Bleak House
“Miss Summerson, upon my honour and soul, you may depend upon me!”
“I do,” said I, “quite confidently.”
“I beg your pardon, miss,” said Mr. Guppy, going with one leg and
staying with the other, “but this lady being present—your own
witness—it might be a satisfaction to your mind (which I should wish
to set at rest) if you was to repeat those admissions.”
“Well, Caddy,” said I, turning to her, “perhaps you will not be
surprised when I tell you, my dear, that there never has been any
engagement—”
“No proposal or promise of marriage whatsoever,” suggested Mr. Guppy.
“No proposal or promise of marriage whatsoever,” said I, “between
this gentleman—”
“William Guppy, of Penton Place, Pentonville, in the county of
Middlesex,” he murmured.
“Between this gentleman, Mr. William Guppy, of Penton Place,
Pentonville, in the county of Middlesex, and myself.”
“Thank you, miss,” said Mr. Guppy. “Very full—er—excuse me—lady’s
name, Christian and surname both?”
I gave them.
“Married woman, I believe?” said Mr. Guppy. “Married woman. Thank
you. Formerly Caroline Jellyby, spinster, then of Thavies Inn, within
the city of London, but extra-parochial; now of Newman Street, Oxford
Street. Much obliged.”
He ran home and came running back again.
“Touching that matter, you know, I really and truly am very sorry
that my arrangements in life, combined with circumstances over which
I have no control, should prevent a renewal of what was wholly
terminated some time back,” said Mr. Guppy to me forlornly and
despondently, “but it couldn’t be. Now COULD it, you know! I only put
it to you.”
I replied it certainly could not. The subject did not admit of a
doubt. He thanked me and ran to his mother’s again—and back again.
“It’s very honourable of you, miss, I am sure,” said Mr. Guppy. “If
an altar could be erected in the bowers of friendship—but, upon my
soul, you may rely upon me in every respect save and except the
tender passion only!”
The struggle in Mr. Guppy’s breast and the numerous oscillations it
occasioned him between his mother’s door and us were sufficiently
conspicuous in the windy street (particularly as his hair wanted
cutting) to make us hurry away. I did so with a lightened heart; but
when we last looked back, Mr. Guppy was still oscillating in the same
troubled state of mind.
CHAPTER XXXIX
Attorney and Client
The name of Mr. Vholes, preceded by the legend Ground-Floor, is
inscribed upon a door-post in Symond’s Inn, Chancery Lane—a little,
pale, wall-eyed, woebegone inn like a large dust-binn of two
compartments and a sifter. It looks as if Symond were a sparing man
in his way and constructed his inn of old building materials which
took kindly to the dry rot and to dirt and all things decaying and
dismal, and perpetuated Symond’s memory with congenial shabbiness.
Quartered in this dingy hatchment commemorative of Symond are the
legal bearings of Mr. Vholes.
Mr. Vholes’s office, in disposition retiring and in situation
retired, is squeezed up in a corner and blinks at a dead wall. Three
feet of knotty-floored dark passage bring the client to Mr. Vholes’s
jet-black door, in an angle profoundly dark on the brightest
midsummer morning and encumbered by a black bulk-head of cellarage
staircase against which belated civilians generally strike their
brows. Mr. Vholes’s chambers are on so small a scale that one clerk
can open the door without getting off his stool, while the other who
elbows him at the same desk has equal facilities for poking the fire.
A smell as of unwholesome sheep blending with the smell of must and
dust is referable to the nightly (and often daily) consumption of
mutton fat in candles and to the fretting of parchment forms and
skins in greasy drawers. The atmosphere is otherwise stale and close.
The place was last painted or whitewashed beyond the memory of man,
and the two chimneys smoke, and there is a loose outer surface of
soot everywhere, and the dull cracked windows in their heavy frames
have but one piece of character in them, which is a determination to
be always dirty and always shut unless coerced. This accounts for the
phenomenon of the weaker of the two usually having a bundle of
firewood thrust between its jaws in hot weather.
Mr. Vholes is a very respectable man. He has not a large business,
but he is a very respectable man. He is allowed by the greater
attorneys who have made good fortunes or are making them to be a most
respectable man. He never misses a chance in his practice, which is a
mark of respectability. He never takes any pleasure, which is another
mark of respectability. He is reserved and serious, which is another
mark of respectability. His digestion is impaired, which is highly
respectable. And he is making hay of the grass which is flesh, for
his three daughters. And his father is dependent on him in the Vale
of Taunton.
The one great principle of the English law is to make business for
itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and
consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by
this light it becomes a coherent scheme and not the monstrous maze
the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive
that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their
expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.
But not perceiving this quite plainly—only seeing it by halves in a
confused way—the laity sometimes suffer in peace and pocket, with a
bad grace, and DO grumble very much. Then this respectability of Mr.
Vholes is brought into powerful play against them. “Repeal this
statute, my good sir?” says Mr. Kenge to a smarting client. “Repeal
it, my dear sir? Never, with my consent. Alter this law, sir, and
what will be the effect of your rash proceeding on a class of
practitioners very worthily represented, allow me to say to you, by
the opposite attorney in the case, Mr. Vholes? Sir, that class of
practitioners would be swept from the face of the earth. Now you
cannot afford—I will say, the social system cannot afford—to lose
an order of men like Mr. Vholes. Diligent, persevering, steady, acute
in business. My dear sir, I understand your present feelings against
the existing state of things, which I grant to be a little hard in
your case; but I can never raise my voice for the demolition of a
class of men like Mr. Vholes.” The respectability of Mr. Vholes has
even been cited with crushing effect before Parliamentary committees,
as in the following blue minutes of a distinguished attorney’s
evidence. “Question (number five hundred and seventeen thousand eight
hundred and sixty-nine): If I understand you, these forms of practice
indisputably occasion delay? Answer: Yes, some delay. Question: And
great expense? Answer: Most assuredly they cannot be gone through for
nothing. Question: And unspeakable vexation? Answer: I am not
prepared to say that. They have never given ME any vexation; quite
the contrary. Question: But you think that their abolition would
damage a class of practitioners? Answer: I have no doubt of it.
Question: Can you instance any type of that class? Answer: Yes. I
would unhesitatingly mention Mr. Vholes. He would be ruined.
Question: Mr. Vholes is considered, in the profession, a respectable
man? Answer:”—which proved fatal to the inquiry for ten years—“Mr.
Vholes is considered, in the profession, a MOST respectable man.”
So in familiar conversation, private authorities no less
disinterested will remark that they don’t know what this age is
coming to, that we are plunging down precipices, that now here is
something else gone, that these changes are death to people like
Vholes—a man of undoubted respectability, with a father in the Vale
of Taunton, and three daughters at home. Take a few steps more in
this direction, say they, and what is to become of Vholes’s father?
Is he to perish? And of Vholes’s daughters? Are they to be
shirt-makers, or governesses? As though, Mr. Vholes and his relations
being minor cannibal chiefs and it being proposed to abolish
cannibalism, indignant champions were to put the case thus: Make
man-eating unlawful, and you starve the Vholeses!
In a word, Mr. Vholes, with his three daughters and his father in the
Vale of Taunton, is continually doing duty, like a piece of timber,
to shore up some decayed foundation that has become a pitfall and a
nuisance. And with a great many people in a great many instances, the
question is never one of a change from wrong to right (which is quite
an extraneous consideration), but is always one of injury or
advantage to that eminently respectable legion, Vholes.
The Chancellor is, within these ten minutes, “up” for the long
vacation. Mr. Vholes, and his young client, and several blue bags
hastily stuffed out of all regularity of form, as the larger sort of
serpents are in their first gorged state, have returned to the
official den. Mr. Vholes, quiet and unmoved, as a man of so much
respectability ought to be, takes off his close black gloves as if he
were skinning his hands, lifts off his tight hat as if he were
scalping himself, and sits down at his desk. The client throws his
hat and gloves upon the ground—tosses them anywhere, without looking
after them or caring where they go; flings himself into a chair, half
sighing and half groaning; rests his aching head upon his hand and
looks the portrait of young despair.
“Again nothing done!” says Richard. “Nothing, nothing done!”
“Don’t say nothing done, sir,” returns the placid Vholes. “That is
scarcely fair, sir, scarcely fair!”
“Why, what IS done?” says Richard, turning gloomily upon him.
“That may not be the whole question,” returns Vholes, “The question
may branch off into what is doing, what is doing?”
“And what is doing?” asks the moody client.
Vholes, sitting with his arms on the desk, quietly bringing the tips
of his five right fingers to meet the tips of his five left fingers,
and quietly separating them again, and fixedly and slowly looking at
his client, replies, “A good deal is doing, sir. We have put our
shoulders to the wheel, Mr. Carstone, and the wheel is going round.”
“Yes, with Ixion on it. How am I to get through the next four or five
accursed months?” exclaims the young man, rising from his chair and
walking about the room.
“Mr. C.,” returns Vholes, following him close with his eyes wherever
he goes, “your spirits are hasty, and I am sorry for it on your
account. Excuse me if I recommend you not to chafe so much, not to be
so impetuous, not to wear yourself out so. You should have more
patience. You should sustain yourself better.”
“I ought to imitate you, in fact, Mr. Vholes?” says Richard, sitting
down again with an impatient laugh and beating the devil’s tattoo
with his boot on the patternless carpet.
“Sir,” returns Vholes, always looking at the client as if he were
making a lingering meal of him with his eyes as well as with his
professional appetite. “Sir,” returns Vholes with his inward manner
of speech and his bloodless quietude, “I should not have had the
presumption to propose myself as a model for your imitation or any
man’s. Let me but leave the good name to my three daughters, and that
is enough for me; I am not a self-seeker. But since you mention me so
pointedly, I will acknowledge that I should like to impart to you a
little of my—come, sir, you are disposed to call it insensibility,
and I am sure I have no objection—say insensibility—a little of my
insensibility.”
“Mr. Vholes,” explains the client, somewhat abashed, “I had no
intention to accuse you of insensibility.”
“I think you had, sir, without knowing it,” returns the equable
Vholes. “Very naturally. It is my duty to attend to your interests
with a cool head, and I can quite understand that to your excited