Mr. Chops Comes Into his Property—twelve thousand odd hundred. Further than that, he Goes Into Society “in a chay and four greys with silk jackets.” It was at this turning-point in the career of his large-headed but diminutive hero that the grotesque humour of the Reader would play upon the risible nerves of his hearers, as, according to Mr. Disraeli's phrase, Sir Robert Peel used to play upon the House of Commons, “like an old fiddle.” Determined to Go Into Society in style, with his twelve thousand odd hundred, Mr. Chops, we are told, “sent for a young man he knowed, as had a very genteel appearance, and was a Bonnet at a gaming-booth. Most respectable brought up,” adds Mr. Magsman—“father having been imminent in the livery-stable line, but unfortunate in a commercial crisis through painting a old grey ginger-bay, and sellin' him with a pedigree.” In intimate companionship with this Bonnet, “who said his name was Normandy, which it warn't,” Mr. Magsman, on invitation by note a little while afterwards, visits Mr. Chops at his lodgings in Pall Mall, London, where he is found carousing not only with the Bonnet but with a third party, of whom we were then told with unconscionable gravity, “When last met, he had on a white Roman shirt, and a bishop's mitre covered with leopard-skin, and played the clarionet all wrong in a band at a Wild Beast Show.” How the reverential Magsman, finding the three of them blazing away, blazes away in his turn while remaining in their company, who, that once heard it, has forgotten? “I made the round of the bottles,” he says—evidently proud of his achievement—“first separate (to say I had done it), and then mixed 'em altogether (to say I had done it), and then tried two of 'em as half-and-half, and then t'other two; altogether,” he adds, “passin' a pleasin' evenin' with a tendency to feel muddled.” How all Mr. Chop's blazing away is to terminate everybody but himself perceives clearly enough from the commencement.
Normandy having bolted with the plate, and “him as formerly wore the bishop's mitre” with the jewels, the Dwarf gets out of society by being, as he significantly expresses it, “sold out,” and in this plight returns penitently one evening to the show-house of his still-admiring proprietor. Mr. Magsman happens at the moment to be having a dull tête-à-tête with a young man without arms, who gets his living by writing with his toes, “which,” says the low-spirited narrator, “I had taken on for a month—though he never drawed—except on paper.” Hearing a kicking at the street-door, “'Halloa!' I says to the young man, 'what's up?' He rubs his eyebrows with his toes, and he says, 'I can't imagine, Mr. Magsman'—which that young man [with an air of disgust] never could imagine nothin', and was monotonous company.” Mr. Chops—“I never dropped the 'Mr.' with him,” says his again proprietor; “the world might do it, but not me”—eventually dies. Having sat upon the barrel-organ over night, and had the handle turned through all the changes, for the first and only time after his fall, Mr. Chops is found on the following morning, as the disconsolate Magsman expresses it, “gone into much better society than either mine or Pall Mall's.” Out of such unpromising materials as these could the alembic of a genius all-embracing in its sympathies extract such an abundance of innocent mirth—an illiterate showman talking to us all the while about such people as the Bonnet of a gaming-booth, or a set of monstrosities he himself has, for a few coppers, on exhibition. Yet, as Mr. Magsman himself remarks rather proudly when commenting on his own establishment, “as for respectability,—if threepence ain't respectable, what is?”
THE POOR TRAVELLER.
Apart altogether from the Readings of Charles Dickens, has the reader of this book any remembrance of the original story of “The Poor Traveller”? If he has, he will recognise upon the instant the truth of the words in which we would here speak of it, as of one of those, it may be, slight but exquisite sketches, which are sometimes, in a happy moment, thrown off by the hand of a great master. Comparatively trivial in itself—carelessly dashed off, apparently hap-hazard—having no pretension about it in the least, it is anything, in short, but a finished masterpiece. Yet, for all that, it is marked, here and there, by touches so felicitous and inimitable in their way, that we hardly find the like in the artist's more highly elaborated and ambitious productions. Not that one would speak of it, however, as of a drawing upon toned paper in neutral tint, or as of a picture pencilled in sepia or with crayons; one would rather liken it to a radiant water-colour, chequered with mingled storm and sunshine, sparkling with lifelike effects, and glowing with brilliancy. And yet the little work is one, when you come to look into it, that is but the product of a seemingly artless abandon, in which without an effort the most charming results have been arrived at, obviously upon the instant, and quite unerringly.
Trudging down to Chatham, footsore and without a farthing in his pocket, it is in this humble guise first of all that he comes before us, this Poor Traveller. Christian name, Eichard, better known as Dick, his own surname dropped upon the road, he assumes that of Doubledick—being thenceforth spoken of all through the tale, even to the very end of it, by his new name, as Eichard Doubledick. A scapegrace, a ne'er-do-well, an incorrigible, hopeless of himself, despaired of by others, he has “gone wrong and run wild.” His heart, still in the right place, has been sealed up. “Betrothed to a good and beautiful girl whom he had loved better than she—or perhaps even he—believed,” he had given her cause, in an evil hour, to tell him solemnly that she would never marry any other man; that she would live single for his sake, but that her lips, “that Mary Marshall's lips,” would never address another word to him on earth, bidding him in the end—Go! and Heaven forgive him! Hence, in point of fact, this journey of his on foot down to Chatham, for the purpose of enlisting, if possible, in a cavalry regiment, his object being to get shot, though he himself thinks in his devil-may-care indifference, that “he might as well ride to death as be at the trouble of walking.” Premising simply that his hero's age is at this time twenty-two, and his height five foot ten, and that, there being no cavalry at the moment in Chatham, he enlists into a regiment of the line, where he is glad to get drunk and forget all about it, the Author readily made the path clear for the opening up of his narrative.
Whenever Charles Dickens introduced this tale among his Readings, how beautifully he related it! After recounting how Private Doubledick was clearly going to the dogs, associating himself with the dregs of every regiment, seldom being sober and constantly under punishment, until it became plain at last to the whole barracks that very soon indeed he would come to be flogged, when the Reader came at this point to the words—“Now the captain of Doubledick's company was a young gentleman not above five years his senior, whose eyes had an expression in them which affected Private Doubledick in a very remarkable way”—the effect was singularly striking. Out of the Reader's own eyes would look the eyes of that Captain, as the Author himself describes them: “They were bright, handsome, dark eyes, what are called laughing eyes generally, and, when serious, rather steady than severe.” But, he immediately went on to say, they were the only eyes then left in his narrowed world that could not be met without a sense of shame by Private Doubledick. Insomuch that if he observed Captain Taunton coming towards him, even when he himself was most callous and unabashed, “he would rather turn back and go any distance out of the way, than encounter those two handsome, dark, bright eyes.” Here it was that came, what many will still vividly remember, as one of the most exquisitely portrayed incidents in the whole of this Reading—the interview between Captain Taunton and Private Doubledick!
The latter, having passed forty-eight hours in the Black Hole, has been just summoned, to his great dismay, to the Captain's quarters. Having about him all the squalor of his incarceration, he shrinks from making his appearance before one whose silent gaze even was a reproach. However, not being so mad yet as to disobey orders, he goes up to the officers' quarters immediately upon his release from the Black Hole, twisting and breaking in his hands as he goes along a bit of the straw that had formed its decorative furniture.
“'Come in!'
“Private Doubledick pulled off his cap, took a stride forward and stood in the light of the dark bright eyes.”