John Holdsworth, Chief Mate

by William Clark Russell

The old stage-coach, the Wellerian coachman, the spruce guard with his horn and his jokes, the fat people inside, the gruff people outside, all contributed a picturesque detail to the age they belonged to; but I have generally found that the more picturesque an object is, the fitter it is to be surveyed at a distance only.

If in the days to which the old stage-coach belonged it never rained, it was never cold, one was never in a hurry, there were no missions of life and death to make one curse the delay of a moment—if one’s companions were always good-tempered, and one’s body was so constituted as to endure jerks and jolts and a sitting posture for hours at a stretch without inconvenience—then the old stage-coach may be conceived to have been a very agreeable means of locomotion. But as I have been informed by several elderly gentlemen that the weather forty years ago was pretty much the same sort of weather that it now is, that strokes of death and strokes of business requiring immense despatch happened then as they happen every day; in a word, that in most atmospherical, moral, and civic respects the early years of this century differed but very little from these its maturer days, I can only repeat, in spite of the protests of several venerable friends who seem to find most things (even whilst enjoying them) objectionable which are not as aged as themselves, that if we have one excuse better than another for being on good terms with the times we live in, it is because the picturesque old stage-coach makes no condition of our daily existence.

Hanwitch was about fifty miles from London. To-day a traveller would be carried the distance in about an hour and three-quarters. Holdsworth, starting at half-past seven in the morning, would, providing that the coach did not break down or overturn, reach the town at about four o’clock in the afternoon.

He awoke at half-past six, and at once rose. The morning was a bright one, but all the efforts of the sunshine to squeeze itself through the wire blinds and dusty panes of the coffee-room windows could not avail to communicate the faintest spark of cheerfulness to the dingy apartment, with its bare tables and blue-coloured looking-glass over the chimney, and the old-fashioned prints around the walls, suggestive, one knew not why, of London milk and discoloured blankets.

The waiter came in, looking dejected, limp, and fluey, and perhaps to pay Holdsworth out for neglecting to leave word at the bar before going to bed, that he should want to breakfast at an unreasonable hour, declaimed a bill of fare, nearly every item of which, as Holdsworth named it, he declared could not possibly be got ready before half-past eight. Cold ham and tea must suffice, with which order the waiter sleepily withdrew, and after a long absence returned—when Holdsworth was on the point of starting up and leaving the house in the full belief that he should miss the coach—bearing a teapot of which the contents looked like rain-water, a loaf of bread as hard and slippery as glass under the knife, a lump of butter of the colour and perfume of soaked cheese, and a ham of which what was not bone was brine.

Very lightly breaking his fast with these things, Holdsworth called for his bill, and obtaining the services of the Boots to carry his portmanteau, which was all the baggage he had brought with him from Australia, walked to the house from which the Canterbury coach started.

It wanted but ten minutes of the starting-time, but no coach was visible. However, it was up the yard, and would be brought round in a few minutes, the book-keeper said. As these few minutes threatened to expand into half an hour, Holdsworth entered the bar of the “Canterbury Arms” to obtain a biscuit and some brandy-and-water, partly to complete the wretched breakfast he had made, and partly to exterminate the vile flavour of the tea that lingered in his mouth.

When he returned, the coach was out, the horses were in, several passengers were getting into, or climbing on top of, the vehicle; the coachman, muffled about the throat as though the month were November, and the air full of snow, stood on the pavement, smoking a cigar and surveying the whole picture with a lordly and commanding, though a somewhat inflamed eye; and the busy scene was completed by a body of boys and men offering newspapers, walking-sticks, knives, combs, and broad sheets of songs to the passengers, and striving to drown each other’s importunities with loud and ceaseless clamour.

Off went the coach at last, with Holdsworth by the coachman’s side. The wheels rattled over the hard roads, the houses in long lines swept by, lost by degrees their frowsy exteriors and dingy metropolitan aspects, and attempted little revelations of bucolic life in small gardens, with glimpses of trees in the rear. Then came houses standing alone in grounds of their own, cottages purely pastoral in appearance, with the noise of farmyards about them, and their atmosphere sweetened by the smell of hay and flowers. These dropped away, the breeze grew pure and elastic, the country opened in wide spaces of waving cornfields spotted with bright poppies, and swelling meadow lands and green fields shaded by groups of trees, with here and there a lark whistling in the blue sky, and all London lying behind, marking its mighty presence by a haze that seemed to stretch for miles and miles, and paled the heavens to the hue of its own complexion.

Holdsworth was such bad company that the coachman soon ceased his “observations” touching the different scenes through which they passed, and addressed himself to his companion on the right, a young gentleman who was going as far as Chatham, and who lighted several large cigars in less than half an hour, pulling at them with hollows in his cheeks, and looking at the ash of them, and preserving a very pale face. Holdsworth had something else to think about than the coachman’s refined and classical remarks, delivered from the depth of three shawls. The quick rolling of the coach over the smooth turnpike-road was inducing an exhilaration that acted upon him as good wine acts upon the brain, giving clearness and freedom to thought, and causing life to be felt at her most secret sources. There was the impression in his mind that he had once before travelled on the top of a stage-coach along this very road, though when, or under what circumstances, or whether he had actually performed the journey or had read of some one else having done it, he could not tell. The scenery they were travelling through was altogether delicious, and better than a cordial to a man who had just landed from a three and a half months’ voyage at sea. The aspect of the country was full of that sober sweetness of general effect which soothes the heart with a deep sense of home; of broad yellow tracts burnished by the sunshine, of the delicate shadowing of green, and the neutral tint of fallow soil; houses made as dainty by distance as pictures on ivory; great trees spreading their broad abundant leaves over cool spaces of gleaming water; with the animation, now and again, of human life, where men worked in the fields, or where children sported before the houses, stopping their frolics to cheer the coach, while women held babies high in their hands and swayed to the delighted plunging of the chubby limbs.