Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens (ebooks children's books free TXT) 📕

On the little bell giving clamorous notice of a visitor’s approach (for Mr Bailey came in at the door with a lunge, to get as much sound out of the bell as possible), Poll Sweedlepipe desisted from the contemplation of a favourite owl, and gave his young friend hearty welcome.

‘Why, you look smarter by day,’ said Poll, ‘than you do by candle-light. I never see such a tight young dasher.’

‘Reether so, Polly. How’s our fair friend, Sairah?’

‘Oh, she’s pretty well,’ said Poll. ‘She’s at home.’

‘There’s the remains of a fine woman about Sairah, Poll,’ observed Mr Bailey, with genteel indifference.

‘Oh!’ thought Poll, ‘he’s old. He must be very old!’

‘Too much crumb, you know,’ said Mr Bailey; ‘too fat, Poll. But there’s many worse at her time of life’

‘The very owl’s a-opening his eyes!’ thought Poll. ‘I don’t wonder at it in a bird of his opinions.’

He happened to have been sharpening his razors, which were lying open in a row, while a huge strop dangled from the wall. Glancing at these preparations, Mr Bailey stroked his chin, and a thought appeared to occur to him.

‘Poll,’ he said, ‘I ain’t as neat as I could wish about the gills. Being here, I may as well have a shave, and get trimmed close.’

The barber stood aghast; but Mr Bailey divested himself of his neckcloth, and sat down in the easy shaving chair with all the dignity and confidence in life. There was no resisting his manner. The evidence of sight and touch became as nothing. His chin was as smooth as a new-laid egg or a scraped Dutch cheese; but Poll Sweedlepipe wouldn’t have ventured to deny, on affidavit, that he had the beard of a Jewish rabbi.

‘Go WITH the grain, Poll, all round, please,’ said Mr Bailey, screwing up his face for the reception of the lather. ‘You may do wot you like with the bits of whisker. I don’t care for ‘em.’

The meek little barber stood gazing at him with the brush and soap-dish in his hand, stirring them round and round in a ludicrous uncertainty, as if he were disabled by some fascination from beginning. At last he made a dash at Mr Bailey’s cheek. Then he stopped again, as if the ghost of a beard had suddenly receded from his touch; but receiving mild encouragement from Mr Bailey, in the form of an adjuration to ‘Go in and win,’ he lathered him bountifully. Mr Bailey smiled through the suds in his satisfaction. ‘Gently over the stones, Poll. Go a tip-toe over the pimples!’

Poll Sweedlepipe obeyed, and scraped the lather off again with particular care. Mr Bailey squinted at every successive dab, as it was deposited on a cloth on his left shoulder, and seemed, with a microscopic eye, to detect some bristles in it; for he murmured more than once ‘Reether redder than I could wish, Poll.’ The operation being concluded, Poll fell back and stared at him again, while Mr Bailey, wiping his face on the jack-towel, remarked, ‘that arter late hours nothing freshened up a man so much as a easy shave.’

He was in the act of tying his cravat at the glass, without his coat, and Poll had wiped his razor, ready for the next customer, when Mrs Gamp, coming downstairs, looked in at the shop-door to give the barber neighbourly good day. Feeling for her unfortunate situation, in having conceived a regard for himself which it was not in the nature of things that he could return, Mr Bailey hastened to soothe her with words of kindness.

‘Hallo!’ he said, ‘Sairah! I needn’t ask you how you’ve been this long time, for you’re in full bloom. All a-blowin and a-growin; ain’t she, Polly?’

‘Why, drat the Bragian boldness of that boy!’ cried Mrs Gamp, though not displeased. ‘What a imperent young sparrow it is! I wouldn’t be that creetur’s mother not for fifty pound!’

Mr Bailey regarded this as a delicate confession of her attachment, and a hint that no pecuniary gain could recompense her for its being rendered hopeless. He felt flattered. Disinterested affection is always flattering.

‘Ah, dear!’ moaned Mrs Gamp, sinking into the shaving chair, ‘that there blessed Bull, Mr Sweedlepipe, has done his wery best to conker me. Of all the trying inwalieges in this walley of the shadder, that one beats ‘em black and blue.’

It was the practice of Mrs Gamp and her friends in the profession, to say this of all the easy customers; as having at once the effect of discouraging competitors for office, and accounting for the necessity of high living on the part of the nurses.

‘Talk of constitooshun!’ Mrs Gamp observed. ‘A person’s constitooshun need be made of bricks to stand it. Mrs Harris jestly says to me, but t’other day, “Oh! Sairey Gamp,” she says, “how is it done?” “Mrs Harris, ma’am,” I says to her, “we gives no trust ourselves, and puts a deal o’trust elsevere; these is our religious feelins, and we finds ‘em answer.” “Sairey,” says Mrs Harris, “sech is life. Vich likeways is the hend of all things!”’

The barber gave a soft murmur, as much as to say that Mrs Harris’s remark, though perhaps not quite so intelligible as could be desired from such an authority, did equal honour to her head and to her heart.

‘And here,’ continued Mrs Gamp, ‘and here am I a-goin twenty mile in distant, on as wentersome a chance as ever any one as monthlied ever run, I do believe. Says Mrs Harris, with a woman’s and a mother’s art a-beatin in her human breast, she says to me, “You’re not a-goin, Sairey, Lord forgive you!” “Why am I not a-goin, Mrs Harris?” I replies. “Mrs Gill,” I says, “wos never wrong with six; and is it likely, ma’am—I ast you as a mother—that she will begin to be unreg’lar now? Often and often have I heerd him say,” I says to Mrs Harris, meaning Mr Gill, “that he would back his wife agen Moore’s almanack, to name the very day and hour, for ninepence farden. IS it likely, ma’am,” I says, “as she will fail this once?” Says Mrs Harris “No, ma’am, not in the course of natur. But,” she says, the tears a-fillin in her eyes, “you knows much betterer than me, with your experienge, how little puts us out. A Punch’s show,” she says, “a chimbley sweep, a newfundlan dog, or a drunkin man a-comin round the corner sharp may do it.” So it may, Mr Sweedlepipes,’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘there’s no deniging of it; and though my books is clear for a full week, I takes a anxious art along with me, I do assure you, sir.’

‘You’re so full of zeal, you see!’ said Poll. ‘You worrit yourself so.’

‘Worrit myself!’ cried Mrs Gamp, raising her hands and turning up her eyes. ‘You speak truth in that, sir, if you never speaks no more ‘twixt this and when two Sundays jines together. I feels the sufferins of other people more than I feels my own, though no one mayn’t suppoge it. The families I’ve had,’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘if all was knowd and credit done where credit’s doo, would take a week to chris’en at Saint Polge’s fontin!’

‘Where’s the patient goin?’ asked Sweedlepipe.

‘Into Har’fordshire, which is his native air. But native airs nor native graces neither,’ Mrs Gamp observed, ‘won’t bring HIM round.’

‘So bad as that?’ inquired the wistful barber. ‘Indeed!’

Mrs Gamp shook her head mysteriously, and pursed up her lips. ‘There’s fevers of the mind,’ she said, ‘as well as body. You may take your slime drafts till you files into the air with efferwescence; but you won’t cure that.’

‘Ah!’ said the barber, opening his eyes, and putting on his raven aspect; ‘Lor!’

‘No. You may make yourself as light as any gash balloon,’ said Mrs Gamp. ‘But talk, when you’re wrong in your head and when you’re in your sleep, of certain things; and you’ll be heavy in your mind.’

‘Of what kind of things now?’ inquired Poll, greedily biting his nails in his great interest. ‘Ghosts?’

Mrs Gamp, who perhaps had been already tempted further than she had intended to go, by the barber’s stimulating curiosity, gave a sniff of uncommon significance, and said, it didn’t signify.

‘I’m a-goin down with my patient in the coach this arternoon,’ she proceeded. ‘I’m a-goin to stop with him a day or so, till he gets a country nuss (drat them country nusses, much the orkard hussies knows about their bis’ness); and then I’m a-comin back; and that’s my trouble, Mr Sweedlepipes. But I hope that everythink’ll only go on right and comfortable as long as I’m away; perwisin which, as Mrs Harris says, Mrs Gill is welcome to choose her own time; all times of the day and night bein’ equally the same to me.’

During the progress of the foregoing remarks, which Mrs Gamp had addressed exclusively to the barber, Mr Bailey had been tying his cravat, getting on his coat, and making hideous faces at himself in the glass. Being now personally addressed by Mrs Gamp, he turned round, and mingled in the conversation.

‘You ain’t been in the City, I suppose, sir, since we was all three there together,’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘at Mr Chuzzlewit’s?’

‘Yes, I have, Sairah. I was there last night.’

‘Last night!’ cried the barber.

‘Yes, Poll, reether so. You can call it this morning, if you like to be particular. He dined with us.’

‘Who does that young Limb mean by “hus?”’ said Mrs Gamp, with most impatient emphasis.

‘Me and my Governor, Sairah. He dined at our house. We wos very merry, Sairah. So much so, that I was obliged to see him home in a hackney coach at three o’clock in the morning.’ It was on the tip of the boy’s tongue to relate what had followed; but remembering how easily it might be carried to his master’s ears, and the repeated cautions he had had from Mr Crimple ‘not to chatter,’ he checked himself; adding, only, ‘She was sitting up, expecting him.’

‘And all things considered,’ said Mrs Gamp sharply, ‘she might have know’d better than to go a-tirin herself out, by doin’ anythink of the sort. Did they seem pretty pleasant together, sir?’

‘Oh, yes,’ answered Bailey, ‘pleasant enough.’

‘I’m glad on it,’ said Mrs Gamp, with a second sniff of significance.

‘They haven’t been married so long,’ observed Poll, rubbing his hands, ‘that they need be anything but pleasant yet awhile.’

‘No,’ said Mrs Gamp, with a third significant signal.

‘Especially,’ pursued the barber, ‘when the gentleman bears such a character as you gave him.’

‘I speak; as I find, Mr Sweedlepipes,’ said Mrs Gamp. ‘Forbid it should be otherways! But we never knows wot’s hidden in each other’s hearts; and if we had glass winders there, we’d need keep the shetters up, some on us, I do assure you!’

‘But you don’t mean to say—’ Poll Sweedlepipe began.

‘No,’ said Mrs Gamp, cutting him very short, ‘I don’t. Don’t think I do. The torters of the Imposition shouldn’t make me own I did. All I says is,’ added the good woman, rising and folding her shawl about her, ‘that the Bull’s awaitin, and the precious moments is a-flyin’ fast.’

The little barber having in his eager curiosity a great desire to see Mrs Gamp’s patient, proposed to Mr Bailey that they should accompany her to the Bull, and witness the departure of the coach. That young gentleman assenting, they all went out together.

Arriving at the tavern, Mrs Gamp (who was full-dressed for the journey, in her latest suit of mourning) left her friends to entertain themselves in the yard, while she ascended to the sick room, where her fellow-labourer Mrs Prig was dressing the