THE SEVEN POOR TRAVELLERS--IN THREE CHAPTERS
by Charles Dickens
CHAPTER I--IN THE OLD CITY OF ROCHESTER
Strictly speaking, there were only six Poor Travellers; but, being a
Traveller myself, though an idle one, and being withal as poor as I
hope to be, I brought the number up to seven. This word of
explanation is due at once, for what says the inscription over the
quaint old door?
RICHARD WATTS, Esq.
by his Will, dated 22 Aug. 1579,
founded this Charity
for Six poor Travellers,
who not being ROGUES, or PROCTORS,
May receive gratis for one Night,
Lodging, Entertainment,
and Fourpence each.
It was in the ancient little city of Rochester in Kent, of all the
good days in the year upon a Christmas-eve, that I stood reading
this inscription over the quaint old door in question. I had been
wandering about the neighbouring Cathedral, and had seen the tomb of
Richard Watts, with the effigy of worthy Master Richard starting out
of it like a ship's figure-head; and I had felt that I could do no
less, as I gave the Verger his fee, than inquire the way to Watts's
Charity. The way being very short and very plain, I had come
prosperously to the inscription and the quaint old door.
"Now," said I to myself, as I looked at the knocker, "I know I am
not a Proctor; I wonder whether I am a Rogue!"
Upon the whole, though Conscience reproduced two or three pretty
faces which might have had smaller attraction for a moral Goliath
than they had had for me, who am but a Tom Thumb in that way, I came
to the conclusion that I was not a Rogue. So, beginning to regard
the establishment as in some sort my property, bequeathed to me and
divers co-legatees, share and share alike, by the Worshipful Master
Richard Watts, I stepped backward into the road to survey my
inheritance.
I found it to be a clean white house, of a staid and venerable air,
with the quaint old door already three times mentioned (an arched
door), choice little long low lattice-windows, and a roof of three
gables. The silent High Street of Rochester is full of gables, with
old beams and timbers carved into strange faces. It is oddly
garnished with a queer old clock that projects over the pavement out
of a grave red-brick building, as if Time carried on business there,
and hung out his sign. Sooth to say, he did an active stroke of
work in Rochester, in the old days of the Romans, and the Saxons,
and the Normans; and down to the times of King John, when the rugged
castle--I will not undertake to say how many hundreds of years old
then--was abandoned to the centuries of weather which have so
defaced the dark apertures in its walls, that the ruin looks as if
the rooks and daws had pecked its eyes out.
I was very well pleased, both with my property and its situation.
While I was yet surveying it with growing content, I espied, at one
of the upper lattices which stood open, a decent body, of a
wholesome matronly appearance, whose eyes I caught inquiringly
addressed to mine. They said so plainly, "Do you wish to see the
house?" that I answered aloud, "Yes, if you please." And within a
minute the old door opened, and I bent my head, and went down two
steps into the entry.
"This," said the matronly presence, ushering me into a low room on
the right, "is where the Travellers sit by the fire, and cook what
bits of suppers they buy with their fourpences."
"O! Then they have no Entertainment?" said I. For the inscription
over the outer door was still running in my head, and I was mentally
repeating, in a kind of tune, "Lodging, entertainment, and fourpence
each."
"They have a fire provided for 'em," returned the matron--a mighty
civil person, not, as I could make out, overpaid; "and these cooking
utensils. And this what's painted on a board is the rules for their
behaviour. They have their fourpences when they get their tickets
from the steward over the way,--for I don't admit 'em myself, they
must get their tickets first,--and sometimes one buys a rasher of
bacon, and another a herring, and another a pound of potatoes, or
what not. Sometimes two or three of 'em will club their fourpences
together, and make a supper that way. But not much of anything is
to be got for fourpence, at present, when provisions is so dear."
"True indeed," I remarked. I had been looking about the room,
admiring its snug fireside at the upper end, its glimpse of the
street through the low mullioned window, and its beams overhead.
"It is very comfortable," said I.
"Ill-conwenient," observed the matronly presence.
I liked to hear her say so; for it showed a commendable anxiety to
execute in no niggardly spirit the intentions of Master Richard
Watts. But the room was really so well adapted to its purpose that
I protested, quite enthusiastically, against her disparagement.
"Nay, ma'am," said I, "I am sure it is warm in winter and cool in
summer. It has a look of homely welcome and soothing rest. It has
a remarkably cosey fireside, the very blink of which, gleaming out
into the street upon a winter night, is enough to warm all
Rochester's heart. And as to the convenience of the six Poor
Travellers--"
"I don't mean them," returned the presence. "I speak of its being
an ill-conwenience to myself and my daughter, having no other room
to sit in of a night."
This was true enough, but there was another quaint room of
corresponding dimensions on the opposite side of the entry: so I
stepped across to it, through the open doors of both rooms, and
asked what this chamber was for.
"This," returned the presence, "is the Board Room. Where the
gentlemen meet when they come here."
Let me see. I had counted from the street six upper windows besides
these on the ground-story. Making a perplexed calculation in my
mind, I rejoined, "Then the six Poor Travellers sleep upstairs?"
My new friend shook her head. "They sleep," she answered, "in two
little outer galleries at the back, where their beds has always
been, ever since the Charity was founded. It being so very ill-
conwenient to me as things is at present, the gentlemen are going to
take off a bit of the back-yard, and make a slip of a room for 'em
there, to sit in before they go to bed."
"And then the six Poor Travellers," said I, "will be entirely out of
the house?"
"Entirely out of the house," assented the presence, comfortably
smoothing her hands. "Which is considered much better for all
parties, and much more conwenient."
I had been a little startled, in the Cathedral, by the emphasis with
which the effigy of Master Richard Watts was bursting out of his
tomb; but I began to think, now, that it might be expected to come
across the High Street some stormy night, and make a disturbance
here.
Howbeit, I kept my thoughts to myself, and accompanied the presence
to the little galleries at the back. I found them on a tiny scale,
like the galleries in old inn-yards; and they were very clean.
While I was looking at them, the matron gave me to understand that
the prescribed number of Poor Travellers were forthcoming every
night from year's end to year's end; and that the beds were always
occupied. My questions upon this, and her replies, brought us back
to the Board Room so essential to the dignity of "the gentlemen,"
where she showed me the printed accounts of the Charity hanging up
by the window. From them I gathered that the greater part of the
property bequeathed by the Worshipful Master Richard Watts for the
maintenance of this foundation was, at the period of his death, mere
marsh-land; but that, in course of time, it had been reclaimed and
built upon, and was very considerably increased in value. I found,
too, that about a thirtieth part of the annual revenue was now
expended on the purposes commemorated in the inscription over the
door; the rest being handsomely laid out in Chancery, law expenses,
collectorship, receivership, poundage, and other appendages of
management, highly complimentary to the importance of the six Poor
Travellers. In short, I made the not entirely new discovery that it
may be said of an establishment like this, in dear old England, as
of the fat oyster in the American story, that it takes a good many
men to swallow it whole.
"And pray, ma'am," said I, sensible that the blankness of my face
began to brighten as the thought occurred to me, "could one see
these Travellers?"
"Well!" she returned dubiously, "no!"
"Not to-night, for instance!" said I.
"Well!" she returned more positively, "no. Nobody ever asked to see
them, and nobody ever did see them."
As I am not easily balked in a design when I am set upon it, I urged
to the good lady that this was Christmas-eve; that Christmas comes
but once a year,--which is unhappily too true, for when it begins to
stay with us the whole year round we shall make this earth a very
different place; that I was possessed by the desire to treat the
Travellers to a supper and a temperate glass of hot Wassail; that
the voice of Fame had been heard in that land, declaring my ability
to make hot Wassail; that if I were permitted to hold the feast, I
should be found conformable to reason, sobriety, and good hours; in
a word, that I could be merry and wise myself, and had been even
known at a pinch to keep others so, although I was decorated with no
badge or medal, and was not a Brother, Orator, Apostle, Saint, or
Prophet of any denomination whatever. In the end I prevailed, to my
great joy. It was settled that at nine o'clock that night a Turkey
and a piece of Roast Beef should smoke upon the board; and that I,
faint and unworthy minister for once of Master Richard Watts, should
preside as the Christmas-supper host of the six Poor Travellers.
I went back to my inn to give the necessary directions for the
Turkey and Roast Beef, and, during the remainder of the day, could
settle to nothing for thinking of the Poor Travellers. When the
wind blew hard against the windows,--it was a cold day, with dark
gusts of sleet alternating with periods of wild brightness, as if
the year were dying fitfully,--I pictured them advancing towards
their resting-place along various cold roads, and felt delighted to
think how little they foresaw the supper that awaited them. I
painted their portraits in my mind, and indulged in little
heightening touches. I made them footsore; I made them weary; I
made them carry packs and bundles; I made them stop by finger-posts
and milestones, leaning on their bent sticks, and looking wistfully
at what was written there; I made them lose their way; and filled
their five wits with apprehensions of lying out all night, and being
frozen to death. I took up my hat, and went out, climbed to the top
of the Old Castle, and looked over the windy hills that slope down
to the Medway, almost believing that I could descry some of my
Travellers in the distance. After it fell dark, and the Cathedral
bell was heard in the invisible steeple--quite a bower of frosty
rime when I had last seen it--striking five, six, seven, I became so
full of my Travellers that I could eat no dinner, and felt
constrained to watch them still in the red coals of my fire. They
were all arrived by this time, I thought, had got their tickets, and
were gone in.--There my pleasure was dashed by the reflection that
probably some Travellers had come too late and were shut out.
After the Cathedral bell had struck eight, I could smell a delicious
savour of Turkey and Roast Beef rising to the window of my adjoining
bedroom, which looked down into the inn-yard just where the lights
of the kitchen reddened a massive fragment of the Castle Wall. It
was high time to make the Wassail now; therefore I had up the
materials (which, together with their proportions and combinations,
I must decline to impart, as the only secret of my own I was ever
known to keep), and made a glorious jorum. Not in a bowl; for a
bowl anywhere but on a shelf is a low superstition, fraught with
cooling and slopping; but in a brown earthenware pitcher, tenderly
suffocated, when full, with a coarse cloth. It being now upon the
stroke of nine, I set out for Watts's Charity, carrying my brown
beauty in my arms. I would trust Ben, the waiter, with untold gold;
but there are strings in the human heart which must never be sounded
by another, and drinks that I make myself are those strings in mine.
The Travellers were all assembled, the cloth was laid, and Ben had
brought a great billet of wood, and had laid it artfully on the top
of the fire, so that a touch or two of the poker after supper should
make a roaring blaze. Having deposited my brown beauty in a red
nook of the hearth, inside the fender, where she soon began to sing
like an ethereal cricket, diffusing at the same time odours as of
ripe vineyards, spice forests, and orange groves,--I say, having
stationed my beauty in a place of security and improvement, I
introduced myself to my guests by shaking hands all round, and
giving them a hearty welcome.
I found the party to be thus composed. Firstly, myself. Secondly,
a very decent man indeed, with his right arm in a sling, who had a
certain clean agreeable smell of wood about him, from which I judged
him to have something to do with shipbuilding. Thirdly, a little
sailor-boy, a mere child, with a profusion of rich dark brown hair,
and deep womanly-looking eyes. Fourthly, a shabby-genteel personage
in a threadbare black suit, and apparently in very bad
circumstances, with a dry suspicious look; the absent buttons on his
waistcoat eked out with red tape; and a bundle of extraordinarily
tattered papers sticking out of an inner breast-pocket. Fifthly, a
foreigner by birth, but an Englishman in speech, who carried his
pipe in the band of his hat, and lost no time in telling me, in an
easy, simple, engaging way, that he was a watchmaker from Geneva,
and travelled all about the Continent, mostly on foot, working as a
journeyman, and seeing new countries,--possibly (I thought) also
smuggling a watch or so, now and then. Sixthly, a little widow, who
had been very pretty and was still very young, but whose beauty had
been wrecked in some great misfortune, and whose manner was
remarkably timid, scared, and solitary. Seventhly and lastly, a
Traveller of a kind familiar to my boyhood, but now almost
obsolete,--a Book-Pedler, who had a quantity of Pamphlets and
Numbers with him, and who presently boasted that he could repeat
more verses in an evening than he could sell in a twelvemonth.
All these I have mentioned in the order in which they sat at table.
I presided, and the matronly presence faced me. We were not long in
taking our places, for the supper had arrived with me, in the
following procession:
Myself with the pitcher.
Ben with Beer.
Inattentive Boy with hot plates. Inattentive Boy with hot plates.
THE TURKEY.
Female carrying sauces to be heated on the spot.
THE BEEF.
Man with Tray on his head, containing Vegetables and Sundries.
Volunteer Hostler from Hotel, grinning,
And rendering no assistance.
As we passed along the High Street, comet-like, we left a long tail
of fragrance behind us which caused the public to stop, sniffing in
wonder. We had previously left at the corner of the inn-yard a
wall-eyed young man connected with the Fly department, and well
accustomed to the sound of a railway whistle which Ben always
carries in his pocket, whose instructions were, so soon as he should
hear the whistle blown, to dash into the kitchen, seize the hot
plum-pudding and mince-pies, and speed with them to Watts's Charity,
where they would be received (he was further instructed) by the
sauce-female, who would be provided with brandy in a blue state of
combustion.
All these arrangements were executed in the most exact and punctual
manner. I never saw a finer turkey, finer beef, or greater
prodigality of sauce and gravy;--and my Travellers did wonderful
justice to everything set before them. It made my heart rejoice to
observe how their wind and frost hardened faces softened in the
clatter of plates and knives and forks, and mellowed in the fire and
supper heat. While their hats and caps and wrappers, hanging up, a
few small bundles on the ground in a corner, and in another corner
three or four old walking-sticks, worn down at the end to mere
fringe, linked this smug interior with the bleak outside in a golden
chain.
When supper was done, and my brown beauty had been elevated on the
table, there was a general requisition to me to "take the corner;"
which suggested to me comfortably enough how much my friends here
made of a fire,--for when had I ever thought so highly of the
corner, since the days when I connected it with Jack Horner?
However, as I declined, Ben, whose touch on all convivial
instruments is perfect, drew the table apart, and instructing my
Travellers to open right and left on either side of me, and form
round the fire, closed up the centre with myself and my chair, and
preserved the order we had kept at table. He had already, in a
tranquil manner, boxed the ears of the inattentive boys until they
had been by imperceptible degrees boxed out of the room; and he now
rapidly skirmished the sauce-female into the High Street,
disappeared, and softly closed the door.
This was the time for bringing the poker to bear on the billet of
wood. I tapped it three times, like an enchanted talisman, and a
brilliant host of merry-makers burst out of it, and sported off by
the chimney,--rushing up the middle in a fiery country dance, and
never coming down again. Meanwhile, by their sparkling light, which
threw our lamp into the shade, I filled the glasses, and gave my
Travellers, CHRISTMAS!--CHRISTMAS-EVE, my friends, when the
shepherds, who were Poor Travellers, too, in their way, heard the
Angels sing, "On earth, peace. Good-will towards men!"
I don't know who was the first among us to think that we ought to
take hands as we sat, in deference to the toast, or whether any one
of us anticipated the others, but at any rate we all did it. We
then drank to the memory of the good Master Richard Watts. And I
wish his Ghost may never have had worse usage under that roof than
it had from us.
It was the witching time for Story-telling. "Our whole life,
Travellers," said I, "is a story more or less intelligible,--
generally less; but we shall read it by a clearer light when it is
ended. I, for one, am so divided this night between fact and
fiction, that I scarce know which is which. Shall I beguile the
time by telling you a story as we sit here?"
They all answered, yes. I had little to tell them, but I was bound
by my own proposal. Therefore, after looking for awhile at the
spiral column of smoke wreathing up from my brown beauty, through
which I could have almost sworn I saw the effigy of Master Richard
Watts less startled than usual, I fired away.
