The Holly-Tree
by Charles Dickens
FIRST BRANCH--MYSELF
I have kept one secret in the course of my life. I am a bashful
man. Nobody would suppose it, nobody ever does suppose it, nobody
ever did suppose it, but I am naturally a bashful man. This is the
secret which I have never breathed until now.
I might greatly move the reader by some account of the innumerable
places I have not been to, the innumerable people I have not called
upon or received, the innumerable social evasions I have been guilty
of, solely because I am by original constitution and character a
bashful man. But I will leave the reader unmoved, and proceed with
the object before me.
That object is to give a plain account of my travels and discoveries
in the Holly-Tree Inn; in which place of good entertainment for man
and beast I was once snowed up.
It happened in the memorable year when I parted for ever from Angela
Leath, whom I was shortly to have married, on making the discovery
that she preferred my bosom friend. From our school-days I had
freely admitted Edwin, in my own mind, to be far superior to myself;
and, though I was grievously wounded at heart, I felt the preference
to be natural, and tried to forgive them both. It was under these
circumstances that I resolved to go to America--on my way to the
Devil.
Communicating my discovery neither to Angela nor to Edwin, but
resolving to write each of them an affecting letter conveying my
blessing and forgiveness, which the steam-tender for shore should
carry to the post when I myself should be bound for the New World,
far beyond recall,--I say, locking up my grief in my own breast, and
consoling myself as I could with the prospect of being generous, I
quietly left all I held dear, and started on the desolate journey I
have mentioned.
The dead winter-time was in full dreariness when I left my chambers
for ever, at five o''clock in the morning. I had shaved by candlelight, of course, and was miserably cold, and experienced that
general all-pervading sensation of getting up to be hanged which I
have usually found inseparable from untimely rising under such
circumstances.
How well I remember the forlorn aspect of Fleet Street when I came
out of the Temple! The street-lamps flickering in the gusty northeast wind, as if the very gas were contorted with cold; the whitetopped houses; the bleak, star-lighted sky; the market people and
other early stragglers, trotting to circulate their almost frozen
blood; the hospitable light and warmth of the few coffee-shops and
public-houses that were open for such customers; the hard, dry,
frosty rime with which the air was charged (the wind had already
beaten it into every crevice), and which lashed my face like a steel
whip.
It wanted nine days to the end of the month, and end of the year.
The Post-office packet for the United States was to depart from
Liverpool, weather permitting, on the first of the ensuing month,
and I had the intervening time on my hands. I had taken this into
consideration, and had resolved to make a visit to a certain spot
(which I need not name) on the farther borders of Yorkshire. It was
endeared to me by my having first seen Angela at a farmhouse in that
place, and my melancholy was gratified by the idea of taking a
wintry leave of it before my expatriation. I ought to explain,
that, to avoid being sought out before my resolution should have
been rendered irrevocable by being carried into full effect, I had
written to Angela overnight, in my usual manner, lamenting that
urgent business, of which she should know all particulars by-and-by-took me unexpectedly away from her for a week or ten days.
There was no Northern Railway at that time, and in its place there
were stage-coaches; which I occasionally find myself, in common with
some other people, affecting to lament now, but which everybody
dreaded as a very serious penance then. I had secured the box-seat
on the fastest of these, and my business in Fleet Street was to get
into a cab with my portmanteau, so to make the best of my way to the
Peacock at Islington, where I was to join this coach. But when one
of our Temple watchmen, who carried my portmanteau into Fleet Street
for me, told me about the huge blocks of ice that had for some days
past been floating in the river, having closed up in the night, and
made a walk from the Temple Gardens over to the Surrey shore, I
began to ask myself the question, whether the box-seat would not be
likely to put a sudden and a frosty end to my unhappiness. I was
heart-broken, it is true, and yet I was not quite so far gone as to
wish to be frozen to death.
When I got up to the Peacock,--where I found everybody drinking hot
purl, in self-preservation,--I asked if there were an inside seat to
spare. I then discovered that, inside or out, I was the only
passenger. This gave me a still livelier idea of the great
inclemency of the weather, since that coach always loaded
particularly well. However, I took a little purl (which I found
uncommonly good), and got into the coach. When I was seated, they
built me up with straw to the waist, and, conscious of making a
rather ridiculous appearance, I began my journey.
It was still dark when we left the Peacock. For a little while,
pale, uncertain ghosts of houses and trees appeared and vanished,
and then it was hard, black, frozen day. People were lighting their
fires; smoke was mounting straight up high into the rarified air;
and we were rattling for Highgate Archway over the hardest ground I
have ever heard the ring of iron shoes on. As we got into the
country, everything seemed to have grown old and gray. The roads,
the trees, thatched roofs of cottages and homesteads, the ricks in
farmers'' yards. Out-door work was abandoned, horse-troughs at roadside inns were frozen hard, no stragglers lounged about, doors were
close shut, little turnpike houses had blazing fires inside, and
children (even turnpike people have children, and seem to like them)
rubbed the frost from the little panes of glass with their chubby
arms, that their bright eyes might catch a glimpse of the solitary
coach going by. I don''t know when the snow begin to set in; but I
know that we were changing horses somewhere when I heard the guard
remark, "That the old lady up in the sky was picking her geese
pretty hard to-day." Then, indeed, I found the white down falling
fast and thick.
The lonely day wore on, and I dozed it out, as a lonely traveller
does. I was warm and valiant after eating and drinking,-particularly after dinner; cold and depressed at all other times. I
was always bewildered as to time and place, and always more or less
out of my senses. The coach and horses seemed to execute in chorus
Auld Lang Syne, without a moment''s intermission. They kept the time
and tune with the greatest regularity, and rose into the swell at
the beginning of the Refrain, with a precision that worried me to
death. While we changed horses, the guard and coachman went
stumping up and down the road, printing off their shoes in the snow,
and poured so much liquid consolation into themselves without being
any the worse for it, that I began to confound them, as it darkened
again, with two great white casks standing on end. Our horses
tumbled down in solitary places, and we got them up,--which was the
pleasantest variety I had, for it warmed me. And it snowed and
snowed, and still it snowed, and never left off snowing. All night
long we went on in this manner. Thus we came round the clock, upon
the Great North Road, to the performance of Auld Lang Syne by day
again. And it snowed and snowed, and still it snowed, and never
left off snowing.
I forget now where we were at noon on the second day, and where we
ought to have been; but I know that we were scores of miles
behindhand, and that our case was growing worse every hour. The
drift was becoming prodigiously deep; landmarks were getting snowed
out; the road and the fields were all one; instead of having fences
and hedge-rows to guide us, we went crunching on over an unbroken
surface of ghastly white that might sink beneath us at any moment
and drop us down a whole hillside. Still the coachman and guard-who kept together ...
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