CHAPTER IV.
ANOTHER FORM OF DESERT.
It was Weymouth which he had just entered. Weymouth then was not therespectable and fine Weymouth of to-day.
Ancient Weymouth did not present, like the present one, anirreproachable rectangular quay, with an inn and a statue in honour ofGeorge III. This resulted from the fact that George III. had not yetbeen born. For the same reason they had not yet designed on the slope ofthe green hill towards the east, fashioned flat on the soil by cuttingaway the turf and leaving the bare chalk to the view, the white horse,an acre long, bearing the king upon his back, and always turning, inhonour of George III., his tail to the city. These honours, however,were deserved. George III., having lost in his old age the intellect hehad never possessed in his youth, was not responsible for the calamitiesof his reign. He was an innocent. Why not erect statues to him?
Weymouth, a hundred and eighty years ago, was about as symmetrical as agame of spillikins in confusion. In legends it is said that Astarothtravelled over the world, carrying on her back a wallet which containedeverything, even good women in their houses. A pell-mell of sheds thrownfrom her devil's bag would give an idea of that irregular Weymouth--thegood women in the sheds included. The Music Hall remains as a specimenof those buildings. A confusion of wooden dens, carved and eaten byworms (which carve in another fashion)--shapeless, overhangingbuildings, some with pillars, leaning one against the other for supportagainst the sea wind, and leaving between them awkward spaces of narrowand winding channels, lanes, and passages, often flooded by theequinoctial tides; a heap of old grandmother houses, crowded round agrandfather church--such was Weymouth; a sort of old Norman villagethrown up on the coast of England.
The traveller who entered the tavern, now replaced by the hotel, insteadof paying royally his twenty-five francs for a fried sole and a bottleof wine, had to suffer the humiliation of eating a pennyworth of soupmade of fish--which soup, by-the-bye, was very good. Wretched fare!
The deserted child, carrying the foundling, passed through the firststreet, then the second, then the third. He raised his eyes, seeking inthe higher stories and in the roofs a lighted window-pane; but all wereclosed and dark. At intervals he knocked at the doors. No one answered.Nothing makes the heart so like a stone as being warm between sheets.The noise and the shaking had at length awakened the infant. He knewthis because he felt her suck his cheek. She did not cry, believing himher mother.
He was about to turn and wander long, perhaps, in the intersections ofthe Scrambridge lanes, where there were then more cultivated plots thandwellings, more thorn hedges than houses; but fortunately he struck intoa passage which exists to this day near Trinity schools. This passageled him to a water-brink, where there was a roughly built quay with aparapet, and to the right he made out a bridge. It was the bridge overthe Wey, connecting Weymouth with Melcombe Regis, and under the archesof which the Backwater joins the harbour.
Weymouth, a hamlet, was then the suburb of Melcombe Regis, a city andport. Now Melcombe Regis is a parish of Weymouth. The village hasabsorbed the city. It was the bridge which did the work. Bridges arestrange vehicles of suction, which inhale the population, and sometimesswell one river-bank at the expense of its opposite neighbour.
The boy went to the bridge, which at that period was a covered timberstructure. He crossed it. Thanks to its roofing, there was no snow onthe planks. His bare feet had a moment's comfort as they crossed them.Having passed over the bridge, he was in Melcombe Regis. There werefewer wooden houses than stone ones there. He was no longer in thevillage; he was in the city.
The bridge opened on a rather fine street called St. Thomas's Street. Heentered it. Here and there were high carved gables and shop-fronts. Heset to knocking at the doors again: he had no strength left to call orshout.
At Melcombe Regis, as at Weymouth, no one was stirring. The doors wereall carefully double-locked, The windows were covered by their shutters,as the eyes by their lids. Every precaution had been taken to avoidbeing roused by disagreeable surprises. The little wanderer wassuffering the indefinable depression made by a sleeping town. Itssilence, as of a paralyzed ants' nest, makes the head swim. All itslethargies mingle their nightmares, its slumbers are a crowd, and fromits human bodies lying prone there arises a vapour of dreams. Sleep hasgloomy associates beyond this life: the decomposed thoughts of thesleepers float above them in a mist which is both of death and of life,and combine with the possible, which has also, perhaps, the power ofthought, as it floats in space. Hence arise entanglements. Dreams, thoseclouds, interpose their folds and their transparencies over that star,the mind. Above those closed eyelids, where vision has taken the placeof sight, a sepulchral disintegration of outlines and appearancesdilates itself into impalpability. Mysterious, diffused existencesamalgamate themselves with life on that border of death, which sleep is.Those larvae and souls mingle in the air. Even he who sleeps not feels amedium press upon him full of sinister life. The surrounding chimera,in which he suspects a reality, impedes him. The waking man, wending hisway amidst the sleep phantoms of others, unconsciously pushes backpassing shadows, has, or imagines that he has, a vague fear of adversecontact with the invisible, and feels at every moment the obscurepressure of a hostile encounter which immediately dissolves. There issomething of the effect of a forest in the nocturnal diffusion ofdreams.
This is what is called being afraid without reason.
What a man feels a child feels still more.
The uneasiness of nocturnal fear, increased by the spectral houses,increased the weight of the sad burden under which he was struggling.
He entered Conycar Lane, and perceived at the end of that passage theBackwater, which he took for the ocean. He no longer knew in whatdirection the sea lay. He retraced his steps, struck to the left byMaiden Street, and returned as far as St. Alban's Row.
There, by chance and without selection, he knocked violently at anyhouse that he happened to pass. His blows, on which he was expending hislast energies, were jerky and without aim; now ceasing altogether for atime, now renewed as if in irritation. It was the violence of his feverstriking against the doors.
One voice answered.
That of Time.
Three o'clock tolled slowly behind him from the old belfry of St.Nicholas.
Then all sank into silence again.
That no inhabitant should have opened a lattice may appear surprising.Nevertheless that silence is in a great measure to be explained. We mustremember that in January 1790 they were just over a somewhat severeoutbreak of the plague in London, and that the fear of receiving sickvagabonds caused a diminution of hospitality everywhere. People wouldnot even open their windows for fear of inhaling the poison.
The child felt the coldness of men more terribly than the coldness ofnight. The coldness of men is intentional. He felt a tightening on hissinking heart which he had not known on the open plains. Now he hadentered into the midst of life, and remained alone. This was the summitof misery. The pitiless desert he had understood; the unrelenting townwas too much to bear.
The hour, the strokes of which he had just counted, had been anotherblow. Nothing is so freezing in certain situations as the voice of thehour. It is a declaration of indifference. It is Eternity saying, "Whatdoes it matter to me?"
He stopped, and it is not certain that, in that miserable minute, he didnot ask himself whether it would not be easier to lie down there anddie. However, the little infant leaned her head against his shoulder,and fell asleep again.
This blind confidence set him onwards again. He whom all supports werefailing felt that he was himself a basis of support. Irresistiblesummons of duty!
Neither such ideas nor such a situation belonged to his age. It isprobable that he did not understand them. It was a matter of instinct.He did what he chanced to do.
He set out again in the direction of Johnstone Row. But now he no longerwalked; he dragged himself along. He left St. Mary's Street to the left,made zigzags through lanes, and at the end
of a winding passage foundhimself in a rather wide open space. It was a piece of waste land notbuilt upon--probably the spot where Chesterfield Place now stands. Thehouses ended there. He perceived the sea to the right, and scarcelyanything more of the town to his left.
What was to become of him? Here was the country again. To the east greatinclined planes of snow marked out the wide slopes of Radipole. Shouldhe continue this journey? Should he advance and re-enter the solitudes?Should he return and re-enter the streets? What was he to do betweenthose two silences--the mute plain and the deaf city? Which of the tworefusals should he choose?
There is the anchor of mercy. There is also the look of piteousness. Itwas that look which the poor little despairing wanderer threw aroundhim.
All at once he heard a menace.