saith that there is no one else, save and except the waiter at the
Dodo, now laying the cloth. I have paced the streets, and stared
at the houses, and am come back to the blank bow window of the
Dodo; and the town clocks strike seven, and the reluctant echoes
seem to cry, ‘Don’t wake us!’ and the bandy-legged baby has gone
home to bed.
If the Dodo were only a gregarious bird – if he had only some
confused idea of making a comfortable nest – I could hope to get
through the hours between this and bed-time, without being consumed
by devouring melancholy. But, the Dodo’s habits are all wrong. It
provides me with a trackless desert of sitting-room, with a chair
for every day in the year, a table for every month, and a waste of
sideboard where a lonely China vase pines in a corner for its mate
long departed, and will never make a match with the candlestick in
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Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces
the opposite corner if it live till Doomsday. The Dodo has nothing
in the larder. Even now, I behold the Boots returning with my sole
in a piece of paper; and with that portion of my dinner, the Boots,
perceiving me at the blank bow window, slaps his leg as he comes
across the road, pretending it is something else. The Dodo
excludes the outer air. When I mount up to my bedroom, a smell of
closeness and flue gets lazily up my nose like sleepy snuff. The
loose little bits of carpet writhe under my tread, and take wormy
shapes. I don’t know the ridiculous man in the looking-glass,
beyond having met him once or twice in a dish-cover – and I can
never shave HIM to-morrow morning! The Dodo is narrow-minded as to
towels; expects me to wash on a freemason’s apron without the
trimming: when I asked for soap, gives me a stony-hearted something
white, with no more lather in it than the Elgin marbles. The Dodo
has seen better days, and possesses interminable stables at the
back – silent, grass-grown, broken-windowed, horseless.
This mournful bird can fry a sole, however, which is much. Can
cook a steak, too, which is more. I wonder where it gets its
Sherry? If I were to send my pint of wine to some famous chemist
to be analysed, what would it turn out to be made of? It tastes of
pepper, sugar, bitter-almonds, vinegar, warm knives, any flat
drinks, and a little brandy. Would it unman a Spanish exile by
reminding him of his native land at all? I think not. If there
really be any townspeople out of the churchyards, and if a caravan
of them ever do dine, with a bottle of wine per man, in this desert
of the Dodo, it must make good for the doctor next day!
Where was the waiter born? How did he come here? Has he any hope
of getting away from here? Does he ever receive a letter, or take
a ride upon the railway, or see anything but the Dodo? Perhaps he
has seen the Berlin Wool. He appears to have a silent sorrow on
him, and it may be that. He clears the table; draws the dingy
curtains of the great bow window, which so unwillingly consent to
meet, that they must be pinned together; leaves me by the fire with
my pint decanter, and a little thin funnel-shaped wine-glass, and a
plate of pale biscuits – in themselves engendering desperation.
No book, no newspaper! I left the Arabian Nights in the railway
carriage, and have nothing to read but Bradshaw, and ‘that way
madness lies.’ Remembering what prisoners and ship-wrecked
mariners have done to exercise their minds in solitude, I repeat
the multiplication table, the pence table, and the shilling table:
which are all the tables I happen to know. What if I write
something? The Dodo keeps no pens but steel pens; and those I
always stick through the paper, and can turn to no other account.
What am I to do? Even if I could have the bandy-legged baby
knocked up and brought here, I could offer him nothing but sherry,