‘Yes,’ said the recruiting sergeant, ‘kauloes and lolloes; and all the lolloes have to do is to kick and cut down the kauloes, and take from them their rupees, which mean silver money. Why do you stare so?’
‘Why,’ said I, ‘this is the very language of Mr. Petulengro.’
‘Mr. Pet—?’
‘Yes,’ said I, ‘and Tawno Chikno.’
‘Tawno Chik—? I say, young fellow, I don’t like your way of speaking; no, nor your way of looking. You are mad, sir; you are mad; and what’s this? Why your hair is grey! You won’t do for the Honourable Company—they like red. I’m glad I didn’t give you the shilling. Good day to you.’
‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ said I, as I proceeded rapidly along a broad causeway, in the direction of the east, ‘if Mr. Petulengro and Tawno Chikno came originally from India. I think I’ll go there.’
APPENDIX [313]
CHAPTER I—A WORD FOR LAVENGRO
Lavengro is the history up to a certain period of one of rather a peculiar mind and system of nerves, with an exterior shy and cold, under which lurk much curiosity, especially with regard to what is wild and extraordinary, a considerable quantity of energy and industry, and an unconquerable love of independence. It narrates his earliest dreams and feelings, dwells with minuteness on the ways, words, and characters of his father, mother, and brother; lingers on the occasional resting-places of his wandering half military childhood; describes the gradual hardening of his bodily frame by robust exercises, his successive struggles, after his family and himself have settled down in a small local capital, to obtain knowledge of every kind, but more particularly philological lore; his visits to the tent of the Romany chal and the parlour of the Anglo-German philosopher; the effect produced upon his character by his flinging himself into contact with people all widely differing from each other, but all extraordinary; his reluctance to settle down to the ordinary pursuits of life; his struggles after moral truth; his glimpses of God and the obscuration of the Divine Being to his mind’s eye; and his being cast upon the
world of London, by the death of his father, at the age of nineteen. [314a] In the world within a world, the world of London, it shows him playing his part for some time as he best can in the capacity of a writer for reviews and magazines, and describes what he saw and underwent whilst labouring in that capacity; it represents him, however, as never forgetting that he is the son of a brave but poor gentleman, and that if he is a hack author, he is likewise a scholar. It shows him doing no dishonourable jobs, and proves that if he occasionally associates with low characters, he does so chiefly to gratify the curiosity of a scholar. In his conversations with the apple-woman of London Bridge the scholar is ever apparent, so, again, in his acquaintance with the man of the table, for the book is no raker up of the uncleanness of London; and if it gives what at first sight appears refuse, it invariably shows that a pearl of some kind, generally a philological one, is contained amongst it. It shows its hero always accompanied by his love of independence, scorning in the greatest poverty to receive favours from anybody, and describes him finally rescuing himself from peculiarly miserable circumstances by writing a book, an original book, within a week, even as Johnson is said to have written his ‘Rasselas,’ and Beckford his ‘Vathek,’ and tells how, leaving London, he betakes himself to the roads and fields.