Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1628 page)

What my impressions of my apartment in Paris might have been, if I had recovered there according to my anticipations, I cannot venture to say; for, before I had got fairly settled in my new rooms, I suffered a sudden relapse. My life again became the life of an invalid, and my ways of thought and observation turned back disastrously to the old invalid channel. Change of air and scene — which had done nothing for my body — did nothing either for my mind. At Paris, as before in London, I looked at the world about me purely from the sick man’s point of view — or, in other words, the events that passed, the sights that appeared, and the persons who moved around me, interested or repelled me only as they referred more or less directly to myself and my own invalid situation. This curious narrowness of view, of which I am not yet well enough entirely to rid myself, though as conscious as another of the mental weakness that it implies, has no connection that I can discover with excessive selfishness or vanity; it is simply the result of the inevitable increase of a man’s importance to himself which the very fact of sickness is only too apt to produce. My own sensations as a sick man now fill up the weary blank of my daily existence when I am alone, and form the main topic of inquiry and conversation when my doctor and my friends enliven my solitude. The concerns of my own poor body, which do not, I thank Heaven, occupy my attention for much more than one hour out of the twenty-four when I am well, become the main business and responsibility of all my waking moments now that I am ill. Pain to suffer, and the swallowing of drugs and taking of nourishment at regulated periods, daily restraints that I must undergo, and hourly precautions that I am forced to practice, all contribute to keep my mind bound down to the level of my body. A flight of thought beyond myself and the weary present time — even supposing I were capable of the exertion — would lead me astray from the small personal rules and regulations on which I now depend absolutely for the recovery of my health.

Have my temper and disposition changed for the worse under these unfavorable circumstances? Not much, I hope. I can honestly say for myself that I envy no other man’s health and happiness. I feel no jealous pang when I hear laughter about me. I can look at people out of my window running easily across the road, while I can hardly crawl from one end of my chamber to the other, without feeling insulted by their activity. Still, it is true, at the same time, that I warm to people now exactly in proportion as I see them sensibly and sincerely touched by my suffering condition; and that I like or dislike my habitation for the time being, just as it happens to suit or not to suit all the little requirements of my temporary infirmity. If I were introduced to one of the most eminent men in the country at this moment, and if he did not look sorry to see me ill, I should never care to set eyes on the eminent man again. If I had a superb room with the finest view in the world, but no bedside conveniences for my pill-boxes and medicine-bottles, I would leave that superb room and fine view, and go cheerfully to a garret in an alley, provided it adapted itself comfortably to the arrangement of my indispensable invalid’s lumber. This is, doubtless, a humiliating confession; but it is well that I should make it once for all — for the various opinions and impressions which I am about frankly to write down will be found to be more or less coloured by what I venture to describe as the involuntary egotism of a sick man. Let us see how my new lodging in Paris suits me, and why it is that I immediately become fond of it.

I live in a little building of my own, called a Pavilion. Outside it resembles, as to size, brightness, and apparent insubstantiality, a private dwelling-house in a Pantomime. I expect as I drive up to it, for the first time, to see Clown grinning at the door, and Harlequin jumping through the window. A key is produced, and an odd little white door, through which no fat man could penetrate even sidewise, is opened; I ascend a steep flight of a dozen steps, and enter my toy castle; my own independent, solitary, miniature mansion.

The first room is the drawing-room. It is about the size of a large packing-case, with a gay looking-glass and clock, with bright red chairs and sofa, with a cozy round table, with a big window looking out on another Pavilion opposite and on a great house set back in a courtyard. To my indescribable astonishment, it actually possesses three doors! One I have just entered by. Another leads into a bed-chamber of the same size as the drawing-room, just as brightly and neatly furnished, with a window that looks out on the everlasting gayety and bustle of the Champs Elysées. The third door leads into a dressing-room half the size of the drawing-room, and having a fourth door which opens into a kitchen half the size of the dressing-room, but of course possessing a fifth door, which leads out again to the head of the staircase. As no two people meeting in the kitchen could possibly pass each other, or remain in the apartment together without serious inconvenience, the two doors leading in and out of it may be pronounced useful as well as ornamental. Into this quaint little culinary crevice the coal-merchant, the wood-merchant, and the water-carrier squeeze their way, and find a doll’s cellar and cistern all ready for them. They might be followed, if I were only well enough to give dinners, by a cook and his scullions; for I possess, besides the kitchen and cistern, an elabourate charcoal stove in the kitchen, at which any number of courses might be prepared by any culinary artist who could cook composedly with a row of small fires under his nose, a coal-cellar between his legs, a cistern scrubbing his shoulder, and a lukewarm wall against his back.

But what is the main secret of my fondness for the Pavilion? It does not, I am afraid, lie in the brightness and elegance of the little rooms, or even in the delightful independence of inhabiting a lodging, which is also a house of my own, where I can neither be disturbed nor overlooked by any other lodgers. The one irresistible appeal which my Parisian apartment makes to my sympathies consists in the perfect manner in which it fits my wants and flatters my weaknesses as an invalid.

I have quite a little druggist’s stock in trade of physic-bottles, glasses, spoons, card-boxes, and prescriptions; I have all sorts of queer vestments and coverings, intended to guarantee me against all variations of temperature and all degrees of exposure, by night as well as by day; I have ready remedies that must be kept in my bed-chamber, and elabourate applications that I must find handy in my dressing-room. In short, I myself am nothing but the centre of a vast medical litter, and the closer the said litter revolves round me the more comfortable I am. In a house of the usual size, and in rooms arranged on the ordinary plan, I should be driven distracted (being an untidy man even in my healthiest moments) by mislaying things every hour in the day, by having to get up to look for them, and by being compelled to walk up and downstairs, or to make others do so for me, when I want to establish communications between dressing-room, bedroom, drawing-room, coal-cellar, and kitchen. In my tiny Parisian house of one small story, I can wait on myself with the most perfect ease; in my wee sitting-room, nine-tenths of the things I want are within arms-length of me, as I repose in my elbow-chair; if I must move, I can get from my bed-chamber to my kitchen in less time than it would take me to walk across an English drawing-room; if I lose my morning draught, mislay my noontide drops, or leave my evening pill-box under my afternoon dressing-gown, I can take my walking-stick or my fire-tongs and poke or fish for missing articles in every corner of the room, without doing more than turning round in my chair. If I had been well and had given dinner-parties, I might have found my habitation rather too small for me. As it is, if my Pavilion had been built on purpose for a solitary lodger to fall ill in with the least possible amount of personal discomfort, it could not have suited my sad case better. Sick, I love and honour the skillful architect who contrived it. Well, I am very much afraid I should never have bestowed so much as a single thought on him.

Why do I become, in one cordial quarter of an hour, friendly, familiar, and even affectionate with my portress? Because it is part of my unhealthy condition of body and mind that I like nothing so well as being pitied; and my portress sweetens my daily existence with so much compassion that she does me more good, I think, than my doctor or my drugs.

Let me try to describe her. She is a thin, rapid, cheerful little woman, with a tiny face and bright brown eyes. She has a husband (Hippolyte senior) and a son (Hippolyte junior), and a lodge of one room to live in with her family. She has not been in bed, for years past, before two or three in the morning; for my Pavilion and the second Pavilion opposite and the large house behind are all shut in from the roadway by handsome iron gates, which it is the business of somebody in the porter’s lodge to open (by pulling a string communicating with the latch) at all hours of the night to homeward-bound lodgers. The large house has so many tenants that some one is always out at a party or a theater — so the keeping of late hours becomes a necessary part of the service in the lodge, and the poor little portress is the victim who suffers as perpetual night-watch. Hippolyte senior absorbs his fair share of work in the day, and takes the early-rising department cheerfully, but he does not possess the gift of keeping awake at night. By eleven o’clock (such is sometimes the weakness even of the most amiable human nature) it is necessary that Hippolyte senior should be stretched on his back on the nuptial bedstead, snoring impervious to all sounds and all in-comers. Hippolyte junior, or the son, is too young, to be trusted with the supervision of the gate-string. He sleeps, sound as his father, with a half-developed snore and a coiled-up body, in a crib at the foot of the parental bed. On the other side of the room, hard by the lodgers’ keys and candlesticks, with a big stove behind her and a gaslight before her eyes, sits the faithful little portress, watching out the weary hours as wakefully as she can. She trusts entirely to strong coffee and the near flare of the gas-light to combat the natural sleepiness which follows a hard day’s work begun at eight o’clock every morning. The coffee and the gas deserve, to a certain extent, the confidence she places in them. They keep her bright, brown eyes wide open, staring with unwinking pertinacity at the light before them. They keep her back very straight against her chair, and her arms crossed tightly over her bosom, and her feet set firmly on her footstool. But though they stop sleep from shutting her eyes or relaxing her limbs, they cannot prevent some few latent Morphian influences from stealthily reaching her. Open as her eyes may be, the little woman nevertheless does start guiltily when the ring at the bell comes at last; does stare fixedly for a moment before she can get up; has to fight resolutely with something drowsy and clinging in the shape of a trance, before she can fly to the latch-string, and hang on to it wearily, instead of pulling at it with the proper wakeful jerk. Night after night she has now drunk the strong coffee, and propped herself up stiffly in her straight chair, and stared hard at the flaring gas-light, for nearly seven years past. Some people would have lost their tempers and their spirits under these hard circumstances, but the cheerful little portress has only lost flesh. In a dark corner of the room hangs a daguerreotype likeness. It represents a buxom woman, with round cheeks and a sturdy waist, and dates from the period when she was the bride of Hippolyte senior, and was thinking of following him into the porter’s lodge. “Ah, my dear sir,” she says, when I condole with her, “if we do get a little money sometimes in our way of life, we don’t earn it too easily. Aïe, Aïe, Aïe! I should like a good sleep; I should like to be as fat as my portrait again!”

The same friendly relations — arising entirely, let it always be remembered, out of my illness and the portress’s compassion for me — which have let me into the secrets of the strong coffee, the daguerreotype portrait, and the sleepy constitution of Hippolyte senior, also enable me to ascertain, by special invitation, how the inhabitants of the lodge dispose of some of the hardly-earned profits of their situation.

I find myself suffering rather painfully one morning, under some aggravated symptoms of my illness, and my friend, the portress, comes into the Pavilion to talk to me and keep up my spirits She has had an hour’s extra sleep, for a wonder, and is in a chirping state of cheerfulness in consequence. She shudders and makes faces at my physic-bottles; entreats me to throw them away, to let her put me to bed and administer a light tea to begin with, and a broth to follow (un Thé léger et un Bouillon). If I will only stick to these remedies, she will have them ready, if necessary, every hour in the day, and will guarantee my immediate restoration to health and strength. While we are arguing the question of the uselessness of drugs and the remedial excellence of tea and broth, Hippolyte senior, with a look of mysterious triumph, which immediately communicates itself to the face of his wife, enters the room to tell her that she is wanted below in the lodge. She goes to his side and takes his arm, as if he was a strange gentleman waiting to lead her down to dinner, nods to him confidentially, then glances at me. Her husband follows her example, and the two stand quite unconfusedly, arm in arm, smiling upon me and my physic-bottles, as if they were a pair of lovers, and I was the venerable parent whose permission and blessing they were waiting to receive.

“Have you been getting a new doctor for me?” I ask, excessively puzzled by their evident desire to connect me with some secret in the lodge.

“No,” says the portress, “I believe in no doctors. I believe in nothing but a light tea and a broth.”