remember how many it was (as if half-a-dozen babes either way made
no difference) – had happened to a Mrs. What’s-her-name, as once
lodged there – but he didn’t call it to mind, particular. Nettled
by this phlegmatic conduct, I informed him that I had left the town
when I was a child. He slowly returned, quite unsoftened, and not
without a sarcastic kind of complacency, HAD I? Ah! And did I
find it had got on tolerably well without me? Such is the
difference (I thought, when I had left him a few hundred yards
behind, and was by so much in a better temper) between going away
from a place and remaining in it. I had no right, I reflected, to
be angry with the greengrocer for his want of interest, I was
nothing to him: whereas he was the town, the cathedral, the
bridge, the river, my childhood, and a large slice of my life, to
me.
Of course the town had shrunk fearfully, since I was a child there.
I had entertained the impression that the High-street was at least
as wide as Regent-street, London, or the Italian Boulevard at
Paris. I found it little better than a lane. There was a public
clock in it, which I had supposed to be the finest clock in the
world: whereas it now turned out to be as inexpressive, moonfaced,
and weak a clock as ever I saw. It belonged to a Town Hall,
where I had seen an Indian (who I now suppose wasn’t an Indian)
swallow a sword (which I now suppose he didn’t). The edifice had
appeared to me in those days so glorious a structure, that I had
set it up in my mind as the model on which the Genie of the Lamp
built the palace for Aladdin. A mean little brick heap, like a
demented chapel, with a few yawning persons in leather gaiters, and
in the last extremity for something to do, lounging at the door
with their hands in their pockets, and calling themselves a Corn
Exchange!
The Theatre was in existence, I found, on asking the fishmonger,
who had a compact show of stock in his window, consisting of a sole
and a quart of shrimps – and I resolved to comfort my mind by going
to look at it. Richard the Third, in a very uncomfortable cloak,
had first appeared to me there, and had made my heart leap with
terror by backing up against the stage-box in which I was posted,
while struggling for life against the virtuous Richmond. It was
within those walls that I had learnt as from a page of English
history, how that wicked King slept in war-time on a sofa much too
short for him, and how fearfully his conscience troubled his boots.
There, too, had I first seen the funny countryman, but countryman
of noble principles, in a flowered waistcoat, crunch up his little
hat and throw it on the ground, and pull off his coat, saying, ‘Dom
thee, squire, coom on with thy fistes then!’ At which the lovely
young woman who kept company with him (and who went out gleaning,
in a narrow white muslin apron with five beautiful bars of five
different-coloured ribbons across it) was so frightened for his
sake, that she fainted away. Many wondrous secrets of Nature had I
come to the knowledge of in that sanctuary: of which not the least
terrific were, that the witches in Macbeth bore an awful
resemblance to the Thanes and other proper inhabitants of Scotland;
and that the good King Duncan couldn’t rest in his grave, but was
constantly coming out of it and calling himself somebody else. To
the Theatre, therefore, I repaired for consolation. But I found
very little, for it was in a bad and declining way. A dealer in
wine and bottled beer had already squeezed his trade into the boxoffice,
and the theatrical money was taken – when it came – in a
kind of meat-safe in the passage. The dealer in wine and bottled
beer must have insinuated himself under the stage too; for he
announced that he had various descriptions of alcoholic drinks ‘in