Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1799 page)

Mr. Goodchild, who had only wanted encouragement to disclose the real state of his feelings, and who had been pining beneath his weary secret, now burst into tears, and confessed that he thought another day in the place would be the death of him.

So, the two idle apprentices followed the donkey until the night was far advanced.  Whether he was recaptured by the town-council, or is bolting at this hour through the United Kingdom, they know not.  They hope he may be still bolting; if so, their best wishes are with him.

It entered Mr. Idle’s head, on the borders of Cumberland, that there could be no idler place to stay at, except by snatches of a few minutes each, than a railway station.  ‘An intermediate station on a line — a junction — anything of that sort,’ Thomas suggested.  Mr. Goodchild approved of the idea as eccentric, and they journeyed on and on, until they came to such a station where there was an Inn.

‘Here,’ said Thomas, ‘we may be luxuriously lazy; other people will travel for us, as it were, and we shall laugh at their folly.’

It was a Junction-Station, where the wooden razors before mentioned shaved the air very often, and where the sharp electric-telegraph bell was in a very restless condition.  All manner of cross-lines of rails came zig-zagging into it, like a Congress of iron vipers; and, a little way out of it, a pointsman in an elevated signal-box was constantly going through the motions of drawing immense quantities of beer at a public-house bar.  In one direction, confused perspectives of embankments and arches were to be seen from the platform; in the other, the rails soon disentangled themselves into two tracks and shot away under a bridge, and curved round a corner.  Sidings were there, in which empty luggage-vans and cattle-boxes often butted against each other as if they couldn’t agree; and warehouses were there, in which great quantities of goods seemed to have taken the veil (of the consistency of tarpaulin), and to have retired from the world without any hope of getting back to it.  Refreshment-rooms were there; one, for the hungry and thirsty Iron Locomotives where their coke and water were ready, and of good quality, for they were dangerous to play tricks with; the other, for the hungry and thirsty human Locomotives, who might take what they could get, and whose chief consolation was provided in the form of three terrific urns or vases of white metal, containing nothing, each forming a breastwork for a defiant and apparently much-injured woman.

Established at this Station, Mr. Thomas Idle and Mr. Francis Goodchild resolved to enjoy it.  But, its contrasts were very violent, and there was also an infection in it.

First, as to its contrasts.  They were only two, but they were Lethargy and Madness.  The Station was either totally unconscious, or wildly raving.  By day, in its unconscious state, it looked as if no life could come to it, — as if it were all rust, dust, and ashes — as if the last train for ever, had gone without issuing any Return-Tickets — as if the last Engine had uttered its last shriek and burst.  One awkward shave of the air from the wooden razor, and everything changed.  Tight office-doors flew open, panels yielded, books, newspapers, travelling-caps and wrappers broke out of brick walls, money chinked, conveyances oppressed by nightmares of luggage came careering into the yard, porters started up from secret places, ditto the much-injured women, the shining bell, who lived in a little tray on stilts by himself, flew into a man’s hand and clamoured violently.  The pointsman aloft in the signal-box made the motions of drawing, with some difficulty, hogsheads of beer.  Down Train!  More bear!  Up Train!  More beer.  Cross junction Train!  More beer!  Cattle Train!  More beer.  Goods Train!  Simmering, whistling, trembling, rumbling, thundering.  Trains on the whole confusion of intersecting rails, crossing one another, bumping one another, hissing one another, backing to go forward, tearing into distance to come close.  People frantic.  Exiles seeking restoration to their native carriages, and banished to remoter climes.  More beer and more bell.  Then, in a minute, the Station relapsed into stupor as the stoker of the Cattle Train, the last to depart, went gliding out of it, wiping the long nose of his oil-can with a dirty pocket-handkerchief.

By night, in its unconscious state, the Station was not so much as visible.  Something in the air, like an enterprising chemist’s established in business on one of the boughs of Jack’s beanstalk, was all that could be discerned of it under the stars.  In a moment it would break out, a constellation of gas.  In another moment, twenty rival chemists, on twenty rival beanstalks, came into existence.  Then, the Furies would be seen, waving their lurid torches up and down the confused perspectives of embankments and arches — would be heard, too, wailing and shrieking.  Then, the Station would be full of palpitating trains, as in the day; with the heightening difference that they were not so clearly seen as in the day, whereas the Station walls, starting forward under the gas, like a hippopotamus’s eyes, dazzled the human locomotives with the sauce-bottle, the cheap music, the bedstead, the distorted range of buildings where the patent safes are made, the gentleman in the rain with the registered umbrella, the lady returning from the ball with the registered respirator, and all their other embellishments.  And now, the human locomotives, creased as to their countenances and purblind as to their eyes, would swarm forth in a heap, addressing themselves to the mysterious urns and the much-injured women; while the iron locomotives, dripping fire and water, shed their steam about plentifully, making the dull oxen in their cages, with heads depressed, and foam hanging from their mouths as their red looks glanced fearfully at the surrounding terrors, seem as though they had been drinking at half-frozen waters and were hung with icicles.  Through the same steam would be caught glimpses of their fellow-travellers, the sheep, getting their white kid faces together, away from the bars, and stuffing the interstices with trembling wool.  Also, down among the wheels, of the man with the sledge-hammer, ringing the axles of the fast night-train; against whom the oxen have a misgiving that he is the man with the pole-axe who is to come by-and-by, and so the nearest of them try to get back, and get a purchase for a thrust at him through the bars.  Suddenly, the bell would ring, the steam would stop with one hiss and a yell, the chemists on the beanstalks would be busy, the avenging Furies would bestir themselves, the fast night-train would melt from eye and ear, the other trains going their ways more slowly would be heard faintly rattling in the distance like old-fashioned watches running down, the sauce-bottle and cheap music retired from view, even the bedstead went to bed, and there was no such visible thing as the Station to vex the cool wind in its blowing, or perhaps the autumn lightning, as it found out the iron rails.

The infection of the Station was this:- When it was in its raving state, the Apprentices found it impossible to be there, without labouring under the delusion that they were in a hurry.  To Mr. Goodchild, whose ideas of idleness were so imperfect, this was no unpleasant hallucination, and accordingly that gentleman went through great exertions in yielding to it, and running up and down the platform, jostling everybody, under the impression that he had a highly important mission somewhere, and had not a moment to lose.  But, to Thomas Idle, this contagion was so very unacceptable an incident of the situation, that he struck on the fourth day, and requested to be moved.

‘This place fills me with a dreadful sensation,’ said Thomas, ‘of having something to do.  Remove me, Francis.’

‘Where would you like to go next?’ was the question of the ever-engaging Goodchild.

‘I have heard there is a good old Inn at Lancaster, established in a fine old house: an Inn where they give you Bride-cake every day after dinner,’ said Thomas Idle.  ‘Let us eat Bride-cake without the trouble of being married, or of knowing anybody in that ridiculous dilemma.’

Mr. Goodchild, with a lover’s sigh, assented.  They departed from the Station in a violent hurry (for which, it is unnecessary to observe, there was not the least occasion), and were delivered at the fine old house at Lancaster, on the same night.

It is Mr. Goodchild’s opinion, that if a visitor on his arrival at Lancaster could be accommodated with a pole which would push the opposite side of the street some yards farther off, it would be better for all parties.  Protesting against being required to live in a trench, and obliged to speculate all day upon what the people can possibly be doing within a mysterious opposite window, which is a shop-window to look at, but not a shop-window in respect of its offering nothing for sale and declining to give any account whatever of itself, Mr. Goodchild concedes Lancaster to be a pleasant place.  A place dropped in the midst of a charming landscape, a place with a fine ancient fragment of castle, a place of lovely walks, a place possessing staid old houses richly fitted with old Honduras mahogany, which has grown so dark with time that it seems to have got something of a retrospective mirror-quality into itself, and to show the visitor, in the depth of its grain, through all its polish, the hue of the wretched slaves who groaned long ago under old Lancaster merchants.  And Mr. Goodchild adds that the stones of Lancaster do sometimes whisper, even yet, of rich men passed away — upon whose great prosperity some of these old doorways frowned sullen in the brightest weather — that their slave-gain turned to curses, as the Arabian Wizard’s money turned to leaves, and that no good ever came of it, even unto the third and fourth generations, until it was wasted and gone.

It was a gallant sight to behold, the Sunday procession of the Lancaster elders to Church — all in black, and looking fearfully like a funeral without the Body — under the escort of Three Beadles.

‘Think,’ said Francis, as he stood at the Inn window, admiring, ‘of being taken to the sacred edifice by three Beadles!  I have, in my early time, been taken out of it by one Beadle; but, to be taken into it by three, O Thomas, is a distinction I shall never enjoy!’

CHAPTER IV

When Mr. Goodchild had looked out of the Lancaster Inn window for two hours on end, with great perseverance, he begun to entertain a misgiving that he was growing industrious.  He therefore set himself next, to explore the country from the tops of all the steep hills in the neighbourhood.

He came back at dinner-time, red and glowing, to tell Thomas Idle what he had seen.  Thomas, on his back reading, listened with great composure, and asked him whether he really had gone up those hills, and bothered himself with those views, and walked all those miles?

‘Because I want to know,’ added Thomas, ‘what you would say of it, if you were obliged to do it?’

‘It would be different, then,’ said Francis.  ‘It would be work, then; now, it’s play.’

‘Play!’ replied Thomas Idle, utterly repudiating the reply.  ‘Play!  Here is a man goes systematically tearing himself to pieces, and putting himself through an incessant course of training, as if he were always under articles to fight a match for the champion’s belt, and he calls it Play!  Play!’ exclaimed Thomas Idle, scornfully contemplating his one boot in the air.  ‘You
can’t
play.  You don’t know what it is.  You make work of everything.’

The bright Goodchild amiably smiled.

‘So you do,’ said Thomas.  ‘I mean it.  To me you are an absolutely terrible fellow.  You do nothing like another man.  Where another fellow would fall into a footbath of action or emotion, you fall into a mine.  Where any other fellow would be a painted butterfly, you are a fiery dragon.  Where another man would stake a sixpence, you stake your existence.  If you were to go up in a balloon, you would make for Heaven; and if you were to dive into the depths of the earth, nothing short of the other place would content you.  What a fellow you are, Francis!’  The cheerful Goodchild laughed.

‘It’s all very well to laugh, but I wonder you don’t feel it to be serious,’ said Idle.  ‘A man who can do nothing by halves appears to me to be a fearful man.’

‘Tom, Tom,’ returned Goodchild, ‘if I can do nothing by halves, and be nothing by halves, it’s pretty clear that you must take me as a whole, and make the best of me.’

With this philosophical rejoinder, the airy Goodchild clapped Mr. Idle on the shoulder in a final manner, and they sat down to dinner.

‘By-the-by,’ said Goodchild, ‘I have been over a lunatic asylum too, since I have been out.’

‘He has been,’ exclaimed Thomas Idle, casting up his eyes, ‘over a lunatic asylum!  Not content with being as great an Ass as Captain Barclay in the pedestrian way, he makes a Lunacy Commissioner of himself — for nothing!’

‘An immense place,’ said Goodchild, ‘admirable offices, very good arrangements, very good attendants; altogether a remarkable place.’

‘And what did you see there?’ asked Mr. Idle, adapting Hamlet’s advice to the occasion, and assuming the virtue of interest, though he had it not.