Mugby Junction

Published：2026-07-29 22:51:01 Source: best durable karaoke machines for kids Author: Toy Trucks

Transcribed from the 1894 Chapman and top rated talking learning toysHall “Christmas Stories”edition by David Price, email [email protected]

MUGBY JUNCTION

CHAPTER I—BARBOX BROTHERS

I.

“Guard!  What place is this?”

“Mugby Junction, sir.”

“A windy place!”

“Yes, it mostly is, sir.”

“And looks comfortless indeed!”

“Yes, it generally does, sir.”

“Is it a rainy night still?”

“Pours, sir.”

“Open the door.  I’ll get out.”

“You’ll have, sir,” said the guard, glisteningwith drops of wet, and looking at the tearful face of his watch by thelight of his lantern as the traveller descended, “three minuteshere.”

“More, I think.—For I am not going on.”

“Thought you had a through ticket, sir?”

“So I have, but I shall sacrifice the rest of it.  I wantmy luggage.”

“Please to come to the van and point it out, sir.  Begood enough to look very sharp, sir.  Not a moment to spare.”

The guard hurried to the luggage van, and the traveller hurried afterhim.  The guard got into it, and the traveller looked into it.

“Those two large black portmanteaus in the corner where yourlight shines.  Those are mine.”

“Name upon ’em, sir?”

“Barbox Brothers.”

“Stand clear, sir, if you please.  One.  Two. Right!”

Lamp waved.  Signal lights ahead already changing.  Shriekfrom engine.  Train gone.

“Mugby Junction!” said the traveller, pulling up thewoollen muffler round his throat with both hands.  “At pastthree o’clock of a tempestuous morning!  So!”

He spoke to himself.  There was no one else to speak to. Perhaps, though there had been any one else to speak to, he would havepreferred to speak to himself.  Speaking to himself he spoke toa man within five years of fifty either way, who had turned grey toosoon, like a neglected fire; a man of pondering habit, brooding carriageof the head, and suppressed internal voice; a man with many indicationson him of having been much alone.

He stood unnoticed on the dreary platform, except by the rain andby the wind.  Those two vigilant assailants made a rush at him. “Very well,” said he, yielding.  “It signifiesnothing to me to what quarter I turn my face.”

Thus, at Mugby Junction, at past three o’clock of a tempestuousmorning, the traveller went where the weather drove him.

Not but what he could make a stand when he was so minded, for, comingto the end of the roofed shelter (it is of considerable extent at MugbyJunction), and looking out upon the dark night, with a yet darker spirit-wingof storm beating its wild way through it, he faced about, and held hisown as ruggedly in the difficult direction as he had held it in theeasier one.  Thus, with a steady step, the traveller went up anddown, up and down, up and down, seeking nothing and finding it.

A place replete with shadowy shapes, this Mugby Junction in the blackhours of the four-and-twenty.  Mysterious goods trains, coveredwith palls and gliding on like vast weird funerals, conveying themselvesguiltily away from the presence of the few lighted lamps, as if theirfreight had come to a secret and unlawful end.  Half-miles of coalpursuing in a Detective manner, following when they lead, stopping whenthey stop, backing when they back.  Red-hot embers showering outupon the ground, down this dark avenue, and down the other, as if torturingfires were being raked clear; concurrently, shrieks and groans and grindsinvading the ear, as if the tortured were at the height of their suffering. Iron-barred cages full of cattle jangling by midway, the drooping beastswith horns entangled, eyes frozen with terror, and mouths too: at leastthey have long icicles (or what seem so) hanging from their lips. Unknown languages in the air, conspiring in red, green, and white characters. An earthquake, accompanied with thunder and lightning, going up expressto London.  Now, all quiet, all rusty, wind and rain in possession,lamps extinguished, Mugby Junction dead and indistinct, with its robedrawn over its head, like Cæsar.

Now, too, as the belated traveller plodded up and down, a shadowytrain went by him in the gloom which was no other than the train ofa life.  From whatsoever intangible deep cutting or dark tunnelit emerged, here it came, unsummoned and unannounced, stealing uponhim, and passing away into obscurity.  Here mournfully went bya child who had never had a childhood or known a parent, inseparablefrom a youth with a bitter sense of his namelessness, coupled to a manthe enforced business of whose best years had been distasteful and oppressive,linked to an ungrateful friend, dragging after him a woman once beloved. Attendant, with many a clank and wrench, were lumbering cares, darkmeditations, huge dim disappointments, monotonous years, a long jarringline of the discords of a solitary and unhappy existence.

“—Yours, sir?”

The traveller recalled his eyes from the waste into which they hadbeen staring, and fell back a step or so under the abruptness, and perhapsthe chance appropriateness, of the question.

“Oh!  My thoughts were not here for the moment. Yes.  Yes.  Those two portmanteaus are mine.  Are youa Porter?”

“On Porter’s wages, sir.  But I am Lamps.”

The traveller looked a little confused.

“Who did you say you are?”

“Lamps, sir,” showing an oily cloth in his hand, as fartherexplanation.

“Surely, surely.  Is there any hotel or tavern here?”

“Not exactly here, sir.  There is a Refreshment Room here,but—”  Lamps, with a mighty serious look, gave hishead a warning roll that plainly added—“but it’s ablessed circumstance for you that it’s not open.”

“You couldn’t recommend it, I see, if it was available?”

“Ask your pardon, sir.  If it was—?”

“Open?”

“It ain’t my place, as a paid servant of the company,to give my opinion on any of the company’s toepics,”—hepronounced it more like toothpicks,—“beyond lamp-ile andcottons,” returned Lamps in a confidential tone; “but, speakingas a man, I wouldn’t recommend my father (if he was to come tolife again) to go and try how he’d be treated at the RefreshmentRoom.  Not speaking as a man, no, I would not.”

The traveller nodded conviction.  “I suppose I can putup in the town?  There is a town here?”  For the traveller(though a stay-at-home compared with most travellers) had been, likemany others, carried on the steam winds and the iron tides through thatJunction before, without having ever, as one might say, gone ashorethere.

“Oh yes, there’s a town, sir!  Anyways, there’stown enough to put up in.  But,” following the glance ofthe other at his luggage, “this is a very dead time of the nightwith us, sir.  The deadest time.  I might a’most callit our deadest and buriedest time.”

“No porters about?”

“Well, sir, you see,” returned Lamps, confidential again,“they in general goes off with the gas.  That’s howit is.  And they seem to have overlooked you, through your walkingto the furder end of the platform.  But, in about twelve minutesor so, she may be up.”

“Who may be up?”

“The three forty-two, sir.  She goes off in a sidin’till the Up X passes, and then she”—here an air of hopefulvagueness pervaded Lamps—“does all as lays in her power.”

“I doubt if I comprehend the arrangement.”

“I doubt if anybody do, sir.  She’s a Parliamentary,sir.  And, you see, a Parliamentary, or a Skirmishun—”

“Do you mean an Excursion?”

“That’s it, sir.—A Parliamentary or a Skirmishun,she mostly doesgo off into a sidin’.  But, when shecanget a chance, she’s whistled out of it, and she’swhistled up into doin’ all as,”—Lamps again wore theair of a highly sanguine man who hoped for the best,—“allas lays in her power.”

He then explained that the porters on duty, being required to bein attendance on the Parliamentary matron in question, would doubtlessturn up with the gas.  In the meantime, if the gentleman wouldnot very much object to the smell of lamp-oil, and would accept thewarmth of his little room—The gentleman, being by this time verycold, instantly closed with the proposal.

A greasy little cabin it was, suggestive, to the sense of smell,of a cabin in a Whaler.  But there was a bright fire burning inits rusty grate, and on the floor there stood a wooden stand of newlytrimmed and lighted lamps, ready for carriage service.  They madea bright show, and their light, and the warmth, accounted for the popularityof the room, as borne witness to by many impressions of velveteen trouserson a form by the fire, and many rounded smears and smudges of stoopingvelveteen shoulders on the adjacent wall.  Various untidy shelvesaccommodated a quantity of lamps and oil-cans, and also a fragrant collectionof what looked like the pocket-handkerchiefs of the whole lamp family.

As Barbox Brothers (so to call the traveller on the warranty of hisluggage) took his seat upon the form, and warmed his now ungloved handsat the fire, he glanced aside at a little deal desk, much blotched withink, which his elbow touched.  Upon it were some scraps of coarsepaper, and a superannuated steel pen in very reduced and gritty circumstances.

From glancing at the scraps of paper, he turned involuntarily tohis host, and said, with some roughness:

“Why, you are never a poet, man?”

Lamps had certainly not the conventional appearance of one, as hestood modestly rubbing his squab nose with a handkerchief so exceedinglyoily, that he might have been in the act of mistaking himself for oneof his charges.  He was a spare man of about the Barbox Brotherstime of life, with his features whimsically drawn upward as if theywere attracted by the roots of his hair.  He had a peculiarly shiningtransparent complexion, probably occasioned by constant oleaginous application;and his attractive hair, being cut short, and being grizzled, and standingstraight up on end as if it in its turn were attracted by some invisiblemagnet above it, the top of his head was not very unlike a lamp-wick.

“But, to be sure, it’s no business of mine,” saidBarbox Brothers.  “That was an impertinent observation onmy part.  Be what you like.”

“Some people, sir,” remarked Lamps in a tone of apology,“are sometimes what they don’t like.”

“Nobody knows that better than I do,” sighed the other. “I have been what I don’t like, all my life.”

“When I first took, sir,” resumed Lamps, “to composinglittle Comic-Songs—like—”

Barbox Brothers eyed him with great disfavour.

“—To composing little Comic-Songs-like—and whatwas more hard—to singing ’em afterwards,” said Lamps,“it went against the grain at that time, it did indeed.”

Something that was not all oil here shining in Lamps’s eye,Barbox Brothers withdrew his own a little disconcerted, looked at thefire, and put a foot on the top bar.  “Why did you do it,then?” he asked after a short pause; abruptly enough, but in asofter tone.  “If you didn’t want to do it, why didyou do it?  Where did you sing them?  Public-house?”

To which Mr. Lamps returned the curious reply: “Bedside.”

At this moment, while the traveller looked at him for elucidation,Mugby Junction started suddenly, trembled violently, and opened itsgas eyes.  “She’s got up!” Lamps announced, excited. “What lays in her power is sometimes more, and sometimes less;but it’s laid in her power to get up to-night, by George!”

The legend “Barbox Brothers,” in large white letterson two black surfaces, was very soon afterwards trundling on a truckthrough a silent street, and, when the owner of the legend had shiveredon the pavement half an hour, what time the porter’s knocks atthe Inn Door knocked up the whole town first, and the Inn last, he gropedhis way into the close air of a shut-up house, and so groped betweenthe sheets of a shut-up bed that seemed to have been expressly refrigeratedfor him when last made.

II.

“You remember me, Young Jackson?”

“What do I remember if not you?  You are my first remembrance. It was you who told me that was my name.  It was you who told methat on every twentieth of December my life had a penitential anniversaryin it called a birthday.  I suppose the last communication wastruer than the first!”

“What am I like, Young Jackson?”

“You are like a blight all through the year to me.  Youhard-lined, thin-lipped, repressive, changeless woman with a wax maskon.  You are like the Devil to me; most of all when you teach mereligious things, for you make me abhor them.”

“You remember me, Mr. Young Jackson?”  In anothervoice from another quarter.

“Most gratefully, sir.  You were the ray of hope and prosperingambition in my life.  When I attended your course, I believed thatI should come to be a great healer, and I felt almost happy—eventhough I was still the one boarder in the house with that horrible mask,and ate and drank in silence and constraint with the mask before me,every day.  As I had done every, every, every day, through my school-timeand from my earliest recollection.”

“What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?”

“You are like a Superior Being to me.  You are like Naturebeginning to reveal herself to me.  I hear you again, as one ofthe hushed crowd of young men kindling under the power of your presenceand knowledge, and you bring into my eyes the only exultant tears thatever stood in them.”

“You remember Me, Mr. Young Jackson?”  In a gratingvoice from quite another quarter.

“Too well.  You made your ghostly appearance in my lifeone day, and announced that its course was to be suddenly and whollychanged.  You showed me which was my wearisome seat in the Galleyof Barbox Brothers.  (When theywere, if they ever were,is unknown to me; there was nothing of them but the name when I bentto the oar.)  You told me what I was to do, and what to be paid;you told me afterwards, at intervals of years, when I was to sign forthe Firm, when I became a partner, when I became the Firm.  I knowno more of it, or of myself.”

“What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?”

“You are like my father, I sometimes think.  You are hardenough and cold enough so to have brought up an acknowledged son. I see your scanty figure, your close brown suit, and your tight brownwig; but you, too, wear a wax mask to your death.  You never bya chance remove it—it never by a chance falls off—and Iknow no more of you.”

Throughout this dialogue, the traveller spoke to himself at his windowin the morning, as he had spoken to himself at the Junction overnight. And as he had then looked in the darkness, a man who had turned greytoo soon, like a neglected fire: so he now looked in the sun-light,an ashier grey, like a fire which the brightness of the sun put out.

The firm of Barbox Brothers had been some offshoot or irregular branchof the Public Notary and bill-broking tree.  It had gained foritself a griping reputation before the days of Young Jackson, and thereputation had stuck to it and to him.  As he had imperceptiblycome into possession of the dim den up in the corner of a court offLombard Street, on whose grimy windows the inscription Barbox Brothershad for many long years daily interposed itself between him and thesky, so he had insensibly found himself a personage held in chronicdistrust, whom it was essential to screw tight to every transactionin which he engaged, whose word was never to be taken without his attestedbond, whom all dealers with openly set up guards and wards against. This character had come upon him through no act of his own.  Itwas as if the original Barbox had stretched himself down upon the officefloor, and had thither caused to be conveyed Young Jackson in his sleep,and had there effected a metempsychosis and exchange of persons withhim.  The discovery—aided in its turn by the deceit of theonly woman he had ever loved, and the deceit of the only friend he hadever made: who eloped from him to be married together—the discovery,so followed up, completed what his earliest rearing had begun. He shrank, abashed, within the form of Barbox, and lifted up his headand heart no more.

But he did at last effect one great release in his condition. He broke the oar he had plied so long, and he scuttled and sank thegalley.  He prevented the gradual retirement of an old conventionalbusiness from him, by taking the initiative and retiring from it. With enough to live on (though, after all, with not too much), he obliteratedthe firm of Barbox Brothers from the pages of the Post-Office Directoryand the face of the earth, leaving nothing of it but its name on twoportmanteaus.

“For one must have some name in going about, for people topick up,” he explained to Mugby High Street, through the Inn window,“and that name at least was real once.  Whereas, Young Jackson!—Notto mention its being a sadly satirical misnomer for Old Jackson.”

He took up his hat and walked out, just in time to see, passing alongon the opposite side of the way, a velveteen man, carrying his day’sdinner in a small bundle that might have been larger without suspicionof gluttony, and pelting away towards the Junction at a great pace.

“There’s Lamps!” said Barbox Brothers.  “Andby the bye—”

Ridiculous, surely, that a man so serious, so self-contained, andnot yet three days emancipated from a routine of drudgery, should standrubbing his chin in the street, in a brown study about Comic Songs.

“Bedside?” said Barbox Brothers testily.  “Singsthem at the bedside?  Why at the bedside, unless he goes to beddrunk?  Does, I shouldn’t wonder.  But it’s nobusiness of mine.  Let me see.  Mugby Junction, Mugby Junction. Where shall I go next?  As it came into my head last night whenI woke from an uneasy sleep in the carriage and found myself here, Ican go anywhere from here.  Where shall I go?  I’llgo and look at the Junction by daylight.  There’s no hurry,and I may like the look of one Line better than another.”

But there were so many Lines.  Gazing down upon them from abridge at the Junction, it was as if the concentrating Companies formeda great Industrial Exhibition of the works of extraordinary ground spidersthat spun iron.  And then so many of the Lines went such wonderfulways, so crossing and curving among one another, that the eye lost them. And then some of them appeared to start with the fixed intention ofgoing five hundred miles, and all of a sudden gave it up at an insignificantbarrier, or turned off into a workshop.  And then others, likeintoxicated men, went a little way very straight, and surprisingly sluedround and came back again.  And then others were so chock-fullof trucks of coal, others were so blocked with trucks of casks, otherswere so gorged with trucks of ballast, others were so set apart forwheeled objects like immense iron cotton-reels: while others were sobright and clear, and others were so delivered over to rust and ashesand idle wheelbarrows out of work, with their legs in the air (lookingmuch like their masters on strike), that there was no beginning, middle,or end to the bewilderment.

Barbox Brothers stood puzzled on the bridge, passing his right handacross the lines on his forehead, which multiplied while he looked down,as if the railway Lines were getting themselves photographed on thatsensitive plate.  Then was heard a distant ringing of bells andblowing of whistles.  Then, puppet-looking heads of men poppedout of boxes in perspective, and popped in again.  Then, prodigiouswooden razors, set up on end, began shaving the atmosphere.  Then,several locomotive engines in several directions began to scream andbe agitated.  Then, along one avenue a train came in.  Then,along another two trains appeared that didn’t come in, but stoppedwithout.  Then, bits of trains broke off.  Then, a strugglinghorse became involved with them.  Then, the locomotives sharedthe bits of trains, and ran away with the whole.

“I have not made my next move much clearer by this.  Nohurry.  No need to make up my mind to-day, or to-morrow, nor yetthe day after.  I’ll take a walk.”

It fell out somehow (perhaps he meant it should) that the walk tendedto the platform at which he had alighted, and to Lamps’s room. But Lamps was not in his room.  A pair of velveteen shoulders wereadapting themselves to one of the impressions on the wall by Lamps’sfireplace, but otherwise the room was void.  In passing back toget out of the station again, he learnt the cause of this vacancy, bycatching sight of Lamps on the opposite line of railway, skipping alongthe top of a train, from carriage to carriage, and catching lightednamesakes thrown up to him by a coadjutor.

“He is busy.  He has not much time for composing or singingComic Songs this morning, I take it.”

The direction he pursued now was into the country, keeping very nearto the side of one great Line of railway, and within easy view of others. “I have half a mind,”’ he said, glancing around, “tosettle the question from this point, by saying, ‘I’ll takethis set of rails, or that, or t’other, and stick to it.’ They separate themselves from the confusion, out here, and go theirways.”

Ascending a gentle hill of some extent, he came to a few cottages. There, looking about him as a very reserved man might who had neverlooked about him in his life before, he saw some six or eight youngchildren come merrily trooping and whooping from one of the cottages,and disperse.  But not until they had all turned at the littlegarden-gate, and kissed their hands to a face at the upper window: alow window enough, although the upper, for the cottage had but a storyof one room above the ground.

Now, that the children should do this was nothing; but that theyshould do this to a face lying on the sill of the open window, turnedtowards them in a horizontal position, and apparently only a face, wassomething noticeable.  He looked up at the window again. Could only see a very fragile, though a very bright face, lying on onecheek on the window-sill.  The delicate smiling face of a girlor woman.  Framed in long bright brown hair, round which was tieda light blue band or fillet, passing under the chin.

He walked on, turned back, passed the window again, shyly glancedup again.  No change.  He struck off by a winding branch-roadat the top of the hill—which he must otherwise have descended—keptthe cottages in view, worked his way round at a distance so as to comeout once more into the main road, and be obliged to pass the cottagesagain.  The face still lay on the window-sill, but not so muchinclined towards him.  And now there were a pair of delicate handstoo.  They had the action of performing on some musical instrument,and yet it produced no sound that reached his ears.

“Mugby Junction must be the maddest place in England,”said Barbox Brothers, pursuing his way down the hill.  “Thefirst thing I find here is a Railway Porter who composes comic songsto sing at his bedside.  The second thing I find here is a face,and a pair of hands playing a musical instrument that don’tplay!”

The day was a fine bright day in the early beginning of November,the air was clear and inspiriting, and the landscape was rich in beautifulcolours.  The prevailing colours in the court off Lombard Street,London city, had been few and sombre.  Sometimes, when the weatherelsewhere was very bright indeed, the dwellers in those tents enjoyeda pepper-and-salt-coloured day or two, but their atmosphere’susual wear was slate or snuff coloured.

He relished his walk so well that he repeated it next day. He was a little earlier at the cottage than on the day before, and hecould hear the children upstairs singing to a regular measure, and clappingout the time with their hands.

“Still, there is no sound of any musical instrument,”he said, listening at the corner, “and yet I saw the performinghands again as I came by.  What are the children singing? Why, good Lord, they can never be singing the multiplication table?”

They were, though, and with infinite enjoyment.  The mysteriousface had a voice attached to it, which occasionally led or set the childrenright.  Its musical cheerfulness was delightful.  The measureat length stopped, and was succeeded by a murmuring of young voices,and then by a short song which he made out to be about the current monthof the year, and about what work it yielded to the labourers in thefields and farmyards.  Then there was a stir of little feet, andthe children came trooping and whooping out, as on the previous day. And again, as on the previous day, they all turned at the garden-gate,and kissed their hands—evidently to the face on the window-sill,though Barbox Brothers from his retired post of disadvantage at thecorner could not see it.

But, as the children dispersed, he cut off one small straggler—abrown-faced boy with flaxen hair—and said to him:

“Come here, little one.  Tell me, whose house is that?”

The child, with one swarthy arm held up across his eyes, half inshyness, and half ready for defence, said from behind the inside ofhis elbow:

“Phoebe’s.”

“And who,” said Barbox Brothers, quite as much embarrassedby his part in the dialogue as the child could possibly be by his, “isPhoebe?”

To which the child made answer: “Why, Phoebe, of course.”

The small but sharp observer had eyed his questioner closely, andhad taken his moral measure.  He lowered his guard, and ratherassumed a tone with him: as having discovered him to be an unaccustomedperson in the art of polite conversation.

“Phoebe,” said the child, “can’t be anybobbyelse but Phoebe.  Can she?”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Well,” returned the child, “then why did you askme?”

Deeming it prudent to shift his ground, Barbox Brothers took up anew position.

“What do you do there?  Up there in that room where theopen window is.  What do you do there?”

“Cool,” said the child.

“Eh?”

“Co-o-ol,” the child repeated in a louder voice, lengtheningout the word with a fixed look and great emphasis, as much as to say:“What’s the use of your having grown up, if you’resuch a donkey as not to understand me?”

“Ah!  School, school,” said Barbox Brothers. “Yes, yes, yes.  And Phoebe teaches you?”

The child nodded.

“Good boy.”

“Tound it out, have you?” said the child.

“Yes, I have found it out.  What would you do with twopence,if I gave it you?”

“Pend it.”

The knock-down promptitude of this reply leaving him not a leg tostand upon, Barbox Brothers produced the twopence with great lameness,and withdrew in a state of humiliation.

But, seeing the face on the window-sill as he passed the cottage,he acknowledged its presence there with a gesture, which was not a nod,not a bow, not a removal of his hat from his head, but was a diffidentcompromise between or struggle with all three.  The eyes in theface seemed amused, or cheered, or both, and the lips modestly said:“Good-day to you, sir.”

“I find I must stick for a time to Mugby Junction,” saidBarbox Brothers with much gravity, after once more stopping on his returnroad to look at the Lines where they went their several ways so quietly. “I can’t make up my mind yet which iron road to take. In fact, I must get a little accustomed to the Junction before I candecide.”

So, he announced at the Inn that he was “going to stay on forthe present,” and improved his acquaintance with the Junctionthat night, and again next morning, and again next night and morning:going down to the station, mingling with the people there, looking abouthim down all the avenues of railway, and beginning to take an interestin the incomings and outgoings of the trains.  At first, he oftenput his head into Lamps’s little room, but he never found Lampsthere.  A pair or two of velveteen shoulders he usually found there,stooping over the fire, sometimes in connection with a clasped knifeand a piece of bread and meat; but the answer to his inquiry, “Where’sLamps?” was, either that he was “t’other side theline,” or, that it was his off-time, or (in the latter case) hisown personal introduction to another Lamps who was not his Lamps. However, he was not so desperately set upon seeing Lamps now, but hebore the disappointment.  Nor did he so wholly devote himself tohis severe application to the study of Mugby Junction as to neglectexercise.  On the contrary, he took a walk every day, and alwaysthe same walk.  But the weather turned cold and wet again, andthe window was never open.

III.

At length, after a lapse of some days, there came another streakof fine bright hardy autumn weather.  It was a Saturday. The window was open, and the children were gone.  Not surprising,this, for he had patiently watched and waited at the corner until theyweregone.

“Good-day,” he said to the face; absolutely getting hishat clear off his head this time.

“Good-day to you, sir.”

“I am glad you have a fine sky again to look at.”

“Thank you, sir.  It is kind if you.”

“You are an invalid, I fear?”

“No, sir.  I have very good health.”

“But are you not always lying down?”

“Oh yes, I am always lying down, because I cannot sit up! But I am not an invalid.”

The laughing eyes seemed highly to enjoy his great mistake.

“Would you mind taking the trouble to come in, sir?  Thereis a beautiful view from this window.  And you would see that Iam not at all ill—being so good as to care.”

It was said to help him, as he stood irresolute, but evidently desiringto enter, with his diffident hand on the latch of the garden-gate. It did help him, and he went in.

The room upstairs was a very clean white room with a low roof. Its only inmate lay on a couch that brought her face to a level withthe window.  The couch was white too; and her simple dress or wrapperbeing light blue, like the band around her hair, she had an ethereallook, and a fanciful appearance of lying among clouds.  He feltthat she instinctively perceived him to be by habit a downcast taciturnman; it was another help to him to have established that understandingso easily, and got it over.

There was an awkward constraint upon him, nevertheless, as he touchedher hand, and took a chair at the side of her couch.

“I see now,” he began, not at all fluently, “howyou occupy your hand.  Only seeing you from the path outside, Ithought you were playing upon something.”

She was engaged in very nimbly and dexterously making lace. A lace-pillow lay upon her breast; and the quick movements and changesof her hands upon it, as she worked, had given them the action he hadmisinterpreted.

“That is curious,” she answered with a bright smile. “For I often fancy, myself, that I play tunes while I am at work.”

“Have you any musical knowledge?”

She shook her head.

“I think I could pick out tunes, if I had any instrument, whichcould be made as handy to me as my lace-pillow.  But I dare sayI deceive myself.  At all events, I shall never know.”

“You have a musical voice.  Excuse me; I have heard yousing.”

“With the children?” she answered, slightly colouring. “Oh yes.  I sing with the dear children, if it can be calledsinging.”

Barbox Brothers glanced at the two small forms in the room, and hazardedthe speculation that she was fond of children, and that she was learnedin new systems of teaching them?

“Very fond of them,” she said, shaking her head again;“but I know nothing of teaching, beyond the interest I have init, and the pleasure it gives me when they learn.  Perhaps youroverhearing my little scholars sing some of their lessons has led youso far astray as to think me a grand teacher?  Ah!  I thoughtso!  No, I have only read and been told about that system. It seemed so pretty and pleasant, and to treat them so like the merryRobins they are, that I took up with it in my little way.  Youdon’t need to be told what a very little way mine is, sir,”she added with a glance at the small forms and round the room.

All this time her hands were busy at her lace-pillow.  As theystill continued so, and as there was a kind of substitute for conversationin the click and play of its pegs, Barbox Brothers took the opportunityof observing her.  He guessed her to be thirty.  The charmof her transparent face and large bright brown eyes was, not that theywere passively resigned, but that they were actively and thoroughlycheerful.  Even her busy hands, which of their own thinness alonemight have besought compassion, plied their task with a gay couragethat made mere compassion an unjustifiable assumption of superiority,and an impertinence.

He saw her eyes in the act of rising towards his, and he directedhis towards the prospect, saying: “Beautiful, indeed!”

“Most beautiful, sir.  I have sometimes had a fancy thatI would like to sit up, for once, only to try how it looks to an erecthead.  But what a foolish fancy that would be to encourage! It cannot look more lovely to any one than it does to me.”

Her eyes were turned to it, as she spoke, with most delighted admirationand enjoyment.  There was not a trace in it of any sense of deprivation.

“And those threads of railway, with their puffs of smoke andsteam changing places so fast, make it so lively for me,” shewent on.  “I think of the number of people who can go wherethey wish, on their business, or their pleasure; I remember that thepuffs make signs to me that they are actually going while I look; andthat enlivens the prospect with abundance of company, if I want company. There is the great Junction, too.  I don’t see it under thefoot of the hill, but I can very often hear it, and I always know itis there.  It seems to join me, in a way, to I don’t knowhow many places and things that I shall never see.”

With an abashed kind of idea that it might have already joined himselfto something he had never seen, he said constrainedly: “Just so.”

“And so you see, sir,” pursued Phoebe, “I am notthe invalid you thought me, and I am very well off indeed.”

“You have a happy disposition,” said Barbox Brothers:perhaps with a slight excusatory touch for his own disposition.

“Ah!  But you should know my father,” she replied. “His is the happy disposition!—Don’t mind, sir!” For his reserve took the alarm at a step upon the stairs, and he distrustedthat he would be set down for a troublesome intruder.  “Thisis my father coming.”

The door opened, and the father paused there.

“Why, Lamps!” exclaimed Barbox Brothers, starting fromhis chair.  “How do you do, Lamps?”

To which Lamps responded: “The gentleman for Nowhere! How do you DO, sir?”

And they shook hands, to the greatest admiration and surprise ofLamp’s daughter.

“I have looked you up half-a-dozen times since that night,”said Barbox Brothers, “but have never found you.”

“So I’ve heerd on, sir, so I’ve heerd on,”returned Lamps.  “It’s your being noticed so oftendown at the Junction, without taking any train, that has begun to getyou the name among us of the gentleman for Nowhere.  No offencein my having called you by it when took by surprise, I hope, sir?”

“None at all.  It’s as good a name for me as anyother you could call me by.  But may I ask you a question in thecorner here?”

Lamps suffered himself to be led aside from his daughter’scouch by one of the buttons of his velveteen jacket.

“Is this the bedside where you sing your songs?”

Lamps nodded.

The gentleman for Nowhere clapped him on the shoulder, and they facedabout again.

“Upon my word, my dear,” said Lamps then to his daughter,looking from her to her visitor, “it is such an amaze to me, tofind you brought acquainted with this gentleman, that I must (if thisgentleman will excuse me) take a rounder.”

Mr. Lamps demonstrated in action what this meant, by pulling outhis oily handkerchief rolled up in the form of a ball, and giving himselfan elaborate smear, from behind the right ear, up the cheek, acrossthe forehead, and down the other cheek to behind his left ear. After this operation he shone exceedingly.

“It’s according to my custom when particular warmed upby any agitation, sir,” he offered by way of apology.  “Andreally, I am throwed into that state of amaze by finding you broughtacquainted with Phoebe, that I—that I think I will, if you’llexcuse me, take another rounder.”  Which he did, seemingto be greatly restored by it.

They were now both standing by the side of her couch, and she wasworking at her lace-pillow.  “Your daughter tells me,”said Barbox Brothers, still in a half-reluctant shamefaced way, “thatshe never sits up.”

“No, sir, nor never has done.  You see, her mother (whodied when she was a year and two months old) was subject to very badfits, and as she had never mentioned to me that she wassubjectto fits, they couldn’t be guarded against.  Consequently,she dropped the baby when took, and this happened.”

“It was very wrong of her,” said Barbox Brothers witha knitted brow, “to marry you, making a secret of her infirmity.’

“Well, sir!” pleaded Lamps in behalf of the long-deceased. “You see, Phoebe and me, we have talked that over too.  AndLord bless us!  Such a number on us has our infirmities, what withfits, and what with misfits, of one sort and another, that if we confessedto ’em all before we got married, most of us might never get married.”

“Might not that be for the better?”

“Not in this case, sir,” said Phoebe, giving her handto her father.

“No, not in this case, sir,” said her father, pattingit between his own.

“You correct me,” returned Barbox Brothers with a blush;“and I must look so like a Brute, that at all events it wouldbe superfluous in me to confess to thatinfirmity.  I wishyou would tell me a little more about yourselves.  I hardly knewhow to ask it of you, for I am conscious that I have a bad stiff manner,a dull discouraging way with me, but I wish you would.”

“With all our hearts, sir,” returned Lamps gaily forboth.  “And first of all, that you may know my name—”

“Stay!” interposed the visitor with a slight flush. “What signifies your name?  Lamps is name enough for me. I like it.  It is bright and expressive.  What do I want more?”

“Why, to be sure, sir,” returned Lamps.  “Ihave in general no other name down at the Junction; but I thought, onaccount of your being here as a first-class single, in a private character,that you might—”

The visitor waved the thought away with his hand, and Lamps acknowledgedthe mark of confidence by taking another rounder.

“You are hard-worked, I take for granted?” said BarboxBrothers, when the subject of the rounder came out of it much dirtierthan be went into it.

Lamps was beginning, “Not particular so”—when hisdaughter took him up.

“Oh yes, sir, he is very hard-worked.  Fourteen, fifteen,eighteen hours a day.  Sometimes twenty-four hours at a time.”

“And you,” said Barbox Brothers, “what with yourschool, Phoebe, and what with your lace-making—”

“But my school is a pleasure to me,” she interrupted,opening her brown eyes wider, as if surprised to find him so obtuse. “I began it when I was but a child, because it brought me andother children into company, don’t you see?  Thatwas not work.  I carry it on still, because it keeps children aboutme.  Thatis not work.  I do it as love, not as work. Then my lace-pillow;” her busy hands had stopped, as if her argumentrequired all her cheerful earnestness, but now went on again at thename; “it goes with my thoughts when I think, and it goes withmy tunes when I hum any, and that’snot work.  Why,you yourself thought it was music, you know, sir.  And so it isto me.”

“Everything is!” cried Lamps radiantly.  “Everythingis music to her, sir.”

“My father is, at any rate,” said Phoebe, exultinglypointing her thin forefinger at him.  “There is more musicin my father than there is in a brass band.”

“I say!  My dear!  It’s very fillyilliallydone, you know; but you are flattering your father,” he protested,sparkling.

“No, I am not, sir, I assure you.  No, I am not. If you could hear my father sing, you would know I am not.  Butyou never will hear him sing, because he never sings to any one butme.  However tired he is, he always sings to me when he comes home. When I lay here long ago, quite a poor little broken doll, he used tosing to me.  More than that, he used to make songs, bringing inwhatever little jokes we had between us.  More than that, he oftendoes so to this day.  Oh!  I’ll tell of you, father,as the gentleman has asked about you.  He is a poet, sir.”

“I shouldn’t wish the gentleman, my dear,” observedLamps, for the moment turning grave, “to carry away that opinionof your father, because it might look as if I was given to asking thestars in a molloncolly manner what they was up to.  Which I wouldn’tat once waste the time, and take the liberty, my dear.”

“My father,” resumed Phoebe, amending her text, “isalways on the bright side, and the good side.  You told me, justnow, I had a happy disposition.  How can I help it?”

“Well; but, my dear,” returned Lamps argumentatively,“how can I help it?  Put it to yourself sir.  Look ather.  Always as you see her now.  Always working—andafter all, sir, for but a very few shillings a week—always contented,always lively, always interested in others, of all sorts.  I said,this moment, she was always as you see her now.  So she is, witha difference that comes to much the same.  For, when it is my Sundayoff and the morning bells have done ringing, I hear the prayers andthanks read in the touchingest way, and I have the hymns sung to me—sosoft, sir, that you couldn’t hear ’em out of this room—innotes that seem to me, I am sure, to come from Heaven and go back toit.”

It might have been merely through the association of these wordswith their sacredly quiet time, or it might have been through the largerassociation of the words with the Redeemer’s presence beside thebedridden; but here her dexterous fingers came to a stop on the lace-pillow,and clasped themselves around his neck as he bent down.  Therewas great natural sensibility in both father and daughter, the visitorcould easily see; but each made it, for the other’s sake, retiring,not demonstrative; and perfect cheerfulness, intuitive or acquired,was either the first or second nature of both.  In a very few momentsLamps was taking another rounder with his comical features beaming,while Phoebe’s laughing eyes (just a glistening speck or so upontheir lashes) were again directed by turns to him, and to her work,and to Barbox Brothers.

“When my father, sir,” she said brightly, “tellsyou about my being interested in other people, even though they knownothing about me—which, by the bye, I told you myself—youought to know how that comes about.  That’s my father’sdoing.”

“No, it isn’t!” he protested.

“Don’t you believe him, sir; yes, it is.  He tellsme of everything he sees down at his work.  You would be surprisedwhat a quantity he gets together for me every day.  He looks intothe carriages, and tells me how the ladies are dressed—so thatI know all the fashions!  He looks into the carriages, and tellsme what pairs of lovers he sees, and what new-married couples on theirwedding trip—so that I know all about that!  He collectschance newspapers and books—so that I have plenty to read! He tells me about the sick people who are travelling to try to get better—sothat I know all about them!  In short, as I began by saying, hetells me everything he sees and makes out down at his work, and youcan’t think what a quantity he does see and make out.”

“As to collecting newspapers and books, my dear,” saidLamps, “it’s clear I can have no merit in that, becausethey’re not my perquisites.  You see, sir, it’s thisway: A Guard, he’ll say to me, ‘Hallo, here you are, Lamps. I’ve saved this paper for your daughter.  How is she a-goingon?’  A Head-Porter, he’ll say to me, ‘Here! Catch hold, Lamps.  Here’s a couple of wollumes for yourdaughter.  Is she pretty much where she were?’  Andthat’s what makes it double welcome, you see.  If she hada thousand pound in a box, they wouldn’t trouble themselves abouther; but being what she is—that is, you understand,” Lampsadded, somewhat hurriedly, “not having a thousand pound in a box—theytake thought for her.  And as concerning the young pairs, marriedand unmarried, it’s only natural I should bring home what littleI can about them, seeing that there’s not a Couple of eithersort in the neighbourhood that don’t come of their own accordto confide in Phoebe.”

She raised her eyes triumphantly to Barbox Brothers as she said:

“Indeed, sir, that is true.  If I could have got up andgone to church, I don’t know how often I should have been a bridesmaid. But, if I could have done that, some girls in love might have been jealousof me, and, as it is, no girl is jealous of me.  And my pillowwould not have been half as ready to put the piece of cake under, asI always find it,” she added, turning her face on it with a lightsigh, and a smile at her father.

The arrival of a little girl, the biggest of the scholars, now ledto an understanding on the part of Barbox Brothers, that she was thedomestic of the cottage, and had come to take active measures in it,attended by a pail that might have extinguished her, and a broom threetimes her height.  He therefore rose to take his leave, and tookit; saying that, if Phoebe had no objection, he would come again.

He had muttered that he would come “in the course of his walks.” The course of his walks must have been highly favourable to his return,for he returned after an interval of a single day.

“You thought you would never see me any more, I suppose?”he said to Phoebe as he touched her hand, and sat down by her couch.

“Why should I think so?” was her surprised rejoinder.

“I took it for granted you would mistrust me.”

“For granted, sir?  Have you been so much mistrusted?”

“I think I am justified in answering yes.  But I may havemistrusted, too, on my part.  No matter just now.  We werespeaking of the Junction last time.  I have passed hours theresince the day before yesterday.”

“Are you now the gentleman for Somewhere?” she askedwith a smile.

“Certainly for Somewhere; but I don’t yet know Where. You would never guess what I am travelling from.  Shall I tellyou?  I am travelling from my birthday.”

Her hands stopped in her work, and she looked at him with incredulousastonishment.

“Yes,” said Barbox Brothers, not quite easy in his chair,“from my birthday.  I am, to myself, an unintelligible bookwith the earlier chapters all torn out, and thrown away.  My childhoodhad no grace of childhood, my youth had no charm of youth, and whatcan be expected from such a lost beginning?”  His eyes meetinghers as they were addressed intently to him, something seemed to stirwithin his breast, whispering: “Was this bed a place for the gracesof childhood and the charms of youth to take to kindly?  Oh, shame,shame!”

“It is a disease with me,” said Barbox Brothers, checkinghimself, and making as though he had a difficulty in swallowing something,“to go wrong about that.  I don’t know how I came tospeak of that.  I hope it is because of an old misplaced confidencein one of your sex involving an old bitter treachery.  I don’tknow.  I am all wrong together.”

Her hands quietly and slowly resumed their work.  Glancing ather, he saw that her eyes were thoughtfully following them.

“I am travelling from my birthday,” he resumed, “becauseit has always been a dreary day to me.  My first free birthdaycoming round some five or six weeks hence, I am travelling to put itspredecessors far behind me, and to try to crush the day—or, atall events, put it out of my sight—by heaping new objects on it.”

As he paused, she looked at him; but only shook her head as beingquite at a loss.

“This is unintelligible to your happy disposition,” hepursued, abiding by his former phrase as if there were some lingeringvirtue of self-defence in it.  “I knew it would be, and amglad it is.  However, on this travel of mine (in which I mean topass the rest of my days, having abandoned all thought of a fixed home),I stopped, as you have heard from your father, at the Junction here. The extent of its ramifications quite confused me as to whither I shouldgo, fromhere.  I have not yet settled, being still perplexedamong so many roads.  What do you think I mean to do?  Howmany of the branching roads can you see from your window?”

Looking out, full of interest, she answered, “Seven.”

“Seven,” said Barbox Brothers, watching her with a gravesmile.  “Well!  I propose to myself at once to reducethe gross number to those very seven, and gradually to fine them downto one—the most promising for me—and to take that.”

“But how will you know, sir, which isthe most promising?”she asked, with her brightened eyes roving over the view.

“Ah!” said Barbox Brothers with another grave smile,and considerably improving in his ease of speech.  “To besure.  In this way.  Where your father can pick up so muchevery day for a good purpose, I may once and again pick up a littlefor an indifferent purpose.  The gentleman for Nowhere must becomestill better known at the Junction.  He shall continue to exploreit, until he attaches something that he has seen, heard, or found out,at the head of each of the seven roads, to the road itself.  Andso his choice of a road shall be determined by his choice among hisdiscoveries.”

Her hands still busy, she again glanced at the prospect, as if itcomprehended something that had not been in it before, and laughed asif it yielded her new pleasure.

“But I must not forget,” said Barbox Brothers, “(havinggot so far) to ask a favour.  I want your help in this expedientof mine.  I want to bring you what I pick up at the heads of theseven roads that you lie here looking out at, and to compare notes withyou about it.  May I?  They say two heads are better thanone.  I should say myself that probably depends upon the headsconcerned.  But I am quite sure, though we are so newly acquainted,that your head and your father’s have found out better things,Phoebe, than ever mine of itself discovered.”

She gave him her sympathetic right hand, in perfect rapture withhis proposal, and eagerly and gratefully thanked him.

“That’s well!” said Barbox Brothers.  “AgainI must not forget (having got so far) to ask a favour.  Will youshut your eyes?”

Laughing playfully at the strange nature of the request, she didso.

“Keep them shut,” said Barbox Brothers, going softlyto the door, and coming back.  “You are on your honour, mind,not to open you eyes until I tell you that you may?”

“Yes!  On my honour.”

“Good.  May I take your lace-pillow from you for a minute?”

Still laughing and wondering, she removed her hands from it, andhe put it aside.

“Tell me.  Did you see the puffs of smoke and steam madeby the morning fast-train yesterday on road number seven from here?”

“Behind the elm-trees and the spire?”

“That’s the road,” said Barbox Brothers, directinghis eyes towards it.

“Yes.  I watched them melt away.”

“Anything unusual in what they expressed?”

“No!” she answered merrily.

“Not complimentary to me, for I was in that train.  Iwent—don’t open your eyes—to fetch you this, fromthe great ingenious town.  It is not half so large as your lace-pillow,and lies easily and lightly in its place.  These little keys arelike the keys of a miniature piano, and you supply the air requiredwith your left hand.  May you pick out delightful music from it,my dear!  For the present—you can open your eyes now—good-bye!”

In his embarrassed way, he closed the door upon himself, and onlysaw, in doing so, that she ecstatically took the present to her bosomand caressed it.  The glimpse gladdened his heart, and yet saddenedit; for so might she, if her youth had flourished in its natural course,having taken to her breast that day the slumbering music of her ownchild’s voice.

CHAPTER II—BARBOX BROTHERS AND CO.

With good-will and earnest purpose, the gentleman for Nowhere began,on the very next day, his researches at the heads of the seven roads. The results of his researches, as he and Phoebe afterwards set themdown in fair writing, hold their due places in this veracious chronicle. But they occupied a much longer time in the getting together than theyever will in the perusal.  And this is probably the case with mostreading matter, except when it is of that highly beneficial kind (forPosterity) which is “thrown off in a few moments of leisure”by the superior poetic geniuses who scorn to take prose pains.

It must be admitted, however, that Barbox by no means hurried himself. His heart being in his work of good-nature, he revelled in it. There was the joy, too (it was a true joy to him), of sometimes sittingby, listening to Phoebe as she picked out more and more discourse fromher musical instrument, and as her natural taste and ear refined dailyupon her first discoveries.  Besides being a pleasure, this wasan occupation, and in the course of weeks it consumed hours.  Itresulted that his dreaded birthday was close upon him before he hadtroubled himself any more about it.

The matter was made more pressing by the unforeseen circumstancethat the councils held (at which Mr. Lamps, beaming most brilliantly,on a few rare occasions assisted) respecting the road to be selectedwere, after all, in nowise assisted by his investigations.  For,he had connected this interest with this road, or that interest withthe other, but could deduce no reason from it for giving any road thepreference.  Consequently, when the last council was holden, thatpart of the business stood, in the end, exactly where it had stood inthe beginning.

“But, sir,” remarked Phoebe, “we have only sixroads after all.  Is the seventh road dumb?”

“The seventh road?  Oh!” said Barbox Brothers, rubbinghis chin.  “That is the road I took, you know, when I wentto get your little present.  That is itsstory.  Phoebe.”

“Would you mind taking that road again, sir?” she askedwith hesitation.

“Not in the least; it is a great high-road after all.”

“I should like you to take it,” returned Phoebe witha persuasive smile, “for the love of that little present whichmust ever be so dear to me.  I should like you to take it, becausethat road can never be again like any other road to me.  I shouldlike you to take it, in remembrance of your having done me so much good:of your having made me so much happier!  If you leave me by theroad you travelled when you went to do me this great kindness,”sounding a faint chord as she spoke, “I shall feel, lying herewatching at my window, as if it must conduct you to a prosperous end,and bring you back some day.”

“It shall be done, my dear; it shall be done.”

So at last the gentleman for Nowhere took a ticket for Somewhere,and his destination was the great ingenious town.

He had loitered so long about the Junction that it was the eighteenthof December when he left it.  “High time,” he reflected,as he seated himself in the train, “that I started in earnest! Only one clear day remains between me and the day I am running awayfrom.  I’ll push onward for the hill-country to-morrow. I’ll go to Wales.”

It was with some pains that he placed before himself the undeniableadvantages to be gained in the way of novel occupation for his sensesfrom misty mountains, swollen streams, rain, cold, a wild seashore,and rugged roads.  And yet he scarcely made them out as distinctlyas he could have wished.  Whether the poor girl, in spite of hernew resource, her music, would have any feeling of loneliness upon hernow—just at first—that she had not had before; whether shesaw those very puffs of steam and smoke that he saw, as he sat in thetrain thinking of her; whether her face would have any pensive shadowon it as they died out of the distant view from her window; whether,in telling him he had done her so much good, she had not unconsciouslycorrected his old moody bemoaning of his station in life, by settinghim thinking that a man might be a great healer, if he would, and yetnot be a great doctor; these and other similar meditations got betweenhim and his Welsh picture.  There was within him, too, that dullsense of vacuity which follows separation from an object of interest,and cessation of a pleasant pursuit; and this sense, being quite newto him, made him restless.  Further, in losing Mugby Junction,he had found himself again; and he was not the more enamoured of himselffor having lately passed his time in better company.

But surely here, not far ahead, must be the great ingenious town. This crashing and clashing that the train was undergoing, and this couplingon to it of a multitude of new echoes, could mean nothing less thanapproach to the great station.  It did mean nothing less. After some stormy flashes of town lightning, in the way of swift revelationsof red brick blocks of houses, high red brick chimney-shafts, vistasof red brick railway arches, tongues of fire, blocks of smoke, valleysof canal, and hills if coal, there came the thundering in at the journey’send.

Having seen his portmanteaus safely housed in the hotel he chose,and having appointed his dinner hour, Barbox Brothers went out for awalk in the busy streets.  And now it began to be suspected byhim that Mugby Junction was a Junction of many branches, invisible aswell as visible, and had joined him to an endless number of by-ways. For, whereas he would, but a little while ago, have walked these streetsblindly brooding, he now had eyes and thoughts for a new external world. How the many toiling people lived, and loved, and died; how wonderfulit was to consider the various trainings of eye and hand, the nice distinctionsof sight and touch, that separated them into classes of workers, andeven into classes of workers at subdivisions of one complete whole whichcombined their many intelligences and forces, though of itself but somecheap object of use or ornament in common life; how good it was to knowthat such assembling in a multitude on their part, and such contributionof their several dexterities towards a civilising end, did not deterioratethem as it was the fashion of the supercilious Mayflies of humanityto pretend, but engendered among them a self-respect, and yet a modestdesire to be much wiser than they were (the first evinced in their well-balancedbearing and manner of speech when he stopped to ask a question; thesecond, in the announcements of their popular studies and amusementson the public walls); these considerations, and a host of such, madehis walk a memorable one.  “I too am but a little part ofa great whole,” he began to think; “and to be serviceableto myself and others, or to be happy, I must cast my interest into,and draw it out of, the common stock.”

Although he had arrived at his journey’s end for the day bynoon, he had since insensibly walked about the town so far and so longthat the lamp-lighters were now at their work in the streets, and theshops were sparkling up brilliantly.  Thus reminded to turn towardshis quarters, he was in the act of doing so, when a very little handcrept into his, and a very little voice said:

“Oh! if you please, I am lost!”

He looked down, and saw a very little fair-haired girl.

“Yes,” she said, confirming her words with a seriousnod.  “I am indeed.  I am lost!”

Greatly perplexed, he stopped, looked about him for help, descriednone, and said, bending low.

“Where do you live, my child?”

“I don’t know where I live,” she returned. “I am lost.”

“What is your name?”

“Polly.”

“What is your other name?”

The reply was prompt, but unintelligible.

Imitating the sound as he caught it, he hazarded the guess, “Trivits.”

“Oh no!” said the child, shaking her head.  “Nothinglike that.”

“Say it again, little one.”

An unpromising business.  For this time it had quite a differentsound.

He made the venture, “Paddens?”

“Oh no!” said the child.  “Nothing like that.”

“Once more.  Let us try it again, dear.”

A most hopeless business.  This time it swelled into four syllables. “It can’t be Tappitarver?” said Barbox Brothers, rubbinghis head with his hat in discomfiture.

“No!  It ain’t,” the child quietly assented.

On her trying this unfortunate name once more, with extraordinaryefforts at distinctness, it swelled into eight syllables at least.

“Ah!  I think,” said Barbox Brothers with a desperateair of resignation, “that we had better give it up.”

“But I am lost,” said the child, nestling her littlehand more closely in his, “and you’ll take care of me, won’tyou?”

If ever a man were disconcerted by division between compassion onthe one hand, and the very imbecility of irresolution on the other,here the man was.  “Lost!” he repeated, looking downat the child.  “I am sure Iam.  What is to bedone?”

“Where do you live?” asked the child, looking up at himwistfully.

“Over there,” he answered, pointing vaguely in the directionof his hotel.

“Hadn’t we better go there?” said the child.

“Really,” he replied, “I don’t know but whatwe had.”

So they set off, hand-in-hand.  He, through comparison of himselfagainst his little companion, with a clumsy feeling on him as if hehad just developed into a foolish giant.  She, clearly elevatedin her own tiny opinion by having got him so neatly out of his embarrassment.

“We are going to have dinner when we get there, I suppose?”said Polly.

“Well,” he rejoined, “I—Yes, I suppose weare.”

“Do you like your dinner?” asked the child.

“Why, on the whole,” said Barbox Brothers, “yes,I think I do.”

“I do mine,” said Polly.  “Have you any brothersand sisters?”

“No.  Have you?”

“Mine are dead.”

“Oh!” said Barbox Brothers.  With that absurd senseof unwieldiness of mind and body weighing him down, he would have notknown how to pursue the conversation beyond this curt rejoinder, butthat the child was always ready for him.

“What,” she asked, turning her soft hand coaxingly inhis, “are you going to do to amuse me after dinner?”

“Upon my soul, Polly,” exclaimed Barbox Brothers, verymuch at a loss, “I have not the slightest idea!”

“Then I tell you what,” said Polly.  “Haveyou got any cards at your house?”

“Plenty,” said Barbox Brothers in a boastful vein.

“Very well.  Then I’ll build houses, and you shalllook at me.  You mustn’t blow, you know.”

“Oh no,” said Barbox Brothers.  “No, no, no. No blowing.  Blowing’s not fair.”

He flattered himself that he had said this pretty well for an idioticmonster; but the child, instantly perceiving the awkwardness of hisattempt to adapt himself to her level, utterly destroyed his hopefulopinion of himself by saying compassionately: “What a funny manyou are!”

Feeling, after this melancholy failure, as if he every minute grewbigger and heavier in person, and weaker in mind, Barbox gave himselfup for a bad job.  No giant ever submitted more meekly to be ledin triumph by all-conquering Jack than he to be bound in slavery toPolly.

“Do you know any stories?” she asked him.

He was reduced to the humiliating confession: “No.”

“What a dunce you must be, mustn’t you?” said Polly.

He was reduced to the humiliating confession: “Yes.”

“Would you like me to teach you a story?  But you mustremember it, you know, and be able to tell it right to somebody elseafterwards.”

He professed that it would afford him the highest mental gratificationto be taught a story, and that he would humbly endeavour to retain itin his mind.  Whereupon Polly, giving her hand a new little turnin his, expressive of settling down for enjoyment, commenced a longromance, of which every relishing clause began with the words: “Sothis,” or, “And so this.”  As, “So thisboy;” or, “So this fairy;” or, “And so thispie was four yards round, and two yards and a quarter deep.” The interest of the romance was derived from the intervention of thisfairy to punish this boy for having a greedy appetite.  To achievewhich purpose, this fairy made this pie, and this boy ate and ate andate, and his cheeks swelled and swelled and swelled.  There weremany tributary circumstances, but the forcible interest culminated inthe total consumption of this pie, and the bursting of this boy. Truly he was a fine sight, Barbox Brothers, with serious attentive face,and ear bent down, much jostled on the pavements of the busy town, butafraid of losing a single incident of the epic, lest he should be examinedin it by-and-by, and found deficient.

Thus they arrived at the hotel.  And there he had to say atthe bar, and said awkwardly enough; “I have found a little girl!”

The whole establishment turned out to look at the little girl. Nobody knew her; nobody could make out her name, as she set it forth—exceptone chamber-maid, who said it was Constantinople—which it wasn’t.

“I will dine with my young friend in a private room,”said Barbox Brothers to the hotel authorities, “and perhaps youwill be so good as to let the police know that the pretty baby is here. I suppose she is sure to be inquired for soon, if she has not been already. Come along, Polly.”

Perfectly at ease and peace, Polly came along, but, finding the stairsrather stiff work, was carried up by Barbox Brothers.  The dinnerwas a most transcendant success, and the Barbox sheepishness, underPolly’s directions how to mince her meat for her, and how to diffusegravy over the plate with a liberal and equal hand, was another finesight.

“And now,” said Polly, “while we are at dinner,you be good, and tell me that story I taught you.”

With the tremors of a Civil Service examination upon him, and veryuncertain indeed, not only as to the epoch at which the pie appearedin history, but also as to the measurements of that indispensable fact,Barbox Brothers made a shaky beginning, but under encouragement didvery fairly.  There was a want of breadth observable in his renderingof the cheeks, as well as the appetite, of the boy; and there was acertain tameness in his fairy, referable to an under-current of desireto account for her.  Still, as the first lumbering performanceof a good-humoured monster, it passed muster.

“I told you to be good,” said Polly, “and you aregood, ain’t you?”

“I hope so,” replied Barbox Brothers.

Such was his deference that Polly, elevated on a platform of sofacushions in a chair at his right hand, encouraged him with a pat ortwo on the face from the greasy bowl of her spoon, and even with a graciouskiss.  In getting on her feet upon her chair, however, to givehim this last reward, she toppled forward among the dishes, and causedhim to exclaim, as he effected her rescue: “Gracious Angels! Whew!  I thought we were in the fire, Polly!”

“What a coward you are, ain’t you?” said Pollywhen replaced.

“Yes, I am rather nervous,” he replied.  “Whew! Don’t, Polly!  Don’t flourish your spoon, or you’llgo over sideways.  Don’t tilt up your legs when you laugh,Polly, or you’ll go over backwards.  Whew!  Polly, Polly,Polly,” said Barbox Brothers, nearly succumbing to despair, “weare environed with dangers!”

Indeed, he could descry no security from the pitfalls that were yawningfor Polly, but in proposing to her, after dinner, to sit upon a lowstool.  “I will, if you will,” said Polly.  So,as peace of mind should go before all, he begged the waiter to wheelaside the table, bring a pack of cards, a couple of footstools, anda screen, and close in Polly and himself before the fire, as it werein a snug room within the room.  Then, finest sight of all, wasBarbox Brothers on his footstool, with a pint decanter on the rug, contemplatingPolly as she built successfully, and growing blue in the face with holdinghis breath, lest he should blow the house down.

“How you stare, don’t you?” said Polly in a houselesspause.

Detected in the ignoble fact, he felt obliged to admit, apologetically:

“I am afraid I was looking rather hard at you, Polly.”

“Why do you stare?” asked Polly.

“I cannot,” he murmured to himself, “recall why.—Idon’t know, Polly.”

“You must be a simpleton to do things and not know why, mustn’tyou?” said Polly.

In spite of which reproof, he looked at the child again intently,as she bent her head over her card structure, her rich curls shadingher face.  “It is impossible,” he thought, “thatI can ever have seen this pretty baby before.  Can I have dreamedof her?  In some sorrowful dream?”

He could make nothing of it.  So he went into the building tradeas a journeyman under Polly, and they built three stories high, fourstories high; even five.

“I say!  Who do you think is coming?” asked Polly,rubbing her eyes after tea.

He guessed: “The waiter?”

“No,” said Polly, “the dustman.  I am gettingsleepy.”

A new embarrassment for Barbox Brothers!

“I don’t think I am going to be fetched to-night,”said Polly.  “What do you think?”

He thought not, either.  After another quarter of an hour, thedustman not merely impending, but actually arriving, recourse was hadto the Constantinopolitan chamber-maid: who cheerily undertook thatthe child should sleep in a comfortable and wholesome room, which sheherself would share.

“And I know you will be careful, won’t you,” saidBarbox Brothers, as a new fear dawned upon him, “that she don’tfall out of bed?”

Polly found this so highly entertaining that she was under the necessityof clutching him round the neck with both arms as he sat on his footstoolpicking up the cards, and rocking him to and fro, with her dimpled chinon his shoulder.

“Oh, what a coward you are, ain’t you?” said Polly. “Do you fall out of bed?”

“N—not generally, Polly.”

“No more do I.”

With that, Polly gave him a reassuring hug or two to keep him going,and then giving that confiding mite of a hand of hers to be swallowedup in the hand of the Constantinopolitan chamber-maid, trotted off,chattering, without a vestige of anxiety.

He looked after her, had the screen removed and the table and chairsreplaced, and still looked after her.  He paced the room for halfan hour.  “A most engaging little creature, but it’snot that.  A most winning little voice, but it’s not that. That has much to do with it, but there is something more.  Howcan it be that I seem to know this child?  What was it she imperfectlyrecalled to me when I felt her touch in the street, and, looking downat her, saw her looking up at me?”

“Mr. Jackson!”

With a start he turned towards the sound of the subdued voice, andsaw his answer standing at the door.

“Oh, Mr. Jackson, do not be severe with me!  Speak a wordof encouragement to me, I beseech you.”

“You are Polly’s mother.”

“Yes.”

Yes.  Polly herself might come to this, one day.  As yousee what the rose was in its faded leaves; as you see what the summergrowth of the woods was in their wintry branches; so Polly might betraced, one day, in a careworn woman like this, with her hair turnedgrey.  Before him were the ashes of a dead fire that had once burnedbright.  This was the woman he had loved.  This was the womanhe had lost.  Such had been the constancy of his imagination toher, so had Time spared her under its withholding, that now, seeinghow roughly the inexorable hand had struck her, his soul was filledwith pity and amazement.

He led her to a chair, and stood leaning on a corner of the chimney-piece,with his head resting on his hand, and his face half averted.

“Did you see me in the street, and show me to your child?”he asked.

“Yes.”

“Is the little creature, then, a party to deceit?”

“I hope there is no deceit.  I said to her, ‘Wehave lost our way, and I must try to find mine by myself.  Go tothat gentleman, and tell him you are lost.  You shall be fetchedby-and-by.’  Perhaps you have not thought how very youngshe is?”

“She is very self-reliant.”

“Perhaps because she is so young.”

He asked, after a short pause, “Why did you do this?”

“Oh, Mr. Jackson, do you ask me?  In the hope that youmight see something in my innocent child to soften your heart towardsme.  Not only towards me, but towards my husband.”

He suddenly turned about, and walked to the opposite end of the room. He came back again with a slower step, and resumed his former attitude,saying:

“I thought you had emigrated to America?”

“We did.  But life went ill with us there, and we cameback.”

“Do you live in this town?”

“Yes.  I am a daily teacher of music here.  My husbandis a book-keeper.”

“Are you—forgive my asking—poor?”

“We earn enough for our wants.  That is not our distress. My husband is very, very ill of a lingering disorder.  He willnever recover—”

“You check yourself.  If it is for want of the encouragingword you spoke of, take it from me.  I cannot forget the old time,Beatrice.”

“God bless you!” she replied with a burst of tears, andgave him her trembling hand.

“Compose yourself.  I cannot be composed if you are not,for to see you weep distresses me beyond expression.  Speak freelyto me.  Trust me.”

She shaded her face with her veil, and after a little while spokecalmly.  Her voice had the ring of Polly’s.

“It is not that my husband’s mind is at all impairedby his bodily suffering, for I assure you that is not the case. But in his weakness, and in his knowledge that he is incurably ill,he cannot overcome the ascendancy of one idea.  It preys upon him,embitters every moment of his painful life, and will shorten it.”

She stopping, he said again: “Speak freely to me.  Trustme.”

“We have had five children before this darling, and they alllie in their little graves.  He believes that they have witheredaway under a curse, and that it will blight this child like the rest.”

“Under what curse?”

“Both I and he have it on our conscience that we tried youvery heavily, and I do not know but that, if I were as ill as he, Imight suffer in my mind as he does.  This is the constant burden:—‘Ibelieve, Beatrice, I was the only friend that Mr. Jackson ever caredto make, though I was so much his junior.  The more influence heacquired in the business, the higher he advanced me, and I was alonein his private confidence.  I came between him and you, and I tookyou from him.  We were both secret, and the blow fell when he waswholly unprepared.  The anguish it caused a man so compressed musthave been terrible; the wrath it awakened inappeasable.  So, acurse came to be invoked on our poor, pretty little flowers, and theyfall.’”

“And you, Beatrice,” he asked, when she had ceased tospeak, and there had been a silence afterwards, “how say you?”

“Until within these few weeks I was afraid of you, and I believedthat you would never, never forgive.”

“Until within these few weeks,” he repeated.  “Haveyou changed your opinion of me within these few weeks?”

“Yes.”

“For what reason?”

“I was getting some pieces of music in a shop in this town,when, to my terror, you came in.  As I veiled my face and stoodin the dark end of the shop, I heard you explain that you wanted a musicalinstrument for a bedridden girl.  Your voice and manner were sosoftened, you showed such interest in its selection, you took it awayyourself with so much tenderness of care and pleasure, that I knew youwere a man with a most gentle heart.  Oh, Mr. Jackson, Mr. Jackson,if you could have felt the refreshing rain of tears that followed forme!”

Was Phoebe playing at that moment on her distant couch?  Heseemed to hear her.

“I inquired in the shop where you lived, but could get no information. As I had heard you say that you were going back by the next train (butyou did not say where), I resolved to visit the station at about thattime of day, as often as I could, between my lessons, on the chanceof seeing you again.  I have been there very often, but saw youno more until to-day.  You were meditating as you walked the street,but the calm expression of your face emboldened me to send my childto you.  And when I saw you bend your head to speak tenderly toher, I prayed to GOD to forgive me for having ever brought a sorrowon it.  I now pray to you to forgive me, and to forgive my husband. I was very young, he was young too, and, in the ignorant hardihood ofsuch a time of life, we don’t know what we do to those who haveundergone more discipline.  You generous man!  You good man! So to raise me up and make nothing of my crime against you!”—forhe would not see her on her knees, and soothed her as a kind fathermight have soothed an erring daughter—“thank you, blessyou, thank you!”

When he next spoke, it was after having drawn aside the window curtainand looked out awhile.  Then he only said:

“Is Polly asleep?”

“Yes.  As I came in, I met her going away upstairs, andput her to bed myself.”

“Leave her with me for to-morrow, Beatrice, and write me youraddress on this leaf of my pocket-book.  In the evening I willbring her home to you—and to her father.”

* *

“Hallo!” cried Polly, putting her saucy sunny face inat the door next morning when breakfast was ready: “I thoughtI was fetched last night?”

“So you were, Polly, but I asked leave to keep you here forthe day, and to take you home in the evening.”

“Upon my word!” said Polly.  “You are verycool, ain’t you?”

However, Polly seemed to think it a good idea, and added: “Isuppose I must give you a kiss, though you arecool.”

The kiss given and taken, they sat down to breakfast in a highlyconversational tone.

“Of course, you are going to amuse me?” said Polly.

“Oh, of course!” said Barbox Brothers.

In the pleasurable height of her anticipations, Polly found it indispensableto put down her piece of toast, cross one of her little fat knees overthe other, and bring her little fat right hand down into her left handwith a business-like slap.  After this gathering of herself together,Polly, by that time a mere heap of dimples, asked in a wheedling manner:

“What are we going to do, you dear old thing?”

“Why, I was thinking,” said Barbox Brothers, “—butare you fond of horses, Polly?”

“Ponies, I am,” said Polly, “especially when theirtails are long.  But horses—n-no—too big, you know.”

“Well,” pursued Barbox Brothers, in a spirit of gravemysterious confidence adapted to the importance of the consultation,“I did see yesterday, Polly, on the walls, pictures of two long-tailedponies, speckled all over—”

“No, no, NO!” cried Polly, in an ecstatic desire to lingeron the charming details.  “Not speckled all over!”

“Speckled all over.  Which ponies jump through hoops—”

“No, no, NO!” cried Polly as before.  “Theynever jump through hoops!”

“Yes, they do.  Oh, I assure you they do!  And eatpie in pinafores—”

“Ponies eating pie in pinafores!” said Polly.  “Whata story-teller you are, ain’t you?”

“Upon my honour.—And fire off guns.”

(Polly hardly seemed to see the force of the ponies resorting tofire-arms.)

“And I was thinking,” pursued the exemplary Barbox, “thatif you and I were to go to the Circus where these ponies are, it woulddo our constitutions good.”

“Does that mean amuse us?” inquired Polly.  “Whatlong words you do use, don’t you?”

Apologetic for having wandered out of his depth, he replied:

“That means amuse us.  That is exactly what it means. There are many other wonders besides the ponies, and we shall see themall.  Ladies and gentlemen in spangled dresses, and elephants andlions and tigers.”

Polly became observant of the teapot, with a curled-up nose indicatingsome uneasiness of mind.

“They never get out, of course,” she remarked as a meretruism.

“The elephants and lions and tigers?  Oh, dear no!”

“Oh, dear no!” said Polly.  “And of coursenobody’s afraid of the ponies shooting anybody.”

“Not the least in the world.”

“No, no, not the least in the world,” said Polly.

“I was also thinking,” proceeded Barbox, “thatif we were to look in at the toy-shop, to choose a doll—”

“Not dressed!” cried Polly with a clap of her hands. “No, no, NO, not dressed!”

“Full-dressed.  Together with a house, and all thingsnecessary for housekeeping—”

Polly gave a little scream, and seemed in danger of falling intoa swoon of bliss.

“What a darling you are!” she languidly exclaimed, leaningback in her chair.  “Come and be hugged, or I must come andhug you.”

This resplendent programme was carried into execution with the utmostrigour of the law.  It being essential to make the purchase ofthe doll its first feature—or that lady would have lost the ponies—thetoy-shop expedition took precedence.  Polly in the magic warehouse,with a doll as large as herself under each arm, and a neat assortmentof some twenty more on view upon the counter, did indeed present a spectacleof indecision not quite compatible with unalloyed happiness, but thelight cloud passed.  The lovely specimen oftenest chosen, oftenestrejected, and finally abided by, was of Circassian descent, possessingas much boldness of beauty as was reconcilable with extreme feeblenessof mouth, and combining a sky-blue silk pelisse with rose-coloured satintrousers, and a black velvet hat: which this fair stranger to our northernshores would seem to have founded on the portraits of the late Duchessof Kent.  The name this distinguished foreigner brought with herfrom beneath the glowing skies of a sunny clime was (on Polly’sauthority) Miss Melluka, and the costly nature of her outfit as a housekeeper,from the Barbox coffers, may be inferred from the two facts that hersilver tea-spoons were as large as her kitchen poker, and that the proportionsof her watch exceeded those of her frying-pan.  Miss Melluka wasgraciously pleased to express her entire approbation of the Circus,and so was Polly; for the ponies were speckled, and brought down nobodywhen they fired, and the savagery of the wild beasts appeared to bemere smoke—which article, in fact, they did produce in large quantitiesfrom their insides.  The Barbox absorption in the general subjectthroughout the realisation of these delights was again a sight to see,nor was it less worthy to behold at dinner, when he drank to Miss Melluka,tied stiff in a chair opposite to Polly (the fair Circassian possessingan unbendable spine), and even induced the waiter to assist in carryingout with due decorum the prevailing glorious idea.  To wind up,there came the agreeable fever of getting Miss Melluka and all her wardrobeand rich possessions into a fly with Polly, to be taken home. But, by that time, Polly had become unable to look upon such accumulatedjoys with waking eyes, and had withdrawn her consciousness into thewonderful Paradise of a child’s sleep.  “Sleep, Polly,sleep,” said Barbox Brothers, as her head dropped on his shoulder;“you shall not fall out of this bed easily, at any rate!”

What rustling piece of paper he took from his pocket, and carefullyfolded into the bosom of Polly’s frock, shall not be mentioned. He said nothing about it, and nothing shall be said about it. They drove to a modest suburb of the great ingenious town, and stoppedat the fore-court of a small house.  “Do not wake the child,”said Barbox Brothers softly to the driver; “I will carry her inas she is.”

Greeting the light at the opened door which was held by Polly’smother, Polly’s bearer passed on with mother and child in to aground-floor room.  There, stretched on a sofa, lay a sick man,sorely wasted, who covered his eyes with his emaciated hand.

“Tresham,” said Barbox in a kindly voice, “I havebrought you back your Polly, fast asleep.  Give me your hand, andtell me you are better.”

The sick man reached forth his right hand, and bowed his head overthe hand into which it was taken, and kissed it.  “Thankyou, thank you!  I may say that I am well and happy.”

“That’s brave,” said Barbox.  “Tresham,I have a fancy—Can you make room for me beside you here?”

He sat down on the sofa as he said the words, cherishing the plumppeachey cheek that lay uppermost on his shoulder.

“I have a fancy, Tresham (I am getting quite an old fellownow, you know, and old fellows may take fancies into their heads sometimes),to give up Polly, having found her, to no one but you.  Will youtake her from me?”

As the father held out his arms for the child, each of the two menlooked steadily at the other.

“She is very dear to you, Tresham?”

“Unutterably dear.”

“God bless her!  It is not much, Polly,” he continued,turning his eyes upon her peaceful face as he apostrophized her, “itis not much, Polly, for a blind and sinful man to invoke a blessingon something so far better than himself as a little child is; but itwould be much—much upon his cruel head, and much upon his guiltysoul—if he could be so wicked as to invoke a curse.  He hadbetter have a millstone round his neck, and be cast into the deepestsea.  Live and thrive, my pretty baby!”  Here he kissedher.  “Live and prosper, and become in time the mother ofother little children, like the Angels who behold The Father’sface!”

He kissed her again, gave her up gently to both her parents, andwent out.

But he went not to Wales.  No, he never went to Wales. He went straightway for another stroll about the town, and he lookedin upon the people at their work, and at their play, here, there, every-there,and where not.  For he was Barbox Brothers and Co. now, and hadtaken thousands of partners into the solitary firm.

He had at length got back to his hotel room, and was standing beforehis fire refreshing himself with a glass of hot drink which he had stoodupon the chimney-piece, when he heard the town clocks striking, and,referring to his watch, found the evening to have so slipped away, thatthey were striking twelve.  As he put up his watch again, his eyesmet those of his reflection in the chimney-glass.

“Why, it’s your birthday already,” he said, smiling. “You are looking very well.  I wish you many happy returnsof the day.”

He had never before bestowed that wish upon himself.  “ByJupiter!” he discovered, “it alters the whole case of runningaway from one’s birthday!  It’s a thing to explainto Phoebe.  Besides, here is quite a long story to tell her, thathas sprung out of the road with no story.  I’ll go back,instead of going on.  I’ll go back by my friend Lamps’sUp X presently.”

He went back to Mugby Junction, and, in point of fact, he establishedhimself at Mugby Junction.  It was the convenient place to livein, for brightening Phoebe’s life.  It was the convenientplace to live in, for having her taught music by Beatrice.  Itwas the convenient place to live in, for occasionally borrowing Polly. It was the convenient place to live in, for being joined at will toall sorts of agreeable places and persons.  So, he became settledthere, and, his house standing in an elevated situation, it is noteworthyof him in conclusion, as Polly herself might (not irreverently) haveput it:

“There was an Old Barbox who lived on a hill,
And if he ain’t gone, he lives there still.”

Here follows the substance of what was seen, heard, or otherwisepicked up, by the gentleman for Nowhere, in his careful study of theJunction.

CHAPTER III—THE BOY AT MUGBY

I am the boy at Mugby.  That’s about what Iam.

You don’t know what I mean?  What a pity!  But Ithink you do.  I think you must.  Look here.  I am theboy at what is called The Refreshment Room at Mugby Junction, and what’sproudest boast is, that it never yet refreshed a mortal being.

Up in a corner of the Down Refreshment Room at Mugby Junction, inthe height of twenty-seven cross draughts (I’ve often counted’em while they brush the First-Class hair twenty-seven ways),behind the bottles, among the glasses, bounded on the nor’westby the beer, stood pretty far to the right of a metallic object that’sat times the tea-urn and at times the soup-tureen, according to thenature of the last twang imparted to its contents which are the samegroundwork, fended off from the traveller by a barrier of stale sponge-cakeserected atop of the counter, and lastly exposed sideways to the glareof Our Missis’s eye—you ask a Boy so sitiwated, next timeyou stop in a hurry at Mugby, for anything to drink; you take particularnotice that he’ll try to seem not to hear you, that he’llappear in a absent manner to survey the Line through a transparent mediumcomposed of your head and body, and that he won’t serve you aslong as you can possibly bear it.  That’s me.

What a lark it is!  We are the Model Establishment, we are,at Mugby.  Other Refreshment Rooms send their imperfect young ladiesup to be finished off by our Missis.  For some of the young ladies,when they’re new to the business, come into it mild!  Ah! Our Missis, she soon takes that out of ’em.  Why, I originallycome into the business meek myself.  But Our Missis, she soon tookthat out of me.

What a delightful lark it is!  I look upon us Refreshmentersas ockipying the only proudly independent footing on the Line. There’s Papers, for instance,—my honourable friend, if hewill allow me to call him so,—him as belongs to Smith’sbookstall.  Why, he no more dares to be up to our Refreshmentinggames than he dares to jump a top of a locomotive with her steam atfull pressure, and cut away upon her alone, driving himself, at limited-mailspeed.  Papers, he’d get his head punched at every compartment,first, second, and third, the whole length of a train, if he was toventur to imitate my demeanour.  It’s the same with the porters,the same with the guards, the same with the ticket clerks, the samethe whole way up to the secretary, traffic-manager, or very chairman. There ain’t a one among ’em on the nobly independent footingwe are.  Did you ever catch one of them, when you wanted anythingof him, making a system of surveying the Line through a transparentmedium composed of your head and body?  I should hope not.

You should see our Bandolining Room at Mugby Junction.  It’sled to by the door behind the counter, which you’ll notice usuallystands ajar, and it’s the room where Our Missis and our youngladies Bandolines their hair.  You should see ’em at it,betwixt trains, Bandolining away, as if they was anointing themselvesfor the combat.  When you’re telegraphed, you should seetheir noses all a-going up with scorn, as if it was a part of the workingof the same Cooke and Wheatstone electrical machinery.  You shouldhear Our Missis give the word, “Here comes the Beast to be Fed!”and then you should see ’em indignantly skipping across the Line,from the Up to the Down, or Wicer Warsaw, and begin to pitch the stalepastry into the plates, and chuck the sawdust sangwiches under the glasscovers, and get out the—ha, ha, ha!—the sherry,—Omy eye, my eye!—for your Refreshment.

It’s only in the Isle of the Brave and Land of the Free (bywhich, of course, I mean to say Britannia) that Refreshmenting is soeffective, so ’olesome, so constitutional a check upon the public. There was a Foreigner, which having politely, with his hat off, beseechedour young ladies and Our Missis for “a leetel gloss host prarndee,”and having had the Line surveyed through him by all and no other acknowledgment,was a-proceeding at last to help himself, as seems to be the customin his own country, when Our Missis, with her hair almost a-coming un-Bandolinedwith rage, and her eyes omitting sparks, flew at him, cotched the decanterout of his hand, and said, “Put it down!  I won’t allowthat!”  The foreigner turned pale, stepped back with hisarms stretched out in front of him, his hands clasped, and his shouldersriz, and exclaimed: “Ah!  Is it possible, this!  Thatthese disdaineous females and this ferocious old woman are placed hereby the administration, not only to empoison the voyagers, but to affrontthem!  Great Heaven!  How arrives it?  The English people. Or is he then a slave?  Or idiot?”  Another time, amerry, wideawake American gent had tried the sawdust and spit it out,and had tried the Sherry and spit that out, and had tried in vain tosustain exhausted natur upon Butter-Scotch, and had been rather extraBandolined and Line-surveyed through, when, as the bell was ringingand he paid Our Missis, he says, very loud and good-tempered: “Itell Yew what ’tis, ma’arm.  I la’af.  Theer! I la’af.  I Dew.  I oughter ha’ seen most things,for I hail from the Onlimited side of the Atlantic Ocean, and I haivetravelled right slick over the Limited, head on through Jeerusalemmand the East, and likeways France and Italy, Europe Old World, and amnow upon the track to the Chief Europian Village; but such an Institutionas Yew, and Yewer young ladies, and Yewer fixin’s solid and liquid,afore the glorious Tarnal I never did see yet!  And if I hain’tfound the eighth wonder of monarchical Creation, in finding Yew andYewer young ladies, and Yewer fixin’s solid and liquid, all asaforesaid, established in a country where the people air not absoluteLoo-naticks, I am Extra Double Darned with a Nip and Frizzle to theinnermostest grit!  Wheerfur—Theer!—I la’af! I Dew, ma’arm.  I la’af!”  And so he went,stamping and shaking his sides, along the platform all the way to hisown compartment.

I think it was her standing up agin the Foreigner as giv’ OurMissis the idea of going over to France, and droring a comparison betwixtRefreshmenting as followed among the frog-eaters, and Refreshmentingas triumphant in the Isle of the Brave and Land of the Free (by which,of course, I mean to say agin, Britannia).  Our young ladies, MissWhiff, Miss Piff, and Mrs. Sniff, was unanimous opposed to her going;for, as they says to Our Missis one and all, it is well beknown to thehends of the herth as no other nation except Britain has a idea of anythink,but above all of business.  Why then should you tire yourself toprove what is already proved?  Our Missis, however (being a teazerat all pints) stood out grim obstinate, and got a return pass by SoutheasternTidal, to go right through, if such should be her dispositions, to Marseilles.

Sniff is husband to Mrs. Sniff, and is a regular insignificant cove. He looks arter the sawdust department in a back room, and is sometimes,when we are very hard put to it, let behind the counter with a corkscrew;but never when it can be helped, his demeanour towards the public beingdisgusting servile.  How Mrs. Sniff ever come so far to lower herselfas to marry him, I don’t know; but I suppose he does, and I shouldthink he wished he didn’t, for he leads a awful life.  Mrs.Sniff couldn’t be much harder with him if he was public. Similarly, Miss Whiff and Miss Piff, taking the tone of Mrs. Sniff,they shoulder Sniff about when he islet in with a corkscrew,and they whisk things out of his hands when in his servility he is a-goingto let the public have ’em, and they snap him up when in the crawlingbaseness of his spirit he is a-going to answer a public question, andthey drore more tears into his eyes than ever the mustard does whichhe all day long lays on to the sawdust.  (But it ain’t strong.) Once, when Sniff had the repulsiveness to reach across to get the milk-potto hand over for a baby, I see Our Missis in her rage catch him by bothhis shoulders, and spin him out into the Bandolining Room.

But Mrs. Sniff,—how different!  She’s the one! She’s the one as you’ll notice to be always looking anotherway from you, when you look at her.  She’s the one with thesmall waist buckled in tight in front, and with the lace cuffs at herwrists, which she puts on the edge of the counter before her, and standsa smoothing while the public foams.  This smoothing the cuffs andlooking another way while the public foams is the last accomplishmenttaught to the young ladies as come to Mugby to be finished by Our Missis;and it’s always taught by Mrs. Sniff.

When Our Missis went away upon her journey, Mrs. Sniff was left incharge.  She did hold the public in check most beautiful! In all my time, I never see half so many cups of tea given without milkto people as wanted it with, nor half so many cups of tea with milkgiven to people as wanted it without.  When foaming ensued, Mrs.Sniff would say: “Then you’d better settle it among yourselves,and change with one another.”  It was a most highly deliciouslark.  I enjoyed the Refreshmenting business more than ever, andwas so glad I had took to it when young.

Our Missis returned.  It got circulated among the young ladies,and it as it might be penetrated to me through the crevices of the BandoliningRoom, that she had Orrors to reveal, if revelations so contemptiblecould be dignified with the name.  Agitation become awakened. Excitement was up in the stirrups.  Expectation stood a-tiptoe. At length it was put forth that on our slacked evening in the week,and at our slackest time of that evening betwixt trains, Our Missiswould give her views of foreign Refreshmenting, in the Bandolining Room.

It was arranged tasteful for the purpose.  The Bandolining tableand glass was hid in a corner, a arm-chair was elevated on a packing-casefor Our Missis’s ockypation, a table and a tumbler of water (nosherry in it, thankee) was placed beside it.  Two of the pupils,the season being autumn, and hollyhocks and dahlias being in, ornamentedthe wall with three devices in those flowers.  On one might beread, “MAY ALBION NEVER LEARN;” on another “KEEP THEPUBLIC DOWN;” on another, “OUR REFRESHMENTING CHARTER.” The whole had a beautiful appearance, with which the beauty of the sentimentscorresponded.

On Our Missis’s brow was wrote Severity, as she ascended thefatal platform.  (Not that that was anythink new.)  Miss Whiffand Miss Piff sat at her feet.  Three chairs from the Waiting Roommight have been perceived by a average eye, in front of her, on whichthe pupils was accommodated.  Behind them a very close observermight have discerned a Boy.  Myself.

“Where,” said Our Missis, glancing gloomily around, “isSniff?”

“I thought it better,” answered Mrs. Sniff, “thathe should not be let to come in.  He is such an Ass.”

“No doubt,” assented Our Missis.  “But forthat reason is it not desirable to improve his mind?”

“Oh, nothing will ever improve him,” said Mrs.Sniff.

“However,” pursued Our Missis, “call him in, Ezekiel.”

I called him in.  The appearance of the low-minded cove washailed with disapprobation from all sides, on account of his havingbrought his corkscrew with him.  He pleaded “the force ofhabit.”

“The force!” said Mrs. Sniff.  “Don’tlet us have you talking about force, for Gracious’ sake. There!  Do stand still where you are, with your back against thewall.”

He is a smiling piece of vacancy, and he smiled in the mean way inwhich he will even smile at the public if he gets a chance (languagecan say no meaner of him), and he stood upright near the door with theback of his head agin the wall, as if he was a waiting for somebodyto come and measure his heighth for the Army.

“I should not enter, ladies,” says Our Missis, “onthe revolting disclosures I am about to make, if it was not in the hopethat they will cause you to be yet more implacable in the exercise ofthe power you wield in a constitutional country, and yet more devotedto the constitutional motto which I see before me,”—it wasbehind her, but the words sounded better so,—“‘MayAlbion never learn!’”

Here the pupils as had made the motto admired it, and cried, “Hear! Hear!  Hear!”  Sniff, showing an inclination to joinin chorus, got himself frowned down by every brow.

“The baseness of the French,” pursued Our Missis, “asdisplayed in the fawning nature of their Refreshmenting, equals, ifnot surpasses, anythink as was ever heard of the baseness of the celebratedBonaparte.”

Miss Whiff, Miss Piff, and me, we drored a heavy breath, equal tosaying, “We thought as much!”  Miss Whiff and MissPiff seeming to object to my droring mine along with theirs, I droredanother to aggravate ’em.

“Shall I be believed,” says Our Missis, with flashingeyes, “when I tell you that no sooner had I set my foot upon thattreacherous shore—”

Here Sniff, either bursting out mad, or thinking aloud, says, ina low voice: “Feet.  Plural, you know.”

The cowering that come upon him when he was spurned by all eyes,added to his being beneath contempt, was sufficient punishment for acove so grovelling.  In the midst of a silence rendered more impressiveby the turned-up female noses with which it was pervaded, Our Missiswent on:

“Shall I be believed when I tell you, that no sooner had Ilanded,” this word with a killing look at Sniff, “on thattreacherous shore, than I was ushered into a Refreshment Room wherethere were—I do not exaggerate—actually eatable things toeat?”

A groan burst from the ladies.  I not only did myself the honourof jining, but also of lengthening it out.

“Where there were,” Our Missis added, “not onlyeatable things to eat, but also drinkable things to drink?”

A murmur, swelling almost into a scream, ariz.  Miss Piff, tremblingwith indignation, called out, “Name?”

“I willname,” said Our Missis.  “Therewas roast fowls, hot and cold; there was smoking roast veal surroundedwith browned potatoes; there was hot soup with (again I ask shall Ibe credited?) nothing bitter in it, and no flour to choke off the consumer;there was a variety of cold dishes set off with jelly; there was salad;there was—mark me! freshpastry, and that of a light construction;there was a luscious show of fruit; there was bottles and decantersof sound small wine, of every size, and adapted to every pocket; thesame odious statement will apply to brandy; and these were set out uponthe counter so that all could help themselves.”

Our Missis’s lips so quivered, that Mrs. Sniff, though scarcelyless convulsed than she were, got up and held the tumbler to them.

“This,” proceeds Our Missis, “was my first unconstitutionalexperience.  Well would it have been if it had been my last andworst.  But no.  As I proceeded farther into that enslavedand ignorant land, its aspect became more hideous.  I need notexplain to this assembly the ingredients and formation of the BritishRefreshment sangwich?”

Universal laughter,—except from Sniff, who, as sangwich-cutter,shook his head in a state of the utmost dejection as he stood with itagin the wall.

“Well!” said Our Missis, with dilated nostrils. “Take a fresh, crisp, long, crusty penny loaf made of the whitestand best flour.  Cut it longwise through the middle.  Inserta fair and nicely fitting slice of ham.  Tie a smart piece of ribbonround the middle of the whole to bind it together.  Add at oneend a neat wrapper of clean white paper by which to hold it.  Andthe universal French Refreshment sangwich busts on your disgusted vision.”

A cry of “Shame!” from all—except Sniff, whichrubbed his stomach with a soothing hand.

“I need not,” said Our Missis, “explain to thisassembly the usual formation and fitting of the British RefreshmentRoom?”

No, no, and laughter.  Sniff agin shaking his head in low spiritsagin the wall.

“Well,” said Our Missis, “what would you say toa general decoration of everythink, to hangings (sometimes elegant),to easy velvet furniture, to abundance of little tables, to abundanceof little seats, to brisk bright waiters, to great convenience, to apervading cleanliness and tastefulness positively addressing the public,and making the Beast thinking itself worth the pains?”

Contemptuous fury on the part of all the ladies.  Mrs. Snifflooking as if she wanted somebody to hold her, and everbody else lookingas if they’d rayther not.

“Three times,” said Our Missis, working herself intoa truly terrimenjious state,—“three times did I see theseshameful things, only between the coast and Paris, and not countingeither: at Hazebroucke, at Arras, at Amiens.  But worse remains. Tell me, what would you call a person who should propose in Englandthat there should be kept, say at our own model Mugby Junction, prettybaskets, each holding an assorted cold lunch and dessert for one, eachat a certain fixed price, and each within a passenger’s powerto take away, to empty in the carriage at perfect leisure, and to returnat another station fifty or a hundred miles farther on?”

There was disagreement what such a person should be called. Whether revolutionise, atheist, Bright (Isaid him), or Un-English. Miss Piff screeched her shrill opinion last, in the words: “Amalignant maniac!”

“I adopt,” says Our Missis, “the brand set uponsuch a person by the righteous indignation of my friend Miss Piff. A malignant maniac.  Know, then, that that malignant maniac hassprung from the congenial soil of France, and that his malignant madnesswas in unchecked action on this same part of my journey.”

I noticed that Sniff was a-rubbing his hands, and that Mrs. Sniffhad got her eye upon him.  But I did not take more particular notice,owing to the excited state in which the young ladies was, and to feelingmyself called upon to keep it up with a howl.

“On my experience south of Paris,” said Our Missis, ina deep tone, “I will not expatiate.  Too loathsome were thetask!  But fancy this.  Fancy a guard coming round, with thetrain at full speed, to inquire how many for dinner.  Fancy histelegraphing forward the number of dinners.  Fancy every one expected,and the table elegantly laid for the complete party.  Fancy a charmingdinner, in a charming room, and the head-cook, concerned for the honourof every dish, superintending in his clean white jacket and cap. Fancy the Beast travelling six hundred miles on end, very fast, andwith great punctuality, yet being taught to expect all this to be donefor it!”

A spirited chorus of “The Beast!”

I noticed that Sniff was agin a-rubbing his stomach with a soothinghand, and that he had drored up one leg.  But agin I didn’ttake particular notice, looking on myself as called upon to stimulatepublic feeling.  It being a lark besides.

“Putting everything together,” said Our Missis, “FrenchRefreshmenting comes to this, and oh, it comes to a nice total! First: eatable things to eat, and drinkable things to drink.”

A groan from the young ladies, kep’ up by me.

“Second: convenience, and even elegance.”

Another groan from the young ladies, kep’ up by me.

“Third: moderate charges.”

This time a groan from me, kep’ up by the young ladies.

“Fourth:—and here,” says Our Missis, “I claimyour angriest sympathy,—attention, common civility, nay, evenpoliteness!”

Me and the young ladies regularly raging mad all together.

“And I cannot in conclusion,” says Our Missis, with herspitefullest sneer, “give you a completer pictur of that despicablenation (after what I have related), than assuring you that they wouldn’tbear our constitutional ways and noble independence at Mugby Junction,for a single month, and that they would turn us to the right-about andput another system in our places, as soon as look at us; perhaps sooner,for I do not believe they have the good taste to care to look at ustwice.”

The swelling tumult was arrested in its rise.  Sniff, bore awayby his servile disposition, had drored up his leg with a higher anda higher relish, and was now discovered to be waving his corkscrew overhis head.  It was at this moment that Mrs. Sniff, who had kep’her eye upon him like the fabled obelisk, descended on her victim. Our Missis followed them both out, and cries was heard in the sawdustdepartment.

You come into the Down Refreshment Room, at the Junction, makingbelieve you don’t know me, and I’ll pint you out with myright thumb over my shoulder which is Our Missis, and which is MissWhiff, and which is Miss Piff, and which is Mrs. Sniff.  But youwon’t get a chance to see Sniff, because he disappeared that night. Whether he perished, tore to pieces, I cannot say; but his corkscrewalone remains, to bear witness to the servility of his disposition.

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