Second Day
There was a little more stir in the place the next morning, but it was because it was filled with tramps, who were wisely taking advantage of the early coolness and hurrying on their way. But when we turned off the High Street the town was as still in the glare of day as it had been in the late twilight. The high brick walls of the private gardens might have enclosed dwelling-places of the dead rather than of the living, for not a sound came over them. The little pointed houses might have been sepulchres for all the signs of life they gave. The whole town, instead of one little street, should be called Tranquil Place. It seemed very characteristic that the Cathedral should be closed, and this at the season when the tourist is abroad in the land. It was being cleaned, an old man told us. We looked through the iron railing of the door into the nave, and at the marble floor, and the tall, white, rounded arches. ‘It’s like looking down the throat of Old Time!’ Mr. Grewgious thought when he stood there. At the farther end by the chancel steps a charwoman was at work on bended knees. By her side was one small bucket. Here, truly, was a Liliputian set to do the work of Brobdignag. At that rate it is probable visitors were shut out for many months.
After we had looked at the ‘Bull,’ which still reminds the public by a sign of the good beds enjoyed by Mr. Pickwick and his friends, at the Town Hall where Pip was apprenticed, at the many-gabled, lattice-windowed house in which Rosa Bud bloomed into young ladyhood, and were standing in front of the ‘Six Poor Travellers’’ lodging-place, reading the inscription over the door, and wondering who were the proctors classed with rogues who could not rest within, a benevolent Englishman passing that way fell upon us. He was a worthy fellow-citizen of Richard Watts. Seeing we were strangers, he, without waiting to be asked, bestowed upon us the charity of information.
‘Do you know what a Proctor is, Sir?’ he asked, addressing himself to J., who meekly, as befits one receiving alms, said that he did not. ‘No! Well, then, I will tell you. It is a proc-u-ra-tor,—one who collects Peter’s pence for the Pope, Sir. Richard Watts lived in the sixteenth century, when Protestantism made people feel bitterly, Sir, and he would have no friends of the Pope beneath his roof. Proc-u-ra-tor! That’s what a Proctor is, Sir.’
He had disappeared around the curve of the street before we had finished thanking him. As the information was new to us, I, with the common belief that others must be as ignorant as myself, now imitate his benevolence, and here bestow it in alms upon whoever may be in need of it.
It was one o’clock when we mounted our tricycle and set out once more for Canterbury. The sky was still unclouded and the day warm, but a good breeze was blowing, and we were fresh for our ride. The streets of Chatham were as busy as those of Rochester were idle, and blocked with waggons, so that we had to fall in line and go at snail’s pace. Once, with a sudden halt, we were brought so near a horse just in front, that my foot knocked against his leg; but he bore the blow stoically, as if he were used to Chatham streets. An American circus was about to start out on its grand street parade, and children hung about corners and out of windows. At the foot of the hill outside the town, and marked ‘Dangerous’ by the National Cyclists’ Union, for the benefit of cyclers, two very small boys offered to ‘Push it up, Sir!’ but as it looked as if it would push them down, we declined. At the top we met a cycler on his way from Canterbury, and he gave us evil tidings of the road. It became worse with every mile, he said, and it was heavy and hilly, and the dust was enough to stifle one. To this last statement his appearance bore good testimony.
The Marshes.