Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

by John Wilson

DR KITCHINER.

FOURTH COURSE.

Pray, reader, do you know what line of conduct you ought to pursue if you are to sleep on the road? "The earlier you arrive," says the Doctor, "and the earlier after your arrival you apply, the better the chance of getting a good bed—this done, order your luggage to your room. A travelling-bag, or a 'sac de nuit,' in addition to your trunk, is very necessary; it should be large enough to contain one or two changes of linen—a night-shirt—shaving apparatus—comb, clothes, tooth and hair brushes, &c. Take care, too, to see your sheets well aired, and that you can fasten your room at night. Carry firearms also, and take the first unostentatious opportunity of showing your pistols to the landlord. However well-made your pistols, however carefully you have chosen your flint, and however dry your powder, look to the priming and touch-hole every night. Let your pistols be double-barrelled, and with spring bayonets."

Now, really, it appears to us, that in lieu of double-barrelled pistols with spring bayonets, it would be advisable to substitute a brace of black-puddings for daylight, and a brace of Oxford or Bologna sausages for the dark hours. They will be equally formidable to the robber, and far safer to yourself. Indeed we should like to see duelling black-puddings, or sausages, introduced at Chalk-Farm;—and, that etiquette might not be violated, each party might take his antagonist's weapon, and the seconds, as usual, see them loaded. Surgeons will have to attend as usual. Far more blood, indeed, would be thus spilt, than according to the present fashion.

The Doctor, as might be expected, makes a mighty rout—a prodigious fuss—all through the Oracle, about damp sheets; he must immediately see the chambermaid, and overlook the airing with his own hands and eyes. He is also an advocate of the warming-pan—and for the adoption, indeed, of every imaginable scheme for excluding death from his chamber. He goes on the basis of everything being as it should not be in inns—and often reminds us of our old friend Death-in-the-Pot. Nay, as Travellers never can be sure that those who have slept in the beds before them were not afflicted with some contagious disease, whenever they can they should carry their own sheets with them—namely, a "light eider-down quilt, and two dressed hart-skins, to be put on the mattresses, to hinder the disagreeable contact. These are to be covered with the traveller's own sheets—and if an eider-down quilt be not sufficient to keep him warm, his coat put upon it will increase the heat sufficiently. If the traveller is not provided with these accommodations, it will sometimes be prudent not to undress entirely; however, the neckcloth, gaiters, shirt, and everything which checks the circulation, must be loosened."

Clean sheets, the Doctor thinks, are rare in inns; and he believes that it is the practice to "take them from the bed, sprinkle them with water, fold them down, and put them into a press. When they are wanted again, they are, literally speaking, shown to the fire, and, in a reeking state, laid on the bed. The traveller is tired and sleepy, dreams of that pleasure or business which brought him from home, and the remotest thing from his mind is, that from the very repose which he fancies has refreshed him, he has received the rheumatism. The receipt, therefore, to sleep comfortably at inns, is to take your own sheets, to have plenty of flannel gowns, and to promise, and take care to pay, a handsome consideration for the liberty of choosing your bed."

Now, Doctor, suppose all travellers behaved at inns on such principles, what a perpetual commotion there would be in the house! The kitchens, back-kitchens, laundries, drying-rooms, would at all times be crammed choke-full of a miscellaneous rabble of Editors, Authors, Lords, Baronets, Squires, Doctors of Divinity, Fellows of Colleges, Half-pay Officers, and Bagmen, oppressing the chambermaids to death, and in the headlong gratification of their passion for well-aired sheets, setting fire so incessantly to public premises as to raise the rate of insurance to a ruinous height, and thus bring bankruptcy on all the principal establishments in Great Britain. But shutting our eyes, for a moment, to such general conflagration and bankruptcy, and indulging ourselves in the violent supposition that some inns might still continue to exist, think, O think, worthy Doctor, to what other fatal results this system, if universally acted upon, would, in a very few years of the transitory life of man, inevitably lead! In the first place, in a country where all travellers carried with them their own sheets, none would be kept in inns except for the use of the establishment's own members. This would be inflicting a vital blow, indeed, on the inns of a country. For mark, in the second place, that the blankets would not be long of following the sheets. The blankets would soon fly after the sheets on the wings of love and despair. Thirdly, are you so ignorant, Doctor, of this world and its ways, as not to see that the bed-steads would, in the twinkling of an eye, follow the blankets? What a wild, desolate, wintry appearance would a bedroom then exhibit!

The foresight of such consequences as these may well make a man shudder. We have no objections, however, to suffer the Doctor himself, and a few other occasional damp-dreading old quizzes, "to see the bed-clothes put to the fire in their presence," merely at the expense of subjugating themselves to the derision of all the chambermaids, cooks, scullions, boots, ostlers, and painters. (The painter is the artist who is employed in inns, to paint the buttered toast. He always works in oils. As the Director-General would say—he deals in buttery touches.) Their feverish and restless anxiety about sheets, and their agitated discourse on damps and deaths, hold them up to vulgar eyes in the light of lunatics. They become the groundwork of practical jokes—perhaps are bitten to death by fleas; for a chambermaid, of a disposition naturally witty and cruel, has a dangerous power put into her hands, in the charge of blankets. The Doctor's whole soul and body are wrapt up in well-aired sheets; but the insidious Abigail, tormented by his flustering, becomes in turn the tormentor—and selecting the yellowest, dingiest, and dirtiest pair of blankets to be found throughout the whole gallery of garrets (those for years past used by long-bearded old-clothesmen Jews), with a wicked leer that would lull all suspicion asleep in a man of a far less inflammable temperament, she literally envelopes him in vermin, and after a night of one of the plagues of Egypt, the Doctor rises in the morning, from top to bottom absolutely tattooed!

The Doctor, of course, is one of those travellers who believe that unless they use the most ingenious precautions, they will be uniformly robbed and murdered in inns. The villains steal upon you during the midnight hour, when all the world is asleep. They leave their shoes down stairs, and leopard-like, ascend with velvet, or—what is almost as noiseless—worsted steps, the wooden stairs. True, that your breeches are beneath your bolster—but that trick of travellers has long been "as notorious as the sun at noonday;" and although you are aware of your breeches, with all the ready money perhaps that you are worth in this world, eloping from beneath your parental eye, you in vain try to cry out—for a long, broad, iron hand, with ever so many iron fingers, is on your mouth; another, with still more numerous digits, compresses your windpipe, while a low hoarse voice, in a whisper to which Sarah Siddons's was empty air, on pain of instant death enforces silence from a man unable for his life to utter a single word; and after pulling off all the bed-clothes, and then clothing you with curses, the ruffians, whose accent betrays them to be Irishmen, inflict upon you divers wanton wounds with a blunt instrument, probably a crow-bar—swearing by Satan and all his saints, that if you stir an inch of your body before daybreak, they will instantly return, cut your throat, knock out your brains, sack you, and carry you off for sale to a surgeon: Therefore you must use pocket door-bolts, which are applicable to almost all sorts of doors, and on many occasions save the property and life of the traveller. The corkscrew door-fastening the Doctor recommends as the simplest. This is screwed in between the door and the door-post, and unites them so firmly, that great power is required to force a door so fastened. They are as portable as common cork-screws, and their weight does not exceed an ounce and a half. The safety of your bedroom should always be carefully examined; and in case of bolts not being at hand, it will be useful to hinder entrance into the room by putting a table and chair upon it against the door. Take a peep below the bed, and into the closets, and every place where concealment is possible—of course, although the Doctor forgets to suggest it, into the chimney. A friend of the Doctor's used to place a bureau against the door, and "thereon he set a basin and ewer in such a position as easily to rattle, so that, on being shook, they instantly became molto agitato." Upon one alarming occasion this device frightened away one of the chambermaids, or some other Paulina Pry, who attempted to steal on the virgin sleep of the travelling Joseph, who all the time was hiding his head beneath the bolster. Joseph, however, believed that it was a horrible midnight assassin, with mustaches and a dagger. "The chattering of the crockery gave the alarm, and the attempt, after many attempts, was abandoned."

With all these fearful apprehensions—in his mind, Dr Kitchiner must have been a man of great natural personal courage and intrepidity, to have slept even once in his whole lifetime from home. What dangers must we have passed, who used to plump in, without a thought of damp in the bed, or scamp below it—closet and chimney uninspected, door unbolted and unscrewed, exposed to rape, robbery, and murder! It is mortifying to think that we should be alive at this day. Nobody, male or female, thought it worth their while to rob, ravish, or murder us! There we lay, forgotten by the whole world—till the crowing of cocks, or the ringing of bells, or blundering Boots insisting on it that we were a Manchester Bagman, who had taken an inside in the Heavy at five, broke our repose, and Sol laughing in at the unshuttered and uncurtained window showed us the floor of our dormitory, not streaming with a gore of blood. We really know not whether to be most proud of having been the favourite child of Fortune, or the neglected brat of Fate. One only precaution did we ever use to take against assassination, and all the other ills that flesh is heir to, sleep where one may, and that was to say inwardly a short fervent prayer, humbly thanking our Maker for all the happiness—let us trust it was innocent—of the day; and humbly imploring his blessing on all the hopes of to-morrow. For, at the time we speak of, we were young—and every morning, whatever the atmosphere might be, rose bright and beautiful with hopes that, far as the eyes of the soul could reach, glittered on earth's, and heaven's, and life's horizon!