IS IN PART PROFESSIONAL, AND FURNISHES THE READER WITH SOME VALUABLE HINTS IN RELATION TO THE MANAGEMENT OF A SICK CHAMBER Mr Mould was surrounded by his household gods. He was enjoying the sweets of domestic repose, and gazing on them with a calm delight. The day being sultry, and the window open, the legs of Mr Mould were on the window-seat, and his back reclined against the shutter. Over his shining head a handkerchief was drawn, to guard his baldness from the flies. The room was fragrant with the smell of punch, a tumbler of which grateful compound stood upon a small round table, convenient to the hand of Mr Mould; so deftly mixed that as his eye looked down into the cool transparent drink, another eye, peering brightly from behind the crisp lemon-peel, looked up at him, and twinkled like a star.
Deep in the City, and within the ward of Cheap, stood Mr Mould’s establishment. His Harem, or, in other words, the common sitting room of Mrs Mould and family, was at the back, over the little counting-house behind the shop; abutting on a churchyard small and shady. In this domestic chamber Mr Mould now sat; gazing, a placid man, upon his punch and home. If, for a moment at a time, he sought a wider prospect, whence he might return with freshened zest to these enjoyments, his moist glance wandered like a sunbeam through a rural screen of scarlet runners, trained on strings before the window, and he looked down, with an artist’s eye, upon the graves.
The partner of his life, and daughters twain, were Mr Mould’s companions. Plump as any partridge was each Miss Mould, and Mrs M. was plumper than the two together. So round and chubby were their fair proportions, that they might have been the bodies once belonging to the angels’ faces in the shop below, grown up, with other heads attached to make them mortal. Even their peachy cheeks were puffed out and distended, as though they ought of right to be performing on celestial trumpets. The bodiless cherubs in the shop, who were depicted as constantly blowing those instruments for ever and ever without any lungs, played, it is to be presumed, entirely by ear.
Mr Mould looked lovingly at Mrs Mould, who sat hard by, and was a helpmate to him in his punch as in all other things. Each seraph daughter, too, enjoyed her share of his regards, and smiled upon him in return. So bountiful were Mr Mould’s possessions, and so large his stock in trade, that even there, within his household sanctuary, stood a cumbrous press, whose mahogany maw was filled with shrouds, and winding-sheets, and other furniture of funerals. But, though the Misses Mould had been brought up, as one may say, beneath his eye, it had cast no shadow on their timid infancy or blooming youth. Sporting behind the scenes of death and burial from cradlehood, the Misses Mould knew better. Hat-bands, to them, were but so many yards of silk or crape; the final robe but such a quantity of linen. The Misses Mould could idealise a player’s habit, or a court-lady’s petticoat, or even an act of parliament. But they were not to be taken in by palls. They made them sometimes.
The premises of Mr Mould were hard of hearing to the boisterous noises in the great main streets, and nestled in a quiet corner, where the City strife became a drowsy hum, that sometimes rose and sometimes fell and sometimes altogether ceased; suggesting to a thoughtful mind a stoppage in Cheapside. The light came sparkling in among the scarlet runners, as if the churchyard winked at Mr Mould, and said, ‘We understand each other;’ and from the distant shop a pleasant sound arose of coffin-making with a low melodious hammer, rat, tat, tat, tat, alike promoting slumber and digestion.
‘Quite the buzz of insects,’ said Mr Mould, closing his eyes in a perfect luxury. ‘It puts one in mind of the sound of animated nature in the agricultural districts. It’s exactly like the woodpecker tapping.’
‘The woodpecker tapping the hollow Elm tree,’ observed Mrs Mould, adapting the words of the popular melody to the description of wood commonly used in the trade.
‘Ha, ha!’ laughed Mr Mould. ‘Not at all bad, my dear. We shall be glad to hear from you again, Mrs M. Hollow elm tree, eh! Ha, ha! Very good indeed. I’ve seen worse than that in the Sunday papers, my love.’
Mrs Mould, thus encouraged, took a little more of the punch, and handed it to her daughters, who dutifully followed the example of their mother.
‘Hollow Elm tree, eh?’ said Mr Mould, making a slight motion with his legs in his enjoyment of the joke. ‘It’s beech in the song. Elm, eh? Yes, to be sure. Ha, ha, ha! Upon my soul, that’s one of the best things I know?’ He was so excessively tickled by the jest that he couldn’t forget it, but repeated twenty times, ‘Elm, eh? Yes, to be sure. Elm, of course. Ha, ha, ha! Upon my life, you know, that ought to be sent to somebody who could make use of it. It’s one of the smartest things that ever was said. Hollow Elm ree, eh? of course. Very hollow. Ha, ha, ha!’
Here a knock was heard at the room door.
‘That’s Tacker, I know,’ said Mrs Mould, ‘by the wheezing he makes. Who that hears him now, would suppose he’d ever had wind enough to carry the feathers on his head! Come in, Tacker.’
‘Beg your pardon, ma’am,’ said Tacker, looking in a little way. ‘I thought our Governor was here.’
‘Well! so he is,’ cried Mould.
‘Oh! I didn’t see you, I’m sure,’ said Tacker, looking in a little farther. ‘You wouldn’t be inclined to take a walking one of two, with the plain wood and a tin plate, I suppose?’
‘Certainly not,’ replied Mr Mould, ‘much too common. Nothing to say to it.’
‘I told ‘em it was precious low,’ observed Mr Tacker.
‘Tell ‘em to go somewhere else. We don’t do that style of business here,’ said Mr Mould. ‘Like their impudence to propose it. Who is it?’
‘Why,’ returned Tacker, pausing, ‘that’s where it is, you see. It’s the beadle’s son-in-law.’
‘The beadle’s son-in-law, eh?’ said Mould. ‘Well! I’ll do it if the beadle follows in his cocked hat; not else. We carry it off that way, by looking official, but it’ll be low enough, then. His cocked hat, mind!’
‘I’ll take care, sir,’ rejoined Tacker. ‘Oh! Mrs Gamp’s below, and wants to speak to you.’
‘Tell Mrs Gamp to come upstairs,’ said Mould. ‘Now Mrs Gamp, what’s your news?’
The lady in question was by this time in the doorway, curtseying to Mrs Mould. At the same moment a peculiar fragrance was borne upon the breeze, as if a passing fairy had hiccoughed, and had previously been to a wine-vaults.
Mrs Gamp made no response to Mr Mould, but curtseyed to Mrs Mould again, and held up her hands and eyes, as in a devout thanksgiving that she looked so well. She was neatly, but not gaudily attired, in the weeds she had worn when Mr Pecksniff had the pleasure of making her acquaintance; and was perhaps the turning of a scale more snuffy.
‘There are some happy creeturs,’ Mrs Gamp observed, ‘as time runs back’ards with, and you are one, Mrs Mould; not that he need do nothing except use you in his most owldacious way for years to come, I’m sure; for young you are and will be. I says to Mrs Harris,’ Mrs Gamp continued, ‘only t’other day; the last Monday evening fortnight as ever dawned upon this Piljian’s Projiss of a mortal wale; I says to Mrs Harris when she says to me, “Years and our trials, Mrs Gamp, sets marks upon us all.”—“Say not the words, Mrs Harris, if you and me is to be continual friends, for sech is not the case. Mrs Mould,” I says, making so free, I will confess, as use the name,’ (she curtseyed here), ‘“is one of them that goes agen the obserwation straight; and never, Mrs Harris, whilst I’ve a drop of breath to draw, will I set by, and not stand up, don’t think it.”—“I ast your pardon, ma’am,” says Mrs Harris, “and I humbly grant your grace; for if ever a woman lived as would see her feller creeturs into fits to serve her friends, well do I know that woman’s name is Sairey Gamp.”’
At this point she was fain to stop for breath; and 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, though Mrs Gamp appeared on her own showing to be in constant communication with her. There were conflicting rumours on the subject; but the prevalent opinion was that she was a phantom of Mrs Gamp’s brain—as Messrs. Doe and Roe are fictions of the law—created for the express purpose of holding visionary dialogues with her on all manner of subjects, and invariably winding up with a compliment to the excellence of her nature.
‘And likeways what a pleasure,’ said Mrs Gamp, turning with a tearful smile towards the daughters, ‘to see them two young ladies as I know’d afore a tooth in their pretty heads was cut, and have many a day seen—ah, the sweet creeturs!—playing at berryins down in the shop, and follerin’ the order-book to its long home in the iron safe! But that’s all past and over, Mr Mould;’ as she thus got in a carefully regulated routine to that gentleman, she shook her head waggishly; ‘That’s all past and over now, sir, an’t it?’
‘Changes, Mrs Gamp, changes!’ returned the undertaker.
‘More changes too, to come, afore we’ve done with changes, sir,’ said Mrs Gamp, nodding yet more waggishly than before. ‘Young ladies with such faces thinks of something else besides berryins, don’t they, sir?’
‘I am sure I don’t know, Mrs Gamp,’ said Mould, with a chuckle—‘Not bad in Mrs Gamp, my dear?’
‘Oh yes, you do know, sir!’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘and so does Mrs Mould, your ‘ansome pardner too, sir; and so do I, although the blessing of a daughter was deniged me; which, if we had had one, Gamp would certainly have drunk its little shoes right off its feet, as with our precious boy he did, and arterward send the child a errand to sell his wooden leg for any money it would fetch as matches in the rough, and bring it home in liquor; which was truly done beyond his years, for ev’ry individgle penny that child lost at toss or buy for kidney ones; and come home arterwards quite bold, to break the news, and offering to drown himself if sech would be a satisfaction to his parents.—Oh yes, you do know, sir,’ said Mrs Gamp, wiping her eye with her shawl, and resuming the thread of her discourse. ‘There’s something besides births and berryins in the newspapers, an’t there, Mr Mould?’
Mr Mould winked at Mrs Mould, whom he had by this time taken on his knee, and said: ‘No doubt. A good deal more, Mrs Gamp. Upon my life, Mrs Gamp is very far from bad, my dear!’
‘There’s marryings, an’t there, sir?’ said Mrs Gamp, while both the daughters blushed and tittered. ‘Bless their precious hearts, and well they knows it! Well you know’d it too, and well did Mrs Mould, when you was at their time of life! But my opinion is, you’re all of one age now. For as to you and Mrs Mould, sir, ever having grandchildren—’
‘Oh! Fie, fie! Nonsense, Mrs Gamp,’ replied the undertaker. ‘Devilish smart, though. Ca-pi-tal!’—this was in a whisper. ‘My dear’—aloud again—‘Mrs Gamp can drink a glass of rum, I dare say. Sit down, Mrs Gamp, sit down.’
Mrs Gamp took the chair that was nearest the door, and casting up her eyes towards the ceiling, feigned to be wholly insensible to the fact of a glass of rum being in preparation, until it was placed in her hand by one of the young ladies, when she exhibited the greatest surprise.
‘A thing,’ she said, ‘as hardly ever, Mrs Mould, occurs with me unless it is when I am indispoged, and find my half a pint of porter settling heavy on the chest. Mrs Harris often and often says to me, “Sairey Gamp,” she says, “you raly do amaze me!” “Mrs Harris,” I says to her, “why so? Give it a name, I beg.” “Telling the truth then, ma’am,” says Mrs Harris, “and shaming him as shall be nameless betwixt you and me, 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,” I says to her, “none on us knows what we can do till we tries; and wunst, when me and Gamp kept ‘ouse, I thought so too. But now,” I says, “my half a pint of porter fully satisfies; perwisin’, Mrs Harris, that it is brought reg’lar, and draw’d mild. Whether I sicks or monthlies, ma’am, I hope I does my duty, but I am but a poor woman, and I earns my living hard; therefore I do require it, which I makes confession, to be brought reg’lar and draw’d mild.”’
The precise connection between these observations and the glass of rum, did not appear; for Mrs Gamp proposing as a toast ‘The best of lucks to all!’ took off the dram in quite a scientific manner, without any further remarks.
‘And what’s your news, Mrs Gamp?’ asked Mould again, as that lady wiped her lips upon her shawl, and nibbled a corner off a soft biscuit, which she appeared to carry in her pocket as a provision against contingent drams. ‘How’s Mr Chuffey?’
‘Mr Chuffey, sir,’ she replied, ‘is jest as usual; he an’t no better and he an’t no worse. I take it very kind in the gentleman to have wrote up to you and said, “let Mrs Gamp take care of him till I come home;” but ev’rythink he does is kind. There an’t a many like him. If there was, we shouldn’t want no churches.’
‘What do you want to speak to me about, Mrs Gamp?’ said Mould, coming to the point.
‘Jest this, sir,’ Mrs Gamp returned, ‘with thanks to you for asking. There is a gent, sir, at the Bull in Holborn, as has been took ill there, and is bad abed. They have a day nurse as was recommended from Bartholomew’s; and well I knows her, Mr Mould, her name bein’ Mrs Prig, the best of creeturs. But she is otherways engaged at night, and they are in wants of night-watching; consequent she says to them, having reposed the greatest friendliness in me for twenty year, “The soberest person going, and the best of blessings in a sick room, is Mrs Gamp. Send a boy to Kingsgate Street,” she says, “and snap her up at any price, for Mrs Gamp is worth her weight and more in goldian guineas.” My landlord brings the message down to me, and says, “bein’ in a light place where you are, and this job promising so well, why not unite the two?” “No, sir,” I says, “not unbeknown to Mr Mould, and therefore do not think it. But I will go to Mr Mould,” I says, “and ast him, if you like.”’ Here she looked sideways at the undertaker, and came to a stop.
‘Night-watching, eh?’ said Mould, rubbing his chin.
‘From eight o’clock till eight, sir. I will not deceive you,’ Mrs Gamp rejoined.
‘And then go back, eh?’ said would.
‘Quite free, then, sir, to attend to Mr Chuffey. His ways bein’ quiet, and his hours early, he’d be abed, sir, nearly all the time. I will not deny,’ said Mrs Gamp with meekness, ‘that I am but a poor woman, and that the money is a object; but do not let that act upon you, Mr Mould. Rich folks may ride on camels, but it an’t so easy for ‘em to see out of a needle’s eye. That is my comfort, and I hope I knows it.’
‘Well, Mrs Gamp,’ observed Mould, ‘I don’t see any particular objection to your earning an honest penny under such circumstances. I should keep it quiet, I think, Mrs Gamp. I wouldn’t mention it to Mr Chuzzlewit on his return, for instance, unless it were necessary, or he asked you pointblank.’
‘The very words was on my lips, sir,’ Mrs Gamp rejoined. ‘Suppoging that the gent should die, I hope I might take the liberty of saying as I know’d some one in the undertaking line, and yet give no offence to you, sir?’
‘Certainly, Mrs Gamp,’ said Mould, with much condescension. ‘You may casually remark, in such a case, that we do the thing pleasantly and in a great variety of styles, and are generally considered to make it as agreeable as possible to the feelings of the survivors. But don’t obtrude it, don’t obtrude it. Easy, easy! My dear, you may as well give Mrs Gamp a card or two, if you please.’
Mrs Gamp received them, and scenting no more rum in the wind (for the bottle was locked up again) rose to take her departure.
‘Wishing ev’ry happiness to this happy family,’ said Mrs Gamp ‘with all my heart. Good arternoon, Mrs Mould! If I was Mr would I should be jealous of you, ma’am; and I’m sure, if I was you, I should be jealous of Mr Mould.’
‘Tut, tut! Bah, bah! Go along, Mrs Gamp!’ cried the delighted undertaker.
‘As to the young ladies,’ said Mrs Gamp, dropping a curtsey, ‘bless their sweet looks—how they can ever reconsize it with their duties to be so grown up with such young parents, it an’t for sech as me to give a guess at.’
‘Nonsense, nonsense. Be off, Mrs Gamp!’ cried Mould. But in the height of his gratification he actually pinched Mrs Mould as he said it.
‘I’ll tell you what, my dear,’ he observed, when Mrs Gamp had at last withdrawn and shut the door, ‘that’s a ve-ry shrewd woman. That’s a woman whose intellect is immensely superior to her station in life. That’s a woman who observes and reflects in an uncommon manner. She’s the sort of woman now,’ said Mould, drawing his silk handkerchief over his head again, and composing himself for a nap ‘one would almost feel disposed to bury for nothing; and do it neatly, too!’
Mrs Mould and her daughters fully concurred in these remarks; the subject of which had by this time reached the street, where she experienced so much inconvenience from the air, that she was obliged to stand under an archway for a short time, to recover herself. Even after this precaution, she walked so unsteadily as to attract the compassionate regards of divers kind-hearted boys, who took the liveliest interest in her disorder; and in their simple language bade her be of good cheer, for she was ‘only a little screwed.’
Whatever she was, or whatever name the vocabulary of medical science would have bestowed upon her malady, Mrs Gamp was perfectly acquainted with the way home again; and arriving at the house of Anthony Chuzzlewit & Son, lay down to rest. Remaining there until seven o’clock in the evening, and then persuading poor old Chuffey to betake himself to bed, she sallied forth upon her new engagement. First, she went to her private lodgings in Kingsgate Street, for a bundle of robes and wrappings comfortable in the night season; and then repaired to the Bull in Holborn, which she reached as the clocks were striking eight.
As she turned into the yard, she stopped; for the landlord, landlady, ............