Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1629 page)

(“My sentiments also!” adds her husband, parenthetically.)

“But we have something to show you in the lodge,” continues the portress.

(Hippolyte senior arches his eyebrows, and says “Aha!”)

“And when you feel better,” proceeds my cheerful little friend, “only have the politeness to come down to us, and you will see a marvelous sight!”

Hippolyte senior depresses his eyebrows, and says “Hush!”

“Enough,” replies the portress, understanding him; “let us retire.”

And they leave the room immediately, still arm in arm — the fondest and most mysterious married couple that I have ever set eyes on.

That day I do not feel quite strong enough to encounter great surprises; so my visit to the lodge is deferred until the next morning. Rather to my amazement, the portress does not pay me her usual visit at my waking on the eventful day. I descend to the lodge, wondering what this change means, and see three or four strangers assembled in the room, which is bed-chamber, parlor, and porter’s office all in one. The strangers, I find, are admiring friends; they surround Hippolyte senior, and all look one way with an expression of intense pleasure and surprise. My eyes follow the direction of theirs, and I see, above the shabby little lodge table, a resplendent new looking-glass in the brightest of frames. On either side of it rise two blush-coloured wax-tapers. Below it are three ornamental pots, with blooming rose-trees in them, backed by a fan-like screen of fair white paper. This is the surprise that was in store for me; and this is also the security in which the inhabitants of the lodge have invested their last hard-earned savings. The whole thing has the effect upon my mind of an amateur high altar; and I admire the new purchase accordingly with such serious energy of expression that Hippolyte senior, in the first sweetness of triumph, forgets the modesty proper to his position as proprietor of the new treasure, and apostrophizes his own property as Magnifique, with a power of voice and an energy of gesticulation which I have never noticed in him before. When his enthusiasm has abated, and just as I am on the point of asking where my friend the portress is, I hear a faint little voice speaking behind the group of admiring friends:

“Perhaps, messieurs et mesdames, you think this an extravagance for people in our situation,” says the voice, in feebly polite tones of apology; “but, alas! how could we resist it? It is so beautiful; it brightens the room so; it gives us such a noble appearance. And, then, it is also a property — something to leave to our children — in short, a pardonable extravagance. Aïe! I am shaking all over again; I can say no more!”

While these words are in course of utterance, the group of friends separate, and I see sitting behind them, close to the big stove, the little portress, looking sadly changed for the worse. Her tiny face has become very yellow; her bright brown eyes look disproportionately large; she has an old shawl twisted round her shoulders, and shivers in it perpetually. I ask what is the matter, imagining that the poor little woman has got a fit of the ague. The portress contrives to smile as usual before she answers, though her teeth are chattering audibly.

“You will not give me drugs, if I tell you?” she says.

“I will do nothing that is not perfectly agreeable to you,” I reply, evasively.

“My complaint is a violent indigestion (uneforte indigestion),” continues the portress, indicatively laying one trembling forefinger on the region of her malady. “And I am curing myself with a light tea.”

Here the forefinger changes its direction and points to a large white earthenware tea-pot, with an empty mug by the side of it. To save the portress the trouble of replenishing her drinking-vessel, I pour out a dose of the light tea. It is a liquid of a faint straw colour, totally unlike any English tea that ever was made; and it tastes as a quart of hot water might taste after a wisp of hay had been dipped into it. The portress swallows three mugfuls of her medicine in my presence, smiling and shivering, looking rapturously at the magnificent new mirror with its attendant flower-pots and tapers, and rejecting, with grimaces of comic disgust, all overtures of medical help on my part, even to the modest offering of one small pill. An hour or two later I descend to the lodge again to see how she is. She has been persuaded to go to bed; is receiving, in bed, a levée of friends; in answering, in the same interesting situation, the questions of all the visitors of the day relating to all the lodgers in the house; has begun a fresh potful of the light tea; is still smiling; still shivering; still contemptuously skeptical on the subject of drugs.

In the evening I go down again. The teapot is not done with yet, and the hay-flavour ed hot water is still pouring inexhaustibly into the system of the little portress. She happens now to be issuing directions relative to the keeping awake of Hippolyte senior, who, for this night at least, must watch by the gate-string. He is to have a pint of strong coffee and a pipe; he is to have the gas turned on very strong; and he is to be excited by the presence of a brisk and wakeful friend. The next morning, just as I am thinking of making inquiries at the lodge, who should enter my room but the dyspeptic patient herself, cured, and ready to digest anything but a doctor’s advice or a small pill? Hippolyte senior, I hear, has not fallen asleep over the gate-string for more than half an hour every now and then, and the portress has had a long night’s rest. She does not consider this unusual occurrence as reckoning in any degree among the agencies which have accomplished her rapid recovery. It is the light tea alone that has done it; and, if I still doubt the inestimable virtues of the hot hay water-cure, then, of all the prejudiced gentlemen the portress has ever heard of, I am the most deplorably obstinate in opening my arms to error and shutting my eyes to truth.

Such is the little domestic world about me, in some of the more vivid lights in which it presents itself to my own peculiar view.

As for the great Parisian world outside, my experience of it is bounded by the prospect I obtain of the Champs Elysées from my bedroom window. Fashionable Paris spins and prances by me every afternoon in all its glory; but what interest have healthy princes and counts and blood-horses, and blooming ladies, plunged in abysses of circumambiant crinoline, for me, in my sick situation? They all fly by me in one confused phantasmagoria of gay colours and rushing forms, which I look at with lazy eyes. The sights I watch with interest are those only which seem to refer in some degree to my own invalid position. My sick man’s involuntary egotism clings as close to me when I look outward at the great highway, as when I look inward at my own little room. Thus the only objects which I now notice attentively from my window are, oddly enough, chiefly those which I should have missed altogether, or looked at with indifference if I had occupied my bachelor apartment in the enviable character of a healthy man.

For example, out of the various vehicles which pass me by dozens in the morning, and by hundreds in the afternoon, only two succeed in making anything like a lasting impression on my mind. I have only vague ideas of dust, dashing, and magnificence in connection with the rapid carriages late in the day, and of bells and hollow yelping of carters’ voices in connection with the deliberate wagons early in the morning. But I have, on the other hand, a very distinct remembrance of one sober brown omnibus, belonging to a sanitary asylum, and of a queer little truck which carries baths and hot water to private houses, from a bathing establishment near me. The omnibus, as it passes my window at a solemn jog-trot, is full of patients getting their airing. I can see them dimly, and I fall into curious fancies about their various cases, and wonder what proportion of the afflicted passengers are near the time of emancipation from their sanitary prison on wheels. As for the little truck, with its empty zinc bath and barrel of warm water, I am probably wrong in sympathetically associating it as frequently as I do with cases of illness. It is doubtless often sent for by healthy people, too luxurious in their habits to walk abroad for a bath. But there must be a proportion of cases of illness to which the truck ministers; and when I see it going faster than usual, I assume that it must be wanted by some person in a fit, grow suddenly agitated by the idea, and watch the empty bath and the hot-water barrel with breathless interest until they rumble away together out of sight.

So, again, with regard to the men and women who pass my window by thousands every day; my view of them is just as curiously circumscribed as my view of the vehicles. Out of all the crowd, I now find, on taxing my memory, that I have noticed particularly just three people (a woman and two men) who have chanced to appeal to my invalid curiosity.

The woman is a nursemaid, neither young nor pretty, very clean and neat in her dress, with an awful bloodless paleness in her face, and a hopeless consumptive languor in her movements. She has only one child to take care of — a robust little girl of cruelly active habits. There is a stone bench opposite my window; and on this the wan and weakly nursemaid often sits, not bumping down on it with the heavy thump of honest exhaustion, but sinking on it listlessly, as if in changing from walking to sitting she were only passing from one form of weariness to another. The robust child remains mercifully near the feeble guardian for a few minutes — then becomes, on a sudden, pitilessly active again, laughs and dances from a distance, when the nurse makes weary signs to her, and runs away altogether when she is faintly entreated to be quiet for a few minutes longer. The nurse looks after her in despair for a moment, draws her neat black shawl, with a shiver, over her sharp shoulders, rises resignedly, and disappears from my eyes in pursuit of the pitiless child. I see this mournful little drama acted many times over, always in the same way, and wonder sadly how long the wan nursemaid will hold out. Not being a family man, and having nervously acute sympathies for sickness and suffering just now, it would afford me genuine satisfaction to see the oppressed nurse beat the tyrannical child; but she seems fond of the little despot; and besides, she is so weak that, if it came to blows, I am afraid, grown woman as she is, she might get the worst of it.

The men whom I observe are not such interesting cases, but they exhibit, in a minor degree, the peculiarities that are sure to attract my attention. The first of the two is a gentleman — lonely and rich, as I imagine. He is fat, yellow, and gloomy, and has evidently been ordered horse exercise for the benefit of his health. He rides a quiet English cob; never has any friend with him; never — so far as I can see — exchanges greetings with any other horseman; is never smiled at from a carriage, nor bowed to by a foot-passenger. He rides with his flaccid chin sunk on his fat breast; sits his horse as if his legs were stuffed, and his back boneless; always attracts me because he is the picture of dyspeptic wretchedness, and always passes me at the same mournful jog-trot pace. The second man is a police agent. I cannot sympathize with him, in consequence of his profession; but I can observe, with a certain lukewarm interest, that he is all but worked to death. He yawns and stretches himself in corners; sometimes drops furtively on to the stone bench before my window; then starts up from it suddenly, as if he felt himself falling asleep the moment he sat down. He has hollow places where other people have cheeks; and, judging by his walk, must be quite incapable of running after a prisoner who might take to flight. On the whole, he presents to my mind the curious spectacle of a languid man trying to adapt himself to a brisk business, and failing palpably in the effort. As the sick child of a thriving system, he attracts my attention. I devoutly hope that he will not return the compliment by honouring me with his notice.

Such are the few short steps that I take in advance to get a moderately close glance at French humanity. If my view is absurdly limited to my own dim horizon, this defect has at least one advantage for the reader: it prevents all danger of my troubling him with my ideas and observations at any great length. If other people value this virtue of brevity in writers, orators, and preachers as sincerely as I do, perhaps I may hope, on account of my short range of observation and my few words, to get another hearing, if I write the second chapter of my invalid experiences. I began the first half of them (as herein related) in France; and I am now completing the second (yet to be recorded) in England. When the curtain rises on my sick-bed again, the scene will be London.

CHAPTER THE SECOND. — MY LONDON LODGING.

I last had the honour of presenting myself to the reader’s notice in the character of an invalid laid up in lodgings at Paris. Let me now be permitted to reappear as an invalid laid up, for the time being, in a London cab. Let it be imagined that I have got through the journey from Paris, greatly to my own surprise and satisfaction, without breaking down by the way; that I have slept one night at a London hotel for the first time in my life; and that I am now helplessly adrift, looking out for furnished apartments as near as may be to my doctor’s place of abode.

The cab is fusty, the driver is sulky, the morning is foggy. A dry dog-kennel would be a pleasant refuge by comparison with the miserable vehicle in which I am now jolting my way over the cruel London stones. On our road to my doctor’s neighbourhood, we pass through Smeary Street — a locality well known to the inhabitants of Northern London. I feel that I can go no further. I remember that some friends of mine live not far off, and I recklessly emancipate myself from the torment of the cab by stopping the driver at the very first house in the windows of which I see a bill with the announcement that apartments are to let.