Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/292

282[February 20, 1869] perfect cube. One side was window, overlooking a strip of clay soil hemmed in between brick walls. There were no tombstones yet, but if it wasn't a cemetery why, when I opened the window to get rid of the odour of the varnish, did it smell like one? The opposite side of the cube was composed of a chest of drawers. I am not impertinently curious by nature, but, as I was the first-floor lodger, I thought myself entitled to open the top long drawer, with a view to the bestowal therein of the contents of my black bag. The drawer was not empty; but that which it held made me very nervous. I suppose the weird figure I saw stretched out there, with pink arms and legs sprouting from a shroud of silver paper, a quantity of ghastly auburn curls, and two blue glass eyes unnaturally gleaming in the midst of a mask of salmon-coloured wax, was Selina's best doll, the present, perhaps, of her uncle, who was, haply, a Calcutta director, or an Asylum Press Almanac maker, or a brewer and distiller, or a cashier in the Bank of Faith. I shut the drawer again hurriedly, and that doll, in its silver paper cerecloth, haunted me all night.

The third side of my bedroom consisted of chimney—the coldest, hardest, brightest looking fireplace I ever saw, out of Hampton Court Palace guardroom. The fourth side was door. I forget into which corner was hitched a washhand stand. The ceiling was mainly stucco rosette, of the pattern of the one in my sitting-room. Among the crazes which came over me at this time was one, to the effect that this bedroom was a cabin on board ship, and that if the ship should happen to lurch, or roll in the trough of the sea, I must infallibly tumble out of the door, or the window, or into the drawer where the doll was—unless the drawer and the doll came out to me—or up the chimney. I think that I murmured "Steady," as I clomb into bed. My couch—an "Arabian" one Mrs. Primpris said proudly—seemingly consisted of the Logan, or celebrated rocking stone of Cornwall, loosely covered with bleached canvas, under which was certain loose foreign matter, but whether composed of flocculi of wool, or of the halves of kidney potatoes I am not in a position to state. At all events I awoke in the morning, marbled all over like a scagliola column. I never knew, too, before, that any blankets were ever manufactured, in Yorkshire or elsewhere, so remarkably small and thin as the two seeming flannel pocket-handkerchiefs with blue and crimson edging, which formed part of Mrs. Primpris's Arabian bed-furniture. Nor had I hitherto been aware, as I was when I lay with that window at my feet, that the moon was so very large. The orb of night seemed to tumble upon me, flat, until I felt as though I were lying in a cold frying-pan. It was a "watery moon," I have reason to think, for when I awoke the next morning, much battered with visionary conflicts with the doll, I found that it was raining cats and dogs.

"The rain," the poet tells us, "it raineth every day." It rained most prosaically all that day at Wretchedville, and the next, and from Monday morning till Saturday night, and then until the middle of the next week. Dear me! Dear me! How wretched I was. I hasten to declare that I have no kind of complaint to make against Mrs. Primpris. Not a flea was felt in her house. The cleanliness of the villa was so scrupulous as to be distressing. It smelt of soap and scrubbing brush, like a Refuge. Mrs. Primpris was strictly honest, even to the extent of inquiring what I would like to have done with the fat of cold mutton chops, and sending me up antediluvian crusts, the remnants of last week's cottage loaves, with which I would play moodily at knock-'em-downs, using the pepper caster as a pin. I have nothing to say against Alfred's fondness for art. India-rubber, to be sure, is apter to smear than to obliterate drawings in chalk; but a threepenny piece is not much; and you cannot too early encourage the imitative faculties. And again, if Selina did require correction, I am not prepared to deny that a shoe may be the best implement, and the bladebones the most fitting portion of the human anatomy, for such an exercitation. I merely say that I was wretched at Wretchedville, and that Mrs. Primpris's apartments very much aggravated my misery. The usual objections taken to a lodging house are to the effect that the furniture is dingy, the cooking execrable, the servant a slattern, and the landlady either a crocodile or a tigress. Now my indictment against my Wretchedville apartments simply amounts to this: that everything was too new. Never were there such staring paper-hangings, such gaudily printed druggets for carpets, such blazing hearthrugs—one representing the Dog of Montargis seizing the murderer of the Forest of Bondy—such gleaming fire-irons, and such remarkably shiny looking-glasses, with gilt halters for frames. The crockery was new, and the glue in the chairs and tables was