The Remarkable History of Sir Thomas Upmore, bart., M.P., formerly known as «Tommy Upmore»

This offer was highly disinterested; but I did not enjoy its magnanimity, especially as my protector now became so engrossed with the great professor, that he quite forgot poor little me.

"Now is your time, to go through with the question," spake the arch-enemy, Brachipod, "which, beyond all doubt, is nothing more than a case of organic levigation – "

"Levigation be d – d!" cried Professor Jargoon. "Any fool can see, that it is gaseous expansion."

"Gaseous expansion is bosh, bosh, bosh," shouted Professor Chocolous; "ze babe, zat vos born a veek longer dis day, vill tell you – bacilli, bacilli!"

"How pleasant it would be, to hear all this nonsense," declared Professor Mullicles, "if ignorance were not so dogmatic! The merest neophyte would recognise, at once, this instance of histic fluxion."

Without any delay, a great uproar arose, and the four professors rushed at me, to save rushing at one another. My heart fell so low, that I could not run away, though extremely desirous of doing so; and the utmost I could manage was to get behind a chair, and sing out for my father and mother. This only redoubled their zeal, and I might not have been alive now to speak of it, had not Professor Brachipod pulled out an implement like a butcher's steelyard, and swung back the others, with a sweep of it.

"He belongs to me. It was I who found him out. I will have the very first turn at him," he cried. "I'll knock on the head any man, who presumes to prevent me from proving my theory. Just hold him tight, while I get this steel hook firmly into his collar. Now are you satisfied? This proves everything. Can this levigation be d – d, Jargoon? All his weight is a pound and five ounces!"

He turned round in triumph, and a loud laugh met him. He was weighing my jacket, without me inside it. For mother had told me, a hundred times, that a child had much better be killed, than weighed. At the fright of his touch, I slipped out of my sleeves, and set off at the top of my speed away. In the passage, I found a side door open, and without looking back dashed through it.

"Go it, little 'un!" a cabman cried, the very man who had brought mine enemies; and go it I did, like a bird on the wing, without any knowledge of the ground below. Some of our boys, looking out of a window, called out, "Well done, Tommy! You'll win the – " something, it may have been the Derby, I went too fast to hear what it was. Short as my legs were, they flew like the spokes of a wheel that can never be counted; and I left a mail-cart, and a butcher's cart too, out of sight, though they tried to keep up with me. Such was my speed, on the wings of the wind, with my linen inflated, and my hair blown out, – the nimblest professor, that ever yet rushed to a headlong conclusion, were slow to me. In a word, I should have distanced all those enemies, had I only taken the right road home.

But alas, when I came to the top of a rise, from which I expected to see my dear parents, or at any rate our cinder-heap, there was nothing of the kind in sight. The breeze had swept me up the Barnet road; and yonder was the smoke of our chimney, like a streak, a mile away down to the left of me. All the foot of the hill, which is now panelled out into walls, and streets, of the great cattle-market, remained to be crossed, without help of the wind, ere ever I was safe inside our door. And the worst of it was, that the ground had no cover, – not a house, nor a tree, nor so much as a ditch, for a smallish boy to creep along; only piles of rubbish, here and there, and a few swampy places, where snipes sometimes pitched down, to have a taste of London.

Tired as I was, after that great run, and scant of breath, and faint-hearted – for the sun was gone down below Highgate Hill, and my spirits ever seem to sink with him – I started anew for my own sweet home, by the mark of the smoke of our boiling-house. I could hear my heart going pit-a-pat, faster than my weary feet went; for the place was as lonely as science could desire, for a snug job of vivisection. Of that grisly horror I knew not as yet the name, nor the meaning precisely; but a boy at our school, who was a surgeon's son, used to tell things, in bed, there was no sleeping after. And once he had said, "If they could catch you, Tommy, what a treat you would be, to be lectured on!"

As the dusk grew deeper in the hollow places, and the ribs of the naked hills paler, I began to get more and more afraid, and to start back, and listen at my own footstep. And before I could hear what I hoped to hear – the anvil of the blacksmith down our lane – the air began to thicken with the reeking of the earth, and the outline of everything in sight was blurred, and a very tired fellow could not tell, at any moment, what to run away from, without running into worse. At one time, I thought of sitting down, and hiding in a dip of the ground, till night came on, and my enemies could not see me; but although that might have been the safest plan, my courage would not hold out for it. So on I went, in fear and trembling, peeping, and peering, both behind me and before, and longing with all my heart to see our own door.

But instead of that, oh, what a sight I saw – the most fearful that can be imagined! From the womb of the earth, those four professors (whose names are known all over it), Brachipod, Jargoon, Chocolous, and Mullicles, came forth, and joined hands in front of me. They laughed, with a low scientific laugh, like a surgical blade on the grindstone.

"Capital, capital!" Brachipod cried; "we have got him all snug to ourselves, at last. Let me get my hook into my pretty little eel."

"Famous, famous!" said the deep voice of Jargoon; "now you shall see, how I work my compressor."

"Hoch, hoch!" chuckled Chocolous; "ve have catch ze leetle baird at last. I vill demonstrate his bacilli."

But the one that terrified me most of all was Professor Mullicles; because he said nothing, but kept one hand, upon something, that shone from his long black cloak.

"Oh, gentlemen, kind gentle gentlemen," I sobbed, dropping down on my knees before them, "do please let me go to my father, and mother. They live close by, and they think so much of me, and I am sure they would pay you, for all your inventions, a great deal more than the Government. I only flew once, and I didn't mean to fly, and I am sure it must have been a mistake altogether; and I will promise, upon my Sammy, as Bill Chumps says, not to do it any more. Oh, please to let me go! It is so late; and I beg your pardon humbly."

"Eloquent, and aerial Tommy," replied that dreadful Brachipod, "this case is too momentous, in the interests of pure science, for selfish motives to be recognized. It will be your lofty privilege, to abstract yourself, to revert to the age of unbroken continuity, when that which is now called Tommy was an atom of protobioplasm – "

"Stow that rubbish," broke in Jargoon.

"Ach, ach, ach! All my yaw is on the edge!" screamed Chocolous, dancing with his hands up.

"Proto-potatoes!" spoke Mullicles sternly, advancing to support his view of me.

"D – n," exclaimed all of them, unanimous for once, when there was no view of me to be had; "was there ever such a little devil? After him, after him! He can't get away."

"Can't he?" thought I, though I did not dare to speak, having not a single pant of breath to spare. For, while I was down on my knees for mercy, through the tears in my eyes, I had seen a lamp lit. I knew where that lamp was, and all about it, having broken the glass of it, once or twice, and lamps were a rarity in Maiden Lane as yet. It was not a quarter of a mile away, and the light of it shone upon my own white pillow.

So when those philosophers parted hands, to shake fists at one another, out of the scientific ring I slipped, and made off, for the life of me. My foes were not very swift of foot, and none of them would let another get before him; so that, if I had been fresh and bold, even without any breeze to help me, I might have outstripped them easily. But my legs were tired, and my mind dismayed; and the scientific terms, in which they called on me to stop, were enough to make any one stick fast. And the worst of it was, that having no coat on, I was very conspicuous in the dusk, and had no chance of dodging to the right or left. So that I could hear them gaining on me, and my lungs were too exhausted for me to scream out for father.

Thus, within an apple-toss of our back door, and with nothing but a down-hill slope, between me and our garden, those four ogres of grim science had me lapsing back into their grasp again. Their hands were stretched forth, in pursuit of my neck, and their breath was like flame at the tips of my ears – when a merciful Providence delivered me. I felt something quivering under my feet; over which I went lightly, with a puff of wind lifting the hollows of my hair, and shirt-sleeves. In an instant, I landed on a bank of slag; but behind me was a fearful four-fold splash!

So absorbing was my terror, and so scattered were my wits, that for ever so long I could not make out, what had happened betwixt me and my pursuers, except that I was safe, and they were not. There they were, struggling, and sputtering, and kicking – so much at least as could be seen of them – throwing up their elbows, or their heels, or heads, and execrating nature (when their mouths were clear to do it) in the very shortest language, that has ever been evolved. At the same time, a smell (even stronger than their words) arose, and grew so thick, that they could scarcely be seen through it.

This told me, at once, what had befallen them, or rather what they had fallen into, – videlicet, the cleaning of our vats, together with Mr. John Windsor's; whose refuse and scouring is run away in trucks, upon the last Saturday of every other month. It would be hard to say, what variety of stench, and of glutinous garbage, is not richly present here; and the men from the sewers, who conduct it to the pit, require brandy, at short intervals. In the pit, which is not more than five feet deep, yet ought to be shunned by trespassers, the surface is covered with chloride of lime, and other materials, employed to kill smell, by outsmelling it; and so a short crust forms over it, until the contents become firm and slab, and can be cut out, for the good of the land, when the weather is cold, and the wind blows away.

Now certain it is, that all the science they were made of, could never have extricated those professors, without the strong arms of my father, and mother, and even small me at the end of the rope. The stuff they were in, being only half cooled (and their bodies grown sticky with running so), fastened heavily on them, like tallow on a wick, closing so completely both mouth and eyes, that instead of giving, they could only receive, a lesson in materialism. Professors Brachipod, and Chocolous, being scarcely five feet and a quarter in height, were in great danger of perishing; but Mullicles, and Jargoon, most kindly gave them a jump now and then, for breath. And, to be quit of an unfragrant matter, and tell it more rapidly than we did it, – with the aid of a blue-man from the Indigo works, and of two thickset waggoners, we rescued those four gentlemen from their sad situation, and condoled with them.

Not for £5 per head, however, would any of our cabmen take them home; though a man out of work had been tempted by a guinea, to relieve them a little, with a long-handled broom, and to flush them with a bucket, afterwards. Under heavy discouragement, they set forth on their several ways, surveyed by the police at a respectful distance, on account of the danger to the public health.

CHAPTER V.

"GRIP."

My mother was so frightened, at the fright I had been through, that she took it for an urgent sign from Heaven, that my education should be stopped at once. Having had as much of school as I desired, I heartily hoped, that her opinion would prevail; but father was as obstinate as ever, and after the usual argument – in which she had the best of the words perhaps, and he of the meaning – I was bound to the altar of the Muses once again, with a promise of stripes, if I should try to slip the cord. Dr. Rumbelow undertook, that no professor of anything harder than languages – unless it were Professor Megalow – should come in, at any door of the Partheneion, without having tallow poured over him, which he had found, from high Greek authority, to be the right ointment for Neo-sophistæ. And he said that my father must have been familiar with the passage he referred to, and had thus discomfited all the Pansophistæ, better than any modern Deipnosophist could have done. But my father said no; he had never even heard of the gentleman, with the hard name to crack; and as for them Prophesiers, they ought to have prophesied what his clots was, before tumbling into them. He ought to have an action of trespass against them; and, but for the law, he would do so.

To make it quite certain, that no man of science should analyse, synthesise, generalise, or in any way scientise me, I was now provided with a guardian, intrepid of neologisms ten yards long. The father of our Bill Chumps, Mr. Chumps, the Purveyor of Meat, was the owner of a dog, who was the father of a pup, who was threatening, every day, to make mincemeat of the author of his existence. The old dog might have tackled him, Bill told me, or at any rate could have shown a good turn-up, but for having broken his best fighting-tooth, on the spiked collar of the last mastiff he had slain. Through this disability on the part of old Fangs, he found his son Grip too many for him; yet could not be brought to confess it, and abstain from a battle, at every opportunity. These encounters in no wise disturbed Mr. Chumps, but became inconvenient to Mrs. Chumps, when she heard the piano (which had cost £10, for her daughter, Belinda, to learn her scales) upset, and entirely demolished. If it had been possible to hang Grip, hanged he would have been that very day; for the mistress had nursed Fangs through his distemper, and never would listen to a word against him. Whereas the whole fault was upon the side of Fangs; of which I am quite certain, from the character of Grip, as it unfolded itself before me, when he became my own dear dog.

Providentially, their attempt to hang him had proved a miserable failure. Not that he resisted – he was too docile, and kind, and intelligent, to do that – but because his neck was much too thick, and manifold, and his wind too good, for any rope to be of much account to him. And before they could try any other form of murder, his master came home, and made short work with them, knowing the superiority of the dog. Now, that same evening, the day being Monday, the very choice club, to which he, and my father, and Mr. John Windsor belonged, as well as the largest potato-man at King's Cross, and the owner of the Indigo-blue concern, and the most eminent merchant in the cat's meat line, and several other gentlemen of equal distinction, held their bi-daily congress at "The Best End of the Scrag," at the corner.

That night there was a very fine attendance; and my father, who had long been acknowledged to be the wittiest man on our side of the road – perhaps because he got no chance at home, to say what came inside him – upon this occasion was compelled, by the nature of some of the smells he had gone through, to be at his best, as he generally was, after not less than two glasses and a half. And he told the adventure, of the four professors, not as a sad and deplorable thing, but rather as matter for merriment. In such a light did he put it, that all the gentlemen laughed heartily, most of all Mr. John Windsor, who knew, even better than my father did, the variety of organic substance, active in that pit just then.

"There's things there," he said, "to my living knowledge, that'll never come out of their hair while they live. And those big Savage-Johns always have long hair, and as fuzzy as a cat stroked upward. Why, the very last Friday, when I was a-cooling, a pair of them comes with a brazen machine, and asked me, as quiet as a statue, permission for to taste my follet oils. I up with the wooden spoon, and offered them a drop; but that was not their meaning. It was som'at about som'at we gives off, according to them philanderers. And I says – 'Government inquiry, gents?' And they says – 'No, sir; but for purposes of science.' 'Tell me,' says I, 'what the constitootion is of this here clot,' and they said 'Composite organic' something; while my composites all was upon the upper floor, and never a hurdy-gurdy allowed inside. 'So much for science!' says I; 'Jim, show these gentlemen out, by the back-alley door.' And now that you come to discourse of it, Bubbly, it strikes me they might have come very likely, smelling up a side-wind for your poor Tommy."

"I should hope they have had enough of that," said father; "if they come any more, I'll boil them down, and make 'Science-sauce for the million,' How would you like, John, to pay your money, and get no change out of it, along of such a lot?"

"You mean the missus," Mr. Windsor asked – "won't allow Thistledown, as my Jack calls him, to go to old Rum's any more, I suppose? Afraid of the ladies, Mr. Upmore is."

"I'll tell you what to do," Mr. Chumps broke in; "Upmore, you buy my young dog Grip. I'd give him to you with all my heart, if it wasn't for the bad luck of it; though he is worth ten guineas of anybody's money, for he comes of the best blood in England. Downright House of Lords bull-dog he is; same as should be chained to the pillars of the State, to keep them Glads, and Rads, away. Just you put him in charge of Thistledown – or whatever you call that little yellow-haired chap, and I'll back Grip against all the Science, that ever made a pint contain a pot."

"What's the figure?" my father asked, knowing how generously all men talk, and that Mr. Chumps' bull-dogs were a fashionable race.

"If you was to offer me more than a crown," replied Mr. Chumps, with his fist on the table; "I should say, 'Bubbly, he's no dog of yours, because you desire to insult me.' But put you down a crown, as between old friends, and before this honourable company, I say, 'Bucephalus Upmore, Grip is your dog.' Why so? John Windsor here knows why, and so does Harry Peelings from King's Cross, and so does Bill Blewitt, and Sandy Mewliver, and all this honourable company. And so do you, Bubbly Upmore, if you are the man I have taken you for. Gentlemen, it is because Mr. Upmore has told the best story I have sat and listened to, ever since last election day; he digged a pit for his enemies in the gate, and they fell into it themselves; as well as because my son, Bill Chumps, who will make his mark, mind you, if you live to see it, has taken a liking to this gentleman's son – Thistledown, or Bubble-blow, or Up-goes-the-donkey – they've got at least fifty names for him – and, in my humble opinion, he must be protected from the outrages of all those fellows, philo-this, and anti-that, – my son Bill knows their names, and all about them – who have made the world a deal too clever for a quiet man's comfort."

These very simple and sensible words were received with much knocking on the table; and my father put down his five-shilling piece, so that all the other gentlemen had time to see it, before they began talking, as the subject compelled them to do, of the merits of their children, respectively, severally, and all together. And they parted, in thorough good will, inasmuch as not anybody listened to anybody else.

My father's opinion, at the time, had been that the warmth of Mr. Chumps' political and social feelings (promoted by the comforts of the club) had hurried him into a disregard of money, which his friends should never lose a moment to improve. But when the journeyman came over in the morning, on his way to the Partheneion, with Grip trotting chained at the tail of the cart, my father cried —

"What! Has Chumps no more conscience, than to impose upon a friend like this? I, who have known him all these years, to pay as good a crown-piece as was ever coined, for a one-eyed, nick-eared, hare-lipped, broken-tailed son of a [female dog] like that! Gristles, you go back, and tell your master, that you saw me put an ounce of lead through him."

My father strode in, to fetch his gun, which he kept well-charged in the clock-case now, for the sake of so many Professors; and Grip, for a surety, would have been dead, and boiling, in less than five minutes, except for his luck. His luck was that I, being under debate between my two parents, had slipped out of doors, being old enough now by experience to know, that they took the kindest view of me, when I was out of sight. And coming round the corner, to peep in at the window, just to see whether they had settled my concerns, there I saw this poor dog – hideous they might call him – doubtfully glancing in every direction, dimly aware that the world was against him, scenting the death of a dog in the air. One of his eyes was out of sight, and one of his ears was in need of a sling, his tail (which had lately been cracked by his father) hung limp in the dust with a pitiable wag, and every hair on his body was turned the wrong way. His self-respect had suffered a tremendous blow, by the effort of mankind to hang him yesterday, and by dragging at the tail of a cart to-day; and as sure as dogs are dogs, he was aware of the awful decision against him.

Gristles was a hard man, and would not say a word, to comfort or to plead for him, having got a little snap from him, a month or two ago; so he looked down over the back of the cart, and whistled – "Pop goes the Weasel" – while the poor dog implored him, with all his one eye full of wistful enquiry, what harm he had done.

"All right, guv'nor," shouted Gristles, as my father came forthwith his big double-barrel; "my mare will stand fire like a church. But mind you, it ain't no good to shoot at his head, with nothing no smaller than a dockyard cannon. Have at his heart, where you sees him now a-panting; but for God's sake, guv'nor, don't shoot me."

That fellow's cowardly cruelty made my father relent, for his heart was kind; and before he could put up his gun again, I was lying upon Grip, and hugging him. The unfortunate dog, for his last resource, had appealed to the only weak face he could find, and my own fright enabled me to enter into his.

"You little fool, Tommy, get out of the way," my father shouted; but I would not budge, and Grip put his quivering tongue out, and licked my cheek, and besought me with a little speech of whine.