In A Room, All White Wainscot And
Crimson Wall-Paper, A Perfect Gem Of Colour After The Black, Empty
Darkness
In which I had been groping, a pretty girl was telling a
story, as well as I could make out,
To an attentive child upon her
knee, while an old woman sat placidly dozing over the fire. You
may be sure I was not behindhand with a story for myself - a good
old story after the manner of G. P. R. James and the village
melodramas, with a wicked squire, and poachers, and an attorney,
and a virtuous young man with a genius for mechanics, who should
love, and protect, and ultimately marry the girl in the crimson
room. Baudelaire has a few dainty sentences on the fancies that we
are inspired with when we look through a window into other people's
lives; and I think Dickens has somewhere enlarged on the same text.
The subject, at least, is one that I am seldom weary of
entertaining. I remember, night after night, at Brussels, watching
a good family sup together, make merry, and retire to rest; and
night after night I waited to see the candles lit, and the salad
made, and the last salutations dutifully exchanged, without any
abatement of interest. Night after night I found the scene rivet
my attention and keep me awake in bed with all manner of quaint
imaginations. Much of the pleasure of the Arabian Nights hinges
upon this Asmodean interest; and we are not weary of lifting other
people's roofs, and going about behind the scenes of life with the
Caliph and the serviceable Giaffar. It is a salutary exercise,
besides; it is salutary to get out of ourselves and see people
living together in perfect unconsciousness of our existence, as
they will live when we are gone. If to-morrow the blow falls, and
the worst of our ill fears is realised, the girl will none the less
tell stories to the child on her lap in the cottage at Great
Missenden, nor the good Belgians light their candle, and mix their
salad, and go orderly to bed.
The next morning was sunny overhead and damp underfoot, with a
thrill in the air like a reminiscence of frost. I went up into the
sloping garden behind the inn and smoked a pipe pleasantly enough,
to the tune of my landlady's lamentations over sundry cabbages and
cauliflowers that had been spoiled by caterpillars. She had been
so much pleased in the summer-time, she said, to see the garden all
hovered over by white butterflies. And now, look at the end of it!
She could nowise reconcile this with her moral sense. And, indeed,
unless these butterflies are created with a side-look to the
composition of improving apologues, it is not altogether easy, even
for people who have read Hegel and Dr. M'Cosh, to decide
intelligibly upon the issue raised. Then I fell into a long and
abstruse calculation with my landlord; having for object to compare
the distance driven by him during eight years' service on the box
of the Wendover coach with the girth of the round world itself.
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