Читать книгу George Cruikshank's Omnibus - George Cruikshank - Страница 9

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"Ah! sure a pair was never seen

So justly formed—"

Hoby would say, that as "all are not men who bear the human form," so all are not boots that bear the pedal shape. All boots, for example, are not Hessians; nor are all Hessians like my last pair. Mathews used to tell a story of some French Hoby, who, having with incredible genius constructed a pair of boots, which Tom Thumb when a little boy could no more have got on than Cinderella's sister could the magic slipper, refused to part with them for any sum of money—he had "made them in a moment of enthusiasm." Myriads of such moments were consumed in the construction of my last pair. The boots published by Mr. Warren in magazines and country newspapers, exhibiting the grinning portrait of a gentleman in the interesting act of shaving, or a cat bristling up and outwondering Katerfelto, were vulgar in form, and dull of polish, beside mine Hessians. Pleasant it was, just as I was budding into life, to draw them on, and sit with one knee crossing the other, to contemplate my favourite leg. I used to wish myself a centipede, to wear fifty pairs of Hessians at a time.

To say that the boots "fitted like gloves" would be to pay the most felicitous pair of white kids a compliment. They had just as many natural wrinkles as they ought to have; and for the tassels—we have all seen the dandies of that day take out a comb, and comb the tassels of their fire-bucket-looking boots as often as they got into disorder; but mine needed no aid from such trickery and finessing.

I had strolled forth at the decline of a day in spring, and had afterwards dined at Long's—my boots and I. They had evidently been the admiration of every observer. I was entirely satisfied with them, and consequently with myself. Returned home, a pair of slippers was substituted for them, and with my feet on the fender and the vapour of a cigar enwrapping me like a dressing-gown, I sat contemplating "my boots." Thought reverted to the fortunes of my Lord Marquis of Carabas, and I saw in my Hessians a brighter destiny than Puss in hers won for him. I thought too of the seven-leagued boots of my ancient friends the Ogres, and felt that I could take Old and New Bond Streets at a step.

That night those boots melted into thin air. There was "nothing like leather" visible there in the morning. My golden vision had vanished as suddenly as Alnaschar's—only his perished amidst the crash and clatter of a basket of crockery kicked into the clouds; mine had stolen away in solemn silence. Not a creak was heard, yet the Hessians were gone.

It was the remark of my housekeeper that boots could not go without hands. Such boots I thought might possibly have walked off by themselves. But when it was discovered that a window-shutter had been forced open, and sundry valuables carried away, it was plain that some conceited and ambitious burglar had eloped with my boots. The suspicion was confirmed by the detection of a pair of shoes conscientiously left behind, on the principle that exchange is no robbery. Ugh!—such shoes. Well might I declare that nothing like leather was visible. What odious feet had been thrust into my desecrated Hessians! I put my legs into mourning for their loss; and, convinced that I should never procure such another pair, sank from that moment into mere Wellingtons.

It was not long after this, that, seated in a coffee-room in Piccadilly, my attention was drawn to the indolent and comfortable attitude of a person, who, with his legs stretched conspicuously along the cushioned bench, was reading a newspaper. How it was I can hardly tell; but my eye was irresistibly attracted to his boots, just as Othello's was to the handkerchief bound round the wounded limb of Cassio. He seemed to be proud of them; they were ostentatiously elevated into view. The boots were Hessians. Though not now worn in their very "newest gloss," they were yet in excellent, I may say in enviable condition. My anxious glance not only wandered over their polished surface, but seemed to penetrate to their rich bright linings, the colour whereof was now no more a secret to me than were those silken tassels that dangled to delight the beholder. I knew my boots again. The wearer, having the newspaper spread before his face, could not notice any observation directed to his lower extremities; my opportunity of inspection therefore was complete. They were my Hessians. My first impulse was to ring the bell for a boot-jack, and claim them upon the spot; but before I could do so the stranger suddenly sprang upon his feet, seized his hat, and with one complacent glance at those tasselled habiliments, which were far from having lost all their "original brightness," swaggered out of the coffee-room.

Curiosity prompted me to follow—I caught a glimpse of the bright backs of my boots as they flashed round the corner of a neighbouring street. Pursuing them, I surveyed the wearer; and now perceived that not even those incomparable Hessians could transform a satyr into Hyperion, or convert a vulgar strut into the walk of a gentleman. Those boots were never made for such limbs—never meant to be "sported" after so villanous a fashion. You could see that his calves were indifferently padded, and might have sworn the swaggerer was a swell blackleg—one of the shabby-genteel, and visibly-broken-down class. Accordingly, after a turn or two, it was anything but surprising to see him squeeze himself into a narrow passage over the door of which was written the word "Billiards." I heard my boots tramping up the dingy staircase to which the passage led—and my feet, as though from sympathy, and what the philosopher calls the "eternal fitness of things," were moving after them—when the "cui bono?" forcibly occurred to my mind! If I should demand my Hessians, was there a probability of obtaining them? and if I should obtain them, was there a possibility of my ever wearing them again? Could I think of treading in the boots of a blackleg, albeit they never were his own? No, I gave them up to the profanation which was their destiny. I called up Hamlet's reflection on the vile uses to which we may return; and as for the gambler, who in once virtuous boots threaded the paths of vice and depravity, I kicked him—"with my mind's toe, Horatio"—and passed on.

Shakspeare, in one of the most touching and beautiful of his sonnets, tells us how he bemoaned his outcast state,

"And troubled deaf heaven with his bootless cries;"

but with no such cries of mine is the reader doomed to be troubled. Indeed, when I parted from my Hessians on the occasion referred to, I never dreamed of mentioning them more. I had heard, as it seemed, their last creak. Not only were they out of sight, but out of mind. It appeared just as likely that I should ever again be excited on their account, as that I should hang them up à-la-General-Bombastes, and make war upon their adventurous displacer. Yet it was not three months after the event recorded, that in the city, in broad-daylight, my hat was all but lifted off by the sudden insurrection of my hair, on recognising my boots again. Yes, the very boots that once were mine, "et nullus error!" or, as we say in English, "and no mistake!" As easily to be identified were they as the freckled, wrinkled, shrunken features of a beloved friend, parted from in plump youth. I knew my boots, if I may so say, by their expression. Altered as they were, to me were they the same:—"alike, but oh! how different."

"The light of other days had faded."

It could not be said of either Hessian, that it figured on a "leg" this time. The wearer was evidently a collector in the "cast-off" line—had been respectable, and was still bent on keeping up appearances. This was plainly indicated by the one tassel which the pair of boots yet boasted between them—a brown-looking remnant of grandeur, and yet a lively compromise with decay. The poor things were sadly distorted; the heels were hanging over, illustrating the downward tendency of the possessor; and there was a leetle crack visible at the side. They were Dayless and Martinless—dull as a juryman—worn out like a cross-examined witness. They would take water like a teetotaller. There was scarcely a kick left in them. They were in a decline of the galloping sort; and appeared just capable of lasting out until an omnibus came by. A walk of a mile would have ensured emancipation to more than one of the toes that inhabited them.

My once "lovely companions" were faded, but not gone. It was my fortune to meet them again soon afterwards, still further eastward. The recognition, as before, was unavoidable. They were the boots, but "translated" out of themselves; another pair, yet the same. The heels were handsomely cobbled up with clinking iron tips, and a worsted tassel of larger dimensions had been supplied to match the remaining silk one. The boots thus regenerated rendered a rather equivocal symmetry to the legs of an attorney's clerk, whose life was spent in endless errands with copies of writs to serve, and in figuring at "free-and-easys" and spouting-clubs. They were well able to bear him on his daily and nightly rounds, for the new soles were thicker than any client's head in Christendom. This change led me naturally enough into some profound speculations upon "wear and tear," and much philosophical musing on the absorption and disappearance of soles and heels after a given quantity of perambulation. But while I was wondering into what substances and what shapes the old leather might be passing, and also how much of my own original self (for we all become other people in time) might yet be remaining unto me, I lost sight for ever of the lawyer's clerk, but not of my boots—for I suspect he effected some legal transfer of them to a client who was soon as legally transferred to the prison in Whitecross-street; since, passing that debtors' paradise soon after, I saw the identical boots (the once pale blue lining was now of no colour) carried out by an aged dame, who immediately bent her steps, like one well acquainted with the way, towards "mine uncle's" in the neighbourhood.

Hessians that can escape from a prison may work their way out of a pawnbroker's custody; and my Hessians had something of the quality of the renowned slippers of Bagdad—go where they might, they were sure to meet the eye of their original owner. The next time I saw the boots, they were on the foot-board of a hackney-coach; yea, on the very feet of the Jarvey. But what a falling-off! translation was no longer the word. They had suffered what the poet calls a sea-change. The tops were cut round; the beautiful curve, the tassels, all had vanished. One boot had a patch on one side only; the other, on both. I thought of the exclamation of Edmund Burke—"The glory of Europe is extinguished for ever!" Instinct told me they were the boots; but—

"The very Hoby who them made,

Beholding them so sore decay'd,

He had not known his work."

I hired the coach, and rode behind my own boots: the speculative fit again seized me. I recollected how

"All that's bright must fade,"

and "moralized the spectacle" before me. How many had I read of—nay seen and known—who had started in life like my boots—bright, unwrinkled, symmetrical—and who had sunk by sure degrees, by wanderings farther and farther among the puddles and kennels of society, even into the same extremity of unsightly and incurable distortion.

——"Not Warren, nor Day and Martin,

Nor all the patent liquids o' the earth,

Shall ever brighten them with that jet black

They owed in former days."

My very right to my own property had vanished. They had ceased to be my boots; they were ceasing to be boots. They cost me something nevertheless; for having in my perturbation merely told the driver to "drive on," he took me to Bayswater instead of Covent-garden; and, as the price of my abstraction, abstracted seven-and-six-pence as his fare.

From a hackney-coachman they seem to have descended to the driver of what had once been a donkey; to one who cried "fine mellow pears," "green ripe gooseberries," and other hard and sour assistants in the destruction of the human race. This I discovered one day by seeing "my boots" dragged to a police-office (their owner in them), where indeed one of the pair—if pair they might still be called—figured as a credible witness; it having been employed as a weapon, held by the solitary strap that yet adhered to it, for inflicting due punishment on the head of its master's landlord, a ruffian who had had the brutal inhumanity to tap at the door of an innocent tenant, and ask for his rent.

It is probable that in this skirmish they sustained some damage, and required "renovation" once more; for I subsequently saw them at one of those "cobbler's-stalls" which are fast disappearing (the stall becoming a shop, and the shop an emporium), with an intimation in chalk upon the soles—"to be sold." Of the original Hessians nothing remained but a portion of the leggings. They had been soled and re-soled; the old patches had disappeared; and there was now a patch upon the new fronts which they had acquired. Having had them from the last, to the last I resolved to track them; and now found them in the possession of a good ancient watchman of the good ancient time in Fleet-street, from whose feet, however, they were one night treacherously stolen as he sat quietly slumbering in his box. The boots wandered once more into vicious paths, having become the property of a begging-letter impostor of that day, in whose company they were seen to stagger out of a gin-shop—then to run away with their tenant—to bear him, all unconscious of kennels, on both sides of the road, faster than lamplighter or postman can travel—and finally to trip him up against the machine of a "needy knifegrinder" (his nose coming into collision with the revolving stone), who, compassionating the naked feet of his seemingly penniless and sober fellow-lodger, had that very morning presented him with part of a pair of boots, as being better than no shoe-leather. This fragmentary donation was the sad remnant of my Hessians—the "last remains of princely York."

When we give a pair of old boots to the poor, how little do we consider into what disgusting nooks and hideous recesses they may carry their new owner! Let no one shut up the coffers of his heart, or check even momentarily the noble impulse of charity; but it is curious to note what purposes a bashful maiden's left-off finery may be made to serve on the stage of a show at Greenwich fair; how an honest matron's muff, passed into other hands, may be implicated in a case of shop-lifting; how the hat of a great statesman may come to be handed round to ragamuffins for a collection of half-pence for the itinerant conjuror; or how the satin slippers of a countess may be sandalled on the aching feet of a girl whose youth is one weary and wretched caper upon stilts!

"My Hessians"—neither mine, nor Hessians, now—were on their last legs. Theirs had not been "a beauty for ever unchangingly bright." They had experienced their decline; their fall was nigh. Their earliest patchings suggested, as a similitude, the idea of a Grecian temple, whose broken columns are repaired with brick; the brick preponderates as ruin prevails, until at length the original structure is no more. The boots became one patch! Such were they on that winter-morn, when a ruddy-faced "translator" sat at his low door, on a low stool, the boots on his lap undergoing examination. After due inspection, his estimate of their value was expressed by his adopting the expedient of Orator Henley; that is to say, by cutting the legs off, and reducing what remained of their pride to the insignificance of a pair of shoes; which, sold in that character to a match-vender, degenerated after a few weeks into slippers. Sic transit, &c.

Of the appropriation of the amputated portion no very accurate account can be rendered. Fragments of the once soft and glossy leather furnished patches for dilapidated goloshes; a pair or two of gaiter-straps were extricated from the ruins; and the "translator's" little boy manufactured from the remains a "sucker," of such marvellous efficacy that his father could never afterwards keep a lapstone in the stall.

As for the slippers, improperly so called, they pinched divers corns, and pressed various bunions in their day, as the boots, their great progenitors, had done before them, sliding, shuffling, shambling, and dragging their slow length along; until in the ripeness of time, they, with other antiquities, were carried to Cutler-street, and sold to a venerable Jewess. She, with knife keen as Shylock's, ripped off the soles—all besides was valueless even to her—and, not without some pomp and ceremony, laid them out for sale on a board placed upon a crippled chair. Yes, for sale; and to that market for soles there soon chanced to repair an elderly son of poverty; who, having many little feet running about at home made shoes for them himself. The soles became his; and thus of the apocryphal remains of my veritable Hessians, was there just sufficient leather left to interpose between the tender feet of a child, and the hard earth, his mother!