I turned my back on the old decaying past and set my face toward London.
CHAPTER XIII.
MY FRIEND THE CRIPPLE.
In the year 1860, of which I now write, so much of prejudice against railways still existed among many people of a pious or superstitious turn of mind, that I can quote much immediate precedent in support of my resolve to walk to London rather than further tempt a Providence I had already put to so severe a strain. It must be borne in mind of course that we Trenders were little more than barbarians of an unusual order, who had been nourished on a scorn of progress and redeemed only by a natural leaning toward picturesqueness of a pagan kind. Moreover, the sense of mystery, which was an integral part of our daily experience, had ingrained in us all a general antagonism toward unconstructed agencies. Lastly, not one of us had ever as yet been in a train.
Still, it was with no feeling of inability to carve a road for myself through the barriers to existence that I drew, on the evening of my third day’s tramp, toward the overlapping pall that was the roof of the “City of Dreadful Night.”
I had slept, on my road, respectively at Farnham and Guildford, where, in either case, cheap accommodation was easily procurable, and foresaw a difficulty, only greater in proportion, in finding reasonable lodging in London during the time I was seeking work. Indifferently I pictured this city to myself as only an elongated High street, with ramifications more numerous and extended than those of the old burgh that was my native town. I was startled, overwhelmed, dazed with the black, aimless scurrying of those interwoven strings of human ants, that ran by their thronging brick heaps, eager in search for what they never seemed to find, or shot and vanished into tunnels and alleys of darkness, or were attracted to and scorched up by, apparently, the broad sheets of flame that were the shop windows of their Vanity Fair. Moving amid the swarm from vision to vision—always an inconsiderable atom there without meaning or individuality—always stunned and stupefied by the threatening masses of masonry that hemmed me in, and accompanied me, and broke upon me in new dark forms through every vista and gap that the rank growth of ages had failed to block—the inevitable sense grew upon me, as it grows upon all who pace its interminable streets friendless, of walking in a world to which I was by heavenly birthright an alien.
Near midnight, I turned into a gaunt and lonely square, where comparative quiet reigned.
I had entered London by way of Waterloo bridge, as the wintry dusk was falling over house and river, and all these hours since had I been pacing its crashing thoroughfares, alive only to wonder and the cruel sense of personal insignificance. As to a lodging and bed for my weary limbs—sooner had Childe Roland dared the dark tower than I the burrows, that night, of the unknown pandemonium around me. I had slept in the open of the fields before now. Here, though winter, it hardly seemed that there was an out-of-doors, but that the buildings were only so many sleeping closets in a dark hall.
All round the square inside was a great inclosure encompassed by a frouzy hoarding of wood, and set in the middle of the inclosure was some dim object that looked like a ruined statue. Such by day, indeed, I found it to be, and of no less a person than his late majesty, King George the First. When my waking eyes first lighted on him, I saw him to be half-sunk into his horse, as if seeking to shield himself therein from the shafts of his persecutors, who, nothing discomposed, had daubed what remained of the crippled charger himself with blotches of red and white paint.
I walked once or twice round the square, seeking vainly, at first, to still the tumult of my brain. The oppressive night of locked-up London, laden like a thunder cloud with store of slumbering passions, was lowering now and settling down like a fog. The theaters were closed; the streets echoing to the last foot-falls. Seeing a hole in the hoarding, I squeezed through it and withdrew into the rank grass and weeds that choked the interior of the inclosure. I had bought and brought some food with me, and this I fell to munching as I sat on a hummock of rubbish, and was presently much comforted thereby, so that nothing but sleep seemed desirable to me in all the world. Therefore I lay down where I was and buttoning my coat about me, was, despite the frosty air, soon lost in delicious forgetfulness. At first my slumber was broken by reason of the fitful rumble of wheels, or pierced by voices and dim cries that yet resounded phantomly here and there, as if I lay in some stricken city, where only the dying yet lived and wailed, but gradually these all passed from me.
I awoke with the gray of dawn on my face and sat up. My limbs were cramped and stiff with the cold, and a light rime lay upon my clothes. Otherwise no bitterer result had followed my rather untoward experiment.