THE “POMFRET ARMS,” TOWCESTER: FORMERLY THE “SARACEN’S HEAD.”
At the moment of this earnest colloquy in the rain the landlord of the “Saracen’s Head” appeared, “to confirm Mr. Weller’s statement relative to the accommodations of the establishment, and to back his entreaties with a variety of dismal conjectures regarding the state of the roads, the doubt of fresh horses being to be had at the next stage, the dead certainty of its raining all night, the equally mortal certainty of its clearing up in the morning, and other topics of inducement familiar to innkeepers.”
THE YARD OF THE “POMFRET ARMS.”
When Mr. Pickwick decided to stay, “the landlord smiled his delight” and issued orders to the waiter. “Lights in the Sun, John; make up the fire; the gentlemen are wet!” he cried anxiously, although, doubtless, if the gentlemen had gone forward they might have been drowned, for all he cared.
And so the scene changed from the rain-washed road to a cosy room, with a waiter laying the cloth for dinner, a cheerful fire burning, and the tables lit with wax candles. “Everything looked (as everything always does in all decent English inns) as if the travellers had been expected, and their comforts prepared for days beforehand.”
Upon this charming picture of ease at one’s inn descended the atrabilious rival editors of The Eatanswill Gazette and The Eatanswill Independent, the organs respectively of “blue” and “buff” shades of political opinion. Pott of the Gazette, and Slurk of the Independent each found his rival sheet lying on the tables of the inn; but what either of those editors or those newspapers were doing here in Northamptonshire (Eatanswill being a far-distant East Anglian town, by general consensus of opinion identified with Ipswich) is one of those occasional lapses from consistency that in Pickwick give the modern commentator and annotator food for speculation.
When the inn was closed for the night Slurk retired to the kitchen to drink his rum and water by the fire, and to enjoy the bitter-sweet luxury of sneering at the rival print; but, as it happened, Mr. Pickwick’s party, accompanied by Pott, also adjourned to the kitchen to smoke a cigar or so before bed. How ancient, by the way, seems that custom! Does any guest, anywhere, in these times of smoking-rooms, withdraw to the kitchen to smoke his cigar, pipe, or cigarette?
How the rival editors—the “unmitigated viper” and the “ungrammatical twaddler”—met and presently came from oblique taunts to direct abuse of one another, and thence to a fight, let the pages of The Pickwick Papers tell. For my part, I refuse to believe that there were ever such journalists.
