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.