第 6 页

as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-carts were going round.

Everything was bolted and barred that could by possibility furnish

relief to an overworked people. No pictures, no unfamiliar animals, no

rare plants or flowers, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient

world--all TABOO with that enlightened strictness, that the ugly South

Sea gods in the British Museum might have supposed themselves at home

again. Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to breathe

but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to change the brooding mind,

or raise it up. Nothing for the spent toiler to do, but to compare the

monotony of his seventh day with the monotony of his six days, think

what a weary life he led, and make the best of it--or the worst,

according to the probabilities.

At such a happy time, so propitious to the interests of religion and

morality, Mr Arthur Clennam, newly arrived from Marseilles by way of

Dover, and by Dover coach the Blue-eyed Maid, sat in the window of a

coffee-house on Ludgate Hill. Ten thousand responsible houses surrounded

him, frowning as heavily on the streets they composed, as if they were

every one inhabited by the ten young men of the Calender's story, who

blackened their faces and bemoaned their miseries every night. Fifty

thousand lairs surrounded him where people lived so unwholesomely that

fair water put into their crowded rooms on Saturday night, would be

corrupt on Sunday morning; albeit my lord, their county member, was

amazed that they failed to sleep in company with their butcher's meat.

Miles of close wells and pits of houses, where the inhabitants gasped

for air, stretched far away towards every point of the compass. Through

the heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed, in the place of

a fine fresh river. What secular want could the million or so of

human beings whose daily labour, six days in the week, lay among these

Arcadian objects, from the sweet sameness of which they had no escape

between the cradle and the grave--what secular want could they possibly

have upon their seventh day? Clearly they could want nothing but a

stringent policeman.

Mr Arthur Clennam sat in the window of the coffee-house on Ludgate Hill,

counting one of the neighbouring bells, making sentences and burdens of

songs out of it in spite of himself, and wondering how many sick

people it might be the death of in the course of the year. As the hour

approached, its changes of measure made it more and more exasperating.

At the quarter, it went off into a condition of deadly-lively

importunity, urging the populace in a voluble manner to Come to church,

Come to church, Come to church! At the ten minutes, it became aware

that the congregation would be scanty, and slowly hammered out in low

spirits, They WON'T come, they WON'T come, they WON'T come! At the five

minutes, it abandoned hope, and shook every house in the neighbourhood

for three hundred seconds, with one dismal swing per second, as a groan

of despair.

'Thank Heaven!' said Clennam, when the hour struck, and the bell

stopped.

But its sound had revived a long train of miserable Sundays, and the

procession would not stop with the bell, but continued to march on.

'Heaven forgive me,' said he, 'and those who trained me. How I have

hated this day!'

There was the dreary Sunday of his childhood, when he sat with his hands

before him, scared out of his senses by a horrible tract which commenced

business with the poor child by asking him in its title, why he was

going to Perdition?--a piece of curiosity that he really, in a frock and

drawers, was not in a condition to satisfy--and which, for the further

attraction of his infant mind, had a parenthesis in every other line

with some such hiccupping reference as 2 Ep. Thess. c. iii, v. 6 &

7. There was the sleepy Sunday of his boyhood, when, like a military

deserter, he was marched to chapel by a picquet of teachers three times

a day, morally handcuffed to another boy; and when he would willingly

have bartered two meals of indigestible sermon for another ounce or

two of inferior mutton at his scanty dinner in the flesh. There was the

interminable Sunday of his nonage; when his mother, stern of face and

unrelenting of heart, would sit all day behind a Bible--bound, like her

own construction of it, in the hardest, barest, and straitest boards,

with one dinted ornament on the cover like the drag of a chain, and a

wrathful sprinkling of red upon the edges of the leaves--as if it, of

all books! were a fortification against sweetness of temper, natural

affection, and gentle intercourse. There was the resentful Sunday of a

little later, when he sat down glowering and glooming through the tardy

length of the day, with a sullen sense of injury in his heart, and no

more real knowledge of the beneficent history of the New Testament than

if he had been bred among idolaters. There was a legion of Sundays,

all days of unserviceable bitterness and mortification, slowly passing

before him. 'Beg pardon, sir,' said a brisk waiter, rubbing the table.

'Wish see bed-room?'

'Yes. I have just made up my mind to do it.'

'Chaymaid!' cried the waiter. 'Gelen box num seven wish see room!'

'Stay!' said Clennam, rousing himself. 'I was not thinking of what I

said; I answered mechanically. I am not going to sleep here. I am going

home.'

'Deed, sir? Chaymaid! Gelen box num seven, not go sleep here, gome.'

He sat in the same place as the day died, looking at the dull houses

opposite, and thinking, if the disembodied spirits of former inhabitants

were ever conscious of them, how they must pity themselves for their old

places of imprisonment. Sometimes a face would appear behind the dingy

glass of a window, and would fade away into the gloom as if it had seen

enough of life and had vanished out of it. Presently the rain began to

fall in slanting lines between him and those houses, and people began

to collect under cover of the public passage opposite, and to look out

hopelessly at the sky as the rain dropped thicker and faster. Then wet

umbrellas began to appear, draggled skirts, and mud. What the mud had

been doing with itself, or where it came from, who could say? But it

seemed to collect in a moment, as a crowd will, and in five minutes to

have splashed all the sons and daughters of Adam. The lamplighter was

going his rounds now; and as the fiery jets sprang up under his touch,

one might have fancied them astonished at being suffered to introduce

any show of brightness into such a dismal scene.

Mr Arthur Clennam took up his hat and buttoned his coat, and walked out.

In the country, the rain would have developed a thousand fresh scents,

and every drop would have had its bright association with some beautiful

form of growth or life. In the city, it developed only foul stale

smells, and was a sickly, lukewarm, dirt-stained, wretched addition to

the gutters.

He crossed by St Paul's and went down, at a long angle, almost to the

water's edge, through some of the crooked and descending streets which

lie (and lay more crookedly and closely then) between the river and

Cheapside. Passing, now the mouldy hall of some obsolete Worshipful

Company, now the illuminated windows of a Congregationless Church that

seemed to be waiting for some adventurous Belzoni to dig it out and

discover its history; passing silent warehouses and wharves, and here

and there a narrow alley leading to the river, where a wretched little

bill, FOUND DROWNED, was weeping on the wet wall; he came at last to the

house he sought. An old brick house, so dingy as to be all but black,

standing by itself within a gateway. Before it, a square court-yard

where a shrub or two and a patch of grass were as rank (which is saying

much) as the iron railings enclosing them were rusty; behind it,

a jumble of roots. It was a double house, with long, narrow,

heavily-framed windows. Many years ago, it had had it in its mind to

slide down sideways; it had been propped up, however, and was leaning on

some half-dozen gigantic crutches: which gymnasium for the neighbouring

cats, weather-stained, smoke-blackened, and overgrown with weeds,

appeared in these latter days to be no very sure reliance.

'Nothing changed,' said the traveller, stopping to look round. 'Dark and

miserable as ever. A light in my mother's window, which seems never to

have been extinguished since I came home twice a year from school, and

dragged my box over this pavement. Well, well, well!'

He went up to the door, which had a projecting canopy in carved work

of festooned jack-towels and children's heads with water on the brain,

designed after a once-popular monumental pattern, and knocked. A

shuffling step was soon heard on the stone floor of the hall, and the

door was opened by an old man, bent and dried, but with keen eyes.

He had a candle in his hand, and he held it up for a moment to assist

his keen eyes. 'Ah, Mr Arthur?' he said, without any emotion, 'you are

come at last? Step in.'

Mr Arthur stepped in and shut the door.

'Your figure is filled out, and set,' said the old man, turning to look

at him with the light raised again, and shaking his head; 'but you don't

come up to your father in my opinion. Nor yet your mother.'

'How is my mother?'

'She is as she always is now. Keeps her room when not actually

bedridden, and hasn't been out of it fifteen times in as many years,

Arthur.' They had walked into a spare, meagre dining-room. The old man

had put the candlestick upon the table, and, supporting his right elbow

with his left hand, was smoothing his leathern jaws while he looked at

the visitor. The visitor offered his hand. The old man took it coldly

enough, and seemed to prefer his jaws, to which he returned as soon as

he could.

'I doubt if your mother will approve of your coming home on the Sabbath,

Arthur,' he said, shaking his head warily.

'You wouldn't have me go away again?'

'Oh! I? I? I am not the master. It's not what _I_ would have. I have

stood between your father and mother for a number of years. I don't

pretend to stand between your mother and you.'

'Will you tell her that I have come home?'

'Yes, Arthur, yes. Oh, to be sure! I'll tell her that you have come

home. Please to wait here. You won't find the room changed.'

He took another candle from a cupboard, lighted it, left the first on

the table, and went upon his errand. He was a short, bald old man, in a

high-shouldered black coat and waistcoat, drab breeches, and long drab

gaiters. He might, from his dress, have been either clerk or servant,

and in fact had long been both. There was nothing about him in the way

of decoration but a watch, which was lowered into the depths of its

proper pocket by an old black ribbon, and had a tarnished copper key

moored above it, to show where it was sunk. His head was awry, and

he had a one-sided, crab-like way with him, as if his foundations had

yielded at about the same time as those of the house, and he ought to

have been propped up in a similar manner.

'How weak am I,' said Arthur Clennam, when he was gone, 'that I could

shed tears at this reception! I, who have never experienced anything

else; who have never expected anything else.' He not only could,

but did. It was the momentary yielding of a nature that had been

disappointed from the dawn of its perceptions, but had not quite given

up all its hopeful yearnings yet. He subdued it, took up the candle,

and examined the room. The old articles of furniture were in their old

places; the Plagues of Egypt, much the dimmer for the fly and smoke

plagues of London, were framed and glazed upon the walls. There was the

old cellaret with nothing in it, lined with lead, like a sort of coffin

in compartments; there was the old dark closet, also with nothing in

it, of which he had been many a time the sole contents, in days of

punishment, when he had regarded it as the veritable entrance to that

bourne to which the tract had found him galloping. There was the large,

hard-featured clock on the sideboard, which he used to see bending its

figured brows upon him with a savage joy when he was behind-hand with

his lessons, and which, when it was wound up once a week with an iron

handle, used to sound as if it were growling in ferocious anticipation

of the miseries into which it would bring him. But here was the old man

come back, saying, 'Arthur, I'll go before and light you.'

Arthur followed him up the staircase, which was panelled off into spaces

like so many mourning tablets, into a dim bed-chamber, the floor of

which had gradually so sunk and settled, that the fire-place was in a

dell. On a black bier-like sofa in this hollow, propped up behind with

one great angular black bolster like the block at a state execution in

the good old times, sat his mother in a widow's dress.

She and his father had been at variance from his earliest remembrance.

To sit speechless himself in the midst of rigid silence, glancing in

dread from the one averted face to the other, had been the peacefullest

occupation of his childhood. She gave him one glassy kiss, and four

stiff fingers muffled in worsted. This embrace concluded, he sat down on

the opposite side of her little table. There was a fire in the grate,

as there had been night and day for fifteen years. There was a kettle on

the hob, as there had been night and day for fifteen years. There was a

little mound of damped ashes on the top of the fire, and another little

mound swept together under the grate, as there had been night and day

for fifteen years. There was a smell of black dye in the airless room,

which the fire had been drawing out of the crape and stuff of the

widow's dress for fifteen months, and out of the bier-like sofa for

fifteen years.

'Mother, this is a change from your old active habits.'