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[-190-]
CHAPTER XVIII.
CAREFULLY MOVED IN TOWN AND COUNTRY.
IF any reader of this book should require full and valuable
information regarding the houses in the various suburbs of London, their size,
rent, advantages and disadvantages, annual amount of sewer's rate and land-tax,
soil, climate, quality of water, and other particulars, let him address a
letter, post-paid, to "Wanderer," under Cover to the publishers, and
he will have his heart's desire. I am "Wanderer," if you please, and I
am in a position to give the information named; for, during the last ten years,
I have led a nomadic and peripatetic existence; now becoming the tenant of a
villa here, now blossoming as the denizen of a mansion there, sipping the sweets
of the assessed taxes and the parochial rates, and then flying off, with my
furniture in several large vans, to a distant neighbourhood. Want of money,
possession of funds, hatred of town, detestation of the country, a cheerful
misanthropy, and an unpleasant gregariousness - all these have, one by one,
acted upon me, and made me their slave. What I have learned by sad experience, I
now purpose to teach setting myself up as a pillar of example and warning to my
dissatisfied fellow- creatures.
Before I married, I lived in
chambers in Piccadilly, kept my horse, belonged to the Brummel Club, and was
looked [-191-] upon as rather a fine fellow; but
when I married, my Uncle Snape (from whom I obtained the supplies for my
expenses, and who was a confirmed woman-hater) at once stopped my allowance, and
I had nothing but my professional earnings as an Old Bailey barrister, and a
hundred a year which I had inherited. Under these circumstances I had intended
going into lodgings; but my wife's family (I don't know exactly what that means:
she has no mother, and her father never interferes with her or her sisters: I
think it must be her Sisters who are the family, but we always speak of
"the family ") were very genteel, and looked upon lodgings as low; so
it was generally understood that I must take a house, and that "the
family" would help to furnish it. I need not mention that there was
a great discussion as to where the house should be. The family lived in St.
John's Wood, and wished us to be near them; but the rents in that saintly
neighbourhood were beyond my means, and, after a great deal of searching and
heart-aching worry, after inspecting a dozen "exact things,"
"just what you wanted," and "such treasures!" found for me
by friends, none of which would do, I at last took a house in Bass's Buildings,
in the New Road. That great thoroughfare has since been subdivided, I think, but
then it was the New Road stretching from Paddington to Islington, and our house
was about a mile from the Paddington end. It was small, but so was the rent,
sixty pounds a year, and it was quite large enough for my wife and me and our
one servant. It had a little garden in front, between it and the road, with a
straight line of flagstones leading direct from the gate to the doorsteps, and
bits of flower-beds (in which nothing ever grew) intersected by little
gravel-paths about a foot wide. This garden was a source of great delight to my
humorous friends. One of them could be seen carefully putting one foot before
the other, in order that he might not step off the path, and, after wandering in
and out between the little beds, would [-192-]
feign excessive fatigue on his arrival at the house, declaring he had been
"lost in the shrubbery;" another would suggest that we should have a
guide on the spot to show visitors the nearest way; while a third hoped we
intended giving some out-door fetes in the summer, assuring us that the
"band of the Life Guards would look splendid on that," pointing to a
bit of turf about the size of a pocket-handkerchief. When the street-door was
opened wide back, it entirely absorbed the hall, and we could not get out of the
dining-room door; but then we could, of course, always pass out through the
"study," a little room like a cistern, which just held my desk and one
chair.
There was a very small yard at the back, giving on to a set
of stables which had their real entrance in the mews but we were compelled to
cover all our back windows with putty, imitative of ground-glass, on which we
stuck cut-out paper designs of birds and flowers, as these looked directly on
the rooms over the stables, inhabited by the coachman and his family; and the
sight of a stalwart man at the opposite window, shaving himself in very dingy
shirt-sleeves within a few feet of your nose, was not considered genteel by the
family. We were rather stivy in the upstairs rooms, owing to low ceilings, and a
diffidence we felt as to opening the windows, for the New Road is a dusty
thoroughfare, and the immediate vicinity of a cab-stand, though handy on some
occasions, lets one into rather a larger knowledge of the stock of expletives
with which the English language abounds, than is good for refined ears. But when
we knew that the coachman was out, we used to open the back windows and grow
very enthusiastic over "fresh air from Hampstead and Highgate," which,
nevertheless, always seemed to me to have a somewhat stabley twang. One great
point with the family was that there were no shops near us : that being an acme
of vulgarity which it appears no well-regulated mind can put up with; to be
sure, the row immediately opposite [-193-] to us
was bounded by a chemist's, but then, you know, a chemist can scarcely be called
a tradesman - at least the family thought so - and his coloured bottles were
rather a relief to the eye than otherwise, giving one, at night, a strange idea
of being at sea in view of land. On the door next to the chemist's stood, when
we first took possession of our house in Bass's Buildings, a brass plate with
"Middlemiss, Portrait Artist," on it, and by its side a little case
containing miniatures of the officer, the student in cap and
gown, and the divine in white bands, with the top of the wooden pulpit
growing out from under his arms, which are common to such professors. It was a
thoroughly harmless little art-studio, and apparently did very little business,
no one ever being seen to enter its portal. But after a twelve-month Mr.
Middlemiss died, and we heard through the electric chain of our common butcher,
that his son, a youth of great spirit, was about to carry on the business. The
butcher was right. The new proprietor was a youth of great spirit, no half
measures with him; he certainly did not fear his fate too much, nor were his
deserts small (though in his lamented father's time his dinners were said to
have been restricted), for he set his fate upon one touch-of paint - to win or
lose it all. He coloured the entire house a bright vermilion, on which, from
attic to basement, the following sentences were displayed in deep black letters:
"The Shop for Portraits! Stop, Examine, and Judge for Yourselves! 'Sit,
Cousin Percy; sit, good Cousin Hotspur' - Shakespeare. Photography defied! Your
Likeness in Oils in Ten Minutes! 'The Counterfeit Presentment' - Shakespeare.
Charge low, Portraits lasting ! Art, not Mechanical Labour!" Kit-cat
portraits of celebrated characters copied from photographs leered out of every
window, while the drawing-room balcony was given up to Lord John Russell waving
a parchment truncheon, and Mr. Sturgeon, the popular preacher, squinting at his
upheld forefinger. The family were out of town when [-194-]
this horrible work was undertaken: when they returned, they declared with
one voice that we could live in Bass's no longer, and must move at once.
I was not sorry, though I liked the little house well enough;
but we had been confined there in more senses than one, and wanted more room for
our family, now increased by a baby and a nurse. The nurse was a low-spirited
young person, afflicted with what she called "the creeps," under the
influence of which she used to rock to and fro, and moan dismally and slap the
baby on the back; and it was thought that change of scene might do her good. I
was glad, too, for another reason. I had recently obtained occasional employment
on a daily journal, which detained me until late at night at the
newspaper-office, and I had frequently to attend night consultations at the
chambers of leading barristers, to whom I was to act as junior. Bass's Buildings
were a horrible distance from the newspaper-office and the chambers; and walking
home at night had several times knocked me up. So my wife submitted to the
family a proposition that I must remove to some more convenient position; and
the family, after a struggle (based, I am inclined to think, on the reflection
that lunch at my expense would not be so practicable), consented.
The neighbourhood of Russell Square was that selected, and in
it we began to make constant research. There are few Londoners of the rising
generation who know those ghastly streets, solemn and straight, where the
daylight at the height of summer fades at four o'clock, and in winter only looks
in for an hour about noon; where the houses, uniform in dirt and dinginess, in
lack of paint on their window-sills, and in fulness of filth on their windows,
stare confronting each other in twin-like similitude. Decorum Street, Hessian
Street, Walcheren Square, Great Dettingen Street, each exactly resembling the
other, all equally dreary, [-195-] equally
deserted, equally heart-breaking, equally genteel. Even the family could not
deny the gentility, but were good enough to remember having visited a judge in
Culloden Terrace, and having been at the routs of Lady Flack, wife of Sir
Nicholas Flack, Baronet, Head of the College of Physicians, and Body-preserver
in Ordinary to the Great Georgius of sainted memory. All the districts just
named were a little above my means; but eventually I settled down into a house
in Great Dowdy Street, a row of small but very eligible tenements on the Dowdy
estate. None of your common thoroughfares, to be rattled through by vulgar cabs
and earth-shaking Pickford's vans; but a self-included property, with a gate at
each end and a lodge with a porter in a gold-laced hat and the Dowdy arms on the
buttons of his mulberry-coloured coat, to prevent anyone, except with a mission
to one of the houses, from intruding on the exclusive territory. The rent was
seventy pounds a year, "on a repairing lease" (which means an annual
outlay of from five-and-twenty to thirty to keep the bricks and mortar and
timbers together), and the accommodation consisted of a narrow dining-room
painted salmon-colour, and a little back room looking out upon a square black
enclosure in which grew fearful fungi; two big drawing-rooms, the carpeting of
which nearly swallowed a quarter's income; two good bed-rooms, and three attics.
I never went into the basement save when I visited the cellar, which was a
mouldy vault under the street-pavement, only accessible through the area, and
consequently rendering anyone going to it liable to the insults of rude boys,
who would grin through the area-railings, and say, "Give us a drop, guv'nor;"
or, "Mind you don't drop the bottle, old 'un;" and other ribald
remarks; but I believe the kitchen was pronounced by the servants to be
"stuffy," and the whole place "ill conwenient," there being
no larder, pantry, nor the usual domestic arrangements. I know, too, that we [-196-]
were supposed to breed and preserve a very magnificent specimen of the
blackbeetle ; insects which migrated to different parts of the house in droves,
and which to the number of five-and-twenty being met slowly ascending the
drawing-room stairs, caused my wife to swoon, and me to invest money in a
hedgehog: an animal that took up his abode in the coal-cellar on the top of the
coals, and, retiring thither early one morning after a surfeit of beetles, was
supposed to have been inadvertently "laid" in the fire by the cook in
mistake for a lump of Wallsend.
I don't think there were many advantages in the Great Dowdy
Street house (though I was very happy there, and had an immense amount of fun
and pleasure) beyond the proximity to my work, and the consequent saving in
cab-hire and fatigue. But I do recollect the drawbacks; and although six years
have elapsed since I experienced them, they are constantly rising in my mind. I
remember our being unable ever to open any window without an immediate inroad of
"blacks:" triturate soot of the most penetrating kind, which at
once made piebald all the antimacassars, toilet-covers, counterpanes, towels,
and other linen; I remember our being unable to get any sleep after five A.M.,
when, at the builder's which abutted on our back enclosure, a tremendous bell
clanged, summoning the workmen to labour, and from which time there was such a
noise of sawing, and hammering, and planing, and filing, and tool-grinding, and
bellows-blowing, interspersed with strange bellowings in the Celtic tongue from
one Irish labourer to another, and mingled with objurgations in pure Saxon from
irate overseers, that one might as well have attempted a quiet nap in the
neighbourhood of Babel when the tower was in course of erection. I remember, on
the first occasion of our sleeping there, a horrible yell echoing through the
house, and being discovered to proceed from the nurse aforenamed, who had, at
the time of her shrieking, about [-197-] six A.M.,
heard "ghostes a bursting in through the walls." We calmed her
perturbed spirit, finding no traces of any such inroads; but were aroused in a
similar manner the next morning, and then discovered that the rushing in of the
New River supply, obedient to the turncock's key, was the source of the young
person's fright. I remember the hot summer Sunday afternoons, when the pavement
would be red-hot, and the dust, and bits of straw, and scraps of paper, would
blow fitfully about with every little puff of air, and the always dull houses
would look infinitely duller with their blinds down, and no sound would fall
upon the ear save the distant hum of the cabs in Holborn, or the footfall of
some young person in service going to afternoon church - or to what was,
in her mind, its equivalent - in all the glory of open-worked stockings, low
shoes, and a prayer- book swaddled in a white cotton pocket-handkerchief. I have
sat at my window on scores of such Sundays, eyeing the nose of Lazarus over the
dwarf Venetian blinds opposite, or the gorgeous waistcoat of Eliason, a little
higher up (for the tribes are great in the neighbourhood). I have stared upwards
to catch a glimpse of the scrap of blue unclouded sky, visible above the houses;
and then I have thought of Richmond Hill; of snowy tablecloths, and cool Moselle-cup,
and salmon-cutlets, in a room overhanging the river at the Orkney Arms, at
Maidenhead ; of that sea-breeze which passes the little hotel at Freshwater Bay,
in wild hurry to make play over the neighbouring downs; of shaded walks, and
cool retreats, and lime avenues, and overhung bathing- places, and all other
things delicious at that season; until I have nearly gone mad with hatred of
Great Dowdy Street, and fancied myself pretty able to comprehend the feelings of
the polar bears in their dull retrogressive promenade in the Zoological Gardens.
That none of our friends had ever heard of Great Dowdy Street; that no cabman
could be instructed as to its exact whereabout, naming it generally as [-198-]
"somewhere near the Fondlin';" that migration to a friend's
house in a habitable region to dinner occasioned an enormous expense in
cab-fare; that all the tradesmen with whom we had previously dealt declined our
custom, "as they never sent that way;" that we found Tottenham Court
Road a line of demarcation, behind which we left light, and sunshine, and
humanity - on our side of which we tumbled into darkness and savagery; that we
were in the midst of a hansom-cab colony, clattering home at all hours of the
night; and in the immediate neighbourhood of all the organ-men, who gave us
their final grind just before midnight; all these were minor but irritating
annoyances. At length, after six years' experience of this life, we heard that
Uncle Snape was dead, and had left me some money; and we immediately determined
on quitting Great Dowdy Street.
"Oh, my life in Egypt!" sighs Cleopatra in the Dream of
Fair Women, remembering the dalliance and the wit, the Libyan banquets, and all
the delights of that brief but glorious season. "Oh, my life in Agatha
Villa, Old Brompton!" say I, which was quite as brief, and almost as
glorious. We entered upon Agatha Villa immediately on quitting Great Dowdy
Street, and revelled in the contrast. Such an elegant house; such a dining-room
in red flock paper and black oak furniture, such a, drawing- room in satin paper
and chintz, opening with large French windows upon a little lawn, such a study
for me, such a spare bed-room for a bachelor friend from Saturday till Monday!
It was at Agatha Villa that we commenced our delightful little Sunday dinners -
which, indeed, finished in the same place. It was at Agatha Villa we first
discovered how fond people were of us; what a popular writer I was; how my
oratorical displays at the Old Bailey were making a sensation. People liked
coming to see us at Agatha Villa not for the mere sake of what they got, of
course, but [-199-] because they were sure of
meeting "such charming people" at our house : money was all very well,
they would remark, but no money could bring together such a host of genius as
was always to be seen at Agatha Villa. The host of genius (I am not speaking of
myself) was expensive to entertain; it stopped late, it dined heavily, it smoked
on the lawn, and remained sipping cold drinks until past midnight. Its admirers
remained too: sometimes some of the host of genius borrowed money and didn't
return it; the host of genius was always either painting a picture which I was
expected to buy, or giving a concert which we were expected to patronise, or
having a "ben" for which we had to take stalls. From one of the
admirers of the host of genius I bought a pair of horses, they were not good
horses; from another I purchased a phaeton, it was a bad one! I confess I
did not like the manner in which some of the host of genius used to climb up the
walls and kiss their hands to Miss Crump's young ladies who were walking in the
next garden, and I owned to Miss Crump that it was too strong retaliation even
for the pianoforte practice at five A.M.: they could not take any liberties with
my neighbour on the other side, for he was Dr. Winks, the celebrated mad-doctor,
and we were always in a state of mental terror lest some of his patients should
get loose and come over the wall at us. However, the life at Agatha Villa,
though merry, was brief. Through my own exertions, and those of the host of
genius, I ran through a couple of thousand pounds in two years, and then the
Cotopaxi Grand Imperial Mining Company, in which I had invested the rest of
Uncle Snape's money, went to smash, and I had to give up Agatha Villa.
The thought of having to return to London and its dreariness,
in the summer which had just set in, was the bitterest morsel of that tart
humility which we were about to partake of; and you may judge, therefore, with
what delight I received an offer of a country-house, rent free, for [-200-]
a year. "It's a capital old house, any way," said old Cutler,
its owner, "a capital house, near town, and yet thoroughly in the country.
I'm going to take my gal abroad for a year to see the Continent, and you're not
only welcome to live at Wollops, but I shall be obliged to you for keeping the
place aired. Now, Wollops was a house, if you like ! An old red-brick
Queen-Anne mansion, with little deep mullioned diamond-paned windows, with
quaint old armour in the hall, and a portrait of Brabazon de Wollop, temp.
Charles the Second, over the chimney-piece; there are long passages, and
tapestry-hung rooms, and oak corridors, and secret doors, and a wine-cellar so
like a subterraneous dungeon, that my heart sank within me every time I entered
it; there were likewise numerous bed-rooms, with tremendous bedsteads, all
plumes and hangings; and a stone kitchen like that one in the Tower of London
which Mr. Cruikshank drew. The house stood in the middle of splendid grounds;
there was a carriage drive tip to it; its drawing and dining room windows looked
out upon a beautiful lawn dotted here and there with brilliant beds of verbena
and scarlet geranium; and there was a lake, and a kitchen-garden, and an
orchard, all kept up at Mr. Cutler's expense ; and everything was so noble and
so grand, that a friend, who knew the reason of our quitting Agatha Villa,
remarked, on seeing Wollops, that one more attempt at retrenchment would take us
into Buckingham Palace. From our windows we looked away over green fields, to
Harrow on the one side, to Highgate on the other, and it was worth something
when coming
From brawling courts
And dusty purlieus of the law,
to feel your feet on the turf, with the sweet fresh air blowing round you, and
that soft silence, broken only by the pipe of bird or hum of insect, which is
the greatest of all rural charms to an overworked Londoner. Wollops was too far [-201-]
for the host of genius, as they could not have got back at night, so we
only had our own friends and the family. I am happy to say that the
croquet-parties at Wollops were the cause of marrying off my wife's two younger
sisters: one to a revising barrister, and the other to a county-court judge
while the elder girls, who had been very uncivil about what they called the
"goings on" at Agatha Villa, were so delighted with Wollops that they
forgave us off-hand, and each came and stayed a month. All this was during the
summer weather; the autumn of that year was as good as summer, warm, clear, and
sunny, and we were thoroughly happy. But, one fatal morning in the middle of
November we got up and found winter had arrived; the wind roared through the old
house, and moaned and shrieked in the long corridors; the rain dashed against
the badly-fitting romantic windows, and lodged in large pools on their inner
sills; the water-pipe along the house was choked, overflowed, soaked through the
old red brick, which was just like sponge, and coming through the drawing-room
wall, spoilt my proof copy of Landseer's Titania. The big bare trees outside
rattled and clashed their huge arms, the gardeners removed everything from the
beds, the turf grew into rank grass, and the storms from Harrow to Highgate were
awful in their intensity. Inside the house, the fires would not light for some
time, and then the chimneys smoked awfully, and the big grates consumed scuttles
of coals and huge logs of wood without giving out the smallest heat. The big
hall was like a well; after dark the children were afraid to go about the
passages; and the servants came in a body and resigned, on account of the damp
of the stone kitchen. Gradually the damp penetrated everywhere; lucifers would
not strike, a furry growth came upon the looking-glass, the leather chairs all
stuck to us when we attempted to rise. My wife wanted us to leave Wollops, but I
was firm - for two nights afterwards; then the rats, [-202-]
disturbed by the rains from their usual holes, rushed into our bed-room
and danced wildly over us. The next morning at six A.M. I despatched the
gardener to town, to bring out three cabs, and removed my family in those
vehicles to lodgings in Cockspur Street, where I am at present.