Transcribed from the 1894 Chapman and Hall edition of "Christmas Stories"
by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
THE HOLLY-TREE--THREE BRANCHES
FIRST BRANCH--MYSELF
I have kept one secret in the course of my life. I am a bashful man.
Nobody would suppose it, nobody ever does suppose it, nobody ever did
suppose it, but I am naturally a bashful man. This is the secret which I
have never breathed until now.
I might greatly move the reader by some account of the innumerable places
I have not been to, the innumerable people I have not called upon or
received, the innumerable social evasions I have been guilty of, solely
because I am by original constitution and character a bashful man. But I
will leave the reader unmoved, and proceed with the object before me.
That object is to give a plain account of my travels and discoveries in
the Holly-Tree Inn; in which place of good entertainment for man and
beast I was once snowed up.
It happened in the memorable year when I parted for ever from Angela
Leath, whom I was shortly to have married, on making the discovery that
she preferred my bosom friend. From our school-days I had freely
admitted Edwin, in my own mind, to be far superior to myself; and, though
I was grievously wounded at heart, I felt the preference to be natural,
and tried to forgive them both. It was under these circumstances that I
resolved to go to America--on my way to the Devil.
Communicating my discovery neither to Angela nor to Edwin, but resolving
to write each of them an affecting letter conveying my blessing and
forgiveness, which the steam-tender for shore should carry to the post
when I myself should be bound for the New World, far beyond recall,--I
say, locking up my grief in my own breast, and consoling myself as I
could with the prospect of being generous, I quietly left all I held
dear, and started on the desolate journey I have mentioned.
The dead winter-time was in full dreariness when I left my chambers for
ever, at five o'clock in the morning. I had shaved by candle-light, of
course, and was miserably cold, and experienced that general
all-pervading sensation of getting up to be hanged which I have usually
found inseparable from untimely rising under such circumstances.
How well I remember the forlorn aspect of Fleet Street when I came out of
the Temple! The street-lamps flickering in the gusty north-east wind, as
if the very gas were contorted with cold; the white-topped houses; the
bleak, star-lighted sky; the market people and other early stragglers,
trotting to circulate their almost frozen blood; the hospitable light and
warmth of the few coffee-shops and public-houses that were open for such
customers; the hard, dry, frosty rime with which the air was charged (the
wind had already beaten it into every crevice), and which lashed my face
like a steel whip.
It wanted nine days to the end of the month, and end of the year. The
Post-office packet for the United States was to depart from Liverpool,
weather permitting, on the first of the ensuing month, and I had the
intervening time on my hands. I had taken this into consideration, and
had resolved to make a visit to a certain spot (which I need not name) on
the farther borders of Yorkshire. It was endeared to me by my having
first seen Angela at a farmhouse in that place, and my melancholy was
gratified by the idea of taking a wintry leave of it before my
expatriation. I ought to explain, that, to avoid being sought out before
my resolution should have been rendered irrevocable by being carried into
full effect, I had written to Angela overnight, in my usual manner,
lamenting that urgent business, of which she should know all particulars
by-and-by--took me unexpectedly away from her for a week or ten days.
There was no Northern Railway at that time, and in its place there were
stage-coaches; which I occasionally find myself, in common with some
other people, affecting to lament now, but which everybody dreaded as a
very serious penance then. I had secured the box-seat on the fastest of
these, and my business in Fleet Street was to get into a cab with my
portmanteau, so to make the best of my way to the Peacock at Islington,
where I was to join this coach. But when one of our Temple watchmen, who
carried my portmanteau into Fleet Street for me, told me about the huge
blocks of ice that had for some days past been floating in the river,
having closed up in the night, and made a walk from the Temple Gardens
over to the Surrey shore, I began to ask myself the question, whether the
box-seat would not be likely to put a sudden and a frosty end to my
unhappiness. I was heart-broken, it is true, and yet I was not quite so
far gone as to wish to be frozen to death.
When I got up to the Peacock,--where I found everybody drinking hot purl,
in self-preservation,--I asked if there were an inside seat to spare. I
then discovered that, inside or out, I was the only passenger. This gave
me a still livelier idea of the great inclemency of the weather, since
that coach always loaded particularly well. However, I took a little
purl (which I found uncommonly good), and got into the coach. When I was
seated, they built me up with straw to the waist, and, conscious of
making a rather ridiculous appearance, I began my journey.
It was still dark when we left the Peacock. For a little while, pale,
uncertain ghosts of houses and trees appeared and vanished, and then it
was hard, black, frozen day. People were lighting their fires; smoke was
mounting straight up high into the rarified air; and we were rattling for
Highgate Archway over the hardest ground I have ever heard the ring of
iron shoes on. As we got into the country, everything seemed to have
grown old and gray. The roads, the trees, thatched roofs of cottages and
homesteads, the ricks in farmers' yards. Out-door work was abandoned,
horse-troughs at roadside inns were frozen hard, no stragglers lounged
about, doors were close shut, little turnpike houses had blazing fires
inside, and children (even turnpike people have children, and seem to
like them) rubbed the frost from the little panes of glass with their
chubby arms, that their bright eyes might catch a glimpse of the solitary
coach going by. I don't know when the snow begin to set in; but I know
that we were changing horses somewhere when I heard the guard remark,
"That the old lady up in the sky was picking her geese pretty hard to-
day." Then, indeed, I found the white down falling fast and thick.
The lonely day wore on, and I dozed it out, as a lonely traveller does. I
was warm and valiant after eating and drinking,--particularly after
dinner; cold and depressed at all other times. I was always bewildered
as to time and place, and always more or less out of my senses. The
coach and horses seemed to execute in chorus Auld Lang Syne, without a
moment's intermission. They kept the time and tune with the greatest
regularity, and rose into the swell at the beginning of the Refrain, with
a precision that worried me to death. While we changed horses, the guard
and coachman went stumping up and down the road, printing off their shoes
in the snow, and poured so much liquid consolation into themselves
without being any the worse for it, that I began to confound them, as it
darkened again, with two great white casks standing on end. Our horses
tumbled down in solitary places, and we got them up,--which was the
pleasantest variety _I_ had, for it warmed me. And it snowed and snowed,
and still it snowed, and never left off snowing. All night long we went
on in this manner. Thus we came round the clock, upon the Great North
Road, to the performance of Auld Lang Syne by day again. And it snowed
and snowed, and still it snowed, and never left off snowing.
I forget now where we were at noon on the second day, and where we ought
to have been; but I know that we were scores of miles behindhand, and
that our case was growing worse every hour. The drift was becoming
prodigiously deep; landmarks were getting snowed out; the road and the
fields were all one; instead of having fences and hedge-rows to guide us,
we went crunching on over an unbroken surface of ghastly white that might
sink beneath us at any moment and drop us down a whole hillside. Still
the coachman and guard--who kept together on the box, always in council,
and looking well about them--made out the track with astonishing
sagacity.
When we came in sight of a town, it looked, to my fancy, like a large
drawing on a slate, with abundance of slate-pencil expended on the
churches and houses where the snow lay thickest. When we came within a
town, and found the church clocks all stopped, the dial-faces choked with
snow, and the inn-signs blotted out, it seemed as if the whole place were
overgrown with white moss. As to the coach, it was a mere snowball;
similarly, the men and boys who ran along beside us to the town's end,
turning our clogged wheels and encouraging our horses, were men and boys
of snow; and the bleak wild solitude to which they at last dismissed us
was a snowy Sahara. One would have thought this enough: notwithstanding
which, I pledge my word that it snowed and snowed, and still it snowed,
and never left off snowing.
We performed Auld Lang Syne the whole day; seeing nothing, out of towns
and villages, but the track of stoats, hares, and foxes, and sometimes of
birds. At nine o'clock at night, on a Yorkshire moor, a cheerful burst
from our horn, and a welcome sound of talking, with a glimmering and
moving about of lanterns, roused me from my drowsy state. I found that
we were going to change.
They helped me out, and I said to a waiter, whose bare head became as
white as King Lear's in a single minute, "What Inn is this?"
"The Holly-Tree, sir," said he.
"Upon my word, I believe," said I, apologetically, to the guard and
coachman, "that I must stop here."
Now the landlord, and the landlady, and the ostler, and the post-boy, and
all the stable authorities, had already asked the coachman, to the wide-
eyed interest of all the rest of the establishment, if he meant to go on.
The coachman had already replied, "Yes, he'd take her through
it,"--meaning by Her the coach,--"if so be as George would stand by him."
George was the guard, and he had already sworn that he would stand by
him. So the helpers were already getting the horses out.
My declaring myself beaten, after this parley, was not an announcement
without preparation. Indeed, but for the way to the announcement being
smoothed by the parley, I more than doubt whether, as an innately bashful
man, I should have had the confidence to make it. As it was, it received
the approval even of the guard and coachman. Therefore, with many
confirmations of my inclining, and many remarks from one bystander to
another, that the gentleman could go for'ard by the mail to-morrow,
whereas to-night he would only be froze, and where was the good of a
gentleman being froze--ah, let alone buried alive (which latter clause
was added by a humorous helper as a joke at my expense, and was extremely
well received), I saw my portmanteau got out stiff, like a frozen body;
did the handsome thing by the guard and coachman; wished them good-night
and a prosperous journey; and, a little ashamed of myself, after all, for
leaving them to fight it out alone, followed the landlord, landlady, and
waiter of the Holly-Tree up-stairs.
I thought I had never seen such a large room as that into which they
showed me. It had five windows, with dark red curtains that would have
absorbed the light of a general illumination; and there were
complications of drapery at the top of the curtains, that went wandering
about the wall in a most extraordinary manner. I asked for a smaller
room, and they told me there was no smaller room.
They could screen me in, however, the landlord said. They brought a
great old japanned screen, with natives (Japanese, I suppose) engaged in
a variety of idiotic pursuits all over it; and left me roasting whole
before an immense fire.
My bedroom was some quarter of a mile off, up a great staircase at the
end of a long gallery; and nobody knows what a misery this is to a
bashful man who would rather not meet people on the stairs. It was the
grimmest room I have ever had the nightmare in; and all the furniture,
from the four posts of the bed to the two old silver candle-sticks, was
tall, high-shouldered, and spindle-waisted. Below, in my sitting-room,
if I looked round my screen, the wind rushed at me like a mad bull; if I
stuck to my arm-chair, the fire scorched me to the colour of a new brick.
The chimney-piece was very high, and there was a bad glass--what I may
call a wavy glass--above it, which, when I stood up, just showed me my
anterior phrenological developments,--and these never look well, in any
subject, cut short off at the eyebrow. If I stood with my back to the
fire, a gloomy vault of darkness above and beyond the screen insisted on
being looked at; and, in its dim remoteness, the drapery of the ten
curtains of the five windows went twisting and creeping about, like a
nest of gigantic worms.
I suppose that what I observe in myself must be observed by some other
men of similar character in _themselves_; therefore I am emboldened to
mention, that, when I travel, I never arrive at a place but I immediately
want to go away from it. Before I had finished my supper of broiled fowl
and mulled port, I had impressed upon the waiter in detail my
arrangements for departure in the morning. Breakfast and bill at eight.
Fly at nine. Two horses, or, if needful, even four.
Tired though I was, the night appeared about a week long. In cases of
nightmare, I thought of Angela, and felt more depressed than ever by the
reflection that I was on the shortest road to Gretna Green. What had _I_
to do with Gretna Green? I was not going _that_ way to the Devil, but by
the American route, I remarked in my bitterness.
In the morning I found that it was snowing still, that it had snowed all
night, and that I was snowed up. Nothing could get out of that spot on
the moor, or could come at it, until the road had been cut out by
labourers from the market-town. When they might cut their way to the
Holly-Tree nobody could tell me.
It was now Christmas-eve. I should have had a dismal Christmas-time of
it anywhere, and consequently that did not so much matter; still, being
snowed up was like dying of frost, a thing I had not bargained for. I
felt very lonely. Yet I could no more have proposed to the landlord and
landlady to admit me to their society (though I should have liked it--very
much) than I could have asked them to present me with a piece of plate.
Here my great secret, the real bashfulness of my character, is to be
observed. Like most bashful men, I judge of other people as if they were
bashful too. Besides being far too shamefaced to make the proposal
myself, I really had a delicate misgiving that it would be in the last
degree disconcerting to them.
Trying to settle down, therefore, in my solitude, I first of all asked
what books there were in the house. The waiter brought me a _Book of
Roads_, two or three old Newspapers, a little Song-Book, terminating in a
collection of Toasts and Sentiments, a little Jest-Book, an odd volume of
_Peregrine Pickle_, and the _Sentimental Journey_. I knew every word of
the two last already, but I read them through again, then tried to hum
all the songs (Auld Lang Syne was among them); went entirely through the
jokes,--in which I found a fund of melancholy adapted to my state of
mind; proposed all the toasts, enunciated all the sentiments, and
mastered the papers. The latter had nothing in them but stock
advertisements, a meeting about a county rate, and a highway robbery. As
I am a greedy reader, I could not make this supply hold out until night;
it was exhausted by tea-time. Being then entirely cast upon my own
resources, I got through an hour in considering what to do next.
Ultimately, it came into my head (from which I was anxious by any means
to exclude Angela and Edwin), that I would endeavour to recall my
experience of Inns, and would try how long it lasted me. I stirred the
fire, moved my chair a little to one side of the screen,--not daring to
go far, for I knew the wind was waiting to make a rush at me, I could
hear it growling,--and began.
My first impressions of an Inn dated from the Nursery; consequently I
went back to the Nursery for a starting-point, and found myself at the
knee of a sallow woman with a fishy eye, an aquiline nose, and a green
gown, whose specially was a dismal narrative of a landlord by the
roadside, whose visitors unaccountably disappeared for many years, until
it was discovered that the pursuit of his life had been to convert them
into pies. For the better devotion of himself to this branch of
industry, he had constructed a secret door behind the head of the bed;
and when the visitor (oppressed with pie) had fallen asleep, this wicked
landlord would look softly in with a lamp in one hand and a knife in the
other, would cut his throat, and would make him into pies; for which
purpose he had coppers, underneath a trap-door, always boiling; and
rolled out his pastry in the dead of the night. Yet even he was not
insensible to the stings of conscience, for he never went to sleep
without being heard to mutter, "Too much pepper!" which was eventually
the cause of his being brought to justice. I had no sooner disposed of
this criminal than there started up another of the same period, whose
profession was originally house-breaking; in the pursuit of which art he
had had his right ear chopped off one night, as he was burglariously
getting in at a window, by a brave and lovely servant-maid (whom the
aquiline-nosed woman, though not at all answering the description, always
mysteriously implied to be herself). After several years, this brave and
lovely servant-maid was married to the landlord of a country Inn; which
landlord had this remarkable characteristic, that he always wore a silk
nightcap, and never would on any consideration take it off. At last, one
night, when he was fast asleep, the brave and lovely woman lifted up his
silk nightcap on the right side, and found that he had no ear there; upon
which she sagaciously perceived that he was the clipped housebreaker, who
had married her with the intention of putting her to death. She
immediately heated the poker and terminated his career, for which she was
taken to King George upon his throne, and received the compliments of
royalty on her great discretion and valour. This same narrator, who had
a Ghoulish pleasure, I have long been persuaded, in terrifying me to the
utmost confines of my reason, had another authentic anecdote within her
own experience, founded, I now believe, upon _Raymond and Agnes, or the
Bleeding Nun_. She said it happened to her brother-in-law, who was
immensely rich,--which my father was not; and immensely tall,--which my
father was not. It was always a point with this Ghoul to present my
clearest relations and friends to my youthful mind under circumstances of
disparaging contrast. The brother-in-law was riding once through a
forest on a magnificent horse (we had no magnificent horse at our house),
attended by a favourite and valuable Newfoundland dog (we had no dog),
when he found himself benighted, and came to an Inn. A dark woman opened
the door, and he asked her if he could have a bed there. She answered
yes, and put his horse in the stable, and took him into a room where
there were two dark men. While he was at supper, a parrot in the room
began to talk, saying, "Blood, blood! Wipe up the blood!" Upon which
one of the dark men wrung the parrot's neck, and said he was fond of
roasted parrots, and he meant to have this one for breakfast in the
morning. After eating and drinking heartily, the immensely rich, tall
brother-in-law went up to bed; but he was rather vexed, because they had
shut his dog in the stable, saying that they never allowed dogs in the
house. He sat very quiet for more than an hour, thinking and thinking,
when, just as his candle was burning out, he heard a scratch at the door.
He opened the door, and there was the Newfoundland dog! The dog came
softly in, smelt about him, went straight to some straw in the corner
which the dark men had said covered apples, tore the straw away, and
disclosed two sheets steeped in blood. Just at that moment the candle
went out, and the brother-in-law, looking through a chink in the door,
saw the two dark men stealing up-stairs; one armed with a dagger that
long (about five feet); the other carrying a chopper, a sack, and a
spade. Having no remembrance of the close of this adventure, I suppose
my faculties to have been always so frozen with terror at this stage of
it, that the power of listening stagnated within me for some quarter of
an hour.
These barbarous stories carried me, sitting there on the Holly-Tree
hearth, to the Roadside Inn, renowned in my time in a sixpenny book with
a folding plate, representing in a central compartment of oval form the
portrait of Jonathan Bradford, and in four corner compartments four
incidents of the tragedy with which the name is associated,--coloured
with a hand at once so free and economical, that the bloom of Jonathan's
complexion passed without any pause into the breeches of the ostler, and,
smearing itself off into the next division, became rum in a bottle. Then
I remembered how the landlord was found at the murdered traveller's
bedside, with his own knife at his feet, and blood upon his hand; how he
was hanged for the murder, notwithstanding his protestation that he had
indeed come there to kill the traveller for his saddle-bags, but had been
stricken motionless on finding him already slain; and how the ostler,
years afterwards, owned the deed. By this time I had made myself quite
uncomfortable. I stirred the fire, and stood with my back to it as long
as I could bear the heat, looking up at the darkness beyond the screen,
and at the wormy curtains creeping in and creeping out, like the worms in
the ballad of Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene.
There was an Inn in the cathedral town where I went to school, which had
pleasanter recollections about it than any of these. I took it next. It
was the Inn where friends used to put up, and where we used to go to see
parents, and to have salmon and fowls, and be tipped. It had an
ecclesiastical sign,--the Mitre,--and a bar that seemed to be the next
best thing to a bishopric, it was so snug. I loved the landlord's
youngest daughter to distraction,--but let that pass. It was in this Inn
that I was cried over by my rosy little sister, because I had acquired a
black eye in a fight. And though she had been, that Holly-Tree night,
for many a long year where all tears are dried, the Mitre softened me
yet.
"To be continued to-morrow," said I, when I took my candle to go to bed.
But my bed took it upon itself to continue the train of thought that
night. It carried me away, like the enchanted carpet, to a distant place
(though still in England), and there, alighting from a stage-coach at
another Inn in the snow, as I had actually done some years before, I
repeated in my sleep a curious experience I had really had there. More
than a year before I made the journey in the course of which I put up at
that Inn, I had lost a very near and dear friend by death. Every night
since, at home or away from home, I had dreamed of that friend; sometimes
as still living; sometimes as returning from the world of shadows to
comfort me; always as being beautiful, placid, and happy, never in
association with any approach to fear or distress. It was at a lonely
Inn in a wide moorland place, that I halted to pass the night. When I
had looked from my bedroom window over the waste of snow on which the
moon was shining, I sat down by my fire to write a letter. I had always,
until that hour, kept it within my own breast that I dreamed every night
of the dear lost one. But in the letter that I wrote I recorded the
circumstance, and added that I felt much interested in proving whether
the subject of my dream would still be faithful to me, travel-tired, and
in that remote place. No. I lost the beloved figure of my vision in
parting with the secret. My sleep has never looked upon it since, in
sixteen years, but once. I was in Italy, and awoke (or seemed to awake),
the well-remembered voice distinctly in my ears, conversing with it. I
entreated it, as it rose above my bed and soared up to the vaulted roof
of the old room, to answer me a question I had asked touching the Future
Life. My hands were still outstretched towards it as it vanished, when I
heard a bell ringing by the garden wall, and a voice in the deep
stillness of the night calling on all good Christians to pray for the
souls of the dead; it being All Souls' Eve.
To return to the Holly-Tree. When I awoke next day, it was freezing
hard, and the lowering sky threatened more snow. My breakfast cleared
away, I drew my chair into its former place, and, with the fire getting
so much the better of the landscape that I sat in twilight, resumed my
Inn remembrances.
That was a good Inn down in Wiltshire where I put up once, in the days of
the hard Wiltshire ale, and before all beer was bitterness. It was on
the skirts of Salisbury Plain, and the midnight wind that rattled my
lattice window came moaning at me from Stonehenge. There was a hanger-on
at that establishment (a supernaturally preserved Druid I believe him to
have been, and to be still), with long white hair, and a flinty blue eye
always looking afar off; who claimed to have been a shepherd, and who
seemed to be ever watching for the reappearance, on the verge of the
horizon, of some ghostly flock of sheep that had been mutton for many
ages. He was a man with a weird belief in him that no one could count
the stones of Stonehenge twice, and make the same number of them;
likewise, that any one who counted them three times nine times, and then
stood in the centre and said, "I dare!" would behold a tremendous
apparition, and be stricken dead. He pretended to have seen a bustard (I
suspect him to have been familiar with the dodo), in manner following: He
was out upon the plain at the close of a late autumn day, when he dimly
discerned, going on before him at a curious fitfully bounding pace, what
he at first supposed to be a gig-umbrella that had been blown from some
conveyance, but what he presently believed to be a lean dwarf man upon a
little pony. Having followed this object for some distance without
gaining on it, and having called to it many times without receiving any
answer, he pursued it for miles and miles, when, at length coming up with
it, he discovered it to be the last bustard in Great Britain, degenerated
into a wingless state, and running along the ground. Resolved to capture
him or perish in the attempt, he closed with the bustard; but the
bustard, who had formed a counter-resolution that he should do neither,
threw him, stunned him, and was last seen making off due west. This
weird main, at that stage of metempsychosis, may have been a sleep-walker
or an enthusiast or a robber; but I awoke one night to find him in the
dark at my bedside, repeating the Athanasian Creed in a terrific voice. I
paid my bill next day, and retired from the county with all possible
precipitation.
That was not a commonplace story which worked itself out at a little Inn
in Switzerland, while I was staying there. It was a very homely place,
in a village of one narrow zigzag street, among mountains, and you went
in at the main door through the cow-house, and among the mules and the
dogs and the fowls, before ascending a great bare staircase to the rooms;
which were all of unpainted wood, without plastering or papering,--like
rough packing-cases. Outside there was nothing but the straggling
street, a little toy church with a copper-coloured steeple, a pine
forest, a torrent, mists, and mountain-sides. A young man belonging to
this Inn had disappeared eight weeks before (it was winter-time), and was
supposed to have had some undiscovered love affair, and to have gone for
a soldier. He had got up in the night, and dropped into the village
street from the loft in which he slept with another man; and he had done
it so quietly, that his companion and fellow-labourer had heard no
movement when he was awakened in the morning, and they said, "Louis,
where is Henri?" They looked for him high and low, in vain, and gave him
up. Now, outside this Inn, there stood, as there stood outside every
dwelling in the village, a stack of firewood; but the stack belonging to
the Inn was higher than any of the rest, because the Inn was the richest
house, and burnt the most fuel. It began to be noticed, while they were
looking high and low, that a Bantam cock, part of the live stock of the
Inn, put himself wonderfully out of his way to get to the top of this
wood-stack; and that he would stay there for hours and hours, crowing,
until he appeared in danger of splitting himself. Five weeks went
on,--six weeks,--and still this terrible Bantam, neglecting his domestic
affairs, was always on the top of the wood-stack, crowing the very eyes
out of his head. By this time it was perceived that Louis had become
inspired with a violent animosity towards the terrible Bantam, and one
morning he was seen by a woman, who sat nursing her goitre at a little
window in a gleam of sun, to catch up a rough billet of wood, with a
great oath, hurl it at the terrible Bantam crowing on the wood-stack, and
bring him down dead. Hereupon the woman, with a sudden light in her
mind, stole round to the back of the wood-stack, and, being a good
climber, as all those women are, climbed up, and soon was seen upon the
summit, screaming, looking down the hollow within, and crying, "Seize
Louis, the murderer! Ring the church bell! Here is the body!" I saw
the murderer that day, and I saw him as I sat by my fire at the Holly-
Tree Inn, and I see him now, lying shackled with cords on the stable
litter, among the mild eyes and the smoking breath of the cows, waiting
to be taken away by the police, and stared at by the fearful village. A
heavy animal,--the dullest animal in the stables,--with a stupid head,
and a lumpish face devoid of any trace of insensibility, who had been,
within the knowledge of the murdered youth, an embezzler of certain small
moneys belonging to his master, and who had taken this hopeful mode of
putting a possible accuser out of his way. All of which he confessed
next day, like a sulky wretch who couldn't be troubled any more, now that
they had got hold of him, and meant to make an end of him. I saw him
once again, on the day of my departure from the Inn. In that Canton the
headsman still does his office with a sword; and I came upon this
murderer sitting bound, to a chair, with his eyes bandaged, on a scaffold
in a little market-place. In that instant, a great sword (loaded with
quicksilver in the thick part of the blade) swept round him like a gust
of wind or fire, and there was no such creature in the world. My wonder
was, not that he was so suddenly dispatched, but that any head was left
unreaped, within a radius of fifty yards of that tremendous sickle.
That was a good Inn, too, with the kind, cheerful landlady and the honest
landlord, where I lived in the shadow of Mont Blanc, and where one of the
apartments has a zoological papering on the walls, not so accurately
joined but that the elephant occasionally rejoices in a tiger's hind legs
and tail, while the lion puts on a trunk and tusks, and the bear,
moulting as it were, appears as to portions of himself like a leopard. I
made several American friends at that Inn, who all called Mont Blanc
Mount Blank,--except one good-humoured gentleman, of a very sociable
nature, who became on such intimate terms with it that he spoke of it
familiarly as "Blank;" observing, at breakfast, "Blank looks pretty tall
this morning;" or considerably doubting in the courtyard in the evening,
whether there warn't some go-ahead naters in our country, sir, that would
make out the top of Blank in a couple of hours from first start--now!
Once I passed a fortnight at an Inn in the North of England, where I was
haunted by the ghost of a tremendous pie. It was a Yorkshire pie, like a
fort,--an abandoned fort with nothing in it; but the waiter had a fixed
idea that it was a point of ceremony at every meal to put the pie on the
table. After some days I tried to hint, in several delicate ways, that I
considered the pie done with; as, for example, by emptying fag-ends of
glasses of wine into it; putting cheese-plates and spoons into it, as
into a basket; putting wine-bottles into it, as into a cooler; but always
in vain, the pie being invariably cleaned out again and brought up as
before. At last, beginning to be doubtful whether I was not the victim
of a spectral illusion, and whether my health and spirits might not sink
under the horrors of an imaginary pie, I cut a triangle out of it, fully
as large as the musical instrument of that name in a powerful orchestra.
Human provision could not have foreseen the result--but the waiter mended
the pie. With some effectual species of cement, he adroitly fitted the
triangle in again, and I paid my reckoning and fled.
The Holly-Tree was getting rather dismal. I made an overland expedition
beyond the screen, and penetrated as far as the fourth window. Here I
was driven back by stress of weather. Arrived at my winter-quarters once
more, I made up the fire, and took another Inn.
It was in the remotest part of Cornwall. A great annual Miners' Feast
was being holden at the Inn, when I and my travelling companions
presented ourselves at night among the wild crowd that were dancing
before it by torchlight. We had had a break-down in the dark, on a stony
morass some miles away; and I had the honour of leading one of the
unharnessed post-horses. If any lady or gentleman, on perusal of the
present lines, will take any very tall post-horse with his traces hanging
about his legs, and will conduct him by the bearing-rein into the heart
of a country dance of a hundred and fifty couples, that lady or gentleman
will then, and only then, form an adequate idea of the extent to which
that post-horse will tread on his conductor's toes. Over and above
which, the post-horse, finding three hundred people whirling about him,
will probably rear, and also lash out with his hind legs, in a manner
incompatible with dignity or self-respect on his conductor's part. With
such little drawbacks on my usually impressive aspect, I appeared at this
Cornish Inn, to the unutterable wonder of the Cornish Miners. It was
full, and twenty times full, and nobody could be received but the post-
horse,--though to get rid of that noble animal was something. While my
fellow-travellers and I were discussing how to pass the night and so much
of the next day as must intervene before the jovial blacksmith and the
jovial wheelwright would be in a condition to go out on the morass and
mend the coach, an honest man stepped forth from the crowd and proposed
his unlet floor of two rooms, with supper of eggs and bacon, ale and
punch. We joyfully accompanied him home to the strangest of clean
houses, where we were well entertained to the satisfaction of all
parties. But the novel feature of the entertainment was, that our host
was a chair-maker, and that the chairs assigned to us were mere frames,
altogether without bottoms of any sort; so that we passed the evening on
perches. Nor was this the absurdest consequence; for when we unbent at
supper, and any one of us gave way to laughter, he forgot the peculiarity
of his position, and instantly disappeared. I myself, doubled up into an
attitude from which self-extrication was impossible, was taken out of my
frame, like a clown in a comic pantomime who has tumbled into a tub, five
times by the taper's light during the eggs and bacon.
The Holly-Tree was fast reviving within me a sense of loneliness. I
began to feel conscious that my subject would never carry on until I was
dug out. I might be a week here,--weeks!
There was a story with a singular idea in it, connected with an Inn I
once passed a night at in a picturesque old town on the Welsh border. In
a large double-bedded room of this Inn there had been a suicide committed
by poison, in one bed, while a tired traveller slept unconscious in the
other. After that time, the suicide bed was never used, but the other
constantly was; the disused bedstead remaining in the room empty, though
as to all other respects in its old state. The story ran, that whosoever
slept in this room, though never so entire a stranger, from never so far
off, was invariably observed to come down in the morning with an
impression that he smelt Laudanum, and that his mind always turned upon
the subject of suicide; to which, whatever kind of man he might be, he
was certain to make some reference if he conversed with any one. This
went on for years, until it at length induced the landlord to take the
disused bedstead down, and bodily burn it,--bed, hangings, and all. The
strange influence (this was the story) now changed to a fainter one, but
never changed afterwards. The occupant of that room, with occasional but
very rare exceptions, would come down in the morning, trying to recall a
forgotten dream he had had in the night. The landlord, on his mentioning
his perplexity, would suggest various commonplace subjects, not one of
which, as he very well knew, was the true subject. But the moment the
landlord suggested "Poison," the traveller started, and cried, "Yes!" He
never failed to accept that suggestion, and he never recalled any more of
the dream.
This reminiscence brought the Welsh Inns in general before me; with the
women in their round hats, and the harpers with their white beards
(venerable, but humbugs, I am afraid), playing outside the door while I
took my dinner. The transition was natural to the Highland Inns, with
the oatmeal bannocks, the honey, the venison steaks, the trout from the
loch, the whisky, and perhaps (having the materials so temptingly at
hand) the Athol brose. Once was I coming south from the Scottish
Highlands in hot haste, hoping to change quickly at the station at the
bottom of a certain wild historical glen, when these eyes did with
mortification see the landlord come out with a telescope and sweep the
whole prospect for the horses; which horses were away picking up their
own living, and did not heave in sight under four hours. Having thought
of the loch-trout, I was taken by quick association to the Anglers' Inns
of England (I have assisted at innumerable feats of angling by lying in
the bottom of the boat, whole summer days, doing nothing with the
greatest perseverance; which I have generally found to be as effectual
towards the taking of fish as the finest tackle and the utmost science),
and to the pleasant white, clean, flower-pot-decorated bedrooms of those
inns, overlooking the river, and the ferry, and the green ait, and the
church-spire, and the country bridge; and to the pearless Emma with the
bright eyes and the pretty smile, who waited, bless her! with a natural
grace that would have converted Blue-Beard. Casting my eyes upon my
Holly-Tree fire, I next discerned among the glowing coals the pictures of
a score or more of those wonderful English posting-inns which we are all
so sorry to have lost, which were so large and so comfortable, and which
were such monuments of British submission to rapacity and extortion. He
who would see these houses pining away, let him walk from Basingstoke, or
even Windsor, to London, by way of Hounslow, and moralise on their
perishing remains; the stables crumbling to dust; unsettled labourers and
wanderers bivouacking in the outhouses; grass growing in the yards; the
rooms, where erst so many hundred beds of down were made up, let off to
Irish lodgers at eighteenpence a week; a little ill-looking beer-shop
shrinking in the tap of former days, burning coach-house gates for
firewood, having one of its two windows bunged up, as if it had received
punishment in a fight with the Railroad; a low, bandy-legged,
brick-making bulldog standing in the doorway. What could I next see in
my fire so naturally as the new railway-house of these times near the
dismal country station; with nothing particular on draught but cold air
and damp, nothing worth mentioning in the larder but new mortar, and no
business doing beyond a conceited affectation of luggage in the hall?
Then I came to the Inns of Paris, with the pretty apartment of four
pieces up one hundred and seventy-five waxed stairs, the privilege of
ringing the bell all day long without influencing anybody's mind or body
but your own, and the not-too-much-for-dinner, considering the price.
Next to the provincial Inns of France, with the great church-tower rising
above the courtyard, the horse-bells jingling merrily up and down the
street beyond, and the clocks of all descriptions in all the rooms, which
are never right, unless taken at the precise minute when, by getting
exactly twelve hours too fast or too slow, they unintentionally become
so. Away I went, next, to the lesser roadside Inns of Italy; where all
the dirty clothes in the house (not in wear) are always lying in your
anteroom; where the mosquitoes make a raisin pudding of your face in
summer, and the cold bites it blue in winter; where you get what you can,
and forget what you can't: where I should again like to be boiling my tea
in a pocket-handkerchief dumpling, for want of a teapot. So to the old
palace Inns and old monastery Inns, in towns and cities of the same
bright country; with their massive quadrangular staircases, whence you
may look from among clustering pillars high into the blue vault of
heaven; with their stately banqueting-rooms, and vast refectories; with
their labyrinths of ghostly bedchambers, and their glimpses into gorgeous
streets that have no appearance of reality or possibility. So to the
close little Inns of the Malaria districts, with their pale attendants,
and their peculiar smell of never letting in the air. So to the immense
fantastic Inns of Venice, with the cry of the gondolier below, as he
skims the corner; the grip of the watery odours on one particular little
bit of the bridge of your nose (which is never released while you stay
there); and the great bell of St. Mark's Cathedral tolling midnight. Next
I put up for a minute at the restless Inns upon the Rhine, where your
going to bed, no matter at what hour, appears to be the tocsin for
everybody else's getting up; and where, in the table-d'hote room at the
end of the long table (with several Towers of Babel on it at the other
end, all made of white plates), one knot of stoutish men, entirely
dressed in jewels and dirt, and having nothing else upon them, _will_
remain all night, clinking glasses, and singing about the river that
flows, and the grape that grows, and Rhine wine that beguiles, and Rhine
woman that smiles and hi drink drink my friend and ho drink drink my
brother, and all the rest of it. I departed thence, as a matter of
course, to other German Inns, where all the eatables are soddened down to
the same flavour, and where the mind is disturbed by the apparition of
hot puddings, and boiled cherries, sweet and slab, at awfully unexpected
periods of the repast. After a draught of sparkling beer from a foaming
glass jug, and a glance of recognition through the windows of the student
beer-houses at Heidelberg and elsewhere, I put out to sea for the Inns of
America, with their four hundred beds apiece, and their eight or nine
hundred ladies and gentlemen at dinner every day. Again I stood in the
bar-rooms thereof, taking my evening cobbler, julep, sling, or cocktail.
Again I listened to my friend the General,--whom I had known for five
minutes, in the course of which period he had made me intimate for life
with two Majors, who again had made me intimate for life with three
Colonels, who again had made me brother to twenty-two civilians,--again,
I say, I listened to my friend the General, leisurely expounding the
resources of the establishment, as to gentlemen's morning-room, sir;
ladies' morning-room, sir; gentlemen's evening-room, sir; ladies' evening-
room, sir; ladies' and gentlemen's evening reuniting-room, sir; music-
room, sir; reading-room, sir; over four hundred sleeping-rooms, sir; and
the entire planned and finited within twelve calendar months from the
first clearing off of the old encumbrances on the plot, at a cost of five
hundred thousand dollars, sir. Again I found, as to my individual way of
thinking, that the greater, the more gorgeous, and the more dollarous the
establishment was, the less desirable it was. Nevertheless, again I
drank my cobbler, julep, sling, or cocktail, in all good-will, to my
friend the General, and my friends the Majors, Colonels, and civilians
all; full well knowing that, whatever little motes my beamy eyes may have
descried in theirs, they belong to a kind, generous, large-hearted, and
great people.
I had been going on lately at a quick pace to keep my solitude out of my
mind; but here I broke down for good, and gave up the subject. What was
I to do? What was to become of me? Into what extremity was I
submissively to sink? Supposing that, like Baron Trenck, I looked out
for a mouse or spider, and found one, and beguiled my imprisonment by
training it? Even that might be dangerous with a view to the future. I
might be so far gone when the road did come to be cut through the snow,
that, on my way forth, I might burst into tears, and beseech, like the
prisoner who was released in his old age from the Bastille, to be taken
back again to the five windows, the ten curtains, and the sinuous
drapery.
A desperate idea came into my head. Under any other circumstances I
should have rejected it; but, in the strait at which I was, I held it
fast. Could I so far overcome the inherent bashfulness which withheld me
from the landlord's table and the company I might find there, as to call
up the Boots, and ask him to take a chair,--and something in a liquid
form,--and talk to me? I could, I would, I did.
SECOND BRANCH--THE BOOTS
Where had he been in his time? he repeated, when I asked him the
question. Lord, he had been everywhere! And what had he been? Bless
you, he had been everything you could mention a'most!
Seen a good deal? Why, of course he had. I should say so, he could
assure me, if I only knew about a twentieth part of what had come in his
way. Why, it would be easier for him, he expected, to tell what he
hadn't seen than what he had. Ah! A deal, it would.
What was the curiousest thing he had seen? Well! He didn't know. He
couldn't momently name what was the curiousest thing he had seen--unless
it was a Unicorn, and he see _him_ once at a Fair. But 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 had cleaned the
shoes they run away in--and they was so little that he couldn't get his
hand into 'em.
Master Harry Walmers' father, you see, he lived at the Elmses, down away
by Shooter's Hill there, six or seven miles from Lunnon. 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. He wrote poetry, and
he rode, and he ran, and he cricketed, and he danced, and he acted, and
he done it all equally beautiful. He was uncommon proud of Master Harry
as was his only child; but he didn't spoil him neither. He was a
gentleman that had a will of his own and a eye of his own, and that would
be minded. Consequently, though he made quite a companion of the fine
bright boy, and was delighted to see him so fond of reading his fairy
books, and was never tired of hearing him say my name is Norval, or
hearing him sing his songs about Young May Moons is beaming love, and
When he as adores thee has left but the name, and that; still he kept the
command over the child, and the child _was_ a child, and it's to be
wished more of 'em was!
How did Boots happen to know all this? Why, through being
under-gardener. Of course he couldn't be under-gardener, and be always
about, in the summer-time, near the windows on the lawn, a mowing, and
sweeping, and weeding, and pruning, and this and that, without getting
acquainted with the ways of the family. Even supposing Master Harry
hadn't come to him one morning early, and said, "Cobbs, how should you
spell Norah, if you was asked?" and then began cutting it in print all
over the fence.