Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1626 page)

Let us take a turn in the garden, at the back of the house. Dogs again. The yard is on one side of the garden. Every time our walk takes us near it, the shrill dog barks and the hoarse dog growls. The doctor tells me to have no anxieties. I am suffering devouring anxieties. These dogs may break loose and fly at us, for anything I know to the contrary, at a moment’s notice. What shall I do? Give myself a drop of tonic, or escape for a few hours from the perpetual noises of this retired spot by taking a drive? My wife says, take a drive. I think I have already mentioned that I invariably agree with my wife.

The drive is successful in procuring us a little quiet. My directions to the coachman are to take us where he pleases, so long as he keeps away from secluded villages. We suffer much jolting in by-lanes, and encounter a great variety of bad smells. But a bad smell is a noiseless nuisance, and I am ready to put up with it patiently. Toward dinner-time we return to our inn. Meat, vegetables, pudding, all excellent, clean, and perfectly cooked. As good a dinner as I wish ever to eat; shall I get a little nap after it? The fowls, the dogs, the hammer, the children, the wagons, are quiet at last. Is there anything else left to make a noise? Yes: there is the working population of the place.

It is getting on toward evening, and the sons of labour are assembling on the benches placed outside the inn to drink. What a delightful scene they would make of this homely every-day event on the stage! How the simple creatures would clink their tin mugs, and drink each other’s healths and laugh joyously in chorus! How the peasant maidens would come tripping on the scene and lure the men tenderly to the dance! Where are the pipe and tabor that I have seen in so many pictures; where the simple songs that I have read about in so many poems? What do I hear as I listen, prone on the sofa, to the evening gathering of the rustic throng? Oaths — nothing, on my word of honour, but oaths! I look out, and see gangs of cadaverous savages, drinking gloomily from brown mugs, and swearing at each other every time they open their lips. Never in any large town, at home or abroad, have I been exposed to such an incessant fire of unprintable words as now assail my ears in this primitive village. No man can drink to another without swearing at him first. No man can ask a question without adding a mark of interrogation at the end in the shape of an oath. Whether they quarrel (which they do for the most part), or whether they agree; whether they talk of their troubles in this place or their good luck in that; whether they are telling a story, or proposing a toast, or giving an order, or finding fault with the beer, these men seem to be positively incapable of speaking without an allowance of at least five foul words for every one fair word that issues from their lips. English is reduced in their mouths to a brief vocabulary of all the vilest expressions in the language. This is an age of civilisation; this is a Christian country; opposite me I see a building with a spire, which is called, I believe, a church; past my window, not an hour since, there rattled a neat pony-chaise with a gentleman inside, clad in glossy black broadcloth, and popularly known by the style and title of clergyman. And yet, under all these good influences, here sit twenty or thirty men whose ordinary table-talk is so outrageously beastly and blasphemous that not one single sentence of it, though it lasted the whole evening, could be printed, as a specimen, for public inspection in these pages. When the intelligent foreigner comes to England, and when I tell him (as I am sure to do) that we are the most moral people in the universe, I will take good care that he does not set his foot in a secluded British village when the rural population is reposing over its mug of small beer after the labours of the day.

I am not a squeamish person, neither is my wife; but the social intercourse of the villagers drives us out of our room, and sends us to take refuge at the back of the house. Do we gain anything by the change? Nothing whatever.

The back parlor, to which we have now retreated, looks out on a bowling-green; and there are more benches, more mugs of beer, more foul-mouthed villagers on the bowling-green. Immediately under our window is a bench and table for two, and on it are seated a drunken old man and a drunken old woman. The aged sot in trousers is offering marriage to the aged sot in petticoats, with frightful oaths of endearment. Never before did I imagine that swearing could be twisted to the purposes of courtship. Never before did I suppose that a man could make an offer of his hand by bellowing imprecations on his eyes, or that all the powers of the infernal regions could be appropriately summoned to bear witness to the beating of a lover’s heart under the influence of the tender passion. I know it now, and I derive so little satisfaction from gaining the knowledge of it, that I determine on having the two intolerable old drunkards removed from the window, and sent to continue their cursing courtship elsewhere. The hostler is lounging about the bowling-green, scratching his bare, brawny arms, and yawning grimly in the mellow evening sunlight. I beckon to him, and ask him if he does not think those two old people have had beer enough? Yes, the hostler thinks they have. I inquire next if they can be removed from the premises, before their language gets worse, without the risk of making any great disturbance. The hostler says, Yes, they can, and calls to the pot-boy. When the pot-boy, comes, he says, “Now then, Jack!” and snatches the table away from the two ribald old people without another word. The old man’s pipe is on the table; he rises and staggers forward to possess himself of it; the old woman rises, too, to hold him by the arm for fear he should fall flat on his face. The moment they are off the bench, the pot-boy snatches their seat away from behind them, and quietly joins the hostler, who is carrying their table into the inn. None of the other drinkers laugh at this proceeding, or pay any attention to it; and the two intoxicated old people, left helpless on their legs, stagger away feebly without attracting the slightest notice. The neat stratagem which the hostler and the pot-boy have just performed, is evidently the customary and only possible mode of letting drinkers know when they have had enough at the Nag’s Head. Where did those savage islanders live whose manners a certain sea-captain once upon a time described as no manners at all, and some of whose customs he reprobated as being very nasty? If I did not know that we are many miles distant from the coast, I should be almost disposed to suspect that the seafaring traveler whose opinion I have just quoted had been touching at the Nag’s Head.

As it is impossible to snatch away all the tables and all the benches of all the company drinking and swearing in front of the house and behind it, I inquire of the hostler, the next time he comes near the window, at what time the tap closes? He tells me at eleven o’clock. It is hardly necessary to say that we put off going to bed until that time, when we retire for the night, drenched from head to foot, if I may so speak, in floods of bad language.

I cautiously put my head out of window, and see that the lights of the tap-room are really extinguished at the appointed time. I hear the drinkers oozing out grossly into the pure freshness of the summer night. They all growl together; they all go together. All? Sinner and sufferer that I am, I have been premature in arriving at that happy conclusion! Six choice spirits, with a social horror in their souls of going home to bed, prop themselves against the wall of the inn, and continue the evening’s conversazione in the darkness. I hear them cursing at each other by name. We have Tom, Dick, and Sam, Jem, Bill, and Bob to enliven us under our window after we are in bed. They begin improving each other’s minds, as a matter of course, by quarreling. Music follows and soothes the strife, in the shape of a local duet, sung by voices of vast compass, which soar in one note from howling bass to cracked treble. Yawning follows the duet; long, loud, weary yawning of all the company in chorus. This amusement over, Tom asks Dick for “baccer,” and Dick denies that he has got any, and Tom tells him he lies, and Sam strikes in and says, “No, he doan’t,” and Jem tells Sam he lies, and Bill tells him that if he was Sam he would punch Jem’s head; and Bob, apparently snuffing the battle from afar off, and not liking the scent of it, shouts suddenly a pacific good-night in the distance. The farewell salutation seems to quiet the gathering storm. They all roar responsive to the good-night roar of Bob. A moment of silence, actually a moment, follows; then a repetition of the long, loud, weary yawning in chorus; then another moment of silence; then Jem suddenly shouts to the retiring Bob to come back; Bob refuses, softened by distance; Jem insists, and his four friends join him; Bob relents, and returns. A shriek of indignation, far down the village; Bob’s wife has her window open, and has heard him consent to go back to his friends. Hearty laughter from Bob’s five friends; screams from Bob’s wife — articulate screams, informing Bob that she will “cut his liver out,” if he does not come home directly. Answering curses from Bob; he will “mash” his wife, if she does not hold her tongue. A song in chorus from Bob’s five friends. Outraged by this time past all endurance, I spring out of bed and seize the water-jug. My wife, having the doctor’s directions ever present to her mind, implores me in heart-rending tones to remember that I am under strict medical orders not to excite myself. I pay no heed to her remonstrances, and advance to the window with the jug. I pause before I empty the water on the heads of the assembly beneath; I pause, and hear — oh! most melodious, most welcome of sounds — the sudden fall of rain! The merciful sky has anticipated me; the “clerk of the weather” has been struck by my idea of dispersing the Nag’s Head Night Club by water. By the time I have put down the jug and got back to bed, silence — the primeval silence, the first, the foremost of all earthly influences — falls sweetly over our tavern at last.

That night, before sinking wearily to rest, I have once more the satisfaction of agreeing with my wife. Dear and admirable woman! she proposes to leave this secluded village the first thing to-morrow morning. Never did I share her opinion more cordially than I share it now. Instead of keeping myself composed, I have been living in a region of perpetual disturbance; and, as for doing nothing, my mind has been so agitated and perturbed that I have not even had time to think about it. “We will go, love — as you so sensibly suggest — we will go the first thing in the morning to any place you like, so long as it is large enough to swallow up small sounds. Where, over all the surface of this noisy earth, the blessing of tranquillity may be found, I know not; but this I do know: a secluded English village is the very last place toward which any man should think of turning his steps, if the main object of his walk through life is to discover quiet.

NOTE THE SECOND. DISCOVERY OF — NOTHING.

The next morning we continue our journey in the direction of the coast, and arrive at a large watering-place.

Observing that it is, in every respect, as unlike the secluded village as possible, we resolve to take up our abode in this populous and perfectly tranquil town. We get a lodging fronting the sea. There are noises about us — various and loud noises, as I should have thought, if I had not just come from a village; but everything is comparative, and, after the past experience I have gone through, I find our new place of abode quiet enough to suit the moderate expectations which I have now learned to form on the subject of getting peace in this world. Here I can at least think almost uninterruptedly of the doctor’s orders. Here I may surely begin my new life, and enjoy the luxury of doing nothing. I suppose it is a luxury; and yet so perverse is man, I hardly know whether I am not beginning to find it something more like a hardship at the very outset. Perhaps my busy and active life has unfitted me for a due appreciation of the happiness of being idle. Perhaps I am naturally of a restless, feverish constitution. However that may be, it is certain that on the first day when I seriously determine to do nothing, I fail to find in the execution of my resolution such supreme comfort as I had anticipated. I try hard to fight against the conviction (which will steal on me, nevertheless) that I have only changed one kind of hard work for another that is harder. I try to persuade myself that time does not hang at all heavily on my hands, and that I am happier with nothing to do than ever I was with a long day’s work before me. Do I succeed or do I fail in this meritorious attempt? Let me write down the results of my first day’s experience of the art of doing nothing, and let the reader settle the question for me.

Breakfast at nine o’clock, so as not to make too long a day of it. Among the other things on the table are shrimps. I find myself liking shrimps for an entirely new reason — they take such a long time to eat. Well, breakfast is over at last: I have had quite enough, and yet I am gluttonously sorry when the table is cleared. If I were in health I should now go to my desk, or take up a book. But I am out of health, and I must do nothing. Suppose I look out of window? I hope that is idle enough to begin with.

The sea — yes, yes, the sea! Very large, very gray, very calm; very calm, very gray, very large. Anything else about the sea? Nothing else about the sea.

Yes — ships. One big ship in front, two little ships behind. (What time shall we have dinner, my dear? At five? Certainly at five!) One big ship in front, two little ships behind. Nothing more to see. Nothing.

Let me look back into the room, and study the subjects of these prints on the walls. First print: Death of the Earl of Chatham in the House of Lords, after Copley, R. A. Just so. Curious idea this picture suggests of the uniformity of personal appearance which must have distinguished the Peers in the last century. Here is a house full of noble lords, and each one of them is exactly like the other. Every noble lord is tall, every noble lord is portly, every noble lord has a long, receding forehead, and a majestic Roman nose. Odd; and leading to reflections on the physical changes that must have passed over the peerage of the present day, in which I might respectfully indulge, if the doctor had not ordered me to abstain from thinking.