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_ I had parted from the small bird at somewhere about four o'clock in
the morning, when he had got out at Arras, and had been received by
two shovel-hats in waiting at the station, who presented an
appropriately ornithological and crow-like appearance. My
compatriot and I had gone on to Paris; my compatriot enlightening
me occasionally with a long list of the enormous grievances of
French railway travelling: every one of which, as I am a sinner,
was perfectly new to me, though I have as much experience of French
railways as most uncommercials. I had left him at the terminus
(through his conviction, against all explanation and remonstrance,
that his baggage-ticket was his passenger-ticket), insisting in a
very high temper to the functionary on duty, that in his own
personal identity he was four packages weighing so many
kilogrammes--as if he had been Cassim Baba! I had bathed and
breakfasted, and was strolling on the bright quays. The subject of
my meditations was the question whether it is positively in the
essence and nature of things, as a certain school of Britons would
seem to think it, that a Capital must be ensnared and enslaved
before it can be made beautiful: when I lifted up my eyes and
found that my feet, straying like my mind, had brought me to Notre-
Dame.
That is to say, Notre-Dame was before me, but there was a large
open space between us. A very little while gone, I had left that
space covered with buildings densely crowded; and now it was
cleared for some new wonder in the way of public Street, Place,
Garden, Fountain, or all four. Only the obscene little Morgue,
slinking on the brink of the river and soon to come down, was left
there, looking mortally ashamed of itself, and supremely wicked. I
had but glanced at this old acquaintance, when I beheld an airy
procession coming round in front of Notre-Dame, past the great
hospital. It had something of a Masaniello look, with fluttering
striped curtains in the midst of it, and it came dancing round the
cathedral in the liveliest manner.
I was speculating on a marriage in Blouse-life, or a Christening,
or some other domestic festivity which I would see out, when I
found, from the talk of a quick rush of Blouses past me, that it
was a Body coming to the Morgue. Having never before chanced upon
this initiation, I constituted myself a Blouse likewise, and ran
into the Morgue with the rest. It was a very muddy day, and we
took in a quantity of mire with us, and the procession coming in
upon our heels brought a quantity more. The procession was in the
highest spirits, and consisted of idlers who had come with the
curtained litter from its starting-place, and of all the
reinforcements it had picked up by the way. It set the litter down
in the midst of the Morgue, and then two Custodians proclaimed
aloud that we were all 'invited' to go out. This invitation was
rendered the more pressing, if not the more flattering, by our
being shoved out, and the folding-gates being barred upon us.
Those who have never seen the Morgue, may see it perfectly, by
presenting to themselves on indifferently paved coach-house
accessible from the street by a pair of folding-gates; on the left
of the coach-house, occupying its width, any large London tailor's
or linendraper's plate-glass window reaching to the ground; within
the window, on two rows of inclined plane, what the coach-house has
to show; hanging above, like irregular stalactites from the roof of
a cave, a quantity of clothes--the clothes of the dead and buried
shows of the coach-house.
We had been excited in the highest degree by seeing the Custodians
pull off their coats and tuck up their shirt-sleeves, as the
procession came along. It looked so interestingly like business.
Shut out in the muddy street, we now became quite ravenous to know
all about it. Was it river, pistol, knife, love, gambling,
robbery, hatred, how many stabs, how many bullets, fresh or
decomposed, suicide or murder? All wedged together, and all
staring at one another with our heads thrust forward, we propounded
these inquiries and a hundred more such. Imperceptibly, it came to
be known that Monsieur the tall and sallow mason yonder, was
acquainted with the facts. Would Monsieur the tall and sallow
mason, surged at by a new wave of us, have the goodness to impart?
It was but a poor old man, passing along the street under one of
the new buildings, on whom a stone had fallen, and who had tumbled
dead. His age? Another wave surged up against the tall and sallow
mason, and our wave swept on and broke, and he was any age from
sixty-five to ninety.
An old man was not much: moreover, we could have wished he had
been killed by human agency--his own, or somebody else's: the
latter, preferable--but our comfort was, that he had nothing about
him to lead to his identification, and that his people must seek
him here. Perhaps they were waiting dinner for him even now? We
liked that. Such of us as had pocket-handkerchiefs took a slow,
intense, protracted wipe at our noses, and then crammed our
handkerchiefs into the breast of our blouses. Others of us who had
no handkerchiefs administered a similar relief to our overwrought
minds, by means of prolonged smears or wipes of our mouths on our
sleeves. One man with a gloomy malformation of brow--a homicidal
worker in white-lead, to judge from his blue tone of colour, and a
certain flavour of paralysis pervading him--got his coat-collar
between his teeth, and bit at it with an appetite. Several decent
women arrived upon the outskirts of the crowd, and prepared to
launch themselves into the dismal coach-house when opportunity
should come; among them, a pretty young mother, pretending to bite
the forefinger of her baby-boy, kept it between her rosy lips that
it might be handy for guiding to point at the show. Meantime, all
faces were turned towards the building, and we men waited with a
fixed and stern resolution:- for the most part with folded arms.
Surely, it was the only public French sight these uncommercial eyes
had seen, at which the expectant people did not form en queue. But
there was no such order of arrangement here; nothing but a general
determination to make a rush for it, and a disposition to object to
some boys who had mounted on the two stone posts by the hinges of
the gates, with the design of swooping in when the hinges should
turn.
Now, they turned, and we rushed! Great pressure, and a scream or
two from the front. Then a laugh or two, some expressions of
disappointment, and a slackening of the pressure and subsidence of
the struggle.--Old man not there.
'But what would you have?' the Custodian reasonably argues, as he
looks out at his little door. 'Patience, patience! We make his
toilette, gentlemen. He will be exposed presently. It is
necessary to proceed according to rule. His toilette is not made
all at a blow. He will be exposed in good time, gentlemen, in good
time.' And so retires, smoking, with a wave of his sleeveless arm
towards the window, importing, 'Entertain yourselves in the
meanwhile with the other curiosities. Fortunately the Museum is
not empty to-day.'
Who would have thought of public fickleness even at the Morgue?
But there it was, on that occasion. Three lately popular articles
that had been attracting greatly when the litter was first descried
coming dancing round the corner by the great cathedral, were so
completely deposed now, that nobody save two little girls (one
showing them to a doll) would look at them. Yet the chief of the
three, the article in the front row, had received jagged injury of
the left temple; and the other two in the back row, the drowned two
lying side by side with their heads very slightly turned towards
each other, seemed to be comparing notes about it. Indeed, those
two of the back row were so furtive of appearance, and so (in their
puffed way) assassinatingly knowing as to the one of the front,
that it was hard to think the three had never come together in
their lives, and were only chance companions after death. Whether
or no this was the general, as it was the uncommercial, fancy, it
is not to be disputed that the group had drawn exceedingly within
ten minutes. Yet now, the inconstant public turned its back upon
them, and even leaned its elbows carelessly against the bar outside
the window and shook off the mud from its shoes, and also lent and
borrowed fire for pipes.
Custodian re-enters from his door. 'Again once, gentlemen, you are
invited--' No further invitation necessary. Ready dash into the
street. Toilette finished. Old man coming out.
This time, the interest was grown too hot to admit of toleration of
the boys on the stone posts. The homicidal white-lead worker made
a pounce upon one boy who was hoisting himself up, and brought him
to earth amidst general commendation. Closely stowed as we were,
we yet formed into groups--groups of conversation, without
separation from the mass--to discuss the old man. Rivals of the
tall and sallow mason sprang into being, and here again was popular
inconstancy. These rivals attracted audiences, and were greedily
listened to; and whereas they had derived their information solely
from the tall and sallow one, officious members of the crowd now
sought to enlighten HIM on their authority. Changed by this social
experience into an iron-visaged and inveterate misanthrope, the
mason glared at mankind, and evidently cherished in his breast the
wish that the whole of the present company could change places with
the deceased old man. And now listeners became inattentive, and
people made a start forward at a slight sound, and an unholy fire
kindled in the public eye, and those next the gates beat at them
impatiently, as if they were of the cannibal species and hungry.
Again the hinges creaked, and we rushed. Disorderly pressure for
some time ensued before the uncommercial unit got figured into the
front row of the sum. It was strange to see so much heat and
uproar seething about one poor spare, white-haired old man, quiet
for evermore. He was calm of feature and undisfigured, as he lay
on his back--having been struck upon the hinder part of his head,
and thrown forward--and something like a tear or two had started
from the closed eyes, and lay wet upon the face. The uncommercial
interest, sated at a glance, directed itself upon the striving
crowd on either side and behind: wondering whether one might have
guessed, from the expression of those faces merely, what kind of
sight they were looking at. The differences of expression were not
many. There was a little pity, but not much, and that mostly with
a selfish touch in it--as who would say, 'Shall I, poor I, look
like that, when the time comes!' There was more of a secretly
brooding contemplation and curiosity, as 'That man I don't like,
and have the grudge against; would such be his appearance, if some
one--not to mention names--by any chance gave him an knock?' There
was a wolfish stare at the object, in which homicidal white-lead
worker shone conspicuous. And there was a much more general,
purposeless, vacant staring at it--like looking at waxwork, without
a catalogue, and not knowing what to make of it. But all these
expressions concurred in possessing the one underlying expression
of LOOKING AT SOMETHING THAT COULD NOT RETURN A LOOK. The
uncommercial notice had established this as very remarkable, when a
new pressure all at once coming up from the street pinioned him
ignominiously, and hurried him into the arms (now sleeved again) of
the Custodian smoking at his door, and answering questions, between
puffs, with a certain placid meritorious air of not being proud,
though high in office. And mentioning pride, it may be observed,
by the way, that one could not well help investing the original
sole occupant of the front row with an air depreciatory of the
legitimate attraction of the poor old man: while the two in the
second row seemed to exult at this superseded popularity.
Pacing presently round the garden of the Tower of St. Jacques de la
Boucherie, and presently again in front of the Hotel de Ville, I
called to mind a certain desolate open-air Morgue that I happened
to light upon in London, one day in the hard winter of 1861, and
which seemed as strange to me, at the time of seeing it, as if I
had found it in China. Towards that hour of a winter's afternoon
when the lamp-lighters are beginning to light the lamps in the
streets a little before they are wanted, because the darkness
thickens fast and soon, I was walking in from the country on the
northern side of the Regent's Park--hard frozen and deserted--when
I saw an empty Hansom cab drive up to the lodge at Gloucester-gate,
and the driver with great agitation call to the man there: who
quickly reached a long pole from a tree, and, deftly collared by
the driver, jumped to the step of his little seat, and so the
Hansom rattled out at the gate, galloping over the iron-bound road.
I followed running, though not so fast but that when I came to the
right-hand Canal Bridge, near the cross-path to Chalk Farm, the
Hansom was stationary, the horse was smoking hot, the long pole was
idle on the ground, and the driver and the park-keeper were looking
over the bridge parapet. Looking over too, I saw, lying on the
towing-path with her face turned up towards us, a woman, dead a day
or two, and under thirty, as I guessed, poorly dressed in black.
The feet were lightly crossed at the ankles, and the dark hair, all
pushed back from the face, as though that had been the last action
of her desperate hands, streamed over the ground. Dabbled all
about her, was the water and the broken ice that had dropped from
her dress, and had splashed as she was got out. The policeman who
had just got her out, and the passing costermonger who had helped
him, were standing near the body; the latter with that stare at it
which I have likened to being at a waxwork exhibition without a
catalogue; the former, looking over his stock, with professional
stiffness and coolness, in the direction in which the bearers he
had sent for were expected. So dreadfully forlorn, so dreadfully
sad, so dreadfully mysterious, this spectacle of our dear sister
here departed! A barge came up, breaking the floating ice and the
silence, and a woman steered it. The man with the horse that towed
it, cared so little for the body, that the stumbling hoofs had been
among the hair, and the tow-rope had caught and turned the head,
before our cry of horror took him to the bridle. At which sound
the steering woman looked up at us on the bridge, with contempt
unutterable, and then looking down at the body with a similar
expression--as if it were made in another likeness from herself,
had been informed with other passions, had been lost by other
chances, had had another nature dragged down to perdition--steered
a spurning streak of mud at it, and passed on.
A better experience, but also of the Morgue kind, in which chance
happily made me useful in a slight degree, arose to my remembrance
as I took my way by the Boulevard de Sebastopol to the brighter
scenes of Paris.
The thing happened, say five-and-twenty years ago. I was a modest
young uncommercial then, and timid and inexperienced. Many suns
and winds have browned me in the line, but those were my pale days.
Having newly taken the lease of a house in a certain distinguished
metropolitan parish--a house which then appeared to me to be a
frightfully first-class Family Mansion, involving awful
responsibilities--I became the prey of a Beadle. I think the
Beadle must have seen me going in or coming out, and must have
observed that I tottered under the weight of my grandeur. Or he
may have been in hiding under straw when I bought my first horse
(in the desirable stable-yard attached to the first-class Family
Mansion), and when the vendor remarked to me, in an original
manner, on bringing him for approval, taking his cloth off and
smacking him, 'There, Sir! THERE'S a Orse!' And when I said
gallantly, 'How much do you want for him?' and when the vendor
said, 'No more than sixty guineas, from you,' and when I said
smartly, 'Why not more than sixty from ME?' And when he said
crushingly, 'Because upon my soul and body he'd be considered cheap
at seventy, by one who understood the subject--but you don't.'--I
say, the Beadle may have been in hiding under straw, when this
disgrace befell me, or he may have noted that I was too raw and
young an Atlas to carry the first-class Family Mansion in a knowing
manner. Be this as it may, the Beadle did what Melancholy did to
the youth in Gray's Elegy--he marked me for his own. And the way
in which the Beadle did it, was this: he summoned me as a Juryman
on his Coroner's Inquests.
In my first feverish alarm I repaired 'for safety and for succour'-
-like those sagacious Northern shepherds who, having had no
previous reason whatever to believe in young Norval, very prudently
did not originate the hazardous idea of believing in him--to a deep
householder. This profound man informed me that the Beadle counted
on my buying him off; on my bribing him not to summon me; and that
if I would attend an Inquest with a cheerful countenance, and
profess alacrity in that branch of my country's service, the Beadle
would be disheartened, and would give up the game.
I roused my energies, and the next time the wily Beadle summoned
me, I went. The Beadle was the blankest Beadle I have ever looked
on when I answered to my name; and his discomfiture gave me courage
to go through with it.
We were impanelled to inquire concerning the death of a very little
mite of a child. It was the old miserable story. Whether the
mother had committed the minor offence of concealing the birth, or
whether she had committed the major offence of killing the child,
was the question on which we were wanted. We must commit her on
one of the two issues.
The Inquest came off in the parish workhouse, and I have yet a
lively impression that I was unanimously received by my brother
Jurymen as a brother of the utmost conceivable insignificance.
Also, that before we began, a broker who had lately cheated me
fearfully in the matter of a pair of card-tables, was for the
utmost rigour of the law. I remember that we sat in a sort of
board-room, on such very large square horse-hair chairs that I
wondered what race of Patagonians they were made for; and further,
that an undertaker gave me his card when we were in the full moral
freshness of having just been sworn, as 'an inhabitant that was
newly come into the parish, and was likely to have a young family.'
The case was then stated to us by the Coroner, and then we went
down-stairs--led by the plotting Beadle--to view the body. From
that day to this, the poor little figure, on which that sounding
legal appellation was bestowed, has lain in the same place and with
the same surroundings, to my thinking. In a kind of crypt devoted
to the warehousing of the parochial coffins, and in the midst of a
perfect Panorama of coffins of all sizes, it was stretched on a
box; the mother had put it in her box--this box--almost as soon as
it was born, and it had been presently found there. It had been
opened, and neatly sewn up, and regarded from that point of view,
it looked like a stuffed creature. It rested on a clean white
cloth, with a surgical instrument or so at hand, and regarded from
that point of view, it looked as if the cloth were 'laid,' and the
Giant were coming to dinner. There was nothing repellent about the
poor piece of innocence, and it demanded a mere form of looking at.
So, we looked at an old pauper who was going about among the
coffins with a foot rule, as if he were a case of Self-Measurement;
and we looked at one another; and we said the place was well
whitewashed anyhow; and then our conversational powers as a British
Jury flagged, and the foreman said, 'All right, gentlemen? Back
again, Mr. Beadle!'
The miserable young creature who had given birth to this child
within a very few days, and who had cleaned the cold wet door-steps
immediately afterwards, was brought before us when we resumed our
horse-hair chairs, and was present during the proceedings. She had
a horse-hair chair herself, being very weak and ill; and I remember
how she turned to the unsympathetic nurse who attended her, and who
might have been the figure-head of a pauper-ship, and how she hid
her face and sobs and tears upon that wooden shoulder. I remember,
too, how hard her mistress was upon her (she was a servant-of-all-
work), and with what a cruel pertinacity that piece of Virtue spun
her thread of evidence double, by intertwisting it with the
sternest thread of construction. Smitten hard by the terrible low
wail from the utterly friendless orphan girl, which never ceased
during the whole inquiry, I took heart to ask this witness a
question or two, which hopefully admitted of an answer that might
give a favourable turn to the case. She made the turn as little
favourable as it could be, but it did some good, and the Coroner,
who was nobly patient and humane (he was the late Mr. Wakley), cast
a look of strong encouragement in my direction. Then, we had the
doctor who had made the examination, and the usual tests as to
whether the child was born alive; but he was a timid, muddle-headed
doctor, and got confused and contradictory, and wouldn't say this,
and couldn't answer for that, and the immaculate broker was too
much for him, and our side slid back again. However, I tried
again, and the Coroner backed me again, for which I ever afterwards
felt grateful to him as I do now to his memory; and we got another
favourable turn, out of some other witness, some member of the
family with a strong prepossession against the sinner; and I think
we had the doctor back again; and I know that the Coroner summed up
for our side, and that I and my British brothers turned round to
discuss our verdict, and get ourselves into great difficulties with
our large chairs and the broker. At that stage of the case I tried
hard again, being convinced that I had cause for it; and at last we
found for the minor offence of only concealing the birth; and the
poor desolate creature, who had been taken out during our
deliberation, being brought in again to be told of the verdict,
then dropped upon her knees before us, with protestations that we
were right--protestations among the most affecting that I have ever
heard in my life--and was carried away insensible.
(In private conversation after this was all over, the Coroner
showed me his reasons as a trained surgeon, for perceiving it to be
impossible that the child could, under the most favourable
circumstances, have drawn many breaths, in the very doubtful case
of its having ever breathed at all; this, owing to the discovery of
some foreign matter in the windpipe, quite irreconcilable with many
moments of life.)
When the agonised girl had made those final protestations, I had
seen her face, and it was in unison with her distracted heartbroken
voice, and it was very moving. It certainly did not impress me by
any beauty that it had, and if I ever see it again in another world
I shall only know it by the help of some new sense or intelligence.
But it came to me in my sleep that night, and I selfishly dismissed
it in the most efficient way I could think of. I caused some extra
care to be taken of her in the prison, and counsel to be retained
for her defence when she was tried at the Old Bailey; and her
sentence was lenient, and her history and conduct proved that it
was right. In doing the little I did for her, I remember to have
had the kind help of some gentle-hearted functionary to whom I
addressed myself--but what functionary I have long forgotten--who I
suppose was officially present at the Inquest.
I regard this as a very notable uncommercial experience, because
this good came of a Beadle. And to the best of my knowledge,
information, and belief, it is the only good that ever did come of
a Beadle since the first Beadle put on his cocked-hat. _
Read next: CHAPTER XX - BIRTHDAY CELEBRATIONS
Read previous: CHAPTER XVIII - THE CALAIS NIGHT MAIL
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