TOM TIDDLER'S GROUND
CHAPTER I--PICKING UP SOOT AND CINDERS
"And why Tom Tiddler's ground?" said the Traveller.
"Because he scatters halfpence to Tramps and such-like," returned
the Landlord, "and of course they pick 'em up. And this being done
on his own land (which it IS his own land, you observe, and were his
family's before him), why it is but regarding the halfpence as gold
and silver, and turning the ownership of the property a bit round
your finger, and there you have the name of the children's game
complete. And it's appropriate too," said the Landlord, with his
favourite action of stooping a little, to look across the table out
of window at vacancy, under the window-blind which was half drawn
down. "Leastwise it has been so considered by many gentlemen which
have partook of chops and tea in the present humble parlour."
The Traveller was partaking of chops and tea in the present humble
parlour, and the Landlord's shot was fired obliquely at him.
"And you call him a Hermit?" said the Traveller.
"They call him such," returned the Landlord, evading personal
responsibility; "he is in general so considered."
"What IS a Hermit?" asked the Traveller.
"What is it?" repeated the Landlord, drawing his hand across his
chin.
"Yes, what is it?"
The Landlord stooped again, to get a more comprehensive view of
vacancy under the window-blind, and--with an asphyxiated appearance
on him as one unaccustomed to definition--made no answer.
"I'll tell you what I suppose it to be," said the Traveller. "An
abominably dirty thing."
"Mr. Mopes is dirty, it cannot be denied," said the Landlord.
"Intolerably conceited."
"Mr. Mopes is vain of the life he leads, some do say," replied the
Landlord, as another concession.
"A slothful, unsavoury, nasty reversal of the laws of human mature,"
said the Traveller; "and for the sake of GOD'S working world and its
wholesomeness, both moral and physical, I would put the thing on the
treadmill (if I had my way) wherever I found it; whether on a
pillar, or in a hole; whether on Tom Tiddler's ground, or the Pope
of Rome's ground, or a Hindoo fakeer's ground, or any other ground."
"I don't know about putting Mr. Mopes on the treadmill," said the
Landlord, shaking his head very seriously. "There ain't a doubt but
what he has got landed property."
"How far may it be to this said Tom Tiddler's ground?" asked the
Traveller.
"Put it at five mile," returned the Landlord.
"Well! When I have done my breakfast," said the Traveller, "I'll go
there. I came over here this morning, to find it out and see it."
"Many does," observed the Landlord.
The conversation passed, in the Midsummer weather of no remote year
of grace, down among the pleasant dales and trout-streams of a green
English county. No matter what county. Enough that you may hunt
there, shoot there, fish there, traverse long grass-grown Roman
roads there, open ancient barrows there, see many a square mile of
richly cultivated land there, and hold Arcadian talk with a bold
peasantry, their country's pride, who will tell you (if you want to
know) how pastoral housekeeping is done on nine shillings a week.
Mr. Traveller sat at his breakfast in the little sanded parlour of
the Peal of Bells village alehouse, with the dew and dust of an
early walk upon his shoes--an early walk by road and meadow and
coppice, that had sprinkled him bountifully with little blades of
grass, and scraps of new hay, and with leaves both young and old,
and with other such fragrant tokens of the freshness and wealth of
summer. The window through which the landlord had concentrated his
gaze upon vacancy was shaded, because the morning sun was hot and
bright on the village street. The village street was like most
other village streets: wide for its height, silent for its size,
and drowsy in the dullest degree. The quietest little dwellings
with the largest of window-shutters (to shut up Nothing as carefully
as if it were the Mint, or the Bank of England) had called in the
Doctor's house so suddenly, that his brass door-plate and three
stories stood among them as conspicuous and different as the doctor
himself in his broadcloth, among the smock-frocks of his patients.
The village residences seemed to have gone to law with a similar
absence of consideration, for a score of weak little lath-and-
plaster cabins clung in confusion about the Attorney's red-brick
house, which, with glaring door-steps and a most terrific scraper,
seemed to serve all manner of ejectments upon them. They were as
various as labourers--high-shouldered, wry-necked, one-eyed, goggle-
eyed, squinting, bow-legged, knock-knee'd, rheumatic, crazy. Some
of the small tradesmen's houses, such as the crockery-shop and the
harness-maker, had a Cyclops window in the middle of the gable,
within an inch or two of its apex, suggesting that some forlorn
rural Prentice must wriggle himself into that apartment
horizontally, when he retired to rest, after the manner of the worm.
So bountiful in its abundance was the surrounding country, and so
lean and scant the village, that one might have thought the village
had sown and planted everything it once possessed, to convert the
same into crops. This would account for the bareness of the little
shops, the bareness of the few boards and trestles designed for
market purposes in a corner of the street, the bareness of the
obsolete Inn and Inn Yard, with the ominous inscription "Excise
Office" not yet faded out from the gateway, as indicating the very
last thing that poverty could get rid of. This would also account
for the determined abandonment of the village by one stray dog, fast
lessening in the perspective where the white posts and the pond
were, and would explain his conduct on the hypothesis that he was
going (through the act of suicide) to convert himself into manure,
and become a part proprietor in turnips or mangold-wurzel.
Mr. Traveller having finished his breakfast and paid his moderate
score, walked out to the threshold of the Peal of Bells, and, thence
directed by the pointing finger of his host, betook himself towards
the ruined hermitage of Mr. Mopes the hermit.
For, Mr. Mopes, by suffering everything about him to go to ruin, and
by dressing himself in a blanket and skewer, and by steeping himself
in soot and grease and other nastiness, had acquired great renown in
all that country-side--far greater renown than he could ever have
won for himself, if his career had been that of any ordinary
Christian, or decent Hottentot. He had even blanketed and skewered
and sooted and greased himself, into the London papers. And it was
curious to find, as Mr. Traveller found by stopping for a new
direction at this farm-house or at that cottage as he went along,
with how much accuracy the morbid Mopes had counted on the weakness
of his neighbours to embellish him. A mist of home-brewed marvel
and romance surrounded Mopes, in which (as in all fogs) the real
proportions of the real object were extravagantly heightened. He
had murdered his beautiful beloved in a fit of jealousy and was
doing penance; he had made a vow under the influence of grief; he
had made a vow under the influence of a fatal accident; he had made
a vow under the influence of religion; he had made a vow under the
influence of drink; he had made a vow under the influence of
disappointment; he had never made any vow, but "had got led into it"
by the possession of a mighty and most awful secret; he was
enormously rich, he was stupendously charitable, he was profoundly
learned, he saw spectres, he knew and could do all kinds of wonders.
Some said he went out every night, and was met by terrified
wayfarers stalking along dark roads, others said he never went out,
some knew his penance to be nearly expired, others had positive
information that his seclusion was not a penance at all, and would
never expire but with himself. Even, as to the easy facts of how
old he was, or how long he had held verminous occupation of his
blanket and skewer, no consistent information was to be got, from
those who must know if they would. He was represented as being all
the ages between five-and-twenty and sixty, and as having been a
hermit seven years, twelve, twenty, thirty,--though twenty, on the
whole, appeared the favourite term.
"Well, well!" said Mr. Traveller. "At any rate, let us see what a
real live Hermit looks like."
So, Mr. Traveller went on, and on, and on, until he came to Tom
Tiddler's Ground.
It was a nook in a rustic by-road, which the genius of Mopes had
laid waste as completely, as if he had been born an Emperor and a
Conqueror. Its centre object was a dwelling-house, sufficiently
substantial, all the window-glass of which had been long ago
abolished by the surprising genius of Mopes, and all the windows of
which were barred across with rough-split logs of trees nailed over
them on the outside. A rickyard, hip-high in vegetable rankness and
ruin, contained outbuildings from which the thatch had lightly
fluttered away, on all the winds of all the seasons of the year, and
from which the planks and beams had heavily dropped and rotted. The
frosts and damps of winter, and the heats of summer, had warped what
wreck remained, so that not a post or a board retained the position
it was meant to hold, but everything was twisted from its purpose,
like its owner, and degraded and debased. In this homestead of the
sluggard, behind the ruined hedge, and sinking away among the ruined
grass and the nettles, were the last perishing fragments of certain
ricks: which had gradually mildewed and collapsed, until they
looked like mounds of rotten honeycomb, or dirty sponge. Tom
Tiddler's ground could even show its ruined water; for, there was a
slimy pond into which a tree or two had fallen--one soppy trunk and
branches lay across it then--which in its accumulation of stagnant
weed, and in its black decomposition, and in all its foulness and
filth, was almost comforting, regarded as the only water that could
have reflected the shameful place without seeming polluted by that
low office.
Mr. Traveller looked all around him on Tom Tiddler's ground, and his
glance at last encountered a dusky Tinker lying among the weeds and
rank grass, in the shade of the dwelling-house. A rough walking-
staff lay on the ground by his side, and his head rested on a small
wallet. He met Mr. Traveller's eye without lifting up his head,
merely depressing his chin a little (for he was lying on his back)
to get a better view of him.
"Good day!" said Mr. Traveller.
"Same to you, if you like it," returned the Tinker.
"Don't YOU like it? It's a very fine day."
"I ain't partickler in weather," returned the Tinker, with a yawn.
Mr. Traveller had walked up to where he lay, and was looking down at
him. "This is a curious place," said Mr. Traveller.
"Ay, I suppose so!" returned the Tinker. "Tom Tiddler's ground,
they call this."
"Are you well acquainted with it?"
"Never saw it afore to-day," said the Tinker, with another yawn,
"and don't care if I never see it again. There was a man here just
now, told me what it was called. If you want to see Tom himself,
you must go in at that gate." He faintly indicated with his chin a
little mean ruin of a wooden gate at the side of the house.
"Have you seen Tom?"
"No, and I ain't partickler to see him. I can see a dirty man
anywhere."
"He does not live in the house, then?" said Mr. Traveller, casting
his eyes upon the house anew.
"The man said," returned the Tinker, rather irritably,--"him as was
here just now, 'this what you're a laying on, mate, is Tom Tiddler's
ground. And if you want to see Tom,' he says, 'you must go in at
that gate.' The man come out at that gate himself, and he ought to
know."
"Certainly," said Mr. Traveller.
"Though, perhaps," exclaimed the Tinker, so struck by the brightness
of his own idea, that it had the electric effect upon him of causing
him to lift up his head an inch or so, "perhaps he was a liar! He
told some rum 'uns--him as was here just now, did about this place
of Tom's. He says--him as was here just now--'When Tom shut up the
house, mate, to go to rack, the beds was left, all made, like as if
somebody was a-going to sleep in every bed. And if you was to walk
through the bedrooms now, you'd see the ragged mouldy bedclothes a
heaving and a heaving like seas. And a heaving and a heaving with
what?' he says. 'Why, with the rats under 'em.'"
"I wish I had seen that man," Mr. Traveller remarked.
"You'd have been welcome to see him instead of me seeing him,"
growled the Tinker; "for he was a long-winded one."
Not without a sense of injury in the remembrance, the Tinker
gloomily closed his eyes. Mr. Traveller, deeming the Tinker a
short-winded one, from whom no further breath of information was to
be derived, betook himself to the gate.
Swung upon its rusty hinges, it admitted him into a yard in which
there was nothing to be seen but an outhouse attached to the ruined
building, with a barred window in it. As there were traces of many
recent footsteps under this window, and as it was a low window, and
unglazed, Mr. Traveller made bold to peep within the bars. And
there to be sure he had a real live Hermit before him, and could
judge how the real dead Hermits used to look.
He was lying on a bank of soot and cinders, on the floor, in front
of a rusty fireplace. There was nothing else in the dark little
kitchen, or scullery, or whatever his den had been originally used
as, but a table with a litter of old bottles on it. A rat made a
clatter among these bottles, jumped down, and ran over the real live
Hermit on his way to his hole, or the man in HIS hole would not have
been so easily discernible. Tickled in the face by the rat's tail,
the owner of Tom Tiddler's ground opened his eyes, saw Mr.
Traveller, started up, and sprang to the window.
"Humph!" thought Mr. Traveller, retiring a pace or two from the
bars. "A compound of Newgate, Bedlam, a Debtors' Prison in the
worst time, a chimney-sweep, a mudlark, and the Noble Savage! A
nice old family, the Hermit family. Hah!"
Mr. Traveller thought this, as he silently confronted the sooty
object in the blanket and skewer (in sober truth it wore nothing
else), with the matted hair and the staring eyes. Further, Mr.
Traveller thought, as the eye surveyed him with a very obvious
curiosity in ascertaining the effect they produced, "Vanity, vanity,
vanity! Verily, all is vanity!"
"What is your name, sir, and where do you come from?" asked Mr.
Mopes the Hermit--with an air of authority, but in the ordinary
human speech of one who has been to school.
Mr. Traveller answered the inquiries.
"Did you come here, sir, to see ME?"
"I did. I heard of you, and I came to see you.--I know you like to
be seen." Mr. Traveller coolly threw the last words in, as a matter
of course, to forestall an affectation of resentment or objection
that he saw rising beneath the grease and grime of the face. They
had their effect.
"So," said the Hermit, after a momentary silence, unclasping the
bars by which he had previously held, and seating himself behind
them on the ledge of the window, with his bare legs and feet
crouched up, "you know I like to be seen?"
Mr. Traveller looked about him for something to sit on, and,
observing a billet of wood in a corner, brought it near the window.
Deliberately seating himself upon it, he answered, "Just so."
Each looked at the other, and each appeared to take some pains to
get the measure of the other.
"Then you have come to ask me why I lead this life," said the
Hermit, frowning in a stormy manner. "I never tell that to any
human being. I will not be asked that."
"Certainly you will not be asked that by me," said Mr. Traveller,
"for I have not the slightest desire to know."
"You are an uncouth man," said Mr. Mopes the Hermit.
"You are another," said Mr. Traveller.
The Hermit, who was plainly in the habit of overawing his visitors
with the novelty of his filth and his blanket and skewer, glared at
his present visitor in some discomfiture and surprise: as if he had
taken aim at him with a sure gun, and his piece had missed fire.
"Why do you come here at all?" he asked, after a pause.
"Upon my life," said Mr. Traveller, "I was made to ask myself that
very question only a few minutes ago--by a Tinker too."
As he glanced towards the gate in saying it, the Hermit glanced in
that direction likewise.
"Yes. He is lying on his back in the sunlight outside," said Mr,
Traveller, as if he had been asked concerning the man, "and he won't
come in; for he says--and really very reasonably--'What should I
come in for? I can see a dirty man anywhere.'"
"You are an insolent person. Go away from my premises. Go!" said
the Hermit, in an imperious and angry tone.
"Come, come!" returned Mr. Traveller, quite undisturbed. "This is a
little too much. You are not going to call yourself clean? Look at
your legs. And as to these being your premises:- they are in far
too disgraceful a condition to claim any privilege of ownership, or
anything else."
The Hermit bounced down from his window-ledge, and cast himself on
his bed of soot and cinders.
"I am not going," said Mr. Traveller, glancing in after him; "you
won't get rid of me in that way. You had better come and talk."
"I won't talk," said the Hermit, flouncing round to get his back
towards the window.
"Then I will," said Mr. Traveller. "Why should you take it ill that
I have no curiosity to know why you live this highly absurd and
highly indecent life? When I contemplate a man in a state of
disease, surely there is no moral obligation on me to be anxious to
know how he took it."
After a short silence, the Hermit bounced up again, and came back to
the barred window.
"What? You are not gone?" he said, affecting to have supposed that
he was.
"Nor going," Mr. Traveller replied: "I design to pass this summer
day here."
"How dare you come, sir, upon my promises--" the Hermit was
returning, when his visitor interrupted him.
"Really, you know, you must NOT talk about your premises. I cannot
allow such a place as this to be dignified with the name of
premises."
"How dare you," said the Hermit, shaking his bars, "come in at my
gate, to taunt me with being in a diseased state?"
"Why, Lord bless my soul," returned the other, very composedly, "you
have not the face to say that you are in a wholesome state? Do
allow me again to call your attention to your legs. Scrape yourself
anywhere--with anything--and then tell me you are in a wholesome
state. The fact is, Mr. Mopes, that you are not only a Nuisance--"
"A Nuisance?" repeated the Hermit, fiercely.
"What is a place in this obscene state of dilapidation but a
Nuisance? What is a man in your obscene state of dilapidation but a
Nuisance? Then, as you very well know, you cannot do without an
audience, and your audience is a Nuisance. You attract all the
disreputable vagabonds and prowlers within ten miles around, by
exhibiting yourself to them in that objectionable blanket, and by
throwing copper money among them, and giving them drink out of those
very dirty jars and bottles that I see in there (their stomachs need
be strong!); and in short," said Mr. Traveller, summing up in a
quietly and comfortably settled manner, "you are a Nuisance, and
this kennel is a Nuisance, and the audience that you cannot possibly
dispense with is a Nuisance, and the Nuisance is not merely a local
Nuisance, because it is a general Nuisance to know that there CAN BE
such a Nuisance left in civilisation so very long after its time."
"Will you go away? I have a gun in here," said the Hermit.
"Pooh!"
"I HAVE!"
"Now, I put it to you. Did I say you had not? And as to going
away, didn't I say I am not going away? You have made me forget
where I was. I now remember that I was remarking on your conduct
being a Nuisance. Moreover, it is in the last and lowest degree
inconsequent foolishness and weakness."
"Weakness?" echoed the Hermit.
"Weakness," said Mr. Traveller, with his former comfortably settled
final air.
"I weak, you fool?" cried the Hermit, "I, who have held to my
purpose, and my diet, and my only bed there, all these years?"
"The more the years, the weaker you," returned Mr. Traveller.
"Though the years are not so many as folks say, and as you willingly
take credit for. The crust upon your face is thick and dark, Mr.
Mopes, but I can see enough of you through it, to see that you are
still a young man."
"Inconsequent foolishness is lunacy, I suppose?" said the Hermit.
"I suppose it is very like it," answered Mr. Traveller.
"Do I converse like a lunatic?"
"One of us two must have a strong presumption against him of being
one, whether or no. Either the clean and decorously clad man, or
the dirty and indecorously clad man. I don't say which."
"Why, you self-sufficient bear," said the Hermit, "not a day passes
but I am justified in my purpose by the conversations I hold here;
not a day passes but I am shown, by everything I hear and see here,
how right and strong I am in holding my purpose."
Mr. Traveller, lounging easily on his billet of wood, took out a
pocket pipe and began to fill it. "Now, that a man," he said,
appealing to the summer sky as he did so, "that a man--even behind
bars, in a blanket and skewer--should tell me that he can see, from
day to day, any orders or conditions of men, women, or children, who
can by any possibility teach him that it is anything but the
miserablest drivelling for a human creature to quarrel with his
social nature--not to go so far as to say, to renounce his common
human decency, for that is an extreme case; or who can teach him
that he can in any wise separate himself from his kind and the
habits of his kind, without becoming a deteriorated spectacle
calculated to give the Devil (and perhaps the monkeys) pleasure,--is
something wonderful! I repeat," said Mr. Traveller, beginning to
smoke, "the unreasoning hardihood of it is something wonderful--even
in a man with the dirt upon him an inch or two thick--behind bars--
in a blanket and skewer!"
The Hermit looked at him irresolutely, and retired to his soot and
cinders and lay down, and got up again and came to the bars, and
again looked at him irresolutely, and finally said with sharpness:
"I don't like tobacco."
"I don't like dirt," rejoined Mr. Traveller; "tobacco is an
excellent disinfectant. We shall both be the better for my pipe.
It is my intention to sit here through this summer day, until that
blessed summer sun sinks low in the west, and to show you what a
poor creature you are, through the lips of every chance wayfarer who
may come in at your gate."
"What do you mean?" inquired the Hermit, with a furious air.
"I mean that yonder is your gate, and there are you, and here am I;
I mean that I know it to be a moral impossibility that any person
can stray in at that gate from any point of the compass, with any
sort of experience, gained at first hand, or derived from another,
that can confute me and justify you."
"You are an arrogant and boastful hero," said the Hermit. "You
think yourself profoundly wise."
"Bah!" returned Mr. Traveller, quietly smoking. "There is little
wisdom in knowing that every man must be up and doing, and that all
mankind are made dependent on one another."
"You have companions outside," said the Hermit. "I am not to be
imposed upon by your assumed confidence in the people who may
enter."
"A depraved distrust," returned the visitor, compassionately raising
his eyebrows, "of course belongs to your state, I can't help that."
"Do you mean to tell me you have no confederates?"
"I mean to tell you nothing but what I have told you. What I have
told you is, that it is a moral impossibility that any son or
daughter of Adam can stand on this ground that I put my foot on, or
on any ground that mortal treads, and gainsay the healthy tenure on
which we hold our existence."
"Which is," sneered the Hermit, "according to you--"
"Which is," returned the other, "according to Eternal Providence,
that we must arise and wash our faces and do our gregarious work and
act and re-act on one another, leaving only the idiot and the
palsied to sit blinking in the corner. Come!" apostrophising the
gate. "Open Sesame! Show his eyes and grieve his heart! I don't
care who comes, for I know what must come of it!"
With that, he faced round a little on his billet of wood towards the
gate; and Mr. Mopes, the Hermit, after two or three ridiculous
bounces of indecision at his bed and back again, submitted to what
he could not help himself against, and coiled himself on his window-
ledge, holding to his bars and looking out rather anxiously.
