Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit

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'Blooming, Mr Jonas, blooming.'

'And the other one; how's she?'

'Volatile trifler!' said Mr Pecksniff, fondly musing. 'She is well, she
is well. Roving from parlour to bedroom, Mr Jonas, like a bee, skimming
from post to pillar, like the butterfly; dipping her young beak into our
currant wine, like the humming-bird! Ah! were she a little less giddy
than she is; and had she but the sterling qualities of Cherry, my young
friend!'

'Is she so very giddy, then?' asked Jonas.

'Well, well!' said Mr Pecksniff, with great feeling; 'let me not be hard
upon my child. Beside her sister Cherry she appears so. A strange noise
that, Mr Jonas!'

'Something wrong in the clock, I suppose,' said Jonas, glancing towards
it. 'So the other one ain't your favourite, ain't she?'

The fond father was about to reply, and had already summoned into his
face a look of most intense sensibility, when the sound he had already
noticed was repeated.

'Upon my word, Mr Jonas, that is a very extraordinary clock,' said
Pecksniff.

It would have been, if it had made the noise which startled them; but
another kind of time-piece was fast running down, and from that the
sound proceeded. A scream from Chuffey, rendered a hundred times more
loud and formidable by his silent habits, made the house ring from roof
to cellar; and, looking round, they saw Anthony Chuzzlewit extended on
the floor, with the old clerk upon his knees beside him.

He had fallen from his chair in a fit, and lay there, battling for each
gasp of breath, with every shrivelled vein and sinew starting in its
place, as if it were bent on bearing witness to his age, and sternly
pleading with Nature against his recovery. It was frightful to see how
the principle of life, shut up within his withered frame, fought like a
strong devil, mad to be released, and rent its ancient prison-house.
A young man in the fullness of his vigour, struggling with so much
strength of desperation, would have been a dismal sight; but an old,
old, shrunken body, endowed with preternatural might, and giving the lie
in every motion of its every limb and joint to its enfeebled aspect, was
a hideous spectacle indeed.

They raised him up, and fetched a surgeon with all haste, who bled the
patient and applied some remedies; but the fits held him so long that
it was past midnight when they got him--quiet now, but quite unconscious
and exhausted--into bed.

'Don't go,' said Jonas, putting his ashy lips to Mr Pecksniff's ear and
whispered across the bed. 'It was a mercy you were present when he was
taken ill. Some one might have said it was my doing.'

'YOUR doing!' cried Mr Pecksniff.

'I don't know but they might,' he replied, wiping the moisture from his
white face. 'People say such things. How does he look now?'

Mr Pecksniff shook his head.

'I used to joke, you know,' said. Jonas: 'but I--I never wished him
dead. Do you think he's very bad?'

'The doctor said he was. You heard,' was Mr Pecksniff's answer.

'Ah! but he might say that to charge us more, in case of his getting
well' said Jonas. 'You mustn't go away, Pecksniff. Now it's come to
this, I wouldn't be without a witness for a thousand pound.'

Chuffey said not a word, and heard not a word. He had sat himself down
in a chair at the bedside, and there he remained, motionless; except
that he sometimes bent his head over the pillow, and seemed to listen.
He never changed in this. Though once in the dreary night Mr Pecksniff,
having dozed, awoke with a confused impression that he had heard
him praying, and strangely mingling figures--not of speech, but
arithmetic--with his broken prayers.

Jonas sat there, too, all night; not where his father could have seen
him, had his consciousness returned, but hiding, as it were, behind him,
and only reading how he looked, in Mr Pecksniff's eyes. HE, the coarse
upstart, who had ruled the house so long--that craven cur, who was
afraid to move, and shook so, that his very shadow fluttered on the
wall!

It was broad, bright, stirring day when, leaving the old clerk to watch
him, they went down to breakfast. People hurried up and down the street;
windows and doors were opened; thieves and beggars took their usual
posts; workmen bestirred themselves; tradesmen set forth their shops;
bailiffs and constables were on the watch; all kinds of human creatures
strove, in their several ways, as hard to live, as the one sick old
man who combated for every grain of sand in his fast-emptying glass, as
eagerly as if it were an empire.

'If anything happens Pecksniff,' said Jonas, 'you must promise me to
stop here till it's all over. You shall see that I do what's right.'

'I know that you will do what's right, Mr Jonas,' said Pecksniff.

'Yes, yes, but I won't be doubted. No one shall have it in his power to
say a syllable against me,' he returned. 'I know how people will talk.
Just as if he wasn't old, or I had the secret of keeping him alive!'

Mr Pecksniff promised that he would remain, if circumstances should
render it, in his esteemed friend's opinion, desirable; they were
finishing their meal in silence, when suddenly an apparition stood
before them, so ghastly to the view that Jonas shrieked aloud, and both
recoiled in horror.

Old Anthony, dressed in his usual clothes, was in the room--beside the
table. He leaned upon the shoulder of his solitary friend; and on his
livid face, and on his horny hands, and in his glassy eyes, and traced
by an eternal finger in the very drops of sweat upon his brow, was one
word--Death.

He spoke to them--in something of his own voice too, but sharpened and
made hollow, like a dead man's face. What he would have said, God knows.
He seemed to utter words, but they were such as man had never heard.
And this was the most fearful circumstance of all, to see him standing
there, gabbling in an unearthly tongue.

'He's better now,' said Chuffey. 'Better now. Let him sit in his old
chair, and he'll be well again. I told him not to mind. I said so,
yesterday.'

They put him in his easy-chair, and wheeled it near the window; then,
swinging open the door, exposed him to the free current of morning air.
But not all the air that is, nor all the winds that ever blew 'twixt
Heaven and Earth, could have brought new life to him.

Plunge him to the throat in golden pieces now, and his heavy fingers
shall not close on one!



CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE READER IS BROUGHT INTO COMMUNICATION WITH SOME PROFESSIONAL PERSONS,
AND SHEDS A TEAR OVER THE FILAIL PIETY OF GOOD MR JONAS


Mr Pecksniff was in a hackney cabriolet, for Jonas Chuzzlewit had said
'Spare no expense.' Mankind is evil in its thoughts and in its base
constructions, and Jonas was resolved it should not have an inch to
stretch into an ell against him. It never should be charged upon his
father's son that he had grudged the money for his father's funeral.
Hence, until the obsequies should be concluded, Jonas had taken for his
motto 'Spend, and spare not!'

Mr Pecksniff had been to the undertaker, and was now upon his way to
another officer in the train of mourning--a female functionary, a nurse,
and watcher, and performer of nameless offices about the persons of the
dead--whom he had recommended. Her name, as Mr Pecksniff gathered from
a scrap of writing in his hand, was Gamp; her residence in Kingsgate
Street, High Holborn. So Mr Pecksniff, in a hackney cab, was rattling
over Holborn stones, in quest of Mrs Gamp.

This lady lodged at a bird-fancier's, next door but one to the
celebrated mutton-pie shop, and directly opposite to the original
cat's-meat warehouse; the renown of which establishments was duly
heralded on their respective fronts. It was a little house, and this was
the more convenient; for Mrs Gamp being, in her highest walk of art,
a monthly nurse, or, as her sign-board boldly had it, 'Midwife,' and
lodging in the first-floor front, was easily assailable at night by
pebbles, walking-sticks, and fragments of tobacco-pipe; all much more
efficacious than the street-door knocker, which was so constructed as
to wake the street with ease, and even spread alarms of fire in Holborn,
without making the smallest impression on the premises to which it was
addressed.

It chanced on this particular occasion, that Mrs Gamp had been up all
the previous night, in attendance upon a ceremony to which the usage of
gossips has given that name which expresses, in two syllables, the curse
pronounced on Adam. It chanced that Mrs Gamp had not been regularly
engaged, but had been called in at a crisis, in consequence of her great
repute, to assist another professional lady with her advice; and thus it
happened that, all points of interest in the case being over, Mrs Gamp
had come home again to the bird-fancier's and gone to bed. So when Mr
Pecksniff drove up in the hackney cab, Mrs Gamp's curtains were drawn
close, and Mrs Gamp was fast asleep behind them.

If the bird-fancier had been at home, as he ought to have been, there
would have been no great harm in this; but he was out, and his shop was
closed. The shutters were down certainly; and in every pane of glass
there was at least one tiny bird in a tiny bird-cage, twittering and
hopping his little ballet of despair, and knocking his head against the
roof; while one unhappy goldfinch who lived outside a red villa with
his name on the door, drew the water for his own drinking, and mutely
appealed to some good man to drop a farthing's-worth of poison in it.
Still, the door was shut. Mr Pecksniff tried the latch, and shook it,
causing a cracked bell inside to ring most mournfully; but no one came.
The bird-fancier was an easy shaver also, and a fashionable hair-dresser
also, and perhaps he had been sent for, express, from the court end of
the town, to trim a lord, or cut and curl a lady; but however that
might be, there, upon his own ground, he was not; nor was there any more
distinct trace of him to assist the imagination of an inquirer, than
a professional print or emblem of his calling (much favoured in the
trade), representing a hair-dresser of easy manners curling a lady
of distinguished fashion, in the presence of a patent upright grand
pianoforte.

Noting these circumstances, Mr Pecksniff, in the innocence of his heart,
applied himself to the knocker; but at the first double knock every
window in the street became alive with female heads; and before he could
repeat the performance whole troops of married ladies (some about to
trouble Mrs Gamp themselves very shortly) came flocking round the steps,
all crying out with one accord, and 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!'

Acting upon this suggestion, and borrowing the driver's whip for the
purpose, Mr Pecksniff soon made a commotion among the first floor
flower-pots, and roused Mrs Gamp, whose voice--to the great satisfaction
of the matrons--was heard to say, 'I'm coming.'

'He's as pale as a muffin,' said one lady, in allusion to Mr Pecksniff.

'So he ought to be, if he's the feelings of a man,' observed another.

A third lady (with her arms folded) said she wished he had chosen any
other time for fetching Mrs Gamp, but it always happened so with HER.

It gave Mr Pecksniff much uneasiness to find, from these remarks, that
he was supposed to have come to Mrs Gamp upon an errand touching--not
the close of life, but the other end. Mrs Gamp herself was under the
same impression, for, throwing open the window, she cried behind the
curtains, as she hastily attired herself--

'Is it Mrs Perkins?'

'No!' returned Mr Pecksniff, sharply. 'Nothing of the sort.'

'What, Mr Whilks!' cried Mrs Gamp. 'Don't say it's you, Mr Whilks, and
that poor creetur Mrs Whilks with not even a pincushion ready. Don't say
it's you, Mr Whilks!'

'It isn't Mr Whilks,' said Pecksniff. 'I don't know the man. Nothing
of the kind. A gentleman is dead; and some person being wanted in the
house, you have been recommended by Mr Mould the undertaker.'

As she was by this time in a condition to appear, Mrs Gamp, who had
a face for all occasions, looked out of the window with her mourning
countenance, and said she would be down directly. But the matrons took
it very ill that Mr Pecksniff's mission was of so unimportant a kind;
and the lady with her arms folded rated him in good round terms,
signifying that she would be glad to know what he meant by terrifying
delicate females 'with his corpses;' and giving it as her opinion that
he was quite ugly enough to know better. The other ladies were not at
all behind-hand in expressing similar sentiments; and the children, of
whom some scores had now collected, hooted and defied Mr Pecksniff quite
savagely. So when Mrs Gamp appeared, the unoffending gentleman was glad
to hustle her with very little ceremony into the cabriolet, and drive
off, overwhelmed with popular execration.

Mrs Gamp had a large bundle with her, a pair of pattens, and a species
of gig umbrella; the latter article in colour like a faded leaf, except
where a circular patch of a lively blue had been dexterously let in at
the top. She was much flurried by the haste she had made, and laboured
under the most erroneous views of cabriolets, which she appeared
to confound with mail-coaches or stage-wagons, inasmuch as she was
constantly endeavouring for the first half mile to force her luggage
through the little front window, and clamouring to the driver to 'put
it in the boot.' When she was disabused of this idea, her whole being
resolved itself into an absorbing anxiety about her pattens, with which
she played innumerable games at quoits on Mr Pecksniff's legs. It was
not until they were close upon the house of mourning that she had enough
composure to observe--

'And so the gentleman's dead, sir! Ah! The more's the pity.' She didn't
even know his name. 'But it's what we must all come to. It's as certain
as being born, except that we can't make our calculations as exact. Ah!
Poor dear!'

She was a fat old woman, this Mrs Gamp, with a husky voice and a moist
eye, which she had a remarkable power of turning up, and only showing
the white of it. Having very little neck, it cost her some trouble to
look over herself, if one may say so, at those to whom she talked. She
wore a very rusty black gown, rather the worse for snuff, and a shawl
and bonnet to correspond. In these dilapidated articles of dress she
had, on principle, arrayed herself, time out of mind, on such occasions
as the present; for this at once expressed a decent amount of veneration
for the deceased, and invited the next of kin to present her with a
fresher suit of weeds; an appeal so frequently successful, that the very
fetch and ghost of Mrs Gamp, bonnet and all, might be seen hanging up,
any hour in the day, in at least a dozen of the second-hand clothes
shops about Holborn. The face of Mrs Gamp--the nose in particular--was
somewhat red and swollen, and it was difficult to enjoy her society
without becoming conscious of a smell of spirits. Like most persons who
have attained to great eminence in their profession, she took to hers
very kindly; insomuch that, setting aside her natural predilections as
a woman, she went to a lying-in or a laying-out with equal zest and
relish.

'Ah!' repeated Mrs Gamp; for it was always a safe sentiment in cases of
mourning. 'Ah dear! When Gamp was summoned to his long home, and I see
him a-lying in Guy's Hospital with a penny-piece on each eye, and his
wooden leg under his left arm, I thought I should have fainted away. But
I bore up.'

If certain whispers current in the Kingsgate Street circles had any
truth in them, she had indeed borne up surprisingly; and had exerted
such uncommon fortitude as to dispose of Mr Gamp's remains for the
benefit of science. But it should be added, in fairness, that this had
happened twenty years before; and that Mr and Mrs Gamp had long been
separated on the ground of incompatibility of temper in their drink.

'You have become indifferent since then, I suppose?' said Mr Pecksniff.
'Use is second nature, Mrs Gamp.'

'You may well say second nater, sir,' returned that lady. 'One's first
ways is to find sich things a trial to the feelings, and so is one's
lasting custom. If it wasn't for the nerve a little sip of liquor gives
me (I never was able to do more than taste it), I never could go through
with what I sometimes has to do. "Mrs Harris," I says, at the very last
case as ever I acted in, which it was but a young person, "Mrs Harris,"
I says, "leave the bottle on the chimley-piece, and don't ask me to take
none, but let me put my lips to it when I am so dispoged, and then I
will do what I'm engaged to do, 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,"' said Mrs Gamp with emphasis, '"being a
extra charge--you are that inwallable person." "Mrs Harris," I says to
her, "don't name the charge, for if I could afford to lay all my feller
creeturs out for nothink, I would gladly do it, sich is the love I bears
'em. But what I always says to them as has the management of matters,
Mrs Harris"'--here she kept her eye on Mr Pecksniff--'"be they gents or
be they ladies, is, don't ask me whether I won't take none, or whether I
will, but leave the bottle on the chimley-piece, and let me put my lips
to it when I am so dispoged."'

The conclusion of this affecting narrative brought them to the house. In
the passage they encountered Mr Mould the undertaker; a little elderly
gentleman, bald, and in a suit of black; with a notebook in his hand,
a massive gold watch-chain dangling from his fob, and a face in which a
queer attempt at melancholy was at odds with a smirk of satisfaction; so
that he looked as a man might, who, in the very act of smacking his lips
over choice old wine, tried to make believe it was physic.

'Well, Mrs Gamp, and how are YOU, Mrs Gamp?' said this gentleman, in a
voice as soft as his step.

'Pretty well, I thank you, sir,' dropping a curtsey.

'You'll be very particular here, Mrs Gamp. This is not a common case,
Mrs Gamp. Let everything be very nice and comfortable, Mrs Gamp, if you
please,' said the undertaker, shaking his head with a solemn air.

'It shall be, sir,' she replied, curtseying again. 'You knows me of old,
sir, I hope.'

'I hope so, too, Mrs Gamp,' said the undertaker, 'and I think so also.'
Mrs Gamp curtseyed again. 'This is one of the most impressive cases,
sir,' he continued, addressing Mr Pecksniff, 'that I have seen in the
whole course of my professional experience.'

'Indeed, Mr Mould!' cried that gentleman.

'Such affectionate regret, sir, I never saw. There is no limitation,
there is positively NO limitation'--opening his eyes wide, and standing
on tiptoe--'in point of expense! I have orders, sir, to put on my whole
establishment of mutes; and mutes come very dear, Mr Pecksniff; not to
mention their drink. To provide silver-plated handles of the very best
description, ornamented with angels' heads from the most expensive
dies. To be perfectly profuse in feathers. In short, sir, to turn out
something absolutely gorgeous.'

'My friend Mr Jonas is an excellent man,' said Mr Pecksniff.

'I have seen a good deal of what is filial in my time, sir,' retorted
Mould, 'and what is unfilial too. It is our lot. We come into the
knowledge of those secrets. But anything so filial as this; anything so
honourable to human nature; 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 observed by the lamented theatrical
poet--buried at Stratford--that there is good in everything.'

'It is very pleasant to hear you say so, Mr Mould,' observed Pecksniff.

'You are very kind, sir. And what a man Mr Chuzzlewit was, sir! Ah! what
a man he was. You may talk of your lord mayors,' said Mould, waving his
hand at the public in general, 'your sheriffs, your common councilmen,
your trumpery; but show me a man in this city who is worthy to walk
in the shoes of the departed Mr Chuzzlewit. No, no,' cried Mould, with
bitter sarcasm. 'Hang 'em up, hang 'em up; sole 'em and heel 'em, and
have 'em ready for his son against he's old enough to wear 'em; but
don't try 'em on yourselves, for they won't fit you. We knew him,' said
Mould, in the same biting vein, as he pocketed his note-book; 'we
knew him, and are not to be caught with chaff. Mr Pecksniff, sir, good
morning.'

Mr Pecksniff returned the compliment; and Mould, sensible of having
distinguished himself, was going away with a brisk smile, when he
fortunately remembered the occasion. 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.

Mrs Gamp and Mr Pecksniff then ascended the staircase; and the former,
having been shown to the chamber in which all that remained of Anthony
Chuzzlewit lay covered up, with but one loving heart, and that a halting
one, to mourn it, left the latter free to enter the darkened room below,
and rejoin Mr Jonas, from whom he had now been absent nearly two hours.

He found that example to bereaved sons, and pattern in the eyes of all
performers of funerals, musing over a fragment of writing-paper on the
desk, and scratching figures on it with a pen. The old man's chair, and
hat, and walking-stick, were removed from their accustomed places, and
put out of sight; the window-blinds as yellow as November fogs, were
drawn down close; Jonas himself was so subdued, that he could scarcely
be heard to speak, and only seen to walk across the room.

'Pecksniff,' he said, in a whisper, 'you shall have the regulation of
it all, mind! You shall be able to tell anybody who talks about it that
everything was correctly and nicely done. There isn't any one you'd like
to ask to the funeral, is there?'

'No, Mr Jonas, I think not.'

'Because if there is, you know,' said Jonas, 'ask him. We don't want to
make a secret of it.'

'No,' repeated Mr Pecksniff, after a little reflection. 'I am not
the less obliged to you on that account, Mr Jonas, for your liberal
hospitality; but there really is no one.'

'Very well,' said Jonas; 'then you, and I, and Chuffey, and the doctor,
will be just a coachful. We'll have the doctor, Pecksniff, because he
knows what was the matter with him, and that it couldn't be helped.'

'Where is our dear friend, Mr Chuffey?' asked Pecksniff, looking round
the chamber, and winking both his eyes at once--for he was overcome by
his feelings.

But here he was interrupted by Mrs Gamp, who, divested of her bonnet and
shawl, came sidling and bridling into the room; and with some sharpness
demanded a conference outside the door with Mr Pecksniff.

'You may say whatever you wish to say here, Mrs Gamp,' said that
gentleman, shaking his head with a melancholy expression.

'It is not much as I have to say when people is a-mourning for the dead
and gone,' said Mrs Gamp; 'but what I have to say is TO the pint and
purpose, and no offence intended, must be so considered. I have been at
a many places in my time, gentlemen, and I hope I knows what my duties
is, and how the same should be performed; in course, if I did not, it
would be very strange, and very wrong in sich a gentleman as Mr Mould,
which has undertook the highest families in this land, and given every
satisfaction, so to recommend me as he does. I have seen a deal of
trouble my own self,' said Mrs Gamp, laying greater and greater stress
upon her words, 'and I can feel for them as has their feelings tried,
but I am not a Rooshan or a Prooshan, and consequently cannot suffer
Spies to be set over me.'

Before it was possible that an answer could be returned, Mrs Gamp,
growing redder in the face, went on to say:

'It is not a easy matter, gentlemen, to live when you are left a widder
woman; particular when your feelings works upon you to that extent that
you often find yourself a-going out on terms which is a certain loss,
and never can repay. But in whatever way you earns your bread, you may
have rules and regulations of your own which cannot be broke through.
Some people,' said Mrs Gamp, again entrenching herself behind her
strong point, as if it were not assailable by human ingenuity, 'may be
Rooshans, and others may be Prooshans; they are born so, and will please
themselves. Them which is of other naturs thinks different.'

'If I understand this good lady,' said Mr Pecksniff, turning to Jonas,
'Mr Chuffey is troublesome to her. Shall I fetch him down?'

'Do,' said Jonas. 'I was going to tell you he was up there, when she
came in. I'd go myself and bring him down, only--only I'd rather you
went, if you don't mind.'

Mr Pecksniff promptly departed, followed by Mrs Gamp, who, seeing that
he took a bottle and glass from the cupboard, and carried it in his
hand, was much softened.

'I am sure,' she said, 'that if it wasn't for his own happiness, I
should no more mind him being there, poor dear, than if he was a
fly. But them as isn't used to these things, thinks so much of 'em
afterwards, that it's a kindness to 'em not to let 'em have their wish.
And even,' said Mrs Gamp, probably in reference to some flowers of
speech she had already strewn on Mr Chuffey, 'even if one calls 'em
names, it's only done to rouse 'em.'