well
might I then apply that blundering, Examiner-be-praised line of Keats to
myself, for like Ruth:--
"I stood all tears among the alien corn."
A few boys came and stared at me, but I attracted the kindness of none.
There can be no doubt but that I was somewhat vulgar in my manners, and
my carriage was certainly quite unlike that of my companions. Some of
them even jeered me, but I regarded them not. A real grief is
armour-proof against ridicule. In a short time, it being six o'clock,
the supper was served out, consisting of a round of bread, all the
moisture of which had been allowed to evaporate, and an oblong,
diaphanous, yellow substance, one inch and a half by three, that I
afterwards learned might be known among the initiated as single
Gloucester. There was also a pewter mug for each, three-parts filled
with small beer. It certainly gave me, it was so small, a very
desponding idea of the extent to which littleness might be carried; and
it would have been too vapid for the toleration of any palate, had it
not been so sour. As I sat regardless before this repast, in abstracted
grief, I underwent the first of the thousand practical jokes that were
hereafter to familiarise me with manual jocularity. My right-hand
neighbour, jerking me by the elbow, exclaimed, "Hollo, you sir, there's
Jenkins, on the other side of you, cribbing your bread." I turned
towards the supposed culprit, and discovered that my informant had
fibbed, but the informed against told me to look round and see where my
cheese was. I did; it was between the mandibles of my kind neighbour on
my right, and when I turned again to the left for an explanation, the
rogue there had stripped my round of bread of all the crust. I cared
not then for this double robbery, but having put the liquid before me,
incautiously to my lips, sorrowful as I was, I cared for that. Joe
Brandon never served me so. I drank that evening as little as I ate.