The Confused Chalk-lore of John Stuart Mill
One Tuesday morning in the early summer of 1839, Bill the patterer lounged in the doorway of a random house on Cheapside, smoking his pipe. He surveyed a world of much noise and little green. The time was quarter to 10.00 o’clock, and the great throughfare running from St Pauls to the City of London already stank from the discharge of countless horses drawing innumerable gigs, cabs, and omnibuses. The early tide of underpaid clerks and inky office lads of Somers and Camden towns, Islington and Pentonville had by now poured into the City, the shopkeepers in white neckerchiefs and spruce coats had arranged their window displays, and the hosiers, shirtmakers, tailors, tobacconists, and jewellers were busy serving customers. Women were far and few between on Cheapside, but the ever-changing concourse of foot-passengers exhibited specimens of all types of men: gay and shabby, rich and poor, idle and industrious.
Born William Cave but known as Old Bill by his acquaintances, the patterer knows all these types. His father was a clergyman who, to the end of his days, let out that his son was in the colonies, and before he was sent down from Oxford Bill had counted various aristocratic idlers among his acquaintances. Sharing their distaste for gainful employment, he has ever since picked up a crust by exercising his not inconsiderable gift of the gab on the streets of the metropolis and, on occasion, the doorsteps of rural villages. Bill has employed his oratorical skills to tell penny fortunes with a bottle, showcase performing animals, and hawk dead fish, live squirrels, corn-salves, rat poison, and literature – this last a somewhat nebulous category that includes ballads, almanacks, and cheaply printed accounts of mendacious murders, impossible robberies, and delusive suicides. Today he will set up a temporary pitch in a nearby alley and sell sealed packets, supposedly containing obscene drawings but actually stuffed with back numbers of The Morning Chronicle. As a patterer, Bill deems himself an aristocrat of the streets and looks down on the costermongers who sell from their barrows, the pickpockets who trade on mere dexterity of hand, and the beggars who trade only on the milk of human kindness. Patterers, he likes to declare, are the journalists and men of letters of the streets, making their way in the world with only their words, wit, and imagination.
As he watches the world go by from the doorway, Bill recognizes a man whose name he does not know. Threading his way among the foot-passengers who crowd the narrow pavement, the man is unaware of Bill’s attention, but over the years Bill has observed him many times. Always in the same black dress-suit and silk necktie, and always on the same streets at the same times: in the morning he follows the Thames, striding widdershins to his work in the City at India House, which he leaves at 4.00 o’clock in the afternoon to retrace his steps home. The man is tall and slim, with a youthful face, bald head, fair hair and a ruddy complexion. Something in his demeaner suggests to Bill a fellow patterer, though his regularity of habit, office job, and evident obliviousness to his surroundings all signify that he is not. Though he neither jostles his fellows nor collides with the lamp posts, he invariably has the air of a man so deeply absorbed in his own contemplations that he would not recognize a friend if he passed him on the street.
Watching him as he walks, Bill scratches his own head and, not for the first time, wonders what the man is thinking about. We, who have both the benefit of hindsight and access to a better class of literature than that hawked by Bill, can answer his question. Let’s borrow from a fairy and provide Bill with a magic stone so he too may hear the man’s articulated thoughts. What Bill discovers is that, as so often with private reflections, these ratiocinations glide between fantasy and reality and do not withstand careful analysis. Walking down Cheapside, the man with the silk necktie steps in his mind between an Oriental story he read as a child and a house on a street he passed earlier on his walk to work. He is thinking to himself:
Bill’s first impression is that he is overhearing the philosophical ruminations of a professional burglar. True, he does not look like a burglar, but the good ones never do. His profession aside, Bill deems his ideas preposterous. As if we can only tell two people apart by dressing them in different coloured clothes! The man has walked the same streets every weekday for years; surely, he already distinguishes each and every house on his route? Bill concedes that this is likely a man whose great devotion to book learning in his early years has interfered with his activity as an observer of facts at first hand. But Bill too has read the story of ‘Ali Baba & the 40 Thieves’ and reflects that the man’s book reading should have taught him better.If, like the robber in the Arabian Nights, we make a mark with chalk upon a house to enable us to know it again, the mark has a purpose, but it has not properly any meaning. The chalk does not declare anything about the house; it does not mean, This is such a person’s house, or This is a house which contains booty. The object of making the mark is merely distinction. I say to myself, All these houses are so nearly alike, that if I lose sight of them I shall not again be able to distinguish that which I am now looking at from any of the others; I must therefore contrive to make the appearance of this one house unlike that of the others, that I may hereafter know, when I see the mark – not indeed any attribute of the house – but simply that it is the same house which I am now looking at.
Let’s refresh our own memories of a story that everyone thinks they already know. Having wheedled the magic formula Open Sesame out of his brother, Cassim heads into the forest to find the hidden cave where the 40 Thieves store their loot (how he located a hidden door in the rockface without a map is something of a mystery). Once inside, he falls under the spell of the vast stolen treasure and forgets the magic word of opening. Trapped, he is discovered by the 40 Thieves and cut into four parts. When he fails to return home, Ali Baba heads to the cave and brings his brother back in pieces. Morgiana the slave-girl then calls on the cobbler, Baba Mustapha, pays him good coin, and leads him blindfolded to the house, where he sows Cassim back together so he may be decently buried. Meanwhile, on discovering the body has vanished the 40 Thieves infer another burglar and, in succession, three of their number set off into town to track down this second nameless thief. By good fortune, each encounters the cobbler, who talks of his grisly night’s work, and each thief then pay him to again don a blindfold and retrace his steps. Here (in English translation of the original French) is the first such occasion:
The second robber repeats this action, his only variation the use of differently coloured chalk. But chalking the door is a stupid thing to do, for it draws the attention of Morgiana, who infers some nefarious purpose and, twice, foils the plan by chalking the neighbouring houses. When the thieves turn up in the street, they cannot identify the house. Both hapless chalkers are executed by their Chief for having failed. Then there was Ali Baba and 38 nameless thieves.... the robber tied his handkerchief over his eyes and then walked by his side, partly leading him and partly guided by him. ‘I think,’ said Baba Mustapha at length, ‘I went no further,’ and he stopped directly at Cassim’s house, where Ali Baba now lived. Before taking the handkerchief off the old man’s eyes, the thief carefully marked the door with a piece of chalk, which he had ready in his hand, and then asked if he knew whose house that was: to which Baba Mustapha replied, that as he did not live in that neighbourhood he could not tell.
Bill wonders if the man with the silk necktie is as stupid as the two thieves whose chalking he mentally re-enacts. The first robber is obviously an idiot, the second, who repeats a failed act with differently coloured chalk, an imbecile, while the man himself is evidently as clueless about literature as about the world. After executing the second thief the Chief heads into town, encounters the cobbler and so locates the house, which he simply looks at long and hard so he will know it again. The moral of this part of the story, which Bill knew all along, is that the chalk mark is redundant – a keen eye may discern marks that already distinguish the house.
Bill decides the man cannot be a burglar. If he was, he would have been caught and so be one no longer. Besides, the man’s face has that sanctimonious air of respectability that Bill recognizes from his father. His is the look of a man who holds property sacred and would neither break into another’s house nor deface its front door. His mental re-enactment of a criminal’s chalking is merely a fantasy. But the purely hypothetical nature of this thought experiment in graffiti has allowed the man to lose sight of reality. He does not imagine that he too is tracking a nameless burglar who has discovered the password to his hidden cave, and yet provides no other reason why he wishes to chalk what is therefore a random house. Both Bill and the man are infidels but, unlike the man, Bill in his youth studied his Bible and still recalls the story of how David, fleeing the wrath of King Saul, took refuge in the Philistine city of Gath but then began to fear the Philistine king. David knew he could not leave unless the old man kicked him out, so he dribbled saliva into his beard and scribbled marks on the doors of the gate, thereby inducing the king to send him away and inventing the game of Scrabble at the same time (I Samuel 21:13). The Biblical lesson is that a man who makes random marks on a door appears mad.
What puzzles Bill most is the man’s idea that the chalk mark on the door has no meaning. Bill knows something about chalking houses. Though vagrants, patterers are far from disorganized. When working the country districts, where there are no streets, they are obliged to call at the houses. As they are mostly without a hawker’s license, and sometimes find wet linen before it is lost, such peddlers of buttons are often turned away at the door with a curt Good morning! Patterers therefore employ a system of signs, chalked as signals on or near the door. A diamond shape, for example, is read ‘Bone’ and means good, a triangle is ‘Cooper’d’ and means the house has been spoiled by the imprudence of some previous patterer, a square is ‘Gammy’, meaning that the occupant will have you taken up, and a circle with a dot in the center is ‘Flummut’ and means that calling here will land you in quod for a month. Bill has never chalked a mark on a door that means nothing at all. He suspects the man is mistaken and that this chalk mark is really a cypher. But as its appearance is never described, neither by the man in his ratiocinations nor in the story itself, Bill leaves the issue unresolved for the time being.
But that evening, having retired to a safe if foul smelling house in Feld Lane, Bill lights up his pipe and recalls the queer ratiocinations of the man in the black dress-suit and silk necktie. As he smokes, Bill now makes a connection between two of his own earlier reflections. The chalk mark of the story, he now perceives, is like a patterer mark, but the chalk mark imagined by the man is not, and the difference is accounted for by the man’s peculiar picture of himself chalking a random house.* Such a random mark is indeed meaningless, but only because the man has abstracted his act of chalking from any context, thereby removing from view any possible intention behind it. When Bill chalks a house he has in mind some quality of the occupant, while the robbers in the story chalk the house because they are seeking the burglar we know as Ali Baba; only by abstracting from any such scenario could the man frame a picture of himself putting a mark on a house simply and solely to mark the house. This resolves the issue of the chalk mark, but leaves Bill mystified as to the purpose behind the man’s strange imagination of chalking a house.
One lesson that Bill takes from all this is that possession of a magic stone that allows one to hear the thoughts of another may not be as illuminating as the fairy stories suggest.
* Bill is wrong. The chalk mark in the story is not a Patterer-mark. It would be such if the robbers were decent burglars - but the point is that they are stupid, and actually make just the kind of mark that Mill takes them to make.
