neat in her dress, with an awful bloodless paleness in her face, and a
hopeless consumptive languor in her movements. She has only one child
to take care of--a robust little girl of cruelly active habits. There
is a stone bench opposite my window; and on this the wan and weakly
nursemaid often sits, not bumping down on it with the heavy thump of
honest exhaustion, but sinking on it listlessly, as if in changing
from walking to sitting she were only passing from one form of
weariness to another. The robust child remains mercifully near the
feeble guardian for a few minutes--then becomes, on a sudden,
pitilessly active again, laughs and dances from a distance, when the
nurse makes weary signs to her, and runs away altogether, when she is
faintly entreated to be quiet for a few minutes longer. The nurse
looks after her in despair for a moment, draws her neat black shawl,
with a shiver, over her sharp shoulders, rises resignedly, and
disappears from my eyes in pursuit of the pitiless child. I see this
mournful little drama acted many times over, always in the same way,
and wonder sadly how long the wan nursemaid will hold out. Not being a
family man, and having nervously-acute sympathies for sickness and
suffering just now, it would afford me genuine satisfaction to see the
oppressed nurse beat the tyrannical child; but she seems fond of the
little despot; and, besides, she is so weak that if it came to blows,
I am afraid, grown woman as she is, that she might get the worst of
it.
The men whom I observe, are not such interesting cases; but they
exhibit, in a minor degree, the peculiarities that are sure to attract
my attention. The first of the two is a gentleman--lonely and rich, as
I imagine. He is fat, yellow, and gloomy, and has evidently been
ordered horse-exercise for the benefit of his health. He rides a quiet
English cob; never has any friend with him; never--so far as I can
see--exchanges greetings with any other horseman; is never smiled at
from a carriage, nor bowed to by a foot-passenger. He rides with his
flaccid chin sunk on his fat breast; sits his horse as if his legs
were stuffed and his back boneless; always attracts me because he is
the picture of dyspeptic wretchedness, and always passes me at the
same mournful jog-trot pace. The second man is a police agent. I
cannot sympathise with him in consequence of his profession; but I can
observe, with a certain lukewarm interest, that he is all but worked
to death. He yawns and stretches himself in corners; sometimes drops
furtively on to the stone bench before my window; then starts up from
it suddenly, as if he felt himself falling asleep the moment he sat
down. He has hollow places where other people have cheeks; and,
judging by his walk, must be quite incapable of running after a
prisoner who might take to flight. On the whole, he presents to my
mind the curious spectacle of a languid man trying to adapt himself to
a brisk business, and failing palpably in the effort. As the sick
child of a thriving system he attracts my attention. I devoutly hope
that he will not return the compliment by honouring me with his
notice.
Such are the few short steps that I take in advance to get a
moderately close glance at French humanity. If my view is absurdly
limited to my own dim horizon, this defect has at least one advantage
for the reader: it prevents all danger of my troubling him with my
ideas and observations at any great length. If other people value this
virtue of brevity in writers, orators, and preachers as sincerely as I
do, perhaps I may hope, on account of my short range of observation
and my few words, to get another hearing, if I write the second
chapter of my invalid experiences. I began the first half of them (as
herein related) in France; and I am now completing the second (yet to
be recorded) in England. When the curtain rises on my sick bed again,
the scene will be London.
CHAPTER THE SECOND.--MY LONDON LODGING.
I last had the honour of presenting myself to the reader's notice in
the character of an invalid laid up in lodgings at Paris. Let me now
be permitted to reappear as an invalid laid up, for the time being, in
a London cab. Let it be imagined that I have got through the journey
from Paris, greatly to my own surprise and satisfaction, without
breaking down by the way; that I have slept one night at a London
hotel for the first time in my life; and that I am now helplessly
adrift, looking out for Furnished Apartments as near as may be to my
doctor's place of abode.
The cab is fusty, the driver is sulky, the morning is foggy. A dry
dog-kennel would be a pleasant refuge by comparison with the miserable
vehicle in which I am now jolting my way over the cruel London stones.
On our road to my doctor's neighbourhood we pass through Smeary
Street, a locality well known to the inhabitants of Northern London. I
feel that I can go no further. I remember that some friends of mine
live not far off, and I recklessly emancipate myself from the torment
of the cab, by stopping the driver at the very first house in the
windows of which I see a bill with the announcement that Apartments
are to Let.
The door is opened by a tall muscular woman, with a knobbed face and
knotty arms besprinkled with a layer of grate-dust in a state of
impalpable powder. She shows me up into a second-floor front bed-room.
My first look of scrutiny is naturally directed at the bed. It is of
the negative sort, neither dirty nor clean; but, by its side, I see a
positive advantage in connection with it, in the shape of a long
mahogany shelf, fixed into the wall a few inches above the bed, and
extending down its whole length from head to foot. My sick man's
involuntary egotism is as predominant an impulse within me at London
as at Paris. I think directly of my invalid's knick-knacks: I see
that the mahogany shelf will serve to keep them all within my reach
when I am in bed; I know that it will be wanted for no other purpose
than that to which I design to put it; that it need not be cleared for
dinner every day, like a table, or disturbed when the servant cleans
the room, like a moveable stand. I satisfy myself that it holds out
all these rare advantages to me, in my peculiar situation, and I snap
at them on the instant--or, in other words, I take the room
immediately.
If I had been in health, I think I should have had two cogent reasons
for acting otherwise, and seeking apartments elsewhere. In the first
place, I should have observed that the room was not very clean or very
comfortably furnished. I should have noticed that the stained and torn
drugget on the floor displayed a margin of dirty boards all round the
bed-chamber; and I should no sooner have set eyes on the venerable
arm-chair by the bedside than I should have heard it saying privately
in my ear, in an ominous language of its own, "Stranger, I am let to
the Fleas: take me at your peril." Even if these signs and portents
had not been enough to send me out into the street again, I should
certainly have found the requisite warning to quit the house written
legibly in the face, figure, and manner of the landlady. I should
probably have seen something to distrust and dislike in everything
connected with her, down even to her name, which was Mrs. Glutch; I
should have made my escape into the street again, and should not have
ventured near it any more for the rest of the day. But as it was, my
fatal invalid prepossessions blinded me to everything but the
unexpected blessing of that mahogany shelf by the bedside. I
overlooked the torn drugget, the flea-peopled arm-chair, and the
knotty-faced landlady with the ominous name. The shelf was bait enough
for me, and the moment the trap was open, I collected my train of
medicine bottles and confidently walked in.
It is a general subject of remark among observant travellers, that the
two nations of the civilized world which appear to be most widely
separated as to the external aspects of life respectively presented by
them, are also the two which are most closely brought together by the
neighbourly ties of local situation. Before I had been many days
established in Smeary Street, I found that I myself, in my own
circumscribed sphere, offered a remarkable example of the truth of the
observation just recorded. The strong contrast between my present and
my past life was a small individual proof of the great social
contrasts between England and France.
I have truly presented myself at Paris, as living independently in a
little toy house of my own; as looking out upon a scene of almost
perpetual brightness and gaiety; and as having people to attend on me
whose blessed levity of disposition kept them always cheerful, always
quaintly characteristic, always unexpectedly amusing, even to the
languid eye of a sick man. With equal candour I must now record of my
in-door life in London, that it was passed with many other lodgers, in
a large house without a vestige of toy-shop prettiness in any part of
it. I must acknowledge that I looked out upon drab-coloured walls and
serious faces through a smoke-laden atmosphere; and I must admit that
I was waited on (so far as the actual house-service was concerned) by
people whose cloudy countenances seemed unconscious of a gleam of
inner sunshine for days and days together. Nor did the contrast end
here. In my lodgings at Paris, I have represented myself as having
about me a variety of animate and inanimate objects which I might
notice or not just as I pleased, and as using my freedom of choice in
a curiously partial and restricted manner, in consequence of the
narrowing effect of my illness on my sympathies and powers of
observation. In my London lodging, I enjoyed no such liberty. I could
not get even a temporary freedom of selection, except by fighting for
it resolutely at odds and ends of time. I had but one object which
offered itself to my observation, which perpetually presented itself,
which insisted on being noticed, no matter how mentally unfit and
morally unwilling my illness rendered me to observe it; and that
object was--my landlady, Mrs. Glutch.
Behold me then, now, no longer a free agent; no longer a fanciful
invalid with caprices to confide to the ear of the patient reader. My
health is no better in Smeary Street than it was in the Champs
Elysées; I take as much medicine in London as I took in Paris; but my
character is altered in spite of myself, and the form and colour of my
present fragment of writing will, I fear, but too truly reflect the
change.
I _was_ a sick man with several things to discourse of--I _am_ a sick
man with only one topic to talk about. I may escape from it for a few
sentences at a time, in these pages, as I escaped from it for a few
minutes at a time in Smeary Street; but the burden of my song will be
now, what the burden of my life has been lately--my landlady. I am
going to begin with her--I shall go on with her--I shall try to wander
away from her--I shall get back to her--I shall end with her. She will
mix herself up with everything I have to say; will intrude on my
observations out of window; will get into my victuals and drink, and
drops, and draughts, and pills; will come between me and my studies of
character among maids-of-all-work, in this too faithful narrative,
just as she did in the real scenes which it endeavours to represent.
While I make this acknowledgment as a proper warning to the reader
that I have changed into a monotonous sick man since we met last, let
me add, in justice to myself, that my one subject has at least the
advantage of being a terrible one. Think of a sick fly waited on by a
healthy blue-bottle, and you will have a fair idea of the relative
proportions and positions of myself and Mrs. Glutch.
I have hardly been settled an hour in my second-floor front room
before the conviction is forced on my mind that Mrs. Glutch is
resolved to make a conquest of me--of the maternal, or platonic kind,
let me hasten to add, so as to stop the mouth of scandal before it is
well opened. I find that she presents herself before me in the
character of a woman suffused in a gentle melancholy, proceeding from
perpetual sympathy for my suffering condition. It is part of my
character, as a sick man, that I know by instinct when people really
pity me, just as children and dogs know when people really like them;
and I have, consequently, not been five minutes in Mrs. Glutch's
society, before I know that her sympathy for me is entirely of that
sort of which (in the commercial phrase) a large assortment is always
on hand. I take no pains to conceal from Mrs. Glutch that I have found
her out; but she is too innocent to understand me, and goes on
sympathising in the very face of detection. She becomes, in spite of
her knobbed face, knotty arms, and great stature and strength,
languidly sentimental in manner, the moment she enters my room.
Language runs out of her in a perpetual flow, and politeness encircles
her as with a halo that can never be dimmed. "I have been so anxious
about you!" is her first morning's salutation to me. The words are
preceded by a faint cough, and followed by an expressively weary sigh,
as if she had passed a sleepless night on my account. The next morning
she appears with a bunch of wallflowers in her mighty fist, and with
another faint prefatory cough, "I beg pardon, sir; but I have brought
you a few flowers. I think they relieve the mind." The expressively
weary sigh follows again, as if it would suggest this time that she
has toiled into the country to gather me the flowers at early dawn. I
do not find, strange as it may seem, that they relieve my mind at all;
but of course I say, "Thank you."--"Thank _you_, sir," rejoins Mrs.
Glutch--for it is a part of this woman's system of oppressive
politeness always to thank me for thanking her. She invariably
contrives to have the last word, no matter in what circumstances the
courteous contention which is the main characteristic of our daily
intercourse, may take its rise.
Let us say, for instance, that she comes into my room and gets into my
way (which she always does) at the very time when she ought to be out
of it--her first words are necessarily, "I beg pardon." I growl (not
so brutally as I could wish, being weak), "Never mind!"--"Thank you,
sir," says Mrs. Glutch, and coughs faintly, and sighs, and delays
going out as long as possible. Or, take another example:--"Mrs.
Glutch, this plate's dirty."--"I am much obliged to you, sir, for
telling me of it."--"It isn't the first dirty plate I have
had."--"Really now, sir?"--"You may take away the fork; for that is
dirty too."--"Thank you, sir."--Oh for one hour of my little Parisian
portress! Oh for one day's respite from the politeness of Mrs. Glutch!
Let me try if I cannot get away from the subject for a little while.
What have I to say about the other lodgers in the house? Not much; for
how can I take any interest in people who never make inquiries after
my health, though they must all know, by the frequent visits of the
doctor and the chemist's boy, that I am ill?
The first floor is inhabited by a mysterious old gentleman, and his
valet. He brought three cart-loads of gorgeous furniture with him, to
fit up two rooms--he possesses an organ, on which, greatly to his
credit, he never plays--he receives perfumed notes, goes out
beautifully dressed, is brought back in private carriages, with tall
footmen in attendance to make as much noise as possible with the
door-knocker. Nobody knows where he comes from, or believes that he
passes in the house under his real name. If any aged aristocrat be
missing from the world of fashion, we rather think we have got him in
Smeary Street, and should feel willing to give him up to his rightful
owners on payment of a liberal reward. Next door to me, in the second
floor back, I hear a hollow cough and sometimes a whispering; but I
know nothing for certain--not even whether the hollow cougher is also
the whisperer, or whether they are two, or whether there is or is not
a third silent and Samaritan person who relieves the cough and listens
to the whisper. Above me, in the attics, there is a matutinal stamping
and creaking of boots, which go down-stairs, at an early hour, in a
hurry, which never return all day, but which come up-stairs again in a
hurry late at night. The boots evidently belong to shopmen or clerks.
Below, in the parlours, there seems to be a migratory population,
which comes in one week and goes out the next, and is, in some cases,
not at all to be depended upon in the matter of paying rent. I happen
to discover this latter fact, late one night, in rather an alarming
and unexpected manner. Just before bedtime I descend, candle in hand,
to a small back room, at the end of the passage, on the ground floor
(used all day for the reception of general visitors, and empty, as I
rashly infer, all night), for the purpose of getting a sofa cushion to
eke out my scanty allowance of pillows. I no sooner open the door and
approach the sofa than I behold, to my horror and amazement, Mrs.
Glutch coiled up on it, with all her clothes on, and with a wavy,
coffee-coloured wrapper flung over her shoulders. Before I can turn
round to run away, she is on her legs, wide awake in an instant, and
politer than ever. She makes me a long speech of explanation, which
begins with "I beg pardon," and ends with "Thank you, sir;" and from
the substance of which I gather that the parlour lodgers for the past
week are going away the next morning; that they are the likeliest
people in the world to forget to pay their lawful debts; and that Mrs.
Glutch is going to lie in ambush for them all night, in the
coffee-coloured wrapper, ready the instant the parlour door opens, to
spring out into the passage and call for her rent.
What am I about? I am relapsing insensibly into the inevitable and
abhorrent subject of Mrs. Glutch, exactly in accordance with my
foreboding of a few pages back. Let me make one more attempt to get
away from my landlady. If I try to describe my room, I am sure to get
back to her, because she is always in it. Suppose I get out of the
house altogether, and escape into the street?
All men, I imagine, have an interest of some kind in the locality in
which they live. My interest in Smeary Street is entirely associated
with my daily meals, which are publicly paraded all day long on the
pavement. In explanation of this rather original course of proceeding,
I must mention that I am ordered to eat "little and often," and must
add, that I cannot obey the direction if the food is cooked on the
premises in which I live, because I have had the misfortune to look
down certain underground stairs and to discover that in the lowest
depth of dirt, which I take to be the stairs themselves, there is a
lower deep still, which is the kitchen at the bottom of them. Under
these peculiar circumstances, I am reduced to appeal for nourishment
and cleanliness in combination, to the tender mercies (and kitchen) of
the friends in my neighbourhood, to whom I have alluded at the outset
of this narrative. They commiserate and help me with the readiest
kindness. Devoted messengers, laden with light food, pass and repass
all day long between their house and my bedroom. The dulness of Smeary
Street is enlivened by perpetual snacks carried in public procession.
The eyes of my opposite neighbours, staring out of window, and not
looking as if they cared about my being ill, are regaled from morning
to night by passing dishes and basins, which go westward full and
steaming, and return eastward eloquently empty. My neighbourhood knows
when I dine, and can smell out, if it pleases, what I have for dinner.
The early housemaid kneeling on the doorstep, can stay her scrubbing
hand and turn her pensive head and scan my simple breakfast, before I
know what it will be myself. The mid-day idler, lounging along Smeary
Street, is often sweetly reminded of his own luncheon by meeting mine.
Friends who knock at my door may smell my dinner behind them, and know
how I am keeping up my stamina, before they have had time to inquire
after my health. My supper makes the outer darkness savoury as the
evening closes in; and my empty dishes startle the gathering silence
with convivial clatter as they wend on their homeward way the last
thing at night.
Is there no dark side to this bright picture? Is there never any hitch
in these friendly arrangements for feeding me in the cleanest way, on
the most appetising diet? Yes--there is a hitch. Will you give it a
name? I will. Its name is Mrs. Glutch.
It is, I am well aware, only to be expected that my landlady should
resent the tacit condemnation of her cleanliness and cookery implied
in the dietary arrangements which I have made with my friends. If she
would only express her sense of offence by sulking or flying into a
passion, I should not complain; for in the first case supposed, I
might get the better of her by noticing nothing, and, in the second, I
might hope, in course of time, to smooth her down by soft answers and
polite prevarications. But the means she actually takes of punishing
me for my too acute sense of the dirtiness of her kitchen, are of
such a diabolically ingenious nature, and involve such a continuous
series of small persecutions, that I am rendered, from first to last,
quite powerless to oppose her. Shall I describe her plan of annoyance?
I _must_ describe it--I must return to my one prohibited topic (as I
foreboded I should) in spite of myself.
Mrs. Glutch, then, instead of visiting her wrath on me, or my food, or
my friends, or my friends' messengers, avenges herself entirely on
their tray-cloths and dishes. She does not tear the first nor break
the second--for that would be only a simple and primitive system of
persecution--but she smuggles them, one by one, out of my room, and
merges them inextricably with her own property, in the grimy regions
of the kitchen. She has a power of invisibly secreting the largest
pie-dishes, and the most voluminous cloths, under my very eyes, which
I can compare to nothing but sleight of hand. Every morning I see
table utensils which my friends lend me, ranged ready to go back, in
my own room. Every evening, when they are wanted, I find that some of
them are missing, and that my landlady is even more surprised by that
circumstance than I am myself. If my friends' servant ventures to say,
in her presence, that the cook wants her yesterday's tray-cloth, and
if I refer him to Mrs. Glutch, the immoveable woman only sniffs,
tosses her head, and "wonders how the young man can have demeaned
himself by bringing her such a peremptory message." If I try on my own
sole responsibility to recover the missing property, she lets me see,
by her manner at the outset, that she thinks I suspect her of stealing
it. If I take no notice of this manœuvre, and innocently persist in
asking additional questions about the missing object, the following is
a sample of the kind of dialogue that is sure to pass between us:--
"I think, Mrs. Glutch"----
"Yes, sir!"
"I think one of my friends' large pudding-basins has gone
down-stairs."
"Really, now, sir? A large pudding-basin? No: I think not."
"But I can't find it up here, and it is wanted back."
"Naturally, sir."
"I put it on the drawers, Mrs. Glutch, ready to go back, last night."
"Did you, indeed, sir?"
"Perhaps the servant took it down-stairs to clean it?"
"Not at all likely, sir. If you will please to remember, you told her
last Monday evening--or, no, I beg pardon--last Tuesday morning, that
your friends cleaned up their own dishes, and that their things was
not to be touched."
"Perhaps you took it down-stairs then yourself, Mrs. Glutch, by
mistake?"
"I, sir! I didn't. I couldn't. Why should I? I think you said a large
pudding-basin, sir?"
"Yes, I did say so."
"I have ten large pudding-basins of my own, sir."
"I am very glad to hear it. Will you be so good as to look among them,
and see if my friends' basin has not got mixed up with your crockery?"
Mrs. Glutch turns very red in the face, slowly scratches her muscular
arms, as if she felt a sense of pugilistic irritation in them, looks
at me steadily with a pair of glaring eyes, and leaves the room at the
slowest possible pace. I wait and ring--wait and ring--wait and ring.
After the third waiting and the third ringing, she reappears, redder
of face and slower of march than before, with the missing article of
property held out before her at arm's length.
"I beg pardon, sir," she says, "but is this anything like your
friends' large pudding-basin?"
"That is the basin itself, Mrs. Glutch."
"Really, now, sir? Well, as you seem so positive, it isn't for me to
contradict you. But I hope I shall give no offence if I mention that I
had ten large pudding-basins of my own, and that I miss one of them."