General Bounce; Or, The Lady and the Locusts

by G. J. Whyte-Melville

“Will your honesty put decent clothes on your back, missus?” rejoined Tom, who did not see that the article in question was by any means so indispensable; “will your honesty put a joint down before the fire, such as we used to sit down to every day, when we was first man and wife, and lived respectable? Will your honesty furnish a bellyful for this poor little beggar, that’s whining now on my knee for a bit to eat?” Gingham began to relent at this consideration, and Tom pursued his advantage: “Besides, it’s not as if it was to do anybody any harm; there’s Miss Blanche got more than she knows what to do with, and the young gentleman—he’s away at the wars. Honesty, indeed! if honesty’s the game, you’ve a right to your share, what Mrs. Kettering intended you should have. I think I ought to know the law; and the law’s on our side, and the justice too. Ah! Rachel, you used not to be so difficult to come round once,” concluded Tom, trying the tender tack, when he had exhausted all his other arguments; and recalling to his wife’s mind, as he intended it should do, their early days of courtship, and the carriage of a certain brown-paper parcel by the sea-shore.

But Gingham felt she had right on her side; and when we can indulge the spirit of contradiction never dormant in our natures, and fight under the banner of truth at the same time, it is too great a luxury for mortal man, or especially mortal woman, to forego, so Gingham was game to the last. “No, Tom, no!” she said, steadily and with emphasis, “I won’t do it, so don’t ask me, and there’s an end of it!”

Her husband put the child down in disgust, banged his hat upon his head, as if to go back to “The Feathers,” and was leaving the room, when a fresh idea struck him. If he could but break down his wife’s self-respect he might afterwards mould her more easily to his purpose, and the course he proposed to adopt might, at any rate, furnish him in the meantime with a little money for his dissipation; so he turned round coaxingly to poor Gingham, and asked for his bit of dinner, and put the infant once more upon his knee, ere he began to sound her on the propriety of applying for a little assistance to her darling Miss Blanche. “You ought to go and see your young lady, Rachel,” said he, quite good-humouredly, and with the old keeping-company-days’ smile; “it’s only proper respect, now she’s grown to be a great lady, and come to London. I’ll mind the child at home; it likes to be left with its daddy—a deary—and you brush yourself up a bit, and put on your Sunday gown there, and take a bit of a holiday; you needn’t hurry back, you know, if they ask you to stay tea in the room, and I’ll be here till you come home; or if I’m not, I’ll get one of the neighbours to look in. So now go, there’s a good wench.”

Mrs. Blacke had not heard such endearing language since the sea-side walks at St. Swithin’s—she felt almost happy again, and nearly forgot the “three-and-eightpence” wanting for the week’s account. Sundry feminine misgivings had she, as to her personal appearance being sufficiently fine to face the new servants, in the exalted character of Miss Blanche’s late lady’s-maid; but women, even ugly ones, have a wonderful knack of adorning themselves on very insufficient materials, and Tom assured her the black silk looked as good as new, and that bonnet always did become her, and always would—so she gave the child a parting kiss, and her husband many injunctions to take care of the treasure, and started in wonderfully good spirits; Tom’s last injunction to her as she departed being to this effect—“If Miss Blanche should ask you how we’re getting on, Rachel, you put your pride in your pocket—mind that—put your pride in your pocket, do you understand?” So the drunkard was left alone with his child.

We have already said Tom was fond of the little thing—in fact, it was the only being on earth that had found its way to his heart. Man must love something, and Tom Blacke, the attorney’s clerk, who had married for money as if he had been a ruined peer of the realm, cared just as little for his wife as any impoverished nobleman might for the peeress with whom his income was necessarily encumbered; but the more indifferent he was to the mother, the fonder he was of the child; and with all his liking for skittles and vulgar dissipation (the whist and claret of higher circles), he thought it no hardship to spend the rest of the afternoon with an infant that was just beginning to talk. He fully intended, as he had promised, to remain at home till his wife returned, but a drunkard can have no will of his own. When a man gives himself up to strong drink he chooses a mistress who will take no denial, for whom appetite grows too fiercely by what it feeds on, whose beck and call he must be ever ready to obey, for she will punish his neglect by the infliction of such horrors as we may fancy pictured in the imagination of the doomed—till he fly for relief back to the enchantress that has maddened him; and whilst the poison begets thirst as the thirst craves for the poison, the liquid fire poured upon the smouldering flame eats, and saps, and scorches, till it expires in drivelling idiocy, or blazes out in raving, riotous madness. Mr. Blacke was tolerably cheerful up to a certain point, when he arrived at that state which we once heard graphically described by the sergeant of a barrack-guard, on whom the duty had devolved of placing an inebriated warrior in solitary confinement—“Was he drunk, sergeant?” said the orderly officer. “No, sir.” “Was he sober, then?” “No, sir.” “How? neither drunk nor sober! what d’ye mean?” “Well, sir, the man had been drinking, no doubt, but the liquor was just dying out in him.”

So with Tom Blacke—after an hour or so the liquor began to die out in him, and then came the ghastly reaction. First he thought the room was gloomy and solitary, and he got nearer the child’s cradle for company—the little thing was again asleep, and he adjusted its coverlet more comfortably—ah! that slimy, crawling creature! what is it? so near the infant’s head—he brushed it away with his hand, but swarms of the same loathsome insects came climbing over the cradle, chairs, and furniture. Now they settled on his legs and clothes, and he beat them down and flung them from him by hundreds, shuddering with horror the while; then he looked into the corners of the room, and put his hands before his eyes after each startled glance, for hideous faces grinned and gibbered at him, starting out from the very walls, and mopping and mowing, shifted their forms and places, so that it was impossible to identify them. He could have borne these, but worse still, there was a Shape in the room with him, of whose presence he was fearfully conscious, though whenever he manned himself to look steadily at it, it was gone. He could not bear to have this visitant behind him, so he backed his chair hard against the wall. In vain—still on the side from which he turned his head the grim Shape sat and cowered and blinked at him. He knew it—he felt it—mortal nerves could bear it no longer. He grew desperate, as a man does in a dream. Should he take the child and run for it? No! he would meet It on the narrow stairs, and he could not get by there. Ha! the window! bounding into the air, child and all, he might escape. He was mad now—he was capable of anything. Come along, little one!—they are blocking up the room—they cover the room in myriads—the Shape is waving them on—light and freedom without, the devil and all his legions within—Hurrah!

Fortunate was it for the hope of the Blacke family that Mrs. Crimp was at this instant returning to her lodgings above, accompanied by several promising young Crimps, with whom, as she toiled up the common staircase, she kept up a running fire of objurgation and entreaty. The homely sounds, the familiar voices, brought Tom Blacke to himself. The vicinity of such a material dame as Mrs. Crimp was sufficient to destroy the ideal in the most brandy-sodden brain, and the horrors left their victim for the time. But he dared not remain to encounter a second attack. He could not answer for the consequences of another hour in that room alone with the child; so he asked his neighbour, a kind, motherly woman, and as fond of a baby as if she had not nursed a dozen of her own, to keep an eye upon his little one, and betook himself straight to “The Feathers,” to raise the accursed remedy to his lips with a trembling hand, and borrow half-an-hour’s callousness at a frightful sacrifice. Tom thought he knew what was good for his complaint, and “clung to the hand that smote him” with the confirmed infatuation of a sot. So we leave him at the bar, with a glazed eye, a haggard smile, and the worm that never dies eating into his very vitals.

In the meantime, Gingham, with the dingy bonnet somewhat cocked up behind, and her bony fingers peeping through the worn thread gloves, is making her way along the sunny pavement in the direction of Grosvenor Square. The old black silk gown looks worse than she expected in that searching light, and she feels nervous and shy at revisiting her former haunts; nor does she like leaving home for many hours at a time. But as she walks on, the exercise does her good. The moving objects on all sides, and the gaudy bustle of London in the height of the season, have an exhilarating effect on her spirits. It is so seldom she has an outing; moped up for days together in that mews, the very change is enjoyment; and the shops, with their cheap dresses and seductive ribbons, are perfect palaces of delight. She cannot tear herself from one window, where an excellent silk for her own wear, and a frock “fit to dress an angel,” as she thinks, for baby, are to be sold, in tempting juxtaposition, respectively for a mere nothing. If she was sure the colour of the silk would stand, she would try and scrape the money together to buy it; but a pang shoots through her as she recalls the fatal “three-and-eightpence,” so she walks on with a heavy sigh, and though she knows she never can possess it, yet she feels all the better for having seen such a dress as that.

And these, and such as these, are the pleasures of the poor in our great metropolis. Continual self-denial, continual self-restraint, continual self-abasement—like Tantalus, to be whelmed in the waters of enjoyment which must never touch the lip. In the country the poor man can at least revel in its freshest and purest delights. We have been told that “the meek shall inherit the earth”; and the day-labourer, mending “my lord’s” park fence, has often far more enjoyment in that wilderness of beauty than its high-born proprietor. While the latter is in bed, the former breathes the sweet morning air and the scent of a thousand wild flowers, whose fragrance will be scorched up ere noon. The glad song of birds makes music to his ear—the whole landscape, smiling in the sunlight, is spread out for the delight of his eye. Not only the park, and the waving woods, and the placid lake, are his property for the time, but the cheerful homesteads, and the scattered herds, and the hazy distance stretching away as far as those blue hills that melt into the sky. He can admire the shadow of each giant elm without disturbing himself as to which of them must be marked for the axe; he can watch the bounding deer without caring which is the fattest to furnish a haunch for solemn dinners and political entertainments, where people eat because they are weary, and drink because they are dull. The distant view he looks upon is to him a breathing, sparkling world, full of light and life and hope—not a mere county, subdivided into votes and freeholds, and support and interest. His frame is attempered by toil to the enjoyment of natural pleasures and natural beauties. The wild breeze fans his brow—the daisies spring beneath his feet—the glorious summer sky is spread above—and the presence of his Maker pervades the atmosphere about him. For the time the man is happy—happier, perhaps, than he is himself aware of. To be sure he is mortal, and in the midst of all he sighs for beer; yet is his lot one not unmixed with many pure and thrilling pleasures; and if he can only get plenty of work, there are many states of existence far worse than that of an English field-labourer.

Not so with the sons of toil in town—there, all enjoyment is artificial, all pleasure must be paid for—the air they breathe will support life, but its odours are far different from those of the wild flower. If their eyes are ever gladdened by beauty, it is but the pomp and splendour of their fellow-creatures, on which they gaze with sneering admiration—half envy, half contempt. If their ears are ever ravished by music, there is a tempting demon wafting sin into their hearts upon the sounds—there is a mocking voice of ribaldry and vulgar revelry accompanying the very concord of heaven. What pleasure can they have but those of the senses? Where have they to go for relaxation but to the gin-shop? What inducement have they to raise themselves above the level of “the beasts which perish”?