The Dickensian
He was a quiet man, dressed in dark clothes, with
a large limp straw hat; with something almost military
in his moustache and whiskers, but with a quite unmilitary
stoop and very dreamy eyes. He was gazing with
a rather gloomy interest at the cluster, one might
almost say the tangle, of small shipping which grew
thicker as our little pleasure boat crawled up into
Yarmouth Harbour. A boat entering this harbour,
as every one knows, does not enter in front of the
town like a foreigner, but creeps round at the back
like a traitor taking the town in the rear. The
passage of the river seems almost too narrow for traffic,
and in consequence the bigger ships look colossal.
As we passed under a timber ship from Norway, which
seemed to block up the heavens like a cathedral, the
man in a straw hat pointed to an odd wooden figurehead
carved like a woman, and said, like one continuing
a conversation, “Now, why have they left off
having them. They didn’t do any one any
harm?”
I replied with some flippancy about the captain’s
wife being jealous; but I knew in my heart that the
man had struck a deep note. There has been something
in our most recent civilisation which is mysteriously
hostile to such healthy and humane symbols.
“They hate anything like that, which is human
and pretty,” he continued, exactly echoing my
thoughts. “I believe they broke up all
the jolly old figureheads with hatchets and enjoyed
doing it.”
“Like Mr. Quilp,” I answered, “when
he battered the wooden Admiral with the poker.”
His whole face suddenly became alive, and for the
first time he stood erect and stared at me.
“Do you come to Yarmouth for that?” he
asked.
“For what?”
“For Dickens,” he answered, and drummed
with his foot on the deck.
“No,” I answered; “I come for fun,
though that is much the same thing.”
“I always come,” he answered quietly,
“to find Peggotty’s boat. It isn’t
here.”
And when he said that I understood him perfectly.
There are two Yarmouths; I daresay there are two hundred
to the people who live there. I myself have never
come to the end of the list of Batterseas. But
there are two to the stranger and tourist; the poor
part, which is dignified, and the prosperous part,
which is savagely vulgar. My new friend haunted
the first of these like a ghost; to the latter he
would only distantly allude.
“The place is very much spoilt now . . . trippers,
you know,” he would say, not at all scornfully,
but simply sadly. That was the nearest he would
go to an admission of the monstrous watering place
that lay along the front, outblazing the sun, and
more deafening than the sea. But behind—out
of earshot of this uproar—there are lanes
so narrow that they seem like secret entrances to
some hidden place of repose. There are squares
