Bleak House
short, cadaverous, and withered, with his head sunk sideways between
his shoulders and the breath issuing in visible smoke from his mouth
as if he were on fire within. His throat, chin, and eyebrows were so
frosted with white hairs and so gnarled with veins and puckered skin
that he looked from his breast upward like some old root in a fall of
snow.
“Hi, hi!” said the old man, coming to the door. “Have you anything to
sell?”
We naturally drew back and glanced at our conductress, who had been
trying to open the house-door with a key she had taken from her
pocket, and to whom Richard now said that as we had had the pleasure
of seeing where she lived, we would leave her, being pressed for
time. But she was not to be so easily left. She became so
fantastically and pressingly earnest in her entreaties that we would
walk up and see her apartment for an instant, and was so bent, in her
harmless way, on leading me in, as part of the good omen she desired,
that I (whatever the others might do) saw nothing for it but to
comply. I suppose we were all more or less curious; at any rate, when
the old man added his persuasions to hers and said, “Aye, aye! Please
her! It won’t take a minute! Come in, come in! Come in through the
shop if t’other door’s out of order!” we all went in, stimulated by
Richard’s laughing encouragement and relying on his protection.
“My landlord, Krook,” said the little old lady, condescending to him
from her lofty station as she presented him to us. “He is called
among the neighbours the Lord Chancellor. His shop is called the
Court of Chancery. He is a very eccentric person. He is very odd. Oh,
I assure you he is very odd!”
She shook her head a great many times and tapped her forehead with
her finger to express to us that we must have the goodness to excuse
him, “For he is a little—you know—M!” said the old lady with great
stateliness. The old man overheard, and laughed.
“It’s true enough,” he said, going before us with the lantern, “that
they call me the Lord Chancellor and call my shop Chancery. And why
do you think they call me the Lord Chancellor and my shop Chancery?”
“I don’t know, I am sure!” said Richard rather carelessly.
“You see,” said the old man, stopping and turning round, “they—Hi!
Here’s lovely hair! I have got three sacks of ladies’ hair below, but
none so beautiful and fine as this. What colour, and what texture!”
“That’ll do, my good friend!” said Richard, strongly disapproving of
his having drawn one of Ada’s tresses through his yellow hand. “You
can admire as the rest of us do without taking that liberty.”
The old man darted at him a sudden look which even called my
attention from Ada, who, startled and blushing, was so remarkably
beautiful that she seemed to fix the wandering attention of the
little old lady herself. But as Ada interposed and laughingly said
she could only feel proud of such genuine admiration, Mr. Krook
shrunk into his former self as suddenly as he had leaped out of it.
“You see, I have so many things here,” he resumed, holding up the
lantern, “of so many kinds, and all as the neighbours think (but THEY
know nothing), wasting away and going to rack and ruin, that that’s
why they have given me and my place a christening. And I have so many
old parchmentses and papers in my stock. And I have a liking for rust
and must and cobwebs. And all’s fish that comes to my net. And I
can’t abear to part with anything I once lay hold of (or so my
neighbours think, but what do THEY know?) or to alter anything, or to
have any sweeping, nor scouring, nor cleaning, nor repairing going on
about me. That’s the way I’ve got the ill name of Chancery. I don’t
mind. I go to see my noble and learned brother pretty well every day,
when he sits in the Inn. He don’t notice me, but I notice him.
There’s no great odds betwixt us. We both grub on in a muddle. Hi,
Lady Jane!”
A large grey cat leaped from some neighbouring shelf on his shoulder
and startled us all.
“Hi! Show ’em how you scratch. Hi! Tear, my lady!” said her master.
The cat leaped down and ripped at a bundle of rags with her tigerish
claws, with a sound that it set my teeth on edge to hear.
“She’d do as much for any one I was to set her on,” said the old man.
“I deal in cat-skins among other general matters, and hers was
offered to me. It’s a very fine skin, as you may see, but I didn’t
have it stripped off! THAT warn’t like Chancery practice though, says
you!”
He had by this time led us across the shop, and now opened a door in
the back part of it, leading to the house-entry. As he stood with his
hand upon the lock, the little old lady graciously observed to him
before passing out, “That will do, Krook. You mean well, but are
tiresome. My young friends are pressed for time. I have none to spare
myself, having to attend court very soon. My young friends are the
wards in Jarndyce.”
“Jarndyce!” said the old man with a start.
“Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The great suit, Krook,” returned his lodger.
“Hi!” exclaimed the old man in a tone of thoughtful amazement and
with a wider stare than before. “Think of it!”
He seemed so rapt all in a moment and looked so curiously at us that
Richard said, “Why, you appear to trouble yourself a good deal about
the causes before your noble and learned brother, the other
Chancellor!”
“Yes,” said the old man abstractedly. “Sure! YOUR name now will be—”
“Richard Carstone.”
“Carstone,” he repeated, slowly checking off that name upon his
forefinger; and each of the others he went on to mention upon a
separate finger. “Yes. There was the name of Barbary, and the name of
Clare, and the name of Dedlock, too, I think.”
“He knows as much of the cause as the real salaried Chancellor!” said
Richard, quite astonished, to Ada and me.
“Aye!” said the old man, coming slowly out of his abstraction. “Yes!
Tom Jarndyce—you’ll excuse me, being related; but he was never known
about court by any other name, and was as well known there as—she is
now,” nodding slightly at his lodger. “Tom Jarndyce was often in
here. He got into a restless habit of strolling about when the cause
was on, or expected, talking to the little shopkeepers and telling
’em to keep out of Chancery, whatever they did. ‘For,’ says he, ‘it’s
being ground to bits in a slow mill; it’s being roasted at a slow
fire; it’s being stung to death by single bees; it’s being drowned by
drops; it’s going mad by grains.’ He was as near making away with
himself, just where the young lady stands, as near could be.”
We listened with horror.
“He come in at the door,” said the old man, slowly pointing an
imaginary track along the shop, “on the day he did it—the whole
neighbourhood had said for months before that he would do it, of a
certainty sooner or later—he come in at the door that day, and
walked along there, and sat himself on a bench that stood there, and
asked me (you’ll judge I was a mortal sight younger then) to fetch
him a pint of wine. ‘For,’ says he, ‘Krook, I am much depressed; my
cause is on again, and I think I’m nearer judgment than I ever was.’
I hadn’t a mind to leave him alone; and I persuaded him to go to the
tavern over the way there, t’other side my lane (I mean Chancery
Lane); and I followed and looked in at the window, and saw him,
comfortable as I thought, in the arm-chair by the fire, and company
with him. I hadn’t hardly got back here when I heard a shot go
echoing and rattling right away into the inn. I ran out—neighbours
ran out—twenty of us cried at once, ‘Tom Jarndyce!’”
The old man stopped, looked hard at us, looked down into the lantern,
blew the light out, and shut the lantern up.
“We were right, I needn’t tell the present hearers. Hi! To be sure,
how the neighbourhood poured into court that afternoon while the
cause was on! How my noble and learned brother, and all the rest of
’em, grubbed and muddled away as usual and tried to look as if they
hadn’t heard a word of the last fact in the case or as if they
had—Oh, dear me!—nothing at all to do with it if they had heard of
it by any chance!”
Ada’s colour had entirely left her, and Richard was scarcely less
pale. Nor could I wonder, judging even from my emotions, and I was no
party in the suit, that to hearts so untried and fresh it was a shock
to come into the inheritance of a protracted misery, attended in the
minds of many people with such dreadful recollections. I had another
uneasiness, in the application of the painful story to the poor
half-witted creature who had brought us there; but, to my surprise,
she seemed perfectly unconscious of that and only led the way
upstairs again, informing us with the toleration of a superior
creature for the infirmities of a common mortal that her landlord was
“a little—M—, you know!”
She lived at the top of the house, in a pretty large room, from which
she had a glimpse of Lincoln’s Inn Hall. This seemed to have been her
principal inducement, originally, for taking up her residence there.
She could look at it, she said, in the night, especially in the
moonshine. Her room was clean, but very, very bare. I noticed the
scantiest necessaries in the way of furniture; a few old prints from
books, of Chancellors and barristers, wafered against the wall; and
some half-dozen reticles and work-bags, “containing documents,” as
she informed us. There were neither coals nor ashes in the grate, and
I saw no articles of clothing anywhere, nor any kind of food. Upon a
shelf in an open cupboard were a plate or two, a cup or two, and so
forth, but all dry and empty. There was a more affecting meaning in
her pinched appearance, I thought as I looked round, than I had
understood before.
“Extremely honoured, I am sure,” said our poor hostess with the
greatest suavity, “by this visit from the wards in Jarndyce. And very
much indebted for the omen. It is a retired situation. Considering. I
am limited as to situation. In consequence of the necessity of
attending on the Chancellor. I have lived here many years. I pass my
days in court, my evenings and my nights here. I find the nights
long, for I sleep but little and think much. That is, of course,
unavoidable, being in Chancery. I am sorry I cannot offer chocolate.
I expect a judgment shortly and shall then place my establishment on
a superior footing. At present, I don’t mind confessing to the wards
in Jarndyce (in strict confidence) that I sometimes find it difficult
to keep up a genteel appearance. I have felt the cold here. I have
felt something sharper than cold. It matters very little. Pray excuse
the introduction of such mean topics.”
She partly drew aside the curtain of the long, low garret window and
called our attention to a number of bird-cages hanging there, some
containing several birds. There were larks, linnets, and
goldfinches—I should think at least twenty.
“I began to keep the little creatures,” she said, “with an object
that the wards will readily comprehend. With the intention of
restoring them to liberty. When my judgment should be given. Ye-es!
They die in prison, though. Their lives, poor silly things, are so
short in comparison with Chancery proceedings that, one by one, the
whole collection has died over and over again. I doubt, do you know,
whether one of these, though they are all young, will live to be
free! Ve-ry mortifying, is it not?”
Although she sometimes asked a question, she never seemed to expect a
reply, but rambled on as if she were in the habit of doing so when no
one but herself was present.
“Indeed,” she pursued, “I positively doubt sometimes, I do assure
you, whether while matters are still unsettled, and the sixth or
Great Seal still prevails, I may not one day be found lying stark and
senseless here, as I have found so many birds!”