The Uncommercial Traveller Read online

  Dickens, Charles - The Uncommercial Traveller

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  [Title:The Uncommercial Traveller]

  [Author:Charles Dickens]

  [Scanned:David Price ]

  [Checked:David Price ]

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  [Revision:1]

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  [Copyright:Public Domain - Copyright Expired]

  [Category:Fiction]

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  THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER

  CHAPTER I - HIS GENERAL LINE OF BUSINESS

  Allow me to introduce myself - first negatively.

  No landlord is my friend and brother, no chambermaid loves me, no

  waiter worships me, no boots admires and envies me. No round of

  beef or tongue or ham is expressly cooked for me, no pigeon-pie is

  especially made for me, no hotel-advertisement is personally

  addressed to me, no hotel-room tapestried with great-coats and

  railway wrappers is set apart for me, no house of public

  entertainment in the United Kingdom greatly cares for my opinion of

  its brandy or sherry. When I go upon my journeys, I am not usually

  rated at a low figure in the bill; when I come home from my

  journeys, I never get any commission. I know nothing about prices,

  and should have no idea, if I were put to it, how to wheedle a man

  into ordering something he doesn't want. As a town traveller, I am

  never to be seen driving a vehicle externally like a young and

  volatile pianoforte van, and internally like an oven in which a

  number of flat boxes are baking in layers. As a country traveller,

  I am rarely to be found in a gig, and am never to be encountered by

  a pleasure train, waiting on the platform of a branch station,

  quite a Druid in the midst of a light Stonehenge of samples.

  And yet - proceeding now, to introduce myself positively - I am

  both a town traveller and a country traveller, and am always on the

  road. Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of Human

  Interest Brothers, and have rather a large connection in the fancy

  goods way. Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and

  there from my rooms in Covent-garden, London - now about the city

  streets: now, about the country by-roads - seeing many little

  things, and some great things, which, because they interest me, I

  think may interest others.

  These are my chief credentials as the Uncommercial Traveller.

  CHAPTER II - THE SHIPWRECK

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  Dickens, Charles - The Uncommercial Traveller

  Never had I seen a year going out, or going on, under quieter

  circumstances. Eighteen hundred and fifty-nine had but another day

  to live, and truly its end was Peace on that sea-shore that

  morning.

  So settled and orderly was everything seaward, in the bright light

  of the sun and under the transparent shadows of the clouds, that it

  was hard to imagine the bay otherwise, for years past or to come,

  than it was that very day. The Tug-steamer lying a little off the

  shore, the Lighter lying still nearer to the shore, the boat

  alongside the Lighter, the regularly-turning windlass aboard the

  Lighter, the methodical figures at work, all slowly and regularly

  heaving up and down with the breathing of the sea, all seemed as

  much a part of the nature of the place as the tide itself. The

  tide was on the flow, and had been for some two hours and a half;

  there was a slight obstruction in the sea within a few yards of my

  feet: as if the stump of a tree, with earth enough about it to

  keep it from lying horizontally on the water, had slipped a little

  from the land - and as I stood upon the beach and observed it

  dimpling the light swell that was coming in, I cast a stone over

  it.

  So orderly, so quiet, so regular - the rising and falling of the

  Tug-steamer, the Lighter, and the boat - the turning of the

  windlass - the coming in of the tide - that I myself seemed, to my

  own thinking, anything but new to the spot. Yet, I had never seen

  it in my life, a minute before, and had traversed two hundred miles

  to get at it. That very morning I had come bowling down, and

  struggling up, hill-country roads; looking back at snowy summits;

  meeting courteous peasants well to do, driving fat pigs and cattle

  to market: noting the neat and thrifty dwellings, with their

  unusual quantity of clean white linen, drying on the bushes; having

  windy weather suggested by every cotter's little rick, with its

  thatch straw-ridged and extra straw-ridged into overlapping

  compartments like the back of a rhinoceros. Had I not given a lift

  of fourteen miles to the Coast-guardsman (kit and all), who was

  coming to his spell of duty there, and had we not just now parted

  company? So it was; but the journey seemed to glide down into the

  placid sea, with other chafe and trouble, and for the moment

  nothing was so calmly and monotonously real under the sunlight as

  the gentle rising and falling of the water with its freight, the

  regular turning of the windlass aboard the Lighter, and the slight

  obstruction so very near my feet.

  O reader, haply turning this page by the fireside at Home, and

  hearing the night wind rumble in the chimney, that slight

  obstruction was the uppermost fragment of the Wreck of the Royal

  Charter, Australian trader and passenger ship, Homeward bound, that

  struck here on the terrible morning of the twenty-sixth of this

  October, broke into three parts, went down with her treasure of at

  least five hundred human lives, and has never stirred since!

  From which point, or from which, she drove ashore, stern foremost;

  on which side, or on which, she passed the little Island in the

  bay, for ages henceforth to be aground certain yards outside her;

  these are rendered bootless questions by the darkness of that night

  and the darkness of death. Here she went down.

  Even as I stood on the beach with the words 'Here she went down!'

  in my ears, a diver in his grotesque dress, dipped heavily over the

  side of the boat alongside the Lighter, and dropped to the bottom.

  On the shore by the water's edge, was a rough tent, made of

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  Dickens, Charles - The Uncommercial Traveller

  fragments of wreck, where other divers and workmen sheltered

  themselves, and where they had kept Christmas-day with rum and

  roast beef, to the destruction of their frail chimney. Cast up

  among the stones and boulders of the beach, were great spars of the

  lost vessel, and masses of iron twisted by the fury of the sea into

  the strangest forms. The timber was already bleached and iron

  rusted, and even these objects did no violence to the prevailing

  air the whole scene wore, of having been exactly t
he same for years

  and years.

  Yet, only two short months had gone, since a man, living on the

  nearest hill-top overlooking the sea, being blown out of bed at

  about daybreak by the wind that had begun to strip his roof off,

  and getting upon a ladder with his nearest neighbour to construct

  some temporary device for keeping his house over his head, saw from

  the ladder's elevation as he looked down by chance towards the

  shore, some dark troubled object close in with the land. And he

  and the other, descending to the beach, and finding the sea

  mercilessly beating over a great broken ship, had clambered up the

  stony ways, like staircases without stairs, on which the wild

  village hangs in little clusters, as fruit hangs on boughs, and had

  given the alarm. And so, over the hill-slopes, and past the

  waterfall, and down the gullies where the land drains off into the

  ocean, the scattered quarrymen and fishermen inhabiting that part

  of Wales had come running to the dismal sight - their clergyman

  among them. And as they stood in the leaden morning, stricken with

  pity, leaning hard against the wind, their breath and vision often

  failing as the sleet and spray rushed at them from the ever forming

  and dissolving mountains of sea, and as the wool which was a part

  of the vessel's cargo blew in with the salt foam and remained upon

  the land when the foam melted, they saw the ship's life-boat put

  off from one of the heaps of wreck; and first, there were three men

  in her, and in a moment she capsized, and there were but two; and

  again, she was struck by a vast mass of water, and there was but

  one; and again, she was thrown bottom upward, and that one, with

  his arm struck through the broken planks and waving as if for the

  help that could never reach him, went down into the deep.

  It was the clergyman himself from whom I heard this, while I stood

  on the shore, looking in his kind wholesome face as it turned to

  the spot where the boat had been. The divers were down then, and

  busy. They were 'lifting' to-day the gold found yesterday - some

  five-and-twenty thousand pounds. Of three hundred and fifty

  thousand pounds' worth of gold, three hundred thousand pounds'

  worth, in round numbers, was at that time recovered. The great

  bulk of the remainder was surely and steadily coming up. Some loss

  of sovereigns there would be, of course; indeed, at first

  sovereigns had drifted in with the sand, and been scattered far and

  wide over the beach, like sea-shells; but most other golden

  treasure would be found. As it was brought up, it went aboard the

  Tug-steamer, where good account was taken of it. So tremendous had

  the force of the sea been when it broke the ship, that it had

  beaten one great ingot of gold, deep into a strong and heavy piece

  of her solid iron-work: in which, also, several loose sovereigns

  that the ingot had swept in before it, had been found, as firmly

  embedded as though the iron had been liquid when they were forced

  there. It had been remarked of such bodies come ashore, too, as

  had been seen by scientific men, that they had been stunned to

  death, and not suffocated. Observation, both of the internal

  change that had been wrought in them, and of their external

  expression, showed death to have been thus merciful and easy. The

  report was brought, while I was holding such discourse on the

  beach, that no more bodies had come ashore since last night. It

  began to be very doubtful whether many more would be thrown up,

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  until the north-east winds of the early spring set in. Moreover, a

  great number of the passengers, and particularly the second-class

  women-passengers, were known to have been in the middle of the ship

  when she parted, and thus the collapsing wreck would have fallen

  upon them after yawning open, and would keep them down. A diver

  made known, even then, that he had come upon the body of a man, and

  had sought to release it from a great superincumbent weight; but

  that, finding he could not do so without mutilating the remains, he

  had left it where it was.

  It was the kind and wholesome face I have made mention of as being

  then beside me, that I had purposed to myself to see, when I left

  home for Wales. I had heard of that clergyman, as having buried

  many scores of the shipwrecked people; of his having opened his

  house and heart to their agonised friends; of his having used a

  most sweet and patient diligence for weeks and weeks, in the

  performance of the forlornest offices that Man can render to his

  kind; of his having most tenderly and thoroughly devoted himself to

  the dead, and to those who were sorrowing for the dead. I had said

  to myself, 'In the Christmas season of the year, I should like to

  see that man!' And he had swung the gate of his little garden in

  coming out to meet me, not half an hour ago.

  So cheerful of spirit and guiltless of affectation, as true

  practical Christianity ever is! I read more of the New Testament

  in the fresh frank face going up the village beside me, in five

  minutes, than I have read in anathematising discourses (albeit put

  to press with enormous flourishing of trumpets), in all my life. I

  heard more of the Sacred Book in the cordial voice that had nothing

  to say about its owner, than in all the would-be celestial pairs of

  bellows that have ever blown conceit at me.

  We climbed towards the little church, at a cheery pace, among the

  loose stones, the deep mud, the wet coarse grass, the outlying

  water, and other obstructions from which frost and snow had lately

  thawed. It was a mistake (my friend was glad to tell me, on the

  way) to suppose that the peasantry had shown any superstitious

  avoidance of the drowned; on the whole, they had done very well,

  and had assisted readily. Ten shillings had been paid for the

  bringing of each body up to the church, but the way was steep, and

  a horse and cart (in which it was wrapped in a sheet) were

  necessary, and three or four men, and, all things considered, it

  was not a great price. The people were none the richer for the

  wreck, for it was the season of the herring-shoal - and who could

  cast nets for fish, and find dead men and women in the draught?

  He had the church keys in his hand, and opened the churchyard gate,

  and opened the church door; and we went in.

  It is a little church of great antiquity; there is reason to

  believe that some church has occupied the spot, these thousand

  years or more. The pulpit was gone, and other things usually

  belonging to the church were gone, owing to its living congregation

  having deserted it for the neighbouring school-room, and yielded it

  up to the dead. The very Commandments had been shouldered out of

  their places, in the bringing in of the dead; the black wooden

  tables on which they were painted, were askew, and on the stone

  pavement below them, and on the stone pavement all over the church,

  were the marks and stains where the drowned had been laid do
wn.

  The eye, with little or no aid from the imagination, could yet see

  how the bodies had been turned, and where the head had been and

  where the feet. Some faded traces of the wreck of the Australian

  ship may be discernible on the stone pavement of this little

  church, hundreds of years hence, when the digging for gold in

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  Australia shall have long and long ceased out of the land.

  Forty-four shipwrecked men and women lay here at one time, awaiting

  burial. Here, with weeping and wailing in every room of his house,

  my companion worked alone for hours, solemnly surrounded by eyes

  that could not see him, and by lips that could not speak to him,

  patiently examining the tattered clothing, cutting off buttons,

  hair, marks from linen, anything that might lead to subsequent

  identification, studying faces, looking for a scar, a bent finger,

  a crooked toe, comparing letters sent to him with the ruin about

  him. 'My dearest brother had bright grey eyes and a pleasant

  smile,' one sister wrote. O poor sister! well for you to be far

  from here, and keep that as your last remembrance of him!

  The ladies of the clergyman's family, his wife and two sisters-inlaw,

  came in among the bodies often. It grew to be the business of

  their lives to do so. Any new arrival of a bereaved woman would

  stimulate their pity to compare the description brought, with the

  dread realities. Sometimes, they would go back able to say, 'I

  have found him,' or, 'I think she lies there.' Perhaps, the

  mourner, unable to bear the sight of all that lay in the church,

  would be led in blindfold. Conducted to the spot with many

  compassionate words, and encouraged to look, she would say, with a

  piercing cry, 'This is my boy!' and drop insensible on the

  insensible figure.

  He soon observed that in some cases of women, the identification of

  persons, though complete, was quite at variance with the marks upon

  the linen; this led him to notice that even the marks upon the

  linen were sometimes inconsistent with one another; and thus he

  came to understand that they had dressed in great haste and

  agitation, and that their clothes had become mixed together. The

  identification of men by their dress, was rendered extremely

  difficult, in consequence of a large proportion of them being

  dressed alike - in clothes of one kind, that is to say, supplied by