CHAPTER XVIII.
NUTTSreading newspaper; customers drop in.
Mrs Nutts.Now, Mr Nutts; will you drag yourself out of that newspaper? I wish there wasn’t such a thing in the world. I’m sure a man with his wife and family oughtn’t to waste his time with newspapers.
Nutts.(Laying down paper.) Mrs Nutts—but I’m too melancholy to make a noise. Be quiet, my dear, can’t you, and let me enjoy my wretchedness? How d’ye do, Slowgoe? Servant, Mr Peabody. If I should cut you all round to-day, let it go for nothing; for the fact is, the Chancellor’s “Budget’s” quite put my hand out of order.
Nosebag.Well, I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard the pints. I did think to have a little more light in my back room, but now the ’tatoes have made it impossible. We’re to have the window-tax still.
Slowgoe.I must confess it; not that I everexpect anything from the Whigs—still I did look for some fall in soap. I thought washing might be made a little cheaper; but, as you say, Mr Nutts, the taxes keep us still in our dirt.
Peabody.And then in the matter of tea——
Mrs Nutts.What’s that about tea?
Nutts.Of course. Put politics in a teapot, and you women will listen to ’em directly. Why, the tea won’t come down a halfpenny. And why not? Because of the ’tatoes. The potato’s the real root of evil.
Peabody.And the first is—eight millions of money for Ireland. Eight millions more of debt to be laid upon the innocent shoulders of unborn babes.
Mrs Nutts.Dear little creturs!
Nutts.Still it can’t be helped. As a policeman and once a schoolmaster, you must own this, Mr Peabody, the famishing must be fed.
Peabody.He’s no better than a stone that denies it. Nevertheless, it is a little hard that for so many years there should be a running account of misery and profit between tenants and landlords; and at the last, when misery sinks to famine, we should be called on to make up the balance, pocketed years ago by others. There’s a passage, I remember, in Mr Disraeli’s—I don’t mean young Benjamin’s—“Curiosities,” that’s taken from asermon, and it runs somehow so: “If you ladies and gentlemen who are fattening on your pleasures, and wear scarlet clothes—I believe, if you were put in a good press, we should see the blood of the poor gush out with which your scarlet is dyed.” Now, if a good many Irish landlords were squeezed after this fashion, their pockets would run scarlet too.
Nutts.Didn’t Sir Walter Rawley bring potatoes from the New World? I thought so. ’Pon my life! when I think of it, they almost seem as if they’d been sent from the New World to revenge the wickedness she’d suffered from the Old. We made slaves with whips and chains; and the New World, waiting her time—for the wheel of right and wrong comes round, let it turn ever so slowly—makes slaves with potatoes. What do you think of that, Mr Peabody?
Peabody.Why, I think that Mr M’Neile, or any other of the illustrators of Providence—and pretty fiery pictures they’ve painted about it lately—wouldn’t grudge half-a-crown for that thought. Why, he’d beat it into a discourse of an hour and a half long, and print and publish it for a shilling afterwards.The Potato in its Iniquity!Depend on it, Mr M’Neile would make a grand thing of it; showing that Irish landlords had nothing to do with the famine, but that the whole of thepotato blight was nothing more than the wickedness of Cortez and such fellows—all Catholics, be it remembered—coming up more than two hundred years afterwards. The rottenness of present potatoes no other than the whips and chains of bygone centuries coming to a head! There would be something grand in this. Whereas, to lay the blight upon the Maynooth Grant isn’t worthy of the old woman who cursed the Pope for inventing the scarlet fever.
Nutts.Whatever brought the blight, I hope they’ll never trust to ’tatoes again. For my part, I shall never again think of fields of ’em in Ireland, without thinking every root a human slave: fields of misery, and want, and death. I’ve read somewhere of a certain root, that when men eat it they are turned to brutes: well, the potato’s very like it; for, living upon nothing else, it takes the best part of a man clean out of him: it takes away his respect from himself; and when that’s the case, a man’s lost, and may as well go upon all fours at once. And then for the landlords——
Slowgoe.I will not sit any longer in the shop, and hear those worthy and most unfortunate gentlemen abused. As for the National Debt, as a lover of the institutions of my country, I’m bound to think it’s a blessing.
Tickle.What! you don’t think it a burden?
Slowgoe.Not at all. The National Debt is like the hump on a camel—it makes the State carry what it has to carry with greater convenience. (Looking at paper.) So they’re going to make Prince Albert Chancellor of Cambridge. Mr Peabody, though you are now in the police, I believe last week you said you had a vote? Who do you give it to?
Peabody.Nobody.In the first place, I don’t see how the Earl of Powis, being, on his own confession, not so wise a man as the Duke of Northumberland, can have the face to ask for it. And secondly, Prince Albert’s intentions, should he be elected, are too military.
Nutts.What do you mean?—going to turn the students into soldiers?
Peabody.Not all at once; but it’s generally reported, that if he’s made Chancellor, he intends to abolish the trencher-cap at Cambridge University and bring in the Albert hat. I shouldn’t wish it talked about, because it might lose the poor girl her place; nevertheless, the housemaid at Fulham told me of the fact, that on Thursday last she saw her master, the Bishop of London, trying on the Albert hat before the looking-glass.
Tickle.That’s nothing; he might only be doing that as an officer—and I suppose a bishop would rank as lieutenant-colonel—in the Army of Martyrs.Talking of the Duke of Northumberland, I see he’s been lying in state.
Slowgoe.Very right. Even in death people should respect their proper rank, and not come down to the vulgar. I see here’s the account taken from theMorning Herald. Hark! (Reads.) “The noblest and most conspicuous town mansion of the nobility of this country is that which now bears the aspect of desolation, and betokens the chill presence of death.The busy throng without pursue their wonted avocations around the princely pile‘regardless of the dead:’ within, all is darkness and pompous gloom.” Beautiful, isn’t it?
Peabody.Very good, hearselike literature, written with a black plume. But why shouldn’t “the busy throng” go about their business? Would the gentleman have ’em stop and throng about the house? If so, and I’d been on duty, I am sure I should have said “Move on.”
Slowgoe.Don’t be profane, Mr Peabody. The gentleman is now in the chamber. (Reads.) “Eight enormous altar candlesvainlyattempted to dispel the gloom thatthickenedaround the unconscious object of all this pomp, which was supported upon trestles, within an ebony railing, surmounted by eightenormous plumesof black ostrich feathers. The pall, of rich Genoa velvet, thrown partially aside, disclosed the coffin,anunparalleled piece of art, covered with crimson velvet, and sumptuously mounted with massive gold ornaments, and a plate inscribed with the style and title of the Duke at great length.” And this, the writer goes on beautifully to say, is all that remained of the “illustrious object.”
Nutts.Well, he was a very decent man, I believe; but I never knew anything illustrious that he did. What made him illustrious—does anybody know?
Tickle.Why, the same thing that makes a weathercock illustrious—gold.
Nutts.And they call this “lying in state.” “Ostrich feathers—Genoa velvet—and an unparalleled coffin.” Well, when we think what coffins hold at the best, such a show is rightly named; it is “Lyingin State,” and nothing better.
Slowgoe.Of course you’ll sneer, Mr Nutts; anything against the aristocracy. But I’m happy to say that the funeral was of corresponding splendour, and went off remarkably well. A great many of the ambassadors and nobility—though they didn’t go themselves—in the very handsomest manner sent their carriages.
Nutts.Well, that’s making woe easy, isn’t it, when—poor things!—it’s put upon the horses?
Tickle.(With newspaper.) I’m the veriest varmint, if the Church isn’t really in danger now.
Slowgoe.What do you mean? How so?
Tickle.Why, here’s Lord John Russell’s word for it; he’s going to make three more bishops. Manchester’s to be the smallest; I suppose not exactly a fine lawn bishop, but a cotton one.
Slowgoe.Three more? I wish it was thirty.
Tickle.All the worse for the Church, then, I say again. Don’t tell me. Poor old soul! When we think of the money her sons, the bishops, do get through—when we think of their palaces and their coaches—and their bankers’ books—and their coal-mines and their sulphur-mines, for what I know—when we think of all this, and remember the precepts—I think they’re so called—of Lady Church herself, I think her sons can’t be called the most dutiful of children. On the contrary, I do believe they’re getting the old lady every day into greater discredit; and where it will end, who shall say? Thus, it’s my opinion—the more bishops, the more danger.
Nutts.I wonder if Mr Barry’s had orders in the House of Lords to make seats for ’em.
Tickle. Oh, they’re not to go to Parliament, says Lord John, “except as vacancies in the bench of bishops occur.”
Slowgoe. I don’t quite understand that. And I must confess it—whenever I see a Whig meddling with the Church, I feel as if I was looking at a catin a china-closet; nobody can say what precious article mayn’t be smashed.
Nutts.Perhaps his Lordship means that the bishops, like the soldiers, should take the House of Lords in turn; mounting guard in the Church one after t’other.