Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey (smart books to read .TXT) 📖

Having time enough before us, however, we bore away to the left until we came into Golden Square; there, near the corner of Sherrard Street, we sat down, not wishing to part in the tumult and blaze of Piccadilly.  I had told her of my plans some time before, and I now assured her again that she should share in my good fortune, if I met with any, and that I would never forsake her as soon as I had power to protect her.  This I fully intended, as much from inclination as from a sense of duty; for setting aside gratitude, which in any case must have made me her debtor for life, I loved her as affectionately as if she had been my sister; and at this moment with sevenfold tenderness, from pity at witnessing her extreme dejection.  I had apparently most reason for dejection, because I was leaving the saviour of my life; yet I, considering the shock my health had received, was cheerful and full of hope.  She, on the contrary, who was parting with one who had had little means of serving her, except by kindness and brotherly treatment, was overcome by sorrow; so that, when I kissed her at our final farewell, she put her arms about my neck and wept without speaking a word.  I hoped to return in a week at farthest, and I agreed with her that on the fifth night from that, and every night afterwards, she would wait for me at six o’clock near the bottom of Great Titchfield Street, which had been our customary haven, as it were, of rendezvous, to prevent our missing each other in the great Mediterranean of Oxford Street.  This and other measures of precaution I took; one only I forgot.  She had either never told me, or (as a matter of no great interest) I had forgotten her surname.  It is a general practice, indeed, with girls of humble rank in her unhappy condition, not (as novel-reading women of higher pretensions) to style themselves Miss Douglas, Miss Montague, &c., but simply by their Christian names—Mary, Jane, Frances, &c.  Her surname, as the surest means of tracing her hereafter, I ought now to have inquired; but the truth is, having no reason to think that our meeting could, in consequence of a short interruption, be more difficult or uncertain than it had been for so many weeks, I had scarcely for a moment adverted to it as necessary, or placed it amongst my memoranda against this parting interview; and my final anxieties being spent in comforting her with hopes, and in pressing upon her the necessity of getting some medicines for a violent cough and hoarseness with which she was troubled, I wholly forgot it until it was too late to recall her.

It was past eight o’clock when I reached the Gloucester Coffee-house, and the Bristol mail being on the point of going off, I mounted on the outside.  The fine fluent motion {5} of this mail soon laid me asleep: it is somewhat remarkable that the first easy or refreshing sleep which I had enjoyed for some months, was on the outside of a mail-coach—a bed which at this day I find rather an uneasy one.  Connected with this sleep was a little incident which served, as hundreds of others did at that time, to convince me how easily a man who has never been in any great distress may pass through life without knowing, in his own person at least, anything of the possible goodness of the human heart—or, as I must add with a sigh, of its possible vileness.  So thick a curtain of manners is drawn over the features and expression of men’s natures, that to the ordinary observer the two extremities, and the infinite field of varieties which lie between them, are all confounded; the vast and multitudinous compass of their several harmonies reduced to the meagre outline of differences expressed in the gamut or alphabet of elementary sounds.  The case was this: for the first four or five miles from London I annoyed my fellow-passenger on the roof by occasionally falling against him when the coach gave a lurch to his: side; and indeed, if the road had been less smooth and level than it is, I should have fallen off from weakness.  Of this annoyance he complained heavily, as perhaps, in the same circumstances, most people would; he expressed his complaint, however, more morosely than the occasion seemed to warrant, and if I had parted with him at that moment I should have thought of him (if I had considered it worth while to think of him at all) as a surly and almost brutal fellow.  However, I was conscious that I had given him some cause for complaint, and therefore I apologized to him, and assured him I would do what I could to avoid falling asleep for the future; and at the same time, in as few words as possible, I explained to him that I was ill and in a weak state from long suffering, and that I could not afford at that time to take an inside place.  This man’s manner changed, upon hearing this explanation, in an instant; and when I next woke for a minute from the noise and lights of Hounslow (for in spite of my wishes and efforts I had fallen asleep again within two minutes from the time I had spoken to him) I found that he had put his arm round me to protect me from falling off, and for the rest of my journey he behaved to me with the gentleness of a woman, so that at length I almost lay in his arms; and this was the more kind, as he could not have known that I was not going the whole way to Bath or Bristol.  Unfortunately, indeed, I did go rather farther than I intended, for so genial and so refreshing was my sleep, that the next time after leaving Hounslow that I fully awoke was upon the sudden pulling up of the mail (possibly at a post-office), and on inquiry I found that we had reached Maidenhead—six or seven miles, I think, ahead of Salthill.  Here I alighted, and for the half-minute that the mail stopped I was entreated by my friendly companion (who, from the transient glimpse I had had of him in Piccadilly, seemed to me to be a gentleman’s butler, or person of that rank) to go to bed without delay.  This I promised, though with no intention of doing so; and in fact I immediately set forward, or rather backward, on foot.  It must then have been nearly midnight, but so slowly did I creep along that I heard a clock in a cottage strike four before I turned down the lane from Slough to Eton.  The air and the sleep had both refreshed me; but I was weary nevertheless.  I remember a thought (obvious enough, and which has been prettily expressed by a Roman poet) which gave me some consolation at that moment under my poverty.  There had been some time before a murder committed on or near Hounslow Heath.  I think I cannot be mistaken when I say that the name of the murdered person was Steele, and that he was the owner of a lavender plantation in that neighbourhood.  Every step of my progress was bringing me nearer to the Heath, and it naturally occurred to me that I and the accused murderer, if he were that night abroad, might at every instant be unconsciously approaching each other through the darkness; in which case, said I—supposing I, instead of being (as indeed I am) little better than an outcast—

Lord of my learning, and no land beside—

were, like my friend Lord ---, heir by general repute to £70,000 per annum, what a panic should I be under at this moment about my throat!  Indeed, it was not likely that Lord --- should ever be in my situation.  But nevertheless, the spirit of the remark remains true—that vast power and possessions make a man shamefully afraid of dying; and I am convinced that many of the most intrepid adventurers, who, by fortunately being poor, enjoy the full use of their natural courage, would, if at the very instant of going into action news were brought to them that they had unexpectedly succeeded to an estate in England of £50,000 a-year, feel their dislike to bullets considerably sharpened, {6} and their efforts at perfect equanimity and self-possession proportionably difficult.  So true it is, in the language of a wise man whose own experience had made him acquainted with both fortunes, that riches are better fitted

To slacken virtue, and abate her edge,
Than tempt her to do ought may merit praise.

Paradise Regained.

I dally with my subject because, to myself, the remembrance of these times is profoundly interesting.  But my reader shall not have any further cause to complain, for I now hasten to its close.  In the road between Slough and Eton I fell asleep, and just as the morning began to dawn I was awakened by the voice of a man standing over me and surveying me.  I know not what he was: he was an ill-looking fellow, but not therefore of necessity an ill-meaning fellow; or, if he were, I suppose he thought that no person sleeping out-of-doors in winter could be worth robbing.  In which conclusion, however, as it regarded myself, I beg to assure him, if he should be among my readers, that he was mistaken.  After a slight remark he passed on; and I was not sorry at his disturbance, as it enabled me to pass through Eton before people were generally up.  The night had been heavy and lowering, but towards the morning it had changed to a slight frost, and the ground and the trees were now covered with rime.  I slipped through Eton unobserved; washed myself, and as far as possible adjusted my dress, at a little public-house in Windsor; and about eight o’clock went down towards Pote’s.  On my road I met some junior boys, of whom I made inquiries.  An Etonian is always a gentleman; and, in spite of my shabby habiliments, they answered me civilly.  My friend Lord --- was gone to the University of ---.  “Ibi omnis effusus labor!”  I had, however, other friends at Eton; but it is not to all that wear that name in prosperity that a man is willing to present himself in distress.  On recollecting myself, however, I asked for the Earl of D---, to whom (though my acquaintance with him was not so intimate as with some others) I should not have shrunk from presenting myself under any circumstances.  He was still at Eton, though I believe on the wing for Cambridge.  I called, was received kindly, and asked to breakfast.

Here let me stop for a moment to check my reader from any erroneous conclusions.  Because I have had occasion incidentally to speak of various patrician friends, it must not be supposed that I have myself any pretension to rank and high blood.  I thank God that I have not.  I am the son of a plain English merchant, esteemed during his life for his great integrity, and strongly attached to literary pursuits (indeed, he was himself, anonymously, an author).  If he had lived it was expected that he would have been very rich; but dying prematurely, he left no more than about £30,000 amongst seven different claimants.  My mother I may mention with honour, as still more highly gifted; for though unpretending to the name and honours of a literary woman, I shall presume to call her (what many literary women are not) an intellectual woman; and I believe that if ever her letters should be collected and published, they would be thought generally to exhibit as much strong and masculine sense, delivered in as pure “mother English,” racy and fresh with idiomatic graces, as any in our language—hardly excepting those of Lady M. W. Montague.  These are my honours of descent, I have no other; and I have thanked God sincerely that I have not, because, in my judgment, a station which raises a man too eminently above the level of his fellow-creatures is not the most favourable to moral or to intellectual qualities.

Lord D--- placed before me a most magnificent breakfast.  It was really so; but in my eyes it seemed trebly magnificent, from being the first regular meal, the first “good man’s table,” that I had sate down to for months.  Strange to say, however, I could scarce eat anything.  On the day when I first received my £10 bank-note I had gone to a baker’s shop and bought a couple of rolls; this very shop I had two months or six weeks before surveyed with an eagerness of desire which it was almost humiliating to me to recollect.  I remembered the story about Otway, and