Recollections - David Christie Murray

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nor for brilliance at his schoolwork, nor for success in games.

      It was at this time that there was an ebb in the family fortunes, and I was hastily taken away from a respectable private school in the High Street, and sent, as I have explained, to a big vulgar establishment a mile away, where a crowd of some three hundred lads attended, at a cost to their parents of threepence a week per head. I did not stay there long, but whilst I was kept there, by the strain on the family exchequer, I was very unhappy. It was in the midst of a sore-hearted loneliness that I encountered Gavin, who, to the best of my belief, was the son of a bargee who worked on the Worcester and Birmingham Canal. The impulse which took me towards him I have always regarded as one of the strangest, as it was undoubtedly one of the strongest, I have known. He and I were pretty much alike in age—somewhere between nine and ten we must have been—and we seemed to slide together like two separate rainspots which meet upon a window-pane in wet weather. We used to wander about the stony playground, from which every blade of grass was trampled, except in the remoter corners, and to walk with our arms about each other's shoulders, and to exchange almost daily such trumpery schoolboy treasures as we owned. I never had a child sweetheart, and I never knew anybody with whom I exchanged a caress, or bartered a word of real kindness, until I fell in with this fascinating young ragamuffin. I never spoke about him to a soul, but he filled my thoughts night and day, and I was never happy out of his society. I am guilty of no exaggeration when I say that. The feeling I had towards him was, in its own time, so tender, so yearning, so complete in its absorption of my whole nature, that it stands altogether apart in my experience. And when, after a period of some six months, perhaps, the family fortunes revived a little, and I was restored once more to the society of my own social equals, I was broken-hearted at the thought of losing him.

      The master of this rough school had a glimmering of the necessity for technical education, and on occasional afternoons a chosen number of us were drafted off into a big class-room to watch some craftsman working at his trade. One of these men set the whole class on fire with a spirit of emulation. He brought with him a number of medallions, a quantity of plaster-of-paris, a stick or two of common sulphur, and a small brazier, and he proceeded to show us how plaster casts were taken from his medallions. The first part of the process was to oil the surface of the medal, and to bind a strip of brown paper about its edge, so as to form a shallow little well. The next business was to melt enough of the sulphur to secure a cast of the medallion. This part of the process resulted in the production of a most appalling smell, which was not lessened in pungency when the odour of singed brown paper was added to that of melting sulphur. When the cast was cool it also was bound round with brown paper, and a compound of plaster-of-paris and water was poured over it When this had hardened, behold! a snowy reproduction of the original medallion. We all went quite wild about this process, and when the workman filled in the hollowed head in the mould—it was a portrait of John Wesley—with the white preparation, very carefully, by the aid of a small spoon and a camel-hair pencil, we watched with wonder for the next development. The craftsman took a small quantity of chrome-yellow, and, having mixed it carefully with his creamy paste, poured it over the white stuff, so that in a few minutes we saw a snowy bas-relief of the great divine set on a golden-coloured background. From then until I left the school there was an actual fever for the making of plaster medallions, mainly from the heavy, half-effaced Bolton pennies which at that time were in circulation; and among those who were most devoted to this pursuit were my friend Gavin and myself.

      We made casts by the dozen and the score, and when it was known definitely that I was leaving the school, he gave to me his chef d'oeuvre, in the shape of a reproduction in two colours of a medal which had been struck to commemorate the opening of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. There was a solemn understanding between us that I, likewise, should make a cast in two colours, and present it to my chum, and this was to be the symbol and token of an eternity of friendship. I took home the medal; I saved my infrequent pence for the purchase of materials; and one night, all being ready, I set to work to melt my sulphur in a cracked teacup in the kitchen oven. The whole family was assembled in that apartment, for the sitting-room was never used save upon unfrequent gala days, and before long there were sniffs of bewilderment and suspicion at the stench which began to fill the room. I had not thought of this, and I was afraid for the life of me to withdraw the teacup. It was a winter night, and a great fire was blazing on the hearth, so that it was no wonder when the cracked teacup burst asunder, and let out its contents on to the iron floor of the oven. Then there arose an odour of mere and perfect Tophet, and the room was filled with a sulphurous smoke. I confessed myself the author of the mischief by trying to bolt, and I suffered then and there. We were very near being driven entirely out of house and home that night, and I was very shy of reviving the experiment. But my promise lay upon my conscience like a cloud. I had to keep it. To fail in that would have been an unspeakable disloyalty, and very tremulously I made a new occasion when, as I fancied, the coast was clear. It was not so disastrous, in one respect, as the first, but the burning sulphur again betrayed me, and the very natural judgment was that I had been guilty of pure contumacy.

       Table of Contents

      A First View of London—Charles Dickens—The Photograph—On

       the Coach to Oxford—The Manuscript of Our Mutual Friend— An Unpublished Chapter—Dickens as Reader—The British Museum Reading Room.

      I worked in the ramshackle, bankrupt, old printing office at home until I was nearly eighteen years of age, and it was then decided to send me to London to complete my education in the business.

      It is like an exhibition of the biograph, in which the scenes depicted go by at such a racing speed that it is difficult for the eye to follow them. There is an instantaneous vision of the old kitchen, seen at some abnormal unaccustomed hour of early morning in the winter-time. Three o'clock on the morning of January 3, 1865. A gas-lit scene of bustle and hurry. Gone. A minute's waiting in a snow-powdered road, carpet-bag in hand, and four-horsed coach ramping along with a frosty gleam of lamps. A jingle of harness, and an adventurous tooting from the guard's horn, as if a charge was being sounded. Gone. Snow Hill, Birmingham, all white and glistening. An extraordinary bustle and clamour. A phantasmagoria of strange faces and figures. Gone. A station all in darkness, but full of echoes and voices. Gone.

      A buffet at Oxford, and an instantaneous glimpse of people scalding their throats with an intolerable decoction called coffee extract. The figure of an imperious guard with a waving lamp. The vision of a stampede. Gone. Then an interlude of sleep, during which an orchestra plays dream music, with a roll, roll, roll of wheels as a musical groundwork to the theme. Then Paddington, in a fog—a real London particular, now for the first time seen, felt, tasted, sneezed at, coughed at, wept over. Distracted biographic figures rampant everywhere. Gone. A vision of streets, populous, and full of movement, but half-invisible in a pea-soup haze, through which the gas that takes the place of daylight most ineffectually glimmers. Gone. Then a room, still gas-lit when it should be broad day; a table spread with napery none too clean; a landlady in a dressing-gown and curl-papers; and breakfast. The biograph ceases to whirl by at its original speed, and I can take breath here, and can begin to analyse myself and my own surroundings.

      To begin with, this is London; and to continue, I don't think much of it. This is a London egg, and this is London bacon, and this exiguous liquid which “laves the milk-jug with celestial blue” is London milk. All the flavours are strange. The atmosphere is strange. The sight of a lady in curlpapers at 10 a.m. is strange.

      Now, in setting down all these things, I begin to take new notice of a fact which has long been familiar to me. It has been expressed by more than one poet, and the reason for it may be found in the works of more than one man of science; but the fact itself is that every one of these cinemato-graphical exercises is associated with a special odour. These special odours have each one so often recurred that they have driven home certain memories in such wise as to make them stick. The fire in the old home kitchen had been “raked” as we used to say in South Staffordshire, overnight, and it gave forth a scent of smouldering ash which, whenever and

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