Part 6

But I am losing my temper over a hypothetical case. I am forgetting the special purpose of my petition, which is to beg that the Man-Hater may be removed altogether from her usurped position of heroine. The new-fashioned heroine is a libel on her sex. As a husband and a father, I solemnly deny that she is in any single respect a natural woman. Am I no judge? I have a wife, and I made her an offer. Did she receive it as the Man-Haters receive offers? Can I ever forget the mixture of modest confusion and perfect politeness with which that admirable woman heard me utter the most absolute nonsense that ever issued from my lips? Perhaps she is not fit for a heroine. Well, I can give her up in that capacity without a pang. But my daughters and nieces have claims, I suppose, to be considered as examples of what young ladies are in the present day. Ever since I read the first novel with a Man-Hater in it, I have had my eye on their nostrils, and I can make affidavit that I have never yet seen them dilate under any circumstances, or in any society. As for curling their lips and curving their necks, they have attempted both operations at my express request, and have found them to be physical impossibilities. In men's society, their manners (like those of all other girls whom I meet with) are natural and modest; and--in the cases of certain privileged men--winning, into the bargain. They open their eyes with astonishment when they read of the proceedings of our new-fashioned heroines, and throw the book indignantly across the room, when they find a nice man submitting to be bullied by a nasty woman, because he has paid her the compliment of falling in love with her. No, no! we positively decline to receive any more Man-Haters, and there is an end of it!

With this uncompromising expression of opinion, I think it desirable to bring the present petition to a close. There are one or two other good things in fiction, of which we have had enough; but I refrain from mentioning them, from modest apprehension of asking for too much at a time. If the slight changes in general, and the sweeping reform in particular, which I have ventured to suggest, can be accomplished, we are sure, in the future as in the past, to be grateful, appreciating, and incessant novel-readers. If we cannot claim any critical weight in the eyes of our esteemed authors, we can at least arrogate to ourselves the minor merit, not only of reading novels perpetually, but (and this is a rarer virtue) of publicly and proudly avowing the fact. We only pretend to be human beings with a natural desire for as much amusement as our work-a-day destinies will let us have. We are just respectable enough to be convinced of the usefulness of occasionally reading for information; but we are also certain (and we say it boldly, in the teeth of the dull people), that there are few higher, better, or more profitable enjoyments in this world than reading a good novel.

FRAGMENTS OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE.--I.

Laid up in lodgings.

MY PARIS LODGING.

It has happened rather whimsically, and not very fortunately for me, that my first experience of living in furnished lodgings abroad, as well as in England, has occurred at the very time when illness has rendered me particularly susceptible to the temporary loss of the comforts of home. I have been ill, alone, in furnished lodgings in Paris--ill, alone, on the journey back to England--ill, alone, again, in furnished lodgings in London. I am a single man; but as I have already intimated, I never knew what it was to enjoy the desolate liberty of the bachelor until I became an invalid. Some of my impressions of things and persons about me, formed under these anomalous circumstances, may, perhaps, prove not altogether unworthy of being written down, while they are still fresh in my mind.

How I happen, for a temporary period, to be away from the home in which I have hitherto lived with my nearest relatives, and to which I hope soon to return, it is of no importance to the reader to know. Neither is it at all worth while to occupy time and space with any particular description of the illness from which I have been and am still suffering. It will be enough for preliminary purposes, if I present myself at once in the character of a convalescent visiting Paris, with the double intention of passing agreeably an interval of necessary absence from home, and of promoting, by change of air and scene, my recovery from a distressing and a tedious illness. When I add to this, that although I lived alone in my French bachelor apartment, I had the good fortune at Paris, as afterwards in London, to be in the near neighbourhood of the most kind, attentive, and affectionate friends, I have said as much as is needful by way of preface, and may get on at once to my main purpose.

What my impressions of my apartment in Paris might have been, if I had recovered there according to my anticipations, I cannot venture to say; for, before I had got fairly settled in my new rooms, I suffered a sudden relapse. My life, again, became the life of an invalid, and my ways of thought and observation turned back disastrously to the old invalid channel. Change of air and scene--which had done nothing for my body--did nothing either for my mind. At Paris, as before in London, I looked at the world about me, purely from the sick man's point of view--or, in other words, the events that passed, the sights that appeared, and the persons who moved around me, interested or repelled me only as they referred more or less directly to myself and my own invalid situation. This curious narrowness of view, of which I am not yet well enough entirely to rid myself, though as conscious as another of the mental weakness that it implies, has no connection that I can discover with excessive selfishness or vanity; it is simply the result of the inevitable increase of a man's importance to himself which the very fact of sickness is only too apt to produce.

My own sensations, as a sick man, now fill up the weary blank of my daily existence when I am alone, and form the main topic of inquiry and conversation when my doctor and my friends enliven my solitude. The concerns of my own poor body, which do not, I thank heaven, occupy my attention for much more than one hour out of the twenty-four, when I am well, become the main business and responsibility of all my waking moments, now that I am ill. Pain to suffer, and the swallowing of drugs and taking of nourishment at regulated periods; daily restraints that I must undergo, and hourly precautions that I am forced to practise, all contribute to keep my mind bound down to the level of my body. A flight of thought beyond myself and the weary present time--even supposing I were capable of the exertion--would lead me astray from the small personal rules and regulations on which I now depend absolutely for the recovery of my health.

Have my temper and disposition changed for the worse, under these unfavourable circumstances? Not much, I hope. I can honestly say for myself that I envy no other man's health and happiness. I feel no jealous pang when I hear laughter about me. I can look at people out of my window, running easily across the road, while I can hardly crawl from one end of my chamber to the other, without feeling insulted by their activity. Still, it is true, at the same time, that I warm to people now exactly in proportion as I see them sensibly and sincerely touched by my suffering condition; and that I like, or dislike, my habitation for the time being, just as it happens to suit, or not to suit, all the little requirements of my temporary infirmity. If I were introduced to one of the most eminent men in the country at this moment, and if he did not look sorry to see me ill, I should never care to set eyes on the eminent man again. If I had a superb room with the finest view in the world, but no bed-side conveniences for my pill-boxes and medicine-bottles, I would leave that superb room and fine view, and go cheerfully to a garret in an alley, provided it adapted itself comfortably to the arrangement of my indispensable invalid's lumber. This is doubtless a humiliating confession; but it is well that I should make it once for all--for, the various opinions and impressions which I am about frankly to write down, will be found to be more or less coloured by what I venture to describe as the involuntary egotism of a sick man.

Let us see how my new lodging in Paris suits me; and why it is that I immediately become fond of it.

I live in a little building of my own, called a Pavilion. Outside, it resembles, as to size, brightness, and apparent insubstantiality, a private dwelling-house in a Pantomime. I expect as I drive up to it, for the first time, to see Clown grinning at the door, and Harlequin jumping through the window. A key is produced, and an odd little white door, through which no fat man could penetrate even sideways, is opened; I ascend a steep flight of a dozen steps, and enter my toy-castle: my own independent, solitary, miniature mansion.

The first room is the drawing-room. It is about the size of a large packing-case, with a gay looking-glass and clock, with bright red chairs and sofa, with a cosy round table, with a big window looking out on another Pavilion opposite, and on a great house set back in a courtyard. To my indescribable astonishment, it actually possesses three doors! One I have just entered by. Another leads into a bed-chamber of the same size as the drawing-room, just as brightly and neatly furnished, with a window that looks out on the everlasting gaiety and bustle of the Champs Elysées. The third door leads into a dressing-room half the size of the drawing-room, and having a fourth door which opens into a kitchen half the size of the dressing-room, but of course possessing a fifth door which leads out again to the head of the staircase. As no two people meeting in the kitchen could possibly pass each other, or remain in the apartment together without serious inconvenience, the two doors leading in and out of it may be pronounced useful as well as ornamental. Into this quaint little culinary crevice the coal-merchant, the wood-merchant, and the water-carrier squeeze their way, and find a doll's cellar and cistern all ready for them. They might be followed, if I were only well enough to give dinners, by a cook and his scullions--for I possess, besides the cellar and cistern, an elaborate charcoal stove in the kitchen, at which any number of courses might be prepared by any culinary artist, who could cook composedly with a row of small fires under his nose, a coal-cellar between his legs, a cistern scrubbing his shoulder, and a lukewarm wall against his back.

But what is the main secret of my fondness for the Pavilion? It does not, I am afraid, lie in the brightness and elegance of the little rooms, or even in the delightful independence of inhabiting a lodging, which is also a house of my own, where I can neither be disturbed nor overlooked by any other lodgers. The one irresistible appeal which my Parisian apartment makes to my sympathies, consists in the perfect manner in which it fits my wants and flatters my weaknesses as an invalid.

I have quite a little druggist's stock-in-trade of physic-bottles, glasses, spoons, card-boxes and prescriptions; I have all sorts of queer vestments and coverings, intended to guarantee me against all variations of temperature and all degrees of exposure, by night as well as by day; I have ready remedies that must be kept in my bed-chamber, and elaborate applications that I must find handy in my dressing-room. In short, I myself am nothing but the centre of a vast medical litter, and the closer the said litter revolves round me the more comfortable I am. In a house of the usual size, and in rooms arranged on the ordinary plan, I should be driven distracted (being an untidy man even in my healthiest moments) by mislaying things every hour in the day, by having to get up to look for them, and by being compelled to walk up and down stairs, or to make others do so for me, when I want to establish communications between dressing-room, bed-room, drawing-room, coal-cellar, and kitchen. In my tiny Parisian house of one small storey, I can wait on myself with the most perfect ease; in my wee sitting-room, nine-tenths of the things I want are within arm's length of me, as I repose in my elbow-chair; if I must move I can get from my bed-chamber to my kitchen in less time than it would take me to walk across an English drawing-room; if I lose my morning draught, mislay my noontide drops, or leave my evening pill-box under my afternoon dressing-gown, I can take my walking-stick or my fire-tongs, and poke or fish for missing articles in every corner of the room, without doing more than turning round in my chair. If I had been well and had given dinner parties, I might have found my habitation rather too small for me. As it is, if my Pavilion had been built on purpose for a solitary lodger to fall ill in with the least possible amount of personal discomfort, it could not have suited my sad case better. Sick, I love and honour the skilful architect who contrived it. Well, I am very much afraid I should never have bestowed so much as a single thought on him.

Why do I become, in one cordial quarter of an hour, friendly, familiar, and even affectionate with my portress? Because it is part of my unhealthy condition of body and mind, that I like nothing so well as being pitied; and my portress sweetens my daily existence with so much compassion that she does me more good, I think, than my doctor or my drugs.

Let me try to describe her. She is a thin, rapid, cheerful little woman, with a tiny face and bright brown eyes. She has a husband (Hippolyte-senior) and a son (Hippolyte-junior), and a lodge of one room to live in with her family. She has not been in bed, for years past, before two or three in the morning; for my Pavilion and the second Pavilion opposite and the large house behind, are all shut in from the roadway by handsome iron gates, which it is the business of somebody in the porter's lodge to open (by pulling a string communicating with the latch) at all hours of the night to homeward-bound lodgers. The large house has so many tenants that some one is always out at a party or a theatre--so the keeping of late hours becomes a necessary part of the service in the lodge, and the poor little portress is the victim who suffers as perpetual night-watch. Hippolyte-senior absorbs his fair share of work in the day, and takes the early-rising department cheerfully, but he does not possess the gift of keeping awake at night. By eleven o'clock (such is sometimes the weakness even of the most amiable human nature) it is necessary that Hippolyte-senior should be stretched on his back on the nuptial bedstead, snoring impervious to all sounds and all in-comers. Hippolyte-junior, or the son, is too young to be trusted with the supervision of the gate-string. He sleeps, sound as his father, with a half-developed snore and a coiled-up body, in a crib at the foot of the parental bed. On the other side of the room, hard by the lodgers' keys and candlesticks, with a big stove behind her and a gaslight before her eyes, sits the faithful little portress, watching out the weary hours as wakefully as she can. She trusts entirely to strong coffee and the near flare of the gaslight to combat the natural sleepiness which follows a hard day's work begun at eight o'clock every morning. The coffee and the gas deserve, to a certain extent, the confidence she places in them. They keep her bright brown eyes wide open, staring with unwinking pertinacity at the light before them. They keep her back very straight against her chair, and her arms crossed tightly over her bosom, and her feet set firmly on her footstool. But though they stop sleep from shutting her eyes or relaxing her limbs, they cannot prevent some few latent Morphian influences from stealthily reaching her. Open as her eyes may be, the little woman nevertheless does start guiltily when the ring at the bell comes at last; does stare fixedly for a moment before she can get up; has to fight resolutely with something drowsy and clinging in the shape of a trance, before she can fly to the latch-string, and hang on to it wearily, instead of pulling at it with the proper wakeful jerk. Night after night she has now drunk the strong coffee, and propped herself up stiffly in her straight chair, and stared hard at the flaring gaslight, for nearly seven years past. Some people would have lost their tempers and their spirits under these hard circumstances; but the cheerful little portress has only lost flesh. In a dark corner of the room hangs a daguerreotype likeness. It represents a buxom woman, with round cheeks and a sturdy waist, and dates from the period when she was the bride of Hippolyte-senior, and was thinking of following him into the Porter's Lodge. "Ah! my dear sir," she says when I condole with her, "if we do get a little money sometimes in our way of life, we don't earn it too easily. Aïe! Aïe! Aïe! I should like a good sleep: I should like to be as fat as my portrait again!"

The same friendly relations--arising entirely, let it always be remembered, out of my illness and the portress's compassion for me--which have let me into the secrets of the strong coffee, the daguerreotype portrait, and the sleepy constitution of Hippolyte-senior, also enable me to ascertain, by special invitation, how the inhabitants of the lodge dispose of some of the hardly-earned profits of their situation.

I find myself suffering rather painfully, one morning, under some aggravated symptoms of my illness, and my friend the portress comes into the Pavilion to talk to me and keep up my spirits. She has had an hour's extra sleep, for a wonder, and is in a chirping state of cheerfulness in consequence. She shudders and makes faces at my physic-bottles; entreats me to throw them away, to let her put me to bed, and administer A Light Tea to begin with, and A Broth to follow (un Thé léger et un Bouillon). If I will only stick to these remedies, she will have them ready, if necessary, every hour in the day, and will guarantee my immediate restoration to health and strength. While we are arguing the question of the uselessness of drugs and the remedial excellence of tea and broth, Hippolyte-senior, with a look of mysterious triumph, which immediately communicates itself to the face of his wife, enters the room to tell her that she is wanted below in the lodge. She goes to his side and takes his arm, as if he was a strange gentleman waiting to lead her down to dinner, nods to him confidentially, then glances at me. Her husband follows her example, and the two stand quite unconfusedly, arm-in-arm, smiling upon me and my physic-bottles, as if they were a pair of lovers and I was the venerable parent whose permission and blessing they were waiting to receive.

"Have you been getting a new doctor for me?" I ask, excessively puzzled by their evident desire to connect me with some secret in the lodge.

"No," says the portress, "I believe in no doctors. I believe in nothing but a light tea and a broth."

("My sentiments also!" adds her husband, parenthetically.)

"But we have something to show you in the lodge," continues the portress.

(Hippolyte-senior arches his eyebrows, and says "Aha!")

"And when you feel better," proceeds my cheerful little friend, "only have the politeness to come down to us, and you will see a marvellous sight!"

Hippolyte-senior depresses his eyebrows, and says "Hush!"

"Enough," replies the portress, understanding him; "let us retire."

And they leave the room immediately, still arm-in-arm--the fondest and most mysterious married couple that I have ever set eyes on.

That day, I do not feel quite strong enough to encounter great surprises; so my visit to the lodge is deferred until the next morning. Rather to my amazement, the portress does not pay me her usual visit at my waking, on the eventful day. I descend to the lodge, wondering what this change means, and see three or four strangers assembled in the room which is bed-chamber, parlour, and porter's office, all in one. The strangers, I find, are admiring friends: they surround Hippolyte-senior, and all look one way with an expression of intense pleasure and surprise. My eyes follow the direction of theirs; and I see, above the shabby little lodge table, a resplendent new looking-glass in the brightest of frames. On either side of it, rise two blush-coloured wax tapers. Below it are three ornamental pots with blooming rose-trees in them, backed by a fanlike screen of fair white paper. This is the surprise that was in store for me; and this is also the security in which the inhabitants of the lodge have invested their last hard-earned savings. The whole thing has the effect upon my mind of an amateur High Altar; and I admire the new purchase accordingly with such serious energy of expression, that Hippolyte-senior, in the first sweetness of triumph, forgets the modesty proper to his position as proprietor of the new treasure, and apostrophises his own property as Magnifique, with a power of voice and an energy of gesticulation which I have never noticed in him before. When his enthusiasm has abated, and just as I am on the point of asking where my friend the portress is, I hear a faint little voice speaking behind the group of admiring friends:

"Perhaps, Messieurs et Mesdames, you think this an extravagance for people in our situation," says the voice, in feebly polite tones of apology; "but, alas! how could we resist it? It is so beautiful--it brightens the room so--it gives us such a noble appearance. And, then, it is also a property--something to leave to our children--in short, a pardonable extravagance. Aïe! I am shaking all over again; I can say no more!"

While these words are in course of utterance, the group of friends separate, and I see sitting behind them, close to the big stove, the little portress, looking sadly changed for the worse. Her tiny face has become very yellow; her bright brown eyes look disproportionately large; she has an old shawl twisted round her shoulders and shivers in it perpetually. I ask what is the matter, imagining that the poor little woman has got a fit of the ague. The portress contrives to smile as usual before she answers, though her teeth are chattering audibly.

"You will not give me drugs, if I tell you?" she says.

"I will do nothing that is not perfectly agreeable to you," I reply evasively.

"My complaint is a violent indigestion (une forte indigestion)," continues the portress, indicatively laying one trembling fore-finger on the region of her malady. "And I am curing myself with a Light Tea."