sleep, ‘Am I red to-night?’ ‘You are,’ he uncompromisingly
answered. ‘My mother,’ said the spectre, ‘was a red-faced woman
that liked drink, and I looked at her hard when she laid in her
coffin, and I took the complexion.’ Somehow, the pudding seemed an
unwholesome pudding after that, and I put myself in its way no
more.
When there was no market, or when I wanted variety, a railway
terminus with the morning mails coming in, was remunerative
company. But like most of the company to be had in this world, it
lasted only a very short time. The station lamps would burst out
ablaze, the porters would emerge from places of concealment, the
cabs and trucks would rattle to their places (the post-office carts
were already in theirs), and, finally, the bell would strike up,
and the train would come banging in. But there were few passengers
and little luggage, and everything scuttled away with the greatest
expedition. The locomotive post-offices, with their great nets –
as if they had been dragging the country for bodies – would fly
open as to their doors, and would disgorge a smell of lamp, an
exhausted clerk, a guard in a red coat, and their bags of letters;
the engine would blow and heave and perspire, like an engine wiping
its forehead and saying what a run it had had; and within ten
minutes the lamps were out, and I was houseless and alone again.
But now, there were driven cattle on the high road near, wanting
(as cattle always do) to turn into the midst of stone walls, and
squeeze themselves through six inches’ width of iron railing, and
getting their heads down (also as cattle always do) for tossingpurchase
at quite imaginary dogs, and giving themselves and every
devoted creature associated with them a most extraordinary amount
of unnecessary trouble. Now, too, the conscious gas began to grow
pale with the knowledge that daylight was coming, and straggling
workpeople were already in the streets, and, as waking life had
become extinguished with the last pieman’s sparks, so it began to
be rekindled with the fires of the first street-corner breakfastsellers.
And so by faster and faster degrees, until the last
degrees were very fast, the day came, and I was tired and could
sleep. And it is not, as I used to think, going home at such
times, the least wonderful thing in London, that in the real desert
region of the night, the houseless wanderer is alone there. I knew
well enough where to find Vice and Misfortune of all kinds, if I
had chosen; but they were put out of sight, and my houselessness
had many miles upon miles of streets in which it could, and did,
have its own solitary way.
CHAPTER XIV – CHAMBERS
Having occasion to transact some business with a solicitor who
occupies a highly suicidal set of chambers in Gray’s Inn, I
afterwards took a turn in the large square of that stronghold of
Melancholy, reviewing, with congenial surroundings, my experiences
Page 85
Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
of Chambers.
I began, as was natural, with the Chambers I had just left. They
were an upper set on a rotten staircase, with a mysterious bunk or
bulkhead on the landing outside them, of a rather nautical and
Screw Collier-like appearance than otherwise, and painted an
intense black. Many dusty years have passed since the
appropriation of this Davy Jones’s locker to any purpose, and
during the whole period within the memory of living man, it has
been hasped and padlocked. I cannot quite satisfy my mind whether
it was originally meant for the reception of coals, or bodies, or
as a place of temporary security for the plunder ‘looted’ by
laundresses; but I incline to the last opinion. It is about breast
high, and usually serves as a bulk for defendants in reduced
circumstances to lean against and ponder at, when they come on the
hopeful errand of trying to make an arrangement without money –
under which auspicious circumstances it mostly happens that the
legal gentleman they want to see, is much engaged, and they pervade
the staircase for a considerable period. Against this opposing