Chapter 20

CHAPTER 20

Introduces the next

The passengers were landing from the packet on the pier at Calais.
A low-lying place and a low-spirited place Calais was, with the
tide ebbing out towards low water-mark. There had been no more
water on the bar than had sufficed to float the packet in; and now
the bar itself, with a shallow break of sea over it, looked like a
lazy marine monster just risen to the surface, whose form was
indistinctly shown as it lay asleep. The meagre lighthouse all in
white, haunting the seaboard as if it were the ghost of an edifice
that had once had colour and rotundity, dropped melancholy tears
after its late buffeting by the waves. The long rows of gaunt
black piles, slimy and wet and weather-worn, with funeral garlands
of seaweed twisted about them by the late tide, might have
represented an unsightly marine cemetery. Every wave-dashed,
storm-beaten object, was so low and so little, under the broad grey
sky, in the noise of the wind and sea, and before the curling lines
of surf, making at it ferociously, that the wonder was there was
any Calais left, and that its low gates and low wall and low roofs
and low ditches and low sand-hills and low ramparts and flat
streets, had not yielded long ago to the undermining and besieging
sea, like the fortifications children make on the sea-shore.

After slipping among oozy piles and planks, stumbling up wet steps
and encountering many salt difficulties, the passengers entered on
their comfortless peregrination along the pier; where all the
French vagabonds and English outlaws in the town (half the
population) attended to prevent their recovery from bewilderment.
After being minutely inspected by all the English, and claimed and
reclaimed and counter-claimed as prizes by all the French in a
hand-to-hand scuffle three quarters of a mile long, they were at
last free to enter the streets, and to make off in their various
directions, hotly pursued.

Clennam, harassed by more anxieties than one, was among this
devoted band. Having rescued the most defenceless of his
compatriots from situations of great extremity, he now went his way
alone, or as nearly alone as he could be, with a native gentleman
in a suit of grease and a cap of the same material, giving chase at
a distance of some fifty yards, and continually calling after him,
'Hi! Ice-say! You! Seer! Ice-say! Nice Oatel!'

Even this hospitable person, however, was left behind at last, and
Clennam pursued his way, unmolested. There was a tranquil air in
the town after the turbulence of the Channel and the beach, and its
dulness in that comparison was agreeable. He met new groups of his
countrymen, who had all a straggling air of having at one time
overblown