Monsieur l’Officier de l’Octroi, unless the overflowing of a breast
devoted to your charming town should be in that wise chargeable.
Ah! see at the gangway by the twinkling lantern, my dearest brother
and friend, he once of the Passport Office, he who collects the
names! May he be for ever changeless in his buttoned black
surtout, with his note-book in his hand, and his tall black hat,
surmounting his round, smiling, patient face! Let us embrace, my
dearest brother. I am yours e tout jamais – for the whole of ever.
Calais up and doing at the railway station, and Calais down and
dreaming in its bed; Calais with something of ‘an ancient and fishlike
smell’ about it, and Calais blown and sea-washed pure; Calais
represented at the Buffet by savoury roast fowls, hot coffee,
cognac, and Bordeaux; and Calais represented everywhere by flitting
persons with a monomania for changing money – though I never shall
be able to understand in my present state of existence how they
live by it, but I suppose I should, if I understood the currency
question – Calais EN GROS, and Calais EN DETAIL, forgive one who
has deeply wronged you. – I was not fully aware of it on the other
side, but I meant Dover.
Ding, ding! To the carriages, gentlemen the travellers. Ascend
then, gentlemen the travellers, for Hazebroucke, Lille, Douai,
Bruxelles, Arras, Amiens, and Paris! I, humble representative of
the uncommercial interest, ascend with the rest. The train is
light to-night, and I share my compartment with but two fellowtravellers;
one, a compatriot in an obsolete cravat, who thinks it
a quite unaccountable thing that they don’t keep ‘London time’ on a
French railway, and who is made angry by my modestly suggesting the
possibility of Paris time being more in their way; the other, a
young priest, with a very small bird in a very small cage, who
feeds the small bird with a quill, and then puts him up in the
network above his head, where he advances twittering, to his front
wires, and seems to address me in an electioneering manner. The
compatriot (who crossed in the boat, and whom I judge to be some
person of distinction, as he was shut up, like a stately species of
rabbit, in a private hutch on deck) and the young priest (who
joined us at Calais) are soon asleep, and then the bird and I have
it all to ourselves.
A stormy night still; a night that sweeps the wires of the electric
telegraph with a wild and fitful hand; a night so very stormy, with
the added storm of the train-progress through it, that when the
Guard comes clambering round to mark the tickets while we are at
full speed (a really horrible performance in an express train,
though he holds on to the open window by his elbows in the most
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
deliberate manner), he stands in such a whirlwind that I grip him
fast by the collar, and feel it next to manslaughter to let him go.
Still, when he is gone, the small, small bird remains at his front
wires feebly twittering to me – twittering and twittering, until,
leaning back in my place and looking at him in drowsy fascination,
I find that he seems to jog my memory as we rush along.
Uncommercial travels (thus the small, small bird) have lain in
their idle thriftless way through all this range of swamp and dyke,
as through many other odd places; and about here, as you very well
know, are the queer old stone farm-houses, approached by
drawbridges, and the windmills that you get at by boats. Here, are
the lands where the women hoe and dig, paddling canoe-wise from
field to field, and here are the cabarets and other peasant-houses
where the stone dove-cotes in the littered yards are as strong as
warders’ towers in old castles. Here, are the long monotonous
miles of canal, with the great Dutch-built barges garishly painted,
and the towing girls, sometimes harnessed by the forehead,
sometimes by the girdle and the shoulders, not a pleasant sight to
see. Scattered through this country are mighty works of VAUBAN,