Out of Town
SITTING, on a bright September morning, among my books and papers
at my open window on the cliff overhanging the sea-beach, I have
the sky and ocean framed before me like a beautiful picture. A
beautiful picture, but with such movement in it, such changes of
light upon the sails of ships and wake of steamboats, such dazzling
gleams of silver far out at sea, such fresh touches on the crisp
wave-tops as they break and roll towards me - a picture with such
music in the billowy rush upon the shingle, the blowing of morning
wind through the corn-sheaves where the farmers' waggons are busy,
the singing of the larks, and the distant voices of children at
play - such charms of sight and sound as all the Galleries on earth
can but poorly suggest.
So dreamy is the murmur of the sea below my window, that I may have
been here, for anything I know, one hundred years. Not that I have
grown old, for, daily on the neighbouring downs and grassy hill-
sides, I find that I can still in reason walk any distance, jump
over anything, and climb up anywhere; but, that the sound of the
ocean seems to have become so customary to my musings, and other
realities seem so to have gone aboard ship and floated away over
the horizon, that, for aught I will undertake to the contrary, I am
the enchanted son of the King my father, shut up in a tower on the
sea-shore, for protection against an old she-goblin who insisted on
being my godmother, and who foresaw at the font - wonderful
creature! - that I should get into a scrape before I was twenty-
one. I remember to have been in a City (my Royal parent's
dominions, I suppose), and apparently not long ago either, that was
in the dreariest condition. The principal inhabitants had all been
changed into old newspapers, and in that form were preserving their
window-blinds from dust, and wrapping all their smaller household
gods in curl-papers. I walked through gloomy streets where every
house was shut up and newspapered, and where my solitary footsteps
echoed on the deserted pavements. In the public rides there were
no carriages, no horses, no animated existence, but a few sleepy
policemen, and a few adventurous boys taking advantage of the
devastation to swarm up the lamp-posts. In the Westward streets
there was no traffic; in the Westward shops, no business. The
water-patterns which the 'Prentices had trickled out on the
pavements early in the morning, remained uneffaced by human feet.
At the corners of mews, Cochin-China fowls stalked gaunt and
savage; nobody being left in the deserted city (as it appeared to
me), to feed them. Public Houses, where splendid footmen swinging
their legs over gorgeous hammer-cloths beside wigged coachmen were
wont to regale, were silent, and the unused pewter pots shone, too
bright for business, on the shelves. I beheld a Punch's Show
leaning against a wall near Park Lane, as if it had fainted. It
was deserted, and there were none to heed its desolation. In
Belgrave Square I met the last man - an ostler - sitting on a post
in a ragged red waistcoat, eating straw, and mildewing away.
If I recollect the name of the little town, on whose shore this sea
is murmuring - but I am not just now, as I have premised, to be
relied upon for anything - it is Pavilionstone. Within a quarter
of a century, it was a little fishing town, and they do say, that
the time was, when it was a little smuggling town. I have heard
that it was rather famous in the hollands and brandy way, and that
coevally with that reputation the lamplighter's was considered a
bad life at the Assurance Offices. It was observed that if he were
not particular about lighting up, he lived in peace; but that, if
he made the best of the oil-lamps in the steep and narrow streets,
he usually fell over the cliff at an early age. Now, gas and
electricity run to the very water's edge, and the South-Eastern
Railway Company screech at us in the dead of night.
But, the old little fishing and smuggling town remains, and is so
tempting a place for the latter purpose, that I think of going out
some night next week, in a fur cap and a pair of petticoat
trousers, and running an empty tub, as a kind of archaeological
pursuit. Let nobody with corns come to Pavilionstone, for there
are breakneck flights of ragged steps, connecting the principal
streets by back-ways, which will cripple that visitor in half an
hour. These are the ways by which, when I run that tub, I shall
escape. I shall make a Thermopylae of the corner of one of them,
defend it with my cutlass against the coast-guard until my brave
companions have sheered off, then dive into the darkness, and
regain my Susan's arms. In connection with these breakneck steps I
observe some wooden cottages, with tumble-down out-houses, and
back-yards three feet square, adorned with garlands of dried fish,
in one of which (though the General Board of Health might object)
my Susan dwells.
The South-Eastern Company have brought Pavilionstone into such
vogue, with their tidal trains and splendid steam-packets, that a
new Pavilionstone is rising up. I am, myself, of New
Pavilionstone. We are a little mortary and limey at present, but
we are getting on capitally. Indeed, we were getting on so fast,
at one time, that we rather overdid it, and built a street of
shops, the business of which may be expected to arrive in about ten
years. We are sensibly laid out in general; and with a little care
and pains (by no means wanting, so far), shall become a very pretty
place. We ought to be, for our situation is delightful, our air is
delicious, and our breezy hills and downs, carpeted with wild
thyme, and decorated with millions of wild flowers, are, on the
faith of a pedestrian, perfect. In New Pavilionstone we are a
little too much addicted to small windows with more bricks in them
than glass, and we are not over-fanciful in the way of decorative
architecture, and we get unexpected sea-views through cracks in the
street doors; on the whole, however, we are very snug and
comfortable, and well accommodated. But the Home Secretary (if
there be such an officer) cannot too soon shut up the burial-ground
of the old parish church. It is in the midst of us, and
Pavilionstone will get no good of it, if it be too long left alone.
The lion of Pavilionstone is its Great Hotel. A dozen years ago,
going over to Paris by South-Eastern Tidal Steamer, you used to be
dropped upon the platform of the main line Pavilionstone Station
(not a junction then), at eleven o'clock on a dark winter's night,
in a roaring wind; and in the howling wilderness outside the
station, was a short omnibus which brought you up by the forehead
the instant you got in at the door; and nobody cared about you, and
you were alone in the world. You bumped over infinite chalk, until
you were turned out at a strange building which had just left off
being a barn without having quite begun to be a house, where nobody
expected your coming, or knew what to do with you when you were
come, and where you were usually blown about, until you happened to
be blown against the cold beef, and finally into bed. At five in
the morning you were blown out of bed, and after a dreary
breakfast, with crumpled company, in the midst of confusion, were
hustled on board a steamboat and lay wretched on deck until you saw
France lunging and surging at you with great vehemence over the
bowsprit.
Now, you come down to Pavilionstone in a free and easy manner, an
irresponsible agent, made over in trust to the South-Eastern
Company, until you get out of the railway-carriage at high-water
mark. If you are crossing by the boat at once, you have nothing to
do but walk on board and be happy there if you can - I can't. If
you are going to our Great Pavilionstone Hotel, the sprightliest
porters under the sun, whose cheerful looks are a pleasant welcome,
shoulder your luggage, drive it off in vans, bowl it away in
trucks, and enjoy themselves in playing athletic games with it. If
you are for public life at our great Pavilionstone Hotel, you walk
into that establishment as if it were your club; and find ready for
you, your news-room, dining-room, smoking-room, billiard-room,
music-room, public breakfast, public dinner twice a-day (one plain,
one gorgeous), hot baths and cold baths. If you want to be bored,
there are plenty of bores always ready for you, and from Saturday
to Monday in particular, you can be bored (if you like it) through
and through. Should you want to be private at our Great
Pavilionstone Hotel, say but the word, look at the list of charges,
choose your floor, name your figure - there you are, established in
your castle, by the day, week, month, or year, innocent of all
comers or goers, unless you have my fancy for walking early in the
morning down the groves of boots and shoes, which so regularly
flourish at all the chamber-doors before breakfast, that it seems
to me as if nobody ever got up or took them in. Are you going
across the Alps, and would you like to air your Italian at our
Great Pavilionstone Hotel? Talk to the Manager - always
conversational, accomplished, and polite. Do you want to be aided,
abetted, comforted, or advised, at our Great Pavilionstone Hotel?
Send for the good landlord, and he is your friend. Should you, or
any one belonging to you, ever be taken ill at our Great
Pavilionstone Hotel, you will not soon forget him or his kind wife.
And when you pay your bill at our Great Pavilionstone Hotel, you
will not be put out of humour by anything you find in it.
A thoroughly good inn, in the days of coaching and posting, was a
noble place. But no such inn would have been equal to the
reception of four or five hundred people, all of them wet through,
and half of them dead sick, every day in the year. This is where
we shine, in our Pavilionstone Hotel. Again - who, coming and
going, pitching and tossing, boating and training, hurrying in, and
flying out, could ever have calculated the fees to be paid at an
old-fashioned house? In our Pavilionstone Hotel vocabulary, there
is no such word as fee. Everything is done for you; every service
is provided at a fixed and reasonable charge; all the prices are
hung up in all the rooms; and you can make out your own bill
beforehand, as well as the book-keeper.
In the case of your being a pictorial artist, desirous of studying
at small expense the physiognomies and beards of different nations,
come, on receipt of this, to Pavilionstone. You shall find all the
nations of the earth, and all the styles of shaving and not
shaving, hair cutting and hair letting alone, for ever flowing
through our hotel. Couriers you shall see by hundreds; fat
leathern bags for five-franc pieces, closing with violent snaps,
like discharges of fire-arms, by thousands; more luggage in a
morning than, fifty years ago, all Europe saw in a week. Looking
at trains, steamboats, sick travellers, and luggage, is our great
Pavilionstone recreation. We are not strong in other public
amusements. We have a Literary and Scientific Institution, and we
have a Working Men's Institution - may it hold many gipsy holidays
in summer fields, with the kettle boiling, the band of music
playing, and the people dancing; and may I be on the hill-side,
looking on with pleasure at a wholesome sight too rare in England!
- and we have two or three churches, and more chapels than I have
yet added up. But public amusements are scarce with us. If a poor
theatrical manager comes with his company to give us, in a loft,
Mary Bax, or the Murder on the Sand Hills, we don't care much for
him - starve him out, in fact. We take more kindly to wax-work,
especially if it moves; in which case it keeps much clearer of the
second commandment than when it is still. Cooke's Circus (Mr.
Cooke is my friend, and always leaves a good name behind him) gives
us only a night in passing through. Nor does the travelling
menagerie think us worth a longer visit. It gave us a look-in the
other day, bringing with it the residentiary van with the stained
glass windows, which Her Majesty kept ready-made at Windsor Castle,
until she found a suitable opportunity of submitting it for the
proprietor's acceptance. I brought away five wonderments from this
exhibition. I have wondered ever since, Whether the beasts ever do
get used to those small places of confinement; Whether the monkeys
have that very horrible flavour in their free state; Whether wild
animals have a natural ear for time and tune, and therefore every
four-footed creature began to howl in despair when the band began
to play; What the giraffe does with his neck when his cart is shut
up; and, Whether the elephant feels ashamed of himself when he is
brought out of his den to stand on his head in the presence of the
whole Collection.
We are a tidal harbour at Pavilionstone, as indeed I have implied
already in my mention of tidal trains. At low water, we are a heap
of mud, with an empty channel in it where a couple of men in big
boots always shovel and scoop: with what exact object, I am unable
to say. At that time, all the stranded fishing-boats turn over on
their sides, as if they were dead marine monsters; the colliers and
other shipping stick disconsolate in the mud; the steamers look as
if their white chimneys would never smoke more, and their red
paddles never turn again; the green sea-slime and weed upon the
rough stones at the entrance, seem records of obsolete high tides
never more to flow; the flagstaff-halyards droop; the very little
wooden lighthouse shrinks in the idle glare of the sun. And here I
may observe of the very little wooden lighthouse, that when it is
lighted at night, - red and green, - it looks so like a medical
man's, that several distracted husbands have at various times been
found, on occasions of premature domestic anxiety, going round and
round it, trying to find the Nightbell.
But, the moment the tide begins to make, the Pavilionstone Harbour
begins to revive. It feels the breeze of the rising water before
the water comes, and begins to flutter and stir. When the little
shallow waves creep in, barely overlapping one another, the vanes
at the mastheads wake, and become agitated. As the tide rises, the
fishing-boats get into good spirits and dance, the flagstaff hoists
a bright red flag, the steamboat smokes, cranes creak, horses and
carriages dangle in the air, stray passengers and luggage appear.
Now, the shipping is afloat, and comes up buoyantly, to look at the
wharf. Now, the carts that have come down for coals, load away as
hard as they can load. Now, the steamer smokes immensely, and
occasionally blows at the paddle-boxes like a vaporous whale-
greatly disturbing nervous loungers. Now, both the tide and the
breeze have risen, and you are holding your hat on (if you want to
see how the ladies hold THEIR hats on, with a stay, passing over
the broad brim and down the nose, come to Pavilionstone). Now,
everything in the harbour splashes, dashes, and bobs. Now, the
Down Tidal Train is telegraphed, and you know (without knowing how
you know), that two hundred and eighty-seven people are coming.
Now, the fishing-boats that have been out, sail in at the top of
the tide. Now, the bell goes, and the locomotive hisses and
shrieks, and the train comes gliding in, and the two hundred and
eighty-seven come scuffling out. Now, there is not only a tide of
water, but a tide of people, and a tide of luggage - all tumbling
and flowing and bouncing about together. Now, after infinite
bustle, the steamer steams out, and we (on the Pier) are all
delighted when she rolls as if she would roll her funnel out, and
all are disappointed when she don't. Now, the other steamer is
coming in, and the Custom House prepares, and the wharf-labourers
assemble, and the hawsers are made ready, and the Hotel Porters
come rattling down with van and truck, eager to begin more Olympic
games with more luggage. And this is the way in which we go on,
down at Pavilionstone, every tide. And, if you want to live a life
of luggage, or to see it lived, or to breathe sweet air which will
send you to sleep at a moment's notice at any period of the day or
night, or to disport yourself upon or in the sea, or to scamper
about Kent, or to come out of town for the enjoyment of all or any
of these pleasures, come to Pavilionstone.
-THE END-
Charles Dickens' short story: Out of Town
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