Chapter VI: Part 6

The child's pity for his father's sorrowing, was surpassed only, as all who witnessed this Reading will readily recollect, by the yet more affecting scene with his old nurse. Waking upon a sudden, on the last of the many evenings, when the golden water danced in shining ripples on the wall, waking mind and body, sitting upright in his bed--

“And who is this? Is this my old nurse?” asked the child, regarding with a radiant smile a figure coming in.

“Yes, yes. No other stranger would have shed those tears at sight of him, and called him her dear boy, her pretty boy, her own poor blighted child. No other woman would have stooped down by his bed and taken up his wasted hand and put it to her lips and breast, as one who had some right to fondle it. No other woman would have so forgotten everybody there but him and Floy, and been so full of tenderness and pity.”

The child's words coming then so lovingly: “Floy! this is a kind good face! I am glad to see it again. Don't go away, old nurse! Stay here! Good bye!” prepared one exquisitely for the rest. “Not goodbye?” “Ah, yes! good-bye!”

Then the end! The child having been laid down again with his arms clasped round his sister's neck, telling her that the stream was lulling him to rest, that now the boat was out at sea and that there was shore before him, and--Who stood upon the bank! Putting his hands together “as he had been used to do at his prayers “--not removing his arms to do it, but folding them so behind his sister's neck--“Mamma is like you, Floy!” he cried; “I know her by the face! But tell them that the picture on the stairs at school is not Divine enough. The light about the head is shining on me as I go!”

Then came two noble passages, nobly delivered.

First--when there were no eyes unmoistened among the listeners--

“The golden ripple on the wall came back again, and nothing else stirred in the room. The old, old fashion! The fashion that came in with our first garments, and will last unchanged until our race has run its course, and the wide firmament is rolled up like a scroll. The old, old fashion--Death!”

And lastly--with a tearful voice--

“Oh, thank God, all who see it, for that older fashion yet of Immortality! And look upon us, Angels of young children, with regards not quite estranged, when the swift river bears us to the ocean!”

Remembering which exquisite words as he himself delivered them, having the very tones of his voice still ringing tenderly in our recollection, the truth of that beautiful remark of Dean Stanley's comes back anew as though it were now only for the first time realised, where, in his funeral sermon of the 19th June, 1870, he said that it was the inculcation of the lesson derived from precisely such a scene as this which will always make the grave of Charles Dickens seem “as though it were the very grave of those little innocents whom he created for our companionship, for our instruction, for our delight and solace.” The little workhouse-boy, the little orphan girl, the little cripple, who “not only blessed his father's needy home, but softened the rude stranger's hardened conscience,” were severally referred to by the preacher when he gave this charming thought its affecting application. But, foremost among these bewitching children of the Novelist's imagination, might surely be placed the child-hero of a story closing hardly so much with his death as with his apotheosis.

MR CHOPS, THE DWARF.

It remains still a matter of surprise how so much was made out of this slight sketch by the simple force of its humorous delivery. “Mr. Chops, the Dwarf,” as, indeed, was only befitting, was the smallest of all the Readings. The simple little air that so caught the dreamer's fancy, when played upon the harp by Scrooge's niece by marriage, is described after all, as may be remembered by the readers of the Carol, to to have been intrinsically “a mere nothing; you might learn to whistle it in two minutes.” Say that in twenty minutes, or, at the outside, in half-an-hour, any ordinarily glib talker might have rattled through these comic recollections of Mr. Magsman, yet, when rattled through by Dickens, the laughter awakened seems now in the retrospect to have been altogether out of proportion. In itself the subject was anything but attractive, relating, as it did, merely to the escapade of a monstrosity. The surroundings are ignoble, the language is illiterate, the narrative from first to last is characterised by its grotesque extravagance. Yet the whole is presented to view in so utterly ludicrous an aspect, that one needs must laugh just as surely as one listened. Turning over the leaves now, and recalling to mind the hilarity they used to excite even among the least impressionable audience whenever they were fluttered (there are not a dozen of them altogether) on the familiar reading-desk, one marvels over the success of such an exceedingly small oddity as over the remembrance, let us say, of the brilliant performance of a fantasia on the jew's-harp by Rubenstein.

Nevertheless, slight though it is, the limning all through has touches of the most comic suggestiveness. Magsman's account of the show-house during his occupancy is sufficiently absurd to begin with--“the picter of the giant who was himself the heighth of the house,” being run up with a line and pulley to a pole on the roof till “his 'ed was coeval with the parapet;” the picter of the child of the British Planter seized by two Boa Constrictors, “not that we never had no child, nor no Constrictors either;” similarly, the picter of the Wild Ass of the Prairies, “not that _we_ never had no wild asses, nor wouldn't have had 'em at a gift.” And to crown all, the picter of the Dwarf--who was “a uncommon small man, he really was. Certainly not so small as he was made out to be; but where _is_ your Dwarf as is?” A picter “like him, too considering, with George the Fourth, in such a state of astonishment at him as his Majesty couldn't with his utmost politeness and stoutness express.” Wrote up the Dwarf was, we are told by Mr. Magsman, as Major Tpschoffski--“nobody couldn't pronounce the name,” he adds, “and it never was intended anybody should.” Corrupted into Chopski by the public, he gets called in the line Chops, partly for that reason, “partly because his real name, if he ever had any real name (which was dubious), was Stakes.” Wearing a diamond ring “(or quite as good to look at)” on his forefinger, having the run of his teeth, “and he was a Woodpecker to eat--but all dwarfs are,” receiving a good salary, and gathering besides as his perquisites the ha'pence collected by him in a Chaney sarser at the end of every entertainment, the Dwarf never has any money somehow. Nevertheless, having what his admiring proprietor considers “a fine mind, a poetic mind,” Mr. Chops indulges himself in the pleasing delusion that one of these days he is to Come Into his Property, his ideas respecting which are never realised by him so powerfully as when he sits upon a barrel-organ and has the handle turned! “Arter the wibration has run through him a little time,” says Mr. Magsman, “he screeches out, 'Toby, I feel my property a-coming--gr-r-rind away! I feel the Mint a-jingling in me. I'm a-swelling out into the Bank of England!' Such,” reflectively observes his proprietor, “is the influence of music on a poetic mind!” Adding, however, immediately afterwards, “Not that he was partial to any other music but a barrel-organ; on the contrairy, hated it.” Indulging in day-dreams about Coming Into his Property and Going Into Society, for which he feels himself formed, and to aspire towards which is his avowed ambition, the mystery, as to where the Dwarf's salary and ha'pence all go, is one day cleared up by his winning a prize in the Lottery, a half-ticket for the twenty-five thousand pounder.

Mr. Chops Comes Into his Property--twelve thousand odd hundred. Further than that, he Goes Into Society “in a chay and four greys with silk jackets.” It was at this turning-point in the career of his large-headed but diminutive hero that the grotesque humour of the Reader would play upon the risible nerves of his hearers, as, according to Mr. Disraeli's phrase, Sir Robert Peel used to play upon the House of Commons, “like an old fiddle.” Determined to Go Into Society in style, with his twelve thousand odd hundred, Mr. Chops, we are told, “sent for a young man he knowed, as had a very genteel appearance, and was a Bonnet at a gaming-booth. Most respectable brought up,” adds Mr. Magsman--“father having been imminent in the livery-stable line, but unfortunate in a commercial crisis through painting a old grey ginger-bay, and sellin' him with a pedigree.” In intimate companionship with this Bonnet, “who said his name was Normandy, which it warn't,” Mr. Magsman, on invitation by note a little while afterwards, visits Mr. Chops at his lodgings in Pall Mall, London, where he is found carousing not only with the Bonnet but with a third party, of whom we were then told with unconscionable gravity, “When last met, he had on a white Roman shirt, and a bishop's mitre covered with leopard-skin, and played the clarionet all wrong in a band at a Wild Beast Show.” How the reverential Magsman, finding the three of them blazing away, blazes away in his turn while remaining in their company, who, that once heard it, has forgotten? “I made the round of the bottles,” he says--evidently proud of his achievement--“first separate (to say I had done it), and then mixed 'em altogether (to say I had done it), and then tried two of 'em as half-and-half, and then t'other two; altogether,” he adds, “passin' a pleasin' evenin' with a tendency to feel muddled.” How all Mr. Chop's blazing away is to terminate everybody but himself perceives clearly enough from the commencement.

Normandy having bolted with the plate, and “him as formerly wore the bishop's mitre” with the jewels, the Dwarf gets out of society by being, as he significantly expresses it, “sold out,” and in this plight returns penitently one evening to the show-house of his still-admiring proprietor. Mr. Magsman happens at the moment to be having a dull _tête-à-tête_ with a young man without arms, who gets his living by writing with his toes, “which,” says the low-spirited narrator, “I had taken on for a month--though he never drawed--except on paper.” Hearing a kicking at the street-door, “'Halloa!' I says to the young man, 'what's up?' He rubs his eyebrows with his toes, and he says, 'I can't imagine, Mr. Magsman'--which that young man [with an air of disgust] never _could_ imagine nothin', and was monotonous company.” Mr. Chops--“I never dropped the 'Mr.' with him,” says his again proprietor; “the world might do it, but not me”--eventually dies. Having sat upon the barrel-organ over night, and had the handle turned through all the changes, for the first and only time after his fall, Mr. Chops is found on the following morning, as the disconsolate Magsman expresses it, “gone into much better society than either mine or Pall Mall's.” Out of such unpromising materials as these could the alembic of a genius all-embracing in its sympathies extract such an abundance of innocent mirth--an illiterate showman talking to us all the while about such people as the Bonnet of a gaming-booth, or a set of monstrosities he himself has, for a few coppers, on exhibition. Yet, as Mr. Magsman himself remarks rather proudly when commenting on his own establishment, “as for respectability,--if threepence ain't respectable, what is?”

THE POOR TRAVELLER.

Apart altogether from the Readings of Charles Dickens, has the reader of this book any remembrance of the original story of “The Poor Traveller”? If he has, he will recognise upon the instant the truth of the words in which we would here speak of it, as of one of those, it may be, slight but exquisite sketches, which are sometimes, in a happy moment, thrown off by the hand of a great master. Comparatively trivial in itself--carelessly dashed off, apparently hap-hazard--having no pretension about it in the least, it is anything, in short, but a finished masterpiece. Yet, for all that, it is marked, here and there, by touches so felicitous and inimitable in their way, that we hardly find the like in the artist's more highly elaborated and ambitious productions. Not that one would speak of it, however, as of a drawing upon toned paper in neutral tint, or as of a picture pencilled in sepia or with crayons; one would rather liken it to a radiant water-colour, chequered with mingled storm and sunshine, sparkling with lifelike effects, and glowing with brilliancy. And yet the little work is one, when you come to look into it, that is but the product of a seemingly artless _abandon_, in which without an effort the most charming results have been arrived at, obviously upon the instant, and quite unerringly.

Trudging down to Chatham, footsore and without a farthing in his pocket, it is in this humble guise first of all that he comes before us, this Poor Traveller. Christian name, Eichard, better known as Dick, his own surname dropped upon the road, he assumes that of Doubledick--being thenceforth spoken of all through the tale, even to the very end of it, by his new name, as Eichard Doubledick. A scapegrace, a ne'er-do-well, an incorrigible, hopeless of himself, despaired of by others, he has “gone wrong and run wild.” His heart, still in the right place, has been sealed up. “Betrothed to a good and beautiful girl whom he had loved better than she--or perhaps even he--believed,” he had given her cause, in an evil hour, to tell him solemnly that she would never marry any other man; that she would live single for his sake, but that her lips, “that Mary Marshall's lips,” would never address another word to him on earth, bidding him in the end--Go! and Heaven forgive him! Hence, in point of fact, this journey of his on foot down to Chatham, for the purpose of enlisting, if possible, in a cavalry regiment, his object being to get shot, though he himself thinks in his devil-may-care indifference, that “he might as well ride to death as be at the trouble of walking.” Premising simply that his hero's age is at this time twenty-two, and his height five foot ten, and that, there being no cavalry at the moment in Chatham, he enlists into a regiment of the line, where he is glad to get drunk and forget all about it, the Author readily made the path clear for the opening up of his narrative.

Whenever Charles Dickens introduced this tale among his Readings, how beautifully he related it! After recounting how Private Doubledick was clearly going to the dogs, associating himself with the dregs of every regiment, seldom being sober and constantly under punishment, until it became plain at last to the whole barracks that very soon indeed he would come to be flogged, when the Reader came at this point to the words--“Now the captain of Doubledick's company was a young gentleman not above five years his senior, whose eyes had an expression in them which affected Private Doubledick in a very remarkable way”--the effect was singularly striking. Out of the Reader's own eyes would look the eyes of that Captain, as the Author himself describes them: “They were bright, handsome, dark eyes, what are called laughing eyes generally, and, when serious, rather steady than severe.” But, he immediately went on to say, they were the only eyes then left in his narrowed world that could not be met without a sense of shame by Private Doubledick. Insomuch that if he observed Captain Taunton coming towards him, even when he himself was most callous and unabashed, “he would rather turn back and go any distance out of the way, than encounter those two handsome, dark, bright eyes.” Here it was that came, what many will still vividly remember, as one of the most exquisitely portrayed incidents in the whole of this Reading--the interview between Captain Taunton and Private Doubledick!

The latter, having passed forty-eight hours in the Black Hole, has been just summoned, to his great dismay, to the Captain's quarters. Having about him all the squalor of his incarceration, he shrinks from making his appearance before one whose silent gaze even was a reproach. However, not being so mad yet as to disobey orders, he goes up to the officers' quarters immediately upon his release from the Black Hole, twisting and breaking in his hands as he goes along a bit of the straw that had formed its decorative furniture.

“'Come in!'

“Private Doubledick pulled off his cap, took a stride forward and stood in the light of the dark bright eyes.”

From that moment until the end of the interview, the two men alternately were standing there distinctly before the audience upon the platform.

“Doubledick! do you know where you are going to?”

“To the devil, sir!”

“Yes, and very fast.”

Thereupon one did not hear the words simply, one saw it done precisely as it is described in the original narrative: “Private Richard Doubledick turned the straw of the Black Hole in his mouth and made a _miserable_ salute of acquiescence.” Captain Taunton then remonstrates with him thus earnestly: “Doubledick, since I entered his Majesty's service, a boy of seventeen, I have been pained to see many men of promise going that road; but I have never been _so_ pained to see a man determined to make the shameful journey, as I have been, ever since you joined the regiment, to see _you_.” At this point in the printed story, as it was originally penned, one reads that “Private Richard Doubledick began to find a film stealing over the floor at which he looked; also to find the legs of the Captain's breakfast-table turning crooked as if he saw them through water.” Although those words are erased in the reading copy, and were not uttered, pretty nearly the effect of them was visible when, after a momentary pause, the disheartened utterance was faltered out--

“I am only a common soldier, sir. It signifies very little what such a poor brute comes to.”

In answer to the next remonstrance from his officer, Doubledick's words are blurted out yet more despairingly--

“I hope to get shot soon, sir, and then the regiment, and the world together, will be rid of me!”

What are the descriptive words immediately following this in the printed narrative? They also were visibly expressed upon the platform. “Looking up he met the eyes that had so strong an influence over him. He put his hand before his own eyes, and the breast of his disgrace-jacket swelled as if it would fly asunder.” His observant adviser thereupon quietly but very earnestly remarks, that he “would rather see this in him (Doubledick) than he would see five thousand guineas counted out upon the table between them for a gift to his (the Captain's) good mother,” adding suddenly, “Have you a mother?” Doubledick is thankful to say she is dead. Reminded by the Captain that if his praises were sounded from mouth to mouth through the whole regiment, through the whole army, through the whole country, he would wish she had lived to say with pride and joy, “He is my son!” Doubledick cries out, “Spare me, sir! She would never have heard any good of me. She would never have had any pride or joy in owning herself my mother. Love and compassion she might have had, and would always have had, I know; but not--spare me, sir! I am a broken wretch quite at your mercy.” By this time, according to the words of the writing, according only to the eloquent action of the Reading, “He had turned his face to the wall and stretched out his _imploring_ hand.” How eloquently that “imploring hand” spoke in the agonised, dumb supplication of its movement, coupled as it was with the shaken frame and the averted countenance, those who witnessed this Reading will readily recall to their recollection. As also the emotion expressed in the next broken utterances exchanged by the interlocutors:--

“My friend------”

“God bless you, sir!”

Captain Taunton, interrupted for the moment, adding--

“You are at the crisis of your fate, my friend. Hold your course unchanged a little longer, and you know what must happen, _I_ know better than ever you can imagine, that after that has happened you are a lost man. No man who could shed such tears could bear such marks.”

Doubledick, replying in a low shivering voice, “I fully believe it, sir,” the young Captain adds--

“But a man in any station can do his duty, and in doing it can earn his own respect, even if his case should be so very unfortunate and so very rare, that he can earn no other man's. A common soldier, poor brute though you called him just now, has this advantage in the stormy times we live in, that he always does his duty before a host of sympathising witnesses. Do you doubt that he may so do it as to be extolled through a whole regiment, through a whole army, through a whole country? Turn while you may yet retrieve the past and try.”

With a nearly bursting heart Richard cries out, “I will! I ask but one witness, sir!” The reply is instant and significant, “I understand you. I will be a watchful and a faithful one.” It is a compact between them, a compact sealed and ratified. “I have heard from Private Doubledick's own lips,” said the narrator, and in tones how manly and yet how tender in their vibration, “that he dropped down upon his knee, kissed that officer's hand, arose, and went out of the light of the dark bright eyes, an altered man.” From the date to them both of this memorable interview he followed the two hither and thither among the battle-fields of the great war between England in coalition with the other nations of Europe and Napoleon.

Wherever Captain Taunton led, there, “close to him, ever at his side, firm as a rock, true as the sun, brave as Mars,” would for certain be found that famous soldier Sergeant Doubledick. As Sergeant-Major the latter is shown, later on, upon one desperate occasion cutting his way single-handed through a mass of men, recovering the colours of his regiment, and rescuing his wounded Captain from the very jaws of death “in a jungle of horses' hoofs and sabres”--for which deed of gallantry and all but desperation, he is forthwith raised from the ranks, appearing no longer as a non-commissioned officer, but as Ensign Doubledick. At last, one fatal day in the trenches, during the siege of Badajos, Major Taunton and Ensign Doubledick find themselves hurrying forward against a party of French infantry. At this juncture, at the very moment when Doubledick sees the officer at the head of the enemy's soldiery--“a courageous, handsome, gallant officer of five-and-thirty”--waving his sword, and with an eager and excited cry rallying his men, they fire, and Major Taunton has dropped. The encounter closing within ten minutes afterwards on the arrival of assistance to the two Englishmen, “the best friend man ever had” is laid upon a coat spread out upon the wet clay by the heart-riven subaltern, whom years before his generous counsel had rescued from ignominious destruction. Three little spots of blood are visible on the shirt of Major Taunton as he lies there with the breast of his uniform opened.

“Dear Doubledick,--I am dying.”

“For the love of Heaven, no! Taunton! My preserver, my guardian angel, my witness! Dearest, truest, kindest of human beings! Taunton! For God's sake!”

To listen to that agonised entreaty as it started from the trembling and one could almost have fancied whitened lips of the Reader, was to be with him there upon the instant on the far-off battle-field. Taunton dies “with his hand upon the breast in which he had revived a soul.” Doubledick, prostrated and inconsolable in his bereavement, has but two cares seemingly for the rest of his existence--one to preserve a packet of hair to be given to the mother of the friend lost to him; the other, to encounter that French officer who had rallied the men under whose fire that friend had fallen. “A new legend,” quoth the narrator, “now began to incubate among our troops; and it was, that when he and the French officer came face to face once more, there would be weeping in France.” Failing to meet him, however, through all the closing scenes of the great war, Doubledick, by this time promoted to his lieutenancy, follows the old regimental colours, ragged, scarred, and riddled with shot, through the fierce conflicts of Quatre Bras and Ligny, falling at last desperately wounded--all but dead--upon the field of Waterloo.

How, having been tenderly nursed during the total eclipse of an appallingly lengthened period of unconsciousness, he wakes up at last in Brussels to find that during a little more than momentary and at first an utterly forgotten interval of his stupor, he has been married to the gentle-handed nurse who has been all the while in attendance upon him, and who is no other, of coarse, than his faithful first love, Mary Marshall! How, returning homewards, an invalided hero, Captain Doubledick becomes, in a manner, soon afterwards, the adopted son of Major Taunton's mother! How the latter, having gone, some time later, on a visit to a French family near Aix, is followed by her other son, her other self, he has almost come to be, “now a hardy, handsome man in the full vigour of life,” on his receiving from the head of the house a gracious and courtly invitation for “the honour of the company of cet homme si justement célèbre, Monsieur le Capitaine Richard Double-dick!” These were among the incidents in due sequence immediately afterwards recounted!

Arriving at the old chateau upon a fête-day, when the household are scattered abroad in the gardens and shrubberies at their rejoicings, Captain Double-dick passes through the open porch into the lofty stone hall. There, being a total stranger, he is almost scared by the intrusive clanking of his boots. Suddenly he starts back, feeling his face turn white! For, in the gallery looking down at him, is the French officer whose picture he has carried in his mind so long and so far. The latter, disappearing in another instant for the staircase, enters directly afterwards with a bright sudden look upon his countenance, “Such a look as it had worn in that fatal moment,” so well and so terribly remembered! All this was portrayed with startling vividness by the Author of the little sketch in his capacity as the sympathetic realizer of the dreams of his own imagination.

Exquisite was the last glimpse of the delineation, when the Captain--after many internal revulsions of feeling, while he gazes through the window of the bed-chamber allotted to him in the old château, “whence he could see the smiling prospect and the peaceful vineyards “--thinks musingly to himself, “Spirit of my departed friend, is it through thee these better thoughts are rising in my mind! Is it thou who hast shown me, all the way I have been drawn to meet this man, the blessings of the altered time! Is it thou who hast sent thy stricken mother to me, to stay my angry hand! Is it from thee the whisper comes, that this man only did his duty as thou didst--and as I did through thy guidance, which saved me, here on earth--and that he did no more!” Then it was, we were told, there came to him the second and crowning resolution of his life: “That neither to the French officer, nor to the mother of his departed friend, nor to any soul while either of the two was living, would he breathe what only _he_ knew.” Then it was that the author perfected his Reading by the simple utterance of its closing words--“And when he touched that French officer's glass with his own that day at dinner, he secretly forgave him--forgave him in the name of the Divine Forgiver.” With a moral no less noble and affecting, no less grand and elevating than this, the lovely idyll closed. The final glimpse of the scene at the old Aix château was like the view of a sequestered orchard through the ivied porchway of a village church. The concluding words of the prelection were like the sound of the organ voluntary at twilight, when the worshippers are dispersing.

MRS. GAMP.

A whimsical and delightful recollection comes back to the writer of these pages at the moment of inscribing as the title of this Reading the name of the preposterous old lady who is the real heroine of “Martin Chuzzlewit.” It is the remembrance of Charles Dickens's hilarious enjoyment of a casual jest thrown out, upon his having incidentally mentioned--as conspicuous among the shortcomings of the first acting version of that story upon the boards of the Lyceum--the certainly surprising fact that Mrs. Gamp's part, as originally set down for Keeley, had not a single “which” in it. “Why, it ought actually to have begun with one!” was the natural exclamation of the person he was addressing, who added instantly, with affected indignation, “Not one? Why, next they'll be playing Macbeth without the Witches!” The joyous laugh with which this ludicrous conceit was greeted by the Humorist, still rings freshly and musically in our remembrance. And the recollection of it is doubtless all the more vivid because of the mirthful retrospect having relation to one of the most recent of Dickens's blithe home dinners in his last town residence immediately before his hurried return to Gad's Hill in the summer of 1870. Although we were happily with him afterwards, immediately before the time came when we could commune with him no more, the occasion referred to is one in which we recall him to mind as he was when we saw him last at his very gayest, radiant with that sense of enjoyment which it was his especial delight to diffuse around him throughout his life so abundantly.

Among all his humorous creations, Mrs. Gamp is perhaps the most intensely original and the most thoroughly individualised. She is not only a creation of character, she is in herself a creator of character. To the Novelist we are indebted for Mrs. Gamp, but to Mrs. Gamp herself we are indebted for Mrs. Harris. That most mythical of all imaginary beings is certainly quite unique; she is strictly, as one may say, _sui generis_ in the whole world of fiction. A figment born from a figment; one fancy evolved from another; the shadow of a shadow. If only in remembrance of that one daring adumbration from Mrs. Gamp'sinner consciousness, that purely supposititious entity “which her name, I'll not deceive you, is Harris,” one would say that Mr. Mould, the undertaker, has full reason for exclaiming, in regard to Mrs. Gamp, “I'll tell you what, that's a woman whose intellect is immensely superior to her station in life. That's a woman who observes and reflects in a wonderful manner.” Mr. Mould becomes so strongly impressed at last with a sense of her exceptional merits, that in a deliciously ludicrous outburst of professional generosity he caps the climax of his eulogium by observing, “She's the sort of woman, now, that one would almost feel disposed to bury for nothing--and do it neatly, too!” Thoroughly akin, by the way, to which exceedingly questionable expression of goodwill on the part of Mr. Mould, is Mrs. Gamp's equally confiding outburst of philanthropy from _her_ point of view, where she remarks--of course to her familiar, as Socrates when communing with his Daemon--“'Mrs. Harris,' I says to her, 'don't name the charge, for if I could afford to lay my fellow-creeturs out for nothink, I would gladly do it, sich is the love I bears 'em.'”

A benevolent unbosoming, or self-revelation, that last, on the part of Mrs. Gamp, so astoundingly outspoken of its kind, that it forces upon one, in regard to her whole character, the almost inevitable reflection that her grotesque and inexhaustible humour, like Falstaff's irrepressible and exhilarating wit, redeems what would be otherwise in itself utterly irredeemable. For, as commentators have remarked, in regard to Shakspere's Fat Knight, that Sir John is an unwieldy mass of every conceivable bad quality, being, among other things, a liar, a coward, a drunkard, a braggart, a cheat, and a debauchee, one might bring, if not an equally formidable, certainly an equally lengthened, indictment against the whole character of Mrs. Gamp, justifying the validity of each disreputable charge upon the testimony of her own evidence.

In its way, the impersonation of Mrs. Gamp by her creator was nearly as surprising as his original delineation of her in his capacity as Novelist. Happily, to bring out the finer touches of the humorous in her portraiture, there were repeated asides in the Reading, added to which other contrasting characters were here and there momentarily introduced. Mr. Pecksniff--hardly recognisable, by the way, _as_ Mr. Pecksniff--took part, but a very subordinate part, in the conversation, as did Mr. Mould also, and as, towards the close of it, likewise did Mrs. Prig of Bartlemy's. But, monopolist though Mrs. Gamp showed herself to be in her manner of holding forth, her talk never degenerated into a monologue.

Mr. Pecksniff setting forth in a hackney cabriolet to-arrange, on behalf of Jonas Chuzzlewit, for the funeral of the latter's father, in regard to which he is enjoined to spare no expense, arrives, in due course, in Kings-gate-street, High Holborn, in quest of the female functionary--“a nurse and watcher, and performer of nameless offices about the dead, whom the undertaker had recommended.” His destination is reached when he stands face to face with the lady's lodging over the bird-fancier's, “next door but one to the celebrated mutton-pie shop, and directly opposite to the original cats'-meat warehouse.” Here Mr. Pecksniff's performance upon the knocker naturally arouses the whole neighbourhood, it, the knocker, being so ingeniously constructed as to wake the street with ease, without making the smallest impression upon the premises to which it was addressed. Everybody is at once under the impression that, as a matter of course, he is “upon an errand touching not the close of life, but the other end”--the married ladies, especially, crying out with uncommon interest, “Knock at the winder, sir, knock at the winder! Lord bless you, don't lose no more time than you can help,--knock at the winder!” Mrs. Gamp herself, when roused, is under the same embarrassing misapprehension. Immediately, however, Mr. Pecksniff has explained the object of his mission, Mrs. Gamp, who has a face for all occasions, thereupon putting on her mourning countenance, the surrounding matrons, while rating her visitor roundly, signify that they would be glad to know what he means by terrifying delicate females with “his corpses!” The unoffending gentleman eventually, after hustling Mrs. Gamp into the cabriolet, drives off “overwhelmed with popular execration.”

Here it is that Mrs. Gamp's distinctive characteristics begin to assert themselves conspicuously. Her labouring under the most erroneous impressions as to the conveyance in which she is travelling, evidently confounding it with mail-coaches, insomuch that, in regard to her luggage, she clamours to the driver to “put it in the boot,” her absorbing anxiety about the pattens, “with which she plays innumerable games of quoits upon Mr. Pecksniff's legs,” her evolutions in that confined space with her most prominently visible chattel, “a species of gig umbrella,” prepare the way for her still more characteristic confidences. Then in earnest--she had spoken twice before that from her window over the bird-fancier's--but then in earnest, on their approaching the house of mourning, her voice, in the Reading, became recognisable. A voice snuffy, husky, unctuous, the voice of a fat old woman, one so fat that she is described in the book as having had a difficulty in looking over herself--a voice, as we read elsewhere in the novel, having borne upon the breeze about it a peculiar fragrance, “as if a passing fairy had hiccoughed, and had previously been to a wine-vaults.”

“'And so the gentleman's dead, sir! Ah! the more's the pity!'--(_She didn't even know his name_.)--'But it's as certain as being born, except that we can't make our calc'lations as exact. Ah, dear!'”

Simply to hear those words uttered by the Reader--especially the interjected words above italicised--was to have a relish of anticipation at once for all that followed. Mrs. Gamp's pathetic allusion, immediately afterwards, to her recollection of the time “when Gamp was summonsed to his long home,” and when she “see him a-laying in the hospital with a penny-piece on each eye, and his wooden leg under his left arm,” not only confirmed the delighted impression of the hearers as to their having her there before them in her identity, but was the signal for the roars of laughter that, rising and falling in volume all through the Reading, terminated only some time after its completion.

Immediately after came the first introduction by her of the name of Mrs. Harris. “At this point,” observed the narrator, “she was fain to stop for breath. And,” he went on directly to remark, with a combination of candour and seriousness that were in themselves irresistibly ludicrous, “advantage may be taken of the circumstance to state that a fearful mystery surrounded this lady of the name of Harris, whom no one in the circle of Mrs. Gamp's acquaintance had ever seen; neither did any human being know her place of residence--the prevalent opinion being that she was a phantom of Mrs. Gamp's brain, created for the purpose of holding complimentary dialogues with her on all manner of subjects.” Eminently seasonable, as a preliminary flourish in this way, is the tribute paid by her to Mrs. Gamp's abstemiousness, on the understanding that is, that the latter's one golden rule of life, is complied with--“'Leave the bottle on the chimbley-piece, and don't ast me to take none, but let me put my lips to it when I am so dispoged, and then, Mrs. Harris, I says, I will do what I am engaged to, according to the best of my ability.' 'Mrs. Gamp' she says, in answer, 'if ever there was a sober creetur to be got at eighteen-pence a day for working people, and three-and-six for gentlefolks,--night-watching being a extra charge,--you are that inwallable person. Never did I think, till I know'd you, as any woman could sick-nurse and monthly likeways, on the little that you takes to drink.' 'Mrs. Harris, ma'am,' I says to her, 'none on us knows what we can do till we tries; and wunst _I_ thought so too. But now,' I says, 'my half a pint of porter fully satisfies; perwisin', Mrs. Harris, that it's brought reg'lar, and draw'd mild.'” Not but occasionally even that modest “sip of liquor” she finds so far “settling heavy on the chest” as to necessitate, every now and then, a casual dram by way of extra quencher.

It was so arranged in the Reading that, immediately upon the completion of Mrs. Gamp's affecting narrative of the confidential opinions of her sobriety entertained by Mrs. Harris, Mr. Mould, the undertaker, opportunely presented to the audience his well-remembered countenance--“a face in which a queer attempt at melancholy was at odds with a smirk of satisfaction.” The impersonation, here, was conveyed in something better than the unsatisfactory hint by which that attempted in regard to Mr. Pecksniff was alone to be expressed. Speaking of Old Chuzzlewit's funeral, as ordered by his bereaved son, Mr. Jonas, with “no limitation, positively no limitation in point of expense,” the undertaker observes to Mr. Pecksniff, “This is one of the most impressive cases, sir, that I have seen in the whole course of my professional experience. Anything so filial as this--anything so honourable to human nature, anything _so_ expensive, anything so calculated to reconcile all of us to the world we live in--never yet came under my observation. It only proves, sir, what was so forcibly expressed by the lamented poet,--buried at Stratford,--that there is good in everything.” Even the very manner of his departure was delicious: “Mr. Mould was going away with a brisk smile, when he remembered the occasion,” we read in the narrative and saw on the platform. “Quickly becoming depressed again, he sighed; looked into the crown of his hat, as if for comfort; put it on without finding any; and slowly departed.”

The spirit and substance of the whole Reading, however, were, as a matter of course, Mrs. Gamp and her grotesque remembrances, drawn, these latter from the inexhaustible fund of her own personal and mostly domestic experiences. “Although the blessing of a daughter,” she observed, in one of her confiding retrospects, “was deniged me, which, if we had had one, Gamp would certainly have drunk its little shoes right off its feet, as with one precious boy he did, and arterwards sent the child a errand to sell his wooden leg for any liquor it would fetch as matches in the rough; which was truly done beyond his years, for ev'ry individgie penny that child lost at tossing for kidney pies, and come home arterwards quite bold, to break the news, and offering to drown'd himself if such would be a satisfaction to his parents.” At another moment, when descanting upon all her children collectively in one of her faithfully reported addresses to her familiar: “'My own family,' I says, 'has fallen out of three-pair backs, and had damp doorsteps settled on their lungs, and one was turned up smilin' in a bedstead unbeknown. And as to husbands, there's a wooden leg gone likeways home to its account, which in its constancy of walking into public-'ouses, and never coming out again till fetched by force, was quite as weak as flesh, if not weaker.”

Somehow, when those who were assisting at this Reading, as the phrase is, had related to them the manner in which Mrs. Gamp entered on her official duties in the sick chamber, they appeared to be assisting also at her toilette: as, for example, when “she put on a yellow nightcap of prodigious size, in shape resembling a cabbage, having previously divested herself of a row of bald old curls, which could scarcely be called false they were so innocent of anything approaching to deception.” One missed sadly at this point in the later version of this Reading what was included in her first conversation on the doormat as to her requirements for supper enumerated after this fashion, “in tones expressive of faintness,” to the housemaid: “I think, young woman, as I could peck a little bit of pickled salmon, with a little sprig of fennel and a sprinkling o' white pepper. I takes new bread, my dear, with jest a little pat o' fredge butter and a mossel o' cheese. With respect to ale, if they draws the Brighton Tipper at any 'ouse nigh here, I takes that ale at night, my love; not as I cares for it myself, but on accounts of its being considered wakeful by the doctors; and whatever you do, young woman, don't bring me more than a shilling's worth of gin-and-water, warm, when I rings the bell a second time; for that is always my allowange, and I never takes a drop beyond. In case there should be sich a thing as a cowcumber in the 'ouse, I'm rather partial to 'em, though I am but a poor woman.” Winding all up,--with one of those amazing confusions of a Scriptural recollection which prompts her at another time in the novel to exclaim, in regard to the Ankworks package, “'I wish it was in Jonadge's belly, I do,' appearing to confound the prophet with the whale in that mysterious aspiration,”--by observing at this point, “Rich folks may ride on camels, but it ain't so easy for 'em to see out of a needle's eye. That is my comfort, and I hope I knows it.” One whole chapter of “Martin Chuzzlewit,” with the exception of the merest fragment of it--_the_ chapter pre-eminently in relation to Mrs. Gamp--we always regretted as having been either overlooked or purposely set aside in the compilation both of the earlier and the later version of this Reading, the chapter, that is, in which Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Prig converse together in the former's sleeping apartment.

The mere description of the interior of that chamber, related by the Author's lips, would have been so irresistibly ridiculous--the tent bedstead ornamented with pippins carved in timber, that tumbled down on the slightest provocation like a wooden shower-bath--the chest of drawers, from which the handles had long been pulled off, so that its contents could only be got at either by tilting the whole structure until all the drawers fell out together, or by opening each of them singly with knives like oysters--the miscellaneous salad bought for twopence by Betsey Prig on condition that the vendor could get it all into her pocket (including among other items a green vegetable of an expansive nature, of such magnificent proportions that before it could be got either in or out it had to be shut up like an umbrella), which was happily accomplished in High Holborn, to the breathless interest of a hackney-coach stand.

One inestimable portion, however, of this memorable occasion of festivity between those frequend pardners, Betsey Prig and Sairey Gamp, was, by a most ingenious dovetailing together of two disjointed parts, incorporated with the adroitly compacted materials of a Reading that was as brief as the laughter provoked by it was boisterous and inextinguishable. As to the manner of the dovetailing, it will be readily recalled to recollection. Immediately upon Mrs. Gamp's awaking at the close of her night watch, we were told that Mrs. Prig relieved punctually, but that she relieved in an ill temper. “The best among us have their failings, and it must be conceded of Mrs. Prig,” observed the Reader with a hardly endurable gravity of explanation, “that if there were a blemish in the goodness of her disposition, it was a habit she had of not bestowing all its sharp and acid properties upon her patients (as a thoroughly amiable woman would have done), but of keeping a considerable remainder for the service of her friends.” Looking offensively at Mrs. Gamp, and winking her eye, as Mrs. Prig does immediately upon her entrance, it is felt by the former to be necessary that Betsey should at once be made sensible of her exact station in society; wherefore Mrs. Gamp prefaced a remonstrance with--

“Mrs. Harris, Betsey------”

“Bother Mrs. Harris!”

Then it was that the Reader added:--

“Mrs. Gamp looked at Betsey with amazement, incredulity, and indignation. Mrs. Prig, winking her eye tighter, folded her arms and uttered these tremendous words:--

“'I don't believe there's no sich a person!'

“With these expressions, she snapped her fingers, once, twice, thrice, each time nearer to Mrs. Gamp, and then turned away as one who felt that there was now a gulf between them that nothing could ever bridge across.”

The most comic of all the Readings closed thus abruptly with a roar.

BOOTS AT THE HOLLY TREE INN.

Even the immortal Boots at the White Hart, Borough, who was first revealed to us in a coarse striped waistcoat with black calico sleeves and blue glass buttons, drab breeches and gaiters, and who answered to the name of Sam, would not, we are certain, have disdained to have been put in friendly relations with Cobbs, as one in every way worthy of his companionship. The Boots at the Holly Tree Inn, though more lightly sketched, was quite as much of an original creation in his way as that other Christmas friend of ours, the warm-hearted and loquacious Cheap Jack, Doctor Marigold. And each of those worthies, it should be added, had really about him an equal claim to be regarded, as an original creation, as written, or as impersonated by the Author. As a character orally portrayed, Cobbs was fully on a par with Doctor Marigold. Directly the Reader opened his lips, whether as the Boots or as the Cheap Jack, the Novelist seemed to disappear, and there instead, talking glibly to us from first to last just as the case might happen to be, was either the patterer on the cart footboard or honest Cobbs touching his hair with a bootjack. His very first words not only lead up to his confidences, but in the same breath struck the key-note of his character. “Where had he been? Lord, everywhere! What had he been? Bless you, everything a'most. Seen a good deal? Why, of course he had. Would be easier for him to tell what he hadn't seen than what he had. Ah! A deal, it would. What was the curiosest thing he'd seen? Well! He didn't know--couldn't name it momently--unless it was a Unicorn, and he see _him_ over at a Fair. But”--and here came the golden retrospect, a fairy tale of love told by a tavern Boots, and told all through, moreover, as none but a Boots could tell it--“Supposing a young gentleman not eight year'old, was to run away with a fine young woman of seven, might I think _that_ a queer start? Certainly! Then, that was a start as he himself had had his blessed eyes on--and he'd cleaned the shoes they run away in--and they was so little he couldn't get his hand into 'em.” Whereupon, following up the thread of his discourse, Boots would take his crowd of hearers, quite willingly on their part, into the heart of the charming labyrinth.

The descriptive powers of Cobbs, it will be admitted, were for one thing very remarkable. Master Harry Walmers' father, for instance, he hits off to a nicety in a phrase or two. “He was a gentleman of spirit, and good looking, and held his head up when he walked, and had what you may call Fire about him:” adding, that he wrote poetry, rode, ran, cricketed, danced and acted, and “done it all equally beautiful.” Another and a very significant touch, by the way, was imparted to that same portraiture later on, just, in point of fact before the close of Cobbs's reminiscence, and one so lightly given that it was conveyed through a mere passing parenthesis--namely, where the young father was described by Boots as standing beside Master Harry Walmers' bed, in the Holly Tree Inn, looking down at the little sleeping face, “looking wonderfully like it,” says Cobbs, who adds, “(they do say as he ran away with Mrs. Walmers).” Although Boots described Master Harry's father from the first as “uncommon proud of him, as his only child, you see,” the worthy fellow took especial care at once to add, that “he didn't spoil him neither.” Having a will of his own, and a eye of his own, and being one that would be minded, while he never tired of hearing the fine bright boy “sing his songs about Young May Moons is beaming, love, and When he who adores thee has left but the name, and that: still,” said Boots, “he kept the command over the child, and the child _was_ a child, and it's very much to be wished more of 'em was.” At the particular period referred to in this portion of his narrative, Boots informed us pleasantly, that he came to know all about it by reason of his being in his then capacity as Mr. Wahners' under-gardener, always about in the summer time, near the windows, on the lawn “a-mowing and sweeping, and weeding and pruning, and this and that”--with his eyes and ears open, of course, we may presume, in a manner befitting his intelligence.

Perhaps, there was after all nothing better in the delivery of the whole of this Reading, than the utterance of the two words italicised below in the first dialogue, reported by Boots as having taken place between himself and Master Harry Walmers, junior, when “that mite,” as Boots calls him, stops one day, along with the fine young woman of seven already mentioned, where Boots (then under-gardener, remember) was hoeing weeds in the gravel:--

“'Cobbs,' he says, 'I like _you._' 'Do you, sir? I'm proud to hear it.' 'Yes, I do, Cobbs. Why do I like you, do you think, Cobbs?' 'Don't know, Master Harry, I'm sure.' 'Because Norah likes you, Cobbs.' 'Indeed, sir? That's very gratifying.' 'Gratifying, Cobbs? It is better than millions of the brightest diamonds, to be liked by Norah?' '_Certainly_, sir.'”