IT fell to my lot, this last bleak Spring, to find myself in a
watering-place out of the Season. A vicious north-east squall blew me
into it from foreign parts, and I tarried in it alone for three days,
resolved to be exceedingly busy.
On the first day, I began business by looking for two hours at the sea,
and staring the Foreign Militia out of countenance. Having disposed of
these important engagements, I sat down at one of the two windows of my
room, intent on doing something desperate in the way of literary
composition, and writing a chapter of unheard-of excellence—with which
the present essay has no connexion.
It is a remarkable quality in a watering-place out of the season, that
everything in it, will and must be looked at. I had no previous
suspicion of this fatal truth but, the moment I sat down to write, I
began to perceive it. I had scarcely fallen into my most promising
attitude, and dipped my pen in the ink, when I found the clock upon the
pier—a red-faced clock with a white rim—importuning me in a highly
vexatious manner to consult my watch, and see how I was off for Greenwich
time. Having no intention of making a voyage or taking an observation, I
had not the least need of Greenwich time, and could have put up with
watering-place time as a sufficiently accurate article. The pier-clock,
however, persisting, I felt it necessary to lay down my pen, compare my
watch with him, and fall into a grave solicitude about half-seconds. I
had taken up my pen again, and was about to commence that valuable
chapter, when a Custom-house cutter under the window requested that I
would hold a naval review of her, immediately.
It was impossible, under the circumstances, for any mental resolution,
merely human, to dismiss the Custom-house cutter, because the shadow of
her topmast fell upon my paper, and the vane played on the masterly blank
chapter. I was therefore under the necessity of going to the other
window; sitting astride of the chair there, like Napoleon bivouacking in
the print; and inspecting the cutter as she lay, all that day, in the way
of my chapter, O! She was rigged to carry a quantity of canvas, but her
hull was so very small that four giants aboard of her (three men and a
boy) who were vigilantly scraping at her, all together, inspired me with
a terror lest they should scrape her away. A fifth giant, who appeared
to consider himself ‘below’—as indeed he was, from the waist
downwards—meditated, in such close proximity with the little gusty
chimney-pipe, that he seemed to be smoking it. Several boys looked on
from the wharf, and, when the gigantic attention appeared to be fully
occupied, one or other of these would furtively swing himself in mid-air
over the Custom-house cutter, by means of a line pendant from her
rigging, like a young spirit of the storm. Presently, a sixth hand
brought down two little water-casks; presently afterwards, a truck came,
and delivered a hamper. I was now under an obligation to consider that
the cutter was going on a cruise, and to wonder where she was going, and
when she was going, and why she was going, and at what date she might be
expected back, and who commanded her? With these pressing questions I
was fully occupied when the Packet, making ready to go across, and
blowing off her spare steam, roared, ‘Look at me!’
It became a positive duty to look at the Packet preparing to go across;
aboard of which, the people newly come down by the rail-road were
hurrying in a great fluster. The crew had got their tarry overalls
on—and one knew what that meant—not to mention the white basins, ranged
in neat little piles of a dozen each, behind the door of the after-cabin.
One lady as I looked, one resigning and far-seeing woman, took her basin
from the store of crockery, as she might have taken a refreshment-ticket,
laid herself down on deck with that utensil at her ear, muffled her feet
in one shawl, solemnly covered her countenance after the antique manner
with another, and on the completion of these preparations appeared by the
strength of her volition to become insensible. The mail-bags (O that I
myself had the sea-legs of a mail-bag!) were tumbled aboard; the Packet
left off roaring, warped out, and made at the white line upon the bar.
One dip, one roll, one break of the sea over her bows, and Moore’s
Almanack or the sage Raphael could not have told me more of the state of
things aboard, than I knew.
The famous chapter was all but begun now, and would have been quite
begun, but for the wind. It was blowing stiffly from the east, and it
rumbled in the chimney and shook the house. That was not much; but,
looking out into the wind’s grey eye for inspiration, I laid down my pen
again to make the remark to myself, how emphatically everything by the
sea declares that it has a great concern in the state of the wind. The
trees blown all one way; the defences of the harbour reared highest and
strongest against the raging point; the shingle flung up on the beach
from the same direction; the number of arrows pointed at the common
enemy; the sea tumbling in and rushing towards them as if it were
inflamed by the sight. This put it in my head that I really ought to go
out and take a walk in the wind; so, I gave up the magnificent chapter
for that day, entirely persuading myself that I was under a moral
obligation to have a blow.
I had a good one, and that on the high road—the very high road—on the top
of the cliffs, where I met the stage-coach with all the outsides holding
their hats on and themselves too, and overtook a flock of sheep with the
wool about their necks blown into such great ruffs that they looked like
fleecy owls. The wind played upon the lighthouse as if it were a great
whistle, the spray was driven over the sea in a cloud of haze, the ships
rolled and pitched heavily, and at intervals long slants and flaws of
light made mountain-steeps of communication between the ocean and the
sky. A walk of ten miles brought me to a seaside town without a cliff,
which, like the town I had come from, was out of the season too. Half of
the houses were shut up; half of the other half were to let; the town
might have done as much business as it was doing then, if it had been at
the bottom of the sea. Nobody seemed to flourish save the attorney; his
clerk’s pen was going in the bow-window of his wooden house; his brass
door-plate alone was free from salt, and had been polished up that
morning. On the beach, among the rough buggers and capstans, groups of
storm-beaten boatmen, like a sort of marine monsters, watched under the
lee of those objects, or stood leaning forward against the wind, looking
out through battered spy-glasses. The parlour bell in the Admiral Benbow
had grown so flat with being out of the season, that neither could I hear
it ring when I pulled the handle for lunch, nor could the young woman in
black stockings and strong shoes, who acted as waiter out of the season,
until it had been tinkled three times.
Admiral Benbow’s cheese was out of the season, but his home-made bread
was good, and his beer was perfect. Deluded by some earlier spring day
which had been warm and sunny, the Admiral had cleared the firing out of
his parlour stove, and had put some flower-pots in—which was amiable and
hopeful in the Admiral, but not judicious: the room being, at that
present visiting, transcendantly cold. I therefore took the liberty of
peeping out across a little stone passage into the Admiral’s kitchen,
and, seeing a high settle with its back towards me drawn out in front of
the Admiral’s kitchen fire, I strolled in, bread and cheese in hand,
munching and looking about. One landsman and two boatmen were seated on
the settle, smoking pipes and drinking beer out of thick pint crockery
mugs—mugs peculiar to such places, with parti-coloured rings round them,
and ornaments between the rings like frayed-out roots. The landsman was
relating his experience, as yet only three nights old, of a fearful
running-down case in the Channel, and therein presented to my imagination
a sound of music that it will not soon forget.
‘At that identical moment of time,’ said he (he was a prosy man by
nature, who rose with his subject), ‘the night being light and calm, but
with a grey mist upon the water that didn’t seem to spread for more than
two or three mile, I was walking up and down the wooden causeway next the
pier, off where it happened, along with a friend of mine, which his name
is Mr. Clocker. Mr. Clocker is a grocer over yonder.’ (From the
direction in which he pointed the bowl of his pipe, I might have judged
Mr. Clocker to be a merman, established in the grocery trade in
five-and-twenty fathoms of water.) ‘We were smoking our pipes, and
walking up and down the causeway, talking of one thing and talking of
another. We were quite alone there, except that a few hovellers’ (the
Kentish name for ‘long-shore boatmen like his companions) ‘were hanging
about their lugs, waiting while the tide made, as hovellers will.’ (One
of the two boatmen, thoughtfully regarding me, shut up one eye; this I
understood to mean: first, that he took me into the conversation:
secondly, that he confirmed the proposition: thirdly, that he announced
himself as a hoveller.) ‘All of a sudden Mr. Clocker and me stood rooted
to the spot, by hearing a sound come through the stillness, right over
the sea, _like a great sorrowful flute or Æolian harp_. We didn’t in the
least know what it was, and judge of our surprise when we saw the
hovellers, to a man, leap into the boats and tear about to hoist sail and
get off, as if they had every one of ’em gone, in a moment, raving mad!
But _they_ knew it was the cry of distress from the sinking emigrant
ship.’
When I got back to my watering-place out of the season, and had done my
twenty miles in good style, I found that the celebrated Black Mesmerist
intended favouring the public that evening in the Hall of the Muses,
which he had engaged for the purpose. After a good dinner, seated by the
fire in an easy chair, I began to waver in a design I had formed of
waiting on the Black Mesmerist, and to incline towards the expediency of
remaining where I was. Indeed a point of gallantry was involved in my
doing so, inasmuch as I had not left France alone, but had come from the
prisons of St. Pélagie with my distinguished and unfortunate friend
Madame Roland (in two volumes which I bought for two francs each, at the
book-stall in the Place de la Concorde, Paris, at the corner of the Rue
Royale). Deciding to pass the evening tête-à-tête with Madame Roland, I
derived, as I always do, great pleasure from that spiritual woman’s
society, and the charms of her brave soul and engaging conversation. I
must confess that if she had only some more faults, only a few more
passionate failings of any kind, I might love her better; but I am
content to believe that the deficiency is in me, and not in her. We
spent some sadly interesting hours together on this occasion, and she
told me again of her cruel discharge from the Abbaye, and of her being
re-arrested before her free feet had sprung lightly up half-a-dozen steps
of her own staircase, and carried off to the prison which she only left
for the guillotine.
Madame Roland and I took leave of one another before mid-night, and I
went to bed full of vast intentions for next day, in connexion with the
unparalleled chapter. To hear the foreign mail-steamers coming in at
dawn of day, and to know that I was not aboard or obliged to get up, was
very comfortable; so, I rose for the chapter in great force.
I had advanced so far as to sit down at my window again on my second
morning, and to write the first half-line of the chapter and strike it
out, not liking it, when my conscience reproached me with not having
surveyed the watering-place out of the season, after all, yesterday, but
with having gone straight out of it at the rate of four miles and a half
an hour. Obviously the best amends that I could make for this remissness
was to go and look at it without another moment’s delay. So—altogether
as a matter of duty—I gave up the magnificent chapter for another day,
and sauntered out with my hands in my pockets.
All the houses and lodgings ever let to visitors, were to let that
morning. It seemed to have snowed bills with To Let upon them. This put
me upon thinking what the owners of all those apartments did, out of the
season; how they employed their time, and occupied their minds. They
could not be always going to the Methodist chapels, of which I passed one
every other minute. They must have some other recreation. Whether they
pretended to take one another’s lodgings, and opened one another’s
tea-caddies in fun? Whether they cut slices off their own beef and
mutton, and made believe that it belonged to somebody else? Whether they
played little dramas of life, as children do, and said, ‘I ought to come
and look at your apartments, and you ought to ask two guineas a-week too
much, and then I ought to say I must have the rest of the day to think of
it, and then you ought to say that another lady and gentleman with no
children in family had made an offer very close to your own terms, and
you had passed your word to give them a positive answer in half an hour,
and indeed were just going to take the bill down when you heard the
knock, and then I ought to take them, you know?’ Twenty such
speculations engaged my thoughts. Then, after passing, still clinging to
the walls, defaced rags of the bills of last year’s Circus, I came to a
back field near a timber-yard where the Circus itself had been, and where
there was yet a sort of monkish tonsure on the grass, indicating the spot
where the young lady had gone round upon her pet steed Firefly in her
daring flight. Turning into the town again, I came among the shops, and
they were emphatically out of the season. The chemist had no boxes of
ginger-beer powders, no beautifying sea-side soaps and washes, no
attractive scents; nothing but his great goggle-eyed red bottles, looking
as if the winds of winter and the drift of the salt-sea had inflamed
them. The grocers’ hot pickles, Harvey’s Sauce, Doctor Kitchener’s Zest,
Anchovy Paste, Dundee Marmalade, and the whole stock of luxurious helps
to appetite, were hybernating somewhere underground. The china-shop had
no trifles from anywhere. The Bazaar had given in altogether, and
presented a notice on the shutters that this establishment would re-open
at Whitsuntide, and that the proprietor in the meantime might be heard of
at Wild Lodge, East Cliff. At the Sea-bathing Establishment, a row of
neat little wooden houses seven or eight feet high, I saw the proprietor
in bed in the shower-bath. As to the bathing-machines, they were (how
they got there, is not for me to say) at the top of a hill at least a
mile and a half off. The library, which I had never seen otherwise than
wide open, was tight shut; and two peevish bald old gentlemen seemed to
be hermetically sealed up inside, eternally reading the paper. That
wonderful mystery, the music-shop, carried it off as usual (except that
it had more cabinet pianos in stock), as if season or no season were all
one to it. It made the same prodigious display of bright brazen
wind-instruments, horribly twisted, worth, as I should conceive, some
thousands of pounds, and which it is utterly impossible that anybody in
any season can ever play or want to play. It had five triangles in the
window, six pairs of castanets, and three harps; likewise every polka
with a coloured frontispiece that ever was published; from the original
one where a smooth male and female Pole of high rank are coming at the
observer with their arms a-kimbo, to the Ratcatcher’s Daughter.
Astonishing establishment, amazing enigma! Three other shops were pretty
much out of the season, what they were used to be in it. First, the shop
where they sell the sailors’ watches, which had still the old collection
of enormous timekeepers, apparently designed to break a fall from the
masthead: with places to wind them up, like fire-plugs. Secondly, the
shop where they sell the sailors’ clothing, which displayed the old
sou’-westers, and the old oily suits, and the old pea-jackets, and the
old one sea-chest, with its handles like a pair of rope ear-rings.
Thirdly, the unchangeable shop for the sale of literature that has been
left behind. Here, Dr. Faustus was still going down to very red and
yellow perdition, under the superintendence of three green personages of
a scaly humour, with excrescential serpents growing out of their
blade-bones. Here, the Golden Dreamer, and the Norwood Fortune Teller,
were still on sale at sixpence each, with instructions for making the
dumb cake, and reading destinies in tea-cups, and with a picture of a
young woman with a high waist lying on a sofa in an attitude so
uncomfortable as almost to account for her dreaming at one and the same
time of a conflagration, a shipwreck, an earthquake, a skeleton, a
church-porch, lightning, funerals performed, and a young man in a bright
blue coat and canary pantaloons. Here, were Little Warblers and
Fairburn’s Comic Songsters. Here, too, were ballads on the old ballad
paper and in the old confusion of types; with an old man in a cocked hat,
and an arm-chair, for the illustration to Will Watch the bold Smuggler;
and the Friar of Orders Grey, represented by a little girl in a hoop,
with a ship in the distance. All these as of yore, when they were
infinite delights to me!
It took me so long fully to relish these many enjoyments, that I had not
more than an hour before bedtime to devote to Madame Roland. We got on
admirably together on the subject of her convent education, and I rose
next morning with the full conviction that the day for the great chapter
was at last arrived.
It had fallen calm, however, in the night, and as I sat at breakfast I
blushed to remember that I had not yet been on the Downs. I a walker,
and not yet on the Downs! Really, on so quiet and bright a morning this
must be set right. As an essential part of the Whole Duty of Man,
therefore, I left the chapter to itself—for the present—and went on the
Downs. They were wonderfully green and beautiful, and gave me a good
deal to do. When I had done with the free air and the view, I had to go
down into the valley and look after the hops (which I know nothing
about), and to be equally solicitous as to the cherry orchards. Then I
took it on myself to cross-examine a tramping family in black (mother
alleged, I have no doubt by herself in person, to have died last week),
and to accompany eighteenpence which produced a great effect, with moral
admonitions which produced none at all. Finally, it was late in the
afternoon before I got back to the unprecedented chapter, and then I
determined that it was out of the season, as the place was, and put it
away.
I went at night to the benefit of Mrs. B. Wedgington at the Theatre, who
had placarded the town with the admonition, ‘DON’T FORGET IT!’ I made
the house, according to my calculation, four and ninepence to begin with,
and it may have warmed up, in the course of the evening, to half a
sovereign. There was nothing to offend any one,—the good Mr. Baines of
Leeds excepted. Mrs. B. Wedgington sang to a grand piano. Mr. B.
Wedgington did the like, and also took off his coat, tucked up his
trousers, and danced in clogs. Master B. Wedgington, aged ten months,
was nursed by a shivering young person in the boxes, and the eye of Mrs.
B. Wedgington wandered that way more than once. Peace be with all the
Wedgingtons from A. to Z. May they find themselves in the Season
somewhere!