The Chimes | Page 3

teetotums, as
they knocked against each other on the crowded footway, throwing off a little whirlpool
of uncomfortable sprinklings; when gutters brawled and waterspouts were full and noisy;
when the wet from the projecting stones and ledges of the church fell drip, drip, drip, on
Toby, making the wisp of straw on which he stood mere mud in no time; those were the
days that tried him. Then, indeed, you might see Toby looking anxiously out from his
shelter in an angle of the church wall--such a meagre shelter that in summer time it never
cast a shadow thicker than a good- sized walking stick upon the sunny pavement--with a
disconsolate and lengthened face. But coming out, a minute afterwards, to warm himself
by exercise, and trotting up and down some dozen times, he would brighten even then,
and go back more brightly to his niche.
They called him Trotty from his pace, which meant speed if it didn't make it. He could
have walked faster perhaps; most likely; but rob him of his trot, and Toby would have
taken to his bed and died. It bespattered him with mud in dirty weather; it cost him a
world of trouble; he could have walked with infinitely greater ease; but that was one
reason for his clinging to it so tenaciously. A weak, small, spare old man, he was a very
Hercules, this Toby, in his good intentions. He loved to earn his money. He delighted to
believe--Toby was very poor, and couldn't well afford to part with a delight--that he was
worth his salt. With a shilling or an eighteenpenny message or small parcel in hand, his
courage always high, rose higher. As he trotted on, he would call out to fast Postmen
ahead of him, to get out of the way; devoutly believing that in the natural course of things
he must inevitably overtake and run them down; and he had perfect faith--not often
tested--in his being able to carry anything that man could lift.
Thus, even when he came out of his nook to warm himself on a wet day, Toby trotted.
Making, with his leaky shoes, a crooked line of slushy footprints in the mire; and blowing
on his chilly hands and rubbing them against each other, poorly defended from the
searching cold by threadbare mufflers of grey worsted, with a private apartment only for
the thumb, and a common room or tap for the rest of the fingers; Toby, with his knees
bent and his cane beneath his arm, still trotted. Falling out into the road to look up at the
belfry when the Chimes resounded, Toby trotted still.

He made this last excursion several times a day, for they were company to him; and when
he heard their voices, he had an interest in glancing at their lodging-place, and thinking
how they were moved, and what hammers beat upon them. Perhaps he was the more
curious about these Bells, because there were points of resemblance between themselves
and him. They hung there, in all weathers, with the wind and rain driving in upon them;
facing only the outsides of all those houses; never getting any nearer to the blazing fires
that gleamed and shone upon the windows, or came puffing out of the chimney tops; and
incapable of participation in any of the good things that were constantly being handled,
through the street doors and the area railings, to prodigious cooks. Faces came and went
at many windows: sometimes pretty faces, youthful faces, pleasant faces: sometimes the
reverse: but Toby knew no more (though he often speculated on these trifles, standing
idle in the streets) whence they came, or where they went, or whether, when the lips
moved, one kind word was said of him in all the year, than did the Chimes themselves.
Toby was not a casuist--that he knew of, at least--and I don't mean to say that when he
began to take to the Bells, and to knit up his first rough acquaintance with them into
something of a closer and more delicate woof, he passed through these considerations one
by one, or held any formal review or great field-day in his thoughts. But what I mean to
say, and do say is, that as the functions of Toby's body, his digestive organs for example,
did of their own cunning, and by a great many operations of which he was altogether
ignorant, and the knowledge of which would have astonished him very much, arrive at a
certain end; so his mental faculties, without his privity or concurrence, set all these
wheels and springs in motion, with a thousand others, when they worked to bring about
his liking for the Bells.
And though I had said his love, I would not have recalled the