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This does not mean, of course, that the details are not often admirable in their swift and penetrating humour; to say that of the book would be to say that Dickens did not write it. Nothing could be truer, for instance, than the manner in which the dazed and drunken dignity of Durdles illustrates a certain bitterness at the bottom of the bewilderment of the poor.
On the other hand it was as certain as the present wealth of the city, that such a building would have hundreds of companions in the next ten years, and the undesirable, immoral, and generally drunken element, so largely responsible for the continual fires of the district, would be gradually pressed to the outskirts of the city.
The peasants were noisy in and about the tavern. They were singing with drunken voices, each on his own account, and swearing at one another, so that Olga could only shudder and say: "Oh, holy Saints!" She was amazed that the abuse was incessant, and those who were loudest and most persistent in this foul language were the old men who were so near their end.
You'll fetch out that skulkin' coyote, Joe Nelson. You'll fetch him out, savee? Maybe he's at the saloon sure he's drunk, anyway. An' if he ain't handed over that letter to the sheriff, you'll see to it. Say, you'd best shake him up some; don't be too easy." "I'll bring him out," replied Tresler, quietly. "Hah, kind o' squeamish," sneered Jake. "No. I'm not knocking drunken men about. That's all."
It was like the talk of a drunken man, who, on his return home, begins with extraordinary heat telling his wife or one of his household how he has just been insulted, what a rascal had just insulted him, what a fine fellow he is on the other hand, and how he will pay that scoundrel out; and all that at great length, with great excitement and incoherence, with drunken tears and blows on the table.
Again, on the royal highway he loosed a drunken, vicious elephant. With his raised trunk trumpeting as thunder he ran, his maddened breath raising a cloud around him, his wild pace like the rushing wind, to be avoided more than the fierce tempest; his trunk and tusks and tail and feet, when touched only, brought instant death.
He staggered, with a slow and heavy wading motion, out to the centre of the street, a strange and spectral figure, with outstretched arms, uttering a sharp and halting cry or two. The driver pulled up, thirty long and dreary feet past him. "What in hell d'you want?" he demanded irately, raising his whip to start his team once more, as he caught a clearer view of the seemingly drunken figure.
Suddenly a drunken navvy standing on a table in front of and to the left of Ingolby seized a horseshoe hanging on the wall, and flung it with an oath. It caught Ingolby in the forehead, and he fell to the floor without a sound. A minute afterwards the bar was empty, save for Osterhaut, Jowett, old Barbazon, and his assistants.
I have seen more drunken people here than during all my residence in England, and, generally, early in the day. Their liquor, so far as I have observed, makes them good-natured and sociable, imparting a perhaps needed geniality to their cold natures. After breakfast we took a drosky, or whatever these fore-and-aft-seated vehicles are called, and set out for three miles distant.
At length emerging from a narrow-throated gorge, a small house came in sight set in a thicket of fig-trees at the base of a limestone hill. "That," said my guide, pointing to the house, "is Cave City, and the cave is in that gray hill." Arriving at the one house of this one-house city, we were boisterously welcomed by three drunken men who had come to town to hold a spree.
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