Dickens' Women (3 page)

‘Presiding over an establishment like this, makes sad havoc with the features, my dear Miss Pecksniffs,' said Mrs Todgers. ‘The gravy alone, is enough to add twenty years to one's age, I do assure you.'

‘Lor!' cried the two Miss Pecksniffs.

‘The anxiety of that one item, my dears,' said Mrs Todgers, ‘keeps the mind continually upon the stretch.
There is no such passion in human nature, as the passion for gravy among commercial gentlemen. It's nothing to say a joint won't yield – a whole animal wouldn't yield – the amount of gravy they expect each day at dinner. And what I have undergone in consequence,' cried Mrs Todgers, raising her eyes and shaking her head, ‘no one would believe!'

‘I take an interest, my lord,' said Mrs Wititterly, with a faint smile, ‘such an interest in the drama.'

‘Ye-es. It's very interesting,' replied Lord Verisopht.

‘I'm always ill after Shakespeare,' said Mrs Wititterly. ‘I scarcely exist the next day; I find the reaction so very great after a tragedy, my lord, and Shakespeare is such a
delicious
creature.'

‘Ye-es!' replied Lord Verisopht. ‘He was a clayver man.'

‘Do you know, my lord,' said Mrs Wititterly, after a long silence, ‘I find I take so much more interest in his plays, after having been to that dear little dull house he was born in! Were you ever there, my lord?'

‘No, nayver,' replied Verisopht.

‘Then really you ought to go, my lord,' returned Mrs Wititterly, in very languid and drawling accents. ‘I don't know how it is, but after you've seen the place and written your name in the little book, somehow or other you seem to be inspired; it kindles up quite a fire within one.'

‘I'm coming. Is it Mrs Perkins? What, Mr Whilks! Don't say it's you, Mr Whilks, and that poor creeture Mrs Whilks with not even a pincushion ready. Don't say it's you, Mr Whilks! And so the gentleman's dead, sir! Ah! The more's the pity. 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!

‘Ah dear! When Gamp was summonsed to his long home, and I see him a lying in the 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 it wasn't for the nerve a little sip of liquor gives me I never could go through with what I sometimes has to do.

‘“Mrs Harris,” I says to my friend Mrs Harris 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 am engaged to do, according to the best of my ability.”

‘“Mrs Gamp,” she says in answer, “if ever there was a sober creeture 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.”

‘“Mrs Harris,” I says to her, “don't name the charge, for if I could afford to lay all my fellow-creeturs out for nothink, I would gladly do it, sich is the love I bears 'em.”

‘Thank you sir. How are you Mr Mould? Everything be nice and comfortable about the deceased. You know me of old, I hope, and so does Mrs Mould, your 'andsome pardner sir and so does the two sweet, young ladies, your darters; although the blessing of a daughter was deniged myself, which if we had one, Gamp would certainly have drunk its little shoes right off its feet.

‘But them two sweet, young ladies of yourn, Mr Mould, as I knowed afore a tooth in their pretty heads was cut, and have many a time seen – ah! the dear creeturs! a-playing at berryins down in the shop and a-follerin' the order-book to its long home in the iron safe. Young ladies with such faces as your darters thinks of somethin' else besides berryins'; don't they, sir? Thinks o' marryin's; don't they, sir?

‘You ought to know that you was born in a wale, and that you live in a wale, and that you must take the consequences of sich a sitivation.

‘I takes new bread, my dear, with jest a little pat o' fredge butter and a morsel o' cheese: and whatever you do, young woman, don't bring me more than a shillingsworth of gin-
and-water
, when I rings the bell a second time; for that is always my allowange, and I never takes a drop beyond.

‘Rich folk may ride on camels, but it ain't so easy for them to see out of a needle's eye. That is my comfort and I hopes I knows it. Drat the old wexagious creetur, I a'most forgot your piller, I declare! There! Now you're as comfortable as you need to be, I'm sure! and I'm going to be comfortable too.'

I am waited on by an elderly woman with a chronic sniff, who, at the shadowy hour of half past nine o'clock of every evening, gives
admittance
at the street door to a meagre and mouldy old man whom I have never yet seen detached from a flat pint of beer in a pewter pot.

The meagre and mouldy old man is her husband, and the pair have a dejected consciousness that they are not justified in appearing on the surface of the earth.

They come out of some nook when London empties itself and go in again when it fills. They make their bed in the lowest and remotest corner of the basement and they smell of bed, and have no possessions but bed: unless it be (which I rather gather from an undercurrent of flavour on them) cheese.

The most extraordinary circumstance I have traced in
connection
with this aged couple is that there is a Miss Klem, their daughter, apparently ten years older than either of them, who also has a bed and smells of it, and carries it about the earth at dusk and hides it in deserted houses.

I came into this piece of knowledge through Mrs Klem's beseeching me to sanction the sheltering of Miss Klem under that roof for a single night, ‘between her takin' care of the upper part in Pall Mall which the family of his back, and a 'ouse in Serjameses-Street, which the family of leaves town ter-morrer'.

I gave my gracious consent, and in the shadowy hours Miss Klem became perceptible on the doorstep wrestling with a bed in a bundle. Where she made it up for the night I cannot positively state, but I think in a sink. I know that with the instinct of a reptile or insect, she stowed it and herself away in deep obscurity.

‘There, child, read that.'

Nell walked round and read aloud the inscription, in enormous black letters, JARLEY'S WAX WORK.

‘I never saw any wax-work, ma'am,' said Nell. ‘Is it funnier than Punch?'

‘Funnier!' said Mrs Jarley in a shrill voice. ‘It is not funny at all.'

‘Oh!' said Nell, with all possible humility.

‘It isn't funny at all,' repeated Mrs Jarley.

‘It's calm and – what's that word again – critical? – no – classical, that's it – it's calm and classical. No low beatings and
knockings about, no jokings and squeakings like your precious Punches, but always the same, with a constantly unchanging air of coldness and gentility; and so like life, that if wax-work only spoke and walked about, you'd hardly know the difference.

‘I won't go so far as to say, that, as it is, I've seen wax-work quite like life, but I've certainly seen some life that was exactly like wax-work.

‘That, ladies and gentlemen, is Jasper Packlemerton of
atrocious
memory, who courted and married fourteen wives and destroyed them all by tickling the soles of their feet when they was sleeping in the consciousness of innocence and virtue.

‘On being brought to the scaffold and asked if he was sorry for what he had done, he replied yes, he was sorry for having let 'em off so easy and hoped all Christian husbands would pardon him the offence.

‘Let this be a warning to all young ladies to be particular in the character of the gentlemen of their choice.

‘Observe that his fingers is curled as if in the act of tickling, and that his face is represented with a wink, as he appeared when committing his barbarous murders.'

When Nell knew all about Mr Packlemerton and could say it without faltering, Mrs Jarley passed on to the fat man, and then to the thin man, the tall man, the short man, the old lady who died of dancing at a hundred and thirty-two, the wild boy of the woods, the woman who poisoned fourteen families with pickled walnuts, and other historical characters and interesting but misguided individuals.

‘Finally, that,' said Mrs Jarley, ‘is an unfortunate Maid of Honour in the time of Queen Elizabeth, who died from pricking her finger in consequence of working upon a Sunday.

‘Observe the blood which is trickling from her finger; also the gold-eyed needle of the period with which she is at work.'