Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller

highest spirits, and consisted of idlers who had come with the

curtained litter from its starting-place, and of all the

reinforcements it had picked up by the way. It set the litter down

in the midst of the Morgue, and then two Custodians proclaimed

aloud that we were all ‘invited’ to go out. This invitation was

rendered the more pressing, if not the more flattering, by our

being shoved out, and the folding-gates being barred upon us.

Those who have never seen the Morgue, may see it perfectly, by

presenting to themselves on indifferently paved coach-house

accessible from the street by a pair of folding-gates; on the left

of the coach-house, occupying its width, any large London tailor’s

or linendraper’s plate-glass window reaching to the ground; within

the window, on two rows of inclined plane, what the coach-house has

to show; hanging above, like irregular stalactites from the roof of

a cave, a quantity of clothes – the clothes of the dead and buried

shows of the coach-house.

We had been excited in the highest degree by seeing the Custodians

pull off their coats and tuck up their shirt-sleeves, as the

procession came along. It looked so interestingly like business.

Shut out in the muddy street, we now became quite ravenous to know

all about it. Was it river, pistol, knife, love, gambling,

robbery, hatred, how many stabs, how many bullets, fresh or

decomposed, suicide or murder? All wedged together, and all

staring at one another with our heads thrust forward, we propounded

these inquiries and a hundred more such. Imperceptibly, it came to

be known that Monsieur the tall and sallow mason yonder, was

acquainted with the facts. Would Monsieur the tall and sallow

mason, surged at by a new wave of us, have the goodness to impart?

It was but a poor old man, passing along the street under one of

the new buildings, on whom a stone had fallen, and who had tumbled

dead. His age? Another wave surged up against the tall and sallow

mason, and our wave swept on and broke, and he was any age from

sixty-five to ninety.

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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller

An old man was not much: moreover, we could have wished he had

been killed by human agency – his own, or somebody else’s: the

latter, preferable – but our comfort was, that he had nothing about

him to lead to his identification, and that his people must seek

him here. Perhaps they were waiting dinner for him even now? We

liked that. Such of us as had pocket-handkerchiefs took a slow,

intense, protracted wipe at our noses, and then crammed our

handkerchiefs into the breast of our blouses. Others of us who had

no handkerchiefs administered a similar relief to our overwrought

minds, by means of prolonged smears or wipes of our mouths on our

sleeves. One man with a gloomy malformation of brow – a homicidal

worker in white-lead, to judge from his blue tone of colour, and a

certain flavour of paralysis pervading him – got his coat-collar

between his teeth, and bit at it with an appetite. Several decent

women arrived upon the outskirts of the crowd, and prepared to

launch themselves into the dismal coach-house when opportunity

should come; among them, a pretty young mother, pretending to bite

the forefinger of her baby-boy, kept it between her rosy lips that

it might be handy for guiding to point at the show. Meantime, all

faces were turned towards the building, and we men waited with a

fixed and stern resolution:- for the most part with folded arms.

Surely, it was the only public French sight these uncommercial eyes

had seen, at which the expectant people did not form EN QUEUE. But

there was no such order of arrangement here; nothing but a general

determination to make a rush for it, and a disposition to object to

some boys who had mounted on the two stone posts by the hinges of

the gates, with the design of swooping in when the hinges should

turn.

Now, they turned, and we rushed! Great pressure, and a scream or

two from the front. Then a laugh or two, some expressions of

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