The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, already mentioned as a tavern fo
a dropsical appearance, had long settled down into a state of hale infirmity.
In its whole constitution it had not a straight floor, and hardly a
straight line; but it had outlasted, and clearly would yet outlast,
many a better-trimmed building, many a sprucer public-house. Externally,
it was a narrow lopsided wooden jumble of corpulent windows heaped one
upon another as you might heap as many toppling oranges, with a crazy
wooden verandah impending over the water; indeed the whole house, inclusive
of the complaining flag-staff on the roof, impended over the water,
but seemed to have got into the condition of a fainthearted diver who
has paused so long on the brink that he will never go in at all.
This description applies to the river-frontage of the Six Jolly Fellowship
Porters. The back of the establishment, though the chief entrance was
there, so contracted that it merely represented in its connexion with
the front, the handle of a flat iron set upright on its broadest end.
This handle stood at the bottom of a wilderness of court and alley:
which wilderness pressed so hard and close upon the Six Jolly Fellowship
Porters as to leave the hostelry not an inch of ground beyond its door.
For this reason, in combination with the fact that the house was all
but afloat at high water, when the Porters had a family wash the linen
subjected to that operation might usually be seen drying on lines stretched
across the reception-rooms and bed-chambers.
The wood forming the chimney-pieces, beams, partitions, floors and
doors, of the Six jolly Fellowship Porters, seemed in its old age fraught
with confused memories of its youth. In many places it had become gnarled
and riven, according to the manner of old trees; knots started out of
it; and here and there it seemed to twist itself into some likeness
of boughs. In this state of second childhood, it had an air of being
in its own way garrulous about its early life. Not without reason was
it often asserted by the regular frequenters of the Porters, that when
the light shone full upon the grain of certain panels, and particularly
upon an old corner cupboard of walnut-wood in the bar, you might trace
little forests there, and tiny trees like the parent tree, in full umbrageous
leaf.
The bar of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters was a bar to soften the
human breast. The available space in it was not much larger than a hackney-coach;
but no one could have wished the bar bigger, that space was so girt
in by corpulent little casks, and by cordial-bottles radiant with fictitious
grapes in bunches, and by lemons in nets, and by biscuits in baskets,
and by the polite beer-pulls that made low bows when customers were
served with beer, and by the cheese in a snug corner, and by the landlady's
own small table in a snugger corner near the fire, with the cloth everlastingly
laid. This haven was divided from the rough world by a glass partition
and a half-door, with a leaden sill upon it for the convenience of resting
your liquor; but, over this half-door the bar's snugness so gushed forth,
that, albeit customers drank there standing, in a dark and draughty
passage where they were shouldered by other customers passing in and
out, they always appeared to drink under an enchanting delusion that
they were in the bar itself.
For the rest, both the tap and parlour of the Six Jolly Fellowship
Porters gave upon the river, and had red curtains matching the noses
of the regular customers, and were provided with comfortable fireside
tin utensils, like models of sugar-loaf hats, made in that shape that
they might, with their pointed ends, seek out for themselves glowing
nooks in the depths of the red coals, when they mulled your ale, or
heated for you those delectable drinks, Purl, Flip, and Dog's Nose.
The first of these humming compounds was a speciality of the Porters,
which, through an inscription on its door-posts, gently appealed to
your feelings as, 'The Early Purl House'. For, it would seem that Purl
must always be taken early; though whether for any more distinctly stomachic
reason than that, as the early bird catches the worm, so the early purl
catches the customer, cannot here be resolved. It only remains to add
that in the handle of the flat iron, and opposite the bar, was a very
little room like a three-cornered hat, into which no direct ray of sun,
moon. or star, ever penetrated, but which was superstitiously regarded
as a sanctuary replete with comfort and retirement by gaslight, and
on the door of which was therefore painted its alluring name: Cosy.
Miss Potterson, sole proprietor and manager of the Fellowship Porters,
reigned supreme on her throne, the Bar, and a man must have drunk himself
mad drunk indeed if he thought he could contest a point with her. Being
known on her own authority as Miss Abbey Potterson, some water-side
heads, which (like the water) were none of the clearest, harboured muddled
notions that, because of her dignity and firmness, she was named after,
or in some sort related to, the Abbey at Westminster. But, Abbey was
only short for Abigail, by which name Miss Potterson had been christened
at Limehouse Church, some sixty and odd years before.
