tell you," Phil would say; indeed, we could well fancy that it was dismal. The
drawing-room had a rhubarb-coloured flock paper (on account of the governor's
attachment to the shop, Master Phil said), a great piano, a harp smothered in a
leather bag in the corner, which the languid owner now never touched; and
everybody's face seemed scared and pale in the great looking-glasses, which
reflected you over and over again into the distance, so that you seemed to
twinkle off right through the Albany into Piccadilly.
Old Parr Street has been a habitation for generations of surgeons and
physicians. I suppose the noblemen for whose use the street was intended in the
time of the early Georges fled, finding the neighbourhood too dismal, and the
gentlemen in black coats came and took possession of the gilded, gloomy chambers
which the sacred mode vacated. These mutations of fashion have always been
matters of profound speculation to me. Why shall not one moralize over London,
as over Rome, or Baalbec, or Troy town? I like to walk among the Hebrews of
Wardour Street, and fancy the place, as it once was, crowded with chairs and
gilt chariots, and torches flashing in the hands of the running footmen. I have
a grim pleasure in thinking that Golding Square was once the resort of the
aristocracy, and Monmouth Street the delight of the genteel world. What shall
prevent us Londoners from musing over the decline and fall of city
sovereignties, and drawing our cockney morals? As the late Mr. Gibbon meditated
his history leaning against a column in the Capitol, why should not I muse over
mine, reclining under an arcade of the Pantheon? Not the Pantheon at Rome, in
the Cabbage Market by the Piazza Navona, where the immortal gods were
worshipped,��the immortal gods who are now dead; but the Pantheon in Oxford
Street, ladies, where you purchase feeble pomatums, music, glassware, and
baby-linen; and which has its history too. Have not Selwyn, and Walpole, and
March, and Carlisle figured there? Has not Prince Florizel flounced through the
hall in his rustling domino, and danced there in powdered splendour? and when
the ushers refused admission to lovely Sophy Baddeley, did not the young men,
her adorers, draw their rapiers and vow to slay the doorkeepers; and, crossing
the glittering blades over the head of the enchantress, make a warlike triumphal
arch for her to pass under, all flushed, and smiling, and perfumed, and painted?
The lives of streets are as the lives of man, and shall not the streetpreacher,
if so minded, take for the text of his sermon the stones in the gutter? That you
were once the resort of the fashion, O Monmouth Street! by the invocation of
blessed St. Giles shall I not improve that sweet thought into a godly discourse,
and make the ruin edifying? O mes fr�res! There were splendid thoroughfares,
dazzling company, bright illuminations, in our streets when our hearts were
young: we entertained in them a noble youthful company of chivalrous hopes and
lofty ambitions; of blushing thoughts in snowy robes spotless and virginal. See,
in the embrasure of the window, where you sate looking to the stars and nestling
by the soft side of your first-love, hang Mr. Moses' moseum of turned old
clothes, very cheap; of worn old boots, bedraggled in how much and how many
people's mud; a great bargain. See! along the street, strewed with flowers once
mayhap��a fight of beggars for the refuse of an apple-stall, or a tipsy
basket-woman, reeling shrieking to the station. O me! O my beloved congregation!
I have preached this stale sermon to you for ever so many years. O my jolly
companions, I have drunk many a bout with you, and always found vanitas
vanitatum written on the bottom of the pot!
I choose to moralize now when I pass the place. The garden has run to seed, the
walks are mildewed, the statues have broken noses, the gravel is dank with green
moss, the roses are withered, and the nightingales have ceased to make love. It
is a funereal street, Old Parr Street, certainly; the carriages which drive
there ought to have feathers on the roof, and the butlers who open the doors
should wear weepers��so the scene strikes you now as you pass along the spacious
empty pavement. You are bilious, my good man. Go and pay a guinea to one of the
doctors in those houses; there are still doctors there. He will prescribe
taraxacum for you, or pil: hydrarg: Bless you! in my time, to us gentlemen of
the fifth form, the place was bearable. The yellow fogs didn't damp our
spirits��and we never thought them too thick to keep us away from the play: from
the chivalrous Charles Kemble, I tell you, my Mirabel, my Mercutio, my princely
Falconbridge: from his adorable daughter (O my distracted heart!): from the
classic Young: from the glorious Long Tom Coffin: from the unearthly
Vanderdecken��"Return, O my love, and we'll never, never part" (where art thou,
sweet singer of that most thrilling ditty of my youth?): from the sweet, sweet
Victorine and the Bottle Imp. Oh, to see that Bottle Imp again, and hear that
song about the "Pilgrim of Love!" Once, but��hush!��this is a secret��we had
private boxes, the doctor's grand friends often sending him these; and finding
the opera rather slow, we went to a concert in M��d��n Lane, near Covent Garden,
and heard the most celestial glees, over a supper of fizzing sausages and mashed
potatoes, such as the world has never seen since. We did no harm; but I daresay
it was very wrong. Brice, the butler, ought not to have taken us. We bullied
him, and made him take us where we liked. We had rum-shrub in the housekeeper's
room, where we used to be diverted by the society of other butlers of the
neighbouring nobility and gentry, who would step in. Perhaps it was wrong to
leave us so to the company of servants. Dr. Firmin used to go to his grand
parties, Mrs. Firmin to bed. "Did we enjoy the performance last night?" our host
would ask at breakfast. "Oh, yes, we enjoyed the performance!" But my poor Mrs.
Firmin fancied that we enjoyed Semiramide or the Donna del Lago; whereas we had
been to the pit at the Adelphi (out of our own money), and seen that jolly John
Reeve, and laughed�� laughed till we were fit to drop��and stayed till the
curtain was down. And then we would come home, and, as aforesaid, pass a
delightful hour over supper, and hear the anecdotes of Mr. Brice's friends, the
other butlers. Ah, that was a time indeed! There never was any liquor so good as
rum-shrub, never; and the sausages had a flavour of Elysium. How hushed we were
when Dr. Firmin, coming home from his parties, let himself in at the
street-door! Shoeless, we crept up to our bedrooms. And we came down to
breakfast with innocent young faces��and let Mrs. Firmin, at lunch, prattle
about the opera; and there stood Brice and the footman behind us, looking quite
grave, the abominable hypocrites!
Then, sir, there was a certain way, out of the study window, or though the
kitchen, and over the leads, to a building, gloomy, indeed, but where I own to
have spent delightful hours of the most flagitious and criminal enjoyment of
some delicious little Havannahs,
ten to the shilling. In that building there
were stables once, doubtless occupied by great Flemish horses and rumbling gold
coaches of Walpole's time; but a celebrated surgeon, when he took possession of
the house, made a lecture-room of the premises,��"And this door," says Phil,
pointing to one leading into the mews, "was very convenient for having the
bodies in and out"��a cheerful reminiscence. Of this kind of furniture there was
now very little in the apartment, except a dilapidated skeleton in a corner, a
few dusty casts of heads, and bottles of preparations on the top of an old
bureau, and some mildewed harness hanging on the walls. This apartment became
Mr. Phil's smoking-room when, as he grew taller, he felt himself too dignified
to sit in the kitchen regions: the honest butler and housekeeper themselves
pointing out to their young master that his place was elsewhere than among the
servants. So there, privately and with great delectation, we smoked many an
abominable cigar in this dreary back-room, the gaunt walls and twilight ceilings
of which were by no means melancholy to us, who found forbidden pleasures the
sweetest, after the absurd fashion of boys. Dr. Firmin was an enemy to smoking,
and ever accustomed to speak of the practice with eloquent indignation. "It was
a low practice��the habit of cabmen, pot-house frequenters, and Irish
apple-women," the doctor would say, as Phil and his friend looked at each other
with a stealthy joy. Phil's father was ever scented and neat, the pattern of
handsome propriety. Perhaps he had a clearer perception regarding manners than
respecting morals; perhaps his conversation was full of platitudes, his talk
(concerning people of fashion chiefly) mean and uninstructive, his behaviour to
young Lord Egham rather fulsome and lacking of dignity. Perhaps, I say, the idea
may have entered into young Mr. Pendennis's mind that his hospitable entertainer
and friend, Dr. Firmin, of Old Parr Street, was what at the present day might be
denominated an old humbug; but modest young men do not come quickly to such
unpleasant conclusions regarding their seniors. Dr. Firmin's manners were so
good, his forehead was so high, his frill so fresh, his hands so white and slim,
that for some considerable time we ingenuously admired him; and it was not
without a pang that we came to view him as he actually was��no, not as he
the man who has been kind to him in boyhood.
I quitted school suddenly, leaving my little Phil behind me, a brave little
handsome boy, endearing himself to old and young by his good looks, his gaiety,
his courage, and his gentlemanly bearing. Once in a way a letter would come from
him, full of that artless affection and tenderness which fills boys' hearts, and
is so touching in their letters. It was answered with proper dignity and
condescension on the senior boy's part. Our modest little country home kept up a
friendly intercourse with Dr. Firmin's grand London mansion, of which, in his
visits to us, my uncle, Major Pendennis, did not fail to bring news. A
correspondence took place between the ladies of each house. We supplied Mrs.
Firmin with little country presents, tokens of my mother's good-will and
gratitude towards the friends who had been kind to her son. I went my way to the
university, having occasional glimpses of Phil at school. I took chambers in the
Temple, which he found great delight in visiting; and he liked our homely dinner
from Dick's, and a bed on the sofa, better than the splendid entertainments in
Old Parr Street and his great gloomy chamber there. He had grown by this time to
be ever so much taller than his senior, though he always persists in looking up
to me unto the present day.
A very few weeks after my poor mother passed that judgment on Mrs. Firmin, she
saw reason to regret and revoke it. Phil's mother, who was afraid, or perhaps
was forbidden, to attend her son in his illness at school, was taken ill
herself, and the doctor sent for his boy.
Phil returned to Grey Friars in a deep suit of black; the servants on the
carriage wore black too; and a certain tyrant of the place, beginning to laugh
and jeer because Firmin's eyes filled with tears at some ribald remark, was
gruffly rebuked by Sampson major, the cock of the whole school; and with the
question, "Don't you see the poor beggar's in mourning, you great brute?" was
kicked about his business.
When Philip Firmin and I met again, there was crape on both our hats. I don't
think either could see the other's face very well. I went to see him in Parr
Street, in the vacant, melancholy house, where the poor mother's picture was yet
hanging in her empty drawing-room.
"She was always fond of you, Pendennis," said Phil. "God bless you for being so
good to her. You know what it is to lose��to lose what loves you best in the
world. I didn't know how��how I loved her, till I had lost her." And many a sob
broke his words as he spoke.
Her picture was removed from the drawing-room presently into Phil's own little
study��the room in which he sate and defied his father. What had passed between
them? The young man was very much changed. The frank looks of old days were
gone, and Phil's face was haggard and bold. The doctor would not let me have a
word more with his son after he had found us together, but, with dubious
appealing looks, followed me to the door, and shut it upon me. I felt that it
closed upon two unhappy men.
CHAPTER III. A CONSULTATION.
Should I peer into Firmin's privacy, and find the key to that secret? What
skeleton was there in the closet? We know that such skulls are locked up in many
gentlemen's hearts and memories. Bluebeard, for instance, had a whole museum of
them��as that imprudent little last wife of his found out to her cost. And, on
the other hand, a lady, we suppose, would select hers of the sort which had
carried beards when in the flesh. Given a neat locked skeleton cupboard,
belonging to a man of a certain age, to ascertain the sex of the original owner
of the bones, you have not much need of a picklock or a blacksmith. There is no
use in forcing the hinge, or scratching the pretty panel. We know what is inside
��we arch rogues and men of the world. Murders, I suppose, are not many��enemies
and victims of our hate and anger, destroyed and trampled out of life by us, and
locked out of sight: but corpses of our dead loves, my dear sir��my dear
madam��have we not got them stowed away in cupboard after cupboard, in bottle
after bottle? Oh, fie! And young people! What doctrine is this to preach to
them, who spell your book by papa's and mamma's knee? Yes, and how wrong it is
to let them go to church, and see and hear papa and mamma publicly on their
knees, calling out, and confessing to the whole congregation, that they are
glimmering of the skeleton inside.
Although the elder Firmin followed me to the door, and his eyes only left me as
I turned the corner of the
street, I felt sure that Phil ere long would open his
mind to me, or give me some clue to that mystery. I should hear from him why his
bright cheeks had become hollow, why his fresh voice, which I remember so honest
and cheerful, was now harsh and sarcastic, with tones that often grated on the
hearer, and laughter that gave pain. It was about Philip himself. that my
anxieties were. The young fellow had inherited from his poor mother a
considerable fortune��some eight or nine hundred a year, we always understood.
He was living in a costly, not to say extravagant manner. I thought Mr. Philip's
juvenile remorses were locked up in the skeleton closet, and was grieved to
think he had fallen in mischief's way. Hence, no doubt, might arise the anger
between him and his father. The boy was extravagant and headstrong; and the
parent remonstrant and irritated.
I met my old friend Dr. Goodenough at the club one evening; and as we dined
together I discoursed with him about his former patient, and recalled to him
that day, years back, when the boy was ill at school, and when my poor mother
and Phil's own were yet alive.
Goodenough looked very grave.
"Yes," he said, "the boy was very ill; he was nearly gone at that time��at that
time��when his mother was in the Isle of Wight, and his father dangling after a
prince. We thought one day it was all over with him; but��"
"But a good doctor interposed between him and pallida mors."
"A good doctor? a good nurse! The boy was delirious, and had a fancy to walk out
of window, and would have done so, but for one of my nurses. You know her."
"What! the Little Sister?"
"Yes, the Little Sister."
"And it was she who nursed Phil through his fever, and saved his life? I drink
her health. She is a good little soul."
"Good!" said the doctor, with his gruffest voice and frown.��(He was always most
fierce when he was most tender-hearted.) "Good, indeed! Will you have some more
of this duck?��Do. You have had enough already, and it's very unwholesome. Good,
sir? But for women, fire and brimstone ought to come down and consume this
world. Your dear mother was one of the good ones. I was attending you when you
were ill, at those horrible chambers you had in the Temple, at the same time
when young Firmin was ill at Grey Friars. And I suppose I must be answerable for
keeping two scapegraces in the world."
"Why didn't Dr. Firmin come to see him?"
"Hm! his nerves were too delicate. Besides, he did come. Talk of the��"
The personage designated by asterisks was Phil's father, who was also a member
of our club, and who entered the dining-room, tall, stately, and pale, with his
stereotyped smile, and wave of his pretty hand. By the way, that smile of
Firmin's was a very queer contortion of the handsome features. As you came up to
him, he would draw his lips over his teeth, causing his jaws to wrinkle (or
dimple if you will) on either side. Meanwhile his eyes looked out from his face,
quite melancholy and independent of the little transaction in which the mouth
was engaged. Lips said, "I am a gentleman of fine manners and fascinating
address, and I am supposed to be happy to see you. How do you do?" Dreary, sad,
as into a great blank desert, looked the dark eyes. I do know one or two, but
only one or two faces of men, when oppressed with care, which can yet smile all
over.
Goodenough nods grimly to the smile of the other doctor, who blandly looks at
our table, holding his chin in one of his pretty hands.
"How do?" growls Goodenough. "Young Hopeful well?"
"Young Hopeful sits smoking cigars till morning with some friends of his," says
Firmin, with the sad smile directed towards me this time. "Boys will be boys."
And he pensively walks away from us with a friendly nod towards me; examines the
dinner-card in an attitude of melancholy grace; points with the jewelled hand to