The Essays of Douglas Jerrold

by Douglas William Jerrold

CAT-AND-FIDDLE MORALITIES
The Tale of a Tiger

For fifteen years had the large wooden arm-chair of the Cat-and-Fiddle been consecrated to the use of Captain Bam. He would sit in it as it were a throne; and the customary guests of the hostelry paid him affectionate loyalty. He had won all hearts by his odd, kind ways; he had become the familiar oracle of all by his strange, yet wise sayings. He had, too, the rare and happy knack of so mixing his wisdom with his drollery, that when men laughed and swallowed his jest, they also, like children cheated with sweetened physic, swallowed something that in proper season would do them hearty good. And then there was a mystery about Captain Bam; and, at times, mystery is a sort of sauce to human character. It will now and then give a strange relish to what without it would be insipid commonplace. Not that it was so with Captain Bam. Certainly not; but the mystery was this. Fifteen years before—on a sharp, wintry afternoon—he crossed the threshold of the Cat-and-Fiddle. He carried a small leathern pack, and appeared otherwise appointed for a long pilgrimage. It was, we say, sharp, blighting weather, and Captain Bam called hastily for a mug of ale. “A mug of ale, and directly,” said Captain Bam, “for I can’t stop a minute.” The ale was brought, and the Captain hastily took a long draught thereof. He then drew his breath, and a smile as from the very roots of his heart broke over his face, and his eye strangely glimmered and twinkled upon the landlord. “Eureka!” said Captain Bam, and the host looked. “Eureka!” again exclaimed the Captain. “Take my pack,” he said, in a voice trembling with the fulness of satisfaction, “take my pack—I will rest here.”

And Captain Bam—his pack removed—sank in the large arm-chair. It seemed that his travels were ended; that, in a happy moment, he had accomplished the purpose of his life; that all his future existence would be an appointed state of rest. There was a little wooden nook—a sort of summer-house, at the end of a long garden—which, after few words, he hired of the host; whence every night he came to bestow his talk upon the guests of the Cat-and-Fiddle. “And how he would talk! Ha! better than a printed book.” Such was the oft avowed opinion of his gladdened hearers. And now the Captain is dead. His body lies in the churchyard of the market town, but two miles distant from the Cat-and-Fiddle. He had himself written his epitaph. It is a model of brief simplicity—enough to bring a blush into the cheek of many a stone-faced cherub. The epitaph has only one word: it is this: “Bam.”

The Captain died, but not his stories. No; there sat every night in the fireside corner of the Cat-and-Fiddle an ardent, passionate lover of the mind of Bam. He was a silent Pylades—a mute Pythias. He would sit and store himself with the syllables of Bam; then, like the bee, would he fly rejoicing home, and ere he slept hive the wisdom in enduring ink. That wisdom is now before us. The little vellum-bound book, its pages finely written as with the point of a needle, lies upon our desk. Upon the forehead of its title-page there are these words, “Cat-and-Fiddle Moralities”; touchingly recollectful of the genial haunt where their fine wisdom was audible.

There are—no, we will not tell the number of stories enshrined in this little book. But from time to time we will lay one before the reader, in what we believe to be the very words of Bam.

Yes: we will begin with the first. Here it is—the title beautifully engrossed, from which we guess the legal yearnings of the chronicler—here it is.

THE TALE OF A TIGER

Perhaps, my friends, you have never heard of a place called Singapore. Well, it’s no matter if you haven’t. It’s a long, long way east, where all sorts of shipping trade, and where all sorts of people live—Chinamen, Malays, Javanese, Bengalees, English, Dutch, and what not. Well, there was at Singapore a certain Dutch family in the pepper trade. They were named Vandervermin. They were all rich, cautious, heavy people; all save Jacob Vandervermin, who when a mere youth was left a poor orphan; left, as it might have seemed, on purpose to exercise the loving benevolence of prosperous uncles and aunts, and flourishing cousins. Alas! the whole body of the Vandervermins considered the poverty of Jacob as a blight—a family reproach; a nuisance that every one sought to put off upon the other. Jacob was the little toe of clay that disgraced the Vandervermin body of brass. And what made him worse, he was, for one with Dutch blood in his veins, a sprightly, frolicsome fellow. He was a beggar, and yet, with a stony hardness of heart—as Peter Vandervermin, the head of the family, declared—he would laugh and make offensive jokes upon his wretchedness. There are men who cannot understand a joke, simply because it is a thing that carries no worth with it in a ledger. Now Peter Vandervermin received a joke—especially the joke of a poor man—as an offence to his judgment and a sidelong sneer at his pocket. His wife, Drusilla Vandervermin, was of the same belief; and in this goodly creed man and wife had reared a numerous family. Jacob Vandervermin was the only outcast of the name who had ever disgraced it by a jest. It was plain he would come to no good; plain that he would die the death of a sinner. When one day his body was found mortally mangled by a tiger, not one of the Vandervermins was shocked or surprised. No: they had always said that something dreadful would happen to him, and it had come about. Jacob was buried—handsomely buried. Not one of the Vandervermins would have given him when alive the value of a coffin nail; but, being dead, the case was altered. The pride of the family was concerned in the funeral; hence, they respected themselves in their treatment of the deceased. Doubtless the ghost of a despised, ill-used relation is propitiated by a costly burial; and thus many a cousin or half-brother who has glided through life in a cobweb coat has superfine cloth upon his coffin.

I had this history of Jacob Vandervermin from a Chinaman. He repeated it to me with the eloquence and fervour of a believer. The Chinamen—at least the sort that live at Singapore—believe that when the tiger kills its first man, his ghost becomes its very slave; bound, ordered by fate to be a sort of jackal to the tiger; compelled by destiny to find the beast its dinners, even among his kith and kin. Hence, a tiger having carried off one of a family, not one of the survivors is from that moment safe. My Chinaman—he passed for a very learned fellow among his tribe—had the most intimate knowledge of the Vandervermin tragedy, which, after his own lofty fashion—painting his story as though he was painting his native porcelain—he related to me. I shall give it you in plain, cold English; for, my good friends all, be it known to you, I scorn the flourish of a traveller.